The University of Tennessee Body Farm: Unveiling the Secrets of Decomposition

Introduction

The University of Tennessee Anthropological Research Facility, more commonly known as the Body Farm, stands as a pioneering institution dedicated to the study of human decomposition. Founded by Dr. William Bass, this unique research facility has revolutionized forensic science by providing invaluable insights into the processes that occur after death. Through meticulous observation and experimentation, researchers at the Body Farm have significantly advanced our understanding of postmortem changes, aiding law enforcement and forensic experts in their investigations.

The Genesis of the Body Farm

Professor Emeritus William Bass, a distinguished figure in forensic anthropology, established the world’s first laboratory for decomposition research at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, in 1981. Before his historic establishment, Bass worked for the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., focusing on cataloging skeletal remains. Additionally, Bass worked as an anthropologist in South Dakota and also served as a professor at the University of Kansas and the University of Nebraska. His vision was born out of a need to bridge the gap between anthropological knowledge and the practical demands of criminal investigations. Prior to the establishment of the Body Farm, limited research existed on the various stages of human decomposition, hindering the ability of forensic experts to accurately determine time of death and identify remains.

In 1966, while teaching at the University of Kansas, Dr. Bass got the first idea for what would eventually become the Body Farm when he was asked if it was possible to determine the time of death of a decomposed cow. He determined that additional research was needed to accomplish this, and suggested that such knowledge could be determined by allowing a deceased cow to decompose in a field and observing the process. Bass further realized that additional research was needed into the field of human decomposition when he was summoned in December of 1977 to examine what was first assumed to be a murder victim buried on top of the grave of a Confederate soldier in Franklin, Tennessee who had been killed at the Battle of Nashville in 1864. As the body was relatively intact and still contained most of its flesh, Dr. Bass initially estimated that the body had been dead for less than one year, but examination of the clothing determined that the body was actually that of the soldier buried in the grave.

A Unique Research Environment

The Body Farm is located a few miles from downtown Knoxville, Tennessee, United States, behind the University of Tennessee Medical Center, and is part of the Forensic Anthropology Center, which was established by Dr. It consists of a 2.5-acre (10,000 m2) wooded plot, surrounded by a razor wire fence. The outdoor site consists of 2.5 shady acres where human donors are buried, partially covered, or left out in the elements so forensic anthropologists can study how bodies break down and decompose under different conditions. At the UT Knoxville facility, researchers use donated human remains to study the effects and timetable of decomposition on the human body in various environments on the 2-acre compound. The facility was established in 1981 with the first body donor. The Anthropology Research Facility was established in 1981 by anthropologist William Bass to study human decomposition and insect activity. It began with a single donated body and today has more than 150 human donors placed in various scenarios on the grounds. The bodies are exposed in a number of ways in order to provide insights into decomposition under varying conditions. The Anthropological Research Facility, the first body farm created, was founded by Bass to generate information about what a corpse experiences when exposed to various experimental conditions.

To duplicate real-life scenarios, donors are left to decompose in various states-partially clothed, wrapped in plastic, placed in a car trunk, or in a garbage bin. Here, human remains lay openly exposed to the elements. Some bodies are covered with plastic or clothing, some are naked, some are buried, some hang from scaffolds or are in the trunks of cars.

The facility serves as a primary research facility for doctoral students in forensic sciences and as a training site for investigators, law-enforcement officers, morticians, dental experts, emergency medical personnel, decontamination experts, and anthropologists.

Research Focus and Methodologies

Research at the Body Farm has helped forensic anthropologists to document the decomposition of the human body in relation to weather, water, indoor versus outdoor settings, clothing, insects, small mammals, and other variables. Forensic researchers at UT Knoxville’s famous Anthropological Research Facility, popularly known as the “Body Farm,” have made headlines for decades in their discoveries of what happens to human bodies after death.

The goal is always the same: to simulate crime scenes so that students can document decay and learn to identify future victims (or the time and circumstances of their death). Students at the Body Farm initially determine the age, sex, ancestry and stature of unknown victims and donors. Studying the rate of decay helps forensic scientists determine when a person died.

"This study was part of a larger project where we were investing environmental changes in the vicinity of a decomposing body,” said Jennifer DeBruyn, co-author and professor in the Department of Biosystems and Soil Science (BESS). “Our bodies are concentrated in nutrients and other elements compared to the surrounding environment. The next most abundant elements in the body are sulfur, phosphorus, sodium, and potassium. “What we were surprised to see was that we also had higher concentrations of calcium and magnesium than what we would expect from the input of the body alone,” said Stacy Taylor, lead author on the study and a postdoctoral researcher in DeBruyn’s lab. “While we do have calcium (Ca) and magnesium (Mg) in our bodies, much of it is tied up in our bones, which would take years or decades break down. “Again, the concentrations in soil were higher than what we would expect based on just what would be coming from the body,” said Taylor. “This study was an important documentation of the types of elements released during human decomposition and how they changed over time,” said DeBruyn.

With so many forces influencing the decomposition of the human body, it is sometimes difficult-if not impossible-to determine time of death or identity. The information gathered by studying how the body decomposes because of digestive enzymes, bacteria, and insects is most often used to determine the postmortem interval. Knowing the length of time that has passed since death helps a great deal when attempting to reconcile the information gathered at the crime scene with alibis given by possible suspects.

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Entomology's Role

Bill Rodriguez, one of Bass' graduate students, wrote his doctoral thesis on information gathered from this facility. During the facility's first year of operation, Rodriguez conducted a study where each day he observed and notated the presence of various insects on human cadavers and other information like changes in the body, and the timing of each of these. Rodriguez noticed that blow-flies immediately swarmed a carcass in study and began mass-producing eggs all over its orifices. However, other insects were also attracted to the freshly rotting body including yellow jackets and wasps. Once the blow-fly eggs turned into maggots, beetles too began assembling on the body not only to feed on the body itself but on its co-inhabitants, the maggots, as well. In another case in 1981, a man named Alan Gell was granted an appeal to his earlier conviction for the murder of another man, Allen Ray Jenkins. Gell's attorney, Mary Pollard, needed assistance finding the postmortem interval on the victim in order to clear her client. With this, she turned to Murray Marks, one of the forensic anthropologists who worked at the Body Farm under Bass.

Stages of Decomposition

In addition, the four stages of decomposition were systemically characterized in a scientific, orderly manner beginning with "1-81". During the fresh stage, maggots fed and multiplied on the corpse. The skin of the upper jaw and mandible stretch into what looks like a smile, and the hair and skin are still securely attached to the skull. After a couple days, the body enters the bloat stage, which is caused by the gases that the bacteria in the intestines give off as they feed on the dead tissues. Next, the body slowly decomposes in the decay stage until it finally reaches the dry stage in which the body has basically become a skeleton. About a month passed before "1-81" entered the dry stage.

Training and Education

The Body Farm serves not only as a research facility but also as a training ground for professionals in various fields. You must be a student at the university to participate in studies at the Body Farm, specifically a student in the biological anthropology department, where forensic anthropology courses are concentrated. There are undergraduate and postgraduate studies available to forensic science students and anthropology majors. The University of Tennessee facility offers short courses for the general public who are over 18 years of age that focus on recovery methods, field methods and human osteology. Some forensic anthropologists are employed in forensic science facilities where they work closely with medical examiners or forensic pathologists. The majority of graduates work in research and are employed at colleges and forensic facilities.

The FBI Laboratory began sending personnel to the Body Farm two decades ago to better understand the intricacies of investigating outdoor crime scenes. FBI Evidence Response Team members receive training each year at the Forensic Anthropology Center in Knoxville, Tennessee. Training this month marks 20 years for the unique partnership. During the five-day class, students learn and apply a rigid methodology of probing the ground to find clandestine graves and then unearthing the remains and documenting everything, including clues and potential evidence that might be buried in the surrounding soil. The goal is to collect as complete a picture as possible of the deceased.

The FBI's Role

For the class, one of the FBI Laboratory’s most popular, students are separated into small groups led by Forensic Anthropology Center instructors. Each group is escorted to a separate isolated area on the wooded grounds and provided probes to poke into the soil and feel for anomalies or soft spots. When a potential burial site is discovered, students learn how to map it on a grid of twine and stakes and begin scraping away thin layers of dirt, which is sifted for clues. Students take turns measuring, documenting, and sketching as the contours of a skeleton begin to emerge.

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Kacey Gabriel, head of the forensic response section of the FBI Laboratory, said the annual course plays a key role in what he calls “defensible evidence collection”-properly documenting, photographing, and packaging crime scene evidence. "Any mistakes made during the crime scene process could render evidence useless in court,” Gabriel said.

For one student, Barbara, a trace evidence examiner at the FBI Laboratory in Quantico, Virginia, the course illustrated the tough conditions under which crime-scene evidence is sometimes collected before it arrives on her desk at the Lab. “It helps us better understand where the evidence is coming from and how it is handled before we get it,” she said.

National Forensic Academy

The University of Tennessee’s Forensic Anthropology Center inspired the formation of the National Forensic Academy (NFA), one of the leading law-enforcement investigation training centers in the United States. The NFA offers an intensive ten-week training program designed to educate law-enforcement agents in identification, collection, and preservation. The primary goal of the NFA is to prepare law-enforcement officers to recognize crucial components of crime scenes and improve the process of evidence recovery and submission.

Contributions to Forensic Science

Aside from his contributions to real criminal cases, Bass’s scientific discoveries also have lent themselves to solving some fictional crimes. Bass served as the head of the anthropology department from 1971 to 1992 before moving to the role of director of the Forensic Anthropology Center from 1992 to 1998.

The Body Farm's success over the past 36 years is directly responsible for a vast amount of the overwhelming progress in narrowing that range. As Body Farm research continues to evolve, the researchers at the Anthropological Research Facility continue to identify new methods to calculate the postmortem interval, body identification, and any other variables that might aid criminal investigations. Time of death in a homicide case can make the difference between bringing criminals to justice and a cold case. Therefore, this has been the main focus of the Body Farm since it was opened. With the progression of research, Bass is hopeful that in the future, entomologists will be able to declare time of death within a half-day. What makes this a difficult task to accomplish is that every minute that passes after death, the range of time they can correctly estimate time of death is broadened dramatically.

Case Studies

One situation, case "91-23", involved arson upon a car on the border of Tennessee. After using other various forensics on the body including bone examinations, Bass and his team were able to identify the victim. The only other question was how long ago the victim had died; with this, they turned toward entomology, and more specifically, the life cycle of flies.

A more recent case came to light in 2007 with Bass' agreement to exhume the body of the late J.P. Richardson, Jr, more famously known as "The Big Bopper". He was one of the three musicians that died in a plane crash in February 1959. His son, Jay Richardson, had never met his father and, knowing the strange controversies surrounding the plane crash, decided to contact Bass to see if he could gather any answers. Questions lingered as to whether or not Buddy Holly's gun found at the scene of the crash had been fired earlier or if Richardson had managed to survive the initial crash and simply died trying to get away. After exhumation of the body, Bass examined it using a portable X-ray system. After X-ray examination, Bass was able to come to a fairly certain conclusion: Richardson died immediately upon impact.

The William M. Bass Donated Skeletal Collection

The University of Tennessee also houses the nation’s largest modern bone collection, the William M. Bass Donated Skeletal Collection. Data on the skeletal remains in the collection are entered into the University of Tennessee’s Data Bank. This database is the primary tool that forensic anthropologists across the United States use to determine age, sex, stature, ancestry, and other unique characteristics from skeletal remains.

With innovations and adaptation to change, computers are able to identify properties of bone matter that has been buried years beginning at the Forensic Anthropology Data Bank founded in 1986 at the University of Texas, which houses thousands of detailed measurements of skeletons. This data provides strong evidence that shows differences in ethnic background from ancient times to present today. Along with the data bank, technological innovations have given researchers a computer tool called FORDISC. Body Farm staff is also studying the compounds released by corpses after burial. If a person is reported missing, the authorities search for the missing entities using K-9 units, but they do not know what specifically activates what the K-9 smell for. Research has confirmed that dead bodies give off more than 400 compounds.

Body Donation

Donating a person's body after death will ensure that research can continue, and thirty to fifty bodies are donated each year. However, a body donation policy has been established that sets certain guidelines. For example, once a body has been donated, the remains will not be returned to the family as the skeleton will be placed into the program's donated skeletal collection. Bodies which were infected by diseases such as HIV and MRSA may only be donated if first cremated, which is still considered useful for research.

"The heart and soul of everything we do here is the people who donate their bodies to us,” said Dawnie Wolfe Steadman, director of the Forensic Anthropology Center at the facility, which has a skeletal collection of more than 1,700 individuals. “We have over 4,000 people from around the world who have donated their body to us while they are living. They feel strongly about the science that we do and they want to be a part of it.

Public Perception and Media Influence

Television shows have and continue to aid the success and public opinion of the Body Farm. Before programs like CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, there was a great deal of protest and controversy that surrounded the Body Farm mainly because people thought it was grotesque, barbaric and an insult to the deceased, to let their bodies decompose for unnecessary scientific reasons. CSI, accompanied by scientific advances, has helped the public come to terms with this research.

Challenges and Future Directions

When asked about the growth of the Body Farm in the future, Bass insinuated that the Body Farm is too small right now and a higher percentage of land area that has not been contaminated by other burials is needed for future achievements.

Dawnie Wolfe Steadman, who manages the research facility, said managing an outdoor crime scene presents unique challenges for even the most seasoned investigators. “If there’s a dead body in the living room of a house, they know how to approach that, they know how to map that-there’s an entry and an exit area that they take, and there are very clear ways of processing the indoor crime scene,” she explained. “You don’t know all the boundaries of this scene. There are no boundaries out here. And you don’t know where all the evidence might be.

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