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

On the inside of the blackened skull, surrounding the hole, was a dark, irregular stain: blood that had flowed from the wound, then cooked in the fire. The blood ruled out any possibility that the trauma to the skull had occurred when the garbage bag was chucked into the weeds. Postmortem wounds don’t bleed once the blood has cooled and rigor mortis has set in. Sheilah Anderson was killed and then she was cooked.

The face of the skull wasn’t burned, but it was broken: three of the upper front teeth had snapped off; the tips of both nasal bones were fractured; and the lower jaw was broken in three places. It was just the sort of trauma I’d expect to see in the face of a woman who got hit from behind with a hammer, then fell face-first onto a basement floor or a driveway.

What I didn’t expect to see was the trauma in the other bones recovered from the roadside garbage bag. The fifth, sixth, and seventh cervical vertebrae showed cut marks from a large, sharp implement of some type. When I put the cervical (neck) and thoracic (chest) vertebrae together, aligned as they had been when she was alive, the damage was startling: an entire section of the spine had been cut loose from the ribs. The ribs on the right side had been severed close to the vertebrae; the left ribs had been cut farther from the spine, leaving stumps about two inches long. Most of the bones of the upper arms had been broken with violent force, and the legs had been cut from the pelvis at the hip joint.

This skeletal jigsaw puzzle just went on and on. But I was making progress, I reminded myself: In fitting these new pieces into the old puzzle, I found that one of the unburned fragments—the proximal end of the radius (the “elbow” end of one of the forearm bones)—fit perfectly with a burned piece of radius I’d received in Corporal Kelleher’s first FedEx shipment. One of the new femur fragments fit perfectly with the femoral shaft recovered in the second batch, found in the woods behind the house. (That femoral shaft also yielded DNA that further corroborated the identification made from dental records.) So although some details remained confusing—very confusing—one thing had become crystal clear: All three sets of bone fragments, recovered from three different locations over the course of fifteen months, came from Sheilah Anderson, a woman whose husband claimed she had lit out for parts unknown.

Parts unknown, indeed. That wasn’t where she ended up; that was what she ended up—or would have, if Kelleher hadn’t been such a dogged investigator. The case was one of the strangest I’d ever encountered, and one of the most bizarre aspects was this: to all appearances, Jim Anderson was quite willing to murder and dismember his wife . . . but, by golly, he wasn’t about to violate a municipal ordinance against unpermitted open burning! So he’d obtained the requisite permit authorizing him to burn trash on June 12, and we know for a fact that he had a fire in the yard on the appointed day, because Alexandria’s fire chief drove past to make sure the blaze was under control.

Just imagine the scene: a murderous husband, burning his wife’s body in the front yard, smiling and waving to the fire chief as he drives past. If a screenwriter pitched that story to a Hollywood film studio, he’d probably be laughed right off the lot. To Corporal Kelleher, though, and the prosecutor, Assistant Attorney General Janice Rundles, this was no laughing matter. Would a New Hampshire jury believe the bizarre scenario?

On the flight back to Knoxville, I racked my brain for any additional evidence that might be gleaned from the mutilated bones. I had already told Kelleher and Rundles everything I could. If anyone could tease additional clues from the severed, charred fragments, it would be Steve Symes, a former student and now a highly respected colleague. After I was back in Knoxville, I called Steve to propose a most unorthodox threesome: Could he slip away for a weekend in a secluded cabin with me and Sheilah Anderson? He could, he said. We agreed to rendezvous at Montgomery Bell State Park.

Montgomery Bell lies halfway between my office in Knoxville and Steve’s morgue in Memphis, four hundred miles away. Rolling hills, covered with oaks and hickories, wrap around a lovely little lake, apparently brimming with fish (15-Inch Size Limit on Bass, cautions a sign at the water’s edge). A six-story lodge of stone stood on a peninsula; half a dozen cabins perched halfway up a hillside, and ours was spectacular. The windows shed plenty of light on the dining table, where we laid out Sheilah Anderson’s burned and fragmented bones. Murder investigation with a view.

Sheilah’s dismemberment was one of the most complex and puzzling that Steve and I had ever seen. Judging by the fractures in the bones of the arms and legs, her limbs appeared to have been removed by blunt-force trauma. Her pelvis, ribs, and spine, however, seemed to have been cut apart with a wickedly sharp implement of some type.

Steve was immediately struck, as I had been, by the differential burning. The bones recovered from the front yard in 1993 were burned far more severely than either those recovered from the backyard shortly afterward or the skull and other bones found by the road crew in 1994. Steve suggested that the burning had occurred in two stages: Her entire body was put on the fire that the fire chief saw in June of 1993, he hypothesized. When that fire didn’t do the job, the skull and other parts were removed and discarded—some in the backyard, some by the roadside—and the remaining bones were burned again in the front yard, this time more thoroughly.

Burning had destroyed the tool marks on the first set of bones; however, the unburned and slightly burned portions of the skeleton gave Steve some undamaged marks to