Death's Acre

by William M. Bass

  Bill gently troweled the earth away to reveal the skull without moving it, an excavation technique called “pedestaling.” As he exposed the left side of the head, he saw more fractures near the forehead—a web of bone fragments angling outward—but no hole. “Hey, guys, the bullet might still be in the cranium,” he said excitedly. A few minutes more and Bill had completely exposed the skull. The cartilage joining it to the cervical vertebrae had long since decomposed, so Bill reached down and lifted it. As he rotated it to look at the face, he heard a small clatter within the cranium: a .22-caliber bullet rattling around in the space created by the drying and shrinking of the brain.

  The sobering reality of the situation hit them hard when they’d finished excavating the remains, gathering the soil samples, and boxing everything up for the trip back to Knoxville. They put the remains, the clothing, and the soil samples in a cardboard specimen box, measuring one foot square by three feet long. As Samantha emerged from the crawl space carrying the box, Robert Ramsburg started toward her. In a panic she turned to Bill Grant. “What do I do?” she whispered. “Is he going to want to see the remains?”

  “This is evidence,” said Bill. “He can’t. Don’t say anything; don’t even look at him.”

  Eyes on the ground, Samm walked to the truck. From her downcast gaze and stricken face, Robert Ramsburg had to have a pretty good idea what the box contained.

  He was right. It was his son.

  It came as no surprise to anyone involved in the case that the anthropological examination indicated that the skeletal remains were those of a white male, age twenty-eight to thirty-four, measuring five feet five inches to five feet ten inches tall. It was also no surprise that dental X rays confirmed the victim to be Terry Ramsburg, a thirty-three-year-old white male who stood five feet six inches tall before a bullet laid him low.

  I sent copies of our forensic report to the TBI, the Cumberland County sheriff, the Crossville Police Department, and the district attorney’s office on October 9. That same day, Lillie Mae Ramsburg Davis was charged with first-degree murder and held without bond.

  Her trial was set for July of 1992. For months she proclaimed her innocence. Then, a week before the trial was scheduled to start, Lillie Mae cut a deal, pleading guilty to second-degree murder. Investigators told me that she’d shot him on the sofa as he lay sleeping, then dragged him under the house and buried him. Shockingly, she continued to inhabit the house, along with her two daughters, directly over Terry Ramsburg’s decaying body for another two and a half years; for part of that time her new husband lived atop the remains of his murdered predecessor.

  Lillie Mae was sentenced to thirty years, but she became eligible for parole in just ten. At her parole hearing Robert Ramsburg, her former father-in-law, testified passionately against her release, and the parole board voted to keep her in prison.

  Lillie Mae’s guilty plea turned time since death into a moot issue, legally speaking, but scientifically it was still important. Terry Ramsburg’s body had largely skeletonized under the house, except for a large quantity of adipocere beneath the chest and abdominal regions. (Adipocere—literally, “grave wax”—is a soapy, greasy substance that forms when fat decomposes in a damp environment.) The extent of skeletonization and adipocere formation told me that Terry Ramsburg had been in that crawl space a long, long time, probably since the day of his murder.

  Could Arpad’s soil analysis confirm or pinpoint the time since death with any greater precision? Well, as often happens with new scientific techniques, in this case we learned more about the technique itself than about the murder to which it was applied.

  All the volatile fatty acids Arpad tested for were below detectable limits, and those limits were pretty doggone low: twenty-two parts per million. In plain language, the body had lain there so long that the flesh-eating bugs had long since moved on to greener pastures, and even their waste products had evaporated into thin air. Temperature measurements taken in the crawl space suggested that the body could have reached that point in about eleven months, whereas nearly three times that many months had actually elapsed since his disappearance. The technique, we now realized, was better suited to bodies that were still actively decomposing.

  After the Ramsburg case, Arpad Vass continued to refine his soil-analysis technique for estimating time since death. He also developed other ways to harness cutting-edge chemistry to catch killers. Recently he devised a similar technique that analyzes tiny tissue samples from a murder victim’s liver, kidneys, brain, or other organs. If the body is no more than a few weeks old, this tissue-biopsy technique can pinpoint time since death to within a matter of days or even hours. Now Arpad is working to isolate and identify the specific molecules that constitute the distinctive odor of death—the molecules that cadaver dogs respond to—as a step toward developing portable systems that police and human-rights investigators could use to locate clandestine graves.

  And Arpad’s original breakthrough—analyzing soil samples to determine time since death—has proved its accuracy and value in dozens of cases. The investigation into one of those cases would begin just three months after Lillie Mae confessed to shooting Terry Ramsburg and burying him under the house. Time since death—and Arpad—would play a prominent role in the “Zoo Man” murders.

  CHAPTER 12

  The Zoo Man Murders

  EVERY OCTOBER, the East Tennessee hills get all gussied up for six dazzling weeks. The dogwoods turn crimson; the maples, a brilliant red-orange; the tulip poplars, bright yellow; the oaks, variations in red and brown.

  Nine miles east of downtown Knoxville, not far beyond a bridge where Interstate 40 crosses the green waters of the Holston River, the fall colors put on a show in a thick stand of hardwoods paralleling the highway. The woods lie at the end of a short dead-end road, Cahaba Lane, which runs for a half-mile beside the eastbound lanes of the freeway. Facing the traffic are a handful of houses and trailers and a church perched high on a grassy slope, East Sunny-view Baptist Church. To the south, away from the interstate, a small wet-weather creek winds through the trees.

  Cahaba Lane dead-ends at the foot of a towering billboard—Comfort Inn, Free Breakfast, Guest Laundry—supported by five rusting I-beams. Between two of the supports, a path leads up a gently sloping ridge that is dotted with empty beer cans, snack wrappers, egg cartons, shoes, and other household and automotive debris. The forest floor is also littered with acorns, which support a large population of squirrels.

  On October 20, 1992, a hunter—aiming to do a little squirrel population control—wandered up the path into the woods. A ways up the trail he noticed a battered mattress and a rotting doghouse; stuffed into the doghouse was a department-store mannequin. Kicking aside some of the debris, he saw that the “mannequin” was actually a young woman: a chemically blond, partially nude, and very dead young woman, her hands bound with orange baling twine. The hunter raced to a phone and called the police. Within minutes the dead end began filling with vehicles from the Knox County Sheriff’s Department and the Knoxville Police Department. One of the KPD officers who converged on Cahaba Lane recognized the victim as Patricia Anderson, a thirty-two-year-old white female he’d been trying to find since she disappeared nearly a week before.

  Patty Anderson was no stranger to the police. A prostitute with a cocaine habit and a police record, she was good-looking and a flashy dresser. She was also in the early stages of pregnancy, a fact that few of her coworkers or clients knew. She’d told a bail bondsman that she was trying to scrape together enough money for an abortion; her quest for cash was probably what had brought her to this unlucky dead end.

  The Knox County medical examiner quickly confirmed what officers at the scene had suspected from Anderson’s battered face, bruised neck, bulging eyes, and livid face: After tying her up, someone had beaten and strangled her. Ironically, hundreds of people must have been passing by just a stone’s throw away; if she called for h
elp, her cries might have been drowned out by the constant roar of the traffic.

  Anderson had last been seen on October 13; the next day her boyfriend spotted his car—a Chevy Malibu, which she had taken—parked at a motel frequently worked by Knoxville prostitutes. But by then she had vanished. To officers familiar with the city’s seamy underbelly, a murder suspect sprang immediately to mind when her battered body was found. He liked to rough up streetwalkers, and he’d done that at Cahaba Lane at least twice before. The hunt was on for Zoo Man.

  Eight months before Patty Anderson was killed—back on February 27—a Knoxville prostitute had called the police to report that a “john” had hired her and driven her out to Cahaba Lane. Once there, she said, he took her into the woods and proceeded to rob, rape, and beat her. Then, in the middle of winter, he left her tied up in the woods, naked. She managed to free herself, get to a phone at a beauty shop nearby, and call the police.

  A Knoxville Police Department investigator, Tom Pressley, drove the woman back to Cahaba Lane later that day so he could inspect the scene. An aging Buick LeSabre was parked at the end of the road. “That’s it! That’s his car!” the woman exclaimed.

  Pressley parked and headed into the woods, accompanied by the woman. About a hundred yards up the path, the woman began to tremble. Clutching Pressley’s arm, she pointed and whispered, “There he is now!” The scene was shocking: A man was standing in the woods with his pants down around his knees; in front of him, on her knees, was a sobbing woman. The officer drew his gun and approached, unnoticed.

  Pressley ordered the man to lie facedown in the woods. Then he cuffed him, led him back to his squad car, and radioed for backup. One of the officers who responded drove the two women back to town; Pressley took the man in and booked him.

  The man caught with his pants down was Thomas Dee Huskey, age thirty-two; he lived in a trailer with his parents in Pigeon Forge, a small town twenty-five miles east of Knoxville. Huskey was charged with rape and robbery. (A wallet belonging to the woman who had led Pressley out to Cahaba Lane was found in the floorboard of the LeSabre.) But a grand jury dismissed the first woman’s complaints; the second woman left town and never showed up to testify against him. After several months in jail, Tom Huskey was released.

  A couple of weeks after his release, Huskey was picked up again, this time for soliciting an undercover policewoman for sex. He was cited and fined, then released again. But he remained a prisoner of lust and rage, which he continued to direct at prostitutes. Among the streetwalkers, he soon acquired a bad reputation and a memorable nickname: “Zoo Man.” He’d worked for two years at the Knoxville Zoo as an elephant handler, until he was fired in 1990 for abusing the animals. His job wasn’t the only reason for the nickname, though: Both during and after the time he worked at the zoo, Huskey liked to take prostitutes to an empty livestock barn beside the zoo. There, rumor had it, he liked to tie women up and abuse them. By the summer of 1992 the word had spread among Knoxville’s prostitutes: Stay away from Zoo Man.

  Not everyone got the message, though. One Sunday afternoon in September, Huskey picked up another prostitute and took her out to Cahaba Lane, promising her $75—nearly twice her usual fee. But once they were in the woods, she later told police, Huskey tied her hands behind her back, then beat her and raped her. As he’d done to his victim in February, he left her tied up on the ground.

  Just a few weeks later, on the night after Anderson’s body was found, the police arrested Tom Huskey in Pigeon Forge, at the trailer he shared with his parents on Huskey Lane. Searching the trailer, they found a piece of orange baling twine in Huskey’s bedroom—the same kind they’d found tied around Patty Anderson’s wrists. They also found an earring, later identified as hers; snagged on the earring was a blond hair. Lacking a follicle, or root, the hair itself didn’t contain enough DNA to compare with the victim’s. However, a chemical analysis by the FBI crime lab showed that the hair found in Huskey’s bedroom had been dyed with the same dye as Patty Anderson’s hair.

  The next step in the quest for evidence was to search the two places Huskey was known to take women for sex: the barn by the Knoxville Zoo and the woods off Cahaba Lane. Six or eight local prostitutes had gone missing over the past few months, and if Huskey had killed one of them, as the evidence sure seemed to indicate, maybe he’d killed others, too.

  Of course, just because a prostitute drops from sight, that doesn’t mean she’s been killed. Having worked several cases involving prostitutes, I’ve learned that many of these women lead mobile, nomadic lives. For one thing, they’re often trying to stay one step ahead of the law. For another, they can command higher prices when they’re the new girl on the block. So maybe the unaccounted-for prostitutes had simply moved on to greener pastures; on the other hand, maybe some of them were dead and decomposing in the woods or the old livestock barn. Unfortunately, the barn had gone up in flames during the summer and the site had been bulldozed clean. Was it an accident or arson? Any evidence that might have been there, including burned bones, was long gone. That left Cahaba Lane.

  Six days after Patty Anderson’s body was found, I got a call from the Knox County Sheriff’s Department. They’d found the bodies of two more women out at Cahaba Lane, the officer said, and they wondered if I’d come take a look. I rounded up a team—Bill Grant (who later worked as a forensic anthropologist for the U.S. Army) and Lee Meadows and Murray Marks (both now UT professors who teach, work forensic cases, and keep the Body Farm going)—and we piled into a white UT pickup truck and headed east. A serial killer was on the loose in Knoxville, and he was preying on some of the city’s most vulnerable women. Women whose livelihood required them to put their bodies—their lives—in the hands of strangers.

  It had been years since I’d worked a serial-murder case, but I vividly remembered how disturbing it was. Back in the mid-1980s, eight women in the Southeast were murdered and dumped alongside major highways; three of the bodies were found in Tennessee. Many of the victims had reddish hair, so the case became known as the Redhead Murders. Most of those women were prostitutes; that’s when I learned how they’d move from one city to another whenever their earnings began to drop.

  The Redhead Murders were never solved. I hoped this case would turn out better. There’s no such thing as a happy ending in a case like this, but if we got lucky and all did our jobs well, at least there might be less crime and more punishment.

  When I parked the truck at the end of Cahaba Lane and got out, I happened to glance down. There, clinging to the top of my left rear tire, was a slimy used condom. The investigators led us into the woods. The first body was about fifty yards to the right of the billboard—practically within sight of the pavement. This woman, like Patty Anderson, was partially clothed, although her pants were pulled down, exposing her buttocks and genitals. A black female, she was still in the first stage of decomposition: little discoloration, no bloating, minimal insect activity. That was partly because the body was fresh but also because the weather was cold. Blowflies don’t fly if the temperature’s below 50 degrees Fahrenheit.

  “This body’s too fresh for me,” I said. “She needs to go to the medical examiner.” Having recused myself from examining her, I was careful not to touch her. Just by looking at her bruised neck and contorted face, though, I was pretty sure she’d been strangled.

  A sheriff’s deputy asked how long she’d been dead. Just from a glance, and without making much allowance for the cold snap we’d been having, I said, “Not long—maybe a couple of days.” That offhand remark, written down by the deputy and quoted in the newspapers, would come back to haunt me many times in the months and years to come.

  They led me to the second body. This one lay much deeper in the woods than the others had, about a half-mile from the billboard, over the top of the hill and partway down the other side. Unlike the previous bodies, this one was completely nude; a satiny undergarment, a teddy, lay crumpled in the l
eaves about ten feet away. It was another black female, the race obvious from the hair and the exposed teeth. This body was badly decomposed. The skin was discolored and the abdomen bloated; the bones of the left leg were exposed; and both feet were missing. Legs and arms splayed wide, the corpse lay with its crotch jammed against a small tree. The tree trunk extending straight upward from the genitals of the nude, rotting body of the murder victim made the crime even more shocking, more depraved.

  As I studied the body’s position, I realized that this wasn’t the death scene—in other words, this wasn’t where she’d actually been killed. Looking around, I saw a dark, greasy stain several feet higher up the slope, where volatile fatty acids had leached out of the body. Part of the hair mat was there too. Clearly that was where her body had originally lain, until someone or something had come along and moved her.

  Both of the victim’s feet were gone, chewed off at the ends of the tibia and fibula, and the left thigh was badly gnawed as well. I could picture exactly what had happened: After the murder, a week or so passed; by then she would have been smelling pretty foul to you or me. To a dog’s way of thinking, though, she was just starting to smell really interesting.

  Dogs, I’ve observed, don’t like to eat out in the open; they’re afraid of being surprised from behind. Their favorite feeding position is to nestle with their back up against a log or a big rock, so nothing can sneak up on them. Now, if you’re a 50- or 75-pound dog, and you’re trying to drag a 120-pound body off to a safe place to eat it, you’re not going to drag it uphill; you’re going to grab a foot and drag downhill, so you get some help from gravity. In this case, though, the body hadn’t moved far before the spread legs slid to opposite sides of a tree trunk. Once it was lodged there, the dog was stymied. Instead of a whole body, he had to settle for gnawing the thigh and carrying off the feet.