Dead Men Do Tell Tales: The Strange and Fascinating Cases of a Forensic Anthropologist

by Maples, William R.

  I saw terrible things during those nights, but I could not blink or turn away. My job depended on it. After a while it became a test of strength for me, to gaze unflinchingly at the dreadful aftermaths of accidents. Emergency room personnel deal with the same situations, but I would submit that the ER technicians see people after we ambulance men have tidied them up considerably. When we arrived at the scene, we were plunged into pure chaos. It was dark. Cars were overturned or on fire. Crowds were screaming. Police were yelling. Glass was broken. Smells of spilled fuel and roasted flesh were fresh. There is far more drama at the scene of an accident than there is in the emergency room afterward. At the hospital there are no shadows. Everything is clean and well lit and deodorized. Clean sheets and shiny instruments convey an atmosphere of relative calm and control. Already the horror is receding.

  I saw my first autopsy when I was eighteen years old. Most of the autopsies in those days in Austin were done at the funeral homes, as they still are in many places. Pathologists would come in and do the cutting, weighing and photographing. Some of these specialists were very friendly and kind to us young laymen. They would let us stay and ask questions during the procedure. Gradually, I began to be exposed to decomposed bodies and severe trauma. Our funeral home had the contract to handle the remains of servicemen killed in military plane crashes. I saw bodies burned nearly to cinders. I saw the white, bloated bodies of young airmen recovered from the Gulf of Mexico. Many nights I had the eerie experience of sleeping in a room with burned bodies in bags all piled up and clearly visible just outside the screened door. It was at this period that I gradually developed my ability to work with bodies and manage to eat food. I remember having a chili-and-cheese hamburger in the autopsy room after an autopsy, looking at the burger carefully, then taking a bite, and then another, and another.

  I saw tough policemen smoke cigars to keep the odors out of their nostrils. I remember the pathologist cutting through some medium-cooked soft tissue in a burned corpse while saying waggishly: “Well, I guess we don’t want barbecued ribs for lunch today”—and seeing the police run from the room, green with nausea.

  My life took on a strange, Jekyll-and-Hyde quality. By day, as an English literature undergraduate, I would contemplate the glories of Dickens, Trollope and Shakespeare. By night I would voyage into a world of dreadful pain and cruel misfortune, of flames and twisted steel, of bruisings, breakings and bleedings. I studied sonnets and suicides. I saw tragedies printed on paper and scrawled on asphalt. I dissected immortal poems from England and witnessed dead men and women cut carefully to pieces in Texas, under lamplight on stainless steel tables.

  Then I was graduated. Margaret and I married one month before I took my B.A. at the University of Texas in January 1959. McKern encouraged me to go straight on to a Ph.D. in anthropology, skipping the master’s degree. The University of Texas had no Ph.D. program in anthropology but McKern told me I could take courses elsewhere and he would supervise my progress personally. I decided, however, to work first for my master’s degree.

  It was useless. I flailed about in graduate school for a while, trying to make ends meet by moonlighting as a laboratory technician and grading exam papers. One summer I worked two jobs totaling forty-four hours a week, one of them as an athletic director in a school for retarded children, the other as a hospital orderly. At the same time I was attempting to take a full graduate course load. I was drained, exhausted after a year and a half. I was getting nowhere, it seemed. So as soon as Margaret won her degree in education I left school, went to Dallas and got a job with the Hartford Insurance Company as an investigator.

  An old pathologist once told me: “When in doubt, think dirty. You’ll be right ninety percent of the time.” It was good advice, and I had many occasions to put it to good use while investigating insurance claims. Although I came to detest this job and the human vermin it brought me into contact with, in retrospect it was the best possible training for my later career as a forensic anthropologist. If any young man would care to find out in a hurry just how low his fellow human beings can sink, let him become an insurance claims adjuster. Whatever tender blossoms of altruism flowered in his innocent soul, these will be ripped out by the roots in six months flat; I guarantee it. At the same time, he will come face to face with some of the most vivid, brilliant, highly plausible fictions ever spun by human ingenuity. I know I did.

  I shall not dwell on the tangled lies I had to unravel in those years. I learned to spot the people who specialize in falling down in front of vehicles. I learned about the “quick stop artists” who can brake their cars on a dime and cause rear-end collisions any time they like. I learned about physicians and chiropractors and the imaginative reports they would write about whiplash cases. I learned how reports were written charging that victims had suffered “permanent injury,” even though there was not the slightest trace of any injuries and the doctors admitted as much. How could they then diagnose “permanent injury”? Easily: there might not be any permanent injuries now; but, they assured us, many “permanent injuries” develop later as a result of such accidents!

  I had surreal talks with shyster attorneys, conversations that involved a complete suspension of belief on both sides. I would be talking to an attorney and would know he was lying and would know he knew I knew he was lying—and yet we had to talk on, grave-faced and sober, speaking in all seriousness, like two characters in a farce, fully cognizant of the fraud that choked the room like an invisible fog.

  Nor was all the fault on the side of the victims. I saw insurance companies that wouldn’t pay even though they were liable for accidents, because alert claims adjusters had swooped in early, beating the lawyers to the scene, and had obtained a statement from the victims that there were no injuries.

  In those shabby days my esteem for the human race waned considerably. Toward the end, alarm bells would go off in my brain at the mere sound of those quavering, plaintive words: “I just want what’s due me.” All the lies and rigamarole instilled in me a real thirst for the truth, a realization that the truth is a valuable and rare commodity.

  The skepticism of those days has stayed with me all my life and has made me a shrewder investigator than I might be otherwise. Some years later I caught a graduate student falsifying field notes in primate research in Africa. After I found he could not have been in the field, given his receipts and gasoline mileage, I fired him and sent him home. He said to me ruefully as I handed him his airline ticket: “YouVe always had a penchant for investigation.”

  At the time, however, I was miserable. I told Margaret that I wanted to go back to the ivory tower, back to the university. I wanted to get away from all the endless strife, controversy and dishonesty of the insurance business. I wrote my old teacher, Tom McKern, and asked if he thought I had the potential to become a forensic anthropologist, to make a career of it.

  McKern wrote back and said, in essence: “Come.” I went. In short order I earned my master’s degree, put together my thesis on Caddoan Indian skeletons and had someone turn it in for me. By the time I learned I had won my master’s degree, I was in Kenya, trapping baboons as part of a research project. I was an anthropologist, twenty-four years old.

  No primate makes a good pet. That includes humans. We and our cousins—the gorillas, the chimpanzees, the monkeys, including the baboons—are a rather uncivilized lot, fiercely proud and independent, but at the same time treacherous, greedy, aggressive and cruel. I carry a deep scar on my right arm, where an old baboon bit me, lacerating my ulnar artery and coming very near to costing me a limb. I hold no grudge. It was a fair fight. In the eyes of the baboon I was certainly in the wrong. I had jabbed him with a tranquilizer in an effort to capture him alive in Kenya, to ship him to a research laboratory in America. In his position, I would have tried to kill me too.

  My days in Africa marked me far more deeply than this hollow old wound in my arm shows. I caught malaria twice. I had to face down angry Masai tribesmen carrying spears. Wobble
-kneed and drunk on pure adrenaline, I confronted charging Cape buffalo bent on trampling me to muddy paste, and shot them seconds before their horns got intimately acquainted with my chest. For sheer terror I recommend the Cape buffalo; no departmental chairperson or budget committee can begin to compare with this shaggy mass of bone, muscle and rage.

  Kenya is forever glorious in my memory. In those magical times, thirty years ago, my wife and I were still discovering each other, truly building something together, amid the most exotic and beautiful surroundings imaginable. Both of our daughters were born in Nairobi.

  My years in Kenya confirmed me in the path I had chosen. Africa poured forth gifts that I have always treasured, made me a better teacher, gave me a perspective that broadened and deepened my research. There is no greater living laboratory for anthropology on earth than the immensity of Africa, with its startling displays of nature, “red in tooth and claw,” yet profoundly beautiful for all their savagery. What had been theoretical in my mind suddenly came to life before my eyes. I keep an articulated baboon skeleton on a shelf in my office, and it brings back memories of the Kenya and Tanzania I knew then: Kimana, where Hemingway camped and gazed at Kilimanjaro’s snows; the blue Chyulu Hills, the Tsavo National Park, Lake Manyara where the lions lie lazily up in the trees, paws dangling from limbs; the magnificent Serengeti Plain, Lake Magadi, Lake Natron, the Ngurumani Escarpment.

  I have tried to incorporate scenes from Africa into my lectures on anthropology and I think it has made them more interesting and down-to-earth. I can tell my students with eyewitness certainty that a lion will eat this but not that. I can set them straight about baboons, which are described in many textbooks as strict vegetarians, but which I have seen with my own eyes devouring hunks of freshly slaughtered baby antelope, chickens and other birds. Such lessons can’t be learned in books. Africa tided me over during some very lean years in Academe, furnished me with ideas for research projects that ultimately helped me win tenure.

  And it was all so magnificent: we breakfasted on mangoes and papayas. We saw plains of leaping oryxes, wildebeest and zebras, plains that scrolled out forever toward horizons of dust and rainstorms under purplish-blue skies. By night myriad stars shone, and in the limpid heavens the moonlight could be bright enough to read by. We had our clothes torn by “wait-a-bit” thorns, as they are called locally, and we roasted steaks of fresh-killed lesser kudu and impala at our campfires. At night the “bush babies,” a wide-eyed species of lower primate also known as the galago, used to bounce on the tops of our tents as if they were trampolines, jumping up to catch bugs lured by the light of our encampment.

  In those adventurous days I fought and fled from bush fires. I learned to fly, and piloted a plane over the Great Rift Valley, a vast geological feature that slices its way through East Africa. We travelled through the Ngorongoro Crater, a tremendous, extinct volcano whose rim encloses a tremendous ecosystem many hundreds of square miles in area, as green and gorgeous as some lost Eden. I took my wife and infant daughter for a visit to the mysterious Olduvai Gorge, and there we descended into the very deeps of time, where some of the earliest traces of man on earth have been found. The legendary Dr. Louis Leakey, who dug there for over thirty years and won a world-wide reputation as one of the giants of anthropology, hospitably treated us to lunch and tossed the salad with his own hands. I still have an old 8 mm home movie of the event, in which Leakey climbs the side of the gorge, scratching his bottom unselfconsciously, as any of the australopithecine protohumans might have done, in this same gorge, several million years earlier.

  I owed my sojourn in Africa, which began in 1962, to the good offices of my teacher, Tom McKern. In those days an outfit called the Southwest Foundation for Research and Education, based in San Antonio, was interested in acquiring baboons. Baboons, it had been learned, have a peculiarity shared with humans: they can get atherosclerosis, or clogged arteries, from eating a normal diet. Any animal can get atherosclerosis if you force-feed it gobs of cholesterol, but the baboon can apparently get it eating the same things we do. This made baboons a valuable research animal, and the foundation was interested in acquiring specimens.

  I served two tours at the foundation’s primate research center in Kenya between 1962 and 1966. Altogether, we trapped and shipped hundreds of baboons back to America and their descendants are still in this country. It would not surprise me to learn that the baboon whose heart was transplanted into “Baby Fay” in a controversial and unsuccessful operation in 1992 in California was descended from baboon grandparents I trapped in Kenya.

  I had seen baboons only in books and zoos before. Now I had to learn about them in the wild. I soon acquired the basics. Baboons run in troops numbering from about thirty to as many as two hundred individuals. There is considerable sexual dimorphism in baboons. Males and females differ markedly in size. Males weigh from about forty to sixty-five pounds. Females are much smaller and weigh from twenty to thirty pounds. Baboons are aggressive, but in most situations they are not a threat to humans unless they are trapped or if a young baboon is being threatened by a human within sight of its parents. They are fiercely protective of their young.

  We trapped the animals with a variety of techniques. The most common type of trap was a cylinder of strong wire mesh, about five feet high, with more mesh welded to the top and bottom. This cylinder was fitted with a thirty-inch sliding door that could be raised and lowered in metal runners.

  Inside the cylindrical trap we placed a small board shelf on two sticks, high up—too high for the baboon to stand outside and reach with his arm. On these shelves we placed our bait: maize. Baboons love maize. I have seen them running through maize fields in an orgy of gluttony, sticking an ear of maize under each arm, grabbing more ears, letting the first ears drop, replacing them with more ears, which fall when the next two ears are stolen. At the end of a row the baboon emerges with two ears of maize—and a whole trail of fallen and abandoned ears. They are the most improvident of thieves, forever stealing more than they can carry. I’ve known people who behaved in the same way, but that is another story.

  Luring the baboons into the traps was a long task, requiring patience and cunning. First we scattered maize on the bare earth in a suitable clearing. Then we brought the traps in, set them up, and scattered maize around them. Then we scattered maize inside the traps, with the doors wired open. Then we put an ear of corn on the shelf, with the door still wired open. Finally, after the baboons were completely lulled into complacency by this glorious, never ending bounty of free food, we tied one end of a thread to the ear of maize and tied the other end to the falling door of the trap.

  Bang! As soon as the baboon grabbed the ear of maize, the treacherous thread would break and down slammed the sliding door. When we arrived on the scene, there would be some very angry baboons gibbering and screaming and baring their fangs at us from inside the wire mesh traps. Amazing to relate, the creatures seldom had the wits to lift the door and escape. And they always ate the ear of maize clean, making the most of their time in captivity.

  Now they were within our power, and now came the ticklish part: getting the baboons out of the traps and back to camp. We used a syringe crudely fitted to a hollow pipe to inject them with a tranquilizer. I later learned that this tranquilizer was an experimental drug, phencyclidine, now widely recognized as the main ingredient in the illicit drug known as “angel dust.” It worked very well on the animals every time they had to be moved; but we noticed that after two or three doses they became violent and hard to handle whenever they saw us approaching with the pipe-syringe full of phencyclidine. I can only imagine that they did not have sweet dreams when under the influence of this drug. Certainly they came to hate it.

  Our usual method was to hold the needle ready and approach the trap. Usually the caged baboon would jump away from the door and we would seize the instant to jab them in the thigh with the needle and push the plunger. The doses were done by rough guesstimate. We would look at a baboon and
gauge the weight by visual inspection. In a few moments after the needle sank in, the beasts would get groggy. Then they would sway, totter and collapse on the cage of the floor. We waited a bit, then kicked the side of the cage to see if there was any reaction. Then came the moment of truth. I would open the door, grab the inert baboon firmly by the scruff of the neck and the base of the tail and haul the- creature out of the trap. It is essential to act quickly and decisively: grab, grab, yank and hoist. If you move quickly and get the proper grip, it is very hard for the animal to turn its head and bite you.

  All this I knew. All this I had done dozens of times. It was routine to me, second nature. Then one day, when I was hauling an old male baboon out of a trap, everything went horribly wrong. I had him by the neck and tail, there was no problem, everything was going according to plan. When I swung him up over the side of the pickup truck bed, his head swiveled around, so limply that it seemed to be lolling that way, merely because of gravity.

  But in the next instant the cunning old fellow came to life and sank a razor-sharp canine tooth into my arm, a fang several inches long and sharp-edged along its inner curve. It went through my flesh like a stiletto. I was too astonished to feel much pain. I immediately fell to the ground on top of the animal and held his head as immobile as I could. If he managed to push my arm away with his powerful limbs, the tooth would rip clear through my arm muscles and arteries. I knew from experience that this is how a baboon fights, sinking its teeth into its enemy, then pushing the enemy away and letting the tooth tear through the flesh.

  As I pinned the beast to the ground with the pierced arm, I beat him with my left fist on his zygomatic arch—the part of the skull near the cheekbone. It was some time before I could persuade him to open his mouth. I carefully unsheathed the long, bloody canine from my arm and disengaged it. The dripping-jawed old baboon was groggy enough to lie still on the ground now. I drove back to camp, the blood welling up from my wound in warm throbs. The ulnar artery had been nicked. I reached camp, leaped from the truck, ran for the first-aid kit and poured a surgical solution into the deep wound. It was approximately as soothing as napalm. I applied a pressure dressing to the wound and began dosing myself with erythromycin to fight infection. The nearest hospital was in Nairobi, a hundred and forty miles away, but before I could set out I had to wire all the trap doors open, in keeping with Kenyan game laws, so that no baboons could be caught in them and starve while we were away. I also had to give the old baboon who had wounded me another shot of phencyclidine. This time I erred on the side of caution, when it came to estimating the dosage.