On Thursday, October 26, at 2:51 p.m., Thomas Varnadoe, age 13, succumbed to an attack of pneumonia which had been threatening his life for several days. The campus newspaper, the Yellow Jacket, reported the news under a front-page story about the school's productive dairy farm. Thirty-four days later, Thomas, 13, who left home in good health, was dead. Their parents protested, but couldn't stop the sheriff, who shipped the boys that September north to the Marianna reformatory, which by then had a brick-making plant, printing press and farm, all of which relied on child labor. They'd been accused of stealing a typewriter from an old maid and they were charged with "malicious trespassing." They were not represented by a lawyer, nor were they tried. The Hernando County sheriff came for Thomas and Hubert nine years later, in 1934. It's the only photograph of Thomas his family has. He's barefoot like his big brother, Hubert, who's standing behind Thomas. Thomas is 4 years old, wearing a Peter Pan collar and breeches and he's squinting against the light. There's a photograph of Thomas Varnadoe, a black and white family portrait taken late in 1925. Glen Varnadoe says he thinks his uncle, Thomas (above, 4, in front of his family), was beaten to death. "On Thursday, October 26, at 2:51 p.m., Thomas Varnadoe, age 13, succumbed to an attack of pneumonia which had been threatening his life for several days." Kimmerle planned to have them all shipped by May. To be sure, they were also shipping teeth and bone fragments to the UNT Health Science Center in Fort Worth, Texas for genetic testing. They hoped to find distinct matches, to one day be able to say specific bones belonged to Nollie Davis or Grady Huff or Thomas Varnadoe. "Brush his teeth."Ī big chart took up most of one wall in the lab and they slowly filled it with information from the artifacts and remains. "I would wash all of these with water," she said. It looks like if you chewed on something else, something harder." "That's not just from teeth grinding or chewing food. "His wear pattern is very interesting," Kimmerle said. "I can't tell whether that tiny crater is a cavity or something else," she said. Nearby, Ashley Maxwell, 27, peered into a microscope hovering over a molar. A tooth, for instance, can give you an age within a year or two. But analyzing remains can reveal a lot about the life the deceased lived. The found a bullet slug, but it was from the skull of a pig dumped in the woods. As to how the boys died? There were no clear reasons, not yet. Archaeologists found two coins where a boy's eyes would have been, dated 19, clues to when he had been buried.
A faded label on a bottle of embalming fluid found beside a body, for instance, revealed it was made between 19. Another was analyzing the artifacts found in the graves, trying to date coffin handles and nails by their design.
#PUZZLE PIECES OUTLINE SKIN#
Two other students had glued together a skull from dozens of broken bone shards to take a three-dimensional image of it so they could superimpose muscle and skin to see what the boy might have looked like. One was scraping tooth enamel to do isotope analysis, hoping to determine where a kid came from based on minerals in his teeth. Her team that day in March, an attractive crew of graduate students, was busy around the lab on the campus of the University of South Florida. Now she was trying to piece the boys back together, bone fragment by bone fragment, to figure out who they were and, she hoped, how they died.
But when ground penetrating radar showed 50 graves, 19 more than the state had said, and when families wanted the remains of their boys back, it became a mission. When she started the project in 2012, her goal had been to map the cemetery on the reform school campus so that family would know where their relatives were buried. "Hey, babe," she'd sing, and walk out of earshot to get updates on school activities and runny noses. When her cell phone rang, the word BABE popped onto the screen - Mike, her husband.
She'd been working 14-hour days through January, February and March, stressing about finding time for teaching and advising on top of leading this massive project. Erin Kimmerle wanted to give them their names back.
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