HE HAND of the Lordwas upon me, and carried me out in the spirit of the Lord, and set me out in the midst of the valley which was full of bones, and caused me to pass them round about; and behold, there were very many in the open valley, and, lo, they were very dry. And he said unto me, “Son of man, can these bones live?”
–Ezekiel 37:1-2
Photograph Illustration by Benjamen Purvis
With a straight face my grandmother used to tell me the tale of a very old woman in Madera, California, who had outlived all of her family and friends and who thus experienced the insufferable dread of having no one to cry over her grave when her time finally came. And so she devoted the rest of her days to teaching her only companion, a small cocker spaniel named Humphrey, two tricks—the first being how to cry, the second, walking the path from her house to the town’s cemetery.
In this way, my grandmother would tell me, the very old woman had someone, Humphrey, to mourn over her bones when she did, in fact, die.
Photograph Illustration by Benjamen Purvis
I was a young boy then, and for many years I did not know whether or not the story was true, and today I realize that it does not matter. For, either way, the pity I felt for this very old woman who had no one to remember her when she died was real, and it was intense. I came to the ironclad conviction that the woman’s tragedy—to be lonely in death—was equal to any in waking, breathing life.
Which is the exact reason a small headline published in a remote section of one of Las Vegas’ daily newspapers on April 11 of this year elicited my instant compassion:
“Human bones found off U.S. 95.”
There were but three laconic paragraphs beneath it, offering the most basic facts available about a set of human remains discovered in the desert. But to me it was the most engrossing story reported in the paper, not just of that day but, perhaps, of the entire year.
It, of course, was not a unique story—neither in this region nor outside of it. Ancient remains of Native Americans are often discovered in Arizona, and littered across the desert of Sonora, Mexico, are the bones of immigrants who died with thoughts of the American dream flooding their heads. Here in Southern Nevada, hikers, construction workers, desert researchers and off-road enthusiasts stumble across bones in the desert with such frequency that when I, after reading the April 11 headline, called the coroner’s office and asked about the case of the bones found in the desert, was asked in a pleasant and matter-of-fact voice:
“Which one?”
“You get a lot of bones cases?” I said.
“We handle several bones cases, absolutely,” the woman from the coroner’s office said. Later, she would send me a report that shows 20 human-bones cases have come into the Clark County coroner’s office in the past year and a half.
I’m inclined to believe others, too, are fascinated by the phenomenon of bones found in the desert. The American mind is inundated with the idea and image of this phenomenon, from being taught in high school T.S. Eliot’s canonical poem “The Waste Land,” from the widespread folklore precept that one doesn’t double cross the mob unless he wants to end up buried in the desert, from popular television shows that have glamorized the science of forensic investigations such as CSI: Crime Scene Investigation.
It appears to me the phenomenon resonates because, for one, it appeals to the glands, much the same way reality television and celebrity gossip stimulate us. But also because it appeals to the imagination, as we all know there is a mysterious air that still surrounds the desert, and bones themselves possess a cabalistic quality that is at once haunting and irresistible. And, because it appeals to the mind—for investigating bones cases, I’ve learned, is like piecing together a puzzle without the picture.
I wish here to illuminate some of the bones found in the desert and the stories compacted within them, to ponder what it is about them that appeals to our soft tissue, to see how and why the police, forensic anthropologists, odontologists and the coroner’s cold-case team—that is, bones investigators—attempt the incredible feat of turning a pile of bones back into a human being.
The Glands
A set of bones was discovered in the desert in Boulder City, five miles south of the Railroad Pass Hotel and Casino, not far off the U.S. 95 highway, in the Eldorado Valley, just before Halloween, in 2003. They belonged to somebody who had been buried.
The desert motorcyclists who found them called the police, who, according to a well-established procedure, taped off the area and commenced an investigation as if it were a crime scene. Then experts from the Clark County coroner’s office, who are experienced in the esoteric matter of bones, arrived, excavated the decomposed remains, determined that they were in fact human and began their own investigation into just whose bones they were.
The answer would not emerge for another three months. In the meantime, the coroner’s office had taken the profile its forensic anthropologist managed to reconstruct from the information she deduced from the skeletal remains and handed it off to the cold-case team, which, along with the police, began the case’s second excavation: that of the tomes of missing-persons reports filed not just in Clark County but throughout world.
One of which came from the parents of a teenage boy named Jared Whaley, who had gone out with fellow Silverado High students he called his friends on October 14, 2003, and who never returned home. It seemed like a potential match.
And, as it turned out, it was. Six boys had taken Whaley out to the desert that night of October 14, and as his evil hour approached they drank beer with him, accused him of using drugs that weren’t his and spending money which didn’t belong to him, attacked him with a stun gun, put a shotgun bullet in his stomach, then one in his head, pummeled his face bloody and unrecognizable, stripped him naked, bagged him and then gave him an unceremonious burial right there in the desert. The boys went on to immolate all of his belongings, including his ID, in an effort to eradicate Jared Whaley’s existence in its entirety from this world.
They were unsuccessful. For a human’s bones are made of tough, hard tissue, and they endure when all else that constitutes a person’s life decays, and at any rate Whaley had parents, and they worried over him when he didn’t come home that night, and every day thereafter, not yet grieving the loss of their child but still retaining hope, an unbearable limbo. Until, that is, the coroner’s office provided resolution in February 2004, when it informed them that its odontologist had just confirmed their son’s dental records matched the teeth of the remains found in the desert in Boulder City.
“The news media did quite a bit on that case,” says Stephanie Fox, a forensic anthropologist who investigated Whaley’s bones and who’s worked dozens of bones cases in the Las Vegas Valley over the past decade. “And that, I think, is why it sticks out in my memory.”
Indeed. From the human remains found in the desert grave sprouted the grisly components of that nonfictional tale—drugs, deceit, despicable violence, death—which, no matter how atrocious, and most likely due to the atrocity, sells papers and compels the public to tune in to the evening news. No doubt about it. It’s the soil of real life from which fictional television programs like Bones (which follows the work of a forensic anthropologist) and CSI sprout, as does their prodigious success. It’s common knowledge that people, by and large, take a perverted pleasure in such salacious tales. Perhaps bones, abandoned to the perdition of the desert, represent this—above all when they’re buried, in the wake of a homicide. Bones as a symbol not just of death, but also the decomposition of morality, both social and individual, and perhaps even a sign of man’s capacity for sensational cruelty.
At least that’s what I was thinking while I overlooked the site in the Eldorado Valley where they discovered Whaley’s bones, oppressed like the rest of the desert by solitude and a prehistoric sterility. It was there that another forgotten episode docked in the shores of my memory, this time from a movie that has attracted the multitudes.
In Casino, Nick Santoro, a character played by Joe Pesci and based on the flesh-and-blood mafia legend Anthony Spilotro, spits one of the movie’s unforgettable monologues:
“A lot of holes in the desert, and a lot of problems are buried in those holes.
“But you gotta do it right. I mean, you gotta have the hole already dug before you show up. Otherwise, you’re talkin’ ’bout a half-hour to 45 minutes worth of diggin’. And who know who’s gonna come along in that time. Pretty soon, you gotta dig a few more holes. You could be there all f--kin’ night.”
According to police reports, the young men who killed Jared Whaley had surveyed the burial place in the desert a week prior to October 14, and that’s when they had dug the hole in which they gave Whaley a disgraceful interment. Moreover, reports would later characterize the young men as a wannabe mob, and stated that one of them had been a voracious collector of popular books and movies on grisly crimes and their perpetrators.
The Imagination
Not all bones cases are homicides, and not all are resolved.
People, in fact, die in the same manner in the desert as they do outside the desert, as far as the coroner is concerned: by accident, nature, suicide, homicide and undetermined means. Some go unidentified; bones left exposed in the desert are often scattered by hungry animals, flash floods, winds, ATV enthusiasts and all the other elements.
“The coroner’s office identifies 99 percent of the people who die in Clark County within 24 hours of their death,” says Clark County Coroner Michael Murphy, an affable and mindful man. “Nine-tenths of that remaining 1 percent are identified within 72 hours. It’s that one-tenth of 1 percent that take a lot of persistence and hard work to identify.”
And those, I think, are the ones that arouse the imagination. For embedded in every set of bones is a story, says Dr. Jennifer Thompson, a physical anthropologist at UNLV who donates her services in forensic anthropology to coroners’ offices. And anonymous bones are like unfinished stories.
Such as the case of the bones reported by a hiker on the first day of 1988, in the open desert area near Lovers’ Cove at Lake Mead. Investigators discovered at the scene, not far from the bones, a receipt from a grocery store in Houston, Texas, which no doubt was a peculiar piece of evidence. Unable to pinpoint an identity, bones investigators began scavenging through police reports from the recreation area and came across one dated three weeks earlier, about a 1973 MGB convertible that had been towed from a nearby parking lot due to apparent abandonment. Inside, the report noted, there were receipts from stores in Houston, Texas, and a suicide note.
After bones investigators exhausted their myriad avenues of scientific investigations, to no success in determining the identity of those human remains, the bones, which had been stored at the coroner’s office, were given a pauper’s burial with a case number and individualized name reflecting their place of discovery: Doe, Lovers’ Cove. The coroner’s cold-case team, whose Internet database reflects more than 40 active bones cases from as far back as 1969, continue to pursue the resolution of the story of the person who came to the desert to commit suicide.
The desert off of Lake Mead Drive in the southeast is a vast flat of indistinguishable terrain, all dirt and rock and all very monotonous, with ashen shrubs that sprout out thin and sparse, giving the landscape the desolate look of a man with a balding scalp. The heat oppresses, and the inexorable wind makes life miserable in the open desert, I would imagine. There is no sound, save for that rushing wind, and there governs a vacuous air that seems to have sucked the life out of everything within its realm. “What branches grow out of this stony rubbish?” Eliot writes in “The Waste Land.” “You cannot say, or guess, for you know only a heap of broken images, where the sun beats, and the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief, and the dry stone no sound of water.”
I came here after reading the Lovers’ Cove case file, and I wondered about the story of the person from Houston who came to this place to commit suicide: Who was it? What were the circumstances? And, above all, why?
Within minutes of idling directionless in the desert, one thing became clear to me: There is a fatal loneliness to this environment, its landscape and climate and ambiance. And the deeper I walked into the desert, the more absolute the solitude became. To the point that there was nothing to do in that barren land but to turn inward, to submerge myself in my own thoughts and reflections, perhaps just as Lovers’ Cove Doe did before his (or her) final hour.
Like many in Las Vegas I am a transplant, and I arrived in this region with an untraceable notion that people come to the desert to die. Renowned anthropologist Karen Ramey Burns calls the missing persons and unidentified dead—the disappeared of the world—one of humanity’s greatest marks of tragedy, and I fancied how many lay about the large and lonely desert in front of me. Just how many suicides, derelicts, unlucky wanderers, unprepared adventurers, homicide victims? The land is vast, monotonous and inhospitable; it’s not as if people search around for human remains as a pastime.
As Eliot wrote, looking upon the desolate land of his epic poem: “I think we are in the rats’ alley, where the dead men lost their bones.”
“Is it possible we have many sets of bones around us, in the desert, that we just don’t know about?” I asked forensic anthropologist Stephanie Fox.
“Yes, certainly,” she said. “There’s a lot of desert out there, and I think we’ll see more construction crews turn up bones as we continue to grow out into the wilderness, as we’ve seen before.”
I said: “How about the remains of the old frontiersmen and the natives before them, could their bones still be around us?”
And she said: “I’ve helped excavate a Native American out here whose bones are estimated to be 1,600 years old.”
The Mind
So how does one investigate bones?
It’s challenging work. A body left exposed in the desert this time of year will decompose, depending on numerous variables inherent in our unique region, in a matter of weeks. First, the body will start to consume itself. The digestive fluids and microorganisms that naturally reside inside a human body will, now deregulated, turn on the body’s soft tissue, the skin and organs and muscles, and they will feast, releasing as a byproduct a gas that both bloats the body and attracts battalions of insatiable little invertebrates that gorge on death. The body mummifies in the aridity. Then bones begun to surface, and soon all the soft tissue around and on and in between them will decompose, leaving a set of disarticulated bones.
That’s when the work of forensic pathologists—those who deal with soft tissue, the investigators seen on shows like CSI: Crime Scene Investigation—concludes, and those who work with hard tissue, forensic anthropologists, are summoned. Take, for example, the time in December of 2000, when a surveying crew reported what appeared to be bones scattered 10 miles north of Interstate 15’s Apex exit. The bones had fallen flat to the ground and had taken on more of a two-dimensional look. They were bleached white, and flaking, due to long exposure to the sun—in this case two to five years, the investigator estimated.
The pelvis bone, which is broader in females than males, indicated that the remains belonged to a man. There was no skull available, which greatly reduced the possibility of deducing his race and eliminated the ability to match his teeth to any dental records available, as odontologists did with Jared Whaley. Without teeth, moreover, the anthropologist was required to focus more on the long bones to determine age, as well as any evidence of the degenerative changes that come with getting older. The unidentified man was determined to be between 25 and 40. And those long bones, measured and compared to known populations, indicated that he was approximately five-foot-six.
Forensic anthropology, the science by which bones are collected and analyzed for medicolegal purposes, is an imprecise science, but it is an arduous and millimetric one, and there are only a few who practice it throughout the state.
“That intellectual pursuit is what keeps me going,” says Fox, who obtained her master’s degree from UNLV in 1996. “Trying to turn the pieces of the puzzle into something is real intriguing—it’s an intellectual endeavor.”
Investigators from the coroner’s cold-case team, and sometimes police, too, when the case calls for them, then take the anthropologist’s profile and run it against the innumerable reports of the disappeared. Not just here in Clark County, but elsewhere too, for Lovers’ Cove Doe proves people from all over die secret deaths in our desert.
“I’ve seen so many skeletal remains,” Fox says, “and so many don’t get identified, that when we do solve the puzzle and identify the remains it really is a feeling of gratification.”
From what I gather, people who deal with forensics as part of their profession do not, for the most part, watch shows like CSI: Crime Scene Investigation—mainly on account of their inaccurate portrayals of the investigative processes. But just as the creators of the prime-time show play off the salacious and fantastical qualities inherent in the occupation with great adroitness, they have also mastered the art of highlighting the intellectual stimulus of forensic investigation—of piecing together a puzzle from the most irreducible scratch. And they have several Emmys to prove it.
The Heart
It turns out that the bones found off U.S. 95, from the short April 11 newspaper article that had moved me, belonged to a California man named Richard Cottonaro, according to the coroner’s office. He was a man of solid stature, six-feet and 195 pounds, with blond hair, a balding crown, blue eyes and a beautiful smile. He would have been 55 years old at the time he was discovered, and he, like most people who disappear, and like most of the people whose bones are discovered in the desert, had a family. They, in fact, filed a missing persons report in August 2006, and one relative of his actually worked for the Boulder City Police Department, which was called to the scene when a man researching desert tortoises in the Eldorado Valley discovered bones in a wash near mile marker 37 at 3 o’clock in the afternoon of April 5, 2007.
Sergeant Vince Albowicz, who supervised the police’s handling of the bones scene, says: “We do everything in our power in a situation like that to be diligent and respectful. Even if it doesn’t look like much, those bones are someone’s mother, son, daughter, and that alone deserves our best efforts.”
Yes, indeed, for I had thought: The unidentified human bones found along Needles Highway, the unidentified bones discovered in the Las Vegas wetlands, the unidentified bones uncovered by State Route 159/160, and all the innumerable bones resting alone in the Southern Nevada desert yet to be revealed—they all, with minimal exceptions, belonged to someone in life. To someone with parents, to someone who went through school making friends and enemies, to someone who perhaps once wrote love letters, to someone who perhaps once had a job and joshed around with his coworkers, to someone, that is, just like you and me.
And so I said to coroner Murphy: “I can’t imagine any salary is commensurate to the work your bones investigators do; that it can be much of a motivation for investigating the bones of someone whose identity has been unknown for decades.”
He said, “There is an expectancy we have in this society that people, when they die, should be able to rest in peace. Everyone, in our opinion, has a right to an appropriate burial. But yes, money won’t do it. It has to be something more human than that. And I see it in the reactions of my investigators when they can provide a family with answers. I can equate it only to hitting a grand slam in the ninth inning when your team’s down by three.”
Her work in anthropology known throughout the world, Ramey Burns says the tragedy of the world’s disappeared is their silence, and when bones investigators are working late into the night it is to accomplish the high artistic goal of articulating an identity for them, people. Or, in Dr. Thompson’s words, “to bring a resolution to their story.”
Science, however, has yet to discover a means to bring closure to the survivors of the deceased. As corner Murphy says, “There’s nothing I can do about the hole left open in the heart by the passing of a loved one.”
But what he can do is reunite the disappeared with those who would cry over their deceased’s bones, if only they knew where to find them. So that no matter the tragedy experienced in life, the flesh-and-blood human being whom those bones once constituted will not have to suffer the tragedy in death that the very old woman of my grandmother’s tale had feared. For, in the end, nobody wants to be forgotten. Even if they are remembered only by their bones.
It’s my thought on the matter, at any rate.
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In essence, there are five stages of decomposition that dead bodies lying
exposed in the desert undergo, according to the landmark (and, in reality,
only) study on the subject, and they are as follows:
1. Fresh (No discoloring, no insect activity.)
2. Early decomposition (Body turns a grayish-green color, or blackish brown; skin slippage; hair loss; body bloats or deflates; the skin takes on a
leathery appearance.)
3. Advanced Decomposition (Flesh sags; the abdominal cavity caves in; there is a loss of internal organs; presence of maggots; outer tissue mummifies;
half of the skeleton or less exposes itself.)
4. Skeletonization (soft tissue decomposes, sometimes with desiccation; more
than half of the skeleton exposes itself; bones appear either greasy or dry.)
5. Extreme decomposition (skeletonization with bleaching; exfoliation; metaphyscal loss (?); cancellous bone exposed in vertebrae and long bones.)
The first four stages can complete their course in two weeks. But there are
too many variables to say at what point (or what day) each stage progresses to the next.
Illustrations by Colleen Wang