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

ball at the end of the upper arm that joins the shoulder. With a pair of sliding calipers, I carefully measured its diameter at the thickest part. Back in the 1970s, T. Dale Stewart—a Smithsonian anthropologist whose close collaboration with the FBI in the 1950s and ’60s helped pioneer the field of forensic anthropology—had made a careful study of humeral head size in males and females. According to Stewart’s research, if the head measures more than 47 millimeters in diameter, it has to have come from an adult male. Measurements in the range of 44 to 46 millimeters can indicate either a male or female. A measurement of less than 43 millimeters unequivocally indicates a female. The piece lying on my lab table measured 42 millimeters; that meant our mystery victim was a woman, a finding borne out by a characteristically female ridge in the hipbone.

How old had she been when she died? Estimating age is easy if you have the pubic symphysis. Unfortunately—more bad luck—I didn’t. Instead, I had to rely on several less-precise age markers. Judging by the fact that the ends of all her bones (the epiphyses) had fused to their shafts, I could tell that her growth had stopped. Okay, now I knew she was a grown woman. But she wasn’t an old woman, because her spine showed only minor traces of osteoarthritic lipping, the jagged edges that vertebrae begin to acquire when we’re in our late thirties or early forties. One other bone, the coccyx, or tailbone, showed surface features consistent with an age range of thirty-five to forty-five.

But that was about all I could tell Kelleher for sure. I couldn’t even say whether she was Caucasoid, Negroid, or Mongoloid.

“I wish we had a skull,” I told him.

FIFTEEN MONTHS LATER I got my wish. On a cold October night in 1994, I stepped off a Delta flight onto the windy tarmac in Manchester, New Hampshire. Kelleher met me in the terminal, helped me collect my suitcase, then dropped me at a hotel in Concord, the state capital. The next morning he picked me up and took me to the crime lab in the basement of the New Hampshire State Police headquarters.

Basements: Why are crime labs and morgues always in basements? Why not up on the top floor, with big corner windows looking out across the city or the countryside? Just because some of us like to look at bodies and bones, that doesn’t mean we wouldn’t appreciate a nice view out a window every now and then. But I’m getting sidetracked.

A bit of good luck had finally come our way. A road crew clearing brush along a cul-de-sac in Alexandria a few days before had stumbled upon a plastic garbage bag tossed into the weeds. Inside was a human skull, along with a number of other bones. Some, including the skull, were slightly burned; others showed no signs of burning at all.

A comparison of the teeth with dental X rays confirmed what Jim Kelleher had suspected for quite some time: the dead woman was Sheilah Anderson, a white female, age forty-seven, reported missing sixteen months earlier. Unable to contact her, Mrs. Anderson’s adult daughter had phoned the police in June of 1993, about two weeks before the first batch of burned bones was found; that’s why Kelleher had asked me to double-check the ME’s initial impression that the burned bones were from a dog. Sheilah’s husband, Jim Anderson, a former New York City police officer who had left the force under suspicious circumstances, told investigators that his wife had simply skipped out one day. She left, according to Anderson, for parts unknown.

Sheilah’s daughter had doubted her stepfather’s story. So had the state police, particularly after Jim Anderson attempted suicide in the days after his wife’s disappearance. He was put in a hospital psychiatric ward for observation. On July 2, the day he was scheduled to be released, a trooper had accompanied Sheilah’s daughter to the house so she could get some clean clothes for Jim to wear home. While she was at the house, she decided to take a look around. Out back, at the edge of the woods, she found a burned tennis shoe that she recognized as her mother’s.

The trooper then began looking around in earnest. In the front yard he’d noticed ashes from a brush pile Jim Anderson had burned a few weeks before. Sifting through the ashes, he began to find bone fragments—the 475 charred pieces that were the start of my skeletal jigsaw puzzle. At that exact moment, Jim Anderson arrived home from the psychiatric ward. When he saw the officer pulling bone fragments from the ashes, Jim began drinking hard and fast. Vodka, straight up.

Ten days later, the police found the second batch of bones—the shaft of the femur, the deer tibia, and the vial of additional fragments—scattered in the woods near the burned sneaker. Then came the long wait—fifteen months—before the skull turned up. With the skull finally in hand, Kelleher no longer needed me to make a positive identification; the dental X rays had done that within hours after the highway crew found the garbage bag in the weeds. (A necklace of Sheilah’s was still fastened around the vertebrae, as if to erase any speck of doubt.)

The mission that had brought me a thousand miles, to the basement of the New Hampshire State Police, was to shed whatever light I could on Sheilah Anderson’s manner of death. One look at the skull and I knew the trip was not going to be wasted. The back of the skull was burned, but not much. Halfway up, slightly to the right of the midline, was a round hole the size of a silver dollar. I’d seen holes like this many times before: they’re what’s left by a blow from a hammer swung with great force against the cranium. The blow not only punched out a disk of bone, it also sent fractures racing outward like lightning from the point