Written in Bone

by Sue Black

  Readers of All That Remains may remember the mention made there of a character who claimed to have dissolved his mother-in-law in a mixture of caustic soda and vinegar. The victim, Zaina, was a fifty-six-year-old mother of six who took her youngest daughter to school one morning and was never seen again. Police investigations in her home revealed her blood in the bedroom, on the landing and in her bathroom. A crucial piece of evidence was a palm print, in her blood, found at the top of the stairs, which belonged to her son-in-law. When questioned, he produced many bizarre explanations for her disappearance and for the blood, including a tale involving her being kidnapped by masked men and held for ransom.

  Eventually he admitted that Zaina was dead, alleging that they had always got on well but that one day she had made sexual advances towards him. He was, he said, utterly repulsed and had pushed her away, more forcibly than he had intended. She had fallen back and hit her head on the headboard of the bed; blood appeared at her nose, she didn’t move and it was clear that she was dead. Panicking, he dragged her body across the landing into the bathroom and deposited it in the bath while he considered what to do. Fearing that he would not be believed, he decided that he had to get rid of her body. It was when he was questioned under caution that he said he had gone out, leaving her in the bath, and purchased a quantity of caustic soda and vinegar, which he poured over Zaina on his return. He told the police that her body had just dissolved and he had flushed her down the plughole.

  It was at this point that the police came to me to ask if it was possible to dissolve a body in the way that the accused was describing. It was time to call a halt to his string of fantasies. First of all, domestic caustic soda is not sufficiently strong to liquefy a body, certainly not within the time frame given—a matter of hours. And combining it with vinegar would have neutralized the caustic soda. Vinegar is an acid, caustic soda is alkaline, and when you put them together you get something called sodium acetate and water. It’s not a nice chemical, and there may have been some initial “burning’ on the surface of the skin, but little more effect than that.

  He had to come up with another story. Evidently, the son-in-law was no chemist, but he had relevant experience in another sphere. He worked part-time as a butcher in a pie factory and also served part-time in a kebab shop. You can see where the police thinking was starting to go. Using something like a cleaver and his not inconsiderable butchery skills, he had dismembered Zaina’s body in the bath of her own home, wrapped the body parts in plastic bags and stored them behind the bar in the kebab shop. We know this because her blood was found there.

  That night, he and his brother cut up the body parts into smaller pieces. They said they had then toured the city dropping them in bins outside other takeaway shops, where they would be picked up by the bin lorries and sent to a landfill site. As you can imagine, this prompted a full-scale food alert. But although all the waste destined for the landfill site, and the site itself, and the meat on sale from the takeaway and the pie factory, was checked, no evidence was found to confirm that Zaina had met this particular fate. It is perhaps not surprising that the kebab shop closed down shortly afterwards—although it reopened later under new ownership and, as far as I know, is still trading as a takeaway.

  Zaina’s son-in-law was given a life sentence and his brother a seven-year stretch for assisting in the disposal of her remains. Her relatives believe that the motive for her murder was money. Zaina had a nice house and cash in the bank, and the son-in-law wanted both. The pain suffered by a family in such circumstances—having to bear not only the devastating loss of a person they loved, but also the knowledge that their life has been violently taken away by a close relation, and the distress of never having the body returned to be properly laid to rest—must be unfathomable.

  No body has ever been found, despite an extensive search that entailed identifying every spare rib recovered from the landfill site. Was it human or was it animal? Cases like this illustrate why it is so important for a forensic anthropologist to be as confident identifying fragments of rib from a pig, sheep, goat or other animal as they are pieces of human bone, and in their ability to differentiate between them. Students usually find ribs very boring and hate the hours we spend teaching how to tell them all apart, but we know that such a skill may well be critical to an investigation, especially one that involves dismemberment.

  We also drum it into our students that they must be able to seriate the ribs, which means knowing how to distinguish right from left and even, in the absence of a full set, which region of the chest they are likely to have come from: top, middle or bottom. Can you tell, for example, whether what you have is part of the right fifth rib or the left fourth rib, even when all you have is a fragment? This is by no means easy to establish but it can matter.

  I once gave evidence at trial in relation to the dismemberment of the body of a baby boy whose skeleton had been found under a concrete floor. The defence pushed hard on how certain I could be that the knife used had entered between the fifth and sixth ribs. Was this vital to the case? Probably not, but deliberately unsettling an expert witness in order to introduce just enough doubt in the minds of the jury as to the validity of their testimony (“What do you mean, you can’t be sure? What kind of an expert are you?’) is a courtroom tactic frequently employed by defence lawyers.

  Telling right from left is relatively straightforward, as long as you have the segment of the rib next to the vertebral column at the back. Here, where the shaft of the bone turns a corner, a furrow starts to appear along the bottom border of the rib. This is the subcostal groove, which houses blood vessels and nerves that run all the way along the length of the lower border of the rib from the back to the front.

  If you are a meat-eater (and it doesn’t put you off your dinner), you can see this for yourself the next time you eat spare ribs. Look at the area of muscle closest to the bone. Providing it is a lower border of the bone and not an upper one, the holes that convey the blood vessels, and a white, solid little rod, the intercostal nerve, should be visible. Because the subcostal groove is always on the bottom of the bone, and the outer surface is convex and the inner one concave, we can tell which way up it goes and front from back. This enables us to say reliably whether the rib is from the right or the left. It sounds logical, and it is, but it has to be taught.

  Our first task, then, when seriating ribs, is to quickly sort rights from lefts. If all the ribs are present and correct, we expect to have twelve on one side and twelve on the other, but of course things aren’t always that simple. There may be extra ribs or some missing because of damage or scavenging. Now what we have to decide for each rib is whether it comes from the apex of the chest, the upper middle region, the lower middle region or the base of the chest.

  The first two ribs don’t look like any of the others. The really tight angle they have around the top of the lungs gives them a distinctive “comma” shape which makes them easy to identify. The next four (ribs 3–6) are what are called “true ribs,” or vertebrosternal ribs, as they each have their own separate costal cartilage that attaches to the sternum at the front and their shape reflects this upper-middle function.

  The lower-middle ribs (7–10) are known as false, or vertebrochondral, ribs because their anterior ends do not extend all the way round to the sternum, terminating instead in a common costal margin, which you can see quite clearly in individuals who do not have a lot of covering fat. The final two (11 and 12) are called “floating’ ribs as they don’t attach at the front to either the costal margin or the sternum and simply terminate in the muscle of the abdominal wall. As a result, they are somewhat vestigial and much smaller.

  In some extreme types of cosmetic surgery, people may choose to have their lower ribs shortened or even removed altogether. The fashion for an exaggerated hour-glass figure, which the Victorians achieved with very unforgiving corsetry, can today be surgically acquired. More meaningfully, the lower floating ribs can be taken out and used as an autograft to
repair fractures elsewhere in the patient’s body, such as the face or mandible. A very dear friend of mine, who was a paramedic with the Marines, was shot on a tour of duty in Northern Ireland while trying to recover a wounded soldier. One of his ribs was very successfully pressed into service to rebuild his shattered jaw. It is useful to know which bits of your body are not essential to you and can be used as spare parts if required.

  Sometimes it isn’t just the ribs that need to be identified, but matter from elsewhere in the body that becomes associated with them. I once found, nestled on the inner surface of the back of the right ribs of an elderly lady, a mass of tiny stones that would have been inside her abdominal cavity. These were gallstones, formed as a result of her diet containing too much cholesterol and her liver producing insufficient bile salts to dissolve them. Gallstones can accumulate in the gall bladder, which is essentially a little storage pouch, or move to block either the bile duct or the sphincter at the opening connecting the gall bladder to the small intestine. This lady had some very large stones, about the size of walnuts, and many smaller ones like sweetcorn kernels, with flat faces and sharp angles where they fitted into one another like a jigsaw. Stones also occur in other parts of the body connected to the urinary system, including the kidneys, ureters and bladder. So we need to be mindful of the “stones within the bones.”

  Seriation and identification of ribs is relatively uncomplicated when they are intact and adult. Seriating infant ribs is another matter, and requires specialist knowledge and experience.

  In 1999 I was called upon by the Foreign Office to fly out to Grenada in the West Indies to help with a situation of some political sensitivity.

  Grenada had gained independence from the UK in 1974, with Sir Eric Gairy becoming the country’s first prime minister. Five years later, while he was away at a UN summit, control of the country was seized in a bloodless coup by a revolutionary group called the New Jewel Movement, or NJM (“Jewel” was an acronym for Joint Endeavour for Welfare, Education and Liberation). Their leader, Maurice Bishop, viewed as a heroic “man of the people” by many Grenadians, dissolved Parliament and appointed himself head of the ruling PRG (People’s Revolutionary Government).

  The revolution was welcomed by most of the population and Bishop set about implementing a range of measures to improve the lives of the islanders, including free education and healthcare, better public transport and new infrastructure projects. But it was not long before cracks started to appear within the PRG and in 1983 he was deposed and placed under house arrest by members of his own party loyal to his second-in-command. The country descended into chaos.

  A crowd of several thousand of his followers freed Bishop and marched with him to the army HQ. A military force was dispatched from another fort to quash the protest and eight people, including Bishop, three Cabinet ministers, among them his girlfriend Jacqueline Creft (who had been minister for education), and two union leaders, were taken away. They were said to have been lined up against a wall and executed. It is not known what happened to their bodies but there were many rumours, including claims that they had been placed in a pit, had petrol poured over them and were set alight, with grenades being thrown in to blast them into unrecognizable pieces.

  US president Ronald Reagan ordered an invasion of Grenada, citing concerns for the safety of several hundred American medical students who were resident on the island. Although Margaret Thatcher, the UK prime minister, was unimpressed not to have been consulted about the invasion of a former British colony, the British government remained publicly supportive of the US decision.

  Operation Urgent Fury, a four-day land, air and sea offensive involving over 8,000 US forces, swiftly restored peace, but Bishop remained a national martyr without a fitting grave. Several attempts were made to find his remains, and a US military investigation had also apparently been unsuccessful.

  The phone call from the Foreign Office came after a gravedigger unearthed a US Marines body bag containing human bones in what should have been an empty plot in a cemetery in the Grenadian capital, St George’s. Rumour spread like wildfire among the locals that these could be the remains of the PRG martyrs, perhaps even of Maurice Bishop himself, and there were concerns about potential unrest. A combined task force from the US military and the FBI was preparing to fly out to examine the remains and the Grenadian government contacted the UK government to request a small and impartial observer team to join the investigation.

  Our team was indeed small. It consisted of me, the forensic anthropologist, and Dr Ian Hill, the forensic pathologist. The contrast between the Brits and the Americans couldn’t have been more striking. The large US contingent arrived in force, all corporate jackboots and polo shirts, baseball caps and jackets bristling with logos. They boasted the latest gear, packed into shiny, metallic matching luggage, and an air of distance and superiority that was palpably chilly.

  Ian looked like the man from Del Monte with his very English sun hat, short-sleeved checked shirt, cream-coloured blazer and beige slacks. I, as usual, looked like someone’s mother (which, to be fair, I was). We were clearly instantly assessed as “no immediate threat,” supernumeraries to be tolerated but largely ignored. Always a dangerous assumption, as any fan of Columbo knows.

  Ian, an RAF man, spent the entire flight out to Grenada commenting on every creak and groan of the aircraft, recalling every airline crash he had ever attended and advising me on what I should do in the event of an emergency landing. If I was calm on take-off, I was a nervous wreck by the time we touched down. I was glad to arrive at the lovely hotel where we were billeted. It always feels incongruous, on a forensic mission, to find yourself on a tropical island surrounded by swimming pools, cocktail bars and open-air restaurants, but we soon adapted.

  Our first meeting with the US forensic team prompted them to reassess their first impressions of us, if only to add the adjective “annoying” to their appraisal. We asked for a copy of the previous US investigation’s report. We were told in no uncertain terms that they were presently unable to locate a copy, but “ma’am” should be reassured that as soon as they did, we would be supplied with one. There was no attempt even to pretend that this rhetoric didn’t smell like something coming straight out of the back end of a large male bovine.

  Ian and I decided on a strategy of attrition. We just kept on asking, every single day, if they had yet laid their hands on a copy of the report. Every day we got the same stock reply, delivered with patience and courtesy. Some days, just to break the monotony, we would ask twice, or take it in turns, with Ian asking one day and me the next. Or we would both ask, as if we didn’t communicate with each other. Sometimes you just have to make your own fun.

  We sought out the gravedigger to talk to him about what he had found, where he had found it and why he thought everyone was so twitchy. A lovely man, he was happy to take us to the cemetery and show us the hole he had refilled once he realized what he had stumbled upon. He passed on local opinion on what was buried there and imparted all sorts of useful intel—much of it gossip, but some of it relevant detail that had not been reported in the preliminary briefing meetings. He told us it was common knowledge that Jacqueline Creft had been pregnant with Bishop’s child at the time of their execution. Since this was a critical nugget our US colleagues had chosen not to share, we hadn’t been factoring in the possibility of recovering fetal remains. Which just goes to show how important it is to speak to everyone, however peripheral their involvement may seem.

  We started the official excavation very early in the morning to try to avoid the searing midday heat. Not far below the surface we encountered the anticipated US Marines canvas body bag. It was in poor condition but we were able to lift it virtually intact using the rolling technique perfected by nurses for changing sheets under a bed-bound patient. We employ this method regularly when we need to transfer remains into body bags with minimal disruption.

  The US team began to pack up as soon as the bag had been extracted. But th
at is not our protocol. We would always ensure that a burial site is searched fully, both below the recovered remains and to the sides. In this case the body bag had been breached, and bones can move within the soil in all directions as a result of faunal activity and the effects of water courses in the soil. So we would never have assumed that the bag and its contents were the only items in the hole.

  As I trowelled away some soil, I started to uncover some additional bones. That is, of course, only to be expected in a cemetery that has been in use for many years. These were small, juvenile human ribs. They would, naturally, have to be investigated, but it was clear to me immediately that they were not fetal, and therefore there was no possibility that they could be associated with Jacqueline Creft’s rumoured pregnancy.

  However, I was in a mischievous mood. I looked up from the depths of my dusty, dirty hole in the ground at the gleaming jackboots of my US counterpart and asked him sweetly, “Tell me, are we expecting to find a child?” The blood drained from his face and, without a word, he turned and ran to an isolated corner of the cemetery, gesticulating wildly and gabbling into his mobile phone. I won’t deny that this small chalking up of points on the UK scoreboard was childish, but I couldn’t help allowing myself a self-congratulatory little smile.

  When he returned, I asked him if he was comfortable seriating juvenile ribs. If so, I would just hand them up to him. I thought he was going to faint. It was clear that he had little experience in dealing with juvenile remains. I did not mention, as I passed the bones upwards, that they were not fetal, because of course I wasn’t supposed to know that the possibility of finding fetal bones was even on our radar. He asked me how old I thought the child might be.

  “Young,” I said. Perhaps I enjoyed this just a little too much, but the Americans had been so incredibly standoffish to us that I felt I deserved some tiny payback.

  In the mortuary, I prolonged his discomfort through what had now become a role reversal by giving him the partial juvenile skeleton to lay out. He spent the next four hours setting up his “equipment,” and on his mobile phone because, apparently, he was having some technical difficulties. Of course, you don’t need equipment to lay out a juvenile skeleton, just experience. I left him to it until about an hour before the end of the day, at which point I finally put him out of his misery and laid out the bones myself, from head to toe, in about fifteen minutes. When I announced that this was a child of about two years of age, he did actually offer me a weak smile. I felt I had made my point, and he knew it. Thinking that maybe I had scaled a barrier, I pressed my advantage by asking again for the report of the previous investigation. But apparently it was still missing in action.