Searching for Answers

Michael says the idea of being a university professor was never something she thought she could see herself doing. She admits she went to college simply to get out of her small, rural town in southern Illinois, and not because she had any academic passion or interest.

“I worked at Goodwill for $5.15 an hour, and I thought ‘this can’t be it,’” she recalls. She describes her first year at college as pretty aimless, until she took a course in biological anthropology, taught by University of Iowa professor Robert Franciscus. His lectures about what existed before modern human fossils were studied fascinated Michael.

“I learned there was this work so much older than what I’ve been told, and it was so much more complex and interesting when it comes to human culture, and even what came before human culture,” says Michael.

She wanted to know more. “For whatever reason, I marched up to him at the end of a class and asked if I could work in his lab,” she says.

It worked — she started working in his lab soon after.

She learned a valuable lesson from the experience, she says: that it’s not always intellect, but tenacity that gets you ahead. “I was super interested, I showed up at the lab and tried to make myself helpful however I could,” she says. “I know it sounds corny, but Dr. Franciscus seriously saved my life. That experience gave me self-esteem. I never felt smart before, but I learned that my curiosity was part of studying humans and learning, and that if I showed up, that was the key, straight up, into this very cool world.”

It’s a lesson she imparts on the students she works with at UNH, encouraging their curiosity and self-motivation as they work on cases.

Another part of what clicked for Michael was the satisfaction of solving mysteries, the more complex the better.

In forensic anthropology, “it’s more than just the bones; it’s the culture, the behavior, the scene where the remains are, the history,” explains Michael. “It’s so fulfilling to move someone from a shelf in a medical examiner’s office to giving them a dignified burial. Case solving like that is like a high — you can’t stop once you experience that.”

In her two classes last semester (Cold Cases and Introduction to Forensic Anthropology), Michael’s students learned the basics of identifying human remains, from learning search and recovery methods to related topics such as ethics in investigations, media bias, forensic genealogy, use of databases, critical thinking and forensics in true-crime media such as podcasts and TV shows, and understanding gender diversity in cold cases. Both courses featured numerous guest speakers from the criminal justice area, including New Hampshire Department of Justice investigator Fred Lulka and assistant medical examiner Dr. Mitchell Weinberg.

The students who go on from those classes to work in the FAIR Lab share Michael’s “deep intolerance for injustice,” she says, and so employ their skills to do what they can to remedy what she characterizes as a national epidemic of unidentified remains, especially among marginalized or Indigenous communities.

Ashanti Maronie ’23 sits in front of four large, wired cases full of bone fragments — a mandible, portions of femurs, a small section that may be an eye socket, atlas and axis neck vertebrae (the ones that allow you to shake your head or nod up and down). There are also small metal and wooden fragments of what might be a coffin. The bones came to the New Hampshire medical examiner’s office innocuously enough: a resident had discovered them during a routine excavation.

Maronie became involved in the lab during his sophomore year, soon after he read a story about Kevin Cooper, a man on California’s death row whose case was reopened based on misdeeds suspected during the original investigation in 1983. The possible miscarriage of justice caught Maronie’s attention.

“I had an idea that the justice system was messed up: You can be actively made into the villain, even if you aren’t,” Maronie recalls. “The U.S. prides itself on its fair justice system, but if we’re allowing people to get swept under the rug and leaving them behind, how can we hold ourselves to that standard?”

That underlying theme of justice met with Maronie’s fascination with one of the main tenets of anthropology: “the idea that we can study was makes everyone them,” he says.

After taking Intro to Forensics with Michael, he changed his major to a self-designed program in forensic science.

So for the weeks he looked at the co-mingled bones, working to identify how many lives they represent and what happened to them before their death, he did so believing he’s performing an act of justice.

He’s determined, through months of research and working with a local historical society, that the remains likely came from what was a burial area on a poor farm, common in New England in the 1800s and early 1900s, where homeless or indigent people would work for brief stints to pick up wages.

Despite the fact that he might not be able to identify the names of each of the remains, “does that mean they don’t deserve to be properly buried somewhere? It’s a matter of justice after the fact vs. prior” and using forensic anthropology to correct wrongs of the past, he says. “I know people make mistakes, but we also have the capability to go back and say, ‘OK this was wrong and we have to fix it.’”

Based on his work, Maronie will attend a reburial ceremony at the Brentwood Town Cemetery this spring.

He plans to pursue advanced degrees in the field, and hopes to one day work for the Innocence Project, which works to free innocent people who have been wrongly convicted and advocates for justice system reform to prevent wrongful convictions.

For students, forensic anthropology work requires not only investigative curiosity and technical skill, but also a talent for research and culling together sources to create a complete picture. It also requires a social sensitivity — remembering that each set of skeletal remains is someone’s family member or friend, that they lived a life that was of value and that they are more than just a mystery to solve.

The process starts with archival research, searching through digitized newspapers from the area where remains were discovered, gathering any information from law enforcement, combing through public databases on sites like ancestry.com, even researching town maps, as land-use records might reveal long-forgotten cemeteries that would explain human remains being found in a location. At the same time, skeletal analysis is being done to start to identify ethnic background, gender, any obvious trauma, dental attributes and other physical cues.

From there, traditional research and bone study meet modern-day online media research, especially in the area of social media. “Sometimes we’ll be combing through comments on Reddit or Facebook,” says Kylee Jedraszek ’23, who works in the FAIR Lab. It’s also a bit of legwork: Jedraszek’s taken samples to dentists to get X-rays done and, like Maronie, spends time reaching out to historical societies, state archaeologists, medical examiners and state police when needed.

Michael and the FAIR Lab students also work closely with the DNA Doe Project, a nonprofit organization that uses investigative genetic genealogy to identify unidentified remains.

Jedraszek, who is pursuing an internship with the state police’s major crimes unit, sees the justice of forensic anthropology as doing right by that person’s loved ones.

“I really love what I’m doing because it’s a special thing to have the opportunity to make that difference in a family’s life,” she says.

In both classes and the lab, students are exposed to what Michael says are the humanitarian and social justice aspects of forensic anthropology — including more awareness of biases that can introduce errors into investigation and better knowledge of marginalized groups. Students say she emphasizes the importance of respect and reverence for each person they are trying to identify, as well as their loved ones.

“This is a person who had a family at some point, they had a community somewhere, and we can be part of bringing them back to that,” says Kyana Burgess ’22, who graduated last spring with dual degrees in anthropology and sustainability, and who was mentored by Michael.

Burgess says those lessons hit home in the case of “Ina” Jane Doe — a woman whose remains had been found in an Illinois park in 1993, but whose identity had remained a mystery. Working with a team of DNA testing agencies, genealogists and law enforcement, Michael and her students’ work ultimately helped lead to the remains being identified as Susan Lund, a 25-year-old woman from Tennessee.

“We were part of the press conference [where her identity was announced], and I got to meet her family there; I’d never met a victim’s family before,” Burgess explains. “It was a tough time for the families, but it was also a really powerful moment to think that even in those circumstances, while terrible, we can help bring that closure.”

Burgess’s research, which began during her undergraduate years, focuses on missing person databases, and the discrepancies between those that are federally maintained, state-run, or citizen-created.

Both Burgess and fellow alum Michaela Morrill ’21 work on The Fall Line, a true-crime podcast, in research and content creation, and Morrill has continued to work with Michael in the FAIR Lab.

“[My UNH experience] has helped me so much in respecting cultures and histories of people. Doing this kind of research on a set of remains is really such an intimate moment that we’re not always afforded, so we always respect that.”

Michael believes that the modern advances in forensic anthropology and in genetic genealogy mean that with proper funding, remains have a good chance of being identified.

“It seems unfair, with these advanced techniques we have now, that someone’s bones would sit on a shelf. Especially if we have DNA, it’s no longer an impossibility that we will identify you,” she says. “I have learned that so much of the things that happen in a life are related to what kind of family ties you have, what support you have, what resources you have. When those connections are frayed, and people seem to drop out of society, they shouldn’t be forgotten,” she says.

“People are so much more than the worst thing that happened to them.”