Dead Men Do Tell Tales: The Strange and Fascinating Cases of a Forensic Anthropologist by William R. Maples, Michael Browning Page A
Authors: William R. Maples, Michael Browning
Tags: Medical, Forensic Medicine
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County.
The body was cut in two through the lower back, at the top of the fifth lumbar vertebra. This was a somewhat unusual but not entirely unknown method of dismemberment. It all depends how many portions you want. If you are going to be frugal and make only one cut, the lower back is obviously the place you would choose.
In this particular case, however, the lower portion of the body had been further dismembered through the thighs. The dismemberment was probably done with a fine-toothed saw, such as a hacksaw. The torso of the upper portion of the body was wearing a T-shirt advertising the Boot Hill Saloon, a bar in Daytona popular with motorcycle enthusiasts. The victim was identified as a biker, but again no one was ever charged with his murder. Obviously he was the victim of gang justice, and his killers scattered his remains after cutting him to pieces and packing him up into the twin suitcases for his final trip.
By now the reader will perhaps share some of my frustration over these dismemberment cases. Over and over again I have acted the part of “all the king’s horses and all the king’s men” in the old Mother Goose rhyme, trying to reassemble some poor Humpty-Dumpty of a murder victim, who didn’t fall off a wall, but who was most likely shot or stabbed to death, then laboriously sawed to pieces by his killer. At great pains, and against long odds, I have sometimes succeeded in reuniting pieces of bodies that seemed impossibly far-flung. Sometimes I can even make out the personality of the murderer and the circumstances of the crime. I can see a mental picture of the corpse cutter at work, panting and sweating, his teeth gritted, removing the head and limbs, one after another, with tools I can clearly identify. But all this is not enough. The pieces remain, the culprit goes uncaptured and unpunished.
The real victory in these dismemberment cases is often scientific and intellectual, rather than moral. More and more today, dismemberment cases are being treated with the attention they deserve. Under the old coroner system, nobody would look twice at a dismemberment. They were too puzzling and horrible to contemplate for long. A finding of “Body Taken Apart” would be entered, the remains would be buried and that would be the end of it. Now we are studying these appalling cases more and more closely, with a clearer knowledge of anatomy and with improved scientific techniques. As I have shown, we are sometimes able to piece together bodies that have been scattered practically to the four winds, across hundreds of miles; bodies lost for many years. It is not every day that we have the satisfaction of seeing a murderer and corpse cutter convicted and led away in handcuffs as a result of our work, but we are making progress.
One of the ghastliest cases of dismemberment I ever encountered ended in the most satisfying way imaginable, with a dramatic plea of guilty within minutes of my testimony. I call it “The Case of the Pale-Faced Indian.” It happened this way:
In 1981, right after I’d finished helping dig up the bodies of the three drug smugglers down in La Belle, I was called in to identify a buried, dismembered body. The body belonged to a Gainesville man who owned land in a rural area. On this lot stood an unused house trailer. A Vietnam veteran named Tim Burgess, a desperate-looking man with long dark hair and flowing muttonchop whiskers, had asked permission to camp on the man’s property. The landowner agreed, but Burgess soon took advantage of his hospitality and moved into the vacant trailer. When the landowner finally asked him to leave, Burgess refused.
The landowner learned that Burgess had a criminal record and had been paroled from prison. He had been arrested several times. Once, while walking a pet Doberman in front of the White House in Washington, D.C., his dog had lunged at a passerby and Burgess’s coat had flapped open, revealing .45-caliber automatics and several hundred
The body was cut in two through the lower back, at the top of the fifth lumbar vertebra. This was a somewhat unusual but not entirely unknown method of dismemberment. It all depends how many portions you want. If you are going to be frugal and make only one cut, the lower back is obviously the place you would choose.
In this particular case, however, the lower portion of the body had been further dismembered through the thighs. The dismemberment was probably done with a fine-toothed saw, such as a hacksaw. The torso of the upper portion of the body was wearing a T-shirt advertising the Boot Hill Saloon, a bar in Daytona popular with motorcycle enthusiasts. The victim was identified as a biker, but again no one was ever charged with his murder. Obviously he was the victim of gang justice, and his killers scattered his remains after cutting him to pieces and packing him up into the twin suitcases for his final trip.
By now the reader will perhaps share some of my frustration over these dismemberment cases. Over and over again I have acted the part of “all the king’s horses and all the king’s men” in the old Mother Goose rhyme, trying to reassemble some poor Humpty-Dumpty of a murder victim, who didn’t fall off a wall, but who was most likely shot or stabbed to death, then laboriously sawed to pieces by his killer. At great pains, and against long odds, I have sometimes succeeded in reuniting pieces of bodies that seemed impossibly far-flung. Sometimes I can even make out the personality of the murderer and the circumstances of the crime. I can see a mental picture of the corpse cutter at work, panting and sweating, his teeth gritted, removing the head and limbs, one after another, with tools I can clearly identify. But all this is not enough. The pieces remain, the culprit goes uncaptured and unpunished.
The real victory in these dismemberment cases is often scientific and intellectual, rather than moral. More and more today, dismemberment cases are being treated with the attention they deserve. Under the old coroner system, nobody would look twice at a dismemberment. They were too puzzling and horrible to contemplate for long. A finding of “Body Taken Apart” would be entered, the remains would be buried and that would be the end of it. Now we are studying these appalling cases more and more closely, with a clearer knowledge of anatomy and with improved scientific techniques. As I have shown, we are sometimes able to piece together bodies that have been scattered practically to the four winds, across hundreds of miles; bodies lost for many years. It is not every day that we have the satisfaction of seeing a murderer and corpse cutter convicted and led away in handcuffs as a result of our work, but we are making progress.
One of the ghastliest cases of dismemberment I ever encountered ended in the most satisfying way imaginable, with a dramatic plea of guilty within minutes of my testimony. I call it “The Case of the Pale-Faced Indian.” It happened this way:
In 1981, right after I’d finished helping dig up the bodies of the three drug smugglers down in La Belle, I was called in to identify a buried, dismembered body. The body belonged to a Gainesville man who owned land in a rural area. On this lot stood an unused house trailer. A Vietnam veteran named Tim Burgess, a desperate-looking man with long dark hair and flowing muttonchop whiskers, had asked permission to camp on the man’s property. The landowner agreed, but Burgess soon took advantage of his hospitality and moved into the vacant trailer. When the landowner finally asked him to leave, Burgess refused.
The landowner learned that Burgess had a criminal record and had been paroled from prison. He had been arrested several times. Once, while walking a pet Doberman in front of the White House in Washington, D.C., his dog had lunged at a passerby and Burgess’s coat had flapped open, revealing .45-caliber automatics and several hundred
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