Dead Men Do Tell Tales: The Strange and Fascinating Cases of a Forensic Anthropologist (24 page)

That evening, someone found the temporary shipping container, with her name on it, on a freeway. Inside were cremains.

The family was tracked down and the box returned to them. They were outraged. They immediately retained attorneys and filed a $10 million lawsuit against the cemetery. Defense attorneys hired by the insurance company representing the cemetery interviewed forensic scientists from all over the country, searching for someone to put together a team of experts. The field of forensic anthropology is not crowded. My name inevitably came up.

I remember flying there for the interview, which was conducted in a suite of an airport hotel. I was surrounded by a phalanx of eight or more attorneys, who questioned me closely about what I would do, what should be done, what shouldn’t be done and so forth. A short time after, I was told that I had been selected to put together a team of experts, the choice of whom would be left to me. The team assembled included Clyde Snow, who had worked with the Mengele remains in Brazil; Doug Ubelaker from the Smithsonian; Lowell Levine, one of this country’s foremost forensic dentists, who testified at the trial of serial killer Ted Bundy; Bob Kirschner, a deputy chief medical examiner from Chicago; and Dr. Robert Fitzpatrick, this country’s top forensic radiologist. One of the country’s foremost microscopy labs was retained to do all the microscopic and chemical analyses.

By this point in the lawsuit the plaintiffs had been offered a very handsome sum to settle out of court. They refused. So we were told this would have to go all the way to trial. Our examination left no stone unturned. We lavished hours and hours upon our examination of the cremains. As our expenses mounted, the insurance company howled to the cemetery operators: “We promised you a Cadillac defense! No one said anything about Rolls-Royces!”

The medical records on the deceased woman stacked up eighteen inches high. The x-rays numbered in the dozens. We also had good dental x-rays. One of the important factors centered on the surgical procedure performed on the woman; the surgeon had used vascular clips to close off blood vessels. In the radiographs made before her death, I could count at least twenty-nine of these clips. Her surgical record indicated that the surgeon had closed off the blood vessels using Hemaclips, a special brand. Hemaclips are tiny things, about a quarter of an inch long. Hospital purchasing records showed that the hospital was using Hemaclips made of tantalum, although Hemaclips are sometimes made of other materials as well.

From the cremains in the urn in the niche, we recovered intact or in halves the remains of at least eighteen Hemaclips. The other eleven had been pulverized in the cremation and grinding process and were scattered uniformly throughout the ashes and cremains. These little specks could nevertheless be spotted by x-rays and chemically analyzed. Every single sample of cremains in the niche showed tiny fragments of tantalum. The cremains found in the box abandoned on the freeway did not show these flecks and indeed had no tantalum fragments at all. So they could not have come from the woman whose name was on the box.

Furthermore, the urn in the niche yielded a dental post that had been used to attach an artificial crown. It had been altered on both ends by the dentist who inserted it. The alterations on the ends of the post were very distinctive because they were irregular. We had five views of this dental post in the deceased woman’s x-rays. I was able to put the tooth we recovered from the cremains under one video camera, then put each computer-enhanced dental x-ray on the other video camera, and superimpose them. We came down, thread by thread, lining up every single screw thread on the post, to prove this tiny piece of metal was a unique specimen.

The results of our investigation were clear and unequivocal: we proved that the woman was in the urn, and in the niche, right where she was supposed to be. We proved that the cremains on the freeway weren’t hers. After the very first member of our team gave a deposition under oath, the plaintiffs hastily settled out of court for what I gather was a vastly reduced sum. Settlements are always kept secret, so I don’t know what the figure was, but the attorneys we were working for were glowing like sunbeams and seemed extravagantly grateful. I gather millions of dollars were saved.

Why, the reader may ask, if our case was so airtight, did the cemetery pay out even a nickel? I am no lawyer, but I imagine that the universal fear of the unpredictability of the American jury had something to do with it. A box containing cremains was found on the freeway, and the box had the woman’s name on it. There was always the possibility that a jury might stubbornly conclude, in the face of all scientific evidence to the contrary, that the box, the name and the cremains were all the proof it needed to find for the plaintiff.

Soon afterward I was called in on another case, and when I quoted my rates the new attorneys were taken aback. They called the lawyers who knew about the freeway case. “Isn’t he a bit steep?” they asked, as I later learned. And the lawyer from the freeway case said: “Pay it. He’s worth whatever he asks.” It is always gratifying to receive these little tokens of esteem. The money isn’t unpleasant either.

Whose, then, were the remains in the box left on the freeway? They were never identified. We were able to demonstrate that they were the remains of several people scrambled together, and their volume was rather small. This led me to investigate the interior of a crematory retort chamber myself, as I have described above. Within, scattered in the corners and amid the crevices of the firebrick walls, was a small quantity of bone fragments and ashes left over from previous cremations.

I suspect, therefore, that a disgruntled employee from the crematorium surreptitiously gathered up these remnants, or others like them, and placed them in the box beside the freeway to cause grief to the funeral home. He certainly succeeded.

But in the end, the dreams of wealth or revenge, the loud legal cries of injury and outrage, the hypothetical millions of dollars demanded to redress this imagined wrong—all of these were reduced to ashes and smoke. All that remains today is a cool, silent urn in a distant columbarium.

11
Death in 10,000 Fragments

You will say that reality does not have the slightest obligation to be interesting. I reply that even if reality can escape the necessity of being interesting, hypotheses never can
.

—Jorge Luis Borges,
Death and the Compass

There is a stretch of I–75 about twenty miles north of Gainesville along which the great highway passes through a green and smiling landscape, all rolling fields and thick forests of pine and live oak. I can never travel this particular portion of the interstate without glancing over at a beautiful pasture that appears just south of the exit for High Springs, via County Road 236. This pasture has a solitary oak tree at its edge, then a dense stand of forest just to the west.

Sheltered under the eaves of this forest are the ruins of an old burned shack. Within those charred ruins, on January 28, 1985, were found the remains of two calcined human skeletons, so badly burned that they were almost reduced to powder. Next to one of the skeletons, welded shut by the fury of the fire that consumed the shack and its occupants, was an Ithaca Model 37 12-gauge shotgun whose stock had been completely reduced to ashes.

Today when anyone asks me which was the most difficult, the most fascinating and perplexing case I have ever encountered, I answer without an instant’s hesitation: the Meek-Jennings case. I have examined human remains, ancient and modern, famous and obscure, in Asia, Africa, Europe and South America, as well as all over the United States; but I had only to travel twenty miles from my front doorstep to encounter the most baffling and complex problem in forensic anthropology that has ever occupied my mind or challenged the resources of the C. A. Pound Human Identification Laboratory.

The Meek-Jennings case began with a hellish fire, and from the first moment it was possessed of a hellish complexity. That fire, and those skeletons, would occupy me and my students for the next year and a half. Many times during my inquiry a vital piece of evidence would dangle just out of reach, then, when grasped, would slip away or reverse its meaning. I had to unravel a set of remains that occupied only a few square feet, but whose tangled history reached from Alaska to Florida, across thousands of miles and a dozen years.

Everything about this case seemed to defy a simple solution. Things seemed to reduplicate themselves, multiply themselves, fragment themselves. At times we seemed to be gazing through a kaleidoscope instead of a magnifying glass.

At first we thought we were dealing with one fire; it turned out there were two. We imagined we were investigating two deaths; later we found out there were four. The deaths occurred in pairs, in two states, widely separated. There were two suicide notes, both of which looked fake. There were dozens and dozens of antemortem and postmortem x-rays to compare, some of them of very poor quality. Other x-rays, which would have solved the case in an instant, had been destroyed. A slip of memory on the part of a surgeon plunged us into difficulties that seemed insoluble. A crucial gold tooth inlay eluded us for months, while another tooth, found hundreds of miles away, cast the gravest doubt on our findings at that point. At various stages in our inquiry it seemed possible that the bones in the burned cabin were a macabre jest, deliberately put there to make fools of us, by a murderer gifted with almost superhuman cunning, a man so ruthless he would pull his own teeth and fling them into the flames, to throw us off the track.

“We are to go together so our ashes cannot be separated,”
boasted a suicide note found a few hundred feet from the fire. It was my task to prove this prophecy false.

Besides the skeletal remains of two individuals recovered from the fire scene, there were the burned remains of a dog, as well as the previously cremated ashes of a second dog, all mixed together. Before it burned, the old cabin had been an abandoned farmhouse, which meant that all sorts of flotsam and jetsam were found mixed among the ashes. Generations of animals, wild and tame, had died and left their bones for years and years beneath the house. Mixed in with the fragments was an accumulation of old bullets and cartridges, shoe eyelets, molten buttons and even an ancient Chinese coin.

If only I had been called in just two days sooner! The Alachua County Sheriff’s Department thought I was out of the country, in Peru, and unreachable; in fact I had just returned to the United States the morning before the remains were discovered. I could easily have gone out to the burned shack and seen the remains
in situ
. Instead an investigator from the medical examiners office carefully gathered up every single bone fragment she could find, placed them
in a single body bag
and carried them back to the medical examiner’s laboratory. By the time they arrived they could not have been more jumbled if they had been run through a cement mixer.

When I finally opened the vinyl bag I was overwhelmed. Inside, totally commingled and crushed, were approximately ten thousand bone fragments, not counting bone that had been reduced to ash and particles of sand. In my entire career I have never seen such an impossible chaos of fragments, some broken by the fire to begin with, some broken even further by careless handling, all tumbled together in a hopeless, brittle welter of dust, cinders, calcined bone, stray teeth and sand. If the bones had simply been cut into ten thousand fragments it would have been easier. As matters stood, the remains had been jumbled twice, once by the fire and again by the evidence technician.

The deaths in High Springs, as it turned out, were linked with a particularly shocking and heinous double murder in New Hampshire that had occurred a few days earlier. Because of the notoriety of the New Hampshire victims there was a blaze of media attention. Newspapers in Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Florida followed the case closely. We here in Gainesville were being pressured by politicians and law enforcement officers from another state. The New Hampshire authorities made it plain they considered us incompetent rubes and hicks who, to hide our abysmal ignorance, were desperately trying to sweep the whole matter under the rug. In view of the fact that I spent a year and a half painstakingly reassembling those skeletons, I consider that a bit of an insult. Long after we submitted our conclusions and proof the New Hampshire state attorney pointedly disregarded them and kept the case open. He went on to become governor of the state, so I suppose you have to hand it to him: he knew how to strike a popular pose in the public eye.

But one of the most fascinating aspects of the Meek-Jennings case was the personality of the killer. To a degree unparalleled in most of my investigations, the mind of the murderer seemed to taunt us and puzzle us, beyond death, beyond the dissolving fires that destroyed the old cabin and its occupants. In this case, contrary to all common sense, love and death were mixed in equal proportions. The Meek-Jennings affair was one involving both passion and premeditation. Here were present the deepest, tenderest sentiments of romanticism, side by side with a depraved, homicidal rage. Here the fires of love were nearly all-consuming. They almost consumed the truth.

To this day I cannot fathom why nobody spotted the burning cabin when it caught fire. There was a Shell filling station on a hill at the County Road 236 exit of Interstate 75, hardly a mile and a half away. To me it seems incredible that no one saw the smoke or reported the blaze, unless it happened at dusk, or at night. But even then we are left with the astounding fact that the ruins of the cabin were only discovered on January 28, fully ten days after the fire.

When sheriff’s deputies arrived at the scene everything had long since cooled. The masonry of the cabin fireplace was cold. All the galvanized tin roofing had collapsed on top of the ashes and the metal was cool to the touch. There was not a wisp of smoke. Trees upwind of the cabin were scarcely scorched at all, but those downwind, to the west, were blackened and charred fully forty feet up their trunks. This was dramatic proof of how hot the fire had been and suggests that there was a strong wind fanning the flames in a westerly direction.