There are, of course, more stories behind those stories. Readers who are interested in the factual history of the Body Farm might enjoy our first book, the nonfiction memoir Death’s Acre. That book also contains a chapter on the “Zoo Man” case, a series of murders that electrified and terrified Knoxville in the early 1990s. Our fictional story here borrows freely from the factual case, in which Knoxville prostitutes were taken into the woods off Cahaba Lane and then murdered. We feel entitled to borrow, as both Dr. Bill Bass and KPD fingerprint expert Art Bohanan played key roles in the prosecution of Thomas “Zoo Man” Huskey for the Cahaba Lane murders.
We’ve endeavored to be accurate in our depiction of KPD’s SWAT team, which was relatively new at the time of our story. We have, however, taken one large liberty in our depiction of KPD’s bomb squad, which did not yet have a bomb-sniffing dog in 1992.
The book’s central premises were true then, and, sadly, remain true now: Women — especially young, poor women driven by desperation to prostitution — are among the most vulnerable members of our society; they’re often preyed upon, largely scorned, and easily overlooked if they go missing. And sadistic sexual predators — embodiments of cunning and evil, created by a tangled, terrible confluence of nature and “nurture”—still coil unseen among and around us. As ever, there are serpents in the garden in which we dwell. Even so, it is a lush and lovely garden.