Emily Craig - Teasing Secrets from the Dead - My Investigations at America

“And I've got these other wigs-” I began once more, reaching for them. This time Liz held up one palm for silence.

I searched desperately for my well-worn explanations of the limits of forensic sculpture. How it could never be portrait-quality-we just don't have the data for that. How, nevertheless, many people seem able to leap over the crude quality of a forensic image and jump to a flash of recognition, particularly when a loved one is involved. How often I had seen forensic images succeed-and, to be honest, how often I had seen them fail.

But to my utter surprise, the two of them began to smile and then to laugh.

“This is amazing,” Joe said softly.

“More than amazing,” Liz agreed. She turned to me. “I thought you'd do some kind of Gumby-like thing-I don't know, something that looked weird and unnatural. But this really looks like a human being. We might really find her with this.”

Three months later, nurse-practitioner Shari Goss saw the four photos of my facial reconstruction posted on the bulletin board of her neighborhood grocery store and burst into tears. “I know her,” she told the astonished grocer. She had recognized Mwivano Mwambashi Kupaza, a young exchange student from Tanzania who had been living in Madison, Wisconsin, for the past three years. Kupaza was the twenty-five-year-old cousin of forty-year-old Peter Kupaza, Goss's ex-husband. After seeing the poster, Goss called the police in her rural Wisconsin hometown of Wesby to give them the young woman's name.

Joe and Liz were then able to find a photograph of Mwivano, which resembled my reconstruction almost exactly. They went on to match the prints lifted from the remains they had found with fingerprints lifted from medical records that Mwivano had touched when she signed them. Finally, we had our positive ID.

The story that Joe and Liz eventually put together was heartbreaking. They believed that Peter had raped Mwivano, who became pregnant and then had an abortion. About two years later, he allegedly killed her and dismembered her body in his home, packing it in plastic bags and carrying it to the river.

Ironically, no one had ever filed a missing persons report on Mwivano Kupaza. Her friends and relatives in Tanzania believed she was still in the United States. Her U.S. community of friends and fellow students thought she had returned to Tanzania.

Peter Kupaza's trial was a dramatic event. Mwivano's and Peter's relatives flew in from Tanzania, sitting in the front row for every day of the trial. When Shari Goss testified against her ex-husband, she nearly broke into tears as the D.A. showed her several knives that the couple had once had in their kitchen. Prosecutors suggested that these were the very knives that had been used to dismember Mwivano's remains. On another day, prosecutors showed a slow-motion video superimposition comparing my clay reconstruction to Mwivano's photograph. There were audible gasps from the jury, and two of Mwivano's relatives began to cry.

Peter maintained his innocence throughout. A June 21, 2000, article by Jason Shepard in the Capital Times reported his testimony:

“I would like to tell you today, I did not do this. I did not do this. I do not have the heart… I miss my cousin.” Shepard reported that Kupaza spoke of his and Mwivano's relatives as a single family. David and Rebecca Mwambashi were Mwivano's parents and Peter's aunt and uncle. Yet he spoke of them and of his uncle Raphael as though they were all his parents and as though Mwivano were his sister:

“Why should I make my father Raphael Mwambashi cry? Why should I make my father David Mwambashi cry? Why should I break his heart?… Why should I make my mother Rebecca cry forever?… Why should I do this to my sister? I'm supposed to protect her.”

Yet Peter's own uncle, the family patriarch, Raphael Mwambashi, testified against his nephew. “He cheated me,” Mwambashi was quoted as saying in the same article. “Now we know he was never true to me.”

When Peter Kupaza was finally found guilty, he himself began to weep, while family members stared straight ahead, silently. Later, he was given a life sentence with no parole for thirty years-a decision that would mean he could not return to Tanzania until he was seventy years old. Although Mwivano's family had originally intended to take their daughter back with them, they decided to bury her remains in Wisconsin. Devout Lutherans, they chose to hold her funeral at Coon Prairie Lutheran Church in Westby.

“The burden is not as heavy as we thought it would be because of you people,” Raphael Mwambashi said at the ceremony, according to a June 26, 2000, story by William R. Wineke in the Wisconsin State Journal . “We leave for home tomorrow having accomplished everything we had to do. We leave her body with you people knowing that it is in the good hands of good people.” Although I could not be at the funeral, I was glad to have been part of the process that brought justice to the family of Mwivano Kupaza.

In the Kupaza case we had a skull, which helped enormously: It meant that we could give the victim a face, which enabled us to give her a name. But what if you don't have a skull? Some murderers know how useful those head bones are to crime scene investigators, and they go to no end of trouble to disguise the identity of their victims. Then we have to tease secrets out of something else.

Such was the case with Everett Hall, a disabled coal miner from Pike County, Kentucky, whose wife persuaded her two boyfriends to kill him in 1996. (“That woman had some awesome powers of persuasion,” one of the deputies once told me.) Mrs. Hall's two beaux allegedly shot Everett in the head and decided to hide his body in a nearby abandoned coal mine, expecting his corpse to decompose rapidly. But when they went back to check on their work a year later, they discovered that the mine's consistent temperature, low humidity, and absence of flies and their larvae had simply mummified the remains. So they cut off Everett 's head, burned it, and buried it in a construction site. To this day, that head reportedly lies beneath a small strip mall in Pikeville.

Now, thought the boyfriends, the head problem was solved-but what about the rest of the body? Hall's wife and her fellas decided to dynamite that section of the mine-but none of them had the cash to buy the dynamite. Hall's wife agreed to trade sexual favors for the explosives they needed-a maneuver that the detectives on the case would later dub “nookie for nitro.”

The plan worked fine up until the actual explosion, when the guys failed to detonate the charge correctly. The disappointingly small blast only loosened a few small slabs of stone and filled the shaft with coal dust.

They decided to try again, since it would be years before enough coal dust settled to fully conceal the headless corpse. So they loaded Everett 's remains into a wheelbarrow, rolled him into a more confined area of the mine shaft, and sent Mrs. Hall out for some more dynamite.

Unfortunately for them all, she only came back with a homemade hand grenade. Making do with what they had, the men rigged an elaborate system of pulleys and string to detonate the grenade after they were out of harm's way. But their second attempt was doomed to failure, too, for their weapon turned out to be nothing more than a smoke grenade.

After the smoke cleared, the men came up with a third plan. They decided to build a fire from the timbers that were holding up the roof of the mine, placed the corpse on their makeshift funeral pyre, and doused the whole thing with motor oil. Then, somehow, their survival instincts clicked into place. Realizing that they were in imminent danger of being crushed by a collapsing mine if not suffocated by the smoke filling a small, confined area, they decided not to light the fire and simply walked away, leaving the body still sprawled over the stacked timbers.