Corpses and more corpses all over the place. Bodies that are going to rot under the sun. And people who approach them, touch them, observe them and write them down. The scene is terrifying But don’t think that these people are doing something macabre. Those who analyze everything are scientists.
It is the Tennessee Forensic Anthropology Center (USA), better known as the Corpse Farm. Behind it there is a story.
In 1969 the director of the Kansas Bureau of Investigation needed to know when had a cow been killed by a group of rustlers.
Rustling was rampant at that time and thieves killed the animals and cut them into pieces in the same place. The land owners It took them days to discover what happened and when the complaint was made all the clues were lost.
Help was then sought from William Marvin Bass III. He was 41 years old, a professor of forensic anthropology at the University of Kansas, and sometimes gave a hand to the Police in the identification of human skeletal remains.
The man asked Four cows will be sacrificed. One for each season of the year. And see its degree of putrefaction as the days go by. None of the ranchers accepted the proposal.
This is how the farm was created
Two years later Bass was a professor at the University of Tennessee and was offered the position of state forensic anthropologist. He accepted, but I couldn’t find solutions with his research. He realized that he came from Kansas, a dry and arid place, and Tennessee was wet and rainy.
That’s why when the police asked him to say in front of a corpse how many hours he had been dead I didn’t hit the key. Tired, Bass asked the dean of the University for a piece of land «to plant corpses.»
And they gave it to him. It was the beginning of the Corpse Farm, the first that existed in the world.
Bass and his students planted corpses all over the campus. Some were buried in shallow ditches, others remained on the ground, others inside suitcases, some in water and a group inside cars, to simulate real crime scenes.
And they started scoring day after day. The temperature and all climatic variations. But there were other items to take into account.
One was whether the corpse was dressed in wool, cotton or lycra. AND They waited for the first invader to arrive.
It was about the blue fliesthose that arrive before any other insect on a corpse. And they leave their eggs in the eyes, mouth and nose of the dead.
These flies have history. The first writing about them and a crime dates back to the 13th century, in China.
A man was investigating the murder of a farmer in a small village. His neck had been cut with a scythe. The researcher made everyone who had a scythe go to the town square.
Once there he let some small flies escape. instantly, They all went to the same scythe, that despite having been washed, indicated the murderer.
And the results to determine the time of a murder, the manner and even the perpetrators, appeared not by magic but by the investigation and statistics of the Corpse Farm.
Which takes time, as the human body goes through four stages after death.
The stages of the body
In the first call «fresh body»the temperature of the corpse drops and the blood that stops circulating accumulates in certain parts of the body.
In the second, called «early decomposition»bacteria begin to consume the tissues and changes in skin color begin to be noticed.
In the third, called «advanced decomposition»gases accumulate, the body swells and tissues break down.
In the fourth and last one begins the «skeletonization»which first becomes evident on the face, hands and feet. Under some humidity conditions and other factors, the body can become mummified.
For 51 years, Body Farm has not stopped growing in size. At first, the bodies were those of homeless people. People without resources and without family members to claim them.
Now every year hundreds of people sign to donate their bodies. William Marvin Bass himself, who is 97 years old today, He has already signed the donation of his body: «I always enjoyed teaching, and I don’t see why I should stop doing it when I die. If students can learn something from my skeleton, that’s fine with me,» he declared in an interview.
And his idea spread. In the United States currently the largest Body Farm is that of the University of South Florida, which opened in 2017 and is located near Tampa. And there are two more. Like any other that exists in the world.
As in the CSI series, bodies speak. And they can even point to a murderer.
GML
