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

by Maples, William R.

  But the story did not end with the reburial. The unexpected revelation of the skull enabled investigators to settle once and for all a rumor about King Robert, put forward in 1327 by the French chronicler, Jean Le Bel. Le Bel said King Robert died of la grosse maladie, a medieval euphemism for leprosy. Today leprosy can be treated and arrested with such drugs as dapsone and rifamprin, but in the Middle Ages the visitation of the disease sentenced the sufferer to lifelong banishment and a lonely, lingering death. The disease germ, Mycobacterium leprae, hates heat and heads for the cooler areas of the body: the buttocks, the nose, the extremities of the limbs and, in males, the testicles. Here it multiplies and gnaws away at nerve endings and skin and cartilage tissue. As the nasal cartilage and the palate are destroyed, the patient’s features undergo a kind of collapse, resulting in the classic “leonine” or lionlike face characteristic of leprosy. But because leprosy can mimic almost any skin disease, it is often very difficult to tell whether the “lepers” of the Bible or the Middle Ages really had the malady.

  Enter Vilhelm Møller-Christensen. This Danish doctor, endowed with superhuman patience, had made a hobby of examining medieval skeletons in Denmark since the 1930s. In 1944, while working at Aebelholt Abbey in Denmark, he had unearthed the skeleton of a young woman whose bones were terribly deformed. He suspected leprosy, but to verify his thesis years of patient work were needed. He learned that medieval leper hospitals were usually dedicated to St. George (known as St. Jørgen in Danish), and that there had been thirty-one such hospitals in medieval Denmark. On the property of a farm near Naestved, known as St. Jørgen’s Farm, long and patient digging revealed the most extensive medieval graveyard for leprosy victims ever discovered. Over a twenty-year period Møller-Christensen unearthed, cleaned and preserved more than 650 skeletons. Many had their upper incisors missing and their maxillae eroded, a deformity Møller-Christensen called fades leprosa, the “leprous face.”

  In 1968 the Danish doctor was finally able to examine the cast of the skull of King Robert. He needed only a few minutes’ inspection to reach a conclusion. The ravages of fades leprosa were unmistakable. “The matter finally lay beyond dispute,” wrote Michael Howell and Peter Ford in their engaging 1985 book, The Ghost Disease. “A great man had been brought low by a terrible affliction. Robert the Bruce, King of Scots and a hero of his country, ended his days as a leper.”

  Perhaps the single most eloquent and affecting skeleton I have ever examined belonged to Joseph Merrick, the so-called “Elephant Man,” whose story has reached a modern audience thanks to a popular play and motion picture.

  For me, the Elephant Man is no artistic stage prop, nor a distant, historical footnote, but a deeply moving reality. I have carefully studied his bones, and these extraordinary relics made an indelible impression on me, I who have seen thousands of skeletons in every conceivable state of wholeness and decay.

  I had two reasons for requesting to examine these remarkable remains. I wanted to look closely at Merrick’s skeleton because it seemed to me that photographs and drawings of him in life showed distortions that did not particularly match the photographs of the skeleton. And since the skeleton and the body cast of Joseph Merrick were prepared immediately after his death and are both kept at the Royal London College of Medicine Museum, it was possible to use modern superimposition techniques to overlay one image upon another, the external body cast and the inner bones, matching them up. After an examination that lasted several days, we discovered that, to a surprising extent, Merrick’s deformities belonged to his skin, not to his skeleton.

  But there was another reason I felt it important to do this project. The museum’s curators told me that at that time, in 1988 the American pop star Michael Jackson had made a startling offer to buy the Elephant Man’s skeleton for a million dollars. The museum quite properly rejected his offer, but as soon as word of it got out, long-lost Merrick relatives came scampering out of the woodwork, eager to “rescue” the skeleton from the museum’s collection. One may speculate as to their motives. I felt that, in the face of such demands to release this unique, famous and quite irreplaceable skeleton, it would be helpful to demonstrate that the bones of the Elephant Man could still contribute something to science. Human remains should not remain idle in museum collections. Medical museums are not attics in which to store things merely for curiosity’s sake. Their contents should serve some ongoing scientific purpose. If the remains of Joseph Merrick were to stay in the collection, it was necessary to prove they belonged there. I hoped I was helping to “hold the fort,” together with the museum’s curators, against people who wished to traffic with Merrick’s bones.

  Nor was this a makework project. The diagnosis of the genetic disorder that Joseph Merrick suffered from has lately been called into question. Dr. Frederick Treves, who discovered the Elephant Man and wrote the original monograph on him, diagnosed Merrick as suffering from multiple neurofibromatosis. But recent articles have suggested that it might be Proteus syndrome, a newly discovered and rather obscure disorder.

  Not being a pathologist myself, I didn’t want to jump into that controversy, but I did want to make sure that the evidence of the skeleton and body cast was thoroughly used and would remain available to those pathologists interested in the question.

  The Royal London College of Medicine Museum is a fascinating old building. Pacing the corridors of its upper floors, one feels the atmosphere of Victorian medical schools. I was there at Christmas-tide, 1988, and the building was like an icebox inside. I would come away from the hospital in the gloomy evenings, my breath fuming in damp dark, yet breathing the air of Charles Dickens, partaking of the spirit of some of the characters from A Christmas Carol or The Old Curiosity Shop. London is my favorite city, a veritable time machine, allowing you to slip back easily into bygone epochs simply by turning a corner, stepping into a narrow alley or shadowy byway.

  Besides Merrick’s bones, the hospital has a rich and macabre collection of oddities, including evidence of the famous 1911 “Siege of Sidney Street,” in which police battled a gang of anarchists. There is a specimen in a jar—a bit of tissue with a bullet wound in it—taken from the body of one of the police constables killed by the anarchists.

  To reach the floor where Merrick’s skeleton was laid out for me, I climbed two flights of a back stairway. Just before the stairs, the walls were hung with the names and photographs of past medical staff members. There I saw honored Francis Camps, the famous forensic pathologist; Watson Jones, one of the premier orthopedic surgeons of his time; and Grafton Elliot Smith, whose magnificent study of Egyptian mummies remains one of the best ever done.

  The Merrick skeleton normally resides in a large room in the museum. But for my examination it was moved to a small workroom, which contained among other things a large tank of tropical fish and a window looking down at the narrow street alongside the hospital. This view must have been very similar to the one once glimpsed by Joseph Merrick himself, for he spent his last years in two rooms of this hospital. The room we finally entered had an old-fashioned warded lock with a single plate coming down at the end, with a keyhole-shaped keyhole, which opened to a large old-fashioned heavy iron key.

  There, facing us on a low platform, stood the famous skeleton.

  I was surprised to see how small it was. Merrick had been a short man in life, and his stature had been shortened further by scoliosis, or curvature of the spine. I was also struck immediately by the great differences between the left and right sides of the skeleton. The bony defects were not at all symmetrical. Merrick’s infirmity had invaded his right side utterly but spared parts of his left. The right side of his skeleton showed vastly greater enlargement and bony growth, while the left side was mostly lacking these defects. Even in the skull, the right side of the braincase displayed massive nodules of bone; but the left side was smooth and unaltered, except by the small rectangular window through which Merrick’s brain had been removed during the postmortem preparation. This little win
dow was closed with metal latches.

  I measured the body cast, then the skull, from various directions. I prepared numerous video and photographic images, so that we could actually decide where his flesh met his bone, the exact thickness of Merrick’s skin tissue. Thus we were able to establish exactly how much of the abnormal growth was the result of soft-tissue tumors and how much was owed to bone changes. As I have said, we found that most of the changes in Merrick’s head were due to soft-tissue abnormalities and not skeletal deformities.

  Gradually, however, the cold light of science yielded to a host of human emotions. By passing my hand, very lightly, close to the surface of the massive body cast of Merrick’s features, made after his death, I experienced a ghostly sensation: I could actually feel Merrick’s hairs, stuck in the plaster after all these years, yanked out of his dead body when the plaster was removed after his death on April 11, 1890. These hairs may one day furnish absolute proof, by means of the DNA they still contain, of the exact nature of Merrick’s malady. There may soon come a day when geneticists will be able to determine with certainty the genetic basis of Joseph Merrick’s profound infirmity. Ironically the bones themselves are probably devoid of DNA; they were boiled after Merrick’s death, prior to being mounted.

  Other parts of his body were also preserved, including large areas of his skin with the major soft-tissue growths represented. Unfortunately the museum lies near the London Docks, a section of the city heavily bombed during World War II. During the Blitz, the alcohol in those old specimen jars evaporated and the skin specimens dried out and were lost. They would have been an ideal source of DNA.

  Another small oddity: Dr. Frederick Treves, the famous surgeon who discovered and cared for Merrick, changed the Elephant Man’s name to “John Merrick.” No one knows why, and the error has crept into all the literature about Merrick, even the Blue Guide to London. But if one examines Treves’s original notes, as I did, one sees that the doctor mysteriously scratched out the word “Joseph” and wrote “John.” Merrick’s birth certificate is also at the museum, and on this document he is clearly identified as Joseph.

  This renowned and unique skeleton makes an almost physical impact upon your eye and heart. Perhaps it’s because we have read so much about the man who owned it, and we possess such poignant descriptions of Joseph Merrick, his sad life as a circus freak, his remarkable rescue from misery at the hands of Dr. Treves, and his ennobling struggle to realize his human potential. For my part, I can only declare that this skeleton, perhaps more than any other I have ever beheld, talks to you in very simple, powerful, human terms. It transfers emotions to you in a physical sense, with a directness and immediacy unequaled by any other skeleton I have ever seen. As I looked at Merrick’s hips—that oversized right hip, side by side with the undersized left hip—I seemed to behold poor Merrick himself, limping along with his slowly tapping cane; his outsize cap perched atop the great, swaying hood that curtained off his enormous head from mocking eyes; his shabby, concealing, ragged cloak: Merrick the man, as he was in life, making his way haltingly through the dark streets of Whitechapel at night, burdened with his terrible body. This image, I say, came to me with the vivid force of a vision, and it remains a haunting personal memory. As I beheld his hands, his delicate and almost perfectly formed left hand, and the huge, clublike right hand, I could see the two halves of Joseph Merrick, soul and body: the delicate, intelligent person caged within, who impressed all who came in contact with him with his essential humanity, his gentleness, patience and joy—and the dreadful, gnarled, outward facade of swollen bone and tissue run riot, which acted as a prison house to his spirit and made of him, to ignorant eyes, a monster.

  Both these truths were written unmistakably in that extraordinary skeleton, and reconfirmed my faith in the veracity and expressiveness of the human frame. Stretched to its uttermost, deformed beyond deformity, bone never lisps, stutters or falls dumb. It proclaims its truths the more loudly, the more it is taxed and twisted by unnatural nature and misfortune. Patient and silent while we live, our skeletons shout to heaven and posterity after we die.

  9

  “A Sunless Place …”

  Methought I saw

  Life swiftly treading over endless space:

  And, at her footpnnt, but a byegone pace,

  The ocean-past, which, with increasing wave,

  Swallowed her steps like a pursuing grave….

  So lay they garmented in torpid light,

  Under the pall of a transparent night,

  Like solemn apparitions lulled sublime

  To everlasting rest,—and with them Time

  Slept, as he sleeps upon the silent face

  Of a dark dial in a sunless place.

  —Thomas Hood, The Sea of Death

  Hell is not a place, some theologians declare, but a state of being. Evil has no independent existence, St. Augustine wrote, but is merely the absence or negation of good.

  Such subtleties lie beyond my competence. I am a scientist, not a clergyman. I do not know whence evil arises; but I have seen where it falls to earth, extinguishing life and disfiguring limb. I have examined carefully the aftermaths of evil, in that too late hour when it has already triumphed over the meek, the weak and the innocent. On my laboratory table I have read its atrocious language of wounds and outrages, the sight of which would wring the hardest heart.

  And I have been present, too, at the autopsies of evildoers after they have been executed by law. I have seen the black scorch marks left by the electric chair on their shaved heads and legs; seen their brains and viscera laid bare by the knife and the Stryker saw, the tops of their heads popped off with a twist of the Virchow skull-breaker, a tool shaped like a large, shiny skate key with flanges on its bore. I have seen their organs lifted out one by one, set aside, weighed and photographed. Afterward, the autopsy room is thoroughly cleaned and disinfected with diluted bleach; but if you look closely, you can see that the bits of chalk used to scrawl the organ weights on the blackboard are maculated with old human blood.

  On such occasions, we clearly do not expect demons to swarm gibbering from the opened braincase and flitter like black bats around the autopsy room. Nevertheless, it is impossible to regard a murderer’s brain without an involuntary tingle of curiosity: what lay deep within the coralline gray whorls of this small, silenced kingdom? What happened along its intricate hallways, within the fine cerebral web work of axons and dendrites, whose tiny, myriad sparkings are the physical basis of thought? Before it was shocked to death itself, what shocking poisons did this unique lump of flesh distill, to so subvert the mind of its owner and warp his will to evil?

  I cannot say. Over the years my work has brought me into contact with abysses of evil: the most depraved murders, and the most unregenerate murderers. But even after long, enforced communion with the foulest recesses of human nature, I cannot trace this dark river to its source, nor can I suggest a way to dam or divert it. From what I have seen, the impulse to evil is something deep within an individual from his very earliest years, if not from birth. At the center of the labyrinth of certain human personalities there lurks a Minotaur that feeds on human flesh, and we have not yet found the thread to help us map this maze and slay the beast.

  The instruments of murder are as manifold as the unlimited human imagination. Apart from the obvious—shotguns, rifles, pistols, knives, hatchets and axes—I have seen meat cleavers, machetes, ice picks, bayonets, hammers, wrenches, screwdrivers, crowbars, pry bars, two-by-fours, tree limbs, jack handles (which are not “tire irons;” nobody carries tire irons anymore), building blocks, crutches, artificial legs, brass bedposts, pipes, bricks, belts, neckties, pantyhose, ropes, bootlaces, towels and chains—all these things and more, used by human beings to dispatch their fellow human beings into eternity. I have never seen a butler use a candelabrum. I have never seen anyone use a candelabrum! Such recherché elegance is apparently confined to England. I did see a pair of sneakers used to kill a woman, and th
ey left distinctive tread marks where the murderer stepped on her throat and crushed the life from her. I have not seen an icicle used to stab someone, though it is said to be the perfect weapon, because it melts afterward. But I do know of a case in which a man was bludgeoned to death with a frozen ham.

  Murderers generally do not enjoy heavy lifting—though of course they end up doing quite a bit of it after the fact, when it is necessary to dispose of the body—so the weapons they use tend to be light and maneuverable. You would be surprised how frequently glass bottles are used to beat people to death. Unlike the “candy-glass” props used in the movies, real glass bottles stand up very well to blows. Long-necked beer bottles, along with the heavy old Coca-Cola and Pepsi bottles, make formidable weapons, powerful enough to leave a dent in a wooden two-by-four without breaking. I recall one case in which a woman was beaten to death with a Pepsi bottle, and the distinctive spiral fluting of the bottle was still visible on the broken margins of her skull. The proverbial “lead pipe” is a thing of the past, as a murder weapon. Lead is no longer used to make pipes.