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

by Maples, William R.

  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 reinfor
ced 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!

  Alas, it must be admitted from the outset that dismemberment is an extremely effective means of concealing a victim’s identity. In this chapter, I warn the reader fairly and beforehand, the riddles will outnumber the solutions, and the scattered remnants of many of these victims must await the Last Judgment, to be reunited and speak the truth about their final hours.

  Dismemberment cases are often lit with a baleful, lurid light in my mind. In most of my cases I have to place myself in the role of the victim, to see what happened at the time of death. I imagine the gun firing at me, or the knife, or the hammer, or the ax, rising and falling, sinking into my body. The victim and I, we are trying to defend ourselves. We throw our forearms up, we grapple with our fingers, we turn our heads aside, clinging to life. In such cases I relive the crime from the victim’s standpoint, and the victim is very personified and individualized.

  But in dismemberment cases the victim is already dead, and I must place myself inside the brain of the murderer, who has slain his victim and who is now cutting him to pieces. I become the dismemberer, imagining the scene, the tools, the strokes that hack the body asunder. “Why did you cut there?” I ask myself. “What implement did you use to do this? Did you pause to catch your breath? Were you in a hurry? Did you fling down one tool in disgust and seize another?”

  Many dismemberments are done in bathtubs—more things come out of bathtubs than bathtub gin, I assure you!—and most of my cases seem to involve motorcycle gang members or people involved in the drug trade. The cases seem to cluster along the 1-95 corridor in Florida, and if the state has a Dismemberment Capital, it is probably Daytona Beach. Interstate highways are the veins and arteries by which crime circulates in America. Serial killers seem to float through them like blood cells, sometimes fast, sometimes slow. Crimes committed along interstate highways ought to be considered extraterritorially, apart from the normal rules of geography, and separate from a state’s good name. These huge highways form a kind of fifty-first state of their own, a state whose flower is the deadly nightshade and whose state bird is the vulture.

  When I first got into forensic anthropology people tended to use hacksaws to dismember bodies. They were the tool of choice for killers because they are easily available, easily disposable, and their fine, serrated blades cut very efficiently through bone. It is a lot easier to saw through a human bone with a hacksaw than with a wood saw. I have verified this myself.

  On the other hand, hacksaws are a great help to us who investigate such dismemberments. Very often a new hacksaw blade will leave a smear of paint on the bone surfaces—gray, orange, blue, yellow. Such smears can be analyzed chemically and very often matched up to a specific brand of saw blade.

  In recent years, however, hacksaws have been supplanted by chain saws. Chain saws have certain advantages: the killer saves time and effort with a chain saw. But of course the disadvantage is that chain saws are incredibly loud and messy. They sling sprays of blood and debris in all directions. Chain saws, too, yield evidence to the eye of the experienced investigator. Often their cuts are quite individualized, differing noticeably from one model to the next. Sometimes we can even recover chain-saw oil from the bone surfaces which can be chemically analyzed. Although I have not heard of it done yet, there will undoubtedly come a day when the debris left over by a chain saw after a dismemberment, or even minute traces of flesh, bone and blood on the chain-saw blade itself, will be analyzed for their DNA content and matched up with the DNA of the victim.

  In the collection of the C. A. Pound Human Identification Laboratory is a special set of cow bones which is very precious to me. As my experience with dismemberments increased, I decided it would be useful to have a catalog of saw marks as a sort of reference library. I therefore asked a technician at the Florida Museum of Natural History to do me a favor. I took him a box of fresh soup bones and asked him to saw through them with every type of saw we could think of: kitchen saws, table saws, wood saws, band saws, hacksaws, crosscut saws, pruning saws, chain saws, even anatomical Stryker saws, whose oscillating blade is designed to cut through bone, but not flesh. Under microscopic analysis every different type of saw will make a different type of tooth pattern in bone. A Stryker saw, for example, produces circular arcs of short radius, with some overlapping. A band saw’s cut is very smooth. It leaves few tooth marks and those it does leave tend to be straight, fine and seldom overlapping. Hacksaw blade marks often overlap, because the person doing the sawing will change the angle of attack as he cuts through the bone. They look like a tiny, skewed tic-tac-toe board with thousands of squares. Chain-saw marks go straight through bone. A table saw with a rotating eight-inch blade, the kind a handyman might have mounted on his worktable, produces parallel curves. We labeled and photographed all these cut-patterns carefully. The collection is a valuable resou
rce, though by now I carry most of the patterns in my head.

  Anyone who has carved a chicken or a turkey knows that it is much easier to cut through the joint than through the solid bone. But you would be amazed how few dismemberers actually remove the legs at the hip. Most of them saw through at crotch level, leaving a stump of thighbone still attached to the pelvis, usually several inches long. This stump is a godsend to the investigator. It is here that we look for our saw marks. This upper leg bone, the femur, has very thick walls at this point and these walls often furnish very clear evidence of the implement used to cut through them. Thin-walled bones aren’t nearly as good for this purpose. Even if a knife is used to disarticulate the joints, it will leave telltale gashes as well. My point is, there is no way to cut a body up and leave no traces of the tools you use. Hew at them though you may, bones yet will have their say.

  In 1981, I was called to a medical examiner’s office in Leesburg, in central Florida’s Lake County. There I heard an extraordinary tale. It seems someone had observed a furry white dog, of a poodlelike breed, eating something on the side of the road. It developed that the dog was nibbling on the lower portion of a left human leg, very fresh. The dog had been hungry, and most of the muscle tissue was already devoured. A week later the lower portion of a right leg was found near Daytona, in Volusia County, over a hundred miles away.

  When I compared these legs I found that they were very consistent with one another and almost certainly came from the same body. One of the most telling signs appeared on the knees: the skin below the knees showed a matching pair of calluses, of the type commonly seen on the knees of surfers. The legs had been chopped off an inch or so above the knee joint, the cuts passing through the lower kneebones at the same height on both legs. Microscopic analysis of the cut bone surfaces showed the fine straight marks of teeth that overlapped one another, as if the angle of attack had changed during manual sawing. This was a classic hacksaw dismemberment.