Dead Men Do Tell Tales: The Strange and Fascinating Cases of a Forensic Anthropologist (45 page)

The La Belle drug murders. These three victims were bound and shotgunned and flung into a pit atop one another. The shoes of the murdered men appeared early on in the dig.

I am forced to lie beside the victims because of back pain. I found some relief from the heat and stench by drinking a Dr Pepper.
(Photo courtesy of Wallace M. Graves, Jr., M.D.)

The three excavated bodies in the La Belle murder pit.

Another view of the three victims at La Belle. Our excavation demonstrated that the victim buried deepest had been shot last.

Femurs showing the typical pattern of chain-saw dismemberment.

An orthopedic nail used to repair a fractured femur in life.

The bottom end of the same nail in life (left) and after death (right).

A healed hole in a skull (trepanning), drilled to relieve pressure after a head injury.

An artificial hip taken from a skeleton.

A hardcover edition of this book was published in 1994 by Doubleday. It is here reprinted by arrangement with Doubleday.

Dead Men Do Tell Tales
. Copyright © 1994 by William R. Maples. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. For information, address: Broadway Books, a division of Random House, Inc., 1540 Broadway, New York, NY 10036.

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www.broadwaybooks.com

Unless otherwise noted, all photos appear courtesy of William R. Maples.

The Library of Congress has Cataloged the Doubleday hardcover edition as follows:

Maples, William R
.
      
Dead men do tell tales /
by William R. Maples and Michael Browning
.
          
p.  cm
.
     
1. Maples, William R.  2. Anthropologists—United States—Biography.  3. Forensic anthropology—United States—Case studies.  I Browning, Michael.  II. Title.
GN50.6.M36A3 1994
614′.l-dc20

eISBN: 978-0-307-76390-7

v3.0

Table of Contents

1 Every Day Is Halloween

2 Talkative Skulls

3 “Bolts of Bones”

4 “The Enfolding Earth”

5 Flotsam and Jetsam

6 “When the Sickness Is Your Soul”

7 Outpacing the Fiend

8 Unnatural Nature

9 “A Sunless Place ”

10 Flames and Urns

11 Death in 10,000 Fragments

12 Lost Legions

13 The Misplaced Conquistador

14 Arsenic and “Old Rough and Ready”

15 The Tsar of All the Russias

16 “These Rough Notes and Our Dead Bodies ”

Acknowledgments