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

Any day now I expect to turn on the radio and hear a woeful ballad about Fat Sam and Cadillac Joe. If it ever plays out that way, Monty might finally make that fortune after all—not quite the way he intended, but maybe on a far bigger scale: Through the alchemy of country music, those zinc bars of his could someday be turned into gold or even platinum. I suspect he’d like that.

CHAPTER 11

Grounded in Science

INEVER CEASE to be amazed by the whys and the ways human beings commit murders—and by the new techniques forensic scientists develop to solve these crimes. Some of those techniques, I’m proud to say, are being devised by people I’ve trained.

On September 20, 1991, I got a call from Jim Moore, a TBI agent based in Crossville, a small city about sixty miles west of Knoxville. Some bones, possibly human, had been found in the crawl space beneath a house outside Crossville. Agent Moore wondered if I could come over the next day with a forensic response team to excavate the bones and determine whether they were indeed human.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t go, I told him: I was leaving early in the morning for Washington, D.C., to teach a forensic anthropology class at the Smithsonian Institution for medical examiners from around the country and for agents from the Smithsonian’s next-door neighbor, the FBI. I could, however, send over an experienced forensic response team.

By this time the forensic response teams worked like a well-oiled machine, even without me. I rounded up the graduate students who were on call—Bill Grant, Samantha Hurst, and Bruce Wayne—and relayed Agent Moore’s instructions: They were to meet him at his office in the Cumberland County courthouse in Crossville at 12:30 the next day, then follow him out to the scene. As they left my office I gave them one final reminder: “Don’t forget Arpad’s soil samples!” A revolutionary new technique for determining time since death was about to get its first test in a murder case.

During the decade since we’d begun studying human decomposition at our research facility, we’d done dozens of studies and experiments, most of them involving the many variables that affect the rate of decomposition. We’d seen bodies hold together throughout winter and much of spring, and we’d watched them skeletonize in as little as two weeks during the muggy heat of summer. We’d compared bodies tucked in the shade with bodies baked in the sun and found that the bodies in sun tended to mummify, their skin becoming tough as leather, impervious to maggots. We’d compared bodies on land to bodies submerged in water; the floaters lasted twice as long. We’d compared bodies on the surface to bodies buried in graves, ranging from shallow to deep; the deeply buried bodies took eight times as long to decompose as the exposed bodies. We’d compared fat bodies to skinny ones; the fat ones skeletonized far faster, because their flesh could feed vast armies of maggots; in fact, one recent follow-up study, measuring daily weight loss in cadavers, recorded an astonishing forty-pound weight loss by an obese body in just twenty-four hours—a record I’m sure no fad diet will ever come close to.

All of these studies shed important light on the events and timing of human decay, but they all relied on an observer’s interpretation of visible, gross changes. (By gross, I mean the changes were large-scale.) So although we’d made every effort to detail and differentiate those changes as thoroughly as possible, there remained room for subjective interpretation and, therefore, an element of imprecision. Determining time since death was still a frustrating, inexact science.

Then, a few years after we’d begun our research, a young scientist approached me with the audacious and ambitious proposal to make it an exact science. His name was Arpad Vass, and he worked in a commercial laboratory that analyzed forensic specimens for law enforcement agencies. Arpad proposed entering our Ph.D. program and developing a quantitative, scientific technique that would rely on biochemical data to determine time since death. In effect, he proposed inventing a forensic clock that could be run backward, starting the moment a body was found. When it stopped—when it unwound all the way back to zero, basically—it would tell the time of a murder victim’s death.

Arpad had a bachelor’s degree in biology, with a minor in chemistry, and a master’s degree in forensic science—great credentials for a criminalist. But Arpad wanted to do more than work in a crime lab: he wanted to advance the frontiers of forensic technology. The idea was fascinating. If it worked, it would offer a revolutionary new way—a quantitative, objective way—to answer one of the first and most crucial questions every homicide detective asks: How long has this person been dead?

I had two nagging concerns about Arpad’s proposal. First, how in the world could we define a chemistry project as anthropology research? Second, and far more crucial, could he make the technique work?

I’ve always been a big believer in the cross-fertilization of ideas. Every forensic investigation is a team effort, and the more experience—the more kinds of experience—the better, in my opinion. Not all of my colleagues in the field share that view; while I’ve improvised down in the bowels of a football stadium, some anthropologists have dwelled high in the proverbial ivory tower, looking down their noses at our unorthodox methods in Tennessee. But over the years I’ve noticed that my knowledge as an anthropologist has been greatly enriched by things I’ve learned from people who came to this field by an unconventional route.

Take Emily Craig, for example. Unlike our typical graduate student, she hadn’t come to us waving a freshly inked B.S. in anthropology; in fact, she was in her forties by the time she applied to our Ph.D. program. Emily had a master’s degree in medical illustration, and she’d worked for years in a Georgia orthopedic clinic, illustrating scientific articles and