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

had come from a piece of bone taken from the middle of the left femur. Brown asked me to obtain another bone sample, so an independent DNA lab could cross-check the government’s results. I unpacked the Stryker autopsy saw I’d brought from the anthropology department and plugged it in.

A Stryker saw is an ingenious tool. It can chew through a femur in a matter of seconds but can also buzz against a child’s forearm without even breaking the skin. The secret is that its fine teeth, about the size of those on a hacksaw blade, oscillate back and forth in tiny strokes, just a sixteenth of an inch long. Bearing down on rigid material, such as a corpse’s bones or a child’s plaster cast, the teeth take rapid little bites. Pressing lightly on the skin, though, the teeth merely wiggle the skin back and forth, maybe producing a tickle and a giggle.

I cut into the femur right beside the notch left by the GBI’s Stryker saw; it took less than a minute to notch out a quarter-cylinder about two inches long and an inch wide. I gave this to Brown for shipment to the independent DNA lab. As one final precaution, I bagged and gave him a finger bone, too, in case a third test should someday seem necessary.

Next I opened the plastic bag of clothes tucked down at the foot of the body bag. The body itself wasn’t too smelly, but the clothes reeked of decomp and ammonia. Despite their rotting and stained fabric, a pair of blue jeans was easily recognizable. The shirt was also crumbling, but it looked to be red and green plaid. According to Lisa, the Harden family had asked the funeral home to dress Chigger in his favorite outfit, jeans and a plaid shirt.

If we were lucky, we would find one final piece of identifying material accompanying Chigger’s body: the bullet his brother had fired into his chest more than twenty-five years earlier. It would be difficult and time consuming to search the remains for it now; I decided my chances of finding it might be better after the cremation, when I could sift through the ashes.

As the sun sank low over the red- and gold-leafed Tennessee hills outside, I folded the white body bag back over the moldy skeleton; with a quick push, the bag slid deep into the furnace. Helen Taylor slid the door upward, latched it in place, and switched on the fan. Seconds later I heard a soft whump as the gas ignited.

The next morning dawned foggy and cold. Back inside the garage at the East Tennessee Cremation once more, I felt the heat still radiating from the furnace’s masonry. The cremation had taken only a couple of hours, but the body had remained overnight in the furnace so I could examine the burned bones in situ. Sliding the furnace door open, I peered inside the long, dark chamber with a flashlight. The bones inside still clearly outlined a human skeleton. The long bones of the arms and legs were fractured but intact, as was the pelvic structure; the crumbling remnants of a rib cage still sketched the framework of a chest. Most recognizably human of all was the skull. As soon as I touched it, it broke into small pieces.

Using a long-handled broom and a large dustpan, Helen Taylor scooped up the bone fragments and ashes, then spread them on a worktable beneath a vented exhaust hood so I could sift through them. Lurking amid the bone shards and the soft, ashy material were dozens of rusty steel staples; two years before, they had held together the cardboard container in which the body had arrived at Tri-State. Helen handed me a large, heavy magnet and showed me how to drag it through the cremains, trolling for staples.

The weight of the magnet was enough to crush all but the largest pieces of bone; in their lightness and fragility the fragments resembled the airy and brittle meringue cookies made by baking beaten, sweetened egg whites. Tiny blobs of an amorphous, glasslike material were scattered throughout the cremains, possibly left by melted buttons or other artifacts from the clothing that was burned along with the body. As I continued to sift and stir the material, sorting out pieces that were obviously not human cremains, I strained for a glimpse of a bullet or, more precisely, a melted blob of lead, something that might once have been a bullet. I saw nothing that looked even close.

The final stage in the cremation process was to pulverize the remaining pieces of bone. Some of the Tri-State cremains I’d analyzed had contained large bone fragments; news reports had indicated that the Marshes had used a wood chipper or simply a large board to break up large fragments. So I’d done an experiment in cremains processing myself, on another set of cremains I’d received from Bill Brown: I’d put some of the burned bones down in Carol’s blender, an old Hamilton Beach model, and switched it on. A terrible clatter and chatter ensued, some of it from the blender, some of it from Carol. (You’d think I’d have learned, after buying two new stoves for Ann, not to use my household appliances for research. Needless to say, the kitchen counter soon acquired a new blender, and the contaminated one was banished to the garage.)

East Tennessee Cremation Services had a much more sophisticated way of pulverizing burned bones: an IEE processor, which looked a lot like a soup kettle grafted on top of a garbage disposal, but cost a whopping $4,000. Helen put the cremains in the kettle and covered the top with a heavy lid, then flipped a switch. The fragments were gone in sixty seconds, reduced to a grainy powder. Then she poured the processed cremains into a plastic bag positioned inside a rectangular plastic case—they fit, but just barely—sealed the bag tightly with a plastic cable tie, and handed the box to me. I now