Within the human body are 206 bones. In the average male they weigh twelve pounds; in the average female, ten pounds. Together, they form a remarkable and, to the trained eye, informative framework of the body they once supported. They can show how the person lived; any debilitating illnesses the person had, such as rickets or polio; healed fractures; whether the person was right- or left-handed; and even possible clues as to occupation (for instance, waitresses show signs of their arm strength in their bones; their strong side is more developed than the other side).

Several basic questions arise with the discovery of any skeletal remains:

1. What was the age of the person at the time of death? This is a complex and often vexatious subject (see the George Shotton case on page 152).

2. What was the sex of the person? The clearest indicators are the skulland the pelvis. The male pelvis is narrow and steep, whereas the female pelvis is much broader and shallower (a divergence further accentuated by childbirth). Skull variation is most noticeable in the supraorbital ridge and the nuchal crest, both of which are larger in the male.

3. What was the person's race? Using variation in the shape of the eyesockets and the nose, forensic anthropologists can categorize people into one of three racial groups: Mongoloid (Asian), Negroid (African), and Caucasoid (European). In Negroids and Mongoloids, the ridge of the nose is often broad in relation to its height; in Caucasoids, it is narrower.

4. What was the person's height? When a corpse is intact, measurement presents little difficulty, but in cases of dismemberment, when a body or skeleton is incomplete, a measurement can be calculated because of a fairly standard relationship between the length of the limbs and the total height of the body. This relationship was first noted by Dr. Mildred Trotter, a professor of anatomy at Washington University in St Louis. After World War II, Trotter worked for the U.S. Army in Hawaii, helping repatriate the remains of servicemen killed in action. By studying the long bones of hundreds of servicemen, Trotter devised a formula that was generally accurate within plus or minus three centimeters. For a male Caucasoid the formula is:

These figures are for dry bones (without cartilage), and measurements must be made using a special osteometric board, not a tape measure. Obviously, the more bones that are available, the greater the accuracy. Additional tables that attempt to indicate the corpse's build (that is, slender, medium, or heavy) are also available. The most practical applications for these calculations have been in passenger identification after airline disasters, but as the following cases demonstrate, bones and the information they can divulge have prompted some of forensic science's greatest moments. 

Michel Eyraud

DATE: 1889

LOCATION: Lyons, France

SIGNIFICANCE: This case was a triumph for perhaps the greatest of the early forensic scientists.

Investigating complaints about a foul riverside stench at Millery, a small town in central France, a council worker traced the smell to a canvas sack hidden among some bushes. Hesitantly, for the odor was abominable, he loosened the ties, only to reel back in horror as the rotted remains of a darkbearded man slid into view. The body was taken to the Lyons city morgue, a rancid barge anchored in the middle of the River Rhône. There, on August 13, 1889, Dr. Paul Bernard unpeeled the oil burlap that shrouded the corpse and began his examination. Severe putrefaction made it difficult to state any assertions with certainty, but he determined that death had been due to strangulation and put the victim's age at thirty-five.

Four days later, the discovery of a splintered wooden trunk that, judging from its smell, had held the dead body added to the mystery. A railway label indicated that it had been shipped from Paris to Lyons-Perrache on July 27.

News of the gruesome find made headlines all across France and reached the desk of Assistant Superintendent Marie-François Goron at the Sûreté in Paris. He went at once to the missing-person files and found that on Saturday, July 27, a man had reported the disappearance of his brother-inlaw, Toussaint-Augsent Gouffé, a forty-nine-year-old bailiff and notorious philanderer last seen the previous day. Goron had visited Gouffé's office in the rue Montmartre. The janitor reported hearing a man go upstairs at nine o'clock on Friday evening and had assumed it was Gouffé. But when the man came downstairs and hurried off, he had realized it was a stranger. In Gouffé's office, Goron had found nothing untoward except for a pile of spent matches on the floor. Dismissing the disappearance as most likely another interlude in Gouffé's eclectic sex life, Goron had left.

But now he wasn't so sure. Neither was he convinced when Gouffé's brother-in-law visited the Lyons morgue, glanced briefly at the corpse, and shook his head, saying that the missing man had chestnut hair, while that of the corpse was black.

Wrong Corpse?

Goron's stubbornness took him to Lyons, despite the advice of the examining magistrate, who assured him that the case was almost solved. A cabdriver had told the police of driving three men and a heavy trunk from the Paris train to a spot near Millery. Yet within hours of his arrival, Goron exposed the cabdriver as a publicity-seeking liar, and the investigation was resumed.

When Goron interviewed Dr. Bernard, the physician defiantly brandished a test tube of hair taken from the unknown man, adamant that the corpse could not possibly be that of Gouffé, because the hair color was entirely different. Bombast turned to disbelief as he watched Goron immerse the hair in distilled water, removing the grime and blackened blood, allowing a distinctive chestnut color to emerge. At Goron's behest, the corpse was exhumed from the cemetery of La Guillotiere and delivered to Jean Alexandre Eugéne Lacassagne, professor of forensic medicine at the University of Lyons and a true pioneer of scientific criminal investigation.

With decomposition so far advanced, Lacassagne devoted most of his attention to the bones and hair. He spent days paring off the maggoty flesh until just a skeleton was left. At once his expert eye picked out an irregularity. A deformity of the right knee had affected the bones to which the muscles are attached; any wasting of those muscles would probably result in a limp. A family member confirmed that Gouffé had fallen from a horse in childhood and had limped ever after. As to the cause of death, Lacassagne agreed that it was strangulation—damage to the thyroid cartilage was manifest—but he thought the signs were consistent with manual strangulation rather than Bernard's verdict of garroting with a ligature. Another point of contention was the age of the corpse. Bernard had guessed thirty-five; after examining the teeth, Lacassagne put it at closer to fifty (Gouffé had been forty-nine). Finally, microscopic comparison of Gouffé's hair, taken from his hairbrush, to that of the corpse convinced Lacassagne that this was Gouffé.

Vindicated, but still with a killer to find, Goron returned to Paris. Never a slave to convention, he offered money from his own pocket as an inducement to loosen tongues. It worked. A friend of Gouffé's described seeing him in a bar with an ugly, balding fellow called Michel Eyraud two days before the murder; also present was Eyraud's attractive young mistress, Gabrielle Bompard. Apparently, Eyraud, who had convictions for pimping, was now nowhere to be found.

Second Trunk

In hopes of jogging memories, Goron hired a carpenter to make a copy of the rotten trunk, which was then exhibited publicly. An estimated thirty-five thousand people trooped by, while photographs were circulated around the world. Within days, Goron received a letter from a Frenchman living in London. He told how the previous July, a man accompanied by his daughter, subsequently identified as Eyraud and Bompard, had taken lodgings with him; before returning to Paris they had bought a trunk very like the one shown in the photograph.

Despite massive newspaper coverage, neither Eyraud nor Bompard was heard from until January 1890, when out of the blue, Eyraud wrote Goron a letter from New York. In it he protested his own innocence but viciously turned on Gabrielle, whom he accused of the murder.

A few days later, this bizarre tale took yet another twist, when Mlle. Bompard appeared at Goron's office to divulge an astonishing saga of greed, sex, and murder. During an assignation with Gouffé at her apartment, she had coquettishly coiled a sash from her dressing gown around his neck, then draped it up to an overhead pulley. This was the signal for Eyraud to leap out from behind a curtain and begin hauling the startled bailiff skyward. But the knot had slipped, and Eyraud had had to strangle Gouffé with his powerful hands. The intent had been robbery but they had overlooked several thousand francs hidden behind some papers. The next day they had taken the trunk to Lyons and then had fled to America. According to Mlle. Bompard, when Eyraud announced his intention to reprise their murderous performance, she had returned to Paris.

On May 19, 1890, Eyraud was captured in Havana, Cuba, and extradited to France. As expected, the trial caused a sensation. Few co-defendants have attacked each other quite so virulently as Eyraud and Bompard, drowning their defense in a sea of acrimony. The outcome was never in doubt, only the sentence. Gallic courts have traditionally treated attractive female defendants with great leniency, and Bompard was no exception. She received twenty years in jail; Eyraud lost his head to the guillotine.

Conclusion

Had Eyraud and Bompard shipped their trunk to anywhere else in France, they would, in all probability, have escaped detection. But they chose Lyons, and that brought the trunk and its contents under the scrutiny of Alexandre Lacassagne. His identification of Gouffé's corpse, though an outstanding forensic triumph, was just one of many over a long career (he died in 1921). Before anyone else, he recognized the significance of striations on bullets; he was a leader in bloodstain analysis at crime scenes; later, he undertook groundbreaking research into the criminal psyche. It is a body of work without parallel, and it fully entitles Lacassagne to be called the father of scientific criminal investigation. 

Adolphe Luetgert

DATE: 1897

LOCATION: Chicago, Illinois

SIGNIFICANCE: This crime rocked America just as science was beginning to gain a foothold in the courtroom.

As the nineteenth century drew to a close, Chicago's population was multiplying at a prodigious rate. For the industrious, the rewards were high, and by 1897, Adolphe Luetgert, a stocky middle-aged German, had carved out a comfortable living as proprietor of a sausage factory on the north side of the city. Unfortunately, success at work did not translate into happiness at home. An inveterate rake, Luetgert spent more time entertaining various mistresses than he did at home. But a reconciliation seemed to be under way when, on May 1, he and his wife Louisa set out for an evening stroll. It was the last time anyone saw the petite Mrs. Luetgert alive.

Three days later, her brother called at the Luetgert house, anxious to learn Louisa's whereabouts. Luetgert shrugged off his concerns, slyly hinting that Louisa had eloped with a lover. Such a suggestion, absurd and entirely out of character, drove angry family members to the police. A search of local sewers and waterways yielded nothing, and on May 15, they turned their attentions to the sausage factory. A nervous watchman led them down to the cellar, home to three large steam vats. One, containing a malodorous reddish-brown liquid, was emptied and its contents strained through three gunny sacks. Among the residue were what appeared to be particles of bone; they also found two gold rings, the larger of which was engraved "L. L."

More ominous material was found around the vat: a twelve-inch strand of hair, half of an upper false tooth, a piece of cloth, some string, a scrap of leather, and a hairpin. In the smokehouse, among the ashes, fragments of charred bone and corset steel strongly suggested that Luetgert had first attempted to boil his wife to nothing in the sausage vat and then had burned what remained. Analysis of the reddish-brown liquid that oozed from the vat revealed traces of hematin, a decomposition product of hemoglobin normally found in blood.

Such grisly revelations stunned the local Polish and German communities, who, sickened by the prospect of their staple diet having been defiled in so dreadful a manner, packed the public gallery to overflowing when Luetgert's trial opened at Cook County Criminal Court on August 30, 1897.

Murder Plans

They heard the story of a venal, vicious brute who beat his wife without remorse, flaunted his affairs in front of her, and repeatedly boasted of plans to get rid of her. These plans appeared to have been put into motion on March 11, when, according to sausage factory employee Frank Ordowsky, Luetgert arranged delivery of 378 pounds of crude potash to the factory. The following month, on April 24, Ordowsky and another employee were told to empty the potash into barrels alongside the vat. Later that day, Luetgert tipped the potash, which "burned like fire," into the vat, filled it with water, and let it simmer for a week.

On the day of Louisa's disappearance, a Saturday, Luetgert opened a valve, allowing steam into the vat. Once the mixture was boiling, he dispatched the watchman on errands that left the factory empty most of the day and that night. All weekend the vat bubbled. On Monday morning, Luetgert scraped up the residue that had boiled onto the floor, burned some of it in the smokehouse, buried yet more, and dumped the rest next to some railroad tracks. Curious employees were told that he was making soap to clean the premises prior to selling them.

This, then, was the prosecution's case. To allay defense doubts that such a concoction would actually dispose of a body, they cooked their own potash soup, into which they then lowered a human cadaver. They got similar results.

The forensic team entrusted with examining the remains was headed by Dr. George Dorsey, a Harvard-trained anthropologist. He and his colleagues from the Field Museum recovered part of a femur, a phalanx (toe bone), a rib, a sesamoid (an extra bone that sometimes forms over tendons, especially near the joints in fingers and toes), a fragment of skull, a metacarpal, and part of a humerus. Dorsey, tetchy and somewhat theatrical on the stand, demonstrated what to him were clear similarities between the charred remains and specimens from the museum, assuring the court that the bone fragments, which barely totaled a few ounces, were definitely those of a human female.

With the benefit of hindsight, modern anthropologists have expressed misgivings about these assertions, disputing whether enough material had been recovered to positively identify it as being human in origin. Many of Dorsey's contemporaries shared this unease. However, any hopes entertained by Luetgert that medical conflict would aid his defense were dashed by the abundance of corroborating evidence. He had no answer for the engraved gold wedding band, or the witnesses who testified that Louisa's knuckles were so swollen from arthritis that slipping the ring from her finger was an impossibility—unless another means had been found.

Convicted of first-degree murder, Luetgert served a life sentence at Joliet State Penitentiary and died from a heart attack in 1911.

Conclusion

Sadly, the criticism that Dorsey endured from other, more circumspect anthropologists persuaded him never to testify again in a trial. Even if his ego failed to survive the mauling, his legacy did; without innovators like Dr. George Dorsey, forensic testimony would never have achieved its modern credibility.

George Shotton

DATE: 1919

LOCATION: Swansea, Wales

SIGNIFICANCE: An incredible tale of deceit, murder, and intrigue baffled investigators for decades.

By the spring of 1920, detectives in South Wales were convinced that glamorous ex-chorus girl Mamie Stuart, twenty-six, missing since the previous November, had been murdered. Even more galling was the belief that they knew who had killed her—George Shotton, a smooth-talking marine surveyor. The only fly in the ointment, as far as police were concerned, was that Mamie Stuart's body was nowhere to be found.

She had married Shotton in 1918, and after much moving around, the couple had settled in a remote cottage overlooking Swansea Bay. Suddenly, just before Christmas 1919, both had vanished. It so happened that at about the same time, a male guest had departed a Swansea hotel, leaving a leather trunk. When by the following March the trunk had still not been claimed, the hotelier called the police. Inside were two dresses and a pair of shoes, all slashed to ribbons; some jewelry; a Bible; a rosary; and a manicure set. There was also a scrap of paper bearing the address of Mamie Stuart's parents. Mr. and Mrs. Stuart identified the contents as belonging to their daughter and announced that they had been trying in vain for months to contact her. Both feared for her safety. They handed over a letter written by Mamie in which she expressed grave doubts about her husband. It read, "If you don't hear from me, please wire to Mrs. Hearn [a friend] and see if she knows anything about me. The man is not all there. I don't think I will live with him much longer. My life is not worth living." Mrs. Hearn confirmed that Mamie had once begged, "If I am ever missing, do your utmost to find me, won't you?"

Soon afterward, a cleaner at the cottage found a leather handbag behind the bedroom dresser. It contained a sugar ration card in Mamie's name and two pounds (eight dollars) in change. By this time, Chief Inspector William Draper of Scotland Yard had discovered what Mamie Stuart never knew— that George Shotton had been married for years. Furthermore, he and his wife and child were living in an isolated house barely a mile from the cottage that he and Mamie had called home.

Shotton admitted knowing Mamie and leaving the trunk at the hotel, but he denied that they had married. He claimed to have last seen her in early December, when they had quarreled over her infidelity and parted. Corroboration for at least one facet of this story came with the discovery of a letter penned by Mamie to an admirer. It read, "My old man seems to know quite a lot . . . but what the eye don't see the heart can't grieve. . . . Am just dying to see you and feel your dear arms around me."

Acting on the belief that Shotton, consumed by jealousy, had killed Mamie and disposed of her body, Draper ordered every inch of the cottage and garden searched. Nothing was found. Police fanned out and scoured the surrounding countryside, but all to no avail. The missing woman's description, circulated throughout Britain, also failed to produce a single worthwhile lead, which meant that the charge sheet when Shotton was arrested on May 29, 1920, read "bigamy" alone. His defense—that someone else had assumed his identity and married Mamie in July 1918—failed to impress the court, and Shotton began a sentence of eighteen months' hard labor.

And there the case of the missing ex-chorus girl might well have ended— but for a strange turn of events forty-one years later.

Four Decades Pass

On Sunday, November 5, 1961, three cavers in a region of the South Wales coast known as Brandy Cove were exploring a disused lead mine when they made a gruesome discovery. Behind some rocks, almost hidden by a thick stone slab, lay a sack containing human bones. Nearby was a black butterfly comb—a tuft of dark brown hair still attached—and two rings, one a gold wedding band.

The remains were taken to the Forensic Science Laboratory at Cardiff, where Home Office pathologists Dr. William James and Dr. John Griffiths reassembled the bones into a complete skeleton. Cause of death was undetermined; it might have been strangulation or stabbing, but there was nothing to say definitely. The body had been sawn into three pieces, and judging from the pelvis, it was female. She had been approximately five feet four inches tall, the same height as Mamie Stuart. Close examination of the skeleton revealed how old the woman had been at death. Until the midtwenties, gristle at the end of the bones, especially the long bones, is soft to allow for growth. Eventually this gristle calcifies and becomes bone —as in this case—a process usually completed by age twenty-five. When the rest of the skeleton has consolidated, the sutures of the cranium begin to fuse together, again at a predictable rate, until completely sealed by age thirty. Here, none of the sutures were closed, which put the woman between the ages of twenty-four and twenty-eight at the time she died.

In sex, height, and age, the skeletal remains matched Mamie Stuart's description. Scraps of clothing and shoes found in the mine shaft came from the 1920s. An elderly lady, a close friend of Mamie's, identified the rings as belonging to the long-lost girl, while hallmarks put the date of manufacture between 1912 and 1918. Conclusive identification came by superimposing a photograph of the skull over a life-size portrait taken of Mamie during her theater days. The result left no room for doubt—after forty-one years, Mamie Stuart's body had been found.

At the coroner's inquest, the court heard a startling tale. Bill Symons, an eighty-three-year-old ex-postman, recalled an afternoon in 1919 when he had been delivering mail and happened to see George Shotton struggling with a heavy sack outside his cottage. Shotton looked up, saw Symons's blue uniform, and nearly fainted. Gathering his wits quickly, he exclaimed, "God! For a minute I thought you were a policeman." When Symons offered to help carry the sack to Shotton's van, which was parked on the road, Shotton hastily declined and hefted the sack alone. The incident had ended with Shotton driving off in the direction of Brandy Cove.

After consideration of this evidence, the coroner's jury decided that the skeleton was indeed that of Mamie Stuart, that she had been murdered, and that the evidence pointed to George Shotton as the murderer. All of this then raised the inevitable question—where was George Shotton?

Three weeks later, after a search involving Interpol, the ex-marine surveyor was tracked down—to a cemetery in the west of England. He had died penniless and alone at age seventy-eight in a Bristol hospital on April 30, 1958. Forensic science had revealed his secret, but just three years too late to confront him with the evidence.

Conclusion

Nowadays in Britain, no coroner's jury would be allowed to name a suspected murderer; the Criminal Law Act of 1977 withdrew such privileges. Ironically, the last person so named was Lord Lucan, who vanished just after the 1974 killing of his children's nanny. He, too, has never been found. 

William Bayly

DATE: 1933

LOCATION: Ruawaro, New Zealand

SIGNIFICANCE: This case concluded with a landmark trial in which the defendant was accused of double murder, even though the body of one of the victims was never found.

On Monday, October 16, 1933, the body of Christobel Lakey was dragged from a pond on the farm that she and her husband, Samuel, worked near Ruawaro, a town on the north island of New Zealand. Her face, a mass of purple welts, provided hideous confirmation that she had been murdered. Sam Lakey was nowhere to be seen, and all of his rifles were missing. An old buggy that had been unused for a decade showed signs of recent use, and its wheels were stained with fresh blood. More blood found in a barn suggested that someone had shot Sam Lakey indoors and then had used the buggy to dispose of his body. But where?

That remained a mystery until October 30, when a policeman probing swampland near the Lakeys' boundary fence felt something metallic. He scraped away several inches of mud to find the missing firearms—two shotguns and a pea rifle, all later identified as belonging to Lakey. Just then, the owner of the adjoining property, William Bayly, stormed up and angrily ordered the searchers off his land. Police were unsurprised by his belligerence. They had already heard stories of bad blood between Bayly and the Lakeys, the result of a dispute over grazing rights. Allegedly, one quarrel had terminated with Christobel shouting, "You murdered Elsie Bayly and your conscience is hurting you. I wouldn't be surprised if we got the same treatment!"3

Assured by police that they had no intention of trespassing on his land, Bayly became more cooperative, enough to volunteer that perhaps Sam Lakey, upon finding his wife's body, had panicked and fled, fearing he would be suspected of murder. Curiously, after signing a statement to this effect, Bayly also vanished. Soon afterward, a neighbor came forward, talking of thick smoke belching from Bayly's cowshed on the day that the Lakeys had disappeared. Police went at once to investigate.

Cremated Body

A fine carpet of ash covered the cowshed floor. In one corner stood a large, smoke-blackened oil drum, surrounded by blood. Immediately fear grew that Lakey had been incinerated in the makeshift crematorium, and a full-scale survey of the farmyard seemed to bear this out. Searchers found hundreds of bone fragments, all roasted; two false teeth; some sacking; part of a cigarette lighter; and the stem of a cherrywood pipe, similar to one owned by Lakey. Scrapings of shot lead taken from the oil drum and elsewhere in the shed totaled 28.7 grams, coincidentally the exact weight of a bullet from Lakey's rifle. A shell of this size was also found in a pair of Bayly's dungarees. Draining a sheep dip revealed yet more bones together with a tuft of gray hair, some shotgun cartridges, and a cigarette lighter whose white wool wick was identical to wicks found in Mrs. Lakey's workbasket.

Although investigators were convinced that Bayly was a double murderer, to refute any future defense claims that Lakey had killed his wife and then fled, they wanted confirmation that these body parts had belonged to Sam Lakey.

New Zealand's premier pathologist, Dr. P. P. Lynch, was asked to conduct a thorough examination of the remains, a mammoth undertaking. He first dealt with the hair—it was definitely human in origin. As for the individual bones, he identified the atlas, which is the top bone of the vertebral column; a portion of heelbone; and numerous parts of the vault, or top of the skull. In order to test the theory that Bayly had cremated Sam Lakey's body in the large oil drum, Lynch burned the carcass of a 150-pound calf in a similar container. The fire was started at quarter past four one afternoon. By the next morning, the carcass was reduced to a bucketful of ash, much the same amount as was found in the cowshed.

Before Lynch could complete his work, Bayly came out of hiding and gave himself up. His trial in Auckland for double murder lasted almost a month. Dozens of witnesses testified on behalf of the prosecution, but none did so more effectively than Lynch. He produced no fewer than 250 exhibits —jars, boxes, bottles, and vials—all containing what he claimed were the residual parts of Sam Lakey. All the defense could counter with was a weak claim of conspiracy by the police to manufacture evidence against the accused.

On June 23, 1934, history was made. Even without Sam Lakey's corpse to provide evidence against him, Bayly was convicted of both murders, and a month later he was hanged at Mount Eden Jail.

Conclusion

Even today, juries are reluctant to return murder convictions without the presence of a body. That a New Zealand jury was willing to take this unprecedented step so many years ago speaks volumes about the quality and quantity of forensic evidence made available by the prosecution. 

John Wayne Gacy

DATE: 1978

LOCATION: Des Plaines, Illinois

SIGNIFICANCE: The sheer enormity of Gacy's crimes made it virtually impossible to identify all of his victims. Discovering their names required the most painstaking analysis.

When police called at the Des Plaines, Illinois, home of contractor John

Wayne Gacy on December 13, 1978, there was nothing to suggest that America's worst serial killer was about to be unmasked. They were there in response to a routine missing-person report; fifteen-year-old Robert Piest had applied for a job with Gacy and had not been seen since. Gacy, thirtysix, managed to deflect their inquiries, but when a follow-up background check revealed a past conviction for sexually molesting a minor, officers hastened back to the house on West Summerdale Avenue. Virtually unbidden, Gacy showed them a trapdoor that led into a crawl space under the house.

When raised, the trapdoor revealed a hideous sight: bodies everywhere, all strangled and raped. Gacy coolly admitted that twenty-seven bodies were buried either beneath his house or in the garage (there were actually twenty-eight—he had forgotten one). When he ran out of space around the house, Gacy dumped another five bodies, including Robert Piest's, into a nearby river.

A vicious homosexual, Gacy had cruised Chicago's Bughouse Square district, trolling for young males, enticing them into his black Oldsmobile with offers of marijuana. Those who succumbed to his savage sexual demands were released, bleeding and battered; those who didn't were chloroformed into insensibility, raped, and then killed. Gacy tapped into another source of victims by offering five-dollar-per-hour jobs with his contracting business. Few lived to draw a paycheck.

Identifying the remains provided investigators with a huge logistical problem. First, there was the similarity of the victims—all males between ages fourteen and the midtwenties. Next, many parents, unwilling to accept that their sons might have drifted into a lifestyle that they found repugnant, were reluctant to extend any assistance. It was left to dental charts, X-rays, and fingerprint records to provide the names that the authorities so desperately sought. By the end of January 1979, only ten had been identified. Frustrated by such dilatory progress, investigators requested the assistance of Clyde Snow, an Oklahoma anthropologist with an encyclopedic knowledge of bones.

Because of Gacy's haphazard burial techniques—bodies were piled on top of bodies—Snow first had to ensure that bones from different skeletons had not been confused by the excavation crew. Next, he compiled a thirtyfive-point reference chart of each head for comparison with various missing-person reports.

One of these yielded the name of David Talsma, a nineteen-year-old exMarine reported missing in the Chicago area on December 9, 1977. As a boy, Talsma had broken his left arm. Snow recalled that one of the skeletons —the seventeenth disinterred at Gacy's house— had shown signs of similar distress. At five feet eleven inches, the skeleton was the same height as Talsma, and hospital records confirmed that Talsma had sustained a head injury, as had this body. A Holmesian element was introduced with Snow's final finding: The left arm was several millimeters longer than the right. Together with beveling of the left scapula, this strongly suggested that this victim had been left-handed—as Talsma had been. One more successful identification had been completed, but there were still many more to go.

All through 1979 the team labored, but by the year's end nine bodies had still not been identified. With frustration mounting, Snow decided to expand the search parameters.

Forensic Sculpture

The art of reconstructing a face from a skull is not a recent development; it dates back to 1895, when Swiss-born anatomist Wilhelm His began creating full-size models that often bore remarkable similarities to his subjects. On one occasion, he was given a skull thought to be that of Johann Sebastian Bach. By carefully reconstructing the face, His confirmed that the skull did indeed belong to the great composer. Obviously, eye and hair color remained areas of guesswork, but His found that the bone conformation provided him with a clear idea of what the face would look like.

One of the foremost modern practitioners of facial reconstructions, Betty Pat Gatliff, frequently collaborated with Snow. Given seven of the unidentified skulls to work with, she first set about establishing skin thickness by gluing pencil eraser heads to strategic points on the skull. Then modeling clay was applied in accordance with certain carefully delineated measurements. These gave Gatliff an idea of what the mouth and cheeks would look like, but not the nose, which always presents special difficulties. Because cartilage decomposes quickly after death, leaving the characteristic gaping hole, only by rearranging the slivers of bone that remained could Gatliff make a reasonable estimate of what the nose's shape might have been. The final touches were cosmetic: prosthetic eyes, and in cases in which hair had been found with the bodies, the addition of an appropriately colored wig.

When photographs of the reconstructions were released to the media, the response was disappointing. Not a single definite identification resulted, although independent phone calls from two Chicago sisters hinted that one of the reconstructions bore a very strong resemblance to their missing brother. Tragically, neither girl would proceed due to the parents' unwillingness to become involved. Right to the end, this perceived lack of parental concern plagued the investigation, with the result that nine of Gacy's victims remain unidentified.

Conclusion

On March 13, 1980, Gacy was convicted of thirty-three murders, the highest tally ever in the United States, and he was sentenced to death. His fourteen-year battle against that fate ended on May 10, 1994, when he was executed by lethal injection.

Josef Mengele

DATE: 1985

LOCATION: Embú, Brazil

SIGNIFICANCE: Invariably when forensic science attempts to identify a corpse, its efforts are directed toward the victim of a homicide or accident. On this occasion the roles were oddly reversed: The victims were known, and they numbered in the millions. But was their killer this handful of bones recovered from a Brazilian hillside?

When Russian soldiers entered the gates of Auschwitz on the afternoon of January 27, 1945, it was the outside world's first glimpse of high-tech genocide. Hundreds of corpses littered the ground, all that was left of the estimated 1.25 million people who died in this remote corner of Poland, sacrificed on the altar of Aryan racial purity. Only the devastation remained; the architects of this madness had already disappeared into the transit camp that was postwar Europe, among them the man who would become the most hunted criminal on earth.

The search for Dr. Josef Mengele was slow in getting under way. At first his name meant nothing to the Allies. And he was lucky. After a brief period in American hands—they had no idea who he was—he finally made his way to Argentina in 1949 and there lived a life of virtual anonymity. Ironically, it took the capture of another Nazi, Adolf Eichmann, in 1961, to awaken interest in Mengele. At long last the mad doctor, the so-called Angel of Death, who had personally consigned four hundred thousand people to their doom, took his place alongside the other great ogres of history. Details of hideous experiments on children helped fuel the image of a maniac hell-bent on engineering the perfect race from a test tube.

As interest grew, so did the myths. Books and movies hinted at jungle hideouts where an increasingly deranged Mengele coordinated efforts to resurrect the Third Reich, funded by bulging Swiss bank accounts and assorted Latin dictators. His family insisted that he was dead. His pursuers believed otherwise. International indifference, widespread and entrenched, finally gave way in 1985, when Washington announced that there would soon be official efforts to bring Mengele to justice.

But it was too late. With rumors of Mengele's imminent capture gaining strength, a German couple living in Brazil, Wolfram and Lisolette Bossert, brought all speculation to an abrupt halt by leading police to the village of Embú and the grave of a man buried under the name of Wolfgang Gerhard. This, they said, was the final resting place of Josef Mengele, dead from drowning in 1979 at age sixty-seven.

Exhumation

Exactly forty-one years to the day after Allied troops landed on the beaches of Normandy, Dr. José Antonio de Mello, assistant director of the local forensic department, opened up the coffin. Its contents were taken away for inspection by scientists from the United States, Germany, and an independent team representing the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Vienna, who had pursued Mengele for decades. Never before had such a formidable team been assembled to discover the identity of a corpse.

Conformation of the pelvis—narrow and steep—suggested that the skeleton was male; bones on the right side, being markedly longer than those on the left, pointed to someone who had been right-handed. The eye sockets and nose were Caucasian. Several factors helped establish the subject's age at the time of death. Because tooth abrasion occurs at a constant rate throughout a lifetime, allied to the amount of adjacent bone loss this can give an approximate guide to the age. Here it suggested someone between sixty and seventy years old, very close to what Mengele's age would have been. Microscopic examination of the femur's bloodcarrying canals (the more numerous and the more fragmented they are, the older the individual) also hinted at someone in his late sixties.

Because Mengele's SS file contained only the skimpiest physical details —white male, 174 centimeters (5 feet 8.5 inches) tall, with a head circumference of 57 centimeters (22.4 inches)—scientists had to tread carefully. A hand-drawn dental chart from 1938 showed twelve fillings but failed to note their type or exact location. Also, there was no mention of Mengele's distinctive gap-toothed smile. Despite the paucity of medical records, some compelling conclusions were drawn. Measurement of the femur, tibia, and humerus bones suggested a height of 173.5 centimeters, within half a centimeter of Mengele's known height, and an X-ray of the teeth, compared in minute detail with the 1938 chart, showed an unusually wide incisor canal between the halves of the upper palate that must have produced a gap-toothed smile.

Richard Helmer, a forensic anthropologist from West Germany, provided the clinching evidence. A champion of video superimposition, in which a photograph is placed over an image of a skull to determine whether the two are the same person, Helmer first marked more than thirty identifying features on the skull. Then, with two high-resolution video cameras mounted on tracks, he began shooting. Using known photographs of Mengele and a photograph of the skull, Helmer matched the images exactly, allowing the forensic team to state that, within reasonable scientific certainty, the bones at Embú were those of Josef Mengele.

Not everyone was pleased. Some victims and conspiracy buffs, particularly journalists and writers who had a vested interest in Mengele's continued existence, all expressed doubts. The Angel of Death, they said, had tricked the world again and was still in hiding, dreaming up his mad schemes for world domination.

Conclusion

Finally, in 1992, the myth was well and truly laid to rest. Genetic material from the bones found in Brazil was compared with samples from Mengele's living relatives in Germany. Using a technique that the evil doctor could never have imagined, DNA analysis confirmed the match. The hunt for the century's most wanted criminal was indeed over at last.

John List

DATE: 1986

LOCATION: Westfield, New Jersey

SIGNIFICANCE: Bones reveal details not only about the victims of crimes but occasionally about the perpetrators as well.

For almost a month, the large, run-down house owned by John List in Westfield, New Jersey, had stood deserted, and yet each night the lights still blazed brightly. His neighbors on Hillside Avenue were puzzled. They knew the forty-six-year-old insurance salesman as a tight-wad, hardly the kind to run up unnecessarily high electricity bills. Repeated phone calls to the police finally resulted in action on the night of December 7, 1971, when two officers went to investigate. After knocking and receiving no answer, they gained entrance through a window. Inside it was icy cold. Their flashlight tour of the rambling eighteen-room mansion came to a sudden halt in a large room at the rear of the house. Neither man could believe his eyes. Spread out neatly on the floor were four sleeping bags. On top of each, just as tidily arranged, was a dead body.

John List's wife, Helen, had been shot through the head, as had been her three teenage children. Upstairs, her eighty-five-year-old mother-in-law, Alma List, had also been executed. Only John List was missing. Five addressed envelopes were taped to a filing cabinet. The letters they contained provided chilling insight into the mind of a man who had reached the end of his mental tether. List, a pillar of the local Lutheran church, readily conceded the wrongfulness of his actions, but he rationalized that they had been necessary to spare his family the ignominy of a life on welfare. Financial foolhardiness had led him to the brink of bankruptcy, and rather than let his sons face ridicule at the hands of friends, he had decided to kill them. The same went for his wife and mother. Because his daughter's interest in acting and the occult would compromise her spiritual development, she, too, had to die.

Pathologists estimated that death had occurred a month earlier. By tracing family members' movements, detectives were able to narrow this down to one day, November 9. It appeared as though Helen List had been shot in the morning, then Alma was shot just minutes later. That afternoon, when the children returned, List eliminated them one by one. In all, he fired twentythree rounds of ammunition from two weapons, a .22 caliber Colt revolver and a 1918 German nine-millimeter Steyr semiautomatic pistol. As the investigation swung into action, detectives were confident that they would soon be able to clear this case from their books; after all, they already had a written confession. Even the fact that List had disappeared was seen as only a temporary setback; he would be easy enough to find, they reasoned.

The first clue to his whereabouts came just forty-eight hours after the bodies were found, when List's car was discovered in the long-term parking lot at New York's JFK Airport. Police also discovered that he was not completely without funds; bank records showed that on the day of the killings, List had withdrawn $2,100 in cash from his mother's account. But as days drifted into weeks and then months, the expected capture did not materialize. A coast-to-coast wanted-poster campaign also failed to produce any kind of worthwhile lead. Because of his fluency in German, circulars were distributed in West Germany and German-speaking regions of South Africa. Again, there was nothing. More frustration followed when investigators targeted areas where the Lutheran church was prominent. By now, the months had meandered into years, and still there was no sign of the missing man—seemingly, John List had vanished off the face of the earth.

Resolute Detective

When Bernard Tracey first joined the Westfield police force, List had already been a fugitive for two years. Nevertheless, the rookie cop acquired an almost obsessional interest in the unsolved case, little thinking that it would haunt him for almost sixteen years. Promotion to the rank of detective allowed him the opportunity to add his own input to the search for the elusive killer. But every avenue led nowhere. By early 1986, almost at his wit's end, Tracey contacted the supermarket tabloids in an effort to resurrect interest in the case. On February 17, the Weekly World News ran an account of the List family murders and included a photograph of the fugitive. One reader in Aurora, Colorado, saw the photograph and gasped. Wanda Flanery was amazed by the uncanny resemblance between List and her neighbor's husband, Bob Clark. Unable to contain herself, she confronted Mrs. Clark with the article. Delores Clark, who knew nothing of her husband's background, thought the idea preposterous and said so, defending her husband in such a forthright and heartfelt manner that Wanda wound up apologizing in embarrassment for having raised the subject. Only later would Wanda Flanery learn that she was not mistaken. List had moved to the Denver area within two weeks of the murders and had applied for a Social Security number in the name of Robert P. Clark. Under this alias he had created an entirely new life for himself.

List never heard about this brush with disaster. Delores had found the idea so ridiculous that she didn't even mention it to him. The way she figured it, her husband might be hopeless with money, but he certainly wasn't any killer! She was half right: List's fiscal ineptitude had not deserted him. Not long after this incident, with debts piling up around his ears, he was forced to take an accounting job back in Richmond, Virginia. In 1988, Delores joined him.

TV Program

That same year, Tracey played his final card. He contacted the makers of America's Most Wanted, a syndicated TV show that ran true-crime stories and had a good record of tracking down wanted fugitives. (The program was mandatory viewing in the home of Richmond accountant Bob Clark!) But the show's producers gave Tracey a cool reception, explaining that they rarely featured cases more than eight years old; any older and the trail was, they felt, too cold for them to be of any practical assistance.

But Tracey was indefatigable. A year later he tried again, and this time the program's producers said yes. The most significant aspect of their involvement was the decision to hire forensic sculptor Frank A. Bender of Philadelphia, who had undertaken similar work for the U.S. Marshals, to produce a bust of John List as he might look eighteen years after the crime.

Because appearance is so heavily influenced by diet and exercise, Dr. Richard Walter of the Michigan Department of Corrections was asked to prepare a psychological profile of List with special emphasis on his likely lifestyle. Walter felt that List's religious upbringing would proscribe any attempt to alter his appearance by plastic surgery. That same background would also manifest itself in a "meat and potatoes" type of person. Because nothing suggested a fondness for exercise, such an unrelieved diet would very likely produce sagging jowls as List aged, giving him the appearance of being somewhat older than he actually was.

Assistance came in the form of a revolutionary new computer program that simulates the effects of aging—sags, wrinkles, receding hairline. With this software, FBI technical specialist Gene O'Donnell was able to scan the last known photograph of John List, at age forty-six, into the computer and then generate a picture of his likely current appearance.

Using all of these tools, Bender produced a bust of the fugitive that showed heavy jowls, a receding hairline, and gray hair. Because List had not been the outdoor type, Bender made the skin coloring pale. As a final touch, he added thick-lensed spectacles, much thicker than those worn by List in 1971.

On May 21, 1989, America's Most Wanted broadcast its segment on John

List. After reenacting the crime, it showed the bust in profile and full face. Of the more than 250 calls received, one came from Colorado. The anonymous caller said that List was currently living in Richmond, Virginia, under the alias Robert P. Clark. (The caller turned out to be a relative of Wanda Flanery, who had watched the show in Colorado and had again noticed the similarity to her ex-neighbor.) After several days of working their way through all the tips received, investigators finally interviewed "Bob Clark" on June 1, 1989.

Loud protestations of mistaken identity fizzled upon production of his fingerprints, and the sixty-four-year-old man who had been on the run for almost two decades was returned to New Jersey to stand trial. On April 12, 1990, he was jailed for life.

Conclusion

The use of computer-enhanced imagery is growing fast. In 1994, London police enlisted the facilities of Vogue magazine to help with an unknown dead woman whose face was too battered to permit publication of a photograph. Using equipment designed to manipulate photo images of models so that every blemish is removed, experts were able to create a photograph of how the woman had looked when alive. Within hours she was successfully identified.