Seldom does a week go by without my receiving a visit or a telephone call from some young person eager to go into forensic anthropology. Will I accept him or her as a student? Alas, I don’t have the money to support large numbers of students, nor the space in which to teach and train them, nor the time to give them all the attention they deserve. Even if I were to take them in, where would they go when they left me, having won their doctorates? Where would they get jobs? No doubt a handful of them would, as I did, work their way into a university system and slowly establish a practice. Most wouldn’t. That is the bitter truth.
The murder and suicide rate in the state of Florida could easily furnish cases for six full-time forensic anthropologists. In my daydreams I locate them on a mind-map of the state with stickpins: there would be one in the Panhandle, another in Gainesville, another in Orlando, one in southwest Florida and one, perhaps two, in Miami. Miami, as we all know, is a very special place: the deadliest city in the most crime-ridden state in the Union. Forensic anthropologists would find plenty to do there. They would be useful to state medical examiners in skeletonized cases, cases involving burn victims, decomposed bodies and the like. We could even help identify fresh bodies belonging to the nameless and the homeless, who are flocking to Florida—and to Florida’s morgues—in ever increasing numbers nowadays. Some medical examiners’ offices perform over three thousand autopsies each year.
I can’t be everywhere. I have been under as many as four separate subpoenas, to testify in four separate cities, all on the same day. One prosecutor, jokingly I hope, actually threatened to throw me in jail if I did not testify for him, rather than in another case scheduled for that day! Ours is a very large state. If a decomposed body is found in the Florida Keys, there is no way I can be on the scene immediately. Sometimes the remains are shipped to me, if I cannot go to them. Federal Express won’t transport human remains, including cremains, but the U. S. Post Office has no such qualms, as long as the remains are identified as “evidence” or “specimens.” But if we had a forensic anthropologist stationed in Miami, these cases could be attended to on the spot.
Such are the thoughts that sometimes visit me at night. But “sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof,” as the Bible says. Whenever I am beset by doubts over the future of my discipline, or the career opportunities for my students, or the fate of my laboratory after I am gone, I look at the filing cabinets filled with case reports. Here at least is solid, measurable progress. Here I can claim to have made a difference.
In days when people knew more Latin than they do now, someone composed a deeply moving inscription that can still be read over the lintel of the New York City medical examiner’s office:
Taceant Colloquia. Effugiat Risus. Hic Locus Est Ubi Mors Gaudet Succurrere Vitae.
[Let idle talk be silenced. Let laughter be banished. Here is the place where Death delights to succour Life.]
I have no room over my laboratory door lintel for an engraved inscription, but if I did I would choose the last words of the explorer, Robert Falcon Scott, who perished in the frozen wastes of Antarctica in 1912, of hunger and exposure, in a place that was only a few miles from food and safety. The last entry in his diary read:
Had we lived, I should have had a tale to tell of the hardihood, endurance and courage of my companions, that would have stirred the heart of every Englishman. These rough notes and our dead bodies must tell the tale.
That’s how I feel about the skeletons here in my laboratory. They have tales to tell us, even though they are dead. It is up to me, the forensic anthropologist, to catch their mute cries and whispers, and to interpret them for the living, as long as I am able.
Acknowledgments
This book could not have been written, and the life it describes could not have been lived, were it not for my wife, Margaret Kelley. Margaret and I are old comrades now. We met in Miss Berry’s Spanish class in my sophomore year at North Dallas High School. At the end of the year Miss Berry struck a deal with me: she’d give me a C if I would promise never to take Spanish again. I readily agreed. I never mastered the language of Cervantes and Calderón, but I won Margaret.
We married in 1958 and through all these years she has been the spark that has galvanized me to greater effort. It was she who persuaded me to accept a job offer to work with baboons in Africa, and take her with me, even though she was five months pregnant. Both of our children, Lisa and Cynthia, were born in Africa. She has always been the more energetic and adventuresome of us two, and her courage and patience with the outlandish side of my work has always amazed me. There is certainly no one more skilled and experienced than she is, when it comes to removing bloodstains from laundry! Nor are there many wives who could sit unflinchingly through a slide presentation of time-lapsed photography depicting the action of maggots on the human face, as Margaret once did at a convention of the American Academy of Forensic Scientists. Her clarity of intellect and strong heart have upborne me all my adult life. Without her I might have been a mere, dull measurer of bones. With her, I have never become unmoored from the lively touch of humanity.
My professional indebtedness to my old teacher, Tom McKern, and to my colleagues, old and young, such as Clyde Snow, Michael Baden, Lowell Levine, Doug Ubelaker, as well as to William Hamilton, the District 8 chief medical examiner, has already been hinted at in these pages, but I would like to re-echo it here. Without the support of the Florida medical examiners, especially Wallace Graves and Joe Davis, my story would have been sparse indeed. Special mention must be made of Curtis Mertz, of Ashtabula, Ohio, who helped me solve the puzzling Meek-Jennings case described in Chapter 11. Mertz assembled all the dental information, the postmortem remains, and the antemortem radiographs in this labyrinthine affair. We worked very much as a team, and the final, conclusive dental identifications are owed to his keen eye.
I owe special debts to Bob Benfer, who got me started on historical cases; to Bill Goza, expeditor and amazing resource; and to the Wentworth Foundation. The administration of the University of Florida is gratefully acknowledged.
C. Addison Pound, Jr., benefactor of the laboratory bearing his name and that of his parents, has given me the freedom to develop my interests. His continued support of the goals of this laboratory is a shining example of how a private citizen can have an impact on crime and assisting its victims.
Margaret’s help was invaluable to me in reading the manuscript and making many useful suggestions. She took several of the photographs that appear in this book, and helped me assemble the rest. I would like to acknowledge the assistance of Yale’s Beinecke Library for a photograph of Tsar Nicholas’s daughters and for access to other photographic archives. I am grateful for the help and hospitality of Dr. Alexander Avdonin, who enabled us to view and analyze the skeletons of the Tsar and his family. An earlier, shorter version of the account of the Ekaterinburg skeletons appeared in the Miami Herald’s Tropic magazine, and permission to reuse this material is herewith gratefully acknowledged. Our literary agent, Esther Newberg, surpassed Rumpelstiltskin in spinning gold from raw flax. Our editors at Doubleday, Bill Thomas and Rob Robertson, were enthusiastic, Argus-eyed and patient, at all the right times.
William R. Maples, Ph.D.
Michael C. Browning
The logo of the C. A. Pound Human Identification Laboratory.
The tombstone of outlaw Bonnie Parker. Every criminal was likely loved by someone in life.
“These rough notes, and our dead bodies …” The science of forensic anthropology consists of listening to the whispers of the dead.
The C. A. Pound Human Identification Laboratory, showing “odor hoods.” Inside these ventilated plastic bubbles skeletal remains are boiled clean of flesh and prepared for examination.
Nature’s trickery: radiographs of human hand (left) and bear paw (right).
Male and female pelvises. Note that the female specimen (below) has a greater pelvic breadth and wider subpubic angle. Such distinctions are aids in what w
e call “sexing the skeleton.”
Human thighbones (femurs) as they progress through life. At birth the end of the bone at the knee is a separate element, or epiphysis. The epiphysis gets larger and changes its shape as growth progresses, beginning to unite with the rest of the femur. The groove, or scar, shows a femur that has recently united, signaling the end of growth. The groove disappears in an adult femur, and one might never guess the single bone had originally been several parts.
A .410 shotgun entrance wound at the base of the back of the skull.
An incomplete gunshot exit wound. Note fractures near top of cranium. The round entrance wound from a second bullet shows no external beveling of the bone surface.
A 12 gauge shotgun entrance wound, fired from about ten feet away from the victim.
Skull showing multiple fractures from a tool.
Which injury came first? This closeup photograph shows the injury on the left occurred before that on the right because a fracture (see arrow) from the left injury crosses the injury on the right. Therefore the blow on the left fell first.
An apparent mismatch. When the tool is placed next to the wounds, it is not consistent. It has a right-angle bend. Such a tool would have cut smoothly into thin bone. Note that the top of the tool is ground down (dressed) while the shaft of the tool remains rounded.
When the tool is rotated, however, the effective angle is now greater than 90 degrees. The tool would now crush the bone, causing the sloping surfaces seen in the wound.
A gunshot exit wound, producing outer beveling of bone surfaces.
Multiple wounds from a meat cleaver.
The size and manufacturer’s trademark can be seen near the center of a silicone breast augmentation implant. One of my students once mistook this implant for a jellyfish.
The many large white areas in this radiograph are scattered bullet fragments from multiple rounds of a .22 in the head.
A .22 bullet can be seen embedded in a bone from the leg. The entrance wound in the back of the bone suggests that the victim may have been running from the assailant when he was shot.
The bullet tracks of five .22-caliber wounds to the head are indicated by the dowel pins.
Vertebrae from the chest of an elderly man showing bony outgrowths on the bodies and fusion of many vertebrae. In life, this man’s movements would have been severely limited.
The La Belle drug murders. These three victims were bound and shotgunned and flung into a pit atop one another. The shoes of the murdered men appeared early on in the dig.
I am forced to lie beside the victims because of back pain. I found some relief from the heat and stench by drinking a Dr Pepper. (Photo courtesy of Wallace M. Graves, Jr., M.D.)
The three excavated bodies in the La Belle murder pit.
Another view of the three victims at La Belle. Our excavation demonstrated that the victim buried deepest had been shot last.
Femurs showing the typical pattern of chain-saw dismemberment.
An orthopedic nail used to repair a fractured femur in life.
The bottom end of the same nail in life (left) and after death (right).
A healed hole in a skull (trepanning), drilled to relieve pressure after a head injury.
An artificial hip taken from a skeleton.
A hardcover edition of this book was published in 1994 by Doubleday. It is here reprinted by arrangement with Doubleday.
Dead Men Do Tell Tales. Copyright © 1994 by William R. Maples. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. For information, address: Broadway Books, a division of Random House, Inc., 1540 Broadway, New York, NY 10036.
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Unless otherwise noted, all photos appear courtesy of William R. Maples.
The Library of Congress has Cataloged the Doubleday hardcover edition as follows:
Maples, William R.
Dead men do tell tales / by William R. Maples and Michael Browning.
p. cm.
1. Maples, William R. 2. Anthropologists—United States—Biography. 3. Forensic anthropology—United States—Case studies. I Browning, Michael. II. Title.
GN50.6.M36A3 1994
614′.l-dc20
eISBN: 978-0-307-76390-7
v3.0
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