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

dogs, coyotes, vultures, and raccoons often feed on corpses, and the hands and feet are the easiest parts for predators to pull off and drag away. In this case, though, I wasn’t sure what to make of that, since the body had been buried, or at least partially buried. Interestingly, the one hand that remained was still inside a white glove when we found it, reinforcing my sense that the victim might have been a waiter at an upscale restaurant or an usher at a wedding.

I was pretty sure, right from the start, that this was a male; however, the genital region was one of the areas where decomposition had reached the advanced stage, so I knew I’d have to rely on the pelvis and other skeletal indicators to confirm the sex. The pubic bones were short and sharply angled—not the sort of pelvic geometry conducive to child-bearing. Clearly, our mystery corpse was a mystery man.

The sternal end of the clavicle, where the collarbone joins the breastbone, was fully fused, so that meant he was probably at least twenty-five. The pubic symphysis—the joint where the pubic bones met at the front of the abdomen—had a rough, bumpy surface, which told me he was probably somewhere in his mid- to late twenties. To check my own conclusions, I called in six of my graduate students—by now, students were filtering back from their holiday travels—and asked them to estimate the man’s age. All six put the age at twenty-six to twenty-nine.

The femoral head, the ball at the top of the thighbone, measured 50 millimeters, or about 2 inches, in diameter—also pretty typical for a male. The left femur measured 490 millimeters in length, or about 19.3 inches, and the right femur was 492. Using a formula derived by anthropologist Mildred Trotter and statistician Goldine Gleser in 1958, I calculated that our victim had once stood between five feet nine inches and six feet tall—when he still had his head, that is.

The process of cleaning and examining the bones failed to turn up any indication of the cause of death. As decayed as the soft tissue was in places, we wouldn’t have been able to detect stab wounds even if they had been present; the bones themselves bore no cut marks or other signs of skeletal trauma. Judging by the state of decomposition, I still estimated the time since death at a few months, or possibly more, but definitely less than one year.

Police in Williamson County and Nashville checked for missing-person reports filed within the past year. No one at all was missing in Williamson County; none of Nashville’s missing persons matched the physical description of these remains: white male, mid-twenties to early thirties, about five feet ten inches tall.

Area newspapers—hurting for juicy news during the lull between Christmas and New Year’s—got wind of the mystery and began reporting it. HEADLESS BODY FOUND AT FRANKLIN, read one headline on January 1. The story, sent out over the Associated Press wire service, told how the body was found sitting atop Colonel Shy’s coffin. It also described the “tuxedo-type shirt, vest, and coat” and quoted my estimate of time since death: “It appears the man has been dead two months to a year,” I said, “and a year may be a little too much.” I gave another reporter a narrower range, two to six months.

A day or two later, one enterprising reporter started looking into other recent deaths and found one in Knoxville that bore some similarities: Less than two months before, a decapitated man had turned up in a rural area just outside Knoxville. Could the two cases be related, the work of a serial killer? I told him I didn’t think so. The Knoxville victim had been dismembered and mutilated—his head and neck hacked off, his arms and lower legs severed, even his genitals cut off. The Franklin body—at least, what we had of it—showed no cut marks. TORSO CASE NOT LINKED TO OTHER DECAPITATED BODY, the resulting headline proclaimed.

Then, on January 3, the plot thickened: A Williamson County sheriff’s deputy arrived, bearing the skull and mandible. The coroner and sheriff’s deputies had gone back to the grave, excavated further, and located the skull inside the coffin. “It’s my theory that he was crammed head first in the hole made in the colonel’s casket,” the coroner told a UPI reporter. OFFICER’S GRAVE MYSTERY GROWS, read that day’s headline. The story began, “The head, feet and an arm of an unidentified body found in the grave of a Confederate officer have been recovered from inside the officer’s coffin, authorities said.”

There was no longer any mystery about the cause of death: A gunshot of enormous force had blasted into the forehead about two inches above the left eye; the exit wound—if you could call it that—was at the back of the head, near the base of the skull. I say skull, but that’s not exactly accurate: The force of the projectile was so great that it shattered the poor man’s head into seventeen pieces. I had to glue them back together just to determine the location and size of the entry and exit wounds. Judging by the destruction, he had been shot by a large-caliber gun, possibly at close range. Our mystery man had died a violent, instantaneous death.

The latest wrinkle in the case was this: Unlike the rest of the body, the skull was virtually fleshless and chocolate-brown in color, much like the ancient Indian skulls I’d excavated in South Dakota. The teeth had no fillings but lots of cavities, some of them quite large; his lower-left third molar was on the verge of abscessing. There was no indication that this elegantly attired gentleman had ever set foot in a dentist’s office or had ever received a scrap of dental care—modern dental care, anyway.

An uncomfortable suspicion began gnawing at me.

Just then the telephone rang. It was a technician from the state crime laboratory in Nashville calling. “Dr. Bass, we’re finding some odd things in