Praise the Lord, my idea worked, and soon we were ready to move the body. But now there was a new problem: The corpse had hardened and warped over time, so that parts of it were wedged between the pile of wood and the roof of the mine. With little room to maneuver in the confined space, I lay on my back and pushed up against the mummified torso from below, so that Charles could quickly slide out some of the heavy mine timber that had been supporting the victim's shoulders. Then I had to slide over and do the same thing to the lower legs, which were still wrapped in the sleeping bag. Somehow we managed to slide the body into the body bag that Charles had laid out on the floor of the mine.
Now Charles took over. “Okay, men. The doc here has done her part. Now we need you to help us get this fellow out of here.”
I took a secret pleasure in seeing that everyone else was as eager as I was to leave, springing into action before Charles had even finished speaking. Luckily, someone had thought to bring some rope, which they tied into two loops at the end of the body bag in order to drag it through the shaft. Since there wasn't enough room to stand up and carry it, each man took turns slowly dragging it behind him as we crawled out of the shaft. When we reached the place where we could stand up again, our pace quickened as four men each grabbed a corner of the bag and carried it the rest of the way.
I breathed a sigh of relief when we got outside, silently vowing that I would never go into another coal mine. If there was another body down there, the mine inspectors or the coroner could bring it out to me.
Getting the body out of the mine felt like a huge achievement, but we still had to establish a positive ID, even though the state police and the coroner were sure that this was Everett Hall. I felt pretty confident, though, especially since Charles had brought a half-inch-thick stack of x-rays over to my lab in Frankfort. With all that medical data, it seemed pretty certain that we could quickly confirm his identity.
At first everything went smoothly. The pathologist conducted an autopsy that revealed a match between our victim's remains and the description on Everett Hall's missing person report, including the presence of a partially amputated foot that had healed quite nicely. Then it was my turn. I wheeled the gurney into the radiology room. I was fairly certain that once I took my first x-ray of the victim's spine, I'd be able to match my work to the films in Hall's medical records. I went to stand behind the lead-lined protective barriers in our lab's x-ray suite-built to hospital specification-and took my first shot.
It didn't match.
Okay, maybe I'd just gotten the angle wrong. I took another look at the films in the medical records, readjusted the body, and tried again.
Again, it didn't match.
I kept taking shot after shot until, I had taken more than ten x-rays of the victim's spine. No matter how I tried, I couldn't get a match.
When you're looking at antemortem spinal x-rays, you always start with the most current ones, because vertebrae tend to change shape slightly over the years, under the pressures of stress and advancing age. As time goes by, small overgrowths of bone called “lipping” commonly occur around the edges of each back bone. In this case, the x-rays in Hall's medical file showed significant lipping and partial collapse of one vertebra, but our victim had neither. Sometimes a person gets surgery to correct such problems, but there was no evidence that Hall had done that.
Was it possible that we didn't have Hall after all? Then why had this body appeared in exactly the same spot, under the same bizarre conditions, that had been described by Mrs. Hall's boyfriend?
Maybe the hospital had mislabeled these last few x-rays and put them in the wrong jacket? But when I looked carefully at the many x-rays in the envelope, every single one had the same name and patient number, affixed at the time of each x-ray exam. For three days, I tried to come up with a logical explanation for the discrepancy, while the authorities back in Pikeville grew increasingly impatient for the positive ID that would enable them to arrest their suspects and charge them with the murder of Everett Hall. In frustration, I went to Dr. Tracey Corey, one of the pathologists in our Louisville office, who thought a bit and then asked me whether Hall had been on Medicaid. When I told her that he was, she suggested that I compare all the x-rays in his file to one another.
Sure enough, they didn't match. It seemed that Hall's file contained the x-rays of three separate people-all listed under the same name and patient identification number. Apparently, Hall had been passing around his Medicaid card to others who also reaped the benefits of free medical care at taxpayers' expense. I had to go back through the entire file, all the way to 1986, to find some x-rays that actually matched our victim's spine.
I learned a valuable lesson from Hall's case, because I have since encountered three similar cases of medical fraud while trying to identify homicide victims from x-ray comparisons. I guess when you're trying to establish a positive ID, you can never be too careful.
Sometimes the evidence you need for a victim ID has been destroyed, either by accident or by the deliberate efforts of a murderer. In a case I later thought of as “Ashes to Ashes,” I had to go to extraordinary lengths to recover human remains from fire-related debris-a painstaking process, but one that paid off in the end.
Gary and Sophie Stephens were a well-respected and popular couple who lived in the Coldiron community in Kentucky 's Harlan County. They vanished shortly after an evening church service in December 1997. Although their son, a U.S. postal worker, lived with them, he claimed to have no knowledge of their whereabouts.
Authorities duly got a search warrant and examined the house, where they found minute traces of blood spatter and a single bullet hole in the wall. An all-out effort by the community sent searchers into the mountains, forests, and coal mines throughout the county for a nonstop three-day search.
Finally, a neighbor found the Stephenses' abandoned pickup truck behind a tobacco barn. Detectives had it loaded onto a flatbed truck and taken to a commercial garage, where they went over the truck with a fine-tooth comb. When they found what appeared to be fragments of burned bone behind the toolbox, they called me.
A two-hour drive got me to the garage in Loyall where they had delivered the truck. No one answered my knock on the door, but after I blew the horn of my van a few times, the garage door opened and several state troopers signaled for me to drive right inside. No wonder they hadn't heard me knock-a long cylindrical kerosene heater was roaring in the center of the room, and the guys had a radio blaring to try to drown out the noise. The sound was not pleasant, but the warmth certainly was. It was now seven p.m. and already well below freezing.
“Glad you got here so quick,” said a detective I knew only as Smitty. “Philip's out by the river, but he'll be back in a few minutes.”
I had never worked a case in Harlan County, but I knew Coroner Philip Bianchi from some of the classes I had taught for coroners in the Commonwealth, and I recognized most of the officers from having worked dozens of cases in the surrounding region. After the obligatory handshakes all around, Smitty helped me out of my coat and directed me to a pickup covered with a blue tarp.
“Philip asked if you would go ahead and look at the stuff in the truck as soon as you got here. We need to make sure these are human bones.”
Indeed they were-incinerated human bone fragments mixed in with the ashes and dirt that had sifted into the corners of the truck bed. I had the impression that the truck bed had been swept out, but not completely, leaving these bits and pieces behind.