Series : Equinox - Channel 4 UK Show title : Criminal Evidence First shown : 14th Dec 2000 Catalogue Number :

Criminal evidence follows the work of leading forensic anthropologist and detective novelist, Kathy Reichs, as she solves high-profile murder cases. Combining archaeology and anthropology with cutting-edge scientific techniques, Reichs pieces together the last days and hours of people who may have died many years earlier. She gives a guided tour of The Body Farm, where the very latest research is carried out on how bodies decompose in different circumstances. Programme summary Reich's evidence is the murder victims themselves: the unique characteristics of their physical remains indicate their age, sex and the time and manner of their death. She reopens the case of Dale Arnold, a wealthy businessman who had been found shot dead three years earlier. The coroner brought a verdict of suicide but the family suspect he was murdered. The body was exhumed and a second autopsy performed on the decomposed remains. Reichs worked with leading pathologist Dr Michael Baden to examine the gunshot wound to the victim's skull along with what was known about the circumstances of his death. They conclude that it was indeed suicide. In another case, Reichs is asked to identify some human bones dug up by a dog on a building site. The detectives need as detailed a description as possible so they can compare it with their missing persons' register. Reichs pinpoints the victim's age to within two or three years and her examination also reveals a bullet hole behind his ear. She explains the detailed work of the ballistics or firearms investigator, and gradually builds up a remarkably detailed picture of how the victim lived and died. Reichs visits the Anthropological Research Facility in Knoxville, Tennessee, usually referred to as The Body Farm. There, scientists have a unique opportunity to study how bodies decompose in different circumstances. She describes how forensic entomologists can judge the approximate time of death from the insects they find on the bodies: maggots are attracted to wounds; later on, ants come to eat the remaining soft tissue. Then, as the body fats degenerate, they leak out and kill nearby vegetation. Each of these factors gives an indication of when the person died. Over the past 30 years, some 300 corpses, bodies donated to science or left unclaimed, have been buried or allowed to lie above ground in a range of settings so the course of their decomposition can be observed. Some of the newest and most sophisticated techniques in forensic science have been developed during the investigation of genocide. Kathy Reichs is an expert human rights witness in the continuing investigation into Rwandan war crimes as well as in the exhumations of people butchered in Guatemala in the early 1980s. Criminal Evidence films a harrowing journey to a village in Guatemala, where 18 years earlier a massacre occurred at the height of the civil war: 23 villagers were massacred and placed in a makeshift grave, where they have remained ever since. Reichs hopes to identify the victims, reconstructing the last moments of their lives. Few, if any, of the killers will be brought to justice, but when the forensic work is complete, the villagers will at least have the comfort of giving their loved ones a proper burial. Reichs says that her experience is particularly relevant to investigating such terrible situations: 'One of the areas in which forensic anthropologists are very, very much involved is human rights work, particularly when you have mass graves, because … [you have] the archaeological technique to appropriately recover the remains and then the anthropological techniques to analyse them.' Transcript Kathy: A dog digs up a bone at a construction site. They turn out to be human and the police are called. Then the police call me. I'm Kathy Reichs, a forensic anthropologist. While the police chase down leads, I deal with the physical evidence offered by 'human remains', a sanitised phrase for decomposing corpses and skeletons. This bag of bones was once a human being. The clues I'm looking for could make them speak, telling me age, race, sex, time and manner of death. Narrator: Reichs belongs to a new breed of forensic scientists. She's an expert in studying bones, someone who knows how to read their secrets long after death. Her science is rooted in archaeology and anthropology. To put flesh on her cases, she calls on specialists in other areas of forensic science. But it's not just her investigative skills or her pearls and manicured nails that distinguish Reichs; she's also a successful crime novelist. Her fictional heroine Tempe Brennan, like Reichs, is a well-groomed forensic anthropologist and gives us a unique insight into the world of Kathy Reichs. Kathy (book excerpt): By 9am I was already in autopsy room number four. I often work here since many of my cases are less than perfectly preserved. But it's never fully effective. Nothing is. The fans and disinfectants never quite win over the smell of ripened death. The antiseptic gleam of the stainless steel never really eradicates the images of human carnage. People had said to me for years, 'Oh, you should write a book, this is fascinating, it's interesting, you should write.' I thought with fiction I could introduce them to my science, but in a way that's fun. Writing fiction is very different from writing science. Shot of headstone at graveyard Kathy: Soil samples were taken from the top of the vault at approximately 2.5 feet. A man was shot to death. The coroner's verdict was suicide. But his family hasn't accepted the finding. They've brought me in to examine the bullet hole in his skull to find out the truth. Narrator: Dale Arnold was a wealthy man and a devout Christian. He ran a thriving farm equipment company and was accustomed to all the rewards of the American dream. His family just won't believe he took his own life. To satisfy themselves they've hired Reichs, and one of America's most famous pathologists, New York's Dr Michael Baden. Kathy: In the case of Dale Arnold the family was uncertain that the original finding of death by suicide, was in fact the case. They suspected that the death could be a bit more complicated. So they hired Dr Baden and myself to come out to exhume Mr Arnold and to take a look at the wounds to be sure that they were consistent with the findings of suicide. Narrator: Kathy drives out to the scene of Dale Arnold's death. His body was found in a trailer home on a country road, one of his many residences. Kathy: The initial meeting with Brink Arnold in Anthony, Kansas. Brink Arnold is the son of Dale Arnold, the deceased. So, Brink, it was you that found your dad? Brink: Yes it is. Kathy: When was that, what day was that? Brink: January the 23rd. Basically several phone calls trying to locate him 'cause we usually communicated during the day and he didn't respond. I asked several people in the company had they heard from him, and nobody heard from him. Kathy: And you came in and what did you see? Brink: I came in and found my father in a recliner and basically saw that he wasn't moving. His head was slightly cocked, leaning to the left but I noticed that there was a small trickle, not real red — dark colour, just a little streamer down his left ear. Narrator: Arnold owned the Baretta 9mm found on his lap. The police found no evidence of foul play. Detective: The investigation revealed it was a self-inflicted gun shot wound to the right temple, exiting the left side of the head. The door was locked from the inside prior to the family getting there. Nothing in the house was disturbed, there were Rolex watches lying on the cabinets. No sign of robbery, forced entry or anything like that. Narrator: The coroner ruled it suicide and Dale Arnold was laid to rest. Now a second autopsy will be performed. Kathy: The body is surprisingly well-preserved given the amount of water that was in the vault and in the grave. Baden: He's better than your embalmed bodies and your pickled bodies. Kathy: He's in real good shape. One of the issues is: could he have been sick enough that he might have shot himself? Baden: He was a heavy cigarette smoker. He didn't like doctors, even though he's a multimillionaire. Kathy: The lesion on the right parietal is approximately 1cm in diameter, has clean edges on the outside bevelling on the endocranial surface and powder burning around the circumference of the ectocranial surface. Because when a bullet enters the brain, the brain pretty much fills up the skull and it creates a tunnel and it creates tremendous pressure inside the skull and there's nowhere for that to go. So if you get that rapid loading of pressure, the pressure has to go somewhere so the skull fractures. So you've got these fractures at the entrance wound. Baden: Even though the body's been in for so long, the soot is prominent, that would indicate that has to be an entrance. Kathy: Not only an entrance, but a close contact with the barrel of the gun because you're not going to get that if the gun is shot at a distance. At the exit you've got a clean border on the inside of the skull and that bevelling – that pulling away of bone on the outside of the skull. So that would indicate the trajectory, that this is the entrance, this is the exit. So the bullet was moving in this direction. Everything else points to a contact gunshot wound, you've actually got the gun in contact with the head. Narrator: Reichs concludes that Dale Arnold was killed by a bullet from a gun held against his temple, but the family think that someone else may have pulled the trigger. Since there were no signs of a struggle, at such close range that would only have been possible if he were drugged and unconscious when he was shot. The body has no blood in it to test for drugs, but unlike many of Reich's cases, even after years in the ground, Arnold's organs are well-preserved. Samples from them test negative. Reichs concludes that Dale Arnold deliberately held a pistol to his head and fired it. Forensic science can do no more, but the forensic scientist has one more job. Brink: In my mind his passing is still going to be suspicious. I would say that we need to move on with our life. Kathy (book excerpt): I closed my eyes and listened to cows lowing softly in the distance. Somewhere life was calm, routine, and made sense. Narrator: Reichs is ready to begin work on the bones from the construction site. Kathy: This is adipose tissue, that's a type of tissue that's like a grave-wax from hydrolysis of the fats and things. I'm feeling something very hard in here, so there may be some bones in here as well. Narrator: This waxy tissue will reveal nothing. It's the bones she needs to get at. Some of them are boiled for up to 48 hours, others are cleaned by hand. Kathy: Now I can do at least a preliminary survey of the basic biological profile, which is the sex, the age, the race and the height and that's what the detective needs right out the door in order to go out and find missing persons who might fit that profile. I have no problems with the sex on this individual. On this individual you've got a very narrow sciatic notch here, you've got a typically male shape to the front of the pelvis here, it's a big heavy broad pelvis with quite heavy muscle attachment areas with the skull. Narrator: Life leaves tell-tale marks on the human skeleton — illness, injury, and here, even the size of this man's muscles are etched in bone. Kathy: …there's a heavy muscle attachment area to the back. There's a large mastoid process. The skull has typically male characteristics. I've got a heavy ridge where the muscles attach above the ear opening. My guess is around 5ft 6in, but his muscle attachments are fairly large. So he's not a real tiny fellow. He's got fairly narrow cheekbones, if you look at the cheekbones from the base of the skull, they don't balloon out; they're not rounded and flaring, so this is a real typical European or white characteristic to the cheekbones. So in terms of the profile of the face, the shape of the nose, the size of the nasal opening, the shape of those cheekbones, all of those are consistent with European ancestry. So I think it's going to be pretty safe to say with this fellow, that he is a fellow, he is a male, he's probably somewhere around 35-45 years old, probably closer to 40. When I look a little more carefully after the cleaning I'm probably going to able to narrow that range a bit, 40 plus or minus two or three years in either direction. Narrator: The victim was a man approaching middle age but Reichs' examination reveals something else — a bullet hole behind the ear, a classic sign of a point-blank killing. Part 2 Narrator: Montreal, in French-speaking Quebec. It's here that bilingual Reichs spends much of her working year. Kathy: The opportunity to come to Montreal occurred maybe a year after I'd taken my introductory French course. So I'm sure when I arrived in Montreal my French was truly terrible. NARRATOR: But beneath the joie de vivre, there is something else: a city that provides Reichs with murder, fact and fiction. Kathy (book excerpt): For more than a decade now, the skeletonized, decomposed, mummified, burned, or mutilated cadavers of Quebec province have come to me for analysis and identification. When a conventional autopsy is of no use, I tease what I can from the bones. A cardboard box is brought into the garbage dump by city workers, it breaks open revealing a naked body with no hands and a mutilated face. Someone tried very hard to make sure this victim would never be identified. There's a tremendous amount of trauma to the skull and the face. You can see that all the facial bones are fractured: the mandible is fractured here; the cheekbone; and there's an enormous area of radiating fractures up here. So you've got over 100 stab wounds throughout the body and then someone just beat the crap out of him in his face and his head as well. When you remove the hands and mutilate the face, you can't use fingerprints. So identity is my main problem and I'll go about that first of all by being more precise about his age at death. At autopsy it's very easy to take out the pubic synphysis, the two halves where the pelvis meet in front and there are certain changes that take place on this surface. This fellow had a fairly smooth surface, there's not a lot of ridges or furrows, it looks fairly dense and smooth and you have a nice rim going all the way around it. And then the ends of the ribs, where the ribs attach in front. In a young person the end of this rib is going to be quite flat and it's going to have a lot of ridges and furrows across its surface. As you get older, a pit develops and then it gets deeper and the edges of that pit get a little thinner. While the rib configuration tells me he's 33-42, that's about as precise as I can be with that. My experience tells me he's probably 35-40. We've decided to get all of the bones back in place and then take it over to Toronto where they have a computerised system of doing facial reproductions. Narrator: Reichs has the skull in her travel bag. Kathy (in airport): Well I've carried skull and body parts. Once I carried an entire skeleton in a hockey bag from a case I was working on in Illinois. I have to go through security just like everyone else. Security guard: Is that real? Kathy: Yes, it's a skull. Narrator: Using x-rays, pathology photos and the skull, police artist Bette Clark begins to reconstruct the victim's face. Kathy: It was broken here. Bette: And this was broken in a couple of places. Narrator: The process is highly rigorous. Clark's a trained artist who made a specialty in anatomy and muscle structure. Her work has already led to 10 positive IDs from just skulls and double that number from bodies that were burnt or mutilated beyond recognition. Kathy: … maybe 110lbs, he was little … and you've got a narrow bridge you can see this continues to about there. Where you've got good underlying bony structure, your cheekbones, the breadth of your jaw, how far apart the eyes are, how wide the nose is, you're probably going to get a pretty good replica of the person. Where you venture off — where it's more art than science — is adding things like moustaches, eyebrows, hairlines, those kinds of things, you can be a bit more off on those than the actual structure and the contour of the face and the placement of the features. Bette: Now we have another picture. Narrator: But in this case the victim's mutilated face bore enough facial hair to make an accurate representation. Bette: We have 100,000 images on our computers here, they're a mugshot system. I use one face, perhaps going through thousands for an eyebrow; and I'll go through thousands more and find the nose I want or pieces of a nose and then put them together. The bridge isn't correct here — how did we build that? I just want to match up that nostril. Kathy: Oh yeah, that's good. What I look at is the breadth of the skull compared to the breadth of the cheekbones. Compare this to the distance here, that's good, and then this, that's good. And I like this better too. Kathy (book excerpt): Violent death is the final intrusion, and those who investigate it are the ultimate warriors. Though I participate, I am never comfortable with the indifference with which the system approaches the deceased and the death investigation. Even though a sense of detachment is a must to maintain emotional equilibrium, I always have the feeling that the victim deserves something more passionate, more personal. Narrator: The victim's picture is issued. The police wait to see if he is identified. In Reichs' lab the skeleton found at the construction site is slowly giving up its secrets. Reichs has found a bullet hole behind the ear, a classic tell-tale sign of an execution. Kathy: The perimortem trauma is right here above the right mastoid process and it's an entrance hole, it's got a clean border on the outside. When viewed from the endocranial surface — the inside of the skull — it's got that classic bevelling: as the bullet goes through the bone it pulls bone particles with it as it exits the bone on the inside. So this is a classic entrance wound — clean on the outside, bevelled on the inside. There is no exit and the bullet was found inside the skull. On the X-ray here you can see the bullet. It entered in the left. There's no exit hole in the skull so it was embedded in the brain. The individual was probably lying on his back and as the brain decomposed there was nothing to hold the bullet any longer and it just dropped to the back of the skull. One of the interesting things I see here is, the sternum is made up of two parts. This is the upper part which is right below your throat, and then there's a long thin portion that normally is found just below this. I don't have that. It's missing. It could simply be that it wasn't collected but what's curious is that I am getting damage to the ribs that attach along the sternum up there, the upper, the second, the third, the fourth ribs on both sides. Given that a bullet was found in the tissue in the thoracic area, it's possible that it went through the sternal area and that's why I don't have it, and I'm seeing this damage. This is an X-ray of the tissue that hasn't been cleaned down as yet, and you can see the vertebral column running along here and here obviously we've got a second bullet. This one isn't as deformed as the first bullet, it's come through the soft tissue and then lodged against the spinal column. So we've clearly got two gunshot wounds to this individual. Narrator: Two wounds and two bullets. Every bullet bears the unique marks of the gun that fired it. The ballistics lab is where tests take place to determine if bullets have been fired from the same gun. Lab man: OK, so right now I'm aligning the grooves. Kathy: You're just finding the place on each where the grooves are clear enough to see them. Lab man: Yeah exactly. Have a look. You see the small lines that are… Kathy: Yeah on either side of the big ones (exactly). They go straight across from one bullet right into the next. Lab man: OK, and right now I'm able to say that both bullets were fired by the same gun because of this small thing and we are examining every land and groove and trying to match those fine lines. Narrator: The grooves are caused by tiny chips of steel that embed themselves in the gun barrel during manufacture. Each manufacturer uses a slightly different process to hollow out its gun barrels, producing signature patterns of spiral grooves and ridges called lands. Every bullet carries the imprint of the barrel from which it was fired. Lab man: So right now I'm measuring the width of lands and groove. I put one line there, the other line there and that's the width of the groove. Kathy: You just click on this and click on this and the computer enters that? Lab man: Exactly. And I read it here, it's in millimetres. I mark it with a pen and count how many lands and grooves there are. One, two, three, four and five. I have five, five lands and a groove to the right. Narrator: Each make and model of a gun is characterised by these measurements and catalogued by the FBI. Through this process, the type of gun that killed Reichs' subject has been identified, but cannot be revealed — it's criminal evidence. The police will only say that the model has been around for over 100 years. In theory, the killing could have taken place any time within that period. Reichs needs a more accurate way of dating time of death and there is only one place in the world where that science has become an art. Kathy (book excerpt): I saw death too often, too close, and I feared I was losing a sense of its meaning. I knew I couldn't grieve for the human being that each of my cadavers had been. That would empty my emotional reservoir for sure. Some amount of professional detachment was mandatory in order to do the work, but not to the extent of abandoning all feeling. Narrator: Hidden away in Knoxville, Tennessee is one of the world's strangest laboratories, the Anthropological Research Facility, better known as The Body Farm. There is only one way to measure how fast human corpses decompose in a natural setting: put them there and wait. Over the past 30 years around 300 bodies have been left to rot in these three acres of woodland and the man responsible is Dr Bill Bass. Bill Bass: One of the problems of having them on the hill here though is that when they decay they kind of slide down the hill, so you get it scattered and then, if the bags fill up with fluid goo, it's like a rubber tire with water in it; it has an inertia of its own. Maggots don't like sunlight, so if you have a body lying on the ground with no clothing on the maggots will use the skin as an umbrella and will eat all the internal organs away, but the skin then will turn to leather. That's going to be hard to get off. We're kind of hoping that if we leave the stuff on it won't dry quite that much and maybe the insects will be a little bit more on it than they have. Kathy: The Body Farm started its first serious research in decomposition back in the 1970s and that's really due to Bill Bass. It's incredibly useful, prior to the standards that were established at The Body Farm you really didn't have any structured experiments where data was collected at regular intervals. Bill Bass: He had really good teeth there. For the last 29 years I've looked at what happens to a body when it decays. How long does it take and what are the characteristics we need to look at when we first see a body to tell us how long that body's been there? Narrator: The corpses come from three sources: unclaimed bodies; bodies left to science; and from people who donate the bodies of their relatives. Bill Bass: Got some animal activity there. Kathy: That would be what, groundhog or racoon? Bill Bass: Well, the groundhog probably. I think the racoon goes more for the soft tissue. I've threatened to stay out here and shoot one or two at night but I haven't done it yet. This is one that had clothing — we'll take a look. I came to the University of Tennessee on 1 June 1971 and the first 10 cases I get, half of them are maggot-covered bodies. Now the police don't ask you 'Who is that?' They ask you how long that individual has been there. So I decided I better learn something about this. Must have had a hole over here — this big gaping hole over here would indicate that there was either a stab wound or gunshot wound in that area where the maggots have been attracted. They would be attracted reasonably to the blood and then this allows them quick entrance into the abdominal cavity. Narrator: Bass's work shows that there are five clear stages of decomposition: fresh, bloated, decay, post-decay and, finally, dry, when mainly bones and hair remain. How long each stage lasts depends largely on temperature, depth of burial and insect activity. As many as 520 species of insect have been found to invade the body, attacking in five waves, corresponding to the five stages of decomposition. The shortest time a body has gone from full flesh to skeleton in the hot Tennessee sun has been just two weeks. Bill Bass: These are ants and maggots that have already been here and done their thing. What you're getting now are the ants eating some of the remaining soft tissue that doesn't smell like the original decay. Kathy: Sweeter smell. Narrator: This smell changes during decomposition. Researcher Jennifer Love is working towards understanding precisely which odours signal which stages of biochemical breakdown after death. Another aid to determining when a person died. Jennifer: Being able to understand the chemistry of odour is an important step. As a body is decomposing it's really decomposing through two processes, autolysis, which is cell death and breakdown and putrefaction, which is bacterial consumption. Both result in by-products. So as the body decomposes and these by-products are produced in greater and greater quantities, this is what's creating the odour. Narrator: Love uses an aromascan to sample and analyse the air around decaying bodies, revealing the molecular components of the complex scents and their intensity. Science has succeeded in accurately depicting the very smell of death. Jennifer (looking at computer screen): See these high peaks? We're seeing this on every body that's being sampled. So this is a characteristic pattern to decay. Narrator: While Love's work can help locate a corpse, another new science can go one step further — locate where a corpse once was. After death, the body's fats break down into acids which leach into the soil and kill the vegetation. A sign that a body once lay there. Fatty acid evidence is now the cutting-edge science for the accurate determination of time of death. Vass: The vegetation needs to be removed so that we're actually at the soil. When police and investigators arrive at a crime scene they have a lot of things going on and they have questions to answer, who, what, when, where and why. My expertise is in answering when and where did the individual die. You don't want to get a lot of rocks and stuff in there, you want to actually get soil because that's what absorbs the material coming off the individuals. Narrator: Vass monitors the deterioration of different fatty acids. The ratio between them gives him the most precise dating of time since death ever achieved. Kathy: When I saw the volatile fatty acid research that's going on I found that absolutely intriguing and immediately thought of the relevance of that for solving questions of post mortem interval. So what do we have on here? Vass: Here we have the concentration of the volatile fatty acids and we look at the ratios and the amounts of these various fatty acids. This methodology has been so successful that in 30 days of decomposition we have been able to get it within plus or minus two days. And after more than two years, we can get plus or minus two weeks of decomposition. Kathy: What a wonderful technique. What if you have a situation in which, for example, you don't even have a body but you've got the stain from a decompositional episode? Could our heroine use that? In the fourth Temperance Brennan novel that I'm working on now, volatile fatty acids will appear. Narrator: The new techniques being developed at The Body Farm may inform Reichs' fiction but the Farm also informs her science. She continually draws on its extensive documentation of skeletons. In particular, the research linking the colour of bones to their time in the ground helps her determine that the body from the construction site is not a recent killing. The construction-site skeleton is found with its clothes, a shirt pulled above the head in classic gangland style. Reichs examines them for any clues about their age. Kathy: We've got a colour co-ordinated tie, it's got diagonal pink stripes matching the pink in the shirt. We got brown pants, I'm guessing polyester with cotton thread, because the material is very well preserved, the thread is gone and natural fibres would disappear quicker than synthetic fibres. Not seeing a lot of decoration on the pants, the zipper's still here. Not finding any tags. Narrator: By their style and fabric they appear to date from the 1970s. The police publicise the discovery of the clothes hoping someone will recognise them and identify the victim. But Quebec's tabloid press already thinks it knows who it is: one of the province's most famous missing persons, Real Picard. The age of the clothes is consistent with the mysterious disappearance of Real Picard 28 years ago. Could the bones in Reichs' lab be his? Kathy: This fellow, if it is the person we think it is, had a history of some trauma, he's been in some car wreck, things like that. So it's possible that those old healed fractures might show up on his bones. He's got a little pit, it's a very smooth edged pit, which tells me it's not recent. Narrator: A possible link to a missing person is always helpful to Reichs. She will examine the victim's physical remains for any signs of trauma consistent with the missing person's history. Kathy: …post-mortem damage. That doesn't belong there, it's not recent, it's well-healed whatever it is. So that may be a result of a blow. It could have been caused by something hitting the skull or the skull hitting against something. We've got a partial lower dentition, there are a number of teeth that have been lost ante-mortem, there are caries in some of the molars; there's at least one anterior tooth that has been lost post mortem. There's trauma to a finger bone, probably a second meta carpal, possibly a defence wound – might have been caused when the hand was thrown up to protect the victim from the bullet. Narrator: Real Picard was a taxi driver and a night club bouncer in the city of Sherbrooke in French Quebec. His best friend was Raymond Nault. Raymond Nault (translation): He fought a lot and he made enemies. If I had got as mad as the others I would have gone after him myself. It wasn't nice to see a drunk on the floor getting kicked in the ears, nose and eyes. You don't beat a man like that for Christ's sake. He was my buddy but at the end he wasn't much of a friend. Narrator: Picard's story starts here, 90 miles east of Montreal in Sherbrooke Quebec. Picard worked as a bouncer in this building. Today it's a health services office but in Picard's day it was a Vicomte Hotel, a notorious strip club. In the dangerous club world of 1972 Sherbrooke, everybody knew Picard, including the police, who believed his violent ways kept the Vicomte out of trouble. Montreal detective: He was a good man, but when he was on the job as a doorman he was taking care of business. That's probably the other side of him, he wasn't scared of anyone. We had gangs, local gangs. A lot of them left to go down to Montreal to join what we called Little Mafia down there. They were trying to come back over here and that's when it all started at the Vicomte Hotel and they wanted to take this hotel under protection. I don't know if it's a word that's exact in English, but in French it's protection. Then all the problems started over there. One week, three or four guys came down from Montreal, try to put up some trouble over there - they were thrown out then. The week after, a bomb exploded outside the building. Then the week after, came the disappearance of Real Picard. Narrator: That Friday Picard left his bar at 3.30 in the morning and was never seen again. Montreal detective: We got a call from the Nolton Police Department which is about 30-35 miles from here, saying that they had found Real Picard's car over there. It was unlocked, the keys were in the ignition and there was a broken denture on the front seat with a few spots of blood. Narrator: The windows were smashed and a fuse had been rigged to a plastic petrol container, a botched attempt to destroy the car and its contents, including Picard's false upper denture. Does the dental evidence match the skull recovered from the construction site? Part 3 Kathy: Just in the last year I've been to the UK several times, I've been to France, Italy, South Africa, Singapore, New Zealand, Australia, all over Canada, all over the US. The bad side is you're often alone so you end up spending a lot of time in a lot of hotels, that tend to blend together. One day you're in Sydney, and the next day you're in Melbourne; you can't remember if you're in room 1102 or 507 from one day to the next. So parts of it can be pretty stressful. You have to switch gears, you have to switch from novelist to scientist. I'll go to do an author tour in South Africa, and then a month later I'll return to Rwanda as an expert witness in the genocide tribunal for the United Nations. Narrator: Reichs is a bone detective. Her expertise is reading human bones for signs of crime and when those crimes are on a massive scale, her training in archeology and anthropology prove an invaluable combination. Kathy (in Guatemala): One of the areas in which forensic anthropologists are very much involved in is human rights work, and particularly where you have mass graves because we have the archeological technique to appropriately recover the remains and then the anthropological techniques to analyse them. Narrator: A tiny village in Guatemala. Eighteen years ago a massacre occurred here at the height of a civil war. Early one morning, anti-government rebels passed down this hill. They were pursued hours later by an army unit. Most of the people living here fled to safety, others were not so lucky; by that afternoon 23 villagers had been butchered, men, women and children. When the villagers returned, they found the bodies of their friends and relatives in a burned-out house. They carried their dead through a cornfield and hastily buried them in a well, covered with blankets. Since then they have lived alongside the unmarked grave, too fearful to give the victims a proper funeral. Under the watchful eye of the authorities, Reichs will work with Guatemalan colleagues to recover the bones. By piecing them together they hope to identify the victims and reconstruct the last moments of their lives, thus ensuring a permanent record of what took place. But their exhumation permit is in constant danger of being revoked. Kathy: What do we have here? Man: Well we found these bones in this area. Kathy: So I see you've got a lower humerus here — piece of arm bone, very little burning in some parts over here and then you've got more blackening here and then the intense burning in the cranial fragment there. Do you expect them to be fragmented? Man: I hope everything will be better than this because this is nothing. If everything's like this it's difficult to work. Kathy: Difficult, not impossible. Narrator: As the dig continues, the villagers tell their stories. By a quirk of fate Martina Panjoj was away the day of the massacre. Martina Panjoj: When I returned, I found that I had four daughters killed and my eight grandchildren. Of my eight grandchildren in the grave the youngest are four years old, three years, three months and a three-day-old newborn baby. I called for the neighbours to come and help me bury them. Later the army returned and kidnapped my son and I still don't know what happened to him. Kathy: I have a piece coming out of it, do you want to bag that? Fred: Oh yeah, this is good. Kathy: This is an adult skull; looks like a mandible is coming across here; this looks like the orbit. Fred: It's lying on its left side apparently. This is the right side of its head. This is the right temple bone, which is right here, and this it's right cheekbone right here, but it's apparently flattened. Kathy: There's a kind of textile, a piece of clothing coming around the neck area. Fred: We'll just keep digging and see what we find. It's the beginning of a lot more. We'll be working here all day. Narrator: With only a temporary permit for the exhumation the team work around the clock. Then they make a tragic discovery. Fred: Found a piece of burnt cloth, and when I lifted it, I found a baby. What we have here is the ribs, both sides, these are the vertebrae and these are the hip bones. Haven't found the legs or the cranium, but we have at least the thorax. This is one of the hardest things about the job, when you have to deal with little children. But you do the best you can. Kathy: There was something about that particular situation, as we worked in that pit and we were uncovering those infants and those young mothers and those children and looking up and seeing the exact same faces looking down at us that had been killed there just 20 years earlier. I found that very disturbing, I also found that very rewarding and that's really the point of the human rights work. Narrator: The first complete skeleton is now ready to be exhumed. Kathy: Here you're hoping that there's going to be some sort of court process, that someone's going to be brought to answer for what went on here. So because of that, because it does have that forensic aspect to it, you've got to be much more careful about documenting all of the steps in the recovery process. Narrator: With the archaeological work well under way the first bones are taken into the lab so that the forensic work can begin. Kathy: Clearly got a metal fragment right here, there's no question about that one. Fred: This was the one we actually recovered. Kathy: You can actually see that one. Fred: Yeah we can see that one. This one looks like it's coming straight across the back from the neck. Kathy: Straight through the arch. So you've got one going across this way, and then right across the spinal column here. Every little bit of detail that you see that corroborates an eye-witness account can be important in court. Narrator: Work continues but so far only six people have been charged with complicity in the massacres of the 1980s. The murderers may never be brought to justice, but after the forensic work is completed the dead will be given a proper burial, giving some comfort to the living. Kathy (book excerpt): Cases involving children are always difficult for me. Of all victims, they are the most vulnerable, the most trusting, and the most innocent. I ache each time one arrives in the morgue. The stark truth of fallen humanity stares at me. And pity provides small comfort. Narrator: Evidence is mounting that the body found at the construction site was that of Real Picard, a nightclub bouncer who disappeared almost 30 years ago. To investigate that possibility Reichs examines the victim's teeth for any similarity with Picard's. Kathy: He's got a third molar, it's your lat molar of your wisdom tooth on the right side and then he had no teeth on the rest of his upper jaw. Now if he wore a denture you're probably going to see an impression of that tooth on the denture. Narrator: Real Picard did wear an upper denture. Police found it broken and bloody on the seat of his abandoned car. The plate went into police evidence, but now it can't be found, nor can Picard's dental records. All that remains in the police file are the pictures of the missing dentures. Forensic dentist Dr Robert Dorian believes the denture may match the skull but he can't be certain from the photographs. He needs the missing upper plate. The case for Picard is building: a construction site, formerly in the middle of remote woods. An almost complete skeleton. An attempted link to a missing person with the right characteristics — from age, sex, height, race and clothes right down to an upper denture. Kathy: OK we've got skeletonised remains that were found in a very damp environment. It's definitely a guy, he was white, he was probably somewhere around 40 years old, he suffered a gunshot wound to the back of the head. He possibly suffered another gunshot wound to the chest — I'm missing the sternum but I've got damage to some of the upper ribs which attach to the sternum at that point. He probably has a defensive wound of one hand, he may have thrown his hand up at the time when he was being shot. We have a possible ID. One of the problems is this individual disappeared over 28 years ago and most of the medical and dental records have disappeared. Right now everything I'm seeing is consistent with the individual that went missing back in 1972. But I have nothing that's definitive to establish a positive identification. Narrator: Real Picard spent his last night as he always did, as the police say, 'taking care of business down at the Vicomte Hotel'. By 3.30am the crowd had dwindled down to an attractive blonde woman, a stranger in town. She had been drinking with Picard for the last few hours. According to the hotel employees, Picard left with the woman and went to his car. Police believe that she was a decoy for a gang involved in a protection racket. They made the grab and spirited Picard away. A fresh grave may have already been dug. In the parlance of Quebec, a reglement compte – a settling of accounts. Kathy (book excerpt): The victim becomes part of the evidence, an exhibit, on display for police, pathologists, forensic specialists, lawyers and eventually, jurors. Number it. Photograph it. Take samples. Tag the toe. While I am an active participant, I can never accept the impersonality of the system. It is like looting on the most personal level. At least I would give this victim a name. Death in anonymity would not be added to the list of violations he or she would suffer.

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