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

in hopes they would be less likely to have been swayed by Knoxville’s extensive news coverage of the case.

An initial pool of 340 potential jurors was called, then narrowed down to 60. Some prospective jurors were desperate to be released from jury duty; others were equally eager to serve. District Attorney Randy Nichols had indicated he would seek the death penalty, so jurors who said they were unequivocally opposed to the death penalty were excused. After a couple weeks of interviews in Nashville by the prosecution and the defense, twelve jurors and four alternates were told to pack their bags, then bused to Knoxville. For the next two weeks they would spend their days in the courtroom and their nights in an undisclosed hotel.

On January 26, 1999, the Zoo Man murder trial finally got under way. The linchpin of the prosecution’s case was Huskey’s own confession, in which he described the murders in detail. But if the confession made it clear that Huskey—or “Kyle,” or whoever he called himself that day—had strangled the four women, the tape gave the defense some powerful ammunition as well. The trio of voices and names played back through the speakers made it easy to believe that Zoo Man really was crazy. To buttress the insanity defense, Moncier called witnesses ranging from a psychiatrist and a psychologist—both of whom agreed that Huskey suffered from multiple-personality disorder—to Knox County jail workers who testified that they’d talked with Huskey’s evil alter ego, “Kyle.” Curiously, Huskey’s mother denied any knowledge of “Kyle” or “Daxx.” Tom, she said, was just plain Tom: That’s all; there was nobody else in there.

The defense didn’t challenge my analysis of the scapula fracture. The hyoid, though, was another matter entirely. The electron micrographs clearly showed trauma to the bone, but Moncier disputed my conclusion that it indicated strangulation. He called his own expert witness, a pathologist from Atlanta—who was a physician, true, but who wasn’t board-certified. The pathologist ventured that maybe a deer had stepped on the hyoid and crunched it; Moncier pressed me as to whether that was possible. Well, hell, anything’s possible. It was possible a Martian spaceship had landed on it, but the only explanation that satisfied both forensic science and common sense was that the woman had been strangled.

The trial itself lasted for two weeks, then the jury began to deliberate. The deliberations dragged on for a day, two days, three. Eventually the jury sent out a note saying that they agreed that Huskey had killed three of the four women. As to the fourth murder, eleven of the twelve jurors were convinced of his guilt, but the twelfth juror thought it possible that the final murder had occurred after Huskey’s arrest on October 22. (Although Neal Haskell’s entomological analysis had put the murder around October 21 or 22, Moncier had hammered away at my offhand remark that Patricia Johnson might have been dead only “a couple of days.”) Despite arguments and pressure from the other eleven jurors, the twelfth continued to hold out.

But in the end, the real stumbling block wasn’t Huskey’s guilt or innocence; the real stumbling block was his sanity. By the fourth day of deliberations the twelve jurors had divided into three immovable groups: Five believed that Huskey was sane and should be held accountable for the murders; four believed he was insane; the other three couldn’t make up their minds. Finally, on the fifth day, they sent the judge a note saying they were hopelessly deadlocked.

After six years, half a million dollars, and thousands of hours of investigative work and legal wrangling, Judge Richard Baumgardner declared a mistrial. For the police, prosecutors, and victims’ families, it was a bitter blow. But worse was still to come. In July of 2002, Judge Baumgardner—ruling on yet another defense motion—agreed to bar the use of Huskey’s confessions. Twice during his interrogation—the day of his arrest and again a week later—Huskey had asked for a lawyer, but investigators with the Knox County Sheriff’s Department and the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation continued to question him.

As of this writing, Tom Huskey’s retrial on the four murder charges has been postponed—again—and an appeals court has reversed some of his earlier rape and kidnapping convictions and lowered his sentence to forty-four years. Legal insiders say the murder cases might be dropped altogether, if the confessions can’t be used as evidence. The wheels of justice turn slowly, it seems . . . and sometimes they stop altogether or even spin backward. On the other hand, the man who confessed to killing four women remains behind bars, for the moment at least, and is scheduled to remain there another forty years. And the only bodies to emerge from the woods at the end of Cahaba Lane, during these ten years Huskey has been behind bars, have been a few bushy-tailed squirrels. Out on Magnolia Avenue, though, a new generation of women is working the streets again. Turnover’s high out there. I wonder how many of them have even heard of Zoo Man. I wonder if they realize how vulnerable they are. I wonder, even if they do, if they can do a damn thing about it.

CHAPTER 13

Parts Unknown

THE PHONE RANG, startlingly loud in the silence. It was July, and the university was practically a ghost town. The hallways were dim and deserted in the depths beneath Neyland Stadium. Most of the students and faculty had vanished in late May and wouldn’t reappear until late August. Understandably, they seized any opportunity to get out of the depths of the stadium. I, on the other hand, was spending nearly every waking moment down in my dark, dusty office. It had been months since Ann died, but I still couldn’t bear the emptiness of our house. At work, by contrast, I was surrounded by people. Most of them were dead, mind you, but they were comforting all the same. They had shared their stories with me