“I don't believe it,” I said under my breath to Lee. But she had grown up in this area and she just shook her head.
“Around here, that's par for the course,” she drawled. “Can't say as I blame them. It's cheaper than a movie.”
So for the rest of the day, we had an audience. They called out encouragement to us when we started sifting an area that Ferguson had used as a dump, and they let out a loud cheer when detectives dismantled the wood-burning stove and brought it out into the yard so that Lee and I could sift the ashes. Lee was about seven months pregnant at the time, and as she bent over the sifting screen, one of the onlookers called out an offer of his folding lawn chair.
“Why not?” Lee called back. “Thanks!” When I offered to walk over and get the chair, a little girl came running over with a chair for me, too. Lee and I went back to work, sifting ashes in relative comfort while the crowd ate their picnic lunches and country music blared from the radio on a nearby pickup.
Later that day, deputies brought Ferguson to the scene and began questioning him about where he'd put the rest of his wife's remains. So far, we'd found her bones mixed in with his pocket change, in the cistern, in the kitchen cupboard, in the stove, and in a trash dump. But some bones were still missing, and the deputy suggested that I question him myself.
I had never knowingly spoken to a murder suspect before, but I was willing to give it a try. I don't know what I expected, but in a million years, I'd never have guessed what Ferguson said when I asked him where the bones were.
“Oh,” he said calmly, “I pulled them out of the cistern and burned them for fuel this winter. It got pretty cold out here.” Amazingly, he knew the name of every bone and gave me a detailed description of which ones he'd hidden in the kitchen, as opposed to those he'd put in his bedroom. Not only that, but he cleared up the mystery of the holes. In apparent fits of loneliness, he would retrieve one of his wife's bones from the cistern and drill a hole in it just big enough to thread with a long leather thong. Then he'd wear it around his neck, giving a whole new meaning to the term “trophy wife.”
Ferguson also assured us that we had scoured all of his hiding places (and he eventually pled guilty to both murders). We had enough evidence to convict him and enough bones to identify the victim, so detectives from the TBI told us to go home.
As Lee and I packed up our gear and made our way back to our truck, the crowd of onlookers started to applaud. To them, we weren't just dirty, tired forensic anthropology students. We were some kind of heroes.
Lee and I looked at each other and laughed. At this point I wasn't worried about an inappropriate reaction. What would be an appropriate reaction in a situation like this?
But I'd turned over an important page in my professional development there in Bean Station, Tennessee. For the first time, I'd been considered the lead investigator on the forensic anthropology team. Experienced investigators had turned to me for direction and I was forced to make quick decisions that — right or wrong — would affect the investigation's outcome. I felt that I had passed a final, crucial test — a test that I now realized I'd be taking over and over and over again. There would never be a rule book at any crime scene I processed. I'd have to rely on common sense, academic training, and the ability to improvise — just as I had done here.
But next time I'd bring my own lawn chair.
3
Waco
The evil that men do lives after them;
the good is oft interred with their bones.
There are two torsos in this bag!”
“I have a baby's hand — who needs a baby's hand?”
“Does that foot match my leg?”
We were calling out in the morgue, but we could barely hear over the whining bone saws, clanking metal trays, and roaring industrial-strength garbage disposals. The smell of burned bone and tissue flooded my nostrils until I thought I could taste it, but I tried to stay as focused as all the other professionals here, the blood-spattered pathologists, anthropologists, and dentists busily sorting through the scraps and shards — the remains of the people who had once called themselves the Branch Davidians.
Two months before, they had been a community of men, women, and children living in relative secrecy in Mount Carmel, their guarded enclave on the outskirts of Waco, Texas. Today, they were body parts in the morgue. Their fate was the end result of a series of miscalculations and violent acts that will never be completely justified or understood. Now, though, I was part of a team seeking to discover who they were and how they had died. At least we could do that.
It all started with Vernon Howell, better known as David Koresh, who led a cult that he named for himself — the Branch Davidians. The charismatic Koresh had ruled his community with an iron hand, prescribing harsh punishments for wayward souls. He persuaded the Davidians to move into the Waco compound, isolating themselves from the sinful world. He also persuaded them to give him everything they owned, using their wealth to amass a huge cache of illegal weapons — his defense against what he saw as the Bible's promise of imminent apocalypse.
It was this mass of firearms and explosives that drew the attention of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF), which duly sent agents to the compound with a search warrant. But as the ATF agents moved in, the Davidians opened fire from the compound's windows, doors, and rooftops, killing four agents and wounding more than a dozen. As the ATF returned fire, five Davidians were also killed, and Koresh himself was wounded.
The Davidians barricaded themselves inside the compound and a fifty-one-day siege began. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) replaced the ATF as the lead agency and tried to convince the Davidians to surrender themselves peacefully. A few did leave the compound — but most stayed locked inside.
Finally, the FBI turned to desperate measures. On the morning of April 19, 1993, they used tanks to punch holes in the compound walls and pumped in clouds of tear gas, hoping to flush the Davidians out into the open. Instead, the Davidians stood their ground and began to shoot until the FBI backed off. Then they doused their own compound with fuel and set it on fire. Within minutes, wind-whipped flames were roaring through the ramshackle buildings, igniting the stockpiles of ammunition. The resulting explosions created huge mushroom-shaped clouds of fire and smoke worthy of the holocaust that Koresh predicted. When the smoke cleared, some eighty people were dead.
I watched the fire mesmerized on the small television I kept in my office, its tiny screen filled with flames. The news reporters tried desperately to keep up with the contradictory reports: No Davidians were coming out of the building — was that because they wouldn't or because they couldn't? What about reports of gunshots coming from inside the compound as it burned? Were the Davidians firing wildly at the FBI — or was it simply the heat of the fire, exploding the ammunition allegedly stored there on-site?
One thing was obvious: No one could survive that inferno. My fellow anthropology students and I watched for hours as the number of presumed victims rose to sixty, seventy, eighty…