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

guides to surgical procedures. In the course of that career she’d spent a lot of time around doctors and seen a lot of bones, so I figured she might bring an interesting perspective to her anthropology studies. As it turned out, I was wrong—by way of underestimation, that is.

Her first semester, Emily took my human-identification class, in which students learned how to look at skeletal remains and determine the Big Four: sex, age, race, and stature. I brought in one skeleton every other week—a known skeleton, often one from a forensic case the police had brought to me.

About six weeks into the course—about the time the students were starting to get cocky—I’d always throw them a curve. An elderly black man had wandered away from a nursing home in Winchester, Tennessee, years before; when a skeleton was eventually found, the authorities asked me to determine if this was the missing man. I didn’t think so, I told them initially: The skull wasn’t Negroid; the teeth and jaws didn’t jut forward the way a black man’s would. Pat Willey, the graduate student who ran my bone lab at the time, agreed with me. Then, a week later, we received X rays of the missing black man—which matched the skeleton we’d confidently pronounced as white.

Every year in Human Identification, I led my students down the same primrose path I’d taken with that skeleton, and invariably the students—noting the absence of prognathism in the mouth structure—would write Caucasoid on their test paper just as confidently as I had pronounced it years before.

When I got to Emily’s paper I was shocked: Negroid, she’d written—the only one in the class to get it right; the only one ever to get it right. I called her into my office and confronted her. “Tell me who told you that was a Negroid skeleton,” I demanded. For years I’d been fooling students with this trick question, then sworn the class to secrecy afterward, so the next year’s students would likewise learn not to jump to conclusions so quickly. Now, it seemed, somebody had broken the code of silence.

“No one told me,” she said. She sounded surprised and indignant.

I persisted: “Then how did you know? Everybody gets that wrong. They take one look at that skull and they’re sure it’s Caucasoid.”

“I didn’t look at the skull,” she answered. “I looked at the knee.”

I stared at her, utterly baffled. “What on earth are you talking about?”

My student then proceeded to explain to her professor—a diplomate of the American Board of Forensic Anthropologists—that the knees of blacks have more space between the condyles—the broad, curved ends of bone that form the knee’s hinge—than the knees of whites. “That’s why surgeons would much rather operate on the knees of black athletes than white athletes. There’s a lot more room to work in. Everybody in sports medicine knows this.”

At this point I was more than three decades into my career, yet this was a complete revelation. “Nobody in anthropology knows this,” I told her. After I swallowed a few mouthfuls of humble pie and collected my professorial wits, I added, “This would make a great dissertation topic.”

Emily took my advice. Not only did she research, confirm, and publish what she’d already noticed in the knees of living athletes, she went a step further: Another subtle difference in the knees of blacks, she found, could be used to estimate race in unidentified bodies. The angle of an interior seam in the femur just above the knee—called Blumensaat’s line, in honor of the German physician who first noticed it in lateral (side-view) X rays—differed in whites and blacks. After taking hundreds of X rays and measurements of femurs, Emily devised a formula that could distinguish, with up to 90 percent accuracy, a Negroid femur from a Caucasoid femur. In a field that had previously depended solely on the skull to determine race, this was a remarkable advance.

If Emily hadn’t come to anthropology by way of medical illustration, we might never have learned about this, and we’d have missed out on a technique that has proven crucial in identifying several unknown murder victims.

It was that same sort of scientific cross-pollination that Arpad Vass was proposing in his plan to use biochemical data to pinpoint time since death. In his case, though, it wasn’t bone structure he was talking about, but bacteria.

As Arpad talked about turning bacteria into a forensic stopwatch, I tried to think of some other department where his research might fit better than in anthropology. I knew it was too applied and too forensic-oriented to gain approval in the biology or chemistry departments. I also figured it would be a stretch to admit him into the anthropology program. But I couldn’t stop thinking about how the field might benefit from such a revolutionary technique. “Tell you what,” I finally said. “I’ll fight to get you in, if you’ll definitely tie it to human decomposition—and if you’re sure you can make it work.” He assured me that he would and he could.

It didn’t take long to show me that he was serious about the first requirement. Within a matter of days Arpad was out at the research facility, taking samples of decaying flesh, maggot soup, and greasy soil. He’d gather a batch of samples, disappear into a chemistry lab for days, then reemerge to gather more goo.

It was that second part of our deal—making it work—that would be the hard part. Arpad had theorized that as a body decayed, a succession of different bacteria would feed on the decaying tissues, in the same way that a consistent succession of insects did. “Pigs is pigs,” an old saying goes; Arpad’s hope was that bugs is bugs, whether those bugs are macroscopic or microscopic.

In theory, his idea was simple. In reality, though, it was overwhelming. Looking at the samples under a microscope was like looking at an aerial photograph of Saint Peter’s Square during the Pope’s annual Easter sermon: the field of view was packed with individuals