Death's Acre

by William M. Bass

  But if that was the case, why on earth was the top of the body so far away from the lower portion? I’ve seen many cases where the intense heat of a fire caused a skull to burst or shatter, but I’ve never seen one where it caused the head and upper torso to fly across a room.

  As I stood there scratching my head, looking from one heap of bones to the other, I said—thinking out loud, mainly—“The only thing I can think of that would explain this separation is some sort of explosion.”

  As soon as I said it, Lieutenant Wilmot spoke up. “Funny you should say that. One of the neighbors down the road said he heard an explosion before the fire.” It would have saved me some puzzlement if he’d thought to pass along that investigative tidbit a little sooner; on the other hand, if he had, I wouldn’t have had the fun of formulating an exotic theory. I inspected the bones again. The surface of the sternum was badly fractured and pitted; the spine had separated just below the skull—exactly where it would if a violent explosion had ripped apart the chest.

  The fragmentation of the body was not the only indication of violence. Several inches from the spinal column, in the region of the thoracic vertebrae and ribs, we found an oblong disk of lead. Measuring about an inch long and three-quarters of an inch wide, it was flat on top. Its underside bore the impression of woven fabric. It didn’t take a forensic genius to guess that before the fire, and before the explosion, there had been a gunshot. From no more than a few feet away, a bullet had been aimed at a human heart.

  Some things remained puzzling, but one thing was clear: unless the victim had carefully doused the house with gasoline, strapped a stick of dynamite to his chest, lit the fuse, and then fired a gun at his heart, this was a clear-cut case of murder by a killer who had gone to great lengths to destroy the evidence of his crime. Great lengths, but not successful ones.

  Working steadily as a team—David Hunt and I excavating material, Pat Willey diagramming our finds and bagging the bones, Steve Symes taking photo after photo—we plucked and sifted bones and teeth from the ashes. As the cold afternoon winter light began to fade, we loaded up for the two-hour drive back to Knoxville. Some twenty paper bags of burned remains lay in the back of the truck, and two tantalizing questions hung in the air between us: Were these the bones of James Grizzle? If so, who had killed him, and why?

  Answering the first of those questions required a close examination of the bones and teeth. At the scene, we’d been pretty sure the remains were male. The long bones were quite large and robust, and although the skull was fragmented, the external occipital protuberance—the bump at the base of the skull—was easily identifiable and unusually massive, an almost certain indication of maleness. Measurements in the lab corroborated this further: The head of the femur—the ball that inserts into the hip socket—usually measures 45 millimeters or more in diameter in adult males; our victim’s femoral heads measured a whopping 50 millimeters, or almost 2 inches. The circumference of the femoral shafts was also quite manly, at 94 millimeters; a woman’s femur rarely exceeds 81 millimeters in circumference.

  To determine race, we looked at the facial structure. Although the skull was badly fragmented, portions of the upper and lower jaws were intact enough to interpret. The alveolar areas of the mandible and maxilla, where the tooth sockets met the jaws, were flat, and the teeth were perpendicular to the jaws, rather than jutting forward. The jaws, in other words, were a white man’s.

  Our victim was clearly an adult. His collarbones, or clavicles, had fully fused or matured, so we knew he was at least twenty-five years old. His lower spine showed the beginnings of osteoarthritic lipping—ragged, jagged shelves projecting from the edges of vertebrae—suggesting that he was over thirty; however, the lipping was slight enough to indicate that he was probably not more than forty. Lieutenant Wilmot had told us that James Grizzle was thirty-six years old, so at this point the smart scientific money was betting that this was indeed Grizzle. To be sure, though, we’d have to get lucky with dental records.

  Before moving to the Bible Belt of Tennessee, Grizzle had been a steelworker in the Rust Belt of Indiana. An employee of Bethlehem Steel, he’d had good medical and dental benefits—and a conscientious dentist in La Porte, Indiana, who had taken X rays a few years before.

  The mandible, or lower jaw, is denser bone than the maxilla, or upper jaw, so it had emerged from the ashes more intact. In both jaws, though, the heat of the fire had shattered most of the teeth at the junction where the enamel meets the root. By and large, then, we couldn’t look for fillings; we’d have to match distinctive features in the structure and geometry of the tooth roots and the jaws themselves.

  Grizzle’s mandibular X ray showed us the following: His left third molar—his wisdom tooth—was not fully erupted; his left first molar was missing, with bone beginning to resorb or fill the empty socket; his right first molar and right second molar sockets were also empty and beginning to fill in with bone. (His dental-care benefits might have been excellent, but his lifelong dental hygiene, or at least his overall dental health, was quite poor.)

  Grizzle’s maxillary X ray revealed that the left first premolar bore an odd root, in the shape of an S; that same tooth also had a filling on its inner surface.

  Fortunately for us, our victim’s upper-left first premolar was one of the few teeth whose crown had not shattered; on that crown was a filling, exactly where the X ray told us to look for one. The other features—the missing molars, the resorbed bone, and the S-shaped root—all matched perfectly. I called Lieutenant Wilmot to tell him we had positively identified the victim as James Grizzle.

  The remaining questions—who had killed Grizzle, and why?—fell to Lieutenant Wilmot and his colleagues to answer. It didn’t take them long.

  One of Grizzle’s neighbors—those concerned, caring neighbors who hadn’t bothered to report the explosion or fire at the time—told deputies that after Grizzle bought the house, he had hired someone to help him remodel it. The worker, a man named Stephen Leon Williams, had moved into the house with Grizzle, bringing along his girlfriend for company.

  Grizzle had a lot of money in the bank, his father told police—about $30,000 in his checking account and another $9,000 in savings; apparently he made the mistake of telling Williams about it, for the prosecutor alleged that Williams forged Grizzle’s signature on checks drawn on the account in the days after Grizzle’s disappearance.

  As if the murder weren’t already gothic enough, one night not long after Grizzle’s mangled body was uncovered, a bizarre new twist came to light: An acquaintance of Williams’s named Anthony Layne Flynn sat drinking in a Kingsport tavern called Ralph’s Bar. His tongue loosened and his judgment impaired by one too many beers, Flynn told his astonished bar mates how Williams had enlisted his help by asking that he bring his Doberman to Grizzle’s house to eat the body. But either the dog wasn’t hungry enough or the body wasn’t yet ripe enough, because he turned up his pointed nose at it.

  That’s when Williams resorted to dynamite. But instead of decimating the body, the explosion only ripped it in two. Finally, as a last resort, he doused the house with gasoline and set it afire. As the flames roared into the night sky, he must have thought they were covering his tracks completely, destroying all evidence of the carnage he had committed. In fact, the fire was calling attention to it. It was a beacon, blazing brightly in the dark woods, and its message was clear: Crime scene—investigate with care.

  IN OCTOBER OF 1981, Stephen Leon Williams was found guilty of first-degree murder in the death of James Grizzle. His codefendant, Anthony Layne Flynn, who owned the finicky Doberman, was acquitted and released.

  Because of the shocking ways he had desecrated Grizzle’s corpse, Williams was sentenced to die in the electric chair. His execution was scheduled for April 16, 1982. His lawyers promptly appealed the death sentence. A series of appeals, then a nationwide moratorium on executions, delayed the sentence year after year.<
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  In 1999, from behind bars, Williams filed a lawsuit against me. His suit named several codefendants: the investigators, a TV production company, and the Discovery Channel, which had featured the Grizzle case in a forensic documentary. I found it astonishing that our legal system would even permit such a thing: Long after his trial, a convicted killer actually sues the people who uncovered and reported the murder he committed. Fortunately, Williams himself voluntarily dropped me from his lawsuit.

  More than twenty years after his conviction for murdering, dismembering, blasting, and burning James Grizzle, Williams remains alive and well in a Tennessee prison. As for the crime scene, it has long since been reclaimed by the Tennessee woods. Somewhere on a steep hillside above a ribbon of green water, a deepening layer of leaf litter and silt nurtures a growing colony of weeds, vines, and tree seedlings. Beneath it all, slowly disappearing from view, is a slab of stained concrete and a jumble of bricks. Here, real-life crime scene investigators once sifted down through ashes and came up with the truth.

  CHAPTER 7

  Death’s Acre: The Body Farm Is Born

  If the victim has already been dead for a long time, the head and face will be swollen, the skin and hair will have come off, the lips and mouth will be opened, the eyes will be protruding, and maggots will be feeding.

  —Sung Tz’u, The Washing Away of Wrongs, Chinese forensic text published in A.D. 1247*

  WHEN I REALIZED I had misjudged Colonel William Shy’s time since death—by 112 years, no less—my first reaction was profound embarrassment. I had made such confident pronouncements to the newspaper reporters who were following the story, and I had a lot of words to eat afterward—words that had been printed everywhere from Tennessee to Thailand.

  Humbling experiences can open the door to life’s greatest insights, though, if we’re willing to learn from them. It didn’t take long for my personal embarrassment to give way to professional curiosity. One reason forensic cases have always appealed to me is the challenge they pose: They’re often tragic crimes, but they’re also scientific puzzles to be solved. I’ve never liked hunting—the idea of killing animals for sport has absolutely no appeal to me—but the excitement of unraveling a forensic riddle is probably not so different from the thrill a big-game hunter experiences while stalking a deadly predator.

  But just what was the riddle here—what would I be chasing in this case? The more I thought about it, the more exciting it became: my prey would be death itself. To understand fully what had happened to Colonel Shy—and what eventually happens to us all—I would need to track death deep into its own territory, observe its feeding habits, chart its movements and timetables.

  More than seven hundred years ago, a Chinese official named Sung Tz’u compiled a remarkable handbook for forensic investigators. The book, whose title is often translated as The Washing Away of Wrongs, suggests an impressive array of postmortem examinations and tests that should be conducted during the early postmortem interval—the hours or days following a suspicious death. The book also describes, in graphic terms, the changes bodies undergo during the extended postmortem interval—the weeks and months it takes for a corpse to transform from flesh to bare bone.

  In the three-quarters of a millennium since Tz’u’s writing, however, virtually nothing more had been discovered or published about the extended postmortem interval. When I examined Colonel Shy’s remains in 1977, I had no more knowledge or scientific literature to draw on than Sung Tz’u had possessed in 1247.

  Already—long before I made Colonel Shy’s acquaintance—the idea of making a scientific study of decomposition had been germinating in some recess of my mind. The seed had been planted back in 1964, when I wrote to Harold Nye at the Kansas Bureau of Investigation and suggested that we find some rancher to help me study decomp on the hoof (“If you have some interested farmer who would be willing to kill a cow and let it lie . . .”). That seed was still lying dormant in 1971, when I moved to Knoxville to head the anthropology department at the University of Tennessee. Along with my new teaching position, the move to UT brought me a state-level political appointment as well: I was named Tennessee’s first (and so far its only) state forensic anthropologist. Even as I labored to sort and stack hundreds of boxes of Arikara Indian bones in the musty offices beneath Neyland Stadium, the letter of appointment arrived. It was a testament to the importance of networking.

  A year or two before, one of my University of Kansas Ph.D. students, Bob Gilbert, had requested pubic bones from medical examiners around the country. Bob was researching skeletal differences between males and females—specifically, the gradual changes that occur in the female pubic symphysis, the joint where the two pubic bones, arching forward from the hipbones, meet at the front of the pelvis. In young adults the surface of the pubic symphysis is rugged, ridged, and grooved; by the mid-thirties the bone is denser and its texture smoother; after age fifty, the face of the joint itself begins to erode. Bob’s Ph.D. dissertation aimed to chart those changes in the female pubic symphysis in detail, so that anthropologists could estimate age more precisely. To do that, he needed pubic bones, and lots of them.

  Some of the medical examiners he contacted were shocked by his request and refused. But Dr. Jerry Francisco, the chief medical examiner in Tennessee, was intrigued by the research and recognized its potential contribution to forensic science. He sent Bob a batch of pubic bones, and he became a good friend of mine, trading stories with me at forensic meetings.

  When I told Jerry I was moving to Tennessee, he asked if I’d be interested in joining his staff as state forensic anthropologist. It wouldn’t pay much—a flat fee of $150 per case—but the work promised to be fascinating. Immensely flattered, I said yes at once. Not long after that, I also received a fancy badge as a special consultant to the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation. Eventually, I realized that if I hadn’t been working these cases as a state official, I could have charged a hefty hourly consulting rate. Sadly, by the time I figured that out, I’d grown far too fond of the fancy title and the shiny badge to give them up just for something as common as money. One particularly complex forensic case in the 1990s consumed hundreds of hours of my time; in that case my $150 fee translated into less than a dollar an hour. But hey, I also got the privilege of taking a lot of abuse on the witness stand too. Defense attorneys love to bring up the Colonel Shy case, even if it has no connection with their client’s case, to sow seeds of doubt in the minds of jurors. (“Isn’t it true, Dr. Bass, that your estimate of time since death in that case was off by nearly 113 years?!”)

  I was still settling into my first semester at the University of Tennessee when the calls and cases and bodies began coming in. It didn’t take long to notice a difference between Kansas bodies and Tennessee bodies. More often than not, the Kansas corpses tended to be clean, sun-bleached skeletons, like something you’d see in a Hollywood western. The typical Tennessee body, I noticed very quickly, was more often a rotting, maggot-laden mess. In fact, of the first ten sets of remains brought to me for examination by Tennessee law enforcement officers after I arrived in Knoxville, half were swarming with maggots.

  The difference was a function of geography and demographics: Kansas is twice the size of Tennessee—about 82,000 square miles, compared to Tennessee’s approximately 42,000—but has barely half as many people. Statistically speaking, then, the odds of stumbling across a fresh body in Kansas are only one-fourth the odds of tripping over a corpse in the Volunteer State. (Actually, the difference is even larger than that, because Tennesseans tend to die younger, thanks to a homicide rate that’s twice as high—a problem for someone in another field to figure out.) Since there are far more bodies in Tennessee lying around waiting to be found—often by hunters tramping around in the woods—it stands to reason they’re likely to be found more quickly than that handful of Kansas bodies quietly skeletonizing out there on the vast, lonesome prairie. Hence, dead Tennesseans are lik
ely to be a lot messier and smellier.

  Still, there was justice to be served. And for a forensic anthropologist—particularly a TBI-badge-toting, official state forensic anthropologist—squeamishness was not an option. I had let it be known that I was available to help identify bodies or determine cause of death. Therefore every case was welcome and so was every body. But some were more welcome than others—to me, and to the other faculty and staff who shared our quarters beneath the football stadium. It was the janitor who finally snapped.

  A FISHERMAN HAD found a “floater”—a floating corpse—in the Emory River, about fifty miles from Knoxville, and a Roane County deputy sheriff brought me the body for identification. The dead man was still wearing most of his clothes; unfortunately, he wasn’t still wearing his head. That would make it difficult, if not impossible, to identify him positively. “We need to find the head,” I told the deputy. It might well be at the bottom of the Emory far from where the fisherman had found the body, but there was also a chance somebody had found the skull lying on the riverbank somewhere and maybe even picked it up.

  The body arrived on a Wednesday. On Thursday the Roane County News, the area’s weekly paper, ran a front-page story on the discovery of the body and the importance of the missing skull. The article asked anyone who had seen or acquired a skull to bring it to the sheriff’s department. Over the next few days two skulls arrived, which deputies duly delivered to me.

  The first one, which came in on Friday, was dry and dusty, clearly not from our recent, ripe floater. Two things about this skull intrigued me, though: the ethnicity, and the huge hole knocked in the base of the cranium. Our floater was Caucasoid, but this skull looked Japanese or Chinese, which made it an unusual find in East Tennessee. I asked the sheriff’s office for the story behind it, and they told me the man who’d brought it in was a junkyard dealer. A few days before, he’d bought a junked car from a local landowner. Sitting inside a five-gallon paint bucket in the car’s engine compartment was the skull.