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

it’s important to try every possible technique to latch on to a print and a name. In a serial murder case like this one, the stakes were at their highest: At least three women were already dead, and if this killer fit the pattern of most serial killers, women would keep on dying until he was caught. This was no time for a squeamish sense of propriety.

I studied the hands. The skin was soggy and on the verge of sloughing off, but I knew that wouldn’t keep Art from getting the prints: he’d been known to put his own fingers inside the sloughed-off skin of a murder victim’s fingers in order to restore the natural contours and get the prints. From my point of view, the key question was whether the hands held any clues to the woman’s manner of death or time since death. Examining them closely, I saw no defensive wounds, so she hadn’t been fighting off a knife attack; there were no rope marks, no trauma of any sort.

Taking a knife from my tool bag, I cut off one hand, then the other, to double his chances of matching a print. I sealed them in a plastic bag and handed them to Art, who headed off to work his magic. On his way out he stopped to take prints from the fresh corpse down near the road, and he sealed those prints in another small bag.

For my work I would need a much bigger bag. On the ground beside the body, we zipped open a black “disaster bag”—the euphemism for body bag—and gently slid her inside the long opening. Then, with half a dozen of us gripping the corners and sides of the bag, we carried her out of the woods and put her in the truck.

As we were loading up, a police radio crackled to life. Art Bohanan had already ID’d one of the victims. Not the one whose hands he’d taken—that one would require more work—but the fresh one. Her name was Patricia Ann Johnson; thirty-one years old, she was a Chattanooga native who’d been staying in a Knoxville shelter for the past few weeks. She’d never been arrested for prostitution, but she’d been seen hanging out in the areas often worked by Knoxville hookers. Art relayed two other interesting pieces of information: She suffered from epilepsy, and her neck had several latent prints on it, which he’d detected by fuming her entire body with superglue and dusting it with ultraviolet powder. Unfortunately, there wasn’t enough detail in those prints to identify the person whose hand had been squeezing her neck.

Now it was my turn to get to work and see what I could find out about victim number three.

We got back to the Body Farm just before dark. After I backed the truck through the gate, we pulled the bag out, laid it on the ground, and unzipped it to remove the body and begin cleaning off the tissue.

When we’d slid the body into the bag, we’d seen very few maggots—barely a handful. Now there was a huge swarm of maggots, literally tens of thousands of them. One of the students asked where they’d all come from. Could there have been a massive egg hatch during the forty-five-minute trip back to the university? No, I explained, just some confusion about what time of day it was. Maggots don’t like sunlight, so if a body is out in the open, they burrow beneath the skin during daylight. When we sealed the remains in the opaque black bag, though, the maggots thought night had fallen, so they came out to feed on the surface.

One other interesting but gruesome note about maggots: Although cold weather keeps blowflies grounded, it doesn’t faze their larval offspring, the maggots. Even though we think of insects as “cold-blooded,” as maggots digest human tissue, the chemical breakdown of the flesh generates a surprising amount of heat; on cold mornings at the Body Farm, it’s not uncommon to see steam rising off a writhing mass of maggots huddled together for warmth. As my colleague Murray Marks has observed, for the residents of the Body Farm it’s not quite as cold and lonely out there as you might think.

We attached metal tags to one arm and one leg to identify victim number three. This was our twenty-seventh forensic case in 1992; that meant she was case number 92-27. To estimate her age, we looked at several different bone structures: her skull sutures, her clavicles, and her pelvis. The bones of the pelvis were dense and smooth, with a marked absence of grain; in other words, they were the bones of a mature but young woman, probably somewhere between twenty and thirty. Her clavicles, on the other hand, had not fully matured: The medial, or sternal, end of the collarbone is the last piece of bone in the body to fuse completely to its shaft; the fact that this epiphysis, as it’s called, had not yet fully ossified suggested that she was not yet twenty-five. Luckily, we could pin it down even more precisely than that. Research data from one of my former Kansas students indicated that the victim was probably somewhere between eighteen and twenty-three. Finally, the basilar suture in the skull—the joint where the occipital bone (the back of the head) meets the sphenoid (the skull’s floor)—was only partly fused, another indicator that she was not yet twenty-five. Factoring all those indicators together, I was confident that she was somewhere between twenty and twenty-five.

To determine her stature, we measured the length of the left femur—44.4 centimeters—and plugged that value into a formula developed back in the 1950s but more recently refined a bit by a UT colleague, Dr. Richard Jantz. One of the world’s leading authorities on skeletal measurements, Richard has assembled a huge database of skeletal measurements; he’s also developed a powerful computer software package that, from a few simple skeletal measurements, can accurately determine an unknown corpse’s sex, race, and stature.