I'm happy to report that thermal maceration will destroy even the most tenacious of maggots, including those which hide themselves deep within a bone's nerve and artery channels. If I'm in a particularly sadistic mood, I'll watch as the water heats up and the maggots swarm frantically out of their hiding places. They rise to the top of the steaming liquid, writhing momentarily on the greasy film that forms on the surface before they succumb to the heat. Occasionally some of the more athletic maggots even manage to scale the Crock-Pot's ceramic liner-only to sizzle and pop when they slide down the other side and land on the cooker's hot metal frame.
I hadn't had to boil any bones, but it had taken me several hours to reconstruct the skulls, working by myself and using simple household glue out of a tube. As I stood by my shiny morgue table, watching them dry-the large skull for the woman, the little one for the child-I felt a bitter satisfaction. My colleagues and I had collected a huge amount of evidence that might someday be used to convict a killer. Of course, I'm a scientist, and my focus is on the evidence, not the criminal or the crime. And even as I write this, no suspects for this killing have been arrested. Still, I had my own reward: the contentment of having done the best I could, of making the evidence reveal its secrets so that justice-whatever it was-could be done. I can't reveal any more about this open case, but suffice it to say that there is no statute of limitations on murder, and tomorrow always brings another day and another chance.
Tomorrow also seems always to bring another case. In my first six months on the job, I had to deal with the exhumation of an allegedly battered child who had been buried in 1972; a partially skeletonized victim tied to a tree and shot in the head; a corpse hidden in a refrigerator for a year; a decomposed body found in the Cumberland River; one case of skeletal remains slashed by a farm implement; another battered and left along the side of the road; and a third left scattered in the woods. Before the end of 1994, I also had to deal with eight separate cases in which fire had reduced the bodies to bone. Seven of these were probably tragic accidents, but one was definitely a homicide disguised by fire. Three mountain men blown to bits by land mines in a booby-trapped marijuana patch rounded out the census for that first half year.
With this kind of caseload, it didn't take me long to understand why Kentucky needed a full-time forensic anthropologist. Kentucky has a history of violent crime and “mountain justice” dating back even before the notorious feuds of the Hatfields and the McCoys. This culture of lawlessness has only gotten worse with the rise of illegal drug use and marijuana's dubious honor as the one of the Commonwealth's most lucrative cash crops. Add to that the region's large areas with limited access-perfect for hiding dead bodies-and a warm climate that needs only days to reduce a body to bones, and you have the ideal conditions to produce lots and lots of skeletal remains.
Sometimes the bones I look at are not recent victims but rather are ancient or historic bones that turn up during construction projects or archaeological digs. I try to refer those cases to one of Kentucky 's many expert archaeologists or physical anthropologists, people whose academic training suits them to that type of analysis. I stick to bones that tell the stories of more recent crimes, though I occasionally consult with the academics to take advantage of their expertise.
One such expert is Nancy Ross-Stallings, a bespectacled self-avowed science nerd who works out of the tiny community of Harrodsburg as a contract archaeologist. She first came to my aid in the winter of 1995, after I had spent two days in the woods of McCreary County, down in the Daniel Boone National Forest near the Tennessee line.
Bill Conley (not his real name) had disappeared in the summer of 1994. About six months later, his boyfriend admitted to Lexington police detectives that he had killed Bill and hidden his body in the woods near Whitley City, another small town in southeastern Kentucky. State police troopers, sheriff's deputies, and Lexington city detectives searched diligently for Conley for more than a year, until finally, late one December afternoon in 1995, I got a call from the McCreary County Sheriff's Department. Conley's body was long gone, of course. But they thought they'd found his skull.
It was just before dark that I met Deputy David Morrow at the Blue Heron Café on Highway 27S. I followed his cruiser up a winding gravel road, where we stopped beside a pea-green 4x4 Jeep Cherokee belonging to the U.S. Forest Service. Through bitter experience, I'd learned to keep all of my key field gear in a sturdy backpack-in Kentucky's rough rural terrain, it's a rare occasion when I can actually drive my full-size van right up to a crime scene-so it didn't take long to transfer my camera, pack, and shovel into the Jeep.
A few minutes later, we had driven up the rocky, washed-out side road to a place where two trees had been marked with fluorescent orange spray paint, showing where one of the deputies had already blazed a path to the scene. I'd earned the nickname “Boondock Bone Doc” from all the hours I'd logged at crime scenes just like this one, on the side of a mountain or way out in the woods, searching for skeletal remains. And no matter where I went, no matter how isolated the scene, the first thing I always saw was a cluster of cops standing around smoking cigarettes, waiting patiently for my arrival.
“I hope this really is Conley's skull,” I said under my breath to the deputy, and he nodded. During the past year, people searching for this very victim had located the skeletal remains of three other people in the woods within a thirty-mile radius of where we were right now. I couldn't help being a little skeptical.
“So how do you know it's his?” I went on.
David was just now getting his long legs untangled from the Jeep's backseat. He handed me my pack and smiled. “You see that scraggly lookin' guy by that tree?”
I nodded.
“He's says he's the one who killed him.”
“You're kidding!”
“Yeah, he's been telling every cop who would listen that he killed his lover in Lexington, then brought the body down here to hide it. Unfortunately, he hid it so well that even he couldn't find it again, even after he decided to confess.”
“Why did he confess?” I asked. “If the victim was so well hidden, no one would ever have been the wiser.”
David laughed and leaned down to whisper in my ear. “The guy has AIDS now, and I guess he figured if he could get arrested and put in jail, then at least he'd have medical care for the rest of his life.”
“Oh, great. And here I thought maybe he just felt guilty and wanted to do the right thing.”
“Well, he did do the right thing, for whatever reason. We just need the body before we can put him away. Luckily, the detective in Lexington finally had him talk to one of the Forest Service guys who knows this area, and the killer's description of the terrain gave him just enough clues that he was able to find this skull. There's a side story to this too, that will make your hair stand on end-”
McCreary County Coroner Milford Creekmore joined us, interrupting the “side story” as he and his team piled out of their ancient ambulance, deluging us with friendly greetings. I stared at his old vehicle, hardly able to believe he'd gotten up into this rough terrain, but I should have known that where Milford was concerned, ordinary rules don't apply. We'd already worked together on a few cases-he's a great guy and, until his defeat in a close election a few years ago, he was one of Kentucky 's most colorful coroners. Mountain born and bred, Milford was about as round as he was tall, and by age forty he'd lost all but a few of his natural teeth. He scrounged the junkyard for cheap vehicles and then equipped them with the most outlandish, jury-rigged set of lights and sirens you could imagine. However, tonight he had managed to get his vehicle up that terrible road, urging it on like a recalcitrant mule, and when he and his clan piled out I knew that not one of them would hang back from the work ahead, not Milford-or his two sons-or his ex-wife-or his daughter, who had brought along her baby. They all wanted to see the skull and help with the investigation, but Milford made it clear that he and no one else was going to be my right-hand man.