Finding Everett Ruess

by David Roberts

  Later, over the telephone, Greenspan admitted to me that he was not at all happy with the hairbrush. The DNA from Waldo’s hair was “degenerated,” and it might have been contaminated by being handled by others. On the other hand, he was one hundred percent certain that the molar DNA was Caucasian. It was not only not Navajo—it belonged to no Native American.

  So the body in the crevice on Comb Ridge was most likely not that of Everett Ruess. It was instead that of some other young white man.

  But who the hell was he?

  Between 1912 and, say, 1940, there were very few white men of any kind wandering about the Navajo reservation. And in southeastern Utah during that era, if an Anglo vanished in the wilderness, pretty much everybody knew about it. For weeks after getting Greenspan’s DNA report, I sought out regional historians and old-timers to ask them if they knew of any tales of Anglos disappearing on the rez in the 1920s or 1930s. The best informed scholars told me that nothing in Aneth Nez’s story rang even the faintest bell.

  Despite the lingering reservations we all harbored about the soundness of Family Tree’s findings, Ron Maldonado decided to complete the excavation, in hopes of coming up with further clues to the young man’s identity. A few days before our return to the Comb, I was in Boulder, Colorado, having dinner with my friend Steve Lekson. Of all the Southwestern archaeologists I had met, I considered Lekson the most brilliant.

  Now I told Steve about our Comb Ridge quest. He didn’t know much about Everett Ruess, but his eyes lit up. “You can do a lot more than just DNA,” he said, when I had finished my recital. “A physical anthropogist can tell all kinds of things from bones. What kind of bones have you got?” At the end of the evening, Steve gave me the e-mail address of his colleague at the University of Colorado, Dennis Van Gerven.

  On November 23, I was back on the rim of the Comb with Maldonado, Denny, Greg, and Vaughn. The blazing heat of July had given way to a late autumnal glory: soft, low-angled light, cool in the shade, balmy in the sun. Maldonado unpacked his tool bag, then lay in an awkward position on his side, as he reached into the crevice and excavated with trowel and brush. He kept up a running commentary. “Water’s been comin’ through here,” he said. “There’s a lot of disturbance, but I think it’s natural.… Seems like a jumble of bones. Not like a crevice burial—just stuff the body in any way you can.…

  “Holy smokes, what’s going on in here? That looks like a tooth way over here, by the lower leg.… He’s definitely been crunched in here tight.”

  Maldonado’s labor confirmed our initial suspicion that the crevice was almost too shallow to hold a human body. Everything about the confused muddle of the bones bespoke haste, concealment, and a desperate forcing of the body into a rock coffin into which it did not really fit. After two hours of steady work, Maldonado completed his excavation.

  I was disappointed that we had found not a single scrap of apparel, but Vaughn said, “I’m not surprised. Leather and cloth just rot away, or the varmints get it. It’s prime stuff for pack rats to build their nests with.”

  The only “artifacts” Ron’s troweling had revealed were a couple of old metal buttons and about twenty-five beads—yellow, orange, red, and green, made apparently of glass and turquoise. Some were so tiny that I could not imagine how an artisan had drilled holes through them. “Probably a necklace,” Maldonado ventured, “that he had hanging around his neck. The cord they were strung on is long gone.” To all of us, it was disconcerting to find an ornament that seemed so Native American in style. But I remembered Everett’s pride in the Navajo bracelet he had bought—“whose three turquoises gleam in the firelight,” he wrote in his last letter to Waldo.

  At the end of the excavation, Maldonado had said, “I think we’ve found his lower jaw.” Now the mandible rested on the surface of a nearby boulder as we studied it. Most of the teeth were still in their sockets. Two of the left front incisors overlapped, indicating a severe overbite. Maldonado soliloquized: “No fillings. But the teeth aren’t ground down, either. He had a crooked smile, that’s for sure. Definitely an adult, not a child. He had a kind of pointy chin.”

  “What do you want to do with it?” I asked.

  “Give me a minute. I’ve got to think.” As he had in July, Maldonado seemed to retreat into a trance. I realized that he was weighing all kinds of moral considerations on his mental scales, including, as he had said the previous summer, the desire to give “solace and closure” not only to the Ruess family, but to Daisey Johnson. Perhaps fifteen minutes passed before he spoke again, and when he did, it was as if he had prepared a speech.

  “On the rez,” he said, “when you come across a Navajo burial, you can almost always find somebody who knows who it was. In this case, there’s nothing of that sort around. I’ve never had anybody claim affiliation to a burial when there wasn’t someone really there in the ground. Especially the older people—they don’t make up stories. They don’t have any reason to make up a story.

  “But on the other hand, I’ve never before found an Anglo buried in a crevice.” Maldonado paused as he looked around at each of us. “It’s okay with me to recover this mandible and get it to the guy at CU. As long as we all pledge to return it to the grave after he’s finished analyzing it. Everybody on board with this?” We all murmured our assent.

  Maldonado wrapped the mandible in tissue, then inserted it in a plastic bag. I put it in my day pack and carried it out to the car, where I returned it to the archaeologist. “I’ll get in touch with Van Gerven, and have him talk to you.”

  Maldonado held the package in his hands. “I have no idea what we’ll learn from this,” he said. “Maybe nothing.”

  * * *

  Dennis Van Gerven ignored my first two e-mails. Later he admitted he was doing his best to stiff-arm my inquiries, since he tended to get bombarded with pleas from nut cases who had watched too many episodes of CSI. His first communiqué had annoyance written all over it, as he signed off, “In short a study of the mandible from my point of view would be quite pointless.”

  I persisted. “Would there not be some chance you might see something the DNA test couldn’t tell us?” He e-mailed back, still annoyed, “I seriously doubt it but Paul and I would be willing to look at it.” Around New Year’s Day, Maldonado shipped the mandible to Paul Sandberg, Van Gerven’s grad-student assistant.

  Meanwhile on the Internet I had found the report of one of Van Gerven’s cardinal triumphs. In the “Hillmon case,” Van Gerven had solved a riddle of faked identity that had vexed experts since 1879, and that had been important enough twice to reach the Supreme Court. The man’s modus operandi had been to superimpose photos of an excavated skull onto historic photographs of living men, to ascertain the best match. Reading the report, I realized that Van Gerven knew his way around a skeleton.

  I hammered away, e-mailing a detailed account of Everett Ruess, Aneth Nez, Daisey Johnson, Denny Bellson, and our efforts so far on Comb Ridge. And I promised to scour the Internet for all the photos of Everett I could find and forward them. Slowly, Van Gerven warmed to the challenge. On January 6 he e-mailed me, “Dig up everything that you can. We may be able to do something interesting.” By “dig up” I assumed he meant “find photos,” not return to the grave with shovel in hand.

  The case had caught Van Gerven’s fancy. “The money shot is the profile,” he e-mailed on January 10, referring to a side photo of Everett taken by Dorothea Lange in 1933. Already, Van Gerven had noticed a striking similarity between the mandible and the deep jaw in the Lange photo. But the anthropologist was frustrated. “Is the portion of the mandible,” he queried me on January 12, “the entirety of the material recovered?”

  “Forgot to mention,” I wrote the next day, “the upper part of the skull was intact when we first saw the site, but the FBI team managed to destroy it when they tried to yank it out of the ground! Would a picture of it pre-FBI help?”

  Within an hour, Van Gerven e-mailed back, “Yes yes yes. Do you have the pieces??? G
od, get them and send them.… Get us the photos and try for each and every piece of skeleton. Man, let me know.” A full-blown fever had evidently seized the former skeptic.

  Greg Child’s photos from before the FBI outing and mine from after pushed Van Gerven over the edge. I thought my snapshots of the saddle crammed on top of the smashed cranium would dismay anyone who saw them, but Van Gerven was jazzed. “God there is a skull!” he e-mailed back. “If it is still just that complete or even if not we will take the ID to a whole new level. The best stuff is still there!!!!” If someone could retrieve—or even simply measure in situ—other parts of the skull, Van Gerven told me over the phone, he might be able to reconstruct the whole head and compare it to the photos of Everett Ruess.

  The upshot was that Van Gerven and Sandberg decided to drop everything at the beginning of a hectic spring term at CU and head down to southeast Utah. I got in touch with Maldonado, Denny, and Vaughn to arrange yet another rendezvous. On January 23 the two scholars drove all the way from Boulder to Bluff, an eleven-hour journey, their four-by-four packed with tools. And the next day the five men headed out to the grave site. For Denny, it would be the eighth visit since he had first stumbled upon the lonely grave the previous May.

  On January 24, Van Gerven, Sandberg, Denny, Vaughn, and Ron Maldonado went out to the site. As I sat stewing in Cambridge, wondering what magic this team might pull off, they went to work in the rock crevice. It had rained for several days in southeast Utah, and the dirt roads were slick as they drove the plateau toward the crest of the Comb, but as soon as the men reached the hidden cranny, the sky cleared and a benevolent sun shone down upon them.

  Maldonado turned the excavating over to Van Gerven and his doctoral student. In the first few minutes they made a startling deduction from the bones: these were unmistakably the remains of a male between the ages of late teens and early twenties. Piece by piece, the physical anthropologists retrieved one rib and vertebra and toe bone and tooth after another; they also salvaged many scraps of the young man’s skull. Digging deeper than even Maldonado had in November into the farthest recesses of the crevice, they found many more glass and turquoise beads, as well as a turquoise pendant. Each bone and artifact was gently handled and wrapped for removal to a CU lab. From new molar teeth, Van Gerven thought a colleague of his might retrieve another DNA signature.

  There were some surprises. “I think whoever killed him stole his shoes,” Van Gerven told me two days later.

  “Why do you think that?”

  “The guy wasn’t out there walking barefoot. And Denny agreed, if a Navajo buries somebody, he leaves his shoes on him.”

  “Vaughn thought a varmint might have taken the shoes.”

  “Nope,” Van Gerven responded. “If a predator gets his teeth into the shoe, he pulls the foot loose with it. We’ve got a heel bone. We’ve got big toes, for Christ’s sake!

  “The wonderful thing,” Van Gerven went on, “is that we have diagnostic bones from the lower face. The nasal region is pivotal—where the bridge of your glasses sits. If we can put all the pieces of skull together, and if the contours fit the photographs of Everett, then we’ve got a hell of a case.”

  At the very end of the day, wedging himself as deep inside the crevice as he could, Vaughn found the most provocative artifact yet. It was a metal button, embossed with the logo MOUNTAINEER curving around the rim above an X, in the vertices of which the numerals 0–1-2–3 were tucked. At once Vaughn thought of Everett’s rambles in the Sierra Nevada in 1933. There the vagabond had befriended Park Service rangers and Sierra Club hikers. Was the button a vestige of some such association?

  A friend of Vaughn’s who was an expert in buttons (yes, archaeology has become that specialized!) eventually e-mailed him an analysis:

  [The button] probably came from a pair of Mountaineer overalls made by ZCMI in Salt Lake City. They began manufacturing Mountaineer overalls in 1872 and they were still available in the 1930s and for who knows how much later. ZCMI is the Mormon Church’s Zions Cooperative Mercantile Institution. It started to manufacture all sorts of goods by Mormons for Mormons so that the Utah economy was stimulated and insulated from leakage to the outside world. We have found work clothes buttons marked ZCMI, so the Mountaineer button may be a later version.

  This information, however, did not prove that the overalls in question had belonged to an Anglo, for in the early decades of the twentieth century, Indians in Utah regularly bought and traded for Mormon-made clothing.

  Back in Boulder, Van Gerven and Sandberg’s first task was to stabilize the very fragile pieces of bone—especially skull fragments—they had retrieved from the crevice. Many of the bones were sun-bleached and eroded after decades of exposure to the elements. But the anthropologists were heartened to find, as Sandberg wrote me in late February, that “three fragments of the face, two of them with teeth still in place, were tightly embedded and protected in the dirt, and we had a nearly complete mandible. It seems as though a previous attempt to force the skull out of the dirt [i.e., by the FBI] had left much of the face intact under the surface.”

  From the very start, Van Gerven and Sandberg were able to make what they called a “biological profile” of the victim. “The shape of the pelvis told us that the individual was male,” Sandberg explained. “The degree of developmental maturity of the bones told us that he was between the ages of nineteen and twenty-two, and measurement of the femur gave us a stature estimate of five feet eight, give or take a couple of inches.”

  The facial fragments were critical to reconstructing the dead man’s physiognomy. Molding the stabilized bones in place with clay representing the missing parts, the scientists painstakingly rebuilt a partial model of the head. For comparison, they had two of the splendid portraits of Ruess that Dorothea Lange had shot in 1933, one face-on, one in profile. As Sandberg explained,

  Using Adobe Photoshop CS, we blended images of Ruess and the bones together. This technique is good at excluding people, almost too good because it can easily exclude the right person due to distortions that arise in photography. You’ve got to take the photo of the bones in the same manner as the portrait. Once we got the two photos superimposed, we aligned two anatomical points that were the easiest to establish on the bones and the portrait. In the profile portrait, they were the top of the nose and the bottom of the mandible. In the front view portrait, they were the edges of the teeth. Now the question becomes, do the other anatomical landmarks line up? They do. Everything matches.

  “I’d be just as happy to disprove the match as I would to prove it,” Van Gerven had warned me as the two men had started their work. But day by day he grew more animated. “I have a really good feeling about this,” he told me in early February. A few days later: “So far, there’s nothing exclusionary.”

  Finally, at the end of February, Van Gerven phoned me with his verdict. “All the lines of evidence converge,” he said. “This guy was male. Everett was male. This guy was about twenty years old. Everett was twenty years old. This guy was about five foot eight. Everett was about five eight.

  “Everett had unique facial features, including a really large, deep chin. This guy had the same features. And the bones match the photos in every last detail, even down to the spacing between the teeth. The odds are astronomically small that this could be a coincidence.”

  * * *

  Van Gerven paused. “If I had to take it to court, I’d say that it matches Everett Ruess with reasonable professional certainty.”

  Van Gerven and Sandberg wanted further corroboration of their find, however, so they enlisted Kenneth Krauter, a colleague at the University of Colorado, who is a professor of molecular, cellular, and developmental biology and a leading expert on DNA. Krauter and his assistant, Helen Marshall, agreed to perform a new DNA test on the bones. From one of the femurs Marshall cut a cross-section disk, used an ultrasonic method to clean it of all possible contaminants, then pulverized and dissolved it to extract the DNA at the core.

/>   Meanwhile, the four Ruess nieces and nephews all sent saliva samples to Krauter’s lab. The aim was to compare the DNA in those samples with the DNA extracted from the femur. A nephew or niece would be expected to share about 25 percent of the DNA of his or her uncle.

  Using state-of-the-art hardware and software from Affymetrix, an industry leader in gene technology, Krauter and Marshall compared no fewer than 600,000 DNA markers. (CODIS, the protocol used in most criminal forensic cases, is capable of comparing only from fifteen to eighteen markers.)

  To Krauter and Marshall’s surprise and delight, the comparison with the saliva samples yielded an overlap very close to 25 percent of the markers for all four nieces and nephews. To double-check their results, the scientists compared the femur DNA to a database of fifty random strangers. The overlap with all fifty was infinitesimal—only tiny fractions of one percent at most. Further checking their results against possible errors, Krauter forwarded his analysis to colleagues at Harvard, who vouched for its integrity.

  In April 2009, Krauter announced, “The combination of forensic analysis and genetic analysis makes it an open-and-shut case. I believe it would hold up in any court in the country.”

  On April 30, 2009, with my article in Adventure just out, the National Geographic Society held a nationwide teleconference to announce our discovery. In a motel room in Farmington, New Mexico, Denny, Daisey, and I shared a telephone, as did Ken Krauter and Dennis Van Gerven from an office at the University of Colorado in Boulder; also on the line were Ron Maldonado in Window Rock, Brian Ruess in Portland, and Michèle Ruess in Seattle. Asking us questions from their assorted venues were reporters ranging from the New York Times to the Los Angeles Times and the Associated Press, as well as regional correspondents in Denver, Boulder, Durango, Salt Lake City, Tucson, and other Western cities and towns.