Dead Men Do Tell Tales: The Strange and Fascinating Cases of a Forensic Anthropologist (18 page)

A Ka-Bar knife similar to that used by Danny Rolling in the Gainesville student murders.

The wall near my office in Gainesville, memorializing the five students murdered in Gainesville in 1990. Rolling pleaded guilty the first day of his trial. A Jury recommended the death penalty.
(Photo courtesy of Michael Warren.)

8
Unnatural Nature

In nature, there’s no blemish but the mind;
None can be called deforma, but the unkind
.

—Shakespeare,
Twelfth Night
,
Act III, Scene 4

I have spent most of my life exploring the extraordinary properties of human bone and the close-knit harmony of the human skeleton. From the pale, translucent, pearly luster of the fetal skeleton, so delicate and wraithlike, to the ghastly, disfiguring eruptions and out-bubblings that seethe up like scorched milk from the extraordinary bones of Joseph Merrick, the renowned “Elephant Man” of the 1880s, the mortal frame of the human body—the skeleton—is to me an object of inexhaustible wonder, a book I shall never finish reading.

If there is one thing I have sought to impress on my students, it is that they must not think of bones as solid and unchanging. The astonishing hardness and durability of human bone can deceive the untaught into thinking that bone is something rocklike and changeless. Nothing could be further from the truth. Our skeletons are constantly in flux, constantly reshaping themselves. While we live, our bones are alive, formed of a swarm of living cells embedded and surrounded in the matrix of the bone wall, basking in the warmth of the blood cells they create in their inmost marrow. The covering of the bone, the periosteum, is constantly spinning forth new bone cells, destroying old ones. Throughout our lives our bones change from one hour to the next. As we age, they begin slowly to fuse together, to remodel themselves, to grow stiffer, more brittle and less elastic. Nor am I exempted from this process simply because I have studied it in some detail: inside my own body, across autumns and winters, I sense the slow approach of age by the gradual, ineluctable stiffening of my joints. With each passing year, my movements are slightly more circumscribed. I am my skeleton’s mask and puppet, as you are yours.

We keep no secrets from our bones. We blurt out everything shamelessly to these silent, obedient servants of our days. Within the archives of our skeletons are written down the intimate diaries of our lives: our ancestry, our illnesses, our injuries and infirmities, the patterns of our labor and exercise, sometimes even our most secret sins and blush-worthy abuses. All we have been, or nearly, is inscribed and enclosed in our skeletons, to be revealed at last when they stand forth naked, the flesh having fallen away from them. To read all of these things—that is the art of forensic anthropology.

Of what does this remarkable structure consist? The great English stylist and polymath, Sir Thomas Browne (1605–82), marveled that so little should be left of a man, after cremation:

How the bulk of a man should sink into so few pounds of bones and ashes, may seem strange unto any who considers not its constitution…. Even bones themselves reduced to ashes do abate a notable proportion. And consisting much of a volatile salt, when that is fired out, make a light kind of cinders…
.

Browne was a shrewd observer. Fire does indeed resolve bone into its two essential components: one that is inorganic and made up of minerals such as calcium carbonate, and the other consisting of more complex organic chemicals.

These organic portions of the bone include a material called collagen—you may know it from shampoo commercials on television. Collagen is a marvelous substance that gives bone its elasticity, adding to its strength and preventing breakage. It gives the bone the ability to bend and flex within tolerable limits. We would shatter at every fall, like china dolls, were it not for collagen. It is possible to leach the calcium and other inorganic chemicals out of a fresh bone by soaking it in a dilute solution of acid, such as hydrochloric acid. What remains after this acid bath is a specimen of what appears to be hard rubber. So elastic is the bone at this point that a fibula—the long thin bone from the lower portion of the leg—can sometimes carefully be tied into an overhand knot.

The disease osteomalacia—“bone-softness” in Greek—is characterized by a superabundance of collagen, disproportionate to the inorganic bone matrix. The victims of this disease are able to tie their legs in knots and perform other amazing and shocking contortions. Such prodigies formerly inhabited circus sideshows and were advertised as “The India-Rubber Man” or “The Boneless Wonder.” The latter was mentioned by Winston Churchill in a famous parliamentary speech lampooning Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald in 1931. As a youth, Churchill said, he had longed to see the Boneless Wonder in P. T. Barnum’s circus, but he was forbidden to do so by his parents, “who judged that the spectacle would be too revolting and demoralizing for my youthful eyes.

“I have waited fifty years,” Churchill said scathingly, while turning to face Ramsay MacDonald, “to see the Boneless Wonder sitting on the Treasury bench.”

The other, inorganic component of bone is what remains after a fire or long action by the sun. All the organic compounds are volatized away and what is left is a chalky residue: “calcined bones.” Here is bone at its driest, purged of all its organic compounds by heat. But diseases, too, can rob a bone of collagen and, when collagen departs, elasticity departs as well. Osteoporosis, hyperparathyroidism and
osteogenesis imperfecta
—all these conditions are essentially imbalances in bone chemistry, rendering bones brittle as twigs. Sometimes children with these disorders are brought to hospital emergency rooms with one or more broken bones and are diagnosed as victims of child abuse. They aren’t. Their bones, not their parents, are to blame.

One particularly horrific disease,
leontiasis ossea
, which is mercifully rare, causes huge foamy eruptions and effusions of bone, jutting up from the skull, forming horrid crowns and bubbles of bone. The skulls of the victims of this disease seem to start up in waves and combs, resembling a lion’s shaggy mane.

All of us have seen the brain teaser in newspapers: how many bones are there in the human body? The answer is usually upward of two hundred, but the question is terribly unscientific. The number of bones in your body strictly depends on the time in your life you are talking about. Even after maturity it varies. The bones of the coccyx, the tailbone, will fuse together. In the bones of some adults the breastbone will be a single bone, but in others it is still two or three bones. In some older individuals you may find only a few dozen separate elements, because so many bones have fused together. There are even cases on record of skeletons being totally fused into a single solid mass. In such an extreme case, the individual must choose whether he wishes to spend the brief remainder of his life in a sitting or standing position.

The pangs of childbirth, the Bible says, are fleeting and immediately repaid by the joys of new motherhood. But women should know that a record of those days is etched permanently in the surface of their pelvises as “parturition scars.” These scars begin to form in about the fourth month of pregnancy, when a hormone that softens the tendons that knit the pelvic bones together is released. To use a bit of shop talk, these telltale signs of childbirth appear on the dorsal side of the pubic symphysis near the margins of the articular surfaces and in the preauricular grooves or sulci of the ilia. In plain English, this means that women often carve notches in their pelvises after every childbirth, the way gunfighters in the American West carved notches in their pistol butts after every death.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but I believe a case might be made that female skeletons are more beautiful than their male counterparts. There are actual scientific terms to distinguish the aesthetic impression a female skeleton makes, as opposed to a male. Such terms are aids to identification, or “sexing the skeleton,” as we call it. A typical female set of bones is said to be
gracilis
—smoother, less knobbly, with edges gracefully planed or beveled, as if by an invisible adze. A typical male is
robustus
. His bones are thick, pitted and bumped with rough irregularities where the muscles and tendons were attached. These qualities of robustness and gracefulness are used in determining the sex of skeletons that are incomplete or immature, and they are often very subjective. There are bits of skeletons, especially those of children and adolescents, in which the sex distinction is obviously very blurry. Female body builders are creating knotty lumps on their bones where their hard-won new muscles are anchored, so their bones look more robust. Transsexual men who take estrogen are going in the opposite direction, moving from
robustus
to
gracilis
, making their skeletons smoother and more equivocal.

Certain it is that the female skull is visibly more polished and even-surfaced than the male skull, as if it had been turned on some invisible potter’s wheel. We men are rough creatures, even in our inmost core. The male skull has a square jaw and heavy brows. We sport craggy bumps and knots and projections where our muscles are anchored. Our skulls often look as though they were sculpted of rough clay. The same is true of male arm and leg bones. Males have big knobby joints. If you don’t believe it, go to the beach and look at the knees. The length of a person’s hair may deceive you, but the knees—never!

One of the most puzzling cases I ever handled occurred over in Jacksonville some years ago. A completely dry and fleshless skeleton was found next to a rusted .22 rifle. The bones were still clothed in a very soiled running suit. Decomposition of the flesh had thoroughly soaked the running suit and left it in a dry, hard, crumpled mass. There was a .22-caliber gunshot wound in the forehead of the skull. The police brought me the body and the clothing and asked me for an analysis.

It was a small skeleton, a very
gracile
individual. I briefly examined the running suit and put it aside and turned to the bones. After a while I phoned the medical examiner’s office and said: “I believe the individual is a male, probably from Asia and in his late twenties and of short stature.” They thanked me and said they would check the missing persons reports.

A few days later they called back and said: “We’ve got some missing Asiatic females but no males.”

I said I’d take another look at the skeleton. I called back and said that the pelvis showed some female characteristics, but overall I thought it was a male. They pleaded with me: “Can’t you tell us anything more?”

So I went back and looked at the skeleton a third time. I pried open the hardened mass of the running suit and found a pocket concealed on the inside of the trousers. I removed several objects and called the medical examiner’s office. After all this work I felt a smug satisfaction in having solved the mystery by very obvious methods.

“I can’t tell you his name,” I said innocently, “but would his address and driver’s license number help you at all?”

Among the objects in the clotted-together pocket was a disintegrating driver’s license that identified the owner as a twenty-eight-year-old male from the Philippines, who had been arrested a couple of years before for attacks on male children. He had escaped from custody during transport, hitched a ride in a pickup truck and leaped out of the truck with a .22 rifle stolen from a rack on the rear window. After that, he had vanished. Desperate, a fugitive, he had apparently decided to kill himself using the stolen rifle.

On February 17, 1818, a large tomb was found on the grounds of Dunfermline Abbey in Scotland. Sandstone slabs concealed a shallow vault, barely eighteen inches deep. Fragments of oak and nails and tatters of gold cloth were found around the form of a tall man, encased in lead. Immediately speculation arose that this was the long-lost grave of King Robert the Bruce, a hero of the Scottish wars of independence, the man who, according to legend, learned patience from a spider spinning its web at his cell window, the man who forced the English to relinquish their claim on Scotland in 1328 with the Treaty of Northampton. Yet King Robert’s death had always remained a mystery. He died only a year after this personal triumph, shut away from the world, apparently in the grip of a mysterious wasting disease. He breathed his last, aged fifty-five, on June 7, 1329, and was buried in Dunfermline Abbey, his heart enshrined separately at Melrose Abbey.

The rediscovered grave was hastily closed up again and remained locked and barred until it was officially reopened on November 5,1819. A large crowd of notables and scientists were on hand to witness the event. The lead was peeled back from the limbs and sawed away from the skull of the skeleton, which belonged to a man who in life had stood about five feet eleven inches tall. The breastbone was split, as if the heart had been forcibly removed after death. The teeth of the lower jaw survived, but the upper incisors were missing from the maxilla, or upper jaw, and the maxilla itself looked curiously eroded and worn away. The body was examined and an exact cast was made of the skull, which still reposes in the Anatomical Museum of the Medical School of the University of Edinburgh. A copy of the cast is kept in Dunfermline Abbey, and another in the Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons of England in London. The skeleton was then reburied with great pomp and ceremony, and a copy of John Barbour’s 1375 epic poem on the life of Robert,
The Brus
, was interred with the bones. For the skeleton almost certainly belonged to the greatest of Scotland’s kings, Robert the Bruce.