Identification by Dental Records

"Also, he never flossed in the back."

"Mom and Dad are going to have to call up kindly Doctor So-and-so. Pick up your dental records. Wanna know why? Because there's gonna be nothing left of your face."

— Tyler Durden, Fight Club

A crime drama trope. Sometimes a dead body will be so devastated (e.g., burned or decayed beyond recognition) that identifying the victim by their appearance is impossible. The investigators have no choice but to use the victim's dental records to find out their identity.

Dental identification lets the audience know that the death was gruesome without necessarily showing the body. It also adds another layer of complexity to the plot. Was the body really correctly identified? What if the records are missing?

Sometimes the smart criminal knows to circumvent this by removing the victim's teeth.

Sometimes in fiction, a character has his teeth surgically altered so he can fake his death. Such surgery is easily identifiable in Real Life, at least in modern times, and in most cases the best way to fake a death through dental ID would be to switch the records.

A common trope in police procedurals, medical mysteries, and forensic shows. Identifying bodies from dental records is Truth in Television, but it works a lot better in fiction than in real life. See the Useful Notes page.

Compare The Girl Who Fits This Slipper. If instead a relative is brought in to positively identify the body, see Identifying the Body.

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Examples

Anime & Manga

• Case Closed: In the case of Mermaid Island, arranging for a surreptitious dental record swap is how the suspect faked her death and framed the very victim whose records she swapped with, but eventually both Conan and Heiji see through the deception.
• In Fullmetal Alchemist, when Roy Mustang is led to believe that Maria Ross assassinated Maes Hughes, he cuts off her escape and incinerates her to the point that the corpse can only be identified in this fashion. Subverted in that Mustang knew she was innocent all along and faked her death by incinerating a literal meat puppet. The coroner who performed the identification was also complicit in Mustang's deception.
• In Loveless, Seimei's body is identified this way after it is mangled beyond recognition before the start of the story. In one of the biggest Mind Screw moments of the last decade, Seimei turns up alive and well later on and apparently faked his own death, and it's heavily implied they pulled this off by switching his records with the real victim who died in his place.

Comic Books

• In Detective Comics #832, Sherman Shackley ("Shark" of the Terrible Trio, low-tier Batman villains) fakes his death by throwing a corpse stolen from a morgue to sharks, but not before pulling out his own teeth and throwing them in the water too, ensuring that the police will identify the corpse as his.
• Examined in Batman: The Dark Knight Returns when Batman dives after a figure that he believes to be Two-Face, who had seemingly been rehabilitated but now plotted to destroy the Gotham Twin Towers, which he falls from thanks to his disloyal henchmen.
  The impact is tremendous. Even bone is turned to powder. Not much of a corpse left. Mostly liquid. Problem is... there might not be any fingerprints. Even dental records would probably be useless.

Fan Fiction

• A variant in Symbiosis: Delia Ketchum and her husband's bodies were so charred that they had to be identified by their DNA to tell which was which.

Films — Live-Action

• In Bushwhacked, Reinhart Bragden's alleged remains are identified by his dental records. His teeth had been pulled and planted at the scene of a fire in order to fake his death and frame Max for arson and murder.
• After a bungled bank robbery in Charley Varrick, Charley breaks into his dentist's office after hours and removes the dental records of a deceased gang member, to prevent the police from identifying her body. He also decides to switch the records of himself and his unreliable partner, which later allows him to pass off the latter's dead body as his own.
• Invoked in Evil (2003). Erik corners Silverhielm and threatens to remove all his teeth so that there would be nothing to identify after killing him. He doesn't go through with it.
• Also invoked in Lethal Weapon 3. After Martin Riggs and Lorna Cole dropped that impromptu bust on Jack Travis' weapons smuggling, we see Tyrone calling Jack to complain about it, wanting out of a deal since the weapons that were taken were the ones being sold to him. Jack threatens him into sticking around, claiming that if Tyrone backed out, not even his dentist would be able to identify the body when he's done with him.
• Used for deceitful purposes at the end of Novocaine.
• Referenced in the Kevin Sorbo vehicle Paradox, in which a cop from a Magitek world who hates using magic visits our world and is fascinated by the idea. He's later inspired to check the teeth of a murder victim and uses the fact that they show evidence of dentistry at all to conclude that the victim came from our universe.
• In Ricochet, Earl Talbot Blake fakes his death by switching his dental records with another inmate and killing said inmate after escaping from prison.
• In Stuart Little, it is revealed that Stuart's birth parents (who are mice) were killed in a grocery store incident where a stack of soup cans fell over and crushed them. The bodies had to be identified by their dental records.
• A rather silly version of this pops up in Time Chasers. An alternate-timeline version of Lisa is killed, and her body left totally unrecognizable from a plane crash, meaning police have to use dental records to confirm her identity. The trouble is that A: There isn't really any "database" for finding dental records, so investigators need to have an idea of who their John/Jane Doe is before they can compare records, and B: Lisa is alive and well in the timeline this occurs in, so the cops had no reason to compare dental records against those of someone who isn't dead.
• Oz from The Whole Nine Yards has a Chekhov's Skill: he is a dentist and can thus fake deaths by altering the teeth and dental work of corpses to resemble those of living people. Averted in the sequel The Whole Ten Yards, as Lazlo Gogolak isn't fooled for a second.
• In Wild Things, police find some teeth by the beach and use Suzie Toller's dental records to identify them as hers and confirm her death. Later, it's revealed that she knocked out her own teeth to fake her death.

Literature

• 2666: Attempted in the few times when the bodies are decomposed beyond recognition. It doesn't always work.
• In the novella Angels of the Silences by Simon Bestwick, two teenage girls return as ghosts after being murdered, but they look just as they did when they were alive and are torn between whether to move on or try to return to their human lives. Eventually, the killer abducts their friend. The girls rescue her and set the house alight, killing the man by slowly roasting him over the flames. They are then able to stage their "deaths" and finally choose to move on to the next world — their bodies had actually lain in the house for months since they were killed but are now so badly burned that they can only be identified by dental records, and no one knows how long the girls have really been dead.
• Subverted in a post-war Biggles short story in which he receives a report of the death of an acquaintance of his from wartime service, whose charred skeleton was found in the wreckage of an aircraft owned by said wartime acquaintance, which he was flying in a solo speed-record attempt. It's only because Biggles insisted upon it that dental records were checked at all, at which point the incident ceases to become a crash investigation and turns into a homicide, because not only do the dental records not match but the body has a bullet embedded in its skull. It turns out that the guy had picked up a passenger, a young aviation enthusiast who just wanted a joyride, then shot him in the head and hit the silk. The body was supposed to provide the ultimate alibi while the perpetrator committed a jewelry heist. He ultimately ends up running out into the path of a truck whilst fleeing the police, and dental records end up being used a second time to identify what's left of him.
• In The Blue Nowhere by Jeffrey Deaver, an early potential suspect is cleared when the detectives discover that his decomposed body had been found years before, confirmation having been made via dental records. The killer, being a computer hacker who specialized in databases, had changed his official records to match that of the corpse.
• Bony series:
  • The Sands of Windee has a variation in which the murder victim had a metal plate in his head from a past skull injury, which is identified by the surgeon who implanted it.
  • In The Mystery of Swordfish Reef, the murder victim's body is left in the ocean and has undergone significant decomposition by the time it resurfaces. A friend of the deceased recalls that he had dental work done within the past year, and knows the dentist who did it, so the identity of the remains is able to be established from the dental records.
• In the Joe Gunther novel Borderlines, after a body is discovered in a burned house it's announced that while they think they have a positive ID on him they'll have to wait until dental records confirm it. Since the novel was written in The '80s, this is expected to take several weeks, and the records eventually show that he's not who they thought he was, and that man was actually alive. The real victim was someone who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
• Brat Farrar discusses this but eventually averts it. The protagonist is impersonating a long-lost heir; it turns out that he doesn't have to deal with matching the heir's dental history, as the dentist who could have recognized him died, and his records were destroyed, during the Blitz.
• In The Brotherhood of the Rose by David Morrell, one of the protagonists — on the run from the world's intelligence agencies for having killed inside a Truce Zone — visits a Mexican dentist and asks to have all his teeth removed. It turns out to be a trap and his surrogate father Elliot recaptures him while he's under the anesthetic. Elliot asks his 'son' why he wanted his teeth removed and is shocked to find that he intended to commit suicide; as his body would never be identified, his surrogate family would think he had successfully escaped, thus being spared the pain of his death.
• In The Clairvoyant Countess, when Madame Karitska gets enough evidence, Lt. Pruden has a grave exhumed to double-check with this.
• Gorky Park: Three bodies are found in Gorky Park, Moscow — shot and with their faces cut off. Each was also shot in the face, not as a coup-de-grace but to destroy their teeth. However, a clue survives in that one of the characters had gutta-percha in his dental work (anyone living in the Soviet Union would have stainless steel dentistry) revealing that he's a foreigner.
• In The Haunted Hotel by Wilkie Collins, the identity of the skull found in the hotel is finally confirmed by identification of the dental plate in its mouth.
• In the Longmire novel The Dark Horse, the murder victim was shot in the head in his isolated ranch house, which was then burned down around him. By the time the authorities got there, he could only be identified by his teeth. Given a twist in that the victim's brother is a dentist, and therefore in a position to falsify his dental records...
• Several Lord Peter Wimsey stories invoke this trope, though the identification is usually subverted.
  • In the short story "In the Teeth of the Evidence", the dentist who makes the initial identification is working from written records and is so disturbed by the state of the badly burned body that he performs only a cursory examination. It's only after the coroner finds hyoscine in the remains that he re-examines the teeth and determines that the corpse's teeth had been altered so that they would match the dental records of the killer, an evil dentist who had hoped to fake his own death.
  • The Nine Tailors also features a failed dental identification.
• In the Patrick McManus story Down And Way Out In South America, while on a South America fishing trip, Pat recalls seeing a nature documentary about piranhas where they ate an entire cow in minutes and hopes that if he falls into a river there will be enough left of him to identify via dental x-rays.
• In the Nancy Drew Files book "Till Death Do Us Part'', a woman plots to kill Nancy's boyfriend Ned Nickerson and pass him off as her husband so that she can collect the husband's inheritance. Stealing Ned's dental records is part of her fiendish scheme.
• Dental identification is also a key plot point in One, Two, Buckle My Shoe.
• In Rupert Holmes' novel Swing, a character is killed in a fiery car accident and identified via dental records. It later turns out that the character instead switched dental records with the woman she killed in order to appear to have died.

Live-Action TV

• In The CW's failed pilot for an Aquaman series, a young man found floating in the ocean is identified as an air force pilot who disappeared in 1945. Unfortunately, even if you accept the ridiculous Bermuda Triangle reappearing abductees premise of the pilot, dental records do not work that way.
• Appears in several episodes of The Bill. For example, in the Season 5, Episode 6 episode "Life and Death", a man has a drug overdose after confessing to a murder. He is identified by dental records, allowing the police to track down his family.
• This appears frequently in Bones, as the characters deal with corpses in advanced states of decay and/or dismemberment.
• Averted in Breaking Bad when Hank and Gomez can't identify a burnt corpse because "teeth do this popcorn thing at a certain temperature".
• Double subverted in one episode of Castle. The killer yanked out the victim's teeth to prevent dental identification and threw her in a bonfire to get rid of the body, but he didn't account for the fact that the victim has a titanium dental implant, and the team is able to identify her by tracing the serial number.
• This appears in several episodes of CSI, it being a long-running cop show. For example, in "Bad to the Bone", skeletal remains are identified as Marissa Cleary from her dental records.
• In the Grand Finale of House, House fakes his death by swapping his dental records with that of a drug addict whose body has been disfigured beyond recognition by a fire. House had been seen in the burning building moments before it collapsed, but the addict was a full head shorter than House, so it's possible that the dental records were checked in this case specifically because the identification was otherwise doubtful.
• Referenced in How I Met Your Mother when Barney says that given the things he knows about Goliath National Bank, he'll never be fired, but he might one day "wash up on shore with no fingerprints or teeth".
• Mentioned in an episode of Hustle: a deceased criminal, quoth Morgan, "threw himself under a goods train a week after his release... there was so little left, by the time they scraped him off the track, they had to identify him from dental records". (Their goal is to make it seem that they Never Found the Body, and that he actually faked his death to abscond with the stolen gold.)
• Iron Fist (2017): In "Felling Tree with Roots", Ward Meachum walks into his father's apartment to find him using a hammer to smash out the teeth of two Hand assassins to delay identification.
• Brought up on It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia when Mac and Charlie want to fake their deaths. They leave a few of Charlie's teeth in a car. This is not how it works.
• An episode of Law & Order has the characters discover skeletal remains with the teeth having been purposely removed by the killer to prevent positive ID.
• In The Listener, a prima ballerina goes missing and her car is later found abandoned outside the city near a lake. In the car, the police find some blood and a tooth. They use dental records to verify that the tooth belonged to the missing woman and suspect that her abusive husband followed her out to the lake, hit her hard enough to knock out a tooth, killed her and dumped the body in the lake. However, Toby then discovers that the woman lost that tooth a month before and kept it as a souvenir. She then planted it and the blood to fake her death and frame her husband.
• In the "Red Dress" episode of Malcolm in the Middle, Lois scolds her sons about burning the titular dress and tells them that if they had burned to death, she would have had to identify them by their dental records.
• One episode of The Mentalist has a body burned in a car identified by dental records. As it turns out, the dentist providing the actual records helped the "victim" fake their death and supplied falsified records. The body is an unclaimed cadaver.
• Midsomer Murders: "The Green Man" has a bunch of skeletons found behind a wall. They're thought to date from the previous century, but then one is found to have 20th-century dental work.
• NCIS uses dental records when DNA isn't possible for some reason.
  • In a straightforward example, a mummified corpse is tentatively identified based on his dog tags. The man served before DNA profiling was mandatory, so there's no DNA sample to match the body with.
    Ducky: Well, young man, we'll have to match your smile.
  • "The Meat Puzzle" features a macabre variation. A suspect in a serial-killer case is said to have died years ago, and dental records confirm this... but other evidence points to the man being still alive. The forensics team tests the blood type of both the teeth and the corpse, and finds that they don't match. Meaning that the killer faked his own death all those years ago by removing his own teeth and gluing them in the corpse's skull.
  • In "Frame-Up", Tony is arrested for murder when he is tied to a bite mark on a dismembered leg via dental impressions. It turns out that it was part of a chain of evidence set up by Abby's revenge-obsessed lab assistant, Chip.
• The Outer Limits (1963): Defied in "The Hundred Days of the Dragon", in which a foreign dictatorship kills and replaces William Lyons Selby, a leading Presidential candidate, with an Evil Doppelgänger. After the fake Selby assassinates the real one and begins impersonating him, the conspirators cremate Selby's corpse to prevent this trope, and we later see the impostor canceling a dental appointment.
• Person of Interest: While working as a CIA hitman, John Reese is sent to kill a supposed traitor, but finds out that he's only being killed because He Knows Too Much. Reese gives him a ticket to Canada and says that he will fake his death, then takes out some pliers.
  Reese: One more thing. Boss is gonna need proof of death. Couple of molars should do it. Care to do the honors?
• There's an Urban Legend that the reason you're told to adopt the "brace position" or "crash position" in case of a plane crash or emergency landing is to preserve your dental records if you die. This is debunked in QI, and David Mitchell comments that he'd never believed it in the first place, because surely, they'd just say, "In the unlikely event of the plane crashing, I think we can all agree you'd like to be identified. Bite down hard on your armrest."
• In a Münster episode of Tatort, a man fakes his death in a house fire in South Africa by having his dentist tamper with his dental records. Since Professor Boerne is the one thus fooled into signing a false death certificate, he takes this personally and goes to the extra trouble and expense of reconstructing the face from the skull found in the burned-down house to identify the victim's real identity.
• Treadstone: Samantha McKenna shoots an intruder in her house, and because they're afraid of calling the police she and her husband Doug take the body out in the woods to be buried. Samantha is an ER nurse, so she knows they have to remove the hands, feet (with an electric saw) and teeth (with pliers). "It won't prevent an ID forever, but it'll delay whoever finds him."
• A unique variation appears in the Vera episode "Sandancers". A DNA sample from a deceased soldier is needed to identify a blood stain, but the victim's family had already cleaned or disposed of everything that could yield a sample. Then Joe asks if the mother kept any of his baby teeth.
• This is frequent in Wire in the Blood, as the protagonists deal with deeply disturbed people who either frantically mutilate their victims or are cold-blooded sociopaths min-maxing their way to maximal body count by removing other identifying features from their victims.

Manhwa

• In Veritas, this is how Lightning Tiger's remains are identified after he's burnt to a crisp.

Tabletop Games

• An interesting subversion of this can be found in most versions of Dungeons & Dragons regarding the spell 'Speak with Dead'. In most cases, the spell required that the corpse's jaw was intact in order to function (basically the caster was briefly animating the corpse for the purpose of answering some questions) so a common practice was to remove the lower jaw of anyone you killed and didn't want blabbing about it later.

Video Games

• Mentioned in the opening sequence of Eternal Darkness, but the dental records cannot be used (because the victim's head is missing).
• In Grim Fandango, the computer terminals at the Department of Death scan the user's teeth to give them access, which makes sense seeing as a person's chompers are one of the few identifying physical features one can carry over from the Land of the Living. This is used in a puzzle early on in the game, where Manny has to make a mold so that a local resistance group can make a replica of his teeth and access the Department of Death's computer network.
• In Rama, Puck identifies the skeleton of Dr. Takagishi this way.

Visual Novels

• Subverted in Higurashi: When They Cry. Takano, who vanishes on the night of Watanagashi, has her burnt body identified thusly when they find it stuffed in a well. However, she's the Big Bad, and she faked the corpse after all.
• In Umineko: When They Cry, at the end of the first arc, Maria's jawbone is identified this way.

Webcomics

• A variation in The Dreamer: a body is identified by its false teeth.
  "Lord Almighty, it's Joseph, alright. I made those teeth just for him."
• In Questionable Content #1662, after Hannelore idly wonders if she has a clone somewhere, she has a disturbing fantasy about said clone being a mercenary for her Corrupt Corporate Executive mother. The clone's about to kill her (to fake her own death using the matching DNA) and promises not to pull out her teeth to prevent dental identification while she's still alive.

Web Videos

• In The Confession of Fred Krueger, the cop interrogating Freddy mentions that one of his victims was only able to be identified by her dental records. Freddy seems rather gleeful about what he did to her to put her in that state.

Western Animation

• Archer: Subverted in the episode "The Wind Cries Mary". The horrifically burned corpse of ex-ISIS agent Lucas Troy is discovered in a crashed plane after he killed 4 of his fellow ODIN agents and stole $10 million and a case of uranium, only identifiable by his dental records. It turns out Luke faked his own death, having paid a homeless person to get his teeth drilled to match Luke's dental records.

Real Life

• The four Ted Bundy victims found at his Taylor Mountain dumpsite were identified by dental records — mainly because all they found were skulls and jawbones. One of the pieces of evidence presented at a trial was bite marks on one of his victims which were compared to Bundy's dental records.
• Adolf Hitler's dentist was used by the Soviet special forces to identify the incinerated corpse they found outside the Führerbunker in Berlin as him.
• The first historical case of this trope in actual use is generally given as the identification of American Patriot Joseph Warren's body by the false teeth Paul Revere had made for him (see Webcomics above). He had been killed at Bunker Hill and buried in an unmarked grave, and his family couldn't get at the body for nearly a year.
• Serial killer John Haigh, a.k.a. the Acid Bath Murderer, was convicted partly on the evidence of a victim's dentist, who was able to identify her dentures. (Haigh's usual method of disposing of evidence wasn't as effective against plastic.)
• At least 90 of the 229 people onboard Swissair Flight 111 were identified this way, due to the recovered remains being too mutilated for visual identification.

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