them.”
I could see the investigators nodding to each other, and that gave me the courage to go on. “Besides, Charles, how bad can it be? There's the entrance, and it's a lot bigger than I expected. Heck, it looks like it's eight feet high and a good fifteen feet wide. I've been in lots of spaces smaller than that.”
This time it was the mine inspectors who laughed, and if I'd been a little more astute to the glances that passed between them, maybe I would have swallowed my pride and stayed outside. But I didn't. With my best show of bravado, I reached for my regular hard hat and picked up my biggest flashlight.
“No, Doc, that won't do,” said Charles. “You have to wear this.” He handed me a dented and blackened coal miner's helmet and a flat metal box to which was attached a short insulated cable and small spotlight. As I held this helmet in one hand and the box in the other, he strapped a thick nylon webbed belt around my waist.
“Put on the helmet first, Doc, and I'll adjust it for you.”
I did as I was told. The headgear fit surprisingly well after Charles gave a little twist to a knob at the back of my neck, just under the helmet's rim. Next he took the flat orange-colored box from me and hooked it onto the belt.
“This here's the battery for that light you still have in your hand,” he explained. “It's fully charged and should last as long as you're in there-unless, of course, you get lost or trapped.” He looked me straight in the eye, but couldn't keep a straight face for long. I expect he spotted the apprehension that was starting to creep back into my eyes as I watched some of the mine inspectors shaking hands and wishing “good luck” to the folks who would be leading me inside.
“Hey, Doc, I was just kidding,” Charles said in what I think he meant as a reassuring tone. He grabbed the cable attached to the battery and snaked it up through a loop in the back of my helmet, clipping it and the spotlight to the metal frame over my forehead. Then he clicked the light on and off a few times, just to make sure it worked. It gave off a bright white beam that seemed powerful enough in the dim twilight-but what kind of illumination would it provide once I was underground?
“Looks like you're good to go now, Doc,” Charles said cheerfully. “Give me a minute to get my stuff on, and we'll join the others. Maybe you could grab that body bag and my camera from the back of that pickup over there while I suit up.”
As we walked over to the mine entrance, Charles took the bag and the camera, leaving me free to walk into the mine with empty hands. As nonchalantly as I could, I turned on my light, pulled on my favorite leather gloves, and followed the other five members of the recovery team, who all finally turned on their own helmet lights and divided into pairs. We walked upright and side by side for about two hundred yards into the base of the mountain. By now, the last of the outside light had faded away and our tiny headlamps cast eerie shadows as they bounced along in cadence with our footsteps.
Then, suddenly, the shaft narrowed dramatically, like a funnel, the sides and ceiling closing in until there wasn't room to walk abreast or even to stand upright. That's when I noticed the silence. We were so far underground that no outside sound could penetrate, and I suddenly felt a wave of panic, gasping for breath and breaking out in a cold sweat.
“Wait up a minute, guys,” I called to the men ahead of me. I had stopped dead in my tracks, trying to get control of my breathing. “I'm having a little trouble, here.”
Newcomer's jitters were old hat to them, so they all stood together in a group, waiting for me to gather the courage to continue. I could tell they were amused by my discomfort, and more than one derisive glance was cast my way; but, frankly, I didn't care. I thought I was doing pretty damned good to have come
Charles did, too. From this point on, he kept up a running commentary about the case, knowing that would keep my mind too busy to conjure up images of danger.
“We know who this guy is supposed to be, Doc. He disappeared about a year and a half ago, and the fella who told us where he hid the body said he helped with the killin'. While we were waiting for you to get here, I went ahead and collected a batch of the victim's x-rays, so hopefully you can identify him at tomorrow's autopsy. I think I told you that the head's been cut off, and it looks like maybe rats or something's been working on his fingers. There's no skin or prints left.”
By now, I was stooped over and proceeding in a duck-walk crouch, a position so uncomfortable that it was hard to keep my mind on the case. My poor knees and back were about to give out, and my only comfort was that the situation couldn't possibly get any worse.
And then, of course, it did. Suddenly, the men in front of me stopped and one hung a lantern light on a hook that had been drilled into a single support timber.
“This is it,” he said, pointing to a pile of jumbled coal and flat rocks. “From here on in, we'll be on hands and knees, but you've gotta be careful not to hit any of the support timbers on the other side of this pile. For some reason, the men who killed this guy pulled out most of the supports. I think the ones left are good enough to keep this shaft open, but this batch of rocks fell just as we were coming in to look for the body this morning, so let's not take any chances.”
You don't have to worry about me, I thought. I had taken all the chances I was going to take just by coming down here in the first place.
Apparently without fear, the leaders of our team lay down and slithered through an opening that was just high enough to accommodate the bulk of an average-sized man. Swallowing hard, I followed them. After crawling a seemingly endless hundred yards on our hands and knees, we rounded a sharp corner and entered a slightly larger cavern about a mile and a half inside the mine, where Everett Hall had lain for the past eighteen months. His mummified corpse was perched on its belly on top of a pile of mine timbers, pointing a bony finger straight at us.
The space we had to work in was a little larger but no higher than the shaft we had just crawled through, allowing just enough room for my five helpers to sit down with their backs against the wall. Here they sat, aiming their headlamps at the corpse, waiting for me to make the next move.
This was my chance to make up for that panic attack, so I crawled casually over to the corpse and started dictating into my tape recorder.
“What is this stuff?” I said, interrupting myself. I held my fingers up to my nose trying to get a whiff of the greasy liquid. “It smells like my old car.”
“It's gotta be either motor oil or kerosene,” said Charles as he lifted a plastic jug from somewhere behind the corpse. “There's four of these jugs back here, and they're all empty. No miner in his right mind would bring this stuff in here, so these fools must have planned to burn this body on top of what looks like a makeshift bonfire.”
“So it's flammable?” the rescue team leader jumped in, a hint of alarm in his normally easygoing voice. “All right, people, let's be extra careful. No camera flashes, and no scraping with these tools we brought. All we need is for a spark to reach this stuff, and we're all dead.”
Okay, but what's the
I glanced over at the four men sitting against the wall, their arms and legs folded like a row of Buddha effigies, and got an idea. “I know you guys don't want to get too close to this body, but I need you to scoot over here and give Charles and me some light. If you all aim your headlamps at one section at a time, I think there will be enough light to take some photos.”
Praise the Lord, my idea worked, and soon we were ready to move the body. But now there was a new problem: The corpse had hardened and warped over time, so that parts of it were wedged between the pile of wood and the roof of the mine. With little room to maneuver in the confined space, I lay on my back and pushed up against the mummified torso from below, so that Charles could quickly slide out some of the heavy mine timber that had been supporting the victim's shoulders. Then I had to slide over and do the same thing to the lower legs, which were still wrapped in the sleeping bag. Somehow we managed to slide the body into the body bag that Charles had laid out on the floor of the mine.
Now Charles took over. “Okay, men. The doc here has done her part. Now we need you to help us get this fellow out of here.”
I took a secret pleasure in seeing that everyone else was as eager as I was to leave, springing into action before Charles had even finished speaking. Luckily, someone had thought to bring some rope, which they tied into two loops at the end of the body bag in order to drag it through the shaft. Since there wasn't enough room to stand up and carry it, each man took turns slowly dragging it behind him as we crawled out of the shaft. When we reached the place where we could stand up again, our pace quickened as four men each grabbed a corner of the bag and carried it the rest of the way.
I breathed a sigh of relief when we got outside, silently vowing that I would
Getting the body out of the mine felt like a huge achievement, but we still had to establish a positive ID, even though the state police and the coroner were sure that this was Everett Hall. I felt pretty confident, though, especially since Charles had brought a half-inch-thick stack of x-rays over to my lab in Frankfort. With all that medical data, it seemed pretty certain that we could quickly confirm his identity.
At first everything went smoothly. The pathologist conducted an autopsy that revealed a match between our victim's remains and the description on Everett Hall's missing person report, including the presence of a partially amputated foot that had healed quite nicely. Then it was my turn. I wheeled the gurney into the radiology room. I was fairly certain that once I took my first x-ray of the victim's spine, I'd be able to match my work to the films in Hall's medical records. I went to stand behind the lead-lined protective barriers in our lab's x-ray suite-built to hospital specification-and took my first shot.
It didn't match.
Okay, maybe I'd just gotten the angle wrong. I took another look at the films in the medical records, readjusted the body, and tried again.
Again, it didn't match.
I kept taking shot after shot until, I had taken more than ten x-rays of the victim's spine. No matter how I tried, I couldn't get a match.
When you're looking at antemortem spinal x-rays, you always start with the most current ones, because vertebrae tend to change shape slightly over the years, under the pressures of stress and advancing age. As time goes by, small overgrowths of bone called “lipping” commonly occur around the edges of each back bone. In this case, the x-rays in Hall's medical file showed significant lipping and partial collapse of one vertebra, but our victim had neither. Sometimes a person gets surgery to correct such problems, but there was no evidence that Hall had done that.
Was it possible that we didn't have Hall after all? Then why had this body appeared in exactly the same spot, under the same bizarre conditions, that had been described by Mrs. Hall's boyfriend?
Maybe the hospital had mislabeled these last few x-rays and put them in the wrong jacket? But when I looked carefully at the many x-rays in the envelope, every single one had the same name and patient number, affixed at the time of each x-ray exam. For three days, I tried to come up with a logical explanation for the discrepancy, while the authorities back in Pikeville grew increasingly impatient for the positive ID that would enable them to arrest their suspects and charge them with the murder of Everett Hall. In frustration, I went to Dr. Tracey Corey, one of the pathologists in our Louisville office, who thought a bit and then asked me whether Hall had been on Medicaid. When I told her that he was, she suggested that I compare all the x-rays in his file to one another.
Sure enough, they didn't match. It seemed that Hall's file contained the x-rays of three separate people-all listed under the same name and patient identification number. Apparently, Hall had been passing around his Medicaid card to others who also reaped the benefits of free medical care at taxpayers' expense. I had to go back through the entire file, all the way to 1986, to find some x-rays that actually matched our victim's spine.
I learned a valuable lesson from Hall's case, because I have since encountered three similar cases of medical fraud while trying to identify homicide victims from x-ray comparisons. I guess when you're trying to establish a positive ID, you can never be too careful.
