Whoever wishes to plumb the depths of man’s inhumanity to man need only scan the textbook, the Medico-legal Investigation of Death, edited by two pathologists, Werner U. Spitz and Russell S. Fisher, one of the standard texts in our field. It is a 623-page tome filled with photographs that will sear the eyeballs of the uninitiated, though it holds no terrors for me and my colleagues.
In it are shown men, women and children in every stage of death and decay. Every refinement of murder and torture, every bizarre accident of fate and fortune, is laid out within these pages in dispassionate detail. Here are bodies shot, stabbed, hanged, bludgeoned, poisoned, mangled, decapitated, dismembered, flayed, drowned, strangled, stretched, crushed, burned, dried, mummified and plank-stiff with rigor mortis. Here are bodies that have been gnawed by dogs and rats, fish and alligators, beetles and roaches; bodies that are corrupt and frothing with fly eggs and maggots. And here, too, are bodies preserved with wondrous purity and freshness, enfolded soon after death in a bright crystalline coverlet of snow and ice, cradled by cold and seemingly immortal in their mortality.
But in many ways the most dreadful chapter in this Black Museum is Chapter Eighteen, which deals with the investigation of wrongful deaths in childhood. Its frontispiece is the body of a newborn infant, stabbed to death many times. One of the collaborators on this chapter, Dr. James T. Weston, calls child murder and child torture “man’s inhumanity to man in its most extreme form,” and he notes that this darkest of deeds has been “rationalized by virtually every justification known to man, including religious beliefs and practices, discipline and education and, to a large degree, economic gain.” Children are so defenseless and so innocent that these crimes seem particularly horrendous. “Whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depths of the sea,” warned Jesus Christ in Matthew 18:6. A millstone seems a very light punishment, in my eyes!
Some of the cases and photographs in this chapter can break your heart. There is the child who was choked to death by pepper, which its parents forced it to inhale for punishment. There is the child parboiled over half its body by immersion in hot water. There is the child whose frenulum, the stringy halter connecting the upper lip to the gum, is torn because he has been hit in the mouth so often (a lacerated frenulum is a common finding in physically abused children). There is the baby beaten to death by a drunken father be cause its crying interrupted a TV football game. There are the looped weals on the back and buttocks of a child beaten with an electrical extension cord—dozens and dozens of angry weals on a child’s small back. There is a terrible photograph showing blackened necrosis of the fingertips of a child “sustained in an effort to protect himself when repeatedly beaten on the head.”
I do not recite these horrors for low effect. I have two children myself, both girls, now grown, with sons and daughters of their own. I can feel keenly the pain a normal father feels in his imagination at the mere thought of such brutal injuries. It costs me an effort, in my professional capacity, to put aside the outrage any human being must experience when brought into contact with these depravities. Yet put it aside I must, if I am to reach clear and dispassionate conclusions in my investigations.
The more we know about these affairs, the more alert we will be to their telltale signs. I hope sincerely that a day will come when the brutal parejit or adult will stay his or her hand, if only through fear of being found out; from the certain foreknowledge that the old excuses—“She fell;” “I turned my back for a minute, and it happened;” “He’s always so clumsy …”—will no longer hold water, but instead lead to swift intervention, prosecution and stern punishment.
I have had several cases involving young children and they have always remained vivid in my memory. One of the most disturbing of these involved the remains of a five-year-old girl which were brought to me for analysis. They were found in a cloth bag that had been thrown into a pond. Her mother and her mother’s boyfriend were accused of murder. There was evidence that they punished the child by forcing her to stand in the corner of the bedroom for approximately ten days without food or water or other fluids. She was not allowed to lie down and, whenever she collapsed, she was forced to stand up again. In a diabolical refinement of cruelty, a note was sent to her school informing her teacher that her medications required that she receive no food or water during the day. The teacher, knowing no better, complied with the strange request, becoming an unwitting accomplice in the poor child’s torments. Fortunately, she kept the note, and this telltale piece of paper was later used as evidence in the investigation of the little girl’s murder.
For murdered she had been. An indictment had been secured which charged that the girl had died of a penetrating wound to the skull. My part of this terrible case lay in the interpretation of injuries and, after a careful examination of the remains, I decided that the death-by-head-injury scenario was false. The hole in the little girl’s skull was natural. A small bone had simply fallen away from the decomposing skull, under water.
After I discussed my findings with the medical examiner, he returned to the district attorney and indicated to him the true cause of death: starvation compounded with possible blunt trauma caused by beatings on the abdomen. A new indictment was obtained, one that excluded the penetrating injuries. At the trial it came out that the little girl was forced to eat soap and recite the alphabet endlessly. She was whipped mercilessly with a belt whenever she wet her pants. She was forbidden to sleep, but instead had to stand nightlong in a half-packed suitcase. The mother’s boyfriend, a sadistic lout named Don MacDougall, was the child’s chief tormentor. The mother herself plea-bargained with the district attorney in return for a fifteen-year sentence. She has served her time, with time off for good behavior, and is already free. MacDougall was tried in early 1983 and was sent to prison. He was due to be released from the Madison County Correctional Institute in North Florida on New Year’s Eve 1992. Under the old penal regulations, MacDougall had managed to shorten his sentence by a certain number of days, for good behavior behind bars. But when it was learned he was to be let loose, there was such an outcry from the community that the Florida attorney general, Bob Butterworth, intervened personally and rescinded the early release date in MacDougall’s case. As of this writing, he is still behind bars, and as one who has seen the pitiable remains of his victim, I cannot feel sorry for him.
Sometimes it takes a long time to conclude a case. In 1983 a medical examiner from Naples, Florida, sent me the skull of another five-year-old girl. He wanted to know what kind of weapon had damaged the skull. As I examined the skull carefully, I found that something had struck the little girl in the center of the forehead and crushed her fragile bones through the inner halves of both eyes, then passed through her frontal bone, producing a defect that extended from the base of her nose sloping upward and backward almost to the center of the top of her head. It was a terrible injury, caused by terrific force. It must have killed her instantly.
After taking some measurements and looking at sharp angles formed by the crushed bone, I reported that the weapon had a flat surface, two sharp angles and parallel sides. It appeared as if she had been struck by the narrow edge of a two-by-four piece of lumber, or something very similar in shape and dimensions. That was all I could determine.
Years passed. Then, in 1992, almost ten years after her death, an investigator told me he had interviewed a pedophile already in prison, who had admitted that he had killed the girl. We had to exhume the rest of her body from the cemetery to gather additional evidence, but the confession of the murderer agreed very closely with my original findings. He told police he had used, not a two-by-four, but a piece of building block about an inch and a half thick. Its sharp angles and straight, parallel sides matched the injury to the little girl’s skull exactly. Eventually he pleaded guilty to the crime and the case was finally closed. The little girl’s skull, which had been separated
from her body as evidence, has been finally buried with her.
Our first impressions are always the strongest. One case in particular has haunted me for years because of the powerful impression it made on me at the time, and because it was one of the first such cases I encountered. It involved the dismemberment of a young girl, just thirteen years old, and it occurred in 1978.
Her skull was found inside a paint can only a couple of weeks after the child herself disappeared from a school bus stop on the east coast of Florida. The skull was clean when it was found in the paint can and the paint can itself was rusty and had probably rusted before the death of the child. This detail was of some importance, as you will see. The rest of the child’s body was never found.
My analysis disclosed that the cartilage covering the occipital condyle, the bone that supports the skull on the neck, had been cut on its forward surface and bent backward, while the cartilage was still fresh. Now when I first saw this skull, after the police brought it to me, this tab of cartilage had dried, blackened and hardened, but a microscopic analysis showed that the cuts had been made before this drying and hardening took place.
The conclusion was obvious and grisly: a knife had been used to remove the head from the bones of the neck immediately after death. Additional cuts were found in various places on the skull, some in places deep within it, places where even a knife used in the most ferocious assault could not reach. I concluded that a knife had been used to deflesh the remains after death.
There was a fracture of the upper jaw which probably resulted from a blow under the chin. So blunt trauma had taken place; the young girl had been hit hard, perhaps hard enough to kill her, almost certainly hard enough to knock her unconscious.
Rusty scratches parallel to one another were found on the top of the cranial vault. Now, since the police investigators had carefully cut the paint can apart and spread it open to remove the skull, we could surmise that these scratches occurred when the skull was forced through the rusty rim of the can by the murderer. That meant that there was no soft tissue on the skull when it was forced into the can. It must have been boiled, to have been rendered so clean in so short a length of time.
Bone during life is covered with a very tough fibrous material called periosteum. Pardon the illustration, but when you eat barbecued ribs, the tough fibrous material that makes the meat adhere to the ribs is the deceased pig’s periosteum. In the case before me, I concluded that, even if shreds of periosteum had been left on the skull when it went into that paint can, those rusty scratches could not have been made on the surface of the bone. Therefore all the periosteum had been carefully and thoroughly removed by the killer.
Gradually a terrible picture emerged. Abducted, beaten, murdered, decapitated, her skull scraped clean with a knife and then boiled and jammed into a rusty paint container—the little girl had met a cruel and terrible fate. Though her identity was established, and the time of her abduction was pinned down, no arrests were made.
Often in the years that followed I thought about that small, pathetic skull. Some years later I asked to see it again, hoping that with experience and hard-won expertise I might spot something I had missed in my first analysis—in vain. I had learned all I could learn from it. I was almost resigned to the fact that not all murders can be solved and that this little girl was among those innocents whose deaths go unavenged. The only bitter consolation in this case was that the girl’s parents knew what happened, and that their daughter was dead beyond a doubt. So many cases of missing children are never resolved; and the parents remain in agonies of uncertainty for the rest of their lives, always clinging to the faint hope that the child may still be alive somewhere. In such cases the lives of the parents are often wrecked forever.
Then, in the early part of 1994, as this chapter was being written, a man was arrested in New England in connection with the murders of several twelve- and thirteen-year-old children. I learned that he lived in the same county as the decapitated thirteen-year-old whose skull I had examined so carefully. At the same time, another twelve-year-old girl was murdered in an adjoining county, in a case I had also investigated at the time. I have passed the case numbers on to investigators. I hope that a demonstrable link can be found. I hope that the law has caught up with a monster.
Sometimes we get confirmation of our findings from the murderer’s own lips. In 1990 a man named Michael Durocher, who was on Death Row at the Florida State Prison in Starke for another crime, and who saw his appointment with the electric chair draw ever nearer, decided to get certain matters off his conscience.
Durocher told investigators where he had buried his girlfriend, Grace Reed, her five-year-old daughter, Candice, and his own six-month-old son, Joshua, all of whom he had murdered some ten years earlier. Durocher was under a death sentence for the 1986 shotgun slaying of a Jacksonville store clerk, whom he robbed of forty dollars and a car. He had also been convicted of fatally beating a roommate in Jacksonville in 1988, and received a life sentence for that crime.
Now, in 1990, following Durocher’s directions, a team from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE) located the bodies of the children, Candice and Joshua, as well as that of Grace Reed, in hidden graves in Green Cove Springs. Durocher admitted that he shot the mother and daughter with a shotgun, but when investigators asked how the baby died—this baby was his own son—he suddenly fell silent. Then, with a grim smile, he said cryptically: “That’s for you to find out.”
Indeed, forensic analysis clearly showed that the woman was shot in the back of the head with a shotgun and the jacket and bones of the little girl showed that a shotgun blast hit her in the back near her right armpit and tore through near her breastbone.
But the bones of baby Joshua had not a single mark on them. Clearly he was not killed with a shotgun. Was he stabbed? Smothered? Choked? Or had he been buried alive? “That’s for you to find out,” Durocher had said. I took him at his word and accepted the challenge. With infinite care, I bent my attention to the tiny, mostly skeletonized remains before me, which belonged to an infant murdered ten years earlier.
The ribs were not in good condition, but as far as I could see there were no nicks on them. They were clean. In cases of stabbing murders involving adults, the stabbing implement will not strike any bone about fifty percent of the time. In children, the probability is obviously much higher, because children’s bones, especially their ribs, are much closer together. But in this case there was no sign of bone damage.
The baby was still dressed in overall rompers with a bib going up to straps across his shoulders. The legs opened on their inner seams so that his diapers could be changed. Under the bib of the overalls was a T-shirt with hearts and balloons on it and over the clothing of the upper body was a jacket with a hood. All the snaps on the rompers were closed. The straps at the top of the bib were fastened, the shirt was in place under the straps and bib. The top snap of the jacket was closed, but the lower two snaps were opened.
We photographed the clothing still in place and could see no perforation in the back, in the front, or anywhere. But then I discovered that, if I raised the lower corner of the unsnapped jacket and peeled it back, there was a perforation in the bib. When I examined the T-shirt beneath the bib, I found another perforation, with the same tilt of its axis, in the same location as the one in the bib. Under the microscope the synthetic threads could be seen to have a sharp, slanted cut at their ends.
I reported my conclusions to the prosecutor and the defense attorney: that in my opinion the child had been carefully stabbed to death, by a murderer who was fastidious enough to lift the corner of the baby’s jacket, slip the knife in through the two layers of clothing underneath, and then coolly replace the jacket over the dying infant’s fatal wound.
I was quite confident of my conclusions, but apparently the prosecutor was not. Later, however, Durocher broke down and pleaded guilty to first-degree murder in these three deaths and was given three more death sentences. After his
conviction, the text of an interview he had had with a prison psychiatrist was made available to the court. The prosecutor telephoned me, excitement tingling in her voice, and told me that I had been right. Durocher had confessed to stabbing the baby in the left chest, underneath its jacket, just as I had said. I told the prosecutor I was not surprised, that I had been confident I was right all along, and that she ought to have trusted me more. Was I arrogant? I hope not.
Durocher went to the electric chair in the fall of 1993. At the end he behaved stoically, refusing to beg for clemency, or to pursue legal appeals, or even to seek a stay of execution. To Florida Governor Lawton Chiles he wrote forthrightly that he believed in capital punishment and added: “I respectfully request that justice now be served.” It was. Michael Durocher is no longer among us. Unfortunately, neither are the five other people he senselessly murdered, including his own infant son.
Because of my connection with the case, I was invited to be present at Durocher’s autopsy but had to decline, because I was to be in Hawaii that day, working with some Vietnam War remains. In Florida, executed criminals are not autopsied in prison. After being electrocuted and pronounced dead, they are loaded into a funeral coach and taken to the District 8 medical examiner’s office in Gainesville.
When one is present at such autopsies, one’s thoughts naturally revert to the question of capital punishment. I suppose I have an idealistic, humanistic admiration for countries like Great Britain that have abolished the death penalty altogether; but when I return to my work in the United States I conclude reluctantly that we Americans may not yet be sufficiently advanced to take that sublime step. I have seen cases—too many cases—of people who have served time for one murder killing again after being released. I have seen the bodies of prisoners murdered in jail by killers who are still serving time. I once saw the mutilated corpse of a prisoner who had been handcuffed, stabbed through the eyes and in other parts of his body, then thrown off a third-floor balcony inside the prison.
Dead Men Do Tell Tales: The Strange and Fascinating Cases of a Forensic Anthropologist Page 14
