Had this been a “normal” multi-fatality fire-say, an out-of-control grease fire in a crowded bar or social club-investigators would already be facing a challenging and intricate death investigation as they sought to assemble each set of remains and give it a name. But this was no ordinary fire-it had been set, deliberately, in the midst of a controversial law enforcement effort that had drawn an enormous amount of media coverage. So the team at Fort Worth would also be conducting a very visible criminal investigation, treating each scrap of bone and shred of tissue as pieces of evidence. The anthropologists permitted at the scene would need to know more than academic science-they'd also have to know how to observe confidentiality mandates and chain-of-custody protocols. In Knoxville, we spelled that mixture of anthropological and forensic expertise “B-A-S-S.”
But Dr. Bass's wife had just died of cancer, and he was in the throes of settling her affairs. Reluctantly, he decided to stay in Knoxville, sending graduate students to go in his place. To our mingled pride, excitement, and apprehension, he chose Bill Grant, Theresa Woltanski- and me.
The three of us piled into my vintage Jeep Cherokee, throwing an odd assortment of clothes, food, and field gear into the back. If we were assigned to the morgue-analyzing the remains as they came in-we'd be issued the normal protective gear: scrubs, gloves, and masks. But if we were assigned to recover remains at the site itself, we'd need to supply our own clothes: work boots, hats, foul-weather gear, and specialized excavation tools. We were taking no chances on showing up unprepared.
We drove all night and showed up in Fort Worth at six a.m.-just one hour before we'd been asked to meet Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Nazim Peerwani in his office. We knew from experience that we wouldn't be allowed to just walk in. A medical examiner's office is almost always secreted behind locked doors and security checkpoints, with carefully controlled access to the public. After all, behind those locked doors, the M.E.'s staff is trying to piece together the stories of the most personal and violent crimes. Distraught families, often ready to lash out at any target, tend to show up at the M.E.'s office, and sometimes perpetrators show up there too, perhaps driven by some irrational urge to further punish their dead victims, hoping to destroy key evidence of their crime, or even seeking to preserve their freedom by killing or disabling one of the scientific sleuths working on their case.
In a mass-fatality incident, with dozens of family members showing up to identify the dead, it's even more important to control access to the morgue. Medical examiners, hoping to shield families from the horrors of a charred body or disfigured face, want very much to control civilians' access to the remains, even as family members insist on seeing their loved ones one last time. Influenced by TV images, many civilians imagine a morgue as a kind of clinical funeral home, with neat rows of peacefully sleeping corpses-as opposed to the blood-spattered and often chaotic place of business that it is.
It's also important to keep out the thrill-seekers who inevitably congregate at disaster sites, their morbid curiosity fueled by the media and occasionally evolving into a fanatical desire to penetrate behind closed doors. Ordinarily rational, well-mannered people suddenly start behaving like spectators at a Roman circus, insisting on their very own up-close-and-personal view of the dead bodies as they appear on TV.
So although Bill, Theresa, and I had not yet worked a mass fatality, we weren't surprised when the large, polite man from the county sheriff's department stopped us as soon as we stepped off the sidewalk.
“Dr. Peerwani is expecting us! Please let us through!” Theresa said impatiently. One of my closest friends in the program, she was always quick to confront any perceived injustice. Now her long blond hair whipped across her sleep-deprived face as she spoke urgently to the officer.
“At least call Dr. Peerwani on your radio,” Bill suggested. A tall, easygoing military veteran who seldom got worked up over anything, he was my other close buddy and, as it happened, Theresa's boyfriend. I looked at him gratefully, glad for his diplomatic skills and his air of quiet authority.
Eventually, we were taken to a reception area where we were issued special identification badges printed right then and there-good for this incident only. Anyone who wanted access to the morgue had to wear one of these highly visible badges at all times.
“Hold on there, folks,” the receptionist said as we headed for the next locked door. “Y'all will have to wait for Dr. Peerwani. He wants to give you the guided tour.”
“Oh, come
We had seen Dr. Peerwani on television almost every day, so when the darkly handsome Middle Eastern man in his starched white lab coat came through the door, we all stood in an instinctive gesture of respect. The doctor nodded and smiled but never broke stride as he signaled us to follow him into the inner sanctum of the morgue.
We hurried to keep up as Dr. Peerwani took us through the building, barely pausing to toss out a few brief words of introduction to the key people we'd be working with. As he identified various areas of the morgue, I tried to memorize every one of his quick, soft words, which held only a trace of a British-influenced accent. The building was like a maze and I worried that I'd never be able to find my way. But gradually a pattern started to emerge.
First came the “office areas,” the ones where paperwork and research were done. At this early hour, workers were just beginning to fill these halls, turning on lights and opening doors in the staff's personal offices, library, and conference room. Here I saw furniture worthy of a well-heeled law firm, along with lush carpeting, large windows, and soft lighting fixtures. I even heard classical music seeping from under one closed office door. Office workers wore the standard professional suits and dresses.
Then, as we traveled deeper into the inner sanctum, the atmosphere changed along with the decor, as if we were following a photographer's gray scale from light to dark. Suddenly the big windows were gone, the carpet changed to tile flooring, and the institutional fluorescent lights hummed and flickered. Now we were in the lab, where forensics experts were just clocking in, busily covering their T-shirts and blue jeans with white lab coats. These people were getting ready to receive the vials of blood, tissue samples, and bits of trace evidence that would be taken from the bodies waiting for us downstairs, in the autopsy suite.
As we rushed downstairs, the uniform changed once again-the autopsy workers all wore light-blue surgical scrubs. Suddenly Dr. Peerwani stopped in mid-stride and we skidded to a halt, stacking up behind him. He turned and glanced at the three of us, then set off in another direction.
“Go change into scrubs before we go any farther,” he said, nodding in the direction of two well-marked bathrooms. Theresa and I found ourselves in a large room that looked like a health club locker room-large lockers lining one wall, shower stalls and toilet cubicles in the back. Tall shelves stacked with light-blue surgical scrubs in several sizes stood right inside the door. We quickly took off our jeans and T-shirts and slipped on the scrubs over our underwear. Back in the hall, we now resembled the other workers we encountered as we continued our tour, except that these other people wore turtlenecks, thermal underwear, and heavy socks under their gear. And for good reason: As we got closer and closer to the autopsy suite, the air got colder-and the smell got stronger.
I will never forget that smell. Nothing I had ever experienced-in the operating room, on the Body Farm, on the few cases I had worked-even came close to this overpowering aroma. The nauseating smell of burned flesh-which I'd never really gotten used to-was now enhanced by the rancid odor of kerosene and the acrid scent of gunpowder. And pervading it all was the putrid smell of decomposing bodies.
Bill, Theresa, and I rolled our eyes and glanced at each other. As Dr. Peerwani flung open the double doors of the autopsy suite, we were sure we'd see burned and rotting corpses stacked floor to ceiling. What else could explain that overpowering smell?
Nope. Nothing. At this early hour, the morgue was empty. Four or five large stainless steel autopsy sinks lined the walls, and a cabinet full of rubber gloves, face masks, and other protective gear stood just inside the door. I noticed that the floors were scrubbed clean, the sinks were shiny, and just a few lights were on. I began to understand that the smells from a mass fatality seep into microscopic pores of the floor, ceiling, and walls. Water can flush away the visible evidence of death-but not the odors. They linger for a long, long time.
Dr. Peerwani was about to lead us into the adjoining x-ray room when he suddenly glanced at his watch and again broke off in mid-sentence. “Come on,” he said once more, and the three of us found ourselves almost sprinting to keep up with him as he headed back to the conference room, where investigators were gathering for the seven-thirty a.m. briefing.
I knew how urgent it was to identify the bodies as soon as possible-bereaved families were waiting for the news, government officials were taking enormous amounts of political heat, and FBI investigators were still trying to determine what had really happened in the compound. So I didn't quite see why precious time was being taken out of the workday for a meeting.
Now, of course, I know that such briefings are standard protocol in any mass fatality, in which numerous agencies and large numbers of personnel are all working together at top speed. Everyone needs to be kept aware of the investigation as a whole, and it's important to have a time when the inevitable problems can be discussed and, hopefully, solved. Maybe a backlog in the x-ray department can be solved by pathologists being more selective in the views they request. Perhaps new phone lines need to be installed so that investigators can contact family members more easily. Or maybe more investigators are needed at the crime scene than in the morgue, requiring a reassignment of duty stations. It's also important, in a situation where so much is going on and rumors are flying madly, to keep the whole group informed with daily progress reports. It's good to start each day with a clear statement of where you are, what's not working yet, and what you hope to accomplish.
This day I saw yet another reason for a daily briefing: It gives the players on a very large team a chance to meet. Of the thirty or so people who filled the room, most had not even known each other, let alone worked together, before April 19. After only a week, though, they seemed very well acquainted, with Bill, Theresa, and I being the only newcomers. Then, to our surprise, we heard Dr. Peerwani saying our names.
“They're three forensic anthropologists just in from Tennessee,” he explained, “and we're going to team them up with the forensic pathologists in the morgue to help separate and identify the skeletal material.” Faces around the room nodded and smiled, and we smiled back gratefully.
I now know that many M.E.'s offices go along for years handling deaths in their own communities with no need for the specialized skills that my discipline can provide. Not until there's a mass fatality might they need some outside help. But if the M.E. doesn't quite know what forensic anthropologists do, it can be hard to coordinate the two disciplines.
Luckily, the Tarrant County M.E. 's office had an anthropologist on staff already, Max Houck. Max's primary job was as a trace-evidence analyst-someone who analyzes the tiny bits of evidence found at a crime scene, such as the hairs or paint particles left on a victim's clothes. But he had anthropological training, too, which meant that the pathologists in his office were used to teaming up with folks like us. Later, when I'd worked more mass fatalities, I'd realize what a huge difference that made. Max had given his colleagues a good idea of what they might expect from us, even though he wasn't at the briefing today-he was spending every possible minute out at the crime scene, locating and sorting the human remains.
Although I never worked the scene at Waco, I later learned what was involved in Max's assignment. In a fire like the one at Waco, there is a hierarchy of damage. Some victims emerge charred but relatively intact. Maybe their bodies were located on the periphery, or perhaps their remains were shielded from the inferno by falling walls, furniture, or even other bodies. Other victims have been reduced to fragments and body parts, which may have been scattered over a relatively wide area and mixed in with pieces from other people. The piles of charred torsos, the commingled arms, legs, and skull fragments, can be impossible to sort out completely at the scene, though Max and his team of Texas Rangers and medical investigators were certainly doing their best. Eventually, though, they simply had to bag and tag the remains they found, accepting that we at the morgue were going to get some body bags filled with the remains from several different people, all fused together from the heat of the fire. Or we might get a bag that held only the remnants of a hand, or perhaps a tiny T-shirt wrapped around a charred piece of skin and a baby bottle. Maybe we'd be able to match those fragments with pieces that came in other bags. Or maybe not.
Max and his team had worked out a system for keeping track of where each bag of remains was found. They'd created a crime scene diagram that enabled them to give each body bag its own number, showing us where the parts were found. We had a huge copy of this diagram posted prominently in a hallway next to the morgue, the body bag numbers marked out in red and the entire area sectioned off with an alphabetized grid. Knowing which body parts were found where could help pathologists and other investigators try to piece together exactly what had happened before, during, and after the fire-information that might be crucial at trial. And the diagram gave those of us in the morgue some common standard with which to begin the identification process. True, body parts might be blown across the site, with one person's hands in sector A and their feet in sector D; but, by and large, most people's remains tended to stay within a single sector. At least this way, we had a fighting chance of reuniting fragmented parts with their original owner, especially if someone had found a nearby torso or skull that we could identify. Hopefully, by the end of the investigation, every number would have a name.
