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

by Maples, William R.

  Happily the angry colonel’s views were not shared by others in the military. In early 1986, I was invited to testify at a hearing of the Veterans Affairs Committee at the U. S. Senate. After my testimony I was invited by Major General John Crosby, who had also testified on behalf of the Army, to join him for lunch at the Pentagon. Crosby was an extraordinary officer, a man who radiated an air of command and brisk efficiency. I told him frankly that I believed any problems within CILHI could be corrected if we all worked together, instead of at cross-purposes. General Crosby agreed with me and over the months that followed we were gratified to see nearly all the reforms we had proposed carried out at CILHI.

  Toward the end of 1986, General Crosby invited us back to the laboratory for a follow-up visit. Soon the three of us found ourselves under contract to review all identifications recommended by the laboratory involving Southeast Asian casualties. This review process continues to this day. Ellis Kerley became chief of the laboratory for several years but is now retired and living in Hawaii. Today CILHI has several civilian consultants. Lowell and I are the most active, but there are others who watch over the laboratory on a less frequent basis. Tadao Furue was handled gently. He was kept on as senior anthropologist at the facility, but his role became more and more an advisory one. He died a few years later.

  Now I visit CILHI twice a year. Besides reviewing every single case recommended for identification, my colleagues and I discuss CILHI’s personnel needs, its staff, improvements in equipment and such stuff. Often we huddle over a set of remains and make suggestions as to what more might be done to identify them. At other times we play devil’s advocates, challenging age estimates and other conclusions. Fresh air and free debate make every identification more reliable and trustworthy.

  The search for unaccounted-for servicemen does not stop at CILHI’s laboratory doors. Year in and year out, you will find teams from CILHI in the field, actively searching for and recovering the remains of our lost soldiers. In the rain forests of New Guinea they can be found investigating the hundreds of plane crashes left over from World War II. In the mountains and gorges of South Korea they are busy seeking out the dead from some long-forgotten battle, reclaiming them from the shallow graves where they were buried by returning villagers. There is a full-time American-run search office near Hanoi. Expeditions still comb Vietnam, north and south, as well as Laos and Cambodia. Here the anthropologists and the army investigators alike wear civilian clothes, as the Vietnamese do not permit American uniforms to be worn in the countryside. Their work can be dangerous. Some of the personnel in the laboratory wear Purple Hearts for wounds received many years ago in such search-and-recover missions. Recently one CILHI team in Cambodia came under fire from Khmer Rouge guerrillas. Lately the North Koreans have been turning over sets of U.S. servicemen’s remains from that more than forty-year-old conflict, and these too, must be identified.

  Unfortunately, the Pakse case ended messily. Doubts over the unidentified remains persisted and in 1986, after I had done my report on CILHI but before I signed a contract with the Army to conduct an ongoing review of the lab, I was asked by Mrs. Hart to look again at the remains of her husband. I agreed.

  The remains were brought to my laboratory in Gainesville in a full-sized casket with a military escort. The lid of the great polished casket was opened—to disclose seven tiny bits of bone. I thoroughly described each fragment and what conclusions could be drawn in terms of age, weight, height and so on. The Army then asked Ellis Kerley to review the Hart case, as well as the independent reports made by Dr. Charney in Colorado and myself in Florida. Based on this evidence, Ellis recommended that the identification of Lieutenant Colonel Hart be rescinded. Later another identification from Pakse was rescinded as well.

  Concerning this pair of rescinded identifications, an important point must be made: the fact that the identifications were rescinded means that the available evidence, on which the identifications had been made, was later found to be inadequately proven in the collective opinion of the reviewing scientists. In other words, the evidence in these two cases did not meet reasonable levels of scientific certainty. But I want it understood clearly that there were no findings of misidentifications in these disputed cases, and there is absolutely no evidence to support any such charge.

  Mrs. Hart sued the government and won approximately $500,000; but the government appealed and ultimately won its case. The persistent widow, whose honest doubts had led to a thorough reform of CILHI, was not able to prove in court that CILHFs overconfident identification of her husband, even though it was based on such limited evidence, was “intentional and malicious,” as she had claimed in her lawsuit. Another family, whose son was also identified after Pakse, was so incensed that they scorned to accept his alleged remains, giving them instead to Dr. Charney, who uses them as a lecture exhibit to demonstrate evidence used to make some military identifications.

  This bitter aftermath vividly shows how painful and vexatious the whole question is, how different is the emotional response of each family it touches. Some want to get the whole thing behind them, and some will never sleep until they have vengeance. I make it a point to avoid contact with the families. Their emotions would cloud my objectivity; and frankly, I do not want to tell them the terrible tales of violence and suffering told me by those bones. I will say no more here, beyond what most people already know: that death in combat is not always quick, clean or painless, and the remains of our soldiers are sometimes maltreated after death, as we have all seen on television as recently as October 1993, in the streets of Mogadishu, in Somalia.

  During my first visit to CILHI—which, for all I knew then, would be my last—I took a few minutes out to attend to some personal business. My wife had a roommate in college whose brother had been a pilot in Vietnam. His jet had crashed, and he had been killed; but his body had been recovered. Taking advantage of my unique access to the laboratory, I asked to see the young man’s mortuary records just before I left. To my relief, I found that the young pilot had been identified by dental records as well as by fingerprints. As I closed the records I knew that, if my wife’s college roommate ever asked me this awful question, I could reassure her that there was absolutely no mistake about her brother’s identification.

  What does the future hold for CILHI and the whole process of identifying our unaccounted-for war dead? As time goes on, the recovered bone fragments are growing smaller and smaller, the teeth scarcer and scarcer. As a result, identifications are obviously getting harder and harder to make. It is not hard to foresee a day, not very long distant, when CILHI will have to rely on DNA analysis to identify these remains, rather than go through the grindingly slow process of physically examining minuscule bits of skeletal material. By comparing DNA samples recovered from the remains with that of living relatives, identities could be established beyond all reasonable doubt, in weeks rather than years.

  I must hasten to add that CILHI doesn’t have the capability to do such DNA matching right now, at least not on the grand scale needed to close out the Vietnam files, let alone the even older and more fragmentary remains that are coming in from South and North Korea. Such a task lies beyond the combined capacity of all the DNA laboratories in the United States, at present. I should therefore like to see CILHI establish its own DNA lab, devoted exclusively to its own casework on our unaccounted-for servicemen. It would not be cheap. But the sum would be small indeed, compared to the mountains of money spent waging the Vietnam War.

  I have seen the names of the Pakse crew on the famous Vietnam memorial wall in Washington. For me, as for most visitors, the wall is a deeply moving experience. But I am touched almost as deeply when I visit Arlington National Cemetery and see the grave of the Unknown Soldier from Vietnam. To the end of his life, my friend Tadao Furue lamented that these remains had been wrested prematurely from his care, taken from CILHI and buried in Washington.

  I remember Tadao shaking his head in frustration and telling me: “If they had o
nly given me more time! I could have identified him!” Tadao’s spirit was unconquerable. Could he have made this Unknown Soldier known? One can only wonder. Heavy slabs of marble now guard the nameless warrior forever.

  13

  The Misplaced Conquistador

  At lengthy Pizarro, unable, in the hurry of the moment, to adjust the fastenings of his cuirass, threw it away, and, enveloping one arm in his cloak, with the other seized his sword, and sprang to his brother’s assistance. It was too late; for Alcantara was already staggering under the loss of blood and soon fell to the ground. Pizarro threw himself on his invaders, like a lion roused in his lair, and dealt his blows with as much rapidity and force, as if age had no power to stiffen his limbs. “What hoi” he cried, “Traitors! have you come to kill me in my own house?”

  —William H. Prescott, History of the Conquest of Peru,

  Book 4, Chap. 5

  Francisco Pizarro died as he lived, by the sword. When the rapiers of his assassins pricked his gullet, they extinguished a life that was all strife and struggle. Illegitimate and illiterate, a foundling in infancy and a swineherd in youth, he made his way to South America and, by pure force of will, toppled one of the greatest empires the world has seen. He enriched himself, his family and the King of Spain beyond the dreams of avarice. Indomitable in adversity, ruthless in victory, Pizarro and his followers laid waste utterly to the Inca civilization whose ruined monuments dazzle us still; whose Cyclopean walls, golden masks and inscrutable pictographs are so extraordinary they almost seem not of this earth. But when it came to sharing out this almost immeasurable loot, Pizarro and his associates became embroiled in blood feuds that proved fatal. At the very height of his powers, the warlord of conquered Peru was assassinated.

  Thanks to the faithful chroniclers of New Spain, we know nearly as much about Pizarro’s assassination in 1541 as we do about many political murders in our own century. Because of the extraordinary continuity of Spanish civilization in the conquered continent, we can follow the story of his bones almost year by year.

  I have held this old sinner’s skull in my hands. The trauma marks still visible on Pizarro’s remains bear astonishing witness to the terrible fury of his attackers. Modern assassins have the tremendous explosive force of firearms at their disposal. Pizarro’s slayers wielded swords alone; but what sword steel could do to the human skull and skeletal frame it did to Francisco Pizarro. He died brutally and painfully, as the multiple nicks and scorings of his bones attest. His skeleton can stand comparison with several modern murder victims I have examined, for the atrocity of the wounds it reveals.

  There is a powerful magic in the past. When we touch a human artifact from centuries or millennia ago, we seem to behold our brother human beings from across the deeps of time. If we are not careful, we fall into dreams of bygone days and the light of sunsets long extinguished. I have seen cool, analytical, clear-brained colleagues, especially my archaeologist friends, practically swooning with admiration over some small potsherd, all but overcome by the mere physical presence of human antiquity. “Just think!” they will say in hushed voices. “This is the very such-and-such that once belonged to so-and-so!”

  I envy them this second sight, this gift of imaginative reverie; but I cannot afford to share the mood. I have been called to far countries to examine remains of considerable age, and have handled things vested with exceptional historical significance, but I can’t permit myself the luxury of time travel on these occasions. The clock is ticking. Work has to be done. Accuracy is all. As Margaret Thatcher admonished George Bush in the emergency days after Iraq invaded Kuwait: “Now, George, this is no time to go wobbly!” On such occasions I am more likely to worry about electric voltage and adapters, whether our equipment will work, whether we have brought enough film and instruments, whether we have sufficient spare parts if something breaks. I cannot spare time to muse about vanished greatness and departed glory. I cannot afford to go wobbly.

  Yet when I look back on the case of the misplaced conquistador, Francisco Pizarro, I am struck by how neatly the pieces fell into position, and how the remains dovetailed exactly with historical accounts of the man. Pizarro’s were the first really famous bones I handled, and the investigation into his death marked my first foray into historical forensic anthropology. Together with several colleagues, I was able to unmask an impostor mummy, which for years had been displayed and reverenced as the body of the conquistador. At the same time, I was able to help authenticate another set of skeletal remains as belonging beyond any doubt to the man who conquered Peru for Spain. A careful reconstruction of facial features, built up from the true skull, has given us a reasonable portrait of what Pizarro looked like in life. The verified bones have been put in their rightful place of honor in Lima’s Cathedral of San Agustín, and a case of mistaken identity has been solved for good.

  There was a time when every schoolchild knew of the astonishing exploits of Francisco Pizarro, the self-made soldier of fortune from Trujillo, Spain, who went to Panama with Vasco Nuñez de Balboa, the first European discoverer of the Pacific Ocean. At the age of fifty, an old man by the reckoning of his time, Pizarro embarked on the conquest of Peru. This climaxed in 1532 with his famous march to Cajamarca, deep in the Peruvian interior, with sixty-seven horses and a mere hundred and ten soldiers, not more than twenty of whom were armed, and these only with crossbows or arquebuses. Atahualpa, the Inca King, was waiting for him there with an army of 40,000 to 50,000 men, but was strangely paralyzed by indecision. Atahualpa allowed Pizarro to take possession of the citadel of Cajamarca and camped with his Inca army on the plains below. Invited to a parley, the Inca chief entered the citadel with only a few hundred followers. There he was ambushed and captured by Pizarro’s men, who slaughtered the King’s courtiers and raped his concubines. Overnight, almost at a stroke, the empire of the Incas was laid low, its King taken prisoner.

  Then comes the famous tale of the Room of Gold. In return for his life and freedom, Atahualpa offered to fill with gold a room twenty-two feet long and seventeen feet wide to a height of seven feet. Pizarro agreed but also demanded that an adjacent room, somewhat smaller, be filled twice over with silver.

  Five months later the larger room was still not quite full, even though a total of 1,326,539 gold pesos had been amassed. One fifth of the treasure was sent back to Spain and the remainder was divided among Pizarro and his men. Once the gold was disposed of, Atahualpa had no further value to Pizarro. To get rid of him, Pizarro had the Inca tried on trumped-up charges of insurrection, embezzling funds, adultery and idol-worshiping. He was found guilty and, two hours after sundown on July 16, 1533, was led to the stake to be burned. Atahualpa only avoided this atrocious mode of execution by “converting” to Christianity at the stake, and being baptized as “Juan de Atahualpa.” Pizarro then had the Inca chief garroted.

  The Spaniards proceeded to tear the Inca Empire to shreds and divide its spoils. A puppet king installed by Pizarro, Toparca, died mysteriously. Atahualpa’s bravest general, Challcuchima, was burned at the stake. The last Inca army, led by a general named Quizquiz, was destroyed utterly by Pizarro’s bitter rival, an old, one-eyed veteran named Diego de Almagro. On November 15, 1533, the Inca capital, Cuzco, fell. With it came more than half a million pesos’ worth of gold. The victorious conquistadors rampaged across the land, using the Incas’ own highways to travel, all the while slaughtering flocks, confiscating crops, despoiling temples and causing farm land and irrigation systems to fall into ruin. The unrestrained cruelty of the conquest of Peru still arouses our horror and pity.

  Deprived of most of the booty by Pizarro and his brothers, Almagro and his men were understandably outraged. Pizarro offered Almagro the country of Chile, and the old soldier marched off, hoping to duplicate Pizarro’s success. But Chile held no gold to compare with the riches of Peru. Almagro and his men endured two years of terrible war and physical hardship, emerging from Chile empty-handed and furious with Pizarro and his brothers, who wer
e now in possession of all the Inca wealth. After a series of battles and double crosses, Almagro was defeated at Las Salinas on April 26, 1538, captured and executed by the garrote, on the orders of Pizarro’s brother, Hernando. Pizarro himself later stripped Almagro’s son of his lands, leaving the young man and his followers penniless and desperate for revenge. Pizarro was now governor of Peru, ruling from Lima, which he had founded in 1535.

  The younger Almagro and his supporters spun a plot to kill Pizarro at mass on Sunday, June 26, 1541. One of the conspirators whispered of the plot while confessing his sins to a priest, who broke the sacred and confidential seal of confession and informed Pizarro of the danger. Pizarro seems to have shrugged off the warning but, as a precaution, feigned illness and did not attend mass that Sunday. He shared the story with the vice-mayor, Juan Belásquez, who assured the governor that he was safe as long as the “rod of justice” was in Belásquez’s hands. With these assurances, Pizarro sat down to his Sunday dinner with about twenty guests seated around the table, including his half brother, Francisco Martín de Alcántara, Belásquez and other cavaliers.

  It was the last meal he would ever eat. While he was yet at table, a tumult was heard outside the governor’s palace. The conspirators charged across the Plaza de Armas outside the governor’s mansion, shouting their intentions. There is confusion about their number: some accounts say there were as few as seven, some as many as twenty-five. Pizarro kept his head and calmly ordered the front door of the palace to be locked. The officer sent to do this, Francisco Hurtado de Hevia, unwisely chose to negotiate with the aggressors through the half-open door. They forced their way in with a great clamor. Hearing this uproar, most of Pizarro’s dinner guests promptly deserted him, among them Belásquez, who climbed down into the garden with his “rod of justice” firmly grasped in his mouth.