Mountain Meadow Massacre: The First 9/11

On a blue-sky day in August of 1999, in a lush lonely valley in Utah's southwestern corner, a backhoe tore open a mass grave, exposing a jumble of bones.

When a forensic anthropologist examined these bones it sparked a legal, political and historical debate that reverberated through the palatial offices of the Mormon Church and into the governor's mansion. 

Professor Shannon Novak, an attractive, personable and dynamic Ph.D., had little idea that her scientific examination would re-ignite a long-simmering controversy about what happened on September 11, 1857 to 120 Arkansas immigrants who were killed in what has been dubbed -- the Mountain Meadows Massacre.

For nearly 100 years, the official story has been that their wagon train, while on its way to California, was attacked by a band of bloodthirsty Paiute Indians.  Paiute elders refuted this and there were rumors, even in the Mormon community, that the killings were a "blood atonement" ordered by Church leader Brigham Young.  Exactly who was responsible has been clouded in mystery.

"As with most mass killings, emotion and propaganda surround this historic event, often with greatly disparate views," said Novak.  "With time, interpretations often become bipolar -- either romanticized or exaggerated depending on which side is recounting the event.  Physical evidence can often provide a reality check, requiring all sides to reconsider what they have 'known to be true.'"

Her forensic analysis appeared to lend credence to the Paiute Indians' claims that the tribe did not participate in the Massacre to the extent history has recorded.  The majority of the wounds on the remains probably came from Mormon gunshots not from Indian tomahawks and knives.  It quickly became clear that the story of the Massacre was about to be altered

We'll show how Novak went about unearthing the secrets and solving The Riddles of the Dead in the Mountain Meadows Massacre.  As a trained anthropologist who'd studied mass graves and battle sites from medieval London to modern Croatia she was well prepared to analyze the remains.  What her studies hadn't prepared her for was the firestorm that followed.

When the Salt Lake City Tribune first reported Novak's preliminary findings her research was prematurely terminated.  Utah's Governor, Mike Leavitt ordered state officials to immediately return the bones to Brigham Young University for a reburial ceremony.  The governor -- whose ancestor Dudley Leavitt was one of the participants in the slaughter -- wrote he did not want controversy to highlight "the rather good-spirited attempt to put (the massacre) behind us."

Novak had 24 hours to photograph the skeletal records before she had to turn them over to waiting state officials.  She and a photographer conducted a marathon session that recorded the forensic evidence on the bones.

While the bones were taken away, she had done enough work to publish a report that will provide us with the foundation to produce this program.  We'll start by returning to the Utah valley where the Massacre took place and reconstruct what occurred.  It's a story that refuses to die.  We'll see how historical occurrences continue to reverberate into the present.  We'll talk to the descendants of the survivors and using a combination of forensic and historical evidence solve this Riddle of the Dead: The Mountain Meadows Massacre.