Death's Acre Page 20

  Parts unknown, indeed. That wasn’t where she ended up; that was what she ended up—or would have, if Kelleher hadn’t been such a dogged investigator. The case was one of the strangest I’d ever encountered, and one of the most bizarre aspects was this: to all appearances, Jim Anderson was quite willing to murder and dismember his wife . . . but, by golly, he wasn’t about to violate a municipal ordinance against unpermitted open burning! So he’d obtained the requisite permit authorizing him to burn trash on June 12, and we know for a fact that he had a fire in the yard on the appointed day, because Alexandria’s fire chief drove past to make sure the blaze was under control.

  Just imagine the scene: a murderous husband, burning his wife’s body in the front yard, smiling and waving to the fire chief as he drives past. If a screenwriter pitched that story to a Hollywood film studio, he’d probably be laughed right off the lot. To Corporal Kelleher, though, and the prosecutor, Assistant Attorney General Janice Rundles, this was no laughing matter. Would a New Hampshire jury believe the bizarre scenario?

  On the flight back to Knoxville, I racked my brain for any additional evidence that might be gleaned from the mutilated bones. I had already told Kelleher and Rundles everything I could. If anyone could tease additional clues from the severed, charred fragments, it would be Steve Symes, a former student and now a highly respected colleague. After I was back in Knoxville, I called Steve to propose a most unorthodox threesome: Could he slip away for a weekend in a secluded cabin with me and Sheilah Anderson? He could, he said. We agreed to rendezvous at Montgomery Bell State Park.

  Montgomery Bell lies halfway between my office in Knoxville and Steve’s morgue in Memphis, four hundred miles away. Rolling hills, covered with oaks and hickories, wrap around a lovely little lake, apparently brimming with fish (15-Inch Size Limit on Bass, cautions a sign at the water’s edge). A six-story lodge of stone stood on a peninsula; half a dozen cabins perched halfway up a hillside, and ours was spectacular. The windows shed plenty of light on the dining table, where we laid out Sheilah Anderson’s burned and fragmented bones. Murder investigation with a view.

  Sheilah’s dismemberment was one of the most complex and puzzling that Steve and I had ever seen. Judging by the fractures in the bones of the arms and legs, her limbs appeared to have been removed by blunt-force trauma. Her pelvis, ribs, and spine, however, seemed to have been cut apart with a wickedly sharp implement of some type.

  Steve was immediately struck, as I had been, by the differential burning. The bones recovered from the front yard in 1993 were burned far more severely than either those recovered from the backyard shortly afterward or the skull and other bones found by the road crew in 1994. Steve suggested that the burning had occurred in two stages: Her entire body was put on the fire that the fire chief saw in June of 1993, he hypothesized. When that fire didn’t do the job, the skull and other parts were removed and discarded—some in the backyard, some by the roadside—and the remaining bones were burned again in the front yard, this time more thoroughly.

  Burning had destroyed the tool marks on the first set of bones; however, the unburned and slightly burned portions of the skeleton gave Steve some undamaged marks to study. Unlike many dismemberment cases, these bones showed virtually no traces of false starts, hesitation marks, or interrupted cuts. The tool marks indicated that the bones had been sliced or shaved decisively, sharply, and forcefully. The cuts were made not by a sawing motion but by a chopping motion, and they were made with enough force to cut through some of the bones with a single blow. The blade was sharp enough to shave off thin sections of bone in spots—for example, a slice from the body of one of the vertebrae—yet heavy enough to cut through such large structures as the hipbones and the femora.

  Steve and I were both puzzled by the case. The marks on the cut faces of the bones were odd too. They indicated a blade that was curved; however, that in itself wasn’t the odd part: many common garden tools have curved blades. Whatever this implement was, though, it had a tighter curve to the edge than any ax or shovel we’d ever seen. If the curve or arc of the edge were extended to form a complete circle, that circle would have measured less than three inches in diameter. Considering the great force required to shear the bones, we wondered if the tool might have been a posthole digger chopping downward with a man’s full weight behind it—but the edges of a postholer weren’t that curved, either.

  We spent all Saturday morning and half the afternoon studying and restudying the cut marks, considering and rejecting different tools as the implement of dismemberment. Then, in late afternoon, there was a knock at the cabin door. When I opened it, I found myself face-to-face with a park ranger. Uh-oh, I thought, this means trouble. Using my body as a screen, I tried to block the ranger’s view of the bones spread all over the dining-room table.

  The ranger’s visit did mean trouble, though not because we were using the cabin as a forensic laboratory. I’d gotten a phone call from Knoxville, said the ranger, and it sounded urgent. Leaving Steve with the bones, I hurried up to the lodge. The call was from Dot Weaver, a friend who was caring for my ninety-five-year-old mother; when I returned the call, she told me that Mom had just suffered a series of small strokes and had been taken to the hospital.

  I told Steve we needed to cut our work short. There wasn’t that much more he could tell me anyway, he said. We took one last look at Sheilah Anderson’s ravaged remains, hoping that Janice Rundles, the New Hampshire prosecutor, wouldn’t have to depend solely on our meager findings to cinch the case against Jim Anderson. Luckily, she didn’t: just before the case came to trial, Anderson—once one of New York City’s Finest—pleaded guilty to murdering his wife. Shortly after he was imprisoned, he took a guard hostage, held him for several hours, and beat him severely. Maybe someday he’ll say what it was he used to chop up his wife’s body.

  My weekend rendezvous with Steve hadn’t been quite as satisfying as I’d hoped it would be, but that’s the way some cases go: All you can do is look at the evidence and listen to the bones. The bones don’t always tell you the whole story, but when they do, the tale can be both horrifying and hypnotizing.

  Steve found that out firsthand from a victim named Leslie Mahaffey. . . .

  I FIRST MET STEVE a quarter-century ago, out in the boonies of western South Dakota. He was a scrawny twenty-four-year-old with a B.A. in anthropology; after graduation he’d gotten a job cataloging bones for Bob Alex, South Dakota’s state archaeologist. Steve’s main task was to sort and catalog thousands of Sioux and Arikara Indian bones from the W. H. Over Collection, assembled by a self-taught South Dakota archaeologist during the late 1800s and early 1900s.

  In 1978, in one of the first large-scale repatriations of Native American remains, Bob Alex persuaded the government of South Dakota to return the bones in the Over Collection to the Arikara and Sioux tribes for reburial. Before giving the bones back, though, he offered to let me study them a while.

  The collection was housed in a former military hospital northwest of Rapid City. Late in the spring of 1978, I arrived from Knoxville in a Ford station wagon, towing a U-Haul trailer that would carry the collection back to Tennessee. Steve had been under the gun to complete his inventory and box up the bones before I got there. On his desk I saw an open and well-thumbed copy of my guidebook to bones, Human Osteology: A Laboratory and Field Manual. (Since it came out in 1971, the book has gone through twenty-three printings and sold somewhere around seventy-five thousand copies, making it something of a blockbuster among textbooks, I’m proud to say.)

  We howdied and shook hands. “I see you’re using my book,” I said.

  “Well, I tried some others,” he said, “but this is the only one that’s actually helpful in identifying some of the more difficult bones.”

  Clearly this was an exceptionally bright young man. Quite possibly a genius.

  Within ten minutes of meeting Steve, I realized—and not just because I was
flattered by his comment—that he had the makings of an exceptional anthropologist. He was knowledgeable and curious, but clearly mature, disciplined, and steady, too—a combination far less common in would-be professors than you might think. Unlike a lot of today’s students, he hadn’t swallowed some romanticized image of anthropology from TV shows or Hollywood movies. He knew it took a lot of hard work, and he seemed more than willing to get dirt under his fingernails. By the time we finished loading up the U-Haul, I’d convinced Steve that he should go to graduate school, and I’d made a pretty strong case for Tennessee as the place to do it. There was one minor problem with that plan, though. Our graduate slots for the coming fall were already filled.

  Four months later, Steve showed up in Knoxville anyhow, the academic equivalent of a football walk-on, hoping to snag a place on the starting team a week before the opening game. I shoehorned him into classes in archaeology and osteology, hoping that a slot in the forensics program would open up soon—and that Steve would still be interested by then.

  It did, and he was. He quickly absorbed the rest of my osteology handbook, thereby earning a place on our forensic response teams. The walk-on had done it: He’d made the anthropological equivalent of varsity first string. In the field, Steve showed a quick grasp of crime scene investigation. Equally important, he was a superb photographer. When it comes to crime scene photos, more is always better, and great is always best. Steve’s crime scene photographs were—still are—the best I’ve ever seen.

  After eight long years of graduate work and crime scene assistance, Steve passed his doctoral examinations, then took a job as the staff forensic anthropologist for the medical examiner in Nashville. Besides working full-time for the ME, Steve planned to research and write his Ph.D. dissertation there in Nashville. His topic: estimating age by examining the sternal end of the clavicle. (“The collarbone’s connected to the . . . breastbone. . . .”)

  Then came another one of those pivotal points in Steve Symes’s life. During the course of a few violent weeks in Nashville, Steve was handed three dismemberment cases. The detective working one of the cases pointed to a notch in a bone and asked Steve to tell him about it. Happy to have a chance to display his expertise, Steve drew himself up and said, in his most professorial voice, “Why, that’s a saw mark in an arm bone.”

  The cop stared at Steve in disgust. “I know it’s a saw mark in an arm bone,” he snorted. “You’re the bone doc; what kind of saw mark?”

  Steve didn’t know, but after he finished blushing, he decided to find out—not just about that particular saw, but about all types of saws.

  At this point I can’t help but add that I’d been trying for years, unsuccessfully, to interest a graduate student in researching saw marks. We’d had a sensational dismemberment case in Knoxville in the mid- 1980s. A love triangle turned hateful, and the woman and one of her men ended up killing her other man, then cutting him up and scattering the pieces all over town. That case had gotten me to thinking about how little we knew about what evidence might be left behind by a saw as it cut up a body. But nobody seemed inclined to pursue the topic, including Steve, until that bloody Nashville summer when he found himself butting up against the problem not once but three times.

  Police departments and courts all over the world have long considered ballistics evidence to be scientifically credible. Just like people, guns leave fingerprints: A pistol’s firing pin makes a consistent impression in every cartridge it strikes; the rifling in the barrel leaves characteristic grooves on each slug that spirals toward a victim; the ejector mechanism scratches or dents every spent shell case the same way as it kicks it out of the breech.

  If guns leave telltale marks, why wouldn’t saws? Steve and I felt sure they would. At the time, though, we seemed to be in the minority. Conventional wisdom held that every stroke, every pass of a saw erased the marks left by the previous stroke; in other words, saws covered their own tracks. Steve made up his mind to prove that they didn’t—that there was a world more detail to be seen, a world more evidence to be gathered.

  Over the next two years Steve bought or borrowed every kind of saw he could lay his hands on: ripsaws, crosscut saws, hacksaws, jigsaws, coping saws, circular saws, chop saws, Japanese pull saws, and more. He spent several weekends with Dr. Cleland Blake, an East Tennessee medical examiner who was also a master woodworker—and studied hundreds of saw blades in Cleland’s collection, ranging from jewelers’ trim saws to lumberjack-grade chain saws.

  Clamping donated arm bones and leg bones in his bench vise, Steve made thousands of experimental cuts and studied them through microscopes. At first, he saw little that seemed meaningful. Eventually, though, he found the key. Peering through a surgeon’s operating microscope and angling light across the cut marks, he saw a world of three-dimensional detail open before his eyes: immense canyons and jagged cliff faces carved in bone. He took countless micrographs, plaster impressions, and measurements, cataloging push strokes, pull strokes, rotary cuts, false starts, skips, hesitations, and other telltale marks left by saws as they ripped through the bones.

  I’ll never forget the first time Steve hauled me into a lab, led me to a stereo microscope, and gave me a stroke-by-stroke replay of the saw marks in a femur he had clamped in a vise and sawed in half. Etched forever in a cross section of bone—as they are now in my mind’s eye as well—were the zigzag bite marks left by individual teeth sliding back and forth, chewing their way relentlessly downward through the bone in a series of shallow, Z-shaped tracks. It was a moment that made me proud and humble at the same time: The student—my student—had surpassed the teacher, in at least this one macabre specialty.

  Eventually, Steve was able to look at a bone fragment from a murder and see far more than “a saw mark in an arm bone”; eventually he was able to discern, for instance, the tracks of a ten-teeth-per-inch crosscut saw, with a kerf (cut) width of 0.08 inch, created by alternating offset teeth, cutting on a push stroke—a stroke interrupted, he might observe, by three skips, two false starts, and one temporary halt. A husband cutting up his wife’s body wouldn’t mean to leave such telltale tracks behind, any more than a hired shooter means to leave ballistic evidence on his bullets. It’s simply the unavoidable consequence.

  Steve never got around to writing that serviceable, boring dissertation on the sternal end of the clavicle; instead he wrote Morphology of Saw Marks in Human Bone: Identification of Class Characteristics— despite the dry-sounding title, a unique and pioneering contribution to forensic anthropology and homicide investigation.

  Not long after he began his research on saw marks, Steve moved westward again, this time to Memphis. Word of his gruesome specialty spread; gradually, packages of dismembered body parts began arriving in Memphis from other cities and states and countries, shipped to Steve by police or prosecutors desperate to narrow the search for a killer or a murder weapon. His most sensational case began on April 6, 1992, when Mike Kershaw, a Canadian police constable, called to ask for Steve’s help with a gruesome killing that had occurred the previous June in Saint Catherines, a midsize city located across the tip of Lake Ontario from Toronto.

  Leslie Mahaffey, a fourteen-year-old Saint Catherines girl, had stayed out late one night with friends, missing her 11:00 P.M. curfew by several hours. Sometime around 2:00 A.M., as she walked alone from a phone booth toward her house, she was abducted. Two weeks later, fishermen discovered her body. It had been cut into ten pieces, encased in blocks of concrete totaling 675 pounds, then dumped into two nearby rivers. The blocks were exposed when the water level dropped by several feet. Leslie’s brutal murder had terrified the public and baffled the police; Constable Kershaw hoped Steve might be able to shed light—any light, no matter how faint—on the killing or the killer.

  On April 30, Kershaw came to Memphis, bringing Leslie Mahaffey’s butchered bones: sections from both femurs, both upper arms, two lower arm bones, and two cervical vertebrae. The
specimens had been immersed in formalin to preserve them. Despite the passage of nearly a year, the bones still had soft tissue on them.

  The very day Kershaw arrived in Memphis, another Saint Catherines girl, Kristen French, was found murdered; it appeared that she’d been raped and sexually tortured before she was killed. Canadian police knew that if they didn’t catch the killer soon, more girls were likely to die horrible deaths.

  Steve began by photographing each bone, then he cooked them in hot water for several hours and gently teased away the soft tissue. Right away he could tell that all the cuts were from the same type of saw. The cuts were very uniform; the cut surfaces were smooth, almost as if they had been polished, and there was very little breaking or chipping at the places where the saw had entered and exited each bone.

  There were, however, numerous false starts, places where the saw began cutting into the bone, but—maybe because the position or angle was awkward, maybe because the bloody saw slipped from the killer’s grasp—the blade had jumped out of the groove, forcing a new cut to be started. Several of the false starts were quite deep, extending almost all the way through the bone. That told Steve that the cutting was easy—the mark of a power saw of some type—because if you’re using a handsaw, and the saw jumps out of a deep groove, you don’t start a new one, you maneuver the blade back into the groove you’ve already cut. The deep false starts—together with the uniform width of the grooves, the polished-looking surfaces, and the convex curve of the cut marks—told Steve that Leslie’s body had been cut up with a circular saw with a blade diameter of 71⁄4 inches or greater.

  Of course, a lot of Canadians own circular saws; Steve could tell the police what type of saw had cut up the body, but he couldn’t tell them whose garage or basement to search for it. The case remained unsolved for ten more months. Finally, in the winter of 1993, the police got a huge break. A twenty-three-year-old woman named Karla Homolka came forward with a sordid and shocking story. Her husband, a bookkeeper named Paul Bernardo, had abducted Leslie Mahaffey and Kristen French to use as sex slaves, she claimed. Paul had forced Karla to participate in some sex acts, she said, and to videotape others. After an escalating series of degrading and violent acts, he’d strangled the girls. Besides Leslie Mahaffey and Kristen French, there was a third victim, Karla claimed: her own younger sister, Tammy, whom Paul had drugged and raped back in 1990. While still unconscious, Tammy had vomited and choked to death; until Karla’s visit to the police, her sister’s death had been considered merely a tragic accident.