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

the crawl space suggested that the body could have reached that point in about eleven months, whereas nearly three times that many months had actually elapsed since his disappearance. The technique, we now realized, was better suited to bodies that were still actively decomposing.

After the Ramsburg case, Arpad Vass continued to refine his soil-analysis technique for estimating time since death. He also developed other ways to harness cutting-edge chemistry to catch killers. Recently he devised a similar technique that analyzes tiny tissue samples from a murder victim’s liver, kidneys, brain, or other organs. If the body is no more than a few weeks old, this tissue-biopsy technique can pinpoint time since death to within a matter of days or even hours. Now Arpad is working to isolate and identify the specific molecules that constitute the distinctive odor of death—the molecules that cadaver dogs respond to—as a step toward developing portable systems that police and human-rights investigators could use to locate clandestine graves.

And Arpad’s original breakthrough—analyzing soil samples to determine time since death—has proved its accuracy and value in dozens of cases. The investigation into one of those cases would begin just three months after Lillie Mae confessed to shooting Terry Ramsburg and burying him under the house. Time since death—and Arpad—would play a prominent role in the “Zoo Man” murders.

CHAPTER 12

The Zoo Man Murders

EVERY OCTOBER, the East Tennessee hills get all gussied up for six dazzling weeks. The dogwoods turn crimson; the maples, a brilliant red-orange; the tulip poplars, bright yellow; the oaks, variations in red and brown.

Nine miles east of downtown Knoxville, not far beyond a bridge where Interstate 40 crosses the green waters of the Holston River, the fall colors put on a show in a thick stand of hardwoods paralleling the highway. The woods lie at the end of a short dead-end road, Cahaba Lane, which runs for a half-mile beside the eastbound lanes of the freeway. Facing the traffic are a handful of houses and trailers and a church perched high on a grassy slope, East Sunny-view Baptist Church. To the south, away from the interstate, a small wet-weather creek winds through the trees.

Cahaba Lane dead-ends at the foot of a towering billboard—Comfort Inn, Free Breakfast, Guest Laundry—supported by five rusting I-beams. Between two of the supports, a path leads up a gently sloping ridge that is dotted with empty beer cans, snack wrappers, egg cartons, shoes, and other household and automotive debris. The forest floor is also littered with acorns, which support a large population of squirrels.

On October 20, 1992, a hunter—aiming to do a little squirrel population control—wandered up the path into the woods. A ways up the trail he noticed a battered mattress and a rotting doghouse; stuffed into the doghouse was a department-store mannequin. Kicking aside some of the debris, he saw that the “mannequin” was actually a young woman: a chemically blond, partially nude, and very dead young woman, her hands bound with orange baling twine. The hunter raced to a phone and called the police. Within minutes the dead end began filling with vehicles from the Knox County Sheriff’s Department and the Knoxville Police Department. One of the KPD officers who converged on Cahaba Lane recognized the victim as Patricia Anderson, a thirty-two-year-old white female he’d been trying to find since she disappeared nearly a week before.

Patty Anderson was no stranger to the police. A prostitute with a cocaine habit and a police record, she was good-looking and a flashy dresser. She was also in the early stages of pregnancy, a fact that few of her coworkers or clients knew. She’d told a bail bondsman that she was trying to scrape together enough money for an abortion; her quest for cash was probably what had brought her to this unlucky dead end.

The Knox County medical examiner quickly confirmed what officers at the scene had suspected from Anderson’s battered face, bruised neck, bulging eyes, and livid face: After tying her up, someone had beaten and strangled her. Ironically, hundreds of people must have been passing by just a stone’s throw away; if she called for help, her cries might have been drowned out by the constant roar of the traffic.

Anderson had last been seen on October 13; the next day her boyfriend spotted his car—a Chevy Malibu, which she had taken—parked at a motel frequently worked by Knoxville prostitutes. But by then she had vanished. To officers familiar with the city’s seamy underbelly, a murder suspect sprang immediately to mind when her battered body was found. He liked to rough up streetwalkers, and he’d done that at Cahaba Lane at least twice before. The hunt was on for Zoo Man.

Eight months before Patty Anderson was killed—back on February 27—a Knoxville prostitute had called the police to report that a “john” had hired her and driven her out to Cahaba Lane. Once there, she said, he took her into the woods and proceeded to rob, rape, and beat her. Then, in the middle of winter, he left her tied up in the woods, naked. She managed to free herself, get to a phone at a beauty shop nearby, and call the police.

A Knoxville Police Department investigator, Tom Pressley, drove the woman back to Cahaba Lane later that day so he could inspect the scene. An aging Buick LeSabre was parked at the end of the road. “That’s it! That’s his car!” the woman exclaimed.

Pressley parked and headed into the woods, accompanied by the woman. About a hundred yards up the path, the woman began to tremble. Clutching Pressley’s arm, she pointed and whispered, “There he is now!” The scene was shocking: A man was standing in the woods with his pants down around his knees; in front of him, on her knees, was a sobbing woman. The officer drew his gun and approached, unnoticed.

Pressley ordered the man to lie facedown in the woods. Then he cuffed him, led