Dead Men Do Tell Tales: The Strange and Fascinating Cases of a Forensic Anthropologist (36 page)

So, after reassembling all our broken travel arrangements, we left for Louisville on Saturday morning. We arrived Sunday afternoon at the hotel, a Ramada Inn located right beside the Zachary Taylor National Cemetery. As we pulled into the parking lot we were horrified to see a host of satellite dishes, mounted on large vehicles, surrounding the hotel. When I checked into the hotel I learned to my chagrin that I had telephone messages waiting for me from the “Today” show, “Good Morning America,” CNN and various other news organizations. Rising met us at the hotel and told us the VA desired a meeting with us right away.

The VA was worried about publicity and I didn’t blame them: the whole Taylor exhumation was fast becoming a media circus. The VA was no longer opposed to exhuming Taylor, but it was adamantly opposed to taking pictures of the remains. “No photos,” the two representatives told us firmly.

I explained that as forensic scientists we were obligated to document what we did and that we couldn’t proceed without photographs.

The VA official said: “How do we know these photographs won’t show up in the
National Enquirer?”

“Easy,” I answered him. “Show me one photograph I’ve ever taken that has appeared in any newspaper or magazine or publication such as the
National Enquirer.”
I explained that the photos would be used in scientific books, publications and scientific articles. This appeared to satisfy him.

That Sunday evening was one of the most interesting and atmospheric of my life. We went to a reception and dinner at Zachary Taylor’s old home, which is located not far behind the cemetery. It is a splendid old dwelling and its owners are devoted to the President’s memory. They have delved into every aspect of his life with extraordinary zeal. Other members of the Taylor family were there, including the President’s two great-great-great-great-granddaughters, a beautiful and vivacious pair of young women who charmed everyone with their lively, sparkling manner. I was amazed to hear that, had the VA forbidden us access, the Taylor family had made arrange merits with neighbors whose property abutted the rear of the cemetery, to climb over the wall and enter the mausoleum directly from behind! I was silently relieved matters had not gone so far.

Dinner was served in a gorgeous dining room overhung by magnificent chandeliers. Portraits of Zachary Taylor hung everywhere, and the elegant meal was concluded by a dessert of pecan pie that was said to be an old family recipe, a favorite of the President’s. Margaret’s health was toasted—it was her birthday—and we both learned wonderful bits of Taylor family lore and heard many fascinating anecdotes about “Old Rough and Ready” from the lips of those to whom he was no remote textbook figure, but a beloved and well-remembered ancestor. Seldom has history come so agreeably to life as it did for me that evening.

Yet at the back of everyone’s mind was the dark and fascinating prospect of the next day. We were about to resurrect a dead man, yet the mood was lively, convivial, even festive. There was an indefinable air of keen anticipation: tomorrow morning the President whose likeness hung upon the walls of this dining room, Zachary Taylor himself, would reenter the world of the living. He would step back onto the stage of American history he had suddenly vacated a hundred and forty-one years earlier.

The next morning, whatever hopes we had that the investigation in the cemetery would be conducted quietly and decorously were dashed. When we arrived at the entrance to the cemetery at 9
A.M.
we found the fire department at the front gate, directing traffic. Police were everywhere. The main avenue of the cemetery was lined with hundreds of people. Media camera units were positioned in cherry-picker cranes overhead. We were let through a police barrier and parked on the curved drive just in front of the Taylor tomb. Watched by thousands of inquisitive eyes, we unloaded our equipment and proceeded to document the area.

The local funeral director had secured services of some volunteers from a memorial vault company to assist in the delicate task of moving the massive slab of Tennessee marble that sealed the vault containing the coffins of President and Mrs. Taylor. This enormous vault was inside the tomb, with only a couple of feet of clearance on three sides.

When the slab was lifted, a badly rotted wooden casket was seen to be lying within the vault. Inside this casket was a lead liner, all the seams of which had been soldered shut. Under closer examination, we saw a rectangular soldered plate near the head of the liner. Beneath this plate was a cracked glass window. The apparent purpose of this glass window was to allow the dead President to be viewed while lying in state in his coffin at the White House.

We had not expected to find this sealed box of lead and had no tools with which to open it. In any case the mausoleum was so small that there was no room to work or maneuver, and the milling crowds outside were oppressive. We decided to take the lead liner and the enclosed remains to the office of the state medical examiner and to open it there.

Now we were alone at last, and now the true investigation could begin. At the office of the medical examiner, we changed to scrub suits and discussed how the lead liner could best be opened. It looked solid, but we now saw it was pocked with several perforations. Historical records said Taylor had not been embalmed—his wife had forbidden it. Instead, his body had been packed in ice for the lying in state. As his body decomposed within the lead box, the resultant butyric acids had eaten through the metal in several places. So these holes were an important piece of evidence. Because they showed Taylor had not been embalmed, and because arsenic was part of the nineteenth-century embalming process, we could be sure the remains had not been contaminated by an undertaker.

But how to open the box? Initially it was decided to use a small blowtorch. A worker from the maintenance department of the county coroner’s office was summoned to the room and, using a small torch attached to a miniature propane tank, he began carefully to melt the solder joints of the casket. Suddenly I had a horrifying thought. Peering through the opened portion of the seam, I could see that the box was lined with cloth! If this cloth liner should catch fire from the flame of the blowtorch, our proposed examination of Zachary Taylor might end with his unexpected cremation! The blowtorch was extinguished instantly and sent back to the basement.

We considered awhile and then fell back on a trusty Stryker saw, the oscillating bladed tool that is used to cut bone in autopsies. This saw went through the lead liner like cheese, and the top popped off as neatly as if we had used a can opener.

The lid was moved out of the way and all of us peered down into the depths of the container. There lay all that remained of President Zachary Taylor.

The former President had been totally skeletonized. Abundant hair could be seen adhering to the skull. The deceased President’s bushy eyebrows were still visible, clinging to the supraorbital ridges above his skull’s eye sockets. The hair was dark, flecked with gray. For the rest, he presented an austere picture of simple mortality: a skeleton, clad in his funeral attire, his skull pillowed on a bunch of straw stuffed beneath the casket liner. He had one missing tooth and one collapsed crown, but otherwise his teeth were still magnificent. Taylor must have had a brilliant, winning smile in life.

The deceased President was dressed in an unusual one-piece suit that consisted of a pleated shirtlike top with buttoned sleeves, and plain trousers below. I suppose it was the nineteenth-century equivalent of a jumpsuit, all of one piece and probably chosen for convenience’s sake. He wore no shoes or stockings, but his bony hands were sheathed in fine cloth gloves. Under his fallen lower jaw there was a very large cloth bow tie knotted butterfly fashion around his neck, a beautiful and curiously soft-looking thing, almost the sort of adornment a girl might wear.

All of the clothing and gloves must have been white originally, but now they were yellowed with age and stained by the decomposition process to a tobacco-like brown. As I have already mentioned, the lead liner itself had a cloth lining which was a faint beige color, falling down in several places. The darkness of the hair may have been due to decomposition. Apart from a few lumps of adipocere, a waxy substance that forms when body fats combine with moisture, the remains were entirely skeletal.

Then we went to work. Photographs were taken. A forensic dentist examined the teeth. With a pair of scissors I carefully cut the back of the gloves down each finger and removed all ten fingernails. I gently collected sufficient samples of hair from the President’s head and his body. In the area of the feet I found several fallen toenails, including both of the nails from the great toes. We also sampled a small portion of bone from the breastbone or sternum, took a small piece of the adipocere and collected samples of the textiles from under the body that had soaked up fluids from the decomposing remains. If arsenic had been used to kill Taylor, arsenic would be present in all these things.

All the samples were placed in envelopes. Everything was divided—fingernails, hair, adipocere, bone, fabrics—so that we had two identical sets of samples. One set of specimens went to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory for analysis and the other to the Kentucky laboratory that routinely performs toxicology work for the state medical examiner.

By now it was around 4
P.M
. The examination was nearly complete. The coroner’s office was telephoning around Louisville to find a specialist in soldering lead. At length a man who worked with lead roofs was located and agreed to come to the office and solder the lead box shut again.

Before he arrived, Taylor’s two great-great-great-great-granddaughters asked to see their ancestor. This was a delicate situation. I have already described the skeletal state of the remains. Gently we described the contents of the lead box to them, and asked again: were they quite sure they wanted to look? They insisted they did, they assured us they could stand the sight. So at length the two young women were allowed to come into the room and peer into the casket containing their renowned forebear. They were enthralled, not in the least upset. I still have a photograph of them in the room, gesturing with animation and smiling excitedly.

Clare Rising, who had devoted so much time to explicating the Taylor riddle, was also permitted to come in and have a brief glimpse of the deceased President. She approached the casket with considerable hesitation and no little awe. I fixed my eyes on her and I could sense that, at that moment, she wasn’t looking at a mere mass of dead bones. She was gazing on the legendary figure of history: Zachary Taylor.

The container was closed, returned to the cemetery with an American flag draped around it. It was replaced in the vault and the heavy marble lid was replaced. This time the marble was sealed with epoxy that would guarantee the Taylors’ privacy and repose. After this, we all went home to await the results of the laboratory analysis.

Shortly after I returned to Gainesville, the results were released by Dr. Nichols’s office. They were clear and unequivocal. The amounts of arsenic found in all samples were consistent throughout. They showed that President Taylor had in his remains only the levels of arsenic consistent with any person who lived in the nineteenth century. The levels were in every case minuscule. They could never have produced death, or even illness.

Arsenic is a remarkable and powerful poison that can kill quickly or slowly, depending on the dosage. A sudden, massive dose of arsenic could kill within hours and, if this occurs, no trace of the poison will be deposited in the hair or nails or bones of the deceased. But if the victim lives for twenty-eight to thirty hours after ingesting the arsenic, minute traces of the poison will be deposited in the hair and bones. As we all know, Zachary Taylor lived for five days after the onset of his symptoms. There was ample time for arsenic to be deposited in his system, if he had been poisoned. Our investigation demonstrated, once and for all, that he hadn’t.

It is remotely possible that another poison might have been used to kill Taylor, but only arsenic would have produced the symptoms he showed before dying, and arsenic was by now conclusively out of the question. The verdict of history must be that Zachary Taylor died of natural causes. Indeed, he may have been unwittingly killed by his doctors.

In those days, cathartics and laxatives were prescribed for diarrhea, and fluids were often deliberately withheld, on the advice of doctors. A strong case might be made that the President had a fairly routine case of intestinal infection. Perhaps the vegetables and cherries he devoured had not been washed, or had been washed in contaminated water. The heat of July would have afforded a fertile breeding ground for
E. coli
germs and these, massed in millions in his gut, may have formed an army the old general could not defeat.

One minor note: we also found in the coffin several pupa cases of flies that were attracted to the dead President in that hot summer so long ago. These bold insects had paid a price for their temerity: their offspring had been buried alive with the illustrious man their parents had presumed to light upon.

The aftermath was all very anticlimactic. I learned, if I did not already know, how fickle was the fancy of the American media. Zachary Taylor the Murder Victim was news. Zachary Taylor the President who died a natural death was history, and ancient history at that. The satellite dishes were stowed, the camera lenses were capped, the generators were unplugged, the notebooks snapped shut. No more did the networks jangle my phone, wooing me with their blandishments. “Old Rough and Ready” resumed his interrupted sleep, and I returned to my modern murders unmolested. Like hoarfrost at noon, the media simply evanesced.

Clare Rising finished her book on Zachary Taylor, but as far as I know it remains unpublished, despite her past literary success. She clung to her poisoning theory and did extensive additional research in the medical literature, trying to explain why, even though Taylor might have been poisoned, no poison would show up in a chemical analysis. But to my mind the death of President Taylor has been settled now, and Clare Rising is entitled to some of the credit whether she agrees or not. Without her extraordinary efforts, the mystery might have lingered indefinitely. Now it is resolved.