I seldom have nightmares. When I do, they are usually flitting images of the everyday things I see on the job:
crushed and perforated skulls, lopped-off limbs and severed heads, roasted and dissolving corpses, hanks of human
hair and heaps of white bones all in a day's work at my office, the C. A. Pound Human Identification Laboratory
of the Florida Museum of Natural History at the University of Florida. Recently I dreamed I was in a faraway country,
trying on shoes, and the leather in the shoes was so improperly prepared that the laces and uppers were crawling
with maggots. But there was a simple, ordinary explanation for this phantasm: one of my graduate students was raising
maggots as part of a research project.
I have gazed on the face of death innumerable time, witnessed it in all its grim manifestations. Death has no power
to freeze my heart, jangle my nerves or sway my reason. Death to me is no terror of the night but a daylit companion,
a familiar condition, a process obedient to scientific laws and answerable to scientific inquiry.
For me, every day is Halloween. When you think of all the horror movies you have seen in your entire life, you
are visualizing only a dim, dull fraction of what I have seen in actual fact. Our laboratory is primarily devoted
to teaching physical anthropology to graduate students at the University of Florida, and is part of the Florida
Museum of Natural History. Yet, thanks to the wording of the 1917 law establishing the museum, we often find ourselves
investigating wrongful death, attempting to dispel the shadows surrounding murder and suicide. All too often in
the past, under the old coroner system, the innocent have died unavenged, and malefactors have escaped unpunished,
because investigators lacked the stomach, the knowledge, the experience and the perseverance to reach with both
hands into the rotting remnants of some dreadful crime, rummage through the bones and grasp the pure gleaming nugget
of truth that lies at the center of it all.
Truth is discoverable. Truth wants to be discovered. The men who murdered the Russian Tzar Nicholas II and his
family and servants in 1918 imagined that their crime would remain hidden for all eternity, but scarce sixty years
had passed before these martyred bones rose up again into the light of day and bore witness against their Bolshevik
assassins. I have seen the tiny, wisp-thin bones of a murdered infant stand up in court and crush a bold, hardened,
adult killer, send him pale and penitent to the electric chair. A small fragment of a woman's skullcap, gnawed
by alligators and found by accident at the bottom of a river, furnished enough evidence for me to help convict
a hatchet murderer, two years after the fact.
The science of forensic anthropology, properly wielded, can resolve historical riddles and chase away bugbears
that have bedeviled scholars for centuries. Reluctantly but carefully, I examined the skeletal remains of President
Zachary Taylor, who died in 1850, and helped lay to rest persistent suspicions that he was the first of our presidents
to be assassinated. The sword-nicked skull of the butchered Spanish conquistador, Francisco Pizarro, came within
my field of inquiry, and I have held in my hands the bony orb that once enclosed vast dreams of gold, blood and
empire. The gargoyle-like skull and skeleton of the Victorian-era "Elephant Man," Joseph Merrick, furnished
me with pictures and impressions so poignant and vivid that I almost seemed to be conversing with the man himself.
But I do not seek out the illustrious dead to pay them court or borrow their fame. To me, the human skeleton unnamed
and unfleshed is matter enough for marvel. The most fascinating case I ever had involved a modern, love-struck
couple with very ordinary names: Meek and Jennings. It fell to me to extricate their bones, burned and crushed
and commingled in thousands of fragments, from a single body bag, and put them back together again as best I could.
When I was finished, after a year and a half's work, what I had was what lies deepest within all of us, at our
center; that which is the last of us ever to be cut, burned, disassembled or dissolved: that which is strongest,
hardest and least destructible about us; our firmest ally, our most trustworthy companion. our longest surviving
remnant after we die: our skeleton.
Chapter Two: Talkative Skulls
One of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's most amusing short stories, "Crabbe's Practice," deals with the desperate
attempts of a young doctor to set himself up in the world and acquire patients. Hoping to burnish his academic
reputation, he publishes a deep and erudite paper in a medical journal, with the bizarre title, "Curious Development
of a Discopherous Bone in the Stomach of a Duck." Later he confesses to a friend that the paper was a fraud.
While dining on roast duck, the young doctor discovered that the fowl had swallowed an ivory domino, and he had
turned the experience into a research paper. "Discopherous" is just a Greek term for "circle-bearing,"
and refers to the circular dots on a domino.
Conan Doyle was a doctor himself and knew whereof he spoke. Anyone who works in science knows the dull desperation
and sharp anxiety of the early days in one's career. Few of us do not look back on those pinched, scraping times
without a secret shudder, followed by a pang of relief that they are past. The miserable pay and financial woes;
the long nights of study and the battles against sleep; the frightful hurdles of examinations: the climactic defense
of one's doctoral dissertation; the hissing, malignant envy that is the curse of university life at all times and
in all places; the constant struggle to get published, to win tenure, to carve out a niche and be recognized in
one's field--all these torments are well known in Academe, and have been known to drive some people mad, even to
suicide. Some people. Not me.
My early experiences riding shotgun in the funeral parlor's ambulance in Texas had shown me a side of life no book
could teach. These dreadful sights gave me a certain balance, along with reserves of strength that I could call
on in the ordinary trials of life at the university. When you have seen bodies burned to cinders in fires, or pummeled
to jelly under a truckload of bricks, or reduced to empty skins whose bones have been squeezed from them by the
terrific force of plane crashes, then the bumps and bogies of academic life l-old few terrors for you. "It
could be worse," you tell yourself: and when worse is the thing you saw lying dead in a highway culvert scarcely
twelve hours earlier, you know you are telling the truth.
The first time I was asked for my considered opinion about a skull came when I was still in graduate school, still
working under Tom McKern in his laboratory. It was a watershed moment for me, because for the first time McKern
was treating me I will not say as an equal, but very nearly as a colleague whose independent opinion he valued.
On that morning when I came into the laboratory McKern presented me with a cranium, a skull without the lower jaw.
It had been found in Lake Travis near Austin with a fishing line tied around the zygomatic arch, the cheekbone.
The other end of the fishing line was tied to a large rock.
As I handled the still damp cranium, my attention was drawn to the palate. More than anything else, the shape of
that palate struck me. It stood out, to my eyes, in a very unusual way. Looking at it, I was racked by doubts.
I felt very insecure because obviously McKern was going to judge me on my response. More than that. I was insecure
because I was about to give him an answer I felt was intrinsically improbable. At last I summoned up my courage
and spoke:
"I think it's Mongoloid, probably Japanese," I said. McKern looked at me for a long moment. Then at last
he said: "That's what I think too."
Whatever pride I felt was immediately dampened by McKern, who went on to point out all the other things I had missed.
With the sure touch of a true master of forensic anthropology, he demonstrated one detail after another, details
which I had seen but had not observed. At such times McKern was truly dazzling and I shall never forget those lucid,
decisive moments in which he practically made that old skull speak.
I had not observed that some of the teeth had been glued into their sockets. I had not observed the scorching on
the outer cranial vault. I had not observed the very simple fact that the skull had been attached to a fishing
line tightly tied to its zygomatic arch, which meant that it was dry, unfleshed bone to start with, when it was
plunged into the lake.
After McKern had pointed out all these things, the answer became clear. The skull before us was almost certainly
a World War II trophy skull that some serviceman brought back from the Pacific Theater. The scorching had occurred
during battle, perhaps by the action of flamethrowers or as the result of a fiery plane crash. The teeth had fallen
out as the skull dried out and had been glued back in. Finally, either the serviceman himself had sickened of his
gruesome relic, or he had died and his heirs wanted to get rid of the thing. But how to dispose of it? If they
put it in the garbage it might be found. Burning it was too much trouble. Burying it would be bothersome and might
leave traces. Best to throw it in the lake! Tie a rock to it for good measure! And so the skull went overboard,
bubbling down into the depths of Lake Travis, only to be found again by the purest chance.
I am certain that, somewhere in Japan today, there is a family wondering what became of an uncle, a father, a long-lost
relative who marched off to war more than half a century ago. They will never know. And the Japanese man whose
skull this was, how could he have dreamed that, after great and fiery battles in the middle of the vast Pacific,
the bony vessel enclosing his dreaming brain was destined to end up tied to a rock and drowned in a cool American
lake, then fished up onto a bright laboratory table at the University of Texas?
From a skeleton, a skull, a mere fragment of burnt thighbone, Dr. WilliamMaples can deduce the age, gender,
and ethnicity of a murder victim, the mannerin which the person was dispatched, and, ultimately, the identity of
thekiller. In Dead Men Do Tell Tales, Dr. Maples revisits his strangest,most interesting, and most horrific
investigations, from the baffling cases ofconquistador Francisco Pizarro and Vietnam MIAs to the mysterious deaths
ofPresident Zachary Taylor and the family of Czar Nicholas II.
"When he's not shattering myths about maggots, Dr. Maples
is delightfullyunraveling true murder
mysteries, ancient and modern. He's not just anotherclever forensic
detective -- he's a poet, a philosopher, and a sly
commentatoron the fractured human condition, pre-and post-mortem. " --
Carl Hiaasen, author of Strip Tease and
Native Tongue
"Whether Maples' subjects are famous or anonymous, it
is how he tellstheir stories that makes this
book so fascinating and -- in its fashion --delightful. " --Jonathan
Yardley, Washington Post Book World
"William
R. Maples and Michael Browning could've written a dry clinicalanalysis of
forensic anthropology; instead they tell tales better
than the deadcould for themselves. " -- New York Times Book
Review
Forensic anthropologist Maples revisits
his strangest, most interesting, and most horrific investigations, from
gruesome and baffling dismemberment cases to the
revelation of the identity of long-buried skeletons. "These tales of crime
unmasked by science are compelling in their own
right. "--The Boston Globe. Photos.
William Maples is blessed with an
eerie but powerful gift. From a skeleton, a skull, a
mere fragment of burnt thighbone, he can deduce the age, gender and
ethnicity of a corpse, and the manner in which the
victim was dispatched; his gift has sealed the doom of many a killer. His
skill is to read the tales of death written on the
bones of the dead, and in this fascinating book he revisits his strangest,
most interesting and most horrific investigations,
from gruesome and baffling dismemberment cases to the revelation of the
identity of long-buried skeletons. In his work at
the C. A. Pound Human Identification Laboratory at the University of
Florida, Dr. Maples has borne witness to every act of
cruelty and brutality of which the criminal mind is capable. Yet he never
forgets that the remains spread before him were
once human beings, and that compassion is as powerful a tool in solving the
riddle of bones as is scientific knowledge.
Maples has gained an international reputation for his work on skeletons
ranging from the family of Czar Nicholas II to
Vietnam MIAs to conquistador Francisco Pizarro, but, as he writes in these
memoirs, his most satisfying moments come
when his investigations lead to "the heavy clang and click of a prison door
slamming shut" on the guilty. Dead Men Do Tell
Tales is a completely engrossing journey into the world of forensic
anthropology, the science of bones, a form of detection
equal parts knowledge and empathy.