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

in his checking account and another $9,000 in savings; apparently he made the mistake of telling Williams about it, for the prosecutor alleged that Williams forged Grizzle’s signature on checks drawn on the account in the days after Grizzle’s disappearance.

As if the murder weren’t already gothic enough, one night not long after Grizzle’s mangled body was uncovered, a bizarre new twist came to light: An acquaintance of Williams’s named Anthony Layne Flynn sat drinking in a Kingsport tavern called Ralph’s Bar. His tongue loosened and his judgment impaired by one too many beers, Flynn told his astonished bar mates how Williams had enlisted his help by asking that he bring his Doberman to Grizzle’s house to eat the body. But either the dog wasn’t hungry enough or the body wasn’t yet ripe enough, because he turned up his pointed nose at it.

That’s when Williams resorted to dynamite. But instead of decimating the body, the explosion only ripped it in two. Finally, as a last resort, he doused the house with gasoline and set it afire. As the flames roared into the night sky, he must have thought they were covering his tracks completely, destroying all evidence of the carnage he had committed. In fact, the fire was calling attention to it. It was a beacon, blazing brightly in the dark woods, and its message was clear: Crime scene—investigate with care.

IN OCTOBER OF 1981, Stephen Leon Williams was found guilty of first-degree murder in the death of James Grizzle. His codefendant, Anthony Layne Flynn, who owned the finicky Doberman, was acquitted and released.

Because of the shocking ways he had desecrated Grizzle’s corpse, Williams was sentenced to die in the electric chair. His execution was scheduled for April 16, 1982. His lawyers promptly appealed the death sentence. A series of appeals, then a nationwide moratorium on executions, delayed the sentence year after year.

In 1999, from behind bars, Williams filed a lawsuit against me. His suit named several codefendants: the investigators, a TV production company, and the Discovery Channel, which had featured the Grizzle case in a forensic documentary. I found it astonishing that our legal system would even permit such a thing: Long after his trial, a convicted killer actually sues the people who uncovered and reported the murder he committed. Fortunately, Williams himself voluntarily dropped me from his lawsuit.

More than twenty years after his conviction for murdering, dismembering, blasting, and burning James Grizzle, Williams remains alive and well in a Tennessee prison. As for the crime scene, it has long since been reclaimed by the Tennessee woods. Somewhere on a steep hillside above a ribbon of green water, a deepening layer of leaf litter and silt nurtures a growing colony of weeds, vines, and tree seedlings. Beneath it all, slowly disappearing from view, is a slab of stained concrete and a jumble of bricks. Here, real-life crime scene investigators once sifted down through ashes and came up with the truth.

CHAPTER 7

Death’s Acre: The Body Farm Is Born

If the victim has already been dead for a long time, the head and face will be swollen, the skin and hair will have come off, the lips and mouth will be opened, the eyes will be protruding, and maggots will be feeding.

—Sung Tz’u, The Washing Away of Wrongs, Chinese forensic text published in A.D. 1247*

WHEN I REALIZED I had misjudged Colonel William Shy’s time since death—by 112 years, no less—my first reaction was profound embarrassment. I had made such confident pronouncements to the newspaper reporters who were following the story, and I had a lot of words to eat afterward—words that had been printed everywhere from Tennessee to Thailand.

Humbling experiences can open the door to life’s greatest insights, though, if we’re willing to learn from them. It didn’t take long for my personal embarrassment to give way to professional curiosity. One reason forensic cases have always appealed to me is the challenge they pose: They’re often tragic crimes, but they’re also scientific puzzles to be solved. I’ve never liked hunting—the idea of killing animals for sport has absolutely no appeal to me—but the excitement of unraveling a forensic riddle is probably not so different from the thrill a big-game hunter experiences while stalking a deadly predator.

But just what was the riddle here—what would I be chasing in this case? The more I thought about it, the more exciting it became: my prey would be death itself. To understand fully what had happened to Colonel Shy—and what eventually happens to us all—I would need to track death deep into its own territory, observe its feeding habits, chart its movements and timetables.

More than seven hundred years ago, a Chinese official named Sung Tz’u compiled a remarkable handbook for forensic investigators. The book, whose title is often translated as The Washing Away of Wrongs, suggests an impressive array of postmortem examinations and tests that should be conducted during the early postmortem interval—the hours or days following a suspicious death. The book also describes, in graphic terms, the changes bodies undergo during the extended postmortem interval—the weeks and months it takes for a corpse to transform from flesh to bare bone.

In the three-quarters of a millennium since Tz’u’s writing, however, virtually nothing more had been discovered or published about the extended postmortem interval. When I examined Colonel Shy’s remains in 1977, I had no more knowledge or scientific literature to draw on than Sung Tz’u had possessed in 1247.

Already—long before I made Colonel Shy’s acquaintance—the idea of making a scientific study of decomposition had been germinating in some recess of my mind. The seed had been planted back in 1964, when I wrote to Harold Nye at the Kansas Bureau of Investigation and suggested that we find some rancher to help me study decomp on the hoof (“If you have some interested farmer who would be willing to kill a cow and let it lie . . .”). That seed was still lying dormant in 1971,