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

of the 1940s and ’50s. Krogman was a physical anthropologist who, along with two Smithsonian colleagues, virtually created the science of forensic anthropology. He was considered such a great forensic authority that during World War II, the U.S. government had him waiting in the wings to identify the remains of Adolf Hitler. As it turned out, the Russians beat the Americans to the burned-out bunker containing Hitler’s bones, so Krogman never got a look at the Führer. But he had plenty of other forensic cases, from the police and the FBI, to keep him busy.

In the Post article, Krogman mentioned several other scientists who also specialized in identifying human skeletal remains. One of those he named was Dr. Charles E. Snow, an anthropology professor at the University of Kentucky, where I was pursuing a master’s degree in counseling. The school, Dr. Snow, and I were all located in Lexington, just thirty miles from the scene of that early-morning truck collision. Although I didn’t know it at the time, I was about to collide head-on with my future.

A Lexington lawyer who read the article realized that Dr. Snow might be able to identify the third victim of the fiery crash. He called Dr. Snow, who readily agreed to examine the remains. At the time, I was taking an anthropology class from Dr. Snow just for fun. When he got the lawyer’s call, Snow asked if I would be interested in accompanying him on a human-identification case. This was a chance to apply, to a real-world case, scientific techniques that so far I had only read about. Why was I the one student he invited to go along? Perhaps he appreciated my budding brilliance; perhaps what he appreciated was the fact that I had a car to get us there. In any case, I jumped at the chance.

The body had been buried months before, so the lawyer completed the necessary paperwork to authorize an exhumation. On a warm spring day in April of 1955, Dr. Snow and I drove to a small cemetery beside a little country church in east-central Kentucky. By the time we arrived, the grave had been excavated and the coffin uncovered. Spring rains had raised the water table almost to ground level, so the coffin was immersed in water. As it was hoisted from the grave by a cemetery truck, water poured from every seam.

The body was burned, rotted, and waterlogged—quite a contrast to the immaculate bone specimens I had studied in the university’s osteology lab. Traditional anthropological specimens are clean and dry; forensic cases tend to be wet and smelly. But they’re intellectually irresistible too: scientific puzzles demanding to be solved, life-and-death secrets waiting to be unearthed.

From the smallness of the skull, the width of the pelvic opening, and the smoothness of the eyebrow ridge, even my inexperienced eye could see that these bones came from a female. Her age was a bit trickier: The wisdom teeth were fully formed, so she was an adult, but how old? The zigzag seams in the cranium, called sutures, were mostly fused together but still clearly visible; that suggested she was in her thirties or forties.

As it turned out, the police already had a pretty good idea whose body this was. Dr. Snow’s job was simply to confirm or refute the tentative identification. An eastern Kentucky woman had been missing since the time of the accident; what’s more, the night before the wreck, neighbors had overheard her say that she was riding to Louisville with one of the truck drivers, a man with whom she’d had a longtime relationship.

The lawyer who enlisted Dr. Snow’s help had already obtained the missing woman’s medical records and dental X rays. Armed with this information, Dr. Snow swiftly matched her teeth and fillings with those appearing in the X rays. By confirming her identity, Dr. Snow gave the lawyer a solid legal basis for a liability claim on behalf of the woman’s surviving relatives. It seems that she and her boyfriend were killed when the other truck swerved across the highway’s centerline and struck them head-on. The truck that killed them was owned by a nationwide grocery chain—The Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company, or A&P—so there were deep pockets to be tapped in court.

Dr. Snow’s consulting fee for the case was $25; he handed over $5 of that to me for taking us to the cemetery in my car. I suspect the lawyer extracted a good deal more than that from the cash registers of A&P.

I didn’t get rich that day, but I sure got hooked. It was fascinating to see the way burned and broken bones could identify a victim, solve a long-standing mystery, close a case. From that moment on, I decided, I would focus on forensics. I turned my back on counseling, switched to anthropology, and set about making up for lost time.

A year later, in 1956, I was accepted by the anthropology Ph.D. program at Harvard University. Harvard was regarded as the best anthropology department in the country, so I was honored to be accepted, but I turned them down. There was only one place to learn what I wanted to learn: in Philadelphia, at the feet of the famous bone detective Wilton Krogman.

I arrived in Philadelphia to begin my Ph.D. studies at the University of Pennsylvania in September. I was fresh from a summer job at the Smithsonian Institution, where I had analyzed and measured hundreds of Native American skeletons. I was twenty-seven years old by now—I had spent three years in the Army during the Korean War—and I had the beginnings of a family: a bright young wife, Ann—who would later earn a Ph.D. of her own in nutrition science—and our six-month-old son, Charlie. To save money, Ann and I rented a small apartment several miles west of downtown Philly.

Not long after the semester started, Dr. Krogman fell down the stairs in his house and shattered his left leg. Normally he commuted to campus by city bus,