The Skeleton Crew Read Online Free PDF Page A

in wire-rimmed spectacles who took the stage shortly after Todd: Dr. Marcella Fierro. Fierro started her career as an ambitious young medical student in upstate New York. Only the ninth woman in the country certified in forensic pathology, Fierro joined Richmond’s Medical College of Virginia Hospitals and the office of the Virginia medical examiner, where she would one day meet author Patricia Cornwell. As a technical writer for the medical examiner in Richmond, Cornwell gained intimate knowledge of forensic science—material that would later surface in her wildly popular crime novels. And Fierro became the model for Kay Scarpetta, the unassailable expert pathologist featured in more than a dozen of Cornwell’s best-selling books. (Fierro points out that she is not the physical model for Scarpetta: “Kay is blond, blue-eyed, and a hundred and fifteen pounds. I’ve never been blond, I have brown eyes, and I haven’t weighed a hundred and fifteen pounds since I was twelve.”)
    In the 1970s, more than a decade before her friendship with Cornwell began and when Todd Matthews was still in kindergarten, Fierro heard a speaker at an American Academy of Forensic Sciences meeting call for anational registry for the unidentified. The subject resonated with her. Fierro had noticed that if a nameless but potentially recognizable body—an unidentified, or UID in law enforcement lingo—turned up on her autopsy table, the police took photos and issued a missing-person report or an APB. But if the body had decomposed or lacked fingerprints, “forget it,” Fierro said. “There was really nothing.”
    It was obvious—to Fierro, at least—that this was a problem. It turned out to be a bigger problem than she could have imagined, involving law enforcement agencies, police departments, coroners, and medical examiners across fifty states with overlapping responsibilities for the unidentified and a communication breakdown that rivaled that of Apollo missions on the far side of the moon.
    Big urban police departments considered their smaller, more rural counterparts hicks and rubes; professionally trained medical examiners with advanced degrees looked down on locally elected coroners. Consequently, if a missing person became an unidentified body several states away, or even in the next county, the case might remain unsolved because public service officials in one location didn’t deign to share information or confer with their counterparts elsewhere.
    They did all agree on one thing: no one wanted to talk to the public.
    Theories abound on why law enforcement entities are so fiercely autonomous. Major urban police forces as we know them have been around since the mid- to late nineteenth century, state police forces evolved independently at the end of the nineteenth century, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation came into existence even later. Within a single municipality, police power can be divided among dozens of separate organizations, creating legions of fiefdoms. It was unclear whether a stray human body “belonged” to the medical examiner or to law enforcement. The fact was, no one entity owned the problem of UIDs, and early on, no one seemed to know how to go about identifying them.
    Yet seeds were being sown. Around the time that Fierro was performing her first autopsies in Richmond in the mid-1970s, a police artist and an anthropologist from the Smithsonian Institution joined forces to attempt to elicit the “personality” of a skeleton found in woods adjacent to a Maryland industrial park. Science had not yet enabled investigators to reconstructpersonality based solely upon the fragmentary remains of an individual, the pair wrote. But they decided to try to give one victim a presence that others might recognize.
    The anthropologist determined that the victim was a seventeen- to twenty-two-year-old female, shorter than average, with a skewed right hip and a