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

vault, stretching some eight ominous feet from door to back wall, is lined with firebrick or refractory (heat-resistant) concrete.

Bodies generally arrive by hearse; at most crematoriums, the hearse backs up to a garage door, and the body, in its cardboard shipping box, is pulled onto a gurney, which is wheeled up to the furnace door. It’s a simple, one-person operation to slide the box from the gurney into the furnace, then close the door and fire up the gas.

The first step is to switch on a powerful fan, which forces a steady draft of air through the oven—the “primary chamber,” it’s called—and then out through an exhaust stack. Once the fan is running, the operator sets a timer that controls the length of the burn. The timer also controls a gas valve and a sparking ignition device, much like the ones found in residential gas ranges.

The first burner to ignite is called the “afterburner.” Located at the rear of the furnace, it’s a small burner that does double duty. First it slowly preheats the interior, to minimize heat stress and cracking in the firebrick. During the cremation itself, it burns any uncombusted gases before they go up the stack.

Once the furnace is preheated, a low-intensity burner, the “ignition burner,” kicks on in the roof of the furnace, its flame directed downward. The ignition burner’s only job is to incinerate the cardboard carton or the body bag containing the corpse. Cardboard catches fire at around 500 degrees Fahrenheit; engulfed by the flame shooting down onto it, the carton catches fire within seconds.

Several minutes later the cardboard has been reduced to ash, and the cremation of the body itself can begin. Now a more powerful burner, the cremation burner, blasts downward onto the body. In most cases the furnace’s temperature stays somewhere between 1,600 and 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit; extremely obese bodies, however, can burn at much higher temperatures, up to 3,000 degrees.

IEE builds its furnaces tough to survive those kinds of conditions. The company also offers annual inspections, cleaning, thermostat calibration, and repairs at the customer’s request. Most facilities request at least one inspection and calibration a year. In twenty years, I heard, Tri-State never requested a single inspection or cleaning. Reportedly, the only visit an IEE technician ever made to Tri-State was when the GBI asked the company to come verify or refute Brent Marsh’s claim that he’d fallen behind in his work because the furnace was broken. According to the IEE technician, the furnace fired right up.

ON SEPTEMBER 3, 2002, the day after Labor Day, one of Chigger Harden’s relatives got a phone call from Greg Ramey, the GBI agent heading the Tri-State investigation. Samples of DNA from the 339 corpses recovered from Tri-State had been analyzed at the Air Force DNA laboratory in Maryland. The lab compared the GBI’s samples with known genetic material donated by relatives or obtained from medical offices. Some of Chigger’s relatives had given blood samples, but as it turned out, they needn’t have: a tissue sample from Chigger’s autopsy remained on file at an area hospital.

Agent Ramey called to say that a DNA match indicated that Chigger’s body was one of the 339 corpses found on the grounds of the crematorium back in February. Designated by the GBI as body number 218, he had lain decaying in the Georgia woods for nearly two years. Since February he’d been in a cold-storage facility set up by the GBI near Noble. What, Ramey wanted to know, would the family like done with the body now?

The Hardens still wanted the body cremated, in accordance with Chigger’s wishes. First, though, they wanted to be absolutely sure it was Chigger. Bill Brown, their attorney, asked me to examine the body, and he arranged to have it delivered to a place where the examination and cremation could be done in swift succession.

One crisp October afternoon I arrived at a small, neat building that houses the East Tennessee Cremation Company, located at the edge of an industrial park near the Knoxville airport. A few minutes later Bill Brown arrived, along with his assistant, Lisa Scoggins, and his son, Andy, who would photograph and videotape the body and my examination, so there would be a visual record for their legal case.

The crematorium’s manager, Helen Taylor, ushered me into the garage area, which housed two IEE cremation furnaces, both of them spotless. In front of one was a gurney, and on it was a white body bag. Unzipping it, I found that the body was mostly skeletonized, though bits of tissue remained here and there. Beside the skull, though no longer attached, was the hair mat: long, thick brown hair, just like the shoulder-length brown hair depicted in the photo of Chigger that Lisa had brought.

The body was nude; the clothes had been removed by the GBI and put in a separate plastic bag. Leaf litter and pine needles were scattered through the remains and the clothing, suggesting that the body had been lying outdoors for quite some time. The absence of dirt in the nasal passages and ears told me that the body had never been buried. Here and there, I found small bits of rotting cardboard, as well as a handful of dead dermestid beetles, sometimes called hide beetles or carpet beetles, which like to nibble dried flesh off bones.

The skeleton was largely intact; the lower jaw and the bones of the lower right leg and foot were missing, though, probably carried off by scavengers. I studied the skull. It was large and broad, with a heavy brow ridge and an unusually prominent bump at the base of the skull, the external occipital protuberance. Any student in my osteology class would have had no trouble telling this was a male. The teeth were vertical, rather than jutting forward, so the skull was clearly Caucasoid, and the cranial sutures showed a degree of fusion typical of a man in his forties. Nothing in the skeletal material contradicted the GBI’s identification.

The DNA sample