Dead Men Do Tell Tales. The Strange And Fascinating Cases Of A Forensic Anthropologist by William R. Maples PhD, Michael Browning PhD Paperback

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From a skeleton, a skull, a mere fragment of burnt thighbone, prominent forensic anthropologist Dr. William Maples can deduce the age, gender, and ethnicity of a murder victim, the manner in which the person was dispatched, and, ultimately, the identity of the killer.In Dead Men Do Tell Tales, Dr. Maples revisits his strangest, most interesting, and most horrific investigations, from the baffling cases of conquistador Francisco Pizarro and Vietnam MIAs to the mysterious deaths of President Zachary Taylor and the family of Czar Nicholas II.

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Bones tell no lies: the case file of a forensic anthropologist, March 15, 2016
By Melissa Embry

Before there was "Bones," even before "CSI", in the days when DNA evidence was still on the far frontiers of science, forensic anthropologist William R. Maples was bringing criminals to justice, clearing the innocent, and give names to the nameless dead simply by examining the structure of human skeletons. In his 1994 memoir, "Dead Men Do Tell Tales," co-written with journalist Michael Browning, Dr. Maples describes his career arc from an English literature undergraduate in the 1950's, paying his way through college by recovering the bodies of accident victims for a local funeral home, to his work in the 1970's through the mid-1990's at the C. A Pound Human Identification Laboratory of the Florida Museum of Natural History.

The museum, Maples wrote, was charged by law to "provide assistance to the state in the 'identifying specimens.' I doubt the original framers of the law imagined that among those 'specimens' would be human remains, still less that those remains would be the ghastly leavings of murderers and maniacs."

If there seems to be a certain gleefulness in Maples' description, chalk it up to the "combination of good luck and bad character" he says caused him to change his major in the last semester before his graduation at the University of Texas from English to anthropology. He had become interested in anthropology when as a freshman, his adviser suggested taking an anthropology class in place of the one he wanted, whose registration was already filled. Changing majors in his last year required a course in advanced physical anthropology taught by UT newcomer Tom McKern.

McKern had already assisted in identifying the remains of American soldiers killed in World War II and Korea. After Maples' first discussion with McKern, "a conversation that lasted half an hour at most. . . I knew what I wanted to do with my life."

That life would include (at the urging of his wife) traveling to Kenya for a research project on baboons (both of their daughters were born in Kenya, and Maples cherished memories of the country until his death in 1997); identifying cremated remains both for relatives suing a funeral home and law enforcement forces in a two-state multiple murder-suicide case; and assisting with the identification of the remains of murdered Russian Tsar Nicholas II and his family. In between were days spent excavating the victims of drug deals gone bad, identifying bodies mutilated both by their murderers and subsequently by sharks or alligators, and determining whether a host of solitary bodies found in Florida's jungle-like undergrowth died by their own hands or at those of others.

For those who fear the journey will prove too gruesome, Maples leads his readers through the horrors with cool and compassionate eyes that could see "bones of martyred innocents, and bones of double-eyed murderers, all lying side by side, equal and silent beneath the impartial eye of science. . . victims and murderers alike area people."

The epigraphs of the book's chapters quote poets and historians, journalist/soldier Ambrose Bierce and a Soviet ambassador, and plentiful photographs of appropriately sanitized bones let readers test their observations against those of Maples and his fellow researchers.

Maples ends with a plea for more resources devoted to forensic anthropology, a plea even more pertinent twenty years after the writing, when state governments are famously asking whether we really need any more anthropologists.