Alas, the surfer’s legs were all of him that ever turned up. We never did find any other portion of that body, nor were we ever able to match a name to the remains. The route of the car could be ascertained fairly easily from the pattern of highways between the two far-flung legs. I made sure every sheriff’s office along the way was notified of the case and asked them to be on the lookout for more remains. But none was ever found.
Many of these slayings were drug-related, and organized crime has more murder experience than any other segment of society. They know how to kill, and they know how to cover their tracks.
So it was in the case of the torso with the Grim Reaper tattoo. In 1987, I was invited to examine a headless, armless, legless trunk, upon whose shoulder was tattooed a large, detailed and horrific picture of the Grim Reaper, wielding his scythe, his bony jaws open in laughter. Neither the head nor the limbs were ever found, but we had high hopes that the tattoo would identify the torso. Tattoos are visible for long periods after death, almost as long as any skin remains on the body. Indeed, when the outer layer of skin, the epidermis, slips off in early decomposition, the underlying layers of skin, where the tattoo ink actually is, are exposed, making the colors much brighter and more vivid than during life. Many medical examiners actually keep photo libraries of tattoos taken from dead bodies to aid them in identifying remains, and this tattoo certainly belonged in a museum. It stood forth in blazing Technicolor. It was wonderfully distinctive. The police showed photographs of it around at all the bars frequented by bikers and their hangers-on. But no one remembered seeing it—or at least no one would admit to having seen it. The body was never identified. The Grim Reaper mocked us all with his fleshless jaws.
Left unattended, our defunct bodies quickly become part of the food chain. On land, flies, beetles, cockroaches, rats, dogs, cats, pigs, raccoons, bears and any number of animals rush in and feast whenever death rings the dinner gong. In water, alligators, fish, crabs and sharks are no less hungry. In such cases, the investigator practically has to elbow his way through a crowd of famished banqueters before he can salvage and examine what is left.
One case that gave me some difficulty was a body found in two pieces, washed ashore in different locations in the Florida Keys. The head and portions of the neck were found in one spot and nearly all the rest—the torso, with legs attached and feet cut partly away—in another. It appeared that sharks had bitten at, but not quite through, the neck. There were clear marks of sharks’ teeth on the remains. But there were also very fine marks on the neck vertebrae still visible, which showed that the head had been sawed off. When I looked at the top vertebra protruding from the torso I saw similar marks which left no doubt: the body had been dismembered before it was thrown into the water. We were dealing with a murder, perhaps committed aboard a ship, and not a shark attack in the open sea.
I concluded that in this case a saw, probably a hacksaw, was used to dismember the body into three pieces, only two of which were ever found. Since both these fragments showed shark damage, I believe a shark got the rest of the corpse. Neither the victim nor his murderer was ever identified in this case, but at least we knew the killer was another human being, not a shark.
The shark, incidentally, is one of the true scavengers of the sea, and from time to time portions of human remains are found in sharks’ bellies, but only if the shark is caught and cut open soon after swallowing them. The stomach acid of the shark’s digestive system is extremely corrosive. It dissolves bone so quickly that the window of opportunity to find remains inside a shark is very small. A tibia I once examined, which had been taken from a shark’s stomach, was reduced to a paper-thin cylinder of bone, with a greatly reduced diameter. It was so eaten away that investigators originally believed it was an ulna, a bone from the arm. I was able to set them straight: it was a tibia, a leg bone, dissolved to a shadow of itself by acid. Of all sharks, tiger sharks are fondest of human flesh. They are the species whose entrails most often yield up human remains.
In March 1990,1 was called back in on a case involving a severed head that had been found in October 1987, in a closed vinyl bucket on the east coast of Florida, in Palm Beach County. For three years the head had been kept at the Palm Beach County medical examiner’s office, awaiting identification or a lucky break in the case. The medical examiner’s patience was finally rewarded. He learned that in 1983, four years before the head came to light, a headless trunk had been found clear across the Florida peninsula, propped against a pasture fence in a field belonging to a former county sheriff. A chain saw had been used to cut the head from the body.
Even though the two pieces were separated by many miles and several years, this case nevertheless resulted in one of the neatest match-ups of any dismemberment in my experience. The head had been cut off just below the hyoid bone, or Adam’s apple. The neck ended just above the thyroid cartilage. By superimposing old x-rays, taken of the torso four years earlier, and new ones taken of the head (which had been very well preserved in its sealed vinyl bucket), we were able to prove they belonged together. The victim was identified as a Jamaican who had reportedly been involved in drug smuggling. In this case we were able to come up with a name for the victim and to take the head and body off the police’s books. But his murderer escaped unpunished. No one was ever charged with this death.
The following month I received a complete body in two portions in the small and large suitcases of a set of matching luggage bought at Sears. The suitcases in this case were of the Hercules brand and were found in two different counties, miles apart: West Palm Beach in Palm Beach County and Fort Pierce in Martin County.
The body was cut in two through the lower back, at the top of the fifth lumbar vertebra. This was a somewhat unusual but not entirely unknown method of dismemberment. It all depends how many portions you want. If you are going to be frugal and make only one cut, the lower back is obviously the place you would choose.
In this particular case, however, the lower portion of the body had been further dismembered through the thighs. The dismemberment was probably done with a fine-toothed saw, such as a hacksaw. The torso of the upper portion of the body was wearing a T-shirt advertising the Boot Hill Saloon, a bar in Daytona popular with motorcycle enthusiasts. The victim was identified as a biker, but again no one was ever charged with his murder. Obviously he was the victim of gang justice, and his killers scattered his remains after cutting him to pieces and packing him up into the twin suitcases for his final trip.
By now the reader will perhaps share some of my frustration over these dismemberment cases. Over and over again I have acted the part of “all the king’s horses and all the king’s men” in the old Mother Goose rhyme, trying to reassemble some poor Humpty-Dumpty of a murder victim, who didn’t fall off a wall, but who was most likely shot or stabbed to death, then laboriously sawed to pieces by his killer. At great pains, and against long odds, I have sometimes succeeded in reuniting pieces of bodies that seemed impossibly far-flung. Sometimes I can even make out the personality of the murderer and the circumstances of the crime. I can see a mental picture of the corpse cutter at work, panting and sweating, his teeth gritted, removing the head and limbs, one after another, with tools I can clearly identify. But all this is not enough. The pieces remain, the culprit goes uncaptured and unpunished.
The real victory in these dismemberment cases is often scientific and intellectual, rather than moral. More and more today, dismemberment cases are being treated with the attention they deserve. Under the old coroner system, nobody would look twice at a dismemberment. They were too puzzling and horrible to contemplate for long. A finding of “Body Taken Apart” would be entered, the remains would be buried and that would be the end of it. Now we are studying these appalling cases more and more closely, with a clearer knowledge of anatomy and with improved scientific techniques. As I have shown, we are sometimes able to piece together bodies that have been scattered practically to the four winds, across hundreds of miles; bodies
lost for many years. It is not every day that we have the satisfaction of seeing a murderer and corpse cutter convicted and led away in handcuffs as a result of our work, but we are making progress.
One of the ghastliest cases of dismemberment I ever encountered ended in the most satisfying way imaginable, with a dramatic plea of guilty within minutes of my testimony. I call it “The Case of the Pale-Faced Indian.” It happened this way:
In 1981, right after I’d finished helping dig up the bodies of the three drug smugglers down in La Belle, I was called in to identify a buried, dismembered body. The body belonged to a Gainesville man who owned land in a rural area. On this lot stood an unused house trailer. A Vietnam veteran named Tim Burgess, a desperate-looking man with long dark hair and flowing muttonchop whiskers, had asked permission to camp on the man’s property. The landowner agreed, but Burgess soon took advantage of his hospitality and moved into the vacant trailer. When the landowner finally asked him to leave, Burgess refused.
The landowner learned that Burgess had a criminal record and had been paroled from prison. He had been arrested several times. Once, while walking a pet Doberman in front of the White House in Washington, D.C., his dog had lunged at a passerby and Burgess’s coat had flapped open, revealing .45-caliber automatics and several hundred rounds of ammunition.
In short, Burgess was a creepy customer, a man with a violent past whose very sanity was open to question. Not wanting to confront him face to face, his reluctant landlord wrote a letter to Burgess’s probation officer. He complained that not only was Burgess squatting on his property without permission but he was also growing marijuana in the woods.
I have long since ceased to be amazed at the extraordinary quirks of our criminal justice system. The probation officer, a softhearted sort, did nothing more than write Burgess a letter revealing that his landlord had complained about him. In the same letter was a stern warning to Burgess—to destroy his marijuana crop.
This letter was the unfortunate landowner’s death warrant.
Completely unaware that Burgess was furious with him for tattling to his probation officer, the exasperated landowner went out to confront his trespassing tenant and have it out with him once and for all. He took his pet dog with him. Neither he nor the dog was ever seen alive again. When the landowner was reported missing a few days later, deputies went out to the property. There they found the victim’s pickup truck and his dead dog. As they searched the property, an investigator tripped over what appeared to be a stick protruding up at an odd angle from the ground. Closer inspection revealed it was no stick but the severed end of a human thighbone, with the flesh rotted, dried and retracted from it.
(An odd sidelight: a few months later, when the same investigator stepped into another patch of woods to relieve his bladder, he happened to discover another body. He had been searching for it for months, in a completely unrelated case. You would be amazed how many bodies turn up during these errands of nature; the body of the baby son of the famous aviator, Charles Lindbergh, was found by a truck driver in similar circumstances after the child was kidnapped in 1932.)
But to return to the bone protruding from the dirt: together with my archaeologist colleague, Dr. Sigler-Eisenberg, we set about digging up the remains. Both thighbones had been cut through and the legs placed alongside the torso in the grave. There was one rather shocking detail: the victim had been scalped, with the hair and soft tissue cut away from the entire top of the head. The body also showed evidence of shotgun wounds to the buttocks, the abdomen and the neck. He had been killed with three separate blasts.
Burgess had fled, but not far. He was reportedly seen going into the woods with a .357 magnum revolver a mile away from the spot where we were excavating. Immediately all the investigators rushed pell-mell from the scene, eager to catch the prime suspect. As the last of them faded from view, Dr. Sigler-Eisenberg and I looked at each other. We both realized that we were defenseless, alone at the scene of a terrible murder, with the probable murderer roaming in the woods nearby! We waited in some suspense until the officers returned a short time later—only to make themselves scarce again when it came time to hoist the rotting remnants into our vehicle. It is amazing how burly policemen can dwindle and disappear when there is dirty work like this to be done!
Burgess’s capture was a bit anticlimactic. While the search was still under way, he telephoned a neighbor who was a deputy sheriff and arranged to surrender to him personally.
The method of dismemberment in this case was unorthodox. Marks on one femur indicated that a knife was used to cut through the skin and muscle; then the knife was used to hack on the bones. If you have ever tried to use a large pocket knife or hunting knife to hack through a tree limb, you’ll find that at first it appears you are making great progress, but after a while your arm is tired and you are still no more than halfway through. The same thing seems to have happened here. Weary and frustrated, the killer then went for an ax and finished the amputation with a single ax blow. Having served his apprenticeship on one leg, he then proceeded with the ax to the second leg, which he also severed.
But the grotesque multiple methods used to chop up the corpse paled in comparison with the grotesque theories Burgess’s defense attorney raised at the trial. I have never seen a trapped man wriggle more artfully in court than Burgess did, through his lawyer. He pleaded not guilty to the charge of murder. He claimed he had acted in self-defense.
Burgess, his lawyer explained, believed he was an American Indian. The fact that he had scalped his victim proved that he had killed his opponent in self-defense, for Indians do not scalp helpless, unarmed people but only those whom they have slain in battle after a fair fight! I have never heard a more astonishing and original defense. The prosecutor actually arranged to call an ethnologist to the witness stand, to testify that this was absurd, that Indians had often taken scalps indiscriminately, even from victims they had not themselves killed, even from victims who remained alive after the scalping.
Then came my turn to testify. More than most others, dismemberment cases are an ordeal to testify about in court. I have to reveal in excruciating and grisly detail what exactly it is that I have learned from a set of human remains. As I speak, the court is hearing terrible things. The judge hears, the jury hears, the defendant hears—and oftentimes the mother, or father, or some other near, dear relative of the victim is listening to my testimony too, listening with tears trickling down their cheeks. At such times I cannot bear to think about the families. I shut them out from my mind. I focus on the remains, only the remains. They, not the living, are my sole concern. When a conviction does occur, it comes too late for the victim and is often scant comfort to the bereaved families. But it does help the future, potential victims of the killer, whose lives would be forfeit if he were not caught and punished.
But this time the dreadful recital of details had an astonishing result. I demonstrated to the jury with a folding hunting knife found in Burgess’s possession exactly how he would have had to hold the very end of the handle to get sufficient leverage to hack at the bones and cause the damage I had observed. My testimony was sharply challenged by the defense, so I had to go over it again and again, with much repetition, and explanations, and repeated demonstrations.
All this while, Burgess was fidgeting in his chair. After I finished my testimony, and the medical examiner was beginning his, the accused motioned to his attorney. A whispered conference ensued. At the end of it, Burgess’s attorney asked to approach the bench.
Burgess wished to change his plea to “guilty.” His attorney explained that Burgess found the demonstrations of the death and dismemberment of his former landlord so true to life, so evocative of the real event, that it was recalling memories too horrible for him to bear.
Hearing this, I confess I felt a thrill of vindication. It’s always damnably frustrating, at a trial, to know that the person in the courtroom most able to confirm your testimony about a crime, the person who knows every sing
le detail about it, is very likely the person on trial. He is sitting a few feet away from you, often staring right at you—but his lips are sealed forever. This case made up for many of the puzzling dismemberments which ended, after so much work on my part, in perplexity and riddles. This time at least, like the heavy clang and click of a prison door slamming shut, there was the satisfying sense of absolute certainty.
6
“When the Sickness Is Your Soul”
If it chance your eye offend you,
Pluck it out, lad, and be sound:
’Twill hurt, but there are salves to friend you,
And many a balsam grows on ground.
And if your hand or foot offend you,
Cut it off, lad, and be whole;
But play the man, stand up and end you,
When the sickness is your soul.
—A. E. Housman, A Shropshire Lad, xlv.
The notion of suicide is invested with an awful grandeur in most people’s minds. The sheer irrevocability of the act, the final plunge that tumbles the self-murderer into that shadowy realm “from which no traveler returns,” strikes our hearts with gloomy solemnity. In Western culture the approaches to suicide are guarded with grim religious anathemas and barred by the threat of perpetual curses and soul-blasting bolts of spiritual lightning. Dante consigns suicides to the seventh circle of his Inferno, where their shades are transformed to trees in a dark forest whose bleeding branches are forever torn by demonic birds. Strict Christian dogma forbids the self-slain body to rest in hallowed ground. The monks who bury Ophelia, Hamlet’s drowned sweetheart in Shakespeare’s tragedy, allow her coffin into the churchyard only reluctantly, at the “great command” of the king. Otherwise, “she should in ground unsanctified have lodg’d, till the last trumpet.”
Dead Men Do Tell Tales: The Strange and Fascinating Cases of a Forensic Anthropologist Page 8
