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Crime Scene Analyst: David Koresh’ skull
More articles on this topic: Branch DavidiansCrime Scene Analyst
CSI: Kentucky
Unlike the TV version, forensics is tedious work
Art imitates Emily Craig’s life almost every night.
Sometimes she tunes in to see if the imitators are getting it right. They aren’t — not entirely, at least.
But that doesn’t stop Craig from counting herself among the millions who enjoy popular TV crime dramas like “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation.”
“The science isn’t bad,” said Craig, Kentucky’s forensic anthropologist. “They really do their research. But in real life, it would take six people six months to do what one person does in 45 minutes on TV.”
Craig, who lives in rural Scott County but works in Frankfort, is among the rare forensic scientists who can expertly wear more than one hat. She was the first in her field to be hired as a full-time state employee, and her unique expertise about the human knee joint solved a major mystery in the Oklahoma City bombing.
Craig has written important papers, worked important cases (such as Oklahoma City, Waco and 9/11) and contributed text and illustrations to scientific textbooks. Last year she published a well-received memoir, “Teasing Secrets from the Dead,” that has been translated into five languages and was released last month in paperback (Three Rivers Press, $13.95).
But Craig’s main job is to identify the dead from fragments of teeth and bone. She is also a medical illustrator and forensic sculptor who can transform a skull into an uncanny likeness of the face that once reposed there.
Craig’s skills represent only one small corner of a sprawling, complex field that involves toxicology, psychology, pathology, dentistry, anthropology and even entomology, the study of insects. (The development of fly larvae on human remains can be a reliable indicator of time of death.)
On TV, dramatic license begets the creation of forensic superheroes who are expert in most every discipline — and fine cops to boot.
Craig can’t help but laugh.
“The crime scene analyst who does everything from arresting suspects to running a mass spectrometer simply doesn’t exist,” Craig said.
Forensic scientists are pleased that “CSI” and its ilk have piqued the public’s interest in their field. But they aren’t too keen about the misconceptions proliferated by the shows, which draw some of the largest audiences on TV.
For the week of Sept. 19-25, “CSI” ranked first in the Nielsen ratings, followed by “Criminal Minds” (No. 3), “CSI: Miami” (5) and “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” (7).
“NCIS,” which stands for Naval Criminal Investigative Service, ranked 12th, and “Cold Case” was 20th.
“People truly expect investigations to be done in a flash,” Craig said. “They’ll say things like, ‘Why don’t you just do the DNA?’ Well, you don’t just do DNA. It’s a genetic code, not a bar code.”
Craig said she gets a steady stream of phone calls and e-mails from youngsters interested in the technology of solving crimes. For the most part, their interest quickly dies when they hear how much time and money it takes to earn a doctorate in the field.
“I’m thinking, ‘You don’t want to be a forensic scientist, honey. You want to be an actress,’ ” said Craig, who has appeared on such shows as “48 Hours,” “Unsolved Mysteries” and “America’s Most Wanted.”
Craig belongs to a skull-and-bones club so small and elite that it makes the one at Yale seem downright all-inclusive.
The Indiana native is one of only 61 board-certified, actively practicing forensic anthropologists in the United States, and one of only two who are full-time state employees.
“On any given day,” Craig writes in her memoir, “you might find me beside the smoking wreckage of a plane crash, sifting the ashes of a burned-down backwoods cabin, or in my lab, carefully cataloging a suspicious-looking pile of bones. …
“It can be gruesome, but I love my job. I thrive on the challenge of solving a mystery.”
Kentucky doesn’t lack for challenges in that regard. Hired in 1994, Craig works 75 to 100 new cases every year, most of them homicides.
Collecting and evaluating human remains is meticulous, laborious work. Craig recently exhumed a skeleton with little more than a hand trowel and a whisk broom, for example. The process took six hours.
Forensic anthropologists speak for people who can no longer speak for themselves — the missing and the murdered, whose fragmented remains represent a final chance to tell the world when and how they died.
“I cannot imagine the anxiety felt by a family member of a person who has disappeared,” said former prosecutor Luke Morgan, executive director of Kentucky’s office of legal services. “Dr. Craig provides an invaluable service for the citizens of the commonwealth. Many times she answers the question ‘Who is it? Whose remains are those?’ It may be a hard answer, but at least it is some answer.”
Craig’s book documents several interesting cases involving individuals and families, but of greater historical importance is its morgue’s-eye view of three of the greatest mass tragedies in recent American history: Waco, Oklahoma City and 9/11.
In 1993, as a graduate student at the University of Tennessee, Craig was dispatched to Waco, Texas, to help local authorities identify the remains of the Branch Davidians, a religious cult that set its own compound on fire rather than surrender to federal agents.
Craig helped determine that more than a third of the 80 who died were victims of murder-suicide, including cult leader David Koresh. Craig herself rebuilt Koresh’s shattered skull; a bullet hole punctuated the middle of his forehead.
In 1995, investigators of the Murrah Federal Building bombing in Oklahoma City were mystified by what came to be known as the “extra leg.” Amputated above the knee by the explosion, it apparently didn’t match any of the recovered bodies.
The defense lawyer for Timothy McVeigh, who was convicted of the bombing, claimed the leg belonged to the “real bomber,” a white man dressed in military gear.
Craig had written her dissertation on how to determine a person’s race from the angle of the knee joint. She insisted that the leg belonged to an African-American woman.
She was right. The leg matched the remains of a young black woman in the Air Force who was at the federal building that morning to apply for a new Social Security card.
In September 2001, Craig was summoned to Ground Zero, where on two occasions she worked 30 days straight trying to identify the burned and shattered remains of those who died in the World Trade Center attacks.
The experience was so traumatic, Craig said, “that my agent and editors had to almost force me to write about it. I knew that when I faced the reality of it all, I would break down. And I did. But I’m glad I did it. It was like therapy.”
If it hadn’t been for a bum knee, Craig might have had to cope with the latest American tragedy, Hurricane Katrina’s devastation of New Orleans.
Injuries suffered while playing soccer, riding rodeo and driving her motorcycle forced Craig last year to undergo a total knee replacement — and to resign from the federal government’s Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Team.
The latter wasn’t a difficult decision.
“I’ve had all of the mass fatality work I can handle,” Craig said. “If it happens here in Kentucky, I’ll step up to the plate, for sure. But only then.”
Coping with dead bodies and grieving families is painful, painstaking work. They make it look easy on TV. It is anything but.
“You have no idea how hard we have to work to get just one solid piece, admissible piece of evidence,” Craig said. “Most people expect real life to be like TV, where they get the test results back after the next commercial break. That’s not how it works at all.”
Sidebar:
Excerpt about Koresh’s skull
Forensic anthropologist Emily Craig, on showing to the chief medical examiner the reassembled skull of Branch Davidian cult leader David Koresh. He was among the 80 cult members who died during a siege by federal agents at Waco, Texas, April 19, 1993.
“I picked up the skull and pointed to the semicircular hole in the middle of the forehead. It was beveled inward, surrounded with the sooty tattoo that was the earmark of a contact gunshot wound. Then I carefully turned the skull upside down so the doctor could see the exit wound. The bullet had left the lower part of the back of the skull, not too far from the spinal cord.
“It was an unforgettable moment. We all stood in silence together, thinking back over the past weeks … (to) the accusations that the FBI had murdered Koresh and his followers, the claims that the Bureau (of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms) had set the fire that killed everyone.
“Now I held Koresh’s skull in my hand for all of us to see, marked with the unmistakable evidence of the cult leader’s death by an intimate hand. No FBI agent could ever have gotten close enough to press a gun to his skull — and this beveled hole ringed with soot could only have been made by such a gun.”
– From “Teasing Secrets From the Dead” by Emily Craig
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