A Stroll In The Body Farm
Sydney Morning Herald
Saturday January 17, 2004
On an acre in Knoxville, Tennessee, the dead are helping the living. Studying how human bodies decompose has given forensic scientists valuable tools to help solve murders. Caroline Overington reports.
YOU might think that the dead can't speak but Dr Bill Bass would disagree. He can hear them, especially when they are crying out for justice.
Bass, 75, is one of the world's best known forensic anthropologists, and here is an example of the kind of work he does: in December 1993 there was a brutal, multiple murder in a small town named Summit, Mississippi. A four-year-old girl called Krystal had been strangled; her parents were stabbed to death.
Police suspected that the husband of Krystal's grandmother that is, a man she knew as Grandpa had something to do with the deaths. After all, just 24 hours after he called police to say he had found the little girl's body, he filed an insurance claim for $US250,000 ($324,000).
Police had no real evidence to connect Krystal's grandfather to the crime. But they knew that, two years after Krystal was born, he had taken an insurance policy on her life, naming himself as beneficiary. Police believed he then waited two years doubtless spending some of that time bouncing Krystal on his knee while the policy matured. Three months after it did, she was dead.
Police asked Bass to study Krystal's body, to see if he could find any evidence that might lead to a conviction.
``The only witnesses, beside the killer, were the three dead people," Bass says in his new book. ``I would have to learn the truth from the bodies themselves."
So he studied photographs of Krystal's tiny, naked corpse, which was swarming with maggots, and he studied the cabin where her body was found. He made notes about how tightly sealed the cabin was, and about the temperature in the region at the time. He noted the size of the maggots, the extent to which they had devoured Krystal's body and the number of maggot casings left in her hair. By putting these things together, Bass was able to convince a jury that Krystal had been dead for at least two weeks before her body was found. Her killer had no alibi for that time. He is now in jail.
``Now, you see, these are the kind of people you want to put away," says Bass, still satisfied, five years after the trial ended. ``With cases like that, you think, `I'm doing something good.' "
Of course, it takes more than a fine mind to understand what a murder victim is trying to say. You also need access to a huge number of corpses. Bass has that, because he is the founder of the world's only Body Farm, which is an acre (about 4000 square metres) five minutes from his office in Knoxville, Tennessee, that is littered with rotting bodies.
The Body Farm made famous when Patricia Cornwell published a best-selling novel of the same name is surrounded by a wire fence topped with razor wire, and there is a lock on the gate. Before he unlocks that gate, Bass gives all visitors a pair of surgical booties to put over their shoes.
``You might get mucky," he says.
But actually, the Body Farm is a clean, quiet place. There are bare oaks and hummingbirds. And yes, for as far as the eye can see, there are human corpses, some of them bloated and covered in blowflies. The face of one has rotted away, leaving only the dentures intact. Another has been ravaged by raccoons. And here's another, with the skull open, like a teapot.
``He's had an autopsy done on him," says Bass, looking down at the remains. ``See, the brains are gone."
You can smell the bodies, which are donated, either directly to the Body Farm or to medical science, but the stench is not overpowering. And the corpses are not grotesque. It is natural for people to be frightened about what might happen to them after they die. But the corpses at the Body Farm are reassuring. There is nothing of the person left, just a pile of bones.
As Bass says in his new book: ``We are organisms. We're conceived, we're born, we live, we die, and we decay. But as we decay, we feed the world of the living: the plants, the bugs, the bacteria."
When you kneel next to a rib-cage that has settled into the soil, and you can clearly see that bones are not people, and when your guide is a man who has walked so often in the valley of death, it is easy to feel comforted by that idea.
Bass founded the Body Farm in 1981. He did it because he was embarrassed, and here is why: on December 29, 1977, Bass was working at his office at the University of Tennessee when he got a call from police. Could he come out to the grounds of a mansion, south of Nashville? There was an old cemetery there, where eight members of the Shy family the original owners of the mansion had been buried. But one of the graves had recently been disturbed.
Bass went to have a look. He found that the grave of Colonel Shy who died in the Civil War in 1864 had indeed been disturbed, perhaps by somebody looking for Civil War artefacts. But when police dug around a bit, they found more than disturbed earth. There was a headless body, dressed in a tuxedo, sitting on top of Colonel Shy's coffin. Bass got onto his knees and had a look. He could see a hole in the lid of the Civil War coffin. He shone a torch inside, but there was nothing but ``goo". But the body on top seemed fresh.
``The flesh was still pink," Bass remembers. ``The corpse was still largely intact." Bass told reporters who had gathered that the headless man in the grave appeared to have been dead for somewhere between two and six months.
``What better hiding place for a body than a full grave?" Bass thought. It was a variation on the theme of hiding something in plain sight.
Police needed Bass to help them identify the body, so as was then his custom Bass took it home and boiled it in a pot to remove the flesh. By looking at clean bones, he can often tell the gender of a corpse, and the person's height, race and sometimes manner of death. By now, police had found a skull, and Bass was intrigued by his corpse's poor dental care. It didn't seem normal. And then he got a call from a colleague, who was studying the dead man's clothes. All the fibres were natural cotton and silk, not synthetic. And there were no labels.
The awful truth was being revealed: this wasn't a fresh body, it was Colonel Shy. Bass had misjudged the time of death by almost 113 years.
How could he have made such an embarrassing error? In part, because Colonel Shy's body was embalmed, and the coffin was cast iron, which meant maggots had trouble getting to it. But the bigger truth, says Bass, was: ``I just didn't know enough. And it wasn't just me. None of us knew enough about what happens to bodies after death."
It was then that Bass decided to keep bodies, to study when and why they decay. He stored his first one in a mop closet at the university, but that was no good. A janitor complained. So he started storing them on one of the College of Agriculture's farms, but it wasn't secure. The bodies would get ravaged by animals, or stumbled upon by road workers. So, finally, Bass found some land just across the Tennessee River from the university's main campus.
He took his first body there in 1981. It was a man who suffered from alcoholism and heart disease. Bass covered the corpse with chicken wire to protect it from raccoons, and left it. Then he locked the gate. The Body Farm was born.
It is impossible to understate the contribution that Bass and his students have since made to our knowledge of human decomposition. One of the first studies they did was on maggots and flies, which Bass loathes. A graduate student, Bill Rodriguez, got hold of some corpses most of them donated and set them up on wooden platforms. Then, with his own head wrapped in netting, he watched the maggots hatch and feast. Other students have locked bodies in cars, or wrapped them in plastic, or put them in water, to see what difference this makes to the way they decompose.
As a result, we know all kinds of things that we did not know before Bass started his work. For example, we know that, in warm weather, maggots and flies can turn a fresh body into a skeleton in less than two weeks, but embalmed bodies can last for years. A body locked in the boot of a car will decay much faster than one in a cool field, in part because of the heat. The face often goes first, because maggots like wet places, but they also like fresh wounds. So, if there is a lot of maggot activity around a corpse's neck, the victim might have had his/her throat cut.
Bass's students have also set fire to bodies, so we know that when a person's head burns, the moisture inside quickly reaches boiling point and the whole skull explodes. But if a skull has a bullet wound, the steam can escape. If Bass finds an intact skull inside a burnt house, he usually concludes that the person was shot in the head.
After Patricia Cornwell's book about the Body Farm was published in 1994, people started asking Bass when he might write a book. So last year he asked a journalist friend, Jon Jefferson, to produce one with him. It is called Death's Acre and it has been a surprise hit, with 45,000 copies now in print in the US, and 20,000 in Australia, where Bass has guest-lectured. The book is superbly written. The chapters on forensic science and entomology (insect activity on rotting bodies) are grotesque and fascinating. The descriptions of the murders Bass has helped solve are chilling. But most of all, you sense throughout that Bass has respect for the dead, which is vastly more than can be said of the people who take their lives.
Bass himself has come close to death. Not so long ago, he collapsed during lunch, and his heart had to be jump-started. Now he has a pacemaker, because he is not ready to die.
``Not any time soon," he says. ``I have too much to do."
But when he does die, will he go to the Body Farm?
``There was a time when I was sure I would," he says. ``The scientist in me wants to sign the donation papers. But the rest of me can't forget how much I hate flies."
© 2004 Sydney Morning Herald