January 14, 2026 • 24 mins
Content Warning: This episode contains discussion of human remains and skeletal material. If you’re sensitive to this topic, this episode may not be for you.
After death, decomposition proceeds predictably, but the fate of what remains is not always controlled. In this episode of Mayhem in the Morgue, Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Kendall Crowns examines the journeys skeletal remains can take long after death. From medical school anatomy labs and public sidewalks to airport cargo facilities and forgotten attics, Dr. Crowns recounts cases where bones became objects of confusion, investigation, and unintended alarm.
Highlights
• (0:00) Welcome to Mayhem in the Morgue with Dr. Kendall Crowns
• (0:30) Decomposition, bone persistence, and what ultimately remains after death
• (2:15) Medical school anatomy labs and learning from real human bones
• (5:30) A forgotten skull on public transportation and a police response
• (8:00) A failed carrying strap and an unexpected public reaction
• (11:00) Studying anatomy at home and introducing skeletons at Thanksgiving
• (13:30) Customs and Border Protection encounters human remains in transit
• (17:45) Two skulls intercepted at an airport and forensic evaluation
• (20:00) Homeowners discover skulls in their attic
• (22:45) Ancient remains, museum custody, and the long journey toward repatriation
About the Host: Dr. Kendall Crowns
Dr. Crowns is the Chief Medical Examiner for Travis County, Texas, and a nationally recognized forensic pathologist. He las led death investigations in Travis County, Fort Worth, Chicago, and Kansas. Over his career, he has performed thousands of autopsies and testified in court hundreds of times as an expert witness. A frequent contributor to Crime Stories with Nancy Grace, Dr. Crowns brings unparalleled insight into the strange, grisly, and sometimes absurd realities of forensic pathology.
About the Show
Mayhem in the Morgue takes listeners inside the bloody, bizarre, and often unbelievable world of forensic pathology. Hosted by Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Kendall Crowns, each episode delivers real-life cases from the morgue, the crime scene, and the courtroom. Expect gallows humor, hard truths, and unforgettable investigations.
Connect and Learn More
Have a question for Dr. Crowns? Submit them to mayheminthemorgue@gmail.com
Learn more about Dr. Kendall Crowns on Linkedin. Catch him regularly on Crime Stories with Nancy Grace and follow Mayhem in the Morgue where you get your podcasts.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Today's episode does not include graphic descriptions of the death
of an individual or destruction of human bodies. It's just
about skeletons. But if skeletons upset you, this is not
the episode for you. Welcome and may have the more
with their host, Doctor Kinder crowns today's episode Skeletons and
(00:27):
the Attic. After a person dies, their body decomposes, and
there are several stages in the decomposition process. The first stage,
known as the fresh stage, begins almost immediately. The cells
begin to autodigest or break down and liquefy, and this
creates an environment and food for our friendly bacteria that
(00:50):
have always been part of our lives. They are usually
hanging out in our intestines, and these bacteria multiply, and
without the immune system keeping them in check, they break
out of their confines and begin to consume us like
a giant loaf of bread. Eventually, the fluids dry up,
the tissues disappear and turn to dust, and all that
(01:10):
is left of us is our skeleton. The time it
takes for the body to decompose to the skeleton is
dependent on many variables, including environment, temperature, how much the
person weighed, if they are buried in ground, the composition
of a soil, or if they are buried in a
coffin or a vault. All these variables come into play,
and it can take thousands of years for us to
(01:32):
fully disappear. The oldest known complete human ancestor skeleton that
has been found, whose nickname is Littlefoot, was found in
South Africa and it is aged to be about three
point six seven million years old. In the end, all
that is left of us is our bones, and our
bones will evidently be around for a long long time.
(01:54):
Sometimes our bones find their way out of the grave
and go on a fantastic journey of their own. And
on today's episode, we're going to discuss several instances where
someone's bones when on their own adventure long after their
owner passed away. When I attended medical school in the
early nineties at the University of Kansas School of Medicine,
(02:14):
in our first semester, one of our classes was anatomy.
This class is, of course, when you learn about every
aspect of the human body, every tiniest detail of every
organ system. This is where they have the famous cadaver
labs that you see in TV shows and movies about
medical school. When you walk into the anatomy lab on
your first day, you are struck by the overwhelming smell
(02:35):
of framaldehyde. The bodies are lined up on gurneys that
have metal tops on them that look like tens to
help slow the decomposition process down. There were about fifteen
of these gurneies all lined up in this wide, sterile
dissection room. The cadavers are typically acquired through bodies that
are willed to science, and in the anatomy lab you
(02:55):
work in groups and there are multiple students assigned to
each cadaver. Every organ system is evaluated during the semester.
You spend a lot of time with the cadaver, and
at any hour of the day you might be in
the cadaver lab. I remember one two am study session
looking at the nerves of the face with one of
my classmates. It was always a little eerie to be
(03:16):
in that lab late at night with all those dead bodies,
but over time, just like anything else, you get used
to it. The only organ system that you don't evaluate
is a skeletal system. To do this, you would have
to take all the muscles and tissues off the bone,
and that would take too much time for students to do,
and students never have enough time to learn the skeletal system.
(03:36):
The medical school would assign the students a set of bones.
They weren't models or bone clones or whatever, but actual
human bones. These bones would help give a true three
D perspective on where muscles inserted, where blood vessels and
nerves course through, and other important landmarks that you just
can't get with a picture. And where did the bones
that we were given come from. The bones were from
(03:58):
bodies that were donated science or ex cadaver lab patients.
When the day came for the skeletons to be assigned,
we were told to show up to the lab to
receive them. When I arrived, the bones were contained in long,
ancient rectangular wooden boxes that looked like tiny caskets. The
boxes were hinged and had hooklike closures, and if I remember,
(04:20):
a plate with a number on it was affixed to
one end. They were stacked up to the side of
the table of the person assigning them. When they handed
mean by box, I opened it, checked the contents, and
signed a piece of paper stating that I had received
the box. The bones were complete, and I acknowledged my
box number. The box contained a humorous femur to be aphibula, ribs, clavicles,
(04:42):
bones of the fingers and feet, and a sort of
verbe rae, and I think part of the pelvis. It
wasn't a complete skeleton, but it had enough of the
different bones that you could learn what you needed to know.
The one thing is it didn't contain the skull that
arrived separate. It came in a white canvas bag with
a draw string. One side of the bag was comically
labeled property of the Kansas University School of Medicine in
(05:04):
large black ink letters. The skull was a complete human
skull with attached manible and full set of teeth. It
had a number written in sharpie on the base of it.
We were told by one of the anatomy professors that
we were to be the caretakers of these bones for
the duration of the section of the anatomy class. He
said not to write on them, to face them in
any way, and definitely don't damage them, and above all,
(05:27):
don't lose them. The skeletons and skull had been part
of the school for a long long time, and they
were very expensive and hard to acquire, and they were
a person after all. The professor then told us a
cautionary tale of one med student who didn't listen to
the warnings. He told us that the bones would be
(05:47):
our constant companion and we would take them wherever we
were going to study them. And the unfortunate student commuted
to class every day on a bus, and on this
fateful day, he was writing the bus with his backpack
and his bag with the skull in it. And this
was before the bags were labeled. They were just plain
white drawstring bags. He got to a stop for the school,
(06:10):
grabbed his backpack and got off the bus forgetting the
bag was in his seat, and headed off to class.
The bus continued on making stops for the rest of
the day, with no one noticing the innocent white draw
string bag with a human skull in it sitting in
the chair. Finally, when the bus driver got to the
end of his shift and took the bus back to
(06:31):
the lot, he was going through it, checking the bus
for any trash or left items when he saw the
white bag sitting in the seat. He picked the bag
up and looked inside, and what he saw was that
it contained a human skull. He freaked out. He didn't
know what to do. He felt he had found the
skull of a person that had been murdered, that the
killer had been on his bus, just carrying the dead
(06:51):
person's head around in the middle of the day. How
scary was that The police recalled and when they arrived,
they evaluated it and took it to the medical Examiner's office.
When the skall arrived at the medical examiner's office, they
evaluated it, noticed a number at the base, and how
it appeared to be an antomic specimen. Their first inclination
(07:12):
was it probably came from the medical school, and they
called the medical school, read them the number, and the
school informed them it was indeed one of their skulls,
and it was returned to the medical school and eventually
returned to the student, and he was reminded rather sternly
not to leave the skull anywhere ever again. And after
all that, we were told that the bags were then
(07:33):
comically labeled with the large Kansas University School of Medicine,
and the next time a bus driver anybody found one,
they would know it was a skull from the school,
and they just had to call the medical school to
return it. I lived in an apartment several blocks from
the medical school, and I walked to class every day,
and I would study at the library or at one
of the study rooms at the school between classes. Carrying
(07:57):
the skall bag wasn't a problem. It easily fit into
my backpack. The box of bones, on the other hand,
was a bit more of an issue. It was bulky
and awkward and problematic to carry on my several block walk.
I decided to make a strap for it to make
it easier to carry. I used two pull strings from
the hoodies from a couple of my hooded sweatshirts. I
braided them together, nootting the ends that I slid between
(08:20):
the lid and the base of the box. With the
box shut and latch, the strap would be held in place. Nowadays,
it would have been very pinterest worthy. The day after
I made the strap, I put it in the box
and headed off to class with the box slung over
my shoulder. The strap did its job, making the box
easy to carry with my backpack. I walked to school
(08:41):
very proud of my accomplishment. As I got to the
school entrance, I was passing by people heading to their
places of work, when all of a sudden pop, one
side of the strap came out, and the box fell
quickly to the sidewalk and slammed into it. Upon impact,
the lid of the box exploded open and the bones
came spilling out all over the sidewalk, bouncing and making
(09:01):
odd crackling noises, and they came to rest on the
sidewalk and on the ground next to the sidewalk. I
didn't even have a chance to react before the bones
were everywhere. It was just like a card game my
brother always loved playing with me, called fifty two pickup.
Most of the people walking by me didn't even acknowledge
what had just occurred, but one person stopped. She said,
(09:22):
oh no, let me help you pick this up. But
when she began reaching to pick up some of the bones,
I could tell in her face that her brain registered
what she was attempting to help me retrieve. She paused
and said, wait, are these human bones? Her voice had
an air of concern. I myself was quickly picking up
the bones and putting them back in the box. And
(09:42):
when she said this, I stopped and I said, oh, yes,
they're human bones, but it's okay. I'm a medical student.
My answer really didn't explain the situation, because of course,
saying you're in medical school will always justify carrying around
a box of human remains her face. I went from
concern too alarmed, and she quickly stood up and walked away,
(10:04):
glancing over her shoulder periodically to see where I was at.
I continued to pick up the bones, not thinking about
the brief encounter I had had with the passer by.
I verified they were all there, closed the box, latched it,
and headed off to class. Thankfully, no police showed up
later to figure out who the disheveled person was in
the gray hooded sweatshirt with the box of bones. The
(10:27):
woman who tried to help me either realized she was
in front of the medical school and probably thought I
was telling the truth, or she just didn't know what
to do. Either way, I didn't have to explain what
happened that evening. When I was back at my apartment,
I checked to see what damage I had caused. I
looked the box over. One of the corners was dented
from the fall, but the box itself was intact and
(10:48):
not broken. I looked at each bone, none of them
were damaged. I got off lucky and would not have
to pay any fines due to the accident, and above all,
I wouldn't want to become yet another cautionary tale. I
threw my homemade strap away and went back to carrying
the box. Even though it was awkward, at least it
was safe. I went home that year for Thanksgiving and
(11:08):
took my box of bones with me, but I forgot
this call at my apartment. I planned to do some
studying while I was home during Thanksgiving. On Thanksgiving Day,
while the turkey was cooking and the packers were playing
the Lions on TV, I got the bones out to
study for a little while. One of the guests at
my parents' Thanksgiving dinner was one of the sociology professors
at the university that my dad taught at. He was
(11:30):
watching the football game with my dad and brother. He
saw the box and he asked me, what do you
have there, kindle And I told him it's a box
of bones. I have to study it for anatomy class.
He said, real bodes, real humid bows, and I said, yes,
real human bones. He walked over and picked up one
of the long bones. Which one is this? He said,
(11:53):
it's the femur. I told him he turned to my
dad and said, art, I thought we were the only
guest cubbing today, showing my dad the femur. My dad replied,
don't worry, he won't be eating any of the dessert.
Kindled in bring his head home. They laughed and went
back to watching the game. Classic dad jokes. Shortly after Thanksgiving,
(12:14):
we took the test over the bones. After the test
was taken, we had to turn the bones and the
skull in. They had been my constant companion, hanging out
with me at my apartment, going home with me on Thanksgiving,
and accompanying me to school. It was a little sad
to turn them in, but if I had wanted to
pass the class, I had to do it. When I
(12:35):
handed over the box and the bag with the skull
in it, the contents were evaluated, No damages of note
were found, and off the bones and the skull went
to be given to the next student. I never saw
them again. Our time together had ended. It was just
our friendship was never meant to last. It just wasn't
meant to be. As a side note, recently, the University
(12:57):
of Kansas School of Medicine in my hometown on Wichhawk,
Kansas has begun incorporating virtual reality technology into their anatomy
lab teaching along with cadavertive section, and are soon opening
a state of the art anatomy lab that will include
both VR and cadavers. Maybe with all the technology options,
the skull and the bones will finally be able to
(13:19):
stop taking public transportation and their journey will finally come
to an animal Wow. The next case occurred much later,
long after my medical school career had ended. First, I
have to give you a little background information. Part of
working as a medical examiner is working with other agencies,
including the United States Custom and Border Protection Agencies. They
(13:43):
have officers and agents stationed at three hundred and twenty
eight ports of entry in the United States, which includes
major airports and some minor airports. Their job is to
enforce immigration and agricultural laws and prevent illegal items from
entering into the country that could be potentially happenzardous. At
CBP dot gov, there is an extensive list of what
(14:04):
these items are that can't come into the country, and
they include things like alcohol, fruits and vegetable livestock, switchblades,
legal drugs, certain animal products, products made with prison labor, explosives,
and kinder eggs. The list goes on and on. One
really odd item I noticed was dog and cat fur,
(14:25):
And if anybody out there is in the market for
dog and cat fur, I have plenty of it readily
available at my home at any moment, and I'd be
happy to share it with you for a reasonable price.
When customs in border patrol finds these items in someone's luggage,
they can confiscate them. The person can contest it, but
it depends on if they were legally bringing it into
(14:45):
the US and have the proper paperwork and declared it,
and they might get it back. But if they don't
and they were found to be bringing it in illegally,
depending on what it is, they can be fined or
possibly arrested, and the item is confiscated and either destroyed
or taken by the government and used for packages that
are coming through ports of entry. Customs and Border Patrol
(15:07):
employees X ray scanners and trained dogs to sniff out
specific items like explosives and drugs. Nowadays they even use
artificial intelligence. Sometimes the items that are found and seized
are human remains, specifically bones, and that brings us to
the next story. Two decades ago, you could buy skulls
online and sometimes they would end up in packages or
(15:29):
luggage going through the airport. Up until July of twenty sixteen,
you were actually able to buy human remains of all kinds,
but especially bones on eBay, and a lot of them
were used for craft projects. There were reports published in
the literature of the online skeletal market noting not all
states have laws about the sale of human remains. The
(15:50):
only federal law prohibits the trafficking of Native American human remains,
and it is known as the Native American Graves Protection
and Repatriation Act, which was created in nineteen ninety. In
the reports, the top price for a skull online was
around five thousand dollars and the origin of ten percent
of the skulls was vague or unclear, so the question
(16:12):
was where did the skulls come from. It was documented
in one article that California had the most sale of
skulls and Missouri was second, and the majority of the
skulls were coming from international sellers. Since July of twenty sixteen,
though eBay has created a policy where human parts or
items containing body parts are not allowed to be sold
(16:32):
on the website. Their official policy located on their customer
service page, states that human body parts or items containing
body parts are not allowed to be sold on eBay,
which includes first class relics. I didn't know what those are,
and I had to look that up, and those are
basically religious artifacts or parts of saints, like you know,
Saint Francis's fingers. They also include funeral items like urns
(16:56):
are also not allowed to be sold. The only exception
is items containing human scalp pair such as locks or wigs.
eBay does go on to state that they will remove
the listing or other content, issue a warning, and they
will restrict your activity or suspend your account. They say
that their policy helps to ensure that important government regulations
are followed. Even though eBay has stopped the sale of skulls,
(17:20):
there's still a market for them online, which you can
just as easily type in human skulls and find places
that are selling them, And there are places that actually
sell first class relics too, just in case you're looking
for them before eBay banned human skulls. So I was
working in Chicago. We got a call from the US
Custom and Border Patrol agent based at O'Hare International Airport.
(17:41):
She stated that during a routine package screening, a package
coming through from China heading to Michigan was flagged for
further inspection. It had a curious invoice on it stating
that contents were plastic dental moldings. The canine unit dogs
didn't smell anything out of the ordinary, but when the
package was X rayed, it wasn't dental moldings at all.
It was actually two fully intact human skulls with attached
(18:04):
mandibles and all their teeth, so technically it could have
been dental related. The skulls were obviously human, and the
question became who were they, where did they come from,
where they acquired legally? And that's when the Medical Examiner's
Office got involved. They contacted us and the skulls were
brought to the office and the case was assigned to me.
When I evaluated them, they were not plastic dental moldings.
(18:27):
They were actually two fully intact human skulls packed in
bubble wrap and tissue paper. They had survived the journey
from China quite well and didn't have any fractures. They
were fully cleaned of tissue and bleached white. They were
obviously meant for research. They didn't exhibit any evidence of injury.
Upon examining the cranial cavity, it was devoid of tissue.
(18:47):
So in this type of case, where all that is
left is bones, most offices will consult a forensic anthropologist
to further evaluate them, and that's what we did in
this case. When the forensic anthropologists reviewed this, he agreed
that there was no evidence of injury. He stated that
the skulls appeared to be that of middle aged males
of Asian ancestry. How the skulls escaped the rest of
(19:10):
their body is unknown because he couldn't tell either were
they killed, did they die of natural causes, or were
they removed by a trophy hunting alien. It's all up
for debate. Attempts were made to contact the center and
the recipient to no avail. The skulls had no one
that would claim them or knew anything about them. I
made the cause of manner of death undetermined. After that,
(19:33):
the death investigators reached out to the Chinese embassy. The
embassy helped facilitate the return of the skulls to China.
What happened to them after that, I have no idea.
Hopefully they were actually reunited with the rest of their
bodies and appropriately buried or cremated, and were not repackaged
and sent to somewhere else in Michigan. The last case
(19:57):
we're going to talk about is a case of a
couple who had he just bought a new home on
the South side of Chicago. As they were moving in,
they found the previous owner had left behind some boxes
and some other items. The majority of the boxes were
full of old papers and notebooks, and when the husband
went up into the attic, it was quite dirty and
he noticed in the corner two more boxes. One box,
(20:18):
again was just old papers, and he didn't really look
at them and promptly threw it away, and the other
box was labeled fan parts. When he opened up the box,
he instantly saw two skulls sitting in the box, mixed
with other longbones. The owner instantly panicked, ran down the stairs,
told his wife, and they called the police. They were
concerned that the previous owner had murdered the individuals and
(20:41):
was possibly a serial killer. The story of the victims
of John Wayne Gacy being found in his crawl space
a little over twenty years earlier were still being talked
about around the city and finding remains like this always
made people instantly nervous, and for good reason, because who
knows it could be another serial killer. Responded and looked
at the box and determined the contents were probably human,
(21:04):
and the remains came to the medical Examiner's office, and
once again they became my case when I evaluated them.
They came in a dusty water damage box labeled with
the nineteen seventy style graphic and writing on it stating
fan parts. I opened it up and revealed the contents inside.
There were two human skulls. They did not have their mandibles,
(21:25):
not all their teeth, and what teeth there were were
markedly worn down, almost flattened. Also in the box were
different bones femurs, tibia, fingers, toes, part of a pelvis,
some ribs, and a vertebrae. They weren't bleached and clean
and weren't anatomic specimens meant for teaching. They were dirty
and weathered. Some of the bones were beginning to crumble,
(21:45):
and there was a fair amount of dust in the box.
I evaluated each of the bones and again saw no
evidence of injury. Once more, a forensic anthropologist was consulted.
He agreed that there was no obvious evidence of injury.
He determined, based on morphology and other findings, that the
bones were that of ancient human beings. He specifically pointed
(22:05):
out the whear on the teeth was consistent with an
ancient diet of tough unprocessed in a brace of foods,
which are normal and common findings with an ancient population.
There were other findings too that further corroborated this, and
he felt the skulls were easily over one hundred years old,
maybe even closer to one thousand years old, and he
(22:26):
felt that they were most consistent with ancient South American
rainforest Indians. Because of this, no cause of manner death
were issued, because they were historical remains and there'd be
no idea of how they died. And the investigators looked
into the owner of the house. It turned out the
individual was actually an old anthropologist who had died. So
the assumption was that he had kept some of the
(22:48):
specimens that he had reviewed over the years, and for
whatever reason, had placed them in that box and stuck
them in his attic. Maybe he just didn't know what
to do with them or how to get rid of them.
We contacted several South American embassies, and they didn't want them,
and so the bones had nowhere to go. They had
no home, and the person who originally had them was
(23:08):
long since passed away. We were out of options for
someone to take the bones in this situation. What can
we do? Sometimes in cases like this, we will bury
them with other unidentified bodies and pauper graves. In this case,
the investigators reached out to a museum and asked if
they had an interest in taking them, and ultimately they
(23:30):
did end up taking them and probably put them in
one of their specimen collections. In recent years, I know
a lot of the museums are working very hard to
return all their collections of bones to the proper tribes
or proper countries from which they came. I like to
think those two Rainforest Indians were part of this and
were returned, finally making it back to the land from
(23:50):
which they came and being properly buried by someone who
cared and those bones fantastic journey had finally come to
an end. And that brings us to the end of
the episode. I hope you learned something like your bones
are just waiting to go on their own adventure after
you die, and I hope you were entertained until the
(24:12):
next time
Today's episode does not include graphic descriptions of the death
of an individual or destruction of human bodies. It's just
about skeletons. But if skeletons upset you, this is not
the episode for you. Welcome and may have the more
with their host, Doctor Kinder crowns today's episode Skeletons and
(00:27):
the Attic. After a person dies, their body decomposes, and
there are several stages in the decomposition process. The first stage,
known as the fresh stage, begins almost immediately. The cells
begin to autodigest or break down and liquefy, and this
creates an environment and food for our friendly bacteria that
(00:50):
have always been part of our lives. They are usually
hanging out in our intestines, and these bacteria multiply, and
without the immune system keeping them in check, they break
out of their confines and begin to consume us like
a giant loaf of bread. Eventually, the fluids dry up,
the tissues disappear and turn to dust, and all that
(01:10):
is left of us is our skeleton. The time it
takes for the body to decompose to the skeleton is
dependent on many variables, including environment, temperature, how much the
person weighed, if they are buried in ground, the composition
of a soil, or if they are buried in a
coffin or a vault. All these variables come into play,
and it can take thousands of years for us to
(01:32):
fully disappear. The oldest known complete human ancestor skeleton that
has been found, whose nickname is Littlefoot, was found in
South Africa and it is aged to be about three
point six seven million years old. In the end, all
that is left of us is our bones, and our
bones will evidently be around for a long long time.
(01:54):
Sometimes our bones find their way out of the grave
and go on a fantastic journey of their own. And
on today's episode, we're going to discuss several instances where
someone's bones when on their own adventure long after their
owner passed away. When I attended medical school in the
early nineties at the University of Kansas School of Medicine,
(02:14):
in our first semester, one of our classes was anatomy.
This class is, of course, when you learn about every
aspect of the human body, every tiniest detail of every
organ system. This is where they have the famous cadaver
labs that you see in TV shows and movies about
medical school. When you walk into the anatomy lab on
your first day, you are struck by the overwhelming smell
(02:35):
of framaldehyde. The bodies are lined up on gurneys that
have metal tops on them that look like tens to
help slow the decomposition process down. There were about fifteen
of these gurneies all lined up in this wide, sterile
dissection room. The cadavers are typically acquired through bodies that
are willed to science, and in the anatomy lab you
(02:55):
work in groups and there are multiple students assigned to
each cadaver. Every organ system is evaluated during the semester.
You spend a lot of time with the cadaver, and
at any hour of the day you might be in
the cadaver lab. I remember one two am study session
looking at the nerves of the face with one of
my classmates. It was always a little eerie to be
(03:16):
in that lab late at night with all those dead bodies,
but over time, just like anything else, you get used
to it. The only organ system that you don't evaluate
is a skeletal system. To do this, you would have
to take all the muscles and tissues off the bone,
and that would take too much time for students to do,
and students never have enough time to learn the skeletal system.
(03:36):
The medical school would assign the students a set of bones.
They weren't models or bone clones or whatever, but actual
human bones. These bones would help give a true three
D perspective on where muscles inserted, where blood vessels and
nerves course through, and other important landmarks that you just
can't get with a picture. And where did the bones
that we were given come from. The bones were from
(03:58):
bodies that were donated science or ex cadaver lab patients.
When the day came for the skeletons to be assigned,
we were told to show up to the lab to
receive them. When I arrived, the bones were contained in long,
ancient rectangular wooden boxes that looked like tiny caskets. The
boxes were hinged and had hooklike closures, and if I remember,
(04:20):
a plate with a number on it was affixed to
one end. They were stacked up to the side of
the table of the person assigning them. When they handed
mean by box, I opened it, checked the contents, and
signed a piece of paper stating that I had received
the box. The bones were complete, and I acknowledged my
box number. The box contained a humorous femur to be aphibula, ribs, clavicles,
(04:42):
bones of the fingers and feet, and a sort of
verbe rae, and I think part of the pelvis. It
wasn't a complete skeleton, but it had enough of the
different bones that you could learn what you needed to know.
The one thing is it didn't contain the skull that
arrived separate. It came in a white canvas bag with
a draw string. One side of the bag was comically
labeled property of the Kansas University School of Medicine in
(05:04):
large black ink letters. The skull was a complete human
skull with attached manible and full set of teeth. It
had a number written in sharpie on the base of it.
We were told by one of the anatomy professors that
we were to be the caretakers of these bones for
the duration of the section of the anatomy class. He
said not to write on them, to face them in
any way, and definitely don't damage them, and above all,
(05:27):
don't lose them. The skeletons and skull had been part
of the school for a long long time, and they
were very expensive and hard to acquire, and they were
a person after all. The professor then told us a
cautionary tale of one med student who didn't listen to
the warnings. He told us that the bones would be
(05:47):
our constant companion and we would take them wherever we
were going to study them. And the unfortunate student commuted
to class every day on a bus, and on this
fateful day, he was writing the bus with his backpack
and his bag with the skull in it. And this
was before the bags were labeled. They were just plain
white drawstring bags. He got to a stop for the school,
(06:10):
grabbed his backpack and got off the bus forgetting the
bag was in his seat, and headed off to class.
The bus continued on making stops for the rest of
the day, with no one noticing the innocent white draw
string bag with a human skull in it sitting in
the chair. Finally, when the bus driver got to the
end of his shift and took the bus back to
(06:31):
the lot, he was going through it, checking the bus
for any trash or left items when he saw the
white bag sitting in the seat. He picked the bag
up and looked inside, and what he saw was that
it contained a human skull. He freaked out. He didn't
know what to do. He felt he had found the
skull of a person that had been murdered, that the
killer had been on his bus, just carrying the dead
(06:51):
person's head around in the middle of the day. How
scary was that The police recalled and when they arrived,
they evaluated it and took it to the medical Examiner's office.
When the skall arrived at the medical examiner's office, they
evaluated it, noticed a number at the base, and how
it appeared to be an antomic specimen. Their first inclination
(07:12):
was it probably came from the medical school, and they
called the medical school, read them the number, and the
school informed them it was indeed one of their skulls,
and it was returned to the medical school and eventually
returned to the student, and he was reminded rather sternly
not to leave the skull anywhere ever again. And after
all that, we were told that the bags were then
(07:33):
comically labeled with the large Kansas University School of Medicine,
and the next time a bus driver anybody found one,
they would know it was a skull from the school,
and they just had to call the medical school to
return it. I lived in an apartment several blocks from
the medical school, and I walked to class every day,
and I would study at the library or at one
of the study rooms at the school between classes. Carrying
(07:57):
the skall bag wasn't a problem. It easily fit into
my backpack. The box of bones, on the other hand,
was a bit more of an issue. It was bulky
and awkward and problematic to carry on my several block walk.
I decided to make a strap for it to make
it easier to carry. I used two pull strings from
the hoodies from a couple of my hooded sweatshirts. I
braided them together, nootting the ends that I slid between
(08:20):
the lid and the base of the box. With the
box shut and latch, the strap would be held in place. Nowadays,
it would have been very pinterest worthy. The day after
I made the strap, I put it in the box
and headed off to class with the box slung over
my shoulder. The strap did its job, making the box
easy to carry with my backpack. I walked to school
(08:41):
very proud of my accomplishment. As I got to the
school entrance, I was passing by people heading to their
places of work, when all of a sudden pop, one
side of the strap came out, and the box fell
quickly to the sidewalk and slammed into it. Upon impact,
the lid of the box exploded open and the bones
came spilling out all over the sidewalk, bouncing and making
(09:01):
odd crackling noises, and they came to rest on the
sidewalk and on the ground next to the sidewalk. I
didn't even have a chance to react before the bones
were everywhere. It was just like a card game my
brother always loved playing with me, called fifty two pickup.
Most of the people walking by me didn't even acknowledge
what had just occurred, but one person stopped. She said,
(09:22):
oh no, let me help you pick this up. But
when she began reaching to pick up some of the bones,
I could tell in her face that her brain registered
what she was attempting to help me retrieve. She paused
and said, wait, are these human bones? Her voice had
an air of concern. I myself was quickly picking up
the bones and putting them back in the box. And
(09:42):
when she said this, I stopped and I said, oh, yes,
they're human bones, but it's okay. I'm a medical student.
My answer really didn't explain the situation, because of course,
saying you're in medical school will always justify carrying around
a box of human remains her face. I went from
concern too alarmed, and she quickly stood up and walked away,
(10:04):
glancing over her shoulder periodically to see where I was at.
I continued to pick up the bones, not thinking about
the brief encounter I had had with the passer by.
I verified they were all there, closed the box, latched it,
and headed off to class. Thankfully, no police showed up
later to figure out who the disheveled person was in
the gray hooded sweatshirt with the box of bones. The
(10:27):
woman who tried to help me either realized she was
in front of the medical school and probably thought I
was telling the truth, or she just didn't know what
to do. Either way, I didn't have to explain what
happened that evening. When I was back at my apartment,
I checked to see what damage I had caused. I
looked the box over. One of the corners was dented
from the fall, but the box itself was intact and
(10:48):
not broken. I looked at each bone, none of them
were damaged. I got off lucky and would not have
to pay any fines due to the accident, and above all,
I wouldn't want to become yet another cautionary tale. I
threw my homemade strap away and went back to carrying
the box. Even though it was awkward, at least it
was safe. I went home that year for Thanksgiving and
(11:08):
took my box of bones with me, but I forgot
this call at my apartment. I planned to do some
studying while I was home during Thanksgiving. On Thanksgiving Day,
while the turkey was cooking and the packers were playing
the Lions on TV, I got the bones out to
study for a little while. One of the guests at
my parents' Thanksgiving dinner was one of the sociology professors
at the university that my dad taught at. He was
(11:30):
watching the football game with my dad and brother. He
saw the box and he asked me, what do you
have there, kindle And I told him it's a box
of bones. I have to study it for anatomy class.
He said, real bodes, real humid bows, and I said, yes,
real human bones. He walked over and picked up one
of the long bones. Which one is this? He said,
(11:53):
it's the femur. I told him he turned to my
dad and said, art, I thought we were the only
guest cubbing today, showing my dad the femur. My dad replied,
don't worry, he won't be eating any of the dessert.
Kindled in bring his head home. They laughed and went
back to watching the game. Classic dad jokes. Shortly after Thanksgiving,
(12:14):
we took the test over the bones. After the test
was taken, we had to turn the bones and the
skull in. They had been my constant companion, hanging out
with me at my apartment, going home with me on Thanksgiving,
and accompanying me to school. It was a little sad
to turn them in, but if I had wanted to
pass the class, I had to do it. When I
(12:35):
handed over the box and the bag with the skull
in it, the contents were evaluated, No damages of note
were found, and off the bones and the skull went
to be given to the next student. I never saw
them again. Our time together had ended. It was just
our friendship was never meant to last. It just wasn't
meant to be. As a side note, recently, the University
(12:57):
of Kansas School of Medicine in my hometown on Wichhawk,
Kansas has begun incorporating virtual reality technology into their anatomy
lab teaching along with cadavertive section, and are soon opening
a state of the art anatomy lab that will include
both VR and cadavers. Maybe with all the technology options,
the skull and the bones will finally be able to
(13:19):
stop taking public transportation and their journey will finally come
to an animal Wow. The next case occurred much later,
long after my medical school career had ended. First, I
have to give you a little background information. Part of
working as a medical examiner is working with other agencies,
including the United States Custom and Border Protection Agencies. They
(13:43):
have officers and agents stationed at three hundred and twenty
eight ports of entry in the United States, which includes
major airports and some minor airports. Their job is to
enforce immigration and agricultural laws and prevent illegal items from
entering into the country that could be potentially happenzardous. At
CBP dot gov, there is an extensive list of what
(14:04):
these items are that can't come into the country, and
they include things like alcohol, fruits and vegetable livestock, switchblades,
legal drugs, certain animal products, products made with prison labor, explosives,
and kinder eggs. The list goes on and on. One
really odd item I noticed was dog and cat fur,
(14:25):
And if anybody out there is in the market for
dog and cat fur, I have plenty of it readily
available at my home at any moment, and I'd be
happy to share it with you for a reasonable price.
When customs in border patrol finds these items in someone's luggage,
they can confiscate them. The person can contest it, but
it depends on if they were legally bringing it into
(14:45):
the US and have the proper paperwork and declared it,
and they might get it back. But if they don't
and they were found to be bringing it in illegally,
depending on what it is, they can be fined or
possibly arrested, and the item is confiscated and either destroyed
or taken by the government and used for packages that
are coming through ports of entry. Customs and Border Patrol
(15:07):
employees X ray scanners and trained dogs to sniff out
specific items like explosives and drugs. Nowadays they even use
artificial intelligence. Sometimes the items that are found and seized
are human remains, specifically bones, and that brings us to
the next story. Two decades ago, you could buy skulls
online and sometimes they would end up in packages or
(15:29):
luggage going through the airport. Up until July of twenty sixteen,
you were actually able to buy human remains of all kinds,
but especially bones on eBay, and a lot of them
were used for craft projects. There were reports published in
the literature of the online skeletal market noting not all
states have laws about the sale of human remains. The
(15:50):
only federal law prohibits the trafficking of Native American human remains,
and it is known as the Native American Graves Protection
and Repatriation Act, which was created in nineteen ninety. In
the reports, the top price for a skull online was
around five thousand dollars and the origin of ten percent
of the skulls was vague or unclear, so the question
(16:12):
was where did the skulls come from. It was documented
in one article that California had the most sale of
skulls and Missouri was second, and the majority of the
skulls were coming from international sellers. Since July of twenty sixteen,
though eBay has created a policy where human parts or
items containing body parts are not allowed to be sold
(16:32):
on the website. Their official policy located on their customer
service page, states that human body parts or items containing
body parts are not allowed to be sold on eBay,
which includes first class relics. I didn't know what those are,
and I had to look that up, and those are
basically religious artifacts or parts of saints, like you know,
Saint Francis's fingers. They also include funeral items like urns
(16:56):
are also not allowed to be sold. The only exception
is items containing human scalp pair such as locks or wigs.
eBay does go on to state that they will remove
the listing or other content, issue a warning, and they
will restrict your activity or suspend your account. They say
that their policy helps to ensure that important government regulations
are followed. Even though eBay has stopped the sale of skulls,
(17:20):
there's still a market for them online, which you can
just as easily type in human skulls and find places
that are selling them, And there are places that actually
sell first class relics too, just in case you're looking
for them before eBay banned human skulls. So I was
working in Chicago. We got a call from the US
Custom and Border Patrol agent based at O'Hare International Airport.
(17:41):
She stated that during a routine package screening, a package
coming through from China heading to Michigan was flagged for
further inspection. It had a curious invoice on it stating
that contents were plastic dental moldings. The canine unit dogs
didn't smell anything out of the ordinary, but when the
package was X rayed, it wasn't dental moldings at all.
It was actually two fully intact human skulls with attached
(18:04):
mandibles and all their teeth, so technically it could have
been dental related. The skulls were obviously human, and the
question became who were they, where did they come from,
where they acquired legally? And that's when the Medical Examiner's
Office got involved. They contacted us and the skulls were
brought to the office and the case was assigned to me.
When I evaluated them, they were not plastic dental moldings.
(18:27):
They were actually two fully intact human skulls packed in
bubble wrap and tissue paper. They had survived the journey
from China quite well and didn't have any fractures. They
were fully cleaned of tissue and bleached white. They were
obviously meant for research. They didn't exhibit any evidence of injury.
Upon examining the cranial cavity, it was devoid of tissue.
(18:47):
So in this type of case, where all that is
left is bones, most offices will consult a forensic anthropologist
to further evaluate them, and that's what we did in
this case. When the forensic anthropologists reviewed this, he agreed
that there was no evidence of injury. He stated that
the skulls appeared to be that of middle aged males
of Asian ancestry. How the skulls escaped the rest of
(19:10):
their body is unknown because he couldn't tell either were
they killed, did they die of natural causes, or were
they removed by a trophy hunting alien. It's all up
for debate. Attempts were made to contact the center and
the recipient to no avail. The skulls had no one
that would claim them or knew anything about them. I
made the cause of manner of death undetermined. After that,
(19:33):
the death investigators reached out to the Chinese embassy. The
embassy helped facilitate the return of the skulls to China.
What happened to them after that, I have no idea.
Hopefully they were actually reunited with the rest of their
bodies and appropriately buried or cremated, and were not repackaged
and sent to somewhere else in Michigan. The last case
(19:57):
we're going to talk about is a case of a
couple who had he just bought a new home on
the South side of Chicago. As they were moving in,
they found the previous owner had left behind some boxes
and some other items. The majority of the boxes were
full of old papers and notebooks, and when the husband
went up into the attic, it was quite dirty and
he noticed in the corner two more boxes. One box,
(20:18):
again was just old papers, and he didn't really look
at them and promptly threw it away, and the other
box was labeled fan parts. When he opened up the box,
he instantly saw two skulls sitting in the box, mixed
with other longbones. The owner instantly panicked, ran down the stairs,
told his wife, and they called the police. They were
concerned that the previous owner had murdered the individuals and
(20:41):
was possibly a serial killer. The story of the victims
of John Wayne Gacy being found in his crawl space
a little over twenty years earlier were still being talked
about around the city and finding remains like this always
made people instantly nervous, and for good reason, because who
knows it could be another serial killer. Responded and looked
at the box and determined the contents were probably human,
(21:04):
and the remains came to the medical Examiner's office, and
once again they became my case when I evaluated them.
They came in a dusty water damage box labeled with
the nineteen seventy style graphic and writing on it stating
fan parts. I opened it up and revealed the contents inside.
There were two human skulls. They did not have their mandibles,
(21:25):
not all their teeth, and what teeth there were were
markedly worn down, almost flattened. Also in the box were
different bones femurs, tibia, fingers, toes, part of a pelvis,
some ribs, and a vertebrae. They weren't bleached and clean
and weren't anatomic specimens meant for teaching. They were dirty
and weathered. Some of the bones were beginning to crumble,
(21:45):
and there was a fair amount of dust in the box.
I evaluated each of the bones and again saw no
evidence of injury. Once more, a forensic anthropologist was consulted.
He agreed that there was no obvious evidence of injury.
He determined, based on morphology and other findings, that the
bones were that of ancient human beings. He specifically pointed
(22:05):
out the whear on the teeth was consistent with an
ancient diet of tough unprocessed in a brace of foods,
which are normal and common findings with an ancient population.
There were other findings too that further corroborated this, and
he felt the skulls were easily over one hundred years old,
maybe even closer to one thousand years old, and he
(22:26):
felt that they were most consistent with ancient South American
rainforest Indians. Because of this, no cause of manner death
were issued, because they were historical remains and there'd be
no idea of how they died. And the investigators looked
into the owner of the house. It turned out the
individual was actually an old anthropologist who had died. So
the assumption was that he had kept some of the
(22:48):
specimens that he had reviewed over the years, and for
whatever reason, had placed them in that box and stuck
them in his attic. Maybe he just didn't know what
to do with them or how to get rid of them.
We contacted several South American embassies, and they didn't want them,
and so the bones had nowhere to go. They had
no home, and the person who originally had them was
(23:08):
long since passed away. We were out of options for
someone to take the bones in this situation. What can
we do? Sometimes in cases like this, we will bury
them with other unidentified bodies and pauper graves. In this case,
the investigators reached out to a museum and asked if
they had an interest in taking them, and ultimately they
(23:30):
did end up taking them and probably put them in
one of their specimen collections. In recent years, I know
a lot of the museums are working very hard to
return all their collections of bones to the proper tribes
or proper countries from which they came. I like to
think those two Rainforest Indians were part of this and
were returned, finally making it back to the land from
(23:50):
which they came and being properly buried by someone who
cared and those bones fantastic journey had finally come to
an end. And that brings us to the end of
the episode. I hope you learned something like your bones
are just waiting to go on their own adventure after
you die, and I hope you were entertained until the
(24:12):
next time
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