Who is Clyde Snow?

Clyde Snow
1928 -
Clyde Snow is perhaps the most famous forensic anthropologists in the world today. He prefers to call his work, "osteobiography" saying, "there is a brief but very useful and informative biography of an individual contained within the skeleton, if you know how to read it" (Current Biography 52).

He was born in Fort Worth, Texas on January 7, 1928 to Wister Clyde Snow and Sarah Isabel Snow. His father was a doctor, so Clyde was frequently shuttled around on house calls with his parents, learning much about medicine, life and death. His first encounter with bones happened when he was twelve on a hunting trip with his father. His dad helped identify some mysterious bones which turned out to be a mule deer along with a man who had been missing for a few years (Current Biography 53).

Snow's scholastic achievements in school started somewhat shaky. During his sophomore year in high school he was expelled for a particular fire cracker incident. He then transferred to the New Mexico Military Institute in Roswell, where his grades dropped until a fellow student showed him how to study. He managed to get his Associates Degree there. Next he attended Southern Methodist University in Dallas and decided that having fun would be his main priority and promptly flunked out. By 1951 though he had earned his Bachelors Degree from Eastern New Mexico University and continued straight into Texas Technical University to get his masters degree in Zoology. The next three years he served as a Lieutenant in the U.S. Air Force Medical Service Corps at the Histopathology Center. In 1958, he enrolled at the University of Arizona, to study Archaeology. He later switched to Anthropology, and received his Ph.D. studying the growth of Savannah baboons (Current Biography 53).

It was 1967 and he had already been working at the Civil Aeromedical Institute (CAMI) for six years where he studied airplane crash fatalities. Snow would examine the remains to determine the cause of death and CAMI would use this information to update and improve airline safety and precautions. Here he began to develop his interest and skills in Forensic Anthropology and eventually became the Head of the department in 1968. His reputation grew from there and in 1972 the American Academy of Forensic Sciences acknowledged forensic work as a specialty within the discipline of anthropology (Huyghe 165).

By 1979 he decided to focus solely on forensics. Here is a compilation of some of his better known skeletal confirmations: John F. Kennedy, the men who fought in General Custer's "last stand" in 1876, Dr. Josef Mengele, the famous Nazi war criminal who fled to Brazil the many victims of serial killer,John Wayne Gacey, Egyptian boy King Tutankhamun and the victims of the Oklahoma bombing (Current Biography 52).

Besides these very public and well known figures he has worked extensively with Americas Watch and other human rights groups. In the 1980's he went to Argentina to exhume mass graves filled with innocent civilians who had been killed by government death squads during the war. He has worked in Argentina, Guatemala, Ethiopia, Philippines, Croatia and others. So far his work has led to the conviction of five officers in Argentina (Huyghe 166). Hundreds of officers were involved of course, but this is a start. More than anything, his work has brought these atrocities to the surface, where the bodies have to be dealt with and questioned by the public and governments.

Currently, Snow is working in former Yugoslavia, near Ovcara. It has become one of the largest forensic excavations ever dealing with war crimes (Stover 40). Snow still teaches at the University of Oklahoma and sometimes lectures to Forensic Science organizations and Law Enforcement personnel. When he's not traveling he lives near Oklahoma City with his wife Jerry Whistler (Current Biography 54). He maintains his Texas roots and personality that may help him cope while wading through so much sadness each day. His advice to co-workers in the field is, "you do the work in the daytime and cry at night" (Green 111).

References:
Current Biography 58.4 (1997):52-54.

Green, Michele. "Dr. Clyde Snow Helps Victims of Argentina's "Dirty War" Bear Witness From the Grave" People Weekly Dec 8, 1986: 111.

Huyghe Patrick. "Clyde Snow The Detective's Detective" Readers Digest 137.823 (1990):165.

Stover Eric. "The Grave at Vukovar" Smithsonian 27.12 (1997):40+.

Written by students in an Introduction to Anthropology course at MSU-Mankato