Death Without a Ripple

Orlando Castaneda arrives in San Dimas to find the San Gabriel Valley suburb alight with the glow of a stunning Indian summer afternoon. It’s three days before Halloween in 1995, and Castaneda intends to spend this Saturday taking his champion Spanish Andalusian show mount, Incendio, on the animal’s first trail ride. He sets out from the rented stable for a wooded dirt-and-gravel gully adjacent to a secluded residential stretch of Covina Hills Road, a route he’s never ridden before.

He’s scouting for a safe place to enter the gully from the street when he sees her. She is lying face up in a patch of scorched foliage at the bottom of the 30-foot embankment. Her knees are bent and her right hand rests on her chest. Her nude body is so limp and her skin so unnaturally pale that for several seconds Castaneda thinks she is a mannequin. But as he stares down from his saddle, his queasy panic tells him otherwise. “Hey! Hey, are you OK? Hello?” he shouts, hoping to elicit some sign of life. Getting none, he spurs the horse into a gallop and races toward the nearest house to summon help.

At 3 p.m., a 911 call reporting a body in the 21000 block of Covina Hills Road comes into the Walnut/Diamond Bar station of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. The two deputies who respond 15 minutes later secure the scene, take Castaneda’s statement and, after checking the body for vital signs, pronounce the victim dead. Their involvement, however, will be short-lived. Under county law, all “traumatic” deaths, a category that includes not only homicides but also suicides, drug overdoses, fatal fires and car accidents, must be referred to the L.A. County Coroner’s Office. Within an hour, the deputies notify the coroner and send for homicide detectives.

Even before he arrives, Daniel Aikin, the investigator dispatched to the scene, has a good idea of what he will find. In a county the size of Los Angeles, a coroner’s investigator typically deals with a couple of dumped bodies every week. Though he is only 33, Aikin has been working in the field for 13 years, long enough to know that when a naked woman is burned and ditched on a isolated hillside, it is likely she has been sexually assaulted, then beaten and strangled. As he carefully edges his way down the embankment, occasionally pausing to snap photographs, he notices clumps of blackened undergrowth searing a path toward the victim.

When he kneels beside her for a closer look, Aikin sees that his instincts were sound. The right side of her face and neck are charred, but he finds a faint mark on the front of her throat, an indication of a possible ligature injury. The woman’s tongue protrudes between her teeth, another sign of suffocation. Burned scraps of a plaid-patterned fabric that the investigator guesses are the remnants of a sleeping bag lie under her head. Aikin estimates that she has been in the ravine for less than 24 hours.

Dan Anderson, a criminalist who works for the coroner’s office, soon joins the examination. He harvests pieces of the plaid cloth, collects hair samples, takes scrapings from beneath the young woman’s fingernails and swabs her nipples and genitals for a sexual assault evaluation. If an arrest is made, the specimens may prove useful in tying a suspect to her killing. When he and Aikin finish, they wrap her in two sheets--one cloth, the other plastic--for the ride back to the coroner’s headquarters. There she will be fingerprinted and stored in the 40-degree crypt.

Later that night, as he types up his report, Aikin notes that the woman’s identity remains a mystery. Neither the detectives investigating her death nor concerned neighborhood residents have any idea who she is; the only personal possession recovered at the scene was her silver earring. And so, when he turns in the paperwork at 9:45 p.m., Aikin assigns her the alias she will keep during the course of a heart-rending five-year journey: Jane Doe #59.

*

EVERY YEAR IN LOS ANGELES COUNTY, SEVERAL HUNDRED MEN AND WOMEN lose their identities when they die. Most are lucky enough to regain them within a few days or weeks after investigators from the coroner’s office find the medical records or fingerprints that match the body to the life it led. For others, months may go by before investigators can track down family members or friends and successfully reunite them with their names. Between 85% and 90% of the county’s John and Jane Does eventually are identified.

But in a handful of cases, investigations can stretch on for years, remaining officially open, if not active, long after the dead have been cremated. In the most confounding cases, the ashes will be consigned to an unmarked common grave at the cemetery where Los Angeles buries its poor, its abandoned and its nameless dead. These “unidentifiables” may have ended their lives suddenly or predictably, violently or quietly, but the uncertainty surrounding their deaths stems from the same sad fact. “The biggest problem we have is that nobody is looking for these people,” says Craig Harvey, the coroner’s chief of investigations. “So many people think we live in a ‘Leave It to Beaver’ society, but the truth is that most of us don’t even know our neighbors.”

Even if the life that preceded it was filled with joy, a death marked by prolonged anonymity is by definition a tragic one. If you die without your name, your body will be touched by dozens of hands, none of them belonging to the mother or father who cradled you as an infant or the brother or sister you wrestled with as a child. Your scars, jewelry and clothes will be meticulously photographed, but not by the friends who may have been there when you acquired them. The people asking questions won’t be bereaved survivors trying to assign meaning to your life, but county investigators who know nothing about your dreams or disappointments. To these overworked strangers will fall the task of figuring out who you were.

Much has been written about the fragmentation of American society, about families alienated from their communities and family members alienated from one other. To spend time poring over the case files of hundreds of unidentified bodies, however, is to come face to face with the real flesh-and-bone consequences of such isolation. Gilda Tolbert, the lone coroner’s investigator working full time to identify the county’s Does, puts it bluntly: “If the employer, family or friends don’t care enough to pick up the phone, there is almost no other way of identifying a person who has never been arrested. I am at a dead end. We are never going to know who that person is.”

Of the 33 Jane and John Does who remained unidentified in 1995, 14 appeared to be transients. John Doe #108 was burned beyond recognition next to a flood-control basin in Culver City when the propane tank he was using to warm himself exploded. John Doe #137 succumbed to cirrhosis of the liver by railroad tracks in Santa Fe Springs. John Doe #19 was bludgeoned to death in South El Monte. John Doe #83 was hit by a car while riding a bicycle at midnight on the southbound I-5 transition to the 110 Freeway.

It’s not surprising that individuals occupying the margins of society--people without regular addresses, Palm Pilots, or insurance coverage--would prove difficult to trace. More puzzling are the number of Does who defy all efforts to identify them despite obvious signs that they had homes and families.

Why, for example, hasn’t anyone been searching for John Doe #58, who, in 1995, was found floating in the ocean off Long Beach with a gold cross necklace, 35 $100 bills in the pocket of his shorts and a blood-alcohol level high enough to have rendered him comatose? Or for that matter, John Doe #181, who for days floated face down and fully clothed in a 62-degree Malibu Creek until finally found in 1995 by three hikers? Both men were young, in their late teens to early 20s. In both cases, according to Harvey, “the chances of their being on their own at that age without any parents still alive are practically nil.”

And what about Jane Doe #54, a woman between 25 and 43 years old who was hit by a 2,405-ton freight train in La Puente a month before Jane Doe #59 was killed? Her death was ruled a suicide because a witness saw her covering her ears while the conductor blared the train’s whistle. The pathologist who performed her autopsy found pregnancy stretch marks and a Caesarean section scar on her stomach, and the name “Alejandro” tattooed on the back of her shoulder. How many children did she have, and what has become of them? Who is Alejandro?

Jane Doe #59’s body also revealed a lot about her. She was between 19 and 33 years old, most likely in her early 20s because her wisdom teeth were just emerging. She was 5-feet-5 and weighed 130 pounds. She was so fair that everyone assumed she was white, but the contours of her skull suggested she may have had some Latino ancestry, too. She never had any cavities, and never wore braces to correct her crooked smile. At some point in her short life she chipped her right front tooth. She had brown eyes and a delicate, half-inch-long scar above her left eyebrow.

For her last meal, she apparently ate rice with a red sauce. She kept her fingernails neatly trimmed and unpolished. She didn’t spend a lot of time walking barefoot. She highlighted her light brown shoulder-length hair, and before she died had pulled it back into a high bun, as if she had been preparing to take a bath. She was trendy enough to wear a hoop through her upper ear, but not so trendy as to have a tattoo.

She was somebody’s daughter. She must have been somebody’s friend. But at her most vulnerable, nobody comes forward to provide a coherent narrative to her life, leaving only a handful of fragments to be sorted and studied until they are set aside like an old newspaper.

*

TWO DAYS AFTER CASTANEDA’S DISCOVERY, SGT. DORAL RIGGS, ONE OF TWO lead detectives on the case, enters Jane Doe #59’s height, weight, age estimate and eye and hair colors into a computerized database of missing persons maintained by the California Department of Justice. It turns out that a lot of women in their late teens to early 30s are regarded as missing by someone; the computer yields 70 possible matches.

Several people responding to media reports about the San Dimas murder also call the Sheriff’s Department to say they might know the identity of Jane Doe #59. A mother from the Covina area tells investigators that a 16-year-old friend of her daughter’s whom child-welfare authorities had removed from an unfit home in early October had disappeared from the trailer park where she’d been staying. A married man from Upland phones to say that Jane Doe sounds a lot like his 23-year-old mistress, whom he has not seen in two weeks. An anonymous tipster reports watching a 17-year-old girl die of a crack overdose at a West Hollywood party where the host had threatened to kill anyone who called 911.

Volunteers working in the sheriff’s homicide bureau rule out some of the candidates because the missing women have either returned home or let their families know they are alive. The 16-year-old from the unfit home surfaces, too. Others are eliminated based on physical evidence. The married man’s missing girlfriend, for instance, sports an ankle tattoo; Jane Doe #59 does not. The case of the 17-year-old who reportedly OD’d in West Hollywood--”We got pretty excited about that one,” Riggs concedes--goes nowhere once toxicology tests show that Jane Doe #59 was clean.

Based on her appearance, Riggs makes certain assumptions about what she might have been like. He notes that she looks well nourished. Her hair and nails are clean. Although the tops of her feet are burned, the soles are soft and free of calluses, which tells the detective that she probably wasn’t living on the streets when she died.

Cases involving young, seemingly stable victims are the “kind of cases you expect to solve right away,” he says. “Any day I thought we were going to identify this girl. She was not the type you don’t identify.”

The crime scene itself yields a few clues. Nothing suggests she was killed there. The pattern of the scorched vegetation in the gully indicates that her killer or killers wrapped her naked body in a sleeping bag, which may have been transported to Covina Hills Road in a car or truck. There the sleeping bag with her body inside was doused with flammable liquid, set on fire and pushed down the steep embankment. Still burning, it stopped its downward course at one point, then went rolling down the hill again. It eventually came to rest at the bottom.

Investigators trace the contents of trash bags discovered near the body to an address in Baldwin Park, but as far as they can tell, the residents are guilty only of littering. An artist reconstructs her face in a drawing, and the likeness is printed on fliers requesting the public’s help. Deputies stationed on Covina Hills Road ask drivers they see frequently traveling the route whether they saw anything unusual in the days before Castaneda went riding there.

That effort turns up a promising lead. A truck driver says he spotted three white men in their 20s standing by a red four-door sedan stopped on Covina Hills Road the evening of Oct. 27, the night Jane Doe’s body presumably was dumped. The truck driver particularly remembered one of the men, who appeared to be climbing up the embankment. “They made eye contact and he felt like the other guy gave him a long, cold stare,” Riggs says.

But the red car could have come from almost anywhere because the dump site is easily accessible from the I-10 and I-210 freeways. Without a license-plate number, investigators are unable to trace the suspicious red sedan. Whenever cars with unexplained bloodstains are reported, they check samples against Jane Doe’s blood even though her injuries didn’t appear to have bled much. More often than not, the cars belong to animal poachers.

Riggs’ most significant clue is simply that no one seems to be searching for Jane Doe #59. The detective hones in on what he calls the “caretaker theory.” What if at the time of her death Jane Doe was in the company of someone close to her, someone like a husband or boyfriend? What if he didn’t report her missing because he killed her? And what if, all this time, he has been making excuses to her unsuspecting family?

*

DURING THE THREE-MONTH period stretching from Halloween to late January, the body of Jane Doe #59 is taken from the crypt to be X-rayed, fingerprinted and treated to inhibit decomposition. A forensic dentist, a forensic anthropologist and the forensic pathologist who performed her autopsy examine her corpse. Her jaws are pulled from her skull to make it easier for the dentist to chart her teeth. Her skull, clavicles and pelvic bones are removed from her body so that the anthropologist can better ascertain her age and race. The pathologist preserves samples of her internal organs in Formalin in case they are ever needed for DNA typing. With the slivers of information each of these procedures produces, Riggs hopes he will get closer to recovering her identity.

Fingerprints can be enormously helpful in identifying the dead. Since many of the people who wind up as Jane or John Does have been arrested before, their fingerprints are often on record with local, state or national law-enforcement agencies. Of the 254 Doe cases that came before the coroner in 1995, 111 were resolved through fingerprinting, more than any other method. In this case, the chore is complicated because the skin on the young woman’s left hand is completely burned off, while her right hand has grown so dehydrated that the prints resemble “chicken scratch,” in Daniel Aikin’s words.

While Riggs works the missing-person angle, Gilda Tolbert of the coroner’s Identification and Notification Section shepherds Jane Doe #59’s body on its medical journey through the coroner’s office. One of the first things she does is ask E. Rufus Martinez, a forensic identification specialist, to remove the fingers from Jane Doe’s right hand and chemically “rehydrate” them in a last-ditch attempt to lift a computer-readable set of prints.

On Halloween day, Martinez wheels the body into a laboratory not much larger than a doctor’s examination room. He clips off the fingers with a scalpel and places each in its own specimen jar, filled with a solution of alcohol and glycerin. Within hours, the pads have plumped up like sun-dried tomatoes after a soaking. Martinez has a clean set of prints stamped on a card in black ink, copies of which Tolbert sends to the Sheriff’s Department and the FBI.

On the same day, Deputy Medical Examiner Pedro M. Ortiz-Colom performs her autopsy. He does an average of 40 autopsies a month. Even so, the fate that awaits Jane and John Does who can never be identified strikes Ortiz-Colom as particularly sad. To die without a name “is the last abandonment for anybody, to be buried in a grave alone, with nobody knowing anything about you.”

Before getting started,he reads Aikin’s report and speaks with Riggs, who’s on hand for the procedure. The possibility that the woman had been sexually assaulted means Ortiz-Colom will check for evidence of trauma to her breasts and genitalia. Since Aikin had noted a mark on her neck, he will “have to consider asphyxia” as the cause of death--a theory that will require a careful dissection of her neck. In the meantime, he will look for any abnormalities, scars or previous undetected health conditions that might aid in her identification.

Ortiz-Colom first catalogs the obvious, including the second- and third-degree burns on her torso. Because the skin around the burns is not red, which would indicate “a vital reaction,” and because he doesn’t find any soot in her lungs or airway, Ortiz-Colom concludes that Jane Doe #59 was probably already or nearly dead when she was set on fire.

Although he finds no evidence of sexual trauma (the lab specimens recovered at the scene suggest the same), other data from the autopsy support Aikin’s initial hunch about how Jane Doe was killed. There are indications of blunt-force trauma to her face and head, although in Ortiz-Colom’s judgment the blows do not appear to have been fatal. Other injuries bolster the theory that someone strangled her. Three small internal contusions on the sides of her neck indicate her assailant grabbed her from the front and pressed down on her trachea, although two different injuries to the back neck muscle suggests she was taken from behind in a chokehold.

While additional findings also point toward manual strangulation as the likely cause of death--namely, broken blood vessels inside her eyes--the conflicting evidence of how the deed was carried out bothers Ortiz-Colom. For one thing, he knows that if charges are ever brought against anyone, the defense most certainly would hire a pathologist to tear his less-than-ironclad hypotheses to shreds. “I thought this specialty would give me all the answers, but I soon found that it gives me more questions than answers,” Ortiz-Colom says with a heavy sigh.

Nonetheless, in the autopsy report he submits, Ortiz-Colom doesn’t equivocate. He lists the cause of Jane Doe #59’s death as “compression of the airway producing asphyxia . . . moded as homicidal.”

*

ONCE THE AUTOPSY, THE DENTAL exam and the anthropologist’s report are complete, Riggs and Tolbert know a lot more about Jane Doe. Her dental charts show she had good teeth, and they help Tolbert exclude other young women who have been reported missing. Still, what they have learned about Jane Doe #59 pales in comparison to what they don’t know. The FBI and Sheriff’s Department found no prints that matched Jane Doe’s. Without the young woman’s identity, detectives can’t interview neighbors or co-workers who may have known her companions or when she was last seen alive. Might one of them have seen her riding in a red four-door sedan like the one the truck driver glimpsed on Covina Hills Road? Not knowing her name “shuts down so many things for you,” Riggs says. “If we had our way, everyone would have their fingerprints and DNA on file.”

When all 70 of the possible identities suggested by Riggs’ original search of the state’s missing persons bank are disqualified, the detective prints out new lists of missing women. By then, though, he has run out of ideas for actively pursuing Jane Doe’s killer or killers. All he can do is wait for someone wondering about her whereabouts to pick up the telephone.

Riggs still believes in his caretaker theory, but he acknowledges its limitations. If his premise is correct and Jane Doe was murdered by an intimate, “after a while you would expect [her] family would be looking for her. When they don’t, you start thinking, ‘Maybe I’m so far off in what I’m doing,’ ” he says.

There is the possibility, of course, that the young woman’s family is looking for her but that their missing person report has been misplaced or contains errors in height, weight or other physical characteristics that kept it from showing up on Riggs’ computerized printout. A few years ago, Tolbert got a call from a San Diego detective who had inherited the unsolved case of a teenage boy missing since 1989. The boy’s parents had been searching for him all that time, but it was only after Tolbert personally ran his description through her John Doe records that they learned their son had drowned off the coast of Los Angeles nine years earlier.

As weeks go by without any breaks in the case, Tolbert and Riggs begin to doubt they will ever identify her. On Jan. 4, 1996, two months after she was found, Tolbert, with Riggs’ consent, concludes that the search for Jane Doe #59’s name has reached an impasse and sets in motion the process for disposing of the body through public cremation and burial. In Jane Doe’s case file, Tolbert records the handwritten verdict as follows: “No further leads. Proceed County Dispo.”

*

AT THE CORNER OF EAST 1ST AND Lorena streets in Boyle Heights, hidden behind a tall stone wall, rests a tidy, four-acre graveyard. More than 150,000 people are buried beneath its sloping, well-tended lawns, but few visitors ever come to lay flowers on the unmarked graves here, where Los Angeles has buried its dispossessed dead for more than a century. Bereaved families have occupied the on-site chapel only twice during the past six years.

Nine months after Tolbert clears the way for Jane Doe #59’s interment at the Los Angeles County Cemetery, a county morgue technician delivers the young woman to her final destination. It has taken that long for her case to work its way through the system--for Ortiz-Colom to sign off on his 12-page autopsy report, for Tolbert to approve a pre-cremation checklist, and for a burial permit and death certificate to be issued. During that time, her body decayed in a special crypt reserved for old corpses. Still anonymous, she will be one of six people whose journey will end here, in ashes, this September day.

The crematory operator, 39-year-old Craig Garnette, checks to make sure he has the right body, then wheels Jane Doe #59 into the gray, high-ceilinged room where he spends most days working alone. Garnette slides her body and two others into the three brick-and-sheet-metal furnaces and pushes the “on” button. Two hours later, he shuts the oven down and opens the furnace doors. When the ashes are cool and processed, he shakes them into separate numbered urns about the size and shape of loaf pans, covers the tin boxes and shelves them chronologically on metal racks.

There, Jane Doe #59’s ashes will sit untouched for more than four years while the county holds off interring the remains--just in case someone comes forward to claim her. No one does.

*

FOR SEVERAL DAYS EACH DECEMBER, the cemetery is unusually busy. Only one funeral per year is held there--county employees call it simply “the service”--and the grounds must be prepared. Clyde Emerson, director of decedent affairs at County-USC Medical Center, arrives at 8:30 a.m. Dec. 11, 2000, driving a pickup truck. Under the arm of his suit coat, he clutches a change of clothes for the grim, dirty and physically demanding job that awaits him. An administrator who spends most of his days behind a desk, Emerson easily could have delegated the job to someone else. But since the East 1st Street cemetery is among his responsibilities, he felt he should be here.

Inside the mortuary, Garnette and Albert Gaskin, who, at 60, oversees the hospital morgue, already are waiting. The three men put on disposable white coveralls, surgical masks and paper caps and begin moving urns off the storage racks and into the back of Emerson’s pickup. When the truck is loaded, Emerson steers it across the grass to a single grave, 8 feet long, dug beneath the branches of a spreading tree. One by one, the trio carries the tin boxes to the side of the hole, where gloved fingers pry off the lids and pour. As they work, a fine dust settles on their necks, eyebrows and ears.

Four hours and three more truckloads later, the communal grave holds the remains of 2,703 people cremated by the county in 1996, the majority of whom have names, if nothing else. Many of them passed away in nursing homes or hospitals, but they ended up here as indigents because their families were either too poor or too indifferent to arrange private burials. Others, such as immigrants who died far away from their native lands, went unclaimed because no one could locate their next of kin. The 33-member society to which Jane Doe #59 belonged--individuals rendered nameless by death all the way to this depressing destination--make up the remainder.

Four days after covering the grave, Emerson, Gaskin and Garnette meet at the cemetery again for the service. They are the only mourners, and they gather around Phil Manly, a second-generation county hospital chaplain and interdenominational Protestant minister.

Manly, who has presided over the annual ceremony for each of the last 28 years, wears a contented smile and a green tie with Santas on it. The county is required by law only to inter unclaimed remains, but the funeral has been a tradition for as long as anyone can remember, a voluntary, albeit imperfect, exercise in decency. “It’s still kind of an awesome service for me,” Manly says. “I do many individual services throughout the year, but only one like this.”

A fist-sized stone marker stands at the foot of the grave. It’s inscribed “1996,” the year Jane Doe #59 and the others buried with her were cremated. On top rests a young bougainvillea bush and a pair of cellophane-wrapped poinsettias, courtesy of Gaskin, that crackle in the morning breeze.

The county is squeamish about publicizing the service, and so Orlando Castaneda had no idea the woman whose body he found in 1995 was finally being buried. Had he known, he says he would have attended because the young woman remains a part of his life in ways both mundane and profound. Castaneda has stopped going on trail rides by himself. He also has stopped visiting his horses in their stalls at night “because I always worried about having her spirit appear to me.” Every so often he thinks of her and prays that her soul is at rest. “That is one of the things I worry about: If I die, will my soul not rest?”

Standing above the final resting place of 2,703 people, it’s impossible not to ask the same question. Manly attempts to answer it. Raising his voice above a lawn mower and weed trimmer wailing nearby, he opens his Bible and reads the reassuring words of Psalm 121: “I will lift up my eyes to the hills. From where will my help come? My help comes from the Lord, who made Heaven and Earth.”

He also quotes John Donne, dwelling not on the famous “No man is an island” passage, but the lines that come before: “All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language.”

Finally, Manly closes his eyes and offers a short prayer for the living. “I ask for those of us standing here that we may continue to have life and health and peace and home and family and that we never take them for granted. May we treat our loved ones better as we say goodbye to these people.”

When the 10-minute service is over, Manly wipes his eyes. “I still get a little emotional after all these years, but I think I would be worried if I ever stopped,” he says. As a religious man, he knows that “theologically, these are just the bodies that hold the souls, but the bodies should be handled reverently.” He credits the county for honoring the dead, but says a common grave “just doesn’t seem right.”

Unless someone claims them, though, the 33 Jane and John Does who were cremated in 1997 will be laid to rest in exactly the same way this coming December. In the meantime, Garnette will be busy cremating not only the 17 Jane and John Does who remain unidentified from 1999 and the 21 from the year 2000, but all of L.A. County’s forgotten and forsaken dead from those same years. Flipping his baseball cap back on, he hikes back across the grass toward the crematory to resume his work. Then he stops and looks back, giving the grave one last nod: “Sometimes you wonder if they’re safer in there.”