|
|
"A comprehensive, collaborative elections resource."
|
Tale From the Crypt
|
|---|
| Parent(s) |
Candidate
|
| Contributor | Thomas Walker |
| Last Edited | Thomas Walker Aug 01, 2008 04:43pm |
| Logged |
1
[Older]
|
| Category | General |
| Media | Newspaper - Washington Post |
| News Date | Thursday, October 20, 2005 10:00:00 PM UTC0:0 |
| Description | When the stone was pulled off the tomb, Douglas Owsley peered down into the burial vault. He could see rotted coffins that had been dragged off a shelf and bones strewn around the floor.
"It's a mess," he said. Then he climbed down into the grave.
Owsley is a forensic anthropologist at the Smithsonian, a bone expert so famous that he is regularly summoned to inspect bodies from Guatemala to Croatia to the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Tex.
Yesterday he drove to Congressional Cemetery in Southeast Washington and climbed into the family crypt of William Wirt, who was U.S. attorney general from 1817 to 1829, the presidential candidate of the Anti-Masonic Party in 1832, and a prosecutor in Aaron Burr's treason trial. Owsley was hoping to determine whether a skull that had been sitting on a shelf in D.C. Council member Jim Graham's office for a year and half is Wirt's stolen head.
Down in the burial vault, where Wirt and seven relatives were laid to rest, Owsley, 54, hung a lantern on a root that crept through the crypt. He looked around. The lead liners of long-rotted coffins littered the floor, along with the bones they once held. Other coffins sat on three shelves in various stages of decay. |
| Share |
|
|
2¢
|
|
| Article | Read Full Article |
|
| Date |
Category |
Headline |
Article |
Contributor |
|
|
