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

or sofa) to get the human bonfire started. But in some cases, especially if the victim is grossly obese, the eventual result is a huge, hot, sooty grease fire. I suppose the gruesome moral of this student’s research, if research ever has a moral, is pretty simple: Watch your weight, and don’t smoke in bed. (I halfway do, and I definitely don’t.)

Graduate students in UT’s anthropology department have actually burned donated cadavers and amputated limbs to gather scientific data about precisely what happens when a body burns. By observing and photographing the processes firsthand, these researchers gather baseline data about the “normal” processes of burning. Armed with such data, we’re far better equipped to help police spot abnormal and suspicious patterns. For example, a burning body normally assumes what we call the “pugilistic posture”: As the muscles and tendons heat up, they shrink as a result of all that water evaporating, and the hands tighten into fists. The arms flex, too, drawing the fists toward the shoulders in the manner of a prizefighter putting up his guard. The legs bend slightly, and the back arches a bit. It’s eerie to see a cadaver actually moving, shifting into a boxer’s stance; it seems to be taking one final, desperate stand against the Grim Reaper. Eeriness aside, it’s scientifically illuminating. In a real-world forensic investigation, finding a burned body that’s not in the pugilistic posture could be a clue that the victim was tied up at the time of death, perhaps with the arms bound behind the back.

In this case, though, there was no possibility of finding such clues. For one thing, the remains had already been removed from the Suburban by the Monterrey medical examiner’s staff. For another, the heat had been so intense that most of the bones had been reduced to fragments. There was no way to tell whether the arms had been flexed or extended, free or bound, before they crumbled.

Kneeling down beside the ruined vehicle, I leaned in through the driver’s door and began sifting through the charred rubble in the floorboard, searching for any remaining bones or teeth. Almost immediately, deep in a layer of rubble, I found a small, gray piece of curved bone. Although it measured only three or four inches square, I recognized it as the top of the cranium. The smooth inner surface had burned away, exposing the spongy bone inside.

Finding the bone within the debris layer answered one question that had been worrying me: Had the body actually burned in the Suburban, or had a set of previously burned bones simply been tossed into the vehicle, either before or during the fire? From the way the other pieces of burned material surrounded it, I could tell that the body had indeed burned there in the Suburban.

But while one important question had just been answered by the cranial fragment, another, equally important question had just been raised: What was the top of the skull doing at the bottom of the rubble heap? And why was it upside down? Theoretically, of course, it was possible that the bone had fallen or been jostled from a higher position, either during the fire or during the subsequent excavation by the medical examiner’s staff. However, that explanation didn’t fit with the position and condition of the fragment. The inner, concave surface of the cranium had burned away, while the outer surface—the very top of the head—was relatively undamaged. That could mean only one thing: during the fire, the body was head-down on the driver’s floorboard.

Next time you’re sitting behind the wheel of your car, try an experiment: Invert your position so that your head is down by the gas pedal. Not easy, is it? I know, because I’ve tried it. Can you envision any scenario in which running off the road and into a ditch—without rolling the vehicle—could possibly shift you into that position? Taphonomically, this case just didn’t make sense.

Taphonomy—the arrangement or relative position of the human remains, artifacts, and natural elements like earth, leaves, and insect casings—is one of the most crucial sources of information to a forensic anthropologist at a crime scene. Is there a greasy black stain surrounding the body or skeleton, indicating that the death and decomposition took place in the same spot, or is the ground clean and the vegetation healthy-looking, suggesting that the body was moved or dragged from another location? Are the bones within the clothing, or beside it? Is there a wasp nest in the skull, or a tree seedling growing up through the rib cage? All these things, and many more, are important pieces of the taphonomic puzzle; they can shed a lot of light on when or how someone died.

In Madison Rutherford’s case, the taphonomy was topsy-turvy. If Rutherford had run off the highway, crashed in a ditch, and been killed or knocked unconscious by the impact, he would have burned up right where he sat, in the driver’s seat. Instead, the body had burned in a head-down position. Even if he wasn’t wearing a seat belt, any impact severe enough to cause death or unconsciousness would have triggered the air bag, and that would have limited his movement. The taphonomy was a red flag, a signal that something was fishy here.

After bagging and labeling the cranial fragment, I searched the rest of the vehicle without finding any more bones or teeth. Except for missing that skull fragment, the medical examiner’s staff had done a thorough job of excavating the Suburban.

Almost as significant as what we found in the vehicle was what we didn’t find. The bicycle Rutherford had bought was gone. On the one hand, its absence could indicate that Rutherford had made it to the dog breeder’s and given away the bicycle, as he’d said he planned to do. But on the other hand, there were no dog bones in the Suburban, either. So unless the dog had proved far more adept than the human at escaping the fire, there was a discrepancy