Death's Acre

by William M. Bass

  In this case, there was a way I needed to refocus or shift my vision so that I’d see what I hadn’t been able to spot dead-on. So I stepped back a bit; instead of scrutinizing the teeth individually, I inserted them into their sockets in the jaws of the skull, and I looked back and forth from the skull to the photo of Lisa Silvers, alive and smiling. And that’s when I saw two things I’d missed before. First, there was a slight space between the two upper central incisors—the “two front teeth,” as the old song calls them. I noticed it when I fitted the teeth into their sockets, and there it was in the photo as well.

  Second—and far more striking, now that I had the teeth in place—there was a slight notch at one corner of each of the four upper incisors. The teeth weren’t chipped; they were formed that way. It was a genetic anomaly, and it just might hold the key to identifying this body. As I swung my gaze back to the photo, I felt a tingle of excitement. I called Detective Foote. “We have a positive identification of Lisa Silvers,” I told him.

  THAT WAS IN APRIL. In the two months since then, a lot of water had flowed under a lot of bridges.

  For me, the biggest change was my move to Tennessee at the end of May. My years at Kansas had been a period of tremendous growth. My summers in the field were intense but exciting; the academic year brought the combined pleasures of forensic cases for the police and KBI and the daily thrill of classroom teaching. Put me in front of a group—whether it’s freshman undergraduates, an anthropology Ph.D. seminar, a class of new FBI trainees, or a bunch of senior citizens—and it’s like throwing a switch inside me that releases a huge jolt of adrenaline. I move around in goofy ways to show how the skeleton works; I tell jokes, usually slightly off-color ones that tend to get me hauled onto the carpet at least once a semester. But the vast majority of students seemed to notice and appreciate my teaching style; my “Intro to Anthropology” classes at Kansas swelled to more than a thousand students every fall; to cope with the flood of students, the dean had to move us from a lecture hall to the university’s main auditorium.

  But there was an undercurrent of deep discord within the anthropology department. When I had arrived in Kansas in 1960, the anthropology faculty consisted solely of archaeologists and cultural anthropologists. Then, in rapid succession, three physical anthropologists were hired. Soon the three of us were building a national reputation for our forensic work—and were also teaching the majority of students who took anthropology courses. And soon the cultural anthropologists began resenting us. The tension got so bad, all three of the physical anthropologists began job-hunting.

  I was the first to jump ship. The University of Tennessee was hoping to build a national-caliber anthropology program, just as we’d begun to do at Kansas. When they offered me the chance to head it—and the chance to hire two additional faculty of my choice—it was too good to turn down.

  Within a year the two other physical anthropologists had likewise left for greener pastures, or at least more collegial ones, and Kansas had lost a cadre of expertise that had taken a decade to build.

  When I arrived in Knoxville on June 1, 1971, it didn’t look like a dream assignment. Up until then, the handful of anthropologists were housed in the university’s small archaeological museum. If we were to build the department—and start a graduate program—we’d need more space, and lots of it. The only space available had just opened up: a spooky building tucked beneath the stands of Neyland Stadium, UT’s enormous shrine to Southeastern Conference college football (the third-largest stadium in the United States).

  The gloomy building, added in the 1940s, had originally housed the school’s football players and other athletes. Then, when it got too old and run-down for the athletes, the university built a new athletic dorm and shifted nonathletes into the rooms beneath the stands. Now that the space had gotten too old and run-down for the nonathletes, the school graciously gave it to the faculty. My faculty.

  What matters, though, is not the space you’re put in to work; what matters is the work you do in it. The Manhattan Project, the World War II race to develop the atomic bomb, also started out under a football stadium. Beneath the stands of Stagg Field at the University of Chicago, a team of physicists led by Enrico Fermi built a crude fission reactor, brought its uranium fuel to critical mass, and set off a chain reaction that changed the world.

  We started out in Knoxville with eight offices, utterly empty except for a single telephone sitting in the floor of one office. No desks, no chairs, no shelves, no filing cabinets. The moment I arrived, we began frantically scrounging, begging, and borrowing furnishings, equipment, and supplies. We never stopped. Our growth would always outstrip our budget; by now the anthropology department has grown from its original eight rooms to 150 or so. They’re even older and more run-down today than they were in June of 1971, but there’s still a critical mass of anthropological expertise down there beneath the stands. The chain reaction is still going strong.

  NOT LONG after Lisa Silvers had disappeared, her uncle Gerald was hauled back to Tracy, California, and sentenced to an “indeterminate” length of time in the Deuel Vocational Institute for the robbery and hit-and-run crimes he’d committed there several years before.

  From the beginning, police in Kansas had been suspicious of Gerald’s story. Lisa had never wandered off before, and it seemed unlikely she’d have done so in the dark, while her parents were away. Most child abductions, they also knew, involve a relative or acquaintance of the victim. As their investigation continued they grew more certain of his guilt. When two of his fellow inmates at Deuel told detectives that Gerald had admitted raping and killing the toddler, they knew they had a case.

  The trial was set to begin on June 16 in Olathe, Kansas; the prosecutor, Mark Bennett, had scheduled me to testify the morning of Friday, June 18. “If you arrive by plane, I will make arrangements to have you picked up if you will advise me of the flight and time of arrival,” he wrote me. I wrote back to let him know that I needed to drive, so I could retrieve a few more boxes we hadn’t been able to cram into the moving van that brought our belongings to Knoxville.

  I had barely had time to unpack my suitcase and start settling into my new digs in Knoxville, Tennessee, when I found myself climbing into the car for the long drive back to Kansas. As I headed west on Interstate 40 in my new “Grabber Blue” Mustang convertible—my reward to myself for landing a new job and a big raise—I had plenty of time to reflect on the sad case.

  I arrived on the afternoon of the seventeenth, tired from the twelve-hour drive and nervous about how my testimony would go. I reviewed my reports and mentally practiced explaining the scientific data in language that wouldn’t intimidate a jury of Kansas laypeople.

  The next morning, right on schedule, I was sworn in. Mark Bennett led me through my findings, briefly going through the various methods I used to determine the age, then focusing on how the gap in the front teeth and the notches on the incisors matched the photo of Lisa exactly.

  To my great relief, the defense attorney didn’t challenge my identification of Lisa’s body. He did, however, challenge several obvious weaknesses in the prosecution’s case, as I’d expected he might: Could I determine the cause of death? No, I could not. Were there signs of violence or trauma? No, there were not. Could I tell whether Lisa had been raped? No, I could not. I knew who she was, and I knew she’d been in that stream a long time, and I knew that was a human tragedy and a damned shame, but that’s all I knew.

  The trial lasted a week. By the time it ended I was back in Knoxville, unpacking more household boxes and desperately scrounging around for more office furniture. Mark Bennett sent me the front-page story from The Kansas City Star:SILVERS ACQUITTED IN NIECE’S DEATH. The defense had attacked the credibility of the two prisoners who testified that Gerald had admitted raping and killing Lisa. Both men, defense witnesses testified, were homosexuals.

  Earl Silvers, Lisa’s father, praised Gerald’s
defense attorney after the trial. “He was very good,” Earl told a local newspaper reporter. “He was always working—seven days a week, up until 9 or 10 o’clock each night.” Charles Silvers, Lisa’s grandfather, expressed his hope that Gerald would come home to Kansas when he finished his prison sentence at Deuel. “California is not a place to start a new life,” he said.

  Lisa’s remains were buried not long after the trial ended. If she had lived, she would be in her mid-thirties now. She might have a child of her own. Maybe a girl with fine blond hair and a slight gap in the middle of four distinctly notched teeth at the center of a big, bright smile.

  CHAPTER 5

  The Case of the Headless Corpse

  IT MUST HAVE BEEN a really quiet news day; there’s no other possible explanation for the explosion of media interest in my slight miscalculation.

  Actually, it was a quiet couple of weeks, at least to begin with. It all started during that dependably slow week in Knoxville between Christmas and New Year’s Day. The university was closed for Christmas break; most of my students had gone to visit their families. My oldest son, Charlie, who was twenty-one at the time, had come to Tennessee for the holidays from the University of Arizona, where he was a first-year graduate student in—what else?—anthropology, with an emphasis in forensics. (This was back before he realized he didn’t want to live on a professor’s salary all his life.)

  Late on the afternoon of Thursday, December 29, 1977, I got a call from the Williamson County sheriff’s office. Because I was the Tennessee state forensic anthropologist—as well as a badge-carrying consultant to the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation—law enforcement officials throughout the state had my home telephone number. Consequently the phone was apt to ring at any hour of the day or night, and the less convenient the hour, the more likely it was to be a call from someone who needed me to examine a body.

  This time the someone was Detective Captain Jeff Long, calling from Franklin, a town about thirty miles south of Nashville. Franklin was small at the time—just a few thousand people—but a lot of country-music stars and Nashville doctors owned horse farms and mansions there, so it was a town of relatively affluent and well-educated people.

  Two of the most affluent and best educated were Ben and Mary Griffith, a physician and his wife. The Griffiths had just bought an antebellum estate called Two Rivers and were beginning to restore the house. According to Captain Long, on the morning of Christmas Eve, Mrs. Griffith was showing a friend the house and grounds when she suddenly noticed something amiss.

  In back of the house was a tiny family cemetery where eight members of the Shy family, the mansion’s original owners, had been buried in the 1800s and early 1900s. Mrs. Griffith noticed that the most prominently marked grave had been disturbed. The grave’s headstone, more than a hundred years old, bore this inscription: Lt. Col. Wm. Shy, 20thTenn. Infantry, C.S.A., Born May 24, 1838, Killed At Battle of Nashville, Dec. 16, 1864.

  Beneath the headstone the earth was freshly turned, down to a depth of three or four feet. Grave-robbers, Mrs. Griffith thought, probably searching for Civil War artifacts. She didn’t see signs of a coffin, either on the ground or down in the grave itself—perhaps they’d been scared off before reaching it—but she called Sheriff Fleming Williams anyway.

  Needless to say, most of Sheriff Williams’s deputies were doing what most of the rest of us were doing: enjoying the holidays with their families. The sheriff came out, took a quick look, and—since there didn’t seem to be any dire emergency—told her he’d be back after Christmas. A churned-up grave in a tiny old cemetery was nothing to get excited about, he thought.

  When he returned on December 29, though, his thinking changed swiftly. Just below the surface of the recently disturbed earth, he found what appeared to be a recent murder victim. More precisely, he found most of one: the body had no head.

  Sheriff Williams radioed the Williamson County coroner, Clyde Stephens, who hurried out to the Griffiths’ backyard, joining what was fast becoming a throng of deputies. Under the coroner’s direction, they continued the excavation very carefully, so as not to destroy any evidence they might need in a murder trial.

  The body was that of an elegantly dressed young man decked out in a tuxedo of some sort. Although it was pretty ripe, the corpse was still largely intact and its flesh was still pink. The informal consensus was that, whoever he was, he’d been dead no more than a few months. But how had he come to be recently buried, or partially buried, in an old Civil War grave?

  Easy, thought the coroner: What better hiding place for a body—a second body—than a grave? It was simply a macabre twist on the old trick of hiding something in plain sight. But apparently the killer had been scared away halfway through the task of burying his victim. A grave-tampering incident was one thing; a murder case was quite another. In a hurried graveside conference, the sheriff and the coroner decided they might need some expert help excavating the remains. That’s when Detective Captain Long called me.

  I told Captain Long that I would meet him at the sheriff’s office the following morning and that I would bring an assistant: my son Charlie. While his Arizona classmates were off skiing and partying, Charlie would be getting valuable field experience in a homicide investigation—an enviable Christmas bonus for any aspiring anthropologist.

  We set off early, heading west on Interstate 40 in my Mustang convertible. It was a cold, wet day, so, needless to say, we did not put the top down. A few months after I had bought the car, Charlie—who, unlike me, loved speed and was, after all, a teenager at the time—whipped into the left lane of a prairie straightaway just as the farmer he was passing executed a left turn. The Mustang was never quite the same after that.

  On this gray December morning, I was at the wheel—not because I didn’t trust Charlie’s driving but because I tend to get carsick if I’m not steering. During the three-hour drive to Franklin, we talked about Charlie’s studies at Arizona. His major professor, Walter Birkby, had been my first graduate student at the University of Kansas, so I got to catch up not only on Charlie’s progress but also on Walter’s career. The miles passed swiftly.

  We arrived in Franklin at about 10:30 A.M. and followed Captain Long out to Two Rivers. After some 125 years the two-story home was obviously in need of its current restoration, but it was still striking: red brick, black shutters, and tall chimneys at each end. Big oaks and maples filled the front yard.

  In back, the ground sloped down toward the Harpeth River; on a gentle rise, halfway between the house and the river, a cluster of headstones marked the Shy family cemetery. Directly behind Colonel Shy’s stone marker was an oak tree; directly in front was the muddy hole in the ground. As we neared the grave I noticed that the sod had been carefully removed and set aside. I guessed that whoever dug that hole had planned to cover his tracks thoroughly, until something—a barking dog, an unexpected porch light, or possibly even Mrs. Griffith’s home-and-garden tour—sent him scurrying away.

  The hole measured about three feet square and three to four feet deep. Peering down into it, I could see exposed flesh and bone. With Charlie’s help I began to clean out the disturbed soil and expose the body. The ground was wet and the hole was muddy. At first we lay on a piece of plywood positioned at the edge of the grave, reaching in with trowels to pick the earth loose. Except for the cold and the rain, the work was easy, because the dirt had been disturbed so recently. As the hole got deeper I climbed down inside. Over the years, counting my excavations of Indian burials in the Great Plains, I’ve been in somewhere around five thousand graves. By the time I die I suspect I’ll hold some sort of unofficial record: “body that’s been in and out of the most graves ever.”

  Just as Captain Long had told me over the phone, the body was in an advanced state of decay. By now some of the joints had deteriorated. The legs were separated from the pelvis, and the arms were detached from the torso. The knees and the elbows, however, were
still intact and still covered with clothing, as was most of the torso. From the look of the formal black jacket and pleated white shirt, I wondered if the victim had been a waiter from some fancy Nashville or Franklin restaurant. Either that or a groomsman at a wedding, a guy who’d indiscreetly dallied with the wrong bridesmaid—or the bride.

  The body was in a sitting position on top of the antiquated coffin that had been buried in 1864. From excavating thousands of Native American burials on the Great Plains in the 1950s and ’60s, I knew that burying a body in a flexed position required less digging than stretching it out horizontally. It was one more sign of someone hurrying to conceal a crime.

  As we dug deeper and exposed more of the body, I saw a small hole in the top of the old coffin. The coffin appeared to be made of cast iron—the top of the line, funereally speaking, back in the 1860s. The hole, which measured about one foot by two feet, might have been caused by the force of a pick or shovel striking the brittle metal. Then, as the disturbed, soggy earth settled around the hastily buried victim, the pelvis and lower spine dropped through the opening and into the old coffin. As a result, I had a hard time extracting the remains.

  As I carefully unearthed body parts and pieces of clothing, I handed them up to Charlie, who laid them out in anatomical order on the plywood. Once I’d recovered all the body parts I could find, he placed the pieces in evidence bags and labeled them. In addition to the body, I found two cigarette butts, which Charlie bagged as well.