One of the most dramatic and revolutionary advances in forensic science in recent decades is the advent of DNA testing. Although DNA testing isn’t a magic wand — as the Leoma Patterson case makes painfully clear — it is an astonishing breakthrough. DNA research is no longer confined to the field of genetics; within anthropology, a new scientific discipline—“molecular anthropology”—is emerging. UT’s anthropology faculty now includes a talented young molecular anthropologist, Dr. Graciela Cabana, who will doubtless find fascinating ways to advance the frontiers of her specialty through research at the Body Farm.
One piece of research that will probably never be done at the Body Farm is the effect of book writing on the health of the body, or at least the health of my body. In the year 2002, early in the writing of my memoir, Death’s Acre, my heart stopped beating and I nearly died. Then, just as this book was nearing completion, my cardiologist informed me that my pacemaker — implanted after my 2002 brush with death — was dying, and needed to be replaced right away. I went in for day surgery on a Wednesday morning, and by lunchtime that day, I was headed home. The following day, I felt good enough to take my dog, Trey, for her afternoon walk, and early the next week I drove to Nashville and gave a two-hour lecture to a group of medical professionals. Officially I’ve been retired for years now, but some weeks I still put in forty or fifty hours of work — by choice, not of necessity. Occasionally I end up wishing I’d chosen to say no more often, but mostly I say yes because I love to lecture and love to consult on interesting forensic cases. Sometime soon, for example, I’m supposed to help a team of forensic scientists exhume and examine the remains of the famous magician Harry Houdini, who died on Halloween in 1926; he supposedly died from a ruptured appendix, but questions — and rumors about death threats and poison — have persisted for eighty years, veiling the truth like smoke and mirrors.
Houdini was arguably the world’s greatest escape artist, yet in the end, he couldn’t escape the Grim Reaper. None of us will, but some of us — thanks to the magic of technology and medicine — manage to prolong our performance by years. It’s my good fortune that cardiac science, like forensic science, has made immense strides in the course of my adult life.
And yet: the human heart, like the human mind, remains mysterious and sometimes tragically flawed, as the unchanging penchant for murder reminds me again and again. It has been my calling and my privilege to help solve some of those murders, and — thanks to years of research by graduate students and faculty at the Body Farm — to provide scientific tools that help other forensic scientists solve them. I never set out to create something famous at Body Farm; I was simply putting one scientific foot in front of the other, trying to answer questions as they arose in the course of murder investigations or classroom discussions. Gradually, though, those research steps have taken me and my colleagues and students on quite a journey.
In the chapters that follow, you’ll see how things we’ve learned at the Body Farm have helped us identify the dead, figure out what happened to them, and in many cases (though sadly not all) bring killers to justice. But the real breakthrough, as I’m reminded in the wake of the tragic shootings at Virginia Tech, remains elusive. The real breakthrough will come the day we learn not how to solve more murders, but how to prevent more murders.
Meanwhile, until that day dawns, our not-so-ivory-tower research, behind our locked gates and wooden fences, will equip investigators with more and better tools to solve the crimes that occur in the real world. The world beyond the Body Farm.
— DR. BILL BASS
Knoxville, Tennessee
June 2007
1
THE GOLDEN BOWL, THE BURNING PALACE: APPLYING MODERN SCIENCE TO ANCIENT BONES
As fans of the television series CSI know, death scenes can capture a wealth of detail about what happens in the instant when human life is snuffed out — even, I can say with certainty, when that instant occurred nearly three thousand years ago.
More than four decades ago and six thousand miles away, I had one of my most memorable experiences in applying the tools of archaeology and anthropology to the questions of forensic science. The death scene lay in the ancient hilltop citadel of Hasanlu, in northwestern Iran, where a fierce army attacked the massive fortress, breached its mighty walls, and brought down its palace and temple in a rain of blood and fire. Hundreds had died in the battle and the blaze, but I was focusing on three of the dead, who were unearthed in a particularly dramatic discovery in the ruins.
Midway through the project, though, I began to fear that a fourth death might soon be involved: my own. As I lay doubled over, delirious for days on end, my circumstances may have been less heroic than those of the ancient warriors whose bones had drawn me here, but the setting — the way of life, the nearness of death, even the practice of medicine — had changed little in the twenty-eight centuries since the fortress fell.
In the summer of 1964, at age thirty-five, I was an eager assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Kansas at Lawrence. Although the ink on my Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania had been dry for only three years, by that time I’d excavated more skeletons than almost any other anthropologist in America. Starting in 1957, the summer after I entered graduate school at Penn, I’d worked for the Smithsonian Institution, which was excavating numerous Native American village sites throughout the Missouri River Basin. The Army Corps of Engineers was building a string of dams along the Missouri; the river’s waters were rising; and the Smithsonian was racing to unearth and preserve as many relics and bones as possible before the sites were inundated forever. My first summer in the Missouri Basin, my crew and I painstakingly located and excavated several dozen Arikara Indian graves; by 1963, after I’d devised a way to use road-grading equipment to peel back the earth atop the graves without damaging the bones within, we were excavating several hundred each summer. I got so fast and efficient at excavating burial grounds that I eventually earned the label “Indian grave robber number one” from a Native American activist who disapproved of digging up Indian graves. (This chapter in my career is told in more detail in my memoir, Death’s Acre, published in 2003.)