Horton’s defense attorney didn’t challenge anything in my original analysis, nor did she question my certainty that the bones I’d examined the day before were the same bones. About all she did was ask whether I’d observed anything in the skeletal material indicating an unnatural manner of death. “There is nothing on those bones that will tell you that,” I answered.
“And so probably there wouldn’t be anything about those bones either that would indicate if that person had ever been molested?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Nothing in the bones?”
“Not from the bones.”
The cornerstones of the prosecution’s case against the former school janitor included the fact that Liz was last seen near the school, where Horton was at work at the time of her disappearance, and the testimony of the woman who charged that Horton had chloroformed and molested her at age fourteen. Although the case was purely circumstantial, the jury found it convincing, voting to convict Horton of first-degree murder. He began serving a life sentence, with no chance of parole for at least fifteen years.
Then, in February 2007, the Kansas Supreme Court struck down the conviction, ruling that the district court should not have allowed testimony from the woman who claimed that Horton had chloroformed and molested her. Apart from that alleged “prior bad act,” the supreme court ruling said, prosecutors lacked enough evidence even to charge Horton.
The very day the supreme court struck down the conviction and ordered Horton’s release, Johnson County District Attorney Phill Kline refiled a murder charge against Horton. “It is vitally important that we ensure that Lizabeth’s cry for justice be heard,” Kline told reporters.
Four months after the D.A. made that statement, I stepped off another plane in Kansas, an aging scientist testifying once more about a young girl’s bones he first held in his hands nearly thirty-five years ago. Will Lizabeth’s cry for justice finally be heard? I don’t know yet. All I know is that I’ve done all I can to shed a ray of light on a sad, dark crime.
4
FORENSICS AT THE SPEED OF FLIGHT: INTERPRETING TEETH AND TRAUMA
A career in forensic science isn’t ideally suited to finger-drumming, foot-tapping, impatient sorts. Many cases involve weeks or even months of study, research, and meticulous drudgework by a team of methodical investigators — scientists, evidence technicians, lab techs, and detectives. Some cases resist closure for years or — like that of Elmer Reynolds — even decades. But in a few rare instances, real-life forensic progress occurs with remarkable swiftness—almost as fast as it does on CSI. In one memorable case, I managed to identify a set of scattered, fragmentary skeletal remains in the field, and to begin piecing together the brutal way in which the young victim was killed.
The key to the identification was forensic dentistry, a specialty that dates back centuries. One interesting footnote to the Revolutionary War, in fact, revolves around forensic dentistry. Paul Revere, the silversmith who became America’s most famous Minuteman, was also a practicing dentist. After the Battle of Bunker Hill, he identified the body of General Earl Warren, who’d been buried in a mass grave, by means of a silver dental bridge Revere had made for the officer. Unlike DNA and fingerprints, teeth are not only distinctive but durable, as the first use of forensic dentistry in a U.S. criminal court demonstrated in 1850. Harvard chemistry professor John White Webster was accused of murdering surgeon George Parkman (to whom he owed a large sum of money) and dissecting the corpse. A set of false teeth, found in a furnace near Webster’s chemistry lab, allowed Parkman’s dentist to identify his body, paving the way for Webster’s conviction and hanging. It was nearly half a century later, in 1898, that the first scientific textbook devoted to forensic dentistry was published, a French title that translates roughly as Dentistry in Legal Medicine. The first U.S. text didn’t follow until the release of Forensic Odontology in 1966. Most fans of forensic books and television shows are aware that the biochemical building blocks of DNA can be assembled in many billions of different ways, ensuring that no two people — except for identical twins — will possess the same genetic “fingerprint.” Not many of those same people realize that there are likewise billions of possible combinations of tooth shapes, sizes, orientations, and anomalies, including cavities, fillings, chips, and distinctively shaped roots. Although identical twins can’t be distinguished from one another by their DNA, they can be told apart by their teeth.
Trauma analysis — interpreting marks on bone to unravel how a person was killed — is far newer than forensic dentistry. My renowned mentor Dr. Wilton Krogman, who spent years teaching the intricacies of teeth, skipped right over skeletal trauma in the first edition of his groundbreaking forensic anthropology textbook, The Human Skeleton in Forensic Medicine, published in 1962. Surprisingly, the word “trauma” does not rate even a mention in the index of the book’s second edition, published just twenty-one years ago. Another giant in the field, T. Dale Stewart, also gave short shrift to trauma in his 1979 text, Essentials of Forensic Anthropology.
My initial education about skeletal trauma came not from professors but from Native Americans — from examining thousands of Arikara Indian skeletons, which I excavated during the course of thirteen summers between 1957 and 1970. Among those thousands of skeletons, hundreds bore the signs of trauma: skulls gouged across the forehead and at the base with the telltale cuts of a scalping knife; other skulls crushed by war clubs; bones (most often pelvic bones) in which an arrowhead lodged for months or even years after a warrior was shot, as evidenced by the way the bone healed around the flint. Most of the Indian graves I excavated coincided with the rapid proliferation of horses throughout the Plains Indian culture, and the number of broken arms and legs soared when Indians began trying to ride horses (it’s like teenagers and cars, these days). My crash course in skeletal trauma — like my immersion, at Dr. Krogman’s feet, in the intricacies of teeth — was to serve me well many times during my career. But the two converged as never before, and never since, in a case twenty-five years ago.
One afternoon in March of 1982, I got a call from Dan Cook, an assistant district attorney from the Twenty-first Judicial District, a rural area located a couple hundred miles west of Knoxville. A skull had been found in rural Houston County, he said, and he hoped I could identify it. Houston County, by the way, is named in honor of Sam Houston, who was born in Virginia in 1793 but who grew up in Tennessee — a fact that probably accounts for his subsequent greatness. Over the course of a remarkable career, Houston served as governor of Tennessee, as commander of the army that defeated the Mexican general Santa Anna after the Alamo, as the first (and only) president of the Republic of Texas, as a U.S. senator from Texas, and as governor of Texas.