Blood Beneath My Feet: The Journey of a Southern Death Investigator Read online

  In order for her to produce her perfect poultry, she used lard. As our coronary arteries crackled with anticipation, we sat around her huge kitchen table and smacked our lips impatiently. And the liquefied fat sizzled and popped, working on our succulent bird. Finally, after the blessing was said, we could enjoy the perfection.

  When I came to Atlanta as a medicolegal death investigator, I thought of the city in terms of my grandmother’s iron skillet, only Atlanta’s products were much less palatable. The city frequently felt to me like one big concrete-and-asphalt frying pan. In the punishing summers, a person can only attempt to endure the heat. There is nowhere to go for relief.

  As would happen many times over the course of an Atlanta summer, one time I was called to a death scene in an Atlanta Housing Authority high-rise. What many people don’t realize is that Atlanta was the first city in the nation to have federally subsidized housing for low-income residents. The area once known as Techwood Homes was the nation’s first; its original residents moved in right after World War II. It was also famous for being the hunting ground of the Atlanta Child Killer during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Techwood is a distant memory now; it was torn down to make way for the 1996 Summer Olympic Village and because it was a blight in the eyes of city officials who didn’t want to advertise Atlanta’s poor to the world.

  The legacy left behind by the homes was one of terror. The hulking low-and high-rise structures housed Atlanta’s indigent, infirm, and insane, much like warehouses for the soon-to-be dead. The homes weren’t considered a hand up for the impoverished living there as much as a governmental boot in the ass that pressed those inhabitants closer to their graves.

  I have an affinity for graveyards, though that is actually an understatement. For hours I have wandered the tombs in New Orleans and other Southern cities, taking in the beauty of gravestone prose and the quiet solemnity of various statuary. Government housing in Atlanta is a tomb as well, but absent any mournful platitudes chiseled by the living, touting lives well-lived or family members missed.

  On this particular occasion, in the summer of 1993, I walked into one of the supposedly air-conditioned Techwood dwellings to find the bloated corpse of a somewhat young man lying on the cold tile floor next to a pile of blankets and a pillow without a case. He wore once-white jockey shorts now stained with decompositional fluid, and he was surrounded by all manner of pornographic magazines. (Does this sound familiar?) Actually, one magazine stood out in the pile. On the cover was an airbrushed platinum-blonde strumpet with pouty lips and bedroom eyes, and sticking out of the pages of the magazine was a folded piece of notebook paper. In childlike script, this man had composed a letter to the woman featured inside that month’s issue. On the final page of her photo spread, for thirty dollars plus postage and handling, she promised to send the reader a pair of her used panties.

  Mary Elizabeth Scott Killian with her ever-present Bible in hand. Her mother was excommunicated from the Catholic church after she married a Methodist minister. Mary hated drinking and card-playing yet she married a man who liberally engaged in both. My grandmother Pearl peeks around the backdrop at age two. Circa 1915.

  The uniformed officer accompanying me that day actually giggled as I read the man’s request out loud:

  Dear Sam,

  Please send me a pair of your panties. I have been diagnosed with a sick mind and a girl won’t touch me. It be good if I could touch your pretty underwear cause I ain’t never touched a girl before.

  The hopelessness of his world and the abiding loneliness in those words overwhelmed me. In my opinion, this small boon he pled for was not the cry of a pervert, but the request of a human to receive something no government program or housing authority could provide—the touch of satin against his unwanted hands, something of beauty to caress his skin, while waiting out his life in the cinder-block reality of the projects.

  Later that summer I was called to one of these same locations again. The structure was mammoth, and it housed the elderly and the mentally challenged. Commonly, when I would get out of my car outside one of these structures, I could smell the humanity that dwelt within. The smell is a combination of cheap disinfectants and unwashed old people. Usually there was no functioning air-conditioning system in these units, so the combination of heat and stagnant air, coupled with any other strong aromas, made it almost intolerable to the uninitiated. Every day throughout summer the mixture of smells sizzled in the vast cast-iron skillet that is Atlanta.

  I’ve always been fascinated by what humans will tolerate and eventually accept. Never was this brought into tighter focus than that day in 1993. As I entered through the lobby of this building, my eyes were drawn upward some twenty or thirty stories. Each floor had its own balcony-like landing that completely circled the inside of the building. As I looked up, I looked directly into the eyes of countless blank faces staring down at me.

  I met a young Atlanta police officer, who had been patiently waiting for me to arrive, and we rode the elevator up together. I found out why he had been waiting in the lobby.

  “It’s a decomp. A bad one.”

  When we got off the elevator I noticed that, unlike on the other floors, everyone’s doors here were closed and the walkway was empty. The only exception was an immensely large black woman in a housedress with her hair in pink foam-rubber curlers. She was steadily popping gum without ever blowing a bubble. I put on the most pleasant face I could conjure under the circumstances and introduced myself. But before I said anything more, the police officer explained, “She found him.”

  She was very anxious to tell me her side of the story, but I advised her to hold what she had to say until I’d had a chance to examine the decedent. It was impossible not to smell him. When I had first stepped out of the elevator, his location was evident.

  Perhaps I should stop here a moment and provide a modicum of advice regarding the examination of decomp remains. Don’t place anything under or in your nose prior to the exam (e.g. the Silence of the Lambs scene at the funeral home). What a bunch of BS. The problem is that while you are hovering over some juicy maggot-infested corpse, not only will you have to smell decomp but now that odor is laced with Vicks. The mix is as repugnant as the scene may be. In truth, senses adjust over time and you just get used to the smell.

  I immediately saw him when I entered his apartment. He was lying with his right arm thrown grotesquely behind his back, wearing his Jockey shorts, now stained with his green and brown decomp fluid. The entire body was covered with large decompositional blisters referred to as blebs. These are filled with the foulest substance known to man, decomp fluid, so if this stuff ever gets on your clothes, just throw them out or get a new wife because one or the other will have to go.

  Both the body and the room were filled with blowflies, and maggot husks were strewn about the floor, indicating that the decedent had been dead for some time. The apartment was neat and would have been quite inhabitable were it not for the festering corpse on the living room floor. There were no signs of trauma or forced entry. However, the one thing I couldn’t get past was the fact that this man smelled so foul, even by my timeworn standards, and though we found out he’d been mentally ill and had lived a very cloistered existence, no one had noticed for weeks. Even though people lived below, above, and on either side of him. Not to mention there was constant traffic in the outside hall throughout any given day.

  I exited the apartment. The woman who’d been waiting for me was anxious to let me know that the decedent had had a problem “boo booing on heself.”

  So I rolled the dice, prepared for an entertaining story, and asked her the ultimate investigative question: “What do you mean?”

  “Dat bouy alway boo booed on heself. An I tol hem that if he boo booed on heself, I ain’t gonna help him no mo.”

  Why had she taken it upon herself to take care of this man? This is when I was given insight into a certain segment of the African American culture in Atlanta. She informed me that she was
his “play mama.” Don’t get any wild ideas. I found out that “play” relatives come in any and all varieties—play cousins, play brothers, play sisters, play daddies, and the ever-popular play grandmama. Come to think of it, I never encountered a play granddaddy, but I did have a drunk, homeless guy under an overpass once tell me that the dead guy next to him was his “play-play.” For reasons of good taste and my personal sanity I didn’t pursue the woman for an explanation at the time, but later I discovered more about it.

  There is bound to be a sociologist somewhere who could describe it more professionally, but I’ll give you my take on it: I don’t have a real one (of whatever denomination of relative—pick one) so I’ll find the biggest sucker I can and mooch off and exploit their goodwill. Taking on this endearment resulted in a fierce loyalty when it came to trying times, such as at a homicide scene. One man admitted to me, after having been identified by witnesses as the play brother of a pedestrian struck by a vehicle, “Man, I didn’t even know his dead ass, and I sure as hell ain’t his play brother!”

  I pressed the woman. “Ma’am, if you were his play mama, why had you not told anybody that he was not coming to the door for the past week?”

  “I told dat bouy that if his stinky ass kept boo booing on heself, I wunt gonna take care of hem.” She explained that every day she walked past his door, she “smelled the boo boo.” She would knock on the door without response, then announce to him through the door that he should “clean that boo boo up.” After a week had passed someone else, whose olfactory senses were a bit more discriminating, had alerted the super who had then contacted the play mama, and both had entered the apartment.

  As we were leaving, I heard the play mama tell the super, “I hope you don’t think I am gonna clean up this bouy’s mess in dare. I tol him not to boo boo on heself.” Ah, the endless demands of motherhood.

  THE TRAILER PARK

  SWIMMING HOLE

  TO BE LEFT BEHIND is an experience everyone hopes to avoid in life. Children get distracted and may suddenly find themselves separated from their mothers. Teenagers long to be invited by would-be friends across a creaky railroad trestle for beers, but our social acceptance relies on discerning the best group to follow for these rites of passage. The “right” university fraternity for many may be the key to their entire future, or so they believe. Though, when you’re finally accepted and arrive at some highly touted gathering of your peers, you may wish you’d been left out after all.

  Adult relationships carry similar pitfalls. Girlfriends and wives may think the grass is greener over the septic tank. Or children, in a cyclical twist of fate, may choose to abandon their parents. Life is full of ironies and impediments.

  Growing up in the Jesus-saturated South did not make my generation immune to separations and divorces. It did give opportunistic preachers the chance to hammer these already bruised individuals for their sin, even if no true sin had been perpetrated. God’s army is the only army in the world that shoots its own wounded.

  Some claim the trouble began when everybody’s mama went out and got a job. Horseshit. This I do know: my daddy abandoned me twice in my life, both times leaving me and mama in a house trailer, broken and without means.

  Unlike the sturdy brick structures my grandfather built when he was a stonemason (before he started distributing electricity), trailers are a symbol of modern American culture—cheap and throwaway. These thin, choice tornado targets are crammed into every hollow and open pasture across the American countryside, where once stood hand-hewn homesteads with inviting front porches. Where musty root cellars once contained rows of canning jars filled with preserved foods to get a family through the winter or your grandfather’s not-so-secret stash of Who-Hit-John, now stand rows of jacked-up wheels on cinderblocks—wheels that take a family nowhere.

  The first time Daddy left, when the sheriff hauled him off for threatening to kill the whole family, he sat in jail for a time before being sent to Vietnam by the judge. My mother and I were left behind in a gold-painted single-wide we had parked on the property of my grandparents. Fortunately, my grandparents saw to it that we were taken of. Mama worked as a keypunch operator at a local cotton mill while Daddy fought in the Marine Corps, and Granny Pearl took care of me.

  Late at night, as the tree frogs croaked, I would regularly slip out the door of our trailer at the urging of my mother and sneak next door into my grandparents’ house. Their door was never locked. In my pajamas I would edge open their icebox and make off with one of their gallons of milk. But once I’d tiptoed back outside with my prize, my papaw would inevitably scare the life out of me by saying from the darkness beneath their chinaberry tree, illuminated only by his hand-rolled cigarette, “Hey boy! Where you going with my milk?” I’d sprint away in the darkness, chased by my grandfather’s toothless laughter, until I found our trailer door. Those were the sweetest of days.

  The next time Daddy left us, the memories were not nearly as fond. He had moved us 400 miles away from the safe care of my grandparents. Living near Atlanta now, we had only the red Georgia clay and the leering glares of our trailer-park landlord. This old man would come by our home often, always wearing a brown felt hat with a silk band and smelling of the White Owl cigars he chomped. Our single-wide had torn linoleum floors, stained walls, and no loving grandmothers to turn to.

  I spent my time then with Freddie, another cast-off child who lived across from us on Highway 92. His place was a tar-paper shack with torn and rotting furniture parked on its front porch. His perpetually drunk Mama and Daddy beat him regularly. Remembering now his chronically unbrushed yellow teeth and his greasy hair, I think he probably had rickets.

  He was my only friend back then and we needed each other equally. We played together with our G.I. Joes or pretended to be Evel Knievel, jumping off wooden ramps we’d constructed from a scrap heap. Freddie would sit with me in our trailer, which I guess was better than the ass-whooping he was bound to be receiving across the road. Unlike at his home, we could at least sit down without fighting German cockroaches for the space. Mama always kept our place clean.

  It was safer indoors for both of us. Fun might await outside but so did shouted scoldings from our landlord, who viewed children as bothersome gnats and me in particular as a roadblock to the favors of my still young and beautiful mother. And, for Freddie, our aluminum-sided vestige was a safe harbor from the hateful words he heard in his own home. I’d like to believe, anyway, that my presence there and our trailer performed a measure of good for at least one dirty, unloved boy.

  To the uneducated, hell-raising, mill-working youth of the South, trailer parks are armadas of success. They are always occupied by males with names ending in Y—Kenny, Tommy, Davy, Sammy, Johnny, Joey, or the most popular by far, Ricky. The females are a bit more diversified: Christy, Carla, Misty, Crystal, Sonya, or Tonya. When this stratum of the South’s population gets together in groups, their conversation consists almost exclusively of such topics as ex-spouses, the decline of rock and roll since the plane crash of Lynyrd Skynyrd, who of them could kick whose ass, and whose truck is the baddest. They use terms such as “my old lady,” “my old man,” “you shittin’ me,” and “go ahead and call the sheriff and I’ll tell that sum bitch he can kiss my ass too.” Take this amalgam of characters, apply a single-wide or double-wide, and you begin to get the picture.

  Now, most Southerners are extremely proud of their heritage, and they are not ashamed to tell you so. Drive down one of our highways and you’ll see it displayed on our bumper stickers: I DON’T CARE HOW YOU DID IT UP NORTH, IT’S HERITAGE NOT HATE, or the timeless G.R.I.T.S. (Girls Raised in the South), or simply FORGET HELL! These people are generally from one of two groups: those who have descended from Southern aristocracy and those who haven’t. Interestingly enough, our ancestors witnessed much the same demographic in the antebellum South. Those who did not descend from aristocracy (which includes one half of my family) went to work either in the fields or in the mills, while th
e other half owned those farms and mills (the other half of my family).

  An outsider can better appreciate the subtle nature of this stratified culture by simply observing how our leisure time is usually spent. Some will be interested in the minutes from last month’s meeting of the Daughters of the American Revolution, while the rest take their pleasure in setting the limits on how many squirrels a person is allowed to shoot at any one time. Oddly, the two seemingly exclusive groups greatly depend upon each other’s existence.

  A great example of this symbiosis is lived out in mill towns. Though Northern capital has purchased a number of the textile or paper establishments over the years, some Southern owner families remain, along with those who scratch out a living working for them. And many of those inhabit prefabricated trailer-home bliss.

  Having spent a good part of my childhood in a trailer (in the South they are not referred to as mobile homes), I speak with some authority about these vestiges of fake-pine paneling and pseudo-stucco ceilings. These structures embody a sense of vulnerability. When the spring storms arrived each year, I would always imagine my mother and I catapulted into the stratosphere by a twister. Nothing would be left behind but a pre-poured set of concrete steps, a few short stacks of cinder blocks, and my Hot Wheels racetrack, which I’d kept beneath our home. We were never catapulted to a new sphere, in fact, though we eventually landed among the Southern elite and their mill money.

  Over the course of my investigative career I have paid many visits to trailers, searching for forensic truths. My first visit to a trailer park while investigating a death, as opposed to visiting one of my relatives, involved one of the most astounding handgun shootings I had ever heard of, let alone investigated. This trailer park was situated beneath the high-rise bridge of Airline Highway as it egresses westward past the former New Orleans International Airport. The area is dark and perpetually wet due to poor drainage and its geographic orientation in Jefferson Parish, Louisiana. To add to the ambience, there is the perpetual sound of airplane traffic. The smell of JP-5 jet fuel hangs heavily in the air. This is further accented by the relentless rattle and hum of Airline Highway.