Written in Bone

by Sue Black

  The responses to these questions provide us with the four basic parameters by which every human can be categorized: sex, age, ethnicity and height. They make up a biological profile of the individual: for example, male, aged between twenty and thirty years, white, between 6 ft and 6 ft 3 ins in height. This profile automatically excludes those people reported missing who do not fit, thereby reducing the possibilities. To give an idea of scale, in a recent case, the biological profile cited above resulted in over 1,500 possible names for the police to investigate.

  We ask the bones all sorts of other questions in the hope that they might answer. Did she have children? How did her arthritis affect how she walked? Where was that hip replacement done? When and how did she break that radius? Was she left- or right-handed? What size shoes did she wear? There is barely a single region of the body that cannot tell a part of our story, and the longer we live, the richer the narrative.

  DNA identification has of course been a game-changer in reuniting the dead with their names. But it can only help if investigators have a source with which the DNA of the deceased can be compared. Source DNA matching requires the individual to have previously given a DNA sample that remains on record. Unless they are one of the minority who do so for occupational reasons, such as police officers, soldiers and forensic scientists, this will only have happened if they have been charged and found guilty of an offence. If the police believe they know who the person was, they can search for source DNA in their house, office or car and have it compared with that of a parent, sibling or offspring. Sometimes a relative may already be on the criminal database and a link can be made via that circuitous route. When molecular forensic science is unable to assist, forensic anthropology, and its focus on the bones, is often a last resource upon which to call. Until we have a name for the deceased, it is extremely difficult for the authorities to establish whether a crime has taken place that needs to be investigated, let alone to conclude the person’s story to the satisfaction of the criminal justice system and their bereaved family.

  Lastly, can we assist with the cause and manner of death?

  Forensic anthropologists are scientists and, in the UK, are not generally medically qualified. Determining both manner and cause of death falls very clearly within the expertise and responsibility of the forensic pathologist. The “manner” of death might be, for example, that the victim was beaten around the head with a blunt instrument, while the “cause” of death may be blood loss. However, this is an area where the partnership between pathology and anthropology can work in harmony. Sometimes bones will tell us not only about who the person was, but what may have happened to them.

  We ask different questions when dealing with the manner and cause of death. Does this child have too many old, healed injuries for them to have been caused by anything other than abuse? Did that perimortem fracture happen because this woman was trying to defend herself?

  Experts learn to read different parts of the body for their own purposes. A clinician will look to the soft tissues and organs for signs of disease and a clinical pathologist may examine biopsies of tumours or categorize changes in cells to establish the nature or progression of a pathology or condition. The forensic pathologist will focus on the cause and manner of the death while the forensic toxicologist analyses body fluids, including blood, urine, vitreous humour from the eye or cerebrospinal fluid to determine if drugs or alcohol have been consumed.

  With so many scientific disciplines all focusing on their own niche, sometimes with unblinking myopism, the bigger picture can often be obscured. For the clinician and the pathologist, the bones might be just something to crack open with pincers or electric saws in order to get to the organs inside. Only if there is trauma or obvious pathology will they be given more than a cursory glance. Forensic biologists are more interested in the cells that hide in the spaces within the bones than they are in the bones themselves. They will slice the bone and grind it down to a powder to get to the nuclear coding hidden in its depths. The forensic odontologist gets excited by teeth, but perhaps less so by the bones that hold them.

  So the song of the skeleton may go unheard. And yet this is the most durable component of our bodies, often lasting for centuries, keeping its memories safe for a long time after the story told by the soft tissues has been lost.

  If identity can be established from DNA, fingerprints or dental matching, nobody is much interested in the bones until all the other work is done and the experts have moved on to pastures new. It may be months, sometimes years, after a body is found before the forensic anthropologist enters the picture and the bones are at last called upon to give up their memories.

  The scientist has no control, of course, over what they have to work with. The more recent the remains or the more complete the skeleton, the more of the story we can hope to recover, but unfortunately, human bodies are not always found intact or in good condition. The passage of time metes out its ravages on a discarded, concealed or buried corpse. Animals consume and destroy bones and the physical effects of weather, soil and chemistry conspire against retention of the song of a life lived.

  The forensic anthropologist must be able to try to retrieve a part of its tune from just about anything, and to do that, we need to know what to look for and where to find it. If multiple bones tell a similar story we can have confidence in our opinion. If only a single bone is recovered we will necessarily need to be more cautious about how we interpret what it is saying to us. Unlike our fictional counterparts, we need to keep our feet on the ground and our heads out of the clouds.

  Forensic anthropology is a discipline that deals in the memory of the recent, not the historical, past. It is not the same as osteoarchaeology or biological anthropology. We need to be ready to present and defend our thoughts and opinions in a courtroom as part of an adversarial legal process. Our conclusions must therefore always be underpinned by scientific rigour. We must research, test and retest our theories and be fully conversant with, and able to convey, the statistical probability of our findings. We need to understand and adhere to Part 19 of the Criminal Procedure Rules on expert evidence and to the CPS rules on disclosure, unused material and case management. We will, quite rightly, be robustly cross-examined. If our evidence is to be taken into consideration by a jury who will decide on the ultimate guilt or innocence of a defendant, we must be sound in our scientific understanding and interpretation, clear and comprehensible in our presentation and accurate in our protocols and procedures.

  Perhaps forensic anthropology was once viewed as one of the easier routes into the interesting world of forensic science. It certainly exudes the kind of investigative charm that makes it irresistible to crime fiction. Not any longer. It is a profession, governed in the UK by a professional body with a royal charter. We must sit examinations and be retested every five years to remain active, competent and credible certified expert witnesses. There is no room in our business for the amateur sleuth.

  This book takes you on a journey through the human body, examined through the lens of anatomy and forensic anthropology as they are applied in the real world. We will look at the body in segments, chapter by chapter, exploring how the anatomically trained forensic anthropologist might work to help to confirm the identity of the deceased and how we can assist the pathologist to determine manner and cause of death or the odontologist or radiologist to interpret findings relevant to their disciplines. We will look at the way our life experiences are written into our bones and how we can use science to unravel the story. I want to show you how using what we know of the bones allows us to piece together what can be extraordinary events—life is often more remarkable than fiction.

  The forensic cases used as examples are all real ones, but in many of them I have changed names and locations out of respect for the dead and their families. Only where a case has gone to court and the press have published details of the protagonists have I included real names. The dead have a right to privacy.

  PART I

&
nbsp; THE HEAD

  Cranial Bones

  1

  The Brain Box

  Neurocranium

  “Life’s true face is the skull”

  Nikos Kazantzakis

  Writer, 1883–1957

  There is no more instantly recognizable image in the iconography of death than the human skull. Skulls, or their representations, have been used for ritual purposes throughout most cultures and civilizations since the earliest times. Today the skull is our preferred scary emblem for Hallowe’en, the adopted logo of heavy-metal rockers, bikers and ancient pirates, the international symbol for poisons and the favoured motif for the infamous goth T-shirt.

  As objets d’art, the highly decorated human skulls of the Victorian era were curios made for trade, as were the infamous carved and sculpted crystal skulls that, it was claimed, originated from pre-Columbian Aztec or Mayan cultures. Many were eventually shown to be late nineteenth-century artefacts designed to entice and fleece the wealthy collector. Fake skulls have been used not only for the purposes of generating income but even to fabricate “evidence” to promote scientific theories. The 1912 Piltdown hoax was an attempt to convince the academic world that a new “missing link” had been found in the hierarchy of evolution between the ape and the human. In 1953, the humanesque skull said to have been discovered in gravel beds near Piltdown in East Sussex was exposed as a forgery when it was shown conclusively that, while the neurocranium, the “brain box” section of the skull, was that of a small modern human, the altered mandible (the lower jawbone) had come from an orangutan. Not the greatest moment in history for the image of the incorruptible British academic scientist.

  The skull even became a hugely expensive piece of art when, in 2007, Damien Hirst created his iconic For the Love of God. The story behind the title was that his mother was always asking him, “For the love of God, what are you going to do next?” The result this time was an ostentatious platinum cast of a human skull, set with over 8,600 flawless diamonds, including a large, pear-shaped pink diamond placed in the centre of the forehead to represent the third, all-seeing, eye. The piece was tagged as a memento mori, a man-made object designed to help us reflect on the reality of our mortality, and to hint that perhaps art might succeed where life has failed: by scoring a victory over decay through the persistence of beauty. It reputedly cost around £14 million to make. To whom it was sold, or indeed whether it was ever sold at all, for its astronomical asking price of £50 million remains a mystery.

  There are two aspects of this piece of Hirst’s art that trouble me. The extravagant use of diamonds in such a potentially frivolous artwork is none of my business. However, the fact that the original skull was bought from a taxidermy shop in Islington should raise questions for us all about the ethics of being able to buy and sell the remains of our ancestors, irrespective of their antiquity. At one time or another, these remains were somebody’s living son or daughter. If we would be offended by someone selling remains from our family vault, and most of us would be, surely we must extend the same courtesy to others? Secondly, the teeth were real: they were removed from the skull and inserted into the cast, which indicates that the integrity of the original remains was violated for the sake of art. Their disassociation bothers me. And so, on another level, does the suspicion that he got the position of some of the teeth wrong.

  Perhaps the appeal of the symbolism of the skull lies in the fact that it is the most obviously human part of our remains and the core of “us” the “person”: the home where we park our brains and the seat of our intellect, power, personality, senses and, some believe, even our soul. We tend to recognize people by their faces, not, for example, by their kneecaps. It is the part of a person with which we most commonly interact and it is the repository for our conscience, our intelligence and therefore our humanity and self. Our enduring fascination with skeletons and skulls probably also has a simpler source: we all possess and occupy a human body, and yet our own bones remain largely invisible to us and therefore a mystery.

  When forensic anthropologists are called to assist the police with their investigations, it is understood that certain parts of a body may not be complete for perfectly explainable reasons. While most of us are issued with a full complement at birth, there are exceptions. Hands and feet, fingers and toes, for example, may never have formed, perhaps due to amniotic banding, a rare condition which can result in limbs or digits being amputated in the womb. During our lives, some of us may lose limbs through injury or have them surgically removed. And when human remains are discovered after death, some parts may be missing. Usually this will be due to scavenging animal activity but occasionally it may be because they have been deliberately removed or disposed of separately. In this, as in every aspect of our work, the forensic anthropologist must maintain an open mind and be prepared to attempt to extract as much information as possible from the smallest fragments.

  While excavating a body from a lead coffin in the crypt of a church in London a few years ago, I commented to my colleague, “I can’t find his left leg.” She told me to look closer, because we always have two. Not in this case, however. Sir John Fraser had had his leg shot off by a cannon in the great siege of Gibraltar in 1782, so there wasn’t one to be found. But one thing is certain: while we can carry on with our lives minus a limb or a finger or two, no human being has ever walked this earth without a head. Therefore, every skeleton has, or has had, a skull. And this is the bit we really want to find.

  One set of remains I encountered, while working in London in my very early days as an anthropologist, presented me with a puzzle. I was contacted one morning by the police, who were looking for assistance with a “rather unusual” case. In all honesty, there is no typical case in our business. Almost every investigation has some element of abnormality or strangeness to it. The police asked if I could come down and advise them on the recovery of some skeletal remains from a garden and then examine the remains at the local mortuary.

  The forensic strategy team met in one of those grey, featureless offices that are commonplace in police headquarters. Copious cups of tea are always provided and if you are lucky you might even get a bacon sandwich. The background to the case was laid out by the senior investigating officer (SIO).

  A pleasant lady of mature years had walked, unannounced and in a state of some agitation, into her local police station and told the desk sergeant that if the police were to lift some patio slabs in the back garden of a nearby ground-floor property, they would find a body.

  The woman was detained while a police search team was dispatched to the flat. When interviewed, she explained that some twenty years before, she used to care for the old lady who lived at this address. One day she had let herself into the flat to find her charge dead on the floor. She said that she had panicked and, not knowing what to do for the best, buried the body because she didn’t want to get into trouble with the police. She told the landlord that the old lady had taken ill and been moved to a care home and then set about clearing out the property. This did not, however, explain why, as it later transpired, she continued to collect the old lady’s pension for a couple of years after her death, which would in itself, you’d have thought, have been enough to attract some attention.

  The flat was now occupied by another tenant, who was temporarily moved into alternative accommodation while the forensic team went to work. Through a set of sliding glass doors that led to the garden, they stepped on to a patio paved with grey concrete slabs. The slabs were easy to lift and, less than six inches below the surface, they discovered their first bone. It was at this point that the police had phoned me.

  A full excavation and body recovery was undertaken and a complete set of skeletonized remains unearthed. All, that is, except for the head. When I informed the police of this absence, they asked me if I was sure. Maybe I had missed it? My indignation at the implication that perhaps I had not done my job properly, perhaps even that I wasn’t able to recognize a head, was indescribable, and
my response was terse. How do you miss something the size of a football? No, it had not been missed. Everything from the fourth cervical vertebra downwards was present, but the head, and the top three vertebrae, were most certainly not there.

  At the mortuary I was able to confirm that the headless skeleton was that of an elderly female, who fitted the description provided by the informant down to the arthritis in her hands and feet and her hip replacement. We even found the belt she used to keep her trousers up, which had belonged to her late husband and had a distinctive military buckle. The pathologist reported that there was no specific evidence to indicate the manner or cause of death and agreed that the identity of the individual was probably not in question.

  Her medical records indicated that her right hip had been replaced some years before but unfortunately no record had been kept of the implant number, which would have been a useful identifier. Her dentist told us that she wore dentures, but of course we had no head, and therefore no teeth. As she had no living relatives it was not possible to DNA-type against a family member.

  Looking at the upper surface of the remaining cervical vertebrae, I was able to offer the opinion that the skull had been removed around the time of death. There was sufficient evidence of trauma and fracturing to suggest a forced separation. But we needed to find it.