“I was one of the people who helped find him, yes.” I'd never had a conversation like this before. Usually it's the police and the coroners who talk to the survivors. “At least, I think we've found him. That's why we need your help.” I told her what we knew and what we didn't know.
“And what do you need from me?”
I explained about the DNA test, my voice hesitant as I stumbled over the words. In her place, I'd want to know for sure, even thirty-four years later. But perhaps she preferred not to know. Or maybe she'd spun out some fantasy of Henry living happily, safely, somewhere else, unable, for some inexplicable reason, to tell his family where he was. Maybe she didn't want closure. Maybe, having lost so many others, she preferred to keep this door open.
After I finished talking, there was a long pause. I searched wildly for something else to say, something that might convince her or maybe just something that would bring her comfort. But before I could say anything, Minna spoke.
“All right,” she said simply. “You can have some of my blood. How do we proceed?”
The final arrangements were made with the help of the FBI. A sample of Minna's blood was taken in Florida and flown to LabCorp in North Carolina, where the mitochondrial DNA was compared to a sample from a bone of our victim.
It was a match.
The rest of the puzzle remains maddeningly incomplete. Why had Henry flown to Cincinnati? What was his connection (if any) to the Cleveland Syndicate? Why had he been killed? When I think back on the case of Henry Scharf, I sometimes see it as my greatest triumph. Identifying a victim who's been dead and hidden for over thirty years is an extremely rare achievement. Yet if it's a triumph, it's an extremely frustrating one, my happy memories of discovering the bullet and reading the keys intermixed with the heart-wrenching thought of that final phone call. I would have liked to have given Minna Greenberg the satisfaction of telling her who had killed her brother and why. But maybe, after everything else she'd been through, just knowing that he hadn't willingly deserted her was enough.
6. Finding Names for the Dead
Bereavement in their death to feel
Whom we have never seen-
A vital kinmanship import
Our souls and theirs between.
– EMILY DICKINSON
OKAY, GUYS, I MADE IT. We're going to start digging now.” I was trying to sound positive, but my voice rang hollow, even to me.
“Don't get too comfortable down there, Doc. We still have to haul you out.”
I looked at the dirt walls surrounding me and shook my head. I was standing literally at the bottom of a grave, on a gray, freezing, late-winter day. Comfort was not an option.
I don't participate in all that many exhumations, but even if I had, this one would have been special. We were trying to recover the buried bones of the “Tent Girl,” a mysterious young woman whose remains had been found some thirty years ago.
I'd first learned of Tent Girl only a few days after I'd taken the job as state forensic anthropologist. Scott County Coroner Marvin Yokum had come to me with Tent Girl's picture, explaining that this was a case that had gone unsolved for decades.
It all started on the morning of May 17, 1968, when an unemployed well-driller living in Monterey, Kentucky, was out looking for old glass telephone insulators, which he used to sell for extra money. That morning, as he searched through the underbrush around Eagle Creek, he stumbled over an old green tarpaulin tied with a small thin cord. Inside the tarp were the badly decomposed remains of a naked young woman with a piece of white fabric wrapped around her head.
Marvin took charge. His autopsy report eventually described the woman as sixteen to nineteen years old, 5'1'' tall, weighing 110-115 pounds, with short, reddish-brown hair. A pathologist brought in from nearby Hamilton County, Ohio, told Marvin that the young woman had probably been wrapped up in the canvas, bound, and left to die, slowly, of suffocation.
The investigation had gone on for months, and Marvin had even called in the FBI. The Bureau had managed to determine that the white cloth was probably a diaper, but found very little else that could be used to identify her. When the local newspaper ran a story on the victim, they called her Tent Girl, because of the canvas tarp. The paper had asked Covington police officer Harold Musser for sketches based on the autopsy photos, and something about the wistful young woman with her waifishly short hair caught the public's imagination. When Tent Girl was finally laid to rest in the Georgetown Cemetery-only a few miles from where I now live-the marker on her grave read simply “#90”-the number of her anonymous plot.
Three years later, two men who owned a local monument company built her a special headstone-red, to match her hair-with a version of the sketch etched into the granite. The Tent Girl became a local legend, drawing visitors from all over Kentucky and Ohio, especially young women, who seemed to feel a special kinship with her.
Marvin felt something for her, too, and when I took the job in Kentucky he thought he saw a fresh chance of solving a case that had bothered him for years. He brought me the autopsy photos and Musser's sketches, and asked if I could maybe do a better sketch. However, to my artist's and anthropologist's eye, the sketch artist had done an excellent job. He'd been true to all the scientific detail available in the photo-and, somehow, he'd made the young woman's face come alive.
“I honestly don't think I could improve on these,” I told Marvin. “The problem isn't with the sketches. The problem is that the right person hasn't seen them yet.”
Marvin was reluctant to accept this, but I'd seen it already in my short career and I'd have cause to see it again throughout the years. Facial reconstructions are basically a shot in the dark. If you're lucky enough to get the right person to see them, they work. If you're not, they don't. The quality of the facial reconstruction is important, sure, but that alone won't bring you success. Luck has a lot more to do with it.
And, indeed, it was luck that had brought me here today. Some thirty years after Tent Girl had been laid to rest, I was standing in her grave-because someone finally thought he knew who she was.
“Do you have enough room over there, Doc?” My grave-digging companion, a local deputy, was standing right beside me, trying not to step on any of the bones. We'd excavated the grave with a backhoe, but the young woman had been buried without a coffin, so as soon as we caught sight of the first bone, I'd climbed down into the hole. Now I was on my knees with a hand trowel, recovering those few bones that hadn't long ago crumbled into earth. Later that week, we would try to match their mitochondrial DNA with the blood of someone who thought that Tent Girl might be her long-lost sister.
The deputy was standing ready with a shovel, prepared to toss out the dirt that I dug up. “Seems to me like you've got all the hard work,” I told him, scraping a little more soil away from the half-buried fibula. “This looks like the easy part to me.”
He shook his head. “I'm just as happy not to have to dig up a dead woman's bones,” he said. “I'll leave that little job to you.”
The story of how Tent Girl's identity had finally been discovered was one that would make even the most arrogant investigator bow her head and give thanks for the dedicated efforts of interested civilians. Some twenty years after that well-driller had found the body, he'd moved to Livingston, Tennessee, where his daughter, Lori, started dating a seventeen-year-old boy named Todd Matthews. Todd hadn't even been born when Lori's father found the Tent Girl, but something about the anonymous young woman caught his imagination. Todd went on to marry Lori and his interest in Tent Girl increased, almost to the point of obsession. Eventually, he made it his life's work to discover Tent Girl's identity.