All That Remains Read online

  About the Book

  We shy away from death. We ignore it and avoid speaking of it, as if talking about it will somehow encourage it. We tend to personify death as the grim reaper, a sinister, hooded harbinger of pain. But death can be peaceful and merciful too. And, like it or not, death is inevitable; we would do well to try to understand it better.

  Sue Black confronts death every day. As a professor of anatomy and forensic anthropology, she focuses on mortal remains in her lab, at burial sites, at scenes of violence, murder and criminal dismemberment, and when investigating mass fatalities due to war, accident or natural disaster. In All That Remains she reveals the many faces of death she has come to know, using key cases to explore how forensic science has developed, and what her work has taught her.

  Do we expect a book about death to be sad? Macabre? Sue’s book is neither. There is tragedy, but there is also humour in stories as gripping as the best crime novel. While there is much about death that must remain unknown to us, as an expert witness from the final frontier Sue Black is the wisest, most reassuring, most compelling of guides.

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Introduction

  1: Silent teachers

  2: Our cells and ourselves

  3: Death in the family

  4: Death up close and personal

  5: Ashes to ashes

  6: Dem bones

  7: Not forgotten

  8: Invenerunt corpus – body found!

  9: The body mutilated

  10: Kosovo

  11: When disaster strikes

  12: Fate, fear and phobias

  13: An ideal solution

  Epilogue

  The man from Balmore

  Acknowledgements

  Picture Credits

  Index

  About the Author

  Copyright

  all

  that

  remains

  a life in death

  Sue

  Black

  For Tom, for ever my love and my life.

  And for Beth, Grace and Anna – each is my favourite daughter.

  Thank you all for making every moment of my life worthwhile.

  Introduction

  ‘Death is not the greatest loss in life.

  The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live’

  Norman Cousins

  political journalist (1915–1990)

  Me at about two years of age.

  DEATH AND THE hyped-up circus that surrounds her are perhaps more laden with clichés than almost any other aspect of human existence. She is personified as sinister, as a harbinger of pain and unhappiness; a predator who haunts and hunts from the shadows, a dangerous thief in the night. We give her ominous and cruel nicknames – the Grim Reaper, the Great Leveller, the Dark Angel, the Pale Rider – and portray her as a gaunt skeleton in a dark, hooded cloak wielding a deadly scythe, destined to separate our soul from our body with one lethal swipe. Sometimes she is a black, feathered spectre that hovers menacingly over us, her cowering victims. And, despite being feminine in many languages where nouns have genders (including Latin, French, Spanish, Italian, Polish, Lithuanian and Norse), she is often none the less depicted as a man.

  It is easier to treat death unkindly because in the modern world she has become a hostile stranger. For all the progress humanity has made, we are little closer to deciphering the complex bonds between life and death than we were hundreds of years ago. Indeed, in some respects, we are perhaps further away than ever before from understanding her. We seem to have forgotten who death is, what her purpose is, and, where our ancestors perhaps considered her a friend, we choose to treat her as an unwelcome and devilish adversary to be avoided or bested for as long as possible.

  Our default position is either to vilify or to deify death, sometimes vacillating between the two. Either way, we prefer not to mention her if we can help it in case it encourages her to come too close. Life is light, good and happy; death is dark, bad and sad. Good and evil, reward and punishment, heaven and hell, black and white – our Linnaean tendencies lead us to neatly categorise life and death as opposites, giving us the comforting illusion of an unambiguous sense of right and wrong that perhaps unfairly banishes death to the dark side.

  As a result we have come to dread her presence as if she were somehow infectious, afraid that if we attract her attention then she might come for us before we are remotely ready to stop living. We may conceal our fear by putting on a show of bravado or poking fun at her in the hope of anaesthetising ourselves to her sting. We know, though, that we will not be laughing when we reach the top of her list and she does finally call out our name. So we learn at a very early age to be hypocritical about her, ridiculing her with one turn of the face and then becoming deeply reverential with another. We learn a new language to try to blunt her sharp edges and dull the pain. We talk about ‘losing’ someone, whisper of their ‘passing’ and, in sombre respectful tones, we commiserate with others when a loved one has ‘gone’.

  I didn’t ‘lose’ my father – I know exactly where he is. He is buried at the top of Tomnahurich Cemetery in Inverness, in a lovely wooden box provided by Bill Fraser, the family funeral director, of which he might have approved, although he would probably have thought it too expensive. We put him in a hole in the ground on top of the disintegrating coffins of his mother and father, neither of which will now hold more than their bones and the few teeth they still had when they died. He has not passed, he is not gone, he is not lost: he is dead. Indeed, he better not have gone anywhere – that would be most troublesome and inconsiderate of him. His life is extinct, and none of the euphemistic rhetoric in the world will ever bring it, or him, back.

  As the product of a strict, no-nonsense, Scottish Presbyterian family where a spade was called a shovel and empathy and sentimentality were often viewed as weaknesses, I like to think my upbringing has made me pragmatic and thick-skinned, a coper and a realist. When it comes to matters of life and death I harbour no misconceptions and in discussing them I try to be honest and truthful, but that does not mean I don’t care, and it doesn’t make me immune to pain and grief or unsympathetic to that of others. What I do not have is a maudlin sentimentality about death and the dead. As Fiona, our inspirational chaplain at Dundee University, puts it so eloquently, there is no comfort to be had from soft words spoken at a safe distance.

  With all our twenty-first-century sophistication, why do we still opt to take cover behind familiar, safe walls of conformity and denial, rather than opening up to the idea that maybe death is not the demon we fear? She does not need to be lurid, brutal or rude. She can be silent, peaceful and merciful. Perhaps the answer is that we don’t trust her because we don’t choose to get to know her, to take the trouble in the course of our lives to try to understand her. If we did, we might learn to accept her as an integral and fundamentally necessary part of our life’s process.

  We view birth as the beginning of life and death as its natural end. But what if death is just the beginning of a different phase of existence? This, of course, is the premise of most religions, which teach that we should not fear death as it is merely the gateway to a better life beyond. Such beliefs have brought solace to many through the ages, and perhaps the vacuum left by the increasing secularisation of our society has contributed to the resurgence of an ancient, instinctive but unsubstantiated aversion to death and all its trappings.

  Whatever we believe, life and death are unquestionably inextricably bound parts of the same continuum. One does not, and cannot, exist without the other and, no matter how much modern medicine strives to intervene, death will ultimately prevail. Since
there is no way we can ultimately prevent it, perhaps our time would be better spent focusing on improving and savouring the period between our birth and our death: our life.

  Herein lies one of the fundamental differences between forensic pathology and forensic anthropology. Forensic pathology seeks evidence of a cause and manner of death – the end of the journey – whereas forensic anthropology reconstructs the life led, the journey itself, across the full span of its duration. Our job is to reunite the identity constructed during life with what remains of the corporeal form in death. So forensic pathology and anthropology are partners in death and, of course, in crime.

  In the UK, anthropologists, unlike pathologists, are scientists rather than doctors and are therefore unlikely to be medically qualified to certify a death or the cause of death. In these days of ever-expanding scientific knowledge, pathologists cannot be expected to be experts in everything, and the anthropologist has an important role to play in the investigation of serious crimes involving a death. Forensic anthropologists assist in unravelling the clues associated with the identity of the victim and may aid the pathologist to reach his or her final decisions about the manner and cause of death. Each discipline brings its own complementary and specific skills to the mortuary table.

  On one such mortuary table, for example, a pathologist and I were faced with human remains in an advanced stage of decomposition. The skull was shattered into over forty jumbled fragments. As the medically qualified practitioner, her remit was to determine the cause of death and she was pretty sure it was going to be gunshot injury. But she needed to be certain. Surveying with dismay the multitude of fragments of white bone on the grey metal tabletop, she said, ‘I can’t identify all the pieces, let alone try to stick them together. That’s your job.’

  The forensic anthropologist’s role is first to help establish who the person may have been in life. Were they male or female? Tall or short? Old or young? Black or white? Does the skeleton show evidence of any injuries or disease that might be linked to medical or dental records? Can we extract information from bones, hair and nails about their composition which might tell us where the person was living and the type of food they ate? And in this case, could we undertake a three-dimensional human jigsaw puzzle to allow us to reveal not only the cause of death, which was indeed gunshot injury to the skull, but also the manner of death? By gathering this information and completing the jigsaw we were able to establish the identity of the young man and to corroborate eyewitness testimony by confirming a ballistic entry wound to the back of the head and its exit from the forehead above and between his eyes. This was a close-range execution, in which the victim had been kneeling when the firearm was placed directly against the skin at the back of his head. He was just fifteen and his crime was his religion.

  Another illustration of the symbiotic relationship between anthropologist and pathologist concerned an unfortunate young man who was beaten to death after confronting a group of youths intent on vandalising a car in the street outside his house. His body had been kicked and punched, he had suffered fatal impact trauma to his head and he exhibited multiple skull fractures. In this case we knew the identity of the victim, and the pathologist was able to determine the cause of death as blunt-force trauma, resulting in massive internal haemorrhage. But she also wanted to report on how his death was brought about and, in particular, on the type of implement most likely to have been used to kill him. We were able to identify every fragment of the skull and to reconstruct it, enabling the pathologist to confirm that there had been one primary blow to the head, made by a hammer, or something of similar shape, which had caused a focal depressed fracture and multiple radiating fractures leading to the fatal intracranial bleeding.

  For some, the distance between the beginning and the end of life will be lengthy, perhaps over a century, whereas for others, like these murder victims, the two events will occur much closer together. Sometimes they may be separated only by a fleeting but precious few seconds. From the point of view of the forensic anthropologist, a long life is good news, as the longer it has been, the more scars of experience will be written and stored within the body, and the clearer their imprint on our mortal remains will be. For us, unlocking this information is almost like reading it in a book, or downloading it from a USB stick.

  In the eyes of most people, the worst outcome of this earthly adventure is a life cut short. But who are we to judge what is short? What is not in doubt is that the longer we survive beyond birth, the higher the probability will be that our lives will end sooner rather than later: we are more likely, in most cases, to be closer to death at ninety than we are at twenty. And logic tells us that we will never again be further away from a personal acquaintance with death than we are right at this moment.

  So why are we surprised when people die? Over 55 million of us around the world do it every year – two a second – and it is the one event of our lives that we know with absolute certainty is going to happen to every single one of us. This by no means diminishes our sadness and grief when it happens to someone close to us, of course, but its inevitability demands an approach that is both practical and realistic. Since we can’t influence the creation of our lives, and their end is unavoidable, perhaps we should be focusing on what we can regulate: our expectations of the distance between them. Perhaps it is this we should be trying to manage more effectively by measuring, acknowledging and celebrating its value rather than its duration.

  In the past, when death was less easy to postpone, we may have been better at this. In Victorian times, for example, when infant mortality was high, nobody was surprised if a child did not reach its first birthday. Indeed, it was not unusual for several children in a family to be given the same name to ensure that it survived, even if the child did not. In the twenty-first century, infant death is more shocking, but to be stunned when someone dies at the age of ninety-nine defies all logic.

  Society’s expectations are the battleground of every medical expert who aims to force death into a retreat. The best they can hope to do is to buy more time and expand the distance between our two mortal events. That they will ultimately always lose the fight should not stop them from trying, and it does not – lives are prolonged every day in hospitals and clinics around the world. Realistically, though, some of these medical achievements may amount to no more than a stay of execution. Death is coming, and if it wasn’t today, it might be tomorrow.

  Over the centuries, society has catalogued and measured life expectancy, by which we mean the age at which we are statistically most likely to die – or, to look at it more positively, the length of time we are likely to spend living. Life tables are interesting and useful tools but they are dangerous, too, in that they create an expectation that will not be reached by some and will be exceeded by others. We have no way of knowing whether we are the average Joe who will conform to the norm or whether we will be an outlier at one end or the other of life’s bell curve.

  And when we find ourselves to one side or other of the curve, we take it personally. We are proud of ourselves when we exceed our life expectancy because it makes us feel that we have somehow beaten the odds. When we don’t reach the age anticipated for us, those we leave behind may feel that they have been robbed of the life of someone dear to them and experience anger, bitterness or frustration. But of course that is simply the nature of the life curve: the norm is just the norm, and most of us will fall into the variations around it. It is unfair to blame death and accuse her of cruelty and larceny when she has always been honest in demonstrating that our life spans can be anywhere within the range of human possibilities.

  The longest-living person in the world whose age could be verified was Frenchwoman Jeanne Calment, who was 122 years and 164 days of age when she died in 1997. In 1930, the year of my mother’s birth, female life expectancy was sixty-three, so on her death at seventy-seven she exceeded the norm by fourteen years. My grandmother fared even better: when she was born, in 1898, her life expectancy woul
d have been only fifty-two. She lived to be seventy-eight, outstripping that by twenty-six years, which may in part be a reflection of the huge number of medical advances during her lifetime – although her cigarettes didn’t help her in the end. The prediction for me, when I arrived in 1961, was a life that might be seventy-four years long. That would leave me now with just seventeen to go. My goodness me, how did that happen so quickly? However, based on my current age and lifestyle, I can now realistically expect to reach eighty-five, and I may have another twenty-nine years or more to look forward to. Phew.

  So, during the course of my life, I have gained the prospect of an additional eleven years. Isn’t that great? Not really. You see, I didn’t get those extra years when I was twenty, or even forty. If I am given them, it will be when I am seventy-four. Would that we could be granted more time in our prime, where youth continues to be wasted on the young.

  The calculations of life expectancy given at birth are slowly becoming more accurate and we know that among the next two generations, those of my children and grandchildren, there will be more centenarians than have ever before existed in human history. Yet the maximum age to which our species is capable of living is not increasing. What is changing dramatically is the average age at which we die, and therefore we are seeing an increase in the number of individuals falling into the far right regions of the bell curve. In other words, we are changing the shape of human demography. The rapidly expanding health and social issues created by the growth of an ageing population are starting to give us a glimpse of the resulting impact on society.

  While longer lives are for the most part to be celebrated, I do wonder at times if, in striving to stay alive for as long as possible at all costs, all we are in fact doing is prolonging our dying. While life expectancy may be variable, death expectancy remains unchanged. Should we ever actually conquer death, the human race and the planet would be in real trouble.