by Adam Johnson
While grad students carry out the “intake” and “placement” of the bodies outdoors, about twenty-five undergrads volunteer to process the remains for free, from disarticulating the sun-dried cadavers to soaking them in the kettles to scrubbing the last bits of cartilage off with their gloved hands. They remove tendons with hemostats and toothbrushes, then they wash the bones again by hand, adding Dawn if still greasy. Finally, they leave them out on countertops to dry.
I can imagine rushing to volunteer at a crime scene, I tell Kate, but it seems another thing entirely to hand-wash decomposition off the bones of dead strangers. “I know,” she says. “This is really the worst, most difficult part of the whole process, this room right here. But I think these students realize that they wouldn’t otherwise get a chance to handle actual human remains. And so they do the work. We’re really grateful.”
Kate did plenty of processing herself as a PhD student in the anthropology department of the University of Tennessee, home to the first body farm in this country, opened in 1980. One major difference between the two facilities is the climate: the dry weather and the Central Texas sun combine to guarantee mummification, rather than the thorough skeletonization that naturally occurs in humid Tennessee. Another is also a function of location: Texas is at the center of what Kate calls “a mass disaster,” with hundreds of undocumented immigrants dying each year as they attempt to cross the southwestern border with Mexico. In the “dry” lab, they store and analyze migrant remains, hoping to lead to positive identifications (the long-term project is dubbed Operation ID). Most of these bodies were exhumed in Brooks County, where last year a colleague of Kate’s from Baylor University delivered sixty body bags in a single day. Those remains, kept separate from the donations, are still being processed, and the personal items and clothes sorted and hand-washed by volunteers. (They recently discovered one young woman’s ID card in the shoes she’d been buried in.) Some law enforcement divisions, aware of the work being done, now bring bodies directly to FACTS, rather than burying them where they were discovered.
While FACTS had only three cadavers donated in 2008 (its first year), by 2012 that number was up to fifty new donations, and then sixty-six last year. Thirty-six have been placed since January. Unlike medical schools, FACTS has no restrictions: the only disqualifiers for donation are communicable disease or extreme obesity; people can donate their organs and tissue before being brought in. Plus, they try to accommodate any specific requests: one person wanted his cellphone and charger to be stored with his bones in perpetuity; another wanted a photo of himself included, so that researchers would see his face while working with his remains; one woman wanted to have a hummingbird feeder installed above her decomposing cadaver; and another woman, in perhaps the most eccentric request of all, wanted to be laid out to rot in eighteenth-century colonial dress. “As long as they can provide the outfit,” Kate says.
Kate, like most of the people who work here, plans to donate herself—though with the stipulation that she be buried for three years before her remains are handled. “When I donate, I don’t want people that I know looking at me. Even if I go to Tennessee, people know me there. I want to be a nice skeleton when they excavate me. I figure three years will be enough time for that, under any soil conditions.”
In her later years, Patty moved to Austin, closer to Carl and John and Ted, to finish her PhD in Psychology (the career she’d quietly dreamt of). But, having expended huge reserves of energy on raising her brood and somehow, miraculously, paying the bills—after Xerox she’d tried real estate (bad market), work on an oil rig, then a series of bookkeeping jobs—Patty had already begun to adjust her ambitions. Now that she finally had a chance to complete her degree, she found she no longer had the flexibility it required: her ego could not stand the condescension of her much younger grad-student advisors. And so this was her last hurrah. “She wasn’t going to be able to accept the situation, so she bailed out,” says Jim. “She figured out how to live on lower wages. She found a condo on terms that let her afford the mortgage, figured out what her means were, and learned to live within them, and stayed out of stores so she wouldn’t be tempted to buy things.”
In her condo, says Carl, “she had a pool, she had a yard she never had to cut, she had plenty of space to spread her books out and do her crossword puzzles”—and that was that. She wore a bathing suit, says Ted, “ninety percent of the time,” with “the little muumuu thing to put over it.” In her final months, when she wasn’t working odd jobs, you’d find her at choir practice at St. James Episcopal (they were chosen to sing at Lady Bird Johnson’s funeral). Otherwise she was out by the pool with a paperback, drinking her coffee and relishing a cigarette. “She went from being a fairly successful businesswoman,” says Carl, “to not really caring about materialistic things.” Jim tells me, “She was happy with what her kids were doing, by and large—that was a big one. She thought she had done it well enough—and for a while there, she wondered if she’d be able to.”
Patty died with the kind of stubborn independence that marked her life. Her children had no idea just how ill she’d been, and they agree she must have feared needing to restructure her life around her health, being defined by rounds and rounds of hospital appointments—something she had no patience for. A couple weeks before she died, she sent an email to her kids: “They did an x-ray, and I’ve got a hernia, and I’m naming the hernia Penelope.” Penelope had long been her play name for moments of denial, moments when she wanted to be free and invisible: whenever she’d found herself in a houseful of kids calling for her, she’d call back “My name is not Mom, it’s Penelope!” In hindsight, Mary thinks, the so-called “hernia” was “a huge growth in her intestines, and she didn’t want to put it out there because people would try to boss her around.” As the daughter of such an independent woman, Mary is sympathetic. “That’s the greatest thing that you fear, that you won’t have say over your life anymore.”
Patty was rushed to the hospital with severe abdominal pains, and soon after her arrival the stress induced a heart attack. In examining her, they discovered a mass in her intestines large enough that nothing could be done. Long ago, when the kids were still young, Patty had made absolutely clear to her children that she did not want to be kept alive on machines or through extreme surgical measures. “There was no doubt in anyone’s mind,” John says. “She wanted it her way. That was her iron will, one last time.” In brief moments of lucidity, through the haze of morphine, Patty saw her sons John and Carl and Ted. She died a few hours later.
Then came the question of what to do with her body. Again, Patty’s children had long known her wishes: while she’d considered herself a Catholic, she’d often spoken about her faith in science, and she’d seen no need for her body to be pumped full of chemicals and sealed into an expensive coffin after death—Patty would much rather her remains be put to use in a cool experiment, part of discovering new terrain. And while they range in spiritual leanings from improvised New Age (Mary) to “your most straight-up Richard Dawkins atheist” (Jim), her children all share Patty’s view of her physical self. “She would mock the foolishness of thinking that there was anything going on with your body after you died,” says Jim. “The special part is the alive person.”
“Her body was whatever carried her spirit and her brain around,” says Carl, “and in the end it was just a bag of meat when she was done with it. Whatever happened after that, that could be useful, was a good thing.” If in life she hadn’t become a psychologist, at least in death, perhaps, her pieces could be put to work for science.
Once all the Robinson siblings were gathered in Austin, they discussed how best to put Patty to use at such sudden notice. Without advance arrangements, options were limited. Searching online, Jim soon encountered FACTS—and Carl recalled Patty mentioning to them that a body farm was being built in San Marcos. For the Robinsons, this was the perfect way to satisfy their mother’s wishes.
Her choir had a memorial for Patty at
the church, which her kids dutifully attended—except Jim (“I didn’t want to see her church ladies, and I don’t feel bad about it”). As for the siblings themselves, in lieu of a traditional funeral, they gathered friends and family at John’s house. “There was a tremendous amount of sadness,” Ted says—and then corrects himself. “Not really sadness: a release. But it wasn’t that movie scene where everyone’s wailing and wearing black and just acting.” Everyone drank and told stories about Patty. And, sometime in the middle of all this, the morgue handed the remains of Patricia Robinson off to the body farm.
Years before there was a forensic research facility in San Marcos, Elaine’s father, an entomologist and parasitologist, staked out a pig to observe the process of decomposition and which insects arrived first. He worked on a couple of cases with the Austin PD and DPS, collecting maggots and flies from bodies at crime scenes, and helped train law enforcement to do the same. He never had to explain his work to Elaine and her two younger sisters, she says, “because we were biologists’ kids! We were always camping in the hill country, picking up fossils or arrowheads. Mom and Dad had us making plaster casts of animal footprints we found.” They collected tadpoles, snakes, and horned toads. As a family, says Elaine, “we don’t shy away from things. We don’t get the ooh gross syndrome so many people have.”
Elaine had always been fascinated with science herself, but because of “how life shook out,” she took a very winding road through employment, from waitressing gigs to a stint operating a wastewater treatment plant. There was also a year and a half, in her early twenties, as a gravedigger. “Needless to say, death does not bother me a whole lot. To work in the cemetery, you’ve got to not be thinking about it too much.” Now, mostly retired, she does ornamental ironwork in her own blacksmithing shop.
The combination of her reptile- and insect-friendly childhood and her time spent interring the dead made Elaine a very un-squeamish individual, and one with a clear understanding of the inevitable progression of the human body. And so when Bill announced that, when the time came, he wanted to be donated to science, she was instantly comfortable with the idea. Watching local TV one night, he saw a news item about the body farm, and he told Elaine “That’s where I want to go. I want to write it down and notarize it.”
This was two days before the accident.
That morning, they woke up at 4:45 as usual—Bill started work in San Antonio at 6 a.m.—but Elaine remembers him being out of sync. “He did say that he just couldn’t get it together.” It was in the forties that day, so he needed his leathers, but he took a long time finding his gear. And though the cold meant taking his Ultra Classic was the best idea (it blocked more wind), at the last minute he decided on his Softail. “Before we met, he had three wrecks on a red Softail just like that,” says Elaine. Then Bill rode off down the same winding route he’d taken every day for years.
Elaine watched the morning news with her coffee and saw that there’d been an accident on their road, way out in the country. “I was listening for the word ‘motorcycle’—and then I heard it. Crap, it’s him! I called his work: he hadn’t gotten there. I called again, and now it’s a quarter after six. I threw on clothes, no jacket—it was cold, but I didn’t care—and I raced over there.” The road was blocked by a fire truck, but the volunteer firefighters (her neighbors) told her the bike was red. She knew it was Bill. He’d run off the road. “We just really don’t know what happened,” Elaine says, “but he ended up flipping.” The helicopter had already transported him to the hospital, leaving the sheriff’s department there to survey the scene. They gave her Bill’s wallet, and the leathers they’d cut off him, and she cleared out his saddle bags “because he had made himself a special lunch the night before, something from Germany that he was used to eating”—he’d been stationed there early on in the Army—“and I got it out of his bag because it would’ve been no good.”
At the hospital, the trauma team was hard at work: on the surface, Bill had merely fractured a tooth and scraped his nose, but internally, the damage was much more serious. Because his neck had already been broken twice—once at seventeen, in a car accident, and fractured again in the military—Bill could only wear a lightweight helmet: a standard helmet would put too much pressure on his neck. And so he’d suffered extensive brain trauma and re-broken his neck, leaving him unconscious, in need of a breathing tube, and paralyzed from the throat down. “He was one of those few cases that would have had zero chance at recovery,” says Elaine. “So, you know, it sucked big-time.”
During that week, friends took turns being on call, sitting in the waiting room, rotating through visiting hours. “He didn’t think the guys liked him that much, because he thought he was so different,” Elaine says. “But he had friends that were there for him every single minute he was in the hospital. He was a hard character, but he really doesn’t know the effect he had on people.”
For Elaine, someone who had never witnessed her partner sleep through the night, “Those days were the calmest I’d ever seen him.” He was admitted on February 28 and never regained consciousness. On March 6, a decision was made, and Elaine left the hospital room as they took him off the respirator.
When they first met in person, on a date at a friend’s dairy farm, Bill’s hair hung to his shoulders, and Elaine can still go on and on about his black locks. “He had thick, thick hair, super-wavy and curly, and when it was wet, it was total ringlets. It was so pretty! He always kept it in a braid or tucked down his shirt in the back, because he didn’t want anybody to be able to grab it—he’s always thinking fight, right? It had to be wet for me to be able to braid it because it would puff. It was luxurious, man.” Bill let his hair grow throughout the four years they spent together, with the idea of donating it someday to make hairpieces for sick children. “When we ended up cutting it off, at the hospital, it was down to his butt crack! It was so thick, we had to snip a little bit at a time. They had to go get a bigger pair of scissors.” She gave his ponytail to Locks of Love.
Then, as happens, came the question of the body. Once they knew he would not recover, Elaine looked into donating Bill’s remains to a medical school—but, as is usually the case, they were unable to take him because he had died in an accident. So she made arrangements with FACTS, and on the day of his death they sent a pair of graduate students to pick the body up from the morgue.
“People know that he donated his body to science,” Elaine says. “Some know it was to FACTS, but they don’t know what that means—I don’t call it ‘the body farm’ because most people would not be able to deal with it. But Bill would never have wanted to be in a hole in the ground.” Respecting his contempt for traditional funerals, Elaine held a “memorial barbecue“ for Bill. “He’s not social, but he always wanted to have friends over for barbecue: he just grills and lets them talk with each other.” And since Bill was a Mason and a Shriner—he often wore his Shriner patch on his biker vest—she followed instructions and cremated his white sheepskin Masonic apron on the grill, sprinkling the ashes around their yard.
I ask Elaine how she can handle the idea of her fiancé being at the facility right now, the “details“ of it. She hasn’t had to handle the thought, she says, “because for some reason I’m able to block out the part where they’re actually doing the initial research. I know what it’s all about, but my brain doesn’t even focus on that side of it”—the body of someone she loves laid out to rot—“not even when I’m talking about it. I don’t think of him being outside in this situation, going through the steps we go through after death. I’m able to totally separate myself from that.” Instead, she tries to think about “what people might learn from him that will identify somebody or save somebody or whatever might come of it.”
She and her two sisters are all considering donating. The application sits on Elaine’s desk.
In the 2012 issue of Forensic Science International, an article entitled “Spatial Patterning of Vulture Scavenged Human Remains” appeared. It f
eatured computerized maps and tables of data, as well as a series of color photos taken outdoors, over a twenty-five-hour period, with a motion-sensitive game camera. The sequence of images went as follows:
December 26, 2009, 11:16 a.m.: A deceased woman’s fully fleshed body is laid out in a dry field, the belly extremely bloated, in stark contrast to the arms and breasts and legs, now withered. The head is turned over the right shoulder, facing the camera, but she remains anonymous, a thin black bar Photoshopped over her eyes. An American black vulture stands by the left leg, peering at the body.
12:06 p.m.: A swarm of vultures, over two dozen of them, have descended on the body. Only the distended belly is visible above the fray.
3:39 p.m.: The body, still covered in its outer casing of skin, is now deflated entirely, all viscera removed. The skull looks as if it’s been stripped, but the right hand, stretched above its head, is still mostly intact. A cluster of birds lingers.
The next day, 12:12p.m.: The body is finally de-fleshed, mostly skeleton, and in an entirely different position. Turned completely around by the frenzy of vultures, its head now rests at the opposite, right-hand edge of the frame, turned upright; its right arm bones are stretched out above the shoulder; its right leg is no longer visible. One bird remains at work on what little might be left inside the rib cage.
The article, the result of a FACTS study, was coauthored by Kate, her fellow researcher Michelle Hamilton, and Texas State geographer Alberto Giordano, who tracked the impact of vulture scavenging patterns on one human body over a seven-month period.
Things we know about New World vultures: They soar when the air heats up, sniffing out their meals from on high. Their heads can be as red as flayed skin (the turkey vulture), or as gray and cracked as dry earth (the black vulture). They’re literally repulsive: they urinate on themselves, vomit when threatened, and feed on carcasses. But as far as how they scavenge remains—and human remains in particular—our knowledge is only anecdotal, based on research done with pig cadavers. Using photography and GPS mapping to track even the smaller bones, this FACTS study provided new information that impacted forensic work in the vulture-friendly Southwest: the birds are capable of de-fleshing a human body in as little as five hours; they cause signature damage to the orbital bones (around the eyes) and the rib cage; they dramatically disturb the positioning of the body (within two more days, they would drag the subject out of the camera’s range).