Stories in bones

VISITORS to Clyde Snow’s house in Norman, Oklahoma were often surprised to find no divide between his work and the rest of his life. His work table, with human bones laid out on it, was right beside his living room. His leggy dog Thunder lounged underneath it. Mr Snow himself, pipe or unfiltered Camel clamped in his mouth, would wander between the bones and the TV, or the bones and his pot of ever-boiling coffee, sometimes with a skull cradled gently in his hands. He was listening to the stories told by human remains.

For bones could talk. If you unearthed them carefully enough, sifting the earth minutely for strands of hair and slowly brushing away the dirt from the orbits of the eyes, you could reconstruct a face and a life. The earth could talk too, giving up its secrets “like a beautiful woman” as Mr Snow, a devotee of both women and poetry, liked to say. From one fragment of skull and a pearl button, found on the site of Custer’s last stand at Little Bighorn in 1876, he deduced the presence at the battle of Mitch Bouyer, a civilian Sioux interpreter. From some shreds of European clothes, he proved that a skeleton dug up in Bolivia was neither Butch Cassidy nor the Sundance Kid, as thought, but a German prospector called Zimmerman. And from a crooked left index finger, details of his hat size and the presence of Nazi-era dental fillings, Mr Snow proved in Brazil in 1985 that he was dealing not with Wolfgang Gerhard, as the identity card declared, but with Josef Mengele, who had experimented on hundreds of victims at Auschwitz.

After decades of experience Mr Snow could tell, more or less at a glance, the sex, race, height and handedness of a body. In his later years it could be done by computer, and he used one, but only to check what he had already deduced with the calipers and tape-measure pulled from his battered leather bag. He knew within five minutes whether bones were prehistoric or modern, even without clues. At the trial of Saddam Hussein in 2006, where he gave evidence of the use of chemical agents against the Kurds, Saddam scoffed that the bones he had examined were probably Sumerian. Mr Snow’s riposte (never actually delivered, though on the tip of his tongue) was that, advanced though the Sumerians were, they did not have digital watches.

He went to Baghdad because his special interest was in those who had died violently; especially those who were then hidden or buried in mass graves. He hoped to give them names, as well as establishing—by the slashes of machetes, the stabs of bayonets or the clean entry hole of a bullet—how they had died. He brought into the light not merely local murder victims whose killers had tried to dispose of them in fires or factory vats, but also the thousands of innocents slaughtered by the state in Argentina, Guatemala, Iraqi Kurdistan, Congo, El Salvador and the Balkans. Wherever atrocities had been covered up he would soon appear, a polite but rumpled figure in a tweed jacket with a fedora tilted on his head. His ways of working could seem casually slow, starting at noon and punctuated by many a meal of good steak and good wine. But his intensity of purpose, to bring to justice the rational, well-dressed men who had sat round a table and ordered mass killings, was ferocious.

A bunch of keys

When he began to investigate the Argentinian desaparecidos in 1984, the jumbled bones of nameless victims were being dug up randomly by bulldozers. He assembled a team of students and, under the wary noses of the police and using chopsticks from a Chinese restaurant, demonstrated how careful exhumation could attach names to the bodies. Almost all those he unearthed had been killed with a single bullet to the head from an army-issue Ithaca shotgun. As a result of his work, five officers were convicted of at least some of the killings, and his student team grew into a national forensic organisation that continued his work and was copied elsewhere.

Not many people did his job; almost none when he started, in the 1960s, by investigating air crashes. (From that period he learned the habit of never flying with a ballpoint in his breast pocket, which in a crash could pierce the heart.) He supposed his father, a country doctor in Texas, had first got him interested in bones from that green glow of the X-ray machine in his office. At school he was too fond of pranks, and at college too fond of boozing, to study much. But he carried a striking memory from his boyhood of finding, on a hunting trip, the tangled skeletons of a hunter and a mule deer, and with them a bunch of keys that unlocked doors in a local house, proving who the hunter was.

To those who asked him how he could stand the work, and whether it didn’t get to him in the end, he would gruffly say, of course. He was especially distressed by mass graves of children machine-gunned in El Salvador, and by having to show a mother in Argentina the bones, organised into separate bags, of her “disappeared” daughter. On the other hand, relatives both there and in Kurdistan often wanted to help him excavate mass graves, and while helping would laugh and eat ice cream, as if death were simply a part of life. And so it was, for each bone was a witness in the present. He always told his students to cry at night; and in the day just to listen calmly to what the bones were saying.