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10 1. In the Deep Woods T he hunters were walking in the deep woods of north Louisiana . The man and his son stumbled across what appeared to be human bones, though they seemed too small to represent an adult. The bones were just a few feet off a narrow, unpaved road used only by the members of a private hunting club. The man quickly called the sheriff’s office to report the gruesome discovery. October 8, 2010, 10:30 p.m. The phone was ringing. Something was wrong somewhere. Was it my family or was it my job? Nervously , on the third ring, I picked it up. A coroner needed a forensic anthropology team. Mr. Raymond Rouse, coroner of Catahoula Parish in north central Louisiana, had asked his wife and full-time assistant, Mrs. Rouse, to call me. They needed help, Mrs. Rouse said, and they needed it right away. She had been given my name and telephone number by the Louisiana State Police. She relayed how the hunter and his son had been walking in an isolated, wooded area of their sparsely populated parish earlier in the day and had discovered a set of what they thought were human skeletal remains. Mrs. Rouse also went on to say that the sheriff of the parish, James Kelly, had consulted with the coroner, and they both agreed that they needed help with the case, the likes of which they had never seen before and hoped to never see again. Mrs. Rouse explained that they thought the bones might belong to a fairly young individual and that the sex might be a female because the teeth had braces on them and the bands on the braces were pink. Though quite a few of the remains had already been recovered when they called me, I asked them to please stop the recovery work and put a guard on the site for the rest of the night and until we could get there the next day. I told Mrs. Rouse that our team from In the Deep Woods 11 the LSU Forensic Anthropology and Computer Enhancement Services , or FACES, Laboratory, would be there the following morning around 10:00 a.m. Since we had not worked with Catahoula’s coroner before, I explained to Mrs. Rouse that we were trained in recovery and analysis of human skeletal remains and that training and experience could be extremely important in months to come, especially if the case turned out to be a homicide. Mr. Rouse, the coroner, agreed to hold the site. I hung up the phone and immediately called Ginny Listi and told her to put together a recovery team, and, especially, to round up a couple of our graduate students to assist with the case. Experience in the field and in the lab is the only way students who study to be forensic anthropologists can ever call themselves that. They absolutely must have such experience because no book learning in the world will ever make a biological anthropologist with a master’s degree or a PhD into a forensic anthropologist without on-the-job training. Every case is different; we just did not know at the time how different this one would be. I went to bed that night but did not sleep well, knowing that we had a three-hour drive ahead of us the next day and the possibility of a child victim. Thank goodness children’s cases are rare in our line of work, but even at that, I can see the handful or so of them on which I have worked in the last thirty years as though they happened yesterday. Around 10 a.m. on October 9, 2010, FACES Lab personnel including Ginny and two graduate students, Charlana McQuinn and Valerie Kauffeld, and I pulled into Harrisonburg, Louisiana. A town of approximately 2,000 people, Harrisonburg is the largest town in Catahoula Parish and is the parish seat. The parish has a population of approximately 10,000. The town and the parish have a very low crime rate, with the greatest crime in the area usually associated with someone doing “a little drugs.” First, as pre-determined, we went to the small stationery shop from which the coroner operated. In Louisiana, we have a coroner’s system, not a medical examiner’s system. All coroners are elected by the citizens in their respective parishes. Most parishes, especially [18.216.190.167] Project MUSE (2024-04-26 10:56...

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