THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, October 2, 1995 TAG: 9510020040
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY MIKE MATHER, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 262 lines
Detective W.H. Barber Jr. saw the skeleton and his heart sank.
``When I first heard about it, I hoped I would find an arrow nearby, or a tomahawk, or a musketball,'' the Chesapeake detective said.
The sprawling woods of the Great Dismal Swamp sometimes offer up such historic finds. Indian skirmishes, Revolutionary War conflicts, Civil War clashes - all have left human remains.
But the Smith & Wesson .38-caliber revolver found near the decayed corpse - and a tell-tale hole in the bare skull - meant Barber had a case to work.
A mystery.
Five days after Barber's find, Virginia Beach police Detective Al Byrum put on blue jeans, tennis shoes and a short-sleeved shirt to start a similar case. A fisherman had uncovered pieces of another skeleton partially buried in the bank of a lake at an Owl's Creek golf course.
Another mystery.
For five months, the detectives and forensic experts have pitted their investigative wits and scientific acumen against two people with hidden identities.
Barber's victim erased his own identity.
A killer eradicated the identity of Byrum's victim.
To solve the cases, the detectives turned to experts who give life to bare bones.
Barber - working with Hampton Roads' chief medical examiner, Dr. Faruk Presswalla - spent 300 hours uncovering his dead man's final secret. When Barber closed the case in September, he ended three years of wondering for a Delaware family.
Byrum - teamed with the anthropology curator at the National Museum of Natural History, Douglas Ubelaker - hasn't been so fortunate.
The deaths are unrelated and the detectives have never met, but within days of each other they were saddled with the same predicament - a nameless victim, an open case and many dead ends.
For detectives, these are the worst cases. With a fresh body and fresh clues, police can almost always identify the victim. In Presswalla's nearly 20 years as medical examiner in Norfolk, fewer than five bodies have been buried without names.
The skeleton Barber investigated was nearly added to that list.
Barber spent the weekend of April 15 tramping though the Great Dismal Swamp. A 41-year-old fraud detective, he was sent to investigate the skeleton simply because he was available when the call came in.
``No investigator likes to start with absolutely nothing, and I started with absolutely nothing,'' he said.
``It was just skeletal remains that showed signs of enormous animal activity,'' Barber said.
Sometimes in autopsy reports it's called ``animal drag-off,'' expected when a body has been left in the woods a long time. In the swamp, everything from small rodents to bears had scavenged the body.
The lower jaw was missing; the clothes were rotted and decayed. The wallet was empty except for a Band-Aid.
No identification. No jewelry. No clues to tell Barber who had died or why.
Later, Barber would learn two things: The death was suicide, and the victim went to incredible lengths to die anonymously.
But Barber wouldn't let that happen.
``The family was the motivating factor,'' Barber said. ``He had a family, somewhere.''
The 18-year veteran, known to friends as ``Buddy,'' collected everything around the body: A pack of Winston cigarettes, a beer can, a comb and a .38 revolver with the serial number ground away.
On April 17, the skeleton was taken to the Norfolk medical examiner's office, Presswalla's clinical domain.
The scant clues - tangled in leaves, twigs and rotted clothes - began emerging like gold flakes in a miner's pan.
Because the suicide victim had been dressed in old jeans, hunting boots, a sweatshirt and a jacket, investigators surmised the victim died during winter. But exactly what winter was anyone's guess. Presswalla's was sometime between 1989 and 1993.
As Presswalla examined the bones, Barber probed the clues around them in search of an identity.
Sometimes, a certain combination of bones may tell investigators almost nothing, but other combinations reveal a surprisingly complete picture of a person.
The shapes of a skull and pelvis can tell a forensics expert like Presswalla the sex and race of the subject. The measurement of a femur or a foot reveals height. And with the waist measurement of pants, Presswalla was able to guess the victim's weight.
Finally, by studying bone fusing and arthritic changes, the doctor estimated age.
When the examination was finished, Presswalla knew this: The suicide victim was a white male in his 40s, 5-foot-10, 175 to 185 pounds, with a well-healed break on his right forearm and two upper molar extractions.
Those facts alone would significantly focus a missing-persons search.
In one of the man's pockets, Barber found an odd, thread-thin silver strip from a $100 bill that had apparently decayed. The Secret Service told Barber that the counterfeit-prevention measure wasn't used before 1990.
The beer can, devoid of fingerprints, was no help. The rusted gun divulged little, too. The make and model had been in production since 1955. Barber sent the revolver to a crime lab, hoping technicians could raise the filed-away serial number.
Then, Barber called the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. for information on the cigarette pack. Company officials said encoded information on the foil contains the dates, times and locations of virtually every step in the manufacturing and distribution process.
That was news to Barber.
With that, Barber thought he would know virtually where and when his man bought the pack, further narrowing the search.
But the key piece of foil was missing.
``I was very disappointed,'' Barber said. ``This is the kind of case you take home with you.''
The company could say only that the cigarettes were in circulation between August 1991 and March 1993.
Still, that cut in half Presswalla's best guess for time of death.
Now, Barber could focus on the missing-persons reports for those years. Police departments from as far away as Kodiak Island, Alaska, called with information and sent dental records for the most promising cases.
None matched.
A police artist crafted a clay face over the skull, hoping someone would recognize the man. The face was put on posters, but they failed to produce a lead.
Barber even called the Arizona-based manufacturer of the man's hat - Bass Pro Shops - to get a list of local customers. Company representatives told him the list was so large that a truck would have to deliver it.
Barber was going nowhere - a dead end loomed ahead for the tenuous trail.
Then the Norfolk crime lab called. It had raised the serial number on the revolver. Barber ordered a trace.
He wasn't prepared for what it showed.
Meanwhile, Byrum also was struggling.
He had far less to work with than did Barber, but what he did have was more disturbing.
``I knew he had bones,'' Byrum said of his Chesapeake counterpart. ``But I had bones.''
The washed-out gully leading to the lake bank where the Virginia Beach detective began his investigation was littered with white bone shards, most smaller than a silver dollar. The largest bone uncovered was the pelvis, broken in two.
When all the pieces and fragments were collected, they barely filled two shoe box-sized containers.
``I have never had a case like this,'' Byrum said. ``Usually, you have a body and a crime scene and an anxious feeling.''
The case gave Byrum a luxury seldom shared by homicide detectives - time. He savored it.
Police posted an around-the-clock guard for several days while investigators converted the crime scene to an archaeological excavation.
Police called a plant specialist, Old Dominion University professor Gerald F. Levy, to date tree seedlings growing around the bones. Byrum also called the Smithsonian Institution to ask for Douglas Ubelaker, the anthropology curator.
Byrum remembered him from a homicide class. Ubelaker was the teacher; the subject was bones. Byrum flew to Washington in the city's private plane to pick him up.
``We took our time and we were very careful because I had the feeling that whatever evidence we were going to get in this case, we would get from the gully,'' Byrum said.
The detectives and experts spent several days at the lake, unearthing dirt and leaves layer by layer with trowels and paint brushes.
``Dr. Ubelaker would pick up a piece of bone no bigger than your thumb, and he would just recite what part of the skeleton it came from,'' Byrum said. ``It was amazing.''
The fragments represented most of a body's bone groups, but the bones weren't arranged in any anatomical pattern, as they were with Barber's skeleton. Instead, the scattering led Byrum to believe the fragments were dumped in a pile.
The bones were shattered because they were burned, Ubelaker told Byrum. But the ground showed no signs of a fire.
``Some bones were charred and showed signs of extreme heat,'' Byrum said. ``Others showed no signs of burning at all.''
Byrum now thinks the killer stuffed the victim into a container and burned the body. Bones exposed to the highest heat charred. Others were somewhat protected because the body was folded and burned unevenly.
The heat was so intense it destroyed even teeth: Just three survived.
Still, the fragments were enough for the scientists to determine that the victim was a woman, 25 to 35, whose race is unknown. She had been dead between between one and four years.
Like Barber, Byrum found a few other clues.
In the gully, detectives spotted a charred piece of cloth, probably from a blanket. Another wadded piece of material found in the pile turned out to be a bra cup, its size undetermined.
Using a metal detector, police found a 4-inch section of gold chain and two metal eyelets like those used in duffle bags. The blanket swatch and fibers found attached to the eyelets have been sent to the Washington FBI lab for analysis. The bones were sent for DNA extraction.
Like extracting DNA, raising a gun's destroyed serial number is a difficult chore.
Just as handwriting sometimes leaves impressions on lower sheets of paper, a serial number stamped onto a gun can also leave readable marks on lower layers of the metal. Simply filing away the digits doesn't always remove them.
Barber was lucky.
The suicide revolver was made by Smith & Wesson in 1982 and sent to the Norfolk Police Department.
Barber thought his dead man might be a cop.
``It was shocking to find the gun came back to Norfolk,'' he said.
When Norfolk switched to semiautomatics in 1987, many of the .38 revolvers were sold to officers who wanted them. Others were traded in for discounts on the new weapons.
Only an extensive records search from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms would show if the gun stayed with its first owner - a police officer - or if it was traded in. Barber ordered the search.
It took ATF clerks nearly four months to search the transactions by hand. They uncovered a meandering path of ownership.
From the police, the gun was traded in and became property of a broker. From the broker, it was sold to a gun shop that went defunct. The defunct dealer sold the revolver to a Seaford, Del., gun shop, and that gun shop sold it again.
But there the trace ended. The ATF's Washington office couldn't read the name on the final sale.
That wasn't good enough, Barber thought. He had worked too hard to let it go now.
He called Ron Tarrington, resident agent in charge of the Norfolk ATF office, and asked for help. Tarrington found someone who could read the name.
The gun owner was Bruce Allen Todd, 38.
Todd, tormented by depression, purchased the revolver on Jan. 30, 1992, at the gun shop in Seaford, Del.. The next day, Todd sold all his possessions and, without disclosing his destination, drove his truck to Chesapeake. Once there, he sold his truck for cash.
He was never seen again. His family never reported him missing.
In 1971, when Todd was 12, he broke his right arm. X-rays show the fracture matches the well-healed break on the skeleton.
Dental records, however, weren't conclusive, in part because the lower jaw was never found.
``I think we are satisfied it is him,'' Presswalla said. ``We may not get a scientific, exact identification, but it is still a preponderance of the evidence.''
Barber, however, is more certain.
``There is no doubt in my mind that we have laid to rest Bruce Allen Todd,'' Barber said.
Presswalla signed the death certificate.
There is no death certificate for Byrum's victim - her name remains a mystery.
Like Barber, Byrum ordered searches of missing-persons reports and has earmarked a possible match.
If DNA can be extracted from the bones, the Virginia Beach detective can compare the genetic code with that of the missing woman's mother.
Byrum is expecting to hear from the Washington lab any day.
``I don't consider this a hopeless case at all,'' Byrum said. ``It's obviously a homicide and you just can't let that slip through the cracks. You have to go after it with all you've got. Maybe I'm optimistic, but I think this is a solvable case.'' MEMO: Byrum is asking anyone with information about this case to call him at
427-4101, or to call Crime Solvers at 427-0000.
ILLUSTRATION: TWO DETECTIVES, TWO DEATHS TO SOLVE
[Color Photos]
VICKI CRONIS
Staff
Virginia Beach Detective Al Byrum: He had a scattering of bone
shards, which barely filled two containers the size of shoe boxes.
But he also had time, and a bones expert from the Smithsonian.
MORT FRYMAN
Staff
Chesapeake Detective W.H. Barber Jr.: He had a bare skeleton in the
Great Dismal Swamp, with a hole in its skull and without its lower
jawbone. He had a rusted revolver with the serial number ground
away. He had rotted clothes. And he had the area's chief medical
examiner.
by CNB