A team of researchers at the University of New Hampshire helped solve a cold case from almost 40 years ago. The group helped identify a skull found in the town of Bristol in 1986 as Warren Kuchinsky. State police say there’s no evidence of foul play associated with Kuchinsky’s death.
The Forensic Anthropology Identification and Recovery (F.A.I.R.) Lab at UNH has contributed to solving a number of cold cases in recent years. They’re brought in by the state when their expertise is needed.
Lab co-directors Amy Michael, a forensic anthropologist, and Alex Garcia-Putnam, a historical bioarchaeologist, work with students to analyze human skeletal remains. They spoke with NHPR’s All Things Considered host Julia Barnett about their work.
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Transcript
So let's hear about the role that each of you play in working on these cold cases. Alex, let's start with you.
Alex Garcia-Putnam: As a historical bioarchaeologist, in terms of the cold case work, the things I work on are much colder and much older, but still in the realm of using our knowledge of the human skeleton to answer questions about these people in the past. These are people who were accidentally disinterred from a historic cemetery or things like that, [such as] inadvertent archeological discoveries.
Amy, what about you?
Amy Michael: So from the forensic anthropology perspective, we're interested in what we call positive identification or personal identification. So that's actually matching the name of a missing person to a set of unidentified skeletal remains, whether that's historical cases like Alex was talking about or more forensic cases, someone who died within the last 50 years. In the Bristol case, that's what we're aiming to do with our state partners, the office of the Medical Examiner and Major Crimes Unit.
What is the main goal of the work that's done at the lab?
Amy Michael: We want to get those people either back to their families, if these are more recently missing people, or we want to get those people back in the ground if they're historical individuals that were accidentally disinterred or were never interred to begin with.
So in the U.S., we have a missing and unidentified persons database called NamUs [National Missing and Unidentified Persons System]. This is a federal database. And we have an epidemic in this country of missing and unidentified people. So each state has a role to play in that. We are in a small state, but we still have lots and lots of sets of unidentified skeletal remains here in New Hampshire. So that’s the work of our lab.
Anything to add to that, Alex?
Alex Garcia-Putnam: From the historical or archeological perspective giving these individuals that get disinterred, usually construction or something like that, just giving them a respectful reburial [and] reminding ourselves that these are people that deserve some form of respectful final disposition and not to end up on a shelf somewhere, it's kind of the ultimate goal.
Staying with you, Alex, what role do your students play in the lab?
Alex Garcia-Putnam: So we are a very unique lab in that the lab is one of the only kind of undergraduate-only labs of its kind. We really engage our students from the get-go to be, hands-on, working with us on these cases. So they're an integral part of the process.
Amy Michael: What we found is that when you give undergraduates some responsibility in that way, they take off with it. A lot of our students are from northern New England, a lot are from New Hampshire, and so they recognize these little small towns that these unidentified sets of remains come from. They do the research, they get into the archives, they look at land use records, they look at tax maps. They do the background research to get the identifications or the reburials that we're seeking.
What kind of information can you learn from remains that maybe the average person wouldn't see with the naked eye?
Alex Garcia-Putnam: The basics of what we do when we have a set of skeletal remains is to establish or estimate the biological profile. So what was the age at death for that individual, estimating that. Estimating their biological sex. And then potentially some information on what we would colloquially refer to as race, but we think of as more kind of biogeographical ancestry.
Those are really useful when you're working a forensic case, [it] might help you narrow down a pool of missing people. Then archeologically, it tells us a lot about the identity of this person in the past. It might help us understand their lived experience.
We look at the treatment of the remains after death. So understanding that process [is] really, really important for understanding how long that person's been dead and understanding all the things that have happened to them since.
Are there conditions unique to New Hampshire that can affect skeletal remains?
Amy Michael: So New Hampshire has a lot of decaying granite in the soil, right? We’re the Granite State. That is pretty horrible for bone preservation. So we have to learn both, sort of the microenvironments, the regional environments of northern New England, and also the scavengers are in the area. How are they manipulating remains even long after the death of the person? So you have this combination of what's in the soil, what's on the surface, and who are the animals showing up.
Alex Garcia-Putnam: The other piece of this is that any preservation, it's good to have a stable environment. And New Hampshire is not stable, right? We go from super cold, cold to super warm summers, right? So that fluctuation is really bad for preservation.
I heard you referenced this a little bit earlier in our conversation, Alex, but to go deeper on it, obviously you're studying these remains in a lab kind of as specimens, but these are actual people. How do you honor that as you do research?
Alex Garcia-Putnam: You know, one of the simplest things is the language we choose to use. We try not to say, “specimen No. 1,” [we say] this is the individual that we're working on. And just that simple kind of language switch is really helpful. I know [when] we both came up in this field, these were skeletons to work on. That switch has been happening over the last couple of decades, of thinking about these as people.
Amy Michael: We often don't have to work too hard to instill it in our students. A little gentle reminder from us that this is not a skeleton, this is a person. You're not going to give this person a nickname. They haven't even lost their name. The name is just unknown to us at this moment. All of that stuff, when you explain that to 20 year olds, they intuitively get it. They don't have to unlearn the things that Alex and I have had to unlearn from being kind of raised in a different type of academy.
I would imagine that this type of science carries with it a level of baggage, maybe, that other science doesn't. How do each of you handle that and process it?
Amy Michael: I think both Alex and I feel pretty strongly about not traumatizing our students unnecessarily. We want to give them real world experience, but we don't want to put experiences in front of them that they're unable to process. But we want to do it in a way that there's some like aftercare, right? Let's talk about it before, let's talk about it during, let's talk about it afterwards.
We can't talk out of both sides of our mouths to say, “You must respect these decedents as people, but also, you yourself as a person can't be unbothered by this.” Like we recognize that we're working with dead people and that is a heavy burden for some folks.
The sort of lingering things that still stick with me are interactions with family members, right? When you see sort of the residue that's left when a person is missing and a family doesn't have answers. Or you see the grief that comes when a family gets an answer [and] now they have to process that answer.
Alex Garcia-Putnam: I mean, to echo a lot of what Amy said, we don't get called in unless things have gone pretty bad, right? The other things that I carry with me are some of the positives when we do get to do a reburial and we see that community come together for something positive like that. I want my students to not only confront the more challenging things, but also to see the positive that we do as well.
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