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

and had entered my life; they were companions who would never abandon me. Besides, at work, I knew, it wouldn’t be long before someone would call me with an interesting case. So when the phone rang on this quiet summer day, I reached for it eagerly.

At the other end of the line was my secretary, Donna, whose office lay, literally, a football field away from my private sanctuary, tucked deep beneath the stadium’s east stands. She was transferring a call, she said, from Corporal James J. Kelleher of the New Hampshire State Police.

“Hello, this is Dr. Bass,” I said. Corporal Kelleher introduced himself. He worked in the major crimes unit, he explained, and was the lead investigator on a case he believed might involve a homicide. He had read about me in Bones, a book written by Doug Ubelaker, a former student, who was now a staff anthropologist at the Smithsonian Institution. (One of the things that thrills me when I look back on my career is the fact that three of the Smithsonian’s physical anthropologists—Ubelaker, Doug Owsley, and Dave Hunt—got their Ph.D.s from me, and I served on the doctoral committee for a fourth, Don Ortner.)

As Kelleher outlined the case, I began to take notes. A few handfuls of burned bone fragments had been found in a yard in Alexandria, he said, a tiny hamlet in the center of the state. The medical examiner thought they were dog bones, but Kelleher suspected they were human. If he was right—if the bones were indeed human—he needed a positive identification of the dead person; if possible, he also needed to know the manner of death. Kelleher asked whether I could help. “I believe I can,” I said. “I can sure try.”

Six days later, a well-wrapped FedEx package arrived; inside the layers of paper and bubble wrap was a box containing bone fragments—hundreds of them—burned to a crisp. By this time I’d examined dozens of burned bodies and thousands of burned bones; they’d been sifted and plucked from burned-up cars, burned-down houses, even a “blowed-up” fireworks factory, as some of the locals would say. But except for bones from commercial crematoriums, I had never seen bones so completely burned as these.

Nearly every forensic case represents a scientific jigsaw puzzle, figuratively speaking. This one was a puzzle in the most literal way you can imagine. All told, the package contained 475 individual bone fragments, many of them no bigger than a pea. Piecing together even an approximation of a partial human skeleton would take days of tedious puzzle work.

I took the package down to the bone lab, in the basement of the stadium, where there was plenty of work space, good light from a wall of windows, and a stout lock on the door to protect the chain of custody. Clearing off one of the long tables near the windows, I unrolled a long piece of brown wrapping paper and taped it down. With a felt-tip marker, I wrote the names of the main sections of the body—skull, arms, ribs, vertebrae, pelvis, and legs—in their normal anatomical positions, more or less. Sorting the pieces into related piles would make it easier to start piecing together the charred rubble that had once been a human being.

Over the next few days I worked to reconstruct the life-size puzzle. The work was demanding, tedious, and baffling: exactly the kind of scientific challenge I’ve always liked best. Some pieces were fairly easy. There were four fragments from the right femur; remnants of both kneecaps; dozens of pieces of ribs; and three partial vertebrae. But all too soon I’d pulled out and placed every one of the big, easy pieces; all that remained were tiny, difficult pieces, and hundreds of them. A challenge, I reminded myself. You always say you like a challenge. Be careful what you wish for.

The pieces seemed to come from every major area of the body—all but one, I gradually realized: out of the 475 fragments, I couldn’t find a single piece from the skull. That’s not to say there wasn’t one; more than half the fragments were so small and featureless that I couldn’t tell what bone they came from. Still, the empty space at the top of my brown-paper chart seemed more than random coincidence. Worse, it meant I wouldn’t be able to shed much light on who this was and how he or she had died.

Ten head-scratching days later, FedEx brought me another package from Jim Kelleher, smaller than the first but equally well wrapped. This one contained a large, relatively unburned piece of bone, easily recognizable as the mid-shaft of a left human femur; a glass vial containing more than five dozen small bone fragments; and one other bone, unburned but covered with tooth marks. Dogs, probably, had chewed off the upper end; the lower end had been broken off. Unlike all the other fragments, this bone was clearly nonhuman. I headed down the hall to consult one of my colleagues, a zoological archaeologist named Walter Klippel. Walter instantly recognized it as a tibia from the left hind leg of a white-tailed deer.

According to Kelleher, the first batch of burned fragments had been found on July 2, in a household pit used to burn brush and trash; the second set was discovered on July 22, scattered alongside a trail leading into the woods behind the house.

Unfortunately, I still didn’t have a skull or teeth to work with; that meant I would probably not be able to make a positive identification from these remains. With a bit of good luck, there might be a healed fracture or some other distinctive feature on the bones that could be matched to someone’s antemortem X rays. In this case, though, good luck seemed not to be in the cards.

Still, there was enough detail in the bones—burned and fragmented though they were—to help narrow things down quite a bit for Kelleher. One relatively intact piece of bone was the unburned head of the humerus, the