Morgue (17 page)

The decaying lid of Oswald's casket, likely damaged when gravediggers removed the cracked vault, came completely loose in our hands as we opened it. The smell of moldy dirt, mildewed wood, and rotten flesh emanated from the box in an invisible cloud. The forensic pathologists in the room couldn't ignore it; the civilians pulled back and covered their noses.

The casket's interior was a mess. The inch-thick wooden sides were water-stained and spongy. Some of the moldy fabric lining had fallen loose from the lid, covering the corpse underneath. We gingerly removed the fabric remnants and there he was, lying on a rotten straw mat.

We were finally face-to-face with what was left of the man buried in Lee Harvey Oswald's grave, or at least what appeared to be a man-shaped blob of black cream cheese in a cheap brown suit.

He wore no shoes and his feet had partially skeletonized. The muscles in his legs were long gone and a flimsy parchment of skin had shriveled around his dry bones.

His hands, also skeletal, were crossed politely over his belly in a classic funereal pose. On his left pinkie, two rings stood out amid the grim, fetid decay: a gold wedding band and a smaller ring with a red gem, which Marina confirmed she had asked the funeral home to put on her late husband's hand back in 1963.

Oswald's original embalmer, mortician Paul Groody, was admitted to the exhumation as a crucial link to the original burial. Now he peeked into the casket and studied the man in full, although the corpse's face was unidentifiable. After a few seconds, the now-sixtysomething Groody declared it to be the man he'd carefully embalmed and dressed eighteen years before, then left after being in the room less than a minute.
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Now the dirty work began.

First, we removed the rings on the corpse's finger and gave them to Marina, who stood nearby. Her presence was unusual—most widows don't attend their husbands' exhumations and autopsies—but she didn't seem to be shaken by the macabre nature of the moment. While we worked, she floated among the onlookers, talking softly, and she never broke down in any way. Maybe the degradations of her upbringing in postwar Russia steeled her against death's grotesquerie, or maybe she'd simply gotten hard in the fierce personal storms after the assassination, I don't know. But I saw her as a true survivor.

We four medical examiners encircled the casket as I gently opened the flap of the suit coat and exposed the flesh beneath—or what was left of it. The skin was mostly gone, replaced by grave wax. The ribs had become so brittle that they crumbled at the slightest touch. There was almost no way we'd be able to identify the fatal bullet wound.

Almost all of the abdominal flesh had disintegrated, exposing a wad of embalmer's stuffing that created the illusion of a healthy torso for the funeral, and the beige organ bag, which now held only a small amount of a congealed, tannish paste that had once been his vital organs.

The body and clothing showed no signs of mutilation, although they were blotchy with areas of multicolored mold. We found no maggots or crawling insects, and the body itself was held together mostly by a tissue of dry and decomposed flesh.

At his 1963 autopsy, Lee Harvey Oswald was measured at five-foot-nine, although the Marines had twice listed him as five-foot-eleven (more evidence to conspiracy author Eddowes that Oswald was in fact two different men). So we rolled up the corpse's trouser leg and measured his right tibia, a bone in the lower leg that correlates closely to a human's living height. It was about 38 centimeters, or 15 inches long, suggesting this man had been about 174 centimeters tall, or just under five-foot-nine. That didn't prove we had the right man, but it didn't prove we had the wrong man either.

In the end, we didn't remove the body from the casket, nor did we even turn it over. It was simply too far gone to withstand any handling, and Marina had asked that we not do any more damage to the body than absolutely necessary to identify it. But it wouldn't tell us what we came to find out anyway.

We needed only the head.

Our plan was to X-ray, photograph, and create plaster molds of the corpse's teeth for comparison to two sets of dental X-rays taken during Oswald's Marine Corps days. The first was reportedly taken when Oswald reported to the USMC Recruit Depot in San Diego on October 25, 1956; the second came from a routine military checkup on March 27, 1958.

Those two sets matched, so if our X-rays lined up with them, we'd know we had Lee Harvey Oswald, right?

Not necessarily. First, we had to determine if the dental records from the Marine Corps were authentic and if a handful of obvious inconsistencies in Oswald's charts could be explained. For example, military dentists had reported Oswald was missing a right molar, but in fact it simply had never grown in and it still lay hidden in his jaw, out of the normal X-ray's view. In another case, the dentist's notes simply listed a filling in the wrong tooth. Unfortunately, such charting errors are common in the military, where a soldier might see any number of different doctors and never build a history with any of them.

Our team—including accomplished forensic odontologists Irvin Sopher and James Cottone—studied Oswald's Marine Corps records and was comfortable that the relatively minor blips could be easily explained and that the X-rays were authentic.

Now the messy part.

We could see the teeth and jaw, but Dr. Linda Norton had already determined that we couldn't take our X-rays without removing the head, which was covered with patches of both mummified flesh and grave wax. The forehead ridges were definitely male. The calvarium—that domelike cranium bone sometimes called the brainpan—was mostly free of any soft tissues, but a topknot of brownish-black scalp hair, maybe four inches long, still clung stubbornly to the right front hairline.

With a scalpel, I severed several rotted muscles and dried tendons in the shriveled neck and detached the skull from the spine at the second cervical interspace, the upper neck. With very little force, I pulled the head away from the backbone.

We snipped an embalmer's wire that had held the corpse's mouth closed for the funeral, and the jaw came off in my hand. While Sopher and Cottone stripped away old tissue with hot water and a scrub brush, I examined the skull more closely.

We could clearly see where Dr. Rose had sawed the skull open, but mummified tissue held the skullcap firmly in place, like glue. We decided not to cut or force open the skull and look inside, especially with Marina standing nearby. It would prove nothing. It was empty.

But this disembodied skull contained the keys to other mysteries.

*   *   *

In February 1946, when Lee Harvey Oswald was six years old, his mother took him to Fort Worth's Harris Hospital with a painful, persistent earache. There a doctor diagnosed him with acute mastoiditis, a bad ear infection that had spread to the mastoid process, a bony protrusion just behind his left ear. A new, wartime antibiotic called penicillin still wasn't commonly used in civilian hospitals, so the only other cure was for a doctor to slit the skin behind a child's ear, then scrape or drill an eraser-sized hole in the bone to remove the pus.

Treatments for ear infections in that day make us cringe now. As a child in the 1940s myself, I had a bad middle-ear infection that slowly and excruciatingly accumulated pus. My parents didn't take me to the hospital. Instead, my uncle sat on me while my doctor-father pierced my eardrum with a needle. It hurt like hell for a few seconds but not as bad as a throbbing ear full of pus.

Oswald's surgery went much more smoothly, and he left the hospital four days later with a three-inch scar behind his left ear. In high school, he claimed to have an abnormal eardrum, but when he joined the Marines in 1956 at age seventeen, his physical exam listed the scar but no other physical defects. The scar was noted again when Oswald left the Marines in 1959.

But the scar wasn't noted in Oswald's 1963 autopsy. Dr. Earl Rose listed several smaller scars, but none behind his ear. Years later, British journalist Michael Eddowes took what might have been an ordinary, even understandable, oversight in a run-of-the-mill autopsy and turned it into the smoking gun in the murder of the millennium. In the most analyzed homicide of human history, that little scar was transformed into a big question mark: If a veteran medical examiner didn't see a three-inch scar in Lee Harvey Oswald's autopsy, is it possible a scar-less impostor had killed JFK and been liquidated by Jack Ruby in a plot of Machiavellian proportions?

Well, conspiracy theories always seem more credible in books and movies than in real life.

As we examined the skull, the small hole in the left mastoid process leapt out. Its man-made edges were rounded and smooth, healed but not natural. It was an old lesion that couldn't be faked. Our dead man and Lee Harvey Oswald had both undergone a mastoidectomy in the distant past.

So we had another strong point of identification, although many World War II–era kids bore the same scar. Again, the evidence didn't rule out the possibility we were holding Lee Harvey Oswald's head in our hands.

The final proof would come from his own mouth.

*   *   *

America's first forensic dentist was Paul Revere.

Yes, the quintessential patriot was not only a master silversmith but also an amateur dentist who crafted special working dentures from animal teeth, then wired them into the toothless mouths of fellow Bostonians. When the Revolutionary War broke out in 1776, Revere's friend Dr. Joseph Warren was shot in the face at the Battle of Bunker Hill by a musket ball and couldn't be identified. Months after Warren was buried in a mass grave with many of the other 114 dead rebels, his brothers searched for him. But which of the decaying corpses was he?

Revere was able to identify his friend's body from a set of unique ivory dentures he'd made for Warren from a hippopotamus tusk just a year before. Warren got a hero's funeral and American forensic odontology was born.

Two hundred years later, in 1981, forensic dentistry had blossomed into an indispensable science. Because teeth are more resistant to destruction and decay than bones or flesh, and because they can exhibit unique features, they can help us identify people reliably in difficult conditions. Simply put, forensic odontologists identify the dead by their teeth and, in the case of bite marks, they can sometimes tell who (or what) did the biting.

Forensic dentistry played a key role in confirming that rumors of Adolf Hitler's survival were greatly exaggerated, in proving that serial killer Ted Bundy had bitten one of his victims, and in identifying victims of mass disasters such as the 9/11 World Trade Center bombing, the Branch Davidian fire in Waco, and the 1975 crash of Eastern Flight 66 at New York's JFK airport, which killed 113 people—the biggest catastrophe in my father's career as Chief Medical Examiner for New York City.

Now we were using it to determine if the man buried in reputed assassin Lee Harvey Oswald's grave was in fact Lee Harvey Oswald.

But this wouldn't be the first time forensic dentistry helped to identify the remains of a presidential assassin.

After shooting President Lincoln on April 14, 1865, John Wilkes Booth was run to ground on a Virginia farm, where he was killed by US soldiers—although, as with Oswald, nineteenth-century conspiracy theorists claimed it wasn't Booth but a look-alike who died that night. Nevertheless, Booth's own dentist positively identified the remains by prying open his mouth to find a distinctive jaw formation and two gold fillings he'd recently inserted.

In 1869, Booth's reputed corpse was disinterred from an unmarked grave on a Washington military post and returned to his family. At that time, Booth's brother examined the body closely—including “a peculiarly plugged tooth”—and told reporters that it was undoubtedly John Wilkes Booth.

Booth was laid to rest in his family's Baltimore plot, but the conspiracy theories weren't. To this day, many people believe Booth escaped justice only to die penniless in an Oklahoma hotel and to become a famous sideshow mummy. We knew that no matter who we found buried in Lee Harvey Oswald's grave, the conspiracy theories would never die. They'd just mutate.

Luckily, we had two topflight “tooth men” on our team. My old Baltimore colleague Dr. Irvin Sopher, now the Chief Medical Examiner for West Virginia, was actually a dentist as well as a medical doctor, and he had written a highly regarded textbook on forensic dentistry. Dr. James Cottone was a retired Navy dentist who headed the forensic odontology section of the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio (and would later work for nine years identifying unknown soldiers' remains at the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command's forensic labs in Hawaii).

The normal human mouth is full of unique traits. Each of our normal complement of thirty-two teeth has five distinct surfaces, all with well-defined natural traits like pits, crevices, bumps, and facades. Our teeth can grow at angles or slightly rotate in their sockets. Life adds its own damage, and dentists leave obvious traces when they pull, drill, fill, and straighten teeth. Forensic dentists can see telltale similarities in fragments of teeth as well as whole jaws.

We'd outfitted our Baylor lab with everything we'd need to make molds of the corpse's upper and lower jaws, photograph them, then shoot and develop X-ray films to compare against the Marine Corps' images.

Sopher and Cottone dove into the work. They immediately saw several unusual and distinctive dental traits in the corpse's mouth.

First, almost none of Oswald's teeth lined up. He had a bilateral crossbite, a relatively rare misalignment of his front and back teeth typically seen in fewer than three of every hundred people.

Second, his top two front teeth were slightly rotated away from each other, rather than growing truly side by side, like planks in a fence.

Third, his upper right canine, or eyetooth, displayed a prominent cusp known as a tubercle, not ordinarily seen on the front of a normal tooth.