Written in Bone
Inside Chico State’s Human Identification Lab…
Have you ever seen the television show ‘Bones’? That’s kind of what I do in a nutshell,” quips Dr. Ashley Kendell, director of the Human Identification Lab at Chico State University. But she also quickly adds that her job in reality is anything like they portray it on television. “I’m usually dressed head to toe in hazmat gear, those big marshmallow suits with gloves and masks, and everything’s covered. The process is dirty. It smells. And it’s science, so it’s really slow and meticulous. We don’t turn around cases in a day, and we don’t have fancy holograms that can project what a person looked like in life. But most of us who do this can’t imagine doing anything else because it’s fascinating.”
Kendell, along with Drs. Eric Bartelink, Colleen Milligan, Amber Plemons and P. Willey, make up the team running Chico State’s Human Identification Lab. For more than five decades, this world-class facility has been quietly putting forensic anthropology to work, becoming California’s busiest forensic anthropology laboratory and the largest in the Western United States. “We cover about 88 percent of the counties in California for forensic anthropological casework and consultation. We get around 120 to 150 cases per year, as well as work from Washington, Nevada and Montana,” she says.
The cases run the gamut from quick questions about whether something found in a backyard is a human bone to full investigations involving burned, decomposed or skeletonized remains. “When remains cannot be visually identified we develop what’s known as a biological profile, that gives an estimate of a person’s age at death, stature, skeletal sex and geographic origins. This helps an agency get an idea of what a person looked like in life,” Kendell explains. “So, I can tell them I have a female between the ages of 25 and 40 who stands between five-foot-four and five-foot-eight, and there will probably be a lot of missing persons reports that would match that record.”
The hope is that the profile, combined with where someone was found, can point investigators to an identification. “There’s one feature right in the front of your forehead, the big sinus called a frontal sinus,” Kendell says. “The shape of that in an X-ray is individualizing, so it’s as good as a fingerprint.” Similarly, a medical device, an unusual pattern inside the bone, extra teeth, ribs or vertebrae can also be used to establish an identification. “You just don’t know what you’ll find until you start digging into a case,” Kendell says.
Kendell came to Chico State as a faculty member in 2017, where she earned her master’s degree before completing her Ph.D. at Michigan State. She’d also previously worked in forensic anthropology labs in Michigan and Arizona. Shortly after Kendell arrived in Chico, the Camp Fire happened. “I had seen maybe two fire cases. Body concealment attempts, and that was it,” Kendell recalls. “But I got thrown into the Camp Fire in my first year in Chico, and that has really become a lot of what I do now.”
In fact, Kendell and molecular anthropologist Dr. Beth Shook have worked to develop better methods for collecting DNA from wildfire victims for the purposes of identification. Kendell, along with Bartelink, Milligan and Plemons, also train search-and-rescue teams and law enforcement officers in the recovery of remains in burned environments without damaging them. “When the human body is exposed to intense heat, muscles pull it into a ‘pugilistic posture,’ or what’s sometimes called a ‘boxer’s pose,’ because our flexors are stronger than our extensors. So, all of the muscles of flexion will outdo the extension muscles,” says Kendell.
That predictable position can help scientists understand where to look for preserved tissue and DNA. “We’re trying to put together a series of visual diagrams to say, when you’re in the morgue, these are the regions that you want to prioritize. This is what tissue can look like and still be viable for DNA.”
The work is intensely scientific, yet profoundly human. “I didn’t necessarily want to be a forensic pathologist and see soft tissue or things like nail polish and tattoos because that’s so personal,” Kendell notes. With a skeleton, she can concentrate on the science. “I spent five years as a death investigator, but you’re in someone’s home and talking to family members so you get to see them as a person. The same goes when you see things like wildfire victims who tried to leave a house but didn’t make it. Same with child abuse cases. Those are the ones that go home with you.” For Kendell, the rewards far outweigh the challenges. “It’s nice to know that we can give back to our community by getting decedents identified and returned to families as quickly as possible.”
Kendell acknowledges that breaking into the forensic anthropology field can be demanding. She spent 14 years in college earning a bachelor’s degree, two master’s degrees, a Ph.D. and two board certifications. “It’s a really long haul, so you have to love it.” Kendell says. At Chico State, Kendell says that students get a leg up by being able to participate in hands-on experience with real-world forensic work, field recovery and the agencies that make up the medico-legal system. Four to five new master’s students join the program each year, and the lab is growing. A new state-funded facility is under construction, with expected completion in summer 2027. It will be significantly larger than the current space, with additional laboratories, classrooms and a 150-person training center.
The endless variation of her work continually fascinates Kendell. “If you were to see a human skull or just a humerus bone in the upper arm, you would never look at that and think, ‘Hey, I might be able to do an ID or get a presumptive ID from this single element,’ because they all look relatively the same,” she says. But they aren’t. “Your skeleton is constantly remodeling,” she says. “Your bones are going to record not only what you look like, but also your lifestyle and repetitive habits, as well as what you ate. They record if you do heavy manual labor, or if you had a traumatic injury 20 years prior. And because the majority of our casework is homicides, trauma analyses can help answer questions like how a person died, the timing of their injury and how much time has elapsed since their death,” Kendell says.
Studying human remains has also given Kendell clear insight into the way humans live. “We don’t take care of ourselves,” she says with a laugh. “Seriously, don’t do drugs, don’t drink too much alcohol, and eat clean, whole foods. The information you can get from a skeleton still to this day blows my mind.” •
