Death's Acre: Inside The Legendary Forensic Lab The Body Farm Bill Bass (howl and other poems TXT) 📖

of Indian burials in the Great Plains, I’ve been in somewhere around five thousand graves. By the time I die I suspect I’ll hold some sort of unofficial record: “body that’s been in and out of the most graves ever.”

Just as Captain Long had told me over the phone, the body was in an advanced state of decay. By now some of the joints had deteriorated. The legs were separated from the pelvis, and the arms were detached from the torso. The knees and the elbows, however, were still intact and still covered with clothing, as was most of the torso. From the look of the formal black jacket and pleated white shirt, I wondered if the victim had been a waiter from some fancy Nashville or Franklin restaurant. Either that or a groomsman at a wedding, a guy who’d indiscreetly dallied with the wrong bridesmaid—or the bride.

The body was in a sitting position on top of the antiquated coffin that had been buried in 1864. From excavating thousands of Native American burials on the Great Plains in the 1950s and ’60s, I knew that burying a body in a flexed position required less digging than stretching it out horizontally. It was one more sign of someone hurrying to conceal a crime.

As we dug deeper and exposed more of the body, I saw a small hole in the top of the old coffin. The coffin appeared to be made of cast iron—the top of the line, funereally speaking, back in the 1860s. The hole, which measured about one foot by two feet, might have been caused by the force of a pick or shovel striking the brittle metal. Then, as the disturbed, soggy earth settled around the hastily buried victim, the pelvis and lower spine dropped through the opening and into the old coffin. As a result, I had a hard time extracting the remains.

As I carefully unearthed body parts and pieces of clothing, I handed them up to Charlie, who laid them out in anatomical order on the plywood. Once I’d recovered all the body parts I could find, he placed the pieces in evidence bags and labeled them. In addition to the body, I found two cigarette butts, which Charlie bagged as well.

Over the years I’ve noticed that killers tend to smoke heavily at crime scenes. In one murder case—involving an auto chop-shop owner who shot a snitch with a hunting rifle—I found a whole pile of mini-cigar butts at the spot where the killer had lain in ambush for hours. Those particular butts had plastic tips, which he’d bitten down on with enough force to leave tooth marks; fortunately, I was able to match those marks with a cast we later made of his teeth. Under the circumstances, chain-smoking is not surprising, I guess—a killer is likely to be very tense, and smoking is a nervous habit—but it’s not too smart, either, since even paper cigarette butts can pick up fingerprints and saliva-borne DNA—evidence that can send a killer to death row. (Note to smokers: That’s one more way smoking can kill you.)

As I excavated, the hole got deeper and deeper; by the time I had recovered most of the body, I had reached the top of the Civil War–era coffin. I asked a deputy to loan me his flashlight, instructed Charlie and the deputy to hold my ankles, and hung headfirst in the pit so I could peer inside the hole in the coffin’s lid. There wasn’t really anything to see—just a thin layer of goo in the bottom—but then again, I hadn’t expected there to be anything left after more than a century. Several years before, I had excavated a cemetery dating from this same period, the mid- to late 1800s. That cemetery contained nearly twenty graves, but the bone fragments I recovered from that entire cemetery could fit easily in the palm of one hand: they’d crumbled that completely in the damp dirt of Tennessee. Knowing what I did about Civil War–era burials, then, I would have been astonished if Colonel Shy’s bones had shown up in the beam of the flashlight. With a grunt and a tug, Charlie and a deputy hauled me up out of the grave.

By now Charlie and I were both soaked and chilled to the bone. We took off our muddy jumpsuits and put them in the trunk of the Mustang, along with the remains and the clothing, which we’d removed from the body and bagged separately. Before heading back to Knoxville, we needed to make a brief detour to the state crime laboratory near Nashville, where TBI technicians would pore over the clothing and cigarette butts for clues to the identities of our victim and his killer.

We got to the crime lab late in the day, just before closing time. The clothing was wet and smelly, so the TBI staff did not welcome us with open arms. To keep from stinking up the entire laboratory, they finally decided to spread the clothing out in their heated garage to dry and air out.

Charlie and I got back to Knoxville late that Friday night. I pulled into the garage—fortunately, it was not attached to the house, so we wouldn’t smell the body—and headed inside for a shower, sleep, and a weekend of college football bowl games. Whoever was out there in the Mustang, he wasn’t likely to go anywhere, because I took the car keys with me.

On Monday morning I took the remains to the anthropology department offices beneath the football stadium and put them in several large pots of hot water to soften the tissue for easy removal. (By now, after many years and two replacement stoves, I had learned not to do this at home.) The process of sorting, cleaning, and examining the bones would take a couple of days, even though the skeleton wasn’t complete.

It wasn’t just the skull that was missing; so were the feet and one of the hands. That’s common with bodies recovered outdoors: