Death's Acre

by William M. Bass

  CHAPTER 16

  The Backyard Barbecue

  BACKYARD BARBECUES are popular in Tennessee during the summer. I’ve been to hundreds of them. One of them was a humdinger.

  On July 21, 1997, a TBI agent named Dennis Daniels called me from a rural area in Union County, Tennessee, about forty miles north of Knoxville, and asked me to come take a look at some bones he suspected were human. Daniels—along with two Union County Sheriff’s Department investigators, David Tripp and Larry Dykes—was at the house of a twenty-one-year-old man named Matt Rogers.

  I collared two graduate students who were part of my forensic response teams, Joanne Bennett and Lauren Rockhold, and headed to Union County. We’d had twenty-two forensic cases so far in 1997; this, then, would be case 97-23. We met a sheriff’s deputy at the county courthouse in Maynardville, then followed him out into the country. Serious country. The road wound through woods, hardscrabble farms, run-down houses, and rusting trailers; we wound up somewhere around a ramshackle hamlet called Jim Town.

  The Rogers house was a small wooden structure; it was painted, or had been, once upon a time, but most of the paint had long since peeled off, leaving the boards to weather to a silvery gray. The officers led me around to the side of the house and behind a toolshed. I knew right away what they wanted me to look at, even before they pointed it out: a rusty fifty-five-gallon oil drum, its sides pierced with large bullet holes. It’s what country folks call a “burn barrel”; put a smokestack on it and move it to the city, and it would be promoted to “incinerator.” What had caught my eye was the end of a big bone sticking up out of the top of the barrel.

  “Matt says they’re animal bones,” Agent Daniels told me. “A dead goat his dogs drug up into the yard.” It was clear the TBI agent didn’t believe Matt’s story.

  Daniels had good reason to be suspicious. Matt’s twenty-seven-year-old wife, Patty, had been reported missing eleven days before. Adding fuel to the fire of suspicion was the fact that Patty’s disappearance had been reported not by Matt but by Patty’s best friend, Angie, who had last seen Patty on July 7 at a cookout. At the cookout Patty had told Angie that she planned to leave Matt the next day. But Angie wasn’t the only one Patty told, and that’s when the plot began to thicken, like something right out of a soap opera. Patty, it seems, was having an affair with Angie’s brother, Michael. That night at the cookout, Patty and Michael told Matt about the affair and said they wanted to be together on the morrow. Patty and Matt left the cookout engaged in a bitter argument.

  Angie didn’t hear from Patty for two days, which concerned her, given how close they were and what Patty had told her. Then Matt called, and Angie got truly scared: He asked if she’d seen Patty. She’d stormed out of the house at 2:00 A.M. the night of the cookout, he said, and he hadn’t seen her since.

  The next day Angie went to the sheriff’s office to report Patty missing. She’d tried to persuade Matt to file the report, but he’d refused; he’d also asked her to let him know if she contacted the sheriff, so he could straighten up the house before anybody came over to talk to him. Angie did not tell Matt she’d filed the report, and when deputy Larry Dykes went out to the Rogers house, he noticed that Patty’s purse, car keys, and cigarettes were sitting on the counter. It struck him as odd that a woman would leave home for three days without those things, not to mention her child.

  Patty stayed missing; her daughter went to stay with Matt’s parents. On July 21 the missing-person report was turned over to Detective David Tripp. The more Tripp learned, the more certain he became that Patty hadn’t simply walked out on her husband and child. It had now been two weeks since anyone had seen Patty. Detective Tripp and Deputy Dykes returned to question Matt again; this time, they brought along TBI Agent Daniels. They also brought cadaver dogs.

  Matt Rogers stuck by his story. When Tripp and Daniels asked permission to search his property, he consented. As the cadaver-dog handlers fanned out across several acres, Matt sat down on a rock in the yard to watch the search.

  Agent Daniels was drawn to the underside of the house. The house sat several feet off the ground, supported at the corners and several other places, but there was no enclosed foundation or crawl space. Daniels got a flashlight from his car and began peering into the darkness under the floor.

  Tripp, meanwhile, noticed a trash pit and the barrel in the side yard, both showing recent signs of burning. A lifelong country boy himself, he knew that when somebody in the country needed to get rid of something, the tendency was to dump it or burn it. Tripp peered into the barrel and called out to Daniels, “You can call off your cadaver dogs. I believe I’ve found our girl.” It was then that Matt, still sitting on his rock, explained about the dogs and the goat, and it was then that Daniels called and asked if I could bring a team out to Union County.

  I could see why they might have doubted Matt’s story about the goat bones. I sure didn’t believe it: after forty years of studying human skeletons, I knew a human femur when I saw one sticking up out of a burn barrel. This particular femur was badly burned—its fractured surface and grayish-white color told me it had been burned for a long time in a hot fire—but it was unmistakably human.

  The barrel wasn’t the only place where a lot of burning had occurred. A few feet to one side lay a mattress; once upon a time it had been a mattress, anyhow. Now it was a debris field of bent and blackened springs interspersed with charred tin cans, batteries, broken dishes, and other household trash. Leaning down for a closer look, I spotted what looked to be tiny fragments of burned bone nestled among the debris. We were going to have our work cut out for us. It was already late afternoon by now; we had about three more hours of daylight in which to excavate and recover bone fragments scattered over a large and complex site.

  Joanne and Lauren unloaded our gear from the truck: shovels and trowels for digging; wire-mesh screens for sifting rubble; cameras, calipers, and specimen bags. The rubble was strewn over a fairly big area, about eleven feet long by five or six feet wide. To help us keep track of what we found and where we found it, I used surveyor’s flagging tape to divide the area into a grid of twelve equal rectangles.

  Joanne worked the grid on one side, and Lauren worked the other. Meanwhile, I excavated the barrel, pausing every so often to check on the women’s progress. As they worked their way along the mattress grid, it soon became apparent that the body had been burned on the mattress initially, as the fragments there were arranged roughly in anatomical order. Portions that had resisted burning were then transferred to the barrel for additional burning. Most people don’t realize how hard it is to consume a body by fire. It sounds like an easy way to get rid of a murder victim, but it’s not.

  The burn barrel contained a wealth of skeletal material besides the femur I’d first spotted. The femur (it was the left one), while extensively burned, was still relatively intact. Not so most of the other bones in the barrel: most were gray, brittle shards, which I had to handle carefully to avoid breaking. Laying the barrel on its side, I stuck my head in and carefully sorted through its contents, looking for bone. I found plenty, all of it fragmentary: parts of a scapula, a tibia, other long bones, most of the sacrum, and a number of vertebrae. Some of the vertebrae had fallen to the bottom of the barrel and escaped the fire’s worse effects; lightly charred, they still had bits of soft tissue on them. A large piece of a cranium was down in the bottom as well, also not as badly burned as the other bones. Scattered on the ground around the base of the barrel were still more bones: additional long-bone fragments, pieces of the sacrum and sacroiliac joint, fragments from ribs and vertebrae, a toe bone, and two more pieces of the skull.

  As I was excavating the barrel, Joanne and Lauren were methodically working their way across the twelve rectangles of the mattress-area grid. First they did a visual scan of the surface, where they found numerous bone fragments. Then, once they’d plucked out every bone they could see, they began to sc
reen all the other ashy material, all the way down to bare earth. Three of the grid’s twelve rectangles contained trash but no bones; the other nine yielded bone fragments by the thousands. By the time we finished excavating the scene, darkness was falling. Over the course of three hours we’d filled thirty-two paper evidence bags (each about the size of a lunch sack) with bone fragments.

  We headed back to Knoxville. Matt Rogers headed off to the Union County jail, where he was charged with first-degree murder.

  SOME MEN will do anything to be rid of their wives. I, on the other hand, would have done anything to hang on to Annette.

  It took us completely by surprise. On New Year’s Eve of 1996, Annette had noticed a couple of swollen lymph nodes along her collarbone. Bright and early January 2, she was at the doctor’s office. They took X rays, and the picture was stunning and grim: lung cancer, already at Stage Four. A round of radiation, and the tumor went away.

  Just five months later, though, Annette went away too. She awoke one morning struggling to breathe. I called an ambulance. On the way to the hospital, her heart stopped. They revived her; it stopped again. The cancer had come roaring back with a vengeance. Even as the ambulance came racing up to the ER entrance, Annette was dying. By the time I got there—a minute or two behind the ambulance, no more—she was gone.

  All my life I’d been a believing Christian. I wasn’t without doubts—what thinking person ever is?—but still I had trusted in the existence of a loving God. I’d grown up in the church; I’d taught Sunday school for years; I’d taken youth groups to Mexico for summer mission projects. But that instant in the ER—the instant Annette died—I seemed to feel my religious faith die, too.

  As I thought more about it in the bleak days and weeks that followed, I decided the Bible had gotten it exactly backward. Maybe God hadn’t created us in His image; maybe we’d created God in our image. A Greek philosopher had reached the same conclusion some 2,500 years ago: “The Ethiopians say that their gods are snubnosed and black,” wrote Xenophanes, “the Thracians that theirs have light blue eyes and red hair. . . . If cattle and horses or lions had hands, or were able to draw with their hands, and do the works that men can do, horses would draw the forms of the gods like horses, and cattle like cattle, and they would make their bodies such as they each had themselves.”*

  A loving father: That was the picture of God I’d drawn with my heart, if not with my hands. That’s what I’d wanted and needed God to be, ever since that shot rang out in my daddy’s office sixty-five years before. But could an all-powerful, all-loving Heavenly Father have allowed these two fine women of mine to die of cancer? Ann had been a nutritionist; besides eating a healthy diet herself, she taught thousands of others to do so, too; yet cancer had struck her digestive tract. Annette, who died of lung cancer, had never smoked a day in her life; her only medical sin was to spend three decades married to a heavy smoker.

  Maybe it all boiled down to mere chemistry and genetics: Ann and Annette simply didn’t possess enough physiological or genetic resistance to the carcinogens with which the world is filled. Some people do; these two women didn’t. Perhaps that was the cold, objective reason they died.

  Ann’s death had been slow and draining, and I’d begun dealing with it even before it was over. Annette’s was swift and crushing, and it came only two months after the death of my mother, who had been very close to me all my life. The weight of grief was staggering. I dreaded setting foot in my empty house. Without warning I would find myself sobbing, unable to stop. Those months were some of the darkest of my life.

  All I had left to live for was my work. Cases like this one: a case in which a man was suspected of killing, dismembering, and burning his own wife. The world seemed full of wrong.

  THE NEXT DAY, down in the bone lab in the basement of the stadium, we began fitting the pieces of bone together, like some charred jigsaw puzzle. I hoped we’d be able to piece together not just the skeleton but the story of this person’s death—probably the story of Patty Rogers’s death.

  I already knew that the story, like the skeleton, would be fragmentary at best. At the scene we’d recovered pieces of virtually every bone in the body, with one notable exception: apart from a bit of cheekbone, all the bones of the face were missing, and so were the teeth. Teeth are durable—they often survive even commercial cremation fairly well—so their absence, plus the lack of face bones, told me that those parts of the skull had been carefully removed in an effort to make identification of the victim impossible. I wasn’t ready to concede that it would be impossible, but it sure wasn’t going to be easy.

  As in every case, we began by trying to determine sex, age, race, and stature. Lacking the racially distinctive structures of the face, and possessing not so much as a single completely intact long bone—lacking a single intact bone of any sort, for that matter—I knew we wouldn’t be able to determine either race or stature. Sex and age, on the other hand, we could probably figure out from what we had.

  Luckily, one of the hipbone fragments included the sciatic notch. The sciatic notch—the gap through which the sciatic nerve passes when it emerges from the spine and runs down the leg—is markedly wider in females, because the hipbone above it flares out more widely. (The sciatic notch is to the hipbone what the notch beside a long, pendulous earlobe is to the side of the head.) In adult males the sciatic notch has just enough room to accommodate the end of your finger; in adult females there’s two to three times that much room. The sciatic notch in this case, case 97-23, was wide, telling us unequivocally that this was a woman’s body. One question down, one to go: How old a woman was she?

  Analyzing the structure and texture of the pubic bone is often the best way to pin down an age estimate, but in this case those features had been destroyed by the fire. We’d have to look elsewhere for age markers. Fortunately, even though the bones were fractured and fragmented, their epiphyses—the junctions where the ends of the bones fuse to the shafts—remained relatively intact, and the epiphyses can reveal quite a bit about age. Take the femur I saw sticking out of Matt Rogers’s burn barrel, for instance. Odd though it seems, as late as age fifteen, that femur had actually consisted of five separate pieces of bone, held together at the epiphyses by cartilage.

  Most prominent of the five pieces of an immature femur is the main shaft. Adjoining the shaft’s upper end, at the proximal epiphysis, is the rounded femoral head: the ball that fits into the hipbone’s acetabulum, or socket. It was the femoral head that first caught my eye in Matt Rogers’s burn barrel the previous day. Below the femoral head is the greater trochanter, a prominent, bony bump on the lateral, or outer, part of the upper thigh, right where the leg hinges into the torso. Directly opposite the greater trochanter, on the medial side of the shaft, is the lesser trochanter, a much smaller bump. Finally, down at the distal end, are condyles, forming the femur’s half of the knee joint.

  The epiphyses can narrow the possible range of a victim’s age. They ossify, or turn from cartilage to bone, at different ages. The last of the femur’s epiphyses to fuse is the distal one, just above the knee. In some cases, that distal epiphysis doesn’t fully ossify until age twenty-two. Since our burned woman’s distal epiphyses had completely ossified, she must have been at least twenty-two.

  Was there anything else that could narrow down her age? Luckily, even though the pubic symphysis was badly damaged, other age markers on the hipbones had survived the fire. The auricular surface of the ilium (the surface of the hip’s broad, ear-shaped upper part) was fine-grained in texture; that, plus the well-defined crest where the ilium fused with the sacrum, told me that she was probably somewhere between twenty-five and thirty-five. So far, at least, I hadn’t found anything that would indicate that this was not Patty Rogers, a twenty-seven-year-old white female.

  Right from the outset we had all figured that these were probably Patty’s remains, but over the years I’ve learned that assumptions
can cloud your thinking, leading to scientific error and personal embarrassment. I learned that lesson the hard way in the Colonel Shy case, when I misgauged the Confederate officer’s time since death by almost 113 years—my personal record for inaccuracy, by the way. I’ve also had several cases where the identity of the body turned out to be quite a surprise to homicide investigators. Over in Morgan County, a prominent local contractor disappeared from the town of Wartburg. For years afterward, every time somebody’s bones turned up, the police assumed they’d finally found him. They were particularly surprised the time I informed them that their latest find wasn’t their middle-aged male contractor at all but an eighteen-year-old female.

  So as I began to inspect the shattered bones of 97-23 for some clue, I tried to keep an open mind. It was hard to keep pessimism from creeping in, though. Not a single bone was intact; much of the skull was missing; and everything was burned to a crisp. Correction: almost everything. A few vertebrae that were nestled in the bottom of the barrel had emerged largely unscathed, and so had a chunk of parietal bone, from the upper-right part of the skull. Like the other bones we’d collected, the parietal was fractured, but unlike the other shattered bones, the fracture lines of the parietal were unburned. It hadn’t been the heat of the fire, or the internal pressure as cranial fluids vaporized, that caused this fracture. Something else—some powerful external force—had shattered the skull around the time of death.

  Looking at the other pieces of skull, I spotted what appeared to be telltale traces of that powerful force. The inner surfaces of three different pieces of the skull—the left parietal and two fragments of the occipital, from the base of the skull—bore traces of a grayish-black material, possibly metallic. I had a hunch what it was, and an X ray confirmed that hunch. The material showed up on the negative X-ray films as pure white. That’s because it was radiographically opaque: it was lead spatter, from a bullet. Our victim, 97-23, had been shot in the head before her body was burned.