The space we had to work in was a little larger but no higher than the shaft we had just crawled through, allowing just enough room for my five helpers to sit down with their backs against the wall. Here they sat, aiming their headlamps at the corpse, waiting for me to make the next move.

This was my chance to make up for that panic attack, so I crawled casually over to the corpse and started dictating into my tape recorder.

The headless body is prone and is lying on top of a pile of wood. The body appears to be mummified from prolonged exposure to an environment with constant temperature and low humidity. There is no evidence of insect or maggot activity, but there is evidence of carnivore scavenging. The flesh has been removed from the torso and arms, and small tooth marks are visible in the remaining soft tissues. The lower portion of the body is wrapped in a dark-colored sleeping bag, and several pieces of rope and electrical wire encircle the sleeping bag. The body appears to be covered in a dark, unidentified viscous liquid…

“What is this stuff?” I said, interrupting myself. I held my fingers up to my nose trying to get a whiff of the greasy liquid. “It smells like my old car.”

“It's gotta be either motor oil or kerosene,” said Charles as he lifted a plastic jug from somewhere behind the corpse. “There's four of these jugs back here, and they're all empty. No miner in his right mind would bring this stuff in here, so these fools must have planned to burn this body on top of what looks like a makeshift bonfire.”

“So it's flammable?” the rescue team leader jumped in, a hint of alarm in his normally easygoing voice. “All right, people, let's be extra careful. No camera flashes, and no scraping with these tools we brought. All we need is for a spark to reach this stuff, and we're all dead.”

Okay, but what's the good news, I found myself thinking. I had never wanted to leave a crime scene so badly in my life. I picked up the few stray finger bones that had fallen to the floor of the mine and tried to think how to get the body out of this tight spot without causing any further damage to it. But scared as I felt, I had a job to do. Someone had to take pictures of the body before I moved it-and without a flash.

I glanced over at the four men sitting against the wall, their arms and legs folded like a row of Buddha effigies, and got an idea. “I know you guys don't want to get too close to this body, but I need you to scoot over here and give Charles and me some light. If you all aim your headlamps at one section at a time, I think there will be enough light to take some photos.”

Praise the Lord, my idea worked, and soon we were ready to move the body. But now there was a new problem: The corpse had hardened and warped over time, so that parts of it were wedged between the pile of wood and the roof of the mine. With little room to maneuver in the confined space, I lay on my back and pushed up against the mummified torso from below, so that Charles could quickly slide out some of the heavy mine timber that had been supporting the victim's shoulders. Then I had to slide over and do the same thing to the lower legs, which were still wrapped in the sleeping bag. Somehow we managed to slide the body into the body bag that Charles had laid out on the floor of the mine.

Now Charles took over. “Okay, men. The doc here has done her part. Now we need you to help us get this fellow out of here.”

I took a secret pleasure in seeing that everyone else was as eager as I was to leave, springing into action before Charles had even finished speaking. Luckily, someone had thought to bring some rope, which they tied into two loops at the end of the body bag in order to drag it through the shaft. Since there wasn't enough room to stand up and carry it, each man took turns slowly dragging it behind him as we crawled out of the shaft. When we reached the place where we could stand up again, our pace quickened as four men each grabbed a corner of the bag and carried it the rest of the way.

I breathed a sigh of relief when we got outside, silently vowing that I would never go into another coal mine. If there was another body down there, the mine inspectors or the coroner could bring it out to me.

Getting the body out of the mine felt like a huge achievement, but we still had to establish a positive ID, even though the state police and the coroner were sure that this was Everett Hall. I felt pretty confident, though, especially since Charles had brought a half-inch-thick stack of x-rays over to my lab in Frankfort. With all that medical data, it seemed pretty certain that we could quickly confirm his identity.

At first everything went smoothly. The pathologist conducted an autopsy that revealed a match between our victim's remains and the description on Everett Hall's missing person report, including the presence of a partially amputated foot that had healed quite nicely. Then it was my turn. I wheeled the gurney into the radiology room. I was fairly certain that once I took my first x-ray of the victim's spine, I'd be able to match my work to the films in Hall's medical records. I went to stand behind the lead-lined protective barriers in our lab's x-ray suite-built to hospital specification-and took my first shot.

It didn't match.

Okay, maybe I'd just gotten the angle wrong. I took another look at the films in the medical records, readjusted the body, and tried again.

Again, it didn't match.

I kept taking shot after shot until, I had taken more than ten x-rays of the victim's spine. No matter how I tried, I couldn't get a match.

When you're looking at antemortem spinal x-rays, you always start with the most current ones, because vertebrae tend to change shape slightly over the years, under the pressures of stress and advancing age. As time goes by, small overgrowths of bone called “lipping” commonly occur around the edges of each back bone. In this case, the x-rays in Hall's medical file showed significant lipping and partial collapse of one vertebra, but our victim had neither. Sometimes a person gets surgery to correct such problems, but there was no evidence that Hall had done that.

Was it possible that we didn't have Hall after all? Then why had this body appeared in exactly the same spot, under the same bizarre conditions, that had been described by Mrs. Hall's boyfriend?

Maybe the hospital had mislabeled these last few x-rays and put them in the wrong jacket? But when I looked carefully at the many x-rays in the envelope, every single one had the same name and patient number, affixed at the time of each x-ray exam. For three days, I tried to come up with a logical explanation for the discrepancy, while the authorities back in Pikeville grew increasingly impatient for the positive ID that would enable them to arrest their suspects and charge them with the murder of Everett Hall. In frustration, I went to Dr. Tracey Corey, one of the pathologists in our Louisville office, who thought a bit and then asked me whether Hall had been on Medicaid. When I told her that he was, she suggested that I compare all the x-rays in his file to one another.

Sure enough, they didn't match. It seemed that Hall's file contained the x-rays of three separate people-all listed under the same name and patient identification number. Apparently, Hall had been passing around his Medicaid card to others who also reaped the benefits of free medical care at taxpayers' expense. I had to go back through the entire file, all the way to 1986, to find some x-rays that actually matched our victim's spine.

I learned a valuable lesson from Hall's case, because I have since encountered three similar cases of medical fraud while trying to identify homicide victims from x-ray comparisons. I guess when you're trying to establish a positive ID, you can never be too careful.