Was the fragmented skeleton found in a crevice on Utah’s Comb Ridge actually Everett Ruess? To help answer that question, University of Colorado at Boulder forensic anthropologists Dennis Van Gerven and Paul Sandberg got to work, CSI style. Their first task was to stabilize the very fragile pieces of bone–especially skull fragments, which had been left exposed to the elements. Luckily, excavators found three fragments of the face—two of them with teeth still in place—tightly embedded and protected in the dirt. They also found an in-tact mandible. After months of painstaking work, the team's results are compelling. “Considering all of the biological and historical evidence together, if this isn’t Ruess, we’ve got an enormous coincidence on our hands,” says Van Gerven. Here the pair reveals how forensic science helped solve the mystery.
1 - Once the bones were cleaned and sorted, Van Gerven and Sandberg generated a biological profile for the corpse. The shape of the pelvis revealed that the individual was male. The degree of developmental maturity of the bones indicated that he was between the ages of 19 and 22. And the measurement of the femur suggested an approximate height of five feet eight.
2 - The fragile pieces of the face were superimposed onto a portrait of Ruess taken by Dorothea Lange shortly before the vagabond's disappearance. Using Adobe Photoshop, Van Gerven and Sandberg blended images of Ruess and the bones. Having both a profile shot and a front view shot with teeth exposed allowed them to compare the most important "anatomical landmarks."
3 - The two most discernible anatomical points of interest were the top of the nose and the bottom of the mandible. They matched exactly.
4 - Fortunately, Everett was smiling in the portrait. While bone can distort underground, teeth cannot. Van Gerven and Sandberg found a surprisingly good match.
5 - The team carefully examined the bridge of the nose, the lower border of the eye orbit, the base of the nasal opening, and the dimensions of the mandible. The degree to which the bones sit "inside" the face in this view was first approximated and then measured in a composite that was scaled to life-size. Everything matched up.
6 - When the researchers scaled the photo of the bone to match the size of one of the teeth, all of the other teeth lined up in a row, and the top and bridge of the nasal bones also matched.