Scene of the Crime (23 page)

And there are other reasons why charts may not be completely accurate. Rarely, dentists lie to their patients about how much work they've done. Christopher Joyce and Eric Stover, in
Witnesses From the Grave: The Stories Bones Tell,
quote Robert Kirschner, assistant medical examiner for Cook County, Illinois. He'd been working on identifying bodies from an airplane crash and referred to a very well-dressed young woman who'd had quite a lot of dental work done:

"It was very difficult to get records from her dentist____" When

they finally got hold of the records, it was obvious why the dentist had been reluctant: the records showed far less work than what the team found in the woman's teeth. "[H]e had obviously shown half of his dental work on his records so he could cut his income to the IRS. On the other hand, if you got a welfare dentist, you saw a person who actually has three fillings in their mouth, but the dental records would show ten. They were marking 'em down left and right so they could collect from Medicaid."

(101)

This section, quoted in the the
Wall Street Journal's
review of the book, illustrates one major problem. Try to make a positive identification from charts like those. It can't be done—unless the dentist has some sort of code to show what work s/he
really
did and is willing to admit it.

Age may also be a factor. If the last time this person went to the dentist was at the age of eight, and the person is now sixteen or seventeen, the chart cannot possibly be accurate. Too many deciduous teeth have been replaced by permanent teeth, which might have come in at a different angle from the baby teeth and will certainly have different problems.

Forensic dentistry has uses other than identifying corpses. In one case, a burglar who took one bite out of an apple and then left the apple at the scene was later definitely identified — after a suspect had been produced in other ways—by a cast of his teeth, which matched a cast of the bite taken from the apple. In a far more serious case, in which a murder victim had been repeatedly bitten, tooth marks identified the killer. Obviously, a nonsuspect ident in this type of case is impossible; the suspect must first be produced by other means of investigation.

Long-Bone X Rays

If for any reason both fingerprints and dental charts are unfeasible—e.g., the corpse had dentures (which are missing) and no hands; somebody has made a determined effort to avoid identification by removing head, hands and feet—the next step, if long-bone X rays of the suspected person exist, is long-bone X-ray comparison. Of course, the more X rays are available of arms and legs, the surer the identification is; however, a very detailed X ray of even one leg or one arm may be sufficient for a firm identification.

Dealing With Skeletal Remains

When working with unknown remains, investigators follow a protocol, apparently developed at the time of the Parkman-Webster case, when one medical school professor murdered another and was convicted on testimony from the janitor (see discussion of this case later in this chapter).

Briefly, the protocol asks medical experts to determine as much as possible about the remains, beginning with the broadest category (human or animal? one person or several?) and gradually narrowing to age, sex, anomalies that might be used for identification, and finally focusing in on time (as narrowly as possible, realizing at times determining the century might be the best possible) and cause of death, if it can be determined. For a more detailed explanation of the protocol, see Joyce and Stover, pp. 52ff.

Obviously, the more there is left, the more likely these questions are to be answerable. Working with a skull alone, even the best pathologist is likely to mistake the sex as often as 25 percent of the time; and as races become more and more mixed through interracial marriage and other interracial sexual contact, it becomes less and less possible to distinguish race. If the entire skeleton is present, handedness is easy to determine, because the right-handed person's right arm tends to be slightly larger and vice versa (apparently because of more use rather than of anything innate). Sex in an adult is fairly easy to determine if pelvic bones are present, but even then there is as much as a 10 percent chance of error. Sex in child skeletal remains is extremely difficult, as before puberty there is very little difference. If the long bones remain, height is fairly easy to determine. Weight may be somewhat more difficult, particularly if the person was extremely overweight.

Cause of death in skeletal remains may be easy to determine, if a bullet, knife or arrowhead remains in the area, or if marks where a bullet ricocheted off a rib are visible, or if the bones themselves are visibly damaged. But soft-tissue damage will be impossible to recognize in a skeleton.

What this means to you is that in your writing, you may determine how much is left of the decedent and how much your fictional pathologist will be able to determine from the remains.

Reconstructing the Face

If you can find an English translation of I.A. Gerasimov's
The Face Finder,
it's well worth reading. Gerasimov, a forensic anthropologist working in Moscow, is capable of reconstructing the face from the skull. He has determined that the ways that muscles attach to the skull can be used to figure out depth of tissue at different places on the face, thus overcoming the problem of determining the person's probable facial fullness. If this problem is difficult to envision, think of someone you know who has recently gained, or lost, quite a lot of weight. Could you be certain of recognizing an extremely heavy person from a reconstruction of what that person's face would look like if the person were slim? With some people, there is little problem, but most of us have had the experience I had when I was nineteen—encountering a friend who had graduated a year before I did. She had been heavy all the way through school, but after graduation she moved away and embarked on a long-range weight-loss program. Two years later, when she and I met, she had to introduce herself—I hadn't the slightest idea who she was. Her slim face could not be recognized from her heavy face.

Gerasimov has worked in many criminal cases; he's also been involved in reconstructing the faces of historical figures whose skulls could be recovered and of whom authentic portraits are not known. The photographs in his book of facial reconstructions of such people as Ivan the Terrible and Attila the Hun are fascinating and at times extremely revealing.

Martin Cruz Smith's novel
Gorky Park
was based on the work of Gerasimov, and the description Smith gave of Gerasimov's work is far more detailed than this book has the space to present. Smith wrote the book partly under the assumption that no one else in the world was doing the same sort of work. This fact, to him, meant that he had to travel to the Soviet Union to do research, and had to set the book in the Soviet Union. What began, in his mind, as another mystery of the type he was already writing turned into a personal and fictional odyssey. The book, which took more than seven years to write, catapulted the writer from the status of barely making a living (among other things, he had worked as an ice cream man) to the status of millionaire.

And there's one very interesting thing I thought you'd like to know: Smith was incorrect in his assumption that nobody but Gerasimov was reconstructing faces from skulls. William Krogman of the FBI was one of the pioneers of the technique, and the Oklahoma team of Clyde Snow and Betty Gatliff work all over the world. Similar work, using photos as well as sculpture, has been going on in England for more than fifty years. Which brings to mind an interesting question: If he'd known the truth, would he have ever written
Gorky Park!
Well, if you've read
Gorky Park,
most likely you, like me, are glad Smith knew about Gerasimov's cases but not, perhaps, about Buck Ruxton.

Though to be completely fair, I should add that Smith might have known about the Buck Ruxton case but decided it was immaterial. The techniques used were somewhat different.

Who Was Buck Ruxton?

AParsi, he was born Bukhtyar Sustomji Ratanji Hakim. His medical training was in Bombay, but when he moved to England, he

Anglicized his name. In 1928, at the age of thirty, he entered into a common-law marriage with Isabella Van
Ess,
and by 1930, the Ruxtons were settled in Lancaster.

The marriage was a stormy one. According to later reports, Ruxton was convinced his wife was cheating on him; Mrs. Ruxton several times reported to police that he was physically abusing her. In 1935, Mrs. Ruxton and her twenty-year-old maid Mary Rogerson were reported missing. Ruxton maintained that his wife had left him for another man; he had no explanation for why the maid also was missing. His explanations of the blood on carpeting and clothing also were somewhat frail.

In late September of 1935, portions of two bodies were found in and near the Annan River between Carlisle and Edinburgh. All identifying characteristics, including fingertips, eyes, and front teeth, had been removed. There is a slight possibility that they might not have been connected with Mrs. Ruxton and Miss Rogerson, except that portions of the body were wrapped in a copy of a newspaper sold only in Lancaster and nearby More-cambe.

When questioned, Ruxton continued to insist that his wife had left him and he didn't know what had happened to the maid. But the circumstances were suspicious: Mrs. Ruxton had buck teeth, and the teeth of the older woman were missing. Miss Rogerson had a squint in one eye, and the eyes of the younger woman were missing. And there was still all that blood on the carpet.

Pathologists from the universities in Edinburgh and Glasgow examined the bodies. Enough was left of the dermis to permit a fingerprint examination of Miss Rogerson. To identify the other body, pathologists seized photographs of Mrs. Ruxton. Then, from the same angle, they photographed the unknown skull. The two photographs were then superimposed and rephotographed. The fit was perfect.

Was the body indeed that of Mrs. Ruxton? Was Dr. Buck Ruxton guilty of murder? The question was for a jury to decide. Ruxton continued to deny everything, calling his accusation "absolute bunkum" (Gaute and Odell 200). The jury did decide; Ruxton was hanged on May 12, 1936, at Strangeways Prison. It was later revealed that he had written and signed a brief confession on October 14, only one day after his arrest.

Strange Identifications

In some situations, positive identification may be impossible, but because of surrounding circumstances, a presumptive identification that will be sufficient grounds for a murder charge may be made. John Haigh, English murderer of the year in 1949, misunderstanding the meaning of the term
corpus delicti,
dissolved the body of his victim Olive Durand-Deacon in forty gallons of sulphuric acid. Her dentist's identification of her plastic denture (still intact) coupled with other evidence was sufficient to lead to his conviction and his execution on August 10, 1949, in Wandsworth Prison. Numerous books have been written about this case, which is considered one of the classics of criminology.

Similarly, on December 21,1957, con man L. Ewing Scott was convicted in Los Angeles, California, of the murder of his wife Evelyn on or about May 16, 1955, even though all that was ever found of her was her denture and some of her medicine, both dumped near the incinerator of the Scotts' next-door neighbors. A fascinating book,
Corpus Delicti,
by Diane Wagner, details this case and the painstaking investigation that led to Scott's conviction.

The Parkman-Websfer Case

And there is the one that has been called "America's classic murder." It happened in staid Boston, in November 1849. Dr. John White Webster of the Massachusetts Medical College, a Harvard graduate, owed money to Dr. John Parkman, another professor at the medical college. When Dr. Parkman tried to collect, Dr. Webster knocked him in the head with a stick of kindling wood ... and who knows better how to dispose of a body than a doctor?

Webster dissected Parkman's body and burned the pieces in his assay oven. He probably would have gotten away with it except for Ephraim Littlefield, the college janitor, who remembered how hot the wall got behind the oven the day Dr. Parkman vanished. Webster got nervous; he gave the janitor a turkey for a Thanksgiving present. But he had not been noted for generosity to the help, and that only made Littlefield more suspicious. Finally Littlefield, knowing that for a janitor to accuse a professor without evidence would be futile, pried out some brick and found portions of a body. Now he had something to tell the police.

Webster, of course, insisted the body portions were from a cadaver he'd been working on. But even Webster's imagination could not dream up a reply when police found Parkman's teeth in Webster's assay oven. And one professor was hanged on August 30, 1850, for bludgeoning to death another professor, with a conviction based on the testimony of the janitor... not quite what you'd expect in Boston in the mid-nineteenth century.

How do we know so much about what actually happened?

Just prior to his execution, Webster confessed.

What Is a Corpus Delicti?

More than a few murderers have come to grief because of their misunderstanding of this legal term. Knowing that a case cannot be tried without a
corpus delicti,
and seeing the word
corpus,
which is so similar to
corpse,
they leap to the conclusion that nobody can be tried for murder if the corpse cannot be located or identified.