by Sue Black
A couple of weeks later, quite by coincidence, I was contacted by the family’s solicitor. It appeared that the pathologist had returned from his holiday, looked at the bones and confirmed that I was right, and the police had contacted the bereaved couple to inform them that the remains they had found in their garden did in fact match some of the missing parts of their elder son. The parents were seeking a second opinion and their lawyer, someone I happened to know, wanted to retain my services. Imagine his surprise when I told him I had already written a report on the case.
He was unaware that I had examined the bones because, it seemed, my presence in the mortuary had been airbrushed out of the police records. This was possible because there was no report. If I had been asked to submit one, my examination would have had to be disclosed. I returned to the mortuary, this time on behalf of the family, to reassure myself that the remains I had examined were the ones being returned to them. The bones were all in agreement, they were human, from a young child and some showed evidence of predation. Everything was present and correct, and I gave my original report to the lawyer, together with an addendum covering my second visit to the mortuary.
And that was the end of it. Until, some time later, I had a call from another police force in the south of the country. Apparently, they had been brought in to investigate the handling of the case by the original force to try to establish what had gone wrong and what lessons could be learned. The SIO suggested that, rather than visiting me in my office, perhaps he could come and talk to me at my house, as he lived not far away and it would be more relaxed and less formal. He arrived with a colleague, and we all sat in my kitchen, drinking coffee and eating biscuits through what was still a long interrogation, less formal or not. The SIO asked the questions while the junior officer recorded my every word.
I could not say why I had not been asked to write a report: they would have to ask the local police about that one.
Why had I written one anyway? Because my professional advice had been sought and I had carried out the work requested. Whether or not I was going to be paid to produce a report, it was my duty to record what I had found.
How did I know at the time that the remains were human? At least by now the bones had been tested for DNA and it had been confirmed that they belonged to the little boy. So there was nobody doubting my ability to identify juvenile remains, just someone trying to understand why others would have chosen not to accept it.
How had the lawyer happened to come to me for advice? The answer to that one was easy: pure chance. Although he knew me both professionally and personally, he had no idea when he approached me that I had already been involved.
Then the question I’d been waiting for. How did I think the child’s remains had come to be found, two weeks after the fire, in the middle of the garden? Of course, I could not say. I had never visited the scene and I had not been present during either the original recovery of the bodies or the subsequent discovery of the bones.
All I could do was surmise, and I asked the SIO if he wanted me to do that. He did. I had been going over the puzzle in my head and I had come up with a theory. It may be completely wide of the mark, it may be partially correct or it may be true. We will never know. But it is at least capable of plausibly explaining what happened.
During the fire, the roof had collapsed into the boys’ bedroom. They had been buried under the debris, and it was known that wooden rafters had fallen across the children’s beds, so it was possible there had been contact between the body of the elder boy and the underside of a burning rafter.
A burning piece of wood will sear and adhere to human skin, and in doing so it can protect that part of the body to some extent from further damage. Provided the wood is not totally consumed by the fire, body tissue may remain stuck to it even when it is finally lifted.
Once the flames had been extinguished and the fire service were clearing the rubble looking for the bodies, they painstakingly removed the collapsed rafters from the bedroom. Perhaps they never turned them over to inspect the undersides, and therefore wouldn’t have noticed small parts of a child’s body stuck fast to one of them. The rafters were then stacked outside the house along with all the other debris.
Here the decomposing tissue would have been detected by animals. Cats and foxes in particular have an excellent sense of smell. They would have searched out the remains and carried them away for consumption—further out into the garden, where the bones had been found. The tooth marks I saw on the bones supported this supposition.
The SIO queried why I had not tendered this as a possibility to the police at the time. The answer was simple: nobody had asked.
Police forces have long memories and I didn’t work for that particular force for at least a decade. This fire took place thirty years ago, and times and police procedures have changed a lot since then, which can only be a good thing. Even though the role of forensic anthropology in fatal house fires is now widely recognized, sometimes it is still a struggle to have our skills acknowledged.
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When we recover an adult body that has been fragmented by a fire, we know we are looking for twenty-seven hand bones, or remnants of them, in total—8:5:14 is the magic formula: eight carpals, five metacarpals and fourteen phalanges. However, not every hand has that exact complement, and while we expect to have four fingers and a thumb, in all the right places and of the right proportions, this isn’t always the case. There may be variations in the structure of a hand caused by congenital or accidental alterations.
As we have already discussed, much of the future appearance of the hand is set between four and six weeks of fetal growth. Anything that interrupts normal development at this time may be manifested in the final appearance of the hand, although genetics will also play a significant role in human variations. Probably the most common congenital conditions are seen in the number of digits present on the hands.
The scientific name for the arrangement of fingers on our hands, or toes on our feet, is dactyly. Having too many is called polydactyly, which is most frequently represented on the hand by an extra vestigial digit on the medial side of the small finger. It is a relatively simple surgical procedure just to snip this off. Usually the digit is comprised simply of soft tissue, although sometimes a full extra bone will have formed. Polydactyly is the result of a non-vital genetic mutation and so can be passed down through the generations of a family. It is not uncommon, affecting about 1 in every 1,000 births. In 2016 a woman in China exhibiting polydactyly (she had 6 fingers on each hand) gave birth to a son with a more extreme form of the condition: he had 2 palmar regions for each limb, 7 fingers on his right hand, 8 on his left—15 fingers in all, but no thumbs. He also had 8 toes on each foot. An incredible total of 31 digits, 11 of them supernumerary. But even this is not the world record. The highest number of digits ever recorded was 34, belonging to a young Indian boy born in 2010 with 10 toes on each foot and 7 fingers on each hand. As he later had some of these removed, the official world record for living with polydactyly is held by another Indian, Devendra Suthar, who has 28 digits, 7 on each hand and foot. He is a carpenter and says he has to take extra care when cutting wood not to chop any of them off.
Oligodactyly is the opposite condition: fewer digits than we would normally expect. This is usually associated with a range of clinical syndromes. Ectrodactyly, or split hand/split foot formation (SHFM), is the absence of one or more central digits. This reduces the hand or foot to an even number (either four or two), giving it the appearance of a claw. In those who have only two visible digits, it is likely that syndactyly, fusion of digits, will also have occurred.
Macrodactyly, which is rare, is when the fingers or toes grow to an abnormally large size. This tends to be seen only on one hand, most commonly in the index finger. The cause is not well understood. Conversely, brachydactyly results in very small digits, usually because of shortened bones. An inherited condition, brachydactyly is generally present at birth but only becomes noticea
ble as some of the fingers start to grow and others do not follow suit.
There are variations on these conditions that are most unusual, among them mid-ray duplication polydactyly, which produces a duplicate finger. Thomas Harris gave his character Hannibal Lecter a duplicate middle finger on his left hand in his novel The Silence of the Lambs, although this singular feature did not make it into the film version. Equally rare is a transposed finger. I was giving a lecture in a pub one evening (as you do . . . something called a Pint of Science) in which I was talking about my research into hand identification. A young woman asked me afterwards if I’d like to take a picture of her hands as she had been born with her middle and ring fingers transposed. And recently another lady let me photograph her hands, which had an extra transverse crease on the little fingers that didn’t align with a joint. She considered it weird; I thought it was really interesting as it is something that occurs in less than 1 per cent of the population. I love hands. They are so quirky.
Other alterations to the hands, of course, may occur during the life of an individual. Amputations, due to accident, ritual, surgical removal or, in some parts of the world, punishment for a crime, are a common anomaly. Self-amputation, or autotomy, is seldom seen, and is generally the result of a person becoming trapped and having to remove their own limb to free themselves and save their own life. It is also reported in people with body identity disorder, where the sufferer cannot recognize parts of their own body as belonging to them and feels compelled to remove what they perceive as an offensive imposter.
Amputations can also occur in utero, caused by the presence of amniotic constricting bands. This, too, is very rare, but quite a shock for the new parents.
Forensic anthropologists, then, need to be alert to the possible manifestations of any one of these conditions or events. In cases of amputation we will always look at the ends of the bones to see whether there has been any healing to indicate that it occurred before the person died. Cut ends would point to perimortem or postmortem amputation, and we will usually be able to detect the marks of the tool used to remove the body part.
In the days before attention was paid to the health and safety of manual workers, missing fingers were an occupational hazard. Recently, some nine hundred historical pictures were exhibited of convicts, about a third of them women, photographed just before their release from HM General Prison in Perth, Scotland. These were basically nineteenth-century police mugshots, taken to help the enforcers of law and order to keep track of criminals as they moved around Scotland. There was the usual full-frontal facial view, with a profile captured by a carefully positioned mirror. But what was really interesting was that many of them also had their hands photographed. Apparently, this was to record that they were still in possession of all their fingers—or, in some cases, not—at the time of their release as amputations in industrial accidents were so common that the loss of a digit became as much of an identifying feature as a face.
These days there is a vogue for “amputation tattoos” that acknowledge the absence of a finger, sometimes an entire hand. For example, the phrase “Good uck” spelled out across the knuckles, with no “L” because the finger where it should go has been amputated. I have also seen “Love” tattooed on the knuckles of a man’s right hand, while the back of his left hand, from which all of the fingers had been amputated, carried the message “No room for hate.”
We are all used to practical jokes involving fake severed fingers, especially around Hallowe’en. When I was a child, every October one would turn up in someone’s serving of school rice pudding. These days, rubber fingers are not, it seems, enough for some. Grotesque gothic jewellery made from archaeological bone is now bought and sold on the internet. When you look at the online comments of those prepared to spend $15 on a necklace made from real human finger bones, it pretty much says everything you need to know about this kind of person.
“Bones were clean. One showed osteoporosis or arthritis. Great gift for my friend.”
Or this, from the Q&A section: “Q. Are the three bones from the same finger?”
“A. The bones are from separate people, but we try our best to select those that look like they might go together.”
Does anyone else wonder on what planet it is OK to buy bits of dead people and sell them as jewellery, or is it just me?
I was working in my office one day when Viv, my PA, put through another of those phone calls from the police.
“We have something unusual we would like you to look at. Can we bring it over?”
This time it was clearly not going to be a seal flipper. Two officers arrived in the office with a small evidence bag. This being Scotland, they always hunt in pairs and accept a cup of tea before we get down to business.
Inside the bag was a silver-coloured key fob which had been found in the undergrowth at the side of a wooded path by a man walking his dog (it is always someone walking their dog). There were no keys on it. Nothing strange about that, until you looked at what was dangling from the key ring: three human finger bones, perfectly articulated, strung on a silver wire that bridged the joint spaces. I looked at the policemen and they looked at me. Their eyes were pleading with me to tell them it was just a piece of novelty tat and I was about to ruin their day.
These were the distal, middle and part of the proximal phalanx of the left index finger of a young adult male. They had been cleaned (probably boiled and bleached) and there was no detectable smell of decomposition about them, so they had probably been separated from the rest of the hand for some time. The cut marks on the proximal end of the proximal phalanx indicated that the finger had been removed by a saw, probably an electric one rather than a handsaw, judging by the spacing and regularity of the cut marks.
Now the police had to investigate. They began by making door-to-door inquiries in the area where the item had been found. Given that we knew we were looking for a young male (most likely still alive) who had lost his left index finger, if he did live locally he wasn’t going to be too hard to find. Sure enough, the police soon tracked him down.
The key fob belonged to the amputee, David, who had worked as a carpenter in his father’s business since he was a boy. One day, needing to cut some wood in a hurry, he had bypassed the required safety guards and protection and, in his haste, had an accident with his circular saw and chopped his finger clean off. He and his finger were rushed to hospital. The finger could not be reattached but he asked if he could keep it and was allowed to do so.
There are regulations governing what happens to amputated body parts and most of them are, of course, incinerated as medical waste. But there can be a bit of wriggle room when patients ask to keep bits of themselves such as gallstones and teeth. While individual hospitals have their own policies, there is no law against people retaining their own body tissue, as long as it doesn’t constitute a public health hazard, and amputees can and do ask for assorted body parts to be returned to them. The view of the Human Tissue Authority is that when this is permitted, hospital records should be kept to ensure traceability.
Some amputees want their whole body to be reunited in death, for religious or personal reasons, and to save whatever they have had removed to be buried or cremated with them when they eventually die. Historically, the limbs of people who lived on without them were sometimes given their own graves. One such was the leg of Lord Uxbridge, shattered by a cannon shot in the Battle of Waterloo. It is he who is supposed to have coined the expression “one foot in the grave.” Recently this custom has made a comeback, with a Muslim hospital chaplain in the north of England setting up a public burial site specifically for amputated limbs.
One thing you cannot do with your own amputated body parts in your lifetime, ironically, is have them cremated, as the Cremations Act 2008 does not allow human tissue from living people to be accepted. And yet there is nothing to stop people doing it themselves on a bonfire.
Others go for some outlandish options, often after having their amputated limb
s rejected for scientific research. One woman in the USA apparently has an amputated foot, which she paid to have skeletonized, with its own Instagram account. Words fail me.
But ours is not to reason why, and it may be argued that, inexplicable as it may seem for an amputee to want to keep a part removed from their body, they ought to be entitled to do whatever best helps them to deal with their trauma. Should we all have rights over our own bodies, attached or detached? That is up for discussion, but when it comes to the lack of respect shown for bits of other people’s, as demonstrated by the distasteful trade in trinkets made from human bone, I believe that a line should be drawn in the sand.
Still, what David did with his amputated finger is mind-boggling by any standards. He took it home and boiled it in a pan of hot water until all the soft tissue fell away. He said he had seen his mum doing this with bones when she was making soup, so he thought it would probably work. The soft tissue and fingernail went into the bin and he popped his finger bones into a container of bleach until they were nice and white. But when he noticed that they were still leaking a little fat he decided to boil them again, this time using a biological detergent, which was what his mum did when she wanted to get fat stains out of the tablecloth. I promise you, this is all true. He then put the bones on paper towels on his bedroom windowsill to dry in the sun, and when they stopped smelling and leaking, he transferred them to a small glass jar, which he stored on a bookshelf in his bedroom.