Dead Men Do Tell Tales: The Strange and Fascinating Cases of a Forensic Anthropologist (9 page)

Soothed and fortified by the foaming brew, they collected their thoughts. Then, suddenly, one pot hunter had a dreadful notion: what if the person who did this were watching them right that minute from the woods? Flinging down their beer cans in panic, they beat a hasty retreat to the sheriff’s office. Better confess to illegal pot hunting than connive at concealing a murder!

The sheriff’s office called the Florida Department of Law En forcement and the FDLE called me, asking that I cooperate in the excavation of remains. A curious scene ensued. The pot hunters were allowed by the sheriff to watch us while we excavated the mound, and they frequently pointed out bits of Indian chert or flint that I had uncovered. Watching me carefully work with my Marshalltown trowel, the trowel of choice for most professional archaeologists, one turned to the other and said: “Look! They use the same tools we do!”

At last came the grim task of examining the remains. The body was that of a female and the plastic garbage bag had preserved her soft tissues. Facial recognition even of a fresh body is difficult because of postmortem changes. That’s the reason garbage bags are so helpful to us. They enclose the remains in a sealed, watertight environment, so the soft tissues last longer. The tissues are not beautiful, nor do they delight the nose, but they are recognizable.

We got a good description from the remains of the deceased and good evidence of the injuries she received at the time of her death. Even so, we had some difficulty learning her name. The body was still clad in a T-shirt with the words “
PIGGLY WIGGLY
” stenciled on it. Piggly Wiggly stores are popular supermarkets in many parts of the South. Now, the only Piggly Wiggly store within a hundred miles of the old Indian mound was in a nearby town. Police visited the store, spoke with the manager, asked when the shirt was sold, how many were sold. They did not think to ask if any employee had worn such a shirt, or if any of the staff was missing. Then they gave up.

So a specialist in artistic reconstruction of the face was called in. She came to my laboratory and got the information she needed. Facial reconstructions are not a new technique; people have been attempting to do them since the very early years of the nineteenth century. Today they are still a hotly debated procedure, nearly always a last resort. Some forensic anthropologists do them, some don’t. As a rule, I don’t. But in rare cases, when all other avenues have been explored without success, and when there are absolutely no more names of possible victims to investigate, then a reconstruction of the deceased’s face can be of some value. If it is published in the newspaper, people may come forward and suggest one or more names of people they knew, who might have resembled the published image. A dead-ended investigation can thus be strung out a bit further, with a few more names to investigate, a few more persons to check out, a few more sets of records to compare to the remains. Sometimes it works. This was one of those times.

The reconstruction was published in a newspaper complete with a description that I provided and the fact that she was wearing a Piggly Wiggly T-shirt. The grandmother of a young woman phoned and reported that the image looked like her granddaughter. She was right. The body was, in fact, that of her granddaughter, who had worked at that Piggly Wiggly when she disappeared. We were able to match the granddaughter’s dental x-rays with those of the remains.

Unfortunately no one was ever brought to justice for this murder. There was a very likely suspect, but there never was enough evidence for an arrest. At one level the case was solved. At another, it will never be solved. We have had no choice but to release the skeletal remains for burial, since it appears no trial will ever be held.

The macabre case of the La Belle drug murders was one of the most chilling ever to come to my attention. It occurred in 1981 and was one of the first illicit burials I investigated, but the grim details of the killings, which emerged little by little as the corpses were excavated over the course of a week, comprised a steadily unfolding tableau of horror.

My involvement began when I received a phone call from Dr. Wally Graves, the district medical examiner in Fort Myers. Wally told me the police had located the gravesite of three buried bodies. A team from the FDLE had already been assisting in the investigation. He told me that this was a drug case, in which three Northeastern businessmen had come down to Florida to negotiate with some local drug smugglers. As often happens in these sordid cases, negotiations broke down. The three Northeasterners were kidnapped from their hotel in Fort Myers and eventually shot and buried. All this had been learned from an informant who had turned state’s evidence. The corpses would have to be disinterred very carefully if a case were to be made against their murderers. The details of the crime would have to be reconstructed from the stratigraphic evidence of the scene. The three individuals had been placed in a hole one at a time, shot, and then buried. The three corpses had lain in the grave pit for three years, one atop the other, like the levels of an ancient city. The whole excavation process turned out to be amazingly complex. Moreover, it had to be carried out in strictest secrecy. Everybody concerned fervently hoped that word of our activities wouldn’t leak out, not only for the sake of the informant’s safety, but for our own as well.

I had the happy thought of suggesting that I bring along a professional archaeologist to supervise the excavation. Wally and the FDLE agreed, and Dr. Brenda Sigler-Eisenberg of the Florida Museum of Natural History accompanied me.

Every morning I would check our car for disturbances of the hood and check beneath it for any sign of tampering. It did not escape me that we were staying at the same hotel from which the three drug dealers had been kidnapped.

To get to the site we had to drive through a golf course. When we arrived we found the local sheriff on hand, along with a number of investigators from the state attorney’s office, several of whom guarded the dig site around the clock, armed with assault rifles. Investigators from FDLE and the FDLE crime scene analysts were also present and we soon settled into a workmanlike routine of digging and photographing and diagraming the hole and its grisly contents. We had the local fire chief there with a pumper truck to provide a water source to wash the gummy soil through screens so that we could recover all evidence, no matter how small.

The skull of the first body had been located before we got there. A shovel had shaved along the very top surface of the dry bone and we could see about a three-inch circular patch of exposed cranium. We began the excavation downward from there after establishing our grid system and our depth controls. The district medical examiner and one of his senior staff members pitched in, carrying buckets of dirt, washing the material through the screens, wearing oversized rubber boots. At first there was a rigid division of labor, but pretty soon everybody pitched in and we made good progress.

As the pit was slowly excavated over the next few days we began to see grim things. The uppermost body was that of a man whose hands were tied tightly behind his back. His body was arched like a bow since the other end of the rope was tied to his ankles. The head was encircled with duct tape around the mouth and showed clear evidence of a shotgun wound, from a gun fired at close range. Some skin remained on some of the lower parts of the body. It was eerie to watch as the color of the skin visibly changed to a darkening red as it was exposed to the sun and air, as if the long-decayed flesh were returning to a mocking semblance of life.

The body beneath him was face down. A rope was tied to one hand but did not secure the other limbs. He too had duct tape around his mouth. He had been shot in the upper right chest, from the front, and then had fallen downward over the third body. His arm was flung over the third body, which lay lowest in the grave.

In those days I was having some back trouble. I found it excruciating to stoop over these corpses for hours on end. I compromised by crawling down into the hole and lying alongside the bodies, digging them out while lying next to them, face to face. My unorthodox methods amused many of the investigators, as well as the medical examiner, who delighted in photographing me, lying alongside corpses, holding a trowel in one hand and a can of Dr Pepper soda in the other.

We found that our clothes were quickly becoming soiled and malodorous from working in the grave. We had to buy new clothes and have the hotel launder the ones we had been wearing. The hotel staff were extremely reluctant to handle our clothes at first, but after we explained to them the need they were very understanding. So we were able to wear fresh, clean clothes every day.

As time stretched on the investigators grew increasingly restless. At one point Dr. Sigler-Eisenberg announced that we needed some teaspoons so that we could clean away the soil around the bodies even more carefully. I thought we were going to have a full-scale revolt on our hands!

Dr. Sigler-Eisenberg’s zeal impressed us all. She insisted on working straight through and not stopping for lunch even though we had sandwiches brought out to the site each day. Only later did I discover that she was too nauseated to eat.

While we were digging one day we heard that word of our activities had leaked out to the drug lords in Miami. Three carloads of them were said to be heading our way. I wondered what we would do if three carloads of men armed with automatic weapons drove onto the site. My first inclination would have been to jump into the hole with the three bodies, but then I realized that the most logical thing for the killers to do would be to throw explosives into the grave to destroy the evidence. Fortunately I never did have to decide what the best course of action might be. I suppose it would have been to run into the nearby palmettos to join the rattlesnakes.

The third body, which lay beneath the other two, was fairly well preserved. His organs could be discerned at the subsequent autopsy. As a rule, the deeper a body lies in the earth, the better the preservation. During the excavation we found small plastic wrappers that had encircled buckshot in shotgun shells. By the location of these wrappers, on top of the bodies and between them, we were able to establish the sequence of events.

The body buried deepest had been shot
last
, not first. Our conclusion was later corroborated by the informant, who later testified in court that the man who lay bottommost in the grave was actually the last to die. After the men were kidnapped from their hotel, they realized their situation was hopeless, that they were all going to die. Contemplating his fate, knowing that there was no escape, the third man had begged to be executed first, so that he would not have to watch the other two murders. In an exquisite refinement of cruelty, his tormentors threw him into the hole face up first, alive, shot his two colleagues so they would fall on him, and only then did they shoot him through the V of his open-necked shirt. He was the first to be buried, but the last to expire. His state of mind, as he was flung into the pit alive, as he heard the shots ring out, as he felt the bodies of his comrades fall on him, twitching and bleeding, I leave to your conjecture.

As a result of our excavation, whose results were reinforced by the informant’s testimony in court, close to twenty people went to jail for various offenses related to drug trafficking and murder. I was relieved to see them there. The actual trigger man was a thug named Larry Ferguson (though the use of the word “thug” to describe this case is an insult to the memory of the bold, strangling assassins who practiced
thuggee
in India in the early nineteenth century). Ferguson went to trial, was found guilty of second-degree murder and received a prison sentence of twenty-one years.

All this lay in the future. When we finished our work in the murder pit and the bodies were taken away, one of the investigators from the state attorney’s office shot a wild hog. We barbecued it near the excavation and feasted that evening on a somewhat tough but tasty barbecued pig, with baked beans and swamp cabbage. Dr. Sigler-Eisenberg seemed to regain her appetite at last.

5
Flotsam and Jetsam

TIN WOODMAN
: “What happened to you?”

SCARECROW
: “They tore my legs off and they threw them over there! Then they took my chest out and they threw it over there!”

TIN WOODMAN
: “Well, that’s you all over.”

COWARDLY LION
: “They sure knocked the stuffings out of you, didn’t they?”

SCARECROW
: “Don’t stand there talking! Put me together!”

—The Wizard of Oz
, 1939 MGM screenplay by Noel
Langley, Florence Ryerson and Edgar Allan Woolf

To profane a dead body by cutting it to pieces has always seemed, at least to our Western eyes, an act of bestial brutality. It is one thing to do murder. It is quite another to destroy the murder victim’s identity, and this is the effect of dismemberment. The Roman poet Vergil moves us to pity with his description of the death and decapitation of King Priam, after the fall of Troy, in the second book of the
Aeneid
. The king has lost his life but, what is worse, he has lost his selfhood.

He, who was once lord of so many tribes and lands, the monarch of Asia—he lies a huge trunk upon the shore, his head severed from his shoulders, a corpse without a name!

I see about four or five dismemberment cases a year, and they are among the most challenging and frustrating crimes in my experience. I am not counting the accidental cases, which are caused by car crashes or other mishaps involving machinery. I mean murder victims who have been coldly, deliberately cut to pieces, whose fragmented bodies show the work of human malevolence—and hard work at that. Taking apart a fresh human body is no mean task. You will work up a sweat doing it. I have seen every tool imaginable used for this grisly purpose, from the ancient stone choppers used by early man millions of years ago in the Olduvai Gorge in Kenya to the Rambo knives, hacksaws and chain saws of today. It is a bloody, messy, dangerous business. Saws and knives can slip and wound you while you are using them. Bone itself can be quite sharp; I have been cut by broken bones while working with remains. The disease of AIDS has made us all far more careful in the autopsy room; and AIDS has created a new wrinkle in dismemberment cases. If the saw blade were to slip and cut a murderer while he was cutting up a victim afflicted with AIDS, he could quite possibly catch the disease. In this case, the victim would be revenged on his killer, even after death!