Important evidence is furnished from the existence of injuries such as fractures, whether old or recent; the marks of gunshot wounds, of trephining, amputation, excision, or other surgical operation on the bones. The remains of an old, ununited fracture in his left humerus enabled Sir William Fergusson to verify and settle all doubt as to the identity of the body of the great missionary and explorer, Dr. Livingston.[579] The existence of an injury may constitute evidence of great importance to the accused, as happened in the case of an English gentleman charged with murder, where the trial turned on the deposit of callus in a broken rib, the only bone produced in court. From the state of this callus there could be no doubt that the fracture must have been produced about eight or ten days before death, and could not have belonged to the deceased. There was, therefore, complete failure of the identity, and the accused was discharged.[580]
On the other hand, circumstances may arise in which the existence or not of an injury is a fact of great importance to the prosecution. Among other specimens in the Army Medical Museum at Washington, the bones of the forearm of Wirtz, executed for inhuman treatment of prisoners during the Civil War, show no remains or trace of fracture; yet it was claimed in defence at the trial that he could not have been guilty of the atrocities attributed to him, for the reason that this arm was disabled from a fracture.
Disease of the bones, whether hereditary or acquired, is an essential descriptive element in reconstituting individuality. Caries and necrosis, rickets, spinal disease, ankylosis, and other external manifestations of bone lesion may furnish pointers of such value as often to be incontestible. They are so evident as not to require detailed mention; but much care in such cases is necessary to distinguish between disease, decay, and violence, and artefacta. The last may have resulted from the axe or spade of the grave-digger or from post-mortem lesions made at the necropsy, as in the remains of the notorious Beau Hickman of Washington, whose body on being exhumed showed that sundry amputations and reamputations had been made on the principal limbs. Having died in a public hospital, the cadaver had been utilized in rehearsal of these operations previous to its burial in the Potter’s Field.
Injuries of the phalanges, known as “baseball fingers,” are valuable indications. This was one of the facts of identification in the celebrated Cronin case.
Duration of Burial.
The condition of the exhumed bones may throw some light on the question as to the probable length of time they have been under ground, as well as the probable cause of death. If the bones were entirely denuded of soft parts we should hardly expect them to be those of a corpse buried only three or four months previously. The noting of such an injury as a fracture inflicted by some sharp instrument on a skull found in a cesspool was sufficient, with other evidence of a general character, to convict a prisoner tried at the Derby Lent Assizes in 1847.
In all cases of the kind under consideration, special attention should be paid to the surroundings, every little detail of which should be noted with the utmost accuracy; for such articles as clothes, jewelry, buttons, and in fact anything that may furnish an inference,[581] may not only throw light on the identity of the person, but otherwise assist justice. Cases are recorded in which the identity has been established principally by the clothing found with the skeleton. In Taylor’s “Medical Jurisprudence” a case is mentioned where the skeleton, portions of clothes, buttons, and boots of a Cornish miner were identified after twenty-six years’ submersion in water. Somewhat similar circumstances, a few years ago, enabled the arctic explorer, Lieutenant Schwatka, and others to identify the remains of Lieutenant Irving, of the ill-fated Franklin party.
In exceptional circumstances, as that of great cold, for instance, organic remains may be preserved indefinitely. Visitors to the Junior United Service Club in London may remember the mammoth bones discovered in digging the foundation of the club-house. Accounts of remarkable preservation of bodies discovered a long time after the occurrence of Alpine accidents, and the finding of well-preserved mammoth remains in the Siberian ice, are matters of common knowledge. A few years since, in assisting to take the remains of a mammoth from an ice cliff in Escholtz Bay, Alaska, I came across the skull of a musk-ox and the rib of a reindeer which showed the deformity and callus of a united fracture, yet there are geological reasons for believing that thousands of years must have elapsed since these remains were entombed in the ice.
A precaution to be taken in judicial investigation of bones is to ascertain whether they belong to more than one body, as they may have been put together with a view to deceive. Each bone should be examined separately, to ascertain whether it is a right or left bone or belongs to the same skeleton. They should be put together with intelligence and care, and if incomplete parts of a skeleton they may be laid in sand or putty and photographed, or the medical man may go further and, Agassiz-like, reconstruct the skeleton from the fragments. In the case of a fracture the bones should be sawn longitudinally in order to study the callus.