odontology
by Leif Kullman
The disastrous holiday trip
Our world is today growing very international with people travelling a lot both in work and privately. Not at least has Internet contributed to this fact. Today many people are visiting a lot of other countries every day by means of modern computer and communication technology. I myself use to look in some foreign newspaper every day I have an opportunity. This week for example I looked into the Sydney Morning Herald Tribune during Wednesday afternoon. The time was then about midnight in Australia, they are six to seven hours ahead our middle European time and the headings in my monitor was therefore from the Thursday edition. Really a thrilling feeling to be able to read something that still was not published in the opposite part of our earth. In Forensic Odontology a good cooperation has existed among the Scandinavian countries since long. Soon there will probably also be an well-established co-operation among most countries in the world, at least among those who have access to experts in this subject. We have today an International Organization for Forensic Odonto-Stomatology and Sweden is the coming three year honoured of being responsible for the executive board of this society.
However, the development has been very fast and there was not so many years ago since it was a very big adventure for a Swedish teenager to make his first holiday trip to the Mediterranean area. This is the story of how one young Swedish male went traveling to the southern of Europe on an interrail card with some mates and who later on had to be returned dead home to his family in Sweden after an odontological identification had been performed in Albania. Without a good international cooperation in the forensic sciences and the usefulness of the teeth as an identification tool, he should have remained buried as an unknown person in a cemetery in Albania.
The three young Swedish comrades had been out traveling for some weeks and in the beginning of July they had reached Brindisi in Italy and were heading for Corfu.
They took a ferry at Brindisi it was only one nights journey to go to Corfu. During this night Peter, as we can call him disappears.
They were all sleeping in an outer boat deck and Peters comrades noticed nothing during the dark hours, but in the morning Peter could not be found on board. When the boat came to Corfu the authorities were contacted of the comrades and the police also called Peters parents in Sweden to let them know about his disappearance.
One week after this event a male body is found on a sandy beach outside the village Poro in the Vlora district in Albania. The body is dressed in T-shirt with a special text and in trousers and must have been floating in the water for some days since the soft tissues has taken up a lot of water and reached a stage of slight putrefaction.
An autopsy was carried out by an Albanian doctor in Forensic Medicine. During this the examiners reached the conclusion that the corpse belonged to a young male not older than 30 and probably of a Nordic origin. The cause of death was found to be asphyxia by drowning. A rough dental examination was also performed showing a good dental status (by the doctor in Forensic Medicine). Some amalgam fillings were found and all teeth existed except four premolars, which had been extracted a long time ago of orthodontic reasons. Since the police could not find any missing person matching this description, the body was buried as an unknown foreigner in a cemetery. Fortunately the authorities also forwarded a message with the body description to Interpol.
During the last days in July the antemortem dental data of Peter were recorded in Stockholm in a computerbase at the department of Forensic Medicine. Since a couple of years this is an regular routine which is performed in cooperation with the police (more details about this routine can be read im my ODIS-letter from october 1996).
In September, Interpol in Sweden received a message about the unknown and buried body in Albania. The inscription of the T-shirt of the dead person was recognized by an alert policeman and he forwarded the message to our department. We wrote out the dental description in English in an Interpol form and this was sent, together with a personal and medical description to Albania together with a request to exhume and re-examine the body. Copies of the antemortem dental radiographs were also attached.
The request was diplomatic supported by the Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Finally in February the next year the skeletonised body was exhumed and a new examination carried out by the same coroner as before. Everything was in complete accordance in the dental data and an identity with Peter could be established. The body could at last be taken back home to Sweden and the young man could be buried in the family cemetery with a lot of grateful relatives present. A definitive answer is always better than uncertainty in cases of disappeared persons.
Next month:
I will tell you more about age estimation of human beings based on the teeth.
Leif Kullman
