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

So was the fire damage to the vehicle. Aside from the fuel in the gas tank, a vehicle doesn’t have all that much flammable material in it: a little carpet, some upholstery, a fabric headliner. But this Suburban had burned with remarkable intensity, so fiercely that firefighters simply couldn’t extinguish the blaze. I’m no arson investigator, but I’ve excavated enough burned vehicles, and talked to enough arson experts, to have picked up some basic knowledge. Judging by the devastating damage to the vehicle, the amount of burning material in the Suburban—the “fuel loading,” as arson investigators call it—far exceeded the norm. That suggested that the fire was fed by an accelerant, and lots of it, much of it concentrated at the right rear corner of the vehicle, where the roof had collapsed from the intensity of the heat.

There was one other red flag waving in the breeze above that ravaged Suburban. Supposedly, Rutherford had run off the freeway, gone into a ditch, and hit the embankment so hard that the vehicle caught fire. But there was almost no front-end damage, and Gibson, who had visited the scene of the accident, said the embankment was only slightly scraped or gouged at the point of impact. In short, the “crash” looked like something anyone could have walked away from—or pedaled away from.

But back at the forensic center in downtown Monterrey, there were the bones: clear evidence that someone, presumably Madison Rutherford, had not walked away from the four-wheeled inferno.

MONTERREY’S FORENSIC CENTER was a brand-new, sparkling-clean facility, even larger and more impressive than the Regional Forensic Center recently added to the University of Tennessee Medical Center back in Knoxville. When John Gibson and I arrived at the facility, we were met by a small delegation of Monterrey and Mexican government officials. I wasn’t quite sure who they all were, as everyone but me was speaking in Spanish, but thanks to Gibson’s fluent Spanish I soon found myself in a lab and ready to get down to work. Dr. Jose Garza, a member of the medical examiner’s staff, brought me the bones, teeth, and one other item excavated from the Suburban. All that remained of a once-robust man had been scooped up and sealed into a half-dozen or so small plastic bags.

Not surprisingly, most of the bagged bones were calcined, meaning that the organic matter in them had burned completely. These calcined fragments were a lightweight, chalky, crumbly gray—exactly what I’d expect from a really intense fire. And yet, the medical alert bracelet found in the car—stainless steel with a caduceus in red enamel—looked remarkably undamaged. Remarkably unworn, too: its clasp was open.

Any fire hot enough to calcine bone destroys the genetic material, so it’s not possible to extract a DNA sample from calcined bone and use it for identification. However, while most of these bones were calcined, not all were. The piece of skull I’d found, for example, would certainly yield enough DNA for a test; so would one or more of the four teeth recovered by the medical examiner. By comparing this DNA with a sample from one or both of Madison Rutherford’s parents, who were both still alive, we would be able to tell with almost absolute certainty if these were Rutherford’s burned bones. But we had a problem. According to Gibson, Rutherford’s parents hadn’t provided a sample.

I have three sons, and if one of them was thought to be dead, I’d want to know, and with certainty, whether a body presumed to be his was actually his or not. I can’t imagine a parent—any parent—not wanting to know, regardless of the sadness that a positive identification would bring. The lack of DNA comparison samples was yet another red flag. By now this case was raising more red flags than a Chinese military parade.

If we couldn’t harness modern DNA testing to confirm the identity of the burned corpse, we’d have to rely on old-fashioned physical anthropology: I’d have to learn the story from the bones. As I began reconstructing the skull, the plot quickly began to thicken. I expected to see cranial sutures that were beginning to fuse, especially on the inner surfaces, where ossification begins. They should still have been readily visible as dark, squiggly lines. Instead, the sutures were almost completely ossified, marked only by slight, barely perceptible ridges of smooth bone, like drywall seams that have been covered with joint compound. Other fragments attested to stout bones with highly developed muscle-attachment points and extensive signs of arthritis.

“You said Rutherford was thirty-four?” I asked Gibson. He nodded.

Four teeth had been recovered from the floorboard of the Suburban: three incisors and a second molar. There were no fillings in any of the teeth. That much, at least, was consistent with Rutherford’s dental records. But there were large, unfilled cavities in the two upper incisors—not the sort of thing one expects to see in the teeth of a wealthy financial adviser. The molar was extremely worn, almost like the teeth, which I’d seen in prehistoric graves, belonging to people whose lifelong diet of stone-ground grain had steadily ground down their teeth as well. The incisors bore two other striking features. They were shovel-shaped, square and flat, with a U-shaped rim on their inner side; and their worn edges indicated a classic type of bite.

I called Gibson over and showed him the teeth. “You see that wear pattern? That’s called ‘occlusal wear,’ ” I said. “It’s caused by the teeth clacking and rubbing against each other. In this case, the edges of these upper teeth lined up almost exactly with the edges of the lower teeth; that’s known as an edge-to-edge bite. People of European descent don’t have that type of bite.”

“Who does?” he asked.

“People of Mongolian descent: Asians. Eskimos. Native Americans.”

Gibson stared at me. “So what you’re telling me here is . . . ?”

The puzzle pieces—the worn teeth, the invisible sutures—had all fallen into place, and the picture it showed