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

Lisa Rinker had indeed been stabbed. Bill found a total of seven knife marks—several in different parts of the chest cavity (the ribs and sternum), plus defensive wounds on both hands. The knife marks were made by a thin-bladed knife, Bill’s examination found. According to police, Danny Heath often wore a large pocketknife in a sheath on his belt, but they say after Lisa’s murder, he stopped wearing it. The cause of death on Lisa’s death certificate was changed: Undetermined was struck through, and Homicide put in its place.

Sadly, Lisa’s killer remains at large. Despite the skeletal proof Bill found showing that Lisa had been murdered, and despite the lingering questions surrounding Bernie Woody and Danny Heath, the Fairfax County Commonwealth Attorney remains unwilling to prosecute the case.

Anthropologists and insects can reveal the truth about a crime, but they can’t force the wheels of bureaucracy to turn, and they can’t guarantee that justice will be done. All they can do is serve as a voice for victims, and hope that voice is heard.

CHAPTER 9

Progress and Protest

ON MAY 15, 1981, when we laid my first research subject at the Body Farm, corpse 1-81, in the sixteen-foot-square chain-link enclosure that was the Anthropology Research Facility, the daytime high was just 58 degrees. Over the next few days, though, temperatures shot up into the eighties. A couple of months earlier and we might as well have put him in a meat locker, but once the hot weather hit, the changes were swift and dramatic. Within days the flesh of the face was nearly gone, consumed by the maggots hatching in the mouth, nose, eyes, and ears. Bill Rodriguez was carefully charting the insect activity, but the changes in the body itself, and their timing, were fascinating—and gruesome.

There are four broad stages in a body’s decomposition: the fresh stage, the bloated stage, the decay stage, and the dry stage. Some scientists tend to split these into finer gradations, but I try not to get bogged down by definitions. (There are two kinds of observers in science: splitters and lumpers. I’ve never been much of a splitter; in my heart of hearts, I’m a lumper.)

In 1-81’s fresh stage, the body’s toothless upper jaw and yellow-toothed mandible stretched what was left of a face into a kind of grin. As the insects multiplied and fed, they soon left gaping eye sockets to stare at us blindly. The hair and skin retained their hold on the skull, but within days their grip was clearly beginning to slip.

By the end of the first week, the corpse began to bloat. As bacteria began to consume the stomach and intestines, the abdomen started inflating almost like a balloon from the waste gases of the microbes. Meanwhile, the skin began turning a rich, reddish brown. Fatty tissues began to break down beneath the skin, giving the corpse a glossy shine, almost as if it had been basted with a glaze and baked in an oven.

As the flesh turned the color of caramel, a network of purplish-crimson lines began to show through it, like a satellite map of a continent’s rivers. We were seeing the circulatory system, its veins and arteries highlighted as the blood within them began to putrefy, making them larger and darker, almost as if they’d been outlined on the body with a felt-tip marker.

The graduate students and I watched in utter fascination. As far as I knew, no scientist had ever done this before: deliberately set out a human body to decompose, then simply sat back and watched, taking systematic note of what happened and when. Many scientists—and even the artist Michelangelo—had studied bodies, but their focus was human anatomy; by dissecting the dead, they hoped to learn more about the flesh and bone of the living. My interest was death itself.

Two weeks into 1-81’s journey from fresh corpse to bare skeleton, his skull was bare bone. The hair had slid off in a mat, still held tenuously together by tangles and a bit of tissue. The hair mat lay in a dark, greasy pool of goo that surrounded the head. His bloated abdomen had collapsed, leaving his belly shrunken and clinging to the jutting rib cage, marking his transition from the bloated stage to the decay stage. Within another week, the ribs themselves—along with the vertebrae of the spine—were exposed. So were the bones of his pelvis, as the result of a vigorous insect assault on his genitals and the surrounding area.

His limbs had decomposed more slowly. Lacking the moist, dark openings of the face and pelvis, the arms and legs were less desirable territory to the insects colonizing the body. One dramatic and fascinating change had taken place at the hands and feet, though: About seven days into the process, the skin began to soften and slough off in large sheets, almost as if 1-81 had suffered a particularly severe sunburn and his skin were peeling. At first the sloughed-off skin was pale and pliable; amazingly, the ridges and whorls of the finger- and toe prints were still clearly visible, a fact I relayed to one of my friends at the Knoxville Police Department, Arthur Bohanan, who was KPD’s top fingerprint expert. Within a few days, though, the skin had dried and shriveled, almost as dead leaves do. But when Art took one of these shriveled husks back to his lab, he managed to moisten and uncurl it, coaxing 1-81’s identity once again from something an untrained investigator might well have discarded as leaf litter.

One month after his arrival, 1-81 was little more than a skeleton. Some leathery skin remained on his rib cage and skull, where the sun had dried or mummified it to the texture of leather; beneath it, though, all his soft tissue had been consumed by bacterial action and insects. I left his bones to bleach for four