The Skeleton Crew Read online

  By the time his son-in-law got hold of the case, I remind Riddle as we drive away from the roadside gully, the mystery of her identity was decades old—frosbitten, as cold cases go. Riddle doesn’t seem to hear me.

  “I found her,” he insists stubbornly in the car, his watery eyes staring straight ahead at the Kentucky landscape, his calloused right hand gripping the grab handle above the passenger door. “She’d probably still be laying there on that rock if it weren’t for me.”

  1

  THE ULTIMATE IDENTITY CRISIS

  Chances are good that you or someone you know has at one point stumbled over a dead body. There are shockingly large numbers of them out there. According to the National Institute of Justice, America is home to tens of thousands of unidentified human remains, with four thousand more turning up every year: intrepid adventurers or athletes who left their IDs at home; victims of accidents and mass disasters; suicides; undocumented immigrants; the homeless; runaway teenagers; victims of serial killers; and those who cast off a former identity, changed names, and left no forwarding address.

  From the sheer number of unidentified individuals, you’d think that American roadways, bodies of water, vacant lots, and woodlands are littered with nameless bodies quietly decomposing, infested with maggots, swelling up like balloons, drying out like jerky, poked at and gnawed by animals. There are men and women, young and old, black, white, Asian—or, as a forensic anthropologist would classify the victims’ skulls, in dated-­sounding terms: Negroid, Caucasoid, Mongoloid. Some are discovered within hours or days; some are skeletons or a single bone by the time somebody happens upon them.

  These anonymous dead become law enforcement’s version of wards of the state—an onerous responsibility, a major pain in the ass. Unidentified corpses are like obtuse, financially strapped houseguests: they turn up uninvited, take up space reserved for more obliging visitors, require care and attention, and then when you’re ready for them to move on, they don’t have anywhere to go.

  Like infants abandoned on doorsteps, their fates are determined largely by who finds them. One corpse might get a thorough going-over: measured and weighed; gender, race, and approximate age determined; hair and eye color, if hair or eyes remain, noted; scars, tattoos, and old injuries inventoried. Just over a state or county line, another set of remains might be butchered, misplaced, or rushed to the crematorium, sending potential clues literally up in smoke.

  * * *

  In the normal scheme of things, after a person dies, he or she is remembered, revered, commemorated. The lucky or the wealthy get a bridge or building named after them. But when bodies are divorced from their personal identities, the living are left in the lurch. The unidentified dead don’t yield up any of the soothing coping rituals—dedications, obituaries, memorials, eulogies, reminiscences—we rely on in the wake of a death.

  What’s left are mournful monikers such as Tent Girl, Somerton Man, Princess Doe, Saltair Sally, the Boy in the Box, the Belle in the Well, the Lady Who Danced Herself to Death: celebrities of sorts in their hometowns, but generally unknown and unacknowledged elsewhere.

  The stories of Tent Girl and other fabled, unidentified corpses such as the Lady of the Dunes, murdered in my home state of Massachusetts, reveal uncomfortable truths about our law enforcement and medicolegal systems. They also expose the transience of personal identity. Driver’s license? Photo ID? Passport? It turns out we maintain our day-to-day identities superficially. We’re easily separated from the paper and plastic that proves we are who we say we are. Unlike pets and sharks, we’re not microchipped—not yet, anyway—and even medical alert bracelets don’t always include names. Despite the common belief that DNA is a tell-all human barcode, DNA is useless as an identification tool without a sample to compare it to.

  If you’ve been unlucky enough to suffer the ultimate identity crisis, more permanent, unique identifiers—the tattoo of Cold Play lyrics on your left shoulder blade, the diamond drilled into your front tooth, the fillings in your molars—might match up with a notation on a missing-person report. The data—a picture of the tattoo, an estimated height and age, the postmortem photos, and usually the remains themselves—are stored away on the chance that a name will miraculously find its way into the system, or that new information will surface within weeks, months, years, or decades. But too often, it doesn’t surface at all.

  We don’t like to think that public agencies would abandon cases that prove too challenging, but—confronted with more immediate concerns than a quietly decomposing body—they often do.

  What would it be like, I wondered, when so much revolves around identity, to have none? The Latin root of identity, identitas, comes from idem—the same. We automatically sort our fellow beings into categories: like us or unlike us, same or different. Sociologists say this sorting is fundamental to our world: identity lets us know who’s who and what’s what. Our primitive selves survived by discerning friend from foe. Yet identity is fleeting. The “you” known to others can disappear, leaving behind a nameless body that people find perplexing, frustrating, pitiable . . . and, for me and many others, an irresistible mystery.

  Thanks to famous criminal cases—O.J. Simpson, Laci Peterson, Anna Nicole Smith, Michael Jackson, and Caylee Anthony among them—the language of forensics and the notion that experts “read” clues from remains and skeletons has infiltrated our public consciousness. Powerful computers have given the art and science of facial reconstruction a boost. CSI, NCIS, Dexter, The X-Files, Cold Case, Fringe, and Bones have made the tools famous—and misleadingly effortless.

  The real world of the unidentified is complicated and, until recently, almost entirely undocumented and unquantified. It wasn’t until 2004 that the Department of Justice set out to tally exactly how many unidentified bodies had been stowed in freezers and evidence rooms, cremated, or buried in potter’s fields for the past century.

  With a far-from-comprehensive response to this first-of-its-kind national census, the Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics tallied more than thirteen thousand sets of unidentified remains. Because record keeping was so uneven—some coroners working on the questionnaire turned up long-forgotten skeletons stowed in Bankers Boxes in back rooms—the National Institute of Justice estimates the real figure is closer to forty thousand: the population of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania; North Miami Beach, Florida; or San Gabriel, California.

  In researching and writing this book, I found that many people are unaware of the extent of the problem. Even those who have heard figures tossed around, such as eighty thousand people reported missing in the United States on any given day, don’t imagine that Jane and John Does make up a significant subset of that number. A longtime forensics specialist told me most people are flabbergasted when she cites the number of unidentified remains in America. In any other realm, so many neglected deaths would lead to a public outcry, she observed ruefully. Not so for the unidentified, although there’s no shortage of justice waiting to be served on their behalf.

  “I don’t know how the police and the city morgue didn’t realize that the body they had for 7 months in the refrigerator was my brother’s body,” wrote the sibling of thirty-two-year-old Andrea Zabini, a native of Italy who had been in the United States only ten months when he disappeared in North Miami in 2001. “Our angel Dafne,” Alessandro Zabini addressed a letter in halting English to Daphne Owings of South Carolina, who noted similarities between Andrea’s description and that of a John Doe who had been discovered dead in an open field frequented by the homeless. “You from far away did it . . . [Y]ou gave us the serenity, because now we can give him a grave and we’ll have a stone, where we can cry [for] our relative.”

  Most relatives of the nameless dead don’t get that closure. Around half of the unidentified die natural, accidental, or self-inflicted deaths. The rest have been murdered. (For a small number, the official cause is “undetermined.”) If you watch detective shows,
you know how law enforcement feels about a cold case homicide. When investigators don’t even know the victim’s name, the odds of finding—let alone convicting—the killer round to zero.

  An unidentified corpse is the Blanche DuBois of the forensic world: completely dependent on the kindness of strangers like Daphne Owings, Todd Matthews in Tennessee, Ellen Leach in Mississippi, Betty Brown in North Carolina, and Bobby Lingoes in Massachusetts. The web sleuths labor to reunite the unidentified dead with their names, provide answers to families, and help law enforcement reopen long-dormant cold cases. This book is the story of the men and women whose macabre hobby of trolling Internet bulletin boards and gory law enforcement websites in an attempt to match names of the missing with the remains of the unidentified dead has propelled a remarkable shift in the number of cases that are solved, and in the relationship between the public and law enforcement.

  As I met the web sleuths and delved into the world of missing persons, the unidentified, crowdsourcing, and cold cases, I found out what a crucial role a kind and curious stranger can play in bringing closure to families whose loved ones have disappeared.

  * * *

  In May 2010, I saw a photo in The Boston Globe of a woman with well-shaped eyebrows and a sensitive mouth. She had deep-set eyes and luxurious auburn hair swept back off her high forehead in a ponytail.

  She looked familiar, like someone I might see running along the shoulder of my suburban street or waiting in line at Starbucks, but the colors in the picture struck me as garish and her expression eerily bland, as if she were posing for a Disneyesque mug shot. Then I realized what I was looking at wasn’t a photograph at all.

  It was a digitally constructed approximation of what a murder victim looked like before her face decomposed.

  In 1974, the story said, a woman had been found dead on a beach in Provincetown, Massachusetts, her hands chopped off at the wrists, her skull bashed in. She was nude, lying on a thick beach blanket, a pair of Wrangler jeans neatly folded under her almost-severed head. Her toenails were painted a bubble-gum pink. She had been dead for days, maybe weeks. The local police chief called the murder horrific, brutal for any time and any place, but particularly shocking for Provincetown.

  I knew Provincetown as an artsy community at the end of the stunning Cape Cod National Seashore, a great place to spend a summer weekend but an unlikely setting for the lurid, the sensational, the sinister. Amazingly, despite years of effort by investigators, thousands of tips, two exhumations, DNA tests, and directives from psychics, no one had ever identified the redhead. Now a new, go-getter police chief was reopening the case on the chance that state-of-the-art forensic techniques would provide a name and a history for the woman who was known only as the Lady of the Dunes.

  Considering its subject had been dead for more than thirty years, the reconstruction in the Globe was startlingly lifelike. Even the new chief, a tough-guy Vin Diesel look-alike with a shaved head, noted kind of wistfully that she had beautiful hair. She had also had thousands of dollars’ worth of dental work, yet no dentist had ever stepped forward with records that matched her teeth.

  The Lady of the Dunes belongs to a certain category of unidentified victim—young, attractive, female—that communities tend to fetishize. She was buried under a flat stone the size of a sheet of loose-leaf paper at the edge of a grassy field adjacent to austere gray-shingled St. Peter the Apostle church in Provincetown, the marker engraved “Unidentified Female Body Found Race Point Dunes” along with the date she was discovered: July 26, 1974. Flowers still appear regularly at her grave, and people make pilgrimages to hers and other unidentified victims’ resting places as if to sacred sites.

  Over the next few days I kept thinking that the Provincetown murder victim must have been someone’s daughter, maybe someone’s mother, sister, aunt, or cousin. How could no one miss her? How could she have ended up in a quaint Cape Cod town one hot summer day, never to be heard from again, and how could her disappearance have raised not the slightest alarm among her relatives, friends, coworkers? Why did no one ever report her missing? And if someone had, how had no one made the connection to the Lady of the Dunes?

  At least three Provincetown police chiefs consumed with her case swore to solve it; all retired, defeated, as the years passed. Incredibly, a new suspect in her murder would be identified in 2012 as I wrapped up research on this book.

  I’m not particularly spiritual, but I felt sad for the Lady of the Dunes, a young woman robbed of her history, her future, and something we all take for granted: a name. Everyone I talked to agreed that it seemed impossible. If by a random stroke of bad luck I became a victim of a fatal accident or a deadly attack far from home, I was pretty confident word would make it back to someone who cared about me. And yet the thought nagged at me.

  I closed the newspaper and went to my computer, where Googling “Lady of the Dunes” generated websites populated with small cities of dead people who, like her, had never been identified. They are unsettling, these sites: a Facebook for the dead. Some warn viewers that the photos within are disturbing and graphic. But nothing prepares you for the seemingly endless collection of heads: artists’ reconstructions, vivid color portraits that capture an inquisitive look in the eyes or a stubborn set to the mouth, crude pencil sketches, cartoon-like illustrations, and distorted clay dummies sporting wigs, like something out of a beautician’s academy for the hopeless. Then there are the postmortem photos: waxen faces with unseeing eyes, some individuals sporting grievous, barely disguised injuries.

  I scrolled past image after image. It was like walking into a morgue, pulling out drawers, and yanking the sheets off body after body. What if you logged onto a site like this and came across the face of someone that you knew?

  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 tablo
ids—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.