The Skeleton Crew (12 page)

In the days and weeks following 9/11, the search was on to identify the victims. Fewer than three hundred intact bodies would be recovered from Ground Zero. The rest were body parts, flecks and fragments of tissue and bone. At first, Robert Shaler, director of forensic biology at New York City's Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, decided his team would test only samples from body fragments the size of a thumb or larger. But when he saw how small many of the fragments were, he changed his mind. They would analyze everything that came along. Some of what came along was barely recognizable as human. On more than one occasion technicians realized they were
trying to extract DNA from bits of plastic.

A few years earlier,
maverick biotech entrepreneur J. Craig Venter
of Maryland-based Celera Genomics had launched a highly publicized race to see whether his privately held company could sequence the entire human genome faster than a public consortium made up of talented scientists from around the world, including DNA pioneers James Watson and Francis Crick. Cloned sheep, human organs grown in petri dishes, genetically modified foods—biotech in 2001 had reached a pinnacle of promise and controversy. Mapping the blueprint of human life was expected to revolutionize medicine, opening the floodgates to a host of new drugs for everything from cancer to diabetes, and Venter wanted to lay claim to that cash cow.

I was rooting for Venter's rival, MIT scientist Eric Lander, who headed up the publicly funded international Human Genome Project. Lander—a Brooklyn-born former Rhodes scholar and recipient of a MacArthur “genius” grant—led a consortium that, unlike Celera, was committed to making its results freely available online and in scientific journals.

Venter declared victory in the sequencing race in April 2000. Lander's “hard-core” group of bioinformatics specialists published the draft genome in the prestigious science journal
Nature
in 2001. (The two factions subsequently joined forces.)

Venter, who flew to New York the day following the attacks, had met forensic expert Shaler just months earlier, at a museum reception. They had been a short cab ride away from lower Manhattan, at the American Museum of Natural History. Now the elegant affair seemed like it had occurred on another planet. Venter offered Shaler his expertise and the use of Celera's gene-sequencing facility to help identify the New York City victims. At the time, DNA profiling—determining the likelihood that genetic material came from a particular individual—was not as advanced as the science of sequencing. Documenting the 30,000 genes of the human genome had taken even speedy Celera almost three years. The challenge in New York City was fundamentally different but comparable in scope, a Herculean task outside the realm of anything previously attempted with existing technology and tools.

September 11 became the world's largest forensics case, illuminating
the need for fast, accurate DNA fingerprinting. Three years later, in 2004, President Bush signed into law the Justice for All Act—known as the DNA Initiative—which established rights for crime victims; provided for post-conviction DNA testing that might set the innocent free; and helped state and local law enforcement get access to DNA analysis labs.

The DNA Initiative had one more provision.

Almost a footnote to the National Institute of Justice's list of requests in that year's $232.6 million proposed budget was $2 million—less than one-hundredth of the total—that Cheri Nolan had slipped in for “missing persons identification.”

It went through, she told me, still sounding surprised almost eight years later.

“From there,” she said, “we rocked.”

Matthew Hickman, toiling away at tallying the nation's unidentified dead to help Nolan and others make a case for government aid, had no statutory authority to require anyone to turn over anything, so he was gratified to find that—aside from a handful of recalcitrant coroners—agencies and individuals seemed to see the situation as a matter of public policy and offered up what they had. The problem was, what they had was often incomplete and inaccurate.

Some agencies had lists dating to the early twentieth century; others had sketchy files going back only a few years. It wasn't unusual for rec­ords to go out with the coroner leaving office and start up again with the new one coming in. Only around half of the offices even had policies on whether to keep records, X-rays, fingerprints, DNA—or the bodies themselves.

Medical examiners or coroners serving larger jurisdictions were more likely to have such policies, but
Dr. Randy Hanzlick, the outspoken chief medical examiner
from Atlanta, said bluntly that most agencies disliked even admitting unidentified cases still existed and would far rather forget about them than think or talk about them. Only 30 percent of offices serving jurisdictions of less than 2,500 people (read: small-town coroners) had
policies governing the unidentified.

Some agencies buried the remains; others cremated them. In more than one office, staff discovered dusty bones in cardboard Bankers Boxes. Hurricane Katrina forced a complete halt to Hickman's data collection efforts in Louisiana as the state was forced to ship bodies to whichever facility would take them. Three years after Hickman's boss first approached him, Hickman and his colleagues were finally ready to announce their findings.

RTI had delivered Hickman's questionnaire to 2,000 coroners and medical examiners across the country. Around 1,600 actually responded, a rate of return that allowed statisticians to extrapolate that the nation's medical examiners and coroners had investigated almost one million human deaths during 2004. Of the estimated 4,400 dead who came in unidentified across the country every year, 1,000 or so tended to remain unidentified after one year. Hickman had eked out records of almost 13,500 unidentified human remains, some decades old. But he and others knew this didn't tell the full story.

Shortly before the final results were in, National Institute of Justice staffer Nancy Ritter wrote, “If you ask most Americans about a mass disaster, they're likely to think of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center, Hurricane Katrina, or the Southeast Asian tsunami. Very few people—­including law enforcement officials—would think of the number of missing persons and unidentified human remains in our nation as a crisis. It is, however, what experts call ‘a mass disaster over time.'

“More than forty thousand sets of human remains that cannot be identified through conventional means are held in the evidence rooms of medical examiners throughout the country,” Ritter wrote in a National Institute of Justice journal in January 2007. The actual study, published a few months later, cited Hickman's total of 13,500. According to Hickman, 40,000 is a “mythical” number, an extrapolation that took on a life of its own.

The phrase “silent mass disaster”
and the 40,000 figure spread virally through media outlets. No one questioned the higher figure; after all, as Cheri Nolan pointed out, numbers are crucial in the funding game. Nolan herself believes that because so many remains went unrecorded for decades, the true figure actually tops 40,000. George Adams, a former Fort
Worth cop now with the Center for Human Identification, the world-­renowned DNA forensics lab at the University of North Texas, agrees, suggesting the real number may be in excess of 60,000, because each time he calls an agency and asks how many unidentified remains it has, the number goes up.

After Hickman digested the initial shock of there being so many unidentified bodies lying around all over the country, he acknowledged that a coldhearted rationalist might argue that Americans take for granted homicides and car crash fatalities that account for similar numbers of lost lives each year (around 15,000 and around 34,000, respectively). But, he said, when you make the link between the unidentified and the missing, that's when it hits people: Wait, there's a connection here. People are looking for missing persons. Medical examiners may have those remains. There are lives hanging in the balance.

Web sleuths helped put two and two together. They provided answers that, however painful, ended the paralyzing doubt that many claimed was even worse than hearing about a loved one's death. There suddenly existed the possibility, Hickman said, for closure.

In the end it was the numbers, Hickman believes, that got a lot of players interested in the unidentified remains real fast. Who the players would turn out to be was the real surprise.

6

INSIDE REEFER 2

I
t was only seven in the morning but I was wearing the desert heat like a lead suit. My throat, eyes, and sinuses had shriveled up like a slug doused in sea salt. Somewhere to the west the Vegas strip hummed, but the taxi had deposited me on a seemingly deserted street of low buildings of the type favored by personal-injury lawyers and insurance agents. I pushed a buzzer next to the mirrored door of 1704 Pinto Lane and admired a Japanese-style sand garden of swaying grasses, flowering desert plants, artfully placed boulders, and cacti. Excellent landscaping is not something you expect at the morgue.

When Mike Murphy opened the door, nothing about him dashed the illusion that I'd come to inquire about life insurance or a timeshare. Marcella Fierro complained to me once about “Joe Coroner from East Wherever”—the elected official who's also the local feed store operator or a farmer who milked cows before signing the day's death warrants—but she wasn't talking about Clark County coroner P. Michael Murphy, known to pals as Murf. He's an FBI National Academy graduate and holds a doctorate in business administration. Vegas's death chief likes to say he's in the people business. The day I met him, he was revved and brisk, clearly prepared to interact with someone with a pulse.

Clark County, Nevada, encompassing the world-renowned Las Vegas strip, serves two million residents and forty-two million visitors a year in an area the size of New Jersey. What happens in Vegas may or may not stay in Vegas but it always takes on a sordid tinge. Murphy's predecessor had
fielded a storm of media calls in 1996 when a mysterious assailant gunned down rapper Tupac Shakur in a drive-by shooting, and again in 2002 when, in bed with a stripper at the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino, The Who guitarist John Entwistle died of a cocaine-induced heart attack. The Clark County coroner's office is the model for the original
CSI
, at one time the most-watched program on American television.

Dealing with more than ten thousand deaths a year doesn't seem like a dream job, but during the sixty-plus years the county coroner's office has been in existence, only three people have held the top post. Murphy's two predecessors each served for nineteen years. In late 2003, Murphy was elected only months before he launched what turned out to be a very controversial website that would serve as a turning point for the web sleuth movement. He was simply too naïve, he said later, to realize that posting actual photographs of dead people on the Internet might not have been a good idea. For a time, he was sure he was about to become the shortest-­tenured coroner in county history.

The day I met him, his dark suit, crisp white shirt with a monogrammed cuff, and sharp tie were set off by mother-of-pearl cuff links in rich blues and greens—almost as reflective as his bald head—that glinted as he offered me his hand. He wore a heavy gold-link bracelet and two rings: a thick, stone-embossed band from the FBI Academy and the other with a claddagh design engraved “Mike,” a gift from his wife. These rings, he noted in the same confiding tone he might use to give me a promising stock tip, were exactly the kind of distinctive details that came in handy when identifying a body.

Murphy became the public face
of Clark County's radical Internet experiment, an effort to enlist the public's help in identifying the disturbingly large backlog of unidentified bodies he inherited in 2003. But he told me that if I really wanted to understand the story behind the website, I needed to know about Jane Arroyo Grande Doe and Rick Jones.

At nine o'clock at night on October 5, 1980, a driver was speeding along a lonely dirt road just south of State Route 146 and west of Arroyo Grande
Boulevard in Henderson, Nevada. Henderson back then consisted of a whole lot of nothing; vacant, arid land dotted with scrub and an enormous sky punctuated with telephone poles and electrical lines. Through the deepening dusk the driver spotted what looked like a nude female form lying facedown in the desert.

An autopsy found the young woman to be between fourteen and twenty years old and dead for around a day. She was petite, five foot two and a hundred pounds. In the coroner's photo, she looked peaceful. Her long-lashed hazel eyes were closed under finely shaped brows. Her wavy shoulder-length auburn hair, pulled back from her high forehead, framed her perfectly oval face. Her classic, delicate beauty struck me; she looked like she might have been a silent movie star of the 1920s.

Being dead may have accounted for her alabaster complexion, but her ginger hair and brows suggested the fairness typical of a redhead. Her ears were small and her mouth wide, the lower lip protruding slightly as though her last expression was a puzzled frown or a look of disgust. Her strong round chin would have been particularly noticeable when she smiled or laughed. The letter
S
was tattooed on her right forearm.

Her assailant or assailants struck her on the head and stabbed her repeatedly in the back. With not even one piece of clothing as a clue to her identity, she became Clark County Coroner Office case 80-1221. She was buried in Henderson under a flat rectangular marker surrounded by palm trees and inscribed “Jane Doe, Oct. 5, 1980. From your family at the Henderson Police Department.” In the coroner's office, she became known as Jane Arroyo Grande Doe—the case, Murphy says, “that started it all for us.”

Offices lined the walls and enclosed a corral of cubicles on the administrative side of the Clark County coroner's building. A posted sign read: “Remember . . . Families entrust us with one of their most precious possessions . . . The body is dear to them . . . treat it reverently.” I trailed Murphy
to a cubicle occupied by a man with close-cropped light hair, a goatee, wire-rimmed squarish glasses, and blue eyes. A coroner investigator, Rick Jones had donned maverick black Western boots under the gray polyester slacks of a civil servant. His solid build befit the former cop and onetime casino security guard but his voice was gentle, almost a whisper.

Rick Jones and other coroner investigators were among the first to arrive at the scenes of suicides, accidents, murders, and deaths due to natural causes; an alarmingly large number of Vegas's forty million tourists a year go there to check out of life. A Harvard sociologist found that residents of Las Vegas had a 50 percent higher risk of suicide than folks living elsewhere in the country. You increased your suicide risk just by moving into the city, and lowered it by moving out.

If someone hangs himself during Jones's shift, he drives an official white SUV to the scene. After snapping pictures to document how the body was found, he talks to the cops and slices the rope off the suicide's neck.

I'd become aware that some people seem more at ease around corpses than others. A coroner once told me the ability to handle bodies—­physically and emotionally—is a matter of exposure. The more you do it, he said, the better you tolerate it. But I think it comes down to something innate. You either have the squeamishness gene or you don't. I've found that there are those who are repulsed by an out-of-focus image of a dead person on a computer screen and others who are entirely blasé about hoisting a severed limb into the back of their pickup truck or peeling bits of human beings off pavement. Jones turned out to be in the latter camp.

He and around thirty other full-time and part-time death investigators were available around the clock to accompany police on emergency calls, often enduring years of sporadic, limited shifts before being hired as full-time coroner investigators. It's a great job, Jones insisted the day I met him at the Clark County office. “I love the work that I do. We're blessed to be thrust into a family to help them go through the ordeal they have to go through. It's not that we like to see people hurting. But it's a necessary part of the job. We do things and we see things that most people don't ever have to see or think about.”

“How do you know—when do you know—if you're capable of this
job?” I asked him.

“You actually have to do a few ride-alongs to see if it's something you can handle,” he said. “There are calls that test us and see if we can truly stay in this field or not.” Like all who passed the test, Jones had a few scenes permanently etched in his brain, scenes he didn't often talk about but couldn't erase. He remembered the first SIDS death he attended. He remembered how a woman, backing out of the driveway, didn't see her two-year-old trying to get into the passenger door and crushed the toddler's head under the wheels.

Jones will never forget talking to a father at the scene of an accident in which two teenage girls were thrown from a motor home on the freeway. “I had to meet with the father and ask him to help me ID the girls. The father told me one girl's name and then dropped to his knees and started crying and said, ‘I couldn't find Alexis's head.' She had been decapitated at the scene.

“These are deaths we keep to ourselves and keep in the back of our heads. We do appreciate life. We take every effort in our home life to make every hour, every day, count because you never know when you may not have a chance to see your family again. We encourage people, ‘Before you leave your circle of loved ones, make sure they know how you feel about them, because life can be short and death can happen quite suddenly,' ” Jones said soberly.

After gathering information at the scene of each death, Jones arranges to have the corpses brought to the coroner's building. Each body wheeled through the side bay doors is fingerprinted, photographed, X-rayed, and examined. A driver's license doesn't cut it for positive identification. If the person is not identified at the scene, someone must come in and identify him or her, or the fingerprints are run against those in the FBI system. Fingerprints are a powerful identification tool—if you can get them. Crackheads sometimes literally sear off their prints by handling red-hot glass pipes. Skin on the hands of a badly decomposed or bloated corpse can slide off like a glove, requiring the person conducting the autopsy to slip their own hand inside to try to recover prints.

(To rehydrate dessicated fingertips, pros suggest soaking the hands or individual fingers for ninety days in embalming fluid or Downy fabric
softener. Then press on an inked wad of Silly Putty—just as good as the expensive stuff in the medical supply catalog—and transfer to paper.)

There are a number of separate fingerprint repositories, and investigators may not check them all consistently. The military uses the same fingerprint system based on arches, loops, and whorls developed by Sir Edward Henry in the late nineteenth century. To check a body against military records, you need all ten digits intact. The FBI stockpiles and compares fingerprints—­seventy million criminal prints and thirty-four million civilian prints—
through the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification
System databank, known as IAFIS. Homeland Security has its own fingerprint database.

Bleached bones discovered outside make up most of Clark County's unidentified. “Bodies found in homes, hotel rooms or apartments give investigators more to go on; they can identify a person by his papers and possessions. People found outdoors are often homeless, and have no identification at all,”
Abigail Goldman wrote in the
Las Vegas Sun
in 2008. “Or they've been dumped, victims of foul play.”

Of the hundred-plus Jane and John Does that turn up in Clark County every year, investigators identify the vast majority within twenty-four hours by talking to locals, checking with cops, looking at lists of missing persons. If the family lives locally, Jones goes to their home, knocks on their door, and informs them in his soft voice that their loved one is awaiting them in the adobe building on Pinto Lane.

Soon after Jones became a coroner investigator for Clark County in 1998, he was leafing through the cold cases—the unidentifieds—and came across Jane Arroyo Grande Doe. He sat for a time gazing at her photo. His daughter was around her age. “I kind of took it personally,” he said of the cold case. “If it had been my daughter who was missing, there'd be no end to my searching for her.”

Was Jane Arroyo Grande Doe a runaway? Was she in the foster care system? Why was no one looking for her? Every week he checked descriptions of missing teens from the 1970s in the hope that someone, somewhere, was looking for a girl with auburn hair and an
S
tattoo on her arm. No one seemed to know her. But Jones did know, as he said later, that “she's a young gal and a pretty gal and she doesn't deserve to be found on the road dead.”

Local newspapers had run stories, but they could only do so much. And how about the other hundred and eighty unknowns in the file? “
America's Most Wanted
or
Unsolved Mysteries
—they're not going to profile a hundred and eighty persons for us,” Jones said. But Jane Arroyo Grande Doe's picture had given him an idea.

One morning in 2003, soon after Murphy took over as coroner, Jones stepped into Murphy's office. “I've got something to talk to you about,” Jones said. “You know our John and Jane Doe cases, our cold cases? They're just sitting. There's not much that can be done with them. We're at a standstill. We need help.” He described his idea to his new boss: Why not post pictures on the Internet of “facially recognizable” unidentified corpses such as Jane Arroyo Grande Doe?

Murphy blinked. “Why would we want to do that?”

Jones admitted it was risky. At the time, the only public displays of death were sordid, underground affairs, like the controversial 1978 film
Faces of Death
, which purported to show real people and animals in various stages of dying or death, narrated by a “pathologist.” Whether the film or its sequels used real or fake footage, it elicited a firestorm of criticism, and enough notoriety to turn it into a cult favorite with a sizable worldwide audience.