victims were wearing jewelry or clothing that a spouse or parent will remember from that morning.
Here at Waco we had none of those clues. The list of the compound's residents was incomplete and in some cases had been intentionally obscured by the victims themselves, who included runaways, foreign nationals using false names, and U.S. citizens who had changed their names to conform to the sect's beliefs. And because they'd all been shut up together for days, no one on the outside had any idea of what they were wearing. Branch Davidians didn't carry wallets with IDs, nor did they indulge in materialistic practices like wearing jewelry (except a few pieces bearing the Star of David, which Koresh bestowed on some of his favorites). No one even knew exactly how many people had lived in the compound-but somehow the unique team of experts that had been assembled here would have to come up with a list of names.
That team-
No one had time to tell me what to do, so I kept an eye on the seasoned staff and imitated them, thrusting my arms into a heavy cotton surgical gown so that the dangling strips of cloth would tie in the back. Then I grabbed a yellow surgical mask that I also tied in back, pulling it tightly over my mouth and nose. It didn't shut out the smell, but it did reassure me that I wouldn't be inhaling any stray spatters of blood. Next, I reached into a box and pulled out a one-size-fits-all pair of paper booties, which I slipped over my sneakers like a pair of galoshes. Another box held thin paper head covers, elasticized like shower caps, so I could tuck my hair underneath.
Theresa glanced over at me and laughed. “This is like striptease in reverse.”
Her joke broke the tension, connecting us with the other workers. We all looked at one another and chuckled, and some of the bolder women began to wave their gear over their heads, doing a quick bump and grind before covering up every bit of exposed flesh. Getting a victim's blood on you was no joke. But it helped to laugh at ourselves.
I went on to don my face shield, a flat piece of thin plastic about twelve inches square, attached at the top to a layer of foam padding designed to fit gently against my forehead. I pulled a strip of elastic up over the back of my head, so that the plastic shield completely covered my face while the top circled my head like the old-fashioned stereotype of a Hollywood Indian's headband. I wished there was something I could put on to cover up the smell, but nothing I've found has ever really worked.
Last but not least came the coverings for our hands. Each of us was issued a pair of cut-proof gloves made from finely woven wire that resembled a miniature version of medieval chain-mail armor. Our supervisors warned us that broken glass and shards of metal were mixed in with the remains. Clumsy as they were, these devices would prevent injuries and the spread of infection through cuts. Thick rubber gloves went on over this armor for yet another layer of protection.
Covered from head to toe with cloth, plastic, paper, and chain mail, all we could see of each other was our eyes. We were finally ready to get down to work.
Someone snapped a few switches and all the lights came on as the huge exhaust fans roared into gear. Autopsy technicians-sometimes called “deaners” for no reason that I could ever tell-began wheeling gurneys into the room. Unlike the gurneys I'd seen in hospitals, these were asymmetrical, one end slightly higher than the other. On each gurney rode a black body bag with a large red number spray-painted on it. “MC- 23,” for example, was the twenty-third bag of remains recovered at Mount Carmel. The spray paint was an efficient-and waterproof-way to mark the bag boldly.
Each autopsy workstation was about ten feet long and three feet deep, with a large stainless steel sink flanked on both sides by elevated countertops. Each sink had three spigots connecting to a spray nozzle, a rubber hose, and a gooseneck faucet, giving us the maximum range of options for washing away the blood and gore. The whole unit rose to meet a three-foot-high backsplash equipped with lights, while the sink itself opened into the maw of a huge garbage disposal unit.
Two large steel rings in front of each sink lined up perfectly with the two large hooks at the end of each gurney. As the technicians wheeled the gurneys up to the sinks, they slipped the hooks into the rings and then used their feet to flip the locks at each of the gurney's four wheels. Now the gurney was part of our workstation. Each gurney had a two-inch hole in its lower end, sealed with a big black rubber stopper. This end now extended well over the lip of the sink, allowing us to uncork the gurney and drain fluids or rinse water down into the sink. The body bags were often simply left on the gurneys, so that we could roll them to another part of the lab without ever disturbing the remains.
Bill joined Dr. Gary Sissler, Theresa went to work with Dr. Peerwani, and I became a part of Dr. Charles Harvey's team. Dr. Harvey appeared to be in his fifties, a little shorter than I, but better nourished. He moved quickly and with purpose, immediately handing me a rectangular blue pan that looked for all the world like my own kitchen dishpan, though this one was filled with bloody remains. I immediately recognized them as pieces of burned skull mixed into a grapefruit-sized wad of baked blood and brains.
“Something just isn't right here,” Dr. Harvey said, looking over my shoulder into the pan. “We originally thought all these people died from the fire. But this woman doesn't seem to have been burned all that badly. Her body was relatively intact and there was no soot in her airway.”
I nodded. Usually, fire victims die from a rapid buildup of carbon monoxide while choking on the smoke. But this one had died
“There's another thing,” Dr. Harvey went on. “Investigators didn't see any evidence that any building debris had fallen on top of her-and yet her skull was in pieces. If it didn't get smashed in the crash or burned by the fire, what broke it?”
I looked down uncertainly at the charred remains. They held a secret that I had suddenly become responsible for discovering.
“I'll be anxious to see what you can do with this,” Dr. Harvey said brusquely, and he went quickly back to his own new victim.
I stood uncertainly for a moment in the midst of the morgue traffic. Everyone seemed to be moving purposefully to his or her assigned task, but where was I supposed to work? Dr. Harvey's autopsy area was already filled to capacity with technicians, and stacks of instruments covered every horizontal surface. Finally I took the bucket over to a somewhat isolated white porcelain sink tucked into one corner of the morgue, checking to make sure it wasn't a “clean” sink-one of those closely guarded by safety watchdogs and reserved for hand-washing-before gingerly lifting out some of the pieces. I'd done this before, but never in this lab, surrounded with strangers, burdened by the knowledge that I was now part of a history-making event. I took a deep breath, forcing my mind to focus on the evidence I held and, as so often happens, my hands took on a life of their own, moving instinctively to tease the bone away from the brain.
It was the bones that caught my interest. The brain and other soft tissue had been essentially destroyed by the fire and the past week's process of decomposition. But the sturdy bones held secrets that I might decipher if I could just get the “squishy stuff” out of the way.
It was simple at first to grasp the largest pieces of the broken skull and pull them away from what was left of the brain. After I had scraped away the last of the baked blood and soft tissue from these large pieces, I washed them in a pan of hot soapy water, then set them aside on a blue towel to dry. The whole process was a little like doing the dishes after a particularly messy meal.
My goal was to reassemble the skull-only then could I read the story of the young woman's death-but in order to recover every single bone fragment, I had to pull the brain apart piece by piece, as if I were breaking off chunks of bread dough, my double-gloved fingers carefully probing the bloody tissue, seeking the bits of bone that were embedded within. As I extracted and then washed the smaller pieces, blood and dirty water splashed onto my chest and face shield and, to make matters worse, the occasional fly would land on me and crawl around. I soon discovered that if I tried to flick off the insect with my messy rubber gloves, I would spread more blood and gore to the spot where, before, only a little fly had left its tracks. So I did my best to ignore the flies and blood spatter that now covered not only my body but my face shield as well, a pockmarked pattern of black and red that left me feeling like I was looking through an insect-spattered windshield-without the wipers.
Then I began to discern the pattern that was gradually emerging in the skull fragments, and suddenly my discomfort vanished. Even at this early stage, I could see that these fractures were caused by something other than the fire, just as Dr. Harvey had suggested. But because of my anthropological training, I was able to see something in the bones that I recognized, though I could hardly believe my eyes. There was only one explanation for the way this woman's skull had shattered-but nothing I had heard in any of the news coverage or at this morning's briefing supported what I thought I saw.
My first impulse was to run over to Dr. Harvey and share my suspicions with him. But common sense and a sense of self-preservation prevailed. I'd had one too many run-ins with grad-school professors who'd taken me to task for “theorizing ahead of the facts.” No, I'd gather every scrap of evidence I could before presenting Dr. Harvey with what I intuitively knew to be the truth.
So I removed the last morsel of goo from the skull bones before starting to dry each one with a paper towel. I knew that the next step was to glue the skull pieces together-that way, we could see the skull as it had been in life, and what I had discovered would be fully revealed. But the edges of the bones had to be entirely dry before the glue would stick and they were still soaking wet from their bath. I looked at them impatiently-maybe if I toweled them off?
One of the autopsy technicians must have seen me clumsily rubbing a few scraps of paper towel over the bones, because she suddenly tapped me on the shoulder. I turned around to see that she was holding a hair dryer in her gloved hand. She, too, was wearing a protective surgical mask, but I could tell by the crinkle at the corners of her eyes that she was smiling broadly underneath. I'm sure my eyes crinkled too as I smiled and took the dryer. In just a few minutes, I started gluing my bones back together.
Here is where Bill Bass's relentless pursuit of perfection paid off. Any other teacher might have allowed me to leave his class unsure of how to identify and reposition tiny random fragments. But thanks to Dr. Bass's insistence on detail, I could read the subtle variations in the contour of the bone and discern the delicate three-dimensional pattern of veins imprinted on some inside surfaces of the skull-clues that showed me at a glance which bones went where. As I had already done in my Tennessee murder cases, I started to glue the broken pieces together, edge to edge, just the way you'd piece together a broken vase.
Before too long the original shape of the woman's skull emerged: first her forehead, then her eye sockets, then the holes for the hearing mechanism and spinal cord. And then, as I placed two large matching pieces together, I saw exactly what I had expected to see, the evidence that I was longing to share with Dr. Harvey: a neat round hole with beveled edges in a place where the bone should have been smooth and solid. The hole's outside edge was surrounded by a ring by of black soot, also a significant clue. Dr. Harvey's first guess had been right. Neither the fire nor the falling walls had shattered this woman's skull. She died because someone had held a gun up to her head and pulled the trigger.
The black soot told me how close the gun had been. You only get that sort of “gunpowder tattoo” when the gun's muzzle is close to the victim's head. I could see where the bullet had pierced the skull, too, breaking out a plug of bone as it forced its way through the skull's three primary layers-the smooth outer ectocranium, the inner endocranium, and the spongy bone sandwiched in between. As usually happens with entrance gunshot wounds to the skull, the entire three-layer bone plug had broken away at a slight angle, leaving a cone-shaped hole, sort of like the round window of a jet airplane, with the inside circumference of the hole larger than the outside edge.
Sometimes a bullet will also create an exit wound. That too leaves a beveled hole, but in the opposite direction, with the outside edge larger than the hole inside the skull. I didn't see that here, which meant that, theoretically, the bullet was still lodged in the woman's brain. But I hadn't found any trace of it, though I'd just squished through every square inch of brain matter, feeling for bone fragments. Was there a bullet or wasn't there?
I took a closer look at the skull. I could see that it was missing several fragments, probably pieces that the shot had blown away. Most likely, the exit wound was marked out on one of these missing pieces.
Now it was time to approach Dr. Harvey and ask him to examine my rebuilt skull. When I tentatively approached him, he stepped away from his own case without a word, businesslike but exhausted. I offered up the skull in its plastic pan like some weird project for art class, and he lifted the skull gently with both hands, slowly turning it around.
I heard his short, sharp intake of breath. The next thing I knew, he was dashing out of the room, taking the skull with him.
Standing there, still holding the blue pan in front of me, I glanced over to the team at the next autopsy station. They had just opened a body bag that contained hundreds of broken and burned bone fragments.
“You're an anthropologist, aren't you?” asked a male voice from behind one of the anonymous masks. I nodded and walked over to their gurney. “We could use you here,” said the same muffled voice. And that's how it started. Two weeks of seemingly endless hopscotch in which I moved from task to task, helping out wherever I could.
Sometimes I would arrange groups of bones in anatomical order, separating the burned and fragmented tibias, fibulas, scapulas, hoping that a count of similar bones-two right femurs, for example-would help me determine just how many people's parts were in that pile. Or I might be asked to dissect someone's pelvic bones, examining the joints in a quest to determine the person's age. Most of the time, though, I was cleaning up skull fragments and gluing them back together, just as I'd done on that first case. Little did I know that the gunshot wound I'd found had been just the
