Death's Acre Read online

  Bill Rodriguez was the ideal graduate student for the task—partly because he was willing to take it on, and partly because he had a broader background in field research than most graduate students.

  Bill had an undergraduate degree in anthropology, with a minor in zoology. He’d entered anthropology intending to study primates, and in fact he actually went to Africa as part of a team working to restore laboratory-raised chimpanzees to the wild. But he’d also taken my osteology course and had done quite well in it, so one day, when I needed someone to go with me on a forensic case, I went looking for an assistant, and Bill was the first qualified helper I found. He was washing grimy windows in one of our classrooms; because we were housed beneath the stadium’s concrete stands, a lot of dust and dirt swirled onto and into our quarters. Bill had a teaching assistantship, which sounded pretty highbrow, but the “assistantship” part included some lowbrow chores like washing windows.

  “I need somebody to go out on a case with me,” I said. “Why don’t you finish that later?” Bill was only too happy to oblige.

  It was a cold, snowy day. The body, which had been discovered by a road crew picking up trash alongside a country road, was partially covered with mud. The skull lay ten feet or so away from the rest of the body; all the remains were largely skeletonized.

  I asked Bill—as I always asked my students—to tell me what he made of the scene. He correctly identified the skull as a white male’s; he also quickly determined that the man had been shot in the head. Then he pointed out what looked to be additional perimortem trauma to the skull and commented on the shallow burial.

  His last two observations were logical but wrong. The marks he interpreted as trauma inflicted around the time of death were actually postmortem: they were tooth marks left by rodents (rats, probably) that had dragged off the skull and gnawed off bits of flesh. What appeared to be a shallow grave was actually an illusion: the body lay in a shallow creek bed that was dry when we were there; during rainy spells, though, muddy water had gradually deposited a thin layer of silt around and on top of the body.

  The skull bore a couple of other interesting clues as well. The location of the gunshot entry wound—just behind the right ear, with a fracture pattern suggesting that the barrel of the gun had been pressed against the skull—marked this as an execution-style killing. One of the zygomatic bones, or cheekbones, was deformed in a way I’d seen several times before. It had been broken, probably in a bar fight—and probably by a pool cue, judging by what I’d learned about several prior victims who had almost the exact same pattern of trauma and healing. His teeth had several unfilled cavities and lots of chewing-tobacco stains, so clearly he was not exactly from the upper crust.

  As we excavated, we noticed numerous pupal casings in and around the remains; that told me that—like those Arikara Indians whose graves had first gotten me thinking about insects—he’d been killed during warm weather. The vines and roots growing under parts of the body tended to confirm that as well.

  The police never managed to solve that particular murder, but the case did have one happy ending: it got Bill Rodriguez hooked on forensics. Primatology lost a promising young scientist that cold, snowy day. Not long after that, Bill helped clear the ground, level the gravel pad, and pour the concrete for the new Anthropology Research Facility. A few months later he helped me set out our first research subject, corpse 1-81. By then Bill had settled on his thesis topic. H. B. Reed had chronicled insect activity in dog carcasses. Bill would do the same thing with human corpses, beginning with 1-81.

  THE INSECT STUDY was not a pleasant project. Besides 1-81, we’d brought over a decomposing body from the sow barn; in addition, over the next few months, we acquired another couple of bodies.

  Bill put the bodies up on wire racks, so he could observe and gather insects from beneath them. Then he parked himself on a stool for hours every day and watched what happened.

  What he saw first, with each of his four experimental subjects, was a profusion of blowflies. The warm-weather bodies, like 1-81, began attracting blowflies by the hundreds within a matter of minutes. Blood triggered a feeding frenzy like nothing he could have imagined: Sitting just a foot or two away from a bloody body, Bill would soon find even himself overrun with flies, seeking any moist bodily fluids to feed on, any dark, damp orifices (including Bill’s nostrils) to lay their eggs in. He quickly learned to wrap netting around his head to keep the flies out of his eyes, nose, mouth, and ears.

  On a warm day it took only a matter of hours for the nose, mouth, and eyes to be filled with grainy, yellowish-white masses of fly eggs. One female blowfly can lay hundreds of eggs at a time, and there were literally thousands of pregnant females swarming around each body after its arrival. In the heat of May and June—the months when 1-81 and 2-81 were placed in the research enclosure—those clumps of eggs hatched into thousands of maggots in as little as four to six hours.

  But the flies weren’t the only bugs to flock to a fresh body. Yellow-jackets and wasps showed up within the first minutes to hours too. Some of them fed on the body itself, Bill noticed; others snagged flies on the wing, carried them off, and decapitated them with one swift bite of their jaws. Still others feasted on the masses of fly eggs or the tender young maggots hatching in the body’s openings.

  As the maggot population exploded, Bill noticed carrion beetles arriving to feed not just on the carrion but on the maggots as well. Like a wasp beheading a fly, a beetle would clamp its powerful jaws on a wriggling victim and cut it cleanly in two. Bill described some of these life-and-death struggles for me in epic terms; I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a student so thoroughly immersed in a research project. “This is the food chain in action,” he told me excitedly one day. “This isn’t just some happenstance occurrence; it’s an orderly sequence, it’s something we can interpret and use forensically.”

  Bill’s research was a breath of fresh air for the field of anthropology, but not for his home life. After a day parked on his stool, surrounded by bodies and buzzing insects—many of which would light on him after feeding on corpses, and some of which would even lay eggs on him—he’d go home with the reek of decomp on his clothes, his skin, his hair. After the first day or two Bill’s wife, Karleen, issued strict orders: He was to strip in the garage, put his clothes straight in the washer, and jump into the shower immediately. Then, and only then, was he permitted to approach her.

  Early in the study—just a matter of days into it—Bill and I were speculating about how far away the flies could smell the bodies, and whether the same flies were coming back day after day to feed on them. That’s when we got the idea of marking the flies with orange paint and trying to track them.

  Using the net with which he gathered specimens every day, Bill caught five blowflies buzzing around corpse 1-81. He brought them back to my office in the department and painted the thorax of each one with UT orange so they’d be easy to spot in a swarm. When we took the marked flies outside and released them, they took off, seemingly at random. The next day at the Body Farm, though, Bill netted three of the five marked flies.

  ON FEBRUARY 11, 1982, nine months after the study began, Bill presented his results at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences in Orlando, Florida. The room, a large banquet room in a big Hyatt Hotel, was fairly crowded as Bill got up. Within minutes, though, as he began projecting the 35mm slides he’d taken at frequent intervals during the study, people began to get up and leave the room. Were Bill’s slides—the first images we’d shown of human bodies decomposing at the research facility—too disturbing for even seasoned forensic scientists to stomach?

  Another few minutes passed, and the people who had left the room began returning—accompanied by throngs of others, summoned from other presentations scheduled simultaneously with Bill’s. “You’ve got to come see this” was the message that spread like wildfire through the Hyatt’s meeting rooms that day.<
br />
  Bill went on to publish his results in the Journal of Forensic Sciences that fall, and that article, “Insect Activity and Its Relationship to Decay Rates of Human Cadavers in East Tennessee,” became one of the most cited, most reprinted articles in the journal’s history. In fact, in a 1998 brochure highlighting the fiftieth anniversary of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences, Bill’s talk got mentioned as one of the organization’s high points—“the first of the ‘bug’ papers,” the brochure called it.

  As one of the rising young stars of forensic anthropology, Bill took some interesting jobs after graduate school, including positions with a forensic consulting laboratory in Louisiana and with the medical examiner in Syracuse, New York. His most unusual job, though, is his current one: He’s the staff forensic anthropologist for the Armed Forces medical examiner, whose office is responsible for identifying and, when needed, autopsying the bodies of military personnel, diplomats, spies, space shuttle astronauts, and anyone else sent by the federal government—or nearby state and local governments—for examination.

  IN APRIL OF 1986, while he was still working for the Louisiana forensic lab, Bill was asked by police in Falls Church, Virginia, to examine evidence gathered from a death scene a year and a half earlier.

  In August of 1984, Lisa Rinker, an eighteen-year-old girl, had left her house one Sunday night around 10:30, telling her mother she was going for a walk around the block. She never returned, and the next morning her mother contacted the police to report her missing. Police, family, and friends began searching the town and surrounding areas, but they found nothing.

  The following Saturday night, one of Lisa’s friends—the best friend of Lisa’s boyfriend, in fact—brought Lisa’s father a pair of familiar-looking pink flip-flops, which he said he’d spotted at an intersection outside town as he was putting up Missing posters. Her sister, Nancy, confirmed that the flip-flops were Lisa’s.

  Mr. Rinker rounded up a group of relatives and friends, and the next day they headed out to search the woods near the intersection. The searchers set about their work with a sense of grim foreboding, for the smell of death was in the air, and strong. About sixty yards from the highway guardrail they found Lisa’s body lying in dense underbrush. She was wearing dark blue corduroy jeans with white trim on the pockets—the same pants she’d been wearing the night she disappeared—and a shredded tube top. Her torso was covered with maggots; her face had been eaten away, and so had her internal organs. The skin on her hands and feet had begun to slip, or slough off. Her feet were bare; however, despite the rough terrain and dense underbrush, the soles showed no traces of bruises or scratches. The lack of trauma to the soles, together with a difference in skin color around the toes and arches, suggested that she’d been wearing something on her feet at the time of her death, and possibly for some time afterward as well.

  Two days later the local medical examiner performed an autopsy. Because of the advanced state of decomposition and partial skeletonization, he was unable to tell what had killed her. He listed Lisa’s cause of death as undetermined, and her grieving parents buried her.

  But the police investigators weren’t ready to put the case to rest. Lisa had quarreled bitterly with her boyfriend, Bernie Woody, on the night she disappeared. According to police, Lisa had been cheating on him—with her own sister’s husband, Dale Robinson—and witnesses had told investigators the boy had threatened her. A car owned by his friend Danny Heath, the fellow who spotted Lisa’s sandals beside the highway, was reported parked beside the road that night near the spot where Lisa’s body was eventually found.

  The detectives leaned hard on Lisa’s boyfriend and his pal Danny. During a polygraph test, a police statement said, Danny appeared to be lying when he was asked questions about Lisa’s death. With no cause of death and nothing but circumstantial evidence to suggest that Lisa might have been murdered, though, the district attorney decided not to file criminal charges against either Bernie Woody or Danny Heath.

  Meanwhile, a new investigator, Rick Daniele, had become fascinated with the case. Daniele sent photos of the body to Dr. Louise Robbins, a forensic anthropologist in North Carolina, along with the flip-flops found beside the highway. Dr. Robbins, an expert in footprint and shoe print analysis, told Daniele that the discoloration patterns in the forefoot and arch areas indicated that the flip-flops had remained on her feet for several days after she was killed. Dr. Robbins also noticed a piece of sloughed-off skin stuck to one of the flip-flops—further proof that the body was partially decomposed when the sandal was removed.

  That’s when Detective Daniele contacted Bill Rodriguez and asked him to analyze the evidence. Besides the photos, he sent Bill soil samples that had been gathered at the death scene, along with preserved maggots that had been collected from Lisa’s body. It was obvious that the investigators had done a thorough job of gathering evidence; it was less obvious, but just as significant, that entomology had become a respected forensic tool, thanks in great measure to Bill’s insect study at the Body Farm five years before.

  As Bill leafed through the photos of Lisa’s body, he was struck immediately by the advanced state of decomposition, particularly in the chest region and the hands. Lisa’s face was completely gone, but that wasn’t too surprising: with its moist openings, the face is a blowfly’s preferred place to feed and lay eggs—usually, that is. But not when there’s blood somewhere else on the body.

  Any forensic anthropologist who’s seen a victim who’s been stabbed to death or whose throat has been cut knows how dramatically the presence of blood at the sites of those wounds attracts flies and promotes maggot growth. Within days, if the weather is warm—as it was in August of 1984, when Lisa Rinker died—the masses of maggots hatching in the bloody wounds consume the surrounding tissues far faster than they otherwise would. It’s a phenomenon we call “differential decomposition,” which raises a red flag instantly in the mind of any trained forensic scientist.

  From the extent of differential decomposition in her chest and abdomen, Bill was virtually sure Lisa had been stabbed there; the damage to the soft tissue of her hands suggested that she’d been cut there, too, probably trying to defend herself. He called Detective Daniele to tell him so.

  Armed with Bill’s reading of the photos, Daniele retrieved Lisa’s clothing from the evidence file and sent it to the Virginia crime lab. The crime lab’s analysis bore out Bill’s hunch: tests of eight stained areas of Lisa’s pants indicated the presence of blood—lots of blood, enough to have soaked the fabric. Daniele pleaded with the family and the district attorney to allow Lisa’s body to be exhumed so Bill could examine it for signs of skeletal trauma.

  Three months later, on a cold, snowy day in January, Bill arrived at the cemetery where Lisa had been buried. Breaking through the frozen ground, cemetery workers unearthed her coffin and hoisted it out of the ground; then they put it into a hearse for the trip to the Fairfax County morgue. There, Bill removed the chest, abdomen, and both hands, placed them in a large kettle of water, and boiled them for an hour to remove the flesh. Then he removed the bones from the kettle and gently brushed them clean.

  Lisa Rinker had indeed been stabbed. Bill found a total of seven knife marks—several in different parts of the chest cavity (the ribs and sternum), plus defensive wounds on both hands. The knife marks were made by a thin-bladed knife, Bill’s examination found. According to police, Danny Heath often wore a large pocketknife in a sheath on his belt, but they say after Lisa’s murder, he stopped wearing it. The cause of death on Lisa’s death certificate was changed: Undetermined was struck through, and Homicide put in its place.

  Sadly, Lisa’s killer remains at large. Despite the skeletal proof Bill found showing that Lisa had been murdered, and despite the lingering questions surrounding Bernie Woody and Danny Heath, the Fairfax County Commonwealth Attorney remains unwilling to prosecute the case.

  Anthropologists and insects can
reveal the truth about a crime, but they can’t force the wheels of bureaucracy to turn, and they can’t guarantee that justice will be done. All they can do is serve as a voice for victims, and hope that voice is heard.

  CHAPTER 9

  Progress and Protest

  ON MAY 15, 1981, when we laid my first research subject at the Body Farm, corpse 1-81, in the sixteen-foot-square chain-link enclosure that was the Anthropology Research Facility, the daytime high was just 58 degrees. Over the next few days, though, temperatures shot up into the eighties. A couple of months earlier and we might as well have put him in a meat locker, but once the hot weather hit, the changes were swift and dramatic. Within days the flesh of the face was nearly gone, consumed by the maggots hatching in the mouth, nose, eyes, and ears. Bill Rodriguez was carefully charting the insect activity, but the changes in the body itself, and their timing, were fascinating—and gruesome.

  There are four broad stages in a body’s decomposition: the fresh stage, the bloated stage, the decay stage, and the dry stage. Some scientists tend to split these into finer gradations, but I try not to get bogged down by definitions. (There are two kinds of observers in science: splitters and lumpers. I’ve never been much of a splitter; in my heart of hearts, I’m a lumper.)

  In 1-81’s fresh stage, the body’s toothless upper jaw and yellow-toothed mandible stretched what was left of a face into a kind of grin. As the insects multiplied and fed, they soon left gaping eye sockets to stare at us blindly. The hair and skin retained their hold on the skull, but within days their grip was clearly beginning to slip.

  By the end of the first week, the corpse began to bloat. As bacteria began to consume the stomach and intestines, the abdomen started inflating almost like a balloon from the waste gases of the microbes. Meanwhile, the skin began turning a rich, reddish brown. Fatty tissues began to break down beneath the skin, giving the corpse a glossy shine, almost as if it had been basted with a glaze and baked in an oven.