Dracula Unearthed

Press text by Hoggard Films: "In his home city of Cologne, Germany, 31-year-old forensic entomologist Mark Benecke is known as "Dr. Maggot." By day, he uses his forensics expertise to solve real murder mysteries. But by night, the good doctor heads the European chapter of Vampire Empire, and is an intense devotee of the living dead.
In DRACULA UNEARTHED, we follow Dr. Maggot as he journeys into the heart of the Transylvanian countryside to the vampire landmarks of fantasy and reality. There he seeks the answer to a vexing question. Was the legendary Count a real-life bloodsucker or just a figment of people's darker fantasies?
Unlike many fans of the supernatural Count, Benecke believes that many aspects of the myth are very natural indeed, and are based on the biology of the human body and the science of death.
Join Dr. Maggot and his cast of scientists, historians and believers on a Transylvanian journey to untangle the myth of the two Draculas."

• Locations all over Romania, in Transylvania as well as in Valachia
• Most thoroughly researched
• Many surprises: Most lovely landscapes, mist in the hills, burials, decomposition, believers in undead persons, and much much much more
• All about vampire folklore, history, Vlad the Impaler, Dracula, Draculea, and the technique of impaling
• Strigoi, Yelle, rain makers, and other undead creatures
• Bran Stoker and his original manuscript
• Starring many well-known scholars and curators that work on vamires and vampirism
• Hosted by forensic biologist Mark Benecke
• Romanian newspapers love the production already: Front page of Romanian newspaper "National" (May 2002)
• All about Vampires & Decomposition of Corpses
• All about Transylvanian Society of Dracula

Riddles of the Dead: Meet the Sleuths Solving the Riddles of the Dead

Sydney Possuelo (“Invisible People”)
Sydney Possuelo is head of Brazil’s Department of Isolated Indians.  With over forty years service to Indian causes, he has made first contact with numerous isolated tribes and in the process has fallen ill to malaria a staggering 37 times.  Sydney’s commitment has not only affected his health but also taken its toll on his private life.  Married three times, Sydney’s family complains he cares more for the Indians than for them.  Looking back over a career that has seen Indian territories and cultures eradicated, he tries to avoid contact at all costs, only doing so when the dangers of isolation outweigh the risks of contact.

Dean Manning (“Savage Evidence”)
Dean Manning is an investigator for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY).  Based in Canberra, he is a veteran detective of the Australian Federal Police.   Since joining the ICTY Srebrenica investigation, he has been primarily involved with the exhumation of mass graves and the coordination of all evidence from the exhumation projects.  In the past few years Dean has testified in some of the highest profile war crimes cases in the world.  Dean feels a special duty to the widows and orphans of Bosnia who ask him, “What has happened to my family?”

Dr. Greg Fox (“Execution Island”)
Dr. Gregory Fox, an archaeologist, is the lead field investigator on the Kwajalein case for the Central Identification Laboratory of Hawaii (CILHI’s.)  A veteran of several CILHI missions, Fox has been particularly consumed with this case - he lost an uncle to the Pacific war on the island of Peleliu.

Dr. Mark Benecke aka “Dr. Maggot” (“Dracula Unearthed”)
Dr. Mark Benecke, a 31-year-old German forensic biologist known as “Dr. Maggot,” believes in a ‘physiological basis for vampirism’, and contends that vampires can be explained scientifically – that light sensitivity, thirsting for blood and the phenomenon of gasping corpses are natural, not supernatural, conditions.  This intense devotee of the living dead uses modern criminal forensic methods to investigate the vampire myth.

Through this work, Benecke has had a play written about him and is the author and co-author of more than five books, including The Dream of Eternal Life, (Columbia University Press, 2002). His articles have appeared in periodicals ranging from the science journal, ‘Nature’, to the less than profound vampire magazine, ‘Bite Me’.  He’s even delivered medical lectures on the topic of impaling.  But unlike many fans of the supernatural Count, the German doctor thinks that many aspects of the myth are very natural indeed – and are based on the biology of the human body and the biology of death.

Dr. John Oxford & Dr. Johan Hultin (“Plague Hunters”)
Dr. John Oxford is a virologist from the Royal London Hospital, who sleuths through old books and dusty rooms looking for clues to a mystery that is more than 80 years old.  He wants to learn why the Spanish Influenza outbreak of 1918-19 was so deadly and he thinks that important clues lie waiting in a little-known medical archive containing tiny boxes of paraffin-coated tissue samples from the past.   In his spare time he scours graveyards trying to solve the mystery of where and when the first victims were struck down.  Was it America in 1918?  Or could it have been France and England in 1916?  Is it possible that the killer hid itself for two years while spreading around the world? 

Dr. Johan Hultin, a retired pathologist with an adventurous spirit and a passion for preventing the next deadly influenza outbreak, did what few teams of scientists have done before– he dug up a well-preserved corpse in Alaska’s permafrost.  He dubbed the young Inuit woman that died in 1918, “Lucy.”  She was obese and loaded with intact tissue.  He sent the tissue samples off to Ann Reid at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Washington DC where she, too, had also been searching feverishly for clues to the flu’s lethality.  So much tissue was recovered from Lucy that Ann Reid and her team will be busy for years to come.

Neda Brkovic (“Clearing the Killing Fields”)
Neda Brkovic is a student at the CIDC Canine Countermine School in Bosnia.  She has been at the school for over six months training her dog Bonza to detect landmines.  She is 24 years old and lives in Tuzla.  Neda first learned about the demining business from a patron at the restaurant where she had been a waitress for eight years.  Unlike most of the other demining students, Neda does not come from a military background and had never encountered a landmine before coming to the CIDC.

Dr. William Bass III (“Biography of a Corpse,” “Forensic Frontiers”)
Dr. Bill Bass is a legend in forensic circles.  In 1980, Bass created the world’s first, and only, outdoor laboratory devoted to human decomposition: the University of Tennessee's Forensic Anthropology Research Facility, better known as "The Body Farm."  Ever since its inception, "The Facility," as it's called by the staff, has produced pioneering scientific research on the rates of human decay under a wide variety of conditions. It also serves as the world's only setting where human corpses are routinely used in controlled and realistic scientific tests of cutting-edge forensic technologies, such as ground-penetrating radar, artificial "noses" for sniffing out clandestine graves, and analytical instruments for gauging time since death based on biochemical "markers" of decomposition. The Body Farm also provides a unique training environment for FBI agents, crime-lab technicians, homicide detectives, and cadaver dogs.

Besides guiding the research at the Body Farm, Dr. Bass has written or co-authored more than 200 scientific publications, many of them based either on the Facility's work or on murder cases and other mysteries he's helped to prosecute or solve. Equally important, Dr. Bass is a dedicated, lifelong teacher.  He has taught thousands of students, (his undergraduate courses were always filled to capacity, sometimes with more than 1000 students at a time), and he's been named "National Professor of the Year" by the U.S. Council for Advancement and Support of Education.  His former students form the backbone of America's emerging generation of forensic anthropologists:

Dr. Bass has personally trained more than half the forensic anthropologists practicing in the United States today.  He's a fellow of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists, the American Anthropological Association, and the Physical Anthropology Section of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences (AAFS).  Since 1989, he has served on the editorial boards of both the Journal of Forensic Sciences and the Forensic Science Review. He's also been featured on numerous television news and documentary programs, including CBS's "60 Minutes II," ABC's "48 Hours," and a BBC documentary, "Body Detectives." Bass is considered by many to be America’s leading forensic scientist.

For more information, please contact:
Emma Murphy
Publicist National Geographic Channel
Tel: + 44 207 805 2273
Email: emma.murphy@bskyb.com


RIDDLES OF THE DEAD - Episode Guide

Sundays from 29 September, 2002 at 9.00pm UK / CET
premiering on National Geographic Channel

Episode One - Plague Hunters
Sunday 29th September
Spanish Influenza – the single deadliest virus of all time – killed 50 million people in just 18 months in 1918. Because of global travel, a new pandemic could kill over 110 million people before being contained. Could a new influenza pandemic be on the horizon? Scientists say the chances are near 100%. Now the race is on as forensic science shows the world of modern medicine how to track a killer.

Episode Two – Biography of a Corpse
Sunday 6th October
Visit the Body Farm, a unique research facility at the University of Tennessee. Not for the faint hearted, this episode follows a body from its arrival as a fresh corpse until it’s removal as a skeleton. Along the way learn the remarkable story of the Body Farm itself, which since it’s beginning in 1980, has been home to over 400 decomposing corpses.

Episode Three – Forensic Frontiers
Sunday 13th October
The Body Farm is a very unusual place. It’s where US forensic anthropologists study decomposing corpses. Spending time at the Body Farm allows scientists like Steve Symes, an expert on dismemberment cases and skeletal trauma, and Elayne Pope to determine the difference between body burns and ‘burning the evidence’. Not for the squeamish.

Episode Four – War Crimes
Sunday 20th October
An international team of criminal investigators and archaeologists try to bring justice to one of the former Yugoslavian civil war’s most gruesome atrocities. Join United Nations investigator Dean Manning and forensic anthropologist Jose Pablo Baraybar as they excavate mass grave sites near Srebrenica. Watch as they sift through the evidence and recreate the crime in an effort to bring the killers to trial. Many families need answers about the fate of their loved ones.

Episode Five – Leonardo: The Man Behind the Shroud
Sunday 27th October
There has long been controversy over whether the Shroud of Turin is a sacred Christian relic or a clever fake. Could Leonardo Da Vinci really be the man behind the Shroud? British writers Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince think so. And is it just coincidence that the Library of the Pallazo Reale, containing a self-portrait of Leonardo, is situated behind the Cathedral that holds the Shroud? We look at the mystery surrounding what some believe to be the authentic burial cloth of Jesus – The Shroud of Turin.

Episode Six – Execution Island
Sunday 3rd November
In August 1942, nine American Marines were stranded on a remote paradise island, unintentionally left behind after the American raid on the Japanese stronghold of Makin, in the Pacific. Sixty years on, two United States Marine veterans accompany a team from the US Army’s Central Intelligence Laboratory, and return to “Execution Island” in an effort to find, exhume, identify and repatriate the remains of the nine men.  Forensic anthropologist, Dr. Greg Fox, leads a dig team to the spot they think the executed Americans were buried.

Episode Seven - Dracula Unearthed
Sunday 10th November
Romania is one of the most superstitious places in Europe. Join Dr. Mark Benecke, a German forensic investigator with a dark passion for vampires… and his own set of detachable fangs.  Witness his investigation of Vlad Dracula's Poenari Citadel, tourist pleasing Bran Castle, medieval torture implements and other Romanian vampire stories as he tries to separate fact from Hollywood fiction.

Episode Eight – Clearing the Killing Fields
Sunday 17th November
Today, more than 100 million landmines lie buried around the world’s war zones. That’s around one landmine for every sixty people. In areas such as Bosnia – Herzogovina, the wars these weapons were intended are long over but the carnage continues. Follow de-miners Neda Brkovic (and her mine detecting dog, Bonza) and Zlato Vesselicas as they take on one of the biggest threats facing their war-torn country. Both Neda and Bonza are training at a school for mine sniffer dogs and handlers. Once they graduate, they will join scores of Bosnians and others from the international community who risk life and limb to release their homeland from these buried killers.

Episode Nine – Invisible People
Sunday 24th November
From drug smuggling to disease, adventurer Sydney Possuelo has fought to help tribes survive the encroachment of the modern world in the Amazon. He has already lost one colleague to an angry tribesman. News of a violent split in the Korubo tribe now leads Sydney and his team back, where he comes face-to-face with his friend’s killer.

Episode Ten – Angkor – The Lost City
Sunday 1st December
How does a city die? In the case of Angkor, it seems that it happened quickly. Despite its wealth, sophistication and power, the spectacular heart of the Khmer kingdom from the 9th to 14th centuries was abandoned about 500 years ago, but why? Professor Roland Fletcher of the University of Sydney thinks he has solved this great mystery. Fletcher and his team use the latest in imaging technology in a high-tech quest to determine the actual size of Angkor and theorise about its demise.  Did this city commit virtual environmental suicide?

Episode Eleven – Plague Survivors
Sunday 8th December
How could anyone walk away unaffected from the Black Death, a plague thought to be one of the most pathogenic bacterial agents known to man? Follow the work of American geneticist Steven O’ Brien as he pursues his hunch that genes are at the heart of this mystery. His investigation has led to a startling realisation that what may have helped our ancestors survive the Plague in the preceding centuries, may enable us to survive our modern-day equivalent, HIV.

Episode Twelve – Changing Tombs
Sunday 22nd December
For 150 years The Necropolis Company of London have gone about the work of digging up the dead with as much secrecy as they could muster.  For the first time they have allowed cameras unique access to record their team of specialists and their daily work. Follow the team as they undertake one of their most important projects involving the exhumation, re-interring and restoration of one of London's most beautiful derelict churches. 

Episode Thirteen – Criminal Evidence
Sunday 29nd December
For Dr. Kathy Reichs the worlds of forensic science and crime fiction collide. A typical week’s work involves overseeing an exhumation in Kansas, a mass grave in Guatemala and a cadaver with a pierced skull in rural Quebec. But as Dr. Reichs details her job as a successful forensic anthropologist and novelist, she also searches for clues to solve these mysteries. By using the cutting edge of forensics, she proves that dead men really do tell tales.

Episode Fourteen – Lost in Egypt’s Great Sand Sea: In the steps of the Real English Patient
Sunday 5th January 2003
How could an army, reportedly 50,000 strong, vanish in the blink of an eye? Why have history's greatest minds failed to solve what happened on that fateful day in 525 BC? Join scientists using forensic technology to find the answer, as they follow in the footsteps of Hungarian spy Count Laszlo Almsay - the real-life model for The English Patient - who searched for years for the mysterious remains of the army of Persian King Cambyses. The secret to the centuries-old mystery may lie in the writings of ancient Greek historian Herodotus.

Access episode info and images directly on the web at www.nationalgeographic.co.uk/riddles

For more information, please contact:
Emma Murphy
Publicist National Geographic Channel
Tel: + 44 207 805 2273
Email: emma.murphy@bskyb.com


Secrets Of The Dead Unearthed By Forensic Science

Dracula, Leonado da Vinci, The Invisible People of Brazil, The Lost City of Angkor

For centuries, scores of unsolved mysteries have continued to baffle experts the world over – is the Shroud of Turin real or an elaborate fake?  What caused the deadliest viral outbreak of all time? Was Dracula, the legendary vampire king, a man or simply a myth?

Riddles of the Dead, the new 14 part series premiering on National Geographic Channel on Sunday 29 September at 9pm UK / CET, takes viewers into the world of ‘living archaeology’ where state of the art technology and old-fashioned detective work blend to create a pioneering form of investigative science.  Each fascinating 60-minute episode follows archaeologists, paleontologists, forensic scientists and criminal medical specialists as they attempt to unearth new findings concerning both age-old mysteries and modern day events, including war crimes and gruesome murders.

The series premiere, Plague Hunters examines the effect of the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918 which killed an estimated 80 million people in the space of just 18 months before completely disappearing.  Such a virulent outbreak today could kill upwards of 110 million people.  Scientists believe that the chances of such an outbreak occurring are now nearly 100% as viruses and bacteria become increasingly immune to the weapons used to combat them.

Other episodes in the Riddles of the Dead series include:

•    Dracula Unearthed – Journey into the heart of the Transylvanian countryside to follow “Dr. Maggot” on his hunt for the real count Dracula.  By day, he is a forensic entomologist solving real-life murder mysteries but by night, Dr. Mark Benecke, seeks to find proof that there is a ‘physiological basis for Vampirism.’

•    Leonardo: The Man Behind the Shroud - Could Leonardo Da Vinci have orchestrated one of the greatest hoaxes of all time?  Scientists, religious figures, shroud and crucifixion experts all theorise on the veracity of the Shroud of Turin worshipped by millions as the authentic burial cloth of Jesus Christ.

•    Biography of a Corpse – Visit a laboratory you will never want to see again.  The ‘Body Farm’ in Tennessee has been home to more than 400 corpses that left are to decompose in varying conditions.  Studies on the corpses have led to invaluable contributions to the field of forensic science; where death is not the end, it is only the beginning.  Follow a body from its arrival as a fresh corpse to its removal as a skeleton and learn how Dr. Bass and his team have used their research to bring murderers to justice.

•    War Crimes – Forensic experts have worked tirelessly since the end of the Bosnian conflict to uncover a recent past that is all too shocking.  Follow Australian Homicide Investigator Dean Manning and his team as they unearth a massacre site hidden in the hills near the town of Srebrenica, the scene of Europe’s worst wartime atrocity since the Nazi Era.

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This page owned by Dipl.-Biol. ENGLISH TEXT, Ph.D., Certified Forensic Biologist, International Forensic Research & Consulting, E-mail forensic@benecke.com, Postfach 250411, 50520 Cologne, Germany, http://www.benecke.com/ , Phone +49-173-287-3136, FAX +49-221-660-2644. Last change of this page Jan 5, 2008.