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

answered. The courtroom crowd was horrified by what Steve had to say, but their horror was lessened by the way he said it—by what one reporter described as his “open American manner and a self-deprecating sadness.” Self-deprecating is right: Steve is one of the world’s top five experts on tool marks in human bone, but he’s remarkably modest and unpretentious.

When Paul Bernardo took the witness stand, he denied that he’d murdered Leslie Mahaffey; he claimed both she and Kristen French had died accidentally while he was out of the room. He did, however, admit to dismembering Leslie. He cut up her body, he said, with an old McGraw-Edison saw: a circular saw of the type described by Steve. In fact, the saw, which Bernardo had gotten from his grandfather, was found in the basement of his tidy bungalow in a Saint Catherines suburb. Unfortunately for the prosecution, the blade and part of the housing were missing.

Steve left Toronto the day after he testified, hoping he’d done some good, but juries are funny: you can never tell for sure what’s going to hit home with them. Bernardo’s trial dragged on through June, through July, into August. Then, as the trial was nearing its end, a dramatic flourish made fresh headlines: The crown prosecutor concluded his case by producing a rusted saw blade that a police diver had fished from the lake only days before. Alongside the blade, the diver also found part of the housing of a power tool. The blade and the housing fit Bernardo’s old McGraw-Edison saw perfectly. The blade also fit Steve’s cut-mark analysis to a T: a circular saw blade, 71⁄2 inches in diameter, thinner and finer-toothed than most modern, carbide-tipped blades, with the right width to have made the 0.08-inch cuts.

Paul Bernardo was convicted on two counts of murder and sentenced to two twenty-five-year prison terms, without the possibility of parole. I’m told he gets fan letters and phone calls from teenaged girls. I know a lot about human bones, and so does Steve Symes. But there’s a lot more we’ll never comprehend about the dark recesses of the human heart.

CHAPTER 14

Art Imitates Death

BY 1993, I’d been running the anthropology department at the University of Tennessee for more than two decades. I’d helped create a new Forensic Anthropology Section within the American Academy of Forensic Sciences (AAFS), an important milestone in the development of this fascinating new field. I was also serving my twenty-second year as Tennessee State forensic anthropologist, a position that led to interesting forensic cases in nearly all of Tennessee’s ninety-five counties. My relationships with police departments, district attorneys, the TBI, the FBI, and other law enforcement agencies were strong. I lectured frequently to groups of medical examiners, doctors and dentists, police, and funeral directors. I testified in court several times a year; occasionally I made it into the newspapers or onto the television news, especially if there was a particularly gruesome case or if I won some teaching award, as I did in 1985, when the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education did me the honor of naming me National Professor of the Year. All in all, I thought, things were about as busy and exciting as they could possibly be.

I couldn’t have been more wrong. One brief phone call, and things would intensify beyond my wildest imaginings. For quite a few years I’d been lecturing regularly at forensic meetings all over the country. At one of those meetings I met a young assistant medical examiner from Virginia, Dr. Marcella Fierro. Over the years, seeing one another at meeting after meeting, we became good friends. Eventually, after Dr. Fierro became Virginia’s chief medical examiner, she began inviting me up to lecture to her staff once a year, either to broaden their horizons or just to strengthen their stomachs.

Most medical examiners are forensic pathologists—physicians specializing in disease or trauma to tissue. If they’re able to autopsy a body within a few hours or even a few days of death, they’re often remarkably successful at determining time since death and cause of death. But once decomposition reaches a fairly advanced stage, an autopsy becomes difficult. The soft tissues begin to liquefy through a combination of bacterial action, cellular chemical changes (a pH disruption called autolysis), and maggot feeding. As the soft tissues disappear, so do the physical clues a pathologist looks for, such as knife wounds in flesh. But if there are knife marks or other types of bone trauma, a skilled forensic anthropologist can often deduce an amazing amount of information from the skeleton long after an autopsy is impossible.

In 1984 a young technical writer had joined Dr. Fierro’s staff in Richmond. The woman, a former crime reporter, was clearly very intelligent, highly articulate, and fascinated by forensic investigations. She was also an aspiring crime novelist. After six years in Dr. Fierro’s office, she sold her first mystery novel.

That young woman’s name was Patricia Cornwell, and that novel, Postmortem, established her as a remarkably talented crime writer. It won five major international awards the year after it was published, and it remains the only mystery novel ever to do so. Postmortem marked not just Patricia Cornwell’s debut but the debut of her recurring heroine, Virginia medical examiner Kay Scarpetta. Dr. Scarpetta was tough on the outside, tender and wounded on the inside. She could have been inspired by Cornwell’s boss and mentor, Dr. Marcella Fierro, in her professional life, and Cornwell herself, I suspected, in her personal characteristics. In any case, Scarpetta swiftly became one of the most charismatic superstars of crime fiction. So did Patricia Cornwell.

Patricia Cornwell and I first met at one of Dr. Fierro’s annual training seminars, while she was still with the medical examiner’s office. As usual, I was showing slides of maggot-covered bodies. She introduced herself afterward, asked a lot of questions about my research, and complimented me on my presentation. End