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

When he was called about the Cahaba Lane murders, Neal immediately set about getting samples of live maggots from the bodies so that he could time how long it took them to mature into adult flies. It’s an entomologist’s way of figuring out when the eggs were laid, like counting backward from a baby’s birth to figure out when it was conceived.

Neal also put several pig carcasses in the woods at Cahaba Lane; sheriff’s deputies were posted to guard the experiment and to take temperature readings at frequent intervals. Judging by how long it took the maggots from the bodies to mature, together with what he observed in the pig carcasses, he calculated that blowflies had first begun laying eggs on this woman’s body sometime between October 9 and 13. So three different scientists, using three different techniques, agreed pretty damned closely on when she was killed.

My final challenge would be to find out who she was. With luck, I could learn that straight from her very own mouth. Her teeth were a study in contrasts. On the one hand, a lot of careful work had gone into that mouth: fourteen of her teeth had amalgam fillings. On the other hand, one of her teeth, the lower left first molar, was literally rotting away. The cavity had eaten away much of the crown and spread down into the tooth’s pulp chamber; as a result, the jawbone itself was beginning to crumble too.

I’d seen this sort of contrast before, especially in females. Almost invariably, it pointed to a dramatic change in the victim’s fortunes. A girl grows up, leaves home, and has a hard time making her way in the world; an older woman gets laid off, divorced, or widowed. Whatever the cause of the setback, she cuts costs and corners wherever she can, and before long, dental care is a luxury she can no longer afford.

But even though 92-27 had fallen on hard times, somewhere out there—from the period before her life started going wrong—there were dental X rays with her name on them. I knew we could find them, but it might take a while. Fortunately, we were spared the trouble.

While my colleagues and I had been scrutinizing teeth and bones, chemicals and insects, KPD fingerprint wizard Art Bohanan had been working with the hands I’d cut off for him at the scene. The police had no prints on file that matched the ones Art lifted from the hands, so if she’d ever been arrested, it was someplace besides Knoxville. She also didn’t match any police descriptions or profiles of known prostitutes. But her general description—black female, age twenty to twenty-five, height five feet three inches—did match a missing-person report filed recently by a local woman’s sister. The missing woman, last seen on October 14, was Darlene Smith, a black female age twenty-two, height five feet four inches—a mighty close resemblance to the woman the skeletal analysis described.

From her sister’s report, Art had Darlene Smith’s address, a rented apartment in the eastern section of Knoxville, not far from an area frequently worked by prostitutes. The neighborhood wasn’t particularly desirable but it was pretty cheap. The sister let Art into Darlene’s apartment and dug out a copy of her lease. Art sprayed the paper with ninhydrin, a chemical that reacts strongly with the amino acids in human fingerprint oils. Within moments a jumble of bright purple smudges and prints appeared before his eyes.

The prints came from two pairs of hands, Art determined. One pair of those hands belonged to a man—Darlene’s landlord, Art learned by fingerprinting him that night. The other prints on Darlene Smith’s lease matched the hands I had severed from the decaying corpse at Cahaba Lane.

THE MORNING OF OCTOBER 27, the phone rang again. The police had just found a fourth victim in the woods. I nabbed Bill Grant and Lee Meadows, who’d gone with me the day before, and Emily Craig, the Ph.D. student who had taught me the difference between Caucasoid knees and Negroid knees. Together we retraced the now-familiar route to the scene.

The fourth body lay about a quarter-mile to the right of the billboard, at the edge of the small creek emerging from the woods. Wide and flat, the streambed was dry for much of the year; now, though, a few inches of water trickled through it.

The body was largely skeletonized, except for areas of tissue on the legs, buttocks, and left arm and hand. Lying faceup amid the oak leaves, the bare skull fixed us with a sightless, accusing stare. The vertebrae were completely defleshed, covered only by leaves and twigs. The right arm and hand were missing, probably chewed off by a dog. The left hand, though, lay in the streambed, covered with mud and water. As I dug around it carefully with a trowel, I was pleasantly surprised to find that some of the hand’s soft tissue was still intact.

We bagged the remains and took them back to UT Medical Center. Our first stop was the hospital’s loading dock, where we used a portable X-ray machine to check for bullets, a blade, or any other foreign objects that might tell us something. But there was nothing metallic in the skeleton of this victim, 92-28, except for some dental fillings. Next stop was the Body Farm, where we set the corpse on the ground, opened the body bag, and began cleaning the remains.

Art Bohanan had followed us back from Cahaba Lane. I knew what he wanted, but he wouldn’t have much to work with this time. Not only was there just one hand, there wasn’t even a whole lot of that one. The entire thumb was gone; so were half of the index and middle fingers. About all that remained were the ring finger, the little finger, and part of the palm. But if anybody could tease out an identifying print from a fragment of a rotting hand, it was Art.

Because the remains were already