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

activity. That was partly because the body was fresh but also because the weather was cold. Blowflies don’t fly if the temperature’s below 50 degrees Fahrenheit.

“This body’s too fresh for me,” I said. “She needs to go to the medical examiner.” Having recused myself from examining her, I was careful not to touch her. Just by looking at her bruised neck and contorted face, though, I was pretty sure she’d been strangled.

A sheriff’s deputy asked how long she’d been dead. Just from a glance, and without making much allowance for the cold snap we’d been having, I said, “Not long—maybe a couple of days.” That offhand remark, written down by the deputy and quoted in the newspapers, would come back to haunt me many times in the months and years to come.

They led me to the second body. This one lay much deeper in the woods than the others had, about a half-mile from the billboard, over the top of the hill and partway down the other side. Unlike the previous bodies, this one was completely nude; a satiny undergarment, a teddy, lay crumpled in the leaves about ten feet away. It was another black female, the race obvious from the hair and the exposed teeth. This body was badly decomposed. The skin was discolored and the abdomen bloated; the bones of the left leg were exposed; and both feet were missing. Legs and arms splayed wide, the corpse lay with its crotch jammed against a small tree. The tree trunk extending straight upward from the genitals of the nude, rotting body of the murder victim made the crime even more shocking, more depraved.

As I studied the body’s position, I realized that this wasn’t the death scene—in other words, this wasn’t where she’d actually been killed. Looking around, I saw a dark, greasy stain several feet higher up the slope, where volatile fatty acids had leached out of the body. Part of the hair mat was there too. Clearly that was where her body had originally lain, until someone or something had come along and moved her.

Both of the victim’s feet were gone, chewed off at the ends of the tibia and fibula, and the left thigh was badly gnawed as well. I could picture exactly what had happened: After the murder, a week or so passed; by then she would have been smelling pretty foul to you or me. To a dog’s way of thinking, though, she was just starting to smell really interesting.

Dogs, I’ve observed, don’t like to eat out in the open; they’re afraid of being surprised from behind. Their favorite feeding position is to nestle with their back up against a log or a big rock, so nothing can sneak up on them. Now, if you’re a 50- or 75-pound dog, and you’re trying to drag a 120-pound body off to a safe place to eat it, you’re not going to drag it uphill; you’re going to grab a foot and drag downhill, so you get some help from gravity. In this case, though, the body hadn’t moved far before the spread legs slid to opposite sides of a tree trunk. Once it was lodged there, the dog was stymied. Instead of a whole body, he had to settle for gnawing the thigh and carrying off the feet.

The body was lying faceup—except that the face was already gone. The soft tissue of the neck was also gone, exposing the cervical vertebrae, though the shoulders and arms remained virtually intact.

I wasn’t surprised about the face; it’s often the first thing to go. Blowflies lay their eggs in moist, dark places, so the mouth, nose, eyes, and ears are among the obvious locations. So are the genitals and anus, if the flies can get to them. About the only place a female blowfly would rather lay her eggs than a natural body orifice is a bloody wound.

But while the missing face was to be expected, the missing neck wasn’t, especially considering the good condition of the shoulders and arms. It was a classic case of what’s called “differential decay,” and anytime I see it I consider it a red flag, a clue. The differential decay in the neck region told me that there had been some sort of trauma there. Maybe her throat had been cut, in which case the flies would have flocked to the wound, or perhaps she’d been strangled, and her attacker’s fingernails broke the skin and drew blood. Something, at any rate, had made the neck just as appealing to the blowflies and maggots as the moist orifices of the head.

As I studied the body Arthur Bohanan, a KPD crime lab specialist at the scene, spoke up: “Bill, give me a hand.” Having worked with him for years, I knew he wasn’t speaking figuratively. He wanted me to remove one of the victim’s hands and give it to him.

Art was KPD’s top fingerprint specialist; in fact, he was becoming known as one of the best fingerprint guys in the country, someone even the FBI consulted at times. He wasn’t just a technician, dusting for prints at crime scenes; he was a researcher, exploring new ways to reveal latent prints on surfaces where they’d never been seen before, like fabrics and even the skin of murder victims. Art had worked a number of child abductions and murders over the years, and he’d seen children’s fingerprints disappear—fade away from the interior of an abductor’s car, for instance—far faster than the adult prints did. Why? Art decided to find out. Before puberty, he eventually learned, children’s prints lack the oils that give adult prints such staying power.

To a civilian bystander, Art’s casual request, “Give me a hand,” would have sounded horrifying. To a forensic scientist it was routine. In a murder case it’s not uncommon for investigators to cut off fingers or even entire hands to take back to their own labs or to send to the FBI. In any case when a victim’s identity is unknown,