Wages of Sin Read Free Page A

Medical Examiner Investigator Bob Davis stared at the body. He spotted what appeared to be a hacksaw blade under the right armpit. The blade was burned but still intact. He left it beneath the armpit to be bagged with the body.
    Davis rolled the mutilated corpse over on its side. What looked to be two large charcoal briquettes, or cow dung that’d cooked in the sun too long, lay beneath it. “They look like they’re the hands,” said Davis. “Dr. Bayardo will have to confirm that.” Dr. Bayardo was the Travis County chief medical examiner.
    Eventually Davis removed the body. Since it was so late in the night, the detectives decided to secure the crime scene and return the following morning. A cover was placed over the fire ring to protect it from scavenging animals and the wind.
    Park Ranger Daniel Chapman, an off-duty supervisor, spent the night at the crime scene. He was assigned to protect it from any campers.
    Contrary to his statement to Michael Brewster, that he could be found at Mudd Cove, Chuck Register and his three-year-old son had already left the park.
    As Mancias drove out of the quiet park, he noticed that the temperature on that January night was a balmy 70 degrees. The sky was partly cloudy to cloudy.
    He stopped at the closest Circle K convenience store. “Has anyone bought any firewood from here lately?”
    The cashier said no and glanced at the firewood propped outside the store, against the windows. The firewood was wrapped in plastic just like the single piece that lay four feet from the dead body. “But someone could have stolen some.”

Two
    Thursday morning, January 12, 1995, Park Ranger Michael Brewster awoke to the sound of wisecracking disc jockeys laughing and joking on the radio about some people who had found a dead, mutilated body on a picnic table.
    Boy, what are the odds, thought Brewster. I found a mutilated body, not on a picnic table, but on the ground. A couple of groggy minutes passed before it dawned on Brewster that the deejays were talking about the body he had found. It was going to be a strange day.
     
     
    At 7:30 A.M ., Detective Mancias, his partner Mark Sawa, Sergeant Gage, and Crime Lab Technician Tracy Hill were already back at Pace Bend staring at the fire ring in the gray light of the morning. Hill photographed the area again and made plaster casts of the tire tracks she’d photographed the night before.
    Detective Jim Davenport, a trained arson investigator, arrived and looked through the firepit. He took a few samples, then Mancias, Sawa, and Hill began to sift through the ash. Using a screen, they filtered out bone fragment after bone fragment.
    With an eye out for vultures, Hill left to take aerial photographs of Pace Bend. The helicopter made low repeated passes over the park. Texas Ranger “Rocky” Wardlow peered out of the chopper’s windows and watched for more bodies. The word “ritualistic” still hadn’t left the investigators’ minds.
     
     
    Just after lunchtime, Hill, Mancias, Davenport, and Dr. Roberto Bayardo gathered at the county morgue. A nearly nude, severed, blackened corpse lay on the table before them, its belly protruding as if it had just eaten too much, too fast.
    Dr. Bayardo noticed a portion of charred brain. The neck was almost completely missing. A portion of the throat kept the skull attached to the thorax.
    The numerous scorch marks indicated that a powerful, fast-burning accelerant, possibly charcoal lighter, had been placed on the victim’s shoulders, back, and head and had been allowed to soak into the T-shirt.
    Davenport believed that the burned logs he had seen at the park must have been soaked in accelerant and placed in the head and chin areas and the armpits. There were deep burn and char patterns on both sides of the body between the waistline and armpits, as if the flames had burned up and outward.
    The maroon underwear the body wore had a white waistband with a label that read “HANES M (32-34).” The underwear