Death's Acre

by William M. Bass

  The man who had sold the junker, it turns out, had served in the Pacific theater during World War II. While walking along a beach in Okinawa, he had stumbled across a crashed Japanese Zero; inside was the skull of the dead pilot, which our patriotic GI brought home as a war trophy. (In ensuing years I would encounter more World War II trophy skulls, almost all of them Japanese, almost none of them European in origin—an interesting commentary on our attitudes toward the dead from different cultures.) At some point between 1945 and 1973, the base of the Japanese pilot’s skull—his foramen magnum—was knocked out so a light bulb could be inserted into his cranium: The dead warrior had been reduced to a mere Halloween decoration.

  Skull number two was a Native American skull, also dry, dusty, and far older than our floater. The search for the missing skull would have to continue. Meanwhile, the unsolved mystery was starting to cause a stink—literally. Most cities have morgues where bodies can be kept in cold storage until they’re identified and either claimed by relatives or buried by the local government. That’s not the case in many small, rural towns—like Kingston, the seat of Roane County, where our floater had surfaced once enough decomposition gases had built up in his abdomen to make him buoyant. The deputy didn’t want to take the smelly body back to Kingston with him, so I helpfully agreed to keep it at the university. The problem was, I didn’t have a cooler, either. With the weekend now at hand, I wrapped the body in plastic, sealed it the best I could, and stashed it in the mop closet of a rest room near my office. I’m not sure how many people were in the building when the janitor came in to mop the halls that weekend, but I expect everyone who was—and probably a few passing motorists outside—heard him when he opened the stinky bundle in his closet and saw what was inside. On Monday morning he made it crystal clear—in language equally plain to a scientist or a sailor—that, department head or not, I was never, under any circumstances whatsoever, to store rotting bodies in his mop closet or anywhere else in his building. One single infraction, I gathered, might result in the subsequent discovery of my own headless body in very short order.

  Ever quick to take a hint, I sought help from my boss, the college dean. I explained our little dilemma, which he comprehended with swiftness and equanimity. Opening a campus telephone directory, he thumbed through the listings for the College of Agriculture, made a brief call, and solved my problem: The ag school had several farms outside of town, and on one of those farms stood a vacant building, a sow barn, which was basically an open, three-sided shed. The farm’s only neighbors were the prisoners in a county correctional facility, and they probably had better things to complain about than an occasional whiff of decomposition. It seemed like a good place to store bodies temporarily until we could clean and study the bones.

  It worked fine for several years. Gradually, though, I started noticing something odd: Occasionally I would find a body in a slightly different position than the way I had left it a day or two before. I also noticed footprints and other signs of uninvited human visitors. Eventually we figured out what was happening. The convicts next door, working outdoors on the grounds of the penal farm, had discovered the sow barn’s gruesome new residents and had taken to sightseeing. So far nothing had been removed, but I didn’t want to take the chance of losing a crucial piece of forensic evidence—a skull containing a telltale bullet, for instance.

  As I was mulling over the need for a new storage facility, along came Colonel Shy, telling me that merely warehousing bodies wasn’t enough. I needed to do more than just remove the rotting flesh from bodies; I needed to study it, observe it, learn everything it could tell me about death and decomposition. I couldn’t do that kind of research in a musty sow barn, especially not one located forty-five minutes away from my offices and labs. I needed someplace bigger, somewhere closer.

  It was my sixth year as head of the anthropology department. By now our physical-anthropology faculty had expanded from one to three; our curriculum had grown from undergraduate courses to a full-fledged Ph.D. program; and we were beginning to attract some of the brightest and best graduate students in the nation. We had, in short, the resources to do something that had never been done before: to establish a research facility unlike any other in the world—a research facility that would systematically study human bodies by the dozens, ultimately by the hundreds; a laboratory where nature would be allowed to take its course with mortal flesh, under a variety of experimental conditions. At every step, scientists and graduate students would observe the processes, document variables such as temperature and humidity, and chart the timing of human decomposition. We would pick up where Sung Tz’u had left off seven centuries before.

  The idea was simple; the implications—and the possible complications—were profound. By most cultural standards and values, such research could appear gruesome, disrespectful, even shocking. Yet the chancellor never questioned the wisdom of it; fortunately, he had watched and admired the growth of our program up until now, so he was unhesitating in his support. Once again it was a simple matter of a phone call.

  Just across the Tennessee River from the main campus—barely a long punt from the football stadium, as the pigskin flies—was an acre or so of surplus land behind the UT Medical Center. For years the hospital’s trash had been burned there, and it wasn’t exactly prime real estate, but I’m not sure I’d have felt at home if it had been.

  All my life I’ve scrimped and scratched and made do with very little. Growing up during the Great Depression, I saw how carefully my mother stretched the insurance money we got after my father’s death. Excavating Indian graves on the plains of South Dakota, I fed crews of hungry college students on government-surplus peanut butter and berthed them on surplus Army cots. Moving into dilapidated quarters huddled beneath the football stadium—the windows looked out onto a maze of steel girders supporting the upper deck—I repainted peeling walls and refinished ancient dormitory desks and repaired hand-me-down filing cabinets. So when the chancellor offered me an acre of nearby land—even junky land—just five minutes from my office, I was grateful to get it: death’s own acre, you could call it.

  In the fall of 1980 my students and I set to work. We cleared trees and brush from the center of the site; we laid a gravel driveway so trucks could pull in with bodies and equipment; we ran a water line and electricity from the hospital. Working mostly by hand, we cleared and leveled a pad sixteen feet square beneath the shelter of the trees, then spread several inches of gravel. Once we had the sixteen-by-sixteen pad ready, I had a concrete truck come pour a load of concrete; together, the students and I smoothed its surface. Atop this slab we built a small frame building, simple and windowless, roofed with cheap asphalt shingles. The building would give us a place to store tools like shovels and rakes, instruments like scalpels and surgical scissors, and supplies like latex gloves and body bags. It ran the full width of the pad but extended only six feet deep. That left us a front porch, so to speak, measuring ten feet by sixteen feet. On it we could easily lay up to a dozen bodies for our decomposition studies.

  The sow-barn visits by the convicts from the penal farm had shown me that security was important, so I decided we could afford, just barely, to fence our little square research area.

  People who know about the Body Farm today seem to think it sprang into existence fully formed, but that’s not the way it happened at all. It came from humble beginnings, and it progressed by small steps. The questions we hoped to answer were almost laughably elementary: At what point does the arm fall off? What causes that greasy black stain under decomposed bodies, and when? When do the teeth fall out of the skull? How long before a corpse becomes a skeleton? To find answers, we first had to find research subjects. We had the farm; now we needed the bodies. I sent letters to the medical examiners and funeral directors in Tennessee’s ninety-five counties.

  Finally, one Thursday evening in the middle of May, 1981, I drove a covered pickup truck to Burris Funeral Home in Cross
ville, Tennessee—an hour west of Knoxville, on the Cumberland Plateau—and picked up our first donated research subject. The corpse was a seventy-three-year-old white male who had suffered from chronic alcoholism, emphysema, and heart disease. We knew his identity—the body had been donated by his daughter—but for the sake of confidentiality, we assigned him a unique identifying number. In life he’d had a family and a name; in death he would be known simply as “1-81”: the anthropology department’s first donated body of 1981. (My forensic cases were identified by the same pair of numbers, but in reverse order: The first criminal case of that same year was case 81-1. The system wasn’t fancy, but it worked.)

  The following morning a handful of graduate students and I laid corpse 1-81 on the concrete pad we had poured a few months before. Someone took pictures. To protect 1-81 from rodents and other predators small enough to squeeze through the fence, we covered the body with a wooden framework screened with wire mesh. One by one we filed out of the chain-link enclosure. I closed the gate and snapped a padlock onto the latch. A fly brushed past my ear. The Anthropology Research Facility was embarking on its first research project. Death’s acre was open for business. The Body Farm was born.

  CHAPTER 8

  A Bug for Research

  ON A WARM, sunny day in 1981, as corpse 1-81 lay decomposing at my newly commissioned Anthropology Research Facility, almost visible across the river from the University of Tennessee’s anthropology department, Bill Rodriguez and I stepped out from beneath Neyland Stadium. In Bill’s hand was a glass vial containing five flies, and on the back of each fly was a dot of orange paint, bright as the jersey of a UT lineman.

  Standing on the steps in the sunshine, Bill unscrewed the top of the vial. Within seconds all five flies were gone. We looked at each other and grinned. “Let me know what happens next,” I said.

  As it turned out, Bill was about to embark on a study that would help spur a revolution in forensic science, becoming one of the most heavily cited anthropology papers of all time. I didn’t know that at the time, though. At the time, all I knew was that there was a lot yet to learn about bodies and bugs.

  I HAD MOVED to Knoxville ten years earlier, in 1971. I’d spent the sixties teaching in Kansas and excavating Indian graves in South Dakota; between the ancient Indian skeletons and the recent murder victims brought to me by local deputies and KBI agents, I’d seen somewhere in the neighborhood of five thousand bodies prior to coming to Tennessee. By then I figured I’d seen just about everything. I figured wrong.

  During my first year in Knoxville, local and state police officers brought me around a dozen bodies to examine, and in at least half of those cases I found myself face-to-face with something I knew very little about: maggots.

  Maggots are the small, wormlike larvae that hatch from the eggs laid on a body by flies—usually, but not always, the iridescent green insects called blowflies. When maggots first hatch, they’re smaller than grains of rice; by the time they mature, they’re roughly as long and fat as pieces of macaroni. They get that big by feasting on decaying flesh. In Tennessee they do, anyhow; in Kansas, not so much.

  Kansas has a pretty dry climate, so bodies often mummify—dry out and shrivel up—before the maggots get to them. In Tennessee, on the other hand, there’s twice as much rainfall and plenty of humidity between rainstorms; in summer you can almost steam broccoli just by setting it outdoors. All that moisture, plus all the shade from the Tennessee woods—there’s not much prairie east of the Mississippi—tends to keep a corpse’s flesh soft and easy for maggots to chew. It didn’t take me long in Tennessee to learn to open body bags outdoors and on the ground, lest the morgue be overrun by maggots and flies.

  I’ve had a strange, symbiotic relationship with flies ever since I was a small child. Shortly after my father’s death, my mother and I moved in with her parents. We lived on a farm, and where there are farm animals, there are flies. My mother, who hated flies, made me a business proposition: for every ten dead flies I brought her, she’d pay me a bounty of one cent.

  With an incentive like that, I became a six-year-old fly-killing machine. When Grandpa came in from milking the cows, I noticed, flies would flock to any drops of milk that sloshed out of his pail. Swat—seven with one blow! Before long I learned to cajole my grandmother for cups of milk, so I didn’t have to wait for milking time or Grandpa’s spills. The fly carcasses piled up, and so did my pennies.

  Ever since, though—and as a scientist, I’m embarrassed to admit this—I have despised flies. I hate rattlesnakes more, but rattlesnakes are a lot less common, a lot more shy, and a lot easier to kill. As I’d learned in South Dakota, all it takes to decapitate a prairie rattler is a steady hand and a razor-sharp shovel. Flies, though, are relentless and almost infinite in number. Lay a fresh, bloody body out of the ground on a summer day, and within minutes the air will be thick with swarming blowflies. Swing a shovel like a giant flyswatter and you can probably knock down a few on the wing, but in the time it would take to do that, dozens of reinforcements will arrive.

  Yet, watching the flies swarm, I knew there must be something that they and other insects could teach us. There had to be some way they could deepen our understanding of death—particularly the postmortem interval, or time since death.

  I certainly wasn’t the first scientist to notice how swiftly flies can sniff out the odor of death, how unerringly they are drawn to the scent of blood. Way back in A.D. 1247, the Chinese investigator Sung Tz’u recounted a murder case in his pioneering forensic handbook The Washing Away of Wrongs:

  There was an inquest on the body of a man killed by the roadside. . . . The inquest official familiarized himself with the victim’s neighborhood. He thereupon sent a number of men separately to go and make proclamations. The nearest neighbors were to bring all their sickles, handing them in for examination. If anyone concealed a sickle, they would be considered the murderer and would be thoroughly investigated. In a short time, seventy or eighty sickles were brought in. The inquest official had them laid on the ground. At the time the weather was hot. The flies flew about and gathered on one sickle. The inquest official pointed to the sickle and said, “Whose is this?” One man abruptly acknowledged it. . . . Then he was interrogated but still would not confess. The inquest official indicated the sickle and had the man look at it himself. “The sickles of the others in the crowd had no flies. Now, you have killed a man. There are traces of blood on the sickle, so the flies gather. How can this be concealed?” The bystanders were speechless, sighing with admiration. The murderer knocked his head on the ground and confessed.*

  Six centuries later, in the 1890s, a New York entomologist named Murray G. Motter examined 150 bodies that were exhumed when a cemetery was relocated. Motter noticed that the bodies had fed and housed numerous species of insects, at various developmental stages (larvae, pupae, adults); ultimately some of the insects became entombed in the very corpses that had nourished them—an irony that probably went unnoticed and unappreciated by the bugs themselves.

  Motter published his insect inventory in the Journal of the New York Entomological Society under the remarkably thorough title “A Contribution to the Study of the Fauna of the Grave: A Study of One Hundred and Fifty Disinterments, With Some Additional Experimental Observations.” The study did not inspire other entomologists to follow in Motter’s macabre footsteps, at least not with human subjects. However, sixty years later another entomologist—this one in Knoxville, by curious coincidence—made a detailed study of insect activity in dog carcasses. The Knoxville entomologist’s name was H. B. Reed; the question that interested him was not forensic but ecological: How does a corpse alter the environment in the small ecosystem where it decays? To find out, over a one-year period Reed set out forty-five carcasses of dogs that had been euthanized by the local pound. He set out one every two weeks during hot weather; during cooler spells he lengthened that interval.

  Reed made several intrig
uing observations. Not surprisingly, he found that the total number of insects on, in, and around the carcasses was greatest during the summer; however, several individual species experienced their population peaks during cooler weather. The woods were buggier, he noted, but decomposition proceeded faster in open areas—possibly because of higher temperatures, he theorized. Perhaps most important, Reed meticulously documented all the species of insects, both adults and larvae, associated with the dog carcasses.

  In the 1960s a South Carolina entomologist named Jerry Payne made a similar study using baby pig carcasses. Payne’s major contribution was his careful record of insect succession: that is, he noted who showed up, and when, to march in the insect parade.

  Meanwhile, during my summers in South Dakota in the sixties, I had noticed an interesting phenomenon in the Arikara Indian remains I was excavating. Some of the graves contained numerous pupal casings—the hard, hollow shells in which maggots encase themselves for their metamorphosis into adult flies; other graves, though, contained few casings or none at all. Eventually the light dawned: During winter, flies are grounded by the cold; in fact, anytime the temperature drops below 50 degrees Fahrenheit, flies stop flying. The Arikara graves that contained no pupal casings held people who died and were buried during cooler seasons of the year. It fascinated me at the time to realize that we could figure out, two hundred years after it happened, what season of the year an Arikara warrior had fallen in battle. By the time I established the Body Farm, I knew that if I could get a graduate student interested in studying insect activity in corpses, we’d probably figure out ways to deduce a lot more than just the particular season in which a person had died.