Dead Men Do Tell Tales: The Strange and Fascinating Cases of a Forensic Anthropologist (12 page)

Alas, my own experiences with suicides have usually taken me to ignobler places. What I see tends to be either rotten, or ridiculous, or simply sad. I am speaking here primarily of young people who commit suicide. I firmly believe that, if more would-be young suicides knew what grim jokes policemen will make about them, how unlovely a picture they will present to the technicians who must drag them away, autopsy them and compose their remains for burial, much of the imagined flash and glamour of the act of self-annihilation would evaporate. In most cases I have dealt with, suicide has proved to be a hasty, profligate, wasteful and ill-considered solution to a doubtful problem—a love thwarted, a reputation besmirched, a bank account overdrawn, a sudden temper tantrum or a drug-darkened depression. I do not include among these spur-of-the-moment extinctions the self-inflicted deaths of the terminally ill, for whom life has become a bitter and unsupportable burden. Loneliness, old age, incurable and painful illnesses, these are sometimes sufficient reasons for suicide. In such cases we ought to take a step backward, suspend judgment, and look with mercy upon those for whom death was a mercy.

Gallows humor and graveyard whistling are normal human reactions in the face of death. How many times have I heard police investigators, when confronted with a body that has four or five gunshot wounds to the head, or with its skull horribly crushed, or wrapped thickly with chains in a sunken, stove-in boat, say with mock solemnity: “Must be suicide, eh, Doc?”

And one cannot be too quick to disagree!
Often suicides present the most bizarre injuries. When I was a graduate student, moonlighting in a hospital in Austin, I saw a truly extraordinary case: an attorney had committed suicide by shooting himself
five times
in the head with a .38 special at his desk, while his frantic secretary hammered at the locked door of his office! The door had been locked from the inside; there was no suspicion of the secretary’s complicity in his death. The lawyer had acted entirely alone. When the police came to the room and took the gun from his hand, the wounded man was still very much alive, still able to look at them, follow them with his eyes. The shooting occurred late in the afternoon and it was my duty at the hospital to remain with him, during a painfully slow death watch, until he died at last, sometime after midnight. The investigation revealed that the unfortunate attorney had put the barrel of the gun in his mouth and fired five times. Two bullets had exited from the side of his face, two more exited his cranial vault near the top of the skull, and the fifth bullet remained lodged in his brain. It is not unusual for autopsies to disclose multiple gunshot wounds in suicide victims, although these occur most commonly in wounds of the torso. For a man to shoot himself five times in the head, and live as long as this lawyer did, was rare indeed.

Most suicides are far better thought out than most pregnancies. A tremendous deliberation, a dreadful persistence mark some of the self-inflicted deaths I have seen. In such cases the will to die can be as strong—even far stronger—than the will to live. Some suicide victims are willing to pass through hellish torments in order to attain the surcease from sorrow they crave. There is one case in the scientific literature in which a man managed to cut himself in two at the waist with a table saw. In old Japan, most cases of suicide committed by courtiers, called seppuku, involved slitting the stomach open with a sharp knife, after which the agony would be cut short by a friend who would step up and slit the dying man’s throat. But there are other examples, notably that of the famous Marshal Maresuke Nogi in 1912, in which no accomplice was used, no coup de grâce was given. The victim quietly and stoically bled to death from the self-inflicted belly wound. One terrible case, published in the literature of our discipline, involved a man who wedged a large knife into an old radiator inside a church, then charged the knife repeatedly, butting the point with his head, until at last the blade pierced his skull and he died. Other documented cases have involved men who have killed themselves by raising the hydraulic tailgates of semi trucks, or lowering the raised beds of dump trucks, onto their necks and heads, like slow, blunt guillotines. In these cases the force of the machine-driven tailgate all but cuts the neck in two, mashing it to the consistency of a flattened noodle. There are also documented suicides by people who used chain saws on themselves, or purposely permitted themselves to be bitten to death by poisonous snakes.

There is a second type of suicide, which may be called the fastidious suicide, involving a person who wishes to look beautiful in death, to die tidily, or to cause as little trouble as possible to the investigators afterward. One case I recall involved a man who shot himself in the stomach twice, but was careful to position the barrel of the gun the second time so that the bullet entered exactly the same hole made by the first bullet. For some reason he did not want two entrance wounds in his stomach.

Women will often put on a pretty nightgown and apply makeup before killing themselves. One remarkable case in Ohio involved an eighteen-year-old girl who managed to shoot herself in the back by holding the revolver behind herself and pulling the trigger with her thumb. Her body revealed a single gunshot wound in the middle of her shoulder blades and at first glance the death looked like murder. But the angle of the limbs, the trajectory of the bullet and the fact that it took place in a room locked from the inside led police to realize it was suicide. Apparently the young woman was anxious to avoid disfiguring herself with a gunshot wound, so she would look nice in her casket.

Something similar occurred in a case of mine involving a dead man found in the Ocala National Forest. The corpse was found about fifty yards off the road, in the woods. All that remained when the body was located was a skeleton. Judging from the position of the skeleton, the man had apparently been seated, his back propped against a tree. Nearby was found a toiletries kit, including a can of pump-type toothpaste, aftershave, a container of Right Guard deodorant, nail clippers and razor blades, all contained neatly in an Adidas bag. The skeleton wore Adidas shoes and Dockers trousers. A ballpoint pen was found near his hand, but if he had written a note with it, the paper had long since disappeared. A bullet had pierced the skull, from one side to the other.

Everything about this solitary, seated skeleton in that lonely wood seemed to point to suicide—except for the fact that there was no gun! A zippered gun case was found right next to the body, but it was empty and the weapon was nowhere in sight. It stretched belief to imagine that a killer would shoot someone, take the murder weapon with him and leave the gun case behind. Where was the gun?

We searched for the better part of two days, using metal detectors, rakes and other tools, all around the tree where the skeleton had been found. Just before dusk on the second day, as I was moving leaves under a low bush with my trowel, I heard the clink of metal on metal: there, hidden by fallen leaves, was a .38-caliber snub-nosed revolver, about ten feet from the body. It was clearly the weapon used in the shooting.

But how did the gun get over there? Did someone come along, pick it up, see that it had begun to rust and then pitch it away? Was it dragged away by an animal eating part of the hand during decomposition? Such are the baffling questions that confront the forensic anthropologist. Nor was the young man ever identified. Somewhere in this country there may be parents who are still wondering about the fate of a perhaps troubled man in his early twenties, who went to Florida, walked into a deep forest and never walked out again. In a heroic effort to identify the remains, the police even investigated the manufacturing dates of the pump toothpaste, but to no avail. The gun used was a .38 Special made by Charter Firearms, and the police traced it to San Francisco, where it had been sold five years earlier. But the paper trail of the gun ended at that point.

Another interesting, meticulously planned suicide happened here in Gainesville a few years ago. It involved an instructor at the University of Florida who carefully taped a beer can opener and another metal object to his arm, wrapped the two frayed, bare ends of an electrical cord around these, plugged the cord into an appliance timer and set the timer to go off at 4
A.M
. The man then took a large dose of sleeping pills, washed them down with whiskey and went calmly to bed. He slept soundly and never awakened. The appliance timer, electronically precise, completed its circuit at precisely 4
A.M
. and electrocuted him, just as he had planned.

Another please-don’t-fuss-over-me suicide in Gainesville involved a man who was found dead and decomposing in the front seat of his car, a hose leading from the exhaust through the cracked window on the driver’s side. The car was out of gas, but the key in the ignition was switched to the running position. This was a straightforward case of carbon monoxide poisoning. The deceased left no note, but placed neatly alongside his body, on the seat of the car, was a business card belonging to Pete Zeller, the investigator in our local medical examiner’s office. Pete was shocked to learn of this detail, and even more shocked to realize that he
knew
the dead man. He was an old acquaintance whom Pete had seen a couple of months earlier. The man had seemed in good spirits. Pete told the man he was now retired from the police and was working for the medical examiner’s office. The man seemed fascinated by this information. He asked Pete casually what the best way of committing suicide might be. Just as casually, Pete answered that he believed carbon monoxide poisoning was relatively painless.

As the man said good-bye, Pete gave him one of his business cards, never dreaming of the use it would be put to. The man killed himself shortly afterward. He left Pete’s card on the front seat as a kind of forwarding address, to make sure his remains would be properly taken care of. Pete had to endure some ribbing from his coworkers. “Pete,” they said, “next time tell your suicidal friends to park their cars right outside the medical examiner’s office. That way it saves us gasoline.”

Many people, of course, kill themselves without meaning to. Accidental and natural deaths are often confused with suicides and murders. Very often an elderly person will fall, either down a flight of stairs, or in a bathroom, or someplace else, and the fall will produce lacerations and hemorrhages so severe that a careless observer might conclude the deceased had been bludgeoned to death. Such cases call for all the forensic pathologist’s skill.

I know of one remarkable case in which a young man killed himself utterly by accident after he dressed himself up as a vampire, to go to a Halloween party. He wore a shirt stained with fake bloodstains, and beneath the shirt he had placed the end panel of a wooden apple crate, made of soft pine. As a final touch, for gory effect, he planned to appear at the party with a “stake” driven into his own heart. The stake would be transfixed in the soft pine panel underneath his shirt. Unfortunately, things did not work out as planned. The youth opted to use a sharp-pointed knife in lieu of a stake, and to tap the knife into the pine panel with a hammer. Obviously he believed the hidden wooden crate panel would shield him from harm. It didn’t. The soft wood split easily beneath the hammer-driven knife point, and the blade plunged deep into the young man’s heart. His last words, as he staggered out of his room, were a gasp of disbelief: “I really did it!” Then he toppled forward, dead. This was no true suicide, but instead an absurd and tragic accident.

But accidental self-inflicted deaths can spring from darker roots. In these deaths a certain type of aberrant sexual behavior reaches a different climax than that expected. I am referring to autoerotic asphyxiation.

This practice is very old, and very dangerous. In his perverse 1791 novel,
Justine
, the Marquis De Sade describes a French nobleman who is in the habit of hanging himself nearly to death, to enhance the intensity of orgasm during masturbation by restricting the flow of oxygen to his brain. By slow degrees, over a period of months, the nobleman increases the duration of the torture and the tightness of the noose, until at last he kills himself. Sade was a keen and clinical observer of aberrant behavior—not least his own—and people would do well to heed this cautionary tale. Sad to relate, this bizarre practice still flourishes today and is a well-recognized pattern of deviant behavior, one that often leads to disastrous results.

Whether this self-torture “works,” whether there really is an intensification of sexual sensation in an oxygen-starved brain, or whether it is merely a ritualistic reenactment of execution fantasies or other sadomasochistic acts, I leave to the pathologists and the psychiatrists. What I do know, and what all of us who see these cases know, is that such behavior, once begun, goes from peak to peak and becomes increasingly dangerous the more it is practiced. And the strangulation ritual tends to be repeated, over and over again, over considerable periods of time. We know this because the beam, or pipe, or other solid object used to attach the other end of the rope is often found worn into a groove by long repetition of this activity.

Typically, the victim will knot a rope over a wooden beam, or a pipe in the basement, or a tree limb. He will then tie the other end of the rope around his neck, usually padding the neck with a towel or other materials to avoid rope burns or chafes. The hands may also be tied, usually with some sort of fast-release slip knot. Very often the victim is cross-dressed with panty hose and other items of women’s attire. Often, too, explicit photographic pornographic material will be found on the floor near the victim.

Those who indulge in these perilous high jinks are courting death. They believe they can stop at any moment, but what they do not realize is that the inhibition of oxygen to the brain can cause the loss of consciousness
at any second, without any warning
. No one sends the man in the noose a telegram saying: “Your brain is about to shut down.” And so they suddenly slump, inert, and then the constriction is intensified. Suffocation, asphyxiation without regaining consciousness, occurs in a matter of seconds. The victim will be found dead, in circumstances that would be excruciatingly embarrassing to him, if he were yet alive to see himself.