Death's Acre Page 21
On the morning of Monday, June 12, 1995, Steve walked up the steps of a Toronto court building to testify in Paul Bernardo’s murder trial, which had begun four weeks earlier. Canadian reporters were fascinated by Steve and his grisly specialty. “You’ll never meet another man like this,” began one newspaper story, “and you probably won’t mind.” The story went on: “As far as he knows, he is the only person in the world to have earned his doctorate by using bones to differentiate the tools used to tear apart human bodies.”
When Steve was called to the witness stand by the frock-coated crown prosecutor, he painted a precise and horrifying picture of Leslie Mahaffey’s dismemberment. The kerf width—the groove cut by the saw blade—was unusually narrow in Leslie’s bones, indicating a thin blade. Most carbide-tipped circular saw blades leave a kerf of about 1⁄8 (0.125) inch; the blade that butchered Leslie was thinner, with a kerf width of just 0.08 to 0.09 inch. When Steve made experimental cuts of his own in other bones, using circular saws with blades ranging from 71⁄4 to 12 inches in diameter, he testified that his cuts were more uniform, showing less tendency to drift, than the cuts in Leslie’s bones. But Steve had an advantage that Leslie’s killer had not had: he was cutting clean, dry, defleshed bone, and it was rigidly anchored in a vise.
On cross-examination, Paul Bernardo’s attorney asked just one question: Would cutting up a body with a circular saw make a mess? A big mess, Steve answered. The courtroom crowd was horrified by what Steve had to say, but their horror was lessened by the way he said it—by what one reporter described as his “open American manner and a self-deprecating sadness.” Self-deprecating is right: Steve is one of the world’s top five experts on tool marks in human bone, but he’s remarkably modest and unpretentious.
When Paul Bernardo took the witness stand, he denied that he’d murdered Leslie Mahaffey; he claimed both she and Kristen French had died accidentally while he was out of the room. He did, however, admit to dismembering Leslie. He cut up her body, he said, with an old McGraw-Edison saw: a circular saw of the type described by Steve. In fact, the saw, which Bernardo had gotten from his grandfather, was found in the basement of his tidy bungalow in a Saint Catherines suburb. Unfortunately for the prosecution, the blade and part of the housing were missing.
Steve left Toronto the day after he testified, hoping he’d done some good, but juries are funny: you can never tell for sure what’s going to hit home with them. Bernardo’s trial dragged on through June, through July, into August. Then, as the trial was nearing its end, a dramatic flourish made fresh headlines: The crown prosecutor concluded his case by producing a rusted saw blade that a police diver had fished from the lake only days before. Alongside the blade, the diver also found part of the housing of a power tool. The blade and the housing fit Bernardo’s old McGraw-Edison saw perfectly. The blade also fit Steve’s cut-mark analysis to a T: a circular saw blade, 71⁄2 inches in diameter, thinner and finer-toothed than most modern, carbide-tipped blades, with the right width to have made the 0.08-inch cuts.
Paul Bernardo was convicted on two counts of murder and sentenced to two twenty-five-year prison terms, without the possibility of parole. I’m told he gets fan letters and phone calls from teenaged girls. I know a lot about human bones, and so does Steve Symes. But there’s a lot more we’ll never comprehend about the dark recesses of the human heart.
CHAPTER 14
Art Imitates Death
BY 1993, I’d been running the anthropology department at the University of Tennessee for more than two decades. I’d helped create a new Forensic Anthropology Section within the American Academy of Forensic Sciences (AAFS), an important milestone in the development of this fascinating new field. I was also serving my twenty-second year as Tennessee State forensic anthropologist, a position that led to interesting forensic cases in nearly all of Tennessee’s ninety-five counties. My relationships with police departments, district attorneys, the TBI, the FBI, and other law enforcement agencies were strong. I lectured frequently to groups of medical examiners, doctors and dentists, police, and funeral directors. I testified in court several times a year; occasionally I made it into the newspapers or onto the television news, especially if there was a particularly gruesome case or if I won some teaching award, as I did in 1985, when the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education did me the honor of naming me National Professor of the Year. All in all, I thought, things were about as busy and exciting as they could possibly be.
I couldn’t have been more wrong. One brief phone call, and things would intensify beyond my wildest imaginings. For quite a few years I’d been lecturing regularly at forensic meetings all over the country. At one of those meetings I met a young assistant medical examiner from Virginia, Dr. Marcella Fierro. Over the years, seeing one another at meeting after meeting, we became good friends. Eventually, after Dr. Fierro became Virginia’s chief medical examiner, she began inviting me up to lecture to her staff once a year, either to broaden their horizons or just to strengthen their stomachs.
Most medical examiners are forensic pathologists—physicians specializing in disease or trauma to tissue. If they’re able to autopsy a body within a few hours or even a few days of death, they’re often remarkably successful at determining time since death and cause of death. But once decomposition reaches a fairly advanced stage, an autopsy becomes difficult. The soft tissues begin to liquefy through a combination of bacterial action, cellular chemical changes (a pH disruption called autolysis), and maggot feeding. As the soft tissues disappear, so do the physical clues a pathologist looks for, such as knife wounds in flesh. But if there are knife marks or other types of bone trauma, a skilled forensic anthropologist can often deduce an amazing amount of information from the skeleton long after an autopsy is impossible.
In 1984 a young technical writer had joined Dr. Fierro’s staff in Richmond. The woman, a former crime reporter, was clearly very intelligent, highly articulate, and fascinated by forensic investigations. She was also an aspiring crime novelist. After six years in Dr. Fierro’s office, she sold her first mystery novel.
That young woman’s name was Patricia Cornwell, and that novel, Postmortem, established her as a remarkably talented crime writer. It won five major international awards the year after it was published, and it remains the only mystery novel ever to do so. Postmortem marked not just Patricia Cornwell’s debut but the debut of her recurring heroine, Virginia medical examiner Kay Scarpetta. Dr. Scarpetta was tough on the outside, tender and wounded on the inside. She could have been inspired by Cornwell’s boss and mentor, Dr. Marcella Fierro, in her professional life, and Cornwell herself, I suspected, in her personal characteristics. In any case, Scarpetta swiftly became one of the most charismatic superstars of crime fiction. So did Patricia Cornwell.
Patricia Cornwell and I first met at one of Dr. Fierro’s annual training seminars, while she was still with the medical examiner’s office. As usual, I was showing slides of maggot-covered bodies. She introduced herself afterward, asked a lot of questions about my research, and complimented me on my presentation. End of story—or so I thought.
Then, in the summer of 1993, I got a phone call. The voice at the other end of the line said, “Dr. Bass, this is Patricia Cornwell.” She reminded me who she was and where we’d met—by now she was rich and famous, and no longer working for Dr. Fierro—then she came straight to the point: “I was wondering if you might be willing to run a little experiment for me at your research facility.” She was working on a new novel, she explained, in which she planned to have the killer return to the death scene—the basement of a house—some days after the murder and move the body to another location. What signs or marks, she needed to know, could a body pick up as it began to decay, and how much of that detail would remain once the body was moved to a new location?
This was a first. I’d been asked to study particular phenomena by medical examiners and homicide detectives, but never by a novelist. My first
inclination was to say no, but as she described what she had in mind, my scientific curiosity was piqued. These were interesting questions. By now we’d been studying decomposition at the Anthropology Research Facility for a dozen years, but up to this point, most of the bodies had been buried or simply lying outdoors on the ground. Our main research focus had always been to learn more about the processes and timetable of decomposition so that we could help law enforcement estimate time since death more precisely and accurately. Cornwell’s request opened up a whole new research area.
I called Detective Arthur Bohanan, my friend and colleague at the Knoxville Police Department, to get a homicide detective’s perspective on whether this sort of experiment sounded helpful and what kinds of information would be most valuable. Art was not your average cop. Over the years he had turned himself into a true expert on fingerprints—specifically, on ways to capture them from surfaces that had never yielded prints before: fabrics, paper, even the skin of a murder victim. He’d gone so far as to patent an apparatus that would vaporize cyanoacrylate—superglue—and waft it across surfaces or throughout an entire room. If you’ve ever accidentally superglued your fingers together, you know how eagerly the stuff bonds to human fingertips. Art figured out that it also bonds to the oils that fingertips leave on things they touch. His apparatus, which is now used by crime technicians worldwide, can capture latent fingerprints that routine dusting could never reveal. Recently the FBI ordered another sixty-six of Art’s machines; for a fingerprinting system, you can’t get a better product endorsement than that.
As we talked about the experiment Cornwell wanted me to run, Art became more and more enthusiastic. If a fingerprint on a body could help crack a case, why not some other distinctive mark? He’d seen odd imprints and discolorations on bodies before but didn’t have any data that could help explain them. That settled it: I would do the experiment. Together, Art and I called her to discuss the setup in more detail.
Cornwell planned to set the murder in a basement in the town of Black Mountain, North Carolina. One of the trademarks of Cornwell’s fiction is her frequent use of places she’s been or experiences she’s had. Black Mountain is a summer resort town where she spent much of her youth. North Carolina and Tennessee occupy roughly the same latitude and share a border, defined by the crest of the Great Smoky Mountains. Black Mountain lies about the same distance east of the crest that Knoxville lies to the west of it, so the climate at her crime scene closely resembled the climate at our research facility.
To simulate a basement, we’d need a concrete slab. Coincidentally, that part of the experimental setup was already prepared: We were just about to build a storage shed at the research facility for gardening tools, medical instruments (the scalpels and other implements needed to cut apart a skeleton at the end of a research study), and a small weather station; as a first step we’d recently poured a slab that would be plenty big for the experiment. To simulate an enclosed basement, all we had to do was build a “room” atop the slab—basically, a simple plywood box measuring eight feet long, four feet wide, and four feet high.
Then Bohanan and I realized we might have a problem. Summer was approaching fast, and the summers in East Tennessee are hot and muggy, with temperatures frequently ranging into the low to mid-90s—quite a bit warmer than a below-grade basement in Black Mountain would be. We called Cornwell to discuss the problem; she told us to buy an air conditioner, if that would resolve it, and to send her the bill. We needn’t have worried. There are ebbs and flows in the donated-cadaver business, and that summer, for some reason, we hit a slow period. Before long, summer was over; football season and fall weather arrived.
So did Patricia Cornwell. In September of 1993, on a football weekend, she paid us a visit. Football weekends in Knoxville are crazy; she booked what was probably the last available hotel room in the city, and she dined amid throngs of orange-clad UT fans at a popular riverfront restaurant near the stadium. I took her out to the research facility, where she took copious notes as I showed her corpses in various stages of decomposition and explained some of the graduate students’ research projects.
A few weeks later Arthur Bohanan and I took a donated corpse’s fingerprints, then we drove him—corpse 4-93—out to the facility. Together we wrestled the body out of the truck and into our plywood box. We positioned the body on its back, as Cornwell had requested. Beneath it we placed a coin—a penny, lying heads-up—along with a key, a brass strike plate from a door frame, a pair of scissors, and a chain-saw chain. Then we closed the door and walked away, just as the killer in Cornwell’s story was going to do.
Six days later we went back, dismantled the box, and retrieved the body. However, unlike Cornwell’s killer, who dumped the victim’s body beside a lake, we took ours to the morgue so we could examine and document whatever traces or clues the simulated death scene might have left. Imprinted on the body’s lower back was a perfect circle. Within the circle a faint imprint of Abraham Lincoln’s head was clearly visible. The imprint was not quite as distinct as what you’d get if you put a piece of paper on top of a penny and rubbed a pencil lead across it, but it was amazingly close. The disk was brown with specks of green—copper oxide from the penny’s corrosion by body fluids.
The key and the strike plate were sharply outlined on the legs. So was the pair of scissors that we’d placed under the back; its handles left perfect ovals in the flesh. The chain-saw chain left a sinister, coiled imprint, discolored a deep reddish brown along the teeth, almost as if they had bitten into the skin.
The body bore one other mark as well: a distinct, raised line of flesh zigzagging across the back and shoulder. That one was a puzzle to us at first; then we took a closer look at the spot where the body had lain. Running through our concrete slab, which had been poured by rank amateurs—namely, me and my students—was a crack whose zigs and zags matched those on the body perfectly.
Arthur and I were both delighted with the results; so was Patricia Cornwell when we sent her a research report and copies of our photographs. She said the experiment had given her exactly the kind of detail she needed for her book.
The next time I saw Cornwell again was the following February, at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences in San Antonio, Texas. As a crime writer, she was always on the lookout for new techniques that might make her books more interesting and realistic, and the AAFS meetings were often the place where researchers unveiled scientific breakthroughs and new forensic technologies. I bumped into her on a balcony overlooking the lobby of the Marriott River Center, the hotel where the conference was taking place. I asked how the book was coming along; she said that it was finished and that she was quite pleased with it. She thanked me again for running the experiment, then she added, “I’m calling the book The Body Farm.” You could have knocked me over with a feather.
When we first began researching human decomposition back in 1980, our facility didn’t even have a name. After all, it was really just a two-acre patch of ground, fenced off to keep out carnivorous animals and curious humans. The original fence was chain-link, but after a few passersby caught traumatic glimpses of the bodies inside, we added a wooden privacy fence. At some point, probably when we began writing up our research results for scientific journals like the Journal of Forensic Sciences, we decided we should probably call it something scientific-sounding. So we named it the Anthropology Research Facility, or ARF. Well, it wasn’t long before some wag with the local district attorney’s office suggested renaming it the Bass Anthropology Research Facility, or BARF. Luckily, that nickname never caught on; instead, police and FBI agents gradually started referring to it as “the Body Farm.” Before long, I was calling it that too. It’s easier to say and a lot more descriptive than “Anthropology Research Facility.”
When Cornwell asked us to stage the experiment for her, I had no idea the facility itself would figure in her book; I assumed she’d use some of the research
data, and that would be it. Instead, here she was telling me we were the title attraction. I was terribly flattered, and here’s why: In all the years we’d been studying decomposition, nobody much had seemed to give a damn about our research—a few anthropologists and entomologists, maybe, but that’s about it. Then along comes a famous writer who wants to name her book after our facility. What a nice pat on the back! I told her I couldn’t wait to read it.
A few months later a copy arrived in the mail. As I read it I was stunned. The research facility was featured, and glowingly; so was its director, “Dr. Lyall Shade.” It was as if the world’s biggest spotlight had just swiveled in our direction: The phone didn’t stop ringing for weeks. Our departmental secretaries fielded dozens of calls from reporters asking for the Body Farm’s number. There wasn’t a phone out there in the woods, of course, but after the first hundred or so calls, I jokingly told the secretaries to tell the callers to hang up and call “1-800-I AM DEAD.”