Body Farms

BODY FARMS
Springtime in east Tennessee is a beautiful thing. Sunlight dapples through lush oak and maple trees. A warm breeze sends the invigorating scent of juniper through the air. Then the windshifts, and suddenly the atmosphere is filled with the smell of human decomposition. So it goes in springtime at the body farm in Knoxville. Its official name is the University of TennesseeAnthropological Research Facility, though most people just call it the Facility. It is barely two acres, but it is the current resting place for 188 corpses. Some of them are buried; others lie on the grass orin the woods, decaying. Since 1981, the Facility has studied hundreds of corpses to determine what happens to the human body after it dies. The farm not only helps law-enforcement agencies closepreviously unsolvable murders, but it also provides testimony for the dead, telling their story when they are no longer able to tell it themselves.
The first facility of its kind, the farm revolutionizedforensic anthropology—translating the maggots, putrefaction and other horror shows into a matter-of-fact timetable of death. At the Facility, researchers have also learned to cull evidence from bodiesthat have been burned, dismembered or blown up. And somewhere along the way, as America developed a fascination with forensics, the Facility won a degree of celebrity. It was the focus of PatriciaCornwell's 1994 novel "The Body Farm" and has often been referred to on "CSI." As this brainchild of Dr. William Bass approaches 30, however, body farms are taking root at forensic-anthropologydepartments all over the United States. Nowadays, there are body farms in Carolina University, Kansas, Texas and Florida.
Not everyone is thrilled about living next to an open-air cemetery. In Texas,protests about falling property values and buzzards that disturb flight patterns have forced a search for a new plot of land. Western Carolina University went to great lengths to make sure the residents...