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Zusatztext "When he's not shattering myths about maggots! Dr. Maples is delightfully unraveling true murder mysteries! ancient and modern. He's not just another clever forensic detective -- he's a poet! a philosopher! and a sly commentator on the fractured human condition! pre-and post-mortem." —Carl Hiaasen! author of Strip Tease and Native Tongue "Whether Maples' subjects are famous or anonymous! it is how he tells their stories that makes this book so fascinating and—in its fashion—delightful." —Jonathan Yardley! Washington Post Book World "William R. Maples and Michael Browning could've written a dry clinical analysis of forensic anthropology; instead they tell tales better than the dead could for themselves." — New York Times Book Review Informationen zum Autor William R. Maples, Ph.D. and Michael Browning Klappentext From a skeleton, a skull, a mere fragment of burnt thighbone, prominent forensic anthropologist Dr. William Maples can deduce the age, gender, and ethnicity of a murder victim, the manner in which the person was dispatched, and, ultimately, the identity of the killer. In Dead Men Do Tell Tales , Dr. Maples revisits his strangest, most interesting, and most horrific investigations, from the baffling cases of conquistador Francisco Pizarro and Vietnam MIAs to the mysterious deaths of President Zachary Taylor and the family of Czar Nicholas II. Leseprobe I seldom have nightmares. When I do, they are usually flitting images of the everyday things I see on the job: crushed and perforated skulls, lopped-off limbs and severed heads, roasted and dissolving corpses, hanks of human hair and heaps of white bones all in a day's work at my office, the C. A. Pound Human Identification Laboratory of the Florida Museum of Natural History at the University of Florida. Recently I dreamed I was in a faraway country, trying on shoes, and the leather in the shoes was so improperly prepared that the laces and uppers were crawling with maggots. But there was a simple, ordinary explanation for this phantasm: one of my graduate students was raising maggots as part of a research project. I have gazed on the face of death innumerable time, witnessed it in all its grim manifestations. Death has no power to freeze my heart, jangle my nerves or sway my reason. Death to me is no terror of the night but a daylit companion, a familiar condition, a process obedient to scientific laws and answerable to scientific inquiry. For me, every day is Halloween. When you think of all the horror movies you have seen in your entire life, you are visualizing only a dim, dull fraction of what I have seen in actual fact. Our laboratory is primarily devoted to teaching physical anthropology to graduate students at the University of Florida, and is part of the Florida Museum of Natural History. Yet, thanks to the wording of the 1917 law establishing the museum, we often find ourselves investigating wrongful death, attempting to dispel the shadows surrounding murder and suicide. All too often in the past, under the old coroner system, the innocent have died unavenged, and malefactors have escaped unpunished, because investigators lacked the stomach, the knowledge, the experience and the perseverance to reach with both hands into the rotting remnants of some dreadful crime, rummage through the bones and grasp the pure gleaming nugget of truth that lies at the center of it all. Truth is discoverable. Truth wants to be discovered. The men who murdered the Russian Tzar Nicholas II and his family and servants in 1918 imagined that their crime would remain hidden for all eternity, but scarce sixty years had passed before these martyred bones rose up again into the light of day and bore witness against their Bolshevik assassins. I have seen the tiny, wisp-thin bones of a murdered infant stand up ...
