The Best American Crime Writing (15 page)

Back at UT, Bass discovered his TSD approximation had been off—by more than a hundred years. The corpse was that of a Confederate army colonel, William Shy.

“It was an understandable mistake to make on the site,” recalls
Doug Owsley, one of Bass’s former graduate students who assisted the professor with the Shy case. “The body was incredibly well preserved because Shy’s family had bought the best coffin money could buy, an early version of the modern sealer casket—airtight. It retarded decomposition.”

In the wake of this blunder, Bass was more frustrated researcher than humiliated expert. “He learned from it,” says Owsley, now a curator with the Smithsonian Institution. “He knew this was all part of the scientific method: to learn from data. But that was when Bass realized just how little data there was on human decomposition and he decided it was time for new research, his own research.” He became obsessed with wanting to study the whole postmortem continuum, rather than just glimpsing the snapshots in time that he had been seeing.

In 1980, Bass persuaded the university to give him a new lot of land, the area behind the UT Medical Center, and the contemporary Body Farm was born. Since then, Bass and the researchers from around the world who have used the facility have produced groundbreaking data and technology. Thanks to the Farm, a pair of specialists invented a device that lifts fingerprints off a corpse, the FBI improved a ground-penetrating-radar gizmo that detects buried bodies, and a UT graduate student discovered it’s possible to determine TSD by measuring the amount of organic soup that leaks into the soil. Yet the most revolutionary discoveries at the Farm have come from studying the bugs—specifically, the flies. Insect science, or entomology, is what made the difference in the Rubenstein case.

The Rubenstein trial got under way in June 1999, long after the accused had collected and spent all $250,000 of the insurance money. (“What did you spend the money on?” the prosecution asked Rubenstein. “I don’t remember,” he said. “I just spent it.”) Given the overwhelming amount of circumstantial evidence against him,
Rubenstein’s credibility was the central issue. Each side based its case on Rubenstein’s claim that when he had visited the cabin on November 16 and November 27, he had found it empty. The prosecution claimed the defendant was lying and therefore was the killer; the defense, naturally, maintained the man was truthful and innocent.

Rubenstein’s attorneys called to the stand Dr. Lamar Meek, an entomologist at Louisiana State University. Meek testified that all three Perrys died at approximately the same time and had been dead for about two weeks. Meek’s TSD was consistent with Rubenstein’s story. Bass’s expert opinion was that the Perrys had been dead for almost a month when Rubenstein made the call to police. Bass’s conclusion was based on an examination of several four-by-six photos of the bodies and a videotape of the crime scene and took into account the temperature in Pike County during the months of November and December.

Bass’s testimony convinced all but one of the twelve jurors. Rubenstein walked. But because his trial had ended with a hungjury, he could and did face another trial. It began in January 2000, and this time Bass saw something he had missed in round one.

When the medical examiner took the stand, he showed the jury pictures of 4-year-old Crystal’s badly decomposed head. The color slides were projected in the front of the courtroom. The images were much larger than any of the pictures Bass had seen, and from his seat in the gallery Bass now spotted scientific proof that the Perrys had been dead for at least twenty-one days when their bodies were discovered.

There are five major stages of decomp: “fresh;” then “bloat,” which occurs when gases trapped in the stomach and intestines cause the abdomen to puff; then comes “decay,” when organs putrefy and the elements wear away or eat away soft tissue; Mother Nature then leaves the corpse to “dry;” and finally “skeletal.” Temperature and other factors affect the rate of decomposition.

Although researchers have divided the postmortem into these five states, it is more of a fluid slide than a distinct step-by-step process. But at the Body Farm, Bass and his team of anthropologists have worked with forensic entomologists and learned it is possible to time-stamp the decomp continuum by looking at the insects that are on or around a body.

Looking up at the giant color slides of Crystal that Meek was using, Bass saw maggot pupal casings in the girl’s hair. He had looked for them in the small photos and the video of the crime scene that he had been given, but he hadn’t seen them. Now, however, there they were, plain as day. Thanks in large part to research done at the Body Farm, every forensic scientist knows that for flies to find a body and lay their larvae, the larvae to hatch into maggots, and the maggots to pupate, it takes at least twenty-one days. At least. And considering that the bodies were in a closed-up cabin, it likely took a few days for the flies to even find the bodies. Bass’s TSD estimate was as much of a scientific certainty as anyone could ask for.

Bass took the stand, presented the facts in his aw-shucks Pooh Bear way, and the jury delivered a guilty verdict. Rubenstein is now appealing his death sentence.

We as a society are at once fascinated and revolted by death. While some people have protested Bass’s facility, other folks made Patricia Cornwell’s novel
The Body Farm
, which celebrates the gory yet necessary work done there, a national best-seller.

Bass understands the dichotomy. “We’re not a culture of death,” he says, sitting in his kitchen. “We try to cover it up. When someone is killed, the police come and put a sheet over him; you can’t see the body. And when you see the person in the casket, he doesn’t look dead; he’s been made to look like what he looked like when he was alive. It’s because people don’t know much about death.”

Bass says he has never been troubled by the cases he has worked
because he views each one as a puzzle rather than as a human tragedy. Tapping his psychology background, he suspects it’s a defense mechanism. He doesn’t think about the victims as people for the same reason that he tells morbid death jokes at crime scenes: Like the rest of us, he doesn’t like to confront his own mortality.

But unlike the rest of us, Bass hasn’t had much of a choice. Death has been his life, both on and off the farm. One sort of forensic job does bother him: suicide. Every time one comes his way he thinks about his father. When Bass was 4 years old—the same age as Crystal when she was strangled—his dad went to work at his law office, closed the door, and shot himself in the head. “It’s something my mother and my family never talked about,” Bass says, taking off his glasses and rubbing his eyes. “But now as I’m getting older, as I look at my grandson who’s four years old and I think, Why did Dad do that? I think, Something must have had him pretty depressed to give up Mom and me.”

Bass has buried two wives. His first wife, to whom he was married for thirty-nine and a half years—and, yes, that half year matters to Bass—died of colon cancer in 1993. His second wife, who was his secretary in the anthropology department for many years, died not long after their third anniversary. She also died of cancer.

How has death changed Bill Bass? Carol would prefer he didn’t answer the question. She looks at him from across the kitchen table and shakes her head. “No, I wish you wouldn’t, Bill.”

“It’s all right,” Bass says. “What she doesn’t want me to say is that I’m no longer a believer. I was raised a devout Baptist. I even taught Sunday school. But now I guess you’d say I’m a nonbeliever.” Carol blurts out that if such a revelation were read by his former students, “Well, they would call me up and say, ‘What’s wrong with Dr. Bass?’”

“What’s wrong is, I lost two wives,” Bass says, coming as close as the man can to getting snippy. “They died because they did not have the genetic ability to adapt to the cancer. No matter how
much praying I did, it didn’t make a bit of difference. It wouldn’t have mattered if I’d had ten million people out there praying.” Bass pauses and strokes Knox, who has coiled up at his master’s feet. He falls silent as if making the point that he did indeed have ten million people out there praying. “I think we’ve got this whole thing backward, to tell you the truth,” Bass adds. “I don’t think a god created us in his image. I think we created a god in our image.”

About a month after our afternoon together, Bass suffered another death in the family: His beagle, Knox, had to be put down. Bass wanted to bury the dog in a “special place.” Their backyard was too small, so Bass and one of his three sons who was home visiting laid Knox to rest at the Body Farm.

When Bass retired, his biggest fear was that his anthropology department and research facility would be radically changed. He even worried that the forensic program would be done away with altogether and the facility closed. He had reason to worry: Two forensic anthropologists retired from academia right about the same time he did. One left the University of New Mexico, the other left the University of Arizona; the institutions haven’t replaced them with forensic anthropologists.

To ensure that his legacy endures, Bass saw to it that two of his former graduate students and fellow teachers inherited his life’s work. Richard Jantz was appointed director of the forensic center, and Murray Marks was named Jantz’s number two. Jantz is nearing retirement age himself; before long Marks will likely assume control.

The day after Marks gave me a tour of the farm, we returned. He wanted to remove that body bag from under the dead man and cut down a corpse from a tree, basically tidy up before the FBI class arrived a few weeks later. One body propped up against a tree, he explained, had been an experiment. Last summer a local assistant district attorney came to see Marks and asked him if he could determine
a murder victim’s TSD. The lawyer gave him pictures of a dead woman. She was partially undressed and tied to a tree. She had been out jogging and was mugged, dragged into the woods, raped, and strangled to death.

Marks couldn’t give the prosecutor an answer. According to the information about the scene and the pictures Marks was looking at, it was obvious that vertical corpses decompose much more slowly than horizontal corpses. But Marks couldn’t say how much slower, because, well, he’d never researched the rate of decomp for vertical corpses.

“I wanted to speak for this victim,” Marks tells me. The regret is thick in his voice. “But looking at those pictures, I was once again reminded how little we know about death.” Marks came out here to the farm, taped a body to a tree, and began looking for answers, just the way Bass would have done.

By the time I learned that Dr. William Bass’s Body Farm existed, a good hit had been written about the place. Yet no one had dealt with the obvious and perhaps most compelling question: What motivated Bass to pursue such a macabre science? My hunch was that Bass’s own life story must be at least as interesting as the gruesome homicides he had helped solve. Fortunately, my editor in chief, Art Cooper, trusted my instincts, and Bass turned out to be far more fascinating than I had imagined
.

Bass continues to be the busiest retired forensic anthropologist in the field. He’s been an expert witness for plaintiffs in a class action suit against the Tri-State Crematory in Noble, Georgia, where instead of cremating hundreds of corpses as they were paid to do, the operators allegedly tossed the cadavers into the woods and sent grieving families home with ums filled with charred sawdust. Meanwhile, Bass has been advising several graduate students, like the one who’s perfected a ground-penetrating-radar device that can detect a corpse
buried under concrete. And thanks to Bass’s cache, the size of the Body Farm itself has doubled. Last fall, the University of Tennessee gave the forensic program of the anthropology department an additional acre and a half of land
.

Much to the chagrin of his wife, Carol, during what little downtime Bass has had lately, he’s been cowriting a book about his life’s work. It will be published in fall 2003. Patricia Cornwell, author of the best-selling crime novel
The Body Farm,
is penning the foreword. The working title of Bass’s book is
The Real Body Farm.

It was a typical Friday afternoon in the Kiryat Hayovel neighborhood of southern Jerusalem. At the Supersol market, the Sabbath rush was underway; shoppers pushed their carts past shelves stripped bare of bread and stacked with matzos for the weeklong Passover holiday. A line had formed at the delicatessen counter in the back, where Sivan Peretz wrapped chicken breasts and salmon steaks and made small talk with his customers. A middle-aged security guard stood poised inside the supermarket entrance, carefully searching bags. At 1:49
P.M.
, 17-year-old Rachel Levy—petite, with flowing hair and a girlish gap between her teeth—stepped off the bus from her nearby apartment block and strolled toward the market on a quick trip to buy red pepper and herbs for a fish dinner with her mother and two brothers. At the same moment, another girl—strikingly attractive, with intense hazel eyes—walked toward the store’s glass double doors. The teenagers met at the entrance, brushing past each other as the guard reached out to grab the hazel-eyed girl, whose outfit may have aroused suspicion. “Wait!” the guard cried. A split second later, a powerful explosion tore through the supermarket, gutting shelves and sending bodies flying. When the smoke cleared and the screaming stopped, the two teenage girls and the guard lay dead, three more victims of the madness of martyrdom.

Ayat al-Akhras and Rachel Levy never knew each other, but they grew up less than four miles apart. One had spent her life locked
within the grim confines of the Dehaishe refugee camp outside Bethlehem, a densely packed slum whose 12,000 residents lived in poverty and frustration. The other dwelled in the shadow of a sleek shopping mall filled with cinemas, cafes, and boutiques. In their different worlds, the girls were typical teenagers. Ayat was deeply politicized by the rage, gunfire, violent death, and fervently anti-Israeli messages that surrounded her. Rachel did her best to shut out the violence and pretend that Israel was a normal country. In another time and another place, they could have been schoolmates, even friends. But the intifada cast them in the role of adversaries and, ultimately, executioner and victim. “When an eighteen-year-old Palestinian girl is induced to blow herself up, and in the process kills a seventeen-year-old Israeli girl,” President George W. Bush said as he announced plans to dispatch Colin Powell to the region in an attempt to stop the bloodletting, “the future itself is dying.”

For the most part, the world has been accustomed to one kind of suicide bomber—the angry Islamic male driven by visions of paradise who martyrs himself as he kills infidels. Since September 2000, 170 Israelis have been killed by more than 60 Palestinian suicide bombers, prompting a full-scale invasion of the West Bank last week. Now the story of Ayat al-Akhras may signal a new and terrifying phase in the Middle East and perhaps elsewhere: the spread of suicide bombing to all levels of society. There was something about staring into the almost-twin faces of the bomber and her victim last week that moved the seemingly unending tale of strife in the region to a deeper and even more unsettling place: to women and children as weapons as well as casualties of war. Martyrdom—or, depending on your point of view, murder—is becoming mainstream. As Powell’s mission goes forward, the world hopes for a resolution, or at least an end to the terrible violence of recent weeks. But the forces that pushed Ayat to become a human bomb will take far longer to defuse.

Ayat al-Akhras grew up hearing stories of Israeli aggression and Palestinian flight. Both her mother, Khadra Kattous, and her father, Muhammad al-Akhras, grew up in a tent camp in the Gaza Strip, where their parents had fled from Arab villages near Tel Aviv at the end of the 1948 war. After Israel occupied Gaza in 1967, Muhammad migrated to the Dehaishe camp near Bethlehem, a maze of cinder-block buildings, refuse-strewn alleyways, and open sewers. Khadra moved there as well, and three years later the couple were married. Muhammad found a job as a supervisor with an Israeli construction firm at the settlement of Betar Hit, building houses for Jews as they expanded their hold on the territories. He built himself a three-story concrete house in an alley in Dehaishe, and there raised his eleven children, four boys and seven girls, alongside thousands of other families of the Palestinian dispossessed. Earning a steady paycheck, al-Akhras was able to support his large clan with a better life than most. Many of Dehaishe’s residents took a dim view of his working for Israelis, but they also recognized that he needed to provide for his family.

When the first intifada erupted in 1987, the camp became a hotbed of militancy. Local youths fought street battles with the occupying army; dozens were killed and injured. The oldest child in the al-Akhras family, Samir, was jailed twice for throwing stones at Israeli soldiers. And Ayat—the brightest of their children, according to her parents—became infected by politics. An outstanding student in love with the written word, she wanted to become a journalist “to communicate to the world about the Palestinian cause,” says her mother. Fiercely opinionated, Ayat dominated conversations at family gatherings: “She would stick to her arguments even if everybody else argued the opposite.”

But she had a softer side, too. She covered the walls of her tiny bedroom with posters of pop singers from Iraq and Egypt. Every Ramadan, she traveled with her mother across the Green Line to pray at the Al Aqsa Mosque on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem,
virtually the only excursions she made outside the camp. Her life was bounded by her home, her public girls’ school, the small local mosque she attended on holidays, and the outdoor market in Bethlehem where she shopped with her mother and sisters. Shortly after she turned 15, she met a slim young man named Shadi Abu Laban, who had put aside his college plans to earn a living working as a tile layer. Ayat and Shadi became inseparable. Last year they got engaged, with a traditional wedding and feast planned for July. Ayat insisted they hold the party in the alley in front of her home—an all-day festival of food, dancing, and music that would be open to everyone in the neighborhood. She planned to enroll at Bethlehem University in September to pursue a journalism degree.

Rachel Levy’s childhood was more moneyed, but it wasn’t easy. As an infant she moved with her parents from Israel to California’s Silicon Valley, where her mother, Avigail, joined the family electronics business and her father, Amos, worked in the furniture trade. A family illness took them back to Israel eight years later. The marriage collapsed, and Avigail moved the kids—Rachel and her brothers, Guy, now 22, and Kobi, 7—to a small apartment in the Ramat Sharett quarter of southern Jerusalem, a series of drab high-rises in the shadow of the Jerusalem shopping mall. Rachel had a tough time making the transition from the United States. She considered Israelis brash; she preferred speaking English. But after a trip back to the United States last summer, she returned convinced that Israel was where she belonged, telling her mother, “I feel at home here.”

She finally adapted to the rhythms of teenage life. She fretted about the gap between her teeth and agonized about her weight. Like many teenage girls, she filled her diary with poetry about love and death—including long passages from the Song of Songs and the Book of Psalms. To stay trim, she worked out every day and usually ate the same meal when she went out: a salad, a Diet Pepsi, a lollipop, and a pickle. She listened to the music of Pink Floyd and
Christina Aguilera, liked
Pretty Woman
and
Titanic
, and socialized at the Jerusalem mall. Though the Palestinian uprising had cast a pall over that life—a suicide bomber killed three people in a downtown cafe where Rachel and her friends hung out—she remained apolitical and unconcerned, caught up in teenage passions. “She wasn’t afraid of bombs,” says a friend. “‘Aren’t you afraid to go [out]?’ I would ask her. And she said, ‘No, why would I be?’”

Across the Green Line in Dehaishe, the second intifada had erupted. After the collapse of peace talks at Camp David and Ariel Sharon’s provocative visit to the Temple Mount, Dehaishe had become one of the hotbeds of the uprising that began in September 2000. Ayat al-Akhras was in the middle of it. Masked militants often marched through the neighborhood after the funerals of suicide bombers and guerrillas killed by Israeli troops, firing their automatic rifles in the air. Night after night, Ayat spent hours glued to news reports on Al-Jazeera and Al Manar, the television network of Lebanon’s Hizbullah movement. Then the uprising touched her personally: Her brother was shot and wounded by Israeli troops. Three cousins, all members of Hamas, were killed in the Gaza Strip—a place that Ayat and her immediate family, lacking permits, were unable to visit. Ayat’s family recoiled at the group’s suicide bombings of civilians, but like most people in Dehaishe, her parents say they were strong supporters of the Tanzim guerrillas who killed Jewish settlers and soldiers in the territories; they considered those to be legitimate targets. When Mahmud Mughrabi, a close family friend and a member of Fatah, was shot dead while planting a roadside bomb near a Jewish settlement, the al-Akhras family hung a poster of the militant in their living room. “I made the frame myself,” Ayat’s mother says with pride.

Like many Palestinian girls her age—even smart, ambitious ones—Ayat was eventually drawn to the cult of martyrdom. For the first year of the intifada, suicide bombings were the exclusive province of Islamic radicals, who accepted only male recruits and
motivated them with promises of virgins and paradise. Women could not become suicide bombers, the Hamas and Islamic Jihad leaders maintained, because a woman traveling out of the home without a
makram—
her husband, brother, or father—constituted a breach of Islamic law. The rule was ironclad, though Hamas spiritual leader Sheik Ahmed Yassin did allow that “we will start using women when we have run out of men.”

But as the violence intensified, Palestinian nationalism became as strong a motivation for martyrdom as Islamic radicalism. Last winter the secular Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades embraced suicide bombings as well, believing that such tactics would inflict far more pain on the Israelis than guerrilla warfare would, hastening an end to the occupation. They even started a unit for female recruits. Wafa Idriss, a divorced 26-year-old ambulance worker from a Ramallah refugee camp, became the first female suicide bomber, blowing herself up in central Jerusalem in January and killing an elderly Jewish man. Dareen Abu Ayish, a student at Nablus University who was considered brilliant by her classmates, tried in vain to join Hamas earlier this year. After she was rejected, she joined the Al Aqsa brigades, and detonated herself at a checkpoint near Jerusalem in February, injuring five Israelis.

Many girls in the Dehaishe camp rejoiced that women were now playing a role in throwing off Israeli occupation. Even the youngest children were affected. “Since last Christmas, the girls don’t want dolls anymore,” says Vivian Khamis, a professor of psychology at Bethlehem University. “All they want are guns and tanks.”

Ayat’s anger peaked when the Israel Defense Forces rolled into Dehaishe in early March. On the evening of March 8, neighbor Isa Zakari Faraj and his daughter were playing with Legos when he was shot through the window by Israeli troops. Ayat’s brother Samir and a cousin tried to carry the mortally wounded man to a nearby hospital,
but he died in their arms. “When Ayat saw me and our cousin carrying Isa past the doorway, she screamed out in pain, and I told her to get back inside,” says Samir.

Faraj’s death had a powerful impact on Ayat. Shortly afterward, her friends believe, she either sought out or was approached by the Al Aqsa brigades’ suicide unit. “You send out signals at school or mosque, and those in charge of suicide attacks gather information about the candidates,” says a teacher in the camp, explaining that stating admiration for martyrs or a willingness to die for the cause is often enough to alert the operatives. “At that very moment everything becomes secret. [Once recruited,] the would-be martyr might then tell her friends, ‘I was just kidding when I made those statements.’” Experts say Ayat’s self-discipline and intelligence made her a natural candidate for the brigades. They say she probably needed little psychological preparation for her task, which helps explain why she didn’t vary her daily routine in the weeks before her death.

As the appointed hour grew near, though, she made little attempt to conceal her hatred of Israel, or what she saw as Arab passivity. Watching the Arab summit on TV with her parents last month, she seethed at the failure of Arab leaders to rush to the defense of Palestine. Days before her operation, she met in a secret location with at least one accomplice from Al Aqsa, who videotaped her final message and dropped it off with a local TV station in Bethlehem after her attack. Backlit, with her head wrapped in the black-and-white checked kaffiyeh of the Fatah movement, she reads from a prepared statement in a strong monotone: “I say to the Arab leaders, ‘Stop sleeping. Stop failing to fulfill your duty. Shame on the Arab armies who are sitting and watching the girls of Palestine fighting while they are asleep.’”

Rachel Levy spent the days before Passover in ebullient spirits. A photography project that she had labored on for weeks—water scenes around Jerusalem—went on display at her high school, winning rave reviews from teachers, classmates, and parents. “She
became far more outgoing after that,” says her mother. “I think the success of her exhibit gave her a lot of confidence in herself.” On the first night of Passover, the family gathered at Avigail’s brother’s house in the settlement of Pisgat Zeev on the eastern edge of Jerusalem. At 10:30 somebody switched on the television—and the family, horrified, watched the scenes of the devastating suicide attack in Netanya. “Racheli became sad, worried, said she wanted to go home,” her mother recalls. “We left. But the next day, Racheli was herself again. She looked radiant.”

She spent Thursday night, March 28, at the Jerusalem mall with her older brother and his girlfriend, returning home in the wee hours. After sleeping in, she and her mother drank coffee in the kitchen and discussed the family’s Friday-evening meal. “Racheli said she would like a change, fish instead of chicken, but we didn’t have all the ingredients,” her mother says. “We were missing parsley,
kousbara
[coriander], and red pepper. I told Racheli to go down to the local store to pick up those items, but she insisted on going to the supermarket in Kiryat Hayovel. I said, ‘Okay, go, but be quick. It’s late.’”