Teasing Secrets from the Dead: My Investigations at America's Most Infamous Crime Scenes

by Emily Craig

  As the days rolled on, our investigation developed a new focus: sect leader David Koresh. The charismatic figure had taken on a kind of near-mythic status, and there was even speculation that he and some of his henchmen had somehow escaped the inferno, fueled by a National Examiner “eyewitness report” of Koresh jumping into a getaway car at the end of a tunnel leading out of the compound. Unless we positively identified his remains, no one would ever be certain if Koresh lived or died. The last thing any of us wanted was for the self-styled messiah to earn some sort of mythic status that would inspire his cult to spring up again. And if he was by some chance alive, the FBI wanted him at the top of their Most Wanted list.

  So, back in the lab, we were keeping a close watch for any remains that might be associated with Koresh. Our first break came on the afternoon of May 1, when pathologists began to examine body bag “MC- 08.” Our dentists had earlier obtained a model of the cult leader's teeth and they knew, almost by heart, what dental evidence they were looking for. They'd made it a matter of routine to check every body bag for Koresh's telltale stainless steel crown and missing premolar, and I'll never forget the sight of Rodney Crow, our chief forensic dentist, bending over MC-08 as we all held our breath.

  Crow stood up slowly, straightening his back to the fullest. “That's him.”

  “Are you serious?” asked someone hidden behind a mask.

  “I'm serious. That's him.” A huge Cheshire-cat grin spread over Crow's face and then quickly disappeared. We had finally found David Koresh.

  Koresh's postmortem exam the next morning followed the standard autopsy protocol, but given the high level of controversy surrounding his demise, a lot more people than usual made sure to check and double-check the evidence. Chip Clark, camera at the ready, never left Dr. Peerwani's side as the corpse was x-rayed, examined, and identified. It was standing room only around the gurney as we watched Dr. Crow make a detailed record of the dental evidence. Then Dr. Peerwani called me to his side as he began to sift through the burned debris and bones found near the victim's head.

  “It looks like I may have a little job for you here, Emily,” he said in a low voice. “I'd like you to go get ready to piece this one together just as soon as I've collected the fragments.”

  He refused to speculate about what I might find-and I too was finally learning not to “theorize ahead of the facts.” Still, I had reconstructed enough skulls shattered by gunshot wounds in the past five days that I could readily recognize the same type of injury here.

  However, “Yes, sir,” was all I said. I backed off and signaled to Max Houck, who had finished at the crime scene and was now working with us in the morgue.

  “This is going to be huge, Max,” I muttered under my breath. “I think we should do this together. I know I'd feel a lot more secure if a second pair of hands and eyes was involved each step of the way.”

  Max nodded and we went over to the sink, laying out the toothbrushes, scissors, and knives we would need if we found remnants of tissue clinging to the bones. I filled my trusty blue plastic pan with warm soapy water, took off my double set of heavy protective gloves, and put on two pairs of thin surgical gloves instead. I was already a little nervous about doing this case, and I wanted all the manual dexterity I could muster.

  Half an hour later, Dr. Peerwani had filled a metal tray with dozens of skull fragments, most of them burned, some no larger than a dime. He brought the tray over to our sink and ceremoniously handed it to me.

  Naturally, there was a flurry of extra attention given to this all-important part of the autopsy. FBI agents, pathologists, and the other anthropologists jockeyed for better spectator angles, only to be nudged aside by Chip Clark, our intrepid photographer, who needed to get some preliminary photos before we started work. It was a little unnerving to have such close scrutiny as I delicately picked pieces of fragile bone from the tray, cleaned them off, and laid them out in some semblance of anatomical order-pieces from the face in one spot, bones from the back of the head in another, side pieces in a third.

  Then, as often happens when I work, I forgot where I was, focusing only on finding each piece's proper place. Max and I made a good team, sharing our task wordlessly. Sometimes he could pick out a piece from the pile that matched the color of a piece I was holding. A few times we simultaneously picked up separate pieces whose fractured edges matched in shape or whose anatomical landmarks lined up. Once again, I thought of piecing together a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle, though in this case huge sections of the puzzle were missing.

  Nevertheless, by noon we were ready to start gluing the pieces together. On an ordinary day it would have been lunchtime, but we were both too engrossed to think of food. Instead, Max brought out the new two-part glue we had started using to reconstruct the skulls. It worked on wet items and hardened instantly, even expanding slightly to fill in gaps where necessary. It took two people to use it, though; one to hold the bone fragments together, the other to squeeze the applicator bottle. A tiny amount of watery liquid would dribble down into the crack between the bones, while the “gluer” quickly set down the bottle and picked up a small spritzer. Once the second element had been sprayed onto the skull-sometimes accompanied by a dramatic little puff of smoke-the chemical reaction was instant and irreversible. If the “bone handler” had remained immobile throughout the process, the bones were now permanently fused.

  This painstaking process had to be repeated with each new matching fragment, so Max and I took turns holding and spraying. Even so, the strain of holding the bones perfectly still was nerve-wracking, and each of us found that after only a few minutes our fingers started to tremble or even to curl up with muscle cramps.

  Word had reached the break room that we had started to glue Koresh's skull back together, and we were abruptly joined by a curious matinee audience who had suddenly agreed that this was indeed more important than lunch. Large portions of Koresh's frontal and left parietal bones were missing but, gradually, before all our eyes, the skull took shape in my hands and the gunshot wounds emerged.

  Max and I were so focused, we didn't even realize that the room had become eerily quiet. The half-dozen men watching over our shoulders hadn't said a word since they spotted the first evidence of the gunshots, but I could hear some of them breathing, their mouths only inches from the back of my neck. Maybe it was their warm breath, or maybe it was just nerves, but when I put the last critical pieces in place, the hairs on the back of my neck started to tingle. Max's eyes met mine, and I saw his pupils dilate-an uncontrollable reaction signaling excitement and pleasure. I suspect that my eyes mirrored his, because I felt as if I were blushing, the blood pounding in my ears. I was sure the guys standing behind me could hear my heartbeat.

  The spell was broken when the double doors flew open and Dr. Peerwani sailed into the room, the tails of his long white lab coat flapping in his wake.

  “I just heard that you've found gunshot wounds in his head!”

  “Yes, sir.” Max and I spoke almost in unison.

  “Show me, please, Miss Craig.” Dr. Peerwani's good manners and respect for his workers never failed, even in this critical moment.

  I picked up the skull and pointed to the semicircular hole in the middle of the forehead. It was beveled inward, surrounded with the sooty tattoo that was the earmark of a contact gunshot wound. Then I carefully turned the skull upside down so the doctor could see the exit wound. The bullet had left the lower part of the back of the skull, not too far from the spinal cord.

  It was an unforgettable moment. We all stood in silence together, thinking back over the past weeks-all the remains we'd identified, the children we'd labored over, the death and destruction that Koresh had caused. We thought of the people whose remains had passed through our hands, the families who would never see their loved ones again. We thought of the horror of April 19, watching the flames flicker across our TV screens, and we thought of the rumors that had blared from those same TVs, the accusations that the FBI had mu
rdered Koresh and his followers, the claims that the Bureau had set the fire that killed everyone. Now I held Koresh's skull in my hand for all of us to see, marked with the unmistakable evidence of the cult leader's death by an intimate hand. No FBI agent could ever have gotten close enough to Koresh to press a gun to his skull-and this beveled hole ringed with soot could only have been made by such a gun. Koresh was dead from a contact gunshot wound to the forehead, and we, together, had proven it.

  Chip had been taking pictures throughout the reconstruction. Now he was hoping to get a good shot that would show the entrance and exit wounds at the same time. No camera could show both, however, no matter which way we turned the skull. I leaned over and whispered a suggestion to Max, who nodded in agreement. From our casual chitchat, he knew I was a certified medical illustrator, so when I offered to make drawings of the injuries-drawings that Dr. Peerwani could then use to describe his findings-Max readily agreed. Dr. Peerwani gave us his clearance right away, as did Dr. Doug Owsley, today's forensic-anthropology team leader.

  Though I'd expected to draw only Koresh's head, Dr. Peerwani asked me to make drawings of his hip as well. While Max and I had been putting the skull together, our colleagues at the next table were examining his hip and lower spine. Spinal x-rays had matched x-rays taken by Koresh's chiropractor before the siege-one more proof that we had indeed found our man. Dr. Peerwani had also discovered that Koresh had a large, healing gunshot wound in his left innominate (hip) bone at the time he died, probably from the first shootout with ATF back in February. (Transcripts made from phone conversations and videotapes made during the siege had led investigators to this conclusion about Koresh's injury.) Chip had documented the hip bone with photographs, but Dr. Peerwani wanted a drawing as well. I was happy to oblige.

  As I began my sketches, using the same sort of plain white paper and number 2 pencil that I'd used for Dr. Hughston, I couldn't help feeling that I had come full circle. I worked late into the night, making sketches of injuries in the rebuilt skull from four different angles, along with a view of the hole in Koresh's hip. These drawings became part of the autopsy report, which confirmed that Vernon Howell, a.k.a. David Koresh, had died from “massive craniocerebral trauma due to a contact gunshot wound to the mid forehead.” Before the next day was over, facsimiles of my drawings had been sent to FBI director William Sessions-and to his boss, Attorney General Janet Reno.

  The drawings were such a success that Dr. Peerwani quickly asked me to illustrate several more of the gunshot wounds that had been sustained by the victims. That was how I spent my last week at Fort Worth -cleaning bloody brains from the skulls, gluing the pieces back together, and documenting my findings. Given how my first day had gone, it seemed a fitting conclusion.

  I turned a page in my professional life during those few weeks. Now more than ever, I saw forensic anthropology as a crucial way of finding out what had happened, helping investigators solve the riddles of the dead. But I had also stumbled upon the contradiction that would always mark my work. No matter how skilled or professional I might become, my elation at solving forensic problems would forever coexist with suppressed despair for the victims.

  When I returned to the university, I threw myself into my final year's casework with a new urgency. I was now more determined than ever to find a full-time job doing exactly the kind of work I had done at Waco. To do that job well, I'd need to soak up every bit of knowledge in the few months of school that remained to me. After all, my on-the-job initiation at Waco had put me under the supervision of some of the most distinguished forensic anthropologists in the world. Once I graduated, I'd be on my own.

  4. Crying Out for Justice

  The dead cannot cry out for justice,

  it is a duty of the living to do so for them.

  – LOIS MCMASTER BUJOLD

  THE BLACK BLOWFLIES were so heavy and slow in the summer air that I could knock them to the ground with my bare hand. The two dead bodies over which they swarmed already seethed with maggots, offspring of the flies that had gotten there several days before me. As I knelt beside the woman's body, sweat running from my forehead and puddling inside my oversized glasses, I felt as though someone had draped my shoulders with a hot, wet blanket.

  The bodies lay only a few yards apart, so just by pacing back and forth through the weeds I could see that each of them was at the same stage of decay. They had both been killed at about the same time-not too long ago, judging by the faintly lighter green of the grass peeking out from underneath their bodies. If they'd been here more than a few days, the grass would have yellowed; if they'd been here longer than that, it would have died completely.

  I was also fairly certain that someone had tossed these bodies here when they were already dead. Their arms and legs were in awkward disarray, and no nearby plants had been disrupted-no broken stems or wilted stalks to indicate a struggle. The lack of pooled or spattered blood on the grass also told me that the bodies had been put here after death, when blood remains within the body because there is no beating heart to force it out.

  These two had not died gently. Their skulls had actually warped from the attacks they had sustained-a common occurrence with low-velocity blunt-force trauma, which can cause bone to literally bend before it breaks, never to return to its original shape. Only the murderer knew just how much force it had taken to do that, and to split the skulls into the pieces I saw here, but at least I could read part of these victims' story in the large gaps of missing bone and in the fracture lines that crisscrossed their caved-in skulls. I knew, too, that as they lay there, with their broken and bloody skulls, flies had chosen those warm, moist areas to lay their first eggs, and I could see their hatching larvae concentrated there now, busily consuming everything except hair, bones, and teeth.

  A little more than a year had passed since I'd been at Waco, and this was the first case for which I was completely on my own. Just three working days ago, on July 1, I'd signed on as State Forensic Anthropologist, making me responsible for the analysis and identification of decomposed bodies and skeletal remains found anywhere in the Commonwealth of Kentucky. But even if I'd already worked a thousand cases, this would have been a tough one.

  It started when a farmer had discovered the bodies of this woman and child in the tall grass at the edge of a fallow pasture somewhere near the close-knit town of Somerset, in Pulaski County. By the time I got to the scene, the sheriff's deputies had already identified the victims as a twenty-one-year-old woman and her four-year-old half-brother, last seen sitting on the steps of a neighborhood church on the afternoon of Sunday, just four days before. Obviously, they hadn't been murdered on the church steps-but where had they died? And when, and how? Obviously, the murderer had fractured their skulls-but had he shot them first? Beaten them to death? Or perhaps they had died by stabbing or even strangulation, the final beating merely an angry aftermath? If I could help investigators answer these questions, we might be able to answer the biggest question of all: Who killed them?

  Coroner Alan Stringer had called me right after noon, asking me to come down to help with the crime scene investigation. Three days into the job, and I couldn't have found Somerset on a map-luckily, I was able to catch a ride with a couple of state police lab techs also assigned to the case. I didn't know any of the investigators yet, either, who were now standing behind me in a loose semicircle, safely away from the overwhelming smell. Sheriff Sam Catron stepped up and introduced himself, gallantly volunteering to assist with what he knew was going to be a difficult job. The good-natured mix of uniformed deputies and detectives in street clothes backed off just far enough to where they could watch my every move and see how I was going to work beside their fearless leader. I brushed ineffectually at the swarm of flies now buzzing around my head and wondered if the overwhelming smell would make me faint. It was time to collect samples of my old nemesis: maggots.

  I started with the woman, whose skull bones peeped out from under a mass of dark, wet, maggot-filled hair.
Normally, I'd gather maggots with a small spoon-like scoop, but I was so new to the job that I hadn't yet gotten my crime scene kit in order. Stifling a grimace, I reached into the maggot mass with my latex-gloved hand and pulled up a handful. As they writhed in my palm, I used my other hand to pick out a dozen long, plump ones and drop them into a little plastic cup, the kind doctors use to collect urine samples. My goal was to “freeze them in time”-to kill them while leaving their bodies intact-so that an entomologist could tell us just how old they were.

  At school I'd killed maggots by filling my specimen jar with 70 percent isopropyl alcohol, but that was yet another item that was missing from my crime scene kit. Maybe if I covered them with scalding water?

  “Okay, but where in the world am I going to find boiling hot water, way out here…?” I had been literally thinking out loud during this whole process, talking through each one of my actions for the benefit of my colleagues. This was a technique I'd developed during my Tennessee casework, when I'd realized that, otherwise, my actions seemed meaningless at best, downright weird at worst. Besides, sharing my process gave others a chance to offer a helping hand.

  Sure enough, one of the detectives called out, “What about the radiator in your van? Y'all just drove a hundred miles. It should still be plenty hot.”

  “What a brilliant idea!” I cocked my head at my fellow investigators, held out my cup of maggots, and smiled sweetly. “Can one of you please take care of this for me?”

  I sat back on my heels and waited as the investigators shuffled their feet and looked sideways at each other. Finally, Deputy Coroner Tim Phelps sidled over and tentatively took the cup. He headed back to the van and I went back to picking maggots off the woman's body. From somewhere behind me, I heard the sound of a hood popping open and then Tim's agonized groan of disgust as he siphoned scalding water from the radiator over the writhing insects. I tried to hide my smirk.