Dead Men Do Tell Tales: The Strange and Fascinating Cases of a Forensic Anthropologist (35 page)

Pizarro’s bones were placed where they belonged, inside the glass-walled sarcophagus in the cathedral chapel, where they can still be seen today. The impostor mummy, when last I saw him, was lying ignobly on a piece of plywood propped between two sawhorses in the cathedral crypt, destined for an anonymous reburial in the bowels of the cathedral. Whoever he was, he cannot complain. For nearly a hundred years he had basked in the borrowed glory of Francisco Pizarro. He was knelt before, prayed to and well-nigh worshiped by thousands of pilgrims. He enjoyed far more homage than most of us receive after death, and with this flood of fervent, mistaken devotion his ghost must rest content. Fame is fleeting—even in death.

14
Arsenic and “Old Rough and Ready”

Duncan is in his grave;
After life’s fitful fever he sleeps well;
Treason has done his worst: nor steel, nor poison
,
Malice domestic, foreign levy, nothing
,
Can touch him further…
.

—Shakespeare,
Macbeth, Act III, Scene 2

Summers in Washington, D.C., can be horribly hot, and July 4, 1850, was infernal. President Zachary Taylor, hero of the Battle of Buena Vista in the Mexican War, had just returned from a ceremony in the blazing sun, at which he laid the foundation-stone for the Washington Monument. He was tired, hungry and thirsty. He wolfed down a big meal of raw vegetables, fresh cherries and iced buttermilk. Within a very short time it became apparent that the food had not agreed with him. The President developed gastroenteritis and acute diarrhea and was forced to take to his bed. Five days later, on July 9, the man known to his contemporaries as “Old Rough and Ready” was dead. He was sixty-six years old and had been President just sixteen months.

Taylor’s abrupt death came at a crucial point in American history. It removed from the scene a man whose force of character might have quelled the storm brewing across America over slavery—or hastened that storm’s breaking. Taylor might have recalled his fellow Southerners to a sense of the duty they owed to their country; but it is equally possible that he might have driven them to desperate deeds by opposing them with naked force. We can never know. A single ill-digested meal toppled Taylor into his grave; the rest is guesswork and silence.

Some historians have called Zachary Taylor the Dwight Eisenhower of his day, because of his brilliant military record; but there was an element of fire, of hot-tempered truculence, in Taylor that was wholly missing from Ike’s serene, controlled disposition. A Southerner who owned sugar and cotton plantations worked by over four hundred slaves—his daughter, Knox, was the first wife of the man who would become president of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis, and his son, Richard, served as a general for the South in the Civil War—Taylor nevertheless campaigned hard to admit California and New Mexico as free states and threatened to lead an army in person against any Southerners who would not submit to laws enacted by Congress. When two Southern legislators, Alexander Stephens and Robert Toombs, told Taylor he was betraying the South, the President exploded, saying he would hang all “traitors” to the Union with no more compunction than he had shown when hanging spies and deserters in Mexico. In the days immediately preceding his fatal illness, Taylor ordered the military garrison of Santa Fe, New Mexico, to be reinforced against possible attacks by proslavery militiamen from Texas. He was a tough man, singularly unafraid of his enemies, willing to do battle to keep the United States one nation, indivisible.

His death marked an important crossroads in the crisis over slavery. His successor, Millard Fillmore, was at pains to mollify the angry Southerners whom Taylor had defied. The new President quietly shelved New Mexico’s application for statehood and lent his support to a jellified compromise bill that contained all sorts of sops to satisfy both sides of the slavery question. The outbreak of the Civil War was postponed for another decade, and in the awful glare of that cataclysmic passage of arms, the story of Zachary Taylor, his short presidency and his sudden death, receded into oblivion. Few schoolchildren today could name the twelfth President of the United States. The bumbling Millard Fillmore is better known than the hard-bitten hero of Buena Vista.

Yet from time to time Taylor’s sudden death would tax the ingenuity of amateur historians. Aged sixty-six, he was old but not decrepit. His constitution had been tried and tempered in arduous campaigns in Mexico, and earlier in Florida against the Seminole Indians. He was no stranger to heat and thirst. Could raw vegetables and fruit, washed down with cold milk, kill a man? Books published in 1928 and again in 1940 raised the possibility that Taylor had been poisoned by proslavery conspirators. If so, he, not Abraham Lincoln, would have been the first President in American history to be assassinated.

My mind was far from these theories in 1991, when I received a visit from Clare Rising in the office I then occupied in the Florida Museum of Natural History. Rising was one of our alumnae: she had received her Ph.D. in English from the University of Florida and was the prize-winning author of
Season of the Wild Rose
, a historical novel set during the Civil War. It was while researching this novel that she had come across the Taylor case, and it had fascinated her ever since. She was writing a book about Taylor. She described his symptoms—vomiting, abdominal spasms, diarrhea and progressive weakening—which she had gleaned from contemporary accounts of his death. Was it possible, she asked me, that such symptoms might result from poisoning?

I told Rising that I wasn’t a pathologist but that the symptoms she had described certainly could have resulted from arsenic poisoning.

She said: “Well, could this be proven?” And I explained that arsenic and other metallic poisons are quickly deposited in the skeletal system and hair of poisoning victims, if they live for a few days after the initial intake of the poison. Such metals would remain in the hair and bones, even after death.

She asked: “How could this be proven?” I told her it would be a fairly simple matter, given access to the remains, to have tests done that would prove the presence or absence of arsenic.

I gradually discovered that Rising was an extremely persistent and single-minded individual. Initially I had scant interest in the Taylor question, and I tried to steer her toward other people in the field who I felt were perfectly competent to conduct such tests. I suggested she contact my colleague, Doug Ubelaker, at the Smithsonian Institution. I suggested the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology at Walter Reed Hospital. I suggested the Armed Forces Medical Museum. I furnished her with names and telephone numbers.

In vain. Rising kept returning to me. She had a scholarly obsession with Zachary Taylor—“my Zachary,” she called him fondly—and she saw this inquiry as a way to do justice to a rather neglected figure in American history. I was less sanguine than she. Moreover the enormity of exhuming a former President of the United States was somewhat daunting. I had assisted at many exhumations, but never at one of such extraordinary historical significance. I had no misgivings about the technical side of the affair. No corpse on earth has the power to overawe me. Our defunct bodies are all equal before science. Nevertheless, I could dimly foresee how controversial this project might prove, and what a fanfaronade of media attention might accompany it. As events were to show, my fears proved justified many times over!

Finally, on the latest of her many visits, Rising sat down in a chair across from my desk and said: “Well, just how would we get permission?”

I explained to her something that many people do not know: human remains are not the property of cemeteries. They don’t belong to the nation, no matter who they were in life. Nor do they belong to the courts. They belong to the relatives who survive them. From a legal standpoint, dead human bodies are treated exactly the same as any other personal effects left behind by the deceased. They are passed on, together with the rest of the estate. You own the remains of your dead ancestors. They are yours by law.

Therefore, I told Rising, if anyone wanted to examine a body, the first step must be to approach the surviving family members. These in turn can request a funeral director licensed in the state to open the grave, provided the body is properly reburied upon completion of the examination. I told her that very often in murder cases we go through this procedure, with the families’ permission. If the family agrees, we need not go through the courts. This timesaving procedure is especially useful when we are dealing with murder victims who are buried in states other than those where the murders took place.

Rising was elated. She told me she had tracked down many of the living relatives and knew from genealogies who the nearest direct descendant was—and she mentioned a man in Louisiana whose name is familiar to millions of people.

I said: “Well, all you have to do is get that gentleman to sign a request that the nearest licensed funeral director open the tomb.”

I have already said Rising was persistent. But even I was surprised when she triumphantly telephoned me from Louisiana a few weeks later and announced that she had won permission to exhume the remains of Zachary Taylor. Not only that: she had already approached a funeral director in Louisville, Kentucky, whose firm had moved President Taylor and his wife from an older mausoleum to a newer aboveground tomb in the 1920s. Rising’s enthusiasm was contagious. The funeral director said that he would not only cooperate but would perform the exhumation without charge.

Zachary Taylor, I learned, was entombed in the Zachary Taylor National Cemetery in Louisville, Kentucky, which, like all national cemeteries, is supervised by the Veterans Administration. The land for that cemetery had been donated to the federal government by the Taylor family, but they had retained ownership of a strip of land at the rear of the cemetery, on both sides of the Taylor mausoleum, as a private family burial plot. Everything else was under VA stewardship.

I did some soul-searching before agreeing to be present at the exhumation. It is my firm belief that the dead have a right to privacy and that there must be a good, compelling reason for us to break in upon the slumber of the grave. In the case of President Taylor, there was the charge—albeit unproven—of murder, the foulest crime man can commit. For over a hundred and forty years it had hovered around Taylor’s memory like a miasma. Now we were in a position to decide once and for all whether or not there was anything to it. The relatives had given their consent. Their scruples had been satisfied that this was a legitimate inquiry, and not an exercise in idle speculation. The local coroner, Dr. Richard Greathouse, had agreed to treat the procedure as an official investigation into the cause of Taylor’s death, and he had enlisted the aid of the state medical examiner, Dr. George Nichols IV.

It was the consent of the relatives, however, that weighed most with me. If they saw no indignity in exhuming Taylor, then there was none. Rising had written to family members as far away as Rome and Stockholm, and all had consented to the investigation. The
New York Times
editorialized that our inquiry showed “a cavalier contempt for the dead,” but I could not agree. It would be frivolous indeed to exhume a President to see if he had suffered from a certain disease, or to learn some small particular about his life and times. But murder is another thing entirely, and murder was what we aimed to prove or disprove.

The team I had put together consisted of myself, Dr. Nichols, Dr. William Hamilton, the District 8 medical examiner in Florida, who had worked for Dr. Nichols before coming to Gainesville (and who had experience in examining the exhumed victims of arsenic poisoning), two graduate students, Ariene Albert and Dana Austin-Smith, who would do the still photography, and a local retired attorney and historian, Bill Goza, who would lend us historical assistance and expedite details. Finally, my wife Margaret, a media specialist who is always an important member of my team, would handle logistics and take care of videotaping the investigation for scientific purposes.

A date was set. We made hotel reservations and rented a van for the following weekend. Then difficulties began to crop up. Rising telephoned me, saying that a problem had arisen with the Veterans Administration. The VA was reluctant to give permission for the exhumation. When I finally reached a high-level official in the VA, he said the matter might have to be resolved at “a higher level.”

I said: “What do you mean by ‘higher’?”

And he said: “Since it involves the remains of a President, the White House.”

By now it was Thursday. The tomb was supposed to be opened the next Monday. There was no way we could secure presidential permission in that short interval. Even though the Taylor family owned the mausoleum and the strip of land adjacent to it, the VA ran the cemetery and had the key to the Taylor crypt. The Zachary Taylor mausoleum was situated at the back of the cemetery, and the VA controlled all the land in front of it. They could simply lock the front gate and there would be little we could do to oppose them.

With some disappointment—for by now I had become rather interested in this project—I phoned Rising and said there was no way we could proceed the following Monday. Perhaps some other time … In the meantime all our arrangements were canceled.

Shortly afterward, Rising called me back and said she’d been in contact with the coroner, Dr. Richard Greathouse. He, I discovered, wasn’t about to be dictated to by the Veterans Administration. He was a man of extraordinary determination, confidence and a strong sense of territory. Greathouse told Rising to tell me that whether I came to Louisville or stayed home was all the same to him. I was welcome to be on hand if I liked. But with or without me, Zachary Taylor’s tomb was going to be opened that Monday morning and the only way the federal government could prevent this was by armed force!