Death's Acre Page 22

  By 1996, The Body Farm was one of the best-selling mysteries ever published. The book was an international hit, selling hundreds of thousands of copies in England, Japan, and other countries. Someone I know was traveling to Japan regularly on business at the time, and he told me that his colleagues in Japan made him stuff his suitcase with copies of the book every time he came from America.

  It wasn’t long before a parade of reporters and television crews was beating a path to Knoxville and the Body Farm. Even now, some ten years later, the parade still hasn’t stopped. Some of the stories have been lurid or laughable, but others have been factual and respectful.

  But flattering as the attention was, it was also distracting. If we’d been willing to give up research, teaching, and writing, we could have devoted twenty-four hours a day to giving tours of the facility. I give around a hundred lectures a year to police, undertakers, ATF agents, and other groups, and nearly everybody I talk to asks to come to the Body Farm. One week, den mothers from two different Cub Scout dens called, asking me to take their kids on a tour of the Body Farm. At that point I finally snapped: clearly, things had gotten out of hand. I began saying no far more often than I said yes. And yet, I still say yes, and my colleagues still say yes, many times.

  And some of the attention is a blessing. Because of Patricia Cornwell’s blockbuster novel and all the subsequent media attention it sparked, we get far more calls than we used to from people who want to donate their bodies for research. What nearly all of these donors say when they contact the university is “I want to donate my body to the Body Farm.”

  In November of 2002, Patricia Cornwell published a remarkable new book—nonfiction, this time. Titled Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper, Case Closed, it represented the culmination of two years of painstaking forensic research. In a case of life imitating art—or, more precisely, art inspiring life—the crime novelist has reinvented herself as a real-life forensic detective. Digging deep into the past and using up-to-the-minute DNA technology, her book makes the case that Jack the Ripper was a Victorian artist named Walter Sickert, who painted a gruesome series of murder pictures that bore striking resemblances to the murder scenes where Jack the Ripper left his victims. If Patricia Cornwell ever decides to give up fiction for good, the real world could use a tenacious forensic investigator like her.

  There are moments in life when, in hindsight, you realize everything has changed forever. I’m proud to say the publication of The Body Farm was one of those moments in my life, and in the life of the Anthropology Research Facility I created. And I’m proud to call Patricia Cornwell both my colleague and my friend.

  CHAPTER 15

  More Progress, More Protest

  SIX MONTHS after Patricia Cornwell’s novel The Body Farm thrust the Anthropology Research Facility into the limelight, I was still basking in the glow of media attention. I’d always gotten along well with journalists, mainly because I didn’t mind telling them what I learned when I examined decomposing bodies or bare bones. My openness had caused me some embarrassing moments—especially when I misjudged Colonel Shy’s death by almost 113 years—but it had also helped educate the public about forensic anthropology and the role it could play in fighting crime.

  By this time I’d been heading the anthropology department at the University of Tennessee for nearly twenty-five years. During that quarter-century, the faculty had grown from six to twenty. Our program had grown from a small undergraduate major to one of the nation’s leading training grounds for forensic anthropologists: There were around sixty board-certified forensic anthropologists in the United States by now, and I’d helped train a third of them.

  The Council for the Advancement and Support of Education had named me Professor of the Year, not just for UT or Tennessee, but for all of the United States and Canada. Not long after that, President Ronald Reagan came to Knoxville and had lunch with me. Our work was attracting recognition and acclaim, in America and around the world. I was invited to lecture in Australia, Canada, and Taiwan.

  Much to my surprise, my personal life was full and happy again, too. The reason for that change had been right under my nose for twenty years. Ever since I moved to Knoxville to run the anthropology department at UT, I had loved going to work each day. One reason was the work itself: teaching is fun, mostly, and forensic cases are fascinating. Another reason was Annette Blackbourne.

  I had hired Annette not long after I came to UT. The department already had one secretary, but as we expanded and began building a research program, we needed someone to keep track of our research grants. When I interviewed Annette for the job, I was impressed by her organizational and financial skills; I was even more impressed by her warmth, maturity, and empathy with people. In a large department like ours, populated by everyone from homesick first-year undergraduates to tenured, self-important professors, diplomacy and humor were crucial.

  When our main departmental secretary left for a higher-paying job, I promoted Annette into that position; later still, her job was upgraded from secretary to administrative assistant. Perhaps counselor or adviser would have been a more accurate title. Whenever I faced a difficult decision, I ran it past Annette, and more than once she saved me from making a terrible mistake. For instance, when picketers showed up at the Body Farm, she kept me from rushing over to confront them. Instead we watched them, unnoticed from a car across the parking lot, chuckling at the cleverness of their protest banner; as a result I was able to respond to news reporters later with a much cooler, clearer head.

  In twenty years of working together, Annette and I had never spoken a cross word to one another. Everyone in the department—the other faculty, the graduate students, the undergrads—adored her. Over the years Ann and I had become close friends with Annette and her husband, Joe, a pharmacist at UT Medical Center. Twice a year the four of us would pile into a car or a camper for a long weekend excursion somewhere in the Southeast: Nashville, Asheville, Chattanooga, Mammoth Cave, and half a dozen other destinations. Then, shortly before Ann got sick, Annette’s husband was diagnosed with lung cancer. He died about the time Ann’s cancer was diagnosed.

  Throughout Ann’s illness Annette was a generous and sympathetic listener, and when Ann died, she understood exactly what I was going through. Annette’s friendship and understanding pulled me through those difficult first months; eventually that friendship deepened into love. Fourteen months after Ann’s death, Annette and I got married in a small chapel at Second Presbyterian Church. I felt reborn. I felt young all over again.

  Everything, in short, was going well in the fall of 1994. Too well to last.

  Once again, the trouble began with waterlogged bodies. Years before, there had been that Roane County floater I’d stashed in the department’s mop closet, provoking the wrath of the janitor. This time the problem started with Tyler O’Brien’s adipocere study. Adipocere is the greasy, waxy substance that often coats bodies pulled from lakes, rivers, and damp basements. With all the water in Tennessee, I was quite familiar with adipocere. But, as usual, I didn’t just want to know the what and the why of it; I also wanted to know the when of it, so that the next time a sheriff’s deputy or rescue squad brought me a floater, I could look at the degree of adipocere formation and tell them, with at least some measure of scientific confidence, how long that body had been “sleeping with the fishes.”

  I’d tried to persuade several graduate students to do a master’s thesis study on adipocere, but I hadn’t found any takers; I guess they’d all been around long enough to know that floaters are corpses at their worst—their smelliest and slimiest. But finally, in the fall of 1993, along came Tyler O’Brien, who had spent the previous summer working for the medical examiner in Syracuse, New York. Syracuse is surrounded by New York’s Finger Lakes, so Tyler saw quite a few drowning victims during his summer with the ME. Some of those drowning victims were adipocere-covered and others weren’t, and Tyler, like me, was curious
about the difference in conditions and time since death.

  The simplest procedure would have been to moor bodies in the river below the research facility. But we didn’t want fishermen calling the police every day for six months, so Tyler came up with a new system: he dug three grave-size pits in the ground, lined them with heavy plastic, and filled them with water. Tyler’s narrower, more controlled study had a strong scientific argument in its favor. By limiting the number of variables—in other words, by factoring the possibility of any hungry fish out of the equation—he could focus purely on adipocere formation, without outside interference.

  Tyler’s study involved three bodies, one in each pit. To make it easy to study a body at various intervals during the experiment, he put a wire platform in the bottom of each pit and attached hooks to each corner so we could hoist it up; then he put the body on top.

  The first body floated like a cork. We’d push his head down, and his feet would bob to the surface; we’d push his feet down, and his head would pop back up. We discussed weighting him down, but decided to let his body seek its own level in the water. The second body sank like a rock. Often drowning victims or murder victims thrown in a lake or river will rise to the surface after a few days or weeks—when enough decomposition gases have built up in the abdomen—but this guy went down and stayed down. The third body was a tall, robust black man; I was sure he’d sink, too, since black people have denser bones than whites, but he surprised me. Like the first guy, this one was a natural floater.

  Tyler left the bodies in the water for five months; by then the flesh was completely rotten, and there was little more to be learned. But along the way he’d observed some interesting phenomena. One of the most interesting was this: Adipocere forms roughly two to three inches above and below the waterline, rather than uniformly over the entire body. We assumed it must be related to the availability of both water and oxygen, but we weren’t certain. As with almost any good research project, Tyler’s study raised as many questions as it answered.

  Up until then, the only research on adipocere formation had been limited to small samples of tissue placed in vials of water in a laboratory. Tyler’s project was a truly pioneering study of adipocere formation in its natural setting. Tyler kept careful notes and took numerous photographs; in addition, the university’s video department came out and shot a good bit of footage of the experiment. The images on the tape were gruesome, but they were so scientifically enlightening that I included them on an instructional videotape I made for law enforcement officers, as part of a UT continuing-education program called the Law Enforcement Satellite Academy of Tennessee—LESAT, for short.

  Unfortunately, a Nashville television reporter who had come to give a presentation at LESAT happened to view that particular tape, and she was horrified by what she saw. That’s not surprising; even I have a hard time looking at that footage, and I’m exposed to dead and decaying bodies all the time. I have a hard time seeing footage of surgical procedures, too, but that doesn’t mean the surgeon has done anything wrong. In hindsight, though, I could only conclude that this TV reporter mentally blacklisted us and then waited for a reason to pounce.

  Before long she got it. By this time Tennessee’s medical examiners were sending me a steady supply of bodies that had gone unclaimed after death. Some of those unclaimed bodies were homeless men, and—unbeknownst to me—a few of those homeless men also happened to be military veterans.

  I served in the Army during the Korean War. I have the highest respect for the men and women who defend our nation, and I would never intentionally do anything disrespectful to any veteran, living or dead. But none of that made any difference when Nashville’s Channel 4 heard that honorably discharged veterans were rotting on the ground at the Body Farm.

  My first warning of trouble came when a reporter called to ask for an interview. “Sure,” I said, “come on over.” That entire fall I was teaching some 300 miles from Knoxville at UT-Martin, another state school in northwest Tennessee. The reporter and her cameraman made the 150- mile drive from Nashville to Martin. As they were setting up the camera and lights, she told me 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 stu
dents 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,” he said, “should have to yield to the need to apprehend criminals.” The committee voted 5–4 to shelve the bill. We’d avoided catastrophe by the narrowest possible margin.

  Sometime later, I happened to be at a meeting where the governor of Tennessee was present. The governor took me aside afterward and, leaning close to my ear, said quietly, “Apparently my commissioner of veterans’ affairs doesn’t have enough work to do.” I took that as a sign that the uproar over the Body Farm was over—for the moment, at least, and for good, I hoped.