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

Ironic, isn’t it? Touched by death at such a tender age, you’d think I’d have had my fill of it early on and spent the rest of my life carefully steering clear. And yet, I deal daily with death. I have spent decades actively seeking it out; I immerse myself in it.

Perhaps I’m trying to prove my bravery even now, across the gulf of years and mortality that separates us. Or perhaps when I grasp the bones of the dead, I’m somehow trying to grasp him, the one dead man who remains forever elusive.

Sitting in the basement of the New Jersey State Police headquarters on that day back in 1982, I found nothing in those five cigar vials, nothing in those ten small bones, that could tell me anything about the Lindbergh baby I hadn’t already known. Nothing to refute the evidence presented at Bruno Hauptmann’s murder trial. Nothing to vindicate that half-century of hope in the heart of his widow.

Anna Hauptmann, too—like the Lindberghs, and like me—had lost someone dear. Cherished husband but convicted killer, he would continue to elude her until that day when she herself slipped from those around her, finally catching up to the man she’d lived with and loved.

Perhaps on that day she finally, fully grasped him. Perhaps one day soon I’ll elude those who live with and love and should know me, and in that moment I’ll find my long-lost father.

In the meantime, I search for others among the dead. From ancient Indians to modern murder victims, I do reach others. Thousands and thousands of others.

CHAPTER 2

Dead Indians and Dam Engineers

THE SKY ABOVE the South Dakota plains was a deep blue, darkening almost to purple at the top. To the west, towering cumulus clouds dropped ragged gray curtains of rain, which evaporated long before reaching the ground. From two miles above the ground, I could scan a huge expanse of rolling prairie out the airplane window. The grass and brush were already mostly brown; the Missouri River was even browner, meandering muddily into the landscape from the northwest and meandering out, even more muddily, to the southeast. The only patches of green, I had heard, were small circles of lush grass dotting the hills along the riverbank somewhere to the north of us, marking the site of an ancient Arikara village. It was the summer of 1957, a vast new horizon was opening before me, and my excitement was building.

Then, as the engines throttled back and the Frontier Airlines DC-3 began lurching downward through the turbulence, a new sensation began building: motion sickness, my lifelong Achilles’ heel. Mercifully, my flight touched down before my breakfast came up.

We landed in Pierre late in the morning. The handful of passengers ducked through the oval doorway in the fuselage, clambered down the stairs, and headed into the whitewashed one-room terminal. I looked around for Bob Stephenson, the Smithsonian archaeologist who had promised to pick me up. He was nowhere to be seen. Soon the other passengers were gone, and I found myself in an empty waiting room far from home.

The airport control tower resembled a tree house on stilts. After a while I climbed up to ask the controller if he knew the archaeologists who were working outside town, explaining that Dr. Stephenson had promised to pick me up and take me out to the site. “Oh, he’s probably stuck in the mud somewhere,” the controller said. “We had a lot of rain last night, and things get pretty slick around here when it’s wet.” Late that afternoon Bob showed up, apologetic and covered with mud. Sure enough, he’d been stuck for three hours. Little did I know it at the time, but I was about to get stuck here—of my own free will—for the next fourteen summers.

I had been brought to South Dakota by the combined might of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the Smithsonian Institution, and the earth’s last ice age (which ended, I might add, somewhat before my time). Twenty thousand years ago a thick sheet of glacial ice swept relentlessly southward across America’s Great Plains. Shoving mountains of earth and rock before it, grinding stone into powdery alluvial soil, it reshaped millions of square miles of the planet’s surface.

Now an equally relentless army of engineers, archaeologists, and anthropologists had descended on the prairie to make a few changes of their own. The engineers were starting to flood it; the rest of us were frantically excavating it, digging and sifting for buried treasure—archaeological treasure—in a desperate race against the rising waters of the newly dammed Missouri River.

The Missouri may be the most underrated river in the world. Here in America, it plays second fiddle to the Mississippi, and that’s a gross injustice, in my opinion. Don’t get me wrong: The Mississippi is a great river. Flowing 2,350 miles from Minnesota’s Lake Itasca to the Louisiana delta, the Mississippi is a mighty waterway coursing through the very heart of America.

It’s the name of the thing that seems unjust. Consider a drop of Minnesota rainwater that plops into the Mississippi’s headwaters at Lake Itasca: From the lake’s rocky outlet—small enough to wade across—that drop flows 2,350 miles before it enters the salty shallows of the Gulf of Mexico. By contrast, a Montana raindrop, falling into a spring on the eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains, journeys 2,300 miles in the Missouri River just to reach the great confluence with the Mississippi at St. Louis; from there, it continues another 1,400 miles before it reaches the Gulf—a total distance of 3,740 miles. Only the Nile and the Amazon flow farther. So, on the basis of length, at least, the Missouri should be considered the main river and the Mississippi the tributary.

The Missouri is amazing in another respect as well. To the best of my knowledge, it’s the largest river that has ever changed its mind, or its destination, on a