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

He didn’t tell me at the time, but Arpad spent months at the microscope, staring and despairing. It would take an immense laboratory, with a staff of perhaps fifty, to identify and track the legions of microbes converging on his research subjects, digesting their tissues, and leaving behind greasy puddles of waste. Then it hit him: the microbes themselves might be too difficult to analyze, but the grease slicks they left behind—the by-products and waste products created by the digestion of soft tissues—might contain some useful evidence.

Arpad took another look at his samples—not at the bugs themselves this time, but at the smelly soup in which they swam. Chemically the liquid around and beneath decaying bodies proved to be a mixture of various compounds, mainly volatile (lightweight, easily evaporated) fatty acids created by the breakdown of fat and DNA. As he studied the samples he’d collected over the weeks and months, Arpad realized that the ratio of compounds continuously evolved as the bodies decomposed further and further. In other words, a sample taken from beneath body A five days after death would differ markedly from a sample taken fifty days after death. Arpad really began to get excited when he noticed that the same patterns or ratios—the same evolving chemical profile—that held true for body A also held true for body B, body C, and so on.

By then Arpad knew he was on the trail of a consistent scientific phenomenon he could measure and harness. All he had to do now was track the ratios over time, then develop a procedure for taking a sample from a crime scene, determining the ratio of volatile fatty acids in that sample, adjusting for the average daily temperatures, then comparing that ratio with the ratios he’d observed at known postmortem periods. Oh, and develop a formula or equation that could easily calculate time since death, by matching his crime scene ratios with the ratios he’d carefully measured during two years of research at the Body Farm.

It’s a difficult concept to explain—heck, it’s a difficult concept for me to understand, not being a chemist—but an simple analogy might make it a little easier. Suppose you know that Joe Blow eats a scrambled egg every morning for breakfast; sometimes he also chops up a boiled egg in a can of tuna for lunch; and if he’s feeling really ambitious, he might whip up a batch of chocolate-chip cookies using another two eggs. Now, if for some reason you happen to rummage around in Joe’s garbage can, you should be able to tell, from the ratio of eggshells to tuna cans and chocolate-chip bags, how many days’ worth of Joe’s garbage you took out of that can.

What, you may be wondering, does all this have to do with some bones—possibly human bones—buried under a house in Crossville, Tennessee? Quite a bit, I hoped, which is why I wanted to be sure the forensic response team remembered to bring back soil samples.

The house belonged to a man named Terry Ramsburg. But Terry Ramsburg wasn’t around; in fact, nobody had seen hide nor hair of him in more than two years, including his wife, Lillie Mae.

Actually, by now Lillie Mae was his ex-wife. She had reported Terry missing on January 16, 1989. He’d left the house for work at his auto body shop one day, she said, and didn’t come home that night. When he still hadn’t come back a week or so later, she finally called the police.

Not too long after she reported him missing, Lillie Mae filed for divorce, on the grounds that Terry had deserted her. In due course the divorce came through, and Lillie Mae subsequently remarried. She stayed in the house, just in case Terry should happen to resurface, and her new husband moved in with her and her two daughters.

Terry’s father, Robert Ramsburg, didn’t quite believe Lillie Mae’s story. He knew things had been stormy at home—Terry expected Lillie’s teenaged daughters to help out at the body shop, and they didn’t like that—but he didn’t believe Terry would simply leave town without a word. And when Lillie Mae got married again, Robert got more suspicious. His mind kept coming back to that house, and eventually he decided to snoop around a bit. One September day when nobody was home, Robert opened the wooden door leading to the crawl space. Holding a flashlight in one hand, he scuttled around beneath the floor joists, looking for something—anything—that might tell him about his son’s disappearance.

In the far corner of the crawl space, he found it: a bit of red cloth protruding slightly from the soil. It was in a patch of dirt that seemed disturbed, fluffier than the hard-packed clay beneath most of the house. He tugged gently, exposing more fabric; then, using his bare hands, he began to scrape away the dirt. Gradually the red fabric assumed the familiar outline of a pair of long johns, and then he saw, jutting from the waistband, something that looked like bone. At once he stopped digging, went inside, and called the sheriff’s office. A few phone calls and hours later, my graduate students were on their way.

For years our forensic response teams had carried essentially the same set of tools: shovels, trowels, rakes, paper evidence bags, plastic body bags, wire-mesh screens, cameras. Now, they took a small but significant addition: a pair of Ziploc plastic bags in which to collect soil samples—one sample from beneath the remains, another from an uncontaminated region ten feet away.

Agent Moore was waiting at the courthouse. So was Lillie Mae, who had consented to the search. They drove the mile and a half to the house caravan-style, with the white UT truck trailing the TBI sedan and Lillie Mae’s car. With his characteristic thoroughness, Bill Grant jotted down her license tag: RNW-016. Several other cars were already parked at the house. Some had delivered a handful of city police and sheriff’s deputies, but sitting quietly in one car