This is Florida Gulf Coast University.
[Music]
PIERCE: Thanks to movies, novels and television shows,
forensic scientists have come to be seen
as some of the great criminal-catching
and mystery-solving experts of modern time.
Find out what a modern-day forensic anthropologist
learned from a renowned mentor,
how that knowledge is
being passed on to students today
and how a treasure trove of historic materials might
keep that knowledge transfer in effect for generations
on this edition of
FGCU Perspectives.
Our guest today is Heather Walsh-Haney, who
teaches and researches in Justice Studies at FGCU
and is also a forensic anthropologist. Start by
describing the field that you teach and research in.
WALSH-HANEY: I am first and foremost a biological
anthropologist with a subfield in forensic anthropology,
so my training is in human and non-human
primate anatomy, behavior
and the cultural material
that are the vestiges of our lives.
PIERCE: So that's
where you are today.
Did you start the education process
with that in mind?
WALSH-HANEY: My family is rich with readers,
so I knew of books by laypersons, anthropologists -
of course, Ruth Benedict
and Margaret Mead and Marvin Harris.
And I followed Marvin Harris to the University of Florida,
where I started taking cultural anthropology classes.
Along with those classes came the
basic biological anthropology classes.
And in that class, Bill Maples
came and guest-lectured.
And he was an energetic, parsimonious,
intellectual speaker,
and I knew, the way that he presented
the field of forensic anthropology,
that I wouldn't be stuck in an academic
ivory castle. I'd be able to do real-world work
where my answers could literally walk into a courtroom
and tell me whether I was right or wrong.
PIERCE: And has that field, that biological anthropology -
especially as it relates to criminal justice work -
has that been taught for long?
WALSH-HANEY: No, it really hasn't. And, in fact,
when I was a student of Dr. Maples's,
he didn't have lecture classes in forensic anthropology.
He only selected a few students every year
that he would literally
pour his knowledge into,
and that was because he didn't want bad guys
knowing how we specialist catch them.
And so today, when I teach forensic anthropology
to my graduate students,
I teach them the secrets that
I don't necessarily teach to undergrads.
In undergrads' classes,
I'm really giving them a holistic view,
and I'm always going back to how we go about
proving and disproving hypotheses
and how, in general,
it affects the human condition.
PIERCE: I have an architect friend, another A,
art and study, who likes to corner people
and say, "Name three famous architects."
WALSH-HANEY: Mm-hm.
PIERCE: And most people can get one,
and then they'll struggle with maybe, you know,
Mike Brady from The Brady Bunch.
WALSH-HANEY: Right.
PIERCE: I would be hard-pressed to come up with
the names of three famous anthropologists.
I'd give you Margaret Mead, but then I'd stop.
Is that changing?
WALSH-HANEY: Absolutely. We have Kathy Reichs,
who has written thirteen or fourteen fiction novels,
and the TV show Bones is
modeled after her character;
and then we have Bill Bass, who started the
Anthropological Research Facility,
or what Patricia Cornwell calls the body farm.
PIERCE: Body farm.
WALSH-HANEY: Right. And then we have Clyde Snow.
Clyde Snow is world-renowned in
helping in the identification of genocide victims
and human rights victims in general.
PIERCE: So the premise that we started with,
that novels and television shows and movies,
it is a case of art imitating life,
not vice versa.
WALSH-HANEY: Absolutely.
PIERCE: The studies are there, the work is being done.
WALSH-HANEY: Yes, and it's becoming pervasive.
Now when I'm on a crime scene,
law enforcement knows or expects
that a forensic anthropologist will be there
if this is someone who is
decomposing or skeletonized.
I've been in this field now 16 years, and in the beginning,
when I would deal with law enforcement in particular,
they didn't really know what an anthropologist was, and
on occasion I'd even be referred to as the pathologist,
and I'm not a medical doctor, right?
I'm a PhD.
PIERCE: We hear bones, of course, being brought up
a lot in the kind of work you do. Is it always bones?
WALSH-HANEY: No, the work that I do
is not always skeletal remains.
In southern... subtropical climates like we have
here in Florida, most of my cases are skeletal,
but I'm often called in to help with fresh cases where
I'm helping to analyze evidence of trauma;
do tool mark comparisons; look at stab wounds, for
example, that might be on a rib or on a vertebra
and left unseen by a pathologist.
But with the anthropologist,
not only can we locate it, but we can also, hopefully,
tell you whether it was a serrated blade or not
or a type of saw, whether it was hand-powered
or gas-powered that did a dismemberment.
PIERCE: So going back to William Maples. Having an
opportunity to learn from, study with. Tell me about that.
WALSH-HANEY: I cherish the time that
I had with Dr. Maples, and he...
into my work with him, he developed a glioblastoma
brain cancer, which is inevitably fatal.
And he lived a year with that cancer. And in that time,
I had an opportunity, for example, to go to Bosnia
and help out in human rights cases. But rather than
do that, I wanted to stay with my mentor,
and he was at the lab and teaching
his students as much as possible
because he wanted to make sure that
he could pour his knowledge into us.
PIERCE: What was his career? What was his
background, and what drew you to him?
WALSH-HANEY: He started as a ambulance driver,
and then during his studies at the University of Texas,
he worked with Ellis Curley,
where he went off to Africa.
And in Africa, he was working with non-human primates,
cataloging them and trying to understand
genetic differences
between different primates.
And then from there, he went up to a
smaller university in the northeast,
and then went on to University of Florida.
And while he was there at the University of Florida,
he looked at the remains of
the last Tsar of Russia, the Romanovs.
He was called in to evaluate the remains of Joseph
Merrick, otherwise known as the Elephant Man.
He was contacted to evaluate the skeletal remains
of President Zachary Taylor.
He was contacted by the Evers family
to help in the analysis of Medgar Evers.
The list goes on and on and on.
He was known as a meticulous scientist
and someone who
expected the best out of everyone.
PIERCE: When he was called in to consult on
these cases or to do research on these cases,
what was it that he was doing? What was he bringing
that had not been done in those instances?
WALSH-HANEY: Well, especially with the Romanovs,
with their remains,
he brought the entire armory with him.
He could do meticulous macroscopic photography.
He could do histology - the cellular analysis of bone.
He could quickly read a skeleton, determine
who that person was and how they died,
much faster than other scientists.
He could work alone, but he was also very capable
of looking at colleagues and friends
and figuring out who is best suited
to help me answer this question.
So his efficiency and his meticulousness
really helped him shine above others.
PIERCE: And people like you come out of his teachings
and continue to do high-profile things.
WALSH-HANEY: Yes. Yes. I am blessed to be
at Florida Gulf Coast University.
In fact, this is the place where Dr. Maples wanted to
retire. His first case came out of Port Charlotte.
PIERCE: Hm.
WALSH-HANEY: His first forensic anthropology case.
And when I was looking at universities, his widow,
Margaret Maples, had really stood behind me
when I focused like a laser on FGCU
and mentioned that this would be a university
where we could build a program
around the teaching of Bill Maples
and how I would take the field
into the next generation.
PIERCE: What role - as you talk about the next
generation - what role does technology play?
WALSH-HANEY: Oh, it's huge. The field is
always changing. We cannot stay static.
Also, because the criminals get smarter
and better. So we have to be able to, you know,
change our field of focus, you know,
or depth of field, so to speak.
PIERCE: Mm-hm.
WALSH-HANEY: Where we use digitizers now
to help in the metric analysis of skeletal remains
where we'll measure cord lengths of crania
or long bones to figure out
how tall someone was, what their sex was.
We'll use histology to grind pieces of bone
and look for evidence of healing
or trauma that happened around the time of death.
So, so much, so much has changed,
and I'm able to bring that on to my students.
PIERCE: And the knowledge of these things
might have existed prior,
but an ability to measure
it might not have.
WALSH-HANEY: Well said. Absolutely.
The ability to change, again, the scale;
to have a more focused analysis;
the tools are easier to obtain now,
they're less expensive.
And it's something that translates very easily to
my undergraduate forensic anthropology class.
When they're learning how to read a microscope
and look at the cellular development of bone,
it takes away the scariness of technology
and it opens them up to other fields of science.
PIERCE: So to brag for a moment -
and you get just a moment to do that -
high-profile things, things that you might have worked on
that we might have heard of the situations.
WALSH-HANEY: Well, as part of the
federal government's DMORT team,
I responded to the World Trade Center.
So I helped, I worked at the Staten Island landfill there
to help in the identification of biological material.
I helped in Hurricane Katrina, also with DMORT, where
I helped in recovery of human remains there.
I have helped in the analysis of the eight
young men that were found in Fort Myers
and believed to have been killed by a serial killer.
So I helped in the analysis of those skeletal remains.
Boy, I've worked in Bermuda, Fiji, Guatemala, Bahamas.
I work with nine Medical Examiner Districts in Florida,
and right now I'm doing,
you know, quite a few cases.
To me, every case is high-profile because
I want to find the answers and I want to help families.
PIERCE: Dealing with a lot of tragedy and
unfortunate circumstances, then.
WALSH-HANEY: Yes. And when
I'm dealing with undergraduates
who are thinking about
continuing with graduate school,
or I'm working and mentoring with
my hand-picked graduate students,
that's one of the things that we
have to talk about, is sort of debriefing.
Because we deal with infants
who have been brutalized by parents.
We deal with women who have been
torn apart by spouses or boyfriends.
And those are images
that can stay with you.
But through mentoring and allowing my students
to really talk about their feelings,
all of us are pretty sound, emotionally.
You know, we're cut from a different cloth,
people who want to deal with the dead.
And it's a special type of person.
And we're not macabre.
We are really trying to help those
who can't speak for themselves.
PIERCE: Is there some work that you've done
that is more satisfying than others?
WALSH-HANEY: I tell you, the work that
has been most satisfying as of late
is to see the growth of my graduate students.
I have one graduate student in particular
who received a very large PhD fellowship
to be part of the CUNY system,
and she is in an evolutionary
primatology program
that wherein she beat out students from Harvard and Stanford and, you know, top echelons of universities.
And it's from the program here at FGCU.
She's brilliant in and of her own right,
but her ability to publish, her ability to work in
scientific settings and work closely with a mentor
who focused upon her students and not just
my own research and my own books,
allowed her to continue on
in Dr. Maples's legacy.
PIERCE: So you've had a great mentor,
you're becoming or are one.
Where do your students - in addition to that example -
what will they become? What will they go on and do?
WALSH-HANEY: I have another student who is
a civilian scientist for the Air Force.
He beat out well-seasoned military investigators
for the position. It was highly coveted.
He beat out hundreds -
literally hundreds -
of folks who already had degrees in hand
and had worked in the military.
I have students who are medical
legal death investigators.
I have students, for the most part, though,
who are focused on getting a PhD
and teaching and consulting
as a forensic anthropologist.
But it's really my hope, as it was Dr. Maples's - in his
book, Dead Men Do Tell Tales, in the last few pages,
he says that it was his hope that every medical examiner
office in Florida and throughout the United States
would have a forensic anthropologist
on staff. And that's my dream.
I don't want to have to consult for ten Medical Examiner
Districts my whole life here in Florida.
I'd like to know that my students
are part of those systems
and that they can call on me
in a particularly difficult case,
but that they're really part from
the system as soon as the case appears.
PIERCE: It's easy to take a look at those -
I asked you to brag -
and to take a look at the high-profile,
the things that show up in the news.
What's a mundane activity for a forensic anthropologist?
What's a day-to-day encounter?
WALSH-HANEY: A mundane activity
is when someone in jail
decides that he or she wants a get out of jail free card
for the day and happens to remember
about a homicide and where a body was hidden
by a friend of a friend of a friend.
And with law enforcement, and sometimes
the FBI, my students and I end up going out
to citrus groves, for example, and
methodically searching for the burial site,
going over aerial photographs,
looking at changes in soil cover,
and then only to find that
there's nothing there.
That's the more mundane side,
the frustrating side.
PIERCE: You've mentioned Dr. Maples several times,
and not only does his mentoring
help you become who you are
and bring you to this university,
but that relationship brings something else
to the University. Tell us tell us about that.
WALSH-HANEY: It does. So, when I came to FGCU,
Margaret Maples, his widow, worked with me
to bring the William R. Maples
Collection to FGCU.
And this collection consists of the non-human
primates that he collected in Africa.
So we have everything from
tiny little marmosets to chimpanzees,
which is rare to have access to
skeletal material like that.
In addition, we have all of his notes,
his data, his slides, his photographs
from all of those historic cases. Everything from Medgar
Evers to the Romanovs to President Zachary Taylor.
And our hope is that all this
material will be digitized,
and then as international and national researchers want
to access it, they'll be able to, and all through FGCU.
PIERCE: What does that bring to a student's education,
having an archive like that?
WALSH-HANEY: It allows them to see real-life evidence
of what forensic anthropology can do.
It also allows them to see the similarities and
differences between non-human primates and humans.
And it also--
PIERCE: Why is that important?
WALSH-HANEY: It's important because
the manifestation of our anatomy -
of having these large brains and walking on two feet -
seeing humans and how we behave and how we move
is through an evolutionary perspective.
So it helps us tease apart what makes us human,
but it also makes us more respectful of
the animal world around us.
PIERCE: I interrupted you -
you were listing the many ways
that it might benefit a student
to have this archive of material.
WALSH-HANEY: Well, it's a springboard
for them to continue on in research.
For example, in looking at Dr. Maples's notes for
the Elephant Man, it was originally thought
that he had myositis ossificans, which is a disease
process that causes calcification of soft tissues.
PIERCE: Kay.
WALSH-HANEY: And that would cause his deformity.
But perhaps the students would want to continue on
and come up with differential diagnoses
to try to figure out where has science
taken us today that might allow us
to look at alternative diseases that may have
caused Joseph Merrick's horrible condition.
PIERCE: There's not a week that goes by that we
don't read something in the news about
somebody going through
some archive and finding some new...
WALSH-HANEY: Oh, yes.
PIERCE: Something new
about something that exists in an archive.
Can that happen here?
WALSH-HANEY: Oh, absolutely. The photos
that we have of the Romanov family, for example,
the skeletal remains. If someone were to go through
that archive and look at those remains,
they would probably be -
the photos, rather, of those remains -
they'd probably be able to tease apart the types of
trauma that was inflicted and where it was,
maybe even understand the sequence
of blows in one of the individuals.
PIERCE: And again, with technology advancements,
not only what we have today,
but we have 5 years from now, 10 years from now,
15 years from now,
They might be able to see something
that you couldn't see today.
WALSH-HANEY: Absolutely. With fresh eyes.
Fresh eyes are so important in any case.
In fact, my students and I work on cold cases all the time for various Medical Examiner Districts in Florida.
Some of these cases are from
the 70s, 80s, 90s, and fresh eyes -
especially from an anthropological
point of view -
can really help turn the case in a new direction,
help to put the bad guys and gals in jail,
and help to identify someone
who was previously unidentified.
PIERCE: The materials that you talk about
in Dr. Maples's "treasure trove" I said.
WALSH-HANEY: Mm-hm. Mm-hm.
PIERCE: Suitcase full? File cabinet full? How big a...
WALSH-HANEY: Oh, no. Bookshelf full.
PIERCE: Okay.
WALSH-HANEY: There are thousands upon
thousands of parts of the archive,
and that's not even teasing
apart the skeletal material.
Every skeleton can have upwards of 206 bones in them.
So for those non-human primates, I mean, it's priceless.
PIERCE: A phrase that comes up in materials
about you: "reading the bones."
WALSH-HANEY: Yes.
PIERCE: Tell me about reading the bones.
WALSH-HANEY: So, it is my job to have a
focused analysis of skeletal remains,
and so I'll look at the upper arm bone, or humerus,
and I'll I'll read it, I'll look at it, I'll study it
to see: is this the humerus of a male or female?
Was this somebody who was active?
Was this the insertion of a muscle that might
indicate this person was a baseball player or a welder?
That's what I mean by reading bones.
PIERCE: And the opportunity comes up frequently.
WALSH-HANEY: Oh, daily. Daily, I have new cases.
Daily, I am working on finishing the case that came
before it. And daily, my students are with me.
Right now, as I sit here talking with you,
there are five graduate students in the morgue
in the Collier County Medical Examiner's Office,
and they are working with the skeletal remains there
under the supervision of a pathologist.
PIERCE: So many fields, research is done
and a benefit goes to many.
A lot of what you do, the benefit goes to a family,
the benefit goes to, you know, a legal system.
How does that spread?
Is there a way of kind of compounding
the effect of work that's done in your field?
WALSH-HANEY: Oh, absolutely.
I've spent a great deal of time
working with Victoria Sanford,
who is a cultural anthropologist
in Guatemala City, Guatemala.
And so one of the things that I've done there -
and brought graduate students with me -
is that we've looked at current cases
that are evidence of feminicide,
which is the murder of women,
that is sanctioned by the government.
And so we go in and we
analyze the skeletal material
so we can make stronger and stronger cases against
a government that doesn't care about its women.
PIERCE: We talked about the movies
and the novels and television shows.
What do they get right,
and what do they get wrong?
WALSH-HANEY: Oh, it's amazing
how much they get right.
In fact, I have to put my cards out
on the table and tell you that I consult
for the Bones show and for CSI.
The writers that I've spoken to
really strive to, you know, get to
the nuts and bolts of the analysis.
But, obviously, it's art, and so there is bits of
technology that doesn't occur in real life,
or if it did, fledgling anthropologists
like me wouldn't have access to it.
But my students also have a project
where they analyze the Bones show.
They pick out one section of the series,
and they will tease it apart -
whether it's determining the sex
of the skeleton or the age of an individual -
and then they'll go back to journal articles
and figure out where the science has changed
since that show aired, since the writers highlighted
a particular type of science in the show.
And then they present their
findings to the class.
PIERCE: And I bet they always have
the best technology, those shows.
WALSH-HANEY: Yes, of course they do.
[Laughter] Deep pockets.
PIERCE: So, on shows like that, and as their
increase in frequency and in popularity,
does that drive more people to your field,
or to have an interest in the field, anyway?
WALSH-HANEY: It does. I definitely get students now,
who - maybe they're visiting campus
as part of our opening to bring in high school students
to have them think about FGCU -
and I'll have high school students talk to me.
And they'll say, "Oh, I watch Bones, I watch CSI.
This is what I want to do." So it absolutely has an effect.
In fact, I've been part of a course that brings
forensic science to grade school teachers
so that they can help to really grab students
and get them interested and unafraid of science.
And absolutely, the shows, the fiction novels...
I also notice they're bringing females
and young women into the math and
 science fields, which is wonderful to see.
PIERCE: So you get - I don't want to say renewed
attention, but a heightened attention -
for a program as a result
of these fictional encounters.
Do you have to dissuade any? If you get this group of
people that comes in, say, "I want to do exactly that."
WALSH-HANEY: Yes.
PIERCE: Do you have to say, "Well, it's not exactly that?"
WALSH-HANEY: I do.
I don't want to say I dissuade,
but I will definitely remove the rose-colored
glasses in that I am first and foremost a scientist.
So I spend a lot of time by myself.
I spend a lot of time reading.
I spend a lot of time surrounded by bones,
and it is tiring, meticulous work.
And I want to make sure that the students understand
that, that they have to have a love of research first -
and of writing, because all of our work has to
culminate in writing and hopefully publication.
The other thing that I have to
make sure that they understand
is I don't just work with skeletonized remains,
that I work with fresh remains.
And some forensic anthropologists
also work with the living.
In fact, I've had one case where I was
evaluating the age of a refugee
based upon radiographs
or x-rays of his bones.
So, you know, I need my students
to understand that we deal with the living,
we deal with the dead, and that the dead can be
in various stages of freshness and decomposition.
PIERCE: So you've brought us to the present,
that, you know, dealing with the living,
but you deal a great deal with the past.
WALSH-HANEY: Yes.
PIERCE: What's the future? What's the future
for forensic anthropologists
and the people who are coming
out of your program,
the people who will be coming into
and then coming out of your program?
WALSH-HANEY: The future for my students
is one that will hopefully include a PhD,
where they'll be teaching students the field,
they'll be consulting as forensic anthropologists.
But they can also be part of
museum systems, where they're curators.
I've had... Some of my mentors
worked with plastic surgeons.
PIERCE: Hm.
WALSH-HANEY: Because we're so used to looking at
skeletal facial structures that they've been there at
surgery and can tease apart suture morphology,
or the joints of the head, to help a plastic surgeon
in dealing with cleft lip and cleft palate.
My students can work with law enforcement agencies.
It's almost a direct conduit to the FBI,
working in evidence collection teams. But ideally, I want
my students to do what my mentor instilled in me,
and that is to be a scholar-practitioner.
I want them to go on and to, you know,
teach as a professor and to practice the field.
PIERCE: And as a teacher, what do they teach?
WALSH-HANEY: Ah. Well, they'll teach things
like gross anatomy in medical schools. They will
teach human osteology, the scientific study of bone.
They can teach introduction to anthropology,
physical anthropology, biology, chemistry, you name it.
It is a hard science.
PIERCE: I want to thank you for
taking the time to be with us today.
It's an exciting field, and it's interesting to hear
how it relates to its fictional counterparts.
WALSH-HANEY: Thank you very much.
PIERCE: Thanks for your time.
[Music]
