Death's Acre: Inside The Legendary Forensic Lab The Body Farm by Bill Bass (essential books to read txt) 📕

So by now I knew these bones were from a Negro female and I knew she was an adult. But was she eighteen or was she eighty? To find out, I looked to the cranial sutures.

Most people think of the cranium as a single dome of bone, and if you run your hands over the top of your head, it certainly feels like one piece. In reality, though, the cranial vault is a complex assembly of seven separate bones: the frontal bone, or forehead; a pair of parietal bones, which forms the skull’s upper sides and rear; the temporal bones, low on either side; the sphenoid, which forms the floor and part of the sides, and the occipital bone, the skull’s heavy back and base, which rests atop the first cervical vertebra and channels the spinal cord into the neck. (For a labeled diagram of the skull, see Appendix I, “Bones of the Human Skeleton.”)

The joints where the cranium’s seven bones meet are called sutures. The name refers to their appearance: They have a serrated or zigzag look, like the ragged stitches holding together Dr. Frankenstein’s monster. When we’re born, the joints are actually formed of cartilage, but as we age, the cartilage ossifies (turns to bone) and the sutures smooth over, all but disappearing by old age in many cases.

This woman’s coronal cranial suture—the one running across the top of her head—had begun to fuse; that meant she must have been at least twenty-eight, because generally that joint is one of the last to fuse. But the fact that it was only partially fused indicated that she was probably not far past thirty—probably thirty-four at the oldest, I estimated.

So far so good: I knew three of the Big Four—sex, race, and age. That left only stature. For centuries, artists and scientists have noticed that although people’s height or stature can vary enormously, their proportions—the ratio of leg length to total stature, for instance—are all pretty much the same. There’s a famous illustration in Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks showing a nude man drawn within a circle and a square; he’s drawn with four arms (one pair stretched out to the side horizontally, the other pair elevated so the fingertips are at the same height as the top of his head) and four legs (one pair with the feet together, the other pair with the feet spread several feet apart). In his trademark mirror-image script below the illustration, Leonardo adds these observations on human proportion developed by the architect Vitruvius: “The length of a man’s outspread arms is equal to his height. . . . The greatest width of the shoulders contains in itself the fourth part of man. From the elbow to the tip of the hand will be the fifth part of a man; and from the elbow to the angle of the armpit will be the eighth part of man. The whole hand will be the tenth part of the man.”*

In the 1950s anthropologist Mildred Trotter and statistician Goldine Gleser took that age-old notion of proportionality and conducted extensive skeletal research to refine its accuracy. After measuring hundreds of skeletons, Trotter and Gleser devised formulas that could extrapolate stature from the length of any of the body’s so-called long bones—the bones of the arms (humerus, radius, or ulna) or legs (femur, tibia, or fibula). The best results come from measuring the femur, the thighbone; that’s probably why the KBI brought me a femur.

Placing the bone on an osteometric board—a sliding wooden gizmo that resembles a pair of bookends joined by a yardstick—I measured its length at 47.2 centimeters. Then I plugged that number into Trotter and Gleser’s formula for Negroid females: (47.2 × 2.28) + 59.76. The resulting number, 167.38, was her stature in centimeters. Translating from metric measurements to English units told me that the woman was about five feet six inches, give or take an inch.

So now I knew all four: sex, female; race, black; age, thirty to thirty-four; height, five feet six inches. The next question would be harder to answer definitively: Who was she? Normally, when a skull comes in with a full set of teeth, there’s a reasonably good chance of making a positive identification. The trick is to match preexisting dental X rays with the corpse’s fillings or bridgework or other unique features in the shape, structure, or arrangement of the teeth. Of course, to do that, you’ve got to lay your hands on the dental X rays of missing persons who match the age range, sex, and race of your corpse. That isn’t always possible, but you’d be surprised how often a dentist is able to provide the records needed to cinch an identification.

In this case, though, there was a problem: This woman’s teeth showed no signs of any dental work. Lord knows, she could have used some dental work: She had large cavities in two of her lower teeth and in five of her upper teeth, and smaller cavities in most of her other teeth. Worse, one of her upper wisdom teeth had abscessed. The lack of dental care meant she was probably poor; the fact that she’d managed to hang on to her teeth so far, and had been able to withstand the pain of an abscess, suggested that she was one tough cookie. One other feature of her dentition was striking: When I fitted her mandible to her skull, I couldn’t quite get her lower jaw to line up beneath her upper jaw; the mandible skewed about a quarter-inch to the right, giving her a slight but distinctive crossbite that would have shown up whenever she flashed a big smile.

Lacking dental work, dental records, or photographs, I couldn’t make a positive identification of the body. However, I could make a presumptive, or probable, identification. A woman from Atchison, Kansas—a small town about twenty miles from where the body had been found—had been reported missing on August 10, some three weeks earlier. Her name was