Death Beneath the Moss

Groundbreaking forensic techniques solve a murder in remote British Columbia and shape a career in crime scene investigation.

In 1973, Robert James Gould is murdered and his body burned at his wilderness camp. Five years later, the RCMP bring Mark Skinner — a young forensic anthropologist — into the investigation to search the crime scene.

Death Beneath the Moss describes how Skinner’s use of forensic archaeological techniques to recover and decipher thousands of bone fragments and other evidence helped to reconstruct the killer’s behaviours and ultimately led to an arrest and conviction. Lessons learned from this case shaped subsequent investigations, both in Canada and internationally, including at mass graves in Bosnia, East Timor, and Afghanistan.