Dr. Bass often went with us. But even when he wasn't physically present, we knew that the responsibility was ultimately his. As lead investigator, he would review everything we did and his signature would be above ours in every report. If we screwed up, you could bet we'd hear about it-but if we did well, we'd hear about that, too, and that was what kept us going. Once again, I had cause to be grateful for Dr. Bass's demanding standards, because it was this experience that really taught me how to think like a detective, how to use my common sense, instinct, and intuition as well as my book-learning.

Almost every case started with a visit to the crime scene. We never heard about the “fresh” bodies-that was a job for the pathologist. But if they found decomposing remains, unassociated body parts, or bones, they'd call in the anthropologists.

We'd rush to the scene-perhaps a farmhouse with two smoking corpses or maybe a back-alley apartment with a cache of bones hidden under the floorboards. We'd check in with the officer in charge, who would already have secured the scene. Then we'd work with the officers to come up with a plan for gathering and documenting the evidence.

Here is where I learned how crucial is the information gleaned from the scene. Sure, lab analysis was vitally important, but every investigation starts with the crime scene-if only you know how to look.

On one very early case, I, the novice, saw nothing out of the ordinary until fellow student Bill Grant pointed out that the charred body in the car was covered with burned maggots. This was irrefutable evidence that the man, and his car, had been torched well after he had started to decompose.

In another case, the sheriff took me aside and told me that our murder suspect had just confessed to beating the victim to death with a golf club. I realized how close I might have come to disregarding the broken putter we'd just found in our search through a roadside dump for scattered bones.

Yet another time, I was initially led astray when I examined a severely decomposed and partially skeletonized body propped up against a tree with her legs splayed in a provocative pose-a location that could be easily seen from a nearby road. I assumed that the victim had died there-until I found another site, about fifteen feet away, that contained her teeth, a portion of her broken jaw, pieces of her jewelry, and a mat of her scalp hair, which had sloughed off during the early stages of decomposition. Clearly, someone had moved the dead girl and propped her up in a perverse attempt to display her to passersby. I figured this one out after about two hours of careful analysis, but next time I'd know not to make any quick assumptions about where and how someone had died until I had thoroughly investigated the entire crime scene.

Once we'd learned everything we could from the scene, we'd take the evidence back with us to the university lab, covering every piece of evidence with the paper trail known in law enforcement circles as the “chain of custody.” Whenever any piece of evidence changed hands, someone had to sign and date a piece of paper indicating who was taking it and where it was going.

Back at the lab, we'd begin the second phase of the analysis. Our job was most often to help the police identify victims, offering basic information that would enable police to request someone's medical records or talk to a family in search of a positive ID. Police also asked us to help determine time of death-pathologists could do that from intact soft tissue remaining on whole fresh corpses, but we anthropologists were becoming specialists in analyzing decaying flesh, charred tissue, and bone.

We were fortunate to have the decay facility as a reference resource. For example, say we had a case where skeletal remains were found still encased in a flannel shirt and denim jeans. We could turn to documentation from studies of corpses dressed in similar garments, learning how long it had taken for the clothes to rot away to the point where they matched the victim's. If we had a decomposing body, we could turn to Bass's notes on research projects documenting the rate and pattern of postmortem tooth loss; of maggot infestation; and of soft-tissue decomposition, liquefaction, and eventual disappearance.

Every day we were finding answers to new questions, and each answer led to still more questions: How long does it take for the plants surrounding a corpse to discolor, die, and then return with vigor? Do the bloodier corpses affect plants differently than the ones that are relatively intact? How long does it take for a person's hair to fall out-and under what kind of circumstances will it fall out faster? What if an animal uses this hair in its nest-how far away should you look for that and how do you recognize it? Does the hair change color after death? What if it's gotten contaminated with rotting flesh and animal feces-how can you tell and what should you look for? We learned to ask these and a thousand other questions-and, slowly but surely, we learned to answer them, answers that I put to good use working the rest of the cases in this book.

What brought it all together for me was what I like to think of as the “Friends and Family Case of 1993.” It all began when the Grainger County rescue squad pulled Richard Carpenter's relatively fresh body out of a cistern. No, amend that: They pulled out most of his body, but his head and his penis were missing. Tennessee State Medical Examiner Dr. Cleland Blake called our team from the backyard of a farmhouse in Bean Station, up in the northeast corner of Tennessee. The victim's head and penis were probably still in the cistern, he told us. But no one could say for sure.

The detectives were already putting a case together against Donald Ferguson, whose arrest warrant alleged that he had “slipped up behind” his longtime friend Richard and “hit him in the head with a hammer.” Donald then reportedly cut off Richard's head and penis with the electric carving knife that hung by the kitchen door in the tiny frame house that Donald shared with his mother. As reported in the Knoxville News-Sentinel, Donald's mother, Nannie, had heard a “thump” in the night. The next day she saw Richard's body in the backyard and his head in a plastic bag.

Nannie, who had suffered repeated psychological and physical abuse from her son, was severely beaten by him once more. Instead of cowering in submission as she had done so many times, she fled directly to the Grainger County Sheriff's Department and filed a complaint. “I've got bruises all over my body… and I've been wanting to talk about this,” she said. She also told authorities that Donald had put the body in the cistern.

County D.A. Al Schmutzer thought the murder had occurred on Thursday night, August 19. On Friday morning, when Grainger County deputies arrived at his house, Donald was, as always, out front with a broom, tidying things up. Richard Carpenter's truck was still in the driveway and his mixed-breed dog was still standing guard over it. The bewildered dog wandered off that afternoon, never to be seen again.

Later that day, volunteer members of the local fire and rescue squad pulled the body from the cistern, and Dr. Blake called us. He'd seen the cut marks on the victim's neck bones, and he expected to find matching cut marks on the vertebrae still attached to the head. He wanted anthropologists to document that these marks did indeed match and then to help him further match the cut marks to a specific knife or saw.

Just as my classmates Tom Bodkin, Lee Meadows-Jantz, and I pulled up in our big white truck, volunteers were lifting the plastic bag containing the victim's head out of the water with a grappling hook, while the deputies watched from the farmhouse's back door, smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee. We joined them, expecting to be steered toward the newly discovered head. But after we all exchanged the pleasantries that are a cultural requirement in the South, the deputies escorted us into the suspect's bedroom.