by Leif Kullman

The case with the heavy weighted denture
One summer day the police in Stockholm is called to a house in the center of town, where the neighbors have felt a smell of death in the staircase. For a long time nobody has seen the owner of the flat, an old lady. A female body in an advanced stage of putrefaction is found, which is brought to the department of Forensic Medicine for an autopsy. On probable reasons the police suspect that it is the owner of the flat, but the Forensic Odontologist is asked to assist in establishing the identity.

The owner of the flat has visited a dentist regularly according to some relatives, and the police manage to find him. He is a pensioner, but has kept some of the material from his professional life. However, in this particular case, he has no records or radiographs left, but he finds a couple of slides of the patient and her new dentures. She consulted him because her dentures were too old and badly fitting. Especially she was dissatisfied with the denture in the lower jaw. He decided to produce new ones, and to use a heavy metallic bottom plate in the lower denture, just to give it a chance to stay in place due to its weight. He became very fond of the dentures he manufactured and in an education purpose he took some slides of the dentures. In figure 1 the denture can be seen and in figure 2 some information he wrote, manufacturing year and the weight of the denture which is 32 grams.

During my postmortem examination I cannot find any denture in the mouth only two toothless jaws, but the police finds on my request the dentures in the bathroom of the flat. The dentures are not marked with the social security number of the patient, which else is common today in Sweden, due to recommendations from the National Board of Health and Welfare.


Figure 2

However, they fit exactly to the jaws and the lower denture prove to weigh 31.6 grams.The missing 0.4 gram could be attributed to attrition.

A very probable identity can be established between the flat owner and the unknown dead body from the apartment.

Next month I will relate some of the program that the Swedish Society of Forensic Odontology had recently during the annual meeting for dentists in Sweden at the International Fair in Älvsjö.

                                                                                            Leif Kullman