Death's Acre

by William M. Bass

  The body was lying faceup—except that the face was already gone. The soft tissue of the neck was also gone, exposing the cervical vertebrae, though the shoulders and arms remained virtually intact.

  I wasn’t surprised about the face; it’s often the first thing to go. Blowflies lay their eggs in moist, dark places, so the mouth, nose, eyes, and ears are among the obvious locations. So are the genitals and anus, if the flies can get to them. About the only place a female blowfly would rather lay her eggs than a natural body orifice is a bloody wound.

  But while the missing face was to be expected, the missing neck wasn’t, especially considering the good condition of the shoulders and arms. It was a classic case of what’s called “differential decay,” and anytime I see it I consider it a red flag, a clue. The differential decay in the neck region told me that there had been some sort of trauma there. Maybe her throat had been cut, in which case the flies would have flocked to the wound, or perhaps she’d been strangled, and her attacker’s fingernails broke the skin and drew blood. Something, at any rate, had made the neck just as appealing to the blowflies and maggots as the moist orifices of the head.

  As I studied the body Arthur Bohanan, a KPD crime lab specialist at the scene, spoke up: “Bill, give me a hand.” Having worked with him for years, I knew he wasn’t speaking figuratively. He wanted me to remove one of the victim’s hands and give it to him.

  Art was KPD’s top fingerprint specialist; in fact, he was becoming known as one of the best fingerprint guys in the country, someone even the FBI consulted at times. He wasn’t just a technician, dusting for prints at crime scenes; he was a researcher, exploring new ways to reveal latent prints on surfaces where they’d never been seen before, like fabrics and even the skin of murder victims. Art had worked a number of child abductions and murders over the years, and he’d seen children’s fingerprints disappear—fade away from the interior of an abductor’s car, for instance—far faster than the adult prints did. Why? Art decided to find out. Before puberty, he eventually learned, children’s prints lack the oils that give adult prints such staying power.

  To a civilian bystander, Art’s casual request, “Give me a hand,” would have sounded horrifying. To a forensic scientist it was routine. In a murder case it’s not uncommon for investigators to cut off fingers or even entire hands to take back to their own labs or to send to the FBI. In any case when a victim’s identity is unknown, it’s important to try every possible technique to latch on to a print and a name. In a serial murder case like this one, the stakes were at their highest: At least three women were already dead, and if this killer fit the pattern of most serial killers, women would keep on dying until he was caught. This was no time for a squeamish sense of propriety.

  I studied the hands. The skin was soggy and on the verge of sloughing off, but I knew that wouldn’t keep Art from getting the prints: he’d been known to put his own fingers inside the sloughed-off skin of a murder victim’s fingers in order to restore the natural contours and get the prints. From my point of view, the key question was whether the hands held any clues to the woman’s manner of death or time since death. Examining them closely, I saw no defensive wounds, so she hadn’t been fighting off a knife attack; there were no rope marks, no trauma of any sort.

  Taking a knife from my tool bag, I cut off one hand, then the other, to double his chances of matching a print. I sealed them in a plastic bag and handed them to Art, who headed off to work his magic. On his way out he stopped to take prints from the fresh corpse down near the road, and he sealed those prints in another small bag.

  For my work I would need a much bigger bag. On the ground beside the body, we zipped open a black “disaster bag”—the euphemism for body bag—and gently slid her inside the long opening. Then, with half a dozen of us gripping the corners and sides of the bag, we carried her out of the woods and put her in the truck.

  As we were loading up, a police radio crackled to life. Art Bohanan had already ID’d one of the victims. Not the one whose hands he’d taken—that one would require more work—but the fresh one. Her name was Patricia Ann Johnson; thirty-one years old, she was a Chattanooga native who’d been staying in a Knoxville shelter for the past few weeks. She’d never been arrested for prostitution, but she’d been seen hanging out in the areas often worked by Knoxville hookers. Art relayed two other interesting pieces of information: She suffered from epilepsy, and her neck had several latent prints on it, which he’d detected by fuming her entire body with superglue and dusting it with ultraviolet powder. Unfortunately, there wasn’t enough detail in those prints to identify the person whose hand had been squeezing her neck.

  Now it was my turn to get to work and see what I could find out about victim number three.

  We got back to the Body Farm just before dark. After I backed the truck through the gate, we pulled the bag out, laid it on the ground, and unzipped it to remove the body and begin cleaning off the tissue.

  When we’d slid the body into the bag, we’d seen very few maggots—barely a handful. Now there was a huge swarm of maggots, literally tens of thousands of them. One of the students asked where they’d all come from. Could there have been a massive egg hatch during the forty-five-minute trip back to the university? No, I explained, just some confusion about what time of day it was. Maggots don’t like sunlight, so if a body is out in the open, they burrow beneath the skin during daylight. When we sealed the remains in the opaque black bag, though, the maggots thought night had fallen, so they came out to feed on the surface.

  One other interesting but gruesome note about maggots: Although cold weather keeps blowflies grounded, it doesn’t faze their larval offspring, the maggots. Even though we think of insects as “cold-blooded,” as maggots digest human tissue, the chemical breakdown of the flesh generates a surprising amount of heat; on cold mornings at the Body Farm, it’s not uncommon to see steam rising off a writhing mass of maggots huddled together for warmth. As my colleague Murray Marks has observed, for the residents of the Body Farm it’s not quite as cold and lonely out there as you might think.

  We attached metal tags to one arm and one leg to identify victim number three. This was our twenty-seventh forensic case in 1992; that meant she was case number 92-27. To estimate her age, we looked at several different bone structures: her skull sutures, her clavicles, and her pelvis. The bones of the pelvis were dense and smooth, with a marked absence of grain; in other words, they were the bones of a mature but young woman, probably somewhere between twenty and thirty. Her clavicles, on the other hand, had not fully matured: The medial, or sternal, end of the collarbone is the last piece of bone in the body to fuse completely to its shaft; the fact that this epiphysis, as it’s called, had not yet fully ossified suggested that she was not yet twenty-five. Luckily, we could pin it down even more precisely than that. Research data from one of my former Kansas students indicated that the victim was probably somewhere between eighteen and twenty-three. Finally, the basilar suture in the skull—the joint where the occipital bone (the back of the head) meets the sphenoid (the skull’s floor)—was only partly fused, another indicator that she was not yet twenty-five. Factoring all those indicators together, I was confident that she was somewhere between twenty and twenty-five.

  To determine her stature, we measured the length of the left femur—44.4 centimeters—and plugged that value into a formula developed back in the 1950s but more recently refined a bit by a UT colleague, Dr. Richard Jantz. One of the world’s leading authorities on skeletal measurements, Richard has assembled a huge database of skeletal measurements; he’s also developed a powerful computer software package that, from a few simple skeletal measurements, can accurately determine an unknown corpse’s sex, race, and stature. The stature calculation told us that with her 44.4-centimeter femur, our victim had stood about five feet three inches tall.

  Now we knew sex, race, age, and stature. Next came the search for evidence of the manner
of death. We checked and rechecked everything. There was no sign of trauma—no fractures, cut marks, or other traces of trauma—on any of the bones we had. But we didn’t have every bone. Her feet were missing, but they probably wouldn’t have told us how she died. One other bone was missing, though, and it was potentially the single most important bone in her body. It came from the region where differential decay had raised a red flag the instant I saw the body. What we were missing was the hyoid bone from the neck—the one bone that can reliably reveal whether someone has been strangled. Floating above the larynx and below the mandible, or lower jaw, the hyoid is a thin, horseshoe-shaped bone. If you tilt your head back slightly, clasp the front of your windpipe, and wiggle your hand back and forth, you’ll probably be able to feel your hyoid moving. From its exposed position and thin structure, you’ll also understand why it’s often broken in cases of strangulation.

  Given that the two more recent victims had been strangled, it seemed crucial that we find the missing hyoid. We checked the body bag carefully, in case the hyoid was somewhere at the bottom of the bag, but no luck. I called together four of my grad students. “I need you to go back out to Cahaba Lane and find that hyoid,” I told them. They looked dismayed and dubious, but I wasn’t ready to give up. Time after time I’ve been amazed at how much skeletal evidence can be recovered from a death scene, even months or years after a murder: bones, bullets, teeth, even toenails. “Start where we found her,” I told the students, “then work your way uphill to the spot where the hair mat was. It’s got to be there.” I meant that last part in more ways than one.

  A few hours later they returned, triumphantly bearing the hyoid. Sure enough, up near the initial death scene, the bone had fallen out (or been plucked out by some scavenger), and then had been covered by falling leaves.

  The hyoid was in three pieces, but that didn’t necessarily mean it had been broken; in some people the hyoid never fully ossifies into a single arch of bone. Instead—as in this woman’s case—the two side pieces, called the “greater horns,” are joined by cartilage to the central arch, or “body.” It was possible that the horns had been broken off, but it was also possible that the cartilage in those joints had simply decomposed. To know which was the case, I needed to look closer—much, much closer.

  I took the pieces to a scanning-electron-microscope lab in the college of engineering. At a magnification of 20 ×, I thought I saw some traces of damage to the bone itself: tiny linear fractures and avulsion (literally, “pulling apart”) fractures at the surface where the cartilage had been attached. I zoomed in for a closer look. Sure enough, at 100× and 200×, the damage was unmistakable: numerous microscopic linear fractures that ended in a small region of avulsed bone.

  It wasn’t much to look at, but it was crucial evidence: a telltale sign that cartilage had been ripped from this bone by some powerful force—for example, a pair of strong hands, squeezing mercilessly until the moment she ceased to struggle, ceased to breathe, ceased to live. That moment had probably come somewhere between ten and twenty days ago. I arrived at that estimate of time since death, or TSD, by correlating two sets of observations: the body’s advanced state of decomposition, and the pattern of daytime and nighttime temperatures over the past several weeks.

  To narrow down the TSD, I enlisted the help of my former student, chemistry whiz Arpad Vass, who was now a research scientist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. I sent Arpad two soil samples: one taken from beneath the victim’s body, where volatile fatty acids had soaked into the ground; the other an uncontaminated control sample taken from the hillside some fifteen feet above the death scene. In the Ramsburg case—the man shot by his wife, then buried in the crawl space beneath the house—Arpad had been handicapped by the lengthy postmortem interval. Here, though, the conditions were perfect for his technique. First, Arpad analyzed the relative concentrations of the decay products, then he factored in the temperature patterns. This time the technique worked brilliantly: Arpad’s calculations put the TSD at fourteen to seventeen days. Based on the decomp, I had put the murder sometime in the period of October 6 to 16; Arpad narrowed that window to October 12 to 15, right around the same time Patty Anderson had disappeared.

  Just to be sure, the sheriff’s investigators had asked for an additional TSD estimate, for each of the bodies, from a forensic entomologist named Neal Haskell, who had done an interesting study at the Body Farm a few years before. Neal was developing a forensic technique for re-creating death scenes, in effect, by using a freshly killed pig as a stand-in for the murder victim—a “body double,” as they say in Hollywood, but of a different species. By letting nature take its course until the insects on the pig carcass matched those on the human victim, Neal hoped to be able to pinpoint time since death to within a day or two. But to know whether the pig carcasses would work as stand-ins for humans, he needed to make a head-to-head comparison of the bug activity in each species. The only place where he could do that, of course, was at UT’s Anthropology Research Facility. I was glad to have him do the study there; if the technique worked—and the study showed that it did, at least within the first couple of weeks postmortem—it could be useful at crime scenes virtually anywhere.

  When he was called about the Cahaba Lane murders, Neal immediately set about getting samples of live maggots from the bodies so that he could time how long it took them to mature into adult flies. It’s an entomologist’s way of figuring out when the eggs were laid, like counting backward from a baby’s birth to figure out when it was conceived.

  Neal also put several pig carcasses in the woods at Cahaba Lane; sheriff’s deputies were posted to guard the experiment and to take temperature readings at frequent intervals. Judging by how long it took the maggots from the bodies to mature, together with what he observed in the pig carcasses, he calculated that blowflies had first begun laying eggs on this woman’s body sometime between October 9 and 13. So three different scientists, using three different techniques, agreed pretty damned closely on when she was killed.

  My final challenge would be to find out who she was. With luck, I could learn that straight from her very own mouth. Her teeth were a study in contrasts. On the one hand, a lot of careful work had gone into that mouth: fourteen of her teeth had amalgam fillings. On the other hand, one of her teeth, the lower left first molar, was literally rotting away. The cavity had eaten away much of the crown and spread down into the tooth’s pulp chamber; as a result, the jawbone itself was beginning to crumble too.

  I’d seen this sort of contrast before, especially in females. Almost invariably, it pointed to a dramatic change in the victim’s fortunes. A girl grows up, leaves home, and has a hard time making her way in the world; an older woman gets laid off, divorced, or widowed. Whatever the cause of the setback, she cuts costs and corners wherever she can, and before long, dental care is a luxury she can no longer afford.

  But even though 92-27 had fallen on hard times, somewhere out there—from the period before her life started going wrong—there were dental X rays with her name on them. I knew we could find them, but it might take a while. Fortunately, we were spared the trouble.

  While my colleagues and I had been scrutinizing teeth and bones, chemicals and insects, KPD fingerprint wizard Art Bohanan had been working with the hands I’d cut off for him at the scene. The police had no prints on file that matched the ones Art lifted from the hands, so if she’d ever been arrested, it was someplace besides Knoxville. She also didn’t match any police descriptions or profiles of known prostitutes. But her general description—black female, age twenty to twenty-five, height five feet three inches—did match a missing-person report filed recently by a local woman’s sister. The missing woman, last seen on October 14, was Darlene Smith, a black female age twenty-two, height five feet four inches—a mighty close resemblance to the woman the skeletal analysis described.

  From her sister’s report, Art had Darlene Smith’s address, a rented apartment in th
e eastern section of Knoxville, not far from an area frequently worked by prostitutes. The neighborhood wasn’t particularly desirable but it was pretty cheap. The sister let Art into Darlene’s apartment and dug out a copy of her lease. Art sprayed the paper with ninhydrin, a chemical that reacts strongly with the amino acids in human fingerprint oils. Within moments a jumble of bright purple smudges and prints appeared before his eyes.

  The prints came from two pairs of hands, Art determined. One pair of those hands belonged to a man—Darlene’s landlord, Art learned by fingerprinting him that night. The other prints on Darlene Smith’s lease matched the hands I had severed from the decaying corpse at Cahaba Lane.

  THE MORNING OF OCTOBER 27, the phone rang again. The police had just found a fourth victim in the woods. I nabbed Bill Grant and Lee Meadows, who’d gone with me the day before, and Emily Craig, the Ph.D. student who had taught me the difference between Caucasoid knees and Negroid knees. Together we retraced the now-familiar route to the scene.

  The fourth body lay about a quarter-mile to the right of the billboard, at the edge of the small creek emerging from the woods. Wide and flat, the streambed was dry for much of the year; now, though, a few inches of water trickled through it.

  The body was largely skeletonized, except for areas of tissue on the legs, buttocks, and left arm and hand. Lying faceup amid the oak leaves, the bare skull fixed us with a sightless, accusing stare. The vertebrae were completely defleshed, covered only by leaves and twigs. The right arm and hand were missing, probably chewed off by a dog. The left hand, though, lay in the streambed, covered with mud and water. As I dug around it carefully with a trowel, I was pleasantly surprised to find that some of the hand’s soft tissue was still intact.