Excerpts from an Interview with forensic archeologist, and faculty at the Evergreen State College, Dr. Mark Papworth, January 3, 1996

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Working with the police seems to be a long ago thing now. I retired from that in 1989. Health reasons. I was working two jobs. I was working here and for the County at the same time. As a consequence I had a heart attack and my doctor and my wife berated me to the point of saying you're behaving like you're 35 years old and you're not. You're 58 and you can't do two jobs so I decided to go back and be a teacher and I quit working for the County. But I spent from 1981 to 1989 fairly actively involved.

I worked full time for the County most of the time. And I worked for Lewis County. I worked for Mason County. And for several others. My commissions are in five counties. I still have commissions in five counties and the reason for that is that it's much easier if you're a sworn officer to simply write out a report as a supplementary report and I don't have to appear as an expert witness which takes up a tremendous amount of time.

And so always I prefer to work as a deputy within the department wherever it is and then they can use me. If they need me they can call me to court but generally they don't have to if my report is just filed along with the rest of the data.

In those cases where I have been called as an expert witness it has been regarding recovery of data in the field. Specifically, what led me into this was I had a background in human biology and osteology as a useful part of my main career which was in archeology. I was trained as an archeologist but I also had a degree in human biology and I did my own skeletal examinations and things like that. I did the metric measurements and the sex and age and stature and race of the various bony elements that I would pick up.

So, long ago when I first arrived here... I came here from Ohio. And before Ohio I was at University of Colorado. Before that I was at the University of Michigan. In each one of those places I worked with law enforcement agencies in identifying human remains for them, mostly as PR for the institution I was working for. But it started when I was a graduate student thirty years ago.

At any rate, every place I went I was never in a place for more than six weeks before the phone would ring, and somebody would say Dr. Papworth we understand that you worked with the FBI, etc. with such and such. We have some bones here we'd like you to examine. Would you please...

Inevitably I would say yes because it was always good representation. In any town/gown relationship, it's always good if you can do anything to improve understanding between an institution of higher learning and the community it exists in. If you can bring them together it's all for the best. So that was the general purpose of my participation.

And I did that until the Green River task force got wind of me, when that began, that bloody business in 1982, 83. And the first girls, along the Green River. They didn't know what to do with these skeletalized and partially skeletalized specimens that they were turning up. So my sheriff, big hearted fellow that he was, volunteered me to them. First of all I went down there to talk to them to see what they wanted.

In those days they just had supermarket shopping bags full of the bones that they had picked up out in the field. And they'd just hand me, and say, what can you tell us about this, which horrified me. I was storming at them about wasting a lot of data. I simply pointed out that where you picked this up and how it was lying there was much more important than what it is itself for a lot of the information that's involved in this. That was because of my background in archeology.

That's what I took to the field. And after I began identifying bones for Green River, well for the King County Medical Examiners office. I did some reconstructions for them too, to show that it was possible to make a fairly good reconstruction from skeletal parts of an individual. I could say this is what the victim looked like to a certain degree. It wasn't the kind of thing you would put up in a picture gallery but the purpose of making a reconstruction like that is to eliminate all the persons it could not be.

First, I know that she was black. Then I know that if she was normal height to weight ratio she would have been six foot four and weighed 128 pounds Shoe size was this that and the other thing and she had buck teeth and I've eliminated 99 per cent of the other possibilities in that immediate vicinity, which makes it possible to go out and look for mug shots and then take the mug shots back out on the street and say have you seen this woman until we work out by a process of elimination which one she has to be. And that's the way it would work.

Your involvement in the Ingram case?

At that time I was chief deputy coroner for Thurston County And in that capacity I was obliged to assist the Sheriffs office in any way I could and they just asked me to come out here. We want you to do an examination of some property. Essentially this was calling on my expertise not as a forensic scientist so much as an archeologist.

Two of the detectives who worked on the case. One of them was from Olympia PD and the other was the sergeant in charge of the investigation. At that time I believe the case was in the hands of Tommy Lynch. At any rate he and ....Schultz and Lynch had a construction or a land moving company on the side. They had a big tractor with a blade on it and a dump truck and this and that and the other thing. A little cat. Lots of land moving equipment at any rate. I don't remember just exactly which piece they brought. I think it was the big tractor. They brought one of their big pieces of equipment out there with a blade and they indicated an area that had been indicated to them by the witnesses against Paul Ingram as an area in which burials had taken place, burials specifically of the remnants of victims of ritual sacrifice, and animals that had been sacrificed and of course the recurrent theme of babies that had been sacrificed. And they buried them out back they said, out back of the house and in the field near by.

So I proceeded under the assumption that the only way to do it was to clear a sizable area. To not leave out anything that was included in the accusers description of where it had been buried.

So we took the pasture out back and literally took the top off of it. The object in this was to cut off, without disturbing the underneath soils, cut off all of the sod and the roots of the grasses which are contained within the first three or four inches of what you generally call the top soil.

Beneath that there was a clear..I can't remember exactly the composition of the soil, but it was much more light colored matrix than the topsoil which was very organic and deeply black in color. And so, consequently breaks or holes in it were very visible. In peeling back and exposing that field I was careful not to walk behind it, not to make excess holes and what not, and to get it all cleared off and then go through very carefully with a trowel and flatten those areas or remove dirt that had fallen back on it until I got all of the excess dirt off the top of the freshly cut exposure of the surface. In such a situation any hole that is dug with a post hole digger or a shovel or what have you down through that surface becomes mixed with other dirts. Even if you don't mix it, it becomes so aerated in the process of throwing it up out of the, that the microorganisms multiply frenetically within it . It become loosened. In loosening up the soil it allows for all kinds of admixtures of different kinds of animals. And the soil changes character completely . It becomes a disturbed soil, And as such it takes on a very distinct different color from the parent material from which it was derived. It gets mixed with topsoil. It gets mixed with roots. It gets all kinds of junk in it by mistake. And then when you fill the hole back up and stamp it down here's the circular outline, a light field of clays with this nice dark hole in the middle of it.

To any archeologist that's a pit. That's simply a pit and it's been filled in and those pits will last thousands of years. I've dug people out of pits like that, in Africa, in another time another occupation working as an archeologist. I've dug people out of pits that I could follow down that were 22,000 years old. Pits don't go away. They're there if you can see them. They're there even if you can feel them. The change in the consistency of the stiff dirt and then the loose dirt.

The fields around the Ingram houses had no pits, there were no holes. No one had ever dug a hold there. I found one bone. I believe I identified it as an elk toe bone. And it was in not a pit form. It was in a slot, a long narrow troughlike depression in the subsod that looked very much like a dog had dug it out, put it in there and then scooped the dirt back in there.

You did this in two locations?

Yes, I looked at both houses where he had lived. The second place we didn't do because of what we had not found at the other place. They said, well look this over Doc and see what you think. Is there any use in doing this over there? Well, considering that all of this stuff is supposed to have been done in the last decade I can see enough just in the surface disturbance to see if it warrants it or not. So I carefully examined the surface of the ground, picking up loose trash and cleaning it up and looking at it for any indications of new growth that might indicate disturbance some time five or six years in the past. Any place where there were saplings cut down I would count the tree ring growth to see when they'd been cut, this kind of stuff to tell me something about the surface of the ground, and I combed the backyard and the adjoining areas behind that house very thoroughly. I found a couple of trash pits, junk like that, which I cleaned out looking to see if the trash had been thrown in on top of something to hide it. It had not. This was just casual disposal of cans and junk. There were no intentionally dug pits to dispose of any evidentiary material at all.

I talked to Neil who was a good friend of mine. I went to Neil McClanahan after I got back, and I said, Neil there's nothing out there. There was nothing there, Neil, nothing. I told him that there was no evidence. He responded with a remark that I found at the time a little bit frightening and in retrospect terrifying because of what it meant for the admixture, the confusion of church and state.

I said look, there wasn't any evidence. I did four or five of these supposed cult killing scenes and what not, in the course of my tenure with the county some of them here, some of them in Mason county, around, but I've been to different sites to locate bodies where they were buried by the cultists when one of them came forward and said that he'd been involved and all this.

On no occasion have I ever found any evidence for what they say, None at all. In this my experience is directly comparable to that of the 250 or so cases that the FBI has responded to. Nobody ever finds anything, or if you do find something it's so obviously a plant or something.

I did one for Lacey PD. And that was out in back of a schoolyard. There was an old sheet or blanket which was held down by pegs to the ground and on it were some bones and an old steak knife driven through the middle of it and it was laid out in a little pattern and what not. And so somebody had found this and gotten all excited about this. I looked at the proximity of the place. I looked at the bones, they were chicken, they were cooked. They were probably McDonalds. And the steak knife was a beat up battered old thing that would have come out of any dump. The sheet was a dropcloth kind of thing, a discard and it was so obviously planted back there in the trees to look like a ritual site and it was a childish appearance and then I talked to the patrol people I responded to and tried to make it a little educational experience out of it for them

I said first of all let's look at the proximity. What's the first thing you notice in this area. Well there's a Junior High School right over there. I think we're getting into this when we think seventh or eighth grade. But I went ahead and showed them how to tell the difference between one piece of ground and another and how to estimate how long the sheet had been there by what was growing underneath it, what was green and what was white shoots and to make some sensible determination as to just exactly when it had been done which in this case was about a month before.

At any rate..but that's the kind of thing. That's the closest to evidence that I ever found, was some kids playing in the back of a schoolyard.

You were starting to say something about what McClanahan said to you?

Right, I had a difficult time with his statement and I still do because it shocked me. He had just recently become a Catholic and he was, you know, a zealous recruit and he believed entirely in the devil and in inherent evil in the pattern of things and he said on several occasions to me and to my wife when he was over at the house he said I'm out there on the street fighting the devil every day. I'm fighting the devil, is what I'm doing. So my job is a dead serious one. The implication was that it, you know, it was an extremely stressing sort of a job.

On this one occasion I said Neil there's no evidence. There's no evidence. None at all. Zero.

And he said to me if you were the devil would you leave any evidence? and I..my hair stood on end and I realized at that point there was no talking to him beyond that and I excused myself and I said..My report..I handed that to somebody and I'm out of here. I have nothing else to add.

I can make no stronger statement than there was no evidence and I made that statement more than a year ago to the Today Show. I think they got the kernel of my message right there without the necessity of embellishment. It's a pretty simple statement but in this case it's an extremely vital statement. Why that lack of evidence held no weight.....Why the result of that experiment...I can't remember the social psychologist from California that came up here..

Dr. Richard Ofshe.

Ofshe's work. Damn that was beautiful. I read about it of course in Larry Wright's book where Ofshe makes up a hypothetical situation right in front of the detectives who are handling the interrogation. He makes up a hypothetical situation and suggests this to Paul Ingram. And Paul says I'll go and pray. And Ofshe says that's a good idea, you go and pray about this and come back tomorrow. And he brought back the next day a three page confession to all of those things that Ofshe had made up.

This case disturbed everybody who was connected with it. It split the department, the Sheriff's department badly. And two of the detectives who worked, in fact the two who were doing the interview when Ofshe was there. Both left detectives shortly thereafter. One went into civil and the other went back to patrol. They were both guys that I knew and worked with and respected greatly. I worked cases with them in the field and had been very impressed with their thoroughness, with their thoughtfulness.

For my records, what is your title here?

Member of the faculty. I teach anthropology and human anatomy and some forensics and I teach an awful lot of police science. I've been here for 24 years and in that time I've graduated 55 policemen with their degrees, emphasis in criminal justice. I've tried to give them a smattering of the law, budgets and finance, political economy and police techniques. This guy just brought me a wonderful paper on policing in a small community. The new hot thing in police work is small community police work getting back to knowing the people you're working with, bicycle patrols all this kind of stuff, get to know the people you work with. So he was delivering me his finished paper. I'm going to give it right straight over to our security force here.

I know nothing of the politics of the investigation. I was working down in the basement, me and the jail were downstairs. We had three levels between me and detective land. But after McClanahan's statement I distanced myself from that because I was so overwhelmed with this fundamental violation of constitutional rights and this confusion of church and state. The idea of trying the devil was terrifying. It's medieval.

The person whose name does not appear nearly enough is Gary Tabor who was the Chief Deputy Prosecuting Attorney and as far as the County was concerned, they had to ask for supplemental budgets, twice I think, and it ran to at least two million dollars. And the Sheriff to his discredit could have stepped in at any time and said no, you're breaking the county on a case has no value at all. But because the guy confessed and Gary Tabor was a very devout Christian and Neil McClanahan was a hyperdevout Christian. He confessed and these guys were convinced there was a devil and that was the end of it. I've never been able to get a satisfactory explanation for why this case could not be reopened. The associations that you might turn to donate money, none of them will touch it with a ten foot pole because of the confessions, and to overturn that and to go right back to the bones of contention is more than they're willing to underwrite. People think it was a miscarriage of justice. Only in the most general sense. The thing I learned from reading Larry Wright's book (Larry called me a number of times when he was writing the book.) I was very much impressed with how delicate and fragile the law is. The law is the people and the people have spoken. This is Thurston County. Their idea of the law is something that somebody else does. They didn't want to hear about it. And then the idea of justice comes into it. I'm reminded of Oliver Wendell Holmes or one of the grand old chief justices who has a quote that has gone down in legal history, at some pause in the proceedings he told a young attorney. You seem to be concerned with justice. May I remind you that this is a court of law. It always draws a laugh, but justice and the law seldom have anything really to do with each other.