PIECING TOGETHER THE PUZZLE

Most people would shun the grisly prospect of a profession that is centered around death. But forensic anthropologist Scott Grantham doesn't consider his efforts to identify dead people morbid.

He thinks of it as a puzzle. Sometimes the pieces of the puzzle are readily assembled, but at other times the times Grantham admits are frustrating the puzzles go unsolved.

"You want all of it to work. You want to know that you've got somebody back where they belong with the people they're important to," said Grantham, his slight drawl a remnant of his native Mississippi.

As a forensic anthropologist, Grantham, 57, works with law enforcement and other authorities to try to determine the identity of bodies. He moved to Cape Girardeau in 1963.

About 1 years ago Grantham began a consulting business in forensic anthropology. He does his work at Lorberg Memorial Funeral Chapel, 433 S. Sprigg, where Cape Girardeau County Coroner John Carpenter is funeral director.

Usually depending on the time of the year and other factors Grantham's services are requested when the body has been dead a week and identity by facial features or other methods is impossible. Before that time, he said, the body would go to a medical examiner.

When a body is found, Grantham said, the forensic anthropologist works to determine that the remains are human and that the death didn't result from a murder. If the anthropologist is lucky, he said, he or she has most or all of a body to work with.

"You give the remains all the respect they're due as a human," he said. "But one of the things you avoid doing is to let yourself think of it in terms of a personality because, if you didn't do that, it would just really get to you. I think it would make you ... unable to function like you should."

Two million disappearances are reported each year, he said. The anthropologist works to pare down the odds against identification by determining the body's sex, race, age, how long ago the person died, and any other helpful information. A forensic dentist then compares a dental chart from the body with the dental records of the person believed to be dead, said Grantham.

"What I do is hopefully make it easier for the dentist; maybe reduce it from several million down to a few thousand cases, and generally they'll have an idea: `We think this might be so and so.'"

Grantham said it's hard to beat a situation where the investigating officer, dentist, and maybe a medical examiner and a coroner approach the problem from several different directions and it all comes together as the textbooks say it's supposed to.

Grantham cited two cases he said shows the extremes of his job. The first, he said, involved the remains of a man that he helped identify last year in Jefferson County south of St. Louis. After he determined the man to be a white male, about 5 feet, 6 inches in height, and about 30 years of age, a positive identification was made, he said.

"That kind of makes your day when you know you've helped identify somebody," he said.

The man, he said he believes, was murdered. The case is now in court, Grantham said, and he is scheduled to testify.

The bones of a woman at the SEMO Regional Crime Lab at Southeast Missouri State University represents the other extreme, he said. After 13 years, the woman determined to probably be white, 5 feet, 3 inches in height and 35 years of age remains unidentified.

Grantham said a farmer in Mississippi County found the woman's body in the Mississippi River. The farmer found the body in a pile of driftwood that he had burned, he said.

"At first it looks like it ought to be fairly simple to figure out who she is," said Grantham. "But then once you start looking at the tributaries of the Mississippi River, and remember we're south of the mouth of the Ohio (River), you've got ... about two-thirds of the United States that she could have come from."

He said he also worked on the murder case of Margaret Smith, a retired professor from Southeast.

"In fact, she lived about three blocks from here. It was kind of strange working on a neighbor and a colleague," he said.

Smith's body was found along Highway 177 in February 1981. She disappeared in July 1980. The case ended in the conviction of a Cape Girardeau man.

One case Grantham said he took some ribbing over involved what appeared to be a deformed human foot that was found at the Lone Star plant at Cape Girardeau. Found nearby, he said, was a strip of skin with hair on it, a pair of panty house and a sack of women's clothing. The items led one to believe the foot belonged to a woman.

"To make a long story short, that turned out to be the right hind paw of a bear," he said. "Once a bear claw has the skin removed, along with the claws, it looks very much like a deformed human foot.

"I took a lot of kidding over that, and every once in a while somebody will still refer to it. You take the kidding and go on."

A local taxidermist probably got rid of the paw after someone killed the bear on a trip and had a bearskin rug made that retained the claws, he said.

But the case that bothered him the most, he said, involved 39 infant bones that he held in his palm. The bones, the remains of what Grantham suspects was a murder, were also found at Lone Star, he said. The case has gone unsolved.

Grantham said he didn't understand how someone could kill a child.

"I don't know if I want to understand it because if I understood it I might be able to explain it away, and I don't want to be able to do that. Little kids should be picked up and held and loved and fussed at spoiled if you will."

Grantham estimated he's probably worked on 50 or 60 forensic cases predominantly from Southeast Missouri.

He holds a master's degree in anthropology from the University of Mississippi at Oxford and studied forensics at the University of Tennessee. Before retiring in 1987 Grantham taught anthropology at Southeast Missouri State University.