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

held in my hands what the Harden family believed they had received more than two years before. I placed the container in the backseat of my truck and headed home.

The initial, bogus cremains of Chigger Harden had weighed in at 3.6 pounds, less than half what my measurements of one hundred sets of cremains had shown to be the average weight of cremains from males. The cremains I had with me now, on the other hand, were a testament to a burly farmer’s frame: including the weight of the bag (but not the plastic box), they tipped the scales at 8.1 pounds, probably pretty close to what he’d weighed back when he first came into this world. After weighing the cremains, I opened the bag and filled a clean plastic film canister with a sample, then resealed the bag. I sent this sample, like the others, to Galbraith Laboratories.

When the results came back, I was surprised: the cremains contained 5 percent silicon, roughly ten times what I’d expected. Perhaps all that silicon came from soil clinging to the body or the clothing, or perhaps some of it was bits of the furnace’s concrete lining flaking off. Another cremains sample, which Galbraith analyzed at the same time, contained just 0.5 percent silicon, which was much closer to the human body’s normal ratio. As usual, a piece of research had raised as many questions as it had answered. But the fundamental question had been answered pretty conclusively by now: We had a positive DNA identification from the GBI and the Air Force; we had an anthropological examination of the skeletal remains, which were consistent with Chigger’s age, race, sex, and hair length and color; we had clothing that matched; and we had independent corroboration from the commercial DNA lab that tested the piece of bone I’d cut from the femur with the Stryker saw.

There was one loose end that still nagged at me, one unanswered question that still kept me from laying this case to rest. I climbed into my truck and headed for UT. Displaying my TBI badge conspicuously on the dashboard, I parked in an illegal spot (the only kind I could find) and walked into the radiology department in the basement of UT’s student clinic. Over the years the technicians and physicians there have been unfailingly gracious and accommodating about my occasional requests to have odd things x-rayed. They seem to find it interesting; they also seem to appreciate the fact that I don’t bring them decomposing bodies to x-ray: I get those scanned with a portable machine on the loading dock at UT Medical Center.

From a cardboard box I was carrying, I took out two flat plastic bags, roughly a foot square, into which I had divided Chigger’s cremains. Spread to a uniform thickness, the cremains formed a square layer about an inch thick in each bag.

The radiology technician stepped behind her lead shield and opened the shutter. The first negative she brought me was almost clear, indicating that it was badly underexposed; apparently she’d overcompensated for the thinness of the sample. Her second exposure was right on the money: The ground-up bone fragments appeared in many shades of gray; dozens of tiny white toothlike objects dotted the image—metal teeth from the zipper of the bag in which the body had arrived from Georgia and been cremated.

The negative showed one other radiographically opaque object. It was an almost perfect disk, about the size of a penny and twice as thick. I fished it out. The disk was heavy—heavy as lead. I hadn’t been able to see it or feel it in the cremains, but it had been there all along. I had found Chigger’s bullet.

The Harden family’s long period in limbo was over. The finding of the bullet wasn’t exactly good news, but they were grateful for it all the same. I’ve encountered that response time and time again in dealing with the families of the missing and the dead. Uncertainty and dread are almost always harder to bear than the finality of certain loss.

I can’t give people back their loved ones. I can’t restore their happiness or innocence, can’t give back their lives the way they were. But I can give them the truth. Then they will be free to grieve for the dead, and then free to start living again. Truth like that can be a humbling and sacred gift for a scientist to give.

CHAPTER 20

And When I Die

IN MY FIRST FORTY YEARS as a forensic anthropologist, I saw hundreds of corpses and thousands of skeletons. I scrutinized death from every angle. Every angle but one, that is. Then one day I found myself flat on my back on a restaurant floor, staring death straight in the eye. And death was staring right back at me.

My wife, Carol, and I were driving from Nashville back to Knoxville. It’s about a three-hour drive, and we decided to stop for lunch about halfway back, in Cookeville. We pulled off of Interstate 40 and headed for my favorite local restaurant, Logan’s Road House, which serves a baked sweet potato I crave.

I’d gone to Nashville to lecture to a group of organ-donor professionals. I didn’t feel well the night before, and if I’d had any sense I’d have canceled my talk right then, but I’d come to Nashville to lecture and, by God, I was going to lecture. There’s a long tradition in the Bass family of a trait we like to call determination. I’m told other people often refer to us as mule-headed.

I gave the group a slide-lecture introduction to forensic anthropology. It starts with the case of a Texas man who set his car on fire and killed himself and moves on to the case of Madison Rutherford, who faked his death in a car fire. I’ve given this talk dozens of times, but I could barely get through it that morning. Normally in