Odd this day
Today is the 40th anniversary of the day a peat cutter called Andy Mould “picked what looked like a piece of wood off the elevator at the peat-shredding mill” where he worked in Cheshire, and “threw it towards his workmate Eddie Slack … as it hit the ground, peat fell away to reveal a human foot”.
They had discovered Lindow Man, “the best preserved bog body to be found in Britain”. What was odd about this — apart from the find itself — was that Andy had discovered Lindow Woman on 13 May the previous year, and in the process had helped to catch someone who’d got away with murder for 23 years.
The saga of Lindow Woman began when Andy and his workmate Stephen Dooley
picked a peculiar football-sized lump off an elevator carrying peat to the shredding machine.
(This quote and the ones in the opening paragraph come from the British Museum’s 1986 book The Bog Man and the Archaeology of People, by Don Brothwell.)
It’s remarkable, really, that we have either find, considering how close both came to being minced up and spread on someone’s garden. It seems only to have been these workmates’ propensity for remarking on funny shaped bits of peat that saved the finds for posterity.
Anyway, they joked that it was a dinosaur’s egg, decided it was probably a knackered old football, and started hosing it down.
But this was no ball. This was evidently, gruesomely, a human skull — missing its jaw but still possessing skin, some hair, and one baleful eyeball that stared at them.
The police were swiftly called, and soon had someone in mind. It was, they thought, Malika de Fernandez, who had lived nearby, disappeared in 1960, and whose husband, Peter Reyn-Bardt, was suspected of her murder. When Her Majesty’s Constabulary knocked on his door again after so long, and told him they’d found what they reckoned was his wife’s cranium, he broke down and confessed.
Detective Inspector George Abbott, leading the investigation, was understandably rather pleased with this turn of events, but had misgivings. Why had they only found this bit? He sent the head off for radiocarbon dating, and learned that whoever this was, she’d been dead 1,740 years. The margin of error was, admittedly, 80 years, but that still didn’t put Mr Reyn-Bardt in the frame for her demise.
Not altogether surprisingly, Peter R-B remembered around this time that he had, in fact, not murdered his wife at all, and wished to retract his confession. No, no, it had been manslaughter, you see; he hadn’t really meant to do it. All that stuff about doing her in and disposing of her… good heavens, no.
The jury convicted him 11–1, and he died in prison.
So, when the next oddly shaped lump of peat turned out to have toenails, its discoverers, or the coppers they called, might have been forgiven for thinking “oh, it’s only another of those dead people from Roman-era Britain”. But they had to be sure, of course. And it turned out they’d found another person whose life had been terminated early against their will. This one, however, was not going to provide the opportunity to crack a cold case. He’d been dead somewhere in the region of 1,865 to 1,982 years.
Exact cause of death, though, has not been easy to pinpoint, not least because it doesn’t look to have been quick.
His body shows evidence of multiple injuries, including a couple of blows to his head with a V-shaped implement, possibly an axe, which appears to have driven a sliver of skull into his brain. A hard blow across his back with something blunt broke his neck and at least one rib. Ligature marks on the neck where a sinew cord was found may indicate garroting. His throat was cut from ear to ear. And he may have been stabbed.
He may have had copper pigment on his chest, and seems to have eaten some burnt bread, which could be signs of something ritualistic — or he may have eaten something that had been burnt by accident, and been violently set upon. It’s difficult to be certain at this historical distance.
What we do know is that he had good teeth and his fingernails showed little sign of manual labour. We also know that radiography suggests he could pass, not much altered…
…for someone standing to be Vice President of the United States in November.
