Dead Men Do Tell Tales: The Strange and Fascinating Cases of a Forensic Anthropologist (10 page)

Alas, it must be admitted from the outset that dismemberment is an extremely effective means of concealing a victim’s identity. In this chapter, I warn the reader fairly and beforehand, the riddles will outnumber the solutions, and the scattered remnants of many of these victims must await the Last Judgment, to be reunited and speak the truth about their final hours.

Dismemberment cases are often lit with a baleful, lurid light in my mind. In most of my cases I have to place myself in the role of the victim, to see what happened at the time of death. I imagine the gun firing at me, or the knife, or the hammer, or the ax, rising and falling, sinking into my body. The victim and I, we are trying to defend ourselves. We throw our forearms up, we grapple with our fingers, we turn our heads aside, clinging to life. In such cases I relive the crime from the victim’s standpoint, and the victim is very personified and individualized.

But in dismemberment cases the victim is already dead, and I must place myself inside the brain of the murderer, who has slain his victim and who is now cutting him to pieces. I become the dismemberer, imagining the scene, the tools, the strokes that hack the body asunder. “Why did you cut there?” I ask myself. “What implement did you use to do this? Did you pause to catch your breath? Were you in a hurry? Did you fling down one tool in disgust and seize another?”

Many dismemberments are done in bathtubs—more things come out of bathtubs than bathtub gin, I assure you!—and most of my cases seem to involve motorcycle gang members or people involved in the drug trade. The cases seem to cluster along the 1-95 corridor in Florida, and if the state has a Dismemberment Capital, it is probably Daytona Beach. Interstate highways are the veins and arteries by which crime circulates in America. Serial killers seem to float through them like blood cells, sometimes fast, sometimes slow. Crimes committed along interstate highways ought to be considered extraterritorially, apart from the normal rules of geography, and separate from a state’s good name. These huge highways form a kind of fifty-first state of their own, a state whose flower is the deadly nightshade and whose state bird is the vulture.

When I first got into forensic anthropology people tended to use hacksaws to dismember bodies. They were the tool of choice for killers because they are easily available, easily disposable, and their fine, serrated blades cut very efficiently through bone. It is a lot easier to saw through a human bone with a hacksaw than with a wood saw. I have verified this myself.

On the other hand, hacksaws are a great help to us who investigate such dismemberments. Very often a new hacksaw blade will leave a smear of paint on the bone surfaces—gray, orange, blue, yellow. Such smears can be analyzed chemically and very often matched up to a specific brand of saw blade.

In recent years, however, hacksaws have been supplanted by chain saws. Chain saws have certain advantages: the killer saves time and effort with a chain saw. But of course the disadvantage is that chain saws are incredibly loud and messy. They sling sprays of blood and debris in all directions. Chain saws, too, yield evidence to the eye of the experienced investigator. Often their cuts are quite individualized, differing noticeably from one model to the next. Sometimes we can even recover chain-saw oil from the bone surfaces which can be chemically analyzed. Although I have not heard of it done yet, there will undoubtedly come a day when the debris left over by a chain saw after a dismemberment, or even minute traces of flesh, bone and blood on the chain-saw blade itself, will be analyzed for their DNA content and matched up with the DNA of the victim.

In the collection of the C. A. Pound Human Identification Laboratory is a special set of cow bones which is very precious to me. As my experience with dismemberments increased, I decided it would be useful to have a catalog of saw marks as a sort of reference library. I therefore asked a technician at the Florida Museum of Natural History to do me a favor. I took him a box of fresh soup bones and asked him to saw through them with every type of saw we could think of: kitchen saws, table saws, wood saws, band saws, hacksaws, crosscut saws, pruning saws, chain saws, even anatomical Stryker saws, whose oscillating blade is designed to cut through bone, but not flesh. Under microscopic analysis every different type of saw will make a different type of tooth pattern in bone. A Stryker saw, for example, produces circular arcs of short radius, with some overlapping. A band saw’s cut is very smooth. It leaves few tooth marks and those it does leave tend to be straight, fine and seldom overlapping. Hacksaw blade marks often overlap, because the person doing the sawing will change the angle of attack as he cuts through the bone. They look like a tiny, skewed tic-tac-toe board with thousands of squares. Chain-saw marks go straight through bone. A table saw with a rotating eight-inch blade, the kind a handyman might have mounted on his worktable, produces parallel curves. We labeled and photographed all these cut-patterns carefully. The collection is a valuable resource, though by now I carry most of the patterns in my head.

Anyone who has carved a chicken or a turkey knows that it is much easier to cut through the joint than through the solid bone. But you would be amazed how few dismemberers actually remove the legs at the hip. Most of them saw through at crotch level, leaving a stump of thighbone still attached to the pelvis, usually several inches long. This stump is a godsend to the investigator. It is here that we look for our saw marks. This upper leg bone, the femur, has very thick walls at this point and these walls often furnish very clear evidence of the implement used to cut through them. Thin-walled bones aren’t nearly as good for this purpose. Even if a knife is used to disarticulate the joints, it will leave telltale gashes as well. My point is, there is no way to cut a body up and leave no traces of the tools you use. Hew at them though you may, bones yet will have their say.

In 1981, I was called to a medical examiner’s office in Leesburg, in central Florida’s Lake County. There I heard an extraordinary tale. It seems someone had observed a furry white dog, of a poodlelike breed, eating something on the side of the road. It developed that the dog was nibbling on the lower portion of a left human leg, very fresh. The dog had been hungry, and most of the muscle tissue was already devoured. A week later the lower portion of a right leg was found near Daytona, in Volusia County, over a hundred miles away.

When I compared these legs I found that they were very consistent with one another and almost certainly came from the same body. One of the most telling signs appeared on the knees: the skin below the knees showed a matching pair of calluses, of the type commonly seen on the knees of surfers. The legs had been chopped off an inch or so above the knee joint, the cuts passing through the lower kneebones at the same height on both legs. Microscopic analysis of the cut bone surfaces showed the fine straight marks of teeth that overlapped one another, as if the angle of attack had changed during manual sawing. This was a classic hacksaw dismemberment.

Alas, the surfer’s legs were all of him that ever turned up. We never did find any other portion of that body, nor were we ever able to match a name to the remains. The route of the car could be ascertained fairly easily from the pattern of highways between the two far-flung legs. I made sure every sheriff’s office along the way was notified of the case and asked them to be on the lookout for more remains. But none was ever found.

Many of these slayings were drug-related, and organized crime has more murder experience than any other segment of society. They know how to kill, and they know how to cover their tracks.

So it was in the case of the torso with the Grim Reaper tattoo. In 1987, I was invited to examine a headless, armless, legless trunk, upon whose shoulder was tattooed a large, detailed and horrific picture of the Grim Reaper, wielding his scythe, his bony jaws open in laughter. Neither the head nor the limbs were ever found, but we had high hopes that the tattoo would identify the torso. Tattoos are visible for long periods after death, almost as long as any skin remains on the body. Indeed, when the outer layer of skin, the epidermis, slips off in early decomposition, the underlying layers of skin, where the tattoo ink actually is, are exposed, making the colors much brighter and more vivid than during life. Many medical examiners actually keep photo libraries of tattoos taken from dead bodies to aid them in identifying remains, and this tattoo certainly belonged in a museum. It stood forth in blazing Technicolor. It was wonderfully distinctive. The police showed photographs of it around at all the bars frequented by bikers and their hangers-on. But no one remembered seeing it—or at least no one would admit to having seen it. The body was never identified. The Grim Reaper mocked us all with his fleshless jaws.

Left unattended, our defunct bodies quickly become part of the food chain. On land, flies, beetles, cockroaches, rats, dogs, cats, pigs, raccoons, bears and any number of animals rush in and feast whenever death rings the dinner gong. In water, alligators, fish, crabs and sharks are no less hungry. In such cases, the investigator practically has to elbow his way through a crowd of famished banqueters before he can salvage and examine what is left.

One case that gave me some difficulty was a body found in two pieces, washed ashore in different locations in the Florida Keys. The head and portions of the neck were found in one spot and nearly all the rest—the torso, with legs attached and feet cut partly away—in another. It appeared that sharks had bitten at, but not quite through, the neck. There were clear marks of sharks’ teeth on the remains. But there were also very fine marks on the neck vertebrae still visible, which showed that the head had been sawed off. When I looked at the top vertebra protruding from the torso I saw similar marks which left no doubt: the body had been dismembered before it was thrown into the water. We were dealing with a murder, perhaps committed aboard a ship, and not a shark attack in the open sea.

I concluded that in this case a saw, probably a hacksaw, was used to dismember the body into three pieces, only two of which were ever found. Since both these fragments showed shark damage, I believe a shark got the rest of the corpse. Neither the victim nor his murderer was ever identified in this case, but at least we knew the killer was another human being, not a shark.

The shark, incidentally, is one of the true scavengers of the sea, and from time to time portions of human remains are found in sharks’ bellies, but only if the shark is caught and cut open soon after swallowing them. The stomach acid of the shark’s digestive system is extremely corrosive. It dissolves bone so quickly that the window of opportunity to find remains inside a shark is very small. A tibia I once examined, which had been taken from a shark’s stomach, was reduced to a paper-thin cylinder of bone, with a greatly reduced diameter. It was so eaten away that investigators originally believed it was an ulna, a bone from the arm. I was able to set them straight: it was a tibia, a leg bone, dissolved to a shadow of itself by acid. Of all sharks, tiger sharks are fondest of human flesh. They are the species whose entrails most often yield up human remains.

In March 1990,1 was called back in on a case involving a severed head that had been found in October 1987, in a closed vinyl bucket on the east coast of Florida, in Palm Beach County. For three years the head had been kept at the Palm Beach County medical examiner’s office, awaiting identification or a lucky break in the case. The medical examiner’s patience was finally rewarded. He learned that in 1983, four years before the head came to light, a headless trunk had been found clear across the Florida peninsula, propped against a pasture fence in a field belonging to a former county sheriff. A chain saw had been used to cut the head from the body.

Even though the two pieces were separated by many miles and several years, this case nevertheless resulted in one of the neatest match-ups of any dismemberment in my experience. The head had been cut off just below the hyoid bone, or Adam’s apple. The neck ended just above the thyroid cartilage. By superimposing old x-rays, taken of the torso four years earlier, and new ones taken of the head (which had been very well preserved in its sealed vinyl bucket), we were able to prove they belonged together. The victim was identified as a Jamaican who had reportedly been involved in drug smuggling. In this case we were able to come up with a name for the victim and to take the head and body off the police’s books. But his murderer escaped unpunished. No one was ever charged with this death.

The following month I received a complete body in two portions in the small and large suitcases of a set of matching luggage bought at Sears. The suitcases in this case were of the Hercules brand and were found in two different counties, miles apart: West Palm Beach in Palm Beach County and Fort Pierce in Martin County.

The body was cut in two through the lower back, at the top of the fifth lumbar vertebra. This was a somewhat unusual but not entirely unknown method of dismemberment. It all depends how many portions you want. If you are going to be frugal and make only one cut, the lower back is obviously the place you would choose.