The Skeleton Crew (8 page)

Once again, Jeff Ernstein surfaced briefly,
this time to comment on a 2012 news story about his sister's remains posted by
Mail Online
, a wildly popular offshoot of the British tabloid
The Daily Mail.
Liz was very slender, he wrote, and he could see how she was mistaken for a teenaged boy. Besides, many young men then had long hair. Liz had had no dental work done besides cleanings, hence no records. “My mother, father, and older brother all passed away without knowing for sure . . . Thank you all and pray we catch an old killer, if still alive,” signed “her brother. - J Ernstein, Jackson, United States.”

The posts by Jeff E., James G., and Gina M. spanning more than five years were like a dialogue between actors performing an existential play before an enormous audience that came and went at will. An actor might speak a few lines one night, fall silent for years, and then pipe up again in
front of a group of people who had completely missed the first act.

In 2013, ColdCases lived on—having logged a total of more than seventy thousand posts since 1999, with two thousand per month at its peak between 2005 and 2007—although its creator, Troy More, was long gone. In one of More's final posts on ColdCases, in 2001, he reported to his loyal following that he had moved to New Zealand and was hot on the trail of one of the oldest unsolved cases in New Zealand history, that of an unidentified woman discovered floating in Wellington Harbor in 1902.

ColdCases accomplished what More originally set out to do: spread the word about Caledonia Jane Doe. As a result of More's efforts, sixteen hundred people from newsgroups around the world, some as far afield as Israel, Australia, Kazakhstan, and New Zealand, offered an assortment of theories and tips about her murder. Unfortunately, none of them helped identify her.

Both More and Doe founder Jennifer Marra seem to have vanished from the Web. Perhaps if you know how to maneuver within little-known corners of the Internet, you're equally skilled at making yourself invisible.

There was no question that web forums exposed cold cases to fresh eyes, resurrecting them from obscurity; but ironically the people behind these efforts receded behind the Internet's potentially insidious veil. Faces, identities, and motives became as opaque as the facts of the cases themselves. The forums reminded me of Alice in Wonderland. It was perpetually teatime in the virtual world, and conversations were as out of sync as Alice's and the Mad Hatter's. And Alice, the White Rabbit, and the Mad Hatter could be anyone at all.

4

GHOST GIRLS

L
ivingston, Tennessee, is plopped like the yolk of a sunny-side-up egg in a valley roughly midway between Nashville, home of country music, and Knoxville, birthplace of Mountain Dew and the Dempster-Dumpster. The Highland Rim, an escarpment of stratified bedrock, encircles the region like an ancient fortification that defined Todd Matthews's world for the first half of his life.

Livingston's downtown looks like someone stopped the clock in 1955. Even in 2012, a citizen who votes to allow liquor to be sold within county lines runs the risk of being accused of openly and willingly courting the devil and is ostracized accordingly.
The Jeffersons
,
The Dukes of Hazzard
,
Knight Rider
, and
I Dream of Jeannie
provided the only proof to young Todd that there was civilization beyond the mountains. He didn't encounter blacks until he was eight years old and his family sought medical care for his congenital heart condition in Nashville, a hundred miles away. The city, talking cars, a genie in a bottle, a middle-class black family—all seemed equally fantastical to a boy growing up in small-town Tennessee in the early 1970s.

Athletic fields and parking lots dwarf Livingston Academy's low brick academic building, much as they did during Todd's time there as a student in the late 1980s. In those days, the football queen wore a strapless white gown with a hoop petticoat overlaid with lace. The dresses of her royal attendants were tiered pastel affairs as big as pup tents. In the yearbook's head-and-shoulder portraits, the girls' big hair fell in bangs curling like spiders' legs over
their foreheads. The boys' hair, with the exception of Todd's, was conservatively short.
Todd's wavy 'do reached a height
that rivaled some of the girls'. And he was the only student with a chinstrap beard.

In the South, men pride themselves on their toughness and self-­reliance. Boys grow up with a football in one hand and a hunting rifle in the other, but Todd, born with a bum heart, wasn't allowed to play sports or hunt. The closest he got to running with the rah-rah football crowd was announcing the members of the marching band, team, and cheerleaders at games.

When it was time for animal dissections in biology lab, some girls groaned while the boys, accustomed to shooting and skinning deer, squirrels, rabbits, and raccoons, were unfazed by the cardboard box full of dead cats, each in a plastic bag secured with a rubber band. The animals were sliced lengthwise through the belly, the arteries and veins injected with red or blue dye. At the beginning of the year,
Todd had struck a deal with his lab partner,
Wayne Sells: Todd, the more talented artist, would sketch the splayed animal's innards, while Wayne did the actual cutting. Nothing would have induced Todd to lift a scalpel.

Todd—imaginative, artistic, stubborn—stymied his father, the Fort Benning recruit who had shipped out to Vietnam soon after Wilbur Riddle stumbled on Tent Girl.

Just before Todd was born, Billy Matthews brought home a Purple Heart from his stint in the Special Forces. He was driving alone on a Tennessee highway when an oncoming vehicle veered into his path, demolishing both cars and breaking both of Billy's legs. Years later, on his forty-sixth birthday, Billy was driving a tanker full of diesel on a short-haul circuit between Nashville and Knoxville when the fuel caught fire on Highway 111 in Cookeville. He escaped by kicking out the truck cab's rear window with the heel of his cowboy boot. His neck, arms, and chest were badly burned but he was not killed, as the news reported that day. He became known as the man with nine lives.

When I met Billy Matthews, he was still wiry and fit, a Clint Eastwood look-alike in jeans, athletic shoes, and a dark oxford shirt with a ballpoint pen in the pocket. Practically vibrating with nervous energy, he patted his receding hairline, fiddled with his watch, and cheerfully reminisced about
how he used to give Todd whippings for being “hardheaded.” Daddy, as Todd and his brother Mark still call him, hadn't demanded that his sons take on many household chores but when he said be home by nine o'clock, you'd better be home. Todd didn't dare drink or smoke pot in high school; Billy Matthews would have killed him.

In October 1987, Todd had just started his senior year. He was having lunch with a friend in the cafeteria when he spotted a girl he had never seen before. She was petite, with soulful brown eyes. Her dark hair fell in perfect waves just past the shoulders of her burgundy rain jacket emblazoned with the name of some other school.

Even if the sixteen-year-old girl noticed Todd gazing at her across the room, she was unaware that she had unwittingly become his personal quest, and that this would change her life. Meanwhile, there was no question in Todd's mind that this girl, whoever she was and wherever she had come from, was his future wife.

Word got around that the new girl had moved to Livingston from northern Kentucky; her name was Lori Ann Riddle, and she was a junior. Todd spent the hours after lunch wondering how to insert himself into Lori's path. The last period of the day, he walked into study hall and saw her seated there. He gave a slight nod of acknowledgment to some higher being before walking over and sitting down next to her.

Lori and Todd started dating. If Todd had a premonition about his future father-in-law as he had had about his future wife, he never mentioned it. But his first meeting with Wilbur Riddle would prove as life-changing as his first glimpse of Riddle's daughter.

Swapping spooky tales on their first Halloween together, Lori told Todd her best real-life ghost story: the one about her daddy finding a dead body in Kentucky.

The day Wilbur Riddle and I made our pilgrimage to the Tent Girl site, Riddle decided we must drop in on his old friend Bobby G. Vance, the former sheriff of Scott County, the man Wilbur had raced to phone when he saw what was encased in the tarp. Sheriff Vance's office back then was in the imposing nineteenth-century brick courthouse adorned with a nonblindfolded Lady Justice that still stands in the heart of historic downtown Georgetown, a straight shot down Route 25 from Sadieville. Tall, solid, with dark hair, Vance, although still a young man in 1968, had served two four-year terms as deputy sheriff in the three-­person department before being elected to a four-year term as sheriff. Most locals knew Vance by sight. Georgetown was—and is—small-town South, where the sheriff shook his forefinger at rowdy boys and threatened to tell their daddies on them. Vance knew Wilbur Riddle may not have been the straightest arrow, but he wouldn't joke about a corpse.

It was around ten in the morning on that day in May when Vance pulled his cruiser in beside Riddle's truck. The two men hustled down the embankment to the spot by the creek where the bundle lay. They peered at it as if it had fallen to earth from outer space. Vance was wearing a suit, white shirt, and tie. The odor had gotten worse, and as Riddle remembers it, Vance was promptly sick in the bushes.

“Will you open it?” Vance said to Riddle.

“Yeah, I'll open it.”

Among his many avocations, Riddle traded knives. He typically had one or two new bone-handled Case Canoe penknives in his pocket, but he chose an old, rusty blade; he didn't want that smell on his knife. He didn't think it would ever come off. Done, he placed the knife on the ground. Riddle had sliced the fabric at a place that happened to expose the back of a neck.

The flesh looked petrified, like shoe leather. In a corpse, the intestinal bacteria that help break down food start to produce a foul-smelling gas that flows into the blood vessels and tissues. The gas bloats the body and blackens the skin. Even seasoned coroners can find it harrowing to encounter a neglected body at close range.

“What is it?” Vance said, still queasy.

“It's a girl.”

“White or black?'”

“White,” Riddle said.

At around eleven, Vance phoned Kentucky State Police Post 12 in Frankfort. Detective Edward L. Cornett picked up the phone. The report he typed up a few days later said that Bob Vance, sheriff of Scott County, stated that a body tied up in a tarpaulin had been found in a rural area beside US 25 thirteen miles north of Georgetown by one “Wilburn” Riddle, and Vance had requested that the state police help with the investigation.

Meanwhile, deputy coroner Kenneth Grant, Deputy Sheriff Jimmy Williams, and a newspaper reporter arrived. A photographer captured the incongruous scenes I later saw of men in black suits and narrow ties kneeling on the brush-covered ground and conferring in groups like accountants lost in the woods.

The bundle was loaded onto an ambulance and taken to Johnson's Funeral Home near downtown Georgetown, then to Saint Joseph Hospital in nearby Lexington, where the autopsy commenced in a basement room at five o'clock in the afternoon.

Murder was not a common occurrence in Scott County
in the sixties. During Vance's entire twelve-year tenure, there had been only one besides Tent Girl: an irate wife shot her drunk husband to death in bed. The Tent Girl case was, Todd would tell me later, like “murder in Mayberry.” By the time I met him, Vance even looked like Andy Griffith.

Vance lived in a big, stately brick house at the end of a long driveway in a subdivision of stately houses on spacious lots not far from his former office in the courthouse. He was long retired from the sheriff's department as well as from his second career, as county tax assessor. He answered the door with his wife, Maxine, at his side. His hair was gray and he walked with a hesitant step, but he was as tall and striking as in the news photos taken at the edge of Route 25 forty-three years earlier. With all the flourish of a Southern gentleman, he escorted me to a seat in the dining room, where a vinyl-covered photo album sat on the table. “It's been so long, I don't know what I can remember,” Vance apologized. “My head don't work like it used to.”

Maxine, round and affable, was as quick and lively as her husband was deliberate and slow. As soon as we sat down she urged him, “Why don't you tell her what you did?” Vance fanned open the pages of the album, which turned out to contain a collection of newspaper clippings, police reports, autopsy results, and a copy of the 1969
Master Detective
.

Vance gripped each yellowing page in its plastic sheath like a lifeline, perusing them through smudged bifocals. After a lengthy pause, he intoned as though quoting scripture, “We went down there, the coroner and I, and Wilbur, it seemed like, had found this body over a rock wall and he sort of kicked it and maybe it rolled down the hill. Maybe an arm rolled out.”

Vance remembered joining Riddle at the scene. He recalled that the body, severely decayed, smelled terrible. Paramedics took it to Johnson's Funeral Home and then to a hospital to conduct the autopsy.

“You went to that, didn't you?” Maxine prompted.

“I very well did,” Vance said.

“Johnson was there with you. He wanted to go eat and you were sick.” Maxine didn't try to hide her amusement at her husband's weak stomach. Vance probably wished he had skipped breakfast that day.

“It smelled up the whole bottom of that hospital, to tell you the truth, it was that bad. I remember it was a hot, muggy spring and it was just terrible, seeing the maggots around her,” Vance said, peering at me with the glasses slipping down his nose. “I hate to tell you that, but it's true.”

A grandfather clock ticked.

Maxine leaned forward and put her hand on her husband's arm. “She wants you to tell her the rest of the story, Bobby,” she said.

With Vance, state police detective Ed Cornett, a deputy sheriff, the deputy coroner, and two hospital employees gathered around the autopsy table, Dr. James T. McClellan made the first incision, in the neck, near the spot Riddle had exposed by ripping open the bag. The color and texture of the skin struck him as skinned and raw. Peeling the rest of the fabric away exposed flesh churning with fly larvae.

“When the body is placed on the autopsy table, it is seen to be that of a young white female whose age is estimated to be near eighteen years,” McClellan wrote. “She is five foot one inch in length. The hair is reddish-­brown and fairly short. The eyes are decomposed and their color cannot be determined. The scalp is partially decomposed but is dried. The right side of the face is partially decomposed and sloughed away. The mouth hangs
open.” No fillings, but a line of decay was visible along the edge of an upper front tooth, a fact that became important much later.

In his official report,
McClellan noted that the tarpaulin
was made of a thin green waterproof canvas, both ends tied with heavy cotton rope of a type that might be used for tents, awnings, or clotheslines threaded through the eyelets. She was naked except for a slightly ragged hand towel draped across her right shoulder, back, and lower right neck, McClellan noted. It was a mystery why it was resting on her shoulder, Riddle said later. The police report called it a small white towel similar to ones used by motels, with spots of blood on it, but at various points the cloth would be identified as the kind of towel found in roll-up dispensers common in service station lavatories and later, most significantly, as a baby's diaper.

There were no flesh wounds to indicate choking, hanging, or trauma. X-rays revealed no evidence of bullets or broken bones. McClellan removed the fourth finger of the left hand for fingerprints, and stored organ specimens in a refrigerator. Eight days later, the organ tissue was delivered to Cincinnati for toxicological tests.

A state police sergeant took photos during the autopsy. In one photo, a figure—presumably McClellan in a white lab coat—is visible at the edge of the frame. With his hand encased in a light-colored latex glove, he grips the corpse slightly below the right shoulder, supporting it upright for the photographer. The ravaged face—nose gone, teeth bared in a gruesome grin, left eyeball melted away, right glowing white in its socket, a swath of hair matted to the cratered, blackened forehead—is turned toward the camera over what remains of the left shoulder. The effect, despite the horrific state of the corpse, is oddly coquettish, the toothy smile almost cheerful.