Shallow Graves Research Articles

Decomposition of Abdomen Fatty Flesh of Cadaver Buried in Nami Series Soil of Bukit Kor Terengganu

Abstract The identification of a buried cadaver become challenging when the cadaver is badly decomposed. Therefore, a simulated burial experiment was performed to investigate the potential of cadaveric derived lipids to be developed as burial biomarkers in interpreting the anthropogenic signal to locate a clandestine grave and estimate the postmortem interval (PMI). This experiment was designed to mimic a burial in a shallow grave under tropical climate. The abdomen fatty flesh of commercial pig (Sus scrofa) was buried in Nami series soil and allowed to decompose for 150 days of burial period. The soils were collected at 15 designated sampling points. Modified Bligh Dyer Extraction method was utilized to extract the lipids from the soils. The extracted lipids were analysed with Gas Chromatography-Flame Ion Detector. The highest mass of total lipid extracts recovered was 0.1699 g/g soil dry weight. The major lipid components detected were palmitic (C16:0) and stearic (C18:0) acids, together with methyl nonadecanoic acid and cholesterol. Different decomposition stages exhibited different concentrations of these soil lipid components Therefore, these soil lipids can be developed as burial biomarkers to be used as a tool in forensic investigations.

The Spectral Arctic: A History of Dreams and Ghosts in Polar Exploration by Shane McCorristine

Reviewed by: The Spectral Arctic: A History of Dreams and Ghosts in Polar Exploration by Shane McCorristine Elsa Richardson Keywords Shane McCorristine, Elsa Richardson, Britain, England, nineteenth century, polar exploration, Franklin expedition, Far North, spectrality, Northwest Passage shane mccorristine. The Spectral Arctic: A History of Dreams and Ghosts in Polar Exploration. London: UCL Press, 2018. Pp. 326. In his account of a failed expedition to find the Northwest Passage, the explorer William Edward Parry recalled overwintering in a harbour of Melville Island. With the ships anchored in thick ice and their men idle, boredom quickly became a problem to be staved off with time consuming routines and ingenious entertainments. Theatrical performances were staged, calisthenics classes were held on deck, and a barrel organ was produced for the crew to dance to. In spite of these precautions, the eerie stillness of the dark landscape induced a kind of collective somnolence, where melancholic moods developed and reveries took on a life of their own. Here with the sound of wolves howling in the distance, the Aurora Borealis lighting the sky overhead, and everywhere the vast emptiness of a frozen world, is the spectral North to which Shane McCorristine’s new book attends. Long imagined as a remote and unmapped region, against which heroic adventurers could test the limits of their endurance, narratives of exploration also trafficked in the strange and the sublime. Excavating stories of clairvoyance, ghosts, mummies, and shamans from archival documents, memoirs, and fictional texts, McCorristine argues for the supernatural as a constitutive element of the Arctic imaginary in Victorian Britain. In the process, he asks that we take dreams more seriously, that we recognise that they are “not simply abstract and disembodied experiences for people, but forms of practice” (49). To dismiss Parry’s strange reveries as marginal to the real business of imperial exploration—maps, men, and nations—would be to overlook the ways in which that history was shaped by dreams, superstitions, visions, and other enchantments. The Spectral Arctic builds on a growing field of humanities research dedicated to histories of the uncanny and the unexplainable. Investigating subjects like spiritualism, mesmerism, mysticism, and the occult, scholars from a range of disciplines including literary studies, philosophy, sociology, and geography, have identified the supernatural as key to understanding the history of modern Britain. These highly varied studies find common ground in their challenge to the disenchanted reading of modernity first made famous by the [End Page 304] sociologist and political economist Max Weber, by which rationalisation and intellectualisation have been credited with forcing magic, religion, and spirituality from the public realm. Over the last two decades historians have chipped away at the idea of disenchantment to reveal the magical imagination at work in the operations of capitalism and the structures of modernity itself. In his first book, Spectres of the Self: Thinking about Ghosts and Ghost-seeing in England, 1750–1920 (2010) McCorristine explored the idea of the haunted self, but his new work moves away from ghostly subjectivities to attend to the “cultural production of the spectral” instead (43). Describing the Arctic as a space where “intense bundles of dreams, bodies and spirits gathered,” his interest lies in how the region was constructed in the popular Victorian imagination (12). One of the strengths of this approach is that it privileges voices silenced by the standard narrative of polar exploration. Western women, excluded from exclusively male expeditions, appeared in Arctic ballads, poetry, and fiction as the objects of love and sexual longing, as enduring emblems of home and country. They were, according to McCorristine, “spectrally present” not only in the form of literary representations, but also as disembodied witnesses to the search for the Northwest Passage (176). At the centre of The Spectral Arctic is the ill-fated Franklin expedition: its disappearance in 1848, the recovery missions launched, the influential appeals of Lady Jane Franklin, the sad discovery of shallow graves, evidence of cannibalism, and the unravelling of a national fantasy. Newspapers from the period covered the search in detail and some featured extraordinary reports from young women who claimed to have visited the expedition. Placed into a mesmeric trance, more than a dozen clairvoyant women travelled to the...

Spatial impacts of a multi-individual grave on microbial and microfaunal communities and soil biogeochemistry

Decomposing vertebrates, including humans, result in pronounced changes in surrounding soil biogeochemistry, particularly nitrogen (N) and carbon (C) availability, and alter soil micro- and macrofauna. However, the impacts of subsurface human decomposition, where oxygen becomes limited and microbial biomass is generally lower, are far less understood. The goals of this study were to evaluate the impact of human decomposition in a multi-individual, shallow (~70 cm depth) grave on soil biogeochemistry and soil microbial and nematode communities. Three individuals were interred and allowed to decay for four years. Soils were collected from two depths (0‒5 and 30‒35 cm) along linear transects radiating from the grave as well as from within and below (85‒90 cm depth) the grave during excavation to assess how decomposition affects soil properties. Along radiating surface transects, several extracellular enzymes rates and nematode richness increased with increasing distance from the grave, and likely reflect physical site disruption due to grave excavation and infill. There was no evidence of carcass-sourced C and N lateral migration from the grave, at least at 30‒35 cm depth. Within the grave, soils exhibited significant N-enrichment (e.g., ammonium, dissolved organic N), elevated electrical conductivity, and elevated respiration rates with depth. Soil biogeochemistry within the grave, particularly in the middle (30‒35 cm) and base (70‒75 cm depth), was significantly altered by human decomposition. Mean microbial gene abundances changed with depth in the grave, demonstrating increased microbial presence in response to ongoing decomposition. Human-associated Bacteroides were only detected at the base of the grave where anoxic conditions prevailed. Nematode community abundance and richness were reduced at 70‒75 cm and not detectable below 85‒90 cm. Further, we identified certain Plectus spp. as potential indicators of enrichment due to decomposition. Here we demonstrate that human decomposition influences soil biogeochemistry, microbes, and microfauna up to four years after burial.

Macrocheles species (Acari: Macrochelidae) associated with human corpses in Europe

The biology of macrochelid mites might offer new venues for the interpretation of the environmental conditions surrounding human death and decomposition. Three human corpses, one from Sweden and two from Spain, have been analysed for the occurrence of Macrochelidae species. Macrocheles muscaedomesticae (Scopoli) females were associated with a corpse that was found in a popular beach area of southeast Spain. Their arrival coincides with the occurrence of one of their major carrier species, the filth fly Fannia scalaris, the activity of which peaks during mid-summer. Macrocheles glaber (Müller) specimens were collected from a corpse in a shallow grave in a forest in Sweden at the end of summer, concurrent with the arrival of beetles attracted by odours from the corpse. Macrocheles perglaber Filipponi and Pegazzano adults were sampled from a corpse found indoors in the rural surroundings of Granada city, south Spain. The phoretic behaviour of this species is similar to that of M. glaber, but it is more specific to Scarabaeidae and Geotrupidae dung beetles, most of which favour human faeces. Macrocheles muscaedomesticae is known from urban and rural areas and poultry farms, M. glaber from outdoors, particularly the countryside, whereas M. perglaber is known from outdoor, rural, and remote, potentially mountainous locations. Macrocheles muscaedomesticae and M. perglaber are reported for the first time from the Iberian Peninsula. This is the first record of M. perglaber from human remains.

Characterizing forensically important insect and microbial community colonization patterns in buried remains

During violent criminal actions in which the perpetrator disposes of the victim’s remains by burial, the analysis of insects and bacterial colonization patterns could be necessary for postmortem interval (PMI) estimation. Our research aimed to assess the decomposition process of buried rat carcasses from shallow graves (40 cm), the diversity and dynamics of insects and bacteria throughout the decomposition stages, and the environmental parameters’ influence on these variations. The results provide further insight on decomposition in soil and contribute to a broader understanding of the factors involved in decomposition by qualitatively and quantitatively analysing the decomposer community (bacteria and insects). Additionally, two bacterial taxa, Enterococcus faecalis and Clostridium paraputrificum that were investigated for the first time as PMI indicators using quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR) showed differential abundance over time, promising data for PMI estimation. The current study on the decomposition of buried rat carcasses in a natural environment will strengthen the current knowledge on decomposed remains from shallow graves and represents an effort to quantify insect and bacterial taxa as PMI estimators.

Applying the principles of isotope analysis in plant and animal ecology to forensic science in the Americas.

The heart of forensic science is application of the scientific method and analytical approaches to answer questions central to solving a crime: Who, What, When, Where, and How. Forensic practitioners use fundamentals of chemistry and physics to examine evidence and infer its origin. In this regard, ecological researchers have had a significant impact on forensic science through the development and application of a specialized measurement technique-isotope analysis-for examining evidence. Here, we review the utility of isotope analysis in forensic settings from an ecological perspective, concentrating on work from the Americas completed within the last three decades. Our primary focus is on combining plant and animal physiological models with isotope analyses for source inference. Examples of the forensic application of isotopes-including stable isotopes, radiogenic isotopes, and radioisotopes-span from cotton used in counterfeit bills to anthrax shipped through the U.S. Postal Service and from beer adulterated with cheap adjuncts to human remains discovered in shallow graves. Recent methodological developments and the generation of isotope landscapes, or isoscapes, for data interpretation promise that isotope analysis will be a useful tool in ecological and forensic studies for decades to come.

Violence, desecration, and urban collapse at the Postclassic Maya political capital of Mayapán

This article presents evidence from a mass grave at the Itzmal Ch’en administrative group, an outlying ceremonial center at the Postclassic period Maya political center of Mayapán, Yucatan, Mexico. The grave contains the remains of at least 20 individuals, likely the group’s elite patrons. The remains were subject to extensive postmortem treatment that included butchering, burning, and scattering, along with ritual paraphernalia and midden debris. The deposit is significant in the context of the city’s prolonged sociopolitical collapse, as radiocarbon evidence suggests that the deposit predates the final abandonment of the city. The shallow grave is instead associated with an ethnohistorically-documented period of internal conflict from between CE 1302 and 1400. More broadly, we evaluate the Itzmal Ch’en mass grave as a rare form of mortuary deposit in the Maya region, an example of desecration and ritual violence. The abandoned ceremonial plaza and grave site would have represented a macabre monument to a period of violent conflict in the city’s history that would have been visible to the city’s remaining occupants for the last half century prior to Mayapán’s final abandonment.

The Identification of a 1916 Irish Rebel: New Approach for Estimating Relatedness From Low Coverage Homozygous Genomes

Thomas Kent was an Irish rebel who was executed by British forces in the aftermath of the Easter Rising armed insurrection of 1916 and buried in a shallow grave on Cork prison’s grounds. In 2015, ninety-nine years after his death, a state funeral was offered to his living family to honor his role in the struggle for Irish independence. However, inaccuracies in record keeping did not allow the bodily remains that supposedly belonged to Kent to be identified with absolute certainty. Using a novel approach based on homozygous single nucleotide polymorphisms, we identified these remains to be those of Kent by comparing his genetic data to that of two known living relatives. As the DNA degradation found on Kent’s DNA, characteristic of ancient DNA, rendered traditional methods of relatedness estimation unusable, we forced all loci homozygous, in a process we refer to as “forced homozygote approach”. The results were confirmed using simulated data for different relatedness classes. We argue that this method provides a necessary alternative for relatedness estimations, not only in forensic analysis, but also in ancient DNA studies, where reduced amounts of genetic information can limit the application of traditional methods.

Bad Girl Gone by Temple Mathews

Reviewed by: Bad Girl Gone by Temple Mathews Kate Quealy-Gainer, Assistant Editor Mathews, Temple Bad Girl Gone. Dunne/St. Martin’s Griffin, 2017[272p] Trade ed. ISBN 978-1-250-05881-2 $18.99 E-book ed. ISBN 978-1-4668-6324-8 $10.99 Reviewed from galleys Ad Gr. 7–10 Sixteen-year-old Echo Stone learns that the strange orphanage she’s awakened in actually houses the ghosts of murdered children, a depressing fact she figures out when she manages to find her way home, only to discover it surrounded by police tape and her parents crying over the violent death of their daughter. The only way out of Middle House and onto wherever souls at rest go is to find her murderer and exact vengeance, a task with which her fellow residents of Middle House are happy to assist her. The premise is intriguing, but Echo makes a milquetoast narrator, buckling under any pressure and playing the damsel in distress even in death as the dreamy, ghostly Cole comes to her rescue more than once; her focus on mundane aspects of her former life, like her weight and fashion choices, also seems misplaced. However, the mystery itself is well plotted with effective red herrings and possible suspects, and Echo’s ultimate takedown of the culprit is gratifying. It’s the other Middle House kids, though, who steal the show; they are goofy, eccentric, and entirely sympathetic in the raw deal they got out of their shortened lives. This is not quite as dark as Wallace’s Shallow Graves (BCCB 1/16), but it certainly serves up a satisfying dish of revenge from the other side. Copyright © 2017 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Shallow Graves by Kali Wallace (review)

Shallow Graves by Kali Wallace (review)

Estimation of Postmortem Interval from Cartilage Changes of Rabbit Auricle

In forensic practice, estimating the time of death is one of the most important procedures but is often extremely difficult. There are many methods for estimating the time of death, which can be divided into two categories (rate methods and concurrence methods). Postmortem decompositional changes to auricular cartilage were analyzed to help establish a new methodology in determining the postmortem interval. Methods: The ears were collected from rabbits buried in simulated shallow graves for different time periods (0, 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30 days). The auricles were examined both macroscopically and microscopically to detect changes occurring over a specified time. Results: Numerous macroscopic changes including color and texture changes and gradual degradation of cartilage were observed. LM showed gradual structural changes in the tissue over time including: cartilage matrix density and nuclear material. Conclusion: Postmortem degradation of ear cartilage may be useful for estimating a presumptive postmortem interval.

These Shallow Graves by Jennifer Donnelly (review)

These Shallow Graves by Jennifer Donnelly (review)

Design and evaluation of a bioreactor with application to forensic burial environments

Existing forensic taphonomic methods lack specificity in estimating the postmortem interval (PMI) in the period following active decomposition. New methods, such as the use of citrate concentration in bone, are currently being considered; however, determining the applicability of these methods in differing environmental contexts is challenging. This research aims to design a forensic bioreactor that can account for environmental factors known to impact decomposition, specifically temperature, moisture, physical damage from animals, burial depth, soil pH, and organic matter content. These forensically relevant environmental variables were characterized in a soil science context. The resulting metrics were soil temperature regime, soil moisture regime, slope, texture, soil horizon, cation exchange capacity, soil pH, and organic matter content. Bioreactor chambers were constructed using sterilized thin-walled polystyrene boxes housed in calibrated temperature units. Gravesoil was represented using mineral soil (Ultisols), and organic soil proxy for Histosols, horticulture mix. Gravesoil depth was determined using mineral soil horizons A and Bt2 to simulate surface scatter and shallow grave burial respectively. A total of fourteen different environmental conditions were created and controlled successfully over a 90-day experiment. These results demonstrate successful implementation and control of forensic bioreactor simulating precise environments in a single research location, rather than site-specific testing occurring in different geographic regions. Bone sections were grossly assessed for weathering characteristics, which revealed notable differences related to exposure to different temperature regimes and soil types. Over the short 90-day duration of this experiment, changes in weathering characteristics were more evident across the different temperature regimes rather than the soil types. Using this methodology, bioreactor systems can be created to replicate many different clandestine burial contexts, which will allow for the more rapid understanding of environmental effects on skeletal remains.

The Pomegranate Lady and Her Sons by Goli Taraghi

eager to break the silence. I always kept it to myself, and it was as if I had built a wall around myself. But at last the wall collapses .” And the painful memories surface: of mass killings, including women and children; beheadings; finding the shallow graves of thousands of fallen young soldiers ; officers without a conscience sending their men into war-crime scenarios; seeing best buddies die; leaving behind lovers and their children when a political settlement was finally reached and they returned home. But what happened in the jungles of Indonesia came home with them, and they would never be the same. More than five thousand did not come home. Speerstra visits those stories, too, of bereaved parents whose grief never went away, or of fiancées who waited in vain. And though there is an inevitable similarity running through these stories, no two are the same. Speerstra’s storytelling powers are fully exercised here by varying the narrative techniques and by letting each subject tell his story in his own unique way. Characteristically, the author allows the stories their emotional dimension. In many of these stories, he listens to the heartbeat of a lost generation; in recording them, he makes sure that the war and its cost are no longer forgotten. Henry J. Baron Calvin College Goli Taraghi. The Pomegranate Lady and Her Sons. Sara Khalili, tr. New York. W. W. Norton. 2015 (©2013). isbn 9780393063332 Goli Taraghi, a renowned Iranian female author, now in her seventies, has lived in Iran, the US, and France and has written and published both before the Islamic Revolution of 1979 and after. Her latest collection, published in English, The Pomegranate Lady and Her Sons, includes ten short stories that cover various moments and eras in the span of her life, taking place in Tehran, Paris, and other cities in between and beyond. These stories seem to be mainly based on either Taraghi’s own life or on other women she has met throughout her life and journeys. Some of her themes include three generations of women, a thief, a ballet class, neighborhood young loves, a coup d’état, grandmothers, the intertwined lives of maids, nannies, and their employers. Of the stories in the collection, only three are primarily about male characters; interestingly , they are entitled “In Another Place,” “The Great Lady of My Soul,” and “The Other One,” and even these are, in one way or another, stories with a female center. Taraghi writes of the world around her, allowing her to indulge herself and her readers in the well-represented familiar world but limiting her ability to take her readers beyond her immediate surroundings , beyond her social class and lifestyle. Her stories are strongest when she delves into (re)creating a world with its events and characters, and when she stays within the bounds of simple storytelling, rather than trying to use intricate plot devices that might be more harmful than helpful to the story. On another note, the stories are not the strongest with regard to rhythm and pacing, tone and voice, as these do not change much from one story to another, from one context to another. Goli Taraghi is a storyteller who reminds you of a grandmother who gathers her grandkids around her at night and tells stories of a life, a life wished for and gone by, struggled for and let go of, remembered and recounted. Her stories are simple and accessible, yet they revive peoples who are not simple and accessible. Her stories are happy, hopeful, and humane while simultaneously sad, dark, and heartbreaking. Without any forced gestures, they invite you to sit, listen, imagine, and think about these lives. It is for these very reasons that Sheniz Janmohamed Firesmoke TSAR This collection of poems from Sheniz Janmohamed spans three poetic forms in its quest to uncover both truths about the soul and the life cycle of fire. Using images of nature and combining them with references to history and the tenets of her cultural heritage to evoke beautiful examinations into life, Janmohamed’s writing is wonderfully complex in its simplicity. C Fong Hsiung Picture Bride TSAR This novel about a Chinese Indian girl forced...

Op klompen troch de dessa by Hylke Speerstra

68 WLT SEPTEMBER / OCTOBER 2015 There are several technical points that mar this work, the first of which can be attributed to neither the author nor the translator. Columbia University Press made the inexplicable decision to set the work in a sans serif font, which is difficult to read. Second, each page has a light gray circle in the center, echoing the one formed by the cover, that further distracts from the text. Third, each of the six chapters has, sequentially at the top of the first page, several of the steps necessary to fold an origami crane. There is certainly a connection between the atomic bombings and origami cranes, but this seems overly precious and disconnected from the literature. Erik R. Lofgren Bucknell University Hylke Speerstra. Op klompen troch de dessa. Gorredijk, Netherlands. Bornmeer. 2014. isbn 9789056153359 Friesland’s best-selling author has done it again; this time a collection of stories from survivors of the ill-advised and illfated attempt by the Dutch government to maintain colonial control of Indonesia. Shortly after the end of World War II, the Dutch sent one hundred thousand of their young men, many of them still in their teens, to gruesome combat in the jungles and rice fields of Indonesia. They went illprepared and ill-equipped. (The book’s title alludes to that: In wooden shoes through the rice fields.) They left behind siblings, parents, girlfriends, fiancées, and dreams of a future. Led to believe that they were fighting for a just cause, they discovered that they had been betrayed, that they were rather engaged in a guerilla warfare that would continue to haunt them with its shame and guilt. Hylke Speerstra, as he had done with Dutch emigrants who after World War II scattered across the globe (Cruel Paradise, 2005), searched out survivors of this dark chapter in Dutch history and gathered their stories. The story, for example, of Ale van der Meer who in the Depression years worked for a pittance, was picked up by the Germans in World War II and sent to a forced-labor camp (from which he walked back at war’s end weighing less than a hundred pounds), was pressed into military service and sent to Indonesia not long after that, became part of a firing squad carrying out executions, and shot a suspected sniper who turned out to be a young lad of twelve or thirteen: memories that tore at his soul the rest of his life. Survivors break their long silence in these stories. In the words of one: “I’m World Literature in Review eager to break the silence. I always kept it to myself, and it was as if I had built a wall around myself. But at last the wall collapses .” And the painful memories surface: of mass killings, including women and children; beheadings; finding the shallow graves of thousands of fallen young soldiers ; officers without a conscience sending their men into war-crime scenarios; seeing best buddies die; leaving behind lovers and their children when a political settlement was finally reached and they returned home. But what happened in the jungles of Indonesia came home with them, and they would never be the same. More than five thousand did not come home. Speerstra visits those stories, too, of bereaved parents whose grief never went away, or of fiancées who waited in vain. And though there is an inevitable similarity running through these stories, no two are the same. Speerstra’s storytelling powers are fully exercised here by varying the narrative techniques and by letting each subject tell his story in his own unique way. Characteristically, the author allows the stories their emotional dimension. In many of these stories, he listens to the heartbeat of a lost generation; in recording them, he makes sure that the war and its cost are no longer forgotten. Henry J. Baron Calvin College Goli Taraghi. The Pomegranate Lady and Her Sons. Sara Khalili, tr. New York. W. W. Norton. 2015 (©2013). isbn 9780393063332 Goli Taraghi, a renowned Iranian female author, now in her seventies, has lived in Iran, the US, and France and has written and published both before the Islamic Revolution...

Nitrous oxide, methane and carbon dioxide dynamics from experimental pig graves

Twelve pig carcasses were buried in single, shallow and deep (30 and 90cm, respectively) graves at an experimental site near Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, with three shallow and three deep wrapped in black plastic garbage bags. An additional six carcasses were left at the surface to decompose, three of which were bagged. Six reference pits without remains were also dug. The objective of this three-year study was to examine the biogeochemistry and utility of nitrous oxide (N2O), methane (CH4) and carbon dioxide (CO2) in grave detection and whether grave depth or cadaver condition (bagged versus bare) affected soil pore air concentrations and emission of the three gases. Graves showed significantly higher (α=0.05) concentrations and surface fluxes of N2O and CO2 than reference pits, but there was no difference in CH4 between graves and reference pits. While CH4 decreased with depth in the soil profiles, N2O and CO2 showed a large increase compared to reference pits. Shallow graves showed significantly higher emissions and pore air concentrations of N2O and CO2 than deep graves, as did bare versus bagged carcasses.

Long-term effects of hydrated lime and quicklime on the decay of human remains using pig cadavers as human body analogues: Field experiments

An increased number of police enquiries involving human remains buried with lime have demonstrated the need for more research into the effect of different types of lime on cadaver decomposition and its micro-environment. This study follows previous studies by the authors who have investigated the effects of lime on the decay of human remains in laboratory conditions and 6 months of field experiments. Six pig carcasses (Sus scrofa), used as human body analogues, were buried without lime with hydrated lime (Ca(OH)2) and quicklime (CaO) in shallow graves in sandy-loam soil in Belgium and recovered after 17 and 42 months of burial. Analysis of the soil, lime and carcasses included entomology, pH, moisture content, microbial activity, histology and lime carbonation. The results of this study demonstrate that despite conflicting evidence in the literature, the extent of decomposition is slowed down by burial with both hydrated lime and quicklime. The more advanced the decay process, the more similar the degree of liquefaction between the limed and unlimed remains. The end result for each mode of burial will ultimately result in skeletonisation. This study has implications for the investigation of clandestine burials, for a better understanding of archaeological plaster burials and potentially for the interpretation of mass graves and management of mass disasters by humanitarian organisation and DVI teams.

Book Review: The Shallow Grave

Book Review: The Shallow Grave

Examination of Human Remains Encased in Concrete: A Case Report and Review of the Literature

While fortunately relatively uncommon, law enforcement and death investigators may encounter decedents who have been deliberately concealed in some elaborate fashion. This may involve a body buried in a shallow grave, a body placed into a container such as a drum or suitcase (sometimes after dismemberment), or a body encased in concrete. Regarding the latter, while occasionally one may read about such cases in the media or fictional stories, there is a relative paucity of such cases reported in the forensic literature. This can be problematic when one encounters such a case, as there are several unique issues to navigate, including handling and examining what may be a large, heavy mass of concrete, accessing the body, obtaining appropriate radiological studies, and certifying the death (which may be challenging if extensive decomposition is present). We present a case of a 2-year-old child who was killed and then entombed in concrete within a trash barrel for over a month before the body was discovered. This report includes a detailed description of our approach of the examination and handling of the remains and a literature review to identify similar cases with a focus on the most commonly reported causes and manners of death. We then conclude with a brief discussion of using the terminology “homicidal violence” or “homicide by unspecified means” in cases such as the one presented.

Estimating postmortem interval using RNA degradation and morphological changes in tooth pulp

The accurate determination of time since death, or postmortem interval (PMI), can be critical in the investigation of suspicious deaths. Knowing when a suspicious death occurred can limit the number of potential suspects to those without a viable alibi for the time of the crime. The forensic techniques currently employed to determine PMI: pathology, entomology, and anthropology, are accurate over different time periods following death. A large gap in time exists between the capabilities of forensic entomology and traditional anthropology, leaving a period in which PMI is difficult to estimate. In this study, time-dependent differences in RNA decay rates were examined to extend the time frame over which early PMI estimates can be made. Comparing the decay rates of a large, labile segment of β-actin RNA and a smaller, more stable, non-overlapping segment of the same RNA from tooth pulp, we were able to estimate PMI values of pigs buried within a shallow grave for up to 84 days. This compares favorably to an estimate of PMI using insect data. Full skeletonization and loss of insect activity was observed by day 28 of our study. In addition to differences in RNA decay rates, morphological changes were observed in the pulp as it aged postmortem. To provide a quantitative measure of progressive color changes, analysis of digital photographs of each tooth's pulp were used to construct a simple colorimetric assay. This assay was then used to cluster ages of pulp samples by color. The two assays, used in combination with one another, can create a more precise estimate of PMI. The potential advantages of this molecular means of estimating PMI include extending the time frame for such estimates, is applicable to samples collected worldwide (no specialized knowledge of local insect fauna is required), is relatively fast, and inexpensive.