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

CHAPTER 17

The Not-So-Accidental Tourist

DEATH AND CRIME know no boundaries, and the bones of the dead speak a universal language, whether they’re found in Knoxville, New York, or Old Mexico.

A hundred miles south of San Antonio, Texas, lies Monterrey, Mexico, a city of some three million people. The capital of the Mexican state of Nuevo León, Monterrey, is a bustling industrial center that could easily pass for an American city, except for the abundance of Spanish and the scarcity of pale skin.

On January 17, 1999, my own pale skin—I am a reluctant and nervous air traveler—arrived at Monterrey International Airport. I had traveled to Mexico to meet an insurance investigator named John Gibson and, with any luck, to answer a $7 million question.

Inside the chain-link fence of a police impound lot in Guadalupe, a suburb on the eastern edge of Monterrey, sat the ruined shell of a Chevy Suburban. Six months before, in July of 1998, the Suburban had burned with enough heat to reduce a man’s body to a few handfuls of charred bone fragments.

As with so many other cases, this one began with a phone call from a stymied investigator. Gibson, based in San Antonio, had been hired by a large insurance company, Kemper Life, to look into the death of one of its policyholders. Gibson had already seen the vehicle and what little was left of the person inside. Now he and Kemper Life needed my help in identifying the remains.

Gibson met me at the airport and drove us to the Sheraton Ambassador, a gleaming tower of black glass that would have looked equally at home in Los Angeles or Tucson. Over an early dinner in the hotel restaurant, Gibson filled me in on the details of the case.

The policyholder was an American named Madison Rutherford, a thirty-four-year-old financial adviser from Connecticut. Rutherford and his wife, Rhynie, owned a colonial farmhouse on five acres outside Danbury. They shared their wooded estate with a menagerie of dogs, cats, and chickens. Rhynie was the sole beneficiary of his life insurance.

In my line of work, I’m often reminded of the huge range in the value assigned to different people’s lives—and their deaths. Death finds some people so poor, so alone, and so dispossessed that their bodies lie unclaimed in morgues until a county medical examiner or coroner buries them in paupers’ graves. Others—blessed with a loving family, social prominence, or hefty insurance—go out in a blaze of grief, glory, and gold. Most of us fall somewhere in the middle. The last time somebody asked me, I couldn’t even remember whether I had any life insurance; my wife, Carol, had to remind me that I do. It’s a fairly modest amount, though; I’m not worth much dead, and I’m certainly not worth killing.

Madison Rutherford, on the other hand, was worth a fortune dead: a whopping $7 million—$4 million of it through Kemper Life, $3 million more through another company, CNA. Some people would certainly consider him worth killing.

Rutherford and a friend had arrived in Monterrey around July 10, reportedly en route to a dog breeder in Reynosa, a city one hundred miles to the east. There, Rutherford planned to buy an exotic Brazilian dog, a variety of mastiff called a Fila. Rutherford bought a bicycle in Monterrey—a gift, he said, for the dog breeder—and loaded it into the vehicle.

On the night of July 11, Rutherford left his friend at their hotel—the same Sheraton where Gibson and I were now staying—and set out for Reynosa. In the predawn hours of July 12, on the way back into Monterrey, his rented Suburban left the freeway, struck an embankment, and went up in flames. Police and firefighters raced to the scene, but they could do little to fight the intense fire. When it finally subsided, they looked inside and saw nothing—and no one—inside.

Later that morning the police contacted the car rental agency. The agency in turn contacted Rutherford’s friend, a retired Connecticut state trooper named Thomas Pietrini. Pietrini asked to accompany the rental agency employee to the impound lot in Guadalupe where the burned Suburban had been taken.

Once there, Pietrini leaned into the passenger compartment, poked around in the charred debris on the floorboards, and emerged with a blackened wristwatch. On the back of the watch was a sooty inscription: To Madison—Love, Rhynie. A bit more searching turned up a medical alert bracelet, which warned that the wearer, Madison Rutherford, was allergic to penicillin. Pietrini also found bones—or, more precisely, fragments of incinerated bones. I wondered if there would be anything left in the vehicle for me to find.

ON MONDAY, the day after my arrival, Gibson drove me out to the impound lot in Guadalupe. Over the past thirty years, I’ve excavated dozens of burned vehicles, but I’ve never worked one so thoroughly consumed by fire. The glass was gone. The paint—originally dark blue, I think—had blistered off completely, leaving only rusting steel. One corner of the roof had partially melted and collapsed. Inside, virtually nothing but metal had survived: seat frames and coiled springs, the vehicle’s own charred skeleton. Seeing the damage confirmed what I had already suspected from Gibson’s description of the bones: this had been an incredibly intense fire.

It takes a lot of heat to incinerate a body: After all, by weight, we’re mostly water, so getting a body to burn is like starting a fire with soggy wood. But once it finally catches, the human body can burn surprisingly well. One reason is the carbon we contain. The other is the fat we carry.

Several years ago, one of our forensic graduate students studied factors that contribute to cases of “spontaneous combustion”—people whose bodies ignite and burn up. These combustions are actually far from spontaneous, of course. It takes both an ignition source (for example, a smoldering cigarette) and an external fuel source (say, a mattress