Dead Men Do Tell Tales: The Strange and Fascinating Cases of a Forensic Anthropologist (13 page)

In the past, before this aberrant behavior was well documented, many of these cases were treated as homicides and suicides, instead of accidents. But crime marches on: murderers have learned this obscure wrinkle in human behavior and now attempt to set up false autoerotic asphyxiation scenes to throw investigators off the scent. In such cases, the presence or absence of the repetitive groove in the overhead beam can be all-important. Investigators will take note, too, of the fact that almost all practitioners of autoerotic asphyxiation are white males. No one knows why, but this is a statistical fact.

Nor are these deaths unusual. There is probably an average of one a month in my state, Florida. Occasionally we see some truly bizarre cases. Some men, literally afraid to risk their necks, have wrapped chains around their
waists
to cut off their breathing. This method of constriction is also effective in depriving the brain of oxygen. The victims then haul themselves aloft with chain hoists—from which they are later found dangling and dead. One wretch apparently enjoyed having his Volkswagen Beetle pull him slowly around with a chain wrapped about his waist. Unfortunately the chain got wrapped around a wheel and the car reeled him in, thrashing like a giant marlin, until he was crushed.

Another poor soul, for whom pain and pleasure were obviously closely akin, attached an electric train transformer to his penis with alligator clips and was in the habit of administering mild shocks to his genitals. Regrettably, on one occasion—the last!—the transformer shorted out, and he received the full 110-volt household electrical charge. He was instantly and ignominiously electrocuted. This case, when presented at one of our meetings, was interesting because the parents of the deceased had removed all evidence of the transformer before the police investigators showed up. They were understandably horrified and chagrined to discover their son dead under such sordid circumstances and did their best to conceal the manner of his death. But alligator clips leave very characteristic marks and these were plainly visible at the autopsy. After a few shrewd, discreet questions on the part of investigators, the unhappy parents broke down and revealed the full, shabby truth of the matter. The death was ruled accidental.

Milton Helprin, longtime chief medical examiner in New York City, used to tell the story of a young Irishman seen standing on the far reaches of a subway platform by several witnesses. At a certain point he suddenly and silently pitched forward right in front of an oncoming train. He was found dead beneath the wheels, horribly mangled. But his family was Catholic and did not readily accept the initial conclusion of suicide. They were quite certain their son had no reason to commit suicide, and in the end they were proved right. Helprin reexamined the mangled body and noticed tiny burn marks on the right thumb, index finger and the tip of the penis. He was able to reassure the family their son had died accidentally. He had been urinating on the subway tracks, and the stream had accidentally reached the third rail. The arc of falling water, rich with salts favoring conduction, instantly became an arc of lethal electricity. The lad was probably dead before he hit the tracks.

Of all the deaths I am called upon to investigate, suicides are among the most frustrating. Bones are my province, and most methods of suicide leave no evidence upon the skeleton. When we find a skeleton in the woods, fallen apart or disarticulated, I immediately look up, scanning the tree limbs above the skeleton, searching for some long-forgotten noose. As decomposition takes place in a hanging victim, the neck begins to stretch, until it may be several feet long. Finally the drying, mummifying skin will tear, head and trunk part company, and all falls down to earth, sundered in twain. The noose, however, may survive and point its hempen finger down at the truth.

Many of the skeletons that come to my laboratory belong to suicide victims who behaved like shy hermits in their final hours. Usually they are found in remote, out-of-the-way places. People often go to some hidden place to kill themselves, whether from a desire to act alone and unhindered, or because they wish simply to disappear in solitude, spending their last moments in reflective silence. In any event, by the time many of these bodies are found they are badly decomposed, perhaps only skeletons. It’s up to us, the anthropologists, the pathologists, the investigators, to try to establish how these people came to die in such a secluded, pathless place. Inevitably these suicides get confused with straightforward murder victims who have been dumped in hidden locations. Another possibility is accidental death—the skeleton may belong to someone who took a drug overdose by mistake.

In cases involving poison or drugs, we always look for the pill bottles or the containers. Of course, many skeletons in the woods have a bottle with them—but it most likely contains a few remaining drops of Mad Dog 20–20, a potent, cheap wine. Such cases do indeed involve poisoning, the long slow poisoning of alcohol; but these deaths are not defined by law as suicidal.

But what if the victim took the drugs or the poison
before
going to the death scene? What if the poison was contained in a single capsule? In these cases, obviously, there won’t be any evidence at the scene. Sometimes it happens that the victim flings the bottle away in horror or disgust after swallowing its contents. Such bottles are awfully difficult to find. In fact, I had one startling case involving a body found in the woods. In this case the police did a scene investigation and did not notice
two other
decomposing bodies fifty feet away. If you can miss a rotting corpse, imagine how easy it is to overlook a tiny pill bottle! The initial body was ruled not a suicide.

One would think that, when guns are involved in a suicide, the investigation would be a fairly straightforward matter. There’s a hole in the head, a gun lying alongside the remains. Get the deceased identified, find a history of despondency—case closed! But in fact it doesn’t work that way. The gun may be gone. A lot of people, happening on a body in the woods with a gun nearby, take the gun and leave the body unreported. Guns are valuable. And so the suicide, minus its gun, masquerades as murder and causes us no end of bother.

I have never encountered a note with the skeleton of a suicide. After remains have spent weeks or months in the wild, we count ourselves lucky indeed to find anything decipherable left on paper or plastic in these cases. Occasionally we’ll get a telephone number on a matchbook cover or some other tiny clue, but not very often. The enormous Meek-Jennings suicide note, quoted elsewhere in this book, was the longest and most complex document of its kind ever to come before my eyes.

Euthanasia is legal in the Netherlands, and I can certainly understand suicide in the context of a terminal, incurable illness, when pain is great and insupportable or medical bills are accumulating ruinously. But most of the suicides I see seem to involve a lashing out, a last infliction of pain upon one’s loved ones or family. All too often it’s a boyfriend or girlfriend who blows his or her brains out in front of the person who has rejected them. These are hot-tempered acts of vengeance in which one’s own death becomes a weapon meant to wound forever. Such cases often follow a curious etiquette, as though death were a last fling, a chance to go shopping. Sometimes we find the receipt from the gun store, where the weapon was bought a few days or hours earlier, even though it is quite rare for people to buy guns specifically to commit immediate suicide. Some of these weapons are extremely expensive, and the ammunition used is costly and sophisticated. And very often this last, lethal extravagance will be paid for with a credit card, because the new owner knows he won’t be around to settle the bill. Charles Whitman, the mass murderer who killed sixteen people from his perch atop the famous tower at the University of Texas in 1966, used a rubber check to buy one of his weapons at Davis Hardware in Austin. The other he paid for with his Sears credit card.

The state of Florida has an inordinate number of suicides, particularly of the elderly. Over and over again, the same scenario unfolds: Mom and Pop, up in the Midwest, decide it is time to retire and go live the good life in sunny Florida. They little realize what pain awaits them! A year or two after moving into the trailer or condominium, Pop suffers a heart attack and Mom is left alone, or vice versa. Every living soul the survivor knows is back home in the Midwest. To return or stay? Somehow going back seems harder than going forward. The survivor hangs on in Florida, but the sands of life are ebbing away. Gradually there is a sinking, a submersion into a sea of strangers. The long, sunny days become painful and tedious; all seems overbright and irritating in these hot latitudes. Suicide becomes a soothing way out of a painful, empty existence.

I sometimes wish, as Florida fills up with refugees from the northern United States, that we could put brutally honest signs up at the state borders, “
SENIORS! WELCOME TO FLORIDA
!” they would say.
“BE ADVISED YOU ARE NOT JUST LEAVING THE SNOWS BEHIND; YOU ARE
LEAVING YOUR LIVES BEHIND
.” People who come to Florida all too often do not realize how painful our peculiar rootless newness can be. Naples, Fort Myers, St. Petersburg, Miami Beach—these communities sit atop invisible cliffs, overlooking abysses of self-extinction for the elderly.

One such case, memorable to me chiefly because of the dead man’s teeth, involved a skeletonized set of remains found in Polk County, near Disney World, in 1987. He had a bullet hole in the center of his skull and a gun lying beside him. He also had a perfect set of teeth, not particularly worn, with no fillings and not a single cavity. His teeth were as unmarred as a child’s, but fully grown and in the mouth of an adult. The medical examiner called me from his district in central Florida and wanted to know the age of the remains. He estimated the deceased was in his forties, primarily because of these flawless teeth. I looked at the skeleton, especially at the spinal column, and said the man was older than sixty-five years of age, probably older than seventy.

I think the medical examiner concealed a polite smile at the apparent absurdity of my findings. But I stuck to my findings. I can’t always be right but I have to say what I have concluded. Without much confidence, he passed on my findings to the police, who began to investigate further. Almost immediately they verified that the very gun found with the body had been sold to an eighty-year-old man who had been missing for several months. When the man’s dental records were checked, those extraordinary, perfect teeth shone forth intact from the x-ray light table. For a lucky handful of people in this world there is no such thing as tooth decay. Their teeth naturally resist all cavities, and normal wearing away is replaced by upwellings of dentin, the inner material of the tooth, rising and replacing the worn enamel like tiny fountains of youth. This old gentleman was among these happy few, but he was unhappy nonetheless. Neighbors confirmed that he had been acting despondent before he disappeared. The rest of the puzzle pieces fell into place easily. Age was all, in this case. When the police began looking for an eighty-year-old instead of a forty-year-old, the matter was quickly solved.

After exercising our wits to their utmost, we investigators sometimes have to confess failure. Killing is killing, whether it be directed against oneself or another, and in some cases it is simply impossible to decide whether a victim died by his own hand or someone else’s.
“You killed him and then made it look like suicide!”
is more than a hackneyed line from the movies. Sometimes it comes true.

I remember a notorious crack house that burned down in Jacksonville some years ago. The incinerated remains of a young woman were found in the smoldering ruins. At first she was thought by police to have perished in the fire. When I examined her closely, however, I saw there were burned maggots on the body—clear evidence she had been dead and decomposing at least forty-eight to seventy-two hours before the fire. Was she a homicide victim? Had she died of a drug overdose? Had she committed suicide? I cannot tell. No one can tell. The nameless burned woman remains one of the many enigmas in my career. I wish that every case had an answer, but it seems that questions always outnumber answers in my world.

7
Outpacing the Fiend

Like one, that on a lonesome road
Doth walk in fear and dread
,
And having once turned round, walks on
,
And turns no more his head;
Because he knows a frightful fiend
Doth close behind him tread…
.

—Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
The Rime of the Ancient Manner

We forensic anthropologists owe a dark debt to murderers. From the beginning, our science has walked almost abreast of homicide, trying to outpace the “frightful fiend” who commits it. Sometimes we are scarcely half a step ahead; sometimes we are several steps behind. In all such cases our instructors are assassins. It is our task to solve—or at least try to solve—terrible problems put before us by men who have slain their fellow men. Over the years, these brutal teachers have brought out the best in us, stimulated us, put us on our mettle. By challenging us to unravel seemingly impossible knots of malevolence, the killers have ultimately helped us in the advancement of science and the spread of knowledge. It is a singular fact that some of the most dazzling pieces of detective work in our profession have come about as a direct result of some extraordinarily depraved murder. The darker the crime, the brighter shines the solution.

Ours is a remarkably new science. Accurate bone measurement began only in 1755, when Jean Joseph Sue (1710–92), an anatomy professor at the Louvre, published the complete measurements of four bodies and the maximum lengths of many of the bones of fourteen cadavers ranging in age from a six-week-old fetus to an adult of twenty-five years. From these late beginnings, and from a handful of interesting cases, a broad field of forensic investigation has come into being, so wide, so active, so thriving today that we hold annual conventions at which hundreds of forensic scientists meet to delve into a panoply of cases, old and new. It is a field in which Americans can claim noteworthy achievements—both in crime and in its subsequent investigation.