I laid the man's femur flat on the counter, placing one straight flat needle of the caliper against the bottom side of the knee and the other against the rounded ball at the top. Most anthropologists use an osteometric board to take these measurements; it resembles a fish-measuring board, or one of those devices that measures your foot at the shoe store, but I find that a caliper is just as accurate and much more efficient, especially when the bones in question are still covered with flesh. The osteometric board only works on free-standing bones, but I can insert the needles of my calipers into the joints and ends of bones that are still attached to a body.
This femur was 536 millimeters long. When FORDISC 2.0 learned that these measurements had belonged to a White male, it obligingly reported a height of 6 feet, 4 inches, give or take a few inches.
“He was huge,” remarked Lambers, who looked about 5'10'' at most.
“I'm 5'8''.” I nodded in agreement at him before looking at my sketch of the suit. “Yeah, he was pretty bulky. But given how tall he was, I don't think he was roly-poly fat, just big all over. I'd say he weighed close to 250 pounds. So when we start going through missing persons files, we can knock out the short, skinny guys immediately.”
Identifying this man was everybody's top priority at the moment. News of our discovery had hit the airwaves all over northern Kentucky and southern Ohio, and my voice mail was already clogged with messages from reporters. Luckily, departmental protocol wouldn't let me talk to the press this early in the process; I could only discuss this case with the coroner and the detective in charge. So I called Mark and Detective Daly and told them what we'd learned. We all knew it was crucial to capitalize on this narrow window of opportunity while the press and the public were still interested.
Mark and Daly listened eagerly as I ran down our discoveries. Then Daly asked the one question I couldn't answer: “How long do you think he's been dead?”
As I'd done yesterday, I shook my head. “It's been a while, I'll say that much. Twenty years? Twenty-five? Let's keep it vague for now. Maybe tomorrow I'll find out more.”
The next morning there was an e-mail message waiting for me from Daphne Harris, proprietor of the Red Rose Vintage Clothing Company in Indianapolis. To my amazement, she had answered me right away, estimating that the suit I'd sketched had been made sometime between 1955 and 1963. I immediately sent her pictures of the eyeglasses and the monogrammed money clip, and her answers were similar: 1955 to 1965 for the glasses, and the 1940s or 1950s for the clip.
Well, that at least gave us a back date. But maybe this guy was just old-fashioned. Or maybe he was wearing someone else's stuff, though I couldn't think of a reason why he'd do that. I was longing for a more precise date of death, but I knew we'd been incredibly lucky to get as much as we had. If all we'd had was the bones, we'd have been stuck.
By this time, local and state police agencies had already searched their missing persons files, and they had no records matching my description. That wasn't surprising for a case that was at least two decades old. It was even less surprising for this particular corner of Kentucky, which had been a lawless center of illegal gambling and prostitution from the 1930s through the 1960s. The Cleveland Syndicate, a Mafia-related crime ring heavily into gambling, had moved in right after the end of World War II and had remained in control until the 1960s, when U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy and his colleagues began lengthy investigations into the problem and backed political reformers in the whole region, including Campbell County.
When I took another look at the dates and thought about the organized crime connection, a wild thought came to mind. Was it possible that this rich man, executed decades ago and encased in lime, was actually Jimmy Hoffa? After all, the money clip read either HS or SH, what if the H stood for Hoffa? I knew it was a wild hunch, but my fingers trembled as I called my colleagues at the FBI.
They soon put an end to that theory. Hoffa's missing person's report, they told me, identified him as 5'5'' and 180 pounds. He was clearly way too short and thin to be our guy.
Meanwhile, I was reaching out to experts across the country. I sent the pen and pencil to the A. T. Cross Company in Lincoln, Rhode Island, hoping they could tell me when the items were manufactured. I sent the coin-it was a nickel-to the U.S. Mint, hoping that they could tell me whether the little date on the bottom really was 1964. (The coin was so corroded, I couldn't be sure.) The eyeglasses went to a local optical company to see if they could find any clues hidden in the frame style or the prescription. I took the skull to Dr. Mark Bernstein, our consultant in forensic odontology. And I sent the clothes and the money clips to the Fort Thomas Police Department for safekeeping.
One week after our trip to the river, all that remained in my lab were the bones and the keys. I'd gotten all I could from the bones. It was time to look at the keys.
The keys were a solid mass, fused together by years of corrosion. At first I thought I could simply pry them apart, and I did manage to break away two of the outer keys. The third time was definitely not the charm, however: The key split right down the middle. I'd have to find a better approach.
I laid out a piece of white butcher paper on my lab counter, then pulled out some petri dishes and a jar of naval jelly. Naval jelly is an acid that was originally used to remove rust and corrosion from metal objects such as ships, hence its name. I thought that at the very least I could use it to separate the keys. What I really hoped for was to read a manufacturer's name and city, but first things first.
I soaked the keys in the naval jelly for about an hour, then rinsed them in clear water to remove the acid. I was walking a fine line: I wanted the acid to eat away the corrosion while leaving intact any writing or logos on the keys. By alternately soaking and rinsing over a period of about two days, I was able to separate the rest of the keys without breaking any more of them.
The individual keys were still corroded, however, and no writing was visible to the naked eye. Full of optimism, I examined each one through my dissecting microscope. Yes, indeed I could just barely make out a cluster of tiny letters, stamped around the edge of two of the keys.
The letters were scarcely legible, but I thought that making them more three-dimensional might make them easier to read. So I turned off the room lights and worked under the single light of a freestanding halogen lamp, which had been positioned to hit each key at an angle. When I looked at a key under a large wall-mounted magnifying glass, I could see the contours of each letter on it a little more clearly. And when I delicately scraped each key's stamped surface with the blade of a scalpel, I managed to remove the decades-long corrosion a fraction of a millimeter at a time. Finally, I could read the secrets of the keys.
What I found sent me hurrying to the phone. After several long-distance calls, I dialed one final number.
Detective Daly picked up the phone. “I hope you're sitting down,” I told him. “Because you're not going to believe this. Our John Doe is from Connecticut.”
I could feel his surprise even over the phone. “What makes you say that, Doc?” he said finally.