When they pulled up the door, they found a woman’s arm partially covered by the navy blue sleeve of a flight attendant’s uniform. Right beside the arm was a purse. An ALPA investigator opened the purse and found the woman’s passport and wallet. He opened the wallet and saw the cheerful picture of April Lynn Slater, one of the flight attendants. Suddenly death on the hill wasn’t anonymous anymore.
Supplee looked around in hopes that someone from the coroner’s team was still nearby, but they were all gone. It was late afternoon now and everyone was leaving. Supplee realized he would have to leave the arm on the hill for the night. It bothered him that it would be left behind in the darkness until the coroners retrieved it the next day.
A few hours later at the nightly progress meeting, he broke down crying when he told the investigators from the flight attendants union what he had found. When he returned to his hotel room, Supplee called his mother and told her about the horror of the site. She couldn’t understand why he had volunteered for the job. “Why are you there?” she asked. “Why are you putting yourself through this?”
“I just couldn’t imagine not being here,” he said. “I have to do this.” He felt he was making a contribution to safety. That was the paradox about the whole ordeal. Crashes made flying safer.
Many investigators coped with the horror by building imaginary walls. Instead of looking at the body parts scattered around the site, they focused on the wreckage. Haueter told them, “Concentrate on metal, not on people.” Supplee followed that advice but found that he still got upset at the end of the day, when he went back to his hotel room and collapsed on the bed. He would turn on the TV, hoping to forget about the crash, but it would be on every channel.
As the hill got soaked by storms and then baked in the sun, it took on the horrible odor of rotting flesh. Many investigators put cologne, orange juice, or Vicks VapoRub on their surgical masks to counteract the stench. Haueter put a sweet-smelling ointment called Tiger Balm in his moustache.
Supplee was haunted by the sharp smell of bleach. Each time the investigators left the crash site, they had to scrub their hands in a bleach solution to wash away any germs that might be present in the body parts. Supplee then washed his hands with soap to get rid of the bleach smell, but it would not go away. He smelled it every time he put a forkful of food in his mouth, every time he brushed his teeth. The Clorox seemed to be deep in his pores. He took shower after shower, but the smell lingered, triggering flashbacks of the carnage on the hill.
John Cox’s biggest emotional challenge was picking through the cockpit. It was as if someone had destroyed the office where he worked every day. He did not know Emmett or Germano, but they were all part of the pilot brotherhood. Cox found skull fragments and parts of the pilots’ brains on the autopilot panel, but he did not get emotional. He also found a finger with a ring still attached, but even that didn’t bother him. The tragedy did not affect him until he pulled away a thicket of wiring and found Emmett’s epaulets, the shoulder stripes that pilots wear to denote whether they are a captain or a first officer. The epaulets were still attached to Emmett’s shirt, which was splattered with mud.
“One of ours,” Cox said sadly. They had found Emmett, but it just as easily could have been anyone from ALPA. It could have been Cox himself.
He suggested that they take a ten-minute break, but the other investigators wanted to keep working. Cox said he desperately needed a break. He walked away, tears streaming down his cheeks.
The emotion erupted again during dinner at Mario’s, an Italian restaurant that was a favorite of the pilots. Cox tried to convince his ALPA colleagues that he could work on both crash investigations—Flight 1016, the Charlotte accident that had occurred two months earlier, and the one in Hopewell. But the other union members were skeptical.
“You can’t do this,” one of the union officials said. “It’s just too much.”
“Let me find a way,” Cox said.
They talked about what a challenging job it was. Cox found it rewarding—the hunt for clues, the idea that he could help solve the mystery of a crash, and the belief that he could actually make flying safer. But he was overwhelmed. He was working in a steamy rubber suit all day long and was getting only three or four hours of sleep each night. He started crying, right there in the corner booth at Mario’s.
“All right,” he said finally. “You’re going to have to take me off of 1016.”
The next day, he felt invigorated. The Mario’s episode had cleansed him.
“I hit the wall last night,” he told his colleagues. “But I’m better now.”
Many people in the Pittsburgh area regarded Beaver County as a Podunk kind of place. Ever since the steel mills shut down, it had been a bedroom community that emptied every morning as people drove to jobs in neighboring Allegheny County, which included Pittsburgh. Allegheny was bigger, richer, more sophisticated, and had the airport, the museums, the colleges, the Steelers, and the Pirates. Beaver County had the Hopewell High School Vikings.
No one expected the county coroner’s office to be especially sophisticated at body identification procedures. The office was a throwback to the 1960s, with old furniture and a creepy opaque-glass door with CORONER in black letters—it looked like something from a Hitchcock movie.
In a typical year, the tiny office did only 100 autopsies. Two or three of those were unidentified bodies that were found in the woods, but otherwise the coroners knew the name of every dead body they saw. Suddenly they had 132 victims, with bodies torn apart worse than anyone had ever seen, and they had to identify them all.
The coroner’s office sent six teams to the site to photograph and document the remains. Figuring that people sitting in different parts of the plane would be found in the same areas, the teams carefully recorded the location of each body part on the hill. They used a grid system of letters and numbers to indicate the placement, such as “IW32” or “KW920.” Unfortunately, there proved to be no correlation between the location of the body parts and where passengers sat on the plane. Bodies had been blown in every direction.
The bagged body parts were stored in a refrigerated truck on the hill until they could be driven to the morgue at the 911th Airlift Wing, an Air Force Reserve unit at the Pittsburgh airport. A giant hangar normally used for big C-130 transport planes had been appropriated for the massive task of identifying the dead.
Wayne Tatalovich, the county coroner, accepted help from virtually anyone who offered—the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, the FBI, and local hospitals and dental schools. As the Ziploc bags arrived, they were X-rayed to find any wreckage that had been mixed with the remains. An FAA bomb expert examined each body part for evidence of explosives. If there were bones in the bag, an anthropologist tried to determine if they were from a male or a female and attempted to estimate the person’s age. Teeth were sent to dentists, who compared them against records submitted by the victims’ families. Fingers went to an FBI team in the hangar that tried to take fingerprints.
The scale of the effort was staggering. There were 132 people on the plane, but 1,800 Ziploc bags. Workers on the coroner’s teams made lots of mistakes. They wrote down the wrong letters for the grids where body parts were found. Their logs and photographs were inconsistent and incomplete. Their computers kept breaking down. Some were using Macintosh computers, others were using PCs, and the lists could not be transferred from one computer to the other. Volunteers who logged the findings into the database made repeated errors. In the space where they were supposed to list which personal effects were found with the remains, they often wrote, “Yes.”