Dead Men Do Tell Tales: The Strange and Fascinating Cases of a Forensic Anthropologist (34 page)

The missing hands, the lopped-off genitals and the cavities in the soft tissue were blamed on the assassins. They must have mutilated Pizarro’s dead body after they killed him. Corruption took hold in places where the skin had been pierced. Pizarro had been stabbed in the throat. From this wound, decay and maggots must have invaded the skull and stripped away its skin. The investigators concluded that, beyond the shadow of any doubt, these remains belonged to Pizarro. The mummy was blessed and then reverently reburied, with seals of authenticity attached to it by cotton cords and copper wires. The dusty innards were carefully collected and placed in a glass bottle, which was corked and deposited in the coffin. The remains of clothing surrounding the body were also carefully collected and wrapped up. Documents were prepared in triplicate, attesting that these were the true remains of the conquistador. A beautiful, ornate sarcophagus of glass, marble and bronze was constructed to hold the authenticated mummy. Over the years hundreds of thousands of people would pass by it, peer into it, and pay homage to it. On my first visit to Lima I saw people kneeling before it in silent prayer.

This state of affairs might have gone on indefinitely had not four workmen, who were cleaning the crypt beneath the altar one Friday in 1977, removed some bricks from a large, square, free-standing pilaster at the center of the crypt. In the exposed recess, they saw a flat, horizontal row of wooden planks. The workers said nothing to church officials of their find. Returning the next day, they removed more bricks and disclosed a second row of planks. Between these two planked floorings were two wooden boxes filled with human bones. Besides bones, one of the boxes held a lead casket on whose lid was an inscription, incised around the four edges: “
AQVí ESTÁ LA CABEÇA DEL SEÑOR MARQVéS DON FRANCISCO PIZARO
” it began, and the rest of the inscription was, word for word, identical with that seen and copied down by church officials in 1661.

This was an astonishing find. In the center of the lid of the lead box was a hexafoil pattern, a six-leafed design that some have taken as a veiled reference to the Star of David. Rumors had pursued Pizarro, in life and after death, that he came from a family of
conversos
, or forcibly converted Jews. This enigmatic six-leafed flower was a fascinating footnote to the discovery.

The workmen had hitherto kept silent about their discovery. One cannot help but suspect that if the casket had been made of silver it would have been stolen and melted down, and its contents lost forever. But when, after rubbing the metal, they found it was nothing more precious than lead, the men decided to inform church officials and get credit for the discovery. The authorities immediately called on Dr. Hugo Ludeña, a distinguished Peruvian historian, to investigate the matter. Ludeña in turn brought in other scholars: Dr. Pedro Weiss, an internationally known Peruvian physician and anthropologist who has a fascinating collection of Inca skulls; and two radiologists, Dr. Oscar Soto and his wife, Dr. Ladis Soto.

Ludeña, Weiss and the Sotos concurred in their opinion that the skull in the lead casket belonged to Pizarro, but their findings were hotly disputed by other Peruvian scholars, who insisted the mummy in the glass sarcophagus had to be genuine. Dr. Ludeña approached Dr. Robert Benfer, a colleague of mine who teaches anthropology at the University of Missouri and who has excavated many prehistoric Peruvian burials, asking him to look at the remains. Bob suggested that I collaborate because of my forensic experience. I made two trips to Lima in early 1984 to examine the bones and, on July 4, 1984, we also participated in the opening of the sarcophagus, the removal of the mummy and its examination in the cathedral library.

Of the two wooden boxes found in the hidden niche, the larger one, which we called Box A, contained the mixed remains of several skeletons: among them were the remains of at least two children, an elderly female, the skull and postcranial remains of an elderly male and the skull-less, postcranial skeleton of a second elderly male. There were also the rusty remnants of a sword. This box was lined with tatters of brown velvet and had an outline of a cross upon it. The cross itself was long gone, but the nails to attach it remained, and these were found to contain the rather rare metal, vanadium. They were probably made of melted-down sword steel.

The second wooden box, referred to as Box B, was painted light green and its interior was coated with a kind of red plaster. This, too, contained human bones, as well as the lead container with the inscription, inside which was found a human skull. This skull fitted nicely to the skull-less remains of the elderly male found in the other box. Its occipital condyles, the part of the skull’s base where it joins the neck, were perfectly congruent with the uppermost vertebrae of the skeleton in Box A. It appeared that the owner of this skull had lost a good many teeth before he died, including most of his upper molars and many of the incisors and molars of the lower jaw. This reunited skull and skeleton belonged to a white male at least sixty years old at the time of his death, who stood about sixty-five to sixty-nine inches tall in life, based on the length of his long bones.

(Because Pizarro was a foundling, his age at the time of his death is doubtful. He was variously said to be sixty-three or sixty-five years old by contemporary historians.)

When Bob and I examined the skull and other bones carefully, we began to see clear traces of terrible wounds. There were no fewer than four sword thrusts to the neck. In one, a double-edged weapon had entered the neck from the right side and nicked the first cervical vertebra. The direction of the sword thrust was clear: it would have pierced the right vertebral artery. This was a mortal blow. A second sword thrust, also from the right, was equally devastating: it had cut away portions of vertebrae and the blade had been pressed home with tremendous force. A third thrust to the neck nearly split open the spinal cord. A fourth passed through the right vertebral opening of another neckbone and would also have cut through the right vertebral artery.

As Bob and I followed the backbone down into the trunk, we saw other injuries. The sixth thoracic vertebra clearly showed the marks of a stab wound from a blade thrust downward into the body at an angle of fifteen degrees. A second thrust pierced the abdomen and nicked the twelfth thoracic vertebra. The ninth right rib was also nicked, but the rib cortex was crumbly and we were not able to determine whether this nick was due to a stab wound. The development of the spine in general, with characteristic pockmarks and herniations, showed that it belonged to a man who had lived a long, vigorous life.

There were also wounds in the arms and hands of the skeleton, the sort of injuries we call “defensive wounds,” which are suffered when someone tries to defend himself with his hands. The right humerus, or upper arm, had been cut cleanly and obliquely by an edged weapon. Probably a heavy sword, not a rapier, had been used here, in an attempt to disable the man whose skeleton lay before us. There were two deep nicks on the left first metacarpal bone of the hand, below the thumb. The right fifth metacarpal bone had been broken off altogether and was not in the box. It may have been broken off when Pizarro was disarmed.

The right lower armbone, or ulna, showed an old fracture that indicated the owner had broken his arm as a boy. Greenish stains were found on some of the heelbones, which agreed with the story that Pizarro had been buried with a single Moorish spur. The green was probably verdigris, from copper in the spur. From the relative size of the bumps on the bones where muscles had been attached, it was clear that the individual had been right-handed. Many of the joints showed “lipping,” which is associated with arthritis. We know Pizarro found it painful to ride a horse, preferring to walk instead. The size of the bones showed they belonged in life to a well-developed, robust man.

The lower jaw, or mandible, had fallen away from the skull as it usually does after death. On its lower margin, beneath the chin, were eleven finely incised marks, clearly made by sharp, double-edged weapons pointing in several directions. One of these marks lined up perfectly with one of the deeper stab wounds found in the neck, thus furnishing more proof that the skull in the leaden coffer truly belonged with the set of loose bones in the other box. These telltale nicks indicated that the deceased had either been stabbed repeatedly through the neck or, more probably, that one assailant had thrust his sword in, then sawed the blade back and forth against the jawbone, aiming upward into the neck and head and scratching the mandible in the process.

The skull, too, showed signs of trauma. There was a clean fracture or cut through the right zygomatic arch of the skull, a kind of slender bridge of bone that runs back from the cheekbone on both sides of our heads. This may have been caused by a sword thrust. Another thrust had passed through the left eye socket and left a clear nick in the bone where it exited from the left wall of the orbit. A rapier or dagger had passed into the brain through the neck, up into the right base of the skull, where it had been twisted and thrust in again. The sphenoid bone on the left side of the skull base showed signs of yet another pair of thrusts. Yet in spite of all these stabbings, the braincase was remarkably intact. The high nasal bridge showed clear evidence of an old fracture that had healed; the owner of the skeleton had broken his nose earlier in his violent life.

All in all, the skull and skeletal remains before me were unmistakably those of a man who had suffered a dreadful, violent death. His assailants had stabbed him over and over again, concentrating their homicidal fury on his head and neck. There were at least eleven stab wounds made by the points of weapons on the bones—possibly as many as fourteen. There were as many as fourteen separate cuts made by sharp edges on the bones and one possible blunt-force fracture of the hand. Interestingly, most of the wounds were on the right side of the body and neck. This is the side a right-handed swordsman would present to his opponents. The extraordinary trauma inflicted on the neck agreed very closely with accounts of Pizarro’s murder. The angle of some of the wounds suggested that they were inflicted as the victim lay on the floor. The defensive wounds to the hands and arm show that the victim vainly struggled to push away the plunging swords. His last sight on earth must have been terrible: flashing steel points, rising and falling and piercing his body, his head, his throat and his left eye. Death, when it came at last, must have been a merciful release.

It should also be noted that not every stab wound will leave a mark on the skeleton underneath. In one of my modern cases, the skin of a murdered man revealed twenty-four separate stab wounds, yet only eight of these left marks on his skeleton. It is very likely that Pizarro was stabbed many more times than his bones disclose.

The other bones found in Box A could not be identified with certainty. The two children may have been Pizarro’s sons, Juan and Gonzalo, who are said to have died at the ages of four and ten respectively. The dental remains of the older child’s skeleton placed his age at between eight and eleven years. The remains of the younger child showed him to be about two years old, both dentally and skeletally. We can only guess about the female remains. Perhaps they are those of Doña Inés Muñoz, the wife of the faithful Alcántara, who died fighting for his chief. Perhaps the remains of the second elderly male are those of Alcántara himself. We cannot tell.

The wounds and the inscription on the lead box containing the skull made it clear beyond any doubt that we were dealing with the remains of Pizarro. One question remained: who was the mummy in the glass coffin upstairs?

Bob and I were shown into the sumptuous cathedral library, with its beautifully paneled walls, its gorgeous old leather-bound volumes and its wealth of silver and gold crucifixes and religious paintings. Amid this splendor, on a table, lay the leathery old mummy, its skin greasy to the touch, and with a single dried eyeball lying deep within one shadowy socket of its fleshless face. Its head had been separated from its body in 1891 and wired back on.

We photographed and measured the mummy carefully. Despite the absence of genitals, we were able to determine easily that it was a male of advanced years, who had been 165.5 cm (about five feet, five inches) tall in life. The skeletal morphology was rather effeminate or “gracile,” as we call it: the man had been something of a physical weakling in life. The skin of the legs bore the marks of high stockings which had long since disappeared, and the marks of some cord used long ago to bind the legs together. The pattern of the velvet sarcophagus liner was etched into the skin of the back.

Every remaining bit of skin on the mummy was minutely examined for evidence of wounds. There were none. The exposed bones were examined carefully with various magnifying devices. We found absolutely no evidence of unhealed fractures, chips, scratches or incised marks. The bone was in excellent condition and any damage caused by trauma would have been clearly evident. None could be seen.

The conclusion was inescapable: we were dealing with an impostor. The man who lay before us was no soldier. He had lived a quiet life and had died a quiet death. Most likely he was a churchman, a scholar or a petty functionary of the government whose remains had somehow got confounded with Pizarro’s in the earthquake-ridden centuries after the conquistador’s death. It is certainly amusing that the 1891 investigators thought his skull was that of a criminal! So much for the “fossa of Lombroso” and all such quackeries!

A careful cast was made of Pizarro’s skull by Robert Levy of the Florida Museum of Natural History, and from it Betty Pat Gatliff of SKULLpture Inc., an Oklahoma firm specializing in such reconstructions, was able to build up a clay bust of Francisco Pizarro as he looked in life: a heavy-set man with a broad, peasant’s face. This bust was presented to the museum of the Convent of La Coria in Pizarro’s native city, Trujillo, Spain, along with a cast of the skull from the lead casket in Lima.