by Emily Craig
Was this one of those times when I had to rely on touch as well as sight? Closing my eyes, I ran my fingers slowly down to the notch at the distal end. First the White femurs. Then the Black ones…
Wait a minute-here was something! I opened my eyes. Now I could see it. The difference was in the intercondylar notch, the place at the center of the knee joint where the thigh fits into the knee. There was a marked racial difference in the angle of the notch-and somehow, without even realizing it, that was what I'd noticed.
By the time I was ready to graduate in the summer of 1994, I was able to prove that, on the average, the angle of the intercondylar notch differs by about 10 degrees between Blacks and Whites. And I'd come to understand why a generation of Dr. Bass's students had failed at the case I'd finally solved. Because of racial mixing in this country, many African Americans (and probably lots of Whites, too) have a variety of racial characteristics. Our test case's White heritage could be read in the bones of his skull and the curve of his thigh bones-clues to which we had all responded. But the angle of his intercondylar notch revealed his Black ancestry as well.
I was coming to see for myself that skin color doesn't necessarily line up with bone evidence. Our test case might have been light-skinned, dark-skinned, or anything in between, with bones that said one thing and hair and skin that hinted at another. This wasn't the last time I was almost fooled. In 1997, for instance, when I was working as the Commonwealth of Kentucky 's forensic anthropologist, I helped to recover a decomposed body from a cistern in Campbell County. Visually, it seemed that these remains had once belonged to a female with straight, reddish-brown hair and skin the color of dirty snow, so we gave local newspapers and TV stations a description of this missing White female, hoping that someone who knew her would come forward.
After weeks of no response, I agreed to do a three-dimensional facial reconstruction on this woman's skull-and as soon as I removed all of the flesh and saw her facial bones, I realized that our ID had gone awry. This woman's skull demonstrated evidence of racial admixture-that combination of White and Black parentage that leaves nature a lot of choices as to skin color, hair texture, and facial features. When we changed our description to “mixed race,” we were finally able to find someone who knew this person-a dark-skinned woman whose friends considered her “mixed race.” It seemed the six months she spent in the cistern had been enough to destroy her dark epidermal (outer) layer of skin, leaving only the pigment-free endodermal (inner) layer, a creamy white covering dotted with gray patches from the decomposition. Without the skeletal evidence, we would never have found out who she was.
Once we students had some training under our belts, we were sent out into the field as part of a forensic team that worked on actual Tennessee cases under Dr. Bass's supervision. This arrangement had been carefully worked out between the school and law enforcement agencies throughout the state, and it was an invaluable part of our training. Just as in class, all of our case findings had to be written in a concise report that could be read and understood by the wide range of local, state, and federal investigators who might be interested. We also knew that we might have to testify in court, explaining what we'd found in language that a jury could follow and defending our opinions against a defense attorney's challenges.
No longer were we doing this work for academic credit alone. Now it was for real, and the demands on us were high. We couldn't just state that a young woman had sustained a high-velocity gunshot wound to the side of her head-we had to describe the gross and microscopic appearance of the wound: How had her skull bone been damaged? At what point had the bullet entered? What did the hole look like? How did we know it was an entrance wound (where the bullet went in) and not an exit wound (where the bullet went out)? Then we had to back up our findings by citing documented studies of similar wounds.
Despite the simplified, positive statements that fictional detectives tend to make, we learned to pepper our reports with such cautious phrases as “most likely,” “consistent with,” and “appears to be.” And we made sure to back up every opinion we offered with citations from peer-reviewed scientific articles. Slowly but surely, we learned to avoid speculation about the actual murder scenario, limiting ourselves to strictly clinical terms and standard anatomical nomenclature. Let the TV scientists proclaim that “The victim was crouched on the floor when the killer grabbed her hair and then shot her with a gun held six inches from her left ear-making him, of course, right-handed.” In the real world, such a report would more likely read: “There is a circular defect one inch anterior to the left external auditory meatus. This defect is eleven millimeters in diameter and demonstrates internal beveling. Internal beveling is characteristic of entrance gunshot wounds to the skull. [Here we would insert a citation referring to the appropriate portion of the scientific literature.] There is no evidence of gunpowder stippling in the bone.”
Although we were learning volumes from this on-the-job training, our professors warned us not to cut classes to work on a case. But by now we only had four or five hours of formal lectures each week, so we were usually able to respond quickly whenever we were called to a crime scene. Our team was loosely organized, drawn from a pool of about ten grad students, with a core group of half a dozen willing to be on call 24-7 to every law enforcement agency in the state of Tennessee.
Dr. Bass often went with us. But even when he wasn't physically present, we knew that the responsibility was ultimately his. As lead investigator, he would review everything we did and his signature would be above ours in every report. If we screwed up, you could bet we'd hear about it-but if we did well, we'd hear about that, too, and that was what kept us going. Once again, I had cause to be grateful for Dr. Bass's demanding standards, because it was this experience that really taught me how to think like a detective, how to use my common sense, instinct, and intuition as well as my book-learning.
Almost every case started with a visit to the crime scene. We never heard about the “fresh” bodies-that was a job for the pathologist. But if they found decomposing remains, unassociated body parts, or bones, they'd call in the anthropologists.
We'd rush to the scene-perhaps a farmhouse with two smoking corpses or maybe a back-alley apartment with a cache of bones hidden under the floorboards. We'd check in with the officer in charge, who would already have secured the scene. Then we'd work with the officers to come up with a plan for gathering and documenting the evidence.
Here is where I learned how crucial is the information gleaned from the scene. Sure, lab analysis was vitally important, but every investigation starts with the crime scene-if only you know how to look.
On one very early case, I, the novice, saw nothing out of the ordinary until fellow student Bill Grant pointed out that the charred body in the car was covered with burned maggots. This was irrefutable evidence that the man, and his car, had been torched well after he had started to decompose.
In another case, the sheriff took me aside and told me that our murder suspect had just confessed to beating the victim to death with a golf club. I realized how close I might have come to disregarding the broken putter we'd just found in our search through a roadside dump for scattered bones.
Yet another time, I was initially led astray when I examined a severely decomposed and partially skeletonized body propped up against a tree with her legs splayed in a provocative pose-a location that could be easily seen from a nearby road. I assumed that the victim had died there-until I found another site, about fifteen feet away, that contained her teeth, a portion of her broken jaw, pieces of her jewelry, and a mat of her scalp hair, which had sloughed off during the early stages of decomposition. Clearly, someone had moved the dead girl and propped her up in a perverse attempt to display her to passersby. I figured this one out after about two hours of careful analysis, but next time I'd know not to make any quick assumptions about where and how someone had died until I had thoroughly investigated the entire crime scene.
Once we'd learned eve
rything we could from the scene, we'd take the evidence back with us to the university lab, covering every piece of evidence with the paper trail known in law enforcement circles as the “chain of custody.” Whenever any piece of evidence changed hands, someone had to sign and date a piece of paper indicating who was taking it and where it was going.
Back at the lab, we'd begin the second phase of the analysis. Our job was most often to help the police identify victims, offering basic information that would enable police to request someone's medical records or talk to a family in search of a positive ID. Police also asked us to help determine time of death-pathologists could do that from intact soft tissue remaining on whole fresh corpses, but we anthropologists were becoming specialists in analyzing decaying flesh, charred tissue, and bone.
We were fortunate to have the decay facility as a reference resource. For example, say we had a case where skeletal remains were found still encased in a flannel shirt and denim jeans. We could turn to documentation from studies of corpses dressed in similar garments, learning how long it had taken for the clothes to rot away to the point where they matched the victim's. If we had a decomposing body, we could turn to Bass's notes on research projects documenting the rate and pattern of postmortem tooth loss; of maggot infestation; and of soft-tissue decomposition, liquefaction, and eventual disappearance.
Every day we were finding answers to new questions, and each answer led to still more questions: How long does it take for the plants surrounding a corpse to discolor, die, and then return with vigor? Do the bloodier corpses affect plants differently than the ones that are relatively intact? How long does it take for a person's hair to fall out-and under what kind of circumstances will it fall out faster? What if an animal uses this hair in its nest-how far away should you look for that and how do you recognize it? Does the hair change color after death? What if it's gotten contaminated with rotting flesh and animal feces-how can you tell and what should you look for? We learned to ask these and a thousand other questions-and, slowly but surely, we learned to answer them, answers that I put to good use working the rest of the cases in this book.
What brought it all together for me was what I like to think of as the “Friends and Family Case of 1993.” It all began when the Grainger County rescue squad pulled Richard Carpenter's relatively fresh body out of a cistern. No, amend that: They pulled out most of his body, but his head and his penis were missing. Tennessee State Medical Examiner Dr. Cleland Blake called our team from the backyard of a farmhouse in Bean Station, up in the northeast corner of Tennessee. The victim's head and penis were probably still in the cistern, he told us. But no one could say for sure.
The detectives were already putting a case together against Donald Ferguson, whose arrest warrant alleged that he had “slipped up behind” his longtime friend Richard and “hit him in the head with a hammer.” Donald then reportedly cut off Richard's head and penis with the electric carving knife that hung by the kitchen door in the tiny frame house that Donald shared with his mother. As reported in the Knoxville News-Sentinel, Donald's mother, Nannie, had heard a “thump” in the night. The next day she saw Richard's body in the backyard and his head in a plastic bag.
Nannie, who had suffered repeated psychological and physical abuse from her son, was severely beaten by him once more. Instead of cowering in submission as she had done so many times, she fled directly to the Grainger County Sheriff's Department and filed a complaint. “I've got bruises all over my body… and I've been wanting to talk about this,” she said. She also told authorities that Donald had put the body in the cistern.
County D.A. Al Schmutzer thought the murder had occurred on Thursday night, August 19. On Friday morning, when Grainger County deputies arrived at his house, Donald was, as always, out front with a broom, tidying things up. Richard Carpenter's truck was still in the driveway and his mixed-breed dog was still standing guard over it. The bewildered dog wandered off that afternoon, never to be seen again.
Later that day, volunteer members of the local fire and rescue squad pulled the body from the cistern, and Dr. Blake called us. He'd seen the cut marks on the victim's neck bones, and he expected to find matching cut marks on the vertebrae still attached to the head. He wanted anthropologists to document that these marks did indeed match and then to help him further match the cut marks to a specific knife or saw.
Just as my classmates Tom Bodkin, Lee Meadows-Jantz, and I pulled up in our big white truck, volunteers were lifting the plastic bag containing the victim's head out of the water with a grappling hook, while the deputies watched from the farmhouse's back door, smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee. We joined them, expecting to be steered toward the newly discovered head. But after we all exchanged the pleasantries that are a cultural requirement in the South, the deputies escorted us into the suspect's bedroom.
When they arrested Ferguson, they told us, they'd insisted that he empty his pockets and spread the contents on his bed. There among his keys and loose change was a human kneecap. This patella appeared to have acquired a smooth polish, the kind it might have gotten from the skin oils and regular rubbing of a human hand. And indeed, Ferguson told the deputies, he'd been carrying the patella in his pocket for the past year. Then he told us even more-he'd thrown his wife, Shirley, into the cistern after beating her to death two years earlier. He'd made up a story about her running off with another man and, until now, everyone had believed him.
By now Ferguson was at the local jail and was no longer cooperating with the authorities. So Tom, Lee, and I gathered in the yard with Dr. Blake, the men from the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation (TBI), the sheriff's department, and the local rescue workers.
“We already searched the yard and outbuildings when we were looking for Richard,” one burly deputy explained. He added that he and his colleagues had found tiny bits of blood spattered on the kitchen walls and floor despite the obvious lengths to which someone had gone to clean up the crime scene. So, he went on, investigators had kept searching until they found the patella in Ferguson 's pocket. Now, despite his confession, they needed us to confirm that the object was indeed a human bone. Yes, Lee told him. It was. Clearly there were more skeletal remains to be found, so we formed teams to look for them-one for the house, a second for the yard and outbuildings, and a third to drain the cistern.
Cisterns are an integral part of homes throughout Appalachia. The rural areas don't always have sewers or water services, and it's usually too expensive to sink a well. If someone living in the country wants water, he or she pretty much has to collect rainwater or bring in a truckload of water to fill the cistern-a large, concrete-lined hole or a polyvinylchloride (PVC) drum buried in the ground, about three feet wide at the top, six to eight feet wide at the bottom, and up to twelve feet deep.
Detectives hadn't yet had to enter Ferguson 's concrete cistern-they'd used ropes and grappling hooks to retrieve Carpenter's body and then his head. But if there were more bones down there, a grappling hook wouldn't be enough. As we made our plans, Dr. Blake let us see the head, which he'd already photographed. There, in the victim's mouth, was the bloody stump of an amputated penis. As we stood staring at it, the rescue workers continued to drag the cistern with a net, retrieving a few plastic bags, a rotting shirt, and a single bone, which one of the firefighters held high over his head and waved in the air. All of us anthropologists could see right away that it was a radius-a bone from the human forearm.
“Okay,” I heard myself saying. “Now we know Ferguson was telling the truth. We'll have to drain the cistern.” Much to my surprise, the words came out with a tone of authority that sounded confident even to me. I expected the other investigators to cock their heads and smirk at the “uppity new kid,” but they only nodded in agreement and asked my advice on how to retrieve the rest of the bones without damaging any critical evidence.
Suddenly, everyone was looking at me. Lee was actually the most experienced member of the team, with Tom still a newcomer. But by age, I appea
red to be the senior member of our team, so folks seemed to assume that I'd be the one to come up with something.
I knew that someday I'd be out of school, and then I really would be in charge of recovery efforts like this one. I felt so ill-equipped-and I knew that the investigative team in Ferguson 's yard had decades of training and experience. Surely the local firefighters knew more about cisterns than I did. And clearly the detectives had amassed years of experience searching for and documenting evidence.
So I came up with an approach that I still rely on today: I gathered the leaders of each team and drew on their strengths. “All right, gentlemen,” I said to the sheriff's chief deputy, the lead man from TBI, the volunteer fire chief, and Dr. Blake, the M.E. “Let's work together to set up a plan. We need to get all the water out of that cistern, but we can't disturb or lose any evidence. What do you think is the best way to get it done?”
To my delight, this method worked. The team members immediately began offering suggestions-for my approval. For the first time I could remember, my relatively advanced age was working for me-at the ripe old age of forty-five, I at least looked like someone who should be in charge. Some of the TBI detectives had worked with me before and they knew I was still a student. But they also knew that I'd been working with Dr. Bass for almost three years, serving as a key investigator in some of his recent major cases. They were clearly willing to trust my judgment, making me think that I should trust it, too.
I started with the team that was going to drain the cistern. The local fire department had figured out how to pump the water out, so I made only one small suggestion: Put a screen over the outflow pipe to catch any small particles or bones that might be sucked out with the water. They improvised, pulling a screen from an outbuilding's window and propping it up on concrete blocks. A few minutes later, we found our first prize: some small human hand bones.
