“I honestly don't think I could improve on these,” I told Marvin. “The problem isn't with the sketches. The problem is that the right person hasn't seen them yet.”
Marvin was reluctant to accept this, but I'd seen it already in my short career and I'd have cause to see it again throughout the years. Facial reconstructions are basically a shot in the dark. If you're lucky enough to get the right person to see them, they work. If you're not, they don't. The quality of the facial reconstruction is important, sure, but that alone won't bring you success. Luck has a lot more to do with it.
And, indeed, it was luck that had brought me here today. Some thirty years after Tent Girl had been laid to rest, I was standing in her grave-because someone finally thought he knew who she was.
“Do you have enough room over there, Doc?” My grave-digging companion, a local deputy, was standing right beside me, trying not to step on any of the bones. We'd excavated the grave with a backhoe, but the young woman had been buried without a coffin, so as soon as we caught sight of the first bone, I'd climbed down into the hole. Now I was on my knees with a hand trowel, recovering those few bones that hadn't long ago crumbled into earth. Later that week, we would try to match their mitochondrial DNA with the blood of someone who thought that Tent Girl might be her long-lost sister.
The deputy was standing ready with a shovel, prepared to toss out the dirt that I dug up. “Seems to me like you've got all the hard work,” I told him, scraping a little more soil away from the half-buried fibula. “This looks like the easy part to me.”
He shook his head. “I'm just as happy not to have to dig up a dead woman's bones,” he said. “I'll leave that little job to you.”
The story of how Tent Girl's identity had finally been discovered was one that would make even the most arrogant investigator bow her head and give thanks for the dedicated efforts of interested civilians. Some twenty years after that well-driller had found the body, he'd moved to Livingston, Tennessee, where his daughter, Lori, started dating a seventeen-year-old boy named Todd Matthews. Todd hadn't even been born when Lori's father found the Tent Girl, but something about the anonymous young woman caught his imagination. Todd went on to marry Lori and his interest in Tent Girl increased, almost to the point of obsession. Eventually, he made it his life's work to discover Tent Girl's identity.
Todd's all-consuming interest in the case began to threaten his marriage and drastically cut into the time he spent with his own young son. When he realized that the Internet could significantly expand his ability to search for clues, he started spending hour after hour at his computer. Late one night in January 1998, after his wife and child had gone to bed, Todd clicked on to a missing persons website-and struck pay dirt. There was a description of a young woman who had gone missing from Lexington, Kentucky. Somehow, intuitively, Todd knew that this was the woman he sought.
The description had been posted by Rosemary Westbrook, a forty-year-old woman then living in Arkansas. Rosemary's father and brother had been killed by floods in Illinois two weeks before she was born, and her mother's hands were full caring for the other six children. Baby Rosemary was sent to live with relatives who made sure she kept in close touch with her mother, brothers, and sisters.
When she was ten, Rosemary learned that her older sister Barbara Ann Hackmann Taylor, then twenty-four, had mysteriously disappeared. As an adult, Rosemary decided that she wanted to find her missing sister. The previous August, she had posted a description of Barbara-the very posting Todd Matthews found that January night:
NAME: BARBARA ANN (HACKMANN) TAYLOR
RELATIONSHIP: SISTER
DATE OF BIRTH: 9-12-1943
FEMALE
When Todd called Rosemary and gave her the details about the Tent Girl, she, too, became convinced that this was her missing sister, known to family and friends as Bobbie. Apparently Bobbie had married a man named George Earl Taylor, with whom she'd traveled the carnival circuit in the mid-1960s. When Bobbie disappeared, George took their baby son and daughter to live with his parents, telling them that Bobbie had run off with a trucker. The son had died as a young adult, but the surviving daughter was still haunted by the knowledge that her mother had never come back to get her, had never sent so much as a postcard to say she remembered her child.
Bobbie had also helped raise George's daughter from a previous marriage. That daughter later told Rosemary that she'd last seen Bobbie in Lexington, Kentucky -a detail that made Todd more certain than ever that Tent Girl was Barbara Ann Hackmann Taylor. He contacted Marvin Yokum, who after all these years was still Scott County coroner.
Once again, Marvin and I met in my office, along with Scott County Detective John Ferris. This time, besides Tent Girl's autopsy photos, Marvin was able to show me photos of Barbara Ann.
In the first one, she looked somber, her mouth closed, her eyes serious as she stared into the camera. I looked slowly back and forth between that forty-year-old photograph and the old sketch of Tent Girl. Yes, I thought. Everything looked right-the proportions of the features, the shape of the face. This could be a match.
“Do you have any other pictures?” I asked.
Marvin slid another photograph across my desk, a three-quarter view in which Bobbie's mouth was open just a little, exposing a couple of teeth. I looked closely at the autopsy photo that had been taken of the decomposed head and face and noticed several similarities. I couldn't see enough teeth in Bobbie's picture to be absolutely certain, but maybe-just maybe-it was a match.
“It's not enough for a positive ID, though,” I added quickly, and saw Marvin's look of disappointment. “First of all, the photograph's too fuzzy. And secondly, the teeth just aren't that unusual. I mean, if you get a real clear picture with someone's mouth open real wide, and maybe the person has a gold front tooth with a heart carved in it, or if a tooth is totally rotated and then the one next to that is missing-then, yes, a forensic odontologist can make a positive ID from that.” I gestured toward the snapshot lying on my desk, one of those Kodak specials from forty years ago, with the white border and the little date stamped on it. “This is so close, though, I think we can justify looking at DNA.”
Marvin nodded. “All right then,” he said finally. “I think we've got to dig up her grave.”
Detective Ferris and I agreed that an exhumation and DNA comparison were warranted. We, too, were eager to solve the mystery of the Tent Girl, who had become such a big part of local legend. But it was still the middle of winter, and the ground was frozen solid. Although the coroner soon got the exhumation order from the state officials, it would be weeks before the weather cleared enough for us to use it.
Then, one day, I heard on the radio that the temperature was supposed to get up to the low forties, with sunshine at least until the afternoon. I called Marvin, who alerted the backhoe operator at the county garage and contacted County Sheriff Bobby Hammons. Later that morning, we all met at the graveyard.
The weather report had been a bit optimistic. The clouds were gray and lowering as we arrived at the cemetery, and the day was bitterly cold. Somehow, the bleak weather seemed appropriate for our morbid task-but I could have done without the sleet, which started to come down lightly, then heavily, after I'd been down in the grave for an hour or so.
“You going to be much longer, Doc?” Marvin called down after about five minutes of heavy sleet.
“Maybe another hour?” I called back. I was cold, too, but at least I was down here out of the wind-and moving. Poor Marvin and the sheriff had nothing to do but stand in the open cemetery and wait for us to hand up more bones.
When we finally got the bones back to the lab, I was eager to do my own analysis. Marvin had been right about one thing: Forensic science had advanced a good deal in the last thirty years, and I was sure I could find out more than my predecessors had. Although the people who had done the analysis thirty years ago had been expert pathologists, they didn't have the benefit of modern forensic techniques or of anthropologic expertise. And this victim's soft tissue had been badly decomposed when they found her, making it even harder to base an age estimate upon pathological evidence. As an anthropologist, I was trained to pick up on things that the previous scientists might have missed.
One thing I saw right away was that the woman was much older than they had thought. By my estimation, she was in her mid-twenties instead of in her teens-another indication that she might be Bobbie Taylor.
When I had finished a standard analysis of the bones, I sent the DNA sample down to LabCorp, the private DNA laboratory in North Carolina that would later analyze the genetic material of Henry Scharf. Then, all we could do was wait. Two months later, on April 28, 1998, the DNA testing comparing Tent Girl's genetic material with a sample from her sister confirmed what Todd had suspected from the first: Tent Girl and Barbara Ann Hackmann Taylor were one and the same.
When the Taylor family learned of the positive identification, they decided to return to Georgetown for the burial service they hadn't been able to have thirty years before. Because our community had more or less adopted Tent Girl, the entire extended family, including Bobbie's adult daughter, decided to leave her here, her monument intact, although they did add a simple plaque with her real name. Bobbie's husband was dead by then, and there was no chance for a trial to bring justice for Bobbie, but at least her family could come together for a last farewell.
It seemed as if everybody in Georgetown came to the service, trying to look at the family-and Todd-without seeming to stare. Todd, of course, was the hero of the day, with Rosemary, Bobbie's daughter, and the rest of the family clustered around him, thanking him again and again for not giving up on his quixotic quest. I wished we could have told the family who killed Bobbie and promised them some kind of justice for her lonely death. But as I watched Rosemary and her niece shaking Todd's hand and patting him on the back, tears of relief streaming down their faces, I was glad that at least we had been able to give Tent Girl back her rightful name.
The story of Tent Girl evokes for me one of the most important-and poignant-parts of my job: victim identification. It's the police's job to catch the killers. It's my job to analyze the remains, which often starts and ends with figuring out who the person was, so that the law enforcement team-or the family-can take it from there. Much as I like working with the investigators, it's important for me to remember that their job is fundamentally different from mine. And if I forget that basic difference, I might get into real trouble when it comes time to testify in court. It's important for all parties-the lawyers for both sides, the judge, and above all the jury-to see me as supremely neutral, simply there to tell the scientific truth as I see it. If I ever once seem to be part of the prosecution's team-if I ever start to think of myself that way-my value to the process will be lost.
Because so much of crime drama and detective fiction focuses on catching the bad guys, my part of the process comes in for a lot of misrepresentation. In addition to everything else, movies, TV, and mystery novels often make my job seem a lot simpler than it is. If you don't know any better, you might get the idea that there's some kind of national database out there, recording every detail about every missing person in the country. You might easily come to believe that once the police have found an unidentified body, that magical computer will spit out an instant match.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Hundreds of people go missing every day-and, for many, nobody even bothers to report their absence. Say a family has a troubled teen at home, perhaps even a child who is being abused. The child runs away and the family-angry or ashamed or simply confused-doesn't report it. If that youngster's body turns up three states away with no identification, how can investigators ever give it a name? People don't come with bar codes. If someone asks us to compare a set of bones to the medical or dental records of Mary Smith or Jose Lopez, that we can do. But to pull a name out of thin air-no.
