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

CHAPTER 6

The Scene of the Crime

FOR REASONS I don’t fully understand, forensics has suddenly become a hot topic on television. Night after night, a seemingly endless parade of victims is murdered, and night after night those murders are swiftly and cleverly solved. On most television dramas, at least, the forensic scientist is practically a god, endowed with a huge intellect and outfitted with every razzle-dazzle technology imaginable.

It pains me to admit it, but I am somewhat less brilliant than TV supersleuths—and, with all due respect, so are many of my forensic colleagues. We’re not geniuses, and our gadgets can’t answer every question or pinpoint every perpetrator. But even though TV sometimes creates unrealistic expectations about the swiftness and certainty of murder investigations, some shows have done a great service by spotlighting the role forensic scientists—even ordinary, real-life ones—can play in bringing killers to justice. And these shows do get a lot dead right: Crime scene investigation is absolutely crucial to solving a crime.

Surprisingly, many of my fellow forensic anthropologists—probably nine out of ten—have never worked a crime scene. They’re happy to examine bones on a lab table or under a microscope, but they don’t dirty their hands or shoes in the muck, mud, or blood of fieldwork. They stay clean and dry that way, but they also miss a lot of evidence that could reveal the truth about what happened to a murder victim. A victim like James Grizzle, whose story—as we pieced it together at the crime scene—is one of the most bizarre and shocking I have ever encountered.

One chilly January morning, I got a phone call from a detective with the Hawkins County, Tennessee, sheriff’s office, asking if I could help search for the body of a man whom they suspected had burned to death in his house a week or so earlier. I agreed to help, and enlisted three of my brightest graduate students—Steve Symes, Pat Willey, and David Hunt—to make the hundred-mile trip to Hawkins County the next morning.

By now I’d been searching crime scenes and death scenes in Tennessee for ten years, and I’d developed an approach that seemed to work quite well. Anytime I received a request from law enforcement for help finding, recovering, or identifying human remains, I took a four-person forensic response team: a faculty member (me in those days, though now other faculty members take turns taking forensic cases) and three students trained in osteology, identification of human bones.

I no longer used my own car. The anthropology department now had a pickup truck, which we kept loaded at all times with the equipment we’d need in the field—shovels and trowels for digging; wire-mesh screens for sifting small bones and bone fragments from dirt; three body bags for transporting corpses in the back of the truck (beneath a camper shell); paper evidence bags for collecting scattered bones, bullet casings, cigarette butts, beer bottles, knives, and any other evidence we recovered; one-hundred-foot surveyor’s tapes for measuring the proximity of bodies or bones to fixed landmarks such as trees, utility poles, and buildings; either red or orange survey flags for marking the location of every bone or piece of evidence; and at least two cameras.

I considered the cameras the most important part of our equipment; they were essential in documenting the scene, the search, and particularly the recovery of human remains. I know of only two types of scientific research that require utterly destroying the very thing you’re studying: excavating an archaeological site and investigating a death scene. By the time you’re finished, it’s gone, dismantled, so you better make damned sure you’ve got an exhaustive record on film; there’s no going back to check for something you overlooked—say, footprints on the surface of a shallow grave—after you’ve trampled or dug up the ground.

It was Kansas lawman Harold Nye—a living legend at the KBI—who taught me one of my most important lessons about crime scene investigation: “Shoot your way in, and shoot your way out.” It sounds like the modus operandi of a trigger-happy bank robber, but Harold was talking about photography. “When you arrive at the scene and get out of your car, take a picture of the house or the car or whatever the scene is,” he said. “As you walk closer, take some more. Take pictures of the ground before you walk on it; take pictures of who’s there; pictures of what kind of shoes officers at the scene are wearing. Take pictures of the body before you move it or even touch it.”

Harold had shot his way into the Clutter family’s farmhouse the night the bodies were discovered there. If he hadn’t—if he or anyone else involved in the investigation had set foot in the basement before Harold photographed its dusty floor—the KBI would never had seen and preserved on film the footprints that were later linked to the killers’ boots. Because Harold shot his way in, the telltale footprints were caught on film and the killers were convicted.

It’s hard to put a price tag on human life and criminal justice; film, on the other hand, is pretty damn cheap. Over the decades I’ve taken hundreds of thousands of crime scene photos, and I’ve never regretted a single click of the shutter. As cameras become more and more sophisticated—exposing for infrared frequencies or heat, capturing high-resolution digital images, and even incorporating GPS (global positioning system) receivers that automatically record precise location coordinates in longitude and latitude—photography will sharpen the focus of crime scene investigation still further.

On my four-person forensic teams, one member always served as our photographer. For the search of the burned house in Hawkins County, the camera would be wielded by Steve Symes, one of my Ph.D. students. Steve had shown a remarkable talent for crime scene photography; his photos often revealed far more detail than those taken by the official photographers from police departments or sheriff’s offices. On this