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

I鈥檓 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鈥檚 all.

What does a forensic anthropologist do that a pathologist doesn鈥檛?

They鈥檙e interested in flesh. We look at the bones. In fact, we鈥檙e usually
called in when there鈥檚 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鈥檚 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鈥檛
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鈥攅asy if the bone is complete, not so easy if it isn鈥檛. 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鈥檚 human, is to clean the flesh off the bone.
Then you鈥檙e 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鈥檙e good enough鈥攁nd tenacious鈥攜ou can
uncover them to resolve the case. As soon as they鈥檙e 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: 鈥淥h gosh, we鈥檇 really like for Mary to look at
this, too.鈥� 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鈥攊t 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
鈥渕aggots鈥� has an ugly connotation, but they can also tell us much about a dead
body. I鈥檓 not sorry to see them because, in the field, their size can tell you
their stage of development and therefore how long it鈥檚 been since
death鈥攁lthough 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鈥檝e seen a huge increase in work recently. Why is that?

Yes, and it鈥檚 very interesting, because in the US people seem to have become
so, well, preoccupied with finding dead things. I don鈥檛 know if it鈥檚 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鈥檙e 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鈥檛 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鈥檛 want to get fined. The
blood, they said, 鈥淲ell, that鈥檚 from our deer kill.鈥�

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鈥檛 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鈥檝e spent a morning defleshing a skeleton, what do you eat for
lunch?

Well, after you鈥檝e had someone who鈥檚 been burned you absolutely don鈥檛 go near
a barbecue. We wear a lot of different types of protective gear of course, but
then I鈥檒l take it off, and shower and shower. I go for a long walk. That鈥檚 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鈥檛 want to acknowledge this.

What鈥檚 your biggest ambition?

To identify more people. More than 300 000 people are currently reported as
鈥渕issing鈥� in the US. It鈥檚 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鈥檚 so sad.

These are the people you want to identify?

I鈥檝e worked on over 570 cases and approximately 35 of those remain
unidentified鈥攍ike 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鈥檇 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鈥檙e 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鈥檙e going to try it with others. It鈥檚 far more help to the living than to the
dead when you can help like that.