Teasing Secrets from the Dead: My Investigations at America's Most Infamous Crime Scenes

estimate the age and then perhaps the sex. The first time I worked on a child, the body still contained some identifiable soft tissue, so I was able to determine by looking at the genitals that I was working on a little girl. Later I'd get children who had been reduced to piles of burned bones-no soft tissue, nothing to tell me the sex. On an adult, that wouldn't matter: I can usually tell the sex of an adult arm or leg bone by measuring its size at the joint or by finding sex-marked features in a pelvis or in some morphologic feature such as muscle insertions-the places where muscles fit into the bone, which are generally more prominent in men. With young children, it's harder, since boys' and girls' bones pretty much resemble each other until puberty.

When I later worked on mass fatalities, I often used clothing to help determine gender, but I couldn't do that here. We had already been told that in the Davidians' communal compound, items of clothing were shared by all the children and essentially “unisex,” with pretty much everyone wearing the same kinds of shorts and T-shirts. So now, since I was working on an unburned child, I turned to hair color and length to help with the ID. I cut off a lock of hair, washed it, and set it aside to dry. Later, I'd note its characteristics in that victim's permanent record, where hopefully it would narrow down the list of possible matches.

My job would have been far easier if this child had come to me with teeth still inside her mouth. As in most cases, though, the teeth had fallen out as the little body decomposed, and I had to feel around for them inside the cold, putrid, oatmeal-like soft tissues that had once surrounded her head and neck and filled her skull. As patiently as I could, I managed to retrieve fourteen teeth. I laid the teeth on top of a fine-mesh screen and rinsed them off with a stream of warm water from the sink before reinserting them into their sockets. I continued to pinch bones out of the goo, swishing them gently in a pan of warm soapy water and laying them out in anatomical order on a clean white sheet: first the skull fragments, then the neck bones, collarbones, shoulder blades, ribs, and so on toward the toes, until the little skeleton was complete.

Final analysis of the skeleton was left to one of the senior members of the forensic anthropology team, either Dr. Doug Ubelaker or Dr. Doug Owsley, both former students of Dr. Bass who now worked at the Smithsonian. The medical examiner's protocol required that only certain credentialed experts conduct the final analysis and sign their names to the official autopsy report. Fine with me. Still a graduate student, I was well aware of my limitations and was quite content to be a “worker bee.”

So now, as I laid the final piece of the skeleton in place, I called for Chip to come photograph the skull's face with his Polaroid camera. Though I knew that taking Polaroids of the teeth was standard procedure, no one had ever actually explained to me exactly what the snaps were for. I later learned that during the siege, law enforcement negotiators had insisted that the adults in charge send out videotapes of the children in order to prove that they were well cared for and unharmed. Now FBI agents and dentists were analyzing the freeze-frame images from these same videotapes and comparing them to our “dental Polaroids.” Since most of these children had never been to a dentist or doctor, this process of comparison was the only way to identify them, short of DNA analysis.

I was, frankly, proud of my burgeoning skill in assembling children's skeletons, and I soon learned to lean on that pride as a way to get through the long and grueling days. Satisfaction in a job well done filled me each time I called Chip over, refueling my energy for the next pile of bones.

One day, just as I was putting a child's last tiny tooth in place, I was asked to make a special trip to the conference room to deliver some autopsy findings. I walked into the conference room, my mind on the coffee break I was planning to take-and there on the screen was a freeze-frame image of a child who was strikingly similar to the one I had just been working on, a joyous little face, baring tiny teeth in a bright smile and waving “bye-bye” to the camera.

I was stunned. Tears welled up in my eyes, and my chest tightened. I looked away as quickly as I could, but it was too late. The image had burned itself into my retinas and suddenly my body was on its own recognizance, trembling and shaking in a way I didn't recognize.

I had to escape. I must have turned pale. I couldn't seem to move. Then, out of nowhere, a strong hand took hold of my elbow, and before I knew it I was in the inner sanctum of Dr. Peerwani's private office, as dazed as if I were lost in a sleepwalker's trance. When I finally became aware of my surroundings again, I discovered that I was sobbing uncontrollably in the arms of Harold Elliott, the strong and gentle police chaplain who was also my host.

Harold let me cry for what must have been about five minutes. Then he gently led me away-out of Dr. Peerwani's office, away from the morgue, the conference room, the videotape, away from the unforgettable image of that happy, smiling child whose little hand was still waving bye-bye in my mind.

“It's all right,” Harold said softly as he ushered me into the front seat of his car. “Just let the feelings come.”

I shook my head. How could I ever do my job with feelings like these?

Harold drove me to a nearby botanical garden, where for the first time in days I saw the midday sun and heard birds singing. When I was ready, I started to talk, and Harold listened. He was very good at listening.

“I just feel so helpless,” I found myself saying. I hadn't known I felt this way-but then, I hadn't known I was ready to burst into tears, either. “All those people-all those children. Led like lambs to the slaughter, by people they trusted. And there's nothing I can do for them. It's too late.”

“I know,” Harold said quietly. “All you can do is what you're doing. But that doesn't mean it isn't hard.”

Harold had spent most of his career as a chaplain for the Arlington Police Department. He was used to helping strong men deal with the despair and helplessness that seem to erupt routinely in situations where death and human destruction are served up on a daily basis. He knew that if I was to spend my life dealing with the dead, I had to learn to protect myself from the dead.

“You're no different from anyone else,” he assured me. “If you didn't feel this way once in a while, you'd be a machine.”

“But they all saw me,” I said, mortified now by my loss of control in front of my colleagues. “What will they think?”

Harold shrugged. “They've all been there. The ones who have learned to deal with it will think exactly what I do-that you can't do this work without falling apart once in a while. The test comes in what you do next.”

We sat for a while longer in the peaceful garden, the bright sun glinting off the shiny green grass at my feet. I realized how long it had been since I had seen any other light than the harsh white fluorescent bulbs in the morgue. How long it had been since I had smelled anything other than burnt bones and rotting flesh and smoke. I took a deep breath.

“All right,” I said. “Let's go back.”

Walking through the door of the morgue that afternoon was one of the hardest things I ever did. Maybe Harold understood what had happened to me-but these people were professionals. They hadn't lost control, and I couldn't expect them to be charitable about the fact that I had. And, indeed, some of my colleagues refused to look me in the eye as I walked in, pointedly turning away or simply ignoring my presence. The woman who had given me the hair dryer, though, made it a point to smile weakly and nod my way. So did the doctor who had pulled me into my first autopsy. He called me over now and handed me another blue plastic pan full of skull fragments. I took it quickly and gratefully slipped over to my favorite little sink. I picked out the pieces one by one, washing each one carefully in the warm soapy water. As I glued the skull back together, just as I had done on that very first day, a sense of deja vu, settled over my shoulders as I watched yet another gunshot wound emerge.

Immersed as I was in the daily details of the investigation, it was easy to forget the big picture. But over the next week, I began to realize that we had gathered an increasing amount of evidence suggesting that many of the Branch Davidians had died in a mass murder-suicide. The half-dozen anthropologists on the project had found a total of eighteen gunshot wounds-eight definite, two probable, and eight “possible.” The forensic pathologists examining the remaining soft tissue had found additional irrefutable evidence of gunshot injuries, bludgeoning, and at least one suspected stabbing. While the fragmented and incinerated remains would always hide the cause and manner of death for some victims, the evidence we uncovered was highly significant, and our supervisors meticulously documented even the tiniest details: carefully cataloguing the remains as they were recovered, conducting thorough autopsies on every victim, painstakingly reconstructing each shattered skull.

Ever since my first day, when I had managed to put that skull together in just a few hours, my colleagues had sought me out as the “skull lady,” my own special niche in what we now called the “disassembly line.” Practice makes perfect, and I could now pull apart and then put together these three-dimensional jigsaw puzzles in record time. It didn't always go as smoothly as it had the first time. Some of those skulls were extremely fragile, with large sections of bone blown away or burned up. But if I needed help holding pieces together while the glue dried or bridging the gaps with makeshift struts, Bill or Max was always right there by my side.

As our investigation drew to a close, we had established irrefutable evidence that more than one third of Waco 's victims had sustained “non-heat-related trauma,” which included contact or close-range gunshot wounds, shrapnel wounds, and blunt-force trauma-all before their bodies had ever felt the fire. We all believed that the true figure was a lot higher than one third, though without the evidence to prove it, the medical examiners duly listed many victims' cause and manner of death as “undetermined.”

Members of the press continued-some still continue-to say that the Branch Davidians were all killed by the fire, but we knew that simply wasn't true. And though these reporters never hesitated to point an accusing finger at the federal government, they somehow still refuse to publicize the now-public autopsy findings, which prove conclusively that Waco ended in a mass murder-suicide orchestrated and carried out by the Davidians themselves.

As the days rolled on, our investigation developed a new focus: sect leader David Koresh. The charismatic figure had taken on a kind of near-mythic status, and there was even speculation that he and some of his henchmen had somehow escaped the inferno, fueled by a National Examiner “eyewitness report” of Koresh jumping into a getaway car at the end of a tunnel leading out of the compound. Unless we positively identified his remains, no one would ever be certain if Koresh lived or died. The last thing any of us wanted was for the self-styled messiah to earn some sort of mythic status that would inspire his cult to spring up again. And if he was by some chance alive, the FBI wanted him at the top of their Most Wanted list.

So, back in the lab, we were keeping a close watch for any remains that might be associated with Koresh. Our first break came on the afternoon of May 1, when pathologists began to examine body bag “MC- 08.” Our dentists had earlier obtained a model of the cult leader's teeth and they knew, almost by heart, what dental evidence they were looking for. They'd made it a matter of routine to check every body bag for Koresh's telltale stainless steel crown and missing premolar, and I'll never forget the sight of Rodney Crow, our chief forensic dentist, bending over MC-08 as we all held our breath.

Crow stood up slowly, straightening his back to the fullest. “That's him.”

“Are you serious?” asked someone hidden behind a mask.

“I'm serious. That's him.” A huge Cheshire-cat grin spread over Crow's face and then quickly disappeared. We had finally found David Koresh.

Koresh's postmortem exam the next morning followed the standard autopsy protocol, but given the high level of controversy surrounding his demise, a lot more people than usual made sure to check and double-check the evidence. Chip Clark, camera at the ready, never left Dr. Peerwani's side as the corpse was x-rayed, examined, and identified. It was standing room only around the gurney as we watched Dr. Crow make a detailed record of the dental evidence. Then Dr. Peerwani called me to his side as he began to sift through the burned debris and bones found near the victim's head.

“It looks like I may have a little job for you here, Emily,” he said in a low voice. “I'd like you to go get ready to piece this one together just as soon as I've collected the fragments.”

He refused to speculate about what I might find-and I too was finally learning not to “theorize ahead of the facts.” Still, I had reconstructed enough skulls shattered by gunshot wounds in the past five days that I could readily recognize the same type of injury here.

However, “Yes, sir,” was all I said. I backed off and signaled to Max Houck, who had finished at the crime scene and was now working with us in the morgue.

“This is going to be huge, Max,” I muttered under my breath. “I think we should do this together. I know I'd feel a lot more secure if a second pair of hands and eyes was involved each step of the way.”

Max nodded and we went over to the sink, laying out the toothbrushes, scissors, and knives we would need if we found remnants of tissue clinging to the bones. I filled my trusty blue plastic pan with warm soapy water, took off my double set of heavy protective gloves, and put on two pairs of thin surgical gloves instead. I was already a little nervous about doing this case, and I wanted all the manual dexterity I could muster.