The Body Farm Where The Dead Do Tell Tales By William Bass

The Zoo Man Murders is a case that shows that in the court of law there are ways to go around the law. That is why forensic anthropologies and scientist are very important to the law system, because sometimes they are the only ones with the power to show what really happened. This case was narrated and explained in great detail in the book “Death's Acre: Inside the Legendary Forensic Lab the Body Farm Where the Dead Do Tell Tales” by William Bass. In February 27 of 1992 a prostitute reported a “John” who hired her and drove her to Cahaba Lane, in her report she said that this man rob, rape and beat her and left her tied up in the woods. That same day detective Tom Pressley decided to investigate a little more and drove the woman to Cahaba

They used a formula developed back in the 1950’s. They measured the length of the left femur, 44.4 centimeters they plugged into the formula and he stature calculation were that she was 5’3 inches tall. After the stature the next step was to conclude a manner of death. The body showed no sign of trauma. The answer lied in the Hyoid bone, the one bone that can reveal if someone has been strangled or not. Her hyoid bone was in three pieces, but that doesn’t mean it was broken. For some people the Hyoid bone never fully ossifies and instead is joined by cartilage. With this into consideration her Hyoid bone was either broken off or just a simple victim of decomposition. The forensic team used a scanning electron microscope. The results showed tiny linear fractures in the bone which indicated that she was indeed strangled to

The first technique was to graph the correlation between the body’s advanced state of decomposition, and the pattern of daytime and nighttime temperatures. This technique let to the conclusion that she was killed from October 6 to 16. The second technique was to get soil samples, one from beneath the victim’s body and the other from an uncontaminated control sample. The results narrow the window to October 12 to 15. The last technique used was relatively new and involved using a freshly killed pig and using this pig as a “body double.” The result of this technique indicated that the victim was killed between October 9 and 13. Using three different techniques they obtained very similar data. The last piece to solve this puzzle was to identify the victim. They got a fingerprint from the victim but there was not a match in the database. They move on into the missing people report in which they found a woman name, Darlene Smith who matched all of their forensic evidence. They went into her house and got a fingerprint from a document that she had sign before disappearing and the fingerprint were indeed a match to the