To make sure we all take proper care, I've developed my own protocol for collecting evidence from a suspicious fire-death scene, a procedure that has proven to be so successful that coroners across the Commonwealth have adopted it as the standard for all fire deaths. Better safe than sorry and, if an apparent accident turns out to be murder, this procedure will protect what might turn out to be crucial evidence.
So now, having exposed the body and noted its position and condition, I continued to follow my own protocol. First stop: the head, where I tried to pick up fragments that might have separated from the rest of the skull. Several of these quarter-sized broken pieces had already fallen into the pile of burned debris that surrounded the victim's head and shoulders. Other pieces teetered precariously on the rounded surface of the remaining skull, so before they could fall, I gently coaxed them free and stored them in one of the snap-lid boxes that were also part of my protocol. Before I started using these boxes, fragments were simply placed in the body bag, where they were often ground into powder from their contact with other bones and the body itself during the long, bumpy journey from the crime scene to the morgue. I quickly learned not to do that, because I know these loose fragments are too precious to lose: By putting them back together at the autopsy, I often figure out exactly how the person died. The boxes are a great protector, and I'm happy their use has spread across the state.
Meanwhile, the woman's partially destroyed head lay before me, so I picked up a small piece of skull bone from the ashes and matched its jagged edges to the part of the skull still clinging to her brain. These two bone fragments had once formed a single bone-but the piece I held in my hand was a pale, toasty brown, while the piece attached to her brain was charred and blackened by the fire. The bone had been cleanly fractured and was easy to rematch-but why were the two fragments such different colors? The answer to that question lay in the science of differential burning.
Differential burning is most often associated with fatal wounds to the skull, that prime target of murderers. Usually, when you're dealing with a fire, you're trying to answer one key question: Did the intense heat of the fire break this skull apart, or was the skull shot, hit, or crushed before the fire began?
If you know how to read the skull fragments, they can usually tell you. When an intact skull cracks open in a fire, all the pieces show the same kind of burning, as if a painted vase had simply cracked. If the skull was fractured before it burned, however, each fragment burns in a slightly different way. When you reconstruct that kind of skull, it looks as though somebody broke a vase, painted a few random pieces, and then put it back together.
That sort of differential burning was here in my hands, and since we all knew something wasn't quite right with this scene, I didn't want to take any chances on losing what might be a crucial piece of evidence. So I got Alan Stringer's brother, Larry, the deputy coroner, to help me with the next step. Larry gently lifted the victim's rigid shoulders, bringing the head up out of the burned debris as I unfolded a medium-sized white trash bag, the kind that has a built-in drawstring at one end, and slipped it over her head. Now if anything else broke off, it would be preserved intact inside the bag. And if any associated evidence should get dislodged during transport-a tooth, an earring, maybe even the bullet or bullet fragments I was seeking-that would be safely contained as well.
With the victim's head tightly wrapped in plastic, I picked up the pieces of bone at the distal, or far, ends of her arms and legs. This was harder than it sounds. Imagine a fireplace in which all the wood has burned away to ash and clinkers. Now you have to go through those clinkers-all of them the same color; each with its own odd, distorted shape-and distinguish between the ones that used to be bone and the ones that used to be wood. They all look pretty much the same, so your only clue is a variation in shape-and, of course, each piece's relationship to the torso.
Working as slowly and carefully as I could and documenting each part of the process, I recovered the bones of each extremity-left arm and hand, left leg and foot, then the right arm, the right leg, putting each extremity into its own carefully labeled plastic box. I took special care with the victim's right arm, where I could see some differences in color in the bone fragments, which again suggested differential burning. My guess was that her arm, too, had been broken into pieces before it burned off in the fire.
With all the small pieces recovered, we were finally ready to bag the torso. I'd learned the hard way to save that for last, having seen many cases in which grabbing the torso first disrupted forever the fragile, fire-ravaged bones of the extremities.
Now the body was gone-but we still weren't through with this victim's associated evidence. Because of the numerous fractures, I strongly suspected that this woman had sustained at least one gunshot wound to the head and one to the arm, so we scooped up the charred and blackened debris that had lain under the victim, hoping it contained a bullet.
Whenever a person is shot, you hope that the bullet is still inside the body. When the body is burned, though, a bullet might fall through the charred flesh into the surrounding debris. I can't stand the thought of losing a bullet, so when I work a potential homicide scene, I make sure to shovel up all of the debris, load it into bags, boxes, or buckets, and take it back with me to the lab. There an x-ray will point me to any bullets or parts thereof. In this case, we'd bagged up the body and the debris-but what if a bullet had passed all the way through the body and landed elsewhere in the mess? Sam and I were taking no chances: The house would remain a protected crime scene until after the autopsies. If I had to come back and put every scrap of wood and ash through a fine archaeological sifter, I was fully prepared to do so.
By the time I finished the recovery and field analysis of the children, I could see they'd most likely suffered the same fate as their mother. As I shared my suspicions with the rest of the team, our determination grew. We were all more than willing to do whatever it took to make sure someone didn't get away with murder. Not this time.
By now, I'd been on the job long enough to realize that most investigators-myself included-tend to divide cases into two categories. There are the ordinary murders, the ones you want to solve but have to accept that you might not. And-even though you always remain impartial with the evidence-there are some cases that really get to you, the ones you know will trouble your sleep for months to come if you don't put the killer behind bars. This was one of those cases. A young woman and two innocent children had apparently been gunned down and then incinerated-and not one seasoned professional at that scene was going to rest until we'd found out who'd done it.
It was after midnight when I got home that night, and the odor of burned flesh, smoke, and blood had seeped into my nose, my skin, and even my hair. I showered for at least thirty minutes, trying to remove the scent of death, until I finally realized the taint was no longer on my body but had burned into my brain. Those weeks in Texas, the bodies of burned children, the odors of singed hair and charred flesh, engulfed me in a flashback that I couldn't repress. I crawled into bed and cried myself to sleep-something I hadn't done since Waco. Luckily, sleep worked its healing magic and I awoke the next morning ready to face a new day.