Blood, Bullets, and Bones

by Bridget Heos

  Later, DNA testing revealed Windeby Girl to be a man. His bones indicated that he was sickly—and could easily have died of disease instead of a death sentence. Half his hair, which would have been dyed red by the sphangnum moss in the bog, might have been lost during excavation. The “lover” found nearby had lived three hundred years before Windeby “Girl.” Likewise, many bog bodies have been examined for violent injuries—but whether these were part of brutal attacks or simply the result of the bodies’ time in the bogs is unclear. While these bog bodies are a matter of great historical interest, they’re not exactly parts of criminal investigations. But in one case, a bog body did lead to a murder being solved.

  Bogs produce peat, which is cut out of the soil and used as fuel. In 1983, workers digging out peat in England found a human skull. Investigators determined it to belong to a female between the ages of thirty and fifty. Twenty-two years earlier, Malika Reyn-Bardt had gone missing, and police had long suspected her husband, Peter Reyn-Bardt. Faced with what he thought was his wife’s skull, Peter confessed to the murder and was found guilty. But it turned out the skull was around 1,600 years old, giving Reyn-Bardt a pretty solid alibi—for that crime, anyway.

  Forensic anthropology in historic cases (fifty to five hundred years old) can have contemporary implications. After the Russian royal family—the Romanovs—were massacred as part of a political uprising in 1918, there was speculation as to whether any of the children had escaped. One woman even claimed for several decades to be Anastasia Romanov.

  During World War I, 1.7 million Russian soldiers were killed, and nearly 7.5 million wounded, captured, or ruled missing in action. The Russian economy was in shambles from funding the war. The people rioted, blaming Tsar Nicolas II for the disaster. He abdicated in 1917, and a provisional government took power. Months later, the radical Bolshevik Party, led by Vladimir Lenin, overthrew the provisional government, and Lenin became dictator. Though he ended Russia’s involvement in the war in Europe, Lenin was faced with a civil war at home. The White Army, made up of Royal allies and other anti-Bolsheviks, fought to regain power. Meanwhile, the Romanovs were living under Bolshevik guard in a mansion in the Ural Mountains. The White Army was pushing toward this location, and there was hope of a rescue.

  Portrait of the Romanov family

  Then, on July 17, 1918, the Romanovs were awakened in the middle of the night and informed that they were being moved to another home because of the fighting nearby. The family—Tsar Nicholas II and Tsarina Alexandra Feodorovna; their daughters, Olga, Tatiana, Maria, and Anastasia; their son, Alexei; his doctor, Yevgeny Botkin (who treated Alexei for hemophilia); a cook, Ivan Kharitonov; a footman, Alexei Trupp; and a maid, Anna Demidova—were moved to a room downstairs, where they were to await transportation. Jewels and other family treasures were hidden in pillows the family carried, and Anastasia’s corset was lined with jewels as well.

  Soon, the family learned their true fate. Bolshevik commander Yakov Yurovsky entered, accompanied by a death squad, and read a decree of execution. He shot Tsar Nicholas first. Then the firing squad, which had gotten drunk to numb themselves to the brutality, haphazardly opened fire. Anna hid behind the jewel-filled pillows but was discovered and killed. Anastasia’s corset served as a bulletproof vest of sorts, and she survived the first moments of the attack. Afterward, the bodies were stripped, the clothes burned, and the jewels sent to Moscow. The execution was supposed to be a state secret, so Yurovsky hid the bodies in an abandoned mineshaft, but he moved them when word got out of their location. To hide the identity of the victims, he doused them with hydrochloric acid and burned the bodies that he thought were the tsar and tsarina.

  Eight days after the massacre, the Russian White Army conquered the Siberian town of Ekaterinburg and searched the mineshaft. They found evidence of the bodies having been there, including the tsarina’s eyeglass case, but couldn’t find the new graves. The location would remain a mystery for years to come, leading people to wonder if some of the Romanovs had survived.

  In 1920, a woman was rescued from a Berlin canal after attempting suicide. She was confined to an asylum, where she told a fantastic story. She had survived a Russian firing squad and was found alive on a truck carrying the dead bodies. She was secreted away and had wound up in Berlin. She was Anastasia Romanov! In 1928, the woman traveled to America, purportedly for jaw surgery due to injuries from the massacre. She was greeted as a celebrity by some and dear friend by others. Gleb Botkin—the son of Dr. Botkin who had died in the massacre—had played with Anastasia as a child. He was overjoyed to see her again. But others were skeptical. A private investigator hired by the royal family said that “Anastasia” was really Franziska Schanzkowska, a Polish peasant who had vanished three days before the incident on the bridge and had a history of mental illness. But the woman known as Anna Anderson (a fake name she once gave at a hotel in lieu of Anastasia) stuck to her story until her death in 1984.

  In the 1980s, Soviet Union leader Mikhail Gorbachev declassified documents from the Bolshevik regime, including the Yurovsky Note, which described the assassination. According to the note, Anastasia had evaded the rain of bullets for a time but was eventually killed during the attack. Evidence could be found in the forest, where Yurovsky had buried the bodies.

  Anna Anderson, who claimed to be the youngest daughter of Tsar Nicholas

  People were determined to see for themselves whether this was true. In 1992, an American team of forensic anthropologists excavated the Romanov grave to account for those killed in the attack. The team found nine skeletons instead of the expected eleven. They were able to match the skeletons to most of the victims. One female skeleton had extended ankle joints caused by crouching or kneeling. That belonged to the maid, Anna. Another skeleton lacked upper teeth—that was the doctor. A tall, large-boned skeleton belonged to the footman, who was over six feet tall. The tsar was identified by his jutting brow line and hips deformed from horseback riding. The tsarina’s dental work matched another skeleton’s. A skeleton with incomplete molars belonged to either Maria, who was nineteen, or Anastasia, seventeen. Tatiana, the tallest of the sisters, was matched to a skeleton of the correct height. Olga was known by her wide forehead. The cook, an adult male, was linked to a skeleton by the process of elimination. And that was all. Where were Alexei and either Maria or Anastasia? Could Anna Anderson have been telling the truth?

  DNA from the bodies was tested against that of England’s Prince Philip (husband of Queen Elizabeth II), whose grandmother was the tsarina’s sister. It was a match. Anna had since passed away, but tissue samples had been saved. The DNA from these was tested against DNA from the bodies. They were not a match. Instead, her DNA matched the relatives in Poland that the private investigator had tracked down years ago. Still, the missing children—who would now be an elderly man and woman—could be elsewhere (though the likelihood of Alexei’s having survived the attack was slim given his health problems).

  Then, in 2007, a team searching for the lost bodies near the Romanov grave hit bone and dug deeper. They found skeletons badly damaged by acid and fire. The DNA matched the Romanov family. Alexei and his sister had been found, and the story brought to a close. It just wasn’t the ending anybody wanted.

  From these stories, it’s not surprising that much can be learned from a contemporary skeleton. With just a skull, dental records can tell the identity of the victim. The pelvic bone and skull indicate whether the skeleton is male or female. Age can be determined by the number of bones in a body. Babies are born with 270 bones. Over time, these fuse together, until, at age twenty, an adult has 206 bones. Bones can even show whether a person was right- or left-handed, the bones having a higher density and often being slightly longer in the dominant arm. And marks on bones show the type of wound that was suffered.

  In July 1982, blackberry pickers in Goochland County, Virginia, found human bones in a berry patch. The lower part of the body was missing, probably having been devoured by animals. Jean
s and a red jersey were found nearby. Dr. J. Lawrence Angel, a curator at the Smithsonian and the FBI’s consultant in forensic anthropology (nicknamed Sherlock Bones by the press) determined it to be that of an eighteen- to twenty-four-year-old. The skull and smoothness of the brow indicated she was female. She was around five feet tall and thin but broad shouldered. She had a large skull, strong chin, and thin, asymmetrical nose. Her left little finger had been injured—possibly from a defensive wound against a knife.

  The next January, the body was linked to a missing woman from Arlington, Bilmaris Rivera. On May 24, 1980, she had left for work as a chemist on a marine base, but never made it. Her car was found on fire two days later, with no body inside. Dental records from her native Puerto Rico confirmed the match. However, the case went cold, and the bones were shipped to the woman’s family for burial. Angel passed away.

  Then in May 1991, the Goochland County commonwealth’s attorney made an arrest and ordered the body exhumed. He asked Angel’s successor, Douglas Ubelaker, to examine the body. In particular, he sought information about the wounded finger. To everyone’s disappointment the grave was waterlogged. The finger might have been be lost. But when the casket was opened, investigators found the finger protected in a bag, its contents labeled in Angel’s handwriting. He had somehow known to preserve the finger with extra care.

  As with the bog bodies, the forensic anthropologist couldn’t be sure if the finger injury had happened before or after death. Her body had clearly been damaged while in the woods. Some bones were missing, and others had tooth marks, indicating that animals had fed on the carcass. However, the finger wound was unlike the others; it was clear-cut, as though sliced off, not chewed. Ubelaker did experiments to determine what could have caused such an injury. One possibility was that the finger had been injured when slammed in the door of Bilmaris’s Pinto. Substituting chicken bones for the finger bone, he tested this theory. The cuts were similar on the chicken bones. The case never went to court. The damaged finger, and perhaps the possibility of its having been slammed in a car door, must have looked bad enough for the suspect to plead guilty. This shows that a body—no matter how poor the condition—is extremely helpful in an investigation. But the lack of a crime scene makes the puzzle hard to piece together. That’s because so very much can be gleaned from the scene of the attack. For that reason, it’s where criminal profilers do much of their work.

  10

  To Catch a Killer: Criminal Profilers

  The FBI established its Behavioral Science Unit in the 1970s. It was dedicated to investigating high-profile or difficult-to-solve murders by studying how murderers think and behave—in other words, through criminal profiling. FBI profilers are perhaps best known for tracking down serial killers by looking for patterns at crime scenes. In fact, the term serial killer was coined by one of the FBI’s early profilers, Robert Ressler. But by then, serial killers—and psychological profiling—had existed for nearly a century. Perhaps the most notorious serial killer was Jack the Ripper, mentioned in the introduction, and so named because his true identity was never known.

  London in the late 1800s was the richest city in the world. But the wealth didn’t flow into its East End neighborhoods. These were flooded instead with poor immigrants from Ireland and Europe, who joined the poor natives of England in the crowded tenements. In such a cramped, deprived, and disease-ridden environment, alcoholism flourished, and with few options for employment, many women turned to prostitution. Fifteen hundred prostitutes worked in the Whitechapel neighborhood alone. Yet for all its ills, random murders were uncommon in Whitechapel. People killed people they knew, whether in rage or for some personal gain. That’s how the Ripper case was investigated at first.

  The body of Mary Ann “Polly” Nichols was found in a Whitechapel gateway at three forty-five a.m. on August 31, 1888, her throat cut and her body mutilated with a knife. The men who found the body summoned a police officer, but by the time he arrived, another policeman, Constable John Neil, had also made the discovery. The time of death was quickly determined. A police officer had walked past the gateway a half hour before, and so the killing must have occurred minutes earlier. A woman was sleeping in a room above the gateway but heard no scream. That meant the killer had probably taken Polly by surprise and killed her instantly, mutilating her quickly before fleeing the scene.

  Such an escape would not have been difficult. London streets were lit by dim gas lamps. Even in the middle of the night, the streets of Whitechapel were well traveled by prostitutes, drinkers, and those walking to and from their factory night shifts, but the darkness and the black clothing worn at the time would have concealed the blood on the killer.

  A doctor was called in to examine the body. He noted that the cuts on the body ran left to right, meaning the killer might have been left-handed. The weapon appeared to have been a dagger or sharp knife and wasn’t left at the scene. Next, police worked to identify the victim. “Lambeth Workhouse” was stenciled on her petticoats, and a worker there was able to identify the body as Polly, who had since moved out. She had most recently lived in a lodging house and worked as a prostitute. Her new housemate, Ellen Holland, had last seen Polly at two thirty a.m. She’d said she was going out to find a customer so that she could pay her rent.

  As in most murder cases, investigators questioned the people Polly knew. She had been married with five children but left them when the youngest was still a toddler. Her ex-husband said their marriage had broken up because of her drinking. Her father said it was because the husband had had an affair. Whatever the reason, the husband hadn’t seen Polly in three years. The police suspected neither man in the murder.

  Polly wasn’t the first woman in Whitechapel to be violently killed that year. There had been two other prostitutes murdered—in April and August. Police investigated Jack Pizer, a man who was said to be blackmailing prostitutes and assaulting them. His alibi cleared. On closer look, the three murders were dissimilar. The first victim survived long enough to say there had been three assailants. The second victim was stabbed repeatedly, but not mutilated like Polly.

  Whether or not these were early Ripper victims is still debated today. Either way, police knew all too soon that a single killer was targeting the neighborhood’s prostitutes. The next victim, Annie Chapman, was found in a backyard on Hanbury Street at around six a.m. on September 8, 1888. The wounds were similar to Polly’s, and like that murder, this attack had happened quickly. Annie had been seen talking to a man on the street just minutes earlier. A witness described him as “shabby-genteel,” dark, in his forties, and wearing a deerstalker hat.1 The doctor who examined the body suggested that based on the cuts, the killer might have had a background in medicine. Doctors and medical students were investigated.

  Map showing the locations of the Whitechapel murders

  On September 25, 1888, the Central News Agency received a letter addressed “Dear Boss” and signed by “Jack the Ripper.” In it, the killer promised to cut off the ear of his next victim. It was at first thought to be a hoax. But in the early morning hours of September 30, the bodies of Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes were found less than an hour apart in separate locations. Eddowes’s ear was sliced from top to bottom. Her body was also mutilated, and a kidney removed.

  A piece of her bloody apron was found near the body, and above it, written in chalk, were the words, “The Juwes are the men that Will not be Blamed for nothing.”2 Though a photograph could have been taken (they were taken of the bodies in the morgue), Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Charles Warren didn’t want to wait for a photographer to arrive. He was concerned that with daybreak near, people would see the words and be inflamed against the Jewish immigrants in the neighborhood. So he erased the writing. Afterward, the men who saw it disagreed on the misspelling. Was it “juwes” or “jewes” or “juews”? This could have been an important clue, as crimes have been solved by having a suspect write a message and checking the misspellings against each oth
er. They also could have compared the handwriting side by side to the letters purportedly written by Jack the Ripper—and there were more to come.

  The Central News Agency received a letter on October 1 that said:

  I wasn’t codding dear old Boss when I gave you the tip. You’ll hear about saucy Jacky’s work tomorrow double event this time number one squealed a bit couldnt finish straight off. had no time to get ears for police. Thanks for keeping last letter back till I got to work again.

  Jack the Ripper3

  Again, detectives couldn’t tell if it was a hoax. The killer had intimate details of the crime, but perhaps they had been gleaned from news accounts. A couple of weeks later, the chairman of the East End Vigilance Committee, George Lusk, received a gruesome package—half of a kidney—and a letter. It said:

  From hell

  Mr. Lusk

  Sir

  I send you half the

  Kidne I took from one women

  prasarved it for you. tother piece

  I fried and ate it was very nise. I

  may send you the bloody knif that

  took it out if you only wate a whil

  longer

  signed Catch me when

  you can

  Mishter Lusk4

  The kidney was determined to be human and was similar to Catherine Eddowes’s other kidney. It didn’t contain the preserving chemicals used in hospital autopsies. But such chemicals weren’t used in autopsies conducted by medical students. If the letter had been a hoax, that might have been the source. Of course, nowadays, a simple DNA test of the body and the kidney could answer this question. As it was, the authenticity of the letters and package were never known.