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

me was not Madison Rutherford’s. “This isn’t a thirty-four-year-old Connecticut stockbroker,” I told Gibson. “This is a fifty- or sixty-year-old Mexican laborer.”

A lot of money was riding on the identification of these burned bones. The Kemper Life policy had been issued just six months before the “accident,” and when Rutherford bought it, he told Kemper he was canceling the CNA coverage. Instead he was doubling up, and then some.

By now it was obvious that Rutherford had neither died in an accident nor been ruthlessly murdered. He had elaborately faked his death. His tragic death was an elaborate hoax, a $7 million scam. On the basis of my findings, Kemper Life refused to pay the $4 million to Rutherford’s “widow,” Rhynie. In the delicate, formal language of the insurance industry, “the deceased was not the insured.”

Rhynie sued Kemper; she also sued CNA, which was likewise balking at paying their $3 million. The forensic evidence was clearly on the side of the insurance companies. On the other side of the case, though, was a woman who had received a death certificate from Mexican authorities; she had cremated and scattered a portion of the remains, and she now lived conspicuously alone. Despite the scientific evidence, there was some risk that a jury might accept Rhynie’s version of the case: heartbroken widow is abused by heartless insurance companies. Both companies reached an out-of-court settlement with her, Kemper for a tiny fraction of the policy’s value, CNA for a larger but still modest sum.

Meanwhile, Madison Rutherford—the living, breathing Madison Rutherford—had vanished into thin air, even more thoroughly than if he actually had burned to a crisp. And that, it seemed, was that. For a while.

I PUT AWAY my file on the faked death and got back to my real life. Gradually, out of the ashes of grief after Annette’s sudden death, happiness had emerged once more. I owe a big debt of gratitude to my youngest son, Jim, for that turn of events. He was visiting from Atlanta one day during the sad months after Annette died, and I had told him how lonely I was. Out of the blue, Jim said (for it was a suggestion, not really a question), “Why don’t you marry Carol Lee?” It was one of those ideas whose brilliance, once it’s voiced, is patently obvious—the kind of idea that makes you say, “Why didn’t I think of that?”

Carol Lee Hicks and I had grown up together in Virginia. She was younger than I was by nine years, but our town was small and our families were close, so we played together often. In fact, I remember playing with her one July day in 1944 at her grandmother’s house—a game of hide-and-seek, followed by some lively chicken-chasing. (In southern Virginia in 1944, you took your entertainment wherever you could find it.) Toward lunchtime, as we were running down the road to Carol’s father’s flour mill, she complained that her side and her leg hurt. “Oh, we’re almost there, don’t stop now,” I said. Then I looked at her, and something I saw made me say, “Okay, let’s sit on the bank here for a minute.”

That afternoon Carol began running a fever; by the next day it had escalated into chills. Her doctor had just been reading a journal article about polio and quickly realized that Carol was in the early stages of the disease. By getting her to the hospital in Lynchburg right away, he probably saved her life.

Carol walked into the hospital on her own; three days later, when her fever broke, she was already paralyzed from the waist down. She would spend seven or eight months in the hospital, and she wouldn’t walk again until early 1945. And she was one of the lucky ones.

Polio has been virtually forgotten by now, but in the first half of the twentieth century, it was a plague of almost biblical proportions. Tens of thousands of innocent children and young adults were killed, crippled, or paralyzed. Polio, a powerful form of viral meningitis, cut a wide and ruthless swath through an entire generation of Americans.

Carol quickly won the battle with the disease itself, but her struggle to overcome the damage it had done would prove lengthy and excruciating, requiring years of physical therapy and twelve complicated surgeries. In Virginia and Atlanta and Warm Springs, Georgia—where President Franklin D. Roosevelt had established a medical institute to help fellow polio victims—teams of doctors labored over Carol, transplanting healthy muscle onto withered limbs, stretching or cutting shrunken tendons, fusing together unstable anklebones. During my junior and senior years at the University of Virginia, I often visited Carol in the UVa hospital, where she began undergoing reconstructive surgeries at the age of thirteen.

Over the years we stayed in close touch. At sixteen she was a bridesmaid at my wedding to Ann. Carol grew up, married a local boy, and had a son, Jeff. Later, she and her husband and Jeff spent two weeks one summer excavating Indian graves with us in South Dakota. Eventually she and her husband divorced and Carol went to work in an office full of doctors, where her positive attitude and wicked sense of humor kept the practice in high spirits. We saw her every time we went up to Virginia for a visit.

And then Carol began coming down to Tennessee: As my mother’s health declined, Carol came down to help take care of her, and when Annette got cancer, Carol came down to help take care of her too. Now I was the one who needed taking care of. And then my son, Jim, bless his heart, posed that brilliant question to me: “Why don’t you marry Carol Lee?” And so I did. Life, shared with her, became worth living again.

Carol has been informed that she is not, under any circumstances, allowed to die before I do. She assures me, with a twinkle in her eye, that I’ll go first. One way or another, I suspect she’s right about that. I