The Pond That Looked Like Nothing

There was nothing remarkable about the pond.

It sat in a shallow basin on the flat Florida coastal plain of Brevard County, not far from Titusville, surrounded by the same scrubby palmetto and slash pine that covered most of the undeveloped land between Interstate 95 and the Indian River.

From the edge, it looked like any of the hundreds of small, dark peat ponds scattered across central Florida’s landscape — unremarkable, organic, slightly murky.

The kind of water that holds frogs and wading birds and nothing you would stop to look at twice.

In the spring of 1982, workers preparing the land for the Windover Farms housing development were draining ponds and clearing ground to make way for the roads and drainage infrastructure that any new subdivision required.

The land was being transformed, as so much Florida land had been transformed in the previous few decades, from palmetto scrub and wetland into something organized for residential use.

The work was loud and mechanical and unremarkable.

And then backhoe operator Steve Vanderjagt paused to examine something in the bucket.

He had pulled up what he first took to be a pale rock — oddly shaped, encrusted with peat.

He turned it over in his hands.

The object had two hollow openings.

Eye sockets.

He was holding a human skull.

His first response, by his own later account, was something in the neighborhood of alarm.

More bone appeared, in the disturbed sediment, in the mud around the pond’s edge.

The site supervisor was called.

The conversation turned immediately to whether this was a crime scene.