waiting for me in the yard, finishing their first cup of coffee, and anxious to get started.
Mark was a good-looking young man with a winning smile and a flair for fashion, so I had to stifle a smile when I saw what he was wearing today. Like me, he was clothed in a jumpsuit, a garment designed to handle the mud, blood, and unidentified substances that abound at most crime scenes. In sharp contrast to my faded navy uniform, however, Mark was dressed in one of the most remarkable outfits I'd ever seen. It was brand-new, for starters, with razor-sharp creases ironed into the sleeves and trousers, and every inch of the khaki shirt was covered with shiny new decals, flags, and insignia. It looked as though it hadn't even been washed yet.
“I thought you said this case was in a rough spot,” I said, trying to be tactful.
Mark smiled sheepishly. “Well, it is,” he said, “but I've never worked a skeletal case in the woods before, so my wife thought this would be a good time to break in my field gear.” He was so young and eager, I felt as if I were taking my kid brother off to scout camp. On the other hand, Al, the retired cop, his face creased from years of smoking and bad coffee, was wearing faded jeans, an old wool shirt, and a leather jacket I just knew was left over from World War II.
By seven o'clock, we had all reached the river, parking our separate vehicles in the dirt alongside the isolated road. As I got out of my van, I shivered from the wave of heavy fog that swirled up through the trees to greet me. It was still too dark to see more than a few feet ahead of us, so we groped our way along the bank until we reached the barrier of yellow crime-scene tape. Off in the woods, I could see a half-dozen tiny spots of light moving our way. They were cigarettes, I realized, in the hands of cops who had already gathered at the site. They'd heard us stumbling through the woods and came over to meet us, each with a cup of coffee in one hand, a cigarette in the other. They were obviously expecting us because they handed each of us a fresh cup as well, and that was all it took to make us members of the team.
We stood around waiting for the fog to clear, introducing ourselves, then starting in on the jokes and stories that always seem to bond this sort of work crew. Just as the coffee ran out, the fog started to lift, and we all slipped under the yellow crime-scene tape and moved cautiously toward the river. The officer who had spent the night at the scene led us to a steep ledge and pointed out the bright orange marker flags that Daly had placed there the night before. I could see exposed parts of the skeleton still embedded in the earth, a few bones perched precariously on chunks of sand that looked ready to break off and slide into the river. A little farther up the bank, more bones lay amid pieces of fabric.
I took a few steps back from the ledge and shook my head. Thank heavens we'd waited until it got light! Even during the daytime, recovering those bones would be a delicate, dangerous job, as my colleagues and I struggled to keep our footing on a slick, muddy riverbank that dropped about six feet straight down to the rain-swollen Ohio River. By the end of the day I knew I'd be exhausted from hours of trying to keep my balance, a trowel clutched in one hand, a safety rope wrapped around the other.
I opened up my backpack and pulled out what has become my standard working gear: thin leather gloves with the fingertips cut off, a length of rope, my kneepads, and a firefighter's belt. A few feet away, the cops watched me curiously, while I did my best to act nonchalant. Since I'm often attached to a climbing rope, grasping after the bones and body parts strewn with depressing regularity over Kentucky's big, green mountains and deep, dramatic ravines, this is routine for me, but the men sometimes seem mystified when they see me in this get-up.
“Hey, Al, give me a hand with this belt, will you?” I was taking no chances with the slick and crumbling riverbank. I looped the heavy webbing around my ample rear, pulled it tight around my waist, and clipped it onto the thick rope. Al obligingly wrapped the other end of the rope twice around a tree before grasping the other end firmly in his big hand. I could probably have stood upright even without the rope, but the small degree of constant tension helped me keep my balance and gave me that extra bit of psychological security I needed. I just prayed Al would have the strength to haul me up the bank if the soil gave out from under me.
If this had been a routine murder, every officer present would have known how to document the evidence and secure the scene. For some reason, though, bones seem to turn it into a whole new situation, so these experienced law-enforcement professionals were all looking to me.
“Okay, guys,” I said to the assembled team. “The first thing we need is a videographer. And a photographer.” It would be heartbreaking to spend hours recovering and analyzing skeletal evidence only to have it thrown out of court because someone hadn't recorded where, when, and how it was found.
Of course, the pictures, even those taken first thing this morning, would not show a pristine crime scene. There were footprints everywhere from all the people who'd been traipsing through the scene the previous evening. I didn't so much mind the folks who had legitimate tasks to perform, but I knew some of the prints had been left by cops who were just plain curious. I could read last night's frantic activity in the recently broken branches and plant stems throughout the area, and in the newly disturbed soil around the victim's skull.
At least the officers had established a definite perimeter, looping bright yellow tape around several trees and then stretching it taut to set off an area approximately of about 1,600 square feet. Any member of the public who showed up in this isolated spot would hopefully have been deterred by the large black letters warning CRIME SCENE-DO NOT CROSS.
Down by the river, most of the remains appeared to be untouched. Even from this distance, I could make out the soft mix of sand and mud that typifies the banks along the flood-prone Ohio River, and it was this fine-grained fluvial mix, soaked by recent rains, that made the riverbank so treacherous. In the places where the bank dropped steeply down to the river, the soft soil tended to break off under even the slightest pressure.
“Once I'm down there,” I went on, “I'll have a better idea of what comes next.” Grabbing a handful of marker flags, I let Al ease me down about twenty feet to the edge of the dropoff, where the bones were down a steady, steep slope, with an overhanging ledge that jutted out over a straight drop down to the river.
“All right,” I called back up from the brink. “We don't really know what we've got yet, so we're going to have to document this just as if it's a homicide. I don't want it to get too crowded down here, so let's restrict access to the men taking the pictures. Oh, and let's have somebody taking notes and bagging the evidence. I'll recover the bones myself and hand them up to Mark.” I took another look at the slick bank. “Somebody probably should be safety officer, too, just to keep an eye on things.”
The officers looked at one another for a moment, then quickly divided up the tasks. Officer David Lambers of the Fort Thomas Police Department, a young, clean-cut kid with a shy, friendly demeanor, got the job of note-taker. He would also pack each bone into its own little evidence bag, labeling it carefully with the case number, time, and date. Two other officers picked up the cameras, while the remaining men formed a kind of bucket brigade, ready to pass each bone up the riverbank to the coroner.
As the guys quickly sorted themselves out, I was struck again by the difference between real life and TV, where you often see one single heroic scientist doing
The other golden rule of crime scenes is so obvious you'd think it wouldn't need to be mentioned:
Recovering human remains is always a fascinating experience, and new theories about the case can evolve as you come across new bits of evidence. That's how it was this day. When we started, we were looking at the fairly routine excavation of what was probably a derelict who had died peacefully (if tragically) within the past few months. By the end of the day, a series of small, odd, and fascinating clues had led us to suspect that this was one of the most unusual cases that any of us had ever worked on.
The skull was precariously close to the river's edge, so I decided to start with that. I was especially curious about a peculiar mass of whitish material that I could see on the ground around the skull. From a distance, it looked like adipocere, or grave wax, a grainy material that bears a weird resemblance to crumbling Styrofoam. You tend to find adipocere wherever body fat decomposes in a moist area containing abnormally low levels of oxygen, and I thought that its presence here helped confirm Mark's theory that this man had died and decomposed right on this very spot. The shaded, damp riverbank, inundated with new layers of silt each time the river flooded, was the perfect environment for the creation of adipocere.
As soon as I knelt down beside the skull, however, I realized that my first impression had been wrong. This wasn't adipocere-it was lime.
That told me a whole different story. First of all, powdered lime doesn't appear naturally in the Kentucky woods. Somebody had to cart it all the way out here and sprinkle it over the dead man, to keep his body from smelling or to make it decompose more quickly. That didn't sound like a natural death to me.
Second, someone had had an awfully big stake in covering up this guy's death. By this point, I'd seen thousands of Kentucky homicide victims, and I could vouch for the fact that many people did very little to conceal their crimes. I'd seen a shocking number of girlfriends and family members who'd simply been killed and tossed into the woods. And since it's a felony to tamper with physical evidence, covering a body with lime added a second crime to the first one. Why had someone gone to so much trouble to hide this body?
Ironically, the lime intended to make the body disappear had actually helped preserve it. As soon as the river's moisture hit the lime's calcium carbonate, the powder had hardened, creating a crust that had encased our victim like a plaster-of-Paris shell. Only fragments of the lime remained. But when I lifted up the larger chunks of the hardened substance, I could see the reverse topography of a body, as if some perverse sculptor had used our victim's corpse to cast a mold.
When I called out that I had found lime, a shiver of anticipation ran through every cop at the scene as the implication of my words sank in. I knew we were all thinking the same thing: This was no accident. Thank heavens we had followed procedure and treated the area as a crime scene.
Now it was time to reach for the skull, and I was sorely tempted to simply snatch it from the soil and start checking for some sort of fatal injury. But I made myself go slowly. The detectives had pulled into a tight group above me on the riverbank, gazing down intently as I knelt over the half-buried skull, using a small soft-bristle paintbrush to brush away as much loose dirt and debris as I could. Then I followed the contours of the bone gently with my fingers, reaching as far into the soil as I dared, carefully lifting the skull from its resting place.
Breathless with anticipation, I turned the skull slowly in my hands. There was a neat round bullet hole directly behind the left ear, fractures radiating out from the hole like starbursts. Maybe tonight when I got home I'd feel some compassion for this man, shot in the head and left to rot in the dirt. Now all I felt was the thrill of the hunt.
Mark had come up behind me and was studying the skull over my shoulder. “Look,” I said, tracing the bullet hole with my gloved finger. “Here's an entrance gunshot wound. Now, do we have an exit wound, or have we gotten
I turned the skull around slowly in my hand. Nope. No exit wound. The bullet that had killed this man might be lodged within these head bones, stuck inside the dirt and muck that over the years had taken the place of blood and brains.
Beside me, Mark was shaking his head, reluctant to give up his theory of a homeless man dead of natural causes. “Are you sure it's a bullet wound?” he asked stubbornly. “Maybe something here along the river bashed the skull after he died. Or maybe he just got drunk, fell down, and hit his head.”
I heard a murmur of agreement from the officers higher up the bank. If this was a homicide, they'd have to find the killer. They needed to know what I thought and why I thought it. So, as I'd learned to do back in Tennessee, I started to think out loud, as much for my own benefit as for that of my colleagues.
“Okay,” I began. “The first thing I do when I see a skull is to check for trauma. Hopefully, that tells me right off the bat whether we're looking at a homicide, suicide, or death from natural causes. If you're lucky enough to find a gunshot wound, that pretty much rules out natural causes. And depending on where the bullet hole is, you might be able to eliminate suicide or even accident.”
I held up the skull a little higher, so everyone could see the hole. “Of course, you've got to be able to tell the difference between a gunshot wound and a hole that's been made in some other way. But see this beveling around the hole? To me, that spells ‘bullet.' And look at these sharp fractures radiating out in all directions. You need speed and force to make fractures like that, so again, I'm thinking ‘bullet.'”
“Okay, so it's not natural causes,” Mark said reluctantly. “But what about suicide?”
“Or accidental death?” Daly chimed in. I could see him calculating all the different ways this investigation could go, wondering how much manpower he'd need, how much time.
