Analyzing Forensic Clues for Burial Sites

"It's a way of taking in a lot of data, organizing it and analyzing it for spatial patterns."
"If nothing else, it's going to help people search more efficiently for missing persons."
"It's a huge problem [searching for dead remains lost in countries in conflict]. It's bigger than we realize."
"Ideally, you'd like to say, this is a very kind of human behaviour [how and where soldiers, terrorists or secret police dispose of the dead] and we see a lot of consistencies. That way you can take a lot of information from other countries and make reliable predictions about a country you've not been to."
Derek Congram, forensic anthropologist, researcher, University of Toronto

Canadian forensic anthropologist Derek Congram tests soil during work for the U.S. Defence Department locating remains of missing soldiers in Vietnam.          Handout

An ordinarily little-thought-of problem resulting from civil wars, attempts at genocide, tyrannical governments, is that all too often tens of thousands of people disappear never to be seen again, victims whose bodies have been concealed, shut away from public discovery as a way of shielding their murderers from justice. Derek Congram, a forensics anthropologist based in Toronto, has developed a computer system he hopes will aid the search for victims of war and others.

Families want to know the ultimate disposal of their loved ones. Governments that succeeded those who destroyed peoples' lives look for accountability demanded by their populations. Justice can often not be seen to be served when no proof exists that people have been slaughtered, their bodies buried in mass graves, hidden and awaiting gruesome discovery, from Spain to Rwanda to the Congo, let alone Syria and Iraq.

This man's work leading to the production of his computer-based program that seeks the geographic locations of bodies, was published recently in the journal Forensic Science International, and the attention it attracted led a large U.S. Defense Department program to consult with him in the effort to discover the whereabouts of still-missing GIs from foreign war zones.

Mr. Congram is on the cusp of leaving his work in research at the University of Toronto to take up work as a forensic coordinator for the Red Cross in South America where political violence is not unknown. Colombia awaits his attention as it recovers from a civil war where thousands of civilians were killed. In Spain the search continues for the estimated 115,000 people murdered after being taken from their homes half a century earlier.

In the United States the search for its missing soldiers rings up a price tag of $200-million annually. Developing countries where conflict or genocide has occurred represents a vast field of unmarked mass graves crying out for discovery and identification. A UN investigation in Bosnia and Rwanda went forward to solve the location of those who died in mass slaughters.

The Saddam Hussein Iraq years produced countless unsolved murders, among the 20 countries where Mr. Congram has been involved in a U.S. Justice Department project in the past. His new search system is set to analyze known data surrounding the disappeared, to develop an algorithm to predict their possible locations with inputs when possible, including information about such bodies already previously recovered.

Distance of the burial site from where people went missing, and the area under control by the killers are all added to the data base resulting in a map that identifies possible "hot zones" where such remains might be revealed to be buried. Five known civil-war burial locations in Spain became part of a test of the new program. Three of the locations were proven to be within the hot zones identified by the software, with the remaining two located a short distance off.

His work, which comprised his doctoral thesis, led to three years working with the U.S. Defense team to discover the whereabouts of soldiers' graves who were killed in Southeast Asia and Korea in the hopes that the mapping could make the search more efficient when and if they gain access to territory as yet closed off to entry.

Deconstructing an (Ancient) Crime

"He's in better condition than recent homicide victims I've worked on who have been found out in the open."
"Imagine, we know the stomach contents of a person [who lived] 5,000 years ago. In a lot of cases we are not able to do that even now."
"It was a very active defensive wound, and interesting in the context that no other injuries are found on the body, no major bruises or stab wounds, so probably he was the winner of that fight, even possibly he killed the person who tried to attack him."
"Roughly half an hour before his death he was having a proper meal, even a heavy meal."
"If you're in a rush and the first thing is to get away from someone trying to kill you, that's not what you do [pay attention to details]."
"The aim of the offender was to kill him, and he decides to take a long-distance shot -- could be a learning effect from what happened one or two days before. Which is pretty much what you see all the time nowadays. Most homicides are personal and follow violence and an escalation of violence. 'I want to follow him, find him and kill him.' All the emotions we have in homicide, these things have not died out in all these years."
"This was not a robbery gone bad or something. You go back to your village with this unusual [copper] axe, it would be pretty obvious what had happened."
Detective Inspector Alexander Horn, Munich Police

Dutch forensic experts Alfons and Adrie Kennis create the first image of Otzi (inset) Photo Heike Engel, South Tyrol Museum of Alchaeology

The man was not lean, not overweight, but well muscled and in fine shape for someone of 45, obviously accustomed to moving about a lot on his size 7-1/2 feet. He had brown eyes and shoulder-length dark brown hair, was five feet, five inches tall, weighed 110 pounds, and lived and died five thousand years ago. His body was found intact, encased in a glacier at the northern Italian border with Austria, by two hikers, in 1991. And his discovery caused a worldwide sensation. His well-preserved body was the finest and most complete ever discovered of a human being who lived during the Copper Age.

And his body is being preserved at the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology, in Bolzano, Italy. He is known as 'The Iceman', and also as 'Otzi', named for the geography where he was found, close to the crest of the Otztal Alps. Detective Inspector Horn had been approached by Angelika Fleckinger, director of the Bolzano, Italy museum where Otzi was being kept, with the request that he agree to some forensic work in determining the cause of the Iceman's death, and Mr. Horn was agreeable to the prospect, the 'coldest case' he had ever been assigned to.

Because the high humidity of the ice in the glacier in which he had been frozen after death was instrumental in preserving his organs and skin in intact condition, the forensic experts who went to work on Otzi the Iceman were able to reach useful conclusions on the basis of the evidence they found. Traces of pollen found in his digestive tract enabled scientists to place his death to have taken place in late spring or early summer.

Otzi the Iceman’s Homeland

In the several days preceding his death, he had eaten three substantial meals, and descended from an elevation of some 6,500 feet to the floor of the valley below, then ascended the mountains once again. He was discovered 10,500 up the mountain where his death had occurred. A deep, disabling cut which had been sustained mere days before his death, was noted in his right hand, penetrating the bone. Mr. Horn theorized from what he saw, and from his vast store of experience as a detective, that Otzi might have been embroiled in a violent altercation in his village.

The theory went so far as to assume that whoever the violent contest was with, Otzi might have prevailed, then decided to leave the village, provisioning himself for a trip with food, fire embers wrapped within leaves inside a birch-bark cylinder, and assorted equipment. He had with him a small flint dagger, and an almost completed bow, along with arrows, also in a state of near completion. Clearly, he meant at some point in his journey to finish his weapons, but seemed in no particular hurry to do so. He was not expecting to encounter any problems on his journey.

He made camp in a gully on the saddle of the mountain, had his dinner of Ibex meat, einkorn wheat, fat and bracken. A half hour later someone appeared behind him at a distance of  30 metres, took aim and shot him in the back. The arrow entered under his left armpit, ripping a half-inch section of his subclavian artery, a deadly wound. The angle of the wound led to estimations that he would have been shot from below and behind.

Nothing, it seems, from the investigation, that Otzi had taken with him was spirited away. He had a copper axe, which at the time would have been a tool/weapon of estimable value. And nor was his clothing disturbed, made from leather and fur of ten animals representing six species common to the geography. To take possession of either axe or clothing items, returning to the village with them, would have represented a dead giveaway of the perpetrator's intent, success and spoils.