Unaware of Houston County’s illustrious pedigree-by-association, a dog had brought a cranial vault — the top of a skull — into the yard of a trailer about eight miles east of Erin, Houston County’s small (population 1,500) seat of government. The people living in the trailer had recognized the skull as human, and had called the sheriff ’s office, which in turn called the D.A.’s office.
Dogs have a keen sense of smell; they love to chew on bones, and with the exception of dogs that have been carefully trained to search for human remains, they don’t normally make any distinction between animal bones and human bones. If someone has been killed and dumped in the woods in a rural area, it’s often hunters or dogs who find the victim’s body or skeleton. The favorite bones of dogs are the long bones of the arms and legs — the humerus, radius, and ulna from the arm, and the femur, tibia, and fibula from the leg — because the ends of these bones contain lots of bone marrow, which canines consider a delicacy. When dogs have found a body, they tend to pull off and scatter the bones, and they invariably chew off the ends of the long bones, turning up their noses at the bone shafts, which contain much less marrow.
Skulls tend to pose a problem for most dogs. The skull is big and round, like a bowling ball — too big to fit easily into a dog’s mouth. The mandible, or lower jaw, and the cheekbones, or zygomatic arches, offer projections a dog’s teeth can clamp down on, but once those have been chewed off, it takes a pretty big dog to latch onto a skull and bring it home, and by the time Fido trots up the front steps with it, there’s not much left of the bones of the face.
Assistant District Attorney Cook asked if he could send the skull to me in hopes I might be able to tell whether it could belong to a sixteen-year-old girl from a neighboring county who had been missing since the previous November. The girl, a pretty honor student who kept up her grades while holding down a part-time job as a waitress at a steakhouse, had vanished after dropping her boyfriend at his house. The next day, her locked car was found in a church parking lot just two blocks from her home.
The missing girl’s name was Kathy Nishiyama, and when I asked Cook whether one or both of her parents were Japanese, he told me that her father was. At that point, I figured there was a pretty good chance I could tell, just by looking at the skull, whether it was likely to be hers.
Japanese people are classified by physical anthropologists as “Mongoloid” (descended from ancestors in Mongolia), with skeletal features that distinguish them from the other major groups or races, “Caucasoid” (white European) and “Negroid” (black, of African descent). In addition to including most Asians, the Mongoloid group includes Native Americans, who are descended from Asians who crossed the Bering Strait many thousands of years ago and migrated down through North America and South America. One hallmark of Mongoloid skulls is their wide, flat cheekbones; another is the distinctive shape of the central teeth, or incisors: the back side of the incisors is scooped, or concave, rather than flat; if you look at them from the biting edge, the cross section resembles that of a garden spade or an old-fashioned coal scoop. For this reason, they’re called “shovel-shaped incisors.” I can’t explain why Mongoloid peoples evolved this particular dental characteristic many thousands of years ago — as far as I know, nobody has yet figured out the “survival value” of shovel-shaped incisors to people in ancient Asia — but their forensic value is quite high, since they can reveal a murder victim’s race even if virtually no other skeletal evidence remains intact. I asked the prosecutor whether any of the incisors were still attached to the skull. Unfortunately, they were gone — the mandible and even the upper jaw had been chewed off, leaving only the cranial vault — but I still hoped I’d be able to tell whether the skull was Mongoloid.
Cook arranged for Mike Dover, the chief helicopter pilot for the Tennessee Highway Patrol, to fly the skull to me that same afternoon. We hung up the phone around 1 P.M.; three hours later, a big blue and white Huey helicopter bearing the official seal of the THP on either side settled onto the helipad of the UT Medical Center in a blast of rotor wash that buffeted me and two of my graduate assistants, Steve Symes and Pat Willey.
Dover handed me the skull and I cradled the top of the cranial vault in my hands. The zygomatic arches, or cheekbones, had been bitten away, making it difficult to tell if this person had the wide, flat cheekbones typical of Asian people. Still, I could tell a couple of important things from the vault: the small size, gracile (smooth) shape, and sharp-edged eye orbits told me it was female, and the prominent cranial sutures — some of which hadn’t yet begun to fuse — told me it was an adolescent. Nothing, in other words, excluded the possibility that this was a sixteen-year-old Asian-American. So far, so good, if “good” can ever be applied to the quest to identify a missing and possibly murdered girl.
The cranial vault wasn’t all Dover brought me. He also brought news that had been radioed to him while he was in flight. Down an old logging road near the trailer where the skull-toting dog lived, a team of searchers had found more bones and some clothing. Could I fly back to Houston County with Dover, the authorities wanted to know, and help identify the additional skeletal material? I agreed, and offered to bring Steve with me. I was wearing a suit — hardly the best clothes for crawling around in the woods at night — but Dr. Bob Lash, the Knox County medical examiner (whose morgue was located in the hospital basement), offered to loan me a jumpsuit, and within a few more minutes we were airborne.
By the time the helicopter reached Houston County, darkness was falling. In the twilight, from a couple thousand feet above the wooded hills, Dover was having difficulty pinpointing the search area and, more to the point, his landing zone. He got on the radio and made a request, and a few moments later the dusk was pierced by the blue strobes of half a dozen police vehicles, arrayed around a small clearing. We landed and got out, and the search team led us to several evidence flags planted in the forest floor, marking the locations of several pieces of skeletal material and clothing they’d found scattered across several hundred yards in the woods.
The most significant thing they’d found was the upper jaw, which contained thirteen teeth, some intact, others broken. I immediately zeroed in on the incisors. Of the four upper incisors — the two central incisors and the two lateral ones flanking them — two were broken off at the roots and missing their crowns. Two, however — the right lateral incisor and the left central incisor — gave me the information I needed: the incisors were shovel-shaped — not dramatically, but about what I’d have expected in the child of one Mongoloid parent and one Caucasoid. The odds that this was Kathy Nishiyama had just skyrocketed.
“You know,” I said to Dan Cook, “if we could get in touch with Kathy Nishiyama’s dentist and get hold of her dental records, I bet we could make a positive identification this evening while we’re out here at the scene.” A few minutes later, as Steve Symes and I sifted through the leaves on the forest floor, I heard a turbine spool up and the helicopter ratchet skyward. Kathy Nishiyama’s dentist had been located in her hometown of Clarksville, about twenty miles east, and Dover was dashing over to retrieve her dental records.
The clothing found scattered in the woods consisted of a pair of bloodstained blue jeans, which had been torn or cut; a purple sweater; a white coat; and a pair of blue and white tennis shoes. The additional skeletal material was two fragments of the right temporal bone, from just above the ear; the mid shaft of the left fibula, or shinbone; and the crown of a tooth — an upper left central incisor, whose curving posterior cross section resembled that of a shovel…and whose broken base fit perfectly with the corresponding root that remained embedded in the jawbone.