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

Sifting through the churned-up mess, we found a few pieces of a man’s skull. There was barely a handful of fragments left—when you roll a backhoe over calcined bones and then flail away at them with a bunch of rakes five times, you’re going to pulverize things pretty thoroughly—but it was enough to indicate that the man had set fire to his homestead and killed himself.

FORTUNATELY, in the Hawkins County case, the sheriff’s office had called us before the fire scene had been disturbed; the arson investigator would be joining us there, but we’d get first crack at the scene. If there were burned bones somewhere amid the rubble, we should be able to find them, and they’d probably still be very close together.

On the east, or downhill, side, facing the river, the house had been two stories high; the west side was notched into the hill, with only the main floor above grade. According to Lieutenant Wilmot, the bedroom where Grizzle was most likely to have been sleeping—going by descriptions from the prior owners—was at the north end of the upper floor. Now, of course, there was no upper floor: during the fire, the floor joists had burned through and the main floor and roof had collapsed onto the concrete slab running beneath the entire structure. That concrete slab, by the way, was our friend. A smooth, solid surface ringed by low ridges of jumbled brick, it was now one giant evidence pad, saving everything for us.

We started at the downhill face of the house at about 10:30, sifting and probing our way delicately toward the center of the house. At about 11:15, Steve Symes’s keen photographer’s eye, bleary and bloodshot though it was, zoomed in on a bone jutting from beneath a pile of bricks, a collapsed section of the chimney. As we lifted off the bricks, we found both sets of leg bones and most of the spine. Some of the joints were still partially articulated, or held together by ligaments and cartilage, but many of the bones themselves had been reduced to fragments. Completely calcined, these shards of a shattered life clinked together in my hand like bits of a smashed ceramic mug. This corpse had been seriously incinerated.

The condition of the bones indicated a hot fire. The condition of the electrical wiring confirmed it: the copper had melted, dribbling into ragged lines on the concrete floor. Copper’s melting point is around 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit, so the fire raged hotter than that. What’s more, such high temperatures clearly pointed to the presence of accelerants; without the addition of gasoline or some other flammable liquid, experiments have shown, house fires usually don’t exceed 1,600 degrees.

The concentration of bones was about a foot inside the east wall of the house—the side facing the river—and was several feet north of a concrete-block wall that divided the house into a north end and a south end. As we were removing the bones, we found a mass of burned tissue resting on a piece of white cotton fabric from a man’s jockey shorts and a charred pair of olive-drab pants.

At this point we were pretty sure we’d found the body of a male, very likely the missing James Grizzle. But as we continued to search the scene, the picture got fuzzier, not clearer, and more and more intriguing.

The position of the legs, pelvis, and spinal column indicated that the body was lying on its back; the legs were bent or folded over the top of the body, with the knees up above the shoulders—occupying the space where the head should have been but wasn’t. We explored the surrounding area thoroughly in search of the head. Finally, about six feet away, embedded in another pile of bricks, we found arm bones, a few ribs, and the skull and mandible. These bones, like the first batch, were oddly arranged and badly fragmented, apparently from the fire.

But why were they six feet away from the lower two-thirds of the body? As I sorted through the possibilities in my mind, I considered the fact that the house was a two-story structure. I have seen cases, in similar buildings, where part of a body has burned and fallen through a hole in the floor, leaving the other part to settle elsewhere, atop a different layer of rubble. Could that have happened in this case?

I looked again at the legs and pelvis. Besides the fabric of the underwear and pants, there wasn’t much under the bones—just some unburned Sheetrock or drywall, unburned floor tile, and the house’s concrete slab. There was also very little beneath the head, arms, and ribs. If one part of the body had burned away and fallen through a hole in the upper floor, leaving the rest of the body up in the master bedroom until the entire floor collapsed, we should have found quite a bit of burned debris underneath one of our groupings of bones: the charred remnants of wooden joists, subflooring, and flooring material—maybe even blackened bedsprings and a burned mattress, if the man had been asleep at two A.M., when the fire began. The fact that so little other material was beneath the bones suggested that the entire body was probably already down in the basement when the main floor burned through and collapsed onto the slab.

But if that was the case, why on earth was the top of the body so far away from the lower portion? I’ve seen many cases where the intense heat of a fire caused a skull to burst or shatter, but I’ve never seen one where it caused the head and upper torso to fly across a room.

As I stood there scratching my head, looking from one heap of bones to the other, I said—thinking out loud, mainly—“The only thing I can think of that would explain this separation is some sort of explosion.”

As soon as I said it, Lieutenant Wilmot spoke up. “Funny you should say that. One of the neighbors down