Free Dead Men Do Tell Tales: The Strange and Fascinating Cases of a Forensic Anthropologist by William R. Maples, Michael Browning

died, of all places, at a birthday party.
    The victim had been an unfortunate young man, discharged from the military because of emotional problems. He had attacked his drill sergeant, and anyone who has served in the Army knows what a feckless deed that is. Some time after his discharge he attended a birthday party for a friend who was a parolee from a Florida prison. When the presents were unwrapped, one gift in particular caught the victim’s eye: a holster for a .357 magnum revolver, given to the birthday boy by his girlfriend. The recipient proudly strapped on the holster and put the gun in it, wearing both while dancing at the party. For some reason, this gun and holster excited the keenest jealousy in the mind of the victim, who complained loudly that the guest of honor had such a beautiful gun, while he had none. Laughing, the birthday boy unbuckled the gun and holster, handed them to the victim and invited him to wear them. Greedily the victim snatched the revolver and holster, strapped them on and went outside. After a minute or two, the parolee followed him, perhaps because he was worried about losing his gun. A few seconds later a shot rang out.
    Pale and distraught, the guest of honor rushed back into the house and announced that the victim had shot himself. The other guests rushed out and found the victim in a sitting position against the base of a tree, dead, dripping blood from a massive head injury, with the gun on the ground next to his limp hand.
    Whether their wits were fogged by alcohol, or whether they were simply stupid I cannot tell; but instead of reporting the shooting to the police, the partygoers decided to place the body in a sleeping bag and transport it to the edge of the county, where they all helped bury it in the dark of night. It didn’t take long for the story of the shooting to leak out—the parolee was charged with possession of a firearm by a convicted felon, failure to report a death and transporting a body from the scene of a death. He was sent back to prison and for a time it seemed he might be charged with murder.
    The shooting occurred in late 1979, but the body was not unearthed until November 1980. It took the police over a year of tramping up and down in the woods before they found the grave. All this while, the penitent partygoers were racking their brains, trying to remember where they had mislaid the corpse. When it was finally unearthed, the skull of the victim was found to be reduced to approximately eighty fragments by the terrific explosive force of the .357 magnum slug, and it required extensive reconstruction at the C.A. Pound Human Identification Laboratory. Eventually I located the entrance wound and the well-defined and externally beveled exit wound. The trajectory of the bullet, which entered in the right temporal bone of the skull, was upward and slightly forward, consistent with the story of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
    If I had not been able to reconstruct that skull, very likely the birthday boy would have been charged with murder. As matters stood, he was sentenced to 186 days in jail and immediately released, with time served. He was relieved. At his sentencing he told the judge: “It’s been riding me since 1979. I’ve had no comfort.” To my knowledge, no other charges were ever filed against the partygoers, despite the macabre and unorthodox circumstances of their nocturnal trip to the woods.
    In 1981 a sordid tale of brutality and child abuse was cut short by a well-aimed bullet from a .22-caliber rifle, leaving me with the buried body of a man in his forties, recovered from a shallow grave in central Florida. My analysis of the skull would help decide the fate of a seventeen-year-old girl who had confessed to shooting him.
    The girl told police that she had been living in a hellish nightmare for eight years. She was the stepdaughter of the dead man and said he had been sexually abusing her since she was nine years old. She had an infant daughter,