The Skeleton Crew

by Deborah Halber

  “They picked up my sister after being in that bag,” Rosemary was saying matter-of-factly, leafing through the album as if looking for something.

  “Surely you’re not going to show it to her?” Putt exclaimed from his easy chair across the room. He must have guessed what she had arrived at.

  “Sure, I’m going to show it to her,” Rosemary said calmly. Turning to me, she said, “I’m going to show you what they did for me.”

  “She may be like me! You may ruin her supper!” Putt protested.

  Rosemary ignored him. “This is what my sister looked like when they picked her up,” she said, handing me the photo that made my stomach lurch and my throat tighten every time I saw it. It was the one taken at the autopsy, with half of Bobbie’s face eaten away. Her eyeballs bulged, her teeth were bared in that gruesomely coy grin. Her scalp was stiff and blackened by decay. It was the image that materialized in Todd Matthews’s nightmare years before a reporter pulled it out and showed it to him in his kitchen.

  “And they still picked her up,” Rosemary was saying. “They didn’t know who she was. They did what they had to do for her. Not only for her, but for us, too.”

  “They” were the deputy coroner, the deputy sheriff, and others who had been called to the scene the day Wilbur Riddle had stumbled upon Bobbie Ann. “They” had cut open the green tarp. “They” had swatted away the swarming insects and brushed aside the wriggling maggots. “They” had uncurled the doubled-over figure of the young woman, laid her on a stretcher, and slid the stretcher into an ambulance. To Rosemary, these were acts of generosity and selflessness. Acts that she feels compelled to pay forward.

  The discovery of her sister’s body wrapped in a canvas tent eventually led Rosemary to what many might consider an unusual choice of volunteer work—as assistant coroner of Arkansas’s Saline County.

  Her first coroner call was to a wooded area where a small private plane containing a family of six had crashed after takeoff from Hot Springs.

  Rosemary saw a little girl, age eleven or twelve, who looked like someone had laid her out on a log, her hands on her belly, her head missing. She found the pilot still in his seat, smoldering in the wreckage. It was a long, difficult night, but Rosemary stuck with it until they recovered every piece of every one of the bodies, and she continues to attend to victims whenever she’s needed. It’s her way of giving back.

  * * *

  The young man calling himself George Earl Taylor had left the U.S. Army under dubious circumstances. Early 1962 marked America’s first combat missions against the Vietcong. Perhaps he didn’t relish the idea of being shipped overseas. Around the time he went AWOL, a fire conveniently destroyed Army records containing the names of dozens of enlistees, Taylor’s among them.

  Taylor may not even have been legally free to marry in August 1963. It would come to light that in addition to Bonnie and the two children he had had with Bobbie Ann while they were married, Taylor had fathered at least ten more children with nine women between 1958 and his death in 1987. As an adult, Bonnie posted notices on Ancestry.com message boards searching for half brothers and half sisters in the states Taylor frequented: Ohio, New York, Arkansas, Florida.

  It was a pattern, Rosemary told me, that became apparent when pieces of the puzzle of Bobbie Ann’s last four years started to fall into place. Earl would take one child with him—one time, he even took a boy who was not his biological son—and move to a new city. The child’s mother had left them, he’d say. Run off with another man.

  He played the single dad, alone with a kid, in need of the kind of help a young woman might provide, she said. A sympathy ploy if you ever saw one.

  Why hadn’t Bobbie Ann’s husband reported her missing? Rosemary’s guardians, the Rules—Bobbie’s aunt and uncle—recalled Taylor as mean and impulsive, even violent. Wilbur Riddle had found the body not far from I-75, the highway leading from Lexington, Kentucky, to Ohio, where Taylor’s family lived. The canvas that Bobbie was wrapped in resembled the kind used to store a carnival’s rolled-up tents.

  If Bobbie had been identified soon after Riddle found her, Taylor would likely have been questioned. Three decades later, almost everyone who might have been able to shed light on the events of late 1967 and early 1968 is dead. In one of her works of fiction, mystery author Kate Atkinson described a missing girl as “an incorporeal mystery, a question without an answer. A puzzle that could tease you until you went mad.” Even with a body and a name, Tent Girl and the story of her last moments are maddeningly unknowable.

  * * *

  Todd, in his outreach for NamUs, sometimes asks Rosemary Westbrook to place a phone call to a stranger, someone missing a family member. The stranger is often poised for an answer that will extinguish years of hope. Rosemary always relays that even though she was sad to learn her sister was dead, a lot of good came of it. The more she and Todd Matthews share their story, she tells the stranger, the greater the chance that they will give someone the strength to search for a missing loved one.

  Rosemary’s real purpose in becoming deputy coroner of Saline County is opportunities like these to talk to the living. Having been through her sister’s death, she felt she knows what families are going through. She knows how much it meant to her that strangers had picked up her sister’s body in its horrific state and treated it with respect. Rosemary figures that if those men could go out in a field and pick up her sister in an advanced state of decomposition, she could do the same for somebody else. She never hesitated to do it, she told me, “not one little iota at all.”

  Her words reminded me of Mike Murphy and Rick Jones in Vegas, who considered themselves privileged to talk to family members at what had to be the worst moments of their lives. They reminded me of Marcella Fierro, asking the unidentified dead on her autopsy tables for their stories. They reminded me of Clyde Gibbs, Bobby Lingoes, Ellen Leach, Betty Brown, and everyone else I had met whose words and actions demonstrated the formidable depth of their compassion.

  I looked at Rosemary, fierce and plaintive, sitting on the couch, clutching the Bobbie book on her lap.

  “Everybody needs to go home,” she said doggedly. “Everybody needs to go home.”

  EPILOGUE

  The web sleuths are all around you. Your coworker with the bowl of saltwater taffy on her desk, the guy who swipes your card for a latte, the high school teacher who kept that ball python in the glass tank: any one of them and thousands of others might be one click away from solving a cold case in your hometown—or anywhere in the world. Anyone can join the skeleton crew. In fact, as soon as you put down this book, go straight to your computer, Google “NamUs,” sign up as a public user for both the missing- and unidentified-persons databases, and start sleuthing. You’ll be a cyber–Sherlock before you know it.

  But beware.

  As web sleuths and many of us know, communicating online is risky under the best of circumstances. Psychologist John Suler contends that computer-­only dialogue can be rife with misinterpretation. Lacking auditory and visual cues, the tone of an e-mail, blog, or newsgroup post is often ambiguous. Those reading a message can project—sometimes unconsciously—­their own expectations, wishes, anxieties, and fears onto the writer.

  To make matters worse, web sleuths sometimes compete for recognition from law enforcement. That recognition is often slow in coming, or nonexistent, because of the unspoken implication that civilians are pointing out something law enforcement should have picked up on.

  Forensic anthropologist Emily Craig once compared the search for matches to a gold rush. When people first sought to duplicate Todd’s success with Tent Girl, the Internet was like an untapped mine of data. People found nuggets everywhere and staked out their own territories. It was—and still is—difficult for many prospectors to give that up.

  The federal government’s entrée into the online world of the missing and unidentified was another game changer.
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  In 2005, the National Institute of Justice, the research arm of the U.S. Department of Justice, convened a strategy session in Philadelphia of federal, state, and local law enforcement, medical examiners and coroners, forensic scientists, policy makers, victims’ advocates, and families of the missing. This national task force determined what medical examiner Marcella Fierro had pointed out almost three decades earlier: agencies that worked on these cases needed a uniform means of information-sharing. NamUs, the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, came online in 2007, the first system open not just to criminal justice professionals but also to the general public.

  But many web sleuths were loath to share their hard-won information with NamUs. When NamUs hired Todd Matthews as an administrator, he traded his factory job for a government paycheck and his double-wide trailer decked out in nylon flowers and gold cherubs for a custom-built house with French doors and cathedral ceilings. Rare phone calls from small-town newspapers morphed into requests to appear on Good Morning America and to consult for TV shows.

  To a contingent of web sleuths, Todd had become a sellout, a traitor.

  Todd had bumped up against the widespread belief that doing good for financial gain was not as pure as doing good for its own sake. Todd himself could see how his new situation was jealousy making, how his good fortune seemed built on the backs of others’ misfortunes.

  In April 2011, the Doe Network voted to kick him out.

  On the phone to me, Todd fretted about the charges against him—breach of confidentiality and failure to uphold administrative standards—­that ostensibly stemmed from remarks he had made at a forensics workshop a year earlier. But he was convinced his real crime was working for NamUs.

  After witnessing months of web sleuth feuding and backstabbing, I shouldn’t have been surprised that Todd had become a target in a Doe Network firefight. Or was he the instigator? I don’t get it, I told him. Wasn’t he the celebrated solver of Tent Girl? Hadn’t he been with the Doe Network since the beginning, helping it grow and gain national recognition? Hadn’t he courted financial ruin and divorce through his dedication to the cause? Wasn’t he the public face of the Doe Network?

  “You never think people following you will turn around and crucify you,” he told me ruefully. “But they will.”

  * * *

  In April 2010, Todd was an invited speaker at a meeting of law enforcement and forensic specialists in Fort Lauderdale. Wearing both his NamUs and Doe Network hats, he advised cops that volunteer organizations could help them investigate missing persons and unidentified cases—if the cops knew how to work with the volunteers.

  The Doe Network tried to vet its members, Todd was saying to the cops, coroners, and medical examiners. “It’s not easy. It’s actually been called ‘Doe nut-work’ before, because I guarantee you, I’ve heard from every lunatic in the world. You have to sift through these people very carefully.”

  Months later, the North Carolina web sleuth with the uncanny visual memory—Daphne Owings, Doe’s prolific matchmaker, who got involved partly to take her mind off her husband’s tour of duty in Iraq—came across a recording posted online of Todd’s talk.

  At one point in his presentation Todd spotted conference attendee Clyde Gibbs, the zombie fan/death investigator from the North Carolina Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. Gibbs interacts with “quite a colorful volunteer,” Todd said into the microphone. “I think she’s the chief medical examiner there [in North Carolina], or she thinks she is . . .”

  As a former Doe area director and administrative team member, Daphne Owings had been in touch with Clyde Gibbs on many occasions. Todd hadn’t exactly named her, but if he tried to claim he wasn’t talking about her, that was bullshit, Daphne told me later. To say she was irked by his remarks would be an understatement. To make matters worse, she believed she heard Todd refer to Doe volunteers as “lunatics” and urge cops to use NamUs instead of Doe.

  Daphne wasn’t swayed by Todd’s conciliatory comment a few seconds later about how her “heart was in the right place” and how Doe Network volunteers were working to change things for the better. Daphne wanted to change things, all right. She wanted to see that pompous twerp Todd Matthews put in his place.

  She filed a complaint with Doe administrators. The board, still led at that time by Helene Wahlstrom, advised Todd to resign quietly, citing his increased responsibilities with NamUs as his reason for bowing out. Todd refused. Armed with assurances from supporters that he hadn’t in fact maligned the Doe Network at the workshop, Todd asked the board to let the matter drop.

  As the Doe Network’s Webmaster, Wahlstrom, though she lived in Sweden, had considered herself owner of the site since Jennifer “Stormy” Marra bequeathed it to her in 2001. For a decade Wahlstrom had worked almost constantly, she told me, entering cases into the Doe database, writing up case files, answering e-mails, forwarding tips to law enforcement. Fluency in ten languages enabled her to translate cases of European missing and unidentified individuals into English.

  Wahlstrom called for a vote by the administrative board. It was four-to-two against Todd. Defeated, in April 2011 he resigned from the Doe Network.

  * * *

  A couple of months later, I met Todd in the Atlanta airport, where he was en route to a law enforcement conference. He flopped onto a plastic seat next to me in the Delta terminal. He had decided to take back the website, he announced.

  It so happened—through an oversight or malevolence on Todd’s part, depending on whom you ask—that the Doe Network domain was in Todd’s name. (Wahlstrom acknowledged that Todd paid the annual fees but said she bought the domain name, doenetwork.org, in around 2000. The late Patrick Harkness, whose plea for help finding his missing cousin Sean Lewis Cutler led Carol Cielecki to the Doe Network, has also been credited with hosting the site during its early years.)

  The next day, in between setting up a NamUs booth and driving with me to meet Tent Girl’s sister near Little Rock, Todd called the service provider. As suspected, the board had blocked his access to the site in the wake of his resignation, but he convinced the domain provider he was the site’s owner and received a new password—which was simultaneously routed to a second e-mail address belonging to a member of the board that had ousted him. Before Todd knew what was happening, the person had logged in and reset the password, shutting him out again.

  Todd kicked himself. His enemies had beaten him at the game of revolving passwords, removed his name from the account, and put theirs on. But the domain provider again restored Todd’s access, and this time he quickly orchestrated a complete change of guard. The new board, which includes Todd as head of media, public, and business relations, consists of his most loyal long-term supporters.

  During a week in May 2011, behind the scenes at the Doe Network, computer-savvy members worked to restore data trashed by some members of the previous board. Users who happened to sign in during that time saw little evidence that the Doe Network had just undergone a major coup.

  For Wahlstrom, the loss of the website was a terrible blow. She said she had founded and worked for the organization for more than twelve years. At one time, her ambition was to grow the group to “the size and fame” of human rights organization Amnesty International. The work gave her purpose and helped her grow as a person, she wrote to me in an e-mail. It gave her a feeling of contributing to the world. It helped her recognize her strengths.

  Wahlstrom was blindsided by what she saw as Todd’s perfidy. She had believed the group altruistic, yet one person—Todd—ruined everything with his struggle for power, or recognition, or something else she didn’t understand.

  A year after Todd laid claim to the Doe Network, Wahlstrom still didn’t trust her emotions enough to speak to me on the phone. But she e-mailed me that she did want the truth to be known.

  “This is very painful for me, and something I’m still trying to come to terms wi
th . . . [A]t this time it is hard for me to take pride in [my work on the Doe Network] or even consider it a good thing. I hope I will again, one day. Right now,” she wrote, “I am just sad.”

  * * *

  In the fifteen years since Todd solved Tent Girl, web sleuthing has set in motion an ongoing coup of its own by transforming law enforcement’s relationship with the public. As Robert McCrie, a police science professor at New York’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice, put it, law enforcement’s too important to be left to the police alone. The Internet age has extended the ability of the public to help out with investigations, which some—pointing to the aftermath of the social media and entertainment site Reddit’s 2013 misindentification of Boston Marathon bombing suspects—­would argue is a mixed bag.

  Law enforcement in America has always been a highly structured, authoritarian bureaucracy, but before the invention of the automobile, telephone, and two-way radio, the old-fashioned beat cop was a neighborhood fixture. In the 1980s, so-called team policing and community policing initiatives sought to resurrect the foot cop to make police more visible, available, and accountable. Community policing was a dismal failure. No one could agree on what it meant, and no one came up with a consistent way to evaluate whether or not it was working. But it paved the way for a middle ground.

  Ralph Taylor, a professor of criminal justice at Temple University, said Internet groups such as the Doe Network are “digital-age throwbacks” to community policing and neighborhood watches. Web sleuths and missing-­person advocates, by broaching what was once police-only territory, helped the shift—still in progress—toward citizens and cops working together more cooperatively than defensively. “The advocate is a tide washing in onto the shore,” says a San Bernardino County, California, coroner’s office death investigator who has worked with cops for decades. “That tide changes the shape of the land. It doesn’t do it one wave at a time. It does it over years.”