Dead Men Do Tell Tales: The Strange and Fascinating Cases of a Forensic Anthropologist (29 page)

Now Meek: from the outset Meek’s powerful, stop-at-nothing personality had animated this case diabolically. Page Jennings was merely his plaything and possession. By his own admission in the suicide note, he had murdered her parents in New Hampshire and set the inn on fire. He had then strangled Page, not once but twice, and crushed her skull with a rock. If the evidence in this case were false, it was Meek who had falsified it. If the bones in the shack were not his, he had nevertheless put them there. If this dismal tale were ever to have an ending, it rested with me to determine whether the male skeleton retrieved from the burned cabin belonged to Glyde Earl Meek or not. Did that buckshot-spattered, fire-cracked brainpan belong to a self-proclaimed murderer or to a nameless innocent? This was what I had to prove, conclusively enough to satisfy police in Florida and New Hampshire.

There was a perplexing tab of bone from the male skeleton that seemed to float apart from the reconstruction, as it took shape. Composed of several fragments, dark gray and mottled in color, this flattened bone would provide me with a crucial, coinciding piece of evidence. It was the first, topmost rib of a male rib cage, short and stubby. Our ribs progress like harp strings, moving from small, short beginnings down to full, harmonious curves before shrinking again to the last, lowest ribs. This particular rib had a very irregularly shaped, calcified cartilage at the end nearest the breastbone. This nubbin of cartilage, this small irregularity, was extraordinarily distinctive. Under powerful illumination it stood out like a knot on a pine log.

A bright light and an old x-ray proved it was Meek’s. In the early 1980s Meek had visited a chiropractor in Tucson, Arizona. I had not looked deeply into the dark areas of these x-rays, but now I used a special piece of equipment, a “hot spot,” a bright reflecting bulb, to scrutinize the opaque and gloomy edges of these old x-rays. This powerful beam pierces the deepest shadows in x-ray films.

There, captured by the Arizona chiropractor and now illumined by the brilliant “hot spot,” was the selfsame rib. The x-ray I took of the burned rib fragment, superimposed on the old chiropractor’s x-ray, lined up magnificently. Exterior contours, interior irregularities, fell into place like a Euclidean theorem. The male rib from the fire belonged to Glyde Earl Meek. I did not fling up my arms or shout “Eureka!” but I will confess to experiencing a keen, silent elation while gazing at this eloquent bit of bone.

By now I had had a bellyful of New Hampshire state Attorney General Stephen Merrill’s insinuations about the incompetence of Florida law enforcement officials and their dull-witted investigators. As late as June 1986, a year and a half after the murders, Merrill ostentatiously kept the case open and insisted on listing Meek as a living, wanted criminal. For this public and obstinate skepticism he won the huzzahs of the
Manchester Union Leader
.

Merrill is to be commended for resisting the temptation to try to “close the book” on this sad, salacious controversy by accepting the facile conclusion that Page Jennings and Meek died in a fire in a High Springs, Florida shack on January 28th, 1985 [said an editorial in the
Union Leader
on June 4].

It’s not a question of the competence of the experts; it’s a question of whether that competence is being extended beyond the area of their expertise. Merrill does not challenge the evidence. But, ever mindful of Meek’s reputation as a devious convict, he notes that the teeth are not attached to bone, that in the past (in Arizona) Meek has saved his extracted teeth, and that there is a possibility of a “salting of the site” with phony evidence….

One can only wonder whether the Florida police, who have halted their search for Meek, are being equally precise in their consideration of the essential distinction between what the evidence indicates and what it proves. Merrill … deserves praise for demonstrating a high degree of professionalism in not accepting easy conclusions.

There were no such bouquets for me, toiling patiently in my little laboratory in Gainesville, poring over myriad flakes of reassembled bone. By now I was sure of my identifications, but I wished to “make assurance doubly sure.” I determined to find the telltale gold filling that Meek had worn in life and was so conspicuously absent from his skeleton in death.

To do this I enlisted the services of three University of Florida archaeologists: Michael A. Russo, Charles R. Ewen and Rebecca Saunders. You can still examine our expense account in the files. We claimed for four pairs of leather gloves, ten dust masks and fifty Ziploc plastic bags. Using a tripod-mounted fine screen, with a 1/16-inch mesh, we excavated the complete shack down to sterile soil—in vain. We did not find the gold inlay.

Then I directed that all the rocks, dirt and debris from the original spoil-piles—the material that had earlier been screened through a ⅛-inch mesh—be brought back to the C. A. Pound Human Identification Laboratory and put through another, finer screen. This time we would use a 1/16-inch mesh, about as fine as a window screen.

It was a young graduate student, Heidi Sydow, who found the gold inlay. She was part of a work-study program and she more than earned her pay that day. The crucial filling was caught at last, after infinite pains and disappointments, sifted out in the fine mesh. A single pin was bent, but the whole filling stood forth unmistakably. Now it was captured in my hands, glittering with that imperishable sparkle that has rendered gold so precious for thousands of years. This fleck of gold, that day, was more precious to me than any other.

Pure gold melts at 1,945 degrees Fahrenheit. Dental gold is far stronger. In a really hot structural fire, after eight hours of burning, where the heat is most intense, it gets up to a little over 1,200 degrees Centigrade, or just under 2,300 degrees Fahrenheit. In my experience I have seen aluminum and pot metals melt in house fires, but seldom any metal more durable. To get to 1,945 degrees in a house fire the blaze would have to continue as a raging fire for around three hours. It is absurd to imagine the small shack in High Springs burning for three hours at these terrific temperatures. The galvanized tin roof sections that had collapsed into the fire were unmelted. The Ithaca shotgun’s slide was welded shut, but its barrel was undeformed by the heat.

And in fact this gold filling had not melted either. Its original shape was still clearly recognizable, and it was definitely Meek’s. The New Hampshire authorities clung feebly to their hypothesis—Meek could have flung his gold filling into the fire! But soon after that Dr. Mertz was able to prove that a whole fragment of the male jaw, with teeth attached, corresponded to Meek’s dental x-rays. Obviously he had not flung his jaw into the fire.

After immense doubts and difficulties we had proved what seemed likeliest at the very beginning of the case: Page Jennings and Glyde Earl Meek were dead. Their bones were the bones found in the burned cabin. The long and laborious investigation was closed. Glyde Earl Meek was finally, quietly taken off the “Most Wanted” list, and Stephen Merrill was elected governor of New Hampshire. His successor wrote me a friendly letter, apologizing for the doubts and difficulties stirred up over the Meek-Jennings affair. The most troublesome case I had ever encountered was finally solved.

Mixed with the sense of triumph was a bitter aftertaste of exasperation, because it took so much work to demonstrate beyond doubt what was from the very beginning the most probable solution. There was the feeling of having come round in a gigantic circle, after infinite and exhausting labor, to the simple starting point. “Reality,” as Borges wrote, “has not the slightest obligation to be interesting….”

But the long suicide note
was
interesting. What did its absurd, theatrical tale really mean? I have my own theories about its nuances.

I believe Glyde Earl Meek murdered Page Jennings shortly after she left her brother’s apartment for the last time on January 11. I believe all the references to her joyous waiting, her deep meditations, her passive submission to strangulation, her loving acceptance of her death and cremation—all these are lies, made up by Meek to conceal the fact that he murdered a young girl and her parents because they dared to thwart him, stand in the path of his extravagant and all-encompassing dream of love and self-admiration. I believe he had every intention of murdering Chris Jennings too—the hatred for Chris fairly blazes from the suicide note, and the young man can count himself lucky he was not in his Gainesville apartment on January 18 when Meek came back from his homicidal errand in New Hampshire. I believe Meek entered the apartment bent on murder, using Page’s key, only to find it unoccupied. Chris had gone to his parents’ funeral in New Hampshire. That funeral saved his life.

What were Meek’s thoughts as he traveled south from New Hampshire? Short on sleep, guilty of two, probably three, murders, nearly out of his mind, he may have toyed with the idea of substituting Chris Jennings’s body for his own in the cabin. Meek had no idea how precise postmortem identifications of burned bones can be. He had already tried to hide the New Hampshire murders with a fire. Did he hope to cheat death and elude justice by placing Chris Jennings’s body next to his dead sister’s? “I would have taken all their lives anyway,” he wrote in the note found in the meadow.

Enraged, exhausted and baffled to find Chris Jennings out of reach, Meek gave up, decided to die, and recrafted his suicide note to include an element of mercy. Chris Jennings, unexpectedly out of harm’s way, would now be allowed to live after all, so that he could suffer endless pangs of remorse.

“You live with it all now, Bucko—Mai, Betty and us. Meddling fools,” Meek wrote in the note left in Jennings’s apartment. In the longer, more detailed note found in the Fiat he said:

Her brother won’t be harmed so that he can live with everything for the rest of his life. A pay back for rejecting her and writing that she was “insane” in his journal. Personally I would like to wait around and do him but she has made me promise not to give him the easy way out but to think about it every day. I have promised to go with her and so we shall
.

Then, a few lines later in the same note:

She is waiting now and I must do what I can’t believe I’m going to do but I must do for me and her
.

“Waiting” indeed! I believe Page Jennings was dead days before the fire in the cabin on January 18. Possibly her body was stored in the mini-warehouse during the hectic period between January 11 and January 18. The account of her strangulation rings true, but I believe it may very well have occurred long before her body was placed in the cabin to burn. I am still curious about the blood found on one of her Reebok sneakers. Where did it come from? When was it shed? Blood tests taken at the time revealed that the blood could have been Page Jennings’s; DNA testing, the kind of testing we can do today, would leave absolutely no doubt. And I could wish, if that Reebok shoe were still available, that a careful DNA analysis might be run on that old blood smear. I believe the results would bear out my hypothesis, that Page was murdered, completely against her will.

To this day I feel pity for the bright young high school javelin thrower whose early life had been filled with such promise. That she would become the murdered child of murdered parents, that she would be strangled, brained and combusted to a heap of burned bones amid the ruins of a squalid, deserted shack a thousand miles from her home was an outcome as horrific as it was undeserved.

The buckshot in Meek’s skull, as well as the lead traces on his lower jaw, make it clear that Meek used the shotgun on himself as the fire was kindled. If he used ropes to tie himself down, as he proclaimed in the suicide note, they were unnecessary. The shotgun blast killed him instantly.

Perhaps he hoped for some sort of fiery and final confusion, mingling his guilt with the innocence of the dead young woman beside him, his bones with hers. His final thoughts, as he pulled the trigger amid the licking flames, remain his alone. We possess only the leaden globules against the shattered and burned brainpan.

Chris Jennings left Gainesville, returned north and sold the inn his parents owned. He still sends me a Christmas card every year. It is a remembrance I appreciate.

12
Lost Legions

O stranger, go tell the Spartans
That here we lie, obedient to their orders
.

—Simonides, 92D,
Epitaph for the 300 Spartans
killed at Thermopylae

The question of American soldiers missing in action in Vietnam is an open, bleeding wound in American politics even today. No matter how many facts and reasonable arguments are sent into battle against it, no matter how many congressional and military delegations visit Hanoi, it seems this lingering ghost cannot be laid to rest. The picture of gaunt, starved, tortured men housed in bamboo cages in some trackless jungle has been reinforced in popular movies so often now, that the existence of these poor wraiths has become an article of faith for thousands of Americans. These soldiers were lost in a lost war, and this twice-lost state has created an empty, gaping, painful blank in America’s soul.

Even though by now the term “MIA” has been superseded by the more correct expression, “unaccounted for,” nevertheless this question has paralyzed American foreign policy toward Vietnam. It still prevents full normalization of relations nearly two decades after the cessation of hostilities. While only about 2200 men are still listed as unaccounted for from the Vietnam War, as opposed to 78,750 unaccounted for from World War II and 8,170 from the Korean War, it is the vanished soldiers of Vietnam who tug at our hearts and rob many of us of our reason today, long after the last guns have fallen silent.