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

and compare the bones you’re examining with the size and development of other, known specimens. To that end, I’d brought along the two definitive reference books on this subject, Radiographic Atlas of Skeletal Development of the Foot and Ankle and a companion volume, Radiographic Atlas of Skeletal Development of the Hand and Wrist. Both represented careful studies based on X rays of hundreds of children’s hands and feet. According to the measurements in those studies, the hand and foot bones from the glass vials were slightly larger than those of an eighteen-month-old male and slightly smaller than those of a twenty-four-month-old male. It took less than an hour for me to reach the same conclusion that my mentor, Dr. Krogman, had reached five years before me: There was nothing in the bones themselves to refute the notion that these were all that remained of a Caucasoid male child, aged twenty months. A twenty-month-old Caucasoid male child named Charles Lindbergh Jr.: the Eaglet.

As I slipped the bones back into their glass vials and pressed the cork stoppers tight, I was struck by how little was left—how little to mark the loss of that glittering promise, the bright future, that Charles Lindbergh Jr. could have had; the relationship he might have forged with his famous father; the pride the elder might have felt as his son grew and perhaps spread his own wings, piloting airplanes or jets or even spacecraft.

By 1982, I had three healthy sons of my own, ages twenty-six, twenty, and eighteen. I could scarcely imagine what it must have cost Charles Lindbergh in his soul to lose a young son to a violent death. But I did know what it cost to lose a different loved one to a violent, untimely, and senseless death, and I knew how fast such a thing could happen: A makeshift ladder in New Jersey breaks, and suddenly a kidnapping becomes a murder. Or a bright young lawyer’s index finger curls around a trigger, and a bullet leaves a swift smear of carnage across a different set of lives. Across my life.

It happened in March of 1932—by utter but strange coincidence, the very same month Bruno Hauptmann was nailing together a crude ladder that bore a fatal flaw. I was three and a half years old, twice the age of the Lindbergh baby. My father, Marvin, was an up-and-coming young attorney in the town of Staunton, Virginia. He was bright and good-looking; he was married to his childhood sweetheart, Jennie (twenty years earlier, they’d been crowned King and Queen of the Maypole); and he looked to have a promising future in politics. He’d already made one run for the office of commonwealth’s attorney; he didn’t win, but at age thirty he still had plenty of chances—or so everyone thought.

We lived in a two-story white house on Lee Street, a couple of miles from the center of town, beside an apple orchard. My recollections of that time are few and fuzzy, but one memory of my father—of my father and me—remains crystal-clear: It was a Sunday morning, and he and I drove into town in our big black Dodge to buy a newspaper. (He’d come of age during the heyday of the Model T, but he’d also heard his father say, countless times, that Fords were made of tin, “and damned sorry tin at that.”)

The Dodge stopped at a street corner where a man stood beside a stack of papers. Daddy reached across me, rolled down the window, then handed me a dime and asked if I would pay the man. For some reason—fear? shyness?—I shook my head no and pressed my body against my father’s. He smiled good-naturedly, took the coin back, and gave it to the vendor.

I have photographs of this handsome young lawyer I’m named after. In some of them he holds me on his lap. In others he stands beside my mother. In most of them he is smiling. We were happy—he was happy—in those days, to the best of my memory.

But the best of my memory isn’t nearly good enough, because it doesn’t begin to account for what came next. One Wednesday afternoon, not long after our Sunday newspaper excursion, my father closed the door of his law office and shot himself. It was early spring; the apple trees in the orchard would have been about to bloom; U.S. farm prices were finally on the rise; and my father put a bullet through his head.

Decades later, in the one brief conversation we ever had about my father’s suicide, my mother intimated that he’d been asked to invest money for some of his law clients and had lost it when the stock market crashed. Perhaps he was unable to face the people whose money he’d lost, or perhaps he was unable to face himself; who can say? Looking back on it today, when I am forty years older than he was when he killed himself, I can’t help thinking, You could have gotten past it. If you’d just hung on a little longer, things would have worked out all right in the end. But for whatever reason, he couldn’t see or feel a way, any way, to hang on. And so he let go.

The instant he pulled the trigger, my father slipped from my grasp—slipped away from all of us—and he remains out of reach to this day. I still miss him. I imagine the things he and I would have done together as I grew up. I long for fatherly and lawyerly advice when I’m heading into a murder trial to face hostile questioning on the witness stand. I’m in my seventies, but I still cry like a child when I recall how I shrank from paying that corner newspaper vendor. If only I had paid the man! Perhaps that would have pleased my father; perhaps he would have smiled at the bravery of his little man, felt his heart lighten a bit, felt his own courage ratchet upward one