Magazine

Bones From Dinky Creek

A Deputy Sheriff appears, and the Fresno coroner’s office and medicine combine efforts to identify human remains.

This “Coroner’s Corner” article is reprinted from the January issue of Vital Signs, the montly magazine of the Fresno-Madera Medical Society.

THE CORONER’S MORNING BRIEFING was well under way when a tall young man abruptly appeared in the room interrupting a lively discussion concerning the need to post a case from the previous day. He was wearing an old pair of dark washable pants and an I’m-going-to-the-mountains kind of shirt with boots to match.

“Who are you?” I said, putting the question to the look on my face.

“I’m a deputy sheriff.”

“Sure you are.”

“No, no. I’ve got some bones with me,” said the deputy. “We are going to Dinky Creek to look for the rest of this guy. We think he’s a hunter that’s been missing for a few weeks.” He thrust a plastic bag at the group. Inside were two clearly visible long bones.

“Are these human?” he asked.

“Looks like. Where did you get them?” Dr. Gopal inquired.

“Between Dinky Creek and the Big Trees,” replied the deputy. “A guy brought them in last evening. If you think they are human, we will go up there today and look for more.”

“They are clearly human — a tibia and a fibula,” opined Dr. Gopal.

“How long have they been there and are they male?” were the earnest questions from the deputy.

“You can’t tell how old they are after six months,” replied Dr. Gopal. “We will have a forensic anthropologist examine them and get back to you in a few days. Let’s make sure they are male.”

The deputy looked distressed. “They are quicker than that on TV.”

“Yea,” I shot back. “Detectives are better dressed on TV, too.”

The deputy looked offended. To change the subject he turned the bag over exposing a metal plate on the tibia.

“What’s that plate?” he asked. “It’s got two lines of numbers.”

Whoa. That plate was an attention getter that changed everything. This was not just another bag of bones. “That is orthopedic hardware,” I said with enthusiasm.

The deputy told us he’d been looking for a missing hunter up in the Dinky Creek area for a couple of months. “We think it’s him,” he said.

“Call his family and see if he had a leg operation,” I directed. The detective unhooked his radio and called his “boss.” In a few minutes it was confirmed that the missing hunter was never under the knife.

In the meantime I called orthopedist Don Huene, MD, with whom I had previously done some forensic work. “Don, we’ve got old bones with an attached orthopedic plate about five-inches long. There are six closely placed screw holes,” I explained to Don.

“Are the screws hexagonal?” he asked. Everyone agreed that they were. Don replied, “That sounds like a Synthes plate.”

A quick check on the internet produced the company’s phone number in Pennsylvania. A nice sounding voice answered the phone. We asked her to check out the numbers.

She said the one number identified the plate as belonging to their company but she did not have a record of the second number on her computer so she would connect me with the legal department. “Are you sure? We don’t want to sue anybody,” I tried to reassure her. She insisted.

I was transferred to a somewhat defensive voice identified as Joanna. After I assured her that this was a CSI thing and no trial lawyers were involved, she produced what she said were two pages of addresses from that lot number showing that that particular part was shipped all over California.

I crossed my fingers, and after a few minutes she said, “Well, there was one shipped one to St. Agnes Hospital in Fresno on April 3, 1999.” I thanked her profusely and called St. Agnes. After going through several departments, we were connected to David in the orthopedic department. With the date of operation in hand, he soon identified the patient.

Meanwhile, the Coroner’s Office and the sheriff’s deputies were searching their memories for Dinky Creek area missing persons. Deputy Coroner Loretta Andrews remembered a 2006 case where a body was recovered and she thought perhaps it had a missing leg. She pulled the record and brought the name to my office just as David called back from St. Agnes with a name — the same name

Integrating medicine and the Coroner’s Office gave us a match and positive identification in less time than it takes to drive to Dinky Creek.