Uncle John's Endlessly Engrossing Bathroom Reader (85 page)

TV shows like
CSI
and
Bones
make forensic science seem commonplace, but
30 years ago, one man took the practice from an obscure academic specialty
to the frontlines of international crime and human rights investigations.

Clyde Snow stands over six feet tall, wears a cowboy hat and leather boots, and chain-smokes Cuban cigars. He drinks a lot, too. He’s been described as “an unmade bed of a man.” He doesn’t look like an angel or a savior, but that’s what many people think he is—people who’ve lost loved ones, especially children and grandchildren. He hardly ever has happy news for relatives, though; it’s rare that a case he’s involved in turns up a living person. In fact, the person is usually long dead, maybe even for decades. Snow has little more than bones—often buried in unmarked plots; sometimes in mass graves—with which to identify who people were and how they died. He says the bones “make good witnesses. They may speak softly, but they never forget.” He calls his work
osteobiography
, the art and science of reading a person’s bones. “There is,” he says, “a brief but very informative biography contained within the skeleton, if you know how to read it.”

Forensics
is the application of any science in a criminal or legal investigation. Forensic anthropology focuses on human skeletal remains. The long bones of the leg, for example, can determine height and weight, the bones in the arms and hands can tell whether the deceased was left- or right-handed, skull measurements can determine sex and race, and measurements of the back of the skull can determine age at time of death. In addition, forensic anthropologists can identify old fractures, scarring from wounds, and deformities from disease.

And sometimes they can determine the cause of death. Once, when investigating human rights abuses at a youth detention facility in Bolivia, Snow found metal residue from a .22 caliber rifle bullet on a boy’s ribcage, indicating he’d been shot in the back,
probably by a guard. Another boy had a bullet wound in a his skull, but Snow determined it wasn’t the actual shot that killed him; it was lead poisoning from the bullet fragment that remained in his head. It’s this kind of work that makes Snow and the other anthropologists he’s trained during his long career the forensic experts of last resort, when there’s no blood, soft tissue, or even teeth. “Bones can be puzzles,” he says. “But they never lie.”

Born in 1928, Clyde Snow grew up in rural West Texas, the son of a country doctor. He was used to looking at bones at an early age as he accompanied his father on patient visits. He got his Master’s Degree in Zoology and eventually a Ph.D. in Anthropology at the University of Arizona. He wound up based in Oklahoma City in 1960 when an old friend offered him a job in a new field—investigating casualties of airline crashes to help design safer airplanes at the Civil Aeromedical Institute, a subsidiary of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). One of the most important parts of his job was recreating what happened during an airline crash by studying the human remains at crash sites. By determining what passengers did before and during impact, he could learn where and how safety improvements could be incorporated into planes.

This combination of physical anthropology and the study of human behavior appealed to Snow, and he started offering his services to the local medical examiner’s office. From the 1960s through the 1990s, if there were hard-to-identify victims anywhere in the United States, law enforcement called Clyde Snow.

Snow worked on some of the most notorious cases of the 20th century, including the serial killings of Ted Bundy, identifying the skull of notorious Auschwitz doctor Josef Mengele, reviewing the autopsy X-rays from John F. Kennedy’s assassination, and identifying victims of the 1995 terrorist bombings in Oklahoma City. He traveled to the Little Big Horn to try and identify soldiers who died with Custer, and to Bolivia to see if the real Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid were buried there (they weren’t). For a NASA study about what happened to bones after a high-altitude
fall, he interviewed survivors of suicide jumps off the Golden Gate Bridge. (He says most of the survivors had a change of mind on the way down.) Here are some of his best-known cases:

 

American Airlines Flight 191:
On May 25, 1979, the deadliest airline crash in American history killed all 258 passengers, 13 crew, and 2 bystanders on the ground in Chicago. Clyde Snow was called to a makeshift morgue in a hangar at O’Hare International Airport to try to identify what were essentially the unidentifiable remains of the 50 people whose bodies had not been accounted for. He worked 16-hour days with a team of medical investigators, dentists, and X-ray technicians examining more than 10,000 body parts. Snow had to create new forensic techniques on the spot, including designing the first computer database that matched information compiled from the bones with what was known about missing passengers. Over a five-week period, they identified 20 more people—an amazing outcome, considering the condition of the remains.

 

Serial Killer John Wayne Gacy:
In 1980 Gacy was convicted of murdering 33 young men who had been found the year before, buried beneath his home in a Chicago suburb or dumped in a nearby river. The victims were not easy to identify—they were all young white males—and many were probably runaways or drifters. Using missing persons reports, dental records, X-rays, and fingerprints, police could identify only half of them.

Snow was called in by the medical examiner’s office, and with the help of a forensic radiologist, they managed to identify five more victims over the next few months. But after a year, there were still nine unidentified bodies. Rather than give up, Snow enlisted the aid of medical artist Betty Pat Gatlieff to undertake the very new practice of facial reconstruction. Using Snow’s precise measurements, Gatlieff painstakingly sculpted clay onto various points of each skull, recreating the nose, cheeks and mouth, and later adding prosthetic eyes and a wig. Though only one of the nine victims was identified from the recreations, the technique was further refined by Snow and Gatlieff and used successfully many times since, leading to about a 70% identification rate.

 

Argentina and the Disappeared:
A turning point in Snow’s career came in 1984 when he was alerted to the plight of relatives of
desaparecidos
(the disappeared)—thousands of people who were abducted and killed by Argentina’s military junta between 1976
and 1983. Many of the bodies had been dumped in unmarked graves, and now, with a new government in power, there was an outcry from the public to try to locate the missing. Snow originally went to Argentina as part of a group advising officials how to properly exhume and identify remains, but his involvement quickly became more hands-on. He agreed to work directly on a couple of cases, and when he couldn’t find enough professionals, he trained a team of six anthropology and medical students from the University of Buenos Aires. Over the next two years, they worked on dozens of exhumations together, and were able to identify the bodies of numerous
desaparecidos
.

Snow’s work in Argentina went beyond merely identifying bodies; it marked the first time forensics were used to bring human-rights criminals to justice. At the 1985 trial of nine former Junta officials, Snow showed dozens of slides documenting atrocities—a sternum that clearly showed a victim had been shot in the back, a skull with fragments of shotgun pellets that had come from a standard police weapon at close range, and the skeleton of a young woman whose pelvis showed clear signs of having given birth shortly before her death. With Snow’s help, the bones of three victims spoke loud and clear—and five of the nine defendants were convicted. Snow’s work in Argentina has led to nearly 25 years of organized humanitarian investigations by himself and other forensic scientists, in countries such as Guatemala, Ethiopia, Iraq, Bolivia, the Philippines, Chile, and the former Yugoslavia.

From 1961 to ’62, Clyde Snow developed statistical models of airline crashes that combined anthropological measurements with seating charts and statements from survivors. His shocking conclusion: Young men were twice as likely to survive as older men, women, and children. Why? “They do not act like gentlemen,” Snow concluded. In other words, they didn’t help others get out. Families traveling together helped each other, but strangers, for the most part, didn’t help other strangers—even children.

For the witnesses of the strange goings-on in Rendlesham

Forest, convincing themselves that they’d seen a UFO was one thing—convincing the locals was another. When the story finally broke in the pages of the
News of the World,
a British tabloid newspaper, in October 1983, the farmers and foresters who lived around Rendlesham Forest didn’t believe a word of it.
They
hadn’t seen or heard anything unusual on the nights in question, and when a reporter from the
Times
of London visited the area the day the
News of the World
story broke, he had no trouble finding locals who were already laughing off some of the key elements of the story.

Had the American airmen ever even been in a forest before?

• Depressions in the ground of the kind described by the witnesses at the “landing site” are scattered all over the forest—not always arranged by chance into triangular patterns, but they are everywhere. Rabbits dig them, to get at roots under the ground.

• The strange marks in the trees? They were everywhere, too, not just at the landing sight. They weren’t burns or scrapes made by a UFO blasting off—they were axe marks made by foresters to mark the trees that are ready to be cut down.

• The screaming animals? Those were
muntjac
, also called “barking deer,” who live in Rendlesham Forest and are well known—at least to the locals—for squeaking, barking, and even screaming like human beings when startled by things like, say, bands of agitated airmen roaming through the forest at 3:00 a.m. waving flashlights and talking loudly into tape recorders as they troll for space aliens.

By now the story was taking on a life of its own, helped along by the fact that the original witness statements, though unclassified, still hadn’t been made public. They were gathering dust in an Air Force filing cabinet somewhere. Only the Halt memo had been leaked to the
News of the World
.

Without their original written statements to pin them down, some of the witnesses apparently began to embellish their stories. Remember how Jim Penniston reported that the closest he ever came to the object was 50 yards, or half a football field, away? In time he would claim that he not only walked right up to the craft, he examined it for 45 minutes before it finally took off, and he took notes and drew diagrams into a small notebook the entire time. John Burroughs was with Penniston, and he denies this version of the story. He says that neither of them got close to the source of the lights. He also denies that Penniston took notes. But that hasn’t stopped Penniston from producing such a notebook, complete with handwritten notes and sketches of the spacecraft, in television interviews ever since.

Lieutenant Colonel Halt’s story also “improved” with age: Though he never mentioned it in his memo, he later claimed that after the UFO left the forest, it hovered over the base for a while and even shined a spotlight on the bunker where nuclear weapons were stored. (In the event of a Soviet nuclear attack on NATO countries, nuclear bombers based at RAF Bentwaters and RAF Woodbridge would have been part of a retaliatory strike).

Halt’s new version of events collapses under its
own
weight: If an unidentified aircraft—human or otherwise—had entered the airspace over a military base and shined a beam of light right on the building where nuclear bombs were kept, wouldn’t someone have sounded an alarm? Scrambled jets? But no one did. According to Halt—the deputy base commander
—
he and his men, by now “unnerved and exhausted” after spending hours in the forest, just returned to base after seeing the UFO and went to bed. The unidentified craft (if there ever really was one) was allowed to fly off unchallenged.

The furor surrounding the “Incident at Rendlesham” soon caught the interest of Ian Ridpath, a prominent British science writer and editor of the
Oxford Dictionary of Astronomy.
When Ridpath started asking locals for their theory on what the airmen saw in the woods, one forester named Vincent Thurkettle told him that the bright light they saw was almost certainly the lighthouse at Orford Ness, some five miles east of the forest.