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

1993, Mike drove them to the cabin and dropped them off. The young couple was having marital problems, they told relatives, and needed some privacy to work things out. They would have plenty of privacy in Summit, all right: Besides the main highway bisecting it, the town has only a few paved streets, and the sidewalks get rolled up at sunset. The cabin didn’t even have a telephone.

Mike drove back to Summit twice in November to see if they were ready to go home. But both times he found the cabin dark and locked, and he’d forgotten to bring his spare key with him. On his second visit, he reported, a neighbor said the Perrys had gotten into a rusty brown van and driven away with two men who looked suspicious, like drug dealers. Nobody had seen them since. Finally, on December 16, he returned again, this time with a duplicate key. Entering the cabin, he found Darryl and Annie lying dead on the living-room floor and Krystal’s body sprawled on a bed.

Mike went to the nearest phone—at a convenience store a quarter-mile down the road—and called the Pike County Sheriff’s Department. When a deputy arrived, he found Mike out back, behind the cabin. “They’re in there,” he told the deputy. “They’re dead. Their eyes are gone.”

Right after the deputy came a Mississippi Highway Patrol officer named Allen Applewhite, who would become the lead investigator in the case. Applewhite was shocked by what he saw in the cabin. The bodies were badly decomposed, and the stench of rotting flesh was overpowering. The corpses of Darryl and Annie were bloated and soaked with blood. Krystal was lying on her back, naked, her face and genitals already consumed by maggots. Applewhite had two daughters himself. He was haunted by the image of this young girl, slaughtered for no apparent reason.

But it didn’t take him long to find a possible reason—and a shocking suspect. Twenty-four hours after his 911 call to police, Michael Rubenstein filed a life-insurance claim for a quarter of a million dollars. The person insured was Krystal, Mike Rubenstein’s four-year-old granddaughter.

When he learned of the policy, Applewhite wasted no time getting a copy of it. Mike and Doris had taken out the $250,000 policy in September of 1991, when Krystal was two years old. As he scanned the fine print on the policy, Applewhite read something that made his blood run cold. The policy had a two-year waiting period for benefits. Barely three months after the policy’s death benefit could be collected, Krystal was dead. As any good detective will tell you, when there’s money involved in a crime, you follow the trail of money. That trail, short and straight, led to Michael and Doris Rubenstein.

It seemed unlikely that a woman would be involved in the killing of her own son and granddaughter. But the police had to consider that possibility. What Applewhite learned about Doris Rubenstein didn’t fit with the image of a cold-blooded killer. Doris wasn’t a particularly admirable specimen of motherly love and grandmotherly nurture. Her main love seemed to be alcohol and pills. Often she seemed woozy, drunk, or drugged—a woman who was incompetent, maybe even pathetic, yet probably not a menace to anyone except herself.

But as the state trooper investigated Doris’s husband, Michael, a far different picture emerged: a picture of a man who was competent, shrewd, and deadly. Rubenstein had a long history of insurance fraud, including suspicious fire-insurance claims, staged automobile accidents, and faked injuries involving a large cast of characters. One chilling case years before unfolded in front of a twelve-year-old boy named Darryl Perry, the son of Rubenstein’s girlfriend at the time, Doris Perry.

The year was 1979. Rubenstein had just taken on a new business partner named Harold Connor. The two men first met when Rubenstein contacted the local unemployment office, asking for the names of job-seekers who might like to help him produce and distribute a tabloid listing local television schedules. Because he would teach Connor the ropes—and because he was taking a chance by hiring an inexperienced partner—he demanded that Connor take out a life-insurance policy naming Rubenstein as the beneficiary. The value placed on Connor’s life was $240,000.

The policy was issued in August of 1979. Three months later Rubenstein invited Connor on a deer-hunting trip. Connor declined: He had never been hunting before, and had even told relatives he hated the idea of killing animals. But Rubenstein insisted. To keep peace with his new partner, Connor finally agreed to go. On a cold November morning, they drove to Evangeline Parish, Louisiana, parked on Lone Pine Road, and hiked into the woods. Also on the hunt were another of Doris’s sons, David Perry; a man named Michael Fornier, who had recently been paroled from federal prison; and young Darryl.

Connor returned from his first and only hunting trip in a body bag. The story told by Rubenstein and the others painted a classic picture of a tragic hunting accident: As Fornier clambered over a fallen log, his 12-gauge shotgun slipped from his grasp. When the butt of the gun hit the ground, it discharged. Connor, who was directly in front of Fornier, was hit squarely in the back. The blast ripped through his chest and shredded his heart.

Rubenstein told the story to game wardens and then to the police; then he told it to a claims representative for Mutual of New York, which had issued the $240,000 policy. But the insurance company delivered some bad news to Rubenstein: the death benefit wasn’t in effect yet. Like many life-insurance policies, this one had a two-year waiting period. Connor’s death had jumped the gun, so to speak, by twenty-one months.

Rubenstein responded by suing Mutual of New York, claiming he had not been informed of the waiting period. When the lawsuit came to trial, the insurance company put an expert witness on the stand, a Texas forensic pathologist named Dr. Ronald Singer, who was a specialist in ballistics. Pointing to the angle of