News contact: Sarah Sue Goldsmith Assistant Director Office of University Relations
http://www.lsu.edu/guests/wwwpr/newsservice.html LSU News Service 225 388-3871
"There's a house, and a hollow front porch, and a metal door, and a skeleton. Can you come?"
Such phone calls are part of the fabric of Mary Manhein's life as director of the Forensic Anthropology and Computer Enhancement Services Laboratory at LSU. Each call represents tragedy or violence to a human being and heartache for the victim's survivors.
Manhein's new book -- The Bone Lady: Life as a Forensic Anthropologist (LSU Press, $24.95) -- is a collection of anecdotes weaving her professional life into musings about her childhood in southern Arkansas and northern Louisiana.
As a forensic anthropologist and bioarchaeologist, she has worked with law enforcement officers throughout Louisiana, as well as in Arkansas, Mississippi, Texas and other states to help identify skeletal remains and match them to missing persons.
When coroners are stumped in determining the cause of death or identifying the remains, Manhein studies the bones to assess physical trauma, age, race, sex and height. She and her staff use computer technology to show age progression in a missing person and clay facial reconstructions to restore the humanity of the bones and lead to identifications.
Whether it's the body of an elderly woman, a child or a young man that law enforcement officers need help identifying, to Manhein it's more than just a case number and an unsolved mystery. Each is a person.
For example, there's the story of Duncan Morgan, who had been sitting in a recliner in his rickety trailer home watching TV when someone blew off his head with a shotgun.
The primary witness, "Willie" (Manhein does not use real names), recalled that he had helped bury the body of the murdered man -- stuffed into a plastic bag -- in the Mississippi River levee. He just wasn't sure where. Willie trapped snakes and lizards for a living and was afraid of his nephew, Jacob, the killer, due for release from prison any day (for another crime). Authorities wanted Willie's help locating the body before Jacob was released. Willie might disappear.
Manhein didn't go into this business for the glamour.
"So there I was. Amid fire ants, rising water, and prison trusty labor, we built sandbag levees, and we looked and looked for the man in the plastic bag, but we couldn't find him..." Three weeks later, a backhoe found the corner of the plastic bag, and Duncan Morgan's remains were brought to the surface for Manhein to study.
The skeleton beneath the front porch, the small box of bones that turned out to be a family pet, the battered body buried in the rose garden, a cemetery excavation in New Orleans, the "Spanish" gentleman in the cast-iron coffin, old coffins found in the 1930s and reburied on the grounds of the Louisiana State Capitol -- these are only a few of the human tragedies that Manhein has worked to find answers to.
She introduces readers to forensic entomology and muses about who really shot Huey Long. While she does explain how bone structure differs from male to female and from one race to another -- and how signs of trauma can be traced on the bones -- she softens the impact with her personal anecdotes.
Manhein says in her book that she grew up in a family of storytellers in the mountains of southwest Arkansas. They sat around the fireplace in the evenings listening to the stories. "Memories of those stories come to me at the oddest of times. I find them comforting," she says.
Many of these family tales are woven into Manhein's book, relieving the grimness of the tragic situations and sketching in the life of the forensic anthropologist just as she fills in the features of the bones she studies.
-30-
RSS