As Lee and I packed up our gear and made our way back to our truck, the crowd of onlookers started to applaud. To them, we weren't just dirty, tired forensic anthropology students. We were some kind of heroes.
Lee and I looked at each other and laughed. At this point I wasn't worried about an inappropriate reaction. What
But I'd turned over an important page in my professional development there in Bean Station, Tennessee. For the first time, I'd been considered the lead investigator on the forensic anthropology team. Experienced investigators had turned to me for direction and I was forced to make quick decisions that-right or wrong-would affect the investigation's outcome. I felt that I had passed a final, crucial test-a test that I now realized I'd be taking over and over and over again. There would never be a rule book at any crime scene I processed. I'd have to rely on common sense, academic training, and the ability to improvise-just as I had done here.
But next time I'd bring my own lawn chair.
3. Waco
– WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
THERE ARE
We were calling out in the morgue, but we could barely hear over the whining bone saws, clanking metal trays, and roaring industrial-strength garbage disposals. The smell of burned bone and tissue flooded my nostrils until I thought I could taste it, but I tried to stay as focused as all the other professionals here, the blood-spattered pathologists, anthropologists, and dentists busily sorting through the scraps and shards-the remains of the people who had once called themselves the Branch Davidians.
Two months before, they had been a community of men, women, and children living in relative secrecy in Mount Carmel, their guarded enclave on the outskirts of Waco, Texas. Today, they were body parts in the morgue. Their fate was the end result of a series of miscalculations and violent acts that will never be completely justified or understood. Now, though, I was part of a team seeking to discover who they were and how they had died. At least we could do that.
It all started with Vernon Howell, better known as David Koresh, who led a cult that he named for himself-the Branch Davidians. The charismatic Koresh had ruled his community with an iron hand, prescribing harsh punishments for wayward souls. He persuaded the Davidians to move into the Waco compound, isolating themselves from the sinful world. He also persuaded them to give him everything they owned, using their wealth to amass a huge cache of illegal weapons-his defense against what he saw as the Bible's promise of imminent apocalypse.
It was this mass of firearms and explosives that drew the attention of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF), which duly sent agents to the compound with a search warrant. But as the ATF agents moved in, the Davidians opened fire from the compound's windows, doors, and rooftops, killing four agents and wounding more than a dozen. As the ATF returned fire, five Davidians were also killed, and Koresh himself was wounded.
The Davidians barricaded themselves inside the compound and a fifty-one-day siege began. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) replaced the ATF as the lead agency and tried to convince the Davidians to surrender themselves peacefully. A few did leave the compound-but most stayed locked inside.
Finally, the FBI turned to desperate measures. On the morning of April 19, 1993, they used tanks to punch holes in the compound walls and pumped in clouds of tear gas, hoping to flush the Davidians out into the open. Instead, the Davidians stood their ground and began to shoot until the FBI backed off. Then they doused their own compound with fuel and set it on fire. Within minutes, wind-whipped flames were roaring through the ramshackle buildings, igniting the stockpiles of ammunition. The resulting explosions created huge mushroom-shaped clouds of fire and smoke worthy of the holocaust that Koresh predicted. When the smoke cleared, some eighty people were dead.
I watched the fire mesmerized on the small television I kept in my office, its tiny screen filled with flames. The news reporters tried desperately to keep up with the contradictory reports: No Davidians were coming out of the building-was that because they wouldn't or because they couldn't? What about reports of gunshots coming from inside the compound as it burned? Were the Davidians firing wildly at the FBI-or was it simply the heat of the fire, exploding the ammunition allegedly stored there on-site?
One thing was obvious: No one could survive that inferno. My fellow anthropology students and I watched for hours as the number of presumed victims rose to sixty, seventy, eighty…
When mass disasters strike today, authorities call in an elite squad of trained death investigators under the auspices of such organizations as DMORT (Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Team). But in 1993, there was no national structure, and the morgue work fell to local medical examiners, who had to call on their own personal network of experts if they needed extra help. Since our own Dr. Bill Bass was world-famous for his skill in victim identification, we knew he'd be asked to help out at Waco. Every forensic anthropology grad student in the department hoped to be taken with him.
After years of working fire-related death scenes as part of Bass's team, we could all picture what was involved. The bodies of the Davidians had undoubtedly burned beyond the point of recognition, or even customary identification procedures such as fingerprints. To identify their remains-to put names on their graves-someone would have to gather the bone shards and teeth and skull fragments scattered amid the rubble, hoping to find enough bits and pieces to match previously existing medical and dental records.
Even small, quickly extinguished structure fires can kill, causing a victim to die of smoke inhalation with little visible injury. A little more time in the fire makes the skin blister and the eyes and tongue swell. The victims might be dead and slightly disfigured, but you can still tell who they are. Usually, though, a fire is far more brutal.
The scalp is the first to go, as the hair quickly turns to ashes. In a matter of seconds, the facial skin blisters, then splits, shrinks, and burns to a crisp. That thin layer by which we recognize each other is quickly consumed by flames that leave only a hard blackened mask across the cheeks and jaw. And forget about tattoos, scars, or birthmarks-anything that might be used to identify a victim- because they disappear without a trace.
Next, the muscles start to burn. Then the bones. Body parts with little or no soft tissue coverings burn first: head, fingers, toes, hands, feet. Minutes after the head becomes a skull, the arms and legs turn into dry, almost mummified cylinders of muscle and bone.
The lower spine, thighs, and pelvis are more durable. Solid, heavy bones covered with relatively large masses of soft tissue, they can last longer than any other part of the body. Meanwhile, the fire's warmth envelops the stomach and chest, causing the organs and intestines to expand even as the skin starts to shrink and split. As a result, the internal organs will sometimes burst through the abdomen, erupting out of the belly like some sci-fi alien, the blood curdling and boiling as it, too, escapes the walls of its vessels.
After an hour or so, only bones are left. But not those pristine white skeletons that you may have seen hanging in the corner of an anatomy lab. Bone in its natural state is a pale, buttery yellow. Toasted in the heat of a raging fire, it turns brown, then black, blue-gray, gray, white and, finally, ash. The smaller bones go through those stages quickly, though if you're lucky you might come upon the ashes in an almost cartoon-like state, holding the bone's original size and shape until the slightest gust of wind or careless touch sends them crumbling into dust.
Even the sturdiest bones tend to warp and fracture after the insulating muscles and skin are burned off. The skull goes especially quickly once the thin protective covering of the scalp has burned away, so that the bone is directly exposed to the heat. The skull tends to split as the brain inside heats up, building up a head of steam that eventually bursts through the fragile burned bones. But even the skull that survives the cooking of the brain is likely to shatter after prolonged exposure to the heat.
By the time the fire has done its work, those bones that have not yet been reduced to ash may have lost all connection to organic matter, so that only their mineral salts remain. (Those salts-from animal bones-are what give bone china its strong yet delicate texture.) The technical term for this reduction to brittle white mineral is “calcination.” In a very short time, a 180-pound human body can be burnt down to a few pounds of calcined bone and some scraps of blackened muscle.
But let's not forget the teeth, made from the body's strongest tissue. False teeth, of course, are long gone by this time, but well after the hips and spine have been reduced to ashy fragments, a person's natural teeth may remain-to the undying gratitude of forensic investigators. Of course, burnt teeth become brittle and the enamel is likely to separate from the root. And if the surrounding bone has burned away, as often happens, the tooth fragments tend to fall down into the debris. Still, if you sift diligently and long enough, you are likely to find at least one or two dental clues in even the most vicious fire.
In fact, teeth usually survive even a professional crematory, along with some fragments of the larger bones. That's why professional cremationists don't trust entirely to fire-they take the burnt remains and put them in a pulverizer, which grinds the bone shards and broken teeth into ash and fragments small enough to fit in an urn. Luckily for forensic investigators, any fire-even an inferno as devastating as the one at Waco -will leave bone fragments and teeth.
I could well imagine the arduous recovery process that had begun at Waco as soon as the smoke had cleared, with forensic investigators of all types kneeling in the rubble, sifting through the ashes and debris. What a horrifying job! Not only would these victims be burned truly beyond recognition, but their remains would be all mixed together-“commingled,” as we call it. I pictured the families in those ramshackle, crowded buildings, pressed together in a wild dash for the exit, trying to escape the flames, or maybe huddled in places they thought would provide safety. And when the fire had reduced their bodies to fragile clumps of burned bone and muscle, parts from one person would almost certainly have broken off to mix with the burned parts of another-an arm thrown over a leg, a torso tumbling down to lie beside a skull. Pieces of the buildings would have crashed down upon the burning corpses, breaking off more body parts, as the intense heat of the fire melted skin onto muscle and fused tissue onto charred bone. Burned wood, nails, and debris would have joined the mix of flesh and ashes to form a homogenous black mass of charcoal, punctuated only by splintery bones and scattered teeth.
So investigators would do their best to extract the human remains from this mass of debris, sorting it as best they could on the spot and then shipping it over to the local morgue, which happened to be the Tarrant County facility in Fort Worth. (Even though the Waco catastrophe had taken place in McClennan County, the medical examiner's office in neighboring Tarrant County was under contract to do McClennan's autopsies.) Usually, a morgue is staffed only with pathologists-experts who analyze soft tissue and perform autopsies on a regular basis. But the soft tissue of most of these eighty or more people had been reduced to ash and charcoal. Time to call in the forensic dentists and anthropologists to look at the teeth and bone.
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.
