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Copyright © 2003 by Dr. Bill Bass and Jon Jefferson
Foreword copyright © 2003 by Cornwell Enterprises, Inc.
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DEDICATED TO
ALL VICTIMS OF MURDER,
ALL THOSE WHO MOURN THEM,
AND ALL WHO SEEK JUSTICE
ON THEIR BEHALF.
Contents
FOREWORD The Mayor of the Body Farm
CHAPTER 1 The Bones of the Eaglet
CHAPTER 2 Dead Indians and Dam Engineers
CHAPTER 3 Bare Bones: Forensics 101
CHAPTER 4 The Unsavory Uncle
CHAPTER 5 The Case of the Headless Corpse
CHAPTER 6 The Scene of the Crime
CHAPTER 7 Death’s Acre: The Body Farm Is Born
CHAPTER 8 A Bug for Research
CHAPTER 9 Progress and Protest
CHAPTER 10 Fat Sam and Cadillac Joe
CHAPTER 11 Grounded in Science
CHAPTER 12 The Zoo Man Murders
CHAPTER 13 Parts Unknown
CHAPTER 14 Art Imitates Death
CHAPTER 15 More Progress, More Protest
CHAPTER 16 The Backyard Barbecue
CHAPTER 17 The Not-So-Accidental Tourist
CHAPTER 18 The Bloody Beneficiary
CHAPTER 19 Ashes to Ashes
CHAPTER 20 And When I Die
APPENDIX I Bones of the Human Skeleton
APPENDIX II Glossary of Forensic and Anthropological Terms
Acknowledgments
Index
FOREWORD
The Mayor of the Body Farm
MOST PEOPLE who attend national or international forensic science and forensic medical meetings spend more time trying to find which ballroom whatever presentation is in than the presentation itself lasts. Since I have no sense of direction, even inside hotels, I have missed my share of fifteen-minute slide shows and lectures, and arrived far too late for the handouts, too.
Missing breakfast meetings is harder to do. They are located in the dining room you eat in three times a day, and last at least an hour, usually beginning at 7:30 A.M. when everyone is tired, perhaps hungover, but enthusiastic nonetheless about seeing slides of people who were mauled to death by sharks, bears, and alligators, or killed in commercial airline crashes, or perhaps dismembered in unusual ways for unusual reasons, or committed suicide using unexpectedly creative means such as a pneumatic hammer or a crossbow. (In one sad case, when the arrow failed to kill the poor man, he pulled it out of his chest and tried again.)
The experienced and the brave ate their bacon and eggs, undaunted by the sights and sounds of gory horrors, and I was often among them, taking notes and handling myself professionally and without flinching until one rather awful early morning when the legendary Dr. Bill Bass shuffled in with boxes of slides askew under one arm and notes flapping under the other. His breakfast topic was “the Body Farm,” and despite prevailing rumors that I coined that name for the only human decay research facility of its kind in the world, I didn’t. The first time I met the self-effacing, funny, and brilliant Dr. Bass, I had never heard of the Body Farm. Within an hour, and without premeditation, he ruined my taste for undercooked scrambled eggs, fatty bacon, and congealing grits for the rest of my life.
“Good God,” I said, appalled, early into the first slide presentation of his I had ever seen (in Baltimore, I think). “I can’t believe he’s showing this while we’re eating!”
Dr. Marcella Fierro, the chief medical examiner of Virginia, buttered a roll and ignored me as Dr. Bass slowly clicked through one slide after another, depicting how speedily a body can skeletonize in very hot, humid weather, such as one finds in the South during the summer. I looked around the crowded room at forensic scientists and forensic pathologists, all of them buttering their rolls and stirring their coffee, some taking notes.
“My God.” I pushed my plate away when Dr. Bass began to focus on maggots. “This should never be shown at a breakfast meeting!”
“Shhhhh!” Dr. Fierro nudged me with her elbow.
I avoided all such breakfasts and the Body Farm for many years. Often, scientists urged me to visit Dr. Bass’s facility in Knoxville, Tennessee.
“No,” I would say.
“You really should. It’s not just about decomposing bodies and maggots and all that. It’s about how we determine time of death, or whether a body was moved after death and where it might have been before it was moved, and who the dead person was, and how he or she died,” and on and on.
Dr. Bass is jokingly referred to as the mayor of the Body Farm. In the early days of my eventual visits, just inside the razor wire–topped wooden fence, was a mailbox that the anthropologists used for leaving each other notes and messages. How odd it seemed the first time I followed that unmistakable stench of decaying human flesh and entered the acre of the dead and was greeted by a mailbox with its red flag at high alert.
“It’s really not a mailbox for our residents,” Dr. Bass told me rather sheepishly, as if it might enter my mind that the dead people scattered about might write home to catch up on the news. “It’s just we don’t have a phone out here.”
They still don’t. The scientists may carry cell phones, as I do, but most of us don’t pull them out while wearing grubby protective gloves and perhaps rubber boots and surgical masks. When you’re busy inside the Body Farm, you rarely think of calling anyone for any reason.
Throughout my career, I have emphasized that forensic experts, such as my character Dr. Kay Scarpetta, hear the dead speak. The dead have much to say that only special people with special training and special gifts have the patience to hear, despite the assault on the senses. Only special people can interpret a language very few among the living care about, much less understand.
Welcome to Dr. Bill Bass’s Body Farm, the one that physically exists right this minute on a wooded patch of death-soaked land behind a hospital in the hills of Tennessee. Many of his silent guests arrive through their own selfless choosing (often making their own reservations months, even years, in advance, donating their bodies to Dr. Bass’s remarkable ongoing study). Daily, wounded and worn-out bodies melt into the earth and are carried away by birds and insects and other predators who are simply part of the food chain and not the least bit morbid.
Changes to what was once human flesh can be as slight as the shift in a shadow or as dramatic as a conflagration inside one of the old, rusted cars you might find lying around at the Body Farm. Years come and go, as do the dead who have been reduced to ashes and bone, and all of Dr. Bass’s patient translation adds to the fluency of a secret language that helps condemn the wicked and free those who have done no wrong.
—Patricia Cornwell
CHAPTER 1
The Bones of the Eaglet
A DOZEN TINY BONES, nestled in my palm: They were virtually all that remained, except for yellowed clippings, scratchy newsreel footage, and painful memories, from what was called “the tr
ial of the century.”
That label seems to get thrown around quite a lot, but in this case, maybe it was right. Seven years after the Scopes “Monkey Trial” and half a century before the O.J. Simpson debacle, America was mesmerized by a criminal investigation and murder trial that made headlines around the world. Now I was to decide whether justice had been done, or an innocent man had been wrongly executed.
The case was the kidnapping and death of a toddler named Charles Lindbergh Jr.—known far and wide as “the Lindbergh baby.”
In 1927, Charles Lindbergh, a former barnstormer and airmail pilot, had flown a small, single-engine plane, the Spirit of St. Louis, across the Atlantic Ocean. He did it alone, with no radio or parachute or sextant, staying awake and on course for thirty-three hours straight. By the time he reached the coast of France, news of his flight had reached Paris, and Parisians by the thousands flocked to the airfield to welcome him. The moment he touched down, 3,600 miles after leaving New York, the world changed, and so did Charles Lindbergh’s life. His achievement brought him fame, fortune, and a pair of nicknames: “Lucky Lindy,” which he hated, and “the Lone Eagle,” which reflected both his solo flight and his solitary nature.
Five years after he flew into the limelight, Lindbergh and his wife, Anne, were living in a secluded New Jersey mansion. They had a twenty-month-old son; his parents named him Charles Jr. but journalists called him “the Eaglet.” It was the heyday of sensational journalism, and savvy reporters and publishers knew that a Lindbergh story—almost any Lindbergh story—was a surefire way to sell newspapers. So when the heir and namesake of Charles Lindbergh was kidnapped, a media frenzy broke out: The case attracted more journalists than World War I had. The ransom notes—at first demanding $50,000, then later upping the ante to $70,000—made front-page headlines and newsreel footage; so did the claims, emerging from towns throughout America, that the Lindbergh baby had been found alive and well. But all those claims, and all those hopes, were laid to rest two months after the kidnapping, when a small child’s body was found in the woods a few miles from the Lindbergh mansion. The body was badly decomposed; the left leg was missing below the knee, as were the left hand and right arm—chewed off, it appeared, by animals.
On the basis of the body’s size, the clothing, and a distinctive abnormality in the one remaining foot—three toes that overlapped—the remains were quickly identified as the Lindbergh baby’s. The next day they were cremated, and a brokenhearted Charles Lindbergh flew out over the Atlantic, alone once more, to scatter his son’s ashes. No one called him Lucky Lindy now.
The police eventually arrested a German immigrant named Bruno Hauptmann, a carpenter whose garage rafters had apparently been used to construct a makeshift ladder used to reach the Lindberghs’ second-floor nursery. Hauptmann was arrested after police traced a large portion of the ransom money to him. He was charged with kidnapping and murder: The baby’s skull had been fractured, though the injury might actually have resulted from a fall, since the ladder broke during the abduction. Despite allegations that some of the evidence against him was suspect or fabricated, Hauptmann was convicted. He died in the electric chair in April of 1936.
Fifty years after the crime, in June of 1982, I was contacted by an attorney representing Bruno Hauptmann’s widow, Anna. All these years after his execution, Mrs. Hauptmann was still trying to clear her husband’s name. Her only chance was a dozen tiny bones. Recovered from the crime scene after the body’s cremation, they had been carefully preserved ever since by the New Jersey State Police. At the request of Mrs. Hauptmann’s attorney, I drove up to Trenton to see if this handful of scattered bones might somehow show that the body had been incorrectly identified—that a rush to judgment had triggered a terrible miscarriage of justice. Let them be the bones of a younger boy, an older boy, a girl of any age, she must have prayed. Anything but the bones of Charles Lindbergh Jr.
I was her final hope—a small-town scientist backing up traffic at a tollbooth as I asked directions to the headquarters of the New Jersey State Police.
It was a long and fascinating road that had brought me to Trenton, and by that I don’t mean the New Jersey Turnpike. What had brought me here was a path that once pointed toward an uneventful career in counseling but that suddenly veered off in the direction of corpses, crime scenes, and courtrooms.
My forensic career began as a result of an early-morning traffic accident outside Frankfort, Kentucky, in the winter of 1954. On a damp, foggy morning, two trucks collided in a fiery crash on a two-lane highway. When the fire was out, three bodies, burned beyond recognition, were found in the vehicles. The identities of both drivers were easily confirmed, but the third body was a bit of a mystery.
By sheer but momentous coincidence, some months after that accident, The Saturday Evening Post carried an article about Dr. Wilton M. Krogman, the most famous “bone detective” of the 1940s and ’50s. Krogman was a physical anthropologist who, along with two Smithsonian colleagues, virtually created the science of forensic anthropology. He was considered such a great forensic authority that during World War II, the U.S. government had him waiting in the wings to identify the remains of Adolf Hitler. As it turned out, the Russians beat the Americans to the burned-out bunker containing Hitler’s bones, so Krogman never got a look at the Führer. But he had plenty of other forensic cases, from the police and the FBI, to keep him busy.
In the Post article, Krogman mentioned several other scientists who also specialized in identifying human skeletal remains. One of those he named was Dr. Charles E. Snow, an anthropology professor at the University of Kentucky, where I was pursuing a master’s degree in counseling. The school, Dr. Snow, and I were all located in Lexington, just thirty miles from the scene of that early-morning truck collision. Although I didn’t know it at the time, I was about to collide head-on with my future.
A Lexington lawyer who read the article realized that Dr. Snow might be able to identify the third victim of the fiery crash. He called Dr. Snow, who readily agreed to examine the remains. At the time, I was taking an anthropology class from Dr. Snow just for fun. When he got the lawyer’s call, Snow asked if I would be interested in accompanying him on a human-identification case. This was a chance to apply, to a real-world case, scientific techniques that so far I had only read about. Why was I the one student he invited to go along? Perhaps he appreciated my budding brilliance; perhaps what he appreciated was the fact that I had a car to get us there. In any case, I jumped at the chance.
The body had been buried months before, so the lawyer completed the necessary paperwork to authorize an exhumation. On a warm spring day in April of 1955, Dr. Snow and I drove to a small cemetery beside a little country church in east-central Kentucky. By the time we arrived, the grave had been excavated and the coffin uncovered. Spring rains had raised the water table almost to ground level, so the coffin was immersed in water. As it was hoisted from the grave by a cemetery truck, water poured from every seam.
The body was burned, rotted, and waterlogged—quite a contrast to the immaculate bone specimens I had studied in the university’s osteology lab. Traditional anthropological specimens are clean and dry; forensic cases tend to be wet and smelly. But they’re intellectually irresistible too: scientific puzzles demanding to be solved, life-and-death secrets waiting to be unearthed.
From the smallness of the skull, the width of the pelvic opening, and the smoothness of the eyebrow ridge, even my inexperienced eye could see that these bones came from a female. Her age was a bit trickier: The wisdom teeth were fully formed, so she was an adult, but how old? The zigzag seams in the cranium, called sutures, were mostly fused together but still clearly visible; that suggested she was in her thirties or forties.
As it turned out, the police already had a pretty good idea whose body this was. Dr. Snow’s job was simply to confirm or refute the tentative identification. An eastern Kentucky woman had been missing since the time of the a
ccident; what’s more, the night before the wreck, neighbors had overheard her say that she was riding to Louisville with one of the truck drivers, a man with whom she’d had a longtime relationship.
The lawyer who enlisted Dr. Snow’s help had already obtained the missing woman’s medical records and dental X rays. Armed with this information, Dr. Snow swiftly matched her teeth and fillings with those appearing in the X rays. By confirming her identity, Dr. Snow gave the lawyer a solid legal basis for a liability claim on behalf of the woman’s surviving relatives. It seems that she and her boyfriend were killed when the other truck swerved across the highway’s centerline and struck them head-on. The truck that killed them was owned by a nationwide grocery chain—The Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company, or A&P—so there were deep pockets to be tapped in court.
Dr. Snow’s consulting fee for the case was $25; he handed over $5 of that to me for taking us to the cemetery in my car. I suspect the lawyer extracted a good deal more than that from the cash registers of A&P.
I didn’t get rich that day, but I sure got hooked. It was fascinating to see the way burned and broken bones could identify a victim, solve a long-standing mystery, close a case. From that moment on, I decided, I would focus on forensics. I turned my back on counseling, switched to anthropology, and set about making up for lost time.
A year later, in 1956, I was accepted by the anthropology Ph.D. program at Harvard University. Harvard was regarded as the best anthropology department in the country, so I was honored to be accepted, but I turned them down. There was only one place to learn what I wanted to learn: in Philadelphia, at the feet of the famous bone detective Wilton Krogman.
I arrived in Philadelphia to begin my Ph.D. studies at the University of Pennsylvania in September. I was fresh from a summer job at the Smithsonian Institution, where I had analyzed and measured hundreds of Native American skeletons. I was twenty-seven years old by now—I had spent three years in the Army during the Korean War—and I had the beginnings of a family: a bright young wife, Ann—who would later earn a Ph.D. of her own in nutrition science—and our six-month-old son, Charlie. To save money, Ann and I rented a small apartment several miles west of downtown Philly.
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