raincoat, they remained just out of my reach. The guys dug out a little around the hole's edge, which seemed like a good idea until I actually put my head, shoulders, and both arms into the enlarged hole. Then, thanks to Milford 's plastic coat, I started to slide in, headfirst. Chivalry is not dead in Kentucky, though, and at least three pairs of hands instantly grabbed hold of my belt, ankles, and parts in between, saving me from a chilly, stinky shampoo.
With that we decided to quit for the night and start fresh the next morning. Milford made arrangements for all of us to stay at a little local motel and, after we checked in, we all slipped over to the cafe next door. By “all,” I include the confessed murderer. In fact, sitting across from him, munching on my hamburger and talking about the weather, I lost sight of the fact that I was in the middle of a homicide investigation until he stood up, ostensibly to go to the bathroom. Three men with guns and badges were on their feet before he ever cleared his chair. He wasn't fazed by this, but I certainly was. When they finally escorted him to the men's room, the rest of us laughed quietly to break the tension. Then Deputy David Morrow leaned across the table and asked me if I wanted to hear the story he'd started to tell me out there in the woods. Of course, I said yes.
“I'm not sure you noticed, but halfway down that mountain road there was a divot in the limestone cliff, and a piece of pipe was sticking out,” he began.
“Yeah, I saw that. It looked like some sort of well, or maybe a spring.”
“That's exactly what it is, Doc, the outlet of a spring where most of the locals get their drinking water.” In the next seat, Skinner, the weather-worn U.S. Forest Service investigator, nodded as he, too, listened intently.
“That spring is a dandy, too,” chimed in Milford 's son Ethelbert. “In fact, I stopped on my way down and filled me up a couple of jugs.”
The deputy and Skinner exchanged glances. David set down his cup of coffee and closed his eyes. Skinner took over.
“Son, do you remember last spring when I placed a Forest Service warning sign on that spring?”
“Sure do. And do you know, the whole county was laughing at you for doing it? We've been getting our water from that spring ever since Daddy's daddy can remember. Everybody knows that it tastes funny every once in a while when the weather changes, but no harm has ever come of it. No gov'ment sign can keep the folks from this county from doin' what they've always done. And that's why that sign saying the water ain't fit to drink came down almost as soon as it went up.”
“Well, Ethelbert, they shouldn't have done that,” Skinner said patiently. “And you might want to go empty your jugs. Tonight the doc there almost fell into the source of that spring. And the guy she was trying to lift out of the water had a full-blown case of AIDS when the killer dumped his body there.”
Everybody at the table froze, and we “outsiders” turned to look at the Creekmores sitting at one end of the long table. As one, they pushed back their chairs and left the cafe. It's hard to say what happened that night, but rumor has it that the phone lines in McCreary County were jammed for hours.
The next morning, though, they were all back at the site, ready to go to work. Nobody mentioned the fouled drinking water again, but when Milford, Jr., one of the hardest workers in the bunch, was helping me scour the sand and gravel from the little stream, a frown was fixed across his face and he never uttered a word.
We searched for bones until the middle of the afternoon and we were able to find about half of what Conley had started with. The forest carnivores-coyotes, foxes, raccoons, and opossums-had done their best to scatter individual bones as they dragged them away from the rotting carcass to feast on the flesh and gnaw for the marrow. Then Mother Nature camouflaged what was left. Leaf- fall had blanketed the forest floor, and the bones had bleached and discolored until they matched the deep gray-brown of the twigs and leaves that covered them.
Those bones' size and shape make some of them difficult to locate, and even when they
That's exactly what had happened here, and after about fifteen flags dotted the forest floor, I could see that they formed a kind of pie-slice shape, with the apex right near the spot where we'd found the skull. From there, the flags sort of fanned out, with one edge of the triangle along the creek and the other at the base of the hill. We'd found one rib bone about sixty feet from the spring outlet, which we used to mark the third side of the triangle. For now, this triangle was the outer limit of our search as we walked shoulder to shoulder in one long line, back and forth across this wedge of land, stirring the leaves with our feet and sticking marker flags into the ground every time we found a bone.
The detectives took lots of pictures and then sketched the overall scene to document the bones' distribution. When we were finally ready to collect the bones, Milford, David, and I walked through the woods together. I picked up each bone, looked at it quickly, and told David how to enter it in the log book: #1 = right scapula, #2 = left humerus, and so on. Milford then popped each bone into a bag numbered according to the log.
Things had been going smoothly when I picked up #63, a left femur. When I looked at it, however, I was startled. What in the world had happened to the distal end of this bone, down by the knee? It looked as though it had been broken off, crisscrossed with deep gashes that left long bony splinters hanging off the end where the knee joint should have been. I knew these woods were full of black bears and coydogs-large mongrel farm dogs that had bred with coyotes-and I knew that these scavengers often chewed human bones down to the core. But this bone looked as though something else had happened to it.
I didn't want to slow down our search, so I just asked David to make a note in the log and told Milford to set this bone aside for a closer look. Then, about ten feet farther on, I picked up the right femur and the mystery began to clear up. This bone had identical striations and the end with the knee joint was also missing. I decided not to voice the suspicion that was beginning to form-not until we collected the rest of the evidence.
By now, the afternoon was turning to evening, and we had reached the point of diminishing returns. The rest of the team had searched an area about fifty yards beyond our triangle, and a local search and rescue team had brought in some of their cadaver dogs. All of these searchers now agreed that they'd done all they could and we decided to call it quits. We had enough bones and teeth to identify the victim, and we'd certainly recovered a great deal of Conley's skeleton.
I was no longer surprised, though, that we hadn't recovered any bones from Conley's feet or lower legs. Sitting down in the open rear hatch of the Jeep, I pulled out the two femurs, gently brushed off the dirt and leaf litter, and held them side by side. I could now be sure that the gashes and grooves were deliberate and man-made. Conley's legs had been cut off.
This was my first case of human butchering, and when I gathered my colleagues to explain my findings, they were as shocked and confused as I was. Of course, the murderer had already confessed, but none of us was comfortable with the notion that there was another crime scene out there somewhere-the place where someone had cut Conley's legs off at or around the time of death.
The Lexington detectives had already returned to their home turf, taking the confessed killer with them. David got through to them on his radio to see if they could squeeze any more information from the suspect before he “lawyered up.” But our luck had run out. The confessed killer wasn't talking anymore, now that he was assured a lifelong berth in the penitentiary, and we were left to wonder what had happened. Maybe the body wouldn't fit into the trunk of his car once rigor mortis set in? Maybe he'd wanted to keep a trophy? Maybe he'd gotten hungry and decided to follow in the footsteps of Jeffrey Dahmer?
It's a safe bet that no one will ever know, but here's where I decided to call on Nancy, who I thought could at least help me identify the weapon that had been used to make the cuts. Nancy had studied the macabre practice of human butchering and the evidence this practice left on bones-just the kind of science that I needed to wrap up this case.
When Nancy had a chance to examine the bones, she confirmed that the preliminary cuts on Bill's legs had been made with a thick, smooth-bladed knife, while the final amputations had been performed with hacking blows from an axe-like tool. She explained that a saw or a knife often leaves its “signature” on the bone, so that a hacksaw, for instance, makes fine irregular lines across the cut end of a bone, whereas a large table saw cuts cleanly in a single direction until the bone is severed. A chainsaw rips and chews through the bone in an instant, leaving gouges and chips in its wake, while a serrated knife leaves a pattern of dips and points-not to be confused with the straight, smooth cut mark often left by a butcher knife or a meat cleaver. The work done with cut marks by Nancy and my fellow forensic anthropologists-Steve Symes of Pennsylvania and the late William Maples of Florida-has helped to put numerous suspects behind bars.
I've had occasion to use cut-mark evidence in several other Kentucky cases, in sometimes surprising ways. One of the things that haunts investigators is knowing that a person can die violently- stabbed, shot, poisoned-without a single mark being left on the bone. And when the flesh has decomposed or been burned away, the bones are all you've got left.
Luckily, bones enable you to roughly determine the time a wound was inflicted, and fairly easily, too, because the nature of bone changes so radically after the body dies. When a person is alive or very recently dead, his or her bones resemble green wood. If you stick a knife into what we call a “green bone,” you can pry up a little sliver, because the bone-living tissue-is still pliable. If you try to make the same cut days or weeks after death, the bone is more like firewood-dead and dried-out wood-and it's not going to have that flexibility. That's why the cut marks made at or around the time of death look completely different from those made after death-if you know what to look for. So when Nancy and I reviewed the evidence in the case of Bill Conley, we concluded that the bone had been sliced “perimortem”-either at the time of death, immediately before, or fairly soon thereafter. Although we couldn't tell exactly why the amputation had happened, at least Nancy had identified the butchering tools.
From a death investigator's point of view, there are two types of fires: the kind that kill people, and the kind that somebody sets to disguise a homicide. Kentucky has far more than its share of the latter, and nobody really knows why. Is it that investigators in other states just aren't as suspicious about fire-related deaths as we are? Or does the criminal element in Kentucky really not know that even the most all-consuming fire inevitably leaves behind some human bones?
Of course, I'm glad they don't know. I'm kind of reluctant to tell them. But for the record, here it is: If you ever plan to incinerate a person, don't count on the body being completely destroyed. Trying to burn a human body-which after all is about 80 percent water-is like trying to burn a huge, sopping sponge. The fluid-filled organs, muscles, and bones can often withstand the fiercest of flames.
Ironically, one of my first major cases of homicide disguised by fire also happened in Pulaski County, where it was initially discovered by my old friend Sheriff Sam Catron. By the time this case broke in 1995, Sam, like so many law enforcement officers in Kentucky, had learned to keep my personal phone numbers in his pocket. My colleagues across the state know I'm available to them at any time of the day or night, so I wasn't surprised to get Sam's call at five o'clock one April Sunday afternoon.
“So here's the story,” Sam said wearily after we'd exchanged the usual pleasantries. “A small wood-frame farmhouse in the northeastern corner of the county burned to the ground earlier this afternoon. The fire department found two charred bodies in the living room. We found one more in one of the bedrooms.”
Sam and I both knew that this case wasn't necessarily a homicide. In Kentucky, it's not that unusual for remote dwellings to burn to the ground with sleeping or incapacitated occupants inside. Lots of mountain folks rely on wood-burning stoves and kerosene heaters for heat, and they sometimes use coal-oil lamps or even candles for light. The rural volunteer fire departments do their best, but sometimes they're not even aware of the fire until it's too late to help. In this case, a distant neighbor just happened to see the blaze and call it in. But the ramshackle old house was pretty much rubble by the time the firefighters got there.
Generally, the coroner, local law enforcement officers, and an arson specialist examine a fire scene. If the fire appears to be truly accidental, the bodies are simply recovered and brought to the M.E.'s office for autopsy and positive ID.
So what had made Sam and the coroner suspicious in this case? For one thing, the fire had occurred in the middle of a mild day in April. Not much chance that anyone was using a heater. Then there was the time of day. How likely was it that three able-bodied people were sleeping so soundly during daylight hours that they couldn't make their way out of this small one-story house, especially since there were plenty of doors and windows? The third clue, and the one most significant to trained fire-death investigators, was the fact that the bodies themselves were in abnormal positions.
Of course, probably no charred fire victim can be said to have a “normal” position, but there are certain things you look for when investigating a fire death. If a person dies from smoke inhalation- the usual cause of death in a fire-carbon monoxide builds up in the blood, causing a rapid loss of consciousness. Even after the person has blacked out, though, his or her body continues to react. The windpipe, or trachea, sucks in soot and smoke, and the organs and muscles turn a bright cherry red as carbon monoxide replaces oxygen in the blood. Last-minute chemical reactions in the muscles of the victim cause him or her to contort into what we call the “pugilistic” position-arms bent at the elbows; wrists and forearms drawn in toward the shoulders; hands balled into fists, as if the person
