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

two or three—and assigned us to the Marines. My heart sank. The Marines were taking the brunt of the U.S. casualties in Korea, so I thought I was lost.

Just then a lieutenant intervened. The lieutenant noticed on my intake papers that I’d graduated from UVa and had taught math and science. Figuring that I might be reasonably bright (or possibly not seeing me as one of the Few Good Men the Marines were looking for), he told the sergeant to assign me to the U.S. Army instead, in the “scientific and professional” category. The sergeant objected; the lieutenant persisted. When the sergeant continued to argue—in front of a roomful of draftees—the lieutenant finally pulled rank, snapping, “That is an order, Sergeant.”

I was saved. Instead of the Korean Peninsula, I was sent to the Army Medical Research Lab, called AMRL, at Fort Knox, Kentucky, to help study how noise and vibration—from trucks, tanks, and artillery—affected the soldiers using them. I would spend the rest of the war surrounded by dozens of doctors, research scientists, good-looking nurses, and deafening, powerful machines. Life was good. Then it got even better: I met Lieutenant Owen.

An old friend of my mother’s was stationed at the Pentagon outside Washington, D.C.: Colonel Hilda Lovett, the senior dietician for the Army’s entire network of hospitals. Colonel Lovett had promised my mother that she’d look out for me, and she was true to her word. When she heard I was assigned to AMRL, she cast her eye about for a suitable girlfriend for me, and her eye happened to light on a bright young nutritionist in training at Walter Reed Army Hospital: First Lieutenant Mary Anna Owen. Lieutenant Owen was scheduled for assignment to Fort Lee, in Virginia; however, whether through coincidence or through meddling at the highest levels of the Pentagon, her orders changed and she went to Fort Knox. I received orders of my own: I was to call on this lieutenant and make her feel welcome.

On the appointed afternoon in the fall of 1952, I arrived at her apartment. As always, I was compulsively early, but when I got there she wasn’t in; she was next door, chatting with another nutritionist. Hearing me knocking, she came running. When I heard footsteps and turned, what I saw wasn’t Lieutenant Owen double-timing in an Army uniform; what I saw was a girl named Ann, glowing in a red dress. The instant I saw her running toward me in that red dress, I thought, That’s the girl I’m going to marry.

And I was right. Less than a year later we got married in my hometown in Virginia, in the presence of my mother, my stepfather, a horde of friends and relatives, and the person who had made the match, Colonel Hilda Lovett.

Ann and I spent the next forty years building a life together. Between the two of us, we earned four graduate degrees and produced three healthy sons. Life wasn’t always easy; between our first child, Charlie, and our second, Billy, Ann suffered five miscarriages. But on the whole, we were blessed, busy, and happy.

We moved from Fort Knox to Lexington to Philadelphia to Nebraska to Kansas to Tennessee. We spent a dozen summers in South Dakota, where I spent my days digging dead Arikara Indians out of the ground and Ann spent hers keeping live Sioux out of the ground, helping the tribe fight diabetes through better nutrition. Before we knew it our sons were grown, and in August of 1990 our first grandchild arrived. A new chapter in our lives was beginning. But it didn’t end the way we expected or wanted. One year later, Ann got sick.

It began with abdominal pain—intermittent at first, then constant. Ann went to our family doctor, who took a stomach X ray. The radiologist noticed what looked like an obstruction at the very edge of the film, in the lower GI tract, so Ann went to a hospital, drank that awful barium milkshake, and had a fluoroscopic exam. The pathologist told us it was cancer, and it was pretty advanced: well into Stage Three already, which meant it was probably spreading elsewhere in her body.

Ann wanted to fight it. At sixty, she was still a relatively young woman, and she was looking forward to lots more grandchildren, so she embarked on a course of aggressive chemotherapy. The chemo took a heavy toll on her, but she endured the treatment until it was too late. In March of 1993, eighteen brutal months after that first visit to the doctor, Ann died.

For decades I’d dealt with death on a daily basis, but I’d always managed to float untouched by the tragedy surrounding me. I was a scientist; to me, decaying bodies and broken bones—my stock and trade—were forensic cases, scientific puzzles, intellectual challenges—nothing more. That’s not to say my heart was hard, that it didn’t go out to the people whose loved ones had died; it did, especially to the parents of murdered children. But those were passing waves of sympathy. Now that death had finally hit home, I was drowning in an ocean of grief.

THE ZOO MAN CASE dragged on, throughout Ann’s illness and beyond, with no murder trial anywhere in sight. Meanwhile other women had come forward to say that Huskey had assaulted them. In late 1995 and 1996, Huskey stood trial for a series of brutal rapes in 1991 and 1992.

Moncier lost that case, one of his few high-profile losses I can recall. Huskey was found guilty on various counts of rape, robbery, and kidnapping and was sentenced to sixty-six years in prison for three rapes and a robbery. But the murder case remained stalled by Moncier’s barrage of motions and maneuvers. Finally, in January of 1999—more than six years after the four women were killed in the woods off Cahaba Lane—jury selection began for Huskey’s murder trial. Moncier hadn’t managed to get the trial moved; however, he did prevail on the court to import jurors from out of town,