More than just bones
Darise Ogden discovers that forensic pathologists do more than just analyse the bones of the dead

Dr Robin Watt is working on a burial site in Rotorua when I speak with him. It’s a forensic civil job, he explains, something to do with the redivision of land subject to Treaty of Waitangi claims. I can hear a constant hammering in the background, which I imagine to be one of Watt’s crew excavating the site.

Watt is an independent forensic anthropologist, who deals with both the living and the dead. If, like me, you’re a fan of Kathy Reichs’ Bones, you’ll be more than familiar with the traditional idea of biological anthropology and its connection with the bones of the dead. Each week, Temperance ‘Bones’ Brennan and her trusty angelic sidekick, Special Agent Seeley Booth, solve crimes with often only the fleshless remains of the recently departed from which to draw evidence.

However, forensic anthropologists do more than just “read” bones.

Bringing faces to light
Recently, the bones of a young man were found in the Waitakere Ranges; he had been dead for several decades, with no distinguishing characteristics on or near his remains to assist the Police in identifying him. Keen to settle the mystery, the man’s skull was given to someone with the skill to bring him back to life, through the use of clay. Within months, he had a name, and a family was finally able to lay to rest a brother they had always hoped had run off to Australia. Unfortunately, such stories are a rarity.

Facial reconstruction, says Watt, is very time-consuming as well as costly. It’s also not 100 per cent accurate. “At best,” he says, “you’ve got a 50/50 chance.” In addition to the skull, you also need the lower jaw; and even if you’ve got all the bones, you will be unlikely to know anything about the colour of the person’s hair, whether he or she went grey early, wore glasses, or whether he had a beard. “Not many people are identified,” says Watt. Successes do happen, of course – he’s had some himself – however, the rate is quite low.

On Bones, the character Angela, an artist, utilises software that pinpoints certain features and characteristics, and within moments, it seems, creates a perfect rendition of the person for whom only the bones remain. While software like this does exist, Watt warns that it is based on averages; averages that may become problematic as the world becomes more of a melting pot, and strong ethnic characteristics that once dominated become less obvious. “It’s going to be a growing problem,” he says. “I don’t quite know how they’re going to get around that, unless everyone gets DNA-ed.”

Watt doesn’t just identify the faces of the dead – he also spends quite a lot of time viewing the faces of the living, in an attempt to identify them. Face mapping looks at the bone structure beneath the face – structures that can be identified via passports and closed circuit television (CCTV). In some cases, Watt has been instructed to assist in the identification of the face of alleged murderers captured on CCTV footage.

Last year, for a civil case, he “mapped” the face of an elderly gentleman who claimed he had never been in a particular house, despite the existence of a photo which said different. The man cried foul, and declared that he had been “put” into the photo. Watt managed to obtain a first generation copy of the photo, which he put into Photoshop, enlarged it, and proceeded to study it. “I got reflections out of it, I got shadows out of it… I got such a complex array of data. No one could cut and paste a figure into a thing like that.”

X-ray vision
Watt has also trained in X-ray analysis; an analysis that can provide more than just a key to identifying a person. It can also provide information to assist in identifying the weapon used to create the wounds that may have killed a victim. Years ago, Watt spent time in Britain working on the archaeological burials of Roman Britain. “These were absolutely marvellous for researching wounds,” he says. “You can see the same types of wounds occurring in people today.”

By examining the evidence left behind by the weapon that caused the wound, Watt may be able to identify the type of weapon that was used. “You can get an idea, for example, of how sharp the instrument was or how strong the type of weapon was,” he says. However, there are limitations – while you may be able to identify the type of weapon, you may not be able to identify the actual weapon. In one case he worked on, the victim had been bashed over the head with a large metal mallet: three-quarters of the mallet had become “neatly impressioned” in the hardest part of the victim’s skull. “Once you saw that, it must have been first of all quite a powerful hit by someone who was fairly strong, by a strong, solid weapon on the strongest part of the skull, and when the skull caved in, you were able to detect three corners of that square weapon.” Of course, the analysis won’t tell you the brand of the weapon, who bought it, and where it was bought.

Most of the work Watt has done with X-rays has been to do with “ageing” a person. For example, on one case he worked, there had been “grave concerns” that a particular person had misrepresented his or her age. The hands and wrists were X-rayed – “they’re very good for identifying, because the ends of the bones close and seal off at various different ages” – and Watt, through his analysis, was able to identify that the person had taken 10 years off his or her age. However, like everything else, there are limitations to the science: once a person passes the age of 23 or 24, Watt says it becomes very difficult to age them.

Digging up the evidence
In addition to his anatomical training, Watt has also trained in archaeology. “If there’s one thing that is really valuable, [it’s] having knowledge of how to excavate a burial properly,” he says. He recently took part in a course which taught the participants how to excavate a burial in a way that would assist in uncovering vital evidence. One such piece of evidence could be related to how the burial site was originally constructed – such as the pattern of the shovel used. “Sometimes if you get a nice profile, you can get the outline of the shovel blade, roughly how thick it was, how long it was, [and] how wide it was,” he says.

It is always comforting to discover that the TV programme you so look forward to each week is not a total farce. I will relax now, confident in the knowledge that Bones’s excavation each week of the death scene, and analysis of the bones, is a fairly accurate portrayal of forensic anthropology in the twenty-first century.