Dead Men Do Tell Tales: The Strange and Fascinating Cases of a Forensic Anthropologist (20 page)

And I have been present, too, at the autopsies of evildoers after they have been executed by law. I have seen the black scorch marks left by the electric chair on their shaved heads and legs; seen their brains and viscera laid bare by the knife and the Stryker saw, the tops of their heads popped off with a twist of the Virchow skull-breaker, a tool shaped like a large, shiny skate key with flanges on its bore. I have seen their organs lifted out one by one, set aside, weighed and photographed. Afterward, the autopsy room is thoroughly cleaned and disinfected with diluted bleach; but if you look closely, you can see that the bits of chalk used to scrawl the organ weights on the blackboard are maculated with old human blood.

On such occasions, we clearly do not expect demons to swarm gibbering from the opened braincase and flitter like black bats around the autopsy room. Nevertheless, it is impossible to regard a murderer’s brain without an involuntary tingle of curiosity: what lay deep within the coralline gray whorls of this small, silenced kingdom? What happened along its intricate hallways, within the fine cerebral web work of axons and dendrites, whose tiny, myriad sparkings are the physical basis of thought? Before it was shocked to death itself, what shocking poisons did this unique lump of flesh distill, to so subvert the mind of its owner and warp his will to evil?

I cannot say. Over the years my work has brought me into contact with abysses of evil: the most depraved murders, and the most unregenerate murderers. But even after long, enforced communion with the foulest recesses of human nature, I cannot trace this dark river to its source, nor can I suggest a way to dam or divert it. From what I have seen, the impulse to evil is something deep within an individual from his very earliest years, if not from birth. At the center of the labyrinth of certain human personalities there lurks a Minotaur that feeds on human flesh, and we have not yet found the thread to help us map this maze and slay the beast.

The instruments of murder are as manifold as the unlimited human imagination. Apart from the obvious—shotguns, rifles, pistols, knives, hatchets and axes—I have seen meat cleavers, machetes, ice picks, bayonets, hammers, wrenches, screwdrivers, crowbars, pry bars, two-by-fours, tree limbs, jack handles (which are not “tire irons;” nobody carries tire irons anymore), building blocks, crutches, artificial legs, brass bedposts, pipes, bricks, belts, neckties, pantyhose, ropes, bootlaces, towels and chains—all these things and more, used by human beings to dispatch their fellow human beings into eternity. I have never seen a butler use a candelabrum. I have never seen anyone use a candelabrum! Such recherché elegance is apparently confined to England. I did see a pair of sneakers used to kill a woman, and they left distinctive tread marks where the murderer stepped on her throat and crushed the life from her. I have not seen an icicle used to stab someone, though it is said to be the perfect weapon, because it melts afterward. But I do know of a case in which a man was bludgeoned to death with a frozen ham.

Murderers generally do not enjoy heavy lifting—though of course they end up doing quite a bit of it after the fact, when it is necessary to dispose of the body—so the weapons they use tend to be light and maneuverable. You would be surprised how frequently glass bottles are used to beat people to death. Unlike the “candy-glass” props used in the movies, real glass bottles stand up very well to blows. Long-necked beer bottles, along with the heavy old Coca-Cola and Pepsi bottles, make formidable weapons, powerful enough to leave a dent in a wooden two-by-four without breaking. I recall one case in which a woman was beaten to death with a Pepsi bottle, and the distinctive spiral fluting of the bottle was still visible on the broken margins of her skull. The proverbial “lead pipe” is a thing of the past, as a murder weapon. Lead is no longer used to make pipes.

Whoever wishes to plumb the depths of man’s inhumanity to man need only scan the textbook, the
Medico-legal Investigation of Death
, edited by two pathologists, Werner U. Spitz and Russell S. Fisher, one of the standard texts in our field. It is a 623-page tome filled with photographs that will sear the eyeballs of the uninitiated, though it holds no terrors for me and my colleagues.

In it are shown men, women and children in every stage of death and decay. Every refinement of murder and torture, every bizarre accident of fate and fortune, is laid out within these pages in dispassionate detail. Here are bodies shot, stabbed, hanged, bludgeoned, poisoned, mangled, decapitated, dismembered, flayed, drowned, strangled, stretched, crushed, burned, dried, mummified and plank-stiff with rigor mortis. Here are bodies that have been gnawed by dogs and rats, fish and alligators, beetles and roaches; bodies that are corrupt and frothing with fly eggs and maggots. And here, too, are bodies preserved with wondrous purity and freshness, enfolded soon after death in a bright crystalline coverlet of snow and ice, cradled by cold and seemingly immortal in their mortality.

But in many ways the most dreadful chapter in this Black Museum is Chapter Eighteen, which deals with the investigation of wrongful deaths in childhood. Its frontispiece is the body of a newborn infant, stabbed to death many times. One of the collaborators on this chapter, Dr. James T. Weston, calls child murder and child torture “man’s inhumanity to man in its most extreme form,” and he notes that this darkest of deeds has been “rationalized by virtually every justification known to man, including religious beliefs and practices, discipline and education and, to a large degree, economic gain.” Children are so defenseless and so innocent that these crimes seem particularly horrendous. “Whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depths of the sea,” warned Jesus Christ in Matthew 18:6. A millstone seems a very light punishment, in my eyes!

Some of the cases and photographs in this chapter can break your heart. There is the child who was choked to death by pepper, which its parents forced it to inhale for punishment. There is the child parboiled over half its body by immersion in hot water. There is the child whose frenulum, the stringy halter connecting the upper lip to the gum, is torn because he has been hit in the mouth so often (a lacerated frenulum is a common finding in physically abused children). There is the baby beaten to death by a drunken father be cause its crying interrupted a TV football game. There are the looped weals on the back and buttocks of a child beaten with an electrical extension cord—dozens and dozens of angry weals on a child’s small back. There is a terrible photograph showing blackened necrosis of the fingertips of a child “sustained in an effort to protect himself when repeatedly beaten on the head.”

I do not recite these horrors for low effect. I have two children myself, both girls, now grown, with sons and daughters of their own. I can feel keenly the pain a normal father feels in his imagination at the mere thought of such brutal injuries. It costs me an effort, in my professional capacity, to put aside the outrage any human being must experience when brought into contact with these depravities. Yet put it aside I must, if I am to reach clear and dispassionate conclusions in my investigations.

The more we know about these affairs, the more alert we will be to their telltale signs. I hope sincerely that a day will come when the brutal parejit or adult will stay his or her hand, if only through fear of being found out; from the certain foreknowledge that the old excuses—“She fell;” “I turned my back for a minute, and it happened;” “He’s always so clumsy …”—will no longer hold water, but instead lead to swift intervention, prosecution and stern punishment.

I have had several cases involving young children and they have always remained vivid in my memory. One of the most disturbing of these involved the remains of a five-year-old girl which were brought to me for analysis. They were found in a cloth bag that had been thrown into a pond. Her mother and her mother’s boyfriend were accused of murder. There was evidence that they punished the child by forcing her to stand in the corner of the bedroom for approximately ten days without food or water or other fluids. She was not allowed to lie down and, whenever she collapsed, she was forced to stand up again. In a diabolical refinement of cruelty, a note was sent to her school informing her teacher that her medications required that she receive no food or water during the day. The teacher, knowing no better, complied with the strange request, becoming an unwitting accomplice in the poor child’s torments. Fortunately, she kept the note, and this telltale piece of paper was later used as evidence in the investigation of the little girl’s murder.

For murdered she had been. An indictment had been secured which charged that the girl had died of a penetrating wound to the skull. My part of this terrible case lay in the interpretation of injuries and, after a careful examination of the remains, I decided that the death-by-head-injury scenario was false. The hole in the little girl’s skull was natural. A small bone had simply fallen away from the decomposing skull, under water.

After I discussed my findings with the medical examiner, he returned to the district attorney and indicated to him the true cause of death: starvation compounded with possible blunt trauma caused by beatings on the abdomen. A new indictment was obtained, one that excluded the penetrating injuries. At the trial it came out that the little girl was forced to eat soap and recite the alphabet endlessly. She was whipped mercilessly with a belt whenever she wet her pants. She was forbidden to sleep, but instead had to stand nightlong in a half-packed suitcase. The mother’s boyfriend, a sadistic lout named Don MacDougall, was the child’s chief tormentor. The mother herself plea-bargained with the district attorney in return for a fifteen-year sentence. She has served her time, with time off for good behavior, and is already free. MacDougall was tried in early 1983 and was sent to prison. He was due to be released from the Madison County Correctional Institute in North Florida on New Year’s Eve 1992. Under the old penal regulations, MacDougall had managed to shorten his sentence by a certain number of days, for good behavior behind bars. But when it was learned he was to be let loose, there was such an outcry from the community that the Florida attorney general, Bob Butterworth, intervened personally and rescinded the early release date in MacDougall’s case. As of this writing, he is still behind bars, and as one who has seen the pitiable remains of his victim, I cannot feel sorry for him.

Sometimes it takes a long time to conclude a case. In 1983 a medical examiner from Naples, Florida, sent me the skull of another five-year-old girl. He wanted to know what kind of weapon had damaged the skull. As I examined the skull carefully, I found that something had struck the little girl in the center of the forehead and crushed her fragile bones through the inner halves of both eyes, then passed through her frontal bone, producing a defect that extended from the base of her nose sloping upward and backward almost to the center of the top of her head. It was a terrible injury, caused by terrific force. It must have killed her instantly.

After taking some measurements and looking at sharp angles formed by the crushed bone, I reported that the weapon had a flat surface, two sharp angles and parallel sides. It appeared as if she had been struck by the narrow edge of a two-by-four piece of lumber, or something very similar in shape and dimensions. That was all I could determine.

Years passed. Then, in 1992, almost ten years after her death, an investigator told me he had interviewed a pedophile already in prison, who had admitted that he had killed the girl. We had to exhume the rest of her body from the cemetery to gather additional evidence, but the confession of the murderer agreed very closely with my original findings. He told police he had used, not a two-by-four, but a piece of building block about an inch and a half thick. Its sharp angles and straight, parallel sides matched the injury to the little girl’s skull exactly. Eventually he pleaded guilty to the crime and the case was finally closed. The little girl’s skull, which had been separated from her body as evidence, has been finally buried with her.

Our first impressions are always the strongest. One case in particular has haunted me for years because of the powerful impression it made on me at the time, and because it was one of the first such cases I encountered. It involved the dismemberment of a young girl, just thirteen years old, and it occurred in 1978.

Her skull was found inside a paint can only a couple of weeks after the child herself disappeared from a school bus stop on the east coast of Florida. The skull was clean when it was found in the paint can and the paint can itself was rusty and had probably rusted before the death of the child. This detail was of some importance, as you will see. The rest of the child’s body was never found.

My analysis disclosed that the cartilage covering the occipital condyle, the bone that supports the skull on the neck, had been cut on its forward surface and bent backward, while the cartilage was still fresh. Now when I first saw this skull, after the police brought it to me, this tab of cartilage had dried, blackened and hardened, but a microscopic analysis showed that the cuts had been made before this drying and hardening took place.