Dead Men Do Tell Tales: The Strange and Fascinating Cases of a Forensic Anthropologist (42 page)

“On the Thursday prior to the beginning of the trial,” a court memorandum I have before me reads, “in closed discussions before the judge, part of the discussion was about the replica knife and the accurate work which Dr. Maples had done with the knife wounds. Also discussed were the skeletal remnants …”

The judge ruled that all these things would be allowed into evidence. The memorandum continues:

“It was obvious that Rolling didn’t want to face the photographs, let alone the remnants … That was the evening the defense came to Mr. Smith and offered the first of a series of plea deals.”

The murderer’s resolve was crumbling in the face of these fearful resurrections. The knife he imagined was hidden forever was coming back to haunt him in court. The bones of his victims were ready to return from beyond death, to rise up and smite him. The trial would begin in ninety-six hours.

Rolling quailed. On February 15, 1994, as jury selection began in his trial, the accused man suddenly pleaded guilty to five counts of murder and three counts of rape.

“I’ve been running all my life,” he declared. “And there are some things you can’t run from anymore.”

There began the punishment phase of the case, during which the jury had to decide whether Rolling deserved the death penalty or life in prison. Prosecutor Smith showed the jurors the replica knife, the twin of the Ka-Bar I had identified as the murder weapon. The bones were mercifully withheld from the jurors’ sight. The dark blade danced back and forth before their eyes. Together with the hood Rolling wore, and the photographs of his victims, the knife must have made an overwhelming impression on the panel. Their verdict: Death. Rolling received five death sentences from Judge Stan Morris.

“Five years! You’re going to go down in five years! You understand that? In less than five years!” screamed Mario Taboada, the brother of the slain Manuel Taboada. He was predicting that Rolling would exhaust all his appeals and be executed by 1999. The judge ordered Taboada ejected from the courtroom. Gradually the din subsided. One of the darkest chapters in Gainesville’s history was closed.

All in all, the Rolling case was a significant victory for the science of forensic anthropology in Florida, one that saved the taxpayer the immense cost of a full-blown trial, and the victims’ relatives the terrible pain of hearing in a public courtroom exactly how these innocent young people had died. It remains one of the most extraordinary cases in my experience, one that amply demonstrated the sheer power possessed by human bones: the power to bear witness to the truth beyond death; the power to avenge the innocent; the power to terrify the guilty.

Today, at the side of 34th Street in Gainesville, near the crest of a hill, there is a brilliantly painted section of wall dedicated to student graffiti and free speech. Everyone in Gainesville knows it simply as “The Wall.” It runs beneath a fence draped with kudzu vine at the boundary of the campus golf course, and its shape rather reminds you of a railroad cutting, revealing all sorts of multicolored minerals, some of them precious, some of them fool’s gold.

Anyone is welcome to paint a message on this wall, which is by now a local landmark and a University of Florida tradition. Most of the messages are cheery, or silly, or affectionate, or whimsical. But amid the valentines, the happy birthday wishes and the pleas to save the rain forest is a single dark panel in the wall at the very top of the hill. It contains the names of the five murder victims, neatly lettered against a black background, accompanied by the single word: REMEMBER. If this panel fades or is accidentally defaced, someone always renews it and repaints the names. I pass it twice a day, and I do indeed remember.

I have purposely kept this account of the Gainesville murders for last, not because they struck so close to home—Rolling could have killed anywhere, in any town—but because I believe there is a moral to this melancholy tale. It is simply that the lamp of science, properly grasped and directed, can shine its rays into the very heart of darkness. It can seek out and snare the most artful evildoer in a bright, unequivocal beam of truth. It cannot raise the dead, but it can make them speak, accuse and identify the agent of death. With the capture and punishment of the criminal responsible, the families and relatives of those slain can win a small measure of peace amid their infinite sorrow. With each solved case, with every confession, we extend our knowledge of the criminal mind and its methods, and we render the threat of capture and punishment all the more real and credible.

Yet as I look back on my life, and ahead to the future, I am given pause by the vast amount of work that still needs to be done. Mine is a small field, and it is always going to be a small field; but there is no excuse for its being as small as it is today. Cases now throng in daily to the C. A. Pound Human Identification Laboratory, in such jostling multitudes that I cannot address them all and must focus only on the most serious ones. When the telephone rings, my heartbeat quickens. I know that it is most likely the police, and I know what they will say, for I have heard it hundreds of times now:

“Doc, we’ve got a problem …”

And the problem is always a body, or what is left of one. They tell me they’ve set up security around the remains. They tell me police officers are guarding and preserving the scene. They ask: can I come immediately? Because I no longer have an undergraduate class load, I am able to break free more often than not. If I am rescued by a murder from a dull and dismal faculty meeting, so much the better! In the case of the three shotgunned drug dealers found in a pit near La Belle, I enlisted the aid of an archaeologist colleague and we both managed to be in Fort Myers, 230 miles away, by dark. By 8
A.M
. the next morning we were in the death pit, hard at work.

With crime moving to the forefront of the American domestic political agenda, it would appear likely that investigators such as myself can look forward to busy years and full employment. But against this must be weighed the fact that few universities are willing to underwrite programs like mine, which combine pure academic research with applications in the “real world,” and the fact that few state law enforcement agencies have the money or inclination to avail themselves of the services of a trained forensic anthropologist.

So we fall between two stools. We are regarded by our fellow academics almost as common laborers with dirty hands, who traffic in mundane, workaday police matters, instead of devoting ourselves to pure research. On the other hand the police tend to regard us as woolgatherers and cloud-dwellers from the ivory tower, with no experience of the dark side of life. When I am visiting a new law enforcement agency for the first time, I often assume the persona of the innocent, fuddy-duddy professor who has to have everything pointed out to him. This role-playing won’t win me any Oscars, but it humors the police, does no harm and gets results far more quickly than would an attitude of haughty, know-it-all, intellectual arrogance.

Yet sometimes I am prey to doubts. Who will replace me, and others like me? Who will hire the students I train? I cannot say. The need is there. It cries out to heaven. As I compose these lines, there are forty-eight charred corpses left over from the fiery explosion at the Branch Davidian compound outside Waco, awaiting identification. My colleague, Clyde Snow, is in Chiapas, Mexico, looking at the bodies of slain Zapatista revolutionaries, to see if they were murdered by the Mexican army after they surrendered. Remains of MI As from the Korean War are being returned to America, and their names are a riddle as yet unsolved. The mass graves in Bosnia shout to the skies for discovery and vengeance. Yet programs in forensic anthropology languish, and well-trained young scholars go begging for work.

In my lifetime I have seen programs rise and fall like shooting stars. Once upon a time, at the University of Kansas, three of the gods of forensic anthropology—Tom McKern, Ellis Kerley and Bill Bass—were all on the faculty
at the same time
. They attracted and taught scores of students, many of whom are among the leading people in our field today. Then, almost overnight, they were scattered to the four winds. Bass left one year, McKern and Kerley the next. The university hired a human geneticist, rather than anyone in bone. The same melancholy story is about to be repeated at the University of Arizona, where Walt Birkby has built up a fantastic program. Birkby’s students are probably the best-trained of any in the United States. But Walt is retiring in a couple of years, and the university has already announced he will not be replaced. Therefore he has closed admission to his program. He takes no new students.

Bill Bass has just retired from Tennessee. The university is going to replace him with an assistant professor, but without Bill’s active guidance that program will undoubtedly change. I will retire myself in a few years and, even though University of Florida President John Lombardi has worked miracles in other areas, I seriously doubt whether the C. A. Pound Human Identification Laboratory will survive my departure.

If these memoirs have demonstrated anything, I would hope that it is that forensic anthropology is a discipline useful to society. Had I the power to command it, I should decree that each state have at least one forensic anthropologist working in its crime laboratory. Climate and crime rates have to be taken into consideration of course. A forensic anthropologist would probably starve to death in a cold state like Maine or Minnesota—bodies last forever in those arctic regions! He might find little to do in a state like New Hampshire, where there are only a couple of dozen murders in a year. But here in the sunny, homicidal South there are plenty of bodies to go around, and plenty of bugs to feast on them. Decomposition is swift and sure, and nameless skeletons accumulate in thousands, each beseeching us silently for identification.

Larger states, such as Texas, California, New York, Florida and the like, could easily employ several scientists like me, and none would be idle, I assure you. I know from long experience that I can’t begin to look at all the cases demanding my attention in the state of Florida. A handful of states, those having a single medical examiner with statewide responsibility, have appointed forensic anthropologists to that office, but they are few and far between. As our elected officials bay like bloodhounds over the crime issue, as our state budgets allocate large sums for prisons, police training and equipment, parole officers, boot camps for teenagers and heaven knows what else, they overlook utterly the need to fund research by universities to develop new scientific techniques necessary to apprehend criminals. The Forensic Sciences Foundation has started a small grant program to provide funds, largely supported by donations from members of the American Academy of Forensic Scientists. But none of us is a Croesus or a Rockefeller. Our little fund is growing painfully slowly. It can only provide a few modest grants each year.

Seldom does a week go by without my receiving a visit or a telephone call from some young person eager to go into forensic anthropology. Will I accept him or her as a student? Alas, I don’t have the money to support large numbers of students, nor the space in which to teach and train them, nor the time to give them all the attention they deserve. Even if I were to take them in, where would they go when they left me, having won their doctorates? Where would they get jobs? No doubt a handful of them would, as I did, work their way into a university system and slowly establish a practice. Most wouldn’t. That is the bitter truth.

The murder and suicide rate in the state of Florida could easily furnish cases for six full-time forensic anthropologists. In my daydreams I locate them on a mind-map of the state with stickpins: there would be one in the Panhandle, another in Gainesville, another in Orlando, one in southwest Florida and one, perhaps two, in Miami. Miami, as we all know, is a very special place: the deadliest city in the most crime-ridden state in the Union. Forensic anthropologists would find plenty to do there. They would be useful to state medical examiners in skeletonized cases, cases involving burn victims, decomposed bodies and the like. We could even help identify fresh bodies belonging to the nameless and the homeless, who are flocking to Florida—and to Florida’s morgues—in ever increasing numbers nowadays. Some medical examiners’ offices perform over three thousand autopsies each year.

I can’t be everywhere. I have been under as many as four separate subpoenas, to testify in four separate cities, all on the same day. One prosecutor, jokingly I hope, actually threatened to throw me in jail if I did not testify for him, rather than in another case scheduled for that day! Ours is a very large state. If a decomposed body is found in the Florida Keys, there is no way I can be on the scene immediately. Sometimes the remains are shipped to me, if I cannot go to them. Federal Express won’t transport human remains, including cremains, but the U. S. Post Office has no such qualms, as long as the remains are identified as “evidence” or “specimens.” But if we had a forensic anthropologist stationed in Miami, these cases could be attended to on the spot.

Such are the thoughts that sometimes visit me at night. But “sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof,” as the Bible says. Whenever I am beset by doubts over the future of my discipline, or the career opportunities for my students, or the fate of my laboratory after I am gone, I look at the filing cabinets filled with case reports. Here at least is solid, measurable progress. Here I can claim to have made a difference.

In days when people knew more Latin than they do now, someone composed a deeply moving inscription that can still be read over the lintel of the New York City medical examiner’s office:

Taceant Colloquia. Effugiat Risus. Hic Locus Est Ubi Mors Gaudet Succurrere Vitae
.

[Let idle talk be silenced. Let laughter be banished. Here is the place where Death delights to succour Life.]