A murder mystery in Florida? Bones may tell

FORT MYERS, Fla. - The bones were discovered one morning in a thick, wooded patch of cypress, melaleuca and pines. Covered by a carpet of dirt, leaves and branches, the skeletal remains of eight men were found, a cold case hidden by time.

The grisly and stark findings near an industrial neighborhood east of downtown in this small Southwest Florida city has the community all abuzz as police, a forensic dentist and an anthropologist who helped identify bodies in Hurricane Katrina and Sept. 11 try to divine the stories behind the bones.

Until the answers are found, theories are swirling, some bordering on the absurd, some with a distinctly Florida flavor: Did shifty funeral-home owners dump the bodies? Were they the victims of a murderous Miami mob? Or was a serial killer at work?

The most disturbing possibility is steeped in local history. Some believe the bodies are the vintage work of a suspected serial killer, the Hog Trail Murderer, already on Death Row 285 miles away, believed to have preyed on young men in the area in the mid-1990s.

"It could be anything," says Karen Cooper, a crime-lab analyst supervisor for the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. "We have a lot to figure out. It could be a dumping, it could be a serial killer. There was no clothing, no weapons, so we just don't know yet. The sheer number of individuals makes this a very unusual case."

What the authorities know for sure: The eight men, found within 50 yards of one another, died sometime between 1980 and 2000 but were not buried. All eight were white, and one may have been Hispanic. They ranged in age from 18 to 49, and all except one had great teeth. One victim, who suffered from periodontitis, had a large mouth abscess and was missing teeth. He was likely homeless and a heavy drinker and smoker.

"These (other) men were fastidious about the healthcare of their teeth," says Dr. Margery Friday, a forensic odontologist. "They looked as if they had been to my office just a month ago."

The mystery has become fodder at the local diners, on front porches, just about any place people gather.

"My bet is on the Mafia," says Margaret Fowler, a Cracker Barrel waitress who grew up in the area. "It's the perfect place to `off' someone. I mean, who would ever find you out there?"

She remembers summers playing in vast fields that later became nearby Interstate 75, and she remembers that back in the woods, naughty things happened - from prostitution to drug dealing. The woods were close enough to town for access but far enough to hide secrets in the dark.

"Bodies out there, it's obvious it's some kind of crime somebody was trying to cover up," Fowler says. "Everybody is talking about this, I guess because it's so many bodies all at once."

It all started March 23.

About 10:30 a.m. that Friday morning, an ecologist working for a private developer was surveying the wooded lot off Arcadia Street - more dusty path than road - to see how suitable the lot was for building. The area is desolate, framed mostly by construction and landscaping companies. Dunbar High School is within walking distance, and a bit farther away, the Boston Red Sox train at a local stadium in the winter.

The ecologist happened upon a human skull near a sprawling melaleuca. It was medium brown, close to the shade of tree branches. He called police.

"I just remember riding along and thinking it was probably an animal, especially in that kind of a wooded area," says Fort Myers police Detective Sgt. Jennifer Soto, who was among the first to arrive and who now heads the investigation.

The land was often used as a dumping ground for hunters, a grave for hog, tortoise and gator parts.

"Once I saw the skull, then saw other bones some yards away, my immediate concern was how much more we were going to find," Soto said. "I kept thinking, what are we really working with here?"

Before long, 50 officers from various agencies were on their hands and knees, sifting through razor grass, trees and brush. March had been unseasonably warm, and mercifully an easterly wind made all that digging bearable.

By sunset, eight bodies had been recovered.

"We were chasing the sun, trying to find as much as we could, as quick as possible," says Heather Walsh-Haney, a forensic anthropologist from Florida Gulf Coast University, who was in charge of retrieving the evidence.

Next, teams of cadaver dogs, including German shepherds and Labrador retrievers, some specially trained to sniff out bones as old as 100 years, searched the area.

Now the land, officially labeled a crime scene, has become Florida's largest human excavation, attracting national attention. The bones are now in the Lee County medical examiner's office, where a crew of experts - forensic scientists, anthropologists, botanists and entomologists - is charged with delivering the names and histories of the dead. They have already determined sex, race and age.

"Our job here is to determine who these people are, something about their lives, and how they came to end up in this place," Walsh-Haney says.

A botanist can narrow the time frame based on the growth of the plants, environmental changes in the soil, and to what extent animals may have fed on and scattered the remains.

Walsh-Haney says the human body typically has 206 bones. About 85 percent to 90 percent of those found were intact. That means her team had to examine about 1,600 bones, from coin-size bones found in fingertips to footlong thigh bones.

She examined the facial bones to determine race, explaining that generally each race has distinct formations.

The odontologist can help determine the ages, and perhaps identify the victims by using dental evidence and records. Friday looked at the structure of the teeth and what dental work had been done, which yields distinct clues about the time period. One of the victims possibly had braces, and others had crowns. The materials used, such as silver dental filling, match up with the 20-year time frame.

So does the case of Daniel Conahan, who was sentenced to death in 1999 for the murder of a homeless man whose strangled, naked body was found in a wooded, marshy area just north of Fort Myers.

Conahan, now on Death Row at Union Correctional Institution in Raiford, has long been suspected of the murders of five other men. The string of deaths were named the Hog Trail Murders because of where the bodies were found - remote wooded tracts in Charlotte County - in the mid-1990s. Those cases remain unsolved.

Information from the current case has been entered into the NCIC, the national computerized database of criminal-justice information. That has led to several leads that are being investigated.

"The entire key to this right now is the identification," Soto says. "We are working to try to find out who these people are, and then we may be able to figure out what happened to them. We need the public's help."