To learn more about death, he created the Dead Farm. Today he helps the police [FRAGMENT OF THE BOOK]

While that may not be enough for you, there are currently several “farms” in the US where human corpses are stored. And it’s not about a story straight from a serial killer thriller. Such places are used for learning, but also for solving criminal riddles. The first such farm was founded by forensic anthropologist William M. Bass.

1. Dead Man’s Farm in Knoxville covers an area of ​​1 ha and is fenced with barbed wire
2. In a wooded area, bodies are subjected to various natural factors, and scientists meticulously record all information obtained in this way
3. Bodies are donated every year. There is even a waiting list for people who want to contribute to learning more about the processes of death. The number of places on the farm is limited
4. We get to know the history of Dead Man’s Farm in Knoxville first-hand. Below we present an excerpt from a book co-authored by William M. Bass
5. More information can be found on the Onet homepage.

The forensic anthropologist wanted to investigate the process of decomposition of the cow’s body

I have always been attracted to criminal cases, among other things, because of the challenges they pose to me; these are often tragic crimes, and at the same time scientific puzzles to be solved. I have never liked hunting – the idea of ​​killing animals purely for the sake of sport does not appeal to me at all – but the excitement of solving a scientific puzzle may be reminiscent of the thrill of a hunter following a big game. But where was the puzzle in this case – what was I to look for? The more I thought about it, the more exciting I found the answer: I will pursue death itself. To fully understand what ultimately happened to all of us, I had to track death in its own territory, study its eating habits, observe its movements and habits.

More than seven hundred years ago, a Chinese official, Sung Tz’u, developed an unusual textbook for forensic experts. A book with the title often translated as Washing away the wrongs. The Washing Away of Wrongs), describes an impressive array of examinations and tests to be carried out in the short term – within hours or days – following a suspicious death. It also shows, in a very descriptive manner, the changes that a dead body undergoes over time – the weeks and months it takes for a corpse to turn into bare bones. However, in the more than seven hundred years since Tz’u, virtually nothing has been discovered or written about what happens over the long term to man after death. When I examined Colonel Shy’s corpse in 1977, I had no more knowledge at my disposal than Sung Tz’u in 1247. For some time – before I met Colonel Shy – the idea of ​​scientific research was sprouting somewhere deep in my mind. over the decay of the human body. The seed was planted in 1964 when I wrote to Harold Nye of the KBI and suggested we find a farmer to help me investigate the cow’s decomposition process (“If you know any farmer who would be willing to kill a cow and leave it in the field …” ).

The rest of the text is below the video.

The seed was still dormant in 1971 when I moved to Knoxville to take charge of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Tennessee. Moving to Tennessee brought me not only a new teaching position, but also a state-level political nomination: I became the first (and so far only) state forensic anthropologist in Tennessee. The official nomination letter came to me while I was sorting and stacking hundreds of boxes of Arikara bones in front of the Neyland Stadium stands. It was a testimony to the power of mutual contacts. Two years earlier, one of my PhD students at the University of Kansas, Bob Gilbert, asked medical examiners from all over the country for pubic bones. Bob studied the bone differences between men and women – especially the gradual changes that occur in a woman’s pubic bone, which is where two pubic bones meet. In young women, the surface of the symphysis is uneven, wrinkled; in women who have reached the age of thirty-five, the bone is already much denser and its texture is smoother; after the age of fifty, the seam surface begins to deteriorate.

The purpose of Bob’s doctoral dissertation was to describe these changes in detail so that anthropologists could more accurately assess age. To do this, he needed pubic bones, and as many as possible. Some of the forensic physicians he contacted were shocked at his request and refused. However, Dr. Jerry Francisco, Tennessee’s chief medical examiner, was intrigued by this research and appreciated the contribution it could make to forensic science. He sent Bob a large chunk of pubic bones and became a good friend of mine – we often exchanged interesting stories at meetings and scientific conferences.

Death is unequal to death. Kansas and Tennessee body differences

When I told Jerry I was moving to Tennessee, he asked if I would be willing to join his team as a state forensic anthropologist. It was not a particularly lucrative job – a fixed rate of $ 212 a case – but the job itself was going to be exciting. (…) I had not yet made a permanent home at the University of Tennessee when appeals, cases and human remains began pouring in to me. I soon discovered a significant difference between the Kansas and Tennessee bodies. The Kansas corpses were usually the clean, sun-bleached skeletons you sometimes see in Hollywood Westerns. The typical Tennessee carcass, which I found out very quickly, looked more like rotting, vermin-filled pulp. As many as five of the first ten bodies Tennessee police brought me for examination were eaten from the inside by maggots. This difference resulted from geographic and demographic conditions: Kansas is almost twice the size of Tennessee – it has over 109. square kilometers of area, while Tennessee only less than XNUMX thousand. – but half as many inhabitants.

Statistically speaking, the chances of finding a fresh body in Kansas are four times lower than in Tennessee. (In fact, the difference is even greater, as Tennessee residents are dying younger due to a homicide rate that is twice as high – a problem that should be addressed by a specialist in another field.) Since there are many more bodies in Tennessee waiting to be discovered – often by hunters roaming the woods – it is not hard to conclude that they are found more often and faster than the few corpses scattered across the vast sunburned Kansas prairie. Therefore, dead Tennessee residents tend to look and smell much worse. The pursuit of justice, however, was of paramount importance. Besides, the forensic anthropologist – especially the TBI official consultant and state forensic anthropologist – could not be overly sensitive.

Missing skull. People brought “trophies” from the war

All interested parties knew that I was ready to identify the bodies and determine the cause of their death. Therefore, I gladly accepted every matter and every body, some more and some less willingly – as did all the employees of our department under the stands of the stadium. The only one who finally broke away was the janitor. One angler found a drowned man – a floating corpse – in the Emory River, about eighty kilometers from Knoxville, and the Roane County Sheriff’s Deputy brought the body to me for identification. The deceased still wore most of his clothes – unfortunately, he no longer had a head. This circumstance made it much more difficult, and perhaps even impossible, to make an unambiguous identification. “We need to find the head,” I told the deputy. It may have been lying on the bottom of the river, away from where the angler found the body, but there was a chance someone had found the skull lying on the bank and might even have taken it. The body arrived on Wednesday. On Thursday, an article appeared on the front page of the local weekly newspaper, the Roane County News, about the finding of the body and the importance of the missing skull. The author of the article asked that anyone who has recently seen or purchased the skull bring it to the sheriff’s office.

Over the next few days, two skulls were delivered, which the sheriff’s deputies brought to me. The first one to reach me on Friday was dry and dusty, and certainly not our drowned man. However, it intrigued me for two reasons: ethnic identity and a large hole punched at the base. Our drowned man was white, and this skull probably belonged to a Japanese or Chinese, which is not so common in East Tennessee. I called the sheriff’s office and asked about the history of this find. It turned out that the owner of the junkyard had brought them. A few days earlier, he had bought an old car from a local landowner. In the paint can hidden in the trunk was this very skull. It turned out that the owner of the scrapped car fought in the Pacific region during World War II. While walking along Okinawa Beach, he came across a crashed Japanese Zero plane; inside was the skull of a dead pilot, which our brave soldier took home as a war trophy. (I have come across such World War II trophies many times since, almost all of them Japanese and almost none of the European, which is an interesting commentary on our approach to the dead from other cultures).

Somewhere between 1945 and 1973, the hole in the base of the Japanese pilot’s skull – the so-called great hole – was significantly enlarged so that a light bulb could be inserted inside the skull; thus the dead warrior turned into a regular Halloween decoration. Skull number two, belonging to an Indian, was also dry, dusty, and much older than our drowned man. So we had to continue our search for the missing head. Meanwhile, the unsolved mystery began to stink – literally.

Birth of the Dead Farm. It led to them… a body in a brush compartment

Most cities have mortuaries with cold stores where bodies can be stored until they are identified and taken over by relatives or buried by local authorities. This does not apply to small towns such as Kingston, the capital of rural Roane, where our drowned man has emerged. The deputy sheriff did not want to take the body back to Kingston, so I agreed to keep it at the university. The problem was that I didn’t have a cold store either. As the weekend was just beginning, I wrapped the body in the foil as tightly as I could and put it in the brushes compartment of the toilet next to my office. I don’t know how many people were in the building when the janitor came on Saturday to clean the halls, but I suppose everyone in the department at the time – and possibly a few drivers outside – heard him when he opened the glove compartment and saw what was inside. On Monday morning he explained to me remarkably clearly and emphatically – in a language that both scientists and seafarers understand – that no matter how I am the head of the department, I must under no circumstances keep rotting bodies in his brush locker or anywhere else in the building. . As far as I understood, even one breach of this rule could have resulted in my own headless body being placed in a glove compartment, very soon.

Taking the janitor’s remarks to heart, I decided to turn to my boss, the dean of the college, for help. I explained our little dilemma to him, and he dealt with it with calm and understanding. He reached for the phone book, found the number to the Department of Agriculture, contacted its boss and solved my problem: The Department of Agriculture had several farms outside the city, one of them had an empty building, or more precisely, a single-walled barn. The only neighbors were residents of the local prison. It seemed like a pretty good place to store the bodies until we could clean them and examine the bones.

This system functioned quite well for several years. More and more often, however, I noticed something strange: from time to time I found bodies in a position slightly different from the one in which I had left them a few days earlier. I also found footprints and other traces of uninvited human visitors. We finally understood what was happening. Prisoners in the neighborhood who worked on the farm belonging to the prison found out that the barn had new residents and came to check them out. So far, nothing has been lost, but I did not want to risk losing an important piece of evidence – the skull containing the bullet, for example. While I was considering the need to find new storage space for our bodies, I met Colonel Shy who told me that simply storing the bodies was not enough. I had to do more than remove tissue from my bones; I had to examine her, observe her, learn everything she could tell me about death and decay. I couldn’t do this in the old, decaying barn three quarters of an hour away from my office and laboratories. I needed something bigger and much closer.

It was the sixth year of my work as the head of the Department of Anthropology. During this time, the faculty grew significantly, our program included not only bachelor’s studies, but also master’s and doctoral studies, we began to attract the best and most promising students from all over the country. In short, we had the means and the capacity to do something that had never been done before: create a research unit that has never been anywhere in the world – a facility for the systematic study of human bodies, tens and then hundreds of corpses; a laboratory where nature was free, at its own pace, to deal with the deadly debris under a variety of experimental conditions.

At first, scientists only wanted to know when, for example, a body turns into a skeleton

Scientists and students would observe each step of the process, describe variables such as temperature and humidity, track and record the decomposition time of the human body. We would undertake this type of research in the place where Sung Tz’u ended it centuries ago. The idea was simple, but the implications – and possible complications – difficult to quantify. In light of most cultural standards and values, a similar study could appear macabre, shameful, shocking. However, the rector in no way questioned its purposefulness: fortunately, he constantly watched and admired the development of our department, so he gave us his support without hesitation. Again, it was just a matter of one phone call.

Across the Tennessee River, across from the university’s main campus – one long shot from our football stadium – was a one-acre, or about four-tenths, vacant plot of land to the rear of the University Medical Center. Hospital rubbish had been burned here over the years, so the condition of the property was far from perfect, but I don’t think I would feel well there if it looked so much better. All my life I tightened my belts, struggled to make ends meet and managed somehow despite the lack of funds. I grew up during the Great Depression and saw my mother wisely manage the money we got from our father’s insurance. During the excavations in the Great Plains, I fed hungry students with peanut butter from the government surplus and put them to sleep on camp beds given to us by the military. After moving into a dilapidated building beneath the stadium stands – the windows looked out over the tangle of girders supporting the top of the stands – I repainted the flaky walls, repainted the damaged desks, and repaired the crumbling filing cabinets. So when the rector offered me nearly half a hectare of land – though littered with rubbish – only five minutes from my office, I accepted it gratefully; you could say it was my own death spot.

In the fall of 1980, I went to work with my students. We removed trees and bushes from the central part of the plot and poured a gravel road so that cars with bodies and equipment could enter; we supplied running water and electricity from the hospital. Using almost exclusively ordinary tools, we cleaned and leveled an area of ​​about twenty-five square meters in the shade of the trees, and then covered the area with a layer of gravel several centimeters thick. When the foundation was ready, the concrete mixer poured concrete on it, which we leveled together with the students. On this concrete slab we put a small building with a wooden structure, simple and windowless, covered with cheap bituminous tiles. The building was to be used as a warehouse for tools such as shovels and rakes; instruments – surgical scalpels and scissors; and materials such as rubber gloves and body bags. The warehouse ran along the entire side of the concrete slab, so it was five meters long, but only two meters wide. So we had a kind of three-by-five-meter veranda on which we could arrange up to the twelve bodies needed to conduct our research on decay.

The visits of prisoners from a nearby farm made me realize that securing the plot is important, so I decided to enclose it with even a modest fence. People who know the Corpse Farm as it is today often think it looked like this right away, but in fact it was quite different. The beginnings were really modest and the development was slow, small steps. The questions we wanted to answer seemed ridiculously simple: When does the hand come off? When does this fat black spot appear under the body and what does it come from? When do teeth fall out of the skull? How long does it take for a body to turn into a skeleton? To find out these answers, we first had to find the subjects to study. We had a farm; now we needed the bodies.

I sent letters to medical examiners and funeral directors in ninety-five Tennessee counties. Finally, one Thursday afternoon in the middle of May 1981, I took a tarpaulin pick-up truck to Crosville – a town an hour west of Knoxville in the Cumberland Plateau – and picked up our first research object, a gift from the Burris Funeral Home. The body was that of a seventy-year-old white male, a heavy alcoholic who suffered from emphysema and heart disease. We knew his identity – his daughter gave us the body – but for the sake of discretion, we assigned him his own unique identification number. During his lifetime, he had a family, name and surname; after his death, it was known only as 1-81: the first body donated to the Department of Anthropology in 1981. (My forensic cases were numbered using the same pair of numbers, but in reverse order; the first case in 1981 was thus marked as 81-1. It was not a very fancy system, but it worked.)

The next morning, with a handful of students, I laid the body of 1-81 on a concrete slab that we had poured a few months earlier. Someone took pictures. To protect 1-81 against rodents and small predators that could get through the fence, we covered the body with a wooden structure covered with a wire mesh. One by one we left a small fenced plot. I closed the gate and locked the padlock. A stray fly flew past my head. The Center for Anthropological Research has just started its first research project. The Dead Farm was born.

Excerpt from the book “Dead Farm” by Jon Jefferson and William M. Bass (ZNAK Publishing House).