The Best American Crime Writing (14 page)

People with Asperger’s recognize their difference. One patient said he wished he had a micro-brain on his head to process all the intuitive meaning that surrounded and evaded him. Another patient, studying astronomy, told his therapist that he knew how scientists discovered the stars, and what instruments they used to discover the stars, but not how they discovered the names of the stars. He said he felt like a poor computer simulation of a human being, and he invented algebraic formulas to predict human emotion: frustration
(z)
, talent (x), and lack of opportunity (y) give the equation
x + y = z
.

Darius, explaining that he has never needed to socialize and really only associates with people in transit systems, said to me, “Some people think that I’m different. Okay, fine, I am different, but everybody’s different in their own kind of way. Some people just don’t know how to directly really react to that.” Before Darius’s sentencing hearing, Stephen Jackson sent him a pamphlet on Asperger’s. It was the first Darius had heard of the disorder. When I asked him about the pamphlet, he said, “I’ll put it like this. Out of the twelve things that’s on it I think I can identify myself with at least eight or nine. And all you need is five to have, you know, that type of thing.”

Asperger’s patients choose obsessions the way other people choose interests: Personality accounts for the choice. Sometimes, usually when they’re young, patients acquire and discard fixations in swift succession, but eventually a single subject consumes them. They are born to fall down some rabbit hole, from which they never fully emerge.

The Clinton Correctional Facility, where I interviewed Darius, is a leviathan relic from 1845, just south of the Canadian border, with granite walls thirty feet high. In the intake center a guard examined the cassette and batteries in my tape recorder. I was escorted across

a lawn to the main prison building. The walls leaned in—thirty feet is claustrophobically high. There were long-barreled guns and searchlights in guard towers. I felt as if I might provoke a terrible reaction by accident. We went through the prison lobby, a leaden door, a corridor, another leaden door, and arrived at the interview room, where the guard left me. Except for a table and chairs, the room was as plain as a cell. I sat waiting in a restless institutional quiet. Two guards brought Darius in. In his jumpsuit he looked lumpy and quiescent. We shook hands—Darius’s handshake was bonelessly indifferent—and sat down. The guards left, one whispering to the other, “He’s pretty docile.”

I made a vague little speech: I was writing an article, etc. Darius nodded politely as I talked but gave no indication that he was interested in my aims or motivations or life. When I finished he asked where I was staying and how much it cost and what train I’d come on and how long it had taken. From the time of the trip he guessed that my train hadn’t had an M-10 engine; he wished me luck getting one on the way back. I started asking about his career in transit, and he showed the transporting animation that Detective Mullen had observed. He sketched control panels in the air, he drove trains in mime, he asked for paper and drew the track intersections of subway stations. He often looked away to concentrate on the images he conjured.

Clinton is a maximum-security facility. Darius was there because the Department of Corrections, aware of his impersonation convictions, considered him an escape risk. To keep him safe the DOC had to segregate him from the general population, which meant confining him to his cell for, Darius said, twenty-one hours a day. That morning he had made the guards laugh by wedging a sign in his cell bars that said, “Train Out of Service.” He watched TV and read general interest magazines; he studied arrangements of facts in several specialty publications he subscribed to:
Truckers News
,
World of Trains, Truck
‘N
Trailer;
he made lists of various things, like 185 love songs he happened to think of one day; and he wrote a lot of letters requesting information. Unsatisfied by something he saw on TV, he wrote to the Department of Defense, which replied:

Darius underlined the word “two” every time it appeared.

On May 31 of this year, Darius will have spent 799 days in prison. At his first parole hearing, 912 days into his sentence, the DA’s office will present his history of violations. His full sentence comes to 1,825 days. In the interview room of the Clinton Correctional Facility, I asked Darius if he thought he would continue to impersonate transit employees and otherwise break the law. He looked at the ceiling and took a long breath. He seemed to have prepared his answer. “Okay,” he said, “trains are always going to be my greatest love. It’s something that I depend upon because I’ve been knowing how to do it for twenty-five years. So this is like my home, my best friend, my everything. Everything that I need and want is there. But I don’t want to get caught up with that again, and I’m probably going to need a little help. That much I can admit. If I can find—I know there’s no such program as Trains Anonymous,
but if I can get some kind of counseling it would be really beneficial towards me.”

Darius doesn’t like prison and complains about its deprivations, but he never expresses despair or outrage at the severity of his punishment. He sees his experience in terms of its daily components, without considering the entirety of his sentence—the abstract unbroken length of time between the present and his release. “I’ll get out of here sooner or later,” he says. And it doesn’t occur to him to imagine an alternative life for himself: He never wonders what he might have been.

Darius calls me from prison all the time: He doesn’t appreciate the distinction between friendships and sympathetic writer-subject relationships. I take maybe a third of his calls. Unless we talk about trains, the conversations are short—he gives brief factual reports and makes requests. When he asks how I’m doing and I actually talk about my frustrations or joys, his attention instantly migrates. At the first pause hell ask
, “So
do you think the Eagles are going to win their division?” or “Did you get my subscription to
Billboard
yet?” (I got him a subscription to
Rolling Stone,
but it didn’t have enough music business statistics to satisfy him.) Once I told him I thought high-speed trains in Europe were cool and mentioned Acela, Amtrak’s version. “Yeah, I drove the prototype,” he said
. “Now
see, with Acela …” When he reemerged, I said that looking out the windows of high-speed trains made me dizzy
. “You
have to look out
at an angle,”
he said
, “at an angle.”

Last summer, shortly before his parole hearing, Darius was finally examined by a psychiatrist and diagnosed with Asperger’s. The psychiatrist told the parole board that treatment, which is unavailable in state prison, was vital to Darius’s rehabilitation. Asperger’s experts and activists wrote letters to the parole board. I sent my article, the
sentencing transcript, the
DSM
criteria for Asperger’s, and a ten-page letter, in which I said that Darius’s criminal history was entirely attributable to his disease, there was no evidence he had ever endangered anyone, and Justice Berkman’s sentencing decision was demonstrably arbitrary. The board members did not discuss anything submitted on Darius’s behalf before denying his parole request. He was a danger to society, they wrote, and lacked insight into his own behavior. Darius will be released this summer. He is scheduled to enter a life-skills program for people with Asperger’s
.

O
n a two-acre patch of Tennessee woods that is surrounded by an eight-foot-high fence topped with razor wire, Murray Marks kneels next to a rotting dead man. The corpse is faceup on a body bag. Much of the skin is gone; what little remains on the skeleton resembles beef jerky. Marks shakes his head in frustration. “This body,” he says in his southern whisper of a voice, “should have been taken out of the bag, and the bag laid on top of him. Otherwise the body doesn’t decompose properly; it is just going to stew in its own juices.”

Marks, a 47-year-old associate professor of anthropology at the University of Tennessee, grabs the bag near the body’s torso and pulls the plastic down flat against the ground. A liquid the color and texture of tobacco spit streams out from under the body onto the leaf-covered earth. It is the organic soup of putrefied organs.

“When I find out which of my students put this body here like this,” Marks says, “their heads are on the chopping block.” He stands up and scans the area within the gates for other bodies that may need his attention. Dozens are scattered about in various states of decay.

A nearby skeleton looks as if it had been scooped up by the hand of God, the bones shaken like dice and rolled across the dirt. A couple of badly decomposed corpses are duct-taped to trees; they are slouched over with what’s left of their hands taped behind their backs. Many of the dead still wear the clothes they had on when
they died or—like the body from Chattanooga, the one whose skull was shattered by a gunshot blast—when they were murdered.

Two corpses are what Marks describes as “fresh dead.” Carefully stepping over body parts and ducking tree limbs, he makes his way to one of them: a naked woman belly-up at the base of a tree. A tuft of gray hair protrudes from her scalp, a scalp that has begun to slide off her skull. Marks figures she was in her early sixties when she died.

“Smell that?” he asks me. I take a deep breath; the pungent odor is something like a mixture of fresh mulch and wet garbage, only worse. In the still heat of the Tennessee summer, the foul stench blankets this wooded bluff behind the University of Tennessee Medical Center.

For a few long, quiet moments, we gaze at the woman. A bird chirps. A plane roars overhead. Tree branches rattle in the wind. A dozen or so flies are inching across the woman; one takes off and lands on Marks’s crisp white shirt. Watching the bug, he says the scent of blood draws them. Soon, he adds, flies will swarm the body; they will crawl into every orifice; they will lay eggs, and these larvae will hatch into maggots; the maggots will eat almost everything down to the bone.

Sensing my queasiness, Marks touches my arm and says, “What you need to keep in mind is that this person made the ultimate sacrifice: She or her family decided that this is more important than a traditional burial.” By this Marks means donating her remains to the University of Tennessee Anthropology Research Facility, the only outdoor “laboratory” in the world where researchers study human decomposition. Here at the Body Farm, as the facility is known, scientists harvest information about death to help law enforcement catch killers.

One of the central questions in any homicide investigation is How long has the victim been dead? In cop speak, the answer is “time since death,” or TSD. Once detectives know the TSD, they can establish a timeline of the victim’s final hours and minutes,
which can lead to the murderer—or at the very least, to the last person who saw the victim alive. When a body is found within hours of a crime, a medical examiner performs an autopsy, studies the soft tissue and organs, and fairly easily determines the time and cause of death. But when a body is not found until days or weeks or months later and it has begun to decompose or has decomposed entirely—leaving behind bugs and bones—investigators turn to the Body Farmers. Marks and his colleagues have been so effective at helping cops solve otherwise unsolvable homicides that now the FBI sends agents here for a week every year for what amounts to a Death 101 class.

Standing over the dead woman, Marks points to what could be mistaken for varicose veins, and he slips into forensic investigator mode. “Death is a process,” he says. “She was pronounced dead, but that body is still doing stuff. That marbling on her legs is something we see happening in the vascular system; it means the environment reached a certain temperature, and knowing that I can determine TSD.” The formula, he explains, goes like this: Marbling occurs at about 400 degrees. Divide that number by the average daily temperature, which lately in Tennessee has been in the fifties, and there you have it. The woman has been dead about eight days. In another two weeks, when the body will have been exposed to 1,200 degrees, flesh will give way to bone. “If this were a crime scene,” Marks says, “the first question I would be asked is ‘Hey, Doc, how long has she been dead?’ And from all the research we’ve done here, I would be able to give an answer.”

It was one of the most cold-blooded homicides Mississippi had ever seen. On December 16, 1993, Pike County police got a call from a Michael Rubenstein. The 47-year-old reported that he had just arrived at his cabin in the woods outside the town of Summit and found the bodies of his stepson, 24-year-old Darryl Perry; Perry’s
20-year-old wife, Annie Marie; and the couple’s 4-year-old daughter, Crystal.

Police and an investigator from the Mississippi Highway Patrol rushed to the scene. They covered their mouths, fought through the stench and flies inside the closed-up cabin, and were horrified by what they saw. Darryl’s and Annie Marie’s bodies were on the bloodstained linoleum floor. Crystal’s corpse was on a mattress atop a blood-soaked bedspread. The family had decomposed to the point of being partially mummified. Their faces were covered with maggots. Three days later, a medical examiner determined that the two adults had been stabbed and the girl had been strangled.

Rubenstein told police that the Perrys had been having marital problems and he had loaned them his cabin as a place to work things out. He said he had driven the Perrys from their home in New Orleans to the cabin in early November. When no one heard from them for a couple of weeks, Annie Marie’s mom became concerned and Rubenstein “volunteered” to check on them. Rubenstein, a taxicab driver who was also from New Orleans, said the cabin had been empty when he visited on November 16 and November 27.

Other than the bodies, the killer left no physical evidence. Nevertheless, the highway patrol investigator was troubled by Ruben-stein’s story. Why, the detective wondered, didn’t Rubenstein report the Perrys missing when he had twice checked on them and found them missing?

The investigator discovered that in August 1991, Rubenstein had applied for a $250,000 life insurance policy on Crystal. New York Life had rejected that application because Rubenstein’s stepson was not married to Annie Marie; therefore he had no “insurable interest” in the girl. Then, within weeks of the rejection, Darryl and Annie Marie wed, Darryl adopted Crystal, and Rubenstein successfully reapplied to New York Life.

What’s more, investigators learned that in 1979, Rubenstein took
out a $240,000 insurance policy on a business partner; three months later, that partner was fatally shot in the back during a hunting-trip accident that included Rubenstein and Darryl Perry.

Five years after the homicide, in September 1998, the state police investigator persuaded the DA’s office to present the facts to a grand jury. Rubenstein was indicted on three counts of murder. He was facing a death sentence. The prosecution’s star witness was Murray Marks’s mentor, William M. Bass—the head of UT’s anthropology department, a nationally renowned forensic anthropologist, and the Ph.D. behind the Body Farm.

Bass got the call on the Rubenstein case in May 1999, about a year after he retired from UT. For all of his twenty-one years with the university, he was the anthropology department head. Today he is a 73-year-old professor emeritus, still active in forensic anthropology. Matter of fact, on this quiet afternoon, as we sit in the kitchen of the Knoxville home he shares with his wife, Carol, and his beagle, Knox, Bass is waiting for a call from a neighboring county’s DA. A murderer whom Bass helped convict is before a judge asking for a new trial; Bass is on standby in the event the court again requires his testimony.

In the meantime, Bass is showing me slides of the crime scene for that case—flashing on the wall of his kitchen the same gruesome images he once showed to a jury. The slide projector clicks, and there’s the decomposed headless corpse of an 18-year-old boy in the woods. Click, there’s the skull in a shallow creek bed. Click, a close-up of the skull. The kid was shot three times in the head. Near as Bass can recollect, the teen was “done in” for $300. Hunters found the body on a hill, whereas the skull was discovered in the creek at the base of the slope. As the body decayed, the skull came off and rolled down the hill.

“Interesting thing about this case was the maggot activity,” Bass
says as he rises from the kitchen table and walks over to the scene on the wall. “Maggots don’t like sunlight, so they ate all the flesh under the clothing. See that?” He points to the dark stains on the victim’s shirt and pants. “But they left the skin here”—he points to the dead boy’s arms below his shirtsleeves—“and here.” He points to the skin on the legs between the tattered sneaker and cuff of the jeans. “The maggots left an umbrella of flesh.”

Bass is an owlish man with square glasses, a tan freckled face, and a buzz cut that he has kept high and tight since his days in the Korean War. He has a warm, gravelly southern drawl. Even though he’s talking about a brutal murder, he sounds as if he’s reading
Winnie-the-Pooh
.

While Bass is standing in the light of the projector, the image of the decapitated kid washing over him, his wife hobbles into the kitchen. Carol grew up outside Lynchburg, Virginia, on a farm not far from where Bass spent much of his childhood. Now 64 years old, short with silver hair, she requires a cane to get around. Yet she possesses the effervescent personality of a 16-year-old southern debutante. “Lord, please,” she says, “make yourself right at home.” As she prepares us a lunch of chicken salad sandwiches and iced tea, I ask if the scene on the wall troubles her.

“Oh no,” she says. “The only thing that bothers me—a deputy sheriff came here a few months ago with a skull he found that still had a little matter on it. And he put it on my nice tablecloth. They rolled it around. Back and forth. Of course I didn’t say anything. But it was one of my favorite tablecloths.”

Bass chuckles and shrugs. The raised-eyebrow look on his face seems to say, “Betcha never thought an anthropologist would be doing that.”

Anthropology is the study of human beings. Academia breaks the subject into archaeology, which focuses on man’s relics; cultural anthropology, which examines, well, our cultures; and physical
anthropology, which is concerned with human bones. Forensic anthropology is an extension of physical anthropology.

Bass discovered his passion for this anthropological niche accidentally. After the Korean War, he enrolled at the University of Kentucky, planning on getting his master’s in counseling. But at Kentucky, he ended up exhuming a dead woman and changed his plans.

One hot April afternoon in 1955, the professor of an anthropology elective Bass was taking asked him if he would like to go out on a forensic case. A lawyer had hired the prof to exhume a body and identify it. Shortly after the professor opened the muddy coffin, Bass puked, and soon after that he began working toward a master’s degree in physical anthropology. “The fact that you could take bones,” Bass says, “piece them together as if it were a puzzle and identify a body—that to me was exciting.”

The UT campus is across the Tennessee River from the Body Farm. The anthropology department is buried in the bowels of the football stadium—Home of the Volunteers. The white cinder-block offices and classrooms used to be players’ dorms. Years ago, however, the Vols had a home built for them exclusively; the anthropologists took what they could get.

The physical appearance of the department didn’t change much when Bass took over, but everything else improved quickly. Bass earned his master’s from Kentucky, did his doctoral thesis at the University of Pennsylvania, and then taught at two universities—Nebraska, then Kansas. All the while, he worked with authorities on forensic cases. Then, in 1971, UT asked him to run its anthropology department.

By the time he came to UT, Bass was well-known in the forensic community. Soon after he arrived, the Tennessee medical examiner,
Jerry Francisco, M.D., appointed him the state forensic anthropologist. With Francisco’s support, Bass began going to crime scenes rather than waiting for the cops to bring the remains to him. He didn’t want to miss any salient details.

Many of the small towns Bass visited while working for the M.E.’s office didn’t have the resources to store more than two bodies at a time. Often, with the evidence gathered, cops began asking Bass if he could take the corpses. It occurred to the professor that the bodies would make excellent teaching aids. Modern skeletons are extremely hard to come by.

Bass asked the UT dean for a place where he could lay the bodies to decompose and was given part of the university’s sow barn, out on the agricultural campus, a forty-minute ride from the main campus. Word of the farm spread, and soon unidentified homicide victims and indigents who died at local hospitals were being sent his way. As Bass’s forensic work gained publicity, people began bequeathing or otherwise donating bodies to the facility.

Bass was happy with the research he and his students were doing—that is, until 1977. In a dug-up grave in a nearby county, police had found a coffin and a man’s body. The body was in good shape, which puzzled police, as the cemetery hadn’t been used for more than a hundred years. Authorities wanted to know if this scene was the work of grave robbers or, given the well-preserved corpse, if perhaps a murderer had been trying to hide a recent victim.

At the scene, Bass told police that based on the decomposition, it was a 25-to-28-year-old white male, dead for six months to a year—probably not the work of grave robbers. Bass said he’d be able to give a more specific TSD after a thorough examination of the remains.