Scattered

*** 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:

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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.

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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.

Kimberlee Moran is a professor of forensic archaeology at Rutgers University in Camden, New Jersey. She holds an undergraduate degree in Classical and Near Eastern archaeology from Bryn Mawr College and a Masters of Science in forensic archaeological science from the Institute of Archaeology at University College London. Kimberlee worked as a contract archaeologist for Hunter Research, a CRM firm based in Trenton, NJ, prior to moving to the UK. She moved back to New Jersey in 2010. Her archaeological research includes ancient fingerprints, artificial cranial deformation, the Whispering Woods site in Salem, NJ, and the First Baptist Church of Philadelphia also known as “The Arch Street Project”.

In this episode we talk about:

You can find more information about Kimberlee Moran on her webpage here: https://kimberleemoran.camden.rutgers.edu/

You can find more information about:

Kimberlee references the following books:

Ethics and Professionalism in Forensic Anthropology
by Nicholas V. Passalacqua & Marin A. Pilloud

A 21st Century Ethical Toolbox by Anthony Weston

If you’re interested in ethics in archaeology, you can check out the following:

Society for American Archaeology: https://www.saa.org/career-practice/ethics-in-professional-archaeology

Notes from the start:

Tell me about you! Where are you and why do you listen to Scattered? Fill out the survey and be entered into a draw to receive the ebook Memoirs of a Reluctant Archaeologist.

Support the podcast and my research and Buy Me A Coffee. Your contributions will go toward my research, webhosting, and my time. Want to find out more about my research? Check out the Scavenging Study.

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

Do you have a suggestion for a topic on the Scattered podcast?

Do you have a question about working with human remains?

Drop Yvonne a line at [email protected]

Transcript

Kimberlee Moran: My name is Kimberlee Moran, I’m an associate teaching professor, and director of forensics at Rutgers University in Camden.

Yvonne Kjorlien: And where is Camden? Just for all the people in the world who are not up on the US geography.

Kimberlee Moran: So Rutgers University is the state university of New Jersey. It has three campuses. It’s flagship campus, it’s kind of smack in the center of the state in New Brunswick and then it has two satellite campuses, one in Newark, New Jersey, which is kind of more of its urban campus, and then Camden, New Jersey. And Camden New Jersey is by far the smallest of the three campuses. And so we have very much kind of a small liberal arts college kind of feel. We’re in the southern portion of the state, basically right across the river from Philadelphia.

Yvonne Kjorlien: I see. You’re right in that Northeast corner of the US.

Kimberlee Moran: Great place to be, lots going on.

Yvonne Kjorlien: I imagine autumn there is just beautiful.

Kimberlee Moran: Yeah, it really is. For me, so my background is Forensic Archeology.  I started off my career as an archaeologist. I studied the Greeks, the Romans, Mesopotamia. Never in a million years that I ever think I was going to be doing forensic science. I did end up in the forensic world as a Master’s student and have never looked back. Although I still do a lot of work in traditional archeology as well. So half of the time I have one foot in the past half of the time I have one foot in the present. I’m working in both kind of modern criminal justice and crime scene investigation, but then every now and again, I swing back to my roots and archeology. So being in New Jersey is a wonderful place. It’s very, very good forensically because we’re right smack in the middle of major metropolitan areas that have really excellent forensic laboratories and forensic systems but also archaeologically it is a very historically rich and archaeologically rich area to be. So I get the best of both worlds, being in New Jersey.

Yvonne Kjorlien: And now I was recently having a conversation with somebody about sort of the premise of modern archeology and the way that, I guess the call for archeology nowadays isn’t so much that we go out and willy-nilly dig up Heritage or historical sites. It’s more of a salvage.

Kimberlee Moran: Yeah.

Yvonne Kjorlien: We need to rescue the sites from impending doom because of construction or some other kind of destruction.

Kimberlee Moran: Yeah, so there’s a bunch of different things going on. I mean, one thing that I really appreciate about our modern approaches to archeology is we are grounding archa eology much more robustly in the sciences. And we’re really applying a lot of scientific principles, scientific approaches and scientific testing to what we do within archeology. So back in the day, as you say, it was kind of like willy-nilly, let’s just go find some cool stuff, but now it’s like, okay what are some research questions that we have? What is it that we really want to learn about this site and this material? And then what are the methods that we’re gonna employ to actually ensure that we’re answering those research questions? So there’s that kind of aspect kind of, bringing archaeology more in line with other science fields but also kind of as you say, this idea of salvage, maybe it’s a little bit more about stewardship because archaeological resources are finite. They will not last forever, particularly if they’re impacted by human action. And so, we’re thinking about more of how we preserve archaeological material, preserve that cultural heritage for future generations. And then, in those instances where we can’t just in the ground, leave it alone, how do we, again, kind of rescue it and ensure that it’s being adequately, stewarded, not just the artifacts that come out the ground, but the knowledge that comes out of the ground as well.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right. Yeah, and I’m always floored by what we do nowadays compared to what is glorified and portrayed in the movies and media, and what have you, about just going out the archaeologists going out and digging up treasure. They’re looking for treasure.

Kimberlee Moran: Right, right.

Yvonne Kjorlien: And whether or not the museum gets it back. And then, even if the museum gets it will, then it’s kind of in the gilding cage.

Kimberlee Moran: Right.

Yvonne Kjorlien: The people that that artifact or the site belongs to, they never get to see it again. And it’s behind this plate glass. Nobody touches it. You’d be lucky if you ever get to study it.

Kimberlee Moran: Sure, I mean, we’ve just recently had another Indiana Jones film, right?

Yvonne Kjorlien: Haha.

Kimberlee Moran: And for my generation, we grew up under Indiana Jones, many of us are in archaeology because of Indiana Jones. And, I also see this in my forensic career as well, right? We have all these flavors of CSI programming and many students are in my classroom because they’ve watched, all those CSI shows and they think, that that’s their portrayal of what a crime scene investigator or forensic scientist does. So these shows are great for generating interest in the respective fields and maybe inspiring people to go into them. But yeah, obviously they’re not accurate representations and there’s a lot of responsibility that we have as archaeologists to interact with the public and to kind of bring a more realistic version of archeology and to kind of dismantle that idea of the gilded shape cage of museum collections and museums and really bring the collections out to the general public and have them make that connection of the present with the past.

One of the things about museums is only about 5% of everything a museum has in its collection is ever on display. So there are just troves of material that never see the light of day that are just in storage. Part of that is because it’s stuff that might not be particularly interesting to the general public. Like mounds and mounds of shards broken pottery and things like that. Whoever is curating it might think, okay, nobody really wants to see just a pile of what looks like trash. Archaeology is just kind of historic trash picking in a way. And so again it’s really important to connect people with what’s going on behind the scenes in museums because these collections are accessible. They’re there for research and further study and, even members of the general public have access to those collections if there’s something that they’re studying or they’re researching. So there’s a lot going on behind the scenes in museums. But yeah, again, typically on a day-to-day basis, we just don’t see that other world.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, and so that kind of brings us around. The reason I wanted Kimberlee on the podcast was to talk about ethics of working with human remains because there’s been sort of a shift in perspective, I think over the past 10 yea rs at least. It used to be okay to work with human remains and not just okay but more desirable because you need to work with the remains in the classroom so that you can effectively work with the remains when you’re out in the real world. So you know what to look for, now how it feels, and it just makes you better at what you’re going to be doing. But nowadays, there’s just…people are kind of almost putting a ban on working with remains especially archaeology, anthropology. So I wanted to talk about that. And you have this lovely little story about….was it Philadelphia? You were working on a… you had heard about some human reigns found in Philadelphia. Is that the way it goes?

Kimberlee Moran: Sure. So first of all, just kind of taking a step back, historically anthropologists and archaeologists and I’m going back, a hundred or more years have had a very cavalier approach to human remains. This kind of idea that bones are cool. And there have been a lot of pretty terrible things that have happened within archeology and anthropology, in terms of the treatment of human remains, the acquisition of human remains, particularly of kind of vulnerable populations. We’ve got a long and horrible history in the United States of how we have addressed the remains of indigenous peoples that have very strong feelings about death, and what is appropriate to happen to the human body and archaeologists in the past have just completely disregarded that and trophy hunted, essentially.

And over the generations. we’ve really taken a good hard look at ourselves and our profession and have really kind of tightened up our approach to human remains. So this really came to a head in the 1990s. When we passed legislation in the United States to protect the graves and the cultural heritage of Native Americans. So, NAPGRA is the name of the law that protects and helps to repatriate cultural material related to indigenous people and their human remains.

But that’s kind of the only legal framework that has ever been put in place in the United States in terms of the treatment of this kind of material. So while we’ve gotten a lot better and we’ve really established some good ethical frameworks, we only have that one legal framework, and you still get kind of the spectrum within bioarcheology, anthropology, forensic anthropology of the use and the treatment of human remains.

So in terms of my own work and my thinking has really shifted over the years as well, but back in 2016, I was on the train to work one day and I’m an avid newspaper reader and I opened up the newspaper and I saw this article that was entitled “Old Bones Found and Nobody’s In Charge”, and it was a story of a construction site in Philadelphia. Bones were coming out of the ground and everyone kind of raised their hand and said, “Uh, not my problem. Has nothing to do with me or my agency.” So the Medical Examiner’s Office was called. They established at these were historic human remains — so nothing legal or forensic, nothing to do with them. The Historical Commission was then turned to and they said, “This site lies outside of a registered historical district so nothing really to do with us either.” And then finally, the site was a private construction project, so there were no kind of public funds involved and so other protections that might be in place at kind of the state level also did not apply. So it very much fell into this gray area. And part of the article was this picture of the site foreman looking kind of unhappy and he was holding this box of bones. And it only took a glance to realize that these very much were human bones, human remains. So, this is 2016 and I’m thinking to myself, “Gee, I’d love a box of bones. I could do something with a box of those. I’d at least like to know more about what’s in that box.” So I was a little worried that I might kind of sound like a weirdo if I just called up the construction company and say, Hey, give me your box alone, right? Yeah, probably that wouldn’t go over so well. So I contacted a friend of mine. Who’s the curator of the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia? The Mütter Museum is a museum dedicated to medical history. They currently have a lot of human remains on display — that might not be forever — but the Mütter Museum has a very well-known reputation in the city and I thought, if it’s someone from the Mütter museum called, that would look way more legit than just me calling. So, I reached out to my friend, and I shared with her the article and I said, “Hey, we should get this box of bones and find out what’s here and try to understand why they’re bones coming out of this site in the first place, and are we likely to encounter more human remains?” So she wasn’t particularly interested and then I kind of uttered the famous last words that to this day, I regret. I texted her. “Don’t worry. I’ll do all the work.”

Yvonne Kjorlien: Those are very famous last words.

Kimberlee Moran: Yes. And, man, have I gotten that back in spades.

So again, to make it very long story short, we got the box of bones and we came to find that this site was the former First Baptist Church of Philadelphia Cemetery. And according to all the historical records out there, it shouldn’t be there anymore. There shouldn’t be any human remains. In 1860, it was relocated to a kind of large public open space, kind of cemetery, called Mount Moriah, which is kind of in the southern part of the city kind of close to what’s now the Philadelphia airport. The church had relocated. It was originally on 2nd Street. It had moved a couple of times and nobody was really looking after their burial ground. There were indications from newspapers at the time and from church records, that the cemetery had really fallen into disrepair. There were tenement houses that surrounded the cemetery and people were just throwing their daily garbage into the cemetery and it had gotten into quite a state. So the First Baptist Church in the 1850s bought a plot in this Mount Moriah Cemetery and they put lots of public notices in the papers saying, we are digging up our old burial ground and we are relocating to this new place, and if you have any family members buried here, contact this guy, Locksley, and get it sorted out. And there’s also newspaper articles of the actual work in progress. In fact, there were some interesting observations of how well-preserved individuals were. They would open up a coffin of somebody who had died 30 plus years ago, and family members were still able to recognize the individual.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Wow.

Kimberlee Moran: So that’s very interesting, right? But again, this cemetery should not still be here at Second and Arch Street in Philadelphia. So, initially we thought that maybe these were just a few individuals that had been missed or maybe these were individuals that didn’t have next to kin, so they just left them alone. So our initial approach to the site, once we got permission from the property developer who did not want to have to be dealing with any of this, but they let us come on site just to monitor the overall excavation with the backhoe. They were putting in a two-story parking garage, and because they were going so deep into the ground, this is why they were encountering these remains that were left behind. So what started off as what we thought was just a salvage excavation, turned into a full-fledged archaeological excavation and ultimately in the end around about 500 individuals have been excavated from this site.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Holy cow.

Kimberlee Moran: And there are still more that are under existing structures. After doing our research, we know that we have at least 1700 named individuals that were buried in this burial ground, but we may have up to 3,000 burials in the burial ground.

Yvonne Kjorlien: That’s more than just missing a few individuals.

Kimberlee Moran: Right. Right, exactly. so, Mr. Locksley, clearly did not do his job in 1860.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah.

Kimberlee Moran: Again, we now have evidence as to why that happened. But, we became the stewards of nearly 500 sets of human remains, and we can talk more about some of the legal things later on, but we were given permission by the courts in Philadelphia that oversee unclaimed remains to study those remains for approximately five years, try to identify any of them if we could, and then all the remains were to be reburied in September 2023. It is now October 2023 and those remains are in my building, just next door, and have not been reburied yet and we can kind of circle back as to why that is.

But that has been what originally started as a box of bones, ended up being a whole cemetery, something that we never anticipated in a million years. What we thought was just going to be a very discreet, little research project, ended up being five to six years of our lives and I say ‘our’ because this is now become a real kind of collaborative initiative. It’s expanded way beyond myself, but, yes, it has dominated our lives for at least six years and it’s not over yet.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Because our previous conversation, before the recording, we talked about some of the legal and ethical issues that came up with that. Let’s take a step back because when we were talking before, you told me about the MOVE group.

Kimberlee Moran: Yeah.

Yvonne Kjorlien: And I had always wondered kind of why we are now at the place we are with this whole perspective on not at all using human remains in research, in any study, you can’t even use them in pictures and all that kind of stuff…

Kimberlee Moran: Right.

Yvonne Kjorlien: And where did that come from? Because I’m probably around the same generation as you and, we were brought up using real human remains, in the lab, in the classroom…

Kimberlee Moran: Right.

Yvonne Kjorlien: that’s what you learned on, and you learned how human remains felt. But now the pendulum is swinging quite the opposite way. Where not even human remains in pictures. So, where did that all come from? And you were saying it’s from the MOVE group. So, tell us about that.

Kimberlee Moran: So really, I mean, there’s kind of a culmination of multiple things at play.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, that’s usually the way it is.

Kimberlee Moran: We’re in a really complicated time in history right now.

So, first of all, we have everything that’s happened from the pandemic, and from everything that’s happened, post-George Floyd and a much height in sense of social justice which is really wonderful. We really need that. So we’re a lot more aware of all the various kind of groups that have been oppressed and have been neglected and all the things that, we as white people have just kind of taken for granted. And so that’s part of it is just kind of having our heads in a different space. We’re really paying more attention to things than we ever did before.

The other side of it, and again, it really has come into this interesting moment of history, is something again that happened in Philadelphia, a couple things that have happened in Philadelphia. One of those is the discovery that some human remains from a pretty horrible incident that I’ll describe in a minute we’re never returned to the next of kin. So, back in the 1980s, there was a kind of social group called MOVE. And they kind of lived, kind of communally, the kind of main portion of this group took over a block in Philadelphia. They had kind of communal raising of their children, they all kind of changed their surnames to Africa. They were trying to be self-sufficient in terms of growing their own food and various things like that. And they had a lot of negative interactions with the police and also some of the neighbors as well.

But, they were well known to the police and individuals were kind of regularly arrested and various things like that. So, in the 1980s, there was really a kind of watershed moment where the police department in Philadelphia decided to — and this is not an exaggeration — they decided to drop a bomb on the compound from a helicopter. So you can look this up in the newspapers at the time or more recently. So a bomb was dropped on this city block in Philadelphia. Obviously there was a huge fire. Lots of people from the MOVE movement died as a result of everything kind of going up in flames and a number of those individuals were children.

So after the fire was put out and the Medical Examiner and death investigators came to process the scene and collected the human remains, there were quite a few charred human remains that were recovered and sent to the Medical Examiner’s Office. The Medical Examiner worked with several anthropologists based at the University of Pennsylvania. And, this is pretty routine. Even today, the Medical Examiner kind of works with outside anthropologists when there are skeletonized human remains. And for whatever reason, some of these remains, two bones of children, were retained by the anthropologists. And the anthropologist used them in classes, used images of them in public lectures, and the identities of these remains were known and the next of kin to these remains were known. And yet these remains were retained. There was also another box of remains that were later found in the Medical Examiner’s Office that the Medical Examiner was trying to kind of quietly cremate and dispose of but they were found as well.

So relatively recently within the past couple of years it came to light that these remains had been moving around, to different institutions, used in, again very cavalier and kind of callous way, and clearly never any intention by the anthropologist to ever return them to the next of kin. So has caused…it just it’s been a massive incident in Philadelphia. There are regularly newspaper articles about this and kind of the next, iteration of the saga, and it has sent ripples across the anthropology / bioarcheology community.

In conjunction to that, the University of Pennsylvania has for many, many years have a collection of skulls called the Morton Collection. And Morton was a very unapologetic racist and he collected all of these skulls to basically show that the brain capacity of non-whites was smaller than white individuals. And so it’s come to light that many of these skulls were kind of grave robbed, or they come from enslaved individuals, various things that again just casks, even more of a shadow on this collection of remains. So again, lots of negative press for the University of Pennsylvania. And, unfortunately, it’s been that negative press that has really kind of caused a lot of fear and trepidation amongst the larger community.

So rather than kind of digging deep into the issues and determining what is and isn’t appropriate and having some conversations and maybe coming up with a framework, just again kind of out of fear of what could happen and the articles that could come out, there’s been this kind of retraction within the community of pulling inwards and I’m putting an air quotes “cleaning up” what we have and just kind of pretending, kind of sweeping things under a rug. That’s kind of how I feel, that rather than just coming straight out, “Let’s talk about this,” it’s more kind of, “Let’s just make this problem quietly go away.” And yeah, that’s kind of where we are at the moment. So it’s a really challenging environment.

Kimberlee Moran: and I think we have a lot of work to do to kind of come out of this in a productive way that allows us to continue train our students and prepare them for work in the field, to continue good ethical research, and to also continue having good practices within museums that have collections of human remains. There’s a lot of work that we still need to do.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah. A lot of that the past work… because I’m not too sure that there’s a scientific discipline out there that doesn’t have kind of a shadowy past where, there’s at least a few individuals that we’re not doing right things.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Good things and what’s the discipline to do about that shadowy past?

Kimberlee Moran: Right.

Yvonne Kjorlien: But yeah I think as archaeologists and bio anthropologists. We’ve kind of got our work cut out for us.

Kimberlee Moran: But at the same time that there’s a lot of fear, this could actually be a very exciting point in history for us to be doing this work. I find it very kind of intellectually stimulating, and also morally stimulating to want to jump in and engage in this and have these discussions. I think we do ourselves a disservice by not just kind of facing these issues head on.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Absolutely, absolutely. I fully agree with you on that. I look at this as, “What lessons are we to learn from this.”

Kimberlee Moran: Yeah, definitely.

Yvonne Kjorlien: And how can we move forward in a productive manner that we can all live with?

Kimberlee Moran: And this is a great teaching moment for our students.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right.

Kimberlee Moran: Let’s pull our students in and make them part of this conversation because they are the anthropologist and bio archaeologists of the future.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Mm-hmm

I asked you in an email about this. I’m sort, of how much does personal integrity play into professional ethics. Because for, I mean, we’re not only dealing with perhaps a generational perspective of these anthropologists who are circulating the world with these two children’s from the MOVE group. So, maybe a generational integrity and their perspective there, but also a sense of professional ethics that’s becoming more and more, I guess, I want to say, more distinct in anthropology. But then there’s also a personal integrity as well,…maybe that the morals and values part of that. So yeah. How does that all play in?

Kimberlee Moran: Right, right. So, the personal integrity is what makes you care in the first place and what makes you want to address these issues. When you don’t have that personal integrity, that’s when these bad things happen. But at the same time, you have professional ethics which really kind of codify a set of standards within the discipline. So even if you don’t care, there should be a framework within which you have to work, because you are part of this profession, you have signed up to be members of particular association. So, we have the Society for American Archeology We have the American Association of Physical Anthropologists. We have lots of different organizations. The American Academy Forensic Science, that has an anthropology section. We have lots of organizations organizations that, if you are part of those organizations, you have agreed to follow the Code of Professional Ethics, that they have set out and different organizations, they all have basically the same general ethical principles but different organizations are more kind of direct in what they say you should do as opposed to others. So some professional organizations just basically say don’t do bad things, don’t misrepresent your credentials. Very, very kind of generalized. Whereas other professional organizations really say these are our values and these are the things that you need to abide by if you’re going to be part of this community. We take our personal integrity and we take those folks that care, and we build professional ethics that then we all have to abide by, but there will still sometimes be gaps and that’s where you get kind of the spectrum of interpretation of how, I guess I should say, how far we should go in terms of what we do with human remains.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Let’s take that and talk about what you went through. With the construction site, the Baptist Church in Philadelphia…

Kimberlee Moran: Sure.

Yvonne Kjorlien: because it was a gray area. You said, there was some legal and…

Kimberlee Moran: Right.

Yvonne Kjorlien: all stuff going on before you were to work with the remains.

Kimberlee Moran: Yeah, there was a lot of stuff. So, first of all, we’ve got, the legal gray area where nobody is regulating what’s happening here because this is a private project, it falls outside of preservation regulations and things of that nature. Again, initially we just thought here are a few leftover remains. We had no idea of the scope of what we were dealing with. One of the things that became apparent very early on is that the construction company was…they weren’t going to allow us to do good archeology. They were kind of placating us by allowing us to be on site to just monitor the backhoe. And when the backhoe hit human remains, we had a few minutes to stop the backhoe, take a few pictures to document location and context, basically hand excavate the remains and put them into a box to then go someplace else. And then, the backhoe would just continue to work. Construction was not stopped because we had no authority to stop it. And there wasn’t anybody with authority that was interested in getting involved in this situation. If we annoyed the construction company any point, they could tell us to leave and then nothing was gonna happen. No salvage, no protection was gonna happen. So that was our first ethical issue is: what is worse, bad archeology or no archeology at all?

We were reaching out to various organizations, trying to get some guidance on what we should do, but again, still trying to kind of be on the down-low, because we knew that at any point, we could get kicked off the site and that would be the end of it. And one of the archaeologists that we spoke to point blank told us to walk away, that we should have nothing to do with this, we were going to set Philadelphia archeology back by 30 years. And we said to this archaeologist, “Look, if we’re not there, these things are getting thrown away. We know that they’re being mashed up by construction machinery, and they’re going into big dump trucks to be taken off site with all the dirt that they’re trying to remove. How can we in good conscious allow that to happen?” The archaeologist had no answer for us, just continued to reiterate that we shouldn’t be involved. The rationale of why we shouldn’t be involved is because being involved gave the construction company of veneer of legitimacy. They could say, “Look, we’re doing the right thing. We’re working with archaeologists,” even though clearly we were not producing a good archaeological product here. Though, I understand where she was coming from, but, from my personal integrity, I couldn’t leave that site. Knowing what would happen in our absence.

So we made the decision to continue to be involved, even though all of us were kind of terrified that this was gonna be the end of our careers, we’ll never work in this town again, sort of deal, but we just couldn’t in good conscience allow these remains to be just flagrantly destroyed. So that was our first kind of ethical conundrum.

Our second ethical conundrum was these remains did not want to be disturbed. This was not something that they intended or consented to back in the 18th and 19th centuries. So, this is a pretty terrible situation. How can we bring good about in this situation? How can we — and maybe even a bit we’ll talk about some ethical frameworks, but there’s one ethical framework which has to do with minimizing harm and maximizing good — how can we strike that balance? How can we minimize the harm happening to these remains and maximize benefit for both the remains and for the larger public and for the academic community as well.

Part of that has to do with the actual subsequent analysis that happened to these remains. And our goal has really been to try to build stories. We were calling them osteobiographies: trying to use what is available to us of the physical individual, as well as the historical record, as well as other sort of scientific techniques that can give us insights into who this person is. What is their story? What was their life like? Rather than making these individuals objects that just were salvaged or rescued or whatever language you want to use, but turning them into people that we can have a relationship with. And that also kind of goes to some ethical frameworks, this idea of relationships and care.

And part of that for us has been involving our students in the work as well as doing analysis in the first place. So, these remains aren’t just sitting in a dark storage room, waiting to be reburied. There has been an interaction with these remains, between our researchers, between our students to try to, again, build relationships between the past and the present, build stories, and maximize the benefit that could come from what was otherwise a terrible situation.

Yvonne Kjorlien: That’s lovely. I really like the idea of having a relationship with the remains, and not just with the remains, but the people who used to be the remains.

Kimberlee Moran: And that’s something you lose when you don’t work with actual human remains…  

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right.

Kimberlee Moran: when you don’t involve actual human remains in teaching or when you don’t have them on display. One of the many books that I have in my office is a book on Ethics and Professionalism in Forensic Anthropology.  It’s written by Nicholas Passalacqua — I always say his name wrong — and Marin Pilloud. It’s not a very big book, it’s pretty thin, but it’s got some real treasures in here. And one of the things I really like is that…so, Europe generally, but also the United Kingdom has dealt with these issues generations before we’ve even been thinking about them. I studied in the United Kingdom. One of the things that happened in the UK when I was over there, it came to light that medical doctors were holding on to human tissue, after death, after transplants, all sorts of stuff — and again children were kind of involved — and using them for research and stuff like that. And there was a huge backlash and what resulted is something called the Human Tissue Act. And the Human Tissue Act is very reactionary and it tightens up what can and cannot be done with human tissue, including human remains to the point where it’s really stifled a lot of research and work and education and stuff like that.

There are models out there to look towards that are both good and bad. There are aspects of the Human Tissue Act that are really great and really wonderful and really necessary. But it also shows what can happen within legislation when things swing in a reactionary way. But one of the things that’s in this book is a statement that was developed by the United Kingdom, called Guidance for the Care of Human Remains in Museums. This is from 2005. And it states that the primary reason for museums to display remains are in quotes “to educate, medical practitioners, to educate people in science and history, to explain burial practices, and to bring people into physical contact with past people, and to encourage reflection” end quotes. And I do think that’s really profound and really important and something that maybe we need to think about as we start to reassess, in this instance, human remains as displayed in museums.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Absolutely. Yeah, that’s definitely something that I feel would be missing from putting human remains in a gilded cage or making them inaccessible. I just find that Western society, in general, lacks a relationship with their dead and that starts as soon as the person dies.

Kimberlee Moran: Yeah.

Yvonne Kjorlien: And then it continues. But other cultures across the world, they have very intimate relationships with their dead, with their ancestors.

Kimberlee Moran: Right. Going back to Yeah.

Yvonne Kjorlien: And that includes, yeah, that includes the human remains, whether they’re buried or not or somehow preserved, sometimes they keep them in their homes, sometimes they’re in a certain spot that they visit on a regular basis and they commune with.

Kimberlee Moran: Yeah. Going back to my original field of Near Eastern archeology, there are numerous cultures that bury their ancestors under the floor of their houses,…

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right.

Kimberlee Moran: …they literally had them in their house, in perpetuity.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, so that the ability to have, to start a relationship and continue relationship, if we choose, I think that’s paramount and we shouldn’t disallow ourselves from that possibility.

Kimberlee Moran: Yeah, definitely. For sure.

Yvonne Kjorlien: So, when we look at where we are now, and these professional ethic frameworks, and what happened with the remains from the MOVE group, I just want to maybe take a moment and kind of get an environmental scan about what’s going on now. From what you’re seeing in the classroom. At the triple As, and what have you. Can you give us a sense of what you’re seeing right here, right now?

Kimberlee Moran: Sure. For some folks it’s just business as usual. There’s not a whole lot of change that’s happening. But in other areas, there’s been a call to or some folks have decided that it’s best to just remove all human remains from the classroom. Because we do have really, really excellent replicas now that have all the detail that one would need to kind of do education and training. So there’s that. There are museums. So again, going back to the Mutter Museum. The Mutter Museum is now under new leadership, and there’s been talk about removing human remains from display at the Mutter Museum. The University of Pennsylvania just recently announced their museum of anthropology and archeology, they will be taking all human remains off from display. So, there’s that.

There’s also — and this is not necessarily a bad thing — a reassessment of what either teaching collections or museum collections, what we actually have in our collections and where did it come from. And what do we do when we find no provenience? We have no idea where it came from. It’s just been there forever. Or, when there are problematic proveniences. And, that’s a very good thing. We really should know what we have.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yes, yes. We should.

Kimberlee Moran: We should know where it came from. Right? Right. So that is a good thing. But then the more extreme kind of approaches have been just to remove everything from display, not use it in teaching. Already – and, again, this is not a bad thing — we’ve been increasingly more cautious as to what images we use.

And actually I’ll circle back kind of with the Arch Street material and one of the ways that my thinking has sort of changed. So when we first had the material from Arch Street, we were very adamant that we do not allow pictures of skulls, full frontal facial skulls because we had a lot of newspaper reporters. Of course everyone wants a picture of skull. We were very clear we want to be respectful for the remains. If you do take a picture, we want to make sure that the skull is rotated away from the camera. Or, just don’t take any pictures at all, if you can help it. But I’ve since sort of changed my thinking, and again, this has to do with some of the teaching that I’ve now done with ethics, and my exploration of philosophy and moral philosophers. And there’s some philosophers that, again, talk about the human connection. and seeing people as subjects instead of objects, meaning a subject as a person with their own story and their own individuality as opposed to an object. And I think that’s very important, particularly when it comes to skulls because we’ve had objectified skulls forever. I mean, we’re coming up to Halloween, right? What do we see everywhere? Skeletons, and skulls?

Then there’s another moral philosopher who was around during World War II and was in a concentration camp and spoke a lot about looking an individual in the eyes, and when you look someone in the eyes, you connect with their humanity. And I really thought about that when it comes to skulls. If we’re turning the skull away from the camera, what are we saying about that? Are we making it an object and not an individual?

Yvonne Kjorlien: Very good point.

Kimberlee Moran: If we actually look into the eyes of this person, of what remains of this person, does that elicit more of a connection with this individual? So, I’ve since — I’m not taking pictures of skulls and posting them everywhere, clearly — but, I now have kind of maybe a different attitude towards if we were to take a picture of a skull and to have it, full frontal, that kind of connection. So I don’t know. That’s something that’s been on my mind recently.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah. I completely see your point. There may not be an answer. I mean, this doesn’t a black and white type.

Kimberlee Moran: Right? And that is the interesting thing about ethics is that many times in these ethical situations, there is no right answer. What makes you ethical is thinking about it, and grappling with it and discussing it. Because there might not be a clear yes or no. Because I still haven’t decided, I’m not in a position where anyone’s asking to take pictures of a skull, but I certainly haven’t decided what I would do in that particular… I guess we depend on the situation. But part of really embracing ethics within this field, again, is thinking about it, talking about it, not just having one sentence off-the-cuff dismissive, kind of attitude. It’s really about grappling deeply with these issues.

Yvonne Kjorlien: And I think, brings us kind of full circle to where we started about that the current climate about people not wanting to post any pictures, not work, with the remains, no nothing.

Kimberlee Moran: Right.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Okay. Why is that? Can we please discuss this? What is your thinking around this? Why do you want to do this? And there is a lot of fear, but, at the same time, nobody willing or even able to talk about why they want to do it. They just say, “It’s wrong.” Okay. Why is it wrong? What is your perception on this.

Kimberlee Moran: Right, right. So yeah. So that’s really important, is whenever we do make a decision, an ethical decision of yes, or no, right or wrong, we really need to be able to articulate the reasoning behind that, because if you can’t, then it’s not really ethical, right? It’s dogmatism.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right.

Kimberlee Moran: So I want to briefly go through some of the ethical frameworks from moral philosophy…

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yes, please.

Kimberlee Moran: because they really give us the rationale and they give us the ability to debate these things back and forth again. There might not be a clear answer, but at least you have the logical trail that has led you to where you are.

I got really interested in ethics thanks to the Society of American Archeology. They have an Ethics Bowl. And I’ve now seen more organizations have ethics bowls as part of their annual conference. And the way that then Ethics Bowl works is you have two teams, they’re presented with a scenario, an ethical dilemma, and, if it’s well written there shouldn’t be a clear answer, it should truly be a dilemma that really sparks the debate. And then the two teams basically debated it out in front of a panel of judges. And the panel really decides who made the best argument, not necessarily who had the right answer, but who made the best argument. I’ve been a moderator for the Ethics Bowl for many, many years, and I always thought, “Gee, this would make a really great class, to actually talk about ethical dilemmas and moral philosophy and then have this class culminate in the debate.” And so, coincidentally, when everything was happening with Arch Street, that semester I also started working with colleague of mine in our philosophy department to set up this course, And so, I was very much learning by doing, and this course is now run for six years. This year will be the seventh year that we run this course, it’s now become a fixture.

It’s called Debating Ethical Issues Across Disciplines. And what we do is we introduce the students to the four main ethical frameworks within moral philosophy. The textbook that we use is A 21st Century Ethical Toolbox by Anthony Weston. Highly recommend this book. It’s a really easy way to introduce yourself to moral philosophy and these various frameworks. So the first framework is probably the one that is the easiest to connect to all this discussion with human remains. This is — and I’m just gonna use the terminology use in the textbook — this is what’s referred to as the ethics of the person. So this is grounded in mainly Emmanuel Kant as our main kind of philosopher and it’s this framework that gives us justice, and rights. And it basically says that people are individual and they are deserving of respect and to be treated with dignity. So you can already see how this totally connects with everything that we’re talking about with human remains.

There’s some other interesting aspects about the ethics of the person or particularly about Emmanuel Kant’s various philosophies, and one of the them is this idea of universality, that for something to be ethical, you should be able to have it applied in every situation, you should be okay with a universal kind of doctrine. That can be quite difficult in a lot of different ways – but we might circle back to that — but basically ethics of the person, the idea of dignity, rights, respect, justice, all that sort of stuff.

The next framework using this textbook is called the ethics of happiness. And this is where we get to Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill and utilitarianism or consequentialism, which has to do with we often think of the greatest good for the greatest number of people. But really it’s about maximizing good or happiness — happiness / good kind of synonyms — and minimizing harm. And in this particular framework — and this is one that we use all the time, democracy is kind of based on this framework — there are trade-offs. There’s always going to be winners and losers in this particular framework. Not everybody is going to be happy, but you’re trying to create the most happiness, the greatest amount of good. And so we see this in a lot of different ways and I kind of refer to it earlier about how, in this bad situation, we were just trying to reduce harm as much as possible and try to again, maximize good with our efforts.

The third framework is the ethics of virtue. This is our oldest framework. It goes all the way back to Aristotle and it’s all about character traits. Humaning well. Being the best humans that we can be. Being honest, being transparent, being hard-working, means you go on and on and on with the list of virtues. And so being an ethical person means exercising these virtues, these character traits. As an archaeologist, how do I archeology well? And that would be communication and outreach, again. Honesty, not misrepresenting my qualifications, transparency, hardworking, good practice, all the rest of it.

And our last ethical framework is sometimes called the feminists at the cool framework. So, all these other frameworks tend to be much more centered of justice, and more of masculine approach. This last one is often considered the more feminine approach and it’s grounded in the work of Carol Gilligan and Nell Noddings. And it’s often called the ethics of care or the ethics of relationships. And the idea is that we all live in communities, and being ethical is about the care and the stewardship of relationships.

It’s really interesting: Carol Gilligan just came out. Her seminal book is called In a Different Voice and it has to do with research in psychology that she was participating in that was looking at moral development. They were looking at boys and giving boys certain questions and seeing how they answer those questions. And again the boys tended to approach it by justice and this is what’s right and following the law and stuff like that. Whereas the girls tended to have a more nuanced approach: what are the responsibilities that the different actors have to each other? And at the time, the girls were seen as less morally developed because they didn’t have clear answers, because they had this more nuanced approach. And Carol Gilligan really realized that is wasn’t that they were underdeveloped. It was that they thought of these things differently. She wrote this book In a Different Voice and that’s really kind of changed a lot of our mindset. Now, she’s just recently come out with a new book that basically says that this isn’t a feminist approach. This is just a human approach.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Mm-hmm

Kimberlee Moran: Making it feminist means that you’re cutting out half the population.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right.

Kimberlee Moran: That we all have the ability to think about care and relationships.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right.

Kimberlee Moran: So again, thinking about human remains, our care of them, our stewardship of them, how we use them, that we’re not “using” them…

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right.

Kimberlee Moran: that we’re building relationships with them and our students and so forth. So, using these four frameworks, sometimes these frameworks work together, very nicely. Sometimes these frameworks kind of butt up against each other. But the important thing is to, whatever your decision is with human remains, to try to view that through one or more of these lenses as your rationale.

With the Arch Street material, we decided to learn from the remains, to study the remains. We felt like, first of all, we could do this by preserving the human dignity, that it was actually more dignified, for us to learn from these individuals and tell their stories and see them as people and not as objects. We felt like we were maximizing the good that could be created from the situation. We felt like, as archaeologists that, practicing the virtues of what makes a good archaeologist is to, again, create knowledge in a way that preserves dignity. That just putting these things in a storage container isn’t archeology well. And then also the idea of relationships. That we were creating relationships between the past and the present, that we were stewarding these remains. So, that was our justification one way for us to create the rationale of the approach that we had.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right. Just reflecting on what you’ve been talking about, one of the biggest things that I learned from studying anthropology is that different groups will have different perspectives and…

Kimberlee Moran: Yes.

Yvonne Kjorlien: that anthropology, as an anthropologist, I need to realize that and respect that.,

Kimberlee Moran: Yes.

Yvonne Kjorlien: And in dealing with ethics, different groups will have different perspectives, including anthropologists.

Kimberlee Moran: Yeah.

Yvonne Kjorlien: And we have a different view of working with remains. And different groups of anthropologists will probably have different perspectives on working with human remains. I think, I mean, using that to put the lens on ourselves so that we can respect the different viewpoints, then talk about them.

Kimberlee Moran: Yeah.

Yvonne Kjorlien: That may not be the most natural for us to do, but I think it turning our discipline upon ourselves.

Kimberlee Moran: Yeah. Yes, yes. Yeah, I’ve been to many a conference that has ended up in, raised voices and …

Yvonne Kjorlien: Uh oh.

Kimberlee Moran: …anger issues amongst anthropologists that are supposed to be having a civilized debate and it just kind of…

Yvonne Kjorlien: Spirals.

Kimberlee Moran: …falls apart. Yeah.

Yvonne Kjorlien: I’m going to set the time so I don’t want to too much longer. But this has been amazing food for thought and I really hope that listeners go away with a lot of questions, which is good.

Kimberlee Moran: Right, right. And again, engage with these ethical frameworks. They’re maybe and probably are very good arguments of why we shouldn’t do certain things with remains. I mean, again, we were talking about different cultural groups, going back to respect and dignity has to do with honoring the wishes of next of kin and cultural perspectives. So yeah, definitely think these things through. Part of ethics is all about thinking. So if you want to be an ethical archaeologist-anthropologist person, really engage deeply, instead of just trying to find easy answers. There are no easy answers.

Yvonne Kjorlien: That’s too bad. I was hoping for an easy answer out of this.

Kimberlee Moran: That’s no fun. An easy answer is no fun.

Yvonne Kjorlien: The fun is the journey.

Kimberlee Moran: Exactly, exactly.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Thank you very much for this. This has been wonderful.

Kimberlee Moran: My pleasure. I mean these are issues that are near and dear to my heart, and I do love talking about them and engaging with them. Thank you so much for giving me this time and the space.

Brie Smith is the Chief Operating Officer (COO) of Return Home, a company that specializes in natural organic reduction (NOR), also known as human composting or terramation, as an alternative to burial or cremation. Return Home was founded in 2021 in Washington, USA after the passing of a law allowing NOR, with the goal of providing a more natural and gentle way to care for human remains.

In this episode we talk about:

Return Home’s…

Notes from the start:

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Transcript

Yvonne Kjorlien: Who are you, and where do you work? And what’s going on?

Brie Smith: Yes, I just want to thank you Yvonne for having me on today. I am Brienna Smith, I go by Brie, and I am the Chief Operating Officer at Return Home. We specialize in an end-of-life option. That is an alternative to burial. And cremation, we call it terramation. And it is the gentle breakdown of the body into compost, to return to families in place ashes, or in place of a burial.

Yvonne Kjorlien: okay, I’m just gonna bottom line, this and say that it’s human composting.

Brie Smith: Human composting, body composting.

Yvonne Kjorlien: All right. I understand that, yeah, this is a sensitive topic.

Brie Smith: It is.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Anything involving death is, but on the other hand, sometimes you just got to come right out and just say it.

Brie Smith: Yes, I have a lot of people in my life who have become very accustomed to me, very casually talking about their inevitable demise. So,

Yvonne Kjorlien: It’s funny how it suddenly becomes a topic of conversation more often than not, right?

Brie Smith: Does with me at least. Yes.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah. All right, tell us a bit about Return Home and how you came to be at Return Home, and its inception and all of that great stuff.

Brie Smith: Sure, sure. I can kind of start at the beginning. So, Washington state past unprecedented legislation in January 2019 and that was for funeral directors to begin offering what’s called natural organic reduction in the law, but the layman would call it human composting. And what happened is there was a general kind of panic amongst the industry and the area because there was really no prescribed method in which to accomplish what they were giving us laws to do. So they gave us the rules and regulations but they give us any processes or, machinery or anything that would end up making up what we at Return Home have built. So our CEO — his name is Micah Truman — he was sitting with his mom one day — she lives on Lopez Island — and she had some friends from New York in town, and they were sitting in a circle and Micah said, “Did you hear about this crazy thing? They’re gonna be composting bodies.” And these women are in, maybe they’re late 70s, and they all were like, we love it. We think it’s fabulous, ship me to Washington because I’m in New York. And in that moment he had this, clear vision of the fact that this is actually something that people really resonate with is, the natural breakdown of the body as opposed to something kind of expedited or being preserved and definitely a lot of people really are innately drawn to kind of a natural breakdown. And so that was kind of the inception point of. I can do something with this.

So what Micah did is he went to a group of individuals they are called mortality composters. Mortality composters are individuals who help with ranchers and farmers when they have a mast devastation of a group of animals. If it’s a flock of chickens, or if it’s a herd of cows, or some pigs, what happens is these mortality composters will go to the place where the devastation happened and they will set up the temporary composting facility where they will take those animals, make them into compost that the farmer or rancher can then use to enrich their property. And so, that is what’s happening, and it’s an old science. It’s a die-old science and it’s actually done throughout the whole United States in Canada. But these people had a very specific way to compost these animals and it was very — what some might consider — irreverent to a human being’s body. So they might stack the animals up and coat them and something nitrogen-rich like chicken feces and then they would break down super fast in a big pile because they’re all real hot. And these things were where the minds of the mortality composters were and then Micah came in with the mind of we need to make this acceptable for human care, and for the love that we want to show people when they pass away and to be able to present this to a family.

So ultimately, it took about two and a half years of Micah working with the mortality composters. I joined in about in about two years in, and also helped with kind of the idea that we wanted to make the service hands-on for families. But really the entire development of our vessel system and the organics that go inside our off-gassing and our biofilters, all of that was done with Micah and a group of what we call the Oceans 11 Team of, again, mortality composters and PhDs in composting. These are HVAC people who helped us build the facility, general contractors, and then of course, funeral professionals. So we all came together, again, two and a half years after inception. So, we opened to serve families in June of 2021, and we so have been in operation for just over two years. And we’ve served over 200 families.

I joined with Return Home after being a traditional funeral home employee. I had been in the industry since 2011 and I am still a licensed funeral director, embalmer and crematory operator. I was really drawn to Return Home because of the final product, really what we’re giving families back in place of ashes. I had worked the crematory primarily — it’s about 90% cremation in the county that I live in and worked in — and I didn’t take to cremating. It was not something I enjoyed doing. It was a very quick and kind of aggressive process that I never quite felt great doing and so when this opportunity came with Return Home and Micah knew that I was kind of into green options, it was a really natural fit together and it’s been my pleasure to grow from the services manager of the company to now to again COO and overseeing all of the operations, both in the family services and the composting itself.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Wow, that’s a lot. Thank you for that. There’s a couple things that I would love to address in all of that.

First is a little bit about your journey and how you became a funeral director, like how you found out that you wanted to pursue that path to become a funeral director, embalmer, cremation specialist. And then, once we’ve covered that, a little bit about what traditional funeral homes offer and that it isn’t mandatory, you don’t have to go through…you don’t have to be embalmed or cremated that they’re…all of this narrative around funeral homes, it can be quite misleading. So first let’s get into your journey…because not everybody, starts life wanting to be a funeral director.

Brie Smith: Yeah, neither did. It’s good to point out that this was not what I thought I would be doing with my life. I thought I would maybe go into sports medicine or surgical… I really always loved anatomy and

I blame a couple things . Blame is a funny word for it, but I give credit to the fact that my mother was a cosmetologist when I was young and she did hair and makeup for a mortuary. And so at night, my dad was a beat cop so he would be working the nights as a police officer. And so my mom would take me to the morgue with her and I would sit with her while she did people’s hair and makeup. And she tells the story that one day we were there together and a broom fell. And she had this moment of panic. And I very calmly looked over at her and I said, “Mom, it’s not like she’s gonna hurt you.” So, I just had a really solid comprehension of life and death at a very young age. I’m talking, six to nine years old, when I was going with her. I was also raised on a ranch. So, I really understood the circle of life in a way that not every kid is exposed to, I think. And then I took an anatomy and physiology class where I had to restore a likeness of a person from a skull and we used erasers and we used clay and we built this person’s face-up based on their sex and their nationality and their race. So what we did is we built these faces up and I found in that class that I had a real knack for what we call in the industry restorative art. It’s a level kind of beyond embalming, where traditional embalming you have a person who looks really beautiful and you make them look more beautiful with your efforts and the injection. In this case, these are for devastated individuals who have completely maybe lost half of their face or their hands have been mutilated or…it is a skill of mine to go in and restore them back to their likeness. And so, I really fell in love with that. And after that, it was a kind of a no-brainer for me that I was meant to do this for people.

The cruel irony being that I moved to the Pacific Northwest where barely anyone is embalmed ever. And I rarely got to practice my craft and I ended up essentially burning people all day instead of bringing them back to beautiful so their family could say goodbye. It was something that I was really passionate about but that I didn’t have the opportunity to practice as regularly as I would like to. So that’s what steered me toward Return Home.

And here we actually get to do quite a bit of restorative art. We just don’t use chemicals. And we’ve done chemicals visitations for about 70% of our families come in and see their loved one before they say goodbye. So it’s been really awesome to be able to stretch my skill set in a place where I can’t use the tools I’m used to using. So both myself and Katie, who’s our funeral director here, are licensed embalmers and we still do long bone donation cases and we still do autopsy cases, and we help these families say a final goodbye without the use of chemicals. That’s been really awesome. So that’s kind of been the development of my career so far.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Wow. So you had a very early exposure to not just the funeral home but also to death.

Brie Smith: Definitely.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Wow. Yeah, because a lot of people, especially those people living in cities, do not have that exposure.

Brie Smith: Yeah, yeah. The cyclical, farm life. I went in the summers. So I would go for branding season. All of these little snippets of life where I would see the crop come and go. And I would see the animals come and go. And it was just kind of part of the atmosphere that I was around that, nothing kind of lasted forever. And I think it gave me the ability to accept death in a different kind of way than what we might call a city slicker.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right, right. So let’s talk a bit about your experiences working within the traditional funeral home environment, and what you learned, and what you found that didn’t resonate with you and had you kind of, longing for something else.

Brie Smith: You know what, I think when you ask me that question, it’s multifaceted, because I worked for an excellent company, a family owned, but they owned many facilities. And I think one of my…the hurdles that I was having to go through on a regular basis was the fact that I wasn’t able to make personal or kind of customize our services, it was kind of a prescribed, “This is the menu you get to choose from,” and then the family would choose from the menu and then we would fulfill what they chose. It was a little bit much also to me to not get to give input. It was very hard to feel like I could better the systems or better the service in some way, and then not feel like I was maybe being considered because it wasn’t the traditional way of doing things or it wasn’t the way we were supposed to do things. So I think that there is kind of ingrained in the industry, in some ways, a real prescribed idea of what families should choose and what’s the best thing for them. When in actuality what I’ve learned since joining Return Home is that it is, again, it’s innate people, to be part of the planning of their loved one’s death, and not in the service but actually in the handling of the remains and of the reverence for the quiet moments together, instead of these big public moments that might have happened. And both might happen still. But at Return Home, my point of really bringing families back into the equation where the hands that love you in life can continue loving you in death is based on the fact that I couldn’t do that freely previously. And it was something that I feel like the funeral industry has kind of come in and removed families’ abilities to see their loved ones decompose in any way. If I’ve had a family see their loved one with a green belly and if I would have done that in my previous work, it would have been curtains. I mean it’s a really bad look to have somebody breaking down in front of the family…

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right.

Brie Smith: But it’s natural and people see it and they know that that person has pass ed away and there’s a grief and a connection with the grieving process that goes a long with seeing your person deceased and not seeing them in the hospital and then never seeing them again or whatever that might look like to some people. So I see it benefit the family in a major way in their grief, to be able to open the doors of the funeral home and say, “How much do you want to be involved?” And that’s what was missing previously that I’m really proud to be able to integrate here in what people might consider progressive or non-traditional services.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Very cool. Just a personal story. So my father passed away in 2018. He just didn’t answer his phone and so my sister went over and checked and sure enough he had passed away at home. It took me a while to get up there and to assist in whatever. And by the time I got there, the funeral home had already arrived, and so I didn’t get to see him. And so my perception was he was alive one minute and then just vanished the next. And the next time, when I went to the funeral home, I actually asked to see him and they said, “Sorry, we can’t let you back for health and safety reasons.” I thought that’s kind of weird. So, I have this sort of left open. I had — without belittling the word or anything but — I “Did he actually die?” He could be like Elvis and frequenting 7-11 or, weird places. It’s this weird concept that, because I wasn’t allowed to see his body, I, in some capacity, don’t really know he’s dead.

Brie Smith: Yeah, that is a disconnect that I have heard so many times. And your story it really touches my heart because this is conversations that I’ve had with several people. Since they’ve chosen our service they’re like, “I didn’t get to see XYZ,” and being able to be here and do this this time, has completely changed my perception of what it means when somebody passes away in my involvement in that. To me it’s one of the things that inhibits people’s ability to get closure. Like you said, I don’t really believe in closure to be frank. I know that grief ebbs and flows, and I know that it never ends because I’ve over a decade ago, and it’s just how it goes. But being able to be the arbiter of somebody passing away, and then looking at that family and saying, “Do you need time with them?” Instead of me, just coming in, dispatching right away, and asking the question, not just being like, “Okay, the call came in. We’re gonna go. 90-minute call time: we did great.” It’s great for the business to be quick and to move like that, but what is great for the family? And that’s the question that we ask ourselves at Return Home and we end up asking our families. That’s why people have had such transformative experiences here because we give it back to them. And we say, “Let’s talk about what you feel like you need?” and then we’ll kind of go from there. Usually when you ask someone, “Do you want to see or put your hands on your loved one before they go into their terramation vessel?” and stuff, it’s so common for them to be like, “I don’t think so.” And then the next day, call and be like, “Actually, you know what? I do need that,” and then we make that happen for them and it helps them.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Because it’s like you go into a shock and you really aren’t…I don’t feel capable of making decisions like even small decisions, “Do you want to touch your loved one before they go into the vessel?” That’s a small decision. But under those conditions, it can be monumental. That’s a huge decision to make. You’re grieving, you’re in shock. And yeah, I agree that, yeah, that the loved ones are kind of disconnected from the process and the traditional funeral home environment.

Brie Smith: In the number of times, I sat across from someone with my menu and they chose their menu options and then I wrote it all out and then they signed it. And then the next day, they had no recollection of what we put together.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah.

Brie Smith: So we encourage people to take their time with the arrangements because we are kind of what we consider eco-friendly, or green, or mindful of the environment. We don’t use a lot of paper. So we just send people a link and they can take their time with inputting the loved ones information. They can get help from family members and that database and bring people in to help them. So we’re not just sitting across from a family, having them choose, all of these. And the choice of whether to touch your loved one or not. How about the choice of a $2000 casket that maybe isn’t amazingly beautiful, but it’s within your budget or the $7,000 one that’s absolutely gorgeous, but in both cases, you’ll never see it again.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right.

Brie Smith: But what’s the right choice? I mean, it’s so debatable what the value of the funeral home and the funeral director is, but I found that at Return Home, the value of the funeral director is being able to get that family to take their time, breathe in and out of the grief that they’re feeling, and move at a pace that works for them where they can decide to be participatory or not.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Wonderful. So I don’t want to get too much into the history of funerals and funeral homes, but just suffice to say that embalming is a very recent practice.

Brie Smith: Yeah, the Civil War is when embalming really became the most prevalent outside of ancient Egypt basically. But in the US, the Civil War is what did it, because the men were passing away and they needed to make their way home afterward for services, for funeral services, and things like that. It became a common practice. There are pictures. It’s pretty common knowledge within the industry that, in some mortuary books that exist out there, there’s actually pictures of bodies that are kind of propped up as this is the work that I can do, along the battlefield because the embalmer really became really, really needed at that time.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right.

Brie Smith: They didn’t have refrigeration. That’s something that people don’t quite understand: is that nowadays in the modern world we have refrigeration and it almost in, certain circumstances, completely negates the need for embalming. There’s a time and a place for embalming, though. That is for certain. And it is an art that we do have respect for, but at the end of the day, it’s a lot less needed now than it would have been 150 years ago.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right. Yeah, and so much of this, the funeral business makes it seem mandatory. That embalming is mandatory. That you have to go through a funeral home: it’s mandatory. And you don’t know to question all this because usually, when you’re in this environment of being in a funeral home, faced with death, you are also within a grieving situation. You’re in shock. You don’t have the ability to make decisions, maybe even to think critically at that time. So, questioning any of the practices, questioning the processes, questioning anything that is said to you, just isn’t within your realm. So that’s why I wanted to bring this up now, so that people can question it now.

Brie Smith: Yeah. Yeah. One of the proudest, things of, I think I’m most proud of that we’ve accomplished at Return Home is really putting out on our social media the knowledge that we have transported people from Canada unembalmed. We cannot do it with any other country because pretty much every other country in the entire world requires embalming to cross the border. But Canada does not. So we’ve been able to accommodate those families. We’ve been able to accommodate families from over 20 different states, and the only state that requires embalming to cross state lines is Alabama. And other than that, you do not need to be embalmed at all. And in Alabama, you don’t have to if you’re not going to cross state lines.

So it is really interesting because I didn’t realize how prevalent it was that the funeral homes kind of might push embalming or imply that it’s required to have a visitation or to say goodbye and it’s simply not true. It can restore when someone has been really sick and make them look healthier. It can do a lot of really amazing things for people in need. But most people who die naturally, really never ever have to be embalmed. I think that that’s something that we’re proud to be able to share that information widely because it’s such a misconception.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Nice. I like that. All right, let’s talk about human composting get into some of the science here because when we talked previously, when I first heard about Return Home and human composting, one of my first questions was, “Okay, you can do it with the soft tissue but what happens with the bones?” Because I know, as a former archaeologist, that I dig up bones all the time and there’s no soft tissue. But in, let’s say peat bogs, there can be no bones but soft tissue, skin left. So but it all depends on the environment. So how do you deal with that soft tissue versus hard tissue?

Brie Smith: Yeah, yeah, it’s die-old. I will say that. I’m so proud of our science here because it was kind of a deal breaker for me when I started. I was like, I have to do this before I joined because I have to know that this actually works and trusting our team to John Paul, who is our PhD soil scientist. He created everything that we do and I trust him so much and he’s such an amazing person. It’s just such a pleasure to be able to work alongside of him, truly. He created a system where we place the person in a vessel. They’re eight foot by three and a half by three and a half. So they’re just big rectangular vessels. There is nothing inside of the vessel except for tubes that allow oxygen to flow through. And what we do is we place a straw alfalfa and sawdust inside of the vessel about halfway up roughly, give or take, but it’s at a certain ratio of the organics to the person’s body weight.

So what we do is we place, those three organic materials inside of the vessel. We then lay the person in, and before this happens, we’ve gone through the steps of receiving them into our care. We give every single person who comes into our care, a bath because we believe it is just basic human decency to be clean. So if they are not clean, we clean them and we place them in a compostable garment. Then they go into the vessel just right on top of, we kind of make a cradle with a pillow and a little indention, they settle in there and then the remaining organics go on top. And so the person is kind of sandwiched or cozied in between the two layers of organics.  

And what happens over the next 30 to 60 days is we place them on a system where we have 24/7 monitoring. We constantly monitor the airflow, the temperature and the moisture levels inside of that vessel. And so we have a probe that’s in there that’s making sure that the temperature is the state minimum. For composting human remains is 132 degrees for no less than 72 hours. And that is to kill pathogens. So for us that number we far exceeded. Usually the people in our care are reaching about 150 to 160 degrees for maybe two weeks. So we have really optimized the internal environment and that vessel for the body to break down quickly. What happens is we make sure that the moisture is at the right level. We make sure that the temperature is rising the way it should be. And then when that temperature begins to drop, what we do is we have an external rotator, so our vessels go into this machine that reminds me of those old virtual reality rides that they used to have in malls. I know that’s really silly and specific, but it’s like a big ride that you place the vessel into and the person kind of rotates slowly over about two minutes and what it does is it equalizes the moisture within the vessel. And so we’ll see another spike in temperature because organics that have not used up the nitrogen or the energy that they have inside of them are being exposed to what you’d call the soft tissue. And that means that there’s another, spike temperature in another breakdown. So what we do is we kind of go back and forth to the rotator over the next couple of weeks. Again, everybody is different, so we gauge it based on the temperature and the readings that we’re getting from our cloud. But ultimately, when we see the fallen temperature and then there’s no spike after we go to rotation, that’s when we know that the soft tissue is completely gone. There is no more energy inside of that vessel to use up and there are only bones remaining at that time.

What happens after that is we go to what we call screening. Screening is very similar to after a cremation, where you would sweep out the contents of the retort, that is bones and anything inorganic. And then you go through those with a magnet to make sure that nothing’s inside of there that will go into the processor, which is what in the crematory breaks down the bone to make it fluffy or completely uniform, ideally. So what we’ve done is we took that science and we duplicated it. It’s just a lot bigger. We upend the vessel. We have a team who goes in and we pull anything inorganic. So we’re pulling, any metal replacements hip, stents, screws. We are also looking for things that are in organic that may have been inside of the body, like silicone. And we are pulling those, and they either get recycled or go to medical waste.

And then what happens is the bones in the compost, stay together and all go through a piece of machinery that’s called a processor. And essentially, it makes the bone uniform with the compost. So it’s breaking the bone down and making it unidentifiable amongst the compost that’s already there. And then what happens is the bones are — as you know, I’m sure very well  — porous on the inside. So, when we expose that porous material to these microbes, we see the temperature spike again because there’s microbial activity again. So, after the bones in the compost are broken down together, we go to what’s called the resting phase. Because what’s going to happen is we’re gonna get a spike in temperature, but then this temperature is going to slowly lower. The more moisture content is going to lessen, and they’re going to off-gas a little bit of CO2 as they rest. And what happens is they lower in temperature and moisture to the point where at the end, they’re ambient. There’s no more microbial activity. Then they’re ready to go home.

So the first phase takes about 30 to 60 days, depending on the person’s body makeup. And then the second phase takes pretty much an exact 30 days because, once that temperature drops and goes ambient, we’re ready to go home with the person. So that’s really the science behind what we do, granted there’s the mixture of organics and those ratios and the moisture ratios are very important. But we have really worked hard to make sure that each person is… we know if they’re emaciated going in, what we need to compensate for. We know if they’re obese, going in what we need to compensate for.  And so we’ve really dialed the science to be able to serve to serve our families and what I consider to be the most transparent and, in my opinion, the most gentle way that any facility provides this service.

Yvonne Kjorlien: I find that very interesting because I knew that cremation, the fire will only take care of so much, and that the bones, whatever remains, has to be ground down so it’s uniform size and there’s nothing identifiable. But yeah, with the human composting, like I said, that takes care of a lot of the soft tissue but then you’re left with the hard tissue, the bone. And breaking down that bone so then it becomes available to the microbes so then it can further break down the organic components of the bone tissue. That’s very interesting.

Brie Smith: Yeah, man it works. I mean just the small spongy bones might even break down. Can I say I’ve ever seen a metatarsal in the compost? Like not identifiably …but I like an archeal… I actually likened it… so funny that that’s what you did because, when I first started with Micah and we did our first screening because I was the one back there doing it or our team was very small at that time, I pulled a femur out of the compost and it felt like archaeology. It felt like, my God, this is so beautiful and clean of tissue. And I mean just the fact that it’s actually happening still to this day, two and a half years later, just kind of blows my mind. It really is so miraculous what happens. And it can’t be overstated, how obvious it is that the body is meant to breakdown. It just brings you full circle on this whole thing of, wow, really we are meant to, just the leaves fall in the fall if we left them there, instead of raking them up, they would nurture the earth for the springtime. And that’s what we are meant to do. We are meant to nurture the earth for the next generations to come. And because we don’t die all and go directly into the earth the way we used to, and we don’t use the bathroom and put it back into the earth the way we used to, we’re really depriving the planet of a lot of organic material. So I’m really proud that the company that I’m standing behind returns organic matter to the earth. I think it is vital to the health of our planet, and John Paul, who’s our PhD, says that about 50% of the soil health of the planet has depleted and that if we don’t start giving back to it, it will never be able to be recovered.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Wow, That’s a whole other level. That’s a whole other podcast episode.

Brie Smith: It’s really. John Paul is amazing. So if you ever wanted to go down that rabbit hole, you just let me know because he is fascinating.

Yvonne Kjorlien: All right. So on that note, let’s talk about the difference between terramation, water cremation, and green burial. You’ve got this whole lovely…For the listeners, Return Home has a whole lovely website, and under their resources, they have a lot of educational articles and if you want to delve deep, go there. But I thought the difference between terramation, water cremation, and green burial would be something nice to mention here.

Brie Smith: Yeah, yeah. I mean it’s accessibility based a lot of the time and the differences is as far as what you’re choosing to do is, with all three lower, your footprint. I mean the bottom line is that they are all three much less wasteful than a traditional cremation or burial with embalming might be. I really loved green burial. I still do. I mean, but before even started with Return Home, green burial was my choice for myself. I like the idea of just a natural shroud made of either wicker or bamboo, or maybe just be placed in something that’s soft to the touch, cotton or linen. But to just be placed directly into the earth and breakdown is something that I find super beautiful. But a lot of people are turned off by bugs. I had no idea how many people would ask us about the bugs.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yep.

Brie Smith: We don’t have bugs. We have microbes. Bugs couldn’t survive the temperatures inside of the vessel. But for green burial, specifically, I find that people like green burial until they talk about the bugs and then they’re like, “Yeah, that’s kind of not for me. I really don’t want to be consumed by worms.” It’s weird. So to me, I think it’s lovely. I understand where people might get a little strange about it. It’s also using land in perpetuity. I think that’s something that’s really special about terramation is that there’s no requirement for zoning of any kind, and it’s just like scattering cremated remains. Whereas with burial, even if it is a green burial, you have to go, in at least Washington, to a zoned cemetery and that cemetery has to offer a direct to earth burial. Some of them will say that they do but they’re still inverting in outer burial container over you so that they can drive over you with heavy equipment and things like that.

So, yeah, green burial is very interesting and there’s a lot of nuance. Also, when you do a green burial, you’re putting the heavy metals that are in the person’s body in the earth. So, that’s something that didn’t use to be the case. We used to not put metal bits in people, and we do that now. So there’s a conversation to be had around that.

For me, green burial is my second choice to terramation. I still think it’s absolutely beautiful and I love it.

Alkaline hydrolysis that is what some people call water cremation, or aquamation. A very gentle breakdown. It does use some resources. It uses a lot of water because what’s happening is that you’re being placed in a container that is agitating and working with chemical to break your body down, but in a more natural or rather gentle way than a cremation might do so. The process takes a little bit longer than a cremation but at the end you’re left with more remains and they are stark white. So instead of ashes that come to you and they’re kind of gray and black and splatchy, alkaline remains our absolutely pure white and beautiful and you get more because it’s less aggressive. So the crematory is not breaking the bone down within the vessel that you’re in, that you’re in the pod for the alkaline hydrolysis breaks you down slowly. There’s more bone material because it’s not kind of blasting you away, if you will.

I really like alkaline hydrolysis. I think it’s a beautiful service especially for animals. A lot of people come to Return Home asking if we compost animals and the answer is no, not. We could, but it would be really costly to set up that facility. And so we’re just not in a position to do that right now. But a lot of places all over the US. and my understanding is in Canada, offer it for pets, alkaline hydrolysis, and it to me, is a beautiful alternative to just standard cremation.

 And then, of course, you’re getting an urn back, very similarly to cremation. With terramation, it’s pretty cool because the body is placed in the vessel with organic material that makes it so that we can return about 200 to 250 pounds of organic matter to the earth. We give the family the option to take the full amount with them. If they do, it is placed in burlap because we’re continuing the cycle of life and the compost needs to breathe. So, we put it in something that has air flow. Families go and do memorial gardens, they’ve gone to arboretums. they’ve gone to cemeteries.

So, the options for the terramated remains are pretty much what they are for cremated remains. Except instead of an inert charred carbon, you’re giving back something that has magnesium and phosphates and carbon and all the things that the earth actually wants and needs to thrive. But it’s got the same mobility as cremated remains, which I think is the draw for a lot of people. I think less people choose burial a lot because we’re nuclear we’re moving now, we’re not growing up in Eastern Montana and spending our whole life, there and marrying someone from there, and having kids and dying there. We’re moving. We’re going from A to B. And so the mobility of the remains is something that we find a lot of families prefer to taking up land indefinitely. So, that’s kind of like the quick breakdown of the comparison of the three. I feel like I covered. I’m pretty well.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, no, it’s really good and I like that you brought up the cycle of life and contributing to the life of the Earth because with embalming and the traditional sense, you’re actually polluting the earth because all that formaldehyde, that then sits in the earth, and it’s probably contaminating the groundwater. Then you’ve got the coffin and what it’s made of, the lacquers that are used on that coffin, the materials, the textiles and whatever they’re treated with, and all of that is sitting in the ground. So it’s actually depleting the earth of its value. Whereas terramation is giving value to the soil.

Brie Smith: Yeah, and I mean it is directly contributing to families’ gardens just absolutely being gorgeous. I mean I would say it’s not like when you go to the store and you buy compost because even then they can be chemical laden.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yes.

Brie Smith: What’s so amazing about what we’re doing is it’s just…everything that your body could give to the earth that is good and then we can remove anything that might not be. We negate the pathogens and we negate the chemotherapy and the radiation, and you know what I mean? So these things that may be a consideration are a non issue and they’re actually processed through the terramation where really the only people we can’t help, as far as diseases or what’s in their body, is if you have a prion related illness. So Creutzfeldt-Jakob or Mad Cow disease would be and a no-go because the temperature inside the vessel won’t kill the prions. Only cremation can do that. So we have that limitation. But other than that, I mean we can really take someone who was unwell and their family saw them breakdown over time and they became just a piece of who they once were, and when we return them back to the family, that family gets to see that person’s life live on and really see it happening. It’s pretty cool.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Nice. All right, I’m conscious the time. So you said Return Home is you’re in Washington State but you can accept Decedents from Canada. I looked on your website and I didn’t see any update about Return Home coming to Canada and setting up a facility. Is there any news on that?

Brie Smith: Yeah, so for us, it’s just about legislation, right? So It depends on the area that is looking. And in the US, we’ve had seven states now that have legalized the process and it is a state issue. So state by state, they make up their disposition laws and rules and regulations and they oversee them. So in Canada, is it province by province that they decide on those things or is it national? I don’t actually know the answer to that question.

Yvonne Kjorlien: I don’t know, either, I’d have to look it up.

Brie Smith: What I know is that there has been no legislation passed thus far in Canada, but that it is a big topic of conversation for a lot of people there. Especially, you know, it was amazing to me because I really thought our first case would be from BC. We’re in Seattle, basically proper almost.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right.

Brie Smith: And so, our first family from Canada was from Toronto. And they flew with her to the facility to see her off at a service, and then they flew back to bring her home. So that family came to and fro on that plane and to me, absolutely, I would love to have them not have to do that. Our end goal would be to be local to people, where they wouldn’t have to make grand journeys to fulfill this process. But I’ll say the people who know about it and decide on it are all in and they love it and they’re so glad that their loved one can have the ability to be here with us. We do a lot of digital and virtual services and things like that because we do serve so many people from out of state.

But it’s so amazing to me to see that, the states are legalizing, Canada’s discussing it, and certainly when those policies go through we will be setting our sights on being accessible. I think that’s super important to the cause of what we do.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Fabulous. All right. You do have a very informative website: returnhome.com. And do you have a blog or some way to keep up to date on what is new?

Brie Smith: Yeah. So we, of course as you mentioned, have a really comprehensive blog and resource center. We do both and they’re for different things. So the Return Home blog is specifically more geared toward body composting and terramation and what we do, and then the Resource Center is actually just industry general, like you said, it compares and contrast things. So we have those resources.

My favorite thing that we do is actually something our CEO, Micah, does. Once a month, he sends out a newsletter and it’s just one email that kind of encompasses what we’ve done that month, but they’re very entertaining. And it’s very interesting to read up on the advancements of whatever’s happening in the space at that time. So when you go to our website, I definitely suggest signing up for the newsletter. You can also chat with our staff there. So if you jump on the website, down at the bottom, it’ll pop up, nd it’ll say, “Do you want to talk to us?” and you’re not talking to somebody elsewhere. You are literally talking to me, Katie, Jake. We take the chats, we take every single phone call. We don’t have a call service because we believe in being accessible, and people have all the questions, and we want to answer all the questions.

We also do a lot of social media outreach. So we’re at Return Home NOR on a lot of the platforms. So whether it be TikTok or Instagram, we are always posting educational content because there’s a lot of developments that happen in the space and we just want people to be informed on what atypical and that should…I feel like people should get to know their local mortician or funeral director the same way that they would get to maybe a doctor or somebody who’s in their life because we’re so resourceful. I think that being able to be a resource for people at Return Home, it’s such an honor and pleasure that people would come to us. Because they come to us, again, with questions about composting or just in death care in general – death, dying. We’re experts in beforehand, aftercare, and everything in between. And we know a lot about a lot because we’ve seen a lot. Everybody here who’s works with our staff has been in the funeral industry for, most of us, for at least eight years or so. And then Micah is the only one who’s kind of a newbie, which is really funny because he’s leading the whole thing. But that’s where you can find us and we really try to be available for those Q and A’s pretty much any time because we know there’s a lot to ask.

Yvonne Kjorlien: You’ve definitely given me a lot to think about and unfortunately, it’s in hindsight for my dad’s death, but foresight, I think, for my own planning and what have you because, yeah, like I mentioned, you’re just not in a space when it does happen and so being informed prior to is a good thing and, yeah, you’ve given me a lot to think about. So thank you for that.

Brie Smith: Gosh, it’s my pleasure to just kind of share the good word of “it’s okay to think about it.” It’s not like you would talk about death and you’re gonna die, that’s not how life works. And it can be a topic of conversation that you bring up and you think about and then it won’t happen for another 60 years. So it’s something to consider, to think about. Does it matter to you what happens to you. And if you’ve lived your whole life being a steward of the planet and you’re mindful of your waste and you’re that person, it doesn’t make a whole heck of a lot of sense for you to just be cremated at the end. There’s things that you can do that you would feel good about and your family would feel good about that, that might just be a better option for you. So it’s something to think about.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Fabulous. Thank you very much, Brie, and good luck with home Return Home.

Brie Smith: Thank you for having me. And, again, if you want John Paul on, you just let me know.

A couple episodes ago, I talked to Alisa Hardy and Taylor Dube-Mather about their experiences doing a practicum at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner (OCME) in Alberta. In this episode, I talked to their supervisor at the time of this practicum, Dr. Janne Holmgren. Janne has been a professor at Mount Royal University for 23 years and teaches in the Department of Economics, Justice and Policy Studies. She coordinates a practicum program for students to gain exposure working with the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. She also does research in how jurors perceive evidence, and how new technologies can be used as forensic evidence.

In this episode we talk about:

The program at Mount Royal University is a Bachelor of Arts in Criminal Justice and you can find out more here: https://www.mtroyal.ca/ProgramsCourses/FacultiesSchoolsCentres/Arts/Departments/EconomicsJusticePolicyStudies/DegreePrograms/BachelorofArts-CriminalJustice/index.htm

The OCME practicum is coordinated by Dr. Janne Holmgren. You can view her profile here: https://www.mtroyal.ca/ProgramsCourses/FacultiesSchoolsCentres/Arts/Departments/EconomicsJusticePolicyStudies/Faculty/JanneHolmgren.htm

You can find out more about the Sara Baillie and Taliyah Marsman case here: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/edward-downey-murder-baillie-taliyah-appeal-1.5994491

You can find out more about the Guy Paul Morin case here: https://www.innocencecanada.com/exonerations/guy-paul-morin/

Robert Jensen’s book, Personal Effects, is available through most major retailers: Amazon, Indigo (and it appears to be on sale thru Indigo right now!). His website is: https://robertajensen.com/

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Memoirs of a Reluctant Archaeologist is a fiction novel I wrote inspired by my experiences as a consulting archaeologist. I just created this teaser for the book. You can download it or buy the print copy from your favourite ebook retailer. You can also now buy direct from me: https://payhip.com/YvonneKjorlien

Transcript

Janne Holmgren: I’m Dr. Janne Holmgren. I’m a full professor at Mount Royal University in the Department of Economics, Justice and Policy Studies. I’ve been at MRU for 23 years.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Wow, you’re one of the old folks here.

Janne Holmgren: I know. Scary. I feel so old.  

Yvonne Kjorlien: you’ve seen it evolve — the institution evolve from its college days to, it’s now university days.

Janne Holmgren: Yeah, from the diploma program to the applied program to the bachelor’s program.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah.

Janne Holmgren: Yeah, so I’ve kind of been around the block.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right. And so you came to my attention mostly because I just did a podcast episode with Alisa and Taylor who went through, I guess at least one of your classes but the medical examiner’s internship that you coordinate so that they could get a practicum And do some work and get some exposure with what goes on at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. So, that’s kind of how you came to my attention. But you do way much more than that. So can you kind of give a  — how did you come to be at Mount Royal and doing the research are that you’re currently — if you’re doing any research now — what kind of brought you to that point? So kind of give us a sketch of your journey up to now.

Janne Holmgren: I became very interested in DNA evidence around the OJ Simpson trial. Where, it was clear to me that, DNA was going to become a big part, of that. And at that time there’s really nobody in Canada that was doing critical analysis examination of the evidence. So I was really interested in the impact on trials where you have something so novel like DNA that people can’t really see, they can’t really understand, how that ends up, playing out within the courtroom. So I focused my master’s degree on that kind of work whereby, I interviewed defense lawyers throughout Canada.

And I asked a question: what are the implications for your trials? What are you gonna do with this? How are you gonna play with this? And it became really clear to me that the system that we had in place in Canada because we don’t really have independent laboratories, that the access to — for example, a retest of biological samples were really hard to get hold of. So yeah, I know of a few cases in Canada, where, you think back to the Guy Paul Morin and case where the defense, wanted to retest the sample, but to retest the sample in Canada, they would have had to go through the Center of Forensic Sciences in Ontario or, through the RCMP and they didn’t want to do that, because the samples had already been examined in the laboratory in Canada. So they had to go down to the US, I think it was Boston, to get the sample, reevaluated. And it became clear that it was not his DNA that was part of that sample. So, that’s a long, long story and we know now that, it was a completely different individual that was responsible for the death of nine year old Christine Jessup, I think it was in 1994.

So the playing field within the criminal justice system, it was really clear to me that it was not balanced, the scales of justice was really tilted. In addition to that, any kind of expert testimony that we saw in the Court in the early days of DNA evidence was usually presented by people that worked in the laboratories – again, in the Center of Forensic Sciences and the RCMP laboratories — and we really didn’t have Council in Canada that could really contest what it was that they were doing, of what they were presenting within the courtroom.

So in some cases, they would have had to get an independent expert from the UK, Australia or the US, which usually cost, a lot of money. And because they didn’t really understand DNA evidence, the defense lawyers didn’t really understand DNA evidence, they didn’t really know how to extract the information within the courtroom, ask the right questions. I learned that there was a real need for an independent expert that was not affiliated with the police, or a particular laboratory. So in the early days of my work even as a master student, I was asked to help out defense lawyers understand, how DNA works and whether or not I could help them launch defenses for their clients or what questions to ask, about the actual evidence, which was enormously interesting. So that kind of grew my passion about DNA evidence.

There wasn’t really anywhere in Canada either where I could really get trained. The RCMP is doing all the training in Canada, and I have been incredibly fortunate to attend different courses that the RCMP has put on — in forensic interviewing, for example — which is the other passion of mine. But I kind of pushed my way into courses in the US. I took DNA statistical courses with the American Academy of Forensic Sciences. Where I met many people that were being trained, for the FBI and so forth and other Canadian officers, detectives, and what have you? So I had to kind of figure out how to kind of get that information on my own.

That led to my PhD where I tried something unique. Given that we cannot interview jurors in Canada, I decided to set up a mock trial and I was privileged to get the go-ahead from the Court of Queens Bench in Calgary to actually have a courtroom, and I actually had a real judge, and I had real experts, DNA experts, and I had a real defense lawyers and had real Crown prosecutors participating in my so-called mock trial, which was actually a real trial whereby I changed everything that was identifying about that trial.  We ran this trial in front of a jury. It was completely scripted. So, it was a massive script that they all played to. And it was video recorded with seven different cameras. And then after that, I interviewed the jurors about the evidence. I learned very quickly what it was that they’re fixated within the trial. And one of the major findings that I found was that it almost didn’t matter what evidence was part of the trial. When the expert would actually come forth and give these statistical numbers or the probabilities statistics of the likelihood that this DNA belonging to anyone other than their accused is one in a trillion — that’s really all that they needed to hear. And with that, they would find easily a finding of guilt on the basis of that, even alone, which is hugely problematic. Then they were fixated on all sorts of other things which were really, really funny: the clothing of council, the hairstyles of council, …

Yvonne Kjorlien: I’ve heard that, yeah.

Janne Holmgren: … whether or they had access to water, notebooks. At that time, when I ran this mock trial, it was not the norm that jurors were granted notebooks with information. That’s changed since then. But certainly, one of the issues that came out of my work, was that jurors really needed to be able to ask questions.

I argued in my PhD that really the courtroom is not all that different than on academic classroom. When you have people that are unfamiliar with biology, chemistry, physics, anything like that, and they have bombarded with all this kind of information, and they are dissuaded from taking notes, and they’re dissuaded from taking notes by counsel, for example, saying things like “Look at me”, “Listen to counsel”, “Your job is to pay attention.” And that actually ended up being perceived by the jurors as, “Okay, I’m really allowed to ask I’m not really allowed to write notes. I’m supposed to watch.”

And then council would say things like, “It is my job to ask the questions, not your job to ask the questions, but for you to listen,” which is very interesting. I correlated that with the classroom. This experience in the classroom, students need to be able to ask questions, like “What is this?”, “What is this DNA?”, “How does that work?”

My jurors had a really difficult time understanding that DNA can be extracted from anything in the body. In those early days they thought that blood had to be matched with blood and couldn’t really understand how could you extract DNA from dental pulp, for example. That was really, really difficult for them and difficult for defense lawyers too. We’re trying at that time to not get those statistical numbers to be presented within the courtroom, because they learned very quickly that it had way more of an influence than it probably ought to have had.

Yvonne Kjorlien: I can very much see your perspective that a courtroom is much like a classroom because you’re asking the jurors to make a decision based on what they’re presented, but they have to understand it. So in essence, they need to learn what’s going on. And so in order to learn, you need to be able to ask questions. Because if something is unclear to you, you can’t critically analyze it to make a decision. I can totally understand that. Yeah.

Janne Holmgren: And those other issues that was really apparent. In me interviewing lawyers and judges their perception of the jury, and this idea that jurors, they really don’t ask good questions. They really shouldn’t be allowed to ask questions because they ask ridiculous questions that are totally irrelevant. But for my standpoint as an educator, to me it scared me to think that we wanted the presentation, of a jury that didn’t really understand, was actually kind of okay, with it.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, it’s more than kind of scary. That’s very scary. Very scary.

Janne Holmgren: Based on that research, I was like, there probably is a really good argument for professional jurors. We see in some countries very well educated juror on the issues that are at play because it’s well known that.. and that was a really scary part that I learned when I interviewed defense lawyers for my masters — which was all I did for my Master’s degree, which I completed out of Simon Fraser University — was that if a defense lawyer did not understand the DNA evidence and the accused had a rap sheet of prior convictions, defense lawyers were more likely to encourage a plea. Because they were just so uncomfortable with this idea of having to contest the DNA evidence, which they really didn’t understand. Now the landscape for all of this that we’re talking about today is very different today.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right. Yeah.

Janne Holmgren: But the one issue that remains to this day and something that we see from time to time is that we learn that an expert who provided evidence many, many years ago, might have not completed all the testing of the samples, for example, and have gone into the courtroom just on the basis that they are an expert, a so-called expert, and have provided evidence, on their so- called expertise without really having done the work. And we saw that in the case of the pathologist, Charles Smith, the child pathologist. Who, in fact, in many of the instances that he had testified in, or in the many cases that he testified, he had not actually even completed all that work. And we had families, who’s families’ members, were convicted of murder of their children went off to jail, convicted. There are other children ceased, put into foster care, and so forth. And then since learned that his evidence was, in fact, incorrect and malicious.

Yvonne Kjorlien: So it’s my understanding, there’s a bit of a process at least, in the US to become an expert, be considered an expert witness There is a legal process. Is there a process in Canada?

Janne Holmgren: Yeah. The courtroom needs to conduct an interview of the individual that comes forth with the evidence, and then they decide whether or not that person should be considered an expert. And their questions, about all their work. So for example, in the case of a pathologist, “how many cases have done?”, and so forth. But once you are deemed that expert, nobody really questions anything really about you, which is problematic in some of these cases

Yvonne Kjorlien: Okay. So, it sounds kind of like with the DNA evidence that pretty much anything presented in court, whether it’s an expert witness, whether it’s the DNA evidence, some other evidence, it has to always be open to contest. Always be open to questions. Is that correct?

Janne Holmgren: Yes. I mean the main question that I always present — and I teach this to my students and my forensics courses too — is that we still need to answer the question. “How did it get there?”

Yvonne Kjorlien: Mmm.

Janne Holmgren: We’ve seen some interesting ways that DNA ends up at certain scenes whereby, maybe the individual wasn’t even there. We know that individuals who are working the criminal element are getting more and more sophisticated. One of the issues that we’re dealing with — I’m sure it’s this way in many jurisdictions, but a bit of a trend that we’ve seen locally — is that different vehicles are used by individuals engaging in criminal activities, and then shortly thereafter, we find the vehicle burned out. Why does that happen? That is to conceal the evidence. So that’s problematic for us, of course. Very difficult for us to collect any evidence in those kinds of situations, other than we are still able to identify the vehicle. But in many instances, we might not be able to know the exact color, you might not be able to get the ID of the actual vehicle. So the people that are working in the criminal element, as I call it, they’re getting, more and more sophisticated.

Now there is one part, that’s incredibly interesting. And that’s some of the research that I’m working on currently: is the evidence that we end up collecting from, for example, CCTV and security cameras. It is becoming increasingly more difficult to get away with not being seen, because of these kinds of cameras, just about everywhere. And so the work that I’m working on right now, which is interesting, is I look at the evidence that we’re able to collect, which is, fairly secure evidence — we can play that in court, and that works beautifully in many instances whereby, we don’t actually really need a very tough interrogation in many instances. In many instances, we — and I’ve seen this, through some of the training that I’ve done with the RCMP — we can just play back the video in front of the alleged accused and observe their reaction to that actual video. It’s like, “Here you go. Can you explain to us what’s going on in this video?” And oftentimes the individuals like, “Oh, shoot. That is clearly me. Now I’m gonna have to figure out some sort of an explanation as to what’s going on in the picture,” which is difficult to explain away. If you see someone, pointing a gun, you see the gun, and you see clearly the individual. So that has an advantage in the collection of evidence.

Before, for example, the police — the same goes for, some of the cases that we see at the OCME, where we have an individual that died by falling in front of the train. We have CCTV. Did that individual get pushed from the platform into the train or did they jump? So that’s very, very good evidence.

Now the other piece that I’m working on right now, and that is something that I have invited Alisa (who was one of the students at the OCME to partake in) is what happens to the responders, the collectors of the evidence, the people that are looking at the video, what happens to them? How does it impact them emotionally? Like the vicarious trauma.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Oh, that’s big.

Janne Holmgren: So, you are watching these live events, and it creates the sense of helplessness, and you can imagine. And we see that evidence sometimes could be something — I’m not talking about a specific case because I can’t talk about a specific case — but you can only imagine, a person who is actively dying from fentanyl overdose. There’s cameras behind a building, let’s say at anywhere in Calgary, anywhere. And people walk by and you can see on the video, people are walking by nobody’s tapping this person, then you see them seizing and then they die. And then you watch this. You have this incredible sense of why isn’t anybody stopping? “Stop, stop, and get a kit” or call 911 to save this person. Or, a suicide, an act of suicide, right?

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah.

Janne Holmgren: Where you can actually see the face of the individual contemplating: I should kill myself, or shouldn’t I kill myself. And then it’s on video, that do this. So the evidence is really great. At the impact on those that have to watch it is horrific. The other thing that I worry about is social media, getting hold of anything that’s live.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Oh, yeah.

Janne Holmgren: And that being shared, right? You’ve seen many instances of cases where there’s misinformation in criminal cases, and once that information’s been shared on multiple platforms, it can end up really hurting families. We saw that in the case of the mom and daughter that was murdered in Calgary a number of years ago: Sara Baillie and her five year old daughter, Taliyah Marsman. I don’t know if you remember in the early days, there was some suggestion that Sara Baillie was working in the sex trade and… so that was shown on Twitter, that information was on Facebook, and then we learned later on that the likelihood or the reason or the rationale behind a murder seemed to have been more linked to her trying to help a friend getting out of the sex trade.

Yvonne Kjorlien: I did hear that. Yes.

Janne Holmgren: Which is a very, very different story.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Very different.

Janne Holmgren: And then her family is trying to clear her name, and trying to explain through the media to people that this was not the case at all, which is hugely damaging.

Yvonne Kjorlien: It’s very interesting how easily we can condemn somebody by just that one presumption: she’s working in the sex trade. Well, she must be guilty of everything then.

Janne Holmgren: Yeah.

Yvonne Kjorlien: And then suddenly it flips 180. No, no. She was actually helping somebody trying to get out of the sex trade and that’s why she was killed. Ooo, that changes everything. So, yeah, it really brings to light our own biases, and how we can be so easily influenced by so little on social media or anything really, and it’s all just gossip.

Janne Holmgren: Yeah, yeah. I mean there’s that. So my main research focus now is still on forensics.  I’m still following all the changes to DNA evidence. We’re seeing now that there’s a lot more work related to touch DNA, how much DNA we believe behind. And there’s a lot more work, in the area producing technology that can read DNA very, very quickly. So that in the future — and that is actually happening in some places in the world  — where we can bring the equipment to the crime scene or to a natural disaster, and identify samples, very very quickly. So that’s very interesting. But I’m also a hugely interested in all the other technologies that we are using and we are relying on, like CCTV. And cell phone towers have really changed the landscape too, and was a big part of the Sara Baillie trial, as well because we’re able to find that the perpetrator cell phone had been in all these different places, by linking, the pings, and so forth. So in that trial it was very much about, “Can you explain to us how your cell phone was here, how your cell phone was there,” and all that kind of thing. So yeah.

Yvonne Kjorlien: And from what I understand too the accuracy is getting better and better especially with cell phone locations.

Janne Holmgren: Yes. Yeah.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, because yeah, from what I understood, even five years ago, it wasn’t great. The triangulation was so-so, so being able to actually place somebody at a specific location at a specific time wasn’t quite possible. I mean, it was almost there, but we’re getting pretty close now, from what I understand.

Janne Holmgren: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s very good, it’s very good. But, then we’re still dealing with the people that are trying to outsmart the evidence. We’ve got burner phones, like burner phones we end up, apprehending somebody and they’re in possession of 40 phones, so every time they make a phone call they get rid of it. So we still have to find ways.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right.

Janne Holmgren: And that takes a lot of money, a lot of resources. But it’s clear that we have a lot of work to do, there’s a huge need just thinking about the loss of life in Lahaina in Hawaii. The identification of all those people, they lack resources in many parts the world. My understanding is that the OCME or at the Coroner’s office in Lahaina, they have no capacity to identify all of those individuals. I just read this morning that they have enlisted help of forensic experts, who sifted through evidence on the site of 9/11. So it’s massive amount of work and sadly — just like, which was the case with 9/11 too — some of those bodies will never be found.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, yeah. That’s the thing with those disasters is that nobody is prepared for it, but they seem to be happening more and more. And there needs to be resources out there that we can call upon. I recently read a book: it’s called Personal Effects. And he runs a company that specializes…. Robert Jensen. There we go. Robert Jensen. The book is Personal Effects. And he runs the company that specializes in going in and helping with these disasters, whether they be natural or man-made and just helping to coordinate and sort through and deal with everything, from identification of the people to what happened, and trying to figure that out. Because, yeah, they’re huge undertakings and it’s just utter chaos until you can try to get a handle on things.

Janne Holmgren: That’s one of the reasons that I wanted to establish this partnership with the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, because our program, Justice Studies, really, didn’t have initially a forensic focus and certainly our students did not have a lot of exposure to death investigation as a result. I’m not meaning that every criminal justice program needs to be focusing on death investigation. We are an academic institution, but if we can bridge that experience for the student, the exposure for the student, I think that’s a win-win. The OCME and Calgary finds our students incredibly valuable to them and time and time again… we’ve had three or four of them hired coming out of our degree program, which is unheard of. Students coming out with a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice and then they end up working as death investigators and autopsy technicians full time. So still that’s something that hugely I’m invested in, hugely proud of, and the students that get that opportunity, I’m so proud of them, and the relationship that I’m able to establish with them is a real bonded relationship. I follow them wholeheartedly and I’m immensely proud of them. It’s a win-win situation, all around but it does come with that trepidation, I guess, of what are these students being exposed to? Can they handle what it is that they’re actually seeing, because this is real life. This is real death. They see the worst of Southern Alberta. The majority of cases that the average person south of Alberta knows nothing about.

Yvonne Kjorlien: And death in Western society is not, it’s something very excluded from everyday life.

Janne Holmgren: It’s very uncomfortable, right?

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah. It’s not kind of part of our culture. It used to be that the dead stayed within our homes. We would invite people over and have them look at the body, celebrate their life, transition them over to the next plane into death. There was all these rituals and day long celebrations, day long routines that we used to do and we don’t do that anymore. It’s now, when somebody dies, they’re taken away, they’re behind another wall, in a coffin, they’re put in the ground, they’re just taken away, and so we don’t even have exposure to that anymore. Once somebody dies, they’re taken away from us and so to be around death, that is very, very different. It’s not within our culture at all.

Janne Holmgren: Mm- Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, you’re right. You’re right, And the research I have been doing in interviewing everybody that was willing to participate in that work, in that environment, there’s lots of issues related to you exactly what you’re talking about, that makes it difficult for them to do their job, too. For example, one of the findings that I found in the interviews how infrequent people are prepared when someone dies, and the implication for an office like the Office of Chief Medical Examiner is that that often means that the body cannot be released to a funeral home right away because there’s no preparation.

We’ve got issues where the families are split. There’s infighting within the family as to what the wishes of the individual who had died. Nobody’s had that discussion. Nobody knows. This person in the family thinks it should be cremation. This person in the family thinks it should be burial. It should be a white coffin. It should be like all of these things. But that while all that goes on outside of the Office, that means that there is a body, a decedent that is not being removed, and they’re bursting at the seams. That office is an old office, the one in Calgary, and it’s certainly was not built to house the amount of people that are going through there.

So, seeing that and learning that and certainly the overdoses too,

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah.

Janne Holmgren: There’s way more of that and in the media and create awareness, about it and so forth and it affects all families.… but the exposure that my students that experience is invaluable.

Yvonne Kjorlien: What do you…so because it’s not mandatory, it’s voluntary, the practicum at the OCME. So how many students do you think have gone through the practicum now? Because you’ve been running it for a few years now.

Janne Holmgren: Yeah, I think we’re in Year Seven so I would say 12.

Yvonne Kjorlien: 12. Okay. Do you see that there’s kind of a pattern in those people that come up to and are at least interested in doing the program and then those that actually go through with it?

Janne Holmgren: It’s very competitive…

Yvonne Kjorlien: Oh, it is? Okay.

Janne Holmgren: Meaning that Leanne Atchison, in our department, the practicum coordinator, and I will interview, for that position. So there’s only one student that goes through every four months. So that is the most: three a year.  

Yvonne Kjorlien: Okay.

Janne Holmgren: During COVID, we did not have a student down there. For obvious reasons.

So it’s very competitive. We do complete interviewing process. Multiple interviews where we really kind of, dig at the student, inform the student this is what you’re gonna see, how are you gonna handle that. What are your support systems? How are you gonna handle the fact that you are p ivy to all of this information that nobody knows anything about and you cannot talk about it. You’re exposed to the evidence of criminal cases that will not go before the courts for maybe a year and you might never even see the true outcome of that case and you have to close your mouth and not share that information with anybody. So our fear, of course, is always that we don’t have a student with integrity, maturity, who just really thinks that this is cool and just wants to be able to tell their friends that they have the coolest practicum. So we have to kind of read through all that, vet through that, and so far — knock on wood — we’ve been very successful with that. We do pick students that we consider to be of high caliber.

And I’m fortunate to teach them. So I teach them in Year Two and I teach them in Year Four. I tell my students in Year Two that I keep track of when they hand in assignments, how they engage in my classes in Year Two and their pattern, throughout their degree: their tardiness, their excuses, that communication, the writing skills, all of that kind of stuff. So, sometimes students don’t get opportunity to even interview because we’re like, “No, no. Not gonna happen.”

Yvonne Kjorlien: So that’s kind of the pre-existing stuff. What do you offer in terms of supports when they’re going through this? Because they may be of high caliber, they’re an engaged student, they’ve kind of met your standards going into it, but because we aren’t exposed to death that much especially that much death in such close proximity  — it’s an intense situation to be into practicum at the OCME’s office.  And so what kind of supports you offer during the practicum that can help either train them or help them deal with the stuff that they’re seeing, with the confidentiality they’re having to keep…

Janne Holmgren: It’s a process. The very first day that they end up attending — and usually it’s three days a week that they go and most of the students go Wednesday Friday, something like that, so there’s a bit of a break but — I’m with them. You attend together. And based on that body language, we’ll talk with them, throughout that day. It’s not like the jump into the autopsy suite, watch bodies that are open, and so forth, right off the bat. You do a lot of talking. There’s a smell that’s at the office, is something that…it’s very difficult to get used to. We go outside, we take breaks. And in that first little bit, at the start of the practicum, they’re not really touching anything. They’re learning. The beautiful thing is that they are allowed to ask all in all the questions in the world. All the questions are answered, some of which I are able to answer and we work through it. Then everybody that works in the office — now that I have past students there — they know what the students going through. So that’s peer support that is invaluable, it’s something that we’ve now established this far into the practicum.

They’re encouraged to keep a diary of a sort. I’ve always said, “Before you get in your car or when you’re in a car, before you leave, write down what you need to kind of get off your chest, and then reach out to me. Let’s talk.” We talk often. We talk on the phone. We talk late at night. We talk anytime during the day. I’m totally available, via text. The students text me: “Can we talk?” and we talk. We talk through how difficult it is to see what they see, the shock, and seeing someone dead, that’s their age. The shock of seeing someone who’s committed suicide, that’s their age. Someone that’s their age that’s died in a motorcycle crash, that died in a vehicle accident and so forth. Those are really difficult. The first time they see a child dead. The first time they see a baby versus five year old baby drowning and there’s the first and the first, right?

Some of my students have the worst day ever on the very first day. We can’t predict that and it’s like, are you kidding me? It can be a homicide on the first day, and then a baby death, and then a suicide, and then a fentanyl overdose and then a fire, and then someone falling off a mountain and then a plane crash. It’s like, whoa, right?

Yvonne Kjorlien: It’s a lot. It’s a lot.

Janne Holmgren: It’s a lot. And remember that all deaths go through that office from Red Deer down to the border, and it’s any accidental death, any homicide. All child deaths are considered unnatural, unless, of course, the child is on the terminal care in a hospital something like that. Fire victims, you name it, right? It’s a lot, but we work through it. And by the end of it, they have figured out a really good way to process it. Some of them are absolutely hooked. This is what they want to do. They can’t think of anything better, whereas some of them are like, ”The experience was invaluable, but I think that my skill set is better served as a police officer as a messenger, to people that are still living.” Which is perfect. I’ve done my job. I think, when I teach death investigation and my forensics course, and I show an autopsy in that course. It’s not mandatory for his students to stay, and I have students that as soon as they hear, the drills, the tools that are used in the autopsy, they don’t all the sudden feel so well and they get up and leave. Perfectly fine.

Yvonne Kjorlien: That’s not for everybody.

Janne Holmgren: That’s not for everybody and then have other students that’s like “Whoa! That is so interesting. That’s quite the puzzle. And I know I want more that.” So it’s a process. It continues to be a process. But there are supports in place, through the university. We’ve got counseling services too. I highly recommend that, I encourage that, but a lot of it is really just talking through, what it is, making sense of it, taking a step away. Using their voices, it’s like, “No, I’m not ready to see that.”

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right.

Janne Holmgren: I’ve had students that are like, “No, I’ve got a child of my own. I can’t see this today,” and that is fine. I’ve had students learn how to sew bodies, weigh organs, take samples and that’s a process. You know, it’s not the first day. It’s probably not even first week. I’ve had a few of them that’s like, whoo-whoo! This is type great and they become, the best sew-ers ever and that’s great. But it’s a process and I never compare one student to a past student either.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right. They’re very much the individuals going on there individual journeys.

Janne Holmgren: They’re all my stars. They’re all my stars. It takes a lot of courage to expose yourself to that willfully. Because, the picture that you see in your head is a really tough of photograph, or video, a playback, to get rid of. Once see it, once you smell it can be, a permanent imprint.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, especially that smell. I will never forget that smell. I can’t describe it, but I can never forget it.

Janne Holmgren: Yeah, it’s yeah. I’ve tried putting… what they call that?

Yvonne Kjorlien: The Vicks?

Janne Holmgren: Yeah, the Vicks. Yeah, it doesn’t help. Multiple showers with shampoo into my mouth. Yeah.

Yvonne Kjorlien: No, it’s in your nose. It’s staying for days. That’s it.

Janne Holmgren: I mean that the students are masked, right?

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right.

Janne Holmgren: Big learning covid too, there are still individuals that will end up at the OCME that may have covid, even today, so exposure and stuff is a real thing and learning how to breathe through that for that amount of time, it can make you really, really light-headed too, right? So going outside is really important, grounding your feet and sitting down, and eating and drinking, and all that kind of stuff.

I think that we do a good job looking after the student, but it’s not for everybody and should the student wish to stop that practicum, we take them out immediately. And we tell them that they do not have to stick it out, and it’s not that they are to be considered of a weak character because they are uncomfortable with that situation. Not at all.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right.

Janne Holmgren: That’s why us deciding on who is the next student for that decision is a long process.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right. So we’re almost out of time. So, do you see the program continuing? Do you see the program expanding? You do you see the program changing in any way?

Janne Holmgren: We will continue as long as we are welcome. We are limited by the size of the space. I’m sure that they would happily take five, five students, but they’re really is not the physical space. As it is, now it’s like, you’re moving around, trying to stay out of the way so that they’re really important work. So, I hope that we can continue for a really long time. There has been some talks about a new building, but that decision rests with the Justice Minister and whoever provides that kind of money.

I think that, government officials should go and visit the space and what is actually going on down there. It’s really get a full understanding of how important that work is. And that’s what ultimately my research goal is: is to try and take this research and share it with the general public — how important this work is, the dignity of the individuals that work there, how much pride they have in their work, and how little they recognized for that work. It’s everybody’s worst day to have to go and visit that office. A family member being brought in there is everybody’s worst day. But the work that they do down there is so important. And I’m hugely proud of the work that they do at that office and my students, of course.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right. Just as we close, what is the name of the program which you teach at Mount Royal University?

Janne Holmgren: I teach in the Department of Economics, Justice and Policy Studies in the Faculty of Arts.

Yvonne Kjorlien: In the Faculty of Arts, so if anybody listening to this episode is in getting into the program, that’s where they can find you.

Janne Holmgren: Yes.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Fabulous. All right. Thank you very much.

I talked to Marg because I wanted to find out more about the new group she started, The Fair Field Foundation. My time in consulting archaeology was short-lived and I wanted to find out how Marg was trying to make it a better place.

In this episode we talk about:

You can find out more about Circle CRM Group here: https://www.circleconsulting.ca/

You can find out more about The Fair Field Foundation here: https://thefairfieldfoundation.com/

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Do you have a suggestion for a topic on the Scattered podcast?

Do you have a question about working with human remains?

As always, if you have a suggestion for this podcast, I’d love to hear it. Contact me at [email protected] or through my contact form.

Support the podcast and my research and Buy Me A Coffee. Your contributions will go toward webhosting, transcriptions, and paying for my research travel expenses. (Gas ain’t cheap!) Want to find out more about my research? Check out the Scavenging Study.

Contribute to the conversation about dead people & archaeology at the Reluctant Archaeology Group on Facebook.

Memoirs of a Reluctant Archaeologist is a fiction novel I wrote inspired by my experiences as a consulting archaeologist. I just created this teaser for the book. The ebook is on sale — for FREE — July 1- 31, 2023. You can download it or buy the print copy (no discount) from your favourite ebook retailer.

I talked to Alisa Hardy and Taylor Dube-Mather about their experiences doing a practicum at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner (OCME) in Alberta. Alisa is currently doing the practicum and Taylor completed the practicum in 2019. I did a very casual version of a practicum at the OCME in Edmonton during my graduate program. I wanted to see how our practicums differed and what they learned from their experience.

In this episode we talk about:

The program at Mount Royal University is a Bachelor of Arts in Criminal Justice and you can find out more here: https://www.mtroyal.ca/ProgramsCourses/FacultiesSchoolsCentres/Arts/Departments/EconomicsJusticePolicyStudies/DegreePrograms/BachelorofArts-CriminalJustice/index.htm

The OCME practicum is coordinated by Dr. Janne Holmgren. You can view her profile here: https://www.mtroyal.ca/ProgramsCourses/FacultiesSchoolsCentres/Arts/Departments/EconomicsJusticePolicyStudies/Faculty/JanneHolmgren.htm

Taylor is currently doing her MA at Simon Fraser University with Dr. Gail Anderson.

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Do you have a suggestion for a topic on the Scattered podcast?

Do you have a question about working with human remains?

As always, if you have a suggestion for this podcast, I’d love to hear it. Contact me at [email protected] or through my contact form.

Support the podcast and my research and Buy Me A Coffee. Your contributions will go toward webhosting, transcriptions, and paying for my research travel expenses. (Gas ain’t cheap!) Want to find out more about my research? Check out the Scavenging Study.

Contribute to the conversation about dead people & archaeology at the Reluctant Archaeology Group on Facebook.