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  • [MUSIC]

  • BILL BASS: You get a good, cold day

  • like this, you don't--

  • the decay rate is not very rapid.

  • It's slow.

  • So it's slowed down on a day like this.

  • If you were here in the summer, it would

  • be going gray guts.

  • I'm the person that founded what's called the Body Farm,

  • which is a research facility that we use to find out the

  • length of time since death or the changes that occur to the

  • body and how long does it take.

  • And there are multiple variables, the major factor

  • being temperature.

  • So you decay faster in the summer than

  • you do in the winter.

  • And you have all the others.

  • The clothing or no clothing.

  • And this facility is set up to look at all those variables.

  • I came here June the 1st of 1971.

  • Knew the medical examiner.

  • The medical examiner asked if I would serve as a forensic

  • anthropologist for medical examiner system.

  • And I said yes.

  • And it wasn't long before bodies started coming in.

  • And about half of the first 10 cases were

  • maggot-covered bodies.

  • And the police don't ask you, who is that?

  • They ask you, how long have they been there?

  • I think the reason for that, in the criminal justice system

  • they're trained the sooner you get on the chase, the more

  • likely you are to solve the crime.

  • Well, I didn't know a thing about maggots.

  • And I looked in the literature and there

  • really wasn't much there.

  • And so I thought, we'd better do some research on this.

  • Because I want know what I'm talking about

  • when I talk to police.

  • So I went to the dean in the fall of '71, in November of

  • '71 I went to the dean.

  • I said, dean, I need some land to put dead bodies on.

  • And that was the beginning of the Body Farm.

  • JON JEFFERSON: He was the first person to have this idea

  • to research what happens to bodies after

  • death and when it happens.

  • And the first person-- or at least the first person to do

  • something about it.

  • BILL BASS: We have a number of individuals who will kill

  • their wives or kill their husbands.

  • And what do you do with a dead wife or dead husband?

  • Well, you gotta get rid of it.

  • But how do you do that?

  • Well, one of the things is to go out in the yard.

  • Mainly in the flower garden.

  • And dig a grave.

  • And somebody looks out and sees and says, what you doing

  • over there?

  • Well, you can't say you're burying your husband.

  • So you put a concrete slab over it and say you're pouring

  • a little patio.

  • We have a lot of bodies buried under things like this in our

  • culture today.

  • This was a master's thesis in which we're using ground

  • penetrating radar to look through the concrete and go

  • down underneath it.

  • It's interesting looking at that project over the

  • nine-month period that this master's thesis ran.

  • You could see that there was a body under there.

  • And as time goes by, you can see the body decay.

  • But normally, if you go out to a crime scene, you wouldn't

  • get that nine-month sequence.

  • JON JEFFERSON: He's funny.

  • He's charming.

  • He's genuinely good-hearted.

  • I can imagine that someone without all those attributes

  • might try to set up a facility like this and just get

  • nowhere with it.

  • But he is legendary and beloved in east Tennessee.

  • BILL BASS: There's a skeleton there that has no cover on it

  • except for the leaves.

  • Here's one of the bones way down here too.

  • That's a [INAUDIBLE].

  • Put it back up there.

  • REBECCA WILSON: I handle the William M. Bass Donated

  • Skeletal Collection.

  • It is the end product of our donation program.

  • And those individuals that have willed themselves to our

  • program to be used for both our decomposition research as

  • well as the skeletal aspect of our research.

  • My name is Rebecca Wilson.

  • I am the Assistant Coordinator of the Forensic

  • Anthropology Center.

  • This collection started in 1981.

  • And anyone that wills themself to our program to be used for

  • research at the Anthropological Research

  • Facility is eventually brought here and is stored here in

  • perpetuity.

  • So they are stored-- as long as we exist,

  • they will be here.

  • Currently we have just over 700 individuals in the

  • collection, which makes it the largest collection in the

  • United States of modern Americans.

  • It exceeds the next largest program from about 400

  • individuals.

  • So it's fairly substantial.

  • We had individuals where they have been directly

  • affected by a case.

  • Whether they were a victim or they had a member of the

  • family that was a victim.

  • And those individuals are usually more interested in the

  • decomposition research.

  • And they really want to be used as much as possible for

  • forensic-related research at our research facility.

  • We also have people that we just want

  • to be used for teaching.

  • They're either the individuals that want their skeleton on

  • display in a classroom, which, obviously we cannot.

  • And we tell them that having a skeleton restrung or kind of

  • put back together is not as beneficial for us.

  • So we have those individuals that are just like, I want to

  • be used for teaching.

  • And those individuals that choose that and highlight that

  • are more of the academics.

  • A lot of them--

  • you'll see a lot of nurses and a lot of teachers that say, I

  • really want to be used for that aspect.

  • Obviously, when we go on a case, you're starting in your

  • head putting pieces together.

  • And know where to look when you get back to that lab.

  • So to me, having the skeletons available in the collection is

  • a way so that students can learn what they are expected

  • to find and know in the field and in the lab situation.

  • But also be an avenue for research with those age

  • indicators.

  • Looking at, OK, the difference between males and females.

  • Looking at the way we age.

  • Because those are things that do change with time.

  • And having a modern collection available to do that is

  • extremely important.

  • So we get now--

  • this past year we've had 26 researchers from other

  • institutions coming just to use the collection.

  • And that's amazing.

  • And the number of requests increases every year.

  • And so to me, it's a value.

  • This is a data set.

  • And it's a resource for other people to use.

  • BILL BASS: They're having troubles in courts these days

  • where the average juror is a member of the community.

  • And CSI has been so successful that people think if you don't

  • do it like it's done on CSI then there's

  • something wrong with you.

  • And so you've got to convince them, hey.

  • We don't get it done in an hour.

  • And it takes a little bit more research than what CSI shows

  • that's going on.

  • We've had a couple of experiments.

  • We wanted to reproduce death in a trailer to see how long

  • it takes for a body to decay in a trailer

  • situation like that.

  • Occasionally we'll try to reproduce a crime scene which

  • there's not much in the literature on.

  • And that was one of the ones that we'd done that.

  • And there's a body under there.

  • And the reason we cover them up with black plastic is that

  • maggots don't like sunlight.

  • So when a body is out here, and you have it in the sun and

  • the shade and so forth, the maggots will get on the body.

  • But they will get down under the skin.

  • So they will leave the skin as an umbrella.

  • You will find a body out sometime.

  • It looks fairly good condition.

  • But when you get up to that body and look at it very

  • carefully, you'll find that the skin is just leather.

  • Literally it has turned to leather.

  • And there's nothing there but a skeleton

  • with a leather covering.

  • And what we're trying to do is to get down to

  • the skeletal remains.

  • We put that on there so that the maggots will do a better

  • job of cleaning the skeletons off.

  • We have buried here five burials.

  • When we buried the individuals, we ran pipes down

  • and ran pipes through the body.

  • And this is to get the compounds, the volatile fatty

  • acids that are given off the body.

  • One of my doctoral students who's doing this project has

  • found over 500 compounds that are given

  • off of decaying bodies.

  • Now not all 500 of those are equal in identifying a body.

  • But he has designed a sniffer.

  • A handheld device that you can walk across the ground.

  • And if you find one of those compounds that he's using in

  • his data bank, you can tell that there's

  • a buried body there.

  • So this is the type of research that we're doing.

  • Now the next question that comes up.

  • The reason they're still here.

  • Do you get the same compounds given off of a body that's

  • been dead two years that you get the first year?

  • We don't know that.

  • So we left it.

  • And we're now in the fourth year.

  • These things have been here four years.

  • And there are some decreases of some.

  • But, of course, how long are you going to leave them?

  • Well, I don't know how long we'll leave them.

  • It'll depend on when you get a point of diminishing returns.

  • But we do have individuals--

  • we do have cadaver dog handlers who say that, oh,

  • their dogs can smell Civil War graves.

  • Well, that's 140 years ago.

  • I don't know.

  • I wonder a little bit about that.

  • But we do now have the techniques in forensic

  • anthropology area that we can go about looking

  • at things like that.

[MUSIC]

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