Death's Acre

by William M. Bass

  The house is a small frame structure, maybe a three-bedroom rancher; out front stands an antique Esso gas pump. Just beyond the house is a wooden privacy fence. In this respect, as in many others, it turns out, the Tri-State grounds bear a striking resemblance to the Body Farm. The chief difference is intent: At the Body Farm, we let bodies decompose only because there’s no other way to advance this particular frontier of science. It may sound contradictory, but we hold those decomposing bodies in the highest respect for their unique contribution to forensic research and the quest for killers.

  Tri-State’s fence encloses two large, barnlike buildings, a tiny hut of an office, and a garagelike building with a rusty metal stack jutting up from one end, where the crematorium is located. The larger buildings contain concrete and metal burial vaults; four months before my visit, those vaults had been stuffed with decaying bodies. Now they were empty.

  Off to one side of the buildings, at the edge of the woods, I noticed a broken-down hearse resting on flat tires, rusting in the shade. Opening the door, I caught a foul whiff of decomposition; I later learned that a body had been riding in the back for many months, until the property was raided in February. Nearby stood a mobile home, with another junky hearse parked in front; beside the trailer was a commercial-size barbecue grill, which raised some interesting questions—or simply underscored the irony of the crematorium’s nonperformance.

  The crematorium building contained virtually nothing but the cremation furnace itself, a massive, industrial-looking oven built mainly of blackened firebrick. At the rear of the furnace, the secondary combustion chamber, which burned any organic material not consumed in the main chamber, looked rusted through in several places, as did the flue above it.

  Sliding up the furnace door, I peered inside the main chamber with a flashlight. There wasn’t a body inside, I was relieved to see, just walls, a ceiling, and a floor of heat-resistant firebrick and concrete, much of it cracking and crumbling. The floor at the base of the furnace was blackened, greasy, and littered with dirt, gravel, and at least one small, unburned human vertebra—a child’s—missed by the GBI and the D-MORT team in their sweep of the property.

  I was not the only one who came to inspect Tri-State on this hot summer day. Today was designated a “discovery day” for all the plaintiffs filing suit against Tri-State, the Marsh family, and various funeral homes. All the lawyers involved, for both the plaintiffs and the various defendants, brought in their expert witnesses to inspect the facility. Several former students of mine came over to say hello. One of them, Tom Bodkin, works for the Chattanooga medical examiner; another, Tony Falsetti, teaches anthropology at the University of Florida. I also spotted Michael Baden, a prominent forensic pathologist from New York City, accompanied by a New York forensic dentist. The concentration of forensic firepower in Noble was remarkable.

  My visit was cut short when Tom Bodkin, from Chattanooga, stooped down in the driveway area and began to point out human bones—unburned human bones—lying in the dirt. A local sheriff’s deputy, standing watch over all the lawyers and scientists, radioed headquarters for instructions. Seal off the site, the reply came crackling back. He herded us all off the property, and within minutes a caravan of sheriff’s cruisers and black GBI sedans arrived, looking appropriately like some forensic funeral procession. I’d already seen enough of Tri-State and its cremation furnace by this point anyway. I could see what kind of shape the equipment was in, and it sure didn’t look like it had been regularly serviced by its manufacturer.

  THE GENERAL MOTORS of the cremation industry is a Florida company with the particularly uninformative name Industrial Equipment and Engineering Company, or IEE. In the summer of 2001, some nine months before the Noble story first came to light, I visited IEE’s factory in Apopka, a small town outside Orlando.

  The IEE Power-Pak is the company’s workhorse cremation furnace. Unlike a funeral-home coffin, which is mainly about elegance and show, a cremation furnace is clearly a product of heavy industry, not built for public viewing. With its drop-front door open, the Powerpack looks like a triple-deep, heavy-duty version of the oven in which Hansel and Gretel nearly became gingerbread. The floor is flat, the top is arched, and the entire vault, stretching some eight ominous feet from door to back wall, is lined with firebrick or refractory (heat-resistant) concrete.

  Bodies generally arrive by hearse; at most crematoriums, the hearse backs up to a garage door, and the body, in its cardboard shipping box, is pulled onto a gurney, which is wheeled up to the furnace door. It’s a simple, one-person operation to slide the box from the gurney into the furnace, then close the door and fire up the gas.

  The first step is to switch on a powerful fan, which forces a steady draft of air through the oven—the “primary chamber,” it’s called—and then out through an exhaust stack. Once the fan is running, the operator sets a timer that controls the length of the burn. The timer also controls a gas valve and a sparking ignition device, much like the ones found in residential gas ranges.

  The first burner to ignite is called the “afterburner.” Located at the rear of the furnace, it’s a small burner that does double duty. First it slowly preheats the interior, to minimize heat stress and cracking in the firebrick. During the cremation itself, it burns any uncombusted gases before they go up the stack.

  Once the furnace is preheated, a low-intensity burner, the “ignition burner,” kicks on in the roof of the furnace, its flame directed downward. The ignition burner’s only job is to incinerate the cardboard carton or the body bag containing the corpse. Cardboard catches fire at around 500 degrees Fahrenheit; engulfed by the flame shooting down onto it, the carton catches fire within seconds.

  Several minutes later the cardboard has been reduced to ash, and the cremation of the body itself can begin. Now a more powerful burner, the cremation burner, blasts downward onto the body. In most cases the furnace’s temperature stays somewhere between 1,600 and 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit; extremely obese bodies, however, can burn at much higher temperatures, up to 3,000 degrees.

  IEE builds its furnaces tough to survive those kinds of conditions. The company also offers annual inspections, cleaning, thermostat calibration, and repairs at the customer’s request. Most facilities request at least one inspection and calibration a year. In twenty years, I heard, Tri-State never requested a single inspection or cleaning. Reportedly, the only visit an IEE technician ever made to Tri-State was when the GBI asked the company to come verify or refute Brent Marsh’s claim that he’d fallen behind in his work because the furnace was broken. According to the IEE technician, the furnace fired right up.

  ON SEPTEMBER 3, 2002, the day after Labor Day, one of Chigger Harden’s relatives got a phone call from Greg Ramey, the GBI agent heading the Tri-State investigation. Samples of DNA from the 339 corpses recovered from Tri-State had been analyzed at the Air Force DNA laboratory in Maryland. The lab compared the GBI’s samples with known genetic material donated by relatives or obtained from medical offices. Some of Chigger’s relatives had given blood samples, but as it turned out, they needn’t have: a tissue sample from Chigger’s autopsy remained on file at an area hospital.

  Agent Ramey called to say that a DNA match indicated that Chigger’s body was one of the 339 corpses found on the grounds of the crematorium back in February. Designated by the GBI as body number 218, he had lain decaying in the Georgia woods for nearly two years. Since February he’d been in a cold-storage facility set up by the GBI near Noble. What, Ramey wanted to know, would the family like done with the body now?

  The Hardens still wanted the body cremated, in accordance with Chigger’s wishes. First, though, they wanted to be absolutely sure it was Chigger. Bill Brown, their attorney, asked me to examine the body, and he arranged to have it delivered to a place where the examination and cremation could be done in swift succession.

  One crisp October afternoon I arrived at a small, neat building tha
t houses the East Tennessee Cremation Company, located at the edge of an industrial park near the Knoxville airport. A few minutes later Bill Brown arrived, along with his assistant, Lisa Scoggins, and his son, Andy, who would photograph and videotape the body and my examination, so there would be a visual record for their legal case.

  The crematorium’s manager, Helen Taylor, ushered me into the garage area, which housed two IEE cremation furnaces, both of them spotless. In front of one was a gurney, and on it was a white body bag. Unzipping it, I found that the body was mostly skeletonized, though bits of tissue remained here and there. Beside the skull, though no longer attached, was the hair mat: long, thick brown hair, just like the shoulder-length brown hair depicted in the photo of Chigger that Lisa had brought.

  The body was nude; the clothes had been removed by the GBI and put in a separate plastic bag. Leaf litter and pine needles were scattered through the remains and the clothing, suggesting that the body had been lying outdoors for quite some time. The absence of dirt in the nasal passages and ears told me that the body had never been buried. Here and there, I found small bits of rotting cardboard, as well as a handful of dead dermestid beetles, sometimes called hide beetles or carpet beetles, which like to nibble dried flesh off bones.

  The skeleton was largely intact; the lower jaw and the bones of the lower right leg and foot were missing, though, probably carried off by scavengers. I studied the skull. It was large and broad, with a heavy brow ridge and an unusually prominent bump at the base of the skull, the external occipital protuberance. Any student in my osteology class would have had no trouble telling this was a male. The teeth were vertical, rather than jutting forward, so the skull was clearly Caucasoid, and the cranial sutures showed a degree of fusion typical of a man in his forties. Nothing in the skeletal material contradicted the GBI’s identification.

  The DNA sample had come from a piece of bone taken from the middle of the left femur. Brown asked me to obtain another bone sample, so an independent DNA lab could cross-check the government’s results. I unpacked the Stryker autopsy saw I’d brought from the anthropology department and plugged it in.

  A Stryker saw is an ingenious tool. It can chew through a femur in a matter of seconds but can also buzz against a child’s forearm without even breaking the skin. The secret is that its fine teeth, about the size of those on a hacksaw blade, oscillate back and forth in tiny strokes, just a sixteenth of an inch long. Bearing down on rigid material, such as a corpse’s bones or a child’s plaster cast, the teeth take rapid little bites. Pressing lightly on the skin, though, the teeth merely wiggle the skin back and forth, maybe producing a tickle and a giggle.

  I cut into the femur right beside the notch left by the GBI’s Stryker saw; it took less than a minute to notch out a quarter-cylinder about two inches long and an inch wide. I gave this to Brown for shipment to the independent DNA lab. As one final precaution, I bagged and gave him a finger bone, too, in case a third test should someday seem necessary.

  Next I opened the plastic bag of clothes tucked down at the foot of the body bag. The body itself wasn’t too smelly, but the clothes reeked of decomp and ammonia. Despite their rotting and stained fabric, a pair of blue jeans was easily recognizable. The shirt was also crumbling, but it looked to be red and green plaid. According to Lisa, the Harden family had asked the funeral home to dress Chigger in his favorite outfit, jeans and a plaid shirt.

  If we were lucky, we would find one final piece of identifying material accompanying Chigger’s body: the bullet his brother had fired into his chest more than twenty-five years earlier. It would be difficult and time consuming to search the remains for it now; I decided my chances of finding it might be better after the cremation, when I could sift through the ashes.

  As the sun sank low over the red- and gold-leafed Tennessee hills outside, I folded the white body bag back over the moldy skeleton; with a quick push, the bag slid deep into the furnace. Helen Taylor slid the door upward, latched it in place, and switched on the fan. Seconds later I heard a soft whump as the gas ignited.

  The next morning dawned foggy and cold. Back inside the garage at the East Tennessee Cremation once more, I felt the heat still radiating from the furnace’s masonry. The cremation had taken only a couple of hours, but the body had remained overnight in the furnace so I could examine the burned bones in situ. Sliding the furnace door open, I peered inside the long, dark chamber with a flashlight. The bones inside still clearly outlined a human skeleton. The long bones of the arms and legs were fractured but intact, as was the pelvic structure; the crumbling remnants of a rib cage still sketched the framework of a chest. Most recognizably human of all was the skull. As soon as I touched it, it broke into small pieces.

  Using a long-handled broom and a large dustpan, Helen Taylor scooped up the bone fragments and ashes, then spread them on a worktable beneath a vented exhaust hood so I could sift through them. Lurking amid the bone shards and the soft, ashy material were dozens of rusty steel staples; two years before, they had held together the cardboard container in which the body had arrived at Tri-State. Helen handed me a large, heavy magnet and showed me how to drag it through the cremains, trolling for staples.

  The weight of the magnet was enough to crush all but the largest pieces of bone; in their lightness and fragility the fragments resembled the airy and brittle meringue cookies made by baking beaten, sweetened egg whites. Tiny blobs of an amorphous, glasslike material were scattered throughout the cremains, possibly left by melted buttons or other artifacts from the clothing that was burned along with the body. As I continued to sift and stir the material, sorting out pieces that were obviously not human cremains, I strained for a glimpse of a bullet or, more precisely, a melted blob of lead, something that might once have been a bullet. I saw nothing that looked even close.

  The final stage in the cremation process was to pulverize the remaining pieces of bone. Some of the Tri-State cremains I’d analyzed had contained large bone fragments; news reports had indicated that the Marshes had used a wood chipper or simply a large board to break up large fragments. So I’d done an experiment in cremains processing myself, on another set of cremains I’d received from Bill Brown: I’d put some of the burned bones down in Carol’s blender, an old Hamilton Beach model, and switched it on. A terrible clatter and chatter ensued, some of it from the blender, some of it from Carol. (You’d think I’d have learned, after buying two new stoves for Ann, not to use my household appliances for research. Needless to say, the kitchen counter soon acquired a new blender, and the contaminated one was banished to the garage.)

  East Tennessee Cremation Services had a much more sophisticated way of pulverizing burned bones: an IEE processor, which looked a lot like a soup kettle grafted on top of a garbage disposal, but cost a whopping $4,000. Helen put the cremains in the kettle and covered the top with a heavy lid, then flipped a switch. The fragments were gone in sixty seconds, reduced to a grainy powder. Then she poured the processed cremains into a plastic bag positioned inside a rectangular plastic case—they fit, but just barely—sealed the bag tightly with a plastic cable tie, and handed the box to me. I now held in my hands what the Harden family believed they had received more than two years before. I placed the container in the backseat of my truck and headed home.

  The initial, bogus cremains of Chigger Harden had weighed in at 3.6 pounds, less than half what my measurements of one hundred sets of cremains had shown to be the average weight of cremains from males. The cremains I had with me now, on the other hand, were a testament to a burly farmer’s frame: including the weight of the bag (but not the plastic box), they tipped the scales at 8.1 pounds, probably pretty close to what he’d weighed back when he first came into this world. After weighing the cremains, I opened the bag and filled a clean plastic film canister with a sample, then resealed the bag. I sent this sample, like the others, to Galbraith Laboratories.

  When the results came back, I was s
urprised: the cremains contained 5 percent silicon, roughly ten times what I’d expected. Perhaps all that silicon came from soil clinging to the body or the clothing, or perhaps some of it was bits of the furnace’s concrete lining flaking off. Another cremains sample, which Galbraith analyzed at the same time, contained just 0.5 percent silicon, which was much closer to the human body’s normal ratio. As usual, a piece of research had raised as many questions as it had answered. But the fundamental question had been answered pretty conclusively by now: We had a positive DNA identification from the GBI and the Air Force; we had an anthropological examination of the skeletal remains, which were consistent with Chigger’s age, race, sex, and hair length and color; we had clothing that matched; and we had independent corroboration from the commercial DNA lab that tested the piece of bone I’d cut from the femur with the Stryker saw.

  There was one loose end that still nagged at me, one unanswered question that still kept me from laying this case to rest. I climbed into my truck and headed for UT. Displaying my TBI badge conspicuously on the dashboard, I parked in an illegal spot (the only kind I could find) and walked into the radiology department in the basement of UT’s student clinic. Over the years the technicians and physicians there have been unfailingly gracious and accommodating about my occasional requests to have odd things x-rayed. They seem to find it interesting; they also seem to appreciate the fact that I don’t bring them decomposing bodies to x-ray: I get those scanned with a portable machine on the loading dock at UT Medical Center.

  From a cardboard box I was carrying, I took out two flat plastic bags, roughly a foot square, into which I had divided Chigger’s cremains. Spread to a uniform thickness, the cremains formed a square layer about an inch thick in each bag.

  The radiology technician stepped behind her lead shield and opened the shutter. The first negative she brought me was almost clear, indicating that it was badly underexposed; apparently she’d overcompensated for the thinness of the sample. Her second exposure was right on the money: The ground-up bone fragments appeared in many shades of gray; dozens of tiny white toothlike objects dotted the image—metal teeth from the zipper of the bag in which the body had arrived from Georgia and been cremated.