Only two things about the skull appeared to be at all out of the ordinary. One was the presence of adipocere, a waxy or soapy substance, at the back of the eye orbits. Adipocere — the Latin term translates literally as “grave wax”—forms when fatty tissue decays in a very moist environment, such as a basement…or a riverbank. Most people don’t realize it, but all of us except for the extremely malnourished have pockets of fat behind our eyeballs. If you’ve ever seen photos of concentration camp survivors, you’ll notice that their eyes appear sunken, extremely deep-set in their skulls; that’s because they’ve used up all of their fat reserves, including those small pads behind the eyes. So knowing where the skull had been found, I wasn’t surprised to see the clumps of adipocere deep in the eye orbits.
The skull’s other unusual feature was its shape: the cranial vault was remarkably tall and narrow, with a sloping forehead and slanted openings, or orbits, for the eyes, which gave the skull an almost Oriental appearance. What immediately sprang to my mind when I saw the high, narrow vault was a rare medical condition, a deformity of the skull called “scafoscephalae,” which results from premature closure of the sagittal suture, the joint between the frontal bone (the forehead) and the parietal bones (the sides of the skull). That means that during childhood the skull can’t grow wider, so it grows higher instead, to accommodate the brain’s growth. If you take the top of the skull from someone who had scafoscephalae and turn it upside down, the inside of the cranial vault resembles the V-shaped inner hull or keel of a boat. Today, when children are born with this disorder, it’s correctable: using a Stryker saw, a surgeon can reopen the sagittal suture, allowing the skull to grow normally; eventually the cut bone will fuse together again, but not before the skull has grown to a normal width.
Now, this particular skull wasn’t quite tall and narrow enough to merit a diagnosis of scafoscephalae — if this individual were a child today, he probably wouldn’t require surgical intervention — but its proportions were much closer to scafoscephalic than most people’s.
Of the four people who accompanied the skull, the most unexpected was the president of the East Tennessee Pilots Association, Jim Cline. Cline told me about a Knoxville man named Elmer Reynolds who had disappeared two years before in a small plane — Cline’s plane, in fact — while taking a sixteen-year-old girl for what was supposed to be a brief sightseeing flight. The girl, Linda Hendrick, was from Michigan; she was visiting an aunt in Knoxville — an aunt who lived with her husband in the caretaker’s trailer at Cox’s Skyranch, a small grass airstrip tucked alongside the river about four miles upriver from where the skull was found. When the plane took off near dusk one afternoon in January of 1972, Reynolds said he was going to show Linda the lights of Knoxville. It would need to be a short flight, as the plane had only about a half hour’s worth of fuel on board. When they didn’t return, the Civil Air Patrol launched a search from the air but failed to spot any sign of aircraft wreckage in the wooded terrain or the river shallows; the local rescue squad did some dragging in the river, also without finding anything. One theory that circulated among some law enforcement officers was that perhaps Reynolds, age thirty-two — a man with a wife and five children — might have run off with the teenager. But inquiries at nearby airports where he could have refueled the plane also failed to turn up any signs of its whereabouts or flight path.
The skull was the right age and race to be that of Reynolds. It was obvious from the good condition of the skull’s teeth that this man had received regular dental care. What’s more, one of the molars had a distinctive shape and a distinctive filling.
Most people’s molars have what’s called a “Y-5” pattern; that means the chewing surface of the molar has five peaks, or cusps; the name comes from the fact that the valleys between the five cusps connect to form the shape of the letter Y. One of the skull’s molars had a less common pattern, a “4-+,” in which the valleys between four cusps connect in the shape of a plus sign. These different patterns in molars date back millions of years in our evolutionary history — all the way back to our ancestors, apes of the Miocene epoch (about 27 million years ago). Between the Miocene epoch and the twentieth century, dentistry evolved even more rapidly than primates did. By the 1970s, highly evolved dentists knew that if a patient developed a cavity in the central valley of a molar, it wasn’t enough just to fill the hole itself; a lasting repair required drilling out along the valleys a ways and filling a larger area to make sure the filling was anchored to a solid foundation. This guy, who had a long, uniquely shaped filling in a 4-+ molar, clearly had a highly evolved dentist. “I’m sure Elmer Reynolds’ dentist could tell us if this is him,” I told the small group in my office. One of them — I forget who — called Elmer’s wife, who steered us to a dentist named Robert Greer.
I called Dr. Greer, who had an office in an old house on Magnolia Avenue. “I may have the skull of one of your patients,” I told him. “Could I bring it out and get you to take a look and compare it to your records?” He agreed, and asked me to bring the skull to his office early the next morning.
I showed up at 9 A.M. with the skull in a brown paper grocery bag. “This might be Elmer Reynolds,” I said. Dr. Greer reached into the bag, and as he lifted out the skull, he said at once, “Yeah, that’s Elmer.” He said it before consulting Reynolds’ dental records; in fact, he said it even before inspecting the teeth. He, like me, was struck immediately by the skull’s high, narrow vault — a vault the dentist had bent over at six-month intervals for four years. If Greer had wondered why Elmer hadn’t come in for his regular cleanings, his question was now answered.
Dr. Greer, it turned out, had served as a dentist in the Air Force before setting up private practice as a civilian. During his years in the military, he’d been called on several times to make dental identifications of pilots killed and burned in plane crashes, so he had both interest and experience in forensic dentistry, or odontology. Dental identification — matching a dead person’s teeth to antemortem (before-death) X-rays or records — has been used as evidence in court for more than a century, but the armed forces are the nation’s main repository of odontologists, because soldiers are at greater risk of dying in explosions, plane crashes, and other settings that can make ordinary visual identification impossible.
After recognizing the distinctive shape of the skull, Dr. Greer pulled out a chart and confirmed that the teeth matched Elmer’s dental records. The dentist and I swapped stories about identifying plane crash victims, then I thanked him for his help, put the skull back in the paper bag, and walked out of his office.
As I headed down the front steps toward my car, I passed two men on the sidewalk. We said hello in passing, and then one of them said, “Excuse me, are you the man trying to identify our brother?” Evidently they’d heard a skull had been brought to me for identification, and when they called my office my secretary told them I’d gone to consult Dr. Greer.
I told the men who I was, and acknowledged that I was trying to identify a skull found on the edge of the reservoir. Then they introduced themselves, and their last name was Reynolds, so I figured they probably were indeed Elmer’s brothers, and deserved to know where things stood. “I hate to tell you this,” I said, “but we have made a positive identification, and it is Elmer Reynolds.” We talked for a few minutes, and then I noticed the men glancing at the bag in my hand. Now, as far as I know, neither Emily Post nor Miss Manners ever offered any etiquette advice about this particular sort of situation, so at this point I was forced to wing it. After a moment’s thought, I said, “Would you like to see your brother?” They discussed it for a few minutes and finally decided they would. I took the skull out — this was on a sidewalk along Magnolia Avenue, a busy Knoxville street — and they both said, “Yeah, that’s Elmer all right.” I found it interesting that people who knew him could recognize him even without the soft tissue.