Anthropologist Discovers the Story Behind the Skeleton

May 6, 2009— -- Forensic anthropologist Mary Manhein analyzes human remains and helps law enforcement discover the person behind the bones, determining how their lives ended and earning her the nickname "The Bone Lady."

She loves to solve puzzles. And she's pretty good at it.

"I can look at the pubic bones and say that he is still a young person here," she said, holding a bone. "I can look at this area here and tell that he is quite young... I can tell you he's 5-foot-7 or so... I can tell by the fact that the bones are all fused in this area here that he is an adult, and he's over 18... You are beginning to get an age range here you are beginning to minimize."

"He's white," she said, speculating the race of the human remains. "Paranasal opening, kind of tall tinted, nasals, fairly straight face."

The bone lady isn't always cooped up in her lab. She is constantly on the go.

The day "Nightline" showed up at her lab at Louisiana State University, Manhein sped out of the door before she could sit down for the interview.

Scrambling to Find the Answers

She had received a call from the coroner in Morgan City, La., about 90 minutes away. Human remains had been found near some railroad tracks, and the coroner needed Manhein and her team to come examine them.

Once at the site, Manhein and her assistants delicately started sifting through the dirt, finding more and more bones as they went.

"Our first goal is identification," she said. "Absolutely, we want to identify the person, and only after the person is identified can law enforcement go from there. We're just one stage in many stages of a case like this."

Manhein seems to welcome her grab and go routine.

"You grab who's available, you grab the tools that are always ready and waiting for you, and you're out the door," she said. "So the minute we're called we try and scramble in 30 minutes."

She arrived so quickly at the Morgan City scene that Kenny Ledet, the workman who had found the bones just that morning, was still there.

"So as I was walking, I saw a bone, you know just high and dry on the ground," he said. "White bone, I picked it up and couldn't recognize it... for some reason I did like this and put them by my side, and it clicked. It clicked because they were about the same size."

Ledet was stunned.

"I was at a loss for words," he said. "The first thing that come to my mind was, poor soul, he's got a family somewhere who are going crazy. And that's the part that's bothering me the most is who is it?"

Identifying the Lost and Forgotten

Notifying the family bothers Manhein too. "We want to figure out who this person is, we want to send this person home to his or her family," she said.

And so she became not only an anthropologist, but a kind of crime solver, identifying the remains of the lost and sometimes forgotten.

"It's the most amazing feeling," she said of identifying someone's remains. "I still get chill bumps all over me and we absolutely get giddy in the lab, we are so excited because that's one we can check off. You know this person is identified. So Hallelujah!"

Many cold cases have been checked off successfully because of facial reconstructions made from skulls of the unidentified.

Eileen Barrow, the lab's imaging expert, essentially builds faces from bone remains. She's made more than 100.

"Sometimes they match fairly well, other times not necessarily," said Manhein. "But what we are trying to do is capture something in that face that will spark a memory in the viewer's eyes and in the viewers' minds -- Oh that looks like so and so. Or I haven't seen that person in a while. I know that person!"

She says that publicity is crucial: "We've just started a campaign working with crime stoppers, and we are now putting some cold cases on billboards throughout the state," she said.

Trying to Bring Closure to One Community

Stanley Nelson, a reporter for the Concordia Sentinel, has followed local unsolved cases from the civil rights era for years, including the disappearance of a young man named Joseph Edwards.

"He worked at a restaurant called the Shamrock," said Nelson. "A group of Klansmen who came to be known as the Silver Dollar Group were actually being formed at that time... The thought is that it probably was a relationship with a white woman there at the Shamrock that was the reason why he was killed."

Nelson said there are no reports of any young black men in the area at that time, no one except for Joe.

"Mary is interested in solving any case she can and... the amazing thing about Mary is, she's out here today getting her hands dirty," said Nelson. "She's the first person in 45 years that's made any effort in authority that we know of that's coming out and trying to find him."

Manhein returned to Clayton, La., to help solve Edwards' disappearance by searching for remains near a spot where a partial skull was recently discovered.

"We have no idea who this partial skull belongs to," she said. "We just don't know. This young man disappeared in the 1960s and I have no idea from looking at this partial skull exactly how long it's been out there."

But the community in Clayton has high hopes, to at the very least be able to get some sort of closure.

There were no new discoveries, but Manhein plans to return to Clayton when conditions improve.

"Well, the target today was to try to do another surface survey, which we're trying to do, but the terrain is such, the overgrown area here, it's just not a good time," said Manhein. "My thoughts are... that we need to come back here when the weather is very cold, when all of this is dead. "

For the bone lady, no case is too cold, no person too forgotten, no bone to old.

"It is a very personal thing that drives me. It is. So it's not just the science, it's not just the figuring out the puzzle, it's justice. I like justice. And it gives me a good feeling to know that I am helping in some way."