The Skeleton In The Closet

JULY 28, 2016 - jacksongov.org (Also responsible for photographs)

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Contact Us

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If you have information that can help identify "the skeleton in the closet" or help resolve unclaimed body cases, notify the Jackson County Medical Examiner's Investigations Division:
 

816-881-6600 or investigationsMEO@jacksongov.org

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“I’ll tell you all about my skeleton in the closet.” 

Now that she has your full attention, Diane Peterson will pause for effect. What well-guarded secret is she about to divulge?

Actually, Dr. Peterson isn’t speaking metaphorically. She is being quite literal.  

And the Jackson County Chief Medical Examiner doesn’t yet know the one secret this skeleton — that was, indeed, found in a closet — has been keeping the last 4½ years. 

Who was this man?
 

No Escaping The Smoke

Two days into 2012, the Kansas City Fire Department fought a blaze that gutted a vacant house on Wabash Avenue in the urban core. The next day the house’s windows and doors were boarded up, essentially creating a tomb that would remain sealed more than two months — until individuals who acquired the property with the intention of rehabbing it went back inside to start cleaning the debris. On March 26, they made the shocking discovery inside one of the closets.

Entangled in what appeared to be a pile of charred clothing were the skeletal remains of what Dr. Michael Finnegan, an anthropology consultant, determined was an African American man. Finnegan estimated the man's height at between 5-foot-5 and 5-9, his age range 54 to 65 or older.

Although she needn’t consult her notes too often to refresh her memory about this particular case, assigned to her when she was a Deputy Medical Examiner, Peterson glances at the file briefly. “His clothing being slightly burnt told me he was there when the fire happened.” (And he did not somehow enter the property, then die sometime after Jan. 3.)

Peterson ruled carbon monoxide toxicity (in layman terms “smoke inhalation”) caused the man’s demise. Concluding his death was an accident required some deductive reasoning. 

A neighbor reported the house on Wabash had been empty at least two years, yet had not always gone unoccupied. Homeless people frequently sought shelter in the abandoned dwelling.

The fire was intentionally set — not maliciously but likely out of what would tragically be the man’s fatal attempt to stay warm. To ward off the cold, in a house disconnected from utilities, squatters will frequently risk starting what will hopefully stay a very small, contained fire. (The temperature Jan. 2, 2012, dipped to 23°.)

This fire, ignited near a mattress, got out of control.

“I believe,” Peterson says, “the fire prevented this man from getting out of the room, so he went into the closet to try and avoid the flames. He couldn’t get away from the smoke, though.”

How did the corpse go undetected during the fire investigation?

Shaun Hachinsky, the Deputy Chief Investigator for the Jackson County ME’s Office, shrugs. He won’t hazard a guess, saying, “It was supposed to be a vacant house.”

Fire did not entirely consume the body leaving only the bones behind. Decomposition — the breakdown of organic materials — did. 

And the remains, Peterson says, were not yet 100 percent skeletonized. “Some tissue was still present.”
 

How Fast You Decompose Varies

That tissue immediately proved the man had not been dead years. Paradoxically, full decomposition need not take months.

When Peterson explains how decomposition rates vary, she speaks in the second person, which can send a shiver down your spine: “It doesn’t take years for you to skeletonize — that’s a common misconception. How fast you become a skeleton depends on the environment in which you died, what natural diseases you might have had, how big a person you were, what you were wearing.”

The man in the closet wore multiple coats and was also exposed to the heat from the fire.

“With heat you get bacteria,” Peterson continues, “so decomposition doesn’t take many months. In this case it was only a couple of months to get to near full skeletonization.” 

She has seen even faster decomps. During her fellowship in Birmingham, Alabama, a man went missing about six weeks before his skeleton was found. Peterson sighs. “It was summer in Alabama.”
 

The Skull In The Street

The skeleton in the closet was a rare find.

“We don’t get many complete skeletons like this,” notes Tom Hensley, the Jackson County ME’s Chief of Operations and Investigations. “Sometimes, all that is left is a bone here or there. We do get a lot of skulls.”

This sparks some “shop talk” between Hensley and his Deputy Chief, Hachinsky. 

First, Hachinksy talks about a skull—or was it skulls?—being retrieved from the basement of a closed funeral home. Then Hensley remembers a couple moving into their new house and rummaging through the attic. “They found a skull.”

Hachinsky can top that story. He once picked up a skull found lying on a street in Independence.

“It was just sitting there in the gutter,” he says, “and it had been there quite a while because it’s was around Halloween time, four or five years ago. Everyone thought it was a decoration.”

Hachinsky suspects the skull was from a “private collection” and had, indeed, been used as an especially ghoulish Halloween ornament. Peterson jumps in and says, “We’ve had people buy skulls down in Mexico.”
 

The Skeleton Key

The skull is often the key — the true skeleton key — to unlocking the mystery of who was he?

The skull, alone, can indicate whether the person in question was male or female. A man’s forehead will have a more pronounced eyebrow ridge. (A quick examination of the pelvic bones, if available, is the most precise means for determining gender.) The skull is also vital to deduce ethnicity based on cheek and nasal bone structures.

Furthermore, anyone who has watched crime procedurals on TV — from Quincy, M.E. in the 1970s to NCIS today — knows the skull houses what has to be the most common way to ID a skeleton. The teeth. Just check the dental records.

If not dental records, there’s always DNA. Identifications can even be made when all that is left is a single tooth — no skull, nothing else. 

“We can get DNA from a tooth,” points out Peterson. “If we’ve got just one bone, we can extract DNA from the marrow.”

“But,” stresses Hachinsky, “you have to have dental and DNA records somewhere to match up with.”
 

Waiting For A Hit

Upon seeing a surgical plate screwed into the jawbone, Peterson thought, if nothing else, that would lead to identifying the skeleton in the closet (read 'Another Dead End').  That proved, she says, no pun intended, “to be a dead end.” 

Old fashioned investigative work netted no viable leads. ME investigators visited homeless camps and shelters, asking if any man matching this description — African American, 54 to 65 years old (maybe older), between 5-5 and 5-9 — had disappeared shortly after New Year’s Day 2012. 

“All we can really do now is wait,” Hensley says. “Wait for a hit.”

The best hope of obtaining the man’s name is probably NamUs. The Jackson County ME’s Office has loaded his crucial information, including the dental records and DNA code from the skeleton, into the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System. The U.S. Department of Justice’s database automatically scans all records twice a day, looking for “hits,” matches in the records medical examiners across the nation have put into the system with data — DNA, dental records, missing person reports, etc. — that law enforcement agencies have inputted.

“There are two sides to this,” Peterson says. “We can put the DNA code in. We can put in the dental records we developed from his skull. We can put in our anthropology information. What we are waiting for is for someone else on the other side — the missing person’s side — to put into NamUs the data that will give us a match.”

Hensley puts it succinctly: “Medical examiners have bodies without identifications; someone else has the person’s name but doesn’t know what has become of their body.”
 

Skulls Will Roll

It’s a ghastly thought, but a simple fact of nature. A dead body, if not promptly discovered, will attract animals. 

The smallest critters, ants and flies, can get indoors. Hachinsky saw “clears signs of multi-generations of insects” when he entered an apartment with the lone occupant being — other than the bugs — a weeks-old cadaver. Neighbors had noticed a foul smell, but, in Peterson’s words, “odor alone doesn’t always prompt immediate action.”

Most skeletal remains are discovered outside. Someone may literally trip over a femur or skull. Once ligaments have fully decayed, there’s no connective tissue left to keep the skeleton intact and prevent scavenging animals from scattering the bones.

“Your bones are sort of free to move about as nature might seem fit to move them, whether by animal or rain water,” says Peterson. 

She tries to put this delicately: “The skull... it’s round. It rolls. The skull Shaun picked up in the gutter might have been washed away by the rain.”

That’s why, according to Hensley, “we often only wind up with the skull or a bone here and there.” And that’s why most cases involving only a partial skeleton are officially declared “undetermined.”

“We can’t determine the cause of the death,” Peterson says, “if all we have is a skull and there’s no sign of injury to it.”

What the ME’s Office will do, she says, is everything in its power to put a name with the skull, even if it means waiting decades.
 

More Skeletons In The Closet

There are more skeletons in the closet. Each in its separate box. Or boxes. 

“We do store our unidentified skeletal remains in a closet,” Hensley says. 

Unable to suppress a quick ironic laugh over the skeleton from the house fire on Wabash Avenue still being in a closet — the skull in one box, the rest of the bones in a separate box — Hensley adds, “It’s hard to say how many bodies we have when all we’ve got is bones. I’d say right now we’ve got about a dozen and a half case files.”

“We’ve got bones that go back at least to the 1980s. We’ll hold on to them until their identified,” declares Peterson, “however long it takes.”

Then she states a simple fact: “They don’t take up that much space.”

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