Dead Men Do Tell Tales: The Strange and Fascinating Cases of a Forensic Anthropologist (4 page)

And so began an uncomfortable convalescence. Despite the erythromycin I’d administered back at the camp,
E. coli
bacteria spread and proliferated in the wound. The swollen arm stank so much it seemed to belong not to me but to a corpse. I slept with the limb outstretched, trying to get as far from it as I could. For a while the arm looked as if it might have to be amputated. But with time, and many soakings in Epsom salts, the swelling gradually abated and the wound was purged clean. It was a near-run thing.

Far from being soured on Kenya because of my wound, I became fonder of it than ever, as if the country had entered my heart through a hole in my arm. Phrases and fragments of Swahili recur to my mind at odd moments and, even though they are tattered now with the passage of time, the bits I remember still have a beautiful, vital ring in my ears. I remember how a can opener was called a
tinikata
, a wagon a
gari
, and a train a “smoke wagon,” a
gari la moshi
. I still use some Swahili phrases today because they are wonderfully descriptive. A barbarian, an uncivilized person, is a
shenzi
. An utter fiasco is a
shauri
. One of the medical examiners in Florida also lived in Kenya for a time and it is a great pleasure to greet him with a hearty
“Jambo, bwana
[Good day, sir]!”—and to hear the same in return.

Isaac Newton once complimented his forerunners in science, whose research enabled him to formulate the first laws of physics. “If I have seen further,” Newton said, “it is because I have stood upon the shoulders of giants.” In my case, it has been the shoulders of baboons, but I am nonetheless grateful.

2
Talkative Skulls

People begin to see that something more goes to the composition of a fine murder than two blockheads to kill and be killed—a knife—a purse—and a dark lane. Design, gentlemen, grouping, light and shade, poetry, sentiment, are now deemed indispensable to attempts of this nature
.

—Thomas De Quincey,
On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts

One of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s most amusing short stories, “Crabbe’s Practice,” deals with the desperate attempts of a young doctor to set himself up in the world and acquire patients. Hoping to burnish his academic reputation, he publishes a deep and erudite paper in a medical journal, with the bizarre title, “Curious Development of a Discopherous Bone in the Stomach of a Duck.” Later he confesses to a friend that the paper was a fraud. While dining on roast duck, the young doctor discovered that the fowl had swallowed an ivory domino, and he had turned the experience into a research paper. “Discopherous” is just a Greek term for “circle-bearing,” and refers to the circular dots on a domino.

Conan Doyle was a doctor himself and knew whereof he spoke. Anyone who works in science knows the dull desperation and sharp anxiety of the early days in one’s career. Few of us do not look back on those pinched, scraping times without a secret shudder, followed by a pang of relief that they are past. The miserable pay and financial woes; the long nights of study and the battles against sleep; the frightful hurdles of examinations; the climactic defense of one’s doctoral dissertation; the hissing, malignant envy that is the curse of university life at all times and in all places; the constant struggle to get published, to win tenure, to carve out a niche and be recognized in one’s field—all these torments are well known in Academe, and have been known to drive some people mad, even to suicide. Some people. Not me.

My early experiences riding shotgun in the funeral parlor’s ambulance in Texas had shown me a side of life no book could teach. These dreadful sights gave me a certain balance, along with reserves of strength that I could call on in the ordinary trials of life at the university. When you have seen bodies burned to cinders in fires, or pummeled to jelly under a truckload of bricks, or reduced to empty skins whose bones have been squeezed from them by the terrific force of plane crashes, then the bumps and bogies of academic life hold few terrors for you. “It could be worse,” you tell yourself; and when worse is the thing you saw lying dead in a highway culvert scarcely twelve hours earlier, you know you are telling the truth.

The first time I was asked for my considered opinion about a skull came when I was still in graduate school, still working under Tom McKern in his laboratory. It was a watershed moment for me, because for the first time McKern was treating me—I will not say as an equal, but very nearly as a colleague whose independent opinion he valued.

On that morning when I came into the laboratory McKern presented me with a cranium, a skull without the lower jaw. It had been found in Lake Travis near Austin with a fishing line tied around the zygomatic arch, the cheekbone. The other end of the fishing line was tied to a large rock.

As I handled the still damp cranium, my attention was drawn to the palate. More than anything else, the shape of that palate struck me. It stood out, to my eyes, in a very unusual way. Looking at it, I was racked by doubts. I felt very insecure because obviously McKern was going to judge me on my response. More than that, I was insecure because I was about to give him an answer I felt was intrinsically improbable. At last I summoned up my courage and spoke:

“I think it’s Mongoloid, probably Japanese,” I said. McKern looked at me for a long moment. Then at last he said: “That’s what I think too.”

Whatever pride I felt was immediately dampened by McKern, who went on to point out all the other things I had missed. With the sure touch of a true master of forensic anthropology, he demonstrated one detail after another, details which I had seen but had not observed. At such times McKern was truly dazzling and I shall never forget those lucid, decisive moments in which he practically made that old skull speak.

I had
not
observed that some of the teeth had been glued into their sockets. I had
not
observed the scorching on the outer cranial vault. I had
not
observed the very simple fact that the skull had been attached to a fishing line tightly tied to its zygomatic arch, which meant that it was dry, unfleshed bone to start with, when it was plunged into the lake.

After McKern had pointed out all these things, the answer became clear. The skull before us was almost certainly a World War II trophy skull that some serviceman brought back from the Pacific Theater. The scorching had occurred during battle, perhaps by the action of flamethrowers or as the result of a fiery plane crash. The teeth had fallen out as the skull dried out and had been glued back in. Finally, either the serviceman himself had sickened of his gruesome relic, or he had died and his heirs wanted to get rid of the thing. But how to dispose of it? If they put it in the garbage it might be found. Burning it was too much trouble. Burying it would be bothersome and might leave traces. Best to throw it in the lake! Tie a rock to it for good measure! And so the skull went overboard, bubbling down into the depths of Lake Travis, only to be found again by the purest chance.

I am certain that, somewhere in Japan today, there is a family wondering what became of an uncle, a father, a long-lost relative who marched off to war more than half a century ago. They will never know. And the Japanese man whose skull this was, how could he have dreamed that, after great and fiery battles in the middle of the vast Pacific, the bony vessel enclosing his dreaming brain was destined to end up tied to a rock and drowned in a cool American lake, then fished up onto a bright laboratory table at the University of Texas?

The television show “Quincy” has caused me no end of vexation and amusement. When people learn that I am a forensic anthropologist, the first thing they usually say is: “Oh, like Quincy?” Quincy was a medical examiner whose whole career was one long string of dramatic successes. Born under a lucky star, Quincy solved his cases within hours or days. If Quincy had a problem, he telephoned his brilliant assistant, Sam, back at the lab, and Sam had the answer for him in seconds. Sam! How I envied Quincy his faithful and unerring Sam! Any one of us could shine like the morning star if we only had a Sam working for us. In one episode Quincy and Sam actually determined the hair color of a skeleton by examining its femur—a complete scientific impossibility. A bunch of us forensic anthropologists later cornered the technical advisor of this episode at the annual convention of the American Academy of Forensic Scientists. Up against the wall, needled and jabbed by our merciless questions over this hair-color episode, he finally admitted that he had taken “dramatic license” to “move the plot forward.”

I am not Quincy. The difference between forensic pathologists and forensic anthropologists is quite simple. Pathologists have medical degrees. They are doctors who have received residency training in pathology. If they are fortunate, they also have some training in courtroom procedures. All the medical examiners in the state of Florida are forensic pathologists with medical degrees. In some states they may also serve as county coroners, legally determining the cause of death. But in others, the coroner may have no medical background at all; he may simply be a local person with a reputation for shrewdness and honesty. I have known coroners who were filling station owners, or funeral parlor directors, or even furniture salesmen. Why furniture salesmen? Because in the old days these merchants stocked coffins in their shops.

A forensic anthropologist is not a medical doctor, though he has a Ph.D. and has studied anthropology in college. We specialize in the human skeletal system, its changes through life, its changes across many lifetimes, and its variations around the world. We are part of the larger field of physical anthropology, or biological anthropology as it is known today, which is concerned overall with the human body and all its variations. My specialty, physical anthropology, is distinct from other fields, such as cultural anthropology and archaeology. The cultural anthropologists are the ones who go out and study the exotic tribes, the
“fluttered folk and wild,”
as the poet Rudyard Kipling called them. The archaeologists look for tools and other evidence of ancient and recent man in the folds and hollows of Asia, Africa and Europe.

My field of expertise is the human skeleton. Though some pathologists insist on doing their own skeletal examinations along with autopsies, I can confidently say that there are very few cases in which a forensic anthropologist—someone like me—could not add a great deal of useful information to what a pathologist can discover. I have had pathologists exclaim frankly in my hearing, when confronted with a skeleton: “Gee, I’m not used to looking at these without the meat on them!”

But long and lean were the years from the time I entered graduate school, in 1959, to the time I got my first case, in 1972. There was a spot of work from time to time in McKern’s lab. There were occasional formal examinations of skeletons in Africa. But apart from these cases, the annals of my professional life in this period are rather parched and poor.

When I open my filing cabinets the gaunt memories of those starveling years come back to me vividly. In 1972 I had but a single case. In 1973 hope blazed up like a bonfire: a scatter of buried bodies was found less than a quarter of a mile away from where I live in Gainesville. These remains turned up when new utility lines were being laid, and for a while it was feared that we were dealing with the grisly spoils left by a serial killer. The former owner of the house in whose backyard these bodies came to light was an attorney who had committed suicide years earlier. All sorts of wild theories were floating about.

The police asked me and three university archaeologists to investigate. We all piled into a van and drove to the site. Within a few hours we had turned up casket hardware, nails, screws, etc., that indicated we were dealing with nothing more sinister than an early twentieth-century graveyard. The whole thing was a fiasco, a false alarm.

In 1974, I had two cases. In 1975, two more cases; in 1976, two cases; in 1977, three cases; in 1978—twelve cases! And from then on things began to snowball.

When the Florida Museum of Natural History was endowed by the state legislature in 1917 as the Florida State Museum, one of its functions, as spelled out in the original wording of the law, was that the museum would provide assistance to the state in “identifying specimens.” I doubt the original framers of the law imagined that among those “specimens” would be human remains, still less that those remains would be the ghastly leavings of murderers and maniacs. But over the years I have tried to do my part to repay the generosity and vision of those state legislators of long ago. My first opportunity to do so—my first case—came in April 1972, when a Washington County sheriff’s deputy brought me a peat-encrusted skeleton that had been found in the woods and asked me to analyze it.

The skeleton had been found in a swamp near Chipley. There was no name, no identifying information accompanying it at all. I took the skeleton down to the steam tables at the end of my labora tory in the basement of the anthropology department and started cleaning away the vegetable matter. Meanwhile a class nearby broke for coffee and the professor brought his pupils over to see what I was doing. This professor was a bit of a twit. He said to the students, very jocularly: “You see, science has its uses in the real world.” I was irritated at his condescension but concealed it. I invited the students to have a look at the skeleton. They crowded over.

“Here are his socks,” I said. “And you can see the feet are still in the socks.”

At that point the twit vanished from the scene and so did most of his fainthearted students. I learned the power of cold reality, how it acts like a fly whisk to chase idle minds away; and I admired those students who stayed behind.

You always have a fondness for your first cases, and I found this skeleton very interesting. Under analysis, it turned out to be that of a toothless elderly man with a lot of union or fusion of bones in his back, due to old age. The really fascinating thing was that he had a large opening where one ear would have been on the skull. It was all hollowed out and eaten away. Obviously he had been deaf in that ear. But there was more: a penetration from this area up through the thin bones above, which meant that this perforation went into the cranial vault, the brain case. Finally, along the inner surface of that brain case you could see pitting, where an infection had eroded the bone during life.