The Bones of 29 Young Men
after it was demolished.
First they dug up an arm bone. Then in another corner of the crawl space, they found a kneecap. They called the medical examiner to confirm that they’d unearthed human remains. He gave the go-ahead, and in December 1978, a team of police officers began the excavation that marked all of their careers as the most sensational apprehension of a murderer they’d ever experienced.
From the ground around and under the house at 8213 Summerdale Avenue in Des Plaines, Illinois, they would bring up twenty-nine separate bodies of young men in all different states of decomposition. Several more were dredged up from the river, and John Wayne Gacy was charged with first-degree murder. The final official total of his victims was 33.
To put together a solid case and to bring closure to families who had been waiting as long as six years for news of a missing relative, investigators had to begin the painstaking task of identifying the bodies. Some families came forward with photos, X-rays and dental records, and in other cases, driver’s licenses and other forms of identification belonging to the victims were found in Gacy’s home. Because few parents of missing boys could believe that their sons would engage in the kind of homosexual activity that Gacy claimed happened, it became clear that some would offer no assistance. Detectives had to use dental records, fingerprints, and X-rays of missing persons and assumed victims to get leads on the identities of many of the corpses.
When after six weeks they had succeeded with less than half of the bodies, they turned to a specialist in bones, forensic anthropologists Charles P. Warren and Clyde C. Snow. Since Gacy had piled some bodies on top of others, their first task was to sort and separate individual bones. In the end, it turned out that the typical victim was a Caucasian male in his teens or early twenties—and one had even been married. Warren made charts for each body and examined the bones for unusual osteological features. Forensic odontologists helped with the identification of teeth.
Snow compiled a chart for each skull, based on thirty-five points of reference that could be compared with descriptions in the many missing-person reports they had at their disposal. For example, he determined that one skeleton had been that of a person who was five-feet-eleven, left-handed, had sustained a head injury and had broken his left arm. All of this matched the missing former Marine, David Talsma.
After a year, there were still nine bodies left to identify. Snow then brought in another expert, a sculptress, to examine seven of the skulls.
Betty Pat Gatliff agreed to join the team. Her first step in working with a skull was to establish the thickness of the skin, and for that, she glued eraser-type markers on it at various strategic points. Then she applied modeling clay in accordance with certain measurements, based on general data about facial anatomy. That gave her an idea of what the mouth and cheeks would have looked like. For the nose, if any slivers of cartilage remained, she arranged them to try to determine how large and what shape the nose had been. For this, she relied on racial characteristics. Then she inserted prosthetic eyes. If any hair had been found with the body, she used a wig of the appropriate color. Then her reconstructions were ready for the photographer.
Despite all of this effort, people were reluctant to come forward, so the nine victims remained unidentified. Even so, it was a clear case in which forensic anthropology made an obvious contribution—and it’s likely that much less progress could have been made without such expertise.
Let’s look more closely at how anthropologists work.
Anthropology is the study of humans and it consists of several sub-fields:
- Physical anthropology — The study of the primate order, past and present, such as primate biology, skeletal biology, and human adaptation
- Cultural and linguistic anthropology — The study of the aspects of human society and language, past and present
- Archaeology — The study of past cultures via material remains and artifacts
To some degree, forensic anthropologists draw on each of these fields, but generally rely on knowledge from physical anthropology to apply their expertise to skeletal remains. According to the American Board of Forensic Anthropology, “Forensic anthropology is the application of the science of physical anthropology to the legal process. The identification of skeletal, badly decomposed, or otherwise unidentified human remains is important for both legal and humanitarian reasons. Forensic anthropologists apply standard scientific techniques developed in physical anthropology to identify human remains, and to assist in the detection of crime.”
Stanley Rhine is professor emeritus in the Department of Anthropology at the University of New Mexico. Author of Bone Voyage: A Journey in Forensic Anthropology, he was working in a museum’s osteology lab when he got his first call in 1974. Four skeletonized bodies had been discovered in the northern New Mexican wilderness, victims of a light aircraft crash six years earlier. Forensic anthropologist Clyde C. Snow was assisting the FAA, but they needed a place to lay out the skeletons. Could the lab assist them? Rhine viewed this as an interesting break from routine and was happy to help. From that experience, he was hooked and he invited the recently formed statewide death investigation unit to call on him for other cases. Now with over two decades of experience behind him, he has a pretty good sense of what forensic anthropology involves.
While forensic pathologists are trained to analyze soft tissue and organs, he notes, their experience with hard tissue (bone) is limited. “The forensic anthropologist specializes in hard tissue morphology, structure and variability. In those cases in which soft tissue has been degraded by time, temperature, environment or other external forces, the only tissue remaining more or less intact is bone. The obvious person to call in to evaluate such material is the bone specialist. Moreover, it should be not just your garden-variety osteologist, but one who’s trained in the medicolegal context where it is essential to be able to unerringly distinguish among ante-, peri- and postmortem defects, and where time since death is a significant factor.”
Quite often, it’s the pathologist or medical examiner who calls the forensic anthropologist in for consultation. Thus, they establish a working relationship. “By and large,” says Rhine, “it is the pathologist who tells the anthropologist what he expects, when the case will be available, and what kind of support will be offered. He generally sets the tone of the work.”
It takes years of experience and training in bone analysis to become a skilled FA. “Practice, practice, practice,” Rhine insists. “A person pursuing work in forensic anthropology should accompany someone more experienced to the morgue to work on cases—many cases. He or she should be immersed in such activity and take every opportunity to attend meetings and engage in the exchange of information with others in the field. They need to bolster their experience and broaden it with the insights and observations of others. In short, they should develop a collegial experience. But attitudes are also important, such as patience, the willingness to return again and again to a skeleton to tease out those tiny, hidden revelations, and the perseverance to push against the barriers of ignorance to see how much more can be done.”
Even so, there aren’t many people in this field. “Forensic anthropology has not been universally used across the country,” Rhine explains, “because there aren’t enough of us. There may be on the order of 150 forensic anthropologists in the entire country. A couple of dozen are employed by the military, both in Washington and at the Army’s Central Identification Lab in Hawaii. A few more are at the Smithsonian and other museums. The remainder tend to be underutilized, in part because of a reluctance by some pathologists to venture outside the expertise circumscribed by their own facilities. In other instances, it is generally a tough, uphill battle to convince law enforcement agencies in some locales to deal with ‘those goofy professors.'”
Much of what occurs in forensic anthropology comes from the area of osteology, or the study of bones, although some forensic anthropologists may also specialize in body decomposition and entomology (the study of insects). Forensic anthropologists generally work with forensic pathologists, odontologists, and homicide investigators to point out evidence of foul play and assist with time of death estimates.
The human body has 206 bones. They weigh about twelve pounds for the average male and ten pounds for females. To calculate factors about the bones, they’re laid out on an ostiometric board, which allows measurements to be made with calipers. The basic identifying factors that investigators need to know, which can often be read from bones, are:
- Gender — The male pelvis is narrower than the female, and certain features of the skull are larger in males; the bones tend to be heavier as well.
- Age — In younger people, the stages at which bones are uniting show advancing age; for older people, calcium and other mineral deposits help as well, along with successive changes in the pelvis or evidence of bone diseases like arthritis; other clues come from the developmental stages in the teeth and from worn areas in enamel.
- Previous trauma — If a bone was broken and there are hospital records, this can help with identification.
- Race — One of three races can be determined from variations in the facial structure, especially the nose and eye sockets. In Negroids and Mongoloids, the nose ridge is broader than in Caucasians.
- Height — An intact corpse can be measured, but a disarticulated or incomplete skeleton has to be pieced together. One rule of thumb is that height is about five times the length of the humerus, but there are formulas for height based on other major bones as well (spine, tibia, and femur).
- Body type — Tables provide an estimate based on bone characteristics for determining whether the person was slender, of medium build, or heavy.
- Cause of death — This might be evident in the skull or some of the bones: a knife cut, bullet holes, a blunt weapon fracture, or even a saw to dismember the bones. Sometimes bones will yield evidence of poisoning as well
Forensic identification generally relies on comparing teeth to dental records; doing some type of DNA analysis, and facial revisioning or reconstruction from the shape of the skull. Let’s look at a famous case where several anthropologists worked together to identify the remains of one of the most hated and feared human beings who has ever lived.
Clyde C. Snow was the American anthropologist on a team invited to analyze the apparent remains of the infamous Nazi doctor, Josef Mengele. Snow was considered something of a pioneer in his enthusiastic application of the methods of anthropology to criminal cases, which he called “osteobiography,” and he was a renowned expert on identification.
In 1937, when he was nine years old, Snow saw his first skeleton. He was hunting with his father, a physician, and he got to go along with the men to have a look. He didn’t understand why the bones were so brown. As his father examined the bones for cause of death, he explained a few things to young Clyde—including how they would identify who this skeleton might have been.
One of Snow’s early jobs was to work for the Federal Aviation Administration, searching crash sites and piecing victims together for identification. In one mass disaster, he had to work with over 10,000 body parts. To aid his team, he came up with a computer program that would put all of the victim information into a database for easy access. Using records supplied by relatives about such things as height, weight, dental work, and clothing worn, they could match it against what they determined to be the age, gender, height, weight, and race of each of the victims. In this instance, an astonishing 234 of the 273 victims were identified.
Snow left this position in 1979 to concentrate on forensic work, and in 1985 took on one of his more spectacular cases—the identification of Hitler’s “Angel of Death.” Mengele had run Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp that was part of Hitler’s mass slaughter of over 6 million Europeans, mostly Jews. As part of his job, he had supervised over 400,000 deaths. When the war ended with Germany’s surrender, he fled. He was spotted in a number of South American countries, but no one managed to locate and capture him. Then word came that he had drowned in 1979 and was buried in the tomb of “Wolfgang Gerhard.” To be certain, the Brazilian government decided to open it. For identification, they needed experts, so Clyde Snow was called in, along with a forensic anthropologist from Germany, Richard Helmer.
Snow arrived in Sao Paulo that summer to find the skeletal remains in a state of disarray. In fact, some of the bones had been fractured by those who had dug them up. Nevertheless, the team got right to work. The bones were those of a right-handed Caucasian male between the ages of 60 and 70. Estimates from bone measurements came within half a centimeter to Mengele’s height.
For comparison purposes, they had few records of the living Mengele. There were no dental x-rays, and while the number of fillings had been noted in his files, no other characteristics were included. Snow and Helmer decided to use a technique called “video skull-face superimposition,” which was Helmer’s expertise. Piecing together the shattered skull, they marked it with pins at thirty points of comparison. They did the same with photographs of Mengele, and set the skull and photo side-by-side for cameras. If all thirty points lined up, then they could say they had a positive identification of the Nazi fiend.
The cameras recorded and then superimposed the images, and the experts carefully examined the matching areas. Finally, they pronounced the exhumed skull as that of war criminal Josef Mengele.
Some time later, Mengele’s dental X-rays were located and compared to the teeth in the skull. They proved a match, supporting the video superimposition. Then a DNA analysis confirmed once again that the methods of anthropology had proven reliable and accurate.
From two dimensions to three, let’s have a look at forensics culture.
It’s controversial as to who actually made the first successful facial reconstruction, but it’s often credited to the German anatomist, W. His, who published the results of his studies in 1895. He had acquired a skull said to be that of the late composer Johann Sebastian Bach, and from it, he sculpted what turned out to be a very good facial likeness.
To find out the general depth of the skin and muscles over the skull, His had plunged oiled needles into the faces of corpses. At the top of each needle, he attached a cork. Once the needle hit bone, the cork rested at the skin’s surface. He then pulled the needles out, measured them and made drawings based on the measurements. That way he managed to compose a depth map, which would aid anthropologists of succeeding generations in making portraits from skulls. (Modern researches now use ultrasound, not corpses, for tissue-depth studies.)
Another sculpture was made by a police anatomist in 1916 when a skeleton was recovered in Brooklyn. He placed the skull on some rolled newspaper, put some fake eyes into the sockets, and covered the bones with flesh-colored plastic. A sculptor added sufficient details for the accurate identification of a missing woman.
It was in Russia, however, where the technique of forensic sculpture was more fully developed. Mikhail Gerasimov headed the department of archaeology at a museum and he experimented with the skulls in his care. By 1935, he had become fairly adept at taking a skull and reforming it into a face that people recognized. Four years later, he helped to solve a murder. In 1950, the USSR established the Laboratory for Plastic Reconstruction, and for years they were the renowned experts in the field.
Perhaps the most famous sculpture was the one that American sculptor Frank Bender did of the missing John List. In 1971 in New Jersey, List had murdered his wife, three children, and aged mother, and then fled. Detectives on the case failed again and again to find productive leads. They did some photographic enhancements to try to replicate a likeness of how List might have aged, but it was the sculpture that Bender did that finally turned the tide. For a television show, America’s Most Wanted, he created a three-dimensional face based on a number of factors that helped him to imagine what List would look like in 1989—almost two decades after the murders. When this was shown on TV, a former neighbor of “Bob Clark” in Colorado called in what she knew. Through fingerprints, Clark was identified as List, and he was charged and convicted.
Briefly, the technique involves first making a cast of the skull (or sometimes using the skull itself). Where there’s no skull, the artist must rely on computer-enhanced photos to replicate a skull clay bust. Using the skull or replica, small holes are made for thin wooden or vinyl pegs to be inserted for measuring the skin depth. Then modeling clay fills in the muscles and features around the nose, mouth, cheeks, and eyes, and a thin layer of plastic or clay goes over the skull. Facial features are molded to capture the person’s basic look, and a wig and artificial eyes are added, along with make-up similar to what an embalmer might use for cosmetic enhancement.
Another technique is to set the skull on a turntable. As it turns, information is fed into a computer via a laser beam and assembled into a likeness, based on information from other faces with similar measurements and racial origins.
One place that does this work is the FACES lab at Louisiana State University, run by the Bone Lady. Let’s see how she handled one of her cases.
Alice Penny Taylor died at the age of 19, and the year was 1859. She was buried in the only above-ground vault in the cemetery, not far from Zachary, Louisiana. According to recent adolescent lore, she’d been a witch, and rumors had spread that she roamed during the night hours as a spirit. Sitting on her grave was a test of courage, but in 1990, something more extreme began to occur.
One night, someone opened the vault. The following morning, the cemetery crew found her remains lying out in the open. It seemed impossible, but the marauder had shoved aside the heavy marble slab that covered the grave and opened her metal coffin. The crew re-interred her and replaced the cover, but the grave was soon violated a second and third time. At that point, the cemetery board called in a forensic anthropologist, Mary H. Manhein. Carefully, she picked up the remains and took them to her laboratory. This was now a person whose past she cared about.
Manhein decided to treat Alice as she would a modern forensic case. She and her assistants profiled her probable weight and height according to her delicate anatomy. There were no signs of physical trauma, but her cropped hair bespoke an illness, so they looked into archival data to find out more, and then decided to create a sculpture of her face.
From her skull, they made a mold to cast a plaster likeness. To fill it out, they attached tissue markers—they look like pencil erasers—for uniform skin and musculature depth. Then they sculpted a face, added a brown wig, and from that took photos. While Alice’s bones went back into her crypt, which was covered under protective cement, her likeness remained available for gathering more information.
This story comes from The Bone Lady, Manhein’s book on some of the many cases she has investigated. The title is based on the nickname given to her by the law enforcement agencies with which she works. She teaches at Louisiana State University and directs their Forensic Anthropology and Computer Enhancement Services Laboratory (F.A.C.E.S.). She’s also the deputy coroner of East Baton Rouge Parish in Louisiana. Over the past twenty years, she’s worked on upwards of 600 medico-legal investigations.
In college, she opted to combine physical anthropology with archaeology for applied anthropology, which eventually involved her in forensics. “I like solving puzzles,” she says. “We’re part of the puzzle. We put the bones back together again and see if they’ve been traumatized. Our work adds a new dimension to the analysis process.”
Having for years been the only forensic anthropologist in the Baton Rouge area of Louisiana, she gets a lot of calls from law enforcement officers. She might get invited to examine aged skeletal remains or to help with a recent ambiguous trauma. “We get called in at all stages.”
When a case comes in to the staff in her lab, the first step is to describe its condition on arrival. Then the remains get photographed and X-rayed. After that, the staff removes any putrefying soft tissue from the bones. If a skeleton is disarticulated (not connected), they reassemble it, bone by bone. They also take careful note and make impressions of any dental work and tooth formations to send to dentists or odontologists. That helps with identification. (Even when they think they know who it is, they must have proof.) They then look for evidence of trauma to the bone. All of this is carefully documented for potential use in court.
“If there’s a lot of putrefactive tissue on a skull or on a long bone that might obscure what happened to that person,” Manhein explains, “then we remove the tissue, examine the remains, and put them back together again.”
To clean up bones, they cut the tissue away with scalpels, taking care to avoid scraping the bone. “Then we heat the bones with detergent. To avoid damage, you have to be careful and know when to stop.”
The F.A.C.E.S. lab at LSU is quite unique. It’s been in development since 1980, with special computer features added a decade later. Staffed primarily by female professionals, they offer a variety of services. “We do the traditional forensic anthropology,” Manhein points out, “where we set up a profile—that means age, sex, height, time since death, and what happened. We may also help to get the person identified with dental records. In addition to that, we’ve added the computer enhancement component, where we do age progression from photos. My assistant was trained at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, yet we take it beyond what they do. We also do the computer enhancement on missing felons and missing adults. And we can clear up videotapes of robberies of convenience stores.”
They work with agencies from the international level to local, accepting cases from all over the country and trying to get as much exposure as they can.
“We’ve got one that we feel could be identified,” Manhein says. “This is an FBI case. Picture this: Her remains were found wrapped up in a fishing net, taped down. She was shot in the chest and anchored down with a forty-pound, homemade, concrete anchor. She was found in the early part of February 1999, 15 miles off the southernmost coast of Louisiana, out in the Gulf of Mexico. When we received her, we found the bullet and we were able to give a good description. She was white, 45-55, short brown hair, dead a week or so, had many crowns and fillings in her teeth, and was wearing a butterfly necklace. After more examination, we found that the tibia and fibula in her lower left leg had been broken sometime during her life and healed. She also had a problem in her right knee, so she might have been favoring it because of that break, which means she may have walked with a limp. We had an incredibly detailed profile. We even did a facial reconstruction, and put it into the newspaper and on our website. The FBI did a major publicity campaign and we thought we’d get a quick resolution, but she remains unidentified.”
Manhein doesn’t like open cases. The more help she can get from someone stepping forward with a lead, the better. She even lists some of her cases in her book, in the fashion of an Unsolved Mysteries episode. Her passion is to solve these cases and bring closure to families.
Just as Manhein combines anthropology and art, other scientists combine the identification of remains with bugs. Let’s go down on the Body Farm and then talk to an entomologist.
A forensic entomologist specializes in the developmental stages and behavior of different types of insects found on a cadaver at a crime scene. They provide indicators about the time that has passed since the person’s death (PMI), although this is not an exact science. They also indicate something about the climate and locale in which the death may have occurred.
A prominent physical anthropologist who developed expertise in entomology is Dr. William K. Bass III, who runs the Anthropological Research Facility at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. This two-and-a-half-acre field is dedicated to the study of decomposing human remains, and the presence of more than a dozen bodies at any given time exhibits their ongoing projects. The facility—dubbed the Body Farm by the press— has made important contributions to estimating the PMI in suspicious deaths.
Bass, an expert on skeletal identification, pioneered this unusual research over thirty years ago when he discovered that the field’s state of the art was “mostly anecdotal.” Moving to Tennessee in 1971, he got involved in cases where corpses were infested with insects. “Half of my first ten cases were maggot-covered bodies,” he recalls. “I didn’t know much about that, so I looked through the literature on the subject, and there wasn’t much there.”
He soon acquired a field and the unclaimed cadavers of several homeless men. As they lay exposed, they provided information about what happens to bodies under various conditions. Insects came in and became the subject of intensive study.
“Before our work, no one had ever established a time line,” Bass points out. “There are many factors that can affect how a body decomposes, but we found that the major two are climate and insects. When a person dies, the body begins to decay immediately, and the enzymes in the digestive system begin to eat the tissue. You putrefy, and this gives off a smell.” That attracts the bugs. Measuring and recording this information gave the facility its raison d’être.
As law enforcement realized the value of this information, increasingly more entomologists got involved. M. Lee Goff, professor of entomology at the University of Hawaii at Manoa and author of A Fly for the Prosecution, is a consultant to the Honolulu medical examiner. His book spells out the many contributions that an entomologist can make in a death investigation.
“Most frequently the forensic entomologist is asked to estimate the postmortem interval based on insect activity,” Goff points out. “This is actually an estimate of the period of insect activity, not the actual postmortem interval. The two are often quite close, as the insects arrive and begin their activity shortly following death. In some instances, there may be factors that serve to delay the onset of insect activity, and these must be considered.”
Other contributions include:
- Determining if the body has been moved following death
- Assessing wounds in terms of before, during, or after the death took place
- Individualizing a crime scene
- Serving as alternate specimens for toxicological analysis
- Providing DNA materials from the gut contents of parasitic insects
- Documenting periods of abuse and/or neglect in children or the elderly
- Supporting or contradicting an alibi
Goff’s first experience at a crime scene was in 1984 with the discovery of the body of a female in Hawaii’s Hau Tree Park area, located in Ewa Beach. “I had previously participated in a number of cases at the morgue, but this was the first time someone got me out of bed to go to a scene.” Since then, he’s been increasingly more involved.
In the case of one victim who appeared to have been dead for at least two weeks, the insects had done quite a job. Goff and his assistant collected the specimens and took them back to his lab. They found three species of maggots in different stages of development, which they measured and preserved. They also put some into a rearing chamber to complete their development into adults—thereby differentiating them more definitively. Collecting evidence of one more fly species and two types of beetle, Goff put all of this information into a computer to see if a program that he’d developed would provide a PMI.
The analysis disappointed him: Either no such body existed or there were two different bodies. “In trying to analyze what had gone wrong,” he says, “I had to reevaluate the data I had provided to the computer. That led to the discovery of the role that the positioning of the body played in altering the insect activity—particularly the Sarcophagidae larvae.” In other words, while it is generally the case that two species would not be on a corpse in the specific stages in which they were found on this one, there was something unique about the crime scene. Goff returned and saw that the victim had been partially submerged, which meant that the flies that might otherwise have left as tissues lost moisture had remained. That was a lesson about the limitations of databases: Any given case may have distinct characteristics that throw the data off.
As time passes, different groups of insects come and go in the process of assisting corpse decomposition. As each feeds on the body, it changes the body for the next group, which is attracted to those particular changes.
Entomologists agree that there are four main types of direct relationships:
- The necrophagous species (flies and beetles) that feed directly on the corpse, and their stages of development over about two weeks helps to indicate how long the person has been dead.
- Predators and parasites of the flies and beetles (other types of beetles that prey on eggs and maggots). One type of blow fly can feed on either body tissue or maggots. Wasps are also parasitic on the maggots, and since they tend to specialize, it’s easy to tell what kinds of flies had been on the body.
- Wasps, ants, and beetles that feed on both the body and the maggots. (Wasps that capture too many flies can actually delay decomposition).
- Spiders that use the body as a habitat to prey on other insects.
“The relationships of the insects to the body, in terms of how they make a living,” Goff explains, “are determined by the biology of the insect. Parasites remain parasites, although in some cases the tissue-eaters have been known to switch to predation as the body is consumed. Yet habitat and climatic factors can alter their periods of activity on the body. If the particular insect feeds on dried tissues, it may appear earlier in a hot, arid habitat and possibly not appear at all in a moist habitat. These changes may affect the pattern of succession, but the roles of the individual insects are set by their evolution.”
The job of the forensic entomologist is to interpret these various relationships in order to offer information to law enforcement officers that will assist in leads. “At present,” says Goff, “entomology is relatively well accepted by crime scene investigators. When I first began, we were regarded as having limited value. Over the years, with educational outreach and careful work, we have become a recognized discipline.”
For research—since there’s only one Body Farm at this time—he relies on pigs. “I have selected sites for my studies based on the records of localities in which bodies have been encountered. For each study, I use three pigs. One is placed directly on the ground, or on whatever substrate I’m investigating. This pig is left undisturbed for the duration of the study. A second pig is placed onto a welded wire mesh weight platform. This pig is used to determine the rate of biomass removal by weight and will be weighed each time the site is visited. It’s also equipped with thermocouple probes inserted into the mouth, abdomen and anus to determine changes in internal temperatures related to decomposition. The third pig is also put on a welded wire mesh platform placed directly on the substrate. This pig serves for sampling of insects and other arthropods. Equipment for recording climatic data is placed at each site, including rain gauge and hygrothermograph.”
They then record all factors and add their results into an expanding database.
What Goff finds satisfying about this work is its immediate and practical application. “In many of my academic research projects, I never see any application of the results. Here I see an actual situation and a resolution. I must admit to a certain level of excitement in participating—I’m only human—but I never allow this to interfere with my objectivity.”
In 1984, he and several other forensic entomologists began meeting informally, and eventually they decided to form a certifying board. “We modeled ourselves after similar boards in anthropology, odontology and pathology. It was finally incorporated in the State of Nevada in 1996 as the American Board of Forensic Entomology.”
In the future, Goff believes that advances in technology will make a significant contribution to the discipline. “For example,” he says, “the use of DNA technology to identify immature specimens and extract material from gut contents to allow for individualization of both suspects and victims. Also, we need to focus on standardizing techniques for determining basic life cycles. At present, the data are quite varied, leaving gaps when cases come to trial. Yet even within the relatively new area of drug detection, there have been improvements that allow for more precise analyses. I think it’s going to get even more exciting in the relatively near future.”
Forensic anthropologists appear to have a considerable range of skills for assisting in death investigations. From art to bugs to bones, they make their mark.
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