Death's Acre

by William M. Bass

  On September 20, 1991, I got a call from Jim Moore, a TBI agent based in Crossville, a small city about sixty miles west of Knoxville. Some bones, possibly human, had been found in the crawl space beneath a house outside Crossville. Agent Moore wondered if I could come over the next day with a forensic response team to excavate the bones and determine whether they were indeed human.

  Unfortunately, I couldn’t go, I told him: I was leaving early in the morning for Washington, D.C., to teach a forensic anthropology class at the Smithsonian Institution for medical examiners from around the country and for agents from the Smithsonian’s next-door neighbor, the FBI. I could, however, send over an experienced forensic response team.

  By this time the forensic response teams worked like a well-oiled machine, even without me. I rounded up the graduate students who were on call—Bill Grant, Samantha Hurst, and Bruce Wayne—and relayed Agent Moore’s instructions: They were to meet him at his office in the Cumberland County courthouse in Crossville at 12:30 the next day, then follow him out to the scene. As they left my office I gave them one final reminder: “Don’t forget Arpad’s soil samples!” A revolutionary new technique for determining time since death was about to get its first test in a murder case.

  During the decade since we’d begun studying human decomposition at our research facility, we’d done dozens of studies and experiments, most of them involving the many variables that affect the rate of decomposition. We’d seen bodies hold together throughout winter and much of spring, and we’d watched them skeletonize in as little as two weeks during the muggy heat of summer. We’d compared bodies tucked in the shade with bodies baked in the sun and found that the bodies in sun tended to mummify, their skin becoming tough as leather, impervious to maggots. We’d compared bodies on land to bodies submerged in water; the floaters lasted twice as long. We’d compared bodies on the surface to bodies buried in graves, ranging from shallow to deep; the deeply buried bodies took eight times as long to decompose as the exposed bodies. We’d compared fat bodies to skinny ones; the fat ones skeletonized far faster, because their flesh could feed vast armies of maggots; in fact, one recent follow-up study, measuring daily weight loss in cadavers, recorded an astonishing forty-pound weight loss by an obese body in just twenty-four hours—a record I’m sure no fad diet will ever come close to.

  All of these studies shed important light on the events and timing of human decay, but they all relied on an observer’s interpretation of visible, gross changes. (By gross, I mean the changes were large-scale.) So although we’d made every effort to detail and differentiate those changes as thoroughly as possible, there remained room for subjective interpretation and, therefore, an element of imprecision. Determining time since death was still a frustrating, inexact science.

  Then, a few years after we’d begun our research, a young scientist approached me with the audacious and ambitious proposal to make it an exact science. His name was Arpad Vass, and he worked in a commercial laboratory that analyzed forensic specimens for law enforcement agencies. Arpad proposed entering our Ph.D. program and developing a quantitative, scientific technique that would rely on biochemical data to determine time since death. In effect, he proposed inventing a forensic clock that could be run backward, starting the moment a body was found. When it stopped—when it unwound all the way back to zero, basically—it would tell the time of a murder victim’s death.

  Arpad had a bachelor’s degree in biology, with a minor in chemistry, and a master’s degree in forensic science—great credentials for a criminalist. But Arpad wanted to do more than work in a crime lab: he wanted to advance the frontiers of forensic technology. The idea was fascinating. If it worked, it would offer a revolutionary new way—a quantitative, objective way—to answer one of the first and most crucial questions every homicide detective asks: How long has this person been dead?

  I had two nagging concerns about Arpad’s proposal. First, how in the world could we define a chemistry project as anthropology research? Second, and far more crucial, could he make the technique work?

  I’ve always been a big believer in the cross-fertilization of ideas. Every forensic investigation is a team effort, and the more experience—the more kinds of experience—the better, in my opinion. Not all of my colleagues in the field share that view; while I’ve improvised down in the bowels of a football stadium, some anthropologists have dwelled high in the proverbial ivory tower, looking down their noses at our unorthodox methods in Tennessee. But over the years I’ve noticed that my knowledge as an anthropologist has been greatly enriched by things I’ve learned from people who came to this field by an unconventional route.

  Take Emily Craig, for example. Unlike our typical graduate student, she hadn’t come to us waving a freshly inked B.S. in anthropology; in fact, she was in her forties by the time she applied to our Ph.D. program. Emily had a master’s degree in medical illustration, and she’d worked for years in a Georgia orthopedic clinic, illustrating scientific articles and guides to surgical procedures. In the course of that career she’d spent a lot of time around doctors and seen a lot of bones, so I figured she might bring an interesting perspective to her anthropology studies. As it turned out, I was wrong—by way of underestimation, that is.

  Her first semester, Emily took my human-identification class, in which students learned how to look at skeletal remains and determine the Big Four: sex, age, race, and stature. I brought in one skeleton every other week—a known skeleton, often one from a forensic case the police had brought to me.

  About six weeks into the course—about the time the students were starting to get cocky—I’d always throw them a curve. An elderly black man had wandered away from a nursing home in Winchester, Tennessee, years before; when a skeleton was eventually found, the authorities asked me to determine if this was the missing man. I didn’t think so, I told them initially: The skull wasn’t Negroid; the teeth and jaws didn’t jut forward the way a black man’s would. Pat Willey, the graduate student who ran my bone lab at the time, agreed with me. Then, a week later, we received X rays of the missing black man—which matched the skeleton we’d confidently pronounced as white.

  Every year in Human Identification, I led my students down the same primrose path I’d taken with that skeleton, and invariably the students—noting the absence of prognathism in the mouth structure—would write Caucasoid on their test paper just as confidently as I had pronounced it years before.

  When I got to Emily’s paper I was shocked: Negroid, she’d written—the only one in the class to get it right; the only one ever to get it right. I called her into my office and confronted her. “Tell me who told you that was a Negroid skeleton,” I demanded. For years I’d been fooling students with this trick question, then sworn the class to secrecy afterward, so the next year’s students would likewise learn not to jump to conclusions so quickly. Now, it seemed, somebody had broken the code of silence.

  “No one told me,” she said. She sounded surprised and indignant.

  I persisted: “Then how did you know? Everybody gets that wrong. They take one look at that skull and they’re sure it’s Caucasoid.”

  “I didn’t look at the skull,” she answered. “I looked at the knee.”

  I stared at her, utterly baffled. “What on earth are you talking about?”

  My student then proceeded to explain to her professor—a diplomate of the American Board of Forensic Anthropologists—that the knees of blacks have more space between the condyles—the broad, curved ends of bone that form the knee’s hinge—than the knees of whites. “That’s why surgeons would much rather operate on the knees of black athletes than white athletes. There’s a lot more room to work in. Everybody in sports medicine knows this.”

  At this point I was more than three decades into my career, yet this was a complete revelation. “Nobody in anthropology knows this,” I told her. After I swallowed a few mouthfuls of humble pie and collected my professo
rial wits, I added, “This would make a great dissertation topic.”

  Emily took my advice. Not only did she research, confirm, and publish what she’d already noticed in the knees of living athletes, she went a step further: Another subtle difference in the knees of blacks, she found, could be used to estimate race in unidentified bodies. The angle of an interior seam in the femur just above the knee—called Blumensaat’s line, in honor of the German physician who first noticed it in lateral (side-view) X rays—differed in whites and blacks. After taking hundreds of X rays and measurements of femurs, Emily devised a formula that could distinguish, with up to 90 percent accuracy, a Negroid femur from a Caucasoid femur. In a field that had previously depended solely on the skull to determine race, this was a remarkable advance.

  If Emily hadn’t come to anthropology by way of medical illustration, we might never have learned about this, and we’d have missed out on a technique that has proven crucial in identifying several unknown murder victims.

  It was that same sort of scientific cross-pollination that Arpad Vass was proposing in his plan to use biochemical data to pinpoint time since death. In his case, though, it wasn’t bone structure he was talking about, but bacteria.

  As Arpad talked about turning bacteria into a forensic stopwatch, I tried to think of some other department where his research might fit better than in anthropology. I knew it was too applied and too forensic-oriented to gain approval in the biology or chemistry departments. I also figured it would be a stretch to admit him into the anthropology program. But I couldn’t stop thinking about how the field might benefit from such a revolutionary technique. “Tell you what,” I finally said. “I’ll fight to get you in, if you’ll definitely tie it to human decomposition—and if you’re sure you can make it work.” He assured me that he would and he could.

  It didn’t take long to show me that he was serious about the first requirement. Within a matter of days Arpad was out at the research facility, taking samples of decaying flesh, maggot soup, and greasy soil. He’d gather a batch of samples, disappear into a chemistry lab for days, then reemerge to gather more goo.

  It was that second part of our deal—making it work—that would be the hard part. Arpad had theorized that as a body decayed, a succession of different bacteria would feed on the decaying tissues, in the same way that a consistent succession of insects did. “Pigs is pigs,” an old saying goes; Arpad’s hope was that bugs is bugs, whether those bugs are macroscopic or microscopic.

  In theory, his idea was simple. In reality, though, it was overwhelming. Looking at the samples under a microscope was like looking at an aerial photograph of Saint Peter’s Square during the Pope’s annual Easter sermon: the field of view was packed with individuals of seemingly endless variety.

  He didn’t tell me at the time, but Arpad spent months at the microscope, staring and despairing. It would take an immense laboratory, with a staff of perhaps fifty, to identify and track the legions of microbes converging on his research subjects, digesting their tissues, and leaving behind greasy puddles of waste. Then it hit him: the microbes themselves might be too difficult to analyze, but the grease slicks they left behind—the by-products and waste products created by the digestion of soft tissues—might contain some useful evidence.

  Arpad took another look at his samples—not at the bugs themselves this time, but at the smelly soup in which they swam. Chemically the liquid around and beneath decaying bodies proved to be a mixture of various compounds, mainly volatile (lightweight, easily evaporated) fatty acids created by the breakdown of fat and DNA. As he studied the samples he’d collected over the weeks and months, Arpad realized that the ratio of compounds continuously evolved as the bodies decomposed further and further. In other words, a sample taken from beneath body A five days after death would differ markedly from a sample taken fifty days after death. Arpad really began to get excited when he noticed that the same patterns or ratios—the same evolving chemical profile—that held true for body A also held true for body B, body C, and so on.

  By then Arpad knew he was on the trail of a consistent scientific phenomenon he could measure and harness. All he had to do now was track the ratios over time, then develop a procedure for taking a sample from a crime scene, determining the ratio of volatile fatty acids in that sample, adjusting for the average daily temperatures, then comparing that ratio with the ratios he’d observed at known postmortem periods. Oh, and develop a formula or equation that could easily calculate time since death, by matching his crime scene ratios with the ratios he’d carefully measured during two years of research at the Body Farm.

  It’s a difficult concept to explain—heck, it’s a difficult concept for me to understand, not being a chemist—but an simple analogy might make it a little easier. Suppose you know that Joe Blow eats a scrambled egg every morning for breakfast; sometimes he also chops up a boiled egg in a can of tuna for lunch; and if he’s feeling really ambitious, he might whip up a batch of chocolate-chip cookies using another two eggs. Now, if for some reason you happen to rummage around in Joe’s garbage can, you should be able to tell, from the ratio of eggshells to tuna cans and chocolate-chip bags, how many days’ worth of Joe’s garbage you took out of that can.

  What, you may be wondering, does all this have to do with some bones—possibly human bones—buried under a house in Crossville, Tennessee? Quite a bit, I hoped, which is why I wanted to be sure the forensic response team remembered to bring back soil samples.

  The house belonged to a man named Terry Ramsburg. But Terry Ramsburg wasn’t around; in fact, nobody had seen hide nor hair of him in more than two years, including his wife, Lillie Mae.

  Actually, by now Lillie Mae was his ex-wife. She had reported Terry missing on January 16, 1989. He’d left the house for work at his auto body shop one day, she said, and didn’t come home that night. When he still hadn’t come back a week or so later, she finally called the police.

  Not too long after she reported him missing, Lillie Mae filed for divorce, on the grounds that Terry had deserted her. In due course the divorce came through, and Lillie Mae subsequently remarried. She stayed in the house, just in case Terry should happen to resurface, and her new husband moved in with her and her two daughters.

  Terry’s father, Robert Ramsburg, didn’t quite believe Lillie Mae’s story. He knew things had been stormy at home—Terry expected Lillie’s teenaged daughters to help out at the body shop, and they didn’t like that—but he didn’t believe Terry would simply leave town without a word. And when Lillie Mae got married again, Robert got more suspicious. His mind kept coming back to that house, and eventually he decided to snoop around a bit. One September day when nobody was home, Robert opened the wooden door leading to the crawl space. Holding a flashlight in one hand, he scuttled around beneath the floor joists, looking for something—anything—that might tell him about his son’s disappearance.

  In the far corner of the crawl space, he found it: a bit of red cloth protruding slightly from the soil. It was in a patch of dirt that seemed disturbed, fluffier than the hard-packed clay beneath most of the house. He tugged gently, exposing more fabric; then, using his bare hands, he began to scrape away the dirt. Gradually the red fabric assumed the familiar outline of a pair of long johns, and then he saw, jutting from the waistband, something that looked like bone. At once he stopped digging, went inside, and called the sheriff’s office. A few phone calls and hours later, my graduate students were on their way.

  For years our forensic response teams had carried essentially the same set of tools: shovels, trowels, rakes, paper evidence bags, plastic body bags, wire-mesh screens, cameras. Now, they took a small but significant addition: a pair of Ziploc plastic bags in which to collect soil samples—one sample from beneath the remains, another from an uncontaminated region ten feet away.

  Agent Moore was waiting at the courthouse. So was Lillie Mae, who had consented to the search. They drove the mile
and a half to the house caravan-style, with the white UT truck trailing the TBI sedan and Lillie Mae’s car. With his characteristic thoroughness, Bill Grant jotted down her license tag: RNW-016. Several other cars were already parked at the house. Some had delivered a handful of city police and sheriff’s deputies, but sitting quietly in one car was a pair of civilian onlookers: Terry Ramsburg’s father and mother. Lillie Mae kept her distance.

  Bill, Samantha, and Bruce quickly gathered their tools and crawled beneath the house. Agent Moore had already set up a work light in the crawl space, so the area was well lit. It took only a glance for Bill to confirm that the exposed bone was an innominate—a hipbone—and that it was human. Bill crawled to the doorway, extricated himself, and walked over to the small knot of officers. Robert Ramsburg got out of his car and joined the group; Lillie Mae edged over too.

  “It’s definitely human,” Bill said. Terry’s father hung his head. Lillie Mae spun on her heel and strode away.

  “This is bullshit,” she snarled. “This is fucking bullshit.” She got into her car, slammed the door, and cranked the starter.

  Bill looked at Jim Moore and asked, as tactfully as he could manage, “Are you sure you want to let her leave?”

  Moore looked unruffled. “She’s not going anywhere,” he said, with the assurance of a lawman who knew how to assess someone’s risk of flight.

  Bill crawled back under the house, and the forensic team got back to work. As the most seasoned member, Bill was in charge. He put Samantha to work excavating the legs and Bruce exposing the left side while he moved up to the spot where he expected to find the skull.

  In just a few minutes of troweling Bill found the back of the skull, indicating that the body was lying facedown. Toward the right side of it was a small, neat hole, its edges beveled so that it was slightly larger on the inside than on the outside. A fracture ran from the top of the hole all the way across the skull toward the left side. “Looks like we’ve got a gunshot entry wound,” he told Samm and Bruce.