Written in Bone

by Sue Black

  He wanted to keep them because he thought they were “cool,” but for a while he didn’t really know what he was going to do with them. Occasionally he would take them down to the local pub to show them off to his mates, especially at Hallowe’en. He often remarked that maybe one day he might make them into jewellery, and eventually he decided that this was what he would do.

  He drilled a hole lengthwise through each finger bone and threaded them together with silver wire, which he knotted at the end of the distal phalanx, made a silver cap to cover the cut end of the proximal phalanx and mounted them on a key ring. As if this were not bizarre enough, he then chose, unaccountably, to present the key ring to his new girlfriend on Valentine’s Day as a token of his undying affection.

  She may have been hoping for roses or chocolates, perhaps even a diamond ring for her own finger. Whatever the case, she was so disgusted that she threw the key fob into the bushes—much to David’s consternation, as he was unable to find it, despite searching for hours. Suffice it to say that the relationship did not survive. He hadn’t broken the law, so perhaps his only crime was really bad taste in gifts. This may sound like one of those shaggy dog stories that is embellished with every telling, but it came to us direct from the police officers who tracked down our bold, nine-fingered Romeo.

  How did we know that the finger bones originated from a young, though adult, male? Once again, it is down to the development of the bones. We have seen how the hand is already formed in the fetus: at birth, it will have nineteen identifiable bones, and at two months, bone will have started to appear in the carpals. The last one, the pisiform (pea-shaped) bone, is formed by around eight years of age in girls and ten in boys. Over the next seven years the hand will continue to grow until the growth caps at the end of each bone eventually fuse and the hand ceases to increase in size.

  David, our unfortunate carpenter, lost his finger when he was sixteen. We could see on the X-ray of the bones from his key ring that the bases of both his middle and distal phalanges had fused to their respective shafts, but the fusion was not quite complete as “ghost” growth lines were still visible at the fusion sites. So we knew this had happened relatively recently. The bones of the hand are subjected to fluctuating levels of blood steroids throughout puberty and respond accordingly. Testosterone produces bones that are more robust and larger, and because a boy will be two years older than a girl by the time his hand stops growing, the effect of this hormone in particular results in bigger bones than would be the norm in a female hand. This enabled us to offer the opinion that the bones belonged to a male.

  However, the X-ray of David’s finger could only tell us how old he was when it was chopped off, not how long ago this had happened. His finger, in its glass jar and latterly attached to its key ring, remained for ever frozen at sweet sixteen, whereas he was now eight years older—though it would seem not much wiser—by the time the police felt his collar.

  Because there are so many bones in the hand and they are all growing and maturing at their own rate, a radiograph of the hand is often used as a means of determining the living age of a young individual.

  When an undocumented refugee or asylum-seeker enters the UK as an unaccompanied minor (UM), their likely age will need to be assessed. Many do not know exactly how old they are because the country they have come from does not keep such records. Others may have fled without their documentation, or lost it en route, and so have no definitive proof that they are the age they claim to be.

  Social workers will usually assign to these children what they consider to be their most likely age, based on their responses to various questions, on how old they look and on their general maturity. If the individual is deemed to be under eighteen years of age, they will be assigned a new birth date of 1 January in the most appropriate year. Deciding as far as possible whether somebody should be categorized as a child or an adult is important for the purposes of child protection. As the UK is a signatory to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, if we believe an individual to be a child, defined under the treaty as anyone below the age of eighteen, then we must, among other things, house, educate, feed, protect and care for them until they become an adult. The child will then be the responsibility of the local authority until they reach the age of majority.

  Like all systems, this is open to manipulation by the unscrupulous, in this instance, adults who seek to take advantage of looking younger than their years to benefit from rights granted to children, and who may deliberately travel to the UK without their papers. If they are assigned an approximate birth date below the age of majority, the truth may never come to light provided they keep a low profile and don’t break the law.

  Our justice system has its own criteria involving a number of age thresholds. A child under ten, for example, is deemed to be below the age of criminal responsibility and juveniles (children between the ages of ten and seventeen) who commit an offence are subject to different procedures in dealings with the police and the courts from adults. Although anyone over eighteen is considered in the eyes of the law to be an adult, twenty-one is the minimum age at which you can be sent to prison. If you are under twenty-one and given a custodial sentence, you will therefore serve it in a young offenders’ institution.

  In cases where there is any doubt over an offender’s age that has a bearing on how they are categorized by the criminal justice system, the courts understandably require more definitive evidence than an age that has simply been assigned by social services, and so it is usually when young refugees or asylum-seekers fall foul of the law that forensic anthropology becomes involved.

  Majid was a refugee from Afghanistan who arrived in the UK as an UM and was assigned an age of sixteen by social workers. He was placed in the care of a local authority home for the remaining two years of his childhood. It was here that he started to groom young girls. Two years after he left the children’s home, he was arrested for the rape and murder of his girlfriend’s best friend and found himself before the courts.

  Majid’s records showed that he was now twenty years old. However, his girlfriend told investigators that he had said he was actually twenty-four, and had boasted about having fooled the authorities. If he was twenty-four, then it would mean, of course, that he had been twenty when he moved into the children’s home, not sixteen, and that vulnerable children in care had been exposed to a predatory adult masquerading as a child.

  Naturally, the court needed to know this man’s true age, or the nearest we could get to it, so we were asked to examine him. Lucina led on the case. First of all, radiographs were taken of his hands, which clearly showed that all the bones had fully fused—proof that by this point he was certainly older than seventeen. A CT scan of his clavicle indicated that he was closer to twenty-five.

  As a result, when Majid was duly pronounced guilty, he found himself serving his custodial sentence in prison, not in a young offenders’ facility. He had not been a child even when he first entered the country, let alone when he began offending. He had arrived as an adult. He will therefore be deported on his release.

  This case is an example, albeit an extreme one, of why it is crucial that age assessment in the living is undertaken scientifically. It is too important, not only in protecting the rights of the person being assessed, but also the rights of others, to be left to guesswork. We have the expertise to do this, thanks in large part to the story the bones of the hand can tell us. I am of the firm opinion that the procedures used in age determination of the living are in need of a thorough overhaul. Clinical imaging of the hand is a reliable indicator of age and perhaps it should be used more routinely. Concerns that X-ray radiation may be harmful are easily resolved: it is perfectly possible to use MRI images instead as these involve no ionizing radiation. If Majid’s hand bones had been scanned when he first entered the UK, the authorities would have been in no doubt that he was not telling the truth.

  The hand is, of course, of huge value in identification. It offers an array of infor
mation, from the arborescent pattern of our superficial veins and the pattern of skin creasing over our knuckles to the location, orientation, size and shape of our scars and the number and distribution of our freckles, moles or liver spots. And it is the hand, or rather the print it leaves behind, that is the location of a biometric that has for centuries been accepted as confirmation of our identities. Fingerprints have been found in ancient clay tablets, representing the signature of the person who made them, and were used by Chinese merchants to seal contracts.

  The patterns seen in fingerprints were first described by the Italian anatomist Marcello Malpighi around 1686 and it was a German anatomist, Johann Christoph Andreas Mayer, who observed, nearly a century later, that they may be unique to each individual. In the nineteenth century, the Scottish doctor and missionary Henry Faulds published a paper that suggested fingerprints could be used in the investigation of crime. The baton was quickly picked up by the explorer and anthropologist Francis Galton, who published his seminal text on fingerprint identification in 1892. And the rest is, as they say, pretty much history.

  We all know from our school biology lessons that every palm print and fingerprint is different, even those of identical twins, and each is believed to be unique. However, as this is impossible to prove, for evidential purposes we have to express the proposition that any two prints may have come from the same person, or from two different people, as a statistical probability rather than an absolute certainty. The world had almost reached the point of assuming that fingerprint identification was invincible until, in 1997, DC Shirley McKie, a serving Scottish police officer, was accused of being present in a house where a murder had occurred.

  Because all police officers and scientific experts have their fingerprints and DNA recorded for exclusion purposes, DC McKie’s were on file. When a thumbprint found on the bathroom doorframe of the house was run through the system, it produced a match with hers. She denied having been there, was suspended, then sacked, subsequently arrested, tried and eventually found not guilty of all charges because she had not been at the crime scene.

  Amid allegations of misconduct on the part of the Scottish Criminal Records Office and the police, what became known as the Fingerprint Inquiry was set up by the Scottish government in 2008. This shook the world of forensic identification into the recognition that while the prints themselves may indeed be unique, the methodology used to compare them may sometimes be insufficiently robust. The inquiry’s report warned that, while there is no reason to suggest that fingerprint comparison is inherently unreliable, practitioners and fact-finders must give due consideration to its limitations.

  It was a sobering reminder that every identification technique is fallible. Identification is not a matter of certainty, but of probability. Which is why all scientists must be able to understand the principles that underpin statistics.

  The hand is also an area we examine closely when we are trying to establish how a person has died because it is so often the first part of the body employed to fend off an attack. The presence of defensive wounds may raise suspicions about what has happened to them, as they did in the case of a woman whose identity remained a mystery for some years.

  Her semi-naked body, discovered by hillwalkers, had been found lying face down in a stream in an isolated spot in the Yorkshire dales. She was wearing jeans and socks and her bra was undone but still hooked over one arm. A T-shirt turned up some distance away, but there was no sign of any shoes, handbag or other possessions. She had been dead for no more than a week or two and the cold, flowing water had slowed decomposition.

  After a postmortem examination failed to pinpoint any obvious cause of death, the body was frozen to halt any further decomposition or insect activity while the police continued their investigations. Some weeks later, they sought help from forensic anthropology. A second PM was requested and we made the journey south to see whether the body had anything more to tell us. We might turn up something that had been overlooked, or incorrectly recorded; if not, we would at least be able to confirm for the police the findings of the first examination.

  The woman was between twenty-five and thirty-five years of age and about 4 ft 11 ins (1.5 m) in height. Her facial appearance, the colour and type of her hair and her dentition told us that she was likely to be of south-east Asian ancestral origin (perhaps South Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam, Cambodia, Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines or Indonesia). Her jeans were a size 12, her T-shirt a 10. Her shoe size was probably about a UK size 1 or 2. She had a piercing in each earlobe and a wedding ring on her left hand made of gold that may have come from south-east Asia.

  We found only two injuries, and they were both to her right hand. The first was a spiral fracture of her fifth metacarpal. The metacarpals are among the most common bones to be broken and constitute between 5 and 10 per cent of emergency department visits, most of these by young men. They are usually the result of a fall, a road accident, blunt trauma or assault—in either the batterer or the battered. Fractures to the head and neck of the bone are quite often caused by throwing a punch, whereas fractures to the base of the metacarpal, which are rarer, generally arise from high-force impact. It can be impossible to tell whether a fracture is due to something hitting the hand or the hand hitting something.

  The second trauma was a dislocation of the woman’s proximal interphalangeal (PIP) joint of the right middle finger, which may have been sustained in the same incident that was responsible for the damage to her little finger. This, too, could be explained by a fall, but it could just as easily have been a defensive injury.

  No person matching this woman’s description had been listed as missing and her DNA and fingerprints did not match anyone in criminal records. Isotope analysis of her bones, which gave us information about her diet, confirmed that she was likely to have been living close to the place where she had been found, and had been doing so for quite some time. Her face was drawn by a forensic artist and published in the local papers, but still nobody came forward.

  Eventually she was buried in a small, rural cemetery as an unknown person. The money to pay for her burial was raised in the local community, who took care of her as one of their own until such day as she could be reunited with her name and with those who loved her. In the meantime, she was described on her gravestone as “the Lady of the Hills.”

  When a body remains unidentified, investigating the death is extremely difficult because the police have no means of tracing the last movements of the deceased. They cannot check their bank accounts, mobile phone records or computer or locate relatives, friends or colleagues for questioning. But even after all leads have dried up, cases like these are not forgotten. Cold case reviews take place on a regular basis. With the likelihood of solving them heavily reliant on scientific analysis, discussion is often focused on recent scientific or technological developments that were not available to the original investigation and which might now open up a new avenue of inquiry.

  When this young woman was found, early in the new millennium, social media were in their infancy. With the expansion of these networks around the world, investigating officers thought it was worth trying to flood social media in south-east Asia with her description and the forensic artist’s facial depiction to see if that would produce any fresh leads. And, quite incredibly, it did. Fifteen years after her death, the UK police were contacted by someone from Thailand who believed the Lady of the Hills was their relative.

  A new lead like this ignites a cold case. Now that the police had a name to work with, they assigned a new investigative team, who flew out to Thailand to talk to possible relatives, collect familial DNA and obtain fingerprints from the local authorities who had issued the woman’s ID card. Both DNA and fingerprints were a match. At last she could be named.

  Lamduan had moved to the UK to marry an English teacher. As well as the two children they had together, she had an older son by a different father who had come to England with her. Shortly before her body was found, he had come lo
oking for his mother and was told by his stepfather that she had left him and the two younger children and gone back to Thailand.

  The couple had always kept themselves to themselves and had few friends. Lamduan’s family in Thailand had lost contact with her around the time of her death, but as they, too, had been told that she had abandoned her husband and children, and thought badly of her for it, this was not entirely surprising. It meant her disappearance failed to raise alarm bells with them. Everyone simply believed the husband’s story and assumed that she had run off with someone else, which meant that nobody, in England or Thailand, reported her missing or raised any suspicions.

  Lamduan’s death remains unexplained and the case is still open. All we have to go on anatomically are those two injuries to her right hand. And yet somehow she ended up dead, face down in a moorland stream, only partially clothed and without shoes or handbag. Could she have got those injuries in a fall, or were they defensive? If so, was she pushed? Who was there with her? We must not give up hope of one day being able to answer those questions.

  How we adorn our hands can be a help in taking an inquiry in a particular direction when we need to identify a body, as demonstrated by Lamduan’s wedding band, and the Claddagh ring found on the Irish lady in the case discussed in Chapter 2. So we always check the hands for jewellery, or a sign that jewellery has been present.

  The hands are also a common site for tattoos; less so for piercings, although these are starting to become fashionable. They are usually web piercings, with a stud inserted between the thumb and the index finger, or between any two adjacent fingers, but we sometimes see dermal or single-point piercings on the wrist, on any finger or indeed anywhere on the hand.

  In the future forensic anthropologists may have many more items on their checklists. There are reports that microchips containing personal information are now being embedded in hands to enable people to go about their daily business without the need to rummage around for an ID card, bank card or card key to gain access to their workplace. Some even hold information on their health.