I heard his short, sharp intake of breath. The next thing I knew, he was dashing out of the room, taking the skull with him.
Standing there, still holding the blue pan in front of me, I glanced over to the team at the next autopsy station. They had just opened a body bag that contained hundreds of broken and burned bone fragments.
“You're an anthropologist, aren't you?” asked a male voice from behind one of the anonymous masks. I nodded and walked over to their gurney. “We could use you here,” said the same muffled voice. And that's how it started. Two weeks of seemingly endless hopscotch in which I moved from task to task, helping out wherever I could.
Sometimes I would arrange groups of bones in anatomical order, separating the burned and fragmented tibias, fibulas, scapulas, hoping that a count of similar bones-two right femurs, for example-would help me determine just how many people's parts were in that pile. Or I might be asked to dissect someone's pelvic bones, examining the joints in a quest to determine the person's age. Most of the time, though, I was cleaning up skull fragments and gluing them back together, just as I'd done on that first case. Little did I know that the gunshot wound I'd found had been just the tip of the iceberg.
Besides the regular seven-thirty a.m. briefing, we also attended five p.m. sessions, when the medical personnel and FBI investigators gathered to share our findings for the day. On this first day, I was exhausted and happy to shed my protective gear, which by now was covered with a dense pattern of blood splotches, charcoal smears, some goo that was better left unidentified, and my own sweat. And I hadn't seen Bill and Theresa since Dr. Harvey had taken my arm that morning. I was anxious to compare notes, so I got back into my street clothes as quickly as possible and headed down the hall to join my friends. We barely had time to exchange greetings, though, before it was time to pour into the conference room. We three novices slipped into chairs against the back wall, just as the pathologists and federal agents took their seats around the conference table in the room's center.
As always, Dr. Peerwani opened the meeting, beginning today with a mundane list of the day's case numbers and a rundown of some positive IDs. He relayed a progress report from the scene and thanked everybody for the day's efforts. Then he yielded the floor to Dr. Harvey.
“I have some startling news to report,” Dr. Harvey began. Bill, Theresa, and I leaned forward, wondering what he was about to say. “It concerns a woman found at the scene. Although her remains were burned, she didn't die from the fire. She died from a contact gunshot wound to the head.”
Oh, my God, I thought. That's our victim, the one whose gunshot wound I found.
No one uttered a sound. They just looked at one another, some folks nodding their heads, others raising their hands to massage their aching temples. Still others had already begun furiously scribbling in their notebooks and, behind me, someone started tapping the keyboard of a laptop computer.
I later learned that our discovery had not been totally unexpected. Evidence from some of the earlier autopsies had suggested that at least some victims could not possibly have died from the fire, which was why Dr. Harvey had wanted me to examine the skull in the first place. Like others on the team, he had begun to suspect that at least some Davidians had been executed or had committed suicide before the smoke and flames reached their bodies. Today's discovery was the turning point, though-irrefutable proof that one of the victims had actually been killed by a contact wound to the skull.
Suddenly, the entire investigation was changing before my eyes. No longer was victim identification our sole mission. Every set of remains would now also have to be closely examined for even the most subtle signs of injury, and these findings had to be documented in detail. We would have to be able to distinguish between injuries incurred antemortem, perimortem, and postmortem-before, during, and after death. We would also have to try to determine the cause and manner of death-smoke inhalation? Flames? Being crushed by the building as it fell? Or had the victim been shot or stabbed or killed in some other way before the fire ever started? And then the victims would still have to be identified.
We were all dismissed from the debriefing with the assurance that a new protocol would be in place by morning, one that would hopefully address all of the issues that were just now bubbling to the surface. Meanwhile, Bill, Theresa, and I had to find a place to sleep. Before we'd left Knoxville, we'd prepared ourselves for the fact that if we couldn't find a cheap motel room that we could all afford to share, we'd have to camp out. Earlier that day, we'd started asking the other workers for suggestions and they'd all told us to talk to a tall white-haired man whom I'd seen circulating through the morgue throughout the day-Harold Elliott, chaplain for the Arlington Police Department.
Harold turned out to be our guardian angel. He immediately invited all three of us to stay with him and his wife, Norma, in their lovely home in the neighboring community of Arlington, Texas. We gratefully accepted his offer, returning with him to what we soon came to see as our haven, a crucial refuge from the insanity we faced each day. Suddenly exhausted beyond belief, we managed to get a good night's sleep. Then, the next morning, it all began again.
Each day started the same way. A quick briefing, perhaps a reminder to make sure all the evidence was photographed or a warning not to speak to the press, and then I was off to change into my scrubs and get to work in the morgue. I greeted every day with anticipation and a sense of adventure. Each case was different and I was not only getting to make full use of my newfound forensic anthropology skills, but I was also absorbing reams of new information about mass fatalities.
I think what surprised me most was the degree of order hidden within the chaos. The numbered body bags, arriving fresh from the scene, were entered into a log, then stored in the cooler. When we were ready to work with them, they'd be pulled out, one at a time, and loaded onto gurneys, beginning their journey through an assembly-line system of analysis.
The sequence might vary, depending on what was in the body bag, but there was an established procedure for every type of situation. Photography was always first. Documenting the evidence as it arrived from the scene was critical-especially now that we knew that this incident might not be just a horrible accident. The rumors of suicide and execution were only now reaching the public, and the conspiracy theorists and reporters were having a field day. Speculation abounded. Had the FBI's hostage rescue teams killed the Davidians, peppering them with bullets as they tried to escape the flames? Or perhaps, as one particularly ugly rumor suggested, the angry FBI agents had pumped the dead bodies full of bullets, in some sort of bizarre battlefield revenge for their fallen ATF comrades.
Probably none of us would ever know exactly what had happened inside the compound. But our work would establish the best possible scientific foundation for interpreting the available evidence. Clearly, this case was going to trial, and there would probably be other legal inquiries as well. Maintaining the integrity of the evidence that was gathered-and keeping distortions out of the press-was crucial. So a single photographer, Chip Clark, was assigned to take all morgue photographs, while no one else was allowed to go anywhere near a camera. The investigators knew that Chip could be trusted: He worked at the Smithsonian Institution, which made him a federal employee, and he was fully aware of the protocols necessary for documenting evidence that would stand up in court.
Chip was charged with taking several different kinds of photographs. First, he recorded the initial appearance of each body bag's contents, which preserved a useful overview of the situation. Even more critical, though, was the documentation of particular images that might help tell the story of what had happened inside the compound. A picture of a burned hand encircled in a plastic wristwatch that had melted onto a clip of machine-gun ammunition was pretty telling evidence that hand and ammunition had been in intimate contact during the fire. A gas mask still stuck to the front of a child's face suggested that the child had been alive when the tear gas began to enter the compound. A unique piece of jewelry curled around the neck of a victim could be a crucial means of identification. The burned-off hand of a tiny child grasped in the hand of an adult female was a heart-wrenching record of these people's last moments-a detail that either prosecution or defense might incorporate into their stories about what had happened on April 19. Last but not least, Chip's photos gave us a permanent record of the medical evidence as we continued to search for the truth of that fatal day.