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

the road said he heard an explosion before the fire.” It would have saved me some puzzlement if he’d thought to pass along that investigative tidbit a little sooner; on the other hand, if he had, I wouldn’t have had the fun of formulating an exotic theory. I inspected the bones again. The surface of the sternum was badly fractured and pitted; the spine had separated just below the skull—exactly where it would if a violent explosion had ripped apart the chest.

The fragmentation of the body was not the only indication of violence. Several inches from the spinal column, in the region of the thoracic vertebrae and ribs, we found an oblong disk of lead. Measuring about an inch long and three-quarters of an inch wide, it was flat on top. Its underside bore the impression of woven fabric. It didn’t take a forensic genius to guess that before the fire, and before the explosion, there had been a gunshot. From no more than a few feet away, a bullet had been aimed at a human heart.

Some things remained puzzling, but one thing was clear: unless the victim had carefully doused the house with gasoline, strapped a stick of dynamite to his chest, lit the fuse, and then fired a gun at his heart, this was a clear-cut case of murder by a killer who had gone to great lengths to destroy the evidence of his crime. Great lengths, but not successful ones.

Working steadily as a team—David Hunt and I excavating material, Pat Willey diagramming our finds and bagging the bones, Steve Symes taking photo after photo—we plucked and sifted bones and teeth from the ashes. As the cold afternoon winter light began to fade, we loaded up for the two-hour drive back to Knoxville. Some twenty paper bags of burned remains lay in the back of the truck, and two tantalizing questions hung in the air between us: Were these the bones of James Grizzle? If so, who had killed him, and why?

Answering the first of those questions required a close examination of the bones and teeth. At the scene, we’d been pretty sure the remains were male. The long bones were quite large and robust, and although the skull was fragmented, the external occipital protuberance—the bump at the base of the skull—was easily identifiable and unusually massive, an almost certain indication of maleness. Measurements in the lab corroborated this further: The head of the femur—the ball that inserts into the hip socket—usually measures 45 millimeters or more in diameter in adult males; our victim’s femoral heads measured a whopping 50 millimeters, or almost 2 inches. The circumference of the femoral shafts was also quite manly, at 94 millimeters; a woman’s femur rarely exceeds 81 millimeters in circumference.

To determine race, we looked at the facial structure. Although the skull was badly fragmented, portions of the upper and lower jaws were intact enough to interpret. The alveolar areas of the mandible and maxilla, where the tooth sockets met the jaws, were flat, and the teeth were perpendicular to the jaws, rather than jutting forward. The jaws, in other words, were a white man’s.

Our victim was clearly an adult. His collarbones, or clavicles, had fully fused or matured, so we knew he was at least twenty-five years old. His lower spine showed the beginnings of osteoarthritic lipping—ragged, jagged shelves projecting from the edges of vertebrae—suggesting that he was over thirty; however, the lipping was slight enough to indicate that he was probably not more than forty. Lieutenant Wilmot had told us that James Grizzle was thirty-six years old, so at this point the smart scientific money was betting that this was indeed Grizzle. To be sure, though, we’d have to get lucky with dental records.

Before moving to the Bible Belt of Tennessee, Grizzle had been a steelworker in the Rust Belt of Indiana. An employee of Bethlehem Steel, he’d had good medical and dental benefits—and a conscientious dentist in La Porte, Indiana, who had taken X rays a few years before.

The mandible, or lower jaw, is denser bone than the maxilla, or upper jaw, so it had emerged from the ashes more intact. In both jaws, though, the heat of the fire had shattered most of the teeth at the junction where the enamel meets the root. By and large, then, we couldn’t look for fillings; we’d have to match distinctive features in the structure and geometry of the tooth roots and the jaws themselves.

Grizzle’s mandibular X ray showed us the following: His left third molar—his wisdom tooth—was not fully erupted; his left first molar was missing, with bone beginning to resorb or fill the empty socket; his right first molar and right second molar sockets were also empty and beginning to fill in with bone. (His dental-care benefits might have been excellent, but his lifelong dental hygiene, or at least his overall dental health, was quite poor.)

Grizzle’s maxillary X ray revealed that the left first premolar bore an odd root, in the shape of an S; that same tooth also had a filling on its inner surface.

Fortunately for us, our victim’s upper-left first premolar was one of the few teeth whose crown had not shattered; on that crown was a filling, exactly where the X ray told us to look for one. The other features—the missing molars, the resorbed bone, and the S-shaped root—all matched perfectly. I called Lieutenant Wilmot to tell him we had positively identified the victim as James Grizzle.

The remaining questions—who had killed Grizzle, and why?—fell to Lieutenant Wilmot and his colleagues to answer. It didn’t take them long.

One of Grizzle’s neighbors—those concerned, caring neighbors who hadn’t bothered to report the explosion or fire at the time—told deputies that after Grizzle bought the house, he had hired someone to help him remodel it. The worker, a man named Stephen Leon Williams, had moved into the house with Grizzle, bringing along his girlfriend for company.

Grizzle had a lot of money in the bank, his father told police—about $30,000