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

Then, in the summer of 1993, I got a phone call. The voice at the other end of the line said, “Dr. Bass, this is Patricia Cornwell.” She reminded me who she was and where we’d met—by now she was rich and famous, and no longer working for Dr. Fierro—then she came straight to the point: “I was wondering if you might be willing to run a little experiment for me at your research facility.” She was working on a new novel, she explained, in which she planned to have the killer return to the death scene—the basement of a house—some days after the murder and move the body to another location. What signs or marks, she needed to know, could a body pick up as it began to decay, and how much of that detail would remain once the body was moved to a new location?

This was a first. I’d been asked to study particular phenomena by medical examiners and homicide detectives, but never by a novelist. My first inclination was to say no, but as she described what she had in mind, my scientific curiosity was piqued. These were interesting questions. By now we’d been studying decomposition at the Anthropology Research Facility for a dozen years, but up to this point, most of the bodies had been buried or simply lying outdoors on the ground. Our main research focus had always been to learn more about the processes and timetable of decomposition so that we could help law enforcement estimate time since death more precisely and accurately. Cornwell’s request opened up a whole new research area.

I called Detective Arthur Bohanan, my friend and colleague at the Knoxville Police Department, to get a homicide detective’s perspective on whether this sort of experiment sounded helpful and what kinds of information would be most valuable. Art was not your average cop. Over the years he had turned himself into a true expert on fingerprints—specifically, on ways to capture them from surfaces that had never yielded prints before: fabrics, paper, even the skin of a murder victim. He’d gone so far as to patent an apparatus that would vaporize cyanoacrylate—superglue—and waft it across surfaces or throughout an entire room. If you’ve ever accidentally superglued your fingers together, you know how eagerly the stuff bonds to human fingertips. Art figured out that it also bonds to the oils that fingertips leave on things they touch. His apparatus, which is now used by crime technicians worldwide, can capture latent fingerprints that routine dusting could never reveal. Recently the FBI ordered another sixty-six of Art’s machines; for a fingerprinting system, you can’t get a better product endorsement than that.

As we talked about the experiment Cornwell wanted me to run, Art became more and more enthusiastic. If a fingerprint on a body could help crack a case, why not some other distinctive mark? He’d seen odd imprints and discolorations on bodies before but didn’t have any data that could help explain them. That settled it: I would do the experiment. Together, Art and I called her to discuss the setup in more detail.

Cornwell planned to set the murder in a basement in the town of Black Mountain, North Carolina. One of the trademarks of Cornwell’s fiction is her frequent use of places she’s been or experiences she’s had. Black Mountain is a summer resort town where she spent much of her youth. North Carolina and Tennessee occupy roughly the same latitude and share a border, defined by the crest of the Great Smoky Mountains. Black Mountain lies about the same distance east of the crest that Knoxville lies to the west of it, so the climate at her crime scene closely resembled the climate at our research facility.

To simulate a basement, we’d need a concrete slab. Coincidentally, that part of the experimental setup was already prepared: We were just about to build a storage shed at the research facility for gardening tools, medical instruments (the scalpels and other implements needed to cut apart a skeleton at the end of a research study), and a small weather station; as a first step we’d recently poured a slab that would be plenty big for the experiment. To simulate an enclosed basement, all we had to do was build a “room” atop the slab—basically, a simple plywood box measuring eight feet long, four feet wide, and four feet high.

Then Bohanan and I realized we might have a problem. Summer was approaching fast, and the summers in East Tennessee are hot and muggy, with temperatures frequently ranging into the low to mid-90s—quite a bit warmer than a below-grade basement in Black Mountain would be. We called Cornwell to discuss the problem; she told us to buy an air conditioner, if that would resolve it, and to send her the bill. We needn’t have worried. There are ebbs and flows in the donated-cadaver business, and that summer, for some reason, we hit a slow period. Before long, summer was over; football season and fall weather arrived.

So did Patricia Cornwell. In September of 1993, on a football weekend, she paid us a visit. Football weekends in Knoxville are crazy; she booked what was probably the last available hotel room in the city, and she dined amid throngs of orange-clad UT fans at a popular riverfront restaurant near the stadium. I took her out to the research facility, where she took copious notes as I showed her corpses in various stages of decomposition and explained some of the graduate students’ research projects.

A few weeks later Arthur Bohanan and I took a donated corpse’s fingerprints, then we drove him—corpse 4-93—out to the facility. Together we wrestled the body out of the truck and into our plywood box. We positioned the body on its back, as Cornwell had requested. Beneath it we placed a coin—a penny, lying heads-up—along with a key, a brass strike plate from a door frame, a pair of scissors, and a chain-saw chain. Then we closed the