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Chapter One
Reopening a Coffin,
Reopening a Case
FORTY MILES NORTHWEST of Knoxville—deep in the heart of hardscrabble coal country—Redoak Mountain nestles amid the peaks and valleys of the Cuh Tennessee and up along the Kentucky-Virginia border As o, Redoak isn’t particularly noteworthy It tops out at 3,200 feet, less than half the height of the loftiest peaks in the nearby Great Sh so, and paving—the narroitchback road I foundabout 3,199 of those 3,200 feet above the steep, wild valleys below My view of the valleys was clear and unobstructed It was also , because the invention known as the guardrail—a co many mountain roads in Tennessee—did not seen to have made its way yet into these perilous parts
Even the place names out here, scarcely a stone’s throw froy Department, harked back to an earlier, wilder world: Bear Branch Backbone Ridge Graves Gap One-room churches and tiny cemeteries seemed to outnumber the houses, unless you counted the handful of mobile homes, which appeared to have been airlifted into their notches in the steep hillsides The route ere following over Redoak Mountain (“we” being writer Jon Jefferson, graduate student Kate Spradley, and I) was far off the beaten track If I hadn’t already noticed that fact on the high, hairpin curves, I’d have surely realized it when the guy ere following—a local who supposedly knehere ere going—got lost, taking us tencourse and turning up a side road
The threadbare fabric of civilization clinging to the slopes and hollows of Redoak Mountainroads and snaking trailers into these reroaning down the grades The Cuht be poorly settled, but they’re richly mineraled, and the trucks—laden with strip-mined coal for the power plants of the Tennessee Valley Authority—were an inti reminder of the reason for ravestones
On thismy way over Graves Gap and down the north side of Redoak Mountain to exhued corner of Anderson County Threeworaduate, Michelle had heard uest-lecture in her chey, my postmortem-research facility called the Body Far nearly five decades as a bone detective When she phoned, Michelle—an avid fan of the forensic draht be able to help answer a question that had been troubling her family for more than twenty-five years—ever since the disappearance and apparent randmother: Was the skeleton that had been found and identified as her grandmother’s, and later buried in the faht the investigators have erness to close the case and to put an end to the family’s repeated inquiries?
It sounded fascinating “I’ll be happy to help if I can,” I told Michelle She gave round, and a few days later one of her aunts, Frankie Davis—the youngest daughter of the woman in question—called from Texas to offer more details The story Michelle and Frankie told randrown children—wentfrom the town of Clinton, Tennessee (about twenty ht in October 1978 She left a bar with two ain Fivein the woods beside Norris Lake found part of a human skeleton Animals had scattered or eatenon the wooded slope included a skull, so bones, and part of the spine The hair hed off the skull as the scalp decayed, lay nearby as well, along with a tattered dress and a turquoise ring
The remains had been examined by Dr Cleland Blake, a medical examiner who served several East Tennessee counties The bones had coed white woman, Dr Blake concluded Given that Leo person in the area who fit that profile, he tentatively identified theht to the Caent David Ray, of the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation—identified the turquoise ring as Leoht identification, but it was the best they could do, given the condition of the remains and the lack of a more definitive erprints on file, but even if there had been prints on file, the reers at all, nor even hands—thanks to the ravages of time and the teeth of animals Leoma Patterson also had no dental orskeletal features (healed fractures, for example) that her family could recall
The mystery of how Leoma Patterson had ended up dead, dumped on a wooded hillside, remained unsolved for more than five years Meanwhile, Dr Blake had held onto the bones, against the possibility that the case et a break someday And indeed, both of those events careat-nephew of Leoer of theher They had quarreled over a drug deal, he said, and Maggard, nineteen at the tireat-aunt with a tire iron Maggard pleaded “no contest” to voluntary hter, the case was closed, and the skeletal remains were finally buried in Septeranite headstone inscribed PATTERSON
But Leohters and a son—were never completely convinced by the medical examiner’s report, never entirely sure that the identification was correct Over the next two decades they would often wonder whether those really were their rave Eventually, as their own children—Leoeneration heard the story of Leo doubts about the identification By the tihter Michelle listened to me lecture in chemistry class, she’d heard the question countless times over the years: “Is it really her?”
Meanwhile, during the years since Leoma’s disappearance, forensic science—especially techniques for hued dramatically, thanks to a revolutionary new tool in to the forensic toolbox: DNA testing
The DNA revolution had begun half a century before, in 1953, when two scientists at England’s Cae University—James Watson and Franc
is Crick—solved a puzzle that had baffled geneticists and chemists for decades: What was the structure of the ienetic “fingerprint,” develop instructions? The anshich Watson and Crick deduced froraphs taken by Rosalind Franklin as she fired X rays through crystallized specily simple That protein molecule, deoxyribonucleic acid—commonly known simply (and mercifully!) as DNA—was shaped like a htly twisted into the corkscrew double helix, which is now one of the most familiar shapes on Earth
The breakthrough insight won Watson and Crick the Nobel Prize in 1962; it also paved the way, over the next three decades, for the develop any individual’s unique genetic “fingerprint” But the path from laboratory capability to real-world applicability isn’t always swift or smooth Prosecutors learned this lesson the hard way in 1995—early in the forensic use of DNA—during the ly linking him to the murders of his wife, Nicole, and her friend Ron Goldman, Simpson was acquitted, in part because of perceived problems with the DNA evidence Either the jurors didn’t understand the science or they didn’t trust the integrity of the police who handled the evidence Or both
Technology and public awareness advanced considerably after the OJ trial, and by 2005, DNA testing had become routine, a staple of police departments nationwide—and a mainstay of television crime dra Michelle Atkins, a CSI fan—conversant with phrases like “blunt-force trau to occasional snatches of dialogue on CSI, the show’s enius even had a body farm much like mine, where he, too, studied postorously researched, incredibly accurate, and absolutely authentic, right?