Death's Acre: Inside The Legendary Forensic Lab The Body Farm by Bill Bass (chrome ebook reader .TXT) 📗

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