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

Once again, the trouble began with waterlogged bodies. Years before, there had been that Roane County floater I’d stashed in the department’s mop closet, provoking the wrath of the janitor. This time the problem started with Tyler O’Brien’s adipocere study. Adipocere is the greasy, waxy substance that often coats bodies pulled from lakes, rivers, and damp basements. With all the water in Tennessee, I was quite familiar with adipocere. But, as usual, I didn’t just want to know the what and the why of it; I also wanted to know the when of it, so that the next time a sheriff’s deputy or rescue squad brought me a floater, I could look at the degree of adipocere formation and tell them, with at least some measure of scientific confidence, how long that body had been “sleeping with the fishes.”

I’d tried to persuade several graduate students to do a master’s thesis study on adipocere, but I hadn’t found any takers; I guess they’d all been around long enough to know that floaters are corpses at their worst—their smelliest and slimiest. But finally, in the fall of 1993, along came Tyler O’Brien, who had spent the previous summer working for the medical examiner in Syracuse, New York. Syracuse is surrounded by New York’s Finger Lakes, so Tyler saw quite a few drowning victims during his summer with the ME. Some of those drowning victims were adipocere-covered and others weren’t, and Tyler, like me, was curious about the difference in conditions and time since death.

The simplest procedure would have been to moor bodies in the river below the research facility. But we didn’t want fishermen calling the police every day for six months, so Tyler came up with a new system: he dug three grave-size pits in the ground, lined them with heavy plastic, and filled them with water. Tyler’s narrower, more controlled study had a strong scientific argument in its favor. By limiting the number of variables—in other words, by factoring the possibility of any hungry fish out of the equation—he could focus purely on adipocere formation, without outside interference.

Tyler’s study involved three bodies, one in each pit. To make it easy to study a body at various intervals during the experiment, he put a wire platform in the bottom of each pit and attached hooks to each corner so we could hoist it up; then he put the body on top.

The first body floated like a cork. We’d push his head down, and his feet would bob to the surface; we’d push his feet down, and his head would pop back up. We discussed weighting him down, but decided to let his body seek its own level in the water. The second body sank like a rock. Often drowning victims or murder victims thrown in a lake or river will rise to the surface after a few days or weeks—when enough decomposition gases have built up in the abdomen—but this guy went down and stayed down. The third body was a tall, robust black man; I was sure he’d sink, too, since black people have denser bones than whites, but he surprised me. Like the first guy, this one was a natural floater.

Tyler left the bodies in the water for five months; by then the flesh was completely rotten, and there was little more to be learned. But along the way he’d observed some interesting phenomena. One of the most interesting was this: Adipocere forms roughly two to three inches above and below the waterline, rather than uniformly over the entire body. We assumed it must be related to the availability of both water and oxygen, but we weren’t certain. As with almost any good research project, Tyler’s study raised as many questions as it answered.

Up until then, the only research on adipocere formation had been limited to small samples of tissue placed in vials of water in a laboratory. Tyler’s project was a truly pioneering study of adipocere formation in its natural setting. Tyler kept careful notes and took numerous photographs; in addition, the university’s video department came out and shot a good bit of footage of the experiment. The images on the tape were gruesome, but they were so scientifically enlightening that I included them on an instructional videotape I made for law enforcement officers, as part of a UT continuing-education program called the Law Enforcement Satellite Academy of Tennessee—LESAT, for short.

Unfortunately, a Nashville television reporter who had come to give a presentation at LESAT happened to view that particular tape, and she was horrified by what she saw. That’s not surprising; even I have a hard time looking at that footage, and I’m exposed to dead and decaying bodies all the time. I have a hard time seeing footage of surgical procedures, too, but that doesn’t mean the surgeon has done anything wrong. In hindsight, though, I could only conclude that this TV reporter mentally blacklisted us and then waited for a reason to pounce.

Before long she got it. By this time Tennessee’s medical examiners were sending me a steady supply of bodies that had gone unclaimed after death. Some of those unclaimed bodies were homeless men, and—unbeknownst to me—a few of those homeless men also happened to be military veterans.

I served in the Army during the Korean War. I have the highest respect for the men and women who defend our nation, and I would never intentionally do anything disrespectful to any veteran, living or dead. But none of that made any difference when Nashville’s Channel 4 heard that honorably discharged veterans were rotting on the ground at the Body Farm.

My first warning of trouble came when a reporter called to ask for an interview. “Sure,” I said, “come on over.” That entire fall I was teaching some 300 miles from Knoxville at UT-Martin, another state school in northwest Tennessee. The reporter and her cameraman made the 150- mile drive from Nashville to Martin. As they were setting up the camera and lights, she told me