Death's Acre Read online

  Liz refused to cooperate with the FBI. She told them that the kidnapping had been a simple misunderstanding and that Monty had since left town on a business trip. She didn’t know where he’d gone or when he’d be back, but she assured them that Monty was fine and nothing was amiss. Liz was six months pregnant at the time of the kidnapping. Three months later she gave birth to Monty’s baby, but Monty still wasn’t back from that business trip.

  A couple more months went by. Then the investigators got a tip about Monty’s whereabouts: According to an informant, Monty’s business trip had ended in a shallow grave some seventy-five miles south of Nashville, on a farm near the Alabama border.

  WEST TENNESSEE is cotton territory. Nashville is music territory. Lawrence County, in 1980, was “Fat Sam” Passarrella’s territory. Think of mobsters and you’ll probably picture wise guys from Jersey or Chicago or Vegas. The town of Lawrenceburg, Tennessee, most likely doesn’t spring to mind in connection with organized crime, but it should. Well, maybe not organized crime, actually; more like disorganized crime.

  Fat Sam hadn’t always been called that. His mama had christened him Sam John, but that had been many years and about four hundred pounds ago. Sam grew up in New York, but apparently he fell in with a bad crowd up there, so his family sent him down south to straighten him out. His aunt Louise owned the local telephone company in Lawrenceburg and was a pillar of the community; under her positive influence, the family hoped Sam would embark on a business career of his own.

  He did. By 1980, Sam’s numerous business ventures included counterfeiting, money laundering, marijuana farming, drug distribution, and trafficking in stolen property. This smorgasbord of illegal enterprise had caught the eye of a joint FBI–TBI–Secret Service task force on organized crime, and the task force was amassing a fat file on Fat Sam and his cohorts: “Funky Don” Parsons, Howard “Big Daddy” Turner, Elvin “Bank Robber” (sometimes shortened to “B.R.”) Haddock, and Earl (no nickname) Carroll.

  In the months following Monty Hudson’s disappearance, the task force began tightening its net around Fat Sam’s gang. When Sam was indicted for counterfeiting, the others could see the handwriting on their indictments as well. One of them, Earl Carroll—perhaps figuring the first to squeal would get the best deal—contacted a Nashville FBI agent, Richard Knudsen, and offered to spill the beans on Fat Sam’s crimes, including, he claimed, the kidnapping and murder of Monty Hudson.

  Carroll spun a wild tale. Monty Hudson was a con man, he said, nicknamed “Cadillac Joe” because of his fondness for stealing that particular brand of car. But cars weren’t the only hot properties Monty had acquired. According to Carroll, Monty contacted Fat Sam and offered to sell him a batch of pure silver bars, more than thirty in all, each measuring a good foot and a half long by about six inches wide and four inches high. Tipping the scales at nearly one hundred pounds apiece, each was stamped with a mint mark and serial number attesting to its authenticity. At the time, silver was selling for up to $50 an ounce—about ten times what it is today. At those prices just one of Monty’s silver bars could be worth up to $80,000. But because he needed to sell them quickly and discreetly, no questions asked, he was willing to make Sam a hell of a deal on them: $20,000 cash would buy the whole lot of them.

  Fat Sam was interested, but he wasn’t so gullible as to take Monty’s story on faith. One of his cronies, Funky Don, had some experience with precious metals, and Fat Sam asked Funky Don to run a test, or assay, on one of the bars. He did, and it assayed as pure silver. Sam forked over the twenty grand, and Monty handed over the silver. But as Fat Sam discovered when he had it retested, it wasn’t silver after all; it was actually zinc, another soft, heavy, silvery metal but worth only a few cents per ounce. In other words, for his $20,000, Fat Sam had bought a batch of metal bricks worth less than a hundred bucks. Sam was furious, Carroll told the FBI: furious at Funky Don—maybe he’d botched the assay, or maybe he was in on the scam—and even more furious at Monty.

  That’s when he swooped down on Monty and Liz in the parking lot, just as they were about to skip town. At some point after the kidnapping, Liz was being held elsewhere while Fat Sam and Big Daddy Turner, who was actually a small man, took Monty for another ride in his Cadillac. Sitting in the backseat, Monty said something smart-alecky. It was the last thing he ever said: one of the two men up front—it’s not clear which one—turned around and shot him.

  Now there was the problem of Liz, Monty’s wife: She hadn’t seen the murder, but she could certainly link the men to the kidnapping. Fat Sam didn’t have the heart to kill her, so he called in a hard case, an out-of-towner from across the border in Alabama. Apparently the hired killer took one look at Liz—a beautiful woman, by all accounts, and obviously pregnant to boot—and announced, “No matter what kind of a sorry son of a bitch I am, I can’t kill no pregnant woman.” At that point, said Carroll, Fat Sam released Liz and ordered his cronies to dig two graves in remote areas outside Lawrenceburg: one for Monty, and one for . . . his Cadillac!

  I’ve heard some pretty outlandish stories over the years, but Earl Carroll’s took the cake. Apparently the FBI and TBI believed it, though, because it wasn’t too long after he told it that I found myself headed toward Nashville in search of Monty Hudson. Along with me were Steve, Pat, and an assortment of shovels, trowels, wire-mesh screens, and evidence bags.

  We met FBI Agent Knudsen, several TBI agents, and a state prosecutor for breakfast at a Shoney’s on the south side of Nashville, then piled into their cars for the trip to Fat Sam’s territory. The agents were visibly nervous, so the idea of including a professor’s station wagon in the convoy seemed like a risk to them. We headed south on I-65 for an hour or so, then got off at the exit for Pulaski, another small town near the Alabama border. There, in a Wal-Mart parking lot, we picked up yet another TBI agent: Bill Coleman, based in Lawrenceburg, who was the TBI’s point man, or “case agent,” investigating Fat Sam’s activities.

  After picking up Coleman in Pulaski (the birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan, by the way), we headed out into the country. In the course of about ten miles, we went from a four-lane U.S. highway to a two-lane blacktop to gravel to dirt. The dirt track, an old logging road, ended in a clearing that was being swiftly reclaimed by honeysuckle vines, blackberry bushes, and tree seedlings.

  The instant the cars jounced to a stop, the FBI and TBI agents jumped out, guns drawn in case we were ambushed by Fat Sam and his gang. For once I wished I’d taken TBI Director Carson up on his offer to issue me a TBI firearm when he presented me with my TBI consultant’s badge. I actually went out to the firing range and shot well enough to qualify once—at night, to boot—but then I decided that it was silly for me to carry a gun. For one thing, by the time I get called to a crime scene, I’m a lot more likely to be confronting dead victims than live criminals. For another, I’m generally in no position to defend myself anyway, crawling around with my nose to the ground and my rear end in the air.

  In this case, my rear guard looked pretty competent: half a dozen or so armed state and federal agents, swiftly fanning out around the clearing to establish a secure perimeter. The absence of sheriff’s deputies at a rural scene like this was unusual; the organized-crime task force suspected that some of the local lawmen were not to be trusted, I later learned from Bill Coleman. The TBI and FBI wanted us to arrive unannounced and, if possible, undetected. Me, I was just hoping we’d be able to depart unharmed.

  The FBI agent, Knudsen, had been here once before, led by Earl Carroll. According to Knudsen, Carroll walked to a spot about fifty feet to the left of the logging road, looked down, and started cussing. “Well, this is where he was,” he’d told Knudsen, pointing at a shallow trench in the ground where he said that he and another of Fat Sam’s cronies had buried the body.

  Knudsen led me to the spot in question. It was choked with weeds, briers, bushes, and poison-oak vines, but even so, I could tell at a glanc
e that the ground had been disturbed fairly recently. Atop the area of disturbed earth, a log and several tree branches had been laid side by side. Mixed with the reddish-brown clay was a white, powdery material, which Carroll had told Knudsen was lime, dumped over Monty Hudson’s body in a misguided effort to speed its decomposition. (That seems to be a common misconception among murderers. Lime does reduce the odor of decomposition, but it also reduces the rate of decomposition. As a result, a lime-covered body may be less likely to get sniffed out, but it’s more likely to linger.)

  As a TBI agent videotaped the proceedings, we set to work. First, Steve Symes photographed the scene from several viewpoints, starting from beside the cars, then gradually working his way closer. Then Pat Willey and I began clearing away the brush, vines, and grass. Even before we started to dig, we made a key find. Lying in a tangle of weeds and leaves and small rocks was a human ulna from a right forearm.

  Whoever had moved the body—Fat Sam or his henchmen—had done a pretty sloppy job of it, but that wasn’t surprising. Put yourself in the shoes of the body-mover and you’ll see why: You go out to dig up a body and hide it someplace else. This body, mind you, has been decomposing in a shallow grave for months now, so it’s going to be really smelly and mighty rotten. You hold your breath, grab an arm, and give a pull . . . and the arm comes off in your hands. At this point, unless you’re exceptionally conscientious and have an iron stomach, what you’re going to do is scoop up whatever big pieces you can grab between breaths of fresh air—a head, a torso, a couple legs, most of the arms—and then hightail it out of there as fast as you can. Fortunately for me, most bad guys sent to move a rotten body don’t know or don’t care that teeth can fall out after a few weeks, hands can drop off or get gnawed off, bullets can work free and get left behind.

  Since the grave appeared shallow, we excavated with trowels rather than shovels. After a couple of hours of careful digging, we had dug down to the undisturbed layer of earth. By then we’d found a jumble of other things besides the ulna: two thoracic (upper back) vertebrae. Fifteen teeth. Four fragments of an occipital, the shattered base of a skull. Five finger and toe bones. A fragment of a long bone, possibly from a tibia (shin). Human hair. Empty pupal casings left behind by maggots metamorphosing into adult flies. Tatters of cloth. A bullet.

  We bagged the teeth and bones to take back to the anthropology department for a thorough examination, and we gave the cloth and the bullet to the TBI for analysis. Clambering back into the government cars, we headed back to Nashville, then went our separate ways, safe and sound.

  Back in Knoxville, we began sifting through the material we had in order to determine the Big Four: sex, age, race, and stature. Unfortunately, we didn’t have a whole hell of a lot to go on. Determining the sex was complicated by the lack of a pubic bone, hipbone, or face. However, the ulna was massive, and that strongly suggested that the sex was male. So did the fragments from the occipital: the external occipital protuberance—the bump at the base of the skull—was quite pronounced and bore heavy muscle markings, characteristic of a man’s neck muscles.

  The age was more difficult to pin down, since all we had to judge by was the presence of osteoarthritic lipping. The ulna showed some early (“first stage”) lipping at the elbow joint; so did the finger and toe bones and the thoracic vertebrae. That meant he was probably somewhere between thirty and fifty years old—so maybe somewhere around forty—but it was impossible to be any more precise than that.

  Without a face or cranial vault, determining the victim’s race was tough too. The hair was dark in color and badly matted; from a simple visual examination, we couldn’t determine the victim’s race. We set aside a sample for more detailed study later.

  We were in better shape to determine his stature. We had one long bone, an ulna, and from its length we could extrapolate to estimate the victim’s height. There was one complication: the distal (lower) end of the ulna had been chewed off by a carnivore of some sort, so we first had to figure out how long the bone had originally been before it got gnawed down to about 29.5 centimeters. By comparing it with several complete ulnae, we determined that less than 5 percent of the bone was missing; that meant the complete bone would have measured about 31 centimeters. Plugging that number into a formula developed by anthropologist Mildred Trotter back in the 1950s gave us an estimated stature of around six feet one to six feet two.

  Our studies of decomposition and time since death were just getting under way at the Body Farm in 1981, so we had little research data to compare with what we observed in the remains we’d recovered from the field. Bits of dry tissue remained on some of the bones; the odor of decay was pronounced but not overpowering; and numerous empty pupal cases were interspersed with the bones. On the basis of my observations of other decayed bodies over the prior twenty-five years, I put the time since death at somewhere between one and three years.

  The teeth, I hoped, might be the key to telling us whether or not this was part of Monty Hudson’s body we’d found. Of the fifteen teeth we’d found, seven—nearly half—had fillings, some of them fairly large and distinctive. If we could lay our hands on Monty’s dental X rays—assuming they existed—we should be able to tell pretty quickly whether Earl Carroll’s story was true.

  By this time the FBI had told Liz Hudson that Monty was probably dead, and she agreed to help in any way she could. Her earlier silence had been motivated by the best of intentions: She didn’t know Monty was already dead by the time she was released in Nashville, and she desperately hoped that by keeping quiet, she was keeping him alive. A little naïve, maybe, but also deeply loyal and very brave. Now Liz told Agent Knudsen everything she remembered about the kidnapping and began suggesting where to ask for dental records.

  Monty had lived for quite a while in Tulsa, she said, so Knudsen began contacting dentists there. He struck pay dirt pretty soon: Dr. R. Jack Wadlin confirmed that Monty Hudson had been a patient of his, and he agreed to send dental charts and four bite-wing X rays of Monty’s teeth. The fillings and the pulp cavities, the internal structures, shown in the X rays from Dr. Wadlin matched the fillings and the X rays we took of the teeth we’d recovered from the shallow grave in rural Tennessee. It was indeed Monty Hudson—a little bit of him, anyway—that we’d excavated.

  In the months following our field trip to Fat Sam’s territory, he and his two partners stood trial for the kidnapping of Monty and Liz Hudson. Big Daddy Turner was also charged with Monty’s murder. All three men were convicted on both counts of kidnapping. By then, Passarrella was already facing a stiff sentence for counterfeiting; the kidnapping sentence tacked on another twenty years. I hear Fat Sam’s gotten religion while serving his time, as well as become an accomplished gardener or amateur botanist. I also hear his nickname still fits pretty well.

  Big Daddy Turner ended up taking the worst fall. Offered a sentence of just two years if he pled guilty to lesser offenses, he turned it down, choosing to take his chances with a jury trial. The gamble cost him dearly: he was sentenced to forty years for the kidnappings—twice as much as Fat Sam—plus life in prison for felony murder. After a series of appeals, eventually he pled guilty to two counts of aggravated kidnapping and to “accessory before the fact” to second-degree murder, but he still drew concurrent forty-five-year sentences for the three crimes. Turner had chosen what was behind Door No. 2, you might say, and what was behind it turned out to be a set of steel bars, a whole lot of years, and Turner himself. Meanwhile, just as he’d hoped, Earl Carroll—the stool pigeon—got off the lightest. I read in the newspaper he got a sentence of just two to ten years. My friends in law enforcement tell me he’s been back in at least once since, but is currently on the straight-and-narrow road, literally, as a truck driver.

  Monty’s Cadillac, it later emerged, was buried several miles away, in a field where Fat Sam subsequently planted a large marijuana crop. The TBI had raided the field and destroyed the plants; by amazing coinc
idence, TBI agent Bill Coleman had sat on a mound of earth as he watched the crop’s destruction—the very mound of earth bulldozed atop the Cadillac. After it was unearthed, the car was hauled to the TBI crime lab outside Nashville. Fat Sam needn’t have gone to the trouble of burying it: the lab technicians found no bloodstains or other incriminating evidence anywhere inside.

  Where the rest of Monty’s body ended up, I’ve never heard. The story goes that after Earl and B.R. had buried Monty in the shallow grave, Fat Sam went out to inspect their handiwork and found it wanting; apparently the body was almost entirely exposed. As the old saying goes, if you want something done right, do it yourself. Fat Sam wasn’t as thorough a grave-robber as he might have been, but he was certainly better at holding his tongue than Earl Carroll was.

  Thirty-one of the “silver” bars that set the killing in motion were eventually dredged up from a creek bed in rural Giles County, not many miles from the site of Monty’s initial grave. They were right where Earl Carroll said they’d been dumped. TBI agent Bill Coleman, now retired, has hung on to one of them as a souvenir. Liz Hudson, Monty’s beautiful widow, settled down in Nashville, went to work for one of the city’s many music-related companies, and settled down with a country-music songwriter. Somehow that seems fitting. Any day now I expect to turn on the radio and hear a woeful ballad about Fat Sam and Cadillac Joe. If it ever plays out that way, Monty might finally make that fortune after all—not quite the way he intended, but maybe on a far bigger scale: Through the alchemy of country music, those zinc bars of his could someday be turned into gold or even platinum. I suspect he’d like that.

  CHAPTER 11

  Grounded in Science

  I NEVER CEASE to be amazed by the whys and the ways human beings commit murders—and by the new techniques forensic scientists develop to solve these crimes. Some of those techniques, I’m proud to say, are being devised by people I’ve trained.