Death's Acre: Inside The Legendary Forensic Lab The Body Farm by Bill Bass (essential books to read txt) 📕

wanted for second-degree robbery and hit-and-run in the Golden Gate State—not the sort of uncle I’d want baby-sitting for my children. But that didn’t necessarily mean he was a murderer. In fact, from the contents of the box sitting on my desk, we couldn’t even say for certain that these bones were Lisa’s. Not only was it impossible to determine the sex of the skeleton, there were no healed injuries that could be corroborated by X rays from Lisa’s medical records. Furthermore, there were no dental records; she hadn’t even lived long enough to make her first visit to the dentist. I had half a hundred bones sitting right in front of me, but I didn’t have a single thing I could latch on to. I wrote up my brief findings on the spot for Detective Foote and wished him good luck with the case.

A few months later Foote seemed to have had excellent luck: Two of Gerald Silvers’s fellow inmates in California snitched on him, saying he’d bragged about raping and killing his niece. Gerald was indicted by a Kansas grand jury and brought back to Olathe to stand trial. But as the initial hearing approached, Detective Foote called me in a panic. Because we hadn’t been able to identify the body positively as Lisa’s, it would be easy for Gerald’s attorney to attack the prosecution’s case. There was a body, all right, but there was no particular reason for a jury to believe that it was Lisa’s or that she’d been raped and murdered by her uncle.

Foote was practically pleading: Wasn’t there anything else we could do to get a positive identification? “Do you have a picture of Lisa?” I asked, hoping it might reveal some distinctive feature in her facial structure that we could correlate to her skull. Yes, he did; he agreed to send it to me.

When the envelope arrived, I tore it open. The picture showed a pretty, blond, happy little girl, smiling proudly at the camera. The teeth caught my eye: Somehow, though I couldn’t say why, I saw a glimmer of hope in that bright smile. I put in a call to Detective Foote.

“Tell me more about where the body was found,” I said. The quail hunters who found it had been wading along a narrow, shallow stream running through a pasture, Foote told me, about ten miles outside Olathe. “We need the rest of her teeth,” I said, “not just the molars.”

Detective Foote sounded doubtful. They’d searched for hours, he said, to come up with this much of the skeleton. He didn’t see how they could have missed anything. By this point in my anthropology career, though, I had excavated several thousand skeletons, and I’d gotten pretty good at rounding up bones and teeth. Most of those skeletons came from undisturbed Indian graves, true, but a sizable minority—several hundred, at least—had been scattered in some way: by animals, by storms or erosion, or by human intrusion. In those cases there tended to be a pattern to the scattering, and I hoped it would hold true in this one. “Those teeth will be where that body was found,” I told him. “Let’s go back and find them.”

IT WAS MID-APRIL BY NOW, five months after the quail hunters had stumbled across the small skull in the stream. As we bumped across the prairie and stopped by the embankment, I hoped nothing had disturbed the streambed since the fall. A herd of cows stomping around in the mud could make it virtually impossible to find anything more. Fortunately, there were no signs of cattle, and we’d had a fairly warm, dry spring, so the stream was only a few inches deep. I felt my optimism returning.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that bones in a creek will tend to wash downstream. The tricky part is figuring out how far downstream. Generally the smaller, lighter bones get carried farther than the skull or long bones. Complicating the picture slightly is the fact that the farther downstream a bone gets carried, the farther to either side it can drift as well. If you plot it on a diagram, the scatter pattern tends to look like a skinny teardrop, with the sharp end farthest upstream. The larger the stream and the faster the current, the bigger that teardrop area gets.

I went about fifteen yards downstream from the point where the skull and most of the bones had been found, so I could work my way upstream against the current. By starting beyond the boundary of the expected scatter, I’d be less likely to step on a bone and break it or mash it deeper into the mud. Working upstream also meant that the mud I stirred up as I walked and felt around in the streambed would get washed away from the direction I was heading, rather than into it. It’s simple once you think about it, but you’d be surprised how often untrained searchers wade around at random, muddying up the water in more ways than one.

About ten yards downstream from the skull’s location, I started feeling little pebbles in the silt. Except they weren’t pebbles: They were tiny bones—hand bones and foot bones and vertebrae. And teeth—fourteen in all!—with only two, a pair of lower incisors, remaining lost. I felt like I’d hit the mother lode. As I headed back to my office in Lawrence, I hoped that somewhere in these bones and teeth I’d find something that said, unequivocally, “I am—I was—Lisa Silvers.”

At the very least, I was sure the teeth could help refine my estimate of the dead child’s age. A group of dental researchers at Harvard had carefully charted the stages of formation of several types of deciduous teeth (“baby teeth”). I x-rayed a lower canine, a lower first molar, and a lower second molar; comparing these X rays with those from the Harvard study, I got an estimate of 2.1 years. By a different study’s yardstick, the first