Death's Acre: Inside The Legendary Forensic Lab The Body Farm by Bill Bass (chrome ebook reader .TXT) 📗

and gather insects from beneath them. Then he parked himself on a stool for hours every day and watched what happened.

What he saw first, with each of his four experimental subjects, was a profusion of blowflies. The warm-weather bodies, like 1-81, began attracting blowflies by the hundreds within a matter of minutes. Blood triggered a feeding frenzy like nothing he could have imagined: Sitting just a foot or two away from a bloody body, Bill would soon find even himself overrun with flies, seeking any moist bodily fluids to feed on, any dark, damp orifices (including Bill’s nostrils) to lay their eggs in. He quickly learned to wrap netting around his head to keep the flies out of his eyes, nose, mouth, and ears.

On a warm day it took only a matter of hours for the nose, mouth, and eyes to be filled with grainy, yellowish-white masses of fly eggs. One female blowfly can lay hundreds of eggs at a time, and there were literally thousands of pregnant females swarming around each body after its arrival. In the heat of May and June—the months when 1-81 and 2-81 were placed in the research enclosure—those clumps of eggs hatched into thousands of maggots in as little as four to six hours.

But the flies weren’t the only bugs to flock to a fresh body. Yellow-jackets and wasps showed up within the first minutes to hours too. Some of them fed on the body itself, Bill noticed; others snagged flies on the wing, carried them off, and decapitated them with one swift bite of their jaws. Still others feasted on the masses of fly eggs or the tender young maggots hatching in the body’s openings.

As the maggot population exploded, Bill noticed carrion beetles arriving to feed not just on the carrion but on the maggots as well. Like a wasp beheading a fly, a beetle would clamp its powerful jaws on a wriggling victim and cut it cleanly in two. Bill described some of these life-and-death struggles for me in epic terms; I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a student so thoroughly immersed in a research project. “This is the food chain in action,” he told me excitedly one day. “This isn’t just some happenstance occurrence; it’s an orderly sequence, it’s something we can interpret and use forensically.”

Bill’s research was a breath of fresh air for the field of anthropology, but not for his home life. After a day parked on his stool, surrounded by bodies and buzzing insects—many of which would light on him after feeding on corpses, and some of which would even lay eggs on him—he’d go home with the reek of decomp on his clothes, his skin, his hair. After the first day or two Bill’s wife, Karleen, issued strict orders: He was to strip in the garage, put his clothes straight in the washer, and jump into the shower immediately. Then, and only then, was he permitted to approach her.

Early in the study—just a matter of days into it—Bill and I were speculating about how far away the flies could smell the bodies, and whether the same flies were coming back day after day to feed on them. That’s when we got the idea of marking the flies with orange paint and trying to track them.

Using the net with which he gathered specimens every day, Bill caught five blowflies buzzing around corpse 1-81. He brought them back to my office in the department and painted the thorax of each one with UT orange so they’d be easy to spot in a swarm. When we took the marked flies outside and released them, they took off, seemingly at random. The next day at the Body Farm, though, Bill netted three of the five marked flies.

ON FEBRUARY 11, 1982, nine months after the study began, Bill presented his results at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences in Orlando, Florida. The room, a large banquet room in a big Hyatt Hotel, was fairly crowded as Bill got up. Within minutes, though, as he began projecting the 35mm slides he’d taken at frequent intervals during the study, people began to get up and leave the room. Were Bill’s slides—the first images we’d shown of human bodies decomposing at the research facility—too disturbing for even seasoned forensic scientists to stomach?

Another few minutes passed, and the people who had left the room began returning—accompanied by throngs of others, summoned from other presentations scheduled simultaneously with Bill’s. “You’ve got to come see this” was the message that spread like wildfire through the Hyatt’s meeting rooms that day.

Bill went on to publish his results in the Journal of Forensic Sciences that fall, and that article, “Insect Activity and Its Relationship to Decay Rates of Human Cadavers in East Tennessee,” became one of the most cited, most reprinted articles in the journal’s history. In fact, in a 1998 brochure highlighting the fiftieth anniversary of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences, Bill’s talk got mentioned as one of the organization’s high points—“the first of the ‘bug’ papers,” the brochure called it.

As one of the rising young stars of forensic anthropology, Bill took some interesting jobs after graduate school, including positions with a forensic consulting laboratory in Louisiana and with the medical examiner in Syracuse, New York. His most unusual job, though, is his current one: He’s the staff forensic anthropologist for the Armed Forces medical examiner, whose office is responsible for identifying and, when needed, autopsying the bodies of military personnel, diplomats, spies, space shuttle astronauts, and anyone else sent by the federal government—or nearby state and local governments—for examination.

IN APRIL OF 1986, while he was still working for the Louisiana forensic lab, Bill was asked by police in Falls Church, Virginia, to examine evidence gathered from a death scene a year and a half earlier.

In August of 1984, Lisa Rinker, an eighteen-year-old girl, had left her house one Sunday night around 10:30, telling her mother she was going for a walk around