Death's Acre

by William M. Bass

  Next time you’re sitting behind the wheel of your car, try an experiment: Invert your position so that your head is down by the gas pedal. Not easy, is it? I know, because I’ve tried it. Can you envision any scenario in which running off the road and into a ditch—without rolling the vehicle—could possibly shift you into that position? Taphonomically, this case just didn’t make sense.

  Taphonomy—the arrangement or relative position of the human remains, artifacts, and natural elements like earth, leaves, and insect casings—is one of the most crucial sources of information to a forensic anthropologist at a crime scene. Is there a greasy black stain surrounding the body or skeleton, indicating that the death and decomposition took place in the same spot, or is the ground clean and the vegetation healthy-looking, suggesting that the body was moved or dragged from another location? Are the bones within the clothing, or beside it? Is there a wasp nest in the skull, or a tree seedling growing up through the rib cage? All these things, and many more, are important pieces of the taphonomic puzzle; they can shed a lot of light on when or how someone died.

  In Madison Rutherford’s case, the taphonomy was topsy-turvy. If Rutherford had run off the highway, crashed in a ditch, and been killed or knocked unconscious by the impact, he would have burned up right where he sat, in the driver’s seat. Instead, the body had burned in a head-down position. Even if he wasn’t wearing a seat belt, any impact severe enough to cause death or unconsciousness would have triggered the air bag, and that would have limited his movement. The taphonomy was a red flag, a signal that something was fishy here.

  After bagging and labeling the cranial fragment, I searched the rest of the vehicle without finding any more bones or teeth. Except for missing that skull fragment, the medical examiner’s staff had done a thorough job of excavating the Suburban.

  Almost as significant as what we found in the vehicle was what we didn’t find. The bicycle Rutherford had bought was gone. On the one hand, its absence could indicate that Rutherford had made it to the dog breeder’s and given away the bicycle, as he’d said he planned to do. But on the other hand, there were no dog bones in the Suburban, either. So unless the dog had proved far more adept than the human at escaping the fire, there was a discrepancy between what should have been found and what actually was found. That was another clue.

  So was the fire damage to the vehicle. Aside from the fuel in the gas tank, a vehicle doesn’t have all that much flammable material in it: a little carpet, some upholstery, a fabric headliner. But this Suburban had burned with remarkable intensity, so fiercely that firefighters simply couldn’t extinguish the blaze. I’m no arson investigator, but I’ve excavated enough burned vehicles, and talked to enough arson experts, to have picked up some basic knowledge. Judging by the devastating damage to the vehicle, the amount of burning material in the Suburban—the “fuel loading,” as arson investigators call it—far exceeded the norm. That suggested that the fire was fed by an accelerant, and lots of it, much of it concentrated at the right rear corner of the vehicle, where the roof had collapsed from the intensity of the heat.

  There was one other red flag waving in the breeze above that ravaged Suburban. Supposedly, Rutherford had run off the freeway, gone into a ditch, and hit the embankment so hard that the vehicle caught fire. But there was almost no front-end damage, and Gibson, who had visited the scene of the accident, said the embankment was only slightly scraped or gouged at the point of impact. In short, the “crash” looked like something anyone could have walked away from—or pedaled away from.

  But back at the forensic center in downtown Monterrey, there were the bones: clear evidence that someone, presumably Madison Rutherford, had not walked away from the four-wheeled inferno.

  MONTERREY’S FORENSIC CENTER was a brand-new, sparkling-clean facility, even larger and more impressive than the Regional Forensic Center recently added to the University of Tennessee Medical Center back in Knoxville. When John Gibson and I arrived at the facility, we were met by a small delegation of Monterrey and Mexican government officials. I wasn’t quite sure who they all were, as everyone but me was speaking in Spanish, but thanks to Gibson’s fluent Spanish I soon found myself in a lab and ready to get down to work. Dr. Jose Garza, a member of the medical examiner’s staff, brought me the bones, teeth, and one other item excavated from the Suburban. All that remained of a once-robust man had been scooped up and sealed into a half-dozen or so small plastic bags.

  Not surprisingly, most of the bagged bones were calcined, meaning that the organic matter in them had burned completely. These calcined fragments were a lightweight, chalky, crumbly gray—exactly what I’d expect from a really intense fire. And yet, the medical alert bracelet found in the car—stainless steel with a caduceus in red enamel—looked remarkably undamaged. Remarkably unworn, too: its clasp was open.

  Any fire hot enough to calcine bone destroys the genetic material, so it’s not possible to extract a DNA sample from calcined bone and use it for identification. However, while most of these bones were calcined, not all were. The piece of skull I’d found, for example, would certainly yield enough DNA for a test; so would one or more of the four teeth recovered by the medical examiner. By comparing this DNA with a sample from one or both of Madison Rutherford’s parents, who were both still alive, we would be able to tell with almost absolute certainty if these were Rutherford’s burned bones. But we had a problem. According to Gibson, Rutherford’s parents hadn’t provided a sample.

  I have three sons, and if one of them was thought to be dead, I’d want to know, and with certainty, whether a body presumed to be his was actually his or not. I can’t imagine a parent—any parent—not wanting to know, regardless of the sadness that a positive identification would bring. The lack of DNA comparison samples was yet another red flag. By now this case was raising more red flags than a Chinese military parade.

  If we couldn’t harness modern DNA testing to confirm the identity of the burned corpse, we’d have to rely on old-fashioned physical anthropology: I’d have to learn the story from the bones. As I began reconstructing the skull, the plot quickly began to thicken. I expected to see cranial sutures that were beginning to fuse, especially on the inner surfaces, where ossification begins. They should still have been readily visible as dark, squiggly lines. Instead, the sutures were almost completely ossified, marked only by slight, barely perceptible ridges of smooth bone, like drywall seams that have been covered with joint compound. Other fragments attested to stout bones with highly developed muscle-attachment points and extensive signs of arthritis.

  “You said Rutherford was thirty-four?” I asked Gibson. He nodded.

  Four teeth had been recovered from the floorboard of the Suburban: three incisors and a second molar. There were no fillings in any of the teeth. That much, at least, was consistent with Rutherford’s dental records. But there were large, unfilled cavities in the two upper incisors—not the sort of thing one expects to see in the teeth of a wealthy financial adviser. The molar was extremely worn, almost like the teeth, which I’d seen in prehistoric graves, belonging to people whose lifelong diet of stone-ground grain had steadily ground down their teeth as well. The incisors bore two other striking features. They were shovel-shaped, square and flat, with a U-shaped rim on their inner side; and their worn edges indicated a classic type of bite.

  I called Gibson over and showed him the teeth. “You see that wear pattern? That’s called ‘occlusal wear,’ ” I said. “It’s caused by the teeth clacking and rubbing against each other. In this case, the edges of these upper teeth lined up almost exactly with the edges of the lower teeth; that’s known as an edge-to-edge bite. People of European descent don’t have that type of bite.”

  “Who does?” he asked.

  “People of Mongolian descent: Asians. Eskimos. Native Americans.”

  Gibson stared at me. “So what you’re telling me here is . . . ?”

  The puzzle pieces—th
e worn teeth, the invisible sutures—had all fallen into place, and the picture it showed me was not Madison Rutherford’s. “This isn’t a thirty-four-year-old Connecticut stockbroker,” I told Gibson. “This is a fifty- or sixty-year-old Mexican laborer.”

  A lot of money was riding on the identification of these burned bones. The Kemper Life policy had been issued just six months before the “accident,” and when Rutherford bought it, he told Kemper he was canceling the CNA coverage. Instead he was doubling up, and then some.

  By now it was obvious that Rutherford had neither died in an accident nor been ruthlessly murdered. He had elaborately faked his death. His tragic death was an elaborate hoax, a $7 million scam. On the basis of my findings, Kemper Life refused to pay the $4 million to Rutherford’s “widow,” Rhynie. In the delicate, formal language of the insurance industry, “the deceased was not the insured.”

  Rhynie sued Kemper; she also sued CNA, which was likewise balking at paying their $3 million. The forensic evidence was clearly on the side of the insurance companies. On the other side of the case, though, was a woman who had received a death certificate from Mexican authorities; she had cremated and scattered a portion of the remains, and she now lived conspicuously alone. Despite the scientific evidence, there was some risk that a jury might accept Rhynie’s version of the case: heartbroken widow is abused by heartless insurance companies. Both companies reached an out-of-court settlement with her, Kemper for a tiny fraction of the policy’s value, CNA for a larger but still modest sum.

  Meanwhile, Madison Rutherford—the living, breathing Madison Rutherford—had vanished into thin air, even more thoroughly than if he actually had burned to a crisp. And that, it seemed, was that. For a while.

  I PUT AWAY my file on the faked death and got back to my real life. Gradually, out of the ashes of grief after Annette’s sudden death, happiness had emerged once more. I owe a big debt of gratitude to my youngest son, Jim, for that turn of events. He was visiting from Atlanta one day during the sad months after Annette died, and I had told him how lonely I was. Out of the blue, Jim said (for it was a suggestion, not really a question), “Why don’t you marry Carol Lee?” It was one of those ideas whose brilliance, once it’s voiced, is patently obvious—the kind of idea that makes you say, “Why didn’t I think of that?”

  Carol Lee Hicks and I had grown up together in Virginia. She was younger than I was by nine years, but our town was small and our families were close, so we played together often. In fact, I remember playing with her one July day in 1944 at her grandmother’s house—a game of hide-and-seek, followed by some lively chicken-chasing. (In southern Virginia in 1944, you took your entertainment wherever you could find it.) Toward lunchtime, as we were running down the road to Carol’s father’s flour mill, she complained that her side and her leg hurt. “Oh, we’re almost there, don’t stop now,” I said. Then I looked at her, and something I saw made me say, “Okay, let’s sit on the bank here for a minute.”

  That afternoon Carol began running a fever; by the next day it had escalated into chills. Her doctor had just been reading a journal article about polio and quickly realized that Carol was in the early stages of the disease. By getting her to the hospital in Lynchburg right away, he probably saved her life.

  Carol walked into the hospital on her own; three days later, when her fever broke, she was already paralyzed from the waist down. She would spend seven or eight months in the hospital, and she wouldn’t walk again until early 1945. And she was one of the lucky ones.

  Polio has been virtually forgotten by now, but in the first half of the twentieth century, it was a plague of almost biblical proportions. Tens of thousands of innocent children and young adults were killed, crippled, or paralyzed. Polio, a powerful form of viral meningitis, cut a wide and ruthless swath through an entire generation of Americans.

  Carol quickly won the battle with the disease itself, but her struggle to overcome the damage it had done would prove lengthy and excruciating, requiring years of physical therapy and twelve complicated surgeries. In Virginia and Atlanta and Warm Springs, Georgia—where President Franklin D. Roosevelt had established a medical institute to help fellow polio victims—teams of doctors labored over Carol, transplanting healthy muscle onto withered limbs, stretching or cutting shrunken tendons, fusing together unstable anklebones. During my junior and senior years at the University of Virginia, I often visited Carol in the UVa hospital, where she began undergoing reconstructive surgeries at the age of thirteen.

  Over the years we stayed in close touch. At sixteen she was a bridesmaid at my wedding to Ann. Carol grew up, married a local boy, and had a son, Jeff. Later, she and her husband and Jeff spent two weeks one summer excavating Indian graves with us in South Dakota. Eventually she and her husband divorced and Carol went to work in an office full of doctors, where her positive attitude and wicked sense of humor kept the practice in high spirits. We saw her every time we went up to Virginia for a visit.

  And then Carol began coming down to Tennessee: As my mother’s health declined, Carol came down to help take care of her, and when Annette got cancer, Carol came down to help take care of her too. Now I was the one who needed taking care of. And then my son, Jim, bless his heart, posed that brilliant question to me: “Why don’t you marry Carol Lee?” And so I did. Life, shared with her, became worth living again.

  Carol has been informed that she is not, under any circumstances, allowed to die before I do. She assures me, with a twinkle in her eye, that I’ll go first. One way or another, I suspect she’s right about that. I just hope she doesn’t have some secret $7 million life-insurance policy on me tucked away somewhere.

  BOSTON’S NORTH END is a hip, high-tech, creative part of the city, filled with loft apartments, artists, and dot-com companies. In the fall of 2000, one of Boston’s hottest Web-design firms was Double Decker Studios, whose clients ranged from Boston’s mass-transportation agency to media giant America Online. The company’s reputation was soaring, and so was its cash flow.

  Thomas Hamilton was helping the budding young company manage its financial growth. He’d joined Double Decker a year or so before as its financial controller; his performance since then had put him in line for a major promotion, to chief financial officer. The job would carry a hefty salary and a hefty set of responsibilities.

  Kemper Life had hired a Connecticut private investigator named Frank Rudewicz to try to pick up Rutherford’s scent in New England. Meanwhile, a Massachusetts detective, Mike Garrigan, was investigating Thomas Hamilton. Everything checked out except for one odd little detail: Hamilton was driving a car registered to Rhynie Rutherford. When the detectives crossed paths and swapped notes, they found that the affairs of Rutherford and Hamilton intertwined with eerie coincidence. When they traded photos, they saw why: Thomas Hamilton was Madison Rutherford. After faking his death in Mexico, Madison had slipped back across the border, returned to New England, and been hired in another finance-related capacity under another name.

  That wasn’t all they dug up. Thomas Hamilton wasn’t the first alias Rutherford had employed. In fact, “Madison Rutherford” was an alias, or had been, for a number of years. The slippery scammer had been born “John Patrick Sankey”; he began using the name Madison Rutherford as early as 1986 to fabricate tax returns, obtain the mortgage on his five-acre estate, and purchase his life-insurance policies. It was only a few months before the trip to Mexico that he legally changed his name from Sankey to Rutherford, and then only after a passport application was rejected. Although he and Rhynie appeared to be living well, they were actually deep in debt: Madison had filed for bankruptcy, and the life-insurance scam was a desperate effort to dig himself out of a very deep hole.

  Detective Garrigan found one other helpful tidbit: Madison’s new life in Boston included at least two new girlfriends. When she learned this, Rhynie was no longer a grieving widow; now she was an angry, scorned woman.

 
Alerted by the detectives, the FBI moved swiftly. On the afternoon of November 7, 2000, as “Thomas Hamilton” left his office at Double Decker Studios, FBI agents swooped in and nabbed him. The U.S. government charged him with wire fraud for faking his death and attempting to defraud the insurance companies. With a mountain of evidence against him, including testimony from an embittered Rhynie, Rutherford pleaded guilty to fraud and received a five-year sentence, the maximum allowed. “This is one of the most serious crimes I’ve seen in this court,” the federal judge told him. “This is a crime that caused a lot of people a lot of pain.”

  The discovery that he was alive and well in Boston cleared up the mystery of Madison Rutherford’s fate and whereabouts. But another tantalizing mystery remains unsolved: Whose body was incinerated in that Chevy Suburban outside Monterrey in the predawn hours of July 12, 1998? One thing is certain: Rutherford didn’t just dig up some old skeleton from a handy roadside cemetery—the fracture patterns in the burned bones indicated that the body was fresh when it was burned. So the next question is: Where did Rutherford get a fresh body? Once she began cooperating, Rhynie told government officials that Madison said he’d broken into a cemetery mausoleum and stolen a corpse. If that’s really where he got it, I guess it’s lucky the crypt didn’t contain the remains of a thirty-something Caucasoid male. If it had, he might well have gotten away with it, and “Thomas Hamilton”—$7 million richer—might be living a life of luxury in some lavish Boston penthouse instead of doing time in a federal prison.

  CHAPTER 18

  The Bloody Beneficiary

  WHEN THE OUTCOME of a capital murder trial hinges on forensic anthropology, the pressure is excruciating. On the one hand, there’s the risk of helping send an innocent man to the gas chamber; on the other hand, there’s the very real possibility that a brutal killer might be set free. That high-stakes dilemma was brought home to me recently when I was called for help by a DA prosecuting one of the most cold-blooded murders I’ve ever confronted.