Dead Men Do Tell Tales: The Strange and Fascinating Cases of a Forensic Anthropologist (15 page)

Dr. Buck Ruxton was tried, found guilty, sentenced to death and hanged at Strangeways Jail, Manchester, on May 21, 1936.

I was born the year after Ruxton was hanged. It often strikes me how relatively young our science of forensic anthropology is. With the exception of a handful of great, departed pioneers, I have seen and known personally many of the principal figures of our field. Indeed, many of them are still alive today.

Our discipline is so new fledged that even in the 1930s the recently founded FBI had to take its cases across the street to the Smithsonian Institution for analysis. There the Division of Physical Anthropology was led by a brilliant anatomist whose picture later appeared on a Czechoslovakian postage stamp: Ales Hrdlicka (pronounced “Hurd-LICH-ka”). Hrdliçka had come to the Smithsonian in 1903. He was a remarkable, eccentric man, very slender, bald, mustached and proper. He invariably wore a high, starched collar and he was very tight-fisted. Colleagues still tell stories of how, on business trips, he would step up to the front desk of a hotel with a paper bag full of skulls and bones in one hand—the bones would be sticking out of the top of the bag—and a small valise in the other. Then he would loudly request a room without a bath, to save money. Hrdlicka became founding editor of the
American Journal of Physical Anthropology
and is responsible for beginning the Smithsonian’s vast collection of human skeletons, which today numbers over 33,000 specimens.

But Hrdliçka never published any of his cases. I suspect his greatest successes lie buried deep in FBI archives. He left pupils, admirers, colleagues who had learned much from him—but not a word to posterity. The science of forensic anthropology had to wait until 1939 for the appearance of a paper that summed up everything about the human skeleton known up to that time. This was Wilton Marion Krogman’s
Guide to the Identification of Human Skeletal Material
, which was originally published not by any university or scholarly press but by the FBI. In 1958, Krogman published an expanded version of his paper in book form:
The Human Skeleton in Forensic Medicine
, which appeared just at the time I elected to enter the field. Krogman himself worked at the University of Pennsylvania and lived to be ninety-nine years old. He was active to the end, though he used to complain, just shy of a century, that his eyesight was failing!

One of my most distinguished colleagues, Dr. Ellis R. Kerley, propagated our discipline far and wide among other forensic scientists. I first met Ellis when I interviewed at the University of Kansas, around 1971. After I joined the American Academy of Forensic Sciences in 1974, I came to know him better. Ellis has been a mentor for many of us in the field, a very lovable man, the only forensic anthropologist ever to have served as president of the academy, and the man who pioneered the organization of our section within the academy. In a sense, we all rode in on Ellis’s coattails. Ellis also worked with Dr. Lowell Levine and Clyde Snow on the identification of the remains of Dr. Josef Mengele, the Nazi “Angel of Death,” who eluded justice after the war and finally drowned in Brazil in 1979. DNA samples from Mengele’s surviving family members in Germany proved conclusively that the bones in a certain grave were his. Ellis was also called in to examine the remains of the astronauts who died in the
Challenger
space shuttle disaster in 1986. Because of the terrific force of the explosion and the subsequent long fall to the ocean, the remains were very fragmentary and immense pains were taken to ensure proper identification. Details of the condition of these remains have never been made public, but Ellis’s reputation is so great that no one has ever dreamed of questioning them.

Krogman’s brief
Guide
became the Bible of the new science, both for the FBI and for the United States Army, which soon had to deal with thousands of skeletonized dead American soldiers, sailors and airmen in World War II. The furious island battles in the Pacific Theater, and the back-and-forth fighting later on in Korea, resulted in many remains being left on the field to be retrieved later. Those without dogtags could only be gathered up by the Army Quartermaster Corps and taken to military mortuaries for identification. Often the skeletons of Japanese and Koreans were mixed in with the American remains, and it became a matter of some importance to separate our dead from these other bones of Asiatic origin. (Korea was the last American war in which large numbers of American dead were abandoned or buried on the battlefield. By the time of the Vietnam War, advances in mobility and transport enabled most American soldiers to be evacuated immediately from combat zones, whether they were wounded or dead.)

Partly because of the United States campaigns in the Pacific, the Central Identification Laboratory in Hawaii (CILHI) was set up in 1947. Charles E. Snow (1910–67) was the first physical anthropologist to serve there. Mildred Trotter, who is still with us today, was another. Trotter has won an extraordinary reputation in our field for her great contributions to anatomy and osteology. My own teacher, Tom McKern (1920–74), worked on these war dead in 1948–49. McKern collaborated with another well-known anthropologist, T. Dale Stewart, in identifying and measuring the remains of 450 skeletons of men killed in the Korean War.

Dale Stewart was a devoted disciple of Hrdliçka’s. He admired the old man so much that he painted a portrait of him and hung it in his office; and Hrdliçka’s ashes are in an urn next to the portrait. Dale himself was an extremely active, fit man who broke his hip while in his eighties and used to demonstrate how well it had healed by doing jumping jacks for anyone who cared to watch. He used to get into terrific scholarly arguments with another legendary figure in our field, Larry Angel. Larry was a Harvard-educated anthropologist, bald, with muttonchop whiskers and a brilliant, restless mind. I never heard Larry talk about anything but his work. It was a sight to behold, to see these two giants—giants in intellect, but men of very small physical stature—Stewart and Angel, quarreling loudly with each other at the Smithsonian over pubic symphyses (the pubic symphysis is a part of the skeleton which changes throughout life and can be crucial in determining age). Larry was an extraordinary character in his own right, a dazzling teacher who used to astonish police and FBI agents by
tasting
bone samples placed in front of him. It looked shocking enough, but there was-a reason why Larry did what he did. Small fragments of bones often get mixed up with rocks, and it can be difficult to tell the two apart. -But you can decide immediately whether a small lump of material is bone or rock by touching it to your tongue. Bone will stick to your tongue because of its porous nature. Rock will not. It is a trick I use myself, from time to time. But it does cause talk.

For us forensic anthropologists, 1973 is the year we came of age as a discipline. It was in that year that the new section of physical anthropology was established within the American Academy of Forensic Sciences, with fourteen members. This is our own section and we meet once a year at the academy’s convention. Our work is published in the
Journal of Forensic Sciences
, and within its pages are articles with such titles as: “Injuries to Cadavers Resulting from Experimental Rear Impact” (an article for which six corpses were strapped into automobiles and test-crashed to see what postmortem trauma would look like); “The Effect of Severe Bedsores on Bone;” “The Individuality of Human Footprints;” and “The Mummified Heart.”

I have not missed an academy contention since 1974, the year I joined, and I look forward to every reunion with intense anticipation. I love these meetings because they represent the only chance I get to see many of my colleagues—and many of my colleagues are extremely colorful people. The extraordinary Clyde Snow can be relied upon to tell hair-raising stories, in his Southwestern drawl, of the latest bodies he’s examined in war zones in Bosnia, Afghanistan or Guatemala. Papers are presented on new research and techniques. The former New York City medical examiner, Dr. Michael Baden, hosts a “Bring Your Own Slides” evening, at which some truly astounding images are presented.

One of the highlights of our meetings is the proceedings of the Last Word Society, in which each participant will present a paper on some vexing historical problem. Among the riddles we have debated are these: Was Vincent Van Gogh’s color imagery and style the result of digitalis poisoning? Did Charles Darwin suffer from nicotine toxins? Who was Jack the Ripper? Did King Richard III really order the murder of the two princes in the Tower of London? What was the final body count in the legendary crash that killed Notre Dame football coach Knute Rockne? What was the final body count in the legendary feud between the Hatfields and McCoys?

One comes away from the AAFS convention with renewed energy to try something new, do something differently. Perhaps we will exchange notes, reprints or case reports with each other. Perhaps we will feel encouraged to check an unidentified skeleton to see if it matches a missing person we’ve heard described during a meeting. Sometimes we bring specimens to the conventions, not to fool each other but in honest perplexity. We are baffled, so we solicit one another’s opinions. Often the advice we get is invaluable. These annual meetings are a splendid opportunity for us to trade ideas, to scrape away the rust of academic isolation.

During these annual proceedings applicants who wish to become diplomates of the American Board of Forensic Anthropology are examined. Involved are two days of rigorous examination, a day of written tests, followed by a day of on-the-spot identification of skeletal specimens. The second day’s exams obviously require the presence of the dead as well as the living, and some of us have to bring specimens of bones to the convention.

This requires some explanation, particularly at airports. I always make a point of telling the airline ticket agent just how many skulls I have with me in my baggage—not to shock her, but to make sure that, in case the plane crashes, investigators will know why there were more skulls than passengers aboard. This is mere professional courtesy to my colleagues, who will have to pick through my remains in the event of an accident.

Once, I recall, we were using the skeletal collections of a major museum for exam purposes. This museum had some very interesting specimens, including many samples of gunshot victims from the Texas Revolution in the early part of the nineteenth century. But the most fascinating skeleton in the bunch wasn’t a victim of war, or murder, or any violent death. It was the skeleton of one of the curators of the museum, who had bequeathed his bones to the collection, where they had remained for many years. These bones stood out, not for any deep scientific reason, but because they had bits of tinsel still sticking to them.

Tinsel! We were told that this curator’s skeleton had been “invited” to many Christmas parties at the museum in the years after his death. We also heard that his bones had been bedecked with Christmas decorations—and the evidence of the tinsel was sparkling, conclusive proof that the rumors were true. I am usually against lighthearted treatment of human remains, but in this case I suspended judgment. The man in life was loved. He left his bones to the museum where he had spent his happiest days. It was no very great wrong, I think, for his successors to take his bones to Christmas parties he would himself have enjoyed, alive. And if they saluted his memory with festive cups of eggnog, and decked his bones with tinsel and ornaments, they did so out of sincere respect and affection for a departed scientist.
That
is true camaraderie!

The skeleton of the “Elephant Man,” Joseph Merrick, from the front.
This skeleton, more than any other I have examined, “talks” to you eloquently.
(Photo courtesy of Royal London Hospital Medical College.)

The skeleton of Joseph Merrick from the right side.
(Photo courtesy of Royal London Hospital Medical College.)