For JANUARY 2001 issue

SCIENCE IN CRIME DETECTION

WHEN BONES GIVE AWAY THE CRIMINAL

-Dr. Anil Aggrawal

The forensic pathologist encounters dead bodies in his professional life almost daily, but there are occasions when he has to contend with just bones. We have tackled the problem of bones in our previous issues. To go through these cases, you can see Crime and Detective February 1994 issue in which our story “What do the bones tell us?“ appeared. This was number 11 in our series of stories. Then in April 1999, we gave a story “When bones speak“. This was number 71 in the series.

We are now fast approaching the 100th story in our series, and I intend a special story for that occasion. The current story is our 92nd story, and I have decided to give you yet another good bone story this time.

Some time back the Police found some bones in a metal garbage can buried behind a house. The lid was in place over the can when the remains were located. These bones were brought to a forensic pathologist for opinion and he had to opine whatever he could from the bones.

The bones are reproduced here for the benefit of the readers. These contained the bones of thigh, lower legs, skull and the hip bones. Now you might imagine that very little can be deduced from the bones, but that’s not true. You can say a lot of things from the bones, if you are trained in forensic osteology. This is a branch by which you can examine bones and can tell the police a lot of things.

Thigh bone is technically known as femur. The length of the Left femur was 476mm. There are special formulas by which one can calculate the height of the individual from the length of the femur. After applying the formulae, the height of the individual was found to be 5’4”. Hip bones showed certain special characteristics by which the pathologist could say that the bones belonged to a female. You might ask, how this could be done. Well, this is not very difficult if you are trained. Nature has made the hip bones of female slightly wider than those of males, for one special reason. The reason is that the female has to give birth to a baby and the birth of the baby is made easier by having wider bones. It is these wider bones which give the female her characteristic gait too. An osteologist can examine the bones and can say whether the bones belong to a male or a female. Actually any bone would have some differences between a male and a female, but the bones which show maximum differences between the two sexes are the hip bones and the skull, and fortunately both were available for analysis.

By now, two things had become clear. Number one that the police had a female body in their hands (well, not actually a body – only her bones), and number two that her height was about 5’4”. Now the next thing was to know whether this woman was an Asian woman, Black woman or a white woman. The skulls of all these women show certain characteristic differences. By examining these differences the osteologist could say that the skull belonged to a white woman.

Now it was very important to discover how she had been killed. This is not always easy if only the bones are available. But fortunately in this case the skull showed a very big gap. You can see this gap in one of the pictures. This is a kind of fracture known as a signature fracture. Signature fracture is a special term which is applied for certain special kinds of fractures in the skull. Certain weapons, such as hammer etc. leave their special characteristics such as shape and size on the skull. In a way, they leave their signatures over the skull, and by a proper examination of these fractures, the osteologist can often tell the police too much about the weapon. By examining this fracture, the osteologist could say that that it had been caused by a flat object whose dimensions were around 5”x2”. And the death had occurred because of the skull injury.

Now the police swung in action. They had enough information in their hands to start the investigation. When neighbors were contacted, initially they refused to tell anything to the police. But the police knew too much, and they threatened them with dire consequences, if they purposely hid information from the police. At this, certain neighbors complained about one individual (I will hold back his name, but for the purpose of this story, let his name be Sudhir) living in the house being abusive toward his wife, and when he filed a missing person’s report on his wife, the police obtained a search warrant for his home and yard. The wife was a Caucasian, 5’4” tall, and very heavy-set (about 250 lbs. according to her drivers license). Everything recovered is pictured here. No flesh was there on the bones.

When Sudhir was contacted, he expressed his innocence. His wife was not there, and he said that she had gone to her parents’ house. This was an obvious lie. The police began searching his house. A garbage can was found in his backyard, and a caustic substance was found in the bottom of the garbage can. It was thought by the forensic osteologist to have been poured over the upper body.

After this information, the forensic osteologist came into picture once again, and formulated the sequence of events. The body was stuffed into the can pelvis-first, with the feet apparently sticking out of the top of the can. The head and vertebrae were found on the pelvis fragments. The pelvic fragments recovered were protected from the caustic liquid by a dent in the can, which held them above the liquid in the bottom of the can. No clothing was recovered with these remains.

This means that Sudhir had first hit his wife with a flat object. A child’s cricket bat was recovered from his house whose measurements were exactly what the osteologist had predicted. Furthermore there were blood and hair sticking on the bat, which matched exactly with those of the lady who was killed. This was sufficient to prosecute the culprit. The culprit then stuffed the body of his wife in a garbage can in his backyard and filled it up with acid, so that the whole body was eaten away. By some coincidence the police recovered the bones from that garbage can. Had it not been for the skills of the forensic osteologist, this murder might have gone unnoticed.

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(Dr. Anil Aggrawal is a professor of Forensic Medicine at the Maulana Azad Medical College, New Delhi-110002. His E-mail is dr_anil@hotmail.com and his Website address is: http://members.tripod.com/~Prof_Anil_Aggrawal/index.html

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Note to the Editor: Please make all correspondence at S-299 Greater Kailash-1, New Delhi-110048. Phones (R): 6465460, 6291942, 6413101; (O) 3239271-4

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