community to its core, but now a wave of fear could ripple through Knoxville. The battered body of a young man dressed in women’s clothing and a wig was found two weeks ago outside Chattanooga, tied to a tree in Prentice Cooper State Forest. Chattanooga’s medical examiner, Dr. Jess Carter, yesterday identified the victim as Craig Willis, 31, formerly of Knoxville.
An autopsy by Carter, supplemented by a skeletal examination by University of Tennessee forensic anthropologist (and “Body Farm” founder) Bill Brockton, indicated that Willis was killed by massive and repeated blunt-force trauma to the head. Willis’s identity eluded investigators initially because no form of identification was found on his body, and the skin of his hands-including the fingerprints-had peeled off by the time the corpse was found. One piece of the missing skin was recently discovered by Brockton during a second search of the crime scene, said Carter, allowing the victim’s prints to be matched to prints on file from an employment background check Willis underwent three years ago.
One source close to the investigation, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the slaying appears to be a hate crime, motivated by the victim’s apparent sexual orientation. “He was wearing a sort of female dominatrix- looking outfit,” said the source, “consisting of a long blond wig and a black leather corset, which most people would consider to indicate an S amp;M fetish or a quote-unquote kinky lifestyle. To some guys around here, a man in that kind of getup is like a red flag to a bull.”
East Tennessee gay rights activists have decried the slow pace of the investigation. “If a straight, conventional man or woman were killed in such a horrific manner, the police would leave no stone unturned,” said Steve Quinn, coordinator of the Chattanooga Gay and Lesbian Alliance. “In this case, they seem more interested in sweeping the murder under the rug. The authorities here seem to consider homosexuals, transvestites, and transsexuals to be expendable, and that’s an outrage.” Knoxville activist Skip Turner added, “Craig Willis is a martyr in the struggle for sexual freedom. His bones cry out for justice.”
Willis had moved from Knoxville to Chattanooga approximately six months ago, said Carter. He taught at Bearden Middle School for three years before moving to Chattanooga, where he had recently opened a karate school called Kids Without Fear. No one answered repeated calls to either Willis’s home phone or the number listed for Kids Without Fear.
I was surprised the reporter hadn’t contacted me, since Jess had mentioned my involvement in the investigation. I was also surprised he hadn’t gotten wind of Willis’s arrest record or proclivities. A few hours after Art phoned her with Willis’s ID, Jess called him back to say that a search of his apartment had yielded hundreds of images of child pornography-in print, on CDs, and on his computer’s hard drive. Some of the photos showed only nude children; some showed other adults with children; and some showed Willis himself performing sex acts with boys. A more seasoned or better-connected journalist would have gotten wind of the search, I felt sure, or at least the arrest record.
The story left me with very mixed feelings. I knew it might help the detectives to have more information than the general public now possessed. But it turned my stomach to hear Craig Willis, molester of children, described as a martyr to anything other than depravity and predation.
I wondered, too, about whether Jess had some agenda in releasing the information the way she did. Was she the unnamed source who referred to Willis’s “kinky lifestyle,” too? That didn’t sound like the open-minded Jess I knew, but she could have said it to be deliberately provocative. I’d suspected she was frustrated with the slow pace of the investigation in Chattanooga. By framing the news in a way that sparked the anger of gay rights activists, was she hoping to ratchet up the pressure on the police? Jess was a smart woman and a gifted medical examiner, so I was sure she had thought carefully about what to say. She was also fearless and a bit of a maverick, though, and I hoped that she hadn’t crawled out onto some limb farther than she should have.
CHAPTER 21
THE HEAD HAD BEEN simmering for three days down in the Annex before I took it out of the kettle for good. The hot water, bleach, Biz, Downy, and Adolph’s Meat Tenderizer had done their work well: the remaining bits of tissue scrubbed off easily with a toothbrush; the bone had lightened to a deep ivory; and the aroma steaming off of it was like fresh laundry. Well, fresh laundry that had been mighty rank, for quite some time, before it went into the wash. Fresh laundry that could use another cycle or two. Still, the improvement was dramatic, and the results quite tolerable. I could take this skull back to Stadium Hall without offending anyone’s sense of propriety or smell.
I set the skull and the top of the cranial vault on some paper toweling to dry, opened the valve that drained the kettle, and fished a few small bone fragments from the mesh screen in the bottom. I placed the fragments in a small ziplock bag, then packed everything in a cardboard box, cushioned with more paper toweling.
Jess had called to say she was headed for Knoxville; she had two autopsy cases waiting for her in the cooler at the hospital, but before she tackled those, she wanted to see what information about the murder weapon I could glean from the skull now that it was stripped of its soft tissue. “Flesh forgets; bone remembers,” she had said just before hanging up. It was a mantra of mine that I’d uttered enough times for her to remember, apparently. Her voice had regained most of its usual energy; either she was trying hard to sound cheerful again, or she’d managed to get some rest since I saw her looking so haggard in the morgue at the ME’s office. I phoned Peggy, my secretary, and asked her to steer Jess to my office, which was at the far end of the stadium from the administrative offices, when she showed up.
I walked up the one-lane ramp from the Annex, which was down near Neyland Drive, to the ser vice road that ringed the base of the stadium, and threaded my way beneath massive girders, cradling the box as if it were some precious gift. In a way, it was: the key, perhaps, to what had killed Craig Willis, and perhaps even to who had killed him.
I unlocked my office door and set the box on my desk, then switched on the lamp. Removing the lid, I reached in with both hands and hoisted out the skull. I set it on a doughnut-shaped cushion, one of dozens we had scattered around the classrooms and labs in the Anthropology Department, and swiveled the light and magnifying glass around to give me a good look. I had a theory, based on a cursory look in the Annex, but sitting on the window ledge beside me was the object I hoped would confirm it.
Just as I reached into the box for the top of the cranial vault, Jess Carter knocked on the doorframe and strode in. “Perfect timing,” I said. “I just now got him finished. You want to take a look?”
By way of answering, she stepped to the desk and leaned down. Picking up the skull, she turned it this way and that, playing the ring-shaped fluorescent light over the contours from every possible angle. I stood back in silence, letting her take her time, make her own observations, formulate her own ideas and questions. Her eyes swept rapidly across the skull, then zeroed in on every fracture and indentation I had spotted. I had seen her work before; every time I did, it reminded me why she was one of the best medical examiners I’d ever worked with. Jess set the skull back on its cushion and subjected the top of the cranium to the same scrutiny, turning it over and over beneath the light. Finally she laid it down, finished with her examination, and turned to me. “Amazing,” she said. “With all that macerated, contused tissue in place, the bone just looked like a big, mushy mess. Now it’s easy to see discrete, individual marks left by a series of blows.” She reached back down and picked up the skull again. “It looks almost like the killer used three different weapons,” she said. She pointed to an indentation on the left parietal, the side of the skull. “Here,” she said, “this indentation was made by an implement about an inch and a half wide, maybe a little more, with a flat face and parallel edges.” I simply nodded; she wasn’t asking anything yet, so I let her think out loud. “Here, in the frontal bone, there’s a deep triangular gouge right in the center of the forehead.” Again I nodded. “And the eye orbit looks like it was smashed by something broad and flat, three or four inches wide.” There were other indentations in the bone as well, but she had pointed out the three most distinctive ones, and none of the others deviated from the patterns she had noted. “That doesn’t make sense, though,” she said. “Why would somebody strike a blow with one weapon, put it down, then strike a blow with another, and then trade that one for a third?”
I smiled. “Those were my questions exactly,” I said. “Then I realized that it didn’t have to be three different weapons; it could be one weapon with three different impact surfaces.” She looked puzzled, so I reached over to the windowsill and produced my visual aid with a flourish. It was a piece of lumber, an ordinary two-by-four. First I laid the two-inch edge in the narrower indentation she had noticed first. It nestled down in the groove perfectly, its
