Death's Acre Page 18

  We bagged the remains and took them back to UT Medical Center. Our first stop was the hospital’s loading dock, where we used a portable X-ray machine to check for bullets, a blade, or any other foreign objects that might tell us something. But there was nothing metallic in the skeleton of this victim, 92-28, except for some dental fillings. Next stop was the Body Farm, where we set the corpse on the ground, opened the body bag, and began cleaning the remains.

  Art Bohanan had followed us back from Cahaba Lane. I knew what he wanted, but he wouldn’t have much to work with this time. Not only was there just one hand, there wasn’t even a whole lot of that one. The entire thumb was gone; so were half of the index and middle fingers. About all that remained were the ring finger, the little finger, and part of the palm. But if anybody could tease out an identifying print from a fragment of a rotting hand, it was Art.

  Because the remains were already virtually skeletonized, it took me less time than usual to clean the bones for a forensic examination. I could already tell, even out in the field, that this was a woman. The pelvis was textbook female: broader hips, a raised sacroiliac joint, a wide sciatic notch, and a greater subpubic angle—all part of the geometry designed to allow a baby’s head to pass through the pelvis during birth. The cranium, too, had classic female features. The upper edges of the eye orbits were sharp, the chin tapered to a point at the midline, and the cranial vault was smooth and lacking in heavy muscle markings.

  Race was easy to peg, too. On the ground beside the skull we’d found the hair mat where it had sloughed off: light brown and slightly wavy. That hair, plus the shape of the mouth—teeth that were oriented quite vertically, with no forward protruding or jutting—clearly marked her as white.

  To estimate age, we looked at several different bone structures: her upper jaw, her clavicles, and her pelvis. Like 92-27, 92-28 had pelvic bones that were dense and smooth, with a marked absence of grain; in other words, they were the bones of a mature but young woman, probably somewhere between her mid-twenties and mid-thirties. Her clavicles were fully mature as well: the medial, or sternal, ends of the bones had fused completely to the shafts, which meant she was at least twenty-five. Finally, her cranial sutures—including those in the hard palate, called the intermaxillary sutures—were not yet fully fused. Generally the intermaxillary sutures don’t fuse until the late thirties, so she probably wasn’t more than thirty-five. I could say with certainty, then, that she was somewhere between twenty-five and thirty-five, but it was hard to be more precise than that.

  You’d think, since the skeleton was missing only an arm, that we could determine her stature simply by laying the remains on a lab table and stretching a tape measure from head to heel. Unfortunately, it’s not quite that simple. After death, cartilage shrinks and decays, sometimes by as much as several inches. Besides, her skull wasn’t attached. Those two complications virtually guaranteed that the tape-measure method would be wildly inaccurate.

  Instead, we used the same method we’d have used if we’d found nothing but a single femur: we measured its length and extrapolated. This femur was longer than the previous one: 47.8 centimeters. That put 92-28 at somewhere between five feet six and a half inches and five feet nine and a half inches tall.

  Next, I sought any signs of trauma that might tell me how she died. Unfortunately, despite hours of sifting through the leaves and soil, we’d never managed to find her hyoid, so I couldn’t tell if she’d been strangled.

  Another bone, though, did reveal something striking—literally. The left scapula, or shoulder blade, had a large fracture on its lower end. Now, the scapula’s a pretty big, strong bone, and it’s well protected by large muscles. That fracture could only have been caused by a powerful blow—maybe a violent kick from a heavy boot, or possibly a hard hit by a baseball bat or a two-by-four.

  The pattern of breakage at the edges of the fracture indicated that the blow had come from behind, and there were no signs of healing, so the fracture was perimortem (occurring at or just before death). In other words, she was probably running for her life when he caught up with her. She was barefoot, remember, and he was surely wearing shoes. He knocked her facedown on the stream bank, then he set upon her and killed her.

  The greater the length of time since death, the harder it is to pinpoint, at least from the skeletal remains. Because the corpse was almost fully skeletonized, it was obvious that although 92-28 was the last to be found, she’d been the first to die. Taking into account the extreme decomposition of the body, the daily temperatures in September and October, and the condition of the soft tissue that had been submerged in the creek—whose decay rate I knew would therefore have been cut in half—I judged that 92-28 had been dead four to eight weeks before she was found, a pretty wide window of opportunity covering almost the entire month of September. The bugs and the soil analysis, I hoped, would tell the time of the crime with considerably more precision.

  My hopes proved well founded. Arpad’s analysis of the volatile fatty acids from the soil beneath the body put the TSD at thirty to thirty-seven days, meaning that she had been killed sometime during the week of September 22 to 29. Neal Haskell’s entomological analysis came to virtually the same conclusion: September 22 to 26. If indeed she’d died during late September—the interval where our three independent analyses, based on different techniques, overlapped—then the time between killings fit the classic, accelerating pattern for serial killers: Two to three weeks had elapsed between the first murder and the second; perhaps a few days between the second and the third; and, according to the autopsy findings of the medical examiner (ME), as little as a day or two between the third and the fourth.

  This victim’s teeth, like Darlene Smith’s, showed a pattern of careful attention during her youth, followed by neglect and decay in recent years—in other words, another mouth that had fallen on hard times. Half a dozen teeth bore fillings, but one tooth, a lower left incisor, had two unfilled cavities. One of these was small, but the other extended from the top surface of the tooth deep into the pulp cavity. This cavity had probably been filled at one time, but the filling had fallen out, making the tooth more vulnerable to decay than ever. The infection had spread to the jaw itself, causing a large abscess on the surface of the bone. When I first picked up the skull out at the crime scene, I’d noticed that this hole in the tooth had been stuffed with cotton. At the time I said to Art Bohanan, “She had a toothache when she died”; I thought the cotton indicated that a dentist was about to perform a root canal. As it turned out, the police later learned that she was self-medicating with a unique and desperate remedy for the pain: before inserting the cotton, she was soaking it with a paste of cocaine. Desperate times, desperate measures.

  Once more, just as he had with Darlene Smith, Art Bohanan took the hand he was dealt and hit the jackpot. What little skin remained on the hand was waterlogged, decomposing, and incredibly fragile. Art soaked it in alcohol to toughen it up and draw out the water. (If he’d had the opposite problem—if the skin had been dry and stiff—he’d have soaked it in Downy fabric softener; I’m sure the makers of Downy would be pleased to know that their product makes even mummified human skin soft and fragrant.) He’d only been able to salvage one print from the ravaged hand, and it wasn’t even a fingerprint. All he could get was a partial palm print, from the edge of the palm just below the pinky finger.

  It wasn’t much, but it was enough. That partial palm print matched a print on file at KPD: It belonged to Susan Stone, age thirty, height five feet nine inches. A prostitute and a cocaine addict, she’d started her downhill slide some seven years before, when she married a drug dealer. She’d worked some conventional jobs before becoming a hooker; in fact, just six months before she died, she was working as a clerk at a data-processing company. If she’d hung on to that job, she might have hung on to her life.

  CATCHING A SERIAL KILLER is a mammoth job, requiring teamwork every step of the way. Identifying the
murder victims, determining how and when they were killed, and following the trail of evidence to the Zoo Man’s door required the combined efforts of police investigators, a forensic pathologist, forensic anthropologists, a research scientist, and a forensic entomologist. This case is the best illustration I know of such teamwork. Bringing a serial killer to justice is an equally mammoth job, one that can drag on long past the point when someone is arrested and charged with the murders. This case is the best illustration I know of that, too. As my colleagues and I had labored to coax whatever evidence we could from the bodies of the murdered women, the police struggled to coax evidence from Tom Huskey.

  Two weeks after his arrest, their efforts finally began to pay off, and in spectacular fashion. In a series of interviews, Huskey confessed to murdering the four women. As a tape recorder captured the lurid details, he told detectives how he shoved one body (Patty Anderson’s) under a mattress and took her necklace and earrings—items police found in his room when they arrested him. Huskey described his final victim as a black woman who was tall, thin, and “ugly.” She got scared, he said, and started having a seizure of some sort, flopping around “all over” the ground. His report was consistent with the physical description and medical history of Patricia Johnson, the recent transplant from Chattanooga whose body I had pronounced too fresh for me to examine.

  It wasn’t long, though, before the tape-recorded sessions took a bizarre turn. When the taping began, Thomas Huskey was speaking softly, almost meekly. Soon, though, his voice changed dramatically: It grew loud, belligerent, profane—and it belonged to someone else, another personality it called “Kyle,” Huskey’s evil alter ego. “Kyle” bragged that it was he, not Thomas, who had committed the murders. Then came a third voice, cultured, with a British accent. This voice said to be “Phillip Daxx,” an Englishman born in South Africa, who said his role in the trio of personalities was to protect Tom from the evil Kyle. On one level, the case against Huskey appeared ironclad. But the bizarre claims of the various voices complicated the picture enormously. And Huskey had another powerful factor working on his behalf: the toughest defense lawyer I’ve ever seen. Herb Moncier was legendary in Tennessee for his aggressive tactics, his willingness to fight tooth and nail for his clients.

  Moncier wasted no time before going on the offensive. Filing motion after motion, he sought to have Huskey’s confession thrown out; he sought a new venue, arguing that all the newspaper and television coverage made it impossible for Huskey to secure a fair trial in Knoxville; he moved to have Huskey declared mentally incompetent to stand trial; he demanded that the judge recuse himself from the case; he demanded more time, more psychiatric evaluations, more money for the defense.

  Under the barrage of defense motions, the murder case ground to a halt. But I was too preoccupied to notice or care whether a jury sentenced Zoo Man Huskey to live or die. I was preoccupied with a far more urgent life-or-death struggle.

  For decades I had worked closely with mortality. It was almost as if I donned some charmed cloak of immunity every time I strode cheerfully into the valley of the shadow of death. We had an arrangement, the Reaper and I: I would follow in his footsteps, and he would leave me alone. Our relationship was close but strictly professional. Then one day it turned personal. Unfortunately, it wasn’t me he was after. He reached for the person who had walked by my side for forty years.

  IN THE FALL OF 1951, the Korean War battles of Bloody Ridge and Heartbreak Ridge loomed large in the minds of most young American men, including me. Fresh out of the University of Virginia, I was due to be drafted for military service. On November 15, I reported as ordered to the armed forces induction station in Martinsburg, West Virginia. I was one of about two hundred draftees processed that day. The sergeant handling our induction called out the first fifteen names on his list—it was alphabetical, so I was number two or three—and assigned us to the Marines. My heart sank. The Marines were taking the brunt of the U.S. casualties in Korea, so I thought I was lost.

  Just then a lieutenant intervened. The lieutenant noticed on my intake papers that I’d graduated from UVa and had taught math and science. Figuring that I might be reasonably bright (or possibly not seeing me as one of the Few Good Men the Marines were looking for), he told the sergeant to assign me to the U.S. Army instead, in the “scientific and professional” category. The sergeant objected; the lieutenant persisted. When the sergeant continued to argue—in front of a roomful of draftees—the lieutenant finally pulled rank, snapping, “That is an order, Sergeant.”

  I was saved. Instead of the Korean Peninsula, I was sent to the Army Medical Research Lab, called AMRL, at Fort Knox, Kentucky, to help study how noise and vibration—from trucks, tanks, and artillery—affected the soldiers using them. I would spend the rest of the war surrounded by dozens of doctors, research scientists, good-looking nurses, and deafening, powerful machines. Life was good. Then it got even better: I met Lieutenant Owen.

  An old friend of my mother’s was stationed at the Pentagon outside Washington, D.C.: Colonel Hilda Lovett, the senior dietician for the Army’s entire network of hospitals. Colonel Lovett had promised my mother that she’d look out for me, and she was true to her word. When she heard I was assigned to AMRL, she cast her eye about for a suitable girlfriend for me, and her eye happened to light on a bright young nutritionist in training at Walter Reed Army Hospital: First Lieutenant Mary Anna Owen. Lieutenant Owen was scheduled for assignment to Fort Lee, in Virginia; however, whether through coincidence or through meddling at the highest levels of the Pentagon, her orders changed and she went to Fort Knox. I received orders of my own: I was to call on this lieutenant and make her feel welcome.

  On the appointed afternoon in the fall of 1952, I arrived at her apartment. As always, I was compulsively early, but when I got there she wasn’t in; she was next door, chatting with another nutritionist. Hearing me knocking, she came running. When I heard footsteps and turned, what I saw wasn’t Lieutenant Owen double-timing in an Army uniform; what I saw was a girl named Ann, glowing in a red dress. The instant I saw her running toward me in that red dress, I thought, That’s the girl I’m going to marry.

  And I was right. Less than a year later we got married in my hometown in Virginia, in the presence of my mother, my stepfather, a horde of friends and relatives, and the person who had made the match, Colonel Hilda Lovett.

  Ann and I spent the next forty years building a life together. Between the two of us, we earned four graduate degrees and produced three healthy sons. Life wasn’t always easy; between our first child, Charlie, and our second, Billy, Ann suffered five miscarriages. But on the whole, we were blessed, busy, and happy.

  We moved from Fort Knox to Lexington to Philadelphia to Nebraska to Kansas to Tennessee. We spent a dozen summers in South Dakota, where I spent my days digging dead Arikara Indians out of the ground and Ann spent hers keeping live Sioux out of the ground, helping the tribe fight diabetes through better nutrition. Before we knew it our sons were grown, and in August of 1990 our first grandchild arrived. A new chapter in our lives was beginning. But it didn’t end the way we expected or wanted. One year later, Ann got sick.

  It began with abdominal pain—intermittent at first, then constant. Ann went to our family doctor, who took a stomach X ray. The radiologist noticed what looked like an obstruction at the very edge of the film, in the lower GI tract, so Ann went to a hospital, drank that awful barium milkshake, and had a fluoroscopic exam. The pathologist told us it was cancer, and it was pretty advanced: well into Stage Three already, which meant it was probably spreading elsewhere in her body.

  Ann wanted to fight it. At sixty, she was still a relatively young woman, and she was looking forward to lots more grandchildren, so she embarked on a course of aggressive chemotherapy. The chemo took a heavy toll on her, but she endured the treatment until it was too late. In March of 1993, eighteen brutal months after that first visit to the doctor, Ann died.
/>
  For decades I’d dealt with death on a daily basis, but I’d always managed to float untouched by the tragedy surrounding me. I was a scientist; to me, decaying bodies and broken bones—my stock and trade—were forensic cases, scientific puzzles, intellectual challenges—nothing more. That’s not to say my heart was hard, that it didn’t go out to the people whose loved ones had died; it did, especially to the parents of murdered children. But those were passing waves of sympathy. Now that death had finally hit home, I was drowning in an ocean of grief.

  THE ZOO MAN CASE dragged on, throughout Ann’s illness and beyond, with no murder trial anywhere in sight. Meanwhile other women had come forward to say that Huskey had assaulted them. In late 1995 and 1996, Huskey stood trial for a series of brutal rapes in 1991 and 1992.

  Moncier lost that case, one of his few high-profile losses I can recall. Huskey was found guilty on various counts of rape, robbery, and kidnapping and was sentenced to sixty-six years in prison for three rapes and a robbery. But the murder case remained stalled by Moncier’s barrage of motions and maneuvers. Finally, in January of 1999—more than six years after the four women were killed in the woods off Cahaba Lane—jury selection began for Huskey’s murder trial. Moncier hadn’t managed to get the trial moved; however, he did prevail on the court to import jurors from out of town, in hopes they would be less likely to have been swayed by Knoxville’s extensive news coverage of the case.

  An initial pool of 340 potential jurors was called, then narrowed down to 60. Some prospective jurors were desperate to be released from jury duty; others were equally eager to serve. District Attorney Randy Nichols had indicated he would seek the death penalty, so jurors who said they were unequivocally opposed to the death penalty were excused. After a couple weeks of interviews in Nashville by the prosecution and the defense, twelve jurors and four alternates were told to pack their bags, then bused to Knoxville. For the next two weeks they would spend their days in the courtroom and their nights in an undisclosed hotel.