The hand of the Lord was upon me, and carried me out in the spirit of the Lord, and set me down in the midst of the valley, which was full of bones, and caused me to pass by them roundabout: and behold there were very many in the open valley; and lo, they were very dry. And he said to me, Son of man, can these bones live? And I answered, O Lord God, Thou knowest.
—Ezekiel 37:1-3.
To Margaret, Lisa and Cynthia, who never complained about the long hours I spent in the laboratory, or the bizarre stories I brought home….
—W.R.M.
To Allison, Matthew and Noah, who know that the sun shines east, and the sun shines west….
—M.C.B.
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
1
Every Day Is Halloween
I obtained leave to go down into the valley of death and gratify a reprehensible curiosity…. Death had put his sickle into this thicket and fire had gleaned the field…. The bodies [lay] half-buried in ashes; some in the unlovely looseness of attitude denoting sudden death by the bullet, but by far the greater number in postures of agony that told of the tormenting flame. Their clothing was half burnt away—their hair and beard entirely; the rain had come too late to save their nails. Some were swollen to double girth; others shriveled to manikins. According to degree of exposure, their faces were bloated and black or yellow and shrunken. The contraction of muscles which had given them claws for hands had cursed each countenance with a hideous grin. Faugh …!
—Ambrose Bierce, What I Saw of Shiloh.
I seldom have nightmares. When I do, they are usually flitting images of the everyday things I see on the job: crushed and perforated skulls, lopped-off limbs and severed heads, roasted and dissolving corpses, hanks of human hair and heaps of white bones—all in a day’s work at my office, the C. A. Pound Human Identification Laboratory of the Florida Museum of Natural History at the University of Florida. Recently I dreamed I was in a faraway country, trying on shoes, and the leather in the shoes was so improperly prepared that the laces and uppers were crawling with maggots. But there was a simple, ordinary explanation for this phantasm: one of my graduate students was raising maggots as part of a research project.
I have gazed on the face of death innumerable times, witnessed it in all its grim manifestations. Death has no power to freeze my heart, jangle my nerves or sway my reason. Death to me is no terror of the night but a daylit companion, a familiar condition, a process obedient to scientific laws and answerable to scientific inquiry.
For me, every day is Halloween. When you think of all the horror movies you have seen in your entire life, you are visualizing only a dim, dull fraction of what I have seen in actual fact. Our laboratory is primarily devoted to teaching physical anthropology to graduate students at the University of Florida, and is part of the Florida Museum of Natural History. Yet, thanks to the wording of the 1917 law establishing the museum, we often find ourselves investigating wrongful death, attempting to dispel the shadows surrounding murder and suicide. All too often in the past, under the old coroner system, the innocent have died unavenged, and malefactors have escaped unpunished, because investigators lacked the stomach, the knowledge, the experience and the perseverance to reach with both hands into the rotting remnants of some dreadful crime, rummage through the bones and grasp the pure gleaming nugget of truth that lies at the center of it all.
Truth is discoverable. Truth wants to be discovered. The men who murdered the Russian Tsar Nicholas II and his family and servants in 1918 imagined that their crime would remain hidden for all eternity, but scarce sixty years passed before these martyred bones rose up again into the light of day and bore witness against their Bolshevik assassins. I have seen the tiny, wisp-thin bones of a murdered infant stand up in court and crush a bold, hardened, adult killer, send him pale and penitent to the electric chair. A small fragment of a woman’s skullcap, gnawed by alligators and found by accident at the bottom of a river, furnished enough evidence for me to help convict a hatchet murderer, two years after the fact.
The science of forensic anthropology, properly wielded, can resolve historical riddles and chase away bugbears that have bedeviled scholars for centuries. Reluctantly but carefully, I examined the skeletal remains of President Zachary Taylor, who died in 1850, and helped lay to rest persistent suspicions that he was the first of our presidents to be assassinated. The sword-nicked skull of the butchered Spanish conquistador, Francisco Pizarro, came within my field of inquiry, and I have held in my hands the bony orb that once enclosed vast dreams of gold, blood and empire. The gargoyle-like skull and skeleton of the Victorian-era “Elephant Man,” Joseph Merrick, furnished me with pictures and impressions so poignant and vivid that I almost seemed to be conversing with the man himself.
But I do not seek out the illustrious dead to pay them court or borrow their fame. To me, the human skeleton unnamed and unfleshed is matter enough for marvel. The most fascinating case I ever had involved a modern, love-struck couple with very ordinary names: Meek and Jennings. It fell to me to extricate their bones, burned and crushed and commingled in thousands of fragments, from a single body bag, and put them back together again as best I could. When I was finished, after a year and a half’s work, what I had was what lies deepest within all of us, at our center; that which is the last of us ever to be cut, burned, disassembled or dissolved; that which is strongest, hardest and least destructible about us; our firmest ally, our most trustworthy companion, our longest surviving remnant after we die: our skeleton.
I have often wondered whether I have a character flaw, to be so drawn to deathly things. I have always wanted to see the true facts of human existence, no matter how ugly. From a very early age I wanted to see life as it really was, not through the smudged window-pane of a newspaper or by means of the flickering picture of a movie newsreel. I wanted an uncensored view of reality. I did not want to know death from a neatly typed autopsy report, or from the body banked with flowers and surmounted by a stainless steel coffin lid at a funeral parlor. All my life I have been curious about death as it is, as it happens.
I was born in Dallas, Texas, on August 7, 1937. One of my grandfathers was a Methodist preacher, the other a saddle maker. My father was a banker who died when he was only forty, of cancer. I was just eleven. He was a man of strict morals who set a high premium on education. I grew up in a house filled with books and magazines such as Collier’s and the Saturday Evening Post. The dictionary was one of the most used books in our library and reading was nearly as natural as breathing to me. I knew nine months before my father died that he was not going to recover, that the end was inevitable. This was a great sorrow to me; but in his last days my father said something that filled me with pride. He was giving some final instructions to my mother. He urged her to make sure that my brother, who was a splendid athl
ete, went to college. He did not mention me.
“What about Billy?” my mother asked him.
“Don’t worry about Billy. He’ll be all right,” my father replied; and his deathbed faith in me has heartened me all my life.
One formative childhood event sticks out in my mind. It involved the great 1930s woman outlaw, Bonnie Parker, of Bonnie and Clyde fame. She crossed my path twice, even though she died before I was born. Bonnie was from Dallas and she first met Clyde Barrow, a native of Waco, in “Cement City,” a rough part of Dallas near the Trinity River Bottoms, where she was working as a waitress. The pair went on to blaze their way across Texas and the Midwest and their legend was still fresh in Dallas when I was a boy. Our house was right across the street from the home of the chief deputy of the Dallas County Sheriff’s Department.
One night this deputy, who was a friend of my father’s, brought over the autopsy photographs of Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow. I was allowed to see them. They were the first autopsy photographs I had ever seen and they fascinated me. I was only about ten or eleven years old at the time. Far from being horrified, I was enthralled.
Years later, I happened to be wandering in a part of the cermtery where members of my family are buried in Dallas. I came upon a tombstone with this inscription:
AS THE FLOWERS ARE ALL MADE SWEETER BY
THE SUNSHINE AND THE DEW, SO THIS OLD
WORLD IS MADE BRIGHTER BY THE LIVES
OF FOLKS LIKE YOU
Above this poem were the words:
BONNIE PARKER
Oct. 1, 1910–May 23, 1934
I was astonished. The poem might have described a child or a sweetheart, instead of a cigar-smoking murderess who perished in a hail of bullets.
I later photographed this headstone and show the poem part in some of my lectures. The next slide shows the full epitaph, with the superscripted name: Bonnie Parker. In that moment in a Dallas graveyard it came to me that every person, from the most depraved serial killer to the most seraphic innocent, was likely loved by someone when each was alive. Victims and murderers alike are people. They may have followed their paths helplessly or of their own free will, but the paths led equally to the grave. All these people demand and deserve a dispassionate and caring analysis from investigators like myself. We can never forget that what we are doing is not just for the courts or for the general public. What we see on the table will have to be related to the families of victims and to the relatives of killers. Flowers and dew may seem far away from the microscopes and autopsy saws we employ, but they are still part of the picture. My wife’s parents, my maternal grandparents and my father are all buried in that cemetery, in the same ground where Bonnie Parker lies.
I was brought up unreligiously, but with a set of hard, clear-cut moral values. Lies and laziness repel me more than the most putrefied corpse. If you wish to ponder the existence of the human soul or weigh whether there is life after death, you will have to seek elsewhere than in these pages. While I have seen consummate evil and its effects, I have never been overawed by it or attracted by the sleazy runways and approaches to it. The underside of life holds no personal fascination for me; nor have I ever been tempted to crawl into the gutter or stare through the sewer grate at the sordid practices of the living. I am not attracted to bars or nightclubs or bordellos, though I have hauled away and handled and examined the dead bodies of those who frequented them.
When people ask me how I ended up in forensic anthropology, I tell them it was a combination of good luck and bad character. I took my first anthropology course as an entering freshman at the University of Texas, purely by accident. Registration hours were nearly up. We freshmen always received the last appointments of the day. All the sections for introductory biology were filled up. My adviser suggested anthropology as an alternative.
“Fine. What’s that?” I asked him.
“Try it. You may like it,” he answered. So I found myself taking physical anthropology. I majored in English and minored in anthropology all through college and then, with just one semester left before graduation, switched my major to anthropology. One course required for the major was advanced physical anthropology, taught by a newcomer to the University of Texas, a man named Tom McKern.
It was McKern who, more than any other man save only my father, shaped and directed my life. McKern was … simply McKern. He was unique, a born teacher, a brilliant lecturer and a very charismatic personality. I soon learned that he had been born in Tonga, the son of an archaeologist, and had wide experience of foreign lands and far shores. He had worked at a laboratory in Tokyo, identifying the remains of American G.I.s killed at Iwo Jima in World War II, and later in Korea. Among the skeletons submitted to him for identification from the Iwo Jima battlefield was that of one of his closest friends, a man who had been best man at McKern’s own wedding. McKern had seen extraordinary things, and there was a kind of glow about him. He fascinated and impressed every student who came into contact with him. He was what I would become: a forensic anthropologist.
That first day, McKern simply called the roll and dismissed the class. A few of us hung around afterward and chatted with him. He explained what forensic anthropology was, what it involved. He told us about testifying at trials, working with homicide cases. He said you could earn as much as a hundred dollars a day doing this extraordinarily fascinating work, if you testified in court. We were agog at this vast sum! The conversation lasted half an hour at most; but at the end of that half hour, when I walked out of that classroom, I knew what I wanted to do with my life.
Ever since I had turned eighteen I had been practically self-supporting. I paid my college expenses by working at a succession of odd jobs—very odd jobs. I was an attendant in a private sanitarium and had sometimes to restrain violent or delirious patients. I rode shotgun in an ambulance that belonged to a funeral home, and became proficient at throwing sheets with our home’s name on them over the dead, mangled corpses of accident victims. The competition between rival funeral parlors for new business was fierce, and it made our work resemble some macabre rodeo, where the first cowboy who gets his rope over the steer wins, except that we were using sheets, not ropes, and we were flinging them over corpses, not steers.
Those were wild days, full of high-speed chases under Texas starlight. We would fly like bats from hell to the scene of an accident, risking our lives to pluck dead men off the asphalt first, ahead of the competition. We often took more chances getting there than the deceased took to die there. Our ambulance had a top speed of 105 mph, but we had a low-speed transmission. Our competitor’s ambulance could do 110 mph but had a high-speed transmission. The difference in transmissions meant that our competitor could dust us on the flat straightaways out in open country, but we could show him our taillights in town.
We drove around at these breakneck speeds in the days before seat belts, and nothing we told the funeral parlor owner could persuade him to shell out for these safety restraints. This old man was a character. I remember him unfolding a whole set of membership cards for every conceivable organization in town. He belonged to all of them. As the cards riffled down to the tabletop he chuckled. “See these?” he said smugly. “Every one of them’s a funeral!”
Then one night the owner happened to be riding in the ambulance himself and witnessed a particularly ghastly accident. A gravel truck had hit the rear fender of a car, spinning the car around and ejecting the seat-beltless driver like a child from a playground whirligig. The driver landed in the path of the truck, whose front wheels pulped his head. The sight of this atrociously mangled corpse softened even my boss’s hard heart, and he equipped our ambulance with seat belts soon afterward.
I had been to funerals, but it was in those days that I saw my first dead body outside of a coffin. It happened my first night on the job. We were called to a house in Austin, where a woman was having severe chest pains. We found her wedged between her bed and the wall, wearing next to nothing. We hauled her out as gently as we co
uld. She was still alive. We got her on a stretcher, put her aboard the ambulance and gave her oxygen on the way to the hospital. I was reassuring her all the way. Then, a few minutes after she was taken into the emergency room, as I looked on, she died.
Old Judge Watson—I have forgotten his first name—was called in to certify the death. The vertebrae in the judge’s neck were fused together and he could no longer turn his head. So he would swivel his whole body, shoulders, head and all. He came in, looked down at the body, swiveled back and forth like a lighthouse for about half a minute, then croaked two words:
“Heart attack!”
That was all. The verdict was rendered. The authorities were finished with this woman. It was as though she had sunk beneath the surface of a dark sea. The stiff-necked old judge stumped out of the room, leaving us with the silent cadaver. Those two words were all the epitaph she got that night, and the sudden finality of it all impressed me greatly.
Certain scenes are engraved on my memory from those days. I remember the night we were called to the scene of a domestic dispute. A crippled husband had beaten his wife, using his crutch and the brass post from a four-poster bed. I remember another case in which a man got in a fight during which he was hit over the head with a large ketchup bottle. When we arrived the whole scene seemed to be weltering in red gore. I can stand the sight of blood, but the smell of it repels me. I did not think a human body could contain so much blood. In fact, it can’t. A part of the sea of red was ketchup. The man survived and probably went on to other fights. I remember picking up a young man from an overturned car. He had a broken arm and moaned at me, asking where we were taking him. “The hospital,” I said. Suddenly he began flailing away at me with both arms, broken and whole, trying to escape. It was all I could do to hold him down. It turned out he had stolen the car.
Dead Men Do Tell Tales: The Strange and Fascinating Cases of a Forensic Anthropologist Page 1
