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

By May of 1999, I had been working forensic cases for more than forty years and conducting decomposition research for nearly half of that time. Since the Body Farm’s first research back in 1981—Bill Rodriguez’s pioneering entomological study—we’d done dozens of decomp studies, under a wide range of conditions. We hid corpses in the woods. We locked them in the trunks and backseats of cars. We buried them in shallow graves. We submerged them in water. Then we studied and documented everything that happened to them, from the moment of death right up until the time, weeks or months later, when nothing remained but bone. We were building a time-since-death database—the first and only one of its kind in the world—by charting the processes and timetable of human decomposition. My goal for the data was simple: Anytime a real-life murder victim was found, under virtually any circumstances or at any stage of decomposition, I wanted to be able to tell police—with scientific certainty—when that person was killed.

By this time my graduate students and I had tracked the decomposition of more than three hundred corpses at the Body Farm. So when Bill Goodwin telephoned about a case in which time since death was crucial and asked if I could help, I felt pretty confident when I answered, “I believe I can.”

But my confidence would be shaken, my credibility would be challenged, and events in the courtroom would surprise even me.

THE ADULT VICTIMS in this case were named Darryl and Annie Perry. Their daughter, just four years old, was named Krystal. The fact that the case was coming to trial nearly six years after the murders had occurred told me that this must be a difficult case.

The police had identified and charged a suspect; that wasn’t the problem. Circumstantial evidence linked him with the crime; he even had a clear motive. But no hard, irrefutable evidence linked him to the murders: no smoking gun or contaminated knife, no bloody fingerprints, no eyewitness testimony. What’s more, he had a strong alibi for two entire weeks before the bodies were found. That’s why time since death would prove crucial at the trial: If the defense could convince the jury that the family was alive anytime during that two-week period, the suspect would go free.

As far as anyone knew, the only witnesses to the killings, besides the killer, were the three dead people. I would have to learn the truth from the Perrys themselves. But how? By the time I got the call, the bodies had long since been buried, and the cabin where they were found had been cleaned up and sold. Photographs and notes were all that remained to tell the story of how this young family was killed and, more to the point, when they were killed. And so I asked Goodwin to send me every picture he had of the crime scene, especially detailed photographs of the victims’ bodies. As I hung up the phone, I hoped I could find enough forensic evidence in those photos to do my job.

Two days later the prints arrived by UPS and I tore open the envelope. It didn’t take long to realize that something didn’t add up. And if I noticed it, I could be pretty sure the defendant’s lawyer, or at least his own forensic consultants, would notice it too.

Half of the forensic picture was clear and unambiguous. The photos showed the bodies of Darryl, Annie, and Krystal to be grotesquely bloated. It was a familiar sight to me, one I’d seen hundreds of times before. By the time the bodies were found, bacteria were well along the way to liquefying the internal organs, starting in the stomach and intestines. As the bacteria digested the soft tissue, they released gases that inflated the bellies like balloons. Beneath and around the bodies was a dark, greasy stain caused by volatile fatty acids being released during the breakdown of the tissues. The hair was beginning to slough off their heads in the characteristic, unified mass we call the “hair mat.”

The photos of Krystal were among the most poignant I’ve ever seen. Krystal’s nudity underscored how young, how small, and how defenseless she was. Her genital region was badly decomposed. It wasn’t known whether she had been sexually molested, according to the autopsy report, the soft tissues were too far gone to tell. In any case, the image was certainly one of brutal violation.

The average person would look at such pictures, think My God, what a horrible scene, then turn away as quickly as possible. For me it’s a completely different experience. Don’t get me wrong: I abhor death—I’ve lost two wives to cancer, and those ordeals have made me hate death and despise funerals. When I’m studying a crime scene, though, I never regard it as a death; to me, it’s strictly a case. Everything I see and smell is a source of data, a possible key to discovering the truth. I once worked a case involving a house fire in which several young children had burned to death. It wasn’t their charred bodies that upset me; it was the glimpse of a tricycle and a few other toys scattered in the yard outside: reminders of the life that had been snuffed out by the fire.

As I studied the photos from the Perry murder scene, I checked for skin slippage, exposed bone, hair loss, and insect activity to see how long the family had been dead. Like every case, it was a scientific puzzle, and I began trying to fit all the pieces together. By zooming in on each individual piece of that puzzle, figuratively and literally, I was assembling a chronology of events. At the same time, I was shielding myself from the horror portrayed by the picture as a whole.

During decades of research at the Body Farm, I had learned that the events of decomposition occur in a consistent and highly predictable sequence. It’s the same