The Bone Lady: Life As a Forensic Anthropologist

15. Voodoo Woman

VOODOO WOMAN sheriff's deputy called me one day in 1989 to ask if I could look at a skull and tell him something about it. This one wasn't found in the woods or in a grave or along the side of a road, but in a plastic bag inside a small shed behind the home of Ruby Jordan. Who was Ruby Jordan, and what was she doing with a skull in a bag, and where was Ruby Jordan now? Ruby Jordan was dead. Allegedly , she had threatened and subsequently tried to kill her longtime boyfriend, James Robillard. Scared to death of the "voodoo woman," as he called her, Robillard simply defended himself, he told the sheriff. In the end, Ruby lay dead. Authorities confirmed Robillard s story by interviewing eyewitnesses to the event. Later they found a special altar in Ruby's house that contained voodoo paraphernalia, including potions and dolls and other trappings of a serious practitioner. The whole case could have ended there except for one thing. Ruby's children had gone to her house to remove her personal belongings in 15 A VOODOO WOMAN 83 order to settle her estate: in a small outbuilding there they found the plastic bag with the human skull inside. Unnerved, they called the sheriff. I looked at the skull and it told the story. The forehead was straight, the superior eye orbit borders were sharp. Though a fairly large skull, the muscle attachment areas were small. The skull was probably female. In addition, her eye orbits were square, almost rectangular ; her nasal opening was short and broad; and in profile, her upper jaw protruded slightly. These attributes are all associated with a designation of black, or African American. As part of my assessment, I needed to suggest an age at death. The hip bone is the best bone to use for aging up until about sixty years, but all I had was the skull. All animals have joints, or sutures, in the skull. Humans are no exception . Those sutures, most of which are interlocking like pieces of a puzzle, are wide open when we are born to allow for growth and development . Little by little they fuse together at somewhat regular intervals in our lives. The stage of that fusion can be used generally to assess age. As we grow older still, the sutures can actually obliterate, or disappear. The sutures on the black female, case 89-14, were in the process of disappearing, and she had no teeth left in her dental arcade. She may have worn dentures in life and was probably over the age of sixty. Attached to the sparse strands of her real hair was a short gray wig. Inside her eye sockets were the small, round plastic disks that the mortician had carefully placed there, the signature of her formal burial preparation. Inside her nasal opening were dried beetle pupae, or shells, sometimes associated with buried bodies. The color of her skull was dark brown, another sign of probable burial, perhaps as long as ten to twenty years. This older black female had once been removed. Who was she, this woman whose skull had hung at Ruby's place? Some people said that Ruby had had a long-standing feud with her mother, who had died ten years earlier from natural causes and been 84 THE BONE LADY buried in the family plot. Ruby's mother had owned a short gray wig. Could the skull belong to Ruby's mother? Could Ruby have opened her mother's grave to settle their disagreement? Ruby's children had only recently placed a concrete slab across their grandmother's grave. They did not wish to remove the slab, nor did they wish to know what their mother may have done. Since the indicators on the skull were those of a natural burial and since both parties were departed, if it was okay with law enforcement, they would simply let it go. They let it go. ...