"Teasing Secrets from the Dead: My Investigations at America's Most Infamous Crime Scenes" - читать интересную книгу автора (Craig Emily)
1. Death Comes Knocking
MY FIRST CASE STARTED just as so many cases begin for me today-with an unidentified victim. A couple of bass fishermen had found some decomposed and partially skeletonized remains on the edge of West Point Lake, one of the huge Chattahoochee River impoundments that separate the lower portions of Alabama and Georgia. The man had been shot in the head and his body had washed up onto the riverbank. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) had been working the case, but after several weeks, they still had no identification for the victim, and it looked as if this murder might be headed for the cold-case files.
I was still a civilian then, a medical illustrator at a nearby orthopedic clinic, but the police thought I might be able to help by doing a clay facial reconstruction of the victim. When police officers escorted me into the forensic morgue for the first time, I had my first whiff of the smell of decayed human flesh. It was like nothing I'd ever experienced, and I felt an overpowering sense of repulsion. Yet I was also drawn to the mass of bone and decaying tissue that once had been a man-I'd never seen anything like it before. It was slimy and grayish, with bits of bone and rotting leaves and twigs sticking up randomly from a form that I could still recognize as human-but this form had flattened, melted into the black vinyl of the body bag.
As the investigators began to tell me what they knew, I was amazed at how much they'd already learned simply from examining the remains. Enough pelvic soft tissue remained to reveal that this victim was a man; and the coroner, Don Kilgore, had estimated his height from the size label sewn into the trouser remnants that still clung to his leg bones. Now Don gently held the head, which had decomposed down to bare bone, and he showed me the bullet hole, explaining how he could tell where the bullet had entered the man's head, and at what angle. Don had been lucky: He'd recovered a.45-caliber bullet from inside the skull. If police could only link a suspect to the victim, they might be able to solve the crime by comparing bullet evidence.
But the first step, as in every murder investigation, was to identify the victim. Don pointed to some fillings in the man's teeth. If they could just get someone to suggest a name for the victim, he told me, they could probably match the man's teeth to a missing person's dental records. They were starting to lose hope, though. This victim's remains had been here in the morgue for way too long already, and so far no one had come forward with a name.
That's where I came in. At the time, I was dating a detective, Brian McGarr, and all I knew of crime was what I'd heard from him, as he kept me up nights with long, grisly stories of his latest homicide cases. He, in turn, had the incredible good luck to hear all about my exciting work as a medical artist and sculptor, which he at least had the good grace to pretend to find fascinating. Still, maybe he was more interested than I thought. When the West Point case continued to go unsolved, he was the one to suggest to the GBI and the Muscogee County coroner that they commission me to do the facial reconstruction that might help them identify their victim.
Brian and I had a relationship that nicely blended the personal and the professional. He was able to share with me confidential information about police work because I was a volunteer emergency medical technician (EMT) on the local ambulance squad, which gave me an insider's knowledge of the grisly facts surrounding some of his murder cases. Both Brian and I had spent time in the privileged zone behind the yellow crime scene tape, so we understood that unauthorized release of confidential information was forbidden. Still, when professional ethics allowed, we would sit on my back porch for hours hammering out different scenarios that could have caused specific injuries. Sometimes we'd even act out the cases, taking turns playing “killer” and “victim.” When Brian had to testify in court, I'd help him mentally prepare by acting as devil's advocate, pummeling him with questions that challenged his findings at the crime scene. I could also add anatomical facts that supported-or, sometimes, refuted-his interpretation of the victim's fatal injuries. Those conversations were where I first learned to think like a detective. I like to think that, at the same time, Brian was learning to think like a scientist.
Certainly, when it came to analyzing a crime scene and events that led to a murder, Brian was the undisputed expert. But once he realized that my formal training as a medical illustrator enabled me to figure out bullet trajectories and other injury patterns just by reading the autopsy reports, he knew my input was just as valuable as his. At the time, I had no idea that these late-night conversations were actually expanding my understanding of human anatomy and laying the groundwork for a future in forensic anthropology and law enforcement.
A few months before, I'd had my first experience as part of a law enforcement team. Brian had recommended me to do a drawing for an upcoming murder trial. This drawing became a pivotal piece of evidence, enabling prosecutors to demonstrate the pattern of a victim's stab wounds: The injured man was defending himself, not initiating an attack, as the murderer claimed. The D.A. won his case.
It was a heady experience for me, as well. To produce my drawing, I'd been given access to confidential information, and I even became involved with prosecution strategy. The excitement was intoxicating, and I found myself rethinking my current career as a medical illustrator, which began to seem humdrum and predictable by comparison. Brian knew how much I'd come to yearn for something new and exciting, which may have been why he recommended me for the facial reconstruction job.
Still, flattered though I was, I wanted to say no. An anatomical drawing for a trial was one thing. But a sculpture for an ongoing investigation? First of all, I wasn't trained in the technique. Second, this was serious stuff. If I got it wrong, I might ruin their last chance to crack the case.
I wanted to help, though, and I thought I could at least do a little liaison work. So I called Betty Pat Gatliff, a friend and medical illustrator who was also one of the world's best-known forensic sculptors. Her lectures at conferences had fascinated me for years. I'd hung on her every word as she described her work in helping to identify some of the twenty-eight victims of the serial killer John Wayne Gacy, as well as victims of the Green River Killer. One of her first success stories concerned a young Native American who had disappeared years before. Betty Pat produced a facial reconstruction that bore an incredible likeness to the victim and led to the man's positive identification. This brought her more referrals from medical examiners across the country.
On one referral, she actually used her knowledge of human skulls to uncover a flaw in the initial investigation. Skeletal remains and the victim's clothing had been discovered in a remote section of the Southwest, and the victim's bra, lace panties, and high-heeled pumps were collected along with the bones. Naturally, the detectives assumed the victim was female. But when Betty Pat was brought in to do one of her now-famous facial reconstructions, she realized that the skull may have actually belonged to a man. Further forensic anthropology analysis proved her right, and the detectives went on to identify the remains as those of a man who secretly cross-dressed and who had apparently been killed when a prospective lover discovered the deception.
Now, when I approached Betty Pat about the West Point case, she was just as pleasant as I'd remembered-but not very encouraging. “My plate is fuller than full,” she said apologetically. “I couldn't get to this case for at least a year. Why don't you take my course and do it yourself?”
Me? Attend a workshop on forensic sculpture? I was working full-time at a clinic specializing in sports medicine. How could I fit a whole other course of study into my schedule? Still, I was intrigued-and tempted. I haltingly told Betty Pat that I'd think about coming to her class, not realizing how much that conversation would change my life.
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Looking back, I realize that, in many ways, my talk with Betty Pat was merely the next step in a journey I'd been on since childhood. For as long as I can remember, I have been blessed-or maybe cursed-with an insatiable curiosity about the human body. Call me crazy, but my idea of a good time is a pile of mysterious bones to analyze, the chance to dissect the bloody knee of a freshly delivered cadaver, or maybe a long session of photographing a partially decayed face-anything to satisfy my endless fascination with the form and function of our bones, muscles, and tendons.
As a girl growing up in Kokomo, Indiana, in the 1950s and 1960s, I was discouraged from choosing a career in science, as well as from engaging in other kinds of “boy stuff.” So my fascination with science made me feel like a misfit, though given my family history, it should have made sense: My dad,
My father's medical books especially fascinated me. I got his permission to take them off his library shelves-and became hooked. Looking through those books, I felt as though I had entered into another world. I spent hours admiring the full-color renderings of what I might see inside an arm, a leg, or an abdomen. Although he never expected me to make a career in science or medicine, Dad encouraged my interest in those books. I guess he was thrilled that he could share his passion for anatomy with at least one of his four kids.
One afternoon when I was about twelve, I was out in a trout stream near a vacation cabin we owned near Baldwin, Michigan. Suddenly, I caught sight of some bones sticking out of the sandy bank. At that point in my life, it took quite a lot for me to put down my fly rod voluntarily, especially when the trout were biting. But those bones were just too intriguing. I waded over to the bank and pulled a few out of the sand. Just below, under the water, I could see that more were deeply embedded in the black muck just below the surface of the streambed. I was sure that I had stumbled upon a deer's antlers, some ribs, and a pelvis. That was it. I knew I couldn't leave until I had found every single piece of that skeleton.
As I searched for the smooth butter-colored bones among the rocks and sticks at the bottom of the creek, I completely lost track of time. When I suddenly realized that it was starting to get dark, I knew my parents would be frantic. I stuffed all the bones that would fit into my wicker creel, the basket for carrying the fish I'd caught, and thrust the others into a sack I had improvised out of my rain poncho. I reached the path back to our cabin in record time, just as my dad showed up to look for me.
Before Dad could scold me for being late, I dumped the bones at his feet and breathlessly asked him to help me reassemble them, figuring that any doctor could put a skeleton together without thinking twice. But Dad had no idea where to start. He knew where every bone was located while
That was one time my dad couldn't help me. But he was wise enough to see that I had found something that was hugely important to me. Even though it was nearly twilight, Dad walked me back to my fishing spot and waited quietly on the bank while I finished doing my first-ever skeletal excavation. Then he offered moral support for the next two days, as I tried to put those bones back together in our backyard.
Of course, I couldn't do it. But I promised myself that someday, somehow, I
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Deer bones from a trout stream were one thing, but I'll never forget the shock of my first encounter with a human cadaver. It was a dozen years later, and I'd enrolled in the medical illustration program at the Medical College of Georgia, where studying the innards of the human body was part of the program. As I walked into the brightly lit gross anatomy lab, I had to blink a bit to avoid the relentless glare of the overhead fluorescent lights. Everything was cold, clean, and sparkling-gleaming stainless steel fixtures, glass cabinets full of lab instruments, and a shiny-white tile floor. I shivered inside my new white lab coat, partly from the cold-the lab was kept air-conditioned to a chilly 68 degrees-and partly from excitement. There were about thirty-five of us, a mix of med students and illustrators, divided randomly into groups of five or six, and we were all nervous.
I was naïvely expecting to see the bodies laid out on gurneys in quiet repose, anticipating a funeral home kind of quiet in the lab. Instead, everyone was chattering as the sharp smell of formaldehyde assaulted us. A half-dozen stainless steel coffin-like boxes were scattered around the room, mounted on legs that brought them up to tabletop height.
I went to join my group, and as class began, the four lab instructors went from box to box, flipping back the lids to reveal the cadavers floating there in formalin. The intense smell scoured the lining of my nostrils, bringing tears to my eyes. I blinked and peered into our vat. There was our cadaver-a White woman who looked to be about sixty or seventy years old. She was nude, of course, but for some reason that surprised me. She lay face-up on the bottom of the vat, completely submerged in the cloudy fluid, her flaccid, wrinkled skin hanging in thick folds from her short, square frame. Her sagging flesh was light gray, and her long, wispy silver hair was floating just under the liquid's surface, drifting over her face. Her colorless lips were drawn back from her teeth in a deathly grimace and her eyes were open slightly, exposing ghostly white globes. Apparently her eyes had sunk back into the sockets after death, and her slightly closed lids hid the irises. It was a ghoulish sight, but my insatiable scientific curiosity overcame my initial squeamishness.
Around me, the room slowly filled with an uncomfortable silence as one by one the students stopped talking. We had all prepared for this day with such excitement-so proud of our new lab coats, our very own surgical gloves, the little dissection kits we had bought according to our printed instruction sheets-but now we realized how unprepared we really were.
As the conversation quieted, I could hear the low rumble of the exhaust fans sucking the heavy formalin fumes out of the air. Across the room, someone bumped into a stainless steel container and a half-opened lid crashed down. The sound bounced off the tile floor and echoed through the room like a gunshot. Everyone jumped and then laughed self-consciously.
Having opened the containers, the instructors then pulled back on huge stainless steel levers at each end of the vats to lift the bodies up out of the fluid, raising them to table height. I watched transfixed as my group's cadaver rose up slowly, horror movie style, to break through the surface of the oily liquid. Her hair fell back like a swimmer's would while rising out of a pool and then there she lay, stretched out on a perforated steel sheet, the formalin dripping off her body down into the vat. I had the feeling that her most intimate secrets were being revealed: the muted old surgical scar that marked her abdomen; the coarse, dark stubble running up and down her legs; her long, split, and dirty nails. When our instructors told us to flip our cadavers onto their stomachs, I was relieved that I wouldn't have to look into her face any longer, at least not for a while.
It took me a while to overcome the sense that I was trespassing, staring at this woman's most intimate bodily secrets. I was grateful when the instructor started giving instructions on how we were to begin our dissections. Now I didn't have to feel like some sleazy voyeur-I had a purpose for examining this woman's body.
My strongest reaction was that the cadavers were shockingly gray and stiff, so far from the lifelike multicolored tissue I'd expected to explore. During my childhood of hunting and fishing with Dad and my brothers, I had cleaned and dressed plenty of fish and game, and I'd been expecting our specimens in human dissection to be more like that freshly killed tissue-soft, pliable, brightly colored. Working on this washed-out corpse felt like abandoning color TV to watch in black and white. The cadavers' grayness did help with the queasiness of working on a human, though.
We started the dissection by removing the skin, which felt like cold, stiff, waterlogged shoe leather. It had simply not occurred to me that I would have to
Despite the medical touch added by the gloves, I felt as though I were violating this woman. To combat this sensation, my fellow students and I did what we could to depersonalize our cadavers. We didn't give them names, and we referred to each one as “the body” rather than as the “dead person.” When I became a forensic anthropologist, I would have to learn how to reverse this line of thought, remembering that each dead body was actually a person with a story to tell. But I wasn't so philosophical back then. Instead, I was consumed by my fascination with the human body. My only response to this dead woman was excitement at the prospect of all she was about to teach me.
My fellow students and I were totally silent as we took turns making the incisions on the woman's back that would allow us to open the skin as if opening a book: first a long cut down the backbone, then a right-angle cut across her shoulders, then another right-angle cut at the base of her spine, just above the crack in her buttocks, to make a giant letter “I.” The skin on her back was several layers thick, attached to the tissue underneath with hundreds of little fibers that we had to cut through.
Having spent so much time with my dad's textbooks, I expected to be able to look at a real body and see all the parts clearly, but I soon discovered this wasn't possible. Indeed, that's why medical illustrators are necessary. A medical illustration needs to show fully detailed anatomical structures, something that a surgeon might use to navigate an actual body. But neither the illustrator nor the surgeon ever really sees those complete structures, not all at once. We had to be able to see each layer of the body as we dissected it, then imagine what it all looked like when it was intact and in place.
That's why our instructors insisted that we cut into the body with the “I” shape they had chosen. They wanted us to be able to open the body, remove the organs, and then fold everything back exactly the way it was. If we just cut things out and discarded them as we went along, we'd never see the whole picture. Instead, we had to learn both the parts
The medical students were going through a similar process. It was the only chance they'd get to see a body in layers, or to cut out an organ, trace its blood supply, and then put the dissected pieces back together like some three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle. During actual surgery, their goal would be to disturb as little of the body as possible, imagining-with the help of our illustrations-what they could not actually see.
After we had finished exploring the muscles, nerves, and blood vessels in our cadavers' backs, our instructors finally let us turn them face up. (My group immediately put a paper towel over our woman's face, covering her staring eyes and grinning mouth.) As we cut into the abdomen, I again expected to see what I'd seen in my dad's textbooks: the abdominal organs revealed as separate structures, each with its own unique size and shape. Instead, what I saw was that every organ was molded and folded tightly onto its neighbors, like one of those amazing Irish stone fences, in which a collection of separate stones somehow fit so closely together that mortar isn't necessary.
Sorting through loops of intestines, I realized that they are not just one long tube, like a garden hose, folded over to fit neatly into someone's belly. Instead, they are connected to the body's main blood vessels by huge, flat membranes, which, if torn or twisted, can rob the gut of blood and lead to someone's death. Then I was struck by how huge her liver was-about the size and weight of a wet, tightly folded bath towel. I knew that if I slipped my fingers around the liver's narrow edge, I'd find the gall bladder, tucked up underneath one of the liver's lobes. Since gall bladder removal is a pretty common surgical procedure, we students eventually made it a game to see whether we could tell by feel which cadavers had had that type of surgery.
The nervous system was particularly difficult for me to learn. Among other things, nerve pathways cross and crisscross at specific places in the brain and spinal cord. When the pathways are disrupted-from disease, stabbing, gunshot wounds-the whole system can be short-circuited. It took a leap of faith for me to understand that a gunshot wound that completely pulverized one section of the brain might leave the victim alive but severely disabled, while another gunshot wound that cut cleanly through the brain stem meant instant death as the diaphragm and heart quit forever.
Although at the time I was merely learning the architecture of the human interior in order to draw it accurately, one day this training would be vital for my work in forensics. Years later, while testifying in a murder trial, I became recognized as a court-qualified expert in gross anatomy as well as forensic anthropology-a rare distinction for a forensic anthropologist, and one I could not have achieved without my early studies at the Medical College. The case in question hinged on a minuscule cut in the victim's neck bone no bigger than an eyelash. I was able to prove that the tiny trace mark indicated a fatal knife wound when I demonstrated that in order to reach the bone in question, the killer's knife had to work its way through the victim's windpipe, esophagus, and a critical group of arteries, nerves, and veins.
Those nerves and blood vessels sure caused me enough trouble as a student! When I'd first looked at Dad's textbooks, I'd seen that each body part was rendered in a different color-red for arteries, yellow for nerves, and blue for veins. In real life, though, the colors seemed blurred and dulled, and all I could see were bunches of vessels, tangled together like three incredibly long varieties of overcooked pasta.
Gradually, I got used to the lack of color, and I learned to work by touch as well as by sight. When I could see the organs for myself and follow their contours with my hands, I could memorize their anatomy through my fingertips as the shape and location of even the tiniest lymph node flowed effortlessly from my hands into my brain.
In the anatomy lab, I had the luxury of being able to take bodies apart, piece by piece, to see exactly what made things work. Making my cadaver's fingers wiggle and her knees bend by pulling on a tendon imitated a muscle contraction. It might make this dead woman look like a macabre life-size marionette, but it taught me more than any textbook ever could.
The wonder of those first few months stays with me to this day. I walked around in a perpetual state of awe, amazed at the infinite variety of us humans and our bodies, even as I marveled at how alike we all are. I found myself looking at the crowds of people in the local shopping mall, people of different ages, races, and sizes, thrilled at my new knowledge that each anatomical structure shared a common shape, location, and function. Touch the inside of a wrist-anybody's wrist-and you'll feel the pulse of the radial artery in the same tiny spot… every time… in every body. This “human design element” is what makes modern forensic science possible-the fact that we know so much about any individual body before we've ever seen it.
Gross anatomy class was also where I learned that you must never-
This was also when I first encountered the peculiar balancing act that is the hallmark of my profession: Dead bodies are treated as objects to be probed for clues-and yet they must also be viewed as the living human beings they once had been, humans whom we try to honor by learning who they were and how they died. When I first started working in forensic anthropology, I'd approach each case like a puzzle, and I spoke only of “the body” or “the bones.” When I finally learned to refer instead to “the dead person” or “the human remains,” I was better able to hold on to my sense of each victim's humanity. Out in the field, it's easy to get wrapped up in the act of searching for bones, teeth, and evidence associated with the victim-jewelry, clothing, maybe a bullet-and it's all too common to find yourself shouting gleefully when someone finds one of these “treasures.” Among cops and other forensic specialists, it probably doesn't matter too much, but the effect can be devastating when civilians are looking on. I've learned to make a habit of acting as if the victim's mother were always looking over my shoulder and treating every piece of tissue, every scrap of evidence, as if I had a personal connection to the victim.
This approach really paid off when I was working with the remains of the people who died in the World Trade Center. Then, my every move really was under scrutiny by dozens of people, often including the victims' friends, families, and fellow firefighters or police officers. I was thankful, then, that I'd learned to treat every human remain with the respect it deserved, and I was moved by how much my colleagues in the morgue appreciated my gentleness and care.
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As I continued with my medical illustration class, I was most fascinated observing surgical procedures. The medical illustration program at the Medical College of Georgia is considered one of the best in the nation, and one thing that makes it so special are classes in surgical observation, where students get to sketch actual operations while standing at the surgeon's elbow.
Writing these words today, I'm struck by how different my first surgical experience was from those of students today, who have access to television and movies that depict surgery in relatively realistic ways. The closest I'd ever gotten to an operating room before I observed my first surgery was TV's
When I walked into my first operation, I was surprised to see the entire patient covered with the sterile sheets known as surgical drapes. Only the relatively small area that comprised the surgical field-the part of the body on which surgeons were operating-was exposed. With the patient's face, arms, and legs all blocked from view, I found it remarkably easy to forget that this procedure involved an actual human being, especially since the only people monitoring the patient's responses were the anesthesiologist and his or her nurses. During my first few surgeries, I was periodically startled out of my concentration on the procedure whenever the surgeon asked the anesthesiologist, “How's our patient doing?”
The most surprising aspect of my first surgery was the smell of burning flesh. This particular surgeon cut into his patient with a scalpel, then immediately burned the bleeding edges of the wound with a tiny cauterizing tool. Over the years, I've tried to describe the smell of burning flesh and the closest I can come is freshly burned toast thrown into a skillet already simmering with rotten fish, pork fat, and an old leather shoe. However, even that description may not do justice to the aroma. All I can say is that anyone who has ever experienced it recognizes it instantly. It's not like the smell of a fresh steak slapped on a grill: The odor of roasting
As the surgery proceeded, I was especially struck by the smell of warm blood that pervaded the room. The smells of surgery are something the medical shows haven't conveyed at all. While burning human flesh smells nothing like its animal counterpart, human and animal blood smell eerily the same-and as someone who had done her share of hunting and butchering wild game, I hadn't expected the smell of blood to bother me. But it did, maybe because of the visuals that went with it. Every so often, the surgeon would hit an artery and blood would spew up like a tiny geyser. Even the smallest artery could cause an arc of blood to splat across his blue-green robe.
Although I loved watching these surgeries, I realized early on that I'd never make it as a pathologist. Frankly, I don't like to see or smell blood. I can't stand to see someone insert a needle into an eyeball to withdraw fluid, and the sounds and smells associated with aspirating stomach contents make me want to vomit up mine. Even today, I avoid the “squishy stuff” whenever possible and I'm profoundly grateful that I was able to go into first orthopedics and then forensic anthropology, where I could work with muscle and bone rather than internal organs.
Nevertheless, my class in pathology, where we, shoulder to shoulder with the medical students, would watch pathologists perform autopsies, gave me a valuable insight into my own capacities. My budding ability to visualize a body in three dimensions began to pay off: Before the pathologist made the first cut through the skin, I knew precisely what he or she would find underneath. Since I now knew what normal organs and tissue should look like, abnormalities caused by disease or injury seemed glaringly obvious.
It's one thing to stand at a surgeon's elbow and watch the most intricate procedures. It's a whole other thing to perform surgery yourself. The Medical College of Georgia believed that in order to illustrate surgery properly, medical illustrators had to pick up the knife and know how to use it. Of course, we illustrators were never going to operate on our own patients. But if we had never performed operations ourselves, how would we discover how much tension is needed to suture intestines, and how that differs from suturing skin? How would we learn exactly how to hold each instrument, or the correct direction and technique for applying force when retracting a rib cage? And if we didn't thoroughly understand these procedures, how could we translate such information to our drawings? These were things we could only learn by doing.
So in its wisdom, the Medical College had decided that we illustrators would enroll alongside the budding surgeons in their classes in dog surgery. Each of us students-future doctors and illustrators alike-were assigned a large dog who'd been abandoned or donated to our program, on whom we could learn the basics of surgical technique.
From the first, I had mixed feelings about this aspect of our training. On one hand, I love dogs-always do, always have. So I wasn't without sympathy for the critics of the Georgia program, who considered it cruel, disgusting, even unethical for us illustration students to cut up helpless animals in order to learn surgical techniques that we were never going to perform.
On the other hand, the dog surgery program turned out to be one of the most valuable experiences in my education. Here was where I really began to understand what surgeons experienced-because, albeit it on a very small scale, I was doing their work. Each dog in the program received a thorough medical “workup,” then underwent a series of operations over a period of several weeks. We removed their gall bladders and spleens, and resectioned their bowels. Working around the clock, we did everything we could to ease their post-op pain. All of us, illustrators and med students alike, were deeply committed to our dogs' care.
The most surprising thing to me about actually performing surgery for the first time was that the tissue I was operating on was
Being a dog lover, I had bonded with my dog patient as I performed the series of operations on him. He was a large German shepherd with melting brown eyes, and I never failed to spend a few minutes on each “medical” visit scratching him behind the ears and telling him how beautiful he was. Although I purposely never gave him a name, I did manage to block out the fact that our final exam required us to euthanize our dogs and perform autopsies on them.
For the medical students, this was a crucial rite of passage: Could they maintain the detachment they would need to cut open human bodies, to depersonalize their patients enough to be able to work on them? We illustrators felt that we were entitled to a bit more artistic sensitivity-but, truthfully, the process was hard on all of us. We tried to rationalize it, saying that if these dogs hadn't been part of our program, they would have been killed anyway.
That argument was fine in theory, but when I actually had to approach my dog's cage, look into his eyes, and contemplate ending his life, I knew I simply couldn't do it. I went to my professor and begged for a dispensation. He looked into my face for what seemed like several minutes and I couldn't help wondering what he was thinking. “Fine,” he said at last. “You don't have to be there when the animal dies.”
I still had to perform the autopsy, but at least I didn't have to perform that awful act. Looking back, I realize this was an important turning point for me. I had no problem with dead bodies, but I couldn't handle the process of dying. Wherever I worked as a medical illustrator, it wouldn't be in a hospital.
Now I understand that the dog surgery class was important for another reason: It was crucial preparation for the forensic cases I'd later encounter in which the stories of the victims were absolutely heartrending-children led into certain death by their trusted parents, as happened with the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas; a battered wife and murdered infants shot in cold blood by a Kentucky father; the young woman butchered and thrown into the chilly Wisconsin River. What I started to learn in dog surgery-and have had to relearn many times since-is the crucial balance between becoming hardened enough to remain objective with the science while retaining enough emotion to feel outrage on the victims' behalf. Cold, clear objectivity enables me to analyze the evidence, and that's a crucial part of my job, one that offers closure to loved ones and sometimes helps bring a murderer to justice. But compassion for the victim spurs me on to uncover new evidence, keeping me up late to work on a forensic sculpture or sending me on another trip into the Kentucky woods. It's so frustrating when my colleagues and I can't identify a victim or find the crucial evidence in his or her case-but it's so rewarding when we can.
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My experience with dog surgery had taught me that I couldn't work in a hospital-but then where could I practice my profession? Through a series of fortunate coincidences, my ongoing interest in muscles and bones led me to Jack Hughston, M.D., who was then doing groundbreaking work in orthopedics and sports medicine at the Hughston Orthopaedic Clinic in Columbus, Georgia. To my eternal gratitude, Dr. Hughston not only hired me, but also gave me numerous opportunities to expand my knowledge of anatomy, orthopedics, and illustration, and over the next fifteen years I made thousands of drawings based on anatomical dissections and surgeries conducted at the clinic. I was even able to conduct dissections of my own, working with hundreds of knees, ankles, hips, shoulders, and elbows-extremities from men and women of all races and ages. Here, in the clinic's sterile, cold, and often lonely lab, I began to think of myself as teasing secrets from the dead, forever grateful that their final gift would help others regain the function of an injured or diseased limb.
For several years, my participation at the clinic was deeply satisfying. Eventually, though, I felt that I'd come to a standstill. My drawing skills couldn't keep up with my advancement as an anatomist: I was now at the point where I could see things that I couldn't draw. I simply couldn't make my hands reproduce on paper what I could perceive on the cadaver specimen-but my sculpting skills, I thought, were somewhat better. So, almost on a whim, I decided to create three-dimensional wax sculptures to portray the anatomical details I knew were there. Ironically, I'd always enjoyed sculpture more than work in two dimensions; but, until now, I'd had no outlet for this skill.
But when I approached Dr. Hughston, full of enthusiasm for my new idea, I was a bit taken aback by his response. “Sculptures? Clay models? We're not running an art gallery here, Emily. This is a clinic, in case you've forgotten.”
Eventually, I won Dr. Hughston's permission to work on the sculptures in the lab-but on my own time. All of a sudden, I was leading a double life. Every day, I would put in my usual full day's work producing drawings. Every evening, I would labor for hours sculpting life-sized clay models of knees in various stages of dissection, going far past the usual details portrayed in medical textbooks to reveal the pioneering discoveries that Dr. Hughston and his colleagues had made. His anatomical research revealed intricate fibers in the knee, shoulder, and ankle that had never before been shown by medical illustrators-until now.
To ensure accuracy, I brought specimens of fresh amputations right into my art studio. With my left hand, I felt my way along the joint, sometimes staring at the structures, sometimes closing my eyes and trying to send some secret code to my brain. I concentrated my entire being on what my hand was feeling-the contours of the knee, its bumps and curves, the spots where it was soft and spongy, the places where it was hard and smooth. Then, with my right hand, I rendered what I felt into the soft, oily clay. Although I could never have completed this project without a detailed knowledge of anatomy, working on this sculpture was a true leap into the unknown for me, combining science, art, and intuition in my first attempt to make a model come alive.
When my first sculpture was finished, I couldn't wait to show it to Dr. Hughston. He was more taciturn than usual as I ushered him into my studio. But when I lifted the soft cloth to uncover my wax model of a human knee, he was dumbfounded. Pioneer that he was, he saw the possibilities at once.
“Well,” he said after a long pause, in which I eagerly sought to read his blank expression. “Looks like I was wrong. We sure can make use of this.”
With Dr. Hughston's enthusiastic support, I went on to create over two dozen wax models of knees, shoulders, and ankles, pictures of which are still in use today. My work set a new international standard for medical education, creating a reputation for me as well as for the clinic. Yet though I seemed to be at the top of my profession, I realized that I had never really become the scientist I had always wanted to be. I had loved making drawings and sculptures-but they were always in service of a doctor or surgeon's work. I wanted a chance to do my own work with the human body, to take the lead in research and investigation instead of forever following two steps behind.
Medical illustration seemed to be running out of challenges-but I was still intrigued by the prospect of learning how to do a facial reconstruction for the West Point murder case. So off I went to Betty Pat's weeklong seminar in Norman, Oklahoma -where I was immediately sucked into the fascination of forensic work.
We started with the principles behind the different facial tissue depths. Think of a human face-what determines its shapes and contours? Most of it, of course, is bone structure. But the differing soft tissues are what turn the skull into a unique face that we recognize as male or female, Black or White, old or young. Scientists have developed a complex series of mathematical formulas giving the basic information on how sex, race, and other factors help to create different-shaped skulls and different patterns of tissue depth and shape.
To start a sculpture, then, we learned how to use these formulas to cut small erasers into different lengths and glue them on to the skull, to approximate the skin depths at various key points. Then we learned how to “connect the dots” by covering the erasers with clay, building up the contours that mimicked a real human face.
This would be challenging enough if our only goal were to produce a lifelike image. But ultimately, we wanted to create a face that resembled a specific person-a person whom we had never seen. Somehow we had to envision the victim's face and re-create something close to it, so that someone who had known this person could recognize him or her and come forward with a name.
During Betty Pat's weeklong class, I listened in awe to more stories of my teacher's most interesting cases. Then, at night, she and the instructors in the composite drawing class-conducted right next door to our reconstruction class-would discuss the profession of forensic art. As far as I could see, medical and forensic art were fairly similar. The primary difference seemed to be in the payoff. As a medical illustrator, I felt a certain satisfaction in a job well done and the knowledge that I was helping to teach anatomy and surgery to physicians. But that pleasure paled beside the thrill of being part of a team that solved murder mysteries and helped bring killers to justice.
Back I went to the Hughston Clinic, totally hooked on facial reconstruction. Although I was still nervous about doing the sculpture that Brian's colleagues had requested, I was now eager to try. However, the skills that had seemed so temptingly within my reach in Betty Pat's class appeared maddeningly elusive now. Like so many people, I initially thought that facial reconstruction could be reduced to a formula or recipe. If you followed the recipe, you would get a good result. Boy, was I wrong! Sure, you had to know the basics, but then there was all kinds of room for judgment-and for error.
Good student that I was, I followed the recipe I'd learned from Betty Pat. I checked out the formula for a White male, cut the appropriate markers, and glued them on to the skull. Then, to the best of my ability, I covered everything with clay, sculpting eyelids, mouth, and nose to correspond to the bony structure of the underlying bones and teeth. The final result did somewhat resemble a man's face, but to me it was an extreme caricature. The eyes were buggy, the mouth looked like it belonged on a puppet, and I didn't yet understand how important the neck was to make a person look “real.”
None of the cops had any evidence of individualizing details that might make this man's face unique. Did he have a moustache? A beard? Did he wear eyeglasses? Was he bald? Nobody knew-and that made it more difficult.
Although the police were relatively happy with my work, I was not. My frustration led me to what turned out to be a groundbreaking idea. Before I'd left for Betty Pat's class, I'd been working on new computer graphic techniques for demonstrating surgical procedures. I now had the idea of using computer graphics to produce what I called a “postmortem lineup.” By using the computer to apply facial hair, eyeglasses, and several different hairstyles to a single clay sculpture, I gave a range of different looks to that same face.
The completed facial reconstruction might not have been a striking success, but the first-time use of a computer-enhanced postmortem lineup sent a sensational wave through the law enforcement community. When we publicized the case in the Columbus newspaper, trying to identify the victim, the reporter was more astounded with the computer enhancements and variations than with the actual case. Forensic artists across the country quickly adopted my technique for computer-enhanced facial reconstruction, and, with some modifications, it is still in use today. Although my initial foray into the field never produced a victim ID, it seemed I had made a contribution nonetheless.
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It would take me three years of trial and error before I felt I had mastered computer-enhanced facial reconstruction. Still, because I was the only person in the Alabama, Georgia, and North Florida region doing this kind of work, the local police knew me and they starting bringing me all their toughest cases-the ones they just couldn't ID on their own, cases that had gone unsolved for months and even years. Once again, I was working at the clinic all day and leading a secret life at night. And, once again, I was becoming frustrated with my skills as an artist. Give me a bone, a ligament, or a muscle and I'll draw you up a beauty, but when it comes to the human face, you might want to get yourself another illustrator. I was an expert at drawing internal organs, but I couldn't draw faces-I wasn't a portrait artist.
My work with law enforcement was satisfying, though, and I reveled in my newfound camaraderie with police and prosecutors. The more I enjoyed forensic work, the less able I became to put aside my frustrations with the Hughston Clinic. Meanwhile, my experimental computer-assisted techniques had made a modest splash in the law enforcement community, and, along with Karen Burns, I was invited to present them at the July 1990 annual meeting of the International Association for Identification (IAI) in Nashville, Tennessee. Like so many other serendipitous events in my life, this one was to prove a turning point.
I arrived at the conference full of anticipation, thrilled to meet so many forensic artists as well as investigators, forensic scientists, and others in the law enforcement field-people of substance and commitment, dedicated to a cause larger than themselves. These were people I really respected, people with whom I'd be proud to work.
My own presentation went well, and for that I was grateful. My new buddies offered their congratulations. Then they told me that the one presentation I must not miss was the one on forensic anthropology at the “Body Farm”-the world-famous department of forensic anthropology at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, where bodies were literally left to rot on the ground so students and professors could observe and measure the process of decomposition.
This was years before Patricia Cornwell's novel about the place was published. I'd heard about the Body Farm in Betty Pat's workshop, though I confess I hadn't thought much about it. Now, though, I went to the talk by Knoxville doctoral student Murray Marks (who later became one of the nation's foremost professors of forensic anthropology). From the moment that Murray began speaking, I was riveted. And when he speculated on the development of computer technology that could “someday” be used to aid in victim identification, I sat bolt upright in my seat. WHAT!!! You mean I was already on the right track? Anthropology Ph.D.s were just now thinking about this?
That was it. I knew what I wanted to do and where I wanted to do it. I rushed up to Murray after his lecture and excitedly told him what I had been doing on my own to develop the method he'd said was still “pie in the sky.” He was impressed, and urged me to come to Knoxville to apply for one of the coveted slots as a Ph.D. student under Dr. Bill Bass.
I was powerfully drawn to the world of forensic anthropology that Murray described to me that day. But I was now forty-three years old and at the peak of my current profession. Did I really have the strength to start over?
Then came the case of “Baby Lollipops.”
In the fall of 1990, four months after the conference, Detective Charlie Metscher of the Miami Beach Police Department called for my help in identifying a three-year-old child whose emaciated and battered remains had been found under shrubs in a residential area just a few days earlier. Police and medical examiners surmised that the child had likely lain there alive but unable to move as his brain swelled, he became dehydrated, and his life slowly slipped away. In addition to numerous acute cuts and bruises, he was suffering from a recent head fracture, a brain injury, and a massive hemorrhage that involved his left leg and hip. Older injuries covered his entire body, with broken bones in so many stages of healing that it was almost impossible to count the number of times he had been beaten. This child had not only been abused-tortured really-but he had also been starved. Apparently close to three years old, he had weighed only eighteen pounds when he died. Because the tiny T-shirt he had been wearing had a pattern of large lollipops across the chest, the press had dubbed him “Baby Lollipops.”
The discovery of this child and the revelation of the horrors he had endured united the Miami community in a common fury. But the investigation couldn't proceed until the police knew who the child was. Because the crime had been so brutal, the media and police agreed that photos of the child's battered, bruised, and swollen body should not be made public. Nevertheless, he needed a face.
As it happened, Detective Metscher had been in the audience at my presentation in Nashville. He wanted me to use my techniques to create an image of Baby Lollipops that could be circulated throughout South Florida.
Of course I said yes. I was as outraged as he was over the case, and I was determined to do everything in my power to help solve it.
A child dead from abuse evokes a very deep reaction in even the most hardened professionals. The seemingly never-ending litany of tiny bodies with ulcerated burns, torn-off fingers and toes, or huge foreign objects forced into their rectums and vaginas cries out for justice or retribution or both. No professional, no matter how accomplished, ever gets used to the kinds of horrors that we see on a daily basis-we don't become inured to the terrible things that people can do to each other. We do, however, fall into a routine. It may take something truly terrible to shock us. Cops who hide their emotions with cynicism and jokes revert back to human beings again when faced with a victim like Baby Lollipops.
There was also a sense of urgency: Charlie Metscher and I both knew that time was of the essence. Now that the child had been found, there was a good chance that the perpetrators would skip town and never be seen again.
Charlie immediately sent me the photo of the boy and a scenario of the case. I became obsessed with my mission and stayed up two nights in a row, experimenting with as-yet-untested methods that combined photography, digitized images, and computer graphics.
My own limits as a portrait artist had, some months before, pushed me to modify another technique that was now being used by forensic artists doing composite drawings to nab suspects. I called it “facial restoration.” I began by photographing victims' faces that, for various reasons, couldn't be used for public viewing, digitized the images, and then used the computer to cut out the eyes, noses, and mouths. Then, from my homemade computerized file of facial features, I selected features that I thought would most closely resemble those of my victim. I inserted these “new” facial features into the victim's picture and then blended the whole portrait until it appeared as one “natural” face, a sort of computer-assisted “Mr. Potato Head.”
Since most of Baby Lollipops's flesh was still intact, I could smooth out the skin's defects with computerized airbrushing. The software program enabled me to draw new lips over the cut and bruised lips in the picture, even as I maintained the integrity of their original size and general shape. I was feeling optimistic about rendering a convincing image when I ran into a new problem: the eyes.
In the photograph, Baby Lollipops's eyes had been swollen shut, but I wanted to show him with normal, healthy, open eyes. Yet try as I might, I couldn't make the eyes look right when I drew them on the computer. I tried drawing the eyes on a separate sheet of paper and then downloading them into my image, but there was too great a gap between my drawing and the photographed face.
So I turned to one of my colleagues at the clinic for help. By now, people at work knew all about my “secret life,” and they had all been very supportive, even to the point of letting me videotape their faces to create the computerized file of features I used in my clay facial-reconstruction experiments. But when I tried to use these same cutout facial features on Baby Lollipops, I ran into a few unexpected problems. First, my fledgling technique had been designed for use with straight-on photos, whereas the crime scene photos of the battered child had been taken at an angle. And, of course, there were no infant faces in the computer “library” I had created. I asked one of my friends to let me digitize her child's face, and when I sat the little boy down in my studio, I turned the camera ever so slightly, trying to match the angle of the little boy in the autopsy photograph. Back at the computer, I left the image of the T-shirt and the child's shoulders just as they were, but I inserted these new eyes into the face I had restored. I only needed the eyes, because with the computer I had already smoothed over the bruised and decomposed features of Baby Lollipops's face.
Finally, instead of letting the image look like a photograph of a real dead child with a new nose, eyes, and lips, I blended and airbrushed the entire face and head so that it all looked like a drawing of a live little boy. His eyes were open, his lips were closed, and I purposely arched the eyebrows just the tiniest bit to make it appear as if the boy were puzzled-or pleading.
The visual effect was powerful, and when the coroner and detectives released their autopsy information, the poignantly illustrated story made the front page of most major newspapers in Florida, as well as the TV show
Although I was anguished over the case of this battered child, I confess I also felt a kind of exhilaration. For the first time in my life, I was a real member of the forensic team. Before I'd always been “Brian's girlfriend” or “that artist from the clinic,” and the law enforcement personnel treated me with the kind of politeness reserved for outsiders. This time I was a member of the team, first and foremost, and my colleagues on the force weren't afraid to show me their desperation, to share their hopes, fears, and frustration. Nor were they intimidated by the fact that I happened to have a skill that they lacked. Unlike a few of the doctors I'd been working with for the past fifteen years, these guys were far too confident of their own abilities to even think of being threatened by mine.
Then there was the elation of knowing that I'd helped with a case that cried out for justice. Soon after my picture of Baby Lollipops was published, the police were deluged with calls, and by early December they found and arrested the child's mother, Ana Maria Cardona, and her lover, Olivia Gonzalez. A suspicious babysitter had come forward on her own, the day before my picture had even reached the airwaves. She was initially able to tentatively identify Baby Lollipops as Lazaro Figueroa from his description-but she wasn't absolutely certain until she saw my picture.
That picture galvanized both her resolve and the community as a whole. Lazaro had essentially been invisible throughout his short, miserable life. Testimony at trial confirmed that he had spent most of his days tied to a post inside a closet. There were no pictures of him anywhere in existence. But once he had a face, the investigation really came alive. People who knew about Lazaro were finally willing to cooperate with detectives, feeding them the information that enabled them to locate and arrest his mother.
My picture had energized both the cops and the community. And as investigators looked for information about Lazaro's life, they also uncovered several new cases of child abuse. Apparently, people saw the picture and started calling to check on all the other little kids they knew. They also forced friends, family, and welfare officials to check on potentially at-risk children.
Eventually, Gonzalez cut a deal and agreed to testify in exchange for a sentence that would spare her life. At Lazaro's mother's trial, Gonzalez's gripping testimony revealed that the boy had been beaten repeatedly with broomsticks, belts, and finally with a baseball bat. Testimony also revealed that the boy's mother would also intentionally poke his eyes, break dinner plates over his head, and smear his face with his own feces. As a result of Gonzalez's testimony, Ana Maria Cardona was found guilty and eventually sentenced to death in Florida 's electric chair (although the verdict was vacated in July 2002).
The case of Baby Lollipops changed my life. For the first time, I had gotten personally involved with a gripping, heart-wrenching case. For the first time, I was on the inside. And when the whole investigation came together and they got a conviction,
So as the Baby Lollipops case concluded, my soul-searching did, too. I applied for one of the few grad-student slots at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. In December, I gave my six months' notice to the clinic. In May, I packed my bags and left.
“Remember,” said Dr. Hughston as I started to pull out of his driveway on my way to Knoxville, “you can always come back.” He reached in through the window and put that big loving hand on my shoulder, giving it a little shake, just to let me know he meant what he said. Whatever the future held, I knew I was on my way and that I had my mentor's approval. I waved goodbye to Dr. Hughston and Columbus, and headed off to the Body Farm.
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