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

by Emily Craig

  When I met Dr. Hirsch, we soon discovered that he was a close friend and colleague of our own Dr. Hunsaker, with whom I'd worked on my very first Kentucky case. The connection made us feel like friends and, although Dr. Hirsch, too, was working nonstop, he took the time to escort me down to Memorial Park, an enormous storage facility created in only a few days to store the dozens of victims and tens of thousands of body parts created by the disaster.

  Dr. Hirsch and his staff had commandeered a vacant lot by the East River, which they had paved in asphalt. They brought in sixteen refrigerated trucks, similar to the ones at the morgue entrance, and had them parked side by side in two parallel rows of eight. Then workers erected an enormous white tent that soared forty feet into the air. The effect inside was that of a large cathedral, an awe-inspiring sight.

  When Dr. Hirsch opened a door to one of the refrigerated storage trucks, the chilled air took my breath away and temporarily fogged my glasses. The temperature had to be kept close to freezing to preserve these fragile samples as long as possible. As my vision cleared, I could make out shelves lining the walls from floor to ceiling, stacked with plastic bags and boxes full of body parts. Intended as a temporary facility, Memorial Park is still in existence at the time I write this, as DNA analysis of the remains continues.

  Back at the morgue, I watched the triage team for several hours, trying to take in all the details and learn the protocol. I saw how well choreographed the triage was, how every staff member knew exactly what to do and when to do it, in a seamless rhythm that reminded me of the first time I'd watched an operation.

  The next day began in the same way: first the briefing, then the bus ride at daybreak. By the time I got to the morgue, I already felt like an old-timer-so much so that I found myself speaking up during triage. “Oh, that's got to be the flexor tendons of the forearm,” I heard myself say.

  Amy looked around, startled. I had been standing behind her so quietly, I think she'd almost forgotten I was there.

  “Where do you see that?” she asked, half taken aback, half amused at my temerity.

  The whole team was staring at me over their protective masks. I swallowed hard and replied as calmly as I could:

  “Well, that thin band of parallel fibers looks like the flexor retinaculum, and I can see a fragment of the wrist's pisiform bone still embedded in that tendon over on the side. That tendon is running at a right angle to the retinaculum. So unless I miss my guess, you should be able to reach in and straighten out those other tendons and the attached muscles, and then tease out bits of the median and ulnar nerves running right along with them.”

  Amy looked over at me. The corners of her eyes crinkled over the top of her mask, and I could only imagine that she was smiling.

  “Thanks, Emily.” Then she dropped the bombshell: “I think you'll be ready to handle the night shift on your own if you keep this up.”

  What? I had just arrived on the scene a few hours ago, and they were going to put me in charge of triage for the night shift?

  Amy, I knew, was running the day shift, working twelve hours a day, seven days a week. Dr. Dawnie Steadman, from Binghamton in upstate New York, was managing the night shift now, but her tour of duty was supposed to end in one day. If I was up to speed, I'd be taking Dr. Steadman's place. I still couldn't quite believe I was being put in charge so soon. But my training as both bone specialist and anatomist had served me in good stead to start the triage process by identifying each mix of bones and soft tissue that came through our door. If OCME and DMORT thought I was ready, well, then, I'd be ready.

  “So, Emily, how are you making out?” Amy asked during our next break.

  “I think I've got the basic sense of things.” However, it was still hard for me to grasp how some bodies had emerged intact from the blast while others were reduced to amorphous balls of rubbery gray tissue, how incinerated bones could be found next to a piece of skin with an intact tattoo.

  “It will all make more sense to you if you go down to Ground Zero,” said NYPD Captain Kenneth Mekeel, who was standing there with us. I hadn't yet begun to learn people's names, but there was no question that this man was in charge. Mekeel supervised the law enforcement officers working the day shift, and coordinated the flow of human remains between Ground Zero and the OCME. He also coordinated communication with the site at Staten Island, which I would learn about later that afternoon. The gold bars on the captain's shoulders and the row of medals on his chest broadcast his rank, but it was his quick, confident way of speaking that told me he was not only used to giving orders, but also used to having them obeyed. And he was easy to spot in the crowd, which was a great help. Whenever anyone came by asking where the captain was, they were just told to look for the crisp white shirt on the man with the ramrod spine.

  “I'll see if I can find someone to give you a ride down to Ground Zero and a Cook's tour,” he offered now.

  Like just about everyone else in the country, I had an almost primal need to see Ground Zero. For days I had been watching television coverage of the event, and every reporter on the air had said that unless you actually saw it for yourself you just couldn't comprehend the extent of the catastrophe. They were right.

  Mekeel arranged for an FBI agent to come pick me up in his car, and we drove down there with another FBI agent who, like me, had just arrived in New York the day before. On our way downtown, everything seemed surprisingly normal. The streets were full of people going about their business, shopping or on their way to work. As we got closer to the site, though, the whole atmosphere began to resemble a ghost town: the streets blocked off, the police cars not even bothering to use a siren as they raced up and down the deserted avenues.

  Even FBI agents weren't allowed to drive their cars onto the disaster site, so we parked several blocks away and walked up to one of the checkpoints guarded by military police. As at the morgue, we each had to show two forms of picture identification and to sign in. “Make sure you exit through this same checkpoint and sign out on the same logbook,” the guard warned us. This was both a matter of security-restricting unauthorized personnel-and of safety, making sure that everyone who went in came out again safely.

  Mekeel had let me borrow his hard hat and safety goggles, which I donned just like everyone else on the grounds. Even so, we were limited to the outer perimeter of the site-which was just fine with me. It was hectic and dangerous enough where we were.

  The forces that had wrenched and burned the steel were almost beyond comprehension. The air was filled with smoke that carried the unmistakable odor of burning human flesh, and everywhere I looked I could see piles of pulverized concrete and other debris. On the smoldering piles of rubble closer to the center, I saw a hellish whirlwind of smoke and ash swirling over mountains of concrete rubble, glass, and structural steel beams. The gigantic size of these buildings started to register in my imagination-even their collapsed remnants dwarfed the huge grappling cranes that had been brought in to help remove the debris, and the workers scrambling back and forth across this eerie landscape looked like tiny insects.

  On the edge of sixteen acres of devastation, we, too, were dwarfed by the massive trucks of all shapes and sizes that rumbled past. Some were bringing in supplies and equipment to help with the recovery effort. Others were military troop transport vehicles filled with rescue workers. Tanker trucks came in loaded with fuel for the cranes and bulldozers-and, of course, fire trucks and other emergency vehicles carried men and women who were trying desperately to contain the fires still raging in the belly of this monster.

  “Monster” was not too strong a word, I thought, watching the pile of debris belch fire. It almost seemed to be moving of its own accord as the wind whipped any flexible object back and forth while loose pieces of the buildings' skeletons lost their grip and crashed down, sounding like thunder when they landed. Whenever any person or object touched the ground, huge clouds of gray dust billowed up and seemed to stay suspended indefinitely, first rising, then blowing
back and forth in response to the bizarre combination of air currents created by the fires, the wind, and the trucks whizzing by in all directions.

  It was impossible to hear anything over the machinery, so the three of us communicated by hand signals. As my FBI “tour guide” signaled me to follow him, he also pointed downward, indicating that I should watch where I stepped. I looked down and saw that the ground was covered with a matrix several inches deep-coarse sand, glass, bits of electrical wires, and large sections of twisted steel. To my horror, I also saw bits of bone.

  I shouldn't have been surprised. Bone fragments as well as body parts had flooded the morgue all morning long and, now that I had a better idea of the magnitude of the destruction, I knew in my heart that these fragments might be all that was left of many of the lives lost on that terrible morning. An overwhelming sadness entered my heart, and I had to fight hard to hold back tears. I was literally yanked back to attention when someone grabbed my arm and pulled me out of the way of a Humvee coming toward us in reverse at breakneck speed. The driver, in camouflage, a helmet, and goggles, barely glanced in our direction as he maneuvered his vehicle up onto the deserted sidewalk and continued on his way.

  As we got closer to the site, I was struck by the intense, determined activity of the recovery workers. The devastation seemed huge-yet you could feel that the people here wouldn't rest until they'd cleaned it up. Huge cranes and other heavy construction equipment dug into the massive piles of material, while firefighters and Port Authority officers scanned the mass of twisted metal and concrete with a sharp eye out for any evidence of human remains. Whenever anyone spotted a body or body part, he or she would wave to equipment operators to halt immediately. Then one lone man or woman would move in, crawling over the mountain of debris to gently extract the remains and put them in a bag. If someone found a whole body or a large recognizable section of a body, he or she would store it in a conventional body bag-but very few of those were needed. (By the time I left my third tour of duty in January, the final count of whole bodies recovered from the site was slightly more than two hundred.) The remains were more likely to fit into two-by-two-foot red plastic bags or even small freezer-size plastic zipper-lock bags.

  We continued to walk around the entire site, over to where Coast Guard boats were patrolling the river, past a makeshift memorial to the victims-one of hundreds that had sprung up all over the city-then past a parking garage still filled with cars that had been parked there on that fateful morning. By now, they were all coated in a thick layer of the sand-like debris that also covered the streets and sidewalks, as if some volcano had erupted and showered everything with ash. We stopped for a moment in a small church that seemed to have escaped damage even though it was frighteningly near the destruction's epicenter.

  Firefighters and other rescue personnel were scattered across the rows of pews, some sitting quietly with their heads bowed, some on their knees in prayer, and others walking up and down the outer aisles gazing at the pictures and handmade posters taped to the walls-desperate messages from the victims' families and friends, pleading for information and hoping against hope that the person in the picture had somehow made it out alive. I couldn't look. I knew then and there that the only way I could do this job was to insulate myself from the names and faces there on the wall. In that instant, I surrounded myself with the invisible defensive cocoon that I had spun from experience and kept hidden in my soul for such times. I knew that now, more than ever, my private wall was the only thing that would make it possible for me to deal with this overwhelming human tragedy.

  It had been years since I had prayed inside a church, but I stepped up to the altar, lightly placed my fingertips on the cross, and shut my eyes. When I finally looked up, I turned on my heels and headed for the door with a new sense of purpose. As I headed back to the morgue, I now understood that I had to do this job. Not for myself, not for DMORT-but for the victims and the people who loved them.

  On the way back, my FBI guide explained to me the third leg of the recovery effort, one that I'd never actually see for myself but which was an integral part of the work I would do here. When human remains were spotted in a particular place at Ground Zero, he explained to me, they were recovered and sent uptown to the OCME disaster morgue. Then, workers excavated the rubble and debris from that same location and sent it over to the Fresh Kills landfill at Staten Island on barges. Trucks on Staten Island off-loaded this material and workers spread it out on the ground so they could examine it once again for any traces of human tissue. Indeed, some body parts were so small or so camouflaged by their coating of pulverized concrete that they slipped by the spotters at Ground Zero and were only separated from the rubble at the Staten Island facility.

  Eventually, forensic experts from around the country worked around the clock for more than eight months on Staten Island, separating bone and flesh from more than sixty-one million tons of shattered metal and concrete. By the last few months of the effort, they had created a huge assembly-line operation with conveyor belts and commercial sifters. They'd also built a semi-permanent tent city that offered the workers some shelter from the weather, housed the cafeteria and a dining area, and served as space for office work and evidence processing.

  As I returned to the morgue, I realized that my vision of the disaster had shifted. Before, I had been looking for an explanation of why the results of the towers' collapse were so horribly uneven-how a relatively intact body could lie side by side with a tiny bone fragment. But once I saw the magnitude of the destruction, I realized that there was no point in seeking such answers for the mechanisms of injury. We just had to accept things as they were and deal with the results.

  And soon it would be my turn to deal with those results on my own. Today was Wednesday. On Thursday I'd be taking over the night shift triage station in the morgue. I had only tomorrow to get ready.

  On Thursday morning, I didn't get up and go to the morgue with the day-shift workers. Instead, I tried to adjust my sleep/wake schedule by taking a few naps and keeping the room dark and quiet. I'd be expected to show up at the six p.m. briefing that evening and be ready to go as if it were the start of a normal work day-and then I'd be in the belly of the morgue until seven the next morning.

  As I lay in my hotel room bed at two o'clock that afternoon, the thought of having to go to sleep when my built-in diurnal clock was telling me to wake up was almost more than I could bear. I punched the pillow, turned over, and tried to will myself into a state of relaxation. Tonight, I'd face the test.

  When I walked into the morgue that night, the first thing I did was run through a mental checklist of the guys on my team, the men and women I'd met over the past two days who would be helping me with triage. To my Kentucky eyes, they were an almost archetypal group of New Yorkers, colorful and brash. Al Muller, a detective with the NYPD, was our company jokester, always ready to crack a smile and find something funny in even the most awful situation. Mickey was a Port Authority cop who reminded me of a quick-witted and quick-tempered jockey I once met at Churchill Downs. Carmen was part of the NYPD's missing persons unit; an exuberant Latina, she switched back and forth between Spanish and English without even thinking about it. A police officer, Mia, was a headstrong diva with long black dreadlocks and a swagger to her walk. Kam worked on the NYPD Emergency Response Team-a man of action whose skin was the color of oiled mahogany. Mark Caruso was the first openly gay police officer I'd ever met. He complained endlessly-but he was always the first to come up with a pep talk when we needed it, laughing at everything and everybody. Just to make me feel a little more at home, there were Mark Grogan and Don Thacke, the New York versions of the Kentucky and Tennessee cops I'd come to know and love.

  And then there was John Trotter: my buddy, my comrade in arms, my right-hand man.

  John was a Port Authority detective who shaved his head bald as a cue ball but cultivated a thick white beard. A big, broad-shouldered John Wayne kind of guy, he'd gone down to the World Trade
Center right after the first plane hit, trying to get his people out. When Tower 2 started to come down, he ran for his life with a bunch of his men. He zigged and they zagged-so he survived and they died, even though they were all within inches of one another. John was down there, too, when the fighter planes roared over the area, and he didn't know if the planes belonged to friend or foe. All he knew is that he and the civilians he was shepherding out of the area might once again be in danger of death.

  After all he'd been through, John felt that he couldn't go back down to the site to help with rescue and recovery. But he'd been on the job for thirty years, and his bosses knew they had to find something for him. So he'd ended up assigned to the morgue, and I never had a better helper in my life. He seemed to get totally absorbed in the work, as though knowing that he was doing something vitally important for the victims' families and friends-not to mention his own fallen comrades-gave him a way to cope with his own loss. He became a darned good anthropologist, too, recognizing bones almost as quickly as I did, and sometimes helping me figure out which bone some of the fragments belonged to.

  John and I were about the only middle-aged ones among a big group of twenty- and thirty-year-olds, and I think we each appreciated not being the only “old-timer.” We offered each other moral support when the hours and body parts at our table seemed endless, and we often hung out together during breaks.

  Although John and I shared a special bond, every single person on my team was steady, faithful, and smart. I adored them and I would have trusted them with my life. And I was honored-and relieved-by how quickly we all seemed to put our faith in each other.