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

for a single telephone sitting in the floor of one office. No desks, no chairs, no shelves, no filing cabinets. The moment I arrived, we began frantically scrounging, begging, and borrowing furnishings, equipment, and supplies. We never stopped. Our growth would always outstrip our budget; by now the anthropology department has grown from its original eight rooms to 150 or so. They’re even older and more run-down today than they were in June of 1971, but there’s still a critical mass of anthropological expertise down there beneath the stands. The chain reaction is still going strong.

NOT LONG after Lisa Silvers had disappeared, her uncle Gerald was hauled back to Tracy, California, and sentenced to an “indeterminate” length of time in the Deuel Vocational Institute for the robbery and hit-and-run crimes he’d committed there several years before.

From the beginning, police in Kansas had been suspicious of Gerald’s story. Lisa had never wandered off before, and it seemed unlikely she’d have done so in the dark, while her parents were away. Most child abductions, they also knew, involve a relative or acquaintance of the victim. As their investigation continued they grew more certain of his guilt. When two of his fellow inmates at Deuel told detectives that Gerald had admitted raping and killing the toddler, they knew they had a case.

The trial was set to begin on June 16 in Olathe, Kansas; the prosecutor, Mark Bennett, had scheduled me to testify the morning of Friday, June 18. “If you arrive by plane, I will make arrangements to have you picked up if you will advise me of the flight and time of arrival,” he wrote me. I wrote back to let him know that I needed to drive, so I could retrieve a few more boxes we hadn’t been able to cram into the moving van that brought our belongings to Knoxville.

I had barely had time to unpack my suitcase and start settling into my new digs in Knoxville, Tennessee, when I found myself climbing into the car for the long drive back to Kansas. As I headed west on Interstate 40 in my new “Grabber Blue” Mustang convertible—my reward to myself for landing a new job and a big raise—I had plenty of time to reflect on the sad case.

I arrived on the afternoon of the seventeenth, tired from the twelve-hour drive and nervous about how my testimony would go. I reviewed my reports and mentally practiced explaining the scientific data in language that wouldn’t intimidate a jury of Kansas laypeople.

The next morning, right on schedule, I was sworn in. Mark Bennett led me through my findings, briefly going through the various methods I used to determine the age, then focusing on how the gap in the front teeth and the notches on the incisors matched the photo of Lisa exactly.

To my great relief, the defense attorney didn’t challenge my identification of Lisa’s body. He did, however, challenge several obvious weaknesses in the prosecution’s case, as I’d expected he might: Could I determine the cause of death? No, I could not. Were there signs of violence or trauma? No, there were not. Could I tell whether Lisa had been raped? No, I could not. I knew who she was, and I knew she’d been in that stream a long time, and I knew that was a human tragedy and a damned shame, but that’s all I knew.

The trial lasted a week. By the time it ended I was back in Knoxville, unpacking more household boxes and desperately scrounging around for more office furniture. Mark Bennett sent me the front-page story from The Kansas City Star:SILVERS ACQUITTED IN NIECE’S DEATH. The defense had attacked the credibility of the two prisoners who testified that Gerald had admitted raping and killing Lisa. Both men, defense witnesses testified, were homosexuals.

Earl Silvers, Lisa’s father, praised Gerald’s defense attorney after the trial. “He was very good,” Earl told a local newspaper reporter. “He was always working—seven days a week, up until 9 or 10 o’clock each night.” Charles Silvers, Lisa’s grandfather, expressed his hope that Gerald would come home to Kansas when he finished his prison sentence at Deuel. “California is not a place to start a new life,” he said.

Lisa’s remains were buried not long after the trial ended. If she had lived, she would be in her mid-thirties now. She might have a child of her own. Maybe a girl with fine blond hair and a slight gap in the middle of four distinctly notched teeth at the center of a big, bright smile.

CHAPTER 5

The Case of the Headless Corpse

IT MUST HAVE BEEN a really quiet news day; there’s no other possible explanation for the explosion of media interest in my slight miscalculation.

Actually, it was a quiet couple of weeks, at least to begin with. It all started during that dependably slow week in Knoxville between Christmas and New Year’s Day. The university was closed for Christmas break; most of my students had gone to visit their families. My oldest son, Charlie, who was twenty-one at the time, had come to Tennessee for the holidays from the University of Arizona, where he was a first-year graduate student in—what else?—anthropology, with an emphasis in forensics. (This was back before he realized he didn’t want to live on a professor’s salary all his life.)

Late on the afternoon of Thursday, December 29, 1977, I got a call from the Williamson County sheriff’s office. Because I was the Tennessee state forensic anthropologist—as well as a badge-carrying consultant to the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation—law enforcement officials throughout the state had my home telephone number. Consequently the phone was apt to ring at any hour of the day or night, and the less convenient the hour, the more likely it was to be a call from someone who needed me to examine a body.

This time the someone was Detective Captain Jeff Long, calling from Franklin, a town