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

the clavicle; instead he wrote Morphology of Saw Marks in Human Bone: Identification of Class Characteristics— despite the dry-sounding title, a unique and pioneering contribution to forensic anthropology and homicide investigation.

Not long after he began his research on saw marks, Steve moved westward again, this time to Memphis. Word of his gruesome specialty spread; gradually, packages of dismembered body parts began arriving in Memphis from other cities and states and countries, shipped to Steve by police or prosecutors desperate to narrow the search for a killer or a murder weapon. His most sensational case began on April 6, 1992, when Mike Kershaw, a Canadian police constable, called to ask for Steve’s help with a gruesome killing that had occurred the previous June in Saint Catherines, a midsize city located across the tip of Lake Ontario from Toronto.

Leslie Mahaffey, a fourteen-year-old Saint Catherines girl, had stayed out late one night with friends, missing her 11:00 P.M. curfew by several hours. Sometime around 2:00 A.M., as she walked alone from a phone booth toward her house, she was abducted. Two weeks later, fishermen discovered her body. It had been cut into ten pieces, encased in blocks of concrete totaling 675 pounds, then dumped into two nearby rivers. The blocks were exposed when the water level dropped by several feet. Leslie’s brutal murder had terrified the public and baffled the police; Constable Kershaw hoped Steve might be able to shed light—any light, no matter how faint—on the killing or the killer.

On April 30, Kershaw came to Memphis, bringing Leslie Mahaffey’s butchered bones: sections from both femurs, both upper arms, two lower arm bones, and two cervical vertebrae. The specimens had been immersed in formalin to preserve them. Despite the passage of nearly a year, the bones still had soft tissue on them.

The very day Kershaw arrived in Memphis, another Saint Catherines girl, Kristen French, was found murdered; it appeared that she’d been raped and sexually tortured before she was killed. Canadian police knew that if they didn’t catch the killer soon, more girls were likely to die horrible deaths.

Steve began by photographing each bone, then he cooked them in hot water for several hours and gently teased away the soft tissue. Right away he could tell that all the cuts were from the same type of saw. The cuts were very uniform; the cut surfaces were smooth, almost as if they had been polished, and there was very little breaking or chipping at the places where the saw had entered and exited each bone.

There were, however, numerous false starts, places where the saw began cutting into the bone, but—maybe because the position or angle was awkward, maybe because the bloody saw slipped from the killer’s grasp—the blade had jumped out of the groove, forcing a new cut to be started. Several of the false starts were quite deep, extending almost all the way through the bone. That told Steve that the cutting was easy—the mark of a power saw of some type—because if you’re using a handsaw, and the saw jumps out of a deep groove, you don’t start a new one, you maneuver the blade back into the groove you’ve already cut. The deep false starts—together with the uniform width of the grooves, the polished-looking surfaces, and the convex curve of the cut marks—told Steve that Leslie’s body had been cut up with a circular saw with a blade diameter of 71⁄4 inches or greater.

Of course, a lot of Canadians own circular saws; Steve could tell the police what type of saw had cut up the body, but he couldn’t tell them whose garage or basement to search for it. The case remained unsolved for ten more months. Finally, in the winter of 1993, the police got a huge break. A twenty-three-year-old woman named Karla Homolka came forward with a sordid and shocking story. Her husband, a bookkeeper named Paul Bernardo, had abducted Leslie Mahaffey and Kristen French to use as sex slaves, she claimed. Paul had forced Karla to participate in some sex acts, she said, and to videotape others. After an escalating series of degrading and violent acts, he’d strangled the girls. Besides Leslie Mahaffey and Kristen French, there was a third victim, Karla claimed: her own younger sister, Tammy, whom Paul had drugged and raped back in 1990. While still unconscious, Tammy had vomited and choked to death; until Karla’s visit to the police, her sister’s death had been considered merely a tragic accident.

On the morning of Monday, June 12, 1995, Steve walked up the steps of a Toronto court building to testify in Paul Bernardo’s murder trial, which had begun four weeks earlier. Canadian reporters were fascinated by Steve and his grisly specialty. “You’ll never meet another man like this,” began one newspaper story, “and you probably won’t mind.” The story went on: “As far as he knows, he is the only person in the world to have earned his doctorate by using bones to differentiate the tools used to tear apart human bodies.”

When Steve was called to the witness stand by the frock-coated crown prosecutor, he painted a precise and horrifying picture of Leslie Mahaffey’s dismemberment. The kerf width—the groove cut by the saw blade—was unusually narrow in Leslie’s bones, indicating a thin blade. Most carbide-tipped circular saw blades leave a kerf of about 1⁄8 (0.125) inch; the blade that butchered Leslie was thinner, with a kerf width of just 0.08 to 0.09 inch. When Steve made experimental cuts of his own in other bones, using circular saws with blades ranging from 71⁄4 to 12 inches in diameter, he testified that his cuts were more uniform, showing less tendency to drift, than the cuts in Leslie’s bones. But Steve had an advantage that Leslie’s killer had not had: he was cutting clean, dry, defleshed bone, and it was rigidly anchored in a vise.

On cross-examination, Paul Bernardo’s attorney asked just one question: Would cutting up a body with a circular saw make a mess? A big mess, Steve