In her novel, The Body Farm, Patricia Cornwell introduces readers to a "decay research facility" in Knoxville, Tennessee. "On any given day," Cornwell writes, "its several wooded acres held dozens of bodies in varying stages of decomposition." 

Given her description, one might think this place is fictional, but it's not. 

As part of the forensic anthropology department at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville (UT-K), this protected two-and-a-half-acre field dedicated to the study of decomposing human remains is truly unique.  There's no other place like it in the world.  Although it was the Knoxville cops who first dubbed it the Body Farm, current faculty members refer to it simply as "the facility."

Forensic anthropology is the application of physical anthropology to the medico-legal process.  That is, forensic anthropologists assist law enforcement investigators and medical examiners to identify human skeletal and decomposing remains, generally working in cooperation with pathologists and odontologists to estimate the age, sex, ancestry, stature, and unique bony features of the deceased.  The Knoxville facility has made important contributions to estimating the time factors involved in suspicious deaths, but only because its founder realized the dire need for solid information.

Investigator with decomposing body (AP)

Dr. William M. Bass III, an acclaimed expert on skeletal identification and now a consultant and UT-K professor emeritus, single-handedly pioneered this unusual research over thirty years ago when he discovered that the state of the art in this field was "mostly anecdotal."  In the sixties, Bass had worked with law enforcement in Kansas, where bodies were generally found only after they had decomposed into skeletons.  Moving to Tennessee in 1971, where the denser population made it more likely that bodies would be detected fairly quickly, he saw increasingly more corpses.  "Half of my first ten cases were maggot-covered bodies," he recalls.  "I didn't know much about that, so I looked through the literature on the subject, and there wasn't much there."

His desire was to replace guesswork with science, but it wasn't until the late seventies when he set the wheels in motion for the facility.  One winter day Bass was asked to estimate the age of a skeleton dug up on property that had belonged to the family of William Shy, a colonel in the Confederate army.  Having once moved a cemetery in which the Civil War-era remains were mostly dust, Bass figured that this skeleton with pieces of flesh still attached had to be comparatively recent.  "I said that we had the skeleton of a white male between the ages of 24 and 28, and that he'd been dead about a year."  While Bass got the race, gender, and age right, he was far afield on the time of death.  The corpse was that of Shy himself and he had been dead and buried since 1864---some 113 years earlier.  "That was the straw that broke the camel's back for me," Bass admits.  "I realized that there was something here about decomposition that we didn't know."

William M. Bass III credit:Ed Richardson

He soon acquired a plot of land and the unclaimed cadavers of several homeless men.  Whatever they had been in life, in death they made a significant contribution to solving criminal cases.  As they lay out, exposed to the elements, they provided information about what happens to bodies under such conditions.

"Before our work, no one had ever established a time line," Bass points out. "There are a lot of factors that can affect how a body decomposes, but we found that the major two are climate and insects.  When a person dies, the body begins to decay immediately and the enzymes in the digestive system begin to eat the tissue.  You putrefy, and this gives off a smell.  The first of the critters to be attracted to a decaying body are the blowflies.  They come along and lay their eggs, which hatch into maggots.  The maggots then eat the decaying tissue in a fairly predictable way."  Measuring and recording this information gave the facility its raison d'être. 

Since those early days, the place has changed somewhat.  They still use a few unclaimed bodies, but mostly accept those that have been donated to science.  There's even a waiting list for people who want to designate the Body Farm as the destination for their remains.

Dr. Murray K. Marks, an associate professor, is the facility's current curator and a specialist in facial reconstruction.  He oversees each new project, many of which are run by graduate students. "Initially there were three to five donations a year," he says, "and now we get about forty.  At any time, we generally receive about twenty-five bodies in the process and they stay there for about a year."  As each stage of decomposition is recorded and analyzed, it's added to the growing data bank that is made available to law enforcement.

Since forensic investigation generally involves using significant evidence in court, anthropological testimony had to pass the Frye test, which is the legal standard for admissibility as a scientific method.  Bass and Marks quickly proved the validity of their approach, and in Marks' experience, "defense attorneys generally don't question the findings."  Last year, for example, Bass testified in a case in Mississippi in which a man nearly got away with murder---three times over.  It was the facility staff's analysis of the evidence that trapped him in his own lie.

In December of 1993, "Big Mike" Rubenstein called 911 to report the deaths of his relatives in a cabin in Summit.  Investigators responded and found the decomposing bodies of a man, a woman, and a four-year-old child.  Rubenstein claimed to have visited the cabin in mid- and late-November, but had found it empty.  Then he'd come again in December and saw the bodies.  It appeared to be the case of a shocked relative stumbling by accident into a crime scene, but when Rubenstein quickly tried to collect the insurance money, investigators grew suspicious.  The accumulated mail and spoiled food also put Rubenstein's tale into doubt, so they called Dr. Bass and asked him to help construct a timeline for when the deaths had actually occurred.  Bass and his staff agreed to make an analysis. Based on knowledge of insect development cycles and rate of decomposition in certain temperatures, Bass placed the deaths in mid-November---exactly when Rubenstein had admitted visiting the cabin. Ultimately he was convicted of the crimes.

Sometimes the research attempts to duplicate the conditions of a particular crime, but more often experiments are designed for general data collection that could help in future cases. The more precisely the researchers can measure decomposition in identifiable conditions, the more solid is their contribution to solving and prosecuting a crime.

Thus far, almost three hundred corpses have been used in the studies.  They have been placed in a car trunk, left in direct sunlight, placed under canvas and plastic, buried in mud, hung from a scaffold, locked into coffins, refrigerated in the dark, zipped into body bags, or submerged in water.  One may come in headless, another wounded.  One clothed, another naked.  Some are even embalmed.  A dead woman, freshly arrived, lies out in the open on her back, while a pile of bones disintegrates nearby.  Stages of insect infestation on corpses are examined, along with general exposure to the environment and to small rodent disturbance.

"Most of what we know about forensic entomology today," says Marks, "comes from the baseline studies done here at the facility."

When there's an ongoing project, the person assigned to it makes a precise digital record at regular intervals of various aspects of the disintegration process.  He or she may also use an electronic nose with thirty-two sensors to record changes in the various odors.  These are fed into a gas chromatograph, which separates and analyzes the distinct parts of compound mixtures.  The hope is to develop sprays that can be used to train cadaver dogs.  Marks and his colleagues at Oak Ridge National Laboratory are also isolating specific biochemical markers that will provide precise measurements of the postmortem interval during the first two weeks after death.  If they succeed, law enforcement will gain a standard of measure unaffected by the many environmental variables.

The researchers also analyze soil samples, because byproducts of decomposition seep into the ground. That means that they can determine how long a body was lying in a particular area, or whether it was placed somewhere and then moved.  They have more such experiments in mind for the future.

One project will place bodies under concrete to test ground-penetrating radar technology.  "We'll put them under different thicknesses of concrete," Marks explains, "and bury them at different depths.  We'll also be testing the difference in results between industrial concrete vs. what someone might do in their backyard."

Of late, the facility has become as much a teaching as research center.  The professors offer demonstrations to law enforcement officers, and in fact, Bass himself has trained around one-third of the practicing anthropologists who currently assist on criminal cases.  The FBI, recognizing the facility's importance, sends agents for courses on clandestine grave discovery and excavation. 

Since different conditions produce different results, Marks and Bass would both like to see similar facilities open up in other parts of the country.  "We could use one in Florida, one in Michigan, and one in the desert southwest," Bass insists.  However, in a culture where death is often shunned, it's not so easy to convince university administrators to support such research.  It may take a few high-profile cases to emphasize to the public the importance of getting accurate information about time of death.

Let's look at one of the early cases where lack of knowledge generated a scientific dispute, and then examine in greater detail the different types of measurements that are used to determine time of death.