The Skeleton Crew (3 page)

Who, I wondered, would go out of their way to create or peruse an Internet morgue?

James Todd Matthews's cause of choice is dumped, unclaimed, unidentified, and otherwise abandoned dead people.

Identifying the unidentified dead is not a celebrated cause like saving the whales.
As one cold case investigator put it, unidentified corpses
are the bottom of the food chain, and citizens like Todd taking up these cases only serves to exacerbate the already uneasy relationship between cops and civilians. Even the word “civilians,” which the police commonly use to refer to citizens, smacks of the military and emphasizes the divide between those among us who wear uniforms and carry guns and everybody else.

The police occupy a lonely rung of society where they band together for self-preservation. Their tough exterior projects distrust:
“Cynicism, clannishness, secrecy,
insulating themselves from others—the so-called blue
curtain,” write criminologists Larry J. Siegel and John L. Worrall. Many cops believe—understandably—that lawyers, academics, politicians, and the public have little concept of what it means to be a police officer. So it's not surprising that when self-proclaimed web sleuths started seeking information about cold cases around 1999—when the Internet came of age—their phone calls and e-mails weren't universally welcomed by law enforcement.

Working my way through the
names of administrators listed on the Doe Network,
a site that logged thousands of details on hundreds of missing and unidentified people, I connected with Todd Matthews and soon arranged to meet him in Virginia Beach, home to beachside motels, honky-tonk bars, and pizza joints, at
a conference for cops and forensics personnel
who routinely confronted bodies: the newly dead, the decomposed, the dismembered.

In contrast to Todd's childhood in a bucolic region of Tennessee, I'd grown up in a gritty neighborhood in a borough of New York City. With as many as two thousand murders a year—one every four hours—crime was a fact of life in the 1970s. This was the FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD era; the age of the sensational headline, of over-inked black type on gray pulp newsprint unrelieved by color. There was, of course,
The New York Times
, but on the subways and buses everyone's head was buried in the tabloids—the
New York Post
and my family's favorite, the
New York Daily News
. I'd get home from school to thirty-point type screaming terrifying gems like HEADLESS BODY IN TOPLESS BAR, about a robber shooting and decapitating the owner of a Brooklyn strip joint.

A few years later,
serial killer Son of Sam gave New York City
a collective nervous breakdown, generating a run on locks and Mace. David Berkowitz started a yearlong killing spree the summer I graduated from high school, picking off his victims—among them young women with long hair, the way I wore mine at the time—with a .44 double-action revolver. One of his victims was slain only a mile from my apartment building.

More than two decades after I'd left daily newspaper reporting to write about academic research, I became acquainted with the existence of the Lady of the Dunes and jumped at the opportunity to reenter the gritty world outside the ivory tower. I'd come to learn that many who
spend their days among the unidentified also end up reinventing themselves.

Todd Matthews refers to himself, with only a hint of irony, as a hillbilly. Imagining himself some Southern version of Kojak, he'd set out as a teenager to crack Kentucky's biggest unsolved mystery: the identity of a murder victim known as Tent Girl. Now in his forties, a minor celebrity of sorts who played an active role in early grassroots efforts such as the Doe Network, he shares podiums regularly with FBI agents and forensic experts. On the day of the Virginia Beach event, Todd walked into the linoleum-and-cinder-block lobby of an almost windowless police academy with his laptop under his arm. Our fellow attendees were, by definition, a pretty hardened bunch. Gentle, soft-spoken, almost effeminate, Todd stuck out in this crowd like a canary among raptors.

He smiled at a Sofía Vergara look-alike detective behind the desk who, like almost everyone in the building, had a service revolver strapped to one hip. She checked our names on a list and pointed us toward an urn of black coffee, Styrofoam cups, and sticky, cinnamon-scented pastries. I watched Todd mill around, greeting people he recognized from the crime conference circuit.

I thought Todd's aquiline nose, thick chevron mustache, ragged soul patch, chestnut-brown eyes, and white teeth made him good-looking in an early-'80s sort of way. Around five-seven, his shaggy dark brown mane gained him a couple of inches. He exuded a Zen-like calm—until he started to speak. His middle Tennessee dialect—Tommy Lee Jones with a dash of Jed Clampett—was so rapid-fire, I had trouble recognizing it as English. “Dead” became “day-ud,” “well” was “way-eel.”

Besides losing the flip-flops and baseball cap I would come to recognize as integral parts of his look, Todd hadn't dressed for the part of speaker. In a short-sleeved golf shirt and jeans, he angled down the microphone; the previous presenter was a head taller. “I wore a suit in Vegas and everyone thought I was Tony Orlando,” he told a sea of unsmiling cops. “I don't wear a mic because it wears down the chest hair.”

After twenty minutes of leading the audience through the various ins and outs of using an online database to compare the details of the missing and the unidentified, Todd relinquished the podium to a forensic patholo
gist whose PowerPoint was a parade of gore: a corpse's face and neck striped from sternum to forehead with perfectly even, vertical tire treads; skulls bashed in by hammers or riddled with bullet holes; severed limbs, bloodied and mangled or denuded of skin. No one in the audience blinked.

Maybe Todd logged a couple of converts among law enforcement that day. He knew what he was up against. He'd spent years during his one-man investigation of Tent Girl trying to gain the confidence of cops who didn't hide the fact that they considered him a time-sucking, death-obsessed wacko. He'd lost track of the number of times he'd been turned away, ridiculed, dismissed, hung up on.

No one was actively investigating Tent Girl back then, almost no one was keeping track of the thousands of other unidentified bodies, and no one was effectively trying to match them to the tens of thousands of people still listed as missing. Incredibly, it would take thirty years from the time the issue was first raised for a universally accessible system dedicated to this purpose to materialize. One of the first people to advocate for such a thing was a dumpling-shaped woman in wire-rimmed spectacles who took the stage shortly after Todd: Dr. Marcella Fierro. Fierro started her career as an ambitious young medical student in upstate New York.
Only the ninth woman in the country certified in forensic pathology,
Fierro joined Richmond's Medical College of Virginia Hospitals and the office of the Virginia medical examiner, where she would one day meet author Patricia Cornwell. As a technical writer for the medical examiner in Richmond, Cornwell gained intimate knowledge of forensic science—material that would later surface in her wildly popular crime novels. And Fierro became the model for Kay Scarpetta, the unassailable expert pathologist featured in more than a dozen of Cornwell's best-selling books. (Fierro points out that she is not the
physical
model for Scarpetta:
“Kay is blond, blue-eyed,
and a hundred and fifteen pounds. I've never been blond, I have brown eyes, and I haven't weighed a hundred and fifteen pounds since I was twelve.”)

In the 1970s, more than a decade before her friendship with Cornwell began and when Todd Matthews was still in kindergarten, Fierro heard a speaker at an American Academy of Forensic Sciences meeting call for a
national registry for the unidentified. The subject resonated with her. Fierro had noticed that if a nameless but potentially recognizable body—an unidentified, or UID in law enforcement lingo—turned up on her autopsy table, the police took photos and issued a missing-person report or an APB. But if the body had decomposed or lacked fingerprints,
“forget it,” Fierro said. “There was really nothing.”

It was obvious—to Fierro, at least—that this was a problem. It turned out to be a bigger problem than she could have imagined, involving law enforcement agencies, police departments, coroners, and medical examiners across fifty states with overlapping responsibilities for the unidentified and a communication breakdown that rivaled that of Apollo missions on the far side of the moon.

Big urban police departments considered their smaller, more rural counterparts hicks and rubes; professionally trained medical examiners with advanced degrees looked down on locally elected coroners. Consequently, if a missing person became an unidentified body several states away, or even in the next county, the case might remain unsolved because public service officials in one location didn't deign to share information or confer with their counterparts elsewhere.

They did all agree on one thing: no one wanted to talk to the public.

Theories abound on why law enforcement entities are so fiercely autonomous. Major urban police forces as we know them have been around since the mid- to late nineteenth century, state police forces evolved independently at the end of the nineteenth century, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation came into existence even later. Within a single municipality, police power can be divided among dozens of separate organizations, creating legions of fiefdoms. It was unclear whether a stray human body “belonged” to the medical examiner or to law enforcement. The fact was, no one entity owned the problem of UIDs, and early on, no one seemed to know how to go about identifying them.

Yet seeds were being sown. Around the time that Fierro was performing her first autopsies in Richmond in the mid-1970s,
a police artist and an anthropologist from the Smithsonian
Institution joined forces to attempt to elicit the “personality” of a skeleton found in woods adjacent to a Maryland industrial park. Science had not yet enabled investigators to reconstruct
personality based solely upon the fragmentary remains of an individual, the pair wrote. But they decided to try to give one victim a presence that others might recognize.

The anthropologist determined that the victim was a seventeen- to twenty-two-year-old female, shorter than average, with a skewed right hip and a once-broken collarbone. Digging through evidence boxes, the police artist pulled out jewelry and a sweater found with the remains. He fingered strands of her long hair, traced and measured the skull, and started to sketch, conferring with the anthropologist on the shape and placement of her eyes, ears, and mouth.

Within days of the finished sketch's appearing in a local newspaper, police had identified Roseanne Michele Sturtz, who had not been seen since the previous year. People who knew her said that the twenty-year-old nightclub dancer favored one leg and had broken her collarbone when she was six.

A few years later, a father devastated by his son's brutal murder funneled his considerable energy and intensity into shaking up what he perceived as a deeply flawed system. After the disappearance and horrific 1981 murder of six-year-old Adam, Florida hotel developer John Walsh became an impassioned advocate for the missing. He joined forces in 1984 with the then-new nonprofit National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (its acronym, NCMEC, is pronounced “nick-mick”) in Alexandria, Virginia, which Congress would later sanction as the official national resource center and information clearinghouse for missing and exploited children. Walsh went on to host
America's Most Wanted
, among the first TV shows to enlist the public's help in solving crimes, paving the way for a growing movement: ordinary citizens working on cold cases. A decade later, the web sleuth phenomenon would force law enforcement's hand in ways Walsh likely never anticipated.

Fierro continued to forge her own connections within forensics and with the unidentified. When she had treated living patients, asking probing questions always gave her insight into what might be ailing them. So when confronted with UIDs—whom she saw as patients who happened to be dead—she talked to them as well.
She asked them to tell her their stories,
and she found that when she examined them the right way, they responded
as eloquently as if they could speak, telling her whether they were right- or left-handed, if they had ever been seriously injured or undergone surgery, their age and race, whether they took care of their teeth, if they had ever borne a child. No detail was insignificant. “You have a genius for minutiae,” Watson once chided Sherlock Holmes, who routinely made mental notes of esoteric facts. Holmes countered that recognizing distinctive calluses and scars on the hands of cork cutters, weavers, diamond polishers, and other tradesmen might help him identify an unclaimed body.

In the late 1980s, Fierro wrote a handbook for pathologists on tricks of the trade for conducting postmortem examinations of unidentified remains. She approached FBI officials, who, years after the American Academy of Forensic Sciences speaker had called for a registry of the unidentified, were still not the least bit interested in setting up such a thing. Considering that
the FBI wouldn't have a working computer system
that allowed its thirteen thousand agents to track case files electronically for almost another three decades, she shouldn't have been surprised.

Around the time Fierro was learning the silent language of the unidentified, Todd Matthews was a twenty-year-old factory worker in Livingston, Tennessee, who possessed an odd sense of kinship with the deceased. The fact that there were many like Tent Girl, nameless and forgotten, wouldn't reach the public consciousness for more than another decade. The way one longtime forensic anthropologist saw it, when Todd managed to identify Tent Girl, he triggered a gold rush. The case details of long-forgotten UIDs started to find their way out of dusty filing cabinets and onto websites, becoming an untapped mother lode of potentially useful crowdsourcing data.