Dead Men Do Tell Tales: The Strange and Fascinating Cases of a Forensic Anthropologist Read Free

she had sunk beneath the surface of a dark sea. The stiff-necked old judge stumped out of the room, leaving us with the silent cadaver. Those two words were all the epitaph she got that night, and the sudden finality of it all impressed me greatly.
    Certain scenes are engraved on my memory from those days. I remember the night we were called to the scene of a domestic dispute. A crippled husband had beaten his wife, using his crutch and the brass post from a four-poster bed. I remember another case in which a man got in a fight during which he was hit over the head with a large ketchup bottle. When we arrived the whole scene seemed to be weltering in red gore. I can stand the sight of blood, but the smell of it repels me. I did not think a human body could contain so much blood. In fact, it can’t. A part of the sea of red was ketchup. The man survived and probably went on to other fights. I remember picking up a young man from an overturned car. He had a broken arm and moaned at me, asking where we were taking him. “The hospital,” I said. Suddenly he began flailing away at me with both arms, broken and whole, trying to escape. It was all I could do to hold him down. It turned out he had stolen the car.
    I saw terrible things during those nights, but I could not blink or turn away. My job depended on it. After a while it became a test of strength for me, to gaze unflinchingly at the dreadful aftermaths of accidents. Emergency room personnel deal with the same situations, but I would submit that the ER technicians see people after we ambulance men have tidied them up considerably. When we arrived at the scene, we were plunged into pure chaos. It was dark. Cars were overturned or on fire. Crowds were screaming. Police were yelling. Glass was broken. Smells of spilled fuel and roasted flesh were fresh. There is far more drama at the scene of an accident than there is in the emergency room afterward. At the hospital there are no shadows. Everything is clean and well lit and deodorized. Clean sheets and shiny instruments convey an atmosphere of relative calm and control. Already the horror is receding.
    I saw my first autopsy when I was eighteen years old. Most of the autopsies in those days in Austin were done at the funeral homes, as they still are in many places. Pathologists would come in and do the cutting, weighing and photographing. Some of these specialists were very friendly and kind to us young laymen. They would let us stay and ask questions during the procedure. Gradually, I began to be exposed to decomposed bodies and severe trauma. Our funeral home had the contract to handle the remains of servicemen killed in military plane crashes. I saw bodies burned nearly to cinders. I saw the white, bloated bodies of young airmen recovered from the Gulf of Mexico. Many nights I had the eerie experience of sleeping in a room with burned bodies in bags all piled up and clearly visible just outside the screened door. It was at this period that I gradually developed my ability to work with bodies and manage to eat food. I remember having a chili-and-cheese hamburger in the autopsy room after an autopsy, looking at the burger carefully, then taking a bite, and then another, and another.
    I saw tough policemen smoke cigars to keep the odors out of their nostrils. I remember the pathologist cutting through some medium-cooked soft tissue in a burned corpse while saying waggishly: “Well, I guess we don’t want barbecued ribs for lunch today”—and seeing the police run from the room, green with nausea.
    My life took on a strange, Jekyll-and-Hyde quality. By day, as an English literature undergraduate, I would contemplate the glories of Dickens, Trollope and Shakespeare. By night I would voyage into a world of dreadful pain and cruel misfortune, of flames and twisted steel, of bruisings, breakings and bleedings. I studied sonnets and suicides. I saw tragedies printed on paper and scrawled on asphalt. I dissected immortal poems