CIUDAD JUÁREZ, Mexico — Alejandro Hernández Cárdenas took a scorched-looking, decomposed head and five stiff, bloated hands and gently submerged them in his secret solution. After they soak for three days, he said, any scars, lesions or birthmarks the victim might have had will reappear.
Dr. Hernández Cárdenas's technique, normally applied to full bodies, can restore clues like wounds and fingerprints.
They did. The putrid head looked human again, with full lips, large pores and a massive bruise on the forehead. The hands had recovered their identifying prints.
“Science advances,” said Dr. Hernández Cárdenas, “whenever there are difficult situations.”
The newly revealed details may never lead to a conviction, or even an arrest, but Dr. Hernández Cárdenas, a forensic odontologist who works in the Ciudad Juárez Forensic Science Lab, has attained the kind of star status that could be produced only in a city like this, with its semidesert climate, exorbitant murder rate and can-do frontier creativity. Dr. Hernández Cárdenas developed the rehydration technique, which he primarily uses on full bodies, more or less single-handedly, and he even pays part of the cost for the chemicals that turn back the clock on his brittle subjects.
Forensic experts have long used glycerin injections to reconstitute fingers to get prints, but that is not practical for entire bodies — particularly not in the scorching heat of Ciudad Juárez, where bodies decompose and mummify quickly. Only through rehydration does the corpse regain some of its original condition, helping the police by revealing lesions and bringing internal organs back to nearly their state at the time of death.
On most days, Dr. Hernández Cárdenas can be found in the lab here rehydrating some of the bodies that were stored or buried without being identified from 2009 to 2011, the height of the violence between competing criminal syndicates in this border city. With nearly 8,000 people killed during that period, he always has plenty to do, and his process tends to include both music and dark humor.
He says he talks to the corpses, consoling them while he works, indulging them with romantic music as they float in the “Jacuzzi,” the chemical-filled tub he uses for rehydration. If the individual features that reappear on a victim’s face look menacing, ballads give way to rap and hip-hop, which fill the impeccably clean but foul-smelling lab.
Dr. Hernández Cárdenas, 55, focuses mainly on helping rehydrate the hundreds of unclaimed corpses in his hometown, particularly those of women, so they can be identified and the murderers tracked down. “It would have even been a sin not to do it,” said Dr. Hernández Cárdenas, who said his work sometimes keeps him up at night.
“I used to take many girls to bed,” he said, “but not the way you think.”
He has often been frustrated by the lack of justice for those whose deaths he comes to know so intimately. Of the 150 or so bodies he has rehydrated so far, only a handful have provided clues that led to arrests.
Rather casually, he said he also avoids following up to see whether law-enforcement agents have identified the bodies he has worked on, fearing that corrupt officials or criminals will come after him.
“He who knows less, lives more,” he said. “One doesn’t even trust the authorities.”
The biggest supporters of his work are the families of the disappeared, who see in his chemical solutions the chance for closure. Experts, who say Ciudad Juárez is the only place where the technique has been deployed, tend to discuss his efforts in more scientific terms. Dr. Hernández Cárdenas has a patent application that is due for approval this month.
“If it holds up, I think it would be an accomplishment and an amazing advance,” said Elizabeth Gardner, a professor of forensic science at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, who has witnessed Dr. Hernández Cárdenas’s process.
Dr. Hernández Cárdenas, a former boxer, never intended to get into this line of work. Married at 17 and a father of three soon after, he struggled to put himself through college, where he studied orthodontics.
He drove a Red Cross ambulance by night to make ends meet, a side job that came to define his destiny. One night in 1977, he delivered 28 bodies — killed in an explosion — to a morgue. The forensic team asked him to inspect their mouths for identifying traits, a fascinating challenge for the self-described obsessive doctor.
Dr. Hernández Cárdenas continued splitting his time between his elderly patients’ prosthetic teeth (he still has his practice) and Red Cross duties until he got a break at the forensic lab in 2002. He was put in charge of analyzing the cadavers’ teeth to determine their age. Once he was there, a question that had nagged him for years began consuming his time: could the fingertip rehydration used by forensic specialists throughout the world somehow be applied to entire bodies?
Suddenly, “I had material, I had time, I had authorization” to experiment, Dr. Hernández Cárdenas said. He began experimenting with fingers and ears available at the city’s forensic lab, placing them in glass jars — “I kept eating Gerber,” he said — slightly tweaking the chemical proportions each time while enduring his colleagues’ teasing.
One morning, he arrived at the lab to find that one of the jars contained a perfectly intact finger. “I thought my co-workers were playing a trick on me,” he said. But their response left him cold. “We don’t mess with your filthiness,” they assured Dr. Hernández Cárdenas.
In 2008, he managed to properly rehydrate his first full body, becoming a quasi-celebrity among the city’s residents and in the country’s forensic science circles.
“He is in high demand,” said Carlos Reynosa, coordinator of the forensic science master’s program at the Autonomous University of Ciudad Juárez. Staff members from the American Consulate and the United States Agency for International Development have also inquired about, and observed, Dr. Hernández Cárdenas’s method.
Unfortunately, he said, officials and academics are not the only ones interested in his methods.
Now divorced, Dr. Hernández Cárdenas said his intriguing reputation follows him everywhere in Ciudad Juárez. Women, in the midst of dinner dates, often ask him about his work, demanding details that he refuses to divulge. “I don’t think it’s an adequate subject to talk about with a lady,” he said.
Tuesday 16 October 2012
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/16/world/americas/mexican-doctors-bath-for-corpses-reinvigorates-cold-cases.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
