THE TRUTH IS
In The Bones
Unraveling True Crime Stories Through Osteology
Latest Episode
Transcript
Greetings and salutations friends. Welcome back to The Truth is in the Bones, the podcast that uses osteology to debunk, confirm, and speculate theories regarding how people have met their untimely demises. For those of you tuning in from Baraboo Wisconsin, we will be taking a look at a more recent case that I’m sure you’re aware of.
The Bone Breaker Killer, Joseph Clark, was a serial killer in Baraboo Wisconsin. In his teens, Clark would kidnap teenage boys and hold them hostage, periodically breaking their bones as a way to cope with his daily stress and anger. After being caught in 1995 thanks to the escape of Thaddeus Phillips, Clark announced that there were even more boys that were never found.
Despite there being no evidence of this at the time, recent news of skeletal remains dating back to the 90s were found in the area. Other true crime enthusiasts have made assumptions that this person is a victim of Joseph Clark, but as listeners of this podcast you know that the bones know. Today’s episode is taking a look at these remains to see if there is any basis for these theories.
*Intro Music plays (Mama’s Gun by Glass Animals)*
First, we’ll have to get into the logistics of Clark’s known killings. All of the victims of Clark’s were young teenage boys, roughly around 14 years old on average. Clark was able to commit these killings because of his closeness in age to his victims. Clark would sneak into the boys home, drugging them in their sleep, and bringing them outside. When they woke up, Clark would pose as a friend and would offer to help the boys by taking them to his house. It was at this point when things would change. The friendly façade fell and Clarks insidious intentions became clear. He would immobilize his victims by breaking their legs in various ways, most commonly seen through him twisting their feet all the way around. After this point he would keep his victims captive and would break their bones daily, saying that the sound was soothing for him. Speaking about this gives me chills. I’ve never broken a bone, knock on wood, so I can’t even begin to imagine the pain of these young boys felt.
Before we start looking at details about the remains recovered, it’s important to remind everyone that we are going to be discussing a real person and that they deserve your respect. The trauma we will be talking about is not to be taken lightly.
The Cranium is the skull without the mandible, and can tell us a lot about the person we are looking at. Looking at cranial suture fusion we can figure out an estimate age of the person and by observing different features of the cranium we can attempt to figure out the sex of the individual as well. While we don’t have access to the Cranium to look at sutures, we can see some visible sexually dimorphic cranial features. From first glances, it’s clear that this is a hyper masculine skull. The Nuchal Crest is sharp and prominent, and the Supraorbital Margin is thick and round. Looking at Mastoid Process, it clearly follows this masculine trend. The process rounded and elongated, rather than being short and flat. The Supraorbital Glabella is very rounded and is very prominent on the Cranium. While sexing skulls isn’t 100% accurate and doesn’t account for those who do not identify as their assigned gender at birth, it’s safe to say that this is a very masculine skull.
Despite the sex of the skull falling in line with the typical victims of Clark, it would me amiss of me to ignore the very blatant bullet wound going through the parietals. Clark has never admitted to having or using a gun on one of his victims, but it’s always a possibility. Another issue is our inability to age the victim because we don’t have a good view of the cranial suture fusions or the teeth for that matter.
Cranium
Tibia
and Fibula
Looking at the tibia recovered, it’s evident that the bone is broken. This can possibly be a reason as to why some theorists are so quick to attribute this person’s death to Clark. The tibia appears to have a blunt force trauma fracture. The way the bone is broken makes the fracture look like a non-displaced oblique fracture. Non-displaced means that the broken part of the bone isn’t out of alignment and an oblique fracture is one that fractures at an angle.
While this is a blunt force trauma fracture, it doesn’t compare to the other examples of broken tibias from Clarks previous victims. This one seems to have fractures from what looks like a medium sized projectile of great force. Clark was known to use bats and other weapons to break his victims legs, leaving them with Comminuted fractures.
Femur
The femur is another point of contention for theorists. I don’t know if this is new information that came out recently or if people hooked on this story are simply ignoring what this bone tells us. It doesn’t look like this person is a victim of Clark's, but instead got rapped up into something very different yet none the less horrifying. In the usual victims of Clark, we would see unbelievable damage to the femur, often victims had open/compound fractures where skin near the bone break was pierced.
This femur shows evidence of a gunshot wound, rather than continuous blunt force trauma. The fractures of the femur are non-displaced, aside from missing bone, and all seen to stem from where the bullet entered.
Rib Fracture
While doing some research for this episode I learned some pretty interesting things about rib fractures. So, rib fractures are common injuries, which occur most often following blunt thoracic trauma but can also result from severe coughing, athletic activities, and nonaccidental trauma. Despite rib fractures being so common in forensic cases, there is little information focusing on the biomechanics of these fractures. Because of this, there is no uniform understanding of postmortem versus perimortem rib fracture patterns, which is kind of crazy to think about. I personally am not the best with identifying perimortem and postmortem rib fractures, so I relied a lot on a comparative collection.
Looking at this fracture though, it looks like it occurred postmortem. The breaks are very clean as if the bone was dry when it happened. With fresh bone, particularly ribs, there’s more peeling and folds in the rib. This example however shows none of that, leading me to think that this break occurred later after death.
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Conclusion
The story of Joseph Clark is a terrifying and unsettling. I hope that if there are victims of his that we haven’t found yet that they are found and laid to rest. Their souls and families deserve the chance to grieve, find peace, and move past such tragedy. I cannot, however, in good faith say that the remains recovered in Wisconsin belong to a victim of Clark’s. We have found a total of two gun shot wounds, one in the cranium and one in the femur. Clark has never been known to use a gun, and considering how consistent Clark had been with his signature and treatment of his victims it’s hard to get behind the idea that maybe there was an exception. While I don’t have bones of the other victims to show you to compare, the immense trauma described by Phillips as he was being held hostage would leave the bones significantly more broken. We also were unable to age the remains meaning that it’s possible this person didn’t even fall within the age range for Clark. Overall, the most likely story is that the remains belong to someone who was killed in a gun fight, which may have been a quicker death than the one promised by Clark.