by Emily Craig
If this had been a routine murder, every officer present would have known how to document the evidence and secure the scene. For some reason, though, bones seem to turn it into a whole new situation, so these experienced law-enforcement professionals were all looking to me.
“Okay, guys,” I said to the assembled team. “The first thing we need is a videographer. And a photographer.” It would be heartbreaking to spend hours recovering and analyzing skeletal evidence only to have it thrown out of court because someone hadn't recorded where, when, and how it was found.
Of course, the pictures, even those taken first thing this morning, would not show a pristine crime scene. There were footprints everywhere from all the people who'd been traipsing through the scene the previous evening. I didn't so much mind the folks who had legitimate tasks to perform, but I knew some of the prints had been left by cops who were just plain curious. I could read last night's frantic activity in the recently broken branches and plant stems throughout the area, and in the newly disturbed soil around the victim's skull.
At least the officers had established a definite perimeter, looping bright yellow tape around several trees and then stretching it taut to set off an area approximately of about 1,600 square feet. Any member of the public who showed up in this isolated spot would hopefully have been deterred by the large black letters warning CRIME SCENE-DO NOT CROSS.
Down by the river, most of the remains appeared to be untouched. Even from this distance, I could make out the soft mix of sand and mud that typifies the banks along the flood-prone Ohio River, and it was this fine-grained fluvial mix, soaked by recent rains, that made the riverbank so treacherous. In the places where the bank dropped steeply down to the river, the soft soil tended to break off under even the slightest pressure.
“Once I'm down there,” I went on, “I'll have a better idea of what comes next.” Grabbing a handful of marker flags, I let Al ease me down about twenty feet to the edge of the dropoff, where the bones were down a steady, steep slope, with an overhanging ledge that jutted out over a straight drop down to the river.
“All right,” I called back up from the brink. “We don't really know what we've got yet, so we're going to have to document this just as if it's a homicide. I don't want it to get too crowded down here, so let's restrict access to the men taking the pictures. Oh, and let's have somebody taking notes and bagging the evidence. I'll recover the bones myself and hand them up to Mark.” I took another look at the slick bank. “Somebody probably should be safety officer, too, just to keep an eye on things.”
The officers looked at one another for a moment, then quickly divided up the tasks. Officer David Lambers of the Fort Thomas Police Department, a young, clean-cut kid with a shy, friendly demeanor, got the job of note-taker. He would also pack each bone into its own little evidence bag, labeling it carefully with the case number, time, and date. Two other officers picked up the cameras, while the remaining men formed a kind of bucket brigade, ready to pass each bone up the riverbank to the coroner.
As the guys quickly sorted themselves out, I was struck again by the difference between real life and TV, where you often see one single heroic scientist doing all the jobs at a crime scene, or micromanaging the cops with detailed orders. I don't do that. I concentrate on the evidence associated with the remains and try to capitalize on everyone else's special areas of expertise. I have an enormous amount of respect for the police, who know far better than I do how to document and process a crime scene. No fixed protocol works every time; each situation is unique, but you always need to remember, every step of the way, to keep a record of everything you do and of how things looked before you did it. As I recovered the bones, for example, I'd leave marker flags to show where the skull had been and how the bones had been scattered. After I collected the evidence, we'd take pictures of the flags and measure how far apart they were. If I ever had to testify in court where I found the skull, I wanted to be able to say something more precise than, “Um, I think it was kinda near the riverbank.” “Seventy-two inches from Tree A, as labeled in this photograph taken on the morning of April 22,” would make much better testimony.
The other golden rule of crime scenes is so obvious you'd think it wouldn't need to be mentioned: Don't damage the evidence. Yet detectives who understand this very well when the evidence is a drinking glass or a piece of jewelry tend to underestimate how fragile skeletal evidence can be. I didn't want one single mark on those bones that could be attributed either to me or my colleagues, and I was prepared to spend as long as I needed in the recovery process to guarantee that didn't happen.
Recovering human remains is always a fascinating experience, and new theories about the case can evolve as you come across new bits of evidence. That's how it was this day. When we started, we were looking at the fairly routine excavation of what was probably a derelict who had died peacefully (if tragically) within the past few months. By the end of the day, a series of small, odd, and fascinating clues had led us to suspect that this was one of the most unusual cases that any of us had ever worked on.
The skull was precariously close to the river's edge, so I decided to start with that. I was especially curious about a peculiar mass of whitish material that I could see on the ground around the skull. From a distance, it looked like adipocere, or grave wax, a grainy material that bears a weird resemblance to crumbling Styrofoam. You tend to find adipocere wherever body fat decomposes in a moist area containing abnormally low levels of oxygen, and I thought that its presence here helped confirm Mark's theory that this man had died and decomposed right on this very spot. The shaded, damp riverbank, inundated with new layers of silt each time the river flooded, was the perfect environment for the creation of adipocere.
As soon as I knelt down beside the skull, however, I realized that my first impression had been wrong. This wasn't adipocere-it was lime.
That told me a whole different story. First of all, powdered lime doesn't appear naturally in the Kentucky woods. Somebody had to cart it all the way out here and sprinkle it over the dead man, to keep his body from smelling or to make it decompose more quickly. That didn't sound like a natural death to me.
Second, someone had had an awfully big stake in covering up this guy's death. By this point, I'd seen thousands of Kentucky homicide victims, and I could vouch for the fact that many people did very little to conceal their crimes. I'd seen a shocking number of girlfriends and family members who'd simply been killed and tossed into the woods. And since it's a felony to tamper with physical evidence, covering a body with lime added a second crime to the first one. Why had someone gone to so much trouble to hide this body?
Ironically, the lime intended to make the body disappear had actually helped preserve it. As soon as the river's moisture hit the lime's calcium carbonate, the powder had hardened, creating a crust that had encased our victim like a plaster-of-Paris shell. Only fragments of the lime remained. But when I lifted up the larger chunks of the hardened substance, I could see the reverse topography of a body, as if some perverse sculptor had used our victim's corpse to cast a mold.
When I called out that I had found lime, a shiver of anticipation ran through every cop at the scene as the implication of my words sank in. I knew we were all thinking the same thing: This was no accident. Thank heavens we had followed procedure and treated the area as a crime scene.
Now it was time to reach for the skull, and I was sorely tempted to simply snatch it from the soil and start checking for some sort of fatal injury. But I made myself go slowly. The detectives had pulled into a tight group above me on the riverbank, gazing down intently as I knelt over the half-buried skull, using a small soft-bristle paintbrush to brush away as much loose dirt and debris as I could. Then I followed the contours of the bone gently with my fingers, reaching as far into the soil as I dared, carefully lifting the skull from its resting place.
Breathless with anticipation, I turned the skull slowly in my hands. There was a neat round bullet hole dir
ectly behind the left ear, fractures radiating out from the hole like starbursts. Maybe tonight when I got home I'd feel some compassion for this man, shot in the head and left to rot in the dirt. Now all I felt was the thrill of the hunt.
Mark had come up behind me and was studying the skull over my shoulder. “Look,” I said, tracing the bullet hole with my gloved finger. “Here's an entrance gunshot wound. Now, do we have an exit wound, or have we gotten really lucky?” No exit wound might mean that the bullet itself was still inside the man's skull, an incredible piece of good fortune.
I turned the skull around slowly in my hand. Nope. No exit wound. The bullet that had killed this man might be lodged within these head bones, stuck inside the dirt and muck that over the years had taken the place of blood and brains.
Beside me, Mark was shaking his head, reluctant to give up his theory of a homeless man dead of natural causes. “Are you sure it's a bullet wound?” he asked stubbornly. “Maybe something here along the river bashed the skull after he died. Or maybe he just got drunk, fell down, and hit his head.”
I heard a murmur of agreement from the officers higher up the bank. If this was a homicide, they'd have to find the killer. They needed to know what I thought and why I thought it. So, as I'd learned to do back in Tennessee, I started to think out loud, as much for my own benefit as for that of my colleagues.
“Okay,” I began. “The first thing I do when I see a skull is to check for trauma. Hopefully, that tells me right off the bat whether we're looking at a homicide, suicide, or death from natural causes. If you're lucky enough to find a gunshot wound, that pretty much rules out natural causes. And depending on where the bullet hole is, you might be able to eliminate suicide or even accident.”
I held up the skull a little higher, so everyone could see the hole. “Of course, you've got to be able to tell the difference between a gunshot wound and a hole that's been made in some other way. But see this beveling around the hole? To me, that spells ‘bullet.' And look at these sharp fractures radiating out in all directions. You need speed and force to make fractures like that, so again, I'm thinking ‘bullet.'”
“Okay, so it's not natural causes,” Mark said reluctantly. “But what about suicide?”
“Or accidental death?” Daly chimed in. I could see him calculating all the different ways this investigation could go, wondering how much manpower he'd need, how much time.
“Check out the location of the wound,” I suggested, pointing to the small, round hole about an inch behind where the victim's left ear used to be. “And look closely at the angle-the bullet was heading front and center. That's your classic execution-style gunshot wound. I'm not saying it couldn't have been an accident-but it's pretty unlikely. And no way was it suicide.”
The men nodded and started to murmur among themselves. Violent crime was hardly a stranger to our fair Commonwealth. If we were going to discuss all the reasons a lone man might be found shot and buried in the woods, we'd be here until next Easter. So I left the police to their speculations and picked up my paintbrush again, using it to gently loosen some of the sandy soil from the skull's upper jaw and face area, holding the skull carefully over the small plastic box I'd brought for this purpose. As the grainy dirt fell into the box I thought about the intimate connection that had been created between this man's body and the sandy soil in which he'd been buried. His flesh had literally returned to dust-dust that I would later analyze back in my lab, hoping to find a bit of bone or bullet that might tell us who this man had been and who had killed him.
Once the skull's surface was relatively clean, I took a closer look at its grayish-brown contours. Years of work with Dr. Hughston and then in grad school had taught me to rely on my sense of touch, so I gently ran my fingers over the bones as if I were caressing the victim's face. I find this process totally mesmerizing, and I often catch myself slipping into a kind of trancelike state, in which I seem more open than usual to subtle impressions and unexpected insight.
To avoid becoming too absorbed, I make sure to keep up a running commentary, another thing I've learned the hard way. Once I had to examine a particularly large femur whose healed fracture up near the hip joint immediately caught my attention. As I wrapped my fingers gently around the bone and ran my hand up and down the shaft, the men around me all stopped what they were doing and gave me their full attention. I was oblivious of my audience until one of the detectives gently tapped me on the shoulder and asked in a stage whisper if I wanted to be alone. I laughed loudly with the others but I was mortified!
So now, I touched and talked at the same time, less concerned with whether the other investigators were listening than with identifying my own impressions. “Clearly, he was a man,” I said, trying to keep my voice casual so I wouldn't sound too much like some fairground fortune-teller. “Big, robust face, very distinctive. Look at these heavy muscle markings-large facial features, for sure. He's got a big, prominent brow ridge, too. See this thick area of bone right above his eyes? When I first saw how big his skull was, I was pretty sure he was a male, but I know it now. Look at these big mastoid processes, the bones behind each ear. These were attached to the muscles that support and move the head; men usually have larger, stronger muscles than women.”
I guess my audience was indeed listening, because a couple of them gave out a few good-natured cheers. I grinned at the interruption and went on to explain that since men's muscles are larger, all the places where their muscles are attached to bone tend to be larger, too. It's quite noticeable in the trunk, arms, and legs, but you can also see signs of maleness behind the ears and across the back of the skull.
As I reached the man's mid-face, my focus switched to our victim's racial heritage. His nose was long and narrow, with a fairly distinct sharp edge along the bottom, while the ridge of bone connecting the bottom of the nose to the upper teeth was almost vertical. At the top, both sides of the nose came together to form a narrow peak like a little tent, right between the skull's eye sockets. I could tell that this man's eyes had been set relatively close together, and that feature, plus his narrow nose, told me he'd probably had a significant amount of Caucasian ancestry. With the dirt and sand still stuck to the bone, it was difficult to form a specific opinion on his age, but judging by the overall maturity of his bones and teeth, he was clearly an adult.
When I took a closer look at our victim's teeth, I felt a surge of hope. There was still a heavy veneer of dirt, but I could see that many teeth had been filled and covered with gold. Now we knew we were dealing with the homicide of an adult White male who could once afford the very best dental care available. After only two hours on the scene, this was progress.
Now, what about that bullet?
When you've got an entrance wound and no exit wound, the bullet is obviously going to lodge in the brain. In a fresh body, that's good news, because all you have to do is dissect it out either whole or in pieces if it's shattered inside the brain. As a body decomposes, however, the brain liquefies, and there's nothing to hold the bullet or its fragments in place. So it might easily slip out through one of the many large holes that once made room for the spinal cord, nerves, and arteries.
In this case, the cranial vault, or braincase, was packed full of silt. If we were lucky, this silt and sand had gradually filtered into the skull as the brain liquefied, trapping the bullet inside.
Mark had been watching closely as the other investigators gradually drifted back toward the perimeter of the crime scene, drinking their coffee and speculating further about who the dead guy might be. When I told him that we might still have the fatal bullet, his eyes lit up. “You know,” he offered, “I've got an x-ray machine back at the office.” Besides being the local coroner, Mark was a licensed chiropractor with an active practice in Fort Thomas. It could save us an awful lot of sifting and screening through the dirt.
“Sure,” I agreed. “I'm done with the skull for now. Why don't you just pack it up and take it over to your office? We've got plenty to
do till you get back.”
Mark reached for the skull, but I couldn't help hesitating a bit before handing it over. I felt sure that he would indeed find the bullet, and to be honest, I was a little jealous. I couldn't decide whether to reassure myself that I might make an even bigger discovery than Mark, or to remind myself that after all, the end result was all that mattered. This question of who gets the credit had plagued me since my early days as a medical illustrator. I loved being part of a team, but I didn't like sitting anonymously on the bench. Well, I told myself, today I was not only part of the team, I was the star player, the captain, and the coach. The least I could do was let Mark score a point.
So, a little too much like a spoiled child giving up her favorite toy, I held out the skull, and eagerly Mark took it. Holding it upside-down in one hand, he climbed awkwardly back up the riverbank, where he meticulously wrapped the skull in a plastic bag. If the bullet was there, it wouldn't get far. And if it wasn't… I glanced at the choppy waters of the Ohio River and repressed a shudder. If the bullet that had killed this man had fallen out of his skull, we'd probably never see it again, though I was fully prepared to spend several hours sifting through the dirt to find it. “Leave those flags in place,” I told my colleagues, pointing to the markers I'd put around the skull's original location. “And let's stay away from here for now.” If we did have to dig for a bullet, I wanted to start with a relatively pristine section of soil.
Most of the man's bones had been partially freed from their clandestine grave by erosion, though they still lay half-buried under the sandy earth. Others perched precariously on chunks of sand that appeared ready to break off and slide into the river. I wondered how many days of floodwaters eating into the soil had finally freed these bones, and I marveled at the coincidence that had brought those two boys out here, after the bones had appeared but before they'd washed away for good.