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

him back to his squad car, and radioed for backup. One of the officers who responded drove the two women back to town; Pressley took the man in and booked him.

The man caught with his pants down was Thomas Dee Huskey, age thirty-two; he lived in a trailer with his parents in Pigeon Forge, a small town twenty-five miles east of Knoxville. Huskey was charged with rape and robbery. (A wallet belonging to the woman who had led Pressley out to Cahaba Lane was found in the floorboard of the LeSabre.) But a grand jury dismissed the first woman’s complaints; the second woman left town and never showed up to testify against him. After several months in jail, Tom Huskey was released.

A couple of weeks after his release, Huskey was picked up again, this time for soliciting an undercover policewoman for sex. He was cited and fined, then released again. But he remained a prisoner of lust and rage, which he continued to direct at prostitutes. Among the streetwalkers, he soon acquired a bad reputation and a memorable nickname: “Zoo Man.” He’d worked for two years at the Knoxville Zoo as an elephant handler, until he was fired in 1990 for abusing the animals. His job wasn’t the only reason for the nickname, though: Both during and after the time he worked at the zoo, Huskey liked to take prostitutes to an empty livestock barn beside the zoo. There, rumor had it, he liked to tie women up and abuse them. By the summer of 1992 the word had spread among Knoxville’s prostitutes: Stay away from Zoo Man.

Not everyone got the message, though. One Sunday afternoon in September, Huskey picked up another prostitute and took her out to Cahaba Lane, promising her $75—nearly twice her usual fee. But once they were in the woods, she later told police, Huskey tied her hands behind her back, then beat her and raped her. As he’d done to his victim in February, he left her tied up on the ground.

Just a few weeks later, on the night after Anderson’s body was found, the police arrested Tom Huskey in Pigeon Forge, at the trailer he shared with his parents on Huskey Lane. Searching the trailer, they found a piece of orange baling twine in Huskey’s bedroom—the same kind they’d found tied around Patty Anderson’s wrists. They also found an earring, later identified as hers; snagged on the earring was a blond hair. Lacking a follicle, or root, the hair itself didn’t contain enough DNA to compare with the victim’s. However, a chemical analysis by the FBI crime lab showed that the hair found in Huskey’s bedroom had been dyed with the same dye as Patty Anderson’s hair.

The next step in the quest for evidence was to search the two places Huskey was known to take women for sex: the barn by the Knoxville Zoo and the woods off Cahaba Lane. Six or eight local prostitutes had gone missing over the past few months, and if Huskey had killed one of them, as the evidence sure seemed to indicate, maybe he’d killed others, too.

Of course, just because a prostitute drops from sight, that doesn’t mean she’s been killed. Having worked several cases involving prostitutes, I’ve learned that many of these women lead mobile, nomadic lives. For one thing, they’re often trying to stay one step ahead of the law. For another, they can command higher prices when they’re the new girl on the block. So maybe the unaccounted-for prostitutes had simply moved on to greener pastures; on the other hand, maybe some of them were dead and decomposing in the woods or the old livestock barn. Unfortunately, the barn had gone up in flames during the summer and the site had been bulldozed clean. Was it an accident or arson? Any evidence that might have been there, including burned bones, was long gone. That left Cahaba Lane.

Six days after Patty Anderson’s body was found, I got a call from the Knox County Sheriff’s Department. They’d found the bodies of two more women out at Cahaba Lane, the officer said, and they wondered if I’d come take a look. I rounded up a team—Bill Grant (who later worked as a forensic anthropologist for the U.S. Army) and Lee Meadows and Murray Marks (both now UT professors who teach, work forensic cases, and keep the Body Farm going)—and we piled into a white UT pickup truck and headed east. A serial killer was on the loose in Knoxville, and he was preying on some of the city’s most vulnerable women. Women whose livelihood required them to put their bodies—their lives—in the hands of strangers.

It had been years since I’d worked a serial-murder case, but I vividly remembered how disturbing it was. Back in the mid-1980s, eight women in the Southeast were murdered and dumped alongside major highways; three of the bodies were found in Tennessee. Many of the victims had reddish hair, so the case became known as the Redhead Murders. Most of those women were prostitutes; that’s when I learned how they’d move from one city to another whenever their earnings began to drop.

The Redhead Murders were never solved. I hoped this case would turn out better. There’s no such thing as a happy ending in a case like this, but if we got lucky and all did our jobs well, at least there might be less crime and more punishment.

When I parked the truck at the end of Cahaba Lane and got out, I happened to glance down. There, clinging to the top of my left rear tire, was a slimy used condom. The investigators led us into the woods. The first body was about fifty yards to the right of the billboard—practically within sight of the pavement. This woman, like Patty Anderson, was partially clothed, although her pants were pulled down, exposing her buttocks and genitals. A black female, she was still in the first stage of decomposition: little discoloration, no bloating, minimal insect