CRIMINAL MIND > FORENSICS & INVESTIGATION

Kevin Neal

700 Years Later

India Smith

Half a world away and 700 years later, a man who had very likely never heard of Sung T'zu or even the more recent concept of forensic entomology drove his vehicle with the bodies of two children he had just murdered into an empty field next to a rural Ohio township cemetery.

Cemetery where victim's bodies were found

As the killer took the naked bodies of 11-year-old India Smith and her 4-year-old half-brother Cody from the car and laid them in the tall grass, he wasn't thinking about how within minutes, dozens of blow flies would be able to pick up the smell of death and follow it to the culvert separating the hayfield from the small Ohio grave yard. Or about how those flies would lay their eggs in the moist parts of the children's bodies, beginning a cycle of infestation that, while not as regular as clockwork, was at least as predictable as the change of seasons.

As he carefully arranged the corpses, he wasn't aware that the hot, dry summer had caused the tall grass to hold its seeds longer than usual, or how the seeds that he would unknowingly carry away with him would link him to this particular site.

Instead, the killer was thinking that eventually these bodies would be found, and when they were, their location and position would send a very clear message: A twisted message of anger and revenge that he wanted to deliver loud and clear.