Free Dead Men Do Tell Tales: The Strange and Fascinating Cases of a Forensic Anthropologist by William R. Maples, Michael Browning Page B

But above the mat all is quite dry, and beneath the fluid, at the very bottom of the tank, there is usually a very compact mass of clay and sand, devoid of oxygen. This dark world has its own peculiar fauna: very often, millions of cockroaches will scuttle and seethe in vast colonies above the mat, sometimes crawling up the drainpipes and back into the house above them.
    The murdered son-in-law had been cast into the tank still clad in his shirt and trousers. There he had floated for years, face down, his hands and feet dangling down into the liquid. As the flesh on his limbs decomposed, the various bones gently fell away from the trunk and descended to the bottom of the tank, where they were embedded in the clay and sand, and in this oxygenless environment they were preserved from further decay. The skull, too, finally fell away as the neck vertebrae came loose and drifted down into the silt at the tank bottom.
    But the rest of the body, which remained trapped in and above the mat for fifteen years, was badly damaged and almost unrecognizable. The cockroaches had nibbled at the upper surfaces, and the bacteria-rich fluid had gnawed away at the lower surfaces. They presented a scene of almost total dissolution.
    But the preserved bones of the hands and feet, together with the skull, had survived and from these the unfortunate young man was finally and unequivocally identified. He had been missing for a decade and a half, and his homicidal father-in-law had been a spry old eighty years of age when he killed the younger man, single-handedly lifted the concrete slab at the entrance to the septic tank, and stuffed the body in. The aged murderer was beyond earthly justice, but the case of his missing son-in-law could finally be closed.
    North Florida is rich in Indian burial mounds, and beautiful flint arrowheads and precious pottery centuries old can be found here in abundance. Unfortunately these ancient treasure troves are tempting targets for scavengers. My colleagues in the anthropology department at the Florida Museum of Natural History have no love for pot hunters, those destroyers of history who dig into archaeological sites in their unsystematic and destructive lust to recover Indian artifacts and historic relics for private collections. But one day in 1980 two pot hunters made a rare discovery indeed, one that aroused my interest: a recently buried body.
    The pot hunters were digging in an area of Dixie County that had been previously combed through by hundreds of other amateur treasure seekers. It looked like a World War I battlefield, cratered and crisscrossed with trenches. This particular pair of pot hunters, not being very imaginative, were digging in a filled-in trench previously excavated by their predecessors—not exactly a promising place to find artifacts! Their search was rewarded anyway. They found a human corpse. Being the alert and astute observers that they were, they quickly realized that a buried Indian would not have a blond ponytail or be buried in a plastic garbage bag.
    The pair hotfooted it back to their pickup truck and held a hasty conference on the tailgate. What should they do? Retrieve the body? Rebury the body? Go to the police? Say nothing? Have a beer? They opted for the beer.
    Soothed and fortified by the foaming brew, they collected their thoughts. Then, suddenly, one pot hunter had a dreadful notion: what if the person who did this were watching them right that minute from the woods? Flinging down their beer cans in panic, they beat a hasty retreat to the sheriff’s office. Better confess to illegal pot hunting than connive at concealing a murder!
    The sheriff’s office called the Florida Department of Law En forcement and the FDLE called me, asking that I cooperate in the excavation of remains. A curious scene ensued. The pot hunters were allowed by the sheriff to watch us while we excavated the mound, and they frequently pointed out bits of Indian chert or flint that I had uncovered.