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

research facility. Draped across one side of the fence was a giant banner that proclaimed, “This makes us S.I.C.K.!” Even though my facility was the target of the protest, I couldn’t help laughing when I saw the sign. It was smart, it was funny, and it got them great news coverage.

But what had brought the wrath of S.I.C.K. down upon me? It seems that one of the survey crew laying out the parking-lot expansion had taken his sack lunch into the shade one day and suddenly found himself staring at the bodies decomposing inside our little chain-link enclosure. He went home and complained to his mother, who just happened to be one of the leaders of S.I.C.K. As any concerned mother would, she quickly organized a protest.

When I explained the purpose of the facility—researching decomposition to help police solve murders—the group acknowledged that yes, such work had scientific merit, but why did it have to be located here, practically under the public’s nose? Couldn’t we move it, say, twenty miles west, onto the vast, wooded, and heavily guarded government reservation at Oak Ridge?

Well, hell, I’d just moved the damned thing from twenty miles away barely a year before; one of the keys to establishing our research program had been finding a location close to the anthropology department. I phoned the university chancellor, Jack Reese, and explained the dilemma. I didn’t want to cause any trouble for UT, but I sure would hate to lose or relocate my research facility. Jack was as wise as Solomon and as generous as Carnegie. He offered to pay, out of his own budget, for the installation of a chain-link fence around our remaining acre of woods, to keep people from wandering close to the bodies.

A few weeks later the fences were up and the crisis was over. Robert Frost was right: Good fences do make good neighbors. But it wouldn’t be our last crisis—and it wouldn’t be our worst.

CHAPTER 10

Fat Sam and Cadillac Joe

IGOT A CALL one Thursday in May that made me close my office door. That was a rare thing. I kept my door open pretty much all the time—partly because I liked to see what was going on in the department; partly so students and faculty would feel free to talk to me about any little problem they were having (before it became a big problem); partly so nobody would wonder or worry or gossip about what was going on behind Dr. Bass’s closed door. So when they heard my phone ring and my door close, everyone in Anthropology figured something sensitive was going on. It was.

The call came from Arzo Carson, the director of the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation. The TBI and the FBI were working together, he said, on a case that had begun as a kidnapping but had apparently escalated into a murder. Carson didn’t need to tell me that, with the FBI looking over his shoulder, the stakes and the pressure were sky-high for the TBI.

As curious grad students tiptoed past my door, straining to catch snatches of the conversation, Director Carson briefed me on the case. The circumstances—hell, even just the criminals’ names—were the most bizarre I had ever encountered in a forensic case: Fat Sam. Cadillac Joe. Funky Don.

After I hung up, I opened the door and called in two of my best forensic response team regulars, Pat Willey and Steve Symes. Without giving them any details, I asked if they wanted to help me with some fieldwork the next week. Steve and Pat both agreed instantly, clearly eager to pierce the veil of mystery. Five days after the TBI director’s call, the three of us piled into my station wagon and headed west on I-40 toward Nashville. As we drove I filled them in on the case.

Fourteen months before, a couple named Monty and Liz Hudson were kidnapped in broad daylight from the parking lot of a Nashville hotel. The hotel, a Holiday Inn, was in a fairly safe part of town, adjacent to the campus of Vanderbilt University. In plain sight of several witnesses—including one with a camera, who took photographs—the Hudsons were abducted at gunpoint by three men. Two of the kidnappers forced Monty Hudson into his own Cadillac, the third shoved Liz into another car, and the two cars left the Holiday Inn together.

A couple of days later Liz Hudson was released in downtown Nashville. By then the kidnapping had been reported, and agents from the TBI and FBI were crawling all over the parking lot and the Holiday Inn for clues. That’s when the case started to get really strange.

Liz refused to cooperate with the FBI. She told them that the kidnapping had been a simple misunderstanding and that Monty had since left town on a business trip. She didn’t know where he’d gone or when he’d be back, but she assured them that Monty was fine and nothing was amiss. Liz was six months pregnant at the time of the kidnapping. Three months later she gave birth to Monty’s baby, but Monty still wasn’t back from that business trip.

A couple more months went by. Then the investigators got a tip about Monty’s whereabouts: According to an informant, Monty’s business trip had ended in a shallow grave some seventy-five miles south of Nashville, on a farm near the Alabama border.

WEST TENNESSEE is cotton territory. Nashville is music territory. Lawrence County, in 1980, was “Fat Sam” Passarrella’s territory. Think of mobsters and you’ll probably picture wise guys from Jersey or Chicago or Vegas. The town of Lawrenceburg, Tennessee, most likely doesn’t spring to mind in connection with organized crime, but it should. Well, maybe not organized crime, actually; more like disorganized crime.

Fat Sam hadn’t always been called that. His mama had christened him Sam John, but that had been many years and about four hundred pounds ago. Sam grew up in New York, but apparently he fell