Authors: Jefferson Bass
T
he first grave, being excavated by the young African American named Thad, contained the bones of a prepubescent child, probably no more than five feet tall. As I examined the arm and leg bones, I saw that the ends of the bones—the epiphyses, the knobby structures that formed the bearing surfaces at the ankles, knees, hips, wrists, elbows, and shoulders—had not even begun to fuse to the shafts of the bones. That meant that this boy (I now felt it very likely that he was a boy) was nowhere near finished growing when he was killed. There was no skull in the grave, but there was a mandible, one I felt sure would fit the first skull the dog had brought home.
Rodriguez led the excavation of the second grave, which
did
contain a skull. As if to compensate for possessing a skull, this grave was lacking a femur, and I suspected that the missing bone was Jasper’s final find, the one he’d brought home just hours before he and Pettis were shot. Was the femur still in the possession of Pettis’s murderer, kept as a grim souvenir of the killing? Or, more likely, had it been simply tossed off the bridge into the Miccosukee River, along with the GPS tracking collar?
I knelt by the sheet where Rodriguez was laying out the bones. “I’m thinking white male,” he said, handing me the skull. “Am I right?” He was. This one looked to be somewhere between the ages of the first two victims—twelve or thirteen, I guessed, from the sutures in the roof of the mouth and the development of the long bones. I had just picked up the pelvis, whose narrow width confirmed that the bones were indeed male, when Rodriguez gave a low whistle. I glanced down into the grave. “Take a look,” he said. He handed me a thoracic vertebra—it appeared to be the seventh thoracic vertebra, T7, from the middle of the spine—and I noticed two things. First I noticed that the spinous process, the bony fin projecting from the back of the vertebra, had been shattered. Then I saw why: a bullet had blasted through the back of the bone, passed through the spinal canal, and lodged in the body of the vertebra. The boy had been shot in the back. “Must’ve been running away,” said Rodriguez. “Didn’t really have a sporting chance, did he?”
The third grave, being excavated by Raynelle, contained big, robust bones. The ends of the long bones were almost fully fused to the shafts, which meant that his growth spurt was ending. From the size of the bones, I guesstimated his stature to be nearly six feet. The bones weren’t merely big, they were also heavy, dense—possibly African-American, as Negroid skeletons tend to have higher bone density than Caucasoid skeletons. The skull would give a clearer answer to the question of race, but there was no skull in the grave. Not much of one, anyway; the mandible was there, and the molars—whose biting surfaces were bumpy and complex—were also characteristic of a black boy’s.
As Raynelle neared the bottom of the grave, she called me over. “I’ve got no clue,” she said, stretching and sliding the word into two blurry syllables –“cluh-OOO”—as she handed me a piece of bone. It was chunky, small enough to close my fingers around, but big enough to make my hand bulge. Roughly conical in shape, it was smooth over most of its surface, but the narrow end of the cone was splintered. “What is it?”
”It’s a mastoid process,” I told her, holding the fragment behind my left ear, “and I’d bet your next paycheck that it came from the African-American skull that’s sitting in the evidence room at FDLE right now.”
“Wait,” she said. “You’re betting
my
next paycheck?” She laughed. “Not much of a gambler, are you?”
“Not much,” I agreed. “But actually, I might even be willing to bet my own paycheck about this.” As a matter fact, I might even have been willing to bet my life. The splintered edges of this mastoid process, I knew, would fit the splintered edges of that skull’s temporal bone as neatly as the thousandth piece of a jigsaw puzzle fits the first 999 pieces.
What I
didn’t
know was what the puzzle,
this
puzzle, was about. I wasn’t seeing the picture. Was the whole thing turned upside down—were we seeing only the blank cardboard backing, rather than the pattern that was the point of it? Or was there no particular pattern to the deaths, no discernible meaning to the violence? Maybe there was nothing but the emptiness of gaping eye sockets and the blankness of unbroken clay subsoil.
Except that the clay subsoil here was not unbroken, I reminded myself. The steel blade of the open-bowl scraper was doing its job. With near-surgical precision, it was cutting through decades of darkness and oblivion, bringing the boys of the Bone Yard into the light of day.
Over the course of the day, the scraper cut four swaths, each a hundred feet long, beneath the canopy of live oaks. At the center of the cuts was the cluster of three graves the dog had found for us. Around that cluster of graves, the cuts curved and parted, two and two, like a river parting around an island, like the grain of an oak plank making room for a knot; the lines diverged fluidly and gracefully, then merged again. And as the cuts flowed past the island of graves, more graves surfaced, all within a stone’s throw of one another.
Four additional graves in all; four silent war whoops. Like the Indians of the Great Plains, I was counting coup.
W
e did not finish our work at the site by sundown; not by a long shot. In fact, by uncovering the four additional graves with the scraper, we added immeasurably to our work.
When the scraper had revealed the first of the additional graves, I’d hoped that would be enough to override the sundown deadline issued by Sheriff Judson. The sheriff had expressed his hostility by remaining off-site all day, though I had no doubt that he was kept thoroughly apprised of our progress by the deputy he’d posted at the scene. It seemed inconceivable that Judson could object to an extension of the deadline. Just to make sure, though, Riordan left at midafternoon for a five o’clock press conference with his boss, the state attorney for the Second Judicial Circuit. I didn’t see the press conference in person, but I did see a live video feed of it, on the large flat-screen monitor inside the mobile command post.
The event was impressive. Actually, it was more than impressive; it was downright astonishing. Standing in a courtroom of the Leon County Courthouse, alongside the state attorney, Chief Deputy State Attorney Clay Riordan, and the FDLE commissioner, was none other than Darryl Judson, the Lord High Sheriff of Miccosukee County. When the state attorney praised the multijurisdictional investigation currently under way in Miccosukee, Bremerton, and Apalachee counties, Sheriff Judson smiled tightly and nodded modestly. I heard a snort from beside me. “Unbelievable,” Angie said, and I had to agree.
The investigation—the very embodiment of interagency cooperation, according to the state attorney—had found eleven marked graves on the grounds of a former reform school in Apalachee County, and had found seven unmarked graves nearby in Miccosukee County. The state attorney introduced Riordan—whose attention to the case demonstrated the state’s unwavering commitment to the investigation—and Riordan spoke briefly. The eleven marked graves, he explained, appeared to be a small cemetery associated with the former North Florida Boys’ Reformatory. Familiar images flashed onto the screen: archival photos of the reform school, followed by photos Angie had taken yesterday of the crosses. “A preliminary investigation indicates that the marked graves contain the remains of individuals who died from illnesses or accidents at the school,” Riordan said, “including the tragic fire that occurred in 1967. But the seven unmarked graves,” he added—and here the video feed cut to photos taken at the scene no more than an hour or two before—“appear to contain homicide victims.” An intensive investigation of the graves by FDLE and local authorities was now under way, he said, as was yesterday’s slaying of Winston Pettis, a vigilant citizen who had alerted authorities to the existence of the clandestine graves.
Riordan concluded by praising the dedication and exemplary leadership of Sheriff Judson—at this, Angie feigned a retching noise, and several of her colleagues laughed and hooted—and expressing his confidence that the truth
would
be brought to light.
W
hen we’d found the crosses, Vickery had predicted a shit storm. As it turned out, he’d correctly foreseen the form of precipitation . . . but he’d grossly underestimated the magnitude of the tempest. Then again, he’d made his forecast before we found the unmarked graves. The combination of the two finds—the photogenic, enigmatic crosses and the sinister, clandestine burial ground—created the perfect storm. An hour after the press conference, a small squadron of news helicopters appeared above the treetops—three from the direction of Tallahassee, plus two more from the west, perhaps Panama City or Pensacola. They hovered a few hundred feet off the ground, wheeling and jockeying for position, stirring up dust, anxiety, and anger on the ground. The pushiest of the pilots appeared to be lining up for a landing at one end of the site, until a young agent sprinted from the command post to wave him off. In short order the pilots apparently brokered an agreement among themselves, for the aircraft began taking turns circling the site. Eventually they backed off, either because they’d gotten enough footage for their newscasts or because the sun was going down or because someone at FDLE got on the radio and threatened the pilots with arrest.
By the time the air force departed, though, infantry reinforcements arrived: reporters from all three of Tallahassee’s broadcast television affiliates, plus the local Fox station, plus a reporter and a photographer from the
Democrat
, the Tallahassee daily newspaper. They lined the crime-scene tape at the entrance to the site, their camera lenses straining for a closer look. After shooting everything they could shoot from that vantage point, the cameramen and their accompanying reporters circumnavigated the site to take shots from other angles. Fortunately, after the press conference, Angie had had the foresight to send the recently arrived assistants to tape off the site’s entire perimeter, a task that consumed most of a thousand-foot roll of crime-scene tape.
Vickery called FDLE headquarters for guidance on handling the media; headquarters instructed him to be polite, to keep everyone outside the tape, and to refer all questions to the Public Information Office.
As I worked—inspecting the scraper’s final pass through undisturbed soil; conferring with Dr. Bradford, who served as medical examiner for Miccosukee County as well as Apalachee County; identifying small bones of wrists and ankles—I felt telephoto lenses tracking my movements, zooming in on me, invading the privacy of the graveyard. At one point I looked up and saw the
Democrat
photographer being escorted firmly back to the other side of the tape. But eventually the contingent of cameramen and reporters drifted away by ones and twos.
A
s the sun dropped below the tree line and the work lights switched on, the command-post siren whooped again, summoning us all to an end-of-the-day briefing.
“Okay, first,” said Vickery, “Winston Pettis. Autopsy report’s in; so is the report from Firearms. He was shot with a .45, fired from two, three feet away. The bullet pierced the heart, then hit the spine and mushroomed. Even if we had the weapon, which we don’t, Firearms says the bullet’s so deformed it’d be tough to match.”
I raised my hand.
“Doc?”
“What about the dog?”
“What about him?”
“Could the bullet that killed the dog be matched?”
Vickery spread his arms wide in a gesture that took in the group of forensic techs and agents. “See, guys, I
told
you that people from Tennessee aren’t all dumb.” He got a good laugh from that. “We’re still waiting on the veterinarian’s necropsy. The bullet from the dog won’t carry as much weight as the bullet from Pettis, but sure, if we can match it to a weapon, it’s good evidence. The tire impressions at the scene are from a set of twenty-two-inch BFGoodrich off-road tires. They might be on an SUV, might be on a pickup. The tires have been rode hard and put away wet, so the vehicle probably has, too. And yeah, that description fits about ninety percent of the trucks in L.A.” He must have seen the puzzled look on my face, because he added, “You just
thought
you were in north Florida here, Doc. You’re actually in L.A. Lower Alabama.” He smiled, then got brisk and businesslike again. “The GPS collar. Not sure it’ll tell us anything, but the dive team is searching the river where we think it got chucked off the bridge. Murky water, bad current, mucky bottom; tough place to search for something small and black. Oh well. If it were easy, they wouldn’t be paying us the big bucks, would they?” More laughs, these with a slight edge to them. “Okay, next: crime scene. Angie, what’s the bottom line on the overall site here?”
“The MapStar’s working like a champ,” she said, handing out copies of a map that showed the main landmarks of the site—the trees, the boundary, and the seven graves. “The laser was definitely the way to go. As you can see, we’ve got a good baseline map. This printout isn’t zoomed in enough to show all the details, but we’re also starting to map the location of bones within the graves, and we’ll keep adding to the map—bones, artifacts, whatever we find—as we continue to excavate.”
“How about we limit vehicle access tomorrow,” Vickery suggested, “put a checkpoint out at the highway turnoff, so we don’t have so many damn cameras and reporters crawling around here tomorrow?”
She nodded. “Great.”
“Okay, next. Human remains. Doc?”
“First off, FDLE’s got terrific forensic techs,” I began. “I’m hoping to steal ’em all and rope ’em into my graduate program.”
“If I spend five years getting a PhD,” cracked Rodriguez, “would I get paid as much as you’re making for this gig?” There was general laughter at this; it must have been common knowledge that I was working for the heck of it.
“Maybe twice that much,” I joked. “So far we’ve got two adolescent males and one preadolescent—the first skull the dog dug up—that’s probably male as well. There’s skeletal trauma in all three. We’ll start excavating the other four graves tomorrow. Be interesting to see what we find once we’ve got all the remains out and processed.”