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

in with a bad crowd up there, so his family sent him down south to straighten him out. His aunt Louise owned the local telephone company in Lawrenceburg and was a pillar of the community; under her positive influence, the family hoped Sam would embark on a business career of his own.

He did. By 1980, Sam’s numerous business ventures included counterfeiting, money laundering, marijuana farming, drug distribution, and trafficking in stolen property. This smorgasbord of illegal enterprise had caught the eye of a joint FBI–TBI–Secret Service task force on organized crime, and the task force was amassing a fat file on Fat Sam and his cohorts: “Funky Don” Parsons, Howard “Big Daddy” Turner, Elvin “Bank Robber” (sometimes shortened to “B.R.”) Haddock, and Earl (no nickname) Carroll.

In the months following Monty Hudson’s disappearance, the task force began tightening its net around Fat Sam’s gang. When Sam was indicted for counterfeiting, the others could see the handwriting on their indictments as well. One of them, Earl Carroll—perhaps figuring the first to squeal would get the best deal—contacted a Nashville FBI agent, Richard Knudsen, and offered to spill the beans on Fat Sam’s crimes, including, he claimed, the kidnapping and murder of Monty Hudson.

Carroll spun a wild tale. Monty Hudson was a con man, he said, nicknamed “Cadillac Joe” because of his fondness for stealing that particular brand of car. But cars weren’t the only hot properties Monty had acquired. According to Carroll, Monty contacted Fat Sam and offered to sell him a batch of pure silver bars, more than thirty in all, each measuring a good foot and a half long by about six inches wide and four inches high. Tipping the scales at nearly one hundred pounds apiece, each was stamped with a mint mark and serial number attesting to its authenticity. At the time, silver was selling for up to $50 an ounce—about ten times what it is today. At those prices just one of Monty’s silver bars could be worth up to $80,000. But because he needed to sell them quickly and discreetly, no questions asked, he was willing to make Sam a hell of a deal on them: $20,000 cash would buy the whole lot of them.

Fat Sam was interested, but he wasn’t so gullible as to take Monty’s story on faith. One of his cronies, Funky Don, had some experience with precious metals, and Fat Sam asked Funky Don to run a test, or assay, on one of the bars. He did, and it assayed as pure silver. Sam forked over the twenty grand, and Monty handed over the silver. But as Fat Sam discovered when he had it retested, it wasn’t silver after all; it was actually zinc, another soft, heavy, silvery metal but worth only a few cents per ounce. In other words, for his $20,000, Fat Sam had bought a batch of metal bricks worth less than a hundred bucks. Sam was furious, Carroll told the FBI: furious at Funky Don—maybe he’d botched the assay, or maybe he was in on the scam—and even more furious at Monty.

That’s when he swooped down on Monty and Liz in the parking lot, just as they were about to skip town. At some point after the kidnapping, Liz was being held elsewhere while Fat Sam and Big Daddy Turner, who was actually a small man, took Monty for another ride in his Cadillac. Sitting in the backseat, Monty said something smart-alecky. It was the last thing he ever said: one of the two men up front—it’s not clear which one—turned around and shot him.

Now there was the problem of Liz, Monty’s wife: She hadn’t seen the murder, but she could certainly link the men to the kidnapping. Fat Sam didn’t have the heart to kill her, so he called in a hard case, an out-of-towner from across the border in Alabama. Apparently the hired killer took one look at Liz—a beautiful woman, by all accounts, and obviously pregnant to boot—and announced, “No matter what kind of a sorry son of a bitch I am, I can’t kill no pregnant woman.” At that point, said Carroll, Fat Sam released Liz and ordered his cronies to dig two graves in remote areas outside Lawrenceburg: one for Monty, and one for . . . his Cadillac!

I’ve heard some pretty outlandish stories over the years, but Earl Carroll’s took the cake. Apparently the FBI and TBI believed it, though, because it wasn’t too long after he told it that I found myself headed toward Nashville in search of Monty Hudson. Along with me were Steve, Pat, and an assortment of shovels, trowels, wire-mesh screens, and evidence bags.

We met FBI Agent Knudsen, several TBI agents, and a state prosecutor for breakfast at a Shoney’s on the south side of Nashville, then piled into their cars for the trip to Fat Sam’s territory. The agents were visibly nervous, so the idea of including a professor’s station wagon in the convoy seemed like a risk to them. We headed south on I-65 for an hour or so, then got off at the exit for Pulaski, another small town near the Alabama border. There, in a Wal-Mart parking lot, we picked up yet another TBI agent: Bill Coleman, based in Lawrenceburg, who was the TBI’s point man, or “case agent,” investigating Fat Sam’s activities.

After picking up Coleman in Pulaski (the birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan, by the way), we headed out into the country. In the course of about ten miles, we went from a four-lane U.S. highway to a two-lane blacktop to gravel to dirt. The dirt track, an old logging road, ended in a clearing that was being swiftly reclaimed by honeysuckle vines, blackberry bushes, and tree seedlings.

The instant the cars jounced to a stop, the FBI and TBI agents jumped out, guns drawn in case we were ambushed by Fat Sam and his gang. For once I wished I’d taken TBI Director Carson up on his offer to issue me a TBI firearm when