Dead Men Do Tell Tales: The Strange and Fascinating Cases of a Forensic Anthropologist (21 page)

The conclusion was obvious and grisly: a knife had been used to remove the head from the bones of the neck immediately after death. Additional cuts were found in various places on the skull, some in places deep within it, places where even a knife used in the most ferocious assault could not reach. I concluded that a knife had been used to
deflesh
the remains after death.

There was a fracture of the upper jaw which probably resulted from a blow under the chin. So blunt trauma had taken place; the young girl had been hit hard, perhaps hard enough to kill her, almost certainly hard enough to knock her unconscious.

Rusty scratches parallel to one another were found on the top of the cranial vault. Now, since the police investigators had carefully cut the paint can apart and spread it open to remove the skull, we could surmise that these scratches occurred when the skull was forced through the rusty rim of the can by the murderer. That meant that there was no soft tissue on the skull when it was forced into the can. It must have been boiled, to have been rendered so clean in so short a length of time.

Bone during life is covered with a very tough fibrous material called periosteum. Pardon the illustration, but when you eat barbecued ribs, the tough fibrous material that makes the meat adhere to the ribs is the deceased pig’s periosteum. In the case before me, I concluded that, even if shreds of periosteum had been left on the skull when it went into that paint can, those rusty scratches could not have been made on the surface of the bone. Therefore all the periosteum had been carefully and thoroughly removed by the killer.

Gradually a terrible picture emerged. Abducted, beaten, murdered, decapitated, her skull scraped clean with a knife and then boiled and jammed into a rusty paint container—the little girl had met a cruel and terrible fate. Though her identity was established, and the time of her abduction was pinned down, no arrests were made.

Often in the years that followed I thought about that small, pathetic skull. Some years later I asked to see it again, hoping that with experience and hard-won expertise I might spot something I had missed in my first analysis—in vain. I had learned all I could learn from it. I was almost resigned to the fact that not all murders can be solved and that this little girl was among those innocents whose deaths go unavenged. The only bitter consolation in this case was that the girl’s parents knew what happened, and that their daughter was dead beyond a doubt. So many cases of missing children are never resolved; and the parents remain in agonies of uncertainty for the rest of their lives, always clinging to the faint hope that the child may still be alive somewhere. In such cases the lives of the parents are often wrecked forever.

Then, in the early part of 1994, as this chapter was being written, a man was arrested in New England in connection with the murders of several twelve- and thirteen-year-old children. I learned that he lived in the same county as the decapitated thirteen-year-old whose skull I had examined so carefully. At the same time, another twelve-year-old girl was murdered in an adjoining county, in a case I had also investigated at the time. I have passed the case numbers on to investigators. I hope that a demonstrable link can be found. I hope that the law has caught up with a monster.

Sometimes we get confirmation of our findings from the murderer’s own lips. In 1990 a man named Michael Durocher, who was on Death Row at the Florida State Prison in Starke for another crime, and who saw his appointment with the electric chair draw ever nearer, decided to get certain matters off his conscience.

Durocher told investigators where he had buried his girlfriend, Grace Reed, her five-year-old daughter, Candice, and his own six-month-old son, Joshua, all of whom he had murdered some ten years earlier. Durocher was under a death sentence for the 1986 shotgun slaying of a Jacksonville store clerk, whom he robbed of forty dollars and a car. He had also been convicted of fatally beating a roommate in Jacksonville in 1988, and received a life sentence for that crime.

Now, in 1990, following Durocher’s directions, a team from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE) located the bodies of the children, Candice and Joshua, as well as that of Grace Reed, in hidden graves in Green Cove Springs. Durocher admitted that he shot the mother and daughter with a shotgun, but when investigators asked how the baby died—this baby was his own son—he suddenly fell silent. Then, with a grim smile, he said cryptically: “That’s for you to find out.”

Indeed, forensic analysis clearly showed that the woman was shot in the back of the head with a shotgun and the jacket and bones of the little girl showed that a shotgun blast hit her in the back near her right armpit and tore through near her breastbone.

But the bones of baby Joshua had not a single mark on them. Clearly he was not killed with a shotgun. Was he stabbed? Smothered? Choked? Or had he been buried alive? “That’s for you to find out,” Durocher had said. I took him at his word and accepted the challenge. With infinite care, I bent my attention to the tiny, mostly skeletonized remains before me, which belonged to an infant murdered ten years earlier.

The ribs were not in good condition, but as far as I could see there were no nicks on them. They were clean. In cases of stabbing murders involving adults, the stabbing implement will not strike any bone about fifty percent of the time. In children, the probability is obviously much higher, because children’s bones, especially their ribs, are much closer together. But in this case there was no sign of bone damage.

The baby was still dressed in overall rompers with a bib going up to straps across his shoulders. The legs opened on their inner seams so that his diapers could be changed. Under the bib of the overalls was a T-shirt with hearts and balloons on it and over the clothing of the upper body was a jacket with a hood. All the snaps on the rompers were closed. The straps at the top of the bib were fastened, the shirt was in place under the straps and bib. The top snap of the jacket was closed, but the lower two snaps were opened.

We photographed the clothing still in place and could see no perforation in the back, in the front, or anywhere. But then I discovered that, if I raised the lower corner of the unsnapped jacket and peeled it back, there was a perforation in the bib. When I examined the T-shirt beneath the bib, I found another perforation, with the same tilt of its axis, in the same location as the one in the bib. Under the microscope the synthetic threads could be seen to have a sharp, slanted cut at their ends.

I reported my conclusions to the prosecutor and the defense attorney: that in my opinion the child had been carefully stabbed to death, by a murderer who was fastidious enough to lift the corner of the baby’s jacket, slip the knife in through the two layers of clothing underneath, and then coolly replace the jacket over the dying infant’s fatal wound.

I was quite confident of my conclusions, but apparently the prosecutor was not. Later, however, Durocher broke down and pleaded guilty to first-degree murder in these three deaths and was given three more death sentences. After his conviction, the text of an interview he had had with a prison psychiatrist was made available to the court. The prosecutor telephoned me, excitement tingling in her voice, and told me that I had been right. Durocher had confessed to stabbing the baby in the left chest, underneath its jacket, just as I had said. I told the prosecutor I was not surprised, that I had been confident I was right all along, and that she ought to have trusted me more. Was I arrogant? I hope not.

Durocher went to the electric chair in the fall of 1993. At the end he behaved stoically, refusing to beg for clemency, or to pursue legal appeals, or even to seek a stay of execution. To Florida Governor Lawton Chiles he wrote forthrightly that he believed in capital punishment and added: “I respectfully request that justice now be served.” It was. Michael Durocher is no longer among us. Unfortunately, neither are the five other people he senselessly murdered, including his own infant son.

Because of my connection with the case, I was invited to be present at Durocher’s autopsy but had to decline, because I was to be in Hawaii that day, working with some Vietnam War remains. In Florida, executed criminals are not autopsied in prison. After being electrocuted and pronounced dead, they are loaded into a funeral coach and taken to the District 8 medical examiner’s office in Gainesville.

When one is present at such autopsies, one’s thoughts naturally revert to the question of capital punishment. I suppose I have an idealistic, humanistic admiration for countries like Great Britain that have abolished the death penalty altogether; but when I return to my work in the United States I conclude reluctantly that we Americans may not yet be sufficiently advanced to take that sublime step. I have seen cases—too many cases—of people who have served time for one murder killing again after being released. I have seen the bodies of prisoners murdered in jail by killers who are still serving time. I once saw the mutilated corpse of a prisoner who had been handcuffed, stabbed through the eyes and in other parts of his body, then thrown off a third-floor balcony inside the prison.

Capital punishment is a kind of “scorched earth policy,” a last, desperate resort. We create a kind of sterile dead zone around a murderer and his deeds, a sort of “blasted heath” like that in Shakespeare’s
Macbeth
, where nothing lives, except for evil fogs and ghostly warnings. The murderer is gone, his victims are gone, and all that remains is a frightful memory, together with the grim certainty that the dead man will never torture, taunt or kill again. The families of his victims, however, inherit lifelong grief, never to be consoled.

As for the various methods used to inflict capital punishment, I believe some of them are needlessly cruel. Hanging can be anything from a merciful narcosis, to an excruciating agony of strangulation, minutes long, to outright decapitation, if the condemned person falls too far. There is a classic article on hanging, published in 1913 in the British medical journal,
The Lancet
. Ideally, hanging dislocates the neck between the first and second cervical vertebrae, producing a fracture of the odontoid process of the second vertebra, which extends up into the arch of the first. This severs the spinal cord and prevents further respiratory function, as does the rope itself, which constricts the airways.

But it is almost certain that the brain survives conscious for some seconds, maybe even half a minute, after the drop. In some botched hangings, like that of Mary Surratt, who was alleged to have conspired to kill Abraham Lincoln, the body may twitch horribly for several minutes. This is how long it takes for the brain to exhaust the oxygen that was sent to it during the last instants of life. I know that many hangmen in their autobiographies have boasted of their skill, asserting that “the body never moved after the drop.” This means nothing. With the spinal cord severed, the nervous system has been truncated, and no messages can be sent to the lower limbs. But the brain most likely still lives yet a little while longer, in agony, inside the “command module” of the separated skull.

Neither does the guillotine extinguish life in an instant. Grisly experiments involving signals sent by means of eye blinking have verified that brain activity continues for twenty to thirty seconds after death, in a guillotined head. Our brains continue to operate as long as they have oxygen, and when oxygen is lacking, they shut down. A guillotine merely cuts the windpipe and blood supply and nerve endings, but it takes a few seconds for the brain to feel the effects of the sudden deprivation of oxygen and blood. The condemned man, his heart beating wildly with fear, his lungs pumping furiously, is involuntarily prolonging his own agony, richly supplying his brain with blood and oxygen, which will enable it to retain consciousness for several more painful seconds than it would otherwise, after the knife falls. I imagine guillotining must be apocalyptically painful. There is certainly a huge shock, related to the terrific trauma of the vascular and nervous systems.

Nor is the gas chamber any more humane, in my opinion. Hydrogen cyanide gas doesn’t have the instantaneous effect in all individuals that is commonly supposed. There are numerous descriptions of prolonged gasping in some executions. This particular form of execution is unique in that, unlike any other method of capital punishment, it involves the cooperation of the condemned man. He has to take the fatal breath on his own, usually at a sign from the warden or executioner. There have been instances of breath holding on the part of the condemned man, in a desperate attempt to prolong life by a few more seconds. The final, involuntary gasping makes gassing almost a participatory, voluntary act. There is something vaguely obscene about forcing someone to kill himself.

We in Florida carry out death sentences by electrocution, which is supposed to be painless and instantaneous. I hold no brief for electrocution, but I believe it may be the least cruel of all methods of capital punishment, save one. When I was a college student working at a mental hospital in Texas, I was often called upon to take care of psychiatric patients before and immediately after they were given electric shock treatments. This involves a relatively small, nonlethal amount of electricity being sent through the brain. Without exception, I saw them lose consciousness instantly and never complain afterward of any pain, upon reviving. Indeed, not a single one of them could even remember the jolt. Therefore I believe the tremendous charge of electricity sent into the human brain during electrocution must pretty well scramble the nervous system, making it impossible to sense any pain.

If it were up to me, I should prefer that capital punishment be carried out exclusively by lethal injection. Unfortunately those opposed to the death penalty—and I readily grant they are acting from pure and humane motives—have raised all sorts of legal obstacles in the way of this much-needed reform.

During the administration of a lethal injection, a cocktail of chemicals is injected into a vein of the condemned criminal. This cocktail paralyzes the respiratory functions, stops the heart by the action of potassium chloride and closes down the brain quietly and painlessly by means of barbiturates. There have been many cases of suicides involving similar barbiturates, which are used to put animals to sleep. In most of these cases, the needle is found still sticking in the arm of the dead victim and usually the plunger is not even fully depressed—it is that quick.