Death's Acre Read online

  It was Kansas lawman Harold Nye—a living legend at the KBI—who taught me one of my most important lessons about crime scene investigation: “Shoot your way in, and shoot your way out.” It sounds like the modus operandi of a trigger-happy bank robber, but Harold was talking about photography. “When you arrive at the scene and get out of your car, take a picture of the house or the car or whatever the scene is,” he said. “As you walk closer, take some more. Take pictures of the ground before you walk on it; take pictures of who’s there; pictures of what kind of shoes officers at the scene are wearing. Take pictures of the body before you move it or even touch it.”

  Harold had shot his way into the Clutter family’s farmhouse the night the bodies were discovered there. If he hadn’t—if he or anyone else involved in the investigation had set foot in the basement before Harold photographed its dusty floor—the KBI would never had seen and preserved on film the footprints that were later linked to the killers’ boots. Because Harold shot his way in, the telltale footprints were caught on film and the killers were convicted.

  It’s hard to put a price tag on human life and criminal justice; film, on the other hand, is pretty damn cheap. Over the decades I’ve taken hundreds of thousands of crime scene photos, and I’ve never regretted a single click of the shutter. As cameras become more and more sophisticated—exposing for infrared frequencies or heat, capturing high-resolution digital images, and even incorporating GPS (global positioning system) receivers that automatically record precise location coordinates in longitude and latitude—photography will sharpen the focus of crime scene investigation still further.

  On my four-person forensic teams, one member always served as our photographer. For the search of the burned house in Hawkins County, the camera would be wielded by Steve Symes, one of my Ph.D. students. Steve had shown a remarkable talent for crime scene photography; his photos often revealed far more detail than those taken by the official photographers from police departments or sheriff’s offices. On this day, although I didn’t know it at the time, Steve would be laboring under a severe handicap: That morning he’d awakened severely hungover, chilled to the bone, and wringing wet. Sometime in the night, after an intoxicated Steve had fallen asleep, his water bed had sprung a leak, dumping dozens of gallons of water across his floor and through his downstairs neighbor’s ceiling. Luckily the wiring in his electric blanket was waterproof; otherwise he might have been fried. As it was, he felt sick as a dog, and the mountainous roads of eastern Tennessee weren’t helping any.

  It took us about ninety minutes to make the drive from Knoxville to the Hawkins County sheriff’s office in Rogersville; from there we followed a deputy—a Lieutenant Alvis Wilmot, who was heading the investigation—out a winding road along the north fork of the Holston River.

  When you’re out in the country from Rogersville, population four thousand, you’re pretty far out there and pretty close to nowhere. By the time we turned down a gravel drive about twenty-five miles outside town, we were in a remote river valley, so sparsely populated—or maybe so suspicious of outsiders—that the fire hadn’t even been reported until a relative of the house’s owner drove down from Virginia and found the place in ruins. The property was heavily wooded and steeply sloped, angling down on the east side to the clear, green waters of the Holston’s north fork. We all got out and stretched our legs; Steve took some particularly deep breaths.

  According to Lieutenant Wilmot, the blaze had occurred eight days before; as best they could tell from their interviews with the nearest neighbors, it probably began around two o’clock in the morning. By the time it had burned itself out, all that remained was a rectangle of charred rubble, bordered by a jumble of blackened bricks; a larger pile of bricks marked a spot near the center where a chimney had stood.

  The house and land had been purchased just a month or so earlier by a Virginia man named James Grizzle, who hailed from an area even more mountainous and less populated than this one. Grizzle had moved into the house in December to begin remodeling it. The fire occurred on January 15; six days later, not having seen or heard from his son, Grizzle’s father had come looking and had promptly called the sheriff upon seeing that the house had burned. Our goal was to determine whether Grizzle’s body lay somewhere in the charred ruins left by the fire.

  FORENSICALLY, fire scenes pose an interesting combination of circumstances and challenges. As at any death scene involving a decomposed body or bone, it’s important to locate and recover all the human remains; at a fire scene, though, that’s often difficult because of the dramatic changes a human body undergoes in an intense fire.

  The arms and legs are the first to go. Relatively thin and surrounded by oxygen, they’re like kindling, easy to ignite and quick to burn. At temperatures of only a few hundred degrees, the skin quickly blackens, the fat beneath the skin starts to sizzle, and within a matter of minutes the skin splits open and the flesh begins to burn. As it does, something remarkable and eerie happens. The limbs begin to move—the hands and feet clench, the arms curl up toward the shoulders, and the legs spread slightly apart with the knees flexed. It’s a function of biomechanics and muscle strength: The flexors, the muscles that cause our arms and legs to bend, are stronger than the extensors, the ones that cause our limbs to straighten. As fire cooks and dries out the muscles and tendons of the body, they shrink, just like a steak on the grill, and the flexors overpower the extensors.

  The resulting position is very much like a boxer’s stance in the ring; for that reason we call it the “pugilistic posture.” It’s very distinct and very consistent—as consistent in fire victims as a purplish color and swollen tongue are in hanging victims—so long as the limbs are free to flex. If, on the other hand, the arms are tied or pinned behind the back, they won’t be able to curl up, so finding a burned body whose arms are straight can be an important clue that the victim was somehow confined or restrained.

  The other truly dramatic change that occurs is to the head. The skull is basically a sealed vessel, filled with fluid and moist brain tissue. It doesn’t take long for all that moisture to reach the boiling point and create pressure in the cranium; the hotter the fire, the greater the pressure. If there’s an outlet for that pressure—for example, a bullet hole in the skull—the pressure vents harmlessly. If there isn’t, the skull can literally burst, fracturing the cranium into numerous pieces, each about the size of a quarter. Recovering and reconstructing a skull from a fire scene is one of the most tedious tasks a forensic anthropologist ever faces, and even after it’s pieced together, that skull remains a challenge, since blunt-force or sharp-force trauma can be difficult to spot amid the myriad fire-induced fracture lines and the occasional gaps where pieces are missing.

  Fortunately for crime scene investigators, it’s difficult to burn up a body entirely; even cremation leaves substantial portions of bone, which must then be pulverized mechanically. Still, even the biggest, most robust bones of the body—the femur and tibia in the leg, the humerus in the arm—can be badly damaged by a fire. A fairly low-temperature house fire will turn the long bones black or caramel-colored but leave them relatively intact structurally. An arson fire, though—one fueled by gasoline or some other flammable accelerant—can reach temperatures as high as 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit; at such extreme temperatures the bone undergoes a chemical and structural metamorphosis. Bone, like the rest of the body, contains carbon, and at extremely high temperatures that carbon burns out of the bone. What’s left behind, called “calcined” bone, might still retain its shape—just as a coral reef retains its form even after the organisms that built it die—but it will be very lightweight, grayish in color, riddled with heat fractures, and so fragile that it can crumble in your hands, and will certainly crumble underfoot. (Recently, I was contacted by an attorney who’s preparing for a retrial of a murder case; he told me that a key piece of prosecution evidence—a calcined piece of the victim’s burned skull—was accidentally dropped
on the floor and stepped on by a judge, reducing it to powder.)

  For all their destructive power, fires leave behind a surprising amount of evidence, though you have to know where and how to look for it. Actually, I’ve come to enjoy the challenge, the scientific puzzle, of mentally reconstructing what a fire scene looked like just before it burned. Those buttons and snaps, hooks and eyes, brass rivets and zippers, embedded in a heap of ashes? Easy: a chest of drawers once crammed with shirts and brassieres and blue jeans. That mound of broken glass and porcelain beside a charred chandelier? It was once the china cabinet in the dining room.

  The key to mentally reconstructing a burned house is the careful sifting through a layer of ash several inches thick—the remnants of the ceiling and roof. Beneath that layer is a wealth of information about the way things were. For instance, most chairs in houses are made of wood, but they usually have small metal feet on each of their legs, which can indicate their position at the time of the fire. A desk might burn, but the paper clips and staples will mark its location; a cache of needles, pins, and scissors might have once belonged inside a sewing basket.

  The most valuable thing I have found at a fire scene was a $12,000 diamond necklace. It was a woman’s Christmas gift from her husband, unwrapped just months before she burned to death in a suspicious fire in their mansion. When I found the necklace—at the base of a wall, beneath a layer of ash—it had a safety pin fastened around it. That puzzled me, and so did the location where I found it, so I asked her family if they could shed any light on either question. Her relatives told me that she liked to pin her jewelry into the folds of her drapes; when the drapes were closed, the jewelry was on display; when they were open, the jewelry was hidden. Sure enough, I’d found it directly under a window. The explanation matched what we found at the scene.

  Sometimes what you don’t find at a fire scene tells you as much as what you do find. I once excavated a fire scene that had already been examined by the police and an arson investigator, none of whom noted anything suspicious. What struck me most about the house, as I recovered the incinerated body, was that there were no dishes or silverware in the kitchen, no coat hangers in the closets, no picture frames or hangers on the wall. (Pictures themselves will burn, and so will wooden frames, but metal frames, and even the little screws and nails and wires on the back of a wooden frame, don’t burn; they fall to the floor at the base of the wall.) To me it was obvious that the house had been stripped bare, except for a few large items, before the fire—a classic indicator of arson. But the strangest part of the story, as well as we could reconstruct it, was this: The dead man wasn’t the homeowner but the man hired to burn down the house; apparently, as he was dousing the structure with gasoline—during a severe thunderstorm, we learned—lightning struck the house, igniting the gasoline vapors in a fiery explosion that killed him almost instantly. It was one of the best cases of bad timing I’ve ever seen. In this case the evidence at the scene revealed that crimes had indeed been committed, but they were arson and insurance fraud, not murder.

  Anytime I’m called to a fire scene, I try to find all the skeletal material, but I don’t stop there; I also deduce as fully as possible the events that happened before and during the fire. I pay particular attention to identifying jewelry, teeth, and bones, but I also check and recheck for other evidence, and I consider all that evidence before I draw any conclusions about what happened.

  The single thing that does the most to destroy forensic evidence at a fire scene is not the fire itself; it is an untrained, overzealous investigator armed with a rake. An investigator who hasn’t been trained in human osteology and doesn’t know how to recognize and identify burned bone fragments can wreak havoc with a fire scene. It’s maddeningly common for police who are looking for a body to go over an entire scene, raking all the burned material into long ridges, or windrows, about three feet apart. Think about it: If you want to know the location and arrangement of a body when the fire began—and if you want to know its proximity and placement relative to items such as a gun, a knife, or bullets—what hope do you have if you stir everything up with a rake?

  I once arrived at a fire scene with a team to search for the body of a suspected suicide victim, only to be told by a fire marshal that I needn’t bother looking. The scene was massive—a farm compound consisting of a house, a barn, and half a dozen other outbuildings; the firefighters and arson investigator had used a backhoe to clear out portions of the rubble. I figured the most promising place to search was the house, but the fire marshal scoffed at me. “We’ve raked that house five times,” he said. When I allowed as how we’d like to take a look anyway, seeing as how we were already there, he shook his head and walked away as if we were idiots.

  Sifting through the churned-up mess, we found a few pieces of a man’s skull. There was barely a handful of fragments left—when you roll a backhoe over calcined bones and then flail away at them with a bunch of rakes five times, you’re going to pulverize things pretty thoroughly—but it was enough to indicate that the man had set fire to his homestead and killed himself.

  FORTUNATELY, in the Hawkins County case, the sheriff’s office had called us before the fire scene had been disturbed; the arson investigator would be joining us there, but we’d get first crack at the scene. If there were burned bones somewhere amid the rubble, we should be able to find them, and they’d probably still be very close together.

  On the east, or downhill, side, facing the river, the house had been two stories high; the west side was notched into the hill, with only the main floor above grade. According to Lieutenant Wilmot, the bedroom where Grizzle was most likely to have been sleeping—going by descriptions from the prior owners—was at the north end of the upper floor. Now, of course, there was no upper floor: during the fire, the floor joists had burned through and the main floor and roof had collapsed onto the concrete slab running beneath the entire structure. That concrete slab, by the way, was our friend. A smooth, solid surface ringed by low ridges of jumbled brick, it was now one giant evidence pad, saving everything for us.

  We started at the downhill face of the house at about 10:30, sifting and probing our way delicately toward the center of the house. At about 11:15, Steve Symes’s keen photographer’s eye, bleary and bloodshot though it was, zoomed in on a bone jutting from beneath a pile of bricks, a collapsed section of the chimney. As we lifted off the bricks, we found both sets of leg bones and most of the spine. Some of the joints were still partially articulated, or held together by ligaments and cartilage, but many of the bones themselves had been reduced to fragments. Completely calcined, these shards of a shattered life clinked together in my hand like bits of a smashed ceramic mug. This corpse had been seriously incinerated.

  The condition of the bones indicated a hot fire. The condition of the electrical wiring confirmed it: the copper had melted, dribbling into ragged lines on the concrete floor. Copper’s melting point is around 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit, so the fire raged hotter than that. What’s more, such high temperatures clearly pointed to the presence of accelerants; without the addition of gasoline or some other flammable liquid, experiments have shown, house fires usually don’t exceed 1,600 degrees.

  The concentration of bones was about a foot inside the east wall of the house—the side facing the river—and was several feet north of a concrete-block wall that divided the house into a north end and a south end. As we were removing the bones, we found a mass of burned tissue resting on a piece of white cotton fabric from a man’s jockey shorts and a charred pair of olive-drab pants.

  At this point we were pretty sure we’d found the body of a male, very likely the missing James Grizzle. But as we continued to search the scene, the picture got fuzzier, not clearer, and more and more intriguing.

  The position of the legs, pelvis, and spinal column indicated that the body was lying on its back; the legs were bent or folded over the top of the body, with the knees up above the shoulder
s—occupying the space where the head should have been but wasn’t. We explored the surrounding area thoroughly in search of the head. Finally, about six feet away, embedded in another pile of bricks, we found arm bones, a few ribs, and the skull and mandible. These bones, like the first batch, were oddly arranged and badly fragmented, apparently from the fire.

  But why were they six feet away from the lower two-thirds of the body? As I sorted through the possibilities in my mind, I considered the fact that the house was a two-story structure. I have seen cases, in similar buildings, where part of a body has burned and fallen through a hole in the floor, leaving the other part to settle elsewhere, atop a different layer of rubble. Could that have happened in this case?

  I looked again at the legs and pelvis. Besides the fabric of the underwear and pants, there wasn’t much under the bones—just some unburned Sheetrock or drywall, unburned floor tile, and the house’s concrete slab. There was also very little beneath the head, arms, and ribs. If one part of the body had burned away and fallen through a hole in the upper floor, leaving the rest of the body up in the master bedroom until the entire floor collapsed, we should have found quite a bit of burned debris underneath one of our groupings of bones: the charred remnants of wooden joists, subflooring, and flooring material—maybe even blackened bedsprings and a burned mattress, if the man had been asleep at two A.M., when the fire began. The fact that so little other material was beneath the bones suggested that the entire body was probably already down in the basement when the main floor burned through and collapsed onto the slab.