Chapter 7-8, Outpacing the Fiend, Unnatural Nature Summary and Analysis

Murderers help forensic anthropologists advance their science and the worse the crime, the more helpful the contribution. Forensic anthropology is a very new science, developing only in smart spurts starting two hundred and fifty years ago. The field has its professional inception in 1878 with Thomas Dwight, who is influenced at age seven to study anatomy by a highly publicized murder. His pupil is George Dorsey with interests in the human skeleton and who is inspired by a notorious murder in 1897. Dorsey uses brilliant and in that day unknown forensic reasoning to achieve a guilty verdict in the case. Another step forward occurs in 1937 when Dr. John Glaister publishes Medico-Legal Aspects of the Ruxton Case which examines one of the most famous double murders of the twentieth century, a case...