Teasing Secrets from the Dead: My Investigations at America

“Nine months?” I ventured. “A year?”

He laughed again. “Two weeks,” he told me.

“Two weeks?”

“Because of the maggots.”

“The what?” I looked more closely at the mushy ground and took an involuntary step backward. I hadn't noticed them at first, though I had been puzzled by the shiny little dark-brown shells littering the ground at my feet, but now I saw that all around the periphery of the skeleton were dozens of milky-white, slow-moving maggots, bucking like inchworms, on their way to some unknown destination.

Later I would learn that these little creatures have helped solved many murders. Now, though, I was blissfully unaware that those maggots were a huge part of what lay in store for me as a forensic anthropologist. Murray watched with amusement as I tried to lean closer to see the skull without letting the toes of my brand-new running shoes actually touch anything that seemed even faintly maggot-related.

As Murray and I left the decaying human remains, he explained to me a little of the Body Farm's history. In the early 1970s, the program's chair, Dr. William Bass, ran into a roadblock as he tried to solve a case involving a decomposed body. His interest in the process of human decay was piqued when he realized that, amazingly, no one had ever studied this process before, despite its obvious usefulness in forensic investigation. He also knew that U.T. Knoxville didn't have a modern skeletal collection for him to teach osteology or to use as a forensic anthropology database. The school did have a good collection of bones from Native American archaeological sites, but these were too different in size and shape to be of much use in current forensic research.

So Bass asked the University of Tennessee to give him a small section of land where he could leave human bodies to decompose under natural conditions and then gather the bones for his collection. After all, nature's method of stripping a carcass is fast and efficient, and it doesn't cost a cent. People who had donated their bodies to science found their way onto the Body Farm; so did unidentified and unclaimed corpses from the local medical examiner. Nature did its work-and Dr. Bass and his graduate students were able to document the processes by which bodies decay.

Until Dr. Bass came along, forensic scientists who were asked to establish time since death of a badly decomposed or skeletonized body had to rely upon guesswork and experience, laboriously comparing each new case with earlier solved cases. Now, thanks to Dr. Bass's pioneering work, we have documented scientific studies to back up our hunches. Despite the obvious advantages to this method of study, the University of Tennessee at Knoxville is still the only place in the world where scientists can observe and document the day-to-day journey from death to skeletonization.

Now, as Murray and I walked out from the woods full of corpses into the open field, I saw his look of approval. I hadn't fainted or gasped in horror-on the contrary, I'd been fascinated, drawing nearer for a closer look, even asking an intelligent question or two. All things considered, I'd approached the dead body like a scientist rather than a voyeur-and I realized that I had passed a test. True, I'd seen Murray 's slides and heard his descriptions at his lecture the summer before. But I had to admit, seeing the real thing was something else.

As Murray steered me over to two white cars and opened the trunks to see how the newest body-decay project was going, I couldn't help feeling just a bit triumphant. I knew that Dr. Bass had insisted that I-like all other incoming grad students-be taken out to the decay facility as soon as possible. If I wasn't prepared to deal with decomposing bodies-and with all other aspects of death and decay-it was best to find out now. Well, so far so good. But what other tests were in store for me?

I soon found out. Within only a few weeks, I was told to design and carry out a short-term research project of my own. Since I'd come to the university with an avid interest in facial reconstruction, I thought it would be interesting to document the changes in a person's face as he or she decayed. While still in Georgia, I'd been asked to “restore” faces that were in various stages of decomposition and I'd had some success, both with traditional drawing techniques and with experimental computer enhancement. In my naivete, I thought that once I established some predictable baseline parameters for facial decomposition, all I'd have to do was take a photo of a dead person's face and perform a simple computer maneuver to make him or her look alive again.

I was wrong. Okay, I was right in theory-but only if I got to the body within the first day and a half. After that, if it was warm and humid enough, the maggots would have done their work and the face would be irrevocably altered, making any photos totally useless for identification purposes.

However, I was still interested in documenting what happened as maggots destroyed a face and, as luck would have it, I got my chance the very next day, when a newly donated body arrived at our lab just hours after the man had died. I positioned the man carefully on his back out in the open field, not too far from the wooded area. Securing his head with a rock on either side, I spread the camera tripod right over his shoulders and pointed the lens down toward his face at a ninety-degree angle. To my satisfaction, I was able to get a shot in before the first fly had landed.

For the next four days and nights, I returned to the body, remounted the camera, and took a new picture-every four hours. I scaled back to every six hours for the next ten days after that. May in Tennessee is indeed hot and humid, so the flies had laid their eggs the same day I put the body there, and by the next afternoon, the man's nose and mouth were bulging with baby maggots and fly eggs. In the middle of the following night, under the stark beam of my flashlight, his lips seemed to move as if he were trying to speak-I even thought I heard him moaning. No, those sounds were mine, involuntary responses to the sight of what had once been a human face being devoured from the inside out.

It took everything I had to focus the camera and zoom in on the maggot masses that were churning inside this man's mouth and nose and under his eyelids, creating this roiling, seething motion as they fed. Lines of ants were streaming up from the ground, ready to devour any maggots unlucky enough to be pushed out toward the edge of the teeming mass. It was a little unnerving to realize that however much we like to think we're at the top of the food chain while we're alive, once we're dead, we're just part of it.

After I left the facility that night, I went home and quickly poured a therapeutic dose of bourbon over a few ice cubes. As I sat on my back porch, drinking slowly and trying to regain some composure, I seriously doubted if I was cut out for this kind of work.

I managed to sleep for a few hours, but my dreams were filled with crawling maggots and voracious ants. At dawn, back at the facility, two startled vultures who had been trying to disembowel a nearby body flew to the trees directly over my head. As they took off slowly and clumsily from their breakfast, they followed their usual practice of spewing vomit on rapid takeoff-vomit that fell at my feet and over my corpse's torso. Meanwhile, slimy trails of the snails who had visited the carcass during the predawn hours now crisscrossed my subject's face, and his cheeks spewed adolescent maggots who seemed to be growing bigger right before my eyes. Maggots were pouring from his nostrils, too, and they had almost finished snacking on the last traces of his eyeballs, leaving empty sockets in his skull. Stifling a sigh, I forced myself to step over this man's body and set up my tripod.

Entomologists analyze maggots, adult flies, other insects, and similar small scavengers to estimate when and where a person died, and to help determine the types of injuries a victim has suffered. Adult flies-the very same houseflies that buzz around your picnic dinner-can sense death immediately. They are drawn to a body within a few minutes of when death occurs and, if they have access to the carcass, they land and start surveying the territory. Appearances to the contrary, when they crawl around on the body, they aren't eating much-just looking for the ideal place to lay their eggs. The tiny eggs, which resemble little clumps of sawdust, hatch into maggots within a day or two. The maggots immediately start to devour the carcass, growing visibly bigger with each passing day.

At first they don't even resemble the fat, stubby little legless larvae with soft white skin that most people visualize when they hear the word. Maggots have to go through three developmental stages, or “instars.” Their pale, white, papery skin splits and they shed it each time, until finally these mobile, voracious little eating machines have passed from infancy through their teenage days to reach their full growth potential.

Then, when they just can't eat any more, they crawl away from the dead body to find a place to hide. Their soft white skin becomes a dark-brown pupa casing, or shell, shaped something like a miniature football about one-fourth to one-half inch long, within which they metamorphose into adult flies-much as a caterpillar changes into a butterfly within a cocoon. If the weather stays warm and humid, the adult fly breaks open the end of its shell after a week or two, and the cycle is complete. At that point, if by any chance there's anything left of the body, the cycle begins again-and then again. If the entomologist can calculate the cycle, he or she can help you estimate when the dead body was first exposed to the elements.

Time of death is just one of the factors an entomologist helps to determine. Since the insects and other arthropods (spiders, mites, centipedes) commonly found on bodies have preferred habitats, sometimes an entomologist can tell if a person was moved after he or she was killed. If a corpse found in Florida is colonized by a species found only in New Jersey and parts north, the authorities are likely to include the possibility that the body was brought in from someplace else.

Sometimes maggots can even help you figure out whether a person sustained any injuries at the time of death. When the adult flies lay their eggs, they seek out the sites that provide the best environment for their young. In the human body, that would be the mouth, nose, ears, eyes, and genitals-warm, moist, and dark. The flies burrow as far as they can into those tempting, secret places and lay their eggs. In a decaying corpse, therefore, you would expect to see early maggot concentrations there-and if they've congregated anywhere else, perhaps another body part was broken or bloody at the time of death.

What still amazes me is how quickly maggots can reduce a fleshy corpse to bone. That childhood rhyme of “The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out” is not far wrong. There's a saying among forensic entomologists: Three flies and their offspring can consume a carcass as quickly as can a full-grown lion. Not bad for tiny creatures less than an inch long.

By the time I finished my time-lapse portrayal of decay, I was no longer fazed by sights-and smells-that two weeks ago had left me nauseated and trembling. Somehow, the shocking had become commonplace, and the human remains I saw rotting in the sun had begun to look more like three-dimensional puzzles and less like once-living beings. As I would later learn, this kind of detachment had its price-but it was also the necessary precondition for doing this work. If I was ever to learn to estimate the postmortem interval-how long it had been since someone had died-or to read the story of a person's last hours in a few broken bones, I would have to look at human remains as though I were a disembodied representative of science, not as a woman whose own body would one day end up rotting in the ground like everybody else's.

I still don't like maggots, though. Never have. Never will.

“I have a new challenge for you, class,” said Dr. Bass. On his desk he placed a metal cafeteria-style tray filled with a collection of human bones.

“I must confess,” he went on, “I don't have high hopes. In twenty years, no one has ever gotten this one right.”

I'd just finished a semester of Bill Bass's osteology class, where he'd done his best to initiate me and a dozen other grad students into the science of bone. Now we were taking the next giant step into the mysteries of forensic anthropology.

Forensic anthropologists take what we as physical anthropologists have learned about bone and apply it to criminal investigations. In the ideal world, physical anthropologists can look at a skeleton and tell you several basic pieces of information: age, race, sex, and stature. They can probably also tell you something about bone diseases and trauma-broken bones, healed injuries, and other evidence of how the person may have lived or died.

Of course, most anthropologists are usually working with centuries-old skeletons. We forensic anthropologists do the same kind of work-but on people who may have died only a few years, months, or even days ago. Our work may also involve fresh but unassociated body parts-the kind normally encountered in high-impact plane crashes or explosions-as well as corpses partially destroyed by fire.

As part of our academic training, my classmates and I were required to study cultural anthropology and theory of archaeology, and I'd struggled mightily through those classes. But I got my reward when it was finally time to learn about bone. No two ways about it, bone fascinated me.

True, Dr. Bass was an incredibly demanding professor, which I must admit I resented at first, particularly since, at Dr. Hughston's clinic, I'd been considered something of a bone expert myself. I soon came to find out, though, that it wasn't the same at all. The bones at the clinic might be broken or even crushed-but they were always safely encased within a recognizable portion of the human