Old bones to medical examiner
Published 10:30 am Saturday, February 21, 2009
SEATTLE — Daris Swindler could read old bones in the days before DNA analysis became commonplace. Police from around the country would send remains to his office in the University of Washington’s anthropology department, hoping he could divine a subject’s race, age, sex or height from skeletal clues.
Sometimes he could, as when he assisted in the Ted Bundy and Green River serial killer investigations. Sometimes he couldn’t, and packed the unidentified remains away in the department’s archives — essentially a closet on the fourth floor of the oldest building on campus. There they stayed, preserved, for decades.
The university announced Friday that it had transferred the remains of eight possible crime victims kept there to the King County medical examiner’s office, in hopes that DNA analysis could reveal what Dr. Swindler couldn’t. Swindler, who taught at UW from 1968 to 1991, died in Spokane in 2007.
“More than anything I’m grateful Dr. Swindler had the foresight to put them on the shelf and preserve them until technology could catch up,” said Dr. Kathy Taylor, a forensic anthropologist with the medical examiner’s office.
Anthropology department chairwoman Bettina Shell-Duncan said the department knew forensic remains were stored in the archives and began to sort through them after Swindler’s death. DNA extraction from bone has only become viable in the past five years, she said, and it was time to turn over the remains to authorities.
As the review was underway, she said, the Yakima Police Department asked whether the university still had the skull of a murder victim killed in 1977. Taylor helped look for it, and although she didn’t find that one, she did find the remains of eight other people who may have been crime victims. It isn’t clear how much identification work Swindler performed on the remains.
Among them is the partial skull of a juvenile that was mailed to the anthropology department in a box with a 1980 postmark from Bay Center, in Pacific County on the southwest Washington coast. Though Pacific County has no record of any missing person case that might fit, nearby Grays Harbor County does: a 7-year-old boy, Jeffrey Bratcher, who vanished while camping with his family at Ocean City State Park near Ocean Shores in 1974. DNA testing should provide a definitive answer.
“There was a massive search for him at the time, and no one ever found any evidence of what happened to him,” said Grays Harbor Undersheriff Rick Scott, who joined the department three years later. “There was a lot of conjecture, everything from stranger kidnapping to he was sucked out to sea.”
The skull fragment had no teeth, so there was no hope for dental analysis, and no conclusions could have been drawn from it in 1980, Taylor said.
Taylor said she doesn’t know how many of the eight were crime victims.
“Every time I’m confronted with new remains it’s a new puzzle for me, and that’s why I do what I do,” she said.
