Dead Men Do Tell Tales: The Strange and Fascinating Cases of a Forensic Anthropologist (28 page)

Another loose tooth had been found among the ashes of the cabin and clearly identified as Meek’s. So the fear took shape that Meek had pulled his own teeth to salt a death scene with identifiable evidence from his own mouth. This second tooth, found in a matchbox hundreds of miles away, was the germ from which a plague of doubt would spread. From this point onward there gradually took shape a blind, irrational mistrust of anything found among the ashes that could be identified as Meek’s. Such objects, it was reasoned, proved nothing. Meek could have put them there to deceive us. Meek would do anything to throw us off the scent. He would yank out his own teeth and cast them into the flames.

What wasn’t found was almost as important as what was. Meek’s dental x-rays showed a prominent gold filling in his lower jaw. Dental gold has a high melting point. Even though the cabin had burned like a torch, the heat would have been insufficient to melt this gold filling. Yet the gold filling was nowhere to be found. The earth had been sifted through ⅛-inch mesh screens and it had not turned up. Thus we were being whipsawed from two directions: the tooth that was found after the fire proved nothing; the filling that was lost proved everything.

But these difficulties paled by comparison with the examination of the female’s upper jaw. Here we had a very badly burned, calcined, chalk-white palate with many of the teeth still attached. Unfortunately it was so small that it seemed to belong to a midget. If you measure a normal palate in a small, unburned female skull, you will find it is about 49–50 millimeters across, something in that neighborhood. This tiny, burned palate was only 43 millimeters wide—fifteen percent smaller than normal. How could we reconcile this miniature palate with Page Jennings, a fully grown twenty-one-year-old woman? Dr. Mertz told me what I already knew: we had a problem.

The third doubt that bedeviled us was the female tibia. Page Jennings, you may recall, had injured a knee at age seventeen, throwing the javelin in high school. She underwent surgery to repair this injury. The surgeon no longer had the relevant x-rays, but she assured me that she had made two incisions in the surface of the tibia and attached the tendon through them. This is called a Hauser procedure, and it leaves definite and characteristic marks: the bone is cut through in two small parallel rectangles and these rectangles remain visible, even after they have healed over, for the rest of the patient’s life.

I had the New Hampshire surgeon sketch the rectangles in pencil on a sample tibia I took up to her. I still have it today. She drew two rectangles on it in pencil at the precise spots where, she insisted, she had cut into Page Jennings’s kneebone. Seeing them, I was deeply perplexed. I knew very well that, on the burned and painstakingly reconstructed portion of female tibia that was lying on a table at the C. A. Pound Human Identification Laboratory in Gainesville, there was absolutely no trace of these surgical scars. I had carefully reassembled this five-inch portion of tibia from thirty-six separate fragments of bone, x-rayed it and pored over it for days. And the scars
should have been there
, if indeed the burned bone belonged to Page Jennings.

These doubts were incorporated in our report to the New Hampshire state attorney general’s office in 1985. To my vast annoyance, Attorney General Stephen Merrill released all the doubtful points to the press immediately, and the media had a field day. The skeletons in the shack were bogus! Glyde Earl Meek was still alive! Page Jennings couldn’t be identified with the female remains in the shack! A murderer and his love-struck girlfriend were still on the loose! Meek was placed on the FBI’s “10 Most Wanted” list and his photograph was circulated to law enforcement agencies all over America.

These suspicions grew like weeds. The whole case was taking on a perverse life of its own, a life after death in which skeletons rose up and scampered away on miraculously healed legs; adult jaws shrank to the size of children’s; teeth flew out of mouths, and a prominent gold filling somehow evaporated to atoms. To this day, I imagine, there are people in New Hampshire who believe Glyde Earl Meek committed the perfect triple murder and is cavorting around the country as you read these lines, laughing at the law.

These proceedings filled me with chagrin. At the same time I purposed, not without some anger, to get to the bottom of this endlessly mocking case, no matter how long it might take me.

It took me and my students another full year. I doubt if, within the whole history of forensic anthropology, a pair of skeletons has been puzzled over and put back together with such painstaking slowness, such infinite care, as the remains from the burned shack in High Springs. Whenever I had a spare moment in 1985 and 1986, I would return to these two skeletons, cautiously matching up fragments, one by one, bit by bit. Today these remains are kept in two cardboard boxes in the C. A. Pound Human Identification Laboratory, numbered 1C85 and 1D85.

In those days I was still occupying rooms at the Florida Museum of Natural History. At that time in my lab we didn’t have huge tables to work on. The expansion of other activities in the museum was cramping me. So I used two counter tops, manufactured at a Florida state prison with convict labor, each one thirty inches deep by eight feet long. One counter top I used for unsorted material. The other I divided into two areas: “His” and “Hers.”

Very quickly we could confirm that we had two individuals, no more. Furthermore we could rely on those beautiful, enormous, detailed crime scene photographs taken by the Alachua County sheriff’s office, which pretty well indicated that we were dealing with two individuals lying side by side. The dog and squirrel bones presented no great problems. We were able to winnow them out fairly early on. Some types of dog teeth do indeed resemble human “canine” teeth at first glance, but there are distinctive ridges that mark dog teeth clearly and no forensic anthropologist could long be deceived by them.

It was also clear that we were dealing with bones that had burned inside of bodies because of the tremendous twisting and warping and checkering and very characteristic breakage of the bones.

I ask the reader’s patience for taking up again a subject I have touched on earlier, that is, the idiosyncrasies of burned bones. But it is essential that you have a clear picture of this process if you are to accompany me in the investigation that follows. Naked bones that are burned in a fire look much different from bones that are enclosed and burned inside a body. Bones burned as bones, and not as part of a body, react differently under fire than do bones encased in tissue with high fat content and other fluids. In some ways it may be considered as the difference between frying a joint of meat in a pan of bacon grease, as opposed to cooking a naked bone in a hot dry oven. Bones burned naked, without the surrounding flesh, go through the same color changes as bones in fresh bodies. They blacken, gray and whiten. They will shrink, but often not as much, and they don’t warp and distort themselves as much; nor do the bone surfaces change and degrade in the manner we see in bones burned inside bodies.

When bones inside bodies are burned they change color, as the surrounding flesh sizzles and melts away. These transformations happen quickest around the joints, where the skin, soft tissue and muscles are thinner. Here the transformation begins earliest, but eventually it will overtake the whole skeleton if the fire is allowed to burn.

The bone begins to change from its normal color, a creamy white-yellow, to a darker yellow as fats from the surrounding tissue are baked in. Then, as the fire continues to burn, this dark yellow gradually yields to black. The black represents the organic substances of the bone, which have been carbonized. Finally, if these black, carbonized bones remain amid the flames, even the last organic residues are burned away. In these final stages, the color of the bone gradually fades from black to very dark gray, to gray, to light gray and finally to white. When all of the organic constituents of the bone have been burned away completely, leaving only the inorganic portions—calcium carbonate and other salts of organic material—the bones are pure white. Such are the “calcined bones” you encounter in Gothic novels. My point is, fire and bone interact in very predictable ways, going through a clearly visible series of changes, changes which can be pinpointed by color and texture.

As the fire reaches the bone, definite changes occur. Each bone seems to react differently, according to the thickness of the compact bone composing it. Some surfaces begin to “checker” and break into tiny cubes which may or may not separate from one another.

If it does not pain you too much to imagine your leg on fire, I will tell you that, once your flesh is consumed, the surfaces of your tibia—your shinbone—will begin to split into a crisscross checkerboard pattern. This is because the surface of your tibia is relatively thin.

Now if you don’t mind, let the fire move up and consume your thigh. The thighbone is called the femur and here the burn pattern of the surface is completely different, because the outer layer of the femur is thicker. Instead of checkerboards, your thighbone will crackle up into little crescent moons as the fire makes its way through the flesh and begins to gnaw at the bone. Bits may fall off, but they can often be glued back on in the laboratory because of their shape: curved, not right-angled. It’s all very distinctive. So the fragments of a burned tibia look very different from the fragments of a burned femur. In my laboratory I was able to divide many small bits of burned bone into checkerboards and crescent moons, and gradually fit these pieces back together into tibias and femurs. In this particular case I was able to reconstruct a large portion of the burned female’s tibia out of thirty-six small fragments.

I cannot hope to convey the immense, fatiguing and yet fascinating task of reassembling those fragments. We used Duco cement—model airplane glue—to put the bones back together because it does not expand when subjected to moisture, and because you can always dissolve it with acetone if you make a mistake. I challenged my students to attack these bones and carefully monitored their reconstructions. When I agreed, the reconstruction stood. When I disagreed—out poured the acetone.

Often the fragments were so frail that they had to be splinted after they were glued together. The female’s reconstructed tibia is a very twisty thing now: it has a curled flake coming off it like a bean sprout; but when it was part of the living bone, this wild curl lay flat and straight and matched up very nicely with the cavity beneath it. Blame the fire for splitting it and blistering it up. Such are the idiosyncrasies of burned bones.

To sum up a year and a half’s work in a single paragraph: We looked for fragments that could be identified as coming from particular bones. We carefully gauged the thickness of the bone walls. We closely measured the curvature of fragments, which indicated the circumference of a certain bone shaft. We looked carefully at the size of the cavity within the shaft as opposed to the thickness of the walls of the shaft. We scrutinized the shapes of joint surfaces and kept an eye out for the special protuberances that indicated muscle attachment. Color was our ally. We always looked at color, the shades of color a bone goes through as it is burning: cream, dark yellow, black, dark gray, gray, light gray, white. Neighboring colors and neighboring textures helped us figure out the coherence of neighboring bones and fragments, what went next to what.

You must not imagine that at the end of our labors we had anything resembling a pair of fully articulated skeletons. Rather, we were trying to reconstruct certain large, significant, verifiable bones that would correspond to x-rays taken of Page Jennings and Glyde Earl Meek before death.

One by one the baffling difficulties and discrepancies yielded to patient endeavor. The first riddle, the tiny female palate, so small it seemed to belong to a midget, was proved to be an adult palate shrunken by fire. I was able to demonstrate that fire shrinks and compresses bones by a factor of twenty to twenty-five percent. The teeth in this palate matched Page Jennings’s dental x-rays. It was her palate.

Then came the unscarred tibia. If Page Jennings had undergone radical knee surgery at age seventeen, why didn’t the female kneebone show traces of it? When I went back to the New Hampshire surgeon and asked her—very diplomatically of course—to give me copies of her surgical records relating to Page Jennings, I found that she had not used the bone-cutting Hauser procedure, at all, but instead a gentler method known as the Goldthwait procedure, which did not involve cutting into the bone. The surgeon had simply forgotten which type of surgical procedure she had used, but her case records were clear and unequivocal: Goldthwait, not Hauser. This regrettable lapse of memory had cost us months of desperate groping. Now, with the surgical records before me, this riddle was solved. Page Jennings didn’t have surgical scars on her tibia because the surgeon had never cut into the tibia. The surgeon finally agreed with my identification.

With these discrepancies overcome, the rest of the female bones fell into place rather neatly. Her left humerus, or upper-arm bone, closely matched predeath x-rays of Page Jennings’s arm, right down to a tiny bone bubble that looked like a capital letter A with two crossbars. There was also a distinctive dome-shaped formation, as well as areas of density, that were recognizable and congruent—almost mathematically so. Page Jennings’s deltoid tuberosity—a bump or area of roughened bone where the deltoid muscle attaches to the humerus—was identical in the female humerus found at the burned shack. The maverick fragment of fibula that had somersaulted out of the fire and was only charred at one tip matched up perfectly with x-rays of Page Jennings’s left fibula. It became one of our most conclusive pieces of evidence.

To those who, from mischief, fantasy or fond hope, imagine that Page Jennings somehow walked away from that terrible fire, I can only reply: if she did, then she managed to walk away without a major bone in her left leg, her upper left arm, and her palate. That may sound harsh, but in this case the truth had to be used as a blunt instrument. That fibula, that humerus and that palate are today in the C. A. Pound Human Identification Laboratory, and they are all incontestably hers.