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

study. Unlike many dismemberment cases, these bones showed virtually no traces of false starts, hesitation marks, or interrupted cuts. The tool marks indicated that the bones had been sliced or shaved decisively, sharply, and forcefully. The cuts were made not by a sawing motion but by a chopping motion, and they were made with enough force to cut through some of the bones with a single blow. The blade was sharp enough to shave off thin sections of bone in spots—for example, a slice from the body of one of the vertebrae—yet heavy enough to cut through such large structures as the hipbones and the femora.

Steve and I were both puzzled by the case. The marks on the cut faces of the bones were odd too. They indicated a blade that was curved; however, that in itself wasn’t the odd part: many common garden tools have curved blades. Whatever this implement was, though, it had a tighter curve to the edge than any ax or shovel we’d ever seen. If the curve or arc of the edge were extended to form a complete circle, that circle would have measured less than three inches in diameter. Considering the great force required to shear the bones, we wondered if the tool might have been a posthole digger chopping downward with a man’s full weight behind it—but the edges of a postholer weren’t that curved, either.

We spent all Saturday morning and half the afternoon studying and restudying the cut marks, considering and rejecting different tools as the implement of dismemberment. Then, in late afternoon, there was a knock at the cabin door. When I opened it, I found myself face-to-face with a park ranger. Uh-oh, I thought, this means trouble. Using my body as a screen, I tried to block the ranger’s view of the bones spread all over the dining-room table.

The ranger’s visit did mean trouble, though not because we were using the cabin as a forensic laboratory. I’d gotten a phone call from Knoxville, said the ranger, and it sounded urgent. Leaving Steve with the bones, I hurried up to the lodge. The call was from Dot Weaver, a friend who was caring for my ninety-five-year-old mother; when I returned the call, she told me that Mom had just suffered a series of small strokes and had been taken to the hospital.

I told Steve we needed to cut our work short. There wasn’t that much more he could tell me anyway, he said. We took one last look at Sheilah Anderson’s ravaged remains, hoping that Janice Rundles, the New Hampshire prosecutor, wouldn’t have to depend solely on our meager findings to cinch the case against Jim Anderson. Luckily, she didn’t: just before the case came to trial, Anderson—once one of New York City’s Finest—pleaded guilty to murdering his wife. Shortly after he was imprisoned, he took a guard hostage, held him for several hours, and beat him severely. Maybe someday he’ll say what it was he used to chop up his wife’s body.

My weekend rendezvous with Steve hadn’t been quite as satisfying as I’d hoped it would be, but that’s the way some cases go: All you can do is look at the evidence and listen to the bones. The bones don’t always tell you the whole story, but when they do, the tale can be both horrifying and hypnotizing.

Steve found that out firsthand from a victim named Leslie Mahaffey. . . .

I FIRST MET STEVE a quarter-century ago, out in the boonies of western South Dakota. He was a scrawny twenty-four-year-old with a B.A. in anthropology; after graduation he’d gotten a job cataloging bones for Bob Alex, South Dakota’s state archaeologist. Steve’s main task was to sort and catalog thousands of Sioux and Arikara Indian bones from the W. H. Over Collection, assembled by a self-taught South Dakota archaeologist during the late 1800s and early 1900s.

In 1978, in one of the first large-scale repatriations of Native American remains, Bob Alex persuaded the government of South Dakota to return the bones in the Over Collection to the Arikara and Sioux tribes for reburial. Before giving the bones back, though, he offered to let me study them a while.

The collection was housed in a former military hospital northwest of Rapid City. Late in the spring of 1978, I arrived from Knoxville in a Ford station wagon, towing a U-Haul trailer that would carry the collection back to Tennessee. Steve had been under the gun to complete his inventory and box up the bones before I got there. On his desk I saw an open and well-thumbed copy of my guidebook to bones, Human Osteology: A Laboratory and Field Manual. (Since it came out in 1971, the book has gone through twenty-three printings and sold somewhere around seventy-five thousand copies, making it something of a blockbuster among textbooks, I’m proud to say.)

We howdied and shook hands. “I see you’re using my book,” I said.

“Well, I tried some others,” he said, “but this is the only one that’s actually helpful in identifying some of the more difficult bones.”

Clearly this was an exceptionally bright young man. Quite possibly a genius.

Within ten minutes of meeting Steve, I realized—and not just because I was flattered by his comment—that he had the makings of an exceptional anthropologist. He was knowledgeable and curious, but clearly mature, disciplined, and steady, too—a combination far less common in would-be professors than you might think. Unlike a lot of today’s students, he hadn’t swallowed some romanticized image of anthropology from TV shows or Hollywood movies. He knew it took a lot of hard work, and he seemed more than willing to get dirt under his fingernails. By the time we finished loading up the U-Haul, I’d convinced Steve that he should go to graduate school, and I’d made a pretty strong case for Tennessee as the place to do it. There was one minor problem with that plan, though. Our graduate slots for the coming fall were already filled.

Four months later, Steve showed up in Knoxville