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Interstate Radiographs
© 2001 Karrie Higgins
Bibliography appears at bottom.
I’m surprised to find Tammy Zywicki’s missing persons poster still hanging here, scotch-taped to the window of an antique shop in Dubuque, Iowa. I haven’t seen her face in years, not since she disappeared and posters were taped up in gas stations and truck stops all over the Midwest. My first instinct is to rip the poster from the glass. Instead, I stand still, transfixed by her image: her round-frame glasses and baby-fat cheeks, the way she tilts her head as she smiles, a little coy for the camera.
On August 23, 1992, she dropped her brother off in Chicago and was driving
to Grinnell College when her car broke down on Interstate 80. Several witnesses
saw Tammy hunched over the popped hood of her Pontiac. Others saw her talking
to a truck driver who parked on the shoulder behind her car. No one saw her
alive after that.
Illinois State Police found her Pontiac T1000 near mile marker 83 that same
day, ticketed it as abandoned, and towed it the following afternoon. Tammy
wasn’t found until ten days later, 500 miles away, outside Sarcoxie,
Missouri. She had been stabbed once in her right arm, seven times in her chest,
wrapped in a yellow sheet, duct-taped inside a red blanket, and dumped in
a ditch along Interstate 44.
I traveled Interstate 80 that same day, from Grinnell College to Iowa City. Same highway. Opposite direction.
___
I never knew Tammy. All I had were the mugshots and news articles. I read
them every day, memorizing the details, hoping she would send me a sign. Reporters
kept repeating how the body discovered on Interstate 44 had brown eyes and
auburn hair, neither one a match.
Green eyes. Blonde hair. That's our girl.
But the dead woman wore a light blue East Side Eagles Soccer 1989 T Shirt
– Tammy’s high school team – and her height and weight matched
Tammy. We weighed the East Side Eagles shirt against the body's brown eyes,
and the t-shirt came out a little heavier on the heart. But because the body
was too decayed for visual identification, and because Tammy’s dental
records were enroute to the Lawrence County coroner, everyone waited, as though
we had reason to wait. Green eyes darken to brown, blonde hair to auburn,
like autumn leaves, after death.
___
Ten miles from the spot Tammy’s body was recovered, police found a bathrobe,
one woman’s loafer, jewelry, and bones. Three other women went missing
from southwestern Missouri that June, all fitting the description of the body.
___
When the Lawrence County Sheriff’s Office scheduled an autopsy on the body of a woman between the ages of 17 and 21 and weighing approximately 120 pounds, detectives across the United States requested the results, thinking this body could be their missing person. “It’s surprising how many missing people there are who are between 17 and 21 years old, 115-120 pounds, blonde, and so forth,” the coroner said.
___
I was 17 the year Tammy died. I walked alone along busy streets because I
couldn’t drive and hated the noise and speed of riding in cars. I rode
my bicycle on the shoulder of semi-rural highways. I sleepwalked down neighborhood
streets in my nightgown, waking up to chilly breezes, honking horns, or the
screams of my sister as she called my name. I stayed out late with older men,
drinking beer they bought me in bars with graffiti-carved tables and greasy
doorknobs.
My epilepsy was chronic back then, which meant I frequently found myself at the mercy of strangers, whose fingers stroked my scalp while I surfaced from deep epileptic sleep, whose arms lifted me up, carrying me to safer locations if I collapsed on concrete or hard tiles. These strangers inevitably unzipped my backpack, rifling for identification cards or prescription bottles, insurance papers or a pager with pre-programmed phone numbers, though I never carried any of those items. I traveled the same dangerous roads as anyone and made it alive to the exit ramps.
___
I no longer search the faces of truck drivers in roadside cafes, waiting for a tractor-trailer to pull up in the parking lot, for Tammy to electrify me with visions of its murderous driver. For years I did that while stopping on road trips through the Midwest, squinting over coffee mug rims, listening for clues or confessions beneath the clinking of silverware. Back then, there was no hard evidence a trucker killed her, but this is the image that stuck with me: a man with black hair and brown eyes, 6-foot-3, 240 pounds, standing beside his white semi-trailer truck with two diagonal rust-colored stripes, talking to Tammy the last time she was seen.
___
I still wonder about Tammy’s last hours, what she thought when her killer turned off Interstate 80 and onto Interstate 44, if she knew she was going to die, if she was dead before she passed below the last green sign on the I-80 exit ramp. The killer stole her running shoes. I imagine her running across hot blacktop and gravel, her feet burning and blistering as she tries to escape. I hope she was already dead when the killer rolled her inside the sheet, that she didn’t have to hear the duct-tape tearing, that she wasn’t forced to wait helpless and alone by a highway again. I can’t see a broken-down car on the shoulder without thinking of her wrapped in that red blanket.
500 miles off course.
___
Tearing down a Missing Person poster: probably the worst thing you can do.
Tammy’s picture is fading, the poster paper yellowing. Ink bleeds over
her right shoulder where rain and condensation drip down the window. Surely
the antique dealer knows Tammy is dead. There were candlelight vigils all
over Eastern Iowa when the autopsy confirmed her identity, memorials and rallies
on the Grinnell College campus, television and newspaper features about her
short life.
I reach out to rip the poster down, but only the word missing tears
free. I decide it reads better this way, like a memorial. Person: Tammy
Zywicki. Last seen: August 23, 1992, on Interstate 80 near Utica, Illinois.
___
At any given moment, there might be a human skull in the mail: on a UPS truck,
a FedEx truck, stacked inside a warehouse; with a tracking number, a case
number, a series of signatures tracing its provenance from crime scene to
police detectives to DNA lab to forensic artist. The forensic artist signs
for the skull the way one signs for a catalog order: the delivery person doesn’t
know he’s dealing in dead people.
The forensic artist handles the skull with great care, never gripping it by the eye sockets or setting it down without first stabilizing it on a stand. She inspects the box for loose teeth, in case molars or bicuspids got knocked loose during shipment and fell through the packing peanuts. If the victim wore dentures, she reattaches them inside the mouth, affixing clay for the gums. Then, she examines the intact teeth, noting any unique traits that could help someone recognize the face. Teeth are like memoirs carved into bone, telling something of how a victim lived her life. Root canals and gold caps tell one story; molars rotted down to the roots and unrepaired cracks or chips tell another.
If the artist does not view a face from a straight angle, the forehead and chin might appear to change size or shape - the cheeks more defined, the eyes shadowed. She uses The Frankfurt Horizontal Plane for viewing skulls, a standard viewing angle in order to minimize distortion. Using a skull stand, she glues the mandible to the cranium, filling in a small ball of clay where, in life, flesh would sit, so the jaw does not look artificially tense. She stuffs cotton in the eye sockets to protect their edges from cracking under the weight of her sculpture, and this always strikes her: reconstructing a face can destroy the only evidence it leaves behind. She wears rubber gloves when holding the skull, fingering loose teeth with latex-covered tips. Her DNA could contaminate the bone, and police may still need samples. She doesn’t want to leave a trace of herself.
People are always getting all over everything. Their hair sticks to sofas, and they leave a trace. They touch their lover, and their fingertips leave a trace. Paint chips fly from their cars. Saliva sticks to their lovers’ mouths, detectible with a swab. Semen on the sheets. Blood on the shaving razor. Carpet fibers stuck to shoe soles and left behind on the tile of a diner’s greasy floor. No one ever really disappears without a trace.
___
The summer Tammy disappeared was the summer of the new wallpaper. My mother peeled the fake plastic bricks from our kitchen walls, piling them on the floor of the garage like old car parts. We painted the walls cake-icing blue to match the Americana teapots that danced across our new wallpaper. One wall remained blue; the rest we covered with teapots.
Our kitchen was trying on class again. The vinyl tablecloths went out with the plastic bricks, and I missed them in spite of their tackiness. I used to like the silence of glasses set down on them.
But we pasted the paper up all wrong, with sections overlapping one another in thick strips, the teapot halves misaligned, spouts snapped in two. Mom’s orange Garfield clock remained, bright and garish against the country blue, kind of beautiful in its refusal to be replaced.
During our first “new wallpaper” breakfast, I noticed mom’s scrambled eggs looked colder and cleaner, like the photos in culinary magazines, and I wondered whether she noticed this, too. It’s not the kind of thing you say to your mother: your food looks cleaner in the new kitchen. She was quiet, staring out the window and listening to the news reports about Tammy.
Reporters were relentless that week, desperate for details from the autopsy,
honing in on the auburn hair and brown eyes. I accepted her auburn hair right
away. I thought it made a weird kind of sense: that time transforms us, that
once we are lost, we can never really be found.
___
The body changes so much postmortem that a victim’s family
may never recognize her from morgue photographs. The jaw slacks, pulling the
chin down toward the throat. Skin slips from flesh and falls away, sometimes
so completely that the coroner can slide the shell of a whole finger onto
his fingertip, like a thimble. It’s a common method for fingerprinting,
the coroner trading identities with the victim for a brief moment, wearing
death like a costume.
Maybe the victim suffered bruises or a broken nose. Or blood dried on the
hair, holding strands in sticky clumps. The forensic artist infuses dead faces
with life again, imagining the dead with their eyes open and chins lifted,
the skin smooth. She is careful to draw the lips parted a little if the victim
has distinctive teeth, to include scars and birthmarks. The features we
hide most are the ones most likely to save us in the end.
Sometimes the victims are beaten so badly or so thoroughly decayed that the
artist cannot produce an accurate drawing. These cases require a request beyond
reason: the removal of the remaining skin from a victim’s face and the
disarticulation of the skull for creation of a sculpture. The forensic artist
calls the coroner and asks whether the head can be removed, tells him the
choice is between desecration and namelessness, an unmarked grave. The coroner
cleans flesh from the bones, extracts DNA, notes dental features, and packs
the skull for shipment. In this way, the forensic artist participates in the
violence, the desecration.
___
I know the midwestern highways Tammy drove, the ones lined with corn stalks
so tall they hide the great expanse of the land, the great emptiness. And
in that emptiness: two-story houses with peeling white paint. And in those
houses: aluminum foil peeled from casseroles, russet potatoes boiling on the
stove, sunburned men leaving tractor-grease fingerprints on newspaper pages,
girls in too-loose tank tops staring out at the city lights, far away, imagining
the highways that will take them there. And on those highways: semi-trucks
filled with corn, soda pop, beer, Little Debbie cupcakes and Wonder Bread;
train tracks with no signal lights; broken-down cars with their hoods popped,
emergency lights flashing like runway guides in the dark.
___
One summer my boyfriend drove me all over Iowa, just to see the horizon stretch forever all around, to feel humid air blowing our hair into twisted nests, our sweat sticking our thighs to the car seats. He came from Oregon, where the mountains protect you like high city walls, and he searched for midwestern mountains in my Triple A travel guide, horrified to discover only flatness: not even one butte to protect him. Driving at dusk, the air thick with heat, the sky tornado-green, he pulled the car onto the roadside and collapsed on the steering wheel. He couldn’t take the landscape anymore. He felt vulnerable, as if a crop duster pilot might swoop down and shoot him, North-by-Northwest style.
“At least you can see them coming,” I said.
He lifted his head from the steering wheel, lit a cigarette.
“What good does that do if there’s no place to hide?”
___
We get distilled down to objects after death, the things we leave behind that
no one else could. My black Chuck Taylors with the poems on the toes are my
best evidence. Buffalo China bowls ripped off from restaurants, my reporter’s
notebooks filled with stories. But nothing proves me like my teeth: my broken
root canal, the chip in my eyetooth never repaired, the radiographs of my
mouth stored in a minty office in Iowa.
___
List of items known to be missing from Tammy Zywicki’s body and car, issued when police ran out of leads: Amber frame eyeglasses with gold-colored bows, a Garfield wrist watch that played “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head, gray ASICS running shoes, a faux alligator skin vinyl bag, one South Carolina Drivers’ License, and a Canon EOS 35 mm camera, Serial No. 2697811, with attached lens, Serial No. 1006918. Imagine her filling out the Canon registration form, anticipating broken lenses, buttons that need replacing, a light meter registering wrong. She fills in the serial number, never once thinking it might help find her killer someday. Though Tammy was wearing her high school soccer shirt, her own best evidence failed to prove her. It’s surprising how many missing people there are who are between 17 and 21 years old, 115-120 pounds, blonde, and so forth. So it came down to structure, what you see when she’s help up to light. Radiographs of her smile.
___
When the forensic artist first learned to sculpt over a plaster cast of a
skull rather than a real one, she constructed cheekbones like her own –
high and deep – and ignored the shape of the imaginary victim’s
face: a common mistake, to mold the clay into a face one knows best. The hands
are wired for it, from years of itching the same nose, rubbing the same chin,
brushing blush on the same cheeks. And maybe the artist even loves the victim
a little, wants so badly for her to have a name that she gives her a face
she can recognize. Maybe there’s a part of her that wants to trade places,
to have someone handle her this gently, even if it comes after blows from
a steel pipe or bullets fired hot and fast from a handgun. She wants to know
what it’s like to disappear, to be buried so long no one can identify
her, to look out from inside all that clay and see the faces lighting up with
recognition.
And this, the reverse process of decay, the removing of the violence, the covering up of death: the forensic artist cuts tissue depth markers from eraser vinyl and glues them to the skull. They look like candy cigarettes sticking out of its mouth and ears, almost comical except for the numbers on the ends. The numbers mark the 21 points mapped out in tissue depth studies, in which anthropologists calculated the average facial thickness for men and women across different races. The points start with #1 at the forehead, the supraglabella, moving counter-clockwise around the face to #11, frontal eminence. #17-#21 are from just above the ear to below the corner of the bottom lip. She smooths clay in strips according to the thickness of the markers, to keep unconscious aesthetics from shaping the face.
Still amazing, after all these years: how victims, once finally identified,
look so much like her sculptures. Sometimes, people complain that the sculpture
looks too smooth and stiff, the hair not quite the right shade. But never
the immediate family. The forensic artist used to think families felt too
grateful or too relieved to notice (or to point out fine aesthetic points),
but she realized it has more to do with something else - the way our memories
change over time, how we begin to forget details and fill them in with others.
Only people who spend a lot of time remembering a face truly forget what
it looks like.
___
When I was seven, my dad found a dead body on the street in front of our yard.
His pounding on the front door woke me up, and I listened while he told 911
what he saw, wondering if the man in our street was really dead, or whether
the paramedics could still save him. Mom shooed me to my room until police
removed the body, covering my eyes as she scooted me back to bed, the same
way she did during naughty scenes on television.
The body was the buzz of the day. According to Channel 9, the dead man dealed drugs. He was dealing from the yellow duplex two houses down from mine, when a narcotics sale went terribly wrong. There was a fistfight, and someone pulled a knife. The dealer was stabbed several times, tied with thick rope, and locked in the bedroom closet. Somehow he escaped, bleeding all over my street as he crawled over the pebbly blacktop and potholes, stopping on the curb when he could crawl no more.
All the neighborhood kids made sure to see the bloodstains in front of my house. The murderer wasn’t caught for several days, and we were all advised to stay close to home and keep our doors locked. We kids formed a detective agency on the spot, searching for clues in our yards, listening as rumors spread about a strange man running through the back yards on a nearby street. My friend, Nathan, and I continued our detective work even after police arrested the killer, examining footprints and broken windows, anything that looked like evidence. That Christmas, my mother gave me a plastic microscope kit, and this added a whole new layer to our techniques. We pulled hair samples from playground swing chains, dirt samples from doorways, and tiny threads of fabric from our furniture. We had seen it all on television detective shows, so we knew what to do.
But fabric and hair samples got boring. I moved on to blood from dead insects instead. I crawled on the grass by our curb searching for dead bugs, picking them up with tweezers and squishing them against a slide plate to get a blood sample. I dug a small cemetery lot under the bushes in our front yard and collected rocks for the headstones, painting them bright colors and writing family names across the front. Beetle Juiced, Died April 1982, Much Missed (but not by the bike tire). Lady Bugged, Died April 1982, smooshed in the screen door.
___
Human skulls are not complete at birth, and they grow in predictable patterns:
downward and forward, sliding down like glaciers, pulling the face longer,
changing the face’s topography into something more textured and complex.
The spherical face of the baby, with its huge forehead and button nose, gives
way as the cranium expands and the jaw drops. The bones begin to ossify; the
nose bridge rises like a surfacing submarine, lifting the skin around the
eyes like waves. Baby teeth grow in and fall out; the mouth grows to accommodate
adult dentition. A chin chisels itself from the baby fat, and, finally, the
forehead becomes less prominent, the cheekbones more pronounced.
When a child has been missing many years, the forensic artist uses craniofacial
growth models to create age progression drawings. There are mathematical formulas
and computer software to calculate these changes, like a calculus for identity.
These calculations must be balanced with family resemblance: an older sibling’s
long face, a father’s deep-set eyes, a mother’s hair color. Cold
science collides with the people left behind, and there’s a sense in
which the forensic artist is searching for more than one missing person.
Sometimes, the forensic artist draws the criminal instead of the victim, and
when she does this, the pencil strokes come from nothing: no photos, no home
videos, no skull, only the shadowy ether of memory. When she interviews victims
for composite drawings, she sits at their side, hiding her face from full
view. This prevents the victim from melding her features with their memories,
subconsciously using her nose or eyes as a suggestion. She flashes pictures
of movie stars to clarify the look of a chin or nose - only for a few seconds,
no longer. Memories move like mercury, colliding and combining into one
sticky mass until there is no distinction between imagination and fact. They
rise and fall with emotional temperatures. Warm them up with a triggering
image, and they change.
In the 1950s, detectives used Identi-Kits to identify criminals. Victims
described noses, ears, eyes, and cheekbones—anything they could remember—while
investigators laid down transparencies to match, piling them up until a complete
face appeared. But faces are not so symmetrical in real life. The templates
lacked nuance and life, despite their success in finding some people. Strange
to think we can fit all the chins, eyes, cheeks, and noses of this world into
one portable kit and still have enough faces for some to stay missing forever,
invisible among the billions.
___
I was walking home in 100 degree heat from my waitress job, holding on to
my apron with one hand and pulling my hair out of its ponytail with the other,
when a silver Chevy Citation pulled up beside me. A chubby man with rolled-up
sleeves and a loose tie around his neck asked me if I needed a ride.
“You look exhausted,” he said. “And it’s dangerous
to walk on this street by yourself.” His voice sounded sticky, like
he’d been sucking on butterscotch disks.
I glared.
“I’m safe,” he said. “Look, I’ll pull up in
that lot over there. You can inspect my car. No guns.” He leaned down
and picked a smashed, dirty cup off the floor mat. “Just Slurpie cups.”
He gestured for me to follow and sped ahead to the parking lot.
My calves and feet ached from an eight-hour shift at the restaurant. My eyes
itched from cigarette smoke, even fifteen minutes after my shift. And I still
had three miles to go.
I remembered the kidnapping warnings from elementary school, how when I was in third grade a white van with brown stripes had been spotted near playgrounds, its driver trying to get kids to ride with him. We kids were vigilant; we scanned the school parking lot for the van. We told stories about disappeared children. We talked about Johnny Gosh, the newspaper boy who had disappeared years before, how his dental charts were always being compared with found skulls and never matched. I thought about that and my aching calves.
And I got in the car.
___
Letter to the Editor:
Mike Royko’s recent column on running out of gas on I-88 touches my heart. Any person (especially a woman) who chooses to put himself or herself in such jeopardy should be grateful it only cost $38 (it cost Tammy Zywicki her life). The best place for her to find sympathy is in the dictionary. In one of Clinton’s campaign speeches, he said: ‘We must accept responsibility for our own actions.’- John B. Robertson
___
I learn from old newspaper articles that Tammy had just returned from a semester
in Spain. It took me years to find this out, though I have read every article
and watched every news report I could. I imagine Tammy speaking Spanish, rolling
her R’s, crisp and clean - maybe a little too perfect, the way it always
sounds on classroom conversation tapes. I always wanted to study in Spain;
I was dreaming of Madrid the summer Tammy disappeared. She majored in art
history. Same as me. If she were here, we could speak a common language of
rib vaults and charnel-houses, camera obscura and
tromp- l’oeil.
I study the copy of her missing person poster taped to the wall beside my
desk, look for meaning in the way she tilts her head. When I first saw her
picture in the newspaper, I had the feeling I’d been picked out, that
she was pointing at me from across a vast distance. I still feel that way
sometimes, as if her image were infused with mystical power, a Byzantine icon
painted in reverse perspective, so that the vanishing point is me.
___
Leads that never went anywhere.
Three women at the truck stop in Sarcoxie, Missouri, saw a truck driver staring strangely at a spot across the street: the precise place Tammy was found dead. This same trucker used to stare at women all the time. He stopped visiting shortly after Tammy’s murder, and though he used a Commchek credit card with GEES stamped into the plastic to pay for his meals, the credit card company lists people by number, not names—no way to trace it.
The rust-colored stripes on the side of a truck seen parked behind Tammy's Pontiac: a corporate logo, and more than 1, 500 trucks match the description.
The driver seen talking to her - a six-foot tall white male, age 30-45, collar-length bushy hair - matched the description of the strange man in the Sarcoxie truck stop. Investigators later learned that he visited relatives near Chicago the day Tammy disappeared, and he gave a musical wristwatch to his wife: a watch that plays “Raindrops Keep Falling on my Head." It matches the description of the watch stolen from Tammy's wrist.
The logo on the red blanket matches his trucking company, and because of this, police took blood and hair samples after they questioned him. But they never tested the samples, and the trucker died. Somewhere, on a swab in an evidence bag, sits a sample of his blood and skin, and somewhere, in another plastic bag, sits the semen and blood swabbed from Tammy’s body, a sample too small for DNA tests in 1992, but adequate for current technologies.
A trucker who carried a severed breast into a California police station and confessed to several murders worked as a west-coast school bus driver in August 1992, and therefore could not have been driving on Interstate 80 on the day Tammy's car broke down.
Another suspect killed himself before he could be questioned.
And no one has walked into a pawnshop with a Canon EOS 35 mm camera, serial
number 2697811.
Bibliography
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2 September
1992: 1b.
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in Murder Probe, Officer Explains.” Cedar Rapids Gazette 4 September
1992:1a.
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© 2001 Karrie Higgins
This essay was part of my final manuscript for the MFA in Creative Writing
at Antioch University. I would like to thank my mentors, David L. Ulin and
Hope Edelman, for their invaluable advice while revising this piece.