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

me by local deputies and KBI agents, I’d seen somewhere in the neighborhood of five thousand bodies prior to coming to Tennessee. By then I figured I’d seen just about everything. I figured wrong.

During my first year in Knoxville, local and state police officers brought me around a dozen bodies to examine, and in at least half of those cases I found myself face-to-face with something I knew very little about: maggots.

Maggots are the small, wormlike larvae that hatch from the eggs laid on a body by flies—usually, but not always, the iridescent green insects called blowflies. When maggots first hatch, they’re smaller than grains of rice; by the time they mature, they’re roughly as long and fat as pieces of macaroni. They get that big by feasting on decaying flesh. In Tennessee they do, anyhow; in Kansas, not so much.

Kansas has a pretty dry climate, so bodies often mummify—dry out and shrivel up—before the maggots get to them. In Tennessee, on the other hand, there’s twice as much rainfall and plenty of humidity between rainstorms; in summer you can almost steam broccoli just by setting it outdoors. All that moisture, plus all the shade from the Tennessee woods—there’s not much prairie east of the Mississippi—tends to keep a corpse’s flesh soft and easy for maggots to chew. It didn’t take me long in Tennessee to learn to open body bags outdoors and on the ground, lest the morgue be overrun by maggots and flies.

I’ve had a strange, symbiotic relationship with flies ever since I was a small child. Shortly after my father’s death, my mother and I moved in with her parents. We lived on a farm, and where there are farm animals, there are flies. My mother, who hated flies, made me a business proposition: for every ten dead flies I brought her, she’d pay me a bounty of one cent.

With an incentive like that, I became a six-year-old fly-killing machine. When Grandpa came in from milking the cows, I noticed, flies would flock to any drops of milk that sloshed out of his pail. Swat—seven with one blow! Before long I learned to cajole my grandmother for cups of milk, so I didn’t have to wait for milking time or Grandpa’s spills. The fly carcasses piled up, and so did my pennies.

Ever since, though—and as a scientist, I’m embarrassed to admit this—I have despised flies. I hate rattlesnakes more, but rattlesnakes are a lot less common, a lot more shy, and a lot easier to kill. As I’d learned in South Dakota, all it takes to decapitate a prairie rattler is a steady hand and a razor-sharp shovel. Flies, though, are relentless and almost infinite in number. Lay a fresh, bloody body out of the ground on a summer day, and within minutes the air will be thick with swarming blowflies. Swing a shovel like a giant flyswatter and you can probably knock down a few on the wing, but in the time it would take to do that, dozens of reinforcements will arrive.

Yet, watching the flies swarm, I knew there must be something that they and other insects could teach us. There had to be some way they could deepen our understanding of death—particularly the postmortem interval, or time since death.

I certainly wasn’t the first scientist to notice how swiftly flies can sniff out the odor of death, how unerringly they are drawn to the scent of blood. Way back in A.D. 1247, the Chinese investigator Sung Tz’u recounted a murder case in his pioneering forensic handbook The Washing Away of Wrongs:

There was an inquest on the body of a man killed by the roadside. . . . The inquest official familiarized himself with the victim’s neighborhood. He thereupon sent a number of men separately to go and make proclamations. The nearest neighbors were to bring all their sickles, handing them in for examination. If anyone concealed a sickle, they would be considered the murderer and would be thoroughly investigated. In a short time, seventy or eighty sickles were brought in. The inquest official had them laid on the ground. At the time the weather was hot. The flies flew about and gathered on one sickle. The inquest official pointed to the sickle and said, “Whose is this?” One man abruptly acknowledged it. . . . Then he was interrogated but still would not confess. The inquest official indicated the sickle and had the man look at it himself. “The sickles of the others in the crowd had no flies. Now, you have killed a man. There are traces of blood on the sickle, so the flies gather. How can this be concealed?” The bystanders were speechless, sighing with admiration. The murderer knocked his head on the ground and confessed.*

Six centuries later, in the 1890s, a New York entomologist named Murray G. Motter examined 150 bodies that were exhumed when a cemetery was relocated. Motter noticed that the bodies had fed and housed numerous species of insects, at various developmental stages (larvae, pupae, adults); ultimately some of the insects became entombed in the very corpses that had nourished them—an irony that probably went unnoticed and unappreciated by the bugs themselves.

Motter published his insect inventory in the Journal of the New York Entomological Society under the remarkably thorough title “A Contribution to the Study of the Fauna of the Grave: A Study of One Hundred and Fifty Disinterments, With Some Additional Experimental Observations.” The study did not inspire other entomologists to follow in Motter’s macabre footsteps, at least not with human subjects. However, sixty years later another entomologist—this one in Knoxville, by curious coincidence—made a detailed study of insect activity in dog carcasses. The Knoxville entomologist’s name was H. B. Reed; the question that interested him was not forensic but ecological: How does a corpse alter the environment in the small ecosystem where it decays? To find out, over a one-year period Reed set out forty-five carcasses of dogs that had been euthanized by the local pound. He set out one every two