Dead Men Do Tell Tales: The Strange and Fascinating Cases of a Forensic Anthropologist (2 page)

Years later, I happened to be wandering in a part of the cermtery where members of my family are buried in Dallas. I came upon a tombstone with this inscription:

AS THE FLOWERS ARE ALL MADE SWEETER BY
THE SUNSHINE AND THE DEW, SO THIS OLD
WORLD IS MADE BRIGHTER BY THE LIVES
OF FOLKS LIKE YOU

Above this poem were the words:

BONNIE PARKER
Oct. 1, 1910–May 23, 1934

I was astonished. The poem might have described a child or a sweetheart, instead of a cigar-smoking murderess who perished in a hail of bullets.

I later photographed this headstone and show the poem part in some of my lectures. The next slide shows the full epitaph, with the superscripted name: Bonnie Parker. In that moment in a Dallas graveyard it came to me that every person, from the most depraved serial killer to the most seraphic innocent, was likely loved by someone when each was alive. Victims and murderers alike are people. They may have followed their paths helplessly or of their own free will, but the paths led equally to the grave. All these people demand and deserve a dispassionate and caring analysis from investigators like myself. We can never forget that what we are doing is not just for the courts or for the general public. What we see on the table will have to be related to the families of victims and to the relatives of killers. Flowers and dew may seem far away from the microscopes and autopsy saws we employ, but they are still part of the picture. My wife’s parents, my maternal grandparents and my father are all buried in that cemetery, in the same ground where Bonnie Parker lies.

I was brought up unreligiously, but with a set of hard, clear-cut moral values. Lies and laziness repel me more than the most putrefied corpse. If you wish to ponder the existence of the human soul or weigh whether there is life after death, you will have to seek elsewhere than in these pages. While I have seen consummate evil and its effects, I have never been overawed by it or attracted by the sleazy runways and approaches to it. The underside of life holds no personal fascination for me; nor have I ever been tempted to crawl into the gutter or stare through the sewer grate at the sordid practices of the living. I am not attracted to bars or nightclubs or bordellos, though I have hauled away and handled and examined the dead bodies of those who frequented them.

When people ask me how I ended up in forensic anthropology, I tell them it was a combination of good luck and bad character. I took my first anthropology course as an entering freshman at the University of Texas, purely by accident. Registration hours were nearly up. We freshmen always received the last appointments of the day. All the sections for introductory biology were filled up. My adviser suggested anthropology as an alternative.

“Fine. What’s that?” I asked him.

“Try it. You may like it,” he answered. So I found myself taking physical anthropology. I majored in English and minored in anthropology all through college and then, with just one semester left before graduation, switched my major to anthropology. One course required for the major was advanced physical anthropology, taught by a newcomer to the University of Texas, a man named Tom McKern.

It was McKern who, more than any other man save only my father, shaped and directed my life. McKern was … simply McKern. He was unique, a born teacher, a brilliant lecturer and a very charismatic personality. I soon learned that he had been born in Tonga, the son of an archaeologist, and had wide experience of foreign lands and far shores. He had worked at a laboratory in Tokyo, identifying the remains of American G.I.s killed at Iwo Jima in World War II, and later in Korea. Among the skeletons submitted to him for identification from the Iwo Jima battlefield was that of one of his closest friends, a man who had been best man at McKern’s own wedding. McKern had seen extraordinary things, and there was a kind of glow about him. He fascinated and impressed every student who came into contact with him. He was what I would become: a forensic anthropologist.

That first day, McKern simply called the roll and dismissed the class. A few of us hung around afterward and chatted with him. He explained what forensic anthropology was, what it involved. He told us about testifying at trials, working with homicide cases. He said you could earn as much as a hundred dollars a day doing this extraordinarily fascinating work, if you testified in court. We were agog at this vast sum! The conversation lasted half an hour at most; but at the end of that half hour, when I walked out of that classroom, I knew what I wanted to do with my life.

Ever since I had turned eighteen I had been practically self-supporting. I paid my college expenses by working at a succession of odd jobs—
very
odd jobs. I was an attendant in a private sanitarium and had sometimes to restrain violent or delirious patients. I rode shotgun in an ambulance that belonged to a funeral home, and became proficient at throwing sheets with our home’s name on them over the dead, mangled corpses of accident victims. The competition between rival funeral parlors for new business was fierce, and it made our work resemble some macabre rodeo, where the first cowboy who gets his rope over the steer wins, except that we were using sheets, not ropes, and we were flinging them over corpses, not steers.

Those were wild days, full of high-speed chases under Texas starlight. We would fly like bats from hell to the scene of an accident, risking our lives to pluck dead men off the asphalt first, ahead of the competition. We often took more chances getting there than the deceased took to die there. Our ambulance had a top speed of 105 mph, but we had a low-speed transmission. Our competitor’s ambulance could do 110 mph but had a high-speed transmission. The difference in transmissions meant that our competitor could dust us on the flat straightaways out in open country, but we could show him our taillights in town.

We drove around at these breakneck speeds in the days before seat belts, and nothing we told the funeral parlor owner could persuade him to shell out for these safety restraints. This old man was a character. I remember him unfolding a whole set of membership cards for every conceivable organization in town. He belonged to all of them. As the cards riffled down to the tabletop he chuckled. “See these?” he said smugly. “Every one of them’s a funeral!”

Then one night the owner happened to be riding in the ambulance himself and witnessed a particularly ghastly accident. A gravel truck had hit the rear fender of a car, spinning the car around and ejecting the seat-beltless driver like a child from a playground whirligig. The driver landed in the path of the truck, whose front wheels pulped his head. The sight of this atrociously mangled corpse softened even my boss’s hard heart, and he equipped our ambulance with seat belts soon afterward.

I had been to funerals, but it was in those days that I saw my first dead body outside of a coffin. It happened my first night on the job. We were called to a house in Austin, where a woman was having severe chest pains. We found her wedged between her bed and the wall, wearing next to nothing. We hauled her out as gently as we could. She was still alive. We got her on a stretcher, put her aboard the ambulance and gave her oxygen on the way to the hospital. I was reassuring her all the way. Then, a few minutes after she was taken into the emergency room, as I looked on, she died.

Old Judge Watson—I have forgotten his first name—was called in to certify the death. The vertebrae in the judge’s neck were fused together and he could no longer turn his head. So he would swivel his whole body, shoulders, head and all. He came in, looked down at the body, swiveled back and forth like a lighthouse for about half a minute, then croaked two words:

“Heart attack!”

That was all. The verdict was rendered. The authorities were finished with this woman. It was as though she had sunk beneath the surface of a dark sea. The stiff-necked old judge stumped out of the room, leaving us with the silent cadaver. Those two words were all the epitaph she got that night, and the sudden finality of it all impressed me greatly.

Certain scenes are engraved on my memory from those days. I remember the night we were called to the scene of a domestic dispute. A crippled husband had beaten his wife, using his crutch and the brass post from a four-poster bed. I remember another case in which a man got in a fight during which he was hit over the head with a large ketchup bottle. When we arrived the whole scene seemed to be weltering in red gore. I can stand the sight of blood, but the smell of it repels me. I did not think a human body could contain so much blood. In fact, it can’t. A part of the sea of red was ketchup. The man survived and probably went on to other fights. I remember picking up a young man from an overturned car. He had a broken arm and moaned at me, asking where we were taking him. “The hospital,” I said. Suddenly he began flailing away at me with both arms, broken and whole, trying to escape. It was all I could do to hold him down. It turned out he had stolen the car.

I saw terrible things during those nights, but I could not blink or turn away. My job depended on it. After a while it became a test of strength for me, to gaze unflinchingly at the dreadful aftermaths of accidents. Emergency room personnel deal with the same situations, but I would submit that the ER technicians see people after we ambulance men have tidied them up considerably. When we arrived at the scene, we were plunged into pure chaos. It was dark. Cars were overturned or on fire. Crowds were screaming. Police were yelling. Glass was broken. Smells of spilled fuel and roasted flesh were fresh. There is far more drama at the scene of an accident than there is in the emergency room afterward. At the hospital there are no shadows. Everything is clean and well lit and deodorized. Clean sheets and shiny instruments convey an atmosphere of relative calm and control. Already the horror is receding.

I saw my first autopsy when I was eighteen years old. Most of the autopsies in those days in Austin were done at the funeral homes, as they still are in many places. Pathologists would come in and do the cutting, weighing and photographing. Some of these specialists were very friendly and kind to us young laymen. They would let us stay and ask questions during the procedure. Gradually, I began to be exposed to decomposed bodies and severe trauma. Our funeral home had the contract to handle the remains of servicemen killed in military plane crashes. I saw bodies burned nearly to cinders. I saw the white, bloated bodies of young airmen recovered from the Gulf of Mexico. Many nights I had the eerie experience of sleeping in a room with burned bodies in bags all piled up and clearly visible just outside the screened door. It was at this period that I gradually developed my ability to work with bodies and manage to eat food. I remember having a chili-and-cheese hamburger in the autopsy room after an autopsy, looking at the burger carefully, then taking a bite, and then another, and another.

I saw tough policemen smoke cigars to keep the odors out of their nostrils. I remember the pathologist cutting through some medium-cooked soft tissue in a burned corpse while saying waggishly: “Well, I guess we don’t want barbecued ribs for lunch today”—and seeing the police run from the room, green with nausea.

My life took on a strange, Jekyll-and-Hyde quality. By day, as an English literature undergraduate, I would contemplate the glories of Dickens, Trollope and Shakespeare. By night I would voyage into a world of dreadful pain and cruel misfortune, of flames and twisted steel, of bruisings, breakings and bleedings. I studied sonnets and suicides. I saw tragedies printed on paper and scrawled on asphalt. I dissected immortal poems from England and witnessed dead men and women cut carefully to pieces in Texas, under lamplight on stainless steel tables.

Then I was graduated. Margaret and I married one month before I took my B.A. at the University of Texas in January 1959. McKern encouraged me to go straight on to a Ph.D. in anthropology, skipping the master’s degree. The University of Texas had no Ph.D. program in anthropology but McKern told me I could take courses elsewhere and he would supervise my progress personally. I decided, however, to work first for my master’s degree.

It was useless. I flailed about in graduate school for a while, trying to make ends meet by moonlighting as a laboratory technician and grading exam papers. One summer I worked two jobs totaling forty-four hours a week, one of them as an athletic director in a school for retarded children, the other as a hospital orderly. At the same time I was attempting to take a full graduate course load. I was drained, exhausted after a year and a half. I was getting nowhere, it seemed. So as soon as Margaret won her degree in education I left school, went to Dallas and got a job with the Hartford Insurance Company as an investigator.

An old pathologist once told me: “When in doubt, think dirty. You’ll be right ninety percent of the time.” It was good advice, and I had many occasions to put it to good use while investigating insurance claims. Although I came to detest this job and the human vermin it brought me into contact with, in retrospect it was the best possible training for my later career as a forensic anthropologist. If any young man would care to find out in a hurry just how low his fellow human beings can sink, let him become an insurance claims adjuster. Whatever tender blossoms of altruism flowered in his innocent soul, these will be ripped out by the roots in six months flat; I guarantee it. At the same time, he will come face to face with some of the most vivid, brilliant, highly plausible fictions ever spun by human ingenuity. I know I did.

I shall not dwell on the tangled lies I had to unravel in those years. I learned to spot the people who specialize in falling down in front of vehicles. I learned about the “quick stop artists” who can brake their cars on a dime and cause rear-end collisions any time they like. I learned about physicians and chiropractors and the imaginative reports they would write about whiplash cases. I learned how reports were written charging that victims had suffered “permanent injury,” even though there was not the slightest trace of any injuries and the doctors admitted as much. How could they then diagnose “permanent injury”? Easily: there might not be any permanent injuries
now;
but, they assured us, many “permanent injuries” develop
later
as a result of such accidents!