Special Reports

Forensic anthropology sounds pretty glamorous. Do you think you have anything in common with the women forensic experts who appear in detective novels and TV programmes?

Patricia Cornwell's protagonist, Kay Scarpetta, is a pathologist, and real pathologists don't go out and do detective work—you know, hey, this is the real world. So, no, it's not as glamorous as TV and the fiction writers portray it. It's downright dog-biting dirty work. It's stark reality because it involves macerating tissue, disposal of putrefying tissue, cleaning bone. You're not Hamlet looking at poor Yorick: you're putting a skull back together and trying to figure out what happened.

I'm not a detective. I just look at the remains and try to solve one part of the puzzle. Who is this person? What sex? What race? When and how did they die? That's all.

What does a forensic anthropologist do that a pathologist doesn't?

They're interested in flesh. We look at the bones. In fact, we're usually called in when there's so little flesh left that pathologists and coroners would have a hard job carrying out a traditional autopsy. Sometimes bones are all that remain.

We use our knowledge of the human skeleton to deduce the age, sex, race, and height of the victim and look for signs of trauma. Was it a gunshot? A blow to the head? High-velocity trauma bursts a head open so very sharply that it's easy to get it back together. A blunt force trauma often warps the skull, making it hard to reconstruct from the pieces. And both can happen together. Even if a head is shattered into a hundred pieces, you can still determine how many bullets struck it from the pattern of the fractures. Like the cracks in a broken windshield, fractures produced by a second or third projectile usually don't cross the fracture lines produced by the first.

What runs through your mind when you examine some remains for the first time?

The first job is often to figure out if the material is human or animal—easy if the bone is complete, not so easy if it isn't. When broken or burnt, for instance, the femur of a deer can look very similar to the thigh bone of a man. The next step, if it's human, is to clean the flesh off the bone. Then you're looking for a little clue, something the pathologist may have overlooked because the tissue was still on the bone. Bones are good at hiding their secrets, but if you're good enough—and tenacious—you can uncover them to resolve the case. As soon as they're cleaned, the picture can change dramatically.

Can you give me an example?

In one case, a pathologist felt that the cause of death was a gunshot wound. The law enforcement people said: "Oh gosh, we'd really like for Mary to look at this, too." They brought me the remains. I looked at the skull and I took the tissue off. It was very clearly not a gunshot wound at all—it was three episodes of blunt force trauma. Once you had put those 50 or 60 pieces back together, it was evident on the bone. The skull had exploded, but not the way the pathologist had thought.

How do you get the flesh off?

We cut away the putrefactive tissue, trying very carefully not to get too close to the bone. Then we heat, sometimes boil, the bones to get the remaining tissue off. We never intentionally let a scalpel blade get too near a bone because it could mislead us if it cut the bone. Most of our cases have maggots on them, but we remove soft tissue very carefully (and eliminate the maggots).

Do you see many maggots?

Thousands. They bounce off the table like little dancing worms. The word "maggots" has an ugly connotation, but they can also tell us much about a dead body. I'm not sorry to see them because, in the field, their size can tell you their stage of development and therefore how long it's been since death—although you have to keep your wits about you. We once had a case where a body was removed from its original site, causing a whole new wave of insect infestation.

Apparently you've seen a huge increase in work recently. Why is that?

Yes, and it's very interesting, because in the US people seem to have become so, well, preoccupied with finding dead things. I don't know if it's the news media or stories on television, but every time we turn around, somebody is finding bones in the back yard or bones under their house and they're asking us to look at them because they think they have a body. There are just many more bones around than we care to admit.

What was your first case?

A woman had been murdered, gutted like a deer, weighted down and tossed into the Mississippi. The indignity of what they had done to her, I have never forgotten. I can see it today, I can almost smell it. Right, I thought, I have to take care of this.

The police brought us her head and wanted us to clean it up to see if she had been shot at a close distance. We cleaned off the tissue, then put the skull back together again. She had powder burns all over her cranium at close proximity.

Searching out who she was wasn't a problem. The police already knew, but they wanted to know how many times she had been shot. They also needed our help in trying to figure out if some tiny fragments of bone, which had been found in a truck, were hers. The people who killed her washed the cab out with a water hose at a service station to get rid of the blood. Their story was that they had killed a deer out of season, and they put the deer up in the cab of the truck because the authorities suspected them, and they didn't want to get fined. The blood, they said, "Well, that's from our deer kill."

And the killers knew her. They were out late at night. An argument started or something. They got angry and shot her. Then they hit her and fractured the bones in her arm. Those were the fragments washed out of the truck. My professor found tiny pieces of bone lying around at the service station.

We sent the bone to another lab. Cells in deer bone appear a little elongated, rectangular and are densely packed together. Human bone cells are rounder, and loosely packed. This was human, not deer.

Did you find it difficult to work on this?

No. I was very angry. I thought, how dare they do this. You wouldn't have put an animal in the river, or tied it like that. I felt we were restoring her dignity as a human being.

When you've spent a morning defleshing a skeleton, what do you eat for lunch?

Well, after you've had someone who's been burned you absolutely don't go near a barbecue. We wear a lot of different types of protective gear of course, but then I'll take it off, and shower and shower. I go for a long walk. That's the best mental therapy I have. I go for long walks, not only to try to dispel it from my lungs, but also to just begin to think about what I could do to help resolve the case.

You say you are seeing more soft tissue cases. Are more people are being killed?

No, violent crime in the US is down. We are getting more soft tissue cases because law enforcement officers are beginning to appreciate what forensic anthropologists can do to help with a case. Because we carefully remove all of the soft tissue and often times reconstruct the bone, we are able to speak to number of wounds, type, direction or trajectory and so on in a more thorough fashion. Pathologists, as a rule, do not remove soft tissue. People in my line of work have been instrumental in adding a whole new dimension to cases, but I think sometimes pathologists don't want to acknowledge this.

What's your biggest ambition?

To identify more people. More than 300 000 people are currently reported as "missing" in the US. It's that phenomenal. Many of them are runaways, some of them are throwaways, some of them are stranger abductions. Some of them are the lost people, the people of the streets. It's so sad.

These are the people you want to identify?

I've worked on over 570 cases and approximately 35 of those remain unidentified—like the young white male found floating in the Mississippi River in 1982, the small female found on the riverbank in Baton Rouge in early 1985 who'd been dead for months . . . and on and on. Some of them are unusual, such as the man with bluebirds tattooed on his chest. Now, a lot of people have tattoos, but they're not 50-something years old, with a metal pin in their leg from previous surgery.

We have done complete facial reconstructions on all those you can do it on. If even one of these people gets identified from our facial reconstructions, we're going to try it with others. It's far more help to the living than to the dead when you can help like that.