Frozen Body Might Not Solve All Mysteries

The temperature outside sizzled at 109 degrees as the Yavapai County Sheriff’s undercover narcotics agent crept into the dark interior of the stolen Ryder rental truck looking for drugs.

But inside the truck was a top-loading freezer humming quietly. And in its contents, a gruesome discovery: a young woman face down and hunched over at the waist, her naked body swathed in layers of dark garbage bags, her features frozen in icy perfection.

Fingerprints identified the woman as Denise A. Huber, missing three years from her Newport Beach home. But, forensics experts say, the cold that preserved her identity may forever obscure when the 23-year-old was killed.

“There will be no way to tell if the body has been properly preserved at the time of death,” said Dr. Cyril Wecht, a Pittsburgh pathologist who was post-mortem consultant in the cases of John F. Kennedy and Elvis Presley. “When you allow the body to thaw it doesn’t necessarily bring it back to that time in the post-mortem biological clock.”

Coroners who have dealt with frozen remains in northern states say it is not unusual to find bodies maintained in near-perfect condition under winter ice and snow or in the frozen depths of lakes. But the corpses still leave many questions unanswered.

Forensic pathologists say microscopic clues may show whether Huber had been partially thawed at one point and moved or whether she had been sexually assaulted.

The Maricopa County Coroner has said there was no indication of sexual assault nor any sense of when Huber was murdered by a series of blows to the head.

“At this point, we don’t when she was killed or where she was killed,” said Laurie Berra, Yavapai County Sheriff’s Department spokeswoman.

Wecht said coroner’s investigators may be able to determine from the contents of Huber’s stomach if she was killed immediately after she was abducted or died later.

“If they can find out from her family or friends if she ate a certain kind of food at a certain time, say an egg roll,” Wecht said. “If death occurred a short time afterward and she was frozen immediately, the egg roll will still be there.”

Derek Notman, a Minneapolis paleoradiologist, said under the right conditions bodies can remain frozen in near-perfect conditions for dozens of years. Notman said he helped unearth the bodies of three men who perished during the Franklin Expedition 145 years ago while attempting to cross the Arctic Circle.

“They had been preserved by the permafrost all that time,” he said.

But Notman said pathologists can sometimes determine if a body had been thawed at one point in time by looking at cell breakage. When a body is frozen and thawed, Notman said, blood cells rupture and leak intracellular fluid.

There might also be small signs of decomposition, particularly if the intestines and stomach were full at the time of death. But Notman said it would be difficult to determine whether the body began to decompose before the freezing or during some thawing point--such as when it was moved from one place to another.

Mickey Nelson, the Lewis and Clark County coroner in Helena, Mont., said bodies his department has found after a winter’s freeze have remained near perfect.

“We had a plane crash up on a mountain, and they weren’t able to get up there for two months,” Nelson said. “As soon as they thawed out, we had virtually no problem identifying them. We just left them out at room temperature.”

Nelson said incidents in the near-freezing lakes of northern Montana have proven that bodies can remain in icy suspension for years. One man who fell off a boat into the 37-degree deep of Holter Lake about 10 years ago, Nelson said, floated to the surface perfectly preserved two years after he disappeared.

“The identification was accomplished without dental work,” Nelson said. “He never froze, but he was under optimal conditions.”