Trail of Bones: More Cases from the Files of a Forensic Anthropologist

6. Alone in the Woods

Alone in the Woods N unretrieved backpack was the only evidence that Peggy Watson had walked that way on that particular day. Sometimes Peggy would skip school, like any teenager, leavingher backpack behind a small bush at the edge of the school grounds to retrieve at the end of the day. But that day she never returned for the backpack. Her homecoming would be a most painful and long-awaited day for her family some eight years later. The call came late one afternoon. The chief of detectives in a western Louisiana parish had a bone he wanted me to see. He asked, "Can I bring it to you, Mary?" He thought it was human but he wanted to be sure. In fact, he thought it was part of a human skull. His real interest lay in its close proximity to a tennis shoe that had been found not too far away from the bone—a girl's tennis shoe. "Where did you find these?" I asked. "Deep in the piney woods," he answered. He arrived at my office early the next morning. Clean shaven, tall and lanky, he spoke with that polite southern voice that showed his mama had raised him right. He's one of a dying breed. He had spent his entire life in the small town where missing kids were those who just stayed out a little past their curfew. But there was one case, eights years ago, he said, that just tore out the hearts of those who lived in the close-knit community. He told me the story of Peggy Watson and how she sometimes took a break from school but always returned at the end of the day. But on that day eight years before, she did not return. Volunteerssearched the nearby A 6 54 T R A I L OF BONES woods for weeks, knowing that she would not willingly have gone anywhere with a stranger. She was never found. The detective broke the evidence tape on a brown paper bag and pulled out the fragment of bone. I felt an adrenalin rush. Indeed, it was part of a human skull, the calotte, or skullcap. It was small, what we call gracile, with just the beginning of a nice, straight forehead. The parietals, the bones on either side of the skull, were flared just a little, a characteristic that females retain from infancy. Males do not. The sagittal suture, the joint running down the middle of the skull, was wide open, or unfused, supporting my assessment that it belonged to a person under twenty years of age. I told the detective that he had the skullcap of a young human, probably a teenager, and possibly female. The color of the bone provided me with other clues. It was weathered gray, and the outer, or cortical, bone was beginning to crack, or craze. I knew from past experience in Louisiana that such coloring and dryness were often associated with skeletal remains that had been exposed to the elements for five to ten years. "What about the tennis shoe?" I asked him, though I knew it might have nothing at all to do with the bone fragment. He pulled it from another bag. It was an unusual brand and had fared somewhat better than the bone, though it, too, had some age on it. He told me the story of the shoe. The teenager had been wearing shoes just like that one when she disappeared. They were new at the time, and her mother had kept the box they came in for eight long years. "Will you help us search some more, Mary," he asked, "to see if we can find anything that could be used to positively identify her or show that this skull bone does not belong to her?" He had me hooked after he had first said "tennis shoe" and "mother." I knew, however, that the odds were not good after eight years. Also, the damage to the skullcap supported the assumption that animals had probably already destroyed the other remains. Typically in cases where remains are found in the woods, animals will leave the skull for the very last because it's hard for them to get a good grip on, even with long canine teeth. Since this one was Alone in the Woods 55 mostly destroyed, I knew there would not be much more of the skeleton...