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

he presented me with my TBI consultant’s badge. I actually went out to the firing range and shot well enough to qualify once—at night, to boot—but then I decided that it was silly for me to carry a gun. For one thing, by the time I get called to a crime scene, I’m a lot more likely to be confronting dead victims than live criminals. For another, I’m generally in no position to defend myself anyway, crawling around with my nose to the ground and my rear end in the air.

In this case, my rear guard looked pretty competent: half a dozen or so armed state and federal agents, swiftly fanning out around the clearing to establish a secure perimeter. The absence of sheriff’s deputies at a rural scene like this was unusual; the organized-crime task force suspected that some of the local lawmen were not to be trusted, I later learned from Bill Coleman. The TBI and FBI wanted us to arrive unannounced and, if possible, undetected. Me, I was just hoping we’d be able to depart unharmed.

The FBI agent, Knudsen, had been here once before, led by Earl Carroll. According to Knudsen, Carroll walked to a spot about fifty feet to the left of the logging road, looked down, and started cussing. “Well, this is where he was,” he’d told Knudsen, pointing at a shallow trench in the ground where he said that he and another of Fat Sam’s cronies had buried the body.

Knudsen led me to the spot in question. It was choked with weeds, briers, bushes, and poison-oak vines, but even so, I could tell at a glance that the ground had been disturbed fairly recently. Atop the area of disturbed earth, a log and several tree branches had been laid side by side. Mixed with the reddish-brown clay was a white, powdery material, which Carroll had told Knudsen was lime, dumped over Monty Hudson’s body in a misguided effort to speed its decomposition. (That seems to be a common misconception among murderers. Lime does reduce the odor of decomposition, but it also reduces the rate of decomposition. As a result, a lime-covered body may be less likely to get sniffed out, but it’s more likely to linger.)

As a TBI agent videotaped the proceedings, we set to work. First, Steve Symes photographed the scene from several viewpoints, starting from beside the cars, then gradually working his way closer. Then Pat Willey and I began clearing away the brush, vines, and grass. Even before we started to dig, we made a key find. Lying in a tangle of weeds and leaves and small rocks was a human ulna from a right forearm.

Whoever had moved the body—Fat Sam or his henchmen—had done a pretty sloppy job of it, but that wasn’t surprising. Put yourself in the shoes of the body-mover and you’ll see why: You go out to dig up a body and hide it someplace else. This body, mind you, has been decomposing in a shallow grave for months now, so it’s going to be really smelly and mighty rotten. You hold your breath, grab an arm, and give a pull . . . and the arm comes off in your hands. At this point, unless you’re exceptionally conscientious and have an iron stomach, what you’re going to do is scoop up whatever big pieces you can grab between breaths of fresh air—a head, a torso, a couple legs, most of the arms—and then hightail it out of there as fast as you can. Fortunately for me, most bad guys sent to move a rotten body don’t know or don’t care that teeth can fall out after a few weeks, hands can drop off or get gnawed off, bullets can work free and get left behind.

Since the grave appeared shallow, we excavated with trowels rather than shovels. After a couple of hours of careful digging, we had dug down to the undisturbed layer of earth. By then we’d found a jumble of other things besides the ulna: two thoracic (upper back) vertebrae. Fifteen teeth. Four fragments of an occipital, the shattered base of a skull. Five finger and toe bones. A fragment of a long bone, possibly from a tibia (shin). Human hair. Empty pupal casings left behind by maggots metamorphosing into adult flies. Tatters of cloth. A bullet.

We bagged the teeth and bones to take back to the anthropology department for a thorough examination, and we gave the cloth and the bullet to the TBI for analysis. Clambering back into the government cars, we headed back to Nashville, then went our separate ways, safe and sound.

Back in Knoxville, we began sifting through the material we had in order to determine the Big Four: sex, age, race, and stature. Unfortunately, we didn’t have a whole hell of a lot to go on. Determining the sex was complicated by the lack of a pubic bone, hipbone, or face. However, the ulna was massive, and that strongly suggested that the sex was male. So did the fragments from the occipital: the external occipital protuberance—the bump at the base of the skull—was quite pronounced and bore heavy muscle markings, characteristic of a man’s neck muscles.

The age was more difficult to pin down, since all we had to judge by was the presence of osteoarthritic lipping. The ulna showed some early (“first stage”) lipping at the elbow joint; so did the finger and toe bones and the thoracic vertebrae. That meant he was probably somewhere between thirty and fifty years old—so maybe somewhere around forty—but it was impossible to be any more precise than that.

Without a face or cranial vault, determining the victim’s race was tough too. The hair was dark in color and badly matted; from a simple visual examination, we couldn’t determine the victim’s race. We set aside a sample for more detailed study later.

We were in better shape to determine his stature. We had one long bone, an ulna, and from its length we could extrapolate to estimate the victim’s height.