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

that men can do, horses would draw the forms of the gods like horses, and cattle like cattle, and they would make their bodies such as they each had themselves.”*

A loving father: That was the picture of God I’d drawn with my heart, if not with my hands. That’s what I’d wanted and needed God to be, ever since that shot rang out in my daddy’s office sixty-five years before. But could an all-powerful, all-loving Heavenly Father have allowed these two fine women of mine to die of cancer? Ann had been a nutritionist; besides eating a healthy diet herself, she taught thousands of others to do so, too; yet cancer had struck her digestive tract. Annette, who died of lung cancer, had never smoked a day in her life; her only medical sin was to spend three decades married to a heavy smoker.

Maybe it all boiled down to mere chemistry and genetics: Ann and Annette simply didn’t possess enough physiological or genetic resistance to the carcinogens with which the world is filled. Some people do; these two women didn’t. Perhaps that was the cold, objective reason they died.

Ann’s death had been slow and draining, and I’d begun dealing with it even before it was over. Annette’s was swift and crushing, and it came only two months after the death of my mother, who had been very close to me all my life. The weight of grief was staggering. I dreaded setting foot in my empty house. Without warning I would find myself sobbing, unable to stop. Those months were some of the darkest of my life.

All I had left to live for was my work. Cases like this one: a case in which a man was suspected of killing, dismembering, and burning his own wife. The world seemed full of wrong.

THE NEXT DAY, down in the bone lab in the basement of the stadium, we began fitting the pieces of bone together, like some charred jigsaw puzzle. I hoped we’d be able to piece together not just the skeleton but the story of this person’s death—probably the story of Patty Rogers’s death.

I already knew that the story, like the skeleton, would be fragmentary at best. At the scene we’d recovered pieces of virtually every bone in the body, with one notable exception: apart from a bit of cheekbone, all the bones of the face were missing, and so were the teeth. Teeth are durable—they often survive even commercial cremation fairly well—so their absence, plus the lack of face bones, told me that those parts of the skull had been carefully removed in an effort to make identification of the victim impossible. I wasn’t ready to concede that it would be impossible, but it sure wasn’t going to be easy.

As in every case, we began by trying to determine sex, age, race, and stature. Lacking the racially distinctive structures of the face, and possessing not so much as a single completely intact long bone—lacking a single intact bone of any sort, for that matter—I knew we wouldn’t be able to determine either race or stature. Sex and age, on the other hand, we could probably figure out from what we had.

Luckily, one of the hipbone fragments included the sciatic notch. The sciatic notch—the gap through which the sciatic nerve passes when it emerges from the spine and runs down the leg—is markedly wider in females, because the hipbone above it flares out more widely. (The sciatic notch is to the hipbone what the notch beside a long, pendulous earlobe is to the side of the head.) In adult males the sciatic notch has just enough room to accommodate the end of your finger; in adult females there’s two to three times that much room. The sciatic notch in this case, case 97-23, was wide, telling us unequivocally that this was a woman’s body. One question down, one to go: How old a woman was she?

Analyzing the structure and texture of the pubic bone is often the best way to pin down an age estimate, but in this case those features had been destroyed by the fire. We’d have to look elsewhere for age markers. Fortunately, even though the bones were fractured and fragmented, their epiphyses—the junctions where the ends of the bones fuse to the shafts—remained relatively intact, and the epiphyses can reveal quite a bit about age. Take the femur I saw sticking out of Matt Rogers’s burn barrel, for instance. Odd though it seems, as late as age fifteen, that femur had actually consisted of five separate pieces of bone, held together at the epiphyses by cartilage.

Most prominent of the five pieces of an immature femur is the main shaft. Adjoining the shaft’s upper end, at the proximal epiphysis, is the rounded femoral head: the ball that fits into the hipbone’s acetabulum, or socket. It was the femoral head that first caught my eye in Matt Rogers’s burn barrel the previous day. Below the femoral head is the greater trochanter, a prominent, bony bump on the lateral, or outer, part of the upper thigh, right where the leg hinges into the torso. Directly opposite the greater trochanter, on the medial side of the shaft, is the lesser trochanter, a much smaller bump. Finally, down at the distal end, are condyles, forming the femur’s half of the knee joint.

The epiphyses can narrow the possible range of a victim’s age. They ossify, or turn from cartilage to bone, at different ages. The last of the femur’s epiphyses to fuse is the distal one, just above the knee. In some cases, that distal epiphysis doesn’t fully ossify until age twenty-two. Since our burned woman’s distal epiphyses had completely ossified, she must have been at least twenty-two.

Was there anything else that could narrow down her age? Luckily, even though the pubic symphysis was badly damaged, other age markers on the hipbones had survived the fire. The auricular surface of the ilium (the surface of the hip’s broad, ear-shaped upper part) was fine-grained