Interest in this whole area started in the 1970s when the US anthropologist, Dr William Bass, kept being asked by the police to attend crime scenes to tell them how long a victim had been in place. He eventually said that it was incredibly hit-and-miss and it would make prediction much easier, and accurate, if he could observe real dead bodies decaying in natural surroundings. After much wrangling with local Baptists and other protestors, he was given a plot of woodland adjacent to the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, where he set up the ‘Facility’, popularly known as ‘The Body Farm’. This is a place where corpses are exposed to the elements and studied to see how the environment affects their decay. Enclosed by tall scavenger-proof fences and barbed wire, Bill Bass named it ‘Death’s Acre’ in his own memoirs, and it has since become one of the best-known plots in the world, particularly after being publicised by the author Patricia Cornwell in her novel, also called The Body Farm. I was an avid reader of her early books and would have given my back teeth to visit the place but, as it happened, I did not have to sacrifice my molars; the visit was handed to me on a plate.
To aid his studies, Dr Bass asked for corpses to be donated to science. These he would leave exposed in different conditions across the Facility and he and his students would make meticulous observations, hoping to refine what we know about the decomposition process. Imagine a situation in which police have been called to a corpse. In the real world, the body would most certainly not be laid out neatly, waiting to be retrieved. It would most likely be completely or partly buried; it may be hidden in vegetation, or perhaps submerged in water; it might be clothed or naked, bound and gagged, or even be dismembered, with the parts dumped in a variety of places. At the Facility, the donated bodies are used to simulate as many different kinds of disposal as possible. They are left out in a variety of, sometimes bizarre, conditions and their breakdown recorded in detail. If such scenarios are repeated sufficiently often, a database can be built up of what happens under specific conditions. And, since the Facility became famous, streams of PhD students have carried out various kinds of study on the corpses themselves, the soils under, over, and around them, and the insects which colonise them. Some have set up experiments in an attempt to examine the multitude of variables that might affect the nature and the rate of body decay.
I received an opportunity to visit the ‘Facility’ when, in 2005, I was asked to be the subject of a television documentary about my work. I was reluctant and, for months, refused to get involved. But the director, Maurice Melzak, the most quietly persistent man I have ever known, hit on the idea of placing part of the story in the Facility at Knoxville. He had literally pestered me, though very politely, to make a film about my work for many months. He patiently tolerated all my rejections until, one day, he asked if he could come to tea. I remember him sitting in my sunny conservatory asking, ‘Wouldn’t you like to have a chat with Bill Bass and have a look at all the work they are doing there?’ He had hit the right nerve. I wanted to go all right; I am too nosy to miss anything like that. After the slightly traumatic start to our relationship, he became one of my best friends.
I am not a good traveller and I detest the whole tedious process surrounding international airports. By the time we arrived in Knoxville, after a succession of three aeroplanes, endless immigration queues, shuffling, tripping over people’s over-large bags, and bawling babies, I wanted to scream. We had to run as fast as we could to make our last flight from Philadelphia to Knoxville.
We eventually arrived at Knoxville University and met up with Bill Bass and his colleagues. All were anthropology/archaeology academics and most seemed interested in bone – the way it fractured, shattered when shot, or was preserved in various scenarios. We did the rounds of departmental offices, politely nodding to various academics as they looked up and smiled the obligatory ‘hello’ before resuming work. One girl gave us a wonderful demonstration on how to determine the entry points of bullets, and to work out the kind of instrument matching various gaping holes in skulls. I thought her work was highly relevant to police investigations and she was a good teacher.
Bill Bass struck me as being a down-to-earth, cheery man. Born in 1928, he began his research career excavating Native American grave sites in the 1950s but has spent much of his life assisting federal and local police in identifying human remains. This is not easy: the American authorities have a great problem because of the sheer size of their country and the huge numbers of murders taking place. They will probably never know how many killings there are each year. They have several kinds and levels of policing, and it seems that many operate without support and help from the rest. The American system is very complicated to an outsider and, presumably, it is not easy to coordinate information; I have been told that there is often little cohesion or exchange between forces. Bill Bass has helped across the spectrum and the founding of the Facility in 1981 is among his crowning achievements.
On our approach to the Facility, I could feel the anticipation building up in me like a child who wakes early on Christmas morning. As we went through the heavily guarded gates, I took in a place that was cool and shaded, dominated by trees, with sparse greenery underfoot and definite pathways leading in several directions. At one edge, the ground was completely covered in kudzu vine, with green shapes formed from its relentless and suffocating growth. This plant was introduced from South-East Asia and is now considered to be a most noxious weed in the southern states of the US. It spreads, climbs, curls, and entwines over everything in its path, so that any obstacle eventually becomes a green ghost of itself.
But that was only one of the fascinating things to greet me as I walked through those gates. Almost immediately I was in an open area where corpses had been laid out, and they were all in various stages of decay. I was intrigued to pass bodies in different postures along the pathways. Some were partially covered, others wholly covered, and some just naked. It is chastening to realise how casual one can be when confronted with corpse after corpse. I was never shocked, even though some of the sights were worse than anything you would ever see in a horror movie. The only thing that struck me forcibly was the lack of colour compared to many of the dead I had seen in casework – here there was no blood; it had all disintegrated to common brown, along with the skin, hair, and nails. Only the fresh bodies seemed to be real.
The stages of a body’s decomposition have been used, over the years, for determining the ‘post-mortem interval’, or the length of time that has elapsed since a person’s life came to an end. The bodies bequeathed for decomposition studies are invariably of white, middle-aged, and elderly males, which, of course, means that there is an inbuilt bias in the sample of subjects being observed. Older people tend to have a greater need for medication and, of course, this might affect rates of decomposition. Black and Hispanic donors are rare, as are women, and I am not sure that the Facility has ever been donated a child. For whatever reason, black people, Hispanics, and women seem to be less enthusiastic about being exposed, colonised, and studied. To be really useful, there should be no bias in selection of corpses but, of course, you take what you can get. During my visit, I only saw one black corpse laid out in the woodland, and his story was rather sad. His family did not want to pay for his funeral and thought that donating him to Bill Bass was a useful solution. In another case, the individual had been so horrible in life that his family wanted to ‘punish’ him in death. I remember being grimly amused when told the details of his story but, in reality, it was sad for everyone concerned.
As we walked quietly along, one of the senior female academics said, ‘Oh, avoid the vine – it’s full of copperheads.’ I had heard the name before and assumed they were butterflies. Wrong: the copperhead is one of the pit vipers and, although its bite rarely causes death in adults, the effects are very nasty indeed. One amazing fact I learned about these snakes is that, in the absence of a mate, a female can produce live young without sperm. Her egg cell will divide twice to make four cells, and two of th
ese join to make an embryo. So virgin birth exists even in the vertebrates as well as invertebrates! I might never have come across that if I had not visited Knoxville, but I was to learn even more about the menagerie of nasties in ‘death’s acre’.
I had noticed that all the people from the university carried long sticks. I later found out that these were for knocking down webs of the brown recluse spider. These spiders are venomous and terrifying to most Americans, and their bites have serious consequences. Textbooks say that they are not as dangerous as people think. Tell that to someone who has to work surrounded by them. I have three fears which, I am sure, I share with many others – heights, spiders, and snakes, and two of the three were all around me. I was not a bit worried about the bloated bellies bursting with maggots; or the eyes and nostrils being so stuffed with fly eggs that they looked as though they were filled with cotton wool; or the smells; or empty eye sockets, gaping mandibles, and hair slipping away from the scalps. But I was certainly anxious that I might have a close encounter with the wildlife.
Neither the spiders nor the snakes got me but, ironically, an innocent-looking plant certainly did. I was wearing thin, cotton, cropped trousers and, back at the hotel, I noticed red spots on my legs. They were as itchy as flea bites but sore too, and I could not leave them alone. I thought I might have picked up jiggers, a red mite whose larval stages digests holes into the skin and sucks up the resulting ‘soup’. But no, it was confirmed by a local to be poison ivy (Toxicodendron radicans). That night was one of the most miserable of my life and, at about 3:00am, I tore off my nightclothes to reveal running sores on my legs – I had been ripping at them with my nails all night. Instinctively, I ran a hot bath and scrubbed the agonising, burning skin frantically with a nailbrush and shower gel, then put my legs under the cold tap. After that drastic treatment, and dabbing with calamine lotion, my legs felt much better almost immediately. I later learned that the culprit in the plant is an oil (urushiol) that can stick to skin and clothing and, as soon as the oil is removed, the skin can heal. There is a saying that probably every American child knows: ‘If the leaves are three, let it be’. Poison ivy has three leaves on the end of its stems. I will never forget it, and I have the scars to prove it.
We were back at the Facility the next day to film a final year PhD student and chat about her research over one of her corpses. The one which interested us that morning had been fresh and very attractive to the kinds of flies that come early in the succession of scavengers and feeders of flesh. The student was studying a succession of fly communities in an attempt to catalogue the sequence exploiting the rotting meat. It usually starts with bluebottles such as Calliphora vomitoria, and greenbottles such as Lucilia sericata. Of course, different species are involved in different parts of the world, although in a great many places, bluebottles and greenbottles seem to be very common pioneers on a fresh corpse. They can find a body within minutes of it being laid out and the females immediately start laying eggs in every exposed orifice. They are programmed to go into dark places and, sometimes, even make it right up into the higher nasal passages.
All scientific knowledge is incremental but, once the documentary was complete, I came away with a clear sense that, as pioneering and exciting as the Knoxville Body Farm was, it could only ever be one component of our quest to understand what happens when a body decays. One site in one climatic regime, on one kind of soil, in one kind of woodland, was never going to result in an all-embracing model for decomposition of the human body. That is why, since the original Facility started up in Tennessee, six others have been established in the United States, one in North Carolina, Illinois, Colorado and Florida, and two in Texas. There is also one in Australia, just outside Sydney. Scientists in the UK are trying to get one established too, but there are always people resistant to such ventures. At least the existing ones now offer different ecological conditions – different temperatures, humidity, soils, microbes, and scavengers.
It is going to be a very long time before any truly useful predictive models can be constructed. But body farms have been a helpful tool in advancing some of our understanding of human decomposition, even though we must always add caveats to the results. For years and years, scientists and their students in the UK, and other parts of Europe, have been using pigs as analogues for human corpses in body-decay studies. The decomposition of a pig is interesting to watch and, again, there are always differences between individual animals, but I have always doubted the validity of using a pig’s corpse as a substitute for a human one. They appear to be similar to us in many ways and, apparently, we even taste like them when cooked, but one of the barriers to decomposition processes is skin … and pig skin is much thicker and tougher than our own. What is more, pigs generally have more subcutaneous fat.
These differences affect the way that scavengers and microbial populations can influence the early stages in the decay process. Like others, I have buried pigs in various places in an attempt to explain certain events; but I have only done this in relation to specific cases when trying to recreate a sequence of known events, in a known soil and at known temperatures. This work was enlightening and definitely worthwhile for one particular case. I was able to prove that a murder victim buried in a fairly acidic clayey woodland soil on Christmas Eve would, in most cases, lie undiscovered by dogs and foxes until April. By the usual technique of identifying the largest (oldest) maggots on the corpse, the original entomologist on the case had claimed that the victim had died in February; but police intelligence told investigators otherwise. I was asked if I could test the results.
I used three pigs that had been freshly killed for veterinary research, provided by my ebullient Irish friend Helen O’Hare, who was reading veterinary science at Cambridge, and I will never forget that cold, dark Christmas Eve when Helen and I, helped by a group of enthusiastic police officers, buried the still-warm pigs at the crime scene. The findings of this experiment suggested that, indeed, the victim could have been buried on Christmas Eve. I presented a theory involving soil effects and published the findings with the King’s College entomologist as co-author. That paper seems to have become a classic and is frequently cited. There are many published studies of buried pigs that, in my opinion, have little hope of being truly useful. Experiments need to be carried out within the context of specific investigations as this one was. We managed to glean a great deal from that simple experiment, but it involved my visiting the buried pigs every week for months, and taking soil and air temperatures continually with a thermometer linked up to a computer.
It would certainly be useful to be able to construct a robust predictive model for the way human corpses break down. But there are so many factors influencing the phenomenon that such a useful model is probably a long way off. There are just too many imponderables and broad rules become impossible to apply. I feel rather uncomfortable, therefore, when I read a description of a corpse as being in the ‘putrefaction stage’ or in the ‘bloated stage’. Some corpses bloat while they are in the putrefaction stage, but some never bloat at all. There have been many clever techniques applied to the estimation of post-mortem interval, and most of these involve observing sequences of changes in body tissues and fluids. One technique involves the chemical analysis of the vitreous humour in the eye, others examine assemblages of amino acids, fatty acids, volatile organic compounds, or ammonia, uric acid, lactate, and many other compounds generated after certain time intervals. A good deal of information has certainly been derived from the body farms but what I find most interesting is the utter variability of it all. Whatever else we might find out about the processes our bodies go through after we die, death itself is the only absolute biological certainty.
Some years after my visit to Knoxville, the director Maurice Melzak became seriously ill – and, for a while, between us, David and I nursed him as he faded. The specialist cancer hospital was close to our home and we took him there, bringing him home most nights, wrapping him in warm domesticity and comfort
ed by our black cat, Maudie. He was only 63 when he succumbed to that most pernicious disease, and I miss him even now. He was an inventive, good man, in love with the natural world. I grew to love him too, and his rather eccentric manner.
My trip to the Facility had given me a friend, but it also gave me a greater insight into how little we know, and how much we have yet to discover about what happens to our bodies after we die. As mentioned, the possibilities, from putrefaction to mummification, are vast; and, as if to prove it, one particular story sticks in the mind, possibly because it happened in Wales, so close to where I was born.
There was a family whose lives centred around the pub that they ran, a pub that had been in their family for a very long time, and a place that was the centre of everything in that small Welsh village: a meeting point, a social spot, a place of celebrations and commiserations. It sat alongside the family home and an outhouse which had a mezzanine floor, but was mostly used for storing crates and barrels on the ground floor. For years the father and mother of this particular family had run it together and, eventually, they shared the duties with their son and daughter-in-law, a welcome addition to the business. Then the wife went missing and everything changed.
People go missing all the time and, in any given year in the UK, there might be a quarter of a million missing persons reports filed with the police. Almost all of these people will be found again, most resurfacing in their own lives without the drama of police and urgent searches. But there will always be cases of people who walk out of their lives, or vanish under other circumstances, never to be seen again.
When his wife disappeared, the publican called the police and they went through the motions, searching high and low. Friends and family, even distant relations, were contacted in the vain hope that she might have been seen. But all across Wales, and out into the broader world, the story was the same: no one had seen her. She had truly vanished without a trace. The husband said that he was convinced she had gone abroad because they had not been ‘getting on’, and that he just had to accept it. Years went by and there was never any sign of her. She seemed to have just disappeared. But there were those in the village who never really believed him, and there was always a cloak of suspicion wrapped around this man. Many were convinced he had ‘done away’ with her, but there was no proof; searches came to an end, interest eventually faded, and life went on as before. The memory of the missing landlady also faded and people, including the publican and his son, just carried on with their busy lives.
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