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

additional experiments with “green” bone, fresh bone still covered in flesh. Those experiments suggested that burning fresh bodies creates markedly different fracture patterns: green bone tends to warp when it burns, and its transverse fractures curve or even spiral rather than simply encircling the shaft.

As Joanne and I studied the burned fragments from Matt Rogers’s backyard, we compared them to both her experimental specimens and the photos of green bone burned in her later experiments. We were startled to notice that the bones from Matt Rogers’s yard weren’t warped, and their transverse fractures didn’t curve or spiral. Instead, the fracture pattern in case 97-23 bore a striking resemblance to Joanne’s thesis samples—that is, to bones that were defleshed and dry when they were burned. Joanne and I both came to an unexpected but inescapable conclusion: The body had decomposed before it was burned. But how had it decomposed so quickly, and where? Those questions nagged at me.

I wrote up our findings, sending copies of the report to TBI Agent Daniels, the sheriff’s investigators, and the local district attorney. It wasn’t long before I got an answer to my nagging questions. A day after Matt Rogers was arrested, Daniels took a statement from a friend of Matt and Patty Rogers. The friend, named Chris Walker, told Daniels he’d taken a ride in Matt Rogers’s car about a week after Patty’s disappearance. The car smelled terrible, Walker said—the smell of something dead. When he asked about the smell, Matt told him that Patty’s pet turtle had gotten lost in the car and died. The smell was so bad, according to Walker, that he had to hang his head out of the car’s window to breathe—an amazing amount of odor from one small turtle.

A few days after his smelly ride in the car, Walker told the TBI agent, he saw the vehicle being towed out of town, in the direction of Knoxville. When he got home, he called a number of wrecker services in Knoxville in an effort to find out where the car had been taken, but he had no luck.

In light of Walker’s statement, our findings made perfect sense. The fracture patterns in the bones were exactly what I’d have expected to see, had I known the body was locked in the trunk of a car in the July heat for a week or two. Temperatures in the trunk of a dark car (this one was a blue Buick Regal) can reach well over 100 degrees Fahrenheit for the better part of a summer’s day. A week or so of that kind of heat would greatly accelerate decomposition; it would also stink up the car pretty bad, as Chris Walker had noticed.

Walker wasn’t the only one who tried to find the missing car. After taking his statement, both the TBI and the Union County sheriff’s investigators tried to locate it, but in vain. Rumor had it that the car had been taken to a Knoxville scrap yard, sold for a few dollars, and swiftly shredded. I’ve always regretted not getting a chance to examine the car; there’s no doubt in my mind that my former student Arpad Vass, forensic chemist par excellence, would have been able to take a smear sample of volatile fatty acids and prove that a body had decomposed in the vehicle’s trunk.

THE BODY that had probably decomposed in the car—the body that had definitely burned in the yard—was indeed that of Patty Rogers. The bone sample we sent off for testing yielded enough DNA to be reverse-matched to samples from Patty’s parents.

At a preliminary hearing, Matt Rogers pleaded not guilty to the charge of first-degree murder in the death of his wife Patty. But on the eve of his trial he took a hard look at the forensic evidence against him. Our report detailed the gunshot wound to the head, the period of decomposition, the removal of the face and teeth, and the otherwise nearly complete skeletal reconstruction. If he stood trial and was found guilty, he could be sentenced to life without parole.

On December 19, 1997, five months after Patty’s charred bones were salvaged from a burn barrel and trash pit in the yard of her house, Matt Rogers pleaded guilty to second-degree murder. He was sentenced to twenty-five years in prison.

In life, Patty Rogers had been an unhappy, troubled woman. At one point she was a crack addict, though she claimed to have broken the habit. She’d seriously considered suicide. But in a letter she sent to a friend just two weeks before she disappeared, she wrote that she’d gained some much-needed weight and gotten her teeth fixed. “One day I’m gonna surprise a lot of people,” she continued. “I’m gonna make you all proud.” Chillingly, the letter contained this request, too: “If God takes me one day, I want you to promise me that you’ll see about my kids.” I’ve been told that Patty’s daughters are being raised by their father, Patty’s first husband, in Florida.

Matt, meanwhile, is serving his time, and I expect it’s pretty hard time. He’s in Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary, a grim, stone fortress of a prison built a century ago at the base of a forbidding cliff. Brushy Mountain is famous for being escapeproof. Only one prisoner ever came close—James Earl Ray, the man convicted of killing Martin Luther King Jr.—and by the time the bloodhounds and the guards caught up with Ray in the cold, brutal mountains surrounding Brushy, he seemed grateful to be found.

I wouldn’t presume to say that Patty Rogers, murdered and burned by her husband, was somehow posthumously grateful to be found. But as a forensic scientist, I was grateful to have had a hand in finding her, a hand in identifying her, a hand in securing for her at least some modest measure of justice. Her story turned out not to be quite as fragmentary as I’d feared it would be. The ending wasn’t happy, not by any stretch of the imagination. Grimly satisfying,