Text Excerpt 11: Waco Holocaust Electronic Museum What Did They Do to the Bodies? [Note to readers: Many of the official autopsy reports of the Branch Davidians, autopsy photographs, and official diagrams showing the locations of body recoveries are available for viewing at the Waco Holocaust Electronic Museum website. Unfortunately, this documentation cannot be included in a text excerpt.] We are told that the concrete room "collapsed." But when a body is crushed by the simple force of a weight falling from a few feet, perhaps the height of a ceiling, the body parts tend to remain together, even if physically severed by the force. They retain something of the original spacial relationship to each other, as we can see in many fossils. The bodies in this concrete room, however, do not follow that rule. Inside the pantry/concrete room we find heads without trunks, trunks without heads, trunks without limbs, limbs without trunks. We find severed feet and a piece of scalp with a pony tail. We see that an agglutinated mass has been created out of the remains of 11 (eleven) persons. Even if the recovery of the bodies inside the concrete room was so clumsy that body parts were lost during the operation, one must assume that the body parts had already been severed. Widespread dismemberment of bodies throughout the room is not the result of concrete falling from a two-foot hole in the ceiling in the middle of the room. Many of the bodies found in the concrete room were headless, and identification had to rely on fingerprint or DNA identification in the FBI laboratory. By an unknown cause, the roof of the concrete room was damaged. A hole, 18 to 24 inches in diameter, appeared in the roof. On top of the roof nine bodies were found; beneath the roof, some 33 to 43 bodies were found. This was a crime scene if ever there was one. That roof should have been shored up with posts, beams, and plywood to preserve the integrity of the evidence. Instead, the roof was permitted to crumble slowly over a period of days, contaminating the evidence below. The hole got larger, the roof weaker, and the rubble contaminant continued to fall. The rubble was sent with the bodies in the body bags to the autopsy tables. Then, memorialized in the Autopsy Reports, a false explanation was offered--that many victims died from blunt force trauma or suffocation when buried by the "structural collapse." The false assignment of cause of death also appeared in the Department of Justice Report. The chief medical examiner, Dr. Nizam Peerwani, and his forensic dentist, Dr. Rodney Crow, were present at the beginning of the recovery when the hole in the roof was comparatively small. The curator of anthropology at the National Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian Institution, Dr. Douglas H. Ubelaker, and his associate, Dr. Douglas W. Owsley, traveled to Waco to assist Dr. Peerwani with the recovery of the bodies. Dr. Ubelaker is a nationally recognized forensic expert and is a regular consultant to the FBI. These anthropologists are world-class evidence handlers, and should have had the necessary know-how to ensure preservation of the roof. Instead, the roof was allowed to crumble and fall on the remains of the Branch Davidians, day afer day. Thus, the true causes of death, time of death, and circumstances of death for these victims are obscured by the following: 1. contamination of evidence 2. bodily mutilation 3. commingling of body parts 4. displacement of the remains from site of death 5. obliteration of identifying features 6. advanced decomposition 7. incineration 8. perjurious testimony in a court of law The names of Drs. Ubelaker and Owsley appear on the Autopsy Reports as having done the anthropology examinations. These experts should have known the truth and may have had a significant hand in the final version of the DoJ Report. The visitor's attention is drawn to the awful injuries of John McBean (Mt. Carmel Doe 32). It would appear this body's arms, legs, and head were mechanically amputated. The stumps are abrupt, and inconsistent with the graduated amputations caused by the ambient heat of fire. Similar injuries can be found on other corpses found outside the concrete room--for example, the corpse of Mary Jean Borst (Mt. Carmel Doe 45). "If the bodies are still relatively intact, you can certainly determine a lot more than anybody imagines." -- Norm Carmack, chief medical examiner's office, Austin, Texas as quoted in the Washington Post, April 21, 1993. Apparently, someone did not want this to happen. And if so much was done to disguise the manner in which these women and children died, how did they really die? Did the horrors of violence and mutilation demonstrated upon these remains happen after death, or was violence and mutilation practiced upon the living? Perhaps much more can be gleaned from this evidence than we have been able to determine. Perhaps, in combination with other information, these questions will be answered. Next: Excerpt 12, What We Are Supposed to Believe ------------------------------------------------------------ Entire set of text excerpts from the Museum available with anonymous ftp from ftp://ftp.public-action.com/wm2-0txt.zip Excerpted by Carol Valentine. Images omitted. Visit the Museum at http://www.holocausts.org/waco. SkyWriter@holocausts.org Copyright 1996-2000 by Carol A. Valentine, on loan to Public Action, Inc. All commercial rights are reserved. Full statement of terms and conditions for copying and redistribution is available in the Museum Library. 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