CRIMINAL COLD CASES-FUGITIVES FINALLY BROUGHT TO JUSTICE-22-JERRY MCLENDON

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04 COOL HEADS
Police rely on many methods to detect crime. As well as DNA profiling – the single most important technological advance in the solving of cold cases (described in the next chapter) – there are other approaches which have yielded useful results. Here, we look at some of them, including the work of Frank Bender, forensic sculptor. Bender's first assignment was to build a bust of murderer John List for the TV programme, America's Most Wanted. List was a mass murderer who had slain his whole family before going into hiding for many years. Through a combination of psychological profiling, sound detective work, and sheer intuition, Bender was able to create a contemporary likeness of him that eventually led to his capture. The 'Body Farm', brainchild of Dr William Bass, is the nickname of the Anthropology Research Facility at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Here, a team of scientists observe the decomposition of human corpses, in particular analysing insect activity. In this way, the team are able to help police determine, from the condition of a murder victim's corpse, exactly when the victim died, as well as other information. We also report on the work of Necrosearch, a dedicated team of specialists, from archeologists to biologists, whose methodical searching for 'clandestine gravesites' has helped police to solve crimes committed many years ago.

JERRY MCLENDON:
A FORENSIC ANGLE WITH 'THE BODY FARM'
COLD CASES INVOLVING HOMICIDE CAN BE SOLVED IN A NUMBER OF SURPRISING WAYS. ONE OF THE MOST UNUSUAL IN THE HISTORY OF POLICE INVESTIGATIONS IS THE CASE OF JERRY MCLENDON. HE WENT MISSING ONE DAY, AND MIGHT NEVER HAVE BEEN DISCOVERED HAD IT NOT BEEN FOR THE TERRIBLE SMELL OF HIS ROTTING BODY.
It all began one afternoon in 1992, when some men who had set out to go hunting in the countryside passed a furniture dump. Coming from it was the most terrible smell, so pungent that the men decided to report the matter to the police. Detective Ronnie Minter from Henry County went to investigate the situation, and found a couch in the pile of furniture, where the smell appeared to be coming from. Underneath the couch he was horrified to find a human head. The rest of the man's body was wrapped in a sheet, and it had begun to rot down. Because of the dreadful state of the body, it was impossible to identify the victim, so a skin sample from the corpse's hand was taken and sent to the laboratory to gain a fingerprint. The sample was actually what is known as the epidermal glove, that is, the top layer of skin that covers the entire hand.

In order to make the fingerprint, the technician had to put the epidermal glove over his own hand, and then press down with his thumb to form a fingerprint. When the fingerprint was fed into the police's Automated Fingerprint Identification System, a match immediately came up. The victim turned out to be a man named Jerry McLendon, a 35-year-old sailor from Virginia Beach, Virginia. The next step was to find out who killed him – and why.
Unique: finger – and hand – print indentification is one of the oldest forms of forensic evidence, and is still as viable as DNA testing

Drugged and suffocated
The badly decomposed body was taken for an autopsy. The pathologist who performed the task of examining it found that the victim had been killed by asphyxiation. There were also high levels of a tranquillizer in the victim's system, which indicated that he had been drugged before being suffocated.

Next, detectives found out where McLendon had lived and visited his apartment, hoping to find more clues as to what had happened. There, they found signs that the victim had fought his attacker, and noticed that in the bedroom there was a pillowcase stained with bodily fluids. They also noticed that the design of the pillowcase was the same as that of the sheet wrapped round the corpse's body.

When they looked through McLendon's accounts, they discovered that there had been withdrawals on it from a cash machine over the last few days, which was well after McLendon had died. They then followed up security cameras at the cashpoints, which showed a man and a woman withdrawing money. The pair were later identified as David Deshazo and his fiancée, Roxanna Latham. Further investigation revealed that the pair had moved to Henry County, and were living only two miles away from where the body was found. (McLendon's apartment was over two hundred miles away from the scene of the crime.)

Dr William Bass (right) stands with field officers at the scene of a crime. His pioneering work at 'the body farm' (the Anthropology Research Facility at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville) has helped immeasurably in the fight against crime

The case goes cold
The circumstances linking Deshazo and Latham to the murder certainly looked suspicious, and detectives did their best to follow up the various leads in the case and find more evidence so that the suspects could be charged, but in the end they were unable to do so. There was nothing more concrete to link the pair to the crime and the case eventually went cold.

However, there still remained hope that somehow, this case could be solved – there was just too much evidence to simply forget about it. Then one of the investigators had the idea of getting in touch with Dr William Bass of the Anthropology Research Facility at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Bass was the pioneer of a method of analysing the decomposition of human bodies so that more could be found out about how they died. In particular, he had developed systems for studying the way insects devour the human body, paying attention to the time scale of their activity so that the exact moment that the victim died could be calculated. This important, useful, but rather gruesome work earned the Research Facility the nickname of 'The Body Farm' when it was described in a book by best-selling novelist, Patricia Cornwell.

Measuring maggots
Dr Bass began his research on the McLendon body by analysing photographs of it, taken when it was first found in the furniture dump. By looking at the way it had decomposed, he was able to estimate that McLendon had died on 27 September 1992 or before. He was certain that McLendon had not been killed after that date. However, this information was not precise enough for the investigators. McLendon had disappeared almost a week before the twenty-seventh, and the police needed to know exactly when.

Accordingly, Dr Bass looked into the case once again, and this time came up with more detailed information. He studied the photographs of the body once more, and measured the size of the maggots that had infested it. He then found weather reports for the month of September 1992 and, through assessing and analysing the size of the maggots in combination with the climate temperature, calculated that the victim had most probably died on 21 September or the following day.

The killers found
While Dr Bass was studying the remains of Jerry McLendon, police detectives had reopened their investigation. This time, they found more to go on. Deshazo and Latham were no longer on good terms, and Latham now gave evidence against her former boyfriend. She said that she had come upon Deshazo killing McLendon in his flat, suffocating him with a pillow in a fit of jealousy, and had then become so afraid of her boyfriend that she did whatever he told her. In this way, she was forced to steal from McLendon's bank account, and to help throw his body on the furniture tip.

Detectives asked Latham to call Deshazo on the phone, and as the conversation progressed, it became clear that Latham had not been telling the whole truth in her interviews with the police. Deshazo mentioned that Latham had drugged McLendon by tipping a bottle of Xanax (a tranquillizer) into a spaghetti sauce that she had then served up to him. This indicated that she was, from the beginning, involved in the plot to murder McLendon, and was not, as she alleged, forced into it by her boyfriend.

Both suspects were subsequently charged with murder. David Deshazo was convicted of murder in the first degree, while Roxanna Latham gained a verdict of murder in the second degree.

'The Body Farm'
The murder of Jerry McLendon might never have been solved had it not been for the expertise of Dr William Bass and his team at the Body Farm. Bass initially worked for the Smithsonian Institute in Washington DC, studying skeletal remains of Native Americans. He began his forensic work when the Kansas Bureau of Investigation asked him to help in a cattle-rustling case, by looking at the bones of a cow to see exactly when it had died. When he was unable to find any case studies, he came up with the idea of killing a cow and studying the decomposition of the body under rigorous scientific conditions. His planned experiment never took place, but when he moved to Knoxville, Tennessee, and began to work with the police there, he thought of the idea again – but this time, with a difference.

He figured that, in a more populated area, dead bodies would be found before they became skeletons. Because of this, in order to assess the time of death, it would be necessary to look at insect infestation of the body, rather than at the bones. The only way to do this scientifically would be to lay bodies out on a plot of land and watch them decompose, making notes and studying the exact times that insects such as flies and beetles began to get to work on them. It sounded like a strange idea, but Bass was convinced his method would work. He eventually gained permission from the authorities to use a plot of land for this purpose, and was also able to take possession of some corpses which had been unclaimed from the morgue. (Today, many people leave their bodies in their will to the Body Farm, to be used for the purposes of aiding law enforcement.)

Odours and insects
Bass set up his 'Body Farm', as it came to be known, with a team of researchers from the university. They found that as a corpse rots, it begins to give off chemicals that flies are able to smell from a long way off, in some cases from several miles away. Then, as more chemicals are emitted, other insects come to the scene. When the flies hatch their eggs, ants eat them; when the maggots are born, beetles do the same. Spiders and moths also infest the body. The maggots that survive their predators then begin to eat the body, a process that lasts for two weeks. When the maggots depart, they leave a trail behind them. Nature's predator timetable provides the clue to how long the corpse has been there.

By studying all this insect activity, in minute detail, Bass and his team found it possible to make far more accurate estimations of a body's time of death than had hitherto been possible. For this reason, his work became extremely useful in helping police investigations, and was used in a number of cases. As well as the Jerry McLendon case, there were others, including that of a Mississippi family whose bodies were found in their house in December 1993. Through the research team's work, detectives were able to place the time of death at a month before the discovery of the victims' bodies and, armed with this knowledge, were able to charge a suspect with the murder. The suspect, a relative, was later convicted of the crime.

Studying insects finally led to the solving of the Jerry McLendon murder, and helped a myriad more other crimes on the police's cold case files.