Death's Acre: Inside The Legendary Forensic Lab The Body Farm Bill Bass (howl and other poems TXT) 📖

center of the lot, one of the workers spotted what looked like a human skull lying in the weeds. He called his buddies over to confer, and they agreed with his skeletal analysis. Needless to say, that was the end of the cleanup work for the day. The workers called the police, and the police called me.

I headed out Broadway, accompanied by Pat Willey, the graduate student who ran the osteology laboratory—my bone lab. Pat and I did a little digging and found a few more bones, but not many. Most of them, we soon realized, had probably already been scooped up and hauled off to the landfill.

From the condition of the bones—they were completely dry and sun-bleached—it was immediately apparent that they’d been lying in the lot for quite some time, possibly several years. It didn’t take long to make a positive identification, either: The top plate of the dentures was prominently labeled Orval King, the name of a local man last seen some two years before. A seventy-four-year-old who’d spent some time in the regional psychiatric hospital, he had either fallen or lain down in the vacant lot between a house and a busy street and quietly died.

In this case, the tantalizing puzzle to be solved was not who he was, or how long he’d been dead, or even why he died. This time what baffled me was why he hadn’t been found shortly after he died. More precisely, why hadn’t he been smelled shortly after he died? When an adult human male decomposes, the smell can be overpowering, as you can well imagine if you’ve ever driven slowly past a dead dog with your car windows open on a warm summer day.

We knew that the house adjoining the vacant lot was occupied at the time the man died; we also knew that the sidewalk across the front of the lot carried a lot of neighborhood pedestrians, and Broadway was one of Knoxville’s busiest streets. Yet no one had smelled anything, or at least nothing bad enough to prompt suspicion, investigation, or complaints to the city.

So if the stench of death didn’t carry as far as the houses or the sidewalk, how far did it carry? Or, put another way, if the human nose couldn’t detect a body at that distance, at what distance could it detect a decomposing corpse? The answer would be useful not just to me, I figured, but to police, firefighters, and search-and-rescue workers almost anywhere.

Orval King had raised an intriguing research question. Now, at our new two-acre research facility, I had the perfect place to determine the answer scientifically, experimentally. All I needed was a dead body and some live guinea pigs.

The body arrived soon enough: an unclaimed corpse from a nearby medical examiner. The guinea pigs? A cinch. Undergraduates will do anything for extra credit. To recruit volunteers for this experiment, I announced in my fall Anthropology 101 class one Thursday that anyone who wanted to earn ten extra points should meet me at the research facility on Saturday morning. The turnout was incredible. Nearly a hundred students crawled out of bed early on a weekend—all of them motivated, I’m sure, by selfless scientific fervor.

The experiment was simplicity itself: I had positioned a body, which was extremely bloated and quite smelly, a ways up the gravel road leading into the facility. The body was hidden from view by trees and bushes. The day before, I’d put markers at ten-yard intervals from the body—that is, a marker at ten yards, twenty yards, thirty, forty, and fifty. Then I led my student guinea pigs up the primrose path one by one. “Tell me when you smell something” was the only instruction I gave; then, on a clipboard I carried, I made a slash mark in the columns corresponding to the distance each student indicated. As I led them toward the corpse they would begin inhaling sharply and concentrating intensely. Most of them wouldn’t say anything until we were twenty or even ten yards from the body, then they would wrinkle up their noses and say, “Phew, something really stinks here.”

The research was quick and dirty, as we say in academia. It wasn’t the sort of thing I’d ever write up and publish in the Journal of Forensic Sciences, but it was good enough to show me that yes, you can die and decompose in a vacant lot between a house and Broadway and never be smelled by thousands of people passing by just fifty feet away.

OUR FIRST SEVERAL YEARS of research were a time of exciting progress. Bodies had begun arriving almost weekly from medical examiners and donors. In fact, not only was the concrete pad inside our chain-link enclosure filled to capacity, but we’d added three additional shelves—bunk beds for the dead—up the sides of the fence.*

I surveyed our expanding research program with eagerness and pride. It’s true, what they say: Pride goeth before a fall. One spring day in 1985, I arrived to find half of my two-acre research fiefdom flagged off with surveyor’s stakes. To one side a bulldozer idled ominously. I buttonholed one of the surveyors and asked what was going on. The hospital parking lot was being expanded, he told me. As it turned out, the ag school had given me more land than it actually owned; instead of a two-acre former dump, I actually possessed a one-acre former dump, and no appeals on my part could stop the bulldozers and graders and pavers.

But losing half my land turned out to be the least of my worries. A few days later I got called out of a class—a drastic measure, practically unprecedented—by Annette, the departmental secretary. Did I know about the protest out at the Body Farm? I did not. Annette and I jumped into a car and drove over to the hospital parking lot, where we parked in a distant, inconspicuous corner.

A local health-care advocacy group called Solutions to Issues of Concern to Knoxvillians—S.I.C.K. for short—was picketing my