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

from England and witnessed dead men and women cut carefully to pieces in Texas, under lamplight on stainless steel tables.
    Then I was graduated. Margaret and I married one month before I took my B.A. at the University of Texas in January 1959. McKern encouraged me to go straight on to a Ph.D. in anthropology, skipping the master’s degree. The University of Texas had no Ph.D. program in anthropology but McKern told me I could take courses elsewhere and he would supervise my progress personally. I decided, however, to work first for my master’s degree.
    It was useless. I flailed about in graduate school for a while, trying to make ends meet by moonlighting as a laboratory technician and grading exam papers. One summer I worked two jobs totaling forty-four hours a week, one of them as an athletic director in a school for retarded children, the other as a hospital orderly. At the same time I was attempting to take a full graduate course load. I was drained, exhausted after a year and a half. I was getting nowhere, it seemed. So as soon as Margaret won her degree in education I left school, went to Dallas and got a job with the Hartford Insurance Company as an investigator.
    An old pathologist once told me: “When in doubt, think dirty. You’ll be right ninety percent of the time.” It was good advice, and I had many occasions to put it to good use while investigating insurance claims. Although I came to detest this job and the human vermin it brought me into contact with, in retrospect it was the best possible training for my later career as a forensic anthropologist. If any young man would care to find out in a hurry just how low his fellow human beings can sink, let him become an insurance claims adjuster. Whatever tender blossoms of altruism flowered in his innocent soul, these will be ripped out by the roots in six months flat; I guarantee it. At the same time, he will come face to face with some of the most vivid, brilliant, highly plausible fictions ever spun by human ingenuity. I know I did.
    I shall not dwell on the tangled lies I had to unravel in those years. I learned to spot the people who specialize in falling down in front of vehicles. I learned about the “quick stop artists” who can brake their cars on a dime and cause rear-end collisions any time they like. I learned about physicians and chiropractors and the imaginative reports they would write about whiplash cases. I learned how reports were written charging that victims had suffered “permanent injury,” even though there was not the slightest trace of any injuries and the doctors admitted as much. How could they then diagnose “permanent injury”? Easily: there might not be any permanent injuries now; but, they assured us, many “permanent injuries” develop later as a result of such accidents!
    I had surreal talks with shyster attorneys, conversations that involved a complete suspension of belief on both sides. I would be talking to an attorney and would know he was lying and would know he knew I knew he was lying—and yet we had to talk on, grave-faced and sober, speaking in all seriousness, like two characters in a farce, fully cognizant of the fraud that choked the room like an invisible fog.
    Nor was all the fault on the side of the victims. I saw insurance companies that wouldn’t pay even though they were liable for accidents, because alert claims adjusters had swooped in early, beating the lawyers to the scene, and had obtained a statement from the victims that there were no injuries.
    In those shabby days my esteem for the human race waned considerably. Toward the end, alarm bells would go off in my brain at the mere sound of those quavering, plaintive words: “I just want what’s due me.” All the lies and rigamarole instilled in me a real thirst for the truth, a realization that the truth is a valuable and rare commodity.
    The skepticism of those days has stayed with me all my life and has made me a shrewder investigator than I