As William C. Rodriguez inspected the badly decomposed bodies of two Iraqis, he was troubled by the large crowd of observers in the military’s national morgue at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware.
Mr. Rodriguez, a renowned forensic anthropologist, had been called in to settle the most sensational murder case to come out of the years-long Iraq War.
The defendant, Ilario Pantano, had abandoned a comfortable life on Manhattan’s Upper West Side after the Sept. 11 attacks and persuaded the Marine Corps to induct him, at age 31, to help fight the war on terrorism.
But the war turned into a courtroom struggle for his own freedom.