Skull Sessions : Busy Forensic Anthropologist Calls Southland ‘Prime Territory’ for Her Work

Judy Suchey came to California 25 years ago, largely for the bones.

Suchey studies the bones of the dead, some victims of the region’s grisliest crimes: the Manson slayings, the Hillside Stranglers murders and other serial killings.

For a forensic anthropologist, Suchey said, this is a “dream location.”

“Southern California is just prime territory for a person in my profession. There’s more crime and more bodies just thrown away in remote areas here than anywhere in the world. I don’t know anyone anywhere who can match the cases I’ve had.”

Indeed, the 51-year-old Suchey has participated in some of California’s biggest cases while working for coroners in Orange, Los Angeles, Riverside and San Bernardino counties:

* Years after the Tate-LaBianca slayings by the Manson “family,” she identified the remains of ranch hand Donald (Shorty) Shea, now listed as one of the cult’s numerous victims. Shea was decapitated and buried on the Manson family’s Chatsworth property.

* The Hillside Stranglers case, in which Angelo Buono and his cousin, Kenneth Bianchi, sexually tortured and killed nine women in Glendale and then buried their bodies on hillsides in 1977 and 1978.

* The 1986 Cerritos airline crash, in which 82 people died. Suchey’s discoveries allowed scientists to identify dozens of victims by linking the remains with dental records.

* The case of Long Beach serial killer Randy Steven Kraft, who deposited his victims’ bodies along freeways or buried them in remote areas. In 1989, Kraft was sentenced to death for the mutilation and murder of 16 men in Orange County, although authorities believe he may have killed as many as 67 people in three states over 12 years.

* The case of “Sunset Strip Killer” Douglas Daniel Clark, whose victims’ remains were found primarily in Hollywood. Clark was sentenced to death for the 1980 sex slayings of six women.

Steve Dowell, a criminalist with the Los Angeles County coroner’s office, said Suchey has earned a worldwide reputation, not only because of her success with high-profile cases, but because she created a way to determine sex and age through skeletal remains.

Developed with another anthropologist and called the Suchey-Brooks standard, the technique involves measuring the width, length and thickness of pubic bones and applying them to a chart, which is then used to determine sex and age.

A mounted display in Suchey’s office shows that these bones in men differ considerably from those of women, and various other markings on the bones can indicate approximate age.

Raised in Kansas and South Dakota, Suchey (pronounced SUCH-ee) was inspired by a college professor to view forensic anthropology as an adventure, then was compelled to ply her calling in the state that offered the most promise.

These days, Suchey, whose small office is cluttered with human bones, sometimes works 80 to 90 hours a week, including teaching full time at Cal State Fullerton. She does that job not because it’s lucrative--it isn’t--but because it carries spiritual rewards that examining skeletal remains never will, she says.

“If I had to look only at dead bodies all the time, it could get really bad,” she said. “But students are alive and fresh. They’re real .”

Still, she lives for the breakthroughs a skilled expert can bring to a murder case after detectives have all but given up.

A few years ago, Suchey helped unravel a Griffith Park homicide case that had lingered for years. Her work helped determine that the intertwined bodies of an embracing couple, with guns pointed at their backs, did not represent a double homicide, which police originally had thought, but rather the man shooting the woman and vice versa, in virtually the same split-second.

In Needles, Calif., Suchey helped excavate a handful of bones and identify the bodies of a grandfather, his son and grandson years after their small plane had disappeared.

“The sheer volume of her work is impressive,” Dowell said, “and she’s made some remarkable discoveries over the years. I’ve seen her out in the bush, for instance, literally up to her neck in poison oak, looking for things that look like twigs but aren’t twigs--they’re bones.”

Suchey charges less for her services than other independent forensic anthropologists because she doesn’t want to become dependent on the money from that work, she said.

“I like being able to say, ‘I can’t do that now--I have my teaching job.’ And why do I need more money?” Suchey said. “I’m single, I don’t have children. I have two brothers and friends. And a cat. I can’t think of any way in which money would help my life.”

But Suchey does mind what she calls the woeful amounts paid to government pathologists, forensic anthropologists and the like, particularly in Los Angeles County, where the workload is relentless.

“Agencies are terribly underfunded, and the L.A. coroner’s office is one of the worst,” she said. “They should have 50% more, but instead, they keep getting cut. It’s like the difference between me teaching 80 students or 480 in one semester.”

In recent years, Suchey said, her own work has taken a physical toll.

“I spend a lot of time rappelling mountains,” said Suchey, who recently had major surgery on each foot after a four-hour hike up Mt. Baldy to reach a crime scene.

Last year, the venom from the bite of a brown recluse spider began to eat away at her nose until antibiotics and a hospital stay stemmed the erosion. High blood pressure also set in, which doctors blamed on stress.

And there are emotional repercussions.

“The air crash was the worst situation I’d ever been involved in,” she said, “because I had no space. I worked at the scene or on small body parts for three weeks--every minute I wasn’t teaching. I had no rest at all. It just wasn’t good. At times, I got to thinking I could see some of the victims walking in crowds. You’re thinking so much about what you’re doing that it’s constantly on your mind.”

Hoping to work less, Suchey is writing a book aimed at educating prospective forensic scientists. On occasion, she speaks to a mystery writers’ group.

“I’ve been involved in dozens of terrible scenes,” she said, “where you know someone was tortured and then killed, and it’s the middle of the night, the moon is out, and there you are, working on a body. You begin to feel you’re working out of a novel. Most of the time it’s dry, clear-cut and scientific, but once in a while, strange things happen, and you begin to think, ‘This is really weird, and here I am, right in the middle of it.’ ”

One incident occurred a few years ago in a remote desert. Suchey found deep depressions in the soil and a mummified body. She concluded the victim had been tortured because of the condition of the bones.

“We didn’t get there until 2 or 3 in the afternoon, and even by nightfall, we hadn’t finished,” she said. “It got stranger and stranger the more we worked. Parts of skin at the victim’s finger pads had been cut away and were floating about . . . the kind of thing murder mysteries are made of, except it was happening for real.”

Although breakthroughs occur, Suchey’s work yields its share of disappointments. Not long ago, she discovered the remains of a young woman in Indio and thought it might be homicide victim Denise Huber, who was then listed only as missing. Huber’s body was later discovered in a freezer in Arizona. The Indio body has not been identified.

“A tremendous amount of bodies are just never identified,” she said. “And there’s a tremendous amount of crime. People don’t realize it until one of their relatives is killed.”

So in terms of offering a laboratory, California is second to none, she noted, shaking her head.

“And it threatens to be that way for a long time to come. Believe me, the people in my field have no shortage of work. All that crime just won’t let us rest.”