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

I said to Art Bohanan, “She had a toothache when she died”; I thought the cotton indicated that a dentist was about to perform a root canal. As it turned out, the police later learned that she was self-medicating with a unique and desperate remedy for the pain: before inserting the cotton, she was soaking it with a paste of cocaine. Desperate times, desperate measures.

Once more, just as he had with Darlene Smith, Art Bohanan took the hand he was dealt and hit the jackpot. What little skin remained on the hand was waterlogged, decomposing, and incredibly fragile. Art soaked it in alcohol to toughen it up and draw out the water. (If he’d had the opposite problem—if the skin had been dry and stiff—he’d have soaked it in Downy fabric softener; I’m sure the makers of Downy would be pleased to know that their product makes even mummified human skin soft and fragrant.) He’d only been able to salvage one print from the ravaged hand, and it wasn’t even a fingerprint. All he could get was a partial palm print, from the edge of the palm just below the pinky finger.

It wasn’t much, but it was enough. That partial palm print matched a print on file at KPD: It belonged to Susan Stone, age thirty, height five feet nine inches. A prostitute and a cocaine addict, she’d started her downhill slide some seven years before, when she married a drug dealer. She’d worked some conventional jobs before becoming a hooker; in fact, just six months before she died, she was working as a clerk at a data-processing company. If she’d hung on to that job, she might have hung on to her life.

CATCHING A SERIAL KILLER is a mammoth job, requiring teamwork every step of the way. Identifying the murder victims, determining how and when they were killed, and following the trail of evidence to the Zoo Man’s door required the combined efforts of police investigators, a forensic pathologist, forensic anthropologists, a research scientist, and a forensic entomologist. This case is the best illustration I know of such teamwork. Bringing a serial killer to justice is an equally mammoth job, one that can drag on long past the point when someone is arrested and charged with the murders. This case is the best illustration I know of that, too. As my colleagues and I had labored to coax whatever evidence we could from the bodies of the murdered women, the police struggled to coax evidence from Tom Huskey.

Two weeks after his arrest, their efforts finally began to pay off, and in spectacular fashion. In a series of interviews, Huskey confessed to murdering the four women. As a tape recorder captured the lurid details, he told detectives how he shoved one body (Patty Anderson’s) under a mattress and took her necklace and earrings—items police found in his room when they arrested him. Huskey described his final victim as a black woman who was tall, thin, and “ugly.” She got scared, he said, and started having a seizure of some sort, flopping around “all over” the ground. His report was consistent with the physical description and medical history of Patricia Johnson, the recent transplant from Chattanooga whose body I had pronounced too fresh for me to examine.

It wasn’t long, though, before the tape-recorded sessions took a bizarre turn. When the taping began, Thomas Huskey was speaking softly, almost meekly. Soon, though, his voice changed dramatically: It grew loud, belligerent, profane—and it belonged to someone else, another personality it called “Kyle,” Huskey’s evil alter ego. “Kyle” bragged that it was he, not Thomas, who had committed the murders. Then came a third voice, cultured, with a British accent. This voice said to be “Phillip Daxx,” an Englishman born in South Africa, who said his role in the trio of personalities was to protect Tom from the evil Kyle. On one level, the case against Huskey appeared ironclad. But the bizarre claims of the various voices complicated the picture enormously. And Huskey had another powerful factor working on his behalf: the toughest defense lawyer I’ve ever seen. Herb Moncier was legendary in Tennessee for his aggressive tactics, his willingness to fight tooth and nail for his clients.

Moncier wasted no time before going on the offensive. Filing motion after motion, he sought to have Huskey’s confession thrown out; he sought a new venue, arguing that all the newspaper and television coverage made it impossible for Huskey to secure a fair trial in Knoxville; he moved to have Huskey declared mentally incompetent to stand trial; he demanded that the judge recuse himself from the case; he demanded more time, more psychiatric evaluations, more money for the defense.

Under the barrage of defense motions, the murder case ground to a halt. But I was too preoccupied to notice or care whether a jury sentenced Zoo Man Huskey to live or die. I was preoccupied with a far more urgent life-or-death struggle.

For decades I had worked closely with mortality. It was almost as if I donned some charmed cloak of immunity every time I strode cheerfully into the valley of the shadow of death. We had an arrangement, the Reaper and I: I would follow in his footsteps, and he would leave me alone. Our relationship was close but strictly professional. Then one day it turned personal. Unfortunately, it wasn’t me he was after. He reached for the person who had walked by my side for forty years.

IN THE FALL OF 1951, the Korean War battles of Bloody Ridge and Heartbreak Ridge loomed large in the minds of most young American men, including me. Fresh out of the University of Virginia, I was due to be drafted for military service. On November 15, I reported as ordered to the armed forces induction station in Martinsburg, West Virginia. I was one of about two hundred draftees processed that day. The sergeant handling our induction called out the first fifteen names on his list—it was alphabetical, so I was number