In July 1979, a jury convicted Ted Bundy of a brutal attack on four young women in a sorority house at Florida State University, two of whom died. The physical evidence that carried the day was a bite mark Bundy left on the buttock of one victim. It may be the most infamous bite mark in all of criminology. It was not the first to send someone to their doom, and the science behind it may be some of the junkiest ever to swagger into a courtroom.
On the stand was Dr. Richard Souviron, a sort of granddaddy of forensic odontology, the practice of reading teeth and bite marks as evidence. He talked the jury through two bite rings, A and B, and explained why he could rule out one theory: the teeth were not higher in the arch. Prosecutors have won plenty of convictions on testimony like his. The trouble is where this kind of evidence came from, and whether it holds up at all.
A minister nobody paid
It started, as so many things do, with ignorance, paranoia and superstition. That train loves to stop in Salem, Massachusetts.
George Burroughs came to the Massachusetts Bay Colony as a boy in the late 1650s. He may have come from Suffolk, England, or from Virginia, since the records disagree. He graduated from Harvard in 1670. Four years later he was married and serving as minister of a church in Falmouth, the settlement now called Portland, Maine. Then the Wabanaki Confederacy, an alliance of four eastern Algonquin nations and many other tribal bands tired of settlers treating their homeland as empty, destroyed the town. A couple hundred settlers died. Burroughs escaped with a small group of refugees to Salisbury, Massachusetts, and found work preaching again.
In 1680 he took the pulpit at Salem Village, now Danvers, a town seething with feuds and resentment. His predecessor had never been paid, and neither was he. One year into the job his wife, Hannah, died, and Burroughs had to borrow money to give her the most basic funeral. He resigned and left.
When he came back to collect the wages he was owed, the same friend who had loaned him the funeral money had him arrested for not paying the funeral bills. In those days people went to jail for debt. Burroughs escaped prison only because six decent men in town stepped in. He left again, and later his second wife died too.
A witch by his teeth
Salem Village could hold a grudge. In 1692, that same friend accused Burroughs of witchcraft. The charges were the usual lunacy: toads afflicting one of his homes, a spirit that roamed at night to menace young women in their bedchambers, superhuman strength. There were no eyewitnesses. The Reverend Cotton Mather wrote in The Wonders of the Invisible World that "GB was accused by eight confessing witches as being the head actor at some of their hellish rendezvous." Mather couldn't even be bothered to use the man's full name.
Burroughs was private. Not all of his children had been baptized, he didn't wear his faith on his sleeve, and he was no glad-hander. Back then, that was enough to mark a man as Satan's minion. Most of the case was hearsay, and several of his so-called victims testified in identical wording. But one piece of physical evidence sent him to the gallows: a bite mark. The court looked at a mark on the victim's arm, walked over, and took a good long look at Burroughs' teeth. Close enough.
George Burroughs became the only member of the clergy convicted and executed for witchcraft in the Salem witch trials. That bite mark was also the first use of bite mark evidence in a criminal case in North America, and it set a precedent that still stands in courtrooms today.
Skin makes a bad witness
M. Chris Fabricant, director of strategic litigation for the Innocence Project, a nonprofit that works to overturn wrongful convictions, goes after the whole practice in his book Junk Science and the American Criminal Justice System. He writes that "bite mark evidence represents everything that's wrong with forensic science today," and calls it "grossly unreliable."
Why? Human skin is a lousy recording medium. Age, elasticity, ethnicity, pigmentation and how easily someone bruises all change the mark, and so do how hard the biter bit and how hard the victim fought back. Bite fifty people at random and don't expect fifty matching marks. Teeth aren't unique the way fingerprints are, either. Gangsters in the movies burn off their fingerprints with acid, but anyone can change a bite with a trip to the orthodontist. The Innocence Project counts at least 26 cases where bite marks helped convict the wrong person.
Bite mark evidence still used in American courtrooms got its North American start in 1692 Salem. A court looked at a mark on an accuser's arm, eyeballed a minister's teeth, and hanged him for witchcraft.
Swashbuckling men of the drill
Fabricant traces the modern field to a group of Los Angeles dentists in the late 1970s, the era of quaaludes, polyester and the Eagles. The press and pop culture cast them as "swashbuckling crime fighters." They weren't villains, just people of their time who didn't know what they didn't know. And humans are awfully good at making something up and then forcing it to be true, whatever the cost.
Paul Revere, dentist
Bite evidence has one honest hero in American history, and he rode at midnight. Revolutions are bad for business if you sell silver tea sets, so the silversmith Paul Revere took up dentistry on the side. One of his patients, Dr. Joseph Warren, became his friend, and it was Warren who tipped Revere off that the British were coming.
Warren was killed at the Battle of Bunker Hill. British soldiers stripped his body of his uniform and any identification and threw it into a mass grave. His brothers turned to Revere, who searched the battlefield's bloody, decomposing dead, opening mouth after mouth. When he found the fake tooth he had made for Warren, carved from walrus tusk and fastened with wire, they knew they had their man. It was, in Revere's case at least, a legitimate use of teeth as evidence: "America's first identification of human remains by odontology."