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

that she’d dug up copies of every story the Knoxville newspapers had ever published about me. When the camera began rolling, though, her questions focused on just one of those dozens of stories: the 1985 protest at the Body Farm by a local group called S.I.C.K.—Solutions to Issues of Concern to Knoxvillians. Her questions about the protest and other opposition continued for forty-five minutes, then the reporter asked if they could film my class. “Of course,” I said, so they did. Afterward she grilled me on camera for another forty-five minutes. I was beginning to understand how people feel when they’re in the hot seat facing a 60 Minutes reporter.

A few weeks later my friends from Channel 4 followed me to a guest lecture, camera rolling. I felt as if I were being stalked, and I didn’t know why. From the hostile tone of that ninety-minute interview in Martin, I began to fear that they had some hidden agenda, and that concerned me. So when they asked to film at the Body Farm, I told them no.

A few more weeks went by, and one day I got a call from the campus police: Could I please come out to the research facility? When I got there, they were holding the cameraman from Channel 4, who had driven his vehicle up to the facility’s wooden gate, set his tripod and camera on top, and begun shooting footage of everything he could see inside the fence.

I was furious. When the TV station first contacted me, I’d bent over backward to be open, honest, accommodating, and fair. If they had done the same, I’d have been happy to continue cooperating, but now I felt betrayed; by this time I’d decided they were on a witch-hunt of some sort. The cameraman called his boss at Channel 4; the station called its lawyer; the TV lawyer called a UT lawyer.

A couple weeks after the guerrilla filming incident, Channel 4 finally aired its report. A four-part series they called Last Rights, the story decried what it portrayed as the mistreatment of deceased veterans at the Body Farm. Some of the footage was what they’d shot over the top of our nine-foot wooden fence, but most of it was from the LESAT education video—specifically, the graphic footage from Tyler O’Brien’s study of adipocere formation on bodies in water.

To me, the series seemed distorted and lurid, but maybe the TV people thought it was an important blow for dignity and decency; it probably didn’t hurt their ratings, either. Whatever their intentions, the story had a powerful impact. For days after it aired, angry veterans, indignant relatives, and irate citizens called me constantly; other calls came from university officials, alarmed by the negative publicity. In retrospect, I suppose something like this was inevitable. For years we’d been conducting research that required us to sidestep society’s customary treatment of the dead; for years we’d received modest but positive press when our work helped solve crimes; and recently we’d been thrust into the national limelight by the publication of a best-selling murder mystery. We were a hot topic, and maybe somebody, somewhere, decided we needed to be taken down a peg or two.

I hoped the trouble would die down swiftly, but those hopes were soon shattered. As it turned out, the initial furor proved to be the calm before the storm, because Tennessee’s commissioner of veterans’ affairs joined the fray. He persuaded several members of the state legislature to sponsor a bill that would have eliminated our research with unclaimed bodies from medical examiners. Given that those bodies accounted for a sizable percentage of our research subjects, the effect would have been crippling.

I was stunned that matters had reached such a crisis. This was the only scientific facility of its kind in the world. In our first few years of research, we’d published pioneering data on the processes and timing of human decomposition, and that basic data was used all over the world. That data had helped police and prosecutors put dozens of murderers behind bars. I myself had testified as an expert witness in dozens of murder trials and helped send more than a few killers to prison. My former graduate students had become scientists whose research at the Body Farm was beginning to establish them as leading experts in their own right. And we’d only begun to scratch the surface. There were so many more variables to study, so many more techniques to develop and refine. . . .

I knew I couldn’t fight this battle alone, but I didn’t know who could help me. I’d fought scientific battles before, but never legislative ones. If we lost this fight, the Body Farm would go down in scientific history as a bold but doomed experiment.

Then I remembered the prosecutors. They could be the key. There were thirty-one district attorneys in Tennessee, and not only were they law enforcement officials, they were also elected officials: voted into office, and kept in office, because of their commitment to fighting crime. I’d helped a number of the district attorneys directly; in fact, I’d even helped put away a man who had killed an assistant DA in Knoxville a few years before.

I took out my directory of Tennessee law enforcement officials and I began dialing. I told them my side of the veterans’ story, I sent a brief history of the research facility, and I explained what it would mean, not just to me but to police and prosecutors, if the legislature curtailed our research at the Body Farm.

Three months after Channel 4 aired Last Rights, the anti–Body Farm bill came up for a vote in a key Senate committee. Two of the bill’s sponsors served on that committee, so the situation looked grim. But then another senator asked to comment on the bill, and he spoke against it passionately. The bill would effectively close down the Body Farm, he argued, and that would hinder the efforts of law enforcement. “The concerns for the remains of the deceased,”