Death's Acre Read online

  But could we prove that 97-23 was who we thought she was—Matt Rogers’s missing wife, Patty? In the absence of facial features or teeth, the only way to make a positive identification would be a DNA test. DNA testing had become widely available about five years before, in the wake of the Gulf War of 1990 to 1991. In this case, though, genetic testing might or might not work: DNA is destroyed by intense heat, and these bones had been subjected to heat intense enough to cremate them, in effect. Our only hope was that the cervical vertebrae or the unburned chunk of the right parietal—the piece that had probably broken away when the bullet smashed into the skull—might yield enough DNA to be compared with samples from Patty’s blood relatives. We sent one of the vertebral fragments off to a private forensic laboratory and crossed our fingers as the police requested blood samples from Patty’s parents for comparison.

  While we awaited the test results, we resumed our examination of the bones. There remained one more crucial question I hoped we could answer: When had she been killed? Joanne was the ideal assistant to help me answer this question. A year before, she had completed her master’s degree in anthropology. Her thesis project studied how bone is altered by fire.

  Joanne’s research looked at bones burned in two kinds of settings. First, she re-created an archaeological setting: she buried prehistoric bones, then built campfires on the ground above them, in order to determine what kinds of changes might have occurred in ancient bones long after they’d been buried—changes that modern archaeologists would need to know how to spot and interpret when excavating ancient sites.

  Her second experiment, which was directly relevant to the Rogers case, re-created a realistic forensic setting: Joanne put bones in the crawl space beneath a house, then burned the house to the ground. (Lest anyone think my students are arsonists, let me rephrase that: The house, which had been condemned as unsafe, was burned not by Joanne, but by the fire department, which was kind enough to let Joanne harness the blaze for her research. The fire department’s cooperation might have had something to do with the fact that Joanne was dating a firefighter, who is now her husband.)

  For her research specimens Joanne used deer bones, which are abundant in Tennessee and are very similar to the bones of humans. She laid some bones on the dirt in the crawl space, buried some bones about an inch beneath the surface, and buried others about two inches deep. Then, with help from a liberal sprinkling of gasoline, the house began to burn.

  It burned fast. In just two and a half hours, the wooden house was reduced to smoldering embers. Joanne let it cool overnight, then went back the next day to retrieve her bones and her thermal probes, which measured the peak temperatures to which the bones were exposed. In the crawl space itself, temperatures shot up to about 1,700 degrees Fahrenheit; one inch under the ground, the temperature reached about 1,260 degrees Fahrenheit; and two inches down, it got up to a toasty 1,080 degrees Fahrenheit. The severe heat created numerous cracks in the bones, especially the bones on the surface. Those specimens were riddled with fractures, both longitudinal (lengthwise) and transverse (crosswise, or circumferential).

  Joanne’s bone specimens for her thesis research were defleshed and dry, but after she got her degree, she conducted additional experiments with “green” bone, fresh bone still covered in flesh. Those experiments suggested that burning fresh bodies creates markedly different fracture patterns: green bone tends to warp when it burns, and its transverse fractures curve or even spiral rather than simply encircling the shaft.

  As Joanne and I studied the burned fragments from Matt Rogers’s backyard, we compared them to both her experimental specimens and the photos of green bone burned in her later experiments. We were startled to notice that the bones from Matt Rogers’s yard weren’t warped, and their transverse fractures didn’t curve or spiral. Instead, the fracture pattern in case 97-23 bore a striking resemblance to Joanne’s thesis samples—that is, to bones that were defleshed and dry when they were burned. Joanne and I both came to an unexpected but inescapable conclusion: The body had decomposed before it was burned. But how had it decomposed so quickly, and where? Those questions nagged at me.

  I wrote up our findings, sending copies of the report to TBI Agent Daniels, the sheriff’s investigators, and the local district attorney. It wasn’t long before I got an answer to my nagging questions. A day after Matt Rogers was arrested, Daniels took a statement from a friend of Matt and Patty Rogers. The friend, named Chris Walker, told Daniels he’d taken a ride in Matt Rogers’s car about a week after Patty’s disappearance. The car smelled terrible, Walker said—the smell of something dead. When he asked about the smell, Matt told him that Patty’s pet turtle had gotten lost in the car and died. The smell was so bad, according to Walker, that he had to hang his head out of the car’s window to breathe—an amazing amount of odor from one small turtle.

  A few days after his smelly ride in the car, Walker told the TBI agent, he saw the vehicle being towed out of town, in the direction of Knoxville. When he got home, he called a number of wrecker services in Knoxville in an effort to find out where the car had been taken, but he had no luck.

  In light of Walker’s statement, our findings made perfect sense. The fracture patterns in the bones were exactly what I’d have expected to see, had I known the body was locked in the trunk of a car in the July heat for a week or two. Temperatures in the trunk of a dark car (this one was a blue Buick Regal) can reach well over 100 degrees Fahrenheit for the better part of a summer’s day. A week or so of that kind of heat would greatly accelerate decomposition; it would also stink up the car pretty bad, as Chris Walker had noticed.

  Walker wasn’t the only one who tried to find the missing car. After taking his statement, both the TBI and the Union County sheriff’s investigators tried to locate it, but in vain. Rumor had it that the car had been taken to a Knoxville scrap yard, sold for a few dollars, and swiftly shredded. I’ve always regretted not getting a chance to examine the car; there’s no doubt in my mind that my former student Arpad Vass, forensic chemist par excellence, would have been able to take a smear sample of volatile fatty acids and prove that a body had decomposed in the vehicle’s trunk.

  THE BODY that had probably decomposed in the car—the body that had definitely burned in the yard—was indeed that of Patty Rogers. The bone sample we sent off for testing yielded enough DNA to be reverse-matched to samples from Patty’s parents.

  At a preliminary hearing, Matt Rogers pleaded not guilty to the charge of first-degree murder in the death of his wife Patty. But on the eve of his trial he took a hard look at the forensic evidence against him. Our report detailed the gunshot wound to the head, the period of decomposition, the removal of the face and teeth, and the otherwise nearly complete skeletal reconstruction. If he stood trial and was found guilty, he could be sentenced to life without parole.

  On December 19, 1997, five months after Patty’s charred bones were salvaged from a burn barrel and trash pit in the yard of her house, Matt Rogers pleaded guilty to second-degree murder. He was sentenced to twenty-five years in prison.

  In life, Patty Rogers had been an unhappy, troubled woman. At one point she was a crack addict, though she claimed to have broken the habit. She’d seriously considered suicide. But in a letter she sent to a friend just two weeks before she disappeared, she wrote that she’d gained some much-needed weight and gotten her teeth fixed. “One day I’m gonna surprise a lot of people,” she continued. “I’m gonna make you all proud.” Chillingly, the letter contained this request, too: “If God takes me one day, I want you to promise me that you’ll see about my kids.” I’ve been told that Patty’s daughters are being raised by their father, Patty’s first husband, in Florida.

  Matt, meanwhile, is serving his time, and I expect it’s pretty hard time. He’s in Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary, a grim, stone fortress of a prison built a century ago at the base of a forbidding cliff. Brushy Mountain is famous for being escapeproof.
Only one prisoner ever came close—James Earl Ray, the man convicted of killing Martin Luther King Jr.—and by the time the bloodhounds and the guards caught up with Ray in the cold, brutal mountains surrounding Brushy, he seemed grateful to be found.

  I wouldn’t presume to say that Patty Rogers, murdered and burned by her husband, was somehow posthumously grateful to be found. But as a forensic scientist, I was grateful to have had a hand in finding her, a hand in identifying her, a hand in securing for her at least some modest measure of justice. Her story turned out not to be quite as fragmentary as I’d feared it would be. The ending wasn’t happy, not by any stretch of the imagination. Grimly satisfying, maybe, and in murder cases, that’s about the best ending you ever get.

  CHAPTER 17

  The Not-So-Accidental Tourist

  DEATH AND CRIME know no boundaries, and the bones of the dead speak a universal language, whether they’re found in Knoxville, New York, or Old Mexico.

  A hundred miles south of San Antonio, Texas, lies Monterrey, Mexico, a city of some three million people. The capital of the Mexican state of Nuevo León, Monterrey, is a bustling industrial center that could easily pass for an American city, except for the abundance of Spanish and the scarcity of pale skin.

  On January 17, 1999, my own pale skin—I am a reluctant and nervous air traveler—arrived at Monterrey International Airport. I had traveled to Mexico to meet an insurance investigator named John Gibson and, with any luck, to answer a $7 million question.

  Inside the chain-link fence of a police impound lot in Guadalupe, a suburb on the eastern edge of Monterrey, sat the ruined shell of a Chevy Suburban. Six months before, in July of 1998, the Suburban had burned with enough heat to reduce a man’s body to a few handfuls of charred bone fragments.

  As with so many other cases, this one began with a phone call from a stymied investigator. Gibson, based in San Antonio, had been hired by a large insurance company, Kemper Life, to look into the death of one of its policyholders. Gibson had already seen the vehicle and what little was left of the person inside. Now he and Kemper Life needed my help in identifying the remains.

  Gibson met me at the airport and drove us to the Sheraton Ambassador, a gleaming tower of black glass that would have looked equally at home in Los Angeles or Tucson. Over an early dinner in the hotel restaurant, Gibson filled me in on the details of the case.

  The policyholder was an American named Madison Rutherford, a thirty-four-year-old financial adviser from Connecticut. Rutherford and his wife, Rhynie, owned a colonial farmhouse on five acres outside Danbury. They shared their wooded estate with a menagerie of dogs, cats, and chickens. Rhynie was the sole beneficiary of his life insurance.

  In my line of work, I’m often reminded of the huge range in the value assigned to different people’s lives—and their deaths. Death finds some people so poor, so alone, and so dispossessed that their bodies lie unclaimed in morgues until a county medical examiner or coroner buries them in paupers’ graves. Others—blessed with a loving family, social prominence, or hefty insurance—go out in a blaze of grief, glory, and gold. Most of us fall somewhere in the middle. The last time somebody asked me, I couldn’t even remember whether I had any life insurance; my wife, Carol, had to remind me that I do. It’s a fairly modest amount, though; I’m not worth much dead, and I’m certainly not worth killing.

  Madison Rutherford, on the other hand, was worth a fortune dead: a whopping $7 million—$4 million of it through Kemper Life, $3 million more through another company, CNA. Some people would certainly consider him worth killing.

  Rutherford and a friend had arrived in Monterrey around July 10, reportedly en route to a dog breeder in Reynosa, a city one hundred miles to the east. There, Rutherford planned to buy an exotic Brazilian dog, a variety of mastiff called a Fila. Rutherford bought a bicycle in Monterrey—a gift, he said, for the dog breeder—and loaded it into the vehicle.

  On the night of July 11, Rutherford left his friend at their hotel—the same Sheraton where Gibson and I were now staying—and set out for Reynosa. In the predawn hours of July 12, on the way back into Monterrey, his rented Suburban left the freeway, struck an embankment, and went up in flames. Police and firefighters raced to the scene, but they could do little to fight the intense fire. When it finally subsided, they looked inside and saw nothing—and no one—inside.

  Later that morning the police contacted the car rental agency. The agency in turn contacted Rutherford’s friend, a retired Connecticut state trooper named Thomas Pietrini. Pietrini asked to accompany the rental agency employee to the impound lot in Guadalupe where the burned Suburban had been taken.

  Once there, Pietrini leaned into the passenger compartment, poked around in the charred debris on the floorboards, and emerged with a blackened wristwatch. On the back of the watch was a sooty inscription: To Madison—Love, Rhynie. A bit more searching turned up a medical alert bracelet, which warned that the wearer, Madison Rutherford, was allergic to penicillin. Pietrini also found bones—or, more precisely, fragments of incinerated bones. I wondered if there would be anything left in the vehicle for me to find.

  ON MONDAY, the day after my arrival, Gibson drove me out to the impound lot in Guadalupe. Over the past thirty years, I’ve excavated dozens of burned vehicles, but I’ve never worked one so thoroughly consumed by fire. The glass was gone. The paint—originally dark blue, I think—had blistered off completely, leaving only rusting steel. One corner of the roof had partially melted and collapsed. Inside, virtually nothing but metal had survived: seat frames and coiled springs, the vehicle’s own charred skeleton. Seeing the damage confirmed what I had already suspected from Gibson’s description of the bones: this had been an incredibly intense fire.

  It takes a lot of heat to incinerate a body: After all, by weight, we’re mostly water, so getting a body to burn is like starting a fire with soggy wood. But once it finally catches, the human body can burn surprisingly well. One reason is the carbon we contain. The other is the fat we carry.

  Several years ago, one of our forensic graduate students studied factors that contribute to cases of “spontaneous combustion”—people whose bodies ignite and burn up. These combustions are actually far from spontaneous, of course. It takes both an ignition source (for example, a smoldering cigarette) and an external fuel source (say, a mattress or sofa) to get the human bonfire started. But in some cases, especially if the victim is grossly obese, the eventual result is a huge, hot, sooty grease fire. I suppose the gruesome moral of this student’s research, if research ever has a moral, is pretty simple: Watch your weight, and don’t smoke in bed. (I halfway do, and I definitely don’t.)

  Graduate students in UT’s anthropology department have actually burned donated cadavers and amputated limbs to gather scientific data about precisely what happens when a body burns. By observing and photographing the processes firsthand, these researchers gather baseline data about the “normal” processes of burning. Armed with such data, we’re far better equipped to help police spot abnormal and suspicious patterns. For example, a burning body normally assumes what we call the “pugilistic posture”: As the muscles and tendons heat up, they shrink as a result of all that water evaporating, and the hands tighten into fists. The arms flex, too, drawing the fists toward the shoulders in the manner of a prizefighter putting up his guard. The legs bend slightly, and the back arches a bit. It’s eerie to see a cadaver actually moving, shifting into a boxer’s stance; it seems to be taking one final, desperate stand against the Grim Reaper. Eeriness aside, it’s scientifically illuminating. In a real-world forensic investigation, finding a burned body that’s not in the pugilistic posture could be a clue that the victim was tied up at the time of death, perhaps with the arms bound behind the back.

  In this case, though, there was no possibility of finding such clues. For one thing, the remains had already been removed from the Suburban by the Monterrey medical examiner’s staff. For anothe
r, the heat had been so intense that most of the bones had been reduced to fragments. There was no way to tell whether the arms had been flexed or extended, free or bound, before they crumbled.

  Kneeling down beside the ruined vehicle, I leaned in through the driver’s door and began sifting through the charred rubble in the floorboard, searching for any remaining bones or teeth. Almost immediately, deep in a layer of rubble, I found a small, gray piece of curved bone. Although it measured only three or four inches square, I recognized it as the top of the cranium. The smooth inner surface had burned away, exposing the spongy bone inside.

  Finding the bone within the debris layer answered one question that had been worrying me: Had the body actually burned in the Suburban, or had a set of previously burned bones simply been tossed into the vehicle, either before or during the fire? From the way the other pieces of burned material surrounded it, I could tell that the body had indeed burned there in the Suburban.

  But while one important question had just been answered by the cranial fragment, another, equally important question had just been raised: What was the top of the skull doing at the bottom of the rubble heap? And why was it upside down? Theoretically, of course, it was possible that the bone had fallen or been jostled from a higher position, either during the fire or during the subsequent excavation by the medical examiner’s staff. However, that explanation didn’t fit with the position and condition of the fragment. The inner, concave surface of the cranium had burned away, while the outer surface—the very top of the head—was relatively undamaged. That could mean only one thing: during the fire, the body was head-down on the driver’s floorboard.