Death's Acre: Inside The Legendary Forensic Lab The Body Farm by Bill Bass & Jon Jefferson

Author:Bill Bass & Jon Jefferson [Bass, Bill & Jefferson, Jon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Berkley
Published: 2006-09-01T04:00:00+00:00

THE MORNING OF OCTOBER 27, the phone rang again. The police had just found a fourth victim in the woods. I nabbed Bill Grant and Lee Meadows, who’d gone with me the day before, and Emily Craig, the Ph.D. student who had taught me the difference between Caucasoid knees and Negroid knees. Together we retraced the now-familiar route to the scene.

The fourth body lay about a quarter-mile to the right of the billboard, at the edge of the small creek emerging from the woods. Wide and flat, the streambed was dry for much of the year; now, though, a few inches of water trickled through it.

The body was largely skeletonized, except for areas of tissue on the legs, buttocks, and left arm and hand. Lying faceup amid the oak leaves, the bare skull fixed us with a sightless, accusing stare. The vertebrae were completely defleshed, covered only by leaves and twigs. The right arm and hand were missing, probably chewed off by a dog. The left hand, though, lay in the streambed, covered with mud and water. As I dug around it carefully with a trowel, I was pleasantly surprised to find that some of the hand’s soft tissue was still intact.

We bagged the remains and took them back to UT Medical Center. Our first stop was the hospital’s loading dock, where we used a portable X-ray machine to check for bullets, a blade, or any other foreign objects that might tell us something. But there was nothing metallic in the skeleton of this victim, 92-28, except for some dental fillings. Next stop was the Body Farm, where we set the corpse on the ground, opened the body bag, and began cleaning the remains.

Art Bohanan had followed us back from Cahaba Lane. I knew what he wanted, but he wouldn’t have much to work with this time. Not only was there just one hand, there wasn’t even a whole lot of that one. The entire thumb was gone; so were half of the index and middle fingers. About all that remained were the ring finger, the little finger, and part of the palm. But if anybody could tease out an identifying print from a fragment of a rotting hand, it was Art.

Because the remains were already virtually skeletonized, it took me less time than usual to clean the bones for a forensic examination. I could already tell, even out in the field, that this was a woman. The pelvis was textbook female: broader hips, a raised sacroiliac joint, a wide sciatic notch, and a greater subpubic angle—all part of the geometry designed to allow a baby’s head to pass through the pelvis during birth. The cranium, too, had classic female features. The upper edges of the eye orbits were sharp, the chin tapered to a point at the midline, and the cranial vault was smooth and lacking in heavy muscle markings.

Race was easy to peg, too. On the ground beside the skull we’d found the hair mat where it had sloughed off: light brown and slightly wavy.

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