Tatalovich worked to keep the process as dignified as possible. Someone said prayers over the 911th’s PA system. Once the body parts had been identified, chaplains escorted the remains to a hearse. Tatalovich made sure that the passengers’ bloodstained money was replaced with new dollar bills from a local bank before wallets were returned to family members.
Each day a committee of pathologists met around a conference table to decide when they had enough information to identify someone. Most were identified through dental records or fingerprints, or both. If those methods didn’t work, pathologists moved to more creative criteria—using skin color, the serial number of a hip replacement, wires in chest bones from open-heart surgery, or distinctive jewelry found on the body parts. The death certificates all said the same thing: “Accidental death due to severe blunt force trauma.”
The process went slowly. A week after the crash, Joan’s body still had not been identified.
To build an airtight case—if he ever came up with the cause—Haueter had to rule out every other possibility, no matter how far-fetched. So it was standard procedure to run drug and alcohol tests on the pilots. The tests nearly always were negative, but they had to be done to assure people that the pilots were not intoxicated. The tests were easy to perform as long as the pilots’ bodies were intact.
In this crash, there were no bodies. Only parts. And Haueter had to be certain that the parts he was testing truly came from Emmett and Germano. Fingerprints and dental records had been sufficient to identify most passengers, but Haueter wanted to use DNA tests on the pilots to be 100 percent sure about the drug and alcohol results.
Genetic code known as DNA, which is unique in every human being, had been used to identify murderers and war victims. But DNA testing was relatively new in the early 1990s and had not been widely used for plane crashes. It seemed to be a perfect solution to Haueter’s dilemma, however, because the tests could positively identify the pilots’ remains.
The coroners from the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology who were helping with the investigation had body tissue that they believed came from the pilots—part of the upper left arm and back muscle for Germano and the back muscle for Emmett. But they had to find other blood or tissue from each pilot or a relative so they could match the sample with one that was known to have his DNA. Emmett had no children, but his mother was still alive and her DNA would be similar to his. She agreed to give a blood sample to a local doctor. When the experts compared her blood with the DNA from the back muscle, it matched well enough that the experts were sure the muscle had come from Emmett.
The NTSB ran into difficulty getting a match for Germano, however. His parents were no longer alive, and his wife did not want to provide blood samples from their children. Then someone in the investigation remembered a foot that had been found in the cockpit area. The FBI could match it with a footprint taken of Germano when he was in the air force. Unfortunately, by the time the pathologists realized it could be used for DNA, the foot had been placed in a casket to be sent to Germano’s family. Haueter quickly called Tatalovich.
“I need a piece of the foot,” he said.
They just closed the casket, Tatalovich told him.
“I need a piece of that foot. Open it and clip off whatever the AFIP guys need and take it to them.” Haueter could not believe his own words. He was making decisions about a dead man’s foot.
Tatalovich was concerned that he wouldn’t have much to send back in the casket to the family.
“Don’t take out the whole foot, just take off a little chunk,” Haueter said. Tatalovich agreed.
When they compared Germano’s foot with the footprint, it matched. Then they compared the DNA from the foot with the muscle. It matched.
The muscle specimens for both pilots were then sent to the FAA’s Civil Aeromedical Institute in Oklahoma City for analysis; no drugs were found. The tests disclosed a small amount of alcohol in both samples, but that would have been caused by the natural chemical changes in the muscle since the crash. Haueter was now sure that the pilots had not been intoxicated at the time of the crash.
8. THE PSYCHIC AND THE DRUG DEALER
Paul Olson, the man who sat in Seat 17F, was a convicted drug dealer. He had started selling marijuana as a teenager and then switched to cocaine when marijuana sales declined. He was a smart businessman in the thriving South Florida market, adjusting his product line when demand changed. He was a wholesaler. Suppliers dropped bundles of marijuana or cocaine a few miles offshore in the Atlantic Ocean, and Olson fished them out and sold them to other dealers. He was said to have been a millionaire by age twenty-one.
But the lavish life came to an end. Olson got caught, was convicted, and had to serve five years in federal prison. When he got out, he said he had turned over a new leaf and had become a law-abiding citizen. He took a job as a driver with a seafood company. His only link to the past was a requirement that he testify against other drug dealers.
When federal prosecutors called him in the summer about testifying against the alleged leader of a notorious Chicago drug ring, Olson told his fiancée that he was nervous about it. “I thought that part of my life was behind me,” he said. Yet he seemed relaxed when he arrived at the Chicago offices of the U.S. attorney on September 8. He wore a T-shirt and a baseball cap. He had a good tan. He and the prosecutors talked for a few hours, discussing his possible testimony, but they decided he wouldn’t be much help. The meeting ended early, and Olson, who had been scheduled on another flight, was rebooked on Flight 427.
After the crash, an assistant U.S. attorney called USAir and told them about Olson. Haueter got the news a day or two later but was assured by the FBI that Olson would not have been a target for a hit man. He was small potatoes. He was never part of the Witness Protection Program, in which the federal government finds new homes and identities for key witnesses. It was simply that the terms of his drug conviction required him to testify in other cases.
But Olson made for a great conspiracy theory. Maybe someone had blown up the plane to silence him! As the week wore on without the NTSB finding an apparent cause, the conspiracy theories picked up steam. That’s how a small but vocal segment of people deals with uncertainty. In the absence of concrete answers, they blame the forces of evil—the Mob, the Trilateral Commission, the CIA. And just for good measure, they say the federal government covered up the whole thing.
The press, which was getting less and less from the nightly NTSB briefings, pounced on the story, FLIGHT 427 VICTIM LINKED TO DRUG CASH, read the headline in the Chicago Tribune. The Gannett News Service called him a “mystery federal witness” and quoted attorney F. Lee Bailey as saying, “I believe a bomb caused it, particularly after I found out what went on in the cockpit. In my view, in the totality of what we know so far, the scenario is consistent with a bomb. I think two bombs might have gone off in sequence.” The bomb theory was fueled by a New York Times story the same day that quoted an unnamed “aviation official in Washington” who described a mysterious “whoomp, whoomp” sound followed by a surprised grunt from one of the pilots and a voice in the cockpit asking, “Jeez, what was that?” (That mistake in the Times story—Germano actually asked, “What the hell is this?”—was typical of press coverage in the early days after a crash. Reporters were so eager to get scoops that they relied on anonymous sources—in this case someone with a secondhand account of the tape who got important facts wrong.)