Teasing Secrets from the Dead: My Investigations at America's Most Infamous Crime Scenes

by Emily Craig

  Al interrupted my thoughts with a sharp tug on the safety rope. He had seen me maneuvering closer to the riverbank's crumbling brink, and he was taking no chances. I breathed a sigh of relief and waved up at him before kneeling once again beside the bones. I slowly repeated the careful, exacting procedure I had begun with the skull, gently brushing away loose dirt with a soft paintbrush, feeling for each bone's contours underground and then cautiously and patiently freeing it. Detective Lambers and I worked our way slowly but surely down to what should have been the victim's shoulders, brushing the silt and sand into plastic boxes, sealing the bones into labeled evidence bags, and passing our treasures up the riverbank, where other members of our team carefully catalogued each one.

  There was a kind of hypnotic rhythm to our painstaking work, my hands moving on autopilot as my brain wandered off on its own. Something wasn't quite right about this case, but I couldn't figure out what it was. Then, as I gave a particularly vigorous tug to unloose the victim's shoulder blade, I realized what had been bothering me: the consistency of the dirt.

  Any kid who's ever buried a toy or some secret treasure in the backyard knows that such objects are fairly easy to unearth a week or two later. After several months, though, the object gets packed in tighter. Something that's been buried for a year or more takes a fair amount of work to dislodge. Rain loosens the earth, and then gravity causes the loose particles to resettle themselves more tightly against the buried object. The object and the earth begin to bond, and with each passing year it becomes more difficult to separate the two, until the object seems almost to form part of the matrix within which it lies. At that point, you're not lifting out a discrete object-you're teasing out a piece of the whole.

  That was the kind of work I'd been doing to free these bones, which told me that they'd been here far longer than the year or two I'd originally thought. I was starting to wonder exactly how long this man had been dead when I caught sight of something else I didn't expect-a bright metal object, lying just where the man's back hip pocket would have been.

  I finished recovering the bone I'd been working on and turned my attention to the metal. With the same care I'd used for the bones, I managed to free the object, slowly but surely. Then I knelt there for a moment, staring at it in amazement. It was a thick, gold-colored money clip.

  The heavy clip was layered with grime, but something about its weight and heft told me it had once been expensive. “Look at this,” I said to Lambers, who shook his head.

  “Not what you'd expect to find in some derelict's pocket, that's for sure.”

  I nodded. The man's gold fillings and expensive dental care had spoken of prosperity, but plenty of people fall on hard times. How likely was it, though, that a destitute man had a clip like this in his possession?

  “Well, maybe he was a thief and had stolen it. But then, why didn't whoever killed him steal it from him?”

  Lambers bagged and labeled the money clip, and passed it to the cop who stood above us. I heard the murmurs of surprise, the new rounds of speculation, follow the item up the bank. A moment later, we found a big pair of eyeglasses, scratched and worn, but still intact. And then a metal pen and pencil, heavy and corroded, like the money clip, still attached to the fabric that had once been this man's breast pocket. I couldn't tell through the dirt and grime, but it seemed to me that they, too, were gold-colored and part of a matching set, hinting, as the money clip did, at wealth.

  As we worked our way down to the other hip and rear pocket area, we found a rusty lump of metal that had once been keys. Years of corrosion had fused them all together, and I couldn't wait to get them back to the lab and see what secrets they might hold. Then there was an old coin that I thought looked like a nickel, though it was so worn and dirty I couldn't be sure. Maybe it had a date on it, or some other clue that might point us toward this man's identity. A few minutes later, we found a second money clip, smaller and less elaborate than the first but with the same heavy, solid feel.

  Throughout our excavation, I had also been freeing pieces of cloth from the silty earth, teasing them away from the ground as gently as I could. How long had it taken, I wondered, for the cloth to disintegrate into pieces? I was starting to get the distinct impression that these bones had lain here longer than any of us had suspected.

  “Do you think that's a sheet?” Lambers asked, pointing at one swatch of fabric. While much of the cloth was the odd blue-green that Mark had first called workman's blue, this new piece of material seemed to have once been white.

  I pulled the last corner of the cloth free and looked at its sagging folds. “Maybe a shirt?” I suggested. With the fabric all in pieces, it was hard to tell, but it seemed to me that this man had been dressed in a shirt-a fairly nice one, too, by the look of it-and some kind of business suit. Again, not what you'd expect from some homeless guy in the woods. I was becoming ever more intrigued by the emerging portrait of this man, his bones partially swathed in rotting cloth, his remains surrounded by his final earthly possessions like some Egyptian king laid out for burial. As we freed him and the objects around him from the fine-grained sandy soil, I felt that I was watching a long-forgotten photograph slowly come into focus, a moment frozen in time that was gradually making itself visible to my eyes.

  I fingered a scrap of the dark-blue cloth, which seemed to be a well-worn synthetic. “Lucky he wasn't an all-natural guy,” I murmured to Lambers. “Cotton or wool would be long gone by now.”

  “But what about the money clips?” Lambers asked. “And all the other stuff? Why didn't the killer take it? And Doc, how old is it?”

  I shook my head. “Tomorrow,” I said. I couldn't wait till we got this stuff back to the lab.

  A few hours into the excavation, our safety-belt system was no longer working. As I continued to inch closer and closer to the crumbling edge of the riverbank, my legs were beginning to feel the strain of my constant balancing act, and I could only imagine how sore Al's arms were getting as he kept up his constant pull on my rope. The rest of our team was farther up the bank, but the photographer, videographer, and Lambers were right by my side as we migrated toward the dangerous drop-off.

  The swollen Ohio had been rising steadily, its chilly waters now licking the edges of the bank about four feet below our ledge. With a certain amount of bravado, my three helpers had declined my offer of a safety rope. We had only one safety belt, and I was wearing it. My colleagues insisted that they were fine, but the safety officer called a halt. “Take a break, people!” he yelled down to us. “Help is on the way!”

  I breathed a silent sigh of relief as I straightened my back and lay down my trowel. I could have used a break an hour ago, but surrounded by strong, fit cops, most of whom were decades younger than I was, I'd been reluctant to admit it. Sometimes I wonder just how long I can keep doing this type of strenuous fieldwork. I'm only in my mid-fifties, but I already use a walking stick, even while crossing level ground. One of the hazards of my profession is to make me all too uncomfortably conscious of how fragile my body is, holding me hostage to one torn ligament or pulled tendon, one bad twist of the knee or a sudden fall on the wrong part of my hip. Now I was extremely grateful for our half-hour enforced resting period before a local water rescue squad arrived at the scene: three men and a woman riding in a big flat-bottomed boat.

  At first they simply stood by, ready to help if anyone should fall into the swift current, their boat bobbing in the choppy waters a few feet offshore. When they realized that the water was continuing to rise and the current was growing ever swifter, they jammed their bow right into the ledge, almost directly under my feet, their shoulders practically level with my hands. Suddenly, I had an idea.

  “May I come on board?” I asked the rescue squad captain. He seemed a bit taken aback, but after a moment, he nodded yes. Still attached to my safety rope, I sat down in the dirt and slid down the exposed surface of the ledge until my feet were resting on the boat's bow. I carefully turned my head toward the ledg
e. Yes! I could excavate the rest of the site while standing in the boat. The site was just level with my chest, allowing me to hold my arms comfortably straight out in front of me.

  With the help of one of the rescue squad, I unhooked my safety belt. “Heads up!” I called to the men on the shore, and tossed the belt up to Lambers, who put it on gratefully. We passed the next few hours in relative comfort, he wearing the belt, I standing in the boat.

  Of course, there was one small problem: motion sickness. I probably could have handled the gentle rocking of the boat, but all day long huge barges kept making their majestic way up and down the Ohio, creating enormous wakes that rippled their way toward shore. Each time we collided with a wake, our boat would lurch, and I had to stop my work, standing stock-still, eyes squeezed shut, until the nausea passed. I must admit, it's the first time I ever got seasick while digging for a body.

  Mark still hadn't gotten back from his office, and I was starting to get worried about losing the bullet, especially now that bits of soil had started to crumble away from the bank, so my gallant rescue crew improvised a solution. Two men held a wooden backboard up against the bank, allowing me to examine the loose fragments of earth before they fell into the river and were gone forever. I didn't mind the dirt, but I was taking no chances on losing our bullet.

  My patience was starting to wear thin, though. “Where is Dr. Schweitzer?” I asked at about two in the afternoon, and as if on cue Mark came running over the hill waving a large brown envelope.

  “I've got the x-rays!” he called down to us. “I can see the bullet in his skull!” This was certainly a welcome bit of news, though I had to laugh at how my earlier envy had melted into relief. It was good to know that when push came to shove, I really was more interested in getting the results than in taking the credit.

  When Mark made his careful way down to the ledge, I pointed to the large tree root I had just unearthed. “Look, Mark. This actually grew right into his pants. It got inside his pants leg through a small hole near the hip, then grew parallel to his thigh bone for years.”

  Mark looked more closely at the root, which was several inches in diameter. “How long do you think he's been there?” he asked in an awed whisper.

  I shook my head. The bones felt old to me, and the associated evidence-the cloth and objects unearthed along with the bones-had clearly been in the ground for quite a while. In my own mind, I was saying, Ten years? Twenty? But until I could get everything to the lab, I was taking no chances on committing to the wrong answer, even to myself. This case had already thrown us more than its share of curveballs, and I wanted to keep an open mind.

  Lambers and I had agreed that he'd maintain the evidence overnight, bringing it to my lab first thing the next morning. Like a nervous hostess, I scurried around the lab, hurrying to clear away the skeletal remains and paperwork from the case I'd been working on the week before. I'd just doused the counters with disinfectant and loaded my favorite Patsy Cline CD into the stereo when Lambers arrived, looking very much like an overburdened shopper as he clutched several big brown bags tightly to his chest, the inventory list tucked under his chin.

  “Come on, Doc,” he said without moving his jaw, as I rushed to take his burdens from him. “Where should we get started?”

  I smiled at his enthusiasm and couldn't help thinking that he, at least, seemed no worse for wear after yesterday's efforts. I wasn't about to tell him that I was stiff and sore.

  “Let's start with the skull,” I suggested. “I can't wait to get my hands on that bullet.” Lambers watched in fascination as I soaked the skull in a basin of water, rinsing all the dirt away. Then I set up a fine wire-mesh screen, poured the dirty water through it, and breathed a sigh of triumph. There lay the bullet, intact upon the screen.

  I took a picture of the bullet and packed it carefully into a small envelope labeled with the case number, the date, and my initials. Later I'd take it downstairs to the ballistic experts in the state police lab.

  Lambers and I looked at the rest of the evidence bags, feeling like two kids on Christmas morning. So much intriguing evidence-where would we begin?

  “There's no real way to decide,” I said finally. “Let's just pick what interests us most and start there.”

  Lambers nodded and said exactly what I was thinking: “The money clip.”

  As I went through the shopping bags, Lambers prepared to resume his job from the day before, taking notes on everything I said and did. With mounting excitement, I pulled out the two plastic evidence bags that held the money clips. Even through the sand and ground-in dirt, I could see that the larger one was engraved with an intricate cross-hatch pattern and the initials HS-or was it SH? Frustratingly, both ways looked correct. The other one was engraved also, but with simple straight lines. Both bore marks indicating they were made of 14-karat gold.

  Lambers was quick to conclude that this probably wasn't a robbery. “These were in his pockets, Doc. It's hard to believe that someone would take a wad of bills out of solid-gold money clips and then put the clips back into the guy's pocket.”

  I had to agree. “And you can't quite see some derelict just picking them up while scrounging around, can you? You'd need a wad of bills to buy each one.”

  I took the clips over to my sink and gently rinsed them in clear, warm water, removing the last traces of sand with a soft toothbrush. After I laid them on a clean blue towel to dry, Lambers and I each took several photographs with both conventional and digital cameras. In this case, Lambers and I would rely on conventional photographs as evidence, but I e-mailed the electronic pictures to Detective Daly in Fort Thomas, where they appeared on the evening news that very night.

  Next, I looked at the eyeglasses, their cloudy lenses surrounded with thick black plastic frames. “Not too stylish, are they?” I asked Lambers, who was busy noting the time I had opened the bag.

  “No, but they sure are big.” Indeed they were: From side to side, the earpieces measured almost eight inches.

  “Well, his bones are big,” I answered. “And with these glasses, it looks like a lot of flesh must have covered his bones, but we'll know more once we get to his clothes. That's going to be a monumental task, so let's say we do a few more easy ones first.” Lambers nodded as he handed me the bag labeled SOCKS.

  The socks were made of a thin synthetic fiber and were almost twenty inches long, another indication that our victim had been large. At the top of each cuff, I found a clump of rusty metal imbedded in the fabric. When I scraped off the corrosion with a small knife, I saw that these were garter snaps. This man had been wearing knee socks, held up by garters-an unusual style, to say the least.

  Lambers handed me the bag labeled GLOVES. They were big, too, but I could see that they'd been hand-stitched from smooth leather. The same was true of his belt.

  Now I couldn't wait to get a good look at his clothes. Although Mark had originally described the cloth as workman's blue, it was actually closer to a dark blue-green. As I carefully pulled the fragile fabric from the evidence bag, I brushed off the loose dirt, flattened the fabric with my hands, and laid it out on the gurney. Soon I could see that each piece was an individual panel of the same garment. The threads that once held these garments together had disintegrated, perhaps because, until the last few decades, most thread was made of cotton, a natural fiber that decomposes rapidly. The cloth itself was in remarkably good shape. It looked and felt like polyester, a petroleum-based product that theoretically can last forever.

  After an hour's careful unfolding and matching, I managed to reassemble a pair of trousers, a suit jacket, and a long-sleeved shirt. As I looked at his clothes, I began to imagine the man who had worn them had been a large, heavyset man. Fat? Or perhaps he'd just been big-boned and well-muscled. So far, all we knew was that he'd worn big clothes. A simple measuring tape told us that his jacket measured 58 inches around the chest, while it had taken a 48-inch waistband to circle his waist. His arms and his legs were long, and his neck was
big too, almost 18 inches in circumference.

  Although the threads connecting these panels were gone, I could still see the seams and darts, and it appeared as if the suit had been hand-tailored to a custom fit. Evidently, he'd been stylishly dressed, but for what era? After we'd finished recovering all these things yesterday, I would have guessed that they'd lain in their secret grave for at least ten years. But I associated this type of tailored polyester suit with the mid-1960s. (Lambers, of course, had never seen one at all!)

  “This guy dresses like a Cold-War Russian,” I found myself saying, and then asked myself what had brought that image to mind. Something in the cut of his suit recalled for me TV footage of foreign dignitaries meeting with President John F. Kennedy, something old-fashioned and European…

  I pulled out a pencil and a couple of sheets of paper and tapped into my rusty medical-illustration skills. As Lambers called out the measurements of each garment, I sketched out labeled diagrams of the suit jacket, the trousers, and the shirt, complete with notes about the placement and size of buttons, pockets, pleats, even the epaulets on the shoulders of the shirt, and not forgetting the type and manufacturer of the zipper. As Lambers watched in fascination, I went online to search vintage clothing sites.

  I showed him a few images. “What do you think?” I asked him. “1960s? 1970s? We're getting back there, anyway.”

  Lambers shook his head. “If he was killed way back then, we'll never find out who did it.”

  I sighed. “Right now I'm more concerned with figuring out who he was.”

  “That won't be easy either.”

  He was right, of course. It was hard enough identifying a pile of bones that had lain in the woods for a year or more. If this man had been there for two or three decades…