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On the way home from the crime lab, I simultaneously became aware of three things: (1) I was in Henry County; (2) there was a deputy sheriffs car parked on the side of the road just in front of me; and (3) I was doing ninety-five.

  It was, of course, far too late to slow down. I zipped on past the deputy, wondering what I was going say when I had to call Colonel Denney (the chief of detectives) to come to Henry County and get me out of jail. But the deputy didn't try to stop me. I suppose he figured that anybody doing ninety-five through Henry County in a car with four whip antennas had to be a police officer on official business—which I was, but I didn't have to be going that fast.

  This has nothing to do with identifying the corpse, who turned out—when scientists developed fingerprints from his dermis—to be wearing his own belt buckle, but it is part of the whole story.

  And now you know what happened with the Jackson Street Corpse. Even that identification was relatively easy—the man was, after all, found in the backyard of the house where he had been living, there were only three possibles, and his dermis was relatively intact.

  Nothing at All to Go On

  Corpses — even skeletons—are found with far less to go on than

  that.

  Ultimately, of course, before anybody can be identified, there must be a possible person to check out. This "possible identification" may come from missing person reports, from a killer's ten-years-late confession, from citizens who call police after publication of a description. If we have no fingerprints, where do we go?

  Ear-Print Identification

  Believe it or not, a person can be identified by his/her ears, if there is an adequate side photo that shows the ear clearly and if the ear is intact. Scientists have found that the creases and lines in the ear lobe, as well as the arrangement of the entire outer structure in the ear, are consistent and unduplicated, although the creases do tend to become considerably deeper with age. Once, at an ident convention, I talked with a man who told me he'd identified a safecracker by the ear print he left on the door of the safe.

  This knowledge could have saved an English author considerable embarrassment in the early 1980s. The author—whose name I will withhold out of courtesy— became obsessed with the notion that the man in Lee Harvey Oswald's grave was not Oswald, the presumed assassin of President John F. Kennedy, but rather a "ringer" who had been substituted for the real Oswald after Oswald left for the Soviet Union. He insisted that the fingerprint identification, from Oswald's Marine Corps fingerprints and Dallas Police Department fingerprints, was no good because in his opinion someone had substituted the "ringer's" prints for the prints of the real Oswald in the Marine Corps files. He spent considerable time, money and agitation demanding that the grave be opened; the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, which I read at the time, was following the story in considerable detail.

  I wrote a polite letter to the reporter covering the story, asking him to let the writer know that opening the grave was not necessary. There were good photographs in existence of Oswald both before and after the trip to the U.S.S.R.; if the writer feared Marine Corps photos had been tampered with, that was all right, because there were also family photos of Oswald. I had seen enough to know that there were clear photographs showing the ears. I suggested he simply get an ear examiner to examine the photographs and that would give him his conclusive answer without the trouble and expense of opening a grave.

  The reporter told me he had passed the information along.

  The writer ignored me.

  The grave was finally opened in 1981, and the body was once again positively identified as that of Lee Harvey Oswald, on the basis of dental records and skull X-rays. But in fact a positive identification had already been made, ten months before the grave was opened, by earprint expert A.V. Iannarelli, working at the request of author Joe Nickell who thought the English writer's idea was just possible enough to deserve a full exploration. Before being called onto the case by Nickell, Iannarelli had already written the English author's attorney in Dallas to recommend such an investigation; his letter, like mine, was ignored.

  But there are other ways of identifying a body.

  Let's go to a new chapter for them.

  TABLE 6_

  Finding Reference Sources

  The more technically complicated your writing is, the more critical

  it is to find plenty of reference material. But that can be hard to do.

  Here are some hints that might help:

  • Use more than one encyclopedia. Different encyclopedias look at material differently; therefore, one may provide information that another omits. I generally consult World Book and Encyclopaedia Britannica. You'll decide on your own favorites on the basis of what you need and what's available.

  • At the end of each encyclopedia article is a list of related topics. Look them up also, as one of them might tell just what you need to know.

  • Unless you live in a very large city, you may need to make a special trip to the closest big-city and/or university library. At times I have consulted as many as five different libraries in the course of one book. Jean Auel, who spends years researching her Earth's Children books, would probably consider me to be scarcely scratching the surface.

  • Ask a librarian to help you. Most of us are aware of only one serial bibliography, The Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature. Librarians know of hundreds of serial bibliographies. Some of them are specialized and might be looking at your specific topic. In addition, there are many computerized data bases in larger libraries. Some of those may charge a fee, but others are paid for by your tax dollars.

  • Learn to use the appropriate guides to topic headings in card or computerized library book catalogs. If you can't find anything on your topic, you might be looking under the wrong headings. The librarian can help you find the right ones.

  • When you find a useful book, inspect its bibliography. Almost certainly it will list other books and articles that will be helpful.

  • Use interlibrary loan. If a source is not in your library, your librarian can order it for your temporary use. You will pay no more than the cost of mailing; quite often there is no charge.

  • As you build your professional library, haunt used bookstores, Goodwill stores, Salvation Army stores, and Deseret Industries

  stores. On many topics, used books —even old books—are as useful as new books.

  • Learn for yourself as many as you reasonably can of the skills your series character or your "big book" character possesses. There are adult education classes available almost everywhere, and they're generally quite inexpensive. Nobody expects you to spend ten years in medical school and internships before you write a novel about a brain surgeon, but learning to fire a pistol, perhaps to ski if your heroine likes to ski or garden if your hero likes to garden, is easy enough. In fiction as elsewhere, no authority speaks more loudly than the voice of experience.

  To the best of my knowledge, the method detailed here by Gross to make a decaying face recognizable is no longer in use anywhere in the world; furthermore, in my personal library of criminology, and in all the criminology books I have read from many other libraries in several states, I have never found an example in which this method was used for identification.

  But some other methods are equally interesting, and almost as bizarre.

  Forensic Dentistry

  There are very few full-time forensic dentists; more often a forensic dentist is a regular dentist who has become interested in forensic dentistry and offered his services to the local police department. And yet forensic dentistry can do marvelous things. The best fictional account of it I've come across occurs in a Lord Peter Wimsey

  story, "In the Teeth of the Evidence," by Dorothy Sayers. In that story, what at first appears to be an innocent dentist, accidentally burned to death in a fire in his garage, turns out to be a transient murdered by a felonious dentist attempting to escape a very bad situation.

  The story is interesting because Mr. Prende
rgast, the apparent victim, anticipates that a dental investigation will be made of the corpse, and he carefully re-creates his own dental chart in the transient's mouth. But he's caught when Mr. Lamplough, Lord Peter's dentist who assists the police, discovers that what is supposed to be a fused porcelain filling inserted in 1923 is in fact a cast porcelain filling, and the process was not invented until 1928.

  This discovery meant that the body was not that of a dentist who had accidentally burned to death in a fire in his garage, but a victim murdered by a felonious dentist.

  But how is a dental identification done?

  The dental chart in Figure 7-1, used by permission of the dental patient and his dentist, is the latest thing in dental-chart technology. Rather than a paper chart to update periodically, which may become frayed and yellowed over time or even lost in inadvertent file shuffling, this chart was stored on computer. When the patient asked for a photocopy of his chart for use in this book, the dentist assured him what he would get would be even better than a photocopy: an original computer printout of all work done in this patient's mouth to date. But basically, whether it is computerized or done on paper, this is what any dental chart done in the last hundred or so years will look like.

  A dentist working on any patient—whether s/he has worked with this forty-one-year-old patient for forty years or has just encountered this eighty-year-old patient for the first time—charts not only his/her own work but also all work already present before the first time this dentist examined this patient. The printed chart form to be filled in by hand, or the computer form, shows all teeth normally present in an adult; the dentist notes on the chart which teeth are absent in this patient, which teeth have work, where the work is, and what kind of work was done. A dental chart, if accurate, is almost as conclusive as fingerprints. Therefore, if the jaws of an unknown corpse are compared with the dental chart of the person the corpse is likely to be, and if the location and type of dental work

  match the chart, then presumptive evidence exists that this corpse is the person for whom that chart was made.

  X rays, if they exist, will supplement material available on the chart. But unless full-mouth X rays exist, an X ray may show too small an area with too few identification points to make a full identification possible from X ray alone. The dental charts are normally essential.

  But there are possible problems. Of course, if someone actually intends to substitute a body for a known person, the body must first fit the general description of the person. Even a fire will not make it impossible to distinguish between a six-foot-tall man and a five-foot-tall woman. Then a dentist—or at least a highly knowledgeable dental technician who could not practice on a living person but might be able to do fairly convincing work on a corpse—must be willing to spend a lot of time doing dental work on a corpse, and that dentist or technician must have the original chart available to work from.

  In fact, fraud of this sort is probably more common in fiction than in real life. The coincidence of an available unknown corpse to be substituted for a living person and a dentist willing to commit that sort of fraud is rare. But other problems can occur.

  First, if the corpse is reduced to skeletal remains, some of the teeth may be lost. The teeth are not likely to decay—in fact, in a person who before death was healthy, the teeth will probably be the very last items to decay. If you have ever—as I once did in childhood—found a coyote skull and tried to extract its teeth, you know how extremely difficult it is. But as the skeleton continues to weather, perhaps to be gnawed on by predators, teeth may be lost from the jaws and hauled away by predators or washed away by heavy rains. Poor health or borderline scurvy (which loosens teeth and is extremely common in the homeless, drug abusers or other malnourished people) increases the incidence of lost teeth. If the people collecting the skeletal remains are not extremely careful with sieving, teeth may be left behind.

  Sieving

  Sieving, an archaeological technique adapted to forensic medicine, consists of putting all dirt removed from the area of a find through a fairly fine sieve and then sorting everything caught by the mesh, discarding rocks and so forth and retaining everything of potential evidential value. Frequently, in criminalistic work as in archaeological work, sieving turns up small items of great potential —sometimes teeth.

  Second, the charts may not be completely accurate. The person might have gone to another dentist later, after the dentist the family knew about, and had more dental work done, so that a too-early dental chart is compared. If the later work did not obscure the earlier work, identification may still be possible, but if later work covered earlier work—e.g., what was a small amalgam filling is now a deep root canal; teeth that were filled are now missing—identification may become impossible.

  And there are other reasons why charts may not be completely accurate. Rarely, dentists lie to their patients about how much work they've done. Christopher Joyce and Eric Stover, in Witnesses From the Grave: The Stories Bones Tell, quote Robert Kirschner, assistant medical examiner for Cook County, Illinois. He'd been working on identifying bodies from an airplane crash and referred to a very well-dressed young woman who'd had quite a lot of dental work done:

  "It was very difficult to get records from her dentist____" When

  they finally got hold of the records, it was obvious why the dentist had been reluctant: the records showed far less work than what the team found in the woman's teeth. "[H]e had obviously shown half of his dental work on his records so he could cut his income to the IRS. On the other hand, if you got a welfare dentist, you saw a person who actually has three fillings in their mouth, but the dental records would show ten. They were marking 'em down left and right so they could collect from Medicaid."

  (101)

  This section, quoted in the the Wall Street Journal's review of the book, illustrates one major problem. Try to make a positive identification from charts like those. It can't be done—unless the dentist has some sort of code to show what work s/he really did and is willing to admit it.

  Age may also be a factor. If the last time this person went to the dentist was at the age of eight, and the person is now sixteen or seventeen, the chart cannot possibly be accurate. Too many deciduous teeth have been replaced by permanent teeth, which might have come in at a different angle from the baby teeth and will certainly have different problems.

  Forensic dentistry has uses other than identifying corpses. In one case, a burglar who took one bite out of an apple and then left the apple at the scene was later definitely identified — after a suspect had been produced in other ways—by a cast of his teeth, which matched a cast of the bite taken from the apple. In a far more serious case, in which a murder victim had been repeatedly bitten, tooth marks identified the killer. Obviously, a nonsuspect ident in this type of case is impossible; the suspect must first be produced by other means of investigation.

  Long-Bone X Rays

  If for any reason both fingerprints and dental charts are unfeasible—e.g., the corpse had dentures (which are missing) and no hands; somebody has made a determined effort to avoid identification by removing head, hands and feet—the next step, if long-bone X rays of the suspected person exist, is long-bone X-ray comparison. Of course, the more X rays are available of arms and legs, the surer the identification is; however, a very detailed X ray of even one leg or one arm may be sufficient for a firm identification.

  Dealing With Skeletal Remains

  When working with unknown remains, investigators follow a protocol, apparently developed at the time of the Parkman-Webster case, when one medical school professor murdered another and was convicted on testimony from the janitor (see discussion of this case later in this chapter).

  Briefly, the protocol asks medical experts to determine as much as possible about the remains, beginning with the broadest category (human or animal? one person or several?) and gradually narrowing to age, sex, anomalies that might be used for identification, and finally focusing in on time (as n
arrowly as possible, realizing at times determining the century might be the best possible) and cause of death, if it can be determined. For a more detailed explanation of the protocol, see Joyce and Stover, pp. 52ff.

  Obviously, the more there is left, the more likely these questions are to be answerable. Working with a skull alone, even the best pathologist is likely to mistake the sex as often as 25 percent of the time; and as races become more and more mixed through interracial marriage and other interracial sexual contact, it becomes less and less possible to distinguish race. If the entire skeleton is present, handedness is easy to determine, because the right-handed person's right arm tends to be slightly larger and vice versa (apparently because of more use rather than of anything innate). Sex in an adult is fairly easy to determine if pelvic bones are present, but even then there is as much as a 10 percent chance of error. Sex in child skeletal remains is extremely difficult, as before puberty there is very little difference. If the long bones remain, height is fairly easy to determine. Weight may be somewhat more difficult, particularly if the person was extremely overweight.

  Cause of death in skeletal remains may be easy to determine, if a bullet, knife or arrowhead remains in the area, or if marks where a bullet ricocheted off a rib are visible, or if the bones themselves are visibly damaged. But soft-tissue damage will be impossible to recognize in a skeleton.

  What this means to you is that in your writing, you may determine how much is left of the decedent and how much your fictional pathologist will be able to determine from the remains.

  Reconstructing the Face

  If you can find an English translation of I.A. Gerasimov's The Face Finder, it's well worth reading. Gerasimov, a forensic anthropologist working in Moscow, is capable of reconstructing the face from the skull. He has determined that the ways that muscles attach to the skull can be used to figure out depth of tissue at different places on the face, thus overcoming the problem of determining the person's probable facial fullness. If this problem is difficult to envision, think of someone you know who has recently gained, or lost, quite a lot of weight. Could you be certain of recognizing an extremely heavy person from a reconstruction of what that person's face would look like if the person were slim? With some people, there is little problem, but most of us have had the experience I had when I was nineteen—encountering a friend who had graduated a year before I did. She had been heavy all the way through school, but after graduation she moved away and embarked on a long-range weight-loss program. Two years later, when she and I met, she had to introduce herself—I hadn't the slightest idea who she was. Her slim face could not be recognized from her heavy face.