Yvonne Kjorlien

An update, because it’s been a while. And it’s been busy.

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Jessica Auchter is a full professor and research chair in visual culture in international studies at Université Laval in Quebec City, Quebec, Canada. She explores the management of dead bodies after mass violence and how institutions grapple with this challenge.

In this episode we talk about:

Auchter’s research on memory, memorialization, and the representation of violence, leading her to concentrate on the materiality of dead bodies and the politics surrounding their management after events like genocide.
The contrast between institutional approaches to reconciliation, which often focus on political and legal processes, and the immediate, material reality of dealing with dead bodies and the loss experienced by affected communities.
How Western societies tend to manage death by moving it out of the public sphere, which is often seen as a marker of civilization, unlike other cultures where death may be more integrated into public life. This can lead to a perception that death in certain parts of the world is normalized, thus justifying international intervention in managing the dead.
The concept of bodily integrity and how the perception of body parts differs from that of a “whole” body.
How the dismemberment of bodies is a human rights violation and a tactic used to dehumanize enemies, disrupt truth-telling, and demoralize communities.
That scientific authority is becoming more technologically advanced in managing the aftermath of mass conflicts.
Necropolitics, highlighting that some bodies and body parts are valued more than others.

Find more about Jessica Auchter through her websites:

https://www.esei.ulaval.ca/en/our-school/directory/jessica-auchter
https://www.culturevisuelle-ei.chaire.ulaval.ca/en

and the following:

Global Corpse Politics: The Obscenity Taboo (Cambridge, 2021)
Transformations and Transitions: The Social and Political Life of the Dead (with Lia Kent and Caroline Bennett), Death Studies (2024)
Demystifying Trauma in International Relations Theory (with Henrique Tavares Furtado), Security Dialogue (2024)
Missing Pieces and Body Parts: On Bodily Integrity and Political Violence, Death Studies (2024)

Notes from the start

Clea Koff’s 2004 book The Bone Woman: Among the Dead in Rwanda, Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo.

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Transcript

Yvonne Kjorlien: All right, thank you very much for responding to my email, number one. And talking about dead people is always a conversation-ender. And here we’re actually going to have a conversation about dead people. Yay. So, Jessica, please introduce yourself and tell us where you are and what you do.

Jessica Auchter: Thank you so much. So I’m Jessica Auchter. I’m a full professor and research chair in visual culture in international studies at Universite Laval in Quebec City, Canada. so before that I worked at the University of Tennessee Chattanooga for 10 years before moving up to Quebec. So my background is mostly in international studies. My degree is in global politics. But for a long time, I’ve been working with issues of memory, memorialization and its representation and the larger kind of dynamics of the politics of violence and how we think about the aftermath of violence, its effects and those sorts of dynamics. So, I have a wide-ranging interest in those kinds of issues that ultimately led me to this focus on dead bodies, which as you said, is often more of a conversation ender than a conversation starter. So, I’m really excited to get the chance to talk about it at length today.

Yvonne Kjorlien: That is quite a change. I mean, not just from Tennessee to Quebec, but also from what you were studying to now. How are you dealing with, I mean, I guess both culture shifts?

Jessica Auchter: Yeah, it’s interesting. So, the move up here was sort of a natural move because I’ve been working for a long time in the dynamics of kind of visual representation. And so, when the position opened up where I am now for an opportunity to work directly with the kind of dynamics of visual representations of violence and human rights violations, it was kind of a no-brainer to make the move.

But I think for a long time I’ve been interested in the dynamics of violence. Originally it started with an interest in genocide and the aftermath of genocide and the larger politics of memory. But I think over time what I started to realize is that many people who were interested in these kinds of issues were focused a lot on the institutional dynamics of reconciliation after atrocity, after genocide. So it was a lot about peace processes, political reconciliation, institutional mechanisms of justice, but that in many of these instances you were dealing with a very material aftermath of dead bodies. So after genocide, yes, you do have all these issues of political reconciliation and institutional dynamics and rebuilding of state structures and governments, but you also have a lot of dead bodies that are sort of scattered around on the ground. And there is the kind of problem of: How do you deal with them? How do you bury them according to local traditions? How are these understandings contested? What are the involvement of international actors in the kind of dynamics of the materiality of dead bodies after atrocity?

And it started with the genocide context but kind of broadened over time. But also how do you reckon with some of the dilemmas associated with these dead bodies who are often articulated in the context of truth narratives. So I think it started with an interest in violence and its aftermath. But I started to realize that for a lot of people, their immediate experience of political violence had a lot more to do with the materiality of dead bodies or the loss of loved ones and some of these narratives than the kind of attention that academics were paying to these kind of larger scale political and social reconciliation processes.

So that’s where it began is with this interest in kind of bottom up, I’ll say, dynamics of the materiality of dead bodies and just the reality that this is often a management problem. You just have a lot of dead bodies. Sometimes they’re in mass graves, sometimes we don’t know what happened to them, sometimes they’re disappeared. And so at the beginning it was a lot about the way this was framed as a management problem and also the connection between dead bodies and their integration into memorial sites, like memorial museums and that sort of thing.

And then over time I started to think a lot more about how the reality of modern conflict, warfare, human rights violations was that we don’t see the kind of whole body in the way that is often kind of idealized. You’re not just excavating a mass grave and uncovering an entire person, identifying that person, returning them to their loved ones. That isn’t really– and then being able to kind of describe a narrative of what happened to them. That’s not really how it works. You have suicide bombings where body parts are integrated in urban sort of spaces. You have terrorist attacks like September 11th where you have bodies and body parts being combined with rubble. And then you also have governments that are deliberately trying to disaggregate bodies in order to hide what happened to them, especially in the context when governments are perpetrators of human rights violations. So I think over time my interest in dead bodies also led me more recently to this kind of interest in body parts and the questions of bodily integrity that emerge in the article that I recently wrote that was published in the Journal of Death Studies on bodily integrity.

Yvonne Kjorlien: There’s a lot there. So, just we’re going to unpack some of that. I mean, it’s all fabulous, but yeah, let’s start to unpack some of that. So, I find it interesting that you took up the position at Laval, in this Canadian structure where we’re going through this truth and reconciliation with how Canada has treated its indigenous people and everything that’s come of that, including possible burial sites at residential schools and how we’re all coping with that, through investigations, through management, and if we leave them in the ground?Do we investigate? Do we dig them up? And even just involving indigenous community in that, how does that all look like? So, I find that very interesting that you’ve moved back to Canada during that time.

Jessica Auchter: Yeah, it is interesting. So, living in the US, there’s a big struggle with sort of engaging with some of its own of sordid history. In Canada, you see a lot more of a deliberate effort to try to sort of engage this conversation, but the conversation is still quite fraught. And there’s a lot of sort of contestation. And I think some of that comes from assumptions about what should happen that often govern our interaction with mass grave sites or with historical memory more broadly.

But I think also some of it comes from the idea that dealing with mass graves is a problem for them over there or it has become something that we think of as being associated with a post-conflict context in, for example, the developing world rather than in the developed world. Canada is the country that sends its military to engage in humanitarian missions in post-conflict.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, we don’t have that problem here. right?

Jessica Auchter: Yes. So I think that there’s this sort of disjuncture in our sense of who Canada is and then this kind of sorted historical memory that emerges at some of these sites. And so the conversation immediately begins with this fracture in the sort of sense of identity of who we are. And I think immediately from that comes this sort of desire to manage and govern that: Oh, my goodness, there’s this significant trauma. What can we do about it? And so management of trauma — and this is something that I’ve found quite extensively throughout my research trajectory –is that management of trauma is often kind of the first response, especially by government actors but often by communities as well. This trauma has emerged, now we have to manage it, because our goal is to try to end it and it has sort of ruptured up.

I think for a lot of victim communities the opposite is sort of true. That they are trying to find ways to live with that trauma or, in the Canadian case, they have already been living with the trauma that emerged out of the context of these residential schools. In some cases there was awareness of what was going on. In some cases there might not have been knowledge of the extent to which these sorts of things were happening even within the communities that were affected by it. But in a lot of cases the trauma was already a lived experience for some of these communities. And now you see this complicated set of circumstances where you have the material after effects of this atrocity that are emerging. You have questions of what to do with it, but you have this sort of almost automatic response by a lot of actors to kind of try to manage trauma out of the public sphere and into the private sphere. And that’s often what we see for burials or reburials is that it is the burials occur as a mechanism to mobilize dead bodies out of the public sphere, where they’re not supposed to be, back into the private sphere, where they can be managed within certain communities.

There are some exceptions to this of course, but I think often that can put institutions at odds with local communities who are trying to live with that trauma or sort of sit with it, rather than overcome it or manage it. And I think it can also contribute to the sense that these stories are trying to be mobilized out of the public eye at the same time that we’re trying to reckon with the complex stories of these trauma. So I think in a lot of my research what I found is dead bodies kind of emerge as a problem and that’s often how they’re situated. And of course when people are violently killed or killed through deprivation or sort of other sources, it is a problem, no doubt. But I think there’s a difference between thinking of this as an issue the causes of these deaths and then thinking of it as a problem that needs to be managed in terms of grave management, excavations, reburials, which is often what we see as the institutional response.

And one thing that we’re seeing a lot in the context of forensic efforts kind of worldwide is that there are tensions between local communities and international actors or national actors or these kind of systems of management because they’re not always coherent with one another and sometimes local communities have different senses.

So I think my initial sense especially of the Canadian case but of others is always that it is up to local communities to decide kind of like what mechanisms of justice, reconciliation, and all of that, should be sort of privileged and it is the opening of the conversation rather than the closing of it that often allows for these kind of complex working-throughs of some of this trauma. So dead bodies are the initial opening into that conversation if we allow them to function in that way, or at least they can be.

Yvonne Kjorlien: I find this very interesting in that I’m seeing a kind of parallel with just death in general in North America. I’ve had conversations on this podcast and outside of it with people in the funeral industry in where, the funeral industry has sort of a hold on how we deal with death. The dead body is taken away, it’s put into a place. It’s taken care of in a coffin and you never see it again. And it’s very disconnected from the family. And if there’s any cultural tradition or family closure ceremony that they want to do, traditionally historically it wasn’t really included in the funeral industry and now they’re beginning to open it up to where the individual can, I guess, reconnect with the dead and say goodbye and do their ceremony and whatever the individual needs to do. So that management is becoming, I guess, less controlling, less encompassing. And so I just find that an interesting parallel that we’re also seeing that at a very high level institutional, like national, international governance and management level as well versus the community or sometimes even the individual.

Jessica Auchter: Yeah. Yeah. I think that for a long time we’ve made assumptions about, especially in the west, especially in North America, that certain types of management of the dead are sort of appropriate and we’ve connected those with larger narratives of who is civilized and who isn’t. So civilized countries, death is not in the public sphere. Death is in the private sphere. And even for family members of the dead, it’s often sort of mobilized out of particular spaces, like the home into the kind of funeral management kind of industry. And so it has often been seen as a marker of civilization that someone dies, they do not remain in the public sphere. They most certainly are not, for example, burned on a funeral pyre in public, and then their bodies are buried in graves and it’s fine for family members to come visit them in particular spaces. But they don’t stay in the home. There’s no period of observance where family members are with the corpse aside from potentially viewings in funeral homes which are very heavily managed, not like in the space of a home that we see in some other cultural contexts.

So I think for a long time it wasn’t just cultural differences. It was those cultural differences were perceived in a hierarchical manner from a values-laden perspective: like you’re civilized if you mobilize death outside of the public sphere. And it’s only places that are uncivilized that have these sorts of practices. So there’s a hierarchy of values attributed to how people engage with the dead.

But I think from a global perspective and from the context of political violence, which is a context that I’m interested in from a research perspective, what one thing that we see is that there’s often an assumption made that certain parts of the world are more prone to having these sort of deaths and dead bodies publicized. It’s no surprise if there are dead bodies in the streets in Iraq, but in the US that’s an identity rupture. So there’s this kind of naturalization of death in the public sphere.

Several years ago I wrote a book chapter called Death in this Country is Normal which is drawn from a quotation by a doctor that was talking a little bit about these sort of quiet deaths from disease in the global south and the normalization of death and how we envision which deaths count and which deaths don’t count. But I think in many cases death has become normalized and public deaths have become normalized to the extent that political violence is assumed to be the norm in some places and then those deaths enter the public sphere. And that’s why it’s then seen as perfectly appropriate for western entities or international entities to come in and assist with that management of dead bodies, because it’s sort of necessary to re-civilize these contexts where they are so uncivilized that they have to have their death in the public sphere and they can’t manage their death on their own.

So I think there’s a kind of a larger international dynamic when it comes to political violence where two things happen. First, death in certain places is sort of seen as normalized. And then, second, that kind of justifies international intervention in the context of death management. But one of the other effects of it is that when we do see dead bodies in the public sphere in the west, it is seen as sort of sufficiently jarring that it is not only like a wound to governance, sovereignty, management, all of these things, but it’s kind of a wound to identity. And a lot of people have suggested that September 11th sort of posed this for the United States. That you had dead bodies, body parts in the public sphere and immediately there was this huge concern as to how we manage it and this tension between the sort of national dimensions and the family members of the dead. But you have authorities in New York saying we’re going to identify every single piece of human remains that emerge out of that, which ,of course, is physically and forensically not possible. But you see increasingly these kind of cases where bodies are combined with rubble. And I think the September 11th case is one of the ones that got me interested in this dynamic of body parts, not just dead bodies, because you have this huge challenge to resuscitating the body for burial, for family members.

And you see that also at this similar time period, suicide bombings, and that pose similar challenges, increased forms of urban warfare where you see, people being killed in environments where their bodies are more likely to combine with sort of urban rubble and that sort of thing on a global scale. So there’s kind of an interesting dynamic under which these deaths are being normalized in certain places and then they appear to us as more exceptional in the contexts that we are more familiar with or the contexts that global leaders sort of tend to reside in, like the west.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Let’s talk about that, the body parts because that’s the article that kind of got me in touch with you, in Death Studies: “Missing Pieces and Body Parts: On Bodily Integrity and Political Violence”. In it, you talk about ,I guess, the tendency for us to look at body parts as not human or the human being as less than when they are not whole, and how to make a whole human being and what do we consider whole. And I found that very interesting and since September 11th, as you mentioned, there’s been, documentaries and articles and stories come out about, yeah, how do we navigate that? How do we reconcile our definition of what is a whole human being with what we’re finding from the rubble? And not just from a personal individual, family standpoint that very grounded in the now, but also, from insurance purposes? If somebody has lost a leg in an accident, insurance companies have costs for how much a leg is and therefore how much they should compensate the person for losing that leg. This all has, I think, a bigger scope than just the 911, but I think, as you said, it brought it really to the forefront. Let’s talk about this concept of wholeness and how body parts just does not fit into that.

Jessica Auchter: Yes. Yes. I mean, I think for a long time, I’ve been interested in human remains, dead bodies, and the aftermath of violence. And one thing that I realized is that in a lot of the conversations that were being had about this, especially in academic circles, the body was being envisioned as sort of and defined in one particular way as this sort of whole thing, human remains. It’s sort of like our traditional understandings. It’s a body inside a grave or it’s a body that should be buried inside a grave.

And that was, in a substantive way, a mismatch with a lot of what was happening in the human rights practice realm where you see for forensic efforts to resuscitate the body. but the reality of what we were dealing with is very much body parts, not whole bodies. But the more I started to think about the goal of a lot of these forensic efforts, the more I realized that it very much was the resuscitation of the bodily whole. And the idea was we need to get all these parts and gather them together and give them to the family members. And that was being situated very heavily within narratives of justice. Sort of like what brings justice to the family, returning their loved one, but not just returning their loved one, returning their loved one whole.

And that was connected often with these sort of narratives of truthtelling. We won’t know what happened unless or until we can return the whole body of the victim to their family member. So it’s kind of like this complex intersection of these narratives of justice and truthtelling with also these narratives of sort of loved ones interactions with the bodies of their family members. And I think, as you said, it was highlighted quite significantly in the post-911 kind of context but it has been something that was being navigated in the kind of couple of decades preceding that. You have even the sort of classic case of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo, the Argentina desaparecidos, you have this demand, and they demanded the return of their loved ones whole. There is this kind of language of wholeness situated within a lot of these demands. You have in the 1990s the sort of post-Bosnia era where you see these forensic excavations and the attempt is to kind of reaggregate body parts that have been disaggregated. I think Rwanda is also an interesting case because you don’t have the financial commitment from international partners to engage in extensive forensic excavation. But as I mentioned in the Death Studies article, even when I visited Rwanda in 2011 on a research trip, they were still undergoing excavation of mass grave sites. and they were disaggregating body parts.

And in Rwanda, the politics of reburial is quite interesting because the government has reburied dead bodies often in some cases several times as a mechanism of sort of I’ll call it grave management, which I think is kind of interesting because we often think of forensic excavation as being completely apolitical but in many cases governments are using it connected with some of these narratives of reconciliation and truthtelling. But you have this sort of long history then of the reality on the ground being body parts, and different actors reckon with it in different ways. But one thing that I started to realize over time is that you can see a consistency that there is a desire to resuscitate the whole and that’s connected with these narratives of truthtelling and justice for family members especially, even when that may not necessarily be connected directly with what family members want.

And then also that in cases where the resuscitation of the whole body was just forensically impossible, there was this sort of discursive effort to kind of resuscitate the whole. How can we do so through narratives, through storytelling? How can we tell a story about the body part standing in a way that makes us recall this sense of wholeness?

So there was this privileging of bodily integrity and when it was materially not possible, it was done through kind of storytelling and discursive mechanisms often by governments to try to sort of resuscitate this sense of wholeness.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Can you give an example for that?

There’s been several cases where governments or entities have sort of decided that it’s practically impossible to have the whole body. So instead, they’ll set thresholds of the quantity of human remains that are needed in order to refer to something as a full body. So even as far back as World War II, when they would resuscitate sets of human remains, over time guidelines were put in place that suggested as long as you had 3 kilograms of human remains, that was labeled a whole body that could be returned to family members for burial. Here is the body of your loved one that went away to war and died. And in that case, it wasn’t a full body, but the sort of labeling of what counts as a body in a discursive sense labeled those parts as a whole body, even though from a scientific perspective, they most certainly were not.

And the same thing in Bosnia over time. At first, they would return body parts to family members sort of as they found them and identified them. Here are the remains of your loved one. But then the family members would get a phone call six months later. We have the remains of your loved one. We’ve already received the remains of our loved one and buried them. Well, we have more. and so sometimes they would receive more and more over time. And as a result, the International Committee on Missing Persons also has a threshold in the Bosnian case. And the threshold has shifted and changed over time and by context, but a threshold of what percentage of a body has to be there for it to be a whole body. I believe it’s 75% in the Bosnian case or it became 75% at a certain point in time.

And the same thing, September 11th, people were getting phone calls. We found the human remains of your loved one. And then they would receive another phone call. We found another part and another part and another part. And they started to consider whether or not they should wait to inform family members or wait to give over the remains until they had a certain percentage. So you have in some sense this factual scientific definition of a whole body. We were resuscitating the whole body. We found all the body parts and then you have this kind of discursive sense of what wholeness means. And in some cases it can be parts of a body that are labeled a whole body, but in other cases it can be bodies that were not able to be found at all. Missing persons and that sort of thing. And in these kinds of cases sometimes the truthtelling mechanisms take the place of the presence of the body. We don’t have the whole body, but here’s the story of what happened. And in some cases, you see burials of empty coffins. In some cases, you see people taking parts of rubble from September 11th and burying it as if it was their family member, even though there has been no identification. In the article, I tell a story of a suicide bombing attack where there was mingled human remains and some whole bodies that were found but no ability to identify individuals. So they started to give out sets of remains to family members. And when they ran out of whole sets of remains, they just started giving out body parts. How many family members did you lose? Okay, here’s sort of two people. And that kind of dynamic.

So I think there’s a whole host of ways in which there is kind of compensation for missing pieces or compensation for lack of bodies. And at this point you often see governments or institutions kind of step in and they tell the story that they’ve managed to resuscitate the whole but that doesn’t always map on to the reality from a forensic perspective of what has actually happened.

So what I find interesting is that bodily integrity is our goal. Why is it so difficult for us to admit when it’s simply sort of impractical, infeasible, or impossible in to resuscitate the whole body? Why do we refer to 3 kg of human remains as a whole body when it isn’t? And I think that fundamentally it’s underpinned by this kind of fear of the body part. The body part isn’t the whole body. The whole body we can justify its retention of human characteristics.

So this is where I look at kind of the sociocultural underpinnings of this assumption of bodily integrity. And while I do think it differs by context, especially religious context or cultural context, I still think there is this kind of, at least an assumption that makes claims to being universal about bodily integrity, where already we have to justify that human remains are human rather than objects. They’re objects in some ways, but they’re also not objects in other ways. So human remains occupy this sort of liminal space where they’re sort of a thing but they’re also sort of a person but they’re also not a person but they’re also not a thing. I think that when that set of human remains retains human characteristics, a face, a complete body, it’s much easier to justify its sort of lingering humanness and its worthiness of dignity. But a body part doesn’t resemble a human being very effectively. And so I think that’s one of the reasons why body parts are so jarring and why it’s so difficult to fit body parts into our narratives of kind of what counts as human and of dignity of the dead and all of that sort of thing.

And the other reason is that body parts are often treated as objects in other contexts. We can transplant body parts from one person to another. We can harvest them from dead bodies and those don’t pose, at least significant ethical issues in the same way that treatment of human remains raises. Also we amputate body parts all the time and those sorts of dynamics.

It’s kind of interesting because some of these understandings have changed over time. So during the civil war in the United States they would bury amputated limbs the same way you would bury dead bodies. People who were still living but had limbs amputated. And there were quite a lot of amputations but they would bury them with dignity. We don’t see that kind of understanding to the same extent anymore.

But I think also disability studies scholars have pointed to some of the issues with the privileging of bodily integrity that because we…if you think about it, when children start to learn how to draw human beings, they start with a stick figure. It sort of has a whole head. It has two arms. It has two legs. It has a torso. And over time they might add, features, a nose, two eyes. So what about the person that doesn’t have two arms? What about the person that doesn’t have two legs or the body that looks different? So I think there is this kind of default human from a visual perspective and that default colors our interactions with the dead. That the whole human is the human. So if you don’t have the whole human, what does that mean for our understanding of what counts as human?

And it’s one of the reasons why in the article in Death Studies I asked the question: what counts as a body, and what counts as a body part? Because I think some of these questions don’t have as easy answers as we might think. And it also helps us think through some of the assumptions that we often come to the table with that color our perceptions of other things, like people with disabilities soldiers with amputated limbs or some of these kinds of dynamics. And also how we think about the solution to some of these problems.

So if you have soldiers with amputated limbs, for example, and the solution is prosthetics, this kind of mechanical solution where they become superhuman. Then what does that say about people who don’t have prosthetics either who don’t have access to it or who choose not to utilize them? People who are born with disabilities or become disabled through other reasons? Does that make them neither human nor superhuman? What does that mean? And the sort of subhuman ways in which people with incomplete bodies have often been situated in both a historical and contemporary context. So it has a lot of implications that are wider ranging than just the post-conflict context too.

But once I started thinking through it, I found all these contexts in which bodily integrity was not only privileged but also considered the default. And I was interested in not only what implications that has for kind of our sociocultural understandings of what counts as a body, but also what that means for the privileging of certain techniques of resuscitation of the whole body after conflict, like forensics. If the body part is a problem, then how do you fix that problem? It has to be through forensic identification. But what happens if local communities don’t want forensic identification? Or what happens if the spiritual and cultural beliefs of particular communities are that when someone dies, their spirit infuses all of the rocks and trees in that sort of environment? And so it isn’t about the bones and the sort of tissue, that doesn’t retain the sense of who that person was any longer. So what does that mean? That we continue to hold forensics as sort of the end- all be-all for resuscitating the whole human when that might be at odds with some of these other understandings of what counts as a body or what happens to people’s bodies after they die or how bodies interact with their surroundings, like urban rubble or natural landscapes, and those sorts of dynamics. So what does it mean that forensics has become the default answer to the problem of body parts?

When our assumptions are that bodily integrity is something that we absolutely like must have in order to have some kind of justice or dignity.

Yvonne Kjorlien: So, we’ve talked a lot about sort of the rehumanization through wholeness, through regaining that bodily integrity and how organization, institutions, governments try to help with regaining that body integrity and rehumanization of the dead, not just for their national identity, but also for the family and the individual. So let’s take a moment to look at the flip side. How do groups, governments dehumanize by focusing on the body parts? You mentioned earlier about deaggregating on purpose. So let’s talk a little bit about that because it gives a nice contrast to show just how deeply we are connected with this sense of wholeness as a human being.

Jessica Auchter: Yeah, I mean I think it’s no coincidence that dismemberment of bodies even after their death is considered a crime in many jurisdictions. But also from the perspective of international human rights law, bodily dismemberment is a human rights violation. So I think that’s no coincidence that that exists. I think one of the cases I find most interesting is that after the Bosnian genocide when you still had some of the Bosnian Serb militias that were roaming these areas even after the peace agreement, in a lot of cases they would return to sites where bodies were buried and literally take pieces of human remains and take them elsewhere and bury them because they knew that forensic excavations were coming. And some forensic anthropologists suggest this would happen even while forensic excavations were ongoing. Clea Koff’s book, The Bone Woman, where she talks about her involvement in some of these forensic excavations, she shares the story of this happening in the Bosnia context, where people would come in the middle of the night and they would take parts and ransack the graves. They wouldn’t take all of the human remains. So, it wasn’t an attempt to remove all of the evidence, but rather an attempt to both disrupt the evidence and remove the ability for people to resuscitate whole bodies.

Part of that is to sort of continue to hurt family members of those loved ones that wanted the whole bodies of their family members. Part of it was to disrupt the ability for forensic anthropologists to be able to tell the truth of what had happened. Because if you don’t have the whole body then can you tell the story about how that individual died, it may be more difficult. So there’s a connection too with this kind of truthtelling. If you don’t have the whole body how can you tell the truth of what had happened?

You still can in many cases, but I think just the fact that there was this deliberate attempt to kind of move around these bodies testifies to the extent to which there are certain actors that acknowledge that deliberate dismemberment is a human rights violation, but a deliberate dismemberment is a direct attempt to hurt victim communities and family members of those victims. And you see this a lot in authoritarian regimes also. I mean, I think the Jamal Khashoggi case was a very well-known case of a Saudi journalist who was killed in the inside the Saudi embassy, and then his body was dismembered so that there would be no evidence of the crime and also because it’s more practical to take somebody out in body parts rather than as an entire corpse from an embassy if you’re trying to cover up the crime that was committed.

But I think you starting to see this more as sort of a tactic, these kinds of forms of dismemberment. And one of the narratives that underpins this is actually a narrative of a gendered narrative where the whole body is seen to be masculine in its strength, and the dismemberment of the body is sort of emasculating in significant ways. And you see this a lot in the context of soldier communities or of classic warfare where soldiers who are injured are considered to be emasculated until their parts are resuscitated through prosthetics and that sort of thing.

But you also see this as a deliberate tactic of belligerent forces in an attempt to kind of emasculate the forces of other communities is you see dismemberment of soldiers but you also see dismemberment of civilian communities especially women in some cases. And you often see mutilation of bodies as a tactic because it demonstrates that the community wasn’t able to properly protect their vulnerable. So, it’s not uncommon to see in cases of genocide women’s breasts be sliced off or something like that. So, you have to ask what does that tactic achieve in the context of a genocide? If your goal is to exterminate a victim group, why would you mutilate a body like that? And I mean there’s another conversation about the role of sexual violence in the context of genocide. But I think mutilation which often partners with sexual violence but can also exist separate from it, but mutilation of the body or removal of particular body parts can often be seen as a direct attack on the identity of particular communities. And often an attempt to emasculate what are often seen as being the male authorities in a particular community by their inability to protect the women in their communities. So you often see female victims of this kind of violence in the context of genocide. If we think about sort of mutilation as a performance in many ways in the context of these cases of political violence, it often doesn’t serve any tactical purposes, like it doesn’t make it easier for that group to win to carry out this kind of mutilation. An attack on bodily integrity is a purposeful attack on the identity of a community group. It has both sort of symbolic and physical dimensions. That’s one of the things that I think is so interesting.

And then in the aftermath you have this sort of struggle to re-envision what counts as a body, how do we navigate it? And in some contexts, that’s where you see the advent of technology to come into play, like prosthetics for soldiers who have lost limbs and that sort of thing. You don’t typically see that to the same extent obviously in communities that have been victims of this kind of mutilation that I was talking about in the genocidal context, just because you don’t have the funds that you see in a case like you see in the US Army.

But you still see this kind of struggle to reckon with these narratives of what it means to be whole, what it means to be a real woman or a real man or a real member of that community. So, it’s no coincidence that groups take up some of these tactics toward that end.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right. Right. And it’s not new either. I mean, even in archaeological contexts, we see that too. Desecration of graves, desecration of the dead, for an enemy to come in and do that sort of thing. And it helps demoralize and it’s a different type of I guess battle. It’s a different type of conquering or an attempt to conquer. But yeah, it’s not new.

Jessica Auchter: Yes. Yes. Exactly. But I think the fact that we see it as that communities see it and historically have seen it as sort of a valid or a viable tool for dehumanizing the enemy shows how much our sense of humanizing or human is bound up with this kind of bodily whole, the bodily integrity sort of idea.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right. Absolutely.

Jessica Auchter: This narrative works like these actions work precisely because of the assumptions we hold about the whole human body. Which exists in different ways across a variety of religious traditions, cultural traditions, so I don’t want to say it exists everywhere and is universal, but it seems to be fairly universalized at least across many different contexts despite some of these kind of cultural variations.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Absolutely. All right. You talked a little bit about how forensic investigations particularly, in mass conflicts, or terrorism, like 9/11, have had to reassess what wholeness is and body integrity and how we kind of come to terms with that. What other, I guess, shifts or perspective changes have you seen or do you predict might come with body integrity, especially in Canada now with the graves and residential schools and the expectation that they want to find bodies in the graves, but of course they don’t want to dig up the graves to find the bodies because that would be disturbing them. So, is there a whole body under there? I don’t know. And that expectation that we want the whole body, but we can’t have it. So, how do… future perspectives on how we kind of deal with that?

Jessica Auchter: Yeah, I think that one thing over the last years that I’ve seen that I think we will probably see more of is what I think of as technological solutions to this sort of problem. So I mentioned previously the technologies of prosthetics and that sort of thing and this idea of the of superhuman, the sort of transformer kind of thing. I think that forensics is often already posited in many ways as a technological solution to the problem of the post atrocity context.

And some of the recent emergence of this kind of narrative of the human right to know. That there has been this kind of the idea that not knowing is itself a human rights violation in many ways or a violation of the human right to know which has been kind of discussed in human rights legal circles, this kind of human right to know and codified in various ways as I understand it. That isn’t my area of expertise but as I understand it there has been this emergence of this human right to know. I think this kind of idea reinforces is a kind of scientific expertise that already exists in the context of forensics, but I think we will become even more technological and even more dominant in the years to come. So, it’s like if you can’t excavate mass graves for cultural reasons at residential schools, you can acquire sophisticated earth scanning tools that will sort of enable you to be able to tell what’s under the ground.

So I think we’re trending in a direction more and more towards technical dimensions of scientific authority in ways that reinforce some of the narratives that already existed about scientific authority. Like the dominance of forensics that I talked about that sometimes you see even forensic excavations even when local communities don’t want them.

The reason for that is this dominance of scientific authority. You don’t know what’s good for you, but we do and we’ll get you the truth.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right?

Jessica Auchter: I think that forensic excavations have given family members knowledge of what happened, have allowed for legal prosecution. So it’s not that I’m necessarily critical of the tools of forensics. I think they’re incredibly useful in a post conflict context. And in many cases, victim communities do want them and there isn’t, enough money to support these kinds of tools. I don’t mean to suggest that, they’re not wanted more broadly by victim communities, but I think in some instances, they’re not wanted, but yet they emerge in some context because of this set of politics of scientific authority. So I suggest I would suggest that kind of in years to come we’re going to see that scientific authority continue but it will manifest in more technological ways. I think I’ll say it has interesting implications for how we think about bodily integrity and whether or not bodily integrity can itself be technological.

There are some scholars of media that have suggested that the idea of what counts as human is already being re-envisioned by not only artificial intelligence tools and all of that but also by our existence as data doubles in a variety of systems. That for governments you are yourself as a material person but you’re also your data double as it exists in a whole host of bureaucratic systems. So what it means to be human in the eyes of the state or the governments, or something like that, may have already sort of shifted and changed from the materiality of human beings a bit.

I’m not an expert in some of those technologies, but I think that one of the trends that I’m seeing and especially in some of my other research on the visualization of war and how we visually represent human rights violations is that we’re increasingly seeing reliance on technological tools and technological forms of scientific authority. So I think that will have an interesting impact in bodily integrity and some of these debates.

But the other thing that I think we might be witnessing is a move away from the body as the key representative of human rights violations, for example. So I’m currently working on a project that thinks through how the media represented the Bucha massacre in Ukraine because you have media reports on a massacre. It was widely characterized as such. But in very very few of the images that emerged, you see dead bodies at all. You see a lot more of destruction of property, environmental destruction, and that sort of thing. And even though there have been some incredibly iconic images coming out of Gaza also of dead bodies, the majority of images emerging out of that case also are of urban rubble, destruction and that sort of thing. So if you look on the whole at some of these: what does a massacre look like? What does an attack look like? These sorts of things, it looks like destruction of property, not necessarily destruction of human beings, even though we know that that is occurring.

So I think there’s something interesting there also about the extent to which we are directly engaging with the destruction of human beings and whether or not the human is still the central ,I’ll say, thing that is being destroyed in some of these contexts from the perspective of how we interact with images coming out or reports coming out of these types of incidents. So I do wonder also, like I said, I raised the question like what counts as a human body. I wonder whether or not and to what extent human bodies will still be the most relevant indicator of conflicts going forward. And maybe that is sort of more of a turn towards some of these technological representations. Or maybe it’s also something to do with the fact that people are sort of war-weary. and there’s just sort of too many human rights violations in the world, and so dead bodies no longer have the salience as images that they used to. Although I’m not convinced they used to have that same degree of salience that we often assume. I think that that’s also an interesting question to think about with regards to the role that dead bodies play in our sensitization for human rights violations or for conflict in the sort of contemporary era.

Yvonne Kjorlien: It’s an interesting point and something sticks in my mind that the death toll in conflicts has gone down too. During World War II there are how many millions of people died in a span of time and if we look at the same sort of span of time and in other conflicts since the death toll has decreased. So it’s almost like we’ve become more efficient in our conflicts. I don’t know so maybe we just don’t have the numbers we used to?

Jessica Auchter: Yeah, it’s going it’s becoming more technological that sort of war is a video game so to speak.

I mean I say that, but I think the other interesting trend that we’re seeing in addition with lower death toll is the death toll burden is shifting more towards civilians than it did World War II. The preponderance of people who died in war were soldiers, in the contemporary context, the preponderance of people who die in war are civilians.

I think it also raises questions about which lives and death matters. This kind of dynamics of necropolitics, the governance of life and death, the politics of life and death, is also a politics of which lives and deaths matter.

I think there’s an interesting dynamic here. I raised the question earlier about or the dynamic earlier that we think of dead bodies as human sort of, they’re sort of human, they’re not things but they sort of are but they’re sort of not that they occupy this sort of in between space. I think there is important context in which dead bodies sort of are valued in particular ways equivalent to or more than live humans. So on several occasions Israel has traded live terrorists, so to speak, or those that they refer to as such, for the dead bodies of Israeli soldiers that were held. So it’s like we will take the dead body of our comrade back and here’s several live individuals that we’re trading for them. So this kind of valuation like it isn’t to pass judgment on whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing or whatever, but just to say that in different contexts different dead bodies have different degrees of value.

The amount of money that’s spent on identifying every piece of human remains after 911 when there was almost no forensic identification after the Rwanda genocide. These sorts of questions. And like you said even in the insurance industry the valuation of particular limbs. There’s also been some research on the amount of money that the US government has paid out for coalition air strikes that hit civilians. If you kill a civilian, then you pay the family members for the loss of that person but how much are they valued at? Apparently it depends, based on the context. Those numbers are not set and they change over time.

So I think there’s also this kind of larger necropolitics underpinning a lot of it. That we strive towards bodily integrity. It is this default but at the end of the day some bodies are still considered to be more worthy of bodily integrity than others. Some bodies are still considered to be accorded a higher value than others. And the same is true for body parts. Some body parts are valued higher than others. And the effort put into the reaggregation of bodies is worth it in some cases and not worth it in other cases. And who has the power to sort of make some of these decisions also.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Fascinating. I feel like we could talk for days on this, but we’re out of time. So, thank you very much, Jessica, for coming on and talking about this very, I’m just gonna say, interesting. Hopefully we’ve started a number of conversations instead of stopped them and that people are intrigued and they’ll go look at your articles and your books and book chapters and read some more and learn about this.

Jessica Auchter: Thank you so much for giving me the opportunity to talk about a topic that I don’t get a chance to talk about that often because, as I said, for most people it is a conversation ender. But I really appreciate it. It’s been so interesting.

Transcribed by Google

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Howard Williams is a Professor of Archaeology at the University of Chester, England, specializing in mortuary archaeology, and cremation in the early Middle Ages. His academic journey began at the University of Sheffield, followed by an MA in burial archaeology at Reading University, and a PhD focusing on early Anglo-Saxon cremation practices in southeast Britain.

In this episode we talk about:

The recent book “Cremation in the Early Middle Ages,” which he co-edited. It provides a comprehensive look at cremation practices across Northwest Europe, using a unique structured interview approach with contributors.
How contrary to traditional assumptions, new archaeological evidence shows that cremation practices in early medieval Europe were more diverse and widespread than previously thought, extending beyond pre-Christian or non-Christian contexts.
How archaeological evidence challenges simple historical narratives about Christian conversion and burial practices, showing that local and regional variations in death rituals persisted despite church influence.
That there’s no single “Viking funeral” type, contrary to popular media representations, and to be aware of oversimplified cultural attributions in archaeological interpretations.
How new technologies and dating methods are revealing previously unidentified early medieval cremations, challenging assumptions about prehistoric cremation deposits.
The challenges of addressing archaeological misinformation in social media and popular culture, while acknowledging the importance of public engagement.
That mortuary archaeology is crucial for understanding the full scope of human interaction with mortality, from prehistory to present day, and can inform future deathways.
The relationship between mortuary archaeology and forensic science, suggesting that forensics can be viewed as a specialized sub-field of mortuary archaeology, with both disciplines informing each other’s methods and perspectives.

Find more about Professor Howard Williams and cremation in the Early Middle Ages through:

his blog, Archaeodeath: https://howardwilliamsblog.wordpress.com/
his YouTube channel, Archaeodeath: https://www.youtube.com/@archaeodeath
his TikTok https://www.tiktok.com/@archaeodeath

Read and purchase the book, Cremation in the Early Middle Ages, via Sidestone Press: https://www.sidestone.com/books/cremation-in-the-early-middle-ages

You can also read the 2020 open-access edited collection Digging into the Dark Ages: https://www.archaeopress.com/Archaeopress/Products/9781789695274m.ca/

Notes from the start

The taphonomic impact of scavenger guilds in peri-urban and rural regions of central and southern Alberta. Part I – Identification of forensically relevant vertebrate scavengers (Journal of Forensic Sciences 2023)

Get Memoirs of a Reluctant Archaeologist, the first Elise Marquette novel, here.

Do you want to be the first to hear a Scattered episode? Become a Patreon member and get the next episode before everyone else: https://www.patreon.com/c/YvonneKjorlien

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Your contributions will go toward my research, webhosting, and my time. Want to find out more about my research?

Check out the Scavenging Study: https://yvonnekjorlien.com/scavenging-study/.

Transcript

Yvonne Kjorlien: Thank you for coming on my podcast. This is a lovely, I guess, diversion from regular programming because I’ve been trying to get somebody on here to talk about mortuary archaeology and you are the man. Introduce yourself. Who are you? What’s your current role? And then we’ll get into your origin story and get into the nitty-gritty.

Howard Williams: Thank you so much, Yvonne. It’s lovely to be here. And yeah, my name is Howard Williams and I’m professor of archaeology at the University of Chester in England in the UK, but very much on the next to the Welsh border. I happen to live in Wales, just over… I see England every day. I cross the border. But the university is in England. and I live in Wales but I’m in that borderland. I teach at the university a range of topics and on archaeology programs to undergraduates, MRes masters by research and I supervise PhD students. I research a range of fields including mortuary archaeology, the early middle ages, and the history and theory of archaeology, and public archaeology. Death comes into all of those in one way or other. That’s who I am and that’s what I do.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, I find UK and Europe archaeology fascinating because we don’t really have those Ages here in North America.

Howard Williams: No.

Yvonne Kjorlien: We have pre-contact, contact, and post-contact. That’s pretty much, the overlying timeline. It fascinates me about the ages. So I’m always having to consult some sort of reference material because that wasn’t the basis of my training. The basis of my training was all North American. So anytime somebody says Middle Ages or whatever, I’m like, Google it. What is that time frame?

Howard Williams: Yeah. Yeah. these frames of reference are a curse as much as a blessing. And they bracket people in terms of what they study, who they talk to, how they define themselves. So, yeah, one level I’m a medievalist in terms of I do work with historical sources as well as archeological resources, but it’s a very early historical period, so I have dialogue and a lot of constructive dialogue with prehistorians and across disciplines with anthropologists and others as well.

So, it’s a really fun period and region to look at Northwest Europe in the early Middle Ages, sort of in popular terms, early medieval Wales, Anglo-Saxons, Vikings, that kind of stuff. But it’s the period of time which has the most problematic and sketchy terms that get used and abused all the time. People are really interested in the early Middle Ages and not always for good and healthy reasons. But it is a time that is really fascinating because you have some historical sources, a lot of new archaeological finds. And so I’ve been interested in the history of that field and also the burials of that period in particular.

Yvonne Kjorlien: So, how did you get into it? Were you one of those people that kind of came out of the womb wanting to be an archaeologist or were you formed by other circumstances?

Howard Williams: I don’t know. I’ve often actually thought about what my origin story is and I’ve written it and told it in different ways when people ask it. So I’m probably sound, like I’m making it up because I keep changing my narrative because I don’t think there was a single moment I can’t recall. I was very much interested in deep time in natural history, in paleontology, in archaeology when I was very young and I suppose when I went to university I genuinely hadn’t a vision of a career in archaeology. I just wanted to do a three-year subject. First generation going to university. I had an older brother who did physics with astrophysics and I thought what a subject would I like to do and I could actually maintain an enthusiasm with. And I say this to potential students as well because I think there’s a lot of perhaps hyperbole amongst people who do make it in the field that they choose and that somehow ‘I was destined to it’ and ‘I remember once my father said…’ or ‘my mother picked up a fossil and immediately I knew it’ was or that kind of thing but I don’t think… I just kept my options open. I went on some few voluntary digs at the age of 16 18 went to university and did it at the University of Sheffield. I got a BSE archeological science in what was then a big thriving dynamic department of archaeology that sadly just closed. But in the 90s it was a real full of some of the big names in European and British archaeology. and then I went on and I just kept going with it really. So I did an MA in burial archaeology at the University of Reading with then professor Bob Chapman and Dr. Heinrich Härke, Professor Heinrich Härke and Professor Richard Bradley, some quite well-known figures in the world of prehistoric and early historic archaeology in Britain and Europe. Then I stayed at Reading to do a PhD, supervised by Heinrich, looking at specifically early Anglo-Saxon period that’s fifth-sixth century CE cremation practices in southern, southeast Britain.

So it was a really interesting three and a half years. Then I applied for a few lecturesships and was told don’t apply for lecturesships, you’re too inexperienced and you won’t get it and the fools gave me a job and at Trinity College Camarthen as a lecture in archaeology and that was in 1999 and then I was there for three years. I was made permanent but it was a very small place and I jumped from a permanent contract to a temporary contract to go to Cardiff University on a replacement job for two years replacing Professor John Hines, who was on research leave, who’s a quite eminent early medieval Anglo-Saxon archaeologist. I stayed for one year and then jumped to a permanent job at University of Exeter, was there for four and a half years. Then jumped again to the University of Chester, where I still am and they made me senior lecturer when I was appointed in 2008. Then I was appointed to a personal chair as a professor of archaeology in 2010 and that’s what I’ve been doing ever since.

So I’ve sort of went down the academic route quite quickly. I’ve done a range of field work, but also a lot of my work is desk based. I haven’t done active field work for about a decade for a variety of personal and circumstantial reasons, but I’m still actively doing research as well as teaching on those fields I was talking about.

Yvonne Kjorlien: What attracted you to mortuary archaeology? To the burials, the cremation?

Howard Williams: Yeah, good question. I mean it was my undergraduate degree at Sheffield where I was taught by, among others at UCL, Professor Mike Parker Pearson who did funerary archaeology module and I was also taught by Dr. Andrew Chamberlain, who is a human osteologist or biological anthropologist I think is the term now, and I get confused with the terms, but, you know, bones. Mike introduced me to the anthropology and the archaeology of death, more broadly. And then with Andrew and Beth Riga, as well, we did the paleopathology modules and the human osteology modules.

And so I thought this is really good stuff because you can get really a connection to, not only the lives and experiences of past people through their bones, but you can get in touch with and get access to and think about the complex ways in which people dealt with their own mortality. And it’s about cognition. It’s about emotion. It’s about identity and social memory and themes that really connect us today to who we are. I think we can explore in the human past through archeological evidence. It’s not simply about just how people lived. It’s about how they died, how they engaged with the deaths of others. And so I thought that was a really fascinating field that connected up other disciplines, the history of death, anthropology and sociology of death.

And on my master’s degree, I was in a really interesting position because I was working on a burial archaeology MA with Heinrich and Bob. But we also had access to sociology professor Tony Walter who’s a big name in the sociology of 21st century deathways in Britain, and Ralph Hullbrook who’s a historian of early modern death. There are people in other departments all interested in death and society, how we can explore the relationship of mortality to social conditions and how those change over time. So it was kind of a theme that just grabbed me undergraduate level and I just pursued it through and then when I did my PhD it was always going to be death.

And there’s been a lot of work done on the early Anglo-Saxon unburnt dead, the inhumation burials, where in the fifth, sixth, and seventh going on into the seventh century, we have a period where there’s a lot of furnishings, a lot of rich arrangements of treatments of the dead in unburnt. But alongside that, there’s a lot of people who are being cremated and their ashes collected or cremains, as the funerary industry term is, and collected into ceramic urns often and put into the ground as well. And most of the attention had gone on the unburnt dead because they are seemingly a much more easier resource for in terms of human remains are better preserved, the artifacts are better preserved, and so most of the studies had focused on them but I knew there were very far fewer studies have been done on the cremated material. So I thought I didn’t do primary osteological analysis myself but I used the work of others and synthesized and analyzed the burials looking at variability and change over time in. That was just such a fascinating piece of work. Like most PhDs, you hate it by the end, but I think it was a really great choice to explore. So yeah, it was always going to be death for me.

Yvonne Kjorlien: You’re preaching to the choir. I completely understand. But when I tell people I have a podcast about dead people, they kind of look at me sideways. So, any time… the people who are attracted to death and the dying, we’re a different sort. And so, I always like to hear people’s stories. Yeah.

Howard Williams: I mean, I didn’t go through a goth phase or anything like that. It wasn’t like an extension of personal identity, which I know some people that is a thing. And I’m not mocking it, in the same way that I know people go through all kind of, phases in their life of interest in particular things that stay with them and, help explain their trajectory, but, they’re no longer that. But I was never particularly religious. I’m not particularly spiritual. It’s nothing like that. And it’s not anything to do with a particular aesthetic or it was more about the rich promise of the data to allow us to get at past lives and people’s interactions with their mortality. That was the thing that captured my fascination. And it’s like what it could tell us about the past rather than something about me if that makes sense.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right. Yeah, I understand. and you’ve just been, I believe, a co-editor on a recent book,…

Howard Williams: Yes. Yes.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Cremation in the Early Middle Ages.

Howard Williams: Wish I can waft at you just there you are. I know that’s a podcast but I still feel like brandish a book is always a good feeling.

Yvonne Kjorlien: The tangible. You can smell it and touch it.

Howard Williams: Yes. Yeah. Exactly.

So yes, I’ve published quite a lot of reviewed journal articles and book chapters, but I’ve also tried to serve the field and promote my collaborators work, and work with them on a range of edited collections and journal special issues. But my latest edited collection is a really interesting book because we collected it in a different way. I worked with a doctoral researcher, now postdoctoral researcher, from the Netherlands, Femke Lippok, and Femke organized a research seminar at Leiden where she was doing her MA and then PhD on cremation in the early middle ages in 2018, just before a year and a bit before the pandemic and all that. I said to her I’ve done a lot of publications on cremation in early Saxon England but there really isn’t a book, a resource, for student scholars cognit fields that looks at the whole of Northwest Europe and draws together the latest research. Because of course cremated material it’s more difficult to do but we’re increasingly getting stable isotope analysis we’re getting the paleopathological, the osteological data, the contextual excavation data, the quality of excavations of cremation burials is improved massively, our data sets are improving, radiocarbon dating, meaning we can date material that hadn’t previously seen. We thought how do we do this? Do we do another conference and then an edited collection or should we do something different? Because we started during the pandemic we said why don’t we do it by structured interview? Because I’ve been doing edited collections with student contributions and then expert contributions and found it very difficult to get the experts to write.

So in previous projects, I’d already been doing structured interviews to get and actually worked to get perspectives you wouldn’t otherwise garner, so almost like a podcast but then what I would do is then I would transcribe, or me and Femke transcribed, asked questions, sent the manuscript to the author, the author added in citations, images, tables. We also did key information boxes, fact boxes for key sites and key issues. And basically what we’ve produced is a kind of more like a textbook, but it’s written in an informal sort of Q&A style.

I think in doing that we’ve produced something that’s not just simply another edited collection about a topic in archaeology. It’s actually quite I think easy to read but actually there’s more depth and enriched …we got things out of people we wouldn’t have perhaps got if we just let them write. I think I’m really proud of it. I don’t know how it will be received, but yeah, we’ve got 19 chapters covering all from Finland’s Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Poland, Germany, France, Netherlands, Belgium, and Britain and Ireland. So, I think I probably missed a few, but we kept to Northwest Europe, but we could have extended it further if time had allowed.

But yeah, and it’s kind of silver open access, so you can read it online on the publishers website for a year and then they’re going to be downloadable PDF after a year or purchasable from Sidstone Press. But yes, it’s almost fully open access. We got some money from the EU funded ERC project that Femke was working on to help pay for the open access. So, we’re very proud of this. Yes, it came out like we had a book launch just before Christmas and I’ve put that on YouTube. We had a good chat and with all the authors and some extra contributors and yeah, it’s a first of its kind.

So, this was the last time in Europe that cremation was popular before the 19th century reintroduction of the idea of cremation and the early middle ages where cremation goes out for a variety of reasons including Christianization and socio economic changes in different parts of Europe in this period and then cremation was just a very minor weird thing that some people did through the later middle ages into the early modern period. I think this sits an important story for the story of Europe and attitude to death as well as the detailed archeological evidence that we’re able to pull out.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah. I mean, that’s initially what hit me is that it’s a very broad topic and especially, if you’re just talking about Europe. So maybe give us some background about why cremation in the early Middle Ages, especially, it’s a thing that you need an edited collection about it.

Howard Williams: So obviously the story of death in the early middle ages has always been dominated by historical sources, but increasingly, since the 19th century, archeological evidence has helped to fill in the picture. These burials tell us about people’s life and their deathways and particularly since the second world war, 50s and 60s, across Europe, there’s been renewed dialogues over archeological discoveries that are telling the stories of the societies after Rome in the western Roman Empire collapses or fragments in the fifth century traditionally replaced by barbarian successor state. Some of them are Christian, some of them become Christian at various points. Right up into the Viking age, a time of invasion, diaspora, where there’s never actually a period in this period where there isn’t some invasion and diaspora.

But my point is, right the way through up to the 11th-12th century where we see the kind of more consolidation of European medieval states, kingdoms we see various different death rituals some of which are more perhaps familiar and fit into an orthodoxy of Christian practice and others that are either beyond or on the edges of that Christian world. And cremation has often been seen as pre-Christian or non-Christian. But it’s actually much more complicated than that. And the new archeological evidence and the new radiocarbon dating we’ve got is showing us that surprise, surprise really people aren’t doing what the church tells them. People aren’t doing what their kings are telling them. People are doing a lot of crazy stuff. We’re finding that local and regional patterns of the way people are disposing of the dead across Europe doesn’t really fit into any of these simple historical models. And at one level we kind of guessed that 50 years ago, but it’s really refining it now.

So to give you some examples — I’m dumbing it down massively, so if anyone who is an expert in these areas, hears this, please be aware — but the standard model for say, Ireland, the island of Ireland is that Christianity arrives in the sort of late fourth- fifth century, everyone converts to Christianity, Christian golden age. everyone’s, just dancing around colored green, happily being Christian culture and then the Vikings ruin it all and the Normans make it worse and then the English make it worse again. And it’s that story. But actually what the archeological evidence he’s finding is that actually early medieval Ireland, we’ve got evidence of not only burial away from churches is continuing right up to so from the fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth century,10th century and 11th centuries but cremation, something that would traditionally be seen as not Christian, is continued to be practiced right up into the 9th-10th centuries and people can argue to their blue in the face about how godly and Christian the early Irish were. Maybe they were but they were certainly not adverse to doing things that were not sanctioned by the church. I don’t think any churchman would had any choice or control over death rituals. At best they may be interested in how people getting people baptized but how people lived, married, and died is something the church couldn’t control until much later, centuries.

And so it’s kind of many people in who are specialists in the early middle ages would go we knew this already But it’s filling in the gaps actually enriching our story with the archeological evidence to show yes and here’s the evidence. And if you talk to any scholars of later medieval Europe where the church is supposedly having all power and control, we know that’s not happening either. And there’s lots of local variation there. But my point is in these centuries that in Ireland that is traditionally Christian, people are still doing a lot of variable things with their dead.

And likewise we can see the evidence coming out from Europe is showing us in the low countries, in Netherlands and Belgium, cremation inhumation being used as options within societies for generations and generations. So as with perhaps our societies too, whether we’re talking about Canada, the US, Britain, Holland, France, people have options and people are exploring those options. It’s not always clear why people are choosing one or the other. So there’s not one early medieval death way. There are myriad of different ways in which people are disposing of the dead. And I suppose that’s the story we’re pulling out with the book is local and regional variability. N ot a simple narrative.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Because mortuary archaeology, as you said, can shed light on not just lifeways but also death ways and how the living treat the dead, it’s interesting when we have alternative options or perhaps alternatives or changes in the way things are done. And so I find it fascinating that, in your example for Ireland, if the church says do it one way, but then you’ve got some people that are doing it another way, to me that would speak of, there must be a reason why they’re not doing it the standardized or the, sort of ordained way by the church. What would that say to you?

Howard Williams: Absolutely. I think it says to me is that actually burial practice remains kinship focused. So I think it takes a long time, and perhaps never, that large parts of Europe have the church dominating deathways. I mean, in urban context in the later middle ages, sure, but I’m just saying that – and, yes, people will be burying in churchyards from the 10th-11th century in England, for example, but it takes many centuries for that to formalize and those structures to be in place and even then I think there are only certain moments of the funeral where actual priests and other agents of the church would want to or dare to intervene on what goes on.

And so I think funerals are multi-authored, right? They’re places where the dead person might have a say, relatives have a say, neighbors have a contribution and perhaps have a say. And maybe religious specialists formalized and recognized and informal like the old woman of the village who washes all the bodies, will have a role in these kind funerary choices. And I think that there are moments in early medieval Europe where practices might be a literal two fingers to the authorities, but I think in most cases it’s just more we’re doing this stuff yet, and if someone says, I don’t think you should be doing that. There are a few sources from early saying cremation was seen as pagan, but not so much, they weren’t so much interested in the cremation being pagan as human sacrifice, horse sacrifice, and infanticide being things that the church was more latched on to as things they didn’t want happening and eating horses as well. They didn’t like that. They saw that as pagan, but only in certain parts of Europe. So, it an interesting, it’s not so much burning the dead that was ever seen. We don’t have actually a lot of evidence to show that anybody in the church was sitting around going, “do you know what’s really not on? Burning the dead. Yeah, I’ve always thought that.” There’s nothing in scripture that says this. It’s more… so I think a lot of this is down to — if I want to be crude about it –the kin still have the agency have the authority for much of the period I’m studying, the 5th to 11th centuries..

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, so it’s not so much the church saying you should do this. It’s more of the church not saying —

Howard Williams: Or not caring.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, or not caring. And so the family is more open to do whatever they want or need to do.

Howard Williams: Yeah. I mean, we don’t have many cremations in churchyard context. So, I think there is a sense that cremation goes when the church starts to have control over the places of the dead. But I don’t think it’s because cremation is seen as anti-Christian. It’s more about the move towards controlling the process and the places. I’m not saying it’s irrelevant, but I think our evidence is showing it’s a much more rocky and complex path towards that Christian deathways being controlled by how people are being disposed of. So yeah, by the time people are getting churchyard burial, no one’s being burned or very few people are being burned. But it’s about how they get there is a much more complicated route.

So, if you were going to do a historical drama and feature this, you probably wouldn’t have a moment where someone comes to Denmark in the 10th century and goes, “I say, I’m a bit Christian. I think you shouldn’t do this type of things, you heathen types.” And they go, ” Okay.” I don’t think that would have been a conversation that was on the tips of people’s brains in the period. These are all about practices that may have never been part of a discursive conversation. And that’s something that we have to remember when we’re dealing with death rituals is that even today it’s very difficult to talk about death. And then when people do talk about it, they may cook up explanations and justifications on the spot for things they never really thought why they were doing what they were doing. So I don’t see why we should see people in the past as any more necessarily self-reflective on these things. Again our evidence is messy because I think people are messy in terms of the way they think and what they do.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Absolutely. Absolutely. And then, it’s all if there’s actually evidence and if there isn’t, then what kind of story are we going to make up to fill in the gap?

Howard Williams: Yes. Yes. A lot of this is back-projected narratives of Christian conversion, are like Just So stories of people seeing the light or most of that would have been a much more complex process anyway. And, yeah, so absolutely.

That’s the kind of reason why I think that topic is important and why this book I think is going to sort of be a new level for future research to build on, both whether you’re doing the field excavations because I think it’s making a lot of field archaeologists aware that cremation is an early medieval thing in their region and place. Because I think a lot of the time when they’re finding cremations they’re assuming they’re bronze age or earlier iron age and they’re not even getting them radiocarbon dated.

There’s a internal, like making people aware you should be looking for this stuff in areas and periods where they wouldn’t otherwise look. And so I happen to know — and I can’t talk about it because it’s literally not published yet — that there’s one region we don’t cover in this book where I happen to know, as we were finishing the book, the first evidence of cremation practices from the early middle ages was found. And in the book I have to frame it in the introduction as we haven’t found any, but is that because people haven’t looked? And knowing I’m kind of right. I knew that now they’ve radiocarbon dated some of these undated cremation deposits rather than being prehistoric there turning out to be early medieval.

And so I think there’s going to be a lot more of that in the next couple of decades as people realize that they should be looking for this. Dating the very perhaps innocuous small deposit of cremated human remains with a bit of animal bone and you bit of flint and it could be frankly anything from the mesolithic right the way through to the early middle ages. Some of them are going to increasingly turn up being early medieval in date.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Well, that’s delve into that because I did have a question about, are all cremations in an archaeological context: are the cremains always in an urn? Are they always going to be found within an urn or…

Howard Williams: No, no, no. Absolutely not.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Is it just a hearth? And they could be mixed up with burnt animal bones.

Howard Williams: Absolutely, absolutely. And this is one of the key things is that traditions, like in my field of analysis when I was doing my doctoral research on early Saxon period cremations where most of the cremation is… at least a selection of the body is being collected up with the animals that were sacrificed on the grave goods. They were putting whole cows and horses and dogs on pyres with people as well as joints of meat, such as sheep or goat and pig. The dead were clothed, they had pots and they had food and they had all this stuff. They were then collecting bits out of that and putting it in an urn at some later date and burying it. And that gives you a discrete context. We often find that in many different periods and places across later prehistoric and early historic Europe and we find that around the world.

But no, you don’t have to do that. You don’t have to use ceramic. We have examples of other materials used as vessels from bark to leather to wood to bronze vessels. But also, you don’t need to ever there’s nothing telling you there’s universal rule that you have to collect up all the cremains and put them in one place, let alone put them in under the ground at all.

So one of the things I’ve published on is the possibility — and we can come back to this as perhaps an interesting example of the absent dead — but in my period are we missing other burial rights that were involved at disposal above ground? One of the examples from the book is and one of the areas when I did my studies 22-23 years ago all my doctoral research, there was no attested early medieval cremations from Scotland, what is now Scotland, particularly the pictish territories of northern and eastern Scotland.

During my Master’s, just before I started my PhD, I did field work at a site called the Clava Cairns, which are near the famous Culloden Battlefield of much later date and they’re now known to be early Bronze Age. They’re ring cairns and they’re very dramatic monuments and they’re now on the Outlander tourist trail because everyone wants to go to where that inspired the book that inspired the TV series. So the Clava Cairns are now quite a famous international, they were already actually quite famous in the 90s but they’re now extra extra famous. But we were excavating there and they had a secondary scatter of cremated material over the edge of one of the ring cairns and I jokingly said, “I bet it’s early medieval,” just because I was joking because I was one of the few early medieval archaeologists on the project. They were all prehistorians. I got, “Well, maybe.” I’m not trying to say I knew, but I just said it as a tease. Actually, when they got the radiocarbon dates back, this is Pictish, early medieval, it would have been. Now we’ve got more and more evidence that it’s not just these ethnic labels are all dodgy. It’s not just the Anglos and the Saxons, but also the Picts were also cremating the dead. And so this idea in the island of Britain, the idea there’s something ethnically or culturally Germanic about cremating the dead is nonsense. We’ve got clearly…

I’ll give you another example. I did a blog post only a few years ago, mocking the Bernard Cornwall adaptation of one of his book series, The Last Kingdom, where they had a fictional scene where a Cornish princess dies and Uhtred son of Uhtred and Alfred the Great, King Alfred, attend the cremation of a Cornish princess, because she’s pagan and Cornish in the late 9th century. And in my blog post only a few years ago I mocked that. I said that’s ridiculous. It maybe. But yeah, honestly, we know nothing about this. The idea that they would still be pagan in the 9th century and in Cornwall and burning the dead on in dramatic open air fires, I said, was nonsense. And I said, I can’t tell you too much, but let’s just say I’m going to have to eat my hat or eat my own words because it looks like we’ve got evidence now that in Western Britain as well as northern Britain, cremation was a thing. I’m not saying they were doing it as late as the 9th century. But, yeah, so Bernard Cornwall’s ahead of the curve as a fictional writer

This is the point is that we can mock sort of fictional portrayals of things but just sometimes by accident our evidence comes up that makes us go, “yeah, it wasn’t so ridiculous when they did that in that 1978 film or that book from 1985, or whatever it was because now we’ve got evidence of this.” This is one of those things where at the end of the day, we can be as confident as we want as academics, but the evidence is always going to challenge us and shift the picture as we find more out.

Yvonne Kjorlien: So it sounds like, if previously we had thought that cremation was either restricted to a time or a group or a region or even in how cremains were disposed of or buried. All of that is now off the table.

Howard Williams: Yeah. Yeah.

Yvonne Kjorlien: There are no restrictions for time, group, area, even, scattering the ashes above ground. It’s all fair game now.

Howard Williams: It’s true. And I mean, obviously there’s trends. I mean, cremation is very rare in some places. So one of the case studies in the book is cremation in northern France in the Merovingian and Carolingian periods. So an area that is Christianized early, a powerful kingdom, very complex varied regionality but the Merovingian dynasties and then the Carolingian dynasties dominate western Europe. We have very few evidence of cremation because everyone’s nominally Christian and church burial starts taking place earlier. But one of the studies in this book reports on a single cremation burial found in a Carolingian period settlement in the fill of a storage pit and with some artifacts that are very much comparable to those from southern Scandinavia and dating to the 9th, early 10th centuries. I think, I can’t remember that’s exactly the date, but in other words from the Viking period. And so it’s very tempting to go, “Yeah, it’s a Scandinavian raider.” And it may well be because for some, while I don’t like to just jump to those kinds of conclusions, the Frankish Empire was hit hard by Scandinavian raids from the late 8th and 9th century, and we have much less archeological evidence of that than we have in England. We have much more evidence in the archeological record of those Scandinavian armies moving around, Viking armies. There’s been long waiting for more evidence from northern France of Scandinavian presence: raiding, trading and settling. Of course Normandy becomes a sort of, at least in part, a Scandinavian colony that becomes a king, a duchy, and then obviously a kingdom in its own right. So you have that origin story of Normandy. We have to have more archaeological evidence going to come out. Cremation seems to be part of that picture.

So, yeah, all that’s a fun thing about archaeology, isn’t it? We always get new data and sometimes it tells us something about the history and the historical processes. Sometimes it challenges that those historical parables.

Yvonne Kjorlien: That’s the fun of it. Just when you think you’ve got the story figured out, you get a new puzzle piece. It’s like, where does this go? How does this fit in? You have to redo the entire puzzle.

Howard Williams: That’s half the fun.

Yvonne Kjorlien: It is. So, because you brought it up, that the one in the cremation burial in France, that this has to be a Viking. What does a typical Viking burial look like?

Howard Williams: This is the thing. So, lots of Vikings are very popular on social media and media and popular culture. Everyone’s heard of the Vikings. They may not have heard of the Avars or the Franks or the Gepids or any other groups from the early Middle Ages. And part of the problem is that the Vikings are so tied to modern nationhoods and various people’s fantasies of who they are, and now increasingly aDNA is informing ancestral commercialized DNA testing results. So everyone wants to a bit get in on the Viking action, from TV shows and video games to personal ancestry, identities. It links into racialized identities and we have a whole white supremacist and white nationalist angles to the Vikings in North America, in Scandinavia, in Britain too.

So Vikings are a bit contentious, and so when I try and talk about Viking burial rights, I try to make the point that there’s no single way of disposing of the dead that is exclusively Viking. In fact, no one in the early Middle Ages — there’s a good reason for that — no one in the early Middle Ages went around calling themselves Viking. It’s not an ethnic term in that period. If anything, most likely origin for the term is simply someone describing someone on the seaborn venturing, raiding, trading, an expedition over water is probably the origin of the term. And since the 19th century, in particular, it’s become a label we’ve increasingly attributed to a period of northern European history. So, it’s a bit of a myth in itself. There was a thing called a Viking society or Viking culture at all and some people call it old Norse culture but that’s equally a problematic labeling as well.

So I suppose the point is for if you wanted to use it just as a period and regional term, Viking period mortuary practices in Scandinavia, in areas where Scandinavians settle are incredibly varied. They’re disposing of the dead, burning them, burying them on, obviously our evidence comes from on land. The myth of a Viking boat being set alight by flaming arrows is a hallowed tradition that goes back to 1958 and Kirk Douglas, as Einar, in the film The Vikings, so it must be true. But seriously, that’s a bit of a modern myth, but the elements are there.

I’m a bit late to the party of realizing that How to Train Your Dragon 2, the animated film, has the same thing. There’s many different renditions of this firing your arrows. The warrior chief goes off and flaming boats. But there are actual early medieval sources that speak of pushing people out in boats over water, of scattering ashes on water. And so water was important. But my point in this context is there’s no single Viking funeral deathway. They were doing all manner of stuff and that’s only the stuff we have archeological evidence for because they’re probably disposing of the dead above ground. As I said elsewhere, in Europe, they’re probably doing lots of things we don’t have evidence for. So yeah, there’s no such thing as a Viking way of death or Viking funeral. It’s really a modern mashup of mythological sources, historical sources, and a bit of archaeology thrown into the mix.

But you if I showed a Viking period burial site to your audience, most of them would go what’s Viking about this and I would say actually nothing. What you got here is an object that is Hiberno-Norse, shows it’s probably made in Dublin and traded around the Irish Sea. This object is probably from Norway. This object is from southern eastern England. These people had these range of objects they were burying them with the dead, the burial tradition they weren’t going, “he must die like a Viking,” or, “I feel a bit ill today. Got a bad stomach. Quick, let me grab my sword so that I can die like a Viking.” Like in The Last Kingdom, everyone has to grasp a sword so they can go to Valhalla, and it’s a bit nonsense. I suppose what I’m trying to say is there’s so much modern nonsense thought about the Vikings, it’s an ongoing task to remind people that actually our evidence is not what people would like it to be.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, that does the story that we make is not necessarily evidence-informed.

Howard Williams: Yeah, that’s a polite way of putting it. That’s the polite way. You’re much more neutral.

Yvonne Kjorlien: But fiction can be so much fun.

Howard Williams: But we do have evidence that were cremating people in boats, burying people in boats, and they may well have put people in boats and pushed them out into fjords and lakes, and they may have set fire to some of those. It’s not impossible. But we don’t actually have any archeological evidence of flaming boats that was, as per Game of Thrones, as per every fictional representation of the late 20th and early 21st century, either serious or comedic.

Yvonne Kjorlien: It makes for really good fiction, though. Makes for good drama.

Howard Williams: Yeah, it does. And people like the idea of a flaming journey, that the fire is not simply… but I think for most early medieval people, the fire is the journey, the fire, the transformation part of the …you don’t and the flames and the smoke. There’s a lot of animation in burning the dead open air. You don’t necessarily need to put it on a boat to have it disappear. And I think a lot of that comes down to modern funerary industry ideas about a curtains coming down and the coffin is taken away from. I think it matches up with our ideas of journeying and a spiritual idea that’s very Christian in some ways, even if, I’m not saying that everyone who thinks that way is Christian, but I’m saying it does fit into that our aesthetics and our expectations of death as a journey. And our fantasies and our fictions, from Tolken’s Middle Earth, to help us to navigate that in a very interesting way. And a lot of Tolken’s ideas were coming from the early Middle Ages and the mythology of Finland, Wales, but also Scandinavia. And so we have that sort of percolating through via our fantasy and our science fiction as well.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Do you think that media, the film industry, social media is going to be maybe more inclined to be open to archaeological evidence before constructing their story? Can you see anything like that happen or is it just human nature for us just to make up the story and run along with it?

Howard Williams: It’s really interesting, isn’t it? Because obviously I live daily with a sense of dread and despair every time I look at any kind of social media at what nonsense is being spewed now. And, yes, it’s very difficult to stay positive when you realize the level of misinformation about any topic, some of which you think what impact does that have on our world, through to the great pernicious earthshattering misinformation that is literally shifting politics and wars and responses to pandemics, and so on. So, it’s very difficult to stay positive. What I would say is that we have at least an opportunity to challenge, to push back. I’m not saying I’m not sure anyone listens, but I think we do have opportunities with social media now to push back and critique some of this nonsense for those who want to listen.

So, with AI imagery, with the ability to generate all manner of nonsense stories, myths and misconceptions of the early Middle Ages, whether it’s the Vikings and their deathways or anything else, are absolutely rife. And yet, I get a foot in the door as an academic to push back on some of that. And that’s what I try to do with my social media. And I’m not sure I’m doing it particularly well, but as I said, that foot in the door, at least I’m trying to do some of that because how the Vikings dealt with their dead may not seem to be something that matters; it’s something very academic, very esoteric. But when you realize that some of these ideas about fatalistic conceptions of death, of warrior status, and warrior sacrifice and masculinity are feeding directly into various extremist movements today, if this helps people to think a little bit more critically about the basis of those ideas, I hope — I’m not saying I can directly — but indirectly you can chip away at some of that modern mythology by giving them good information. And so it’s saying, “you’re wrong, it’s complicated”, “you’re wrong, it’s complicated,” may seem a bit of not a very constructive exercise with “that’s made up”.

Content has to be about storytelling and engaging people with fun stories as well. But I think there is the possibility that archaeology is being taken seriously. And I think that there’s been lots of discussions about where and how and with whom we should have these conversations about mortuary archaeology in the public domain. Should we be talk and I certainly feel strongly that I should not be talking with pseudoarchaeological grifters directly. I don’t want to have a debate with Graeme Hancock or any of these other people who have made careers and multiple books out of pedaling misinformation about the archeological record, but I do want to reach the audiences of people who are actually interested and for whom this may actually make a difference. Because it does have an impact even into fields as your own, with forensics, the things that, if we’re able to show that deep time human engagement with these death rituals, it does inform communities affected by disasters, by criminality of different forms, and what happens to their loved ones and hopefully their mourning, their restitution, their sense of restorative engagement. That’s what I’d like to think. I haven’t done much work on that directly, but I like to think that if we are talking to the public in some form, we can help people understand what we do, wherever we do it. We don’t always get it right. We’re not perfect. It’s part of an ongoing burgeoning research field where methods are changing, ideas are changing, data is growing, but we are open. We’re not secretive like cabal, who are hiding the truth, which is what the rhetorics of pseudoarchaeology would have people believe about us and I think that’s really important to be open and dealing with those public conversations.

Yes, so what I’m trying to say is I often feel daily despair at what’s the point, but then I think a lot of people are listening and it’s rattling cages of those that would cozily sit there with their AI generated images of Viking warriors or Anglo Saxon funerals and I can say, “Well, actually, this is what we really know.” So I don’t know.

Yvonne Kjorlien: And it’s not like you’re just having a conversation with one person that isn’t recorded and can just, fade into the ether. You’re doing your due diligence to put it out there, and even if somebody doesn’t hear it in that moment, it is there for reference in the future.

Howard Williams: Absolutely. And I think that it’s people, I mean, while a lot of this the mortuary archaeology in the public arena stuff you say it has a short half-life, people are only watching my TikTok videos for half a day, but then they are finding them years later and getting occasional likes. So people are searching for topics and finding a video I did about how we don’t actually have evidence that Picts were woad on their faces or that evidence of Anglo Saxon burial practice or what do we know about early medieval Wales, or I’ve challenged someone else’s narrative on something. They are finding it and I think that can be constructive.

So, I just did a video a couple of days ago that’s gone not very viral, but it did get reaction. I reacted to a, I did a sort of stitch response to a very big and very good academic theologian Bible studies guy on TikTok and he’s great and we’re mutuals. But I said I don’t think his video explaining this late Roman burial was very good. I think he knew that I wasn’t having a go at him. I was able to say as a professor of archaeology these are the issues. While there’s a few people going, “look a drama between academics” actually it can be a really public forum to actually show the wider audience that we can respectfully disagree, we can show that — not necessarily, I didn’t actually disagree with anything he said but my points were that this is a news story rather than actual reviewed research but everyone’s commenting on this new burial showing the “rewriting the history of Christianity north of the Alps” is the story about a burial from near Frankfurt that has a third century silver case around the neck with a 18line Latin script evoking Jesus and St. Titus for protection. So, it’s a really international news story, really exciting archeological find. But I was saying that a lot of the commentators, including this very good TikTok creator who does Bible study stuff, are missing some key points.

So, I’m saying, we need to understand where this is and when it is and what it doesn’t tell us. We can’t tell…. And one of the things that an archaeologist, like myself, will try to keep emphasizing to the public is just because someone’s buried with something, it doesn’t mean they were that thing. So, just because you’re buried with an 18 line silver foil apotropaic prayer doesn’t mean you’re Christian at all. It just means that maybe someone gave it to you. I think it maybe, that’s a bit stark, I think there may very well be Christian. It is exciting evidence. It is the first evidence of Christianity north of the Alps. I’m not denying that. But I think we have to think very carefully about what we’re saying to the public about these things and qualify what the implications are.

And I think that is the job of where we can do…at one level we can be digital killjoys but also we can actually tell a better story by countering each other. Because everything’s so quick nowadays. There’s a rapid fire of press release reviewed study out and within 12 hours there’s 50 YouTube videos 89 TikToks and everyone’s written a blog about it. It’s very difficult to do that rapid work and still keep integrity. I think if we can improve our standards of doing that, start to work on how we do that responsibly and ethically, I think that’s something we academics can really make a contribution towards. Sadly though, there’s a lot of sensationalism within the academy too, and I think we’ve got to be very careful about how we balance this responsive quickfire reaction to new research.

Yvonne Kjorlien: I think that’s the beauty of that way information is nowadays, is that you don’t necessarily have to do it in the moment, because people are always searching. I think it’s more detrimental when somebody goes searching and they don’t find anything. It’s the same, when you were talking about cremation. Are people actually looking? It’s sad when people go looking or when they aren’t even going looking. But now they are. Even if an article is 5 years old, debunking or providing richer, more rigorous information at least it’s still there.

Howard Williams: I have great grave concerns about the AI scraping of my online content but equally at least I can say that some of my academic publications that are now open access after many years of not being, whether through my academia edu page or whether, people can go and consult them, and they can find out more detail. So, if they see a news article about a new archeological discovery –

And I’ve seen examples of this in my blog post, which I’ve been doing an Archaeodeath blog since 2014, of people going back to 2015, 2016 blog post I did about TV shows and films and going, “what did?” and I’m coming up in people’s Google searches about reflecting on The Walking Dead TV show series and how death is portrayed in it. I did a blog post about season 4 of The Walking Dead and how it represents cremation because I’ve done stuff on that kind of fiction as well. And people are actually reading that. They’re finding academics that trying to talk about those themes. Now, I’m not an expert in the zombie apocalypse but I am an expert in how people cremate make the dead. So I can say firstly they’re technologically don’t know what they’re doing, but the key point is what does this tell us about this fictional future where people are trying to deal with an apocalypse and the undead walking everywhere. Why is even cremation featuring? What is the cultural baggage of 21st century North America particularly that is leading people to burn the dead in that TV show? So I’m able to sort of pick that apart a bit and sort of talk about what’s going on and I think people are reading it. Yeah. So I’m finding a lot of my old content is getting accessed and I think you’re absolutely right there.

Yvonne Kjorlien: So, I’m going to ask to maybe finish on pondering a question. What is the use of mortuary archaeology, especially nowadays? I mean, like I said before we started recording, I was delving into your recent blog post on necroviolence and that could be an argument for mortuary archaeology. It’s looking at how past deathways and lifeways have changed over time and show us how we are interacting now with our own deathways and lifeways. But for you, why continue with mortuary archaeology? what’s the purpose of studying it now?

Howard Williams: So, archaeology is the only field that can tell us the full human story from earliest times to our time and document even recent material engagements with material traces. Mortuary archaeology as a subfield is the only way we can access the full depth, breadth, and complexity of human interactions with their mortality. That’s the way I would frame it to you. I would say it’s the only way we can draw on written sources, visual evidence. We can talk to even oral histories. That’s all lovely. And those can give us some really good sources. And I’m not just diminishing or disparaging other avenues towards understanding, but given that for 99% of the human story is prehistory, but also given how the stories of lives and deaths of most people living and dying today are not being told through historical, traditional, or sociological discourse, or verbal discussions. We are the subject that can fill those gaps and provide a rich contextual story. It’s just local and global. We can go from the grand stories, the big narratives of how early the earliest people started to dispose of the dead. We have evidence that before our anatomical modern Homo sapiens, other hominin species were disposing of the dead. Massive debate about Homo naledi I won’t get into here but certainly Neanderthal. Yeah.

So we’ve got that deep time story and that is powerful and important to people today. It helps to then frame what we see going on in the world, whether it is in our own locality whether it’s in Gaza, whether it’s in Ukraine, to see not only how the importance of those traces of the deep past still matter to people today, but how they are politicized, afforded cultural baggage, misinformation. There’s all manner of ways in which those ancient traces matters today, but how we can see patterns in how we deal with the dead that we can trace from the distant past through to the way the importance we give to death today.

I think the other point to quickly add is mortuary archaeology is the only subject that can give us a sense and perspective on the future of our deathways. We’re going to see major changes in what happens to the dead moving forward. We’re in a world of cremation, but will cremation be the same? And will these other alternative technologies with their various complicated names that I never quite can remember. But you know that you know what I’m talking about. they’re all trademarked.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Aquamation, terramation, green burials.

Howard Williams: Yeah, we’re going to see changes, but I think what archaeology can show is, it can inform on a personal emotional level and on a societal level how we engage with the dead for the 21st and 22nd century. So I think mortuary archaeology is important because it tells us about the past, it tells us about the present, and it informs us about the future.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Lovely.

Howard Williams: That’s my thoughts, but I don’t know if your audience will think that’s nonsense or not. I think that’s why we should keep doing it because it reveals past lives and deaths, deathways, of dealing with the dead, but it also is about us and our future.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Death is a part of our lives. It just is. And yeah, I think mortuary archaeology informs us about our, like you said, our mortality and how we deal with that.

Howard Williams: And of course it hopefully, I mean, while it’s a much more emotion sensitive and legalistic context of forensics, I think there’s a lot of constructive dialogue, has been and will continue to be, a lot of constructive dialogue. At one level, forensics is a kind of sub field of mortuary archaeology in my mind and that may antagonize specialists because it’s like an application to a very specific set of deathways or not always voluntary, in that sense, but another level mortuary archaeology can be seen as sort of a deep time partner to what forensics scientists do. I’ve certainly contributed to books where forensic analysis of cremated material from all sorts of horrific and unmentionable scenarios are being discussed alongside bronze age case studies and Roman period case studies. I think that that overlap and dialogue is really important. It helps to inform the methods and the perspectives of people working in forensics, I think. But tell me if I’m wrong, but I think that’s my sense of it.

Yvonne Kjorlien: No, absolutely. I mean, any advice that I had ever heard from people who found themselves in forensic fields or giving forensic consultations usually had a background in anthropology or archaeology and they always said the broader your foundation the better because it’s the principles and the processes that are being applied to forensic contexts.

So forensic as a field is very new and there may be some debate about whether it actually is a discipline but it’s really more the application of the discipline processes of anthropology and archaeology to that context.

Howard Williams: Absolutely, absolutely.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Thank you very much for this conversation. I wish we had more time. I feel like we’ve just scratched the surface. We could talk for hours and maybe I’ll reach out again and do another podcast episode because this has been very lovely, Professor Williams, thank you very much for this.

Howard Williams: Feel free. Thank you. It’s been great to chat. Thank you.

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Dave Sweet is a retired detective from a large western Canadian police service who now works as a consultant in Calgary, conducting workshops, training, writing books, and hosting a podcast. He retired in October 2023 after spending 14.5 years investigating murders and suspicious deaths. Most of our conversation is focused on death notifications and communicating with the next of kin.

In this episode we talk about:

the importance of having facts, being truthful, and using direct language rather than euphemisms like “gone to a better place.”
the perceptions of the families and that they may have already rehearsed or imagined how they would receive bad news about their loved ones by the time officers arrive.
how the initial notification can either traumatize families further or help set them on a path toward healing, depending on how professionally and compassionately it’s delivered.
how people can react differently to death notifications. Cultural differences also play a role in how people express grief.
the critical difference between sympathy (which can be disconnecting) and empathy (which is connecting) and the importance of empathetic responses in notifications.

You can contact Dave Sweet through his website: https://www.unconventionalclassroom.ca/

Transcript

Yvonne Kjorlien: All right, we’ll see how it goes. So why don’t you start by telling me who you are and what you’re currently doing.

Dave Sweet: So my name’s Dave Sweet, and I am a Detective from a large western Canadian police service and, currently, I am working as a consultant in Calgary. Do a lot of workshops, training, write books. I’ve my own podcast. So I’m sort of a jack of all trades, as it stands right now. Not seeing I yeah.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Your own podcast. How did I miss that? I’m gonna have to go stalk, and look you up! What?

Dave Sweet: Yeah. Yeah.

Yvonne Kjorlien: So, how long have you been retired now?

Dave Sweet: I actually just retired last year in October so it’s been, I’m just coming up on my one year anniversary of that, but I’m still a young man, so I feel like I can’t be too idle. I haven’t earned that yet.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right. Thank you again for agreeing to speak with me. I’ve been trying to find somebody or some way to address talking with the next of kin and working with them regarding their either potentially or actual dead relatives. And I’ve always felt very iffy about approaching families to talk about that sort of thing because it’s icky to go and say, “Do you want to talk about how you’re feeling?” because I just find that very insensitive. So, thank you for coming on and agreeing to talk about this very touchy, sensitive subject.

Dave Sweet: Sure. And I recognize it as sensitive as well, but also I think hopefully we’ll be some valuable information for people out there, just in terms of when they’re dealing with their own crisis and tragedy into the future. We’ll all have one at some point in time. So learning a little bit about other families or how other people have approached that may help somebody listening have a better idea on how they might approach their own.

Yvonne Kjorlien: So let’s go back into your past a little bit and if you can maybe sketch out, maybe some situations in where you’ve had to deal with families and talk to them about their next of kin or, either a potential to deceased or somebody who’s actually deceased.

Dave Sweet: Sure. Yeah, of course. So my background really, I spent the last 14 and a half years of my life investigating murders, suspicious deaths. And, obviously, as a result of that, had the opportunity to speak many different families along the way and including having the opportunity to be the first person to advise them when a loved one had died. Often in tragic circumstances and situations. And something, I think came to learn early on, well, there’s a few things I came to learn early on when it came to notifying somebody that I loved one had passed, was one, make sure that when you went to do the notification that you had some facts, some information that you’d be able to pass on to them. Because there’s going to be an immediate need on their end and to understand kind of what has happened. And although you may not be able to know, you may not have all of the information available, you should be able to at least explain a little bit around the circumstance. The second, was to keep it truthful and honest, always. Never to sort of sugar coat an issue, but to, instead, be deliberate in the words and the message that you were giving. And that kind of leads into the next part, which was be direct in your message, specifically. And what I mean by that is that you can find yourself in a really awkward spot, if delivering the news of someone’s sudden loss, you used words like “they’ve gone to a better place” or “they’re no longer here with us.” Those types of phrases or messages often are followed with some really sort of uncomfortable questions, like “What do you mean? Where did they go?” And then would you still have to get to the place where you probably didn’t really want to be in the first place, which is being just completely direct and honest with them. And so I found early on learning from others, really watch them do it themselves that delivery could be done compassionately, but it should be always done directly. And so, you almost created a script, I guess, of sorts, that I used almost every time. We’ve all had this experience, I think where we have, we’re looking at the clock and we’re thinking, “Geez, my loved one isn’t home yet. And it’s weird that I haven’t heard from them,” and if a few hours go by, doubt starts to creep into our minds: “Where are they? What could be happening?” And undoubtedly, at some point in time, some of us, our thoughts might even switch to, “I hope they’re okay,” and “What would it be like if a police officer was to pull up to my home right now?” And we start to kind of pay a little bit more attention to the doorbell, the phone ring, the front of the street, our driveway, as we wait to see our loved one home and hope that everything is gonna be okay.

From my experience, often the delivery of bad news, it was already somewhat expected from families. And so, one thing I came to learn was, early on, was is that if somebody hadn’t, they woke up in the morning and their son or daughter wasn’t home yet, they began to worry. By 11 o’clock and they haven’t been able to reach them, they begun to really worry. So, by the time you show up at the house at one o’clock in the afternoon, their worst fear’s coming true, but I think they’ve actually already gone through a process where they began to sort of rehearse what that is going to look like. And so something I came to learn is is honor whatever that rehearsal is supposed to look like for them. They’ve kind of already decided how they would want the delivery of tragic news given to them. “What would happen if the police officer knocked on the door? Would I let him in? What I make him tea? What I want to know at the door? What would my reaction be to the news it in the first place?” And I think as an investigator, when we walk up to a door and knock on it, we have to recognize that somebody’s has already began to go through that rehearsal. And so really, they’re going to tell you how they want the news delivered. So, I’ll give you an example of it.

Years ago, I’ve done a notification, a young man had –a young father, actually — had gone out with a group of friends and they were enjoying the night. He left his wife and his kidlets at home and in the course of the night, they had found themselves at the house party, I guess. And while they were at the house party, there was an altercation, and in that altercation, he was actually fatally stabbed. And so, our unit was called out. We learned who he was and learn where he lived and learned a little bit about us his history and his life. I was tasked with another officer of going to the home and notifying, his wife of his death.

And I remember we pulled up that morning, it was about 11 o’clock, and she was doing exactly what I just described. She’d been kind of keeping an eye on the front street, waiting to see who was gonna show up and, oh my God, that looks like a couple detectives and a detective car that’s just pulled up in front of my house. And I remember as we’re walking up the front steps, to the home, she comes right out of the house and she stops right on the front step. And I introduced myself. She goes, “I know exactly who you are.” And she goes, “I know why you’re here. Does it have to do with my husband?” And I said, “Yes, can we come in?” And she said, “Absolutely not. You cannot come in.” And I said, “Okay.” She goes, she said, “Is he dead?” And I said, “Yes, he’s dead.” And I said, “Are you sure you don’t want us to come in?” And she goes, “You can’t come in. My son is having his birthday this morning and we have a whole bunch of kids over to the house.”

Yvonne Kjorlien: Wow.

Dave Sweet: “And we are not going to come in and ruin that for him today.” So, she had a short conversation with us out there on the stoop, and then asked us to leave, which we did, and asked us to come back the next day, and we would do the actual delivery of the news to everyone in the home including the children. That’s exactly what we did. But she had already scripted out, this is how she wanted this to be done, for that particular, for her family, she felt that was the right decision to be made.

And so that’s what I mean by people have kind of already scripted it by the time, we’ve even gotten there. And so you have to be very, you have to kind of improvise off of what they’re telling you they need from you at that moment in time. Because, again I say, in a lot of cases, by the time we’ve shown up, some time’s gone by, worry is already set in, and then we’re just the confirmation of what they think me have happened, which is that their loved one has died. And so that was just sort of the things I took away from the notification process when it came to families.

And, depending on how the notification went, those first few words out of an officer’s mouth, out of my mouth, we’re gonna put a family on one of two directions. One, they were not going to be able to get past the sort of trauma of that initial notification experience, or the notification itself could be the catalyst to already putting people on a path where they are going to get … not past it, but be able to put them on a path where you give them a greater chance of being able to heal from the horrible news that they’re already to hear. You can imagine, it could go one of two ways. If the officer that shows up there’s aloof, doesn’t know a lot, stumbles over the victim’s name, doesn’t use direct language, leaves things innocuous, in terms of what is actually occurred. How difficult that will be for the family going forward? They’re going to play that whole scenario over in their mind. It just adds to the trauma.

Versus, you have an officer that shows up at the door and they’re professional. They’re clear in their message. They’re compassionate, and they follow the script that that person wants them to follow. You put them on a much closer path to healing early on. And so, the notification process is a huge part of what, I won’t say, my daily duties, but certainly my weekly duties, while I spent that time in Homicide.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Were you given any guidance or training and how to do a notification?

Dave Sweet: Over the years, they started to put together a course — courses I guess — that would help prepare officers on how to do it. But, no, in those early years, no. It was sort of all based around experience and the experience of watching other officers do it. It’s actually interesting because the script that I used was one that was taught to me when I was just a little baby police officer in uniform, and it was the same script that my officer coach used that I then adopted, and then just kind of built on over time with experience.

Now, not every notification, of course, goes well. You can do all of your best, but people go through notifications in different ways. Some are just completely grief stricken and they can’t get the words out. Others kind of almost go into a shock. And can’t get the words out, but are really avoid of emotion. And then other people become extremely volatile and emotional, and can demand you that you leave or get out of my house, or throw a shoe at you, or take a swing at you. These of all things that have happened, not just necessarily to me, but to other members that I had worked with over the years. And, yeah, every notification was a little bit different, but again, it always came back to sort of recognizing people’s needs and that every victim and every victim family is a little bit different as well.

Yvonne Kjorlien: So if watching TV and the detective says, the person on the receiving end of the notification didn’t react the way that they thought that they should react, and, the storyline says that that’s indicative of something, that’s probably not quite accurate then?

Dave Sweet: Sure. I would agree with that. I would agree that it probably not too accurate because we have, as people, so many different individual responses to something so traumatic that I don’t think you can look at one response and say that qualifies as being more genuine or honest than another response. Like I said, I remember once going to a home of a woman, who’s barely twenty-something. Sun had been killed at a house party in sort of a beating and stabbing. And when we went to the home, she was so sweet. She was so kind, and she brought us in and she wanted to make tea first. And so sat on the couch and sort of made some small talk with her. She prepared the tea and then sat down. We delivered the news and she just stared straight ahead. She just absorbed it, but said nothing and was completely, really void of, I would say, any emotion.

I remember putting my hand out — I don’t offer into somebody else’s hand, but I would always kind of leave my hands open, just so that if somebody wanted to they could hold it, but I let them kind of come into my space versus me going into their space. But she took the opportunity to grab my hand. I remember just kind of holding my hand and cupping that and just kind of staring straight off into the universe and she just held it probably for 10-15 minutes. She cry, she didn’t do anything. She just held it.

And I would say that that was a really unusual reaction. But I would also say that it’s a reaction of grief, no differently than a person who falls to the floor, begins to wail, which also sometimes happened.

Culturally, people are different as well, in terms of the way they react. Some cultures, wailing and being very, very open about their grief, is more commonplace in sort of shutting in like she did, right? And so you have to be prepared for that as well. Yeah.

Yvonne Kjorlien: It sounds like empathy and, like you say, improvisation are two key elements when you go to notify somebody. Do you find that there are, perhaps, some people that are better suited to deliver notification than others, because they have more empathy or improv skills?

Dave Sweet: I do, actually. I do feel that way. Yeah, in anything, it’s a skill set that some people are really, really great at some aspect of police work. And then others are better at a different aspect, like notifications. I think the ones that are skilled at delivering difficult news ones that are not afraid to use that, again, kind of direct language, find a way to be able to use it in such a way that still comes across as compassionate and empathetic. And one thing that I often speak about is one of the greatest a-ha moments I ever had as a police officer was learning the difference between sympathy and empathy and how uniquely different those two things are. [Brene] Brown. I’m not sure if you’re familiar with her but she,…

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah.

Dave Sweet: She really has this thing nailed, this concept nailed. She talks about sympathy as being a real disconnecting or separating action. While empathy is very connecting action.

In her analogies that I’ve seen her do in the past, one of them is that, if you have a friend that’s… you’re walking down the street and you come across a friend who’s fallen in a hole, a sympathetic person will walk to the edge of that hole look down and say, “My goodness. I’m so sorry to see that you fall down the hole. Do you need any help?” And, because you’re practicing sympathy, the friend that’s fallen in the hole’s likely gonna say, “No, I’m okay. I’ll figure it out,” because you’ve kind of disconnected, in that display of “I am sorry.” Which are sort of the three words to a sympathetic reaction to somebody else’s tragedy, “I am sorry”, but they’re the three most common words that we use. “My condolences”, “I’m sincerely sorry”, “I am sorry” –these are all forms of sympathy.

The empathetic person, in that same situation, is walking down the street and they come across their friend who has fallen down the hole, the first thing they will do is acknowledge that their friend is fallen down the whole, they might say something like, “you must be so scared. I see you fall down that hole right now. You look cold. Give me one minute. I’ll be right back.” They leave the edge of the hole, come back with the ladder. Stick it at the end of the edge of the hole, climb down, and then help that person up and then they climb up with them. Right. That’s empathy and empathy that it’s about getting into the hole with somebody to kind of move through that with them. It requires vulnerability and that’s why it’s so connecting. Because there will be an exchange there. I’m going to come into the same hole as you. I’m gonna make myself vulnerable so I can be with you and then we’re going to climb out of this together. That is very connecting.

And so, how does this all matter when it comes to things like notification? I think when we can practice more empathetic responses, and try and stay away from, “I’m so sorry for your loss,” and instead, “I don’t know what you must be going through right now. But if I can do anything for you, call a friend, call a family member, sit here and hold your hand, you’re my priority right now. And I don’t want to leave you until I know you’re going to be okay.” That’s different than saying, “I’m sorry for your loss.” And so that skill set, it takes time to hone it and it takes time to sharpen it, but once you’re able to start to use empathy, whether it’s a notification or any other interaction in your life, it’s a game changer when it comes to relationships.

You could save a marriage once you figure out empathy is different than sympathy, and so you could save your marriage. I’m sorry…

Yvonne Kjorlien: Here we go. Marriage advice on this podcast. I never thought I’d hear it.

Dave Sweet: Yeah. “I’m sorry to hear that the baby was crying all day” versus “I can’t imagine. I know how frustrating is for the baby to cry. When I get home today, I’m going to give you the much needed to break you need. And I’m gonna take little Johnny with me and we’re gonna go for a walk.” That’s different than saying, “I’m sorry. The baby was so colicky today.” You know what I mean? So we can start to practice that and we can do that in all aspects of her life. You don’t have to be doing it in a tragic situation to create that connecting response.

Yvonne Kjorlien: So, that’s notification for a deceased. How does that differ for a missing person when there isn’t kind of that ending. How do you deal with that?

Dave Sweet: I think everybody would have again that sort of a different view on that and, I mean, I respect all of them, I think every, for myself, if I was… So typically we don’t do the notification on the missing person because it’s usually the family member that you would notify [who] has reported that individual missing in the first place.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Mm-hmm

Dave Sweet: So the notification, like they’re the ones notifying us at this individual’s missing. But there is going to be a process that it’s going to still occur where, over the course of a period of time, that individual isn’t just going to be missing, but that they’re — in some instances, not on all, but in some instances — evidence starts being collected in the course of that investigation which starts to lead to a more ominous result of why they may have gone missing.

That’s when, I won’t call so much a notification, but it requires a lot of communication with the missing person’s family to get them to start to realize that this may not have the fairy tale happy ending. And that just requires, again, a lot of empathy, a lot of listening, and a lot of inquiry where you will start to message that things may not be quite so well.

It might start with, “in a case like Bob’s, sometimes we start to collect evidence and sometimes in the course of collecting evidence, we start to become more and more concerned about Bob’s wellbeing. I feel that specifically as it relates to Bob, at this point in time, we are starting to collect some evidence that is causing me some concern.” Right. We won’t actually know until we find Bob what happened to Bob, but you can start to sort of layout that messaging. “What think happened to Bob? You’re his mom. What do you think happened to Bob?”

Yvonne Kjorlien: Mmm.

Dave Sweet: “I think Bob might be gone. You know, a mother always knows these things.” “You might be right, you may not be wrong. How are we going to prepare for if that’s a possibility into the future? Do you need family to start to come be around and support you. We’re gonna work our very best to try and figure out what happened to Bob. And we’re figure out where Bob might be, but in the interm, do you have a support system around you?” Right? “On the chance that your intuition as a mother isn’t wrong. And that we do find Bob deceased…” So that’s kind of where it changes a little bit. I think it’s a little bit more of putting a person — again, it’s a lot of it’s messaging — but putting a person on a path where they start to identify what the conclusion could potentially be, just through how you explain things. It’d be completely irresponsible for an investigator to come in and promise somebody something like, “I promise we’re gonna find Bob.”

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right. Yeah.

Dave Sweet: That would be something that would be terribly damaging to the family because I don’t think, in any of these scenarios, I don’t think it’s our job to destroy hope, but I also don’t think it’s our job to create false hopes either. I think it’s our job to be very realistic and always kind of keep people mindful that all possibilities exist until the investigation’s completed or until Bob is found.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Do you think that there is such a thing as closure?

Dave Sweet: Closure? I guess it depends on what way. If what was important in a missing person’s case, for example, was that the discovery of their loved ones remains and those remains are discovered? Then I guess, from that perspective, there’s some closure, if that’s what was the most important thing. If a family feels that closure comes by way of just some sort of form of justice, I would say the jury’s out on that. I’ve found very few families in my career who felt like a sentence imposed against an offender, that’s done something horrific to their loved one, was the just and fair decision or fair result. Very few families go, “You know what? They got it right on that. Yeah, he only deserved 15 years for the murder of my daughter.” It doesn’t usually happen that way.

I always used to remind families, though, that the decision that occurs in a courtroom and then the sentence that follows, it’s sort of a cruel reality but sentence isn’t for the victim or the victim’s family. The sentence is for, is imposed for the offender and for the community that that offender will one day likely return to. And so, no sentence imposed will be probably good enough.

I remember I used to have this conversation with families before a sentencing. I’d say, “a number is a number and it doesn’t represent the love or the life lived of the person you’ve lost. If the decision is made that the sentence reflects 10, it’s a 10-year sentence, you will wonder why it wasn’t 15. If the judge came back and said it was 15, you would wonder why it wasn’t 25. The judge came back and said life forever and ever and ever, and you’d want to know why it wasn’t death. If the judge had stab wounds. Like, they took my own.” Where does it stop?

And so, families that can resist that, sort of going through that process, usually do a little bit better on the other end when they can separate out the process to the loss. When they equate the loss to, say a number, I think they have the tendency to stay angrier for longer, which is totally a natural response. But those that can find the strength not to do that, I think they actually, in the end, probably do a little bit better, just based on my own experience, in terms of being able to — not close it off, but to — switch the focus of the loss onto something maybe a little bit more positive, like a legacy for example. A foundation, an organization, a scholarship in their loved one’s name. Yeah.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, the reason I asked is that there’s always, I think, this expectation that once you’ve found your missing person and either they’re alive or they’re dead, you found the remains, that ending provides closure or going to trial, the person being found, guilty gives closure. There’s always some perceived endpoint that is going to give me this miraculous closure. This fabled thing. And I’ve heard some families say that, “You know what? No, I never did feel the closure.” You get all those endpoints and there’s still no closure.

Dave Sweet: I actually understand that perspective because, even as an investigator, you’ve put all these hours, months, maybe years into an investigation, into a case. To hear the proverbial gavel drop and the determination of guilt come through, you’d think inside you would be rejoicing, but you’re not. You find that experience very anti-climactic. You knew it was gonna be that way, but it didn’t make you feel the way you thought it was gonna make you feel. Once you get to that point, and the gavel drops, you think inside you’d feel, “YES! All my hard work has got us to this point.” But it never felt that way for me, anyways. I didn’t look at it and cheer out loud or any of those things. And it just felt a decision was made, but it was never quite as joyful or as exciting as what you thought it might be, I guess.

And I think for families, yeah, I don’t think, especially when it comes to missing — if a person’s gone missing, let’s just say it takes a year before there remains are found, and by the time they’re found, it’s not intact remains. Let’s say they were found in the woods or wherever, and they’re not impact anymore, there’ll still not be closure. There’ll be closure on the fact that we can now prove positively say, through the skillful expertise of our anthropologists and people like that, we’ll be able to say, “Yes, we know who this individual is, but there wasn’t enough information left behind with their remains to tell us exactly what happened to them.” And so, yeah, you’ve discovered that their fate, their fate being that they died. But there may never be enough information available to tell you how they died or if somebody was involved in it.

So yeah, you get a closure on one end: you’re no longer looking for them in a crowd. Sometimes people they do that when they’ve lost somebody is missing. They can spend years looking in crowds for them. And I had a friend that talked a little bit about that with me from a personal experience, where, after her father had passed away, she couldn’t believe that he had died. She used to look for him all the time in the crowds, hoping that he’d be there. And she never saw him, of course, but I think that experience is probably tenfold for somebody that’s has a loved one that’s gone missing.

And so, now, we found them, but there’s still a lot of things that need to be explained. So you’ve closed off one thing, but then you’re on to the next thing. And then once we get to the next thing, which is maybe we identify that we do know how they died, and we know who’s responsible for their death, then will the court case provide us closure? It may or not. Does a guilty verdict or a guilty plea give a family closure? Maybe. Some families. But maybe it’s the sentence is the next thing you move on to. That’s what I say by, I don’t know there’s ever a complete closure on any of these things. Yeah.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah. Yeah. It’s sounds like a bit of a roller coaster of expectations, unfulfilled expectations.

Dave Sweet: Yeah, it such a great way of saying it, and then I agree with you. I think it probably is for a lot of families.

Yvonne Kjorlien: The remains that you brought up, when remains are not intact and they’ve maybe been out the woods for a bit or in the water, and the investigation has done as much as it can with the remains to figure out who the individual is, what happened to them, etc, and you’re now ready to turn them over, release them to the family. In your experience, how do people deal with not having an intact relative?

Dave Sweet: Mm-hmm. You know, honestly, we almost start to venture a little bit out of my wheelhouse. I feel like that would be.. unless somebody actually expressed it to me, and I guess a couple families have over the years.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Do you ever get anybody that says you should have tried more, you should have looked more, you should have done more?

Dave Sweet: I mean I’ve never had it to… the short answer is, I don’t know that I’ve had that happen in one of my investigations, but I’ve seen happen to other investigators. Where we’ve recovered partial remains, there’s been a great effort to try and recover the rest of the remains but we’re unsuccessful. Maybe they’ve gone to a landfill, or something like that. So, we were able to recover some but not all. I mean, that obviously leaves people with a terrible sense that the body has not been returned to them intact. And they might become frustrated with the police.

I actually saw this play out, we just saw this play out not that long ago, I think in Manitoba, I don’t know if it was in Winnipeg but they’re,…

Yvonne Kjorlien: All right. Yeah.

Dave Sweet: and you feel for those families. And I understand their grief on… well, how can I even say I understand their grief? I’ve heard their perspective before. I’ve never been in the situation where I can understand their grief, but I’ve heard their perspective and it’s certainly shared and a natural perspective. But I’ve also looked at it on the other side of it and realize how — it doesn’t mean that you don’t try — but how daunting a task that would have been with such a low probability of result.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right.

Dave Sweet: And, I have been part of cases similar to that, where we recovered some of the remains but weren’t able to recover all of them, despite everyone’s best efforts at some point sometimes you just have to say that it’s just not going to happen. Right? Landfills are a great example of that, just because the vastness of the landfill you don’t think that they’re that big until you’re out there standing on a pile of garbage. That’s, however, many feet deep and,…

Yvonne Kjorlien: It’s the depth. Yeah.

Dave Sweet: it’s the depth and kilometers around. Like you don’t.. there’s not necessarily a way of knowing exactly where garbage was deposited or dropped. So this becomes very much the proverbial needle in a haystack. And I do think that we have to try. But I also recognize that it’s extremely limited at some point, and some time also have to know when to fold them. Yeah, and that would be a conversation to have with the family. Yeah.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, again that roller coaster ride of expectations.

Dave Sweet: That’s right. Yeah. But I think, depending on how it’s approached from the beginning, it could potentially help a little bit with people understanding that, right? Like, if it was just, again, it comes back to that messaging and making sure people, the expectations are outlined early and I’m not saying that they’re not in these cases, but I do think that expectations and managing them are very, very important parts, especially in those early days of any investigation. Yeah.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right. Let’s finish on a happier note.

Dave Sweet: This wasn’t happy? This is strange, sure.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Tell me about your podcast, Dave.

Dave Sweet: Sure, yeah. So just was something that I wanted to do. I kind of alluded to it earlier when I was talking about families and they’re like, their need to or I think that’s something families can do when they’re going through tragedies and things is to kind of look outside of the things that aren’t in their control – like sentences and that — and to start to focus more on legacy. And so, one of the things I thought would be important, for myself anyway, is to have just a little podcast that would capture my thoughts, and my voice, and my face, so that one day, a great grandchild that I may never know, maybe able to watch it and say, “You know, the way he thinks or the way he says certain things,” or “I’ve got his nose” or “I’ve got his hands”. That they’d be able to find some familiarity. So the podcast is really sort of a continued effort on my part to leave a bit of a legacy on this earth because I certainly know that tomorrow is not promised to any of us.

And so, my podcast is called The Ride Along. And it’s a feel-good true crime podcast. It’s very much themed in around even some of the things we talked about today. It’s sort of falls that seem kind of theme where hopefully it doesn’t leave people with too much of a heaviness, and maybe some validation on what we can do to live better lives and learn a little bit about what happens when tragedy’s our teacher, and how we can respond to that and take positive takeaways from it. So that’s what’s it’s called The Ride Along, it’s with me and my co-host, Nicole McKay. And you can find it on Apple and Spotify and YouTube, as well.

Yvonne Kjorlien: And you’ve also got a website. Isn’t that correct?

Dave Sweet: I do. So, my website is, it can be found at http://www.unconventionalclassroom.ca, and there you can learn a little bit about some of the workshops and training opportunities I provide. As well, there’s also the other services that I give as well.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Fabulous. Thank you very much, Dave. This ha been enlightening, insightful. It’s everything that I wanted to talk about with yeah, regards to this topic but without the ‘ick’ I was really trying to avoid. All this sensitivity but with none of the ick. So thank you.

Dave Sweet: And I hope it helps somebody out there. And somebody’s going through a tough time. Like, there are people that are out there that will help, you just need to reach out to them. And hopefully you have a supportive friend in your life or a supportive family member, but if you don’t, victim services, most police agencies across this country have them. And there’re also great ways of being able to help you through your grief, loss. Hopefully no money is there and is ever part of this exclusive horrible club that a few families every year have to become part of, but if you are, just know there are people out there that will help you. Yeah.

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Professor Victoria Gibbon is a biological anthropologist at the Department of Human Biology’s Division of Clinical Anatomy and Biological Anthropology at University of Cape Town, South Africa. She leads a transdisciplinary team of researchers in the Western Cape Cold Case Consortium (W4C) to assist with improving investigative outcomes and forensic identification more generally. Dr. Devin Finaughty is a forensic anthropologist/taphonomist with a particular interest in the decomposition ecosystem. South African-born, he is a centennial postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa.

In this episode we talk about:

Their research has focuses on “forensic realism”, experiments that replicate common case scenarios, like single, clothed bodies, to help address gaps for local police cases.
Their goal is to provide investigative leads for police, not just identification. Recovering all remains and personal items can help give closure to families.
Finaughty is now applying his expertise to wildlife forensics through a postdoc, developing forensic entomology protocols to help investigate poaching cases, and to help address South Africa’s poor prosecution rates for poaching cases.
Both researchers emphasize the importance of engaging with stakeholders to understand real-world problems and tailor their research for practical applications.
Both researchers see their greatest impact coming from policy changes informed by their science, rather than the science alone.

Find more about the work Devin and Vicky and others on the team have done together:

https://health.uct.ac.za/anatomybioanth/forensic-taphonomy-identification

Notes from the start

Support the podcast and my research and Buy Me A Coffee or Patreon. Your contributions will go toward my research, webhosting, and my time on this podcast. Want to find out more about my research? Check out the Scavenging Study.

Contact me through ykjorlien@gmail.com or through my contact form. Follow me on Facebook at The Reluctant Archaeologist, or through Instagram @yvonnekjorlien

Do you have a suggestion for a topic on the Scattered podcast?

Do you have a question about working with human remains?

Drop me a note at ykjorlien@gmail.com

Transcript

Yvonne Kjorlien: So, I’m gonna get you each to say your names because I don’t want to say your names incorrectly. So, Devin let’s start with you since you have the name I’d probably end up saying incorrectly.

Devin Finaughty: Okay, so it’s Devin Finaughty.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Finaughty, all right. Vicky.

Victoria Gibbon: Victoria Gibbon.

Yvonne Kjorlien: and you are both, not currently located, Vicky, but you are both teaching in South Africa. Is that correct?

Victoria Gibbon: I can speak for myself. Yes. I am a university professor at the University of Cape Town in South Africa.

Devin Finaughty: And I am a centennial postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg in South Africa.

Yvonne Kjorlien: However you want to start, maybe Vicky if you want to start with your academic background and then we’ll bring in Devin and then Devin you can go through your academic background. How did you get involved, I guess, with forensic taphonomy. What brought you to this place?

Victoria Gibbon: Yeah, so for me, I grew up in Winnipeg, Manitoba and I went on to do business, actually, at the University of Manitoba and swiftly realized that was not my path and I moved over to anthropology which I was very passionate about. It took me a little bit of time to decide whether I wanted to work on stones and go more into archeology, or whether I wanted to focus on bones and move into biological anthropology. And then after getting my undergraduate degree, I had an opportunity to do a Master’s degree in South Africa, and I came over to Johannesburg.

And I did my PhD at the University of Witwatersrand and there I did a PhD in archaeogenetics when it was very very new and I developed a new method for molecular sex determination, that was also good for forensic cases. And then after that I did a postdoc in colorectal cancer genetics because that paid the bills. And then I did a few other postdocs and moved around. So, I did a postdoc at Indiana, at Purdue University in bioarcheology, and then eventually I got full-time work at the University of New Brunswick.

And then I came into the position I am now at the University of Cape Town. So, when I was at the University of New Brunswick, was the first time that I was classified as a forensic anthropologist. And there was basically no casework for me to be engaged in. I did very little my services weren’t needed but when I came to the University of Cape there was already an established service provider, the forensic anthropology Cape Town’s forensic lab. And we do casework with the local police and forensic pathology services. And so, it’s really moving to Cape Town where it became a more central focus within my research program.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Because it is…every institution every area every city region is different and whether or not or to what degree they involve I guess academics and in those forensic investigations. And how they involve or if they involve academics in their investigations, isn’t it?

Victoria Gibbon: Absolutely, and also so in New Brunswick there weren’t very many people who are missing and murdered. Whereas — so in Fredericton, where it was a very small number — whereas in Cape Town that number is very large. So, on average we have about 10% of the individuals that come into our mortuaries remain unidentified per annum.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Wow.

Victoria Gibbon: and the closest mortuary to us at the University of Cape Town has an average intake of around 4 to 5,000 bodies a year. So we’re looking somewhere around two to five hundred people locally who remain unidentified per year and across the country that expands to somewhere between 8 and 10,000 South Africans. So the need is much greater and due to the need it is a direct fuel for research, right? Because where there’s need, research can help fill gaps and maybe improve identification.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Wow, okay. There’s a few things that I want to touch on, but I want to get to Devin first. But yeah, I want to come back to how you’re involved in all that kind of stuff. So, Devin, how did you come to work with Vicky.

What’s your academic path?

Devin Finaughty: So, I grew up in Johannesburg, where I’m now based and when I finished school, I moved to Cape Town to study at the University of Cape Town and I did the whole hog at UCT. So undergrad honors, Master’s, which I then upgraded to PhD under Professor Emeritus Alan Morris, who’s also Canadian. During my Master’s, started to my honors, but then mainly into my Masters and PhD, I had the privilege of being able to work on forensic cases through FACT, the laboratory that for Vicky spoke about, initially as a member and then later as a senior postgrad as a senior member.

And that mainly involved just assisting the senior forensic anthropologists on cases. I hadn’t initially set out to do forensics when I first went to university. I actually wanted to do medicine. I knew about forensics. When I was in high school, I had job shadowed a forensic pathologist at the Hillbrow Mortuary in Johannesburg, which was a very eye-opening experience, as you can imagine. And funnily enough, I was at the mortuary the other day and it hasn’t changed since 2007. It looks the same and it smells the same.

Victoria Gibbon: Shame.

Yvonne Kjorlien: They probably all have the same smell.

Devin Finaughty: Yeah. Mortuaries in South Africa are something interesting. But I didn’t get into medicine; my maths marks wouldn’t good enough. So, I did a general Bachelor of Science degree instead and it was a lecture by Professor Morris in my second year on forensic anthropology or lecture series — he gave us three lectures — that really caught my attention and I sat back and I thought that is a job I would love to do. And I went up to him after the lecture and I said, “your work is amazing. How do I do this?” And he said, “it’s not all that it’s cracked up to be. What are you studying for?” and I said, “I’m trying to get into medicine,” and he said, “oh, stick to that.”

Yeah, but I was not to be deterred and I discovered that there was an honors program in biological anthropology. Had never heard of biological anthropology before, but through my own research realized that that’s the foundation for forensic anthropology. And so, I set myself and getting in there. I was able to get in and then I just carried on right through to PhD.

For my Master’s upgraded to PhD research, I established the first taphonomic research program in Cape Town. So, it was clear through the work that I was able to participate in that we didn’t have a very good understanding of the decomposition processes in Cape Town.

And Cape Town is a globally unique biogeographic environment. It’s the Cape Floristic Kingdom, which only occurs in that part of the world. There are thousands of unique species of plants and animals and that, together with a very unique geography, means that we can’t take data from anywhere else in the world and apply it to Cape Town. And as Vicky explained, there is a tremendous need for this information. So, I set about establishing those data.

And that was when I met Vicky. So, when Vicky started at UCT, Vicky, I think in 2016?

Victoria Gibbon: Yep.

Devin Finaughty: Vicky came in, Alan retired. Vicky came in and pretty much embraced me, even though she didn’t have to, she very much took me under her wing and looked after me as I finished up my PhD for three years, in fact, and that’s how it started together. We started doing forensic casework together and doing research together. We started off co-supervising an honors student, who’s now got his own PhD. And our research program together is just, has blossomed really.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Wow, fabulous. Can I just say that medicine lost out. Ha!

Devin Finaughty: Ironically, I ended up teaching the medical students anatomy and realized that I actually wouldn’t have wanted to study medicine.

Yvonne Kjorlien: So, you’re happy with your path.

Devin Finaughty: Very much so. I mean, as Vicky said I have now taken a step sideways and moved from human forensics into wildlife forensics, which is something we can talk about later, if you’d like, but I am still involved in human forensic casework through my current position at the University of Witwatersrand as part of the Human Variation and Identification Research Unit.

Yvonne Kjorlien: All boy, that’s just a whole other ball of juiciness right there. All right, so let’s talk a little bit about the work that you’ve done together because I have a smattering of articles on my desk here. Everything from scattering patterns and forensic taphonomy to decomp to vertebrate scavenging. And then there is the forensic realism. So, if you…I don’t know how you two… I’m guessing you’ve probably done presentations together before or group chats before… however you want to tackle that, you go for it because I want to hear it all.

Victoria Gibbon: Yeah, okay, maybe I’ll start there. So, I think one of the things that when I came into this position at the University of Cape Town, Devin was there this work was ongoing and he was with good science and knew science. He was revealing more and more interesting questions that needed to be answered. And students are interested in this work. And like I said earlier, there’s definitely need locally for the information. And so while my passion wasn’t originally to do taphonomic work, I could see the value of the outcome for the city, the country, etc. But also that there were student interest. And there were really interesting questions. And at that point in time, we had a really good facility where we were working. And so, it was quite natural for my research program to shift into that because of this interest. So, my research program even today doesn’t only involve forensics and certainly doesn’t only involve forensic taphonomy. But where we come together is in this forensic taphonomy space, and we had our first student together was Max Spies and he did honors with us and was building on one of the questions that came out of Devin’s research on mongoose and how they play a role in decomposition with the scattering and scavenging.

And that work ended up being very informative for us because we not only started to learn information about the decomposition process, but actually mongoose behavior. And so, when we went to, Devin was called out to a case on Table Mountain and I went with, and while we were there, we could see some tunneling in the fynbos, which suggested that mongoose were there, and both hands and feet of the decedent were missing. The feet were there. The hands were missing.

And this is something we had seen in Max’s project, is that the mongoose target small parts of the body, carry them off, and then eat them or consume them underneath denser vegetation. So that they’re protected while they’re consuming. So, we also knew from Max’s work that the scattering normally took a maximum radius of five meters out from the body (edit: the scatter range is 5-12m). So, we cleared back the vegetation five meters and we recovered all the bones of the hands and the feet plus a watch and some jewelry. So that these are the types of things that actually help with identification, right? Is personal belongings, but also the more we recover of a body, the better the chances we have of identifying the body.

And so that was just our first project that we did together and then that led on to Max pursuing a Master’s which then upgraded into a PhD. And since then also had Kara Adams who’s also now a doctor and she has gone on to expand on the work of both Devin and Max and in new directions. And both Max and Kara are now postdocs with other people at the University of Cape Town and they’re working with us on our current project.

But the shift in our thinking through time shifted to… one of the things that I bring very much to this research is the forensic realism. I’m all about forensic application. Devin’s very interested in innovation and is very focused on the minutiae of how these things work. And so I’ve been really focused on asking these questions about realism and he’s really interested in innovation. And so a few years ago he said to me — I don’t know I think — Devin was like, “wouldn’t it be cool if we could do this totally automated and we didn’t need to go to site every day?” and I was like,

Yvonne Kjorlien: Oh yeah!

Victoria Gibbon: “that would be amazing,” because Max went to site every single day. And so did Devin and weighted the pigs every day with a manual block and tackle. And so we approached electrical engineering, I approached the Head of Department there and I said, “we have this idea. Do you think this is possible?” and they ran it as an honors sort of competition. And the students knew the problem and then had to come up with solutions to create an autonomous weighing rig. And then the electrical engineer took the designs the students came up with and then used them to create their own design, which led to our first design. Devin was very instrumental in the creation of that design. And we worked with the electrical engineer, Max, myself, and also Charles Harris (Principal Technical Officer: Department of Human Biology, University of Cape Town), who helped actually build the rig itself.

And so innovation, forensic realism, have become bigger paths within our very targeted research focus. So while our questions that we ask in the students research are very much focused on helping casework, we are also driving and innovating an entire new approach to taphonomic research, and I think that’s where, is an area I’m very interested in and I think at some of our biggest impact is actually happening in that broader space and I think, Devin maybe you could add on to that about the forensic realism and the innovation and how we’re changing things nationally, internationally.

Devin Finaughty: Absolutely. So apart from just improving our own experience of field work and making it more efficient and more cost-effective, which is what automation can do, I mean that the reason I went to Vicky at this idea is that Max and I collecting data, whether it’s hailing or it’s 45 degrees (Celcius) in the shade. So if we…I was like, machines do everything for us now, surely we could get a machine to do this too, at least some aspects of it.

But the other major advantage of moving towards that automation was this is two things. The one is the ability to quantify a lot more of the data that we’re getting. I mean, historically, decomposition has been conceived of in qualitative terms. I mean, if you think of the total body scoring system, for example, even though it’s a score, it is still fundamentally based on a qualitative, subjective observation and we can create all the core definitions that we want about the specific color or the specific thing. The reality is even fundamentally our perception of color is different. It changes based on the light that’s striking the body that you’re looking at. It doesn’t really work in experimental circumstances with clothed bodies because you would then have to open the clothes every day to see what was happening underneath which has a disturbance effect that you can’t quantify unless you have another one that you’re not opening, but then you can’t use the system to monitor that.

So, we were running into these challenges. And then that’s obviously set up against the broader drive to quantification that the Daubert standards brought in, really, for forensic anthropology globally. We don’t have formal rigorous standards in South Africa, but we still hold those as the gold standard, so to speak, and we work towards that. You need that explanatory power. You need to be able to say…you need to be able to tell the courts the likelihood that you’re wrong, more than anything else. And the more quantitative data you have, the best for your chances are going to be able to figure that out and to be able to justify it in a meaningful way.

So, by moving towards automation, we can figure out ways to evaluate decomposition through properly quantitative means, rather than pseudo quantitative means. That’s the one aspect. The other aspect, and this comes back to experimental design and model building, is the ability to collect data from multiple bodies simultaneously. So, we want to build up this model of decomposition. We obviously need lots of instances of decomposition in the given area by geographic area to understand all the nuances in that because every single decomposition sequence is unique, as I’m sure you very well aware and a lot of our listeners are probably aware.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Oh yeah.

Devin Finaughty: So, to capture that variation you need lots of measures. But if we’re manually collecting data, you go to one body, you collect the data, you go to the next body, you collect the data from that. In most circumstances, most researchers don’t have huge teams of students to go and do all of that simultaneously. And so, if you’ve got lots of bodies, because you’ve got lots of replicates, your data collection time could be several hours. And the reality of decomposition is that the biotic agents of decomposition are going to change their activity within their time slot, right? Because the temperature is changing; the weather is changing. And those fine-scale changes on the ground on a daily basis might not seem like much, but add them together, cumulatively over weeks or months of a decomposition sequence, and they can have really, really meaningful changes in the trajectory and rates of decomposition.

So, if you automate things you can now collect all the data simultaneously, so they are truly comparative and your model is going to be that much more accurate for it. The other thing is you can reduce the disturbance factor, right? If we’re going to site every single day, and we’re chasing away scavengers, we’re disturbing the insects, we are changing vegetation. There are a range of things and there’s some research from Australia from the mid-2000s that demonstrates that disturbance of bodies during the decomposition process does change the rate of decomposition. It doesn’t change it significantly when you pool it all together, but at the individual body level, it can change it significantly.

And back to Vicky’s point of forensic realism, we are actually interested in the individual body, Yes, we’ve got to understand broad patterns across lots of bodies over time, but most of our forensic cases are single clothed bodies at least in our local context in Cape Town. And that’s what we need to be working back towards.

The automation gives a series of tools that help to improve the experimental design and achieve things that the discipline’s been trying to achieve for a long time. We wrote about this quite extensively in the two papers we published on this, which, if the listeners want to go read to understand the argument more holistically, they’re more than welcome to because they’re both open access.

But there’ve been these fundamental challenges in the nature of data collection dating back to the 80s, which we’re still grappling with. And we feel and we hope that this approach, it might not solve those problems entirely, but it could at least get us a step closer towards addressing those and improving the quality of data, that we, as forensic taphonomists, are generating.

And that’s part of the reason we’re putting it out there. It’s also the reason we didn’t patent the system or anything. This is something that needs to be built up and innovated according to individual research groups’ needs because decomposition is such a big and such a complex process, one research group couldn’t possibly hope, in an entire academic lifetime, to capture even a fraction of what’s actually happening. So, we need lots of people working on all the different aspects. But if we then want to combine all of that knowledge and hope to build this really comprehensive picture of decomposition across varied biogeoclimatic circumstances, we need all be collecting data in the same way so that the data are comparable and we’re not doing that at the moment. And this keeps coming out in the literature. It’s been coming out in the literature since the 1980s. And so we’re hoping that this autonomous system, far from being prescriptive, is simply a tool, a framework to capture data in a standardized way that will help us answer the more fundamental questions, particularly around forensic realism.

And I’ll hand back over to Vicky to talk more about that.

Victoria Gibbon: I just wanted to add to what Devin was saying there and I think the critical aspect is it’s not about replicating what we as scientists have for years done in labs and in the field, but actually replicate what we’re seeing in real casework.

Devin Finaughty: exactly

Victoria Gibbon: So having our research driven by case work examples. And if I may, Yvonne, I’m cutting here a little bit. I wonder if I could just go back sort of to the beginning because one of the things I think I didn’t say in the beginning is how my role within the police, etc., which because of that role has led me to focus more on what is happening in casework and then have a research approach. So do you mind if I…

Yvonne Kjorlien: Absolutely, and that was actually, when I said, we’ll get back to that later, that was one of the things I wanted to get back to, so this is perfect.

Victoria Gibbon: So, I’m leading a research group. We call ourselves the Western Cape Cold Case Consortium. And we have built ourselves up. We’re a team of researchers involved in forensic practice in a variety of ways. So, we’ve got members of the team who are in forensic pathology services. We have a forensic geneticist, a forensic isotope analysist, a forensic anthropologist, which is me, and then we have a facial reconstruction expert, who specializes in forensic facial reconstruction. Now we’re all in the Western Cape and we have taken our different roles into this new approach and actually this started with a project that…by Athi Baliso, who’s a new lecturer in our department, and she did her Master’s on a survey of forensic anthropology casework in the Western Cape. And as part of that, she isolated different types of patterns that we see in our local cases. So, terrestrial cases, which are the cases that we find on land, what kinds of patterns do we see most common in the Western Cape? So, when we are driving replication studies, what’s the most common and most impactful replication we can do in order to drive our research. And then similarly with aquatic cases in the same way because we are a coastal city. We do get a lot of wash-up cases, and wash up cases are very difficult to identify for a variety of other reasons.

So, the Western Cape Cold Case Consortium, we are trying to look at ways, what are the patterns and ways that research can effectively improve the application of forensic science across a case in order to see if we can get identification rate improvement. And the main thing is, for years we’ve been really driven by quantitative approaches, like Devin said now about Daubert, etc., so a lot of people have set up experiments where they have multiple bodies out at a time. They’re in close proximity to each other. We even have human decomposition body farms where bodies are literally stacked up. But in reality, we do not see that, we don’t see that in case work. We see single cases as the most common in a terrestrial or on land environment. We see clothed individuals. We see them on the surface. We don’t see them buried and this is in our environment. So, we then now try to replicate those circumstances and we are very careful about an area of research, that Devin introduced me to, is carrion biomass and load in the environment. And this is something that leads to this concept of what people refer to as scavenger swamping. So, when we have… one of the things that we realized through one of our students projects, is that the mongoose are a massive impactful, they play a massive impactful role in decomposition and accelerating the decomposition process locally. The question is, originally, like everyone else in the world, we had four (multiple) bodies out at a time and in fairly close proximity to each other. But as we started to shift our thinking, we said, “what happens if we just put out one body?” And what we found was that it was accelerated… I can’t remember exactly how much, but it was like 10-fold. Devin, do you remember?

Devin Finaughty: 419 percent increase in the rate of scavenging.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Wow, okay. So just hang on put a pause in this — how close were you depositing them before and how close, because I’m guessing you’re not just putting out one season. You’re probably putting them out multiples, but at greater distances. So, if you could shed some light on that for me.

Victoria Gibbon: Devin, go ahead.

Devin Finaughty: So, we were initially running four bodies per season. So, we were looking at two different habitats and the same vegetation zone. So, Cape Flats Dune Strandveld, which covers most of Cape Town, and it’s the most of what is intact left, at least that hasn’t been destroyed by urbanization.

And then we have invasive alien trees called Port Jackson and Rooikrans — Acacia saligna and Acacia cyclops — which form these really dense thickets that people love to hide bodies in because they’re really dense thickets. So, we were looking at those two habitats and we had two pigs in each habitat per season running multiple seasons in…to look at annual effects as well. The pigs were around 30 to 40 meters apart. So, not the minimum of 50 meters.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Okay, that is quite close.

Devin Finaughty: Yes, it’s not the minimum of 50 meters that Matuszewski and colleagues have subsequent the advocated to stop the overlap. But that, as Vicky said, we’re now looking at much further, at minimum 50 meters apart, but still within the same broad habitat so that we’re not falling foul of simple pseudoreplication (an important, underexplored concept in forensic taphonomic experimental design detailed by Schoenly, Michaud & Moreau 2015; DOI: https://doi.org/10.1201/b18819).

Yvonne Kjorlien: All right. So, before it was within 50 meters now, you’re definitely outside of that 50 meters.

Victoria Gibbon: Yes.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Got it, okay.

Victoria Gibbon: And so, when we did this experiment where we just put one pig down, we noticed this huge increase in accelerated decomp rate but then that means all the other data we had from years before was really not very useful because that’s not what we see in reality and so it started making us think really differently about what we were doing on the ground. And also feeling very critical about what’s coming out in the international literature because scavenger swamping is the idea where you have too many bodies out and scavengers actually are, by their nature, opportunistic feeders. So, you get the pulse, the carrion pulse comes into the environment and they monopolize on it. But when all the sudden there’s lots of carrion pulses, which is really unnatural, then their behavior becomes unnatural and then what we found is they would end up feeding on which, the heaviest fed-on carcass ended up being the one closest to trees or areas where they could feed in a way that protected them from birds and their own predation. So, we started to think a little bit more about our own structure and design and how we can change that and the mindset internationally and we are making big changes locally on forensic realism and having casework drive research, rather than research drive casework, or try and do the opposite, which doesn’t work. What we’re seeing is that we’re not being very effective and we’re actually struggling to get the message out internationally. There is a huge resistance to this approach.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Welcome to my world.

Victoria Gibbon: So we still battle on and sometimes we struggle to get our papers accepted because then people will turn around and but you only have data from one or two pigs at a time but when you use this approach, it means you have to do many, many years of data collection before you build up a data set, but it doesn’t mean the baseline data we’re producing isn’t more accurate than what we had before.

Devin Finaughty: Or valid.

Victoria Gibbon: Or valid. Yeah.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Exactly. Yes. It’s music to my ears. Let me just say there’s some times… I feel like many, many years. I feel like I’ve been screaming into the void and just crickets. Nobody sees the value of it. So, to have people like you come along and doing this work. I’m feeling pretty vindicated at the moment actually.

Victoria Gibbon: Good. We’re making a difference for one.

Yvonne Kjorlien: But you’re right this is several researchers’ lifetimes worth of work. The variables are just so complex, there are so many of them. We have to dig to figure out what they are and then to try to figure out how they’re integrated, how they interplay with each other because we’re working in naturalistic, very real situations.

I came across a student poster once — and apologies if you are listening, but this is an example — that the poster was an experiment that she had done. She used remains that had already been embalmed and then she put them out to how they would decompose and I’m like, how is this real? What’s the likelihood that investigators would be called upon a scene to find embalmed remains.

Victoria Gibbon: Never. Never in a way that’s actually forensically interesting because an embalmed body, like the application would be very minimal, if at all.

Yvonne Kjorlien: I know what you’re saying about, using the case studies to direct what and how you’re doing the research, that makes complete sense.

Victoria Gibbon: Yeah, absolutely.

Devin Finaughty: If I could add to that. So, I mean this is the approach…like what we’re describing isn’t brand new to toponomy. When Dr. Bill Bass started the Tennessee facility back in the 80s, this was the approach that they used for the first 10 years. They were replicating what they were seeing in casework. But then as we grew in our knowledge of all the variables that were at play, we sort of started to focus in on those and temperature, is, as we’ve seen in the literature, has been the overwhelming focus.

But that made the research very reductionist and my sense is that, for the last at least two decades, we’ve had a very hyper-focused, very reductionist approach to the research, which has led us to ignore a lot of the other factors that are at play. This is what we were starting to see in our own research, as Vicky described. We’re saying, actually, most people are excluding scavengers because they’re interested in the insects or they’re interested in some else. “We’re trying to get the baseline decomposition and then we’ll add in all the variables”. But the reality is that the baseline that really matters is the forensic case. That’s the baseline once we know what happens there, then we can start to go into the minutiae and break it down. We can’t hope to build it up to the complexity of a forensic case, as you rightly pointed out. We’re dealing with biology. Biology is complex and messy. We’re probably never going to be able to realistically, accurately, mathematically describe it, at least not with the current tools and technology that we have. We might get there one day. But we can get approximations that can still be useful forensically. And in our context in South Africa, any information is useful. Even if it doesn’t make it to court, if it just helps guide the investigation, that is worth having. And that’s our goal. Part of the pursuit of the forensic realism, other than just trying to replicate what we’re seeing in casework, is also having a much bigger focus on the ecology.

So, my undergrad is in human physiology and zoology and I’m a closet conservationist, though very much coming out to the closet in that regard now. So, I’m also very, as Vicky said, I’m very interested in the innovation side of things. I’m also very interested in the ecology of what’s happening. And a lot of what Vicky is described with our building this knowledge on the mongoose, that’s core ecological research. And we’ve uncovered a lot of information about this particular species’ biology and its life history patterns, that were actually not known to science because they’ve never been studied in this context. They’ve been studied in nature reserves, where you don’t have frequent anthropogenic pulses of food. And that’s what we knew. Now you bring it into a city site — we’re looking at the sort of peri-urban and we still kind of are looking at peri-urban — but in the urban settings, we hadn’t seen — at least in the leafy suburbs, we hadn’t seen mongoose — but certainly on the fringes, in a city like Cape Town, which is surrounded on many sides by large natural reserves, these animals are coming into our space because we’re encroaching into theirs. And that’s true of many urban areas, even in Johannesburg, which is a city bigger than London with a bigger population. They’ve seen, in the middle of the CBD (Central Business District), they’ve seen scavenging by two species of mongoose, amongst other things. So these animals are coming in. You can’t be excluding them. It’s much better to just say, “Let’s look at what’s happening in forensic cases. Put bodies down and just see what happens and then we can build from there.” That should be our baseline. And that I think is really that’s one of the core impetuses of what we’re trying to do is to bring it back to that realism.

Otherwise, it’s not going to be as useful and as impactful as it should be and could be.

Victoria Gibbon: Yeah, one thing I just want to add to that is I remember one of the projects we were working on we had nude pigs. Unclothed. And I remember saying, “but we never find nude bodies. They’re so rare. So why are we doing this?” And then we started doing the clothed project and we actually compared the data on clothing and unclothing, but also clothing changes the ecology, right? Because it changes where insects go, how insects can access, how scavengers can access, it changes their behavior, it changes then the decomposition across the body.

And so, then Alan Morris, at that time he was retired, and I remember he said but the clothes have to fit the pigs like they fit people. And so, then we had to get a seamstress, and we did an entire review of the clothing types that we get in cases, the most common things that we see. Cotton t-shirts. We don’t see a lot of polyesters. So, what are the most common things? So, we have an entire clothing set-up that is based on a review of casework. Then we go and buy our clothing in on the same day for all of the experiments, across all the seasons, and we buy it from the most common everyday person store in South Africa. So, we buy from Ackermans or Pep, and so that we are replicating accurately what people would wear and everyday clothes, and then we take them to the seamstress, and we’ve created a pattern, took measurements of the pigs, and where they change a lot is in the pants. So, the way the bum fits in the pants and the tapered little legs, but even in our winter one, so when we do a winter season, we’ve got winter clothes. So, they’ve got a sweater on, a t-shirt on, a belt, they’ve got jeans or denims and then they have little baby socks and baby shoes on. And in summer we were going to put flip-flops. We realized that’s kind of counterintuitive because they just fall off, so we don’t put anything on the feet and summer. And in summer, they also have on denims or jeans and then they just have a cotton t-shirt. And they wear underwear. We get them nice new fresh underwear and everything. And then on the day, because of the way the pants fit on the body, we actually sew up the seat of the pants on the pig on the day.

And so, we sew them right up the back end. And so, then they are tailored perfectly to the body just like our clothes are tailored to us, which prevent a barrier for animals, for example, to scurry at the leg and get in. And so those tapered pants that fit them like they do us is important. Now these kinds of nuances in our research, I think sometimes get lost in the publications, but I think we should talk about them. So, I just wanted to raise that we do actually have seamstresses that, over many years now, who have helped us prepare clothes for pigs.

And also, the other thing I wanted to talk about here is the fact that we talk about forensic realism, but then we use pigs, which, of course, aren’t real. What we set out to do, and in South Africa at the moment, it’s not legal to use donor human bodies in this kind of research outdoors. Look, and we are looking at trying to move in that direction. But I also have a fundamental block on the realism of donor bodies in general because who donates their body to science do not match the people who end up being in forensic cases. They don’t match in age. They don’t necessary match in gender, and they most importantly do not match in health. So, the majority…and we know that that affects the ecology, because animals that are sickly, other animals don’t want to eat sick animals. So, if we use donor bodies and the person is elderly and has maybe even been on medicines and all of that, those bodies — and this speaks to what was said earlier — that they emanate smells, like embalmed bodies, that are very different than what is natural. And the majority of people who end up in forensic investigations in South Africa tend to be younger men. And they don’t tend to be elderly, sickly people. They tend to be typically physically healthy young men. And so, using donor bodies, I’m not sure is a perfect analog, either way.

So, I’m not saying that pigs are a good analog or the best analog, but I don’t think having a donor farm in South Africa would replace pig research. I think we need to be able to control how the animal died. Being able to control all the circumstances around the death and the termination to make them as forensically accurate as possible. And not have to worry about all these other influences that people really aren’t controlling for in human donor body farms.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, I think that what Devin said before about the approximation, we’re approaching, and we may spend lifetimes approaching and it may just be an approach.

Victoria Gibbon: Absolutely.

Yvonne Kjorlien: We’re just you continually refining an approximate, and if that’s as good as we get, then that’s as good as we get. But I think you bring up a valuable point that there are so many variables that either we’re taking for granted, we’re overlooking or we’re not accounting for.

Victoria Gibbon: Exactly.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah.

Victoria Gibbon: Absolutely, and then the other part of it is, when I started this work and recently we were kind of called out on this, in my mind, my big sales pitch was time since death, right? So, we’re helping improve time since death (estimates). But actually, over the years, I think that it’s not really about time since death. It’s really about the nuances of how bodies decompose and it’s those nuances that actually are more informative on the forensic lead. So, it’s not actually about the exact time since death. And now I’m no longer using that as my sales pitch. It’s about helping the police investigation on the ground, get started, and that time with that case where we had seen something with the mongoose and then we can apply it in a real case that improves our ability to recover the body fully. And also, I [end] up recovering personal belongings, which are quite diagnostic for individualization. So, it’s about the forensic leads, and it’s about these nuances that help us help the police get their forensic leads and run their investigation, which ultimately lead towards identification.

So, I used to think that forensic anthropology is really about us helping to identify the person. And over the years, I’ve realized, no, my role is to serve the police in improving investigative leads and to help with their investigative process. And so, with W4C, or the Western Cape Cold Case Consortium, that’s our drive. We are trying to, through forensic science, improve forensic outcomes for, not just the police and forensic pathology services, but for the decedent, their families, and the loved ones who have no closure. And so, how can we improve closure? Through science. And how can we facilitate that? But meanwhile still be doing interesting, exciting, innovative science as scientists.

So, it’s the twofold, where we’re at now.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Nice. Devin, I’m gonna hand this back to you.

Devin Finaughty: That was a very mic-drop-moment from Vicky. I’m not sure how I can add to that. So eloquent! And maybe I can sort of just hone-in on some really specific examples…

Yvonne Kjorlien: Sure, yes.

Devin Finaughty… that really illustrate what Vicky was saying. So, if we go back to the case that Vicky mentioned before, about the case that we did on Table Mountain, where we were… we didn’t have to recover the decedent’s hands or the jewelry or the watch. In that case, the police really had a pretty good idea of who the decedent was and we often say it’d be really helpful if people died with their identity documents. And in this case, that was (the case); the person had their wallet, their driver’s license, IDs, passports, everything. So that wasn’t the question. And this speaks to Vicky point, which is our role there wasn’t to facilitate identification. The police, I mean the remains were skeletonized, so we had to do an osteobiographical profile because the decedent could have those items associated, but they’re not primary identifiers, so you still have to do that. But in that case, I think our role much more fundamentally was giving the whole of the decedent back to their family. So, bringing them together as a person, making them whole, and then giving them back to their family.

I spent five years working in the UK just before returning to South Africa. I worked at the University of Kent. And one of my colleagues was in the London Metropolitan Police for 30 years. And we spoke about lots of cases that they worked on. And in the UK, red kites are prominent scavengers of remains, especially in rural areas. And they carry pieces of the body off and they never recover them. And my colleague said to me a lot of families are really upset by that. Even if the finger missing, and even if… There are some families where there are cultural rights that cannot be concluded because the body is not whole, but even if that’s not the case, you still want all of your loved one.

And, the work we’re doing, looking at the mongoose in our context, and very much the work you’re doing in Canada, looking at the scattering patterns there. There’s so much important work within that, that isn’t related to identity, but is just about the ethics of the work that we do and restoring dignity in death, both to the decedent and giving complete closure to the families. And that really needs to be – and should be – one prominent things that underpins our work. And we very much have that close at heart.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Thank you for that because, Vicky, I love that you have refocused not on the identification, and more on the outcomes and being of service to the investigators and their outcomes, and also the ethical issues of closure and giving that back to the families. The reason that I’ve kind of framed our work in terms of the identification and increased recovery of the amount of remains so that closure may be possible, etc., is because just that it’s almost like the families need to drive the ethics of having closure and getting their loved ones back as complete as possible, because the investigators are that middle piece in there, where as long as they can get the identification and get the evidence they need for the case, that’s good for them. But what’s good for them, may not be good enough for the family. And so even as us on the other side where we’re in service to both the investigators and the families, even though we want to eventually appease the families and their desire for closure, we have that the investigators in between, they’re saying, “You know what? I just need an identification and enough evidence to serve my case.” So how do you negotiate that?

Victoria Gibbon: So, this is a trickier space and I think and in the South African environment, probably quite different, Yvonne, than what you experience in Canada, just because of mass. So, for example, with 300 people being unidentified in our local mortuary per year, the police have far less capacity to actually give each case the same amount of energy that it actually needs or desires. And that’s not because they don’t want to do it. It’s because there’s just no more hours in the day and …

Yvonne Kjorlien: It’s capacity.

Victoria Gibbon: it is absolutely capacity. And so, anything that we can do to help them in their casework, they will run with it, but it doesn’t mean that there isn’t a role. And actually, with W4C currently, we have done these five cold cases and we’ve put a lot of science into them and we are struggling to get them identified with the police. We have big campaigns and we’re doing everything we can. But one of the things that’s coming up is we had what we thought was a probable ID and it turns out that it wasn’t the right person. And that has created this new engagement with this family around giving them hope that this could be their missing loved one for years, and then having to go back to them, after creating hope and saying, “I’m sorry, but this isn’t yours.” But then having to… it opened the door for them to communicate to us what it’s like to be on the family side. And to just be totally unaware of where your loved one is and how desolate that can feel for them. And they are now saying to us, “How can we help you identify these people and us, and help you and you help us?”

And so one of the things that this family has said is, “I’m going to do a radio interview and I’m going to talk about my experience and we’re gonna talk about what options are available out there because, while this didn’t lead to my loved one being this person, it’s someone’s loved one”. And so, there’s so much empathy and power actually for these en masse in South Africa, which I think is untapped for these families to actually move together and to push for changes in legislation.

So currently in South Africa forensic science is not forced in any case. It’s not legislated. It’s at the discretion of the pathologist if they want a forensic scientist involved. That could change. Now, if government mandated forensic science to be involved in every single case…so the forensic pathologist always does their role like that is part of their mandate but additional forensic scientific methods are not mandated. So if they were mandated in legislation, we instantly create jobs, when you have jobs, you have people, people with forensic scientists who can pick up that capacity that the current investigation in South Africa can’t carry.

And so now we’ve started to talk about, and even in W4C, we started to try to figure out what are our gaps in identification locally, and what are challenges. And the number one thing that came up — sorry Yvonne, this is kind of taking us in a different direction — but the number one thing that I went into the project thinking was that my science was going to bring a solution. And when we started talking to people on the ground, the number one thing that the people involved — the police, the pathologists — they said there’s a disconnect between the missing person’s form that people fill out at the police station and the unidentified body form that’s filled out at the mortuary. So, these two forms do not speak to each other and therefore their ability to match. And so, then I started looking into these forms. And I originally went provincially and the head of detectives was like, “you’re never going to change the national forms, like forget it.” And I just got the hell in and started making some calls to people I knew in the police and I said, “I need to know who I can contact here,” And sure enough I was able to get a phone number for somebody who’s in the national detectives. And when I called him, explained who I was — and my friend who’s a cop told me all the things not to say and what to say — and so I opened with who I am, and I said, “I was wondering if I could help partner, and help the police improve their missing persons form.” And he was first was like, “no, our forms are fine.” And then I pointed out some really problematic aspects on the form, which I’m not going to repeat here on the podcast. But he was like, “no, it doesn’t say that.” I said, “it does say that. Just pull it up.” And then he was like, “Uh oh.”

And the form, I just found out this week, has been rolled out for pilot in two provinces. So, we’ve totally revised these two forms and they now speak to each other. They are all PDF driven. They’re form-fillable. They’re very transformative, and I’m hoping they get through. And if they get through, they will be the first police missing forms internationally that have non-binary as an option and the…how do we improve… and so then the next step for me is to go back to my electrical engineering friends and say, “can we run an honors project on how to make these PDF forms into [an] app for the police?” And then the data is filled in real time and not having a 30-day delay to be manually filled out and manually entered. And the forms were 12 pages long and now are only seven pages. So, the ability for someone who’s grief-stricken to fill out a missing person’s form is also reduced for both the police officer and for the family member.

And so sometimes, I guess one of the things I just want to say here, is that while we do think our science is informative and I do believe the science we do is good. Sometimes asking people on the ground what would be the biggest difference in improving identification rate? They have solutions that actually, like in this case, it was just an administrative aspect of reworking a form, that in few years, I’m hoping we will actually see an improvement in the matches between missing persons and unidentified bodies in South Africa. And it’s probably going to be the most impactful thing I ever do in my career…

Yvonne Kjorlien: It’ll be completely unresearch-related.

Victoria Gibbon: Exactly! It’s like basically. I was a secretary for the police. I redid their form. So, I do think that these nuances and our impact, we need to be thinking about our power and privilege within the research space, within the university space, to make and affect a real change on the ground. And that’s by having conversations with people on the ground, the police, the pathologist, and the families.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Absolutely. Wow. And, you know what? Yeah, I agree. That’s probably gonna be the most impactful thing that you will be remembered for, and you will ever do; however, yes, it was because of your research the position that you hold and your network that you were able to do that. right and no.

Victoria Gibbon: Yeah, I also think that I’ll never really like I brought it up here, but it’s not the kind of thing you can publish, right? So, it also not something I’ll really be known for, it’s just something I’ll know I did myself. I told you two. Up and…I can’t say I did it all myself. There was a three of us who worked on it together, but it’s interesting.

Yvonne Kjorlien: I’m conscious of the time so, Devin, I’m gonna give it back to you because I think future directions is kind of where you’re at right now with your little switch into wildlife taphonomy. So, if you want to talk a little bit about that and where you kind of see that taking you in the next, maybe five to ten years.

Devin Finaughty: Sure. So, the first thing I want to say is to 100% agree with what Vicky’s just said. My wife and I just met with someone here, we’re up in the Waterberg, in northern South Africa at the moment. And we met with someone who represents one of the local security clusters. And it was just a meet and greet. The take-home message from that conversation – we wanted to know about what is poaching like up here and that – and the take home message was… my wife and I want to want to help, right? We want to take the knowledge and skill and experience that we have in human forensics and apply to the wildlife forensic space. Because a lot of what we do — the forensic taphonomy, the forensic entomology — my wife as a forensic geneticist that specializes in degraded DNA — that isn’t being used in a wildlife forensic space and we feel like there’s something that we could add there. We’re not coming in to tell people what they’re doing wrong at all. We’re just trying to find out how we can help them improve investigative outcomes.

Because, I mean, you’ve heard from our conversation that the missing persons problem that we’ve got is up to 10,000 people a year, which is a catastrophe. And we’ve got a similar problem in wildlife forensics. Although the problem there is very, very poor prosecution rate. So, the National Prosecuting Authority in South Africa is very proud of the fact that they’ve got a 96% prosecution rate, and they should absolutely be proud of that. It’s fantastic. But less than 10% of the cases that are actually brought to the prosecutor make it to trial. And it’s mainly for want of evidence.

So, we have this conversation today basically saying we’re here to help, and the take home message from that is: relationship building. We need to go out. We need a build relationships with all the stakeholders, with the community members, with the local police, with the local farm owners, all of that. We’re not going to be able to do anything if we don’t do that. And I think that really underscores what Vicky had said, which is, regardless of what forensics you’re doing, especially when you’re operating — we’re “pracacademics”, right? We’re doing practical work, but we’re also doing the research. But both of those things ultimately need to serve the stakeholders, at the end of the day. And there are two ways of dealing with the stakeholders. There’s the top-down way of saying we’re the knights in shining armor coming to solve all your problems, this is what we’re going to do, versus we see you’re struggling, you need help. We’re here to help. How can help? And it’s a subtle but very important change of approach that we’re seeing same in the wildlife forensic side.

So, where I’m going now is I’m not leaving taphonomy or the entomology that I do — so I do the forensic taphonomy and entomology together because they go hand in hand together — but as I said, I’m trying to bring that into the wildlife forensic space. I’m also trying to understand very much — what Vicky has just been doing where she’s trying to get to the bottom of what are some of the root causes for the lack of human identification — I’m trying to get to the bottom of why are so few cases actually making it to the prosecutor’s office.

There’s lots of anecdotal information about: oh, that’s a lack of evidence, the police are not collecting things on scene for variety of reasons, I mean straight back to the resourcing point that Vicky brought up. There’s a small team, we learned today that there’s a small team of people to cover an entire province. Poaching scenes can be four to five hundred kilometers apart. The team simply cannot travel all of those distances to multiple scenes and hope to collect evidence. And then there’s quite a good intelligence community here looking at, if an event happens, they can often track the gang that’s perpetrated and say, ”Let’s go and grab them,” then they go and arrest them but then they can’t tie them back to the scene because they never took the time to process the scene. So, they’re held for 48 hours and then they’re released, and the cycle perpetuates. So there needs to be some capacity-building. But how do you… that capacity building is gonna have to come on policy side, right? The state has to devote more resources. Straight back to what Vicky said. You can’t motivate for that policy if you don’t have data. You can bring all the anecdotal information to parliament that you want. They’re just going to shrug their shoulders and say, “that’s what they say.” I’m very keen to establish some hard data on the efficacy of our current forensic practice; I can’t for the entire country, because South Africa is a big country and the nature of wildlife crime is very different depending on what province you’re in. The Western Cape, where Vicky is, doesn’t have a major problem with poaching of, say, rhinos and elephants because they’re very few there, but it’s got a huge problem with marine poaching, particularly of abalone and of succulent poaching. That’s completely different and I need an entire lifetime to do all of those different things, or multiple lifetimes I should say. So, I’m interested in doing it for Bushveld and Lowveld areas of South Africa. Just understanding what’s happening in these areas. And then hopefully bringing some more tools to the table.

So, I’m quite interested in bringing forensic entomology into the space, partly to add additional lines of evidence. So, much like the human cases that Vicky has mentioned, where time since death/post-mortem interval isn’t a major query much of the time, but if you can have that, you can use that to help to link people to scenes, that’s useful. And forensic entomology is, to this day, still the most accurate way of estimating time since death, regardless of what’s died. It just is. But I can’t take the protocols for collecting entomological evidence that we use for human scenes and hope to apply them to wildlife crime scenes because it’s a totally different context. We’re talking about rangers potentially trekking 20, 30 kilometers on foot.

Now they’ve got to sample insects at the scene and bring them back. How do they bring them back alive, number one, and two, in temperature control conditions where I don’t have them carrying — even five extra kilograms of weight over 30 kilometers is a lot because that could be five liters of water for them when it’s 40 degrees Celsius. But you can’t figure any of this out if you’re not going to the scene. So very much like what I was doing with forensic entomology human cases, where I was going to scenes with forensic pathologists at their invitation, or their officers, and just seeing what was happening and trying to figure out — how can I optimize the existing protocols for your circumstance? Our forensic pathologists in South Africa, for example, can’t take boiling water or ethanol to scenes; they’re not allowed to. So you gotta come up with a different way of, you can’t preserve the insects on the scene. You have to bring them back to mortuary, but then you’ve got to account for growth and all sorts of things. So we have to tailor it. That’s one of the aspects that I’m doing is developing and optimizing those protocols for rangers.

The other reason I’m doing it is because one of the primary sources of mass mortality poaching in South Africa is the use of poisoning. So, using things like cyanide or glycophosphate. And water holes get poisoned, so, herds of animals -anything – that comes to drink from that waterhole dies. And then a much more worrying recent trend, particularly in the Lowveld area of South Africa is that poaching gangs are poisoning the carcasses of animals that they’ve killed. So, they kill a rhino, they de-horn it, and then they poison that carcass because the vultures that come to feed in the carcass are a beacon to the security operatives to say, there’s a case there, a potential case, and they make a beeline. And obviously the poachers want as much time as they can get to get away from the scene. So, they’re just poisoning the carcasses to kill the vultures to remove that beacon. And some of our vulture species in South Africa, just in the last five years, have gone from vulnerable to critically endangered as a result of this practice. And the Environmental Management Inspectorate is really struggling to get on top of this because the post-mortem samples that they’re taking from the carcasses, they’re not able to identify what the toxins are in many cases, and even if they are, they have no idea what the concentration is. So, when I said to them, “but have you sampled the maggots that are feeding on the body?” Because then you are [looking at] volatile organic compounds that are being amplified by the same process and you’re just looking at that and they said, “oh no, can you do that?” I said, “yes, here’s the literature that says you can do this.” “Oh, we’d love to do that!” “Great. You need the protocols first.” So that’s another reason to develop those protocols.

And then we also just need baseline developmental data for the forensically relevant species that we’re dealing with, because we have very limited coverage for the northern part of South Africa. The last concerted forensic entomological work that took place north of Pretoria was in the 80s and climate change is real. And we know the developmental biology of insects, which are poikilothermic ecototherms, is very intrinsically linked to temperature. We’ve seen this in one of the species that’s invasive to South Africa, [Calliphora vicina] that comes from the northern hemisphere. In the 70s and 80s, there were a handful of records. Now, they are the dominant species on human forensic cases and wildlife forensic cases in the cooler months of the year South Africa, the dominant species.

But that species wasn’t around 20 years ago in the numbers that it is now. So, we’ve got these species that we could potentially use, but the whole basis of forensic entomology is you need to understand their developmental timelines. So, you need the data for that. So, I plan to sample those species from their locales and do prospective laboratory experimentation to update the developmental standards for a selection of species. I can’t do them all. Far too many. And again, I have a… my contract is for two years, not 10 years. We’ll see what we can do in the two years. But that’s really what I’m doing at least for the next two years, and the hope is that that will continue to grow into continued work in the wildlife forensic space. And hopefully bring to bear some improved outcomes, much the same as Vicky is trying to do with W4C.

Yvonne Kjorlien: I am feeling so honored and privileged to share airtime with you, both of you at the moment. You are doing such amazing work. You’re both so passionate and you’re asking some fundamental questions about the root of why things are happening the way they’re happening and how to change that. And I am beyond honored to share the space with you. Thank you for coming on the podcast. Wow.

Vicky, future directions for you?

Victoria Gibbon: Yeah, so with forensic taphonomy, Devin and I currently have a new project. We’ve deployed some pigs about six weeks ago, and it’s the first time we’ve deployed on Table Mountain, which is the second most common bioecoclimatic zone we find bodies. And the majority of the bodies that come on Table Mountain, die from stab wounds. And so, it’s the first time we’ve actually done trauma on bodies in — and so pig bodies — and they are clothed and what we — just as hashtag watch this space — but the untraumatized versus the traumatized decompose very differently. And I guess that’s not really surprising. It’s what we hypothesized. We thought we were going to get a lot of scavengers. Hashtag none yet. So, we’re a bit disappointed there. So, we’ve got this season, now it’s winter for us, and we’ve had a wicked one so far, so things are unique and interesting. And then we’ll do a summer deployment and we’ll go from there. So that’s where I’m at right now with taphonomy. And with W4C, we will continue in our drive to try and assist on the ground and we are revealing more and more every day how we can help in different and unexpected ways within the system and work within the system. So that’s where we’re at.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Wow. Several lifetimes’ work cut out for both of you. I wish well you on that. Especially on a two-year contract, Devin.

Victoria Gibbon: And I did want to say, Devin, how nice it was to hear you speaking and also seeing that, again, like what I said earlier, we both go into this work thinking our science is the solution, but actually it’s the way that we have moved towards our approach and the approach that we develop to forensic science that actually is movable into both the wildlife forensic space and in the human space because it ends up being, I think that’s the most important thing that our impact will be is really how we approach and hear from the ground to change the way we, our role and also the policy. So, it’s identifying the problem and then trying to do the policy change. It was so nice to hear you talk about that too. And Yvonne, thank you so much for creating this space for us and it’s been such a pleasure for us as well.

Devin Finaughty: Thank you, Yvonne. It’s been wonderful. And I also just want to say for the record that I have learned an incredible amount from Vicky. I mean, she’s complimenting me here, but it goes back tenfold. Vicky has been an amazing mentor to me. I couldn’t ask for better, and I mean that sincerely. And I would encourage all the young scientists to find someone, to find their Vicky, that can help guide them and grow them. As that’s my hashtag advice for the day.

Victoria Gibbon: Thanks so much, Devin. I do think that we work well together, we’re complementary, Yvonne, and that’s also I think a big thing about being a good scientist is recognizing you can’t do it all on your own and figuring out the people who can complement and together you can do a lot more with additional skills, then you can do on your own and that’s definitely true for Devin and I.

Devin Finaughty: 100%

Yvonne Kjorlien: Absolutely.

Transcribed by Google

View Details

Janet Young is a curator of biological anthropology at the Canadian Museum of History, focusing on human skeletal collections. As a curator, she acts as a subject matter expert and bridges museum collections with research and exhibits for public knowledge.

In this episode we talk about:

Janet’s journey to becoming a curator.
How she became involved in the excavation of the 19th century Barrack Hill Cemetery in Ottawa during infrastructure works in 2013-2017.
How records can help trace the movement of remains discarded or moved when the land was developed.
Janet’s research to understand the lives of individuals through skeletal analysis and comparisons to historical records.
Occupation markers, sometimes discernible from skeletal markers left by activities like mercury exposure for hat makers.
Reburials of excavated remains.
How perspectives on treatment of human remains have changed.

You can contact Janet through the Canadian Museum of History: https://www.historymuseum.ca/learn/research/#close

Janet’s blog about her discoveries in the Barrack Hill Cemetery, The Bone Detective: https://www.historymuseum.ca/blog/bone-detective-introduction/

You can visit the remains of the Barrack Hill Cemetery at Beechwood: https://www.beechwoodottawa.ca/en/foundation/history/barrack-hill-cemetery-beechwood

Notes from the start

The first of the 2022-23 Saskatchewan videos of the Scavenging Study are up: https://yvonnekjorlien.com/scavenging-study/

I’ll place the mapping video here too once it’s finished — hopefully soon!

Contact me through ykjorlien@gmail.com or through my contact form. Follow me on Facebook at The Reluctant Archaeologist, or through Instagram @yvonnekjorlien

Do you have a suggestion for a topic on the Scattered podcast?

Do you have a question about working with human remains?

Drop me a note at ykjorlien@gmail.com

Transcript

Yvonne Kjorlien: All So Janet, I’m gonna get you to say who you are and where you work in your role because I don’t want to mess it up.

Janet Young: Yeah, my name is Janet Young. I am the curator of biological anthropology at the Canadian Museum of History.

Yvonne Kjorlien: What does that mean that you are a curator? Let’s delve into that a little bit.

Janet Young: So a curator is someone who is the subject matter expert for different fields. So we have curators history, archeology, ethnology. So there’s a number of curators that work at the Museum and our role is to steward collections and work on projects for the general public, work on exhibits. So sort of the bridge between the content of the holdings of the museum and the public, is bringing that information, and doing research to add to the public knowledge about a certain subject matter.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Wow, and you’ve been there a long time.

Janet Young: Okay, so yes, I’ve been there a long time. I‘ve been there 30 years. The first — this is one of those things — that when I talk to students, I always say, you’re not gonna get the job at the top right away. So I started as a volunteer after I did my Master’s and it wasn’t even in my field, but I started volunteering at the Museum and eventually I made my way over to the physical anthropology section and then I started getting contracts and so I got a series of contracts for about seven years and then they created a position for me and then I worked in that first several years and then the curator of physical anthropology at the time retired and I ended up with his position. So if students ever come to me and say how did you get this position? It’s a lot of sticking to it and not giving up. And just doing your best to get your foot in the door and then working your way up. So yeah, it’s been 30 years. But as you’re trying to work your way into a position the time goes fast, so it’s not so bad.

Yvonne Kjorlien: And what is your educational background?

Janet Young: So I have an undergraduate degree in ancient history and archeology. My Master’s is from England, so it’s Masters of Science in human osteology, paleopathology and funerary archeology. And then I came back home and I started working at the museum and at that time I did my PhD in population health. And even though it’s a subject that is very much modern day and related to modern populations, the program allowed me to work on past populations. So it was a good fit for me at the time.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Nice. Yeah, those people in biological anthropology. We always seem to have very diverse backgrounds.

Janet Young: I know, right? You kind of find your way, find your path. When I first started, when I left high school many moons ago, I wanted to work in archeology and so, you end up on the circuitous path, through different programs and when I was done, I didn’t know what to do. So at that point there was really no computers. So you went to The Graduate Studies Center and you started looking through pamphlets to see what was interesting and I found one on human remains and that was it for me. That’s exactly what I wanted to do. And so yeah, it just starts on a path, but I think for a lot of people in archeology or in biological anthropology, it’s a circuitous path that really find what you’re interested in. So.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, and I find it’s not one of those I guess subjects that isn’t really talked about well in high school number one, so when you’re going into university and trying to figure out what you want to do for the rest of your life because everybody does that when they’re 17, they know exactly what they want to do for the rest of their life and then when you get to university, who talks about death and bodies and human remains like it’s just

Janet Young: Yeah, yeah, for mine it was classical archeology. So it was like here’s a pot, here’s a Roman pot, here’s another Roman pot and here. And so I knew very quickly that that’s not something I wanted to do. But I did take a death and dying class that of sort of piqued my interest in the subject matter and trying to understand how that worked not just now but in the past as well, so it’s sort of piqued my interest for that aspect of archeology that no one had into really introduced me at that point, so.

Yvonne Kjorlien: How did you start working with the Barrick Hill Cemetery?

Janet Young: So it’s really interesting. Well, I think it’s interesting. So when I was working on another project, someone from down the hall was actually the curator of Ontario archeology called me into their office and told me that was I aware of the excavations that were happening in downtown, Ottawa? So we knew that there was a cemetery there for a long time and so, I didn’t at the time, but someone that we both knew, his office overlooked the site, and so that’s who called my colleague. And so that’s really how I found out more details and then I had worked with the police quite a bit. So I reached out to the head of the Ident unit to say, I don’t know if you’re aware, but there is a cemetery there from the 1800s. And so at that point I was put in contact with the archaeologist on the site and we just established working a relationship. And the museum came in to an agreement with the city and so the city allowed it to be my research project and the museum gave me the time to do all the work.

So I was actually down on the site for two summers with the excavation crew. And it’s very odd when you’re… the first site was in one of the main roads in downtown Ottawa, so you’re below road level and there’s people walking by on the sidewalk, but they’re screened off. So you can see normal life going back and forth and you’re basically sitting in the middle of a cemetery. So I came at it, from, I don’t say haphazardly, but I was lucky enough to know enough people in and around the area that informed me of this project and I was allowed to be a part of it, which I really appreciated.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Tell me a little bit about the cemetery itself. So it sounds like downtown Ottawa was built upon this cemetery. And did they know that it was there when they had built up downtown and then what led to then the excavation of the cemetery?

Janet Young: So what happened was…okay, so it’s really an interesting story about how historical cemeteries are used.

So when Colonel By came to the region to build the canal, he had a lot of people, an influx of workers. So he came here in 1826. Canal construction started around 1827. So there was an influx of workers. There was really nothing on that side of the Ottawa River. On the other side of the Ottawa River, there was a lumber industry already but on our side of the Ottawa River there wasn’t anything. So when Colonel By came to town then he started bringing people in, people were hired to do different aspects of the construction. And then there was an infrastructure that came in around these people, so hotels were built and stores were built and stuff like that. So what happened was Colonel By was given the land that Lord Dalhousie had purchased. So it was a bunch of land where the Parliament Hill is today and then into Lower Town. Below that area, the land was owned by Nicholas Spar who was a former lumber yard worker. When Colonel By was doing the canal. he wanted land on either side of the canal so he purchased it. But then he also wanted the land below, what is now Parliament Hill, which is Nicholas Sparks’ land, because they were worried about creating a fortress or something should the Americans attack again, because it was a byproduct of the War of 1812. So what happened was he took 88 acres from Nicholas Sparks.

Yvonne Kjorlien: He just took it.

Janet Young: He just took it. I know they passed the Rideau Canal Act that said basically if you need any land for the Rideau Canal you can take it. And he made the excuse that the land was going to be used as a place to hold water, to help with the workings of the canal. Which was basically a lie. So he took the land. So in those early days, there was no settlers cemetery on the south side of the Ottawa River. People would be ferried over to the other town on the North side, but there was really nothing on the south side. So Colonel By gave, or set aside acreage, for a cemetery that was actually on Nicholas Sparks’ land that he had expropriated. So basically where the cemetery was below Parliament Hill, on a little walking path that went from upper Bytown at the time to lower Bytown. So it’s right in the middle and it was right beside a cedar swamp. So he allowed the cemetery to be created.

We really know nothing about the cemetery other than some of the burial records, but we really know nothing. Nicolas Sparks fought to get his land back and fought to get his land back. So in the late 1840s, he actually got his land back. And so, yeah, I know. It was a very long legal battle. He started almost immediately and he hired a lawyer and fought to get his land back. And so, the cemetery was still there and it’s right in the middle of this prime land, between upper and lower by town. So we started doing was selling lots in and around the area. And then he sold for very cheap price, land that was used for an upper Bytown Market. And we see little breadcrumbs in the newspaper about he paved this road or they made this road going through. So the remains were found on Queen Street. So about in 1851, I think, we have something in the paper saying that they put Queen Street through to the market which means they put a street right over the burial ground.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Oh!

Janet Young: So we start seeing that and it doesn’t look like the cemetery was ever moved. It looks like people who had money and could see what was happening, moved their loved ones. But there was never any formal moving of the cemetery. To the point where, in the 18– I want to say 1854, around there, people who are poor, who were in Bytown, petitioned the city to pay someone to remove the remains of their loved ones because they were becoming exposed in the area of this road. So, we know for a fact that the cemetery was not moved in any formal way.

And so the city just built up around it. Like Nicholas Sparks kind of just didn’t want it to be there anymore. So they just started, selling off lots and creating all these different infrastructure and then people just forgot that it was there. Basically, that’s what happened. Yeah.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Huh. But it sounds like it was used for what, 15, 20 years or so.

Janet Young: Mmm.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah? okay.

Janet Young: It was about I estimate that it opened in the spring, I think, of 1828, the cemetery. And it was closed around 1843. So not even 20 years.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right, okay.

Janet Young: So yeah, and they said it was two acres when closed? So, it was pretty big. Pretty big site.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Okay. And how many individuals do you figure at its maximum? Maybe…

Janet Young: Think the archaeologists thought about 500–

Yvonne Kjorlien: Really? Okay.

Janet Young: –at the time. And we only have small pockets of people and the cemetery was disturbed, starting in the 1870s, so maybe 20 years after it was paved over. People started finding bodies as the infrastructure was being put in.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Okay. So I guess it was just more of a natural urban process to build up over this cemetery.

Janet Young: Yeah, they just wanted to forgotten.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Wow, okay. then…

Janet Young: — which is sad, but it’s just, a lot of historic cemeteries have the same thing: take the way the headstones and just pave over.

Yvonne Kjorlien: So then, what were they doing that there was this excavation going on in the middle of the street and when you got involved. What kind of prompted all that?

Janet Young: Ottawa was putting in the infrastructure for a light rail service —

Yvonne Kjorlien: Ah!

Janet Young: — which runs now underneath Queen Street. But they were doing infrastructure work replacing water mains on Queen Street itself so that area is basically right through the middle of the cemetery and when they when they dug for to put in the water main, they hit bodies, basically, and then They called the police because that’s what you’re supposed to do when you hit bodies. And it went to, there’s the Ontario government, and when it was deemed to cemetery then the archaeologists that they hired had to go and enter an agreement between the city, the province, and anyone who was identified as a descendant.

The Ontario government put an ad in the local paper asking if you think you are descendant of these individuals, could you please come forward and speak for them. One person came forward, and she was not sure whether her ancestor had been moved or not. And so in the end she found out that they had been moved, so she was really not part of the process after that and the churches stepped in.

So the churches who had buried individuals in the cemetery — it was a settler cemetery, it was multi-denominational. So the heads of those churches became the representatives of the individuals.

So it was the representatives the City of Ottawa, the Province, and the archeology company who came to an agreement and I became part of that agreement for work on the individuals.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Okay. Yeah, it’s no small undertaking to excavate a cemetery.

Janet Young: No, it is not and I’m so happy that the archaeologists knew exactly what to do and how to do it because the remains were first discovered in late 2013, but they were not completely, they were not removed or excavations did not progress until the following summer. So it took, like, months to get everything.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Do you have any idea — I know you came later in the process — so I don’t know if you know this, but were they expecting to dig up bodies? Because I can only imagine the poor person on the excavator, just merrily digging away and then suddenly ‘What is in my bucket?’

Janet Young: I think what happened was the city had done a sort of an archaeological, it’s a sort of a report to say if you’re going to hit any archaeological sites, the city had done that. They were told that there was a cemetery there, but it probably been moved. So there was no expectation of finding anybody. And so I think it was a shock when they did. Obviously. But it’s funny because the whole site is crossed with construction events. So there’s a water main trench and then there’s a trench for Bell and then Rogers had done a trench line through the site, but they had dug at night. So when they dug at night, they did their trench they put their cement in and everything. So we were finding human remains on the underside of those cement conduits because they’re digging at night so they didn’t see. And so the fact that they were digging in the day and then they find something large enough that is recognizable to a construction worker? It was enough for them to stop the process. And then anytime there’s digging done in the area they have to have an archaeologist site to sort of watch them. And so the excavations at the site were actually… the Queen Street one was done one summer and the archaeologist had a map of the original downtown before there was buildings or anything. And there was one parking lot that had always been a parking lot. It had never been built upon, never been something else. To this day, it is still a parking lot. And so they’re thinking this is one place that’s not disturbed if anything ever happens we can excavate full individuals and not just truncated burials. And so what happened was the landowner got a permit from the city – I don’t know how — to do a trench for a gas line in the winter of 2016. And what did he do? He went right through a number of burials.

Yvonne Kjorlien: No.

Janet Young: And so, yes, yes. The pristine section. And so that’s why there was a second field season. In 2016, 2017 so that parking lot could be fully excavated but it was just supposed to be the street and then that happened. And then what happened — so if that’s not – so, and I don’t know who’s talking to who or if anyone’s talking to anyone, but for the LRT, they continued trenching down the road where the remains were found initially, so Queen Street. They kept going down the road. So you’re outside the boundaries of the cemetery at this point, all the way down the road. And they were still recovering human remains. And that’s because in the 1940s, a water main was put in down Queen Street and they were taking fill or dirt from the cemetery.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Oh.

Janet Young: And so they were depositing the people, basically remnants of the individuals all the way down Queen Street. So the archaeologists had it was something crazy like a hundred and sixty dump trucks full of earth, that they screened for human remains.

Yvonne Kjorlien: My God, that’s a lot.

Janet Young: Isn’t that a lot? Isn’t that crazy? I appreciate them so much. A lot of work. So the remains that we have for study were actually from those three events and the city is well aware of what’s in the area now and so they are very good about having an archaeologist on site when the construction crews go in to dig beneath the streets now.

Yvonne Kjorlien: You probably know more about that cemetery and about that area than they did back in the 1850s.

Janet Young: If it’s crazy about information that swimming in my head. Because it’s all a mystery. It’s like why does this happen? And you have to go through and you pull on that thread and you follow that mystery to figure out this or that or the other thing. I mean, it’s — and going through old newspapers and, to me it’s just fascinating to try and understand what happened. Why are these people left behind? What happened that the street could be put right over where they were? What happened? So it’s all a mystery and it’s one of the let’s see more interesting thing is to try and see if you can figure it all out. Yeah.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Let’s talk about some of what you found because I find it just fascinating and I’m hoping the listeners will too because you’ve got a blog, “Bone Detective” at historymuseum.ca so if anybody wants to search that, and I find your blogs are contain fascinating stuff so I was wondering if we could touch on some of them and if you’ve had some updates.

Janet Young: Yeah, so I mean obviously there’s lots of stories that have come out of the research and the reason why I initially wanted to do the blog series and the museum supported me, which is really great, was because it was ahead of the reburials and so the remains from that have been excavated have all now been reburied. So it was ahead of the last reburial. And what I really wanted to do is try to bring the people of Ottawa into that history that they might not otherwise know and about these individuals. And so I tried to cherry pick some of the individuals who I was able to do a lot of research on and I had sort of an interesting sort of connection to. And ones that, it’s like a blog series is what, I don’t know, 800, 1000 words. It’s really short, right? And you’re looking at it going, that is five years of work summarized in that little space.

So one of the individuals the one that was found to have all sorts of track marks — I don’t know another way to say it — on his remains and then perforations and then at this crusty substance that were in some of these perforations. And I was able to figure it out, but it took a really long time, you start with: is this something that the body is producing? Is it some for form of cancer? Is it something that he was experiencing? What’s the distribution? How do I see it? There was not a lot of complete skeletons at the site, and he had one of them which was very helpful, to look for distribution. So you start down that path and then you’re like, what are the accretions? Could it be a tumor? Could it be something from gout? Could it be… and so you start going through all of these ideas and then running them to ground and then you’re like, nope, that’s not it, nope, that’s not it.

And so it was really interesting because, when we first did the excavations, I had sent coffinwood off to be identified. And when the identification came back, he basically said “I can’t identify it because it’s bark.” And it was like, “what do you mean it’s bark?” And so I did that it just tuck that sort of information away. And then when I was studying this individual with all these changes on his skeleton, I remembered about the bark and so it occurred to me that it could be not something that he was doing, but something that was being done to him. So I actually did a lot of research and it came… the best solution to this mystery was that it was beetles. So because the bark in the coffins — and I have never found another reference to this. This is the only time… like I had to… there is no reference for this being done at all. And that is Ottawa was a lumber town, Bytown was a lumber town. And so they were taking the logs and they were squaring them in the mills. So they’re taking off the sapwood and the bark and squaring the logs. That sapwood and bark has no value. Even to this day, a whole truck full is 20 bucks. It has absolutely no value because these people in the cemetery were the lowest socioeconomic status, they were building their coffins out of these squarings. And they’re putting the bark side into the coffin so you wouldn’t be able to tell that they were basically the leftovers of the squaring industry. And so what happened was beetles, especially … there’s certain kind of beetles that were very prevalent in Ottawa because of the lumbering industry. They have a multi-year life cycle. So the eggs would have been laid, they would have taken these pieces and built his coffin and buried him. And then in the ground the beetle larvae would have emerged and the only food source was him.

And so the track marks and the perforations, if you look at a log underneath the bark, it’s all beetle activity where they’re eating the top layer of the bone. And then the perforations are where they are creating their nests. And the accretions that I send off for analysis and no one could identify? They’re actually frass. So that it’s basically the beetle poop that they used to line their nests.

And so that was what was in his bones. And so this is a multi-year process of speaking to lumber experts, to Ottawa valley experts about the timber industry, speaking to beetle experts from different places in the world, like trying to get all this information. And all that time and all these years have been put into a 500-word blog series. But it’s so cool, right? It’s one of those things, and that’s why I love doing this research, there’s no mention of it anywhere. It’s just one of those things that they were just doing because it was cheap and easy, but it wasn’t shared widely. It was nowhere in the literature. It’s nowhere. And I think that that one to me is super interesting. And that’s not the body reacting to it, but actually the beetles creating something on the body.

I mean, there’s other stories of identifying what people were doing for a living based on the remains and one of the main ones that I put in the blog series was the lady who was, we believed to be a milner, which was another one of those — she was the only one in the cemetery. She’s lying on her right side and she had a mat of hair that she was lying on. And so first we thought it was a horsehair pillow and I sent the hair off for identification and it came back as human. And so there was a lot of coffin wood that was stuck to it. So I peeled the coffin wood away, and you could see the styling, you could see the curls, you could see how it was pulled back over her ear. And so it ended up being her hair. And all so within her cranial vault there was a very soft, almost loamy, it’s almost dry peat moss, that was inside her cranial vault and I had it analyzed and it came back as brain. So yeah, she was the only one at the site who had preserved brain tissue and preserved hair. I was working with a scientist Parks Canada trying to figure out what is this and everything like that. Then I started noticing skeletal changes on her and and so I noticed her teeth lot of pockmarks in them. Where I have a tailor from the site, he has the same sort of thing from holding pins between your teeth, but it wasn’t to the same extent so I didn’t think she was really sewing anything.

And then she had these changes inside her knees, where the ACL attaches, anterior cruciate ligament attaches. And she had some grooves on the inside of a patella. So I knew that she was holding her legs at a 45 degrees to create the grooves in the patella and that she’s pulling her knees together, seated.

I did some research and this is exactly the position that a milner would take. So the milner would hold a head form between their knees while they worked on it. So that would explain the skeletal changes and dental changes that I was seeing. But, again, why does she have preserved brain tissue? And why does she have preserved hair? Originally, I thought maybe she was embalmed, but embalming really wasn’t a thing during the use of the cemetery, it didn’t really become a thing until after the Civil War, but we do know that those early embalming fluids contain mercury. So I was following sort of that thread of things and early milners, they’re all so termed hatters and in sort of Bytown or early Canada a lot of them were female. It was one of those occupations that females could hold at the time. And they would work with furs to create hats, and working with furs, they would use mercury. And so we know that mercury was used embalming so we know that it helps preserve tissue. So I did a bunch of research on the hatting industry and what they do actually crosses into the body. So she had a high degree of — I think it’s organic versus inorganic mercury — so it tells that she wasn’t ingesting it because inorganic mercury is not small enough to go into the hair. So it wasn’t like she was ingesting. It was being left, leaving her body through her hair as it grew what that wasn’t happening. It was being infused into the hair. And again with the milner industry, they would have a lot of mercury vapor. And so it was the vapors that were going into her hair and it would also cross the blood brain boundary when they inhale it. So that’s why you get mad as a hatter because they were inhaling the mercury. That would explain why her hair is preserved and her brain preserved and no one else at the site had it because she was a milner.

And so again lots of little threads that you have to keep pulling and so you follow a trail and you get some information that doesn’t really make sense and then you follow another trail and eventually all those pieces can come together to create a really good story. And so, I mean, those are just two of them. The cemetery was filled with really great stories and things that I don’t understand either. So I have a child who had dark circles inside their eye sockets. And so I thought, okay, they might have been buried with coins because the silver, as it deteriorates, could leave a dark staining inside their orbits. And then I had it sent off for testing. And it was burnt. And it was burnt and a really high level of heat. And so these were actually scorch marks, but they were just inside the eyes. So, I know! It’s like what is that?

Yvonne Kjorlien: My mind goes to strange and disturbed places with that.

Janet Young: I know! And I don’t know — is that something that happened postmortem? Obviously, the person wasn’t thrashing around when it happened. So is it some treatment postmortem? Is it — what is this? So even though I have some of these mysteries sort of solved there are still a number of them where it’s still, like, okay, I have to try and figure this out, but it’s very lengthy process to go through to try and do this. But I feel like for this population, that I want to try and tell all their stories fully so to me it’s worth the time and the effort to try and really understand who these people were and so, yeah. I mean, they’re mysteries in terms of they’re very interesting, but they’re also a story that’s there from this person and just to be able to really understand those stories and to tell them for other people I think is really important.

Yvonne Kjorlien: So on that note, what do you think that learning about these past populations gives us here now? What is the benefit of studying the past. I guess?

Janet Young: I think the benefit is to understand that, as a population or any population, you weren’t just sort of plopped somewhere. There’s people that came before. There’s people had really hard lives, that worked really hard to get us to a point in history where we are able to have what we have and do what we do, and I think for me — I live in Ottawa population of million people — just one person and I have so many stories. So it’s the idea that every person has a history, every person has a story to tell and I think that connecting us to the past through these stories, I think is important to ground us in our history. You know, yes, it was Bytown. Yes, they did this, I said this they did that, but to say, okay, there was this person here who worked really hard who exposed themselves to really harsh conditions just to survive. And to understand that those people – like, this is the first settler cemetery of Ottawa. These are the people that did most of the living and paying and dying in this town to create this town. They are the beginning of the nation’s capital population. And I think that for us to be able to respect them, respect those people in the past, we can only hope that we are respected the same in the future. That we are people throughout time. We’ve had our challenges and everyone’s story is different and to be able to connect people today to those stories, and understand what was sacrificed for them to be here and to be in this town, I think it’s really important.

And for Barrack Hill Cemetery, what has happened now, is that Beachwood Cemetery, which is the National Cemetery, has created a Barrack Hill Cemetery within their borders. And they do tours. And so all these stories that I’m able to decipher and provide them, are being passed down to all these individuals who go on these tours and try to understand the history of Ottawa and the history of the working class, even people — they’re not the people that had the money and had the power and they were the people that were there every single day working to survive. And so I think it’s important that we understand that. That we came from something, that everything around us was built by somebody else. And to appreciate that aspect of our lives today.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, we have a tendency to take things for granted. Don’t we?

Janet Young: Yes, we do.

Yvonne Kjorlien: It’s nice to be able to say, yeah, there are others here before us and they created this and you’re right, we didn’t just manifest ourselves here adults in this city place wherever there are others here before us and they helped create where we are today.

Janet Young: Yeah, and I mean a lot of kids didn’t make it. They went through several epidemics: smallpox, cholera, to create something. So yeah, I think that we’re less if we don’t understand what we came from. Appreciate it, even.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right. So, what do you — you mentioned that the excavation took place in the middle of the street and you had pedestrians and life going on around you. What was that experience like when you had kind of modern day living people going on and here you were digging in the ground in the past.

Janet Young: It’s surreal, I guess.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Did you have people stop and ask you what you were doing?

Janet Young: No, because it was blocked they couldn’t see there was screens. And then what happened was after the excavations started, they put up tents. Because people could see down from the buildings because it’s right in the middle of downtown Ottawa. So people could see looking down from the buildings and so they put tents up. So there was some news articles about it happening, but the general person, and you could sit there and you can listen to people have everyday conversations walking by you and you’re like, wow. I think that anyone would have been fascinated by what was happening, but if you had opened it up, then traffic wouldn’t move at all. You’d have a gathering around, trying to be a part of it and understand it. So in that sense, it was nice that it was a blocked off, but really surreal.

Yvonne Kjorlien: And so the remains have been all reburied. I’m guessing or there’s still some undergoing analysis or investigation.

Janet Young: So they’ve all been reburied. So the ones excavated the first season, so 2014, they were a reburied in 2017. And then the ones that were excavated in 2016, were we buried in 2019. And then we just had one in the fall for the remains that were found throughout the length of Queen Street. So that was the final reburial. So there is three burials, and each is commemorated with a plaque at the new Bararck Hill Cemetery at Beachwood. So

Yvonne Kjorlien: Cool.

Janet Young: I want to say the city did an amazing job. They opened the first three burials. It was open to the public. They could come and was held at the Museum. They were allowed to come in and look at the boxes. So the City had made and everyone in burial box and tried to follow methods from the time. And so they were all there and people could come and pay the respects and try to understand more about the history and then the second and for the first second and third reburial They got a horse-drawn hearse, so.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Wow!

Janet Young: The majority of the remains were — except for the last reburial — were buried before, and then they had a representative coffin, and that individual was brought to the place of burial in a horse-drawn hearse that would have been representative of the time. So it was really well done. It was multi-denominational because many different religious groups were part of the cemetery. The City did an amazing job and trying to pull it all together, and to give them a respect that they might not had in life, obviously left behind where they were. So try to restore some of that respect to these people.

Yvonne Kjorlien: It’s interesting in the perspectives, because back in the 1850s, when the cemetery was still being used in the cemetery, the fact that it was paved over or built around and just wanted to be forgotten. It’s a very different perspective from how we treat human remains in cemeteries nowadays.

Janet Young: It’s very different. And I don’t know what that is. I don’t know how that evolved or why. There were early reports that people were using the crania the kids a soccer balls, the ones that were exposed at the site, right because there was a school nearby. And so I don’t know what that is. I don’t know how. They could have just done that now there’s articles in the paper for people who are going: you can’t do this, you can’t just go right over the cemetery, you can’t leave these people. But it didn’t change how things were handled at the time. I think the people that were part of the government of the city, they were just trying to they’re more concerned about their economics and they just went and did it anyway.

There was a large transient population at the time so, people weren’t really that linked to the past as much as I think now. But I’m amazed. I’m actually just amazed at that. But we have it to this day. We have old historic burial grounds that are now parks, right? So I mean a generation after Barrick had close — there is an area in Ottawa called McDonald’s Gardens, and anyone who has moved from Barrack would have been moved to McDonald’s Gardens. It became the next major multi-denominational cemetery for the town. It’s a park now because they remove the headstones — some people were moved to Beachwood, others weren’t — they remove the headstones and they made it a park.

And so it’s the same thing with downtown Kingston. There’s all these old burial grounds that people just removed headstones and just use the space of something else. And people don’t know that. It’s not part of the general knowledge of the people that live around these spaces a lot of the times. It’s just a historic view that people are not aware of. And so yeah, I mean, I appreciate the fact that we’ve evolved into making them parks and not just digging up the bones and throwing them somewhere. I mean, that’s an evolution in itself, but we would never think of doing that to this day, right?. There is application. Yeah strange.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, yeah. I’m conscious of the time, although I would love to talk to you just for hours on this. It’s so interesting just one last question and it’s kind of off on a tangent, but I wanted to know that, if you could go back and visit your younger self, 20, 30 years ago, what would you tell young Janet? That, I don’t know, you would appreciate now.

Janet Young: I would tell her to enjoy the process. I think a lot of times you’re fighting so hard to advance yourself and to try and get things done and do things, that you don’t enjoy the evolution of your skills and the evolution of your knowledge and you don’t enjoy — it’s a situations that you have to try and get through as opposed to appreciating them and enjoying them for what they are. And I think that, for me, that would be the one thing that I would go back and say relax, just enjoy what you’re doing and appreciate it. And yeah, I think that that’s the main takeaway for me.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Lovely. Janet this has been a delight. Thank you very much for coming on and talking about yourself and the Barrack Hill Cemetery.

Janet Young: Thank you for having me. I hope it didn’t babble too much. I have so much information in my head. So thank you for having me.

Transcribed by Google

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Patrick Church is a funeral director, embalmer, and instructor in the funeral directing program at Mount Royal University in Calgary.

In this episode we talk about:

Patrick’s background and how he found himself in funeral services.
the history of funeral practices, and how funeral practices have historically been centred around the home until urbanization made these practices impractical.
the evolution of the funeral industry as it adapted to the needs and wants of the communities and families it serves.
how funeral services are continuing to adapt to a changing economic climate prompted by the desire for cremation.
challenges of traditional funeral services in comparison to more recent celebrations of life, and interest in alternatives like natural burials.
newer services that are offered, such as helping more with grief, pre-death care, and community outreach as cultural perspectives around mortality change, and to focus on meaningful rituals and long-term grief support.
How the industry may evolve in response to diversifying preferences remains uncertain but adaptability has been key to its development.

You can contact Patrick through Mount Royal University here: https://www.mtroyal.ca/ContinuingEducation/OccupationalPrograms/fu

Notes from the start

Find my books here: https://yvonnekjorlien.com/shop/

Find some of my art here: https://www.redbubble.com/people/YKjorlienCreate/shop

Contact me through ykjorlien@gmail.com or through my contact form. Follow me on Facebook at The Reluctant Archaeologist, or through Instagram @yvonnekjorlien

Do you have a suggestion for a topic on the Scattered podcast?

Do you have a question about working with human remains?

Drop me a note at ykjorlien@gmail.com

Transcript

Yvonne Kjorlien: All right, Patrick. I’m gonna get you to introduce yourself. Because I always have a fear of saying somebody’s name incorrectly and that’s just not nice. So you know who you are, how to say your name, so please tell me who you are and what you do.

Patrick Church: Okay, my name is Patrick Church. I’m a funeral director and embalmer. I also have the privilege of serving as an instructor at Mount Royal University in the funeral director and embalming program and my specific area of expertise is embalming theory.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Wow, I am just tickled that I could get you on a podcast because I’ve always had an interest in embalming.

Patrick Church: Okay.

Yvonne Kjorlien: And I actually tried to get a job an apprenticeship, way back, 20 years ago when I was fresh out of grad school, but everybody wanted me to do the funeral services part, that the sort of sales end of things. I said, “no, no, no, I don’t do well with the living. I want to work with the dead.” But they didn’t seem to want that. They wanted me at the frontend doing sales and so it didn’t work out.

Patrick Church: That’s unfortunate. A loss to the industry.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Aw, you’re very sweet. Thank you. So let’s talk about how you found yourself in funeral services because I find that that’s always a very interesting journey for people. So tell us about your journey.

Patrick Church: So one of the things that I have been told versus my experience — so I don’t remember ever making the comment but my sister very clearly does — I told her at the close — I believe it was somewhere about ’86 — of my dad’s aunt’s funeral that I could do this job. We’re in the funeral home. And I just reflected to her that it’s a job that I could do. I don’t remember that. Now in university, I had a colleague who she firmly believed that I would make an excellent funeral director, that I just had the classic pieces looked good in black, I would stand demurely to the side into the back, and would not be obtrusive in families experiences and…

Yvonne Kjorlien: That’s very interesting that you had these people around you just volunteering this information that, hey Patrick, you should try a funeral services.

Patrick Church: Yeah. When I was younger, I always thought maybe law, but the further I went in university and as I was doing Master’s work, less interested in school, in that sort of eventual outcome. And so I began knocking on funeral home doors and, somewhat probably similar to yourself, I was met with the wall. And that wall was very much, you don’t have experience, we hire people with experience. Well, how’d you get experience? You have to be hired, right? So this weird catch-22.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right! I am familiar with that one.

Patrick Church: Yeah, and so I knocked on doors and, when I was younger, I was probably a shyer kid. So I didn’t push or sell myself maybe in the ways that I should have. So I went into what I knew and was comfortable with and I started working with databases and non-profits and did a lot of work in that field until I had to eventually further my education. So I’m at a crossroads. I have to go back to school. Am I doing something that I really want to be doing? And if I really want to be doing this, how do I come to do it? And so I determined that I would probably end up going to university in the US. And at a place like either San Francisco or Los Angeles or Cincinnati where there were more open programs. And the year that I had made that determination, the Alberta Funeral Service Association gave me a call and said that the program in Alberta was changing and they would like me to be part of the first class. So all of a sudden sure it was there for me and I did not have to leave and incur a lot of expenses by going south of the border and so here I am.

Yvonne Kjorlien: I’m just amazed that you, I mean, if anybody else would were to have somebody, a friend, family member, come up to them and say “hey you should check out a career in funeral services”. I mean that would probably shock some people to receive that sort of feedback — “What on Earth makes you think that I would fit in funeral services?” other than looking good in black. Because you’re dealing with, number one, the dead. Not everybody can do that, and not everybody wants to do that. And you’re also dealing with this whole mountain of emotions that people, the living go through when dealing with their deceased loved ones. That is not for everyone. So for you to, one: take that, be receptive to that feedback, and then, two, to actually do something with that feedback that just, that amazes me.

Patrick Church: There was and they’re still remains nothing about the work that would intimidate me.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Okay.

Patrick Church: Does that mean I would have no learning curves? Most certainly not. In terms of the decedent, nothing about the body is so massively overwhelming for me. Now, I grew up on a farm. You’d always have the death of animals around you, not on an ongoing basis, but on those one-offs right with cattle, and we’re animals going to slaughter, animals dying naturally you were engaging with that. So nothing about the body would sort of throw any significant disruption to my world. I knew that.

Being with people is something that, like I said, I was shy when I was a kid and, you’re totally right, the funeral industry demands that you have to be pretty much front and center, and you’re dealing with people one-on-one and at a very horrible and weird time for them and you have to somehow be committed to being there with them. And I think that is something that I have grown into most certainly. But something I enjoy. I enjoy people’s stories. I enjoy chatting with people and learning about people and knowing people’s journeys, as much as I can in the short time that I’m with them.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Okay, I’ve heard that before from others that. either living on or working on a farm, it exposes you to, I guess, the cycle of life. It’s not the typical city experience where you’re very divorced and disconnected from that. You’re immersed in it, and it gives you a whole different appreciation for what goes on in the world.

Patrick Church: Yeah, I would concur.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, would you say then with that very early feedback (that you may consider a career in funeral services) with that kind of been a Plan B, or was that just something that was kind of always in the back of your mind.

Patrick Church: I don’t know if I had a plan, Yvonne. That’s the problem with myself.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Okay, fair enough.

Patrick Church: Was interested in law, but not interested enough ultimately to pursue it when it came time, and I had the opportunity to do graduate work. Was it a direction? I was going to go. No, it wasn’t. It did not hold my attention through university. So I guess I fell into it rather than necessarily having a firm plan.

Yvonne Kjorlien: So what did you do your Master’s in?

Patrick Church: Philosophy religious studies.

Yvonne Kjorlien: wow.

Patrick Church: I studied a Jesuit theologian by the name of Bernard Lanigan.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Wow, that’s big stuff.

Patrick Church: And yeah, yeah, he was a interesting voice in the 40s, 50s, 60s in parallel with sort of what was going on at the same time in Europe. An interesting character. Interesting thought.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Okay, but yet you found yourself working in IT and databases for nonprofits after all of that.

Patrick Church: Yeah, totally fell into it. Yes. My dad was a very early advocate of computers. We had a very early apple system. Back in the early 80s late 70s somewhere in there. he began and…

Yvonne Kjorlien: Wow.

Patrick Church: Yeah, so I grew up with them.

Patrick Church: They were easy for me to work with and play with.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Huh.

Patrick Church: And even in the 90s, it wasn’t necessarily easy and familiar for everyone.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right. Yeah.

Patrick Church: So when I came out of school in ‘96 it was okay: where am I? And when the door knocking didn’t pan out, non-profit databases did.

Yvonne Kjorlien: All right, so things changed in the funeral service industry. You mentioned this cycle of nobody’s gonna hire you without experience. The only way you can get experience is being hired. Which I’m sure that, not just me, there are some other people out there that can really relate to that. But at that time, you said the funeral service education system had changed. Tell us about that.

Patrick Church: So historically the system used to be very much controlled by the industry. You would be working in the funeral home, and after the funeral home had the time to evaluate and determine whether you would be a good long-term fit in the industry and probably within their specific funeral home, then they would sponsor you into an education program.

Yvonne Kjorlien: So it kind of was like an apprenticeship or an internship.

Patrick Church: Yeah, yeah very much so.

Yvonne Kjorlien: All right.

Patrick Church: And then, yeah, that changed. The industry realized that maybe that wasn’t the best way of working. Or at least the school system that we had at the time.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, it was very, I mean, from my experience, which is 20 years ago, which may have been around about that time of this education change, I grew up with the stories of — my dad came from farming community, small town — and he would say he went to school with somebody who was apprenticing through their funeral home. And so that’s what kind of stuck in my mind that that’s how you do it. So let’s go out and I started knocking on doors, too. Which is where I met with the whole, yeah, you need experience but we can’t hire you and you would be better off to do the sales portion rather than the embalming portion, etc., etc. So yeah, that’s a bit of a catch-22 definitely, but things changed.

Patrick Church: Yes.

Yvonne Kjorlien: So you were able to go and get your education?

Patrick Church: Yes, which is fantastic. I was going to one way or another it. Just really worked out to my advantage that Mount Royal offered the program on behalf of the Funeral Service Association in Alberta that I didn’t have to travel. And go someplace else.

Yvonne Kjorlien: How long did it take you to do the program? Were you doing it full-time, part-time?

Patrick Church: It was full-time.

Yvonne Kjorlien: All right.

Patrick Church: So it still remains, you have a certain number of hours, apprenticeship hours, that you have to, practical hours, that you have to secure following the schooling. The schooling for myself in the first year was a full year of classes rather than spread out. So some programs rather than doing a spring and summer, will do just fall and winter, backed two years. And Mount Royal did the spring and summer instead of doing the two year. So it made it more appealing to go that route as well. The hours after — I forget the number at this point — but it was essentially a full year of work that you had to engage with.

Yvonne Kjorlien: And that would be at a funeral home, correct?

Patrick Church: Yeah, and you would be submitting various types of reports that would be part of the regulatory bodies’ evaluation of granting you a license. So you’d have your education component. So the college would submit that you have done your education (now university), you would have to submit hours that someone within the funeral home would attest that you have completed these hours, you would have to submit records of certain activities, specifically embalmings and arrangements (so sitting with families and sitting with the deceased).

Yvonne Kjorlien: So, sorry. So pretty much a year of classes and a year of placement in a home

Patrick Church: Yeah, yeah. And then the regulatory board receives all these attestations, and grants license. After you write your board exams. So that’s the final piece is the board exams.

Yvonne Kjorlien: And so are you typically learning and board-certified in both the funeral services and embalming, both at the same time?

Patrick Church: You can be separate.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Okay.

Patrick Church: Now when I went through the program, you could not be. You had to do both pieces. You had to become an embalmer and a funeral director. You could not separate them out.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Okay.

Patrick Church: The license was not a separate license. that changed in the somewhere in the early 2000s and they began creating funeral director only licenses and embalmer only licenses so that who wanted to focus in specific areas could focus in those areas.

Yvonne Kjorlien: So we’ve already kind of touched on at least a little bit of the evolution of funeral services, at least the education portion of it in the past 20 years, that things have changed. But funerals in general have a bit of history. I know, it sounds like you really get into the history of this, and so I’d like you to take us through kind of how funeral services have evolved. I know that embalming, at least in Alberta, and I don’t know about Canada, but it’s not a requirement. And a lot of people don’t know that, and then it’s not always been around. And so I’d like you to take us through, kind of a thumbnail sketch of some of the history. How did we come up to this? Why do we have funeral homes? And why do we have burials? There’s more of a shift to cremation nowadays. And why do embalming when we didn’t always use to embalm. Stuff like that.

Patrick Church: Yeah, the history of our industry is quite fascinating. When we look at, I think, the deeper history that we have with death, we find it’s probably something that’s very familial, something that’s very much centered in small community within a family home. And if it’s not happening within a family home, it’s happening very close to our community. The deceased is probably brought to the home or a central community space. The deceased would be sat with, they’d be watched over. Communities would bring religious and ritual elements to death, dressing of bodies and putting flowers with bodies other other meaningful tokens and elements before ultimately a body would be taken for disposition, whether that be at a at burial, at a cemetery, a community’s little cemetery, or whether that be a community’s point of cremation. So this would have been, I think, the experience most people would have had with death for millennia. It would be something that is is happening very much within a very small community structure.

And as I mentioned, we would have begun practicing ritual elements around death. As we see the rise of religious institutions, they would then begin to serve in a means between the home and that final disposition of interment or cremation. We would see with the rise of churches that we would then bring our loved one into those religious spaces for ultimate service and internment. When we are seeing the development of our large religious institutions, we’re seeing ultimately the growth of community and as communities grow, that brings problems to death remaining something situated in the home and in the small community. So, for example, when communities grow and we begin to experience plague years within large urban settings, community’s response is to move death outside of the urban center to the edge, and so we begin to see cemeteries not being community cemeteries, but being large urban cemeteries located at the edge of urban dwellings. That brings, of course, a level of sort of distance and bureaucracy to death. We will see larger institutions, for example, hospitals, prisons. Those people are going to, when death is experienced in those institutions, be buried in relationship to those institutions. So they will have burial grounds attached to those institutions. So again, death is moved away from our community. Or when we see people going off to war, bodies are going to be buried where they fall. There is no repatriation of death historically, there is no bringing our loved ones home. When we die in in battle, we are buried at the battlefield. So as communities grow and we experience these growth challenges, death is moved further away from that central space that would have been the family, the family home, in our very small community.

Of course, another factor is when we have the growth of. Communities. We also have the growth of communal living. We don’t necessarily have our own living space. We’re in shared spaces. And it’s not fundamentally feasible to bring our loved one into a shared space. And so instead, we have then the places, like churches, like our religious institutions, being able to step in and being able to accommodate and host our experience and our relationship to the deceased. So we have this movement outwards from the home.

Now things are happening in Europe and things are happening in North America. And I want to reflect first on North America, because something quite unique happens, and that is the US Civil War. The US. Civil War brings together horrible, horrible, bloody battlefields, where surgeons, where doctors are needed to address the wounded. These doctors, though, have gone through university where they had to train, and their training involved the preservation of deceased bodies for their study purposes. So doctors knew how to preserve bodies, how to embalm. So, while embalming happened infrequently, prior to this, very infrequently, all of a sudden, the US Civil War offered something that we had never seen before, and that is the opportunity to bring our loved ones back from where they died. We could repatriate them. And so we had doctors undertaking this work and serving as embalmers during the US Civil War, and coming out of the war, offering those services to their communities.

And so we see the rise in North America of embalming in the following the US Civil War in the late 1800s. And with this brought a number of just very pragmatic pieces. So if you are embalming someone, and if you are going to help arrange for someone to be taken someplace, you’re also going to need some sort of transportation receptacle, a casket or a coffin, to do that. And so these folks then were able to then sell these pieces of merchandise. Now that’s fairly niche and does not necessarily provide a living. So you know, you’re working with wood to build a casket for people. Maybe you could work with wood and have furniture. So our industry has this very close relationship to furniture stores, because lots of funeral homes were related to funeral stores, furniture stores in their very early existence.

And so we in North America now see, in the 1800s of course, the rise of, again, those dense urban living situations and apartment dwelling, again that’s not feasible to bring our deceased into those spaces. And so the again, most pragmatic space to bring our deceased to would be the embalmers home. So embalmers homes began to have parlors for families to be with their loved ones.

So we begin to see these, early, early vestiges of our community, as people are want to do well we have this relationship to. To bringing our loved one to church or to our religious institutions. People don’t always stay with their religious institutions. The curious thing about Western Europe is, of course, the Protestant Reformation and the leaving of institution to create one’s own religious practice and paradigm. And once that is something that is ingrained, you can’t really reverse that course. And so people vote with their feet, and they leave their institutions if their institutions are not speaking to them. And so you have this, in the — and I’m sure throughout all of all of time — a leaving of our religious institutions. So in the 1800s the early 1900s continuing to today, as people drift away from those spaces, then it’s not appropriate to bring our loved ones into those spaces. And so we have the development of the creation of chapels associated with the embalmers funeral parlor, and you will see many historical funeral homes that are anchored by a house that was the embalmer, funeral director, the morticians residence. And of course, as those spaces continually over time grow or get outgrown, then we see the more modern funeral home that is those chapel, those service spaces, those visitation spaces, an office space, rather than being tied to a residence, they are much more funeral homes as we experience them, probably today by the vast majority of folks.

So we have this trend in North America of bringing the deceased to to the funeral home, and we have then the creation of these, these service spaces. Now in Europe, we have something curious happening, and that is, through the 1800s, you have the development of crematoria and people working on the establishment of cremation spaces. And while cremation slowly develops in Europe, similar to here, it does not, it does not take off. But you have this. You have this different experience in Europe, where you have crematoriums functioning to offer disposition. And you also have something that we don’t have here in North America with cemeteries, and that is cemeteries being reclaimed, where graves are only used temporarily, and after a certain period of time, the bones of the deceased are taken from the grave so that the grave space can be reused, and then bones are placed into either charnel houses or some other large receptacle where the bones are stored en mass. And so Europe has this very different experience with with their cemeteries, and with their relationship to disposition that we don’t have in North America, but they had this focus on the creation of crematoriums. And so crematoriums come to North America, and we will begin to see them in the 1950s but we don’t really begin probably to see their impact probably into the 80s. And it’s in the 80s and 90s, that cremation really changes the landscape for the funeral profession and for the industry. All of a sudden you have this process that, again, well, death moved from our very familial community space ultimately into the space of a funeral home, now cremation allows it to move out of that space again. So our funeral homes, while they originally those early chapels modeled churches with chairs focused towards a pulpit or a podium where the casket would be at the front, just like an altar would be at the front. And often at funerals, we see that replicated so very much church like structures, funeral homes, in their very modern iteration, have become, rather than being sort of set have become more multi-purpose spaces to be able to accommodate very shifting needs of client families and consumers. And so that is a little bit where we are at and why we are at the funeral homes and the spaces and the practices that we are at now.

Yvonne Kjorlien: It sounds like from what you’re describing that being with the dead is very much a community activity, whether it’s to support the grieving of the family or to, just the community coming together to help out that the living who remains, and the focus of the community for a long time has been the church you look at the layout of small towns even now, I mean we’re starting to get away from it, but small towns across North America and even in Europe, if you look at the layout of a small town, usually the church is the center of the town and that represents the center of the community and that’s where people went to see their neighbors, you saw your neighbors once a week, you got the local gossip and he had some tea and then you went home and you wash, rinse, repeat again next week. And so it sounds like, from what you’re saying that when the population started to get such that the church couldn’t house those community functions where the funeral or the grieving process couldn’t be done just in the home, they had to find another bigger space to have those community functions, but at the same time, people started to disconnect from organized religion and to disconnect from the church. And so maybe people didn’t want to go to a church to do those community functions, but wanted someplace a little bit more agnostic or non-affiliated. And so it sounds like there’s been in the funeral industry, yes, a little bit of industrialization and then also evolution to meet different people’s needs a different times.

Patrick Church: Very much so. Well, the church speaks to what people are going through, it speaks and talks about death, right?

Yvonne Kjorlien: Absolutely. Yeah.

Patrick Church: It’s a big part of people’s lives and a big part of what gives meaning and what has come to them in the person of their loved one and what has all of a sudden being taken from them by this event? So the church historically, it’s part of their narrative, part of their conversation with their congregants, so it makes sense that people would want to be there for that experience of loss. Now not being a church person other than in name, it makes sense that it doesn’t necessarily speak to everyone, so I can appreciate why you would get that shift from the need to be in church, the need to be in that space, the need to contextualize your loved one within that setting.

I also understand that people still have that need to contextualize their loved one within that setting too. But if that setting and what it’s offering doesn’t speak to folks, then why go into that space? So here’s an interesting piece. Early in my career, you would have families who don’t want religion, don’t want the church stuff as part of their service. Yet who do we turned to, as Funeral Directors, we were turning to clergy. And we’re turning to more liberal branches of the church and saying “hey, can you help this family by not really being a clergy person?” And I always thought that was a little bit disingenuous of, not only ourselves his funeral directors, but for the position that we were asking clergy to step into in dealing with families.

Some families don’t mind some of the touchstones of faith, some of the prayers, some of the structure. But some families wanted very little to nothing of that. And yet we would still turn to these folks. Now very fortunately, at the same time we’ve seen the development of celebrants, non-denominational folks, people who are serving as chaplains in hospitals and hospices, who don’t have that solitary commitment to one church institution That they have to sort of somehow try and step away from or take out of their meaningfulness at that moment. Instead, we have people who have the ability to craft services that provide sort of ritual structure for families who don’t want those religious components.

So a good development in my opinion because it was always hard to ask a clergy person to not be a clergy person in that moment.

Yvonne Kjorlien: It’s hard to ask anybody not to be who they are.

Patrick Church: Exactly. Yes.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Okay, so we’ve seen the evolution, I guess, of funeral services away from or, at least, maybe less integration with faith, religion, and the church and to something non-affiliated. but we’ve also seen an evolution away from burial, embalming Tell us a little bit about that.

Patrick Church: Oh yes. The evolution from?

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, because we’ve seen a lot more cremation, green burials.

Patrick Church:

That is very true. Now, our chemicals are purposeful.

We do need to employ them when we are for example, if someone is making a repatriation journey to another country or to another location. They are required by international shipping regulations. They also allow us time. Everybody will go through unique and individual changes and embalming buys time for families to be able to plan and to gather and be together, a very important piece. As you see the movement westward and people need to travel. They’re no longer in their home communities, so they need to be able to come back and historically travel, not being necessarily the easiest process. Embalming did allow for that time. Now, do we need to embalm everybody today? Most certainly not. And I would argue that the vast majority of bodies are not embalmed and do not bring those those chemicals to their disposition, largely because most bodies are being cremated, and that disposition is happening relatively quite quickly. However, embalming and the use of those chemicals does have a purpose now, the other piece is that the cemeteries have regulations around how bodies are buried within those spaces and those regulations will account for the, ultimately, the presence of those chemicals within the environment of the cemetery space. And I think a final point to bring to this is really those chemicals aren’t used in concentration. They are very much used in diluted A little bit of those chemicals goes a very long way in doing its preservative work. So while they are, they are used it is. They are used minimally, and I think by the industry, cautiously, and I think ultimately by by environmental agencies and regulations securely.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Because it sounds like that there are common practices in the funeral industry, like burial, like embalming and then there are regulations. And the two may not necessarily be the same. Burial an embalming may not be a requirement; it’s more of a standard of practice. Whereas vaulting depending on where you are maybe a requirement.

Patrick Church: Yes. Yes, burial is sort of a requirement if we just couldn’t keep a decedent at home, for example. I think most communities, most jurisdictions, most provinces who would be governing health wouldn’t allow for a body to be any other place other than medical research or buried within the confines of a cemetery. Now that doesn’t include cremated remains. But I don’t think we could just keep bodies at home. We would have to find cemetery space for them.

So we technically do have to bury bodies if we are not going to look at something like cremation or aquamation or body donation to medical research, for example. So there is then the requirement to bury within the confines of a cemetery.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right.

Patrick Church: But creating a cemetery is very complicated and not anyone can just create a cemetery.

Yvonne Kjorlien: I can well imagine.

Patrick Church: So how do you create green burial when you don’t have that option to create a cemetery? You depend upon existing cemeteries to create green burial for you. But they then have to have profound insight and practice, and they’re also governed by legislations that determine how deep you need to bury bodies.Tthe most excellent green burial happens in shallow grave not in deep graves with four feet of Earth. Microbial activity just doesn’t happen as efficiently and effectively at that depth. So when that call regulated, it becomes hard to look at anything else in a substantive way.

Yvonne Kjorlien: We get locked into our own perspectives.

Patrick Church: Yeah.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Interesting.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Because really what this all boils down to is just that the pragmatics of it that we need to dispose of this body.

Patrick Church: [ALKALINE HYDROLYSIS]Yeah, and all the regulations around, so for example, I believe Saskatchewan has an alkaline hydrolysis aquamation, where the body is cremated through waters and lyes. And there are the province of Ontario I believe has put a stop to further development. So two came in and started and then the province sort of we haven’t done enough Environmental Research and totally stopped. Communities have gone into big fights over crematoriums coming into their spaces, even though municipalities have zoning for crematoriums to operate and they operate relatively efficiently without any affluent or odor or anything that people are scared of when they think about being next to a crematorium. Yet communities have thrown up roadblocks to the establishment of crematoriums within zoning. So simple body disposal because that’s what it is, very ill and cremation are two primary means of it are hard to manage and negotiate around.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Righ. I find that very interesting. So I understand cremation. It uses a lot of energy to burn a body, but then there’s also the burn off. And it’s a lot of carbon and stuff putting into the atmosphere. But at the same time burial usually involves formaldehyde and all those lovely embalming chemicals which can then leach into the soil and the environment.

Patrick Church: [FORMALDEHYDE AND EMBALMING]That is very true. Now formaldehyde itself is, it’s isn’t that, none of embalming chemicals or the greatest chemicals to be exposing ourselves to at the end of the day. But they are purposeful. They do have a purpose. You think about folks who need to be transported overseas. Lots of factors can affect the need for them. Our bodies bring lots of challenges to being able to be well for services. Time and our ability to ensure good holding of bodies. Does every body have to be embalmed? Probably not, that is in embalmed, but it is a tradition that lots of folks follow.

Yvonne Kjorlien: So with all these new, I guess, options available now — green burial and, composting –where do you see funeral services, and maybe even the continued disconnection with faith and faith-based practices and rituals, where do you see funeral services in the next 10 to 20 years?

Patrick Church: Oh, to have a magic ball, right? To have a looking glass.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right. They’ve done an amazing job over, even just 50, 60, 100 years of adapting to what people want, to their needs.

Patrick Church: The big adaptation that really came at the industry was cremation. That really forced the re-figure its relationship to itself somewhat. So you have, traditionally, when you do a burial, you have caskets, and you have funeral coaches, you have all these equipments that you have to engage with, you have all these revenue streams that you have coming to you. When you have cremation taking over, you lose those revenue streams. And so the industry had to begin compensating — not that the funeral industry is all about money — we’re gonna talk a little bit about it beyond that — but you had to compensate for lost revenue. And so you have unfortunate pieces arise where people would sell hard to families. You have, and would try and upsell on cremation containers because we have to put bodies into something when we cremate them. We have to be able to move them into the confined space of a cremation chamber, so they have to be in something. Every jurisdiction broadly defines it as rigid, combustible, and enclosed. So you have very at minimum cardboard, but cardboard doesn’t work for everyone because it’s not rigid for certain bodies. And so let’s move away from cardboard into your particle boards. And then you would have people who would push more elaborate containers and try and sell more elaborate containers on a regular basis. And so you got a disingenuous feeling created somewhat towards the industry, probably fairly so. People have a bad impression, I think, through for many years of the industry and relationship to being sales focused. And I think that was in terms of a compensation for those shifting lost revenues when it came to came to cremation.

Now we are also seeing though a rise celebration of life services. That are more focused simply on visitation, sort of reception pieces, and not focused on sitting in a chapel, sitting focused at a podium, or focused at a table with an urn. Not that those pieces aren’t part of those celebrations. Not that the deceased isn’t brought into those celebrations that urns our present. But the focus is for lots of folks shifting away from that that need to be in a chapel, need to be in that space.

Patrick Church: So I think that is going to be an ongoing trend, that will probably bring more challenges to the industry. Because at the same time is that rises, do you need the funeral home anymore? Just like with cremation, you don’t need the funeral home, you can take that wherever you want to take it and do whatever you need to do with it. The same when you do those celebrations of life and not those chapel services. You don’t need that space to be able to sit anymore. Well, maybe the funeral home has a reception space we can use that, but lots of places have reception spaces that you can bring stuff in and put things around for people to look at, that you can play videos, that you can pause it some point and offer a toast or a few words. Legions. Think of small town Legions. Think of bars, right? Depending upon the type of people. Golf courses, golf clubs. So there’s all these places where funeral services shift to when you don’t have to have that focused chapel space, and you just want to be doing a celebration of life party. Go to a funeral and ask people about what they want.

I’m in the industry. So I hear it all the time about what people want. But the people who are most vocal about what they want, don’t want funerals.

Yvonne Kjorlien: What is it about the funeral that they don’t want? Is that the faith? Is it that the somberness? Is the chapel? What is it about the funeral they don’t want?

Patrick Church: I think it’s a little bit of all of those pieces, right? So, for some people there is the drive away from seeing the deceased and being with the body is about experiences of seeing someone “put together” poorly, right? Their cosmetic work was wrong, their hair was wrong, things weren’t done well, and so they have just a poor last moment experience with this person. So those are still common stories. There is that peace.

There is I think the somber, the solemnness of the chapel, I think there is probably underlying it. Sometimes the costing of it all in people’s minds. Because the generation that we’re now largely serving is we’re at the Baby Boomers. Right? We’re just at the end of those who were born before World War Two, so at we’re people who were born in the thirties late 30s 40s early 40s, and we’re coming into the Baby Boomers who just the priorities of that don’t really mesh that well for them, I suppose. And I think it’s a little bit of all those pieces you identified.

Yvonne Kjorlien: All right, so it’ll be up to the funeral industry to see how they’re going to continue to adapt to the rising cost of funerals to, I guess, the increased demand of walking away from the somberness, from faith, from chapels, but into what, but that’s I guess the question that’s going to be up to the industry to figure out.

Patrick Church: So I think there’s a whole bunch of positive pieces and that is the industry has learned how to create ritual and offer meaningful ritual to families more than they probably ever have. Offering fantastic and creative types of services to really help be with families. Because we’re starting something very profound when we go through a service. People are on a long journey after someone dies. That grief journey is not quick. It’s not to be underestimated. It’s not to be thought of lightly. It is and — when I say with families, I can’t tell you and emphasize how precious that opportunity is because I get to hear their story about their loved one, the loss of their loved one. I get to be one of the first people who hear it. And it’s a story they’re going to craft over months and years. That story is going to change and shift with grief, but I get to be one of the first people who gets to hear that. And so the ability to, I think, be present to that sort of integral relationship with families has never been, I think, as well appreciated. The relationship that we have to grief work, is I think wholly remarkable at this point. Funeral homes are doing fantastic work with their communities, with their families in that post-loss period and people are taking much advantage of that.

I’ve never understood it, but I suppose it is correct, we had a homeless man the other day at the funeral home, and he just wanted to charge his phone. And so he’s having a coffee and charging his phone. Then he asked for a ride downtown or money for a ride. And so I said, “I have a vehicle. Why don’t I give you a ride?” And as we were on the journey, he asked me the question about my relationship with my death, like, how am I, what is my thoughts around my own mortality. And I’ve never really understood that we’re a death denying culture or if I really understand what that means. But I think the work we are doing is probably reflected in the fact that people have a difficult time with loss, so we must be in some way somewhat of death-defying culture. Because funeral homes that are doing the work with grief and outreach within their communities, there is just such fantastic need for it. People are really taking them up on that work, which is excellent. And funeral homes are really taking up that clarion cry.

There’s other pieces, I think, that are great and that is going to show, I think, profound development and that is probably as we do that work, we have a shift within the culture of, we have death doulas, we have entire pre-death caregiving community that just needs support and I think the profession is learning to appreciate and reach out to those communities and those folks who really are in, I don’t want to say crisis mode, but I would think are in overwork mode for sure. So the industry is really looking at needs of the community in very broad ways that sort of go outside of those traditional pieces that when we think about funeral industry we think about, I have to get cemetery plot, I have to be cremated, I need an urn, I need a casket, right? I mean I need to get right that those are pieces of it, but there’s much more integral pieces. before us. And so I think the industry is moving well in that direction to be with families and to be with the community on those fronts and to help lead where those places need.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right, absolutely.

Patrick Church: Is that affecting ultimately funeral service and those pieces that are more imperative to your podcasting conversation about the deceased? I’m not sure that it is, but I don’t think in 10 years I’m going to see green burial shift around me. I would think that there’s lots of great opportunities for it. But I think it’s overcoming legislation. It’s overcoming lots of pieces and I really like to see it. Now it’s growing I think south of the border and it’s growing in communities on the west coast, and there’s some interesting changes, but I unfortunately don’t think they’re coming soon enough. It may take a more virulent pandemic to change those body engagement policies somewhat. I don’t know.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Maybe we’ll just have to see what happens. There’s just too much going on at the moment. Time has flown, Patrick. Thank you for sharing your history, your background, how you got into funeral services, the history of funeral services, and also what’s going on and how things may change. Thank you for coming on and speaking about all of that.

Patrick Church: No, not at all. Thank you for having me, Yvonne.

Transcribed by Google and Otter.ai

View Details

Ingrid Muhlig is the manager of DNA operations at the National Centre for Missing Persons and Unidentified Remains (NCMPUR) in Canada. The National Missing Persons DNA Program was launched in 2018 and is delivered by two existing programs within the RCMP. The National Centre for Missing Persons and Unidentified Remains (NCMPUR) and the National DNA Data Bank (NDDB) were created to help identify missing and unidentified persons through DNA profiling.

In this episode we talk about:

How DNA profiles are uploaded to national databases, and profile comparisons are done automatically at the national level to check for possible matches between missing persons and unidentified remains cases.
New technologies, like YSTR and mitochondrial DNA, that allow for degraded remains to still be analyzed.
Reporting missing loved ones to local police is key to create the links between missing person and unidentified remains cases.
How historical missing persons cases presented a challenge due to needing updated consent forms for older samples and profiles.
That over 700 unidentified remains cases currently need identification in Canada.
The DNA program has provided 90 “putative identifications” through DNA matches since 2018.
International searches can now be conducted through databases like Interpol’s I-Familia to search for missing Canadians abroad.
Canada’s vast and variable geography, from cities to remote areas, presents diverse scenarios for how people can go missing.

Kudos to everyone involved in the background who make this program possible and successful. Ingrid would like to thank the police investigators, everyone at NCMPUR, and the NDDB Missing Person Unit (MPU).

More information about some items mentioned in the interview can be found here:

Canada’s Missing: https://www.canadasmissing.ca/index-eng.htm
National Centre for Missing Persons and Unidentified Remains (NCMPUR): https://www.canadasmissing.ca/about-ausujet/index-eng.htm
National DNA Data Bank (NDDB): https://www.rcmp-grc.gc.ca/en/forensics/national-dna-data-bank
Some introductory information on STR, YSTR, mitochrondrial profiling : https://innocencecommission-nc.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/understanding-forensic-dna.pdf

Notes from the start

Scavenging Study: new videos are up! They are here: https://yvonnekjorlien.com/scavenging-study/

The Gentle Rebel Podcast: https://www.andymort.com/62-unconventional-multipotentialite-yvonne-kjorlien/

Get my first novel Memoirs of a Reluctant Archaeologist here: https://books2read.com/u/38PrYL

Sasha Reid and the Midnight Order: https://www.hulu.com/series/sasha-reid-and-the-midnight-order-b07966eb-4e06-4383-a31f-5775fa4ec030

Contact me through ykjorlien@gmail.com or through my contact form. Follow me on Facebook at The Reluctant Archaeologist, or through Instagram @yvonnekjorlien

Do you have a suggestion for a topic on the Scattered podcast?

Do you have a question about working with human remains?

Drop me a note at ykjorlien@gmail.com

Transcript

Yvonne Kjorlien: So, Ingrid, I’m gonna get you to introduce yourself because you know you best. And then you can say your last name for me too, so I won’t mispronounce it.

Ingrid Muhlig: So, my name is Ingrid Muhlig and I’m the manager of DNA operations for the National Center of Missing Persons and Unidentified Remains, so NCMPUR. You know the RCMP, we like our acronyms so it’s that NCMPUR. I will try my hardest not to fall back into all the acronyms but, by all means, stop me asked me what it is. If I do say one.

Yvonne Kjorlien: And you do you what? That’s exactly what I thought when I was writing up the little sort of outline of what we could talk about — like, is what I’m talking about what I think I’m talking about because there’s a lot of acronyms going on.

Ingrid Muhlig: Yup, yup.

Yvonne Kjorlien: All right. Tell me a little bit about your role. You’re a manager of a big unit, it sounds like.

Ingrid Muhlig: It’s actually a very small unit. National Centre for Missing Persons and Unidentified Remains is actually a unit of approximately 20 people. But those of us that are responsible for the National Missing Persons DNA Program — there’s two of us, that I’m the manager, I have and also a data, our DNA analyst who does the authorizing of DNA with, and she will speak with the investigators and go over the files make recommendations — so our side of the house, it’s National Missing Persons DNA program is actually, we’re partnered with the NDDB to steward this program.

Yvonne Kjorlien: NDDB. All right.

Ingrid Muhlig: National DNA Databank.

Yvonne Kjorlien: All right.

Ingrid Muhlig: Yeah, and so we take care of mostly the administrative items: logging the information about the case, making recommendations to the investigator, finding out what’s available in regards to DNA, and getting an idea about the case to make those recommendations. And then the NDDB accepts the submissions that we’ve authorized, and they’ll process them and they do the science stuff of processing the DNA and reviewing it, uploading it to CODIS, and then, if associations occur, writing those reports, those reports come back to NCMPUR, and we’ll release into the investigators. Also to the legislation, the legislation that governs how we operate is under DNA Identification Act. And the DNA Identification Act also states that there has to be periodic reviews. So we really, on the NCMPUR side, we manage the life cycle of that DNA profile.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Okay, so if you could take me back a step.

Ingrid Muhlig: Sure.

Yvonne Kjorlien: In just my little preliminary, my own little investigation of websites —

because that’s called research these days — it sounds like the DNA program is very new. It just started in 2018.

Ingrid Muhlig: right

Yvonne Kjorlien: And it’s part of the overall missing persons and unidentified remains unit?

Ingrid Muhlig: It’s a program within the National Center, that it’s one of the services we provide to investigators, medical examiners or coroner’s office. So the National Center for Missing Persons and Unidentified Remains is a national program and it provides services to investigators, medical examiners, Corners across Canada. So we’re really an assist and we assist with different services and one of those being the DNA program.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Got it. Okay. Now, from that perspective, just because I don’t know who’s listening out there and what they know, and it’s something that I learned and in talking to when your colleagues from the Missing Persons and Unidentified Remains group, that things just don’t happen. Like investigators find some remains, efforts are made to identify them and they are, despite efforts, they are then classified as Unidentified. So that doesn’t just magically appear in your database. There is a process that the medical examiner or the coroner has to go through to then log that in the National Database, correct?

Ingrid Muhlig: Right. So typically when remains are located, they’re immediately put into CPIC and that – all police agencies across at Canada have access to it, they have the ability to search against it too, so if they have a missing person and want to search for potential remains, they have that capability within CPIC.

What happens with our Center and our database — we call it MCMPUR, which is Missing Children, Persons and Unidentified Remains — I know you’ve spoken to Kevin about this database — what happens is when those investigators the remains into CPIC, it automatically feeds any body entries or any missing persons directly to our database.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Okay!

Ingrid Muhlig: Then our database has some algorithms, which it starts doing comparisons of whatever has been entered into what’s already in that database and it continues to do comparisons to anything new that’s added.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Okay. But the search in CPIC does have to be done.

Ingrid Muhlig: The entry into CPIC does have to be done.

Yvonne Kjorlien: The entry does.

Ingrid Muhlig: And that is a requirement to participate in the DNA program. And that’s best practices that we preach to all police agencies, medical examiners, corner’s offices is that you need to enter your unidentified remains into this database.

Yvonne Kjorlien: There’s many little steps that many people have to perform to kind of log that entry in get it recognized on the national level.

Ingrid Muhlig: Right. And it goes the same way for missing persons. We want the missing persons in right away. And our mandate is to improve these investigations. So we know, when someone goes missing, the investigator might go and quickly put in the pertinent information that he has at that time.

But, as the missing person, as the days go by and we realize this is more of a long term missing person, our recommendations is always to the investigator go back and make a fullsome entry into that database, give us as much information as we can. So that automated searching and taking place in the background and they don’t even see it. And it can provide some clues or some information, investigative leads.

Yvonne Kjorlien: All right. So with that kind of in mind, since the DNA program, or the piece of it is fairly new – 2018 — what was going on before that kind of led to the development of the DNA program?

Ingrid Muhlig: So in 2000, you had the creation of the crime scene index in the convicted offenders index. And, I know at that time, we also had these humanitarian indices on the table that they wanted to bring forward along with those two indices, but there was a lot of privacy concerns and we had to do a lot of privacy impact assessments. So the best way to move forward was to drop the humanitarian indices and move forward with those criminal ones because that was very important to get moving on those ones. And then we brought in the humanitarian ones later, once they pass those privacy impact assessments.

Yvonne Kjorlien: And what do you mean by humanitarian? Let’s set up a definition on that.

Ingrid Muhlig: So, right so what’s happened is that typically, our, whatever’s going into our indices — so you have the missing person index, you have the relative of a missing person index, and you have the human remains index. So we consider those three to be humanitarian. What’s being uploaded is cases that are non-criminal.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Got it.

Ingrid Muhlig: And then…although the missing persons, the human remains indices do get compared to the criminal ones, by law, we cannot compare the relative one against the criminal indices. So it stays on that humanitarian house and it is never compared to any criminal indices.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Fabulous, so how… Okay, so we’ve kind of touched on how the data are gathered — I mean for the criminal or for the missing and the unidentified — but there are other ways that data can be gathered, correct? Depending on which indices you’re looking at.

Ingrid Muhlig: So I’m not sure if I know what you’re asking.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Investigators, coroners, and medical examiners can put in an entry in CODIS for a missing person or unidentified remains. But then there’s also other humanitarian…

Ingrid Muhlig: So there’s one called a voluntary donor index.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Ah, yes.

Ingrid Muhlig: And it kind of sits on the fence between the two because it has to be in relation to a criminal file or it has to be in relation to a missing person file. When it’s in relation to a missing person file, that submission comes to us to handle. And typically it’s really what’s happened. It’s typically family that’s pulled the information from maybe the national DNA databank website. And what we tend to do is we tried to steer them to make an entry into the relative of missing person index. Because when you put a submission into that voluntary donor index you have criminal Jeopardy now. You’re telling the RCMP that they can go ahead and search against the criminal indices.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Oh! Okay.

Ingrid Muhlig: So we’ll steer them to the relative of missing person index, if that’s the proper index for them to be in, and that way they’ll never be compared against those criminal indices.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Okay. That’s important to know.

Ingrid Muhlig: Yeah. We’ve had a few submissions and we’re like, no that’s not where you want to be. You want to be over here.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah. Yeah. All right. I’m glad I asked that then. Okay. The public can make a submission. I mean to the right place. You guide them there.

Ingrid Muhlig: Right.

Yvonne Kjorlien: If they have a missing persons that they’re worried about.

Ingrid Muhlig: The reality is we don’t deal with the public…

Yvonne Kjorlien: Okay.

Ingrid Muhlig: Because there has to be a missing persons investigation. The public should always go to the investigator of the file and then, if they’re not sure about it, they can contact us, and we’ll guide them through making that submission.

Some of these small detachments, they may handle a missing person case once in a blue moon, right? And then, typically, larger detachments, like I’m thinking of Toronto Police Service or Niagara Regional, they have actual missing person units, right? Where, that their investigators, that’s all they do. We’re very well versed with them and they’re very well versed with our procedures. So that’s the difference. It’s just, you know, the population areas and the smaller population areas might not know about this. And, although we deal with investigators, it’s something the public should be aware of that this is a service available, right?

The DNA program, also too the NCMPUR that manages Canada is missing website and you can get more information about different services from that Canada’s missing website. And we also published the missing persons or unidentified remains in hopes of receiving tips from the public on the different cases. That’s the public component to our unit and the public can… there’s different addresses: you can go to Crime Stoppers, you can go right to the police and jurisdiction, or you can come to us and report information, that’s that Canada’s missing web email address.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right. Yeah, it’s nice to be aware of these Service because there’s nothing like starting a service with all these good intentions and then nobody knowing about it.

Ingrid Muhlig: Right

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, that’s yeah, you don’t want that. No.

Ingrid Muhlig: Right No. Doesn’t look good.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Exactly, right. Have you seen, on that note, do you know who’s using it? Has there been in an increase over the years? I’m guessing during COVID, there was probably a bit of a slump in who used it. I mean, I don’t know.

Ingrid Muhlig: You know what? During COVID, investigators were working back at the office and had seemed, it appeared like they had more time. So they start pulling out these historical missing persons and started going through them. So actually during COVID we had a bit of an uptick of historical ones because the investigators had the time to start pulling out these different investigations.

And it’s funny. Investigators, police investigators, are fickle bunch. They want to see value for the effort they’re putting into and, by all means, I agree with them. If there’s no value. Why are we doing this? Question why we’re doing this, right?

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right. Exactly.

Ingrid Muhlig: I knew when I started, if we start showing them the success and the associations, that they’ll start being more active within the program and definitely we’ve seen that. For our business model, we were expecting one to two cold hits a year and to be now five years in and we’re at 90 putative identifications that have been released. I think we’ve been very successful.

Yvonne Kjorlien: That’s pretty awesome.

Ingrid Muhlig: Yeah, for such a junior program, we are pleased with our success so far.

Yvonne Kjorlien: So I’m wondering if you can talk maybe, I’m guessing there’s a bit of a backlog because there’s this database or all this information, entries for missing persons and unidentified remains — so there is already that in place when this new unit came in 2018….

Ingrid Muhlig: Right. I think where you’re going is these historical ones, right?

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, were you able to tackle some of that?

Ingrid Muhlig: We try and we thought it was going to be a lot easier than it was. And it ended up being actually quite difficult. But what happened was we knew there were already missing person files that had already profiles existing for them because they had done them at the provincial level for them. And we’re kind of like, okay, let’s, we gathered all that information before the, the database came into operation and then when we became operational, we started calling for them. But the issue we ran into is there is a specific consent form for the NMPDP, the National Missing Persons DNA Program. So the investigators had to go back, find the family that would been sampled, get them the complete these forms so they could be submitted to National. And that’s what I always say to the public also, is, I’m like, you may have given your DNA at one point, but if you don’t remember signing this consent form, it’s probably not at National. So another reason to go back to the investigator of the file and say, I would like my DNA put up at the national level.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, that consent. That’s a key piece.

Ingrid Muhlig: It’s huge. It’s Canada. We’re very protective of our personal information and nothing was going to be uploaded unless that specific consent form had been completed. So, you run into hiccups too or some of these cases are fairly old. So the people may have passed on, so then we have to go back to legal and what steps can we take can, we still accept it based on what they previously signed and so, yeah, there’s been a lot of learning curves for the program.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah. Yeah, sometimes, I can imagine it could be really tough and frustrating but at the same time, the spirit of why that is in place and how important it is.

Ingrid Muhlig: And it has to be respected, right? It did cause a lot of work. And even in the creation of the database, we looked at, hey, do we only accept profiles, or do we take samples? And then at one point it was just profiles, and then it got changed and we’re like, no, we’ll accept both actually, profiles or samples, knowing that not every province had the money to create profiles out of these DNA samples, right? So let’s make it accessible to all provinces and territories. And now we’re kinda realizing that existing profiles? Not great because our technology is better now and we’re able to do better profiles. And now we’re going, not only do we do those STR profiles. We’re doing YSTR profiles. We’re doing mitochondrial. So we actually need that sample to be able to do that further processing if necessary, right? So, yeah, the message has changed over the years. We’re kind of like, okay, samples. Give a samples.

Yvonne Kjorlien: I’m glad it only took you five years to figure that one out. Yeah, that’s just it. Technology is improved vastly in 20 years and in five years, it’s changed. And yeah, are we gonna keep up with that?

Ingrid Muhlig: Yeah. That’s it. That’s keeping up with it and keeping in our lane too. So.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah that – mmm.

I know that you gave a presentation for the Canadian Association of Biological Anthropologists in October and I missed your presentation. You know, there’s only one flight…

Ingrid Muhlig: They put me very last or second last.

Yvonne Kjorlien: It was on the Saturday. That’s all I know. There’s only one flight per day from Winnipeg to Calgary and it was during your presentation. So that was it. I had to be on it, so. Are there any tidbits in that presentation that you can share here? Take home messages?

Ingrid Muhlig: You know what? My goal there was to kind of intrigue those who were coming into this field because that’s who we work with, forensic anthropologists throughout Canada, right? With the unidentified remains. And talking to the coroners or talking to different people, it’s interesting how, on the surface they kind of know about us, but they don’t really know us in depth, right? So it was kind of capturing their interest and getting out there again: what the program does and how it can be used, right? Even like, for forensic anthropologists, a lot of times when remains are found they’re incomplete. With the database what’s nice is we can retain that profile. We know it’s been identified. But now we’re just retaining and comparing it to all other human remains that come in so we can potentially identify further remains for that incomplete’s unidentified — well, now they’re identified — remains. So that’s one of the nice things about it because when you get into arms, if you get an arm bone, yeah, at least if you have a skull or a mandible, you have some teeth, you might be able to get a dental from it. But yeah when you’re dealing with a single bone, it’s pretty hard to make that connection between the cases.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Or even a fragment of. You can tell it’s human. It’s definitely not animal. But, from there, where do you go?

Ingrid Muhlig: Right, right. And we’re seeing more cases of burned bones too. And that’s where mitochondrial does come into play. Although it’s not as descriptor, not as discriminative as nuclear, at least gives us the capability of dealing with degraded remains, so..

Yvonne Kjorlien: I’m guessing then, at least with mitochondrial, you can exclude.

Ingrid Muhlig: Right. YSTR and mitochondrial is great for excluding.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right.

Ingrid Muhlig: when you cannot exclude, it tells you it’s that family, right? But it can’t tell you within the family tree exactly where they are. So you now need that additional metadata to come in and help support that identification.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right. But, at least then, you’ve got somewhat of a direction then, which is always helpful.

Ingrid Muhlig: Yes. For sure.

Yvonne Kjorlien: You did mention cost. And, again, I don’t know who might be listening to this and everybody who has watched CSI, they think that DNA can just be… you know, it’s five dollars, you can get it on-demand, and you know, easy peasy, carry on. Let’s dispel some of that myth, shall we?

Ingrid Muhlig: I don’t know our costs unfortunately because I’m not on that side of the house. I do know we did go through another lab, a private lab, for some profiling. I think the STR was 450 or 500 dollars.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Okay, so that’s much cheaper than it was several years ago. It was in the thousands and it could take months, if not years.

Ingrid Muhlig: Yeah, so thousands you’re looking at now or for the genetic genealogy SNP [single nucleotide polymorphism] profiles. So YSTR, I think it was about 400 or 450, so to get it like a STR/YSTR profile. I think it cost us $950 from a private lab.

Yvonne Kjorlien: And what’s turnaround time because that would probably be non-priority, correct?

Ingrid Muhlig: No, that was a quick turnaround and I think ours, probably is for us to do is a bit cheaper because we do it on batches. Where they’re doing just that one case, right? So I would assume that our cost is a bit lower than that. Yeah, and that’s the problem too. It’s humanitarian. We don’t do priority but I can bump things up the queue, when necessary, but our turnaround time, like we say 30 to 60 days. 30 days, we aim for 30. Sixty days, usually it happens if the bones are degraded and we need to process it more than once.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah. Yeah, that’s just because it is a destructive technique. Yeah.

Ingrid Muhlig: I had one case where mom had provided us the baby teeth for her missing son. And, you know, I’m a mom. I know how heart-wrenching it is to have to give up something that you’ve saved like that, right? So we were so happy because the lab was actually able to get a profile from the dried blood that was on the tooth. So we didn’t have to destroy the tooth. So you have these little cheer moments here like yes.

Yvonne Kjorlien: The technology has just come so far.

Ingrid Muhlig: Yeah. It’s crazy.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Okay, so you mentioned that you’ve 90 people identified in the five years.

Ingrid Muhlig: Right. So we provided 90, we tell we call them putative identification reports because in the end it’s the coroner and the medical examiner that it looks at everything, between the information on the file and the DNA and the breakdown of the DNA and they’re the ones who sign off on the identification. So yeah, we’ve provided 90. We’ve had a few international ones.

You might have read recently Toronto Police Service had a lady who had been pulled out of Lake Ontario in 2017 and they tried every avenue to identify her: media releases and everything. And they resorted to genetic genealogy. And it led them back to Switzerland. So then Toronto came to us and we’re like, we think she might be from Switzerland. So we were able to take the profile that we had in our databank and go through Interpol and have it searched against the Switzerland database and sure enough. It identified someone who went missing from Switzerland.

Yvonne Kjorlien: That’s amazing.

Ingrid Muhlig: And you think of it like I know I deal with the Yukon a lot and that’s majority of their people they have up there. There is a lot of tourists coming through, right? Niagara, too. So yeah, so we have these areas where they’re just… and we share a border with the US. So there’s a lot of times we want to do that search on the US side too. So we have that capability, which is nice.

Yvonne Kjorlien: I just love that, you know what? sometimes globalization works.

Ingrid Muhlig: Right. Yeah. Uh-huh.

Yvonne Kjorlien: You can actually call somebody up and say, “So, hey, I’ve got this missing, this person, unidentified person and we’ve got the profile. Can I ship you the profile and you guys take a look over there?”

Ingrid Muhlig: Can you check it out? Let us know?

Yvonne Kjorlien: Sometimes it works. All right, where do you see this going forward? You’ve already mentioned how far you’ve already come in five years and the technology has changed quantumly in with 20, 30 years. Where do you see this going in the next five?

Ingrid Muhlig: The next five? You know what’s hot right now and what’s really picking up, is these international searches.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Ah!

Ingrid Muhlig: I’m getting a lot more requests for people who went missing internationally. So it’s finding the best way to move forward with those I would say.

Yvonne Kjorlien: So, Canadian that have gone missing while they’re traveling?

Ingrid Muhlig: Yeah, the traveling or maybe it is a family member the family, may be like let’s say in England, but their son has come to school here, right? And now they can’t locate their son and he’s gone missing. Interpol has started an international database called I-Familia. And so it kind of works at the same concept as ours nationally but at the international level. It’s huge in Europe. Because those countries, people can pass through multiple countries within one day and there’s not really a tracking system for that, right? So the European countries will submit to I-Familia and then that way they know that’s being searched against all other cases within their area, right? So that’s something we need to look at and see what’s the best way of utilizing that database.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right. Huh.

Ingrid Muhlig: So you never know when something’s missing, you use whatever is at your fingertips to try to locate the missing items. So I don’t think missing persons is any different.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Ah, yeah, that’s just it like we’ve got the technology and we just got to use it and make it work for us. Yeah.

Ingrid Muhlig: Yes, for sure.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, and I think that’s just it: that you don’t know what you don’t know. So it’s difficult, to, I guess, ask for specific help if you don’t know what that specific help is and that’s part of the reason why I wanted to talk to you about this is because I didn’t even know that there was this DNA data bank program going on, I knew about the missing and unidentified remains, but I didn’t know about this other part of it. And, like I said, sometimes you just don’t know what you don’t know.

Ingrid Muhlig: Right or have to experience it to kind of get away with kind of cultural thinking. And we did have some provinces where the police officers were like, if the person went missing here, we’re going to find them here. And, I’m like, challenge taken!

So I’m gonna when I get that inter provincial link happened then, yeah for sure, that said that’s a win for me in the sense that I could say this is why you need to come National. Don’t stop at the provincial level. You need to move on, to bring it up to National.

Yvonne Kjorlien: That’s just it. Yeah, you never know. The unexpected can happen.

Ingrid Muhlig: I see it as a safety net. It’s just an additional safety net that’s in place and can catch these things, right?

Yvonne Kjorlien: Alright, so is there anything that we haven’t covered that you want to touch on?

Ingrid Muhlig: I think our messaging to the public, when I’m speaking the public, is we really need the two sides of the stories to make that link. We need the missing persons and we need the unidentified remains story and we get the unidentified remains from investigators and medical examiners, coroners throughout Canada. But we see that we’re not always getting that missing person report and we’re really seeing that now with IGG in the sense that — are investigative genetic genealogy in the sense that — the ones that I know of that I have been following and they’ve been identified they were never reported missing.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Oh, wow.

Ingrid Muhlig: Yeah, so that really needs to be the take-home is that, if you have a loved one who you haven’t seen, who you can’t get a hold of, please make a report to the police of jurisdiction and get them up into the database.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Okay. Good to know.

Ingrid Muhlig: Because I know to-date, we’ve always run with about 700 unidentified remains. 700 we need to identify. There’s got to be some people who missing …

Yvonne Kjorlien: There’s got to be some people missing. Yeah.

Ingrid Muhlig: …that need to be reported so we can make those links to these unidentified.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right. Yeah, it’s too bad that those unidentified remains, you don’t have any data on whether there’s scavenged or not because I would really like that information. That’s the information I want to know.

Ingrid Muhlig: Yeah, I don’t and unfortunately it’s not something we go into ‘cause that’s more, investigator side of the house.

Yvonne Kjorlien: I know. I’m gonna keep asking for it though because it’s my wish.

Ingrid Muhlig: If it’s items that we see that the investigators need to know, it’s definitely something we’ll look into but, yeah.

Yvonne Kjorlien: It is what it is Ingrid. I understand. We can’t all have everything.

Ingrid Muhlig: No, no. And It’s funny because, until I talk to you I really haven’t talked to anyone who’s looked at the scavenging point of it. Other than, I know, because I’ve had a few cases where dogs are bringing home bones from the woods and bring them home to their dog parents and then they’re calling police about it, which is to me it totally different. I’m here in Ottawa. We’d never even think of that right but my brother-in-law who lives out in BC. he’s got three dogs who just go into the woods disappear for half a day and then come back with these bones and I’m looking at them and I’m like are you sure none of these are human? That’s where my mind goes which is terrible looking at me going. No, they’re animals.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Okay, just so we’re sure. Hey, I hear ya. That would be my first question. You’ve got to check them out.

Ingrid Muhlig: Yes. Yeah, yeah, but yeah, it’s… Canada’s so vast and there’s so many different things that can happen. It’s incredible. Even the waterways, I know, I’ve heard a lot of Red River or Niagara and just doing that check of the waterways to see if any remains have come to surface. So we’ve got a lot of water here in Canada, and that’s where a lot of people can go missing for sure.

Yvonne Kjorlien: And people can go missing in those remote contexts. It doesn’t have to be criminal. People can get snowed in, and they’ll leave their vehicle and they’ll just get caught out and die of exhaustion. Or exposure, yeah.

Ingrid Muhlig: Exposure. Yeah, a lot of scenarios.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, a lot of scenarios in this very big country with a lot of remote areas.

All right, thank you very much for this wonderful conversation. I’m just so tickled that we finally had a chance to connect and talk about this. Yeah.

Ingrid Muhlig: It was great. Thank you for coming forward, and I’m glad we were able to chat about it. Like I say, it’s a service for the people of Canada. And if this is your situation, by all means, speak to the investigator of your files and get that story in so we can start working on making some possible connections.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yes, right. Everybody should know about this service.

Transcribed by Google.

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Dr. Brad Clark teaches journalism at Mount Royal University in Calgary and his research focuses on media representations of marginalized groups. Brad got into teaching after years of experience as a journalist at newspapers and the CBC, where he covered major stories but wanted more variety. I was interested in why journalists ask academics for comments on scenarios in which they are not involved, and Brad provided some great insights.

In this episode we talk about:

How opinions are often presented as journalism nowadays due to the fracturing of credible news sources with the internet and lack of gatekeepers.
That journalism aims to verify facts, provide context, translate jargon, hold power to account and play a watchdog role through investigation and diverse voices.
Academics commenting on issues in which they have no direct involvement.
The overuse of the term “investigative journalist”.
How investigative journalism is represented on Netflix, as seen in Spotlight and Ancient Apocalypse.
How marginalized groups, like indigenous people and women, are often only represented after death rather than advocating for them in life.
Ethical journalism and young people pursuing it as a career to counter conspiracy theories.
That paying for journalism is important to recognize its value as a business amidst a sea of free but often low-quality online information.

You can find more information about Brad at his webpage here: https://www.mtroyal.ca/ProgramsCourses/FacultiesSchoolsCentres/Communications/FacultyStaff/Clark_Brad.htm

More information about some items mentioned in the interview can be found here:

Journalism’s Racial Reckoning: The News Media’s Pivot to Diversity and Inclusion (Amazon.ca)
Blue Storm: The Rise and Fall of Jason Kenney (Amazon.ca)

Thank you to the Community Podcast Initiative at Mount Royal University for letting us use the space to record this episode!

Support the podcast and my research and Buy Me A Coffee. Your contributions will go toward my research, webhosting, and my time. Want to find out more about my research? Check out the Scavenging Study.

Contact me through ykjorlien@gmail.com or through my contact form. Follow me on Facebook at The Reluctant Archaeologist, or through Instagram @yvonnekjorlien

Do you have a suggestion for a topic on the Scattered podcast?

Do you have a question about working with human remains?

Drop Yvonne a line at ykjorlien@gmail.com

Transcript

Yvonne Kjorlien: All right, so tell us who you are and where you’re at. So I’m Brad Clark, I teach in the journalism in broadcast media studies programs at Mount Royal University here in Calgary. And

Brad Clark: My research and my interests in the field really focused around ethics and representations of equity deserving groups. And that’s, that’s what really, that’s really my jam, I, I really enjoy learning about how media can improve the way they do things. I like the way ethics are evolving and seeing how we’re becoming, I think, a little more sensitive to different aspects of our storytelling related to sources related to audience. And that’s, that’s what keeps me getting up every morning and coming into work. Wow.

Yvonne Kjorlien: That’s a ball of wax and a half. How did you get to where you are now? Because I understand you worked at the CBC for a while. Yeah. Yeah. So kind of take us on your, you know, your journey, sure to how you got from I don’t know, being a journalist out in the field. Yeah, doing that glamorous job, because obviously, you know, it is

where you are now?

Brad Clark: Well, I can remember even being in a class and learning about journalism and thinking that this would be fun to teach someday. And, and that might have been like, around 1985, I got my first job as a as a journalist, as a reporter with The St. Albert Gazette, just north of Edmonton in 1986. And, and then, in 1980, and I went back to do a master’s I was I was always quite interested in in, I think, just just understanding journalism at a deeper level. And so going, going back and doing a master’s felt pretty natural. So I did that at the University of Cardiff in Wales. And that was a really interesting place to do that. I think the media then and now in Europe are a lot more outward looking, I find North American media quite inward looking. And there was there was, there’s lots of media there to take in. And so and then I came back, and I worked for CBC for a number of years, and I got to do a lot of really interesting work. I was a national reporter, I got to cover a lot of big stories, I got to do a fair bit of traveling. And, but I was starting to get to a place where I was always excited about telling stories, but more and more, it was just the big stories, not the you know, Brad, the Bank of Canada’s announcing a new interest rate today, we want you to cover the bond that is exciting.

Yvonne Kjorlien: If you hold a mortgage, that’s exciting news.

Brad Clark: Well, in those days, the Bank of Canada was holding interest rates pretty steady, there are a lot of a lot of on air live on air reports of nothing changed today. Which is never a great story arc for any kind of story, let alone a new story.

So I still kind of had this sideways glance at the corner of my eye for an opportunity to teach in and I saw a posting come up at Mount Royal. And, and so I applied in I got here and and I started teaching in right away, I became really keen and trying to find the vocabulary to talk about ethics and good journalism and good reporting. And part of that, for me, was starting to think more and more about accuracy. And who are we hearing from who whose voices are telling the stories? And it started to occur to me more and more that we were telling lots of stories about people from marginalized groups without a lot of input from them. And I can remember really kind of stumbling through trying to explain this to students and how, what strategies were to do it better. And eventually I, as Mount Royal just became a university decided to go back to school again, and do a doctorate. And so I made that my the focus of my doctoral research.

And so my dissertation was on national television news representations of racialized and indigenous peoples and, and that really kind of set me up for the work I’ve done in the last 10 years since then. So that’s kind of how I’ve, I’ve got to where I am now.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Wow, fabulous. So, before we get any further, I wanted to explain why I’ve invited you onto a podcast about dead people. And, for me, it seems obvious, but you know, for a listener, maybe it’s not. So when I worked at the Pickton farm investigation, we had it was high profile, there was a lot of media attention. And, you know, a lot of us had journalists come up to us after we left the premises, and they wouldn’t even introduce themselves. And it was very abrupt, very direct, and I found it a little bit traumatic event. But on top of that, even though I wasn’t reading any of the media and either newspapers or watching the media on the investigation, I did hear that there were people, academics, that were commenting on the investigation that weren’t involved in the investigation. And I found that very interesting. And I didn’t quite understand why that happened. And so part of me inviting you, Brad, to the podcast is just to discuss some of that is why might an academic feel it’s okay to comment about something that they are not involved in. And, universities, academic institutions do promote that, they have it on their websites, that these are the experts that we have at our institutions that are available for comment, regardless of whether or not they’re involved in the situation. So I wanted to get some insight on that from you, but also because the dead can’t talk. And so representing them, I think is an interesting, I guess, population to fit within that the marginalized and the ethics of journalism. So that’s why I wanted you on the podcast.

Brad Clark: Sure.

Yvonne Kjorlien: And I thought you would be fantastic considering your, your past experience and your research to talk about that. Yeah. So

Brad Clark: I think anytime anybody is asked to speak to the media on a subject, they have to be pretty upfront, they need to be transparent about what their background is, what they’re bringing to the interview, and what they can speak to, on a real level, what do they know about the situation to really offer something of value in the way of knowledge that that falls within their range of experience, and relates to whatever issues or themes or ideas that the interviewer is trying to pursue? And I think there has to be, maybe there isn’t enough of this. But I think there needs to be, I think people need to be a lot more upfront about what they aren’t able to answer to say no to questions. No, I can’t answer that. I have no insight. I don’t have any experience in that area.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Well, can we just go back for a second? Sorry, um, because I, what is the purpose for a journalist to go and ask for a comment from somebody who isn’t involved? Sorry, I’m not getting the connection on that.

Brad Clark: So what I would guess is, using the example of the investigation into Robert Pickton, and that series of horrific crimes, that what journalists might be asking experts about, they may be asking about legal views of the legal process. How is the justice system work in this case? When the evidence might be hugely circumstantial, and, you know, what are the implications for the arguments that the prosecution in how to make how is the defense going to coach their case against the charges?

So it kind of depends on what aspect of the event that the journalist is trying to get a handle on. It could be, you know, you could talk to a forensic expert around how you’re how you try to, you know, sift through a site, like the farm to uncover evidence, what the approach is, those are those are things that academics have real background and information about.

If I can extend it to a different example, we can’t just talk to people who are facing end of life, to talk about assisted dying about the made legislation, for example, we need to we need people to interpret the law, the implications of the law. So we may go to professors at the UofC[algary] law school, for example, to make sense of the legislation. So lots of times what we’re doing, or what journalists are doing, when they reach out to experts is to get a handle on the deeper aspects related to the story, that are beyond the grasp of journalists, but also probably beyond the grasp of audiences as well.

Yvonne Kjorlien: So, that kind of contextual, yeah, providing a context, but also that deeper, as well. Okay.

Brad Clark: That’s right. But in the example of assisted dying, I think you’d be doing an audience a real disservice, if you only talk to experts, if you don’t talk to people who are facing end of life in a way that is, can be, you know, very painful, can be very undignified in some ways, and some people may not want it to end that way. So to understand that, you know, you I think you need, you need voices, you need more than just expert voices, probably need more than voices of people who are affected by the legislation as well.

And, so now where I think where things can get ethical is, or unethical, is when people decide to weigh in, without really having the expertise to make the sorts of pronouncements that they make.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right. So I’m going to ask to take a step back, because journalism, I think, at least in my lifetime, has changed. And there’s now perhaps a view and it could just be my perspective, that I’m, I have trouble deciphering between the difference between journalism, and you know, people just spouting their opinions. You know, they say they’re from a media outlet of some sort. But what’s the difference between their opinion and actual journalism? So can you maybe give us a little bit of a history lesson or tell us what is the role of journalism? What do they teach you at journalism school that makes you a journalist?

Brad Clark: Okay. I think there’s a lot to wait lots of ways to think of it. So journalism is a process of verification. Okay, so journalism is finding stuff out. So there’s, there’s an aspect of investigation, of exposing facts and truth. It’s a process of verification. Sometimes it’s a process of interpretation as well. Sometimes journalists are there to interpret the implications of government policy, for example, or they’re there to break down complex issues related to science, break them down in to a way that people can understand. You know how why does a vaccine work a certain way? How has carbon in the atmosphere contributed to the planet heating up? So some of that stuff can be very jargony, but it’s up to one of the things journalists do is find the common language that people use to understand that and, and express it in terms that, that that people can relate to and, and say, oh, okay, now I get it. So it’s almost like doing a public service for translating difficult concepts that would likely impact the public and the public. Probably should know about. Yes, yeah. So that’s, that’s, that’s that aspect of it. I mean, obviously, journalism plays a watchdog role in society, keeping an eye on people in power, holding power to account over the decisions they make, if they’re in government, or if they’re running corporations that have impacts on people. So there’s that aspect of it. Even the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, makes a lot of provisions for oversight of the judiciary and the justice system, so that we’re ensuring people are getting fair access to justice, whether as accused or whether as potential victims in crime or legal disputes. So journalism does a lot of different things. And, and so that’s, that’s what the intent is.

What’s happened in the last 20 years with the growth of the internet and digital media and social media is this incredible fracturing of sources of information. I heard an expression at this conference I was at recently, The Narrative Journalism Conference in Boston at Boston University. And the comment was from an expert in information, disinformation, and misinformation. And she pointed out that knowledge is expensive, information is cheap.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Oh, nice.

Brad Clark: Lots of times, when you’re dealing with stuff that you’re not sure about the source, it’s information, it’s cheap. It’s somebody posting something they’ve seen somewhere, heard somewhere, and just putting it up. Knowledge, whether it’s journalistic or academic or scientific, it costs. It has a cost associated with it. It’s taken effort. It’s involved people, verifying, investigating, and being thoughtful about how to frame it and how to write about it, so that people can see it and understand it.

And so, how do you how do you tell the difference between knowledge and information? I think a lot of it comes down to knowing the source. And, you quite rightly said, a lot of stuff comes from a source maybe you haven’t heard of before. That’s always a telltale sign, that’s always a good reason to start to be skeptical. It’s not to say that there may not be truth to what’s there. But it is sort of the first red flag that this may not be as rigorously curated as you’d like.

And then if it looks like it may be a reliable source, then who are the voices that you see in the content? What sources of information have they brought in to bring this account together? Are they talking to people with direct knowledge? Are they talking to people who have an axe to grind related to the issue? Are they only talking to people with an axe to grind? So, you can start to look for the perspectives that are included and excluded in in the account and you can start to think critically about the potential validity of the information and decide whether it’s something you want to put much stock in or not.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right. And I couldn’t help but notice that, what you just outlined, was what you outlined in regards to what journalism does.

Brad Clark: Sure

Yvonne Kjorlien: They verify, they provide context, they do some knowledge translation, regarding jargon, and whatever. But yeah, if you do come across that piece of information that hasn’t kind of gone through the filter of a journalist, then you have to go and be the journalist yourself, and do that verification, the context, and figuring out how reliable is that information and is it actually knowledge?

Brad Clark: Exactly, yeah, that’s very much the process. And, you know, with, with information being so ubiquitous, like, not everything goes through the lens of, of journalism.

Pre digital media, pre internet, for better or for worse, we had gatekeepers in journalism, who really can control the tap on what made it into the public discourse. What was or wasn’t news was decided by usually powerful white men who were in positions of authority at news organizations all over the world. And, so that brought up kind of a particular perspective to the news.

But one of the things it also did was, it did involve pushing information through kind of an ethical and legal lens. So, things that were purely slanderous or libelous, they didn’t see a lot of light on pages of newspapers or in news broadcasts. Or things that were just straight opinion or that were BS. You know, there were ethical standards to verification to representations of truth that prevented some stuff from making it into the public discourse through the news media.

Yvonne Kjorlien: they’ve provided the filters, but at the same time, they probably kept a lot of really good stuff out because they were, you know, the patriarchal white guy syndrome.

Brad Clark: Yeah, very much the patriarchal settler view of the world that and that’s been one of the beauties of social media is that it has allowed for underrepresented voices to circumvent the traditional gatekeepers. So you get movements that get traction like Idle No More like Black Lives Matter, that may not have got the same kind of traction in the past because of social media. Social media allowed them to sort of circumvent the gatekeepers. The other side of that is it also allows the far right nutcases to circumvent the gatekeepers too.

Yvonne Kjorlien: So if you remove the filters on one, you remove the filters on it all.

Brad Clark: Exactly.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Unfortunately, yeah. And what really brought, I guess, home for me the role of journalism, at least, how it used to be, was when I watched Spotlight, about the Boston Globe and exposing the sexual abuse and assaults in the 80s 90s in Boston in regards to the Catholic Church. And just watching the movie, and seeing how those journalists dug and investigated and brought that case to light. And I thought, oh, that’s what journalism is. That’s their role, versus something like Ancient Apocalypse.

And Graham Hancock says that he’s an investigative journalist. And I’m like, really? Because that’s not what I saw on Spotlight. Yeah, and I thought that was an interesting contrast.

Brad Clark: Yeah, the term investigative journalist is so overused, like it should really be licensed.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Some sort of trademark you have to apply for.

Brad Clark: Exactly. Because, you know, the people who put out the 10,000 Mules documentary related to conspiracy theories around the stolen election in 2020, and the Trump conspiracy that ballots were stuffed, for example, those people would describe themselves as investigative journalists as well. And, work like that is really easy to fact check and verify, and people have. And people who actually could call themselves investigative journalists. So, that’s the problem.

Sometimes people are investigative journalists. And then sometimes people are “investigative journalists” with air quotes.

Yvonne Kjorlien: But again, I think it goes back to kind of your checklist that you say, that provided before, about what journalism provides, that the verification the context, the diversity of voice, and ensuring that isn’t just information, it actually is knowledge. And but now we have to go through that check with, you know, the air quotes investigative journalists to actually ensure that they are actually investigative journalisy or not, and whether or not to believe them.

Brad Clark: Yeah. You know, another way to assess it, I guess I mentioned this earlier, but I’m thinking specifically of the air quote, investigative journalist, Netflix series Ancient Apocalypse. Like, I haven’t looked at that at all.

Yvonne Kjorlien: It’s a fun story. Sure, you know, if you want to blow eight hours and just be along for the ride, watch it. But in terms of actual archaeology and depth, not so much.

Brad Clark: Yeah, what I would look at critically, in watching that series is who are the voices? Who are we talking to? And what are the voices that are left out? And I think, I mean, I haven’t seen the series, but I bet if you do that, you come to understand the perspectives that aren’t there. It kind of reminds me a little bit when I was a kid, I was really, really fascinated by aliens. And, and there was, there was a writer who came out with a book and then it became a documentary. Something about the gods.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Oh, Chariots of the Gods.

Brad Clark: And then there was the sequel called Gold of the Gods and it was sort of looking, you know, taking things that seemed like they were difficult stories to explain, like the pyramids or the Nazca Lines in Peru. And so, you know, what’s the only conclusion you can come to? It must have been aliens. So, that’s kind of what comes to mind to me when I see that and it’s, you know, I don’t know what the logical terminology is, but the idea that sometimes the simplest argument is the right one. Like that really plays out a lot of times, and especially in a world where conspiracy theories are so prevalent these days.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. It’d be interesting to get under the psychology of all that. I’m sure it’s there. Yeah, it was very interesting, because, you know, both programs were on Netflix. And so they’re demonstrating the continuum of accuracy of information. And even though Spotlight was a movie and it was fictionalized, I mean, they touted it, you know, fiction, whereas the Ancient Apocalypse was advertised as a docuseries, as truth. And I thought that was so interesting.

Brad Clark: Yeah. Yeah. You know, one of the troubles with the world today is the way people take the trappings of journalism, what Stuart Hall might call the professional code related to journalism and use that as a way to add credibility to the messaging that they’re putting out. So you call it, you know, kind of half-assed archaeological series a docuseries. You see it in branded content that is made to look like news articles. They come with headlines, they come with a little quote box with, they may include a little infographic in it to hit the key point.

I did some research for a book we did called The Blue Storm: The Rise and Fall of Jason Kenney. And I wrote about the Canadian energy center known as the Energy War Room. And if you go to their website, it has very much the trappings of journalism: headlines and subheads, and decks. They have a section called Matter of Fact where they fact check — and I’m using air quotes –usually media accounts related to the energy industry that they don’t agree with. And, we know that a lot of the messaging is very one-sided, the stories and articles that are put out by the Energy War Room, which was a campaign promise of the UCP to challenge what it referred to as the myths and untruths that people were saying about the oil and gas industry. But that’s a whole other side. But the point is, is that they try to give their views additional credence by taking on the trappings of journalism.

So there’s lots of stuff out there that’s made to look and sound like journalism. That actually isn’t. That’s just one more thing that you need media literacy to kind of address.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, that selective reporting, I think is very interesting, especially because I’m working my way through another one of your books, Journalism’s…

Brad Clark: Racial Reckoning.

Yvonne Kjorlien: yeah, that one. Journalism’s Racial Reckoning, and just how, especially marginalized voices have been excluded, and that is, you know, very selective about what information you choose to report on, choose to investigate, and could also be said about the dead because they can’t speak for themselves. So like you just illustrated with the assisted dying, you know, you can’t just talk with the experts, and you can’t just talk with the people that affects you need, the whole context, the whole picture. And it isn’t about being selective, and what makes the best story because it’s all about shock and awe, sex sells and what have you. You really do have to look at all sides. And I think it’s a matter of integrity that perhaps has been lost.

Brad Clark: Yeah, I think I think there’s that. I think also, if you look at in high profile stories, who the people are who constitute the dead they’re often people who have been invisible. They’re people who have not had the opportunity to be heard from and continue not to be heard from. Another clear example, and very much related to Pickton is missing and murdered indigenous women and girls. And, you know, other people are trying to tell their stories, and I think they’ve done a quite a remarkable job. But, that’s where journalism needs to be better, is to tell those stories before death, tell those stories, when something can be done to keep the people alive.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right. Yeah. And I and I know this comes up a lot with investigations, officers after the fact, detectives after the fact, saying that, you know, what, if this had happened to somebody who was white, or in, you know, an upper class neighborhood, there would have been no question they would have got on the investigation, things would have been done right away, but because you know, is marginalized, indigenous, black, something, you know, woman they weren’t investigated or they weren’t investigated thoroughly, promptly. I hear that all the time. And that Murder in Boston podcast is exactly that.

Brad Clark: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, no. Another US example that I’ve shared with my students is when a young woman hiking a couple years ago, I think her name was Gabby Potito, went missing, I think it was in Arizona, or one of the western states, and it was just this flurry of media coverage. And it very much focused on her boyfriend very, very quickly. And people in the state, First Nations people in the state started saying, excuse me, like, you know, we’ve had dozens of women go missing. And you’ve, you’ve never reported on it. You know, young, pretty 18-year-old white girl goes missing and suddenly you focus all this attention on state efforts to find somebody. And so it’s very much the case. The double standard.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, yeah, it’s tragic. But I’m glad that we’re now it’s coming to awareness. For better or for worse, you know, it’s taken as long as it has to get here. But we’re gaining awareness, and it’s now: what are we going to do about that awareness? How can we move forward in a constructive and productive manner? Yeah, tough stuff all around. But it’s probably one of the reasons why I started this podcast is that talking about death as a taboo, and talking about the hard stuff is hard. But it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t talk about it. If anything, we should because it’s hard. We should talk about it. It’s probably hard for a reason. Yeah. And we’re just avoiding it. To no one’s benefit.

Brad Clark: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah.

Yvonne Kjorlien: So where are you going to go next in your research?

Brad Clark: Um, I’m working on a proposal with a colleague for a book that is going to look at disinformation, as it relates to marginalized groups and who often find themselves the focus of disinformation.

If we think about what we’ve seen with two LGBTQI+ in the last few years, even in Alberta, the issues around transgender youth, there’s been a lot of really significant misinformation about that. There was a time when people who wanted to take a run at queer people would brand them as pedophiles. And now they don’t use that language anymore for fear of being sued for libel. So now the term is groomer. And, this is some of some of the issues that we’re starting to see. And in the media don’t always do a terrific job of countering some of that narrative.

There’s a recent study that came out, just like in the last couple of weeks, looking at the New York Times coverage of transgender issues in the US. And some ridiculously low percentage of the stories included transgender voices in the article. It should be 100%. And I can’t remember what the proviso was, but in one instance, it was as low as like 16% included transgender voices. So you know, that’s just sort of one aspect of it. But that’s where I’m going next.

One of the things, personally, that I have such a tough time with, it’s the journalist in me, is when somebody says something that’s incorrect, that’s factually wrong, like, my body is wracked with energy to correct them. And that’s not always appropriate. But, the existence of either lies or falsehoods, or just information that’s invalid or incorrect, it just gets on my very last nerve in a way that, just it’s the very core of my existence. And so I think that’s kind of what got me on looking at EDI in media in the first place. And now, when we live in a world where misinformation and disinformation are so prominent, I want to kind of bring the two together.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Absolutely, yeah. Yeah, I don’t envy you at the moment, because you’re probably in a constant state of cringe. And because of all the misinformation and lies out there.

Brad Clark: Yeah. I’m prone to be listening to podcasts and start yelling as I’m running: That’s ridiculous. You can’t say that.

Yvonne Kjorlien: So let’s put on our positive thinking cap, if there was one, where do you see journalism in, maybe let’s just do 10 years. Is it gonna get better? Because you said you had some positive coming out of the conference in Boston. You weren’t expecting that?

Brad Clark: I guess I wasn’t expecting as much of it. But, yeah, I know, I felt like people were really celebrating journalism, in a way that I don’t feel happens very often. With journalism. You know, we’ve especially in Canada, we’ve been through so many layoffs. And it’s just seems like it’s been kind of a dark, ugly picture of the future of journalism. Lots of great students, students are really engaged and keen to make a difference coming into the program. So that part has always kind of given me some hope. But I think for me, what the conference did was just remind me of how important the role of journalism is, and the place for it, and the fact that people who are doing it are coming from the right place, they’re there. They’re trying to do good. They’re trying to address some of the issues that we’ve been talking about to correct the narrative to bring in more voices to tell better stories. And, and that’s the other thing, if we tell stories better if we can engage with audiences with important issues, maybe that can motivate more change as well.

Part of the conference was very much focused on narrative journalism. And narrative has been shown to be a really powerful tool in not just pushing out, misinformation and disinformation, but in combating it as well. So if we, if we can tell stories in a way that are fair and accurate, and engaging, maybe that’s a way forward to address some of the issues we’re facing with conspiracy theories, and, the rejection of science and expertise sometimes, as well.

So, I guess, 10 years out, I would love to see that kind of positivity gain some momentum and drive young journalists to continue to try and pursue the craft and get better at it. And I do see that.

There’s, a few years ago, I didn’t find journalism students necessarily looking to practice journalism. And I’m seeing that less and less. I’m seeing students come into the program because they want to be journalists, because they want to tell stories, because they want to hold power to account and make a difference. And so I hope that trajectory continues kind of an upward trend.

And the other part of it is, and we haven’t talked about this at all, it just related to the business model in sustainability. And I’m hoping that people start to recognize the importance of paying for journalism. You know, there was a time in the 1950s and 1960s when like 95% of Canadian households subscribe to at least one newspaper. So you’re paying for news every…all the time. And now and I’ve had people say this to me is why should I pay for subscription? Information is free. Well, remember, information is free, knowledge costs money. And, and so I’m hoping that more people will come to realize that. People pay for books. People pay to stream movies. Why should my work as a journalist not be paid for? Why does it not have value?

Yvonne Kjorlien: I think that’s just it. You know, what is the value? And that’s part of the reason why I wanted to come on and get you on here is to understand the value of journalism because it seems like, either, like we’ve lost the sense of the value, or it has been devalued, in some way, shape or form. And so I wanted to get your insights on that. And, you know, it sounds like journalism still very much does have value. We just don’t perhaps recognize that. In the slew of cheaper free information, what is the value of knowledge? And whoever provides that knowledge or cultivates it.

Brad Clark: Yeah, yeah, well, the other the other thing is journalism has been under attack, as a way to deflect from responsibility for a whole host of things. So, when any reporting is referred to as fake news by the leader of the free world, people start to listen to that as well. So we’ve we’ve been up against that.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah. It’s hard to know who to believe anymore.

Brad Clark: Believe me.

Yvonne Kjorlien: I will, Brad. I will. All right. Well, I think we’re gonna end there because this was just, this was fabulous. Thank you very much. Thank you for your insights. And, yeah, if people want to reach out to you, I hope you’d be welcoming to them.

Brad Clark: Absolutely. Yeah. It’s been a total pleasure. Thanks so much. Fabulous.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

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* This is a continuation of my interview with Brian, without preamble. I highly* recommend listening to Part 1 first.*

Brian Paulsen is assistant police chief in Sturgis, South Dakota. He co-wrote a chapter in Forensic Archaeology based on his Master’s thesis about landfill searches in the United States.

In this episode we talk about:

How Brian led a search of a landfill in Sarpy County, Nebraska to find the remains of a 4-year-old boy murdered by his father and placed in a dumpster.
The search, which involved over 600 volunteers from the community over 30 days, with meticulous records from the landfill helping to determine the search area.
Search methods, which included excavators loading trash into trucks to spread it out for searching, with trucks dumping further from the landfill for teams to manually search.
Who searched. Only first responders searched initially for safety and mental health reasons, but public volunteers were recruited when more searchers were needed.
Results of the search. No remains were found but the perpetrator was still convicted based on evidence and confession. The search provided closure for the victim’s family.
Community support was found to be critical to the success of the Sarpy County search operation, with hundreds of volunteers, donations, and cooperation from local businesses.
Paulsen’s subsequent research. He looked into 46 landfill searches and found a success rate of under 50%, with the chances of recovery dropping significantly after 30 days.
The search raised awareness of landfill search protocols and lessons on factors like timeliness, search area size, and mental health support for searchers.
No centralized database currently tracks landfill search data, but individual case records could help build understanding over time.

More information about the Nebraska landfill search can be found here:

Deseret News: Still searching landfill for boy’s body (June 22, 2003)
Desert News: Landfill hunt for Nebraska boy ends (July 26, 2003)
Forensic Archaeology: Multi-Disciplinary Perspectives (2019, Springer; Amazon.ca link)

Do you have a suggestion for a topic on the Scattered podcast?

Do you have a question about working with human remains?

Drop Yvonne a line at ykjorlien@gmail.com

Transcript, Part 2

Yvonne Kjorlien: Okay, so a search protocol was established through 9/11.

Brian Paulsen: Correct.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Do you know anybody else like that, is that the kind of standard now for searching either catastrophes or any time there’s a lot to sift through?

Brian Paulsen: Yeah, literally and figuratively. Yes. That’s one thing that I didn’t, that I wish I had inquired about and what was their methodology to searching in the landfills and such. A couple of them volunteered and they seemed to do something very similar. They brought the trash out. There are a couple that actually just sent investigators or law enforcement only in to the landfill and they would search an area and then they would be done. There’s not a lot of, I don’t have a lot of information on what others did as far as their methodology.

Yvonne Kjorlien: It sounds like is a bit of a continuum too in search methods.

Brian Paulsen: Yeah.

Yvonne Kjorlien: All right, so from our previous conversations, it sounds like this case that where you had to go in and search the landfill for this boy, prompted you to then do research on landfill searches.

Brian Paulsen: So I came out of the landfill, which it really consumed, basically eight months of my life. And the whole investigation had – there were nights out driving around saying okay, maybe went there, just letting your mind kind of take you and not really saying, okay I got to put it into this –so I was working 18, 20 hour days, sleeping for about four and then getting up again.

I got done with this case in August and we knew we had the trial coming up the next spring, but I had all this time on my hands and I thought, “what am I gonna do?” I had always thought about getting my Master’s degree and I had taken a crime scene, a year-long crime scene course that was put on by a community college in conjunction with the hospital in Lincoln, Nebraska, the state capitol. Nebraska Wesleyan had taken that over and that turned it into a Master’s program. One of the instructors, and eventually the dean of the program, was one of our searchers. She came out. Her background is in archeology and specifically forensic archeology. Dr. Connor. She came out and searched only one day, maybe two. She was one of those that had to get back because of commitments, so I drove her back down to her car, and she was saying, “hey, this is my background, I think what you’re doing is exactly how it should be done. Just continue. If there’s anything you need help with or questions, just let me know.” And really we had, that was kind of where we had really formed our relationship.

After I’d got done with the case, I said, let’s get into forensics, and it was right there in Lincoln, Nebraska, so it was an hour-drive for me. So I went in. It was an accelerated course. I met with a number of cohorts that were doing it as well, some of them that I knew and some of them that I would become good friends with. We started our Master’s program. It was pretty early on that I identified that, “Gosh, I want to know: what were our chances? At what point should we have stopped? What should we have done differently?” I just wanted to know more and, if I ever had to do it again, refine how I’d do it.

As part of my thesis, Dr. Connor sent out an email blast to a number of archaeologists and said, “Hey, are you aware of any landfill searches?” And I sent written letters to state patrols, or highway patrols, depending on what their designation, as well as the state’s attorney’s office because I felt they would have helped at least prosecute or investigate or have knowledge of it within their states. And then all the large departments – Dallas, New York City – if they had a specific investigative unit, I sent a letter to them. All in all, I probably sent out 125, 100 to 125 letters.

My boss at the time, I had made chief 3 years before this (I had made chief in ‘99), and my city manager, I went to him and said, “Can I use official letterhead for my research?” And he said, “Absolutely. This is going to help law enforcement, whether it’s us or somebody else, yes, please do.” And I told him: I will pay postage out of my own pocket, but I felt it would be more official letterhead. I believe that was also some of the reason why some of the agencies did respond. It was of interest that the letter would go out and it went to one department and they’d say, “Oh you need to probably talk to this department because I know they had one, and it was a smaller agency but there was just no way I could send out that many letters. One in particular was a case in southwest Colorado. That was somebody else, probably Denver PD, that said, “We didn’t have one, but so and so did in the southwest corner. You might want to reach out to them.” And we reached out to them as well, any time we got that information.

I should also say that my thesis was also a presentation at the international forensic archaeology conference in St. Louis, and I don’t recall the year. Probably had to have been 2008, I believe.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Because you gonna go look it up.

Brian Paulsen: Yup. Absolutely. Quite honestly, that’s where I met Kimberlee. And other components of that book, Forensic Archaeology book, where my research is published, there were a couple others that were there as well. And I believe one was from the UK. So some of those crime scenes, unusual crime scenes were presented that day.

And one of my cohorts in the program, his thesis was on decomposition and different, not stages, different speeds of decomposition in controlled environments. Because we knew that the landfill was, as I said, 32 degrees, and when we were in there in July, and we also knew it was sealed from oxygen or a lot of oxygen. So he did his using pig cadavers to work on the decomp side of it. So he, we kind of worked hand in hand, and really kind of discovered some of the information from each other. Just off of those two, off of his and mine.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Nice. Okay, so when you sent out these letters, were you just asking them if you could talk them, or were you sending them a survey? What was the level of engagement you were looking for?

Brian Paulsen: I was hoping that they would reach back out. Obviously all of my contact information. It was a survey form of letter: basically I’m doing research and this was institution, this was the agency I work for, but my educational institution was Nebraska Wesleyan, and did you have a landfill, were you aware of any landfills nearby you or in your state, and would you provide me with that information, or contact information? And then several of them, I would follow-up and try to get a hold of the detective within that agency. I kept track of who I sent the letters to and would reach out to a number of those and say, “Okay, this has been reported that you have a landfill search” otherwise what about this. And then there was obviously that great time saver, I just Googled “landfill searches” in the United States. I actually came up with a couple that I had to send additional letters out to because I discovered them on the internet but hadn’t sent a letter to them.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right. So, I didn’t have it highlighted in your chapter about how many responses did you get? I know it was a pretty low number.

Brian Paulsen: Yeah, it was. And a lot of that I think had to do with, quite honestly, with nobody, I mean there’s such a timeframe that could have occurred. And I think it also showed, when I looked at it, you saw more landfill searches occurring as I started to do my research than prior, before. Before – 5 years before, so – there weren’t that many landfill searches. Because I had dated them all, built a timetable that I didn’t even put into my thesis. There were definitely an increase of landfill searches starting, or had occurred and starting to occur. So we were one of those accelerating there in Nebraska.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Very interesting. Okay, so I have here, “The results are gathered from 46 searches provided from reliable sources.” And then, “An additional five searches not used in the results for evidentiary purposes and not in the recovery of human remains.”

Brian Paulsen: Yes.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Out of 100-125 requests –

Brian Paulsen: About a 30% return.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah.

Brian Paulsen: Yeah.

Yvonne Kjorlien: You know what? 30% ain’t bad.

Brian Paulsen: No, it’s not. I thought it would be more. I thought we’d have more landfill searches up to that point. And I’m guessing it was underreported or underdiscovered…

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah.

Brian Paulsen: …because there was really no way to reach out. In hindsight, I probably should have sent to the fraternal organizations, your national associations of chiefs of police, or the police officers’ associations of each state, and as well as the sheriff’s side as well. And then went from there. Mostly it’s, drug investigator conferences – okay, let’s go to those conferences. We talked about going to the international associations of the chiefs of police and having a booth there. And we didn’t, based solely on cost. But we tried to reach out to everybody and anybody we could.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Let’s talk about your results. So you did mention before that that 30-day mark when it comes to the search, that’s kind of the tipping point.

Brian Paulsen: Yeah, yup. And then we started to look at the recoveries in the research and in the responses I got back, and we started looking. I think there was only one recovery out of all of those that occurred 30 days after the event. It’s very important obviously in the York, Nebraska case of a six-hour recovery. It’s very important from time of death, or time of discovery, to the time you enter the landfill, that also affected it as well. The shorter amount of time from death to entering the landfill, the higher the probability of recovery. And then obviously that recovery you could push it, but in 30 days, it was distinctly against the search at that point. At Day 30, the likelihood of recovery is very, very low.

Yvonne Kjorlien: That’s very interesting, especially considering you know the detailed records that waste management keep.

Brian Paulsen: Yeah, yup.

Yvonne Kjorlien: You wouldn’t think that the time of search would be so fixed and so short because you would know that kind of know where the remains were that you were looking for.

Brian Paulsen: Yup, you’re absolutely right. It’s a direct contrast. Because if you, with all the information that landfills store, that you’d be able to go right in and to that point. And my search, the search that I led, was a good example. We knew where we were going but we hit that 30-day window, 29- day window, I think it was, and we chose not to go any further. There’s a lot of background, and I don’t want to say interference, but there’s a lot of background movement politically, okay. Because in my case, the media was there everyday. I gave a media report when I left the landfill everyday. So, people were saying, well there were a lot of people, there were the people who were saying I hope we never stop, and then there were the people saying get him out of there, get those people out of there, let’s go on operating normally.

It affected the landfill. I mean, obviously they’re moving trash they wouldn’t have. It changes their record keeping because the trash coming in during July was being taken to a different spot. So it changes their record keeping. It’s like, okay, this isn’t on June 30th the trash is here, but all the January trash is over into a different phase of the landfill. And, honestly, as well as the operation, when we went into the landfill, everyday they used a measure of dirt, anywhere from 12 inches to 18 inches of dirt to seal the trash. While we were in there, they changed operations and they were spraying it with a coating that was sealing the trash, not having used the dirt, allowing to put more trash to be put into an area. When they put that trash, all that trash that was either the overburden or what we searched, they pushed back in and they, at the end of that day, when they were pushing it back in, they sealed it with this, I called it an ectoskeleton, and I believe, and I know I did in my thesis, I wrote much like a dipped ice cream cone: you put it in, you pull it out and it hardens. It saved them a tremendous amount. They actually had a hole left over when they put all the trash back into the hole that we had dug out because they weren’t putting a foot, 18 inches of dirt on top of each day. They were just basically sealing it with a much thinner layer.

So there’s a lot of pressure. That’s some of what I’ve been researching or reading on the searches for the Indigenous women in Canada is the pressure, and who’s going to pay for it. We were fortunate. We – not saying it’s right – we had a young boy who was murdered and put in a dumpster and I think there was a stronger desire to recover youth or children in a heinous crime like this, over just the average citizen. And I don’t know that that’s fair and I have nothing to support that but my experience has been that an adult victim of crime is not looked on as deeply as a child. So, I think the pursuit of a child in a landfill that’s no-hands-barred, we’re going in, we’re going to take whatever we can to recover. But those outside mechanisms, that outside work, is a lot of pressure on the folks that are operating the landfill as well as the people that are searching.

Most of my agency was at the landfill. We required them, so we had to cover the streets. There were a couple of our officers who had young children who said, “I don’t want to be in there. I don’t want to be the one that finds that.” Okay, then that kind of designates you, your on the streets. The rest of us will go to the landfill. And that worked out well.

Yvonne Kjorlien: So I just want to go back to the results of study. It says here, “Of the 46 cases, searches were successful in 20 of the cases reported.” So that’s under 50%.

Brian Paulsen: Yeah, yup.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, that’s pretty disappointing. And then, “In 25 searches where the duration of the search is known, 13 lasted seven days or less.” And, “if the timeframe is extended to 30 days, an additional seven searches were added”, so up to 20 then.

Brian Paulsen: Yeah, yup.

Yvonne Kjorlien: So, yeah, I think it’s important to know that is not going to be successful. You really have to accept that right at the beginning, that there’s a distinct possibility that searching a landfill, you will not be successful for what you’re looking for.

Brian Paulsen: Right. Absolutely. You’re correct. And I don’t know – there was nobody at the time that we started on our search, there was nobody that gave me or that had that information. I think we still would have went in. Again, going back to the information we had, all the solid information we got from the landfill, all the information that they record, I still probably have went in. I would have felt more pressure, I believe I would have felt more pressure as we went in, starting getting into the late teen-days, as well as that third week, the 21st day, saying “gosh, we got nine days,” we might have pushed harder. We might have had an injury, we might have had something negative come out of that whole search. But, again, that information wasn’t there, wasn’t readily available to us at that time.

Yvonne Kjorlien: You could have had another level of mental health because anxiety finish or to find something.

Brian Paulsen: Yeah, yup. I totally agree. Going in, even into the middle of the search or the halfway point, I still thought we were going to be successful. I think everybody out there was feeling that same way. And when I say “out there”, those that were in the landfill. We took one day – again, it was going back to the regional media interest – we took one day, the prosecutor’s office took one day, one afternoon and we’d like to bring the media in, but we don’t want them to have access to the general population. So, let’s stop the landfill at lunch, we’ll feed them, they can go on their way, and then we’ll have the media come in. They got in, they were able to get their video footage, they were able to ask some of the law enforcement questions about how long, what’s it like, you know, those types of things. But we didn’t subject the general population to that. But it really eased the pressure. There were still daily briefings at the gate at the end of each day. We took an afternoon to make sure they have the information they wanted.

We initially had helicopters flying over and getting video footage and such while we were searching. We had another individual – we laugh about it, I smile about it now – but he was a reporter for the Omaha World Herald. Every morning, he knew what time we went into the landfill. We’d gather, we’d start migrating out on those trailers at about 8 o’clock, and for those that went in early, drove our own vehicles back into the landfill, we saw him get dropped off on the road and walk down the fence everyday to the same spot. And he’d sit there all day and watched us. And I’m sure – I know because he took pictures that I eventually got a couple of with a telephoto lens. He was over there taking pictures, he was the only one that had really thought about “hey, where can I be if something happens?” Everyday, he was out there. Diligently, he was sitting there. He knew that we would quit at 330 or 4 o’clock, when we reached a point of quitting, and you would see him kind of march out and a car would pick him up. And we always used to talk about the old cartoons where the sheepdogs and the wolves were checking in and greeting each other at the time clock. And it was like, “Yup, there he is. He’s coming in, so we can get started.”

We tried to make light of the situation. It was a serious time of all of us, and just trying to make light of that situation.

Yvonne Kjorlien: When I was working on the Pickton investigation, we were warned right at the very beginning – because there was quite a number of us that were employed as civilian technicians, and we were all anthropologists and archaeologists, and so we were not law enforcement – but we were warned at beginning that we would be approached by media, and to not comment and to direct them to commanding officer. And I was approached a couple of times. And I found it very disconcerting. Because they wouldn’t, there would be no preamble. “Hey, I’m so-and-so journalist / reporter / whatever. I’d like to talk to you.” No, it was right out: “Hey, did you find anything?” “How much are you getting paid?” It was very abrupt, in your face, and disruptive. And I was wondering if your volunteers had any experiences like that.

Brian Paulsen: None of that was reported back to us. We really tried diligently to protect them. But generally, obviously with our general public, we, at the beginning of this case, we had no idea where the boy was. It was January so we had freezing temperatures at night, at day, we were seeing 30s and 40s. So we were doing this land – I call it the ground search – for basically about 9 or 10 days. Mostly law enforcement. We had people on horseback, the sheriff’s posse, they came out. We had other agencies that were sending people out. We actually didn’t put a restriction on anybody. We had a younger news reporter who said, well, I can’t get any information, so I’m going to volunteer. She actually volunteered, she went out with a group, but she was asking them questions, but at that time, again it was only first responders, and they knew they couldn’t really discuss the case. She did do the human side: Why are you doing this? And a lot of them were saying: we’re law enforcement, or we’re fire, rescue, whatever they were, we just believe that, hey, somebody calls and needs help, and we’re first responder in this line of work, and we’re going to respond and going to help where we can. But she was out there. And she searched just as much anybody else. Because I, at the end of the first day, I asked the group that she was with, “Is she a bother? Is she being a burden to you?” And they assured me she wasn’t. Had she been, I would have asked her not to come back. She searched for two days, maybe three days, and then after that, didn’t search any more. And she may have been the last three days of the ground search. When we called that off, saying we have no where to look.

That was January. April, after his outburst, we all met, the sheriff’s office and the state patrol, FBI, all the four core agencies – five, I guess with the crime scene unit – we just kind of went through the case again and we ended up searching a sandpit. Because we thought that was the only open water that was open in January. So we searched that sandpit. Found nothing of significance. And there was a lot of experimenting, I shouldn’t say ‘a lot’. There was some experimenting going on. Early on in the search, in the ground search, we had two units of cadaver dogs that responded, one out of Story County, Iowa and one out of Kansas City area. One of them, one of the cadaver dogs from the Kansas City area was actually in the landfill with us and she spent a significant amount of time, towards the end she had to go back to work, but her and her dog were in the landfill. She was using it to develop her own research. She was obviously placing cadaver material in the landfill and seeing if her dog could locate it. We watched her. And the dog alerted. We also watched the dog – he was in there, they were both in there – we had some illegal dumped material, came from the hospital. – let me step back, it didn’t come from the hospital. It came from the family. They had a family member who was injured, needed medical attention, went to the Emergency department, which was probably six miles from the landfill. He was treated and then all of his clothes, all of his belongings were thrown into a sack at the hospital. The family didn’t want to do anything with it because it had been cut off of him. So they basically just threw it into the landfill. So, we had medical waste that came from the family, the dog alerted.

You talk about that anxiety, that sense of hope when that dog alerted and he’d found cadaver and it wasn’t planted or placed by his handler, it was like “Oh my gosh, here we are. We have finally, we are finally culminating, we gonna be successful.” Hopes are up. And then, so we slowed down the operation. At that point, the folks up top knew something was going on because there was no more trash coming up. We decided at that point, we told them something happens down below, your work up here will slow and eventually will stop because we’re not sending anything up. And they knew something was going on because no more trash was leaving. And we were hand searching, using the excavator as much as we could, and finally discovered this bag of clothing that had human blood in it. And it’s like, gosh! Well, it solidified that the dog could do it, could work in that environment. But, again, no help to our case.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, very disappointing, very disappointing. So I’m conscious of the time. So what have learned between doing this landfill search a few years ago and then doing your research? What are some lessons moving forward? Because you did mention to me before that you found out there’s no database or no database that collects information on landfill searches.

Brian Paulsen: No. Probably, I’ve found nobody that probably has more knowledge than the National Centre for Exploited and Missing Children here in the United States. They have a resource there that consults with a lot of the landfills. Other than that, I’m not sure there’s even anybody tracking landfills at this point. I think there’s more knowledge about it, and obviously with the internet and the explosion of the internet and the availability of information. Google searches are producing more. I was receiving, obviously my business card went out at several of the events as well as at that archaeology conference in St. Louis, and those folks that took those they were sending me information, news clippings. I was able to get a few more gathered from there. One, of really no value to my research, the perpetrator wanted the body to be found and wanted it to be of shock-value, he actually put the body in a recliner on top of a landfill over on the east coast. Stuff like that kind of jades the research so it sits off in a separate pile basically because it’s not of value to us.

But just gathering that information, keeping track, watching what’s going on. I have to admit I wasn’t looking outside the United States. So when the media in Canada started talking about the Indigenous females that were in the landfill, or in the landfills yeah, two separate ones, I gave them my opinion. I said if you can get there in 30 days – I didn’t know that Canada does the data gathering like the United States, which if foolish of me because they do – and they said they have a good idea of where they would start. You know there’s a lot of contrast. And, again, I’m talking there a young boy, four years old, there was a lot of interest, a lot of community drive: let’s go get this kid, let’s make sure we get this boy recovered, this is the right thing to do. So, again, it was very low expense. We had our major contracts, those excavators were coming from our major contractors, the dump trucks were coming from contractors. You know, we were using a little city dump truck and it was moving probably half of what those big trucks from the contractors were moving. But he was still there, he was still doing it, you know, and every little bit helped. We had contractors that were coming in, the private contractors was a one-man operation, he spent a couple-three days with us using his excavator. All donated. Food, there was no cost. The water, no cost. We had folks in the area who wanted to do something and would come u, and they knew that we came back for lunch, so they would come to the gate carrying boxes of cookies and cupcakes and things like that. All donated. The equipment was all donated, the gloves, everything.

The Sarpy county attorney’s office had one individual Curtis, who just was phenomenal, in gathering all this stuff. I think he told me there was one business who said, “no, we can’t do anything,” but every other business that he approached over that 30-day window said absolutely we will. He was also a part of that major debrief where we had the banquet. The Governor of Nebraska came in and recognized the department for our work. A number of citizens had written letters had actually quite honestly to the President. We had a letter from the President, as well as his photograph, saying “good job.” Things like that. So people were appreciative, in the community, and in the region, really. And they did whatever they could. We tried to get a thank you out to anybody and everybody. The Dairy Queens in July are busy, but they’d send up 50-60 Buster Bars.

Those were the types of things that they were driving out and giving those . So you think that you’re not doing anything, as far as for the community, for the region, but you’re under notice. You don’t think about that. I wasn’t thinking about that when I was searching. It was after the fact that I was like, “Oh, that was a little more significant that I thought.”

As far as the research and/or the information you talked about, it would be nice if there was a database. We electronically keep records. I can tell you, in the system that I use now, there is a location of, or there is a category of locations, and you can put landfill search in there. So it would be much easier to store. But the compliance, or the voluntary compliance of, gosh, is everybody collecting that information? As a small agency, this was a town of 7000 that I was the chief of, and we weren’t really interested in anything other than if anything was happening in our parks, in our schools, within our community. I doubt that we would have recorded that as a landfill search. We would have said the murder happened here, the landfill search was supplement to that. It was a significant enough event that a lot of people still remember. Obviously I remember it. Just a little more detail in the records-keeping. That can easily be stored in agencies and at the state level as well.

Yvonne Kjorlien: And sometimes it takes a little bit of hindsight and distance before you can see the linkage that actually we should record that because that all linked to whatever and that helped us down the road. Yeah, so sometimes it’s not apparent at the time but definitely becomes clearer the more distance you get from it.

Brian Paulsen: Yeah, and my research was probably five years after the landfill search. And it was fresh in my mind, obviously, even at that point. But it wouldn’t even be that hard to go back and correct something. And say, “this was the landfill search”. You know, regionally, and definitely within that community, there are people that are probably in their 20s that would remember that well in until their 60s and 70s. And when we were talking about our volunteers and talking to the general public, we limited it to, we originally said, 18 and above. And then we had a first responder come from a neighbouring agency and she had a son who was 17 and her daughter was 16. And she said, “hey, would you mind if they come out?” We said, “only if they’re with you, they can come out.” So she brought her son and daughter and they searched as well. But they were the youngest two out there. They ranged, I guarantee you, they ranged into the 60s and 70s that were out there searching as well.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, I found that too that. The older people, to the retirees – there the ones that have the time, that are able to come out and search not just the hours, but days and sometimes weeks to an effort.

Brian Paulsen: Mmm. Yup. Yeah, absolutely. One of our everyday guys was one of those elderly guys. I can still tell you right now, he had a straw hat and wore a white long-sleeved shirt every day. And his name was Tom, his first name was Tom. When we started looking and counting, and we said who’s Tom? He’s was there every day and we thought he must be the guy with the hat, he’s here every day. And, sure enough, when he showed up at the banquet, we said, “are you Tom?” and he said, “yeah, my name’s Tom.” And we said, “well, we were wondering. We kinda figured that’s who you were and that was your name, and you were there every day.” And he goes, “Well, I don’t want any more acknowledgement than that. You telling me that at this point is all that I need, that you recognized I was there everyday.” And I said, “that’s perfect.” He eventually – a number of businesses at that debrief, a number of businesses donated something. We had a weekend in Kansas City, we had a weekend, several weekends in Des Moines, a weekend in Omaha, that were gifted — we just started drawing names of everybody who was there and I hope everybody got something, I don’t know that that is a fact, but I do know that Tom did get something and he was very appreciative of that. It was just a small token for the amount of time and effort that he gave us.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Would it be fair to say that your landfill search, the success of it — and I’m not saying, success because it went well, even though the remains were not found, but that the search itself went well — that that success can be directly attributed to community support?

Brian Paulsen: Oh absolutely. There is no doubt that success. Obviously discouraged for the first few days, week afterwards. It’s like, “gosh, what else could I have done different, we have done different?” But, boy, looking back on that, and you talk about the number of people. Now, 300 showed up for the banquet but there were probably 5 or 600 people that were there when you started looking at every roster signed in and the duplications. So only about 50% showed up. But to bring 600 people into the landfill and search at various time and dates, various weather conditions – we had rain a couple of times, the heat was pretty overbearing a couple of days – but to have that many people, absolutely it was a success. And it wouldn’t have been a success without the support of that community. There was community involvement much larger than I originally thought. I thought our community of 7000 is bearing the brunt of this, but looking back, the region really was supportive for this entire event. If we’d have said in January, “hey, we need this,” they’d have come as much as they did in July when we were in the landfill.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Do you know what, Brian? You asked. You and your department asked for help. So it all starts with the ask and then the community can jump in and deliver. So it takes two, right?

Brian Paulsen: No, absolutely. Absolutely. And it’s that work. We used the media everyday. When we decided in the back of the landfill away from the media, we decided that we were gonna open it up to the general public — we weren’t getting through enough trash – we went to the media and our media report that day was: we need help, we’re going to up it up to the public, this is what you do. And they asked their questions, because they’re gonna do a story and that night – I didn’t see every news, but I know two stations that covered it – and said they need help. They’re asking for help.

And, I’ll be honest, I thought, “We might double our force, we might go from 20 to 40 people.” And then when you have a 109 people roll in the next day, we just kept shaking our head “what are we doing? How are we going to do this?” We really exploded the operation from there. We didn’t have the, we were taking them out in vehicles. And then we got the trailers. And then we decided lunch. Our Salvation Army was there every day, they cooked us breakfast. Excuse me, not the breakfast, they cooked the lunch. The food was brought in and they would cook it or keep it warm and they would hand it out. They were walking around, talking to us, just kinda of support. It was just wonderful to have the Salvation Army there.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Wow. Amazing. Brian, thank you very much for talking to me.

Brian Paulsen: Absolutely!

Yvonne Kjorlien: Thank you for your work on that search. Thank you for your research on landfill searches. I hope that we get more people doing research so we can potentially develop a database, share it with others, and grow the information and get it out there, so that if they have to do a landfill search, they’re not put in the same situation you were that very first time.

Brian Paulsen: Yup. And you know I’m interested in sharing that information. If anybody calls me, I’m use gonna, I use it. To be totally honest, you’ve got about 30 days, you’ve got 30 days. At 31 your chances really diminish. And I tell them, this is my research. And we talked about, everybody, the majority of people now understand how to do a search, like modeled after 9-11, but it’s that carrying on and what you need. You know, I never thought about the tetanus shots. I never thought about, gosh, we need to have them wash their hands because they’re dealing with trash, even though they have gloves on. Just those little things. That whole list of things is out there now because that’s how we did it.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Nice. All right, Brian. Thank you very much.

Brian Paulsen: You bet! My pleasure.

View Details

Brian Paulsen is assistant police chief in Sturgis, South Dakota. He co-wrote a chapter in Forensic Archaeology based on his Master’s thesis about landfill searches in the United States.

In this episode we talk about:

How Brian led a search of a landfill in Sarpy County, Nebraska to find the remains of a 4-year-old boy murdered by his father and placed in a dumpster.
The search, which involved over 600 volunteers from the community over 30 days, with meticulous records from the landfill helping to determine the search area.
Search methods, which included excavators loading trash into trucks to spread it out for searching, with trucks dumping further from the landfill for teams to manually search.
Who searched. Only first responders searched initially for safety and mental health reasons, but public volunteers were recruited when more searchers were needed.
Results of the search. No remains were found but the perpetrator was still convicted based on evidence and confession. The search provided closure for the victim’s family.
Community support was found to be critical to the success of the Sarpy County search operation, with hundreds of volunteers, donations, and cooperation from local businesses.
Paulsen’s subsequent research. He looked into 46 landfill searches and found a success rate of under 50%, with the chances of recovery dropping significantly after 30 days.
The search raised awareness of landfill search protocols and lessons on factors like timeliness, search area size, and mental health support for searchers.
No centralized database currently tracks landfill search data, but individual case records could help build understanding over time.

More information about the Nebraska landfill search can be found here:

Desert News: Still searching landfill for boy’s body (June 22, 2003)
Desert News: Landfill hunt for Nebraska boy ends (July 26, 2003)
Forensic Archaeology: Multi-Disciplinary Perspectives (2019, Springer; Amazon.ca link)

Notes from the start:

Memoirs of a Reluctant Archaeologist, a fictional novel inspired by my time as a Consulting Archaeologist, is now an audiobook. Buy it directly from me and use the code ILOVEBONE2024 to get 50% off. The audio will be delivered through BookFunnel.

If you’re in Calgary on April 3, come out to Owl’s Nest Books as I read excerpts from Memoirs and answer questions. Can’t make the event? Buy the ebook or print version here.

Support the podcast and my research through Buy Me A Coffee. Your contributions will go toward my research, webhosting, and my time. Want to find out more about my research? Check out the Scavenging Study.

Contact me through ykjorlien@gmail.com or through my contact form. Follow me on Facebook at The Reluctant Archaeologist, or through Instagram @yvonnekjorlien

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Drop Yvonne a line at ykjorlien@gmail.com

Transcript, Part 1

Yvonne Kjorlien: all right, so I’m gonna get you to say your name and who you are and where you’re at.

Brian Paulsen: So I am Brian Paulsen. I am the assistant police chief here in Sturgis, South Dakota. I’m sorry, what was the third one? Where I’m at. Sturgis, South Dakota. Sorry combine those two.

Yvonne Kjorlien: All right Sturgis, South Dakota. For any international listeners, that is in America, the United States of America. Because we do have some international listeners, so I just want to make sure everybody knows where we’re all at. So the reason, Brian, I wanted to reach out to you is because you had written a chapter in a textbook, “Forensic Archeology” with Kimberlee Moran all about landfill searchers. And so I greatly appreciate your time and insights on this. Let’s go back to the beginning about what started you on the path to doing the research? Because you had a case involving a landfall search, correct?

Brian Paulsen: Yes, we had a young man, a four and a half year old boy, that was murdered by his father in January. And then it’s reported to us late May early, June — excuse me — late June that he had put him in a dumpster and that dumpster was taken to the landfill. So about five months after the murder we were able to determine the location of the body in the landfill in a neighboring jurisdiction. So that started the landfill search for my department in early July. And then we went through, we had manpower in the landfill probably middle of June, actually, we started the physical hands-on search of that landfill in July and ended about 30 days, 29 days later, end of July.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Did you know prior to searching the landfill that waste management had kept, keeps meticulous record and they knew approximately where that truck had dumped that dumpster’s waste?

Brian Paulsen: Yes, absolutely. Oh, I did not know prior to the landfill search. No.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Okay.

Brian Paulsen: No, it was a learning experience for me, on just the amount of information they had. We know as a fact the truck that carried the body in from that dumpster, the dumpster was the last pickup of the truck route, and then that truck was, I believe, four tons (8,000 pounds) overweight and it was the first truck into the landfill the morning that it delivered.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Wow.

Brian Paulsen: Yeah, and we were able to talk to the manager. Once the location was disclosed that the boy had been put in the dumpster, the next day we met with the manager of the landfill who took us out and said this is where we would start looking but we’re going to have to go about 30 foot down because that January date would have been the bottom of the landfill. We would have started a new phase in our landfill. So the landfill has a liner — 12 inches of sand — and then that January trash came in on top of that sand. So it was layered in that landfill. It was an approximate location. That particular day, when that truck came in, the GPS monitor had dead batteries, and they didn’t have time to go get new batteries. So they just eyeballed it. And quite honestly it was my fence posts. The landfill is surrounded by a six foot high chain link fence. So they just said it’s this many poles in from the, it would have been the south and then on the west side, and that was where they started taking what is called the overburden trash that we were not interested in, they removed that before we ever entered the landfill for the search.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Wow, so had a really good idea, and you were on with it within days, it sounds like. You could get in there quickly and have pretty good idea of where to start searching.

Brian Paulsen: Yep, they keep very meticulous records. I was again shocked to learn how much information they collect when they’re placing trash into that landfill. We were somewhat suspicious of the body going into the trash anyway because the night — the little boy was murdered about 5:30 in the morning — that next night at about midnight, 11 o’clock, midnight, we found a bunch of blood in a trash can. Totally unrelated to the murder, but we stopped the trash immediately at that time. We had reached out to the FBI, the Federal Bureau of Investigations, and they were able to assist us by bringing in their evidence response team. And they split them up into two — in Plattsmouth, Nebraska where this occurred — the trash went into Mills County, Iowa and then it also went into the Sarpy County landfill, which is the landfill we searched. So there are two bordering counties: one to our east and one to our north. And we went into the Sarpy County landfill. But they had split it up, their evidence recovery team. They had placed fresh dirt at the bottom of the landfill and we’re searching trash as it came in. Unfortunately, there were searching the trash that came in from Plattsmouth when the trash coming in from the neighboring county went around and dumped.

If they have a low spot within a landfill, at that time they would push trash to kind of even out the trash. We believe that’s what happened with that first truck. It was used to even out that bottom layer in the landfill. During our search in July, we found that pad of fresh dirt that was in the bottom of the landfill. So we knew that we were really close to where the trash that came in on that Friday morning.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Okay. You had a lot of valuable information right from the get-go that really aided in your search.

Brian Paulsen: It did, and that’s one of the, with all that information, that’s probably the paramount factor in whether we even attempt it or not. With all that information available to us, we said we’ve got to take a shot at finding this young man.

Yvonne Kjorlien: And what were some considerations — because you knew you were probably gonna be searching a landfill — so were there any considerations about the challenges that you would have or the barriers about searching this landfill?

Brian Paulsen: Definitely some challenges and some political implications as well. We’re going into a neighboring jurisdiction, for one. We did not have — our governing body communicated with them, but it was mostly them allowing us to go. They also had representatives from their prosecutor’s office in the landfill with us. But we knew the method of death of the young boy was killed. So we initially opened it, or restricted our searchers to first responders — those that had probably had some of a, witnessed some type of a number of trauma events that it occurred — in there, volunteer or whether they were paid. So we spent our first four or five days with just first responders, which was a very small group. Because they were coming in on days off. There was a few that were signed out there being paid by their agencies. But the most part they were coming in after days off. We realized quickly that that small contingency of searchers was not going to be enough and we made a decision to open it up to the general public. And that first day of opening it up to the general public, we probably increased, we went from about 20 searchers to over a hundred. So quite a large group or large increase in physically searching that landfill. With that increase in numbers, also increased how we took care of them because we knew, mentally, that they were not probably prepared to see or recover that body in the condition it was going to be in. As well as equipment, we needed to make sure that the temperatures were in the 90s — I think it hit a hundred a couple days — but we had to worry about that. So there were tents, there were watering. Food needed to be, so they were out there. We didn’t want to send them out for an hour and then have to gather them all back. So we provided the food offsite — it was in the landfill property, but it was not at the landfill — we took them out. We had a number of our, like our watering district brought in a mobile hand washing station. So we took care, we have everything worked through and taking care for those folks.

We had discussed on the phone: we were worried about the mental health not only of the first responders, but obviously of the general public. So we had mental health professionals on site in the case that we recover the body, but also if somebody was really struggling with the search and knowing how the boy was killed. That’s one factor we did not give to anybody in the general public right away, the first day or two. We met with the mental health professionals and they encouraged us to give that information out. They basically had told us if they discover this boy in the condition he’s gonna be found, you should probably let them know a little bit ahead of time so that it’s not a complete shock. It would help them kind of process up to the point, if we found the body. So we, probably about day two of the general public helping us, we opened it up and said this is how the boy was killed, this is what we’re looking for specifically. And the response from them was “thank you for telling us that.” It was kept very confidential. They understood the confidentiality of it as well. So we have very little problems with our general public.

Yvonne Kjorlien: So you mentioned the decision to go from the first responders, within that first week, to the general public. What were you considering? Was it not enough people? Did you discover that the size might be a little bit more than you originally anticipated? What was involved in that decision? What made you switch or open it up?

Brian Paulsen: Yeah, was you’ve touched on a couple of them. That we didn’t have enough. We were going too slow. With 20 of us searching — we had probably two, we actually had three down in what we call the hole down towards the floor of the landfill, the rest of us were up on the top pad with that clean dirt so that it wasn’t contaminated — but it was taking us a long time to use rakes, shovels, hoes, potato forks, a number of different pieces of equipment that we would hand search real quick. And then the bulldozers would come in and they, just basically two bulldozers and they’d sweep that pad. We’d come up, we’ve dump more trash out of the trash, dump trucks that were going down picking up. And we found that it was not efficient because the trucks were waiting for us to search. So we said we have to have more people. And then it quickly grew from there.

The area actually increased as well. Because initially we didn’t find that pad. It was probably day four or five, I believe, that we finally found that pad that would have been placed in their January by the FBI when they were searching. Once we hadn’t found a little boy at that point, we said we’ve got to expand this out. And again, the landfill manager said the only way it could have been was to the north into the west. So we expanded that dig of the actual trash out to probably 30, 32, 36 feet to the west and then to the north. Probably at least that. So it was a rather large, large hole that we had put in there.

The operation was set up that the dump trucks, they actually built a driveway coming in out of the northeast corner of the pit, driving in, being loaded with excavators, and then they would go out the southwest corner of the landfill of the pit and then they would immediately turn left. That’s where the pad was and they go along and they dump the trash, as they were going to the east. And then we would step in, we would search and then, once we were confident — my assistant chief or I were up, excuse me on the top — and once we were certain that we had searched the thoroughly, we would give the signal for the bulldozers. They scrape it and we’d start the whole thing.

And we didn’t want that downtime. We wanted to be somewhat continuous. Obviously we had to spend 5, 10, 15 minutes searching that trash, but that trash was spread pretty thin once it was done by those trucks. They would dump it, try to thin it as much, but we had an excavator up there a small excavator that will come in and spread that trash out.

Yvonne Kjorlien: All right so I want just want to understand the method that you used: so you had excavators load the trash into trucks, the trucks took the trash outside of the landfill, then the truck spread it out, and then you searched trash that was spread out. Is that correct?

Brian Paulsen: That is correct.

Yvonne Kjorlien: All right. Okay. So, just because, for context for listeners, so I was involved with the Robert Pickton investigation in Vancouver, BC and in that we used conveyor belts. So, instead of taking the trash outside the landfill and spreading it out, like you did for your team, Brian, the conveyor belts were inside the search area. Then the material was dumped onto conveyor belts and we looked out over conveyor belts. So a little different method but still very similar type of method.

Brian Paulsen: Yes, yep, yep, moving that trash and making it thin enough to be searched quickly.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right, right, okay. So you said you searched for about 30 days.

Brian Paulsen: Yes.

Yvonne Kjorlien: And did you, did you have everybody searching in that place where the trash was spread, or did you have different teams doing different things looking differently? Tell me a bit about your team and what you were doing.

Brian Paulsen: There, you know, we would search at the excavator operators, a good point to know is the excavator operators were fully aware where we’re looking for. A bed comforter that would be thick enough that the suspect — the father — had told us that he killed him on top of this comforter quilt knowing that’d be a lot of blood so he had purchased those two nights before the murder. Then put the body in there as well as the knife that he used, the weapon that he used. Then he just kind of bundled it up. So the excavators knew to look for bundled up blankets / comforters, as well as anything that may produce or look like blood. Quite honestly, we had a couple of those excavators that were so precise and so talented that they were able to take items and place them right in front of us. If they would come across the blanket and they couldn’t get it to unfold when they were moving it, they would literally pick it up, they’d bring it over to the team in the hole — which is generally four of us — and then we would actually go in and search that. If it was done, then they would actually move it to an area down in the landfill that had already been searched or already been opened up, and just kind of placed it out of the way. One of the operators came across a roll of carpet and literally laid it out and rolled it with his bucket right in front of us and opened it up for us, so we did nothing but look. It wasn’t what we were looking for, but it could have concealed a body and we thought how truthful is this dad been. We were fairly confident that he would tell us about the comforter and absorbing all the blood because he had put some thought into it. So that carpet went over to the side.

We would do that down in the hole. We would also move items that we knew that didn’t need to go up top. We found some religious statues down there, plastic statues, a lot of comforters and blankets. We had literally had a pile of comforters and blankets that we never sent up top. After we had searched them, we would just drag them out of the way.

And then up top, would be all the other searchers. That was the predominant number of searchers. Towards the end of the search, we had three or four of those civilians that said, “hey, we’d like to come down and help you because we know that the four of you are doing a lot of work down there.” We allowed them to come down to help for a short period of time, probably the last couple, three days. Maybe just the last two days. And again, but we didn’t find anything that was of substance to the case.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Okay, so you didn’t need, if the excavator operators found something, they didn’t put it in the truck and then wait for it to be brought out to the clearing area for the other searchers. They brought it straight to your attention so you can have a look at it, right then and there.

Brian Paulsen: yes, yep, the four of us, the team down in the hole, we felt that we were kind of the control mechanism That if we could save somebody in the general population from seeing something traumatic — this young boy’s body — that we would take that on ourselves in the hole and with the excavators, and then save them up on top that experience. And we had hoped that, if we did find the body down on the bottom, that they would maybe find the comforter on top or something like that. There was a number of things we did take and have tested but nothing that was applicable to our case.

Yvonne Kjorlien: All right. So you did mention mental health concerns. Like that you wanted first responders in there first because they had a trauma training or trauma experience. So let’s talk a little bit about that. Let’s talk about the physical limitations, or anything that may be physical challenges: was it hard labor? Was there as asbestos, anything in the landfill that the searchers needed to be aware of? And then we’ll go into mental health.

Brian Paulsen: Sure. For us, we were really more worried about glass. And we talked with the landfill manager about that and he said it’s kind of a mystery of the landfill that glass generally isn’t found. Our concern with the glass was we knew we had done a bunch of the legwork before, when we taking the overburden off of the landfill, we were doing a lot of leg work on the backside. We knew that the pick-up before the apartment building with the dumpster was a very popular bar, lounge in the area. So there’s a lot of the beer bottles and metals and everything, all the trash that you could imagine coming out of a bar. So we knew there were glass and that was a concern we had for the manager and he said it just kind of disappears. We went down, we knew the 10 or 12 stops on that truck. We knew the order of that truck, as I said, when it went in but also the pickup.

We also were concerned with there was a auto mechanic or an auto dealership that probably had some metals that they may have replaced or something. So we’re worried about that as well. We took care of that on the front side of it. Sarpy County, the Sarpy Count’s attorney’s office here, or there in Nebraska, actually contacted their Department of Health. We provided tetanus shots for all of our searchers, if they wanted it. Gloves along with all the equipment. And we had water at all locations, both out at the pit and then back at the lunch site, plus we had coolers that were in vehicles. So if we needed anything like that.

So we were doing a lot of that leg work. We actually had to sit down and determine on our own — there’s a probably six or seven of us — that sat down and said, “okay, how long do you keep mail?” So your mail, if it’s junk mail or third-party mail that it’s unsolicited sent to you, you throw that right away. We all thought we did. So we started looking for postmarks. We also were saying, “okay, there’s newspapers. When would this story have hit? Would it be out?” We looked at our own bills. How long do you hold a bill? Do you pay it right away, anything like that. You know, the personal things that come through your mail. We felt that those were probably not a good barometer because we’d hold those until we paid them. Some people pay him right away. Some of them will wait to a paycheck or something like that. So we found mail in that window, probably from the day after the murder up until probably a week or so, maybe two weeks later. We found a lot of that mail. We found the debris from that bar. We could hear the glass falling, but in the pit, we didn’t find any of that. We were never worried about any large items. I never saw any large item that would cause an injury and so we knew we were, and it’s just undiscovered territory for us.

It was the first landfill in the state of Nebraska and there’s a lot of information we wanted to gather. So we gathered daily, we took temperatures at the bottom of the landfill. I can tell you that we were searching in July and we found ice and snow in the bottom of the landfill because it was so insulated and encapsulated with dirt at the end of each workday. We found food items that were, as I’ve said many a times in some of my presentations, if you told me that piece of chicken or turkey or roast had been in a landfill, I would have never guessed it if you had just washed it off it. It had some debris on it, but it wasn’t decomposed or anything like that because it was sealed and really couldn’t get a lot of bacteria down to it. So we do that we did that. The temperatures was in the low 30s in the bottom of that landfill when we started probing it with a thermostat, or, excuse me, a thermometer. And so we knew that it was going to be well preserved. And that helped us kind of decide what condition the body would have been in.

And then from there, moving into the mental health, we just had… I had had training and most of my officers had experienced the critical incident stress management — basically a critical incident debriefing. So we are fully aware that we felt that, if we’re able to recover the boy’s body in the landfill, regardless of who it was, we would need to have immediate mental health presence to kind of help debrief them. Honestly law enforcement would have been extremely busy. We didn’t feel that we could push it off on, “Hey, I’ve worked with you for a couple days. Let’s just sit down and talk about it.” So we reached out two of them actually, very good personal friends of mine through the critical incident stress management. They were out there quite regularly and they were always on call if we needed anything. So we wanted to put that in place as well. And again they were valuable to us in whether we released the cause or the manner of death of the young boy, which was very important. And in hindsight, we actually hadn’t told some of the dump truck operators as well as the bulldozer operators hadn’t been informed. So we had the first responders, the general public, the excavators, but we had left a faction out. So it was the mental health folks that came in and said, “hey make sure everybody knows. You can’t leave somebody out because if they find him, or if they see something, we haven’t prepared them, haven’t taken care of them.” So there was a valuable resource to have them out there.

Yvonne Kjorlien: and so I’m just going to reiterate, so the general public that you had in helping you, they were volunteers, correct? Whereas your first responders, they were paid?

Brian Paulsen: Not all the first responders were paid. Some of the first responders were just out there on their days off. At that point, through almost 20 years of law enforcement, I had a lot of networking had gone on and we put that call out, and we called our larger agencies and said “hey if you can spare anybody.” So there are a few that were paid but most of them they’re out there on their days off. We reached out to the National Guard. That’s not something they wanted to do just because that wasn’t their role and we understood that as well. But yeah, we reached out to quite a few of them. The general public were all volunteers.

Yvonne Kjorlien: And so when you put out the call and you had general public people show up, what kind of, I guess, response did you get from the general public when you told them what you were looking for and how you were looking for it? Did you have people immediately say, “Okay, you what? I want to help out but it’s just not within my capacity to do this. Good luck to you.” Or maybe after a few days’ searching, you have people say “Okay, I can’t do this anymore.” What kind of… just because I’m looking at this because people going with the best of intentions, but they don’t really understand or appreciate what’s involved with these searches.

Brian Paulsen: Yes.

Yvonne Kjorlien: and that, you know what? It’s okay, if you want to back out, that you don’t completely understand and it can be damaging to your mental health to stay.

Brian Paulsen: Yes, and we did talk to him about that. And we also let them know that it was totally okay with us if they chose to leave. We all gathered up near the front gates of the landfill and then we took them back on flatbed trailers that a local business had a pumpkin farm or it was a pumpkin farm provided us. So we had seating around this hay rack several hayracks and we have pulled him out there with a tractor most of the time — a couple times it took out with a pickup — and we just unload them. Then there were other, there’s probably four or five of us that drove our own vehicles back there. It was specifically so if we had something or someone that said, “Gosh, this is just too much for me. I don’t want to continue this,” that we could immediately get him out of there, for their own mental health, to make sure that they were okay, that we were going to get them out of there. Actually, it also gave us the opportunity, because it was sworn law enforcement or the prosecutor’s office that would have transported, we would have been calling those mental health professionals saying “please meet us at the gate. We got an individual we’d like to have you talk to.” So we knew that that was a possibility. It was very few people that did that.

We had a couple that chose not to after they had all the facts and they left and there were never any hard feelings. They came out, they decided they couldn’t do it. Perfectly fine with us. We knew what we were asking. It was just a monumental mental and physical task that we were asking folks to do. So, we had a few that would just leave after they got the information, but very few, maybe a couple.

Then we did have a couple that went into the landfill and search for a little while and then just they said I can’t do it. I’m afraid that I’m gonna be 1) the person who finds something of substance in the case or 2) I’m gonna mess something up.” And we told them you can’t mess anything up. This is a recovery for the family at this point. We had enough with the case — obviously because he was prosecuted or pled to second degree murder — but we’ve just felt that really we were recovering part of the case, but also we were hoping for closure for the family.

This was a regional event that had started in January. In April of that year, we had an outburst in the courtroom when the father was sentenced for a willful reckless driving. He made the proclamation in front of a full gallery and full of media, that he had actually indeed killed his son. And then from there he spent about a month negotiating back and forth whether he was going to give us information or not. He finally divulged to the Nebraska state patrol investigators method of, manner of death. And then what he had done. Took him about another week or two before he actually said, “okay, I’ll take you to where I dumped him.” He says, “I can’t tell you or describe it,” he says,” but if you’ll take me out, I can identify where I dropped him in the dumpster.” So about two weeks after his confession – so, about the middle of May or so, towards the end of May — actually was when he finally said, “this is where it’s at. This is where I dumped him.” And we were pretty confident at that point. We had been working with him, trying to gather information so that we could retrieve this young man.

We also knew that as we went in, probably about week one or week two, regardless of the outcome, that we were talking with our mental health professionals, and they said we probably need to do a large debriefing. Now you’re talking, when it was all said and done, we kept a roster. We had some searchers from the general public who, every day that we were searching, they were there. That was probably about a dozen of them that kept coming out day after day after day. We started to know their names and their spouses names and their history, just working side by side and having those conversations. So at the end we said we’ve probably needed to do a large debrief: tell these folks what they’re going to experience and what they need to do and how they should handle it and, quite honestly, some of the feelings they’re having is normal for what we had asked them to do. So we took those 300 or we sent out 300 invitations to folks to come to a banquet and be recognized. Again, this was regional. So many businesses donated: the hall donated, the food was donated, there were so much that was just donated for us that quite honestly, yet we didn’t recover the young man, the boy, but it was a successful endeavor by law enforcement with cooperation of the general public.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Did the family come out and search? Or any relatives?

Brian Paulsen: We had asked the family not to come out and search. We felt that Mom, as any parent or anybody close to a victim, mom really struggled, and rightfully so. And we had asked her not to come out. She had agreed that she wouldn’t. She said “I can’t do that, there’s nothing no way I could do that. But please thank the people that are doing it.” And again, we had asked both her and her mother not to come out and search. We felt that it would affect those searchers, the general public overall.

So they stayed back. I supplied them with information daily: how much we’d searched, whether we had found anything at all. If we had recovered something and said, hey, let’s have this tested, I would tell them. We had a couple items we picked up just to make sure that we don’t miss anything, and we snet it off to be tested. And again, as I said earlier, none of that really added to our case, it was unrelated items. At the end of the landfill search, when I called it, and I’ll never forget the words, I told the group that was standing in front of me, the general public, I just told them, “I have nowhere to lead you at this point. There’s nowhere for me to take you into the landfill.” From that point they were pretty accepting of it, but we still knew we had to do it.

Once we got all of the general public out that afternoon, we had called Mom and Grandma and told them that we were gonna end the search, and they came to the landfill. They were upset. They thought that we were going to recover him. I took them back and we stood at the edge of that hole and I said this is what we’ve done. They said it’s remarkable. They were hoping that we could continue. But we had no place to take them – we could have eventually searched that whole landfill and never found the young man. But they were appreciative of it and they understand. I think as time’s gone on, they understand.

Grandmother’s passed. But I’ve stayed in communication with Mom off and on. We communicate through social media just to tell her, “hey, I’m thinking of you.” On July 31st, when it’s her son’s birthday, I sent her a little note saying “hey, I’m thinking about Brendon today. I know it’s a tough day for you.” January kind of passes without us really having any type of conversation. There for a while, even January, I’d send her a little note said, “hey. I know this is a terrible day for you, but I’m just thinking of you.” So I still have contact with Mom.

Yvonne Kjorlien: The perpetrator is incarcerated, but the body has not been found.

Brian Paulsen: Yes. Yes, correct. It was the first bodiless prosecution in the state of Nebraska. We had enough. We had a crime scene team out of Douglas County, which is Omaha, Nebraska, but their crime scene unit did fabulous work from start to finish for us on this case. They had determined that the amount of blood – the young boy was placed, once he was murdered, he was placed in a fabric recliner in the garage – and they had taken that, gathered all the blood that they possibly could out of that chair to determine that was enough blood that whoever lost it couldn’t sustain life. So, three liters or whatever it would have been. And that was a huge component of it for us.

Then there was enough with the confession which was pretty, it was recorded. There’s video of the perpetrator shouting out in the courtroom that he had killed his son. He then claimed that he was the Antichrist. In hindsight, he had told the jail staff that it was going to be his day in court. So he had it well thought out what he was going to do that day as well. And then the full confession that was videotaped and recorded with the Nebraska state patrol. There’s a number of components. I’ve mentioned other agencies throughout. Again this was regional, it was an individual case that turned into a regional case, incorporating federal partners, our state partners and fellow County, neighboring County agencies as well. So it was a joint effort.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Wow. Just wow, that you’d managed to pull it off and it all came up like, at least the perpetrator, the bad guy was caught, in jail, even if the boy wasn’t found. There was some success out of this.

Brian Paulsen: Yeah, yeah, and it was a learning experience in that landfill. I’ve used that a couple times on some consults, or just I really wouldn’t say ‘consults’. I’ve had a couple call me and say “hey, what do you think? Can we go in? Can’t we? What should we do?”

Since our landfill search in Sarpy County, there are two other landfill searches in the State of Nebraska. Both of those were successful. One of those, the second one, the police chief called me and said “hey, what do you think?” and I said shut your trash down, immediately shut your trash down. He said it’s already done. I believe, as of all the records and in my thesis, that was the fastest recovery, I believe in the United States. And it took about six hours because it was a community about 7,000, they knew where the baby had been dropped or put, and they’d stopped their trash. So when they went in, it took them, I believe about six hours. The other one in northeast, Nebraska, I think was right at 28-29 days. I know we’re gonna talk about the research, but that 30-day window is very important on recovery. If you hit 30 days and you haven’t found the body, I found throughout the research that once Day 30 hits, the likelihood of recovery starts to diminish pretty quickly.

Yvonne Kjorlien: All right, so let’s segue into the research here. First, let’s talk about any research that you did for the methods to do that landfill search and then lessons learned from that, for just about the methods. Then we’ll about the rest of it.

Brian Paulsen: Sure, the method, quite honestly, both in that January with the FBI evidence recovery team was modeled after 9/11 and what they were doing in New York purging the trash out of the Twin Towers.

We kind of modified that when we went in and just put our dirt up on top, open air, breeze, things like that, knowing that we would clean it each time. In our search, we brought in clean soil at least once if not twice, but that was it. Bring it up, spread it out, search it by hand, and then dispose of it. Take that overburden and put it elsewhere. It had never been done, as I said in Nebraska, before. So we looked at, and we looked really heavily to our federal partners who had done it and then modified it, the way they have done it, in the bottom to the top.

(Continued in Part 2)

View Details

Robyn Lacy is a Ph.D. candidate in the archaeology department at Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador.Her research focuses on 17th-century burial landscape development in Northeast North America. Robyn runs a business with her partner, specializing in gravestone conservation in the Atlantic provinces of Canada.

In this episode we talk about:

How Robyn’s interest in burial ground archaeology began during her undergraduate field school in Ireland, where she participated in surveying burial grounds and transcribing inscriptions on headstones.
The distinctions between a cemetery, graveyard, and burial ground, emphasizing historical context and regional variations in North America.
The concept of rural garden cemeteries in the 1830s aimed to address concerns of overcrowding in urban burial grounds, leading to the creation of park-like atmospheres outside city centers.
17th-century burial grounds in the North American Northeast and how settlers chose to develop burial spaces in their newly established communities.
Shifting gravestone iconography and language through time.
What’s involved in the preservation of gravestones.

You can find more information about Robyn and her company, Spade and the Grave, on her webpage here: https://spadeandthegrave.com/

More information about some items mentioned in the interview can be found here:

Pere Lachaise cemetery: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P%C3%A8re_Lachaise_Cemetery
Discovering England’s Burial Spaces (DEBS): https://www.debs.ac.uk/
Ville-Marie, Montreal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ville-Marie,_Montreal
Mount Auburn Cemetery, Massachusettes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Auburn_Cemetery

Notes from the start:

Globe & Mail: Multiple sclerosis origins linked to DNA from ancient Europeans

In October 2023, I gave a presentation at the Canadian Association for Biological Anthropology (CABA) entitled Start with the Why: How My Research on Scattered Remains Turned into a Podcast. You can find a recording of that presentation here.

Contact me through ykjorlien@gmail.com or through my contact form. Follow me on Facebook at The Reluctant Archaeologist, or through Instagram @yvonnekjorlien

Do you have a suggestion for a topic on the Scattered podcast?

Do you have a question about working with human remains?

Drop Yvonne a line at ykjorlien@gmail.com

Transcript

Robyn Lacy: Yeah, so, my name is Robyn Lacy. I’m a PhD candidate in the archeology department at Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador. My research is looking at 17th century burial landscape development in Northeast North America, and I also run a business with my partner where we do gravestone conservation in the Atlantic provinces in Canada.

Yvonne Kjorlien: So what brought you to this because this isn’t the normal sort of archeology stuff that I hear about in Canada. People always want to dig. And you’re not really digging.

Robyn Lacy: Yeah, I mean, I guess we dig around the basis of gravestones but it’s not traditional archeology in the sense the most people think of it. Yeah. So I originally got into burial ground archeology and mortuary archeology through a field school that I did in my undergrad. Everyone has to do a field school usually for an archeology program and I decided that I wanted to do mine abroad. I was at school in Calgary and I went to a field school in Ireland and on the Isle of Man through the University of Liverpool. And while we were in Ireland we were surveying burial ground to transcribe the inscriptions on the headstones and document the gravestones as well and do mapping of the site and that kind of thing. I just thought that was the most interesting thing possible. That was not the avenue of archeology. I was intending to go into at all and I thought that was just such a fascinating area of research and it really stuck with me. So it’s what I’ve been doing in grad school. And then with learning about burial grounds, to me it makes sense to have learned about their conservation as well. And there’s very few people that have an archeology background in Canada that do historic stone restoration and graveyard work as well. So they go really well together for that.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Cool, so you did this field school gonna ask you to take your memory back to when you’re in Ireland doing archeology, which sounds amazing and wonderful, but you’ve also had this amazing opportunity to see archeology on both sides of the Atlantic. Are there differences or is archeology archeology no matter where you go.

Robyn Lacy: I think that the basis is the same, it all comes from the same ideas. But the ways that we operate, especially excavation techniques are a lot different in the UK. And in Ireland you’ll see a site being opened, they’ll take all the topsoil off at once and you’ll do a row of people troweling the whole entire surface together. Whereas here we’re more likely to open one meter units or smaller trenches like that. So the way that sites got approached is a little bit different. But also, when you’re in Europe, you have this depth of structural heritage that goes back a lot farther. Like indigenous structures are a lot different than the stone buildings being built in Europe a couple hundred years ago to thousands of years ago. So there’s a lot of differences and approaches to older sites as well, I think.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, we don’t really have those stone walls here, do we?

Robyn Lacy: They’re really nice.

Yvonne Kjorlien: It’s nice when you’re digging and you hit on something stone because when that happens, at least in Alberta,…

Robyn Lacy: Mm-hmm

Yvonne Kjorlien: it’s either, just another rock, glacial till, or possibly maybe even the stone tool. There’s no stone walls here.

Robyn Lacy: Yeah, and I seeing post hole features and that kind of changes to the ground like that, but it’s really exciting when you find something structural, that’s very clearly structural that’s still standing.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right cool. Yeah. Yeah for that reason. I like doing historic archeology because of the structural aspect. Yeah, seeing…

Robyn Lacy: Me too.

Yvonne Kjorlien: where the walls are and the post holes. And yeah, that’s always cool.

Robyn Lacy: Yeah.

Yvonne Kjorlien: So let’s get into your research a little bit. So let’s first start off with some definitions the difference between a burial site and a graveyard and a cemetery.

Robyn Lacy: So, I mean in different parts of the world, they have different meetings, of course, so this is mostly for North America. Cemetery is in our context a site that is typically municipally owned or if their owned by a church, they’re often non-denominational. It means a certain type of site. It’s sort of more rural. It’s usually on the edge of town. It’s sort of park-like. They come from this idea in the late 18th century and it was called the rural garden cemetery. So they were planned, organized, but not in the same way that you would see rows in like an older site. There are larger monuments, there’s bushes and wide paths. It’s supposed to have this park-like atmosphere. And that design style didn’t come to North America until the 18 30s. I want to say 1834, possibly or around there, with the construction of Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts. So for being really annoyingly technical, anything before that date in North America is not considered a cemetery but cemetery is the colloquial word for most burial sites these days.

Graveyard then or churchyard is the grounds traditionally surrounding a church where the dead are buried. Sometimes they’re not directly around the church, they can be right next to it. But that’s what the graveyard is. And then in North America, burial ground can be used as a catch all term, but in the Northeast, specifically for the Puritans and the Quakers, they used burial ground historically to denote to site that they were bearing their dead in but they were trying to do this separation of church and everything else. They didn’t even call their spaces where they had services a church, they called it the meeting house. So the burial ground was something that was not sacred, that’s just where your mortal remains went to didn’t really matter after that. So they didn’t call it a graveyard specifically to say that it was not associated with the church.

Yvonne Kjorlien: So with this creation of cemetery in this park atmosphere, it almost sounds like, back in the 1930s when this was started. and at least in North America that there was almost a desire to promote a relationship between the living and the dead would that be accurate to say?

Robyn Lacy: Somewhat, yea. And the 1830s. But yeah, there sort of came from this concern that people were having with overcrowding in burial grounds that were in the centers of communities. And there’s a lot of articles about this happening New York and places like that that were more urban centres — Boston as well — where they were like, we have too many people buried in these sites, it’s going to be smelly, it’s going to be making people sick even though that’s not how dead bodies work. And that was something that they thought was going to affect them. So they were like no more burials in the city, we’re going to create these specific spaces outside of the city to bury our dead in. And in Europe, where the royal cemetery movement comes from, it started with — and I’m going to butcher this pronunciation — but Pere Lachaise, which is outside of Paris and that’s the first garden cemetery. So it’s really the model that they were all based off of. And it encouraged people to visit the sites and spend time there, but not a connection to interacting with the space in the same way that it was a hundred or 200 years before that and because it was also removing it from people’s daily viewscape, I would say. You’re not walking by a rural cemetery every day, it’s not something that you’re seeing on your way to the market or on your way home from work because it’s no longer in the center of that town. It would have to be a purposeful trip out there.

Yvonne Kjorlien: I just find that interesting that they want to make it more park-like and more palatable to the living but yet at the same time they’re not really encouraging a more engaged relationship with the dead.

Robyn Lacy: Yeah, it’s interesting because it’s a park but then it’s not very easy to get to for some people.

Yvonne Kjorlien: So yeah, it’s just interesting that they would go out of their way to make cemeteries, into park-like spaces, make them more palatable, but yet not really being encouraging, I guess, a deeper relationship with the dead because these spaces are removed from urban centers, so you have to travel to get to them but yet they’re nicer.

Robyn Lacy: Yeah, and I think a lot of it has to do with the 19th century idea of ‘softening of death’, it’s often referred to in literature. Where you go from seeing these 17th-18th century gravestones that have the skull on them and the hourglass and they’re momento mori — remember you shall die – to the more early 19th century into the Victorian period of there’s a willow tree to denote sorrow and there’s a mourning figure next to an urn. A lot of classical imagery, a lot more, I’d say, romanticized. The language changes a lot, and that’s really what we’re seeing being used in these park-like atmospheres. It’s more of a calm romanticized space.

Yvonne Kjorlien: So it almost sounds like, I don’t know, they’re, don’t know how to put this into words, but taking the opportunity to use a burial ground. I don’t know maybe a reason to create a park. if that makes sense instead of kind of other way around

Robyn Lacy: Yeah, it could very well be a way to create a public space that’s accessible to everyone while so solving some of the issues of where to put dead people. I’m not too sure, I don’t do too much 19th century landscape stuff, so I’m not sure about they’re wider development. But yeah.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right, let’s talk about what you are doing. So you’re the time frame, the geographical area, and then also the groups that you look at in your research.

Robyn Lacy: Yeah, so my PhD dissertation research is on 17th century burial grounds. So I’m in sort of the sites that were established when settlers first arrived in North America when they were coming from settlements they lived in for hundreds of years that been organized for ages — they probably don’t even know why things were in certain places in the communities — to a place that they viewed as completely empty. Obviously it’s not. But when they arrived in North America, they were setting up a community for the first time, and they got to choose where everything went in that community. And what I’m really interested in looking at is how settlers chose to develop the space where they were placing their dead amongst where they were living and where their daily activities were.

So I was looking at settlements founded by the British, the Dutch, and the French in the Northeast. So from Northern Virginia up to Nova Scotia and into Newfoundland, along the coast and then sort of along the St. Lawrence River valley and the Hudson River valley. And looking at how the early settlements from the 17th century there, how they established their burial grounds and then comparing them: what were different religions doing, and what were the different nationalities doing, and if there were any differences seen between those groups or was there sort of like a European conglomerate idea of what to do with your dead? And sort of those kind of theme overall.

Yvonne Kjorlien: So what were people doing with their dead because there are different time frames and different places across the world even now where people are very much in relationship with the dead. I mean, there’s even some time frames where cultures would bury dead under the floors of their houses and actually do their daily living on top of their dead. Tell us a little bit about the Dutch, the British, and the French and how they use the spaces and how they maintained or divorced themselves from a relationship with their dead.

Robyn Lacy: It was pretty interesting. The Dutch and the French, will start with them, what their settlements were very homogeneous based on religion. The Dutch were all represented by the Dutch Reformed Church, which was a branch of the Protestant church after the Protestant Reformation in Europe, which sort of helped form the Netherlands (that’s a whole other thing). And the Dutch Reformed Church was the state religion and that’s what we see reflected in the colonies, aside from a couple Jewish burial grounds as well. And so they were all Protestant basically. And then the French towns, even after the Reformation, Catholicism remains the dominant religion in France. Everyone had to be Catholic in the French settlements as well.

So we have a Catholic conglomerate, a Protestant conglomerate, and then the British towns, they had freedom of religion in the colonies, while that wasn’t the case in Britain. That was something that the British established for their colonists. So we have this hodgepodge of so many different variations on Christianity which all had different ideas of what they wanted to do. We’ve got Protestants. There’s some Catholic influence. There’s some Jewish sites. There’s Quaker, there’s Puritans and those are the ones I look at, but there’s various other denominations in there as well which showed up really interestingly in the data.

One of the variables I was looking at was whether the burial ground was a graveyard or not. So whether it was directly associated with the church spatially, which was what I was looking at. So the Dutch sites the majority of them were associated with the church. There was two sites that weren’t but those two sites were only not associated with church because they were established in such early settlements, so the church hadn’t even been developed yet. The French ones were all associated with the church and there was one that was unknown. And then the British sites were sort of in the middle. They were like some of them were and some of them weren’t, and it was kind of all over the place which was almost 50/50 split which is really interesting.

Yvonne Kjorlien: What can you, I guess, infer from the association of a burial ground with a church. Because you said that the British was kind of a hodgepodge and I’m guessing that’s in alignment with the multitude of religious beliefs, and what have you, with that. So what can you infer from the placement of these burial grounds and association or not an association with a church?

Robyn Lacy: So what kind of is looking like is the closer a settlement or a people was keeping to an older established religion — like French Catholic beliefs didn’t change too much going into the 17th century from what they had been for a long time — the closer they were to a group like that, the more they were likely to have this sort of churchyard model. Where, let’s see, I don’t know where the percentages are here, yeah, so those vast majority I think…11 French sites I looked at were associated with a church, one unknown. So that’s 100% of the data that I do have with associated with the church. And then the further you get into religious groups that are changing — so the Dutch Reform — they’re slightly less. They’re still mostly next to a church, but there’s more that aren’t than when you look at the French ones and then you get to the British site and the Puritans are mostly not associated with the church and the Quakers or sort of both, but they don’t call theirs churches, so that’s all another question mark. The British Anglican sites are beside the church most of the time but a couple aren’t. The farther you get into religious groups that are deviating from the long established…is really where you’re starting to get more variation.

Yvonne Kjorlien: And what about I guess that the format of these burial grounds? Were they all in rows? Were people buried facing a certain specific direction? Are the gravestones all the same?

Robyn Lacy: So I wasn’t looking to closely at individual graves, but from the sites that I did have some previous archaeological excavation data to look at, the majority of them are still following the Christian tradition of varying the grave facing east-west. The gravestone styles vary by region, a lot of influence coming from the New England area. There was some really interesting stuff going on in Montreal with, I think it’s Point de Collier, is where the site is called now Ville-Marie was the earliest sort of settlement in that area, and their earliest burial ground had a division in the middle of it, like a fence going down the middle. There was some burials on one side of the fence that were oriented slightly differently than the directly east-west ones. They do have records of the burials of that site and they think that the ones that were oriented the same way were indigenous people that had joined the Mission and had converted to Christianity, so they were buried in the same space in a segregated section of the burial ground

Yvonne Kjorlien: Isn’t that interesting.

Yvonne Kjorlien: So, you mentioned you weren’t looking specifically at the individual graves, but did you notice any patterns in, like you mentioned iconography before, how there was this softening of the iconography when cemeteries in the park like structure was starting to be taken up. What other shift in iconography did you notice, if at all?

Robyn Lacy: Yeah, so there’s a period where we don’t really have much data for what the grave markers and gravestones would have had. Partially because Quakers and Puritans didn’t like religious iconography. So they often didn’t even mark their graves or they’d mark them with a stick or something. So that definitely plays into what we see for the New England area. But when they did start carving gravestones a lot of for those groups at least didn’t have any imagery at all. So you see a lot of early gravestones, especially around Boston and Massachusetts Bay Area that don’t have any images from the mid 1600s, they just have text. And then they slowly start to have pictures but they are not religious pictures. So there’s very often early gravestones coming out of New England and they shift everywhere sort of on the northeast. We have New England gravestones from the 18th century in Newfoundland, and they have these momento mori images of the winged skull, that also gets called the death’s head. Sometimes the winged cherub, which is also called the sole effigy, which is supposed to supposedly represent the individual’s soul. And then once the 18th century gets rolling you get more images that are less skull-like and more like people. You can see portraitures sometimes and you get into, as it rolls into the 19th century, is when we start seeing that major change to be the softer image and then the text will change from saying ‘here lies the literal body’ or like ‘the corpse of’ to ‘in memory of’ or ‘dedicated to’ kind of thing.

Yvonne Kjorlien: When these people came over and they started to settle did you find that they’re practices or maybe being influenced by the other people and other communities?

Robyn Lacy: Yeah, so I think when people were coming over from Europe they were carrying a lot of traditions with them, but then especially the dissenter groups were using this as an opportunity to be able to practice their own religion and sort of run a community how they would have wanted to. So we’re seeing a lot of new ideas being established at the same time as some groups holding up older traditions as well. A lot of the time people who settle in one area were of a similar background, so lot of Puritans and Quakers in Massachusetts Bay Area, whereas in Quebec in the St. Lawrence Valley River Valley you see a lot of Catholic influence and, to this day, it’s still very divided up like that. So I think that people weren’t moving around quite as much as they do today, so there was a little bit less cross-influence, but it definitely was there. We can see that in the 18th century and after the British took over Dutch New Netherlands, and we see a lot of influence of British ideas and British gravestone carving styles as well appearing in the cemetery.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Very cool. let’s talk a little bit about the work you do with your husband about restoration. What is involved in that? Is it I’m just picturing, growing up in the 80s where it was kind of the thing for bored kids to go in and knock over headstones. I mean, I don’t get it. So other than righting headstones, what else does your work involve?

Robyn Lacy: I mean, I’m sure we’re fixing a lot of problems that were caused by bored kids in the 80s, unfortunately. Yeah, so we do gravestone like cleaning and uprighting and then a lot of repair work as well. Softer stones like marble, specifically marble and limestone, will often crack and break and if the break isn’t too developed, if it hasn’t weathered away too much and is really unstable, we’ll be able to put that back together. But we also do a lot of work with heritage groups and community groups in Newfoundland. So we’ll go out and do workshops and teach their volunteers how to safely clean gravestones so they can upkeep the sites for themselves in the future, and teach other people we’ll do public talks about safety and cemeteries and history about different sites in the work we do and everything as well.

Yvonne Kjorlien: So how do people go about knowing that, I don’t know, their cemetery or graveyard needs tending to? How do they contact you? What’s involved?

Robyn Lacy: People continuously tell us that there’s no shortage of work initially and it’s true. The joke is that every road ends in a cemetery in the province. Yeah. I’m sure that’s true in so many places. But yeah, because European settlers have been here for so long that there’s quite a history of established cemeteries and gravestone carvers and everything. So yeah people often know about what’s local to them. They know about the sites that are in their community, and often people do go out and try and clean up these sites themselves as well. And so if we’re sort of out there making ourselves known on the internet, we haven’t advertised too much but sometimes we’re on the radio or something and then we’ll get some emails afterwards because we have a little website. Yeah, we’re usually just out there talking about heritage and someone will come up to us and be like, I work with such and such cemetery and I’m on the board and can you come to a workshop for us or something and it usually goes from there.

Yvonne Kjorlien: So, what’s the number one thing that maybe well-meaning volunteers do to try to help preserve their gravestones and cemeteries, but it’s not really helping.

Robyn Lacy: That could be a really long list, unfortunately. …

Yvonne Kjorlien: Oh boy. All these well-meaning things that are not helping.

Robyn Lacy: I mean the main issue is that conservation and preservation, as I’m sure you know, for archeology updates very frequently. It’s a very active field. So the information that’s really available to people, online especially, is often quite outdated. I’d say the biggest issue for gravestones is that people put them in concrete. They’ll try to do repairs using concrete or they’ll set the bases into concrete. Concrete is extremely difficult to remove once it’s on a stone. And you can take it off sometimes but it’ll often take pieces of the stone with it and that’s a huge problem. But it is not water-permeable. And that’s an issue when you’re working with a soft historic stone because it causes water to be trapped inside of the stone which makes it weaker in that area. So if you set up a marble headstone up, and down into a block of concrete, after a while water can’t leech out of the bottom of that stone, it’s just sort of collecting there and that weakens that area, and the stone’s going to break. But now that bottom piece that you need it to prepare with is stuck in concrete and you can’t get it out any more.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Okay, no concrete. Good to know.

Robyn Lacy: No concrete.

Yvonne Kjorlien: I would not have thought of that. Okay good.

Yvonne Kjorlien: And so people can just contact you through your website.

Robyn Lacy: Yeah, the business is called Black Cat Cemetery Preservation. If you also Google my name and put gravestone after it. I’m sure something would come up as well.

Yvonne Kjorlien: I think I found you by Googling mortuary archeology because I really wanted to get somebody on here talking about mortuary archeology.

Robyn Lacy: There’s not too many people in Canada that do Mortuary archeology as well as public-facing stuff. So yeah, it’s a small pool.

Yvonne Kjorlien: So why did you want to do a PhD?

Robyn Lacy: I never really intended to go into academia in the sense of being a professor, but I’ve always really been interested in research and writing and that avenue of archeology. So I did my Master’s and then I went to work in Ontario for a couple of years. But I still have a lot of questions from the research I did for my Master’s and I thought the best way to answer them rather than doing it on my own time while trying to work full time would probably be to go back to school. And then there’s a lot of heritage jobs in museums and institutions that do research that even if you’re not like going to be a professor they still want you to have a doctorate. So if I’m interested in doing something like that in the future, that’s like the bonus of having a doctorate in the end.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, I’ve heard that from others that if you want to work in the heritage, in a museum or one of the more I guess a heritage institution of whatever sorts that you really do need a PhD.

Robyn Lacy: Yeah, others like smaller museums and community museums, having a background in museum stuff is great. But if you want to work it like the Royal BC Museum and you want to be a curator of whatever, they want you to have a high level background in it. So they usually ask people to have a doctorate. Yeah, so if I would like those doors to be open to me in the future for sure.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, especially, with your consulting, you’re very firmly situated within the heritage spheres as far as I can see. So yeah, that makes sense. All right. How when do you defend?

Robyn Lacy: My I talked to my supervisors recently and I said borrowing a catastrophe of hopefully late spring early summer. So I’m on the last couple chapters of editing and then the whole thing will get compiled and sent to my supervisors for a second review and then if we’ve got any change, make those, I’ll be going out to my reviewer committee.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Damn! Best of luck. That’s coming up pretty quick.

Robyn Lacy: Thank you it’s a little scary but

Yvonne Kjorlien: I feel bad now for taking up your time. You should be writing and…

Robyn Lacy: No.

Yvonne Kjorlien: editing. All…

Robyn Lacy: No, you’re good. It’s nice to not be editing.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Thank you very much. And again, if anybody wants to reach out to you they could just Google Robyn Lacy and, sorry your website again, is Spade and Grave?

Robyn Lacy: Spade and the Grave. Yes.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Spade and the Grave. All right, sounds good.

Robyn Lacy: Thank you.

View Details

Dr. Sasha Reid is an assistant professor at the University of Calgary, teaching in the Departments of Sociology, Psychology, and in the Faculty of Law. She is also currently a law student at the University of Calgary. Sasha came to media attention when she developed a serial homicide database that suggested patterns in homicides in Toronto that may indicated a possible serial killer. That serial killer was later identified as Bruce McArthur. She has also developed a missing and murdered database (MMD) that has become the largest database of missing and murdered indigenous persons.

I wanted to talk to Sasha primarily about developing a database and what’s involved.

In this episode we talk about:

Sasha’s academic journey and how she developed an interest in psychopathy and developmental psychology.
How and why she developed the serial homicide database.
Tips and tricks for developing a database (and predictive model).
The possibility of using Chat GPT and AI with her databases.
Why she developed the Missing Murdered Database (MMD).
Her teams which help with the databases.
How her work intersects developmental psychology, law, predictive analysis, advocacy and cold cases.

You can contact Sasha at:

Email: Sasha.reid@mail.utoronto.ca
Instagram: sashareidxoxo

Further Reading:

Bruce McArthur case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010%E2%80%932017_Toronto_serial_homicides
West Memphis Three: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Memphis_Three
Pickton case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Pickton
Reid, S. (2017). Compulsive criminal homicide: A new nosology for serial murder. Aggression and violent behavior, 34, 290-301.

Vancouver Sun: Why these women are building a database of 12,000 missing, murdered people in Canada and Why victims’ families want Robert Pickton evidence kept and why police say it’s no longer needed

Notes from the start:

We’ve published the first scholarly article for the Alberta portion of the Scavenging Study! The taphonomic impact of scavenger guilds in peri-urban and rural regions of central and southern Alberta. Part I – Identification of forensically relevant vertebrate scavengers is available here: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1556-4029.15443

Contact me through ykjorlien@gmail.com or through my contact form. Follow me on Facebook at The Reluctant Archaeologist, or through Instagram @yvonnekjorlien

Do you have a suggestion for a topic on the Scattered podcast?

Do you have a question about working with human remains?

Drop Yvonne a line at ykjorlien@gmail.com

Transcript

Yvonne Kjorlien: So go ahead and say who you are and what you’re currently your current position. I guess if that’s applicable.

Sasha Reid: Yeah, this is actually I think and I hope the hardest question of today.

You know why? Because I’m not anything. I am everything, and so I like to introduce myself as hi. I’m Sasha. I’m a person who does a lot of things. I have a PhD in developmental psychology from the University of Toronto. I studied there. I got my Master’s degrees there in criminology and applied psych. and then my PhD’s in developmental. And then I am a law student right now at the University of Calgary in my last year – wahoo — And I am also an adjunct professor at Ontario Tech, which is awesome and new. So yeah.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Wow, and what faculty are you in adjunct there?

Sasha Reid: Faculty of sociology

Yvonne Kjorlien: Sociology. Wow, it’s cool being an adjunct because then you get to work with and meet all sorts of new people where you may not have a chance to before. Yeah.

Sasha Reid: I know that there’s some people there who are doing their dissertations on serial homicide and I know I’ve been asked to be a committee member in order to be a committee member. I have to be affiliated with the university in some ways that this is the only reason why I haven’t adjunct.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah. Yeah, as far as I know in Canada, at least, you don’t get paid for being an adjunct. It’s kind of just a status thing.

Sasha Reid: Yes, it is a thankless position.

Yvonne Kjorlien: All right so, let’s delve into your past a little bit and bring us up to date. What attracted you to doing psychology developmental and serial killers and all that good stuff and why go to school? Especially because you’ve probably been doing for over 10 years now, I would imagine.

Sasha Reid: I think we’re coming up on 20. So, okay here’s the rundown…

Yvonne Kjorlien: alright

Sasha Reid: There was never a period in my life where monsters have not been front and center of my daily thoughts. Never. When I was a kid…

Yvonne Kjorlien: Did you encounter a monster when you were a kid?

Sasha Reid: No, I didn’t. I mean, I tried. I went monster hunting with — and I’m not even kidding — my favorite show was Buffy the Vampire Slayer and we lived in the woods. So my lovely next door neighbor and I would go find the best wood, whittle it down into a stake, and then go at night, hunting vampires in the forest.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Oh, that’s awesome.

Sasha Reid: We’re always looking for something scary. And obviously I didn’t find anything and I grew up a little and I realized monsters do exist, but they’re not like the movies; they’re not vampires and werewolves and whatnot. They’re people and that’s even scarier in a way.

My parents divorced in both the married some very not so kind people and that’s kind of where my introduction to, and I put in quotes, ‘monsters’ that are humans really began to develop. And it was such an isolating experience as a kid feeling so uncomfortable at home and so alone. So I spent a lot of time at the library just reading books, of course about monsters and witchcraft. You kind of just do a little circle and you loop around into abnormal psychology, at least in my library. So I started studying all the abnormal psychology books and I started learning about psychopathy and I thought that’s so interesting. That’s a type of person and it explains, at least in the mind of a child, it explains the bad things that happen to me as a kid. And so just knowing that why did this happen made me feel so much more empowered and safer, and so I wanted to give that to other people too. So then I went into Psych.

Yvonne Kjorlien: I love the question “why?”. I love asking it of everything. I want to know the behind, why something works, why it doesn’t work, why did that happen? Lovely, lovely question.

Sasha Reid: yeah, and you hear it …victims’ family members. They always want to know why. People, I think, are just drawn to the why, and sometimes it’s the most impossible answer. It’s impossible sometimes, and sometimes why isn’t good enough and when you get to that, it’s so traumatizing because it’s not good enough.

Yvonne Kjorlien: I imagine for families who have had a member of their family disappear, has something happened to them, that it’s been a long time and it’s a traumatic experience. And so they probably built In their minds. They want something like horrific and monumental to explain all of this that they’re going through and to have that come across the killer or whoever, the perpetrator, the bad guy say, “I don’t know”, or “They were just there”…

Sasha Reid: Yeah.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah. It’s not good enough.

Sasha Reid: No, it’s also interesting. I’ve heard it from many different accounts, like many different people have said fortunately in their cases they were solved and they got to actually go to court and see the person who killed their family member and so many people say, “That’s it?” “They’re so small”, or “I had expected something so much different.” “That’s it?” They were expecting actual monsters. It’s interesting.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Wow. So let’s go through your academic journey to bring you to your PhD. What lead in your undergrad to have you go into grad and then to get a PhD, because that’s a big step.

Sasha Reid: Yes, that’s a huge if you know anything about me, it is I don’t think a lot. I do everything with very little thought. If I had put an ounce of thought into this, I don’t know if I would have done it, but here I am. So undergrad. I started at Lakehead University and it was great. It was close to home, but I wanted to join a sorority and there was no sorority in Thunder Bay. And so of course, I’m going to apply to the University of Toronto, not because it’s the most incredible institution ever, but sororities, of course.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Okay.

Sasha Reid: Yeah. There’s nothing inspiring there. I started the University of Toronto and it’s incredible and I have the greatest mentors. I’m still so interested in psychopathy and I get to start taking courses like abnormal psychology and brain and behaviour, psychology and the law. And I’m a super curious person and so I’m always chatting with my professors just trying to get their understanding about these things. And I through that developed really good mentors. One of them is Dr. David Nussbaum, just the most incredible person ever. Right now he studies terrorism. He’s amazing. But when I was an undergrad, he studied psychopathy, and he really took me under his wing and I learned so much from him. When it came time to graduate, I told him, “I don’t know what I want to do.” And I think that’s the only failing I think for him as a mentor. It was very little guidance in terms of what I could do with a psychology degree and an interest in psychopathy. And so instead of pursuing a graduate degree in Psych, I pursued a graduate degree in child development and education. So I’m actually an Ontario certified kindergarten to grade six teacher.

Yvonne Kjorlien: I didn’t see that one coming.

Sasha Reid: Yeah, me neither. I threw that it too. I’m a person who does a lot of things. So I did my Master’s degree in applied psychology and human development slash child education. And that was at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. And it’s two years and it was interesting because, that first year, we did just learn a lot about education and, I don’t know, stuff about teaching. And I was so bored. I went to my supervisor and I told her, “This has been wonderful. I’m so grateful that you took me in. It’s a very, very prestigious program, but I think I’m going to drop out.” And the most incredible thing happened. She said, “Why do you want to drop out?” and I said,” I’m not really interested in being a teacher. I’m so much more interested in deviance.” And she looked at me and she leaned across the table and she said, “Sasha, how could you ever hope to understand deviance without first understanding child development?” And I thought, “Oh my God, you’re right.” And so I stayed in the program and actually that day is when I started my serial homicide database.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Really?

Sasha Reid: Because she’s, yeah, she said you need to understand child development to understand deviance, and if you’re not happy with just doing this, find something else to do on the side to help you get through. And guess what? That was a serial homicide database.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Huh! It’s funny how those, little tiny, they seem tiny, they seem insignificant, but they change the course of our lives.

Sasha Reid: Just that one sentence is all it took and it just seemed to make everything make sense. And she’s so right. Sometimes I look back and I’m like, my God, if I didn’t get my Master’s degree in this I would have been at such a disadvantage. Because I didn’t just learn about children, I worked with children for years, and I saw them develop and I saw these stages, I saw how they think and engage. Oh my God, I’m so glad I didn’t drop out.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Wow. Amazing advice. And then for your course of action, to develop the serial homicide database on the side. That was a very interesting reaction to that to that sentence.

Sasha Reid: Yeah, I thought you’re right. I’m gonna stay here. I’m gonna do what I have to do, which is going into classes every day and teaching, which I didn’t like, but at the end of the day, I’m gonna come home to a database, which is interesting, which I know how to develop because I know how children develop, so yeah.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Cool. All right. As you know, we do want to talk about databases; however, let’s finish talking about your academic journey through PhD and where you are now, and then we’ll come back to databases. So you went on to do a PhD after that.

Sasha Reid: Nope.

Yvonne Kjorlien: No? Okay.

Sasha Reid: Because I now felt like I was already in all good and I understand child development and that’s great, but I felt that I had been out of a bit of a disadvantage because I hadn’t yet understood much about deviance, not in a professional sphere. So I applied to get my Master’s in criminology and socio- legal studies at the University of Toronto. And I applied. And I was rejected. Mmm. It makes sense. They kind of — and people do this, and which is why I interviewed myself as, “Hi. I’m Sasha. I’m a person who does a lot of things.” They pigeon-holed me as a person who studies children and somebody asked, “Why are you trying to study crime when you study children?” And I thought, “Oh my Lord. Stop pigeonholing me.” So I wrote them a letter three pages long explaining why they need to change their decision and admit me.

And can you freaking believe it? They did.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yes.

Sasha Reid: They changed their minds. And now on their application website it says, “You cannot write letters to make us change our minds.”

Yvonne Kjorlien: Nice!

Sasha Reid: So I go and I do a one-year Master’s in criminology and I get a better understanding of the sociology of crime. It wasn’t psych-based, which kind of looking back, it wasn’t all that necessary, but it’s a great program. And then after that, I applied to my PhD and I…that was my PhD. Yeah.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Wow, holy smokes. That’s quite the journey. And so, okay, let’s talk about the database and how that kind of…we know how to it originated now…how did it evolve to the point where you could use it as a predictive model for the Bruce MacArthur case?

Sasha Reid: It’s still very much developing. Okay, so I know that people are really interested in databases. And I think it might also just be helpful to start by saying how this began. Because right now, it looks awesome. And right now it looks like it’s so usable and it did not start that way. And I think that there’s a little bit of beauty in showing the horrors of starting a database. And the fact that it’s okay to fail. I started this database by having these Word templates. So people would add a picture and input qualitative and quantitative data about serial killers, and it was literally just a bunch of Word sheets. And maybe they were five to 13 pages long and they were never actually in an Excel file ever until I got so many of these forms and I was like, what am I supposed to do with this all. I’ve got all this data, but I can’t do any stats with it. That’s when we turned it into an Excel file.

And then, I think people in databases will think Excel is not a database and they’re completely correct: it’s not. But it’s a great place to store data. And that kind of just taught me the importance of learning how to break down variables into zeros and ones. Make it as easy as possible. Because you’re going to eventually have to be able to run analyses with it. So keep it short, keep it simple. If you have a qualitative variable, don’t have something that people can write out. Inevitably people will spell things wrong, they will get things wrong. It will never be uniform. Always have drop-down menus. It just helps to standardize everything. And that was really our problem with Excel. It’s because, when I’d ask people to write in things like victim’s names or the locations of serial killers, so many errors, so many spelling errors. They’re not uniform whatsoever. And so I gravitated over to Air Table. Which is an incredible data platform. And right now that’s where the serial homicide database is held. And I’ve learned so much in putting everything in Excel and failing so hard for so many years. I better understand now the importance of having nested data and making sure most things are drop-down and also always having room at the end for notes. So I have a lot of research assistants who work with me to fill out these databases. Early on they would email me to say, “I wasn’t able to do A, B, C or D. Can you keep that in mind?” I’d get so many emails that I was like, “You know what? We’ll just create a notes section at the end. So you can just put that into the individual profile.” That’s been really helpful. I tangented.

Yvonne Kjorlien: It’s all good. So it sounds like… okay, let’s go back to your Word sheets. So you said that you had different people filling these out. How were you getting your data? It sounds like it wasn’t just from the research literature. It sounds like you’re getting personal communications.

Sasha Reid: We were trying. No, so this is again the beauty of trying and failing. So I got my research assistant from the University of Toronto. They were all students, I’m a student. We’re all just interested in crimes, psychopathy, abnormal, whatever. And so we tried to figure out — how can we get the best data possible? Because, again, although we’re students who are all still academics and we want good data. Garbage in, garbage out is a real issue. And so we started by looking at books in the libraries. Fortunately University of Toronto has the biggest library ever. And so there’s a ton of books on serial killers there. So we would rent those out and go through them week after week, just pour through those books and take data from those books and put it into the Word documents. You may be wondering, why wouldn’t you just go to Google? Because I’m dumb do everything the hard way first.

I’m trying to make sure no one else does that. But eventually we did end up going and looking at journal articles and there’s not a lot, but there is enough published case studies on serial killers that we could just pick information and pull it into our Word documents. And then the lower tier data…we tried to tier the data right? So first, you’ve got these books that have been published and that are housed in the universities. You’ve got journal articles where people actually worked with serial killers and we look at those. And then we have — not the best data but at least it’s a temporary holdover — information on the internet in a public domain or even in documentaries. So we would take that data and put it into the database and we cite everything that we have in there just to make sure, if you’re questioning this, here’s the source and maybe it’s a good source, maybe not so take it as it is.

And then after we all got very comfortable with that, we started reaching out more to psychiatrists or psychologists, law enforcement, detectives, people who’d actually worked with these offenders, and just tried to see if there’s anything that they were actually able to share. We tried to get court documents where serial killers actually shared their own statements or where a childhood evaluation had been done. Just because that’s the best information you can possibly get, but, again starting out, I did not know that. I didn’t. So now I know. And for my PhD, I will say this: I definitely wanted to contact serial killers. I went to Yorkville Mall. There’s a store there. It’s called Papyrus. They sell cards and I went there and I bought a hundred empty cards, beautiful cards with beautiful colored envelopes to send to serial killers. Because I am so dumb. And I kind of put that in my ethics that I was going to be like mailing serial killers and getting in touch with them, and that was not gonna fly. So my supervisor and I had a discussion about that and he’s like, “No, you’re never going to get ethics.” Which, he’s correct. I wanted to, but no, I never ended up physically mailing those letters out.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Wow. Yeah, that’s one of those was it really really Brave or really really not so smart.

Sasha Reid: Yeah, that’s kind of like the tagline of my life. Brave, but not so smart. Yup.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Okay, so I want to ask you — it’s actually really great that we are now chatting instead of a year ago when I first contacted you because of Chat GPT and OpenAI and all these AI because they’re all essentially predictive models built on the databases that, AI who knows where they’re getting their data, they’re pillaging the net for literature, essentially English, but, yeah, that’s their data set and they’re building these databases and they’re using them as predictive models that now look like Chat GPT that in essence mimic the English language. So I was kind of wondering, if you wanted to just take a minute and postulate, if you could throw your database into an OpenAI computer and have it run some analyses. Would you be open to doing that and see what patterns would come out of that?

Sasha Reid: Without thought without question: 100%.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yes, Let’s do it.

Sasha Reid: Listen, because there’s a lot of reasons for this. One: I am, and I don’t know if this is controversial or whatnot, I love Chat GPT. I am an enormous proponent of it. Ethics aside, which you can’t actually just put ethics aside, but for a moment, can we just please, this is revolutionary. It is fascinating and it is beautiful and it has helped my life in ways that I did not even know we’re possible and just on a cat side. I will tell you because I have to actually Chat GPT 4. I freaking love this. I asked it to write a song about a bad cat named Mr. Vinegar — meaning my cat, Theo — and to write the song in the style of Michael Jackson’s Don’t Stop Till You Get Enough and then draw a picture. And it gave me cutest song and picture. It was: how can you hate this? But in terms of writing proposals for things like — you’re an academic, I’m an academic — proposals are literally just verbatim the same thing over and over: here is my question, here is the method. Why do I have to say this 1,000 times over? It will do it for you. Obviously you check it. You edit it. You make it good. But hours of time saved every day.

So I love it, and in the name of giving back to something that gives me so much, I’d be very happy to put my data in there. I took it from the internet too. There’s very little in the serial homicide database that’s not already in the public domain. Whatever was explicitly told to me to don’t share this information, yeah, I would absolutely take that out. Violations of privacy are really really big issue. But everything you took was from the public domain, so I’m happy to throw that back there. I’d love to see what it would show. Yeah.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right? Because there’s only so much as a human we can analyze it, until we go blind.

Sasha Reid: Yeah.

Yvonne Kjorlien: But we are human we are liable to make mistakes, we can only see what we’re going to see at the moment and we have a subjective interpretation of how live. How we perceive our reality is based on who we are. So to have a machine take a whack at it without those biases. That would be cool.

Sasha Reid: It’s completely in line with the way I do work. So I never do work independently or alone because I think people can get stuck in intellectual silos and that’s never a good thing. So on my team, I’ve got doctors and lawyers and had historians, geographers, people from every single different background so that I can see, where are my blind spots? What are you seeing that I’m not seeing? And just adding Chat GPT to that or predictive AI, there’s just another member of the team, in my opinion. So I’m very happy to use it. I haven’t yet and I’m actually surprised because I have that ability. I’m gonna see I’m gonna do it today. I’m gonna let you know how it goes.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Especially with 4 because can’t you upload quite a bit more data into four?

Sasha Reid: You can upload entire spreadsheets, PDFs, everything, yeah.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Then you can with…my god. Yeah.

Sasha Reid: I know.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Keep me in the loop. I am so excited about that.

Sasha Reid: Okay, we’re so geeky I love it.

Yvonne Kjorlien: I mean as soon as I learned what everybody’s calling AI, what it actually is and what it actually is is that it’s a predictive model based on data. Like, holy crap! How many more instances can you get about that? I mean we’ve been doing predictive models for God knows how long I’ve been trying to start my own database to develop a predictive model. You’ve done exactly that. So let’s get the machines on board.

Sasha Reid: Yes. A hundred percent. Now, the issue with that always is it goes back to that very fundamental basic: garbage in, garbage out.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yes.

Sasha Reid: Which is why working with predictive models, working with AI, you have to remember this is a symbiotic relationship. It will only give you whatever you put into it. So if you’re giving it garbage, it’s gonna put out garbage and you have to be aware of that and you have to be kind of humble about that. Right? I know in academia, for whatever reason, people have the biggest egos. I think it prevents them from recognizing their own fallibility. So yeah, some data sets are not really good. Sometimes you’re going to get garbage. And when you publish that garbage and you put that out there in the world, that’s a problem. But we can stop that by just, at the outset, if we’re going to start a database, keep that, I don’t know, make one of those little motivational stickers and put it at your computer: garbage in, garbage out. And just work on that basis and be humble enough to recognize that you have a job to get good data and then through your symbiotic relationship with AI, see what you can do.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Fabulous advice. I like it. All right, let’s talk about what you’re doing now with said database because you don’t have just this one serial homicide database. You’ve got another one too.

Sasha Reid: Yeah, so the other one is called the missing murdered database or the MMD and that one I started in my PhD. So, during my PhD, I was working on the serial homicide database, but it got very rote. It’s the same thing over and over and over. And so I just wanted something that was a little more, I don’t know, a little different. I wasn’t necessarily looking to create a database but something happened. One of my friends from my hometown was listed as missing.

I was just looking into cases of cold cases and I came across hers and it said she was missing. And I was like, my gosh, that’s horrible. What? It was such a moment of “Holy crap. I know this person. We went to school together. We walked in the halls together.” We weren’t friends friends. I think that’s going a bit far. We were acquaintances. We had our own teenage dramas, but we knew each other. And she was missing. And then I looked further and I found out that she had actually been found deceased. And that was such a “Whoa.” I’ve never, I’ve had friends in high school who died from car accidents, but never who went missing and were found to deceased. And so I didn’t know what to do. I’m very bad with figuring out what to do with my emotions. I’m so a psychologist. I’m such a quack, but I didn’t know what to do. And so I put her name in an Excel file — because, yes, I was still in Excel during that time — but I put it in an Excel file and I just kind of kept it there. Because that’s the best thing I can do. Just put it in the box and figure out what to do. And then I thought, “that’s really interesting’ and I started populating her name the same way I populate my serial homicide database: name, age, race, when they went missing, where they were found. I just, for whatever reason, got caught in a loop and I continued to do it. And I found I had another acquaintance who went missing and was found to deceased — that’s two. Since that time, I’ve had many more. It’s a problem, as a person from the North. Indigenous communities are very very much struggling with the issue of missing and murdered people. And so that’s my community and these people are going missing and being found to deceased. So I’ve had a lot of people, a lot of friends of mine in the database, which is super unsettling. But I just continue to add to it because it gave me something to do, to hold those emotions for my missing murdered friends, and also to take my mind away from serial homicide which, it gets overburdening sometimes, very overwhelming.

And so yeah, I made that database. And now it’s become the nation’s largest database on missing murdered people. This only speaks to my compulsive nature, it should not have become this.

Yvonne Kjorlien: You got to play to your strengths, right?

Sasha Reid: Yeah.

Yvonne Kjorlien: If you’re good at it, use it. So, you use the serial homicide database as a predictive model to help catch Bruce McArthur. Have either of these two databases helped in other ways that you can mention.

Sasha Reid: Yeah, so okay first I did not help with Bruce McArthur. That was a total fluke. I am just this low life grad student sitting in her computer too late at night doing random things and I found something neat and tried to share it. That is I think the extent of my involvement. But it did, like it was really a cool moment to take that information, put it on a map and see statistically this is atypical. Zooming-in even closer. Oh, wow, all these victims are very similar. And based on what I know as a serial homicide researcher, like that’s red flag right there. So that was a really cool moment: just realizing there is utility in the database beyond just understanding how people develop. That was the primary goal: how does serial killers develop. But because we added that additional information of location and victimology, we were able to find…at least build a very tiny model to show, yeah, this is a statistical anomaly and people are going missing.

So we do continue to use that. We’re trying to make it a lot more technological than it is. When I first did that it was using Google Maps and a calculator. It was really easy. But now we’ve got this incredible colleague at the University of Toronto. She’s a — I’m gonna get it wrong — biostatistician extraordinaire. She studies the movement patterns of sharks and she’s actually working in the database to see if she can when people are going to go missing, where people are going missing, and whether there may be a serial killer involved. And the reason she’s able to identify whether a serial killer is involved is because in the MMD — the missing murder database — we include all solved cases of Canadian serial killers, right? That’s your training data.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right, right. Yeah, because you won’t know whether or not they’re involved if you don’t involve them at the beginning. You need to know that they are involved, train the database first…ah!

Sasha Reid: Yeah, so we train the MMD on all solved Canadian serial homicides, not just homicides. Serial homicides. Because serial killers actually have a really unique way of hunting and hunting is a gross word, but truly that’s what they’re doing. And so we can actually track and see those patterns when they start and how they develop and we can see that in the database. It’s super clear. So by being able to train the MMD on the basis of those solved cases, we’ve got something that we can use to better predict. It’s not always perfect. But it’s something.

Yvonne Kjorlien: So I’m just thinking here. So it sounds like you needed to figure out the pattern in order to apply the pattern to see if there was a pattern.

Sasha Reid: Kind of. We didn’t necessarily understand the pattern. We know that serial killers, just qualitatively case studily, we know that serial killers kill in a very specific way, whether that’s location, whether that’s victim, whether that’s weapon. They’re very routine in some ways, not every way, in some way. But if there’s routine in some way then there’s some sort of predictive capacity there, right?

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right.

Sasha Reid: And then when you layer on top of that other unsolved cases where there are victim clusters and you compare that against your training data, you can see either is – kind of lining up with that — or it’s just an anomaly.

Sasha Reid: It’s not perfect, but it is a start.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right right. Cool. Yeah, I’m thinking of what you’re saying. And of course this is what 10 years after you first started creating your databases and I’m looking at the mountain of possible work that I would need to do on my own stuff to get to that point and I’m like I just don’t know if I’m up for that. But, hey, anybody out there who wants to create a dispersed remains database. I am convinced there patterns. There have already been patterns showing up in the literature which is why I want to create a database. I have tried to start it, but I’m saying now if you want to get on that, whoever’s listening: yes, do it, go for it. It needs to be done.

Sasha Reid: I mean, you’ll never be able to do it alone. And I think that creating a database alone is a problem because, think about this: when you’re creating databases, you’re looking at variables even at the point of which variables do I include in my database? That’s a really important choice.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yes.

Sasha Reid: I was able to create my serial homicide database with a very robust understanding of child development. Every year I’m still adding variables: “Oh, I didn’t think of that.” Yeah, which is super annoying but you need to be able to be open to thinking about: What are the right variables? What am I trying to capture with this? Because sometimes you can over-include variables. I know I’ve over-included variables. We’ve wnded up deleting things. But you have to make sure that you’re including a lot. And you can’t do that on your own. No one person knows so much that they can just create the most flawless, full variable database. Bring in other people to help.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, I just think after doing this for 20 odd years now, I think I’m screaming into the abyss and that’s part of the reason why I started those podcasts is just to get the knowledge out there and say, “You know what? This is important. It needs to be heard and I’m putting it out there for those who want to hear it.” And sometimes you just gotta let it go and see where it lands.

Sasha Reid: That’s the best you can do. Really.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah.

Sasha Reid: And creating databases too. There’s It’s gonna turn out. There’s no guarantee it’s ever going to be able to do anything,…

Yvonne Kjorlien: right

Sasha Reid: but I think when the heart is in the right place and you’re putting this together because you’ve seen something and you recognize that there is a possibility, it’s worth pursuing. For better for worse.

Yvonne Kjorlien: For better or worse.

Sasha Reid: It’ll just be cool and fun and horrible at the same time, but mostly good.

Yvonne Kjorlien: All right, let’s talk about some of… the you’re doing a law degree right now. Sasha, what up?

Sasha Reid: Yes.

Sasha Reid: Wake up every morning and ask myself that same question.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Okay, so you finished your PhD, you’ve got these two databases, you’re working with tons of people, and you move to Calgary to start a law degree.

Sasha Reid: I moved Calgary and I started teaching. So I moved here and I started teaching at the University of Calgary. I was teaching in the sociology department, the psych department, and the undergrad department of law. And so I taught for about two years. And I was teaching of courses, a lot about wrongful convictions. I was teaching a lot of psych courses too, but the law department kind of gave me a lot of freedom. So I was really interested in wrongful convictions because they’re so connected to psychology. So I wanted to teach a course on that. And I taught a course on the West Memphis Three for about four semesters, two years in total. Let me just tell you about the West Memphis Three. You will never come across — with maybe one exception — a crazier case in this.

Okay, we are in the 1980s, height of the satanic panic. We are in the bible belt, United States, Arkansas, baby. You’ve got these three kids who know each other, two are best friends, Jason and Damian, and then you’ve got Jesse Misskelly. And Damian gets pointed at by the police because he looks like the type of person who would kill because he looks like a satanist. There’s three young boys who are murdered in the Robin Hood Hills in that area and so he was immediately just pointed out. So just becomes this entire case of moral panic and hysteria and group think tunnel vision. It’s incredible, an incredible case. But I taught that for so many years and I thought, you know what? I can’t teach this anymore. I can’t sit here and I know that things like this happen, so I’m gonna go to law school and I’m gonna get people who don’t deserve to be in prison out of prison. And I’m gonna teach people about psychology so that they’re not using these tactics to ruin the lives of innocent people.

So now I’m in law school, actually doing this, which is like insane. I’m working on an Innocence Project case right now where basically the same kind of things happened in this person’s case. I can’t talk too much about it, but I can say it’s an innocent person who’s been in prison now for 35 years and this is a Canadian case. So there’s some big problems. I’m working on that case.

And I’m just doing a lot of really interesting investigations where psychology and the law overlap. So I will graduate soon and I hope to create a law firm. That’s the next goal. So we’ll see what happens. But I want to create a law firm where we utilize psychological knowledge and the law to help victims of crime and to help advocate for people who feel like they’ve been exposed to an injustice.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Wow, that’s monumental, Sasha. Just saying.

Sasha Reid: Thank you.

Yvonne Kjorlien: But if you can build two databases, yeah, I think you’ll have no problem. You’ve already done two monumental things already.

Sasha Reid: The team and I, the team and I should reiterate. I have never done this alone.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Wow. Holy smokes. I hope to touch base with you again in a couple years and see where you are with that because, yeah, I mean, those instances where there is a wrongdoing and you’ve got an innocent person in prison. I think that’s an indicator that there’s somehow something systemic that’s not right.

Sasha Reid: Mm- Yeah, and sometimes it is actual, I don’t know how to even say this, misconduct or there’s actual intent and malice to do this. But a lot of times it just comes down to the fact that humans are fallible. We make mistakes. We are prone to all of these cognitive biases and that’s why I also say always stay humble. You are a fallible person because you are a person. And so just being able to help people recognize that I think it’s a really helpful thing in the law. Yeah. We’ll see.

Yvonne Kjorlien: So who did I talk to? I talked to the Midnight Order didn’t I?

Sasha Reid: You talked to the Mini Midnight Order. All right, let me tell you about my groups because they’re like the beating heart and soul of the work that I do. So first, we have the Midnight Order and there’s only so much I can say about that because we do have our documentary TV series coming out sometime in 2024, but this is a group of extraordinary women. They are psychologists, they’re doctors there soon to be police…extraordinaires…everyone, If I don’t know what you are, you’re a something “extraordinaire.” Police extraordinare. And they do all of on-the-ground work with me.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Okay.

Sasha Reid: So that’s the Midnight Order. And then the other group, the one that you met originally was called the Mini Midnight Order and it was Mini Midnight Order because I hadn’t actually had time to think of a good name for them yet. But I have since come up with the name. So they are the Society of Umbra Scientia.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Okay.

Sasha Reid: It means the Society of Shadow Science. Okay, listen, if you are going to be an academic, if you are going to do anything in this world and have a group, you better give it the coolest name ever or else. What are you doing in your life?

Yvonne Kjorlien: I’m sensing those to sorority days coming back.

Sasha Reid: Yes. I just think why wouldn’t you name it something cool. I am not going to name this Alpha Duck.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Unless there’s some sentimentality with the alpha duck.

Sasha Reid: Yeah, just have fun with the names that you make for things. So they’re the Society of Umbra Scientia. And this group helps me with the database. They help me specifically with the MMD. And they’re extraordinary. They’ve been helping me with this for over a year. The input information about missing murdered people. We try to have weekly meetings where I’ll invite people, yourself included, just to share the cool things that you do. Because one thing that’s really important for me, and this comes back to having been mentored myself, having a mentor is super important. I recognize that the one flaw with my mentor is that they didn’t show me what I could do. And with my team I tried very much to mentor them because I don’t have any money to pay anybody anything. I am a student. So what I try to do is make sure I’m giving them opportunities for them to shine. So whether that’s helping them get reference letters or write proposals or introducing them to people in the field just so they know what’s out there. That is on me to do and I’m happy to do that. So I always try to mentor people so that they know: one, they can do it. Right, enough with this Imposter Syndrome. Like, no. You can do it. Like I’m done. I’m over that. You can do it. You have the skills. Everyone else who’s on the top two is just flailing and doubting themselves every day as well. Stop it. Get over yourself and go do it. So that. I try to get that instilled. And then also just helping them connect with people. Like here is what is available. And it’s been good. We’ve had people get into medical school, grad school. And I’m just like they’re doing it, they’re doing it because they can see it and it’s so beautiful.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Nice. Nice. All right, and the other group that you were talking about. Calvaria?

Sasha Reid: Calvaria? The Order of Calvaria, It means the Order of Skulls, obviously.

Yvonne Kjorlien: I like it.

Sasha Reid: Thank you. You would. So this is Sue Brown and myself. Sue Brown is the staff lawyer and director of advocacy for Justice for Girls. She is an incredible superstar. If I met her earlier, she would a hundred percent be on my Midnight Order team, like we’re kindred spirits. So she’s one of the people that I’m working with all of these cases that are coming out of BC. So right now I’m doing a lot of work on miscarriages of justice, wrongful convictions, homicide cases, cold cases within the province of BC itself. So I work side by side with her. We meet every week, and we kind of just have a rundown of the cases that we’re working on.

Trying to get access to information from the RCMP, etc all these different. It’s tricky. It’s not fun, but it’s interesting because slowly every week we chip away at these cold cases, whether that’s meeting people, talking with people, getting information from the courts, or actually visiting certain sites, certain locations themselves. So right now, and I think I can mention this because this is coming out in two weeks. We have written a coalition letter addressed to the RCMP, the Government of Canada, and the Government of British Columbia where we’re basically asking them to put a moratorium on applications to dispose of evidence from the Pickton case. There’s about 14,000 pieces of evidence right now they’re trying to dispose of however that looks whatever that entails. I’m not too sure. We’re trying to figure that out. But until there’s clarity around that and until the families are notified, we’re trying to stop that. So that’s one of the things that we’re doing.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Interesting

Sasha Reid: It is.

Yvonne Kjorlien: When you put it in that light, I understand that. Because I just did a podcast with Kimberly Moran out of the states talking about the ethics of human remains. When I came up through undergrad, I mean, yes, I was taught about the ethics of working with human remains, but it wasn’t so much in the limelight about where the collections that we work with in school came from. Because you could always tell the plastic cast from the real thing and it was always preferable to work with the real thing because when you get out into the real world, whatever you wanted to do with your life, you were going to be working with the real thing. And the real thing feels much different and you also are likely to get representation of disease and pathology and what have you on a real collection then you would a plastic cast. But it was never really talked about where those real ones came from and fast forward 20 years with the whole social justice thing that we’re now involved in and people don’t even want to take pictures of real human remains because they could be done without the knowledge or consent of the individual who had died. Because the individual could have died a hundred years ago in that skeleton could have been in a school collection for a hundred years. I mean, who knows? Or without the consent or knowledge of their next of kin. So there’s all of this. It’s grown into this bigger picture. And so dealing with something like a case like the Pickton case. It was investigated 20 years ago and they have all this evidence which could potentially involve remains or the possessions of the deceased. I could see that the family might want those, or at least want to know that those possessions are being disposed of.

All right. You mentioned you want to open your own law firm. Anything else that you wanted to do in the world? World peace?

Sasha Reid: We’ll put that on maybe next year’s roster.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Okay.

Sasha Reid: You know what I’d actually like to do? Take a break.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Like an actual vacation what? Wow.

Sasha Reid: An actual vacation. I would love to. I think it’s so easy to get caught up, especially I just noticed working on so many advocacy cases how easy it is to get very caught up in the emotion of it. It just goes with you everywhere. So taking a break would be really nice. Yeah.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Do you think you could actually take a break? Like, because you mentioned that emotional involvement, can you just stop that?

Sasha Reid: No, no because the last time I had a break was COVID and it was during COVID that I was like I’m gonna go to law school. So that was my break. I studied to get into law school. I think it’s actually more of a danger for me to take a break than just keep going. I get ideas.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, I know sometimes yeah. Yeah, the break does it’s a gap that needs to be filled and it gets filled with other stuff that you could be doing.

Sasha Reid: Yes.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Sounds like a good idea, yeah. All right. I think we’re gonna finish up there. Thank you very much, Sasha. I look forward to touching base again with you and see where you’re going with all of this and what waves you’re making in the field of law.

Sasha Reid: I love how you laughed when you said that. Thank you.

Yvonne Kjorlien: I mean you you’re making waves already. It’s just a matter of time really.

Sasha Reid: Yeah, I look forward to updating you and also as usual relying on your incredible expertise for some of the strange things that I’m doing.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Always, always willing to talk to you about scavengers and scattered remains. Absolutely.

Sasha Reid: Thank you so much for having me here. It was a pleasure.

View Details

Kimberlee Moran is a professor of forensic archaeology at Rutgers University in Camden, New Jersey. She holds an undergraduate degree in Classical and Near Eastern archaeology from Bryn Mawr College and a Masters of Science in forensic archaeological science from the Institute of Archaeology at University College London. Kimberlee worked as a contract archaeologist for Hunter Research, a CRM firm based in Trenton, NJ, prior to moving to the UK. She moved back to New Jersey in 2010. Her archaeological research includes ancient fingerprints, artificial cranial deformation, the Whispering Woods site in Salem, NJ, and the First Baptist Church of Philadelphia also known as “The Arch Street Project”.

In this episode we talk about:

Working with human remains raises ethical questions around consent, cultural perspectives, and scientific study versus dignity.
Her experience working at a construction site in Philadelphia, which led to the excavation of approximately 500 individuals from an historical cemetery and working with the legal and ethics implications of that experience.
How factors like the MOVE bombing in Philadelphia highlighted issues with the treatment and repatriation of human remains.
Ethical frameworks from moral philosophy and how they can provide rationales for decision-making around human remains.
How attitudes in the use of human remains can vary from using remains in classroom teaching to complete removal from classrooms and museums.
How anthropologists may consider differing cultural and disciplinary perspectives on working with remains.
How ethical dilemmas have no easy answers. They requiring thoughtful consideration of issues from multiple viewpoints.

You can find more information about Kimberlee Moran on her webpage here: https://kimberleemoran.camden.rutgers.edu/

You can find more information about:

the MOVE group here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOVE_(Philadelphia_organization)
Mount Moriah Cemetery here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Moriah_Cemetery_(Philadelphia)
The Arch Street Project here: https://www.archstbones.org/

Kimberlee references the following books:

Ethics and Professionalism in Forensic Anthropology
by Nicholas V. Passalacqua & Marin A. Pilloud

A 21st Century Ethical Toolbox by Anthony Weston

If you’re interested in ethics in archaeology, you can check out the following:

Society for American Archaeology: https://www.saa.org/career-practice/ethics-in-professional-archaeology

Notes from the start:

Tell me about you! Where are you and why do you listen to Scattered? Fill out the survey and be entered into a draw to receive the ebook Memoirs of a Reluctant Archaeologist.

Contact me through ykjorlien@gmail.com or through my contact form. Follow me on Facebook at The Reluctant Archaeologist, or through Instagram @yvonnekjorlien

Do you have a suggestion for a topic on the Scattered podcast?

Do you have a question about working with human remains?

Drop Yvonne a line at ykjorlien@gmail.com

Transcript

Kimberlee Moran: My name is Kimberlee Moran, I’m an associate teaching professor, and director of forensics at Rutgers University in Camden.

Yvonne Kjorlien: And where is Camden? Just for all the people in the world who are not up on the US geography.

Kimberlee Moran: So Rutgers University is the state university of New Jersey. It has three campuses. It’s flagship campus, it’s kind of smack in the center of the state in New Brunswick and then it has two satellite campuses, one in Newark, New Jersey, which is kind of more of its urban campus, and then Camden, New Jersey. And Camden New Jersey is by far the smallest of the three campuses. And so we have very much kind of a small liberal arts college kind of feel. We’re in the southern portion of the state, basically right across the river from Philadelphia.

Yvonne Kjorlien: I see. You’re right in that Northeast corner of the US.

Kimberlee Moran: Great place to be, lots going on.

Yvonne Kjorlien: I imagine autumn there is just beautiful.

Kimberlee Moran: Yeah, it really is. For me, so my background is Forensic Archeology. I started off my career as an archaeologist. I studied the Greeks, the Romans, Mesopotamia. Never in a million years that I ever think I was going to be doing forensic science. I did end up in the forensic world as a Master’s student and have never looked back. Although I still do a lot of work in traditional archeology as well. So half of the time I have one foot in the past half of the time I have one foot in the present. I’m working in both kind of modern criminal justice and crime scene investigation, but then every now and again, I swing back to my roots and archeology. So being in New Jersey is a wonderful place. It’s very, very good forensically because we’re right smack in the middle of major metropolitan areas that have really excellent forensic laboratories and forensic systems but also archaeologically it is a very historically rich and archaeologically rich area to be. So I get the best of both worlds, being in New Jersey.

Yvonne Kjorlien: And now I was recently having a conversation with somebody about sort of the premise of modern archeology and the way that, I guess the call for archeology nowadays isn’t so much that we go out and willy-nilly dig up Heritage or historical sites. It’s more of a salvage.

Kimberlee Moran: Yeah.

Yvonne Kjorlien: We need to rescue the sites from impending doom because of construction or some other kind of destruction.

Kimberlee Moran: Yeah, so there’s a bunch of different things going on. I mean, one thing that I really appreciate about our modern approaches to archeology is we are grounding archa eology much more robustly in the sciences. And we’re really applying a lot of scientific principles, scientific approaches and scientific testing to what we do within archeology. So back in the day, as you say, it was kind of like willy-nilly, let’s just go find some cool stuff, but now it’s like, okay what are some research questions that we have? What is it that we really want to learn about this site and this material? And then what are the methods that we’re gonna employ to actually ensure that we’re answering those research questions? So there’s that kind of aspect kind of, bringing archaeology more in line with other science fields but also kind of as you say, this idea of salvage, maybe it’s a little bit more about stewardship because archaeological resources are finite. They will not last forever, particularly if they’re impacted by human action. And so, we’re thinking about more of how we preserve archaeological material, preserve that cultural heritage for future generations. And then, in those instances where we can’t just in the ground, leave it alone, how do we, again, kind of rescue it and ensure that it’s being adequately, stewarded, not just the artifacts that come out the ground, but the knowledge that comes out of the ground as well.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right. Yeah, and I’m always floored by what we do nowadays compared to what is glorified and portrayed in the movies and media, and what have you, about just going out the archaeologists going out and digging up treasure. They’re looking for treasure.

Kimberlee Moran: Right, right.

Yvonne Kjorlien: And whether or not the museum gets it back. And then, even if the museum gets it will, then it’s kind of in the gilding cage.

Kimberlee Moran: Right.

Yvonne Kjorlien: The people that that artifact or the site belongs to, they never get to see it again. And it’s behind this plate glass. Nobody touches it. You’d be lucky if you ever get to study it.

Kimberlee Moran: Sure, I mean, we’ve just recently had another Indiana Jones film, right?

Yvonne Kjorlien: Haha.

Kimberlee Moran: And for my generation, we grew up under Indiana Jones, many of us are in archaeology because of Indiana Jones. And, I also see this in my forensic career as well, right? We have all these flavors of CSI programming and many students are in my classroom because they’ve watched, all those CSI shows and they think, that that’s their portrayal of what a crime scene investigator or forensic scientist does. So these shows are great for generating interest in the respective fields and maybe inspiring people to go into them. But yeah, obviously they’re not accurate representations and there’s a lot of responsibility that we have as archaeologists to interact with the public and to kind of bring a more realistic version of archeology and to kind of dismantle that idea of the gilded shape cage of museum collections and museums and really bring the collections out to the general public and have them make that connection of the present with the past.

One of the things about museums is only about 5% of everything a museum has in its collection is ever on display. So there are just troves of material that never see the light of day that are just in storage. Part of that is because it’s stuff that might not be particularly interesting to the general public. Like mounds and mounds of shards broken pottery and things like that. Whoever is curating it might think, okay, nobody really wants to see just a pile of what looks like trash. Archaeology is just kind of historic trash picking in a way. And so again it’s really important to connect people with what’s going on behind the scenes in museums because these collections are accessible. They’re there for research and further study and, even members of the general public have access to those collections if there’s something that they’re studying or they’re researching. So there’s a lot going on behind the scenes in museums. But yeah, again, typically on a day-to-day basis, we just don’t see that other world.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, and so that kind of brings us around. The reason I wanted Kimberlee on the podcast was to talk about ethics of working with human remains because there’s been sort of a shift in perspective, I think over the past 10 yea rs at least. It used to be okay to work with human remains and not just okay but more desirable because you need to work with the remains in the classroom so that you can effectively work with the remains when you’re out in the real world. So you know what to look for, now how it feels, and it just makes you better at what you’re going to be doing. But nowadays, there’s just…people are kind of almost putting a ban on working with remains especially archaeology, anthropology. So I wanted to talk about that. And you have this lovely little story about….was it Philadelphia? You were working on a… you had heard about some human reigns found in Philadelphia. Is that the way it goes?

Kimberlee Moran: Sure. So first of all, just kind of taking a step back, historically anthropologists and archaeologists and I’m going back, a hundred or more years have had a very cavalier approach to human remains. This kind of idea that bones are cool. And there have been a lot of pretty terrible things that have happened within archeology and anthropology, in terms of the treatment of human remains, the acquisition of human remains, particularly of kind of vulnerable populations. We’ve got a long and horrible history in the United States of how we have addressed the remains of indigenous peoples that have very strong feelings about death, and what is appropriate to happen to the human body and archaeologists in the past have just completely disregarded that and trophy hunted, essentially.

And over the generations. we’ve really taken a good hard look at ourselves and our profession and have really kind of tightened up our approach to human remains. So this really came to a head in the 1990s. When we passed legislation in the United States to protect the graves and the cultural heritage of Native Americans. So, NAPGRA is the name of the law that protects and helps to repatriate cultural material related to indigenous people and their human remains.

But that’s kind of the only legal framework that has ever been put in place in the United States in terms of the treatment of this kind of material. So while we’ve gotten a lot better and we’ve really established some good ethical frameworks, we only have that one legal framework, and you still get kind of the spectrum within bioarcheology, anthropology, forensic anthropology of the use and the treatment of human remains.

So in terms of my own work and my thinking has really shifted over the years as well, but back in 2016, I was on the train to work one day and I’m an avid newspaper reader and I opened up the newspaper and I saw this article that was entitled “Old Bones Found and Nobody’s In Charge”, and it was a story of a construction site in Philadelphia. Bones were coming out of the ground and everyone kind of raised their hand and said, “Uh, not my problem. Has nothing to do with me or my agency.” So the Medical Examiner’s Office was called. They established at these were historic human remains — so nothing legal or forensic, nothing to do with them. The Historical Commission was then turned to and they said, “This site lies outside of a registered historical district so nothing really to do with us either.” And then finally, the site was a private construction project, so there were no kind of public funds involved and so other protections that might be in place at kind of the state level also did not apply. So it very much fell into this gray area. And part of the article was this picture of the site foreman looking kind of unhappy and he was holding this box of bones. And it only took a glance to realize that these very much were human bones, human remains. So, this is 2016 and I’m thinking to myself, “Gee, I’d love a box of bones. I could do something with a box of those. I’d at least like to know more about what’s in that box.” So I was a little worried that I might kind of sound like a weirdo if I just called up the construction company and say, Hey, give me your box alone, right? Yeah, probably that wouldn’t go over so well. So I contacted a friend of mine. Who’s the curator of the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia? The Mütter Museum is a museum dedicated to medical history. They currently have a lot of human remains on display — that might not be forever — but the Mütter Museum has a very well-known reputation in the city and I thought, if it’s someone from the Mütter museum called, that would look way more legit than just me calling. So, I reached out to my friend, and I shared with her the article and I said, “Hey, we should get this box of bones and find out what’s here and try to understand why they’re bones coming out of this site in the first place, and are we likely to encounter more human remains?” So she wasn’t particularly interested and then I kind of uttered the famous last words that to this day, I regret. I texted her. “Don’t worry. I’ll do all the work.”

Yvonne Kjorlien: Those are very famous last words.

Kimberlee Moran: Yes. And, man, have I gotten that back in spades.

So again, to make it very long story short, we got the box of bones and we came to find that this site was the former First Baptist Church of Philadelphia Cemetery. And according to all the historical records out there, it shouldn’t be there anymore. There shouldn’t be any human remains. In 1860, it was relocated to a kind of large public open space, kind of cemetery, called Mount Moriah, which is kind of in the southern part of the city kind of close to what’s now the Philadelphia airport. The church had relocated. It was originally on 2nd Street. It had moved a couple of times and nobody was really looking after their burial ground. There were indications from newspapers at the time and from church records, that the cemetery had really fallen into disrepair. There were tenement houses that surrounded the cemetery and people were just throwing their daily garbage into the cemetery and it had gotten into quite a state. So the First Baptist Church in the 1850s bought a plot in this Mount Moriah Cemetery and they put lots of public notices in the papers saying, we are digging up our old burial ground and we are relocating to this new place, and if you have any family members buried here, contact this guy, Locksley, and get it sorted out. And there’s also newspaper articles of the actual work in progress. In fact, there were some interesting observations of how well-preserved individuals were. They would open up a coffin of somebody who had died 30 plus years ago, and family members were still able to recognize the individual.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Wow.

Kimberlee Moran: So that’s very interesting, right? But again, this cemetery should not still be here at Second and Arch Street in Philadelphia. So, initially we thought that maybe these were just a few individuals that had been missed or maybe these were individuals that didn’t have next to kin, so they just left them alone. So our initial approach to the site, once we got permission from the property developer who did not want to have to be dealing with any of this, but they let us come on site just to monitor the overall excavation with the backhoe. They were putting in a two-story parking garage, and because they were going so deep into the ground, this is why they were encountering these remains that were left behind. So what started off as what we thought was just a salvage excavation, turned into a full-fledged archaeological excavation and ultimately in the end around about 500 individuals have been excavated from this site.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Holy cow.

Kimberlee Moran: And there are still more that are under existing structures. After doing our research, we know that we have at least 1700 named individuals that were buried in this burial ground, but we may have up to 3,000 burials in the burial ground.

Yvonne Kjorlien: That’s more than just missing a few individuals.

Kimberlee Moran: Right. Right, exactly. so, Mr. Locksley, clearly did not do his job in 1860.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah.

Kimberlee Moran: Again, we now have evidence as to why that happened. But, we became the stewards of nearly 500 sets of human remains, and we can talk more about some of the legal things later on, but we were given permission by the courts in Philadelphia that oversee unclaimed remains to study those remains for approximately five years, try to identify any of them if we could, and then all the remains were to be reburied in September 2023. It is now October 2023 and those remains are in my building, just next door, and have not been reburied yet and we can kind of circle back as to why that is.

But that has been what originally started as a box of bones, ended up being a whole cemetery, something that we never anticipated in a million years. What we thought was just going to be a very discreet, little research project, ended up being five to six years of our lives and I say ‘our’ because this is now become a real kind of collaborative initiative. It’s expanded way beyond myself, but, yes, it has dominated our lives for at least six years and it’s not over yet.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Because our previous conversation, before the recording, we talked about some of the legal and ethical issues that came up with that. Let’s take a step back because when we were talking before, you told me about the MOVE group.

Kimberlee Moran: Yeah.

Yvonne Kjorlien: And I had always wondered kind of why we are now at the place we are with this whole perspective on not at all using human remains in research, in any study, you can’t even use them in pictures and all that kind of stuff…

Kimberlee Moran: Right.

Yvonne Kjorlien: And where did that come from? Because I’m probably around the same generation as you and, we were brought up using real human remains, in the lab, in the classroom…

Kimberlee Moran: Right.

Yvonne Kjorlien: that’s what you learned on, and you learned how human remains felt. But now the pendulum is swinging quite the opposite way. Where not even human remains in pictures. So, where did that all come from? And you were saying it’s from the MOVE group. So, tell us about that.

Kimberlee Moran: So really, I mean, there’s kind of a culmination of multiple things at play.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, that’s usually the way it is.

Kimberlee Moran: We’re in a really complicated time in history right now.

So, first of all, we have everything that’s happened from the pandemic, and from everything that’s happened, post-George Floyd and a much height in sense of social justice which is really wonderful. We really need that. So we’re a lot more aware of all the various kind of groups that have been oppressed and have been neglected and all the things that, we as white people have just kind of taken for granted. And so that’s part of it is just kind of having our heads in a different space. We’re really paying more attention to things than we ever did before.

The other side of it, and again, it really has come into this interesting moment of history, is something again that happened in Philadelphia, a couple things that have happened in Philadelphia. One of those is the discovery that some human remains from a pretty horrible incident that I’ll describe in a minute we’re never returned to the next of kin. So, back in the 1980s, there was a kind of social group called MOVE. And they kind of lived, kind of communally, the kind of main portion of this group took over a block in Philadelphia. They had kind of communal raising of their children, they all kind of changed their surnames to Africa. They were trying to be self-sufficient in terms of growing their own food and various things like that. And they had a lot of negative interactions with the police and also some of the neighbors as well.

But, they were well known to the police and individuals were kind of regularly arrested and various things like that. So, in the 1980s, there was really a kind of watershed moment where the police department in Philadelphia decided to — and this is not an exaggeration — they decided to drop a bomb on the compound from a helicopter. So you can look this up in the newspapers at the time or more recently. So a bomb was dropped on this city block in Philadelphia. Obviously there was a huge fire. Lots of people from the MOVE movement died as a result of everything kind of going up in flames and a number of those individuals were children.

So after the fire was put out and the Medical Examiner and death investigators came to process the scene and collected the human remains, there were quite a few charred human remains that were recovered and sent to the Medical Examiner’s Office. The Medical Examiner worked with several anthropologists based at the University of Pennsylvania. And, this is pretty routine. Even today, the Medical Examiner kind of works with outside anthropologists when there are skeletonized human remains. And for whatever reason, some of these remains, two bones of children, were retained by the anthropologists. And the anthropologist used them in classes, used images of them in public lectures, and the identities of these remains were known and the next of kin to these remains were known. And yet these remains were retained. There was also another box of remains that were later found in the Medical Examiner’s Office that the Medical Examiner was trying to kind of quietly cremate and dispose of but they were found as well.

So relatively recently within the past couple of years it came to light that these remains had been moving around, to different institutions, used in, again very cavalier and kind of callous way, and clearly never any intention by the anthropologist to ever return them to the next of kin. So has caused…it just it’s been a massive incident in Philadelphia. There are regularly newspaper articles about this and kind of the next, iteration of the saga, and it has sent ripples across the anthropology / bioarcheology community.

In conjunction to that, the University of Pennsylvania has for many, many years have a collection of skulls called the Morton Collection. And Morton was a very unapologetic racist and he collected all of these skulls to basically show that the brain capacity of non-whites was smaller than white individuals. And so it’s come to light that many of these skulls were kind of grave robbed, or they come from enslaved individuals, various things that again just casks, even more of a shadow on this collection of remains. So again, lots of negative press for the University of Pennsylvania. And, unfortunately, it’s been that negative press that has really kind of caused a lot of fear and trepidation amongst the larger community.

So rather than kind of digging deep into the issues and determining what is and isn’t appropriate and having some conversations and maybe coming up with a framework, just again kind of out of fear of what could happen and the articles that could come out, there’s been this kind of retraction within the community of pulling inwards and I’m putting an air quotes “cleaning up” what we have and just kind of pretending, kind of sweeping things under a rug. That’s kind of how I feel, that rather than just coming straight out, “Let’s talk about this,” it’s more kind of, “Let’s just make this problem quietly go away.” And yeah, that’s kind of where we are at the moment. So it’s a really challenging environment.

Kimberlee Moran: and I think we have a lot of work to do to kind of come out of this in a productive way that allows us to continue train our students and prepare them for work in the field, to continue good ethical research, and to also continue having good practices within museums that have collections of human remains. There’s a lot of work that we still need to do.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah. A lot of that the past work… because I’m not too sure that there’s a scientific discipline out there that doesn’t have kind of a shadowy past where, there’s at least a few individuals that we’re not doing right things.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Good things and what’s the discipline to do about that shadowy past?

Kimberlee Moran: Right.

Yvonne Kjorlien: But yeah I think as archaeologists and bio anthropologists. We’ve kind of got our work cut out for us.

Kimberlee Moran: But at the same time that there’s a lot of fear, this could actually be a very exciting point in history for us to be doing this work. I find it very kind of intellectually stimulating, and also morally stimulating to want to jump in and engage in this and have these discussions. I think we do ourselves a disservice by not just kind of facing these issues head on.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Absolutely, absolutely. I fully agree with you on that. I look at this as, “What lessons are we to learn from this.”

Kimberlee Moran: Yeah, definitely.

Yvonne Kjorlien: And how can we move forward in a productive manner that we can all live with?

Kimberlee Moran: And this is a great teaching moment for our students.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right.

Kimberlee Moran: Let’s pull our students in and make them part of this conversation because they are the anthropologist and bio archaeologists of the future.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Mm-hmm

I asked you in an email about this. I’m sort, of how much does personal integrity play into professional ethics. Because for, I mean, we’re not only dealing with perhaps a generational perspective of these anthropologists who are circulating the world with these two children’s from the MOVE group. So, maybe a generational integrity and their perspective there, but also a sense of professional ethics that’s becoming more and more, I guess, I want to say, more distinct in anthropology. But then there’s also a personal integrity as well,…maybe that the morals and values part of that. So yeah. How does that all play in?

Kimberlee Moran: Right, right. So, the personal integrity is what makes you care in the first place and what makes you want to address these issues. When you don’t have that personal integrity, that’s when these bad things happen. But at the same time, you have professional ethics which really kind of codify a set of standards within the discipline. So even if you don’t care, there should be a framework within which you have to work, because you are part of this profession, you have signed up to be members of particular association. So, we have the Society for American Archeology We have the American Association of Physical Anthropologists. We have lots of different organizations. The American Academy Forensic Science, that has an anthropology section. We have lots of organizations organizations that, if you are part of those organizations, you have agreed to follow the Code of Professional Ethics, that they have set out and different organizations, they all have basically the same general ethical principles but different organizations are more kind of direct in what they say you should do as opposed to others. So some professional organizations just basically say don’t do bad things, don’t misrepresent your credentials. Very, very kind of generalized. Whereas other professional organizations really say these are our values and these are the things that you need to abide by if you’re going to be part of this community. We take our personal integrity and we take those folks that care, and we build professional ethics that then we all have to abide by, but there will still sometimes be gaps and that’s where you get kind of the spectrum of interpretation of how, I guess I should say, how far we should go in terms of what we do with human remains.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Let’s take that and talk about what you went through. With the construction site, the Baptist Church in Philadelphia…

Kimberlee Moran: Sure.

Yvonne Kjorlien: because it was a gray area. You said, there was some legal and…

Kimberlee Moran: Right.

Yvonne Kjorlien: all stuff going on before you were to work with the remains.

Kimberlee Moran: Yeah, there was a lot of stuff. So, first of all, we’ve got, the legal gray area where nobody is regulating what’s happening here because this is a private project, it falls outside of preservation regulations and things of that nature. Again, initially we just thought here are a few leftover remains. We had no idea of the scope of what we were dealing with. One of the things that became apparent very early on is that the construction company was…they weren’t going to allow us to do good archeology. They were kind of placating us by allowing us to be on site to just monitor the backhoe. And when the backhoe hit human remains, we had a few minutes to stop the backhoe, take a few pictures to document location and context, basically hand excavate the remains and put them into a box to then go someplace else. And then, the backhoe would just continue to work. Construction was not stopped because we had no authority to stop it. And there wasn’t anybody with authority that was interested in getting involved in this situation. If we annoyed the construction company any point, they could tell us to leave and then nothing was gonna happen. No salvage, no protection was gonna happen. So that was our first ethical issue is: what is worse, bad archeology or no archeology at all?

We were reaching out to various organizations, trying to get some guidance on what we should do, but again, still trying to kind of be on the down-low, because we knew that at any point, we could get kicked off the site and that would be the end of it. And one of the archaeologists that we spoke to point blank told us to walk away, that we should have nothing to do with this, we were going to set Philadelphia archeology back by 30 years. And we said to this archaeologist, “Look, if we’re not there, these things are getting thrown away. We know that they’re being mashed up by construction machinery, and they’re going into big dump trucks to be taken off site with all the dirt that they’re trying to remove. How can we in good conscious allow that to happen?” The archaeologist had no answer for us, just continued to reiterate that we shouldn’t be involved. The rationale of why we shouldn’t be involved is because being involved gave the construction company of veneer of legitimacy. They could say, “Look, we’re doing the right thing. We’re working with archaeologists,” even though clearly we were not producing a good archaeological product here. Though, I understand where she was coming from, but, from my personal integrity, I couldn’t leave that site. Knowing what would happen in our absence.

So we made the decision to continue to be involved, even though all of us were kind of terrified that this was gonna be the end of our careers, we’ll never work in this town again, sort of deal, but we just couldn’t in good conscience allow these remains to be just flagrantly destroyed. So that was our first kind of ethical conundrum.

Our second ethical conundrum was these remains did not want to be disturbed. This was not something that they intended or consented to back in the 18th and 19th centuries. So, this is a pretty terrible situation. How can we bring good about in this situation? How can we — and maybe even a bit we’ll talk about some ethical frameworks, but there’s one ethical framework which has to do with minimizing harm and maximizing good — how can we strike that balance? How can we minimize the harm happening to these remains and maximize benefit for both the remains and for the larger public and for the academic community as well.

Part of that has to do with the actual subsequent analysis that happened to these remains. And our goal has really been to try to build stories. We were calling them osteobiographies: trying to use what is available to us of the physical individual, as well as the historical record, as well as other sort of scientific techniques that can give us insights into who this person is. What is their story? What was their life like? Rather than making these individuals objects that just were salvaged or rescued or whatever language you want to use, but turning them into people that we can have a relationship with. And that also kind of goes to some ethical frameworks, this idea of relationships and care.

And part of that for us has been involving our students in the work as well as doing analysis in the first place. So, these remains aren’t just sitting in a dark storage room, waiting to be reburied. There has been an interaction with these remains, between our researchers, between our students to try to, again, build relationships between the past and the present, build stories, and maximize the benefit that could come from what was otherwise a terrible situation.

Yvonne Kjorlien: That’s lovely. I really like the idea of having a relationship with the remains, and not just with the remains, but the people who used to be the remains.

Kimberlee Moran: And that’s something you lose when you don’t work with actual human remains…

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right.

Kimberlee Moran: when you don’t involve actual human remains in teaching or when you don’t have them on display. One of the many books that I have in my office is a book on Ethics and Professionalism in Forensic Anthropology. It’s written by Nicholas Passalacqua — I always say his name wrong — and Marin Pilloud. It’s not a very big book, it’s pretty thin, but it’s got some real treasures in here. And one of the things I really like is that…so, Europe generally, but also the United Kingdom has dealt with these issues generations before we’ve even been thinking about them. I studied in the United Kingdom. One of the things that happened in the UK when I was over there, it came to light that medical doctors were holding on to human tissue, after death, after transplants, all sorts of stuff — and again children were kind of involved — and using them for research and stuff like that. And there was a huge backlash and what resulted is something called the Human Tissue Act. And the Human Tissue Act is very reactionary and it tightens up what can and cannot be done with human tissue, including human remains to the point where it’s really stifled a lot of research and work and education and stuff like that.

There are models out there to look towards that are both good and bad. There are aspects of the Human Tissue Act that are really great and really wonderful and really necessary. But it also shows what can happen within legislation when things swing in a reactionary way. But one of the things that’s in this book is a statement that was developed by the United Kingdom, called Guidance for the Care of Human Remains in Museums. This is from 2005. And it states that the primary reason for museums to display remains are in quotes “to educate, medical practitioners, to educate people in science and history, to explain burial practices, and to bring people into physical contact with past people, and to encourage reflection” end quotes. And I do think that’s really profound and really important and something that maybe we need to think about as we start to reassess, in this instance, human remains as displayed in museums.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Absolutely. Yeah, that’s definitely something that I feel would be missing from putting human remains in a gilded cage or making them inaccessible. I just find that Western society, in general, lacks a relationship with their dead and that starts as soon as the person dies.

Kimberlee Moran: Yeah.

Yvonne Kjorlien: And then it continues. But other cultures across the world, they have very intimate relationships with their dead, with their ancestors.

Kimberlee Moran: Right. Going back to Yeah.

Yvonne Kjorlien: And that includes, yeah, that includes the human remains, whether they’re buried or not or somehow preserved, sometimes they keep them in their homes, sometimes they’re in a certain spot that they visit on a regular basis and they commune with.

Kimberlee Moran: Yeah. Going back to my original field of Near Eastern archeology, there are numerous cultures that bury their ancestors under the floor of their houses,…

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right.

Kimberlee Moran: …they literally had them in their house, in perpetuity.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, so that the ability to have, to start a relationship and continue relationship, if we choose, I think that’s paramount and we shouldn’t disallow ourselves from that possibility.

Kimberlee Moran: Yeah, definitely. For sure.

Yvonne Kjorlien: So, when we look at where we are now, and these professional ethic frameworks, and what happened with the remains from the MOVE group, I just want to maybe take a moment and kind of get an environmental scan about what’s going on now. From what you’re seeing in the classroom. At the triple As, and what have you. Can you give us a sense of what you’re seeing right here, right now?

Kimberlee Moran: Sure. For some folks it’s just business as usual. There’s not a whole lot of change that’s happening. But in other areas, there’s been a call to or some folks have decided that it’s best to just remove all human remains from the classroom. Because we do have really, really excellent replicas now that have all the detail that one would need to kind of do education and training. So there’s that. There are museums. So again, going back to the Mutter Museum. The Mutter Museum is now under new leadership, and there’s been talk about removing human remains from display at the Mutter Museum. The University of Pennsylvania just recently announced their museum of anthropology and archeology, they will be taking all human remains off from display. So, there’s that.

There’s also — and this is not necessarily a bad thing — a reassessment of what either teaching collections or museum collections, what we actually have in our collections and where did it come from. And what do we do when we find no provenience? We have no idea where it came from. It’s just been there forever. Or, when there are problematic proveniences. And, that’s a very good thing. We really should know what we have.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yes, yes. We should.

Kimberlee Moran: We should know where it came from. Right? Right. So that is a good thing. But then the more extreme kind of approaches have been just to remove everything from display, not use it in teaching. Already – and, again, this is not a bad thing — we’ve been increasingly more cautious as to what images we use.

And actually I’ll circle back kind of with the Arch Street material and one of the ways that my thinking has sort of changed. So when we first had the material from Arch Street, we were very adamant that we do not allow pictures of skulls, full frontal facial skulls because we had a lot of newspaper reporters. Of course everyone wants a picture of skull. We were very clear we want to be respectful for the remains. If you do take a picture, we want to make sure that the skull is rotated away from the camera. Or, just don’t take any pictures at all, if you can help it. But I’ve since sort of changed my thinking, and again, this has to do with some of the teaching that I’ve now done with ethics, and my exploration of philosophy and moral philosophers. And there’s some philosophers that, again, talk about the human connection. and seeing people as subjects instead of objects, meaning a subject as a person with their own story and their own individuality as opposed to an object. And I think that’s very important, particularly when it comes to skulls because we’ve had objectified skulls forever. I mean, we’re coming up to Halloween, right? What do we see everywhere? Skeletons, and skulls?

Then there’s another moral philosopher who was around during World War II and was in a concentration camp and spoke a lot about looking an individual in the eyes, and when you look someone in the eyes, you connect with their humanity. And I really thought about that when it comes to skulls. If we’re turning the skull away from the camera, what are we saying about that? Are we making it an object and not an individual?

Yvonne Kjorlien: Very good point.

Kimberlee Moran: If we actually look into the eyes of this person, of what remains of this person, does that elicit more of a connection with this individual? So, I’ve since — I’m not taking pictures of skulls and posting them everywhere, clearly — but, I now have kind of maybe a different attitude towards if we were to take a picture of a skull and to have it, full frontal, that kind of connection. So I don’t know. That’s something that’s been on my mind recently.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah. I completely see your point. There may not be an answer. I mean, this doesn’t a black and white type.

Kimberlee Moran: Right? And that is the interesting thing about ethics is that many times in these ethical situations, there is no right answer. What makes you ethical is thinking about it, and grappling with it and discussing it. Because there might not be a clear yes or no. Because I still haven’t decided, I’m not in a position where anyone’s asking to take pictures of a skull, but I certainly haven’t decided what I would do in that particular… I guess we depend on the situation. But part of really embracing ethics within this field, again, is thinking about it, talking about it, not just having one sentence off-the-cuff dismissive, kind of attitude. It’s really about grappling deeply with these issues.

Yvonne Kjorlien: And I think, brings us kind of full circle to where we started about that the current climate about people not wanting to post any pictures, not work, with the remains, no nothing.

Kimberlee Moran: Right.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Okay. Why is that? Can we please discuss this? What is your thinking around this? Why do you want to do this? And there is a lot of fear, but, at the same time, nobody willing or even able to talk about why they want to do it. They just say, “It’s wrong.” Okay. Why is it wrong? What is your perception on this.

Kimberlee Moran: Right, right. So yeah. So that’s really important, is whenever we do make a decision, an ethical decision of yes, or no, right or wrong, we really need to be able to articulate the reasoning behind that, because if you can’t, then it’s not really ethical, right? It’s dogmatism.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right.

Kimberlee Moran: So I want to briefly go through some of the ethical frameworks from moral philosophy…

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yes, please.

Kimberlee Moran: because they really give us the rationale and they give us the ability to debate these things back and forth again. There might not be a clear answer, but at least you have the logical trail that has led you to where you are.

I got really interested in ethics thanks to the Society of American Archeology. They have an Ethics Bowl. And I’ve now seen more organizations have ethics bowls as part of their annual conference. And the way that then Ethics Bowl works is you have two teams, they’re presented with a scenario, an ethical dilemma, and, if it’s well written there shouldn’t be a clear answer, it should truly be a dilemma that really sparks the debate. And then the two teams basically debated it out in front of a panel of judges. And the panel really decides who made the best argument, not necessarily who had the right answer, but who made the best argument. I’ve been a moderator for the Ethics Bowl for many, many years, and I always thought, “Gee, this would make a really great class, to actually talk about ethical dilemmas and moral philosophy and then have this class culminate in the debate.” And so, coincidentally, when everything was happening with Arch Street, that semester I also started working with colleague of mine in our philosophy department to set up this course, And so, I was very much learning by doing, and this course is now run for six years. This year will be the seventh year that we run this course, it’s now become a fixture.

It’s called Debating Ethical Issues Across Disciplines. And what we do is we introduce the students to the four main ethical frameworks within moral philosophy. The textbook that we use is A 21st Century Ethical Toolbox by Anthony Weston. Highly recommend this book. It’s a really easy way to introduce yourself to moral philosophy and these various frameworks. So the first framework is probably the one that is the easiest to connect to all this discussion with human remains. This is — and I’m just gonna use the terminology use in the textbook — this is what’s referred to as the ethics of the person. So this is grounded in mainly Emmanuel Kant as our main kind of philosopher and it’s this framework that gives us justice, and rights. And it basically says that people are individual and they are deserving of respect and to be treated with dignity. So you can already see how this totally connects with everything that we’re talking about with human remains.

There’s some other interesting aspects about the ethics of the person or particularly about Emmanuel Kant’s various philosophies, and one of the them is this idea of universality, that for something to be ethical, you should be able to have it applied in every situation, you should be okay with a universal kind of doctrine. That can be quite difficult in a lot of different ways – but we might circle back to that — but basically ethics of the person, the idea of dignity, rights, respect, justice, all that sort of stuff.

The next framework using this textbook is called the ethics of happiness. And this is where we get to Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill and utilitarianism or consequentialism, which has to do with we often think of the greatest good for the greatest number of people. But really it’s about maximizing good or happiness — happiness / good kind of synonyms — and minimizing harm. And in this particular framework — and this is one that we use all the time, democracy is kind of based on this framework — there are trade-offs. There’s always going to be winners and losers in this particular framework. Not everybody is going to be happy, but you’re trying to create the most happiness, the greatest amount of good. And so we see this in a lot of different ways and I kind of refer to it earlier about how, in this bad situation, we were just trying to reduce harm as much as possible and try to again, maximize good with our efforts.

The third framework is the ethics of virtue. This is our oldest framework. It goes all the way back to Aristotle and it’s all about character traits. Humaning well. Being the best humans that we can be. Being honest, being transparent, being hard-working, means you go on and on and on with the list of virtues. And so being an ethical person means exercising these virtues, these character traits. As an archaeologist, how do I archeology well? And that would be communication and outreach, again. Honesty, not misrepresenting my qualifications, transparency, hardworking, good practice, all the rest of it.

And our last ethical framework is sometimes called the feminists at the cool framework. So, all these other frameworks tend to be much more centered of justice, and more of masculine approach. This last one is often considered the more feminine approach and it’s grounded in the work of Carol Gilligan and Nell Noddings. And it’s often called the ethics of care or the ethics of relationships. And the idea is that we all live in communities, and being ethical is about the care and the stewardship of relationships.

It’s really interesting: Carol Gilligan just came out. Her seminal book is called In a Different Voice and it has to do with research in psychology that she was participating in that was looking at moral development. They were looking at boys and giving boys certain questions and seeing how they answer those questions. And again the boys tended to approach it by justice and this is what’s right and following the law and stuff like that. Whereas the girls tended to have a more nuanced approach: what are the responsibilities that the different actors have to each other? And at the time, the girls were seen as less morally developed because they didn’t have clear answers, because they had this more nuanced approach. And Carol Gilligan really realized that is wasn’t that they were underdeveloped. It was that they thought of these things differently. She wrote this book In a Different Voice and that’s really kind of changed a lot of our mindset. Now, she’s just recently come out with a new book that basically says that this isn’t a feminist approach. This is just a human approach.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Mm-hmm

Kimberlee Moran: Making it feminist means that you’re cutting out half the population.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right.

Kimberlee Moran: That we all have the ability to think about care and relationships.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right.

Kimberlee Moran: So again, thinking about human remains, our care of them, our stewardship of them, how we use them, that we’re not “using” them…

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right.

Kimberlee Moran: that we’re building relationships with them and our students and so forth. So, using these four frameworks, sometimes these frameworks work together, very nicely. Sometimes these frameworks kind of butt up against each other. But the important thing is to, whatever your decision is with human remains, to try to view that through one or more of these lenses as your rationale.

With the Arch Street material, we decided to learn from the remains, to study the remains. We felt like, first of all, we could do this by preserving the human dignity, that it was actually more dignified, for us to learn from these individuals and tell their stories and see them as people and not as objects. We felt like we were maximizing the good that could be created from the situation. We felt like, as archaeologists that, practicing the virtues of what makes a good archaeologist is to, again, create knowledge in a way that preserves dignity. That just putting these things in a storage container isn’t archeology well. And then also the idea of relationships. That we were creating relationships between the past and the present, that we were stewarding these remains. So, that was our justification one way for us to create the rationale of the approach that we had.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right. Just reflecting on what you’ve been talking about, one of the biggest things that I learned from studying anthropology is that different groups will have different perspectives and…

Kimberlee Moran: Yes.

Yvonne Kjorlien: that anthropology, as an anthropologist, I need to realize that and respect that.,

Kimberlee Moran: Yes.

Yvonne Kjorlien: And in dealing with ethics, different groups will have different perspectives, including anthropologists.

Kimberlee Moran: Yeah.

Yvonne Kjorlien: And we have a different view of working with remains. And different groups of anthropologists will probably have different perspectives on working with human remains. I think, I mean, using that to put the lens on ourselves so that we can respect the different viewpoints, then talk about them.

Kimberlee Moran: Yeah.

Yvonne Kjorlien: That may not be the most natural for us to do, but I think it turning our discipline upon ourselves.

Kimberlee Moran: Yeah. Yes, yes. Yeah, I’ve been to many a conference that has ended up in, raised voices and …

Yvonne Kjorlien: Uh oh.

Kimberlee Moran: …anger issues amongst anthropologists that are supposed to be having a civilized debate and it just kind of…

Yvonne Kjorlien: Spirals.

Kimberlee Moran: …falls apart. Yeah.

Yvonne Kjorlien: I’m going to set the time so I don’t want to too much longer. But this has been amazing food for thought and I really hope that listeners go away with a lot of questions, which is good.

Kimberlee Moran: Right, right. And again, engage with these ethical frameworks. They’re maybe and probably are very good arguments of why we shouldn’t do certain things with remains. I mean, again, we were talking about different cultural groups, going back to respect and dignity has to do with honoring the wishes of next of kin and cultural perspectives. So yeah, definitely think these things through. Part of ethics is all about thinking. So if you want to be an ethical archaeologist-anthropologist person, really engage deeply, instead of just trying to find easy answers. There are no easy answers.

Yvonne Kjorlien: That’s too bad. I was hoping for an easy answer out of this.

Kimberlee Moran: That’s no fun. An easy answer is no fun.

Yvonne Kjorlien: The fun is the journey.

Kimberlee Moran: Exactly, exactly.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Thank you very much for this. This has been wonderful.

Kimberlee Moran: My pleasure. I mean these are issues that are near and dear to my heart, and I do love talking about them and engaging with them. Thank you so much for giving me this time and the space.

View Details

Brie Smith is the Chief Operating Officer (COO) of Return Home, a company that specializes in natural organic reduction (NOR), also known as human composting or terramation, as an alternative to burial or cremation. Return Home was founded in 2021 in Washington, USA after the passing of a law allowing NOR, with the goal of providing a more natural and gentle way to care for human remains.

In this episode we talk about:

Brie’s background, which includes being a licensed funeral director, embalmer, and crematory operator, but she found traditional cremation processes unsatisfying.
A little bit about the history of embalming and that it, and many other things, may not be mandatory.
Embalming, viewing restrictions, and lack of options at traditional funeral homes can interfere with the grieving process, and that the grieving process can interfere with decision-making capabilities of the family.
Return Home’s services which emphasizes personalized, transparent care and allows families involvement like viewing and time with the body before terramation.
The process of NOR and how NOR returns nitrogen-rich remains to the earth, addressing declining soil health from lack of organic matter returning to the environment.
The difference between green burial, alkaline hydrolysis (water cremation), and NOR are more sustainable alternatives to traditional burial and cremation.
Why Return Home can accept decedents from Canada.
Return Home aims to educate the public about death, dying, and more sustainable options through their website, blog, newsletter and social media outreach.

Return Home’s…

Website: https://returnhome.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ReturnHomenor
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/returnhomenor/
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@returnhomenor?
Twitter / X: https://twitter.com/ReturnHomeWA

Notes from the start:

Tell me about you! Where are you and why do you listen to Scattered? Fill out the survey and be entered into a draw to receive the ebook Memoirs of a Reluctant Archaeologist.

Contact me through ykjorlien@gmail.com or through my contact form. Contribute to the conversation about dead people & archaeology at the Reluctant Archaeology Group on Facebook. Check up on me through Instagram @yvonnekjorlien

Do you have a suggestion for a topic on the Scattered podcast?

Do you have a question about working with human remains?

Drop Yvonne a line at ykjorlien@gmail.com

Transcript

Yvonne Kjorlien: Who are you, and where do you work? And what’s going on?

Brie Smith: Yes, I just want to thank you Yvonne for having me on today. I am Brienna Smith, I go by Brie, and I am the Chief Operating Officer at Return Home. We specialize in an end-of-life option. That is an alternative to burial. And cremation, we call it terramation. And it is the gentle breakdown of the body into compost, to return to families in place ashes, or in place of a burial.

Yvonne Kjorlien: okay, I’m just gonna bottom line, this and say that it’s human composting.

Brie Smith: Human composting, body composting.

Yvonne Kjorlien: All right. I understand that, yeah, this is a sensitive topic.

Brie Smith: It is.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Anything involving death is, but on the other hand, sometimes you just got to come right out and just say it.

Brie Smith: Yes, I have a lot of people in my life who have become very accustomed to me, very casually talking about their inevitable demise. So,

Yvonne Kjorlien: It’s funny how it suddenly becomes a topic of conversation more often than not, right?

Brie Smith: Does with me at least. Yes.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah. All right, tell us a bit about Return Home and how you came to be at Return Home, and its inception and all of that great stuff.

Brie Smith: Sure, sure. I can kind of start at the beginning. So, Washington state past unprecedented legislation in January 2019 and that was for funeral directors to begin offering what’s called natural organic reduction in the law, but the layman would call it human composting. And what happened is there was a general kind of panic amongst the industry and the area because there was really no prescribed method in which to accomplish what they were giving us laws to do. So they gave us the rules and regulations but they give us any processes or, machinery or anything that would end up making up what we at Return Home have built. So our CEO — his name is Micah Truman — he was sitting with his mom one day — she lives on Lopez Island — and she had some friends from New York in town, and they were sitting in a circle and Micah said, “Did you hear about this crazy thing? They’re gonna be composting bodies.” And these women are in, maybe they’re late 70s, and they all were like, we love it. We think it’s fabulous, ship me to Washington because I’m in New York. And in that moment he had this, clear vision of the fact that this is actually something that people really resonate with is, the natural breakdown of the body as opposed to something kind of expedited or being preserved and definitely a lot of people really are innately drawn to kind of a natural breakdown. And so that was kind of the inception point of. I can do something with this.

So what Micah did is he went to a group of individuals they are called mortality composters. Mortality composters are individuals who help with ranchers and farmers when they have a mast devastation of a group of animals. If it’s a flock of chickens, or if it’s a herd of cows, or some pigs, what happens is these mortality composters will go to the place where the devastation happened and they will set up the temporary composting facility where they will take those animals, make them into compost that the farmer or rancher can then use to enrich their property. And so, that is what’s happening, and it’s an old science. It’s a die-old science and it’s actually done throughout the whole United States in Canada. But these people had a very specific way to compost these animals and it was very — what some might consider — irreverent to a human being’s body. So they might stack the animals up and coat them and something nitrogen-rich like chicken feces and then they would break down super fast in a big pile because they’re all real hot. And these things were where the minds of the mortality composters were and then Micah came in with the mind of we need to make this acceptable for human care, and for the love that we want to show people when they pass away and to be able to present this to a family.

So ultimately, it took about two and a half years of Micah working with the mortality composters. I joined in about in about two years in, and also helped with kind of the idea that we wanted to make the service hands-on for families. But really the entire development of our vessel system and the organics that go inside our off-gassing and our biofilters, all of that was done with Micah and a group of what we call the Oceans 11 Team of, again, mortality composters and PhDs in composting. These are HVAC people who helped us build the facility, general contractors, and then of course, funeral professionals. So we all came together, again, two and a half years after inception. So, we opened to serve families in June of 2021, and we so have been in operation for just over two years. And we’ve served over 200 families.

I joined with Return Home after being a traditional funeral home employee. I had been in the industry since 2011 and I am still a licensed funeral director, embalmer and crematory operator. I was really drawn to Return Home because of the final product, really what we’re giving families back in place of ashes. I had worked the crematory primarily — it’s about 90% cremation in the county that I live in and worked in — and I didn’t take to cremating. It was not something I enjoyed doing. It was a very quick and kind of aggressive process that I never quite felt great doing and so when this opportunity came with Return Home and Micah knew that I was kind of into green options, it was a really natural fit together and it’s been my pleasure to grow from the services manager of the company to now to again COO and overseeing all of the operations, both in the family services and the composting itself.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Wow, that’s a lot. Thank you for that. There’s a couple things that I would love to address in all of that.

First is a little bit about your journey and how you became a funeral director, like how you found out that you wanted to pursue that path to become a funeral director, embalmer, cremation specialist. And then, once we’ve covered that, a little bit about what traditional funeral homes offer and that it isn’t mandatory, you don’t have to go through…you don’t have to be embalmed or cremated that they’re…all of this narrative around funeral homes, it can be quite misleading. So first let’s get into your journey…because not everybody, starts life wanting to be a funeral director.

Brie Smith: Yeah, neither did. It’s good to point out that this was not what I thought I would be doing with my life. I thought I would maybe go into sports medicine or surgical… I really always loved anatomy and

I blame a couple things . Blame is a funny word for it, but I give credit to the fact that my mother was a cosmetologist when I was young and she did hair and makeup for a mortuary. And so at night, my dad was a beat cop so he would be working the nights as a police officer. And so my mom would take me to the morgue with her and I would sit with her while she did people’s hair and makeup. And she tells the story that one day we were there together and a broom fell. And she had this moment of panic. And I very calmly looked over at her and I said, “Mom, it’s not like she’s gonna hurt you.” So, I just had a really solid comprehension of life and death at a very young age. I’m talking, six to nine years old, when I was going with her. I was also raised on a ranch. So, I really understood the circle of life in a way that not every kid is exposed to, I think. And then I took an anatomy and physiology class where I had to restore a likeness of a person from a skull and we used erasers and we used clay and we built this person’s face-up based on their sex and their nationality and their race. So what we did is we built these faces up and I found in that class that I had a real knack for what we call in the industry restorative art. It’s a level kind of beyond embalming, where traditional embalming you have a person who looks really beautiful and you make them look more beautiful with your efforts and the injection. In this case, these are for devastated individuals who have completely maybe lost half of their face or their hands have been mutilated or…it is a skill of mine to go in and restore them back to their likeness. And so, I really fell in love with that. And after that, it was a kind of a no-brainer for me that I was meant to do this for people.

The cruel irony being that I moved to the Pacific Northwest where barely anyone is embalmed ever. And I rarely got to practice my craft and I ended up essentially burning people all day instead of bringing them back to beautiful so their family could say goodbye. It was something that I was really passionate about but that I didn’t have the opportunity to practice as regularly as I would like to. So that’s what steered me toward Return Home.

And here we actually get to do quite a bit of restorative art. We just don’t use chemicals. And we’ve done chemicals visitations for about 70% of our families come in and see their loved one before they say goodbye. So it’s been really awesome to be able to stretch my skill set in a place where I can’t use the tools I’m used to using. So both myself and Katie, who’s our funeral director here, are licensed embalmers and we still do long bone donation cases and we still do autopsy cases, and we help these families say a final goodbye without the use of chemicals. That’s been really awesome. So that’s kind of been the development of my career so far.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Wow. So you had a very early exposure to not just the funeral home but also to death.

Brie Smith: Definitely.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Wow. Yeah, because a lot of people, especially those people living in cities, do not have that exposure.

Brie Smith: Yeah, yeah. The cyclical, farm life. I went in the summers. So I would go for branding season. All of these little snippets of life where I would see the crop come and go. And I would see the animals come and go. And it was just kind of part of the atmosphere that I was around that, nothing kind of lasted forever. And I think it gave me the ability to accept death in a different kind of way than what we might call a city slicker.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right, right. So let’s talk a bit about your experiences working within the traditional funeral home environment, and what you learned, and what you found that didn’t resonate with you and had you kind of, longing for something else.

Brie Smith: You know what, I think when you ask me that question, it’s multifaceted, because I worked for an excellent company, a family owned, but they owned many facilities. And I think one of my…the hurdles that I was having to go through on a regular basis was the fact that I wasn’t able to make personal or kind of customize our services, it was kind of a prescribed, “This is the menu you get to choose from,” and then the family would choose from the menu and then we would fulfill what they chose. It was a little bit much also to me to not get to give input. It was very hard to feel like I could better the systems or better the service in some way, and then not feel like I was maybe being considered because it wasn’t the traditional way of doing things or it wasn’t the way we were supposed to do things. So I think that there is kind of ingrained in the industry, in some ways, a real prescribed idea of what families should choose and what’s the best thing for them. When in actuality what I’ve learned since joining Return Home is that it is, again, it’s innate people, to be part of the planning of their loved one’s death, and not in the service but actually in the handling of the remains and of the reverence for the quiet moments together, instead of these big public moments that might have happened. And both might happen still. But at Return Home, my point of really bringing families back into the equation where the hands that love you in life can continue loving you in death is based on the fact that I couldn’t do that freely previously. And it was something that I feel like the funeral industry has kind of come in and removed families’ abilities to see their loved ones decompose in any way. If I’ve had a family see their loved one with a green belly and if I would have done that in my previous work, it would have been curtains. I mean it’s a really bad look to have somebody breaking down in front of the family…

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right.

Brie Smith: But it’s natural and people see it and they know that that person has pass ed away and there’s a grief and a connection with the grieving process that goes a long with seeing your person deceased and not seeing them in the hospital and then never seeing them again or whatever that might look like to some people. So I see it benefit the family in a major way in their grief, to be able to open the doors of the funeral home and say, “How much do you want to be involved?” And that’s what was missing previously that I’m really proud to be able to integrate here in what people might consider progressive or non-traditional services.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Very cool. Just a personal story. So my father passed away in 2018. He just didn’t answer his phone and so my sister went over and checked and sure enough he had passed away at home. It took me a while to get up there and to assist in whatever. And by the time I got there, the funeral home had already arrived, and so I didn’t get to see him. And so my perception was he was alive one minute and then just vanished the next. And the next time, when I went to the funeral home, I actually asked to see him and they said, “Sorry, we can’t let you back for health and safety reasons.” I thought that’s kind of weird. So, I have this sort of left open. I had — without belittling the word or anything but — I “Did he actually die?” He could be like Elvis and frequenting 7-11 or, weird places. It’s this weird concept that, because I wasn’t allowed to see his body, I, in some capacity, don’t really know he’s dead.

Brie Smith: Yeah, that is a disconnect that I have heard so many times. And your story it really touches my heart because this is conversations that I’ve had with several people. Since they’ve chosen our service they’re like, “I didn’t get to see XYZ,” and being able to be here and do this this time, has completely changed my perception of what it means when somebody passes away in my involvement in that. To me it’s one of the things that inhibits people’s ability to get closure. Like you said, I don’t really believe in closure to be frank. I know that grief ebbs and flows, and I know that it never ends because I’ve over a decade ago, and it’s just how it goes. But being able to be the arbiter of somebody passing away, and then looking at that family and saying, “Do you need time with them?” Instead of me, just coming in, dispatching right away, and asking the question, not just being like, “Okay, the call came in. We’re gonna go. 90-minute call time: we did great.” It’s great for the business to be quick and to move like that, but what is great for the family? And that’s the question that we ask ourselves at Return Home and we end up asking our families. That’s why people have had such transformative experiences here because we give it back to them. And we say, “Let’s talk about what you feel like you need?” and then we’ll kind of go from there. Usually when you ask someone, “Do you want to see or put your hands on your loved one before they go into their terramation vessel?” and stuff, it’s so common for them to be like, “I don’t think so.” And then the next day, call and be like, “Actually, you know what? I do need that,” and then we make that happen for them and it helps them.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Because it’s like you go into a shock and you really aren’t…I don’t feel capable of making decisions like even small decisions, “Do you want to touch your loved one before they go into the vessel?” That’s a small decision. But under those conditions, it can be monumental. That’s a huge decision to make. You’re grieving, you’re in shock. And yeah, I agree that, yeah, that the loved ones are kind of disconnected from the process and the traditional funeral home environment.

Brie Smith: In the number of times, I sat across from someone with my menu and they chose their menu options and then I wrote it all out and then they signed it. And then the next day, they had no recollection of what we put together.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah.

Brie Smith: So we encourage people to take their time with the arrangements because we are kind of what we consider eco-friendly, or green, or mindful of the environment. We don’t use a lot of paper. So we just send people a link and they can take their time with inputting the loved ones information. They can get help from family members and that database and bring people in to help them. So we’re not just sitting across from a family, having them choose, all of these. And the choice of whether to touch your loved one or not. How about the choice of a $2000 casket that maybe isn’t amazingly beautiful, but it’s within your budget or the $7,000 one that’s absolutely gorgeous, but in both cases, you’ll never see it again.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right.

Brie Smith: But what’s the right choice? I mean, it’s so debatable what the value of the funeral home and the funeral director is, but I found that at Return Home, the value of the funeral director is being able to get that family to take their time, breathe in and out of the grief that they’re feeling, and move at a pace that works for them where they can decide to be participatory or not.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Wonderful. So I don’t want to get too much into the history of funerals and funeral homes, but just suffice to say that embalming is a very recent practice.

Brie Smith: Yeah, the Civil War is when embalming really became the most prevalent outside of ancient Egypt basically. But in the US, the Civil War is what did it, because the men were passing away and they needed to make their way home afterward for services, for funeral services, and things like that. It became a common practice. There are pictures. It’s pretty common knowledge within the industry that, in some mortuary books that exist out there, there’s actually pictures of bodies that are kind of propped up as this is the work that I can do, along the battlefield because the embalmer really became really, really needed at that time.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right.

Brie Smith: They didn’t have refrigeration. That’s something that people don’t quite understand: is that nowadays in the modern world we have refrigeration and it almost in, certain circumstances, completely negates the need for embalming. There’s a time and a place for embalming, though. That is for certain. And it is an art that we do have respect for, but at the end of the day, it’s a lot less needed now than it would have been 150 years ago.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right. Yeah, and so much of this, the funeral business makes it seem mandatory. That embalming is mandatory. That you have to go through a funeral home: it’s mandatory. And you don’t know to question all this because usually, when you’re in this environment of being in a funeral home, faced with death, you are also within a grieving situation. You’re in shock. You don’t have the ability to make decisions, maybe even to think critically at that time. So, questioning any of the practices, questioning the processes, questioning anything that is said to you, just isn’t within your realm. So that’s why I wanted to bring this up now, so that people can question it now.

Brie Smith: Yeah. Yeah. One of the proudest, things of, I think I’m most proud of that we’ve accomplished at Return Home is really putting out on our social media the knowledge that we have transported people from Canada unembalmed. We cannot do it with any other country because pretty much every other country in the entire world requires embalming to cross the border. But Canada does not. So we’ve been able to accommodate those families. We’ve been able to accommodate families from over 20 different states, and the only state that requires embalming to cross state lines is Alabama. And other than that, you do not need to be embalmed at all. And in Alabama, you don’t have to if you’re not going to cross state lines.

So it is really interesting because I didn’t realize how prevalent it was that the funeral homes kind of might push embalming or imply that it’s required to have a visitation or to say goodbye and it’s simply not true. It can restore when someone has been really sick and make them look healthier. It can do a lot of really amazing things for people in need. But most people who die naturally, really never ever have to be embalmed. I think that that’s something that we’re proud to be able to share that information widely because it’s such a misconception.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Nice. I like that. All right, let’s talk about human composting get into some of the science here because when we talked previously, when I first heard about Return Home and human composting, one of my first questions was, “Okay, you can do it with the soft tissue but what happens with the bones?” Because I know, as a former archaeologist, that I dig up bones all the time and there’s no soft tissue. But in, let’s say peat bogs, there can be no bones but soft tissue, skin left. So but it all depends on the environment. So how do you deal with that soft tissue versus hard tissue?

Brie Smith: Yeah, yeah, it’s die-old. I will say that. I’m so proud of our science here because it was kind of a deal breaker for me when I started. I was like, I have to do this before I joined because I have to know that this actually works and trusting our team to John Paul, who is our PhD soil scientist. He created everything that we do and I trust him so much and he’s such an amazing person. It’s just such a pleasure to be able to work alongside of him, truly. He created a system where we place the person in a vessel. They’re eight foot by three and a half by three and a half. So they’re just big rectangular vessels. There is nothing inside of the vessel except for tubes that allow oxygen to flow through. And what we do is we place a straw alfalfa and sawdust inside of the vessel about halfway up roughly, give or take, but it’s at a certain ratio of the organics to the person’s body weight.

So what we do is we place, those three organic materials inside of the vessel. We then lay the person in, and before this happens, we’ve gone through the steps of receiving them into our care. We give every single person who comes into our care, a bath because we believe it is just basic human decency to be clean. So if they are not clean, we clean them and we place them in a compostable garment. Then they go into the vessel just right on top of, we kind of make a cradle with a pillow and a little indention, they settle in there and then the remaining organics go on top. And so the person is kind of sandwiched or cozied in between the two layers of organics.

And what happens over the next 30 to 60 days is we place them on a system where we have 24/7 monitoring. We constantly monitor the airflow, the temperature and the moisture levels inside of that vessel. And so we have a probe that’s in there that’s making sure that the temperature is the state minimum. For composting human remains is 132 degrees for no less than 72 hours. And that is to kill pathogens. So for us that number we far exceeded. Usually the people in our care are reaching about 150 to 160 degrees for maybe two weeks. So we have really optimized the internal environment and that vessel for the body to break down quickly. What happens is we make sure that the moisture is at the right level. We make sure that the temperature is rising the way it should be. And then when that temperature begins to drop, what we do is we have an external rotator, so our vessels go into this machine that reminds me of those old virtual reality rides that they used to have in malls. I know that’s really silly and specific, but it’s like a big ride that you place the vessel into and the person kind of rotates slowly over about two minutes and what it does is it equalizes the moisture within the vessel. And so we’ll see another spike in temperature because organics that have not used up the nitrogen or the energy that they have inside of them are being exposed to what you’d call the soft tissue. And that means that there’s another, spike temperature in another breakdown. So what we do is we kind of go back and forth to the rotator over the next couple of weeks. Again, everybody is different, so we gauge it based on the temperature and the readings that we’re getting from our cloud. But ultimately, when we see the fallen temperature and then there’s no spike after we go to rotation, that’s when we know that the soft tissue is completely gone. There is no more energy inside of that vessel to use up and there are only bones remaining at that time.

What happens after that is we go to what we call screening. Screening is very similar to after a cremation, where you would sweep out the contents of the retort, that is bones and anything inorganic. And then you go through those with a magnet to make sure that nothing’s inside of there that will go into the processor, which is what in the crematory breaks down the bone to make it fluffy or completely uniform, ideally. So what we’ve done is we took that science and we duplicated it. It’s just a lot bigger. We upend the vessel. We have a team who goes in and we pull anything inorganic. So we’re pulling, any metal replacements hip, stents, screws. We are also looking for things that are in organic that may have been inside of the body, like silicone. And we are pulling those, and they either get recycled or go to medical waste.

And then what happens is the bones in the compost, stay together and all go through a piece of machinery that’s called a processor. And essentially, it makes the bone uniform with the compost. So it’s breaking the bone down and making it unidentifiable amongst the compost that’s already there. And then what happens is the bones are — as you know, I’m sure very well — porous on the inside. So, when we expose that porous material to these microbes, we see the temperature spike again because there’s microbial activity again. So, after the bones in the compost are broken down together, we go to what’s called the resting phase. Because what’s going to happen is we’re gonna get a spike in temperature, but then this temperature is going to slowly lower. The more moisture content is going to lessen, and they’re going to off-gas a little bit of CO2 as they rest. And what happens is they lower in temperature and moisture to the point where at the end, they’re ambient. There’s no more microbial activity. Then they’re ready to go home.

So the first phase takes about 30 to 60 days, depending on the person’s body makeup. And then the second phase takes pretty much an exact 30 days because, once that temperature drops and goes ambient, we’re ready to go home with the person. So that’s really the science behind what we do, granted there’s the mixture of organics and those ratios and the moisture ratios are very important. But we have really worked hard to make sure that each person is… we know if they’re emaciated going in, what we need to compensate for. We know if they’re obese, going in what we need to compensate for. And so we’ve really dialed the science to be able to serve to serve our families and what I consider to be the most transparent and, in my opinion, the most gentle way that any facility provides this service.

Yvonne Kjorlien: I find that very interesting because I knew that cremation, the fire will only take care of so much, and that the bones, whatever remains, has to be ground down so it’s uniform size and there’s nothing identifiable. But yeah, with the human composting, like I said, that takes care of a lot of the soft tissue but then you’re left with the hard tissue, the bone. And breaking down that bone so then it becomes available to the microbes so then it can further break down the organic components of the bone tissue. That’s very interesting.

Brie Smith: Yeah, man it works. I mean just the small spongy bones might even break down. Can I say I’ve ever seen a metatarsal in the compost? Like not identifiably …but I like an archeal… I actually likened it… so funny that that’s what you did because, when I first started with Micah and we did our first screening because I was the one back there doing it or our team was very small at that time, I pulled a femur out of the compost and it felt like archaeology. It felt like, my God, this is so beautiful and clean of tissue. And I mean just the fact that it’s actually happening still to this day, two and a half years later, just kind of blows my mind. It really is so miraculous what happens. And it can’t be overstated, how obvious it is that the body is meant to breakdown. It just brings you full circle on this whole thing of, wow, really we are meant to, just the leaves fall in the fall if we left them there, instead of raking them up, they would nurture the earth for the springtime. And that’s what we are meant to do. We are meant to nurture the earth for the next generations to come. And because we don’t die all and go directly into the earth the way we used to, and we don’t use the bathroom and put it back into the earth the way we used to, we’re really depriving the planet of a lot of organic material. So I’m really proud that the company that I’m standing behind returns organic matter to the earth. I think it is vital to the health of our planet, and John Paul, who’s our PhD, says that about 50% of the soil health of the planet has depleted and that if we don’t start giving back to it, it will never be able to be recovered.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Wow, That’s a whole other level. That’s a whole other podcast episode.

Brie Smith: It’s really. John Paul is amazing. So if you ever wanted to go down that rabbit hole, you just let me know because he is fascinating.

Yvonne Kjorlien: All right. So on that note, let’s talk about the difference between terramation, water cremation, and green burial. You’ve got this whole lovely…For the listeners, Return Home has a whole lovely website, and under their resources, they have a lot of educational articles and if you want to delve deep, go there. But I thought the difference between terramation, water cremation, and green burial would be something nice to mention here.

Brie Smith: Yeah, yeah. I mean it’s accessibility based a lot of the time and the differences is as far as what you’re choosing to do is, with all three lower, your footprint. I mean the bottom line is that they are all three much less wasteful than a traditional cremation or burial with embalming might be. I really loved green burial. I still do. I mean, but before even started with Return Home, green burial was my choice for myself. I like the idea of just a natural shroud made of either wicker or bamboo, or maybe just be placed in something that’s soft to the touch, cotton or linen. But to just be placed directly into the earth and breakdown is something that I find super beautiful. But a lot of people are turned off by bugs. I had no idea how many people would ask us about the bugs.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yep.

Brie Smith: We don’t have bugs. We have microbes. Bugs couldn’t survive the temperatures inside of the vessel. But for green burial, specifically, I find that people like green burial until they talk about the bugs and then they’re like, “Yeah, that’s kind of not for me. I really don’t want to be consumed by worms.” It’s weird. So to me, I think it’s lovely. I understand where people might get a little strange about it. It’s also using land in perpetuity. I think that’s something that’s really special about terramation is that there’s no requirement for zoning of any kind, and it’s just like scattering cremated remains. Whereas with burial, even if it is a green burial, you have to go, in at least Washington, to a zoned cemetery and that cemetery has to offer a direct to earth burial. Some of them will say that they do but they’re still inverting in outer burial container over you so that they can drive over you with heavy equipment and things like that.

So, yeah, green burial is very interesting and there’s a lot of nuance. Also, when you do a green burial, you’re putting the heavy metals that are in the person’s body in the earth. So, that’s something that didn’t use to be the case. We used to not put metal bits in people, and we do that now. So there’s a conversation to be had around that.

For me, green burial is my second choice to terramation. I still think it’s absolutely beautiful and I love it.

Alkaline hydrolysis that is what some people call water cremation, or aquamation. A very gentle breakdown. It does use some resources. It uses a lot of water because what’s happening is that you’re being placed in a container that is agitating and working with chemical to break your body down, but in a more natural or rather gentle way than a cremation might do so. The process takes a little bit longer than a cremation but at the end you’re left with more remains and they are stark white. So instead of ashes that come to you and they’re kind of gray and black and splatchy, alkaline remains our absolutely pure white and beautiful and you get more because it’s less aggressive. So the crematory is not breaking the bone down within the vessel that you’re in, that you’re in the pod for the alkaline hydrolysis breaks you down slowly. There’s more bone material because it’s not kind of blasting you away, if you will.

I really like alkaline hydrolysis. I think it’s a beautiful service especially for animals. A lot of people come to Return Home asking if we compost animals and the answer is no, not. We could, but it would be really costly to set up that facility. And so we’re just not in a position to do that right now. But a lot of places all over the US. and my understanding is in Canada, offer it for pets, alkaline hydrolysis, and it to me, is a beautiful alternative to just standard cremation.

And then, of course, you’re getting an urn back, very similarly to cremation. With terramation, it’s pretty cool because the body is placed in the vessel with organic material that makes it so that we can return about 200 to 250 pounds of organic matter to the earth. We give the family the option to take the full amount with them. If they do, it is placed in burlap because we’re continuing the cycle of life and the compost needs to breathe. So, we put it in something that has air flow. Families go and do memorial gardens, they’ve gone to arboretums. they’ve gone to cemeteries.

So, the options for the terramated remains are pretty much what they are for cremated remains. Except instead of an inert charred carbon, you’re giving back something that has magnesium and phosphates and carbon and all the things that the earth actually wants and needs to thrive. But it’s got the same mobility as cremated remains, which I think is the draw for a lot of people. I think less people choose burial a lot because we’re nuclear we’re moving now, we’re not growing up in Eastern Montana and spending our whole life, there and marrying someone from there, and having kids and dying there. We’re moving. We’re going from A to B. And so the mobility of the remains is something that we find a lot of families prefer to taking up land indefinitely. So, that’s kind of like the quick breakdown of the comparison of the three. I feel like I covered. I’m pretty well.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, no, it’s really good and I like that you brought up the cycle of life and contributing to the life of the Earth because with embalming and the traditional sense, you’re actually polluting the earth because all that formaldehyde, that then sits in the earth, and it’s probably contaminating the groundwater. Then you’ve got the coffin and what it’s made of, the lacquers that are used on that coffin, the materials, the textiles and whatever they’re treated with, and all of that is sitting in the ground. So it’s actually depleting the earth of its value. Whereas terramation is giving value to the soil.

Brie Smith: Yeah, and I mean it is directly contributing to families’ gardens just absolutely being gorgeous. I mean I would say it’s not like when you go to the store and you buy compost because even then they can be chemical laden.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yes.

Brie Smith: What’s so amazing about what we’re doing is it’s just…everything that your body could give to the earth that is good and then we can remove anything that might not be. We negate the pathogens and we negate the chemotherapy and the radiation, and you know what I mean? So these things that may be a consideration are a non issue and they’re actually processed through the terramation where really the only people we can’t help, as far as diseases or what’s in their body, is if you have a prion related illness. So Creutzfeldt-Jakob or Mad Cow disease would be and a no-go because the temperature inside the vessel won’t kill the prions. Only cremation can do that. So we have that limitation. But other than that, I mean we can really take someone who was unwell and their family saw them breakdown over time and they became just a piece of who they once were, and when we return them back to the family, that family gets to see that person’s life live on and really see it happening. It’s pretty cool.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Nice. All right, I’m conscious the time. So you said Return Home is you’re in Washington State but you can accept Decedents from Canada. I looked on your website and I didn’t see any update about Return Home coming to Canada and setting up a facility. Is there any news on that?

Brie Smith: Yeah, so for us, it’s just about legislation, right? So It depends on the area that is looking. And in the US, we’ve had seven states now that have legalized the process and it is a state issue. So state by state, they make up their disposition laws and rules and regulations and they oversee them. So in Canada, is it province by province that they decide on those things or is it national? I don’t actually know the answer to that question.

Yvonne Kjorlien: I don’t know, either, I’d have to look it up.

Brie Smith: What I know is that there has been no legislation passed thus far in Canada, but that it is a big topic of conversation for a lot of people there. Especially, you know, it was amazing to me because I really thought our first case would be from BC. We’re in Seattle, basically proper almost.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right.

Brie Smith: And so, our first family from Canada was from Toronto. And they flew with her to the facility to see her off at a service, and then they flew back to bring her home. So that family came to and fro on that plane and to me, absolutely, I would love to have them not have to do that. Our end goal would be to be local to people, where they wouldn’t have to make grand journeys to fulfill this process. But I’ll say the people who know about it and decide on it are all in and they love it and they’re so glad that their loved one can have the ability to be here with us. We do a lot of digital and virtual services and things like that because we do serve so many people from out of state.

But it’s so amazing to me to see that, the states are legalizing, Canada’s discussing it, and certainly when those policies go through we will be setting our sights on being accessible. I think that’s super important to the cause of what we do.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Fabulous. All right. You do have a very informative website: returnhome.com. And do you have a blog or some way to keep up to date on what is new?

Brie Smith: Yeah. So we, of course as you mentioned, have a really comprehensive blog and resource center. We do both and they’re for different things. So the Return Home blog is specifically more geared toward body composting and terramation and what we do, and then the Resource Center is actually just industry general, like you said, it compares and contrast things. So we have those resources.

My favorite thing that we do is actually something our CEO, Micah, does. Once a month, he sends out a newsletter and it’s just one email that kind of encompasses what we’ve done that month, but they’re very entertaining. And it’s very interesting to read up on the advancements of whatever’s happening in the space at that time. So when you go to our website, I definitely suggest signing up for the newsletter. You can also chat with our staff there. So if you jump on the website, down at the bottom, it’ll pop up, nd it’ll say, “Do you want to talk to us?” and you’re not talking to somebody elsewhere. You are literally talking to me, Katie, Jake. We take the chats, we take every single phone call. We don’t have a call service because we believe in being accessible, and people have all the questions, and we want to answer all the questions.

We also do a lot of social media outreach. So we’re at Return Home NOR on a lot of the platforms. So whether it be TikTok or Instagram, we are always posting educational content because there’s a lot of developments that happen in the space and we just want people to be informed on what atypical and that should…I feel like people should get to know their local mortician or funeral director the same way that they would get to maybe a doctor or somebody who’s in their life because we’re so resourceful. I think that being able to be a resource for people at Return Home, it’s such an honor and pleasure that people would come to us. Because they come to us, again, with questions about composting or just in death care in general – death, dying. We’re experts in beforehand, aftercare, and everything in between. And we know a lot about a lot because we’ve seen a lot. Everybody here who’s works with our staff has been in the funeral industry for, most of us, for at least eight years or so. And then Micah is the only one who’s kind of a newbie, which is really funny because he’s leading the whole thing. But that’s where you can find us and we really try to be available for those Q and A’s pretty much any time because we know there’s a lot to ask.

Yvonne Kjorlien: You’ve definitely given me a lot to think about and unfortunately, it’s in hindsight for my dad’s death, but foresight, I think, for my own planning and what have you because, yeah, like I mentioned, you’re just not in a space when it does happen and so being informed prior to is a good thing and, yeah, you’ve given me a lot to think about. So thank you for that.

Brie Smith: Gosh, it’s my pleasure to just kind of share the good word of “it’s okay to think about it.” It’s not like you would talk about death and you’re gonna die, that’s not how life works. And it can be a topic of conversation that you bring up and you think about and then it won’t happen for another 60 years. So it’s something to consider, to think about. Does it matter to you what happens to you. And if you’ve lived your whole life being a steward of the planet and you’re mindful of your waste and you’re that person, it doesn’t make a whole heck of a lot of sense for you to just be cremated at the end. There’s things that you can do that you would feel good about and your family would feel good about that, that might just be a better option for you. So it’s something to think about.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Fabulous. Thank you very much, Brie, and good luck with home Return Home.

Brie Smith: Thank you for having me. And, again, if you want John Paul on, you just let me know.

View Details

A couple episodes ago, I talked to Alisa Hardy and Taylor Dube-Mather about their experiences doing a practicum at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner (OCME) in Alberta. In this episode, I talked to their supervisor at the time of this practicum, Dr. Janne Holmgren. Janne has been a professor at Mount Royal University for 23 years and teaches in the Department of Economics, Justice and Policy Studies. She coordinates a practicum program for students to gain exposure working with the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. She also does research in how jurors perceive evidence, and how new technologies can be used as forensic evidence.

In this episode we talk about:

Janne’s initial interest in forensics and how the the OJ Simpson case played a part. Her research examined issues around independent testing and expert witnesses.
how she identified issues with defense lawyers’ understanding of DNA evidence and biases in how cases were presented
her PhD and how it involved conducting a mock trial with real legal professionals to study juror decision-making, and how they understood complex expert testimony
her current research with new technologies, like CCTV evidence and cell phone tracking, and their use in investigations and trials
the practicum at the OCME, which provides hands-on learning for students. She also talks about extensive screening process that each prospective student must go through due to the graphic nature of the work and confidentiality requirements
the support for students during the practicum, including gradual exposure, extensive dialogue with Dr. Holmgren, peer support from past students, and counselling resources to process experiences
the differing reactions to the program by different students
her passion about recognizing the crucial public service provided by medical examiner offices and their personnel, and hopes to educate others on their important role through her research

The program at Mount Royal University is a Bachelor of Arts in Criminal Justice and you can find out more here: https://www.mtroyal.ca/ProgramsCourses/FacultiesSchoolsCentres/Arts/Departments/EconomicsJusticePolicyStudies/DegreePrograms/BachelorofArts-CriminalJustice/index.htm

The OCME practicum is coordinated by Dr. Janne Holmgren. You can view her profile here: https://www.mtroyal.ca/ProgramsCourses/FacultiesSchoolsCentres/Arts/Departments/EconomicsJusticePolicyStudies/Faculty/JanneHolmgren.htm

You can find out more about the Sara Baillie and Taliyah Marsman case here: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/edward-downey-murder-baillie-taliyah-appeal-1.5994491

You can find out more about the Guy Paul Morin case here: https://www.innocencecanada.com/exonerations/guy-paul-morin/

Robert Jensen’s book, Personal Effects, is available through most major retailers: Amazon, Indigo (and it appears to be on sale thru Indigo right now!). His website is: https://robertajensen.com/

Do you have a suggestion for a topic on the Scattered podcast?

Do you have a question about working with human remains?

As always, if you have a suggestion for this podcast, I’d love to hear it. Contact me at ykjorlien@gmail.com or through my contact form.

Support the podcast and my research and Buy Me A Coffee. Your contributions will go toward webhosting, transcriptions, and paying for my research travel expenses. (Gas ain’t cheap!) Want to find out more about my research? Check out the Scavenging Study.

Contribute to the conversation about dead people & archaeology at the Reluctant Archaeology Group on Facebook.

Memoirs of a Reluctant Archaeologist is a fiction novel I wrote inspired by my experiences as a consulting archaeologist. I just created this teaser for the book. You can download it or buy the print copy from your favourite ebook retailer. You can also now buy direct from me: https://payhip.com/YvonneKjorlien

Transcript

Janne Holmgren: I’m Dr. Janne Holmgren. I’m a full professor at Mount Royal University in the Department of Economics, Justice and Policy Studies. I’ve been at MRU for 23 years.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Wow, you’re one of the old folks here.

Janne Holmgren: I know. Scary. I feel so old.

Yvonne Kjorlien: you’ve seen it evolve — the institution evolve from its college days to, it’s now university days.

Janne Holmgren: Yeah, from the diploma program to the applied program to the bachelor’s program.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah.

Janne Holmgren: Yeah, so I’ve kind of been around the block.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right. And so you came to my attention mostly because I just did a podcast episode with Alisa and Taylor who went through, I guess at least one of your classes but the medical examiner’s internship that you coordinate so that they could get a practicum And do some work and get some exposure with what goes on at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. So, that’s kind of how you came to my attention. But you do way much more than that. So can you kind of give a — how did you come to be at Mount Royal and doing the research are that you’re currently — if you’re doing any research now — what kind of brought you to that point? So kind of give us a sketch of your journey up to now.

Janne Holmgren: I became very interested in DNA evidence around the OJ Simpson trial. Where, it was clear to me that, DNA was going to become a big part, of that. And at that time there’s really nobody in Canada that was doing critical analysis examination of the evidence. So I was really interested in the impact on trials where you have something so novel like DNA that people can’t really see, they can’t really understand, how that ends up, playing out within the courtroom. So I focused my master’s degree on that kind of work whereby, I interviewed defense lawyers throughout Canada.

And I asked a question: what are the implications for your trials? What are you gonna do with this? How are you gonna play with this? And it became really clear to me that the system that we had in place in Canada because we don’t really have independent laboratories, that the access to — for example, a retest of biological samples were really hard to get hold of. So yeah, I know of a few cases in Canada, where, you think back to the Guy Paul Morin and case where the defense, wanted to retest the sample, but to retest the sample in Canada, they would have had to go through the Center of Forensic Sciences in Ontario or, through the RCMP and they didn’t want to do that, because the samples had already been examined in the laboratory in Canada. So they had to go down to the US, I think it was Boston, to get the sample, reevaluated. And it became clear that it was not his DNA that was part of that sample. So, that’s a long, long story and we know now that, it was a completely different individual that was responsible for the death of nine year old Christine Jessup, I think it was in 1994.

So the playing field within the criminal justice system, it was really clear to me that it was not balanced, the scales of justice was really tilted. In addition to that, any kind of expert testimony that we saw in the Court in the early days of DNA evidence was usually presented by people that worked in the laboratories – again, in the Center of Forensic Sciences and the RCMP laboratories — and we really didn’t have Council in Canada that could really contest what it was that they were doing, of what they were presenting within the courtroom.

So in some cases, they would have had to get an independent expert from the UK, Australia or the US, which usually cost, a lot of money. And because they didn’t really understand DNA evidence, the defense lawyers didn’t really understand DNA evidence, they didn’t really know how to extract the information within the courtroom, ask the right questions. I learned that there was a real need for an independent expert that was not affiliated with the police, or a particular laboratory. So in the early days of my work even as a master student, I was asked to help out defense lawyers understand, how DNA works and whether or not I could help them launch defenses for their clients or what questions to ask, about the actual evidence, which was enormously interesting. So that kind of grew my passion about DNA evidence.

There wasn’t really anywhere in Canada either where I could really get trained. The RCMP is doing all the training in Canada, and I have been incredibly fortunate to attend different courses that the RCMP has put on — in forensic interviewing, for example — which is the other passion of mine. But I kind of pushed my way into courses in the US. I took DNA statistical courses with the American Academy of Forensic Sciences. Where I met many people that were being trained, for the FBI and so forth and other Canadian officers, detectives, and what have you? So I had to kind of figure out how to kind of get that information on my own.

That led to my PhD where I tried something unique. Given that we cannot interview jurors in Canada, I decided to set up a mock trial and I was privileged to get the go-ahead from the Court of Queens Bench in Calgary to actually have a courtroom, and I actually had a real judge, and I had real experts, DNA experts, and I had a real defense lawyers and had real Crown prosecutors participating in my so-called mock trial, which was actually a real trial whereby I changed everything that was identifying about that trial. We ran this trial in front of a jury. It was completely scripted. So, it was a massive script that they all played to. And it was video recorded with seven different cameras. And then after that, I interviewed the jurors about the evidence. I learned very quickly what it was that they’re fixated within the trial. And one of the major findings that I found was that it almost didn’t matter what evidence was part of the trial. When the expert would actually come forth and give these statistical numbers or the probabilities statistics of the likelihood that this DNA belonging to anyone other than their accused is one in a trillion — that’s really all that they needed to hear. And with that, they would find easily a finding of guilt on the basis of that, even alone, which is hugely problematic. Then they were fixated on all sorts of other things which were really, really funny: the clothing of council, the hairstyles of council, …

Yvonne Kjorlien: I’ve heard that, yeah.

Janne Holmgren: … whether or they had access to water, notebooks. At that time, when I ran this mock trial, it was not the norm that jurors were granted notebooks with information. That’s changed since then. But certainly, one of the issues that came out of my work, was that jurors really needed to be able to ask questions.

I argued in my PhD that really the courtroom is not all that different than on academic classroom. When you have people that are unfamiliar with biology, chemistry, physics, anything like that, and they have bombarded with all this kind of information, and they are dissuaded from taking notes, and they’re dissuaded from taking notes by counsel, for example, saying things like “Look at me”, “Listen to counsel”, “Your job is to pay attention.” And that actually ended up being perceived by the jurors as, “Okay, I’m really allowed to ask I’m not really allowed to write notes. I’m supposed to watch.”

And then council would say things like, “It is my job to ask the questions, not your job to ask the questions, but for you to listen,” which is very interesting. I correlated that with the classroom. This experience in the classroom, students need to be able to ask questions, like “What is this?”, “What is this DNA?”, “How does that work?”

My jurors had a really difficult time understanding that DNA can be extracted from anything in the body. In those early days they thought that blood had to be matched with blood and couldn’t really understand how could you extract DNA from dental pulp, for example. That was really, really difficult for them and difficult for defense lawyers too. We’re trying at that time to not get those statistical numbers to be presented within the courtroom, because they learned very quickly that it had way more of an influence than it probably ought to have had.

Yvonne Kjorlien: I can very much see your perspective that a courtroom is much like a classroom because you’re asking the jurors to make a decision based on what they’re presented, but they have to understand it. So in essence, they need to learn what’s going on. And so in order to learn, you need to be able to ask questions. Because if something is unclear to you, you can’t critically analyze it to make a decision. I can totally understand that. Yeah.

Janne Holmgren: And those other issues that was really apparent. In me interviewing lawyers and judges their perception of the jury, and this idea that jurors, they really don’t ask good questions. They really shouldn’t be allowed to ask questions because they ask ridiculous questions that are totally irrelevant. But for my standpoint as an educator, to me it scared me to think that we wanted the presentation, of a jury that didn’t really understand, was actually kind of okay, with it.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, it’s more than kind of scary. That’s very scary. Very scary.

Janne Holmgren: Based on that research, I was like, there probably is a really good argument for professional jurors. We see in some countries very well educated juror on the issues that are at play because it’s well known that.. and that was a really scary part that I learned when I interviewed defense lawyers for my masters — which was all I did for my Master’s degree, which I completed out of Simon Fraser University — was that if a defense lawyer did not understand the DNA evidence and the accused had a rap sheet of prior convictions, defense lawyers were more likely to encourage a plea. Because they were just so uncomfortable with this idea of having to contest the DNA evidence, which they really didn’t understand. Now the landscape for all of this that we’re talking about today is very different today.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right. Yeah.

Janne Holmgren: But the one issue that remains to this day and something that we see from time to time is that we learn that an expert who provided evidence many, many years ago, might have not completed all the testing of the samples, for example, and have gone into the courtroom just on the basis that they are an expert, a so-called expert, and have provided evidence, on their so- called expertise without really having done the work. And we saw that in the case of the pathologist, Charles Smith, the child pathologist. Who, in fact, in many of the instances that he had testified in, or in the many cases that he testified, he had not actually even completed all that work. And we had families, who’s families’ members, were convicted of murder of their children went off to jail, convicted. There are other children ceased, put into foster care, and so forth. And then since learned that his evidence was, in fact, incorrect and malicious.

Yvonne Kjorlien: So it’s my understanding, there’s a bit of a process at least, in the US to become an expert, be considered an expert witness There is a legal process. Is there a process in Canada?

Janne Holmgren: Yeah. The courtroom needs to conduct an interview of the individual that comes forth with the evidence, and then they decide whether or not that person should be considered an expert. And their questions, about all their work. So for example, in the case of a pathologist, “how many cases have done?”, and so forth. But once you are deemed that expert, nobody really questions anything really about you, which is problematic in some of these cases

Yvonne Kjorlien: Okay. So, it sounds kind of like with the DNA evidence that pretty much anything presented in court, whether it’s an expert witness, whether it’s the DNA evidence, some other evidence, it has to always be open to contest. Always be open to questions. Is that correct?

Janne Holmgren: Yes. I mean the main question that I always present — and I teach this to my students and my forensics courses too — is that we still need to answer the question. “How did it get there?”

Yvonne Kjorlien: Mmm.

Janne Holmgren: We’ve seen some interesting ways that DNA ends up at certain scenes whereby, maybe the individual wasn’t even there. We know that individuals who are working the criminal element are getting more and more sophisticated. One of the issues that we’re dealing with — I’m sure it’s this way in many jurisdictions, but a bit of a trend that we’ve seen locally — is that different vehicles are used by individuals engaging in criminal activities, and then shortly thereafter, we find the vehicle burned out. Why does that happen? That is to conceal the evidence. So that’s problematic for us, of course. Very difficult for us to collect any evidence in those kinds of situations, other than we are still able to identify the vehicle. But in many instances, we might not be able to know the exact color, you might not be able to get the ID of the actual vehicle. So the people that are working in the criminal element, as I call it, they’re getting, more and more sophisticated.

Now there is one part, that’s incredibly interesting. And that’s some of the research that I’m working on currently: is the evidence that we end up collecting from, for example, CCTV and security cameras. It is becoming increasingly more difficult to get away with not being seen, because of these kinds of cameras, just about everywhere. And so the work that I’m working on right now, which is interesting, is I look at the evidence that we’re able to collect, which is, fairly secure evidence — we can play that in court, and that works beautifully in many instances whereby, we don’t actually really need a very tough interrogation in many instances. In many instances, we — and I’ve seen this, through some of the training that I’ve done with the RCMP — we can just play back the video in front of the alleged accused and observe their reaction to that actual video. It’s like, “Here you go. Can you explain to us what’s going on in this video?” And oftentimes the individuals like, “Oh, shoot. That is clearly me. Now I’m gonna have to figure out some sort of an explanation as to what’s going on in the picture,” which is difficult to explain away. If you see someone, pointing a gun, you see the gun, and you see clearly the individual. So that has an advantage in the collection of evidence.

Before, for example, the police — the same goes for, some of the cases that we see at the OCME, where we have an individual that died by falling in front of the train. We have CCTV. Did that individual get pushed from the platform into the train or did they jump? So that’s very, very good evidence.

Now the other piece that I’m working on right now, and that is something that I have invited Alisa (who was one of the students at the OCME to partake in) is what happens to the responders, the collectors of the evidence, the people that are looking at the video, what happens to them? How does it impact them emotionally? Like the vicarious trauma.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Oh, that’s big.

Janne Holmgren: So, you are watching these live events, and it creates the sense of helplessness, and you can imagine. And we see that evidence sometimes could be something — I’m not talking about a specific case because I can’t talk about a specific case — but you can only imagine, a person who is actively dying from fentanyl overdose. There’s cameras behind a building, let’s say at anywhere in Calgary, anywhere. And people walk by and you can see on the video, people are walking by nobody’s tapping this person, then you see them seizing and then they die. And then you watch this. You have this incredible sense of why isn’t anybody stopping? “Stop, stop, and get a kit” or call 911 to save this person. Or, a suicide, an act of suicide, right?

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah.

Janne Holmgren: Where you can actually see the face of the individual contemplating: I should kill myself, or shouldn’t I kill myself. And then it’s on video, that do this. So the evidence is really great. At the impact on those that have to watch it is horrific. The other thing that I worry about is social media, getting hold of anything that’s live.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Oh, yeah.

Janne Holmgren: And that being shared, right? You’ve seen many instances of cases where there’s misinformation in criminal cases, and once that information’s been shared on multiple platforms, it can end up really hurting families. We saw that in the case of the mom and daughter that was murdered in Calgary a number of years ago: Sara Baillie and her five year old daughter, Taliyah Marsman. I don’t know if you remember in the early days, there was some suggestion that Sara Baillie was working in the sex trade and… so that was shown on Twitter, that information was on Facebook, and then we learned later on that the likelihood or the reason or the rationale behind a murder seemed to have been more linked to her trying to help a friend getting out of the sex trade.

Yvonne Kjorlien: I did hear that. Yes.

Janne Holmgren: Which is a very, very different story.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Very different.

Janne Holmgren: And then her family is trying to clear her name, and trying to explain through the media to people that this was not the case at all, which is hugely damaging.

Yvonne Kjorlien: It’s very interesting how easily we can condemn somebody by just that one presumption: she’s working in the sex trade. Well, she must be guilty of everything then.

Janne Holmgren: Yeah.

Yvonne Kjorlien: And then suddenly it flips 180. No, no. She was actually helping somebody trying to get out of the sex trade and that’s why she was killed. Ooo, that changes everything. So, yeah, it really brings to light our own biases, and how we can be so easily influenced by so little on social media or anything really, and it’s all just gossip.

Janne Holmgren: Yeah, yeah. I mean there’s that. So my main research focus now is still on forensics. I’m still following all the changes to DNA evidence. We’re seeing now that there’s a lot more work related to touch DNA, how much DNA we believe behind. And there’s a lot more work, in the area producing technology that can read DNA very, very quickly. So that in the future — and that is actually happening in some places in the world — where we can bring the equipment to the crime scene or to a natural disaster, and identify samples, very very quickly. So that’s very interesting. But I’m also a hugely interested in all the other technologies that we are using and we are relying on, like CCTV. And cell phone towers have really changed the landscape too, and was a big part of the Sara Baillie trial, as well because we’re able to find that the perpetrator cell phone had been in all these different places, by linking, the pings, and so forth. So in that trial it was very much about, “Can you explain to us how your cell phone was here, how your cell phone was there,” and all that kind of thing. So yeah.

Yvonne Kjorlien: And from what I understand too the accuracy is getting better and better especially with cell phone locations.

Janne Holmgren: Yes. Yeah.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, because yeah, from what I understood, even five years ago, it wasn’t great. The triangulation was so-so, so being able to actually place somebody at a specific location at a specific time wasn’t quite possible. I mean, it was almost there, but we’re getting pretty close now, from what I understand.

Janne Holmgren: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s very good, it’s very good. But, then we’re still dealing with the people that are trying to outsmart the evidence. We’ve got burner phones, like burner phones we end up, apprehending somebody and they’re in possession of 40 phones, so every time they make a phone call they get rid of it. So we still have to find ways.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right.

Janne Holmgren: And that takes a lot of money, a lot of resources. But it’s clear that we have a lot of work to do, there’s a huge need just thinking about the loss of life in Lahaina in Hawaii. The identification of all those people, they lack resources in many parts the world. My understanding is that the OCME or at the Coroner’s office in Lahaina, they have no capacity to identify all of those individuals. I just read this morning that they have enlisted help of forensic experts, who sifted through evidence on the site of 9/11. So it’s massive amount of work and sadly — just like, which was the case with 9/11 too — some of those bodies will never be found.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, yeah. That’s the thing with those disasters is that nobody is prepared for it, but they seem to be happening more and more. And there needs to be resources out there that we can call upon. I recently read a book: it’s called Personal Effects. And he runs a company that specializes…. Robert Jensen. There we go. Robert Jensen. The book is Personal Effects. And he runs the company that specializes in going in and helping with these disasters, whether they be natural or man-made and just helping to coordinate and sort through and deal with everything, from identification of the people to what happened, and trying to figure that out. Because, yeah, they’re huge undertakings and it’s just utter chaos until you can try to get a handle on things.

Janne Holmgren: That’s one of the reasons that I wanted to establish this partnership with the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, because our program, Justice Studies, really, didn’t have initially a forensic focus and certainly our students did not have a lot of exposure to death investigation as a result. I’m not meaning that every criminal justice program needs to be focusing on death investigation. We are an academic institution, but if we can bridge that experience for the student, the exposure for the student, I think that’s a win-win. The OCME and Calgary finds our students incredibly valuable to them and time and time again… we’ve had three or four of them hired coming out of our degree program, which is unheard of. Students coming out with a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice and then they end up working as death investigators and autopsy technicians full time. So still that’s something that hugely I’m invested in, hugely proud of, and the students that get that opportunity, I’m so proud of them, and the relationship that I’m able to establish with them is a real bonded relationship. I follow them wholeheartedly and I’m immensely proud of them. It’s a win-win situation, all around but it does come with that trepidation, I guess, of what are these students being exposed to? Can they handle what it is that they’re actually seeing, because this is real life. This is real death. They see the worst of Southern Alberta. The majority of cases that the average person south of Alberta knows nothing about.

Yvonne Kjorlien: And death in Western society is not, it’s something very excluded from everyday life.

Janne Holmgren: It’s very uncomfortable, right?

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah. It’s not kind of part of our culture. It used to be that the dead stayed within our homes. We would invite people over and have them look at the body, celebrate their life, transition them over to the next plane into death. There was all these rituals and day long celebrations, day long routines that we used to do and we don’t do that anymore. It’s now, when somebody dies, they’re taken away, they’re behind another wall, in a coffin, they’re put in the ground, they’re just taken away, and so we don’t even have exposure to that anymore. Once somebody dies, they’re taken away from us and so to be around death, that is very, very different. It’s not within our culture at all.

Janne Holmgren: Mm- Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, you’re right. You’re right, And the research I have been doing in interviewing everybody that was willing to participate in that work, in that environment, there’s lots of issues related to you exactly what you’re talking about, that makes it difficult for them to do their job, too. For example, one of the findings that I found in the interviews how infrequent people are prepared when someone dies, and the implication for an office like the Office of Chief Medical Examiner is that that often means that the body cannot be released to a funeral home right away because there’s no preparation.

We’ve got issues where the families are split. There’s infighting within the family as to what the wishes of the individual who had died. Nobody’s had that discussion. Nobody knows. This person in the family thinks it should be cremation. This person in the family thinks it should be burial. It should be a white coffin. It should be like all of these things. But that while all that goes on outside of the Office, that means that there is a body, a decedent that is not being removed, and they’re bursting at the seams. That office is an old office, the one in Calgary, and it’s certainly was not built to house the amount of people that are going through there.

So, seeing that and learning that and certainly the overdoses too,

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah.

Janne Holmgren: There’s way more of that and in the media and create awareness, about it and so forth and it affects all families.… but the exposure that my students that experience is invaluable.

Yvonne Kjorlien: What do you…so because it’s not mandatory, it’s voluntary, the practicum at the OCME. So how many students do you think have gone through the practicum now? Because you’ve been running it for a few years now.

Janne Holmgren: Yeah, I think we’re in Year Seven so I would say 12.

Yvonne Kjorlien: 12. Okay. Do you see that there’s kind of a pattern in those people that come up to and are at least interested in doing the program and then those that actually go through with it?

Janne Holmgren: It’s very competitive…

Yvonne Kjorlien: Oh, it is? Okay.

Janne Holmgren: Meaning that Leanne Atchison, in our department, the practicum coordinator, and I will interview, for that position. So there’s only one student that goes through every four months. So that is the most: three a year.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Okay.

Janne Holmgren: During COVID, we did not have a student down there. For obvious reasons.

So it’s very competitive. We do complete interviewing process. Multiple interviews where we really kind of, dig at the student, inform the student this is what you’re gonna see, how are you gonna handle that. What are your support systems? How are you gonna handle the fact that you are p ivy to all of this information that nobody knows anything about and you cannot talk about it. You’re exposed to the evidence of criminal cases that will not go before the courts for maybe a year and you might never even see the true outcome of that case and you have to close your mouth and not share that information with anybody. So our fear, of course, is always that we don’t have a student with integrity, maturity, who just really thinks that this is cool and just wants to be able to tell their friends that they have the coolest practicum. So we have to kind of read through all that, vet through that, and so far — knock on wood — we’ve been very successful with that. We do pick students that we consider to be of high caliber.

And I’m fortunate to teach them. So I teach them in Year Two and I teach them in Year Four. I tell my students in Year Two that I keep track of when they hand in assignments, how they engage in my classes in Year Two and their pattern, throughout their degree: their tardiness, their excuses, that communication, the writing skills, all of that kind of stuff. So, sometimes students don’t get opportunity to even interview because we’re like, “No, no. Not gonna happen.”

Yvonne Kjorlien: So that’s kind of the pre-existing stuff. What do you offer in terms of supports when they’re going through this? Because they may be of high caliber, they’re an engaged student, they’ve kind of met your standards going into it, but because we aren’t exposed to death that much especially that much death in such close proximity — it’s an intense situation to be into practicum at the OCME’s office. And so what kind of supports you offer during the practicum that can help either train them or help them deal with the stuff that they’re seeing, with the confidentiality they’re having to keep…

Janne Holmgren: It’s a process. The very first day that they end up attending — and usually it’s three days a week that they go and most of the students go Wednesday Friday, something like that, so there’s a bit of a break but — I’m with them. You attend together. And based on that body language, we’ll talk with them, throughout that day. It’s not like the jump into the autopsy suite, watch bodies that are open, and so forth, right off the bat. You do a lot of talking. There’s a smell that’s at the office, is something that…it’s very difficult to get used to. We go outside, we take breaks. And in that first little bit, at the start of the practicum, they’re not really touching anything. They’re learning. The beautiful thing is that they are allowed to ask all in all the questions in the world. All the questions are answered, some of which I are able to answer and we work through it. Then everybody that works in the office — now that I have past students there — they know what the students going through. So that’s peer support that is invaluable, it’s something that we’ve now established this far into the practicum.

They’re encouraged to keep a diary of a sort. I’ve always said, “Before you get in your car or when you’re in a car, before you leave, write down what you need to kind of get off your chest, and then reach out to me. Let’s talk.” We talk often. We talk on the phone. We talk late at night. We talk anytime during the day. I’m totally available, via text. The students text me: “Can we talk?” and we talk. We talk through how difficult it is to see what they see, the shock, and seeing someone dead, that’s their age. The shock of seeing someone who’s committed suicide, that’s their age. Someone that’s their age that’s died in a motorcycle crash, that died in a vehicle accident and so forth. Those are really difficult. The first time they see a child dead. The first time they see a baby versus five year old baby drowning and there’s the first and the first, right?

Some of my students have the worst day ever on the very first day. We can’t predict that and it’s like, are you kidding me? It can be a homicide on the first day, and then a baby death, and then a suicide, and then a fentanyl overdose and then a fire, and then someone falling off a mountain and then a plane crash. It’s like, whoa, right?

Yvonne Kjorlien: It’s a lot. It’s a lot.

Janne Holmgren: It’s a lot. And remember that all deaths go through that office from Red Deer down to the border, and it’s any accidental death, any homicide. All child deaths are considered unnatural, unless, of course, the child is on the terminal care in a hospital something like that. Fire victims, you name it, right? It’s a lot, but we work through it. And by the end of it, they have figured out a really good way to process it. Some of them are absolutely hooked. This is what they want to do. They can’t think of anything better, whereas some of them are like, ”The experience was invaluable, but I think that my skill set is better served as a police officer as a messenger, to people that are still living.” Which is perfect. I’ve done my job. I think, when I teach death investigation and my forensics course, and I show an autopsy in that course. It’s not mandatory for his students to stay, and I have students that as soon as they hear, the drills, the tools that are used in the autopsy, they don’t all the sudden feel so well and they get up and leave. Perfectly fine.

Yvonne Kjorlien: That’s not for everybody.

Janne Holmgren: That’s not for everybody and then have other students that’s like “Whoa! That is so interesting. That’s quite the puzzle. And I know I want more that.” So it’s a process. It continues to be a process. But there are supports in place, through the university. We’ve got counseling services too. I highly recommend that, I encourage that, but a lot of it is really just talking through, what it is, making sense of it, taking a step away. Using their voices, it’s like, “No, I’m not ready to see that.”

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right.

Janne Holmgren: I’ve had students that are like, “No, I’ve got a child of my own. I can’t see this today,” and that is fine. I’ve had students learn how to sew bodies, weigh organs, take samples and that’s a process. You know, it’s not the first day. It’s probably not even first week. I’ve had a few of them that’s like, whoo-whoo! This is type great and they become, the best sew-ers ever and that’s great. But it’s a process and I never compare one student to a past student either.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right. They’re very much the individuals going on there individual journeys.

Janne Holmgren: They’re all my stars. They’re all my stars. It takes a lot of courage to expose yourself to that willfully. Because, the picture that you see in your head is a really tough of photograph, or video, a playback, to get rid of. Once see it, once you smell it can be, a permanent imprint.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, especially that smell. I will never forget that smell. I can’t describe it, but I can never forget it.

Janne Holmgren: Yeah, it’s yeah. I’ve tried putting… what they call that?

Yvonne Kjorlien: The Vicks?

Janne Holmgren: Yeah, the Vicks. Yeah, it doesn’t help. Multiple showers with shampoo into my mouth. Yeah.

Yvonne Kjorlien: No, it’s in your nose. It’s staying for days. That’s it.

Janne Holmgren: I mean that the students are masked, right?

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right.

Janne Holmgren: Big learning covid too, there are still individuals that will end up at the OCME that may have covid, even today, so exposure and stuff is a real thing and learning how to breathe through that for that amount of time, it can make you really, really light-headed too, right? So going outside is really important, grounding your feet and sitting down, and eating and drinking, and all that kind of stuff.

I think that we do a good job looking after the student, but it’s not for everybody and should the student wish to stop that practicum, we take them out immediately. And we tell them that they do not have to stick it out, and it’s not that they are to be considered of a weak character because they are uncomfortable with that situation. Not at all.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right.

Janne Holmgren: That’s why us deciding on who is the next student for that decision is a long process.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right. So we’re almost out of time. So, do you see the program continuing? Do you see the program expanding? You do you see the program changing in any way?

Janne Holmgren: We will continue as long as we are welcome. We are limited by the size of the space. I’m sure that they would happily take five, five students, but they’re really is not the physical space. As it is, now it’s like, you’re moving around, trying to stay out of the way so that they’re really important work. So, I hope that we can continue for a really long time. There has been some talks about a new building, but that decision rests with the Justice Minister and whoever provides that kind of money.

I think that, government officials should go and visit the space and what is actually going on down there. It’s really get a full understanding of how important that work is. And that’s what ultimately my research goal is: is to try and take this research and share it with the general public — how important this work is, the dignity of the individuals that work there, how much pride they have in their work, and how little they recognized for that work. It’s everybody’s worst day to have to go and visit that office. A family member being brought in there is everybody’s worst day. But the work that they do down there is so important. And I’m hugely proud of the work that they do at that office and my students, of course.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right. Just as we close, what is the name of the program which you teach at Mount Royal University?

Janne Holmgren: I teach in the Department of Economics, Justice and Policy Studies in the Faculty of Arts.

Yvonne Kjorlien: In the Faculty of Arts, so if anybody listening to this episode is in getting into the program, that’s where they can find you.

Janne Holmgren: Yes.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Fabulous. All right. Thank you very much.

Personal Effects: What Recovering the Dead Teaches Me About Caring for the Living

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I talked to Marg because I wanted to find out more about the new group she started, The Fair Field Foundation. My time in consulting archaeology was short-lived and I wanted to find out how Marg was trying to make it a better place. In this episode we talk about: You can find out moreContinue reading "Scattered Episode 21: Archaeology as a Sustainable Career – Interview with Margarita de Guzman"

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I talked to Alisa Hardy and Taylor Dube-Mather about their experiences doing a practicum at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner (OCME) in Alberta. Alisa is currently doing the practicum and Taylor completed the practicum in 2019. I did a very casual version of a practicum at the OCME in Edmonton during my graduateContinue reading "Scattered Episode 20: Practicum at the Medical Examiner – Interview with Alisa Hardy and Taylor Dube-Mather"

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Dr. Sherry Nakhaeizadeh is a Lecturer in Crime and Forensic Science at University College London Centre for the Forensic Sciences. “Sherry’s background and research interest lies within forensic science interpretations specifically looking at cognitive and human factors. She is currently interested in the application of technological advancement and AI approaches in method development in forensic anthropology as well as using such technologies to understand the interpretive process and expertise in complex visual tasks applied within forensic anthropology specifically, and forensic science broadly” (UCL Centre for the Forensic Sciences).

In this episode we talk about:

Sherry’s educational journey, from archaeology in Sweden to forensic anthropology and cognitive bias in the UK.
how working with archaeological samples of populations is quite different to modern forensic populations, and the limits of working with archaeological samples. For example, a Viking skeletal sample thought to be male because of the grave contents was found through DNA analysis to, instead, be female.
the methods used on skeletal remains in archaeology and forensic contexts are similar, but the stakes are very different.
the transparency and awareness regarding biases and limits in scientific methods used in forensic investigations.
some of Sherry’s experiences working with the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in New York City, what an expert is, the tension between science and the courts, and to whom the duty of the forensic anthropologist lies.
how receiving criticism and debating science helped push her to constructively question her research and evolve.
Sherry’s research on how grave context can influence decisions regarding the osteobiological profile, increasing awareness of cognitive bias to modify decision-making processes to minimize the adverse impact of bias.
how bias isn’t bad, but we do need to understand it. As human beings, we view the world subjectively, and how to increase our awareness of our perception and biases.
technology and how archaeology embraces uncertainty.

Sherry’s webpage at University College London (UCL): https://www.ucl.ac.uk/forensic-sciences/sherry-nakhaeizadeh-0

We refer to the following articles:
Nakhaeizadeh, S., Dror, I.E. & Morgan, R.M. (2014). Cognitive bias in forensic anthropology: Visual assessment of skeletal remains is susceptible to confirmation bias. Science and Justice 54 (3): 208 – 214.

Nakhaeizadeh, N., Morgan, R.M., Rando, C., Dror, I.E., (2017) Cascading Bias of Initial Exposure to Information at the Crime Scene to the Subsequent Evaluation of Skeletal Remains. Journal of Forensic Science doi: 10.1111/1556-4029.13569.

Dror, I.E., Morgan, R.M., Rando, C., Nakhaeizadeh, N., (2017) The bias snowball and the bias cascade effects: Two distinct biases that may impact forensic decision making have been received. Journal of Forensic Sciences doi: 10.1111/1556-4029.13569

Nakhaeizadeh, S., Morgan, R.M., Olsson, V., Arvidsson, M. & Thompson, T. (2020). The value of eye-tracking technology in the analysis and interpretations of skeletal remains: A pilot study. Science & Justice 60(1): 36-42. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scijus.2019.08.005

Miscellaneous notes from the start of the episode:

Edmonton CTV News article about Alberta wildfires: https://edmonton.ctvnews.ca/alberta-wildfire-season-2023-how-does-it-compare-1.6391711
The Reluctant Archaeologist blog: https://reluctantarchaeologist.wordpress.com/2023/05/16/on-destruction-and-loss/
Red Cross in Canada: https://www.redcross.ca/how-we-help/emergencies-and-disasters-in-canada/types-of-emergencies/wildfires/wildfires-information-facts
The Reluctant Archaeologist Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/reluctantarchaeologist

Do you have a suggestion for a topic on the Scattered podcast?

Do you have a question about working with human remains?

As always, if you have a suggestion for this podcast, I’d love to hear it. Contact me at ykjorlien@gmail.com or through my contact form.

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Dr. Ellen McRae Greytak is Director of Bioinformatics at Parabon NanoLabs, Inc.
“Parabon NanoLabs, Inc. (Parabon) is a vertically integrated DNA technology company that develops next-generation therapeutic and forensic products by leveraging the enormous power of DNA.” (from https://parabon-nanolabs.com/about.html)

The Globe and Mail, Alberta edition from August 27, 2022.Parabon came to my attention when I read a newspaper article about how Calgary Police detectives used Parabon’s services to crack two sexual assault cases decades cold.

I reached out to Parabon to learn more and I’m very glad I did. This interview was incredibly enlightening because I’d never heard of the technique they are using.

In this episode we talk about:

how Parabon originated and the services it provides
the research Parabon did to develop a predictive model to estimate a person’s appearance based on their DNA
how clinical DNA is different from forensic DNA and how that difference impacts predictions based on forensic DNA
the difference between genotype (genetic code) and phenotype (what a person looks like), and that the existence of a genetic allele in a person’s genetic code doesn’t determine the expression of a certain physical attribute in a person
the difference between the commonly known DNA processes of identifying an unknown individual and Parabon’s technique
developing and using a predictive model to estimate a person’s appearance from their DNA, including what the person won’t look like
that mixed or degraded forensic DNA samples may impact the prediction of the unknown perpetrator’s appearance
how DNA is merely one of many tools detectives use to identify unknown individuals
the Snapshot Study and how it combines a volunteer’s DNA with photos to help increase the accuracy of Parabon’s predictive models for estimating the appearance of an unknown subject
JusticeDrive crowdfunding to allow the work to continue on cases

Dr. Greytak wishes to note “…[T]he information Parabon provides is a lead, and the final identity confirmation is done through traditional forensic DNA analysis using STRs. However, there are occasions in unidentified remains cases where there is no known DNA available from the decedent. In those cases, we have had medical examiners find a close relative, and then we perform kinship analysis using SNPs, which they can use to close the case.”

Correction: when I said there are “thousands” of unidentified remain in Canada, I was thinking of the number of missing. The Government of Canada reports that, as of 2021, there were 31,240 adults missing in Canada. As of March 23, 2023, there are 228 reported unidentified remains in Canada. You can review them here and here.

You can learn more about the Snapshot Study here: https://snapshot.parabon-nanolabs.com/ (US only)

You can learn more about the JusticeDrive here: https://justicedrive.org/ (international welcome)

Reach out and tell me what you think — about starting a Patreon account so you can support the podcast and my participation in the Scavenging Study. If you were to contribute, what would you like in return? One of my books? A Q&A session? Consultation?

As always, if you have a suggestion for this podcast, I’d love to hear it. Contact me at ykjorlien@gmail.com or through my contact form.

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Andrew Bernie is the Manager of Unrecovered War Casualties, Directorate of Sensitive and Strategic Issues Management – Army in Canberra, Australia. I talked to his Canadian colleague, Dr. Sarah Lockyer, in Episode 15. Over World Wars I and II, and the Korean Conflict, approximately 25, 000 Australian soldiers have no known grave.

In this episode we talk about:

how the recovery and identification of war casualties has no time limit. The families and relatives are still, after decades and a hundred years, deeply affected by connecting a missing and recovered war casualty
the numbers and locations of missing Australian soldiers from WWI (Europe and Turkey), WWII (Papua New Guinea, Singapore, Malaysia, North Africa, and Europe); and Korea (most are thought to be in the Demilitarized Zone). There are likely approximately 9000 Australian soldiers buried as “unidentified soldiers” around the world. In the past, Andrew’s team had also worked to identify Australian soldiers from the Vietnam War
how Australian casualty remains, or the location of possible remains, come to the attention of Andrew’s team
how the democratization and digitization of information allows the public to do their own research and help the search for Australian casualties, and how collaboration with community organizations and individuals helps gather information that makes the discovery and identification of Australian casualties possible
collaboration with bureaucrats, military personnel, scientists, and volunteers to help respectfully and efficiently use valuable resources
the formation of The Korean War Missing in Action Working Group — a collaborative group which includes families of the missing, veterans of the conflict, ex-services organizations, Andrew’s team, Australian Air Force, Navy, and other government organizations — and how it has helped locate and recover missing casualties
the use of oral stories of veterans and families in conjunction with documents to help locate and identify casualties
working with communities in foreign countries to learn their culture, their perspectives, and information regarding the dead
building cross-cultural trust and collaboration through respect for the dead

Andrew has provided the following links for more information:

Unrecovered War Casualties | Army.gov.au

Home – Fallen Diggers

My quest to find the missing | Australian War Memorial (awm.gov.au)

Miscellaneous notes from the start of the episode:

Thank you for helping the Scattered podcast reach +60k downloads and counting! Tell me what you think of the podcast and provide your suggested topics at ykjorlien@gmail.com or through my website at yvonnekjorlien.com.
The Bone Search and Discovery Course has been re-launched. Find it here.
Many thanks to those who voted on the new cover of my first novel Memoirs of a Reluctant Archaeologist. Results are in! Check out the new cover and buy the book here. The Kobo Plus free (for a limited time) version is available here.
The videos for the Alberta portion of the 2021-2022 Scavenging Study are done. Find them here.
I was recently interviewed for the Women in Archaeology podcast. You can listen to it here.

Do you have a suggestion for a topic on the Scattered podcast?

Do you have a question about working with human remains?

Reach out and let me know!

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Dr. Shari Forbes is a Canada 150 Research Chair in Forensic Thanatology at Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières (UQTR). She has the only human decomposition facility in Canada, REST[ES], the site for Recherche en Sciences Thanatologiques [Expérimentales et Sociales]. I have been collaborating with Shari on the Alberta component of a cross-Canada research study ofContinue reading "Scattered Episode 16: The Scavenging Project – Interview with Dr. Shari Forbes"

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Dr. Sarah Lockyer is a Biological Anthropologist and is the Casualty Identification Coordinator for the Canadian Armed Forces and the Department of National Defence. She works with people around the world to identify Canadian service members who have fallen in battle during WWI, WWII and the Korean Conflict, and provide them with a dignified burial.Continue reading "Scattered Episode 15: The Canadian Casualty Identification Program – Interview with Dr. Sarah Lockyer"

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Dr. David Errickson is a Forensic Archaeologist with Cranfield University and is part of the team comprising Cranfield Recovery and Identification of the Conflict Casualties (CRICC). While he has worked with forensic cases in the UK, he also works internationally on historical cases, primarily with the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA). Lara Indra is aContinue reading "Scattered Episode 14: A Service to the Dead – Interview with Lara Indra & Dr. David Errickson"

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Sarah Woodman (formerly Huq) is the Cultural Places Officer at Prince of Wales Northern Heritage Centre in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories. She was a consulting archaeologist for over 10 years and this is how she and I met. In this episode we talk about: Sarah’s background, how she got into archaeology, and why curiosity was pivotalContinue reading "Scattered Episode 13: Putting Humanity into Archaeology – Interview with Sarah Woodman"

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Dr. Nicholas Marquez-Grant is a Forensic Anthropologist with Cranfield University. While he has worked with forensic cases in the UK, he also works internationally on historical, humanitarian, and forensic cases. This episode involves discussion of difficult topics such as mass graves, war, conflict, disasters, and damaged or incomplete human remains. Please be advised that whileContinue reading "Scattered Episode 12: Next of Kin & the Forensic Anthropologist – Interview with Dr. Nicholas Marquez-Grant"

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Recent events have caused me to reflect on what brought me to this place of researching and talking about scattered and scavenged remains. In this podcast, you’ll hear about: My anthropological education about translating knowledge between groups Some of my childhood background that caused me to love research and nature How I found anthropology, humanContinue reading "Scattered Episode 11: For the Love"

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I met Christine Hymanyk when she and some of her classmates joined the search for the remains of a pig carcass in October 2021. She was an undergraduate student in Anthropology at the University of Alberta. Christine had conducted a small experiment in her own time to discover if there were any differences in theContinue reading "Scattered Episode 10: Christine Hymanyk – Student Experiment"

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This episode continues from Episode 7: Shari & the Pig Trials – The Set-up. I recommend you go back and listen to that episode before listening to this, if you haven’t yet done so. In October 2021, we conducted a search exercise on two of the four pig carcasses we deposited near Edmonton. This searchContinue reading "Scattered Episode 09: Shari & the Pig Trials – The Search & Results"

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Amanda Johnson is an Acting Detective with the Edmonton Police Service. We met in August 2021 when Shari Forbes and I traveled to Edmonton to set-up a some sites for the “pig trials”. Amanda was a member of the Missing Persons Unit when we first met, but has recently been promoted to the Homicide Unit.Continue reading "Scattered Episode 08: A Police View on Scattered Remains – Interview with A/Det. Amanda Johnson"

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Shari Forbes, Ph.D, is a chemist who specializes in the scent of decomposition. She has a “body farm”, REST(ES) at Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières in Quebec, and works with law enforcement dog handlers across Canada to train the dogs on the scent of human cadavers. In April 2021, Shari reached out to my colleague,Continue reading "Scattered Episode 07: Shari & the Pig Trials – The Set-up"

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Dan Zadra, David Lewis, and Lyle Willmarth all work with Colorado Parks & Wildlife. Many big thanks to these men for sharing their wisdom with me! Dan is a Wildlife/Property Technician who used to be a hunting guide. Dave works seasonally and part-time with CPW, and Lyle is full-time veteran with over 25 years underContinue reading "Scattered Episode 06: Bears – Interviews with Dan, Dave and Lyle"

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Kevin Blecha is a Wildlife Biologist with Colorado Parks & Wildlife. His graduate & published work focuses on risk and reward in wildlife feeding behaviours. His research has included looking at the feeding behaviours of mountain lions. In this episode we talk about: the typical feeding behaviour of mountain lions (cougars, puma, panthers) whether orContinue reading "Scattered Episode 05: Mountain Lions – Interview with Kevin Blecha"

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Pamela Mayne Correia is a Forensic Anthropologist with 30 years’ experience. She is one of three Forensic Anthropologists on contract to the Province of Alberta. She specializes in cremated remains and currently works at the University of Alberta. In this episode we talk about: what attracted Pam to and sustained her interest in forensic anthropologyContinue reading "Scattered Episode 04: Tales of a Forensic Anthropologist – Interview with Pamela Mayne Correia"

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Dr. Shelley Alexander is a Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada. She specializes in canid (dog species, including wolves, coyotes, domestic dogs) behaviour, and uses non-invasive approaches (like tracking) to observe their movements and infer their behaviour. In this episode we talk about: Shelley’s research and howContinue reading "Scattered Episode 03: Coyotes – Interview with Dr. Shelley Alexander"

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This is an introduction to the podcast series. I address the question of why I’d make a podcast on scattered and scavenged remains. Why knowing about scattered and scavenged remains is important Why doing research on scattered and scavenged remains is important How scattered and scavenged remains impact forensic cases, finding the missing person orContinue reading "Scattered Episode 01: Introduction"

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Dr. Alexandria Young is a forensic archaeologist. She obtained her PhD with the study entitled, “An Investigation of patterns of mammalian scavenging in relation to vertebrate skeletal remains in a Northwestern European context: forensic applications”, from Bournemouth University in 2013. In this episode we talk about: Alexandria’s journey to doing a PhD on scattered andContinue reading "Scattered Episode 02: A Path to Forensic Archaeology – Interview with Dr. Alexandria Young"

Yvonne Kjorlien: Recent Episodes