By Susan E. Barker
Not a day goes by that Dawnie Wolfe Steadman isn’t boning up on her discipline.
A forensic anthropologist, Steadman is trained to identify decomposed human remains, to analyze the inexorable record of disease or injury etched into skeletons during life, and to give voice after death to the personal and communal histories indelibly written on one or more of the 206 bones of the human body.
Less than five years after receiving her PhD, Steadman has an impressive resume in her field. At mass graves in Argentina and individual graves in Cyprus, she has worked with human rights agencies dedicated to identifying thousands of unidentified victims of civil unrest and international conflict. At the request of police agencies in several states, she has differentiated old “trophy” skulls
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| Dawnie Wolfe Steadman, a forensic anthropologist, helps solve grueling mysteries as varied as crime cases and civil war casualties. |
From skeletal remains, she’s also helped to determine poaching as the cause of an Iowa bear death, and has dashed the hopes of more than a few Chicago-area hunters who thought they’d stumbled onto instant celebrity along with the remains of Jimmy Hoffa until Steadman assured them the remains were those of deer.
In fact, Steadman said, 30 to 80 percent of all remains brought to forensic anthropologists turn out to be those of animals. Sometimes, however, they are not.
Last summer, for what was the first but likely not the last time in her career, she gave key testimony in an Iowa murder trial. Steadman told the jury about being called to a scene where police were recovering bones from the bottom of a well. She recounted how she had stayed topside, putting the recovered remains in anatomical position and guiding the search until a complete skeleton was recovered. She then testified about working in collaboration with a forensic pathologist and x-ray records to positively identify the victim, who had been shot with two handguns and thrown into the well where his body remained undiscovered for about 10 years.
Her reward in such cases is to help families learn the truth about missing loved ones, to help law enforcement officers resolve unanswered questions about missing persons and, in criminal cases, to see the guilty prosecuted, she said.
“Testifying at the murder trial was not something I enjoyed doing,” she said. “My examination uncovered more than 50 wounds that were gunshots or gunshot related—wounds due to secondary projectiles: bits of bone or bullets. Essentially, my testimony allowed that person who could not speak to say to the court, ‘Look what happened to me.’”
The human rights applications of her work are even more powerful, she said. Steadman worked for three months in 1991 with the Argentine forensic anthropology team at a mass gravesite, where 300 of the estimated 15,000 to 30,000 men, women and children who disappeared during that country’s “Dirty War” of 1976 to 1983 are buried. The experience had a profound effect, she said.
“There I saw the immediate application of my knowledge of the skeleton to helping people and contributing to the legal process that will perhaps lead to the prosecution of those responsible,” she said. “When I got back, all I wanted to do was work on more of these projects.”
It wasn’t until 1999 that she was able to find the time to do so, however. At that time, she traveled to Cyprus with members of Physicians for Human Rights and worked for several weeks to try to positively identify remains exhumed from the graves of soldiers buried without adequate identification 25 years ago during fighting between Greek and Turkish Cypriots.
Unaccounted-for Greek Cypriot soldiers have been at the root of major political and social unrest in Cyprus for many years, she said. Many Greek Cypriots believe their missing relatives are still being held by Turkish Cypriots. It is a belief that keeps the two sides at odds and makes for a volatile political and social climate, Steadman said. The human rights group hoped to improve the situation by resolving at least some unanswered questions about the dead and missing, and some positive identifications were made as a result, she said.
Steadman joined Binghamton University earlier this year, coming from an assistant professorship at Iowa State University, where because of her versatility as a researcher, teacher and professional mentor in a field that is by its very nature cross-disciplinary, she was hired straight out of graduate school.
She was drawn to forensic work from the broader field of biological anthropology, the branch of the natural sciences that most specifically focuses on the skeleton.
Using bones, some as old as 1,000 years, to better understand the relationship between biology and culture, particularly as it relates to the epidemiology of disease in prehistoric and modern human populations, Steadman’s first interest in the field continues to be an important part of her research.
“Everything about culture,” she said, “affects biology.”
And vice versa.
Throughout time, she said, cultures have changed in response to disease, adopting measures ranging from the medieval construction of sanitaria, where afflicted persons were imprisoned and left to die of thirst or starvation, to relatively benign public health policies that mandate vaccinations.
“If we’re doing epidemiology of past populations,” Steadman said. “We count cases and then try to understand what it is about this population that allowed them to support infectious disease. There’s a critical mass, a number of people, and a range of activity that you have to have for the disease to be propagated, so it tells us about the living conditions of the population.”
“Counting cases” is often possible based solely on skeletal remains ,because in their chronic form many diseases leave markers on bones, she said. Tuberculosis, for instance, in its chronic form disseminates throughout the body and attacks the skeleton, particularly the spine. Likewise, such diseases as syphilis, leprosy and certain types of fungal infections leave a lasting legacy carved on bone. Signs of non-contagious diseases like some cancers are also to be found by an examination of skeletal remains, Steadman noted.
The aspect of her work that will more often put Steadman in the spotlight, however, is not her work with prehistoric epidemiology but her consultations and affiliations with police or disaster management agencies. As a result, her laboratory space on campus is broken up into a teaching lab, a research lab and an evidence room.
When decomposed or mostly decomposed remains are found, she will work with police and with area coroners and pathologists to help establish identities as well as causes and time of death, she said.
To facilitate that process, she expects to set up a research project to determine how quickly bodies decompose in conditions specific to upstate New York, she said.
“These are very important studies,” she said. “When remains are discovered, one of the most often asked questions is ‘How long have they been dead, Doc?’ and until we do enough studies to understand how fast or slow we can expect things to decay in this particular area of New York, we’ll just have to shrug our shoulders with everyone else and say, ‘Gee, I don’t know.’”
That, Steadman said, isn’t just an academic problem; it’s a real forensic issue. Time of death, even when the death took place months or years ago, is often important to determining the guilt or the innocence of a suspect.
Steadman is also a member of the national Disaster and Mortuary Operation Response Team, a group of experts called in to help identify victims of plane crashes, explosions or disasters too large to be handled by local agencies, she is contacting local police agencies, coroners and medical examiners to let them know her assistance will be available if needed.
In the meantime, if she gets one message across to her students and to police, she said, she hopes it will be that every person, no matter their age or cause of death, has a life history recorded in their skeleton — that every bone, any bone, has the potential to be the key to identifying human remains.
“If a single finger bone has a pathology that can be matched to pre-mortem records,” Steadman said, “that’s an ID.”