Scene of the Crime

by Anne Wingate

  a few sadistic officers in the army of the Shah of Iran would,

  for their own amusement, bet on how far a standing condemned man could run after having been beheaded by sword.

  One by one the victims had their heads lopped off as they

  started to run. Some of them ran for considerable distances.

  (Kevorkian 57)

  Your guess is as good as mine on what "considerable distances" means in this context.

  Bodily Processes After Death

  But eventually—normally in seconds, sometimes in minutes or more, the body becomes still. The blood clots and then, in some cases, reliquifies, to the extent that at various times of major crisis both the Soviet and the German armies were practicing blood transfusion from cadavers. Postmortem lividity begins; rigor mortis begins. Gradually, over the next few hours, days and weeks, the body begins to succumb to bacteria. The body tissues and blood vessels, as well as body cavities, begin to fill with gas, which causes the entire body to distend. Decay may cause the body to turn any or all of red, green, brown and black. (Folklore says that a white person will tend to turn black in decay and a black person will tend to turn white in decay. I have never seen anything—either in cases I worked or in reference books I have read—to support such a legend, and I do not believe it.) The eyes appear to bulge, the tongue begins to protrude through the swollen lips, and the penis may appear to be erect.

  Blood may begin to be pushed out of the nose, stomach contents from the mouth and fecal material from the anus. This pressure may cause a postmortem expulsion of the fetus from

  the pregnant uterus----The gas formation in the blood vessels

  may force fluid, air or liquid fat between the epidermis and the dermis [the upper and lower skin layers] to produce a large blister which may rupture. The skin epithelium and the hair and nails may be easily separated from the dermis by disintegration at the roots. When the nutrient material is used up, the formation of gas ceases and the swelling gradually subsides; the gas leaves the tissues, usually by escaping as a result of damage to the structure or by drainage through a postmortem wound.

  (Gonzales 63)

  It is important to know these signs of decomposition, because some of them can easily be mistaken for the signs of a death by

  strangulation, in which the eyes bulge, the tongue protrudes through swollen lips, the penis is typically erect, and the nose may bleed. However, in strangulation the neck may be compressed, the hyoid bone and the thyroid and cricoid cartilages are normally crushed. During a postmortem examination, neck bruises may be visible on the dermis (the inner layer of skin) even if they were not visible on the epidermis (the outer layer of skin).

  Of course, heat and humidity tend to speed the process of decomposition, whereas cold and dryness tend to retard it—almost permanently, if extreme cold or dryness continues.

  The Ice Man and the Bog Man

  Climbers in Switzerland in late summer of 1991 spotted the body of another climber, lodged inside a crack in a glacier. They went back down the mountain and notified officials, and soon the mountain was swarming with rescue workers—who were about four thousand years too late.

  Sometime around the year 2800 b.c.e., the man set off across the ice, wearing boots stuffed with straw, trousers, and a lined jacket, carrying all he was likely to need, including a stone knife. Somehow, he slipped and fell into a crevasse. When he was found, his body appeared to have been freeze-dried. Even his eye color was preserved; with his intact clothing and intact tool kit, he was, exultant scientists proclaimed, probably the greatest treasure-trove of neolithic knowledge ever found, and the two countries across whose boundary the glacier lay at once began arguing about which he belonged to.

  Crime scene? Probably not—and yet, what was he doing crossing that glacier alone? Did he have companions? Did they try to get help? Did they realize he was dead and reluctantly leave him? Or—did they push him in and keep going?

  When peatcutters found a body in a bog in Denmark, they knew they had a murder; the dark-haired man—probably in his mid-forties—still wore around his neck the willow wand with which he had been strangled. But law-enforcement officials were about two thousand years too late for either him or the fourteen-year-old blond girl buried a few feet away from him.

  Investigation—archaeological, not criminal—finally suggested he had been strangled as a sacrifice to the goddess Nertha; the girl-judging from the way her hair had been cut away from one side of her head-might have been executed for adultery. But—why were the two bodies so close together? Had she committed adultery with the intended sacrifice, the intended husband of Nertha?

  There's no knowing, now. What is known is that some substances—oak water, bog water, and oddly enough, arsenic-preserve a body about as well as, and sometimes better than, freezing does. (In fact, for many years arsenic was a common component of embalming fluid. Imagine trying to prove arsenic poisoning after exhuming one of those bodies!)

  Moral: Don't commit your murders with arsenic, and watch where you conceal the body, if you want the body to decay quickly.

  Bodies Under Water

  Humidity is one thing; water is another. Bodies under water begin to decay in an extremely odd way. The fatty tissues of the body begin to react with the water to develop a waxy substance, yellowish-white in color, called adipocere, a form of insoluble soap. Gonzales says adipocere "has a rancid odor, floats in water, and dissolves in ether and alcohol." Adipocere eventually replaces the muscles and viscera, as well as the fatty tissues around the face; as it is very light, it is larger in bulk than the tissues it replaces, and the body, especially the face, may take on an extremely grotesque, irregular, bloated appearance.

  Adipocere formation may become

  complete in adult bodies in from a year to a year and a half, and in full-term newborn infants in from about six to seven weeks; it does not occur in a fetus of less than seven months' gestation because the composition of the fat at this stage is not suitable for its development.

  (Gonzales 68)

  When a body in which much of the tissues have been replaced with adipocere is removed from the water, it is extremely light in weight. The stench is beyond words, far worse than the normal smell of a decaying body (which is bad enough — and as unforgettable as

  it is indescribable); and the appearance is even more jarring. The mind refuses to accept the fact that what was once a human being can now look like that; it must be something made up by set dressers for a horror movie.

  Bodies in Dry Climates

  On the other hand, bodies in an extremely dry climate may mummify—that is, the fluids evaporate without the tissues rotting-and still be in fairly good condition centuries later. However, even an extremely well mummified body may resume decomposition after hundreds, even thousands, of years if the surrounding atmospheric conditions change.

  The Exceptions

  And there are always exceptions, partial exceptions. A body in hot, dry air may mummify in places and decompose in other places, particularly where body parts are pressed together or are in a tight location from which fluids cannot easily evaporate. I once saw the body of a man who had committed suicide by asphyxiating himself in his automobile, which he had hidden in the woods. The body was found eight days after the man went missing, and I can still remember word for word the telephone call that told me. Barbara Brack-man was dispatching. When I answered the phone, she said, "I'm afraid we've found Oscar" (not his real name).

  This was only a few days after the Jackson Street Corpse, and Oscar went missing before the Jackson Street corpse was killed. I had a pretty good idea what I was on my way to, and I said, "Shit! Dead?"

  Barbara assured me that he was dead. When I arrived at the scene about twenty minutes later I had to agree: he was definitely, indisputably dead.

  I've already told you a little about this one, about the Georgia Bureau of Investigation agents arguing about which one of them was not going to open the door and photograph t
he corpse. In general, the body was fairly well preserved, given how long it had been and how hot and humid the weather was. One of the windows was a couple of inches open, and that had been enough to allow some of the fluids to evaporate. But the head, which was inside a plastic bag that had allowed no evaporation, was almost totally reduced to a skull. The body was stretched across the front seat of a car with the feet jammed against the door on the driver's side and the right hand thrust down between the seat and the wall on the passenger's side. The position of the right arm, like that of the head, had not allowed evaporation, and when we finally opened the passenger's door (we — actually I — had begun with the driver's door, so as to get some photos before the body was moved at all), the right arm fell off.

  I've already given you a partial description of the Jackson Street Corpse. After eight days partially wrapped in a wet quilt, in a humid late August in which it had rained several days, decomposition was far advanced, and the smell extended for about a block in any direction. But those weren't the things that bothered me. The Jackson Street Corpse was the only one that ever gave me nightmares, and here's why: Flies had laid eggs in the corpse. Those eggs had hatched, gone quickly through the larva (maggot) stage, metamorphosed into flies, and laid more eggs. When I first saw the body, there seemed to be millions of maggots, seething white footballs of constant motion. I dreamed about those maggots off and on for weeks, until—almost six months later—in my final dream, the maggots turned into baby squirrels, climbed a tree, and ran off, and I never dreamed about them again.

  The crime scene at which I came closest to actually throwing up didn't even include a corpse. The corpse had been removed several days earlier, and Doc and I had to go back over there to check out some things that had come up. The only parts of the corpse remaining were part of one earlobe and the smell—along with the smell of rotten onions, rotten cabbage, rotten potatoes and kerosene. When we got away from the scene I told Doc, who was driving, that he had to stop at the next convenience store so that I could get a Coke; otherwise I was going to be sick.

  He informed me that I was not allowed to be sick. He had made that quite clear exactly four days after I was sworn in, when I found myself sticking my camera into a skull from which the brain had been removed during autopsy, photographing the .22 slugs where they had lodged behind the eyeballs when the man had been shot in the back of the head.

  That had been three years earlier, and I had never gotten sick at a crime scene (and in fact never did). But that day I told Doc that if he did not stop and let me get a Coke he was going to find out very quickly whether or not I was allowed to get sick.

  I got the Coke.

  I hope you're not trying to eat your supper as you read this.

  The Blue Springs Plantation Corpse

  One more story, and then I'll leave this part of the subject. Three men were once riding in a car. One of them was holding a shotgun. The shotgun went off when the car hit a bump, and one of the men, struck full in the face, was instantly killed. The other two men, panicking utterly, took the body out in the country onto a pecan plantation and dumped it. The weather was fairly cool for the South, and when the body was found a short time later, most of it was perfectly preserved. Fingerprinting the corpse took no more than about half an hour, and the prints were so good that I was able to identify the corpse from the prints in only about five minutes. But the wounds had looked appetizing to small rodents —opossums and so forth —and the entire skin and tissue of the face, including the eyes, down to but not below the skull, had been totally consumed. When I first saw the corpse, I saw a man lying on his back, fully clothed, arms outstretched, legs slightly spread apart. He could have been only sleeping, except that he had a skull for a face.

  Identifying the Remains

  That story moves us into the second main topic for this chapter, identifying the remains. That corpse was easily identifiable; his fingertips were in excellent condition, and his prints were on file. The U.S. military services have begun to store a small amount of genetic material from each service person, so that a body-no matter how damaged — can be identified by genetic "fingerprinting" (which we'll discuss in chapter seven). In the future, there will be no more "unknown soldiers." But again, this is working with material deliberately stored for the purposes of identification.

  What if there are no fingerprints stored? What if there is no genetic material stored?

  Sometimes—if there is an idea as to the corpse's identity— objects belonging to that person may be fingerprinted for comparison with an unknown corpse. The FBI disaster squad, which has the responsibility for identifying all corpses from civilian airplane crashes in the United States, once identified the body of an unknown woman from fingerprints on the hairbrush of the woman they thought she might be.

  But even stored fingerprints do no good if no fingerprints can be obtained from the corpse. What do you do then?

  Very often, when the epidermis is nearly or totally destroyed, the dermis skin is still more or less intact, and it has the same fingerprint pattern as the epidermis layer except that the ridges are very fragile ... and finally, as I've been promising, we're back to the Jackson Street Corpse, which began in chapter one.

  Back to the Jackson Street Corpse

  I did a complete crime scene, which took about ten work-hours on several successive days. We discovered that at some point prior to being moved to the bamboo thicket, the body had been laid between the mattress and the box springs. Meanwhile, detectives talking with uniform officers found that on the last day the shotgun house was known to be occupied, there had been three calls from neighbors reporting yelling and fighting. On the first two calls, police had talked to all three winos, each time telling them they had to keep the noise down. The third time, only two had been present. They had been distinctly nervous, and had promised there would be no more noise. That time, we all surmised, uniform officers had been called before the third man died and arrived after he died. Unfortunately, the uniform men could not remember which two of the three they had seen the third time.

  Meanwhile, the medical examiner, wearing a gas mask to do his autopsy, discovered the victim had died of a crushing blow to the back of his head. The crime lab, working with the evidence I had taken there (which had included virtually every portable item which could by the wildest stretch of the imagination have been involved in the crime), discovered evidence that someone had fallen backwards and landed on his head on a small portable space heater.

  At the worst, it was manslaughter; more likely, it was accidental death. But two drunks, with a corpse in the house and cops at the door, had panicked. Most likely, this is what happened: When they realized police were on their way again, they hastily stuffed the body between the mattress and the box springs and possibly—probably — at least one of them then lay down on the bed. After the uniform officers left, the surviving two winos got their companion back out of the bed and bent the body double at the waist, covered him with a quilt, fastened his head and feet together with wire coat hangers, took him into the bamboo thicket in the backyard, and left him there, with a couple of sheets of plyboard laid over him. Both then hit the road —and went on drinking. I never saw the third wino, but I did talk to the second, many months later. He'd totally blanked out the whole thing. When I told him what had happened in the house that night, he watched me intently as I spoke and then said, "Lady, if that's what you say, then I guess that's what happened. But I'm damned if I remember a second of it."

  And he wasn't lying.

  What did we do about it?

  Nothing. What good would it have done? We'd never be able to prove which of the two killed the victim, and more than likely nobody had deliberately harmed anyone. The most we could have gotten anybody on was improper disposal of a human body. And again—what good would it have done?

  But I'm getting ahead of myself. After doing the crime scene, we—the detectives (mainly Bob Morris) and I—returned to the problem of identifying the body.
We had three possibles. The man was wearing a belt buckle with a name on it, but we knew these men wore each other's clothes. The mother of the man who owned the belt buckle viewed the only piece of intact body—a few inches of the back of the neck where the skin had not disintegrated — and insisted that was her son. The coroner said we could not accept that identification; too many people have backs of the neck that look alike.

  In the end, the following morning, after I had all other evidence that was going to the crime lab loaded into the car, the coroner and I went to the morgue where the body was floating in a lead tank of formaldehyde. The coroner neatly snipped off both hands at the wrists, dropped them into plastic buckets of formaldehyde, and directed me to take them to the crime laboratory in Atlanta.

  So off I drove to Atlanta, with two decaying hands crawling with maggots floating in open buckets of formaldehyde in the front passenger's floorboard of the car, and every Boris Karloff movie I'd ever seen or heard of dancing through my brain. It took me about four hours to drive from Albany to Atlanta and to get all the evidence unloaded and turned over to the scientists at the lab.

  And then I headed for home, light of heart and heavy of foot because that ghastly stuff was now out of my car, which wasn't exactly my car because the one Doc and I habitually used was in the shop and I had gone to Atlanta in an unmarked narcotics car.

  And now I will tell you a story.

  The Henry County Line

  Henry County is just south of Atlanta. Henry County has a reputation for enforcing its speed laws very, very thoroughly. Now mind, it's not a speed trap; all speed limit markers are appropriately and reasonably displayed, and fines are fair—but Henry County does enforce its speed laws. Eighteen-wheelers going from Miami to Atlanta or vice versa drive sixty-five or seventy most of the way; but when they cross the Henry County line they pull up their skirts and tippytoe across it at fifty-five, and they stay at fifty-five all the way through Henry County and floorboard it again as soon as they cross the line on the other side.