Dave Sweet is a retired detective from a large western Canadian police service who now works as a consultant in Calgary, conducting workshops, training, writing books, and hosting a podcast. He retired in October 2023 after spending 14.5 years investigating murders and suspicious deaths. Most of our conversation is focused on death notifications and communicating with the next of kin.

In this episode we talk about:

You can contact Dave Sweet through his website: https://www.unconventionalclassroom.ca/

Transcript

Yvonne Kjorlien: All right, we’ll see how it goes. So why don’t you start by telling me who you are and what you’re currently doing.

Dave Sweet: So my name’s Dave Sweet, and I am a Detective from a large western Canadian police service and, currently, I am working as a consultant in Calgary. Do a lot of workshops, training, write books. I’ve my own podcast. So I’m sort of a jack of all trades, as it stands right now. Not seeing I yeah.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Your own podcast. How did I miss that? I’m gonna have to go stalk, and look you up! What?

Dave Sweet: Yeah. Yeah.

Yvonne Kjorlien: So, how long have you been retired now?

Dave Sweet: I actually just retired last year in October so it’s been, I’m just coming up on my one year anniversary of that, but I’m still a young man, so I feel like I can’t be too idle. I haven’t earned that yet.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right. Thank you again for agreeing to speak with me. I’ve been trying to find somebody or some way to address talking with the next of kin and working with them regarding their either potentially or actual dead relatives. And I’ve always felt very iffy about approaching families to talk about that sort of thing because it’s icky to go and say, “Do you want to talk about how you’re feeling?” because I just find that very insensitive. So, thank you for coming on and agreeing to talk about this very touchy, sensitive subject.

Dave Sweet: Sure. And I recognize it as sensitive as well, but also I think hopefully we’ll be some valuable information for people out there, just in terms of when they’re dealing with their own crisis and tragedy into the future. We’ll all have one at some point in time. So learning a little bit about other families or how other people have approached that may help somebody listening have a better idea on how they might approach their own.

Yvonne Kjorlien: So let’s go back into your past a little bit and if you can maybe sketch out, maybe some situations in where you’ve had to deal with families and talk to them about their next of kin or, either a potential to deceased or somebody who’s actually deceased.

Dave Sweet: Sure. Yeah, of course. So my background really, I spent the last 14 and a half years of my life investigating murders, suspicious deaths. And, obviously, as a result of that, had the opportunity to speak many different families along the way and including having the opportunity to be the first person to advise them when a loved one had died. Often in tragic circumstances and situations. And something, I think came to learn early on, well, there’s a few things I came to learn early on when it came to notifying somebody that I loved one had passed, was one, make sure that when you went to do the notification that you had some facts, some information that you’d be able to pass on to them. Because there’s going to be an immediate need on their end and to understand kind of what has happened. And although you may not be able to know, you may not have all of the information available, you should be able to at least explain a little bit around the circumstance. The second, was to keep it truthful and honest, always. Never to sort of sugar coat an issue, but to, instead, be deliberate in the words and the message that you were giving. And that kind of leads into the next part, which was be direct in your message, specifically. And what I mean by that is that you can find yourself in a really awkward spot, if delivering the news of someone’s sudden loss, you used words like “they’ve gone to a better place” or “they’re no longer here with us.” Those types of phrases or messages often are followed with some really sort of uncomfortable questions, like “What do you mean? Where did they go?” And then would you still have to get to the place where you probably didn’t really want to be in the first place, which is being just completely direct and honest with them. And so I found early on learning from others, really watch them do it themselves that delivery could be done compassionately, but it should be always done directly. And so, you almost created a script, I guess, of sorts, that I used almost every time. We’ve all had this experience, I think where we have, we’re looking at the clock and we’re thinking, “Geez, my loved one isn’t home yet. And it’s weird that I haven’t heard from them,” and if a few hours go by, doubt starts to creep into our minds: “Where are they? What could be happening?” And undoubtedly, at some point in time, some of us, our thoughts might even switch to, “I hope they’re okay,” and “What would it be like if a police officer was to pull up to my home right now?” And we start to kind of pay a little bit more attention to the doorbell, the phone ring, the front of the street, our driveway, as we wait to see our loved one home and hope that everything is gonna be okay.

From my experience, often the delivery of bad news, it was already somewhat expected from families. And so, one thing I came to learn was, early on, was is that if somebody hadn’t, they woke up in the morning and their son or daughter wasn’t home yet, they began to worry. By 11 o’clock and they haven’t been able to reach them, they begun to really worry. So, by the time you show up at the house at one o’clock in the afternoon, their worst fear’s coming true, but I think they’ve actually already gone through a process where they began to sort of rehearse what that is going to look like. And so something I came to learn is is honor whatever that rehearsal is supposed to look like for them. They’ve kind of already decided how they would want the delivery of tragic news given to them. “What would happen if the police officer knocked on the door? Would I let him in? What I make him tea? What I want to know at the door? What would my reaction be to the news it in the first place?” And I think as an investigator, when we walk up to a door and knock on it, we have to recognize that somebody’s has already began to go through that rehearsal. And so really, they’re going to tell you how they want the news delivered. So, I’ll give you an example of it.

Years ago, I’ve done a notification, a young man had –a young father, actually — had gone out with a group of friends and they were enjoying the night. He left his wife and his kidlets at home and in the course of the night, they had found themselves at the house party, I guess. And while they were at the house party, there was an altercation, and in that altercation, he was actually fatally stabbed. And so, our unit was called out. We learned who he was and learn where he lived and learned a little bit about us his history and his life. I was tasked with another officer of going to the home and notifying, his wife of his death.

And I remember we pulled up that morning, it was about 11 o’clock, and she was doing exactly what I just described. She’d been kind of keeping an eye on the front street, waiting to see who was gonna show up and, oh my God, that looks like a couple detectives and a detective car that’s just pulled up in front of my house. And I remember as we’re walking up the front steps, to the home, she comes right out of the house and she stops right on the front step. And I introduced myself. She goes, “I know exactly who you are.” And she goes, “I know why you’re here. Does it have to do with my husband?” And I said, “Yes, can we come in?” And she said, “Absolutely not. You cannot come in.” And I said, “Okay.” She goes, she said, “Is he dead?” And I said, “Yes, he’s dead.” And I said, “Are you sure you don’t want us to come in?” And she goes, “You can’t come in. My son is having his birthday this morning and we have a whole bunch of kids over to the house.”

Yvonne Kjorlien: Wow.

Dave Sweet: “And we are not going to come in and ruin that for him today.” So, she had a short conversation with us out there on the stoop, and then asked us to leave, which we did, and asked us to come back the next day, and we would do the actual delivery of the news to everyone in the home including the children. That’s exactly what we did. But she had already scripted out, this is how she wanted this to be done, for that particular, for her family, she felt that was the right decision to be made.

And so that’s what I mean by people have kind of already scripted it by the time, we’ve even gotten there. And so you have to be very, you have to kind of improvise off of what they’re telling you they need from you at that moment in time. Because, again I say, in a lot of cases, by the time we’ve shown up, some time’s gone by, worry is already set in, and then we’re just the confirmation of what they think me have happened, which is that their loved one has died. And so that was just sort of the things I took away from the notification process when it came to families.

And, depending on how the notification went, those first few words out of an officer’s mouth, out of my mouth, we’re gonna put a family on one of two directions. One, they were not going to be able to get past the sort of trauma of that initial notification experience, or the notification itself could be the catalyst to already putting people on a path where they are going to get … not past it, but be able to put them on a path where you give them a greater chance of being able to heal from the horrible news that they’re already to hear. You can imagine, it could go one of two ways. If the officer that shows up there’s aloof, doesn’t know a lot, stumbles over the victim’s name, doesn’t use direct language, leaves things innocuous, in terms of what is actually occurred. How difficult that will be for the family going forward? They’re going to play that whole scenario over in their mind. It just adds to the trauma.

Versus, you have an officer that shows up at the door and they’re professional. They’re clear in their message. They’re compassionate, and they follow the script that that person wants them to follow. You put them on a much closer path to healing early on. And so, the notification process is a huge part of what, I won’t say, my daily duties, but certainly my weekly duties, while I spent that time in Homicide.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Were you given any guidance or training and how to do a notification?

Dave Sweet: Over the years, they started to put together a course — courses I guess — that would help prepare officers on how to do it. But, no, in those early years, no. It was sort of all based around experience and the experience of watching other officers do it. It’s actually interesting because the script that I used was one that was taught to me when I was just a little baby police officer in uniform, and it was the same script that my officer coach used that I then adopted, and then just kind of built on over time with experience.

Now, not every notification, of course, goes well. You can do all of your best, but people go through notifications in different ways. Some are just completely grief stricken and they can’t get the words out. Others kind of almost go into a shock. And can’t get the words out, but are really avoid of emotion. And then other people become extremely volatile and emotional, and can demand you that you leave or get out of my house, or throw a shoe at you, or take a swing at you. These of all things that have happened, not just necessarily to me, but to other members that I had worked with over the years. And, yeah, every notification was a little bit different, but again, it always came back to sort of recognizing people’s needs and that every victim and every victim family is a little bit different as well.

Yvonne Kjorlien: So if watching TV and the detective says, the person on the receiving end of the notification didn’t react the way that they thought that they should react, and, the storyline says that that’s indicative of something, that’s probably not quite accurate then?

Dave Sweet: Sure. I would agree with that. I would agree that it probably not too accurate because we have, as people, so many different individual responses to something so traumatic that I don’t think you can look at one response and say that qualifies as being more genuine or honest than another response. Like I said, I remember once going to a home of a woman, who’s barely twenty-something. Sun had been killed at a house party in sort of a beating and stabbing. And when we went to the home, she was so sweet. She was so kind, and she brought us in and she wanted to make tea first. And so sat on the couch and sort of made some small talk with her. She prepared the tea and then sat down. We delivered the news and she just stared straight ahead. She just absorbed it, but said nothing and was completely, really void of, I would say, any emotion.

I remember putting my hand out — I don’t offer into somebody else’s hand, but I would always kind of leave my hands open, just so that if somebody wanted to they could hold it, but I let them kind of come into my space versus me going into their space. But she took the opportunity to grab my hand. I remember just kind of holding my hand and cupping that and just kind of staring straight off into the universe and she just held it probably for 10-15 minutes. She cry, she didn’t do anything. She just held it.

And I would say that that was a really unusual reaction. But I would also say that it’s a reaction of grief, no differently than a person who falls to the floor, begins to wail, which also sometimes happened.

Culturally, people are different as well, in terms of the way they react. Some cultures, wailing and being very, very open about their grief, is more commonplace in sort of shutting in like she did, right? And so you have to be prepared for that as well. Yeah.

Yvonne Kjorlien: It sounds like empathy and, like you say, improvisation are two key elements when you go to notify somebody. Do you find that there are, perhaps, some people that are better suited to deliver notification than others, because they have more empathy or improv skills?

Dave Sweet: I do, actually. I do feel that way. Yeah, in anything, it’s a skill set that some people are really, really great at some aspect of police work. And then others are better at a different aspect, like notifications. I think the ones that are skilled at delivering difficult news ones that are not afraid to use that, again, kind of direct language, find a way to be able to use it in such a way that still comes across as compassionate and empathetic. And one thing that I often speak about is one of the greatest a-ha moments I ever had as a police officer was learning the difference between sympathy and empathy and how uniquely different those two things are. [Brene] Brown. I’m not sure if you’re familiar with her but she,…

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah.

Dave Sweet: She really has this thing nailed, this concept nailed. She talks about sympathy as being a real disconnecting or separating action. While empathy is very connecting action.

In her analogies that I’ve seen her do in the past, one of them is that, if you have a friend that’s… you’re walking down the street and you come across a friend who’s fallen in a hole, a sympathetic person will walk to the edge of that hole look down and say, “My goodness. I’m so sorry to see that you fall down the hole. Do you need any help?” And, because you’re practicing sympathy, the friend that’s fallen in the hole’s likely gonna say, “No, I’m okay. I’ll figure it out,” because you’ve kind of disconnected, in that display of “I am sorry.” Which are sort of the three words to a sympathetic reaction to somebody else’s tragedy, “I am sorry”, but they’re the three most common words that we use. “My condolences”, “I’m sincerely sorry”, “I am sorry” –these are all forms of sympathy.

The empathetic person, in that same situation, is walking down the street and they come across their friend who has fallen down the hole, the first thing they will do is acknowledge that their friend is fallen down the whole, they might say something like, “you must be so scared. I see you fall down that hole right now. You look cold. Give me one minute. I’ll be right back.” They leave the edge of the hole, come back with the ladder. Stick it at the end of the edge of the hole, climb down, and then help that person up and then they climb up with them. Right. That’s empathy and empathy that it’s about getting into the hole with somebody to kind of move through that with them. It requires vulnerability and that’s why it’s so connecting. Because there will be an exchange there. I’m going to come into the same hole as you. I’m gonna make myself vulnerable so I can be with you and then we’re going to climb out of this together. That is very connecting.

And so, how does this all matter when it comes to things like notification? I think when we can practice more empathetic responses, and try and stay away from, “I’m so sorry for your loss,” and instead, “I don’t know what you must be going through right now. But if I can do anything for you, call a friend, call a family member, sit here and hold your hand, you’re my priority right now. And I don’t want to leave you until I know you’re going to be okay.” That’s different than saying, “I’m sorry for your loss.” And so that skill set, it takes time to hone it and it takes time to sharpen it, but once you’re able to start to use empathy, whether it’s a notification or any other interaction in your life, it’s a game changer when it comes to relationships.

You could save a marriage once you figure out empathy is different than sympathy, and so you could save your marriage. I’m sorry…

Yvonne Kjorlien: Here we go. Marriage advice on this podcast. I never thought I’d hear it.

Dave Sweet: Yeah. “I’m sorry to hear that the baby was crying all day” versus “I can’t imagine. I know how frustrating is for the baby to cry. When I get home today, I’m going to give you the much needed to break you need. And I’m gonna take little Johnny with me and we’re gonna go for a walk.” That’s different than saying, “I’m sorry. The baby was so colicky today.” You know what I mean? So we can start to practice that and we can do that in all aspects of her life. You don’t have to be doing it in a tragic situation to create that connecting response.

Yvonne Kjorlien: So, that’s notification for a deceased. How does that differ for a missing person when there isn’t kind of that ending. How do you deal with that?

Dave Sweet: I think everybody would have again that sort of a different view on that and, I mean, I respect all of them, I think every, for myself, if I was… So typically we don’t do the notification on the missing person because it’s usually the family member that you would notify [who] has reported that individual missing in the first place.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Mm-hmm

Dave Sweet: So the notification, like they’re the ones notifying us at this individual’s missing. But there is going to be a process that it’s going to still occur where, over the course of a period of time, that individual isn’t just going to be missing, but that they’re — in some instances, not on all, but in some instances — evidence starts being collected in the course of that investigation which starts to lead to a more ominous result of why they may have gone missing.

That’s when, I won’t call so much a notification, but it requires a lot of communication with the missing person’s family to get them to start to realize that this may not have the fairy tale happy ending. And that just requires, again, a lot of empathy, a lot of listening, and a lot of inquiry where you will start to message that things may not be quite so well.

It might start with, “in a case like Bob’s, sometimes we start to collect evidence and sometimes in the course of collecting evidence, we start to become more and more concerned about Bob’s wellbeing. I feel that specifically as it relates to Bob, at this point in time, we are starting to collect some evidence that is causing me some concern.” Right. We won’t actually know until we find Bob what happened to Bob, but you can start to sort of layout that messaging. “What think happened to Bob? You’re his mom. What do you think happened to Bob?”

Yvonne Kjorlien: Mmm.

Dave Sweet: “I think Bob might be gone. You know, a mother always knows these things.” “You might be right, you may not be wrong. How are we going to prepare for if that’s a possibility into the future? Do you need family to start to come be around and support you. We’re gonna work our very best to try and figure out what happened to Bob. And we’re figure out where Bob might be, but in the interm, do you have a support system around you?” Right? “On the chance that your intuition as a mother isn’t wrong. And that we do find Bob deceased…” So that’s kind of where it changes a little bit. I think it’s a little bit more of putting a person — again, it’s a lot of it’s messaging — but putting a person on a path where they start to identify what the conclusion could potentially be, just through how you explain things. It’d be completely irresponsible for an investigator to come in and promise somebody something like, “I promise we’re gonna find Bob.”

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right. Yeah.

Dave Sweet: That would be something that would be terribly damaging to the family because I don’t think, in any of these scenarios, I don’t think it’s our job to destroy hope, but I also don’t think it’s our job to create false hopes either. I think it’s our job to be very realistic and always kind of keep people mindful that all possibilities exist until the investigation’s completed or until Bob is found.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Do you think that there is such a thing as closure?

Dave Sweet: Closure? I guess it depends on what way. If what was important in a missing person’s case, for example, was that the discovery of their loved ones remains and those remains are discovered? Then I guess, from that perspective, there’s some closure, if that’s what was the most important thing. If a family feels that closure comes by way of just some sort of form of justice, I would say the jury’s out on that. I’ve found very few families in my career who felt like a sentence imposed against an offender, that’s done something horrific to their loved one, was the just and fair decision or fair result. Very few families go, “You know what? They got it right on that. Yeah, he only deserved 15 years for the murder of my daughter.” It doesn’t usually happen that way.

I always used to remind families, though, that the decision that occurs in a courtroom and then the sentence that follows, it’s sort of a cruel reality but sentence isn’t for the victim or the victim’s family. The sentence is for, is imposed for the offender and for the community that that offender will one day likely return to. And so, no sentence imposed will be probably good enough.

I remember I used to have this conversation with families before a sentencing. I’d say, “a number is a number and it doesn’t represent the love or the life lived of the person you’ve lost. If the decision is made that the sentence reflects 10, it’s a 10-year sentence, you will wonder why it wasn’t 15. If the judge came back and said it was 15, you would wonder why it wasn’t 25. The judge came back and said life forever and ever and ever, and you’d want to know why it wasn’t death. If the judge had stab wounds. Like, they took my own.” Where does it stop?

And so, families that can resist that, sort of going through that process, usually do a little bit better on the other end when they can separate out the process to the loss. When they equate the loss to, say a number, I think they have the tendency to stay angrier for longer, which is totally a natural response. But those that can find the strength not to do that, I think they actually, in the end, probably do a little bit better, just based on my own experience, in terms of being able to — not close it off, but to — switch the focus of the loss onto something maybe a little bit more positive, like a legacy for example. A foundation, an organization, a scholarship in their loved one’s name. Yeah.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, the reason I asked is that there’s always, I think, this expectation that once you’ve found your missing person and either they’re alive or they’re dead, you found the remains, that ending provides closure or going to trial, the person being found, guilty gives closure. There’s always some perceived endpoint that is going to give me this miraculous closure. This fabled thing. And I’ve heard some families say that, “You know what? No, I never did feel the closure.” You get all those endpoints and there’s still no closure.

Dave Sweet: I actually understand that perspective because, even as an investigator, you’ve put all these hours, months, maybe years into an investigation, into a case. To hear the proverbial gavel drop and the determination of guilt come through, you’d think inside you would be rejoicing, but you’re not. You find that experience very anti-climactic. You knew it was gonna be that way, but it didn’t make you feel the way you thought it was gonna make you feel. Once you get to that point, and the gavel drops, you think inside you’d feel, “YES! All my hard work has got us to this point.” But it never felt that way for me, anyways. I didn’t look at it and cheer out loud or any of those things. And it just felt a decision was made, but it was never quite as joyful or as exciting as what you thought it might be, I guess.

And I think for families, yeah, I don’t think, especially when it comes to missing — if a person’s gone missing, let’s just say it takes a year before there remains are found, and by the time they’re found, it’s not intact remains. Let’s say they were found in the woods or wherever, and they’re not impact anymore, there’ll still not be closure. There’ll be closure on the fact that we can now prove positively say, through the skillful expertise of our anthropologists and people like that, we’ll be able to say, “Yes, we know who this individual is, but there wasn’t enough information left behind with their remains to tell us exactly what happened to them.” And so, yeah, you’ve discovered that their fate, their fate being that they died. But there may never be enough information available to tell you how they died or if somebody was involved in it.

So yeah, you get a closure on one end: you’re no longer looking for them in a crowd. Sometimes people they do that when they’ve lost somebody is missing. They can spend years looking in crowds for them. And I had a friend that talked a little bit about that with me from a personal experience, where, after her father had passed away, she couldn’t believe that he had died. She used to look for him all the time in the crowds, hoping that he’d be there. And she never saw him, of course, but I think that experience is probably tenfold for somebody that’s has a loved one that’s gone missing.

And so, now, we found them, but there’s still a lot of things that need to be explained. So you’ve closed off one thing, but then you’re on to the next thing. And then once we get to the next thing, which is maybe we identify that we do know how they died, and we know who’s responsible for their death, then will the court case provide us closure? It may or not. Does a guilty verdict or a guilty plea give a family closure? Maybe. Some families. But maybe it’s the sentence is the next thing you move on to. That’s what I say by, I don’t know there’s ever a complete closure on any of these things. Yeah.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah. Yeah. It’s sounds like a bit of a roller coaster of expectations, unfulfilled expectations.

Dave Sweet: Yeah, it such a great way of saying it, and then I agree with you. I think it probably is for a lot of families.

Yvonne Kjorlien: The remains that you brought up, when remains are not intact and they’ve maybe been out the woods for a bit or in the water, and the investigation has done as much as it can with the remains to figure out who the individual is, what happened to them, etc, and you’re now ready to turn them over, release them to the family. In your experience, how do people deal with not having an intact relative?

Dave Sweet: Mm-hmm. You know, honestly, we almost start to venture a little bit out of my wheelhouse. I feel like that would be.. unless somebody actually expressed it to me, and I guess a couple families have over the years.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Do you ever get anybody that says you should have tried more, you should have looked more, you should have done more?

Dave Sweet: I mean I’ve never had it to… the short answer is, I don’t know that I’ve had that happen in one of my investigations, but I’ve seen happen to other investigators. Where we’ve recovered partial remains, there’s been a great effort to try and recover the rest of the remains but we’re unsuccessful. Maybe they’ve gone to a landfill, or something like that. So, we were able to recover some but not all. I mean, that obviously leaves people with a terrible sense that the body has not been returned to them intact. And they might become frustrated with the police.

I actually saw this play out, we just saw this play out not that long ago, I think in Manitoba, I don’t know if it was in Winnipeg but they’re,…

Yvonne Kjorlien: All right. Yeah.

Dave Sweet: and you feel for those families. And I understand their grief on… well, how can I even say I understand their grief? I’ve heard their perspective before. I’ve never been in the situation where I can understand their grief, but I’ve heard their perspective and it’s certainly shared and a natural perspective. But I’ve also looked at it on the other side of it and realize how — it doesn’t mean that you don’t try — but how daunting a task that would have been with such a low probability of result.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right.

Dave Sweet: And, I have been part of cases similar to that, where we recovered some of the remains but weren’t able to recover all of them, despite everyone’s best efforts at some point sometimes you just have to say that it’s just not going to happen. Right? Landfills are a great example of that, just because the vastness of the landfill you don’t think that they’re that big until you’re out there standing on a pile of garbage. That’s, however, many feet deep and,…

Yvonne Kjorlien: It’s the depth. Yeah.

Dave Sweet: it’s the depth and kilometers around. Like you don’t.. there’s not necessarily a way of knowing exactly where garbage was deposited or dropped. So this becomes very much the proverbial needle in a haystack. And I do think that we have to try. But I also recognize that it’s extremely limited at some point, and some time also have to know when to fold them. Yeah, and that would be a conversation to have with the family. Yeah.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, again that roller coaster ride of expectations.

Dave Sweet: That’s right. Yeah. But I think, depending on how it’s approached from the beginning, it could potentially help a little bit with people understanding that, right? Like, if it was just, again, it comes back to that messaging and making sure people, the expectations are outlined early and I’m not saying that they’re not in these cases, but I do think that expectations and managing them are very, very important parts, especially in those early days of any investigation. Yeah.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right. Let’s finish on a happier note.

Dave Sweet: This wasn’t happy? This is strange, sure.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Tell me about your podcast, Dave.

Dave Sweet: Sure, yeah. So just was something that I wanted to do. I kind of alluded to it earlier when I was talking about families and they’re like, their need to or I think that’s something families can do when they’re going through tragedies and things is to kind of look outside of the things that aren’t in their control – like sentences and that — and to start to focus more on legacy. And so, one of the things I thought would be important, for myself anyway, is to have just a little podcast that would capture my thoughts, and my voice, and my face, so that one day, a great grandchild that I may never know, maybe able to watch it and say, “You know, the way he thinks or the way he says certain things,” or “I’ve got his nose” or “I’ve got his hands”. That they’d be able to find some familiarity. So the podcast is really sort of a continued effort on my part to leave a bit of a legacy on this earth because I certainly know that tomorrow is not promised to any of us.

And so, my podcast is called The Ride Along. And it’s a feel-good true crime podcast. It’s very much themed in around even some of the things we talked about today. It’s sort of falls that seem kind of theme where hopefully it doesn’t leave people with too much of a heaviness, and maybe some validation on what we can do to live better lives and learn a little bit about what happens when tragedy’s our teacher, and how we can respond to that and take positive takeaways from it. So that’s what’s it’s called The Ride Along, it’s with me and my co-host, Nicole McKay. And you can find it on Apple and Spotify and YouTube, as well.

Yvonne Kjorlien: And you’ve also got a website. Isn’t that correct?

Dave Sweet: I do. So, my website is, it can be found at http://www.unconventionalclassroom.ca, and there you can learn a little bit about some of the workshops and training opportunities I provide. As well, there’s also the other services that I give as well.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Fabulous. Thank you very much, Dave. This ha been enlightening, insightful. It’s everything that I wanted to talk about with yeah, regards to this topic but without the ‘ick’ I was really trying to avoid. All this sensitivity but with none of the ick. So thank you.

Dave Sweet: And I hope it helps somebody out there. And somebody’s going through a tough time. Like, there are people that are out there that will help, you just need to reach out to them. And hopefully you have a supportive friend in your life or a supportive family member, but if you don’t, victim services, most police agencies across this country have them. And there’re also great ways of being able to help you through your grief, loss. Hopefully no money is there and is ever part of this exclusive horrible club that a few families every year have to become part of, but if you are, just know there are people out there that will help you. Yeah.

Transcribed by Google

Professor Victoria Gibbon is a biological anthropologist at the Department of Human Biology’s Division of Clinical Anatomy and Biological Anthropology at University of Cape Town, South Africa. She leads a transdisciplinary team of researchers in the Western Cape Cold Case Consortium (W4C) to assist with improving investigative outcomes and forensic identification more generally. Dr. Devin Finaughty is a forensic anthropologist/taphonomist with a particular interest in the decomposition ecosystem. South African-born, he is a centennial postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa.

In this episode we talk about:

Find more about the work Devin and Vicky and others on the team have done together:

https://health.uct.ac.za/anatomybioanth/forensic-taphonomy-identification

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Notes from the start

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Contact me through [email protected] or through my contact form. Follow me on Facebook at The Reluctant Archaeologist, or through Instagram @yvonnekjorlien

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Drop me a note at [email protected]

Transcript

Yvonne Kjorlien: So, I’m gonna get you each to say your names because I don’t want to say your names incorrectly. So, Devin let’s start with you since you have the name I’d probably end up saying incorrectly.

Devin Finaughty: Okay, so it’s Devin Finaughty.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Finaughty, all right. Vicky.

Victoria Gibbon: Victoria Gibbon.

Yvonne Kjorlien: and you are both, not currently located, Vicky, but you are both teaching in South Africa. Is that correct?

Victoria Gibbon: I can speak for myself. Yes. I am a university professor at the University of Cape Town in South Africa.

Devin Finaughty: And I am a centennial postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg in South Africa.

Yvonne Kjorlien: However you want to start, maybe Vicky if you want to start with your academic background and then we’ll bring in Devin and then Devin you can go through your academic background. How did you get involved, I guess, with forensic taphonomy. What brought you to this place?

Victoria Gibbon: Yeah, so for me, I grew up in Winnipeg, Manitoba and I went on to do business, actually, at the University of Manitoba and swiftly realized that was not my path and I moved over to anthropology which I was very passionate about. It took me a little bit of time to decide whether I wanted to work on stones and go more into archeology, or whether I wanted to focus on bones and move into biological anthropology. And then after getting my undergraduate degree, I had an opportunity to do a Master’s degree in South Africa, and I came over to Johannesburg.

And I did my PhD at the University of Witwatersrand and there I did a PhD in archaeogenetics when it was very very new and I developed a new method for molecular sex determination, that was also good for forensic cases. And then after that I did a postdoc in colorectal cancer genetics because that paid the bills. And then I did a few other postdocs and moved around. So, I did a postdoc at Indiana, at Purdue University in bioarcheology, and then eventually I got full-time work at the University of New Brunswick.

And then I came into the position I am now at the University of Cape Town. So, when I was at the University of New Brunswick, was the first time that I was classified as a forensic anthropologist. And there was basically no casework for me to be engaged in. I did very little my services weren’t needed but when I came to the University of Cape there was already an established service provider, the forensic anthropology Cape Town’s forensic lab. And we do casework with the local police and forensic pathology services. And so, it’s really moving to Cape Town where it became a more central focus within my research program.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Because it is…every institution every area every city region is different and whether or not or to what degree they involve I guess academics and in those forensic investigations. And how they involve or if they involve academics in their investigations, isn’t it?

Victoria Gibbon: Absolutely, and also so in New Brunswick there weren’t very many people who are missing and murdered. Whereas — so in Fredericton, where it was a very small number — whereas in Cape Town that number is very large. So, on average we have about 10% of the individuals that come into our mortuaries remain unidentified per annum.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Wow.

Victoria Gibbon:  and the closest mortuary to us at the University of Cape Town has an average intake of around 4 to 5,000 bodies a year. So we’re looking somewhere around two to five hundred people locally who remain unidentified per year and across the country that expands to somewhere between 8 and 10,000 South Africans. So the need is much greater and due to the need it is a direct fuel for research, right? Because where there’s need, research can help fill gaps and maybe improve identification.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Wow, okay. There’s a few things that I want to touch on, but I want to get to Devin first. But yeah, I want to come back to how you’re involved in all that kind of stuff. So, Devin, how did you come to work with Vicky.

What’s your academic path?

Devin Finaughty: So, I grew up in Johannesburg, where I’m now based and when I finished school, I moved to Cape Town to study at the University of Cape Town and I did the whole hog at UCT. So undergrad honors, Master’s, which I then upgraded to PhD under Professor Emeritus Alan Morris, who’s also Canadian. During my Master’s, started to my honors, but then mainly into my Masters and PhD, I had the privilege of being able to work on forensic cases through FACT, the laboratory that for Vicky spoke about, initially as a member and then later as a senior postgrad as a senior member.

And that mainly involved just assisting the senior forensic anthropologists on cases. I hadn’t initially set out to do forensics when I first went to university. I actually wanted to do medicine. I knew about forensics. When I was in high school, I had job shadowed a forensic pathologist at the Hillbrow Mortuary in Johannesburg, which was a very eye-opening experience, as you can imagine. And funnily enough, I was at the mortuary the other day and it hasn’t changed since 2007. It looks the same and it smells the same.

Victoria Gibbon:  Shame.

Yvonne Kjorlien: They probably all have the same smell.

Devin Finaughty: Yeah. Mortuaries in South Africa are something interesting. But I didn’t get into medicine; my maths marks wouldn’t good enough. So, I did a general Bachelor of Science degree instead and it was a lecture by Professor Morris in my second year on forensic anthropology or lecture series — he gave us three lectures — that really caught my attention and I sat back and I thought that is a job I would love to do. And I went up to him after the lecture and I said, “your work is amazing. How do I do this?” And he said, “it’s not all that it’s cracked up to be. What are you studying for?” and I said, “I’m trying to get into medicine,” and he said, “oh, stick to that.”

Yeah, but I was not to be deterred and I discovered that there was an honors program in biological anthropology. Had never heard of biological anthropology before, but through my own research realized that that’s the foundation for forensic anthropology. And so, I set myself and getting in there. I was able to get in and then I just carried on right through to PhD.

For my Master’s upgraded to PhD research, I established the first taphonomic research program in Cape Town. So, it was clear through the work that I was able to participate in that we didn’t have a very good understanding of the decomposition processes in Cape Town.

And Cape Town is a globally unique biogeographic environment. It’s the Cape Floristic Kingdom, which only occurs in that part of the world. There are thousands of unique species of plants and animals and that, together with a very unique geography, means that we can’t take data from anywhere else in the world and apply it to Cape Town. And as Vicky explained, there is a tremendous need for this information. So, I set about establishing those data.

And that was when I met Vicky. So, when Vicky started at UCT, Vicky, I think in 2016?

Victoria Gibbon: Yep.

Devin Finaughty: Vicky came in, Alan retired. Vicky came in and pretty much embraced me, even though she didn’t have to, she very much took me under her wing and looked after me as I finished up my PhD for three years, in fact, and that’s how it started together. We started doing forensic casework together and doing research together. We started off co-supervising an honors student, who’s now got his own PhD. And our research program together is just, has blossomed really.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Wow, fabulous. Can I just say that medicine lost out. Ha!

Devin Finaughty: Ironically, I ended up teaching the medical students anatomy and realized that I actually wouldn’t have wanted to study medicine.

Yvonne Kjorlien: So, you’re happy with your path.

Devin Finaughty: Very much so. I mean, as Vicky said I have now taken a step sideways and moved from human forensics into wildlife forensics, which is something we can talk about later, if you’d like, but I am still involved in human forensic casework through my current position at the University of Witwatersrand as part of the Human Variation and Identification Research Unit.

Yvonne Kjorlien: All boy, that’s just a whole other ball of juiciness right there. All right, so let’s talk a little bit about the work that you’ve done together because I have a smattering of articles on my desk here. Everything from scattering patterns and forensic taphonomy to decomp to vertebrate scavenging. And then there is the forensic realism. So, if you…I don’t know how you two… I’m guessing you’ve probably done presentations together before or group chats before… however you want to tackle that, you go for it because I want to hear it all.

Victoria Gibbon: Yeah, okay, maybe I’ll start there. So, I think one of the things that when I came into this position at the University of Cape Town, Devin was there this work was ongoing and he was with good science and knew science. He was revealing more and more interesting questions that needed to be answered. And students are interested in this work. And like I said earlier, there’s definitely need locally for the information. And so while my passion wasn’t originally to do taphonomic work, I could see the value of the outcome for the city, the country, etc. But also that there were student interest. And there were really interesting questions. And at that point in time, we had a really good facility where we were working. And so, it was quite natural for my research program to shift into that because of this interest. So, my research program even today doesn’t only involve forensics and certainly doesn’t only involve forensic taphonomy. But where we come together is in this forensic taphonomy space, and we had our first student together was Max Spies and he did honors with us and was building on one of the questions that came out of Devin’s research on mongoose and how they play a role in decomposition with the scattering and scavenging.

And that work ended up being very informative for us because we not only started to learn information about the decomposition process, but actually mongoose behavior. And so, when we went to, Devin was called out to a case on Table Mountain and I went with, and while we were there, we could see some tunneling in the fynbos, which suggested that mongoose were there, and both hands and feet of the decedent were missing. The feet were there. The hands were missing.

And this is something we had seen in Max’s project, is that the mongoose target small parts of the body, carry them off, and then eat them or consume them underneath denser vegetation. So that they’re protected while they’re consuming. So, we also knew from Max’s work that the scattering normally took a maximum radius of five meters out from the body (edit: the scatter range is 5-12m). So, we cleared back the vegetation five meters and we recovered all the bones of the hands and the feet plus a watch and some jewelry. So that these are the types of things that actually help with identification, right? Is personal belongings, but also the more we recover of a body, the better the chances we have of identifying the body.

And so that was just our first project that we did together and then that led on to Max pursuing a Master’s which then upgraded into a PhD. And since then also had Kara Adams who’s also now a doctor and she has gone on to expand on the work of both Devin and Max and in new directions. And both Max and Kara are now postdocs with other people at the University of Cape Town and they’re working with us on our current project.

But the shift in our thinking through time shifted to… one of the things that I bring very much to this research is the forensic realism. I’m all about forensic application. Devin’s very interested in innovation and is very focused on the minutiae of how these things work. And so I’ve been really focused on asking these questions about realism and he’s really interested in innovation. And so a few years ago he said to me — I don’t know I think — Devin was like, “wouldn’t it be cool if we could do this totally automated and we didn’t need to go to site every day?” and I was like,

Yvonne Kjorlien: Oh yeah!

Victoria Gibbon: “that would be amazing,” because Max went to site every single day. And so did Devin and weighted the pigs every day with a manual block and tackle. And so we approached electrical engineering, I approached the Head of Department there and I said, “we have this idea. Do you think this is possible?” and they ran it as an honors sort of competition. And the students knew the problem and then had to come up with solutions to create an autonomous weighing rig. And then the electrical engineer took the designs the students came up with and then used them to create their own design, which led to our first design. Devin was very instrumental in the creation of that design. And we worked with the electrical engineer, Max, myself, and also Charles Harris (Principal Technical Officer: Department of Human Biology, University of Cape Town), who helped actually build the rig itself.

And so innovation, forensic realism, have become bigger paths within our very targeted research focus. So while our questions that we ask in the students research are very much focused on helping casework, we are also driving and innovating an entire new approach to taphonomic research, and I think that’s where, is an area I’m very interested in and I think at some of our biggest impact is actually happening in that broader space and I think, Devin  maybe you could add on to that about the forensic realism and the innovation and how we’re changing things nationally, internationally.

Devin Finaughty: Absolutely. So apart from just improving our own experience of field work and making it more efficient and more cost-effective, which is what automation can do, I mean that the reason I went to Vicky at this idea is that Max and I collecting data, whether it’s hailing or it’s 45 degrees (Celcius) in the shade. So if we…I was like, machines do everything for us now, surely we could get a machine to do this too, at least some aspects of it.

But the other major advantage of moving towards that automation was this is two things. The one is the ability to quantify a lot more of the data that we’re getting. I mean, historically, decomposition has been conceived of in qualitative terms. I mean, if you think of the total body scoring system, for example, even though it’s a score, it is still fundamentally based on a qualitative, subjective observation and we can create all the core definitions that we want about the specific color or the specific thing. The reality is even fundamentally our perception of color is different. It changes based on the light that’s striking the body that you’re looking at. It doesn’t really work in experimental circumstances with clothed bodies because you would then have to open the clothes every day to see what was happening underneath which has a disturbance effect that you can’t quantify unless you have another one that you’re not opening, but then you can’t use the system to monitor that.

So, we were running into these challenges. And then that’s obviously set up against the broader drive to quantification that the Daubert standards brought in, really, for forensic anthropology globally. We don’t have formal rigorous standards in South Africa, but we still hold those as the gold standard, so to speak, and we work towards that. You need that explanatory power. You need to be able to say…you need to be able to tell the courts the likelihood that you’re wrong, more than anything else. And the more quantitative data you have, the best for your chances are going to be able to figure that out and to be able to justify it in a meaningful way.

So, by moving towards automation, we can figure out ways to evaluate decomposition through properly quantitative means, rather than pseudo quantitative means. That’s the one aspect. The other aspect, and this comes back to experimental design and model building, is the ability to collect data from multiple bodies simultaneously. So, we want to build up this model of decomposition. We obviously need lots of instances of decomposition in the given area by geographic area to understand all the nuances in that because every single decomposition sequence is unique, as I’m sure you very well aware and a lot of our listeners are probably aware.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Oh yeah.

Devin Finaughty: So, to capture that variation you need lots of measures. But if we’re manually collecting data, you go to one body, you collect the data, you go to the next body, you collect the data from that. In most circumstances, most researchers don’t have huge teams of students to go and do all of that simultaneously. And so, if you’ve got lots of bodies, because you’ve got lots of replicates, your data collection time could be several hours. And the reality of decomposition is that the biotic agents of decomposition are going to change their activity within their time slot, right? Because the temperature is changing; the weather is changing. And those fine-scale changes on the ground on a daily basis might not seem like much, but add them together, cumulatively over weeks or months of a decomposition sequence, and they can have really, really meaningful changes in the trajectory and rates of decomposition.

So, if you automate things you can now collect all the data simultaneously, so they are truly comparative and your model is going to be that much more accurate for it. The other thing is you can reduce the disturbance factor, right? If we’re going to site every single day, and we’re chasing away scavengers, we’re disturbing the insects, we are changing vegetation. There are a range of things and there’s some research from Australia from the mid-2000s that demonstrates that disturbance of bodies during the decomposition process does change the rate of decomposition. It doesn’t change it significantly when you pool it all together, but at the individual body level, it can change it significantly.

And back to Vicky’s point of forensic realism, we are actually interested in the individual body, Yes, we’ve got to understand broad patterns across lots of bodies over time, but most of our forensic cases are single clothed bodies at least in our local context in Cape Town. And that’s what we need to be working back towards.

The automation gives a series of tools that help to improve the experimental design and achieve things that the discipline’s been trying to achieve for a long time. We wrote about this quite extensively in the two papers we published on this, which, if the listeners want to go read to understand the argument more holistically, they’re more than welcome to because they’re both open access.  

But there’ve been these fundamental challenges in the nature of data collection dating back to the 80s, which we’re still grappling with. And we feel and we hope that this approach, it might not solve those problems entirely, but it could at least get us a step closer towards addressing those and improving the quality of data, that we, as forensic taphonomists, are generating.

And that’s part of the reason we’re putting it out there. It’s also the reason we didn’t patent the system or anything. This is something that needs to be built up and innovated according to individual research groups’ needs because decomposition is such a big and such a complex process, one research group couldn’t possibly hope, in an entire academic lifetime, to capture even a fraction of what’s actually happening. So, we need lots of people working on all the different aspects. But if we then want to combine all of that knowledge and hope to build this really comprehensive picture of decomposition across varied biogeoclimatic circumstances, we need all be collecting data in the same way so that the data are comparable and we’re not doing that at the moment. And this keeps coming out in the literature. It’s been coming out in the literature since the 1980s. And so we’re hoping that this autonomous system, far from being prescriptive, is simply a tool, a framework to capture data in a standardized way that will help us answer the more fundamental questions, particularly around forensic realism.

And I’ll hand back over to Vicky to talk more about that.

Victoria Gibbon: I just wanted to add to what Devin was saying there and I think the critical aspect is it’s not about replicating what we as scientists have for years done in labs and in the field, but actually replicate what we’re seeing in real casework.

Devin Finaughty: exactly

Victoria Gibbon: So having our research driven by case work examples. And if I may, Yvonne, I’m cutting here a little bit. I wonder if I could just go back sort of to the beginning because one of the things I think I didn’t say in the beginning is how my role within the police, etc., which because of that role has led me to focus more on what is happening in casework and then have a research approach. So do you mind if I…

Yvonne Kjorlien: Absolutely, and that was actually, when I said, we’ll get back to that later, that was one of the things I wanted to get back to, so this is perfect.

Victoria Gibbon: So, I’m leading a research group. We call ourselves the Western Cape Cold Case Consortium. And we have built ourselves up. We’re a team of researchers involved in forensic practice in a variety of ways. So, we’ve got members of the team who are in forensic pathology services. We have a forensic geneticist, a forensic isotope analysist, a forensic anthropologist, which is me, and then we have a facial reconstruction expert, who specializes in forensic facial reconstruction. Now we’re all in the Western Cape and we have taken our different roles into this new approach and actually this started with a project that…by Athi Baliso, who’s a new lecturer in our department, and she did her Master’s on a survey of forensic anthropology casework in the Western Cape. And as part of that, she isolated different types of patterns that we see in our local cases. So, terrestrial cases, which are the cases that we find on land, what kinds of patterns do we see most common in the Western Cape? So, when we are driving replication studies, what’s the most common and most impactful replication we can do in order to drive our research. And then similarly with aquatic cases in the same way because we are a coastal city. We do get a lot of wash-up cases, and wash up cases are very difficult to identify for a variety of other reasons.

So, the Western Cape Cold Case Consortium, we are trying to look at ways, what are the patterns and ways that research can effectively improve the application of forensic science across a case in order to see if we can get identification rate improvement. And the main thing is, for years we’ve been really driven by quantitative approaches, like Devin said now about Daubert, etc., so a lot of people have set up experiments where they have multiple bodies out at a time. They’re in close proximity to each other. We even have human decomposition body farms where bodies are literally stacked up. But in reality, we do not see that, we don’t see that in case work. We see single cases as the most common in a terrestrial or on land environment. We see clothed individuals. We see them on the surface. We don’t see them buried and this is in our environment. So, we then now try to replicate those circumstances and we are very careful about an area of research, that Devin introduced me to, is carrion biomass and load in the environment. And this is something that leads to this concept of what people refer to as scavenger swamping. So, when we have… one of the things that we realized through one of our students projects, is that the mongoose are a massive impactful, they play a massive impactful role in decomposition and accelerating the decomposition process locally. The question is, originally, like everyone else in the world, we had four (multiple) bodies out at a time and in fairly close proximity to each other. But as we started to shift our thinking, we said, “what happens if we just put out one body?” And what we found was that it was accelerated… I can’t remember exactly how much, but it was like 10-fold. Devin, do you remember?

Devin Finaughty: 419 percent increase in the rate of scavenging.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Wow, okay. So just hang on put a pause in this — how close were you depositing them before and how close, because I’m guessing you’re not just putting out one season. You’re probably putting them out multiples, but at greater distances. So, if you could shed some light on that for me.

Victoria Gibbon: Devin, go ahead.

Devin Finaughty: So, we were initially running four bodies per season. So, we were looking at two different habitats and the same vegetation zone. So, Cape Flats Dune Strandveld, which covers most of Cape Town, and it’s the most of what is intact left, at least that hasn’t been destroyed by urbanization.

And then we have invasive alien trees called Port Jackson and Rooikrans — Acacia saligna and Acacia cyclops — which form these really dense thickets that people love to hide bodies in because they’re really dense thickets. So, we were looking at those two habitats and we had two pigs in each habitat per season running multiple seasons in…to look at annual effects as well. The pigs were around 30 to 40 meters apart. So, not the minimum of 50 meters.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Okay, that is quite close.

Devin Finaughty: Yes, it’s not the minimum of 50 meters that Matuszewski and colleagues have subsequent the advocated to stop the overlap. But that, as Vicky said, we’re now looking at much further, at minimum 50 meters apart, but still within the same broad habitat so that we’re not falling foul of simple pseudoreplication (an important, underexplored concept in forensic taphonomic experimental design detailed by Schoenly, Michaud & Moreau 2015; DOI: https://doi.org/10.1201/b18819).

Yvonne Kjorlien: All right. So, before it was within 50 meters now, you’re definitely outside of that 50 meters.

Victoria Gibbon: Yes.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Got it, okay.

Victoria Gibbon: And so, when we did this experiment where we just put one pig down, we noticed this huge increase in accelerated decomp rate but then that means all the other data we had from years before was really not very useful because that’s not what we see in reality and so it started making us think really differently about what we were doing on the ground. And also feeling very critical about what’s coming out in the international literature because scavenger swamping is the idea where you have too many bodies out and scavengers actually are, by their nature, opportunistic feeders. So, you get the pulse, the carrion pulse comes into the environment and they monopolize on it. But when all the sudden there’s lots of carrion pulses, which is really unnatural, then their behavior becomes unnatural and then what we found is they would end up feeding on which, the heaviest fed-on carcass ended up being the one closest to trees or areas where they could feed in a way that protected them from birds and their own predation. So, we started to think a little bit more about our own structure and design and how we can change that and the mindset internationally and we are making big changes locally on forensic realism and having casework drive research, rather than research drive casework, or try and do the opposite, which doesn’t work. What we’re seeing is that we’re not being very effective and we’re actually struggling to get the message out internationally. There is a huge resistance to this approach.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Welcome to my world.

Victoria Gibbon: So we still battle on and sometimes we struggle to get our papers accepted because then people will turn around and but you only have data from one or two pigs at a time but when you use this approach, it means you have to do many, many years of data collection before you build up a data set, but it doesn’t mean the baseline data we’re producing isn’t more accurate than what we had before.

Devin Finaughty: Or valid.

Victoria Gibbon: Or valid. Yeah.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Exactly. Yes. It’s music to my ears. Let me just say there’s some times… I feel like many, many years. I feel like I’ve been screaming into the void and just crickets. Nobody sees the value of it. So, to have people like you come along and doing this work. I’m feeling pretty vindicated at the moment actually.

Victoria Gibbon: Good. We’re making a difference for one.

Yvonne Kjorlien: But you’re right this is several researchers’ lifetimes worth of work. The variables are just so complex, there are so many of them. We have to dig to figure out what they are and then to try to figure out how they’re integrated, how they interplay with each other because we’re working in naturalistic, very real situations.

I came across a student poster once — and apologies if you are listening, but this is an example — that the poster was an experiment that she had done. She used remains that had already been embalmed and then she put them out to how they would decompose and I’m like, how is this real? What’s the likelihood that investigators would be called upon a scene to find embalmed remains.

Victoria Gibbon: Never. Never in a way that’s actually forensically interesting because an embalmed body, like the application would be very minimal, if at all.

Yvonne Kjorlien: I know what you’re saying about, using the case studies to direct what and how you’re doing the research, that makes complete sense.

Victoria Gibbon: Yeah, absolutely.

Devin Finaughty: If I could add to that. So, I mean this is the approach…like what we’re describing isn’t brand new to toponomy. When Dr. Bill Bass started the Tennessee facility back in the 80s, this was the approach that they used for the first 10 years. They were replicating what they were seeing in casework. But then as we grew in our knowledge of all the variables that were at play, we sort of started to focus in on those and temperature, is, as we’ve seen in the literature, has been the overwhelming focus.

But that made the research very reductionist and my sense is that, for the last at least two decades, we’ve had a very hyper-focused, very reductionist approach to the research, which has led us to ignore a lot of the other factors that are at play. This is what we were starting to see in our own research, as Vicky described. We’re saying, actually, most people are excluding scavengers because they’re interested in the insects or they’re interested in some else. “We’re trying to get the baseline decomposition and then we’ll add in all the variables”. But the reality is that the baseline that really matters is the forensic case. That’s the baseline once we know what happens there, then we can start to go into the minutiae and break it down. We can’t hope to build it up to the complexity of a forensic case, as you rightly pointed out. We’re dealing with biology. Biology is complex and messy. We’re probably never going to be able to realistically, accurately, mathematically describe it, at least not with the current tools and technology that we have. We might get there one day. But we can get approximations that can still be useful forensically. And in our context in South Africa, any information is useful. Even if it doesn’t make it to court, if it just helps guide the investigation, that is worth having. And that’s our goal. Part of the pursuit of the forensic realism, other than just trying to replicate what we’re seeing in casework, is also having a much bigger focus on the ecology.

So, my undergrad is in human physiology and zoology and I’m a closet conservationist, though very much coming out to the closet in that regard now. So, I’m also very, as Vicky said, I’m very interested in the innovation side of things. I’m also very interested in the ecology of what’s happening. And a lot of what Vicky is described with our building this knowledge on the mongoose, that’s core ecological research. And we’ve uncovered a lot of information about this particular species’ biology and its life history patterns, that were actually not known to science because they’ve never been studied in this context. They’ve been studied in nature reserves, where you don’t have frequent anthropogenic pulses of food. And that’s what we knew. Now you bring it into a city site — we’re looking at the sort of peri-urban and we still kind of are looking at peri-urban — but in the urban settings, we hadn’t seen — at least in the leafy suburbs, we hadn’t seen mongoose — but certainly on the fringes, in a city like Cape Town, which is surrounded on many sides by large natural reserves, these animals are coming into our space because we’re encroaching into theirs. And that’s true of many urban areas, even in Johannesburg, which is a city bigger than London with a bigger population. They’ve seen, in the middle of the CBD (Central Business District), they’ve seen scavenging by two species of mongoose, amongst other things. So these animals are coming in. You can’t be excluding them. It’s much better to just say, “Let’s look at what’s happening in forensic cases. Put bodies down and just see what happens and then we can build from there.” That should be our baseline. And that I think is really that’s one of the core impetuses of what we’re trying to do is to bring it back to that realism.

Otherwise, it’s not going to be as useful and as impactful as it should be and could be.

Victoria Gibbon: Yeah, one thing I just want to add to that is I remember one of the projects we were working on we had nude pigs. Unclothed. And I remember saying, “but we never find nude bodies. They’re so rare. So why are we doing this?” And then we started doing the clothed project and we actually compared the data on clothing and unclothing, but also clothing changes the ecology, right? Because it changes where insects go, how insects can access, how scavengers can access, it changes their behavior, it changes then the decomposition across the body.

And so, then Alan Morris, at that time he was retired, and I remember he said but the clothes have to fit the pigs like they fit people. And so, then we had to get a seamstress, and we did an entire review of the clothing types that we get in cases, the most common things that we see. Cotton t-shirts. We don’t see a lot of polyesters. So, what are the most common things? So, we have an entire clothing set-up that is based on a review of casework. Then we go and buy our clothing in on the same day for all of the experiments, across all the seasons, and we buy it from the most common everyday person store in South Africa. So, we buy from Ackermans or Pep, and so that we are replicating accurately what people would wear and everyday clothes, and then we take them to the seamstress, and we’ve created a pattern, took measurements of the pigs, and where they change a lot is in the pants. So, the way the bum fits in the pants and the tapered little legs, but even in our winter one, so when we do a winter season, we’ve got winter clothes. So, they’ve got a sweater on, a t-shirt on, a belt, they’ve got jeans or denims and then they have little baby socks and baby shoes on. And in summer we were going to put flip-flops. We realized that’s kind of counterintuitive because they just fall off, so we don’t put anything on the feet and summer. And in summer, they also have on denims or jeans and then they just have a cotton t-shirt. And they wear underwear. We get them nice new fresh underwear and everything. And then on the day, because of the way the pants fit on the body, we actually sew up the seat of the pants on the pig on the day.

And so, we sew them right up the back end. And so, then they are tailored perfectly to the body just like our clothes are tailored to us, which prevent a barrier for animals, for example, to scurry at the leg and get in.  And so those tapered pants that fit them like they do us is important. Now these kinds of nuances in our research, I think sometimes get lost in the publications, but I think we should talk about them. So, I just wanted to raise that we do actually have seamstresses that, over many years now, who have helped us prepare clothes for pigs.

And also, the other thing I wanted to talk about here is the fact that we talk about forensic realism, but then we use pigs, which, of course, aren’t real. What we set out to do, and in South Africa at the moment, it’s not legal to use donor human bodies in this kind of research outdoors. Look, and we are looking at trying to move in that direction. But I also have a fundamental block on the realism of donor bodies in general because who donates their body to science do not match the people who end up being in forensic cases. They don’t match in age. They don’t necessary match in gender, and they most importantly do not match in health. So, the majority…and we know that that affects the ecology, because animals that are sickly, other animals don’t want to eat sick animals. So, if we use donor bodies and the person is elderly and has maybe even been on medicines and all of that, those bodies — and this speaks to what was said earlier — that they emanate smells, like embalmed bodies, that are very different than what is natural. And the majority of people who end up in forensic investigations in South Africa tend to be younger men. And they don’t tend to be elderly, sickly people. They tend to be typically physically healthy young men. And so, using donor bodies, I’m not sure is a perfect analog, either way.

So, I’m not saying that pigs are a good analog or the best analog, but I don’t think having a donor farm in South Africa would replace pig research. I think we need to be able to control how the animal died. Being able to control all the circumstances around the death and the termination to make them as forensically accurate as possible. And not have to worry about all these other influences that people really aren’t controlling for in human donor body farms.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, I think that what Devin said before about the approximation, we’re approaching, and we may spend lifetimes approaching and it may just be an approach.

Victoria Gibbon: Absolutely.

Yvonne Kjorlien: We’re just you continually refining an approximate, and if that’s as good as we get, then that’s as good as we get. But I think you bring up a valuable point that there are so many variables that either we’re taking for granted, we’re overlooking or we’re not accounting for.

Victoria Gibbon: Exactly.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah.

Victoria Gibbon: Absolutely, and then the other part of it is, when I started this work and recently we were kind of called out on this, in my mind, my big sales pitch was time since death, right? So, we’re helping improve time since death (estimates). But actually, over the years, I think that it’s not really about time since death. It’s really about the nuances of how bodies decompose and it’s those nuances that actually are more informative on the forensic lead. So, it’s not actually about the exact time since death. And now I’m no longer using that as my sales pitch. It’s about helping the police investigation on the ground, get started, and that time with that case where we had seen something with the mongoose and then we can apply it in a real case that improves our ability to recover the body fully. And also, I [end] up recovering personal belongings, which are quite diagnostic for individualization. So, it’s about the forensic leads, and it’s about these nuances that help us help the police get their forensic leads and run their investigation, which ultimately lead towards identification.

So, I used to think that forensic anthropology is really about us helping to identify the person. And over the years, I’ve realized, no, my role is to serve the police in improving investigative leads and to help with their investigative process. And so, with W4C, or the Western Cape Cold Case Consortium, that’s our drive. We are trying to, through forensic science, improve forensic outcomes for, not just the police and forensic pathology services, but for the decedent, their families, and the loved ones who have no closure. And so, how can we improve closure? Through science. And how can we facilitate that? But meanwhile still be doing interesting, exciting, innovative science as scientists.

So, it’s the twofold, where we’re at now.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Nice. Devin, I’m gonna hand this back to you.

Devin Finaughty: That was a very mic-drop-moment from Vicky. I’m not sure how I can add to that. So eloquent! And maybe I can sort of just hone-in on some really specific examples…

Yvonne Kjorlien: Sure, yes.

Devin Finaughty… that really illustrate what Vicky was saying. So, if we go back to the case that Vicky mentioned before, about the case that we did on Table Mountain, where we were… we didn’t have to recover the decedent’s hands or the jewelry or the watch. In that case, the police really had a pretty good idea of who the decedent was and we often say it’d be really helpful if people died with their identity documents. And in this case, that was (the case); the person had their wallet, their driver’s license, IDs, passports, everything. So that wasn’t the question. And this speaks to Vicky point, which is our role there wasn’t to facilitate identification. The police, I mean the remains were skeletonized, so we had to do an osteobiographical profile because the decedent could have those items associated, but they’re not primary identifiers, so you still have to do that. But in that case, I think our role much more fundamentally was giving the whole of the decedent back to their family. So, bringing them together as a person, making them whole, and then giving them back to their family.

I spent five years working in the UK just before returning to South Africa. I worked at the University of Kent. And one of my colleagues was in the London Metropolitan Police for 30 years. And we spoke about lots of cases that they worked on. And in the UK, red kites are prominent scavengers of remains, especially in rural areas. And they carry pieces of the body off and they never recover them. And my colleague said to me a lot of families are really upset by that. Even if the finger missing, and even if… There are some families where there are cultural rights that cannot be concluded because the body is not whole, but even if that’s not the case, you still want all of your loved one.

And, the work we’re doing, looking at the mongoose in our context, and very much the work you’re doing in Canada, looking at the scattering patterns there. There’s so much important work within that, that isn’t related to identity, but is just about the ethics of the work that we do and restoring dignity in death, both to the decedent and giving complete closure to the families. And that really needs to be – and should be – one prominent things that underpins our work. And we very much have that close at heart.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Thank you for that because, Vicky, I love that you have refocused not on the identification, and more on the outcomes and being of service to the investigators and their outcomes, and also the ethical issues of closure and giving that back to the families. The reason that I’ve kind of framed our work in terms of the identification and increased recovery of the amount of remains so that closure may be possible, etc., is because just that it’s almost like the families need to drive the ethics of having closure and getting their loved ones back as complete as possible, because the investigators are that middle piece in there, where as long as they can get the identification and get the evidence they need for the case, that’s good for them. But what’s good for them, may not be good enough for the family. And so even as us on the other side where we’re in service to both the investigators and the families, even though we want to eventually appease the families and their desire for closure, we have that the investigators in between, they’re saying, “You know what? I just need an identification and enough evidence to serve my case.” So how do you negotiate that?

Victoria Gibbon: So, this is a trickier space and I think and in the South African environment, probably quite different, Yvonne, than what you experience in Canada, just because of mass. So, for example, with 300 people being unidentified in our local mortuary per year, the police have far less capacity to actually give each case the same amount of energy that it actually needs or desires. And that’s not because they don’t want to do it. It’s because there’s just no more hours in the day and …

Yvonne Kjorlien: It’s capacity.

Victoria Gibbon: it is absolutely capacity. And so, anything that we can do to help them in their casework, they will run with it, but it doesn’t mean that there isn’t a role. And actually, with W4C currently, we have done these five cold cases and we’ve put a lot of science into them and we are struggling to get them identified with the police. We have big campaigns and we’re doing everything we can. But one of the things that’s coming up is we had what we thought was a probable ID and it turns out that it wasn’t the right person. And that has created this new engagement with this family around giving them hope that this could be their missing loved one for years, and then having to go back to them, after creating hope and saying, “I’m sorry, but this isn’t yours.” But then having to… it opened the door for them to communicate to us what it’s like to be on the family side. And to just be totally unaware of where your loved one is and how desolate that can feel for them. And they are now saying to us, “How can we help you identify these people and us, and help you and you help us?”

And so one of the things that this family has said is, “I’m going to do a radio interview and I’m going to talk about my experience and we’re gonna talk about what options are available out there because, while this didn’t lead to my loved one being this person, it’s someone’s loved one”. And so, there’s so much empathy and power actually for these en masse in South Africa, which I think is untapped for these families to actually move together and to push for changes in legislation.

So currently in South Africa forensic science is not forced in any case. It’s not legislated. It’s at the discretion of the pathologist if they want a forensic scientist involved. That could change. Now, if government mandated forensic science to be involved in every single case…so the forensic pathologist always does their role like that is part of their mandate but additional forensic scientific methods are not mandated. So if they were mandated in legislation, we instantly create jobs, when you have jobs, you have people, people with forensic scientists who can pick up that capacity that the current investigation in South Africa can’t carry.

And so now we’ve started to talk about, and even in W4C, we started to try to figure out what are our gaps in identification locally, and what are challenges. And the number one thing that came up — sorry Yvonne, this is kind of taking us in a different direction — but the number one thing that I went into the project thinking was that my science was going to bring a solution. And when we started talking to people on the ground, the number one thing that the people involved — the police, the pathologists — they said there’s a disconnect between the missing person’s form that people fill out at the police station and the unidentified body form that’s filled out at the mortuary. So, these two forms do not speak to each other and therefore their ability to match. And so, then I started looking into these forms. And I originally went provincially and the head of detectives was like, “you’re never going to change the national forms, like forget it.” And I just got the hell in and started making some calls to people I knew in the police and I said, “I need to know who I can contact here,” And sure enough I was able to get a phone number for somebody who’s in the national detectives. And when I called him, explained who I was — and my friend who’s a cop told me all the things not to say and what to say — and so I opened with who I am, and I said, “I was wondering if I could help partner, and help the police improve their missing persons form.” And he was first was like, “no, our forms are fine.” And then I pointed out some really problematic aspects on the form, which I’m not going to repeat here on the podcast. But he was like, “no, it doesn’t say that.” I said, “it does say that. Just pull it up.” And then he was like, “Uh oh.”

And the form, I just found out this week, has been rolled out for pilot in two provinces. So, we’ve totally revised these two forms and they now speak to each other. They are all PDF driven. They’re form-fillable. They’re very transformative, and I’m hoping they get through. And if they get through, they will be the first police missing forms internationally that have non-binary as an option and the…how do we improve… and so then the next step for me is to go back to my electrical engineering friends and say, “can we run an honors project on how to make these PDF forms into [an] app for the police?” And then the data is filled in real time and not having a 30-day delay to be manually filled out and manually entered. And the forms were 12 pages long and now are only seven pages. So, the ability for someone who’s grief-stricken to fill out a missing person’s form is also reduced for both the police officer and for the family member.

And so sometimes, I guess one of the things I just want to say here, is that while we do think our science is informative and I do believe the science we do is good. Sometimes asking people on the ground what would be the biggest difference in improving identification rate? They have solutions that actually, like in this case, it was just an administrative aspect of reworking a form, that in few years, I’m hoping we will actually see an improvement in the matches between missing persons and unidentified bodies in South Africa. And it’s probably going to be the most impactful thing I ever do in my career…

Yvonne Kjorlien: It’ll be completely unresearch-related.

Victoria Gibbon: Exactly! It’s like basically. I was a secretary for the police. I redid their form. So, I do think that these nuances and our impact, we need to be thinking about our power and privilege within the research space, within the university space, to make and affect a real change on the ground. And that’s by having conversations with people on the ground, the police, the pathologist, and the families.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Absolutely. Wow. And, you know what? Yeah, I agree. That’s probably gonna be the most impactful thing that you will be remembered for, and you will ever do; however, yes, it was because of your research the position that you hold and your network that you were able to do that. right and no.

Victoria Gibbon: Yeah, I also think that I’ll never really like I brought it up here, but it’s not the kind of thing you can publish, right? So, it also not something I’ll really be known for, it’s just something I’ll know I did myself. I told you two. Up and…I can’t say I did it all myself. There was a three of us who worked on it together, but it’s interesting.

Yvonne Kjorlien: I’m conscious of the time so, Devin, I’m gonna give it back to you because I think future directions is kind of where you’re at right now with your little switch into wildlife taphonomy. So, if you want to talk a little bit about that and where you kind of see that taking you in the next, maybe five to ten years.

Devin Finaughty: Sure. So, the first thing I want to say is to 100% agree with what Vicky’s just said. My wife and I just met with someone here, we’re up in the Waterberg, in northern South Africa at the moment. And we met with someone who represents one of the local security clusters. And it was just a meet and greet. The take-home message from that conversation – we wanted to know about what is poaching like up here and that – and the take home message was… my wife and I want to want to help, right? We want to take the knowledge and skill and experience that we have in human forensics and apply to the wildlife forensic space. Because a lot of what we do — the forensic taphonomy, the forensic entomology — my wife as a forensic geneticist that specializes in degraded DNA — that isn’t being used in a wildlife forensic space and we feel like there’s something that we could add there. We’re not coming in to tell people what they’re doing wrong at all. We’re just trying to find out how we can help them improve investigative outcomes.

Because, I mean, you’ve heard from our conversation that the missing persons problem that we’ve got is up to 10,000 people a year, which is a catastrophe. And we’ve got a similar problem in wildlife forensics. Although the problem there is very, very poor prosecution rate. So, the National Prosecuting Authority in South Africa is very proud of the fact that they’ve got a 96% prosecution rate, and they should absolutely be proud of that. It’s fantastic. But less than 10% of the cases that are actually brought to the prosecutor make it to trial. And it’s mainly for want of evidence.

So, we have this conversation today basically saying we’re here to help, and the take home message from that is: relationship building. We need to go out. We need a build relationships with all the stakeholders, with the community members, with the local police, with the local farm owners, all of that. We’re not going to be able to do anything if we don’t do that. And I think that really underscores what Vicky had said, which is, regardless of what forensics you’re doing, especially when you’re operating — we’re “pracacademics”, right? We’re doing practical work, but we’re also doing the research. But both of those things ultimately need to serve the stakeholders, at the end of the day. And there are two ways of dealing with the stakeholders. There’s the top-down way of saying we’re the knights in shining armor coming to solve all your problems, this is what we’re going to do, versus we see you’re struggling, you need help. We’re here to help. How can help? And it’s a subtle but very important change of approach that we’re seeing same in the wildlife forensic side.

So, where I’m going now is I’m not leaving taphonomy or the entomology that I do — so I do the forensic taphonomy and entomology together because they go hand in hand together — but as I said, I’m trying to bring that into the wildlife forensic space. I’m also trying to understand very much — what Vicky has just been doing where she’s trying to get to the bottom of what are some of the root causes for the lack of human identification — I’m trying to get to the bottom of why are so few cases actually making it to the prosecutor’s office.

There’s lots of anecdotal information about: oh, that’s a lack of evidence, the police are not collecting things on scene for variety of reasons, I mean straight back to the resourcing point that Vicky brought up. There’s a small team, we learned today that there’s a small team of people to cover an entire province. Poaching scenes can be four to five hundred kilometers apart. The team simply cannot travel all of those distances to multiple scenes and hope to collect evidence. And then there’s quite a good intelligence community here looking at, if an event happens, they can often track the gang that’s perpetrated and say, ”Let’s go and grab them,” then they go and arrest them but then they can’t tie them back to the scene because they never took the time to process the scene. So, they’re held for 48 hours and then they’re released, and the cycle perpetuates. So there needs to be some capacity-building. But how do you… that capacity building is gonna have to come on policy side, right? The state has to devote more resources. Straight back to what Vicky said. You can’t motivate for that policy if you don’t have data. You can bring all the anecdotal information to parliament that you want. They’re just going to shrug their shoulders and say, “that’s what they say.” I’m very keen to establish some hard data on the efficacy of our current forensic practice; I can’t for the entire country, because South Africa is a big country and the nature of wildlife crime is very different depending on what province you’re in. The Western Cape, where Vicky is, doesn’t have a major problem with poaching of, say, rhinos and elephants because they’re very few there, but it’s got a huge problem with marine poaching, particularly of abalone and of succulent poaching. That’s completely different and I need an entire lifetime to do all of those different things, or multiple lifetimes I should say. So, I’m interested in doing it for Bushveld and Lowveld areas of South Africa. Just understanding what’s happening in these areas. And then hopefully bringing some more tools to the table.

So, I’m quite interested in bringing forensic entomology into the space, partly to add additional lines of evidence. So, much like the human cases that Vicky has mentioned, where time since death/post-mortem interval isn’t a major query much of the time, but if you can have that, you can use that to help to link people to scenes, that’s useful. And forensic entomology is, to this day, still the most accurate way of estimating time since death, regardless of what’s died. It just is. But I can’t take the protocols for collecting entomological evidence that we use for human scenes and hope to apply them to wildlife crime scenes because it’s a totally different context. We’re talking about rangers potentially trekking 20, 30 kilometers on foot.

Now they’ve got to sample insects at the scene and bring them back. How do they bring them back alive, number one, and two, in temperature control conditions where I don’t have them carrying — even five extra kilograms of weight over 30 kilometers is a lot because that could be five liters of water for them when it’s 40 degrees Celsius. But you can’t figure any of this out if you’re not going to the scene. So very much like what I was doing with forensic entomology human cases, where I was going to scenes with forensic pathologists at their invitation, or their officers, and just seeing what was happening and trying to figure out — how can I optimize the existing protocols for your circumstance? Our forensic pathologists in South Africa, for example, can’t take boiling water or ethanol to scenes; they’re not allowed to. So you gotta come up with a different way of, you can’t preserve the insects on the scene. You have to bring them back to mortuary, but then you’ve got to account for growth and all sorts of things. So we have to tailor it. That’s one of the aspects that I’m doing is developing and optimizing those protocols for rangers.

The other reason I’m doing it is because one of the primary sources of mass mortality poaching in South Africa is the use of poisoning. So, using things like cyanide or glycophosphate. And water holes get poisoned, so, herds of animals -anything – that comes to drink from that waterhole dies. And then a much more worrying recent trend, particularly in the Lowveld area of South Africa is that poaching gangs are poisoning the carcasses of animals that they’ve killed. So, they kill a rhino, they de-horn it, and then they poison that carcass because the vultures that come to feed in the carcass are a beacon to the security operatives to say, there’s a case there, a potential case, and they make a beeline. And obviously the poachers want as much time as they can get to get away from the scene. So, they’re just poisoning the carcasses to kill the vultures to remove that beacon. And some of our vulture species in South Africa, just in the last five years, have gone from vulnerable to critically endangered as a result of this practice. And the Environmental Management Inspectorate is really struggling to get on top of this because the post-mortem samples that they’re taking from the carcasses, they’re not able to identify what the toxins are in many cases, and even if they are, they have no idea what the concentration is. So, when I said to them, “but have you sampled the maggots that are feeding on the body?” Because then you are [looking at] volatile organic compounds that are being amplified by the same process and you’re just looking at that and they said, “oh no, can you do that?” I said, “yes, here’s the literature that says you can do this.” “Oh, we’d love to do that!” “Great. You need the protocols first.” So that’s another reason to develop those protocols.

And then we also just need baseline developmental data for the forensically relevant species that we’re dealing with, because we have very limited coverage for the northern part of South Africa. The last concerted forensic entomological work that took place north of Pretoria was in the 80s and climate change is real. And we know the developmental biology of insects, which are poikilothermic ecototherms, is very intrinsically linked to temperature. We’ve seen this in one of the species that’s invasive to South Africa, [Calliphora vicina] that comes from the northern hemisphere. In the 70s and 80s, there were a handful of records. Now, they are the dominant species on human forensic cases and wildlife forensic cases in the cooler months of the year South Africa, the dominant species.

But that species wasn’t around 20 years ago in the numbers that it is now. So, we’ve got these species that we could potentially use, but the whole basis of forensic entomology is you need to understand their developmental timelines. So, you need the data for that. So, I plan to sample those species from their locales and do prospective laboratory experimentation to update the developmental standards for a selection of species. I can’t do them all. Far too many. And again, I have a… my contract is for two years, not 10 years. We’ll see what we can do in the two years. But that’s really what I’m doing at least for the next two years, and the hope is that that will continue to grow into continued work in the wildlife forensic space. And hopefully bring to bear some improved outcomes, much the same as Vicky is trying to do with W4C.

Yvonne Kjorlien: I am feeling so honored and privileged to share airtime with you, both of you at the moment. You are doing such amazing work. You’re both so passionate and you’re asking some fundamental questions about the root of why things are happening the way they’re happening and how to change that. And I am beyond honored to share the space with you. Thank you for coming on the podcast. Wow.

Vicky, future directions for you?

Victoria Gibbon: Yeah, so with forensic taphonomy, Devin and I currently have a new project. We’ve deployed some pigs about six weeks ago, and it’s the first time we’ve deployed on Table Mountain, which is the second most common bioecoclimatic zone we find bodies. And the majority of the bodies that come on Table Mountain, die from stab wounds. And so, it’s the first time we’ve actually done trauma on bodies in — and so pig bodies — and they are clothed and what we — just as hashtag watch this space — but the untraumatized versus the traumatized decompose very differently. And I guess that’s not really surprising. It’s what we hypothesized. We thought we were going to get a lot of scavengers. Hashtag none yet. So, we’re a bit disappointed there. So, we’ve got this season, now it’s winter for us, and we’ve had a wicked one so far, so things are unique and interesting. And then we’ll do a summer deployment and we’ll go from there. So that’s where I’m at right now with taphonomy. And with W4C, we will continue in our drive to try and assist on the ground and we are revealing more and more every day how we can help in different and unexpected ways within the system and work within the system. So that’s where we’re at.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Wow. Several lifetimes’ work cut out for both of you. I wish well you on that. Especially on a two-year contract, Devin.

Victoria Gibbon: And I did want to say, Devin, how nice it was to hear you speaking and also seeing that, again, like what I said earlier, we both go into this work thinking our science is the solution, but actually it’s the way that we have moved towards our approach and the approach that we develop to forensic science that actually is movable into both the wildlife forensic space and in the human space because it ends up being, I think that’s the most important thing that our impact will be is really how we approach and hear from the ground to change the way we, our role and also the policy. So, it’s identifying the problem and then trying to do the policy change. It was so nice to hear you talk about that too. And Yvonne, thank you so much for creating this space for us and it’s been such a pleasure for us as well.

Devin Finaughty: Thank you, Yvonne. It’s been wonderful. And I also just want to say for the record that I have learned an incredible amount from Vicky. I mean, she’s complimenting me here, but it goes back tenfold. Vicky has been an amazing mentor to me. I couldn’t ask for better, and I mean that sincerely.  And I would encourage all the young scientists to find someone, to find their Vicky, that can help guide them and grow them. As that’s my hashtag advice for the day.

Victoria Gibbon: Thanks so much, Devin. I do think that we work well together, we’re complementary, Yvonne, and that’s also I think a big thing about being a good scientist is recognizing you can’t do it all on your own and figuring out the people who can complement and together you can do a lot more with additional skills, then you can do on your own and that’s definitely true for Devin and I.

Devin Finaughty: 100%

Yvonne Kjorlien: Absolutely.

Transcribed by Google

Janet Young is a curator of biological anthropology at the Canadian Museum of History, focusing on human skeletal collections. As a curator, she acts as a subject matter expert and bridges museum collections with research and exhibits for public knowledge.

In this episode we talk about:

You can contact Janet through the Canadian Museum of History: https://www.historymuseum.ca/learn/research/#close

Janet’s blog about her discoveries in the Barrack Hill Cemetery, The Bone Detective: https://www.historymuseum.ca/blog/bone-detective-introduction/

You can visit the remains of the Barrack Hill Cemetery at Beechwood: https://www.beechwoodottawa.ca/en/foundation/history/barrack-hill-cemetery-beechwood

****

Notes from the start

The first of the 2022-23 Saskatchewan videos of the Scavenging Study are up: https://yvonnekjorlien.com/scavenging-study/

I’ll place the mapping video here too once it’s finished — hopefully soon!

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 So Janet, I’m gonna get you to say who you are and where you work in your role because I don’t want to mess it up.

Janet Young: Yeah, my name is Janet Young. I am the curator of biological anthropology at the Canadian Museum of History.

Yvonne Kjorlien: What does that mean that you are a curator? Let’s delve into that a little bit.

Janet Young: So a curator is someone who is the subject matter expert for different fields. So we have curators history, archeology, ethnology. So there’s a number of curators that work at the Museum and our role is to steward collections and work on projects for the general public, work on exhibits. So sort of the bridge between the content of the holdings of the museum and the public, is bringing that information, and doing research to add to the public knowledge about a certain subject matter.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Wow, and you’ve been there a long time.

Janet Young: Okay, so yes, I’ve been there a long time. I‘ve been there 30 years. The first — this is one of those things — that when I talk to students, I always say, you’re not gonna get the job at the top right away. So I started as a volunteer after I did my Master’s and it wasn’t even in my field, but I started volunteering at the Museum and eventually I made my way over to the physical anthropology section and then I started getting contracts and so I got a series of contracts for about seven years and then they created a position for me and then I worked in that first several years and then the curator of physical anthropology at the time retired and I ended up with his position. So if students ever come to me and say how did you get this position? It’s a lot of sticking to it and not giving up. And just doing your best to get your foot in the door and then working your way up. So yeah, it’s been 30 years. But as you’re trying to work your way into a position the time goes fast, so it’s not so bad.

Yvonne Kjorlien: And what is your educational background?

Janet Young: So I have an undergraduate degree in ancient history and archeology. My Master’s is from England, so it’s Masters of Science in human osteology, paleopathology and funerary archeology. And then I came back home and I started working at the museum and at that time I did my PhD in population health. And even though it’s a subject that is very much modern day and related to modern populations, the program allowed me to work on past populations. So it was a good fit for me at the time.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Nice. Yeah, those people in biological anthropology. We always seem to have very diverse backgrounds.

Janet Young: I know, right? You kind of find your way, find your path. When I first started, when I left high school many moons ago, I wanted to work in archeology and so, you end up on the circuitous path, through different programs and when I was done, I didn’t know what to do. So at that point there was really no computers. So you went to The Graduate Studies Center and you started looking through pamphlets to see what was interesting and I found one on human remains and that was it for me. That’s exactly what I wanted to do. And so yeah, it just starts on a path, but I think for a lot of people in archeology or in biological anthropology, it’s a circuitous path that really find what you’re interested in. So.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, and I find it’s not one of those I guess subjects that isn’t really talked about well in high school number one, so when you’re going into university and trying to figure out what you want to do for the rest of your life because everybody does that when they’re 17, they know exactly what they want to do for the rest of their life and then when you get to university, who talks about death and bodies and human remains like it’s just

Janet Young: Yeah, yeah, for mine it was classical archeology. So it was like here’s a pot, here’s a Roman pot, here’s another Roman pot and here. And so I knew very quickly that that’s not something I wanted to do. But I did take a death and dying class that of sort of piqued my interest in the subject matter and trying to understand how that worked not just now but in the past as well, so it’s sort of piqued my interest for that aspect of archeology that no one had into really introduced me at that point, so.

Yvonne Kjorlien: How did you start working with the Barrick Hill Cemetery?

Janet Young: So it’s really interesting. Well, I think it’s interesting. So when I was working on another project, someone from down the hall was actually the curator of Ontario archeology called me into their office and told me that was I aware of the excavations that were happening in downtown, Ottawa? So we knew that there was a cemetery there for a long time and so, I didn’t at the time, but someone that we both knew, his office overlooked the site, and so that’s who called my colleague. And so that’s really how I found out more details and then I had worked with the police quite a bit. So I reached out to the head of the Ident unit to say, I don’t know if you’re aware, but there is a cemetery there from the 1800s. And so at that point I was put in contact with the archaeologist on the site and we just established working a relationship. And the museum came in to an agreement with the city and so the city allowed it to be my research project and the museum gave me the time to do all the work.

So I was actually down on the site for two summers with the excavation crew. And it’s very odd when you’re… the first site was in one of the main roads in downtown Ottawa, so you’re below road level and there’s people walking by on the sidewalk, but they’re screened off. So you can see normal life going back and forth and you’re basically sitting in the middle of a cemetery. So I came at it, from, I don’t say haphazardly, but I was lucky enough to know enough people in and around the area that informed me of this project and I was allowed to be a part of it, which I really appreciated.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Tell me a little bit about the cemetery itself. So it sounds like downtown Ottawa was built upon this cemetery. And did they know that it was there when they had built up downtown and then what led to then the excavation of the cemetery?

Janet Young: So what happened was…okay, so it’s really an interesting story about how historical cemeteries are used.

So when Colonel By came to the region to build the canal, he had a lot of people, an influx of workers. So he came here in 1826. Canal construction started around 1827. So there was an influx of workers. There was really nothing on that side of the Ottawa River. On the other side of the Ottawa River, there was a lumber industry already but on our side of the Ottawa River there wasn’t anything. So when Colonel By came to town then he started bringing people in, people were hired to do different aspects of the construction. And then there was an infrastructure that came in around these people, so hotels were built and stores were built and stuff like that. So what happened was Colonel By was given the land that Lord Dalhousie had purchased. So it was a bunch of land where the Parliament Hill is today and then into Lower Town. Below that area, the land was owned by Nicholas Spar who was a former lumber yard worker. When Colonel By was doing the canal. he wanted land on either side of the canal so he purchased it. But then he also wanted the land below, what is now Parliament Hill, which is Nicholas Sparks’ land, because they were worried about creating a fortress or something should the Americans attack again, because it was a byproduct of the War of 1812. So what happened was he took 88 acres from Nicholas Sparks.

Yvonne Kjorlien: He just took it.

Janet Young: He just took it. I know they passed the Rideau Canal Act that said basically if you need any land for the Rideau Canal you can take it. And he made the excuse that the land was going to be used as a place to hold water, to help with the workings of the canal. Which was basically a lie. So he took the land. So in those early days, there was no settlers cemetery on the south side of the Ottawa River. People would be ferried over to the other town on the North side, but there was really nothing on the south side. So Colonel By gave, or set aside acreage, for a cemetery that was actually on Nicholas Sparks’ land that he had expropriated. So basically where the cemetery was below Parliament Hill, on a little walking path that went from upper Bytown at the time to lower Bytown. So it’s right in the middle and it was right beside a cedar swamp. So he allowed the cemetery to be created.

We really know nothing about the cemetery other than some of the burial records, but we really know nothing. Nicolas Sparks fought to get his land back and fought to get his land back. So in the late 1840s, he actually got his land back. And so, yeah, I know. It was a very long legal battle. He started almost immediately and he hired a lawyer and fought to get his land back. And so, the cemetery was still there and it’s right in the middle of this prime land, between upper and lower by town. So we started doing was selling lots in and around the area. And then he sold for very cheap price, land that was used for an upper Bytown Market. And we see little breadcrumbs in the newspaper about he paved this road or they made this road going through. So the remains were found on Queen Street. So about in 1851, I think, we have something in the paper saying that they put Queen Street through to the market which means they put a street right over the burial ground.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Oh!

Janet Young: So we start seeing that and it doesn’t look like the cemetery was ever moved. It looks like people who had money and could see what was happening, moved their loved ones. But there was never any formal moving of the cemetery. To the point where, in the 18– I want to say 1854, around there, people who are poor, who were in Bytown, petitioned the city to pay someone to remove the remains of their loved ones because they were becoming exposed in the area of this road. So, we know for a fact that the cemetery was not moved in any formal way.

And so the city just built up around it. Like Nicholas Sparks kind of just didn’t want it to be there anymore. So they just started, selling off lots and creating all these different infrastructure and then people just forgot that it was there. Basically, that’s what happened. Yeah.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Huh. But it sounds like it was used for what, 15, 20 years or so.

Janet Young: Mmm.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah? okay.

Janet Young: It was about I estimate that it opened in the spring, I think, of 1828, the cemetery. And it was closed around 1843. So not even 20 years.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right, okay.

Janet Young: So yeah, and they said it was two acres when closed? So, it was pretty big. Pretty big site.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Okay. And how many individuals do you figure at its maximum? Maybe…

Janet Young: Think the archaeologists thought about 500–

Yvonne Kjorlien: Really? Okay.

Janet Young: –at the time. And we only have small pockets of people and the cemetery was disturbed, starting in the 1870s, so maybe 20 years after it was paved over. People started finding bodies as the infrastructure was being put in.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Okay. So I guess it was just more of a natural urban process to build up over this cemetery.

Janet Young: Yeah, they just wanted to forgotten.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Wow, okay. then…

Janet Young: — which is sad, but it’s just, a lot of historic cemeteries have the same thing: take the way the headstones and just pave over.

Yvonne Kjorlien: So then, what were they doing that there was this excavation going on in the middle of the street and when you got involved. What kind of prompted all that?

Janet Young: Ottawa was putting in the infrastructure for a light rail service —

Yvonne Kjorlien: Ah!

Janet Young: — which runs now underneath Queen Street. But they were doing infrastructure work replacing water mains on Queen Street itself so that area is basically right through the middle of the cemetery and when they when they dug for to put in the water main, they hit bodies, basically, and then They called the police because that’s what you’re supposed to do when you hit bodies. And it went to, there’s the Ontario government, and when it was deemed to cemetery then the archaeologists that they hired had to go and enter an agreement between the city, the province, and anyone who was identified as a descendant.

The Ontario government put an ad in the local paper asking if you think you are descendant of these individuals, could you please come forward and speak for them. One person came forward, and she was not sure whether her ancestor had been moved or not. And so in the end she found out that they had been moved, so she was really not part of the process after that and the churches stepped in.

So the churches who had buried individuals in the cemetery — it was a settler cemetery, it was multi-denominational. So the heads of those churches became the representatives of the individuals.

So it was the representatives the City of Ottawa, the Province, and the archeology company who came to an agreement and I became part of that agreement for work on the individuals.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Okay. Yeah, it’s no small undertaking to excavate a cemetery.

Janet Young: No, it is not and I’m so happy that the archaeologists knew exactly what to do and how to do it because the remains were first discovered in late 2013, but they were not completely, they were not removed or excavations did not progress until the following summer. So it took, like, months to get everything.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Do you have any idea — I know you came later in the process — so I don’t know if you know this, but were they expecting to dig up bodies? Because I can only imagine the poor person on the excavator, just merrily digging away and then suddenly ‘What is in my bucket?’

Janet Young: I think what happened was the city had done a sort of an archaeological, it’s a sort of a report to say if you’re going to hit any archaeological sites, the city had done that. They were told that there was a cemetery there, but it probably been moved. So there was no expectation of finding anybody. And so I think it was a shock when they did. Obviously. But it’s funny because the whole site is crossed with construction events. So there’s a water main trench and then there’s a trench for Bell and then Rogers had done a trench line through the site, but they had dug at night. So when they dug at night, they did their trench they put their cement in and everything. So we were finding human remains on the underside of those cement conduits because they’re digging at night so they didn’t see. And so the fact that they were digging in the day and then they find something large enough that is recognizable to a construction worker? It was enough for them to stop the process. And then anytime there’s digging done in the area they have to have an archaeologist site to sort of watch them. And so the excavations at the site were actually… the Queen Street one was done one summer and the archaeologist had a map of the original downtown before there was buildings or anything. And there was one parking lot that had always been a parking lot. It had never been built upon, never been something else. To this day, it is still a parking lot. And so they’re thinking this is one place that’s not disturbed if anything ever happens we can excavate full individuals and not just truncated burials. And so what happened was the landowner got a permit from the city – I don’t know how — to do a trench for a gas line in the winter of 2016. And what did he do? He went right through a number of burials.

Yvonne Kjorlien: No.

Janet Young: And so, yes, yes. The pristine section. And so that’s why there was a second field season. In 2016, 2017 so that parking lot could be fully excavated but it was just supposed to be the street and then that happened. And then what happened — so if that’s not – so, and I don’t know who’s talking to who or if anyone’s talking to anyone, but for the LRT, they continued trenching down the road where the remains were found initially, so Queen Street. They kept going down the road. So you’re outside the boundaries of the cemetery at this point, all the way down the road. And they were still recovering human remains. And that’s because in the 1940s, a water main was put in down Queen Street and they were taking fill or dirt from the cemetery.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Oh.

Janet Young: And so they were depositing the people, basically remnants of the individuals all the way down Queen Street. So the archaeologists had it was something crazy like a hundred and sixty dump trucks full of earth, that they screened for human remains.

Yvonne Kjorlien: My God, that’s a lot.

Janet Young: Isn’t that a lot? Isn’t that crazy? I appreciate them so much. A lot of work. So the remains that we have for study were actually from those three events and the city is well aware of what’s in the area now and so they are very good about having an archaeologist on site when the construction crews go in to dig beneath the streets now.

Yvonne Kjorlien: You probably know more about that cemetery and about that area than they did back in the 1850s.

Janet Young: If it’s crazy about information that swimming in my head. Because it’s all a mystery. It’s like why does this happen? And you have to go through and you pull on that thread and you follow that mystery to figure out this or that or the other thing. I mean, it’s — and going through old newspapers and, to me it’s just fascinating to try and understand what happened. Why are these people left behind? What happened that the street could be put right over where they were? What happened? So it’s all a mystery and it’s one of the let’s see more interesting thing is to try and see if you can figure it all out. Yeah.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Let’s talk about some of what you found because I find it just fascinating and I’m hoping the listeners will too because you’ve got a blog, “Bone Detective” at historymuseum.ca so if anybody wants to search that, and I find your blogs are contain fascinating stuff so I was wondering if we could touch on some of them and if you’ve had some updates.

Janet Young: Yeah, so I mean obviously there’s lots of stories that have come out of the research and the reason why I initially wanted to do the blog series and the museum supported me, which is really great, was because it was ahead of the reburials and so the remains from that have been excavated have all now been reburied. So it was ahead of the last reburial. And what I really wanted to do is try to bring the people of Ottawa into that history that they might not otherwise know and about these individuals. And so I tried to cherry pick some of the individuals who I was able to do a lot of research on and I had sort of an interesting sort of connection to. And ones that, it’s like a blog series is what, I don’t know, 800, 1000 words. It’s really short, right? And you’re looking at it going, that is five years of work summarized in that little space.

So one of the individuals the one that was found to have all sorts of track marks — I don’t know another way to say it — on his remains and then perforations and then at this crusty substance that were in some of these perforations. And I was able to figure it out, but it took a really long time, you start with: is this something that the body is producing? Is it some for form of cancer? Is it something that he was experiencing? What’s the distribution? How do I see it? There was not a lot of complete skeletons at the site, and he had one of them which was very helpful, to look for distribution. So you start down that path and then you’re like, what are the accretions? Could it be a tumor? Could it be something from gout? Could it be… and so you start going through all of these ideas and then running them to ground and then you’re like, nope, that’s not it, nope, that’s not it.

And so it was really interesting because, when we first did the excavations, I had sent coffinwood off to be identified. And when the identification came back, he basically said “I can’t identify it because it’s bark.” And it was like, “what do you mean it’s bark?” And so I did that it just tuck that sort of information away. And then when I was studying this individual with all these changes on his skeleton, I remembered about the bark and so it occurred to me that it could be not something that he was doing, but something that was being done to him. So I actually did a lot of research and it came… the best solution to this mystery was that it was beetles. So because the bark in the coffins — and I have never found another reference to this. This is the only time… like I had to… there is no reference for this being done at all. And that is Ottawa was a lumber town, Bytown was a lumber town. And so they were taking the logs and they were squaring them in the mills. So they’re taking off the sapwood and the bark and squaring the logs. That sapwood and bark has no value. Even to this day, a whole truck full is 20 bucks. It has absolutely no value because these people in the cemetery were the lowest socioeconomic status, they were building their coffins out of these squarings. And they’re putting the bark side into the coffin so you wouldn’t be able to tell that they were basically the leftovers of the squaring industry. And so what happened was beetles, especially … there’s certain kind of beetles that were very prevalent in Ottawa because of the lumbering industry. They have a multi-year life cycle. So the eggs would have been laid, they would have taken these pieces and built his coffin and buried him. And then in the ground the beetle larvae would have emerged and the only food source was him.

And so the track marks and the perforations, if you look at a log underneath the bark, it’s all beetle activity where they’re eating the top layer of the bone. And then the perforations are where they are creating their nests. And the accretions that I send off for analysis and no one could identify? They’re actually frass. So that it’s basically the beetle poop that they used to line their nests.

And so that was what was in his bones. And so this is a multi-year process of speaking to lumber experts, to Ottawa valley experts about the timber industry, speaking to beetle experts from different places in the world, like trying to get all this information. And all that time and all these years have been put into a 500-word blog series. But it’s so cool, right? It’s one of those things, and that’s why I love doing this research,  there’s no mention of it anywhere. It’s just one of those things that they were just doing because it was cheap and easy, but it wasn’t shared widely. It was nowhere in the literature. It’s nowhere. And I think that that one to me is super interesting. And that’s not the body reacting to it, but actually the beetles creating something on the body.

I mean, there’s other stories of identifying what people were doing for a living based on the remains and one of the main ones that I put in the blog series was the lady who was, we believed to be a milner, which was another one of those — she was the only one in the cemetery. She’s lying on her right side and she had a mat of hair that she was lying on. And so first we thought it was a horsehair pillow and I sent the hair off for identification and it came back as human. And so there was a lot of coffin wood that was stuck to it. So I peeled the coffin wood away, and you could see the styling, you could see the curls, you could see how it was pulled back over her ear. And so it ended up being her hair. And all so within her cranial vault there was a very soft, almost loamy, it’s almost dry peat moss, that was inside her cranial vault and I had it analyzed and it came back as brain. So yeah, she was the only one at the site who had preserved brain tissue and preserved hair. I was working with a scientist Parks Canada trying to figure out what is this and everything like that. Then I started noticing skeletal changes on her and and so I noticed her teeth lot of pockmarks in them. Where I have a tailor from the site, he has the same sort of thing from holding pins between your teeth, but it wasn’t to the same extent so I didn’t think she was really sewing anything.

And then she had these changes inside her knees, where the ACL attaches, anterior cruciate ligament attaches. And she had some grooves on the inside of a patella. So I knew that she was holding her legs at a 45 degrees to create the grooves in the patella and that she’s pulling her knees together, seated.

I did some research and this is exactly the position that a milner would take. So the milner would hold a head form between their knees while they worked on it.  So that would explain the skeletal changes and dental changes that I was seeing. But, again, why does she have preserved brain tissue? And why does she have preserved hair? Originally, I thought maybe she was embalmed,  but embalming really wasn’t a thing during the use of the cemetery, it didn’t really become a thing until after the Civil War, but we do know that those early embalming fluids contain mercury. So I was following sort of that thread of things and early milners, they’re all so termed hatters and in sort of Bytown or early Canada a lot of them were female. It was one of those occupations that females could hold at the time. And they would work with furs to create hats, and working with furs, they would use mercury. And so we know that mercury was used embalming so we know that it helps preserve tissue. So I did a bunch of research on the hatting industry and what they do actually crosses into the body. So she had a high degree of — I think it’s organic   versus inorganic mercury — so it tells that she wasn’t ingesting it because inorganic mercury is not small enough to go into the hair. So it wasn’t like she was ingesting. It was being left, leaving her body through her hair as it grew what that wasn’t happening. It was being infused into the hair. And again with the milner industry, they would have a lot of mercury vapor. And so it was the vapors that were going into her hair and it would also cross the blood brain boundary when they inhale it. So that’s why you get mad as a hatter because they were inhaling the mercury. That would explain why her hair is preserved and her brain preserved and no one else at the site had it because she was a milner. 

And so again lots of little threads that you have to keep pulling and so you follow a trail and you get some information that doesn’t really make sense and then you follow another trail and eventually all those pieces can come together to create a really good story. And so, I mean, those are just two of them. The cemetery was filled with really great stories and things that I don’t understand either. So I have a child who had dark circles inside their eye sockets. And so I thought, okay, they might have been buried with coins because the silver, as it deteriorates, could leave a dark staining inside their orbits. And then I had it sent off for testing. And it was burnt. And it was burnt and a really high level of heat. And so these were actually scorch marks, but they were just inside the eyes. So, I know! It’s like what is that?

Yvonne Kjorlien: My mind goes to strange and disturbed places with that.

Janet Young: I know! And I don’t know — is that something that happened postmortem? Obviously, the person wasn’t thrashing around when it happened. So is it some treatment postmortem? Is it — what is this? So even though I have some of these mysteries sort of solved there are still a number of them where it’s still, like, okay, I have to try and figure this out, but it’s very lengthy process to go through to try and do this. But I feel like for this population, that I want to try and tell all their stories fully so to me it’s worth the time and the effort to try and really understand who these people were and so, yeah. I mean, they’re mysteries in terms of they’re very interesting, but they’re also a story that’s there from this person and just to be able to really understand those stories and to tell them for other people I think is really important.

Yvonne Kjorlien: So on that note, what do you think that learning about these past populations gives us here now? What is the benefit of studying the past. I guess?

Janet Young: I think the benefit is to understand that, as a population or any population, you weren’t just sort of plopped somewhere. There’s people that came before. There’s people had really hard lives, that worked really hard to get us to a point in history where we are able to have what we have and do what we do, and I think for me — I live in Ottawa population of million people — just one person and I have so many stories. So it’s the idea that every person has a history, every person has a story to tell and I think that connecting us to the past through these stories, I think is important to ground us in our history. You know, yes, it was Bytown. Yes, they did this, I said this they did that, but to say, okay, there was this person here who worked really hard who exposed themselves to really harsh conditions just to survive. And to understand that those people – like, this is the first settler cemetery of Ottawa. These are the people that did most of the living and paying and dying in this town to create this town. They are the beginning of the nation’s capital population. And I think that for us to be able to respect them, respect those people in the past, we can only hope that we are respected the same in the future. That we are people throughout time. We’ve had our challenges and everyone’s story is different and to be able to connect people today to those stories, and understand what was sacrificed for them to be here and to be in this town, I think it’s really important.

And for Barrack Hill Cemetery, what has happened now, is that Beachwood Cemetery, which is the National Cemetery, has created a Barrack Hill Cemetery within their borders. And they do tours.  And so all these stories that I’m able to decipher and provide them, are being passed down to all these individuals who go on these tours and try to understand the history of Ottawa and the history of the working class, even people — they’re not the people that had the money and had the power and they were the people that were there every single day working to survive. And so I think it’s important that we understand that. That we came from something, that everything around us was built by somebody else. And to appreciate that aspect of our lives today.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, we have a tendency to take things for granted. Don’t we?

Janet Young: Yes, we do.

Yvonne Kjorlien: It’s nice to be able to say, yeah, there are others here before us and they created this and you’re right, we didn’t just manifest ourselves here adults in this city place wherever there are others here before us and they helped create where we are today.

Janet Young: Yeah, and I mean a lot of kids didn’t make it. They went through several epidemics: smallpox, cholera, to create something. So yeah, I think that we’re less if we don’t understand what we came from. Appreciate it, even.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right. So, what do you — you mentioned that the excavation took place in the middle of the street and you had pedestrians and life going on around you. What was that experience like when you had kind of modern day living people going on and here you were digging in the ground in the past.

Janet Young: It’s surreal, I guess.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Did you have people stop and ask you what you were doing?

Janet Young: No, because it was blocked they couldn’t see there was screens. And then what happened was after the excavations started, they put up tents. Because people could see down from the buildings because it’s right in the middle of downtown Ottawa. So people could see looking down from the buildings and so they put tents up. So there was some news articles about it happening, but the general person, and you could sit there and you can listen to people have everyday conversations walking by you and you’re like, wow. I think that anyone would have been fascinated by what was happening, but if you had opened it up, then traffic wouldn’t move at all. You’d have a gathering around, trying to be a part of it and understand it. So in that sense, it was nice that it was a blocked off, but really surreal.

Yvonne Kjorlien: And so the remains have been all reburied. I’m guessing or there’s still some undergoing analysis or investigation.

Janet Young: So they’ve all been reburied. So the ones excavated the first season, so 2014, they were a reburied in 2017. And then the ones that were excavated in 2016, were we buried in 2019. And then we just had one in the fall for the remains that were found throughout the length of Queen Street. So that was the final reburial. So there is three burials, and each is commemorated with a plaque at the new Bararck Hill Cemetery at Beachwood. So

Yvonne Kjorlien: Cool.

Janet Young: I want to say the city did an amazing job. They opened the first three burials. It was open to the public. They could come and was held at the Museum. They were allowed to come in and look at the boxes. So the City had made and everyone in burial box and tried to follow methods from the time. And so they were all there and people could come and pay the respects and try to understand more about the history and then the second and for the first second and third reburial They got a horse-drawn hearse, so.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Wow!

Janet Young: The majority of the remains were — except for the last reburial — were buried before, and then they had a representative coffin, and that individual was brought to the place of burial in a horse-drawn hearse that would have been representative of the time. So it was really well done. It was multi-denominational because many different religious groups were part of the cemetery. The City did an amazing job and trying to pull it all together, and to give them a respect that they might not had in life, obviously left behind where they were. So try to restore some of that respect to these people.

Yvonne Kjorlien: It’s interesting in the perspectives, because back in the 1850s, when the cemetery was still being used in the cemetery, the fact that it was paved over or built around and just wanted to be forgotten. It’s a very different perspective from how we treat human remains in cemeteries nowadays.

Janet Young: It’s very different. And I don’t know what that is. I don’t know how that evolved or why. There were early reports that people were using the crania the kids a soccer balls, the ones that were exposed at the site, right because there was a school nearby. And so I don’t know what that is. I don’t know how. They could have just done that now there’s articles in the paper for people who are going: you can’t do this, you can’t just go right over the cemetery, you can’t leave these people. But it didn’t change how things were handled at the time. I think the people that were part of the government of the city, they were just trying to they’re more concerned about their economics and they just went and did it anyway.

There was a large transient population at the time so, people weren’t really that linked to the past as much as I think now. But I’m amazed. I’m actually just amazed at that. But we have it to this day. We have old historic burial grounds that are now parks, right? So I mean a generation after Barrick had close — there is an area in Ottawa called McDonald’s Gardens, and anyone who has moved from Barrack would have been moved to McDonald’s Gardens. It became the next major multi-denominational cemetery for the town. It’s a park now because they remove the headstones — some people were moved to Beachwood, others weren’t — they remove the headstones and they made it a park.

And so it’s the same thing with downtown Kingston. There’s all these old burial grounds that people just removed headstones and just use the space of something else. And people don’t know that. It’s not part of the general knowledge of the people that live around these spaces a lot of the times. It’s just a historic view that people are not aware of. And so yeah, I mean, I appreciate the fact that we’ve evolved into making them parks and not just digging up the bones and throwing them somewhere. I mean, that’s an evolution in itself, but we would never think of doing that to this day, right?. There is application. Yeah strange.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, yeah. I’m conscious of the time, although I would love to talk to you just for hours on this. It’s so interesting just one last question and it’s kind of off on a tangent, but I wanted to know that, if you could go back and visit your younger self, 20, 30 years ago, what would you tell young Janet? That, I don’t know, you would appreciate now.

Janet Young: I would tell her to enjoy the process. I think a lot of times you’re fighting so hard to advance yourself and to try and get things done and do things, that you don’t enjoy the evolution of your skills and the evolution of your knowledge and you don’t enjoy — it’s a situations that you have to try and get through as opposed to appreciating them and enjoying them for what they are. And I think that, for me, that would be the one thing that I would go back and say relax, just enjoy what you’re doing and appreciate it. And yeah, I think that that’s the main takeaway for me.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Lovely. Janet this has been a delight. Thank you very much for coming on and talking about yourself and the Barrack Hill Cemetery.

Janet Young: Thank you for having me. I hope it didn’t babble too much. I have so much information in my head. So thank you for having me.

Transcribed by Google

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/

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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?

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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

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Get my first novel Memoirs of a Reluctant Archaeologist here: https://books2read.com/u/38PrYL

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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!

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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:

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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.

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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.