It didn’t start out as a skull … only a pile of buried bones she meticulously unearthed and pieced back together. Once the shattered skull was intact, she covered it with clay and deftly began sculpting the features that had once formed a face. Slowly, the shards and remnants were brought back to life-- or at least an eerie likeness of a former life-- right there on her kitchen table. Now that the face was reconstructed, police were able to identify a long dead murder victim.
Macabre work by most people’s standards, but business as usual for Dr. Craig, the state forensic anthropologist for the Commonwealth of Kentucky.
Dr. Craig has always loved combining art and science. Throw equal doses of mystery, intrigue and compassion into the mix and you’ve got a career that makes CSI or Cold Case Files look like child’s play. Dr. Craig, whose father was a physician, worked as a medical illustrator for several years after earning her degree in the field from MCG in 1976. Then, intrigued by the possibility of using her skills to help solve crimes, she went back to school to earn a Ph.D. in forensic anthropology at the University of Tennessee.
It was at the anthropology research center in Knoxville, Tenn., that she not only refined her skills but tested her resolve. The center’s nickname is the Body Farm, a field where bodies donated to science are allowed to decompose under various circumstances so scientists can study the process. It is undeniably grisly business, yet work Dr. Craig finds singularly fascinating.
When the bodies of suspected crime victims are found quickly after death and are relatively intact, it is the job of forensic pathologists to glean information based on injuries, the condition of the organs and other clues. Dr. Craig has the more tedious and often more complicated task of being called in when the body is totally decomposed or destroyed beyond recognition. She has traveled to countless crime scenes, including individual murders and mass tragedies such as the World Trade Center, the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City and the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas to help identify victims and reconstruct crime scenes.
“Every case is different, and they all have their own fascinating aspects,” says Dr. Craig.
She cites her MCG education – which, in addition to art classes included extensive study in sciences such as pathology and anatomy – as excellent training that she continues to draw on to this day. But her most invaluable on-the-job tool, she says, is patience. “I think as a forensic scientist, you have to look at all aspects of every case, and luckily in the real world, we’re not limited by a timetable,” she says. “There are so many professionals working so many aspects of every case that it just takes time to get all the puzzle pieces back in order to make the picture clear.”
As
painstaking as the work often is, it’s worth it “when all of the puzzle pieces
fall into place and our team can solve the crime,” Dr. Craig says. She cites the
tremendous satisfaction of providing a family with closure when she helps
identify a murder victim whose disappearance went unexplained for weeks, months,
years or even decades.
“The human skeleton holds a wealth of information,” she explains. “The biological profile of the victim – age, race, sex and stature – can usually be gleaned from careful analysis. There may also be unique features in or on the bones and teeth. If the person died a violent death, there may be direct evidence on the bones.”
For instance, her sleuthing helped verify close-range gunfire as the cause of death of Branch Davidian members, rather than smoke inhalation as some suspected. She also helped match a displaced leg to an Oklahoma City bombing victim, belying the theory that the leg might belong to an unidentified co-conspirator.
Although Dr. Craig never loses sight of a victim’s humanity, she is a scientist in the purest sense when dispassionately piecing together bone fragments or recreating a set of shattered teeth. “To do this job, I have to be able to put a wall between my brain and my heart,” she says. “If I attack the science of the case, and not the specter of the victim’s suffering and death, it’s much easier to stay objective.”
Yet that very objectivity helps her achieve justice for the victim. “I love those cases where it seems someone is on the brink of getting away with murder, and then we find a key piece of physical evidence that makes us want to say ‘gotcha!’”
Dr. Craig is bemused that her once-esoteric field is now the fodder of countless crime shows. “For so many years, forensic science was kept secret,” she says. “Nobody ever knew what went on behind closed doors. Now, the Pandora’s box is open and the public is just insatiable. The only problem is that criminals read the same books and watch the same TV shows as everybody else, so they’re learning a lot of our tricks.”
It is the public’s insatiability that led to a new arm of Dr. Craig’s career: book-writing. She was lecturing to a group of mystery writers when a literary agent in the audience suggested that she chronicle her experiences in a book.
“Once I finally figured out what I was doing, about halfway through, it became fun,” Dr. Craig says. “It was a lot of work, because I’d never done it before. My learning curve was almost vertical.”
The
book, Teasing Secrets from the Dead: My Investigations at America’s Most
Infamous Crime Scenes, was published by Crown Publishers in 2004.
She doesn’t mind the high-profile aspects of her profession but stresses that the vast majority of her work is decidedly unglamorous. Whether peeling layers of leeches from a discarded corpse, excavating a body from a gravesite or recreating a rib cage from bone fragments to probe a bullet wound, Dr. Craig never flinches in the face of mankind’s cruelest impulses.
“I think the chief highlight is the sum of all the little victories, rather than a few spectacular events,” she says. “And satisfaction comes most often when a seemingly hopeless mystery suddenly gets solved.”
--Christine Hurley Deriso