Over the years, I've developed a number of little tricks to cope with my maggot friends. I've learned to work quickly and to keep the autopsy room as cold as possible. That at least renders the maggots a little sluggish, giving us humans a slight but crucial advantage. Even more than the cold, maggots hate bright light, so whenever possible, I put a large black trash bag over a central portion of the body. After a while the maggots migrate underneath. Slowly I slip the bag down to the other end of the gurney, with many maggots following desperately along, leaving me to work in relative peace. It's nice to feel smarter than a maggot.
“Well, Emily, you're certainly starting off with a bang,” John commented as we began today's autopsy. He looked like your stereotypical college professor-kind of handsome in a studious sort of way, tall and a bit stooped, with his glasses perpetually dangling from a cord around his neck. He always wore a soft brown Mr. Rogers sweater to ward off the chill in the morgue, and he puffed continually on a large wooden pipe to help kill the smell.
“I know,” I said as he cut into the body and flipped a few maggots of his own onto the floor. “A double murder. Not bad for three days on the job.”
“Don't forget to find some tenants for your ‘maggot motel,'” he said with a grin. I knew he understood the science behind it, but I defy anyone to say “maggot motel” with a straight face. Since many maggot species look similar, the entomologist needs to see the adult flies, and so it was my lucky job to collect another dozen larvae from the body and raise them to adulthood. Although all of the pathologists know how to do this, they're even more squeamish than I am when it comes to maggots, so if I'm around, my colleagues are more than willing to pass this duty on to me whether or not it's a skeletal case. I use a simple milk carton with some dirt on the bottom and a small chunk of chicken liver wrapped loosely in aluminum foil. The maggots gorge themselves on the liver, then bury themselves in the dirt to pupate. One of the weirdest parts of my job is my nightly bed-check at the maggot motel, making sure my little charges are alive and well and have plenty to eat.
“I'll never get used to those things,” I said now. “Hey, John, do me a favor, will you? Take a few more puffs of your pipe.” The secondhand smoke covered the smell for me, too.
After John and I had finished the autopsy, I cleaned the skulls and skull fragments, submerging them into warm soapy water and scrubbing them clean with a toothbrush, just as I'd done at Waco. I left them to dry overnight and returned the next day to begin the laborious process of gluing the skulls back together.
In this case, all my questions centered on the skulls, but later I'd run into cases where I had to clean and examine every single bone in a body, searching for skeletal trauma or maybe evidence of an old injury to help me make an ID. This doesn't happen very often, maybe one case in five, but when it does, it's a real chore-messy, time-consuming, and smelly. It's something like deboning a rotten chicken though, of course, on a much larger scale. I use x-rays and photographs to help me figure out some way of working the bones free from the decomposing flesh without damaging them. After all, some of the bones might hold tiny cut marks or other evidence of a murderer's actions, and I don't want to leave my own trace evidence alongside of his.
If there's not too much flesh, I can usually pull the bones out of the soft tissue with a very tiny tweak, like twisting a stem off an apple. If I meet even the slightest resistance, though, I'll dissect the bones away with a small pair of blunt-tip, curve-bladed scissors. Again, my main concern is not to nick or cut any of the cartilage or bone. As I remove each bone from its fleshy casing, I place it on another gurney, aligning my collection in anatomical order. That way, I can do a skeletal inventory while I work, noting what's missing and checking each bone as I lay it into place-my first chance to look for breaks, bruises, or other anomalies that might offer us clues.
If the bones are still too fleshy to reveal their secrets, I'll take them to the corner of my lab that my colleagues jokingly call “Miss Em's kitchen.” There I boil the bones gently, cooking off any remaining flesh in a process we call “thermal maceration.”
Like any good cook, I have my system. I fill two Crock-Pots and a large covered roasting pan with water and some mild dish-washing detergent, which helps cut the grease. I like to have my pots full and ready to go before I even start recovering the bones, so I can drop everything into the water and turn on all the devices at the same time. That way, I know exactly how long each bone has cooked, and I can be certain nothing cooks too long. I make sure that the water heats up gradually, too, so that each bone can adjust to the heat.
I'm happy to report that thermal maceration will destroy even the most tenacious of maggots, including those which hide themselves deep within a bone's nerve and artery channels. If I'm in a particularly sadistic mood, I'll watch as the water heats up and the maggots swarm frantically out of their hiding places. They rise to the top of the steaming liquid, writhing momentarily on the greasy film that forms on the surface before they succumb to the heat. Occasionally some of the more athletic maggots even manage to scale the Crock-Pot's ceramic liner-only to sizzle and pop when they slide down the other side and land on the cooker's hot metal frame.
I hadn't had to boil any bones, but it had taken me several hours to reconstruct the skulls, working by myself and using simple household glue out of a tube. As I stood by my shiny morgue table, watching them dry-the large skull for the woman, the little one for the child-I felt a bitter satisfaction. My colleagues and I had collected a huge amount of evidence that might someday be used to convict a killer. Of course, I'm a scientist, and my focus is on the evidence, not the criminal or the crime. And even as I write this, no suspects for this killing have been arrested. Still, I had my own reward: the contentment of having done the best I could, of making the evidence reveal its secrets so that justice-whatever it was-could be done. I can't reveal any more about this open case, but suffice it to say that there is no statute of limitations on murder, and tomorrow always brings another day and another chance.
Tomorrow also seems always to bring another case. In my first six months on the job, I had to deal with the exhumation of an allegedly battered child who had been buried in 1972; a partially skeletonized victim tied to a tree and shot in the head; a corpse hidden in a refrigerator for a year; a decomposed body found in the Cumberland River; one case of skeletal remains slashed by a farm implement; another battered and left along the side of the road; and a third left scattered in the woods. Before the end of 1994, I also had to deal with eight separate cases in which fire had reduced the bodies to bone. Seven of these were probably tragic accidents, but one was definitely a homicide disguised by fire. Three mountain men blown to bits by land mines in a booby-trapped marijuana patch rounded out the census for that first half year.
With this kind of caseload, it didn't take me long to understand why Kentucky needed a full-time forensic anthropologist. Kentucky has a history of violent crime and “mountain justice” dating back even before the notorious feuds of the Hatfields and the McCoys. This culture of lawlessness has only gotten worse with the rise of illegal drug use and marijuana's dubious honor as the one of the Commonwealth's most lucrative cash crops. Add to that the region's large areas with limited access-perfect for hiding dead bodies-and a warm climate that needs only days to reduce a body to bones, and you have the ideal conditions to produce lots and lots of skeletal remains.