Science: The Professor and the Bones

The body had been very positively identified. Discovered in Schiller Park by Chicago police, the murdered, badly burned corpse was little more than a skeleton, but a Negro woman was certain it was her missing husband. A dentist was equally certain that he recognized the jaw. The woman claimed her husband’s insurance.

To make triply sure, the police took the bones to Anthropologist Wilton Marion Krogman of the University of Chicago. The professor measured them, made a few calculations, then surprisingly announced that the woman and the dentist were both wrong: the skeleton was no Negro’s but that of a middle-aged white laborer. Shortly afterward the missing Negro turned up alive.

Such bone-reading feats have endeared Professor Krogman to policemen throughout the Middle West. They often consult him in baffling cases, are invariably astonished at the precision with which he reconstructs the corpus delicti—and sometimes the crime. Professor Krogman, an ardent detective-story fan, loves this kind of work. In the FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin this great authority on bone measurement recently described his uncannily accurate methods.

By means of well-established formulas, for example, an individual’s face can be reconstructed accurately from his skull, his height calculated with 99% precision from certain single bones (e.g., a man’s height is usually 1.88 times the length of his thigh bone plus 813.06 mm.). A person’s bones “almost literally punch a time clock” as he grows. Sure clues are the uniting of long bones to their caps and the successive disappearance of sutures (seams) in the skull, which occur at precisely known stages in a man’s life. Some Krogman performances:

The Runaway Millionaire. An 18-year-old Oklahoma half-breed Indian had disappeared. Several years later oil was discovered on land allotted to the boy, and his father claimed the royalties. The only evidence of the boy’s death was a skeleton buried in Arkansas, where the father said his son had been killed riding a freight.

One anatomist pronounced the skeleton that of a man over 30. But professor Krogman won the case for the father by proving conclusively that the skeleton was indeed that of an 18-year-old Seminole-Negro whose measurements fitted the missing youngster.

The Accused Brother. In Ohio a man was accused of murdering his brother, whose skeleton was dug up several years after his disappearance. Professor Krogman readily identified the skeleton as that of the missing man. Then the police asked him a harder question: Could he verify or refute the survivor’s assertion that he had killed his brother in self-defense? The Professor carefully examined the bones and the paths of lead shot embedded in them, then reconstructed a picture of the killing which corresponded exactly with the survivor’s story that he had crouched and shot his brother while he came at him with upraised knife. Result: the charge against the killer was changed from murder to manslaughter.

The Cobbler’s Basement. A Cincinnati shoemaker was accused of having lured a young girl into his basement shop and killed her. Police dug into the shop’s dirt floor, found an amazing collection of bones that seemed to explain a whole series of recent unsolved crimes. When they took the bones to Professor Krogman, he quickly identified them as those of a cow, five sheep, a turkey, a rat, a pigeon, a barn owl.