Saturday, Jul. 14, 2001

FBI calls off bones inquiry

By Mike Lee Herald staff writer

The FBI has dropped its criminal investigation in the case of the rediscovered Kennewick Man bones and plans to turn over the ancient remains to the Army Corps of Engineers.

But the agency won't explain how the bones got into the box where they were found, who had access to the remains or why the FBI didn't find the bones when the case was first investigated three years ago.

"It sounds like a whitewash," said Alan Schneider, lawyer for scientists who want to study the ancient skeleton. "We've got an unexplained gap ... of four-and-a-half years to explain what happened to these bones."

Corps spokesman Dutch Meier said he expected the bones to be reunited with the other Kennewick Man pieces at the Burke Museum in Seattle, "pending final identification and further examination."

Preliminary analysis was essentially a visual comparison by a Corps employee with photographs of the pieces that were reported missing three years ago. "That was enough to convince this guy that they looked like the right ones," said special agent Robbie Burroughs, FBI spokeswoman in Seattle.

Burroughs expected the FBI to give the bones to the Corps "sooner than later" but did not know exactly when.

Pieces of Kennewick Man's femurs were reported missing by the Corps in 1998. They were rediscovered in late June when the Benton County Sheriff's Office cleaned out its evidence bunker.

The discovery dumbfounded just about everyone associated with the case, especially since the FBI had investigated after the Corps announced the bones were missing.

Benton County Coroner Floyd Johnson was questioned in the most recent criminal investigation because he rediscovered the bones and was one of the few people with access to them.

He could not be reached Friday but told the Herald earlier that he wasn't concerned about the investigation because the oversight was "just a mix-up."

She declined to answer questions about the investigation that would explain why the bones were overlooked for more than three years and how they apparently were transferred from a box with the bulk of the remains to the one in which they were found.

"We've only got two scenarios - either the mix-up occurred while (the bones) were in the sheriff's possession or it occurred later and then somebody got them back in the sheriff's locker," Schneider said.

"Maybe we should have put the bones on the 10 Most Wanted List, and then we would have gotten a little more" information from the FBI, he said.

Lawyers for the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation and the Nez Perce Tribe - tribes that have claimed Kennewick Man as an ancestor - were not reached Friday.

The issue of who handled the bones could be important if DNA tests ever are done with samples from the femurs - upper leg bones that are critical for scientific evaluation of skeletons.

Mistakes in DNA analysis sometimes are traced to DNA "contamination" by people who handle the bones tested.

Without DNA samples from Kennewick Man's handlers, errors could be hard to weed out, Schneider said.

For the time being, however, there's no guarantee any more testing will be done on Kennewick Man.

It's been almost a month since U.S. Magistrate Judge John Jelderks heard arguments for and against study of the remains by Schneider's clients in federal district court in Portland.

He's given no indication of when he'll render his opinion in the high-profile case.

"Every morning when I wake up, I think is this the day we are going to get a decision?" Schneider said.

But, he added, "It wouldn't surprise me to see this thing take several more months."