Scientist gets skulls and bones to 'talk to him'
It's a lovely Friday morning in the old Granary Burying Ground, and Albert Harper is in his realm, which is to say he's surrounded by interesting dead bodies. Harper, the 57-year-old executive director of the Henry C. Lee Institute of Forensic Science at the University of New Haven, is making his first visit to the circa 1660 Tremont Street cemetery - final resting place of Paul Revere, Samuel Adams, and the victims of the Boston Massacre - but he's always wanted to go. In Harper's line of work, it's just natural that you like cemeteries.
His work is very often macabre; it is rarely so dated. As the forensic anthropologist for the state of Connecticut, he devotes most of his time to working on current cases with law enforcement and attorneys, crimes "where the bad guys are still alive," he says.
But Harper has been getting attention recently for his work on some very old cases - what he calls archeoforensics - including one involving the remains of an Inca warrior, with small holes at the front and back of his skull, that was found by archeologists near the site of a 1536 battle with Spanish conquistadors in Peru.
Harper was brought in to confirm what ar cheologists had suspected: The holes were caused by a Spanish musket ball, and the man was awarded the posthumous honor of being the first known gunshot victim in the New World.
"These old cases just aren't of historical importance," Harper says. "When we apply modern techniques to cases that are hundreds of years old, we're working at the limits of our abilities. And as a result, our ability to solve modern crimes increases."
It was the living, not the dead, that first drew Harper into science. He was a premed student at the University of Texas, with plans to go on to medical school, when he took an anthropology class on a whim.
"One day, the professor asked for volunteers to clean the lab, and my job was to wash the mud off these old skeletons," he remembers. "I thought it would gross me out, but I found it fascinating. I taught myself, just by looking at the bones, to determine the person's sex, their general age, what part of the world they came from. And suddenly research into human variation became much more interesting to me than med school."
He enrolled in a biological anthropology doctoral program at the University of Connecticut, and, during a school trip to the Aleutian Islands his first year, stumbled upon a career in forensics. "I was out walking alone one day, and I found a bone sticking out of a mound near a village. I recognized it as a shin bone, and we started excavating and found the shin bone was connected to the leg bone which was connected to . . . 13 Russian sailors who'd had their throats cut."
Harper is forced to skip over a lot to get to the punch line - the biology and historical research and excavation and oral legends and research into burial traditions and weaponry that allowed him to determine who these victims were. In other words, he skips over exactly what it is he loves about forensics.
"The appeal is in the reconstruction," Harper says as he walks among the graves. "Taking evidence and figuring out - with logic and technology - how these people died."
He kneels down to inspect the carvings on one of the tombstones.
"I love looking at old cemeteries," he says as he runs his hand over the stone. "They have so much to teach us. And they're a reminder of one of life's great lessons."
And what lesson is that?
"That we're all going to die," he says. "The only question is how."
Fact sheet
Hometown: Born in Crystal City, Texas, "the spinach capital of the world"; lives in Lenox, Mass. Education: Graduated from the University of Texas in 1970 with a degree in anthropology; earned his doctorate in biological anthropology from the University of Connecticut in 1975, where he returned to earn a law degree in 1990.
Family: Married to Janet Pumphrey, an appellate lawyer; son, Jake Harper, 22, just graduated from Middlebury College; stepdaughter, Heather Pumphrey, 28, is a law clerk in Boston; stepdaughter, Caitlin Pumphrey, 24, is a realtor in Boston. Hobbies: Enjoys photography, bicycling, racket sports, and travel.
What he thinks of the CSI television franchise: "I've never been able to make it through an entire show. They're too hokey; too cheesy. What we do doesn't take 48 minutes. And we don't carry guns and chase bad guys. We're lab researchers." Making Yorick speak: "Al does this thing where he can pick up a skull and just stare at it and make it talk to him, to tell him its secrets," says Dr. Wayne Carver, the chief medical examiner for the state of Connecticut. "He calls it metaphysical presentation, but it's not magic. It's experience. He's always right. It's irritating because, after 25 years, I'm pretty good at this stuff. But he's always better than me." 