Dead Men Do Tell Tales: The Strange and Fascinating Cases of a Forensic Anthropologist (5 page)

I went to the University of Florida Medical School library, researched the problem and found abundant literature that described the condition. It was a middle ear infection. Such an infection, if not treated, will cause hearing loss and excavation of the bony surface in the area. Sometimes this gnawing will penetrate the brain case, leading to infection that would cause disorientation, nerve problems and death. In its earlier stages the infection produces a dripping exudation from the ear that would be foul-smelling.

Armed with this information, I asked the sheriff if there were any local people who fit this description. It turned out there was a man, a retired farm laborer living on Social Security, who was well known in the vicinity and who had been missing for two years. His name—there is no need to give his name; he was subsequently identified beyond doubt. Toward the end of his life a foul odor hung about him, so oppressive that people shunned him. From his tottering gait, he also seemed to have motor nerve problems. People thought he had suffered a stroke and was partially paralyzed. Neighbors and acquaintances confirmed that he seemed increasingly disoriented toward the end of his days. Finally he wandered off and disappeared, not to be seen again until the skeleton was retrieved from the swamp.

But the skeletal remains that had moldered for two years in the wild could still speak to me. The perforated skull with the pitted brain case yielded up information that agreed very well with reports of the man in life. It could even describe to me the last hours of the unfortunate farmhand, shunned and alone, stumbling into the swamp in pain, his brain swarming with infectious invaders that gnawed away at his balance, his reason and the very bone that encased his brain.

I handed the skeleton back over to the sheriff’s office, together with my findings. Once, long afterward, I was traveling through Chipley and stopped in at the sheriff’s office to ask about the final disposition of the case. The deputies told me that the coroner had ruled the farmhand had been clearly identified and had died a natural death.

In 1974, almost in desperation, an investigator with the Eighth Judicial Circuit of the state attorney’s office brought me a portion of a cranium just a few days before a trial was going to begin. This skullcap had been found by scuba divers near a bridge over the Santa Fe River, the northern boundary of Alachua County, on September 1, 1974, about seventy yards away from a spot where, nearly two years previously, the remains of a headless, handless female body had been found. This headless trunk was identified by certain surgical scars, which were still visible on the torso, as belonging to a Union County woman who had been abducted on August 23, just nine days earlier. At the same time she vanished, a farm laborer named Raymond Stone also disappeared. Stone was later captured in Missouri and, under questioning by police, confessed to killing the woman. Later, however, he retracted his confession.

There was no evidence of trauma or foul play to be found on the woman’s torso. The local medical examiner looked at the body and concluded that the head had been gnawed off and carried away by alligators after the woman’s death. Then the divers found the skullcap.

This medical examiner—there is no need to name him—was an extremely arrogant individual, supremely self-assured, who airily told the sheriff’s investigators, when the skullcap was found, that there was “nothing you could tell from an old, dry bone.” He refused to do any analysis at all.

Almost apologetically, the state attorney’s investigators approached me with the skull fragment and asked me if I could tell them anything about it. I analyzed the remains and, working against the clock because the trial was imminent, made a report in just seventy-two hours. I said this skullcap belonged to an adult white female. She was mature but had not yet reached middle age. The shape of the upper margins of the orbits (eye openings), the smooth, high forehead and the muscle attachment markings were all consistent with a female. Age could only be deduced from the cranial sutures, the “stitches” where the various plates of our skull are joined. This is a notoriously unreliable technique, but in this case it was all I had to go by; therefore my age estimate was carefully vague.

I told the deputies that the woman had been struck at least twice by a weapon that had a hammerlike aspect to it. One of the fractures was a round penetration of the frontal bone, which clearly showed the circular mark of the hammer. A small portion of bone was broken at the edge but hinged downward, indicating that the bone was fresh and elastic when the injury took place. Fracture lines radiated out from this penetration. There was another, second injury, that consisted of a depressed skull fracture of the outer layer of the cranial vault. Here the outer layer had been mashed down, but again you could see clearly the flat, circular striking surface of the hammer head. A depressed skull fracture of this type is also an indication that the bone was still fresh and elastic when the blows were struck. The skull resembles an eggshell that has been cracked but not quite broken through.

When the investigators first came to me they told me in strictest confidence that they had a suspect who was already in custody; that this suspect had confessed to murdering the woman whose headless body had been found in the Santa Fe River in 1972; but that this same suspect had later retracted his confession. The suspect, they told me, had confessed that he had used a hatchet to commit the murder—a hatchet, not a hammer.

The trial took place at Lake Butler, Union County. I remember waiting for hours to testify, sitting on a wooden staircase, which was the only available place for witnesses to wait. It was the first time I testified as an expert witness in a murder case, and it went awkwardly. The prosecutor tried to ask me very controlled, step-by-step questions, instead of simply asking me: “What did you find?” For my part, I tried to treat the jury as if they were a class of undergraduates, to testify as if I were teaching, and that is a mistake too. I even made an attempt at humor, the way a teacher does when he is trying to keep the class’s attention. Whatever the jest was, it fell terribly flat and in that embarrassing instant there was seared into me a lesson I have never forgotten since: a courtroom is not a classroom.

The great riddle of the trial, the hammerlike blows that had apparently been made by a hatchet, was eventually solved. I was just one of many witnesses called, and I was not privy to the other evidence in the case until after the trial. Then I learned that the hatchet the defendant had used was a carpenter’s hatchet, with a blade on one side of the head and a hammer on the other. Even so, I was puzzled: why would he use the hammer side and not the hatchet side to kill? I have learned the answer since. Hammer blows do not spatter blood as much as ax blows do. It is a question of economy and neatness.

I shall never forget Raymond Stone’s appearance when I first laid eyes on him in court. He was a very, very small, thin man who was going bald. He wore a light blue cardigan sweater—I have since learned it is an old courtroom ploy to dress defendants in loose-fitting, baggy clothes. It makes them look smaller and less threatening. I remember thinking that Stone looked like my barber in Gainesville. How could someone so meek and kindly-looking do what Stone was accused of doing? How could he have bludgeoned an innocent woman to death and flung her body from a bridge?

At the trial it came out that, at the time of the murder in 1972, Stone had been working as a hired hand on a farm owned by the victim and her husband. The murder probably had something to do with a spurned sexual advance on Stone’s part. He had propositioned his boss’s wife and been refused; enraged, he had killed her. Stone was convicted and Judge John J. Crews sentenced him to death. At his sentencing, Stone threatened to “raise hell” and tried to spit on the judge; But this frail-looking, malignant man is still alive as I write these lines, and on February 7, 1994, his death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. Stone’s lawyers were able to win a resentencing for him because evidence about his background and unhappy childhood was not heard by the jury at his original trial. Stone grew up in a Missouri garbage dump, sleeping in an abandoned truck. His father murdered Stone’s mother when the boy was nine, and allegedly beat the boy and sexually abused him. Stone had spent much of his life in jails and mental hospitals. A higher court ruled that the jury ought to have been told all this before it recommended the death penalty in Stone’s case.

Despite the resentencing, it is thought unlikely Stone will ever be paroled. He has survived three heart attacks and has undergone bypass surgery in prison. I have also since learned from prison officials that Stone is something of a pariah in prison. Even when he was on Death Row, the other condemned men regarded him as a human rattlesnake.

The skullcap in the Stone case was a victory, not so much for me as for the science of forensic anthropology in Florida. It was the last link in the chain of evidence that connected Stone with his victim. The sutures and shape established the age and sex of the owner; the trauma marks established the shape and type of the weapon. I was able to join the skullcap to the body that had been found two years earlier, and the skullcap was the most eloquent, damning piece of evidence in the case. This victory was owed to good luck, hard work and the mercy of the alligators who gnawed the victim’s head away from her body. In the end, it was the alligators of the Santa Fe River who left this crucial fragment of bone to be retrieved by the scuba divers and to tell its tale in court.

The Stone case had an unexpected sequel about three years ago when the daughters of the deceased woman asked to see the records of the trial, in order to learn more about the death of their mother. The young ladies were received with courtesy at the Lake Butler courthouse, but when the filing cabinet was opened a ghastly sight awaited them: there, still in the drawer, was their mother’s bludgeoned skullcap!

The two were understandably upset and begged that the fragment be released to them immediately for proper burial. It was a ticklish question, since Stone was still alive and going through the endless appeal process that accompanies any death sentence. The current Alachua County medical examiner and I discussed the case and concluded, since we had abundant photographs that could be used in the event of any retrial, that there was no impediment to the skullcap’s release. So the two daughters bore away the last bit of their unhappy mother’s head and buried it.

3
“Bolts of Bones”

O Who shall, from this Dungeon, raise
A Soul enslav’d so many wayes?
With bolts of Bones, that fetter’d stands
In Feet; and manacled in Hands
Here blinded with an Eye; and there
Deaf with the drumming of an Ear
.
A Soul hung up, as ’twere in Chains
Of Nerves, and Artenes and Veins
Tortura besides each other part
In a vain Head and double Heart …

—Andrew Marvell,
A Dialogue Between the
Soul and Body

The unwary visitor to the C. A. Pound Human Identification Laboratory might be pardoned an involuntary gasp of shock. Inside this unobtrusive building, hidden in a grove of thick bamboo off Radio Road in Gainesville, death grins at you from every angle, massed, multiplied and compressed with terrific force within a very narrow compass. My laboratory room itself is not large, perhaps the size of two living rooms; but on its tables, in its shelved boxes, in its labeled specimen jars and phials, are the full and partial skeletons of a silent throng of people, all awaiting identification, or their day in court, at the trials of their killers. It is a fleshless village of the dead, dry and silent save for the soft whirr of a dehumidifier under a table.

But this finality is an illusion. Just as in the book of Ezekiel, the dry bones knit themselves back together, are covered anew with flesh, draw breath and at last stand forth as a living host of human beings, so the remains in this room have begun a second life, a life after death. They are speaking secrets to me and to my students, yielding up hidden information, furnishing ideas and evidence to the world of the living. The truth is germinating in them, sprouting up vividly. Remains such as these have established innocence or guilt. They have pointed the way to the electric chair.

Here lie bones burned and boiled, drowned and desiccated; bones that once lay buried, long forgotten, are now summoned back suddenly into the light of day; bones of martyred innocents, and bones of double-dyed murderers, all lying side by side, equal and silent beneath the impartial eye of science. We have few living visitors, and those who are admitted must show they have good reason to enter. But the dead are welcomed, and we show them every courtesy. As you stare about, you may see some cranial vaults showing clear bullet holes, dark circles where death entered and overtook the owners, extinguishing life as a puff of air blows out a candle. Against a far wall there hangs a translucent death mask, silhouetted on film against the milky-bright shine of an x-ray light table. It is the radiograph of a broken skull, showing a spangling of lead particles shining like lethal dew, sprinkled throughout the braincase. It belongs to a gunshot victim.

On most days the air in my laboratory is cool, chalky, clean-smelling, with a hint of fresh, wet earth. On those days, no reek of decay pollutes the atmosphere. In one corner you may see a young graduate student tweezering his way slowly through a heap of clay clods, separating out the tumbled teeth and vertebrae of an apparent suicide, years old. Hanks of human hair from plane crash victims are nearby, shampooed and shiny, with warm highlights that serve as poignant reminders of lives foreshortened. We use cork collars to prop up skulls we are working on, so they will not roll and fall off the tables.