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

Reed made several intriguing observations. Not surprisingly, he found that the total number of insects on, in, and around the carcasses was greatest during the summer; however, several individual species experienced their population peaks during cooler weather. The woods were buggier, he noted, but decomposition proceeded faster in open areas—possibly because of higher temperatures, he theorized. Perhaps most important, Reed meticulously documented all the species of insects, both adults and larvae, associated with the dog carcasses.

In the 1960s a South Carolina entomologist named Jerry Payne made a similar study using baby pig carcasses. Payne’s major contribution was his careful record of insect succession: that is, he noted who showed up, and when, to march in the insect parade.

Meanwhile, during my summers in South Dakota in the sixties, I had noticed an interesting phenomenon in the Arikara Indian remains I was excavating. Some of the graves contained numerous pupal casings—the hard, hollow shells in which maggots encase themselves for their metamorphosis into adult flies; other graves, though, contained few casings or none at all. Eventually the light dawned: During winter, flies are grounded by the cold; in fact, anytime the temperature drops below 50 degrees Fahrenheit, flies stop flying. The Arikara graves that contained no pupal casings held people who died and were buried during cooler seasons of the year. It fascinated me at the time to realize that we could figure out, two hundred years after it happened, what season of the year an Arikara warrior had fallen in battle. By the time I established the Body Farm, I knew that if I could get a graduate student interested in studying insect activity in corpses, we’d probably figure out ways to deduce a lot more than just the particular season in which a person had died.

Bill Rodriguez was the ideal graduate student for the task—partly because he was willing to take it on, and partly because he had a broader background in field research than most graduate students.

Bill had an undergraduate degree in anthropology, with a minor in zoology. He’d entered anthropology intending to study primates, and in fact he actually went to Africa as part of a team working to restore laboratory-raised chimpanzees to the wild. But he’d also taken my osteology course and had done quite well in it, so one day, when I needed someone to go with me on a forensic case, I went looking for an assistant, and Bill was the first qualified helper I found. He was washing grimy windows in one of our classrooms; because we were housed beneath the stadium’s concrete stands, a lot of dust and dirt swirled onto and into our quarters. Bill had a teaching assistantship, which sounded pretty highbrow, but the “assistantship” part included some lowbrow chores like washing windows.

“I need somebody to go out on a case with me,” I said. “Why don’t you finish that later?” Bill was only too happy to oblige.

It was a cold, snowy day. The body, which had been discovered by a road crew picking up trash alongside a country road, was partially covered with mud. The skull lay ten feet or so away from the rest of the body; all the remains were largely skeletonized.

I asked Bill—as I always asked my students—to tell me what he made of the scene. He correctly identified the skull as a white male’s; he also quickly determined that the man had been shot in the head. Then he pointed out what looked to be additional perimortem trauma to the skull and commented on the shallow burial.

His last two observations were logical but wrong. The marks he interpreted as trauma inflicted around the time of death were actually postmortem: they were tooth marks left by rodents (rats, probably) that had dragged off the skull and gnawed off bits of flesh. What appeared to be a shallow grave was actually an illusion: the body lay in a shallow creek bed that was dry when we were there; during rainy spells, though, muddy water had gradually deposited a thin layer of silt around and on top of the body.

The skull bore a couple of other interesting clues as well. The location of the gunshot entry wound—just behind the right ear, with a fracture pattern suggesting that the barrel of the gun had been pressed against the skull—marked this as an execution-style killing. One of the zygomatic bones, or cheekbones, was deformed in a way I’d seen several times before. It had been broken, probably in a bar fight—and probably by a pool cue, judging by what I’d learned about several prior victims who had almost the exact same pattern of trauma and healing. His teeth had several unfilled cavities and lots of chewing-tobacco stains, so clearly he was not exactly from the upper crust.

As we excavated, we noticed numerous pupal casings in and around the remains; that told me that—like those Arikara Indians whose graves had first gotten me thinking about insects—he’d been killed during warm weather. The vines and roots growing under parts of the body tended to confirm that as well.

The police never managed to solve that particular murder, but the case did have one happy ending: it got Bill Rodriguez hooked on forensics. Primatology lost a promising young scientist that cold, snowy day. Not long after that, Bill helped clear the ground, level the gravel pad, and pour the concrete for the new Anthropology Research Facility. A few months later he helped me set out our first research subject, corpse 1-81. By then Bill had settled on his thesis topic. H. B. Reed had chronicled insect activity in dog carcasses. Bill would do the same thing with human corpses, beginning with 1-81.

THE INSECT STUDY was not a pleasant project. Besides 1-81, we’d brought over a decomposing body from the sow barn; in addition, over the next few months, we acquired another couple of bodies.

Bill put the bodies up on wire racks, so he could observe