All That Remains: A Renowned Forensic Scientist on Death, Mortality, and Solving Crimes

by Sue Black

My grandmother and I would take a picnic up to the top of Tomnahurich Cemetery (always referred to by my father as the ‘dead centre of Inverness’)

There is so much to do before a funeral can be held that sometimes you wonder whether the whole process has been expressly designed to keep you busy to distract you from your grief. Alongside registering the death, arranging the funeral director, obtaining copies of the death certificate and putting a notice in the newspaper, there are so many decisions to be made. Both my parents’ funerals took place at a crematorium chapel, which meant choosing flowers and hymns and writing a piece for the minister to deliver. Did we need funeral cars, and if so, how many? There was a casket to be selected (my father would have commented of his that he had burned better, which was ironic as that was exactly what we were going to do with it), a venue and catering arrangements to be decided upon for refreshments afterwards and we needed to make sure the right people were informed. In Scotland, where the interval between a death and a burial is short, the fevered activity necessary to get everything done in time brings out the best and the worst in people. There are inevitably moments that will go down in family lore.

Mother wished to be laid to rest with Uncle Willie and Teenie at the bottom of Tomnahurich Cemetery and my father wanted to be with his parents at the top. We had suggested that maybe they would like to be buried together, but good Scottish pragmatism (or, in my father’s case, short arms and long pockets) took over.

On Christmas Day we decided that Grandad should join us for lunch and so we placed his box at the end of the dining table. While that might sound weird to some, it felt somehow normal for us to have him with us, a Santa hat perched on top of his box.

Cremation, first introduced in the UK early in the twentieth century, is now the choice of a majority of people and its popularity is evidenced by the number of imaginative things you can now do with somebody’s ashes. They can be fired into space or deposited in water to create a marine reef; you can have them incorporated into glass and made into jewellery, paperweights or vases. They can be put into shotgun cartridges, turned into fish bait or added to fireworks to ensure your send-off goes with a bang, or even compressed to create teeny little diamonds.

Approximately 64 per cent of patients who request the medication will take it, usually in their own residence. The fact that the remaining 36 per cent, quite a high number, decide not to use the drug illustrates that people understand the nature of choice. Perhaps simply knowing that the drug is there if they want it is enough to reassure the terminally ill that control of their own life and death resides in their own hands.

In legal terms, a body is unlikely to be of forensic interest if the individual died more than seventy years ago. At the present time, seventy years takes us back into the middle of the Second World War. It is sobering to think that my great-grandparents, none of whom I ever met, are now technically archaeological skeletal samples and that my grandmother will be archaeological in less than thirty years from now – quite possibly within my own lifetime.

responsibility for treating archaeological remains with decency and dignity, and observing the sanctity of the need to leave a body at peace, must extend beyond the memories of our own lifespans.

The anonymity of human remains deadens our empathetic responses but such is the power of forensic anthropology that it can reinstate identity and rekindle the human instinct to care and protect.

globally, it is believed that over a hundred billion people have lived and died since the appearance of Homo Sapiens about 50,000 years ago – fifteen times as many as the 7 billion or so of us alive in the world today.

In the twenty-first century one in every 39,000 head of population will die every day in the UK – that’s over half a million bodies a year that must be ‘managed’, generally either by burial or cremation.

in the UK evidence of the dead being used as a food source is sparse. Gough’s Cave in Somerset, home at the end of the Ice Age to the Horse Hunters of Cheddar Gorge, is an exception. Skeletal remains found here show cuts consistent with the removal of flesh for consumption.

Preparations for ailments such as migraine, consumption and epilepsy, as well as general tonics, were made from various human parts. The rationale was that if death came upon somebody suddenly, their spirit could remain trapped within their corpse for long enough to bring vital benefits to those who chose to consume it.

A Franciscan apothecary from 1679 even gives us a recipe for human blood jam. He would first recover the fresh blood from recently dead people who exhibited a ‘warm, moist temperament’ and were preferably of ‘plump build’. The blood was left to congeal into a ‘dry, sticky mass’ before being placed on a soft-wood table and cut into thin slices, allowing any liquids to drip away. It was then stirred into a batter on the stove and dried. While still warm, it was ground in a bronze mortar to a powder, which would be forced through fine silk. Once sealed in a jar, it could be reconstituted every spring with fresh, clear water and administered as a tonic.

Hurk

Until the Burial Act of 1857, the reuse of graves had been common but as the cemeteries began to fill up, the eviction of some of their tenants rather more swiftly than was felt to be decent often led to public outrage.

Interestingly, it was only opening a grave that constituted an offence. It was not against the law to actually steal a dead body – as long as it was naked.

In 1870 a wood-carver named Frantisek Rint was given the job of sorting out the accumulated heaps and began to transform the bones of between 40,000 and 70,000 people into outrageously elaborate decorations and furnishings for the chapel. There are chandeliers, coats of arms and fancy buttressing, all constructed from human bones. It seems that in his dedication to his art Rint allowed no sentiment to influence his choice of materials and viewing his handiwork can be an uncomfortable experience when you see how many of the bones come from very young children – including those frivolously used to create his signature.

burial, of whatever duration and whether in the ground or within monuments, is falling out of favour. The 30 million feet of wood, 1.6 million tons of concrete, 750,000 gallons of embalming fluid and 90,000 tons of steel that are buried underground in the United States alone are a stark illustration of its polluting effects.

Japan tops the world cremation league table with 99.97 per cent, closely followed by Nepal (90 per cent) and India (85 per cent). In numerical terms, China has the most cremations – nearly 4.5 million a year.

In traditional Japanese cremations, the family pick the bone fragments out of the ashes with chopsticks and transfer them into an urn, starting at the feet end and finishing at the head so that the deceased is never upside down.

One is ‘resomation’, which involves alkaline hydrolysis. The body is placed into a vat with water and lye (caustic soda or sodium hydroxide) and heated to 160°C under high pressure for about three hours. This breaks down the body tissues into a greenish-brown liquid, rich in amino acids, peptides and salts. The remaining brittle bones are reduced to powder (principally calcium hydroxyapatite) by a cremulator and can then be scattered or used as fertiliser.

If such modern methods become the norm, fewer of us will leave behind as many traces of our physical selves as our ancestors did. Skeletal and other remains have enriched human history by giving archaeologists and anthropologists the voyeuristic luxury and academic stimulation of being able to study the people of former cultures at an up-close and very personal level.

Submersion in a mildly acidic liquid with high levels of magnesium was responsible for the remarkable preservation of the 2,000-year-old Han dynasty Chinese mummy known as the Lady of Dai, who was discovered in 1971 by workers digging an air-raid shelter for a hospital near Changsa. Even her blood vessels were intact, and found to contain a small amount of type A blood.

Our following within certain sectors of society also led to the programme being dubbed Lesbian Cold Case, which rather excluded poor old Wolfram Meier-Augenstein, our expert in isotope analysis, though I suspect the professor was not sorry to be overlooked.

One sad case was the preserved anatomical specimen of a little boy of around eight years of age. This undocumented mummified child had been found in a cupboard in my department at Dundee University. His soft tissue had been dissected away, leaving only his skeleton and his artificially perfused arterial system.

We know that the eminent anatomist William Hunter and the anatomist John Barclay were both performing vascular perfusions at that time and analysis of the chemicals present in the remains of our boy revealed them to be entirely consistent with those used by Hunter and his followers.

Another tragic figure was ‘Crossbones Girl’, a young woman in her late teens, almost certainly a prostitute, found in a pauper’s grave in Cross Bones Cemetery in Southwark, south London. She had died horribly disfigured by tertiary syphilis, doubtless contracted through her occupation.

When we reconstructed her face, the devastation wreaked by this condition on such a young person was shocking to see. Caroline then did a second reconstruction, showing how she would have looked if she had been healthy or could have been cured by penicillin. It is inevitable that we view an anonymous archaeological human skeleton with a certain amount of detachment but seeing the face of the young, flesh-and-blood woman more or less as she was, and as she could have been if fate had dealt her a better hand, dramatically brought home to everyone that we were dealing with a real person who had her own hopes, dreams and character;

As she and the second triplet began to decompose there would have been a build-up of gases in her body which, assisted by a decompression of the baby’s skull, finally succeeded in expelling the infant long after both their deaths in what is known as a ‘coffin birth’.

Trauma analysis is a logical deductive process that requires an appreciation of how bone behaves, how that behaviour alters when the bone is disrupted and subsequently suffers additional traumatic incidents, and how these can be sequenced.

It seems that the first assault on Rosemarkie Man was made to the right side of his mouth, where his teeth were smashed at the front as a result of being struck hard by some projectile, perhaps a spear or a lance or pole of some kind: it made a relatively neat and tidy entry and didn’t penetrate all the way through to his vertebral column or appear to cause any further damage. He had definitely been alive when this occurred as the crown of one of his teeth was found in his chest cavity – in all likelihood he inhaled it after the impact.

The coup de grâce was a large, penetrating wound to the top of his head, delivered with such violence that it shattered the remaining parts of the cranium.

Afterwards, one of the ladies told me she was so exhausted she was going home to have a lie down. Instead of the dry lecture on archaeological finds she had been expecting, she had been taken on a rollercoaster ride of emotions by the story of the brutal murder of a local man. She had even looked into the eyes of the victim, and at a face so lifelike that, though he had been dead for 1,400 years, it would not have been out of place on the streets of Rosemarkie that day.

The burials were in triple coffins typical of the early 1800s for those who could afford them. These multi-layered receptacles were like Russian Matryoshka dolls. There would be an outer wooden coffin, sometimes covered with fabric and featuring ornamental handles and other fittings in addition to a plate bearing the name and date of death of the occupant. Inside this was a lead coffin shell, sealed by a plumber and decorated with his bespoke patterning, also carrying a nameplate giving the details of the deceased. These lead coffins were designed to retain body fluids and were often lined with bran to soak up the foul decomposition liquor. They also ensured that the smell was contained and did not escape and waft upward into the church to offend the delicate noses of parishioners during their Sunday devotions. Finally, there was a more perfunctory inner coffin made of cheaper wood, often elm, which functioned simply as a lining for the lead casket. Within this last box the deceased would lie in full repose, head resting on a pillow stuffed with horsehair, surrounded by cotton punched with holes to resemble more expensive broderie Anglaise fabric and usually dressed in their finest clothes.

As the body decomposes the fluids are slightly acidic. Because they had nowhere to drain, they had reacted with the wood of the inner coffin to form a weak humic acid, which strips the bonds between the base pairs (the building blocks of the DNA double helix) and the helical backbone. So the genomic information had dissolved into a thick, black soupy deposit at the bottom of the coffins, resembling a rich chocolate mousse (anatomists are prone to using food analogies to describe substances they encounter – not terribly appropriate, perhaps, but effective).

If Everilda herself was unremarkable, the other contents of her coffin were interesting. Her eccentric husband had buried her with the full military uniform he had worn on their wedding day, 30 April 1839. He had laid two pairs of trousers across her legs, draped his military jacket across her chest and placed his forage cap near her head and his boots near her feet. The uniform was passed into the skilled curatorial hands of the National Army Museum and Everilda was duly cremated along with the other occupants of the crypt.

Although I appreciate the importance and the tremendous rewards to be gained from healing and tending to the sick, I always had a sneaking feeling that live patients would be more troublesome than dead ones. Being half control freak, half coward, I find that a more mono-directional interaction suits me best – in other words, a job where I am the only one asking the questions.

Forensic anthropologists don’t always get it right, either, of course. That only happens in those dreadful CSI programmes where the clever-clogs scientist invariably triumphs in the end.

We had to work with what we had. The clavicle held the key. This showed clear signs of having been fractured in the past. A bone that has been broken and has then healed rarely looks exactly the same as one that has never been broken. While a bone does mend, it is something of a patch job, and rarely does it repair itself with such precision that it leaves no clue to its previous misadventure.

For the fire recovery officers, this case was a wake-up call to the importance of having a forensic anthropologist at the scene. They admitted that they would never have recognised these grey lumps of ash as human remains; indeed, they might well never have noticed them at all, and just cleared them away with the rubble from the fire. Since that incident, in Scotland forensic anthropologists have regularly attended fatal fires along with the police and the fire service.

For example, if a section of the route somebody took home was near water, perhaps a river, a canal or a lake, then these will be the places to check first. Approximately 600 people in the UK each year succumb to water-related deaths. The largest category (about 45 per cent) are accidental, around 30 per cent are suicides and less than 2 per cent are as a result of criminal intent.

Some 30 per cent of deaths by water are coastal, shore or beach-related incidents, about 27 per cent are associated with rivers while the sea, harbours and canals account for roughly 8 per cent apiece.

Of the reported suicides associated with water, over 85 per cent involve canals and rivers. Such compelling statistics explain why bodies of water are high on the list of prime potential search locations.

Most children feared to have been kidnapped (over 80 per cent) are found swiftly and returned safely with no nefarious intent involved. Usually they have simply wandered off or got lost. Abduction murders, not surprisingly, receive extensive media coverage, but fortunately they are rare.

Such cases are unusual but they are not unheard of, as the story of Kamiyah Mobley illustrates. Taken from a hospital in Jacksonville, Florida, in 1998, when she was only a few hours old, by a woman who had recently suffered a miscarriage, Kamiyah was eventually found alive and well eighteen years later, 300 miles away in South Carolina, having enjoyed a generally happy childhood oblivious of her true identity.

In spite of being well aware that stories like Kamiyah’s are exceptional, many affected families keep a small flame of hope alive across many decades, which perhaps helps to numb the hard edges of their pain.

As a police superintendent reminded me recently: ‘There is no such thing as a closed cold case.’ When a body is found and we can make a positive identification, the news is never welcome to relatives as it dashes those long-nurtured hopes and dreams and forces a harsh acceptance of the reality of the ultimate loss.

The next four weeks were spent shifting over 20,000 tons of earth from the quarry, co-ordinating the work of the diggers with that of the forensic archaeologists and anthropologists, looking for bones, clothing, bits of pushchair, luggage and so on, bucketload by bucketload. The archaeologist directed the digger and inspected the surface of the soil after every scraping and the anthropologist searched through every bucketful.

She believed that Moira’s body might be found directly beneath the coffin of a Mr Sinclair Upton,

Oof

Coffins do not always end up where they are supposed to be. Occasionally people get buried in the wrong place for a variety of reasons.