A not so shallow grave

A not so shallow grave
University of Amsterdam / 22 min / 22-01-2007
In a forest, somewhere in the Netherlands, eight years ago a pig was buried. It was part of a forensic science experiment. How could the grave be found back? How far would the pig have been decomposed and what information could be retrieved from it? A team of forensic scientists from the University of Amsterdam and the National Police Agency are about to find out.
Commissioned by Raphael Panhuysen and Liesbeth Staats, University of Amsterdam.

TRANSCRIPT

INTRO

COM.
In this forest, somewhere in the Netherlands, eight years ago a pig was buried. It was part of a forensic science experiment. How could the grave be found back? How far would the pig have been decomposed and what information could be retrieved from it? Today, a team of forensic scientists from the University of Amsterdam and the National Police Agency are about to find that out.

TITLE A not so shallow grave

TITLE: Henk van Haaster,
forensic botanist, BIAX consult

By looking at the, especially the differences in vegetation on the surface of the soil you can see where we mind find the grave. Especially a few plant species are indicative for this. First plant species is this one, a grass type. (…) it is a very old plant in comparison with the plants of the same species that you will find on the presumed grave. That’s this one. This is the same type of grass I showed before, but this is much younger. The same is true for the differences in moss cover. (…) this whole area is covered by the moss and the moss species in absent from the presumed grace area. Also the small tree that you see here, they are pine trees, they are of very young age compared to the pines you see in the back. And the vegetation differences convince me that here must be the site of the grave.

TITLE Mark Lüsche
Head Special Search Techniques,
National Police Agency

What I’ve done, I’ve scanned the area here. What you see on the screen in along this axis the depth up to 1,8 meters and this is the surface where we have walked with the GPR, the ground penetrating radar. You get a picture of the ground with different layers of different material. One thing that is very appealing is over here the disturbance you get here in the layers. First you see a layer horizontally and that is disturbed here and that is caused by digging. And that are the things that we are triggered for and say ‘Okay something happened there and we have to check that out.’
? So that’s how a grave shows up?
Yes and what you can do after that is with a metal detector do some indication of metal in the grave perhaps jewelry or a knife or something like that and you have a second indication that something is buried there. And when you combine all those indications you can say ‘we are now starting digging because we have a very strong indication that there is something in the ground.’
?What are you looking for?
I’m now looking if I can see any fragments of bones that are sticking to the metal probe and if I hit a rock, you sometimes get particles of the rock on it and then you know: OK, it’s a rock I hit. When you see other particles you can try to locate, as I already told, bone particles and otherwise what you can do is take smell.
? Nothing there yet?
No, what you try to do is if you get a smell of cadaver, it’s a very distinct smell. I don’t get it now. I will do another probe test. I’ll check it again. On the tip is something I can’t recognise. The only thing you see is particles of sand. No distinguished smell of cadaver. What you see is, that the ground is very loose. I can put in the steel probe very deep, so there is something happened here. If I do in on another place, like here, I’m not able to get it as deep as over there. So this is a distinct place where something has happened and we have to check that.

DIG

RED TAPE IS ROLLED OUT,
GEOMETER IS SET UP

COM.
Once the burial site has been located, a local grid is set up to enable precise three-dimensional localisation. Later, the coordinates can be related to the existing national grid to obtain absolute localisation.

CLEARING OF THE FOREST SURFACE

Mark Lüsche:
The techniques we use for locating graves like ground penetrating radar, metal detection, magnetometry are known techniques. What is new is the way we are digging up a grave and the victim. And the use of entomologists, pollen specialists, botanicus who is looking at the plants. That is sometimes done, but to do it in a structural way, that is new.

FIRST SOIL BEEN REMOVED

TITLE: Raphael Panhuysen
Archaeologist & physical anthropologist UvA

?What do you notice in the sand?
Well, you see the discoloration, the differences of colour.
? Can you show me?
Here you have a area that’s more greyish and here we have lighter coloured sand, more yellowish which probably comes from deeper below and this indicates that there must have been the pit, the margin of the pit was in this area. And we now try to find the margins of the pit in the whole.. Or all margins, so that we can determine to where the pit extends and then we’re going to excavate it ofcourse and document every step of the excavation.

TEKENEN VAN KUIL OP TEKENBORD DOOR LIESBETH

Smits:

2S My name is Liesbeth Smits, I’m an Archaeologist and a physical anthropologist.
My role is to excavate a burial and a human skeleton when it is present and to record everything very thouroughly and also to do the initial investigation in the field because you never know what can go wrong and you have to reconstruct as much as possible when it’s still there in the field.

DIGGING IN QUADRONS

Panhuysen:
… When you dig a grave, you take out the soil, put the soil on the side of the pit and then you put in a body and refill the pit with the soil you have taken out and try to hide the spot. By excavating it in quadrons, we can see what happened, how the soil was put back inot the pit and that helps us to establish the sequence of events that took place on that site.

We use this quadrant method also because it gives us a three dimensional picture of the cause of events. It’s a methode that has been developed by Van Giffen, a famous Dutch arceologist that worked, who started with thsi method in the early twenties of the last century and he used it to excavate large burial tombs.

PIT HAS DEEPENED,
LIESBETH IN PIT

TITLE: Liesbeth Smits
Archaeologist , physical anthropologist UvA

What I notice is that the filling of the pit is different from the surounding area. It’s much more loose and that is why there are a lot of roots there, because plants like it The loose ground is easier to penetrate and there’s a lot of nurishment ofcourse and outside the pit, it’s much more compact, the soil. So that is what you can see here.
?And is that typical for graves?
Yes it’s typical because the soil has been taken out and later on it has been put back, so it’s much more loose and that’s why you always can see the difference between the pit filling and the outside.

Hakbijl:
My name is Tom Hakbijl, I am entomologist at the Zoology Museum of Amsterdam.
My role is looking for insects and other ahtropods.
During the excavation, I look if I can find any remains, in the larger remains, and in the laboratory, I look at them more closely. Take samples in the field, and then look at them in the laboratory more closely.

(…)What we have here, these are moulds. They have grown in this empty hollow area and we must be a bit carefull with this for our own safety because the spores they can be toxic. So I put them apart. What I really want to have are the remains of insects thay may have lived here for possibly a number of generations. So there might be an accumulation of insects remains and I’m going to sample to see if they are there.

PIT DEEPER STILL

Panhuysen:
We have the hind legs of the pig showing uo now.
? Can you show them?
I can point them out. Here you have the hind bones of the right leg, and this is the left leg. We have to remove the feet because they were completely entangled in roots. So that was not possible to excavate. You could normally do that in a lab situation. You can see it’s not an adult pig because the epiphesis(?) are not fused. And you can see from the position from the hind legs that it is buried with the hind legs up and that the body is going down in this direction and here we can see the pelvis and the rest of the body of the pig is deep down so the head should be at the bottom of the pit.

The pit should be approximately in this area, we can also in this case see it must be there because we have a lot of roots and we know from this burial that the roots have completely entangled all bones and have fed on the carcas of the pig.
? Is that something new
It is something I see for the first time, it has been noted by others in other circumstances as well. But as you can see we are quite near to a pine tree so it has just extended one root and that has completely developed here to take up the nutritions from the decomposing pig carcas.

LAB

COM.
Back in Amsterdam, the entomologist and the botanist have taken their samples into the laboratory. From these, they hope to retrieve additional information on the life and death of the pig.

HENK RETRIEVING AND WASHING OFF CENTRAL NOSE BONE FROM SKULL

HENK VAN HAASTER:
(…)By taking the right samples for pollen research at the right places, we can tell a lot about the different environments. We are interested in the living environment of the victim, the pig in this case, so by taking the right samples we hope to reconstruct the living environment, which can maybe help us in determining the origin from the pig: where does it come from?

HAKBIJL:
TITLE: Tom Hakbijl
Entomologist, Zoology Museum of Amsterdam
I’m looking for insect remains, in particular puparia of flies that could be inside the nasal cavity. … They might have been inside.

MICROSCOOP

TILT FROM ROOF VIEW TO HENK BEHIND MICROSCOPE,
CU MICROSCOPE SCREEN

HAASTER:
I’m looking at the monster we took from the nasal cavity of the pig and what I see here in the sample is that there are mainly pollen from bechula, birch in this sample. I can hardly find any other species. This gives us an important indication of the season of death. As we have seen, on the burial site there were a lot of pine trees present. Because of the fact that we don’t come across any pollen of pine, which flowers later than birch, I conclude that the season of death must have been april.

TOM ALSO BEHIND MICROSCOPE

HAKBIJL:
This is bone from the nasal cavity and now we are looking if there are some insects or other arthropod remains. There is not very much to be seen. The only thing we see are parts of remains of mites. The mites are … have armoured plates and these plates are clearly visible here. The only problem is that they do not provide us with much information. We are actually looking for the remains of flies and puparia and they are not there.

HENK SWITCHES SAMPLE UNDER MICROSCOPE,
ANOTHER IMAGE APPEARS ON THE SCREEN

HAASTER:
(…) One of the research questions for me was to reconstruct the last meal. If you know what the last meal was, it can help identify the victim. And I have here a pollen slide that we took from the stomach contents. And what we see here is of course very typical for a stomach content of a pig, mainly pollen.
These large pollen grains with one hole here in the surface are typical for pollen corn, our conclusion is that the last meal of the pig must have been a corn meal.

VIEW FROM UNIVERSITY WINDOW, PAN TO
LIESBETH AND RAPHAEL GOING UP THE STAIRS

COM.
So, at the end of this forensic experiment, what is the result. What do we actually know about the pig, apart from that is was a juvenile, it lived on corn and it must have been buried in april

HNK.05
TITLE: Henk van Haaster,
forensic botanist, BIAX consult

What surprised me most was that we could answer so many questions just by looking at the pollen that was still very well preserved on the body of the pig. And I mentioned these questions before and this surprised me very much that we could answer so many things about living environment, last meal and so on.

HAKBIJL:
TITLE: Tom Hakbijl
Entomologist, Zoology Museum of Amsterdam

(…) We didn’t find very much. We did find a few remains of mite, but what we could have found are the remains of flies or fly puparia, that we didn’t.
That is important because these flies can give us information on what has happened in the period between death and burial. And even between burial and excavation.
Their absence means that something has kept flies away from the body in the period between death and burial. This could have been a concealed place, the burial could have taken place at night, in a short period, but it has not been laying in the woods for days. That is one conclusion.

SMITS:
TITLE: Liesbeth Smits
Archaeologist , physical anthropologist UvA

There was one thing that surprised me and that was the large amount of roots in the burial pit. They were lining the burial pit and they led you as it were to the body of the pig. You could follow the roots to the body and the reason is that the filling of the pit is much more loose than the surrounding area, which is much more compact, and so for roots is’s very favourable condition and there’s a lot of nutrition as well because of the burial.

(doorlopend)

PANHUYSEN:
TITLE: Raphael Panhuysen
Archaeologist , physical anthropologist UvA

Apart from the root invasion following the contour of the pig, it was also the position of the pig which was ofcourse quite unusual buried with the head down and the hind legs up, which is a very unusual way to bury a pig but also a human.

BACK TO FOREST

COM.
Interesting as it may be, most of the information found wouldn’t be accepted as hard proof in the courtroom. This is because of the lack of accepted scientific standards. Until this is the case, the results can merely be used as indications.

LÜSCHE:
TITLE Mark Lüsche
Head Special Search Techniques,
National Police Agency

There has to be done more research to make it more hard proof but you get an indication of where the victim is perhaps murdered and that is sometimes very usefull and you can direct your research into another area and try to investigate another area where it might be quite more interesting to look for traces of victims.

One of the institutes that is giving what we call ‘forensic norms’ that is the Dutch Forensic Institute, that is the institute that develops those protocols so. The Forensic Institute has to give them to the police and say: okay, when you use techniques like this, you have to get the traces and look for the traces in this and this way and that is being developed now.

FILLING UP THE PIT

TITLES:

Camera & Editing
Willem Heshusius

Producer & Director
Jos Wassink

Field Technician
Henk van Ramshorst

Second Palynologist
Hylke Bosma

Project Initiator
Raphael Panhuysen

Sponsors
University from Amsterdam
National Police Agency

Copyright (c) Jos Wassink, 2007