Dead Men Do Tell Tales: The Strange and Fascinating Cases of a Forensic Anthropologist (41 page)

In the case of the Romanovs, we can easily go back to Queen Victoria, who has been described as the grandmother of Europe’s royal families. Queen Victoria, like any mother, passed her mitochondrial DNA on to her offspring. And one of her daughters passed that same mitochondrial DNA on to her offspring, one of whom was Alexandra, the wife of Tsar Nicholas II. And Alexandra passed her mitochondrial DNA on to all her children. Similarly Alexandra’s sister, Princess Victoria of Hesse, passed it on to her children, one of whom was the mother of Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, and his sisters. Therefore the mitochondrial DNA found in the blood of Prince Philip would be identical to that of Queen Victoria and the Tsarina Alexandra. It only remained to carry out the necessary tests.

These were performed in July 1993 near London. Prince Philip submitted a sample of his blood and its DNA was extracted. At the same time, Pavel Ivanov, head of the DNA unit at the Russian Academy of Sciences, brought a sample of the Romanov bones to Great Britain. There, using a technique called PCR or polymerase chain reaction, a small sample of DNA was extracted from the bones and grown in a culture.

There are only four nucleotides that make up all mitochondrial DNA: cytosine, adenine, thymine and guanine, known as CATG for short. In mitochondrial DNA there are 16,569 base pairs of nucleotides, arranged in a ring. A computer printout of a DNA sequence looks like a diabolically complex code, based on just four letters in neat columns, repeated again and again in slightly varying order for page after page. Luckily we do not have to scrutinize all 16,569 pairs. We can focus on certain “hyper-variable regions,” made up of a total of just 608 base pairs. Computers are of great help in matching up the hyper-variable regions. When the results for the hyper-variable regions in two DNA samples match up at these crucial checkpoints, you can be virtually certain they are the same.

This is what happened when Prince Philip’s blood DNA was matched up with the Romanovs’ bone DNA. Dr. Peter Gill of the Forensic Science Service of the Home Office said the probability that both samples contained the same DNA was “almost 99 percent.” Taken in conjunction with the compelling physical skeletal evidence, the results are clear and unequivocal. Short of the Last Judgment, when the dead shall rise up and be cloaked anew with flesh, and all our doubts are scheduled to be resolved in the twinkling of an eye, we may say that the mystery of the Romanovs is solved as nearly as it is likely to be. Nevertheless we recommended in our report that the site around the pit be carefully excavated and searched for the remains of the two bodies Yurovsky said he burned. I believe such a dig might well turn up the calcined remains of Anastasia and Alexei.

“Anna Anderson” went to her grave in 1984, claiming she was Anastasia. Her body was cremated and this removed the last possibility of establishing the truth or falsity of her royal pretensions. Cremation destroys utterly all organic components of bone. No known technique can recover any DNA from cremated remains. There are supposed to be hair samples taken from Anna Anderson but these are cut hair, not rooted hair. The shafts of human hair are largely composed of dead material, devoid of significant amounts of DNA. Only hair plucked by the roots from the scalp can be tested for DNA with any real hope of success. There are some tissue samples from Anna Anderson’s body, in a hospital where she underwent surgery in life. To date, legal difficulties have prevented testing these samples for their DNA.

A commission in Russia will hear our team’s conclusions, and I believe the British DNA work to be the final word in resolving this old mystery. It is my understanding that the Romanov remains will be interred in St. Petersburg, which was once, briefly, known as Leningrad.

But there is one last footnote to this long, remarkable history. There is a very good possibility that the bones of the Tsar will be buried without their proper breastbone or arms! My examination of the remains convinced me that the arms and the bayonet-stabbed breastbone of Body No. 9, which has been identified as belonging to Trupp, the footman, are really those of Body No. 4, the Tsar. Body 4 was flung on top of Body 9 in the burial pit, and over the years the bones commingled closely with one another. The Russians labored valiantly to separate them, but I believe the arms and breastbone have been mixed up. I mentioned this to the Russians, and they appeared to accept my conclusion. Some of the other skeletons showed signs of mismatching and commingling as well. Unfortunately no one seems to have the authority to take the skeletons apart again and transpose the arms and breastbones to their proper owners.

It therefore seems likely that, when the last Tsar is finally entombed in St. Petersburg, he will be served in death, as he was in life, by the arms of his faithful footman.

16
“These Rough Notes and Our Dead Bodies …”

“Empty vessel, garment cast
,
We that wore you long shall last.
—
Another night, another day
.”
So my bones within me say
.

Therefore they shall do my will
Today while I am master still
,
And flesh and soul, now both are strong
,
Shall hale the sullen slaves along
,

Before this fire of sense decay
,
This smoke of thought blow clean away
,
And leave with ancient night alone
The stedfast and enduring bone
.

—A. E. Housman,
The Immortal Part

As I write these lines, it is a windy, bright spring day in early March in Gainesville. The live oaks have cast their leaves, and the dogwoods and azaleas are beginning to bloom. Eager young students are bicycling across campus, browsing in Goering’s bookstore, studying their textbooks on sunlit lawns near dormitories.

But I am not thinking of them. I am thinking of ghosts.

I am recalling five young students, four from the University of Florida, one from nearby Santa Fe Community College, who were tortured, mutilated and murdered with demonic cruelty in August 1990. In all, the five victims suffered sixty-one stab wounds, cuts or other disfigurements. One was beheaded, and her head was placed at eye level on a bookshelf near the door of her apartment. Four of the victims were female: Sonja Larson, eighteen, of Deerfield Beach; Christi Powell, seventeen, of Jacksonville; Christa Hoyt, eighteen, of Gainesville; and Tracy Paules, twenty-three, of Miami. One was male: Manny Taboada, twenty-three, of Miami. The horror these murders aroused at the time was so keen that thousands of students literally fled Gainesville, in fear of their lives.

Today, in early March, immured in a lamplit courtroom within the Alachua County Courthouse, a jury has finished staring at pictures of these five young people, taken after their bodies were discovered. Black tape was placed over parts of the pictures considered so grisly they would have been prejudicial to the jury’s reaching an impartial verdict. I can well understand these selective blackouts. In my long career I have seldom seen crime-scene photographs possessed of such sheer depravity.

In the same room with the jury, as they pondered these ghastly photographs, was the author of these terrors: the self-confessed murderer himself, Danny Harold Rolling, a drifter from Shreveport, Louisiana. Rolling claimed he was driven to kill because of abuse suffered as a child—it is a common excuse nowadays. He was arrested almost immediately on another charge after the quintuple murders (which were all committed within forty-eight hours), and only became a suspect in this case two months later, on November 2, 1990. As the prosecutor waved the horrible photographs before the jury, Rolling turned pale and appeared ill. “I’ve got to get out of here,” he whispered at one point.

The jury was tasked with deciding his punishment: life in prison or death in the electric chair. It deliberated through one afternoon, into the evening, and reconvened the next morning, before reaching a verdict. The jury recommended death for Danny Rolling.

I remember how, in the years following his arrest, Rolling toyed with the investigators from prison, admitting nothing. He thought he had been too clever for the police. He thought he had removed all traces of his guilt from the crime scenes. He gathered up all but one piece of the duct tape he used to bind his victims. He washed two of their bodies with detergent after they were dead. He posed the bodies of the slaughtered young women in various lewd positions. Unfortunately for him, he left traces of his semen at the scene, and this identified him by means of DNA “fingerprinting.”

Because of my background with weapons and wounds to bone, I was asked to be present at the autopsies, which were conducted by Dr. William Hamilton, the District 8 medical examiner. Hamilton is a quiet man of supreme competence. Unlike some of his brethren, he rigorously shuns the media limelight and works in silence. We have known each other for years, but from the first Hamilton struck me as remarkable and rare: a man who prefers to seek out the truth and to serve the people of his state with deeds of value, rather than chase the will-o’-the-wisp of fame. It is largely because of Hamilton’s meticulous work that a close-meshed net of scientific evidence was drawn about Rolling. My own role in this case was minor. But I like to think that, wherever Rolling goes, I gave him one small nudge toward punishment and perdition.

My work centered around the murder weapon, and I was assisted by one of my best students, Dana Austin-Smith. Bones can reveal more about a murder weapon than skin and soft tissue, because they are not as elastic. Skin can stretch, distort, relax and finally deliquesce during decomposition. Bones, though more elastic than you might suppose, nevertheless can take and hold an impression from a murder weapon far longer, and far more accurately. By now I need not tell you that the pattern of the human skeleton is as familiar to me as the rooms of my house.

A large knife had been used in the murders. Its hilt left an imprint on one victim’s back, and the point exited her chest on the opposite side, a distance of eight inches, during which the knife was fully sheathed, its entire length buried in the unfortunate girl’s body. But allowing for compression of the rib cage from the force and fury of the blow, the blade length might have been somewhat shorter: say seven to eight inches, to be safe.

After preparing specimens of the damaged bones, I began to examine the knife marks under a low-power stereo-microscope. I found sharp cuts from the blade, marks both sharp and dull from the back of the blade, a point mark from the knife sunk in the body of a vertebra, and an array of bone wounds that gave me the width of the blade itself, from its cutting edge to its back.

I summarized the characteristics. Length: 7–8 inches. Width: 1.25–1.5 inches. A sharp, smooth, nonserrated cutting edge. A false edge resulting from the back of the blade being sharpened behind the tip. A certain shape of hilt where the blade joined the handle. A blade whose cross-section resembled an elongated pentagon. All in all, I concluded, this was a sturdy knife, like a military weapon. It was not a thin blade like a kitchen knife. This formidable weapon had cut through thick bone without any evidence of “blade chattering,” a technical term describing the distinctive cutting pattern, which a thin blade makes when it jumps slightly from side to side during use.

On the afternoon of September 7, 1990, I was at the state attorney’s office in Orlando on another case. I received a telephone call, asking me to join Dr. Hamilton and the leaders of the Gainesville Homicide Task Force for a meeting. It was a fast, hundred-mile drive for me, but I arrived around 4
P.M
.

We were asked about the murder weapon. Could it have been an Air Force survival knife? I said no. That knife has a sawlike, ripping design on the back of the blade, which is only five inches long—far too short to match the weapon used in these murders. Then someone asked if it might be a Marine Corps utility knife, known as a Ka-Bar. I replied that it very well might.

After the meeting I pondered the question further. I knew the general shape of the Ka-Bar but wanted to be absolutely sure. That weekend I visited a knife shop in a nearby mall, where Ka-Bars were sold. I carefully examined one, measuring it with the one-meter tape measure I always carry with me. It fit exactly the dimensions of the wounds! The clerk regarded me with some curiosity. Why, he asked finally, was I making so many measurements? I made a vague reply, but as Margaret and I were walking back to the car, I told her what I thought. The weapon used in these ghastly murders had almost certainly been a Ka-Bar.

As I have said earlier, Rolling was in custody on an unrelated charge at this point. He had not yet been focused on as a suspect in the Gainesville murders. Over three years would pass before I learned that Rolling had indeed purchased a Ka-Bar at an Army-Navy store in Tallahassee on July 17, 1990, some weeks before the killings.

The police scanned many likely areas with metal detectors, but the actual murder weapon has not surfaced to this day. On the Thursday before Rolling was scheduled to go to trial, there was a crucial evidentiary hearing, one that changed the complexion of the case completely.

State Attorney Rod Smith won the court’s approval to introduce into evidence a “replica weapon,” a duplicate of the lost Ka-Bar we believed had been used to commit the crimes. Not only that: the
actual skeletal remains of the victims
, taken from their bodies during the autopsies, and bearing the atrocious nicks, slashes, scorings and gougings, which the knife had caused, and which had enabled me to measure its deadly dimensions with such exactitude, were going to be allowed into evidence as well. Thus, not only the blade, but the bones themselves would be placed before the jury’s gaze.