The Best American Crime Writing

by Otto Penzler

  One of the central questions in any homicide investigation is How long has the victim been dead? In cop speak, the answer is “time since death,” or TSD. Once detectives know the TSD, they can establish a timeline of the victim’s final hours and minutes, which can lead to the murderer—or at the very least, to the last person who saw the victim alive. When a body is found within hours of a crime, a medical examiner performs an autopsy, studies the soft tissue and organs, and fairly easily determines the time and cause of death. But when a body is not found until days or weeks or months later and it has begun to decompose or has decomposed entirely—leaving behind bugs and bones—investigators turn to the Body Farmers. Marks and his colleagues have been so effective at helping cops solve otherwise unsolvable homicides that now the FBI sends agents here for a week every year for what amounts to a Death 101 class.

  Standing over the dead woman, Marks points to what could be mistaken for varicose veins, and he slips into forensic investigator mode. “Death is a process,” he says. “She was pronounced dead, but that body is still doing stuff. That marbling on her legs is something we see happening in the vascular system; it means the environment reached a certain temperature, and knowing that I can determine TSD.” The formula, he explains, goes like this: Marbling occurs at about 400 degrees. Divide that number by the average daily temperature, which lately in Tennessee has been in the fifties, and there you have it. The woman has been dead about eight days. In another two weeks, when the body will have been exposed to 1,200 degrees, flesh will give way to bone. “If this were a crime scene,” Marks says, “the first question I would be asked is ‘Hey, Doc, how long has she been dead?’ And from all the research we’ve done here, I would be able to give an answer.”

  It was one of the most cold-blooded homicides Mississippi had ever seen. On December 16, 1993, Pike County police got a call from a Michael Rubenstein. The 47-year-old reported that he had just arrived at his cabin in the woods outside the town of Summit and found the bodies of his stepson, 24-year-old Darryl Perry; Perry’s 20-year-old wife, Annie Marie; and the couple’s 4-year-old daughter, Crystal.

  Police and an investigator from the Mississippi Highway Patrol rushed to the scene. They covered their mouths, fought through the stench and flies inside the closed-up cabin, and were horrified by what they saw. Darryl’s and Annie Marie’s bodies were on the bloodstained linoleum floor. Crystal’s corpse was on a mattress atop a blood-soaked bedspread. The family had decomposed to the point of being partially mummified. Their faces were covered with maggots. Three days later, a medical examiner determined that the two adults had been stabbed and the girl had been strangled.

  Rubenstein told police that the Perrys had been having marital problems and he had loaned them his cabin as a place to work things out. He said he had driven the Perrys from their home in New Orleans to the cabin in early November. When no one heard from them for a couple of weeks, Annie Marie’s mom became concerned and Rubenstein “volunteered” to check on them. Rubenstein, a taxicab driver who was also from New Orleans, said the cabin had been empty when he visited on November 16 and November 27.

  Other than the bodies, the killer left no physical evidence. Nevertheless, the highway patrol investigator was troubled by Ruben-stein’s story. Why, the detective wondered, didn’t Rubenstein report the Perrys missing when he had twice checked on them and found them missing?

  The investigator discovered that in August 1991, Rubenstein had applied for a $250,000 life insurance policy on Crystal. New York Life had rejected that application because Rubenstein’s stepson was not married to Annie Marie; therefore he had no “insurable interest” in the girl. Then, within weeks of the rejection, Darryl and Annie Marie wed, Darryl adopted Crystal, and Rubenstein successfully reapplied to New York Life.

  What’s more, investigators learned that in 1979, Rubenstein took out a $240,000 insurance policy on a business partner; three months later, that partner was fatally shot in the back during a hunting-trip accident that included Rubenstein and Darryl Perry.

  Five years after the homicide, in September 1998, the state police investigator persuaded the DA’s office to present the facts to a grand jury. Rubenstein was indicted on three counts of murder. He was facing a death sentence. The prosecution’s star witness was Murray Marks’s mentor, William M. Bass—the head of UT’s anthropology department, a nationally renowned forensic anthropologist, and the Ph.D. behind the Body Farm.

  Bass got the call on the Rubenstein case in May 1999, about a year after he retired from UT. For all of his twenty-one years with the university, he was the anthropology department head. Today he is a 73-year-old professor emeritus, still active in forensic anthropology. Matter of fact, on this quiet afternoon, as we sit in the kitchen of the Knoxville home he shares with his wife, Carol, and his beagle, Knox, Bass is waiting for a call from a neighboring county’s DA. A murderer whom Bass helped convict is before a judge asking for a new trial; Bass is on standby in the event the court again requires his testimony.

  In the meantime, Bass is showing me slides of the crime scene for that case—flashing on the wall of his kitchen the same gruesome images he once showed to a jury. The slide projector clicks, and there’s the decomposed headless corpse of an 18-year-old boy in the woods. Click, there’s the skull in a shallow creek bed. Click, a close-up of the skull. The kid was shot three times in the head. Near as Bass can recollect, the teen was “done in” for $300. Hunters found the body on a hill, whereas the skull was discovered in the creek at the base of the slope. As the body decayed, the skull came off and rolled down the hill.

  “Interesting thing about this case was the maggot activity,” Bass says as he rises from the kitchen table and walks over to the scene on the wall. “Maggots don’t like sunlight, so they ate all the flesh under the clothing. See that?” He points to the dark stains on the victim’s shirt and pants. “But they left the skin here”—he points to the dead boy’s arms below his shirtsleeves—“and here.” He points to the skin on the legs between the tattered sneaker and cuff of the jeans. “The maggots left an umbrella of flesh.”

  Bass is an owlish man with square glasses, a tan freckled face, and a buzz cut that he has kept high and tight since his days in the Korean War. He has a warm, gravelly southern drawl. Even though he’s talking about a brutal murder, he sounds as if he’s reading Winnie-the-Pooh.

  While Bass is standing in the light of the projector, the image of the decapitated kid washing over him, his wife hobbles into the kitchen. Carol grew up outside Lynchburg, Virginia, on a farm not far from where Bass spent much of his childhood. Now 64 years old, short with silver hair, she requires a cane to get around. Yet she possesses the effervescent personality of a 16-year-old southern debutante. “Lord, please,” she says, “make yourself right at home.” As she prepares us a lunch of chicken salad sandwiches and iced tea, I ask if the scene on the wall troubles her.

  “Oh no,” she says. “The only thing that bothers me—a deputy sheriff came here a few months ago with a skull he found that still had a little matter on it. And he put it on my nice tablecloth. They rolled it around. Back and forth. Of course I didn’t say anything. But it was one of my favorite tablecloths.”

  Bass chuckles and shrugs. The raised-eyebrow look on his face seems to say, “Betcha never thought an anthropologist would be doing that.”

  Anthropology is the study of human beings. Academia breaks the subject into archaeology, which focuses on man’s relics; cultural anthropology, which examines, well, our cultures; and physical anthropology, which is concerned with human bones. Forensic anthropology is an extension of physical anthropology.

  Bass discovered his passion for this anthropological niche accidentally. After the Korean War, he enrolled at the University of Kentucky, planning on getting his master’s in counseling. But at Kentucky, he ended up exhuming a dead woman and changed his plans.

  One hot April afternoon in 1955, the professor of an anthropology elective Bass was taking asked him if
he would like to go out on a forensic case. A lawyer had hired the prof to exhume a body and identify it. Shortly after the professor opened the muddy coffin, Bass puked, and soon after that he began working toward a master’s degree in physical anthropology. “The fact that you could take bones,” Bass says, “piece them together as if it were a puzzle and identify a body—that to me was exciting.”

  The UT campus is across the Tennessee River from the Body Farm. The anthropology department is buried in the bowels of the football stadium—Home of the Volunteers. The white cinder-block offices and classrooms used to be players’ dorms. Years ago, however, the Vols had a home built for them exclusively; the anthropologists took what they could get.

  The physical appearance of the department didn’t change much when Bass took over, but everything else improved quickly. Bass earned his master’s from Kentucky, did his doctoral thesis at the University of Pennsylvania, and then taught at two universities—Nebraska, then Kansas. All the while, he worked with authorities on forensic cases. Then, in 1971, UT asked him to run its anthropology department.

  By the time he came to UT, Bass was well-known in the forensic community. Soon after he arrived, the Tennessee medical examiner, Jerry Francisco, M.D., appointed him the state forensic anthropologist. With Francisco’s support, Bass began going to crime scenes rather than waiting for the cops to bring the remains to him. He didn’t want to miss any salient details.

  Many of the small towns Bass visited while working for the M.E.’s office didn’t have the resources to store more than two bodies at a time. Often, with the evidence gathered, cops began asking Bass if he could take the corpses. It occurred to the professor that the bodies would make excellent teaching aids. Modern skeletons are extremely hard to come by.

  Bass asked the UT dean for a place where he could lay the bodies to decompose and was given part of the university’s sow barn, out on the agricultural campus, a forty-minute ride from the main campus. Word of the farm spread, and soon unidentified homicide victims and indigents who died at local hospitals were being sent his way. As Bass’s forensic work gained publicity, people began bequeathing or otherwise donating bodies to the facility.

  Bass was happy with the research he and his students were doing—that is, until 1977. In a dug-up grave in a nearby county, police had found a coffin and a man’s body. The body was in good shape, which puzzled police, as the cemetery hadn’t been used for more than a hundred years. Authorities wanted to know if this scene was the work of grave robbers or, given the well-preserved corpse, if perhaps a murderer had been trying to hide a recent victim.

  At the scene, Bass told police that based on the decomposition, it was a 25-to-28-year-old white male, dead for six months to a year—probably not the work of grave robbers. Bass said he’d be able to give a more specific TSD after a thorough examination of the remains.

  Back at UT, Bass discovered his TSD approximation had been off—by more than a hundred years. The corpse was that of a Confederate army colonel, William Shy.

  “It was an understandable mistake to make on the site,” recalls Doug Owsley, one of Bass’s former graduate students who assisted the professor with the Shy case. “The body was incredibly well preserved because Shy’s family had bought the best coffin money could buy, an early version of the modern sealer casket—airtight. It retarded decomposition.”

  In the wake of this blunder, Bass was more frustrated researcher than humiliated expert. “He learned from it,” says Owsley, now a curator with the Smithsonian Institution. “He knew this was all part of the scientific method: to learn from data. But that was when Bass realized just how little data there was on human decomposition and he decided it was time for new research, his own research.” He became obsessed with wanting to study the whole postmortem continuum, rather than just glimpsing the snapshots in time that he had been seeing.

  In 1980, Bass persuaded the university to give him a new lot of land, the area behind the UT Medical Center, and the contemporary Body Farm was born. Since then, Bass and the researchers from around the world who have used the facility have produced groundbreaking data and technology. Thanks to the Farm, a pair of specialists invented a device that lifts fingerprints off a corpse, the FBI improved a ground-penetrating-radar gizmo that detects buried bodies, and a UT graduate student discovered it’s possible to determine TSD by measuring the amount of organic soup that leaks into the soil. Yet the most revolutionary discoveries at the Farm have come from studying the bugs—specifically, the flies. Insect science, or entomology, is what made the difference in the Rubenstein case.

  The Rubenstein trial got under way in June 1999, long after the accused had collected and spent all $250,000 of the insurance money. (“What did you spend the money on?” the prosecution asked Rubenstein. “I don’t remember,” he said. “I just spent it.”) Given the overwhelming amount of circumstantial evidence against him, Rubenstein’s credibility was the central issue. Each side based its case on Rubenstein’s claim that when he had visited the cabin on November 16 and November 27, he had found it empty. The prosecution claimed the defendant was lying and therefore was the killer; the defense, naturally, maintained the man was truthful and innocent.

  Rubenstein’s attorneys called to the stand Dr. Lamar Meek, an entomologist at Louisiana State University. Meek testified that all three Perrys died at approximately the same time and had been dead for about two weeks. Meek’s TSD was consistent with Rubenstein’s story. Bass’s expert opinion was that the Perrys had been dead for almost a month when Rubenstein made the call to police. Bass’s conclusion was based on an examination of several four-by-six photos of the bodies and a videotape of the crime scene and took into account the temperature in Pike County during the months of November and December.

  Bass’s testimony convinced all but one of the twelve jurors. Rubenstein walked. But because his trial had ended with a hungjury, he could and did face another trial. It began in January 2000, and this time Bass saw something he had missed in round one.

  When the medical examiner took the stand, he showed the jury pictures of 4-year-old Crystal’s badly decomposed head. The color slides were projected in the front of the courtroom. The images were much larger than any of the pictures Bass had seen, and from his seat in the gallery Bass now spotted scientific proof that the Perrys had been dead for at least twenty-one days when their bodies were discovered.

  There are five major stages of decomp: “fresh;” then “bloat,” which occurs when gases trapped in the stomach and intestines cause the abdomen to puff; then comes “decay,” when organs putrefy and the elements wear away or eat away soft tissue; Mother Nature then leaves the corpse to “dry;” and finally “skeletal.” Temperature and other factors affect the rate of decomposition.

  Although researchers have divided the postmortem into these five states, it is more of a fluid slide than a distinct step-by-step process. But at the Body Farm, Bass and his team of anthropologists have worked with forensic entomologists and learned it is possible to time-stamp the decomp continuum by looking at the insects that are on or around a body.

  Looking up at the giant color slides of Crystal that Meek was using, Bass saw maggot pupal casings in the girl’s hair. He had looked for them in the small photos and the video of the crime scene that he had been given, but he hadn’t seen them. Now, however, there they were, plain as day. Thanks in large part to research done at the Body Farm, every forensic scientist knows that for flies to find a body and lay their larvae, the larvae to hatch into maggots, and the maggots to pupate, it takes at least twenty-one days. At least. And considering that the bodies were in a closed-up cabin, it likely took a few days for the flies to even find the bodies. Bass’s TSD estimate was as much of a scientific certainty as anyone could ask for.

  Bass took the stand, presented the facts in his aw-shucks Pooh Bear way, and the jury delivered a guilty verdict. Rubenstein is now appealing his death sentence.

  We as a society are at once fascinated and revolted
by death. While some people have protested Bass’s facility, other folks made Patricia Cornwell’s novel The Body Farm, which celebrates the gory yet necessary work done there, a national best-seller.

  Bass understands the dichotomy. “We’re not a culture of death,” he says, sitting in his kitchen. “We try to cover it up. When someone is killed, the police come and put a sheet over him; you can’t see the body. And when you see the person in the casket, he doesn’t look dead; he’s been made to look like what he looked like when he was alive. It’s because people don’t know much about death.”

  Bass says he has never been troubled by the cases he has worked because he views each one as a puzzle rather than as a human tragedy. Tapping his psychology background, he suspects it’s a defense mechanism. He doesn’t think about the victims as people for the same reason that he tells morbid death jokes at crime scenes: Like the rest of us, he doesn’t like to confront his own mortality.

  But unlike the rest of us, Bass hasn’t had much of a choice. Death has been his life, both on and off the farm. One sort of forensic job does bother him: suicide. Every time one comes his way he thinks about his father. When Bass was 4 years old—the same age as Crystal when she was strangled—his dad went to work at his law office, closed the door, and shot himself in the head. “It’s something my mother and my family never talked about,” Bass says, taking off his glasses and rubbing his eyes. “But now as I’m getting older, as I look at my grandson who’s four years old and I think, Why did Dad do that? I think, Something must have had him pretty depressed to give up Mom and me.”

  Bass has buried two wives. His first wife, to whom he was married for thirty-nine and a half years—and, yes, that half year matters to Bass—died of colon cancer in 1993. His second wife, who was his secretary in the anthropology department for many years, died not long after their third anniversary. She also died of cancer.