Dead Men Do Tell Tales: The Strange and Fascinating Cases of a Forensic Anthropologist (11 page)

In this particular case, however, the lower portion of the body had been further dismembered through the thighs. The dismemberment was probably done with a fine-toothed saw, such as a hacksaw. The torso of the upper portion of the body was wearing a T-shirt advertising the Boot Hill Saloon, a bar in Daytona popular with motorcycle enthusiasts. The victim was identified as a biker, but again no one was ever charged with his murder. Obviously he was the victim of gang justice, and his killers scattered his remains after cutting him to pieces and packing him up into the twin suitcases for his final trip.

By now the reader will perhaps share some of my frustration over these dismemberment cases. Over and over again I have acted the part of “all the king’s horses and all the king’s men” in the old Mother Goose rhyme, trying to reassemble some poor Humpty-Dumpty of a murder victim, who didn’t fall off a wall, but who was most likely shot or stabbed to death, then laboriously sawed to pieces by his killer. At great pains, and against long odds, I have sometimes succeeded in reuniting pieces of bodies that seemed impossibly far-flung. Sometimes I can even make out the personality of the murderer and the circumstances of the crime. I can see a mental picture of the corpse cutter at work, panting and sweating, his teeth gritted, removing the head and limbs, one after another, with tools I can clearly identify. But all this is not enough. The pieces remain, the culprit goes uncaptured and unpunished.

The real victory in these dismemberment cases is often scientific and intellectual, rather than moral. More and more today, dismemberment cases are being treated with the attention they deserve. Under the old coroner system, nobody would look twice at a dismemberment. They were too puzzling and horrible to contemplate for long. A finding of “Body Taken Apart” would be entered, the remains would be buried and that would be the end of it. Now we are studying these appalling cases more and more closely, with a clearer knowledge of anatomy and with improved scientific techniques. As I have shown, we are sometimes able to piece together bodies that have been scattered practically to the four winds, across hundreds of miles; bodies lost for many years. It is not every day that we have the satisfaction of seeing a murderer and corpse cutter convicted and led away in handcuffs as a result of our work, but we are making progress.

One of the ghastliest cases of dismemberment I ever encountered ended in the most satisfying way imaginable, with a dramatic plea of guilty within minutes of my testimony. I call it “The Case of the Pale-Faced Indian.” It happened this way:

In 1981, right after I’d finished helping dig up the bodies of the three drug smugglers down in La Belle, I was called in to identify a buried, dismembered body. The body belonged to a Gainesville man who owned land in a rural area. On this lot stood an unused house trailer. A Vietnam veteran named Tim Burgess, a desperate-looking man with long dark hair and flowing muttonchop whiskers, had asked permission to camp on the man’s property. The landowner agreed, but Burgess soon took advantage of his hospitality and moved into the vacant trailer. When the landowner finally asked him to leave, Burgess refused.

The landowner learned that Burgess had a criminal record and had been paroled from prison. He had been arrested several times. Once, while walking a pet Doberman in front of the White House in Washington, D.C., his dog had lunged at a passerby and Burgess’s coat had flapped open, revealing .45-caliber automatics and several hundred rounds of ammunition.

In short, Burgess was a creepy customer, a man with a violent past whose very sanity was open to question. Not wanting to confront him face to face, his reluctant landlord wrote a letter to Burgess’s probation officer. He complained that not only was Burgess squatting on his property without permission but he was also growing marijuana in the woods.

I have long since ceased to be amazed at the extraordinary quirks of our criminal justice system. The probation officer, a softhearted sort, did nothing more than write Burgess a letter revealing that his landlord had complained about him. In the same letter was a stern warning to Burgess—to destroy his marijuana crop.

This letter was the unfortunate landowner’s death warrant.

Completely unaware that Burgess was furious with him for tattling to his probation officer, the exasperated landowner went out to confront his trespassing tenant and have it out with him once and for all. He took his pet dog with him. Neither he nor the dog was ever seen alive again. When the landowner was reported missing a few days later, deputies went out to the property. There they found the victim’s pickup truck and his dead dog. As they searched the property, an investigator tripped over what appeared to be a stick protruding up at an odd angle from the ground. Closer inspection revealed it was no stick but the severed end of a human thighbone, with the flesh rotted, dried and retracted from it.

(An odd sidelight: a few months later, when the same investigator stepped into another patch of woods to relieve his bladder, he happened to discover
another
body. He had been searching for it for months, in a completely unrelated case. You would be amazed how many bodies turn up during these errands of nature; the body of the baby son of the famous aviator, Charles Lindbergh, was found by a truck driver in similar circumstances after the child was kidnapped in 1932.)

But to return to the bone protruding from the dirt: together with my archaeologist colleague, Dr. Sigler-Eisenberg, we set about digging up the remains. Both thighbones had been cut through and the legs placed alongside the torso in the grave. There was one rather shocking detail: the victim had been scalped, with the hair and soft tissue cut away from the entire top of the head. The body also showed evidence of shotgun wounds to the buttocks, the abdomen and the neck. He had been killed with three separate blasts.

Burgess had fled, but not far. He was reportedly seen going into the woods with a .357 magnum revolver a mile away from the spot where we were excavating. Immediately all the investigators rushed pell-mell from the scene, eager to catch the prime suspect. As the last of them faded from view, Dr. Sigler-Eisenberg and I looked at each other. We both realized that we were defenseless, alone at the scene of a terrible murder, with the probable murderer roaming in the woods nearby! We waited in some suspense until the officers returned a short time later—only to make themselves scarce again when it came time to hoist the rotting remnants into our vehicle. It is amazing how burly policemen can dwindle and disappear when there is dirty work like this to be done!

Burgess’s capture was a bit anticlimactic. While the search was still under way, he telephoned a neighbor who was a deputy sheriff and arranged to surrender to him personally.

The method of dismemberment in this case was unorthodox. Marks on one femur indicated that a knife was used to cut through the skin and muscle; then the knife was used to hack on the bones. If you have ever tried to use a large pocket knife or hunting knife to hack through a tree limb, you’ll find that at first it appears you are making great progress, but after a while your arm is tired and you are still no more than halfway through. The same thing seems to have happened here. Weary and frustrated, the killer then went for an ax and finished the amputation with a single ax blow. Having served his apprenticeship on one leg, he then proceeded with the ax to the second leg, which he also severed.

But the grotesque multiple methods used to chop up the corpse paled in comparison with the grotesque theories Burgess’s defense attorney raised at the trial. I have never seen a trapped man wriggle more artfully in court than Burgess did, through his lawyer. He pleaded not guilty to the charge of murder. He claimed he had acted in self-defense.

Burgess, his lawyer explained, believed he was an American Indian. The fact that he had scalped his victim proved that he had killed his opponent in self-defense, for Indians do not scalp helpless, unarmed people but only those whom they have slain in battle after a fair fight! I have never heard a more astonishing and original defense. The prosecutor actually arranged to call an ethnologist to the witness stand, to testify that this was absurd, that Indians had often taken scalps indiscriminately, even from victims they had not themselves killed, even from victims who remained alive after the scalping.

Then came my turn to testify. More than most others, dismemberment cases are an ordeal to testify about in court. I have to reveal in excruciating and grisly detail what exactly it is that I have learned from a set of human remains. As I speak, the court is hearing terrible things. The judge hears, the jury hears, the defendant hears—and oftentimes the mother, or father, or some other near, dear relative of the victim is listening to my testimony too, listening with tears trickling down their cheeks. At such times I cannot bear to think about the families. I shut them out from my mind. I focus on the remains, only the remains. They, not the living, are my sole concern. When a conviction does occur, it comes too late for the victim and is often scant comfort to the bereaved families. But it does help the future, potential victims of the killer, whose lives would be forfeit if he were not caught and punished.

But this time the dreadful recital of details had an astonishing result. I demonstrated to the jury with a folding hunting knife found in Burgess’s possession exactly how he would have had to hold the very end of the handle to get sufficient leverage to hack at the bones and cause the damage I had observed. My testimony was sharply challenged by the defense, so I had to go over it again and again, with much repetition, and explanations, and repeated demonstrations.

All this while, Burgess was fidgeting in his chair. After I finished my testimony, and the medical examiner was beginning his, the accused motioned to his attorney. A whispered conference ensued. At the end of it, Burgess’s attorney asked to approach the bench.

Burgess wished to change his plea to “guilty.” His attorney explained that Burgess found the demonstrations of the death and dismemberment of his former landlord so true to life, so evocative of the real event, that it was recalling memories too horrible for him to bear.

Hearing this, I confess I felt a thrill of vindication. It’s always damnably frustrating, at a trial, to know that the person in the courtroom most able to confirm your testimony about a crime, the person who knows every single detail about it, is very likely the person on trial. He is sitting a few feet away from you, often staring right at you—but his lips are sealed forever. This case made up for many of the puzzling dismemberments which ended, after so much work on my part, in perplexity and riddles. This time at least, like the heavy clang and click of a prison door slamming shut, there was the satisfying sense of absolute certainty.

6
“When the Sickness Is Your Soul”

If it chance your eye offend you
,
Pluck it out, lad, and be sound:
’Twill hurt, but there are salves to friend you
,
And many a balsam grows on ground
.
And if your hand or foot offend you
,
Cut it off, lad, and be whole;
But play the man, stand up and end you
,
When the sickness is your soul
.

—A. E. Housman,
A Shropshire Lad, xlv
.

The notion of suicide is invested with an awful grandeur in most people’s minds. The sheer irrevocability of the act, the final plunge that tumbles the self-murderer into that shadowy realm “from which no traveler returns,” strikes our hearts with gloomy solemnity. In Western culture the approaches to suicide are guarded with grim religious anathemas and barred by the threat of perpetual curses and soul-blasting bolts of spiritual lightning. Dante consigns suicides to the seventh circle of his Inferno, where their shades are transformed to trees in a dark forest whose bleeding branches are forever torn by demonic birds. Strict Christian dogma forbids the self-slain body to rest in hallowed ground. The monks who bury Ophelia, Hamlet’s drowned sweetheart in Shakespeare’s tragedy, allow her coffin into the churchyard only reluctantly, at the “great command” of the king. Otherwise, “she should in ground unsanctified have lodg’d, till the last trumpet.”

Suicide has the power to unsettle us all, to make even the dullest brain philosophize for a few minutes about the meaning of life. It seems we alone of earth’s creatures know we shall die. “Man has an angel’s brain, and sees the axe from the first,” writes the poet Edgar Lee Masters. From seeing the ax, to grasping the ax, to wielding the ax is a process that can occupy less than a minute, and there are actually cases, within the range of my experience, of wretches who chopped themselves to death with axes.

History is filled with heroic suicides: Cato the Younger falling on his sword at Utica, in North Africa, in 46
B.C
., after having lost the last battle to save Rome’s democracy, spending the whole night reading Plato’s
Phaedo
, the dialogue on the immortality of the soul; the boy who “stood on the burning deck” of the French flagship
L’Onent
, at the battle of Aboukir Bay in 1798, and perished rather than abandon the body of the admiral, his father; the Buddhist monk, Thich Quang Due, who immolated himself with gasoline in Saigon in 1963, to protest the corrupt regime of South Vietnam. These noble deaths resonate in human memory like a grand sculpture gallery of the mind. In our own days I have known of altruistic suicides, men who killed themselves out of kindness to others, in hopes of getting insurance settlements for their relatives, or as a means of liquidating debts. Nor is our own profession proof against the cumulative weight of doubt and pain that leads to self-murder. The renowned British forensic pathologist, Sir Bernard Spilsbury (1877–1947), took his own life after careful forethought. Having suffered several strokes, keenly aware that his mental acuity was impaired and that his professional usefulness was nearly at an end, Spilsbury made a significant gesture. He requisitioned only a hundred autopsy forms, instead of his usual five hundred. Day by day, the dead passed through his office, each case ticking off his self allotted time. When the hundredth form was filled out, Spilsbury dined at his club, returned to his laboratory and gassed himself by placing his head in an oven.