Sometimes the evidence you need for a victim ID has been destroyed, either by accident or by the deliberate efforts of a murderer. In a case I later thought of as “Ashes to Ashes,” I had to go to extraordinary lengths to recover human remains from fire-related debris-a painstaking process, but one that paid off in the end.
Gary and Sophie Stephens were a well-respected and popular couple who lived in the Coldiron community in Kentucky 's Harlan County. They vanished shortly after an evening church service in December 1997. Although their son, a U.S. postal worker, lived with them, he claimed to have no knowledge of their whereabouts.
Authorities duly got a search warrant and examined the house, where they found minute traces of blood spatter and a single bullet hole in the wall. An all-out effort by the community sent searchers into the mountains, forests, and coal mines throughout the county for a nonstop three-day search.
Finally, a neighbor found the Stephenses' abandoned pickup truck behind a tobacco barn. Detectives had it loaded onto a flatbed truck and taken to a commercial garage, where they went over the truck with a fine-tooth comb. When they found what appeared to be fragments of burned bone behind the toolbox, they called me.
A two-hour drive got me to the garage in Loyall where they had delivered the truck. No one answered my knock on the door, but after I blew the horn of my van a few times, the garage door opened and several state troopers signaled for me to drive right inside. No wonder they hadn't heard me knock-a long cylindrical kerosene heater was roaring in the center of the room, and the guys had a radio blaring to try to drown out the noise. The sound was not pleasant, but the warmth certainly was. It was now seven p.m. and already well below freezing.
“Glad you got here so quick,” said a detective I knew only as Smitty. “Philip's out by the river, but he'll be back in a few minutes.”
I had never worked a case in Harlan County, but I knew Coroner Philip Bianchi from some of the classes I had taught for coroners in the Commonwealth, and I recognized most of the officers from having worked dozens of cases in the surrounding region. After the obligatory handshakes all around, Smitty helped me out of my coat and directed me to a pickup covered with a blue tarp.
“Philip asked if you would go ahead and look at the stuff in the truck as soon as you got here. We need to make sure these are human bones.”
Indeed they were-incinerated human bone fragments mixed in with the ashes and dirt that had sifted into the corners of the truck bed. I had the impression that the truck bed had been swept out, but not completely, leaving these bits and pieces behind.
When Smitty heard that these fragments were human, he picked up his radio to call the coroner and the other investigators, who had been searching the area for two bodies. But neighbors had already told troopers about seeing the Stephens boy near a large blaze in the woods that had apparently been burning for about two days. Though fires are common in rural Kentucky to clear fields and destroy garbage, it was starting to look like this particular bonfire might have been Gary and Sophie's final resting place.
It was already dark out, and a bitter wind was blowing. But troopers headed out to the site of the bonfire, surrounded the scene with crime scene tape, and blocked the road. Some of the men fanned out to talk with local residents, who told them that the Stephenses' pickup had also been spotted along a railroad track that ran parallel to the Cumberland River, a few miles out of town at a place called Big Rock. A trooper drove over there, then hiked down the path leading to the huge rock that jutted out over the river. As her flashlight played over the craggy landscape, she could see ashes and bones on the rocks that led down to the shore, some just inches away from the water. She quickly put up more crime scene tape by the railroad tracks and radioed Smitty.
Back at the garage, we were all monitoring the radio and making plans for tomorrow. We'd have to process at least three crime scenes-the truck, the bonfire, and the rocks by the river.
“Let's start with the easy one,” I told Smitty. We could do the truck tonight, in fluorescent light and relative warmth. I felt sorry for the troopers who would have to babysit the other two crime scenes all night, but I was soon absorbed in the challenge of getting bone fragments out of the truck.
It wasn't easy. The tiny shards were so badly burned that they often crumbled and slipped through my fingers. Things went a little better when I figured out that I could use a hand trowel, slipping the tool gently under the ashes and laying them on a bed of folded toilet paper that lined the bottom of one of my plastic boxes.
I cleared out the truck bed, but that was only part of the job. Bone fragments and ashes had sifted back behind the toolbox, under the hinges of the tailgate, and behind the bumper where we couldn't reach.
Of course, I could rinse the truck out with a water hose, but what would happen to the skeletal evidence? If I was ever going to identify the victims, I'd need every piece of bone or tooth that remained. It was already touch and go whether we'd find anything that could be compared to Gary and Sophie's medical and dental records. I couldn't bear to think of a critical piece of evidence being washed down the drain.
When I finally figured out a solution, Smitty and the others laughed, but they agreed to help me out. We rolled the truck over to a large drain in the floor of the garage and used a couple of car jacks to tip the truck sideways and backward, so that the rear left corner of the truck bed was lower than the rest. Then we fitted one of my small-mesh sifting screens over the drain and began hosing out the truck as gently as we could.
By midnight, we had enough particles to fill a two-gallon bucket. I covered the bucket in heavy plastic sealed with some duct tape, so I could examine it more closely when I got back to the lab.
Philip had arranged for me to spend the rest of the night in a local motel, and I was grateful for a nice warm bed. My van is always packed and ready to go, with a toothbrush, clean clothes, and a dry pair of boots there when I need them. And boy, did I need them this time!
I worked side by side with Philip and the state police for the next two days, in subzero temperatures, collecting bones and tooth fragments from six different sites. The killer had tried hard to eliminate the remains, but fire is rarely as thorough as we think. There's almost always some part of the body left behind, though sometimes it can be hard to spot.
At the bonfire, for example, we found human bone fragments and blood, evidence that at least one of the victims had been incinerated here. An arson investigator determined that the ground had been soaked with kerosene and scoured with a rake, the killer stirring the fire until only fragments and ashes remained. The killer had then apparently loaded the remaining rubble into the bed of the pickup truck and driven it out of the woods, but bumps along the way shook loose some of the evidence, so we also found a small pile of ash containing human bone fragments on that rocky dirt road. As my colleagues and I carefully followed the trail of ash, collecting and documenting it as we went, I couldn't help thinking of the little birds that had picked up Hansel and Gretel's trail of bread crumbs.
We found another pile of bone-filled ash at the head of the path leading to Big Rock, as well as tracks that matched the tires on the Stephenses' pickup truck. The path bordered on a steep cliff that fell almost straight down into the Cumberland River, whose swift icy waters had undermined the limestone and created a large, swift pool that was more than ten feet deep and swirled with several large whirlpools. I imagined that the killer had stood at the edge of Big Rock and thrown most of the ash into the river, but clumps of bone and ash still clung tenaciously to rocks at the water's edge.
That let me in for a harrowing two days of rappeling to the water's edge, balancing on ice-covered rocks as I used a paintbrush to ease human ash out of the crevices and into a dustpan, then transferred all of it to plastic boxes lined with a cushion of toilet paper. Meanwhile, the police brought in a team of scuba divers from Louisville to check out the river bottom, where they recovered a few more bone fragments.
Back at the lab, I was faced with the daunting task of sifting through some eighty pounds of ash mixed with dirt and fire debris. All of us knew who these victims were-but I was the one who had to prove it, hopefully while finding enough evidence to allow the medical examiner to confirm a cause and manner of death.
By this point, I knew that the largest and most revealing pieces of bone had been recovered from the riverbank, so I opened those boxes first, carefully lifting out the forty-three bone fragments, one by one, onto a clean white sheet of butcher paper. When I saw two complete femoral heads, each from the top end of a right thighbone, I knew we had the remains of two people. But I couldn't yet prove who they were. Philip had found Gary and Sophie's medical and dental records, but I hadn't yet found any teeth or bone fragments that I could match to them.
The sorting process was slow and tedious, but I figured out how x-rays might help. I transferred scoops of ash onto a fiberglass cafeteria-style tray, gently smoothing the debris with my fingertips until it was only an inch thick. Then I took an x-ray of the tray, looking at the films to spot the difference between bone, wood, and metal. When I spotted something that piqued my interest, I could lay the x-ray film right on top of the tray, pinpointing the location of the exact piece I wanted.
I sifted my way through hundreds of scoops of ash, picking out several large pieces of bone, teeth, and metal chunks. Then, after about twelve hours of this sorting process, I saw something that made my heart stop. There on an x-ray was a U-shaped piece of metal with serrated edges. From my former career in orthopedics, I knew I had come upon a surgical fixation staple, most often used to repair or reconstruct ligaments in the knee. I found it hidden in the tray full of ash and rinsed it off well enough to see the engraved logo of the manufacturer and the model number.
I sprinted from the lab to my office, reaching for the pile of medical records stacked up on my desk. I searched desperately for proof of knee surgery-and there it was. Gary Stephens had undergone knee ligament repair in Knoxville just a few years earlier. A quick call to his doctor confirmed that the staple used in the operation was the exact same make, model, and size as the one I'd found.
One positive ID down and one to go. With a fresh wave of enthusiasm, I continued to x-ray several dozen more trays of debris, hoping to identify Sophie. It was a slow, unrewarding process as the x-rays turned up a discouraging number of dead ends-bits of metal that turned out to be zipper teeth, jean rivets, and even a couple of bootlace hooks.
True, I'd also recovered several small pellets of bird shot. But it's not that unusual to find loose shotgun pellets or even bullets in the homes, vehicles, or pockets of Kentucky 's rural residents, so the shot was hardly proof of murder.
Then I did see something useful: a pellet of bird shot actually embedded in a fragment of bone from the spine. Holding my breath, I delicately flicked away the surrounding ash and smiled triumphantly. I now had proof that at least one of the victims had been shot.
There was still no proof that any of these ashes had once been Sophie's, however. And by noon of the third day, I was starting to lose hope. The only evidence that remained was the bucket of debris that we'd rinsed out of the pickup truck, and I'd already looked at that the first night, as it was dripping onto the screen. I hadn't seen anything important then and I didn't expect to find anything now.
Of course, now I had the advantage of x-ray vision. So I continued with my routine of scooping the ash, spreading it out, and scanning the x-rays. Hours passed without results. Then, as I was processing the very last handful of ash, I saw a strange silhouette-like nothing I'd seen in the previous three dozen x-rays. After I'd placed the film on top of the tray and filtered carefully through the mess, my fingertips seized on a small hard object. It was black and covered with ash, and I didn't recognize it until I rinsed it off in the sink. Then I breathed a final sigh of relief. There in my hand was the porcelain crown of a tooth-the very crown I could see on Sophie's dental records.
Now both victims had been identified and we could also prove that at least one of them had been shot in the back. The arson specialist could testify that someone had intentionally incinerated human bodies in the woods and I could attest that the ashes of two people had been thrown into the river. One of these was Gary Stephens. I could also prove that human bones and teeth had been found in the Stephenses' pickup truck, and that one tooth fragment belonged to Sophie.
Though it was impossible to completely separate the remains, it seemed appropriate to bury the husband and wife together, intermingled in death as they had been bound in life. When their son Gary was charged with their murders, he insisted on his innocence, but after he was faced with an impending death penalty trial in the autumn of 2002, he finally pled guilty and was sentenced to life imprisonment.
The “Ashes to Ashes” case taught me a valuable lesson-no detail is too small to be useful, especially when you're dealing with victims who have been destroyed by fire. Like the other cases in this chapter, it points out the many difficulties faced by those of us who try to identify human remains. These cases are hard enough when you are dealing with one victim at a time. When you throw in an explosion, a huge fire, and several dozen victims-the standard recipe for any mass fatality-identifying individuals becomes even more of a challenge. Yet, whether you're dealing with one victim or several hundred, the rules remain the same: Go slow, keep an eye out for details-and always be prepared to be surprised.
7. Oklahoma City
