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

by Emily Craig

  Much to Tim's dismay, I wasn't finished. He watched me extract samples from the maggot mass churning in the woman's pubic area, then bravely made a second trip back to the van. I moved on to collect still more samples from the little boy, labeling each cup with the place on the body from which they'd been taken, along with the date, time, case number, and my initials.

  To Tim's-and my-enormous relief, the maggot-collection part of my work was soon finished. Now it was time to take the temperature of the maggot mass itself, a task requiring the coroner's extra-long thermometer, the one he used to stick in the liver or rectum of recently dead bodies to find out how much they'd cooled off. If you slid the thermometer into the various maggot masses in the woman's and boy's bodies, you could document more information that might help determine time of death.

  Next it was time to document the temperature and humidity of the air that enveloped the bodies-the same hot, sticky air that was making it so hard for me to breathe. The entomologist would eventually need this climatological data, so today and every day for a week the coroner or a deputy would have to return to this spot and document the temperature and humidity. The entomologist would then be able to look at the data and the maggots and work backward to figure out when the flies had first laid their eggs, when the maggots started feasting on the dead bodies-and when the bodies might have shown up in the field.

  I went on to document the bodies' location, taking photos and making a quick sketch to remind me of their relationship to the surrounding scene. The sheriff's deputies were experts in this sort of procedure, so I left them to their more detailed sketches while I studied the two victims once more. Their postcranial area-everything from the neck on down-was still intact, which meant that any clues in these areas were the province of the forensic pathologist. Although there are some areas of overlap, pathologists usually deal with the soft tissues, while I deal with the hard ones-bones and teeth. If enough of the body is intact to permit a traditional autopsy, the pathologist conducts it, documenting the general appearance of the person and the internal organs, and collecting blood and tissue samples for analysis. If not enough soft tissue remains to yield any clues, then we rely on the bones, which I usually work on by myself. This division of labor-soft versus hard tissue-can be confusing to crime-show fans, since TV pathologists tend to appear as experts in all things; but in the forensic world, a person has usually either studied soft tissue and gotten an M.D. or has studied hard tissue and gotten an M.A. or a Ph.D. in anthropology. After all, no one can specialize in everything.

  “Go ahead and bag them,” I told the coroner now, knowing that his men would take the bodies to the morgue. Tomorrow the forensic pathologist and I would do an autopsy together-him focusing on the soft tissue, me concentrating on the bone.

  The coroner and his deputy wrapped each body in a clean white sheet and placed it in an individual body bag. Until we got a positive ID, the bags were labeled John and Jane Doe.

  As the coroner was zipping up the first bag, I moved to the soil where the little boy's head had lain. Luckily, I'd brought a hand trowel, which I now dragged across the soil and matted grass. Piece by piece, a little treasure trove emerged: brownish-gray fragments from his shattered skull, tiny teeth that had separated from the rest of his head during decomp, and small black tufts of hair that had fallen away as his scalp sloughed off. Sealing my collection in a small plastic bag, I quickly labeled it “from head area of child victim” and tucked it inside the boy's body bag. As the guys carried the bag to the coroner's van, I made a similar collection in the spot where the woman had decomposed.

  The police and sheriff's men had finished documenting the scene and were now fanning out across the surrounding field, searching for any remaining evidence. I'd finished my work though, so I stripped off my gloves, tore open a package of disinfecting towelettes to wipe my dripping face and hands, and plumped myself down on a clean patch of grass to drink a bottle of cold spring water.

  “Well, I'm sorry we had to meet under these circumstances, but I'm sure glad you came down here.” Alan, the coroner, was sitting down beside me.

  “Hey, a double homicide after three days on the job-I feel like I've just jumped into the deep end of the pool.”

  Alan laughed quietly and handed me a clipboard full of forms.

  “You know, Alan,” I said quickly, “this is my first case here in Kentucky. Think you could help me out with the paperwork?”

  He grinned. “Don't worry, Doc, we got you covered.” He began to leaf through the pages with me. We continued to talk about the case until Alan asked finally, “So you and Dr. Hunsaker will do the autopsy tomorrow?”

  I nodded. “Yes, he and I had better work on this one side by side-if that's okay with you.”

  This was all old hat to Alan, but I was still getting used to the Kentucky procedure. Because Kentucky is such a large and rural state, every county has its own elected coroner, who serves as the primary death scene investigator after receiving special training in forensic death investigations. Elected coroners are not usually M.D.s, and even if they are, they don't do the autopsies. Instead, the coroner normally works the crime scene, sending any bodies that need autopsies to one of four regional state medical examiner's offices, where forensic pathologists who are M.D.s analyze the body further. The coroner has ultimate responsibility for his or her county, however, authorizing the pathologist to do the autopsy, receiving the final report and, ultimately, issuing the death certificate.

  Sometimes the coroner also needs a bone specialist, in which case he or she calls me. I might come out to the crime scene, assist at the autopsy, or take the bones back to my lab in Frankfort. In this case, pathologist Dr. John Hunsaker would be analyzing the bodies' soft tissue while I tried to figure out what had happened to their skulls.

  “Any thoughts so far?” Alan asked.

  “Well, it's obvious their skulls were shattered,” I said slowly. “But right now I can't tell just how. And I strongly suspect they were dumped here, not killed here.” I was also fairly certain that the victims had died by blunt-force trauma-from being beaten, not shot or stabbed-but I wouldn't really know for sure until I'd had a chance to go back to my laboratory and rebuild the skulls. Since bones break in a fairly predictable manner, rebuilt skulls-or even skull fragments-can often help us figure out what caused the damage. At the very least, we might be able to rule out some potential weapons. Bullet wounds are pretty distinctive, but blunt-force trauma can also leave clues. The round end of a ball-peen hammer, for instance, often leaves a ball-shaped indentation, while a tire iron or the shaft of a golf club tends to leave a long narrow groove.

  To get a true picture, though, you need to recover as many skull fragments as you can. Although in this case I'd found lots of loose skull pieces on the ground, I could see that several more fragments were still embedded in the congealed blood and decomposing brain tissue packed within the “brain case,” the cranium. John and I would have to work out a carefully choreographed sequence in tomorrow's autopsy to make sure that neither of us damaged the other's evidence.

  For both of us, the maggots were going to be both help and hindrance: a help because they'd enable us to narrow down the postmortem interval, or “time since death”; a hindrance because as long as there were maggots in the body, they'd continue to devour its flesh even if the coroner put the bodies in the morgue cooler.

  A maggot mass can take on an astonishing life of its own once it gets established in a carcass. Thousands of maggots can accumulate in a dead victim's chest cavity or pelvis, sort of like a chicken carcass packed tight with lots of creamy overcooked rice. Then the maggots pull together into a cohesive group that churns and boils continually when the air temperature gets too cold for them, as individual maggots try desperately to reach the core for warmth, pushing their hapless neighbors to the periphery-only to be themselves pushed out of the way by yet more desperate maggots. At night or in the morgue cooler, the collective maggot metabolism can be as much as
10 degrees higher than the rest of the body's temperature, so when the body emerges from the fridge, you're likely to see a cloud of steam rising slowly from your homicide victim's collapsed and half-devoured chest.

  “Put the bodies in the freezer, not the cooler,” I told the men. Most maggots can survive those sub-zero temperatures, but at least the freezer's extreme cold would arrest their appetites and make them sluggish. Let's take every opportunity we humans have-the maggots will get their turn soon enough.

  The next day at autopsy, the victims' chest cavities were indeed packed tightly with maggots. For now, they were immobilized-stunned from the cold-but in less than an hour, they'd start to move again. John and I would have to hurry.

  I was dressed in the usual blue-green scrubs, surgical gown, gloves, mask, and face shield. My gear protects me from everything but the smell, which always seems to soak right into my skin, my hair, my nose, even my taste buds. Menthol cream smeared under my nose doesn't seem to help, either-it just adds more noxious fumes to the mix. When I first started in this line of work, I thought someday I'd get used to it-but I haven't.

  This would be a conventional autopsy, so I was only responsible for the teeth and skull bones. I'm always grateful for the “learning by touch” that Tyler and I had practiced in osteology class, given how many times I have to resort to compressing soft tissues manually in order to retrieve bone and teeth fragments, much as I'd done with the children at Waco. Skull fragments and teeth often filter down into the base of the skull, the neck, or even the victim's decomposing chest cavity, and then I have to grope around to find them, feeling through dark brownish-green tissues that resemble nothing so much as chocolate pudding into which someone has stirred a few cups of chunky vomit.

  Meanwhile, the body is still home to tens of thousands of maggots, boiling up out of the chest cavity like suds overflowing from a washing machine. Someone once naïvely asked me why I couldn't simply remove the maggots before doing an autopsy, and all I could do was shake my head and chuckle. By the time we got rid of the maggots, there'd be nothing left of the body.

  Still, the notion of fumigating a maggot-filled body is an appealing fantasy, because after my hands have been dipped in this cauldron of gore for a few minutes, the maggots start to climb up my sleeve, coated with a sticky mucus that allows them to cling to a number of different surfaces. Over my gloves and arms they crawl, migrating up toward my face, with its tempting facial openings… I am so repulsed by their slow, determined journey that my reflexes often take over, causing me to flick my wrist and send several maggots hurling to the floor. That seems like a good place for them-until they start to wriggle off under the counters or climb up the leg of another lab worker or an unsuspecting med student who's come along to observe. So once those maggots hit the floor, you've simply got to step on them-even though stepping on an engorged adult maggot is like smashing a miniature grape. They pop-and their pus-colored innards smear over the floor, making yet another mess. To me there's no contest, though: better underfoot than on my face.

  Over the years, I've developed a number of little tricks to cope with my maggot friends. I've learned to work quickly and to keep the autopsy room as cold as possible. That at least renders the maggots a little sluggish, giving us humans a slight but crucial advantage. Even more than the cold, maggots hate bright light, so whenever possible, I put a large black trash bag over a central portion of the body. After a while the maggots migrate underneath. Slowly I slip the bag down to the other end of the gurney, with many maggots following desperately along, leaving me to work in relative peace. It's nice to feel smarter than a maggot.

  “Well, Emily, you're certainly starting off with a bang,” John commented as we began today's autopsy. He looked like your stereotypical college professor-kind of handsome in a studious sort of way, tall and a bit stooped, with his glasses perpetually dangling from a cord around his neck. He always wore a soft brown Mr. Rogers sweater to ward off the chill in the morgue, and he puffed continually on a large wooden pipe to help kill the smell.

  “I know,” I said as he cut into the body and flipped a few maggots of his own onto the floor. “A double murder. Not bad for three days on the job.”

  “Don't forget to find some tenants for your ‘maggot motel,'” he said with a grin. I knew he understood the science behind it, but I defy anyone to say “maggot motel” with a straight face. Since many maggot species look similar, the entomologist needs to see the adult flies, and so it was my lucky job to collect another dozen larvae from the body and raise them to adulthood. Although all of the pathologists know how to do this, they're even more squeamish than I am when it comes to maggots, so if I'm around, my colleagues are more than willing to pass this duty on to me whether or not it's a skeletal case. I use a simple milk carton with some dirt on the bottom and a small chunk of chicken liver wrapped loosely in aluminum foil. The maggots gorge themselves on the liver, then bury themselves in the dirt to pupate. One of the weirdest parts of my job is my nightly bed-check at the maggot motel, making sure my little charges are alive and well and have plenty to eat.

  “I'll never get used to those things,” I said now. “Hey, John, do me a favor, will you? Take a few more puffs of your pipe.” The secondhand smoke covered the smell for me, too.

  After John and I had finished the autopsy, I cleaned the skulls and skull fragments, submerging them into warm soapy water and scrubbing them clean with a toothbrush, just as I'd done at Waco. I left them to dry overnight and returned the next day to begin the laborious process of gluing the skulls back together.

  In this case, all my questions centered on the skulls, but later I'd run into cases where I had to clean and examine every single bone in a body, searching for skeletal trauma or maybe evidence of an old injury to help me make an ID. This doesn't happen very often, maybe one case in five, but when it does, it's a real chore-messy, time-consuming, and smelly. It's something like deboning a rotten chicken though, of course, on a much larger scale. I use x-rays and photographs to help me figure out some way of working the bones free from the decomposing flesh without damaging them. After all, some of the bones might hold tiny cut marks or other evidence of a murderer's actions, and I don't want to leave my own trace evidence alongside of his.

  If there's not too much flesh, I can usually pull the bones out of the soft tissue with a very tiny tweak, like twisting a stem off an apple. If I meet even the slightest resistance, though, I'll dissect the bones away with a small pair of blunt-tip, curve-bladed scissors. Again, my main concern is not to nick or cut any of the cartilage or bone. As I remove each bone from its fleshy casing, I place it on another gurney, aligning my collection in anatomical order. That way, I can do a skeletal inventory while I work, noting what's missing and checking each bone as I lay it into place-my first chance to look for breaks, bruises, or other anomalies that might offer us clues.

  If the bones are still too fleshy to reveal their secrets, I'll take them to the corner of my lab that my colleagues jokingly call “Miss Em's kitchen.” There I boil the bones gently, cooking off any remaining flesh in a process we call “thermal maceration.”

  Like any good cook, I have my system. I fill two Crock-Pots and a large covered roasting pan with water and some mild dish-washing detergent, which helps cut the grease. I like to have my pots full and ready to go before I even start recovering the bones, so I can drop everything into the water and turn on all the devices at the same time. That way, I know exactly how long each bone has cooked, and I can be certain nothing cooks too long. I make sure that the water heats up gradually, too, so that each bone can adjust to the heat.

  I'm happy to report that thermal maceration will destroy even the most tenacious of maggots, including those which hide themselves deep within a bone's nerve and artery channels. If I'm in a particularly sadistic mood, I'll watch as the water heats up and the maggots swarm frantically out of their hiding places. They rise to the top of the steaming liquid, writhing momentarily on the greasy film th
at forms on the surface before they succumb to the heat. Occasionally some of the more athletic maggots even manage to scale the Crock-Pot's ceramic liner-only to sizzle and pop when they slide down the other side and land on the cooker's hot metal frame.

  I hadn't had to boil any bones, but it had taken me several hours to reconstruct the skulls, working by myself and using simple household glue out of a tube. As I stood by my shiny morgue table, watching them dry-the large skull for the woman, the little one for the child-I felt a bitter satisfaction. My colleagues and I had collected a huge amount of evidence that might someday be used to convict a killer. Of course, I'm a scientist, and my focus is on the evidence, not the criminal or the crime. And even as I write this, no suspects for this killing have been arrested. Still, I had my own reward: the contentment of having done the best I could, of making the evidence reveal its secrets so that justice-whatever it was-could be done. I can't reveal any more about this open case, but suffice it to say that there is no statute of limitations on murder, and tomorrow always brings another day and another chance.

  Tomorrow also seems always to bring another case. In my first six months on the job, I had to deal with the exhumation of an allegedly battered child who had been buried in 1972; a partially skeletonized victim tied to a tree and shot in the head; a corpse hidden in a refrigerator for a year; a decomposed body found in the Cumberland River; one case of skeletal remains slashed by a farm implement; another battered and left along the side of the road; and a third left scattered in the woods. Before the end of 1994, I also had to deal with eight separate cases in which fire had reduced the bodies to bone. Seven of these were probably tragic accidents, but one was definitely a homicide disguised by fire. Three mountain men blown to bits by land mines in a booby-trapped marijuana patch rounded out the census for that first half year.