IDENTIFICATION OF MUTILATED REMAINS.
Many of the foregoing remarks on the identity of the skeleton apply in cases where mutilated remains or a portion only of the body has been recovered. Circumstances often occur in which bodies may require identification after having been drowned and partly eaten by fishes or crabs, or after having been partly eaten by buzzards, or torn into fragments by animals, as has happened in the remains of a dead infant partly devoured by a dog, and in the case of a farmer who died in the woods and was subsequently eaten by his own hogs. After accidents and fires where many persons perish; after a railway disaster where bodies have been mangled, drowned, burnt, and frozen, all in the same accident; or after an explosion from steam or gas or in a mine, or from gunpowder, dynamite, or other substance, the human remains are generally in such a state as to defy all attempts at recognition.
To dispose of a dead body in order to avoid detection, criminals will mutilate, disfigure, and chop into fragments the remains, which they afterward place in a trunk, a wardrobe, or throw into a sewer or other hiding-place. Scarcely a year passes that judiciary medicine is not concerned with cases of the kind. The frequency of such crimes has been attributed by some to the so-called contagion of murder; others offer the simple law of the series in explanation; others still believe that imitation is the principal cause. While there is no doubt a grain of truth in each of these, less philosophic minds will look upon such a beastly proceeding as a mark of the complete satisfaction sought by the destructive instinct.
Why such things should be is of less concern than the fact that criminal mutilation of the dead body is not confined to any age or country. Though more frequent in the last fifteen years, it takes up quite a space in the history of human cruelty. The violent passion, wrath, and vengeance that caused the prophet Isaiah to be sawn in two at the age of one hundred years by order of Manasses and Agag cut into pieces by Samuel have not materially changed in the days of Jack the Ripper; and we find such crimes in antipodal parts of the world, among varied sociological conditions, no matter whether it be the North American Indian, who scalps and mutilates his enemy and places the severed penis in the mouth, or the civilized European, who cuts up the body of his victim and serves it in a curry at a feast of assembled friends.[584]
This new point of judiciary medicine has lately been elaborated by European writers under the title of Dépeçage Criminel, a term which applies to the operation resorted to by an assassin having for its end the getting rid of the body of the victim and to render more difficult the establishment of its identity.
The cleverness of experts scarcely keeps pace nowadays with the more complicated proceedings adopted by criminals. In fact, at a trial of this kind truth and science are often the under dogs in a fight, than which none in forensic medicine is longer and more embarrassing. To cause a rapid disappearance of the proofs of a homicide, with a view to escape the investigations of justice, murderers have been known literally to make hash of the victim which was subsequently eaten by themselves and others. Gruner relates the case of a man who, having killed and cut into pieces his victim, boiled and roasted the fragments and ate them with his wife. Such examples, however, suggest morbid rather than passional phenomena, which manifestly call for rigid scrutiny into the mental state of the culprit, who may be more of a lunatic than a malefactor.
In cases of infanticide new-born children are sometimes cut into pieces and the fragments burnt in order to facilitate the disappearance of the cadaver. There does not appear to be, however, any well-authenticated instance of the operation having been done on a living child. Generally the dismemberment is done in order to cause more ready disappearance of the remains.
The medico-legal problem to be solved in cases of criminal mutilation is to establish the identity of the victim and that of the author of the crime.
Many apparently trivial circumstances may assist in the formation of an opinion as to the identity of the culprit. If the victim be an adult, a man is the author of the deed; if an infant, a woman, the mother, is almost always the guilty one. The London Lancet (May 30th, 1863, p. 617) reports a case in which the body of a child, of apparently four to six months, was found in the sewage of a water-closet, minus an arm cut off below the shoulder, presumably that a vaccination-mark might not be adduced as evidence. A young woman was suspected. Several women deposed having seen a dusky-brown mother’s mark near the child’s navel. After steeping in pure water a portion of the skin said to include the mark, and after washing, the mark gradually reappeared at the end of three days, perfectly distinct. It was recognized by witnesses and produced at the trial as corroborative evidence. The accused was found guilty.
In a case of infanticide at Tarare, in 1884, the upper extremity of a fœtus was found to have been disarticulated after the manner of carving the wing of a fowl. This having suggested to Dr. Lacassagne a cook as the author of the crime, she was speedily discovered and convicted. A few years later an analogous case occurred in Florence and was reported by Dr. A. Montalti.
The instrument used for mutilating the body may furnish a suggestion of identity, to be dispelled or affirmed upon further investigation. The mode of section observed in various instances has led to the recognition of a butcher as the culprit. An expert would have but little trouble in distinguishing the hacking and mangling of a body from the careful cutting and preservation of muscles and blood-vessels in dissections made by medical students, whom the public, by the way, invariably suspect in cases of mutilation. If it can be ascertained that the instrument used was operated either by a left-handed person or by an ambidexter, such a fact may prove of importance. Sometimes the fragments are tied or sewn up in a package. The manner in which the knot is tied may indicate the occupation of the culprit. In one case the regularity of the sewing revealed that it was the work of a woman. Examination of the remains of clothing and of neighboring objects where the crime was committed may result in the identification of the victim or of the murderer. Indeed, it is the careful noting of trivial facts and their combination that is so valuable in all investigations of this class. A compound fact made up of minor facts, which considered severally would possess but little value, may sometimes solve the puzzle in a case where no single fact of conclusive value is obtainable.
Having collected as much of the mutilated remains as possible, the first step toward identification is to replace the pieces in anatomical order, to note carefully their correspondence or otherwise, and to ascertain whether the fragments belong to the same body or to two or several individuals. This is often a delicate and difficult matter, especially where decomposition is advanced or where the horror has been pushed to its utmost limits, as in the case of a fratricide committed in France by several persons, who fragmented the cadaver with a saw and hatchet; boiled the remains and fed them to hogs; and, after crushing the bones with a hammer, threw the fragments into a deep gorge. Again, the body may be divided into numerous pieces, a hundred or more, and disposed of in widely different localities, as in a pond, a manure-heap, a river, or a cesspool. The chopped-up remains of infants have been boiled in lye and afterward thrown into a privy or put in a barrel of vinegar. A mother has also been known to cook with cabbage the dismembered remains of her six-months’ child and serve it at a meal of which both she and her husband partook.
Numerous counterparts of such cases happening in late years could be cited where the object was to favor the disappearance of the cadaver, and in which the establishment of the identity turned on the examination of some small part of the organism; the uterus, the spermatic cord, the lobe of the ear, the hair, or the teeth furnishing a positive demonstration that led to judiciary results.
Putrefaction goes on very fast in a corpse that has been mutilated; but it is slower in parts which, on being separated just after death, have become bloodless in consequence of the hemorrhage. After submersion the outward signs of putrefaction put a notable obstacle in the way of identification, and after drowning the body becomes rapidly unrecognizable.
Supposing it impossible to reconstitute the cadaver in all its essential parts, it is always possible, by following the instructions already given for examining the skeleton, to infer from one or several parts of the cadaver the sex, age, height, and sometimes pathological peculiarities of the victim. Examination of the skeleton and teeth is of capital importance in an investigation of this class. The indications furnished thereby having already been touched upon, and being about all that we are justified in saying, it is only necessary to repeat that many of the details relative to these special indications are so confusing as to suggest caution in using the statistical tables of even high authority, as the observations they rest on are not of sufficient extent to deserve confidence.
A survey of the head, limbs, trunk, and genital parts will give the most useful indications. The HEAD, in fact, is the surest index for justice, and one that lends promptness in the discovery of the assassin. Typical illustrations of this occur in the Goss-Udderzook case and in the recent example of the bomb-thrower, Norcross. In the case of a woman murdered by her husband at Antwerp in 1877 and cut into one hundred and fifty-three pieces and her remains thrown into a privy, the color of the hair, the lobule of a torn ear, and the uterus of a woman having had children furnished special signs that led to identity and condemnation. Examination of the brain and its membranes, though furnishing no very notable characteristics in the matter of identification, may nevertheless be regarded as a natural corollary to that of the skull. Brain weight, which is greatest between thirty and forty years, 1,200 to 1,450 grams in man, 1,100 to 1,500 in woman, diminishes toward the sixtieth year. It is said that the diminution takes place a few years sooner in the opposite sex. The estimated loss of weight in a person of eighty years is admitted to be from 90 to 150 grams. Another sign of age is the tendency to degeneration found in the pineal gland, the cortical substance, the optic and striate thalami, and in the brain capillaries.
The state of the eyes, if not too decomposed, may still become a sign of identity. For instance, the color of the iris, an arcus senilis, a pterygium, a cataract or an operation for the same, an iridectomy, etc., are signs that occasion may utilize.
The TRUNK may show, as it has in several instances, incised wounds that caused death before the mutilation. Besides, the organs therein contained may by their weight, dimension, and tissue alteration indicate the progress of age and of degeneration. Modifications of the circulatory and respiratory apparatus are obviously characteristic. As age advances the only organ whose weight increases with the number of years, the heart, may become hypertrophied or dilated; its coronary arteries may undergo an alteration; the pericardium thickens, and in fact arterial atheroma and degeneration generally may begin between thirty-five and forty years. It should, however, be borne in mind that these signs of senility may come much later or even not at all. In a man of eighty-four years Tourdes found no notable tissue lesion; in another of one hundred and four Lobstein found no trace of ossification of the arteries of the trunk and upper extremities, and in Thomas Parr, aged one hundred and fifty-two years, Harvey found absolutely no lesion of this kind. Although toward eighty years the heart increases in weight in both sexes, the opposite has been observed in exceptional cases. Placing the average weight of this organ in the adult at 266 grams for men, 220 for women, it will be found that progress in weight gives toward the eightieth year an increase of 90 grams for men and 60 for women. Yet a case of cardiac atrophy is reported in a woman of eighty whose heart weighed but 170 grams.
Diminished weight of the lungs becomes accentuated with years. Especially is this the case after pseudo-melanosis and senile emphysema. The state of the lungs of stone-cutters and miners and various thoracic and abdominal diseases may likewise become signs of identity. A cirrhosed liver, an enlarged spleen, a senile kidney, and the like, are sufficiently obvious in their bearings on this question.
Like the trunk, the ARMS AND LEGS, in cases of the class under consideration, show but few traces of disfigurement other than the fact of their having been disjointed. The manner in which the sections were made and the proceedings employed for the disarticulation would equally affirm an experienced hand or the reverse. Such facts have of late years assisted in the discovery and condemnation both of a farmer and of a medical student, and also in the case of the cook already mentioned, who cut off her child’s arm after the manner of carving the wing of a fowl. The existence of deformity, injury, and disease in the limbs should, of course, claim attention, but their relativity in an investigation of the kind is too apparent to require further comment.
Mutilation of the GENITAL ORGANS is not so common. Persons familiar with border warfare have observed the savage custom of cutting off the victim’s penis and placing it in his mouth. In more civilized communities the culprits are generally women in whom hatred and ferocity prompt an act that marks the evident satisfaction sought by the destructive instinct. Sometimes, however, the genital organs have been cut from the cadaver of a woman, presumably for the purpose of concealing traces of rape that may have preceded the murder. The signs furnished by the female genital organs as to virginity, maternity, and the menopause are so easily demonstrated at the necropsy as to become positive proofs of identity. The uterus loses both in size and weight with age. This along with hard, atrophied, and germless ovaries attests the stoppage of menstruation. The question of identity may turn on the age at which menstruation ceases, as happened in an action of ejectment in the case of Doe on the demise of Clark vs. Tatom. The period known as change of life, when the uterus and ovaries lose their function, though placed at forty-five and fifty years, is quite uncertain. In spite of averages, menstruation is occasionally continued to seventy and upward.[585]
The signs furnished by the genital organs of the male are of less importance. Atrophy and diminished weight of the testicles and rarity or absence of the spermatozoids are indications of senility; although spermatozoids have been observed at ninety-four years. The structure of the spermatic cord at different periods of life from the last of intra-uterine to the first of extra-uterine life, in puberty, and in old age, is accompanied by characteristic modifications of development and regression, which are of interest on the question of medico-forensic diagnosis of identity, as shown by Dr. Pellacani.[586]
Congenital deformity of the genital parts, as epispadias or hypospadias; marks of circumcision, useful in India to identify Mussulmans above eleven years; traces of disease that may have left extensive cicatrices, as phagadenic chancre, suppurating buboes, etc., may also furnish characteristics of evidential value.