Dead Men Do Tell Tales: The Strange and Fascinating Cases of a Forensic Anthropologist
Dead Men Do Tell Tales: The Strange and Fascinating Cases of a Forensic Anthropologist by Dr. William R Maples and Michael Browning was an interesting journey into forensic anthropology. So let’s see what I learned this week.
This book is a little bit of an autobiography, mostly cases he worked on throughout his lifetime because this WAS his life’s work, this is what he did. Dr. Maples was born on August 7, 1937 in Dallas, TX and one of his childhood memories includes seeing autopsy photo’s of Bonnie Parker, of Bonnie and Clyde fame, as Parker was buried in the cemetery that was not too far from Maple’s childhood home. This macabre coincidence impacted Maples enough that he mentioned it in his story.
He graduated from college with a degree in English and a minor in anthropology and while in college he worked as a mortuary assistant, which in the 1950’s and 1960’s meant being a literal ambulance chaser. First mortuary to the scene would get to claim the body for burial purposes.
He briefly attempted a master’s program before dropping that and working as an insurance investigator, which he described as depressing work full of con-artists. After realizing that career path was not for him, he contacted a Dr. McHearn at his alma mater and asked about pursuing a PhD in anthropology under Dr. McHearn and this is ultimately what Maples did.
Part of his studies had him in Africa where he trapped baboons for medical testing, which was a little dark to read, but if you look at the reality that a lot of our medical advances have come about as a result of medical testing, this was and is to a degree necessary. And while some of this was hard to read, it also highlighted Maples own personality and humor. Both his daughters were born in Africa and after he finished his studies, he returned to the States and began to build a practice in Forensic Anthropology.
How do you build a practice in death? By being very good at what you do and becoming know as the best in the field. One person brings in a body and says they need help identifying it and cause of death. You do that well enough to hold up in court, and you start to build a reputation. In 1973 or 74, he got his first cold case where in the police brought him a tiny piece of skull cap and asked him to figure out how she died. They already had a suspect who admitted to the death but was claiming it was accidental. From this tiny fragment of bone, Dr. Maples was able to prove that the woman had had her head bashed in with a hatchet.
He eventually became world renowned as a forensic anthropologist. And that is the short short version of his life. Born in 1937. Spent the 1960s in Africa, 1970s building his practice, wrote the book in 1994 and passed away in 1997. So I don’t know what changes or advances have been happening in the field of forensic anthropology since this book was written. But based on his writing, bones don’t lie. He said that multiple times in the book, and anthropologists today are having a hell of a time with the PC Crowds who have politicized everything. This was a man who believed in science. He did not give way to flights of fancy and he tried very hard to keep the fanciful out of his writing and out of his work.
Dr. Maples empathy for people was clear in this book. That comes across in his writing. But science is science, and bones don’t lie. If you were born a male, your skeleton will reflect that in death, regardless of how you “identify” in life. And gender non-binary is not a medical condition, it’s a psychological one. Seek psychiatric help. The bones will tell the tale. Including, incidentally, if you were on hormone therapy for gender reassignment. Your bones will show you were born male, but were on hormones for gender reassignment. They will still reflect your sex at birth. And thank god for that! Because that gives us a definitive way to identify homicide victims. Without that bone deep truth of gender, hundreds if not thousands of bodies would remain unidentified.
He talks about early pathology and about the human/baboon connection which is why he was in Africa darting baboons for medical testing. He discusses how he built his career and reputation, becoming trusted with both the law enforcement community and the US military, eventually playing a significant role in building a program that helps to identify military remains from Korea and Vietnam. This helps reunite missing soldiers with their families for burial. And he helped solver murders. SO many murders.
The woman with the skull cap, murder across stateliness, like literally going from New Hampshire, to Florida, to Alaska, ultimately ending in murder/suicide. A mass murder where they couldn’t find the weapon but he was able to identify the weapon based on tool marks left on the bones. Because bones don’t lie. He gives detailed information on how bodies decompose. He discusses which conditions are best for preservation and the absolute horror if identifying a dismembered body. He doesn’t mean the body was left exposed and the bones were scattered by animals. He means the body was dismembered by a chain saw dismemberment. He talks about what happens if a suicide by hanging is left undiscovered…your body weight will eventually decapitate your corpse.
When a body is buried, its actually preserved better, because insects need oxygen too. Exposure will ensure decay happens faster. He went into two murders in detail, which you can look up online, the LaBelle Drug Murders in 1981, and the Meeks/Jennings murder/suicide.
He talks about a crematorium, not specifically identified due to non-disclosure agreement, but a woman had been cremated and her ashes returned to the family for interment in the family crypt. A month later, a box with cremains in it is found on the side of the road with the woman’s name on it, resulting in the family suing the crematorium. Dr. Maples was able to prove that the cremains they had in the family vault did belong to the woman. He believes the box found was the end result of a bitter former employee trying to stir up trouble for the crematorium. But that is an insane level of skill. To be able to look at the tiny bits of bone fragment post cremation and prove they belonged to a single person.
Now, there were three very cold cases that he was called on for consultation and Dr. Maples was able to absolutely identify either the body or the cause of death.
1. Don Francisco Pizarro, the conqueror of Peru, was assassinated on June 26, 1541. We know the assassination was a bloody brutal affair based on the reports of the assassins who claimed he was hacked to bits. The body was, at the time, interred, but was moved several times over the intervening 400 years between burial and Dr. Maples involvement in the case, due to either construction projects on the church or earthquakes causing instability, resulting in movement of the body. Then after another earthquake in Peru, a lead lined box turned up with an inscription that said “here is the head of Don Pizarro.” This caused some upset in the church as they already had one body…including head…of Don Pizarro on display, being honored in the cathedral in Peru. So a team, including Dr. Maples, was assembled, and they flew down to determine which was the correct body. And they were able to show that the newly discovered body was the correct Don Pizarro. The one that had been on display was most likely a monk who had inadvertently been given a place of honor. Don Pizarro was reinterred and so was the monk, although the monk went to his own grave.
2. The second cold case was more of a historical curiosity. On July 9, 1850, then president Zachary Taylor died in office, becoming the second sitting president to do so. At the time, it was believed to be food poisoning. At question is was it ACTUAL poisoning…like arsenic maybe? In which case Taylor becomes our first assassinated president. And an author who was writing a work of fiction came across this theory, reached out to Dr. Maples, and asked if arsenic poisoning would remain in the bones. To which he said yes. So many hoops were jumped through, including running down all the remaining descendants of President Taylor, AND getting permission from Congress, all for the food poisoning theory to be proven conclusively. But still, you aren’t called in to autopsy a president if you aren’t damn good at your job.
3. The Romanovs. After the fall of the Soviet Union, a team of forensic experts was assembled and flown to Russia for the purpose of identifying several bodies which were found in an unmarked mass grave, and were believed to be the Romanovs, who had been assassinated in a basement in Ekaterinberg in 1917. There were skeletal remains of at least nine people in the grave. There were eleven members of the family assassinated in 1917, just to keep the story on the level. Successfully and conclusively identified were Czar Nicholas II, Czarina Alexandra, Grand Duchess Tatiana, Grand Duchess Olga, Grand Duchess Marie, family physician Doctor Botkin, the Czars footman Alexei Igorevich Trupp, and the Czarina’s ladies maid Anna Demidova. DNA testing later conclusively proved findings from the bones to be accurate. They were able to conclude with 98.9% accuracy that the bones of the Grand Duchesses Olga, Marie, Tatiana and Czarina Alexandra were related to the royal family in England…which is 100% what you would expect as there is a blood connection there. Missing from the grave are Czarevich Alexei and Grand Duchess Anastasia…curious, right? Historically, those are the two persons people were most likely to claim to be, in the years after the assassination. When Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was in the Gulag’s, he mentions meeting at least one person who claimed that he was the Czarevich Alexei. And of course multiple people have come forward claiming to be the Grand Duchess Anastasia. As far as I know, all the claimants to Anastasia have been definitively disproven. Dr. Maples, as stated before, is not prone to flights of fancy. He believes the bodies are still out there, waiting to be discovered. As of 1994 they had not been found. Google confirms that in 2007 the bodies of Alexei Nikolaevich and Anastasia Nikolaevna were discovered in Russia.
The book was fascinating. The tone sometimes seems cavalier and macabre, but I believe Dr. Maples had genuine empathy for the bones that he handled, and for those left behind. I genuinely enjoyed this book, forensics is a truly fascinating field that is often overlooked by flashier subjects. This book was well written an it was a good story. It touches on the darkness that seems to draw humanity in, but was written with empathy and compassion for the victims of crime that he was just trying to see home. And you get the feeling that the ones he couldn’t identify, haunted him until his own passing in 1997.
This book was originally reviewed on January 2, 2022 on YouTube, but is available now on Rumble and PodBean.
