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

BOSTON’S NORTH END is a hip, high-tech, creative part of the city, filled with loft apartments, artists, and dot-com companies. In the fall of 2000, one of Boston’s hottest Web-design firms was Double Decker Studios, whose clients ranged from Boston’s mass-transportation agency to media giant America Online. The company’s reputation was soaring, and so was its cash flow.

Thomas Hamilton was helping the budding young company manage its financial growth. He’d joined Double Decker a year or so before as its financial controller; his performance since then had put him in line for a major promotion, to chief financial officer. The job would carry a hefty salary and a hefty set of responsibilities.

Kemper Life had hired a Connecticut private investigator named Frank Rudewicz to try to pick up Rutherford’s scent in New England. Meanwhile, a Massachusetts detective, Mike Garrigan, was investigating Thomas Hamilton. Everything checked out except for one odd little detail: Hamilton was driving a car registered to Rhynie Rutherford. When the detectives crossed paths and swapped notes, they found that the affairs of Rutherford and Hamilton intertwined with eerie coincidence. When they traded photos, they saw why: Thomas Hamilton was Madison Rutherford. After faking his death in Mexico, Madison had slipped back across the border, returned to New England, and been hired in another finance-related capacity under another name.

That wasn’t all they dug up. Thomas Hamilton wasn’t the first alias Rutherford had employed. In fact, “Madison Rutherford” was an alias, or had been, for a number of years. The slippery scammer had been born “John Patrick Sankey”; he began using the name Madison Rutherford as early as 1986 to fabricate tax returns, obtain the mortgage on his five-acre estate, and purchase his life-insurance policies. It was only a few months before the trip to Mexico that he legally changed his name from Sankey to Rutherford, and then only after a passport application was rejected. Although he and Rhynie appeared to be living well, they were actually deep in debt: Madison had filed for bankruptcy, and the life-insurance scam was a desperate effort to dig himself out of a very deep hole.

Detective Garrigan found one other helpful tidbit: Madison’s new life in Boston included at least two new girlfriends. When she learned this, Rhynie was no longer a grieving widow; now she was an angry, scorned woman.

Alerted by the detectives, the FBI moved swiftly. On the afternoon of November 7, 2000, as “Thomas Hamilton” left his office at Double Decker Studios, FBI agents swooped in and nabbed him. The U.S. government charged him with wire fraud for faking his death and attempting to defraud the insurance companies. With a mountain of evidence against him, including testimony from an embittered Rhynie, Rutherford pleaded guilty to fraud and received a five-year sentence, the maximum allowed. “This is one of the most serious crimes I’ve seen in this court,” the federal judge told him. “This is a crime that caused a lot of people a lot of pain.”

The discovery that he was alive and well in Boston cleared up the mystery of Madison Rutherford’s fate and whereabouts. But another tantalizing mystery remains unsolved: Whose body was incinerated in that Chevy Suburban outside Monterrey in the predawn hours of July 12, 1998? One thing is certain: Rutherford didn’t just dig up some old skeleton from a handy roadside cemetery—the fracture patterns in the burned bones indicated that the body was fresh when it was burned. So the next question is: Where did Rutherford get a fresh body? Once she began cooperating, Rhynie told government officials that Madison said he’d broken into a cemetery mausoleum and stolen a corpse. If that’s really where he got it, I guess it’s lucky the crypt didn’t contain the remains of a thirty-something Caucasoid male. If it had, he might well have gotten away with it, and “Thomas Hamilton”—$7 million richer—might be living a life of luxury in some lavish Boston penthouse instead of doing time in a federal prison.

CHAPTER 18

The Bloody Beneficiary

WHEN THE OUTCOME of a capital murder trial hinges on forensic anthropology, the pressure is excruciating. On the one hand, there’s the risk of helping send an innocent man to the gas chamber; on the other hand, there’s the very real possibility that a brutal killer might be set free. That high-stakes dilemma was brought home to me recently when I was called for help by a DA prosecuting one of the most cold-blooded murders I’ve ever confronted.

The call came in May of 1999 from the district attorney’s office in Magnolia, Mississippi, the county seat of Pike County. A young family had been brutally killed in the small neighboring town of Summit. A twenty-six-year-old man and his twenty-three-year-old wife had been stabbed repeatedly, and their young daughter had been strangled and possibly molested. Their bodies, bloody and badly decomposed, were found in a cabin outside of town on December 16, 1993. The prosecutor who called me, an assistant DA named Bill Goodwin, knew that the family had been murdered earlier that fall, but the question was, how much earlier? Just how long had they been dead before they were discovered? That was the quarter-million-dollar question.

An accurate time-since-death estimate can make or break a murder case. The Zoo Man case had borne that out in a way I would never forget—and maybe never live down. Three of the four victims had obviously been killed while the suspect, “Zoo Man” Huskey, was at large. But the timing of the fourth death—that of Patricia Johnson, whose body I’d pronounced “too fresh for me” and turned over to the medical examiner—became a matter of hot dispute. If Johnson was killed after Huskey was arrested for the murder of Patty Anderson, then clearly Zoo Man had an ironclad alibi for one of those four Cahaba Lane murders, despite what his own confession and