Death's Acre

by William M. Bass

  The call came in May of 1999 from the district attorney’s office in Magnolia, Mississippi, the county seat of Pike County. A young family had been brutally killed in the small neighboring town of Summit. A twenty-six-year-old man and his twenty-three-year-old wife had been stabbed repeatedly, and their young daughter had been strangled and possibly molested. Their bodies, bloody and badly decomposed, were found in a cabin outside of town on December 16, 1993. The prosecutor who called me, an assistant DA named Bill Goodwin, knew that the family had been murdered earlier that fall, but the question was, how much earlier? Just how long had they been dead before they were discovered? That was the quarter-million-dollar question.

  An accurate time-since-death estimate can make or break a murder case. The Zoo Man case had borne that out in a way I would never forget—and maybe never live down. Three of the four victims had obviously been killed while the suspect, “Zoo Man” Huskey, was at large. But the timing of the fourth death—that of Patricia Johnson, whose body I’d pronounced “too fresh for me” and turned over to the medical examiner—became a matter of hot dispute. If Johnson was killed after Huskey was arrested for the murder of Patty Anderson, then clearly Zoo Man had an ironclad alibi for one of those four Cahaba Lane murders, despite what his own confession and Neal Haskell’s entomological analysis said to the contrary.

  By May of 1999, I had been working forensic cases for more than forty years and conducting decomposition research for nearly half of that time. Since the Body Farm’s first research back in 1981—Bill Rodriguez’s pioneering entomological study—we’d done dozens of decomp studies, under a wide range of conditions. We hid corpses in the woods. We locked them in the trunks and backseats of cars. We buried them in shallow graves. We submerged them in water. Then we studied and documented everything that happened to them, from the moment of death right up until the time, weeks or months later, when nothing remained but bone. We were building a time-since-death database—the first and only one of its kind in the world—by charting the processes and timetable of human decomposition. My goal for the data was simple: Anytime a real-life murder victim was found, under virtually any circumstances or at any stage of decomposition, I wanted to be able to tell police—with scientific certainty—when that person was killed.

  By this time my graduate students and I had tracked the decomposition of more than three hundred corpses at the Body Farm. So when Bill Goodwin telephoned about a case in which time since death was crucial and asked if I could help, I felt pretty confident when I answered, “I believe I can.”

  But my confidence would be shaken, my credibility would be challenged, and events in the courtroom would surprise even me.

  THE ADULT VICTIMS in this case were named Darryl and Annie Perry. Their daughter, just four years old, was named Krystal. The fact that the case was coming to trial nearly six years after the murders had occurred told me that this must be a difficult case.

  The police had identified and charged a suspect; that wasn’t the problem. Circumstantial evidence linked him with the crime; he even had a clear motive. But no hard, irrefutable evidence linked him to the murders: no smoking gun or contaminated knife, no bloody fingerprints, no eyewitness testimony. What’s more, he had a strong alibi for two entire weeks before the bodies were found. That’s why time since death would prove crucial at the trial: If the defense could convince the jury that the family was alive anytime during that two-week period, the suspect would go free.

  As far as anyone knew, the only witnesses to the killings, besides the killer, were the three dead people. I would have to learn the truth from the Perrys themselves. But how? By the time I got the call, the bodies had long since been buried, and the cabin where they were found had been cleaned up and sold. Photographs and notes were all that remained to tell the story of how this young family was killed and, more to the point, when they were killed. And so I asked Goodwin to send me every picture he had of the crime scene, especially detailed photographs of the victims’ bodies. As I hung up the phone, I hoped I could find enough forensic evidence in those photos to do my job.

  Two days later the prints arrived by UPS and I tore open the envelope. It didn’t take long to realize that something didn’t add up. And if I noticed it, I could be pretty sure the defendant’s lawyer, or at least his own forensic consultants, would notice it too.

  Half of the forensic picture was clear and unambiguous. The photos showed the bodies of Darryl, Annie, and Krystal to be grotesquely bloated. It was a familiar sight to me, one I’d seen hundreds of times before. By the time the bodies were found, bacteria were well along the way to liquefying the internal organs, starting in the stomach and intestines. As the bacteria digested the soft tissue, they released gases that inflated the bellies like balloons. Beneath and around the bodies was a dark, greasy stain caused by volatile fatty acids being released during the breakdown of the tissues. The hair was beginning to slough off their heads in the characteristic, unified mass we call the “hair mat.”

  The photos of Krystal were among the most poignant I’ve ever seen. Krystal’s nudity underscored how young, how small, and how defenseless she was. Her genital region was badly decomposed. It wasn’t known whether she had been sexually molested, according to the autopsy report, the soft tissues were too far gone to tell. In any case, the image was certainly one of brutal violation.

  The average person would look at such pictures, think My God, what a horrible scene, then turn away as quickly as possible. For me it’s a completely different experience. Don’t get me wrong: I abhor death—I’ve lost two wives to cancer, and those ordeals have made me hate death and despise funerals. When I’m studying a crime scene, though, I never regard it as a death; to me, it’s strictly a case. Everything I see and smell is a source of data, a possible key to discovering the truth. I once worked a case involving a house fire in which several young children had burned to death. It wasn’t their charred bodies that upset me; it was the glimpse of a tricycle and a few other toys scattered in the yard outside: reminders of the life that had been snuffed out by the fire.

  As I studied the photos from the Perry murder scene, I checked for skin slippage, exposed bone, hair loss, and insect activity to see how long the family had been dead. Like every case, it was a scientific puzzle, and I began trying to fit all the pieces together. By zooming in on each individual piece of that puzzle, figuratively and literally, I was assembling a chronology of events. At the same time, I was shielding myself from the horror portrayed by the picture as a whole.

  During decades of research at the Body Farm, I had learned that the events of decomposition occur in a consistent and highly predictable sequence. It’s the same in murders anywhere in the world, any time of the year. It doesn’t vary—not the sequence, that is. What does vary, and dramatically, is the timing. And the main variable that affects timing is temperature.

  On one level that’s just plain common sense, of course: a warm body’s going to decompose faster than a cold one. I used to tell my students, “That’s why you keep meat in the refrigerator, not in your kitchen cabinet.” Higher temperature speeds up the work of bacteria as a body putrefies. It also promotes greater insect activity. Bugs, like people, prefer to picnic in the summertime. But to take things from the level of common sense to the level of scientific precision took us years of research into decomposition rates, and how those rates vary with temperature and humidity. Eventually we derived a mathematical formula that quantified all our observations. That formula, coupled with crime scene weather data, allowed us to calculate time since death no matter how the temperatures varied.

  The key was a unit of measure called “accumulated degree days,” or ADDs: simply put, the running total of the average daily temperature. For example, ten consecutive 70-degree days in summertime would total 700 ADDs; so would 20 wintertime days averaging 35 degrees apiece. In either season, winter or summer, a body at 700 accumulated degree days would exhibit similar
signs of decomposition: bloating, “marbling” (distension and scarlet coloration of the veins), skin slippage, and leaching of volatile fatty acids. In our experiments at the Body Farm, we measured ADDs forward in time from the moment of death, noting what stage of decomp corresponded to a given number of ADDs. In an actual forensic case, we performed that same process in reverse, backtracking through the crime scene weather data until we reached the date when the ADDs corresponded with the actual state of decay of a body discovered at a crime scene.

  In this case, the crime scene photos showed me that the Perry bodies were moving into the advanced stage of decomposition, in which bloating subsides and the tissues undergo most of their breakdown and liquefaction. In my best judgment the decomposition of the Perrys’ bodies indicated they were at approximately 800 ADDs. The next step was to learn what sort of weather they’d had in Mississippi during the weeks before the bodies were found.

  I asked Bill Goodwin to send me Magnolia’s temperature readings for the months of November and December. Those numbers indicated that it had been a pretty chilly fall. On eight separate nights between mid-November and mid-December, the temperature had dropped to freezing or below. Backtracking in time and temperature, I concluded that the family had been killed somewhere between twenty-five and thirty-five days before they were found.

  But there was one thing that didn’t quite fit with that picture: the maggots. The bodies were covered with maggots, the larvae of blowflies. Just as bacteria consume a body from the inside out, blowflies start on the outside and eat their way in. Between the microscopic bugs and the macroscopic ones, nature is extremely efficient at reclaiming us: during a hot Tennessee summer, a fresh body can be reduced to bare bone in as little as two weeks. A swarm of maggots covered the faces of Darryl and Annie. Much of the flesh was gone, exposing their skulls beneath. The maggots were also massed at a number of other locations, which corresponded to the autopsy’s findings of knife wounds—and therefore blood.

  Blowflies love blood. They can smell it miles away. If there’s a lot of blood and the weather’s warm, they can converge on a body by the thousands. They feed and they lay eggs, which can hatch into maggots just a few hours later.

  Darryl had defensive wounds on his hands as well as the fatal wounds to his chest and abdomen. Annie had eight stab wounds in various parts of her body. All of these showed intense maggot activity. So did Krystal’s genitals—just the sort of dark, moist opening the insects like. The rest of her body was not as badly decomposed as her parents’, and for two reasons: Being much smaller and slimmer than her parents, she would naturally decompose more slowly, a phenomenon we observed many times in our studies at the Body Farm. And because she was strangled, rather than stabbed, there was no blood, so she was less appealing to the flies and maggots.

  Some of the maggots I saw in the crime scene photos were a half-inch long, a stage entomologists call the “third instar”; in plain language, that means they were fully mature and close to metamorphosing into pupae and then adult flies. That told me that the maggots had hatched from eggs laid approximately two weeks before. I knew that because of studies we did at the Body Farm in the 1980s. A Ph.D. student of mine, Bill Rodriguez, spent months studying the order and the timing of insect activity in human corpses.

  But no matter how closely I looked—with my naked eye and with a magnifying glass—the one thing I didn’t see in the photos was a single empty pupa casing. This complicated things. The state of decomposition indicated to me that the Perrys had been killed in mid-November. But the maggots—and the absence of pupa casings—suggested that the murders had occurred around December 2. And the suspect—the defendant—had an alibi from December 2 onward. The prosecution had its work cut out for it. So did I.

  Goodwin had first called me on May 18. Two weeks later I made the ten-hour drive to Mississippi for the trial of the man suspected of murdering the Perry family.

  DARRYL, Annie, and Krystal Perry had lived in a New Orleans suburb called Marrero; so did Darryl’s mother, Doris Rubenstein, and her husband, Michael, a cabdriver. In the early 1990s, Michael—Mike—had bought a small cabin 120 miles north, in Summit (elevation 431 feet), as a place for quiet weekend getaways. In November of 1993 the Perrys went up to stay there.

  On November 5, 1993, Mike drove them to the cabin and dropped them off. The young couple was having marital problems, they told relatives, and needed some privacy to work things out. They would have plenty of privacy in Summit, all right: Besides the main highway bisecting it, the town has only a few paved streets, and the sidewalks get rolled up at sunset. The cabin didn’t even have a telephone.

  Mike drove back to Summit twice in November to see if they were ready to go home. But both times he found the cabin dark and locked, and he’d forgotten to bring his spare key with him. On his second visit, he reported, a neighbor said the Perrys had gotten into a rusty brown van and driven away with two men who looked suspicious, like drug dealers. Nobody had seen them since. Finally, on December 16, he returned again, this time with a duplicate key. Entering the cabin, he found Darryl and Annie lying dead on the living-room floor and Krystal’s body sprawled on a bed.

  Mike went to the nearest phone—at a convenience store a quarter-mile down the road—and called the Pike County Sheriff’s Department. When a deputy arrived, he found Mike out back, behind the cabin. “They’re in there,” he told the deputy. “They’re dead. Their eyes are gone.”

  Right after the deputy came a Mississippi Highway Patrol officer named Allen Applewhite, who would become the lead investigator in the case. Applewhite was shocked by what he saw in the cabin. The bodies were badly decomposed, and the stench of rotting flesh was overpowering. The corpses of Darryl and Annie were bloated and soaked with blood. Krystal was lying on her back, naked, her face and genitals already consumed by maggots. Applewhite had two daughters himself. He was haunted by the image of this young girl, slaughtered for no apparent reason.

  But it didn’t take him long to find a possible reason—and a shocking suspect. Twenty-four hours after his 911 call to police, Michael Rubenstein filed a life-insurance claim for a quarter of a million dollars. The person insured was Krystal, Mike Rubenstein’s four-year-old granddaughter.

  When he learned of the policy, Applewhite wasted no time getting a copy of it. Mike and Doris had taken out the $250,000 policy in September of 1991, when Krystal was two years old. As he scanned the fine print on the policy, Applewhite read something that made his blood run cold. The policy had a two-year waiting period for benefits. Barely three months after the policy’s death benefit could be collected, Krystal was dead. As any good detective will tell you, when there’s money involved in a crime, you follow the trail of money. That trail, short and straight, led to Michael and Doris Rubenstein.

  It seemed unlikely that a woman would be involved in the killing of her own son and granddaughter. But the police had to consider that possibility. What Applewhite learned about Doris Rubenstein didn’t fit with the image of a cold-blooded killer. Doris wasn’t a particularly admirable specimen of motherly love and grandmotherly nurture. Her main love seemed to be alcohol and pills. Often she seemed woozy, drunk, or drugged—a woman who was incompetent, maybe even pathetic, yet probably not a menace to anyone except herself.

  But as the state trooper investigated Doris’s husband, Michael, a far different picture emerged: a picture of a man who was competent, shrewd, and deadly. Rubenstein had a long history of insurance fraud, including suspicious fire-insurance claims, staged automobile accidents, and faked injuries involving a large cast of characters. One chilling case years before unfolded in front of a twelve-year-old boy named Darryl Perry, the son of Rubenstein’s girlfriend at the time, Doris Perry.

  The year was 1979. Rubenstein had just taken on a new business partner named Harold Connor. The two men first met when Rubenstein contacted the local unemployment office, asking for the names of job-seekers who might l
ike to help him produce and distribute a tabloid listing local television schedules. Because he would teach Connor the ropes—and because he was taking a chance by hiring an inexperienced partner—he demanded that Connor take out a life-insurance policy naming Rubenstein as the beneficiary. The value placed on Connor’s life was $240,000.

  The policy was issued in August of 1979. Three months later Rubenstein invited Connor on a deer-hunting trip. Connor declined: He had never been hunting before, and had even told relatives he hated the idea of killing animals. But Rubenstein insisted. To keep peace with his new partner, Connor finally agreed to go. On a cold November morning, they drove to Evangeline Parish, Louisiana, parked on Lone Pine Road, and hiked into the woods. Also on the hunt were another of Doris’s sons, David Perry; a man named Michael Fornier, who had recently been paroled from federal prison; and young Darryl.

  Connor returned from his first and only hunting trip in a body bag. The story told by Rubenstein and the others painted a classic picture of a tragic hunting accident: As Fornier clambered over a fallen log, his 12-gauge shotgun slipped from his grasp. When the butt of the gun hit the ground, it discharged. Connor, who was directly in front of Fornier, was hit squarely in the back. The blast ripped through his chest and shredded his heart.

  Rubenstein told the story to game wardens and then to the police; then he told it to a claims representative for Mutual of New York, which had issued the $240,000 policy. But the insurance company delivered some bad news to Rubenstein: the death benefit wasn’t in effect yet. Like many life-insurance policies, this one had a two-year waiting period. Connor’s death had jumped the gun, so to speak, by twenty-one months.