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

two different Cub Scout dens called, asking me to take their kids on a tour of the Body Farm. At that point I finally snapped: clearly, things had gotten out of hand. I began saying no far more often than I said yes. And yet, I still say yes, and my colleagues still say yes, many times.

And some of the attention is a blessing. Because of Patricia Cornwell’s blockbuster novel and all the subsequent media attention it sparked, we get far more calls than we used to from people who want to donate their bodies for research. What nearly all of these donors say when they contact the university is “I want to donate my body to the Body Farm.”

In November of 2002, Patricia Cornwell published a remarkable new book—nonfiction, this time. Titled Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper, Case Closed, it represented the culmination of two years of painstaking forensic research. In a case of life imitating art—or, more precisely, art inspiring life—the crime novelist has reinvented herself as a real-life forensic detective. Digging deep into the past and using up-to-the-minute DNA technology, her book makes the case that Jack the Ripper was a Victorian artist named Walter Sickert, who painted a gruesome series of murder pictures that bore striking resemblances to the murder scenes where Jack the Ripper left his victims. If Patricia Cornwell ever decides to give up fiction for good, the real world could use a tenacious forensic investigator like her.

There are moments in life when, in hindsight, you realize everything has changed forever. I’m proud to say the publication of The Body Farm was one of those moments in my life, and in the life of the Anthropology Research Facility I created. And I’m proud to call Patricia Cornwell both my colleague and my friend.

CHAPTER 15

More Progress, More Protest

SIX MONTHS after Patricia Cornwell’s novel The Body Farm thrust the Anthropology Research Facility into the limelight, I was still basking in the glow of media attention. I’d always gotten along well with journalists, mainly because I didn’t mind telling them what I learned when I examined decomposing bodies or bare bones. My openness had caused me some embarrassing moments—especially when I misjudged Colonel Shy’s death by almost 113 years—but it had also helped educate the public about forensic anthropology and the role it could play in fighting crime.

By this time I’d been heading the anthropology department at the University of Tennessee for nearly twenty-five years. During that quarter-century, the faculty had grown from six to twenty. Our program had grown from a small undergraduate major to one of the nation’s leading training grounds for forensic anthropologists: There were around sixty board-certified forensic anthropologists in the United States by now, and I’d helped train a third of them.

The Council for the Advancement and Support of Education had named me Professor of the Year, not just for UT or Tennessee, but for all of the United States and Canada. Not long after that, President Ronald Reagan came to Knoxville and had lunch with me. Our work was attracting recognition and acclaim, in America and around the world. I was invited to lecture in Australia, Canada, and Taiwan.

Much to my surprise, my personal life was full and happy again, too. The reason for that change had been right under my nose for twenty years. Ever since I moved to Knoxville to run the anthropology department at UT, I had loved going to work each day. One reason was the work itself: teaching is fun, mostly, and forensic cases are fascinating. Another reason was Annette Blackbourne.

I had hired Annette not long after I came to UT. The department already had one secretary, but as we expanded and began building a research program, we needed someone to keep track of our research grants. When I interviewed Annette for the job, I was impressed by her organizational and financial skills; I was even more impressed by her warmth, maturity, and empathy with people. In a large department like ours, populated by everyone from homesick first-year undergraduates to tenured, self-important professors, diplomacy and humor were crucial.

When our main departmental secretary left for a higher-paying job, I promoted Annette into that position; later still, her job was upgraded from secretary to administrative assistant. Perhaps counselor or adviser would have been a more accurate title. Whenever I faced a difficult decision, I ran it past Annette, and more than once she saved me from making a terrible mistake. For instance, when picketers showed up at the Body Farm, she kept me from rushing over to confront them. Instead we watched them, unnoticed from a car across the parking lot, chuckling at the cleverness of their protest banner; as a result I was able to respond to news reporters later with a much cooler, clearer head.

In twenty years of working together, Annette and I had never spoken a cross word to one another. Everyone in the department—the other faculty, the graduate students, the undergrads—adored her. Over the years Ann and I had become close friends with Annette and her husband, Joe, a pharmacist at UT Medical Center. Twice a year the four of us would pile into a car or a camper for a long weekend excursion somewhere in the Southeast: Nashville, Asheville, Chattanooga, Mammoth Cave, and half a dozen other destinations. Then, shortly before Ann got sick, Annette’s husband was diagnosed with lung cancer. He died about the time Ann’s cancer was diagnosed.

Throughout Ann’s illness Annette was a generous and sympathetic listener, and when Ann died, she understood exactly what I was going through. Annette’s friendship and understanding pulled me through those difficult first months; eventually that friendship deepened into love. Fourteen months after Ann’s death, Annette and I got married in a small chapel at Second Presbyterian Church. I felt reborn. I felt young all over again.

Everything, in short, was going well in the fall of 1994. Too well