Category Archives: Life & Death

MORTIS – UNDERSTANDING BODY CHANGES AFTER DEATH

AA5Many crime writers mistakenly believe there’s a precise science to pronouncing time of death (TOD). There is a progressive process, but the sequence and time intervals are influenced by many factors. To craft convincing death scenes, authors need to know how a body actually breaks down.

Mortis is the anatomical term for changes in a body after the moment of death. Medically, that’s when the central nervous system gets unplugged and oxygenated blood is no longer delivered to the tissues, which naturally start recycling. The five types of mortis are:

  • Rigor – stiffening of muscles

  • Livor – settling of blood

  • Algor – change in temperature

  • Palor – change in color

  • Decomp – breakdown in tissue

AA6All these mortis conditions are integral to a decomposing process. Death is a part of life and decomposition is a part of death. Just as life is not always predictable, neither is estimating the post-mortem interval (PMI) between when death anatomically occurred and when first examination of the body begins.

Death investigations work on a triangle of Body – Scene – History. It’s a holistic approach to determining cause of death (COD) and it’s the coroner’s responsibility to answer five universal questions:

  • Who is the deceased?

  • Where did they die?

  • When did they die?

  • What caused their death?

  • What was the means of death?

AA7Some people are confused about the difference between cause and means. Cause is the medical reason. In this fellow’s case the cause of death would be traumatic brain injury. Means is the mechanism or physical reason – gunshot wound to the forehead.

There can be thousands of causes of death, but there are only five classifications:

  • Natural

  • Accidental

  • Suicide

  • Homicide

  • Undetermined

AA8How this ties into mortis is that satisfying the five universal questions, great weight is placed on interpreting the body’s condition when first examined. This is where understanding the mortis process is so important and a lot of the interpretation comes from years of experience.

The proper pronunciation of the mortis states puts emphasis on the first syllable and it’s a long ‘I’ (RYE-gore).

Let’s look at each one.

Rigor Mortis is the stiffening of muscles. It’s caused by the body’s energy source, adenosine triphosphate (ATP), being depleted. With no energy left to keep the muscles flexible, they naturally go to a rigid state until another enzyme begins the breakdown of tissue and relaxation returns.

AA10Immediately upon death, the body enters a brief period of primary flaccidity where it’s dead limp. Depending on many factors, temperature and body mass being the big ones, the muscle stiffening begins in 1- 2 hours, first setting into the eyelids, jaw, and neck. It proceeds to the limb joints and extremities after 4-8 hours and fixes in the organs in about 12 hours. Rigor releases in a reverse sequence and can be absent in as little as 12 hours or can stay for days, again depending on factors.

Livor Mortis is the pooling of blood caused by gravitational settling once the heart stopped pressurizing the vascular system. It’s evident by purplish-red blotching where blood is free to pool and blanched-white where pressure points restrict it. Lividity, as it’s also known, sets in between 30 minutes to 1 hour after death and ‘fixes’ in about 8-12 hours. ‘Fixing’ is the entire settling where blood has coagulated and no longer runs free.

Algor Mortis is the change in body temperature. A cadaver will always achieve ambient temperature, regardless of time. A normal, living human’s core temperature is 36 Celsius (98.6 Fahrenheit) but the scene temperature could be anywhere above or below. In a cold environment, the body will drop to equilibriate. In a hot environment, it will rise. Here’s where so many peripheral factors come into play. Body size. Layered Clothing. Air movement. And the list goes on. A rule of thumb is that a body’s temperaature will change about 1 degree Celsius per hour.

AA11Palor Mortis is the change of color. Live humans are pretty much a reddish tinge due to oxygenated blood flowing (different tones for different races). Immediately upon death, a bluing phase occurs, following by a grey, then a white, and it can be a rainbow of colors as decomposition takes over.

Decomp, or decomposition, is not really a true class of mortis – rather it’s the culmination of the four mortis processes which leads to a breakdown of the body tissues and a return to nature.

Decomposition is a complex and unpredictable thing. There are two processes that morph into one:

  • Putrefaction – action of bacteria on body tissues

  • Autolysis – body breakdown by endogenous substances

AA9In most deaths these two work in tandem, starting with a breakdown in internal organs which produces gas. This causes bloating and skin discoloring, as well as the foul odor from purging or ‘gassing-off’. As the muscle tissues change, the skin begins to dislodge, the joints become loose enough to disarticulate, fats become liquefied, and bones become exposed. Advanced decomp can become skeletonized, mummified, or consumed – again depending on so many factors, which all start from the mortis process.

The changes in a human’s body after death can be just as varied as their experiences in life.

Biological, environmental, and circumstantial factors will shape your death, just like they’re shaping your life.

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I originally wrote this post for Kristen Elise, PhD, on her blog site at MurderLab.com. I think it’s useful information for other crimewriters so I shared it here at DyingWords. Here’s the link to the original post on Kristen’s site:

http://www.murderlab.com/2015/07/mortis-understanding-body-changes-after.html

WHO WAS THE MAD TRAPPER OF RAT RIVER?

AA3Albert Johnson, known as the Mad Trapper of Rat River, was a murderer and a fugitive from the largest manhunt in the history of Canada, leading a posse of Mounties through the Arctic on a six week, winter wilderness chase in 1932. He killed one Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer and wounded two others before dying from police bullets in a firefight on a frozen river. Today, the Mad Trapper tale is symbolic of the North American frontier. He is an icon. A legend. But was he really Albert Johnson? Find out what modern forensic science tells us.

AA14The story began on July 9th, 1931, in the Northwest Territories when a stranger arrived in Fort McPherson. Constable Edgar Millen of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police routinely questioned the newcomer who identified himself as ‘Albert Johnson’ but provided no other personal information. Millen satisfied his responsibility to ensure Johnson was equipped for survival in a frontier land with sufficient money and supplies but thought it odd that Johnson declined to buy a trapping license. He noted Johnson was slight of stature, clean in appearance, and spoke with a Scandinavian accent.

Albert Johnson ventured far into the McKenzie Delta and built a small, log cabin on the banks of the Rat River where he reclused. Come the winter, local natives found their traps being raided and concluded the only suspect was Albert Johnson. They complained to the RCMP in Aklavik, causing two Mounties to dog-sled 60 miles through waist-deep snow, arriving at Johnson’s cabin on December 26th, 1931. Johnson was there but refused to speak, forcing the police to return to Aklavik and get a search warrant.

On December 31st four Mounties returned to Rat River. As they attempted to force into Albert Johnson’s shack, he shot at them with a 30-30 Savage rifle, seriously wounding a constable. The police retreated to form a larger posse.

AA1They came back with nine, heavily-armed men, forty-two dogs, and twenty pounds of dynamite. Johnson again opened fire, causing the police to hurl in explosives which blew the cabin apart. Rather than himself also being in pieces, Johnson emerged from a foxhole under the cabin and blasted back with his rifle. A 14-hour standoff, in -40F temperatures, took place until the posse backed-off to Aklavik for more help.

A severe blizzard delayed the return, but on January 14th, 1932, a huge squad of police and civilians arrived to find Albert Johnson long gone. The pursuers caught up with Johnson two weeks later far up the Rat River where Johnson opened fire from a thicket of trees on the bank and shot Constable Edgar Millen dead. Again the police retreated.

AA11By now the news of the manhunt had reached the outer world through an emerging medium called radio. Listeners all over Canada, the United States, and the world, were fixed to their sets to hear the latest on the cat and mouse game between a lone, deranged bushman and the might of the famed Canadian Mounties who ‘always got their man’. It was like the OJ Simpson case of the time.

The ‘Arctic Circle War’ represented the end of one era and the beginning of another as the police turned to technology to capture Albert Johnson. They embedded radio into another new tactic – the airplane. World War One flying ace W.R. ‘Wop’ May and his Bellanca monoplane were hired to find Johnson from the air and radio his position to the dogsled and snowshoe team on the ground.

On February 14, May spotted Johnson on the Eagle River in the Yukon Territory, confirming Johnson had traveled an incredible 150 miles, crossing a 7,000-foot mountain pass in white-out conditions, in temperatures with windchill hitting 60 below Fahrenheit. He’d eluded his trackers by wearing snowshoes backward and mingling with migrating caribou herds.

AA7The police overtook Johnson on a river bend on February 17th, 1932. It ended in a mass of bullets leaving another Mountie seriously wounded and Albert Johnson, the Mad Trapper of Rat River, dead on the snow.

They sledded Johnson’s body back to Aklavik where it was examined, fingerprinted, and photographed. Remarkably, dental examination showed sophisticated, gold bridgework which indicated this man, age estimated at 35 – 40, came from an affluent background. In his effects was $2,410 in Canadian money (worth $34,000 today) but absolutely no documents on his identification. An extensive investigation ensued to find his true identity. His death photos and description were circulated word wide, causing some leads to come in, but nothing definite. No one came forward to claim the body and ‘Albert Johnson’ was buried in a perma-frost grave near the village of Aklavik.

Here are the GPS coordinates for significant Mad Trapper locations.

These latitudes and longitudes can be plugged into iTouch Maps for satellite viewing. https://itouchmap.com/latlong.html

  1. Cemetery / Gravesite at Aklavik:   +68.222979N   -135.010579W
  2. Trapper’s Cabin on Rat River:  +67.713444N  –135.127873W
  3. Settlement of Fort McPherson:  +67.436700N  -134.88100W
  4. Richardson Mountain Pass:  +67.278236N  -136.122161W
  5. Eagle River Death Scene:  +67.165926N  -137.172716W

AA12The Mad Trapper case was of enormous public interest, many sympathizing how a loner – almost super-human – could endure the environment, living off the land for forty-eight days and outwitting some of the most bush-wise and toughest people of the time. As with the mystery of Albert Johnson’s identity, so was the question of his motive.

Over the years, a number possible identities were offered for who ‘Albert Johnson’ really was.

AA8The most widely accepted theory was Arthur Nelson, a prospector who was known to be in British Columbia from 1927 to 1931 and had left for the Arctic. Photos of Nelson appeared to be a dead-ringer for ‘Albert Johnson’ and descriptions of Nelson’s effects (rifle, pack, and clothing) were identical to those recovered from Johnson.

Another promising lead was a man known as John Johnson, a Norwegian bank robber who’d done time in Folsom Prison. Again, the physical description was similar and the Scandinavian accent noted by Constable Millen seemed to fit.

The Johnson family of Nova Scotia identified the Mad Trapper as their lost relative, Owen Albert Johnson, who was last heard of in British Columbia in the late 1920’s. Again all the pieces fit – physical appearance, personal effects, and disposition.

AA6Sigvald Pedersen Haaskjold was suggested as being the real ‘Albert Johnson’. Haaskjold, who was last seen in northern British Columbia in 1927, was a recluse who was paranoid of authorities because he’d evaded conscription in the First World War. He’d built a fortress-like cabin near Prince Rupert before disappearing. Once more the looks, age, accent, and mentality fit the Trapper’s profile.

As with advances in 1930’s technology like the radio and the airplane which tracked ‘Albert Johnson’ down, forensic technology in the twenty-first century came into play for a once-and-for-all attempt at solving the mystery of who the Mad Trapper of Rat River really was.

AA10In 2007, seventy-five years after his death, ‘Albert Johnson’ was exhumed for another look. As part of a Discovery Channel documentary, a team of eminent scientists including forensic odontologist and DNA extraction expert Dr. David Sweet, forensic pathologist Dr. Sam Andrews, and forensic anthropologist Dr. Owen Beattie, examined the skeletonized remains.

This forensic story is every bit as exciting as the hunt for the Trapper himself.

It took a pile of wrangling to get legal approval for exhumation, then obtain the consent of native peoples who laid claim to the land in which the Trapper was interred. Due to permafrost, there was only a slight window of time when the archeological dig could be made. And the exact location of the grave was in doubt.

AA9Perseverance came down to the last available day when the team and film crew zeroed-in on a shallow grave with a rotten, wooden casket. Using archeological skill and precision, the forensic scientists carefully detached the lid and exposed a perfectly preserved male skeleton. There were no longer traces of flesh or fabric, but what gleamed in their faces was gold bridgework from a sneering skull. Dr. Sweet used dental records made in 1932 to positively identify the ghostly remains as that of the Mad Trapper.

The team cataloged the bones, making three interesting observations. One was a deformity in the spine which led to questions as to how the man could have performed the physical feats described in legend. Second was that one foot was considerably longer than the other, again questioning his mobility. And third was the entry and exit marks of a bullet path through the pelvis which was consistent to the reported fatal wound.

AA13The team had the right remains but were no further ahead in determining identity. Dr. Sweet sectioned the Trapper’s right femur and extracted bone marrow samples as well as pulling four teeth for DNA examination. The remains were replaced in a new casket and re-interred in the original grave.

Back at the University of British Columbia, Dr. Sweet and his colleagues developed a perfect DNA profile of the Trapper. Extensive field investigation located relatives of the primary suspects – Arthur Nelson, John Johnson, Owen Albert Johnson, and Sigvald Pedersen Haaskjold. Descendant DNA profiles were developed for these men and compared to the known biological signature of the Trapper.

And guess who’s DNA matched?

AA4No one’s.

All four suspects were conclusively eliminated by modern forensic technology as being the Mad Trapper – as were a number of other remote possibilities. One sidenote is that oxygen isotopes developed from the teeth enamel indicated that the Trapper originated from either the mid-western United States or from Scandinavia.

So who really was Albert Johnson, the Mad Trapper of Rat River?

The mystery of who lies in the Aklavik grave remains unsolved.

*   *   *

Here are links to the fascinating made-for-television documentary on the forensic exhumation of the Mad Trapper’s skeleton.

http://www.mythmerchantfilms.com/index.php/mnu-library/mnu-lib-madtrapper

https://vimeo.com/channels/vidalbdoc/65414821

And author Barbara Smith wrote The Mad Trapper – Unearthing a Mystery which documents the forensic adventure.  Click Here

THE REAL GENIUS OF ALBERT EINSTEIN’S BRAIN

AA1On April 19, 1955, Mrs. Schafer asked her fifth graders at Valley Road School in Princeton, New Jersey, if they had anything to contribute for current events. A smart little girl, sitting at the front, shot up her hand and blurted “Einstein died!” A smart-ass boy, at the back of the class, said “Yeah, and my dad’s got his brain.”

When Albert Einstein died of an abdominal aneurysm the previous day, it was his will that his body be cremated. There was no mention of his brain being kept for scientific study. The story of what happened to Einstein’s brain over the past sixty years, and what today’s science tells us about the cause of his genius, is fascinating.

AA6Einstein was autopsied by Dr. Thomas Harvey, a pathologist at Princeton University, who removed the brain and kept it without the Einstein family’s knowledge. Dr. Harvey was caught like a grave robber, however worked out a deal with Einstein’s son, getting permission to retain the brain – but only for research, not for profit or show.

Dr. Harvey fixed the brain in celloidin, which is a standard procedure in preserving grey matter, then dissected it into 240 blocks and 1,000 microscopic slides, photographing it extensively. He sent specimens to leading neurologists around the world for their examination and, in time, received most of the pieces back.

AA13Findings were that Einstein’s brain was somewhat smaller than most male’s – 2.7 pounds vs. 3.0 pounds, however the inferior parietal region which governs mathematical and special reasoning was 15% larger than average. Otherwise, they thought at the time, he was a pretty normal guy – at least anatomically.

For twenty-three years Dr. Harvey kept Albert Einstein’s brain in two glass jars in a wooden crate, sometimes in his basement, sometimes in a closet, and for a while behind a beer cooler under his bed. In 1978, it was ‘rediscovered’ and became a media frenzy. That died down and it stayed with Dr. Harvey, travelling here, there, and wherever Dr. Harvey went as his career disappeared into twilight. In 2010, after Dr. Harvey’s death, the brain was transferred to two locations; the U.S. Army’s National Museum of Health and Medicine, and the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia where parts of it are on public display.

But science didn’t forget about Albert Einstein’s brain.

AA16As techniques advanced, Dr. Harvey loaned it out to researchers. In the 1980’s Professor Marian Diamond of the University of California, Berkley, pursued a theory that the ratio of glial cells in Einstein’s grey matter may be higher than average. Glial cells provide nutritional support for the neurons in the brain which allow the parts to communicate. Sure enough, she found that the glial cells in Einstein’s left inferior parietal area were ‘statistically significant’ and that this high ratio could have contributed to his ability to understand complex scientific problems.

Advancing to 1999, a team of researchers at McMaster University in Canada made the shocking discovery that a portion of Einstein’s brain called the parietal operculum region in the inferior frontal gyrus in the frontal lobe was vacant. They also found that part of a bordering region called the lateral sulcus, or the Sylvian fissure, was absent. The researchers speculated that this vacancy, or a missing part of Einstein’s brain actually allowed his thoughts to ‘see’ each other, rather than ‘speak’ which backs up Einstein’s own claim that he was a totally visual thinker, not a verbal communicator.

AA11And, in a 2013 study published in the credible, medical journal Brain that analyzed Einstein’s corpus callosum – the large bundles of nerves that connect the two cerebral hemispheres – scientists determined that Einstein’s nerve connections were thicker than average which may have contributed to his obvious ability to function at a high plane of thought.

The actual anatomical reason for Einstein’s genius remains a mystery. Perhaps, as science advances, new techniques will develop and may conclusively explain why a simple patent clerk, with a flawed brain, was able to see himself riding on a light beam through space and then found a way to express the theory of relativity through words.

But here’s how smart Albert Einstein really was.

AA8He understood the public’s obsession with his status and he understood human nature. He wanted his body burned, including his brain, so it wouldn’t be a shrine to the macabre. He knew that scientists wanting their own celebrity status – their own moment in the science sun, would pore over his glial cells, his parietal region, his lateral sulcus, his frontal gyrus, and his corpus callosum and would profess that they’d cracked the code of genius.

And he knew most of it would be bullshit.

Albert Einstein understood what made him different – he simply saw his own thoughts. He probably wanted people to figure it out for themselves.