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

permanent lower molar suggested an age of 2.9 to 3.9 years. Yet another dental yardstick indicated an age of 2.5 to 3 years.

Of course, the real clincher in forensic dentistry is finding dental work that can be matched with dental records. Unfortunately, since Lisa had never been to the dentist, we had no dental records. On the other hand, since none of these teeth had fillings, they didn’t rule out the possibility that this was Lisa.

By this time I’d stared at those teeth for hours. I could close my eyes and still see their outlines. And even though I was pretty sure there was no scientific stone I’d left unturned, I kept staring at them, turning them over and over in my hands and in my mind. It was the incisors I kept coming back to. There was something about them I was almost noticing but not quite. Maybe I was looking too closely. If you’ve ever stargazed, you’ve probably noticed that your peripheral vision can detect fainter stars than your central vision. So the trick, if you’re hunting a faint star, is to look slightly away from where you think it is.

In this case, there was a way I needed to refocus or shift my vision so that I’d see what I hadn’t been able to spot dead-on. So I stepped back a bit; instead of scrutinizing the teeth individually, I inserted them into their sockets in the jaws of the skull, and I looked back and forth from the skull to the photo of Lisa Silvers, alive and smiling. And that’s when I saw two things I’d missed before. First, there was a slight space between the two upper central incisors—the “two front teeth,” as the old song calls them. I noticed it when I fitted the teeth into their sockets, and there it was in the photo as well.

Second—and far more striking, now that I had the teeth in place—there was a slight notch at one corner of each of the four upper incisors. The teeth weren’t chipped; they were formed that way. It was a genetic anomaly, and it just might hold the key to identifying this body. As I swung my gaze back to the photo, I felt a tingle of excitement. I called Detective Foote. “We have a positive identification of Lisa Silvers,” I told him.

THAT WAS IN APRIL. In the two months since then, a lot of water had flowed under a lot of bridges.

For me, the biggest change was my move to Tennessee at the end of May. My years at Kansas had been a period of tremendous growth. My summers in the field were intense but exciting; the academic year brought the combined pleasures of forensic cases for the police and KBI and the daily thrill of classroom teaching. Put me in front of a group—whether it’s freshman undergraduates, an anthropology Ph.D. seminar, a class of new FBI trainees, or a bunch of senior citizens—and it’s like throwing a switch inside me that releases a huge jolt of adrenaline. I move around in goofy ways to show how the skeleton works; I tell jokes, usually slightly off-color ones that tend to get me hauled onto the carpet at least once a semester. But the vast majority of students seemed to notice and appreciate my teaching style; my “Intro to Anthropology” classes at Kansas swelled to more than a thousand students every fall; to cope with the flood of students, the dean had to move us from a lecture hall to the university’s main auditorium.

But there was an undercurrent of deep discord within the anthropology department. When I had arrived in Kansas in 1960, the anthropology faculty consisted solely of archaeologists and cultural anthropologists. Then, in rapid succession, three physical anthropologists were hired. Soon the three of us were building a national reputation for our forensic work—and were also teaching the majority of students who took anthropology courses. And soon the cultural anthropologists began resenting us. The tension got so bad, all three of the physical anthropologists began job-hunting.

I was the first to jump ship. The University of Tennessee was hoping to build a national-caliber anthropology program, just as we’d begun to do at Kansas. When they offered me the chance to head it—and the chance to hire two additional faculty of my choice—it was too good to turn down.

Within a year the two other physical anthropologists had likewise left for greener pastures, or at least more collegial ones, and Kansas had lost a cadre of expertise that had taken a decade to build.

When I arrived in Knoxville on June 1, 1971, it didn’t look like a dream assignment. Up until then, the handful of anthropologists were housed in the university’s small archaeological museum. If we were to build the department—and start a graduate program—we’d need more space, and lots of it. The only space available had just opened up: a spooky building tucked beneath the stands of Neyland Stadium, UT’s enormous shrine to Southeastern Conference college football (the third-largest stadium in the United States).

The gloomy building, added in the 1940s, had originally housed the school’s football players and other athletes. Then, when it got too old and run-down for the athletes, the university built a new athletic dorm and shifted nonathletes into the rooms beneath the stands. Now that the space had gotten too old and run-down for the nonathletes, the school graciously gave it to the faculty. My faculty.

What matters, though, is not the space you’re put in to work; what matters is the work you do in it. The Manhattan Project, the World War II race to develop the atomic bomb, also started out under a football stadium. Beneath the stands of Stagg Field at the University of Chicago, a team of physicists led by Enrico Fermi built a crude fission reactor, brought its uranium fuel to critical mass, and set off a chain reaction that changed the world.

We started out in Knoxville with eight offices, utterly empty except