The police and sheriff ’s officers had set up portable work lights in the woods, which illuminated the areas where the additional skeletal material had been found during the afternoon’s search. But the area over which the bones and clothing had been scattered was so large that a detailed search would be nearly impossible in the dark. The D.A., sheriff, and police investigators agreed to resume the search the next morning.
But our work wasn’t done for the night. To the east, we heard the thumping of helicopter rotor blades, and soon the landing light of Mike Dover’s chopper swooped into view. In less than an hour Dover had flown to Clarksville, retrieved Kathy Nishiyama’s dental records, and returned. It took only a moment to make the comparison. I’d already noticed, in my initial examination of the skull, that the teeth were in rather poor condition, and not just because several of them had been snapped off at the gum line. Of the thirteen teeth in the upper jaw, ten had fillings, and one had three fillings. In addition, one of the left molars had been pulled before death, long enough ago that the root socket had already begun to fill with bone. Cavity for cavity, filling for filling, the teeth from the skull matched the dental record. Within an hour after I had stepped out of the THP helicopter, and while we were still at the death scene, we had a positive identification of previously unidentified skeletal remains: swiftness I’d never experienced before, nor since.
By 11 P.M. that night, Steve and I were gazing out of the bubble of Mike Dover’s cockpit once more, admiring the lights of Nashville, spread out like jewels on black velvet beneath us. It was one of the prettiest sights I’ve ever seen, and contrasted sharply with the ugliness of the death I’d been asked to help solve. Dover touched down in Nashville just long enough to refuel; by 2 A.M., I was back in Knoxville and asleep in my own bed. While I slept in my bed, Kathy Nishiyama’s skull rested fifty feet away — though “rested” seems the wrong word — in my locked car in my locked garage.
Identifying Kathy Nishiyama was only the first step. Determining what had killed her — and who — were the crucial next steps. I’d brought her skull back so I could study it closely, to be certain of her manner of death. But I’d seen enough already, since the moment Mike Dover first handed me the cranial vault at the hospital helipad, to form a fairly clear and horrifying picture.
The broken teeth — three of the four incisors were broken off near the root — offered one important clue. They exhibited what’s known as a “hinge fracture”: the front surface of each tooth had snapped completely across in a clean horizontal line, and the teeth had folded backward into the mouth like a hinge flexing; the hinge fractures meant they had been hit from the front with great force. The blow carried so much force, in fact, that not only did the teeth snap backward, but as they did, their roots acted as levers, bursting through the bones on the front (anterior) surface of the jaws. The right lateral incisor was the only one of the four central teeth that wasn’t snapped off, but it was chipped on its medial surface (the corner closer to the midline of the jaw). That meant the blow probably came from slightly to Kathy’s left, as it most likely would have if a right-handed person were swinging an implement horizontally. This blow, while certainly painful, would not have killed her, and might not even have knocked her unconscious.
Another horizontal blow caught her on the forehead, above the left eye. This one left an oval indentation in the outer table (layer) of the skull, but did not strike with enough force to fracture the innermost of the skull’s three layers. The cross section of the depressed fracture measured an inch long (horizontally) by three-fifths of an inch high. The oval shape could have been produced by a blunt implement that was cylindrical, or round in cross section: something like a baseball bat, tire iron, or four-cell flashlight.
Another, weaker blow caught her almost in the midline of her forehead, just above the eyebrows. This one also left an oval depressed fracture, oriented vertically, that was about half the size of the one over the left eye. Like the larger oval, this one did not fracture the inner table of the cranium.
None of these three blows, in my opinion, was powerful enough to have killed Kathy Nishiyama, though either of the two frontal fractures could certainly have knocked her unconscious. Then came a fourth blow: an impact behind her right ear that was so powerful it completely sheared off the rear portion of the temporal bone in two pieces. (Those pieces were among the additional skeletal material recovered while Mike Dover was flying eastward to pick me up in Knoxville.) Besides shattering the temporal bone, this blow created a fracture more than three inches long, extending through both the outer and inner tables of the skull. The geometry of these fractures differed from the others. As best I could tell, this blow came while she was lying on the ground, with the right side of her head upturned. This blow could have come from a baseball bat or tire iron or flashlight; it could also have been inflicted, I thought, by a heavy boot, stomping down on the side of the girl’s head as she lay on the ground. There was no way to tell, but I could only hope this poor child had lost consciousness early in her ordeal, so she didn’t suffer for long.
It didn’t take the police long to identify a suspect. On Tuesday — just one day after her skull was found, and while I was diagramming the fractures on an outline drawing of the skull — investigators were questioning a local man.
The suspect, twenty-three-year-old Eddie Hartman, should have had an ironclad alibi: Hartman was an inmate of the Dickson County jail, serving a three-year sentence for burglary, at the time of Kathy Nishiyama’s disappearance. But while Hartman was an inmate of the jail, he wasn’t an inmate in the jail. Not, at least, the night she vanished. Hartman was a “trusty”—one of your higher-ranking convicts, whose good behavior and dependable nature had earned him special privileges. One of those privileges was working outdoors in the fresh air, on a tobacco farm owned by a Dickson County sheriff ’s deputy, Sergeant Carroll Fizer. On November 16, 1981, the day Kathy disappeared, Hartman worked at Fizer’s farm until dark. Rather than drive the prisoner back to jail in town, the deputy gave Hartman the keys to his cruiser and told him to drive himself. With a population of just 800, Charlotte was a small, sleepy town, a sort of Middle Tennessee version of Mayberry; the deputy may even have been thinking of how Otis, the lovable town drunk in Andy Griffith episodes, would obligingly lock himself up whenever he needed to sleep one off. Except Hartman, who had been convicted of abducting a teenaged girl in 1978 (she escaped by jumping out of his car), was no lovable lush, and this was no warmhearted sitcom with a happy ending.
Instead of driving straight back to jail, Hartman drove to Clarksville, whose 60,000 inhabitants made it a teeming metropolis in comparison to sleepy little Charlotte. He didn’t return to the jail until 3:30 A.M., and when he did, he seemed “real scared,” the Dickson County sheriff later said. Something resembling spattered blood was seen on the patrol car’s right-rear fender and trunk by four officers later that day, too.
When Kathy Nishiyama’s remains were found, people remembered Eddie Hartman’s evening of freedom, his late return, his nervousness, and the stains on the car. Two witnesses came forward to say that on the night of November 16, they’d been pulled over near Clarksville — in Montgomery County — by a man in civilian clothes who was driving a Dickson County sheriff ’s cruiser. Another witness said he saw a patrol car, its lights flashing, beside a car in the church parking lot where Kathy Nishiyama’s car was found.