The Skeleton Crew (11 page)

In 1988, not long after swirling around the dance floor to “(I've Had) The Time of My Life” at Livingston Academy's junior-senior prom, Todd, in the same white tux, minus the pink tie and pink cummerbund he wore to the prom, and Lori, resplendent in white, were married at Livingston's Standing Stone State Park, atop the eastern section of the plateau-like upland that surrounds the Nashville Basin.

Months after Wilbur Riddle had moved his eight kids to a house on a country road outside Livingston, the Riddles' house burned down, struck by lightning.

Lori alone among her siblings lost everything in the fire. The Riddles planned to move to Indiana, but Lori didn't want to leave.

Nine months after Todd met his ghost-story girlfriend, Lori's long train trailed behind her as she glided over a swinging bridge and past a waterfall on a beautiful July day. Someone played the guitar. The reception—­attended by Wilbur and Julie Riddle, Lori's crew of siblings, Billy and
Brenda Matthews, and Todd's brother, aunt, and maternal grandparents—was held at a covered picnic shelter just past the bridge.

Billy Matthews bought a single-wide trailer for his son and seventeen-­year-old bride, had it installed in the side yard of his own small, immaculately kept house, and told the young couple they were responsible for the monthly payments.

There they were, a family in middle-class America: Todd's parents, his wife, his living brother, his dead siblings, and Tent Girl. At that point, Todd couldn't have predicted which one would have the biggest impact on his life for much of the coming decade.

5

BRING OUT YOUR DEAD

I
t was a dreary November day, but inside the historic Union League of Philadelphia, I milled among a gathering crowd in a warm ballroom done in rich shades of burgundy and mahogany. Chandeliers twinkled far above our heads and massive floor-to-ceiling velour drapes dripped with tassels the size of dismembered hands.

At a round table set for a formal luncheon, three men introduced themselves as FBI agents. At the next table sat a woman with unruly black curls and very red lips who said she helped law enforcement interpret gang-­related symbols, tattoos, and the scenes of ritualistic slayings. Serial murderer profilers mingled with experts in blood spatter and the use of hypnosis for crime scene recall.

Seated at my left was a short, round woman in a shapeless navy-blue pants suit, sensible black shoes, and metal-framed eyeglasses: the famed Dr. Marcella Fierro. To my right, Todd Matthews perched in a shirt, tie, and pea jacket, looking uncomfortable and a little deflated. His usual chest-forward strut was gone; his hands—typically open-palmed in mock surrender, index fingers like drawn pistols, slapping his thighs for emphasis—­drooped at his sides. Todd was out of his element north of the Mason-Dixon Line; he confessed later he was worried everyone would consider him a redneck.

In the Union League ballroom, the lights dimmed as an Alaska cold case investigator described to the attentive audience the case of the day: the murder of a twenty-year-old woman found
dead in a communal dormitory
bathroom
at the University of Fairbanks in 1993. He displayed a photo of the victim sprawled in a white bathtub, pants yanked down, sweater hiked up, the back of her head shattered by a .22-caliber bullet, stab wounds to her right eye and cheek. Blood covered half her face. I fell into a reverie as the investigator droned on, unable to tear my eyes from the young woman's smooth skin and small bare breasts. Her legs were bent at the knees, her arms raised as if in surrender.

“Would you like the cream?” Startled, I looked down and saw Fierro offering me a small glass pitcher. Waiters in black suits poured coffee from long-spouted silver pots and served chocolate mousse garnished with sprigs of something slender and green.

I was at a meeting of
the Vidocq Society, the exclusive group of crime solvers
profiled in Michael Capuzzo's best-selling book
The Murder Room
. The society was named for the brilliant eighteenth-century French detective Eugène François Vidocq. The group—originally limited to eighty-two, one for each year of Vidocq's life—today claims more than a hundred volunteers who apply their collective forensic brainpower to unsolved homicides. I was there because a handful of Vidocq Society members, such as my host, forensic dentist Dr. Warren Tewes—who, in the wake of 9/11, had searched for teeth to identify victims in the charred wreckage of United Airlines Flight 93 in Shanksville, Pennsylvania—were driven by the subset of cold cases involving nameless victims. (The Vidocq Society typically takes on cases involving known victims.)

As Virginia's chief medical examiner, Marcella Fierro worked on some of the nation's most notorious crimes, including the Virginia Tech massacre and Richmond's Southside Strangler killings. Now retired, once a month she takes the train from Richmond to Philly to share her expertise at the Vidocq Society meetings because, she told me, you never know what little piece of information might lead to an inference, a correlation, or a solution to a cold case.

Fierro had been speaking for the unidentified dead since the 1970s, but until her message got an unexpected boost from a little-known government agency and a former TV producer, it reached only ears as unhearing as those on her autopsy table.

Matthew J. Hickman's first cubicle
at the Bureau of Justice Statistics was a GS-9, a step up from the entry-level GS-5 that had made him feel like he was working in a fishbowl. At least the GS-9 had tall partitions. By the time he had almost completed his PhD, Hickman was a GS-14 with his own office. He found it demoralizing that the size of his cubicle walls corresponded with his pay grade. Right out of
Dilbert
, thought Hickman, who has blue eyes, the trusting nature of a Seattle native, and a shock of dark hair across his forehead.

One day in 2004, the boss walked into Hickman's second-floor office with its glass-front bookcases and window overlooking D.C.'s Chinatown and plunked himself on an unyielding government-issue chair. “We have to find out how many unidentified dead people there are in the United States,” he said to the young statistician. “How can we do that?” It was the royal “we.”

Hickman had done plenty of surveys. He had counted people locked up in prisons across the country and people victimized by crimes. He had never been asked to tally dead people. It turned out that no one else had, either, perhaps because for decades the medicolegal establishment had, by intention or accident, shrouded the unidentified and unclaimed dead in neglect and secrecy. The task Hickman's boss described was literally counting skeletons in closets.

Hickman decided the first order of business was to get his hands on a master list of the more than two thousand medical examiners and coroners in the country. “You'd think that would be easy,” he said ruefully. After calling around D.C., he ended up on the line with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. They had a list but warned him it wasn't up to date or accurate. Hickman took it anyway.

To his surprise, some coroners flatly refused to cooperate. They accused him of being part of a conspiracy to eliminate the much-maligned office of the coroner. Often culled from the ranks of former cops, police chiefs, and death investigators, coroners often ally themselves with local law enforcement and can be distrustful of the feds. Hickman's alma mater,
Temple University, conducted a study that showed that coroners, who are elected, reported 15 percent fewer suicides than medical examiners, who are appointed.
“Coroners would . . . be worried
about antagonizing local community stakeholders who might bad-mouth them,” says the study's author, sociologist Joshua Klugman. The fact that Hickman was no J. Edgar Hoover and took no stand in the coroner-versus-medical-examiner debate didn't seem to matter.

Hickman and colleagues developed an eight-page questionnaire, which was faxed, e-mailed, posted to the Bureau of Justice Statistics website, and snail-mailed around the country. Slowly, in response to hundreds of follow-up e-mails, letters, and phone calls, results started trickling in to RTI International, a North Carolina–based research institute that had helped oversee the survey's creation and was responsible for processing the raw data. Send us what you've got, Hickman begged RTI almost weekly. (“We do get excited by this stuff,” he admitted. “It's kind of nerdy.”)

Around this time, he spoke at a meeting of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences where attendees were in a highly uncharacteristic state of excitement—actually in an uproar, as Hickman put it—to learn the results of the survey. He was afraid they were going to rush the podium when he and the RTI reps insisted they couldn't tell them anything concrete about the numbers of unidentified remains in the United States—not yet, anyway—because the Bureau of Justice Statistics didn't release preliminary findings.

It was one of the roughest presentations he'd ever attended, Hickman said later, but he understood the forensic professionals' impatience.

His survey was akin to what doctors refer to as a gold standard test—the best available under challenging conditions. Overnight, Hickman had switched from feeling like a character in Dilbert to one in Dick Tracy. He'd become one of the enforcers. Hickman experienced that sublime realization that surfaces all too rarely in a data collector's career: his results were going to make a difference in the real world. Maybe even change people's lives.

Hickman had been launched on this challenge
partly because of a woman named Cheri Nolan.
Nolan, blond, blue-eyed, and supremely effective, had
toiled behind the scenes for three presidents and probably knew her way through labyrinthine federal government politics better than many elected officials. Early in her career she worked with John Walsh, the driving force behind the creation of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, which as of 2013 had a volunteer and paid workforce of five hundred in several states and had aided in the recovery of more than 175,000 children. During her eight years at
America's Most Wanted
, Cheri Nolan handled everything from requests for Walsh's autographed headshot to his contract negotiations. She'd see viewer mail begging Walsh for help finding a brother, a sister, or another family member. Nolan was stunned by the volume of such requests—and of missing-person cases in general.

Nolan felt for the families, but the show focused on fugitives, not the missing. Then, in 2001, she returned to government as a deputy assistant attorney general for the U.S. Department of Justice. She was sitting in her spacious, well-appointed office one day, thinking there she was, with great resources and responsibility, while a parallel universe of people were looking for loved ones who were very likely dead and investigators were frustrated by the lack of resources for these cold cases. She decided to find out if she had stumbled across a national problem, something the federal government might play a role in correcting. In 2002, she invited homicide investigators, sheriffs, police chiefs, Atlanta forensic pathologist Dr. Randy L. Hanzlick, members of the Department of Justice, and family members of missing people to a conference room at NCMEC's Alexandria, Virginia, offices. Was the proliferation of the missing and unidentified a problem? The unanimous answer was yes, Nolan recalled. “Is it a national problem? Yes. Is there a role for the federal government? Hallelujah, yes.”

Coroners such as Mike Murphy from Las Vegas, who detailed his bureaucratic struggle for me as we toured his county morgue, were starting to go toe-to-toe with the FBI over the fact that coroners and medical examiners, who were responsible for documenting thousands of unidentified deaths each year were denied direct access to the National Crime Information Center (NCIC), the official law enforcement database of the missing and the unidentified. “We had some issues,” Murphy said bluntly. The FBI told him every coroner's and medical examiner's office in the country had access to NCIC. Murphy said, “Really? Because I don't.” Marcella Fierro, who was at the meeting, joked that if Cheri Nolan could fix such issues,
she, Fierro, could retire.

Nolan knew that before the government allocated money to a problem, it needed numbers. Gathering numbers required money. The attacks on the World Trade Center would be the unexpected impetus for federal money to make its way to Nolan and Fierro's cause.

DNA has the potential to identify criminals with incredible accuracy, as well as to clear suspects and exonerate those accused or convicted of crimes they didn't commit.
As of 2013,
DNA testing had exonerated more than three hundred people in thirty-six states;
eighteen of those proven innocent
had served time on death row, including Kirk Bloods­worth, who served eight years in a Maryland prison for a rape and murder he didn't commit.

In the late 1980s, the federal government had laid the groundwork for national, state, and local DNA databases for the storage and exchange of DNA profiles. The Combined DNA Index System (CODIS) compares crime scene evidence to a database of DNA profiles obtained from convicted offenders and links DNA evidence from different crime scenes, thereby identifying serial criminals. States began passing laws requiring those convicted of certain offenses to provide DNA samples. Eventually, all fifty states would require DNA samples from some categories of offenders.

Public crime labs were becoming overwhelmed by backlogs of unanalyzed DNA samples. A month before 9/11, Nolan's boss, the U.S. attorney general, directed the National Institute of Justice to come up with a way to deal with the backlog in the criminal justice system's analysis of DNA evidence.

As the rubble of the collapsed Twin Towers smoked, the need for fast DNA analysis took on an even greater urgency. Representatives of the nation's forensic community struggled to identify bodies that were in some cases little more than fragments. If Cheri Nolan's initiative wasn't already vast in scope, on September 11, 2001, the biggest mass fatality identification effort in U.S. history would begin.

That morning, I was at my desk in a cubicle at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where I worked as a science writer. It was a spectacular, clear-blue-sky late-summer day in Cambridge—an ordinary Tuesday, it seemed—and I and a dozen colleagues were engrossed in e-mail, typing, phone calls, and heading to or from the café housed under one of MIT's majestic domes. Someone heard the initial newsflash: an airplane had flown into New York's World Trade Center. It soon became clear it wasn't a small private plane or an accident, as the media first reported, but a deliberate move by a hijacked jet that had taken off from Boston's Logan International Airport. Had we known, we might have spotted from our office windows the ascent of American Airlines Flight 11 with one of MIT's own on board.

We would learn later that among the dramas playing out in the sky that morning was a thirty-one-year-old MIT mathematician's heroic attempt to foil one of the hijackings. Software entrepreneur
Daniel M. Lewin had not only started a company that helped revolutionize the way content is delivered over the Internet, he was also a former member of the Israel Defense Forces' Sayeret Matkal,
a top-secret counterterrorist unit. Lewin was seated in 9B and reportedly stabbed from behind by one of the hijackers when he tried to stop ringleader Mohamed Atta from taking control of the plane.

For the next two hours, we crowded around a small TV in our boss's office and watched the gut-wrenching events taking place two hundred miles away. We wept, we covered our mouths with our hands, or—when it became too difficult to watch people leaping to their deaths and see the south and then the north tower collapse amid smoke, debris, flames, and white ash—we paced the deserted cubicles.