Harry London, a detective retiring from the Knoxville, Tennessee Police Department, frowned when he handed me the file.
"This one's from 1995, though the actual murders happened about ten years before that. I doubt you're going to get anywhere on this case, but it'll give you and Rochelle something to think about. Damnedest case I ever got. Couldn't get any information about the victims so I couldn't tie them together or to anybody else."
Harry grinned then.
"Well, they were tied together, sort of. The way they were buried, the guy was lying on his back and the woman was on top of him with her face on his crotch and her crotch on his face. They'd been buried that way for about ten years or so according to the Coroner at the time. All the techs found were bones. There was no clothing, no jewelry, and nothing wrapping either body.
"I couldn't figure out how they got that way unless they were posed in that position when they were buried. Whoever killed them had to have had a real beef against them because he had to dig a grave a lot longer and deeper than he'd have had to if he'd just stacked them in it like you'd think would be normal.
"Anyway, you can read the file and look at the evidence and you'll see why I hit a brick wall when I did my investigation. Maybe you and Rochelle will see something I didn't."
}|{
If you haven't read my other cold case stories, I'm Richard Owens, a detective for the Knoxville, Tennessee Police Department and mostly I work on solving the backlog of cold cases in the department files. Rochelle is a writer who makes her living writing murder mysteries based on real crimes. We met when my former employer, the Nashville, Tennessee Police Department, agreed to let her tag along on one of my cases.
After I got a job as a detective for the Knoxville Police Department, we started living together, but we've both been divorced so while we love each other, we're not ready to make things permanent, at least not for a while. One divorce hurts pretty bad and we want to be sure this time.
}|{
I took the file home with me and gave it to Rochelle to read while I took a shower and changed clothes. When I came back into the living room, Rochelle was grinning.
"For the killer to pose the bodies like this, he must have had a real bone to pick with the couple, so to speak."
I chuckled.
"That's what Harry thought too. He just couldn't figure out why. Since he never was able to identify either body, he couldn't find any motive for them to have been killed, much less a reason why they ended up being buried like that."
Rochelle grinned again.
"Maybe the killer was jealous. I mean, if a man caught his wife in that position with a different man, it might tend to make him at least a little upset. I wonder if that was the motive? The killer comes home and finds his wife with the guy's dick in her mouth and the guy with his face buried in the wife's crotch. He shoots them both and then buries them in that position out of spite.
"Or...maybe it was the wife who finds her husband like that and decides once was one time too many. She shoots them both and then buries them like that out of spite."
I shook my head.
"Well, there was no evidence that they'd been shot. It's possible, but you'd think a bullet would have at least nicked a bone or two on one of them. The coroner didn't find that on either skeleton.
"I'm thinking the killer was probably a man. According to the coroner's report, the guy would have stood about five-eleven and would have weighed between one-eighty and two hundred. The woman was a little smaller, but not by much because she was pretty tall for a woman. She was about five-nine. I can't see you carrying a man or a woman that big a hundred yards off a dirt road up in the mountains. That's where the grave was found.
"This college kid decided it would be a great idea to start growing marijuana out in the woods. The location was a state park so he couldn't be connected to it if anybody found his garden. If he was found there by somebody else, he could say he was just out walking through the woods and stumbled across the plants.
"He'd found a little clearing that he figured was big enough. When he scraped off the surface trash, he found what he thought was just a dirty white rock. He dug around it a little so he could pull it out of the ground. He figured out after a couple more scoops that his rock was a human skull.
"The kid decided maybe planting marijuana there wasn't such a good idea after all, but not telling anybody what he'd found was probably a worse idea. He drove back home and called the Knoxville PD. He admitted why he'd been digging there, but the officers couldn't find any marijuana plants so they said he wouldn't be charged. After the officers confirmed they had a buried body, then radioed for the coroner and his crime scene team and a detective.
"The crime scene techs began digging up the body, but after they lifted up the skull, they found a pelvis under it. When they finished, they had two skeletons, a female on top and a male under her. There were no clothing remnants or anything else found in the grave so apparently both victims were naked when they were buried. Based upon the state of the bones, the coroner at the time estimated they'd been buried for about ten years and he estimated their ages at early twenties.
"That was in 1995. By then, it was routine to take samples for DNA, so the coroner took samples from both sets of bones and had them sequenced in hopes of someday identifying the victims. Harry sent the DNA sequences to CODIS in 1999, but didn't get a match for either skeleton."
Rochelle flipped through the coroner's reports for a while, and then looked up at me.
"There's no cause of death for either body? All it says is undetermined."
"There's no cause of death because the coroner couldn't find one. Both their hyoid bones were intact, so neither had been strangled and he couldn't find any evidence either one had been shot, stabbed, or beaten. That pretty much left death by poisoning, a drug overdose, or maybe smothering, but since he had only the bones to work with, he couldn't find any evidence of those either. In his notes, the Coroner wrote that it could very well have been death by natural causes except he couldn't imagine that two people would have died of natural causes at the same time. He only ruled it a homicide because of that and because there was no way both people could have buried themselves. Somebody else had to do it."
Rochelle closed up the file then.
"I'll see what I can do tomorrow. Right now, we need to eat dinner. You go light the grill and cook the brats while I get everything else ready."
}|{
We'd finished dinner and Rochelle had finished cleaning up when she said she wanted to try an experiment. When she came out of the bedroom, she was naked.
Now, Rochelle is a woman with a very active imagination. That's what makes her a successful author and also makes her so helpful in solving our cold cases. She can think up fifteen ways a murder might have happened and then spends her time trying to prove which one is correct. I spend my time trying to disprove every one. Between the two of us, we usually arrive at the answer.
