Death's Acre Read online

  As the flesh turned the color of caramel, a network of purplish-crimson lines began to show through it, like a satellite map of a continent’s rivers. We were seeing the circulatory system, its veins and arteries highlighted as the blood within them began to putrefy, making them larger and darker, almost as if they’d been outlined on the body with a felt-tip marker.

  The graduate students and I watched in utter fascination. As far as I knew, no scientist had ever done this before: deliberately set out a human body to decompose, then simply sat back and watched, taking systematic note of what happened and when. Many scientists—and even the artist Michelangelo—had studied bodies, but their focus was human anatomy; by dissecting the dead, they hoped to learn more about the flesh and bone of the living. My interest was death itself.

  Two weeks into 1-81’s journey from fresh corpse to bare skeleton, his skull was bare bone. The hair had slid off in a mat, still held tenuously together by tangles and a bit of tissue. The hair mat lay in a dark, greasy pool of goo that surrounded the head. His bloated abdomen had collapsed, leaving his belly shrunken and clinging to the jutting rib cage, marking his transition from the bloated stage to the decay stage. Within another week, the ribs themselves—along with the vertebrae of the spine—were exposed. So were the bones of his pelvis, as the result of a vigorous insect assault on his genitals and the surrounding area.

  His limbs had decomposed more slowly. Lacking the moist, dark openings of the face and pelvis, the arms and legs were less desirable territory to the insects colonizing the body. One dramatic and fascinating change had taken place at the hands and feet, though: About seven days into the process, the skin began to soften and slough off in large sheets, almost as if 1-81 had suffered a particularly severe sunburn and his skin were peeling. At first the sloughed-off skin was pale and pliable; amazingly, the ridges and whorls of the finger- and toe prints were still clearly visible, a fact I relayed to one of my friends at the Knoxville Police Department, Arthur Bohanan, who was KPD’s top fingerprint expert. Within a few days, though, the skin had dried and shriveled, almost as dead leaves do. But when Art took one of these shriveled husks back to his lab, he managed to moisten and uncurl it, coaxing 1-81’s identity once again from something an untrained investigator might well have discarded as leaf litter.

  One month after his arrival, 1-81 was little more than a skeleton. Some leathery skin remained on his rib cage and skull, where the sun had dried or mummified it to the texture of leather; beneath it, though, all his soft tissue had been consumed by bacterial action and insects. I left his bones to bleach for four or five months, then gathered them up and brought them into the hospital morgue for “processing”—cleaning off the last vestiges of dried skin and cartilage. Then I measured the bones, recording the key dimensions: femoral length; femoral head diameter; cranial length, breadth, and height; the distance between the eye orbits; and a host of other data that would preserve the measure of the man.

  The skeletal measurements were part of a larger plan that had been taking shape in my mind over the preceding months and years: to build the largest collection of skeletons—modern skeletons—in the United States. Several immense skeletal collections already existed. The Terry Collection, originally housed in Saint Louis at Washington University but later sent to the Smithsonian Institution, included more than 1,700 individual skeletons; the Smithsonian’s other collections, as I knew from personal experience, possessed far more, including thousands I had sent there during my summers excavating in South Dakota. But those bones were old, and for forensic purposes that made them obsolete.

  In many ways we humans have taken ourselves out of the evolutionary loop. Take me, for example. I’m terribly nearsighted; my vision is about 20/200. If I’d lived ten thousand years ago, I wouldn’t have survived long enough to reproduce and pass along my myopia; squinting hard, I might have glimpsed the saber-toothed tiger about the time he opened up his jaws to chomp down on my neck. Today, fit or unfit for the rigors of “Nature, red in tooth and claw,” we survive and we breed. (Of my three sons, two—Jim and Charlie—inherited my nearsightedness; my middle son, Billy, somehow ended up with eyes sharp enough to qualify him as an Army helicopter pilot.)

  But appearances notwithstanding, we continue to evolve, including our skeletons. A century ago the average white American male stood five feet seven inches tall; today he stands five feet nine inches. The average Arikara Indian female measured five feet three inches back in 1806, when Lewis and Clark glimpsed her standing on the bank of the Missouri River; today she’s two to three inches taller.

  When an unknown crime victim is found—especially if police find only a few of the long bones—the only way to estimate stature accurately is to compare those long bones to the average dimensions of corresponding bones from individuals of known stature. And if the numbers being used for comparison are out of date, the estimation could be off by several inches. As a result, instead of searching for a missing male six feet tall, the police might mistakenly search for a missing male five feet nine. Data from 1-81 could help prevent such mistakes.

  One other way in which 1-81 would continue to help us for years to come was as a teaching tool. Learning the size, shape, and feel of every bone in the human body is an enormous challenge for anthropology students. The only way to do it is to study actual bones—real ones, not plastic or plaster casts of them—for countless hours. In my osteology class every semester, the students used to dread the “black box” test: I’d put several bones inside a black box that had circular openings cut into the sides; to pass the test, a student would have to reach in and tell me, just by feeling them, what bones (or, if I was feeling merciless that day, what bone fragments) were in the black box. Even something as subtle as weight and texture can be crucially important. The skulls of blacks, for instance, are denser, heavier, and smoother than the skulls of whites; that’s one key reason there have been so few outstanding black Olympic swimmers: they have to work harder just to stay afloat. In a forensic case, if only part of a skull is found, knowing the difference in density and heft could help tell police whether the victim was white or black.

  Our donated body, 1-81, had died of disease, but my plan was to build a skeletal collection that would include victims of trauma too. That way, when I lectured about antemortem and perimortem fractures, students could see how bones broken before death had healed, while bones fractured at the time of death didn’t. When I described gunshot entry wounds and exit wounds, students could see and feel how the entry fracture tends to bevel, or widen at an angle, as the bullet penetrates the skull; what lead spatter looks like on the inside of the cranium; how much larger an exit wound is and how it, too, bevels and widens in the direction of the bullet’s travel.

  Much of our early research focused simply on observing and recording the basic progression and timing of decomposition. As Colonel Shy had made painfully clear, our understanding of postmortem processes was quite limited. The questions these studies hoped to answer were simple, but the answers would take years to piece together. Every variable made a difference: Was the body in sunlight or shade? Clothed or nude? Outdoors, or in a building—or a car? The passenger compartment or the trunk? On land or in water? One early experiment posed a deceptively simple question: How far away can the smell of death be detected by the human nose?

  As usual, it was a real-world case that set me to thinking about that question. This one happened right in my own backyard—or almost. The backyard where it happened was only a few miles north of the anthropology department’s offices and labs, off a busy thoroughfare named Broadway. Technically it wasn’t a backyard but a vacant lot between a house and Broadway, covered with weeds, brush, trash, and piles of dirt. In the summer of 1976, the owner of one of the adjoining houses finally got tired of looking at the mess, so he called the property’s owner to complain. The owner obligingly hired a cleanup crew, which brought over a tractor equipped with a front-end loader to scoop
up the trash and brush.

  Several hours and truckloads of debris later, as they got close to the center of the lot, one of the workers spotted what looked like a human skull lying in the weeds. He called his buddies over to confer, and they agreed with his skeletal analysis. Needless to say, that was the end of the cleanup work for the day. The workers called the police, and the police called me.

  I headed out Broadway, accompanied by Pat Willey, the graduate student who ran the osteology laboratory—my bone lab. Pat and I did a little digging and found a few more bones, but not many. Most of them, we soon realized, had probably already been scooped up and hauled off to the landfill.

  From the condition of the bones—they were completely dry and sun-bleached—it was immediately apparent that they’d been lying in the lot for quite some time, possibly several years. It didn’t take long to make a positive identification, either: The top plate of the dentures was prominently labeled Orval King, the name of a local man last seen some two years before. A seventy-four-year-old who’d spent some time in the regional psychiatric hospital, he had either fallen or lain down in the vacant lot between a house and a busy street and quietly died.

  In this case, the tantalizing puzzle to be solved was not who he was, or how long he’d been dead, or even why he died. This time what baffled me was why he hadn’t been found shortly after he died. More precisely, why hadn’t he been smelled shortly after he died? When an adult human male decomposes, the smell can be overpowering, as you can well imagine if you’ve ever driven slowly past a dead dog with your car windows open on a warm summer day.

  We knew that the house adjoining the vacant lot was occupied at the time the man died; we also knew that the sidewalk across the front of the lot carried a lot of neighborhood pedestrians, and Broadway was one of Knoxville’s busiest streets. Yet no one had smelled anything, or at least nothing bad enough to prompt suspicion, investigation, or complaints to the city.

  So if the stench of death didn’t carry as far as the houses or the sidewalk, how far did it carry? Or, put another way, if the human nose couldn’t detect a body at that distance, at what distance could it detect a decomposing corpse? The answer would be useful not just to me, I figured, but to police, firefighters, and search-and-rescue workers almost anywhere.

  Orval King had raised an intriguing research question. Now, at our new two-acre research facility, I had the perfect place to determine the answer scientifically, experimentally. All I needed was a dead body and some live guinea pigs.

  The body arrived soon enough: an unclaimed corpse from a nearby medical examiner. The guinea pigs? A cinch. Undergraduates will do anything for extra credit. To recruit volunteers for this experiment, I announced in my fall Anthropology 101 class one Thursday that anyone who wanted to earn ten extra points should meet me at the research facility on Saturday morning. The turnout was incredible. Nearly a hundred students crawled out of bed early on a weekend—all of them motivated, I’m sure, by selfless scientific fervor.

  The experiment was simplicity itself: I had positioned a body, which was extremely bloated and quite smelly, a ways up the gravel road leading into the facility. The body was hidden from view by trees and bushes. The day before, I’d put markers at ten-yard intervals from the body—that is, a marker at ten yards, twenty yards, thirty, forty, and fifty. Then I led my student guinea pigs up the primrose path one by one. “Tell me when you smell something” was the only instruction I gave; then, on a clipboard I carried, I made a slash mark in the columns corresponding to the distance each student indicated. As I led them toward the corpse they would begin inhaling sharply and concentrating intensely. Most of them wouldn’t say anything until we were twenty or even ten yards from the body, then they would wrinkle up their noses and say, “Phew, something really stinks here.”

  The research was quick and dirty, as we say in academia. It wasn’t the sort of thing I’d ever write up and publish in the Journal of Forensic Sciences, but it was good enough to show me that yes, you can die and decompose in a vacant lot between a house and Broadway and never be smelled by thousands of people passing by just fifty feet away.

  OUR FIRST SEVERAL YEARS of research were a time of exciting progress. Bodies had begun arriving almost weekly from medical examiners and donors. In fact, not only was the concrete pad inside our chain-link enclosure filled to capacity, but we’d added three additional shelves—bunk beds for the dead—up the sides of the fence.*

  I surveyed our expanding research program with eagerness and pride. It’s true, what they say: Pride goeth before a fall. One spring day in 1985, I arrived to find half of my two-acre research fiefdom flagged off with surveyor’s stakes. To one side a bulldozer idled ominously. I buttonholed one of the surveyors and asked what was going on. The hospital parking lot was being expanded, he told me. As it turned out, the ag school had given me more land than it actually owned; instead of a two-acre former dump, I actually possessed a one-acre former dump, and no appeals on my part could stop the bulldozers and graders and pavers.

  But losing half my land turned out to be the least of my worries. A few days later I got called out of a class—a drastic measure, practically unprecedented—by Annette, the departmental secretary. Did I know about the protest out at the Body Farm? I did not. Annette and I jumped into a car and drove over to the hospital parking lot, where we parked in a distant, inconspicuous corner.

  A local health-care advocacy group called Solutions to Issues of Concern to Knoxvillians—S.I.C.K. for short—was picketing my research facility. Draped across one side of the fence was a giant banner that proclaimed, “This makes us S.I.C.K.!” Even though my facility was the target of the protest, I couldn’t help laughing when I saw the sign. It was smart, it was funny, and it got them great news coverage.

  But what had brought the wrath of S.I.C.K. down upon me? It seems that one of the survey crew laying out the parking-lot expansion had taken his sack lunch into the shade one day and suddenly found himself staring at the bodies decomposing inside our little chain-link enclosure. He went home and complained to his mother, who just happened to be one of the leaders of S.I.C.K. As any concerned mother would, she quickly organized a protest.

  When I explained the purpose of the facility—researching decomposition to help police solve murders—the group acknowledged that yes, such work had scientific merit, but why did it have to be located here, practically under the public’s nose? Couldn’t we move it, say, twenty miles west, onto the vast, wooded, and heavily guarded government reservation at Oak Ridge?

  Well, hell, I’d just moved the damned thing from twenty miles away barely a year before; one of the keys to establishing our research program had been finding a location close to the anthropology department. I phoned the university chancellor, Jack Reese, and explained the dilemma. I didn’t want to cause any trouble for UT, but I sure would hate to lose or relocate my research facility. Jack was as wise as Solomon and as generous as Carnegie. He offered to pay, out of his own budget, for the installation of a chain-link fence around our remaining acre of woods, to keep people from wandering close to the bodies.

  A few weeks later the fences were up and the crisis was over. Robert Frost was right: Good fences do make good neighbors. But it wouldn’t be our last crisis—and it wouldn’t be our worst.

  CHAPTER 10

  Fat Sam and Cadillac Joe

  I GOT A CALL one Thursday in May that made me close my office door. That was a rare thing. I kept my door open pretty much all the time—partly because I liked to see what was going on in the department; partly so students and faculty would feel free to talk to me about any little problem they were having (before it became a big problem); partly so nobody would wonder or worry or gossip about what was going on behind Dr. Bass’s closed door. So when they heard my phone ring and my door close, everyone in Anthropology figured something sensitive was going on. It was.

  The call came from Arzo Carson, the direct
or of the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation. The TBI and the FBI were working together, he said, on a case that had begun as a kidnapping but had apparently escalated into a murder. Carson didn’t need to tell me that, with the FBI looking over his shoulder, the stakes and the pressure were sky-high for the TBI.

  As curious grad students tiptoed past my door, straining to catch snatches of the conversation, Director Carson briefed me on the case. The circumstances—hell, even just the criminals’ names—were the most bizarre I had ever encountered in a forensic case: Fat Sam. Cadillac Joe. Funky Don.

  After I hung up, I opened the door and called in two of my best forensic response team regulars, Pat Willey and Steve Symes. Without giving them any details, I asked if they wanted to help me with some fieldwork the next week. Steve and Pat both agreed instantly, clearly eager to pierce the veil of mystery. Five days after the TBI director’s call, the three of us piled into my station wagon and headed west on I-40 toward Nashville. As we drove I filled them in on the case.

  Fourteen months before, a couple named Monty and Liz Hudson were kidnapped in broad daylight from the parking lot of a Nashville hotel. The hotel, a Holiday Inn, was in a fairly safe part of town, adjacent to the campus of Vanderbilt University. In plain sight of several witnesses—including one with a camera, who took photographs—the Hudsons were abducted at gunpoint by three men. Two of the kidnappers forced Monty Hudson into his own Cadillac, the third shoved Liz into another car, and the two cars left the Holiday Inn together.

  A couple of days later Liz Hudson was released in downtown Nashville. By then the kidnapping had been reported, and agents from the TBI and FBI were crawling all over the parking lot and the Holiday Inn for clues. That’s when the case started to get really strange.