Professor's forensic expertise helps Tarrant County investigators solve 1996 homicide
UTA Magazine Spring/Summer 2002
It was her work on a third set of skeletal remains that recently put the UTA forensic anthropologist and adjunct assistant professor of anthropology in the spotlight. For an episode of its New Detectives series, the Discovery Channel featured the murder of a Tarrant County teen-ager and Dr. Austin's role in solving the crime. The episode, titled "Buried Secrets," aired in February.
On May 8, 1996, a teen-ager scouring a wooded area for golf balls discovered the skeletal remains of a human hand adjacent to the Lost Creek Golf Course near Aledo. A team from the medical examiner's office subsequently unearthed an entire body and determined that the male victim had died from massive trauma to the skull and multiple stab wounds to the torso.
Miraculously, the decomposed body still had one identifying mark: a red scorpion tattoo.
Then on Dec. 3, 1999, a woman told police that she'd overheard two men bragging about killing a former acquaintance named Patrick Zacha, with whom they had once formed a loose-knit gang that dealt drugs and committed burglaries. Detective Hargis and partner Mike Utley visited Zacha's father, who acknowledged that his missing son had a tattoo like the victim's.
Armed with a positive identification, detectives took the two men into custody on suspicion of murder.