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

he said, “should have to yield to the need to apprehend criminals.” The committee voted 5–4 to shelve the bill. We’d avoided catastrophe by the narrowest possible margin.

Sometime later, I happened to be at a meeting where the governor of Tennessee was present. The governor took me aside afterward and, leaning close to my ear, said quietly, “Apparently my commissioner of veterans’ affairs doesn’t have enough work to do.” I took that as a sign that the uproar over the Body Farm was over—for the moment, at least, and for good, I hoped.

CHAPTER 16

The Backyard Barbecue

BACKYARD BARBECUES are popular in Tennessee during the summer. I’ve been to hundreds of them. One of them was a humdinger.

On July 21, 1997, a TBI agent named Dennis Daniels called me from a rural area in Union County, Tennessee, about forty miles north of Knoxville, and asked me to come take a look at some bones he suspected were human. Daniels—along with two Union County Sheriff’s Department investigators, David Tripp and Larry Dykes—was at the house of a twenty-one-year-old man named Matt Rogers.

I collared two graduate students who were part of my forensic response teams, Joanne Bennett and Lauren Rockhold, and headed to Union County. We’d had twenty-two forensic cases so far in 1997; this, then, would be case 97-23. We met a sheriff’s deputy at the county courthouse in Maynardville, then followed him out into the country. Serious country. The road wound through woods, hardscrabble farms, run-down houses, and rusting trailers; we wound up somewhere around a ramshackle hamlet called Jim Town.

The Rogers house was a small wooden structure; it was painted, or had been, once upon a time, but most of the paint had long since peeled off, leaving the boards to weather to a silvery gray. The officers led me around to the side of the house and behind a toolshed. I knew right away what they wanted me to look at, even before they pointed it out: a rusty fifty-five-gallon oil drum, its sides pierced with large bullet holes. It’s what country folks call a “burn barrel”; put a smokestack on it and move it to the city, and it would be promoted to “incinerator.” What had caught my eye was the end of a big bone sticking up out of the top of the barrel.

“Matt says they’re animal bones,” Agent Daniels told me. “A dead goat his dogs drug up into the yard.” It was clear the TBI agent didn’t believe Matt’s story.

Daniels had good reason to be suspicious. Matt’s twenty-seven-year-old wife, Patty, had been reported missing eleven days before. Adding fuel to the fire of suspicion was the fact that Patty’s disappearance had been reported not by Matt but by Patty’s best friend, Angie, who had last seen Patty on July 7 at a cookout. At the cookout Patty had told Angie that she planned to leave Matt the next day. But Angie wasn’t the only one Patty told, and that’s when the plot began to thicken, like something right out of a soap opera. Patty, it seems, was having an affair with Angie’s brother, Michael. That night at the cookout, Patty and Michael told Matt about the affair and said they wanted to be together on the morrow. Patty and Matt left the cookout engaged in a bitter argument.

Angie didn’t hear from Patty for two days, which concerned her, given how close they were and what Patty had told her. Then Matt called, and Angie got truly scared: He asked if she’d seen Patty. She’d stormed out of the house at 2:00 A.M. the night of the cookout, he said, and he hadn’t seen her since.

The next day Angie went to the sheriff’s office to report Patty missing. She’d tried to persuade Matt to file the report, but he’d refused; he’d also asked her to let him know if she contacted the sheriff, so he could straighten up the house before anybody came over to talk to him. Angie did not tell Matt she’d filed the report, and when deputy Larry Dykes went out to the Rogers house, he noticed that Patty’s purse, car keys, and cigarettes were sitting on the counter. It struck him as odd that a woman would leave home for three days without those things, not to mention her child.

Patty stayed missing; her daughter went to stay with Matt’s parents. On July 21 the missing-person report was turned over to Detective David Tripp. The more Tripp learned, the more certain he became that Patty hadn’t simply walked out on her husband and child. It had now been two weeks since anyone had seen Patty. Detective Tripp and Deputy Dykes returned to question Matt again; this time, they brought along TBI Agent Daniels. They also brought cadaver dogs.

Matt Rogers stuck by his story. When Tripp and Daniels asked permission to search his property, he consented. As the cadaver-dog handlers fanned out across several acres, Matt sat down on a rock in the yard to watch the search.

Agent Daniels was drawn to the underside of the house. The house sat several feet off the ground, supported at the corners and several other places, but there was no enclosed foundation or crawl space. Daniels got a flashlight from his car and began peering into the darkness under the floor.

Tripp, meanwhile, noticed a trash pit and the barrel in the side yard, both showing recent signs of burning. A lifelong country boy himself, he knew that when somebody in the country needed to get rid of something, the tendency was to dump it or burn it. Tripp peered into the barrel and called out to Daniels, “You can call off your cadaver dogs. I believe I’ve found our girl.” It was then that Matt, still sitting on his rock, explained about the dogs and the goat, and it was then that Daniels called and asked if I could bring a team out to