Death's Acre Read online

  Rubenstein responded by suing Mutual of New York, claiming he had not been informed of the waiting period. When the lawsuit came to trial, the insurance company put an expert witness on the stand, a Texas forensic pathologist named Dr. Ronald Singer, who was a specialist in ballistics. Pointing to the angle of the entry and exit wounds, Dr. Singer said there was no way the shotgun could have fired when the butt struck the ground. According to Singer, the gun had to have been level, at shoulder height, to have produced the fatal wound. In other words, the gun wasn’t accidentally dropped. It was carefully aimed, cocked, and fired.

  When Officer Applewhite uncovered the story about Connor’s death and the life-insurance policy, he was struck by the similarities to Krystal Perry’s death. He was also struck by one key difference: In Krystal’s case, the gruesome death occurred—and the insurance claim was filed—immediately after the two-year waiting period had ended. To Applewhite, it appeared that Rubenstein had learned from his mistake in 1979 and was careful to do things right on his second murder. Remarkably, my forensic report indicated that the murders had occurred sometime around November 15, a date that coincided almost exactly with one of his admitted visits to the cabin.

  Applewhite spent a year building a case against Rubenstein. But when he took his findings to the Pike County district attorney and urged that Rubenstein be arrested, he didn’t get the response he’d hoped for. The DA, Dun Lampton, told Applewhite that he would need hard evidence to prosecute the Perry case, but the only evidence Applewhite had was circumstantial. Granted, the quarter-million dollars appeared to offer a strong motive. Clearly, Rubenstein had a history of shady business deals, fraudulent insurance claims, and probably even murder. And Rubenstein certainly had plenty of opportunity to kill the Perrys: He owned the cabin, after all, and had personally driven the family up there. He even admitted he’d gone back to the cabin on two later occasions. But there was no irrefutable proof of Rubenstein’s guilt.

  Applewhite was stunned and frustrated. When he told Darryl’s biological father, Mack Perry, that no charges would be filed against Rubenstein, Mack wept. But Applewhite promised not to let the matter drop. He continued to follow Rubenstein’s trail of insurance fraud and other scams, and the mountain of evidence continued to grow. In September of 1995, he was stunned to learn that yet another person in Rubenstein’s life had come to grief: after climbing into a car with Rubenstein one Saturday morning, Laron Rosson, a new business partner, vanished without a trace. Just before his disappearance, he had given Rubenstein a truckload of expensive antiques that had been purchased with bad checks.

  In July of 1998, Applewhite finally saw a ray of hope: That month, a Mississippi jury found a man guilty of drowning his four-year-old son, and the verdict was based purely on circumstantial evidence. That man’s motive was a $100,000 life-insurance policy. Applewhite went to Lampton’s assistant DA, Bill Goodwin—the prosecutor who had just won that case—and pleaded with him: “Bill, we’ve got a better case than that here. Instead of a hundred thousand dollars, it’s two hundred fifty thousand, and instead of one victim, it’s three victims.”

  Two months later the DA’s office took Applewhite’s evidence to a grand jury. Rubenstein was indicted for the Perry murders and fraud and was extradited from Louisiana to Mississippi. The case went to trial in June of 1999.

  The lack of hard evidence wasn’t the only problem the prosecutors were facing. One reason time since death was so crucial in this case was that Rubenstein produced a witness, Tanya Rubenstein—a niece, conveniently enough—who testified that she’d seen Annie Perry alive and well in a bar in New Orleans. That was on December 2, she said—fourteen days before the bodies were found. And Rubenstein had an airtight alibi for the period between December 2 and December 16. If Darryl, Annie, and Krystal were indeed alive on December 2, then Rubenstein could not have killed them. But if forensic science could show that they were already dead by that date, then the credibility of the niece’s testimony—and therefore the validity of Rubenstein’s alibi—would be destroyed.

  But the defense wasn’t about to let that happen without a fight. And this particular battle would be waged over the maggots.

  Ever since I first studied the crime scene photos, I’d been fretting over the absence of pupa casings. If I’d seen those, I’d have known for certain that the maggot activity had begun well before December 2. But without them, all I could say for sure was that the maggots had been on the bodies for about two weeks. Clearly the cooler temperatures had slowed the activity of the blowflies and maggots: Blowflies are dormant at temperatures below 52 degrees Fahrenheit, and it was well below that for much of the period in dispute. So I was confident that my estimate of twenty-five to thirty-five days was right. But would the jury share my confidence? That was what was worrying me, especially after the defense hammered hard on the fact that I was not an entomologist.

  After only a few hours of deliberation, the jury informed the judge they were deadlocked at 11–1 for conviction. The judge declared a mistrial, and the prosecution went back to the drawing board to prepare for the retrial. To strengthen their case, Goodwin and Lampton called in entomological reinforcements: my former student Bill Rodriguez, who by now was considered one of the world’s foremost experts on insect activity in human corpses.

  THE RETRIAL started on January 21, 2000. A few days later Goodwin called me to the stand. We went over my qualifications and credentials, including the research studies at the Body Farm, and I was accepted once again as an expert in forensic anthropology. Then, just as I had in the first trial, I explained to the new jurors how I had arrived at my time-since-death estimate.

  When the defense attorney’s turn to cross-examine me arrived, he quickly began trying to undermine my estimate. First, predictably, he brought up the Colonel Shy case, in which I had misjudged the time since death by almost 113 years. That case, I explained, was why I launched our research program at the Body Farm. Then, as I expected, he zeroed in on the maggots and the fact that they were at the two-week stage. I pointed out how the cool temperatures would have slowed their development, but he kept hammering on the fourteen-day number.

  There was one other factor that had to be considered, I argued, one that had become clear to me as I had learned more about the crime scene. Yes, the maggots were at the fourteen-day stage. But the bodies were indoors, locked inside the cabin. And this particular cabin wasn’t some drafty structure of rough logs and mud chinking. This “cabin” was actually built of solid lumber: two-by-fours laid flat and stacked one atop the other. The man who built it had worked at a lumberyard and apparently could get two-by-fours for free, or almost free, so he built the entire cabin of them. Even the interior walls were made of tightly stacked two-by-fours. There just weren’t a lot of openings for insects to penetrate.

  The apparent discrepancy between the decomp evidence and the insect evidence wasn’t necessarily a contradiction at all, I explained. It would have taken a while for the blowflies to detect the scent of death inside—and then even longer to find a way in through the tightly stacked boards. So the two weeks of blowfly activity constituted only a limit—an absolute bare minimum—for time since death. The actual TSD was probably far longer, as the other decomposition markers clearly indicated.

  My testimony was followed by that of Bill Rodriguez, my former student. Working independently from me, Bill, too, had estimated the time since death at about one month—again, because of how cold the weather was and how inaccessible the bodies were. Between the two of us, Goodwin hoped, the insect problem had been “exterminated.” By the time the prosecution rested its case two days later, I was back in Knoxville. Now it was the defense’s turn.

  Unbeknownst to Bill Goodwin, the defense had lined up a surprise witness: entomologist Neal Haskell, who had recently testified (along with me) for the prosecution in the Zoo Man case in Knoxville and who had returned to the Body Farm in 1998 to expand his comparison of insec
t activity in human corpses and pig carcasses. Now Neal was testifying on the other side in a murder case. Fair enough: The world of forensic experts is a small one, and sooner or later someone who’s worked with you on one case will end up challenging you on another. But I was totally unprepared for what Bill Goodwin called to tell me about the exchange in the judge’s chambers that had ensued when he opposed Haskell’s appearance as a surprise witness. According to the defense lawyer, not only was Haskell going to support the defense’s claim that the deaths had occurred on or after December 2, he was prepared to testify that I had perjured myself—had lied to help the prosecution—in the Zoo Man case.

  Scientific differences of opinion are one thing; accusations of perjury are quite another. This was a slap in the face, contradicting everything I stood for, personally and professionally. Four decades earlier, Dr. Wilton Krogman had drilled a fundamental rule of ethics into me: My role in a case was not to serve the prosecutor or the defendant; my role—my only role—was to speak for the victim by uncovering the truth. So when Bill Goodwin had first asked me for a time-since-death estimate in the Perry murders, I immediately asked him not to tell me the prosecution’s theory or timetable, and he didn’t. If I’d thought the Perry family had been killed on or after December 2, I’d have said so and let the chips fall where they would; to hear that Haskell was attacking my integrity made me furious.

  But more troubling than my personal and professional indignation was the damage Haskell’s testimony might do to the prosecution’s case: If the jury believed Haskell’s accusation, they might ignore a compelling body of forensic evidence. At the other end of the phone line, Goodwin listened to my indignant tirade, then asked me to fly back to Mississippi to rebut the accusation of perjury. Wild horses couldn’t have kept me away.

  BACK IN THE COURTROOM in Magnolia, I sat and waited for my chance to defend my good name. As it turned out, when he took the stand Haskell did not accuse me of committing perjury or lying; he merely testified that I’d been wrong about Patricia Johnson’s time since death. Perhaps the defense attorney had been bluffing, perhaps Bill Goodwin had misunderstood. Whatever the reason, I was still eager to explain the circumstances: I would recount the events at Cahaba Lane the day I pronounced her body as too fresh for me, and tell how, when pressed by a police officer, I had guesstimated that she had been out there only a day or two. I would stress—as I had in the Huskey trial—the fact that I had not examined or even touched her body but had sent it straight to the medical examiner. For the hundredth time, at least, I regretted making that unfortunate guesstimate, which had dogged me ever since.

  Then, as I waited and worried, something astonishing happened. Rubenstein’s attorney called the pathologist from the county medical examiner’s office to the stand. During her testimony, the pathologist showed enlargements of autopsy photos. These were photos I’d never seen—photos whose existence I hadn’t known of until that moment.

  And suddenly there it was. In a close-up of Krystal’s face and head, nestled in the roots of her hair, I saw it: a tiny brown object about the size and shape of a grain of wild rice. Looking closer, I saw others as well. From my seat in the courtroom, I leaned over the railing and whispered to Bill Goodwin, “You’ve got to stop this trial. You’ve got to put me back on the stand.”

  Goodwin swiftly requested a recess so we could confer. Excitedly, I told him what I’d spotted in the photo: the empty pupa casings I’d been searching for all along—the ones left behind by maggots as they completed their life cycle and metamorphosed into flies. Just as a caterpillar spins a cocoon, from which it emerges as a butterfly, so a maggot secretes a shelter in which it nestles before it sprouts wings. It’s ironic: We think caterpillars are cute and butterflies are beautiful, but we think maggots are repulsive and flies are nasty. But to me, maggots and flies have their own kind of beauty. Especially in this case: They were like an answer to prayer, right there in the courtroom.

  Those pupa casings proved, scientifically, that blowflies had been feeding and laying eggs on the corpses for more than two weeks. Even if you assumed that they had gotten into that chilly, tightly built cabin and started laying eggs within minutes, that meant that Annie Perry couldn’t possibly have been in a New Orleans bar on December 2. Annie, like Darryl and Krystal, was already dead and decomposing in that cabin on December 2. We had the entomological proof after all; the entire forensic picture now made perfect sense.

  On February 3, 2000, the jury retired to deliberate. Just five hours later they came back with a verdict. They found Rubenstein guilty of three counts of first-degree murder. For the murders of Darryl and Annie Perry, they imposed life sentences. For the murder of Krystal—the “money child,” as Goodwin and Applewhite called her—they sentenced him to die. It seemed fitting, somehow: The jury was convinced that Rubenstein had executed three of his own family, three people who knew and trusted him; now he was the one to be executed.

  Every murder is wrong and brutal in some way, but this case was especially shocking, for its calculated ruthlessness and inhumanity. Michael Rubenstein stabbed his own wife’s son. He stabbed his daughter-in-law. He strangled a four-year-old child. And he probably killed two business partners. If my expertise can help put away even one vicious specimen like that, then all my years of study and research have been well spent.

  During the trial, Carol and I stayed at the same bed-and-breakfast where Darryl Perry’s father and stepmother were staying. They were clearly devastated by the loss of Darryl, Annie, and Krystal. One morning after I had left for court, Mr. Perry, a shy and quiet man, approached Carol in the kitchen. Looking down at the floor, he said to Carol, “Please tell your husband thank you for coming down here to help us.” When she looked up, tears were streaming down his cheeks.

  Doris Rubenstein filed for divorce after Mike’s conviction for the murder of her son, daughter-in-law, and granddaughter. I’m not sure if she ever got it, but I know she never lived to enjoy it: recently she was found dead of heart failure.

  Rubenstein is currently appealing his death sentence, and the proceedings and pleadings will go on for years. I can’t help reflecting that Darryl, Annie, and Krystal never got the chance to plead for their lives. Rubenstein’s execution won’t bring back the people he killed, but it might protect others from meeting that same fate.

  If there’s a hero in this case—beyond forensic science, which made the case against Rubenstein—it’s Allen Applewhite, the Mississippi highway patrolman who refused to let this case die. He bulldogged this case for years, even when it appeared there was no hope of a trial. He dug up a mountain of evidence against Rubenstein, a man he later told me he came to regard as “pure evil.” Allen was so struck by the dark depths of menace and depravity he unearthed in Rubenstein that he still carries a photo of him in his police car, to remind him just how much can be at stake in building a case against a killer. Allen had wept when the first jury deadlocked and the judge declared a mistrial; when the second jury found Rubenstein guilty, he went home and held his own four-year-old daughter tightly in his arms.

  CHAPTER 19

  Ashes to Ashes

  LLOYD HARDEN—“CHIGGER,” his family and friends called him—was an East Tennessee farmer. He and a bunch of other Hardens were born and raised on Harden Road in Birchwood, the name given to a handful of farmhouses sprawled across the broad, fertile floor of the Tennessee River Valley halfway along its hundred-mile run from Knoxville to Chattanooga.

  Chigger’s eight brothers and sisters scattered out across the valley like a handful of windblown seeds, but Chigger stayed put on Harden Road. His life wasn’t an easy one. In school, he never made it past seventh grade; when he was seventeen he learned a hard lesson that he carried with him the rest of his life: He and his nineteen-year-old brother argued over a poker hand and Chigger lost, catching a .22-caliber bullet in the chest from a gun in his own brother’s hand. He survived, but the bullet was too close to his
heart to be safely removed. He kept it inside him for another twenty-seven years, a reminder of the perils of cards, the precariousness of life, and the crucial difference one inch can make when it involves the relationship between a bullet and a heart.

  By the spring of 2000, a life of farm labor had made a burly man of Chigger—not just his muscles but his bones, too, which had grown thicker and stronger to bear the loads they carried year in, year out. He must have looked almost comically oversized, planting strawberry seedlings, pinching the tiny plants between strong, stained fingers and a broad thumb. Now, at age forty-four, Chigger wasn’t a young man anymore. His back ached, and he had other, deeper hurts too. On the night of April 17, 2000, Chigger took some painkillers. I don’t know how many, but it must have been more than a couple. Instead of killing the pain, the pills killed him.

  Chigger had once told his siblings he wanted to be cremated, as his older brother who had shot him (accidentally, the family says) a quarter-century before had been. His sister Suzy asked a nearby funeral home to arrange it, and she bought a fancy brass container to hold his ashes. Chigger’s girlfriend was pregnant, and Suzy wanted Chigger’s child to have the ashes someday.

  The family mourned Chigger’s passing at a memorial service; afterward his body was taken to a waiting hearse and driven to a crematorium. The funeral service and cremation cost $3,110.59, including almost $800 for a combustible, cloth-covered coffin. A few weeks later a plastic bag of ashy, cremated remains—“cremains,” they’re called in the funeral industry—was sent back, and a funeral-home employee transferred them to the brass box. Suzy kept them on her mantel for a while, then gave them to Chigger’s girlfriend.

  Twenty-two months later, his family watched with horror as a macabre story unfolded on national television. Bodies—unburned, decaying human bodies—were being discovered in Noble, Georgia, on the grounds of Tri-State Crematory. Tri-State was where Chigger’s body had been sent to be cremated nearly two years before.