Dr. Clyde Snow is one of the foremost experts on forensic anthropology in the world. Many consider him the best.

In his career, Snow has examined the remains of Pres. Kennedy, Nazi war criminal Dr. Josef Mengele, King Tut and victims of serial killer John Wayne Gacy and domestic terrorist Timothy McVeigh, among many, many others.

Snow also worked the Brenda White case and maintained an interest in the Judith Elwell case.

He talked with me today. Here’s some of what he had to say:

“I was always convinced that those cases were connected in some way,” Snow said. “Even though there were only two (victims), right away you’d think of them as (being victimized by) a serial killer. … There had been cases of serial killers before, of course, but I think the police tendency was to treat most things like that as if they were independent until they had a good series going.

“One thing that struck me was not only the age of the girls and the general description and the circumstances, but they were exactly four weeks apart on Thursdays. It’s almost like someone had Thursday afternoons off. That and some of the other things just made me believe that these were connected. We’d never had cases like that before in Oklahoma City, for two young girls to go missing that close together.

“The other thing that struck me, and I think you mentioned it in the story, was that we went out there, and we collected all the bones (of White’s body), and we found this cat skeleton. And the cat, in the vertebra, it still had a shotgun pellet. It wasn’t an old wound. It had killed the cat. … That skeleton was pretty much on top of the grave. … It occurred to me that what had happened there, and again, it’s kind of a wild theory, is that someone had been keeping an eye on that grave and came back and found that animals had disturbed it. Perhaps he shot the cat and left it deliberately on top of the grave, because if anybody did come by and smell something, they’d peek in there and see a dead cat and move on. Otherwise, you’d have to assume that the cat was shot somewhere else and by coincidence managed to crawl off and die on the grave of this young girl. … I always figured that whoever it was was somehow, in one way or another, keeping an eye on that grave.”