Death's Acre:
The Book on the Body Farm
by Dr. Bill Bass
reviewed by Dr. Katherine Ramsland

             If you’ve ever read Patricia Cornwell’s novel or seen gruesome footage of this place, you may (or not, depending on your nerve) be thrilled to know that there’s finally a book about that strange area in Tennessee known fondly as the Body Farm. Founder Bill Bass has at last organized his notes and teamed up with writer Jon Jefferson to present a definitive history in Death’s Acre: Inside the Legendary Forensic Lab, the Body Farm, Where the Dead Do Tell Tales.

G.P. Putnam’s Sons November 2003 $24.95; photographs

Dr. Bass is willing to admit to mistakes, because that’s in fact how the whole thing began. He describes how learning from his errors — some of which came back to haunt him more often then he liked — was the original inspiration for the plot of land at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville that offers a quiet place to lay out the dead for scientific study. He describes how, after he miscalculated a time of death by 113 years, he reasoned with the university administration to allow him to conduct his anthropology experiments — although they’re actually more along the lines of pathology.              During Bass’s stint as an anthropologist in Kansas, he had examined many human remains in skeletal form, but when he went to Tennessee in 1971 and was invited to serve as the forensic anthropologist for the state medical examiner's office, he saw mostly decomposing corpses. The cops wanted him to tell them how long the remains had been there. "I didn't know anything about maggot-covered bodies," Bass said once in an interview, "so I looked at the literature and found that there wasn't much there." Stymied, he figured that to assist law enforcement effectively, especially in criminal cases, he needed to find a way to learn about how bodies decompose.

             The state-of-the-art in forensic anthropology at that time was mostly anecdotal. In other words, nothing had been systematically collected to form a body of knowledge (no pun intended) from which professionals could benefit. So Dr. Bass got to work with his graduate students to set up some experiments. That’s how the Body Farm began. Across the river from the university’s main campus was an acre of surplus land where the hospital burned its trash. Given access, Bass and his students cleared the place during the fall of 1980, put in electricity and a road, poured a concrete pad, and acquired their first fresh corpse — referred to as 81-1. "It came from humble beginnings," Bass writes about his research facility, "and it progressed by small steps." The initial questions about teeth, bones, flesh, and insects were elementary, but they needed to be answered with good scientific methods.

It wasn’t long before they had more bodies and were able to watch them decompose in various conditions (inside car trunks, in water, under soil, in the sun, etc.). Then Bass’s students branched out into other areas, such as insect activity, measurement of odor, and decomposition leakage into soil. (Many of them went on to become prestigious in their own right.)                         It wasn’t always easy. There were misunderstandings about what he was doing and protests, as well as negative press. Yet he found supporters as well, since it was clear that this type of study benefited law enforcement. Step by step, he expanded the work and offered what he learned to medical examiners, police officers, FBI agents, physicians, and anyone else who was interested. People began to want to leave their body to science, specifically to the Body Farm.

G.P. Putnam’s Sons November 2003 $24.95; photographs

             As Bass tells the history and development of this one-of-a-kind place, he utilizes cases that taught him something new or put his acquired knowledge to the test, so the book sometimes has the quality of a detective novel. The stories of the Zoo Man, a serial killer, and the slaughtered Perry family stand out as Bass’s best work, but there are lesser known tales as well that engage the reader with a fine balance between science and gore. The book even contains a chapter about Bass’s encounters with Patricia Cornwell and his work on a case that had gone through the notorious Tri-State crematorium in Noble, Georgia, where 339 bodies were discovered decomposing in the woods in 2002.

             While the book starts off at a slow pace and oversimplifies the Lindbergh case in a way that risks losing some readers, if you’re interested in forensic pathology and anthropology, it pays to persist. In the end, you’ll come away with knowledge about teeth, insects, adipocere, and time of death that you won’t get anywhere else.

          Copyright 2005 by Dr. Katherine Ramsland,
Professor of Forensic Psychology, DeSales University