Best-selling novelist, and soon to be in New Zealand, Kathy Reichs talks life and death
with Bess Manson
The bones of a 6-year-old boy lie in a box in the lab
where forensic anthropologist and bestselling author Kathy Reichs works in
Charlotte, North Carolina. He has remained there, alone and unidentified, for
more than 20 years. Reichs still lives in hope that she will one day learn his
name and return him to his family.
"I take the bones out periodically to
try and figure out what else I can do or what new techniques have come up to
try and identify him. I thought in 20-some years we may finally have had a
break in that case.
"I have a case that goes back to about 1993. Another
child. He has never been identified. He had dental work - his parents cared enough
about him to take him to a dentist - yet those little bones are sitting in a
box in my lab. There are some for whom it has been a long time." Those are
the frustrating cases, the 62-year-old Chicago- born author laments, the ones
that haven't been solved. And like the heroine in her Bones novels, she feels
an obligation to identify her victims so that they may rest in peace. "If
someone is not identified they just die anonymously. I have a storage closet at
my lab and there are boxes in there with just numbers on them. Many of them
contain people that have never been identified so, yeah, you feel an obligation
to get them back to their families or whoever is out there wondering what has
happened to them."
Reichs is a no-nonsense straight talker who doesn't waste time on pleasantries. A
prerequisite for her job, perhaps.
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