Death's Acre

by William M. Bass

  Lacking dental work, dental records, or photographs, I couldn’t make a positive identification of the body. However, I could make a presumptive, or probable, identification. A woman from Atchison, Kansas—a small town about twenty miles from where the body had been found—had been reported missing on August 10, some three weeks earlier. Her name was Mary Louise Downing; she was a black female, age thirty-two, height five feet six inches. There was no ironclad, 100 percent guarantee that the skull and femur I had were hers, but there was certainly nothing in my examination that cast any doubt on it, either. In fact, I’d have been willing to bet the price of that new kitchen stove that this was Mary Louise.

  On Saturday, September 8, I typed up my report and mailed it to the lead KBI agent investigating the case, along with a copy to the KBI’s director in Topeka. Single-spaced, the report didn’t even fill two pages.

  In the end, there wasn’t really much I could tell the KBI about her beyond her sex, race, age, stature, and poor dental health. The skull and femur revealed nothing about her manner of death. But apparently the KBI had more to work with than I did, and after my examination and report, they were confident that Mary Louise Downing had indeed been found. From the fact that she’d been hidden in a remote stretch of the river bottoms, they assumed she’d been murdered.

  But that was it. Who had killed her, and why, and where, and when—those were secrets that only two people possessed, the killer and Mary Louise, and neither one was talking.

  After mailing off the report, I took one more look at her skull. Piercing her cheekbones and lower jaw, about an inch and a half on either side of the skull’s midline, were four neat, tiny holes where the craniofacial nerves had emerged from her brain. Thin bundles of electrochemical fibers, they would have translated this woman’s inner sadness into outward frowns, her purest happiness into the slightly sideways smile that her crossbite would have given her. She had been someone’s daughter, someone’s wife, someone’s mother. Now she was reduced to a case—one that would never be solved.

  Her disappearance that day in August hadn’t merited a mention in the local newspaper; the discovery of her body in early September had rated only two column inches. In death, as in life, Mary Louise seemed destined to fall through the cracks, unnoticed, uncared for, insignificant.

  And yet . . . And yet . . . We’ve spent forty years together now, Mary Louise and I. She’s been in almost every classroom I’ve set foot in; she’s traveled with me to seminars and conferences, all over the United States: the FBI Academy at Quantico, Virginia; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms trainings in half a dozen states; the U.S. Army Central Identification Laboratory in Honolulu, Hawaii. In life Mary Louise probably never traveled far from Atchison or accomplished much that would look noteworthy. But in death she’s journeyed halfway around the world, educated thousands of students, and helped train hundreds of forensic anthropologists, homicide investigators, crime lab technicians, and medical examiners.

  Mary Louise’s murder will probably never be solved. But, thanks to her, other murders will be—and probably already have been. To me, that makes her a remarkable woman, and a forensic hero.

  No bones about it.

  CHAPTER 4

  The Unsavory Uncle

  A SHERIFF’S DEPUTY appeared in the doorway of my office in the Museum of Natural History at the University of Kansas in Lawrence in December of 1970. Six months later and the deputy wouldn’t have found me in Kansas. I had already accepted a new job at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, and we planned to move the following May.

  The deputy caught me at the desk where I’d spent falls, winters, and springs for the past decade. During that time, the University of Kansas had built one of the best physical-anthropology programs in the nation. With three young, innovative physical anthropologists on the faculty, we were becoming widely known for our forensic expertise. By now I’d worked dozens of forensic cases for various law enforcement agencies, ranging from tiny sheriffs’ offices to the Kansas Bureau of Investigation, whose associate director, Harold Nye, had become a good friend of mine.

  Harold was something of a celebrity in law enforcement circles by this time. He played the key role in tracking down the two former convicts who murdered a family of four in west Kansas in 1959. The case—the murder of the Clutter family, and the KBI’s pursuit of their killers—sparked one of the all-time classics of crime writing, Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, which came out in 1965.

  Capote recounted how Nye fought a persistent case of the flu during the six weeks it took to catch the killers, ex-convicts Dick Hickock and Perry Smith. Despite fevers, Harold worked tirelessly as part of the team of four KBI agents assigned to the case. He followed Perry Smith’s trail to a cheap rooming house in Las Vegas where he had stayed shortly before the murders; more important, he learned from the manager that she was expecting Smith to return to claim a box of possessions he’d stored there. In Mexico City—one of many places the killers traveled after the crime—Harold managed to find a pair of binoculars and a transistor radio they’d stolen from the Clutter house and pawned for a few dollars. Those were important pieces of evidence at the trial, because they helped prove the men had been at the house.

  Harold also snagged another key piece of evidence at the murder scene itself. Two distinctive sets of boot prints, too faint for the human eye to notice, showed up in Harold’s photos of the Clutters’ basement floor. When the killers were arrested, their boots matched those prints exactly. Thanks to meticulous casework by Harold and the other KBI agents, the two men were convicted of first-degree murder and hanged.

  Harold didn’t much like Truman Capote’s account of the case; Nye thought it took too many liberties with facts. He also didn’t think much of Capote himself: When Harold went to Capote’s hotel room to do an interview, Capote answered the door wearing a lacy negligee. That must have given straight-arrow Harold quite a jolt, but he kept it to himself until years later, when he told the story to the writer George Plimpton, who was doing a biography of Capote.

  Although neither of us knew it at the time, Harold would eventually help inspire the creation of the Body Farm. One spring day back in 1964, he called with an unusual question: Could I examine a skeleton and estimate the time since death? This particular skeleton, it turned out, belonged to a cow; occasionally cattle rustlers or vandals leave dead, mutilated cattle out on the prairie. And since there are more cows than people in Kansas, the KBI spent a fair amount of time investigating cattle rustling. In this instance, rather than rustling the cattle, the thieves simply killed and field-dressed the cows, taking the meat and leaving the bones.

  A few days after his call, after double-checking with the university’s paleontologist, I sent Harold a letter. “We do not know of any method by which you could tell the length of time since the cow has been killed,” I wrote. “I can tell you the age of the cow at death; however, I cannot tell you how long it has been since the cow was killed.”

  But his request had set me to thinking. “I do have a suggestion.” I continued:

  As you can imagine, there has been no work done on this that we are aware of. If you have some interested farmer who would be willing to kill a cow and let it lie, we could run an experiment on how long it would take for the flesh to decay and begin to build up some information in this area. However, the rate of decomposition is not the same in the summer as it is in the winter and I am afraid that we would have to sacrifice at least two or more cows before we could get complete data . . .

  Harold never followed up on my suggestion; I guess it was the scientific equivalent of Truman Capote answering the door in a woman’s negligee—maybe just a little too unusual for his tastes. But then again, I didn’t rush to pursue it, either. The fact is, I forgot all about it for nearly forty years; recently I came across that letter in a dusty file, tucked behind a crackly X ray.

  But even though I’d filed and forgo
tten that brief scientific suggestion, somewhere in my subconscious, a seed had been planted—a seed that would germinate some fifteen years later and bear scientific fruit, arising not from dead cows but from human corpses: corpses at the Body Farm.

  But I’m getting ahead of my story. The Body Farm was still far in the future; this was December of 1970, and a detective from the nearby town of Olathe, twenty-five miles southeast of Lawrence, entered my office carrying a cardboard evidence box. Inside was a small, sad set of skeletal remains. I could tell at a glance they were the bones of a small child, probably no more than two or three years old. The sheriff’s deputy, Detective Jerry Foote, told me they had been found a week before by quail hunters out on the prairie. Most of the bones were missing, which I suspected was due to scattering or consumption by animals; fortunately, the skull was relatively complete, except for the absence of most of the teeth.

  I did an initial exam there in my office, explaining what I observed to Detective Foote. I’d learned early on that most police officers are eager to learn all they can about investigative techniques; they appreciate hearing what I have to say as I examine a body or a skeleton, even at the early stages.

  As I studied this small skull, I could tell by how weathered it was that it had been outdoors for months. In addition, I noticed that the left side was bleached nearly white, suggesting that it had lain on its right side, exposing the left to the brunt of the sun and the rain. On the right side I found a few strands of fine blond hair stuck to the forehead, as well as some at the base of the skull and the cervical vertebrae. The hair confirmed what I had thought immediately from the shape of the skull: this child was probably Caucasian.

  Most of the teeth had fallen out, but it was clear that the child had a nearly complete set, including the first molars, which were still attached; that told me the child was probably at least twenty-four months old. The roots of the canines, however, had not yet formed completely, which meant the age was less than thirty-six months. Three years old: For most children, it’s the age of nursery rhymes, stuffed animals, hide-and-seek, crayons. For this child, it was the age of death, and possibly murder.

  Was it a boy or a girl? By adolescence the sex of an unidentified skeleton can be determined fairly easily, mainly from the pelvis: Females have a wider pelvic structure and a markedly longer pubic bone, to allow for childbirth. In early childhood, though, there’s virtually no difference between a male’s pelvis and a female’s. At any specific age, young girls tend to be a bit smaller than boys, but unless you know the age for sure—which means you probably know the identity already—you have no basis for gauging the sex.

  Detective Foote told me he was fairly sure he knew the child’s identity. Eight months before, Lisa Elaine Silvers, aged two and a half, had been reported missing. Her twenty-one-year-old uncle, Gerald Silvers, was baby-sitting Lisa and her baby sister on April 22, 1970, while her parents went to a movie. Gerald fell asleep, he told police, and when he awoke from his nap, Lisa was gone. A search by police and neighbors failed to find any trace of the child.

  After his questioning, Gerald left Kansas and went to California—on short notice and in a police car. While doing a routine background check after Lisa disappeared, Detective Foote learned that young Gerald was wanted for second-degree robbery and hit-and-run in the Golden Gate State—not the sort of uncle I’d want baby-sitting for my children. But that didn’t necessarily mean he was a murderer. In fact, from the contents of the box sitting on my desk, we couldn’t even say for certain that these bones were Lisa’s. Not only was it impossible to determine the sex of the skeleton, there were no healed injuries that could be corroborated by X rays from Lisa’s medical records. Furthermore, there were no dental records; she hadn’t even lived long enough to make her first visit to the dentist. I had half a hundred bones sitting right in front of me, but I didn’t have a single thing I could latch on to. I wrote up my brief findings on the spot for Detective Foote and wished him good luck with the case.

  A few months later Foote seemed to have had excellent luck: Two of Gerald Silvers’s fellow inmates in California snitched on him, saying he’d bragged about raping and killing his niece. Gerald was indicted by a Kansas grand jury and brought back to Olathe to stand trial. But as the initial hearing approached, Detective Foote called me in a panic. Because we hadn’t been able to identify the body positively as Lisa’s, it would be easy for Gerald’s attorney to attack the prosecution’s case. There was a body, all right, but there was no particular reason for a jury to believe that it was Lisa’s or that she’d been raped and murdered by her uncle.

  Foote was practically pleading: Wasn’t there anything else we could do to get a positive identification? “Do you have a picture of Lisa?” I asked, hoping it might reveal some distinctive feature in her facial structure that we could correlate to her skull. Yes, he did; he agreed to send it to me.

  When the envelope arrived, I tore it open. The picture showed a pretty, blond, happy little girl, smiling proudly at the camera. The teeth caught my eye: Somehow, though I couldn’t say why, I saw a glimmer of hope in that bright smile. I put in a call to Detective Foote.

  “Tell me more about where the body was found,” I said. The quail hunters who found it had been wading along a narrow, shallow stream running through a pasture, Foote told me, about ten miles outside Olathe. “We need the rest of her teeth,” I said, “not just the molars.”

  Detective Foote sounded doubtful. They’d searched for hours, he said, to come up with this much of the skeleton. He didn’t see how they could have missed anything. By this point in my anthropology career, though, I had excavated several thousand skeletons, and I’d gotten pretty good at rounding up bones and teeth. Most of those skeletons came from undisturbed Indian graves, true, but a sizable minority—several hundred, at least—had been scattered in some way: by animals, by storms or erosion, or by human intrusion. In those cases there tended to be a pattern to the scattering, and I hoped it would hold true in this one. “Those teeth will be where that body was found,” I told him. “Let’s go back and find them.”

  IT WAS MID-APRIL BY NOW, five months after the quail hunters had stumbled across the small skull in the stream. As we bumped across the prairie and stopped by the embankment, I hoped nothing had disturbed the streambed since the fall. A herd of cows stomping around in the mud could make it virtually impossible to find anything more. Fortunately, there were no signs of cattle, and we’d had a fairly warm, dry spring, so the stream was only a few inches deep. I felt my optimism returning.

  It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that bones in a creek will tend to wash downstream. The tricky part is figuring out how far downstream. Generally the smaller, lighter bones get carried farther than the skull or long bones. Complicating the picture slightly is the fact that the farther downstream a bone gets carried, the farther to either side it can drift as well. If you plot it on a diagram, the scatter pattern tends to look like a skinny teardrop, with the sharp end farthest upstream. The larger the stream and the faster the current, the bigger that teardrop area gets.

  I went about fifteen yards downstream from the point where the skull and most of the bones had been found, so I could work my way upstream against the current. By starting beyond the boundary of the expected scatter, I’d be less likely to step on a bone and break it or mash it deeper into the mud. Working upstream also meant that the mud I stirred up as I walked and felt around in the streambed would get washed away from the direction I was heading, rather than into it. It’s simple once you think about it, but you’d be surprised how often untrained searchers wade around at random, muddying up the water in more ways than one.

  About ten yards downstream from the skull’s location, I started feeling little pebbles in the silt. Except they weren’t pebbles: They were tiny bones—hand bones and foot bones and vertebrae. And teeth—fourteen in all!—with only two, a pair of lower incisors, remaining lost.
I felt like I’d hit the mother lode. As I headed back to my office in Lawrence, I hoped that somewhere in these bones and teeth I’d find something that said, unequivocally, “I am—I was—Lisa Silvers.”

  At the very least, I was sure the teeth could help refine my estimate of the dead child’s age. A group of dental researchers at Harvard had carefully charted the stages of formation of several types of deciduous teeth (“baby teeth”). I x-rayed a lower canine, a lower first molar, and a lower second molar; comparing these X rays with those from the Harvard study, I got an estimate of 2.1 years. By a different study’s yardstick, the first permanent lower molar suggested an age of 2.9 to 3.9 years. Yet another dental yardstick indicated an age of 2.5 to 3 years.

  Of course, the real clincher in forensic dentistry is finding dental work that can be matched with dental records. Unfortunately, since Lisa had never been to the dentist, we had no dental records. On the other hand, since none of these teeth had fillings, they didn’t rule out the possibility that this was Lisa.

  By this time I’d stared at those teeth for hours. I could close my eyes and still see their outlines. And even though I was pretty sure there was no scientific stone I’d left unturned, I kept staring at them, turning them over and over in my hands and in my mind. It was the incisors I kept coming back to. There was something about them I was almost noticing but not quite. Maybe I was looking too closely. If you’ve ever stargazed, you’ve probably noticed that your peripheral vision can detect fainter stars than your central vision. So the trick, if you’re hunting a faint star, is to look slightly away from where you think it is.