Expert Has Had a Bone to Pick With Many a Crafty Criminal

When Judy Suchey visited her family in rural South Dakota not long ago, she learned that a deer had been killed in a nearby woods. She made her way through the brush, gathered up the animal’s bones and had them shipped to herself in Orange County, via United Parcel, for $5.43.

Suchey, a 45-year-old professor at Cal State Fullerton, has a garage full of animal bones that she collects as a hobby. But the forensic anthropologist’s primary interest is human bones.

Almost 20 years ago, she went to work for police in Orange and San Bernardino counties, later adding Los Angeles County. Her job is to help identify the victims by studying their skeletons and to try to tell police what may have happened to them.

Suchey has been called in on the Hillside Strangler case, the Charles Manson case and the Cerritos air crash.

She also was on the scene 2 years ago when authorities thought they may have found the remains of Laura Bradbury of Huntington Beach, a 3-year-old who disappeared Oct. 18, 1984, from a family campsite in Joshua Tree National Monument. But the bone fragments found near the site where she was last seen offered little information and her disappearance remains a mystery.

Suchey’s biggest case, however, may be that of Randy Steven Kraft, which is expected to bring her into the courtroom in Santa Ana on Monday to testify. It was she who identified the skeletal remains of Keith Daven Crotwell, one of the 16 men Kraft is charged with murdering. Suchey cannot discuss the Kraft case while it is in trial, but she can discuss others she has helped to solve.

There was the man in North Watts, she said, who threatened to bury a young boy in his back yard, where he said he had buried lots of other boys. The boy ran straight to the police. They dug up the man’s back yard to the point where it looked like a farm field tilled for planting.

What the police found was a small mountain of bones: chicken bones, rabbit bones, T-bones, pork chop bones and the skeleton of an old dog named Bullet, now residing in Suchey’s garage. But there were no human bones. It had been a costly threat by the old man.

Still, “you never know where the bodies are going to turn up,” Suchey told a group recently at a state criminalists convention in Costa Mesa. “A termite inspector went under a house while it was in escrow and ran into some shoes. He picked one up, and there were bones inside. I was told he left, suddenly.”

Suchey not only studies bones; her job many times is to find the body, based on reports from informants or suspects.

When that happens, she puts together a team of volunteers who help her search.

“These people volunteer their time because they love it; it’s like a picnic with exercise,” she said.

Even so, it is often a difficult job.

“Bones blend in well with the countryside. We do not believe in a straight-line approach,” she said. “We meander around with three-pronged gardening tools, on our hands and knees under trees, going through coyote nests. . . . One of our biggest problems is running into poison oak.”

Another problem is that animals often run off with bones that are critical for identification. In one case, Suchey said, a woman who lived at the base of a ravine thought her dogs had found an unusual number of bones. When one of them brought back a human skull, she understood why.

It was a tough case, Suchey said, because the dogs not only had strewn the bones around the area, they had buried many of them.

The hardest work is excavating, Suchey said, because workers must dig deep and wide to find the bones and be careful not to damage them.

Suchey’s crew once dug up the remains of Tony the farm hand, who had died 3 years earlier. An informant had said he was buried in a horse stall. But Suchey’s crew found four horse stalls and had no choice but to start with the first and work their way through.

“We did not think the odor would be bad because Tony should have decomposed by now,” she said. “But what we had not counted on was that these people buried all their horses there, too.”

After a full day of digging, first with a backhoe and then by hand, they found Tony’s remains in stall No. 2.

Some buried bones remain a mystery even when the digging is easy.

A few years ago, Suchey recalled, a frequent visitor to Griffith Park in Los Angeles stumbled across a crude grave marker that read: “Remains of an unfortunate prospector: May he rest in peace. 1983.” But inside the grave, authorities found two skeletons.

“I don’t know what happened to the old prospector, but these skeletons belonged to a boy about 15, and another in his early 20s,” Suchey said. The case remains unsolved, and the two have never been identified.

Much of Suchey’s work takes place in the coroner’s laboratory. A few years ago, she recounted, the Orange County Sheriff’s Department bought her a deep cooking pot so that she could clean larger bones. She puts them on the stove to heat and washes them with soap and water. Not to be outdone, Los Angeles County authorities bought her two such pots, so she could work on two skeletons at once.

“I used to clean the bones on my back-yard barbecue at home, but I finally decided I’d better work at the office,” she said jokingly.

The most tragic case Suchey may have worked was the Aug. 31, 1986, Cerritos air disaster. She was on the scene twice and saw body parts which had fallen from the plane and embedded in the ground up to a foot deep. That one was no picnic, she said.

When she is not teaching or working on cases, she is doing research. With a partner, she has created a new method to identify the ages of female bones.She has also gained national recognition for her work in measuring the age of victims.

“Dr. Suchey is setting new standards in anthropology with her research on measuring age through pubic bone samples,” said George Gill, a professor at the University of Wyoming who is active in the American Academy of Forensic Sciences. “Even the people who set the old standards are anxious to see her research completed; they’ve seen some of it and are very impressed.”

Suchey, originally from Kansas, joked that she “started out in nursing, but switched to study the dead ones.”

She studied at the University of Kansas and later taught at State University of New York at Potsdam. She said she sent out her resume in an attempt to escape the cold and was accepted at Cal State Fullerton in 1969. She began working for coroners’ offices almost immediately.

In 1975, she was handed a set of bones found in a remote area of the Laguna Hills. She could tell that it was a young man, and tool marks on the sixth cervical vertebrae indicated his head may have been cut off by an instrument. But there was no identification.

Soon after Kraft’s arrest on May 14, 1983, investigators with the Orange County Sheriff’s Department learned that he had been questioned in the Crotwell disappearance. A skull, identified as Crotwell’s through dental records, had been found in the Long Beach Harbor on May 8, 1975. Investigators asked Suchey to re-examine the remains that she had first seen in 1975--this time equipped with Crotwell’s medical records and the skull. A break mark in an arm bone matched an injury Crotwell suffered as a youngster. And the skull had become detached from the body after the fifth cervical vertebrae.

At Kraft’s preliminary hearing in 1983, Suchey discussed details of her two examinations at length and in tremendous medical detail.

Afterward, Municipal Judge John J. Ryan admonished her not to discuss her testimony with anyone outside the case.

“But if you did,” the judge said smiling, “I doubt that anyone would understand you.”