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

I could see why they might have doubted Matt’s story about the goat bones. I sure didn’t believe it: after forty years of studying human skeletons, I knew a human femur when I saw one sticking up out of a burn barrel. This particular femur was badly burned—its fractured surface and grayish-white color told me it had been burned for a long time in a hot fire—but it was unmistakably human.

The barrel wasn’t the only place where a lot of burning had occurred. A few feet to one side lay a mattress; once upon a time it had been a mattress, anyhow. Now it was a debris field of bent and blackened springs interspersed with charred tin cans, batteries, broken dishes, and other household trash. Leaning down for a closer look, I spotted what looked to be tiny fragments of burned bone nestled among the debris. We were going to have our work cut out for us. It was already late afternoon by now; we had about three more hours of daylight in which to excavate and recover bone fragments scattered over a large and complex site.

Joanne and Lauren unloaded our gear from the truck: shovels and trowels for digging; wire-mesh screens for sifting rubble; cameras, calipers, and specimen bags. The rubble was strewn over a fairly big area, about eleven feet long by five or six feet wide. To help us keep track of what we found and where we found it, I used surveyor’s flagging tape to divide the area into a grid of twelve equal rectangles.

Joanne worked the grid on one side, and Lauren worked the other. Meanwhile, I excavated the barrel, pausing every so often to check on the women’s progress. As they worked their way along the mattress grid, it soon became apparent that the body had been burned on the mattress initially, as the fragments there were arranged roughly in anatomical order. Portions that had resisted burning were then transferred to the barrel for additional burning. Most people don’t realize how hard it is to consume a body by fire. It sounds like an easy way to get rid of a murder victim, but it’s not.

The burn barrel contained a wealth of skeletal material besides the femur I’d first spotted. The femur (it was the left one), while extensively burned, was still relatively intact. Not so most of the other bones in the barrel: most were gray, brittle shards, which I had to handle carefully to avoid breaking. Laying the barrel on its side, I stuck my head in and carefully sorted through its contents, looking for bone. I found plenty, all of it fragmentary: parts of a scapula, a tibia, other long bones, most of the sacrum, and a number of vertebrae. Some of the vertebrae had fallen to the bottom of the barrel and escaped the fire’s worse effects; lightly charred, they still had bits of soft tissue on them. A large piece of a cranium was down in the bottom as well, also not as badly burned as the other bones. Scattered on the ground around the base of the barrel were still more bones: additional long-bone fragments, pieces of the sacrum and sacroiliac joint, fragments from ribs and vertebrae, a toe bone, and two more pieces of the skull.

As I was excavating the barrel, Joanne and Lauren were methodically working their way across the twelve rectangles of the mattress-area grid. First they did a visual scan of the surface, where they found numerous bone fragments. Then, once they’d plucked out every bone they could see, they began to screen all the other ashy material, all the way down to bare earth. Three of the grid’s twelve rectangles contained trash but no bones; the other nine yielded bone fragments by the thousands. By the time we finished excavating the scene, darkness was falling. Over the course of three hours we’d filled thirty-two paper evidence bags (each about the size of a lunch sack) with bone fragments.

We headed back to Knoxville. Matt Rogers headed off to the Union County jail, where he was charged with first-degree murder.

SOME MEN will do anything to be rid of their wives. I, on the other hand, would have done anything to hang on to Annette.

It took us completely by surprise. On New Year’s Eve of 1996, Annette had noticed a couple of swollen lymph nodes along her collarbone. Bright and early January 2, she was at the doctor’s office. They took X rays, and the picture was stunning and grim: lung cancer, already at Stage Four. A round of radiation, and the tumor went away.

Just five months later, though, Annette went away too. She awoke one morning struggling to breathe. I called an ambulance. On the way to the hospital, her heart stopped. They revived her; it stopped again. The cancer had come roaring back with a vengeance. Even as the ambulance came racing up to the ER entrance, Annette was dying. By the time I got there—a minute or two behind the ambulance, no more—she was gone.

All my life I’d been a believing Christian. I wasn’t without doubts—what thinking person ever is?—but still I had trusted in the existence of a loving God. I’d grown up in the church; I’d taught Sunday school for years; I’d taken youth groups to Mexico for summer mission projects. But that instant in the ER—the instant Annette died—I seemed to feel my religious faith die, too.

As I thought more about it in the bleak days and weeks that followed, I decided the Bible had gotten it exactly backward. Maybe God hadn’t created us in His image; maybe we’d created God in our image. A Greek philosopher had reached the same conclusion some 2,500 years ago: “The Ethiopians say that their gods are snubnosed and black,” wrote Xenophanes, “the Thracians that theirs have light blue eyes and red hair. . . . If cattle and horses or lions had hands, or were able to draw with their hands, and do the works