The Bone Lady: Life As a Forensic Anthropologist

2. Lost from the MV Mollylea

LOST FROM THE MV MOLLHEA gently removed the fragile bones from the brown paper bag. The sheriff's deputy shifted his footing to get a little closer to the table as I picked up the skull and stared into its sand-filled cavities. It was the summer of 1992, and Donnie Gray had been riding his horse on a sandbar along the Mississippi River in Pointe Coupee Parish, just outside the town of New Roads. When Donnie glanced down at the ground in the sparsely wooded area, the deputy recounted , he spotted what looked like a human skull. Upon closer examination, he was certain. The skull and other bones collected by the Pointe Coupee Parish Sheriff's Department made their way to my laboratory at LSU to become case number 92-15, one of a growing list of more than 450 such cases handled by FACES by mid-1998. "It's a male," I announced, touching each of the features as I scanned the bony sphere. "He has a prominent brow ridge, a sloping forehead, blunt borders on his upper eye sockets (as opposed to sharp upper borders found in females), and large muscle attachment areas." 2 I LOST FROM THE MV MOLLYLEA 23 Variation in skull morphology between sexes: male (left) and female (right) The shape of the skull also indicated that he was Caucasoid, or white European. His eye orbits were somewhat oval and looked like horizontal teardrops; his nasal opening was narrow and tall; his anterior nasal spine, the small bony projection just below the nose, was quite long. "He's young—between eighteen and twenty-five—his bones have not quite finished growing," I said, my gaze falling to the youthful looking collarbone. Its medial end (that closest to the midline of the body) exhibited the raised ridges associated with a young adult. A closer look at the young white male's upper jaw revealed two porcelain crowns on his central incisors, or front teeth. "An easy way to identify him," I thought. "Look at the color of his bone," I said, speaking to the deputy and to myself, as I continued my preliminary assessment. "It's weathered and has lost its ivory finish and smooth texture." Its grayish color was a sign that it had been exposed on the ground's surface for quite some time, perhaps as long as four or more years. The sheriff had his osteological profile: young white male with 24 THE BONE LADY Variation in skull morphology among races: Caucasoid (left), Negroid (center), and Mongoloid (here Asian, right) good dental work who had been dead for at least four years. He could begin the search. Local and regional missing-persons cases provided the names of several missing youths, some with major dental repair work on their front teeth. Their records, however, did not match our case. Frustrated, the sheriff decided to contact the U.S. Coast Guard, a valuable source of information on missing-persons cases along the waterways. The Coast Guard officials searched their records for persons who had been lost on the river and unaccounted for. Ultimately, Michael Baldwin's name came up in their search. This is Michael's story. When Michael Baldwin's alarm woke him at 5:30 on the morning of March 14, 1988, he could not know that he would not be cooking breakfast for the rest of the tugboat crew on the Mollylea as it slowly headed south on the Mississippi River. Nor did he know that it would be his last day on earth. He may have slipped out of his sleeping quarters , walking up on deck to smoke a cigarette or stopping to check one of the barges the tug was moving slowly downriver. At around 7:00 LOST FROM THE MV MOLLYLEA 25 that same morning, perhaps the rest of the crew began to wonder why they could not detect the familiar aroma of coffee brewing or smell the sweet scent of bacon frying in the pan. A search of the vessel provided no clues. Michael Baldwin had simply disappeared. By 1992 Baldwin, a twenty-one-year-old white male, had been missing for almost five years, presumably falling overboard from the Mollylea that March morning in 1988. He had shipped out of Vicksburg as usual on the Mollylea and had been lost, it was believed, somewhere below Natchez, Mississippi. The Coast Guard officials were able to...