I never had any contact with Reynolds’ widow, but I heard she was relieved that we had made an identification, which meant she could finally file a death claim and collect on his life insurance. With five children to support, she must have had quite a financial struggle over the past two years. And although there’s nearly always sadness when a body or skeleton (or skull) is identified, there’s also closure, and the opportunity — painful though it may be — to move from uncertainty and confusion to grief, resolution, and the process of getting on with life again.
I’d received the skull on a Monday. On Friday, I sent the Blount County authorities my report detailing my examination of the skull and the positive identification, based on a distinctive filling in one of the skull’s molars, which precisely matched Elmer Reynolds’ dental records (as did an unusually shaped root in one of the teeth).
The next week, I clambered into a flat-bottomed aluminum boat belonging to the Blount County Rescue Squad. They beached the boat in a small, sandy, debris-laden inlet tucked between rocky bluffs lining that stretch of the river: the site where the boy had found the skull. While rescue squad divers probed the depths and volunteers probed shallower waters with aluminum poles in search of the telltale clatter of metal wreckage, I sifted through sand and layers of washed-up twigs and trash hoping to find bones from Elmer’s postcranial skeleton (the portion below the skull) and anything from his passenger, Linda Hendrick.
The rescue squad’s efforts expanded; six other area rescue squads joined the search, extending it for miles upriver. But I found nothing more where the skull had washed up. In hundreds of hours of searching, the divers and pole-probers found a tool bag Jim Cline said had come from the plane. But that was it: no aircraft, and no more bones. The river was not willing to give up its dead. Not yet, at any rate.
And that, it seemed, was that.
Until thirty-one years later, when the search resumed.
But that’s a story for another, higher-tech chapter in the pages that follow.
3
SHEDDING LIGHT ON A VICTIM’S BONES: USING UV TO ILLUMINATE IDENTITY
One of the most revolutionary changes in forensic science in recent decades has been the advent of DNA testing: the ability to chart any person’s genetic makeup — to take a genetic “fingerprint,” essentially — and compare that with all sorts of forensic evidence, ranging from body fluids (including blood, saliva, and semen), to hair, to skeletal elements such as soft tissue, teeth, and bones.
DNA analysis isn’t without its drawbacks. For one thing, it can be time-consuming and expensive, requiring weeks or even months to process some samples and costing as much as several thousand dollars for a single comparison. For another thing, it’s not always possible to obtain DNA samples, even if you have a complete skeleton; immersion in water, burial in bacteria-rich or acidic soil, or incineration at temperatures hot enough to reduce a body to brittle, calcined bones can make it impossible to recover enough genetic material for a DNA analysis. Still, it’s a remarkable and powerful new tool in the forensic scientist’s toolbox, and I wish it had been available throughout my career.
More specifically, I wish it had been available back in 1975, when I received a box of human bones that were found in a barren field in Kansas. But it wasn’t, so instead I used a combination of ultraviolet radiation and chemistry to shed light on the case of a young murder victim. Thirty years later, I took the witness stand and testified about the technique in the trial of a man finally charged with murder in that case.
The box, which arrived by certified mail on January 20, 1975, came from Dr. James Bridgens, a Johnson County medical examiner in Shawnee Mission, a suburb of Kansas City. I knew Dr. Bridgens slightly from a case I’d worked several years before, in which I managed to identify Lisa Silvers, a two-year-old murder victim, after finding her distinctively notched front teeth submerged in a sandy creek bed outside Olathe.
The bones inside the box from Shawnee Mission had been stumbled upon two weeks earlier, scattered in a field outside Lenexa, about seven miles away. Today, Lenexa is all subdivisions and shopping centers, but in 1975 it was a sleepy farm community whose biggest boast was that it had been “the “Spinach Capital of the World” in the 1930s.
I unpacked the box and inventoried its contents with the help of one of my Ph.D. students, Doug Owsley (who is now the senior physical anthropologist at the Smithsonian Institution). The box held just fourteen bones, or less than 10 percent of a human skeleton: six ribs, two vertebrae, three long bones (a left femur and tibia and a right humerus), a right ilium (part of the hip), a right scapula, and — fortunately — the skull, minus the mandible.
Dr. Bridgens had already matched the teeth and fillings that remained in the upper jaw with the dental records of Lizabeth Wilson, a thirteen-year-old girl from Shawnee Mission. Lizabeth had gone missing the previous July; she was last seen walking home from a public swimming pool near Shawnee Mission East High School. According to the story I heard, Liz’s older brother was supposed to walk her home, but he went off with some friends instead, leaving her to make the walk alone. She vanished without a trace.
Since Dr. Bridgens had already matched the teeth and fillings in the skull with Liz’s dental records, he didn’t need my help in identifying the girl. He needed help making sure that Liz was the only victim whose bones we had. On the surface, it might seem obvious that they were all hers, but when you’ve worked as many murder cases as I have, you learn that what’s obvious is not always the same as what’s true. Serial killers sometimes dump multiple bodies in the same location; in Knoxville’s most notorious serial-killing case, for instance, we found four women’s bodies in the same patch of woods alongside Interstate 40. The darker question underlying Dr. Bridgens’ seemingly routine request was this: Could a serial killer be on the loose in northeast Kansas?
Several quick observations led me to suspect that the bones came from only one person. First, there were no duplicate bones — only one left femur, only one right humerus, and so forth. Second, all the bones appeared similarly weathered, which indicated they had probably been exposed to sunlight, heat, moisture, and cold for the same amount of time. And third, all the bones were consistent with the skeletal structure of a thirteen-year-old white female.
It was fairly easy to estimate the age. What makes growth possible for children and impossible for adults is this: During our youth, the ends of our long bones — called the epiphyses — are not yet fused to the shafts; instead they’re connected to the shafts by cartilage, allowing the shafts to grow throughout childhood. Beginning in early adolescence, the epiphyses begin to fuse, gradually halting the growth of the bone shafts and bringing an end to that remarkable growth spurt occurring around puberty. On one of the long bones from Lenexa, the right humerus, the distal articular surface (the upper arm’s portion of the elbow’s “hinge”) had fused, or united, with the shaft — a union that normally occurs around age twelve. By contrast, the medial epicondyle (a nearby epiphyses, which you can feel as a bump on the inside of the elbow) hadn’t yet fused, so the humerus clearly came from someone only slightly older than twelve. The development of the teeth was also consistent with an age of thirteen or so: the second maxillary molars (nicknamed the “twelve-year molars,” and with good reason) were fully developed, but the third molars (the “wisdom teeth,” which normally erupt around age eighteen) had not begun to mature.