Death's Acre

by William M. Bass

  On January 26, 1999, the Zoo Man murder trial finally got under way. The linchpin of the prosecution’s case was Huskey’s own confession, in which he described the murders in detail. But if the confession made it clear that Huskey—or “Kyle,” or whoever he called himself that day—had strangled the four women, the tape gave the defense some powerful ammunition as well. The trio of voices and names played back through the speakers made it easy to believe that Zoo Man really was crazy. To buttress the insanity defense, Moncier called witnesses ranging from a psychiatrist and a psychologist—both of whom agreed that Huskey suffered from multiple-personality disorder—to Knox County jail workers who testified that they’d talked with Huskey’s evil alter ego, “Kyle.” Curiously, Huskey’s mother denied any knowledge of “Kyle” or “Daxx.” Tom, she said, was just plain Tom: That’s all; there was nobody else in there.

  The defense didn’t challenge my analysis of the scapula fracture. The hyoid, though, was another matter entirely. The electron micrographs clearly showed trauma to the bone, but Moncier disputed my conclusion that it indicated strangulation. He called his own expert witness, a pathologist from Atlanta—who was a physician, true, but who wasn’t board-certified. The pathologist ventured that maybe a deer had stepped on the hyoid and crunched it; Moncier pressed me as to whether that was possible. Well, hell, anything’s possible. It was possible a Martian spaceship had landed on it, but the only explanation that satisfied both forensic science and common sense was that the woman had been strangled.

  The trial itself lasted for two weeks, then the jury began to deliberate. The deliberations dragged on for a day, two days, three. Eventually the jury sent out a note saying that they agreed that Huskey had killed three of the four women. As to the fourth murder, eleven of the twelve jurors were convinced of his guilt, but the twelfth juror thought it possible that the final murder had occurred after Huskey’s arrest on October 22. (Although Neal Haskell’s entomological analysis had put the murder around October 21 or 22, Moncier had hammered away at my offhand remark that Patricia Johnson might have been dead only “a couple of days.”) Despite arguments and pressure from the other eleven jurors, the twelfth continued to hold out.

  But in the end, the real stumbling block wasn’t Huskey’s guilt or innocence; the real stumbling block was his sanity. By the fourth day of deliberations the twelve jurors had divided into three immovable groups: Five believed that Huskey was sane and should be held accountable for the murders; four believed he was insane; the other three couldn’t make up their minds. Finally, on the fifth day, they sent the judge a note saying they were hopelessly deadlocked.

  After six years, half a million dollars, and thousands of hours of investigative work and legal wrangling, Judge Richard Baumgardner declared a mistrial. For the police, prosecutors, and victims’ families, it was a bitter blow. But worse was still to come. In July of 2002, Judge Baumgardner—ruling on yet another defense motion—agreed to bar the use of Huskey’s confessions. Twice during his interrogation—the day of his arrest and again a week later—Huskey had asked for a lawyer, but investigators with the Knox County Sheriff’s Department and the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation continued to question him.

  As of this writing, Tom Huskey’s retrial on the four murder charges has been postponed—again—and an appeals court has reversed some of his earlier rape and kidnapping convictions and lowered his sentence to forty-four years. Legal insiders say the murder cases might be dropped altogether, if the confessions can’t be used as evidence. The wheels of justice turn slowly, it seems . . . and sometimes they stop altogether or even spin backward. On the other hand, the man who confessed to killing four women remains behind bars, for the moment at least, and is scheduled to remain there another forty years. And the only bodies to emerge from the woods at the end of Cahaba Lane, during these ten years Huskey has been behind bars, have been a few bushy-tailed squirrels. Out on Magnolia Avenue, though, a new generation of women is working the streets again. Turnover’s high out there. I wonder how many of them have even heard of Zoo Man. I wonder if they realize how vulnerable they are. I wonder, even if they do, if they can do a damn thing about it.

  CHAPTER 13

  Parts Unknown

  THE PHONE RANG, startlingly loud in the silence. It was July, and the university was practically a ghost town. The hallways were dim and deserted in the depths beneath Neyland Stadium. Most of the students and faculty had vanished in late May and wouldn’t reappear until late August. Understandably, they seized any opportunity to get out of the depths of the stadium. I, on the other hand, was spending nearly every waking moment down in my dark, dusty office. It had been months since Ann died, but I still couldn’t bear the emptiness of our house. At work, by contrast, I was surrounded by people. Most of them were dead, mind you, but they were comforting all the same. They had shared their stories with me and had entered my life; they were companions who would never abandon me. Besides, at work, I knew, it wouldn’t be long before someone would call me with an interesting case. So when the phone rang on this quiet summer day, I reached for it eagerly.

  At the other end of the line was my secretary, Donna, whose office lay, literally, a football field away from my private sanctuary, tucked deep beneath the stadium’s east stands. She was transferring a call, she said, from Corporal James J. Kelleher of the New Hampshire State Police.

  “Hello, this is Dr. Bass,” I said. Corporal Kelleher introduced himself. He worked in the major crimes unit, he explained, and was the lead investigator on a case he believed might involve a homicide. He had read about me in Bones, a book written by Doug Ubelaker, a former student, who was now a staff anthropologist at the Smithsonian Institution. (One of the things that thrills me when I look back on my career is the fact that three of the Smithsonian’s physical anthropologists—Ubelaker, Doug Owsley, and Dave Hunt—got their Ph.D.s from me, and I served on the doctoral committee for a fourth, Don Ortner.)

  As Kelleher outlined the case, I began to take notes. A few handfuls of burned bone fragments had been found in a yard in Alexandria, he said, a tiny hamlet in the center of the state. The medical examiner thought they were dog bones, but Kelleher suspected they were human. If he was right—if the bones were indeed human—he needed a positive identification of the dead person; if possible, he also needed to know the manner of death. Kelleher asked whether I could help. “I believe I can,” I said. “I can sure try.”

  Six days later, a well-wrapped FedEx package arrived; inside the layers of paper and bubble wrap was a box containing bone fragments—hundreds of them—burned to a crisp. By this time I’d examined dozens of burned bodies and thousands of burned bones; they’d been sifted and plucked from burned-up cars, burned-down houses, even a “blowed-up” fireworks factory, as some of the locals would say. But except for bones from commercial crematoriums, I had never seen bones so completely burned as these.

  Nearly every forensic case represents a scientific jigsaw puzzle, figuratively speaking. This one was a puzzle in the most literal way you can imagine. All told, the package contained 475 individual bone fragments, many of them no bigger than a pea. Piecing together even an approximation of a partial human skeleton would take days of tedious puzzle work.

  I took the package down to the bone lab, in the basement of the stadium, where there was plenty of work space, good light from a wall of windows, and a stout lock on the door to protect the chain of custody. Clearing off one of the long tables near the windows, I unrolled a long piece of brown wrapping paper and taped it down. With a felt-tip marker, I wrote the names of the main sections of the body—skull, arms, ribs, vertebrae, pelvis, and legs—in their normal anatomical positions, more or less. Sorting the pieces into related piles would make it easier to start piecing together the charred rubble that had once been a human being.

  Over the next few days I worked to reconstruct the life-size puzzle. The work was demanding, tedious, and baffling: exactly the kind of sc
ientific challenge I’ve always liked best. Some pieces were fairly easy. There were four fragments from the right femur; remnants of both kneecaps; dozens of pieces of ribs; and three partial vertebrae. But all too soon I’d pulled out and placed every one of the big, easy pieces; all that remained were tiny, difficult pieces, and hundreds of them. A challenge, I reminded myself. You always say you like a challenge. Be careful what you wish for.

  The pieces seemed to come from every major area of the body—all but one, I gradually realized: out of the 475 fragments, I couldn’t find a single piece from the skull. That’s not to say there wasn’t one; more than half the fragments were so small and featureless that I couldn’t tell what bone they came from. Still, the empty space at the top of my brown-paper chart seemed more than random coincidence. Worse, it meant I wouldn’t be able to shed much light on who this was and how he or she had died.

  Ten head-scratching days later, FedEx brought me another package from Jim Kelleher, smaller than the first but equally well wrapped. This one contained a large, relatively unburned piece of bone, easily recognizable as the mid-shaft of a left human femur; a glass vial containing more than five dozen small bone fragments; and one other bone, unburned but covered with tooth marks. Dogs, probably, had chewed off the upper end; the lower end had been broken off. Unlike all the other fragments, this bone was clearly nonhuman. I headed down the hall to consult one of my colleagues, a zoological archaeologist named Walter Klippel. Walter instantly recognized it as a tibia from the left hind leg of a white-tailed deer.

  According to Kelleher, the first batch of burned fragments had been found on July 2, in a household pit used to burn brush and trash; the second set was discovered on July 22, scattered alongside a trail leading into the woods behind the house.

  Unfortunately, I still didn’t have a skull or teeth to work with; that meant I would probably not be able to make a positive identification from these remains. With a bit of good luck, there might be a healed fracture or some other distinctive feature on the bones that could be matched to someone’s antemortem X rays. In this case, though, good luck seemed not to be in the cards.

  Still, there was enough detail in the bones—burned and fragmented though they were—to help narrow things down quite a bit for Kelleher. One relatively intact piece of bone was the unburned head of the humerus, the ball at the end of the upper arm that joins the shoulder. With a pair of sliding calipers, I carefully measured its diameter at the thickest part. Back in the 1970s, T. Dale Stewart—a Smithsonian anthropologist whose close collaboration with the FBI in the 1950s and ’60s helped pioneer the field of forensic anthropology—had made a careful study of humeral head size in males and females. According to Stewart’s research, if the head measures more than 47 millimeters in diameter, it has to have come from an adult male. Measurements in the range of 44 to 46 millimeters can indicate either a male or female. A measurement of less than 43 millimeters unequivocally indicates a female. The piece lying on my lab table measured 42 millimeters; that meant our mystery victim was a woman, a finding borne out by a characteristically female ridge in the hipbone.

  How old had she been when she died? Estimating age is easy if you have the pubic symphysis. Unfortunately—more bad luck—I didn’t. Instead, I had to rely on several less-precise age markers. Judging by the fact that the ends of all her bones (the epiphyses) had fused to their shafts, I could tell that her growth had stopped. Okay, now I knew she was a grown woman. But she wasn’t an old woman, because her spine showed only minor traces of osteoarthritic lipping, the jagged edges that vertebrae begin to acquire when we’re in our late thirties or early forties. One other bone, the coccyx, or tailbone, showed surface features consistent with an age range of thirty-five to forty-five.

  But that was about all I could tell Kelleher for sure. I couldn’t even say whether she was Caucasoid, Negroid, or Mongoloid.

  “I wish we had a skull,” I told him.

  FIFTEEN MONTHS LATER I got my wish. On a cold October night in 1994, I stepped off a Delta flight onto the windy tarmac in Manchester, New Hampshire. Kelleher met me in the terminal, helped me collect my suitcase, then dropped me at a hotel in Concord, the state capital. The next morning he picked me up and took me to the crime lab in the basement of the New Hampshire State Police headquarters.

  Basements: Why are crime labs and morgues always in basements? Why not up on the top floor, with big corner windows looking out across the city or the countryside? Just because some of us like to look at bodies and bones, that doesn’t mean we wouldn’t appreciate a nice view out a window every now and then. But I’m getting sidetracked.

  A bit of good luck had finally come our way. A road crew clearing brush along a cul-de-sac in Alexandria a few days before had stumbled upon a plastic garbage bag tossed into the weeds. Inside was a human skull, along with a number of other bones. Some, including the skull, were slightly burned; others showed no signs of burning at all.

  A comparison of the teeth with dental X rays confirmed what Jim Kelleher had suspected for quite some time: the dead woman was Sheilah Anderson, a white female, age forty-seven, reported missing sixteen months earlier. Unable to contact her, Mrs. Anderson’s adult daughter had phoned the police in June of 1993, about two weeks before the first batch of burned bones was found; that’s why Kelleher had asked me to double-check the ME’s initial impression that the burned bones were from a dog. Sheilah’s husband, Jim Anderson, a former New York City police officer who had left the force under suspicious circumstances, told investigators that his wife had simply skipped out one day. She left, according to Anderson, for parts unknown.

  Sheilah’s daughter had doubted her stepfather’s story. So had the state police, particularly after Jim Anderson attempted suicide in the days after his wife’s disappearance. He was put in a hospital psychiatric ward for observation. On July 2, the day he was scheduled to be released, a trooper had accompanied Sheilah’s daughter to the house so she could get some clean clothes for Jim to wear home. While she was at the house, she decided to take a look around. Out back, at the edge of the woods, she found a burned tennis shoe that she recognized as her mother’s.

  The trooper then began looking around in earnest. In the front yard he’d noticed ashes from a brush pile Jim Anderson had burned a few weeks before. Sifting through the ashes, he began to find bone fragments—the 475 charred pieces that were the start of my skeletal jigsaw puzzle. At that exact moment, Jim Anderson arrived home from the psychiatric ward. When he saw the officer pulling bone fragments from the ashes, Jim began drinking hard and fast. Vodka, straight up.

  Ten days later, the police found the second batch of bones—the shaft of the femur, the deer tibia, and the vial of additional fragments—scattered in the woods near the burned sneaker. Then came the long wait—fifteen months—before the skull turned up. With the skull finally in hand, Kelleher no longer needed me to make a positive identification; the dental X rays had done that within hours after the highway crew found the garbage bag in the weeds. (A necklace of Sheilah’s was still fastened around the vertebrae, as if to erase any speck of doubt.)

  The mission that had brought me a thousand miles, to the basement of the New Hampshire State Police, was to shed whatever light I could on Sheilah Anderson’s manner of death. One look at the skull and I knew the trip was not going to be wasted. The back of the skull was burned, but not much. Halfway up, slightly to the right of the midline, was a round hole the size of a silver dollar. I’d seen holes like this many times before: they’re what’s left by a blow from a hammer swung with great force against the cranium. The blow not only punched out a disk of bone, it also sent fractures racing outward like lightning from the point of impact.

  On the inside of the blackened skull, surrounding the hole, was a dark, irregular stain: blood that had flowed from the wound, then cooked in the fire. The blood ruled out any possibility that the trauma to the skull had occurred when the garbage bag was
chucked into the weeds. Postmortem wounds don’t bleed once the blood has cooled and rigor mortis has set in. Sheilah Anderson was killed and then she was cooked.

  The face of the skull wasn’t burned, but it was broken: three of the upper front teeth had snapped off; the tips of both nasal bones were fractured; and the lower jaw was broken in three places. It was just the sort of trauma I’d expect to see in the face of a woman who got hit from behind with a hammer, then fell face-first onto a basement floor or a driveway.

  What I didn’t expect to see was the trauma in the other bones recovered from the roadside garbage bag. The fifth, sixth, and seventh cervical vertebrae showed cut marks from a large, sharp implement of some type. When I put the cervical (neck) and thoracic (chest) vertebrae together, aligned as they had been when she was alive, the damage was startling: an entire section of the spine had been cut loose from the ribs. The ribs on the right side had been severed close to the vertebrae; the left ribs had been cut farther from the spine, leaving stumps about two inches long. Most of the bones of the upper arms had been broken with violent force, and the legs had been cut from the pelvis at the hip joint.

  This skeletal jigsaw puzzle just went on and on. But I was making progress, I reminded myself: In fitting these new pieces into the old puzzle, I found that one of the unburned fragments—the proximal end of the radius (the “elbow” end of one of the forearm bones)—fit perfectly with a burned piece of radius I’d received in Corporal Kelleher’s first FedEx shipment. One of the new femur fragments fit perfectly with the femoral shaft recovered in the second batch, found in the woods behind the house. (That femoral shaft also yielded DNA that further corroborated the identification made from dental records.) So although some details remained confusing—very confusing—one thing had become crystal clear: All three sets of bone fragments, recovered from three different locations over the course of fifteen months, came from Sheilah Anderson, a woman whose husband claimed she had lit out for parts unknown.