Bugged Page 14

  “If the insects we study didn’t exist,” Jonathan tells me, “the world would be covered in dead things.”

  But this wriggling handful doesn’t push my yuck-ometer needle into the red. There’s a darker side to FLIES.

  What I have not yet mentioned about doctors Cammack and Tomberlin is that they’re both well versed in mediocriminal entomology. This means that should you be murdered or abandoned dead—let’s just hope not—insects are your best friends. Forensic pathologists can derive time-of-death (TOD) estimates within 24 to 36 hours of finding a corpse. After 72 hours? You’ll need to contact a forensic entomologist. And they are most definitely scarce. The total number of board-certified experts in the United States can barely fill a freight elevator.

  On average, Jeff Tomberlin tackles about 10 murder cases a year. Tomberlin estimates TOD based on specimen vials, an autopsy transcript, crime scene photos and video, or weather station data. When I told him about my urge to examine the forensic marrow of that interplay of bugs that feed on our carrion—our putrefying flesh—he pointed me toward Michelle Sanford, who works a couple miles away from FLIES in Houston. Sanford is the world’s first and only full-time forensic entomologist, working on an average of 60 cases a year.

  Understandably, Jeff’s lips are sealed on case details. But as we walk back to FLIES from a bar, he leaves me with an amazing story. One day Jeff was walking outside … “And this man came up, shook my hand and said, ‘Thank you.’” His details of the run-in are vague for an obvious reason: Jeff had investigated the murder the man was accused of—strangling his mother in a meth-addled rage with an electrical cord.

  * * *

  People wonder where you go when you die. Heaven’s pearly gates? Hell’s fiery depths? Detroit?

  But the right answer is simpler: you are masticated by maggots and play host to numerous insects. It’s not as bad as it sounds. While the worms certainly do crawl in, they also crawl out. Bellies full, they pump that nutrition back into the world. When all of the teenage angst, collegiate self-discovery, 9-to-5 office time, soccer practices, retirement parties, and rollicking times in the old age home are done, the big payoff of life is to become a pulsating worm farm.

  As the famed forensic entomologist Zakaria Erzinçlioglu4 wrote in his memoir Maggots, Murder, and Men: “Viewed dispassionately, a dead human body is a magnificent and highly nutritious resource.”

  I decided that if I’m going to meet a woman who has “maggot collecting” in her full-time job description, then I’d like to see the source firsthand. When I asked Jeff Tomberlin why Texas is such a great zone to study decomposition, he said it’s likely the warmth that lingers 10 months out of the year. That’s why, just after winter, I’m standing in an outdoor body farm, staring as a throng of flies5 emerge and return to the slit of a cadaver’s dried mouth like bees to a hive.

  Weather: 81 degrees Fahrenheit with a calm breeze.

  “She’s still pretty fresh,” says Lauren Meckel, my graduate student host. “But you can see the flies are attracted to her.” I’ve driven 130 miles southeast of Texas A&M to a 26-acre plot of land in San Marcos called the Forensic Anthropology Research Facility (FARF). Here I’ll witness insects working overtime. The female cadaver before us was placed only two days before. Now she’s mannequin smooth, or “marbled,” and less recognizable. Lauren tells me the speckled, “sawdust”-looking schmutz on her face are actually fly eggs.

  Bugs erode organic matter beyond recognition, dissolving 60 percent of a cadaver’s mass in one week, and can munch away at such speed as to heat a corpse to 122 degrees. A maggot’s predictable nature can narrow a missing person’s timeline well enough to correlate with other existing evidence to help identify them—unmarred face or not. The species give validity to the nursery rhyme “Who Killed Cock Robin?”: “Who saw him die? I, said the fly, with my little eye, I saw him die.”

  Lauren rattles off a list of some of the crawlies she’s seen at FARF: “We get blowflies, cheese skippers, ham beetles, gnats, flea beetles, spider mites, soldier flies, dermestid beetles, ants, big black beetles with hooks on them, butterflies who really like decomposition, millipedes, stink bugs…” All of which are important characters in forensic entomology.

  Parisian army vet and morgue worker J. P. Mégnin expanded the methodology. His 1894 book La faune des cadavres: Application l’entomologie a la medicine legale (The Wildlife of Corpses: The Application of Entomology to the Coroner’s Office) was a landmark in the growth of Canadian and US medicocriminal entomology. It documents nine stages of decomposition with the succession of the first insect responders to a dead body. Succession on a corpse, thoroughly unveiled in the mid-1960s by North Carolina graduate Jerry Payne, is the process where bug colonization attracts new organisms. His carrion work on baby pigs found that 422 arthropod species can usher you forward after death.

  Corpse infestation can resemble a nightclub, with early guests, VIP rooms, and last call drinks. The first to show are fly families Calliphoridae and Sarcophagidae, which sniff out bodies from four miles or more. (In South Africa, in 1981, researcher L. E. O. Braack marked flies and found that they could track carrion from a distance of 40 miles.) Female blowflies lay eggs in a fresh body within 30 minutes of finding it. Days after bodily colonization has begun, flesh flies get a leg up by depositing maggots already developed from eggs. Given that the head’s nostrils, mouth, and eyes are good places to lay eggs, matured maggots traditionally liquefy the brain first (or enter through bullet holes in homicide cases) and stew in the cranial vaults and nasal cavities as well as genitals (lending to the idiom of having bugs up one’s butt).6 Discarded or dead pupa shells (depending on outside temperature) clue in entomologists to the developmental stages and thus a more accurate estimate of TOD.

  Over the next five months as the body dries, and depending on the season, necrophage predators run the show. Silphids, or burying beetles, detect the foul stench of skatole from our degrading, leaky intestines. Ideally, these carrion beetles will deposit larvae into a topsoil chamber near the body, regurgitating dehydrated flesh or cartilage into their offspring’s mouth. Moths and beetles typically stay once the party is over and assist with additional cleanup.

  The guests at the second body we observe have basically vacated. On one rib lies a lone cheese skipper maggot, a species prone to jumping, so I distance myself.7 “Watch out for the hair mat,” Lauren warns.

  I look at the ground at a deflated clump of hair. “Is that his toupee?”

  It’s his scalp. Maggots, as we’ve learned, work from the inside out. Removing fine layers of dermis, like this cadaver’s hair, is part of that. Originally, I’d thought the bodies at FARF were wearing latex gloves before I noticed the busy bugs behind their translucent skin. Nerves kicked my perspiration into high gear. I can’t tell if the smell is me or the dead bodies.

  Lauren lifts the chicken-wire cage protecting a male cadaver from furry mammals. The bearded fellow has the gaping yawn of an opera singer, eroded further by decay with a gullet of maggots. Larvae of various instars (of which there are three larvae growth stages) crawl over one another. My host leans over the body. “Looks like there was some scavenging activity on the arms, so all that tissue is gone,” she says. In its place the bicep has been carved out into a rugged bowl of churning rot. Maggots break the black liquid surface like excited dolphins. The skin has a tanned glaze you’d see on a golden pig at a Hawaiian luau. The visit ends after we approach the next body (as the gentle breeze dies down). Leaking from the left side of the cadaver is “a lot of purge,” frothing with maggots. I stare at the chunky, enamel pool. It’s going to be awhile before I can enjoy a creamy risotto again.

  As we head out, Lauren mentions being relieved there were no cockroaches. Wait, what? I imagine these pools of rot versus the little guys from Joe’s Apartment. “I hate even saying the word,” she says.

  So, I ask, “Is it because they’re greasy?”

  “Eww!—ugh,” she cringes.

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sp; I do a quick scan of the decaying backdrop surrounding us. “Was there an incident that happened in your childhood—”

  “Blech,” she says. “One fell into my bathtub. That was traumatic.” Should Lauren pursue a career as a crime scene investigator, I hope she’ll bring a brown paper bag to breathe into, as a cockroach—though typically not collected for forensic entomologists—could be telling in other parts of the investigation, like disproving alibis. For instance, in one case from the mid-1980s, a grasshopper with a missing leg was unorthodoxly collected and marked as evidence. When said broken leg was found in the jeans cuff of the suspect, though, it was enough to show he was at the murder scene.

  But proving insects’ importance in criminal investigations took convincing. When forensic entomologist Lee Goff became involved with the study in 1983, bugs—these dwellers in our body’s “temporary microhabitat”—were discounted in investigations. “Insects were not then regarded as a significant source of information by most medical examiners … crime scene investigators or lawyers,” he writes in A Fly for the Prosecution. Public interest in the field is attributed to Bernard Greenberg, an outlier since the 1950s. He refers to bugs as “winged bloodhounds.” And the small faction of forensic entomologists who understood their use, like Goff, called themselves “The Dirty Dozen.” Case after case, insects demonstrated their cunning as detectives, missing only a downturned fedora and a .38 Special. Since the ’80s, Goff has worked on over 300 cases, even consulting with TV producers on CSI. But bugs’ dramatic role in helping sniff out murderers started centuries before.

  A death scene investigator training manual written by Chinese judicial administrator Sung Tz’u in 1235 CE documents a murder where flies essentially fingered the suspect. A farmer had been decapitated, so locals were lined up to present their sickles to authorities. When flies gravitated toward the murderer’s sickle, he ’fessed up. It’s hard to believe; so in an effort to prove the story’s legitimacy, the scenario was recently re-created by a student at Sam Houston State University using blood cleaned from a knife. According to one professor, when the tampered blade was set out among normal ones, the flies landed on it within “seconds.”

  Modern forensic entomology helped solve a murder for the first time in 1850, writes Gail Anderson. During house renovations, a mummified baby’s body was uncovered behind a chimney mantelpiece in a Paris residence occupied by four families in three years. All of them were considered suspects. It took the deduction of medical doctor and naturalist Marcel Bergeret to peg a rough TOD estimate. So he performed an autopsy and found the empty puparia of flesh fly larvae in several cavities of the full-term baby, which were laid, he concluded, shortly after its death in 1848. Normally several dozen species would occupy a fresh body. His discovery absolved three families who lived there and convicted the previous owners.

  But the discipline was practically sidelined until a Chicago double murder occurred in 1976. “Father of forensic entomology” Bernard Greenberg’s testimony on blowflies found at the crime scene narrowed the TOD window and helped put away the accused men. Today, “headline homicide cases,” writes Greenberg, typically have two expert entomologists who testify for the prosecution and defense, delivering “minutely scrutinized” hypotheses derived from their evidence.

  Bug forensics helped get Casey Anthony off the hook. Two professionals created a true standstill with the arguments they made, which can sometimes promote scientific advancement. In 2011, NAFEA member8 Timothy Huntington testified for the defense and veteran entomologist Neal Haskell testified for the prosecution. The question was whether Casey had asphyxiated her two-year-old daughter Caylee in the trunk of her car or if the girl had simply drowned in a pool. Both men agreed on the trunk’s putrid smell, but clashed on its origins. Haskell found that the larval stage of the discovered maggots matched theories that a body had been stashed for three to five days. Huntington, however, believed the sparse organic materials in the trunk’s garbage bag attracted them, and that a body—based on his past experiments on decomposing pigs in car trunks—would’ve attracted thousands of insects. “Based on the findings,” testified Huntington, “there’s no reason to believe there was ever a body in the trunk.”

  Interestingly enough, Houston’s Michelle Sanford is working side by side with a DNA analyst on a project that, if available during Anthony’s trial, might have changed the result.

  * * *

  Whether we’re bug infested or not, there’s a stop most of us will make on the way to the cemetery, and it’s where this twenty-first-century DNA analysis is being tested. The morgue at Harris County’s Institute of Forensic Sciences bears an odd resemblance to an auto repair shop. There’s a funny smell of burnt electrical circuits and chemicals and the sound of an occasional buzz saw (cutting through bone). And if you look through the smudged windows in the hallway, you’ll see a series of corpses being disemboweled. Michelle Sanford does a different type of diagnosis.

  Until 2013, chances are the insects colonizing the dead might’ve been tossed in the trash or “smashed” by the autopsy doctors. But then Sanford, who was taught by Texas A&M’s Jeff Tomberlin, joined and slowly began to prove her worth. Insects have answers too. “In the beginning it was like, ‘Please collect something. Please,’” she says about the first responders to a scene. Now the forensic specialists are taking plenty of bugs into consideration. (One time Tomberlin comically had a roly-poly sent along as evidence instead of the bevy of maggots.) After a couple of training sessions, people in the medical examiner’s office have become more aware of what insects to collect. In a sense, Sanford is a prototype for a new trend in the field since she works full time on cases. As of 2016, she’s worked on over 300 deaths—both homicides and natural causes. As the number of these specialists continues to grow, they may become a standard in investigations. “I’ve always had an interest in solving problems with insects,” she says, rarely speaking above a loud whisper. “Forensic entomology, on a smaller scale, is very much like that.”

  Read an entomologist’s extensive case notes, and you’ll find a meticulous fiend at work. Notes may cross-reference National Weather Service meteorological data with indoor temperatures; measure maggot samples within millimeter decimals; and re-create environmental conditions with raw meat (usually pork dressed in clothes given pigs’ hairless resemblance to us).

  I pore over some of Sanford’s consultation cases. The first is about a woman in a “5th wheel trailer” who died of morbid obesity. Judging from the instar size of bronze bottle fly larvae, Sanford estimated 72 hours had passed since the body’s discovery and the woman’s unfortunate demise with lines such as “additional maggots were observed on the couch cushions where purge fluids had collected under the body.” Another file tells of a septuagenarian attacked by honeybees while doing yard work. Sanford mentions the removal of 20 stingers from the poor guy. At the end of each report there are notes on raising pet maggots from the strangest origins to help identify the species and find out how old they were: sheep blowflies “reared from [the] couch [and] ashtray,” and flesh flies “reared from [the] nose.”

  Later, Sanford shows photos from the interior of a deceased hoarder’s house. “It’s full of insect attractants,” she recalls. “They didn’t want us walking on the second floor because they think we’d fall through.” Not only can insects creep indoors, but Sanford’s seen them in offices on the seventh floor. (Actually, a 2015 research paper from Malaysia recorded such high-rise colonization, finding evidence that insects reached one body 11 stories up.) The opposite of this is true with coffin flies, which dig up to a foot beneath soil to reach dead things. Next are images of the bald head belonging to the old man attacked by bees. The next slide shows a murder victim: a bullet wound springing forth blood-glistened maggots.

  None of this made it to Sanford’s Career Day presentation at Carter Lomax Middle School in Pasadena, Texas. Instead, she showed photos of a turkey she used for studying decomposition at Texas A&M. A couple of stud
ents loved the presentation enough to consider joining the field. An elementary school student once wrote her a thank-you note: “My favorite part was when you told us that when a person dies, flies can lay their eggs inside.” Below her comment was a crayon drawing of orange maggots encircling a fly. Jeff Tomberlin took an entomology course while working at a funeral home. Robert Hall told the Los Angeles Times in 1989: “It requires someone who’s just a little bit odd to begin with.”

  It helps in making odd requests, say, to research toxicological extracts9 taken from maggots. In what Lee Goff calls entomotoxicology, drugs affect the developmental stages of maggots ingesting cocaine- or heroin-dosed bodies. To test how high the worms got and if it sped pupation, Goff acquired lethal amounts of cocaine in 1987 with the help of a Hawaiian coroner in order to drug rabbits. The scientists kept tranquilizer darts nearby should anxiety overwhelm the coked-out critters. However, the varmints ODed before the tranquilizer guns were unholstered. Goff’s maggot research then showed that larvae grew much more rapidly when aided by cocaine. Still, although they obtained pupation earlier, the coke maggots reached adulthood concurrently with the control group.

  Molecular DNA extraction in larvae or windowpane specks (that’s fly poop and vomit) also provide potential evidence. Checking the gut content, say, of the phorid fly maggots in 2008’s Casey Anthony case might’ve supplied the DNA evidence to separate food from garbage versus human flesh and convict Caylee’s murder suspects.

  Working with Sanford on this novel technique at the Harris County morgue is DNA analyst Chaquettea Felton. “We’ve been playing with different techniques,” Felton tells me, “like using an insulin needle to inject into the head of the maggot and take out whatever we can.” She and Sanford have also tried crushing the maggots for extraction or dissecting their guts. “Cutting the crap out [of them] works pretty well,” Felton clarifies. “But using the needle to suck it out actually works better. So once we get the insides out,” she says, giggling, “we do a pretreatment.” Afterward she purifies the extracted sample and amplifies the DNA through a polymerase chain reaction to make copies. By performing what’s called a capillary electrophoresis, Felton can separate a human profile from the sample.