I'm Sue Black, I'm a human anatomist and
a forensic anthropologist and my job is
to identify the human or what remains of
the human for medical legal purposes and
throughout my career I've worked a lot
for governments overseas and as a result
have become known as 'a martini girl'
which has 'anytime, anyplace, anywhere'
which means you always have to have your
passport with you at all times because
you simply never know where you're going
to go next.
In 1999 I received a phone call that
requested me to go and assist with the
recovery of evidence associated with the
war crimes investigations in Kosovo.
When I arrived out there it was clear
that there were just so many cases for us
to undertake and all of them have
remained really, really clear in my mind
but one sticks out in particular more
than any because I feel that I was
probably one of the few people that
could have handled what was required of
me in that situation at that time. It was
the case of a family who left the
village to go out into the mountains
because they felt it was safer there for
their children and then on occasion they
would come into the village for
provisions and on one particular day
that's exactly what they did. Dad was
driving the tractor and behind him was a
trailer and on the trailer was his wife,
her sister, their mother and the eight
children. And without warning a
rocket-propelled grenade took out the
trailer. He was also shot, he was snipered
in the leg and he managed to crawl away
into the undergrowth knowing full well,
because of the extent of the explosion,
that none of his family would have
survived. Under cover of darkness when he
was bleeding and obviously very, very
badly injured he still had the presence
of mind to collect the remains of his
family that he could find and to bury
them in a hole and his fear was that if
he didn't then the dogs would find them
and it would be a food source for them.
About 18 months later we come along as
the International Criminal Tribunal and
we ask his permission to exhume the
remains because we need to test whether
the evidence that we will find matches
with his eyewitness testimony
and if it does that's a very strong
indictment site against Milosevic and
his senior advisors. So we dig down in
the place where he told us he'd buried
his family and we recover enough remains
probably only to fill about one and a
half body bags. And our job is to try to
establish how many people are contained
within those remains and do they fit
with the profiles that the gentleman has
told us. When we go back to the mortuary
our job is that we separate out 12 white
body sheets in the mortuary because we
know that there's going to be some
remains that we simply won't be able to
assign to an individual and the 11
people who lost their lives. We hope that
at the end of the day there will be
something relating to each and every one
placed on a piece of white sheeting. His
wife was relatively straightforward, we
only ever found one half of his wife. Her
sister was relatively straightforward as
was their mother as an older individual.
And then it came to the eight children
and the identification of children's
remains is what my area of expertise is.
The little baby was still intact and so
he was very, very easy to identify but
the other children were in various
stages of fragmentation and
decomposition so for example we only
ever found the bottom half of his
twelve-year-old daughter. By the time we
had gone through the day we got to the
final stages of remains that the last
children that we were unable to separate
out with any certainty were twin boys,
twin boys aged 14 years of age and what
we noticed is that one of the upper sets
of limbs had a Mickey Mouse vest
associated with them and so I asked the
police to go away and to ask dad, did any
of his children wear a Mickey Mouse vest,
not was it one of the twins, but any of
the children. The police officer came
back and said oh yes and named one of
the twin boys and that allows us to
identify which possibly were each of the
twin boys. Our rationale for doing it was
that the law requires it of us, in terms
of our recovery of evidence and our
analysis of evidence, but also it was
important for the father because his
biggest concern was that his family's
remains were commingled, in a mixed
grave, and his fear was that his God was
unable to find each and every one of
them because they were mixed together.
His wish was that he would have eleven
body bags returned to him each one
carrying the name of the particular
member of his family because then he
felt if they had a grave with their own
name on it then their God would be able
to find them. Now we were able to return
the eleven body bags with a name and of
course a twelfth body bag that had body
parts in it that we simply couldn't
separate and for us it's really
challenging to marry together those
worlds of being an impartial clinical
forensic investigator and somebody who's
looking down the barrel of a man who has
lost his entire family and all he's
asking of us is to have the confidence
that the remains that we returned to him
are who we say they are.
