Forensics 101: Mass Grave Methodology

The first hurdle to overcome in mass grave investigations is determining the location of the grave. As we discussed last week, mass graves are deliberately hidden to avoid detection, so simply finding the grave is the crucial first step. To further complicate the process, there are often one or more satellite sites associated with mass graves:

• the execution site (either a surface execution site or a site within the grave itself)

• temporary surface deposition sites used during the transfer of remains from primary to secondary and tertiary sites.

But once the final grave is discovered, how do investigators proceed with an excavation that has to unearth and account for all the evidence in the grave without losing any important information?

There are two main methods used to excavate a mass grave:

Pedestal method:

• The soil around the body mass is removed to just below the lower boundary of the grave, allowing complete viewing from all angles and access to all bodies along the outer margins and top of the grave.

• The original grave walls and ramp are destroyed, but investigators do not have to stand on bodies during the excavation process since workers start at the outer boundaries and work inward.

• This formation allows for water drainage from the site and more complete in situ photography while bodies are still in place.

• The main disadvantage to this method is the loss of stability conferred by the earth surrounding the grave. If the central mass erodes, bodies and body parts can become displaced.

Stratigraphic method:

• The grave is treated as a single site: bodies and artifacts are excavated from top to bottom, removing evidence in reverse order to which it was deposited into the grave.

• Grave walls and ramps are retained, leading to a better understanding of how the grave was constructed. Tool marks and tire tracks may also be recovered.

• Due to the even lowering of the surface grave, rainwater can pool within the confines of the grave, damaging exposed remains or eroding the body mass, but tents or shelters can be constructed over the grave to protect it during inclement weather.

• Only bodies on the top of the mass can be accessed or viewed.

• The bodies must be walked on by the investigators during the course of the excavation.

So which method is better?

• Bones are separated from the body during both methods, although larger bones tends to be dissociated in the pedestal method and smaller bones in the stratigraphic method. Thus the stratigraphic method results in more complete body recoveries.

• Decomposition tends to progress faster in bodies on the outer edges of the grave. The pedestal method exposes those bodies, leading to erosion of the mass and possible mixing of the remains.

• Secondary or tertiary graves tend to contain more skeletonized remains and increased dissociation. Use of the pedestal method seems to accelerate slumping of the grave mass.

As a result, current scientific opinion is that the stratigraphic method is preferable where possible.

Photo credit: Gilles Peress and Press Association

I’m going to take a break from blogging for the next few weeks to enjoy the summer holidays and visiting family, but we’ll be back on August 20th with all new content. See you then!

Forensics 101: Forensic Challenges of Mass Grave Excavations

Last week we marked the 18^th anniversary of the massacre of 8,100 Bosniak men and boys in Srebrenica by the Bosnian Serbs. The overwhelming majority of these victims were buried in mass graves in the remote countryside. The task for investigators following the massacre was not only finding the gravesites, but successfully excavating and identifying the victims.

The UN defines a mass grave as a location containing three or more victims who have died by extra-judicial or arbitrary executions that are not the result of an armed conflict (an extra-judicial action is one that takes place by a state or other official authority without legal process or the permission of a court).

Investigators need to determine not only time since death, but also discover any evidence of torture, the specific method of death, and the identity of the victim where possible. For many bodies, this may be a near impossible task.

Among the numerous challenges confronting researchers during mass grave excavations in Bosnia were:

• State of the remains: Victims were often not buried immediately after death because of the need to bring in heavy equipment to dig the grave. As a result, partially decomposed remains became separated and scattered within a single gravesite. The heavy machinery used to dig mass graves and to transport and bury the dead also caused damage to both the soft tissue and the skeleton, masking original trauma and complicating the investigation.

• Victim collection and labeling: During any forensic recovery, each separate body part is identified as an individual specimen. Any possible personal effects or related body parts must be labeled with related information for later association, leading to an incredibly complex identification scheme.

• Secondary and tertiary graves: A large majority of the mass graves in Bosnia were reopened, and disinterred victims moved to secondary or even tertiary graves. Since this occurred anywhere from one and four months post-mortem, soft tissue degradation was well advanced, leading to significant scattering of victims’ remains across large swathes of countryside.

• Lack of associated physical objects: Bodies were carelessly dumped into mass graves and often tightly packed to keep the site as small as possible. When personal effects were recovered, it was often impossible to determine to whom they belonged.

• Clandestine sites: Mass graves, by design, were purposely situated in difficult-to-identify locations, usually in remote areas. In addition, the killers deliberately tried to make victim ID difficult by having their victims remove all personal effects, such as wallets and jewelry, before execution.

• Sheer number of victims: Some mass graves in Bosnia contained up to 700 victims. This made victim recovery and identification a substantial task simply from a procedural and practical standpoint.

• Need for large international teams: Human rights horrors such as mass graves are very difficult tasks for investigators, frequently leading to depression and fatigue. Regular replacements are required, and the specialized nature of the work involved requires an international effort to staff a large team. It will normally take 1 or 2 investigators approximately 4 days to excavate a single victim. If a grave has hundreds of victims, it can take a team of several dozen investigators months to complete.

• Need for on-site facilities: Due to the remote nature of most mass graves, investigators must build or acquire forensic facilities for their investigation—including refrigerated storage areas, running water, decontamination areas, and sorting areas for both remains and personal effects. Provision must also be made for site security during the excavation, and accommodations for the technical staff.

• Victim identification: The majority of mass grave victims frequently lacked sufficient dental records to allow for dental identification. As a result, pathologists and forensic anthropologists had to rely on physical features and antemortem fractures to establish victim identification.

Next week we’re going to look at the practical side of mass grave excavations—how to find the graves—and then, once they are located, how to recover the victims.

Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons and Gilles Peress.

Forensic Case Files: The Srebrenica Massacre

July 11^th this past week marked the 18^th anniversary of the beginning of the Srebrenica massacre—the day the Bosnian Serb army, under the command of General Ratko Mladić, took control of the UN protected enclave of Srebrenica in Bosnia.  Two days later the genocide began.  Between July 13^th and 22^nd, 1995, over 8,100 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were massacred and buried in mass graves by the Serb Army. Between August and November of 1995, many of those bodies were moved to secondary and tertiary mass graves, scattering remains across 300+ grave sites. The locations of these graves were largely unknown to outside investigators, and while a large number of them have been discovered, many are still unidentified.  Teams of pathologists and forensic anthropologists are sponsored by the International Commission on Missing Persons to excavate each newly discovered grave. Attempts are made to identify remains by PCR, physical characteristics and personal belongings found within the grave.  It is truly horrifying work for the ICMP team members, but it is also rewarding as missing loved ones are finally identified and put to rest.

DNA analysis comparing family member samples to the unidentified remains has resulted in the identification of 6,838 individuals from the more than 8,100 reported missing following those 10 days in July. But there remains no trace of over 1,200 men and boys to this day.

On July 11th of each year, all of the newly identified dead are brought to the Srebrenica Genocide Memorial in Potočari for burial.  Last Thursday, 409 additional sets of remains—often no more than a handful of bones—were laid to rest at the memorial. Included in the dead were 43 boys between the ages of 14 and 18, and a newborn infant who was born during the massacre.  This brings the total number of remains interred here to 6,066.

Next week, as we explore this difficult topic further, we’ll look at the forensic anthropology challenges of mass graves.

Photo credit: green-draped coffins—Almir Dzanovic, mass grave exhumation— Photograph provided courtesy of the ICTY, Potocari gravestones— Michael Büker, Potocari Memorial—Mazbln and Potocari Memorial names— Michael Büker; all Wikimedia Commons

Writing WHO You Know

One of the most common pieces of writing advice out there is ‘write what you know’. I’m going to go off on a tangent from that concept to discuss writing who you know.

In reviews of DEAD, WITHOUT A STONE TO TELL IT, there are always comments about the main characters, Trooper Leigh Abbott and Dr. Matt Lowell, and the chemistry they share. But the second most frequent comment is about the book’s secondary characters.

From Amazon.com:

The book is true to the teacher/student relationship. I love the way Matt taught his students, trusting them and respecting them but also protecting them where he needed to. As a teacher, I can say it felt...right, to me. I liked that none of the relationships fell back on stereotypes.

From Goodreads.com:

There is a dynamic cast of secondary characters that add depth and humor to the storyline.

One of the things I’ve always enjoyed about J.D. Robb’s ‘In Death’ series is the large cast of secondary characters that surround the leads and how those characters were given time to grow and develop, and sometimes earn substantial storylines of their own. I always wanted to have that kind of feel within the Abbot and Lowell Forensic Mysteries series.

As a bench scientist for more than 20 years, I’ve had students come and go from our lab. Some passed through quietly, but a number of them made strong impressions on me. When it came to developing characters to back up forensic anthropologist Dr. Matt Lowell, I took advantage of being able to write the characters I knew.

Take Matt’s senior graduate student – Akiko Niigata, or Kiko as she is usually called. Without a doubt, Kiko is the fictional version of one of my best grad students, Vera. Like Vera, she is strong, has a wicked sense of humour, doesn’t suffer fools gladly, is skilled in martial arts, and is a fantastic artist. We always used to tell Vera that she needed to find a way to combine her dual skills in science and the arts, perhaps by illustrating textbooks or journal articles. In Kiko, we have an osteologist and forensic anthropologist-in-training who uses her artistic skills to offer accurate crime scenes sketches for the team, and to provide 2D and 3D skull reconstructions of victims. The name I gave this character is also an inside joke, and my labmates from that time will remember exactly who the infamous Akiko is.

Some grad students in the fictional series are a compilation of past real-life students. Another successful Ph.D. student, Dusan, provides character Paul Layne with his sense of humour and ability to ‘stir the pot’ (especially with the girls in the lab).

The relationship that Matt has with his grad students is really the relationship that I enjoyed with mine. Adults in their own right, these were skilled young men and women who had give-and-take relationships with their trainers, and that aspect is reflected in these characters. The grad students in the series bring their own individual skills to the group, and it’s the combined talents of the two leads and the three students that truly make the team successful in their investigations.

Writing who you know has the advantages of grounding characters in your head and giving you a spring board. While you won’t write your characters exactly as you know real people in your life, you can take aspects of their personalities that strike you as quirky, stubborn or resiliant, and build those into your fictional characters. This isn’t cheating; it’s using the world around you to your advantage. If you’re having trouble finding dynamic characters to write about, instead of falling back on familiar tropes, trying drawing from your own life experiences. You may be pleasantly surprised by how real your characters will seem, and how they will jump off the page for both you and your readers.

Forensic Case Files: American Colonies’ First Murder Victim, Circa 1624

The skeleton was found in 1996 by the Jamestown Rediscovery Archaeological Project team on Jamestown Island, Virginia. Unlike the majority of the settlers’ graves located in the cemetery within the James Fort, the man was discovered under an old roadbed near one other grave close to the southern palisade and the site of the barracks. Soil staining and the remnants of rusted iron nails indicate that he was buried in six-sided, flat-lidded wood coffin. His naked body was originally wrapped in a shroud that is long gone—its presence now only marked by green stains left on the skull and right shin from two brass straight pins used to secure it.

Forensic anthropologists could tell much about the man from his remains. He was tall for the time at nearly 5’9”. He had a slight build, but significant muscle attachment points on the skeleton indicated a strong upper body. He was between the ages of 18 – 20 and showed no sign of disease. His cause of death was equally clear: His right leg was broken and twisted just below the knee, with no signs of healing or bone remodeling. A lead ball and shards of lead shot were embedded in and around the bone.

Forensic anthropologist Dr. Doug Owsley (who has been involved with cases such as the lost Union Solider at Antietam, the murder of a Jamestown colonial servant, and evidence of cannibalism at James Fort) determined that the lead ball hit the leg with such force that it shattered the bone and tore all the soft tissue, twisting the leg 180^o. The wound was fatal, likely rupturing the popliteal artery, and the victim bled out within minutes.

The skull was badly crushed from centuries of pressure from above, but was painstakingly reconstructed by forensic anthropologist Dr. David Hunt, allowing forensic artist Sharon Long to create a 3D reconstruction of the victim:

 

Up to now, the man’s identity has been a mystery. But recent research has revealed that he was most likely George Harrison, who met his end following a duel with Richard Stephens. The fatal injury shows that the bullet struck Mr. Harrison’s leg to the side of the knee. At the time, a typical dueling pose was to stand sideways with your arm and flinklock pistol extended towards your opponant. But the injury is in an unusual location as most duellers would aim for the upper body, a larger target with more vital organs. So was Mr. Stephens a bad shot, or was he aiming to cripple?

There is also some question about the type of ammunition used in the duel. What killed Mr. Harrison was a ‘combat round’ that contained a large main bullet as well as smaller lead shot. Duelling ammunition of the time typically only involved a single lead ball. It is believed that a combat round of this type would not be used in a duel by an honest and honourable combatant.

Richard Stephens, who survived the duel and later went into politics, died in 1636.

Photo credit: Jamestown Rediscovery