PAUL BISHOP'S ODYSSEY started—like all great mysteries—with the arrival of an unsolicited package. The thick envelope bearing a Spanish postmark immediately struck Bishop as odd. The 63-year-old civil servant from Greater Manchester wasn’t expecting any mail from Spain. He didn’t even know anyone in Spain. And he certainly wasn’t expecting what he found inside the package: A complete top set of false teeth. His own teeth, in fact. Teeth he had last seen 11 years ago on a boozy holiday to Spain. Teeth with a story to tell.
Within hours, Bishop was a viral news sensation. He gave interviews to his local BBC news program, then national radio and TV stations. By February 10—the day after he received the package—Bishop’s story was everywhere. For a few days, the internet hummed with the story of Paul Bishop and his marauding teeth.
Here’s what happened—according to Bishop. Eleven years ago he was on a holiday in Spain celebrating a friend’s 50th birthday. One night, after a full day of drinking, he attempted to down what was left of his pint of cider. It did not go to plan. “I washed it down in one but could feel it coming back up,” Bishop told the Manchester Evening News. Bishop vomited the contents of his stomach—and his top set of dentures—into a bin. That was the last time Bishop saw his teeth, until he received the mysterious package.
A letter accompanying the teeth described how they had ended up on Bishop’s doormat. First, the dentures were found by Spanish waste collectors, who sent them to the Centro Nacional de Biotecnología (CNB)—one of Spain’s largest public research bodies. After years in storage, the dentures were discovered by a junior technician, who swabbed them for DNA. The technician looked up the DNA in a database and found a match: Señor Paul Bishop. Cross-referencing those records with the British Council in Altea led to Bishop’s address in Greater Manchester.
Case closed. Or was it? From the moment I read of Bishop’s denture adventure, something about it didn’t add up. How did Bishop’s DNA end up on a European database? Why was a national research organization swabbing items found in a bin? And who was this junior technician so determined to reunite queasy British tourists with their false teeth? Solving this mystery, it turned out, would require the help of a forensic DNA expert, three dentists, some stamp collectors, and Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. Well, the Buckingham Palace press office, to be more precise. I would come to realize that nothing could stand in the way of a good yarn once the viral news machine was underway. And the tooth, I would soon find out, was not exactly what it seemed.
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