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

all along—the ones left behind by maggots as they completed their life cycle and metamorphosed into flies. Just as a caterpillar spins a cocoon, from which it emerges as a butterfly, so a maggot secretes a shelter in which it nestles before it sprouts wings. It’s ironic: We think caterpillars are cute and butterflies are beautiful, but we think maggots are repulsive and flies are nasty. But to me, maggots and flies have their own kind of beauty. Especially in this case: They were like an answer to prayer, right there in the courtroom.

Those pupa casings proved, scientifically, that blowflies had been feeding and laying eggs on the corpses for more than two weeks. Even if you assumed that they had gotten into that chilly, tightly built cabin and started laying eggs within minutes, that meant that Annie Perry couldn’t possibly have been in a New Orleans bar on December 2. Annie, like Darryl and Krystal, was already dead and decomposing in that cabin on December 2. We had the entomological proof after all; the entire forensic picture now made perfect sense.

On February 3, 2000, the jury retired to deliberate. Just five hours later they came back with a verdict. They found Rubenstein guilty of three counts of first-degree murder. For the murders of Darryl and Annie Perry, they imposed life sentences. For the murder of Krystal—the “money child,” as Goodwin and Applewhite called her—they sentenced him to die. It seemed fitting, somehow: The jury was convinced that Rubenstein had executed three of his own family, three people who knew and trusted him; now he was the one to be executed.

Every murder is wrong and brutal in some way, but this case was especially shocking, for its calculated ruthlessness and inhumanity. Michael Rubenstein stabbed his own wife’s son. He stabbed his daughter-in-law. He strangled a four-year-old child. And he probably killed two business partners. If my expertise can help put away even one vicious specimen like that, then all my years of study and research have been well spent.

During the trial, Carol and I stayed at the same bed-and-breakfast where Darryl Perry’s father and stepmother were staying. They were clearly devastated by the loss of Darryl, Annie, and Krystal. One morning after I had left for court, Mr. Perry, a shy and quiet man, approached Carol in the kitchen. Looking down at the floor, he said to Carol, “Please tell your husband thank you for coming down here to help us.” When she looked up, tears were streaming down his cheeks.

Doris Rubenstein filed for divorce after Mike’s conviction for the murder of her son, daughter-in-law, and granddaughter. I’m not sure if she ever got it, but I know she never lived to enjoy it: recently she was found dead of heart failure.

Rubenstein is currently appealing his death sentence, and the proceedings and pleadings will go on for years. I can’t help reflecting that Darryl, Annie, and Krystal never got the chance to plead for their lives. Rubenstein’s execution won’t bring back the people he killed, but it might protect others from meeting that same fate.

If there’s a hero in this case—beyond forensic science, which made the case against Rubenstein—it’s Allen Applewhite, the Mississippi highway patrolman who refused to let this case die. He bulldogged this case for years, even when it appeared there was no hope of a trial. He dug up a mountain of evidence against Rubenstein, a man he later told me he came to regard as “pure evil.” Allen was so struck by the dark depths of menace and depravity he unearthed in Rubenstein that he still carries a photo of him in his police car, to remind him just how much can be at stake in building a case against a killer. Allen had wept when the first jury deadlocked and the judge declared a mistrial; when the second jury found Rubenstein guilty, he went home and held his own four-year-old daughter tightly in his arms.

CHAPTER 19

Ashes to Ashes

LLOYD HARDEN—“CHIGGER,” his family and friends called him—was an East Tennessee farmer. He and a bunch of other Hardens were born and raised on Harden Road in Birchwood, the name given to a handful of farmhouses sprawled across the broad, fertile floor of the Tennessee River Valley halfway along its hundred-mile run from Knoxville to Chattanooga.

Chigger’s eight brothers and sisters scattered out across the valley like a handful of windblown seeds, but Chigger stayed put on Harden Road. His life wasn’t an easy one. In school, he never made it past seventh grade; when he was seventeen he learned a hard lesson that he carried with him the rest of his life: He and his nineteen-year-old brother argued over a poker hand and Chigger lost, catching a .22-caliber bullet in the chest from a gun in his own brother’s hand. He survived, but the bullet was too close to his heart to be safely removed. He kept it inside him for another twenty-seven years, a reminder of the perils of cards, the precariousness of life, and the crucial difference one inch can make when it involves the relationship between a bullet and a heart.

By the spring of 2000, a life of farm labor had made a burly man of Chigger—not just his muscles but his bones, too, which had grown thicker and stronger to bear the loads they carried year in, year out. He must have looked almost comically oversized, planting strawberry seedlings, pinching the tiny plants between strong, stained fingers and a broad thumb. Now, at age forty-four, Chigger wasn’t a young man anymore. His back ached, and he had other, deeper hurts too. On the night of April 17, 2000, Chigger took some painkillers. I don’t know how many, but it must have been more than a couple. Instead of killing the pain, the pills killed him.

Chigger had once told his siblings he wanted to be cremated, as his older brother who had