Featured photo by Kameron Scott

Kameron Scott’s story

Two renowned anthropologists with ties to MTSU discussed several unidentified body cases they were trying to solve.

Tom Holland, a professor at MTSU and the current director of the university’s Forensic Research and Education Institute, discussed a missing person case that spanned nearly thirty-five years in which he was personally involved: Jerry Daegan.

Jerry Daegan was a civilian who worked for Decca Navigation Systems, a company that installed navigation systems on Army helicopters during the Vietnam War. Daegan was last heard from in July 1967, but was reported missing just two months later when Decca filed a missing person’s report after being contacted by his family in the United States.

At the same time that Daegan was last heard from, a helicopter carrying five US servicemen collided with a US Air Force fighter jet. While four of the men could be identified despite being badly damaged, the fifth body was unidentified as it had no identification on it like the other bodies.

The unidentified body was assumed to be that of Pvt. William McRae, who had recently been released from Long Binh Prison after volunteering to return to combat. The body was then buried in Massachusetts.

Four months later, a sixth body was found near the crash site. The fifth body, which was supposed to be McRae’s, was not him. The sixth body found was instead McRae’s and was buried in Medford, Massachusetts.

But what does this have to do with Jerry Daegan?

In 1982, Reagan wanted to bury an unidentified Vietnam soldier in the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. After Congress passed the criteria for a Vietnam serviceman to be buried there, the Central Identification Laboratory in Hawaii found that only six bodies met the criteria.

Attention returned to the identification of Daegan, following the identification of three bodies. After taking a DNA sample from his brother, Jerry Daegan was finally identified in February 2001 and was buried in Youngstown, Ohio.

“It’s those little observations that make a big difference,” said Hugh Berryman, a former professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology and one of the nation’s leading anthropologists.

Berryman talked about several cases where small clues helped identify a body, such as a tube of toothpaste and skin from a skeleton’s finger. The most interesting case, according to Berryman, was the identification of a mummy in the 1980s.

In 1987, when Berryman was living in Memphis, a woman named Clair Austin brought a box to the Department of Egyptian Art and Archeology at the University of Memphis. It contained a mummified head that Austin said had lived in their family for over a century. The university contacted Berryman to examine him on his head and assembled a team of 15 people to help.

Berryman and his group determined that the mummy, named Se-Ankh, was a 20-year-old woman at the time of death. This was not their only significant finding.

A spot that the group initially dismissed as some kind of wart turned out to be a rosette from Egypt’s Macedonian period. After finding gilding on her teeth, they deduced that this mummy must be of high society.

Berryman and Holland then took questions from the audience after completing their respective presentations.

“We would like to say there are no delays as each case is reviewed,” Holland said in response to a question about whether there is a backlog in the process of identifying unidentified service members. “We have a waiting period. Sometimes we have to wait up to 18 months for DNA because extracting DNA from bones is more difficult than extracting it from blood.”

When asked about a notable case, Berryman talked about a case where he was investigating skeletal material in Mississippi, related to a brutal case involving a serial killer targeting prostitutes.

“The fact that I might have missed something haunted me,” Berryman said.

Berryman also answered the last question of the lecture when asked what his favorite part of forensic anthropology is. The question came from someone Berryman knew: his young niece.

“It’s like working on a puzzle and it’s a lot of fun,” Berryman said.

Kameron Scott is a contributing writer for MTSU Sidelines.

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