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

zeroed in on the maggots and the fact that they were at the two-week stage. I pointed out how the cool temperatures would have slowed their development, but he kept hammering on the fourteen-day number.

There was one other factor that had to be considered, I argued, one that had become clear to me as I had learned more about the crime scene. Yes, the maggots were at the fourteen-day stage. But the bodies were indoors, locked inside the cabin. And this particular cabin wasn’t some drafty structure of rough logs and mud chinking. This “cabin” was actually built of solid lumber: two-by-fours laid flat and stacked one atop the other. The man who built it had worked at a lumberyard and apparently could get two-by-fours for free, or almost free, so he built the entire cabin of them. Even the interior walls were made of tightly stacked two-by-fours. There just weren’t a lot of openings for insects to penetrate.

The apparent discrepancy between the decomp evidence and the insect evidence wasn’t necessarily a contradiction at all, I explained. It would have taken a while for the blowflies to detect the scent of death inside—and then even longer to find a way in through the tightly stacked boards. So the two weeks of blowfly activity constituted only a limit—an absolute bare minimum—for time since death. The actual TSD was probably far longer, as the other decomposition markers clearly indicated.

My testimony was followed by that of Bill Rodriguez, my former student. Working independently from me, Bill, too, had estimated the time since death at about one month—again, because of how cold the weather was and how inaccessible the bodies were. Between the two of us, Goodwin hoped, the insect problem had been “exterminated.” By the time the prosecution rested its case two days later, I was back in Knoxville. Now it was the defense’s turn.

Unbeknownst to Bill Goodwin, the defense had lined up a surprise witness: entomologist Neal Haskell, who had recently testified (along with me) for the prosecution in the Zoo Man case in Knoxville and who had returned to the Body Farm in 1998 to expand his comparison of insect activity in human corpses and pig carcasses. Now Neal was testifying on the other side in a murder case. Fair enough: The world of forensic experts is a small one, and sooner or later someone who’s worked with you on one case will end up challenging you on another. But I was totally unprepared for what Bill Goodwin called to tell me about the exchange in the judge’s chambers that had ensued when he opposed Haskell’s appearance as a surprise witness. According to the defense lawyer, not only was Haskell going to support the defense’s claim that the deaths had occurred on or after December 2, he was prepared to testify that I had perjured myself—had lied to help the prosecution—in the Zoo Man case.

Scientific differences of opinion are one thing; accusations of perjury are quite another. This was a slap in the face, contradicting everything I stood for, personally and professionally. Four decades earlier, Dr. Wilton Krogman had drilled a fundamental rule of ethics into me: My role in a case was not to serve the prosecutor or the defendant; my role—my only role—was to speak for the victim by uncovering the truth. So when Bill Goodwin had first asked me for a time-since-death estimate in the Perry murders, I immediately asked him not to tell me the prosecution’s theory or timetable, and he didn’t. If I’d thought the Perry family had been killed on or after December 2, I’d have said so and let the chips fall where they would; to hear that Haskell was attacking my integrity made me furious.

But more troubling than my personal and professional indignation was the damage Haskell’s testimony might do to the prosecution’s case: If the jury believed Haskell’s accusation, they might ignore a compelling body of forensic evidence. At the other end of the phone line, Goodwin listened to my indignant tirade, then asked me to fly back to Mississippi to rebut the accusation of perjury. Wild horses couldn’t have kept me away.

BACK IN THE COURTROOM in Magnolia, I sat and waited for my chance to defend my good name. As it turned out, when he took the stand Haskell did not accuse me of committing perjury or lying; he merely testified that I’d been wrong about Patricia Johnson’s time since death. Perhaps the defense attorney had been bluffing, perhaps Bill Goodwin had misunderstood. Whatever the reason, I was still eager to explain the circumstances: I would recount the events at Cahaba Lane the day I pronounced her body as too fresh for me, and tell how, when pressed by a police officer, I had guesstimated that she had been out there only a day or two. I would stress—as I had in the Huskey trial—the fact that I had not examined or even touched her body but had sent it straight to the medical examiner. For the hundredth time, at least, I regretted making that unfortunate guesstimate, which had dogged me ever since.

Then, as I waited and worried, something astonishing happened. Rubenstein’s attorney called the pathologist from the county medical examiner’s office to the stand. During her testimony, the pathologist showed enlargements of autopsy photos. These were photos I’d never seen—photos whose existence I hadn’t known of until that moment.

And suddenly there it was. In a close-up of Krystal’s face and head, nestled in the roots of her hair, I saw it: a tiny brown object about the size and shape of a grain of wild rice. Looking closer, I saw others as well. From my seat in the courtroom, I leaned over the railing and whispered to Bill Goodwin, “You’ve got to stop this trial. You’ve got to put me back on the stand.”

Goodwin swiftly requested a recess so we could confer. Excitedly, I told him what I’d spotted in the photo: the empty pupa casings I’d been searching for