The Bone Lady: Life As a Forensic Anthropologist

7. The Rose Garden

THE ROSE GARDEN N a cold March day I stood at the side of Antoine Hebert's former house on Lutcher Street, staring down at the skeletal remains of his first wife wrapped in the frayed remnants of a polyester mattress cover. Hand bones protruded from beneath its ragged edges. As I leaned over to clean away the water-soaked soil, a diamond from a set of wedding rings caught the sun's rays and brought a slight gasp and whistle from one of the officers assisting me. A perimortem break— one that occurs at or near the time of death—in one of the small metacarpals of the left hand suggested a struggle. Colleen Hebert's parents already knew their daughter was not coming home. Now they would have a few more remains to bury. Colleen's fractured skull and other bones had arrived at my laboratory a few days before, and positive identification using dental records came from Doctors Barsleyand Carr a short while later. 7 O THE ROSE GARDEN 43 Eight years before Colleen had just up and disappeared one night. Antoine swore she had run away with another man. He later produced an affidavit from a friend of his saying the friend had seen her in a local mall. Her parents thought differently. They knew Colleen dearly loved her two small daughters and swore she would never have left them for anyone. They suspected that harm had come to Colleen. Lead after lead went nowhere. Colleen's parents grieved over the disappearance of their daughter. Meanwhile, Antoine Hebert would talk to the mirror in the bathroom at the house on Lutcher Street. When the window was open, one could smell the roses in the garden just outside. Late one night his second wife, Jolie, heard him call out to Colleen, telling her how great supper had been and what a good cook she was. The rose garden and concrete pad Antoine had placed alongside the house had never attracted much attention. He had always puttered in the yard. No one knew that beneath the rose garden lay Colleen's battered body. Antoine sold the red brick house on Lutcher Street in a cash sale to an elderly lady. Life might have gone OK for him except for one thing. The elderly lady up and sold the house to a young couple whose lending agency required that a new septic tank be installed for sewage disposal. Before the tank could be lowered into place, a drainage trench, or filter bed, had to be made. The backhoe dug the drainage trench right down the side of the house on Lutcher Street, right through the rose garden, and right through the grave of Colleen. Bythat time, Antoine and Jolie were divorced , and she would later testify in court to his strange bathroom conversations. The week-long trial drew standing-room-only crowds, spectators spilling out into the hallways and onto the courthouse square. During extensive cross-examination, the defense attorney grilled me on re- 44 THE BONE LADY trieval techniques and minute details of Colleen's fractured remains. He wanted to convince the jury that her broken bones could have resulted from the backhoe activities when the sewage trench was being dug and when we recovered the rest of her body that cold March day. However, Colleen's bones told her story. The perimortem fractures on her skeleton were distinguished from the postmortem injuries by the staining on the older trauma and the sharp, warped edges of oncevital , living bone that had been displaced violently. The recent trauma caused by the backhoe exposed dry and whitened edges of brittle bone that had long lost its resiliency and ability to resist stress. Near the end of the last day, the defense attorney had only one more expert witness to challenge: Dr. Alfredo Suarez, a no-nonsense, cigar-smoking, South American Houdini with a scalpel and one of the best forensic pathologists with whom I have ever worked. Succinct as ever, especially when pressed, Suarez merely had to take the stand, point to the gaping perimortem wound in the back of Colleens skull, and say, "See that hole? Ain't s'posed to be there." Conviction; life without parole. ...