* * *
A tall, solid man with a round face and a shaved head, Detective Cheek reminded me of a young Telly Savalas. He was wearing a tweedy sports jacket, khakis, crisp blue shirt, and yellow tie—not good attire for tramping through mud in the rain. My loafers sunk into the spongy underbrush. Wet leaves on low branches slapped our faces; thorns snagged our clothes.
We were only a few dozen yards into the thicket but the world outside had disappeared. A freight train’s horn wailed in the distance. Traffic whooshed by on 421, just visible through the trees. I followed Cheek as he picked his way through the brush, watching the back of his neck redden in the chilly dampness.
“If I am correct, where he was found was right through there,” he said. “There’s a tree. I’m pretty sure I can find it.” He paced west, then south, and stopped at a spot littered with blackened, wet branches. “This is it. He was lying right here.”
Cheek remembered taking the call at around five in the afternoon on the ninth of February. He had ducked out of a Sunday afternoon family party celebrating his mother’s birthday and met the deputies at the northbound ramp from Highway 62 to Highway 421, where Betty’s truck now sat on the shoulder behind his unmarked cruiser.
Cheek gestured at the off-ramp, where he conjectured that the murderers pulled over to drag the body out of the car. It would have been easy enough to circle around back onto the highway. The whole process would have taken no more than a few minutes.
Even midday, the ramp was far from busy. Passing drivers must have spotted our roadside foray into the brush, but they all sped by without a second glance. “If we were dragging a body into the woods, they wouldn’t have paid no attention to us, either,” Cheek said as we returned to the cars.
Before I climbed in Betty’s truck, I stooped and picked up a black object, shiny from the rain, lying at the edge of the pavement: a rubber bracelet stamped “live-the-backwoods-life.com.” It seemed incongruous, given that we were absorbed in the details of a backwoods death.
Back in Cheek’s low, nondescript cinder-block building in an industrial park, he pulled out an overstuffed loose-leaf notebook labeled “Old Joe.” Seeing that I noticed the name scrawled on the cover, Cheek looked apologetic, explaining that he started calling the remains Old Joe because he hated having no other name to give them.
Cheek’s first job as a police officer at age twenty-two was in a small North Carolina town called Madison. He’d known he wanted to be a cop since maybe fourth grade when he realized he didn’t like to see people get picked on. He’d always wanted to “get the bad guy,” he said. After twelve years as a beat cop in increasingly larger towns, he started working break-ins and larcenies. He joined the Guilford County sheriff’s department as a detective in 2001, graduating from property crimes to the major-crime unit.
It’s hard to make a case for any murderer “respecting” his victim, but the lack of any shred of dignity for Old Joe especially irked Cheek. “This guy, he was sixty to seventy years old. Whoever did this, they stripped him of all his clothing except his T-shirt and his shorts. They tied him up, they duct-taped him, and then they wrapped him up in a tarp and then they duct-taped the tarp. And then they drug him out in the woods. And took everything, all ID, and, unfortunately for us, he was out there for six to eight months and he totally decomposed.
“I mean, why would you duct-tape somebody and put him in a tarp and hide him in the woods down the road? You know they’re going to be found eventually, and if they live on that road, somebody’s going to know them. But if you drive them a hundred miles away and dump them in someone else’s woods . . .” Cheek trailed off.
“And they took his dentures,” he said after a moment. “When I was there that night, and they were bringing him out and they said his teeth are gone, I knew right then and there, man, this is not good,” Cheek told me. “You got no fingerprints, no tattoos, no wallet, no teeth. You have no idea who this guy is.”
* * *
There are a lot of ways for a body to accidentally become unidentifiable; there’s something particularly insidious about killers who do their best to intentionally turn their victims into John and Jane Does. It’s nothing new. Tragedies from Homer’s time reference “the unwept and unburied corpse” that disturbs the social and cosmic order. I turned to a longtime anthropologist to bring me up to date.
Killers who dump bodies where they will be exposed to the elements get help from nature. In the woods, scavenging animals and insects converge on—and often disperse—human remains. Kentucky’s hundreds of unpopulated acres provided state forensic anthropologist Emily Craig with plenty of challenges during her tenure in the form of skeletons picked completely clean of flesh and muscle in as little as twenty-four hours. Other images of decomposition in Craig’s macabre portfolio were like a gruesome version of Where’s Waldo? “You see the body?” Craig asked as I squinted at a photo of what I thought was a mass of greenish brown vegetation at the foot of a tree. I didn’t. “There’s his elbow,” she said, pointing.
Forensic techniques are sloggingly low-tech. The forensic anthropologist needs the skeleton free of soft tissue, marrow, muscle, and cartilage. Forensic sculptor Frank Bender once took revenge on a recalcitrant workman by having him peer into a bubbling cooking pot on the stove in which Bender was boiling a human head to get the skull clean. Others use Crock-Pots or hot plates for the same purpose. One lab reported a time-saving alternative: dunking the remains in Super Kleen—a foaming industrial cleaner intended for “heavily encrusted soils” in the food and beverage industry—and then baking the disarticulated skeleton in chafing dishes in a large-capacity incubator.
It’s not uncommon for someone to bring the medical examiner a picture to ID skeletal remains, because that’s what happens on TV. “You know, they find the skeleton and somebody does a computer face and it’s perfect,” Craig said. “It takes three minutes and they can bring in a photograph and superimpose them and that’s who it is. But it just doesn’t work that way.”
Craig also stressed that DNA is not the panacea some imagine. But I was impressed by investigators’ resourcefulness in using it in challenging cases of lost identity. In one documented case, DNA from a Pap smear was compared to DNA extracted from teeth as reference samples. A badly burned corpse’s teeth can often still be used for identification; dandruff on any remaining section of a burned scalp can sometimes provide enough DNA for analysis. Then there are deliberate mutilations. “They’ll cut off her tattoo, cut off her hands,” Craig says of murderers. “They know. They watch the same TV shows that we do.”
I went in search of cases in which forensic anthropologists managed to stay one step ahead of killers who thought they had beat the system. A cold case investigator told me about a Virginia case in which the killer worked hard—but not hard enough—to obliterate his victim. Mark Christopher Poe, an ex-sailor, lived on the Norfolk naval base. Poe’s next-door neighbors were a husband, who was deployed at sea, and his attractive young wife. After failing to hear from his daughter, her father went to the house and found blood and signs of a struggle. When police arrived, they found hair and tissue in the bathtub and surmised the woman’s killer cut the body up. Black light illuminated the site of the attack. But the body was gone.
The cops’ first break came when a headless, armless, and legless torso was found floating in the river by fishermen.
Next, in the appropriately named Great Dismal Swamp, a man hunting for bait kicked a sack on the ground and a head rolled out.
Then a man’s truck broke down on a road running through the swamp. Another person stopped to help and began to talk about gigging frogs. The first man had never heard of it, so the man made a gig, a kind of multipronged spear, and showed him. The first man took the gig and ran into the swamp.
He gigged one arm. Cadaver dogs found the other arm on the opposite side of the road. At the trial, two witnesses testified that they had seen Poe
throwing an army-green duffel bag from a bridge into the water. Police recovered a green duffel bag with the name of the victim’s husband stenciled on the side. Fibers from the duffel bag were consistent with fibers removed from the trunk of Poe’s car, which, when tested, revealed the presence of blood. A search of Poe’s home revealed, among other things, a knife that both the victim’s husband and father identified as belonging to the victim, and a strand of hair in Poe’s underwear consistent with that of the victim. Poe was convicted of first-degree murder in 1994 and sentenced to life without parole.
In another case, in 2009, a woman searching a Buena Park, California, Dumpster for recyclable cans found a bloody suitcase with a body inside.
The victim’s teeth had been pulled and all her fingers removed. But within three days the coroner identified Jasmine Fiore, a twenty-eight-year-old former swimsuit and Playboy model with a size 34DD bust.
The serial number on her breast implants led investigators to the manufacturer, which kept on file the recipient’s name, address, phone number, Social Security number, surgeon, and primary care doctor. (Total joint replacements implanted after 1992 have traceable serial numbers, and the FDA requires manufacturers of pacemakers and defibrillators to keep track of such data as well.)
The main suspect in Fiore’s murder—her husband, Ryan Alexander Jenkins, a onetime contestant on the reality TV show Megan Wants a Millionaire—fled to Canada and killed himself. Emily Craig told me of a killer who dismembered his victim, tucked the body parts in neatly tied plastic bags, and tossed them in the Wisconsin River. The water kept the body as cool as a refrigerator would have. The plastic bags thwarted maggots and scavengers. “Ironically, the very steps that the killer had taken to conceal his victim’s identity had helped preserve it,” Craig pointed out.
* * *
Old Joe’s remains, mostly skeletonized, were sent to the chief medical examiner’s office at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. “He works on all the bones,” Detective Cheek said. “He puts them back together—or tries to, anyway. I just call and say, ‘Can I speak to Gibbs?’”
I made my way to the tenth floor of a featureless beige building on the campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine. A man slightly paler than a hospital bedsheet emerged from a back room to greet me. I recognized Clyde Gibbs Jr. from his LinkedIn page, where he’d opted to pose in a black T-shirt emblazoned with a human-size white rib cage, the kind you’d see on a Halloween skeleton costume. “Love anything horror, death, bone, and Doctor Who,” Clyde’s bio reads on Google+.
After decades of anonymity, forensic anthropologists are suddenly rock stars, observed Kathy Reichs, producer of the hit TV series Bones, based on her work as a real-life forensic scientist and her best-selling crime thrillers. Reichs, blond and tousled, could pass for Debbie Harry. Clyde Gibbs would have to be Marilyn Manson.
Gibbs looked like a character from one of his beloved George Romero horror films. For all the hilarity in his social media presence, in person he was low-key and solemn. He wore a small skull cast in metal around his neck. His thinning hair crept back over his prominent forehead; his straggly goatee was shot through with strands of gray; his teeth—what little I could glimpse of them—looked like blackened stubs. The fluorescent light turned his hollow cheeks sallow; he was so rail-thin, he seemed to float like a wraith in a white lab coat through the cinder-block hallways. He exuded an odor of stale cigarette smoke and something sharp and chemical. Formaldehyde? Booze?
I liked Gibbs immediately.
As we sat in a conference room and talked, I pointed a camera at him. He demurely hid his coffee mug in his lap. The mug featured a pale, ghoulish girl in a prim schoolgirl outfit. Long, stringy hair obscured half her face and one of her enormous, black-rimmed, haunted eyes. Not being a fan of the horror genre, I only later recognized the iconic Kyra Schon. She played a little girl turned zombie in Gibbs’s all-time favorite film, Night of the Living Dead, released in 1968, the year Wilbur Riddle stumbled across Tent Girl. In the movie, Schon’s character, Karen Cooper, eats her father’s arm and stabs her mother to death with a trowel.
Gibbs informed me matter-of-factly that his comfort level with the dead stemmed from both his parents working at a funeral home while he was growing up. He didn’t see a human being on the table; he saw a challenge, he offered as an explanation to a question I hadn’t yet asked—a question he apparently heard quite often. “Dealing with the skeletons, it’s a puzzle. You’re going in there saying what’s their age, sex, race, what trauma can I find here?”
Experienced coroners and medical examiners can tell a lot from a corpse. I was surprised by how much forensic anthropologists such as Clyde Gibbs and Emily Craig can tell from just a skeleton.
Gibbs commented that being in possession of a full, intact body would seem more revealing than having only bones to work with. You’d think fingerprints, better access to DNA, eye color, hair color, skin tones, scars, tattoos, and piercings would give you more to go on. But in the end, he said, some of those bodies actually go unidentified longer than the skeletons.
Seen one skeleton, seen ’em all? Not so. A human female skeleton has a more rounded pelvis, more rounded shoulder blades, and thinner bones than male skeletons. Women tend to have narrower rib cages, smaller teeth, less angular jaws, less pronounced brow ridges, and a smaller protuberance at the back of the skull; the carrying angle of the forearm is more pronounced in females than in males.
Hold the skull in profile, the legendary Dr. Bill Bass instructs budding forensic anthropologists, and you can determine its race. The students place one end of a pencil on or near the midline of the skull at the base of the nasal cavity. They then lower the pencil toward the face so that the point touches the chin. If the pencil hits the jaw ridge on the roof or bottom of the mouth, the face is prognathic, or Negroid. If the pencil extends to the chin, the face is orthognathic and therefore Caucasoid.
University of Wisconsin–Madison anthropologist John Hawks notes that the nose aperture of the Caucasian skull is a narrow triangle; the bony protrusion between the eyes is long and thin. Negroid skulls have little or no nasal depression and a wider nasal opening. Mongoloid and Negroid skulls also lack a nasal sill, the angulation dividing the nasal floor from the upper jaw. Other race-related differences include the shape of the eye orbits as viewed from the front. Africans tend to a rectangular shape; East Asians, more circular; Europeans, an “aviator glasses” shape.
* * *
One of three centers in the state that perform autopsies for law enforcement, Gibbs’s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner shares space with the UNC hospitals, a complex of tall buildings.
Through hallway windows, I took in views of verdant rolling hills. I followed Gibbs down a cement staircase lined with boxes of rodent poison. As he pushed open a metal door, it struck me that even though we were on the ninth floor, our surroundings had gotten starker, more basement-like.
Why did it surprise me—again—that a medical examiner would lead me to the morgue? I knew from my failed attempt to make it into reefer 2 in Vegas that I needed more mental preparation—or at least a few stiff drinks—before we went any farther. But Gibbs was already yards ahead on his grasshopper legs.
Sure enough, on the other side of the metal door, I almost bumped into a gurney supporting a human form swaddled in black plastic and duct tape. I’d barely registered this when through an open door I glimpsed people in green scrubs hunched over a silver table.
On the table was what appeared to be a solidly built black man. His chest was wide open, gaping, and very red.
With that horror to my right and the gurney straight ahead, I was in danger of repeating my embarrassing Vegas wimp-out. But relaying this to Gibbs would require catching up with him, and that would mean I had to squeeze past the gurney. Proximity, again, was setting me off. The well-wrapped body at my elbow was far worse than
the bloody one in the next room.
I kept my eyes on the floor tiles and stepped around the gurney, holding my breath the way I used to when skirting a reeking homeless man sprawled on a New York City subway seat. My gaze fell on the corpse’s head, taped up in a plastic bag. “Hey, he can’t breathe with that on,” I felt like calling out to Gibbs; but, to my relief, we had arrived at the storeroom to visit Old Joe.
A full human skeleton, it turns out, can be neatly stored in around 180 square inches. A box that size would hold a couple of sweaters or a bathrobe. Bodies found decomposed with intact soft tissue and muscle present a problem for coroners and medical examiners in the many jurisdictions that possess limited or no refrigerated storage. Totally skeletonized remains require less elaborate conditions and storage space and are generally easier to store.
Old Joe’s was one of dozens of brown cardboard boxes piled haphazardly on metal shelves that reached to the ceiling. What looked like two animal skulls, perhaps once belonging to dogs, sat next to a small, unlabeled bottle of blue liquid. White labels printed with things like “801-2199” and bar codes were affixed to some boxes; others had hand-lettered labels such as “Skulls—Cleveland County.” One box was stamped, presumably from a previous use, “for home canning and freezing.” A single femur, Gibbs explained, would be tagged and labeled and kept in a box with other femora. “We have a femur coming in here, an arm there,” he said.
Gibbs’s forensic investigation determined that the John Doe whose case Detective Cheek and Betty Brown had adopted was a white male, approximately five feet nine or ten inches, with long black and gray hair, who had apparently worn dentures for years. Cause of death was “undetermined.”
A few months after the remains were found, the sheriff’s department sent the skull to the forensic anthropology center at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville—one of twelve forensic anthropology labs in the United States—for a facial reconstruction. The three-dimensional clay bust of Old Joe showed a man with high cheekbones, deep-set eyes, a prominent jaw, and a high forehead.
The Skeleton Crew Page 16