Where the Bodies Were Buried

by T. J. English

  The first of the diggings began on January 13, 2000, at a location in Dorchester across from Florian Hall, at 55 Hallet Street. This particular excavation would involve the uncovering of the most recent of the Southie murder victims, including the bodies of Bucky Barrett, John McIntyre, and Deborah Hussey, all of whom had originally been buried in the basement of the Haunty.

  From the stand, Mires remembered that it was snowing that night, and it was extremely cold. She was the leader of an investigative crew that included Colonel Tom Foley of the state police and many others.

  Prosecutor Wyshak directed the witness’s attention to a photo projected onto a flat-screen monitor. “Do you recognize that location?” he asked.

  “Yes, I do,” answered Mires.

  “And what is that location, Doctor?”

  “That is the location of the grave site off of Hallet Street, across the street, and you can see in the picture with the American flag in the front, that’s Florian Hall.”

  The digging had begun at 5:30 P.M. and was soon shrouded in darkness. Klieg lights were erected at the site, giving the photos presented by Wyshak an eeriness that seemed to match the task at hand.

  “There’s a telestrator in front of you,” said the prosecutor to the witness. “If you could sort of mark the area of excavation . . . you can do it with your finger.”

  Mires was able to draw an arrow or a circle or an X with her finger on the monitor; her markings instantly appeared on the screen in the courtroom and also in the media room two floors below.

  Said Wyshak, “I direct your attention to photo three-seventy. What does this photograph depict?”

  “This is the excavation under way. We initiated the excavation with a large backhoe in order to remove the overburden. . . . We had information leading us to believe there was a seven- to eight-foot overburden, in other words, that much soil over the grave. . . . The soil consistency is going to be different inside the pit than it’s going to be outside the pit. We started to feel the ground getting softer, and we consulted at that time, and we brought in the small Bobcat in order to remove the rest of the overburden.”

  “And showing the next photo, what does that depict?”

  “This is a nice shot of the embankment, which shows you some of the stratigraphy, but right in the middle here, there’s a discoloration, the soil is depressed more, it’s softer, and you can see all the colors are mixed, what we call ‘mottled.’ This is what we believed to be the top of the grave, and soon we found out that it was.”

  Along with being a forensic anthropologist, Mires was also a college professor and someone who often gave presentations to other scientists and people in law enforcement. She narrated her anthropological undertaking with clarity and precision, using terminology of the trade not to impress her listeners, but to lead them into her world, so that even if you were not familiar with a term, you understood what she meant.

  “The small Bobcat had disturbed the very top, so we brought in a tarp and dumped all the soil on that; we then sifted it.” Mires drew a mark on the telestrator. “Here we’re getting an elevation. The police officer in the center is holding a stadia rod, and we’re taking a depth measurement. As I mentioned earlier, you want to lock in the horizontal and vertical dimensions of where you are; this ties it into space. Right? Ties it into Dorchester, ties it into the vertical coordinates in the world.”

  The doctor’s manner was comforting; she was giving us observers—laypeople—details based on logic as we began our descent into what was beginning to feel spooky and ominous. “In the tines of the Bobcat we picked up some leg bones. . . . Here’s a quarter-and-an-eighth-inch mesh screen that’s attached to wood so we can sift the soil. And we are looking for any bones we might have missed. The large leg bones are fairly obvious, but the small foot bones are a little less obvious.”

  Now that Mires and her team had discovered the grave pit, they settled in for the long haul. A large tent was constructed, with lamps and electrical heat generators on the inside. Tables were set up and tarps laid out, so that the findings could be separated and laid out in individual pieces. Photos from this undertaking showed men and women wearing surgical masks and gloves along with boots and digging gear.

  Once the location of the remains within the pit was identified, the process slowed to a crawl. “Essentially, now we’re into a hand excavation. We’re going to use what are called trowels, they’re diamond-shaped hand tools; dustpans; brushes; wooden implements. This is the more tedious and slow process of removing the layers of the soil and material.”

  As Mires explained it, coming upon a bone fragment, the investigators could not just grab it; they had to carefully dig around it, doing as little damage as possible, brushing it, feeling its contours, and then extract the bone from the earth. “So here we have a left and a right femur. We have the tibia, left, and the fibula of the lower leg. . . . If you’ll notice, the bones are almost the exact same color as the soil. So the bones take on the same color as the soil, and they develop a patina, or covering. If the break to the bone is recent, it’s like a dry twig, if you snap it, on the inside it’s going to be white or light in color. The same with a bone. . . . That tells us the damage is postmortem, it occurred after the death of the individual.”

  Eventually, in addition to still photographs documenting each stage of the dig, the investigators brought in a video cameraman. The expedition was videotaped, with the cameraman zooming in tight on each and every major discovery.

  In the courtroom, Mires narrated the video, making sense of what might have seemed to the layperson like a mysterious journey into the core of the earth. In the video, the scene looked like frozen tundra somewhere in Antarctica, with snow swirling in the night air. The archeologists and cops were dressed in huge parkas, with their breath emanating like steam from their mouths in the freezing conditions.

  “What’s starting to happen is we’re beginning to get more than two sets of leg bones showing up. So we have a right and a left for each person, but we’re now beginning to see three sets of leg bones. . . .”

  Using the telestrator, Mires directed viewers to what initially appeared as streams of white in the dark soil. “Here’s the body bag on top, and here’s one set of leg bones, here’s another set of leg bones, and I have a third. A series of ribs. And we have plastic bags and pelvic bones or hipbones over here.”

  For the jurors, these findings were like pieces of a puzzle falling into place.

  Kevin Weeks, in his courtroom testimony, had mentioned the body bags when they moved the bodies, and now, all these years later, Mires was pointing them out, buried underground with the remains. Weeks had also mentioned the lime they had used to suppress the smell of the bodies. Mires pointed out the white chalky substance in the grave pit, which they suspected was lime but wouldn’t know for sure until they sent it to the lab for analysis.

  Said the witness, “With archeology, you don’t exactly know what you’re going to find. It’s revealing itself to you as you go along. . . . Here, for instance, it appears as if this particular individual that belongs to those leg bones was buried not in an anatomical position, that they are probably disarticulated.”

  “What does that mean, disarticulated?” asked Wyshak.

  “Articulated is when you’re attached, everything is attached and the bones are attached to each other with ligaments, and that occurs when you’re buried in a fresh state, right? In this situation, it appeared that this individual was disarticulated, was no longer in an anatomical position. That was probably due to the decomposition.”

  Occasionally, the witness would see something that pricked her enthusiasm, for instance, root growth coming up through the human remains. “There’s a lot of organic material, and so it encourages root and plant growth”—in other words, fluids and the decomposition of the bodies were like fertilizer for the soil. The physical forms of the murder victims were being absorbed into the earth; they were, literally, going back to nature, causing root growth to i
ntertwine with bones and become the organic legacy of the Bulger era.

  Eventually, the remains of three distinct bodies were uncovered. Mires described how these remains were carefully moved inside the tent, where, with the heat generators, it was “a mild fifty degrees.” The various bones were laid out on stainless steel gurneys. “The first thing I do is put the body in anatomical position, as if they were laying prone, faceup, with their hands out on the gurney. . . . You’re going to see some photographs of those full-body shots, or, as we call them, full inventory.”

  On the monitor appeared an image of the reconstruction of nearly an entire skeleton, bones laid out on the gurney in the shape of a human form, complete with a skull or skull fragments. Some in the jury and spectators’ gallery gasped. These disarticulated bones, which were eventually assembled for all three victims, represented all that was left of Barrett, McIntyre, and Davis, and laid out on the table like that they looked almost like people.

  Said Mires, “The skeleton is like a road map. It allows us anthropologists to drive through the lifetime of that individual. We look for signs of age—how old is the person at the time they died; what sex are they, male or female; how tall are they; and ancestry. . . . There are physical characteristics in your skull, in your facial features, and in the shape of your skull that determines who your ancestors were, whether they were Caucasian, Negroid, or Asian in origin, or a mixture.”

  The analysis of the remains continued at the burial site for many hours. Every item found on or near the three distinct skeletons was inventoried, including, in the case of remains that were later identified as those of John McIntyre, the bullet lodged in his skull after being shot in the head at close range by Jim Bulger.

  Three hours into Mires’s testimony, Wyshak said, “All right, now I’d like to direct your attention to approximately nine months later. On or about September 14, 2000, did you respond to a crime scene at Tenean Beach in Dorchester?”

  “I did,” answered the witness.

  And so began the description of the second digging, which was also well documented through photographs and video footage of the excavation. This time, the investigators were looking for the body of Paul McGonagle, who had been killed by Bulger in 1975, ten years before the victims found in the grave near Florian Hall.

  The investigators were told that the body was buried in a rocky area near the shoreline. Again, the anthropologists moved slowly and methodically. The conditions were even more difficult than the previous site. “We’re only three feet from the low-tide line,” noted Mires. “At high tide, the grave itself wasn’t submerged, but the salt water comes through the ground.”

  “And what does that do to decomposition?” asked Wyshak.

  “It has a very caustic effect. Salt water is like acid, almost. There’s a lot of salt in salt water and in the seashells. There’s a lot of calcium carbonate. So it offers a contradiction because it can actually help preserve materials.”

  Before long, the investigators uncovered traces of a body—clothing, a shoe, organic material. “We’re battling the elements. High tide is pretty much full-on now, and we’re getting seepage from the bottom.”

  Said Wyshak to an assistant, “Okay, can we put up exhibit six-oh-six.” On the screen came a photo of what looked like a body crammed into a wet grave, decomposed, fossilized, like something out of a horror movie. “Now, what is this a photograph of?”

  “This is a photograph of an individual fully exposed. . . . It’s about as clear as it got. We have the shoes, platform sneakers. Here we have the knees. And this would be the trunk, the lower trunk. We have the spine, although you can’t see that. Here you can see the arm. And then here it’s the skull on its side and the whole—one side is removed—so it’s actually kind of an open container at that point.”

  Wyshak called for another photo, this one a close-up of something goopy and muddy. “I’ll direct your attention, right in the middle there’s a gold-colored claddagh ring.”

  Said Mires, marking the screen of her telestrator for all to see, “Yes, the ring is here, and although I can’t really make them out here, there are remnants of the finger bones in this area. They’re very hard to pick out. The bones become the color of the soil the body decomposes in, so everything looks the same color because it essentially is now part of the beach after all this time.”

  “Did you recover this claddagh ring?”

  “I did.”

  Wyshak produced the ring—calling it “exhibit six thirty-four for identification”—and handed it to the witness. “Is that the claddagh ring that you recovered at Tenean Beach?

  “Yes, it is.”

  The prosecutor had Mires hold up the ring for the jury to see, and then place it in an evidence envelope.

  The photos kept coming, each one more macabre than the last.

  Now Mires and her team were trying to remove the remains from the grave, but they quickly discovered that the material was “almost the consistency of wet cardboard. It’s very punky, almost like rotten wood, from being saturated and being in this kind of caustic environment for so long. . . . This was the only chance probably that I was going to have to measure the skull, so I set up a ruler so that I could take some very crude measurements, because once I got [the skull] out of the grave, it just kind of fell apart. So you can see here the mandible, what’s left of it. A denture that was probably attached to the maxilla. It’s an upper denture.”

  “Did you recover the denture as well?”

  “Yes.”

  Wyshak handed the witness a plastic sandwich-size bag with something inside. “Can you open the bag?”

  “I can,” said Mires, opening the bag like a box of Cracker Jacks and reaching inside.

  “Are the dentures in the bag?”

  “They are.”

  “Will you display them?”

  Mires held up her prize: a thirty-year-old set of dentures, extracted from the moist, decrepit skull of a Bulger murder victim from long ago.

  Intoned Wyshak to Judge Casper, “Let the record reflect that the witness is displaying the dentures recovered at Tenean Beach in September of 2000.”

  “It may so reflect,” responded the judge.

  “Thank you, Your Honor.”

  “Counsel, would this be a good place to stop for the day?”

  “Sure,” said Wyshak.

  And so, the day ended with the dentures of Paulie McGonagle serving as a sad coda to a long session of grisly testimony.

  The lawyers and court personnel and media people spilled out into the afternoon sunshine. It was Wednesday, midweek, and the bright sky was alive with possibilities, but the dark video and photographic images from the diggings lingered in the air, befouling the shiny façade of a proud city.

  THE FOLLOWING MORNING, Mires was scheduled to return to the witness stand, but, first, there was an issue that the court needed to address. The previous evening, defense counsel had filed a motion with the judge that required immediate attention.

  A motion is a formal request asking the judge to do something for the “moving party” or “movant.” Under Rule 7(b) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, motions must be filed in writing and accompanied by a signed affidavit by the movant—in this case Jay Carney—and the motion papers must be served on all parties in the case. Carney had filed his motion papers too late for the prosecution to draft a response, so that a hearing was required in front of the judge, who would hear oral arguments for and against the motion. These hearings usually took place in the morning before the jury was brought into the courtroom.

  The defense motion, docket number 1134, was headlined “DEFENDANT’S MOTION TO ADJOURN TRIAL.” Bulger’s lawyers were asking that as soon as Mires completed her testimony, the proceedings be adjourned until the following Tuesday. They were, in essence, asking for two extra days.

  “Simply put,” stated the motion, “the defendant’s counsel has hit a wall and are unable to proceed further without additional time to prepare for upco
ming witnesses. Counsel have struggled mightily to be ready for each day of the trial since it began . . . working seven days a week and extraordinarily long hours. . . . There is a physical and mental limitation on how much work can be done by the defense team, and a brief adjournment of the trial will allow counsel to be prepared for the upcoming witnesses.”

  The motion further noted, “The defendant is awakened at 4:00 a.m. every trial day, and by the end of his travel back to Plymouth, this 83-year old man is exhausted. Meaningful interaction with counsel in the evening is impossible.”

  Carney’s motion touched off a spirited debate. It had been brought about, in part, by the prosecution’s contention that the trial was well ahead of schedule and moving fast. In a strategic move, the prosecution also announced that they had dropped certain witnesses who were scheduled to testify. The defense complained on the grounds that since these witnesses were on the prosecution’s list and had been scheduled to appear, the defense was put in the position of having to prepare for witnesses that the government did not intend to call. Precious time had been wasted, and now the defense was struggling to be ready to cross-examine witnesses who had been moved up the list.

  It didn’t seem like an unreasonable request to be asking for two extra days to prepare, but the government wasn’t buying it.

  “Obviously, the government opposes the motion,” said Zach Hafer, who stood to argue on behalf of the prosecution. Hafer took particular exception to defense counsel’s position that they had been hindered, in part, by the government not having been forthcoming with the required discovery material. “As your honor is well aware, we too have spent countless hours, mostly logistically at this point, arranging out-of-state travel, hotel accommodations, witness prep, based on daily progress of this trial. It is a massive undertaking. We’ve met every deadline your honor has set with respect to exhibits, witness lists. We provided daily updates to the defense as to where witnesses are going to fall in the order of proof or even just saying, ‘These are the exhibits that go with this witness.’ In our view, we’ve provided a clean road map to this trial, and there’s absolutely no reason to delay it.”