Morgue (14 page)

But his lower-body injuries ended in a bizarre line at mid-thigh, exactly twenty-seven inches from the soles of his feet. There was no damage—burns, cuts, or anything else—on his back and buttocks, and very little on his front torso. X-rays showed no shrapnel in him, and toxicology found no alcohol or drugs.

Dr. Sopher opened him up and found catastrophic damage to his hearts and lungs. They had hemorrhaged profusely in the blast. It was an injury seen commonly during the London blitz in World War II, when the concussion of exploding Nazi bombs killed people who might show no serious external injuries. Their vital organs had literally been smashed by the jolt of the blast.

So, too, had the bones on the right side of the victim's face. His brain looked as if he'd taken a mammoth punch.

Because of where the body was found (on the driver's side of the wreckage, near where the steering wheel had landed) and the injuries to the right side of his body, we determined this victim had been the driver and that the blast had come from low on the passenger side of the car. His relatively undamaged torso and upper thighs had been protected from the explosion by the seat of the car.

But maybe more troubling was not what we found inside the body, but in its pockets.

It was a kind of manifesto, half suicide note and half warning. It was crudely spelled and typewritten:

To Amerika: I'm playing heads-up murder. When the deal goes down I'm gon be standing on your chest screaming like Tarzan and the looser pays the cut. Dynamite is my response to your justice. Guns and bullets are my answers to your killers and oppressors and victory is my sermon in your death. For my people I will chase you into a pit of hell with both barrels smoking and maybe the best man win and God Bless the loser. Power than peace.

Friends who'd rushed to the scene claimed they recognized the man, and later relatives identified him positively at the morgue. Fingerprints eventually confirmed it. He was Ralph E. Featherstone, a thirty-year-old male with a Washington address.

Who was Ralph Featherstone? State investigators quickly confirmed Featherstone founded and managed the Drum and Spear Bookstore in downtown Washington, which specialized in books by and about black people and was a focal point for an increasingly militant racial politics. When the firebrand H. Rap Brown took control of the SNCC, he made Featherstone one of his key lieutenants. Together, they forcibly transformed the SNCC from a nonviolent integration group to a full-fledged black power movement that promoted violence against racist white society.

Featherstone started as an unlikely militant. A graduate of the District of Columbia Teachers College, he'd taught “speech correction” in several local elementary schools. In 1964, he participated in the historic Mississippi Summer Project to register black voters and opened about forty “Freedom Schools,” where he taught literacy classes, constitutional rights, and black history to some three thousand students. Friends recalled him as quiet, studious, and contemplative.

He'd been arrested in Selma, Alabama, during the 1965 freedom marches, and spent eight days sleeping on the concrete floor of the county jail, eating beans and cornbread for every meal, and getting angrier and angrier.

But inside Brown's newly radicalized SNCC, “Feather” (as he was nicknamed) also grew belligerent and bitter. He admired Ernesto “Che” Guevara and Karl Marx. He came to see all blacks as twentieth-century slaves who must revolt against their white masters and create an autonomous African-American state, with absolute power over every aspect of their lives. He became an unapologetic black separatist.

He didn't know it, but the FBI started watching Featherstone in 1967. As the SNCC got bolder, the feds got more interested in Feather. J. Edgar Hoover's file on him was already a couple of hundred pages in March 1970. They knew that he'd traveled to communist Czechoslovakia in 1968, then later flew to Havana to celebrate the anniversary of Castro's Cuban revolution.

Just a few weeks before he died, Featherstone had married a teacher who was also active in the movement. Still a newlywed bride, she was now also a widow. A month after the fatal blast, she would scatter his ashes in Lagos, Nigeria.

In life, Featherstone had been a hero to the black community in Washington. In death, he was a martyr. Within hours of the incident, before any details were known, the SNCC issued an angry press release that morning, calling the deaths “vicious murders.” Black neighborhoods around Fourteenth Street started to seethe.
Feather was assassinated by the white man,
they murmured. They plotted revenge, but Featherstone's family urged restraint, a calm before any storm.

But a storm was definitely building.

We had identified one of the victims, Ralph Featherstone, but we still didn't know how and why a bomb might have exploded in or near his car.

If there was any good news amid this grimness, it was that our first victim wasn't H. Rap Brown. But our second victim, whose damage was far worse, was a much more difficult and dangerous forensic puzzle.

And we didn't have a good feeling. H. Rap Brown hadn't been seen since the night before and couldn't be found anywhere.

*   *   *

There wasn't much left of the body on my table.

The blast had amputated both legs below the knees. His right forearm and left hand were also missing. His upper right arm had a nasty fracture from which the humerus protruded at a peculiar angle. His thighs were split like fish up to his crotch, the arteries, skin, and muscle cut to ribbons by the blast. His genitals were gone.

His buttocks and pelvis had literally been blown apart, splitting his lower body in half.

A jagged wound stretched from the pubic area to his breastbone, exposing his pureed intestines and frayed chest muscles, but an odd three- to five-inch band of undamaged skin stretched across his belly. His neck, arms, and chest bore even more deep gashes, although the skin of his back was intact.

His jaw, neck, and pharynx were a bloody pulp. His face was flattened and collapsed; what was left of his skull was in a hundred pieces beneath the skin, like broken marbles in a torn paper bag. His eyeballs had burst in their sockets and dried into crusty shells.

Inside, this man's heart and lungs had suffered even worse hemorrhages from the blast. His brain was mush.

Most of the damage was to the front of this man's body.

Like Featherstone, this unfortunate victim had no alcohol or drugs in his system, but X-rays showed something more intriguing: A metallic object embedded in the back of his mouth proved to be a 1.5-volt mercury battery. The films also showed scattered metallic parts—a spring, several rivets, two half-inch-long wires, and many other unidentifiable metal fragments—in his chest and abdomen.

And in a final bit of forensic sleuthing, I found his penis and a flap of his palm in the man's jumbled intestines.

This victim was found about sixty-three feet from the remnants of the passenger side of the Dart, the opposite direction from driver Featherstone. Taking this location and the nature and distribution of his injuries into account, we deduced this was the passenger.

In the meantime, the FBI's experts had concluded the bomb had been about ten sticks of dynamite wired to a battery and a key-wound Westclox alarm clock. They identified the clock from tiny pieces found at the scene. The explosion had been so immense that it shook houses two miles away.

We were starting to see what happened.

The bomb couldn't have been in the glove compartment, under the instrument panel, or under the seat because that didn't fit the nature of the two men's injuries. It had to be somewhere near the passenger-side floorboards.

It couldn't have been planted under the car because the blast pattern, the damage to the chassis, and the angle of the wounds suggested it was inside the car.

It couldn't have been thrown into the car, crime scene specialists said, because all the windows had been rolled up and Trooper Lastner had seen no other vehicles anywhere on the road that night.

There was only one explanation: The bomb had been on the passenger-side floor, between the legs of our unidentified victim. His grievous injuries suggested he had been leaning over it, possibly with his hands on it, when it exploded.

How did we know? His injuries were symmetrical, proving the blast had been directly in front of him. That strange band of skin across his belly was protected because he had been bent forward, creating a fold of skin across his abdomen. His chin and neck had absorbed the bulk of the blast. And the force had blown his hand and genitals upward into his body.

When the bomb went off, Featherstone's right hand was on the wheel, and his right side bore the brunt of the explosion.

It all added up to one thing: Featherstone and his still-nameless passenger knew they were carrying a lethal package. They couldn't have missed it.

Now we knew the driver's name; we also knew that the bomb was inside the Dodge Dart. We strongly believed these two men were knowingly transporting the bomb when it detonated prematurely. Had they intended to blow up the Bel Air courthouse but were scared off by the enormous police presence there? We still don't know to this day, but it's a good theory.

Eager to forestall charges of a cover-up, the Maryland state police publicly revealed what we knew about Featherstone and the bomb's location, and the reaction was immediate.

“Almost before the wreckage was cool,” responded US representative John Conyers, Jr., a black Michigan Democrat, in a letter signed by twenty of the biggest names in the civil rights movement, “the Maryland authorities were certain they had the answers. Ralph Featherstone, they said, was fooling around with high explosives. Those of us who knew him are sufficiently convinced of his level-headedness to be desirous of a better explanation of his death.”

But a day later, we still didn't know who Victim No. 2 was.

The FBI was picking up chatter about new violence related to the Bel Air bombing. Brown's lawyer William Kunstler, a champion of leftist causes, publicly questioned whether the FBI or any other government agency could fairly investigate this tragedy. “I'm always suspicious of the official story,” Kunstler told the
Washington Post
. Militants openly charged authorities with assassinating innocent Americans. A hungry media was already starting to ask, “Where's H. Rap Brown?”

Time was running out.

*   *   *

We worked through the night to identify the nameless man in our morgue.

His own mother wouldn't have recognized his obliterated face. Other than the obvious damage, he had no identifying scars, deformities, or tattoos. His hands were gone, so there were no fingerprints. We had some teeth, but without some idea of who he was, we'd have no dental records to compare. We had requested dental files for the missing H. Rap Brown but so far, none had been found.

Making matters worse, investigators sifting through the debris found two different identity cards with different names (C. B. Robinson and W. H. Payne), Navy discharge papers for a William Payne, a library card for somebody named Will X., and three photographs bearing three different names—but all showing adult black males consistent with our unknown corpse. (And none were H. Rap Brown.)

Was Brown fleeing prosecution with new identities? Or was our dead man one of several Featherstone friends the FBI couldn't find? We knew nothing.

While police meticulously scoured the blast site for more clues and started tracing the documents, Dr. Sopher set to a grim task: reconstructing the dead man's face with its own tissues, hoping to create an accurate enough copy that somebody might recognize him.

The documents yielded our first clue.

The military documents said William H. Payne had enlisted in Covington, Kentucky, and would now be in his mid-twenties, which was consistent with our dead man. The US Navy's Department of Medical Records rushed Payne's 1961 medical history to us and we quickly saw that his blood type (O+) matched the corpse.

But the dental records didn't match. The Navy's dental X-rays clearly showed five filled cavities in the young sailor's mouth. Our corpse had only one.

We scratched Payne off our list of possibilities.

Problem was, we were hitting dead ends in our search for C. B. Robinson, and without records that would include or exclude H. Rap Brown, we were dead in the water.

Dr. Sopher's facial reconstruction was our best bet. Using copper wire and a drill, he pulled the shattered bones of the corpse's face back into place and wrapped the flensed face around them. We took photos of the new face (shading the areas of the worst damage) and prepared to circulate the pictures in the news media, hoping somebody would step forward with an identity.

But the macabre reconstruction furnished an unexpected benefit: We suddenly noticed a strangely irregular front hairline and random bald patches in the man's coarse black close-cropped hair.

Comparing our dead man's hairline to recent photos of Brown, we saw significant differences. And when we compared the distinctive shape of the corpse's left ear to photos of Brown's left ear, they didn't match.

So H. Rap Brown didn't die in the Bel Air explosion. That relieved a lot of people, but Victim No. 2 was still somebody and it was our job to determine who.

The second morning after the bomb went off, we got a break. A searcher found two small patches of skin at the scene that looked like fingertips. Along with the ragged palm skin that I retrieved from the corpse's belly, FBI fingerprint analysts came to a disturbing conclusion.

The two bits of skin were actually a man's right thumb and left pinkie finger.

And they belonged to William H. Payne.

*   *   *

We were mystified. How could the same man's fingerprints and dental records be different? Could one or both be wrong? We needed more evidence before we could say that a man named William H. Payne had been blown to bits in Bel Air, possibly by a terror bomb he intended to plant in a very public place.