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

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