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

rotting cardboard, leaves, and pine needles. On the day Rick got there, the body count reached 139; already 29 of those had been identified by distraught relatives. As the only person on-site with mass-burial expertise, Rick assumed a key role in guiding the search-and-recovery work. The task was greatly hindered by the trees and underbrush covering most of the property, so at Rick’s suggestion, a crew with chain saws and bulldozers began cutting the trees and clearing the land, all the way down to the red Georgia clay.

The day after Rick joined the effort, the GBI searched Brent Marsh’s house, located at the entrance to the crematorium complex, seeking records that could help shed light on the number of bodies that might be hidden on the property, as well as their identities. While searching the house, they spotted still more bodies in the backyard.

Meanwhile, calls from worried people were pouring into funeral homes across the Southeast. Had their loved one been sent to Tri-State? If so, were these the genuine cremains on the mantel or in the cemetery, or was the dearly departed actually festering on the Tri-State grounds?

By Wednesday, just five days after the story broke, the cost of the investigation had soared to $5 million, and the body count had reached 242. Aided by the chain saws and bulldozers, searchers found nearly 100 more bodies during the next six days. On the twelfth day, the grisly finds ceased.

The final toll was 339 bodies at Tri-State, and immeasurable heartache among the families who knew, or feared, that one of those bodies belonged to a father, a mother, a sibling, a child. About 75 of the 339 bodies were identified within the first two weeks. Most of those were recent, relatively fresh bodies: easy to recognize, hard to look at. But painful as it must have been to identify a loved one among the bodies retrieved from Tri-State, at least those families got swift closure, or the chance to begin seeking it. For hundreds more people, the uncertainty and pain would drag on and on.

Within days after the EPA inspector’s discovery of a skull, the lawsuits began—some against Tri-State, others against the funeral homes that had contracted with the crematorium. That’s when I started to hear from lawyers.

On February 21, I got an E-mail from William Brown, an attorney from Cleveland, Tennessee, asking me to analyze the cremains that Tri-State had sent back to Chigger Harden’s family. Understandably, the family feared that the cremains might not be Chigger’s.

Three weeks later, Bill Brown brought me the cremains. Double-bagged in plastic were a few handfuls of dark gray, ashy material. Including the plastic bags, the entire sample weighed 1,650 grams, or 3.6 pounds. That seemed skimpy: the most recent published study on cremation weights gave the average weight of cremains as 2,895 grams for males, 1,840 for females. (Curious about this subject, I began a research study of my own. Several times a week over the next five months, I went to a cooperative crematorium nearby and weighed cremains before they were sent back to families or funeral homes. After weighing fifty sets of cremains from males and fifty from females, I found the males averaged 3,452 grams, or 7.6 pounds, and the females 2,770 grams, or 6.1 pounds.)

As Brown watched, I carefully emptied the bags onto a clean metal tray, then sifted the material through a 4-millimeter wire screen, which would catch all but the smallest pieces. The bags clearly contained fragments of burned human bones: Even though the pieces were small, I could tell from the smooth, curved surface of some of the fragments that they’d come from the head of a femur (thighbone) or a humerus (upper arm bone). There was also a piece of a bone from the hand; a piece from a foot; and small bits of a metatarsal (foot bone), ribs, a femur, and a tibia (lower leg bone).

Much of what the screen caught, though, was nonhuman material. There was one metal staple—not the kind used for stapling papers together but a big, heavy-duty fastener that might have held together a corrugated cardboard carton, of the sort funeral homes use to ship bodies to crematoriums. (Normally when a body is cremated, it’s left in the shipping carton and the entire carton is simply slid into the oven; that makes it easier to handle, and it solves the problem of disposing of the carton as biohazardous waste. Afterward a powerful magnet is used to remove steel objects such as the staples.) The screen had also caught some pieces of what appeared to be burned wood and some fragments of black fabric. The fabric surprised me, since cloth burns at just a few hundred degrees Fahrenheit, while a cremation furnace normally runs far hotter, around 1,600 to 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit. Most puzzling of all, though, were numerous marble-size spheres of a fluffy white substance. Fuzz balls was the best term I could come up with to describe them. The fuzz balls weighed practically nothing, but they represented a considerable percentage of the sample’s volume. Were they accidental contaminants or deliberately added filler? I’d never seen anything like them, and I told Brown so. I offered to get some laboratory tests made at UT; he agreed that might be a good idea, then he thanked me and left.

I got on the phone and called a textile scientist I knew, who offered to look at the fuzz balls. A professor at UT’s Forest Products Center agreed to analyze the fragments that appeared to be wood. I arranged to get samples to them.

These tests would pinpoint the nature of the nonhuman fragments that the 4-millimeter wire screen had sifted out. But that left the bulk of the sample, not quite three pounds of powder and fine particles, which had sifted through the mesh. Visually, the material looked darker than the human cremains I’d seen occasionally over the past forty years, but in a court of law, I knew, I’d have to