“All right,” I said. “Let's go back.”
Walking through the door of the morgue that afternoon was one of the hardest things I ever did. Maybe Harold understood what had happened to me-but these people were professionals. They hadn't lost control, and I couldn't expect them to be charitable about the fact that I had. And, indeed, some of my colleagues refused to look me in the eye as I walked in, pointedly turning away or simply ignoring my presence. The woman who had given me the hair dryer, though, made it a point to smile weakly and nod my way. So did the doctor who had pulled me into my first autopsy. He called me over now and handed me another blue plastic pan full of skull fragments. I took it quickly and gratefully slipped over to my favorite little sink. I picked out the pieces one by one, washing each one carefully in the warm soapy water. As I glued the skull back together, just as I had done on that very first day, a sense of déjà vu, settled over my shoulders as I watched yet another gunshot wound emerge.
Immersed as I was in the daily details of the investigation, it was easy to forget the big picture. But over the next week, I began to realize that we had gathered an increasing amount of evidence suggesting that many of the Branch Davidians had died in a mass murder-suicide. The half-dozen anthropologists on the project had found a total of eighteen gunshot wounds-eight definite, two probable, and eight “possible.” The forensic pathologists examining the remaining soft tissue had found additional irrefutable evidence of gunshot injuries, bludgeoning, and at least one suspected stabbing. While the fragmented and incinerated remains would always hide the cause and manner of death for some victims, the evidence we uncovered was highly significant, and our supervisors meticulously documented even the tiniest details: carefully cataloguing the remains as they were recovered, conducting thorough autopsies on every victim, painstakingly reconstructing each shattered skull.
Ever since my first day, when I had managed to put that skull together in just a few hours, my colleagues had sought me out as the “skull lady,” my own special niche in what we now called the “disassembly line.” Practice makes perfect, and I could now pull apart and then put together these three-dimensional jigsaw puzzles in record time. It didn't always go as smoothly as it had the first time. Some of those skulls were extremely fragile, with large sections of bone blown away or burned up. But if I needed help holding pieces together while the glue dried or bridging the gaps with makeshift struts, Bill or Max was always right there by my side.
As our investigation drew to a close, we had established irrefutable evidence that more than one third of Waco 's victims had sustained “non-heat-related trauma,” which included contact or close-range gunshot wounds, shrapnel wounds, and blunt-force trauma-all before their bodies had ever felt the fire. We all believed that the true figure was a lot higher than one third, though without the evidence to prove it, the medical examiners duly listed many victims' cause and manner of death as “undetermined.”
Members of the press continued-some still continue-to say that the Branch Davidians were all killed by the fire, but we knew that simply wasn't true. And though these reporters never hesitated to point an accusing finger at the federal government, they somehow still refuse to publicize the now-public autopsy findings, which prove conclusively that Waco ended in a mass murder-suicide orchestrated and carried out by the Davidians themselves.
As the days rolled on, our investigation developed a new focus: sect leader David Koresh. The charismatic figure had taken on a kind of near-mythic status, and there was even speculation that he and some of his henchmen had somehow escaped the inferno, fueled by a National Examiner “eyewitness report” of Koresh jumping into a getaway car at the end of a tunnel leading out of the compound. Unless we positively identified his remains, no one would ever be certain if Koresh lived or died. The last thing any of us wanted was for the self-styled messiah to earn some sort of mythic status that would inspire his cult to spring up again. And if he was by some chance alive, the FBI wanted him at the top of their Most Wanted list.
So, back in the lab, we were keeping a close watch for any remains that might be associated with Koresh. Our first break came on the afternoon of May 1, when pathologists began to examine body bag “MC- 08.” Our dentists had earlier obtained a model of the cult leader's teeth and they knew, almost by heart, what dental evidence they were looking for. They'd made it a matter of routine to check every body bag for Koresh's telltale stainless steel crown and missing premolar, and I'll never forget the sight of Rodney Crow, our chief forensic dentist, bending over MC-08 as we all held our breath.
Crow stood up slowly, straightening his back to the fullest. “That's him.”
“Are you serious?” asked someone hidden behind a mask.
“I'm serious. That's him.” A huge Cheshire-cat grin spread over Crow's face and then quickly disappeared. We had finally found David Koresh.
Koresh's postmortem exam the next morning followed the standard autopsy protocol, but given the high level of controversy surrounding his demise, a lot more people than usual made sure to check and double-check the evidence. Chip Clark, camera at the ready, never left Dr. Peerwani's side as the corpse was x-rayed, examined, and identified. It was standing room only around the gurney as we watched Dr. Crow make a detailed record of the dental evidence. Then Dr. Peerwani called me to his side as he began to sift through the burned debris and bones found near the victim's head.
“It looks like I may have a little job for you here, Emily,” he said in a low voice. “I'd like you to go get ready to piece this one together just as soon as I've collected the fragments.”
He refused to speculate about what I might find-and I too was finally learning not to “theorize ahead of the facts.” Still, I had reconstructed enough skulls shattered by gunshot wounds in the past five days that I could readily recognize the same type of injury here.
However, “Yes, sir,” was all I said. I backed off and signaled to Max Houck, who had finished at the crime scene and was now working with us in the morgue.
“This is going to be huge, Max,” I muttered under my breath. “I think we should do this together. I know I'd feel a lot more secure if a second pair of hands and eyes was involved each step of the way.”
Max nodded and we went over to the sink, laying out the toothbrushes, scissors, and knives we would need if we found remnants of tissue clinging to the bones. I filled my trusty blue plastic pan with warm soapy water, took off my double set of heavy protective gloves, and put on two pairs of thin surgical gloves instead. I was already a little nervous about doing this case, and I wanted all the manual dexterity I could muster.
Half an hour later, Dr. Peerwani had filled a metal tray with dozens of skull fragments, most of them burned, some no larger than a dime. He brought the tray over to our sink and ceremoniously handed it to me.
Naturally, there was a flurry of extra attention given to this all-important part of the autopsy. FBI agents, pathologists, and the other anthropologists jockeyed for better spectator angles, only to be nudged aside by Chip Clark, our intrepid photographer, who needed to get some preliminary photos before we started work. It was a little unnerving to have such close scrutiny as I delicately picked pieces of fragile bone from the tray, cleaned them off, and laid them out in some semblance of anatomical order-pieces from the face in one spot, bones from the back of the head in another, side pieces in a third.