Of all the tissues in the human body, nothing tends to outlast teeth after death, a characteristic which makes them ideally suited as a means of identification. Indeed, in the aftermath of serious fires, teeth are often the only means of identifying scorched remains. It is frequently claimed that no two people have identical teeth. However, one must keep in mind that, unlike fingerprints which remain unchanged from birth, dentition achieves its uniqueness through use and wear. For successful identification, both ante-and postmortem records must be available. From such data, it is often possible to make an identification from a single tooth.

It is estimated that almost two hundred different tooth-charting methods exist throughout the world. The American approach, called the universal system, allocates a different number to each of the thirty-two adult teeth, beginning with the upper right third molar (1) and continuing around the mouth to the lower right third molar (32). Information is recorded about the five visible surfaces of each tooth, thus making it possible to complete a dental grid or odontogram, unique to the individual. Naturally, odontological features that can identify remains may also help identify criminals if bite mark evidence is left at the crime scene.

A bite mark is not necessarily an accurate representation of the teeth. Much depends on the mechanics of jaw movement and use of the tongue. Inside the mouth, the lower jaw (mandible) is movable and usually delivers the most biting force. The upper jaw (maxilla) is stationary, holding and stretching the skin, but when skin is ripped or torn, the upper teeth are involved more deeply.

For forensic purposes, bite marks fall into two categories:

1. Human-on-human, in which the skin of one or more participants inan assault is penetrated. (This may not always be the victim. Quite often the victim bites the attacker in self-defense.) The primary value of the bite mark is to identify (or exclude) a suspected assailant.

2. Bite marks on food, such as cheese, chocolate, or fruit. This mayestablish the presence of a person at a particular crime scene.

Of the two, bite marks on humans pose the greatest problem, as they may alter with the passage of time. For this reason, bite marks are routinely photographed over a set period of hours or days, so a permanent record is made. (Ultraviolet light can reveal bite marks even months after they have been inflicted.) If there is no penetration, the underlying bruising may take up to four hours to develop in the living, and is clearly visible for up to thirty-six hours. In a dead victim, they may take twelve to twenty-four hours to become visible. Sometimes it is possible to make a silicone rubber cast if the bite is deep enough. Before this can be done, swab specimens must be taken from the site, as residual saliva can often be detected and used for blood typing or DNA analysis.

Teeth are also useful in determining the age of a corpse, particularly someone young. Because the dental tissue growth of four microns per day is registered by striations on the tooth, it is possible to estimate the age of a young person within twenty days on either side. Age can also be assessed by X-rays of teeth in the jaws and dental eruptions into the mouth, but because these developments are affected by stimuli such as diet, race, and environment, they are not useful after the early teens.

After age twenty-five, senile changes are associated with the teeth; they wear down on the biting surfaces, gums recede, the pulp chamber becomes smaller, the roots are resorbed, and the tips of the roots become translucent. Only by careful observation of all these factors can the odontologist hazard an age. Even then, accuracy is generally no better than about forty-two months either side of the true age.

John Webster

DATE: 1849

LOCATION: Boston, Massachusetts

SIGNIFICANCE: This case involved the first American convicted of murder without the victim's body being either wholly present or definitely identified.

Shortly before Thanksgiving 1849, prominent Bostonian Dr. George Parkman visited the laboratory of Dr. John Webster, a professor of chemistry and mineralogy at Harvard Medical College. The visit was far from social. For some time, Parkman had been hounding Webster for repayment of a $438 loan and had publicly threatened to ruin the professor's career unless the obligation was met. That night Parkman failed to return home. Two days later, on Sunday, November 25, his wife had posters distributed throughout Boston offering a reward for information leading to her husband's whereabouts. Within days, Harvard College increased the reward to three thousand dollars. But there was still no sign of Dr. Parkman.

Webster told Parkman's family that he had repaid his debt on the Friday in question and hinted that Parkman might have been waylaid by thieves on his way home. After all, he was carrying a considerable sum of money.

Someone less than convinced with this story was Ephraim Littlefield, a college janitor. He recalled that on the day of Parkman's disappearance, the door to Webster's laboratory had been locked, and yet a wall adjacent to the lab's assay oven was red-hot. When Littlefield mentioned this to Webster, the latter blanched and blurted out that he had been conducting experiments. The next day, in a rare expression of seasonal goodwill, Webster presented the inquisitive janitor with a Thanksgiving turkey. This only served to make Littlefield even more suspicious. With his wife standing guard, he chiseled through the brick wall using a crowbar and peered into the gloom. In his own words, he described seeing "the pelvis of a man and two parts of a leg," adding with commendable understatement, "I knew that it was no place for these things!"

Littlefield quickly summoned the police. Their search of Webster's laboratory uncovered even more evidence of wrongdoing. In a wooden chest lay a human thorax, the sternum and ribs that constitute the upper torso. And in the oven that Webster used to heat various chemicals,

Reward notice issued in 1849 to publicize the disappearance of Boston physician George Parkman. (Library of Congress) they found what would become the most crucial evidence of all—a set of false teeth. When Webster was arrested, crowds surrounded his house, bombarding his terrified family members with insults and stones. Elsewhere, the shock waves reverberated far beyond Harvard and Boston, as all across America people devoured newspaper accounts of the grisly investigation.

More than 150 bones or fragments were recovered from the laboratory. The task of identifying them was delegated to a team of Webster's university colleagues. Comprising some of the finest scientific minds in America, the panel concluded that the remains were human and belonged to a male, approximately five feet ten inches tall, between ages fifty and sixty —very similar to Parkman, who was sixty years old and had stood an inch under six feet.

Webster's claim that the body parts were from a cadaver used by medical students was refuted by the team's inability to detect any traces of embalming fluid. They were divided on whether the dissection showed evidence of anatomical skill—Webster, a chemist, had not dissected a body since leaving school—but agreed that the level of decomposition coincided with the length of time Parkman had been missing. Also, the remains came from someone very hirsute, as was Parkman. Although unable to determine the precise cause of death, the panel entertained little doubt that these were the mortal remains of George Parkman.

Suicide Attempt

In custody, Webster attempted suicide with strychnine, but he survived to face a charge of murder. His trial caused such a sensation that the public gallery was operated on a ten-minute shift system to accommodate all the spectators. More than sixty thousand people trooped through the courtroom for a glimpse of the notorious defendant.

The testimony of dentist Dr. Nathan Keep was crucial. A close friend of both the victim and the accused, he described how, four years previously, Parkman had come to him for dentures. Because of Parkman's unusually prominent jaw, Keep was obliged to fashion a special cast. Nevertheless, when Parkman tried the dentures he complained of soreness and chafing, so Keep filed them down. On the witness stand, Keep pointed out those file marks to the jury. He also demonstrated how the dentures fit his mold exactly.

For the defense, Dr. William Morton—a pioneer of ether use in dentistry —openly derided Keep's assertion that this set of dentures, and this set alone, fit the cast he had made. To prove his point, Morton produced another set that also fit neatly into Keep's cast.

But public opinion weighed heavily against Webster, as did the final direction of Judge Lemuel Shaw to the jury, in which he stated that the corpus delicti, or actual crime itself, need only be proved "beyond a reasonable doubt." This was a landmark decision. A team of America's most distinguished anthropologists had established only that the bones were those of an elderly man, falling short of positively identifying them as belonging to Parkman. Without the dental testimony, it is doubtful that Shaw would have dared to utter such a directive.

At the end of an eleven-day hearing, Webster was found guilty; he was hanged before an unruly mob on August 30, 1850. Just before his execution, he made a full confession. Just as investigators had thought, the two had met in Webster's laboratory in the college basement. An argument broke out, with Parkman shouting: "I got you your professorship, and I'll get you out of it." Webster terminated the dispute by bludgeoning Parkman with a piece of wood and dissecting the body in a sink. The larger parts went into a vault used for storing cadavers; the rest were incinerated in his assay oven.

Conclusion

Despite the questionable identification—prosecutors nowadays would shun such skimpy proof—the Webster case remains a forensic milestone. It demonstrated for the first time the strength of multitasking in scientific crime investigation. Each expert contributed what he could, and on this occasion the sum of the whole was enough to justify the end result.

Harry Dobkin

DATE: 1942

LOCATION: London, England

SIGNIFICANCE: This case involves one of the earliest examples of odontological identification.

By the summer of 1942, German air raids had reduced so much of London to rubble that just trying to keep up with the business of removing debris was a major logistical nightmare. On July 17, a cleanup crew visited a bombed-out Baptist chapel in Kennington. Down in the crypt, workers began clearing the wreckage. Beneath a stone slab they found a corpse, little more than a skeleton with only a few shreds of skin intact. At first, everything suggested that this was just another victim of the Luftwaffe's nightly air raids. Yet as they lifted the body from its grave, the skull just came away. It had been severed from the body. When pathologist Dr. Keith Simpson examined the remains in the Southwark mortuary the next day, he determined that the victim was female and that she had been dead between a year and eighteen months.

A close inspection confirmed early suspicions that this was a case of willful murder. Not only the head but both legs had been severed, and then the corpse was doused with slaked lime—calcium hydroxide—in an illjudged attempt to hasten decay. It was ill judged because, contrary to popular belief, slaked lime tends to preserve organic matter, not destroy it. Enough of the larynx was left for Simpson to detect a small blood clot on the upper horn of the right wing of the voice box, almost certainly the result of strangulation.

Judging from the sutures of the skull vault—the brow plates were completely fused and fusion was under way between the top plates— Simpson estimated the woman's age at between forty and fifty.

Measurement of the bones suggested someone approximately five feet tall. The hair that remained was dark brown, just turning to gray. Simpson deduced that at some time she would have received medical attention for a fibroid tumor that had enlarged the uterus, and she had obviously undergone extensive dental treatment. Teeth in the upper jaw contained several fillings and showed the marks of a dental plate. Simpson knew that here lay his best chance of a definite identification.

Missing Persons

Acting on Simpson's report, the police studied a list of missing persons. The difficulties of compiling such a list in wartime are obvious, but one name stood out—Rachel Dobkin, the forty-seven-year-old wife of fire warden Harry Dobkin, who was employed by the insurance company next to the Baptist chapel to keep an eye out for fires. For almost twenty years, he and his estranged wife had been locked in a bitter dispute over nonpayment of child support, a conflict that had earned the recalcitrant Dobkin several prison terms. His wife, five feet one inch tall, had been reported missing on April 11, 1941. The next day, her identification card, ration card, and rent book were found at a post office in Guildford, Surrey. Her sister told the police that Rachel had gone to collect arrears of support from her husband. The couple had left a cafe in Dalston at 6:30 P.M., and Rachel had not been seen since.

Mrs. Dobkin's sister also provided the name of Rachel's dentist, Dr. Barnett Kopkin of North London. He had kept precise records of Mrs. Dobkin's treatment from 1934 to 1941 and was able to sketch a chart of her upper jaw. In conformation and number of teeth, location of fillings, and marks made by a dental plate, Dr. Kopkin's diagram matched a photograph of the corpse's mouth exactly. Also, in April 1941, he had extracted two teeth from Mrs. Dobkin's lower left jaw, an operation that left portions of the roots intact. An X-ray of this jaw, examined by a colleague of Simpson's at Guy's Hospital, Sir William Kelsey Fry, showed those same roots.

When Rachel Dobkin's doctor, Marie Watson of the Mildmay Mission Hospital, confirmed that the missing woman had had a uterine fibroid tumor, that should have been enough to satisfy any court, but Simpson, ever the perfectionist, removed any lingering doubts by superimposing a photograph of Rachel Dobkin on the skull, the technique Professor John Glaister had pioneered in the 1930s (see the Buck Ruxton case on page 226).

At his trial, Harry Dobkin's lawyers adopted a two-pronged defense. First, they attempted to dismiss Simpson's findings as being informed by speculation and not fact; then they suggested that if the victim was Mrs. Dobkin, in all probability she had been killed in an air raid. Neither approach worked. Dobkin was convicted and sentenced to death; he was hanged on January 27, 1943.

Conclusion

Simpson's testimony in this trial brought him national prominence. During his long and distinguished career, his meticulous attention to detail and impeccable fairness made him one of the world's foremost pathologists, a man whose opinion was respected and requested around the globe. 

Gordon Hay

DATE: 1967

LOCATION: Biggar, Scotland

SIGNIFICANCE: At the outset of this case, no one realized that a single bite mark would make legal history.

An all-night search for fifteen-year-old schoolgirl Linda Peacock ended at 6:45 A.M. on August 7, 1967, with the discovery of her lifeless body in a cemetery in Biggar, a small country town southwest of Edinburgh. She had fought furiously for her life until she was clubbed senseless and then strangled with a rope. Although she had not been raped, her bra and blouse were disarranged, and on the right breast was an oval-shaped bruise. Crime scene photographs included no less than fifteen photos of the bruise, which appeared to be a bite mark. Scotland's premier forensic odontologist, Dr. Warren Harvey, analyzed the bruise and confirmed that it was, indeed, a bite mark and that one of the killer's teeth was uncommonly jagged.

On the night of Linda's disappearance, witnesses had seen a couple talking by the churchyard gates at around 10:00 P.M. A woman who lived nearby reported hearing a girl scream about twenty minutes later. Although no one could say for sure, the girl matched Linda's description, and she appeared to know the young man she was talking to. At that time, the population of Biggar totaled about two thousand, yet within a week almost twice that number had been interviewed and eliminated as police officers widened their search for the killer. Ultimately the investigation focused on a local detention center for young offenders. Twenty-nine inmates were asked to provide dental impressions. Models made from the casts were then compared with transparencies of the wound.

Purely by observation, Dr. Harvey reduced to five the number of impressions that could not yet be eliminated from suspicion. These five inmates were recalled for further dental impressions. At this stage, Harvey consulted Professor Keith Simpson, the Home Office pathologist, who later said that in more than thirty years, he had never seen a better-defined bite mark. Together, the two experts concentrated their attention on the jagged tooth.

They soon whittled the second batch of impressions down to just one. Gordon Hay, seventeen, had been arrested the previous year for breaking into a factory. He was surly and truculent; his detention had been littered with frequent clashes with authority, and yet he willingly submitted to a further set of impressions being made of his teeth. Harvey and Simpson studied the sharp-edged, clear-cut pits like small craters on the tips of the upper and lower right canines. They were caused by a rare disorder called hypocalcination. The upper pit was larger than the lower and matched exactly the bite mark on the victim's breast. Harvey, in no doubt that they had found the killer, described Hay's teeth as "absolutely unique."

Fantastic Odds

During the course of the investigation, Harvey had examined 342 teenage soldiers. Of those checked, only two had pits, one had a pit and hypocalcination, and none had two pits. Extrapolation of these findings throughout the general population led Harvey to conclude that even if seventeen people could be found with two pitted canines and hypocalcination, then it would still be virtually impossible for any of them to have left the exact mark found on Linda Peacock's breast, so individual was that single tooth.

Hay's defense in the face of this forensic blitzkrieg was one of alibi; he swore that at the time of Linda Peacock's death, he was in the detention dormitory. Not so, said another inmate. He claimed that Hay had entered the dormitory much later that night, breathless, disheveled, and with mud on the knees of his jeans. Yet another boy described Hay meeting Linda Peacock at a local fair the day before her murder. Afterward, as she walked away, Hay announced his intention to have sex with her. (Apparently, local girls frequently dated boys from the detention center. On this occasion, it sounded as though a brief encounter had ended in tragedy when Linda refused Hay's sexual demands. Security at the center was later tightened to prevent any more nocturnal assignations.)

At Hay's trial, which began at Edinburgh High Court on February 26,

1968, his lawyers tried everything to get the dental evidence ruled inadmissible. When that failed, they countered with dental experts of their own. For the first time, a Scottish jury had to consider conflicting bite mark testimony. Deciding that the prosecution witnesses had made their case, they found Gordon Hay guilty of murder. Because of his age, he was sentenced "to be detained during Her Majesty's pleasure."

Conclusion

An appeal claiming the nonadmissibility of dental identification was argued ferociously but failed to overturn the verdict. With their decision to uphold the earlier judgment, the court sent a clear message that bite mark testimony was here to stay. 

Wayne Boden

DATE: 1968

LOCATION: Montreal, Canada

SIGNIFICANCE: The first North American case in which forensic bite mark evidence played a crucial role.

By the middle of January 1970, the worst suspicions of the Montreal police had been confirmed—a serial killer was on the loose in their city. Four times in the preceding eighteen months, young women had died in gruesomely similar circumstances. The first was a popular twenty-one-yearold teacher named Norma Vaillancourt. Her nude and strangled body was found in her apartment on July 23, 1968. Although the killer had gnawed repeatedly at her bare breasts, leaving deep bite marks, there were no signs of resistance; indeed, the medical examiner described the victim's facial expression as serene, smiling almost. This led investigators to wonder if, during consensual sex, the killer had "playfully" strangled the unsuspecting young woman, who had lapsed into unconsciousness without any awareness of what was happening. It was learned that Norma enjoyed an eclectic and varied social life with many boyfriends, none serious. All were checked and cleared.

The following year the body of Shirley Audette, twenty, was found lying on an apartment patio in West Montreal. Although fully clothed, she, too, had been raped and strangled and bitten on the breasts. Again there was that baffling lack of resistance, suggesting that she had known her killer. This murder provided investigators with their first clue. In recent days, Shirley had shared concerns with her friends about an unnamed man, someone who scared her. Unfortunately, she had not elaborated on his identity.

Unlike most serial killers who tend to murder at random, the man branded the Vampire Killer invariably became well acquainted with his victims. Marielle Archambault was a case in point. Other employees at the jewelry store where this attractive twenty-year-old worked remembered her leaving the store at closing time on November 23, 1969, with a handsome, flashily dressed young man. She had seemed ecstatic in his company. The next morning Marielle's desecrated body was found on the living room floor of her apartment. Unlike the previous victims, she had fought furiously for her life, but ugly teeth marks on her breasts provided grim confirmation that the Vampire Killer had claimed victim number three. A photograph of a young man was found at the apartment. Marielle's coworkers identified him as the man who had called for her the previous afternoon, but a sketch made from the photo and printed in the newspapers failed to produce any leads.

The last Montreal victim was twenty-four-year-old Jean Wray. When her boyfriend knocked on the door of her apartment at 8:15 P.M. on January 16, 1970, there was no reply. Puzzled because they had a dinner date, the boyfriend went for a beer in a nearby bar, then returned. This time the door was unlocked. Jean was lying on a sofa, totally nude, and with those trademark bite marks all over her body. Once again there was no sign of a struggle and her face looked eerily tranquil. Police believed that when the boyfriend had first called, the murderer was still in the apartment.

Cross-Country Killer

For more than a year the Vampire Killer lay dormant. His next eruption occurred half a continent away from Montreal. When Elizabeth Pourteous, a high school teacher in Calgary, failed to report for work on May 18, 1971, her apartment manager was asked to check if everything was all right. He found Elizabeth on the bedroom floor. The scene was depressingly familiar:

raped, bra torn open to reveal savage bite marks on her breasts and neck.

The luck that had so conspicuously eluded the Montreal investigation fell right into the hands of the Calgary detectives charged with finding Elizabeth's killer. Two fellow teachers had seen her in a blue Mercedes with a young man the previous evening. They remembered that the car had a bumper sticker advertising beef. Another friend reported that Elizabeth had been very excited about the new man in her life, a well-dressed fellow named Bill, who in every detail matched the description of the Montreal killer.

Next day the blue Mercedes was spotted close to the victim's apartment.

A police stakeout produced almost immediate results. Within half an hour a young man was arrested as he approached the car. There could be no doubt that he was the person in the photograph found in Marielle Archambault's apartment. He gave his name as Wayne Boden, formerly of Montreal, a twenty-three-year-old ex-model who had moved to Calgary a year earlier. He admitted being with Elizabeth on the previous evening, and that he had left a cuff link at her apartment—it was found during the autopsy, embedded in Elizabeth's back—but he insisted that she was still alive when he left the apartment.

An examination of Boden's underwear revealed seminal stains and pubic hairs that matched those from the body of Elizabeth Pourteous. But the decisive evidence was provided by a Calgary orthodontist, Dr. Gordon Swann, who identified the bite marks on Elizabeth Pourteous's breasts as having twenty-nine points of similarity with Boden's teeth.

Boden was sentenced to life imprisonment. He later confessed to three of the four Montreal killings—he always resolutely denied murdering Norma Vaillancourt—and received three more life terms. Officially, the murder of Miss Vaillancourt remains unsolved. In 1984, Boden hit the headlines again, when, on a "humanitarian" day pass from the maximum-security Laval Correctional Centre in Quebec, he escaped from a Montreal hotel after asking to use the bathroom. The panic over the Vampire Killer's liberty lasted less than twenty-four hours. The next day he was recaptured in a Montreal bar. He remained behind bars for the rest of his life. His sentence ended on March 27, 2006, when he died of natural causes at the Kingston Penitentiary in Ontario after a short illness.

Conclusion

In an unusual move, after being convicted, Boden agreed to discuss his case with Swann. During the course of this meeting, Boden expressed astonishment and fascination with the amount of information that Swann was able to glean from the bite mark evidence. "I didn't think you'd appreciate it that much," he told the surprised orthodontist. Then, in a moment of unexpected frankness, he added darkly, "I realize I have a problem."

Theodore Bundy

DATE: 1978

LOCATION: Tallahassee, Florida

SIGNIFICANCE: Ted Bundy's dazzling smile not only attracted victims, it also sent him to the electric chair.

In the early hours of January 15, 1978, someone broke into the Chi Omega sorority house at Florida State University (FSU) in Tallahassee and went on a blood-drenched rampage. At its conclusion, two students, Lisa Levy and Margaret Bowman, lay dead; two others were grievously injured. A man wearing a stocking cap and carrying a wooden club was seen fleeing from the building. Less than ninety minutes later, another student was attacked just a few blocks away, but fortunately she survived. Amid the carnage at the sorority, one vital piece of evidence emerged. Lisa Levy had sustained bite marks on her left buttock. Before the marks were photographed, an officer had the presence of mind to include a yellow ruler in the photo to give a sense of scale. This would later prove to be critical.

One month later, a man using the name Chris Hagen was arrested in Pensacola for driving a stolen vehicle. When a check of records revealed that "Hagen" was none other than Ted Bundy, wanted felon and suspected serial killer, immediately suspicion grew that he might be the architect of the Tallahassee bloodbath.

Between 1969 and 1975, a tidal wave of sex killings had swept from California through the Pacific Northwest and into Utah and Colorado. Numbering in the dozens, all of the victims were strikingly similar— female, young, attractive, generally with long hair parted in the middle. Some were found dumped in deserted areas, whereas others simply vanished, never to be seen again. The logistical problems of interstate murder investigations are many, but as the various law enforcement agencies compared notes and suspects, one name kept cropping up—Ted Bundy, a handsome young Seattle law student, gregarious and much traveled. Wherever Bundy was, women died. But finding the kind of evidence needed to convince a jury required more than speculation.

And then, on November 8, 1974, eighteen-year-old Carol DaRonch was duped into entering a Volkswagen outside a Salt Lake City shopping mall by a stranger claiming to be a police officer. When the man produced some handcuffs and attempted to bludgeon her, Carol DaRonch fought her way out of the car. Despite this close call, the killer continued to find victims until August 16, 1975, when a Salt Lake City police officer arrested a Volkswagen driver who had been acting suspiciously. Inside the car he found a crowbar and handcuffs. The driver turned out to be Ted Bundy. Amid rumors that he was the slayer of countless women, Bundy was identified by Carol DaRonch as her abductor and was sentenced to one to fifteen years of imprisonment.

One year later, in June 1977, following extradition to Colorado on a murder charge, Bundy escaped. After eight days, he was recaptured. Incredibly, on December 30, 1977, Bundy escaped again. Two weeks and two thousand miles later, the Chi Omega massacre occurred in Florida.

"Organized" Killer

Curiously enough, despite the appalling nature of the attack, the Tallahassee crime scene displayed an eerie neatness and was completely devoid of fingerprints. According to the FBI's Behavioral Science Unit, serial killers tend to fall into two categories: organized and disorganized. The latter kill without any consideration of the consequences, often littering the crime scene with clues. Organized killers, as the term implies, are far more calculating and go to quite extraordinary lengths to conceal their involvement. Unsurprisingly, this category of killer normally poses the greater problem for crime investigators. Yet in this instance, such precautions actually assisted the prosecution.

When William Gunter, the Leon County sheriff's department crime scene specialist, visited Bundy's Tallahassee apartment soon after his arrest, he routinely dusted the place for fingerprints. After a few minutes, he was puzzled. No matter where he searched—on closet doors, shelves, bedposts, handles, even an overhead lightbulb—he could not find a single print. As he testified later, "The room had been wiped clean." Such precautions, typical of the organized killer, only heightened suspicion against Bundy. After all, what kind of person lives in a fingerprint-free environment?

But this was conjecture. The prosecution needed solid evidence linking Bundy to the Chi Omega killings. Their best hope lay with the bite marks on Lisa Levy's left buttock. When Bundy refused to provide impressions of his teeth, a search warrant was issued, authorizing detectives to obtain the examples by force if necessary. Realizing the hopelessness of his situation, Bundy acquiesced. Coral Gables dentist Dr. Richard Souviron began by taking frontal color photographs of Bundy's uneven upper and lower teeth and gums. Then, using a mirror, he obtained a reverse-image photograph of the inside surface of the teeth. Next, Bundy was told to bite into a malleable compound and remain motionless for a few minutes. After a while the compound set, forming a permanent mold. Souviron finally took individual wax impressions of each tooth. By pouring sculpting material into these molds, he was able to make precise stone casts of Bundy's teeth.

After much legal wrangling (Bundy had originally accepted a plea bargain, only to change his mind), his trial for the FSU killings opened in Miami on June 25, 1979.

Deadly Testimony

Brimming with arrogance, Bundy, the onetime law student, insisted on leading his own defense. He tackled the state's witnesses with a crossexamination technique that vacillated between the amateurish and the abysmal—until Dr. Richard Souviron assumed the stand. At this juncture, Bundy threw one of his long-suffering lawyers into the fray and slunk off into the background. This was testimony that could kill him and he knew it.

Souviron was questioned at length about the photograph of the bite marks on Lisa Levy's body and the yellow ruler that appeared in the photo. The defense tried to capitalize on the fact that the original ruler had been lost, until Souviron pointed out that it obviously had existed and that he had no reason to doubt its accuracy.

Using an enlarged photograph of the bite mark on Lisa Levy's skin and a similarly sized photo of Bundy's teeth with the lips retracted, Souviron showed how an acetate overlay of Bundy's front teeth fitted exactly atop the photo of the bite marks. Asked by the prosecution if he thought, within a reasonable degree of certainty, that Bundy's teeth had made the bite marks, Souviron replied, "Yes, sir." For the first time, there was actual physical evidence linking Bundy to a murder victim.

Defense attorney Ed Harvey quickly sought to undermine the setback. "Analyzing bite marks is part art and part science, isn't it?" he asked the dentist.

"I think that's a fair statement."

"Your conclusions are really a matter of opinion. Is that correct?"

Souviron agreed that they were, but nonetheless the damage had been done. Confirmation came from Dr. Lowell Levine, chief consultant in forensic dentistry to the New York City Medical Examiner, who told the court that dental identification was nothing new, having been admitted into testimony as far back as the nineteenth century.

On July 23, 1978, Bundy was found guilty on all charges. More than a decade later, on January 24, 1989, he went to his death in Florida's electric chair. Although the exact number of his victims will never be known, just hours before his execution he hinted that it was somewhere between forty and fifty.

Conclusion

It is impossible to overemphasize the importance of odontological evidence in the trial of Ted Bundy. Even with such testimony, prosecutors knew that their case was far from ironclad; without it, they were almost certainly facing acquittal.

Carmine Calabro

DATE: 1979

LOCATION: New York, New York

SIGNIFICANCE: In this case, astute odontological analysis overcame a freakish crime scene faux pas.

On the evening of October 12, 1979, the nude body of a young woman was found on the roof of the Pelham Parkway housing project in the Bronx. Francine Elveson, twenty-six, a tiny woman less than five feet tall and weighing only eighty pounds, shared an apartment in the building with her parents and had not been seen since that morning when she had left for her teaching job at a nearby day-care center.

Her injuries were horrendous: She had been beaten, strangled with the strap of her purse, and then mutilated in the worst way imaginable. Across her chest, scrawled in ballpoint pen, was an obscene message from the killer to the police, challenging them to track him down. In his frenzy he had launched a ferocious biting attack on the insides of the victim's thighs.

During the autopsy, a single black pubic hair was discovered on the corpse. Obviously not from the victim—it was Negroid in origin—the hair was assumed to have been shed by the attacker, and therefore it was considered of critical importance. Only much later would its true significance become known. With the investigation crystallizing into a search for an unknown black male, it was necessary to more closely examine the bite marks.

Examination of bite marks involves carefully photographing them for future reference; if they are sufficiently prominent, cast impressions are made. These are then compared to the teeth of a possible suspect using a variety of equipment that may include infrared and ultraviolet photography, electron microscopy, even computer analysis. The horror aroused by Francine Elveson's death meant that when detectives requested that local residents provide prints of their own teeth, they met with almost universal acceptance. But none matched the marks found on the body.

As the months passed without a tangible lead, police asked the FBI's Behavioral Science Unit to provide a profile of the likely killer. Their response was essentially as follows: a male, twenty-five to thirty-five, poorly educated, probably living in the building where the attack occurred, either alone or with a single parent, and suffering from a psychosis so acute that it would have required treatment in a mental institution. It was also thought likely that given the saturation police coverage, the killer or someone in his family had already been interviewed. One final point: The killer was almost certainly white, not black. (See the Richard Chase case on page 192.)

Case Review

This last point turned the investigation upside down. A review of previous suspects was undertaken, and gradually, from out of the pack, one candidate emerged. At the time of the murder, police had interviewed a middle-aged man living on the fourth floor of the building— the same as Francine Elveson. The man's son, thirty-two-year-old Carmine Calabro, had a history of mental instability, but according to the father, he was undergoing treatment at a nearby hospital. The police had taken the statement at face value and neglected to double-check it. That oversight was now rectified.

Hospital records corroborated the father's story—Calabro had been a patient for one year—but a study of security at the unit found it so slack that he could easily have slipped out, committed the murder, and returned without anyone being the wiser. Also, at the time of the murder, Calabro had been wearing a cast on his arm, which raised the possibility that he had used his cast to render the victim unconscious.

Since leaving the hospital, Calabro, a high school dropout, had worked as a stagehand until being fired. He had no objection to providing a dental print. When forensic odontologists Dr. Lowell Levine, Dr. Homer Campbell, and Dr. Richard Souviron examined that print, they were in no doubt that Calabro was the man who had sunk his teeth into Francine Elveson's thighs.

On December 20, 1980, more than a year after the murder, Calabro was arrested. He was later jailed for life.

Conclusion

So what about the black pubic hair found on Francine Elveson's body? The solution to that puzzle highlights the ease with which criminal investigations can be compromised if forensic procedures are not carried out to the letter. Apparently, the bag used to transport her body to the medical examiner had previously been occupied by a black male murder victim. Afterward, it should have been thoroughly cleaned, but on this occasion some detritus was overlooked. The unexplained black hair had come from that earlier murder victim—not from Elveson's body at all.