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

Six days later we went back, dismantled the box, and retrieved the body. However, unlike Cornwell’s killer, who dumped the victim’s body beside a lake, we took ours to the morgue so we could examine and document whatever traces or clues the simulated death scene might have left. Imprinted on the body’s lower back was a perfect circle. Within the circle a faint imprint of Abraham Lincoln’s head was clearly visible. The imprint was not quite as distinct as what you’d get if you put a piece of paper on top of a penny and rubbed a pencil lead across it, but it was amazingly close. The disk was brown with specks of green—copper oxide from the penny’s corrosion by body fluids.

The key and the strike plate were sharply outlined on the legs. So was the pair of scissors that we’d placed under the back; its handles left perfect ovals in the flesh. The chain-saw chain left a sinister, coiled imprint, discolored a deep reddish brown along the teeth, almost as if they had bitten into the skin.

The body bore one other mark as well: a distinct, raised line of flesh zigzagging across the back and shoulder. That one was a puzzle to us at first; then we took a closer look at the spot where the body had lain. Running through our concrete slab, which had been poured by rank amateurs—namely, me and my students—was a crack whose zigs and zags matched those on the body perfectly.

Arthur and I were both delighted with the results; so was Patricia Cornwell when we sent her a research report and copies of our photographs. She said the experiment had given her exactly the kind of detail she needed for her book.

The next time I saw Cornwell again was the following February, at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences in San Antonio, Texas. As a crime writer, she was always on the lookout for new techniques that might make her books more interesting and realistic, and the AAFS meetings were often the place where researchers unveiled scientific breakthroughs and new forensic technologies. I bumped into her on a balcony overlooking the lobby of the Marriott River Center, the hotel where the conference was taking place. I asked how the book was coming along; she said that it was finished and that she was quite pleased with it. She thanked me again for running the experiment, then she added, “I’m calling the book The Body Farm.” You could have knocked me over with a feather.

When we first began researching human decomposition back in 1980, our facility didn’t even have a name. After all, it was really just a two-acre patch of ground, fenced off to keep out carnivorous animals and curious humans. The original fence was chain-link, but after a few passersby caught traumatic glimpses of the bodies inside, we added a wooden privacy fence. At some point, probably when we began writing up our research results for scientific journals like the Journal of Forensic Sciences, we decided we should probably call it something scientific-sounding. So we named it the Anthropology Research Facility, or ARF. Well, it wasn’t long before some wag with the local district attorney’s office suggested renaming it the Bass Anthropology Research Facility, or BARF. Luckily, that nickname never caught on; instead, police and FBI agents gradually started referring to it as “the Body Farm.” Before long, I was calling it that too. It’s easier to say and a lot more descriptive than “Anthropology Research Facility.”

When Cornwell asked us to stage the experiment for her, I had no idea the facility itself would figure in her book; I assumed she’d use some of the research data, and that would be it. Instead, here she was telling me we were the title attraction. I was terribly flattered, and here’s why: In all the years we’d been studying decomposition, nobody much had seemed to give a damn about our research—a few anthropologists and entomologists, maybe, but that’s about it. Then along comes a famous writer who wants to name her book after our facility. What a nice pat on the back! I told her I couldn’t wait to read it.

A few months later a copy arrived in the mail. As I read it I was stunned. The research facility was featured, and glowingly; so was its director, “Dr. Lyall Shade.” It was as if the world’s biggest spotlight had just swiveled in our direction: The phone didn’t stop ringing for weeks. Our departmental secretaries fielded dozens of calls from reporters asking for the Body Farm’s number. There wasn’t a phone out there in the woods, of course, but after the first hundred or so calls, I jokingly told the secretaries to tell the callers to hang up and call “1-800-I AM DEAD.”

By 1996, The Body Farm was one of the best-selling mysteries ever published. The book was an international hit, selling hundreds of thousands of copies in England, Japan, and other countries. Someone I know was traveling to Japan regularly on business at the time, and he told me that his colleagues in Japan made him stuff his suitcase with copies of the book every time he came from America.

It wasn’t long before a parade of reporters and television crews was beating a path to Knoxville and the Body Farm. Even now, some ten years later, the parade still hasn’t stopped. Some of the stories have been lurid or laughable, but others have been factual and respectful.

But flattering as the attention was, it was also distracting. If we’d been willing to give up research, teaching, and writing, we could have devoted twenty-four hours a day to giving tours of the facility. I give around a hundred lectures a year to police, undertakers, ATF agents, and other groups, and nearly everybody I talk to asks to come to the Body Farm. One week, den mothers from