Body exhumed, science and hope collide

By Abigail Goldman

Wednesday, Dec. 17, 2008 | 2 a.m.

County coffins are sunk three deep. They’re made of cardboard and reinforced with metal ribs that hold while the walls fold and fall, wet and floppy, onto themselves. Exhumed after 13 years, one casket bobs to the surface like a brick. A brown, airless box, hoisted out of the earth and into a hearse for the ride back to the coroner’s cold metal table.

Jane Doe 95-0050 was second in the stack. She was disinterred at dawn in March, an inverse funeral attended by a strange crowd of non-mourners: detectives, gravediggers and the coroner and his crew, carrying coffee or cameras or evidence tape. They were sleepy and solemn and reverent but thrilled: They thought they could finally figure out who this woman was.

But pulling any unknown body out of the ground walks a line between science and hope. Clark County Coroner Michael Murphy thought he had both on his side when he stood over the yawning plot nine months ago.

•••

A family in Kentucky had called. They thought Jane Doe 95-0050 was one of their own, though it’s hard to know how. The back story is bland as bread: She was discovered in the desert near Nellis Air Force Base in 1995. She had been there long enough to be little more than bones — one year, maybe two, beneath the dirt. She wore black pants, a white bra, a colored shirt and khaki coveralls. She was between 35 and 50 years old.

The only skin remaining was on her feet. It stopped at the ankles with her shoes and socks. She was a skeleton wearing boots.

Inside the coffin, a blue plastic bag. Inside the blue plastic bag, a yellow plastic bag sealed with old coroner’s tape. The zipper was rusted shut. A coroner’s technician spent 16 minutes cutting the bag open, and when he was done, he peeled the plastic back as carefully as he would have a baby’s blanket.

“All yours, T,” he said.

Gary Telgenhoff, the medical examiner, talks into a recorder as he paces in circles. The room is a suite of surgical steel, cold and clean. He speaks through a mask. It’s an operation without scalpels.

He recites his observations: animal activity; incisors chipped and fractured post-mortem; green teeth with fillings gone to rust; an unborn coffin beetle. The femur is waterlogged. The body is musty, the room is musty, the bones are starting to dry.

Then Telgenhoff picks up the skull and can’t resist a little dark humor.

“Everybody should have a label on the side of their head like that.”

It’s written in black pen: 95-0050. The cause of death was unknown in 1995 and it’s unknown today. Telgenhoff makes plans to scrape out whatever is left in the skull for testing.

A technician takes one photo, then another — and 100 more.

•••

The University of North Texas Heath Science Center has a special pre-made box for shipping femurs back and forth. The thigh bone is ideal for DNA extraction, and the center, in Fort Worth, is an ideal place to have DNA extracted. It’s one of the country’s leading authorities.

But not this time.

Jane Doe 95-0050 had been below the desert floor where there was enough ground water to damage the bones. For anyone having a hard time understanding how, in the desert, water ruined a body beyond the scope of science, you’re not alone. This is the first time Murphy has seen anything like it.

He’s not happy about it.

His medical examiners sent bones in that special box all the way to Texas, and the university called asking for more. And then more, and then more. So many shipments that “we’ve almost sent them all we’ve got,” Murphy said.

The Clark County coroner’s staff speaks with scientists in Texas regularly, and the answer is always the same: We still can’t do it. We’re trying, but failing.

“Usually our disappointment comes when there’s not a match,” Murphy said.

But this is almost worse than a non-match. It’s a nothing.

Four families now think they know Jane Doe. All of them live out of state. Their names are all kept confidential. Members of those families have sent scrapings of their cheeks to Texas, for comparative purposes, and now they must wait. But they’ve been forced into practiced patience anyway, having waited for years for word.

Without a breakthrough, Jane Doe 95-0050 will be back in the ground in a matter of weeks. The coroner is waiting for Texas scientists to tell him they have exhausted every single possibility. It’s the second time he has asked them if they are sure they’ve done everything they possibly can, and when the second “yes” comes, back she goes.

•••

Exhumations cost the county about $3,000. Medical exams of the deceased cost about $1,500. The DNA testing is covered by the University of North Texas, which has a federal grant. When there’s credible evidence to suggest that an identification is possible, when a family member comes forward — usually through the coroner’s Web site, which describes cases of unidentified remains going back to the 1960s — they’ll disinter the body.

So far, Murphy’s office has exhumed one body a year since he took over in 2002. He had plans to do one every quarter, but then the government budget died its own small death, and those plans were scrapped. There is no one in line after Jane Doe 95-0050.

And when she’s buried again — since it now seems inevitable — the coroner’s office will hold a small scrap of bone behind. This is so that if a new technique for extracting DNA is developed, they won’t need to exhume the entire body again. This is in case science catches up with hope, or luck.