A scientific investigation report on exhumation, postmortem examination and identification of the murdered pastor

A pastor was reported as a missing person on 18 March 2017 at Osterbay Police Station (Tanzania) before his body was spotted buried in a small bush in Mabwepande, Dar es Salaam, on 11 April 2017. The body was discovered after a systematic search lasting two days, which was coordinated by village officers. A technical exhumation was conducted on 12 April 2017 to recover the remains and transport them to Muhimbili National Hospital. The postmortem team consisted of a medical doctor, an archaeologist, an anthropologist, and a pathologist to establish the identity and the cause of death. After a thorough investigation and a postmortem examination, it was determined that a blow by a blunt object with a slightly pointed edge caused the death. Part of the deceased’s forehead above the left eye was pierced and ruptured by radial fractures. The identity of the deceased was confirmed after comparing ante-mortem information collected by the police and data obtained during the postmortem examination. The most important identifying information was the deceased’s clothes, dental medical history, and a scar from a burn he had suffered in childhood. This paper highlights how important it is in a case like this to engage a team of professionals from different fields and with different expertise in order to make the search and recovery work more effective. In addition, the case underlines how a decomposing body can pose a challenge to scientific investigators

Sexing contemporary Tanzanian skeletonized remains using skull morphology: A test of the walker sex assessment method

Determination of sex in a burial or comingled assemblage is an essential element in forensic human skeletal identification. Establishing the sex of individual skeletal remains using skull landmarks is one of the traditional human osteological methods. This study sampled 86 skeletonized skulls of contemporary Tanzanians to test a popular sex assessment technique developed by Walker's cranial nonmetric approach. The sex estimate was scored from Walker's Log Regression equations involving nuchal crest, mastoid, glabella, mental eminence and supra orbit ridge characters. Basing on the formula, females display feature scores of 1–3, and males typically display individual feature scores of 3–5. At the same time, mastoid and glabella were the best features of sex determination after the evaluation. Also, the test displayed a high overlap between males' and females' characteristics of mental eminence, nuchal crest, and supraorbital ridge. Generally, the Walker sex estimation method using cranial features on current skeletonized Tanzania population failed to provide concrete sex assessment results, thus justifying the suggestion that; we need a modified population-specific approach