The human hand is an amazing tool. Twenty-seven bones in it and the wrist connect to rope-like tendons pushed and pulled by 19 muscles, so complex that even the banality of thumb twiddling is a symphony of incomparable precision. Without hands to connect to the outer world, our large brains are mostly pointless. Without hands to carry out what the mind conceives, we'd have been another dead end in the long slog of evolution. While it's true that no hand is the same, they are much more than the biological equal of the snowflake. Try a blizzard's worth of flakes. If eyes are windows to the soul, hands are our life stories. From the infant touching dad's face for reassurance to the adolescent's mastery of the joystick to the knuckle-whitening pressures of adulthood, a life is etched in the scars and callous and lines of the hand. Our hands are nothing less than our autobiographies.
So what are we to make of the hand in this Polaroid tucked inside a case folder at the Clark County Coroner's Office? This muddy-brown stump sticking out of the side of a shallow backyard hole like some broken pipe? And what of the next picture, when the dirt is dug and lifted and brushed away to reveal the cocooned body? Too much like the dust to tell how he died, too eaten by the elements to fingerprint. What we do have is a swatch of back, a patch of skin on the nape of the neck, a plot of skin on the arm, much of this adorned with macabre tattoos.
The legs are ... wrong. Too short. They end at the knee. A matter of expediency, it seems. Dig the hole too short, then shorten the body to make it fit. Eventually, the alleged killer eventually confesses. The cause of death was strangulation. The motive is moot. Another Vegas murder mystery solved. The mystery of that life, though, that's another story.
Because somewhere out there, presumably, is a mother or a brother or lost love or sister or father of the man in the shallow backyard grave, people who might remember a caress or a graduation pat on the back. Where are they? How can they have lost track of this man so thoroughly? Can you even make up a story that ends with a life erased so completely, to the point where not even a hand or a lingering tattoo conjures life memories?
So maybe what we are to make of the hand, that darkened, bruised, printless stump in the Polaroid—an emblem of loss, of isolation, of lostness.
"Homeowner charged with murder after police find body in back yard."
"Backyard Body: Dead man's identity remains a mystery."
I reread the headlines. Dead as many as three years and—and what? Forgotten? Where are his people? Why isn't a parent or sister or wife calling every state, every county, every tiny burg, trying to track down that lost loved one? For that matter, how can you lose a loved one? How does it happen? Interviews with several families who learned the fate of a family member through an investigator for the Clark County Coroner's Office revealed one uneasy reality: It happens far more easily than you'd expect. Sometimes it's years before the loss is even realized. Years more before it's accepted.
At least, that's how it happened with us.
• • •
From the Coroner's Website
Unidentified: Hispanic Female. Discovered in: North Las Vegas, NV. Date found: 09/19/95. Cause of death: Homicide ... The dismembered lower torso, both legs and head were found at a Silver State Recycling facility in North Las Vegas, in Las Vegas, NV. Trash surrounding the body parts indicated the body may have come from southeast Las Vegas. The legs were found in a Mauve American Tourister suitcase.
• • •
The official population of the unidentified dead stands at roughly 5,400, according to the National Crime Information Center. Moreover, those who count such things are pretty certain the number is vastly undercounted or monumentally erroneous. Nevada's portion of that number is 60 people, despite the fact that the Clark County Coroner's Office has roughly 180 unidentified people in its files dating back to 1967. Some of the unknown dead are pictured and all are now, in one way or the other, listed on the county's website. Images of the lost in an ethereal medium, souls lost but in plain sight of the hundreds of thousands have who have logged on and taken a look. But lost all the same, adrift in the purgatory of the world's most powerful communications medium. Lost until someone recognizes that hand, until someone gives up on giving up and decides to give it one last try. Because families do miss them. They do care. For a time, at least. Ultimately, somewhere between the loss and the memories, people let go, hope for the best and get on with their lives. Without a significant bankroll, you can't look forever. You wish you could, though. Especially when you learn about the end and are forced to wonder what kind of pains and struggles and sufferings got them there.
"Looking back, you could say that he was different," says Linda Foster, of Niagra Falls, New York, of her brother. "He got picked on a lot. He worked for somebody who was mentally abusive, and that might have put him over the edge. He used to take vodka in a thermos to work. It was just a troubled life for a long, long time."
Foster's brother James Kavanaugh died in March 2002 when he was run over and dragged more than 220 feet on East Lake Mead Boulevard. He was only identified, and his family notified, a few months ago.
Though his brothers had flown to Vegas a few times to help Kavanaugh, the last two times he hadn't come out to meet them, even though he knew they were there to see him. Lots of delusion might have played into that reluctance, including that Kavanaugh believed he was in the witness protection program. All of it was painful for the family back in Niagra Falls.
"We held onto the thought that no news was good news," Foster says.
For Christian Reid, the last seven years not knowing where or what happened to his brother, Jimmy, were times of unending wonder, dreams of discovery, ceaseless questions.
"Of seven kids, he was kind of like, I would call him the rogue, or whatever," says Reid.
So when Jimmy said he was on his way to California in 1996, it wasn't unexpected and it wasn't alarming. It was just Jimmy. And then, "he just dropped from the face of the Earth, so to speak," Christian says.
Years passed. "People were always like, ‘Gee, I had a dream of Jimmy last night.' Or, "Hey, it looked like Jimmy on a bus.' Or we'd be playing cards and someone would say, ‘What the hell did he do? Did you do something to him? Did I do something to him?'
"The wife, my wife, had a dream Jimmy was at the door. And then one of us would say, ‘Gee, he's either dead or he don't want to be bothered.'"
Turns out he died shortly after his bus stopped in Las Vegas. Christian's last word from him came via a Vegas postcard. "Maybe [he] ran into the wrong people at the bus station—I don't know about there, but here it's kind of a gathering point for undesirables."
Then there was Cecil Walter Golden Ben Wilson. In fairy tales, the name of a wanderer whose travels earn him a pot of gold and the happiness he always deserved. In life, Wilson's wandering days began more than 20 years ago, with the death of his mother. They ended when 37-year-old Anna Mitchel strangled him to death with panty hose, burned him on the grill, then buried him in her back yard. Mitchel claims he wanted sex; she didn't want to give it to him. There was a fight. And with that—an argument about sex—another soul was lost. The body was only found when Mitchel asked her roommate if, well, would he mind so terribly much staying in a hotel while she dug up a body in the back yard and moved it so that her home's new owners—she was being foreclosed—wouldn't find it? He decided to do a little digging himself. At 2 a.m., with the feeble light of a flashlight and a quarter moon to guide him, he felt the thud of shovel on something brown, something thick and handlike. A left hand, fingers curled in and slightly charred.
It wasn't that so much as the decomposition. And the fact that, for a family that hadn't seen or heard from him in a few years, Wilson's disappearance wasn't so unusual. For more than 20 years, he'd been showing up at home every few years, then disappearing.
"We just thought it was normal, because he would take off, then come back, stay around a few months, then leave again," says Millie Shearer, Wilson's sister in Ohio.
It was another case that, until you realize they're really gone, you're naturally programmed to get over it, to move on. "I'm sure a lot of people feel the same way," says Shearer, who has two kids of her own. "A lot of people don't know where their people are, and you just never know what happened to them."
• • •
From the Coroner's Website
Unidentified: Caucasian Male. Discovered in: Las Vegas. Date found: 06/14/1999. Cause of death: Suicide ... The decedent was found on June 14, 1999, hanging from an outside wall of the El Rancho Hotel at 2755 Las Vegas Blvd. South.
• • •
That's when I know how common it really is, when I remember the brother we once lost—and how, despite the hell it caused, how I simply put it out of my mind. It was the early '80s and, one day, Brother No. 2 said he was going to a temple in Chicago. He was an adult in his early 20s. He was smart, respected, a hard worker. He could do what he wanted. And my parents, in some odd way, were grateful that he'd found this religious group, the Hare Krishnas, because its strictures forced him to lay off weed and got him to stop drinking. He left for a weekend. We didn't see or hear from him for three years.
When he showed up it was in an orange saffron robe carrying a pouch of prayer beads, a suitcase full of devotional tapes, his head skinned but for a ponytail and a fellow devotee who never left his side. Within hours, dad was on the phone to deprogrammers he'd made contact with in California. They'd be here in 24 hours. Uncle Bill arrived at the house with a shotgun, told us kids to stay the night at his house. And Brother No. 2 was kidnapped and taken to a cabin in the woods, where he, Mom, Dad and my oldest brother waited for the deprogrammers. Federal agents arrive first. Let him go or go to prison for kidnapping. "I've lost another son," Dad says, months later.
How was he to know then that not all lost souls stay lost?
• • •
From the Coroner's Website
Unidentified: Caucasian Female. Discovered in: Henderson, NV. Date found: 10/05/1980. Cause of death: Homicide ... The nude body of this unidentified white female was found just south of Route 146 and west of Arroyo Grande, in Henderson, Nevada at approximately 2100 hours on October 5, 1980. Lacerations of the scalp and puncture wounds of the back were identified.
• • •
Todd Matthews' intrigue with lost souls began before he even hit adulthood—in some ways, before he was born. In 1968, Matthews' father-in-law found the body of someone who came to be known as Tent Girl in Kentucky. In 1987, when Matthews turned 17, he started to look into the case. "It became an obsession for me." By 1998, he'd solved it by trying to match the Tent Girl with known missing women instead of girls.
"I thought it was unusual to have an unidentified body," says Matthews, now 33. "It's not. It's just unusual to find out about them."
Today, Matthews is married, has children and spends as many hours trying to identify bodies as he can away from his job as a quality technician at an auto plant. When he vacations, it's in cities or rural areas where he knows the unknown dead still lie. Just weeks ago, he turned down a promotion that would have earned him $600 more a month because it would have meant additional hours at the plant; more hours away from the search. "The choice was clear for me," he says, adding that it remains to be seen if his wife will see it the same way.
Along with the 5,400 official unidentified dead, another 101,000 are listed as missing. Of the 5,400, the most, more than 2,000, are in California, with Florida second and New York third. For every unidentified dead person, think a parent or two, maybe a brother and a sister, perhaps a spouse or ex. For every missing, think the same. Very quickly, you're talking about huge numbers of people touched by these losses ... numbers enough that you'd think it might become a public-policy issue. Matthews says he's working on it.
"I'm trying to get my local politicians to do a state website," Matthews says. "Once I have that face-to-face confrontation, that conversation takes them to, ‘Ahhh.' You have to point out these facts and figures and it's staggering. It's not just 5,400 families screaming."
Someone listening was Pat Murphy, the Clark County coroner. After just six months in his new position, Murphy and his staff posted the first website of its kind—detailed accounts of the unidentified bodies, how they were found and, where possible, pictures. Of the deceased, of their tattoos or other markings unique to that person, signs that someone once touched by that person might recognize. Some of the photos are cleaned up digitally, colored, made more viewable or, in the case of a tattoo, cleaned and made clearer.
"It's worked very, very well, way above our anticipated response, to be honest with you," says Murphy, who notes that the site (www.co.clark.nv.us/coroner/unid.htm) has been visited more than 500,000 times. "We've gotten responses from literally all around."
The pictures aren't completely gruesome, but to those who've never looked upon a dead body, they can be startling. That Murphy and his staff have avoided criticism is due in no small part to people like Christian Reid, Millie Shearer and Linda Foster, who credit the website with helping to finding their lost brothers.
"At first, we didn't want to believe it," says Reid, now 65. "Then you're angry and, you know, if someone had pointed out who did it, I mean, I would have gone after him. But after a time, you grow more comfortable. We miss him, but time kind of mellows. We have a firm belief that something happened to him. Whatever it was, I hope it was quick and without pain."
"We were always wondering," Foster, of Niagara Falls, says. "And I'll tell you, finding that website—if it helps get a family member back home, it's worth it. It's meant peace for us and, even though he must have had a hard life, there's still peace for Gary."
Reading the case histories posted on the site is a surreal exercise—it's a roster of lost souls, a play-by-play rundown of the innumerable ways a person can break through the thin membrane of social connection and die alone and unknown.
• • •
From the Coroner's Website
Unidentified: Black Male. Discovered in: Las Vegas. Date Found: 08/19/79. Cause of death: Natural ... On 8/19/79, the decedent suffered an apparent cardiac episode in the gambling area of the El Cortez Casino. He did not have any identification on him.
• • •
Three years passed since the attempted "deprogramming." By now, one brother had already divorced and remarried. A couple of nieces and nephews were born. Jobs were won and lost. I'm in college. Life goes on. Then I get a call. I ply my roommate with beer to drive me to Oklahoma to an odd camp of condos in the middle of nowhere, with no electricity. It's the one place in the United States the Hare Krishnas believe will be the safest from the fallout in a nuclear war. Brother No. 2 is living there. From the moment I arrive, we argue. We drive to Dallas; on the way, he throws my library books about cults out his truck window. At his temple, I snicker derisively at the bongo and castanet-fueled dancing. I leave furious. He writes furious letters to my family. Threatens never to see us again.
Years pass. The drive to family is strong. He has children that he wants to introduce to his parents. A soul, once lost—to us, anyway—begins to return. The first few meetings are tentative, the kidnapping, Oklahoma and the missing years never far from the surface. Then it's every Christmas. Then Christmas and summers. Now when we meet, we clasp hands, hug and can't help but smile. We might not have known it at the time, we don't even realize it today, but this was loss. Moving on, forgetting and getting-on-with-life-loss. It happens all too easily, as an argument, or meeting the wrong people, or just trying to run past traffic on a busy street.