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

by Maples, William R.

  Capital punishment is a kind of “scorched earth policy,” a last, desperate resort. We create a kind of sterile dead zone around a murderer and his deeds, a sort of “blasted heath” like that in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, where nothing lives, except for evil fogs and ghostly warnings. The murderer is gone, his victims are gone, and all that remains is a frightful memory, together with the grim certainty that the dead man will never torture, taunt or kill again. The families of his victims, however, inherit lifelong grief, never to be consoled.

  As for the various methods used to inflict capital punishment, I believe some of them are needlessly cruel. Hanging can be anything from a merciful narcosis, to an excruciating agony of strangulation, minutes long, to outright decapitation, if the condemned person falls too far. There is a classic article on hanging, published in 1913 in the British medical journal, The Lancet. Ideally, hanging dislocates the neck between the first and second cervical vertebrae, producing a fracture of the odontoid process of the second vertebra, which extends up into the arch of the first. This severs the spinal cord and prevents further respiratory function, as does the rope itself, which constricts the airways.

  But it is almost certain that the brain survives conscious for some seconds, maybe even half a minute, after the drop. In some botched hangings, like that of Mary Surratt, who was alleged to have conspired to kill Abraham Lincoln, the body may twitch horribly for several minutes. This is how long it takes for the brain to exhaust the oxygen that was sent to it during the last instants of life. I know that many hangmen in their autobiographies have boasted of their skill, asserting that “the body never moved after the drop.” This means nothing. With the spinal cord severed, the nervous system has been truncated, and no messages can be sent to the lower limbs. But the brain most likely still lives yet a little while longer, in agony, inside the “command module” of the separated skull.

  Neither does the guillotine extinguish life in an instant. Grisly experiments involving signals sent by means of eye blinking have verified that brain activity continues for twenty to thirty seconds after death, in a guillotined head. Our brains continue to operate as long as they have oxygen, and when oxygen is lacking, they shut down. A guillotine merely cuts the windpipe and blood supply and nerve endings, but it takes a few seconds for the brain to feel the effects of the sudden deprivation of oxygen and blood. The condemned man, his heart beating wildly with fear, his lungs pumping furiously, is involuntarily prolonging his own agony, richly supplying his brain with blood and oxygen, which will enable it to retain consciousness for several more painful seconds than it would otherwise, after the knife falls. I imagine guillotining must be apocalyptically painful. There is certainly a huge shock, related to the terrific trauma of the vascular and nervous systems.

  Nor is the gas chamber any more humane, in my opinion. Hydrogen cyanide gas doesn’t have the instantaneous effect in all individuals that is commonly supposed. There are numerous descriptions of prolonged gasping in some executions. This particular form of execution is unique in that, unlike any other method of capital punishment, it involves the cooperation of the condemned man. He has to take the fatal breath on his own, usually at a sign from the warden or executioner. There have been instances of breath holding on the part of the condemned man, in a desperate attempt to prolong life by a few more seconds. The final, involuntary gasping makes gassing almost a participatory, voluntary act. There is something vaguely obscene about forcing someone to kill himself.

  We in Florida carry out death sentences by electrocution, which is supposed to be painless and instantaneous. I hold no brief for electrocution, but I believe it may be the least cruel of all methods of capital punishment, save one. When I was a college student working at a mental hospital in Texas, I was often called upon to take care of psychiatric patients before and immediately after they were given electric shock treatments. This involves a relatively small, nonlethal amount of electricity being sent through the brain. Without exception, I saw them lose consciousness instantly and never complain afterward of any pain, upon reviving. Indeed, not a single one of them could even remember the jolt. Therefore I believe the tremendous charge of electricity sent into the human brain during electrocution must pretty well scramble the nervous system, making it impossible to sense any pain.

  If it were up to me, I should prefer that capital punishment be carried out exclusively by lethal injection. Unfortunately those opposed to the death penalty—and I readily grant they are acting from pure and humane motives—have raised all sorts of legal obstacles in the way of this much-needed reform.

  During the administration of a lethal injection, a cocktail of chemicals is injected into a vein of the condemned criminal. This cocktail paralyzes the respiratory functions, stops the heart by the action of potassium chloride and closes down the brain quietly and painlessly by means of barbiturates. There have been many cases of suicides involving similar barbiturates, which are used to put animals to sleep. In most of these cases, the needle is found still sticking in the arm of the dead victim and usually the plunger is not even fully depressed—it is that quick.

  Obviously, the only painful aspect of lethal injections is the occasional difficulty of finding a vein. Getting the needle into the circulatory system of individuals who have been drug abusers for years can be next to impossible. Physicians, too, balk at administering this final, deadly viaticum, because it violates their Hippocratic oath to, “first, do no harm.” Paramedics perform the task instead. These qualms are nothing new. If you recall, in Plato’s Phaedo, a doctor does not administer the hemlock to Socrates. Instead, a prison attendant brings in the cup, gives a few instructions and leaves the cell. Socrates drinks down the lethal potion himself.

  I suppose the most infamous man I ever saw autopsied was the serial killer, Ted Bundy, who was electrocuted on January 24, 1989, after many appeals, for murdering at least thirty-six young women. Bundy’s body was brought to Gainesville under tight security and autopsied at the medical examiners office. I remember there were a number of young men dressed up in green scrub suits, trying to get past the hospital security men by telling them they were doctors in their residencies there. They weren’t, of course; they were journalists. None succeeded, though a photograph of Bundy’s autopsied remains was later snapped, after the body had left the M.E.’s office, and published in a supermarket tabloid.

  Several things surprised me about Bundy when I saw him for the first time in the flesh. First, he was a much larger man than I had imagined. Somehow, looking at photos of him during the trials, I had received the impression he was slight, of medium height. But he was a tall, powerfully built individual. He had put on weight in prison. He obviously had been exercising well. Another interesting detail was his tan. Bundy exhibited no prison pallor, and one of the personal effects taken from his cell after his execution was a bottle of suntan lotion, the kind that works even without the sun. I believe there was a cunning reason for this. Right up until the end, Bundy had been negotiating frantically with the authorities, offering to go out west with them and show them where he had disposed of the bodies of his victims, in return for a stay of execution. Bundy had already escaped from custody twice, and I believe he was hoping to do it a third time. Tanned and fit, he hoped in his heart of hearts to give the police the slip and blend in with the population outside prison. If so, he was deluded. He died here in Florida.

  The third thing that surprised me was Bundy’s age. You could see it in his face. He had aged extraordinarily. He looked a lot older than he did during his trial.

  As with all electrocuted criminals, there was a halo-shaped burn on Bundy’s scalp, and a burn on the side of one leg. When the cranial vault was opened, there was the usual large mass of congealed blood on top of the brain that is common in men who have perished under these dismal circumstances.

  An enormous amount of investigation has gone into examining physical brain structure, in an attempt to determine how the brain of a genius might differ from t
he brain of a depraved criminal. We all remember the scene in the 1935 movie, Frankenstein, when the bumbling assistant breaks the jar containing the “normal brain” and takes instead the brain of a criminal to be fitted into Dr. Frankenstein’s monster. There is a brilliant and evocative passage in Carl Sagan’s 1974 book, Broca’s Brain, in which Sagan examines the cerebrum of the renowned scientist, Paul Broca, as it floats in a jar of preservative fluid. Sagan wonders if memories of evenings on the Quai Voltaire and the Pont Royal, of dinners with Victor Hugo, of passionate debates with other scientists, were still contained within the dead neurons of the floating brain before him.

  But, as so many behavioral scientists have demonstrated, the physical structure of the brain doesn’t give us the answers to the problem of good and evil. In deficient brains, you get obvious anatomical changes, and in degenerative diseases of the brain, such as syphilis, you get microscopic and even gross changes. But in general appearance the brain of a genius, a madman, and an imbecile may show no differences at all. Size has no bearing on intelligence. Some of history’s most remarkable individuals had brains far below average in size. The brains of males are on average larger than those of females, but this means nothing, as I am sure many women will attest. The brains of modern humans are, on an average, smaller than the brain of an average Neanderthal.

  No. If evil is to be found in the brain, then it is probably there from the very earliest years of life, and involves something very basic in the individual’s personality.

  When it finally was removed and examined, Ted Bundy’s brain looked like anyone else’s.

  10

  Flames and Urns

  The shades are no fable: death is not the end of all, and the pale ghost escapes the raked-over funeral pyre…. Cynthia appeared to me, seeming to bend over my couch’s head…. Her hair, her eyes were the same as when she was borne to the grave: her raiment was charred against her side, and the fire had eaten away the beryl ring her finger wore…. Spirit and voice yet lived, but the thumb-bones rattled on her brittle hands. “False heart!” she cried…. “Now let others possess thee! Soon shalt thou be mine alone; with me shalt thou be, and I shall grind my bones against thine, commingled!”

  —Propertius, Elegies, TV, vii

  To behold a human body, soul-sped and committed to the flames, slowly being combusted within the retort of a crematorium is to witness a spectacle at once solemn and strikingly colorful.

  This is the ultimate bonfire of the vanities, in which all that we wore in life is brightly, briskly swept away like dross, leaving only the durable, solid bones beneath. If the door of the oven be opened during cremation, one can peer in and see the devouring fire playing over the image of mortality, which lies statue-still and stoic beneath the nearly colorless jets of faint blue burning gas. The slow reduction of the body is a very eerie sight, and as the skeleton emerges the flames turn different colors, when various salts and chemicals within us are caught and volatilized. Warm yellows and oranges predominate, with here and there a twinkle of blue-green fire from burning copper, and a flicker of purple from potassium. Finally the bare bone peeps through, blackens as the carbon compounds in it are consumed, then fades from dark gray, to light gray, and at last to ashen white. The bones may twist and split, but usually the pelvis remains articulated, and the skull, though cracked open slightly by the fire, is nonetheless left largely intact and unexploded. Afterward its sightless eye hollows gaze darkly upward at the firebrick ceiling and the chimney flue, through which so much of what we were in life has fled in a plume of fine smoke.

  I have been inside such an oven, called a “retort” by those who operate them, and have investigated closely the process of cremation and the remains that it leaves behind, in connection with a macabre lawsuit that I will come to later. The bricks were still warm from the sojourn of the last occupant, and I had to duck-walk along the V-shaped floor with its central groove, to avoid getting ash all over my trouser knees. I was careful to hold my elbows close, to safeguard a tweed jacket of which I am fond. Bits of calcined bone lay in the corners of the oven and I measured them carefully—I might be called upon to testify about them later. The burning-chamber was cramped, dark, odorless and devoid of soot, but it did not lack a certain powerful, dismal atmosphere. I had to use a flashlight to peer into its farthest recesses, and the beam of the lamp revealed the black, sunken holes hiding the gas nozzles, which normally provide all the light and warmth this gloomy recess ever receives. When I later telephoned Margaret and told her where I had been, she took it very well, all things considered. She knows, by now, that my work leads me into some odd nooks.

  Flame does interesting things to bones, and part of my job is to examine human skeletal remains after they have been burned. You might think that the process of combustion would leave little to study, and that ashes would yield few secrets about the living being so fierily diminished after death. But you would be wrong. Flames can create, and urns can hold, some very lively stories.

  Crematories are usually housed in separate buildings, standing apart from the funeral homes that operate them. Each one is different, and there is a wide range in the quality of the work they do and the pains they take in combusting and inurning human remains.

  Most crematories have a sort of factory atmosphere about them. There are usually exposed air conditioning pipes overhead, a lot of metal duct work for the exhaust. Floors are usually of bare concrete. Machinery stands roundabout, used in processing the burned remains and putting them into proper containers. One very elaborate crematory I visited had a retort that was open at both ends, with doors at either extremity. One end opened onto a nicely furnished room finished with wood paneling and drapes and a chapel-like atmosphere, and the doors to the retort were faced with wood. The remains, encased in a casket, would be pushed in through these handsome portals, which would then be closed gently by the funeral director. The relatives, if they chose, could sit in this chapel-like room and wait for the cremation to be completed. The other set of doors opened onto the bare-floored processing room, where the ashes and bones would be winnowed through, crushed and poured into their final container by businesslike attendants. Most families elect not to stay, as the cremation process takes several hours.

  There are considerable variations in the procedure and the equipment used, but what I am describing now is more or less typical of what happens during the process of cremation.

  Bodies come to the crematorium, most often delivered by a funeral home or by a service that picks up the remains at the nursing home or hospital or wherever death took place. Some remains may come from a funeral ceremony and arrive fully clothed. The remains may still be wearing articles of jewelry. If the owner wore false teeth in life, these may still be in the mouth. Some corpses even wear eyeglasses, though obviously these are not of much use to them anymore.

  Most crematories refuse to cremate remains enclosed in caskets, though a few still do. The most common container used is a large cardboard box, casket-sized, glued or stapled at the corners where it has been folded into shape from flat storage, with a shallow lid. The appearance is not unlike that of an oversized shoebox. Enclosed in such a container, the remains are rolled on a wheeled table like a hospital gurney up to the door of the retort, or cremation chamber. This retort is lined with firebrick and has a very rough interior. Usually the mortar is cracked and flaking from the heat of the flames. Retorts are constantly being repaired and remortared, because of the damage caused by heat within them. This rough, pitted surface has its drawbacks. Ash lodges on the surface of the bricks and cannot be entirely recovered. But metal cannot be used to line the retort, as heat causes it to corrode rapidly. Only firebrick will stand up to fire over time.

  There is usually a groove running down the center of the floor, to trap the combusted remains and make them easier to recover. Natural gas is used to burn the remains and the temperature inside the retort reaches about 1,700 degrees Fahrenheit. A cheap crematory can be bought for a few tho
usand dollars, an elaborate one for hundreds of thousands. Some of the better ones are made in England and have modern conveniences such as timesets, where a computer monitors the temperature and other variables and controls the cooling.

  After the gas jets are ignited, cremation takes varying periods of time, depending on the heat and the individual characteristics of the body. But usually several hours are necessary. Fat bodies tend to burn more quickly than thin, muscular ones, and I even know of a case in which a plump corpse burned so fiercely that the inside of the retort caught fire and was damaged.

  When cremation is complete, all the. organic components of the skeleton have been destroyed, first by charring, then later by complete combustion. They are burned away. The bones go from their natural color to black, as the organic material is carbonized. Then, as these organic compounds are combusted, the black fades to dark gray, to gray, to light gray and finally to white. When the bones are white, they are said to be calcined. They are now extremely brittle, but they still appear more or less normal. Bones may shrink under the action of fire, sometimes by as much as twenty-five percent. They may warp and twist and sometimes fragment into small little checkerboard designs, the way a safety-glass windshield shatters into little cubes. Very often the checking pattern does not completely penetrate the surface of the bone but only the outer aspects.

  This shrinking and warpage and checking does not occur until the body is approaching the naked bone phase. If you look at bones under a microscope at various stages of their combustion, you will see interesting changes. Before burning, a section of bone will show all its interior structures clearly. After burning, the structures can still be seen, though canals will be closed off and shrunken. But in the mid-phase of burning, all is black and choked by carbon residue, and very little of the bone’s structure can be observed.