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

as a coral reef retains its form even after the organisms that built it die—but it will be very lightweight, grayish in color, riddled with heat fractures, and so fragile that it can crumble in your hands, and will certainly crumble underfoot. (Recently, I was contacted by an attorney who’s preparing for a retrial of a murder case; he told me that a key piece of prosecution evidence—a calcined piece of the victim’s burned skull—was accidentally dropped on the floor and stepped on by a judge, reducing it to powder.)

For all their destructive power, fires leave behind a surprising amount of evidence, though you have to know where and how to look for it. Actually, I’ve come to enjoy the challenge, the scientific puzzle, of mentally reconstructing what a fire scene looked like just before it burned. Those buttons and snaps, hooks and eyes, brass rivets and zippers, embedded in a heap of ashes? Easy: a chest of drawers once crammed with shirts and brassieres and blue jeans. That mound of broken glass and porcelain beside a charred chandelier? It was once the china cabinet in the dining room.

The key to mentally reconstructing a burned house is the careful sifting through a layer of ash several inches thick—the remnants of the ceiling and roof. Beneath that layer is a wealth of information about the way things were. For instance, most chairs in houses are made of wood, but they usually have small metal feet on each of their legs, which can indicate their position at the time of the fire. A desk might burn, but the paper clips and staples will mark its location; a cache of needles, pins, and scissors might have once belonged inside a sewing basket.

The most valuable thing I have found at a fire scene was a $12,000 diamond necklace. It was a woman’s Christmas gift from her husband, unwrapped just months before she burned to death in a suspicious fire in their mansion. When I found the necklace—at the base of a wall, beneath a layer of ash—it had a safety pin fastened around it. That puzzled me, and so did the location where I found it, so I asked her family if they could shed any light on either question. Her relatives told me that she liked to pin her jewelry into the folds of her drapes; when the drapes were closed, the jewelry was on display; when they were open, the jewelry was hidden. Sure enough, I’d found it directly under a window. The explanation matched what we found at the scene.

Sometimes what you don’t find at a fire scene tells you as much as what you do find. I once excavated a fire scene that had already been examined by the police and an arson investigator, none of whom noted anything suspicious. What struck me most about the house, as I recovered the incinerated body, was that there were no dishes or silverware in the kitchen, no coat hangers in the closets, no picture frames or hangers on the wall. (Pictures themselves will burn, and so will wooden frames, but metal frames, and even the little screws and nails and wires on the back of a wooden frame, don’t burn; they fall to the floor at the base of the wall.) To me it was obvious that the house had been stripped bare, except for a few large items, before the fire—a classic indicator of arson. But the strangest part of the story, as well as we could reconstruct it, was this: The dead man wasn’t the homeowner but the man hired to burn down the house; apparently, as he was dousing the structure with gasoline—during a severe thunderstorm, we learned—lightning struck the house, igniting the gasoline vapors in a fiery explosion that killed him almost instantly. It was one of the best cases of bad timing I’ve ever seen. In this case the evidence at the scene revealed that crimes had indeed been committed, but they were arson and insurance fraud, not murder.

Anytime I’m called to a fire scene, I try to find all the skeletal material, but I don’t stop there; I also deduce as fully as possible the events that happened before and during the fire. I pay particular attention to identifying jewelry, teeth, and bones, but I also check and recheck for other evidence, and I consider all that evidence before I draw any conclusions about what happened.

The single thing that does the most to destroy forensic evidence at a fire scene is not the fire itself; it is an untrained, overzealous investigator armed with a rake. An investigator who hasn’t been trained in human osteology and doesn’t know how to recognize and identify burned bone fragments can wreak havoc with a fire scene. It’s maddeningly common for police who are looking for a body to go over an entire scene, raking all the burned material into long ridges, or windrows, about three feet apart. Think about it: If you want to know the location and arrangement of a body when the fire began—and if you want to know its proximity and placement relative to items such as a gun, a knife, or bullets—what hope do you have if you stir everything up with a rake?

I once arrived at a fire scene with a team to search for the body of a suspected suicide victim, only to be told by a fire marshal that I needn’t bother looking. The scene was massive—a farm compound consisting of a house, a barn, and half a dozen other outbuildings; the firefighters and arson investigator had used a backhoe to clear out portions of the rubble. I figured the most promising place to search was the house, but the fire marshal scoffed at me. “We’ve raked that house five times,” he said. When I allowed as how we’d like to take a look anyway, seeing as how we were already there, he shook his head and walked away as if we were