by Emily Craig
After photography came analysis. A pathologist or anthropologist had already opened the body bag for Chip to take his snapshots. Then the scientists examined the remains while dictating their findings out loud. A scribe took quick written notes, which a secretary would eventually transcribe into a computer file.
Without disturbing the tissues too much, the pathologist or anthropologist would start by trying to determine the sex, race, and approximate age of the victim. This was often not possible during the initial exam, though, because of the destruction and disarray of the remains. So this initial report might only describe the condition of the bag's contents, the degree of burning, and some general observations, such as whether the bag contained a large section of torso or just a few scraps of unrecognizable tissue.
On to the x-ray room. In some mass-fatality incidents, x-rays were left for later in the process, as they are usually used to determine such questions as whether the victim had old, healed fractures or perhaps a titanium hip replacement-ultimately useful for identification, but hardly the first priority here. What was a priority was making sure that these body bags were free of any unexploded ordnance, such as a hand grenade or another explosive. X-rays could also tell us whether any bullets or bullet fragments were hidden in the tissues, so that during the autopsy these could be located, documented, and removed.
Sometimes, too, these preliminary x-rays might reveal evidence of surgical hardware, such as a pacemaker. If so, the next step was to dissect such devices free from the surrounding body so that we could look for a serial number. Hopefully someone would find a matching number somewhere in the medical records of some victim on our (unreliable) list. Technicians also looked out for pins, screws, and plates used to repair fractures. Maybe we could find an x-ray or medical record documenting the fracture and its repair, enabling a positive ID.
If the body part in question held teeth, the dental identification specialists hurried over to take a quick look and make some notes. These amazing experts could tease secrets from even the smallest piece of dental enamel or burned tooth root-indeed, more than half of the victims at Waco were identified through dental comparisons. The trick here, as with the fingerprints, was finding a matching record. Luckily, many (though not all) of the adults at Waco had dental records on file, so after this quick initial survey, the dentists could start right in searching their files for a possible match. They'd get more time to examine the teeth after the autopsy.
Meanwhile, every moment that the conference room wasn't being used for briefings, investigators were constantly on the phone there, beseeching family members, dentists, and doctors around the world to send any and all records to Fort Worth. The fingerprint experts were going through a similar process-taking what prints they could find and then searching madly for a match. True, lots of the hands had been pretty badly burned, leaving very little skin from which to lift a print. But those FBI experts could sometimes work magic, managing somehow to pull prints from even the most charred fragments of tissue.
Of course, the most heroic print-lifting might produce disappointing results since, TV drama to the contrary, most people's prints aren't on file. There is a central computerized database that compares fingerprints and spits out IDs at the push of a button, but you soon find out that it doesn't cover most of the prints you're looking for-it only includes people with criminal records, and most mass-fatality victims don't have those.
Again, the protocol differs depending on the type of mass fatality. In a plane wreck, with a list of known victims, you can ask employers if they have their staff's prints on file. Or if you know that Jane Doe was on the plane, you can ask her husband to let you lift matching prints from her bathroom mirror or her can of hairspray. But at Waco, we had neither a reliable list of names nor very many printable hands. That put more pressure on the rest of us to try to take up the slack.
Investigators had responded by turning one end of the conference room into a command center dedicated to gathering information on the men, women, and children who had died. Men and women were constantly talking on the phone, ripping paper from the fax, making multiple copies of documents, and scrutinizing computer screens in a frantic effort to keep up with all the information that was pouring in. Little by little they filled out vital information on the growing list of names: age, race, sex, height, weight, eye color, hair color and length. If they could, the staff added other identifying details: prior injuries, surgeries, scars, tattoos. Authorities were holding in reserve the most tedious and time-consuming ID method of them all: the then relatively new science of mitochondrial DNA analysis. In the end, DNA told the story for many of our victims, but in the interests of speed and efficiency, we had to start with the more traditional methods, especially since DNA testing was then a complicated process that involved a number of steps taking anywhere from two weeks to more than a year.
Back in the morgue, the bags kept coming and coming, a seemingly endless procession of human debris. We anthropologists were in constant demand to help with victim identification. If a body had been reduced to a charred torso, we tried to determine the victim's age, race, and sex by examining the bones. This could at least narrow down the possible list of matching names. By now investigators suspected that there had been fifty-five adults, five teenagers, and twenty-three children in the compound when it burned. By further dividing the list of victims into male/female and White/Black/Asian, we made it easier to match charred remains to the names on our list.
The children were the hardest to deal with-both scientifically and emotionally. Max and his team had found many of the children wrapped in blankets, unscathed by the fire. Apparently the Davidian adults had put the young ones in the “bunker” area of the compound. Then the walls collapsed, burying the children under several feet of ordnance, burned structural debris, and other bodies. By the time investigators dug down under the rubble, the children's bodies had already begun to decay. At least they had been spared the worst ravages of the fire.
In order to locate the babies' tiny bones and teeth for analysis, we often had to search by touch. Each little corpse had been reduced to a rotting mass of flesh that revealed no secrets to even the most trained eye. The only way to learn anything was to feel around inside the mutilated body. You could usually find the skull bones pretty easily-they were relatively large, flat, and grouped together, even if they no longer held their characteristic globe shape. But in order to find the tiny pieces of still-growing bones and teeth, we had to start near the victim's head, manually compressing the cold, greasy, decomposed tissues until we felt the tiny, hard treasures we were seeking. Babies' backbones are still developing, with each vertebra composed of three irregularly shaped pieces resembling a set of toy jacks. When we examined shafts of the newborns' forearm bones, we found they were only slightly bigger than wooden matchsticks, while the bones of their fingers and toes were about the size of a grain of cooked rice. It may sound gruesome in description, but you'd be surprised how fast you get used to focusing on the physical details of the body, blocking out the reality of the little human who once inhabited it.
When we'd finally recovered what bones we could, we put the tiny pieces on top of a fine-mesh screen and rinsed them with hot soapy water. Then we had to try to identify the child, first trying to estimate the age and then perhaps the sex. The first time I worked on a child, the body still contained some identifiable soft tissue, so I was able to determine by looking at the genitals that I was working on a little girl. Later I'd get children who had been reduced to piles of burned bones-no soft tissue, nothing to tell me the sex. On an adult, that wouldn't matter: I can usually tell the sex of an adult arm or leg bone by measuring its size at the joint or by finding sex-marked features in a pelvis or in some morphologic feature such as muscle insertions-the places where muscles fit into the bone, which are generally more prominent in men. With young children, it's harder, since boys' and girls' bones pretty much resemble each other until puberty.
When I later work
ed on mass fatalities, I often used clothing to help determine gender, but I couldn't do that here. We had already been told that in the Davidians' communal compound, items of clothing were shared by all the children and essentially “unisex,” with pretty much everyone wearing the same kinds of shorts and T-shirts. So now, since I was working on an unburned child, I turned to hair color and length to help with the ID. I cut off a lock of hair, washed it, and set it aside to dry. Later, I'd note its characteristics in that victim's permanent record, where hopefully it would narrow down the list of possible matches.
My job would have been far easier if this child had come to me with teeth still inside her mouth. As in most cases, though, the teeth had fallen out as the little body decomposed, and I had to feel around for them inside the cold, putrid, oatmeal-like soft tissues that had once surrounded her head and neck and filled her skull. As patiently as I could, I managed to retrieve fourteen teeth. I laid the teeth on top of a fine-mesh screen and rinsed them off with a stream of warm water from the sink before reinserting them into their sockets. I continued to pinch bones out of the goo, swishing them gently in a pan of warm soapy water and laying them out in anatomical order on a clean white sheet: first the skull fragments, then the neck bones, collarbones, shoulder blades, ribs, and so on toward the toes, until the little skeleton was complete.
Final analysis of the skeleton was left to one of the senior members of the forensic anthropology team, either Dr. Doug Ubelaker or Dr. Doug Owsley, both former students of Dr. Bass who now worked at the Smithsonian. The medical examiner's protocol required that only certain credentialed experts conduct the final analysis and sign their names to the official autopsy report. Fine with me. Still a graduate student, I was well aware of my limitations and was quite content to be a “worker bee.”
So now, as I laid the final piece of the skeleton in place, I called for Chip to come photograph the skull's face with his Polaroid camera. Though I knew that taking Polaroids of the teeth was standard procedure, no one had ever actually explained to me exactly what the snaps were for. I later learned that during the siege, law enforcement negotiators had insisted that the adults in charge send out videotapes of the children in order to prove that they were well cared for and unharmed. Now FBI agents and dentists were analyzing the freeze-frame images from these same videotapes and comparing them to our “dental Polaroids.” Since most of these children had never been to a dentist or doctor, this process of comparison was the only way to identify them, short of DNA analysis.
I was, frankly, proud of my burgeoning skill in assembling children's skeletons, and I soon learned to lean on that pride as a way to get through the long and grueling days. Satisfaction in a job well done filled me each time I called Chip over, refueling my energy for the next pile of bones.
One day, just as I was putting a child's last tiny tooth in place, I was asked to make a special trip to the conference room to deliver some autopsy findings. I walked into the conference room, my mind on the coffee break I was planning to take-and there on the screen was a freeze-frame image of a child who was strikingly similar to the one I had just been working on, a joyous little face, baring tiny teeth in a bright smile and waving “bye-bye” to the camera.
I was stunned. Tears welled up in my eyes, and my chest tightened. I looked away as quickly as I could, but it was too late. The image had burned itself into my retinas and suddenly my body was on its own recognizance, trembling and shaking in a way I didn't recognize.
I had to escape. I must have turned pale. I couldn't seem to move. Then, out of nowhere, a strong hand took hold of my elbow, and before I knew it I was in the inner sanctum of Dr. Peerwani's private office, as dazed as if I were lost in a sleepwalker's trance. When I finally became aware of my surroundings again, I discovered that I was sobbing uncontrollably in the arms of Harold Elliott, the strong and gentle police chaplain who was also my host.
Harold let me cry for what must have been about five minutes. Then he gently led me away-out of Dr. Peerwani's office, away from the morgue, the conference room, the videotape, away from the unforgettable image of that happy, smiling child whose little hand was still waving bye-bye in my mind.
“It's all right,” Harold said softly as he ushered me into the front seat of his car. “Just let the feelings come.”
I shook my head. How could I ever do my job with feelings like these?
Harold drove me to a nearby botanical garden, where for the first time in days I saw the midday sun and heard birds singing. When I was ready, I started to talk, and Harold listened. He was very good at listening.
“I just feel so helpless,” I found myself saying. I hadn't known I felt this way-but then, I hadn't known I was ready to burst into tears, either. “All those people-all those children. Led like lambs to the slaughter, by people they trusted. And there's nothing I can do for them. It's too late.”
“I know,” Harold said quietly. “All you can do is what you're doing. But that doesn't mean it isn't hard.”
Harold had spent most of his career as a chaplain for the Arlington Police Department. He was used to helping strong men deal with the despair and helplessness that seem to erupt routinely in situations where death and human destruction are served up on a daily basis. He knew that if I was to spend my life dealing with the dead, I had to learn to protect myself from the dead.
“You're no different from anyone else,” he assured me. “If you didn't feel this way once in a while, you'd be a machine.”
“But they all saw me,” I said, mortified now by my loss of control in front of my colleagues. “What will they think?”
Harold shrugged. “They've all been there. The ones who have learned to deal with it will think exactly what I do-that you can't do this work without falling apart once in a while. The test comes in what you do next.”
We sat for a while longer in the peaceful garden, the bright sun glinting off the shiny green grass at my feet. I realized how long it had been since I had seen any other light than the harsh white fluorescent bulbs in the morgue. How long it had been since I had smelled anything other than burnt bones and rotting flesh and smoke. I took a deep breath.
“All right,” I said. “Let's go back.”
Walking through the door of the morgue that afternoon was one of the hardest things I ever did. Maybe Harold understood what had happened to me-but these people were professionals. They hadn't lost control, and I couldn't expect them to be charitable about the fact that I had. And, indeed, some of my colleagues refused to look me in the eye as I walked in, pointedly turning away or simply ignoring my presence. The woman who had given me the hair dryer, though, made it a point to smile weakly and nod my way. So did the doctor who had pulled me into my first autopsy. He called me over now and handed me another blue plastic pan full of skull fragments. I took it quickly and gratefully slipped over to my favorite little sink. I picked out the pieces one by one, washing each one carefully in the warm soapy water. As I glued the skull back together, just as I had done on that very first day, a sense of déjà vu, settled over my shoulders as I watched yet another gunshot wound emerge.
Immersed as I was in the daily details of the investigation, it was easy to forget the big picture. But over the next week, I began to realize that we had gathered an increasing amount of evidence suggesting that many of the Branch Davidians had died in a mass murder-suicide. The half-dozen anthropologists on the project had found a total of eighteen gunshot wounds-eight definite, two probable, and eight “possible.” The forensic pathologists examining the remaining soft tissue had found additional irrefutable evidence of gunshot injuries, bludgeoning, and at least one suspected stabbing. While the fragmented and incinerated remains would always hide the cause and manner of death for some victims, the evidence we uncovered was highly significant, and our supervisors meticulously documented even the tiniest details: carefully cataloguing the remains as they were recovered, conducting thorough autopsies on every victim, painstakingly reconstructing each shatt
ered skull.
Ever since my first day, when I had managed to put that skull together in just a few hours, my colleagues had sought me out as the “skull lady,” my own special niche in what we now called the “disassembly line.” Practice makes perfect, and I could now pull apart and then put together these three-dimensional jigsaw puzzles in record time. It didn't always go as smoothly as it had the first time. Some of those skulls were extremely fragile, with large sections of bone blown away or burned up. But if I needed help holding pieces together while the glue dried or bridging the gaps with makeshift struts, Bill or Max was always right there by my side.
As our investigation drew to a close, we had established irrefutable evidence that more than one third of Waco 's victims had sustained “non-heat-related trauma,” which included contact or close-range gunshot wounds, shrapnel wounds, and blunt-force trauma-all before their bodies had ever felt the fire. We all believed that the true figure was a lot higher than one third, though without the evidence to prove it, the medical examiners duly listed many victims' cause and manner of death as “undetermined.”
Members of the press continued-some still continue-to say that the Branch Davidians were all killed by the fire, but we knew that simply wasn't true. And though these reporters never hesitated to point an accusing finger at the federal government, they somehow still refuse to publicize the now-public autopsy findings, which prove conclusively that Waco ended in a mass murder-suicide orchestrated and carried out by the Davidians themselves.