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

the entry and exit wounds, Dr. Singer said there was no way the shotgun could have fired when the butt struck the ground. According to Singer, the gun had to have been level, at shoulder height, to have produced the fatal wound. In other words, the gun wasn’t accidentally dropped. It was carefully aimed, cocked, and fired.

When Officer Applewhite uncovered the story about Connor’s death and the life-insurance policy, he was struck by the similarities to Krystal Perry’s death. He was also struck by one key difference: In Krystal’s case, the gruesome death occurred—and the insurance claim was filed—immediately after the two-year waiting period had ended. To Applewhite, it appeared that Rubenstein had learned from his mistake in 1979 and was careful to do things right on his second murder. Remarkably, my forensic report indicated that the murders had occurred sometime around November 15, a date that coincided almost exactly with one of his admitted visits to the cabin.

Applewhite spent a year building a case against Rubenstein. But when he took his findings to the Pike County district attorney and urged that Rubenstein be arrested, he didn’t get the response he’d hoped for. The DA, Dun Lampton, told Applewhite that he would need hard evidence to prosecute the Perry case, but the only evidence Applewhite had was circumstantial. Granted, the quarter-million dollars appeared to offer a strong motive. Clearly, Rubenstein had a history of shady business deals, fraudulent insurance claims, and probably even murder. And Rubenstein certainly had plenty of opportunity to kill the Perrys: He owned the cabin, after all, and had personally driven the family up there. He even admitted he’d gone back to the cabin on two later occasions. But there was no irrefutable proof of Rubenstein’s guilt.

Applewhite was stunned and frustrated. When he told Darryl’s biological father, Mack Perry, that no charges would be filed against Rubenstein, Mack wept. But Applewhite promised not to let the matter drop. He continued to follow Rubenstein’s trail of insurance fraud and other scams, and the mountain of evidence continued to grow. In September of 1995, he was stunned to learn that yet another person in Rubenstein’s life had come to grief: after climbing into a car with Rubenstein one Saturday morning, Laron Rosson, a new business partner, vanished without a trace. Just before his disappearence, he had given Rubenstein a truckload of expensive antiques that had been purchased with bad checks.

In July of 1998, Applewhite finally saw a ray of hope: That month, a Mississippi jury found a man guilty of drowning his four-year-old son, and the verdict was based purely on circumstantial evidence. That man’s motive was a $100,000 life-insurance policy. Applewhite went to Lampton’s assistant DA, Bill Goodwin—the prosecutor who had just won that case—and pleaded with him: “Bill, we’ve got a better case than that here. Instead of a hundred thousand dollars, it’s two hundred fifty thousand, and instead of one victim, it’s three victims.”

Two months later the DA’s office took Applewhite’s evidence to a grand jury. Rubenstein was indicted for the Perry murders and fraud and was extradited from Louisiana to Mississippi. The case went to trial in June of 1999.

The lack of hard evidence wasn’t the only problem the prosecutors were facing. One reason time since death was so crucial in this case was that Rubenstein produced a witness, Tanya Rubenstein—a niece, conveniently enough—who testified that she’d seen Annie Perry alive and well in a bar in New Orleans. That was on December 2, she said—fourteen days before the bodies were found. And Rubenstein had an airtight alibi for the period between December 2 and December 16. If Darryl, Annie, and Krystal were indeed alive on December 2, then Rubenstein could not have killed them. But if forensic science could show that they were already dead by that date, then the credibility of the niece’s testimony—and therefore the validity of Rubenstein’s alibi—would be destroyed.

But the defense wasn’t about to let that happen without a fight. And this particular battle would be waged over the maggots.

Ever since I first studied the crime scene photos, I’d been fretting over the absence of pupa casings. If I’d seen those, I’d have known for certain that the maggot activity had begun well before December 2. But without them, all I could say for sure was that the maggots had been on the bodies for about two weeks. Clearly the cooler temperatures had slowed the activity of the blowflies and maggots: Blowflies are dormant at temperatures below 52 degrees Fahrenheit, and it was well below that for much of the period in dispute. So I was confident that my estimate of twenty-five to thirty-five days was right. But would the jury share my confidence? That was what was worrying me, especially after the defense hammered hard on the fact that I was not an entomologist.

After only a few hours of deliberation, the jury informed the judge they were deadlocked at 11–1 for conviction. The judge declared a mistrial, and the prosecution went back to the drawing board to prepare for the retrial. To strengthen their case, Goodwin and Lampton called in entomological reinforcements: my former student Bill Rodriguez, who by now was considered one of the world’s foremost experts on insect activity in human corpses.

THE RETRIAL started on January 21, 2000. A few days later Goodwin called me to the stand. We went over my qualifications and credentials, including the research studies at the Body Farm, and I was accepted once again as an expert in forensic anthropology. Then, just as I had in the first trial, I explained to the new jurors how I had arrived at my time-since-death estimate.

When the defense attorney’s turn to cross-examine me arrived, he quickly began trying to undermine my estimate. First, predictably, he brought up the Colonel Shy case, in which I had misjudged the time since death by almost 113 years. That case, I explained, was why I launched our research program at the Body Farm. Then, as I expected, he