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

or five months, then gathered them up and brought them into the hospital morgue for “processing”—cleaning off the last vestiges of dried skin and cartilage. Then I measured the bones, recording the key dimensions: femoral length; femoral head diameter; cranial length, breadth, and height; the distance between the eye orbits; and a host of other data that would preserve the measure of the man.

The skeletal measurements were part of a larger plan that had been taking shape in my mind over the preceding months and years: to build the largest collection of skeletons—modern skeletons—in the United States. Several immense skeletal collections already existed. The Terry Collection, originally housed in Saint Louis at Washington University but later sent to the Smithsonian Institution, included more than 1,700 individual skeletons; the Smithsonian’s other collections, as I knew from personal experience, possessed far more, including thousands I had sent there during my summers excavating in South Dakota. But those bones were old, and for forensic purposes that made them obsolete.

In many ways we humans have taken ourselves out of the evolutionary loop. Take me, for example. I’m terribly nearsighted; my vision is about 20/200. If I’d lived ten thousand years ago, I wouldn’t have survived long enough to reproduce and pass along my myopia; squinting hard, I might have glimpsed the saber-toothed tiger about the time he opened up his jaws to chomp down on my neck. Today, fit or unfit for the rigors of “Nature, red in tooth and claw,” we survive and we breed. (Of my three sons, two—Jim and Charlie—inherited my nearsightedness; my middle son, Billy, somehow ended up with eyes sharp enough to qualify him as an Army helicopter pilot.)

But appearances notwithstanding, we continue to evolve, including our skeletons. A century ago the average white American male stood five feet seven inches tall; today he stands five feet nine inches. The average Arikara Indian female measured five feet three inches back in 1806, when Lewis and Clark glimpsed her standing on the bank of the Missouri River; today she’s two to three inches taller.

When an unknown crime victim is found—especially if police find only a few of the long bones—the only way to estimate stature accurately is to compare those long bones to the average dimensions of corresponding bones from individuals of known stature. And if the numbers being used for comparison are out of date, the estimation could be off by several inches. As a result, instead of searching for a missing male six feet tall, the police might mistakenly search for a missing male five feet nine. Data from 1-81 could help prevent such mistakes.

One other way in which 1-81 would continue to help us for years to come was as a teaching tool. Learning the size, shape, and feel of every bone in the human body is an enormous challenge for anthropology students. The only way to do it is to study actual bones—real ones, not plastic or plaster casts of them—for countless hours. In my osteology class every semester, the students used to dread the “black box” test: I’d put several bones inside a black box that had circular openings cut into the sides; to pass the test, a student would have to reach in and tell me, just by feeling them, what bones (or, if I was feeling merciless that day, what bone fragments) were in the black box. Even something as subtle as weight and texture can be crucially important. The skulls of blacks, for instance, are denser, heavier, and smoother than the skulls of whites; that’s one key reason there have been so few outstanding black Olympic swimmers: they have to work harder just to stay afloat. In a forensic case, if only part of a skull is found, knowing the difference in density and heft could help tell police whether the victim was white or black.

Our donated body, 1-81, had died of disease, but my plan was to build a skeletal collection that would include victims of trauma too. That way, when I lectured about antemortem and perimortem fractures, students could see how bones broken before death had healed, while bones fractured at the time of death didn’t. When I described gunshot entry wounds and exit wounds, students could see and feel how the entry fracture tends to bevel, or widen at an angle, as the bullet penetrates the skull; what lead spatter looks like on the inside of the cranium; how much larger an exit wound is and how it, too, bevels and widens in the direction of the bullet’s travel.

Much of our early research focused simply on observing and recording the basic progression and timing of decomposition. As Colonel Shy had made painfully clear, our understanding of postmortem processes was quite limited. The questions these studies hoped to answer were simple, but the answers would take years to piece together. Every variable made a difference: Was the body in sunlight or shade? Clothed or nude? Outdoors, or in a building—or a car? The passenger compartment or the trunk? On land or in water? One early experiment posed a deceptively simple question: How far away can the smell of death be detected by the human nose?

As usual, it was a real-world case that set me to thinking about that question. This one happened right in my own backyard—or almost. The backyard where it happened was only a few miles north of the anthropology department’s offices and labs, off a busy thoroughfare named Broadway. Technically it wasn’t a backyard but a vacant lot between a house and Broadway, covered with weeds, brush, trash, and piles of dirt. In the summer of 1976, the owner of one of the adjoining houses finally got tired of looking at the mess, so he called the property’s owner to complain. The owner obligingly hired a cleanup crew, which brought over a tractor equipped with a front-end loader to scoop up the trash and brush.

Several hours and truckloads of debris later, as they got close to the