Harry Zohn, a professor at Rutgers School of Dental Medicine, is a forensic dentist who works with the Northern Regional Medical Examiner Office in Newark, New Jersey, and the federal Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Teams (DMORTs). He has used his forensics skills to help identify the dead in criminal cases, including the September 11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Center, and to assist in civil litigation and help families find closure when fingerprint identification isn’t possible. Rutgers Magazine recently asked him about the uses of forensic dentistry and his history in the field.

RUTGERS MAGAZINE: What sparked your interest in forensic dentistry?

Harry Zohn: In the spring of 1980, I’d just gotten into dental school, and I went to a lecture by the Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal. He mentioned that when he was hunting Nazis, it was just as important to determine that they were dead as alive, because he and his colleagues needed to know whether they should keep looking for them or divert resources and attention elsewhere. That stayed in the back of my mind. And of course, I grew up with all those police shows on TV!

RM: How did you get involved in the field?

HZ: In 1990, the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, which was part of Walter Reed Army Hospital, offered a forensic dentistry class, which I took.

RM: What makes forensic dentistry a valuable tool?

HZ: Before there was DNA testing, the only scientific way that you could definitively identify somebody post mortem was either through their fingerprints or teeth. And with a badly decomposed body, fingerprints might no longer exist. Even today, forensic dentistry is a lot less expensive than DNA testing, and because there’s such a backlog in DNA labs—up to three months—it can also be more expedient. Families want to have closure.

RM: How is forensic dentistry used?

HZ: The most common way is for identifying people who have passed away and can’t be identified through fingerprints. When dental records are available, we examine the remains and take X-rays, then compare them to the dental records. We look at which teeth are there in the decedent and which are missing and compare that to the records; we also compare dental work, like fillings and crowns.  

Forensic dentistry is also used as evidence in civil litigation. And forensic dentists are sometimes asked to consult in criminal cases involving bite marks. But that has become controversial. There used to be a premise that bite marks were as individual as fingerprints, but a group of odontologists—“odontology” is just another word for the study of teeth—at the dental school at the State University of New York at Buffalo have done studies showing that human dentition isn’t as unique as everybody once thought.

A big proponent of that research is the Innocence Project [the nonprofit legal organization committed to exonerating those falsely convicted]. In fact, there were several cases in which individuals were taken off death row and exonerated because they’d been convicted on the basis of bite-mark evidence, which was shown to be faulty.

RM: Has the field changed in any other ways?

HZ: The odontologists at SUNY Buffalo have built a database of materials used in fillings and crowns.  If a dentist has been conscientious enough to include materials in an individual’s dental record, that can now serve as an extra layer of corroboration. There was a recent case in which a body was found in one place and a head in another, and investigators used the database to prove that the head didn’t belong to the body.

Another advance is the use of ultraviolet light to identify tooth-colored fillings and crowns, which are increasingly common and can sometimes be overlooked. That was pioneered by Gerald Guzy, a faculty member at Rutgers School of Dental Medicine, who wrote several papers on the subject.

RM: What high-profile cases, in addition to the World Trade Center attacks, have you been involved in?

HZ: There was a plane crash in Buffalo in 2009 in which 50 passengers were killed. It overwhelmed the local medical examiner’s office, so DMORT was called in. We helped to identify all the victims. But we’re really not allowed to go into the particulars of specific cases. 

RM: Can you talk about the class you teach in forensic dentistry at Rutgers?

HZ: There are actually two courses, and they may be one of the few regularly scheduled forensic dentistry courses in the country. The first course is a lecture series given in January, and it’s an elective for senior students. We get anywhere from 40 to 50 students signing up for it, out of a class of 90, which is pretty good for an elective. It’s a series of nine or 10 lectures given by faculty members and forensic experts from DMORTs, the New York City medical examiner’s office, and the New York Society of Forensic Dentistry.

The second course—which students can only take if they’ve completed the first part of the course—is a rotation through the Northern Regional Medical Examiner Office in Newark. Our students have been taken to crime scenes to see how they’re processed and assisted the medical examiners with post-mortems. I believe it’s the only such course offered to dental students in North America. Both courses are also open to the dental public—dentists, dental hygienists, and dental assistants—through Rutgers School of Dental Medicine’s continuing education department.

RM: Is it true that you once came into school dressed as the tooth fairy, carrying a wand topped with an oversized, glitter-filled molar?

HZ: Yes. To raise money to treat special-needs patients, a group of dental students asked several faculty members if they would be willing to compete to wear fairy wings on Halloween. The school voted on it—they put a picture of each faculty member on a bag and asked that donors put money in their favorite bag. My bag got the most money, so I got to wear the wings. I handed out toothpaste and floss. It happened to be admissions day, so I greeted the people who were there for interviews while wearing my wings. I imagine they thought that dental school at Rutgers could end up being strange, but it was definitely going to be fun. •