Carefully, cautiously, determined not to miss the smallest detail this time around, the Brazilian investigators retraced their steps. Under the watchful gaze of foreign observers, gravediggers in the small hillside town of Embu reopened the local cemetery's tomb 321, from which they had exhumed some mysterious remains two weeks earlier, and turned up four more teeth and several bone fragments. On the outskirts of nearby Sao Paulo, police descended once again on the dilapidated bungalow where the mystery man was said to have lived, and uncovered two bullets and a box of medical supplies. Then, returning to the home of Wolfram and Liselotte Bossert, self-proclaimed friends of the dead man, policemen came upon a tape that featured martial music and a speech by Adolf Hitler at a rally. The pieces of the puzzle were coming together, and they suggested that the body found at Embu did indeed belong to the "Angel of Death" and the world's most hunted war criminal, Dr. Josef Mengele.
Finally, shortly before noon last Friday, the suggestion became a conclusion. As reporters and television crewmen from around the world jostled for position, Federal Police Superintendent Romeu Tuma and the 16 forensic experts (six of them Americans) who had been examining the skeletal remains inched their way into the top-floor cafeteria of the 20-story Sao
Paulo federal police headquarters. A businesslike Dr. Lowell Levine, a forensic specialist from the U.S. Justice Department, stepped forward and announced the experts' unanimous conclusion: "The skeleton is that of Josef Mengele within a reasonable scientific certainty." Later, the Americans reported that they had "absolutely no doubt" of their findings.
The bones, added Brazilian Forensic Anthropologist Daniel Munoz, conflicted in not a single respect with the medical records of the man who sent 400,000 people, mostly Jews, to their deaths at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in Poland during World War II. Earlier, experts had found that the handwriting on documents discovered in Brazil corresponded to Mengele's, and that photographs found in the Bossert home matched old pictures of the doctor. Most telling of all, an advanced method of matching the reconstructed skull against old photographs convinced the investigators that they had found their man. "I came here not knowing whether it was Mengele," said U.S. expert John Fitzpatrick. "I go home fully convinced that it was."
In West Germany, officials refused to comment on the Brazilian findings until German forensic experts had returned from Sao Paulo. But the week did bring to light a stream of photographs and documents that seemed to leave little doubt that the 25-year hunt for Mengele was over. The weekly magazine Bunte Illustrierte fleshed out details of the Nazi fugitive's sojourn of roughly 18 years in Brazil with an annotated collection of photographs, supplied by Mengele's 41-year-old son Rolf. In response, the rival weekly Stern ran six pages of photographs chronicling the same period of lonely exile. Gerald Posner, a New York lawyer who has pursued the Mengele story for four years and who had flown to West Germany from Sao Paulo to check the veracity of the Bunte documents, expressed no doubts whatsoever. "I'd be willing to bet anyone this material is authentic," he said.