The Bone Lady: Life As a Forensic Anthropologist

25. Duralde's Return

DURALDE'S RETURN E cemetery caretaker stumbled as he walked across the grass that day in early 1991. Where had the hole come from that caught his boot and almost made him fall? After a peek into the opening and a fast withdrawal, he went scurrying to the church office. A cast-iron coffin rested in a shallow subterranean vault; the recent rains had exposed and dislodged the brick cover, which had gone unnoticed on the manicured lawn for more than one hundred years. St. Joseph's Cemetery board asked for my help in sorting out the identity of the person in the coffin. When my assistants and I removed the topsoil covering the subterranean vault, we saw the shallow brick crypt had been constructed by a true craftsman, its arched roof suggesting a slightly rounded appearance. Though below-ground, bricklined vaults are sometimes found in historic cemeteries, they are not as common as the above-ground vaults often associated with Louisiana's majestic cities of the dead.§51 T 122 THE BONE LADY Scale drawings of below-ground vault found in St. Joseph Cemetery, Baton Rouge Once the crypt was completely exposed, we noted that water had managed to make its way inside the coffin. Four men struggled to lift it from its resting place. Transport to my laboratory at LSU was necessary in order to properly identify the origin of the coffin and the person inside. At the laboratory we documented the rare old coffin, noting that the volume of water it contained, when translated into weight, exceeded five hundred pounds. Though cast-iron coffins were popular in Louisiana in the 17005 and iSoos, their cost, averaging twenty to DURALDE'S RETURN 123 thirty dollars, often relegated their use to the upper-middle-class and wealthy citizenry. The coffin now resting in my lab might have been a little more expensive. It was oval shaped rather than the typical toe-pincher we often see. "Toe-pincher" is the label used to describe those coffins, both wooden and metal, that widen out at the shoulders and narrow considerably toward the feet. Our coffin had no identifying mark from a prominent coffin maker like Fisk of the kind often stamped into the metal at the foot or at the head. It did, however, offer an amazing view of the body. Unlike the coffins with the more common single-glass viewing winCOFFINLID Scale drawings of coffin found in vault at St. Joseph Cemetery 124 THE BONE LADY dow, this one from St. Joseph's possessed three. Also, it boasted six intricately shaped handles for lifting. When the metal plates covering the glass windows were removed, we saw that one of the pieces of glass had been dislodged years before. It rested inside the coffin, and the opening provided the perfect path for water to enter during heavy rains. The coffin contained the remains of a young, white male. Since the seal of pitch had been broken for a considerable period of time, no soft tissue was preserved, only bone. Epiphyses on some of his long bones and other bones were unfused. He most likely died between the ages of fifteen and eighteen. No perimortem trauma was noted on his skeleton, but his death could have come from many sources as the epidemics of yellow fever, cholera, smallpox, and others crossed all socioeconomic boundaries. Several of his teeth were filled with gold, entirely consistent with other such burials from the nineteenth century. The machine stitching on his clothing established the 18505 as a base time for his death. Our profile complete, we placed him back in his coffin and back in his crypt. Today he has his own stone, which marks the location of his below-ground crypt. Felix Louis Duralde died at the tender age of seventeen in the mid-i8oos. He was accounted for in the records and known only to have been buried somewhere in the cemetery, the positive location of his vault remaining a mystery until his postmortem trip to my lab a century and a half after his death. ...