Forensic anthropology in its modern form is a relatively new field. In the early part of the twentieth century the analysis of skeletal remains took slow and gradual steps forward. But move forward it did.
Aleš Hrdlička had been born in Bohemia (now part of the Czech Republic) before emigrating in 1881 at the age of thirteen to the US, where he became obsessively interested in human origins. Like George Dorsey before him, Hrdlička studied the indigenous peoples of America. At thirty years old, he set off on a 5-year expedition across America, studying skeletons as he went. His conclusions led him to an original theory – that East Asian people had travelled across the Bering Strait and colonised America around 12,000 years before. This concept has since become a scientific commonplace, thanks in part to DNA profiling. But, as well as human origins, he was interested in the origins of human evil, and studied the anthropomorphic characteristics of criminals and ‘normal’ Americans to discover whether the measurements of wrongdoers were different. By 1939 he was able to announce: ‘Crime is not physical, it is mental.’
Hrdlička’s expertise had not gone unnoticed. In the 1930s the FBI wondered whether this fledgling science might help them in cold cases, and turned to him for help. Hrdlička was consulted in more than thirty-five FBI cases, determining the identity of skeletal remains, their age and whether there had been foul play. Hrdlička brought a greater organisation and systematic approach to forensic anthropology and, on his death, J. Edgar Hoover, the Director of the FBI, praised his ‘outstanding contribution to the science of crime detection’. While he was pursuing these investigations, Hrdlička was also preparing the next generation of forensic anthropologists, teaching students at the Smithsonian Institute.
Just as Sue Black’s own professional turning point emerged from her work on the Balkan genocide, some of the biggest breakthroughs for forensic anthropology in the twentieth century came from its most tragic events. One of Hrdlička’s most gifted apprentices, T. D. Stewart, worked in a warehouse in the Japanese city of Kokura, identifying the war dead from the Korean War. The task was made particularly difficult because of the effects of modern explosive weapons on the human body. The remains arrived in enormous boxes filled with bones, and the process was an arduous and heartbreaking one. But Stewart seized the opportunity given to him: he had unparalleled access to a huge sample group of human bones. He began a painstaking catalogue of measurements, gradually building up a database that allowed accurate predictions of height, weight and approximate age from skeletal remains.
Another anthropologist who made a vast contribution in this area was Mildred Trotter, who in 1947 had started work at the American Graves Registration Service in Hawaii. Impatient with the data she already had for predicting height and age – which was fifty years old and from France – she began to take her own measurements, using bones from soldiers killed in the Second World War. Today, the US Army Central Identification Laboratory remains the largest human identification laboratory in the world, and Stewart’s and Trotter’s measurements continue to be used widely.
The lessons learned in Hawaii have spread outwards and informed other forensic anthropologists dedicated to the identification of the dead. Education is at the heart of what Sue Black has pioneered at the Centre for Anatomy and Human Identification (CAHID) in Dundee. In 2008 the centre set up a free 24-hour email service for police, its aim to answer the key question ‘Is this bone human or not?’ in under ten minutes. The caseload increases in the summer, when people go out into their gardens and dig, or go walking in the countryside.
Answering that vital question can be very difficult. The effects of weather on a landscape and of scavenging animals can scatter and destroy skeletons, sometimes leaving only a single bone behind. The ribs of sheep and deer are very similar to human ribs, and are easily confused. The small bones and teeth of children are also similar to those of animals. And because they are numerous – children have around 800 bones until they fuse into the 209 bones of an adult – they can be easily scattered over a wide area in a rural landscape. (Clyde Snow estimates that a child’s skeleton has only forty-six ‘findable’ bones.)
In 2012 the CAHID service answered a satisfying 365 bone cases. A bone case a day. But how many of those bones turned out to be human? ‘Ninety-eight per cent turn out not to be,’ explains Sue Black. But even a negative result provides an important service. ‘It’s about telling police not to start off a murder investigation on Ermintrude the cow, because they won’t get very far with it.’
And there will always be the 2 per cent that once belonged to a living, breathing person. And that’s where the skills of an anatomist or an anthropologist come to the fore. To identify which human bone they’re looking at, they first have to measure its size and thickness, then look at the subtle bumps, grooves and indentations that define the function of each of our bones. Depending on the bone in question, sex can sometimes be determined: men tend to have larger and more robust bones than women. They also have a heart-shaped opening in their pelvis, compared to the circular one through which women give birth. Men’s skulls tend to be larger, too, with squarer jaws than women’s.
A couple of years ago I was with Sue Black in her office when a uniformed police officer came in carrying a paper bag containing a bone he’d found on the beach near Kirkcaldy, where I grew up. Sue gloved up and took the bone from the bag with a theatrical flourish. We could all see it was a jawbone, a few teeth still doggedly in place. ‘It’s human, all right,’ Sue said solemnly. I was convinced it was a wind-up, staged for my benefit. A human bone from the very beach where I used to play as a child. But no, Sue insisted. She took pity on me and explained, ‘There’s nothing here to interest the police. This is a very old bone. The person this belonged to has been dead for a very long time. Far too long to have any legal significance. We get that kind of thing all the time.’
An encounter with a stranger’s jawbone is something most of us would regard as gruesome. The word isn’t in Sue Black’s professional vocabulary. Nor are ‘disgusting’, ‘repellent’ or ‘queasy’. The human body in all its glories and ignominies is her workplace and she brings to it a calm competence that has no place for squeamishness. She maintains that any lingering discomfort she might have had about blood and flesh and bone was dispelled by her first job – working part time in butcher’s shop from the age of twelve. She recalls it being so cold there that ‘when a lorry with livers in it arrived straight from the abattoir, we used to race each other to the back, so at least we could get our hands warm’. The usual things that push people away from anatomy didn’t bother her. But what pulled her to it?
Not, primarily, a desire to deliver justice to criminals. She is a researcher at heart, obsessed with trying to understand the mysteries of the human body. Only later did she see how that understanding might unlock the mysteries of the destruction we humans wreak on each other. As an anatomy undergraduate, and the first member of her family to go to university, Sue Black found dissecting people ‘the most enormously humbling experience’. She saw them as people who had offered themselves as corporeal textbooks for scientists to pore over, so that they might make breakthroughs that would benefit others. Sue chose bone identification for her first research project and soon realised how readily it could be applied practically.
Her first case involved identifying a microlight pilot who had crashed off the east coast of Scotland. Sue was apprehensive about how she’d react to seeing the crushed body of the pilot, but, faced with the reality, the necessary clinical detachment slipped into place. She resolved that case and decided that she could make a career in this field.
Sue’s work brings her face to face with the sort of questions most of us can relegate to our leisure pursuits. ‘We all love a good mystery,’ she says. ‘We all love a good crime. We all read the books and watch the shows, because we have an innate curiosity about the human body and its anatomy. We can use that curiosity to solve a problem and the problem is “Who is it?” “What is it?” S
o I get a wonderful combination, where I am doing anatomy which is where I feel most at home; I am applying it to a problem in the world that really needs addressing, and I am satisfying basic human curiosity at the same time.’
At the beginning, Sue Black’s forensic work centred around identifying victims. A successful identification often helps to define a crime, and makes a criminal investigation possible. But the investigation of a crime is about much more than who’s been on the receiving end. At its heart it’s about who perpetrated the act. That’s been at the core of crime fiction since the origins of the genre in the nineteenth century. Good scientists, like good detectives, develop new techniques to overcome particular problems. If these techniques are successful they can be applied to other similar cases. For Sue Black the blazing of new trails has always been a driving force. Wherever she can, she is determined to extend the range and scope of forensic anthropology. In recent years she has spent less time working out the identities of victims than she has on nailing the victimisers.
Nick Marsh, Head of Photography for the Metropolitan Police, worked alongside Sue in Kosovo, where they became friends as well as professional confidants. After he returned to the UK, he was confronted with a seemingly hopeless case in his photographic unit. A 14-year-old girl had come to the police alleging that her father was abusing her at night. She had told her mother, who hadn’t believed her. The girl knew she needed evidence. Because she was tech-savvy, she knew that a webcam would switch to recording infrared light when it is dark. The girl set up her camera, pointed it towards her bed and clicked ‘record’.
She brought the resulting video to the police. The seemingly intractable problem Nick Marsh faced was that he could see there had been abuse. But because the camera had a very narrow view, the face of the perpetrator remained out of shot. Without a face or other obvious identifying marks, the video wouldn’t be enough to convict the father.
And so Nick turned to the one person he suspected might be able to help. When she viewed the video, Sue said, ‘It was one of the spookiest things that I’ve ever seen. I felt the hair go up on the back of my neck. At about 4.15 in the morning a pair of legs came into the shot of the camera and stood there. You can see where she is lying on the bed. She is wearing her pyjamas and it is her buttock region that we can see. And he just stands there – and I know it’s a ‘he’ because of the very, very hairy legs – and then very slowly extends his forearm, puts his hand underneath the covers.’
Like Nick, Sue’s first thought was that it would be impossible to identify the abuser. But she looked more closely at the footage and noticed that the infrared light had revealed the perpetrator’s deoxygenated blood, highlighting the superficial veins on his forearm. She already knew that superficial vein patterns differ widely. The further from the heart, the more clearly differentiated they are, so the veins on the hands and the forearms are the most individual ones that our bodies display. But to identify someone on the basis of these patterns would be a forensic first. At Sue’s suggestion, the father’s right arm was photographed. The veins matched perfectly with those of the man in the video.
When the case went to court, the defence questioned the admissibility of Sue’s evidence. The judge agreed that vein pattern analysis had no track record whatsoever. The jury was cleared out so the defence and prosecution could present their arguments on whether the evidence should be allowed or not. The judge asked Sue what she planned to say. By now she had realised that she should have photographed both the father’s arms to demonstrate how forearm veins differ, even on the same individual. In a bid to make her point, she asked the judge to turn his own hands over and look at the differences in his own veins. The judge asked her if her evidence proved beyond doubt that the perpetrator was the father. ‘No,’ she said candidly. ‘I haven’t done enough research to be sure that the pattern wouldn’t match anybody else in the world.’ The defence were desperate to get the evidence thrown out. It came down to the judge. Ultimately, the judge deemed the evidence to be admissable based on Sue’s anatomical experience concerning human variation, but it certainly helped that the defence expert was an image analyst rather than an anatomist, and that he irritated the judge by not turning his mobile phone off.
Sue testifed. The defence made their case. The girl was cross-examined. The jury deliberated and came back with a verdict that Sue had not been expecting: not guilty. Worried that she had over-stepped the mark, Sue asked the prosecution barrister to check with the jury whether the science had seemed at fault to them. If it had, vein pattern analysis as a forensic technique would have to be modified or abandoned. The verdict from the jury was that it wasn’t the science that was the issue. That had made sense to them. They’d gone with ‘not guilty’ not because they didn’t believe the science but because they didn’t believe the girl – she hadn’t cried enough.
Instead of despairing at the fickleness of juries, Sue set about shoring up the science, so it would be better placed to combat purely emotional courtroom responses. Since CAHID were then training police officers from all over the UK in disaster victim identification, Sue decided to make the most of what she saw as a unique opportunity. She had all 500 of her police students strip down to their underwear. Her team then took photographs in infrared and visible light of feet, legs, thighs, backs, abdomens, chests, arms, forearms and hands. Once these photos had been catalogued and compared, they provided strong support for the vein pattern analysis technique.
Because police officers love trading case histories and anecdotes, news of Sue’s expertise had spread far beyond Nick Marsh. Before long another Met officer turned to Sue for help in another paedophilia case. In 2009 police had searched the home of a furniture salesman from Kent called Dean Hardy. They had found sixty-three indecent photographs on his computer. Some were of South-east Asian girls, between the ages of eight and ten. All were being abused by a Western man. The metadata hidden in the photographic data files said they had been taken in 2005. The police could prove that Hardy had travelled to Thailand in 2005, and they accused him of abusing the girls. He denied it.
This time Sue Black instructed that both Hardy’s hands be photographed. Then she looked at them in meticulous detail. She noted the vein patterns. She spotted a small scar at the base of one of his fingers. She looked at the pattern of the creases of his knuckles. She noted the pattern of his freckles. Then she compared her findings with the hand in the photo. They matched in every respect. The police confronted Hardy, saying, ‘There is a greater similarity between your left hand and the hand in this photo than there is between your own left and right hands.’ They then asked, ‘Is that your hand?’ Faced with such detailed evidence, this time he answered, ‘Yes.’
That was the first time in UK history that freckles and veins had been used to identify a criminal. Soon afterwards documentary makers produced a programme on how to catch a paedophile, using Sue’s work with the Met on cornering Dean Hardy. When the documentary was shown, four other women came forward and revealed that Hardy had abused them as children. Hardy was sentenced to six years for the Thailand abuse and a further ten years for the abuse attested to by the UK victims.
Later that year, Sue helped build the platform of evidence that convicted members of Scotland’s largest known paedophile ring. Eight men from across central Scotland had been making, sharing and collecting abusive images. One of the men had 78,000 pictures on his computer. Following her work on this case, Sue and her team are currently involved in around fifteen cases a year involving the identification of paedophile predators. CAHID has become the first port of call for police who need this kind of help.
But the centre at Dundee is far from the only place where leading edge developments in forensic anthropology are being brought to bear on the identification of the unknown. At Louisiana State University, Mary Manheim is creator and director of a laboratory known as FACES (Forensic Anthropology and Computer Enhancement Services). Manheim graduated with a degree in English literature in 1981, b
efore making a disciplinary about-turn to anthropology. She has since been involved in over 1,000 forensic cases across the US, and written three books about them, The Bone Lady (2000), Trail of Bones (2005) and Bone Remains (2013). She has spent decades building a database of missing people, by visiting every police department, sheriff’s office and coroner’s office in Louisiana. The database contains biological profiles of 600 missing people and 170 unidentified remains, and aims to make matches between the two. Now that database is connected to a nationwide resource for people looking for missing loved ones.
In one case Manheim worked on, the body of a woman was found floating in the deep water of the Gulf of Mexico, fifteen miles south of Grand Isle, Louisiana. She had been shot in the chest, wrapped in a fishing net, and sunk with a concrete anchor: it was clearly a case of murder. Though the body had been in the water some time, it was well preserved, partly because the net had kept out the crabs and fish that would normally feed on it. As Manheim noted: ‘dangling body parts with mobile joints are attractive to marine life and often the first to be lost: the hands, the feet, the head’.
The body was labelled 99-15 and sent to FACES. Manheim thought it was a perfect candidate for the program and her team were quickly able to build up a picture of the woman as she would have been alive. Manheim measured her skull: her close-set eyes, overbite and oval eye sockets marked her out racially as a ‘classic white European’. She was wearing an unusual turquoise and diamond necklace in the shape of a butterfly. Analysis of her skeleton revealed that she had suffered old fractures to her legs, and had an arthritic right knee which would have made her limp. She had had her wisdom teeth removed, probably by an American dentist. By measuring her leg bones and looking at her pelvis, they were able to come up with an approximate height, weight, and age. Body 99-15 had been 5’2”–5’5”, aged 48–60, 125–135 pounds. The information went on to the FACES database and, in October 2004, 99-15 was identified as a 65-year-old woman who had gone missing from Missouri in January 1999. The analysis was spot-on apart from having underestimated the woman’s age.