Carved in Bone

CHAPTER 6

The district attorney, Robert Roper, gave me a rueful nod as I headed toward the witness stand, ragged and bleary-eyed. I’d testified as a witness for Bob in half a dozen murder cases, but today I was testifying for the other side, hoping to demolish his charge that Eddie Meacham had murdered Billy Ray Ledbetter.

As a forensic anthropologist, my obligation is to the truth, not to prosecutors or police. In practice, speaking the truth usually means speaking for murder victims, and often that means testifying for prosecutors. Not this time, though. This time, I was speaking for Billy Ray Ledbetter, and I was convinced he hadn’t been murdered by his friend Eddie. But speaking that truth — at least, on behalf of the defense attorney who had roped me into this — was going to stick in my craw so tight I might need to be Heimliched right there on the witness stand.

The bailiff rattled off what I assume was the routine swearing-in question — I wondered if he dabbled in auctioneering on the side, such was his speed — and I assented. Then Burt DeVriess stood to question me, and I felt my hackles rise.

I reminded myself that I was here as a witness for DeVriess and his client, but it wasn’t easy to suppress years of animosity. In almost every East Tennessee murder trial in which I’d testified for the prosecution, DeVriess — nicknamed “Da Grease” by local cops — had served as defense counsel. The guiltier you were, and the more heinous your crime, the more you needed Grease. At least, that’s the way things seemed. Serial rapists, child molesters, drug kingpins, stone-cold killers: the dregs of humanity — or inhumanity — were Burt DeVriess’s bread and butter. I had faced him from the witness chair a dozen times before, and his cross-examinations had never failed to enrage me. Some of that anger was a natural response to the legal system’s adversarial structure, which I didn’t much like. It was maddening to do a meticulous forensic exam, then hear it challenged and undermined by the sort of careerist witnesses widely known as “defense whores”: Yes, theoretically, I suppose it’s possible, as Dr. Brockton claims, that the skull fracture might have been caused by the bloody baseball bat found beside the body. However, in my expert opinion, the fracture more likely resulted from the impact of a large, anomalous hailstone…

Although I resented that sort of far-fetched second-guessing, I wrote it off as a necessary evil. But what I couldn’t forgive or forget was the way DeVriess would skillfully impugn my professional and personal integrity in the slyest, most underhanded of ways. His favorite tactic was to pose an outrageous question that would be struck down immediately…right after it had been etched indelibly in the jurors’ minds. “MISTER Brockton, did you slant your findings to fit the prosecution’s theory, the same way you did in the such-and-such trial three years ago?” (“Objection!” “Sustained.” “Withdraw.”) Every time I squared off against DeVriess I knew an exchange like that was coming, but every time it did, I still got sputtering mad. Which was, of course, was exactly what he wanted.

So given how thoroughly I despised the man and his tactics, why on earth was I about to testify for his team at a murder hearing? Because he had played me like a fish yet again, this time reeling me over to his side of the courtroom. It had happened a few weeks before, when he invited me to lunch—“to bury the hatchet,” he said — and sure enough, throughout the meal he was gracious and conciliatory, praising my research, praising my students, apologizing for his aggressive defense tactics. Then, during dessert, he cast the bait. He had a case he’d appreciate my advice about, he said, because it involved the most baffling forensic mystery he’d ever seen. He posed a series of innocent-sounding hypothetical questions about skeletal structure and sharp trauma—“When a person is stabbed, the knife blade can leave marks on the bones it contacts, can’t it? Can it leave metal particles from the blade, or residue from a sharpening stone? How much variation is there in the shape of the spine? What about such-and-such?” He paid rapt attention to my answers, then posed incisive follow-up questions. “Yes, but if the knife had a thin, flexible blade? If the victim had curvature of the spine?” After it was too late — as I lay flopping in his creel — I realized that he’d been setting the hook during that entire chocolate-fueled dialogue. Da Grease, clever bastard that he was, had appealed to both my scientific curiosity and my sense of justice. As he settled the tab, he concluded with a litany of troubling allegations about the autopsy Billy Ray Ledbetter had received at the hands of Dr. Garland Hamilton, the Knox County medical examiner. I, DeVriess had insisted, was the only hope for saving poor, innocent Eddie Meacham.

He was putting me in a delicate position. As an anthropologist, I’m not technically qualified to determine cause of death; in Tennessee that’s a call that can be made only by a physician with a specialty in forensic pathology — and, what’s more, by a pathologist who has been officially appointed as a medical examiner, a position that marries medical expertise with law enforcement powers. In the normal pecking order of the academic and forensic world, a forensic anthropologist with a Ph.D. was considered a rung below a medical examiner with an M.D. On the other hand, there were certain areas in which my expertise far surpassed the medical examiner’s, and one of those was skeletal structure and geometry. In addition to studying thousands of human skeletons and hundreds of corpses — including scores of mangled, murdered ones — I had also spent a year teaching human anatomy to medical students. So if a man’s life hinged on whether or not a knife blade could thread a zigzag path through the human back, spine, and rib cage, I felt confident that my skeletal research and anatomical knowledge more than equaled Dr. Hamilton’s medical degree.

“Off the record, Dr. Brockton, I’m gonna level with you,” Grease had leaned in and confided. “The vast majority of my clients are probably guilty of the crimes they’re charged with.” Golly, what a news flash that was. “Eddie Meacham is not. He did not kill Billy Ray Ledbetter. He’s being railroaded by an incompetent, impaired medical examiner — and by a prosecutor who doesn’t want to humiliate the ME and compromise his other cases. And for the sake of that, they’re willing to send an innocent man to prison for life. That’s wrong, and if I’ve learned anything at all about you over the years, Dr. Brockton, it’s this: you stand for the truth. Period. I’m begging you, set aside your personal feelings about me and speak the truth about this case and this sham of an autopsy. Eddie Meacham needs your help.”

God, he was good. For years I’d loathed him — today, settling into the witness chair, I loathed him still — but sitting in that restaurant a few weeks ago, I couldn’t help admiring his skill and what appeared to be his passion. I also couldn’t resist his plea to exercise my best judgment and do whatever I thought was right. Flattery? Probably. But wasn’t it possible to be flattered and right?

And what was right, I came to decide as I studied Dr. Hamilton’s autopsy report and my own collection of skeletons and corpses, was to take the stand and point out the impossibility of the medical examiner’s conclusions. Thus it was that I found myself on the witness stand this bleary-eyed morning, wielding bones and diagrams to explain skeletal geometry. Grease led me smoothly through it all, ending with the account of my futile attempt, the previous morning, to replicate the wound path described by the autopsy report. “In your expert opinion, then, Dr. Brockton — based on your extensive knowledge of skeletal trauma and on your own experimental investigation — is it even remotely plausible that the blade of a hunting knife followed that zigzag path through the body of the deceased?” It was not, I said. “Thank you, Doctor, for your candor and your courage,” he concluded, his voice breaking slightly with emotion. I half expected a tear to trickle down his cheek as he returned to the defense table and gave his client’s shoulder an encouraging squeeze.

At the prosecution table, Bob Roper stared morosely at his copy of the autopsy report, then rose to cross-examine me. Neither of us was looking forward to this. He began by leading me through a grade-school exegesis of the steps in the scientific method: observation, hypothesis, controlled experiment, conclusion. I wasn’t sure where he was headed with it, and I grew impatient as we covered the subject in numbing detail. Then I began to discern the trap he was setting for me. “You’ve done dozens of scientific experiments on human decomposition at your research facility, haven’t you, Doctor?” I acknowledged that I had. I could hear the jaws of the trap creaking open: “Dr. Brockton, do you consider reproducible results to be an important part of the scientific method?” Yes, I hedged, in general I do. “And yet you performed this experiment you’re testifying about today, the one you’re using to impugn the medical examiner’s autopsy, only once, isn’t that correct?” Snap!

“That is correct, but—”

“Doctor, correct me if I’m wrong, but if one of your graduate students turned in a Ph.D. dissertation — let’s say, a dissertation about the effects of temperature on the rate of human decomposition — and if that dissertation were based on a single thermometer reading and a single corpse, I’m guessing you’d call that shoddy research. Wouldn’t you?” I had to admit I would. My face burned. Roper spun on his heel and strode back to his seat. “That’s all the questions I have for this witness.”

DeVriess didn’t even stand up for his redirect. “Dr. Brockton, are you familiar with the Manhattan Project?” Of course I was; back during World War II, much of the top-secret work to develop the atomic bomb had taken place just twenty miles away, in Oak Ridge. “The Trinity test in New Mexico — the single experimental detonation of an atomic bomb before Hiroshima — would you call that shoddy science, Doctor? Or would you call that pretty convincing proof?”

I could have kissed that slick bastard. “I reckon I’d call that pretty convincing proof.”

Roper objected, but the judge just smiled and shook his head. Grease moved for an immediate dismissal of all charges; the judge turned him down, too, but did grant his motion to exhume the body of Billy Ray Ledbetter so I could examine it in the flesh — or in what was left of it.

As the dust settled and the hearing ended, I walked over to Roper, sitting glumly at his table. “Bob, I hope there’s no hard feelings. You do know I feel bad about this?”

He looked up, his eyes weary. “Yeah, me too. I like it a lot better when you’re sitting over here on my side.”

“So do I.” I offered my hand, and we shook like good Southern gentlemen. I made to pull away, but he tightened his grip.

“Bill? I’m…I’m real sorry, Bill.”

I gave him a smile I hoped was reassuring. “It’s okay. You’re just doing your job the best way you know how.”

He squeezed again. “I…meant about Kathleen. I should have said something a lot sooner, but I just didn’t know what to say. I’m so, so sorry.”

I tried to speak but found I could not. I looked away, extricated my hand, and fled.