The Skeleton Crew (16 page)

It was just as horrific as the dozens of times it had replayed in his mind. The rotted flesh, the skin leathered over, the hair in disarray. The only difference was that the reporter's photograph was black-and-white. The image burned into Todd's memory was in full color.

The reporter was amused by the look on Todd's face. The photo was taken at Tent Girl's autopsy hours after Wilbur Riddle found her. The gruesome image had never been published, never made available to anyone outside of police investigators working on the case. “I'll bet you've never seen that before,” the reporter chortled.

Immediately after Tent Girl popped through the opening Todd had cut in her shroud, he sat bolt upright in bed, shaken and recoiling from her ruined face.

After a time, he disentangled the sweat-soaked sheets and padded
into the living room. The room was quiet and empty. He turned to return to the bedroom and a glint caught his eye. He spun around and scanned the room: chairs, lamps, tables, all where they should be. Then he spotted it. On the couch was an enormous butcher knife with a razor-­sharp blade.

When Todd and Lori's son Dillan was born, Todd turned his mental image of Tent Girl into a young mother and the white cloth on her shoulder into a diaper. He wrote to the Scott County sheriff, the governor, and the coroner, urging them to exhume her remains and reexamine her pelvis for signs that she had borne a child.

Maybe the young woman had been pregnant and someone killed her to hush it up? Looking at Dillan toddling about, Todd wondered if Tent Girl had had a child who had been kidnapped, or killed and dumped elsewhere. Or—(and here he guessed the truth)—if she had a young child, now motherless, who had no way of knowing her mother was buried in Kentucky.

At that point, Todd even started suspecting Wilbur Riddle. He'd heard about Riddle's romantic conquests outside of his three marriages, rumors about illegitimate children. Todd decided he wouldn't put it past Riddle to “dispose” of an inconvenient lover. He was ashamed afterward of his evil thoughts, but there was no love lost between father-in-law and son-in-law. Over the years, Todd and Riddle's shared interest in Tent Girl had evolved into more of a rivalry.

Sometimes Todd's information-gathering forays dovetailed with trips to see Lori's family in Indiana. Early on, Lori waited patiently in the car while Todd rummaged through microfiche in libraries and picked up old copies of newspapers from archives. Other times Lori railed at him. “You don't think about anybody but yourself!” she yelled. “What about our son? He needs you more than some dead girl.” Their fights got more heated, more physical.

There was the matter of money. Todd's friend and former coworker Wayne Sells recalled that they made no more than eighteen thousand dollars a year. They both worked overtime, but it was hard to support a family
on that salary. More often than not, Todd, Lori, and Dillan ate dinner with Billy and Brenda Matthews in their house next door, so close they could practically shout to one another—too close, in Lori's opinion. And Todd often got so wrapped up in Tent Girl, he forgot he had a family, Lori said years later.

Billy was satisfied that the young couple was meeting payments on the trailer but he didn't know that, besides the money Todd spent pursuing Tent Girl, the couple was living beyond their means, taking cash advances against their credit cards. They told one another they'd work more overtime to pay it back.

Todd was soon bankrupt. He couldn't bring himself to tell his dad. Lori, tired of Todd spending money they didn't have on detective work, moved out of the trailer and rented her own place in town. Todd, always on the computer searching for Tent Girl clues, seemed to have no time for her or their son. “I left because the Tent Girl was his life, not us,” she said simply. At the plant, Todd still couldn't get the hang of working the third shift. He was physically and mentally exhausted by whatever was compelling him to seek out the name of a stranger who had died before he was born. He had to concede his family and friends were right. It was time to give up this crazy attachment to Tent Girl.

He decided to ask one last person and abide by her word.

Todd climbed the steps of a dilapidated house in Livingston, Tennessee. There was no name or shingle out front. Everyone knew where to find the lady who saw visions.

Todd's decision to call on Miz Cole was partly a whim, like the times he dropped everything to drive to a library on the off chance that they would have a stash of two-decade-old newspapers, and partly desperation. Tent Girl appearing bloody and reproachful in his kitchen, Lori moving out, filing for bankruptcy: the events of the past few months had left him shaken.

Yet, the thought of abandoning Tent Girl made Todd feel as guilty as failing to see his grandfather the night he died. Todd's fondest childhood memories were tromping through the woods with Papa Vaughn, searching out unnervingly human-shaped ginseng roots. Papa had recently moved out of his daughter and son-in-law's house next door to the trailer. Todd
didn't visit as often as he planned; he wasn't there the night his grandfather died of heart failure. Since the old man's death, the words played in Todd's mind:
You should have gone. You had the opportunity to go. Why didn't you go?

Some extolled the potency of Miz Cole's psychic powers. Others called her a phony. Then there were those who declared Miz Cole pure evil, a practitioner of witchcraft.

Inside the shabby house, a plain, tired-looking woman answered the door. Furniture covered most of the floor, whatnots such as Avon perfume bottles shaped like the Eiffel Tower crowded every surface, putting Todd, as he recalled the scene years later, in mind of an episode of
Hoarders
. Miz Cole seated Todd at the kitchen table. Todd heard children somewhere in the house or yard. Apparently accustomed to visits from their grandmother's clients, they kept out of sight.

Miz Cole opened notebooks filled with cryptic writing, scribbled verses from the Bible referring to gifts. People in the Bible saw visions, she told him. Her powers, she claimed, were a gift she was obligated to share. She listened attentively as Todd described his indecision, his anguish, over a dead girl who had nothing to do with him, the exasperation of his family, his nightmares. She talked about sprinkling holy water over his door to ward off evil energy. He rejected that idea. She finally said, “The answer lies within yourself.”

If Todd hadn't sounded so serious as he related this, I would have burst out laughing. I'd often thought Todd should have lived in Victorian times, when everyone believed in witches, ghosts, and fairies. On the other hand, I'd heard Todd scorn psychics who purported to know where the remains of the missing could be found. “ ‘Oh, they're buried near the water,'” he mocked. “Okay, well, how many lakes are around here? Specifically north, south, east, or west? What county? They can't tell you that; they just know that the spirit is near the water. Good tip. We'll dig up the entire coastline of the United States.”

But just then Miz Cole's hackneyed phrase was exactly what Todd needed to hear. He didn't know it, but the psychic's advice would help define his adult life. It gave him permission to do what he was determined to do all along: give Tent Girl a name.

At the time, all Todd knew was that he felt better than he had in weeks.
After the reading, although Miz Cole didn't ask him for money, he handed her a five on his way out.

He still didn't know what to make of his terrifyingly realistic nightmare. But he was convinced he was on a quest some force in the universe didn't want him to quit just yet.

9

HOW TO MAKE A JOHN DOE

I
was in Guilford County, in north-central North Carolina, on the trail of a John Doe who was frustrating the hell out of Betty Brown and a local detective. On her day off, Betty, dwarfed behind the wheel of her husband Joe's Dodge Ram—tricked out with a skull-and-bones-motif rearview mirror and ox-size chrome testicles hanging from the trailer hitch—drove me to the site where the remains were found.

Detective R. Allen Cheek hadn't divulged
too many specifics to me on the phone. Some things only the murderer would know, he said. He didn't want to blow his case—should he ever have one.

Trailing Cheek's unmarked cruiser south on US 421, one of many interlacing highways and secondary roads between Raleigh and Greensboro, we passed a sign for Climax Creek, invisible through the dense foliage. “A lot of people get dumped out there dead.” Betty pointed through the truck's window. “In a back area of road with no houses, you can easily pull over and drag a body out and throw it out and no one actually sees you. They found three women there in the last year and a half—one decapitated, one beaten to death, one shot—all dumped on that road, all within a five-mile distance.”

We looped onto a ramp for 421 and had pulled over next to a wooded area dividing the highway's northbound and southbound lanes. Betty chain-smoked in the truck while Cheek and I picked our way into the football field–size island between the two roadways.

It was a gray, misty day. The detective elbowed his way past bram
bles, stepped over a Dunkin' Donuts cup, and skirted an old tire in a puddle. He drew aside a swath of vegetation as if it were a velvet curtain and he was inviting me backstage. “You're going to get your shoes dirty,” he warned.

One February day in 2008, a motorist pulled over at this spot to stretch his legs. Wandering into the woods to take a leak, he spotted a rolled-up tarp. Animals had ripped and shredded it to gain access to something inside. “He started looking at it and he realized he was looking at a human rib cage,” Cheek told me. “So he backed out and called us.”

“Us” was the Guilford County sheriff's office in Greensboro. Many web sleuths make themselves known to local law enforcement to gain trust and information. Betty Brown is no exception. “If you give me a lead, I'll work with anyone,” Cheek said, though he admitted he was initially wary of Brown and her questions. I sympathized. Betty could be a tad scary.

Sometimes when cops wouldn't return her calls, Betty told me out of Cheek's hearing, she'd be forced to “harass” the police department until they entered their missing and unidentified cases into NamUs. She wouldn't let them back down. One sheriff, resisting Betty's efforts to collect a family reference sample for a missing person, told her, “I don't know about that DNA. They're kind of backwoods hick people. I don't think they understand what DNA is.”

“Well, give it a whirl,” Betty told him drily. “They might watch
CSI
.”

Shannon Vita, the fellow Doe Network and NamUs volunteer from Arizona who talks to Betty almost daily, agrees that Betty can be aggressive. “That's how she gets her stuff done. If there is something concerning a family's missing person or unidentified case she feels strongly about, she will not take ‘no' for an answer.”

Today Betty couldn't say no to yet another attempt to ID the John Doe found near US 421.

Betty had told me on the phone from North Carolina that it seemed the John Doe's assailant or assailants thought they knew something about
forensics. In an apparent attempt to mask the victim's identity, they left him clad in nothing but a T-shirt and pair of boxer shorts. And they took his false teeth.

A tall, solid man with a round face and a shaved head, Detective Cheek reminded me of a young Telly Savalas. He was wearing a tweedy sports jacket, khakis, crisp blue shirt, and yellow tie—not good attire for tramping through mud in the rain. My loafers sunk into the spongy underbrush. Wet leaves on low branches slapped our faces; thorns snagged our clothes.

We were only a few dozen yards into the thicket but the world outside had disappeared. A freight train's horn wailed in the distance. Traffic whooshed by on 421, just visible through the trees. I followed Cheek as he picked his way through the brush, watching the back of his neck redden in the chilly dampness.

“If I am correct, where he was found was right through there,” he said. “There's a tree. I'm pretty sure I can find it.” He paced west, then south, and stopped at a spot littered with blackened, wet branches. “This is it. He was lying right here.”

Cheek remembered taking the call at around five in the afternoon on the ninth of February. He had ducked out of a Sunday afternoon family party celebrating his mother's birthday and met the deputies at the northbound ramp from Highway 62 to Highway 421, where Betty's truck now sat on the shoulder behind his unmarked cruiser.

Cheek gestured at the off-ramp, where he conjectured that the murderers pulled over to drag the body out of the car. It would have been easy enough to circle around back onto the highway. The whole process would have taken no more than a few minutes.

Even midday, the ramp was far from busy. Passing drivers must have
spotted our roadside foray into the brush, but they all sped by without a second glance. “If we were dragging a body into the woods, they wouldn't have paid no attention to us, either,” Cheek said as we returned to the cars.

Before I climbed in Betty's truck, I stooped and picked up a black object, shiny from the rain, lying at the edge of the pavement: a rubber bracelet stamped “live-the-backwoods-life.com.” It seemed incongruous, given that we were absorbed in the details of a backwoods death.

Back in Cheek's low, nondescript cinder-block building in an industrial park, he pulled out an overstuffed loose-leaf notebook labeled “Old Joe.” Seeing that I noticed the name scrawled on the cover, Cheek looked apologetic, explaining that he started calling the remains Old Joe because he hated having no other name to give them.

Cheek's first job as a police officer at age twenty-two was in a small North Carolina town called Madison. He'd known he wanted to be a cop since maybe fourth grade when he realized he didn't like to see people get picked on. He'd always wanted to “get the bad guy,” he said. After twelve years as a beat cop in increasingly larger towns, he started working break-ins and larcenies. He joined the Guilford County sheriff's department as a detective in 2001, graduating from property crimes to the major-crime unit.

It's hard to make a case for any murderer “respecting” his victim, but the lack of any shred of dignity for Old Joe especially irked Cheek. “This guy, he was sixty to seventy years old. Whoever did this, they stripped him of all his clothing except his T-shirt and his shorts. They tied him up, they duct-taped him, and then they wrapped him up in a tarp and then they duct-taped the tarp. And then they drug him out in the woods. And took everything, all ID, and, unfortunately for us, he was out there for six to eight months and he totally decomposed.

“I mean, why would you duct-tape somebody and put him in a tarp and hide him in the woods down the road? You know they're going to be found eventually, and if they live on that road, somebody's going to know them. But if you drive them a hundred miles away and dump them in someone else's woods . . .” Cheek trailed off.

“And they took his dentures,” he said after a moment. “When I was there that night, and they were bringing him out and they said his teeth are
gone, I knew right then and there, man, this is not good,” Cheek told me. “You got no fingerprints, no tattoos, no wallet, no teeth. You have no idea who this guy is.”

There are a lot of ways for a body to accidentally become unidentifiable; there's something particularly insidious about killers who do their best to intentionally turn their victims into John and Jane Does. It's nothing new. Tragedies from Homer's time reference “the unwept and unburied corpse” that disturbs the social and cosmic order. I turned to a longtime anthropologist to bring me up to date.

Killers who dump bodies where they will be exposed to the elements get help from nature. In the woods, scavenging animals and insects converge on—and often disperse—human remains. Kentucky's hundreds of unpopulated acres provided state forensic anthropologist Emily Craig with plenty of challenges during her tenure in the form of skeletons picked completely clean of flesh and muscle in as little as twenty-four hours. Other images of decomposition in Craig's macabre portfolio were like a gruesome version of
Where's Waldo
? “You see the body?” Craig asked as I squinted at a photo of what I thought was a mass of greenish brown vegetation at the foot of a tree. I didn't. “There's his elbow,” she said, pointing.

Forensic techniques are sloggingly low-tech. The forensic anthropologist needs the skeleton free of soft tissue, marrow, muscle, and cartilage.
Forensic sculptor Frank Bender
once took revenge on a recalcitrant workman by having him peer into a bubbling cooking pot on the stove in which Bender was boiling a human head to get the skull clean. Others use Crock-Pots or hot plates for the same purpose. One lab reported a time-saving alternative: dunking the remains in Super Kleen—a foaming industrial cleaner intended for “heavily encrusted soils” in the food and beverage industry—­and then baking the disarticulated skeleton in chafing dishes in a large-capacity incubator.

It's not uncommon for someone to bring the medical examiner a picture to ID skeletal remains, because that's what happens on TV. “You
know, they find the skeleton and somebody does a computer face and it's perfect,” Craig said. “It takes three minutes and they can bring in a photograph and superimpose them and that's who it is. But it just doesn't work that way.”

Craig also stressed that DNA is not the panacea some imagine. But I was impressed by investigators' resourcefulness in using it in challenging cases of lost identity. In one documented case, DNA from a Pap smear was compared to DNA extracted from teeth as reference samples. A badly burned corpse's teeth can often still be used for identification; dandruff on any remaining section of a burned scalp can sometimes provide enough DNA for analysis. Then there are deliberate mutilations. “They'll cut off her tattoo, cut off her hands,” Craig says of murderers. “They know. They watch the same TV shows that we do.”

I went in search of cases in which forensic anthropologists managed to stay one step ahead of killers who thought they had beat the system. A cold case investigator told me about a Virginia case in which the killer worked hard—but not hard enough—to obliterate his victim.
Mark Christopher Poe, an ex-sailor,
lived on the Norfolk naval base. Poe's next-door neighbors were a husband, who was deployed at sea, and his attractive young wife. After failing to hear from his daughter, her father went to the house and found blood and signs of a struggle. When police arrived, they found hair and tissue in the bathtub and surmised the woman's killer cut the body up. Black light illuminated the site of the attack. But the body was gone.

The cops' first break came when a headless, armless, and legless torso was found floating in the river by fishermen.

Next, in the appropriately named Great Dismal Swamp, a man hunting for bait kicked a sack on the ground and a head rolled out.

Then a man's truck broke down on a road running through the swamp. Another person stopped to help and began to talk about gigging frogs. The first man had never heard of it, so the man made a gig, a kind of multipronged spear, and showed him. The first man took the gig and ran into the swamp.

He gigged one arm. Cadaver dogs found the other arm on the opposite side of the road. At the trial, two witnesses testified that they had seen Poe throwing an army-green duffel bag from a bridge into the water. Police re
covered a green duffel bag with the name of the victim's husband stenciled on the side. Fibers from the duffel bag were consistent with fibers removed from the trunk of Poe's car, which, when tested, revealed the presence of blood. A search of Poe's home revealed, among other things, a knife that both the victim's husband and father identified as belonging to the victim, and a strand of hair in Poe's underwear consistent with that of the victim. Poe was convicted of first-degree murder in 1994 and sentenced to life without parole.

In another case, in 2009, a woman searching a Buena Park, California, Dumpster for recyclable cans found a bloody suitcase with a body inside.

The victim's teeth had been pulled and all her fingers removed. But within three days
the coroner identified Jasmine Fiore,
a twenty-eight-year-old former swimsuit and
Playboy
model with a size 34DD bust.

The serial number on her breast implants led investigators to the manufacturer, which kept on file the recipient's name, address, phone number, Social Security number, surgeon, and primary care doctor. (Total joint replacements implanted after 1992 have traceable serial numbers, and the FDA requires manufacturers of pacemakers and defibrillators to keep track of such data as well.)

The main suspect in Fiore's murder—her husband, Ryan Alexander Jenkins, a onetime contestant on the reality TV show
Megan Wants a Millionaire
—fled to Canada and killed himself. Emily Craig told me of a killer who dismembered his victim, tucked the body parts in neatly tied plastic bags, and tossed them in the Wisconsin River. The water kept the body as cool as a refrigerator would have. The plastic bags thwarted maggots and scavengers. “Ironically, the very steps that the killer had taken to conceal his victim's identity had helped preserve it,” Craig pointed out.

Old Joe's remains, mostly skeletonized, were sent to the chief medical examiner's office at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. “He works on all the bones,” Detective Cheek said. “He puts them back together—­or tries to, anyway. I just call and say, ‘Can I speak to Gibbs?'”