Death's Acre: Inside The Legendary Forensic Lab The Body Farm by Bill Bass (essential books to read txt) 📕

growth of our program up until now, so he was unhesitating in his support. Once again it was a simple matter of a phone call.

Just across the Tennessee River from the main campus—barely a long punt from the football stadium, as the pigskin flies—was an acre or so of surplus land behind the UT Medical Center. For years the hospital’s trash had been burned there, and it wasn’t exactly prime real estate, but I’m not sure I’d have felt at home if it had been.

All my life I’ve scrimped and scratched and made do with very little. Growing up during the Great Depression, I saw how carefully my mother stretched the insurance money we got after my father’s death. Excavating Indian graves on the plains of South Dakota, I fed crews of hungry college students on government-surplus peanut butter and berthed them on surplus Army cots. Moving into dilapidated quarters huddled beneath the football stadium—the windows looked out onto a maze of steel girders supporting the upper deck—I repainted peeling walls and refinished ancient dormitory desks and repaired hand-me-down filing cabinets. So when the chancellor offered me an acre of nearby land—even junky land—just five minutes from my office, I was grateful to get it: death’s own acre, you could call it.

In the fall of 1980 my students and I set to work. We cleared trees and brush from the center of the site; we laid a gravel driveway so trucks could pull in with bodies and equipment; we ran a water line and electricity from the hospital. Working mostly by hand, we cleared and leveled a pad sixteen feet square beneath the shelter of the trees, then spread several inches of gravel. Once we had the sixteen-by-sixteen pad ready, I had a concrete truck come pour a load of concrete; together, the students and I smoothed its surface. Atop this slab we built a small frame building, simple and windowless, roofed with cheap asphalt shingles. The building would give us a place to store tools like shovels and rakes, instruments like scalpels and surgical scissors, and supplies like latex gloves and body bags. It ran the full width of the pad but extended only six feet deep. That left us a front porch, so to speak, measuring ten feet by sixteen feet. On it we could easily lay up to a dozen bodies for our decomposition studies.

The sow-barn visits by the convicts from the penal farm had shown me that security was important, so I decided we could afford, just barely, to fence our little square research area.

People who know about the Body Farm today seem to think it sprang into existence fully formed, but that’s not the way it happened at all. It came from humble beginnings, and it progressed by small steps. The questions we hoped to answer were almost laughably elementary: At what point does the arm fall off? What causes that greasy black stain under decomposed bodies, and when? When do the teeth fall out of the skull? How long before a corpse becomes a skeleton? To find answers, we first had to find research subjects. We had the farm; now we needed the bodies. I sent letters to the medical examiners and funeral directors in Tennessee’s ninety-five counties.

Finally, one Thursday evening in the middle of May, 1981, I drove a covered pickup truck to Burris Funeral Home in Crossville, Tennessee—an hour west of Knoxville, on the Cumberland Plateau—and picked up our first donated research subject. The corpse was a seventy-three-year-old white male who had suffered from chronic alcoholism, emphysema, and heart disease. We knew his identity—the body had been donated by his daughter—but for the sake of confidentiality, we assigned him a unique identifying number. In life he’d had a family and a name; in death he would be known simply as “1-81”: the anthropology department’s first donated body of 1981. (My forensic cases were identified by the same pair of numbers, but in reverse order: The first criminal case of that same year was case 81-1. The system wasn’t fancy, but it worked.)

The following morning a handful of graduate students and I laid corpse 1-81 on the concrete pad we had poured a few months before. Someone took pictures. To protect 1-81 from rodents and other predators small enough to squeeze through the fence, we covered the body with a wooden framework screened with wire mesh. One by one we filed out of the chain-link enclosure. I closed the gate and snapped a padlock onto the latch. A fly brushed past my ear. The Anthropology Research Facility was embarking on its first research project. Death’s acre was open for business. The Body Farm was born.

CHAPTER 8

A Bug for Research

ON A WARM, sunny day in 1981, as corpse 1-81 lay decomposing at my newly commissioned Anthropology Research Facility, almost visible across the river from the University of Tennessee’s anthropology department, Bill Rodriguez and I stepped out from beneath Neyland Stadium. In Bill’s hand was a glass vial containing five flies, and on the back of each fly was a dot of orange paint, bright as the jersey of a UT lineman.

Standing on the steps in the sunshine, Bill unscrewed the top of the vial. Within seconds all five flies were gone. We looked at each other and grinned. “Let me know what happens next,” I said.

As it turned out, Bill was about to embark on a study that would help spur a revolution in forensic science, becoming one of the most heavily cited anthropology papers of all time. I didn’t know that at the time, though. At the time, all I knew was that there was a lot yet to learn about bodies and bugs.

I HAD MOVED to Knoxville ten years earlier, in 1971. I’d spent the sixties teaching in Kansas and excavating Indian graves in South Dakota; between the ancient Indian skeletons and the recent murder victims brought to