Death's Acre Read online

  Not long after the semester started, Dr. Krogman fell down the stairs in his house and shattered his left leg. Normally he commuted to campus by city bus, but with a hip-length cast, getting to the bus stop and clambering aboard would be nearly impossible. Since Krogman lived west of the city, too, I offered to drive him to and from work while he mended. I thought we’d be carpooling for a couple of months. As it turned out, we rode together for the next two and a half years. It didn’t take him nearly that long to heal, but by the time his cast came off, I had found a new mentor, and he had acquired a new disciple.

  Surprisingly, I took only one course from Krogman at Penn, but all those hours together in the car became my own personal tutorial with the world’s best bone detective. It was like an automobile-age version of the Socratic dialogs, but unlike Plato, I had the great teacher all to myself.

  Krogman would assign me readings, and we’d discuss them as we drove back and forth. He had a fantastic memory for authors, dates, and publication titles, as well as every detail within the articles themselves. His ability to integrate knowledge from many sources, and to apply it to solve forensic problems, was phenomenal.

  Krogman didn’t confine the tutorials to the car, either. Whenever he was given a forensic identification case—a set of bones from a puzzled county medical examiner or FBI agent—Krogman would call me into his lab. He would examine the bones first and formulate his analysis, but he would say absolutely nothing. Then he would ask me to look at the bones and draw my own conclusions. Then, as we compared findings, he demanded that I support and document my statements by citing recent scientific articles on the subject. Krogman was always surprised when I found something he’d overlooked. It didn’t happen often, but when it did, I glowed with pride.

  Krogman’s teaching method was remarkably effective. Not only did it help me retain the material, it also prepared me to face courtroom questioning by hostile lawyers—something I’ve had to do many times in the subsequent years, though I couldn’t have foreseen it then. At the time, all I knew was that Krogman was guiding me, case by case and bone by bone, down a marvelous path.

  All too soon the path forked. I left Penn to take a nine-month teaching post at the University of Nebraska in January of 1960, followed by eleven years at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. But my association with Krogman was far from over. We always stayed in close touch, personally and professionally. And when I trotted up the steps of the red brick headquarters of the New Jersey State Police in June of 1982, I found myself walking in Wilton Krogman’s footsteps once again.

  Krogman had been asked by the New Jersey attorney general to examine the bones five years earlier, in 1977. Because of the lingering questions surrounding the Lindbergh case, the state was considering reopening the investigation. On the basis of Krogman’s findings, they chose not to. Now I was revisiting that same issue on behalf of the convicted killer’s widow.

  By now I had attained a measure of professional standing of my own: I was the head of a thriving university anthropology department at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, as well as the creator of what would come to be called “the Body Farm,” the world’s only forensic facility devoted to research on human decomposition. I had been named a fellow of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences and was serving as president of the organization’s physical anthropology section. I had examined thousands of skeletons and assisted with more than a hundred forensic cases. And yet, despite all that, I felt nervous and small: a pygmy walking in the footsteps of a giant. I would be only the second anthropologist ever given permission to examine the famous Lindbergh bones.

  I was ushered into a basement room of the state police building. A few minutes later a clerk brought me a cardboard evidence box. Inside were five glass vials. One of the vials had cracked at some point; it was held together with clear tape. Originally these vials had kept expensive cigars from going stale. Now, sealed with cork stoppers, they guarded a dozen tiny bones against loss or breakage—bones that represented both the premature death of innocence and the final hope of an aging widow.

  Two of the bones were clearly animal in origin: a two-inch piece of rib from a good-size bird, perhaps a grouse or quail, and a small vertebral arch, probably from the same bird. Both of these bore tooth marks on them—possibly from the same dog or dogs who had gnawed off the hands of the dead child hidden in the forest.

  Of the ten human bones, the largest of them—the calcaneus, or heel, of the left foot—was about an inch and a quarter in diameter; to the untrained eye, it could have passed for a piece of gravel. Four of the bones were from the left foot; two were from the left hand; and four were from the right hand. Despite the passage of half a century, decayed tissue, dirt, and even a few hairs still clung to several.

  Intact and undamaged, the bones bore no signs of trauma, no indication of cause of death. The only skeletal evidence that had pointed to that—the small fractured skull—had been cremated within hours after Charles Lindbergh identified the body as his son’s. What I held in my hands—these ten small bits of hands and a foot—had been sifted from ten baskets of leaves and twigs raked up from the forest floor in the days after the body’s discovery. The police had hoped to find answers—a murder weapon, a set of fingerprints, something that might point to who had stolen the child and what had gone wrong—but this handful of small bones shed precious little light.

  Fifty years later they still illuminated little. In childhood, skeletons are androgynous: There’s no way to determine the sex of a skeleton; all you can do is measure and compare the bones you’re examining with the size and development of other, known specimens. To that end, I’d brought along the two definitive reference books on this subject, Radiographic Atlas of Skeletal Development of the Foot and Ankle and a companion volume, Radiographic Atlas of Skeletal Development of the Hand and Wrist. Both represented careful studies based on X rays of hundreds of children’s hands and feet. According to the measurements in those studies, the hand and foot bones from the glass vials were slightly larger than those of an eighteen-month-old male and slightly smaller than those of a twenty-four-month-old male. It took less than an hour for me to reach the same conclusion that my mentor, Dr. Krogman, had reached five years before me: There was nothing in the bones themselves to refute the notion that these were all that remained of a Caucasoid male child, aged twenty months. A twenty-month-old Caucasoid male child named Charles Lindbergh Jr.: the Eaglet.

  As I slipped the bones back into their glass vials and pressed the cork stoppers tight, I was struck by how little was left—how little to mark the loss of that glittering promise, the bright future, that Charles Lindbergh Jr. could have had; the relationship he might have forged with his famous father; the pride the elder might have felt as his son grew and perhaps spread his own wings, piloting airplanes or jets or even spacecraft.

  By 1982, I had three healthy sons of my own, ages twenty-six, twenty, and eighteen. I could scarcely imagine what it must have cost Charles Lindbergh in his soul to lose a young son to a violent death. But I did know what it cost to lose a different loved one to a violent, untimely, and senseless death, and I knew how fast such a thing could happen: A makeshift ladder in New Jersey breaks, and suddenly a kidnapping becomes a murder. Or a bright young lawyer’s index finger curls around a trigger, and a bullet leaves a swift smear of carnage across a different set of lives. Across my life.

  It happened in March of 1932—by utter but strange coincidence, the very same month Bruno Hauptmann was nailing together a crude ladder that bore a fatal flaw. I was three and a half years old, twice the age of the Lindbergh baby. My father, Marvin, was an up-and-coming young attorney in the town of Staunton, Virginia. He was bright and good-looking; he was married to his childhood sweetheart, Jennie (twenty years earlier, they’d been crowned King and Queen of the Maypole); and he looked to have a promising future in politics. He’d already made one run for the office of commonwealth’s a
ttorney; he didn’t win, but at age thirty he still had plenty of chances—or so everyone thought.

  We lived in a two-story white house on Lee Street, a couple of miles from the center of town, beside an apple orchard. My recollections of that time are few and fuzzy, but one memory of my father—of my father and me—remains crystal-clear: It was a Sunday morning, and he and I drove into town in our big black Dodge to buy a newspaper. (He’d come of age during the heyday of the Model T, but he’d also heard his father say, countless times, that Fords were made of tin, “and damned sorry tin at that.”)

  The Dodge stopped at a street corner where a man stood beside a stack of papers. Daddy reached across me, rolled down the window, then handed me a dime and asked if I would pay the man. For some reason—fear? shyness?—I shook my head no and pressed my body against my father’s. He smiled good-naturedly, took the coin back, and gave it to the vendor.

  I have photographs of this handsome young lawyer I’m named after. In some of them he holds me on his lap. In others he stands beside my mother. In most of them he is smiling. We were happy—he was happy—in those days, to the best of my memory.

  But the best of my memory isn’t nearly good enough, because it doesn’t begin to account for what came next. One Wednesday afternoon, not long after our Sunday newspaper excursion, my father closed the door of his law office and shot himself. It was early spring; the apple trees in the orchard would have been about to bloom; U.S. farm prices were finally on the rise; and my father put a bullet through his head.

  Decades later, in the one brief conversation we ever had about my father’s suicide, my mother intimated that he’d been asked to invest money for some of his law clients and had lost it when the stock market crashed. Perhaps he was unable to face the people whose money he’d lost, or perhaps he was unable to face himself; who can say? Looking back on it today, when I am forty years older than he was when he killed himself, I can’t help thinking, You could have gotten past it. If you’d just hung on a little longer, things would have worked out all right in the end. But for whatever reason, he couldn’t see or feel a way, any way, to hang on. And so he let go.

  The instant he pulled the trigger, my father slipped from my grasp—slipped away from all of us—and he remains out of reach to this day. I still miss him. I imagine the things he and I would have done together as I grew up. I long for fatherly and lawyerly advice when I’m heading into a murder trial to face hostile questioning on the witness stand. I’m in my seventies, but I still cry like a child when I recall how I shrank from paying that corner newspaper vendor. If only I had paid the man! Perhaps that would have pleased my father; perhaps he would have smiled at the bravery of his little man, felt his heart lighten a bit, felt his own courage ratchet upward one small, crucial notch.

  Ironic, isn’t it? Touched by death at such a tender age, you’d think I’d have had my fill of it early on and spent the rest of my life carefully steering clear. And yet, I deal daily with death. I have spent decades actively seeking it out; I immerse myself in it.

  Perhaps I’m trying to prove my bravery even now, across the gulf of years and mortality that separates us. Or perhaps when I grasp the bones of the dead, I’m somehow trying to grasp him, the one dead man who remains forever elusive.

  Sitting in the basement of the New Jersey State Police headquarters on that day back in 1982, I found nothing in those five cigar vials, nothing in those ten small bones, that could tell me anything about the Lindbergh baby I hadn’t already known. Nothing to refute the evidence presented at Bruno Hauptmann’s murder trial. Nothing to vindicate that half-century of hope in the heart of his widow.

  Anna Hauptmann, too—like the Lindberghs, and like me—had lost someone dear. Cherished husband but convicted killer, he would continue to elude her until that day when she herself slipped from those around her, finally catching up to the man she’d lived with and loved.

  Perhaps on that day she finally, fully grasped him. Perhaps one day soon I’ll elude those who live with and love and should know me, and in that moment I’ll find my long-lost father.

  In the meantime, I search for others among the dead. From ancient Indians to modern murder victims, I do reach others. Thousands and thousands of others.

  CHAPTER 2

  Dead Indians and Dam Engineers

  THE SKY ABOVE the South Dakota plains was a deep blue, darkening almost to purple at the top. To the west, towering cumulus clouds dropped ragged gray curtains of rain, which evaporated long before reaching the ground. From two miles above the ground, I could scan a huge expanse of rolling prairie out the airplane window. The grass and brush were already mostly brown; the Missouri River was even browner, meandering muddily into the landscape from the northwest and meandering out, even more muddily, to the southeast. The only patches of green, I had heard, were small circles of lush grass dotting the hills along the riverbank somewhere to the north of us, marking the site of an ancient Arikara village. It was the summer of 1957, a vast new horizon was opening before me, and my excitement was building.

  Then, as the engines throttled back and the Frontier Airlines DC-3 began lurching downward through the turbulence, a new sensation began building: motion sickness, my lifelong Achilles’ heel. Mercifully, my flight touched down before my breakfast came up.

  We landed in Pierre late in the morning. The handful of passengers ducked through the oval doorway in the fuselage, clambered down the stairs, and headed into the whitewashed one-room terminal. I looked around for Bob Stephenson, the Smithsonian archaeologist who had promised to pick me up. He was nowhere to be seen. Soon the other passengers were gone, and I found myself in an empty waiting room far from home.

  The airport control tower resembled a tree house on stilts. After a while I climbed up to ask the controller if he knew the archaeologists who were working outside town, explaining that Dr. Stephenson had promised to pick me up and take me out to the site. “Oh, he’s probably stuck in the mud somewhere,” the controller said. “We had a lot of rain last night, and things get pretty slick around here when it’s wet.” Late that afternoon Bob showed up, apologetic and covered with mud. Sure enough, he’d been stuck for three hours. Little did I know it at the time, but I was about to get stuck here—of my own free will—for the next fourteen summers.

  I had been brought to South Dakota by the combined might of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the Smithsonian Institution, and the earth’s last ice age (which ended, I might add, somewhat before my time). Twenty thousand years ago a thick sheet of glacial ice swept relentlessly southward across America’s Great Plains. Shoving mountains of earth and rock before it, grinding stone into powdery alluvial soil, it reshaped millions of square miles of the planet’s surface.

  Now an equally relentless army of engineers, archaeologists, and anthropologists had descended on the prairie to make a few changes of their own. The engineers were starting to flood it; the rest of us were frantically excavating it, digging and sifting for buried treasure—archaeological treasure—in a desperate race against the rising waters of the newly dammed Missouri River.

  The Missouri may be the most underrated river in the world. Here in America, it plays second fiddle to the Mississippi, and that’s a gross injustice, in my opinion. Don’t get me wrong: The Mississippi is a great river. Flowing 2,350 miles from Minnesota’s Lake Itasca to the Louisiana delta, the Mississippi is a mighty waterway coursing through the very heart of America.

  It’s the name of the thing that seems unjust. Consider a drop of Minnesota rainwater that plops into the Mississippi’s headwaters at Lake Itasca: From the lake’s rocky outlet—small enough to wade across—that drop flows 2,350 miles before it enters the salty shallows of the Gulf of Mexico. By contrast, a Montana raindrop, falling into a spring on the eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains, journeys 2,300 miles in the Missouri River just to reach the great confluence with the Mississippi at St. Louis; from there, it continues an
other 1,400 miles before it reaches the Gulf—a total distance of 3,740 miles. Only the Nile and the Amazon flow farther. So, on the basis of length, at least, the Missouri should be considered the main river and the Mississippi the tributary.

  The Missouri is amazing in another respect as well. To the best of my knowledge, it’s the largest river that has ever changed its mind, or its destination, on a continental scale. Before the last ice age the Missouri actually flowed northeast into Canada, emptying into the icy waters of Hudson Bay. Then, when the glaciers swept down like mighty earthmovers to reshape the land, the Missouri saw an opening and veered southward, running for the warm waters off Mexico and ending up some 2,000 miles from its original outlet.

  Over the ages, the Missouri has witnessed dramatic changes in the life-forms inhabiting its vast watershed. A hundred million years or so ago, dinosaurs ranged across Montana and the Dakotas. They were succeeded by a host of warm-blooded creatures, including cheetahs, camels, woolly mammoths, and huge saber-toothed cats. We humans are relative newcomers: The first inhabitants of the Great Plains might have crossed a land bridge from Asia some 12,000 years ago.

  For millennia these aboriginal Americans led a nomadic existence. Then, about 2,000 years ago, most of them began raising food crops and putting down roots. They built villages of earth lodges: round structures dug into the ground, topped with a domelike wood framework, then covered with earth and sod to insulate against the prairie’s scorching summers and frigid winters. Today we’d call that “earth-sheltered housing.” The Plains Indians just called it “home.”