Death's Acre

by William M. Bass

  Over the years I’ve noticed that killers tend to smoke heavily at crime scenes. In one murder case—involving an auto chop-shop owner who shot a snitch with a hunting rifle—I found a whole pile of mini-cigar butts at the spot where the killer had lain in ambush for hours. Those particular butts had plastic tips, which he’d bitten down on with enough force to leave tooth marks; fortunately, I was able to match those marks with a cast we later made of his teeth. Under the circumstances, chain-smoking is not surprising, I guess—a killer is likely to be very tense, and smoking is a nervous habit—but it’s not too smart, either, since even paper cigarette butts can pick up fingerprints and saliva-borne DNA—evidence that can send a killer to death row. (Note to smokers: That’s one more way smoking can kill you.)

  As I excavated, the hole got deeper and deeper; by the time I had recovered most of the body, I had reached the top of the Civil War–era coffin. I asked a deputy to loan me his flashlight, instructed Charlie and the deputy to hold my ankles, and hung headfirst in the pit so I could peer inside the hole in the coffin’s lid. There wasn’t really anything to see—just a thin layer of goo in the bottom—but then again, I hadn’t expected there to be anything left after more than a century. Several years before, I had excavated a cemetery dating from this same period, the mid- to late 1800s. That cemetery contained nearly twenty graves, but the bone fragments I recovered from that entire cemetery could fit easily in the palm of one hand: they’d crumbled that completely in the damp dirt of Tennessee. Knowing what I did about Civil War–era burials, then, I would have been astonished if Colonel Shy’s bones had shown up in the beam of the flashlight. With a grunt and a tug, Charlie and a deputy hauled me up out of the grave.

  By now Charlie and I were both soaked and chilled to the bone. We took off our muddy jumpsuits and put them in the trunk of the Mustang, along with the remains and the clothing, which we’d removed from the body and bagged separately. Before heading back to Knoxville, we needed to make a brief detour to the state crime laboratory near Nashville, where TBI technicians would pore over the clothing and cigarette butts for clues to the identities of our victim and his killer.

  We got to the crime lab late in the day, just before closing time. The clothing was wet and smelly, so the TBI staff did not welcome us with open arms. To keep from stinking up the entire laboratory, they finally decided to spread the clothing out in their heated garage to dry and air out.

  Charlie and I got back to Knoxville late that Friday night. I pulled into the garage—fortunately, it was not attached to the house, so we wouldn’t smell the body—and headed inside for a shower, sleep, and a weekend of college football bowl games. Whoever was out there in the Mustang, he wasn’t likely to go anywhere, because I took the car keys with me.

  On Monday morning I took the remains to the anthropology department offices beneath the football stadium and put them in several large pots of hot water to soften the tissue for easy removal. (By now, after many years and two replacement stoves, I had learned not to do this at home.) The process of sorting, cleaning, and examining the bones would take a couple of days, even though the skeleton wasn’t complete.

  It wasn’t just the skull that was missing; so were the feet and one of the hands. That’s common with bodies recovered outdoors: dogs, coyotes, vultures, and raccoons often feed on corpses, and the hands and feet are the easiest parts for predators to pull off and drag away. In this case, though, I wasn’t sure what to make of that, since the body had been buried, or at least partially buried. Interestingly, the one hand that remained was still inside a white glove when we found it, reinforcing my sense that the victim might have been a waiter at an upscale restaurant or an usher at a wedding.

  I was pretty sure, right from the start, that this was a male; however, the genital region was one of the areas where decomposition had reached the advanced stage, so I knew I’d have to rely on the pelvis and other skeletal indicators to confirm the sex. The pubic bones were short and sharply angled—not the sort of pelvic geometry conducive to child-bearing. Clearly, our mystery corpse was a mystery man.

  The sternal end of the clavicle, where the collarbone joins the breastbone, was fully fused, so that meant he was probably at least twenty-five. The pubic symphysis—the joint where the pubic bones met at the front of the abdomen—had a rough, bumpy surface, which told me he was probably somewhere in his mid- to late twenties. To check my own conclusions, I called in six of my graduate students—by now, students were filtering back from their holiday travels—and asked them to estimate the man’s age. All six put the age at twenty-six to twenty-nine.

  The femoral head, the ball at the top of the thighbone, measured 50 millimeters, or about 2 inches, in diameter—also pretty typical for a male. The left femur measured 490 millimeters in length, or about 19.3 inches, and the right femur was 492. Using a formula derived by anthropologist Mildred Trotter and statistician Goldine Gleser in 1958, I calculated that our victim had once stood between five feet nine inches and six feet tall—when he still had his head, that is.

  The process of cleaning and examining the bones failed to turn up any indication of the cause of death. As decayed as the soft tissue was in places, we wouldn’t have been able to detect stab wounds even if they had been present; the bones themselves bore no cut marks or other signs of skeletal trauma. Judging by the state of decomposition, I still estimated the time since death at a few months, or possibly more, but definitely less than one year.

  Police in Williamson County and Nashville checked for missing-person reports filed within the past year. No one at all was missing in Williamson County; none of Nashville’s missing persons matched the physical description of these remains: white male, mid-twenties to early thirties, about five feet ten inches tall.

  Area newspapers—hurting for juicy news during the lull between Christmas and New Year’s—got wind of the mystery and began reporting it. HEADLESS BODY FOUND AT FRANKLIN, read one headline on January 1. The story, sent out over the Associated Press wire service, told how the body was found sitting atop Colonel Shy’s coffin. It also described the “tuxedo-type shirt, vest, and coat” and quoted my estimate of time since death: “It appears the man has been dead two months to a year,” I said, “and a year may be a little too much.” I gave another reporter a narrower range, two to six months.

  A day or two later, one enterprising reporter started looking into other recent deaths and found one in Knoxville that bore some similarities: Less than two months before, a decapitated man had turned up in a rural area just outside Knoxville. Could the two cases be related, the work of a serial killer? I told him I didn’t think so. The Knoxville victim had been dismembered and mutilated—his head and neck hacked off, his arms and lower legs severed, even his genitals cut off. The Franklin body—at least, what we had of it—showed no cut marks. TORSO CASE NOT LINKED TO OTHER DECAPITATED BODY, the resulting headline proclaimed.

  Then, on January 3, the plot thickened: A Williamson County sheriff’s deputy arrived, bearing the skull and mandible. The coroner and sheriff’s deputies had gone back to the grave, excavated further, and located the skull inside the coffin. “It’s my theory that he was crammed head first in the hole made in the colonel’s casket,” the coroner told a UPI reporter. OFFICER’S GRAVE MYSTERY GROWS, read that day’s headline. The story began, “The head, feet and an arm of an unidentified body found in the grave of a Confederate officer have been recovered from inside the officer’s coffin, authorities said.”

  There was no longer any mystery about the cause of death: A gunshot of enormous force had blasted into the forehead about two inches above the left eye; the exit wound—if you could call it that—was at the back of the head, near the base of the skull. I say skull, but that’s not exactly accurate: The force of the projectile was so great that it shattered the poor man’s head into seventeen pieces. I had to glue them back together just to determine the location and size of the entry and exit wound
s. Judging by the destruction, he had been shot by a large-caliber gun, possibly at close range. Our mystery man had died a violent, instantaneous death.

  The latest wrinkle in the case was this: Unlike the rest of the body, the skull was virtually fleshless and chocolate-brown in color, much like the ancient Indian skulls I’d excavated in South Dakota. The teeth had no fillings but lots of cavities, some of them quite large; his lower-left third molar was on the verge of abscessing. There was no indication that this elegantly attired gentleman had ever set foot in a dentist’s office or had ever received a scrap of dental care—modern dental care, anyway.

  An uncomfortable suspicion began gnawing at me.

  Just then the telephone rang. It was a technician from the state crime laboratory in Nashville calling. “Dr. Bass, we’re finding some odd things in this clothing you brought us,” he said. “The fibers are all natural—cotton and silk; nothing synthetic.” There were no labels in the clothes that could be traced, he added, and the trouser legs, which laced up the sides, were unlike anything he’d seen before. The square-toed shoes were a style that had become popular a few years earlier—but were also a style that had been common a century before.

  His final question was the one I’d suddenly guessed, with a rush of dread, might be coming: “Do you think this could actually be the body of Colonel Shy?”

  “I’m starting to think that it is,” I admitted. I was glad he couldn’t see my face turning crimson with embarrassment. “I still have a few questions I need answers to—for example, did they have elastic like what’s in those shoes back in 1864?—but it’s looking more and more likely.”

  There’s a time-honored philosopher’s maxim—Occam’s razor, it’s called—that holds that the simplest explanation that fits the facts is usually right. Over the years I’d seen enough bizarre twists in murder cases to know that Occam’s razor could sometimes cut the wrong way, but in this case it seemed right. If the body in my lab was that of Colonel William Shy, it would answer a lot of questions: Why were the cavities in the teeth unfilled? Why did the clothing look not just so formal but so unusual? Why were there no synthetic fibers, no labels, no other traceable artifacts?

  When we found the body sitting atop the coffin, it looked as if it had been added to the grave, not pulled out of a small hole in the coffin’s lid. Having assumed it was an additional body, we easily took the next logical step: it must be a murder victim, and a recent one at that. Our next feat of deductive gymnastics—explaining away the absence of a body within the coffin—had been easy, in light of my prior excavation of tiny fragments from a nineteenth-century cemetery. (Clyde Stephens, the coroner, explained the absence of a body another way, voicing doubts that Colonel Shy had ever occupied the coffin in the first place: “I would have thought there would have been possibly a belt buckle, buttons, or something,” he told a Nashville reporter, “but we didn’t find anything.”)

  At least, we didn’t find anything where we’d expected to. To the embarrassment of everyone involved—or at least everyone quoted in the press—it now appeared that it was Colonel Shy himself who had been hiding in plain sight. Instead of a recent murder victim crammed partway into a coffin, the body was an old soldier pulled mostly out of the coffin, losing his head and some appendages in the grave-robbing tug-of-war. The shattered skull made perfect sense in this new light too: Colonel Shy was killed when Union troops surrounded and overran the hilltop where the 20th Tennessee Infantry had sought safety. The colonel fell in fierce hand-to-hand combat, shot with a .58-caliber minié ball in the forehead at point-blank range.

  By now the story had mushroomed from a local crime story into a human-interest feature on the worldwide Associated Press wire service: A mysterious corpse baffles police; they consult a prominent scientist; the scientist errs spectacularly; the ancient soldier has the last laugh. Judging by the letters and phone calls I got, the story was picked up by papers everywhere. One former student sent me a copy from an English-language paper in Bangkok, Thailand.

  A few weeks later Colonel Shy was reburied in his grave. A local funeral home donated a new coffin, and a regiment of more than a hundred Civil War reenactors turned out in full uniform to give him a full military burial. As the minister concluded his graveside remarks, lightning flashed, thunder rolled, and hailstones pelted the crowd—exactly as historical accounts said they had at the colonel’s first funeral, 113 years before! This time, perhaps, the Confederate soldier could rest in peace.

  I, on the other hand, could not. Although identifying the body as Colonel Shy’s had answered several questions, it had raised one enormous new one: How could I have misjudged the time since death by the whopping margin of almost 113 years?

  That question, it turned out, had several answers. The first and simplest answer came to light when we subjected a tissue sample to chemical analysis. The body, it turned out, had been embalmed—not nearly so common in the 1860s as it is today, but not too surprising for an officer and a gentleman of wealth and social prominence. A man of Shy’s standing would have been buried in his best clothes—the very same black jacket and pleated shirt that we later recognized in the last known photo of Colonel Shy, taken in the early 1860s.

  The next piece of the puzzle took some metallurgical and chemical detective work. The coffin was cast iron, remember, so stout that it kept out water for more than a century. It also kept out the coffin flies—tenacious, gnat-size flies that can burrow deep into the ground and bore through wooden coffins and penetrate tiny openings in metal coffins. And because the coffin was hermetically sealed, there was very little oxygen for bacteria to draw on to digest the body’s soft tissues—hence, the pink tissue that appeared to be only two to six months postmortem.

  Those were partial answers to the troubling question I’d asked myself. The more comprehensive answer was also more unsettling: I just didn’t know enough—not nearly enough—about the postmortem processes that begin when human life ends. And it wasn’t just me: None of us knew enough. Anthropologists, pathologists, coroners, police—we were all woefully ignorant about what happens to bodies after death, and how, and when.

  Colonel Shy—ably assisted by a few newspaper reporters and my own big mouth—had revealed both the depths of my own ignorance and the huge gap in forensic knowledge. Personally, I was embarrassed; scientifically, I was intrigued; above all, I was determined to do something about it.

  From that moment on, everything would change, in ways I could never have imagined.

  CHAPTER 6

  The Scene of the Crime

  FOR REASONS I don’t fully understand, forensics has suddenly become a hot topic on television. Night after night, a seemingly endless parade of victims is murdered, and night after night those murders are swiftly and cleverly solved. On most television dramas, at least, the forensic scientist is practically a god, endowed with a huge intellect and outfitted with every razzle-dazzle technology imaginable.

  It pains me to admit it, but I am somewhat less brilliant than TV supersleuths—and, with all due respect, so are many of my forensic colleagues. We’re not geniuses, and our gadgets can’t answer every question or pinpoint every perpetrator. But even though TV sometimes creates unrealistic expectations about the swiftness and certainty of murder investigations, some shows have done a great service by spotlighting the role forensic scientists—even ordinary, real-life ones—can play in bringing killers to justice. And these shows do get a lot dead right: Crime scene investigation is absolutely crucial to solving a crime.

  Surprisingly, many of my fellow forensic anthropologists—probably nine out of ten—have never worked a crime scene. They’re happy to examine bones on a lab table or under a microscope, but they don’t dirty their hands or shoes in the muck, mud, or blood of fieldwork. They stay clean and dry that way, but they also miss a lot of evidence that could reveal the truth about what happened to a murder victim. A victim like James Grizzle, whose story—
as we pieced it together at the crime scene—is one of the most bizarre and shocking I have ever encountered.

  One chilly January morning, I got a phone call from a detective with the Hawkins County, Tennessee, sheriff’s office, asking if I could help search for the body of a man whom they suspected had burned to death in his house a week or so earlier. I agreed to help, and enlisted three of my brightest graduate students—Steve Symes, Pat Willey, and David Hunt—to make the hundred-mile trip to Hawkins County the next morning.

  By now I’d been searching crime scenes and death scenes in Tennessee for ten years, and I’d developed an approach that seemed to work quite well. Anytime I received a request from law enforcement for help finding, recovering, or identifying human remains, I took a four-person forensic response team: a faculty member (me in those days, though now other faculty members take turns taking forensic cases) and three students trained in osteology, identification of human bones.

  I no longer used my own car. The anthropology department now had a pickup truck, which we kept loaded at all times with the equipment we’d need in the field—shovels and trowels for digging; wire-mesh screens for sifting small bones and bone fragments from dirt; three body bags for transporting corpses in the back of the truck (beneath a camper shell); paper evidence bags for collecting scattered bones, bullet casings, cigarette butts, beer bottles, knives, and any other evidence we recovered; one-hundred-foot surveyor’s tapes for measuring the proximity of bodies or bones to fixed landmarks such as trees, utility poles, and buildings; either red or orange survey flags for marking the location of every bone or piece of evidence; and at least two cameras.

  I considered the cameras the most important part of our equipment; they were essential in documenting the scene, the search, and particularly the recovery of human remains. I know of only two types of scientific research that require utterly destroying the very thing you’re studying: excavating an archaeological site and investigating a death scene. By the time you’re finished, it’s gone, dismantled, so you better make damned sure you’ve got an exhaustive record on film; there’s no going back to check for something you overlooked—say, footprints on the surface of a shallow grave—after you’ve trampled or dug up the ground.