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DEATH is personified as sinister, a dangerous thief in the night. We give her ominous nicknames – the Grim Reaper, the Great Leveller and portray her as a gaunt skeleton in a dark hooded cloak wielding a deadly scythe, destined to separate our soul from our body with one lethal swipe.
We are afraid to attract her attention lest she come for us before we are ready. So we talk about “losing” someone and whisper of their “passing”.
But, working every day with death as my companion, I have come to respect her. When she has done her job, I am permitted to do mine.
And, thanks to her, I have enjoyed a long, productive and interesting career.
Unlike forensic pathology, which seeks a cause and manner of death, forensic anthropology reconstructs the life led.
Our job is to reunite the identity constructed during life with what remains of the body.
It is hard to imagine the crippling, unresolved grief of the bereaved with no body to mourn.
This is why forensic anthropologists will examine every fragment of a body, no matter how small, in an attempt to try to secure an identification.
It’s the bodies we cannot name that haunt forensic anthropologists.
In June 1999 I went Kosovo to help identify large numbers of bodies and corroborate witness accounts in support of charges of war crimes against Slobodan Milosevic and his associates.
I arrived at the first “indictment site” and put on my usual white crimescene suit, double latex gloves and heavy-duty black wellington boots – sweltering in 38C heat.
On March 25 Serbian special police had sacked the village of Velika Krusa.
Armed men separated men and boys from their families and herded them into an abandoned outhouse.
A gunman stood at the door and sprayed it with Kalashnikov fire. Accomplices then torched the building. Forty men and boys reportedly lost their lives that night.
I stood at the door and looked in on a nightmare scene. There were at least 30 bodies piled in one room and a dozen in the other, all badly burned and decomposed.
They’d been there for three hot months and were boiling with maggots, partly scattered and eaten by animals.
There was only one way to clear the space and that was on your hands and knees, working inwards, sifting every piece of debris. The aim was to collect body parts and personal effects that might be identifiable and also crime evidence including bullets and casings. We cleared both rooms and assigned as much identity to each victim as we could.
The oldest was probably in his 80s and the youngest around 15.
At a separate site, the elderly, women and children had been separated from men in a refugee convoy.
The children were taken to one side of a meadow and told to race back to their mothers. With their mothers and grandparents forced to look, the captors shot the children as they ran. Once they were dead, the men turned their guns on the women and elderly. A cold and calculated murder of innocents. As w moo
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Chinks in the armour isn’t always a sign of weakness ..it’s a sign of humanity