Up next... A family pays
respects at a cemetery
and gets a rude surprise.
They saw the body,
called the police.
It was a pretty horrifying sight.
A message is written
on the dead man.
It was the fact that
those letters were on his chest
that made it so unusual.
We got confirmation
of that today
from the Clay County coroner.
He said that the word "fed"
was written on the body
in felt-tip marker.
Can a test of
how those letters were written
lead to a suspect?
The forensic anthropologist
who examined his body
was a trained illustrator.
Which made her
uniquely qualified
to solve this mystery.
They call me
the Boondock Bone Doc.
That little corner of Kentucky
is different.
A lot of strange things happen.
Eastern Kentucky
is deep in Appalachia,
and even locals will tell you
that Clay County
is about as deep as it gets.
Clay County had a reputation,
going back to the 19th century,
of blood feuds,
a lot of smuggling.
And, of course,
when Prohibition came,
it was a big part
of running moonshine
and illicit liquor
to urban areas,
including Chicago
and places like that.
The area is heavily forested,
sparsely populated,
and extremely isolated.
There's no main roads
that travel through there,
there's no main industry,
and it's a very poor community.
The place was known
as being the kind of place
where a bad element hangs out.
And a number of people said they
don't go there without a g*n.
Shortly before sundown
on a September evening in 2009,
a family went to visit
long-dead relatives.
When this family arrived,
they saw a man, naked,
with a rope around his neck.
Police arrive just after sunset.
The dead man appeared
to have been there for days.
As they approach the body,
they notice that it is
a highly unusual scene.
His hands
and his feet were bound.
He was naked
except for his socks.
Strangely, his glasses
were taped onto his head.
He wasn't fully hanging
in the air.
He was partially on the ground.
A red rag had been duct-taped
into the dead man's mouth.
One of the police detectives
saw blood coming out of his ear,
and so his thought was
that he had been bludgeoned.
Taped to the side
of the man's head
was an identification badge
from the U.S. Census Bureau.
He had a Census I.D.
that was hanging, basically,
off of his ear,
so they had his name right away.
The victim was identified
as 51-year-old William Sparkman,
a local teaching assistant.
To make some extra money,
he'd been interviewing people
for the federal government's
once-a-decade census report.
Mr. Sparkman was fearful
and concerned about his safety
while he was out performing
U.S. Census work.
And this possibility of danger
might explain
the strangest thing
about this very strange
crime scene.
Written across
his chest in black marker
are three letters, F-E-D...
"fed."
That would be
a typical slang term
for "federal"...
federal employee, federal agent.
Which immediately, obviously,
sent off alarm bells
with everyone.
Was this an actual message
to the world...
"Be careful if you're
a federal employee"?
In 2009, someone being m*rder*d
because he was doing
government business
was hardly a farfetched theory.
Police are not releasing
exactly how Sparkman d*ed
or really what kind of injuries
he had.
At this point, they say
they're not ruling anything out.
America's first Black
president had been in office
for less than a year,
and many weren't happy about it.
g*n sales spiked.
The tea party, highly critical
of the government,
had just formed.
At the same time,
drug overdose deaths in Kentucky
had sh*t up nearly 300%
since 2000.
This brought a lot of FBI agents
to Clay County,
and not everyone was pleased.
A big angle of that story
was whether or not Bill Sparkman
had stumbled into
some kind of criminal ring
or activity
that led to his death.
As I was talking to
the gentleman who lived there,
he said, "If the federal
government shows up here,
I know how to handle them."
And then he pulled out
this long g*n
and kind of held it up and said,
"This is how you handle them."
Now with a government employee
dead under highly suspicious circumstances,
it looked as if someone thought
the best way
to send a message to the feds
was to k*ll
one of their representatives
and to make it as public
as possible.
It's a lynching.
I mean, quite simply,
it's a lynching.
More now in our breaking news
and a disturbing new report
about a census worker
found dead in Kentucky.
The man was discovered
with a rope around his neck.
Speculation about what happened
grew very quickly,
and it was widespread.
The common theme publicly
was that he was lynched.
Detectives examining
the scene were surprised
not so much by what they found
but what they didn't find.
There was no sign of a struggle.
He didn't have any
defensive wounds on his wrists,
anywhere on his hands.
Roughly 40 yards from the body
was a red pickup truck later
identified as Bill Sparkman's.
Detectives combed a 300-foot
radius around the scene,
looking for evidence.
As a part of the search,
they found no evidence
of footprints, tire tracks,
or anything to indicate
that any vehicle other than
Mr. Sparkman's had been there,
you know, for quite some time.
No foreign fingerprints
were found on the duct tape
binding parts of the body
or in Sparkman's truck.
The absence of evidence
at the scene
led detectives
to a possible conclusion.
One of our working theories was,
"Was Mr. Sparkman k*lled
in some other manner
and in some other place
and then brought
to this location
and then placed on display?"
Detectives found nothing unusual
at Sparkman's house.
So just who was their victim?
Bill Sparkman
was a gentleman in his 50s.
He was not married.
Interestingly, he had adopted
a 2-year-old son
when he was in his early 30s.
By all accounts,
Mr. Sparkman was a kind man
who went out of his way
to help other people.
After volunteering
at a local elementary school,
Sparkman set his sights
on becoming a full-time teacher.
He enrolled
in an online university,
but soon a routine medical
checkup upended his life.
He was at the doctor.
He said that he just mentioned
that he had a cyst
on the side of his neck.
He wasn't too concerned.
But the doctor was,
and so they conducted tests
and found out that he had
stage-3 non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.
Despite the setback,
Sparkman continued on with
his job and with his studies.
In 2008, he got his degree.
This wasn't the only good news
he received that year.
After some brutal chemotherapy,
his cancer was in remission.
He did the whole course
of treatment
and was able to be cancer-free.
Everyone who knew him
said they couldn't imagine
why anyone would want him dead.
But many said his relationship
with Josh,
his 19-year-old adopted son,
was rocky.
Bill lived for Josh.
But Josh was constantly getting
in trouble with the law.
And he would take advantage
of his father.
About a year before
Bill's death,
Josh was charged with possession
of a stolen g*n
and got six months'
house arrest.
And now police
couldn't find him.
We were unsuccessful
in making personal contact
with Mr. Sparkman's son.
A few days later,
Josh Sparkman walked unannounced
into the local police station
and claimed he had nothing to do
with his father's death.
Josh Sparkman was a suspect,
largely because of his demeanor
when the police interviewed him.
He was kind of flat
and seemed very suspicious
to investigators.
Josh said he didn't know it
before his father's death,
but it turned out
he was the beneficiary
of his father's
life-insurance policy,
worth $300,000.
Josh was living
a fairly modest, meager life.
When money is involved,
you do need to consider...
Could they have k*lled someone
in order for the profits
that come afterward?
When Josh Sparkman
walked into a Kentucky
police station
after hearing of the death
of his adopted father,
he had an item that provoked
a lot of interest.
Detectives referred to it
as the "just in case" letter,
and it was apparently written
by Bill Sparkman.
Josh claimed to have just found
the letter,
hidden in a drawer
in his father's house.
What this contained
was life-insurance policy
and other financial documents,
and Josh was the beneficiary
of the life-insurance policy.
So that prompted them
to start investigating Josh.
By this time,
Bill Sparkman's autopsy
had been completed.
The cause of death
was asphyxiation.
The pathologist also had
a window
for Sparkman's time of death.
There were still
partially digested food items
in Mr. Sparkman's stomach that,
based on investigation,
led us to conclude
that he could have d*ed
as early as the Wednesday
before his body was found.
This was three days
before the body was discovered,
and was in line with the last
time Bill was seen alive.
It also appeared to get his son
off the hook
as a possible suspect.
Josh was working
during the time period
where this death
could have occurred,
and we were able to rule out
fairly quickly
that he did not have
any direct responsibility
for his father's death.
Bill's autopsy
revealed another potential clue.
There was an apparent anomaly
with a bone in his neck
called the hyoid bone.
Of the more than 200 bones
in the human body,
the hyoid is unique.
It's the only one not connected
to any other bone.
The hyoid bone
is a little tiny bone
that fits right here
at the base of your neck.
It has no other
bony attachments.
It anchors the muscles
that allow you to speak.
Because of its location,
the hyoid is often broken if
someone is strangled or hanged.
So a broken hyoid, in this case,
was not unusual.
But something else was.
We examined it
under a microscope,
and based on that,
I saw an old fracture,
a healing fracture,
and two other small fractures.
With this hyoid, this fracture
was old and healing,
this one was new,
and this one was new.
Since he'd been asphyxiated,
fresh fractures
of Sparkman's hyoid made sense.
But how and why had he sustained
a premortem fracture
of this bone?
His medical records
didn't indicate any such injury.
No one had an answer.
It was a very,
very intense time.
The detectives worked
under incredible expectation
and pressure.
Now a new potential suspect
entered the investigation.
Lowell Adams had known
the Sparkmans for years.
Lowell Adams was
a family friend.
He was Josh Sparkman's friend.
They had a falling-out, but he
remained friends with Bill.
Lowell Adams told police
that weeks earlier,
Bill had asked for his help.
When the Census Bureau told Bill
to do interviews
in Clay County,
he was warned not to go alone.
Bill Sparkman felt like
he needed security.
And Lowell Adams
was the young man
who Bill paid to accompany him
on some of these trips
into rural Kentucky.
Now detectives got
some surprising information.
Lowell Adams also had
something to gain
from Bill Sparkman's death.
At that point, I found out
that Lowell Adams
was one of the beneficiaries
of the insurance policies.
For reasons
no one could explain,
Lowell Adams was also set
to receive $300,000
from Sparkman's
insurance policy.
Lowell said he didn't know
about this
and that he had nothing
to do with Bill's death.
Police asked him to take
a polygraph test,
and it didn't go as planned.
This was obviously
a surprise to the investigators.
He tells a much different story,
and he makes it clear
that he knew a lot more than
he was letting on initially.
When detectives learned
that Lowell Adams stood
to profit
from Bill Sparkman's death,
he went to the top of a very
thin list of possible suspects.
The first time
they spoke to Lowell,
he basically said
he didn't know anything
about what had happened,
and had no clue
what might have led to this.
Lowell initially
agreed to be polygraphed,
but then appeared to change
his mind.
On the day
of the polygraph test,
Lowell Adams shows up
with a different story
than he had told police.
He told us that
Mr. Sparkman had talked with him
on multiple occasions
about wanting to end his life.
He had asked Lowell
if Lowell would help him do it,
and at one point,
he even told Lowell
that he was planning to stage it
so as to make it
look like a m*rder.
Lowell said he tried
to talk Sparkman out of it
and refused to help him.
Lowell later passed
his polygraph test.
He also had a crucial piece
of information
that might explain something
that had been bugging detectives
since Sparkman's autopsy.
He said
that Mr. Sparkman practiced
attempting to suffocate himself
using materials at his house.
In a follow-up search
of the residence,
we did in fact locate some beams
in a part of the house
where it appeared that ropes
had been attached to them
with some type of weight bearing
on those ropes,
leaving indentations
in the wood itself.
This could provide
a possible explanation
for the breaks
in Sparkman's hyoid bone
that happened before his death.
This fracture
showed signs of healing.
So that means he survived
that injury.
If Bill Sparkman had
staged his own su1c1de,
could he have been the one
who wrote the letters F-E-D
on his chest?
And was it possible to prove it?
It turns out Emily Craig
was in a good position
to address that question.
I've been a practicing expert
in two of the most esoteric,
obscure professions
in the world...
medical illustration
and forensic anthropology.
When Emily Craig examined
the letters on Sparkman's chest,
which had been written
with a felt-tip marker,
she noticed something unusual.
When someone is writing
the alphabet,
they start at the top
and they bring it down.
I don't know anybody that starts
at the bottom
and pushes it up
to make a letter.
There's always
a minimal amount of ink
left at the launch of a stroke.
But the primary bead or pool
is always at the end
of the stroke.
So this beading,
or smudging, in the ink
is not unusual when writing
with a felt-tip pen.
But the locations of those marks
in this case were unusual.
They were at the tops
of the letters.
It tells me that the marker
was drawn from bottom to top
on the "E," on the "D,"
and on the "F."
This started at the bottom
and came up.
According to Emily Craig,
this meant whoever wrote
the letters
was writing them upside down.
And that would be the position
Sparkman would have to be in
if he wrote the letters
on his own chest.
What Dr. Craig was telling us
is these letters were written
from the bottom up...
so basically from his waist
up to his chest.
Since no marker
was found at the scene,
he probably did this at home.
For investigators,
all the pieces
were finally falling into place.
Why was there no sign
of another vehicle at the scene?
Because Bill Sparkman
drove himself there.
Why no foreign fingerprints?
Because Bill Sparkman was alone.
Why no sign of a struggle?
Because there was no struggle.
And why were the ink beads
on the wrong ends
of the letters F-E-D?
Because Sparkman wrote them
on himself.
And perhaps the oddest twist...
Investigators believe Sparkman's
glasses were taped to his head
because his eyesight
was so poor,
he wouldn't be able to see
well enough
to put his plan into action
without them.
A "360" Follow now.
Kentucky state police say
a U.S. Census worker
who was found hanging
from a tree
with the word "fed"
scrawled across his chest
committed su1c1de
and staged his death
to look like a homicide.
Mr. Sparkman was found
in contact with the ground,
almost on his knees.
To survive, all Mr. Sparkman
had to do at any time
was stand up.
The ultimate tragedy
in this tragic story
is why Bill Sparkman did it.
He had been thinking
his cancer had come back.
And he was very concerned
about the prospect of dying
from cancer
and having this very painful end
to his life.
So he wanted to end it earlier.
But if he d*ed
by su1c1de, no death payment
would be paid out to his son
or to Lowell Adams.
And he wanted to make sure
the people close to him
were taken care of.
His family has not
publicly disputed
investigators' conclusions.
In the ultimate irony,
Bill Sparkman's autopsy
showed his cancer
was in remission.
He was not dying of cancer.
I felt incredibly sad
for Bill Sparkman
and the fact that he had put
a lot of people
through kind of
a torturous journey.
We were able to resolve the case correctly
based on the evidence
that we found
and, as much so,
what we were unable to find.
It's an extraordinary case.
It's one that impacted
the investigators.
They had never seen
anything like it.
And I don't think
we've ever seen
anything quite like this since, frankly.