Cannibalism and Lunch

LH&RB –SIS PROGRAM
Sunday, July 11, 2010
12:00 p.m. – 1:15 p.m.
CCC Room 107

“DIGGING” COLORADO LEGAL HISTORY:
ALFRED PACKER: THE MAN, THE MYTHS, THE CANNIBAL

Professor James E. Starrs of The George Washington University Law School, forensics expert and internationally-known authority on exhumation, returns to AALL to discuss the case of Colorado cannibal Alfred (Alferd) Packer, a member of a February 1874 gold prospecting party who returned in the spring, well-fed and without his five companions. Packer was charged at his first trial with murder, not cannibalism, which was not a crime in Colorado then - and still isn't. He was convicted in 1883. When his conviction was reversed on a technicality, his retrial resulted in conviction for five crimes of homicide. Professor Starrs led a team of experts in the exhumation of the Packer party members and will discuss his analysis of the scientific data gleaned from the victims’ bones. This data undermined Packer’s trial testimony, confirming that Packer had cannibalized all five of his companions, when he had contended that he had cannibalized only two under duress when food ran out. Come join us for a fascinating trip through forensic science and the law. Lunch will be served and you’ll also get to hear a poem written about Starrs’s exhumation, “T’was the Night Before Digging”!