Sue is director of the Centre for Anatomy and Human Identification at the University of Dundee. At the heart of her job in the field is the recovery and identification of skeletal remains. Are they human? What sex, what age, what height, what ethnicity? When did death occur? Why? If a corpse is intact and not too decomposed, a pathologist may be able to answer these questions. If not, a forensic anthropologist is needed to analyse not just the bones but all the ‘human remains’ left behind: hair, clothing, jewellery, any of the many items we collect and carry with us every day. As we will see, even the images we leave behind ourselves on camera or video can be analysed for clues that can take years of experience even to notice. Throughout her working life, Sue has traced the secret patterns of the human body, pioneered extraordinary techniques to uncover people’s identities, and taught scores of anatomists, anthropologists and medics how the human body is put together.
The material she has taught her undergraduates, the field trips she has taken them on, and her own research have all been profoundly influenced by her 4-year post-war involvement in Kosovo. Sue describes Kosovo as the big turning point of her career in part because, while she was working there, she was able to share knowledge and experience with a number of national forensic teams. These included the famous Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team, who pioneered the application of their expertise to cases of human rights abuse in the 1970s and early 1980s.
Between 1976 and 1983 Argentina was ruled by a military junta which took violent and repressive action against those it considered left wing or subversive, a conflict named by the perpetrators ‘Guerra Sucia’ or ‘Dirty War’. In Buenos Aires and other cities, civilians were kidnapped in public areas or snatched from their homes and taken to one of 300 secret prisons around the country. Many were brutally tortured – men, women and children alike. Survivors describe being strapped to metal grids and electrocuted. Pregnancy was no deterrent to the captors’ cruelty. Others were drugged, blindfolded and dropped out of planes over the River Plate between Argentina and Uruguay, their bodies washing up on both shores. When not deposited in unmarked graves or water, bodies were sent to morgues and marked ‘no name’. A worker described ‘bodies stored for over 30 days without any sort of refrigeration … clouds of flies and the floor covered in a layer about 10.5 cm deep in worms and larvae’. As many as 30,000 civilians were victims of the ‘Dirty War’, and around 10,000 were among the ‘disappeared’.
Clyde Snow testifies at the 1986 trial of nine former Argentinean military junta leaders for murders carried out during Agentina’s ‘dirty war’. Snow’s testimony helped convict six of the defendants
In 1984, after the fall of the junta, local Argentine judges began to demand that bodies be exhumed from unmarked graves and identified, to enable people to establish what had happened to their lost relatives, and to bring their murderers to justice. The local doctors following the judges’ orders had little experience of analysing skeletons and desperately needed help. In 1986 Clyde Snow, an experienced forensic anthropologist who had worked on the Kennedy assassination and the victims of serial killer John Wayne Gacy, came from the US to train the founding members of the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team. ‘For the first time in the history of human rights investigations,’ explains Snow, ‘we began to use a scientific method to investigate violations. We started out small, but it led to a genuine revolution in how human rights violations are investigated. The idea of using science in the human rights area began here, in Argentina, and it is now used throughout the world.’
Snow collected a small but dedicated team of young Argentineans about him, often training them on the job. In the early months, he describes how his students would break down in tears at the site of graves, and he began to drill a ‘mantra’ into them: ‘If you have to cry, you can cry at night.’ Once the anthropologists had exhumed and documented a body, investigators tried to match its biological profile with medical and dental records of known missing people. In recent years, anthropologists have extracted DNA from the bones of those still unidentified and linked them to living relatives. By 2000, sixty skeletons had been identified, and a further 300 were still under investigation; a tiny proportion of the whole, but a beginning. One identification was of Liliana Pereyra, who was snatched as she walked home from work on 5 October 1977. She would later be tortured, raped and murdered by her abductors. When Liliana disappeared she was five months pregnant. At the trial of nine military leaders in 1985, Clyde Snow was able to testify to Liliana’s identity, telling the court that ‘in many ways the skeleton is its own best witness’. Evidence from Liliana Pereyra’s bones, along with several other representative skeletons, helped convict six of the defendants.
The Argentine team went on to work in more than thirty countries around the world, exhuming mass graves and training others to conduct their own forensic investigations. They trained the Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Foundation, which was set up to investigate human rights violations during the thirty-year civil war. They worked with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa in the aftermath of apartheid. They also collaborated with a team of Cuban geologists in 1997 to identify the remains of Che Guevara in Bolivia. It was known that he had been shot in the legs, arms and thorax in 1967, and had had his hands cut off by Bolivian soldiers to confirm his identity. Anthropologists searching for his remains found seven bodies in two graves. One of the bodies wore a blue jacket, in the pocket of which the team found a small bag of pipe tobacco, which a Bolivian helicopter pilot had given to Guevara shortly before his death. The identification was confirmed by dental records. Thirty years after his execution, Che Guevara was returned to Cuba to a hero’s welcome.
Members of the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team excavate a common grave in Cordoba province, Argentina, where they found some 100 unidentified bodies thought to be victims of the ‘Dirty War’.
The expertise they were able to share in Kosovo helped others like Sue Black to expand their own knowledge and techniques which have formed the basis of developments in the discipline worldwide. Sue herself has worked in such diverse situations as Sierra Leone, Iraq and Thailand in the aftermath of the 2004 tsunami, as well as running extensive training programmes in the UK.
And still atrocities continue that require her expertise. In January 2014 a Syrian defector, code-named ‘Caesar’ and said to have been a military police photographer, smuggled out 55,000 photographs showing the bodies of 11,000 men who had allegedly been detained while fighting against the Assad dictatorship. The regime questioned their legitimacy, claiming an opposition group had faked them. Sue was asked to examine the photographs to determine their authenticity. She has described them as ‘the worst example of violence I have come across in thirty years of forensic science’. Whilst the Kosovo atrocities mainly involved gunshots, and the tsunami was an act of nature, these photographs revealed systematic torture. The bodies showed signs of starvation, strangulation and electrocution. They had suffered beatings, burnings and eye gougings. Sue was asked whether the evidence of torture was credible and if the deaths warranted further investigation. Her answer to both questions was, ‘Emphatically, yes.’
Thankfully, most of the work of the forensic anthropologist doesn’t involve investigating torture or genocide. And it’s only infrequently that they’re called to the scene of what are known as ‘mass fatality events’ – natural disasters, train crashes, the London Transport bombings of 2005. In fact, most of their cases are on a much smaller scale. But just as significant to those touched by these individual fatalities.
John and Margaret Gardiner lived in Helensburgh on the west coast of Scotland, an hour’s drive from Glasgow. John was an ex-merchant seaman whose ability to dream big was matched only by his ability to run up debts. In October 2004 John unveiled his latest get-rich-quick plan: to build luxury kitchens. Margaret was unimpressed by this scheme, and told him so in no uncertain terms.
At her office a few days later, she took a call from a ban
k clerk telling her that there was a problem with her £50,000 loan application. The news surprised her because she hadn’t made a loan application. To the best of her knowledge she’d never asked for a loan in her life. In the course of the conversation, it became clear that John had persuaded another woman to pose as Margaret and fill out the form in her name. This was too much for Margaret. She told her colleagues she was going home to have it out with her husband, and set off to turn him out of the house. That was the last time she was seen alive.
When people asked where his wife was, John reeled off a vague story. But the one thing he couldn’t explain away was why she had suddenly stopped phoning her elderly parents, a duty she carried out every single evening. When Margaret’s disappearance was reported to the police, they took the matter seriously and sent a forensic team round to the house. In the bathroom the CSIs found some blood on the base of the bath tap. Margaret’s blood. They put an endoscope down the U-bend of the bath pipe and discovered a chip of tooth enamel. They checked the washing machine in the kitchen, swabbed around the door and found more of Margaret’s blood.
But none of this meant Margaret was dead. She could have stumbled and fallen in the bathroom, chipping her tooth and cutting herself in the process, then put her bloodied clothes in the washing machine. However, the CSIs were determined to do a thorough job. They took the filter out of the washing machine and there they found a tiny cream-coloured fragment, a mere 4 mm wide and 1 cm long. They weren’t sure but they thought it might just be bone. They could have ground it into a powder and had it tested for DNA. But fortunately they understood that before you apply a test that destroys the evidence, it’s important to apply any available techniques that preserve it.
So they brought the fragment to the Centre for Anatomy and Human Identification, where Sue Black identified it as not just a random piece of bone but the left greater wing of the sphenoid bone. That part of the bone sits in the temple and right underneath it is a crucial branch of a major artery. With that piece of bone missing, Margaret Gardiner would have bled to death. She couldn’t possibly be alive.
Such a tiny piece of evidence made a nonsense of John Gardiner’s fabrications. Confronted with the incontrovertible fragment, he quickly gave the police a new version of events. Margaret had burst through the front door in a rage, he said. Their slanging match quickly turned physical. Margaret got away from her husband’s clutches. He gave chase. She hurried out of the house. Tripped on the top step. Hit her head on the patio. She suffered catastrophic bleeding. John carried his wife into the bathroom, which explained the blood that had been found there. Then he noticed blood on his jumper, so he stuffed it in the washing machine. He washed it on a cold cycle with a non-biological detergent, thus preserving the DNA on the fragment, which must have been trapped in the fibres of his jumper. His story matched the evidence. Later, he told his daughter that he had wrapped Margaret in a sheet and put her in the river. But even though Margaret Gardiner’s body has never been found, on the basis of that tiny fragment of bone containing her DNA, her husband was convicted of manslaughter.
Long before the formal science of anthropology was being used in twenty-first century cases like Margaret Gardiner’s manslaughter, an interest in bones had played a role in a legal judgment. The case in question concerned a thirteenth-century official whose story was presented in the Chinese coroners’ handbook, The Washing Away of Wrongs (1247). A man had killed a young boy and seized his possessions. A long time afterwards, the crime was discovered. The criminal confessed, saying he had beaten the boy and thrown him into a lake. The boy’s body was found in the lake, but the flesh had rotted away, leaving only the bones. A high-ranking official thought that the bones might belong to someone else. No one dared pass a contradictory judgment, and no inquest could be held.
But some time later, another official reviewed the case records and noticed that a relative had described the boy as ‘pigeon-chested’. The official went to look at the skeleton. Sure enough, the victim’s ribs met at an acute angle. A new inquest was called for. The murderer’s confession was validated and he was finally punished for his crime.
But, despite this early success, it was many centuries before the science of bones was formally introduced to the courtroom. The first recorded instance of an anthropologist featuring in a criminal trial was in 1897 in America. George Dorsey was an ethnographer who specialised in Amerindians, and in 1894 he was the first person to be awarded a PhD in anthropology by Harvard University. He had been taught by Thomas Dwight, the so-called ‘father of forensic anthropology’, who had led the way in the subject’s early development and was able to analyse the variability of human skeletons with unprecedented accuracy. At the time of the trial, Dorsey’s passion for collecting artefacts, especially skeletons, took him on expeditions across both North and South America, and he had brought back a large number of Inca mummies from Peru.
In 1897, Dorsey was drawn into a case that occupied the front pages of the newspapers for weeks. Adolph Leutgert had emigrated to Chicago from Germany as a penniless 21-year-old in 1866. Like John Gardiner, he was a man of grand ambitions. Unlike him, he was good with money. For fifteen years he worked odd jobs at tanneries and removal companies until he had saved $4,000 – enough to build a factory and set up the A. L. Leutgert Sausage & Packing Company. Sausages from the factory were soon distributed all over the city and beyond, earning Leutgert the title of ‘The Sausage King of Chicago’.
Just before opening the factory the burly sausage entrepreneur had married a petite and attractive woman called Louisa. But the marriage was a long way from the American Dream. Adolph began to sleep with other women. Rumours spread that he beat his wife.
On 1 May 1897 the pair went out for a spring stroll. But only Adolph returned. Unconvinced by Adolph’s story that she had run away with another man, Louisa’s family went to the police, who carried out an extensive search, eventually turning to the Leutgert sausage factory. An eyewitness told them that he’d seen Adolph and his wife entering the factory at 10.30 on the night she had disappeared. The night watchman corroborated this. More than that – Mr Leutgert had given him an errand and told him he could take the rest of the night off.
As they walked through the factory, the police noticed a peculiar smell coming from a large vat used for steaming sausages. Peering into the vat, the officers noticed sludge at the bottom, which one described as having a ‘very sickening [smell] … something dead around it’. They decided to investigate further.
‘A plug on the outside, near the bottom was withdrawn, and some gunny sacks … were spread on the floor at the bung hole. As the liquid passed out, a slimy sediment and a number of small pieces of bone were deposited on the sacks. The vat was then further searched and, at the bottom, beside other bone fragments, there were found two plain gold rings, stuck together and covered with a slimy, reddish-gray substance; the smaller was a guard ring, the larger a wedding ring, and on the inner surface of the latter was engraved in script “L.L”’ This was later confirmed as Louisa Leutgert’s wedding band, a gift from her husband. Inside a furnace, the police also discovered some small pieces of what looked like bone, and a piece of burned corset. In light of this weight of evidence, Leutgert was arrested.
The trial was held at the Cook County courthouse in the summer of the same year, amid an atmosphere of fevered public interest. George Dorsey and some of his colleagues from the Field Museum in Chicago testified for the prosecution. Dorsey said that the bones found in the furnace were human, and that they included bones from the foot, finger, ribcage, toe and skull of a woman. A further witness testified that the slime found in the vat contained hematin, a chemical created by the decomposition of haemoglobin, found in human blood.
Yet another witness said that, before Louisa’s disappearance, Adolph had bought several hundred pounds of lye – a caustic compound that can be used for such wildly different purposes as curing meat, cleaning ovens and making methamphetamine – which he had graduall
y added to the sausage-dipping vat. Adolph testified that the lye was for cleaning the factory. The prosecution countered that lye is strongly alkaline, good at dissolving large objects.
The first trial produced a hung jury; the jurors were so far from agreement that they nearly came to blows in the deliberation room. But Leutgert wasn’t off the hook. The following year a retrial was held. George Dorsey testified again. And this time Leutgert was found guilty of murdering his wife.
George Dorsey made a good impression on the witness stand. As the Chicago Tribune noted, ‘[I]t was abundantly evident that his sole concern was to present the exact truth as he knew it, exaggerating naught, and setting naught down in malice … his knowledge was … well systematized, so well in hand, so sound, precise and broad.’ By contrast, the defence’s expert, William H. Allport, humiliated himself on the stand by identifying a bone from a dog as one from a monkey. To muffled laughs from the jury, he prevaricated that ‘there is a class of dog monkeys’. But away from the courtroom, Dorsey faced so much harsh criticism from other anatomists about his handling of the case – including the spiteful Allport, who jeered at his ‘identifying a woman from four fragments of bone the size of peas’ – that he abandoned forensics entirely. But the press coverage had undoubtedly put forensic anthropology on the map for the general public for the first time.