Blood, Bullets, and Bones

by Bridget Heos

  The New York City medical examiner, Thomas A. Gonzales, placed Louise’s death between nine and ten p.m. on November 1. During that time, Anibal had been at the Rumba Palace, a dance hall, with his new girlfriend—the same one Louise had beaten up. Many people had seen him there. Anibal seemed to be out of the running for murder suspects. Then Louise’s parents showed the police a threatening letter that Anibal had written to Louise. He seemed right for the crime—if it weren’t for his alibi. When investigators visited the Rumba Palace, it all made sense. It was just a block or so away from the park. He could have sneaked out without anyone noticing.

  Thomas A. Gonzalez, New York City medical examiner

  Dr. Alexander Gettler worked with Gonzalez on the investigation. He noticed in the crime scene photos that the body lay in unusual grass. Earlier, grass seeds had been found in Anibal’s pockets and pant cuffs. He claimed not to have set foot in Central Park for more than two years. The seeds must have come from another park. Gettler wondered whether the seeds matched the grass in Central Park, and how common that grass was. He called in Joseph Copeland, a professor of botany. Copeland said that the grasses, Plantago lanceolata, Panicum dichotoflorum, and Eleusine indica, grew in just one place in New York City: Central Park, and specifically, the hill where Louise was found dead. And the seeds in Anibal’s pockets matched the grass.

  Realizing he had failed an important botany quiz, Anibal said that he had forgotten, but he actually had walked through the park in September. It was another wrong answer. These grasses didn’t go to seed until October. Anibal then confessed that he’d arranged to meet his wife in the park. They’d argued, his temper had flared, and he had killed her. He later retracted his confession but was found guilty. His wife got justice, all because of some grass seeds.

  Nowadays, there are specialists in forensic botany, the study of plants to solve crimes. As with all forensic evidence, plant life can be used to verify—or contradict—a story told by a suspect. Zakaria Erzinçlioǧlu, a forensic entomologist in England, described a case in his memoir, Maggots, Murder, and Men, in which he thought the suspect had made a false confession. William Funnell, a carpenter, was married to Anne Funnell, a bartender. Together they had three sons. Anne disappeared April 24, 1984, and her body was found eleven days later in the bushes of a public green space. William was arrested and confessed. He said that he’d been arguing with his wife for several days over a supposed affair she was having at work. On Tuesday, a fight erupted again. This time, he strangled her and left her lying in their bedroom until dark. Then he carried her body to the green.

  A body that is embalmed and placed in a sealed casket can remain preserved for several decades. Contrary to the macabre children’s song, when you are buried six feet under in a coffin, the worms do not crawl in, or crawl out, or play pinochle on your snout. But left in the open, a body quickly begins to rot, and smelling this, insects arrive and lay their eggs in the corpse. When hatched, the maggots and grubs feast on the flesh. The age of the maggots shows how many days the person has been dead. A forensic entomologist like Erzinçlioǧlu is called in to study the maggot evidence to determine the time of death.

  In this case, he observed that all the maggots were either very old or very young. That was out of the ordinary. The maggots should have varied in age, since different flies constantly lay eggs on the body. This body seemed to have been exposed to flies soon after death, then not exposed for several days, and then exposed again. In watching the video of the body’s removal from the green, Erzinçlioǧlu noticed something else strange. The grass underneath the body was green. As anyone who’s ever had a Slip’N Slide knows, grass covered by something quickly yellows. Yet this body had supposedly been left on the green for eleven days.

  Other evidence didn’t match up, either. The autopsy showed that, in addition to being strangled, Anne had suffered a blow to the head that would have bled, but there were no signs of blood in the bedroom except a small stain likely caused by one of the sons’ nosebleeds. Furthermore, one of the sons had gone into the bedroom after school but hadn’t seen the body, which according to the confession had lain there until nightfall. (The bed was too low for the body to have been hidden underneath.) Erzinçlioǧlu said that William confessed out of fear that one of his sons would be charged. Though there was no evidence against the boys, detectives had suggested that one of them would be tried if not William. So William confessed, hoping the truth would come out at trial, at which point he recanted his confession and pled innocent. As other cases in this book show, that is a dangerous assumption, and William was found guilty.

  Maggots have aided investigators since 1855. That year, a couple was remodeling their home outside Paris when a body was found behind the mantel. The homeowners immediately became suspects. But they hadn’t been living in the home for long, so it was important to determine when the body had been hidden. Swiss doctor Bergeret d’Arbois was called in to conduct the autopsy. To determine the time of death, he studied the maggots and mites that had infested the body. Based on their life cycles, he learned that the person had been dead for seven years. The present homeowners hadn’t moved in yet. So the earlier occupants were suspected instead.

  The same type of work was done sporadically through the years, but it wasn’t until the 1970s and ’80s that dedicated studies of insects on corpses were made. In 1987, Dr. William Bass created America’s first body farm at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Here, donated bodies were placed outdoors so that researchers could observe how a body decomposed in the open air. This would help forensic scientists to determine time of death, which is crucial to creating a timeline, determining when the victim was last seen, and checking alibis.

  Based on insects found with the corpse, forensic entomologists can also tell the season in which the death occurred. In another of Erzinçlioǧlu’s cases, an elderly woman’s body was found in October when a neighbor noticed a strong smell. The body contained several pupae, which the entomologist gathered to study under the microscope. He found five species of flies—four of which were active only in June and July. That meant the woman had been dead since summer. During that time, a man who worked for her had skipped town. Now he was a suspect. It turned out she was a domineering employer but had promised the man an inheritance when she died. He killed her for the money and fled in fear. But his very departure led investigators to him—that and those flies.

  Dr. William Bass studying a decomposed body at the body farm

  Forensic entomology helped Rockland County medical examiner Frederick Zugibe solve the Case of the Slash-Faced Woman. In October of 1984, workers at a hotel in Nanuet, New York, were playing soccer when the ball rolled into the woods. A player jogged over to get it and found the body of a woman whose face had been slashed. Maggots were in the wounds. The hotel security camera was for some reason pointed away from the parking lot. Otherwise, the killer would have been caught on tape. Instead, the case was much more difficult to solve.

  The body belonged to Marie Jefferson, a thirty-two-year-old woman from the Bronx, who had been missing for a week and a half. She had last been seen in Manhattan with her ex-fiancé, Samuel McCullough. The nature of the wounds ruled out robbery. A robber kills quickly—and wouldn’t take the time to slash the victim’s face. Such gratuitous violence also suggested that the murderer killed out of rage. Death was caused by a stab wound to the chest, and from this incision, Zugibe determined the weapon to be a sharp blade. Because the incision showed that the sharp side of the knife was facing the right, he guessed that the killer was left-handed. (People tend to turn the knife inward.)

  Because Marie had been dead for some time, Zugibe would be unable to use some of the traditional methods of determining time of death, such as observing whether rigor mortis had set in, taking the body temperature, and noting changes in the pupils. He still did a battery of tests, including checking the potassium levels in the eyeballs, which increase after death. Time of death is never as exact as it is shown on
TV, but in this case, the range was six to twenty days, hardly a helpful time frame for investigators. Zugibe turned to forensic entomology to narrow it down. He gathered blowfly maggots from the wounds and also took live flies from the corpse to observe their life cycle. Based on this, he determined her to have been dead for seven to nine days.

  In the meantime, investigators learned that Marie’s ex had a history of violence against her and had recently been stalking and threatening her. They tracked down witnesses who had last seen her with Samuel and asked them to demonstrate how the two were walking. The witnesses showed that he had pushed her arm up behind her and led her away. The timing of these accounts matched up with the time of death the medical examiner had given. Samuel was tried and found guilty of murder. He died in prison.

  Time of death was especially elusive in another case handled by Zugibe. In September 1983, a police officer spotted a woman’s blouse near a stone wall on the side of the road. He got out of his car to investigate and found beside it a heavy-duty garbage bag containing what appeared to be a body. When Zugibe unwrapped what turned out to be several bags, insects poured out. Inside was the body of a middle-aged man, six feet tall, two hundred pounds, who had died from a bullet to the head. He appeared to have died three or four weeks earlier. But there were several strange things about the body.

  First, usually after death, bacteria feed on the dead tissue, emitting gas as part of their digestive process. This causes the body to bloat. But that hadn’t happened in this case. Second, the skin was a strange shade of beige—not normal after death. Third, the body’s internal organs usually decompose first, but this body was decomposing from the outside in, with many organs still intact.

  Zugibe suspected staging. The killer might have frozen the body to make it look like the murder had occurred more recently than it really had. This would account for the organs decomposing last. Just as giblets inside a frozen turkey are the last to thaw, so would be the organs in a frozen human body. Zugibe examined cells under a microscope. Indeed, they were distorted from being frozen for months or even years.

  The hands of the body were mummified, so Zugibe injected the fingertips with a chemical solution before taking prints, as in the Brooklyn Butcher case. These fingerprints matched those of Louis Masgay, a Pennsylvania man who had been missing for two and a half years. Zugibe’s frozen theory was correct. Police learned that an informant had seen a body fitting Louis’s description hanging in a warehouse freezer that belonged to Richard Kuklinski, a suspected hit man. Richard was being watched by the FBI, and unknowingly told an undercover agent about the frozen body, helping to break the case.

  “You think those guys are smart?” Kuklinski said, speaking of investigators. “Listen to me. They found this one guy, and when the autopsy was done, they said he was only dead two and a half weeks. But see, he wasn’t. He’d been dead two and a half years.”1

  As it turned out, Louis had planned to meet with Kuklinski to buy pirated movies for resale in his general store. Instead, Kuklinski stole Louis’s $95,000 and killed him. Kuklinski then staged the crime scene by freezing the body, which earned him the nickname “the Iceman.” Kuklinski was sentenced to life in prison for six murders and claimed to have committed 250 in all.

  No matter how diligently medical examiners work, some bodies found in clandestine graves are never identified and the cases are never solved. In 1989, an owner of the Good’nLoud Music store near the University of Wisconsin was investigating a leak in the heating system when he found a human skull in the basement. Police and fire inspectors came on the scene and found an entire skeleton, shoved feetfirst down the chimney chute. It had lost all soft tissue.

  Richard Kuklinski, known as “the Iceman,” being led into trial for murder

  The body was dressed in a sleeveless paisley dress, dark shag sweater, ankle socks, and women’s shoes. And yet the forensic scientists working the case agreed that the skeleton belonged to a man, between twenty-two and twenty-seven years old. Investigators theorized that the victim was transgender and had been killed for this reason. (Transgender people are 28 percent more likely to suffer from violence.) However, the forensic scientists weren’t even sure that a murder had occurred at all. The victim’s only apparent injuries were fractured pubic bones, and that could have happened after death when the body was pushed down the narrow flue. In hopes of learning more, detectives made a clay model and computer-assisted sketch of the victim’s face (as a man) and shared it with the public. But no one came forward who could identify the skeleton. Those who knew the victim might have moved on long ago, as college towns have a large transient population of students, or the victim could have been unrecognizable as a man. Whatever the case, no more was ever learned of the person’s life—or death.

  9

  Dem Bones: Forensic Anthropology Beginnings

  When bodies are badly decomposed, or only the skeletons remain, forensic anthropologists may be called in. Forensic anthropology became an official branch of forensic science in the 1970s. Since then, it has been used to solve cases old and new.

  A forensic anthropologist’s first step is to determine whether the body is ancient (five hundred years or older), historic (fifty to five hundred years old), or contemporary (less than fifty years old). Next, the scientist decides whether the person died of natural causes or was murdered. When two German hikers found a corpse in the Italian Alps on September 19, 1991, the rescue team first assumed it was a hiker who had gotten lost and died of exposure. Though the body was well preserved by the snow, it soon became clear that neither assumption was true. Instead, the body was very old, and the person hadn’t frozen to death. He was murdered.

  Konrad Spindler, an Austrian professor of prehistory, determined the body to be at least 4,000 years old. Carbon-14 analysis further indicated that it was 5,000 years old—placing his time of life at the end of the Stone Age. The man, nicknamed Ötzi for the Ötztal Alps where he was found, was between forty and fifty-three years old at his time of death. The years had been unkind. His growth had been stunted by childhood hunger. Campfires had blackened his lungs. His toes had been repeatedly frostbitten. His teeth were rotting, and he had gum disease. His body contained a large amount of arsenic, probably from working with copper. An analysis of his fingernails showed he had suffered several bouts of illness in his last six months—including intestinal worms and possibly Lyme disease. Today, some of these ailments would suggest a lack of resources and medical aid endured by only the poorest of the poor. But during the Stone Age, such hardships were common.

  Re-creation of Ötzi, a five-thousand-year-old murder victim

  In spite of his poor health, Ötzi must have had a hearty appetite. His stomach was so well preserved that scientists could tell his last meal was red deer and cereal. He’d also eaten, within a short time before his death, wild goat and bread baked in an open fire (as indicated by fragments of wheat and charcoal in his stomach). The iceman must have traveled widely, for archeobotanists found eighty species of mosses and liverworts in and on his body, and dozens of pollen grains. One was from the hop hornbeam tree, which grows in the valley below the Alps and blooms in the spring. Archeologists hypothesized that Ötzi’s journey began in the valley and ended in the snowy Alps.

  He could have frozen to death in a late snowstorm, but his injuries pointed to a different cause of death. Scientists found an arrowhead inside his left shoulder and an entry wound on his back. According to X-rays, the arrow must have pierced a blood vessel, causing Ötzi to bleed to death. He had been murdered.

  Determining the cause of death in a 5,000-year-old cold—or rather, freezing—case was pretty good detective work. Was it possible to determine the murderer and motive, too? Archeologists theorized that Ötzi knew his attackers. The arrow shaft was missing from his shoulder wound, and someone had to have pulled it out. This would have covered up the identity of the killer, as arrows were unique to their owners. Also, the killer stole none of Ötzi’s belongings, even though
such items would have been hard to come by during the Stone Age. Again, possession of these would have linked the killer to the crime.

  Like medical examiners working a contemporary case, archeologists also studied what Ötzi had on his person at the time of death. In some ways, he seemed prepared for his wilderness trek. He wore three layers of clothing, and shoes with bearskin soles, and carried a fire-starting kit. He also had a nice dagger, suggesting high social status. He had other weapons, too, but they were only half finished. The arrows were incomplete and his longbow unstrung. He seemed to have left on the fly. He had a partially healed hand wound—likely from a fight that had happened a day or so before his death—and a head injury, suggesting a fall while on the run, or an outright attack.

  Based on this evidence, archeologists theorized that Ötzi was the leader of his tribe. When old age and sickness weakened him, other tribe members tried to take over. They fought with him in the village, and, fearing assassination, Ötzi fled. His enemies caught up to him and killed him. Archeologists will never know for sure if this is what happened. And no charges were ever filed, obviously.

  The cause of death is not always so clear in ancient cases. Several bodies from the Iron Age (1200 BCE to 550 CE) have been found in bogs across Northwest Europe. Though thousands of years old, they are relatively well preserved by the lack of oxygen in the stagnant waters. They still have skin, hair, and, in some cases, the clothing they wore. Early researchers believed that people were buried in the bogs as punishment. A Roman historian wrote that Germanic peoples shaved the heads of disgraced sinners, killed them, and threw them in the bog instead of cremating them, which was the standard burial practice. When two bog bodies were found in Germany in 1952, one with long red hair that was shorn on one side, researchers theorized that they were secret lovers. They named the half-shaven one “Windeby Girl” and supposed that she had been shaven prior to being killed as a way of disgracing her.