Dead Men Do Tell Tales: The Strange and Fascinating Cases of a Forensic Anthropologist (6 page)

Skeletons in every phase of articulation are housed here, some lying full length on tables, some tucked away in fragments in boxes. A fetal skeleton, seven months developed and stillborn, stands in a bell jar, frail and pearly white, resembling a little monkey with its curiously bulbous skull, eggshell-thin, almost translucent. Jaws without teeth and teeth without jaws grin in ivory scatters. The dark, eyeless shadows of orbital sockets gaze calmly up at the ceiling or over at you. Bones creamy white, butterscotch yellow, dirty gray, sooty black, tangled and tumbled, boxed and loose, articulated and arrayed: a whole community of skeletons is kept here under lock and key, entrusted by chance and the state of Florida to my care.

This laboratory is my realm. It was built in 1991, by my design. I oversaw every detail: the 48-inch tube lights that can be clicked on and off in symmetrical pairs to vary room brightness; the twin, independent ventilation systems; the security locks which seal off the laboratory proper from the administrative area, every door, window and drain. The walls within the laboratory go all the way up to the roof, not just to the drop ceiling, for purposes of security as well as to isolate unpleasant odors.

Security is adamantine. There are burglar alarms strewn throughout the building, including motion detectors. The laboratory doors are fitted with Keso locks manufactured by the Sargent Lock Co. The keys do not have serrated edges, as normal keys have. Instead they are pocked with a unique pattern of depressions. The lock company will issue a duplicate key only upon receipt and verification of my signature. No one outside my staff possesses a key to the laboratory, not the college administration, not even the campus police. The laboratory is locked at night. Maintenance staff cannot enter it unless I am there.

Why this stern isolation? The contents of the laboratory, the bones and the equipment, are not so very valuable in terms of money. But some of them are legally irreplaceable: they represent potential evidence in court cases and must not be tampered with. A determined cracksman could doubtless cut his way in through the wall with the proper tools, but he would set off alarms and would leave a telltale hole, instantly communicating the fact that the precious bones were no longer inviolate, that the chain of evidence had been broken.

In one corner of the laboratory is a safety shower fitted with special nozzles. It sprays water in a powerful yet gentle stream, soft enough to point at your eye and wash it out, if you should happen to be hit with a spurt of formalin, acid or alcohol, all irritating chemicals familiar to those who deal with corpses in the laboratory.

Nearby are three “odor hoods,” clear, ventilated enclosures, each large enough to accommodate a body on their stainless steel trays inside. The sinks came from photo supply stores and were meant to be used to develop pictures. Easy to flush clean, they are ideal for holding human remains that still have old flesh on them. The clear plastic hoods isolate odors and fans carry the corpse stench outdoors when the trays are occupied. Soft tissue removed from the bodies is placed in heat-sealed plastic bags and put in a freezer to one side. I and my students use sleeves of tubular plastic stock, supplied by the KAPAK Co. and made of 3M plastic. These can be cut and sealed to any length. Odors never penetrate the 4.5-mil thickness of the plastic. KAPAK heat-sealable pouches are used for smaller bits of flesh. These sturdy packets are, as their label proclaims, “
FREEZABLE BOILABLE MICROWAVABLE AIRTIGHT
.” A portable impulse sealer looks like a paper cutter and is kept in a leather briefcase. Plug it in, lever down the arm and with a single stroke the plastic container is sealed hermetically.

There are times when you might walk into this room and know right away we’ve been working on something fresh. Sometimes the odors are ghastly. Sometimes, believe it or not, they are appetizing. Strange to say, when I was in my old laboratory in the Florida Museum of Natural History, people would come in and say: “What’s cooking?” or “That sure smells good.” When they found out it was a freshly burned human body they would go green and rush out.

“‘How long will a man lie i’ the earth ere he rot?’” Prince Hamlet asks the gravedigger in the first scene of the fifth act of Shakespeare’s great tragedy. “‘Faith,’” the gravedigger replies, “‘if he be not rotten before he die,—as we have many pocky corpses nowadays, that will scarce hold the laying—he will last you some eight year or nine year…

Shakespeare was an unequaled observer of human nature, but decomposition depends on many variables. A buried corpse may last nearly forever in icy ground. Peat and moisture may also retard decay. In dry sand bodies will mummify to durable parchment. In mineral-rich earth they may be impregnated with salts and metals. But above the earth, especially in warm weather, the interval to skeletonization can be shockingly rapid. The minimum time of total skeletonization is not nine years, nor yet nine months, nor even nine weeks: it may occur in nine days or thereabouts. Dr. T. D. Stewart in his
Essentials of Forensic Anthropology
cites the case of a twelve-year-old girl who had been missing for ten days in Mississippi, following a hurricane. Her remains were found under a discarded, vinyl-covered sofa in the warm months of late summer, so the conditions for dissolution were almost optimal. It was as if she had been placed in a bug incubator. The bugs flourished, the remains diminished and in just over ten days the body had been very nearly skeletonized, with only a few small tabs of cartilage left.

In the late 1970s my colleague Bill Bass set up the Anthropological Research Facility (ARF) at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. He began deliberately exposing bodies donated by the local medical examiner’s office as unidentified or unclaimed to a carefully monitored process of natural corruption. It was a “decay rate facility,” or, as my colleague Dr. Douglas Ubelaker calls it in his book,
Bones
, an “al fresco mortuary.”

In this open-air morgue, thirty to forty bodies continue to be processed each year, along with a handful of dogs. The corpses are placed on concrete slabs or on the bare earth, or are wrapped in plastic or buried in shallow pits. Everything is photographed regularly, to monitor the process of dissolution. The buried bodies are exhumed at intervals, photographed, and reinterred. It’s all for science, but local wags have added Bass’s name to the acronym, renaming the facility “BARF.”

Corpse reek is something you simply have to get used to in my profession. It is one thing to tell yourself that you are smelling butyric acid, methane gas and other organic compounds that are all quite common in nature. But it is quite another to see a clear and present horror lying upon the examining table, laughing with fleshless mouth, gazing with jellied eyes, a soul-flown shell, unstrung, inert, exanimate and ruined. I suppose there is a psychological element in the horror it excites in us, far beyond the actual, physical smell. It shouts “Death!” to our brains at some elemental level, and it takes experience and willpower to overcome the impulse to shrink away and flee. But I never put Mentholatum on my upper lip during an autopsy, the way the FBI agents did in the movie
Silence of the Lambs
. Nobody I know does. After a while you just think around it, think it away.

I have seen policemen, lawyers, x-ray technicians and others become ill and flee the room where such corpses lie, but I am proud to say not a single one of my students has ever flunked this stern trial of nerves. The only times I see my students bothered by such sights occur not in the grotesque, “Halloween” cases, where you see the decomposing skull with the remains of the eyes still glistening in place and tatters of flesh and cartilage adhering to bones; rather, it is the fresh bodies that tend to unsettle them.

Upon the table they see a homicide victim scarcely cold, who climbed from bed just as they did that day for the start of another busy day, who dressed and left her apartment, not knowing that in a few hours she was going to be murdered and would finish the day on the cold metal table in the pathologist’s facility. These are the truly dreadful cases, in my students’ eyes. There is the tendency for the student to look down and see not the victim, but themselves; to identify with the victim. And that can be one of the most emotionally wrenching experiences imaginable. It’s easy not to identify with a skeleton or a grotesquely decomposing mass, or even a burned body, with its limbs contorted into the pose of a boxer as the roasted muscles have contracted amid the flames. Such miserable remains aren’t “human” anymore. But the fresh body on the table can convey a terror beyond that of the most liquefied corpse.

There is no horrible, hidden mystery involved in decomposition. Basically there are two well-mapped processes involved: autolysis and putrefaction.

Autolysis occurs after death when digestive juices, which in life dissolve only food, begin to digest the gastrointestinal tract. Within a few hours of death, these stomach acids will gnaw through the stomach or esophagus which they have patiently and obediently served through every moment of life. It is like some little French Revolution of the guts, in which the servants suddenly become the masters and run amok. At the same time tyrosine crystals may form in the liver as proteins there break down after death.

Putrefaction occurs as a result of bacterial activity throughout the body. Putrefaction is a much greater component of the decomposition process than autolysis, and it sweeps through the body like a silent fire. Blood is a fertile sea in which bacteria swarm and multiply. Gas is released within the blood vessels and tissues. The body swells, becomes distended with methane gas. The body can actually swell to two or three times its normal size in twelve to eighteen hours. A colleague of mine, who shall remain nameless, sometimes demonstrates this phenomenon for visitors by darkening his laboratory, lighting a match and thrusting a needle into the swollen set of remains. There is a great blue jet of flame and onlookers gasp.

As we dissolve, our skin color may change from green to purple to black. Dislodged by the pressure of the accumulating methane, our organs may bloom out from our lower orifices, and foul-smelling fluid may exude or spurt from these openings. The smell is largely composed of butyric acids—this is the stench of death that is so repellent to our nostrils. The skin slips from its moorings, so much that the skin of the hands can sometimes be removed completely, like a glove, though the nails fall away. Fingerprints can still be taken from these slipped-off “gloves.” To do this, the technician must insert his own gloved hand into the dead bag of skin, ink the dead fingertips and carefully roll the prints onto a blank card.

It is a myth that fingernails and hair continue to grow after death. What really happens is that the skin may retract around them, making the hair and nails prickle up and jut out more prominently. Erich Maria Remarque, in his novel,
All Quiet on the Western Front
, imagines a dead friend’s nails growing in weird, subterranean corkscrews after his burial. It is a powerful, disturbing image, but it is pure moonshine. No such thing occurs.

Dreadful as all these processes may seem, they are only the resolution of certain carbon-based compounds into certain other carbon-based compounds. Carbon is the element of life and death. We share it with diamonds and dandelions, with kerosene and kelp. While we may wrinkle our noses at some of its manifestations, we ought also to remember that this element comes to us from the stars, which wheel over us forever in silent, glittering array, pure fires obeying celestial laws.

Against another wall of my laboratory is my workbench, fitted with a drill press, a small anvil, saws, screwdrivers, wrenches and other tools. These implements are not for working with human remains, though their abstract shapes sometimes come in handy in unexpected ways. I use them to design frames and supports and other furniture for the laboratory. I am rather handy with tools, and it is satisfying to do this work myself.

My familiarity with tools often enables me to reach grim conclusions when I am working with the remains of murder and suicide victims. Sometimes I can tell exactly what sort of tool was used to kill someone. The cross section and the size will match up perfectly. I had a case recently in which a rubber mallet was used, just like the one on my toolbench wall. Another skull I examined was perforated with a pattern that perfectly matched the one on this pry bar. I often go to Sears and look at the tools there to see if any match up to the holes in the skulls that come to this laboratory. When the salesman asks: “Can I help you, sir?” I tell him, “No, you wouldn’t understand. I’ll know what I’m looking for when I see it.”

Nearby you will see some machine grinders, used to grind down bones for samples; diamond-blade saws used to cut thin sections from bones and teeth so that they can be examined under a microscope; and the vibrating Stryker saw used in autopsies, a tool whose circular blade does not spin, but instead oscillates back and forth at high speed so that it will not cut skin, but only bone. The Stryker saw is used to cut the top of the skull off so that the brain can be removed. Garden tools such as branch cutters can be used to cut through ribs. Long knives are useful in removing the brain which, if fresh, leaves the skull reluctantly, with a sucking sound. But brain matter is quick to deliquesce and soon turns to a dark pudding.