Two weeks ago, someone thought it was a good idea to drop off three plastic shopping bags of human bones just outside the walls of the crematorium in Tucson.
Police don’t know who dropped them off; they’re still asking. As they unzip the bag and check the bones, the forensics team here at the Pima County Medical Examiner said they still don’t have any idea who the remains belonged to.
"We have a set of white bones which are dried and sun-bleached; they have longitudinal cracks in them from being on the surface," said Greg Hess, the chief medical examiner. He has the bones spread out on the table in his office. There's a femur, a couple of arm bones, a shin bone, even a molar.
“And these are the white sun-bleached bones that weren’t buried and were on the surface," he said.
Then there are the darker bones, the color of freshly dug soil.
They could be bones of a Native American from long ago or a settler or a hiker who got lost sometime around World War II – what forensic anthropologists refer to as "prehistoric."
There's a desiccated femur, the pieces of a child’s skull who died long ago. These are the clues to either some ancient crime or a displaced burial site, nobody knows.
Hess surmises that the white-bleached bones belonged to an illegal immigrant crossing the desert, where so many hundreds have died trying to get into the United States. Illegal immigrants have died at a rate of about one a day trying to cross into the country. Most of those deaths occur in the unforgiving borderlands of Southern Arizona.
“You see this fine latticework underneath the more thick cortical surface?” Hess said. “See there’s no dirt or anything in there? It doesn’t look like these have ever been buried."
So yes, it’s possible someone was digging up graves and while they were doing that, found the remains of an illegal immigrant. But why drop them off at a cemetery? And why in plastic bags, one saying Good Neighbor Pharmacy, the other saying “Thank You?”
On a windy day, Bill Addison stood outside Evergreen Cemetery’s crematorium. He’s been the president here for 50 years. Never in his life has this happened before, he said.
“Well, we all had about the same reaction. That was: ‘Who on Earth did this and why are they here and what are they?’ ” Addison said. “And you just sit and think: ‘Well, when was the last time that happened?’ Well I don’t know. I don’t remember the last time that happened. I don’t remember having someone drop any off at our doorstep."
Days later, the Tucson police got involved. Officer Liz Skeenes went to the cemetery. She’s been a cop 16 years.
This is a first for her too.
“My first impression was that it’s close to Halloween. Maybe this is a joke. Maybe these aren’t real. Someone is playing a prank on you guys,” Skeenes said. “That was kind of my first thought process."
The older bones may be given to a museum. The newer remains may be entered in a DNA database to see if they are ever matched up. Of course, that still doesn’t explain who left them there.
"I'm curious to know where they're from and what the situation is behind them," Skeenes said.
As the trail grows colder, the mystery deepens.
