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

11. Mardi Gras Man

Mardi Gras Man FFICER Mula's voice on the other end of the phone resonated with the rich French ancestry of so many of the lawenforcement agents with whom I had worked over the last twenty-plus years in south Louisiana. He was calling about a case in St. Mary Parish that had frustrated all of us for more than two years. The victim was a white male between thirty-five and forty-five years of age whose body had been discovered when parish road crews were dredging ditches along the highway to prevent flooding. "Mary, I may have a lead on Mardi Gras Man. Could you pull your file on him?" The victim had been dubbed "Mardi Gras Man" by the news media because we had found a string of cheap yellow Mardi Gras beads with his remains. Mardi Gras in Louisiana, usually celebrated in February each year, is one of the biggest parties in the world and is punctuated by the distribution of millions of cheap plastic beads thrown from floats by often drunken riders and caught by sometimes less-than-sober parade-goers. A month prior to Mardi Gras, the Mardi Gras beads begin to show up at various parties and parades. Gooey king cakes, each containing a one-inch tall, naked plastic baby, and adding inches to midriffs already thickened by the Christmas holidays, are sold by the thousands (if you get the baby, you buy the cake the next week). Meanwhile, many locals finalize plans to leave the area. A week or so after Mardi Gras is over, signaled by Fat Tuesday and the beginning of Lent, the beads go underground again. Though some may be seen dangling from the rearview mirrors of automobiles for weeks to come, most people put theirs away until the next year. 0 11 Mardi Gras Man 93 The day we had retrieved Case 00-25, Mardi Gras had not been on my mind. It was a late-September morning in 2000 when I got a call from Bob Bizet, Dr. Chip Metz's chief coroner's investigator. "We need your help, Mary. Can you come? I'll tell you all about it when you get here." "Of course we can come," I told Bob. "Give us a couple of hours and we'll be there." The ride to St. Mary Parish would take at least an hour and a half. That meant I had thirty minutes before I had to walk out the door. I hurried down the hall to the office of my research associate, Beth Basset. Beth gathered together the crew of graduate students we assemble for each case. Our labor force always depends on who's available and how much time each student needs to mobilize. The numbers increase or decrease according to the location of the case, scheduling conflicts with the students' classes, and the condition of the remains. On such a cold, rainy day, our numbers would not be large. We mustered three enthusiastic graduate students eager to gain the experience so coveted in this field and took off down the highway with various tools and equipment bulging from the back of our new Suburban dubbed "Belle." Belle had been purchased with monies allocated by the state legislature to replace "Blue," a worthy vehicle that had been donated by the local sheriff's office when it reached 200,000 miles and was currently in sickbay. We always name our vehicles and accept the gentle ribbing when officers find out that "Belle" is actually our suburban rather than one of our graduate students. As we neared the scene, its location was obvious. We were approximately five miles east of Morgan City along Highway 182. More than fifteen vehicles with lights spinning stretched along the highway and adjacent to a service road that ran parallel to the highway. Small groups of detectives and uniformed officers parted like waves to let us through. Many smiled and waved, their faces looking all too familiar. They pointed the way to the victim, and one look confirmed their discovery: bones and clothing protruded from the large pile of wet mud and debris hanging from the jaws of the backhoe. We had already given the victim a number, 00-25, our twenty-fifth 94 T R A I L OF B O N E S case to date in the year 2000. Our first task would be to recover...