Clyde Snow

Clyde Collins Snow (born January 7, 1928 in Fort Worth , Texas , † May 16, 2014 in Norman , Oklahoma ) was an American forensic anthropologist . His expertise in the interpretation of skeletons made him a worldwide sought-after expert in solving crimes long ago. Among other things, he analyzed the bones of Tutankhamun , Josef Mengele and potential assassins on John F. Kennedy and thereby verified their authenticity. He examined mass graves , identified causes of death and thus helped in solving war crimes. Clyde Snow wrote the following sentence: "Bones can be puzzles, but they never lie and they do not smell bad."

Life

Snow grew up as the only child of Wister Clyde Snow and Sarah Isobell Collins in Ralls, Texas. When he was twelve, while walking with his father, he came across his first skeleton - in fact, a mixture of two skeletons with a murder behind them. Snow had a hard time in school and university. He received his master's degree in zoology from the Technical University of Texas in 1955 , and twelve years later he received his PhD in anthropology from the University of Arizona . By 1960 Snow was employed by the Federal Aviation Administration , researching the effects of plane crashes on passengers and developing new restraint systems and escape routes in airplanes. In 1968 he headed the forensic anthropology department at the Civil Aeromedical Institute in Oklahoma.

In the 1970s, Clyde Snow turned increasingly to forensics . His talent in “reading bones” made him a sought-after reviewer. In 1978 he took a position before a committee of inquiry in the American House of Representatives (HSCA) to investigate the murder of US President John F. Kennedy. In 1979 he began to work with human rights organizations, traveled to Argentina and assigned the skeletons in a mass grave to killing techniques of the Argentine military junta ; several officers were brought to trial and sentenced on the basis of this evidence.

His reputation for solving mass crimes led him to mass graves in Guatemala , the Iraqi part of Kurdistan , the Philippines , El Salvador , Bosnia , Ethiopia , Bolivia , Peru , Croatia and Iraq . He used his reputation to bring criminal proceedings based on the forensic evidence. Time and again, his team got into trouble with government regulatory agencies who feared and wanted to prevent Snow's educational work.

In 1985 he traveled to Brazil on behalf of the Simon Wiesenthal Center to identify the remains of the long-sought Nazi criminal Josef Mengele. His tools were simple, his research extensive. In the report, he linked the circumference of the skull with Mengele's hat size, which he found in SS files.

Snow taught at the University of Oklahoma and trained anthropological forensic scientists at the excavation sites. He was married several times and died of cancer in an Oklahoma City hospital in May 2014 at the age of 86.

further reading

• Christopher Joyce: Witnesses from the Grave: The Stories Bones Tell , Ballantine 1992, ISBN 978-0-345-37552-0
• Short biography in the Oklahoma Digital Library
• History of the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team EAAF
• Obituary in the New York Times

Web links

• Literature by and about Clyde Snow in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ↑ In the American original: "Bones can be puzzles, but they never lie, and they don't smell bad." Quoted from the New York Times on April 9, 1991: Scientist Tells Silente Victims' Tales of Terror
2. ^ Testimony of Dr Clyde Collins Snow , House Select Committee on Assassinations, September 25, 1978
3. ↑ Thomas Keenan, Eyal Weizman: Mengele's Skull: The Advent of a Forensic Aesthetics , Sternberg Press 2012, ISBN 9781934105917 ; → Reading sample ( memento of the original from May 18, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. as PDF