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

virtually skeletonized, it took me less time than usual to clean the bones for a forensic examination. I could already tell, even out in the field, that this was a woman. The pelvis was textbook female: broader hips, a raised sacroiliac joint, a wide sciatic notch, and a greater subpubic angle—all part of the geometry designed to allow a baby’s head to pass through the pelvis during birth. The cranium, too, had classic female features. The upper edges of the eye orbits were sharp, the chin tapered to a point at the midline, and the cranial vault was smooth and lacking in heavy muscle markings.

Race was easy to peg, too. On the ground beside the skull we’d found the hair mat where it had sloughed off: light brown and slightly wavy. That hair, plus the shape of the mouth—teeth that were oriented quite vertically, with no forward protruding or jutting—clearly marked her as white.

To estimate age, we looked at several different bone structures: her upper jaw, her clavicles, and her pelvis. Like 92-27, 92-28 had pelvic bones that 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 her mid-twenties and mid-thirties. Her clavicles were fully mature as well: the medial, or sternal, ends of the bones had fused completely to the shafts, which meant she was at least twenty-five. Finally, her cranial sutures—including those in the hard palate, called the intermaxillary sutures—were not yet fully fused. Generally the intermaxillary sutures don’t fuse until the late thirties, so she probably wasn’t more than thirty-five. I could say with certainty, then, that she was somewhere between twenty-five and thirty-five, but it was hard to be more precise than that.

You’d think, since the skeleton was missing only an arm, that we could determine her stature simply by laying the remains on a lab table and stretching a tape measure from head to heel. Unfortunately, it’s not quite that simple. After death, cartilage shrinks and decays, sometimes by as much as several inches. Besides, her skull wasn’t attached. Those two complications virtually guaranteed that the tape-measure method would be wildly inaccurate.

Instead, we used the same method we’d have used if we’d found nothing but a single femur: we measured its length and extrapolated. This femur was longer than the previous one: 47.8 centimeters. That put 92-28 at somewhere between five feet six and a half inches and five feet nine and a half inches tall.

Next, I sought any signs of trauma that might tell me how she died. Unfortunately, despite hours of sifting through the leaves and soil, we’d never managed to find her hyoid, so I couldn’t tell if she’d been strangled.

Another bone, though, did reveal something striking—literally. The left scapula, or shoulder blade, had a large fracture on its lower end. Now, the scapula’s a pretty big, strong bone, and it’s well protected by large muscles. That fracture could only have been caused by a powerful blow—maybe a violent kick from a heavy boot, or possibly a hard hit by a baseball bat or a two-by-four.

The pattern of breakage at the edges of the fracture indicated that the blow had come from behind, and there were no signs of healing, so the fracture was perimortem (occurring at or just before death). In other words, she was probably running for her life when he caught up with her. She was barefoot, remember, and he was surely wearing shoes. He knocked her facedown on the stream bank, then he set upon her and killed her.

The greater the length of time since death, the harder it is to pinpoint, at least from the skeletal remains. Because the corpse was almost fully skeletonized, it was obvious that although 92-28 was the last to be found, she’d been the first to die. Taking into account the extreme decomposition of the body, the daily temperatures in September and October, and the condition of the soft tissue that had been submerged in the creek—whose decay rate I knew would therefore have been cut in half—I judged that 92-28 had been dead four to eight weeks before she was found, a pretty wide window of opportunity covering almost the entire month of September. The bugs and the soil analysis, I hoped, would tell the time of the crime with considerably more precision.

My hopes proved well founded. Arpad’s analysis of the volatile fatty acids from the soil beneath the body put the TSD at thirty to thirty-seven days, meaning that she had been killed sometime during the week of September 22 to 29. Neal Haskell’s entomological analysis came to virtually the same conclusion: September 22 to 26. If indeed she’d died during late September—the interval where our three independent analyses, based on different techniques, overlapped—then the time between killings fit the classic, accelerating pattern for serial killers: Two to three weeks had elapsed between the first murder and the second; perhaps a few days between the second and the third; and, according to the autopsy findings of the medical examiner (ME), as little as a day or two between the third and the fourth.

This victim’s teeth, like Darlene Smith’s, showed a pattern of careful attention during her youth, followed by neglect and decay in recent years—in other words, another mouth that had fallen on hard times. Half a dozen teeth bore fillings, but one tooth, a lower left incisor, had two unfilled cavities. One of these was small, but the other extended from the top surface of the tooth deep into the pulp cavity. This cavity had probably been filled at one time, but the filling had fallen out, making the tooth more vulnerable to decay than ever. The infection had spread to the jaw itself, causing a large abscess on the surface of the bone. When I first picked up the skull out at the crime scene, I’d noticed that this hole in the tooth had been stuffed with cotton. At the time