By Yvonne Kjorlien
The podcast currently has 31 episodes available.
Patrick Church is a funeral director, embalmer, and instructor in the funeral directing program at Mount Royal University in Calgary.
In this episode we talk about:
You can contact Patrick through Mount Royal University here: https://www.mtroyal.ca/ContinuingEducation/OccupationalPrograms/fu
****
Notes from the start
Find my books here: https://yvonnekjorlien.com/shop/
Find some of my art here: https://www.redbubble.com/people/YKjorlienCreate/shop
Support the podcast and my research and Buy Me A Coffee or Patreon. Your contributions will go toward my research, webhosting, and my time on this podcast. Want to find out more about my research? Check out the Scavenging Study.
Contact me through [email protected] or through my contact form. Follow me on Facebook at The Reluctant Archaeologist, or through Instagram @yvonnekjorlien
Do you have a suggestion for a topic on the Scattered podcast?
Do you have a question about working with human remains?
Drop me a note at [email protected]
Transcript
Yvonne Kjorlien: All right, Patrick. I’m gonna get you to introduce yourself. Because I always have a fear of saying somebody’s name incorrectly and that’s just not nice. So you know who you are, how to say your name, so please tell me who you are and what you do.
Patrick Church: Okay, my name is Patrick Church. I’m a funeral director and embalmer. I also have the privilege of serving as an instructor at Mount Royal University in the funeral director and embalming program and my specific area of expertise is embalming theory.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Wow, I am just tickled that I could get you on a podcast because I’ve always had an interest in embalming.
Patrick Church: Okay.
Yvonne Kjorlien: And I actually tried to get a job an apprenticeship, way back, 20 years ago when I was fresh out of grad school, but everybody wanted me to do the funeral services part, that the sort of sales end of things. I said, “no, no, no, I don’t do well with the living. I want to work with the dead.” But they didn’t seem to want that. They wanted me at the frontend doing sales and so it didn’t work out.
Patrick Church: That’s unfortunate. A loss to the industry.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Aw, you’re very sweet. Thank you. So let’s talk about how you found yourself in funeral services because I find that that’s always a very interesting journey for people. So tell us about your journey.
Patrick Church: So one of the things that I have been told versus my experience — so I don’t remember ever making the comment but my sister very clearly does — I told her at the close — I believe it was somewhere about ’86 — of my dad’s aunt’s funeral that I could do this job. We’re in the funeral home. And I just reflected to her that it’s a job that I could do. I don’t remember that. Now in university, I had a colleague who she firmly believed that I would make an excellent funeral director, that I just had the classic pieces looked good in black, I would stand demurely to the side into the back, and would not be obtrusive in families experiences and…
Yvonne Kjorlien: That’s very interesting that you had these people around you just volunteering this information that, hey Patrick, you should try a funeral services.
Patrick Church: Yeah. When I was younger, I always thought maybe law, but the further I went in university and as I was doing Master’s work, less interested in school, in that sort of eventual outcome. And so I began knocking on funeral home doors and, somewhat probably similar to yourself, I was met with the wall. And that wall was very much, you don’t have experience, we hire people with experience. Well, how’d you get experience? You have to be hired, right? So this weird catch-22.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Right! I am familiar with that one.
Patrick Church: Yeah, and so I knocked on doors and, when I was younger, I was probably a shyer kid. So I didn’t push or sell myself maybe in the ways that I should have. So I went into what I knew and was comfortable with and I started working with databases and non-profits and did a lot of work in that field until I had to eventually further my education. So I’m at a crossroads. I have to go back to school. Am I doing something that I really want to be doing? And if I really want to be doing this, how do I come to do it? And so I determined that I would probably end up going to university in the US. And at a place like either San Francisco or Los Angeles or Cincinnati where there were more open programs. And the year that I had made that determination, the Alberta Funeral Service Association gave me a call and said that the program in Alberta was changing and they would like me to be part of the first class. So all of a sudden sure it was there for me and I did not have to leave and incur a lot of expenses by going south of the border and so here I am.
Yvonne Kjorlien: I’m just amazed that you, I mean, if anybody else would were to have somebody, a friend, family member, come up to them and say “hey you should check out a career in funeral services”. I mean that would probably shock some people to receive that sort of feedback — “What on Earth makes you think that I would fit in funeral services?” other than looking good in black. Because you’re dealing with, number one, the dead. Not everybody can do that, and not everybody wants to do that. And you’re also dealing with this whole mountain of emotions that people, the living go through when dealing with their deceased loved ones. That is not for everyone. So for you to, one: take that, be receptive to that feedback, and then, two, to actually do something with that feedback that just, that amazes me.
Patrick Church: There was and they’re still remains nothing about the work that would intimidate me.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Okay.
Patrick Church: Does that mean I would have no learning curves? Most certainly not. In terms of the decedent, nothing about the body is so massively overwhelming for me. Now, I grew up on a farm. You’d always have the death of animals around you, not on an ongoing basis, but on those one-offs right with cattle, and we’re animals going to slaughter, animals dying naturally you were engaging with that. So nothing about the body would sort of throw any significant disruption to my world. I knew that.
Being with people is something that, like I said, I was shy when I was a kid and, you’re totally right, the funeral industry demands that you have to be pretty much front and center, and you’re dealing with people one-on-one and at a very horrible and weird time for them and you have to somehow be committed to being there with them. And I think that is something that I have grown into most certainly. But something I enjoy. I enjoy people’s stories. I enjoy chatting with people and learning about people and knowing people’s journeys, as much as I can in the short time that I’m with them.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Okay, I’ve heard that before from others that. either living on or working on a farm, it exposes you to, I guess, the cycle of life. It’s not the typical city experience where you’re very divorced and disconnected from that. You’re immersed in it, and it gives you a whole different appreciation for what goes on in the world.
Patrick Church: Yeah, I would concur.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, would you say then with that very early feedback (that you may consider a career in funeral services) with that kind of been a Plan B, or was that just something that was kind of always in the back of your mind.
Patrick Church: I don’t know if I had a plan, Yvonne. That’s the problem with myself.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Okay, fair enough.
Patrick Church: Was interested in law, but not interested enough ultimately to pursue it when it came time, and I had the opportunity to do graduate work. Was it a direction? I was going to go. No, it wasn’t. It did not hold my attention through university. So I guess I fell into it rather than necessarily having a firm plan.
Yvonne Kjorlien: So what did you do your Master’s in?
Patrick Church: Philosophy religious studies.
Yvonne Kjorlien: wow.
Patrick Church: I studied a Jesuit theologian by the name of Bernard Lanigan.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Wow, that’s big stuff.
Patrick Church: And yeah, yeah, he was a interesting voice in the 40s, 50s, 60s in parallel with sort of what was going on at the same time in Europe. An interesting character. Interesting thought.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Okay, but yet you found yourself working in IT and databases for nonprofits after all of that.
Patrick Church: Yeah, totally fell into it. Yes. My dad was a very early advocate of computers. We had a very early apple system. Back in the early 80s late 70s somewhere in there. he began and…
Yvonne Kjorlien: Wow.
Patrick Church: Yeah, so I grew up with them.
Patrick Church: They were easy for me to work with and play with.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Huh.
Patrick Church: And even in the 90s, it wasn’t necessarily easy and familiar for everyone.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Right. Yeah.
Patrick Church: So when I came out of school in ‘96 it was okay: where am I? And when the door knocking didn’t pan out, non-profit databases did.
Yvonne Kjorlien: All right, so things changed in the funeral service industry. You mentioned this cycle of nobody’s gonna hire you without experience. The only way you can get experience is being hired. Which I’m sure that, not just me, there are some other people out there that can really relate to that. But at that time, you said the funeral service education system had changed. Tell us about that.
Patrick Church: So historically the system used to be very much controlled by the industry. You would be working in the funeral home, and after the funeral home had the time to evaluate and determine whether you would be a good long-term fit in the industry and probably within their specific funeral home, then they would sponsor you into an education program.
Yvonne Kjorlien: So it kind of was like an apprenticeship or an internship.
Patrick Church: Yeah, yeah very much so.
Yvonne Kjorlien: All right.
Patrick Church: And then, yeah, that changed. The industry realized that maybe that wasn’t the best way of working. Or at least the school system that we had at the time.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, it was very, I mean, from my experience, which is 20 years ago, which may have been around about that time of this education change, I grew up with the stories of — my dad came from farming community, small town — and he would say he went to school with somebody who was apprenticing through their funeral home. And so that’s what kind of stuck in my mind that that’s how you do it. So let’s go out and I started knocking on doors, too. Which is where I met with the whole, yeah, you need experience but we can’t hire you and you would be better off to do the sales portion rather than the embalming portion, etc., etc. So yeah, that’s a bit of a catch-22 definitely, but things changed.
Patrick Church: Yes.
Yvonne Kjorlien: So you were able to go and get your education?
Patrick Church: Yes, which is fantastic. I was going to one way or another it. Just really worked out to my advantage that Mount Royal offered the program on behalf of the Funeral Service Association in Alberta that I didn’t have to travel. And go someplace else.
Yvonne Kjorlien: How long did it take you to do the program? Were you doing it full-time, part-time?
Patrick Church: It was full-time.
Yvonne Kjorlien: All right.
Patrick Church: So it still remains, you have a certain number of hours, apprenticeship hours, that you have to, practical hours, that you have to secure following the schooling. The schooling for myself in the first year was a full year of classes rather than spread out. So some programs rather than doing a spring and summer, will do just fall and winter, backed two years. And Mount Royal did the spring and summer instead of doing the two year. So it made it more appealing to go that route as well. The hours after — I forget the number at this point — but it was essentially a full year of work that you had to engage with.
Yvonne Kjorlien: And that would be at a funeral home, correct?
Patrick Church: Yeah, and you would be submitting various types of reports that would be part of the regulatory bodies’ evaluation of granting you a license. So you’d have your education component. So the college would submit that you have done your education (now university), you would have to submit hours that someone within the funeral home would attest that you have completed these hours, you would have to submit records of certain activities, specifically embalmings and arrangements (so sitting with families and sitting with the deceased).
Yvonne Kjorlien: So, sorry. So pretty much a year of classes and a year of placement in a home
Patrick Church: Yeah, yeah. And then the regulatory board receives all these attestations, and grants license. After you write your board exams. So that’s the final piece is the board exams.
Yvonne Kjorlien: And so are you typically learning and board-certified in both the funeral services and embalming, both at the same time?
Patrick Church: You can be separate.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Okay.
Patrick Church: Now when I went through the program, you could not be. You had to do both pieces. You had to become an embalmer and a funeral director. You could not separate them out.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Okay.
Patrick Church: The license was not a separate license. that changed in the somewhere in the early 2000s and they began creating funeral director only licenses and embalmer only licenses so that who wanted to focus in specific areas could focus in those areas.
Yvonne Kjorlien: So we’ve already kind of touched on at least a little bit of the evolution of funeral services, at least the education portion of it in the past 20 years, that things have changed. But funerals in general have a bit of history. I know, it sounds like you really get into the history of this, and so I’d like you to take us through kind of how funeral services have evolved. I know that embalming, at least in Alberta, and I don’t know about Canada, but it’s not a requirement. And a lot of people don’t know that, and then it’s not always been around. And so I’d like you to take us through, kind of a thumbnail sketch of some of the history. How did we come up to this? Why do we have funeral homes? And why do we have burials? There’s more of a shift to cremation nowadays. And why do embalming when we didn’t always use to embalm. Stuff like that.
Patrick Church: Yeah, the history of our industry is quite fascinating. When we look at, I think, the deeper history that we have with death, we find it’s probably something that’s very familial, something that’s very much centered in small community within a family home. And if it’s not happening within a family home, it’s happening very close to our community. The deceased is probably brought to the home or a central community space. The deceased would be sat with, they’d be watched over. Communities would bring religious and ritual elements to death, dressing of bodies and putting flowers with bodies other other meaningful tokens and elements before ultimately a body would be taken for disposition, whether that be at a at burial, at a cemetery, a community’s little cemetery, or whether that be a community’s point of cremation. So this would have been, I think, the experience most people would have had with death for millennia. It would be something that is is happening very much within a very small community structure.
And as I mentioned, we would have begun practicing ritual elements around death. As we see the rise of religious institutions, they would then begin to serve in a means between the home and that final disposition of interment or cremation. We would see with the rise of churches that we would then bring our loved one into those religious spaces for ultimate service and internment. When we are seeing the development of our large religious institutions, we’re seeing ultimately the growth of community and as communities grow, that brings problems to death remaining something situated in the home and in the small community. So, for example, when communities grow and we begin to experience plague years within large urban settings, community’s response is to move death outside of the urban center to the edge, and so we begin to see cemeteries not being community cemeteries, but being large urban cemeteries located at the edge of urban dwellings. That brings, of course, a level of sort of distance and bureaucracy to death. We will see larger institutions, for example, hospitals, prisons. Those people are going to, when death is experienced in those institutions, be buried in relationship to those institutions. So they will have burial grounds attached to those institutions. So again, death is moved away from our community. Or when we see people going off to war, bodies are going to be buried where they fall. There is no repatriation of death historically, there is no bringing our loved ones home. When we die in in battle, we are buried at the battlefield. So as communities grow and we experience these growth challenges, death is moved further away from that central space that would have been the family, the family home, in our very small community.
Of course, another factor is when we have the growth of. Communities. We also have the growth of communal living. We don’t necessarily have our own living space. We’re in shared spaces. And it’s not fundamentally feasible to bring our loved one into a shared space. And so instead, we have then the places, like churches, like our religious institutions, being able to step in and being able to accommodate and host our experience and our relationship to the deceased. So we have this movement outwards from the home.
Now things are happening in Europe and things are happening in North America. And I want to reflect first on North America, because something quite unique happens, and that is the US Civil War. The US. Civil War brings together horrible, horrible, bloody battlefields, where surgeons, where doctors are needed to address the wounded. These doctors, though, have gone through university where they had to train, and their training involved the preservation of deceased bodies for their study purposes. So doctors knew how to preserve bodies, how to embalm. So, while embalming happened infrequently, prior to this, very infrequently, all of a sudden, the US Civil War offered something that we had never seen before, and that is the opportunity to bring our loved ones back from where they died. We could repatriate them. And so we had doctors undertaking this work and serving as embalmers during the US Civil War, and coming out of the war, offering those services to their communities.
And so we see the rise in North America of embalming in the following the US Civil War in the late 1800s. And with this brought a number of just very pragmatic pieces. So if you are embalming someone, and if you are going to help arrange for someone to be taken someplace, you’re also going to need some sort of transportation receptacle, a casket or a coffin, to do that. And so these folks then were able to then sell these pieces of merchandise. Now that’s fairly niche and does not necessarily provide a living. So you know, you’re working with wood to build a casket for people. Maybe you could work with wood and have furniture. So our industry has this very close relationship to furniture stores, because lots of funeral homes were related to funeral stores, furniture stores in their very early existence.
And so we in North America now see, in the 1800s of course, the rise of, again, those dense urban living situations and apartment dwelling, again that’s not feasible to bring our deceased into those spaces. And so the again, most pragmatic space to bring our deceased to would be the embalmers home. So embalmers homes began to have parlors for families to be with their loved ones.
So we begin to see these, early, early vestiges of our community, as people are want to do well we have this relationship to. To bringing our loved one to church or to our religious institutions. People don’t always stay with their religious institutions. The curious thing about Western Europe is, of course, the Protestant Reformation and the leaving of institution to create one’s own religious practice and paradigm. And once that is something that is ingrained, you can’t really reverse that course. And so people vote with their feet, and they leave their institutions if their institutions are not speaking to them. And so you have this, in the — and I’m sure throughout all of all of time — a leaving of our religious institutions. So in the 1800s the early 1900s continuing to today, as people drift away from those spaces, then it’s not appropriate to bring our loved ones into those spaces. And so we have the development of the creation of chapels associated with the embalmers funeral parlor, and you will see many historical funeral homes that are anchored by a house that was the embalmer, funeral director, the morticians residence. And of course, as those spaces continually over time grow or get outgrown, then we see the more modern funeral home that is those chapel, those service spaces, those visitation spaces, an office space, rather than being tied to a residence, they are much more funeral homes as we experience them, probably today by the vast majority of folks.
So we have this trend in North America of bringing the deceased to to the funeral home, and we have then the creation of these, these service spaces. Now in Europe, we have something curious happening, and that is, through the 1800s, you have the development of crematoria and people working on the establishment of cremation spaces. And while cremation slowly develops in Europe, similar to here, it does not, it does not take off. But you have this. You have this different experience in Europe, where you have crematoriums functioning to offer disposition. And you also have something that we don’t have here in North America with cemeteries, and that is cemeteries being reclaimed, where graves are only used temporarily, and after a certain period of time, the bones of the deceased are taken from the grave so that the grave space can be reused, and then bones are placed into either charnel houses or some other large receptacle where the bones are stored en mass. And so Europe has this very different experience with with their cemeteries, and with their relationship to disposition that we don’t have in North America, but they had this focus on the creation of crematoriums. And so crematoriums come to North America, and we will begin to see them in the 1950s but we don’t really begin probably to see their impact probably into the 80s. And it’s in the 80s and 90s, that cremation really changes the landscape for the funeral profession and for the industry. All of a sudden you have this process that, again, well, death moved from our very familial community space ultimately into the space of a funeral home, now cremation allows it to move out of that space again. So our funeral homes, while they originally those early chapels modeled churches with chairs focused towards a pulpit or a podium where the casket would be at the front, just like an altar would be at the front. And often at funerals, we see that replicated so very much church like structures, funeral homes, in their very modern iteration, have become, rather than being sort of set have become more multi-purpose spaces to be able to accommodate very shifting needs of client families and consumers. And so that is a little bit where we are at and why we are at the funeral homes and the spaces and the practices that we are at now.
Yvonne Kjorlien: It sounds like from what you’re describing that being with the dead is very much a community activity, whether it’s to support the grieving of the family or to, just the community coming together to help out that the living who remains, and the focus of the community for a long time has been the church you look at the layout of small towns even now, I mean we’re starting to get away from it, but small towns across North America and even in Europe, if you look at the layout of a small town, usually the church is the center of the town and that represents the center of the community and that’s where people went to see their neighbors, you saw your neighbors once a week, you got the local gossip and he had some tea and then you went home and you wash, rinse, repeat again next week. And so it sounds like, from what you’re saying that when the population started to get such that the church couldn’t house those community functions where the funeral or the grieving process couldn’t be done just in the home, they had to find another bigger space to have those community functions, but at the same time, people started to disconnect from organized religion and to disconnect from the church. And so maybe people didn’t want to go to a church to do those community functions, but wanted someplace a little bit more agnostic or non-affiliated. And so it sounds like there’s been in the funeral industry, yes, a little bit of industrialization and then also evolution to meet different people’s needs a different times.
Patrick Church: Very much so. Well, the church speaks to what people are going through, it speaks and talks about death, right?
Yvonne Kjorlien: Absolutely. Yeah.
Patrick Church: It’s a big part of people’s lives and a big part of what gives meaning and what has come to them in the person of their loved one and what has all of a sudden being taken from them by this event? So the church historically, it’s part of their narrative, part of their conversation with their congregants, so it makes sense that people would want to be there for that experience of loss. Now not being a church person other than in name, it makes sense that it doesn’t necessarily speak to everyone, so I can appreciate why you would get that shift from the need to be in church, the need to be in that space, the need to contextualize your loved one within that setting.
I also understand that people still have that need to contextualize their loved one within that setting too. But if that setting and what it’s offering doesn’t speak to folks, then why go into that space? So here’s an interesting piece. Early in my career, you would have families who don’t want religion, don’t want the church stuff as part of their service. Yet who do we turned to, as Funeral Directors, we were turning to clergy. And we’re turning to more liberal branches of the church and saying “hey, can you help this family by not really being a clergy person?” And I always thought that was a little bit disingenuous of, not only ourselves his funeral directors, but for the position that we were asking clergy to step into in dealing with families.
Some families don’t mind some of the touchstones of faith, some of the prayers, some of the structure. But some families wanted very little to nothing of that. And yet we would still turn to these folks. Now very fortunately, at the same time we’ve seen the development of celebrants, non-denominational folks, people who are serving as chaplains in hospitals and hospices, who don’t have that solitary commitment to one church institution That they have to sort of somehow try and step away from or take out of their meaningfulness at that moment. Instead, we have people who have the ability to craft services that provide sort of ritual structure for families who don’t want those religious components.
So a good development in my opinion because it was always hard to ask a clergy person to not be a clergy person in that moment.
Yvonne Kjorlien: It’s hard to ask anybody not to be who they are.
Patrick Church: Exactly. Yes.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Okay, so we’ve seen the evolution, I guess, of funeral services away from or, at least, maybe less integration with faith, religion, and the church and to something non-affiliated. but we’ve also seen an evolution away from burial, embalming Tell us a little bit about that.
Patrick Church: Oh yes. The evolution from?
Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, because we’ve seen a lot more cremation, green burials.
Patrick Church:
That is very true. Now, our chemicals are purposeful.
We do need to employ them when we are for example, if someone is making a repatriation journey to another country or to another location. They are required by international shipping regulations. They also allow us time. Everybody will go through unique and individual changes and embalming buys time for families to be able to plan and to gather and be together, a very important piece. As you see the movement westward and people need to travel. They’re no longer in their home communities, so they need to be able to come back and historically travel, not being necessarily the easiest process. Embalming did allow for that time. Now, do we need to embalm everybody today? Most certainly not. And I would argue that the vast majority of bodies are not embalmed and do not bring those those chemicals to their disposition, largely because most bodies are being cremated, and that disposition is happening relatively quite quickly. However, embalming and the use of those chemicals does have a purpose now, the other piece is that the cemeteries have regulations around how bodies are buried within those spaces and those regulations will account for the, ultimately, the presence of those chemicals within the environment of the cemetery space. And I think a final point to bring to this is really those chemicals aren’t used in concentration. They are very much used in diluted A little bit of those chemicals goes a very long way in doing its preservative work. So while they are, they are used it is. They are used minimally, and I think by the industry, cautiously, and I think ultimately by by environmental agencies and regulations securely.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Because it sounds like that there are common practices in the funeral industry, like burial, like embalming and then there are regulations. And the two may not necessarily be the same. Burial an embalming may not be a requirement; it’s more of a standard of practice. Whereas vaulting depending on where you are maybe a requirement.
Patrick Church: Yes. Yes, burial is sort of a requirement if we just couldn’t keep a decedent at home, for example. I think most communities, most jurisdictions, most provinces who would be governing health wouldn’t allow for a body to be any other place other than medical research or buried within the confines of a cemetery. Now that doesn’t include cremated remains. But I don’t think we could just keep bodies at home. We would have to find cemetery space for them.
So we technically do have to bury bodies if we are not going to look at something like cremation or aquamation or body donation to medical research, for example. So there is then the requirement to bury within the confines of a cemetery.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Right.
Patrick Church: But creating a cemetery is very complicated and not anyone can just create a cemetery.
Yvonne Kjorlien: I can well imagine.
Patrick Church: So how do you create green burial when you don’t have that option to create a cemetery? You depend upon existing cemeteries to create green burial for you. But they then have to have profound insight and practice, and they’re also governed by legislations that determine how deep you need to bury bodies.Tthe most excellent green burial happens in shallow grave not in deep graves with four feet of Earth. Microbial activity just doesn’t happen as efficiently and effectively at that depth. So when that call regulated, it becomes hard to look at anything else in a substantive way.
Yvonne Kjorlien: We get locked into our own perspectives.
Patrick Church: Yeah.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Interesting.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Because really what this all boils down to is just that the pragmatics of it that we need to dispose of this body.
Patrick Church: [ALKALINE HYDROLYSIS]Yeah, and all the regulations around, so for example, I believe Saskatchewan has an alkaline hydrolysis aquamation, where the body is cremated through waters and lyes. And there are the province of Ontario I believe has put a stop to further development. So two came in and started and then the province sort of we haven’t done enough Environmental Research and totally stopped. Communities have gone into big fights over crematoriums coming into their spaces, even though municipalities have zoning for crematoriums to operate and they operate relatively efficiently without any affluent or odor or anything that people are scared of when they think about being next to a crematorium. Yet communities have thrown up roadblocks to the establishment of crematoriums within zoning. So simple body disposal because that’s what it is, very ill and cremation are two primary means of it are hard to manage and negotiate around.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Righ. I find that very interesting. So I understand cremation. It uses a lot of energy to burn a body, but then there’s also the burn off. And it’s a lot of carbon and stuff putting into the atmosphere. But at the same time burial usually involves formaldehyde and all those lovely embalming chemicals which can then leach into the soil and the environment.
Patrick Church: [FORMALDEHYDE AND EMBALMING]That is very true. Now formaldehyde itself is, it’s isn’t that, none of embalming chemicals or the greatest chemicals to be exposing ourselves to at the end of the day. But they are purposeful. They do have a purpose. You think about folks who need to be transported overseas. Lots of factors can affect the need for them. Our bodies bring lots of challenges to being able to be well for services. Time and our ability to ensure good holding of bodies. Does every body have to be embalmed? Probably not, that is in embalmed, but it is a tradition that lots of folks follow.
Yvonne Kjorlien: So with all these new, I guess, options available now — green burial and, composting –where do you see funeral services, and maybe even the continued disconnection with faith and faith-based practices and rituals, where do you see funeral services in the next 10 to 20 years?
Patrick Church: Oh, to have a magic ball, right? To have a looking glass.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Right. They’ve done an amazing job over, even just 50, 60, 100 years of adapting to what people want, to their needs.
Patrick Church: The big adaptation that really came at the industry was cremation. That really forced the re-figure its relationship to itself somewhat. So you have, traditionally, when you do a burial, you have caskets, and you have funeral coaches, you have all these equipments that you have to engage with, you have all these revenue streams that you have coming to you. When you have cremation taking over, you lose those revenue streams. And so the industry had to begin compensating — not that the funeral industry is all about money — we’re gonna talk a little bit about it beyond that — but you had to compensate for lost revenue. And so you have unfortunate pieces arise where people would sell hard to families. You have, and would try and upsell on cremation containers because we have to put bodies into something when we cremate them. We have to be able to move them into the confined space of a cremation chamber, so they have to be in something. Every jurisdiction broadly defines it as rigid, combustible, and enclosed. So you have very at minimum cardboard, but cardboard doesn’t work for everyone because it’s not rigid for certain bodies. And so let’s move away from cardboard into your particle boards. And then you would have people who would push more elaborate containers and try and sell more elaborate containers on a regular basis. And so you got a disingenuous feeling created somewhat towards the industry, probably fairly so. People have a bad impression, I think, through for many years of the industry and relationship to being sales focused. And I think that was in terms of a compensation for those shifting lost revenues when it came to came to cremation.
Now we are also seeing though a rise celebration of life services. That are more focused simply on visitation, sort of reception pieces, and not focused on sitting in a chapel, sitting focused at a podium, or focused at a table with an urn. Not that those pieces aren’t part of those celebrations. Not that the deceased isn’t brought into those celebrations that urns our present. But the focus is for lots of folks shifting away from that that need to be in a chapel, need to be in that space.
Patrick Church: So I think that is going to be an ongoing trend, that will probably bring more challenges to the industry. Because at the same time is that rises, do you need the funeral home anymore? Just like with cremation, you don’t need the funeral home, you can take that wherever you want to take it and do whatever you need to do with it. The same when you do those celebrations of life and not those chapel services. You don’t need that space to be able to sit anymore. Well, maybe the funeral home has a reception space we can use that, but lots of places have reception spaces that you can bring stuff in and put things around for people to look at, that you can play videos, that you can pause it some point and offer a toast or a few words. Legions. Think of small town Legions. Think of bars, right? Depending upon the type of people. Golf courses, golf clubs. So there’s all these places where funeral services shift to when you don’t have to have that focused chapel space, and you just want to be doing a celebration of life party. Go to a funeral and ask people about what they want.
I’m in the industry. So I hear it all the time about what people want. But the people who are most vocal about what they want, don’t want funerals.
Yvonne Kjorlien: What is it about the funeral that they don’t want? Is that the faith? Is it that the somberness? Is the chapel? What is it about the funeral they don’t want?
Patrick Church: I think it’s a little bit of all of those pieces, right? So, for some people there is the drive away from seeing the deceased and being with the body is about experiences of seeing someone “put together” poorly, right? Their cosmetic work was wrong, their hair was wrong, things weren’t done well, and so they have just a poor last moment experience with this person. So those are still common stories. There is that peace.
There is I think the somber, the solemnness of the chapel, I think there is probably underlying it. Sometimes the costing of it all in people’s minds. Because the generation that we’re now largely serving is we’re at the Baby Boomers. Right? We’re just at the end of those who were born before World War Two, so at we’re people who were born in the thirties late 30s 40s early 40s, and we’re coming into the Baby Boomers who just the priorities of that don’t really mesh that well for them, I suppose. And I think it’s a little bit of all those pieces you identified.
Yvonne Kjorlien: All right, so it’ll be up to the funeral industry to see how they’re going to continue to adapt to the rising cost of funerals to, I guess, the increased demand of walking away from the somberness, from faith, from chapels, but into what, but that’s I guess the question that’s going to be up to the industry to figure out.
Patrick Church: So I think there’s a whole bunch of positive pieces and that is the industry has learned how to create ritual and offer meaningful ritual to families more than they probably ever have. Offering fantastic and creative types of services to really help be with families. Because we’re starting something very profound when we go through a service. People are on a long journey after someone dies. That grief journey is not quick. It’s not to be underestimated. It’s not to be thought of lightly. It is and — when I say with families, I can’t tell you and emphasize how precious that opportunity is because I get to hear their story about their loved one, the loss of their loved one. I get to be one of the first people who hear it. And it’s a story they’re going to craft over months and years. That story is going to change and shift with grief, but I get to be one of the first people who gets to hear that. And so the ability to, I think, be present to that sort of integral relationship with families has never been, I think, as well appreciated. The relationship that we have to grief work, is I think wholly remarkable at this point. Funeral homes are doing fantastic work with their communities, with their families in that post-loss period and people are taking much advantage of that.
I’ve never understood it, but I suppose it is correct, we had a homeless man the other day at the funeral home, and he just wanted to charge his phone. And so he’s having a coffee and charging his phone. Then he asked for a ride downtown or money for a ride. And so I said, “I have a vehicle. Why don’t I give you a ride?” And as we were on the journey, he asked me the question about my relationship with my death, like, how am I, what is my thoughts around my own mortality. And I’ve never really understood that we’re a death denying culture or if I really understand what that means. But I think the work we are doing is probably reflected in the fact that people have a difficult time with loss, so we must be in some way somewhat of death-defying culture. Because funeral homes that are doing the work with grief and outreach within their communities, there is just such fantastic need for it. People are really taking them up on that work, which is excellent. And funeral homes are really taking up that clarion cry.
There’s other pieces, I think, that are great and that is going to show, I think, profound development and that is probably as we do that work, we have a shift within the culture of, we have death doulas, we have entire pre-death caregiving community that just needs support and I think the profession is learning to appreciate and reach out to those communities and those folks who really are in, I don’t want to say crisis mode, but I would think are in overwork mode for sure. So the industry is really looking at needs of the community in very broad ways that sort of go outside of those traditional pieces that when we think about funeral industry we think about, I have to get cemetery plot, I have to be cremated, I need an urn, I need a casket, right? I mean I need to get right that those are pieces of it, but there’s much more integral pieces. before us. And so I think the industry is moving well in that direction to be with families and to be with the community on those fronts and to help lead where those places need.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Right, absolutely.
Patrick Church: Is that affecting ultimately funeral service and those pieces that are more imperative to your podcasting conversation about the deceased? I’m not sure that it is, but I don’t think in 10 years I’m going to see green burial shift around me. I would think that there’s lots of great opportunities for it. But I think it’s overcoming legislation. It’s overcoming lots of pieces and I really like to see it. Now it’s growing I think south of the border and it’s growing in communities on the west coast, and there’s some interesting changes, but I unfortunately don’t think they’re coming soon enough. It may take a more virulent pandemic to change those body engagement policies somewhat. I don’t know.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Maybe we’ll just have to see what happens. There’s just too much going on at the moment. Time has flown, Patrick. Thank you for sharing your history, your background, how you got into funeral services, the history of funeral services, and also what’s going on and how things may change. Thank you for coming on and speaking about all of that.
Patrick Church: No, not at all. Thank you for having me, Yvonne.
Transcribed by Google and Otter.ai
Ingrid Muhlig is the manager of DNA operations at the National Centre for Missing Persons and Unidentified Remains (NCMPUR) in Canada. The National Missing Persons DNA Program was launched in 2018 and is delivered by two existing programs within the RCMP. The National Centre for Missing Persons and Unidentified Remains (NCMPUR) and the National DNA Data Bank (NDDB) were created to help identify missing and unidentified persons through DNA profiling.
In this episode we talk about:
Kudos to everyone involved in the background who make this program possible and successful. Ingrid would like to thank the police investigators, everyone at NCMPUR, and the NDDB Missing Person Unit (MPU).
More information about some items mentioned in the interview can be found here:
****
Notes from the start
Scavenging Study: new videos are up! They are here: https://yvonnekjorlien.com/scavenging-study/
The Gentle Rebel Podcast: https://www.andymort.com/62-unconventional-multipotentialite-yvonne-kjorlien/
Get my first novel Memoirs of a Reluctant Archaeologist here: https://books2read.com/u/38PrYL
Sasha Reid and the Midnight Order: https://www.hulu.com/series/sasha-reid-and-the-midnight-order-b07966eb-4e06-4383-a31f-5775fa4ec030
Support the podcast and my research and Buy Me A Coffee or Patreon. Your contributions will go toward my research, webhosting, and my time on this podcast. Want to find out more about my research? Check out the Scavenging Study.
Contact me through [email protected] or through my contact form. Follow me on Facebook at The Reluctant Archaeologist, or through Instagram @yvonnekjorlien
Do you have a suggestion for a topic on the Scattered podcast?
Do you have a question about working with human remains?
Drop me a note at [email protected]
Transcript
Yvonne Kjorlien: So, Ingrid, I’m gonna get you to introduce yourself because you know you best. And then you can say your last name for me too, so I won’t mispronounce it.
Ingrid Muhlig: So, my name is Ingrid Muhlig and I’m the manager of DNA operations for the National Center of Missing Persons and Unidentified Remains, so NCMPUR. You know the RCMP, we like our acronyms so it’s that NCMPUR. I will try my hardest not to fall back into all the acronyms but, by all means, stop me asked me what it is. If I do say one.
Yvonne Kjorlien: And you do you what? That’s exactly what I thought when I was writing up the little sort of outline of what we could talk about — like, is what I’m talking about what I think I’m talking about because there’s a lot of acronyms going on.
Ingrid Muhlig: Yup, yup.
Yvonne Kjorlien: All right. Tell me a little bit about your role. You’re a manager of a big unit, it sounds like.
Ingrid Muhlig: It’s actually a very small unit. National Centre for Missing Persons and Unidentified Remains is actually a unit of approximately 20 people. But those of us that are responsible for the National Missing Persons DNA Program — there’s two of us, that I’m the manager, I have and also a data, our DNA analyst who does the authorizing of DNA with, and she will speak with the investigators and go over the files make recommendations — so our side of the house, it’s National Missing Persons DNA program is actually, we’re partnered with the NDDB to steward this program.
Yvonne Kjorlien: NDDB. All right.
Ingrid Muhlig: National DNA Databank.
Yvonne Kjorlien: All right.
Ingrid Muhlig: Yeah, and so we take care of mostly the administrative items: logging the information about the case, making recommendations to the investigator, finding out what’s available in regards to DNA, and getting an idea about the case to make those recommendations. And then the NDDB accepts the submissions that we’ve authorized, and they’ll process them and they do the science stuff of processing the DNA and reviewing it, uploading it to CODIS, and then, if associations occur, writing those reports, those reports come back to NCMPUR, and we’ll release into the investigators. Also to the legislation, the legislation that governs how we operate is under DNA Identification Act. And the DNA Identification Act also states that there has to be periodic reviews. So we really, on the NCMPUR side, we manage the life cycle of that DNA profile.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Okay, so if you could take me back a step.
Ingrid Muhlig: Sure.
Yvonne Kjorlien: In just my little preliminary, my own little investigation of websites —
because that’s called research these days — it sounds like the DNA program is very new. It just started in 2018.
Ingrid Muhlig: right
Yvonne Kjorlien: And it’s part of the overall missing persons and unidentified remains unit?
Ingrid Muhlig: It’s a program within the National Center, that it’s one of the services we provide to investigators, medical examiners or coroner’s office. So the National Center for Missing Persons and Unidentified Remains is a national program and it provides services to investigators, medical examiners, Corners across Canada. So we’re really an assist and we assist with different services and one of those being the DNA program.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Got it. Okay. Now, from that perspective, just because I don’t know who’s listening out there and what they know, and it’s something that I learned and in talking to when your colleagues from the Missing Persons and Unidentified Remains group, that things just don’t happen. Like investigators find some remains, efforts are made to identify them and they are, despite efforts, they are then classified as Unidentified. So that doesn’t just magically appear in your database. There is a process that the medical examiner or the coroner has to go through to then log that in the National Database, correct?
Ingrid Muhlig: Right. So typically when remains are located, they’re immediately put into CPIC and that – all police agencies across at Canada have access to it, they have the ability to search against it too, so if they have a missing person and want to search for potential remains, they have that capability within CPIC.
What happens with our Center and our database — we call it MCMPUR, which is Missing Children, Persons and Unidentified Remains — I know you’ve spoken to Kevin about this database — what happens is when those investigators the remains into CPIC, it automatically feeds any body entries or any missing persons directly to our database.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Okay!
Ingrid Muhlig: Then our database has some algorithms, which it starts doing comparisons of whatever has been entered into what’s already in that database and it continues to do comparisons to anything new that’s added.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Okay. But the search in CPIC does have to be done.
Ingrid Muhlig: The entry into CPIC does have to be done.
Yvonne Kjorlien: The entry does.
Ingrid Muhlig: And that is a requirement to participate in the DNA program. And that’s best practices that we preach to all police agencies, medical examiners, corner’s offices is that you need to enter your unidentified remains into this database.
Yvonne Kjorlien: There’s many little steps that many people have to perform to kind of log that entry in get it recognized on the national level.
Ingrid Muhlig: Right. And it goes the same way for missing persons. We want the missing persons in right away. And our mandate is to improve these investigations. So we know, when someone goes missing, the investigator might go and quickly put in the pertinent information that he has at that time.
But, as the missing person, as the days go by and we realize this is more of a long term missing person, our recommendations is always to the investigator go back and make a fullsome entry into that database, give us as much information as we can. So that automated searching and taking place in the background and they don’t even see it. And it can provide some clues or some information, investigative leads.
Yvonne Kjorlien: All right. So with that kind of in mind, since the DNA program, or the piece of it is fairly new – 2018 — what was going on before that kind of led to the development of the DNA program?
Ingrid Muhlig: So in 2000, you had the creation of the crime scene index in the convicted offenders index. And, I know at that time, we also had these humanitarian indices on the table that they wanted to bring forward along with those two indices, but there was a lot of privacy concerns and we had to do a lot of privacy impact assessments. So the best way to move forward was to drop the humanitarian indices and move forward with those criminal ones because that was very important to get moving on those ones. And then we brought in the humanitarian ones later, once they pass those privacy impact assessments.
Yvonne Kjorlien: And what do you mean by humanitarian? Let’s set up a definition on that.
Ingrid Muhlig: So, right so what’s happened is that typically, our, whatever’s going into our indices — so you have the missing person index, you have the relative of a missing person index, and you have the human remains index. So we consider those three to be humanitarian. What’s being uploaded is cases that are non-criminal.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Got it.
Ingrid Muhlig: And then…although the missing persons, the human remains indices do get compared to the criminal ones, by law, we cannot compare the relative one against the criminal indices. So it stays on that humanitarian house and it is never compared to any criminal indices.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Fabulous, so how… Okay, so we’ve kind of touched on how the data are gathered — I mean for the criminal or for the missing and the unidentified — but there are other ways that data can be gathered, correct? Depending on which indices you’re looking at.
Ingrid Muhlig: So I’m not sure if I know what you’re asking.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Investigators, coroners, and medical examiners can put in an entry in CODIS for a missing person or unidentified remains. But then there’s also other humanitarian…
Ingrid Muhlig: So there’s one called a voluntary donor index.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Ah, yes.
Ingrid Muhlig: And it kind of sits on the fence between the two because it has to be in relation to a criminal file or it has to be in relation to a missing person file. When it’s in relation to a missing person file, that submission comes to us to handle. And typically it’s really what’s happened. It’s typically family that’s pulled the information from maybe the national DNA databank website. And what we tend to do is we tried to steer them to make an entry into the relative of missing person index. Because when you put a submission into that voluntary donor index you have criminal Jeopardy now. You’re telling the RCMP that they can go ahead and search against the criminal indices.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Oh! Okay.
Ingrid Muhlig: So we’ll steer them to the relative of missing person index, if that’s the proper index for them to be in, and that way they’ll never be compared against those criminal indices.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Okay. That’s important to know.
Ingrid Muhlig: Yeah. We’ve had a few submissions and we’re like, no that’s not where you want to be. You want to be over here.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah. Yeah. All right. I’m glad I asked that then. Okay. The public can make a submission. I mean to the right place. You guide them there.
Ingrid Muhlig: Right.
Yvonne Kjorlien: If they have a missing persons that they’re worried about.
Ingrid Muhlig: The reality is we don’t deal with the public…
Yvonne Kjorlien: Okay.
Ingrid Muhlig: Because there has to be a missing persons investigation. The public should always go to the investigator of the file and then, if they’re not sure about it, they can contact us, and we’ll guide them through making that submission.
Some of these small detachments, they may handle a missing person case once in a blue moon, right? And then, typically, larger detachments, like I’m thinking of Toronto Police Service or Niagara Regional, they have actual missing person units, right? Where, that their investigators, that’s all they do. We’re very well versed with them and they’re very well versed with our procedures. So that’s the difference. It’s just, you know, the population areas and the smaller population areas might not know about this. And, although we deal with investigators, it’s something the public should be aware of that this is a service available, right?
The DNA program, also too the NCMPUR that manages Canada is missing website and you can get more information about different services from that Canada’s missing website. And we also published the missing persons or unidentified remains in hopes of receiving tips from the public on the different cases. That’s the public component to our unit and the public can… there’s different addresses: you can go to Crime Stoppers, you can go right to the police and jurisdiction, or you can come to us and report information, that’s that Canada’s missing web email address.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Right. Yeah, it’s nice to be aware of these Service because there’s nothing like starting a service with all these good intentions and then nobody knowing about it.
Ingrid Muhlig: Right
Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, that’s yeah, you don’t want that. No.
Ingrid Muhlig: Right No. Doesn’t look good.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Exactly, right. Have you seen, on that note, do you know who’s using it? Has there been in an increase over the years? I’m guessing during COVID, there was probably a bit of a slump in who used it. I mean, I don’t know.
Ingrid Muhlig: You know what? During COVID, investigators were working back at the office and had seemed, it appeared like they had more time. So they start pulling out these historical missing persons and started going through them. So actually during COVID we had a bit of an uptick of historical ones because the investigators had the time to start pulling out these different investigations.
And it’s funny. Investigators, police investigators, are fickle bunch. They want to see value for the effort they’re putting into and, by all means, I agree with them. If there’s no value. Why are we doing this? Question why we’re doing this, right?
Yvonne Kjorlien: Right. Exactly.
Ingrid Muhlig: I knew when I started, if we start showing them the success and the associations, that they’ll start being more active within the program and definitely we’ve seen that. For our business model, we were expecting one to two cold hits a year and to be now five years in and we’re at 90 putative identifications that have been released. I think we’ve been very successful.
Yvonne Kjorlien: That’s pretty awesome.
Ingrid Muhlig: Yeah, for such a junior program, we are pleased with our success so far.
Yvonne Kjorlien: So I’m wondering if you can talk maybe, I’m guessing there’s a bit of a backlog because there’s this database or all this information, entries for missing persons and unidentified remains — so there is already that in place when this new unit came in 2018….
Ingrid Muhlig: Right. I think where you’re going is these historical ones, right?
Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, were you able to tackle some of that?
Ingrid Muhlig: We try and we thought it was going to be a lot easier than it was. And it ended up being actually quite difficult. But what happened was we knew there were already missing person files that had already profiles existing for them because they had done them at the provincial level for them. And we’re kind of like, okay, let’s, we gathered all that information before the, the database came into operation and then when we became operational, we started calling for them. But the issue we ran into is there is a specific consent form for the NMPDP, the National Missing Persons DNA Program. So the investigators had to go back, find the family that would been sampled, get them the complete these forms so they could be submitted to National. And that’s what I always say to the public also, is, I’m like, you may have given your DNA at one point, but if you don’t remember signing this consent form, it’s probably not at National. So another reason to go back to the investigator of the file and say, I would like my DNA put up at the national level.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, that consent. That’s a key piece.
Ingrid Muhlig: It’s huge. It’s Canada. We’re very protective of our personal information and nothing was going to be uploaded unless that specific consent form had been completed. So, you run into hiccups too or some of these cases are fairly old. So the people may have passed on, so then we have to go back to legal and what steps can we take can, we still accept it based on what they previously signed and so, yeah, there’s been a lot of learning curves for the program.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah. Yeah, sometimes, I can imagine it could be really tough and frustrating but at the same time, the spirit of why that is in place and how important it is.
Ingrid Muhlig: And it has to be respected, right? It did cause a lot of work. And even in the creation of the database, we looked at, hey, do we only accept profiles, or do we take samples? And then at one point it was just profiles, and then it got changed and we’re like, no, we’ll accept both actually, profiles or samples, knowing that not every province had the money to create profiles out of these DNA samples, right? So let’s make it accessible to all provinces and territories. And now we’re kinda realizing that existing profiles? Not great because our technology is better now and we’re able to do better profiles. And now we’re going, not only do we do those STR profiles. We’re doing YSTR profiles. We’re doing mitochondrial. So we actually need that sample to be able to do that further processing if necessary, right? So, yeah, the message has changed over the years. We’re kind of like, okay, samples. Give a samples.
Yvonne Kjorlien: I’m glad it only took you five years to figure that one out. Yeah, that’s just it. Technology is improved vastly in 20 years and in five years, it’s changed. And yeah, are we gonna keep up with that?
Ingrid Muhlig: Yeah. That’s it. That’s keeping up with it and keeping in our lane too. So.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah that – mmm.
I know that you gave a presentation for the Canadian Association of Biological Anthropologists in October and I missed your presentation. You know, there’s only one flight…
Ingrid Muhlig: They put me very last or second last.
Yvonne Kjorlien: It was on the Saturday. That’s all I know. There’s only one flight per day from Winnipeg to Calgary and it was during your presentation. So that was it. I had to be on it, so. Are there any tidbits in that presentation that you can share here? Take home messages?
Ingrid Muhlig: You know what? My goal there was to kind of intrigue those who were coming into this field because that’s who we work with, forensic anthropologists throughout Canada, right? With the unidentified remains. And talking to the coroners or talking to different people, it’s interesting how, on the surface they kind of know about us, but they don’t really know us in depth, right? So it was kind of capturing their interest and getting out there again: what the program does and how it can be used, right? Even like, for forensic anthropologists, a lot of times when remains are found they’re incomplete. With the database what’s nice is we can retain that profile. We know it’s been identified. But now we’re just retaining and comparing it to all other human remains that come in so we can potentially identify further remains for that incomplete’s unidentified — well, now they’re identified — remains. So that’s one of the nice things about it because when you get into arms, if you get an arm bone, yeah, at least if you have a skull or a mandible, you have some teeth, you might be able to get a dental from it. But yeah when you’re dealing with a single bone, it’s pretty hard to make that connection between the cases.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Or even a fragment of. You can tell it’s human. It’s definitely not animal. But, from there, where do you go?
Ingrid Muhlig: Right, right. And we’re seeing more cases of burned bones too. And that’s where mitochondrial does come into play. Although it’s not as descriptor, not as discriminative as nuclear, at least gives us the capability of dealing with degraded remains, so..
Yvonne Kjorlien: I’m guessing then, at least with mitochondrial, you can exclude.
Ingrid Muhlig: Right. YSTR and mitochondrial is great for excluding.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Right.
Ingrid Muhlig: when you cannot exclude, it tells you it’s that family, right? But it can’t tell you within the family tree exactly where they are. So you now need that additional metadata to come in and help support that identification.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Right. But, at least then, you’ve got somewhat of a direction then, which is always helpful.
Ingrid Muhlig: Yes. For sure.
Yvonne Kjorlien: You did mention cost. And, again, I don’t know who might be listening to this and everybody who has watched CSI, they think that DNA can just be… you know, it’s five dollars, you can get it on-demand, and you know, easy peasy, carry on. Let’s dispel some of that myth, shall we?
Ingrid Muhlig: I don’t know our costs unfortunately because I’m not on that side of the house. I do know we did go through another lab, a private lab, for some profiling. I think the STR was 450 or 500 dollars.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Okay, so that’s much cheaper than it was several years ago. It was in the thousands and it could take months, if not years.
Ingrid Muhlig: Yeah, so thousands you’re looking at now or for the genetic genealogy SNP [single nucleotide polymorphism] profiles. So YSTR, I think it was about 400 or 450, so to get it like a STR/YSTR profile. I think it cost us $950 from a private lab.
Yvonne Kjorlien: And what’s turnaround time because that would probably be non-priority, correct?
Ingrid Muhlig: No, that was a quick turnaround and I think ours, probably is for us to do is a bit cheaper because we do it on batches. Where they’re doing just that one case, right? So I would assume that our cost is a bit lower than that. Yeah, and that’s the problem too. It’s humanitarian. We don’t do priority but I can bump things up the queue, when necessary, but our turnaround time, like we say 30 to 60 days. 30 days, we aim for 30. Sixty days, usually it happens if the bones are degraded and we need to process it more than once.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah. Yeah, that’s just because it is a destructive technique. Yeah.
Ingrid Muhlig: I had one case where mom had provided us the baby teeth for her missing son. And, you know, I’m a mom. I know how heart-wrenching it is to have to give up something that you’ve saved like that, right? So we were so happy because the lab was actually able to get a profile from the dried blood that was on the tooth. So we didn’t have to destroy the tooth. So you have these little cheer moments here like yes.
Yvonne Kjorlien: The technology has just come so far.
Ingrid Muhlig: Yeah. It’s crazy.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Okay, so you mentioned that you’ve 90 people identified in the five years.
Ingrid Muhlig: Right. So we provided 90, we tell we call them putative identification reports because in the end it’s the coroner and the medical examiner that it looks at everything, between the information on the file and the DNA and the breakdown of the DNA and they’re the ones who sign off on the identification. So yeah, we’ve provided 90. We’ve had a few international ones.
You might have read recently Toronto Police Service had a lady who had been pulled out of Lake Ontario in 2017 and they tried every avenue to identify her: media releases and everything. And they resorted to genetic genealogy. And it led them back to Switzerland. So then Toronto came to us and we’re like, we think she might be from Switzerland. So we were able to take the profile that we had in our databank and go through Interpol and have it searched against the Switzerland database and sure enough. It identified someone who went missing from Switzerland.
Yvonne Kjorlien: That’s amazing.
Ingrid Muhlig: And you think of it like I know I deal with the Yukon a lot and that’s majority of their people they have up there. There is a lot of tourists coming through, right? Niagara, too. So yeah, so we have these areas where they’re just… and we share a border with the US. So there’s a lot of times we want to do that search on the US side too. So we have that capability, which is nice.
Yvonne Kjorlien: I just love that, you know what? sometimes globalization works.
Ingrid Muhlig: Right. Yeah. Uh-huh.
Yvonne Kjorlien: You can actually call somebody up and say, “So, hey, I’ve got this missing, this person, unidentified person and we’ve got the profile. Can I ship you the profile and you guys take a look over there?”
Ingrid Muhlig: Can you check it out? Let us know?
Yvonne Kjorlien: Sometimes it works. All right, where do you see this going forward? You’ve already mentioned how far you’ve already come in five years and the technology has changed quantumly in with 20, 30 years. Where do you see this going in the next five?
Ingrid Muhlig: The next five? You know what’s hot right now and what’s really picking up, is these international searches.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Ah!
Ingrid Muhlig: I’m getting a lot more requests for people who went missing internationally. So it’s finding the best way to move forward with those I would say.
Yvonne Kjorlien: So, Canadian that have gone missing while they’re traveling?
Ingrid Muhlig: Yeah, the traveling or maybe it is a family member the family, may be like let’s say in England, but their son has come to school here, right? And now they can’t locate their son and he’s gone missing. Interpol has started an international database called I-Familia. And so it kind of works at the same concept as ours nationally but at the international level. It’s huge in Europe. Because those countries, people can pass through multiple countries within one day and there’s not really a tracking system for that, right? So the European countries will submit to I-Familia and then that way they know that’s being searched against all other cases within their area, right? So that’s something we need to look at and see what’s the best way of utilizing that database.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Right. Huh.
Ingrid Muhlig: So you never know when something’s missing, you use whatever is at your fingertips to try to locate the missing items. So I don’t think missing persons is any different.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Ah, yeah, that’s just it like we’ve got the technology and we just got to use it and make it work for us. Yeah.
Ingrid Muhlig: Yes, for sure.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, and I think that’s just it: that you don’t know what you don’t know. So it’s difficult, to, I guess, ask for specific help if you don’t know what that specific help is and that’s part of the reason why I wanted to talk to you about this is because I didn’t even know that there was this DNA data bank program going on, I knew about the missing and unidentified remains, but I didn’t know about this other part of it. And, like I said, sometimes you just don’t know what you don’t know.
Ingrid Muhlig: Right or have to experience it to kind of get away with kind of cultural thinking. And we did have some provinces where the police officers were like, if the person went missing here, we’re going to find them here. And, I’m like, challenge taken!
So I’m gonna when I get that inter provincial link happened then, yeah for sure, that said that’s a win for me in the sense that I could say this is why you need to come National. Don’t stop at the provincial level. You need to move on, to bring it up to National.
Yvonne Kjorlien: That’s just it. Yeah, you never know. The unexpected can happen.
Ingrid Muhlig: I see it as a safety net. It’s just an additional safety net that’s in place and can catch these things, right?
Yvonne Kjorlien: Alright, so is there anything that we haven’t covered that you want to touch on?
Ingrid Muhlig: I think our messaging to the public, when I’m speaking the public, is we really need the two sides of the stories to make that link. We need the missing persons and we need the unidentified remains story and we get the unidentified remains from investigators and medical examiners, coroners throughout Canada. But we see that we’re not always getting that missing person report and we’re really seeing that now with IGG in the sense that — are investigative genetic genealogy in the sense that — the ones that I know of that I have been following and they’ve been identified they were never reported missing.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Oh, wow.
Ingrid Muhlig: Yeah, so that really needs to be the take-home is that, if you have a loved one who you haven’t seen, who you can’t get a hold of, please make a report to the police of jurisdiction and get them up into the database.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Okay. Good to know.
Ingrid Muhlig: Because I know to-date, we’ve always run with about 700 unidentified remains. 700 we need to identify. There’s got to be some people who missing …
Yvonne Kjorlien: There’s got to be some people missing. Yeah.
Ingrid Muhlig: …that need to be reported so we can make those links to these unidentified.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Right. Yeah, it’s too bad that those unidentified remains, you don’t have any data on whether there’s scavenged or not because I would really like that information. That’s the information I want to know.
Ingrid Muhlig: Yeah, I don’t and unfortunately it’s not something we go into ‘cause that’s more, investigator side of the house.
Yvonne Kjorlien: I know. I’m gonna keep asking for it though because it’s my wish.
Ingrid Muhlig: If it’s items that we see that the investigators need to know, it’s definitely something we’ll look into but, yeah.
Yvonne Kjorlien: It is what it is Ingrid. I understand. We can’t all have everything.
Ingrid Muhlig: No, no. And It’s funny because, until I talk to you I really haven’t talked to anyone who’s looked at the scavenging point of it. Other than, I know, because I’ve had a few cases where dogs are bringing home bones from the woods and bring them home to their dog parents and then they’re calling police about it, which is to me it totally different. I’m here in Ottawa. We’d never even think of that right but my brother-in-law who lives out in BC. he’s got three dogs who just go into the woods disappear for half a day and then come back with these bones and I’m looking at them and I’m like are you sure none of these are human? That’s where my mind goes which is terrible looking at me going. No, they’re animals.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Okay, just so we’re sure. Hey, I hear ya. That would be my first question. You’ve got to check them out.
Ingrid Muhlig: Yes. Yeah, yeah, but yeah, it’s… Canada’s so vast and there’s so many different things that can happen. It’s incredible. Even the waterways, I know, I’ve heard a lot of Red River or Niagara and just doing that check of the waterways to see if any remains have come to surface. So we’ve got a lot of water here in Canada, and that’s where a lot of people can go missing for sure.
Yvonne Kjorlien: And people can go missing in those remote contexts. It doesn’t have to be criminal. People can get snowed in, and they’ll leave their vehicle and they’ll just get caught out and die of exhaustion. Or exposure, yeah.
Ingrid Muhlig: Exposure. Yeah, a lot of scenarios.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, a lot of scenarios in this very big country with a lot of remote areas.
All right, thank you very much for this wonderful conversation. I’m just so tickled that we finally had a chance to connect and talk about this. Yeah.
Ingrid Muhlig: It was great. Thank you for coming forward, and I’m glad we were able to chat about it. Like I say, it’s a service for the people of Canada. And if this is your situation, by all means, speak to the investigator of your files and get that story in so we can start working on making some possible connections.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Yes, right. Everybody should know about this service.
Transcribed by Google.
Dr. Brad Clark teaches journalism at Mount Royal University in Calgary and his research focuses on media representations of marginalized groups. Brad got into teaching after years of experience as a journalist at newspapers and the CBC, where he covered major stories but wanted more variety. I was interested in why journalists ask academics for comments on scenarios in which they are not involved, and Brad provided some great insights.
In this episode we talk about:
You can find more information about Brad at his webpage here: https://www.mtroyal.ca/ProgramsCourses/FacultiesSchoolsCentres/Communications/FacultyStaff/Clark_Brad.htm
More information about some items mentioned in the interview can be found here:
Thank you to the Community Podcast Initiative at Mount Royal University for letting us use the space to record this episode!
****
Support the podcast and my research and Buy Me A Coffee. Your contributions will go toward my research, webhosting, and my time. Want to find out more about my research? Check out the Scavenging Study.
Contact me through [email protected] or through my contact form. Follow me on Facebook at The Reluctant Archaeologist, or through Instagram @yvonnekjorlien
Do you have a suggestion for a topic on the Scattered podcast?
Do you have a question about working with human remains?
Drop Yvonne a line at [email protected]
Transcript
Yvonne Kjorlien: All right, so tell us who you are and where you’re at. So I’m Brad Clark, I teach in the journalism in broadcast media studies programs at Mount Royal University here in Calgary. And
Brad Clark: My research and my interests in the field really focused around ethics and representations of equity deserving groups. And that’s, that’s what really, that’s really my jam, I, I really enjoy learning about how media can improve the way they do things. I like the way ethics are evolving and seeing how we’re becoming, I think, a little more sensitive to different aspects of our storytelling related to sources related to audience. And that’s, that’s what keeps me getting up every morning and coming into work. Wow.
Yvonne Kjorlien: That’s a ball of wax and a half. How did you get to where you are now? Because I understand you worked at the CBC for a while. Yeah. Yeah. So kind of take us on your, you know, your journey, sure to how you got from I don’t know, being a journalist out in the field. Yeah, doing that glamorous job, because obviously, you know, it is
where you are now?
Brad Clark: Well, I can remember even being in a class and learning about journalism and thinking that this would be fun to teach someday. And, and that might have been like, around 1985, I got my first job as a as a journalist, as a reporter with The St. Albert Gazette, just north of Edmonton in 1986. And, and then, in 1980, and I went back to do a master’s I was I was always quite interested in in, I think, just just understanding journalism at a deeper level. And so going, going back and doing a master’s felt pretty natural. So I did that at the University of Cardiff in Wales. And that was a really interesting place to do that. I think the media then and now in Europe are a lot more outward looking, I find North American media quite inward looking. And there was there was, there’s lots of media there to take in. And so and then I came back, and I worked for CBC for a number of years, and I got to do a lot of really interesting work. I was a national reporter, I got to cover a lot of big stories, I got to do a fair bit of traveling. And, but I was starting to get to a place where I was always excited about telling stories, but more and more, it was just the big stories, not the you know, Brad, the Bank of Canada’s announcing a new interest rate today, we want you to cover the bond that is exciting.
Yvonne Kjorlien: If you hold a mortgage, that’s exciting news.
Brad Clark: Well, in those days, the Bank of Canada was holding interest rates pretty steady, there are a lot of a lot of on air live on air reports of nothing changed today. Which is never a great story arc for any kind of story, let alone a new story.
So I still kind of had this sideways glance at the corner of my eye for an opportunity to teach in and I saw a posting come up at Mount Royal. And, and so I applied in I got here and and I started teaching in right away, I became really keen and trying to find the vocabulary to talk about ethics and good journalism and good reporting. And part of that, for me, was starting to think more and more about accuracy. And who are we hearing from who whose voices are telling the stories? And it started to occur to me more and more that we were telling lots of stories about people from marginalized groups without a lot of input from them. And I can remember really kind of stumbling through trying to explain this to students and how, what strategies were to do it better. And eventually I, as Mount Royal just became a university decided to go back to school again, and do a doctorate. And so I made that my the focus of my doctoral research.
And so my dissertation was on national television news representations of racialized and indigenous peoples and, and that really kind of set me up for the work I’ve done in the last 10 years since then. So that’s kind of how I’ve, I’ve got to where I am now.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Wow, fabulous. So, before we get any further, I wanted to explain why I’ve invited you onto a podcast about dead people. And, for me, it seems obvious, but you know, for a listener, maybe it’s not. So when I worked at the Pickton farm investigation, we had it was high profile, there was a lot of media attention. And, you know, a lot of us had journalists come up to us after we left the premises, and they wouldn’t even introduce themselves. And it was very abrupt, very direct, and I found it a little bit traumatic event. But on top of that, even though I wasn’t reading any of the media and either newspapers or watching the media on the investigation, I did hear that there were people, academics, that were commenting on the investigation that weren’t involved in the investigation. And I found that very interesting. And I didn’t quite understand why that happened. And so part of me inviting you, Brad, to the podcast is just to discuss some of that is why might an academic feel it’s okay to comment about something that they are not involved in. And, universities, academic institutions do promote that, they have it on their websites, that these are the experts that we have at our institutions that are available for comment, regardless of whether or not they’re involved in the situation. So I wanted to get some insight on that from you, but also because the dead can’t talk. And so representing them, I think is an interesting, I guess, population to fit within that the marginalized and the ethics of journalism. So that’s why I wanted you on the podcast.
Brad Clark: Sure.
Yvonne Kjorlien: And I thought you would be fantastic considering your, your past experience and your research to talk about that. Yeah. So
Brad Clark: I think anytime anybody is asked to speak to the media on a subject, they have to be pretty upfront, they need to be transparent about what their background is, what they’re bringing to the interview, and what they can speak to, on a real level, what do they know about the situation to really offer something of value in the way of knowledge that that falls within their range of experience, and relates to whatever issues or themes or ideas that the interviewer is trying to pursue? And I think there has to be, maybe there isn’t enough of this. But I think there needs to be, I think people need to be a lot more upfront about what they aren’t able to answer to say no to questions. No, I can’t answer that. I have no insight. I don’t have any experience in that area.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Well, can we just go back for a second? Sorry, um, because I, what is the purpose for a journalist to go and ask for a comment from somebody who isn’t involved? Sorry, I’m not getting the connection on that.
Brad Clark: So what I would guess is, using the example of the investigation into Robert Pickton, and that series of horrific crimes, that what journalists might be asking experts about, they may be asking about legal views of the legal process. How is the justice system work in this case? When the evidence might be hugely circumstantial, and, you know, what are the implications for the arguments that the prosecution in how to make how is the defense going to coach their case against the charges?
So it kind of depends on what aspect of the event that the journalist is trying to get a handle on. It could be, you know, you could talk to a forensic expert around how you’re how you try to, you know, sift through a site, like the farm to uncover evidence, what the approach is, those are those are things that academics have real background and information about.
If I can extend it to a different example, we can’t just talk to people who are facing end of life, to talk about assisted dying about the made legislation, for example, we need to we need people to interpret the law, the implications of the law. So we may go to professors at the UofC[algary] law school, for example, to make sense of the legislation. So lots of times what we’re doing, or what journalists are doing, when they reach out to experts is to get a handle on the deeper aspects related to the story, that are beyond the grasp of journalists, but also probably beyond the grasp of audiences as well.
Yvonne Kjorlien: So, that kind of contextual, yeah, providing a context, but also that deeper, as well. Okay.
Brad Clark: That’s right. But in the example of assisted dying, I think you’d be doing an audience a real disservice, if you only talk to experts, if you don’t talk to people who are facing end of life in a way that is, can be, you know, very painful, can be very undignified in some ways, and some people may not want it to end that way. So to understand that, you know, you I think you need, you need voices, you need more than just expert voices, probably need more than voices of people who are affected by the legislation as well.
And, so now where I think where things can get ethical is, or unethical, is when people decide to weigh in, without really having the expertise to make the sorts of pronouncements that they make.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Right. So I’m going to ask to take a step back, because journalism, I think, at least in my lifetime, has changed. And there’s now perhaps a view and it could just be my perspective, that I’m, I have trouble deciphering between the difference between journalism, and you know, people just spouting their opinions. You know, they say they’re from a media outlet of some sort. But what’s the difference between their opinion and actual journalism? So can you maybe give us a little bit of a history lesson or tell us what is the role of journalism? What do they teach you at journalism school that makes you a journalist?
Brad Clark: Okay. I think there’s a lot to wait lots of ways to think of it. So journalism is a process of verification. Okay, so journalism is finding stuff out. So there’s, there’s an aspect of investigation, of exposing facts and truth. It’s a process of verification. Sometimes it’s a process of interpretation as well. Sometimes journalists are there to interpret the implications of government policy, for example, or they’re there to break down complex issues related to science, break them down in to a way that people can understand. You know how why does a vaccine work a certain way? How has carbon in the atmosphere contributed to the planet heating up? So some of that stuff can be very jargony, but it’s up to one of the things journalists do is find the common language that people use to understand that and, and express it in terms that, that that people can relate to and, and say, oh, okay, now I get it. So it’s almost like doing a public service for translating difficult concepts that would likely impact the public and the public. Probably should know about. Yes, yeah. So that’s, that’s, that’s that aspect of it. I mean, obviously, journalism plays a watchdog role in society, keeping an eye on people in power, holding power to account over the decisions they make, if they’re in government, or if they’re running corporations that have impacts on people. So there’s that aspect of it. Even the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, makes a lot of provisions for oversight of the judiciary and the justice system, so that we’re ensuring people are getting fair access to justice, whether as accused or whether as potential victims in crime or legal disputes. So journalism does a lot of different things. And, and so that’s, that’s what the intent is.
What’s happened in the last 20 years with the growth of the internet and digital media and social media is this incredible fracturing of sources of information. I heard an expression at this conference I was at recently, The Narrative Journalism Conference in Boston at Boston University. And the comment was from an expert in information, disinformation, and misinformation. And she pointed out that knowledge is expensive, information is cheap.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Oh, nice.
Brad Clark: Lots of times, when you’re dealing with stuff that you’re not sure about the source, it’s information, it’s cheap. It’s somebody posting something they’ve seen somewhere, heard somewhere, and just putting it up. Knowledge, whether it’s journalistic or academic or scientific, it costs. It has a cost associated with it. It’s taken effort. It’s involved people, verifying, investigating, and being thoughtful about how to frame it and how to write about it, so that people can see it and understand it.
And so, how do you how do you tell the difference between knowledge and information? I think a lot of it comes down to knowing the source. And, you quite rightly said, a lot of stuff comes from a source maybe you haven’t heard of before. That’s always a telltale sign, that’s always a good reason to start to be skeptical. It’s not to say that there may not be truth to what’s there. But it is sort of the first red flag that this may not be as rigorously curated as you’d like.
And then if it looks like it may be a reliable source, then who are the voices that you see in the content? What sources of information have they brought in to bring this account together? Are they talking to people with direct knowledge? Are they talking to people who have an axe to grind related to the issue? Are they only talking to people with an axe to grind? So, you can start to look for the perspectives that are included and excluded in in the account and you can start to think critically about the potential validity of the information and decide whether it’s something you want to put much stock in or not.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Right. And I couldn’t help but notice that, what you just outlined, was what you outlined in regards to what journalism does.
Brad Clark: Sure
Yvonne Kjorlien: They verify, they provide context, they do some knowledge translation, regarding jargon, and whatever. But yeah, if you do come across that piece of information that hasn’t kind of gone through the filter of a journalist, then you have to go and be the journalist yourself, and do that verification, the context, and figuring out how reliable is that information and is it actually knowledge?
Brad Clark: Exactly, yeah, that’s very much the process. And, you know, with, with information being so ubiquitous, like, not everything goes through the lens of, of journalism.
Pre digital media, pre internet, for better or for worse, we had gatekeepers in journalism, who really can control the tap on what made it into the public discourse. What was or wasn’t news was decided by usually powerful white men who were in positions of authority at news organizations all over the world. And, so that brought up kind of a particular perspective to the news.
But one of the things it also did was, it did involve pushing information through kind of an ethical and legal lens. So, things that were purely slanderous or libelous, they didn’t see a lot of light on pages of newspapers or in news broadcasts. Or things that were just straight opinion or that were BS. You know, there were ethical standards to verification to representations of truth that prevented some stuff from making it into the public discourse through the news media.
Yvonne Kjorlien: they’ve provided the filters, but at the same time, they probably kept a lot of really good stuff out because they were, you know, the patriarchal white guy syndrome.
Brad Clark: Yeah, very much the patriarchal settler view of the world that and that’s been one of the beauties of social media is that it has allowed for underrepresented voices to circumvent the traditional gatekeepers. So you get movements that get traction like Idle No More like Black Lives Matter, that may not have got the same kind of traction in the past because of social media. Social media allowed them to sort of circumvent the gatekeepers. The other side of that is it also allows the far right nutcases to circumvent the gatekeepers too.
Yvonne Kjorlien: So if you remove the filters on one, you remove the filters on it all.
Brad Clark: Exactly.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Unfortunately, yeah. And what really brought, I guess, home for me the role of journalism, at least, how it used to be, was when I watched Spotlight, about the Boston Globe and exposing the sexual abuse and assaults in the 80s 90s in Boston in regards to the Catholic Church. And just watching the movie, and seeing how those journalists dug and investigated and brought that case to light. And I thought, oh, that’s what journalism is. That’s their role, versus something like Ancient Apocalypse.
And Graham Hancock says that he’s an investigative journalist. And I’m like, really? Because that’s not what I saw on Spotlight. Yeah, and I thought that was an interesting contrast.
Brad Clark: Yeah, the term investigative journalist is so overused, like it should really be licensed.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Some sort of trademark you have to apply for.
Brad Clark: Exactly. Because, you know, the people who put out the 10,000 Mules documentary related to conspiracy theories around the stolen election in 2020, and the Trump conspiracy that ballots were stuffed, for example, those people would describe themselves as investigative journalists as well. And, work like that is really easy to fact check and verify, and people have. And people who actually could call themselves investigative journalists. So, that’s the problem.
Sometimes people are investigative journalists. And then sometimes people are “investigative journalists” with air quotes.
Yvonne Kjorlien: But again, I think it goes back to kind of your checklist that you say, that provided before, about what journalism provides, that the verification the context, the diversity of voice, and ensuring that isn’t just information, it actually is knowledge. And but now we have to go through that check with, you know, the air quotes investigative journalists to actually ensure that they are actually investigative journalisy or not, and whether or not to believe them.
Brad Clark: Yeah. You know, another way to assess it, I guess I mentioned this earlier, but I’m thinking specifically of the air quote, investigative journalist, Netflix series Ancient Apocalypse. Like, I haven’t looked at that at all.
Yvonne Kjorlien: It’s a fun story. Sure, you know, if you want to blow eight hours and just be along for the ride, watch it. But in terms of actual archaeology and depth, not so much.
Brad Clark: Yeah, what I would look at critically, in watching that series is who are the voices? Who are we talking to? And what are the voices that are left out? And I think, I mean, I haven’t seen the series, but I bet if you do that, you come to understand the perspectives that aren’t there. It kind of reminds me a little bit when I was a kid, I was really, really fascinated by aliens. And, and there was, there was a writer who came out with a book and then it became a documentary. Something about the gods.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Oh, Chariots of the Gods.
Brad Clark: And then there was the sequel called Gold of the Gods and it was sort of looking, you know, taking things that seemed like they were difficult stories to explain, like the pyramids or the Nazca Lines in Peru. And so, you know, what’s the only conclusion you can come to? It must have been aliens. So, that’s kind of what comes to mind to me when I see that and it’s, you know, I don’t know what the logical terminology is, but the idea that sometimes the simplest argument is the right one. Like that really plays out a lot of times, and especially in a world where conspiracy theories are so prevalent these days.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. It’d be interesting to get under the psychology of all that. I’m sure it’s there. Yeah, it was very interesting, because, you know, both programs were on Netflix. And so they’re demonstrating the continuum of accuracy of information. And even though Spotlight was a movie and it was fictionalized, I mean, they touted it, you know, fiction, whereas the Ancient Apocalypse was advertised as a docuseries, as truth. And I thought that was so interesting.
Brad Clark: Yeah. Yeah. You know, one of the troubles with the world today is the way people take the trappings of journalism, what Stuart Hall might call the professional code related to journalism and use that as a way to add credibility to the messaging that they’re putting out. So you call it, you know, kind of half-assed archaeological series a docuseries. You see it in branded content that is made to look like news articles. They come with headlines, they come with a little quote box with, they may include a little infographic in it to hit the key point.
I did some research for a book we did called The Blue Storm: The Rise and Fall of Jason Kenney. And I wrote about the Canadian energy center known as the Energy War Room. And if you go to their website, it has very much the trappings of journalism: headlines and subheads, and decks. They have a section called Matter of Fact where they fact check — and I’m using air quotes –usually media accounts related to the energy industry that they don’t agree with. And, we know that a lot of the messaging is very one-sided, the stories and articles that are put out by the Energy War Room, which was a campaign promise of the UCP to challenge what it referred to as the myths and untruths that people were saying about the oil and gas industry. But that’s a whole other side. But the point is, is that they try to give their views additional credence by taking on the trappings of journalism.
So there’s lots of stuff out there that’s made to look and sound like journalism. That actually isn’t. That’s just one more thing that you need media literacy to kind of address.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, that selective reporting, I think is very interesting, especially because I’m working my way through another one of your books, Journalism’s…
Brad Clark: Racial Reckoning.
Yvonne Kjorlien: yeah, that one. Journalism’s Racial Reckoning, and just how, especially marginalized voices have been excluded, and that is, you know, very selective about what information you choose to report on, choose to investigate, and could also be said about the dead because they can’t speak for themselves. So like you just illustrated with the assisted dying, you know, you can’t just talk with the experts, and you can’t just talk with the people that affects you need, the whole context, the whole picture. And it isn’t about being selective, and what makes the best story because it’s all about shock and awe, sex sells and what have you. You really do have to look at all sides. And I think it’s a matter of integrity that perhaps has been lost.
Brad Clark: Yeah, I think I think there’s that. I think also, if you look at in high profile stories, who the people are who constitute the dead they’re often people who have been invisible. They’re people who have not had the opportunity to be heard from and continue not to be heard from. Another clear example, and very much related to Pickton is missing and murdered indigenous women and girls. And, you know, other people are trying to tell their stories, and I think they’ve done a quite a remarkable job. But, that’s where journalism needs to be better, is to tell those stories before death, tell those stories, when something can be done to keep the people alive.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Right. Yeah. And I and I know this comes up a lot with investigations, officers after the fact, detectives after the fact, saying that, you know, what, if this had happened to somebody who was white, or in, you know, an upper class neighborhood, there would have been no question they would have got on the investigation, things would have been done right away, but because you know, is marginalized, indigenous, black, something, you know, woman they weren’t investigated or they weren’t investigated thoroughly, promptly. I hear that all the time. And that Murder in Boston podcast is exactly that.
Brad Clark: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, no. Another US example that I’ve shared with my students is when a young woman hiking a couple years ago, I think her name was Gabby Potito, went missing, I think it was in Arizona, or one of the western states, and it was just this flurry of media coverage. And it very much focused on her boyfriend very, very quickly. And people in the state, First Nations people in the state started saying, excuse me, like, you know, we’ve had dozens of women go missing. And you’ve, you’ve never reported on it. You know, young, pretty 18-year-old white girl goes missing and suddenly you focus all this attention on state efforts to find somebody. And so it’s very much the case. The double standard.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, yeah, it’s tragic. But I’m glad that we’re now it’s coming to awareness. For better or for worse, you know, it’s taken as long as it has to get here. But we’re gaining awareness, and it’s now: what are we going to do about that awareness? How can we move forward in a constructive and productive manner? Yeah, tough stuff all around. But it’s probably one of the reasons why I started this podcast is that talking about death as a taboo, and talking about the hard stuff is hard. But it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t talk about it. If anything, we should because it’s hard. We should talk about it. It’s probably hard for a reason. Yeah. And we’re just avoiding it. To no one’s benefit.
Brad Clark: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah.
Yvonne Kjorlien: So where are you going to go next in your research?
Brad Clark: Um, I’m working on a proposal with a colleague for a book that is going to look at disinformation, as it relates to marginalized groups and who often find themselves the focus of disinformation.
If we think about what we’ve seen with two LGBTQI+ in the last few years, even in Alberta, the issues around transgender youth, there’s been a lot of really significant misinformation about that. There was a time when people who wanted to take a run at queer people would brand them as pedophiles. And now they don’t use that language anymore for fear of being sued for libel. So now the term is groomer. And, this is some of some of the issues that we’re starting to see. And in the media don’t always do a terrific job of countering some of that narrative.
There’s a recent study that came out, just like in the last couple of weeks, looking at the New York Times coverage of transgender issues in the US. And some ridiculously low percentage of the stories included transgender voices in the article. It should be 100%. And I can’t remember what the proviso was, but in one instance, it was as low as like 16% included transgender voices. So you know, that’s just sort of one aspect of it. But that’s where I’m going next.
One of the things, personally, that I have such a tough time with, it’s the journalist in me, is when somebody says something that’s incorrect, that’s factually wrong, like, my body is wracked with energy to correct them. And that’s not always appropriate. But, the existence of either lies or falsehoods, or just information that’s invalid or incorrect, it just gets on my very last nerve in a way that, just it’s the very core of my existence. And so I think that’s kind of what got me on looking at EDI in media in the first place. And now, when we live in a world where misinformation and disinformation are so prominent, I want to kind of bring the two together.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Absolutely, yeah. Yeah, I don’t envy you at the moment, because you’re probably in a constant state of cringe. And because of all the misinformation and lies out there.
Brad Clark: Yeah. I’m prone to be listening to podcasts and start yelling as I’m running: That’s ridiculous. You can’t say that.
Yvonne Kjorlien: So let’s put on our positive thinking cap, if there was one, where do you see journalism in, maybe let’s just do 10 years. Is it gonna get better? Because you said you had some positive coming out of the conference in Boston. You weren’t expecting that?
Brad Clark: I guess I wasn’t expecting as much of it. But, yeah, I know, I felt like people were really celebrating journalism, in a way that I don’t feel happens very often. With journalism. You know, we’ve especially in Canada, we’ve been through so many layoffs. And it’s just seems like it’s been kind of a dark, ugly picture of the future of journalism. Lots of great students, students are really engaged and keen to make a difference coming into the program. So that part has always kind of given me some hope. But I think for me, what the conference did was just remind me of how important the role of journalism is, and the place for it, and the fact that people who are doing it are coming from the right place, they’re there. They’re trying to do good. They’re trying to address some of the issues that we’ve been talking about to correct the narrative to bring in more voices to tell better stories. And, and that’s the other thing, if we tell stories better if we can engage with audiences with important issues, maybe that can motivate more change as well.
Part of the conference was very much focused on narrative journalism. And narrative has been shown to be a really powerful tool in not just pushing out, misinformation and disinformation, but in combating it as well. So if we, if we can tell stories in a way that are fair and accurate, and engaging, maybe that’s a way forward to address some of the issues we’re facing with conspiracy theories, and, the rejection of science and expertise sometimes, as well.
So, I guess, 10 years out, I would love to see that kind of positivity gain some momentum and drive young journalists to continue to try and pursue the craft and get better at it. And I do see that.
There’s, a few years ago, I didn’t find journalism students necessarily looking to practice journalism. And I’m seeing that less and less. I’m seeing students come into the program because they want to be journalists, because they want to tell stories, because they want to hold power to account and make a difference. And so I hope that trajectory continues kind of an upward trend.
And the other part of it is, and we haven’t talked about this at all, it just related to the business model in sustainability. And I’m hoping that people start to recognize the importance of paying for journalism. You know, there was a time in the 1950s and 1960s when like 95% of Canadian households subscribe to at least one newspaper. So you’re paying for news every…all the time. And now and I’ve had people say this to me is why should I pay for subscription? Information is free. Well, remember, information is free, knowledge costs money. And, and so I’m hoping that more people will come to realize that. People pay for books. People pay to stream movies. Why should my work as a journalist not be paid for? Why does it not have value?
Yvonne Kjorlien: I think that’s just it. You know, what is the value? And that’s part of the reason why I wanted to come on and get you on here is to understand the value of journalism because it seems like, either, like we’ve lost the sense of the value, or it has been devalued, in some way, shape or form. And so I wanted to get your insights on that. And, you know, it sounds like journalism still very much does have value. We just don’t perhaps recognize that. In the slew of cheaper free information, what is the value of knowledge? And whoever provides that knowledge or cultivates it.
Brad Clark: Yeah, yeah, well, the other the other thing is journalism has been under attack, as a way to deflect from responsibility for a whole host of things. So, when any reporting is referred to as fake news by the leader of the free world, people start to listen to that as well. So we’ve we’ve been up against that.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah. It’s hard to know who to believe anymore.
Brad Clark: Believe me.
Yvonne Kjorlien: I will, Brad. I will. All right. Well, I think we’re gonna end there because this was just, this was fabulous. Thank you very much. Thank you for your insights. And, yeah, if people want to reach out to you, I hope you’d be welcoming to them.
Brad Clark: Absolutely. Yeah. It’s been a total pleasure. Thanks so much. Fabulous.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
*** This is a continuation of my interview with Brian, without preamble. I *highly* recommend listening to Part 1 first.
Brian Paulsen is assistant police chief in Sturgis, South Dakota. He co-wrote a chapter in Forensic Archaeology based on his Master’s thesis about landfill searches in the United States.
In this episode we talk about:
More information about the Nebraska landfill search can be found here:
Do you have a suggestion for a topic on the Scattered podcast?
Do you have a question about working with human remains?
Drop Yvonne a line at [email protected]
Transcript, Part 2
Yvonne Kjorlien: Okay, so a search protocol was established through 9/11.
Brian Paulsen: Correct.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Do you know anybody else like that, is that the kind of standard now for searching either catastrophes or any time there’s a lot to sift through?
Brian Paulsen: Yeah, literally and figuratively. Yes. That’s one thing that I didn’t, that I wish I had inquired about and what was their methodology to searching in the landfills and such. A couple of them volunteered and they seemed to do something very similar. They brought the trash out. There are a couple that actually just sent investigators or law enforcement only in to the landfill and they would search an area and then they would be done. There’s not a lot of, I don’t have a lot of information on what others did as far as their methodology.
Yvonne Kjorlien: It sounds like is a bit of a continuum too in search methods.
Brian Paulsen: Yeah.
Yvonne Kjorlien: All right, so from our previous conversations, it sounds like this case that where you had to go in and search the landfill for this boy, prompted you to then do research on landfill searches.
Brian Paulsen: So I came out of the landfill, which it really consumed, basically eight months of my life. And the whole investigation had – there were nights out driving around saying okay, maybe went there, just letting your mind kind of take you and not really saying, okay I got to put it into this –so I was working 18, 20 hour days, sleeping for about four and then getting up again.
I got done with this case in August and we knew we had the trial coming up the next spring, but I had all this time on my hands and I thought, “what am I gonna do?” I had always thought about getting my Master’s degree and I had taken a crime scene, a year-long crime scene course that was put on by a community college in conjunction with the hospital in Lincoln, Nebraska, the state capitol. Nebraska Wesleyan had taken that over and that turned it into a Master’s program. One of the instructors, and eventually the dean of the program, was one of our searchers. She came out. Her background is in archeology and specifically forensic archeology. Dr. Connor. She came out and searched only one day, maybe two. She was one of those that had to get back because of commitments, so I drove her back down to her car, and she was saying, “hey, this is my background, I think what you’re doing is exactly how it should be done. Just continue. If there’s anything you need help with or questions, just let me know.” And really we had, that was kind of where we had really formed our relationship.
After I’d got done with the case, I said, let’s get into forensics, and it was right there in Lincoln, Nebraska, so it was an hour-drive for me. So I went in. It was an accelerated course. I met with a number of cohorts that were doing it as well, some of them that I knew and some of them that I would become good friends with. We started our Master’s program. It was pretty early on that I identified that, “Gosh, I want to know: what were our chances? At what point should we have stopped? What should we have done differently?” I just wanted to know more and, if I ever had to do it again, refine how I’d do it.
As part of my thesis, Dr. Connor sent out an email blast to a number of archaeologists and said, “Hey, are you aware of any landfill searches?” And I sent written letters to state patrols, or highway patrols, depending on what their designation, as well as the state’s attorney’s office because I felt they would have helped at least prosecute or investigate or have knowledge of it within their states. And then all the large departments – Dallas, New York City – if they had a specific investigative unit, I sent a letter to them. All in all, I probably sent out 125, 100 to 125 letters.
My boss at the time, I had made chief 3 years before this (I had made chief in ‘99), and my city manager, I went to him and said, “Can I use official letterhead for my research?” And he said, “Absolutely. This is going to help law enforcement, whether it’s us or somebody else, yes, please do.” And I told him: I will pay postage out of my own pocket, but I felt it would be more official letterhead. I believe that was also some of the reason why some of the agencies did respond. It was of interest that the letter would go out and it went to one department and they’d say, “Oh you need to probably talk to this department because I know they had one, and it was a smaller agency but there was just no way I could send out that many letters. One in particular was a case in southwest Colorado. That was somebody else, probably Denver PD, that said, “We didn’t have one, but so and so did in the southwest corner. You might want to reach out to them.” And we reached out to them as well, any time we got that information.
I should also say that my thesis was also a presentation at the international forensic archaeology conference in St. Louis, and I don’t recall the year. Probably had to have been 2008, I believe.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Because you gonna go look it up.
Brian Paulsen: Yup. Absolutely. Quite honestly, that’s where I met Kimberlee. And other components of that book, Forensic Archaeology book, where my research is published, there were a couple others that were there as well. And I believe one was from the UK. So some of those crime scenes, unusual crime scenes were presented that day.
And one of my cohorts in the program, his thesis was on decomposition and different, not stages, different speeds of decomposition in controlled environments. Because we knew that the landfill was, as I said, 32 degrees, and when we were in there in July, and we also knew it was sealed from oxygen or a lot of oxygen. So he did his using pig cadavers to work on the decomp side of it. So he, we kind of worked hand in hand, and really kind of discovered some of the information from each other. Just off of those two, off of his and mine.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Nice. Okay, so when you sent out these letters, were you just asking them if you could talk them, or were you sending them a survey? What was the level of engagement you were looking for?
Brian Paulsen: I was hoping that they would reach back out. Obviously all of my contact information. It was a survey form of letter: basically I’m doing research and this was institution, this was the agency I work for, but my educational institution was Nebraska Wesleyan, and did you have a landfill, were you aware of any landfills nearby you or in your state, and would you provide me with that information, or contact information? And then several of them, I would follow-up and try to get a hold of the detective within that agency. I kept track of who I sent the letters to and would reach out to a number of those and say, “Okay, this has been reported that you have a landfill search” otherwise what about this. And then there was obviously that great time saver, I just Googled “landfill searches” in the United States. I actually came up with a couple that I had to send additional letters out to because I discovered them on the internet but hadn’t sent a letter to them.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Right. So, I didn’t have it highlighted in your chapter about how many responses did you get? I know it was a pretty low number.
Brian Paulsen: Yeah, it was. And a lot of that I think had to do with, quite honestly, with nobody, I mean there’s such a timeframe that could have occurred. And I think it also showed, when I looked at it, you saw more landfill searches occurring as I started to do my research than prior, before. Before – 5 years before, so – there weren’t that many landfill searches. Because I had dated them all, built a timetable that I didn’t even put into my thesis. There were definitely an increase of landfill searches starting, or had occurred and starting to occur. So we were one of those accelerating there in Nebraska.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Very interesting. Okay, so I have here, “The results are gathered from 46 searches provided from reliable sources.” And then, “An additional five searches not used in the results for evidentiary purposes and not in the recovery of human remains.”
Brian Paulsen: Yes.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Out of 100-125 requests –
Brian Paulsen: About a 30% return.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah.
Brian Paulsen: Yeah.
Yvonne Kjorlien: You know what? 30% ain’t bad.
Brian Paulsen: No, it’s not. I thought it would be more. I thought we’d have more landfill searches up to that point. And I’m guessing it was underreported or underdiscovered…
Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah.
Brian Paulsen: …because there was really no way to reach out. In hindsight, I probably should have sent to the fraternal organizations, your national associations of chiefs of police, or the police officers’ associations of each state, and as well as the sheriff’s side as well. And then went from there. Mostly it’s, drug investigator conferences – okay, let’s go to those conferences. We talked about going to the international associations of the chiefs of police and having a booth there. And we didn’t, based solely on cost. But we tried to reach out to everybody and anybody we could.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Let’s talk about your results. So you did mention before that that 30-day mark when it comes to the search, that’s kind of the tipping point.
Brian Paulsen: Yeah, yup. And then we started to look at the recoveries in the research and in the responses I got back, and we started looking. I think there was only one recovery out of all of those that occurred 30 days after the event. It’s very important obviously in the York, Nebraska case of a six-hour recovery. It’s very important from time of death, or time of discovery, to the time you enter the landfill, that also affected it as well. The shorter amount of time from death to entering the landfill, the higher the probability of recovery. And then obviously that recovery you could push it, but in 30 days, it was distinctly against the search at that point. At Day 30, the likelihood of recovery is very, very low.
Yvonne Kjorlien: That’s very interesting, especially considering you know the detailed records that waste management keep.
Brian Paulsen: Yeah, yup.
Yvonne Kjorlien: You wouldn’t think that the time of search would be so fixed and so short because you would know that kind of know where the remains were that you were looking for.
Brian Paulsen: Yup, you’re absolutely right. It’s a direct contrast. Because if you, with all the information that landfills store, that you’d be able to go right in and to that point. And my search, the search that I led, was a good example. We knew where we were going but we hit that 30-day window, 29- day window, I think it was, and we chose not to go any further. There’s a lot of background, and I don’t want to say interference, but there’s a lot of background movement politically, okay. Because in my case, the media was there everyday. I gave a media report when I left the landfill everyday. So, people were saying, well there were a lot of people, there were the people who were saying I hope we never stop, and then there were the people saying get him out of there, get those people out of there, let’s go on operating normally.
It affected the landfill. I mean, obviously they’re moving trash they wouldn’t have. It changes their record keeping because the trash coming in during July was being taken to a different spot. So it changes their record keeping. It’s like, okay, this isn’t on June 30th the trash is here, but all the January trash is over into a different phase of the landfill. And, honestly, as well as the operation, when we went into the landfill, everyday they used a measure of dirt, anywhere from 12 inches to 18 inches of dirt to seal the trash. While we were in there, they changed operations and they were spraying it with a coating that was sealing the trash, not having used the dirt, allowing to put more trash to be put into an area. When they put that trash, all that trash that was either the overburden or what we searched, they pushed back in and they, at the end of that day, when they were pushing it back in, they sealed it with this, I called it an ectoskeleton, and I believe, and I know I did in my thesis, I wrote much like a dipped ice cream cone: you put it in, you pull it out and it hardens. It saved them a tremendous amount. They actually had a hole left over when they put all the trash back into the hole that we had dug out because they weren’t putting a foot, 18 inches of dirt on top of each day. They were just basically sealing it with a much thinner layer.
So there’s a lot of pressure. That’s some of what I’ve been researching or reading on the searches for the Indigenous women in Canada is the pressure, and who’s going to pay for it. We were fortunate. We – not saying it’s right – we had a young boy who was murdered and put in a dumpster and I think there was a stronger desire to recover youth or children in a heinous crime like this, over just the average citizen. And I don’t know that that’s fair and I have nothing to support that but my experience has been that an adult victim of crime is not looked on as deeply as a child. So, I think the pursuit of a child in a landfill that’s no-hands-barred, we’re going in, we’re going to take whatever we can to recover. But those outside mechanisms, that outside work, is a lot of pressure on the folks that are operating the landfill as well as the people that are searching.
Most of my agency was at the landfill. We required them, so we had to cover the streets. There were a couple of our officers who had young children who said, “I don’t want to be in there. I don’t want to be the one that finds that.” Okay, then that kind of designates you, your on the streets. The rest of us will go to the landfill. And that worked out well.
Yvonne Kjorlien: So I just want to go back to the results of study. It says here, “Of the 46 cases, searches were successful in 20 of the cases reported.” So that’s under 50%.
Brian Paulsen: Yeah, yup.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, that’s pretty disappointing. And then, “In 25 searches where the duration of the search is known, 13 lasted seven days or less.” And, “if the timeframe is extended to 30 days, an additional seven searches were added”, so up to 20 then.
Brian Paulsen: Yeah, yup.
Yvonne Kjorlien: So, yeah, I think it’s important to know that is not going to be successful. You really have to accept that right at the beginning, that there’s a distinct possibility that searching a landfill, you will not be successful for what you’re looking for.
Brian Paulsen: Right. Absolutely. You’re correct. And I don’t know – there was nobody at the time that we started on our search, there was nobody that gave me or that had that information. I think we still would have went in. Again, going back to the information we had, all the solid information we got from the landfill, all the information that they record, I still probably have went in. I would have felt more pressure, I believe I would have felt more pressure as we went in, starting getting into the late teen-days, as well as that third week, the 21st day, saying “gosh, we got nine days,” we might have pushed harder. We might have had an injury, we might have had something negative come out of that whole search. But, again, that information wasn’t there, wasn’t readily available to us at that time.
Yvonne Kjorlien: You could have had another level of mental health because anxiety finish or to find something.
Brian Paulsen: Yeah, yup. I totally agree. Going in, even into the middle of the search or the halfway point, I still thought we were going to be successful. I think everybody out there was feeling that same way. And when I say “out there”, those that were in the landfill. We took one day – again, it was going back to the regional media interest – we took one day, the prosecutor’s office took one day, one afternoon and we’d like to bring the media in, but we don’t want them to have access to the general population. So, let’s stop the landfill at lunch, we’ll feed them, they can go on their way, and then we’ll have the media come in. They got in, they were able to get their video footage, they were able to ask some of the law enforcement questions about how long, what’s it like, you know, those types of things. But we didn’t subject the general population to that. But it really eased the pressure. There were still daily briefings at the gate at the end of each day. We took an afternoon to make sure they have the information they wanted.
We initially had helicopters flying over and getting video footage and such while we were searching. We had another individual – we laugh about it, I smile about it now – but he was a reporter for the Omaha World Herald. Every morning, he knew what time we went into the landfill. We’d gather, we’d start migrating out on those trailers at about 8 o’clock, and for those that went in early, drove our own vehicles back into the landfill, we saw him get dropped off on the road and walk down the fence everyday to the same spot. And he’d sit there all day and watched us. And I’m sure – I know because he took pictures that I eventually got a couple of with a telephoto lens. He was over there taking pictures, he was the only one that had really thought about “hey, where can I be if something happens?” Everyday, he was out there. Diligently, he was sitting there. He knew that we would quit at 330 or 4 o’clock, when we reached a point of quitting, and you would see him kind of march out and a car would pick him up. And we always used to talk about the old cartoons where the sheepdogs and the wolves were checking in and greeting each other at the time clock. And it was like, “Yup, there he is. He’s coming in, so we can get started.”
We tried to make light of the situation. It was a serious time of all of us, and just trying to make light of that situation.
Yvonne Kjorlien: When I was working on the Pickton investigation, we were warned right at the very beginning – because there was quite a number of us that were employed as civilian technicians, and we were all anthropologists and archaeologists, and so we were not law enforcement – but we were warned at beginning that we would be approached by media, and to not comment and to direct them to commanding officer. And I was approached a couple of times. And I found it very disconcerting. Because they wouldn’t, there would be no preamble. “Hey, I’m so-and-so journalist / reporter / whatever. I’d like to talk to you.” No, it was right out: “Hey, did you find anything?” “How much are you getting paid?” It was very abrupt, in your face, and disruptive. And I was wondering if your volunteers had any experiences like that.
Brian Paulsen: None of that was reported back to us. We really tried diligently to protect them. But generally, obviously with our general public, we, at the beginning of this case, we had no idea where the boy was. It was January so we had freezing temperatures at night, at day, we were seeing 30s and 40s. So we were doing this land – I call it the ground search – for basically about 9 or 10 days. Mostly law enforcement. We had people on horseback, the sheriff’s posse, they came out. We had other agencies that were sending people out. We actually didn’t put a restriction on anybody. We had a younger news reporter who said, well, I can’t get any information, so I’m going to volunteer. She actually volunteered, she went out with a group, but she was asking them questions, but at that time, again it was only first responders, and they knew they couldn’t really discuss the case. She did do the human side: Why are you doing this? And a lot of them were saying: we’re law enforcement, or we’re fire, rescue, whatever they were, we just believe that, hey, somebody calls and needs help, and we’re first responder in this line of work, and we’re going to respond and going to help where we can. But she was out there. And she searched just as much anybody else. Because I, at the end of the first day, I asked the group that she was with, “Is she a bother? Is she being a burden to you?” And they assured me she wasn’t. Had she been, I would have asked her not to come back. She searched for two days, maybe three days, and then after that, didn’t search any more. And she may have been the last three days of the ground search. When we called that off, saying we have no where to look.
That was January. April, after his outburst, we all met, the sheriff’s office and the state patrol, FBI, all the four core agencies – five, I guess with the crime scene unit – we just kind of went through the case again and we ended up searching a sandpit. Because we thought that was the only open water that was open in January. So we searched that sandpit. Found nothing of significance. And there was a lot of experimenting, I shouldn’t say ‘a lot’. There was some experimenting going on. Early on in the search, in the ground search, we had two units of cadaver dogs that responded, one out of Story County, Iowa and one out of Kansas City area. One of them, one of the cadaver dogs from the Kansas City area was actually in the landfill with us and she spent a significant amount of time, towards the end she had to go back to work, but her and her dog were in the landfill. She was using it to develop her own research. She was obviously placing cadaver material in the landfill and seeing if her dog could locate it. We watched her. And the dog alerted. We also watched the dog – he was in there, they were both in there – we had some illegal dumped material, came from the hospital. – let me step back, it didn’t come from the hospital. It came from the family. They had a family member who was injured, needed medical attention, went to the Emergency department, which was probably six miles from the landfill. He was treated and then all of his clothes, all of his belongings were thrown into a sack at the hospital. The family didn’t want to do anything with it because it had been cut off of him. So they basically just threw it into the landfill. So, we had medical waste that came from the family, the dog alerted.
You talk about that anxiety, that sense of hope when that dog alerted and he’d found cadaver and it wasn’t planted or placed by his handler, it was like “Oh my gosh, here we are. We have finally, we are finally culminating, we gonna be successful.” Hopes are up. And then, so we slowed down the operation. At that point, the folks up top knew something was going on because there was no more trash coming up. We decided at that point, we told them something happens down below, your work up here will slow and eventually will stop because we’re not sending anything up. And they knew something was going on because no more trash was leaving. And we were hand searching, using the excavator as much as we could, and finally discovered this bag of clothing that had human blood in it. And it’s like, gosh! Well, it solidified that the dog could do it, could work in that environment. But, again, no help to our case.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, very disappointing, very disappointing. So I’m conscious of the time. So what have learned between doing this landfill search a few years ago and then doing your research? What are some lessons moving forward? Because you did mention to me before that you found out there’s no database or no database that collects information on landfill searches.
Brian Paulsen: No. Probably, I’ve found nobody that probably has more knowledge than the National Centre for Exploited and Missing Children here in the United States. They have a resource there that consults with a lot of the landfills. Other than that, I’m not sure there’s even anybody tracking landfills at this point. I think there’s more knowledge about it, and obviously with the internet and the explosion of the internet and the availability of information. Google searches are producing more. I was receiving, obviously my business card went out at several of the events as well as at that archaeology conference in St. Louis, and those folks that took those they were sending me information, news clippings. I was able to get a few more gathered from there. One, of really no value to my research, the perpetrator wanted the body to be found and wanted it to be of shock-value, he actually put the body in a recliner on top of a landfill over on the east coast. Stuff like that kind of jades the research so it sits off in a separate pile basically because it’s not of value to us.
But just gathering that information, keeping track, watching what’s going on. I have to admit I wasn’t looking outside the United States. So when the media in Canada started talking about the Indigenous females that were in the landfill, or in the landfills yeah, two separate ones, I gave them my opinion. I said if you can get there in 30 days – I didn’t know that Canada does the data gathering like the United States, which if foolish of me because they do – and they said they have a good idea of where they would start. You know there’s a lot of contrast. And, again, I’m talking there a young boy, four years old, there was a lot of interest, a lot of community drive: let’s go get this kid, let’s make sure we get this boy recovered, this is the right thing to do. So, again, it was very low expense. We had our major contracts, those excavators were coming from our major contractors, the dump trucks were coming from contractors. You know, we were using a little city dump truck and it was moving probably half of what those big trucks from the contractors were moving. But he was still there, he was still doing it, you know, and every little bit helped. We had contractors that were coming in, the private contractors was a one-man operation, he spent a couple-three days with us using his excavator. All donated. Food, there was no cost. The water, no cost. We had folks in the area who wanted to do something and would come u, and they knew that we came back for lunch, so they would come to the gate carrying boxes of cookies and cupcakes and things like that. All donated. The equipment was all donated, the gloves, everything.
The Sarpy county attorney’s office had one individual Curtis, who just was phenomenal, in gathering all this stuff. I think he told me there was one business who said, “no, we can’t do anything,” but every other business that he approached over that 30-day window said absolutely we will. He was also a part of that major debrief where we had the banquet. The Governor of Nebraska came in and recognized the department for our work. A number of citizens had written letters had actually quite honestly to the President. We had a letter from the President, as well as his photograph, saying “good job.” Things like that. So people were appreciative, in the community, and in the region, really. And they did whatever they could. We tried to get a thank you out to anybody and everybody. The Dairy Queens in July are busy, but they’d send up 50-60 Buster Bars.
Those were the types of things that they were driving out and giving those . So you think that you’re not doing anything, as far as for the community, for the region, but you’re under notice. You don’t think about that. I wasn’t thinking about that when I was searching. It was after the fact that I was like, “Oh, that was a little more significant that I thought.”
As far as the research and/or the information you talked about, it would be nice if there was a database. We electronically keep records. I can tell you, in the system that I use now, there is a location of, or there is a category of locations, and you can put landfill search in there. So it would be much easier to store. But the compliance, or the voluntary compliance of, gosh, is everybody collecting that information? As a small agency, this was a town of 7000 that I was the chief of, and we weren’t really interested in anything other than if anything was happening in our parks, in our schools, within our community. I doubt that we would have recorded that as a landfill search. We would have said the murder happened here, the landfill search was supplement to that. It was a significant enough event that a lot of people still remember. Obviously I remember it. Just a little more detail in the records-keeping. That can easily be stored in agencies and at the state level as well.
Yvonne Kjorlien: And sometimes it takes a little bit of hindsight and distance before you can see the linkage that actually we should record that because that all linked to whatever and that helped us down the road. Yeah, so sometimes it’s not apparent at the time but definitely becomes clearer the more distance you get from it.
Brian Paulsen: Yeah, and my research was probably five years after the landfill search. And it was fresh in my mind, obviously, even at that point. But it wouldn’t even be that hard to go back and correct something. And say, “this was the landfill search”. You know, regionally, and definitely within that community, there are people that are probably in their 20s that would remember that well in until their 60s and 70s. And when we were talking about our volunteers and talking to the general public, we limited it to, we originally said, 18 and above. And then we had a first responder come from a neighbouring agency and she had a son who was 17 and her daughter was 16. And she said, “hey, would you mind if they come out?” We said, “only if they’re with you, they can come out.” So she brought her son and daughter and they searched as well. But they were the youngest two out there. They ranged, I guarantee you, they ranged into the 60s and 70s that were out there searching as well.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, I found that too that. The older people, to the retirees – there the ones that have the time, that are able to come out and search not just the hours, but days and sometimes weeks to an effort.
Brian Paulsen: Mmm. Yup. Yeah, absolutely. One of our everyday guys was one of those elderly guys. I can still tell you right now, he had a straw hat and wore a white long-sleeved shirt every day. And his name was Tom, his first name was Tom. When we started looking and counting, and we said who’s Tom? He’s was there every day and we thought he must be the guy with the hat, he’s here every day. And, sure enough, when he showed up at the banquet, we said, “are you Tom?” and he said, “yeah, my name’s Tom.” And we said, “well, we were wondering. We kinda figured that’s who you were and that was your name, and you were there every day.” And he goes, “Well, I don’t want any more acknowledgement than that. You telling me that at this point is all that I need, that you recognized I was there everyday.” And I said, “that’s perfect.” He eventually – a number of businesses at that debrief, a number of businesses donated something. We had a weekend in Kansas City, we had a weekend, several weekends in Des Moines, a weekend in Omaha, that were gifted — we just started drawing names of everybody who was there and I hope everybody got something, I don’t know that that is a fact, but I do know that Tom did get something and he was very appreciative of that. It was just a small token for the amount of time and effort that he gave us.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Would it be fair to say that your landfill search, the success of it — and I’m not saying, success because it went well, even though the remains were not found, but that the search itself went well — that that success can be directly attributed to community support?
Brian Paulsen: Oh absolutely. There is no doubt that success. Obviously discouraged for the first few days, week afterwards. It’s like, “gosh, what else could I have done different, we have done different?” But, boy, looking back on that, and you talk about the number of people. Now, 300 showed up for the banquet but there were probably 5 or 600 people that were there when you started looking at every roster signed in and the duplications. So only about 50% showed up. But to bring 600 people into the landfill and search at various time and dates, various weather conditions – we had rain a couple of times, the heat was pretty overbearing a couple of days – but to have that many people, absolutely it was a success. And it wouldn’t have been a success without the support of that community. There was community involvement much larger than I originally thought. I thought our community of 7000 is bearing the brunt of this, but looking back, the region really was supportive for this entire event. If we’d have said in January, “hey, we need this,” they’d have come as much as they did in July when we were in the landfill.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Do you know what, Brian? You asked. You and your department asked for help. So it all starts with the ask and then the community can jump in and deliver. So it takes two, right?
Brian Paulsen: No, absolutely. Absolutely. And it’s that work. We used the media everyday. When we decided in the back of the landfill away from the media, we decided that we were gonna open it up to the general public — we weren’t getting through enough trash – we went to the media and our media report that day was: we need help, we’re going to up it up to the public, this is what you do. And they asked their questions, because they’re gonna do a story and that night – I didn’t see every news, but I know two stations that covered it – and said they need help. They’re asking for help.
And, I’ll be honest, I thought, “We might double our force, we might go from 20 to 40 people.” And then when you have a 109 people roll in the next day, we just kept shaking our head “what are we doing? How are we going to do this?” We really exploded the operation from there. We didn’t have the, we were taking them out in vehicles. And then we got the trailers. And then we decided lunch. Our Salvation Army was there every day, they cooked us breakfast. Excuse me, not the breakfast, they cooked the lunch. The food was brought in and they would cook it or keep it warm and they would hand it out. They were walking around, talking to us, just kinda of support. It was just wonderful to have the Salvation Army there.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Wow. Amazing. Brian, thank you very much for talking to me.
Brian Paulsen: Absolutely!
Yvonne Kjorlien: Thank you for your work on that search. Thank you for your research on landfill searches. I hope that we get more people doing research so we can potentially develop a database, share it with others, and grow the information and get it out there, so that if they have to do a landfill search, they’re not put in the same situation you were that very first time.
Brian Paulsen: Yup. And you know I’m interested in sharing that information. If anybody calls me, I’m use gonna, I use it. To be totally honest, you’ve got about 30 days, you’ve got 30 days. At 31 your chances really diminish. And I tell them, this is my research. And we talked about, everybody, the majority of people now understand how to do a search, like modeled after 9-11, but it’s that carrying on and what you need. You know, I never thought about the tetanus shots. I never thought about, gosh, we need to have them wash their hands because they’re dealing with trash, even though they have gloves on. Just those little things. That whole list of things is out there now because that’s how we did it.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Nice. All right, Brian. Thank you very much.
Brian Paulsen: You bet! My pleasure.
Brian Paulsen is assistant police chief in Sturgis, South Dakota. He co-wrote a chapter in Forensic Archaeology based on his Master’s thesis about landfill searches in the United States.
In this episode we talk about:
More information about the Nebraska landfill search can be found here:
Notes from the start:
Memoirs of a Reluctant Archaeologist, a fictional novel inspired by my time as a Consulting Archaeologist, is now an audiobook. Buy it directly from me and use the code ILOVEBONE2024 to get 50% off. The audio will be delivered through BookFunnel.
If you’re in Calgary on April 3, come out to Owl’s Nest Books as I read excerpts from Memoirs and answer questions. Can’t make the event? Buy the ebook or print version here.
Support the podcast and my research through Buy Me A Coffee. Your contributions will go toward my research, webhosting, and my time. Want to find out more about my research? Check out the Scavenging Study.
Contact me through [email protected] or through my contact form. Follow me on Facebook at The Reluctant Archaeologist, or through Instagram @yvonnekjorlien
Do you have a suggestion for a topic on the Scattered podcast?
Do you have a question about working with human remains?
Drop Yvonne a line at [email protected]
Transcript, Part 1
Yvonne Kjorlien: all right, so I’m gonna get you to say your name and who you are and where you’re at.
Brian Paulsen: So I am Brian Paulsen. I am the assistant police chief here in Sturgis, South Dakota. I’m sorry, what was the third one? Where I’m at. Sturgis, South Dakota. Sorry combine those two.
Yvonne Kjorlien: All right Sturgis, South Dakota. For any international listeners, that is in America, the United States of America. Because we do have some international listeners, so I just want to make sure everybody knows where we’re all at. So the reason, Brian, I wanted to reach out to you is because you had written a chapter in a textbook, “Forensic Archeology” with Kimberlee Moran all about landfill searchers. And so I greatly appreciate your time and insights on this. Let’s go back to the beginning about what started you on the path to doing the research? Because you had a case involving a landfall search, correct?
Brian Paulsen: Yes, we had a young man, a four and a half year old boy, that was murdered by his father in January. And then it’s reported to us late May early, June — excuse me — late June that he had put him in a dumpster and that dumpster was taken to the landfill. So about five months after the murder we were able to determine the location of the body in the landfill in a neighboring jurisdiction. So that started the landfill search for my department in early July. And then we went through, we had manpower in the landfill probably middle of June, actually, we started the physical hands-on search of that landfill in July and ended about 30 days, 29 days later, end of July.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Did you know prior to searching the landfill that waste management had kept, keeps meticulous record and they knew approximately where that truck had dumped that dumpster’s waste?
Brian Paulsen: Yes, absolutely. Oh, I did not know prior to the landfill search. No.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Okay.
Brian Paulsen: No, it was a learning experience for me, on just the amount of information they had. We know as a fact the truck that carried the body in from that dumpster, the dumpster was the last pickup of the truck route, and then that truck was, I believe, four tons (8,000 pounds) overweight and it was the first truck into the landfill the morning that it delivered.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Wow.
Brian Paulsen: Yeah, and we were able to talk to the manager. Once the location was disclosed that the boy had been put in the dumpster, the next day we met with the manager of the landfill who took us out and said this is where we would start looking but we’re going to have to go about 30 foot down because that January date would have been the bottom of the landfill. We would have started a new phase in our landfill. So the landfill has a liner — 12 inches of sand — and then that January trash came in on top of that sand. So it was layered in that landfill. It was an approximate location. That particular day, when that truck came in, the GPS monitor had dead batteries, and they didn’t have time to go get new batteries. So they just eyeballed it. And quite honestly it was my fence posts. The landfill is surrounded by a six foot high chain link fence. So they just said it’s this many poles in from the, it would have been the south and then on the west side, and that was where they started taking what is called the overburden trash that we were not interested in, they removed that before we ever entered the landfill for the search.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Wow, so had a really good idea, and you were on with it within days, it sounds like. You could get in there quickly and have pretty good idea of where to start searching.
Brian Paulsen: Yep, they keep very meticulous records. I was again shocked to learn how much information they collect when they’re placing trash into that landfill. We were somewhat suspicious of the body going into the trash anyway because the night — the little boy was murdered about 5:30 in the morning — that next night at about midnight, 11 o’clock, midnight, we found a bunch of blood in a trash can. Totally unrelated to the murder, but we stopped the trash immediately at that time. We had reached out to the FBI, the Federal Bureau of Investigations, and they were able to assist us by bringing in their evidence response team. And they split them up into two — in Plattsmouth, Nebraska where this occurred — the trash went into Mills County, Iowa and then it also went into the Sarpy County landfill, which is the landfill we searched. So there are two bordering counties: one to our east and one to our north. And we went into the Sarpy County landfill. But they had split it up, their evidence recovery team. They had placed fresh dirt at the bottom of the landfill and we’re searching trash as it came in. Unfortunately, there were searching the trash that came in from Plattsmouth when the trash coming in from the neighboring county went around and dumped.
If they have a low spot within a landfill, at that time they would push trash to kind of even out the trash. We believe that’s what happened with that first truck. It was used to even out that bottom layer in the landfill. During our search in July, we found that pad of fresh dirt that was in the bottom of the landfill. So we knew that we were really close to where the trash that came in on that Friday morning.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Okay. You had a lot of valuable information right from the get-go that really aided in your search.
Brian Paulsen: It did, and that’s one of the, with all that information, that’s probably the paramount factor in whether we even attempt it or not. With all that information available to us, we said we’ve got to take a shot at finding this young man.
Yvonne Kjorlien: And what were some considerations — because you knew you were probably gonna be searching a landfill — so were there any considerations about the challenges that you would have or the barriers about searching this landfill?
Brian Paulsen: Definitely some challenges and some political implications as well. We’re going into a neighboring jurisdiction, for one. We did not have — our governing body communicated with them, but it was mostly them allowing us to go. They also had representatives from their prosecutor’s office in the landfill with us. But we knew the method of death of the young boy was killed. So we initially opened it, or restricted our searchers to first responders — those that had probably had some of a, witnessed some type of a number of trauma events that it occurred — in there, volunteer or whether they were paid. So we spent our first four or five days with just first responders, which was a very small group. Because they were coming in on days off. There was a few that were signed out there being paid by their agencies. But the most part they were coming in after days off. We realized quickly that that small contingency of searchers was not going to be enough and we made a decision to open it up to the general public. And that first day of opening it up to the general public, we probably increased, we went from about 20 searchers to over a hundred. So quite a large group or large increase in physically searching that landfill. With that increase in numbers, also increased how we took care of them because we knew, mentally, that they were not probably prepared to see or recover that body in the condition it was going to be in. As well as equipment, we needed to make sure that the temperatures were in the 90s — I think it hit a hundred a couple days — but we had to worry about that. So there were tents, there were watering. Food needed to be, so they were out there. We didn’t want to send them out for an hour and then have to gather them all back. So we provided the food offsite — it was in the landfill property, but it was not at the landfill — we took them out. We had a number of our, like our watering district brought in a mobile hand washing station. So we took care, we have everything worked through and taking care for those folks.
We had discussed on the phone: we were worried about the mental health not only of the first responders, but obviously of the general public. So we had mental health professionals on site in the case that we recover the body, but also if somebody was really struggling with the search and knowing how the boy was killed. That’s one factor we did not give to anybody in the general public right away, the first day or two. We met with the mental health professionals and they encouraged us to give that information out. They basically had told us if they discover this boy in the condition he’s gonna be found, you should probably let them know a little bit ahead of time so that it’s not a complete shock. It would help them kind of process up to the point, if we found the body. So we, probably about day two of the general public helping us, we opened it up and said this is how the boy was killed, this is what we’re looking for specifically. And the response from them was “thank you for telling us that.” It was kept very confidential. They understood the confidentiality of it as well. So we have very little problems with our general public.
Yvonne Kjorlien: So you mentioned the decision to go from the first responders, within that first week, to the general public. What were you considering? Was it not enough people? Did you discover that the size might be a little bit more than you originally anticipated? What was involved in that decision? What made you switch or open it up?
Brian Paulsen: Yeah, was you’ve touched on a couple of them. That we didn’t have enough. We were going too slow. With 20 of us searching — we had probably two, we actually had three down in what we call the hole down towards the floor of the landfill, the rest of us were up on the top pad with that clean dirt so that it wasn’t contaminated — but it was taking us a long time to use rakes, shovels, hoes, potato forks, a number of different pieces of equipment that we would hand search real quick. And then the bulldozers would come in and they, just basically two bulldozers and they’d sweep that pad. We’d come up, we’ve dump more trash out of the trash, dump trucks that were going down picking up. And we found that it was not efficient because the trucks were waiting for us to search. So we said we have to have more people. And then it quickly grew from there.
The area actually increased as well. Because initially we didn’t find that pad. It was probably day four or five, I believe, that we finally found that pad that would have been placed in their January by the FBI when they were searching. Once we hadn’t found a little boy at that point, we said we’ve got to expand this out. And again, the landfill manager said the only way it could have been was to the north into the west. So we expanded that dig of the actual trash out to probably 30, 32, 36 feet to the west and then to the north. Probably at least that. So it was a rather large, large hole that we had put in there.
The operation was set up that the dump trucks, they actually built a driveway coming in out of the northeast corner of the pit, driving in, being loaded with excavators, and then they would go out the southwest corner of the landfill of the pit and then they would immediately turn left. That’s where the pad was and they go along and they dump the trash, as they were going to the east. And then we would step in, we would search and then, once we were confident — my assistant chief or I were up, excuse me on the top — and once we were certain that we had searched the thoroughly, we would give the signal for the bulldozers. They scrape it and we’d start the whole thing.
And we didn’t want that downtime. We wanted to be somewhat continuous. Obviously we had to spend 5, 10, 15 minutes searching that trash, but that trash was spread pretty thin once it was done by those trucks. They would dump it, try to thin it as much, but we had an excavator up there a small excavator that will come in and spread that trash out.
Yvonne Kjorlien: All right so I want just want to understand the method that you used: so you had excavators load the trash into trucks, the trucks took the trash outside of the landfill, then the truck spread it out, and then you searched trash that was spread out. Is that correct?
Brian Paulsen: That is correct.
Yvonne Kjorlien: All right. Okay. So, just because, for context for listeners, so I was involved with the Robert Pickton investigation in Vancouver, BC and in that we used conveyor belts. So, instead of taking the trash outside the landfill and spreading it out, like you did for your team, Brian, the conveyor belts were inside the search area. Then the material was dumped onto conveyor belts and we looked out over conveyor belts. So a little different method but still very similar type of method.
Brian Paulsen: Yes, yep, yep, moving that trash and making it thin enough to be searched quickly.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Right, right, okay. So you said you searched for about 30 days.
Brian Paulsen: Yes.
Yvonne Kjorlien: And did you, did you have everybody searching in that place where the trash was spread, or did you have different teams doing different things looking differently? Tell me a bit about your team and what you were doing.
Brian Paulsen: There, you know, we would search at the excavator operators, a good point to know is the excavator operators were fully aware where we’re looking for. A bed comforter that would be thick enough that the suspect — the father — had told us that he killed him on top of this comforter quilt knowing that’d be a lot of blood so he had purchased those two nights before the murder. Then put the body in there as well as the knife that he used, the weapon that he used. Then he just kind of bundled it up. So the excavators knew to look for bundled up blankets / comforters, as well as anything that may produce or look like blood. Quite honestly, we had a couple of those excavators that were so precise and so talented that they were able to take items and place them right in front of us. If they would come across the blanket and they couldn’t get it to unfold when they were moving it, they would literally pick it up, they’d bring it over to the team in the hole — which is generally four of us — and then we would actually go in and search that. If it was done, then they would actually move it to an area down in the landfill that had already been searched or already been opened up, and just kind of placed it out of the way. One of the operators came across a roll of carpet and literally laid it out and rolled it with his bucket right in front of us and opened it up for us, so we did nothing but look. It wasn’t what we were looking for, but it could have concealed a body and we thought how truthful is this dad been. We were fairly confident that he would tell us about the comforter and absorbing all the blood because he had put some thought into it. So that carpet went over to the side.
We would do that down in the hole. We would also move items that we knew that didn’t need to go up top. We found some religious statues down there, plastic statues, a lot of comforters and blankets. We had literally had a pile of comforters and blankets that we never sent up top. After we had searched them, we would just drag them out of the way.
And then up top, would be all the other searchers. That was the predominant number of searchers. Towards the end of the search, we had three or four of those civilians that said, “hey, we’d like to come down and help you because we know that the four of you are doing a lot of work down there.” We allowed them to come down to help for a short period of time, probably the last couple, three days. Maybe just the last two days. And again, but we didn’t find anything that was of substance to the case.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Okay, so you didn’t need, if the excavator operators found something, they didn’t put it in the truck and then wait for it to be brought out to the clearing area for the other searchers. They brought it straight to your attention so you can have a look at it, right then and there.
Brian Paulsen: yes, yep, the four of us, the team down in the hole, we felt that we were kind of the control mechanism That if we could save somebody in the general population from seeing something traumatic — this young boy’s body — that we would take that on ourselves in the hole and with the excavators, and then save them up on top that experience. And we had hoped that, if we did find the body down on the bottom, that they would maybe find the comforter on top or something like that. There was a number of things we did take and have tested but nothing that was applicable to our case.
Yvonne Kjorlien: All right. So you did mention mental health concerns. Like that you wanted first responders in there first because they had a trauma training or trauma experience. So let’s talk a little bit about that. Let’s talk about the physical limitations, or anything that may be physical challenges: was it hard labor? Was there as asbestos, anything in the landfill that the searchers needed to be aware of? And then we’ll go into mental health.
Brian Paulsen: Sure. For us, we were really more worried about glass. And we talked with the landfill manager about that and he said it’s kind of a mystery of the landfill that glass generally isn’t found. Our concern with the glass was we knew we had done a bunch of the legwork before, when we taking the overburden off of the landfill, we were doing a lot of leg work on the backside. We knew that the pick-up before the apartment building with the dumpster was a very popular bar, lounge in the area. So there’s a lot of the beer bottles and metals and everything, all the trash that you could imagine coming out of a bar. So we knew there were glass and that was a concern we had for the manager and he said it just kind of disappears. We went down, we knew the 10 or 12 stops on that truck. We knew the order of that truck, as I said, when it went in but also the pickup.
We also were concerned with there was a auto mechanic or an auto dealership that probably had some metals that they may have replaced or something. So we’re worried about that as well. We took care of that on the front side of it. Sarpy County, the Sarpy Count’s attorney’s office here, or there in Nebraska, actually contacted their Department of Health. We provided tetanus shots for all of our searchers, if they wanted it. Gloves along with all the equipment. And we had water at all locations, both out at the pit and then back at the lunch site, plus we had coolers that were in vehicles. So if we needed anything like that.
So we were doing a lot of that leg work. We actually had to sit down and determine on our own — there’s a probably six or seven of us — that sat down and said, “okay, how long do you keep mail?” So your mail, if it’s junk mail or third-party mail that it’s unsolicited sent to you, you throw that right away. We all thought we did. So we started looking for postmarks. We also were saying, “okay, there’s newspapers. When would this story have hit? Would it be out?” We looked at our own bills. How long do you hold a bill? Do you pay it right away, anything like that. You know, the personal things that come through your mail. We felt that those were probably not a good barometer because we’d hold those until we paid them. Some people pay him right away. Some of them will wait to a paycheck or something like that. So we found mail in that window, probably from the day after the murder up until probably a week or so, maybe two weeks later. We found a lot of that mail. We found the debris from that bar. We could hear the glass falling, but in the pit, we didn’t find any of that. We were never worried about any large items. I never saw any large item that would cause an injury and so we knew we were, and it’s just undiscovered territory for us.
It was the first landfill in the state of Nebraska and there’s a lot of information we wanted to gather. So we gathered daily, we took temperatures at the bottom of the landfill. I can tell you that we were searching in July and we found ice and snow in the bottom of the landfill because it was so insulated and encapsulated with dirt at the end of each workday. We found food items that were, as I’ve said many a times in some of my presentations, if you told me that piece of chicken or turkey or roast had been in a landfill, I would have never guessed it if you had just washed it off it. It had some debris on it, but it wasn’t decomposed or anything like that because it was sealed and really couldn’t get a lot of bacteria down to it. So we do that we did that. The temperatures was in the low 30s in the bottom of that landfill when we started probing it with a thermostat, or, excuse me, a thermometer. And so we knew that it was going to be well preserved. And that helped us kind of decide what condition the body would have been in.
And then from there, moving into the mental health, we just had… I had had training and most of my officers had experienced the critical incident stress management — basically a critical incident debriefing. So we are fully aware that we felt that, if we’re able to recover the boy’s body in the landfill, regardless of who it was, we would need to have immediate mental health presence to kind of help debrief them. Honestly law enforcement would have been extremely busy. We didn’t feel that we could push it off on, “Hey, I’ve worked with you for a couple days. Let’s just sit down and talk about it.” So we reached out two of them actually, very good personal friends of mine through the critical incident stress management. They were out there quite regularly and they were always on call if we needed anything. So we wanted to put that in place as well. And again they were valuable to us in whether we released the cause or the manner of death of the young boy, which was very important. And in hindsight, we actually hadn’t told some of the dump truck operators as well as the bulldozer operators hadn’t been informed. So we had the first responders, the general public, the excavators, but we had left a faction out. So it was the mental health folks that came in and said, “hey make sure everybody knows. You can’t leave somebody out because if they find him, or if they see something, we haven’t prepared them, haven’t taken care of them.” So there was a valuable resource to have them out there.
Yvonne Kjorlien: and so I’m just going to reiterate, so the general public that you had in helping you, they were volunteers, correct? Whereas your first responders, they were paid?
Brian Paulsen: Not all the first responders were paid. Some of the first responders were just out there on their days off. At that point, through almost 20 years of law enforcement, I had a lot of networking had gone on and we put that call out, and we called our larger agencies and said “hey if you can spare anybody.” So there are a few that were paid but most of them they’re out there on their days off. We reached out to the National Guard. That’s not something they wanted to do just because that wasn’t their role and we understood that as well. But yeah, we reached out to quite a few of them. The general public were all volunteers.
Yvonne Kjorlien: And so when you put out the call and you had general public people show up, what kind of, I guess, response did you get from the general public when you told them what you were looking for and how you were looking for it? Did you have people immediately say, “Okay, you what? I want to help out but it’s just not within my capacity to do this. Good luck to you.” Or maybe after a few days’ searching, you have people say “Okay, I can’t do this anymore.” What kind of… just because I’m looking at this because people going with the best of intentions, but they don’t really understand or appreciate what’s involved with these searches.
Brian Paulsen: Yes.
Yvonne Kjorlien: and that, you know what? It’s okay, if you want to back out, that you don’t completely understand and it can be damaging to your mental health to stay.
Brian Paulsen: Yes, and we did talk to him about that. And we also let them know that it was totally okay with us if they chose to leave. We all gathered up near the front gates of the landfill and then we took them back on flatbed trailers that a local business had a pumpkin farm or it was a pumpkin farm provided us. So we had seating around this hay rack several hayracks and we have pulled him out there with a tractor most of the time — a couple times it took out with a pickup — and we just unload them. Then there were other, there’s probably four or five of us that drove our own vehicles back there. It was specifically so if we had something or someone that said, “Gosh, this is just too much for me. I don’t want to continue this,” that we could immediately get him out of there, for their own mental health, to make sure that they were okay, that we were going to get them out of there. Actually, it also gave us the opportunity, because it was sworn law enforcement or the prosecutor’s office that would have transported, we would have been calling those mental health professionals saying “please meet us at the gate. We got an individual we’d like to have you talk to.” So we knew that that was a possibility. It was very few people that did that.
We had a couple that chose not to after they had all the facts and they left and there were never any hard feelings. They came out, they decided they couldn’t do it. Perfectly fine with us. We knew what we were asking. It was just a monumental mental and physical task that we were asking folks to do. So, we had a few that would just leave after they got the information, but very few, maybe a couple.
Then we did have a couple that went into the landfill and search for a little while and then just they said I can’t do it. I’m afraid that I’m gonna be 1) the person who finds something of substance in the case or 2) I’m gonna mess something up.” And we told them you can’t mess anything up. This is a recovery for the family at this point. We had enough with the case — obviously because he was prosecuted or pled to second degree murder — but we’ve just felt that really we were recovering part of the case, but also we were hoping for closure for the family.
This was a regional event that had started in January. In April of that year, we had an outburst in the courtroom when the father was sentenced for a willful reckless driving. He made the proclamation in front of a full gallery and full of media, that he had actually indeed killed his son. And then from there he spent about a month negotiating back and forth whether he was going to give us information or not. He finally divulged to the Nebraska state patrol investigators method of, manner of death. And then what he had done. Took him about another week or two before he actually said, “okay, I’ll take you to where I dumped him.” He says, “I can’t tell you or describe it,” he says,” but if you’ll take me out, I can identify where I dropped him in the dumpster.” So about two weeks after his confession – so, about the middle of May or so, towards the end of May — actually was when he finally said, “this is where it’s at. This is where I dumped him.” And we were pretty confident at that point. We had been working with him, trying to gather information so that we could retrieve this young man.
We also knew that as we went in, probably about week one or week two, regardless of the outcome, that we were talking with our mental health professionals, and they said we probably need to do a large debriefing. Now you’re talking, when it was all said and done, we kept a roster. We had some searchers from the general public who, every day that we were searching, they were there. That was probably about a dozen of them that kept coming out day after day after day. We started to know their names and their spouses names and their history, just working side by side and having those conversations. So at the end we said we’ve probably needed to do a large debrief: tell these folks what they’re going to experience and what they need to do and how they should handle it and, quite honestly, some of the feelings they’re having is normal for what we had asked them to do. So we took those 300 or we sent out 300 invitations to folks to come to a banquet and be recognized. Again, this was regional. So many businesses donated: the hall donated, the food was donated, there were so much that was just donated for us that quite honestly, yet we didn’t recover the young man, the boy, but it was a successful endeavor by law enforcement with cooperation of the general public.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Did the family come out and search? Or any relatives?
Brian Paulsen: We had asked the family not to come out and search. We felt that Mom, as any parent or anybody close to a victim, mom really struggled, and rightfully so. And we had asked her not to come out. She had agreed that she wouldn’t. She said “I can’t do that, there’s nothing no way I could do that. But please thank the people that are doing it.” And again, we had asked both her and her mother not to come out and search. We felt that it would affect those searchers, the general public overall.
So they stayed back. I supplied them with information daily: how much we’d searched, whether we had found anything at all. If we had recovered something and said, hey, let’s have this tested, I would tell them. We had a couple items we picked up just to make sure that we don’t miss anything, and we snet it off to be tested. And again, as I said earlier, none of that really added to our case, it was unrelated items. At the end of the landfill search, when I called it, and I’ll never forget the words, I told the group that was standing in front of me, the general public, I just told them, “I have nowhere to lead you at this point. There’s nowhere for me to take you into the landfill.” From that point they were pretty accepting of it, but we still knew we had to do it.
Once we got all of the general public out that afternoon, we had called Mom and Grandma and told them that we were gonna end the search, and they came to the landfill. They were upset. They thought that we were going to recover him. I took them back and we stood at the edge of that hole and I said this is what we’ve done. They said it’s remarkable. They were hoping that we could continue. But we had no place to take them – we could have eventually searched that whole landfill and never found the young man. But they were appreciative of it and they understand. I think as time’s gone on, they understand.
Grandmother’s passed. But I’ve stayed in communication with Mom off and on. We communicate through social media just to tell her, “hey, I’m thinking of you.” On July 31st, when it’s her son’s birthday, I sent her a little note saying “hey, I’m thinking about Brendon today. I know it’s a tough day for you.” January kind of passes without us really having any type of conversation. There for a while, even January, I’d send her a little note said, “hey. I know this is a terrible day for you, but I’m just thinking of you.” So I still have contact with Mom.
Yvonne Kjorlien: The perpetrator is incarcerated, but the body has not been found.
Brian Paulsen: Yes. Yes, correct. It was the first bodiless prosecution in the state of Nebraska. We had enough. We had a crime scene team out of Douglas County, which is Omaha, Nebraska, but their crime scene unit did fabulous work from start to finish for us on this case. They had determined that the amount of blood – the young boy was placed, once he was murdered, he was placed in a fabric recliner in the garage – and they had taken that, gathered all the blood that they possibly could out of that chair to determine that was enough blood that whoever lost it couldn’t sustain life. So, three liters or whatever it would have been. And that was a huge component of it for us.
Then there was enough with the confession which was pretty, it was recorded. There’s video of the perpetrator shouting out in the courtroom that he had killed his son. He then claimed that he was the Antichrist. In hindsight, he had told the jail staff that it was going to be his day in court. So he had it well thought out what he was going to do that day as well. And then the full confession that was videotaped and recorded with the Nebraska state patrol. There’s a number of components. I’ve mentioned other agencies throughout. Again this was regional, it was an individual case that turned into a regional case, incorporating federal partners, our state partners and fellow County, neighboring County agencies as well. So it was a joint effort.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Wow. Just wow, that you’d managed to pull it off and it all came up like, at least the perpetrator, the bad guy was caught, in jail, even if the boy wasn’t found. There was some success out of this.
Brian Paulsen: Yeah, yeah, and it was a learning experience in that landfill. I’ve used that a couple times on some consults, or just I really wouldn’t say ‘consults’. I’ve had a couple call me and say “hey, what do you think? Can we go in? Can’t we? What should we do?”
Since our landfill search in Sarpy County, there are two other landfill searches in the State of Nebraska. Both of those were successful. One of those, the second one, the police chief called me and said “hey, what do you think?” and I said shut your trash down, immediately shut your trash down. He said it’s already done. I believe, as of all the records and in my thesis, that was the fastest recovery, I believe in the United States. And it took about six hours because it was a community about 7,000, they knew where the baby had been dropped or put, and they’d stopped their trash. So when they went in, it took them, I believe about six hours. The other one in northeast, Nebraska, I think was right at 28-29 days. I know we’re gonna talk about the research, but that 30-day window is very important on recovery. If you hit 30 days and you haven’t found the body, I found throughout the research that once Day 30 hits, the likelihood of recovery starts to diminish pretty quickly.
Yvonne Kjorlien: All right, so let’s segue into the research here. First, let’s talk about any research that you did for the methods to do that landfill search and then lessons learned from that, for just about the methods. Then we’ll about the rest of it.
Brian Paulsen: Sure, the method, quite honestly, both in that January with the FBI evidence recovery team was modeled after 9/11 and what they were doing in New York purging the trash out of the Twin Towers.
We kind of modified that when we went in and just put our dirt up on top, open air, breeze, things like that, knowing that we would clean it each time. In our search, we brought in clean soil at least once if not twice, but that was it. Bring it up, spread it out, search it by hand, and then dispose of it. Take that overburden and put it elsewhere. It had never been done, as I said in Nebraska, before. So we looked at, and we looked really heavily to our federal partners who had done it and then modified it, the way they have done it, in the bottom to the top.
(Continued in Part 2)
Robyn Lacy is a Ph.D. candidate in the archaeology department at Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador.Her research focuses on 17th-century burial landscape development in Northeast North America. Robyn runs a business with her partner, specializing in gravestone conservation in the Atlantic provinces of Canada.
In this episode we talk about:
You can find more information about Robyn and her company, Spade and the Grave, on her webpage here: https://spadeandthegrave.com/
More information about some items mentioned in the interview can be found here:
Notes from the start:
Globe & Mail: Multiple sclerosis origins linked to DNA from ancient Europeans
In October 2023, I gave a presentation at the Canadian Association for Biological Anthropology (CABA) entitled Start with the Why: How My Research on Scattered Remains Turned into a Podcast. You can find a recording of that presentation here.
Support the podcast and my research and Buy Me A Coffee. Your contributions will go toward my research, webhosting, and my time. Want to find out more about my research? Check out the Scavenging Study.
Contact me through [email protected] or through my contact form. Follow me on Facebook at The Reluctant Archaeologist, or through Instagram @yvonnekjorlien
Do you have a suggestion for a topic on the Scattered podcast?
Do you have a question about working with human remains?
Drop Yvonne a line at [email protected]
Transcript
Robyn Lacy: Yeah, so, my name is Robyn Lacy. I’m a PhD candidate in the archeology department at Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador. My research is looking at 17th century burial landscape development in Northeast North America, and I also run a business with my partner where we do gravestone conservation in the Atlantic provinces in Canada.
Yvonne Kjorlien: So what brought you to this because this isn’t the normal sort of archeology stuff that I hear about in Canada. People always want to dig. And you’re not really digging.
Robyn Lacy: Yeah, I mean, I guess we dig around the basis of gravestones but it’s not traditional archeology in the sense the most people think of it. Yeah. So I originally got into burial ground archeology and mortuary archeology through a field school that I did in my undergrad. Everyone has to do a field school usually for an archeology program and I decided that I wanted to do mine abroad. I was at school in Calgary and I went to a field school in Ireland and on the Isle of Man through the University of Liverpool. And while we were in Ireland we were surveying burial ground to transcribe the inscriptions on the headstones and document the gravestones as well and do mapping of the site and that kind of thing. I just thought that was the most interesting thing possible. That was not the avenue of archeology. I was intending to go into at all and I thought that was just such a fascinating area of research and it really stuck with me. So it’s what I’ve been doing in grad school. And then with learning about burial grounds, to me it makes sense to have learned about their conservation as well. And there’s very few people that have an archeology background in Canada that do historic stone restoration and graveyard work as well. So they go really well together for that.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Cool, so you did this field school gonna ask you to take your memory back to when you’re in Ireland doing archeology, which sounds amazing and wonderful, but you’ve also had this amazing opportunity to see archeology on both sides of the Atlantic. Are there differences or is archeology archeology no matter where you go.
Robyn Lacy: I think that the basis is the same, it all comes from the same ideas. But the ways that we operate, especially excavation techniques are a lot different in the UK. And in Ireland you’ll see a site being opened, they’ll take all the topsoil off at once and you’ll do a row of people troweling the whole entire surface together. Whereas here we’re more likely to open one meter units or smaller trenches like that. So the way that sites got approached is a little bit different. But also, when you’re in Europe, you have this depth of structural heritage that goes back a lot farther. Like indigenous structures are a lot different than the stone buildings being built in Europe a couple hundred years ago to thousands of years ago. So there’s a lot of differences and approaches to older sites as well, I think.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, we don’t really have those stone walls here, do we?
Robyn Lacy: They’re really nice.
Yvonne Kjorlien: It’s nice when you’re digging and you hit on something stone because when that happens, at least in Alberta,…
Robyn Lacy: Mm-hmm
Yvonne Kjorlien: it’s either, just another rock, glacial till, or possibly maybe even the stone tool. There’s no stone walls here.
Robyn Lacy: Yeah, and I seeing post hole features and that kind of changes to the ground like that, but it’s really exciting when you find something structural, that’s very clearly structural that’s still standing.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Right cool. Yeah. Yeah for that reason. I like doing historic archeology because of the structural aspect. Yeah, seeing…
Robyn Lacy: Me too.
Yvonne Kjorlien: where the walls are and the post holes. And yeah, that’s always cool.
Robyn Lacy: Yeah.
Yvonne Kjorlien: So let’s get into your research a little bit. So let’s first start off with some definitions the difference between a burial site and a graveyard and a cemetery.
Robyn Lacy: So, I mean in different parts of the world, they have different meetings, of course, so this is mostly for North America. Cemetery is in our context a site that is typically municipally owned or if their owned by a church, they’re often non-denominational. It means a certain type of site. It’s sort of more rural. It’s usually on the edge of town. It’s sort of park-like. They come from this idea in the late 18th century and it was called the rural garden cemetery. So they were planned, organized, but not in the same way that you would see rows in like an older site. There are larger monuments, there’s bushes and wide paths. It’s supposed to have this park-like atmosphere. And that design style didn’t come to North America until the 18 30s. I want to say 1834, possibly or around there, with the construction of Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts. So for being really annoyingly technical, anything before that date in North America is not considered a cemetery but cemetery is the colloquial word for most burial sites these days.
Graveyard then or churchyard is the grounds traditionally surrounding a church where the dead are buried. Sometimes they’re not directly around the church, they can be right next to it. But that’s what the graveyard is. And then in North America, burial ground can be used as a catch all term, but in the Northeast, specifically for the Puritans and the Quakers, they used burial ground historically to denote to site that they were bearing their dead in but they were trying to do this separation of church and everything else. They didn’t even call their spaces where they had services a church, they called it the meeting house. So the burial ground was something that was not sacred, that’s just where your mortal remains went to didn’t really matter after that. So they didn’t call it a graveyard specifically to say that it was not associated with the church.
Yvonne Kjorlien: So with this creation of cemetery in this park atmosphere, it almost sounds like, back in the 1930s when this was started. and at least in North America that there was almost a desire to promote a relationship between the living and the dead would that be accurate to say?
Robyn Lacy: Somewhat, yea. And the 1830s. But yeah, there sort of came from this concern that people were having with overcrowding in burial grounds that were in the centers of communities. And there’s a lot of articles about this happening New York and places like that that were more urban centres — Boston as well — where they were like, we have too many people buried in these sites, it’s going to be smelly, it’s going to be making people sick even though that’s not how dead bodies work. And that was something that they thought was going to affect them. So they were like no more burials in the city, we’re going to create these specific spaces outside of the city to bury our dead in. And in Europe, where the royal cemetery movement comes from, it started with — and I’m going to butcher this pronunciation — but Pere Lachaise, which is outside of Paris and that’s the first garden cemetery. So it’s really the model that they were all based off of. And it encouraged people to visit the sites and spend time there, but not a connection to interacting with the space in the same way that it was a hundred or 200 years before that and because it was also removing it from people’s daily viewscape, I would say. You’re not walking by a rural cemetery every day, it’s not something that you’re seeing on your way to the market or on your way home from work because it’s no longer in the center of that town. It would have to be a purposeful trip out there.
Yvonne Kjorlien: I just find that interesting that they want to make it more park-like and more palatable to the living but yet at the same time they’re not really encouraging a more engaged relationship with the dead.
Robyn Lacy: Yeah, it’s interesting because it’s a park but then it’s not very easy to get to for some people.
Yvonne Kjorlien: So yeah, it’s just interesting that they would go out of their way to make cemeteries, into park-like spaces, make them more palatable, but yet not really being encouraging, I guess, a deeper relationship with the dead because these spaces are removed from urban centers, so you have to travel to get to them but yet they’re nicer.
Robyn Lacy: Yeah, and I think a lot of it has to do with the 19th century idea of ‘softening of death’, it’s often referred to in literature. Where you go from seeing these 17th-18th century gravestones that have the skull on them and the hourglass and they’re momento mori — remember you shall die – to the more early 19th century into the Victorian period of there’s a willow tree to denote sorrow and there’s a mourning figure next to an urn. A lot of classical imagery, a lot more, I’d say, romanticized. The language changes a lot, and that’s really what we’re seeing being used in these park-like atmospheres. It’s more of a calm romanticized space.
Yvonne Kjorlien: So it almost sounds like, I don’t know, they’re, don’t know how to put this into words, but taking the opportunity to use a burial ground. I don’t know maybe a reason to create a park. if that makes sense instead of kind of other way around
Robyn Lacy: Yeah, it could very well be a way to create a public space that’s accessible to everyone while so solving some of the issues of where to put dead people. I’m not too sure, I don’t do too much 19th century landscape stuff, so I’m not sure about they’re wider development. But yeah.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Right, let’s talk about what you are doing. So you’re the time frame, the geographical area, and then also the groups that you look at in your research.
Robyn Lacy: Yeah, so my PhD dissertation research is on 17th century burial grounds. So I’m in sort of the sites that were established when settlers first arrived in North America when they were coming from settlements they lived in for hundreds of years that been organized for ages — they probably don’t even know why things were in certain places in the communities — to a place that they viewed as completely empty. Obviously it’s not. But when they arrived in North America, they were setting up a community for the first time, and they got to choose where everything went in that community. And what I’m really interested in looking at is how settlers chose to develop the space where they were placing their dead amongst where they were living and where their daily activities were.
So I was looking at settlements founded by the British, the Dutch, and the French in the Northeast. So from Northern Virginia up to Nova Scotia and into Newfoundland, along the coast and then sort of along the St. Lawrence River valley and the Hudson River valley. And looking at how the early settlements from the 17th century there, how they established their burial grounds and then comparing them: what were different religions doing, and what were the different nationalities doing, and if there were any differences seen between those groups or was there sort of like a European conglomerate idea of what to do with your dead? And sort of those kind of theme overall.
Yvonne Kjorlien: So what were people doing with their dead because there are different time frames and different places across the world even now where people are very much in relationship with the dead. I mean, there’s even some time frames where cultures would bury dead under the floors of their houses and actually do their daily living on top of their dead. Tell us a little bit about the Dutch, the British, and the French and how they use the spaces and how they maintained or divorced themselves from a relationship with their dead.
Robyn Lacy: It was pretty interesting. The Dutch and the French, will start with them, what their settlements were very homogeneous based on religion. The Dutch were all represented by the Dutch Reformed Church, which was a branch of the Protestant church after the Protestant Reformation in Europe, which sort of helped form the Netherlands (that’s a whole other thing). And the Dutch Reformed Church was the state religion and that’s what we see reflected in the colonies, aside from a couple Jewish burial grounds as well. And so they were all Protestant basically. And then the French towns, even after the Reformation, Catholicism remains the dominant religion in France. Everyone had to be Catholic in the French settlements as well.
So we have a Catholic conglomerate, a Protestant conglomerate, and then the British towns, they had freedom of religion in the colonies, while that wasn’t the case in Britain. That was something that the British established for their colonists. So we have this hodgepodge of so many different variations on Christianity which all had different ideas of what they wanted to do. We’ve got Protestants. There’s some Catholic influence. There’s some Jewish sites. There’s Quaker, there’s Puritans and those are the ones I look at, but there’s various other denominations in there as well which showed up really interestingly in the data.
One of the variables I was looking at was whether the burial ground was a graveyard or not. So whether it was directly associated with the church spatially, which was what I was looking at. So the Dutch sites the majority of them were associated with the church. There was two sites that weren’t but those two sites were only not associated with church because they were established in such early settlements, so the church hadn’t even been developed yet. The French ones were all associated with the church and there was one that was unknown. And then the British sites were sort of in the middle. They were like some of them were and some of them weren’t, and it was kind of all over the place which was almost 50/50 split which is really interesting.
Yvonne Kjorlien: What can you, I guess, infer from the association of a burial ground with a church. Because you said that the British was kind of a hodgepodge and I’m guessing that’s in alignment with the multitude of religious beliefs, and what have you, with that. So what can you infer from the placement of these burial grounds and association or not an association with a church?
Robyn Lacy: So what kind of is looking like is the closer a settlement or a people was keeping to an older established religion — like French Catholic beliefs didn’t change too much going into the 17th century from what they had been for a long time — the closer they were to a group like that, the more they were likely to have this sort of churchyard model. Where, let’s see, I don’t know where the percentages are here, yeah, so those vast majority I think…11 French sites I looked at were associated with a church, one unknown. So that’s 100% of the data that I do have with associated with the church. And then the further you get into religious groups that are changing — so the Dutch Reform — they’re slightly less. They’re still mostly next to a church, but there’s more that aren’t than when you look at the French ones and then you get to the British site and the Puritans are mostly not associated with the church and the Quakers or sort of both, but they don’t call theirs churches, so that’s all another question mark. The British Anglican sites are beside the church most of the time but a couple aren’t. The farther you get into religious groups that are deviating from the long established…is really where you’re starting to get more variation.
Yvonne Kjorlien: And what about I guess that the format of these burial grounds? Were they all in rows? Were people buried facing a certain specific direction? Are the gravestones all the same?
Robyn Lacy: So I wasn’t looking to closely at individual graves, but from the sites that I did have some previous archaeological excavation data to look at, the majority of them are still following the Christian tradition of varying the grave facing east-west. The gravestone styles vary by region, a lot of influence coming from the New England area. There was some really interesting stuff going on in Montreal with, I think it’s Point de Collier, is where the site is called now Ville-Marie was the earliest sort of settlement in that area, and their earliest burial ground had a division in the middle of it, like a fence going down the middle. There was some burials on one side of the fence that were oriented slightly differently than the directly east-west ones. They do have records of the burials of that site and they think that the ones that were oriented the same way were indigenous people that had joined the Mission and had converted to Christianity, so they were buried in the same space in a segregated section of the burial ground
Yvonne Kjorlien: Isn’t that interesting.
Yvonne Kjorlien: So, you mentioned you weren’t looking specifically at the individual graves, but did you notice any patterns in, like you mentioned iconography before, how there was this softening of the iconography when cemeteries in the park like structure was starting to be taken up. What other shift in iconography did you notice, if at all?
Robyn Lacy: Yeah, so there’s a period where we don’t really have much data for what the grave markers and gravestones would have had. Partially because Quakers and Puritans didn’t like religious iconography. So they often didn’t even mark their graves or they’d mark them with a stick or something. So that definitely plays into what we see for the New England area. But when they did start carving gravestones a lot of for those groups at least didn’t have any imagery at all. So you see a lot of early gravestones, especially around Boston and Massachusetts Bay Area that don’t have any images from the mid 1600s, they just have text. And then they slowly start to have pictures but they are not religious pictures. So there’s very often early gravestones coming out of New England and they shift everywhere sort of on the northeast. We have New England gravestones from the 18th century in Newfoundland, and they have these momento mori images of the winged skull, that also gets called the death’s head. Sometimes the winged cherub, which is also called the sole effigy, which is supposed to supposedly represent the individual’s soul. And then once the 18th century gets rolling you get more images that are less skull-like and more like people. You can see portraitures sometimes and you get into, as it rolls into the 19th century, is when we start seeing that major change to be the softer image and then the text will change from saying ‘here lies the literal body’ or like ‘the corpse of’ to ‘in memory of’ or ‘dedicated to’ kind of thing.
Yvonne Kjorlien: When these people came over and they started to settle did you find that they’re practices or maybe being influenced by the other people and other communities?
Robyn Lacy: Yeah, so I think when people were coming over from Europe they were carrying a lot of traditions with them, but then especially the dissenter groups were using this as an opportunity to be able to practice their own religion and sort of run a community how they would have wanted to. So we’re seeing a lot of new ideas being established at the same time as some groups holding up older traditions as well. A lot of the time people who settle in one area were of a similar background, so lot of Puritans and Quakers in Massachusetts Bay Area, whereas in Quebec in the St. Lawrence Valley River Valley you see a lot of Catholic influence and, to this day, it’s still very divided up like that. So I think that people weren’t moving around quite as much as they do today, so there was a little bit less cross-influence, but it definitely was there. We can see that in the 18th century and after the British took over Dutch New Netherlands, and we see a lot of influence of British ideas and British gravestone carving styles as well appearing in the cemetery.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Very cool. let’s talk a little bit about the work you do with your husband about restoration. What is involved in that? Is it I’m just picturing, growing up in the 80s where it was kind of the thing for bored kids to go in and knock over headstones. I mean, I don’t get it. So other than righting headstones, what else does your work involve?
Robyn Lacy: I mean, I’m sure we’re fixing a lot of problems that were caused by bored kids in the 80s, unfortunately. Yeah, so we do gravestone like cleaning and uprighting and then a lot of repair work as well. Softer stones like marble, specifically marble and limestone, will often crack and break and if the break isn’t too developed, if it hasn’t weathered away too much and is really unstable, we’ll be able to put that back together. But we also do a lot of work with heritage groups and community groups in Newfoundland. So we’ll go out and do workshops and teach their volunteers how to safely clean gravestones so they can upkeep the sites for themselves in the future, and teach other people we’ll do public talks about safety and cemeteries and history about different sites in the work we do and everything as well.
Yvonne Kjorlien: So how do people go about knowing that, I don’t know, their cemetery or graveyard needs tending to? How do they contact you? What’s involved?
Robyn Lacy: People continuously tell us that there’s no shortage of work initially and it’s true. The joke is that every road ends in a cemetery in the province. Yeah. I’m sure that’s true in so many places. But yeah, because European settlers have been here for so long that there’s quite a history of established cemeteries and gravestone carvers and everything. So yeah people often know about what’s local to them. They know about the sites that are in their community, and often people do go out and try and clean up these sites themselves as well. And so if we’re sort of out there making ourselves known on the internet, we haven’t advertised too much but sometimes we’re on the radio or something and then we’ll get some emails afterwards because we have a little website. Yeah, we’re usually just out there talking about heritage and someone will come up to us and be like, I work with such and such cemetery and I’m on the board and can you come to a workshop for us or something and it usually goes from there.
Yvonne Kjorlien: So, what’s the number one thing that maybe well-meaning volunteers do to try to help preserve their gravestones and cemeteries, but it’s not really helping.
Robyn Lacy: That could be a really long list, unfortunately. …
Yvonne Kjorlien: Oh boy. All these well-meaning things that are not helping.
Robyn Lacy: I mean the main issue is that conservation and preservation, as I’m sure you know, for archeology updates very frequently. It’s a very active field. So the information that’s really available to people, online especially, is often quite outdated. I’d say the biggest issue for gravestones is that people put them in concrete. They’ll try to do repairs using concrete or they’ll set the bases into concrete. Concrete is extremely difficult to remove once it’s on a stone. And you can take it off sometimes but it’ll often take pieces of the stone with it and that’s a huge problem. But it is not water-permeable. And that’s an issue when you’re working with a soft historic stone because it causes water to be trapped inside of the stone which makes it weaker in that area. So if you set up a marble headstone up, and down into a block of concrete, after a while water can’t leech out of the bottom of that stone, it’s just sort of collecting there and that weakens that area, and the stone’s going to break. But now that bottom piece that you need it to prepare with is stuck in concrete and you can’t get it out any more.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Okay, no concrete. Good to know.
Robyn Lacy: No concrete.
Yvonne Kjorlien: I would not have thought of that. Okay good.
Yvonne Kjorlien: And so people can just contact you through your website.
Robyn Lacy: Yeah, the business is called Black Cat Cemetery Preservation. If you also Google my name and put gravestone after it. I’m sure something would come up as well.
Yvonne Kjorlien: I think I found you by Googling mortuary archeology because I really wanted to get somebody on here talking about mortuary archeology.
Robyn Lacy: There’s not too many people in Canada that do Mortuary archeology as well as public-facing stuff. So yeah, it’s a small pool.
Yvonne Kjorlien: So why did you want to do a PhD?
Robyn Lacy: I never really intended to go into academia in the sense of being a professor, but I’ve always really been interested in research and writing and that avenue of archeology. So I did my Master’s and then I went to work in Ontario for a couple of years. But I still have a lot of questions from the research I did for my Master’s and I thought the best way to answer them rather than doing it on my own time while trying to work full time would probably be to go back to school. And then there’s a lot of heritage jobs in museums and institutions that do research that even if you’re not like going to be a professor they still want you to have a doctorate. So if I’m interested in doing something like that in the future, that’s like the bonus of having a doctorate in the end.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, I’ve heard that from others that if you want to work in the heritage, in a museum or one of the more I guess a heritage institution of whatever sorts that you really do need a PhD.
Robyn Lacy: Yeah, others like smaller museums and community museums, having a background in museum stuff is great. But if you want to work it like the Royal BC Museum and you want to be a curator of whatever, they want you to have a high level background in it. So they usually ask people to have a doctorate. Yeah, so if I would like those doors to be open to me in the future for sure.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, especially, with your consulting, you’re very firmly situated within the heritage spheres as far as I can see. So yeah, that makes sense. All right. How when do you defend?
Robyn Lacy: My I talked to my supervisors recently and I said borrowing a catastrophe of hopefully late spring early summer. So I’m on the last couple chapters of editing and then the whole thing will get compiled and sent to my supervisors for a second review and then if we’ve got any change, make those, I’ll be going out to my reviewer committee.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Damn! Best of luck. That’s coming up pretty quick.
Robyn Lacy: Thank you it’s a little scary but
Yvonne Kjorlien: I feel bad now for taking up your time. You should be writing and…
Robyn Lacy: No.
Yvonne Kjorlien: editing. All…
Robyn Lacy: No, you’re good. It’s nice to not be editing.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Thank you very much. And again, if anybody wants to reach out to you they could just Google Robyn Lacy and, sorry your website again, is Spade and Grave?
Robyn Lacy: Spade and the Grave. Yes.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Spade and the Grave. All right, sounds good.
Robyn Lacy: Thank you.
Dr. Sasha Reid is an assistant professor at the University of Calgary, teaching in the Departments of Sociology, Psychology, and in the Faculty of Law. She is also currently a law student at the University of Calgary. Sasha came to media attention when she developed a serial homicide database that suggested patterns in homicides in Toronto that may indicated a possible serial killer. That serial killer was later identified as Bruce McArthur. She has also developed a missing and murdered database (MMD) that has become the largest database of missing and murdered indigenous persons.
I wanted to talk to Sasha primarily about developing a database and what’s involved.
In this episode we talk about:
You can contact Sasha at:
Further Reading:
Vancouver Sun: Why these women are building a database of 12,000 missing, murdered people in Canada and Why victims’ families want Robert Pickton evidence kept and why police say it’s no longer needed
Notes from the start:
We’ve published the first scholarly article for the Alberta portion of the Scavenging Study! The taphonomic impact of scavenger guilds in peri-urban and rural regions of central and southern Alberta. Part I – Identification of forensically relevant vertebrate scavengers is available here: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1556-4029.15443
Support the podcast and my research and Buy Me A Coffee. Your contributions will go toward my research, webhosting, and my time. Want to find out more about my research? Check out the Scavenging Study.
Contact me through [email protected] or through my contact form. Follow me on Facebook at The Reluctant Archaeologist, or through Instagram @yvonnekjorlien
Do you have a suggestion for a topic on the Scattered podcast?
Do you have a question about working with human remains?
Drop Yvonne a line at [email protected]
Transcript
Yvonne Kjorlien: So go ahead and say who you are and what you’re currently your current position. I guess if that’s applicable.
Sasha Reid: Yeah, this is actually I think and I hope the hardest question of today.
You know why? Because I’m not anything. I am everything, and so I like to introduce myself as hi. I’m Sasha. I’m a person who does a lot of things. I have a PhD in developmental psychology from the University of Toronto. I studied there. I got my Master’s degrees there in criminology and applied psych. and then my PhD’s in developmental. And then I am a law student right now at the University of Calgary in my last year – wahoo — And I am also an adjunct professor at Ontario Tech, which is awesome and new. So yeah.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Wow, and what faculty are you in adjunct there?
Sasha Reid: Faculty of sociology
Yvonne Kjorlien: Sociology. Wow, it’s cool being an adjunct because then you get to work with and meet all sorts of new people where you may not have a chance to before. Yeah.
Sasha Reid: I know that there’s some people there who are doing their dissertations on serial homicide and I know I’ve been asked to be a committee member in order to be a committee member. I have to be affiliated with the university in some ways that this is the only reason why I haven’t adjunct.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah. Yeah, as far as I know in Canada, at least, you don’t get paid for being an adjunct. It’s kind of just a status thing.
Sasha Reid: Yes, it is a thankless position.
Yvonne Kjorlien: All right so, let’s delve into your past a little bit and bring us up to date. What attracted you to doing psychology developmental and serial killers and all that good stuff and why go to school? Especially because you’ve probably been doing for over 10 years now, I would imagine.
Sasha Reid: I think we’re coming up on 20. So, okay here’s the rundown…
Yvonne Kjorlien: alright
Sasha Reid: There was never a period in my life where monsters have not been front and center of my daily thoughts. Never. When I was a kid…
Yvonne Kjorlien: Did you encounter a monster when you were a kid?
Sasha Reid: No, I didn’t. I mean, I tried. I went monster hunting with — and I’m not even kidding — my favorite show was Buffy the Vampire Slayer and we lived in the woods. So my lovely next door neighbor and I would go find the best wood, whittle it down into a stake, and then go at night, hunting vampires in the forest.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Oh, that’s awesome.
Sasha Reid: We’re always looking for something scary. And obviously I didn’t find anything and I grew up a little and I realized monsters do exist, but they’re not like the movies; they’re not vampires and werewolves and whatnot. They’re people and that’s even scarier in a way.
My parents divorced in both the married some very not so kind people and that’s kind of where my introduction to, and I put in quotes, ‘monsters’ that are humans really began to develop. And it was such an isolating experience as a kid feeling so uncomfortable at home and so alone. So I spent a lot of time at the library just reading books, of course about monsters and witchcraft. You kind of just do a little circle and you loop around into abnormal psychology, at least in my library. So I started studying all the abnormal psychology books and I started learning about psychopathy and I thought that’s so interesting. That’s a type of person and it explains, at least in the mind of a child, it explains the bad things that happen to me as a kid. And so just knowing that why did this happen made me feel so much more empowered and safer, and so I wanted to give that to other people too. So then I went into Psych.
Yvonne Kjorlien: I love the question “why?”. I love asking it of everything. I want to know the behind, why something works, why it doesn’t work, why did that happen? Lovely, lovely question.
Sasha Reid: yeah, and you hear it …victims’ family members. They always want to know why. People, I think, are just drawn to the why, and sometimes it’s the most impossible answer. It’s impossible sometimes, and sometimes why isn’t good enough and when you get to that, it’s so traumatizing because it’s not good enough.
Yvonne Kjorlien: I imagine for families who have had a member of their family disappear, has something happened to them, that it’s been a long time and it’s a traumatic experience. And so they probably built In their minds. They want something like horrific and monumental to explain all of this that they’re going through and to have that come across the killer or whoever, the perpetrator, the bad guy say, “I don’t know”, or “They were just there”…
Sasha Reid: Yeah.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah. It’s not good enough.
Sasha Reid: No, it’s also interesting. I’ve heard it from many different accounts, like many different people have said fortunately in their cases they were solved and they got to actually go to court and see the person who killed their family member and so many people say, “That’s it?” “They’re so small”, or “I had expected something so much different.” “That’s it?” They were expecting actual monsters. It’s interesting.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Wow. So let’s go through your academic journey to bring you to your PhD. What lead in your undergrad to have you go into grad and then to get a PhD, because that’s a big step.
Sasha Reid: Yes, that’s a huge if you know anything about me, it is I don’t think a lot. I do everything with very little thought. If I had put an ounce of thought into this, I don’t know if I would have done it, but here I am. So undergrad. I started at Lakehead University and it was great. It was close to home, but I wanted to join a sorority and there was no sorority in Thunder Bay. And so of course, I’m going to apply to the University of Toronto, not because it’s the most incredible institution ever, but sororities, of course.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Okay.
Sasha Reid: Yeah. There’s nothing inspiring there. I started the University of Toronto and it’s incredible and I have the greatest mentors. I’m still so interested in psychopathy and I get to start taking courses like abnormal psychology and brain and behaviour, psychology and the law. And I’m a super curious person and so I’m always chatting with my professors just trying to get their understanding about these things. And I through that developed really good mentors. One of them is Dr. David Nussbaum, just the most incredible person ever. Right now he studies terrorism. He’s amazing. But when I was an undergrad, he studied psychopathy, and he really took me under his wing and I learned so much from him. When it came time to graduate, I told him, “I don’t know what I want to do.” And I think that’s the only failing I think for him as a mentor. It was very little guidance in terms of what I could do with a psychology degree and an interest in psychopathy. And so instead of pursuing a graduate degree in Psych, I pursued a graduate degree in child development and education. So I’m actually an Ontario certified kindergarten to grade six teacher.
Yvonne Kjorlien: I didn’t see that one coming.
Sasha Reid: Yeah, me neither. I threw that it too. I’m a person who does a lot of things. So I did my Master’s degree in applied psychology and human development slash child education. And that was at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. And it’s two years and it was interesting because, that first year, we did just learn a lot about education and, I don’t know, stuff about teaching. And I was so bored. I went to my supervisor and I told her, “This has been wonderful. I’m so grateful that you took me in. It’s a very, very prestigious program, but I think I’m going to drop out.” And the most incredible thing happened. She said, “Why do you want to drop out?” and I said,” I’m not really interested in being a teacher. I’m so much more interested in deviance.” And she looked at me and she leaned across the table and she said, “Sasha, how could you ever hope to understand deviance without first understanding child development?” And I thought, “Oh my God, you’re right.” And so I stayed in the program and actually that day is when I started my serial homicide database.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Really?
Sasha Reid: Because she’s, yeah, she said you need to understand child development to understand deviance, and if you’re not happy with just doing this, find something else to do on the side to help you get through. And guess what? That was a serial homicide database.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Huh! It’s funny how those, little tiny, they seem tiny, they seem insignificant, but they change the course of our lives.
Sasha Reid: Just that one sentence is all it took and it just seemed to make everything make sense. And she’s so right. Sometimes I look back and I’m like, my God, if I didn’t get my Master’s degree in this I would have been at such a disadvantage. Because I didn’t just learn about children, I worked with children for years, and I saw them develop and I saw these stages, I saw how they think and engage. Oh my God, I’m so glad I didn’t drop out.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Wow. Amazing advice. And then for your course of action, to develop the serial homicide database on the side. That was a very interesting reaction to that to that sentence.
Sasha Reid: Yeah, I thought you’re right. I’m gonna stay here. I’m gonna do what I have to do, which is going into classes every day and teaching, which I didn’t like, but at the end of the day, I’m gonna come home to a database, which is interesting, which I know how to develop because I know how children develop, so yeah.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Cool. All right. As you know, we do want to talk about databases; however, let’s finish talking about your academic journey through PhD and where you are now, and then we’ll come back to databases. So you went on to do a PhD after that.
Sasha Reid: Nope.
Yvonne Kjorlien: No? Okay.
Sasha Reid: Because I now felt like I was already in all good and I understand child development and that’s great, but I felt that I had been out of a bit of a disadvantage because I hadn’t yet understood much about deviance, not in a professional sphere. So I applied to get my Master’s in criminology and socio- legal studies at the University of Toronto. And I applied. And I was rejected. Mmm. It makes sense. They kind of — and people do this, and which is why I interviewed myself as, “Hi. I’m Sasha. I’m a person who does a lot of things.” They pigeon-holed me as a person who studies children and somebody asked, “Why are you trying to study crime when you study children?” And I thought, “Oh my Lord. Stop pigeonholing me.” So I wrote them a letter three pages long explaining why they need to change their decision and admit me.
And can you freaking believe it? They did.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Yes.
Sasha Reid: They changed their minds. And now on their application website it says, “You cannot write letters to make us change our minds.”
Yvonne Kjorlien: Nice!
Sasha Reid: So I go and I do a one-year Master’s in criminology and I get a better understanding of the sociology of crime. It wasn’t psych-based, which kind of looking back, it wasn’t all that necessary, but it’s a great program. And then after that, I applied to my PhD and I…that was my PhD. Yeah.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Wow, holy smokes. That’s quite the journey. And so, okay, let’s talk about the database and how that kind of…we know how to it originated now…how did it evolve to the point where you could use it as a predictive model for the Bruce MacArthur case?
Sasha Reid: It’s still very much developing. Okay, so I know that people are really interested in databases. And I think it might also just be helpful to start by saying how this began. Because right now, it looks awesome. And right now it looks like it’s so usable and it did not start that way. And I think that there’s a little bit of beauty in showing the horrors of starting a database. And the fact that it’s okay to fail. I started this database by having these Word templates. So people would add a picture and input qualitative and quantitative data about serial killers, and it was literally just a bunch of Word sheets. And maybe they were five to 13 pages long and they were never actually in an Excel file ever until I got so many of these forms and I was like, what am I supposed to do with this all. I’ve got all this data, but I can’t do any stats with it. That’s when we turned it into an Excel file.
And then, I think people in databases will think Excel is not a database and they’re completely correct: it’s not. But it’s a great place to store data. And that kind of just taught me the importance of learning how to break down variables into zeros and ones. Make it as easy as possible. Because you’re going to eventually have to be able to run analyses with it. So keep it short, keep it simple. If you have a qualitative variable, don’t have something that people can write out. Inevitably people will spell things wrong, they will get things wrong. It will never be uniform. Always have drop-down menus. It just helps to standardize everything. And that was really our problem with Excel. It’s because, when I’d ask people to write in things like victim’s names or the locations of serial killers, so many errors, so many spelling errors. They’re not uniform whatsoever. And so I gravitated over to Air Table. Which is an incredible data platform. And right now that’s where the serial homicide database is held. And I’ve learned so much in putting everything in Excel and failing so hard for so many years. I better understand now the importance of having nested data and making sure most things are drop-down and also always having room at the end for notes. So I have a lot of research assistants who work with me to fill out these databases. Early on they would email me to say, “I wasn’t able to do A, B, C or D. Can you keep that in mind?” I’d get so many emails that I was like, “You know what? We’ll just create a notes section at the end. So you can just put that into the individual profile.” That’s been really helpful. I tangented.
Yvonne Kjorlien: It’s all good. So it sounds like… okay, let’s go back to your Word sheets. So you said that you had different people filling these out. How were you getting your data? It sounds like it wasn’t just from the research literature. It sounds like you’re getting personal communications.
Sasha Reid: We were trying. No, so this is again the beauty of trying and failing. So I got my research assistant from the University of Toronto. They were all students, I’m a student. We’re all just interested in crimes, psychopathy, abnormal, whatever. And so we tried to figure out — how can we get the best data possible? Because, again, although we’re students who are all still academics and we want good data. Garbage in, garbage out is a real issue. And so we started by looking at books in the libraries. Fortunately University of Toronto has the biggest library ever. And so there’s a ton of books on serial killers there. So we would rent those out and go through them week after week, just pour through those books and take data from those books and put it into the Word documents. You may be wondering, why wouldn’t you just go to Google? Because I’m dumb do everything the hard way first.
I’m trying to make sure no one else does that. But eventually we did end up going and looking at journal articles and there’s not a lot, but there is enough published case studies on serial killers that we could just pick information and pull it into our Word documents. And then the lower tier data…we tried to tier the data right? So first, you’ve got these books that have been published and that are housed in the universities. You’ve got journal articles where people actually worked with serial killers and we look at those. And then we have — not the best data but at least it’s a temporary holdover — information on the internet in a public domain or even in documentaries. So we would take that data and put it into the database and we cite everything that we have in there just to make sure, if you’re questioning this, here’s the source and maybe it’s a good source, maybe not so take it as it is.
And then after we all got very comfortable with that, we started reaching out more to psychiatrists or psychologists, law enforcement, detectives, people who’d actually worked with these offenders, and just tried to see if there’s anything that they were actually able to share. We tried to get court documents where serial killers actually shared their own statements or where a childhood evaluation had been done. Just because that’s the best information you can possibly get, but, again starting out, I did not know that. I didn’t. So now I know. And for my PhD, I will say this: I definitely wanted to contact serial killers. I went to Yorkville Mall. There’s a store there. It’s called Papyrus. They sell cards and I went there and I bought a hundred empty cards, beautiful cards with beautiful colored envelopes to send to serial killers. Because I am so dumb. And I kind of put that in my ethics that I was going to be like mailing serial killers and getting in touch with them, and that was not gonna fly. So my supervisor and I had a discussion about that and he’s like, “No, you’re never going to get ethics.” Which, he’s correct. I wanted to, but no, I never ended up physically mailing those letters out.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Wow. Yeah, that’s one of those was it really really Brave or really really not so smart.
Sasha Reid: Yeah, that’s kind of like the tagline of my life. Brave, but not so smart. Yup.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Okay, so I want to ask you — it’s actually really great that we are now chatting instead of a year ago when I first contacted you because of Chat GPT and OpenAI and all these AI because they’re all essentially predictive models built on the databases that, AI who knows where they’re getting their data, they’re pillaging the net for literature, essentially English, but, yeah, that’s their data set and they’re building these databases and they’re using them as predictive models that now look like Chat GPT that in essence mimic the English language. So I was kind of wondering, if you wanted to just take a minute and postulate, if you could throw your database into an OpenAI computer and have it run some analyses. Would you be open to doing that and see what patterns would come out of that?
Sasha Reid: Without thought without question: 100%.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Yes, Let’s do it.
Sasha Reid: Listen, because there’s a lot of reasons for this. One: I am, and I don’t know if this is controversial or whatnot, I love Chat GPT. I am an enormous proponent of it. Ethics aside, which you can’t actually just put ethics aside, but for a moment, can we just please, this is revolutionary. It is fascinating and it is beautiful and it has helped my life in ways that I did not even know we’re possible and just on a cat side. I will tell you because I have to actually Chat GPT 4. I freaking love this. I asked it to write a song about a bad cat named Mr. Vinegar — meaning my cat, Theo — and to write the song in the style of Michael Jackson’s Don’t Stop Till You Get Enough and then draw a picture. And it gave me cutest song and picture. It was: how can you hate this? But in terms of writing proposals for things like — you’re an academic, I’m an academic — proposals are literally just verbatim the same thing over and over: here is my question, here is the method. Why do I have to say this 1,000 times over? It will do it for you. Obviously you check it. You edit it. You make it good. But hours of time saved every day.
So I love it, and in the name of giving back to something that gives me so much, I’d be very happy to put my data in there. I took it from the internet too. There’s very little in the serial homicide database that’s not already in the public domain. Whatever was explicitly told to me to don’t share this information, yeah, I would absolutely take that out. Violations of privacy are really really big issue. But everything you took was from the public domain, so I’m happy to throw that back there. I’d love to see what it would show. Yeah.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Right? Because there’s only so much as a human we can analyze it, until we go blind.
Sasha Reid: Yeah.
Yvonne Kjorlien: But we are human we are liable to make mistakes, we can only see what we’re going to see at the moment and we have a subjective interpretation of how live. How we perceive our reality is based on who we are. So to have a machine take a whack at it without those biases. That would be cool.
Sasha Reid: It’s completely in line with the way I do work. So I never do work independently or alone because I think people can get stuck in intellectual silos and that’s never a good thing. So on my team, I’ve got doctors and lawyers and had historians, geographers, people from every single different background so that I can see, where are my blind spots? What are you seeing that I’m not seeing? And just adding Chat GPT to that or predictive AI, there’s just another member of the team, in my opinion. So I’m very happy to use it. I haven’t yet and I’m actually surprised because I have that ability. I’m gonna see I’m gonna do it today. I’m gonna let you know how it goes.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Especially with 4 because can’t you upload quite a bit more data into four?
Sasha Reid: You can upload entire spreadsheets, PDFs, everything, yeah.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Then you can with…my god. Yeah.
Sasha Reid: I know.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Keep me in the loop. I am so excited about that.
Sasha Reid: Okay, we’re so geeky I love it.
Yvonne Kjorlien: I mean as soon as I learned what everybody’s calling AI, what it actually is and what it actually is is that it’s a predictive model based on data. Like, holy crap! How many more instances can you get about that? I mean we’ve been doing predictive models for God knows how long I’ve been trying to start my own database to develop a predictive model. You’ve done exactly that. So let’s get the machines on board.
Sasha Reid: Yes. A hundred percent. Now, the issue with that always is it goes back to that very fundamental basic: garbage in, garbage out.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Yes.
Sasha Reid: Which is why working with predictive models, working with AI, you have to remember this is a symbiotic relationship. It will only give you whatever you put into it. So if you’re giving it garbage, it’s gonna put out garbage and you have to be aware of that and you have to be kind of humble about that. Right? I know in academia, for whatever reason, people have the biggest egos. I think it prevents them from recognizing their own fallibility. So yeah, some data sets are not really good. Sometimes you’re going to get garbage. And when you publish that garbage and you put that out there in the world, that’s a problem. But we can stop that by just, at the outset, if we’re going to start a database, keep that, I don’t know, make one of those little motivational stickers and put it at your computer: garbage in, garbage out. And just work on that basis and be humble enough to recognize that you have a job to get good data and then through your symbiotic relationship with AI, see what you can do.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Fabulous advice. I like it. All right, let’s talk about what you’re doing now with said database because you don’t have just this one serial homicide database. You’ve got another one too.
Sasha Reid: Yeah, so the other one is called the missing murdered database or the MMD and that one I started in my PhD. So, during my PhD, I was working on the serial homicide database, but it got very rote. It’s the same thing over and over and over. And so I just wanted something that was a little more, I don’t know, a little different. I wasn’t necessarily looking to create a database but something happened. One of my friends from my hometown was listed as missing.
I was just looking into cases of cold cases and I came across hers and it said she was missing. And I was like, my gosh, that’s horrible. What? It was such a moment of “Holy crap. I know this person. We went to school together. We walked in the halls together.” We weren’t friends friends. I think that’s going a bit far. We were acquaintances. We had our own teenage dramas, but we knew each other. And she was missing. And then I looked further and I found out that she had actually been found deceased. And that was such a “Whoa.” I’ve never, I’ve had friends in high school who died from car accidents, but never who went missing and were found to deceased. And so I didn’t know what to do. I’m very bad with figuring out what to do with my emotions. I’m so a psychologist. I’m such a quack, but I didn’t know what to do. And so I put her name in an Excel file — because, yes, I was still in Excel during that time — but I put it in an Excel file and I just kind of kept it there. Because that’s the best thing I can do. Just put it in the box and figure out what to do. And then I thought, “that’s really interesting’ and I started populating her name the same way I populate my serial homicide database: name, age, race, when they went missing, where they were found. I just, for whatever reason, got caught in a loop and I continued to do it. And I found I had another acquaintance who went missing and was found to deceased — that’s two. Since that time, I’ve had many more. It’s a problem, as a person from the North. Indigenous communities are very very much struggling with the issue of missing and murdered people. And so that’s my community and these people are going missing and being found to deceased. So I’ve had a lot of people, a lot of friends of mine in the database, which is super unsettling. But I just continue to add to it because it gave me something to do, to hold those emotions for my missing murdered friends, and also to take my mind away from serial homicide which, it gets overburdening sometimes, very overwhelming.
And so yeah, I made that database. And now it’s become the nation’s largest database on missing murdered people. This only speaks to my compulsive nature, it should not have become this.
Yvonne Kjorlien: You got to play to your strengths, right?
Sasha Reid: Yeah.
Yvonne Kjorlien: If you’re good at it, use it. So, you use the serial homicide database as a predictive model to help catch Bruce McArthur. Have either of these two databases helped in other ways that you can mention.
Sasha Reid: Yeah, so okay first I did not help with Bruce McArthur. That was a total fluke. I am just this low life grad student sitting in her computer too late at night doing random things and I found something neat and tried to share it. That is I think the extent of my involvement. But it did, like it was really a cool moment to take that information, put it on a map and see statistically this is atypical. Zooming-in even closer. Oh, wow, all these victims are very similar. And based on what I know as a serial homicide researcher, like that’s red flag right there. So that was a really cool moment: just realizing there is utility in the database beyond just understanding how people develop. That was the primary goal: how does serial killers develop. But because we added that additional information of location and victimology, we were able to find…at least build a very tiny model to show, yeah, this is a statistical anomaly and people are going missing.
So we do continue to use that. We’re trying to make it a lot more technological than it is. When I first did that it was using Google Maps and a calculator. It was really easy. But now we’ve got this incredible colleague at the University of Toronto. She’s a — I’m gonna get it wrong — biostatistician extraordinaire. She studies the movement patterns of sharks and she’s actually working in the database to see if she can when people are going to go missing, where people are going missing, and whether there may be a serial killer involved. And the reason she’s able to identify whether a serial killer is involved is because in the MMD — the missing murder database — we include all solved cases of Canadian serial killers, right? That’s your training data.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Right, right. Yeah, because you won’t know whether or not they’re involved if you don’t involve them at the beginning. You need to know that they are involved, train the database first…ah!
Sasha Reid: Yeah, so we train the MMD on all solved Canadian serial homicides, not just homicides. Serial homicides. Because serial killers actually have a really unique way of hunting and hunting is a gross word, but truly that’s what they’re doing. And so we can actually track and see those patterns when they start and how they develop and we can see that in the database. It’s super clear. So by being able to train the MMD on the basis of those solved cases, we’ve got something that we can use to better predict. It’s not always perfect. But it’s something.
Yvonne Kjorlien: So I’m just thinking here. So it sounds like you needed to figure out the pattern in order to apply the pattern to see if there was a pattern.
Sasha Reid: Kind of. We didn’t necessarily understand the pattern. We know that serial killers, just qualitatively case studily, we know that serial killers kill in a very specific way, whether that’s location, whether that’s victim, whether that’s weapon. They’re very routine in some ways, not every way, in some way. But if there’s routine in some way then there’s some sort of predictive capacity there, right?
Yvonne Kjorlien: Right.
Sasha Reid: And then when you layer on top of that other unsolved cases where there are victim clusters and you compare that against your training data, you can see either is – kind of lining up with that — or it’s just an anomaly.
Sasha Reid: It’s not perfect, but it is a start.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Right right. Cool. Yeah, I’m thinking of what you’re saying. And of course this is what 10 years after you first started creating your databases and I’m looking at the mountain of possible work that I would need to do on my own stuff to get to that point and I’m like I just don’t know if I’m up for that. But, hey, anybody out there who wants to create a dispersed remains database. I am convinced there patterns. There have already been patterns showing up in the literature which is why I want to create a database. I have tried to start it, but I’m saying now if you want to get on that, whoever’s listening: yes, do it, go for it. It needs to be done.
Sasha Reid: I mean, you’ll never be able to do it alone. And I think that creating a database alone is a problem because, think about this: when you’re creating databases, you’re looking at variables even at the point of which variables do I include in my database? That’s a really important choice.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Yes.
Sasha Reid: I was able to create my serial homicide database with a very robust understanding of child development. Every year I’m still adding variables: “Oh, I didn’t think of that.” Yeah, which is super annoying but you need to be able to be open to thinking about: What are the right variables? What am I trying to capture with this? Because sometimes you can over-include variables. I know I’ve over-included variables. We’ve wnded up deleting things. But you have to make sure that you’re including a lot. And you can’t do that on your own. No one person knows so much that they can just create the most flawless, full variable database. Bring in other people to help.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, I just think after doing this for 20 odd years now, I think I’m screaming into the abyss and that’s part of the reason why I started those podcasts is just to get the knowledge out there and say, “You know what? This is important. It needs to be heard and I’m putting it out there for those who want to hear it.” And sometimes you just gotta let it go and see where it lands.
Sasha Reid: That’s the best you can do. Really.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah.
Sasha Reid: And creating databases too. There’s It’s gonna turn out. There’s no guarantee it’s ever going to be able to do anything,…
Yvonne Kjorlien: right
Sasha Reid: but I think when the heart is in the right place and you’re putting this together because you’ve seen something and you recognize that there is a possibility, it’s worth pursuing. For better for worse.
Yvonne Kjorlien: For better or worse.
Sasha Reid: It’ll just be cool and fun and horrible at the same time, but mostly good.
Yvonne Kjorlien: All right, let’s talk about some of… the you’re doing a law degree right now. Sasha, what up?
Sasha Reid: Yes.
Sasha Reid: Wake up every morning and ask myself that same question.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Okay, so you finished your PhD, you’ve got these two databases, you’re working with tons of people, and you move to Calgary to start a law degree.
Sasha Reid: I moved Calgary and I started teaching. So I moved here and I started teaching at the University of Calgary. I was teaching in the sociology department, the psych department, and the undergrad department of law. And so I taught for about two years. And I was teaching of courses, a lot about wrongful convictions. I was teaching a lot of psych courses too, but the law department kind of gave me a lot of freedom. So I was really interested in wrongful convictions because they’re so connected to psychology. So I wanted to teach a course on that. And I taught a course on the West Memphis Three for about four semesters, two years in total. Let me just tell you about the West Memphis Three. You will never come across — with maybe one exception — a crazier case in this.
Okay, we are in the 1980s, height of the satanic panic. We are in the bible belt, United States, Arkansas, baby. You’ve got these three kids who know each other, two are best friends, Jason and Damian, and then you’ve got Jesse Misskelly. And Damian gets pointed at by the police because he looks like the type of person who would kill because he looks like a satanist. There’s three young boys who are murdered in the Robin Hood Hills in that area and so he was immediately just pointed out. So just becomes this entire case of moral panic and hysteria and group think tunnel vision. It’s incredible, an incredible case. But I taught that for so many years and I thought, you know what? I can’t teach this anymore. I can’t sit here and I know that things like this happen, so I’m gonna go to law school and I’m gonna get people who don’t deserve to be in prison out of prison. And I’m gonna teach people about psychology so that they’re not using these tactics to ruin the lives of innocent people.
So now I’m in law school, actually doing this, which is like insane. I’m working on an Innocence Project case right now where basically the same kind of things happened in this person’s case. I can’t talk too much about it, but I can say it’s an innocent person who’s been in prison now for 35 years and this is a Canadian case. So there’s some big problems. I’m working on that case.
And I’m just doing a lot of really interesting investigations where psychology and the law overlap. So I will graduate soon and I hope to create a law firm. That’s the next goal. So we’ll see what happens. But I want to create a law firm where we utilize psychological knowledge and the law to help victims of crime and to help advocate for people who feel like they’ve been exposed to an injustice.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Wow, that’s monumental, Sasha. Just saying.
Sasha Reid: Thank you.
Yvonne Kjorlien: But if you can build two databases, yeah, I think you’ll have no problem. You’ve already done two monumental things already.
Sasha Reid: The team and I, the team and I should reiterate. I have never done this alone.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Wow. Holy smokes. I hope to touch base with you again in a couple years and see where you are with that because, yeah, I mean, those instances where there is a wrongdoing and you’ve got an innocent person in prison. I think that’s an indicator that there’s somehow something systemic that’s not right.
Sasha Reid: Mm- Yeah, and sometimes it is actual, I don’t know how to even say this, misconduct or there’s actual intent and malice to do this. But a lot of times it just comes down to the fact that humans are fallible. We make mistakes. We are prone to all of these cognitive biases and that’s why I also say always stay humble. You are a fallible person because you are a person. And so just being able to help people recognize that I think it’s a really helpful thing in the law. Yeah. We’ll see.
Yvonne Kjorlien: So who did I talk to? I talked to the Midnight Order didn’t I?
Sasha Reid: You talked to the Mini Midnight Order. All right, let me tell you about my groups because they’re like the beating heart and soul of the work that I do. So first, we have the Midnight Order and there’s only so much I can say about that because we do have our documentary TV series coming out sometime in 2024, but this is a group of extraordinary women. They are psychologists, they’re doctors there soon to be police…extraordinaires…everyone, If I don’t know what you are, you’re a something “extraordinaire.” Police extraordinare. And they do all of on-the-ground work with me.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Okay.
Sasha Reid: So that’s the Midnight Order. And then the other group, the one that you met originally was called the Mini Midnight Order and it was Mini Midnight Order because I hadn’t actually had time to think of a good name for them yet. But I have since come up with the name. So they are the Society of Umbra Scientia.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Okay.
Sasha Reid: It means the Society of Shadow Science. Okay, listen, if you are going to be an academic, if you are going to do anything in this world and have a group, you better give it the coolest name ever or else. What are you doing in your life?
Yvonne Kjorlien: I’m sensing those to sorority days coming back.
Sasha Reid: Yes. I just think why wouldn’t you name it something cool. I am not going to name this Alpha Duck.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Unless there’s some sentimentality with the alpha duck.
Sasha Reid: Yeah, just have fun with the names that you make for things. So they’re the Society of Umbra Scientia. And this group helps me with the database. They help me specifically with the MMD. And they’re extraordinary. They’ve been helping me with this for over a year. The input information about missing murdered people. We try to have weekly meetings where I’ll invite people, yourself included, just to share the cool things that you do. Because one thing that’s really important for me, and this comes back to having been mentored myself, having a mentor is super important. I recognize that the one flaw with my mentor is that they didn’t show me what I could do. And with my team I tried very much to mentor them because I don’t have any money to pay anybody anything. I am a student. So what I try to do is make sure I’m giving them opportunities for them to shine. So whether that’s helping them get reference letters or write proposals or introducing them to people in the field just so they know what’s out there. That is on me to do and I’m happy to do that. So I always try to mentor people so that they know: one, they can do it. Right, enough with this Imposter Syndrome. Like, no. You can do it. Like I’m done. I’m over that. You can do it. You have the skills. Everyone else who’s on the top two is just flailing and doubting themselves every day as well. Stop it. Get over yourself and go do it. So that. I try to get that instilled. And then also just helping them connect with people. Like here is what is available. And it’s been good. We’ve had people get into medical school, grad school. And I’m just like they’re doing it, they’re doing it because they can see it and it’s so beautiful.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Nice. Nice. All right, and the other group that you were talking about. Calvaria?
Sasha Reid: Calvaria? The Order of Calvaria, It means the Order of Skulls, obviously.
Yvonne Kjorlien: I like it.
Sasha Reid: Thank you. You would. So this is Sue Brown and myself. Sue Brown is the staff lawyer and director of advocacy for Justice for Girls. She is an incredible superstar. If I met her earlier, she would a hundred percent be on my Midnight Order team, like we’re kindred spirits. So she’s one of the people that I’m working with all of these cases that are coming out of BC. So right now I’m doing a lot of work on miscarriages of justice, wrongful convictions, homicide cases, cold cases within the province of BC itself. So I work side by side with her. We meet every week, and we kind of just have a rundown of the cases that we’re working on.
Trying to get access to information from the RCMP, etc all these different. It’s tricky. It’s not fun, but it’s interesting because slowly every week we chip away at these cold cases, whether that’s meeting people, talking with people, getting information from the courts, or actually visiting certain sites, certain locations themselves. So right now, and I think I can mention this because this is coming out in two weeks. We have written a coalition letter addressed to the RCMP, the Government of Canada, and the Government of British Columbia where we’re basically asking them to put a moratorium on applications to dispose of evidence from the Pickton case. There’s about 14,000 pieces of evidence right now they’re trying to dispose of however that looks whatever that entails. I’m not too sure. We’re trying to figure that out. But until there’s clarity around that and until the families are notified, we’re trying to stop that. So that’s one of the things that we’re doing.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Interesting
Sasha Reid: It is.
Yvonne Kjorlien: When you put it in that light, I understand that. Because I just did a podcast with Kimberly Moran out of the states talking about the ethics of human remains. When I came up through undergrad, I mean, yes, I was taught about the ethics of working with human remains, but it wasn’t so much in the limelight about where the collections that we work with in school came from. Because you could always tell the plastic cast from the real thing and it was always preferable to work with the real thing because when you get out into the real world, whatever you wanted to do with your life, you were going to be working with the real thing. And the real thing feels much different and you also are likely to get representation of disease and pathology and what have you on a real collection then you would a plastic cast. But it was never really talked about where those real ones came from and fast forward 20 years with the whole social justice thing that we’re now involved in and people don’t even want to take pictures of real human remains because they could be done without the knowledge or consent of the individual who had died. Because the individual could have died a hundred years ago in that skeleton could have been in a school collection for a hundred years. I mean, who knows? Or without the consent or knowledge of their next of kin. So there’s all of this. It’s grown into this bigger picture. And so dealing with something like a case like the Pickton case. It was investigated 20 years ago and they have all this evidence which could potentially involve remains or the possessions of the deceased. I could see that the family might want those, or at least want to know that those possessions are being disposed of.
All right. You mentioned you want to open your own law firm. Anything else that you wanted to do in the world? World peace?
Sasha Reid: We’ll put that on maybe next year’s roster.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Okay.
Sasha Reid: You know what I’d actually like to do? Take a break.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Like an actual vacation what? Wow.
Sasha Reid: An actual vacation. I would love to. I think it’s so easy to get caught up, especially I just noticed working on so many advocacy cases how easy it is to get very caught up in the emotion of it. It just goes with you everywhere. So taking a break would be really nice. Yeah.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Do you think you could actually take a break? Like, because you mentioned that emotional involvement, can you just stop that?
Sasha Reid: No, no because the last time I had a break was COVID and it was during COVID that I was like I’m gonna go to law school. So that was my break. I studied to get into law school. I think it’s actually more of a danger for me to take a break than just keep going. I get ideas.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, I know sometimes yeah. Yeah, the break does it’s a gap that needs to be filled and it gets filled with other stuff that you could be doing.
Sasha Reid: Yes.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Sounds like a good idea, yeah. All right. I think we’re gonna finish up there. Thank you very much, Sasha. I look forward to touching base again with you and see where you’re going with all of this and what waves you’re making in the field of law.
Sasha Reid: I love how you laughed when you said that. Thank you.
Yvonne Kjorlien: I mean you you’re making waves already. It’s just a matter of time really.
Sasha Reid: Yeah, I look forward to updating you and also as usual relying on your incredible expertise for some of the strange things that I’m doing.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Always, always willing to talk to you about scavengers and scattered remains. Absolutely.
Sasha Reid: Thank you so much for having me here. It was a pleasure.
Kimberlee Moran is a professor of forensic archaeology at Rutgers University in Camden, New Jersey. She holds an undergraduate degree in Classical and Near Eastern archaeology from Bryn Mawr College and a Masters of Science in forensic archaeological science from the Institute of Archaeology at University College London. Kimberlee worked as a contract archaeologist for Hunter Research, a CRM firm based in Trenton, NJ, prior to moving to the UK. She moved back to New Jersey in 2010. Her archaeological research includes ancient fingerprints, artificial cranial deformation, the Whispering Woods site in Salem, NJ, and the First Baptist Church of Philadelphia also known as “The Arch Street Project”.
In this episode we talk about:
You can find more information about Kimberlee Moran on her webpage here: https://kimberleemoran.camden.rutgers.edu/
You can find more information about:
Kimberlee references the following books:
Ethics and Professionalism in Forensic Anthropology
by Nicholas V. Passalacqua & Marin A. Pilloud
A 21st Century Ethical Toolbox by Anthony Weston
If you’re interested in ethics in archaeology, you can check out the following:
Society for American Archaeology: https://www.saa.org/career-practice/ethics-in-professional-archaeology
Notes from the start:
Tell me about you! Where are you and why do you listen to Scattered? Fill out the survey and be entered into a draw to receive the ebook Memoirs of a Reluctant Archaeologist.
Support the podcast and my research and Buy Me A Coffee. Your contributions will go toward my research, webhosting, and my time. Want to find out more about my research? Check out the Scavenging Study.
Contact me through [email protected] or through my contact form. Follow me on Facebook at The Reluctant Archaeologist, or through Instagram @yvonnekjorlien
Do you have a suggestion for a topic on the Scattered podcast?
Do you have a question about working with human remains?
Drop Yvonne a line at [email protected]
Transcript
Kimberlee Moran: My name is Kimberlee Moran, I’m an associate teaching professor, and director of forensics at Rutgers University in Camden.
Yvonne Kjorlien: And where is Camden? Just for all the people in the world who are not up on the US geography.
Kimberlee Moran: So Rutgers University is the state university of New Jersey. It has three campuses. It’s flagship campus, it’s kind of smack in the center of the state in New Brunswick and then it has two satellite campuses, one in Newark, New Jersey, which is kind of more of its urban campus, and then Camden, New Jersey. And Camden New Jersey is by far the smallest of the three campuses. And so we have very much kind of a small liberal arts college kind of feel. We’re in the southern portion of the state, basically right across the river from Philadelphia.
Yvonne Kjorlien: I see. You’re right in that Northeast corner of the US.
Kimberlee Moran: Great place to be, lots going on.
Yvonne Kjorlien: I imagine autumn there is just beautiful.
Kimberlee Moran: Yeah, it really is. For me, so my background is Forensic Archeology. I started off my career as an archaeologist. I studied the Greeks, the Romans, Mesopotamia. Never in a million years that I ever think I was going to be doing forensic science. I did end up in the forensic world as a Master’s student and have never looked back. Although I still do a lot of work in traditional archeology as well. So half of the time I have one foot in the past half of the time I have one foot in the present. I’m working in both kind of modern criminal justice and crime scene investigation, but then every now and again, I swing back to my roots and archeology. So being in New Jersey is a wonderful place. It’s very, very good forensically because we’re right smack in the middle of major metropolitan areas that have really excellent forensic laboratories and forensic systems but also archaeologically it is a very historically rich and archaeologically rich area to be. So I get the best of both worlds, being in New Jersey.
Yvonne Kjorlien: And now I was recently having a conversation with somebody about sort of the premise of modern archeology and the way that, I guess the call for archeology nowadays isn’t so much that we go out and willy-nilly dig up Heritage or historical sites. It’s more of a salvage.
Kimberlee Moran: Yeah.
Yvonne Kjorlien: We need to rescue the sites from impending doom because of construction or some other kind of destruction.
Kimberlee Moran: Yeah, so there’s a bunch of different things going on. I mean, one thing that I really appreciate about our modern approaches to archeology is we are grounding archa eology much more robustly in the sciences. And we’re really applying a lot of scientific principles, scientific approaches and scientific testing to what we do within archeology. So back in the day, as you say, it was kind of like willy-nilly, let’s just go find some cool stuff, but now it’s like, okay what are some research questions that we have? What is it that we really want to learn about this site and this material? And then what are the methods that we’re gonna employ to actually ensure that we’re answering those research questions? So there’s that kind of aspect kind of, bringing archaeology more in line with other science fields but also kind of as you say, this idea of salvage, maybe it’s a little bit more about stewardship because archaeological resources are finite. They will not last forever, particularly if they’re impacted by human action. And so, we’re thinking about more of how we preserve archaeological material, preserve that cultural heritage for future generations. And then, in those instances where we can’t just in the ground, leave it alone, how do we, again, kind of rescue it and ensure that it’s being adequately, stewarded, not just the artifacts that come out the ground, but the knowledge that comes out of the ground as well.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Right. Yeah, and I’m always floored by what we do nowadays compared to what is glorified and portrayed in the movies and media, and what have you, about just going out the archaeologists going out and digging up treasure. They’re looking for treasure.
Kimberlee Moran: Right, right.
Yvonne Kjorlien: And whether or not the museum gets it back. And then, even if the museum gets it will, then it’s kind of in the gilding cage.
Kimberlee Moran: Right.
Yvonne Kjorlien: The people that that artifact or the site belongs to, they never get to see it again. And it’s behind this plate glass. Nobody touches it. You’d be lucky if you ever get to study it.
Kimberlee Moran: Sure, I mean, we’ve just recently had another Indiana Jones film, right?
Yvonne Kjorlien: Haha.
Kimberlee Moran: And for my generation, we grew up under Indiana Jones, many of us are in archaeology because of Indiana Jones. And, I also see this in my forensic career as well, right? We have all these flavors of CSI programming and many students are in my classroom because they’ve watched, all those CSI shows and they think, that that’s their portrayal of what a crime scene investigator or forensic scientist does. So these shows are great for generating interest in the respective fields and maybe inspiring people to go into them. But yeah, obviously they’re not accurate representations and there’s a lot of responsibility that we have as archaeologists to interact with the public and to kind of bring a more realistic version of archeology and to kind of dismantle that idea of the gilded shape cage of museum collections and museums and really bring the collections out to the general public and have them make that connection of the present with the past.
One of the things about museums is only about 5% of everything a museum has in its collection is ever on display. So there are just troves of material that never see the light of day that are just in storage. Part of that is because it’s stuff that might not be particularly interesting to the general public. Like mounds and mounds of shards broken pottery and things like that. Whoever is curating it might think, okay, nobody really wants to see just a pile of what looks like trash. Archaeology is just kind of historic trash picking in a way. And so again it’s really important to connect people with what’s going on behind the scenes in museums because these collections are accessible. They’re there for research and further study and, even members of the general public have access to those collections if there’s something that they’re studying or they’re researching. So there’s a lot going on behind the scenes in museums. But yeah, again, typically on a day-to-day basis, we just don’t see that other world.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, and so that kind of brings us around. The reason I wanted Kimberlee on the podcast was to talk about ethics of working with human remains because there’s been sort of a shift in perspective, I think over the past 10 yea rs at least. It used to be okay to work with human remains and not just okay but more desirable because you need to work with the remains in the classroom so that you can effectively work with the remains when you’re out in the real world. So you know what to look for, now how it feels, and it just makes you better at what you’re going to be doing. But nowadays, there’s just…people are kind of almost putting a ban on working with remains especially archaeology, anthropology. So I wanted to talk about that. And you have this lovely little story about….was it Philadelphia? You were working on a… you had heard about some human reigns found in Philadelphia. Is that the way it goes?
Kimberlee Moran: Sure. So first of all, just kind of taking a step back, historically anthropologists and archaeologists and I’m going back, a hundred or more years have had a very cavalier approach to human remains. This kind of idea that bones are cool. And there have been a lot of pretty terrible things that have happened within archeology and anthropology, in terms of the treatment of human remains, the acquisition of human remains, particularly of kind of vulnerable populations. We’ve got a long and horrible history in the United States of how we have addressed the remains of indigenous peoples that have very strong feelings about death, and what is appropriate to happen to the human body and archaeologists in the past have just completely disregarded that and trophy hunted, essentially.
And over the generations. we’ve really taken a good hard look at ourselves and our profession and have really kind of tightened up our approach to human remains. So this really came to a head in the 1990s. When we passed legislation in the United States to protect the graves and the cultural heritage of Native Americans. So, NAPGRA is the name of the law that protects and helps to repatriate cultural material related to indigenous people and their human remains.
But that’s kind of the only legal framework that has ever been put in place in the United States in terms of the treatment of this kind of material. So while we’ve gotten a lot better and we’ve really established some good ethical frameworks, we only have that one legal framework, and you still get kind of the spectrum within bioarcheology, anthropology, forensic anthropology of the use and the treatment of human remains.
So in terms of my own work and my thinking has really shifted over the years as well, but back in 2016, I was on the train to work one day and I’m an avid newspaper reader and I opened up the newspaper and I saw this article that was entitled “Old Bones Found and Nobody’s In Charge”, and it was a story of a construction site in Philadelphia. Bones were coming out of the ground and everyone kind of raised their hand and said, “Uh, not my problem. Has nothing to do with me or my agency.” So the Medical Examiner’s Office was called. They established at these were historic human remains — so nothing legal or forensic, nothing to do with them. The Historical Commission was then turned to and they said, “This site lies outside of a registered historical district so nothing really to do with us either.” And then finally, the site was a private construction project, so there were no kind of public funds involved and so other protections that might be in place at kind of the state level also did not apply. So it very much fell into this gray area. And part of the article was this picture of the site foreman looking kind of unhappy and he was holding this box of bones. And it only took a glance to realize that these very much were human bones, human remains. So, this is 2016 and I’m thinking to myself, “Gee, I’d love a box of bones. I could do something with a box of those. I’d at least like to know more about what’s in that box.” So I was a little worried that I might kind of sound like a weirdo if I just called up the construction company and say, Hey, give me your box alone, right? Yeah, probably that wouldn’t go over so well. So I contacted a friend of mine. Who’s the curator of the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia? The Mütter Museum is a museum dedicated to medical history. They currently have a lot of human remains on display — that might not be forever — but the Mütter Museum has a very well-known reputation in the city and I thought, if it’s someone from the Mütter museum called, that would look way more legit than just me calling. So, I reached out to my friend, and I shared with her the article and I said, “Hey, we should get this box of bones and find out what’s here and try to understand why they’re bones coming out of this site in the first place, and are we likely to encounter more human remains?” So she wasn’t particularly interested and then I kind of uttered the famous last words that to this day, I regret. I texted her. “Don’t worry. I’ll do all the work.”
Yvonne Kjorlien: Those are very famous last words.
Kimberlee Moran: Yes. And, man, have I gotten that back in spades.
So again, to make it very long story short, we got the box of bones and we came to find that this site was the former First Baptist Church of Philadelphia Cemetery. And according to all the historical records out there, it shouldn’t be there anymore. There shouldn’t be any human remains. In 1860, it was relocated to a kind of large public open space, kind of cemetery, called Mount Moriah, which is kind of in the southern part of the city kind of close to what’s now the Philadelphia airport. The church had relocated. It was originally on 2nd Street. It had moved a couple of times and nobody was really looking after their burial ground. There were indications from newspapers at the time and from church records, that the cemetery had really fallen into disrepair. There were tenement houses that surrounded the cemetery and people were just throwing their daily garbage into the cemetery and it had gotten into quite a state. So the First Baptist Church in the 1850s bought a plot in this Mount Moriah Cemetery and they put lots of public notices in the papers saying, we are digging up our old burial ground and we are relocating to this new place, and if you have any family members buried here, contact this guy, Locksley, and get it sorted out. And there’s also newspaper articles of the actual work in progress. In fact, there were some interesting observations of how well-preserved individuals were. They would open up a coffin of somebody who had died 30 plus years ago, and family members were still able to recognize the individual.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Wow.
Kimberlee Moran: So that’s very interesting, right? But again, this cemetery should not still be here at Second and Arch Street in Philadelphia. So, initially we thought that maybe these were just a few individuals that had been missed or maybe these were individuals that didn’t have next to kin, so they just left them alone. So our initial approach to the site, once we got permission from the property developer who did not want to have to be dealing with any of this, but they let us come on site just to monitor the overall excavation with the backhoe. They were putting in a two-story parking garage, and because they were going so deep into the ground, this is why they were encountering these remains that were left behind. So what started off as what we thought was just a salvage excavation, turned into a full-fledged archaeological excavation and ultimately in the end around about 500 individuals have been excavated from this site.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Holy cow.
Kimberlee Moran: And there are still more that are under existing structures. After doing our research, we know that we have at least 1700 named individuals that were buried in this burial ground, but we may have up to 3,000 burials in the burial ground.
Yvonne Kjorlien: That’s more than just missing a few individuals.
Kimberlee Moran: Right. Right, exactly. so, Mr. Locksley, clearly did not do his job in 1860.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah.
Kimberlee Moran: Again, we now have evidence as to why that happened. But, we became the stewards of nearly 500 sets of human remains, and we can talk more about some of the legal things later on, but we were given permission by the courts in Philadelphia that oversee unclaimed remains to study those remains for approximately five years, try to identify any of them if we could, and then all the remains were to be reburied in September 2023. It is now October 2023 and those remains are in my building, just next door, and have not been reburied yet and we can kind of circle back as to why that is.
But that has been what originally started as a box of bones, ended up being a whole cemetery, something that we never anticipated in a million years. What we thought was just going to be a very discreet, little research project, ended up being five to six years of our lives and I say ‘our’ because this is now become a real kind of collaborative initiative. It’s expanded way beyond myself, but, yes, it has dominated our lives for at least six years and it’s not over yet.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Because our previous conversation, before the recording, we talked about some of the legal and ethical issues that came up with that. Let’s take a step back because when we were talking before, you told me about the MOVE group.
Kimberlee Moran: Yeah.
Yvonne Kjorlien: And I had always wondered kind of why we are now at the place we are with this whole perspective on not at all using human remains in research, in any study, you can’t even use them in pictures and all that kind of stuff…
Kimberlee Moran: Right.
Yvonne Kjorlien: And where did that come from? Because I’m probably around the same generation as you and, we were brought up using real human remains, in the lab, in the classroom…
Kimberlee Moran: Right.
Yvonne Kjorlien: that’s what you learned on, and you learned how human remains felt. But now the pendulum is swinging quite the opposite way. Where not even human remains in pictures. So, where did that all come from? And you were saying it’s from the MOVE group. So, tell us about that.
Kimberlee Moran: So really, I mean, there’s kind of a culmination of multiple things at play.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, that’s usually the way it is.
Kimberlee Moran: We’re in a really complicated time in history right now.
So, first of all, we have everything that’s happened from the pandemic, and from everything that’s happened, post-George Floyd and a much height in sense of social justice which is really wonderful. We really need that. So we’re a lot more aware of all the various kind of groups that have been oppressed and have been neglected and all the things that, we as white people have just kind of taken for granted. And so that’s part of it is just kind of having our heads in a different space. We’re really paying more attention to things than we ever did before.
The other side of it, and again, it really has come into this interesting moment of history, is something again that happened in Philadelphia, a couple things that have happened in Philadelphia. One of those is the discovery that some human remains from a pretty horrible incident that I’ll describe in a minute we’re never returned to the next of kin. So, back in the 1980s, there was a kind of social group called MOVE. And they kind of lived, kind of communally, the kind of main portion of this group took over a block in Philadelphia. They had kind of communal raising of their children, they all kind of changed their surnames to Africa. They were trying to be self-sufficient in terms of growing their own food and various things like that. And they had a lot of negative interactions with the police and also some of the neighbors as well.
But, they were well known to the police and individuals were kind of regularly arrested and various things like that. So, in the 1980s, there was really a kind of watershed moment where the police department in Philadelphia decided to — and this is not an exaggeration — they decided to drop a bomb on the compound from a helicopter. So you can look this up in the newspapers at the time or more recently. So a bomb was dropped on this city block in Philadelphia. Obviously there was a huge fire. Lots of people from the MOVE movement died as a result of everything kind of going up in flames and a number of those individuals were children.
So after the fire was put out and the Medical Examiner and death investigators came to process the scene and collected the human remains, there were quite a few charred human remains that were recovered and sent to the Medical Examiner’s Office. The Medical Examiner worked with several anthropologists based at the University of Pennsylvania. And, this is pretty routine. Even today, the Medical Examiner kind of works with outside anthropologists when there are skeletonized human remains. And for whatever reason, some of these remains, two bones of children, were retained by the anthropologists. And the anthropologist used them in classes, used images of them in public lectures, and the identities of these remains were known and the next of kin to these remains were known. And yet these remains were retained. There was also another box of remains that were later found in the Medical Examiner’s Office that the Medical Examiner was trying to kind of quietly cremate and dispose of but they were found as well.
So relatively recently within the past couple of years it came to light that these remains had been moving around, to different institutions, used in, again very cavalier and kind of callous way, and clearly never any intention by the anthropologist to ever return them to the next of kin. So has caused…it just it’s been a massive incident in Philadelphia. There are regularly newspaper articles about this and kind of the next, iteration of the saga, and it has sent ripples across the anthropology / bioarcheology community.
In conjunction to that, the University of Pennsylvania has for many, many years have a collection of skulls called the Morton Collection. And Morton was a very unapologetic racist and he collected all of these skulls to basically show that the brain capacity of non-whites was smaller than white individuals. And so it’s come to light that many of these skulls were kind of grave robbed, or they come from enslaved individuals, various things that again just casks, even more of a shadow on this collection of remains. So again, lots of negative press for the University of Pennsylvania. And, unfortunately, it’s been that negative press that has really kind of caused a lot of fear and trepidation amongst the larger community.
So rather than kind of digging deep into the issues and determining what is and isn’t appropriate and having some conversations and maybe coming up with a framework, just again kind of out of fear of what could happen and the articles that could come out, there’s been this kind of retraction within the community of pulling inwards and I’m putting an air quotes “cleaning up” what we have and just kind of pretending, kind of sweeping things under a rug. That’s kind of how I feel, that rather than just coming straight out, “Let’s talk about this,” it’s more kind of, “Let’s just make this problem quietly go away.” And yeah, that’s kind of where we are at the moment. So it’s a really challenging environment.
Kimberlee Moran: and I think we have a lot of work to do to kind of come out of this in a productive way that allows us to continue train our students and prepare them for work in the field, to continue good ethical research, and to also continue having good practices within museums that have collections of human remains. There’s a lot of work that we still need to do.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah. A lot of that the past work… because I’m not too sure that there’s a scientific discipline out there that doesn’t have kind of a shadowy past where, there’s at least a few individuals that we’re not doing right things.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Good things and what’s the discipline to do about that shadowy past?
Kimberlee Moran: Right.
Yvonne Kjorlien: But yeah I think as archaeologists and bio anthropologists. We’ve kind of got our work cut out for us.
Kimberlee Moran: But at the same time that there’s a lot of fear, this could actually be a very exciting point in history for us to be doing this work. I find it very kind of intellectually stimulating, and also morally stimulating to want to jump in and engage in this and have these discussions. I think we do ourselves a disservice by not just kind of facing these issues head on.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Absolutely, absolutely. I fully agree with you on that. I look at this as, “What lessons are we to learn from this.”
Kimberlee Moran: Yeah, definitely.
Yvonne Kjorlien: And how can we move forward in a productive manner that we can all live with?
Kimberlee Moran: And this is a great teaching moment for our students.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Right.
Kimberlee Moran: Let’s pull our students in and make them part of this conversation because they are the anthropologist and bio archaeologists of the future.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Mm-hmm
I asked you in an email about this. I’m sort, of how much does personal integrity play into professional ethics. Because for, I mean, we’re not only dealing with perhaps a generational perspective of these anthropologists who are circulating the world with these two children’s from the MOVE group. So, maybe a generational integrity and their perspective there, but also a sense of professional ethics that’s becoming more and more, I guess, I want to say, more distinct in anthropology. But then there’s also a personal integrity as well,…maybe that the morals and values part of that. So yeah. How does that all play in?
Kimberlee Moran: Right, right. So, the personal integrity is what makes you care in the first place and what makes you want to address these issues. When you don’t have that personal integrity, that’s when these bad things happen. But at the same time, you have professional ethics which really kind of codify a set of standards within the discipline. So even if you don’t care, there should be a framework within which you have to work, because you are part of this profession, you have signed up to be members of particular association. So, we have the Society for American Archeology We have the American Association of Physical Anthropologists. We have lots of different organizations. The American Academy Forensic Science, that has an anthropology section. We have lots of organizations organizations that, if you are part of those organizations, you have agreed to follow the Code of Professional Ethics, that they have set out and different organizations, they all have basically the same general ethical principles but different organizations are more kind of direct in what they say you should do as opposed to others. So some professional organizations just basically say don’t do bad things, don’t misrepresent your credentials. Very, very kind of generalized. Whereas other professional organizations really say these are our values and these are the things that you need to abide by if you’re going to be part of this community. We take our personal integrity and we take those folks that care, and we build professional ethics that then we all have to abide by, but there will still sometimes be gaps and that’s where you get kind of the spectrum of interpretation of how, I guess I should say, how far we should go in terms of what we do with human remains.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Let’s take that and talk about what you went through. With the construction site, the Baptist Church in Philadelphia…
Kimberlee Moran: Sure.
Yvonne Kjorlien: because it was a gray area. You said, there was some legal and…
Kimberlee Moran: Right.
Yvonne Kjorlien: all stuff going on before you were to work with the remains.
Kimberlee Moran: Yeah, there was a lot of stuff. So, first of all, we’ve got, the legal gray area where nobody is regulating what’s happening here because this is a private project, it falls outside of preservation regulations and things of that nature. Again, initially we just thought here are a few leftover remains. We had no idea of the scope of what we were dealing with. One of the things that became apparent very early on is that the construction company was…they weren’t going to allow us to do good archeology. They were kind of placating us by allowing us to be on site to just monitor the backhoe. And when the backhoe hit human remains, we had a few minutes to stop the backhoe, take a few pictures to document location and context, basically hand excavate the remains and put them into a box to then go someplace else. And then, the backhoe would just continue to work. Construction was not stopped because we had no authority to stop it. And there wasn’t anybody with authority that was interested in getting involved in this situation. If we annoyed the construction company any point, they could tell us to leave and then nothing was gonna happen. No salvage, no protection was gonna happen. So that was our first ethical issue is: what is worse, bad archeology or no archeology at all?
We were reaching out to various organizations, trying to get some guidance on what we should do, but again, still trying to kind of be on the down-low, because we knew that at any point, we could get kicked off the site and that would be the end of it. And one of the archaeologists that we spoke to point blank told us to walk away, that we should have nothing to do with this, we were going to set Philadelphia archeology back by 30 years. And we said to this archaeologist, “Look, if we’re not there, these things are getting thrown away. We know that they’re being mashed up by construction machinery, and they’re going into big dump trucks to be taken off site with all the dirt that they’re trying to remove. How can we in good conscious allow that to happen?” The archaeologist had no answer for us, just continued to reiterate that we shouldn’t be involved. The rationale of why we shouldn’t be involved is because being involved gave the construction company of veneer of legitimacy. They could say, “Look, we’re doing the right thing. We’re working with archaeologists,” even though clearly we were not producing a good archaeological product here. Though, I understand where she was coming from, but, from my personal integrity, I couldn’t leave that site. Knowing what would happen in our absence.
So we made the decision to continue to be involved, even though all of us were kind of terrified that this was gonna be the end of our careers, we’ll never work in this town again, sort of deal, but we just couldn’t in good conscience allow these remains to be just flagrantly destroyed. So that was our first kind of ethical conundrum.
Our second ethical conundrum was these remains did not want to be disturbed. This was not something that they intended or consented to back in the 18th and 19th centuries. So, this is a pretty terrible situation. How can we bring good about in this situation? How can we — and maybe even a bit we’ll talk about some ethical frameworks, but there’s one ethical framework which has to do with minimizing harm and maximizing good — how can we strike that balance? How can we minimize the harm happening to these remains and maximize benefit for both the remains and for the larger public and for the academic community as well.
Part of that has to do with the actual subsequent analysis that happened to these remains. And our goal has really been to try to build stories. We were calling them osteobiographies: trying to use what is available to us of the physical individual, as well as the historical record, as well as other sort of scientific techniques that can give us insights into who this person is. What is their story? What was their life like? Rather than making these individuals objects that just were salvaged or rescued or whatever language you want to use, but turning them into people that we can have a relationship with. And that also kind of goes to some ethical frameworks, this idea of relationships and care.
And part of that for us has been involving our students in the work as well as doing analysis in the first place. So, these remains aren’t just sitting in a dark storage room, waiting to be reburied. There has been an interaction with these remains, between our researchers, between our students to try to, again, build relationships between the past and the present, build stories, and maximize the benefit that could come from what was otherwise a terrible situation.
Yvonne Kjorlien: That’s lovely. I really like the idea of having a relationship with the remains, and not just with the remains, but the people who used to be the remains.
Kimberlee Moran: And that’s something you lose when you don’t work with actual human remains…
Yvonne Kjorlien: Right.
Kimberlee Moran: when you don’t involve actual human remains in teaching or when you don’t have them on display. One of the many books that I have in my office is a book on Ethics and Professionalism in Forensic Anthropology. It’s written by Nicholas Passalacqua — I always say his name wrong — and Marin Pilloud. It’s not a very big book, it’s pretty thin, but it’s got some real treasures in here. And one of the things I really like is that…so, Europe generally, but also the United Kingdom has dealt with these issues generations before we’ve even been thinking about them. I studied in the United Kingdom. One of the things that happened in the UK when I was over there, it came to light that medical doctors were holding on to human tissue, after death, after transplants, all sorts of stuff — and again children were kind of involved — and using them for research and stuff like that. And there was a huge backlash and what resulted is something called the Human Tissue Act. And the Human Tissue Act is very reactionary and it tightens up what can and cannot be done with human tissue, including human remains to the point where it’s really stifled a lot of research and work and education and stuff like that.
There are models out there to look towards that are both good and bad. There are aspects of the Human Tissue Act that are really great and really wonderful and really necessary. But it also shows what can happen within legislation when things swing in a reactionary way. But one of the things that’s in this book is a statement that was developed by the United Kingdom, called Guidance for the Care of Human Remains in Museums. This is from 2005. And it states that the primary reason for museums to display remains are in quotes “to educate, medical practitioners, to educate people in science and history, to explain burial practices, and to bring people into physical contact with past people, and to encourage reflection” end quotes. And I do think that’s really profound and really important and something that maybe we need to think about as we start to reassess, in this instance, human remains as displayed in museums.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Absolutely. Yeah, that’s definitely something that I feel would be missing from putting human remains in a gilded cage or making them inaccessible. I just find that Western society, in general, lacks a relationship with their dead and that starts as soon as the person dies.
Kimberlee Moran: Yeah.
Yvonne Kjorlien: And then it continues. But other cultures across the world, they have very intimate relationships with their dead, with their ancestors.
Kimberlee Moran: Right. Going back to Yeah.
Yvonne Kjorlien: And that includes, yeah, that includes the human remains, whether they’re buried or not or somehow preserved, sometimes they keep them in their homes, sometimes they’re in a certain spot that they visit on a regular basis and they commune with.
Kimberlee Moran: Yeah. Going back to my original field of Near Eastern archeology, there are numerous cultures that bury their ancestors under the floor of their houses,…
Yvonne Kjorlien: Right.
Kimberlee Moran: …they literally had them in their house, in perpetuity.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, so that the ability to have, to start a relationship and continue relationship, if we choose, I think that’s paramount and we shouldn’t disallow ourselves from that possibility.
Kimberlee Moran: Yeah, definitely. For sure.
Yvonne Kjorlien: So, when we look at where we are now, and these professional ethic frameworks, and what happened with the remains from the MOVE group, I just want to maybe take a moment and kind of get an environmental scan about what’s going on now. From what you’re seeing in the classroom. At the triple As, and what have you. Can you give us a sense of what you’re seeing right here, right now?
Kimberlee Moran: Sure. For some folks it’s just business as usual. There’s not a whole lot of change that’s happening. But in other areas, there’s been a call to or some folks have decided that it’s best to just remove all human remains from the classroom. Because we do have really, really excellent replicas now that have all the detail that one would need to kind of do education and training. So there’s that. There are museums. So again, going back to the Mutter Museum. The Mutter Museum is now under new leadership, and there’s been talk about removing human remains from display at the Mutter Museum. The University of Pennsylvania just recently announced their museum of anthropology and archeology, they will be taking all human remains off from display. So, there’s that.
There’s also — and this is not necessarily a bad thing — a reassessment of what either teaching collections or museum collections, what we actually have in our collections and where did it come from. And what do we do when we find no provenience? We have no idea where it came from. It’s just been there forever. Or, when there are problematic proveniences. And, that’s a very good thing. We really should know what we have.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Yes, yes. We should.
Kimberlee Moran: We should know where it came from. Right? Right. So that is a good thing. But then the more extreme kind of approaches have been just to remove everything from display, not use it in teaching. Already – and, again, this is not a bad thing — we’ve been increasingly more cautious as to what images we use.
And actually I’ll circle back kind of with the Arch Street material and one of the ways that my thinking has sort of changed. So when we first had the material from Arch Street, we were very adamant that we do not allow pictures of skulls, full frontal facial skulls because we had a lot of newspaper reporters. Of course everyone wants a picture of skull. We were very clear we want to be respectful for the remains. If you do take a picture, we want to make sure that the skull is rotated away from the camera. Or, just don’t take any pictures at all, if you can help it. But I’ve since sort of changed my thinking, and again, this has to do with some of the teaching that I’ve now done with ethics, and my exploration of philosophy and moral philosophers. And there’s some philosophers that, again, talk about the human connection. and seeing people as subjects instead of objects, meaning a subject as a person with their own story and their own individuality as opposed to an object. And I think that’s very important, particularly when it comes to skulls because we’ve had objectified skulls forever. I mean, we’re coming up to Halloween, right? What do we see everywhere? Skeletons, and skulls?
Then there’s another moral philosopher who was around during World War II and was in a concentration camp and spoke a lot about looking an individual in the eyes, and when you look someone in the eyes, you connect with their humanity. And I really thought about that when it comes to skulls. If we’re turning the skull away from the camera, what are we saying about that? Are we making it an object and not an individual?
Yvonne Kjorlien: Very good point.
Kimberlee Moran: If we actually look into the eyes of this person, of what remains of this person, does that elicit more of a connection with this individual? So, I’ve since — I’m not taking pictures of skulls and posting them everywhere, clearly — but, I now have kind of maybe a different attitude towards if we were to take a picture of a skull and to have it, full frontal, that kind of connection. So I don’t know. That’s something that’s been on my mind recently.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah. I completely see your point. There may not be an answer. I mean, this doesn’t a black and white type.
Kimberlee Moran: Right? And that is the interesting thing about ethics is that many times in these ethical situations, there is no right answer. What makes you ethical is thinking about it, and grappling with it and discussing it. Because there might not be a clear yes or no. Because I still haven’t decided, I’m not in a position where anyone’s asking to take pictures of a skull, but I certainly haven’t decided what I would do in that particular… I guess we depend on the situation. But part of really embracing ethics within this field, again, is thinking about it, talking about it, not just having one sentence off-the-cuff dismissive, kind of attitude. It’s really about grappling deeply with these issues.
Yvonne Kjorlien: And I think, brings us kind of full circle to where we started about that the current climate about people not wanting to post any pictures, not work, with the remains, no nothing.
Kimberlee Moran: Right.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Okay. Why is that? Can we please discuss this? What is your thinking around this? Why do you want to do this? And there is a lot of fear, but, at the same time, nobody willing or even able to talk about why they want to do it. They just say, “It’s wrong.” Okay. Why is it wrong? What is your perception on this.
Kimberlee Moran: Right, right. So yeah. So that’s really important, is whenever we do make a decision, an ethical decision of yes, or no, right or wrong, we really need to be able to articulate the reasoning behind that, because if you can’t, then it’s not really ethical, right? It’s dogmatism.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Right.
Kimberlee Moran: So I want to briefly go through some of the ethical frameworks from moral philosophy…
Yvonne Kjorlien: Yes, please.
Kimberlee Moran: because they really give us the rationale and they give us the ability to debate these things back and forth again. There might not be a clear answer, but at least you have the logical trail that has led you to where you are.
I got really interested in ethics thanks to the Society of American Archeology. They have an Ethics Bowl. And I’ve now seen more organizations have ethics bowls as part of their annual conference. And the way that then Ethics Bowl works is you have two teams, they’re presented with a scenario, an ethical dilemma, and, if it’s well written there shouldn’t be a clear answer, it should truly be a dilemma that really sparks the debate. And then the two teams basically debated it out in front of a panel of judges. And the panel really decides who made the best argument, not necessarily who had the right answer, but who made the best argument. I’ve been a moderator for the Ethics Bowl for many, many years, and I always thought, “Gee, this would make a really great class, to actually talk about ethical dilemmas and moral philosophy and then have this class culminate in the debate.” And so, coincidentally, when everything was happening with Arch Street, that semester I also started working with colleague of mine in our philosophy department to set up this course, And so, I was very much learning by doing, and this course is now run for six years. This year will be the seventh year that we run this course, it’s now become a fixture.
It’s called Debating Ethical Issues Across Disciplines. And what we do is we introduce the students to the four main ethical frameworks within moral philosophy. The textbook that we use is A 21st Century Ethical Toolbox by Anthony Weston. Highly recommend this book. It’s a really easy way to introduce yourself to moral philosophy and these various frameworks. So the first framework is probably the one that is the easiest to connect to all this discussion with human remains. This is — and I’m just gonna use the terminology use in the textbook — this is what’s referred to as the ethics of the person. So this is grounded in mainly Emmanuel Kant as our main kind of philosopher and it’s this framework that gives us justice, and rights. And it basically says that people are individual and they are deserving of respect and to be treated with dignity. So you can already see how this totally connects with everything that we’re talking about with human remains.
There’s some other interesting aspects about the ethics of the person or particularly about Emmanuel Kant’s various philosophies, and one of the them is this idea of universality, that for something to be ethical, you should be able to have it applied in every situation, you should be okay with a universal kind of doctrine. That can be quite difficult in a lot of different ways – but we might circle back to that — but basically ethics of the person, the idea of dignity, rights, respect, justice, all that sort of stuff.
The next framework using this textbook is called the ethics of happiness. And this is where we get to Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill and utilitarianism or consequentialism, which has to do with we often think of the greatest good for the greatest number of people. But really it’s about maximizing good or happiness — happiness / good kind of synonyms — and minimizing harm. And in this particular framework — and this is one that we use all the time, democracy is kind of based on this framework — there are trade-offs. There’s always going to be winners and losers in this particular framework. Not everybody is going to be happy, but you’re trying to create the most happiness, the greatest amount of good. And so we see this in a lot of different ways and I kind of refer to it earlier about how, in this bad situation, we were just trying to reduce harm as much as possible and try to again, maximize good with our efforts.
The third framework is the ethics of virtue. This is our oldest framework. It goes all the way back to Aristotle and it’s all about character traits. Humaning well. Being the best humans that we can be. Being honest, being transparent, being hard-working, means you go on and on and on with the list of virtues. And so being an ethical person means exercising these virtues, these character traits. As an archaeologist, how do I archeology well? And that would be communication and outreach, again. Honesty, not misrepresenting my qualifications, transparency, hardworking, good practice, all the rest of it.
And our last ethical framework is sometimes called the feminists at the cool framework. So, all these other frameworks tend to be much more centered of justice, and more of masculine approach. This last one is often considered the more feminine approach and it’s grounded in the work of Carol Gilligan and Nell Noddings. And it’s often called the ethics of care or the ethics of relationships. And the idea is that we all live in communities, and being ethical is about the care and the stewardship of relationships.
It’s really interesting: Carol Gilligan just came out. Her seminal book is called In a Different Voice and it has to do with research in psychology that she was participating in that was looking at moral development. They were looking at boys and giving boys certain questions and seeing how they answer those questions. And again the boys tended to approach it by justice and this is what’s right and following the law and stuff like that. Whereas the girls tended to have a more nuanced approach: what are the responsibilities that the different actors have to each other? And at the time, the girls were seen as less morally developed because they didn’t have clear answers, because they had this more nuanced approach. And Carol Gilligan really realized that is wasn’t that they were underdeveloped. It was that they thought of these things differently. She wrote this book In a Different Voice and that’s really kind of changed a lot of our mindset. Now, she’s just recently come out with a new book that basically says that this isn’t a feminist approach. This is just a human approach.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Mm-hmm
Kimberlee Moran: Making it feminist means that you’re cutting out half the population.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Right.
Kimberlee Moran: That we all have the ability to think about care and relationships.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Right.
Kimberlee Moran: So again, thinking about human remains, our care of them, our stewardship of them, how we use them, that we’re not “using” them…
Yvonne Kjorlien: Right.
Kimberlee Moran: that we’re building relationships with them and our students and so forth. So, using these four frameworks, sometimes these frameworks work together, very nicely. Sometimes these frameworks kind of butt up against each other. But the important thing is to, whatever your decision is with human remains, to try to view that through one or more of these lenses as your rationale.
With the Arch Street material, we decided to learn from the remains, to study the remains. We felt like, first of all, we could do this by preserving the human dignity, that it was actually more dignified, for us to learn from these individuals and tell their stories and see them as people and not as objects. We felt like we were maximizing the good that could be created from the situation. We felt like, as archaeologists that, practicing the virtues of what makes a good archaeologist is to, again, create knowledge in a way that preserves dignity. That just putting these things in a storage container isn’t archeology well. And then also the idea of relationships. That we were creating relationships between the past and the present, that we were stewarding these remains. So, that was our justification one way for us to create the rationale of the approach that we had.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Right. Just reflecting on what you’ve been talking about, one of the biggest things that I learned from studying anthropology is that different groups will have different perspectives and…
Kimberlee Moran: Yes.
Yvonne Kjorlien: that anthropology, as an anthropologist, I need to realize that and respect that.,
Kimberlee Moran: Yes.
Yvonne Kjorlien: And in dealing with ethics, different groups will have different perspectives, including anthropologists.
Kimberlee Moran: Yeah.
Yvonne Kjorlien: And we have a different view of working with remains. And different groups of anthropologists will probably have different perspectives on working with human remains. I think, I mean, using that to put the lens on ourselves so that we can respect the different viewpoints, then talk about them.
Kimberlee Moran: Yeah.
Yvonne Kjorlien: That may not be the most natural for us to do, but I think it turning our discipline upon ourselves.
Kimberlee Moran: Yeah. Yes, yes. Yeah, I’ve been to many a conference that has ended up in, raised voices and …
Yvonne Kjorlien: Uh oh.
Kimberlee Moran: …anger issues amongst anthropologists that are supposed to be having a civilized debate and it just kind of…
Yvonne Kjorlien: Spirals.
Kimberlee Moran: …falls apart. Yeah.
Yvonne Kjorlien: I’m going to set the time so I don’t want to too much longer. But this has been amazing food for thought and I really hope that listeners go away with a lot of questions, which is good.
Kimberlee Moran: Right, right. And again, engage with these ethical frameworks. They’re maybe and probably are very good arguments of why we shouldn’t do certain things with remains. I mean, again, we were talking about different cultural groups, going back to respect and dignity has to do with honoring the wishes of next of kin and cultural perspectives. So yeah, definitely think these things through. Part of ethics is all about thinking. So if you want to be an ethical archaeologist-anthropologist person, really engage deeply, instead of just trying to find easy answers. There are no easy answers.
Yvonne Kjorlien: That’s too bad. I was hoping for an easy answer out of this.
Kimberlee Moran: That’s no fun. An easy answer is no fun.
Yvonne Kjorlien: The fun is the journey.
Kimberlee Moran: Exactly, exactly.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Thank you very much for this. This has been wonderful.
Kimberlee Moran: My pleasure. I mean these are issues that are near and dear to my heart, and I do love talking about them and engaging with them. Thank you so much for giving me this time and the space.
Brie Smith is the Chief Operating Officer (COO) of Return Home, a company that specializes in natural organic reduction (NOR), also known as human composting or terramation, as an alternative to burial or cremation. Return Home was founded in 2021 in Washington, USA after the passing of a law allowing NOR, with the goal of providing a more natural and gentle way to care for human remains.
In this episode we talk about:
Return Home’s…
Notes from the start:
Tell me about you! Where are you and why do you listen to Scattered? Fill out the survey and be entered into a draw to receive the ebook Memoirs of a Reluctant Archaeologist.
Support the podcast and my research and Buy Me A Coffee. Your contributions will go toward my research, webhosting, and my time. Want to find out more about my research? Check out the Scavenging Study.
Contact me through [email protected] or through my contact form. Contribute to the conversation about dead people & archaeology at the Reluctant Archaeology Group on Facebook. Check up on me through Instagram @yvonnekjorlien
Do you have a suggestion for a topic on the Scattered podcast?
Do you have a question about working with human remains?
Drop Yvonne a line at [email protected]
Transcript
Yvonne Kjorlien: Who are you, and where do you work? And what’s going on?
Brie Smith: Yes, I just want to thank you Yvonne for having me on today. I am Brienna Smith, I go by Brie, and I am the Chief Operating Officer at Return Home. We specialize in an end-of-life option. That is an alternative to burial. And cremation, we call it terramation. And it is the gentle breakdown of the body into compost, to return to families in place ashes, or in place of a burial.
Yvonne Kjorlien: okay, I’m just gonna bottom line, this and say that it’s human composting.
Brie Smith: Human composting, body composting.
Yvonne Kjorlien: All right. I understand that, yeah, this is a sensitive topic.
Brie Smith: It is.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Anything involving death is, but on the other hand, sometimes you just got to come right out and just say it.
Brie Smith: Yes, I have a lot of people in my life who have become very accustomed to me, very casually talking about their inevitable demise. So,
Yvonne Kjorlien: It’s funny how it suddenly becomes a topic of conversation more often than not, right?
Brie Smith: Does with me at least. Yes.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah. All right, tell us a bit about Return Home and how you came to be at Return Home, and its inception and all of that great stuff.
Brie Smith: Sure, sure. I can kind of start at the beginning. So, Washington state past unprecedented legislation in January 2019 and that was for funeral directors to begin offering what’s called natural organic reduction in the law, but the layman would call it human composting. And what happened is there was a general kind of panic amongst the industry and the area because there was really no prescribed method in which to accomplish what they were giving us laws to do. So they gave us the rules and regulations but they give us any processes or, machinery or anything that would end up making up what we at Return Home have built. So our CEO — his name is Micah Truman — he was sitting with his mom one day — she lives on Lopez Island — and she had some friends from New York in town, and they were sitting in a circle and Micah said, “Did you hear about this crazy thing? They’re gonna be composting bodies.” And these women are in, maybe they’re late 70s, and they all were like, we love it. We think it’s fabulous, ship me to Washington because I’m in New York. And in that moment he had this, clear vision of the fact that this is actually something that people really resonate with is, the natural breakdown of the body as opposed to something kind of expedited or being preserved and definitely a lot of people really are innately drawn to kind of a natural breakdown. And so that was kind of the inception point of. I can do something with this.
So what Micah did is he went to a group of individuals they are called mortality composters. Mortality composters are individuals who help with ranchers and farmers when they have a mast devastation of a group of animals. If it’s a flock of chickens, or if it’s a herd of cows, or some pigs, what happens is these mortality composters will go to the place where the devastation happened and they will set up the temporary composting facility where they will take those animals, make them into compost that the farmer or rancher can then use to enrich their property. And so, that is what’s happening, and it’s an old science. It’s a die-old science and it’s actually done throughout the whole United States in Canada. But these people had a very specific way to compost these animals and it was very — what some might consider — irreverent to a human being’s body. So they might stack the animals up and coat them and something nitrogen-rich like chicken feces and then they would break down super fast in a big pile because they’re all real hot. And these things were where the minds of the mortality composters were and then Micah came in with the mind of we need to make this acceptable for human care, and for the love that we want to show people when they pass away and to be able to present this to a family.
So ultimately, it took about two and a half years of Micah working with the mortality composters. I joined in about in about two years in, and also helped with kind of the idea that we wanted to make the service hands-on for families. But really the entire development of our vessel system and the organics that go inside our off-gassing and our biofilters, all of that was done with Micah and a group of what we call the Oceans 11 Team of, again, mortality composters and PhDs in composting. These are HVAC people who helped us build the facility, general contractors, and then of course, funeral professionals. So we all came together, again, two and a half years after inception. So, we opened to serve families in June of 2021, and we so have been in operation for just over two years. And we’ve served over 200 families.
I joined with Return Home after being a traditional funeral home employee. I had been in the industry since 2011 and I am still a licensed funeral director, embalmer and crematory operator. I was really drawn to Return Home because of the final product, really what we’re giving families back in place of ashes. I had worked the crematory primarily — it’s about 90% cremation in the county that I live in and worked in — and I didn’t take to cremating. It was not something I enjoyed doing. It was a very quick and kind of aggressive process that I never quite felt great doing and so when this opportunity came with Return Home and Micah knew that I was kind of into green options, it was a really natural fit together and it’s been my pleasure to grow from the services manager of the company to now to again COO and overseeing all of the operations, both in the family services and the composting itself.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Wow, that’s a lot. Thank you for that. There’s a couple things that I would love to address in all of that.
First is a little bit about your journey and how you became a funeral director, like how you found out that you wanted to pursue that path to become a funeral director, embalmer, cremation specialist. And then, once we’ve covered that, a little bit about what traditional funeral homes offer and that it isn’t mandatory, you don’t have to go through…you don’t have to be embalmed or cremated that they’re…all of this narrative around funeral homes, it can be quite misleading. So first let’s get into your journey…because not everybody, starts life wanting to be a funeral director.
Brie Smith: Yeah, neither did. It’s good to point out that this was not what I thought I would be doing with my life. I thought I would maybe go into sports medicine or surgical… I really always loved anatomy and
I blame a couple things . Blame is a funny word for it, but I give credit to the fact that my mother was a cosmetologist when I was young and she did hair and makeup for a mortuary. And so at night, my dad was a beat cop so he would be working the nights as a police officer. And so my mom would take me to the morgue with her and I would sit with her while she did people’s hair and makeup. And she tells the story that one day we were there together and a broom fell. And she had this moment of panic. And I very calmly looked over at her and I said, “Mom, it’s not like she’s gonna hurt you.” So, I just had a really solid comprehension of life and death at a very young age. I’m talking, six to nine years old, when I was going with her. I was also raised on a ranch. So, I really understood the circle of life in a way that not every kid is exposed to, I think. And then I took an anatomy and physiology class where I had to restore a likeness of a person from a skull and we used erasers and we used clay and we built this person’s face-up based on their sex and their nationality and their race. So what we did is we built these faces up and I found in that class that I had a real knack for what we call in the industry restorative art. It’s a level kind of beyond embalming, where traditional embalming you have a person who looks really beautiful and you make them look more beautiful with your efforts and the injection. In this case, these are for devastated individuals who have completely maybe lost half of their face or their hands have been mutilated or…it is a skill of mine to go in and restore them back to their likeness. And so, I really fell in love with that. And after that, it was a kind of a no-brainer for me that I was meant to do this for people.
The cruel irony being that I moved to the Pacific Northwest where barely anyone is embalmed ever. And I rarely got to practice my craft and I ended up essentially burning people all day instead of bringing them back to beautiful so their family could say goodbye. It was something that I was really passionate about but that I didn’t have the opportunity to practice as regularly as I would like to. So that’s what steered me toward Return Home.
And here we actually get to do quite a bit of restorative art. We just don’t use chemicals. And we’ve done chemicals visitations for about 70% of our families come in and see their loved one before they say goodbye. So it’s been really awesome to be able to stretch my skill set in a place where I can’t use the tools I’m used to using. So both myself and Katie, who’s our funeral director here, are licensed embalmers and we still do long bone donation cases and we still do autopsy cases, and we help these families say a final goodbye without the use of chemicals. That’s been really awesome. So that’s kind of been the development of my career so far.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Wow. So you had a very early exposure to not just the funeral home but also to death.
Brie Smith: Definitely.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Wow. Yeah, because a lot of people, especially those people living in cities, do not have that exposure.
Brie Smith: Yeah, yeah. The cyclical, farm life. I went in the summers. So I would go for branding season. All of these little snippets of life where I would see the crop come and go. And I would see the animals come and go. And it was just kind of part of the atmosphere that I was around that, nothing kind of lasted forever. And I think it gave me the ability to accept death in a different kind of way than what we might call a city slicker.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Right, right. So let’s talk a bit about your experiences working within the traditional funeral home environment, and what you learned, and what you found that didn’t resonate with you and had you kind of, longing for something else.
Brie Smith: You know what, I think when you ask me that question, it’s multifaceted, because I worked for an excellent company, a family owned, but they owned many facilities. And I think one of my…the hurdles that I was having to go through on a regular basis was the fact that I wasn’t able to make personal or kind of customize our services, it was kind of a prescribed, “This is the menu you get to choose from,” and then the family would choose from the menu and then we would fulfill what they chose. It was a little bit much also to me to not get to give input. It was very hard to feel like I could better the systems or better the service in some way, and then not feel like I was maybe being considered because it wasn’t the traditional way of doing things or it wasn’t the way we were supposed to do things. So I think that there is kind of ingrained in the industry, in some ways, a real prescribed idea of what families should choose and what’s the best thing for them. When in actuality what I’ve learned since joining Return Home is that it is, again, it’s innate people, to be part of the planning of their loved one’s death, and not in the service but actually in the handling of the remains and of the reverence for the quiet moments together, instead of these big public moments that might have happened. And both might happen still. But at Return Home, my point of really bringing families back into the equation where the hands that love you in life can continue loving you in death is based on the fact that I couldn’t do that freely previously. And it was something that I feel like the funeral industry has kind of come in and removed families’ abilities to see their loved ones decompose in any way. If I’ve had a family see their loved one with a green belly and if I would have done that in my previous work, it would have been curtains. I mean it’s a really bad look to have somebody breaking down in front of the family…
Yvonne Kjorlien: Right.
Brie Smith: But it’s natural and people see it and they know that that person has pass ed away and there’s a grief and a connection with the grieving process that goes a long with seeing your person deceased and not seeing them in the hospital and then never seeing them again or whatever that might look like to some people. So I see it benefit the family in a major way in their grief, to be able to open the doors of the funeral home and say, “How much do you want to be involved?” And that’s what was missing previously that I’m really proud to be able to integrate here in what people might consider progressive or non-traditional services.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Very cool. Just a personal story. So my father passed away in 2018. He just didn’t answer his phone and so my sister went over and checked and sure enough he had passed away at home. It took me a while to get up there and to assist in whatever. And by the time I got there, the funeral home had already arrived, and so I didn’t get to see him. And so my perception was he was alive one minute and then just vanished the next. And the next time, when I went to the funeral home, I actually asked to see him and they said, “Sorry, we can’t let you back for health and safety reasons.” I thought that’s kind of weird. So, I have this sort of left open. I had — without belittling the word or anything but — I “Did he actually die?” He could be like Elvis and frequenting 7-11 or, weird places. It’s this weird concept that, because I wasn’t allowed to see his body, I, in some capacity, don’t really know he’s dead.
Brie Smith: Yeah, that is a disconnect that I have heard so many times. And your story it really touches my heart because this is conversations that I’ve had with several people. Since they’ve chosen our service they’re like, “I didn’t get to see XYZ,” and being able to be here and do this this time, has completely changed my perception of what it means when somebody passes away in my involvement in that. To me it’s one of the things that inhibits people’s ability to get closure. Like you said, I don’t really believe in closure to be frank. I know that grief ebbs and flows, and I know that it never ends because I’ve over a decade ago, and it’s just how it goes. But being able to be the arbiter of somebody passing away, and then looking at that family and saying, “Do you need time with them?” Instead of me, just coming in, dispatching right away, and asking the question, not just being like, “Okay, the call came in. We’re gonna go. 90-minute call time: we did great.” It’s great for the business to be quick and to move like that, but what is great for the family? And that’s the question that we ask ourselves at Return Home and we end up asking our families. That’s why people have had such transformative experiences here because we give it back to them. And we say, “Let’s talk about what you feel like you need?” and then we’ll kind of go from there. Usually when you ask someone, “Do you want to see or put your hands on your loved one before they go into their terramation vessel?” and stuff, it’s so common for them to be like, “I don’t think so.” And then the next day, call and be like, “Actually, you know what? I do need that,” and then we make that happen for them and it helps them.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Because it’s like you go into a shock and you really aren’t…I don’t feel capable of making decisions like even small decisions, “Do you want to touch your loved one before they go into the vessel?” That’s a small decision. But under those conditions, it can be monumental. That’s a huge decision to make. You’re grieving, you’re in shock. And yeah, I agree that, yeah, that the loved ones are kind of disconnected from the process and the traditional funeral home environment.
Brie Smith: In the number of times, I sat across from someone with my menu and they chose their menu options and then I wrote it all out and then they signed it. And then the next day, they had no recollection of what we put together.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah.
Brie Smith: So we encourage people to take their time with the arrangements because we are kind of what we consider eco-friendly, or green, or mindful of the environment. We don’t use a lot of paper. So we just send people a link and they can take their time with inputting the loved ones information. They can get help from family members and that database and bring people in to help them. So we’re not just sitting across from a family, having them choose, all of these. And the choice of whether to touch your loved one or not. How about the choice of a $2000 casket that maybe isn’t amazingly beautiful, but it’s within your budget or the $7,000 one that’s absolutely gorgeous, but in both cases, you’ll never see it again.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Right.
Brie Smith: But what’s the right choice? I mean, it’s so debatable what the value of the funeral home and the funeral director is, but I found that at Return Home, the value of the funeral director is being able to get that family to take their time, breathe in and out of the grief that they’re feeling, and move at a pace that works for them where they can decide to be participatory or not.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Wonderful. So I don’t want to get too much into the history of funerals and funeral homes, but just suffice to say that embalming is a very recent practice.
Brie Smith: Yeah, the Civil War is when embalming really became the most prevalent outside of ancient Egypt basically. But in the US, the Civil War is what did it, because the men were passing away and they needed to make their way home afterward for services, for funeral services, and things like that. It became a common practice. There are pictures. It’s pretty common knowledge within the industry that, in some mortuary books that exist out there, there’s actually pictures of bodies that are kind of propped up as this is the work that I can do, along the battlefield because the embalmer really became really, really needed at that time.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Right.
Brie Smith: They didn’t have refrigeration. That’s something that people don’t quite understand: is that nowadays in the modern world we have refrigeration and it almost in, certain circumstances, completely negates the need for embalming. There’s a time and a place for embalming, though. That is for certain. And it is an art that we do have respect for, but at the end of the day, it’s a lot less needed now than it would have been 150 years ago.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Right. Yeah, and so much of this, the funeral business makes it seem mandatory. That embalming is mandatory. That you have to go through a funeral home: it’s mandatory. And you don’t know to question all this because usually, when you’re in this environment of being in a funeral home, faced with death, you are also within a grieving situation. You’re in shock. You don’t have the ability to make decisions, maybe even to think critically at that time. So, questioning any of the practices, questioning the processes, questioning anything that is said to you, just isn’t within your realm. So that’s why I wanted to bring this up now, so that people can question it now.
Brie Smith: Yeah. Yeah. One of the proudest, things of, I think I’m most proud of that we’ve accomplished at Return Home is really putting out on our social media the knowledge that we have transported people from Canada unembalmed. We cannot do it with any other country because pretty much every other country in the entire world requires embalming to cross the border. But Canada does not. So we’ve been able to accommodate those families. We’ve been able to accommodate families from over 20 different states, and the only state that requires embalming to cross state lines is Alabama. And other than that, you do not need to be embalmed at all. And in Alabama, you don’t have to if you’re not going to cross state lines.
So it is really interesting because I didn’t realize how prevalent it was that the funeral homes kind of might push embalming or imply that it’s required to have a visitation or to say goodbye and it’s simply not true. It can restore when someone has been really sick and make them look healthier. It can do a lot of really amazing things for people in need. But most people who die naturally, really never ever have to be embalmed. I think that that’s something that we’re proud to be able to share that information widely because it’s such a misconception.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Nice. I like that. All right, let’s talk about human composting get into some of the science here because when we talked previously, when I first heard about Return Home and human composting, one of my first questions was, “Okay, you can do it with the soft tissue but what happens with the bones?” Because I know, as a former archaeologist, that I dig up bones all the time and there’s no soft tissue. But in, let’s say peat bogs, there can be no bones but soft tissue, skin left. So but it all depends on the environment. So how do you deal with that soft tissue versus hard tissue?
Brie Smith: Yeah, yeah, it’s die-old. I will say that. I’m so proud of our science here because it was kind of a deal breaker for me when I started. I was like, I have to do this before I joined because I have to know that this actually works and trusting our team to John Paul, who is our PhD soil scientist. He created everything that we do and I trust him so much and he’s such an amazing person. It’s just such a pleasure to be able to work alongside of him, truly. He created a system where we place the person in a vessel. They’re eight foot by three and a half by three and a half. So they’re just big rectangular vessels. There is nothing inside of the vessel except for tubes that allow oxygen to flow through. And what we do is we place a straw alfalfa and sawdust inside of the vessel about halfway up roughly, give or take, but it’s at a certain ratio of the organics to the person’s body weight.
So what we do is we place, those three organic materials inside of the vessel. We then lay the person in, and before this happens, we’ve gone through the steps of receiving them into our care. We give every single person who comes into our care, a bath because we believe it is just basic human decency to be clean. So if they are not clean, we clean them and we place them in a compostable garment. Then they go into the vessel just right on top of, we kind of make a cradle with a pillow and a little indention, they settle in there and then the remaining organics go on top. And so the person is kind of sandwiched or cozied in between the two layers of organics.
And what happens over the next 30 to 60 days is we place them on a system where we have 24/7 monitoring. We constantly monitor the airflow, the temperature and the moisture levels inside of that vessel. And so we have a probe that’s in there that’s making sure that the temperature is the state minimum. For composting human remains is 132 degrees for no less than 72 hours. And that is to kill pathogens. So for us that number we far exceeded. Usually the people in our care are reaching about 150 to 160 degrees for maybe two weeks. So we have really optimized the internal environment and that vessel for the body to break down quickly. What happens is we make sure that the moisture is at the right level. We make sure that the temperature is rising the way it should be. And then when that temperature begins to drop, what we do is we have an external rotator, so our vessels go into this machine that reminds me of those old virtual reality rides that they used to have in malls. I know that’s really silly and specific, but it’s like a big ride that you place the vessel into and the person kind of rotates slowly over about two minutes and what it does is it equalizes the moisture within the vessel. And so we’ll see another spike in temperature because organics that have not used up the nitrogen or the energy that they have inside of them are being exposed to what you’d call the soft tissue. And that means that there’s another, spike temperature in another breakdown. So what we do is we kind of go back and forth to the rotator over the next couple of weeks. Again, everybody is different, so we gauge it based on the temperature and the readings that we’re getting from our cloud. But ultimately, when we see the fallen temperature and then there’s no spike after we go to rotation, that’s when we know that the soft tissue is completely gone. There is no more energy inside of that vessel to use up and there are only bones remaining at that time.
What happens after that is we go to what we call screening. Screening is very similar to after a cremation, where you would sweep out the contents of the retort, that is bones and anything inorganic. And then you go through those with a magnet to make sure that nothing’s inside of there that will go into the processor, which is what in the crematory breaks down the bone to make it fluffy or completely uniform, ideally. So what we’ve done is we took that science and we duplicated it. It’s just a lot bigger. We upend the vessel. We have a team who goes in and we pull anything inorganic. So we’re pulling, any metal replacements hip, stents, screws. We are also looking for things that are in organic that may have been inside of the body, like silicone. And we are pulling those, and they either get recycled or go to medical waste.
And then what happens is the bones in the compost, stay together and all go through a piece of machinery that’s called a processor. And essentially, it makes the bone uniform with the compost. So it’s breaking the bone down and making it unidentifiable amongst the compost that’s already there. And then what happens is the bones are — as you know, I’m sure very well — porous on the inside. So, when we expose that porous material to these microbes, we see the temperature spike again because there’s microbial activity again. So, after the bones in the compost are broken down together, we go to what’s called the resting phase. Because what’s going to happen is we’re gonna get a spike in temperature, but then this temperature is going to slowly lower. The more moisture content is going to lessen, and they’re going to off-gas a little bit of CO2 as they rest. And what happens is they lower in temperature and moisture to the point where at the end, they’re ambient. There’s no more microbial activity. Then they’re ready to go home.
So the first phase takes about 30 to 60 days, depending on the person’s body makeup. And then the second phase takes pretty much an exact 30 days because, once that temperature drops and goes ambient, we’re ready to go home with the person. So that’s really the science behind what we do, granted there’s the mixture of organics and those ratios and the moisture ratios are very important. But we have really worked hard to make sure that each person is… we know if they’re emaciated going in, what we need to compensate for. We know if they’re obese, going in what we need to compensate for. And so we’ve really dialed the science to be able to serve to serve our families and what I consider to be the most transparent and, in my opinion, the most gentle way that any facility provides this service.
Yvonne Kjorlien: I find that very interesting because I knew that cremation, the fire will only take care of so much, and that the bones, whatever remains, has to be ground down so it’s uniform size and there’s nothing identifiable. But yeah, with the human composting, like I said, that takes care of a lot of the soft tissue but then you’re left with the hard tissue, the bone. And breaking down that bone so then it becomes available to the microbes so then it can further break down the organic components of the bone tissue. That’s very interesting.
Brie Smith: Yeah, man it works. I mean just the small spongy bones might even break down. Can I say I’ve ever seen a metatarsal in the compost? Like not identifiably …but I like an archeal… I actually likened it… so funny that that’s what you did because, when I first started with Micah and we did our first screening because I was the one back there doing it or our team was very small at that time, I pulled a femur out of the compost and it felt like archaeology. It felt like, my God, this is so beautiful and clean of tissue. And I mean just the fact that it’s actually happening still to this day, two and a half years later, just kind of blows my mind. It really is so miraculous what happens. And it can’t be overstated, how obvious it is that the body is meant to breakdown. It just brings you full circle on this whole thing of, wow, really we are meant to, just the leaves fall in the fall if we left them there, instead of raking them up, they would nurture the earth for the springtime. And that’s what we are meant to do. We are meant to nurture the earth for the next generations to come. And because we don’t die all and go directly into the earth the way we used to, and we don’t use the bathroom and put it back into the earth the way we used to, we’re really depriving the planet of a lot of organic material. So I’m really proud that the company that I’m standing behind returns organic matter to the earth. I think it is vital to the health of our planet, and John Paul, who’s our PhD, says that about 50% of the soil health of the planet has depleted and that if we don’t start giving back to it, it will never be able to be recovered.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Wow, That’s a whole other level. That’s a whole other podcast episode.
Brie Smith: It’s really. John Paul is amazing. So if you ever wanted to go down that rabbit hole, you just let me know because he is fascinating.
Yvonne Kjorlien: All right. So on that note, let’s talk about the difference between terramation, water cremation, and green burial. You’ve got this whole lovely…For the listeners, Return Home has a whole lovely website, and under their resources, they have a lot of educational articles and if you want to delve deep, go there. But I thought the difference between terramation, water cremation, and green burial would be something nice to mention here.
Brie Smith: Yeah, yeah. I mean it’s accessibility based a lot of the time and the differences is as far as what you’re choosing to do is, with all three lower, your footprint. I mean the bottom line is that they are all three much less wasteful than a traditional cremation or burial with embalming might be. I really loved green burial. I still do. I mean, but before even started with Return Home, green burial was my choice for myself. I like the idea of just a natural shroud made of either wicker or bamboo, or maybe just be placed in something that’s soft to the touch, cotton or linen. But to just be placed directly into the earth and breakdown is something that I find super beautiful. But a lot of people are turned off by bugs. I had no idea how many people would ask us about the bugs.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Yep.
Brie Smith: We don’t have bugs. We have microbes. Bugs couldn’t survive the temperatures inside of the vessel. But for green burial, specifically, I find that people like green burial until they talk about the bugs and then they’re like, “Yeah, that’s kind of not for me. I really don’t want to be consumed by worms.” It’s weird. So to me, I think it’s lovely. I understand where people might get a little strange about it. It’s also using land in perpetuity. I think that’s something that’s really special about terramation is that there’s no requirement for zoning of any kind, and it’s just like scattering cremated remains. Whereas with burial, even if it is a green burial, you have to go, in at least Washington, to a zoned cemetery and that cemetery has to offer a direct to earth burial. Some of them will say that they do but they’re still inverting in outer burial container over you so that they can drive over you with heavy equipment and things like that.
So, yeah, green burial is very interesting and there’s a lot of nuance. Also, when you do a green burial, you’re putting the heavy metals that are in the person’s body in the earth. So, that’s something that didn’t use to be the case. We used to not put metal bits in people, and we do that now. So there’s a conversation to be had around that.
For me, green burial is my second choice to terramation. I still think it’s absolutely beautiful and I love it.
Alkaline hydrolysis that is what some people call water cremation, or aquamation. A very gentle breakdown. It does use some resources. It uses a lot of water because what’s happening is that you’re being placed in a container that is agitating and working with chemical to break your body down, but in a more natural or rather gentle way than a cremation might do so. The process takes a little bit longer than a cremation but at the end you’re left with more remains and they are stark white. So instead of ashes that come to you and they’re kind of gray and black and splatchy, alkaline remains our absolutely pure white and beautiful and you get more because it’s less aggressive. So the crematory is not breaking the bone down within the vessel that you’re in, that you’re in the pod for the alkaline hydrolysis breaks you down slowly. There’s more bone material because it’s not kind of blasting you away, if you will.
I really like alkaline hydrolysis. I think it’s a beautiful service especially for animals. A lot of people come to Return Home asking if we compost animals and the answer is no, not. We could, but it would be really costly to set up that facility. And so we’re just not in a position to do that right now. But a lot of places all over the US. and my understanding is in Canada, offer it for pets, alkaline hydrolysis, and it to me, is a beautiful alternative to just standard cremation.
And then, of course, you’re getting an urn back, very similarly to cremation. With terramation, it’s pretty cool because the body is placed in the vessel with organic material that makes it so that we can return about 200 to 250 pounds of organic matter to the earth. We give the family the option to take the full amount with them. If they do, it is placed in burlap because we’re continuing the cycle of life and the compost needs to breathe. So, we put it in something that has air flow. Families go and do memorial gardens, they’ve gone to arboretums. they’ve gone to cemeteries.
So, the options for the terramated remains are pretty much what they are for cremated remains. Except instead of an inert charred carbon, you’re giving back something that has magnesium and phosphates and carbon and all the things that the earth actually wants and needs to thrive. But it’s got the same mobility as cremated remains, which I think is the draw for a lot of people. I think less people choose burial a lot because we’re nuclear we’re moving now, we’re not growing up in Eastern Montana and spending our whole life, there and marrying someone from there, and having kids and dying there. We’re moving. We’re going from A to B. And so the mobility of the remains is something that we find a lot of families prefer to taking up land indefinitely. So, that’s kind of like the quick breakdown of the comparison of the three. I feel like I covered. I’m pretty well.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, no, it’s really good and I like that you brought up the cycle of life and contributing to the life of the Earth because with embalming and the traditional sense, you’re actually polluting the earth because all that formaldehyde, that then sits in the earth, and it’s probably contaminating the groundwater. Then you’ve got the coffin and what it’s made of, the lacquers that are used on that coffin, the materials, the textiles and whatever they’re treated with, and all of that is sitting in the ground. So it’s actually depleting the earth of its value. Whereas terramation is giving value to the soil.
Brie Smith: Yeah, and I mean it is directly contributing to families’ gardens just absolutely being gorgeous. I mean I would say it’s not like when you go to the store and you buy compost because even then they can be chemical laden.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Yes.
Brie Smith: What’s so amazing about what we’re doing is it’s just…everything that your body could give to the earth that is good and then we can remove anything that might not be. We negate the pathogens and we negate the chemotherapy and the radiation, and you know what I mean? So these things that may be a consideration are a non issue and they’re actually processed through the terramation where really the only people we can’t help, as far as diseases or what’s in their body, is if you have a prion related illness. So Creutzfeldt-Jakob or Mad Cow disease would be and a no-go because the temperature inside the vessel won’t kill the prions. Only cremation can do that. So we have that limitation. But other than that, I mean we can really take someone who was unwell and their family saw them breakdown over time and they became just a piece of who they once were, and when we return them back to the family, that family gets to see that person’s life live on and really see it happening. It’s pretty cool.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Nice. All right, I’m conscious the time. So you said Return Home is you’re in Washington State but you can accept Decedents from Canada. I looked on your website and I didn’t see any update about Return Home coming to Canada and setting up a facility. Is there any news on that?
Brie Smith: Yeah, so for us, it’s just about legislation, right? So It depends on the area that is looking. And in the US, we’ve had seven states now that have legalized the process and it is a state issue. So state by state, they make up their disposition laws and rules and regulations and they oversee them. So in Canada, is it province by province that they decide on those things or is it national? I don’t actually know the answer to that question.
Yvonne Kjorlien: I don’t know, either, I’d have to look it up.
Brie Smith: What I know is that there has been no legislation passed thus far in Canada, but that it is a big topic of conversation for a lot of people there. Especially, you know, it was amazing to me because I really thought our first case would be from BC. We’re in Seattle, basically proper almost.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Right.
Brie Smith: And so, our first family from Canada was from Toronto. And they flew with her to the facility to see her off at a service, and then they flew back to bring her home. So that family came to and fro on that plane and to me, absolutely, I would love to have them not have to do that. Our end goal would be to be local to people, where they wouldn’t have to make grand journeys to fulfill this process. But I’ll say the people who know about it and decide on it are all in and they love it and they’re so glad that their loved one can have the ability to be here with us. We do a lot of digital and virtual services and things like that because we do serve so many people from out of state.
But it’s so amazing to me to see that, the states are legalizing, Canada’s discussing it, and certainly when those policies go through we will be setting our sights on being accessible. I think that’s super important to the cause of what we do.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Fabulous. All right. You do have a very informative website: returnhome.com. And do you have a blog or some way to keep up to date on what is new?
Brie Smith: Yeah. So we, of course as you mentioned, have a really comprehensive blog and resource center. We do both and they’re for different things. So the Return Home blog is specifically more geared toward body composting and terramation and what we do, and then the Resource Center is actually just industry general, like you said, it compares and contrast things. So we have those resources.
My favorite thing that we do is actually something our CEO, Micah, does. Once a month, he sends out a newsletter and it’s just one email that kind of encompasses what we’ve done that month, but they’re very entertaining. And it’s very interesting to read up on the advancements of whatever’s happening in the space at that time. So when you go to our website, I definitely suggest signing up for the newsletter. You can also chat with our staff there. So if you jump on the website, down at the bottom, it’ll pop up, nd it’ll say, “Do you want to talk to us?” and you’re not talking to somebody elsewhere. You are literally talking to me, Katie, Jake. We take the chats, we take every single phone call. We don’t have a call service because we believe in being accessible, and people have all the questions, and we want to answer all the questions.
We also do a lot of social media outreach. So we’re at Return Home NOR on a lot of the platforms. So whether it be TikTok or Instagram, we are always posting educational content because there’s a lot of developments that happen in the space and we just want people to be informed on what atypical and that should…I feel like people should get to know their local mortician or funeral director the same way that they would get to maybe a doctor or somebody who’s in their life because we’re so resourceful. I think that being able to be a resource for people at Return Home, it’s such an honor and pleasure that people would come to us. Because they come to us, again, with questions about composting or just in death care in general – death, dying. We’re experts in beforehand, aftercare, and everything in between. And we know a lot about a lot because we’ve seen a lot. Everybody here who’s works with our staff has been in the funeral industry for, most of us, for at least eight years or so. And then Micah is the only one who’s kind of a newbie, which is really funny because he’s leading the whole thing. But that’s where you can find us and we really try to be available for those Q and A’s pretty much any time because we know there’s a lot to ask.
Yvonne Kjorlien: You’ve definitely given me a lot to think about and unfortunately, it’s in hindsight for my dad’s death, but foresight, I think, for my own planning and what have you because, yeah, like I mentioned, you’re just not in a space when it does happen and so being informed prior to is a good thing and, yeah, you’ve given me a lot to think about. So thank you for that.
Brie Smith: Gosh, it’s my pleasure to just kind of share the good word of “it’s okay to think about it.” It’s not like you would talk about death and you’re gonna die, that’s not how life works. And it can be a topic of conversation that you bring up and you think about and then it won’t happen for another 60 years. So it’s something to consider, to think about. Does it matter to you what happens to you. And if you’ve lived your whole life being a steward of the planet and you’re mindful of your waste and you’re that person, it doesn’t make a whole heck of a lot of sense for you to just be cremated at the end. There’s things that you can do that you would feel good about and your family would feel good about that, that might just be a better option for you. So it’s something to think about.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Fabulous. Thank you very much, Brie, and good luck with home Return Home.
Brie Smith: Thank you for having me. And, again, if you want John Paul on, you just let me know.
A couple episodes ago, I talked to Alisa Hardy and Taylor Dube-Mather about their experiences doing a practicum at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner (OCME) in Alberta. In this episode, I talked to their supervisor at the time of this practicum, Dr. Janne Holmgren. Janne has been a professor at Mount Royal University for 23 years and teaches in the Department of Economics, Justice and Policy Studies. She coordinates a practicum program for students to gain exposure working with the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. She also does research in how jurors perceive evidence, and how new technologies can be used as forensic evidence.
In this episode we talk about:
The program at Mount Royal University is a Bachelor of Arts in Criminal Justice and you can find out more here: https://www.mtroyal.ca/ProgramsCourses/FacultiesSchoolsCentres/Arts/Departments/EconomicsJusticePolicyStudies/DegreePrograms/BachelorofArts-CriminalJustice/index.htm
The OCME practicum is coordinated by Dr. Janne Holmgren. You can view her profile here: https://www.mtroyal.ca/ProgramsCourses/FacultiesSchoolsCentres/Arts/Departments/EconomicsJusticePolicyStudies/Faculty/JanneHolmgren.htm
You can find out more about the Sara Baillie and Taliyah Marsman case here: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/edward-downey-murder-baillie-taliyah-appeal-1.5994491
You can find out more about the Guy Paul Morin case here: https://www.innocencecanada.com/exonerations/guy-paul-morin/
Robert Jensen’s book, Personal Effects, is available through most major retailers: Amazon, Indigo (and it appears to be on sale thru Indigo right now!). His website is: https://robertajensen.com/
****
Do you have a suggestion for a topic on the Scattered podcast?
Do you have a question about working with human remains?
As always, if you have a suggestion for this podcast, I’d love to hear it. Contact me at [email protected] or through my contact form.
Support the podcast and my research and Buy Me A Coffee. Your contributions will go toward webhosting, transcriptions, and paying for my research travel expenses. (Gas ain’t cheap!) Want to find out more about my research? Check out the Scavenging Study.
Contribute to the conversation about dead people & archaeology at the Reluctant Archaeology Group on Facebook.
Memoirs of a Reluctant Archaeologist is a fiction novel I wrote inspired by my experiences as a consulting archaeologist. I just created this teaser for the book. You can download it or buy the print copy from your favourite ebook retailer. You can also now buy direct from me: https://payhip.com/YvonneKjorlien
Transcript
Janne Holmgren: I’m Dr. Janne Holmgren. I’m a full professor at Mount Royal University in the Department of Economics, Justice and Policy Studies. I’ve been at MRU for 23 years.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Wow, you’re one of the old folks here.
Janne Holmgren: I know. Scary. I feel so old.
Yvonne Kjorlien: you’ve seen it evolve — the institution evolve from its college days to, it’s now university days.
Janne Holmgren: Yeah, from the diploma program to the applied program to the bachelor’s program.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah.
Janne Holmgren: Yeah, so I’ve kind of been around the block.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Right. And so you came to my attention mostly because I just did a podcast episode with Alisa and Taylor who went through, I guess at least one of your classes but the medical examiner’s internship that you coordinate so that they could get a practicum And do some work and get some exposure with what goes on at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. So, that’s kind of how you came to my attention. But you do way much more than that. So can you kind of give a — how did you come to be at Mount Royal and doing the research are that you’re currently — if you’re doing any research now — what kind of brought you to that point? So kind of give us a sketch of your journey up to now.
Janne Holmgren: I became very interested in DNA evidence around the OJ Simpson trial. Where, it was clear to me that, DNA was going to become a big part, of that. And at that time there’s really nobody in Canada that was doing critical analysis examination of the evidence. So I was really interested in the impact on trials where you have something so novel like DNA that people can’t really see, they can’t really understand, how that ends up, playing out within the courtroom. So I focused my master’s degree on that kind of work whereby, I interviewed defense lawyers throughout Canada.
And I asked a question: what are the implications for your trials? What are you gonna do with this? How are you gonna play with this? And it became really clear to me that the system that we had in place in Canada because we don’t really have independent laboratories, that the access to — for example, a retest of biological samples were really hard to get hold of. So yeah, I know of a few cases in Canada, where, you think back to the Guy Paul Morin and case where the defense, wanted to retest the sample, but to retest the sample in Canada, they would have had to go through the Center of Forensic Sciences in Ontario or, through the RCMP and they didn’t want to do that, because the samples had already been examined in the laboratory in Canada. So they had to go down to the US, I think it was Boston, to get the sample, reevaluated. And it became clear that it was not his DNA that was part of that sample. So, that’s a long, long story and we know now that, it was a completely different individual that was responsible for the death of nine year old Christine Jessup, I think it was in 1994.
So the playing field within the criminal justice system, it was really clear to me that it was not balanced, the scales of justice was really tilted. In addition to that, any kind of expert testimony that we saw in the Court in the early days of DNA evidence was usually presented by people that worked in the laboratories – again, in the Center of Forensic Sciences and the RCMP laboratories — and we really didn’t have Council in Canada that could really contest what it was that they were doing, of what they were presenting within the courtroom.
So in some cases, they would have had to get an independent expert from the UK, Australia or the US, which usually cost, a lot of money. And because they didn’t really understand DNA evidence, the defense lawyers didn’t really understand DNA evidence, they didn’t really know how to extract the information within the courtroom, ask the right questions. I learned that there was a real need for an independent expert that was not affiliated with the police, or a particular laboratory. So in the early days of my work even as a master student, I was asked to help out defense lawyers understand, how DNA works and whether or not I could help them launch defenses for their clients or what questions to ask, about the actual evidence, which was enormously interesting. So that kind of grew my passion about DNA evidence.
There wasn’t really anywhere in Canada either where I could really get trained. The RCMP is doing all the training in Canada, and I have been incredibly fortunate to attend different courses that the RCMP has put on — in forensic interviewing, for example — which is the other passion of mine. But I kind of pushed my way into courses in the US. I took DNA statistical courses with the American Academy of Forensic Sciences. Where I met many people that were being trained, for the FBI and so forth and other Canadian officers, detectives, and what have you? So I had to kind of figure out how to kind of get that information on my own.
That led to my PhD where I tried something unique. Given that we cannot interview jurors in Canada, I decided to set up a mock trial and I was privileged to get the go-ahead from the Court of Queens Bench in Calgary to actually have a courtroom, and I actually had a real judge, and I had real experts, DNA experts, and I had a real defense lawyers and had real Crown prosecutors participating in my so-called mock trial, which was actually a real trial whereby I changed everything that was identifying about that trial. We ran this trial in front of a jury. It was completely scripted. So, it was a massive script that they all played to. And it was video recorded with seven different cameras. And then after that, I interviewed the jurors about the evidence. I learned very quickly what it was that they’re fixated within the trial. And one of the major findings that I found was that it almost didn’t matter what evidence was part of the trial. When the expert would actually come forth and give these statistical numbers or the probabilities statistics of the likelihood that this DNA belonging to anyone other than their accused is one in a trillion — that’s really all that they needed to hear. And with that, they would find easily a finding of guilt on the basis of that, even alone, which is hugely problematic. Then they were fixated on all sorts of other things which were really, really funny: the clothing of council, the hairstyles of council, …
Yvonne Kjorlien: I’ve heard that, yeah.
Janne Holmgren: … whether or they had access to water, notebooks. At that time, when I ran this mock trial, it was not the norm that jurors were granted notebooks with information. That’s changed since then. But certainly, one of the issues that came out of my work, was that jurors really needed to be able to ask questions.
I argued in my PhD that really the courtroom is not all that different than on academic classroom. When you have people that are unfamiliar with biology, chemistry, physics, anything like that, and they have bombarded with all this kind of information, and they are dissuaded from taking notes, and they’re dissuaded from taking notes by counsel, for example, saying things like “Look at me”, “Listen to counsel”, “Your job is to pay attention.” And that actually ended up being perceived by the jurors as, “Okay, I’m really allowed to ask I’m not really allowed to write notes. I’m supposed to watch.”
And then council would say things like, “It is my job to ask the questions, not your job to ask the questions, but for you to listen,” which is very interesting. I correlated that with the classroom. This experience in the classroom, students need to be able to ask questions, like “What is this?”, “What is this DNA?”, “How does that work?”
My jurors had a really difficult time understanding that DNA can be extracted from anything in the body. In those early days they thought that blood had to be matched with blood and couldn’t really understand how could you extract DNA from dental pulp, for example. That was really, really difficult for them and difficult for defense lawyers too. We’re trying at that time to not get those statistical numbers to be presented within the courtroom, because they learned very quickly that it had way more of an influence than it probably ought to have had.
Yvonne Kjorlien: I can very much see your perspective that a courtroom is much like a classroom because you’re asking the jurors to make a decision based on what they’re presented, but they have to understand it. So in essence, they need to learn what’s going on. And so in order to learn, you need to be able to ask questions. Because if something is unclear to you, you can’t critically analyze it to make a decision. I can totally understand that. Yeah.
Janne Holmgren: And those other issues that was really apparent. In me interviewing lawyers and judges their perception of the jury, and this idea that jurors, they really don’t ask good questions. They really shouldn’t be allowed to ask questions because they ask ridiculous questions that are totally irrelevant. But for my standpoint as an educator, to me it scared me to think that we wanted the presentation, of a jury that didn’t really understand, was actually kind of okay, with it.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, it’s more than kind of scary. That’s very scary. Very scary.
Janne Holmgren: Based on that research, I was like, there probably is a really good argument for professional jurors. We see in some countries very well educated juror on the issues that are at play because it’s well known that.. and that was a really scary part that I learned when I interviewed defense lawyers for my masters — which was all I did for my Master’s degree, which I completed out of Simon Fraser University — was that if a defense lawyer did not understand the DNA evidence and the accused had a rap sheet of prior convictions, defense lawyers were more likely to encourage a plea. Because they were just so uncomfortable with this idea of having to contest the DNA evidence, which they really didn’t understand. Now the landscape for all of this that we’re talking about today is very different today.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Right. Yeah.
Janne Holmgren: But the one issue that remains to this day and something that we see from time to time is that we learn that an expert who provided evidence many, many years ago, might have not completed all the testing of the samples, for example, and have gone into the courtroom just on the basis that they are an expert, a so-called expert, and have provided evidence, on their so- called expertise without really having done the work. And we saw that in the case of the pathologist, Charles Smith, the child pathologist. Who, in fact, in many of the instances that he had testified in, or in the many cases that he testified, he had not actually even completed all that work. And we had families, who’s families’ members, were convicted of murder of their children went off to jail, convicted. There are other children ceased, put into foster care, and so forth. And then since learned that his evidence was, in fact, incorrect and malicious.
Yvonne Kjorlien: So it’s my understanding, there’s a bit of a process at least, in the US to become an expert, be considered an expert witness There is a legal process. Is there a process in Canada?
Janne Holmgren: Yeah. The courtroom needs to conduct an interview of the individual that comes forth with the evidence, and then they decide whether or not that person should be considered an expert. And their questions, about all their work. So for example, in the case of a pathologist, “how many cases have done?”, and so forth. But once you are deemed that expert, nobody really questions anything really about you, which is problematic in some of these cases
Yvonne Kjorlien: Okay. So, it sounds kind of like with the DNA evidence that pretty much anything presented in court, whether it’s an expert witness, whether it’s the DNA evidence, some other evidence, it has to always be open to contest. Always be open to questions. Is that correct?
Janne Holmgren: Yes. I mean the main question that I always present — and I teach this to my students and my forensics courses too — is that we still need to answer the question. “How did it get there?”
Yvonne Kjorlien: Mmm.
Janne Holmgren: We’ve seen some interesting ways that DNA ends up at certain scenes whereby, maybe the individual wasn’t even there. We know that individuals who are working the criminal element are getting more and more sophisticated. One of the issues that we’re dealing with — I’m sure it’s this way in many jurisdictions, but a bit of a trend that we’ve seen locally — is that different vehicles are used by individuals engaging in criminal activities, and then shortly thereafter, we find the vehicle burned out. Why does that happen? That is to conceal the evidence. So that’s problematic for us, of course. Very difficult for us to collect any evidence in those kinds of situations, other than we are still able to identify the vehicle. But in many instances, we might not be able to know the exact color, you might not be able to get the ID of the actual vehicle. So the people that are working in the criminal element, as I call it, they’re getting, more and more sophisticated.
Now there is one part, that’s incredibly interesting. And that’s some of the research that I’m working on currently: is the evidence that we end up collecting from, for example, CCTV and security cameras. It is becoming increasingly more difficult to get away with not being seen, because of these kinds of cameras, just about everywhere. And so the work that I’m working on right now, which is interesting, is I look at the evidence that we’re able to collect, which is, fairly secure evidence — we can play that in court, and that works beautifully in many instances whereby, we don’t actually really need a very tough interrogation in many instances. In many instances, we — and I’ve seen this, through some of the training that I’ve done with the RCMP — we can just play back the video in front of the alleged accused and observe their reaction to that actual video. It’s like, “Here you go. Can you explain to us what’s going on in this video?” And oftentimes the individuals like, “Oh, shoot. That is clearly me. Now I’m gonna have to figure out some sort of an explanation as to what’s going on in the picture,” which is difficult to explain away. If you see someone, pointing a gun, you see the gun, and you see clearly the individual. So that has an advantage in the collection of evidence.
Before, for example, the police — the same goes for, some of the cases that we see at the OCME, where we have an individual that died by falling in front of the train. We have CCTV. Did that individual get pushed from the platform into the train or did they jump? So that’s very, very good evidence.
Now the other piece that I’m working on right now, and that is something that I have invited Alisa (who was one of the students at the OCME to partake in) is what happens to the responders, the collectors of the evidence, the people that are looking at the video, what happens to them? How does it impact them emotionally? Like the vicarious trauma.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Oh, that’s big.
Janne Holmgren: So, you are watching these live events, and it creates the sense of helplessness, and you can imagine. And we see that evidence sometimes could be something — I’m not talking about a specific case because I can’t talk about a specific case — but you can only imagine, a person who is actively dying from fentanyl overdose. There’s cameras behind a building, let’s say at anywhere in Calgary, anywhere. And people walk by and you can see on the video, people are walking by nobody’s tapping this person, then you see them seizing and then they die. And then you watch this. You have this incredible sense of why isn’t anybody stopping? “Stop, stop, and get a kit” or call 911 to save this person. Or, a suicide, an act of suicide, right?
Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah.
Janne Holmgren: Where you can actually see the face of the individual contemplating: I should kill myself, or shouldn’t I kill myself. And then it’s on video, that do this. So the evidence is really great. At the impact on those that have to watch it is horrific. The other thing that I worry about is social media, getting hold of anything that’s live.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Oh, yeah.
Janne Holmgren: And that being shared, right? You’ve seen many instances of cases where there’s misinformation in criminal cases, and once that information’s been shared on multiple platforms, it can end up really hurting families. We saw that in the case of the mom and daughter that was murdered in Calgary a number of years ago: Sara Baillie and her five year old daughter, Taliyah Marsman. I don’t know if you remember in the early days, there was some suggestion that Sara Baillie was working in the sex trade and… so that was shown on Twitter, that information was on Facebook, and then we learned later on that the likelihood or the reason or the rationale behind a murder seemed to have been more linked to her trying to help a friend getting out of the sex trade.
Yvonne Kjorlien: I did hear that. Yes.
Janne Holmgren: Which is a very, very different story.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Very different.
Janne Holmgren: And then her family is trying to clear her name, and trying to explain through the media to people that this was not the case at all, which is hugely damaging.
Yvonne Kjorlien: It’s very interesting how easily we can condemn somebody by just that one presumption: she’s working in the sex trade. Well, she must be guilty of everything then.
Janne Holmgren: Yeah.
Yvonne Kjorlien: And then suddenly it flips 180. No, no. She was actually helping somebody trying to get out of the sex trade and that’s why she was killed. Ooo, that changes everything. So, yeah, it really brings to light our own biases, and how we can be so easily influenced by so little on social media or anything really, and it’s all just gossip.
Janne Holmgren: Yeah, yeah. I mean there’s that. So my main research focus now is still on forensics. I’m still following all the changes to DNA evidence. We’re seeing now that there’s a lot more work related to touch DNA, how much DNA we believe behind. And there’s a lot more work, in the area producing technology that can read DNA very, very quickly. So that in the future — and that is actually happening in some places in the world — where we can bring the equipment to the crime scene or to a natural disaster, and identify samples, very very quickly. So that’s very interesting. But I’m also a hugely interested in all the other technologies that we are using and we are relying on, like CCTV. And cell phone towers have really changed the landscape too, and was a big part of the Sara Baillie trial, as well because we’re able to find that the perpetrator cell phone had been in all these different places, by linking, the pings, and so forth. So in that trial it was very much about, “Can you explain to us how your cell phone was here, how your cell phone was there,” and all that kind of thing. So yeah.
Yvonne Kjorlien: And from what I understand too the accuracy is getting better and better especially with cell phone locations.
Janne Holmgren: Yes. Yeah.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, because yeah, from what I understood, even five years ago, it wasn’t great. The triangulation was so-so, so being able to actually place somebody at a specific location at a specific time wasn’t quite possible. I mean, it was almost there, but we’re getting pretty close now, from what I understand.
Janne Holmgren: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s very good, it’s very good. But, then we’re still dealing with the people that are trying to outsmart the evidence. We’ve got burner phones, like burner phones we end up, apprehending somebody and they’re in possession of 40 phones, so every time they make a phone call they get rid of it. So we still have to find ways.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Right.
Janne Holmgren: And that takes a lot of money, a lot of resources. But it’s clear that we have a lot of work to do, there’s a huge need just thinking about the loss of life in Lahaina in Hawaii. The identification of all those people, they lack resources in many parts the world. My understanding is that the OCME or at the Coroner’s office in Lahaina, they have no capacity to identify all of those individuals. I just read this morning that they have enlisted help of forensic experts, who sifted through evidence on the site of 9/11. So it’s massive amount of work and sadly — just like, which was the case with 9/11 too — some of those bodies will never be found.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, yeah. That’s the thing with those disasters is that nobody is prepared for it, but they seem to be happening more and more. And there needs to be resources out there that we can call upon. I recently read a book: it’s called Personal Effects. And he runs a company that specializes…. Robert Jensen. There we go. Robert Jensen. The book is Personal Effects. And he runs the company that specializes in going in and helping with these disasters, whether they be natural or man-made and just helping to coordinate and sort through and deal with everything, from identification of the people to what happened, and trying to figure that out. Because, yeah, they’re huge undertakings and it’s just utter chaos until you can try to get a handle on things.
Janne Holmgren: That’s one of the reasons that I wanted to establish this partnership with the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, because our program, Justice Studies, really, didn’t have initially a forensic focus and certainly our students did not have a lot of exposure to death investigation as a result. I’m not meaning that every criminal justice program needs to be focusing on death investigation. We are an academic institution, but if we can bridge that experience for the student, the exposure for the student, I think that’s a win-win. The OCME and Calgary finds our students incredibly valuable to them and time and time again… we’ve had three or four of them hired coming out of our degree program, which is unheard of. Students coming out with a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice and then they end up working as death investigators and autopsy technicians full time. So still that’s something that hugely I’m invested in, hugely proud of, and the students that get that opportunity, I’m so proud of them, and the relationship that I’m able to establish with them is a real bonded relationship. I follow them wholeheartedly and I’m immensely proud of them. It’s a win-win situation, all around but it does come with that trepidation, I guess, of what are these students being exposed to? Can they handle what it is that they’re actually seeing, because this is real life. This is real death. They see the worst of Southern Alberta. The majority of cases that the average person south of Alberta knows nothing about.
Yvonne Kjorlien: And death in Western society is not, it’s something very excluded from everyday life.
Janne Holmgren: It’s very uncomfortable, right?
Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah. It’s not kind of part of our culture. It used to be that the dead stayed within our homes. We would invite people over and have them look at the body, celebrate their life, transition them over to the next plane into death. There was all these rituals and day long celebrations, day long routines that we used to do and we don’t do that anymore. It’s now, when somebody dies, they’re taken away, they’re behind another wall, in a coffin, they’re put in the ground, they’re just taken away, and so we don’t even have exposure to that anymore. Once somebody dies, they’re taken away from us and so to be around death, that is very, very different. It’s not within our culture at all.
Janne Holmgren: Mm- Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, you’re right. You’re right, And the research I have been doing in interviewing everybody that was willing to participate in that work, in that environment, there’s lots of issues related to you exactly what you’re talking about, that makes it difficult for them to do their job, too. For example, one of the findings that I found in the interviews how infrequent people are prepared when someone dies, and the implication for an office like the Office of Chief Medical Examiner is that that often means that the body cannot be released to a funeral home right away because there’s no preparation.
We’ve got issues where the families are split. There’s infighting within the family as to what the wishes of the individual who had died. Nobody’s had that discussion. Nobody knows. This person in the family thinks it should be cremation. This person in the family thinks it should be burial. It should be a white coffin. It should be like all of these things. But that while all that goes on outside of the Office, that means that there is a body, a decedent that is not being removed, and they’re bursting at the seams. That office is an old office, the one in Calgary, and it’s certainly was not built to house the amount of people that are going through there.
So, seeing that and learning that and certainly the overdoses too,
Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah.
Janne Holmgren: There’s way more of that and in the media and create awareness, about it and so forth and it affects all families.… but the exposure that my students that experience is invaluable.
Yvonne Kjorlien: What do you…so because it’s not mandatory, it’s voluntary, the practicum at the OCME. So how many students do you think have gone through the practicum now? Because you’ve been running it for a few years now.
Janne Holmgren: Yeah, I think we’re in Year Seven so I would say 12.
Yvonne Kjorlien: 12. Okay. Do you see that there’s kind of a pattern in those people that come up to and are at least interested in doing the program and then those that actually go through with it?
Janne Holmgren: It’s very competitive…
Yvonne Kjorlien: Oh, it is? Okay.
Janne Holmgren: Meaning that Leanne Atchison, in our department, the practicum coordinator, and I will interview, for that position. So there’s only one student that goes through every four months. So that is the most: three a year.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Okay.
Janne Holmgren: During COVID, we did not have a student down there. For obvious reasons.
So it’s very competitive. We do complete interviewing process. Multiple interviews where we really kind of, dig at the student, inform the student this is what you’re gonna see, how are you gonna handle that. What are your support systems? How are you gonna handle the fact that you are p ivy to all of this information that nobody knows anything about and you cannot talk about it. You’re exposed to the evidence of criminal cases that will not go before the courts for maybe a year and you might never even see the true outcome of that case and you have to close your mouth and not share that information with anybody. So our fear, of course, is always that we don’t have a student with integrity, maturity, who just really thinks that this is cool and just wants to be able to tell their friends that they have the coolest practicum. So we have to kind of read through all that, vet through that, and so far — knock on wood — we’ve been very successful with that. We do pick students that we consider to be of high caliber.
And I’m fortunate to teach them. So I teach them in Year Two and I teach them in Year Four. I tell my students in Year Two that I keep track of when they hand in assignments, how they engage in my classes in Year Two and their pattern, throughout their degree: their tardiness, their excuses, that communication, the writing skills, all of that kind of stuff. So, sometimes students don’t get opportunity to even interview because we’re like, “No, no. Not gonna happen.”
Yvonne Kjorlien: So that’s kind of the pre-existing stuff. What do you offer in terms of supports when they’re going through this? Because they may be of high caliber, they’re an engaged student, they’ve kind of met your standards going into it, but because we aren’t exposed to death that much especially that much death in such close proximity — it’s an intense situation to be into practicum at the OCME’s office. And so what kind of supports you offer during the practicum that can help either train them or help them deal with the stuff that they’re seeing, with the confidentiality they’re having to keep…
Janne Holmgren: It’s a process. The very first day that they end up attending — and usually it’s three days a week that they go and most of the students go Wednesday Friday, something like that, so there’s a bit of a break but — I’m with them. You attend together. And based on that body language, we’ll talk with them, throughout that day. It’s not like the jump into the autopsy suite, watch bodies that are open, and so forth, right off the bat. You do a lot of talking. There’s a smell that’s at the office, is something that…it’s very difficult to get used to. We go outside, we take breaks. And in that first little bit, at the start of the practicum, they’re not really touching anything. They’re learning. The beautiful thing is that they are allowed to ask all in all the questions in the world. All the questions are answered, some of which I are able to answer and we work through it. Then everybody that works in the office — now that I have past students there — they know what the students going through. So that’s peer support that is invaluable, it’s something that we’ve now established this far into the practicum.
They’re encouraged to keep a diary of a sort. I’ve always said, “Before you get in your car or when you’re in a car, before you leave, write down what you need to kind of get off your chest, and then reach out to me. Let’s talk.” We talk often. We talk on the phone. We talk late at night. We talk anytime during the day. I’m totally available, via text. The students text me: “Can we talk?” and we talk. We talk through how difficult it is to see what they see, the shock, and seeing someone dead, that’s their age. The shock of seeing someone who’s committed suicide, that’s their age. Someone that’s their age that’s died in a motorcycle crash, that died in a vehicle accident and so forth. Those are really difficult. The first time they see a child dead. The first time they see a baby versus five year old baby drowning and there’s the first and the first, right?
Some of my students have the worst day ever on the very first day. We can’t predict that and it’s like, are you kidding me? It can be a homicide on the first day, and then a baby death, and then a suicide, and then a fentanyl overdose and then a fire, and then someone falling off a mountain and then a plane crash. It’s like, whoa, right?
Yvonne Kjorlien: It’s a lot. It’s a lot.
Janne Holmgren: It’s a lot. And remember that all deaths go through that office from Red Deer down to the border, and it’s any accidental death, any homicide. All child deaths are considered unnatural, unless, of course, the child is on the terminal care in a hospital something like that. Fire victims, you name it, right? It’s a lot, but we work through it. And by the end of it, they have figured out a really good way to process it. Some of them are absolutely hooked. This is what they want to do. They can’t think of anything better, whereas some of them are like, ”The experience was invaluable, but I think that my skill set is better served as a police officer as a messenger, to people that are still living.” Which is perfect. I’ve done my job. I think, when I teach death investigation and my forensics course, and I show an autopsy in that course. It’s not mandatory for his students to stay, and I have students that as soon as they hear, the drills, the tools that are used in the autopsy, they don’t all the sudden feel so well and they get up and leave. Perfectly fine.
Yvonne Kjorlien: That’s not for everybody.
Janne Holmgren: That’s not for everybody and then have other students that’s like “Whoa! That is so interesting. That’s quite the puzzle. And I know I want more that.” So it’s a process. It continues to be a process. But there are supports in place, through the university. We’ve got counseling services too. I highly recommend that, I encourage that, but a lot of it is really just talking through, what it is, making sense of it, taking a step away. Using their voices, it’s like, “No, I’m not ready to see that.”
Yvonne Kjorlien: Right.
Janne Holmgren: I’ve had students that are like, “No, I’ve got a child of my own. I can’t see this today,” and that is fine. I’ve had students learn how to sew bodies, weigh organs, take samples and that’s a process. You know, it’s not the first day. It’s probably not even first week. I’ve had a few of them that’s like, whoo-whoo! This is type great and they become, the best sew-ers ever and that’s great. But it’s a process and I never compare one student to a past student either.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Right. They’re very much the individuals going on there individual journeys.
Janne Holmgren: They’re all my stars. They’re all my stars. It takes a lot of courage to expose yourself to that willfully. Because, the picture that you see in your head is a really tough of photograph, or video, a playback, to get rid of. Once see it, once you smell it can be, a permanent imprint.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, especially that smell. I will never forget that smell. I can’t describe it, but I can never forget it.
Janne Holmgren: Yeah, it’s yeah. I’ve tried putting… what they call that?
Yvonne Kjorlien: The Vicks?
Janne Holmgren: Yeah, the Vicks. Yeah, it doesn’t help. Multiple showers with shampoo into my mouth. Yeah.
Yvonne Kjorlien: No, it’s in your nose. It’s staying for days. That’s it.
Janne Holmgren: I mean that the students are masked, right?
Yvonne Kjorlien: Right.
Janne Holmgren: Big learning covid too, there are still individuals that will end up at the OCME that may have covid, even today, so exposure and stuff is a real thing and learning how to breathe through that for that amount of time, it can make you really, really light-headed too, right? So going outside is really important, grounding your feet and sitting down, and eating and drinking, and all that kind of stuff.
I think that we do a good job looking after the student, but it’s not for everybody and should the student wish to stop that practicum, we take them out immediately. And we tell them that they do not have to stick it out, and it’s not that they are to be considered of a weak character because they are uncomfortable with that situation. Not at all.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Right.
Janne Holmgren: That’s why us deciding on who is the next student for that decision is a long process.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Right. So we’re almost out of time. So, do you see the program continuing? Do you see the program expanding? You do you see the program changing in any way?
Janne Holmgren: We will continue as long as we are welcome. We are limited by the size of the space. I’m sure that they would happily take five, five students, but they’re really is not the physical space. As it is, now it’s like, you’re moving around, trying to stay out of the way so that they’re really important work. So, I hope that we can continue for a really long time. There has been some talks about a new building, but that decision rests with the Justice Minister and whoever provides that kind of money.
I think that, government officials should go and visit the space and what is actually going on down there. It’s really get a full understanding of how important that work is. And that’s what ultimately my research goal is: is to try and take this research and share it with the general public — how important this work is, the dignity of the individuals that work there, how much pride they have in their work, and how little they recognized for that work. It’s everybody’s worst day to have to go and visit that office. A family member being brought in there is everybody’s worst day. But the work that they do down there is so important. And I’m hugely proud of the work that they do at that office and my students, of course.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Right. Just as we close, what is the name of the program which you teach at Mount Royal University?
Janne Holmgren: I teach in the Department of Economics, Justice and Policy Studies in the Faculty of Arts.
Yvonne Kjorlien: In the Faculty of Arts, so if anybody listening to this episode is in getting into the program, that’s where they can find you.
Janne Holmgren: Yes.
Yvonne Kjorlien: Fabulous. All right. Thank you very much.
The podcast currently has 31 episodes available.
10,793 Listeners
360,545 Listeners
48,512 Listeners
2,836 Listeners