July 16, 2009 • 25 mins
Most farms host crops and animals, but body farms specialize in corpses. Join Josh and Chuck as they tackle the fascinatingly gross phenomenon of body farms in this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
It's ready. Are you welcome to Stuff you should know
from house Stuff Works dot Com. Hey, and welcome to
the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. Chuck Bryant's here. That's right, Chuck.
(00:21):
How are you doing? I am well, how are you right? Chuck?
Let's go for a little walk, shall we? Okay, So
Chuck and I are here at the University of Tennessee
campus in beautiful Knoxville, Tennessee, and we're kind of on
the outside of campus. Um, we are in the woods basically. Yeah,
it's a little creepy out here, it is, Chuck, and
(00:43):
you're about to find out what actually, Chuck, watch out
what don't? Oh? Chuck? Wow, you just stepped in a corpse. Yes,
in a corpse. Yeah. That that thing really opened up
a lot more than I thought it would. Kind of
like a right cannamelon. Yeah, but it went right through.
That's gross. Yeah, I'm not sure what the cannon melon is,
but it doesn't sound like that. It's a lot nicer
(01:03):
than that. So okay, well, I guess we can get
out of Knoxville before anybody says anything, right, what is
this place? I'll tell you. Let's just get out of here, okay,
all right, okay, chuckers Wow, and I'm really glad you
washed your foot off back to the students through your
shoe away, got ready to jeans. It's a good thing
you weren't wearing shorts. That was groups I was up
(01:26):
to my ankle and body, so Chuck, I know that
was patently unnecessary that we went all the way to
Knoxville for that, but um, what we were just at
is called the body farm, right, that's the best setup
we've ever had. I know it's just for that. I'm
taking my shirt off for the rest of the podcast.
Do that. Oh dude, Okay, Chuck, I can't do that.
(01:49):
Yes you can. Let's talk about death baby. There's yeah,
you kid. I can't Chuck, settle it. No, he's really
gonna mess me up. Okay, all right, I'll put my
shirt back on. Hold on. Wow, we've reached new new
bows here. Okay, are you better now, big baby? I
think you can't do a podcast with a shirtless Josh.
I'm sorry. All right, Well, let's let's get back to
(02:11):
the to the issue at hand, body farms. Okay, Okay,
so Chuck, do you know me? I'm all about like death, Like, well,
I'm gonna die someday. I can't wait to find out
what happens. Right, So this is right up my alley. Yeah,
I thought it's a cool article. So you liked it
as well? Yeah? Written by your boyfriend Tom? Uh huh
long long time boyfriend time. Uh yeah it was good
body farms, very gruesome but necessary, cool, interesting topic. Yeah,
(02:36):
you just won't kick this one off of you. Well,
what do you want me to do? No, let's talk
about death first. So what the whole point of a
body farm? Is a study decomposition? Right right? That people
might not even know what one is. It's where you
study a dying or a corpse in a state of decay,
so you can learn things from that. Well, put, I
(02:59):
think that's right out of there. Was Actually, so there's
actually three body farms around the country, right, There's one
at Western North Carolina University, go, um some things. Uh.
There is a University of Tennessee at their main campus
at Knoxville, where we just words you're kind of volunteers.
Yeah I won't say go valls though, and you know why? Um.
(03:21):
And then there's another one at Texas State University, San Marcos.
That's it. Three body farms in the entire country. Are
they are really churning out the information? Right? And now?
One of the researchers pointed out that they think it
would be nice one day if there was a body
farm in each state because it's so geographically specific that
(03:41):
it would help to know these kind of things. Yeah, yeah,
makes sense. Yeah. I think Tennessee's got much of the
southeast covered because it's just wet and sticky down here everywhere,
and it's it's muggy and uh yeah, so any information
coming out of Tennessee probably applies to much of the
South Texas. Probably you cover the sand in the rocks
of the of the West. I would imagine what I mean,
(04:02):
in the sun, what happens if you die in Idaho?
Well exactly. You know, maybe it should open one in
the Pacific Northwest. Okay, suggestion, I agree? I agree? Um, alright,
so Chuck, what we're talking about his body farms. Basically, essentially,
it's just a an area attractive land. I think, um,
Knoxville's is like three hundred acres or something like that. Yeah,
(04:26):
it's a big one. Yeah, and then Texas is even
I think it's about ten times the size that I
think it's three thousand acres. Uh and they have um
dead bodies scattered across it. Uh. And I know Tennessee
was the first one to ever open this up, and
it was there was a guy named Dr. Bill Bass,
who you sent me a video that was awesome, Such
(04:46):
an affable man, I should say, Joshua. The Tennessee one
is three acre inside of a three acre area, so
the farming is actually smaller, which is one of the
reasons the residents signed off on it, because they were
a little uh skeptical. Yeah, and I can understand, I
can understand how someone would be sure. Yeah. Um, back
to bas Yeah, so Bass opened this uh the first
(05:08):
one in one at the University of Tennessee. And he
did it because the cops kept coming to him and
asking him, you know, if they could, um, if he
could help you know with this, uh some murder investigations
or anything like that. And um, he finally realized that
we don't know nearly enough about um decomposition as far
(05:30):
as it pertains to criminal investigations. So he took it
upon himself to start collecting corpses, and actually the first
ones he got were unclaimed corpses from local morgues. And
he just took him out to the body farm, which
is actually the technical name for it is the University
of Tennessee Forensic Anthropology Facility UM. And he just started
(05:51):
scattering him around the place and study studying them and
taking journals and logs and photos and uh noting the
rate of decay that kind of thing. Yeah, so let's
talk about the rated decay. Let's talk about decompetition. We
already handled rigor mortists and liver mortis and uh what
is alger mortis um in our rigor mortis podcast? We
want need to talk about that. We already talked about
(06:13):
idle auto licens too, but there's some other stuff too,
like the putrification process and the effects that has in
the body. Let's talk about that because it's gnarly. Okay, Okay, yeah,
it sounds good. Now you're talking about the flies and
the maggots. Sure, okay, we'll start there. One one way
that uh, insects actually give a lot of insight into
(06:33):
how long a body may have been lying there in
a state of decay. Um. I think they said flies
will go in through the orifices like the nose and
the ears. And in one of those videos that you
sent me, it shows flies going into a nose and
the the eyeball liss eye sockets. It's awesome. Yeah. So
they'll do this um within like a day of the
(06:54):
body dying if they have access to it. Give the
bodies outside because the body the flies and then the
lay eggs and then in twenty four hours the eggs
are hatched into larva. Yes, which a k a. Maggots, Right,
and these maggots are decaying flesh eating machines. Actually apparently
(07:15):
they can consume sixt of human corpse within ten days
from the inside out. And actually no, they start from
the outside in because it's laid on the fly legs,
the eggs on the skin, and then they start burrowing
in and eating and eating and eating. Well, dude, I'm
very wrong then, so um and they actually grow about
(07:36):
ten times in five days because they eat so much
and they're built for it too, right, right, they have
like a mouth hook what is it called. Yeah, that
that's a mouth hook that that scoops the the goo
into their mouths and then I think they're their mouth
is on one end, and they're breathing apparatus is on
the other end, so that they're just a little eating
machines and don't have to stop to breathe there. They
(07:57):
can just keep going literally built for it. So back
to what I was saying about the rate of decay.
They can take a look at the size of the
maggots and determine it. While if a maggot is this long,
then it's been in the human body growing for this
many days and it was probably hatched on this day,
so the body has been there for X number of
days or weeks. And that's just one type of fly.
(08:18):
And and this this is actually um they're called corpse fauna. No, yeah,
corpse fauna um, and just just the I think the
common house flies, the one that Tom's talking about in
this article, possibly the bottle fly. But it turns out
there is a whole ecosystem of flies that start to
(08:39):
come in at different stages of the decomposition process. So
some really love to pick you know, the little remnants
off a skeleton. Um. Others you know, start the whole
decomposition process and aid others like to show up when
you know, with the bodies really starting to turn to goo.
And but yeah, they study the flies and they can
figure out how long the body has been out there,
(09:00):
which is a big one. Yeah, this is a big
indicator for helping cops kind of figure out not motive,
but time of death stuff like that. And also, Um,
from this article, I found out that c s I
is a bunch of liars. Yeah, they never do that stuff. No,
I didn't know that blood blood stained pattern analysis, that's
not forensic. No. Um, handwriting analysis, Nope. Shooting guns into
(09:23):
that gel, yeah, that's all. That's not true theirs. Yeah,
which irks me to no end. Yeah, but you know
we've talked about this before. TV always sensationalizes, is that
just get over it. It wouldn't be very entertaining if
they just came by and said, well, the maggots are
twenty millimeters long. Case closed. I gotta tell you that
those videos you sent me were pretty entertaining and gruesome. Yeah.
(09:45):
Did you see that one guy with a big distended belly. Yes.
And actually one of the things that happens to a
corpse as well is the skin black ends right, Yeah,
and that video did point that out that certain parts
turn black. And I know when the blood collect in
certain parts. We talked about that before, certain parts of
the body will be darker and some will be more pale. Yeah, lividity.
Can we talk about deep gloving? I can't wait. I
(10:07):
think you should talk all about it. Yeah, it's pretty cool.
We learned this from the video as well. When um,
let's say you look at a human hand that's been
lying in the woods over the period of the days
of decay, it'll start to look really raising e like
it's been in dishwater, you know. Yeah, and then it
starts to literally you see, it starts to kind of
gather up and slide off the hand, and the epidermis
(10:29):
literally comes off of the hand. And they call it
d gloving. Yeah, and they actually figured out that, um,
you can take this glove, this d glove skin, so
that's kind of laying nearby the hand if you can
get to it before an animal comes up and it's
like hey yeah glove, Um you can. You can take
it into the lab, put a rubber glove on and
(10:52):
then put this human skin on like a glove and
then fingerprint that way. Because you know, once the one
the epidermis comes off, there goes the fingerprints, and and
forensic anthropologists like Dr Bass at the Body Farm have
figured out that you can do this. I mean, how
many just figuring that out? How many crimes have been
solved because somebody figured out you could do that? I
(11:15):
don't know, probably a bunch that pays for itself as
far as I'm concerned, because before that they just had
no fingerprints. They lost the finger They're like, oh well,
and now they do the buffalo bill thing and it's
all good, yeah, good bye. It puts a lotion in
the basket. That was very good. That was pretty pretty good. Okay,
So um yeah, that's dead body stuff. I'm sure we'll
(11:38):
get to more of it in a few um, but really,
forensic anthropologists come in most handy when there is no
flesh any longer. Yeah, but it's just bones, right because
think about it, you've you've lost any uh, any visual
identification of even you know, whether it was a man
(11:58):
or a woman, ethnicity, yeah, um age anything like that.
You can't just look at it like you can, you know,
like that time we found that drifter in the woods,
that one time, he was pretty new you could tell,
and we knew it was like a white probably mid thirties. Uh,
you know, male and you know, we just walked along
(12:18):
and minded our own business. Whatever happened to that guy?
I have no idea anyway. Um, if you if it's
just a skeleton, if that dead drifter had just been
a skeleton, then we wouldn't have been able to say
any of those things with any kind of certainty. So
when just a skeleton is found, Uh, they call in
a forensic anthropologist and they go to town. Chuck, Right,
(12:39):
they can still learn some of these things, Josh, as
you know, they can look at I guess the easiest
thing they can do to determine gender is to look
at the size of the bones, because typically men's bones
are larger where it attaches to the muscle. Not a
dead giveaway, no pun intended, but a good one. And
there's differences in the pelvic bone apparently. Uh. The forehead
(13:00):
is also a big tail tale sign and gender and race. Well,
men's foreheads tend to slope backwards and women's are more rounded. Yeah,
and looking at you, you have a very sloped rear forehead.
You can tell that's not your forehead, dude, that's your
the top of your head. And females chins usually come
(13:22):
to a point where a man's chin is a little
more squared off. How's my chin? It's uh beautiful, Josh,
it's beautiful. Ribs apparently can help determine age a lot
more ragged in our age they get ragged out. Yeah. Um.
And also with with men and women, and giveaway is
especially post adolescent men and women. Um is a the pelvis, Yes,
(13:47):
the pelvic inlet is much wider in women. Basically, the
hole in your pelvic pelvic bone is is much bigger
in women than it is in men, to allow for
easier childbirth. You got it. You don't want to pass
a kid through the pelvic inlet of a man. No,
that would be painful, Like it's not painful enough already. Um.
And then when it comes to the race, they don't
(14:09):
get too specific. They kind of want to say African,
Asian or European. They try to get you know, stay
pretty broad there, well, at least at first. And then
apparently there's some other signs that you can you can
kind of narrow it down even further. But those are
the first three categories they lump them in, right. Actually,
I thought it was an interesting fact. Tom hadn't here
that there were more differences within each racial group than
(14:30):
there are between each group as a whole, which I
don't thought it was kind of cool. Yeah, that is interesting.
And so those are bones, right, yeah, those are bones,
dem bones, dem bones. Yeah, Josh, you want to talk
about disease, of course. And then one of the big
concerns for residents that live near these body farms is,
wait a minute, they just let these bodies. I mean
(14:52):
sometimes as many as forty and fifty bodies out there.
We're worried about buzzards disease there. They're bad stuff get
into the water and shore by creeks, but it doesn't happen.
No one wants to drink dead body. Uh do you
know why? Why? Because if you have an infectious disease,
it's not gonna still be around after your body is decomposing. Yeah,
(15:15):
the the um, the infectious disease organisms also decomposed. They
don't stick around too long. But just to be certain,
any faculty or students who are you know, interacting with
these body farms, they're innoculated against all manner of stuff
because you know, you don't want to really take a chance. Sure, um,
(15:36):
but also they go out of their way. I think
the test um all all corpses that are donated to
them for any kind of infectious disease diseases beforehand. So
you gotta clean, clean, living corpse that you just have
out there. That's not really going to cause much problem, right,
and it should be noted too. Like you said, people
do donate. I think the one in Tennessee said they
had a list of either a list of three hundred
(15:58):
or they had already had three hundred bodies donated. And
you can do that just like your an organ donory.
You can say I'd like my body to go to
a body farm. After that, well, I think you want
to contact the body farm first. Hey, here's a fun
fact for you, Okay. In two thousand and six, the
University of Tennessee had more corpses and skeletons on its
campus than it had Asian students enrolled. We're about UM
(16:22):
nine hundred in the osteopathological collection, nine skeletons, another seven
hundred in two other skeletal collections, and then forty or
so bodies on the body farm and there are only
six D seventy three Asian students on campus. Isn't that crazy? Yeah? Yeah, crazy.
I wonder if they had any Asian bodies. I don't
(16:44):
know with that canceled out, okay, or maybe it would
count toward the total count both ways though, So we
canceled one another out. Okay, sure, But I mean everybody
likes to be count so counted. So what else, Josh?
Shall we talk about some of the the ways that
the body farms have helped out? You mean specifically, yeah,
(17:04):
e g. John Wayne Gaycy. Yeah, that's a good one.
Go ahead. And I've long been in pursuit of a
John Wayne Gacy um painting. You know, he's a prolific painter,
and I found a website finally. Yeah that he wasn't
a very good painter, but you know, just to have
a John Wayne Gaycy, it's crazy. He also loved them.
The Seven Dwarfs were a common theme of his. Really
(17:25):
fascinated by the Seven Dwarves for some reason. What a
creep he was a creepy dude. Yeah, yeah, Well when
Gaycey got popped in what the seventies? Yeah, I guess
if for the two of you who don't know who
that is, John Wayne Gacy is a famous serial killer
he was a serial killer of young men. Yes, he killed. Yeah,
he buried twenty nine of them under his house. Uh yeah,
(17:45):
I think it's not a good place. Which wasn't even
necessarily his house. It was his mother's apartment, which goes
a long way in explaining you know, John Wayne gayzy Um.
But when he finally got got busted and he started
telling the cops about how many people he had killed
that he they went out to his mother's apartment complex
and use ground penetrating radar and found basically a mass grave.
(18:07):
The problem is is like these bodies have been there
for a while, They've been killing kids for a real
long time, and uh, the the bones have become entangled
and they didn't know who was who or anything like that.
So they brought in forensic anthropologists and I believe they
helped to successfully identify uh most, if not all of them, right, Yeah,
So you know that's one way the body farms are contributing. Sure,
(18:29):
that's pretty cool. You know, they'll they'll profile the bones
and then they'll match that with data for missing kids,
and you know, one kind of leads to the other,
and that I know, it's closure somewhat for families. In
this kind of situation. Oh yeah, which is what we're
going to talk about with the Big Bopper. I think
you should talk about the Big Bopper. The Big Bopper
was a singer that perished in the plane crash with
(18:52):
Richie Valence and Buddy Holly back in the day, and
his son, the Big Bopper's son apparently got in touch
with Dr bat Ass because the body of the Big
Bopper was found. His name was J. P. Richardson was
found forty ft from the plane, and the Sun wanted
to know, Hey, did my dad actually die in the
crash or was he trying to go get help and
(19:14):
then died, you know, forty later, because I don't know
that would have made a difference in and how he
felt about Well, apparently there was a long persisting legend too,
and I guess you want to put it a rest,
and he did put a dress. Dr Bascott involved exhumed
the body and basically said, every bone in this guy's
body was crushed and there's no way that he survived
(19:34):
the crash and he was thrown from the plane and uh,
that's scene of that story. Yeah, so the Sun got
that that kind of closure. Can I tell one more.
All right, So there's this um this case in n
three in San Diego, a little seven year old named
Delbert apogean Um was found floating in San Diego Bay uh,
(19:54):
and the coroner, I guess, ruled that he had been
sodomized and um sexually assaulted in other ways before being murdered.
But they never found the killer. And then apparently San
Diego got some federal funding uh for opening cold cases,
and this was one of the ones they went after.
So they hired a forensic anthropologist and showed him, you know,
(20:17):
old crime scene photos and notes from the detectives that
worked the case. And I imagine it probably took the
forensic anthropologists an hour or ten minutes to say, no,
this kid wasn't sodomized or murdered. Yeah, the thing is
back then, no idea, No one was studying this kind
of thing. Nowadays, we know that when the body reacts
(20:38):
with water, all manner of nasty things happened. Bodies breakdown
twice as fast in the water, right, which is why
a lot of people dispose of murder victims in in
lakes or exact. And I guess why these cops weren't
able to really tell much, right, I think, well, not
only that they were just misling over the course of
these this the decades of study of decomposition, this forensic
(21:01):
if the apologist was able to say this kid wasn't murdered,
close your cold case, right yeah cool. Yeah. And then
one of the researchers I saw from that video at
Tennessee is trying to put together a book, like a
reference guide for various states of the case. It was
really yeah, cops kind of look at this instead of
having a truck all the way up to the body
farm like we did. Well, yeah, and I got the
(21:22):
the idea it was going to be like, Okay, here's
a picture of a body that's been underwater for seven days, um,
and you know, hold it up against your body, and
what doesn't look the same will continue to the next page.
So yeah, I guess it's going to be like a
an illustrated atlas of decomposition, the old guide, right. I
would love to get my hands on that one day
(21:42):
when it's done. Yeah, I'd love to go to the
body farm. I mean again, you know, you mean go
back here right right. Yeah. They talked to Tom and
I asked him if he had gone, uh, And he
was like, no, they don't. They learned a long time
ago not to let journalists are weirdos in Yeah. Yeah.
So the guy us describing the smell in the video.
I thought that was interesting. He said. It was didn't
(22:03):
smell like a dead animal, like that familiar smell of
that when you smell a dan animal. He said, it's
very different. He said it's unmistakable. Yeah. He said it
was pungent and sweet. Yeah, well you smell that interesting. Sure,
So that's body farms. Um, yeah, anything else, I don't.
I don't really have anything else about two. Nope. All right,
So I guess let's just go straight to listener mail. Josh,
(22:30):
we're going to uh, we're gonna ask our listeners for
a little information here. Because I didn't know the answer
to this question. We rarely tossed that out. So we
had Poloma right in from California. And Poluma said, a
longtime listener, I love your podcast. It makes my commute enjoyable.
And Josh, you chose Chuck as your partner in crime,
(22:50):
and you all have the great chemistry. Blah blah blah.
Could we resist each other now? It's destiny? Uh? So
she says this. I had a very variants. A few
days ago. It was a soupy day, a bit chilly,
with a few sprinkles of rain here and there. I
was over at my mother's house having a chat inside
when suddenly there was an incredibly bright, white and blue
(23:11):
flash and a quick zapping sound. I thought a light
bulb had burned out in the room or something. My
mother said that she saw a white bolt come through
the wall, passed just in front of my face, and
then go through the opposite wall of the room. We
looked everywhere and tried to think of any kind of
rational explanation. No bull would gun out, no strobe lights
or camera to flash. Thirty seconds after this weird phenomenon happened,
(23:34):
we heard thunder rumble very nearby. After calming down, I
immediately thought of YouTube. You have answers for everything, so
she will think of us when they narrowly escaped death.
Where their first thought? So she says, what in the
world happened? Do you think it was lightning? Was its
static electricity? What's going on here? Has anyone died of
static electricity? So I don't know the answer. I did
(23:55):
look up and found out that no one can die
of statical like tricity that I found that unless unless
results in spontaneous human combustion. H And as far as
I don't know, I don't think lightning can pass through
the room of a house like that, So so I
don't think it goes right in front of your face.
I think if it's coming that close to you, goes
(24:16):
right into you right and you would know. Well, because
we had the other listener mail that I think had
the side strike three blocks away he was at. So Paloma,
we don't have an answer, but I'm hoping some listeners
out there that are smarter than we are might have
a clue as to what happened that day. My money's
on unicorns, So maybe we'll follow up on this if
we get some feedback. Yeah, if you have an answer
(24:37):
for Paloma, especially if it's unicorns, you can send us
an email solving this mystery to stuff podcasts how stuff
works dot Com for more on this and thousands of
other topics. Does it how stuff works dot Com. Want
(24:57):
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you
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
It's ready. Are you welcome to Stuff you should know
from house Stuff Works dot Com. Hey, and welcome to
the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. Chuck Bryant's here. That's right, Chuck.
(00:21):
How are you doing? I am well, how are you right? Chuck?
Let's go for a little walk, shall we? Okay, So
Chuck and I are here at the University of Tennessee
campus in beautiful Knoxville, Tennessee, and we're kind of on
the outside of campus. Um, we are in the woods basically. Yeah,
it's a little creepy out here, it is, Chuck, and
(00:43):
you're about to find out what actually, Chuck, watch out
what don't? Oh? Chuck? Wow, you just stepped in a corpse. Yes,
in a corpse. Yeah. That that thing really opened up
a lot more than I thought it would. Kind of
like a right cannamelon. Yeah, but it went right through.
That's gross. Yeah, I'm not sure what the cannon melon is,
but it doesn't sound like that. It's a lot nicer
(01:03):
than that. So okay, well, I guess we can get
out of Knoxville before anybody says anything, right, what is
this place? I'll tell you. Let's just get out of here, okay,
all right, okay, chuckers Wow, and I'm really glad you
washed your foot off back to the students through your
shoe away, got ready to jeans. It's a good thing
you weren't wearing shorts. That was groups I was up
(01:26):
to my ankle and body, so Chuck, I know that
was patently unnecessary that we went all the way to
Knoxville for that, but um, what we were just at
is called the body farm, right, that's the best setup
we've ever had. I know it's just for that. I'm
taking my shirt off for the rest of the podcast.
Do that. Oh dude, Okay, Chuck, I can't do that.
(01:49):
Yes you can. Let's talk about death baby. There's yeah,
you kid. I can't Chuck, settle it. No, he's really
gonna mess me up. Okay, all right, I'll put my
shirt back on. Hold on. Wow, we've reached new new
bows here. Okay, are you better now, big baby? I
think you can't do a podcast with a shirtless Josh.
I'm sorry. All right, Well, let's let's get back to
(02:11):
the to the issue at hand, body farms. Okay, Okay,
so Chuck, do you know me? I'm all about like death, Like, well,
I'm gonna die someday. I can't wait to find out
what happens. Right, So this is right up my alley. Yeah,
I thought it's a cool article. So you liked it
as well? Yeah? Written by your boyfriend Tom? Uh huh
long long time boyfriend time. Uh yeah it was good
body farms, very gruesome but necessary, cool, interesting topic. Yeah,
(02:36):
you just won't kick this one off of you. Well,
what do you want me to do? No, let's talk
about death first. So what the whole point of a
body farm? Is a study decomposition? Right right? That people
might not even know what one is. It's where you
study a dying or a corpse in a state of decay,
so you can learn things from that. Well, put, I
(02:59):
think that's right out of there. Was Actually, so there's
actually three body farms around the country, right, There's one
at Western North Carolina University, go, um some things. Uh.
There is a University of Tennessee at their main campus
at Knoxville, where we just words you're kind of volunteers.
Yeah I won't say go valls though, and you know why? Um.
(03:21):
And then there's another one at Texas State University, San Marcos.
That's it. Three body farms in the entire country. Are
they are really churning out the information? Right? And now?
One of the researchers pointed out that they think it
would be nice one day if there was a body
farm in each state because it's so geographically specific that
(03:41):
it would help to know these kind of things. Yeah, yeah,
makes sense. Yeah. I think Tennessee's got much of the
southeast covered because it's just wet and sticky down here everywhere,
and it's it's muggy and uh yeah, so any information
coming out of Tennessee probably applies to much of the
South Texas. Probably you cover the sand in the rocks
of the of the West. I would imagine what I mean,
(04:02):
in the sun, what happens if you die in Idaho?
Well exactly. You know, maybe it should open one in
the Pacific Northwest. Okay, suggestion, I agree? I agree? Um, alright,
so Chuck, what we're talking about his body farms. Basically, essentially,
it's just a an area attractive land. I think, um,
Knoxville's is like three hundred acres or something like that. Yeah,
(04:26):
it's a big one. Yeah, and then Texas is even
I think it's about ten times the size that I
think it's three thousand acres. Uh and they have um
dead bodies scattered across it. Uh. And I know Tennessee
was the first one to ever open this up, and
it was there was a guy named Dr. Bill Bass,
who you sent me a video that was awesome, Such
(04:46):
an affable man, I should say, Joshua. The Tennessee one
is three acre inside of a three acre area, so
the farming is actually smaller, which is one of the
reasons the residents signed off on it, because they were
a little uh skeptical. Yeah, and I can understand, I
can understand how someone would be sure. Yeah. Um, back
to bas Yeah, so Bass opened this uh the first
(05:08):
one in one at the University of Tennessee. And he
did it because the cops kept coming to him and
asking him, you know, if they could, um, if he
could help you know with this, uh some murder investigations
or anything like that. And um, he finally realized that
we don't know nearly enough about um decomposition as far
(05:30):
as it pertains to criminal investigations. So he took it
upon himself to start collecting corpses, and actually the first
ones he got were unclaimed corpses from local morgues. And
he just took him out to the body farm, which
is actually the technical name for it is the University
of Tennessee Forensic Anthropology Facility UM. And he just started
(05:51):
scattering him around the place and study studying them and
taking journals and logs and photos and uh noting the
rate of decay that kind of thing. Yeah, so let's
talk about the rated decay. Let's talk about decompetition. We
already handled rigor mortists and liver mortis and uh what
is alger mortis um in our rigor mortis podcast? We
want need to talk about that. We already talked about
(06:13):
idle auto licens too, but there's some other stuff too,
like the putrification process and the effects that has in
the body. Let's talk about that because it's gnarly. Okay, Okay, yeah,
it sounds good. Now you're talking about the flies and
the maggots. Sure, okay, we'll start there. One one way
that uh, insects actually give a lot of insight into
(06:33):
how long a body may have been lying there in
a state of decay. Um. I think they said flies
will go in through the orifices like the nose and
the ears. And in one of those videos that you
sent me, it shows flies going into a nose and
the the eyeball liss eye sockets. It's awesome. Yeah. So
they'll do this um within like a day of the
(06:54):
body dying if they have access to it. Give the
bodies outside because the body the flies and then the
lay eggs and then in twenty four hours the eggs
are hatched into larva. Yes, which a k a. Maggots, Right,
and these maggots are decaying flesh eating machines. Actually apparently
(07:15):
they can consume sixt of human corpse within ten days
from the inside out. And actually no, they start from
the outside in because it's laid on the fly legs,
the eggs on the skin, and then they start burrowing
in and eating and eating and eating. Well, dude, I'm
very wrong then, so um and they actually grow about
(07:36):
ten times in five days because they eat so much
and they're built for it too, right, right, they have
like a mouth hook what is it called. Yeah, that
that's a mouth hook that that scoops the the goo
into their mouths and then I think they're their mouth
is on one end, and they're breathing apparatus is on
the other end, so that they're just a little eating
machines and don't have to stop to breathe there. They
(07:57):
can just keep going literally built for it. So back
to what I was saying about the rate of decay.
They can take a look at the size of the
maggots and determine it. While if a maggot is this long,
then it's been in the human body growing for this
many days and it was probably hatched on this day,
so the body has been there for X number of
days or weeks. And that's just one type of fly.
(08:18):
And and this this is actually um they're called corpse fauna. No, yeah,
corpse fauna um, and just just the I think the
common house flies, the one that Tom's talking about in
this article, possibly the bottle fly. But it turns out
there is a whole ecosystem of flies that start to
(08:39):
come in at different stages of the decomposition process. So
some really love to pick you know, the little remnants
off a skeleton. Um. Others you know, start the whole
decomposition process and aid others like to show up when
you know, with the bodies really starting to turn to goo.
And but yeah, they study the flies and they can
figure out how long the body has been out there,
(09:00):
which is a big one. Yeah, this is a big
indicator for helping cops kind of figure out not motive,
but time of death stuff like that. And also, Um,
from this article, I found out that c s I
is a bunch of liars. Yeah, they never do that stuff. No,
I didn't know that blood blood stained pattern analysis, that's
not forensic. No. Um, handwriting analysis, Nope. Shooting guns into
(09:23):
that gel, yeah, that's all. That's not true theirs. Yeah,
which irks me to no end. Yeah, but you know
we've talked about this before. TV always sensationalizes, is that
just get over it. It wouldn't be very entertaining if
they just came by and said, well, the maggots are
twenty millimeters long. Case closed. I gotta tell you that
those videos you sent me were pretty entertaining and gruesome. Yeah.
(09:45):
Did you see that one guy with a big distended belly. Yes.
And actually one of the things that happens to a
corpse as well is the skin black ends right, Yeah,
and that video did point that out that certain parts
turn black. And I know when the blood collect in
certain parts. We talked about that before, certain parts of
the body will be darker and some will be more pale. Yeah, lividity.
Can we talk about deep gloving? I can't wait. I
(10:07):
think you should talk all about it. Yeah, it's pretty cool.
We learned this from the video as well. When um,
let's say you look at a human hand that's been
lying in the woods over the period of the days
of decay, it'll start to look really raising e like
it's been in dishwater, you know. Yeah, and then it
starts to literally you see, it starts to kind of
gather up and slide off the hand, and the epidermis
(10:29):
literally comes off of the hand. And they call it
d gloving. Yeah, and they actually figured out that, um,
you can take this glove, this d glove skin, so
that's kind of laying nearby the hand if you can
get to it before an animal comes up and it's
like hey yeah glove, Um you can. You can take
it into the lab, put a rubber glove on and
(10:52):
then put this human skin on like a glove and
then fingerprint that way. Because you know, once the one
the epidermis comes off, there goes the fingerprints, and and
forensic anthropologists like Dr Bass at the Body Farm have
figured out that you can do this. I mean, how
many just figuring that out? How many crimes have been
solved because somebody figured out you could do that? I
(11:15):
don't know, probably a bunch that pays for itself as
far as I'm concerned, because before that they just had
no fingerprints. They lost the finger They're like, oh well,
and now they do the buffalo bill thing and it's
all good, yeah, good bye. It puts a lotion in
the basket. That was very good. That was pretty pretty good. Okay,
So um yeah, that's dead body stuff. I'm sure we'll
(11:38):
get to more of it in a few um, but really,
forensic anthropologists come in most handy when there is no
flesh any longer. Yeah, but it's just bones, right because
think about it, you've you've lost any uh, any visual
identification of even you know, whether it was a man
(11:58):
or a woman, ethnicity, yeah, um age anything like that.
You can't just look at it like you can, you know,
like that time we found that drifter in the woods,
that one time, he was pretty new you could tell,
and we knew it was like a white probably mid thirties. Uh,
you know, male and you know, we just walked along
(12:18):
and minded our own business. Whatever happened to that guy?
I have no idea anyway. Um, if you if it's
just a skeleton, if that dead drifter had just been
a skeleton, then we wouldn't have been able to say
any of those things with any kind of certainty. So
when just a skeleton is found, Uh, they call in
a forensic anthropologist and they go to town. Chuck, Right,
(12:39):
they can still learn some of these things, Josh, as
you know, they can look at I guess the easiest
thing they can do to determine gender is to look
at the size of the bones, because typically men's bones
are larger where it attaches to the muscle. Not a
dead giveaway, no pun intended, but a good one. And
there's differences in the pelvic bone apparently. Uh. The forehead
(13:00):
is also a big tail tale sign and gender and race. Well,
men's foreheads tend to slope backwards and women's are more rounded. Yeah,
and looking at you, you have a very sloped rear forehead.
You can tell that's not your forehead, dude, that's your
the top of your head. And females chins usually come
(13:22):
to a point where a man's chin is a little
more squared off. How's my chin? It's uh beautiful, Josh,
it's beautiful. Ribs apparently can help determine age a lot
more ragged in our age they get ragged out. Yeah. Um.
And also with with men and women, and giveaway is
especially post adolescent men and women. Um is a the pelvis, Yes,
(13:47):
the pelvic inlet is much wider in women. Basically, the
hole in your pelvic pelvic bone is is much bigger
in women than it is in men, to allow for
easier childbirth. You got it. You don't want to pass
a kid through the pelvic inlet of a man. No,
that would be painful, Like it's not painful enough already. Um.
And then when it comes to the race, they don't
(14:09):
get too specific. They kind of want to say African,
Asian or European. They try to get you know, stay
pretty broad there, well, at least at first. And then
apparently there's some other signs that you can you can
kind of narrow it down even further. But those are
the first three categories they lump them in, right. Actually,
I thought it was an interesting fact. Tom hadn't here
that there were more differences within each racial group than
(14:30):
there are between each group as a whole, which I
don't thought it was kind of cool. Yeah, that is interesting.
And so those are bones, right, yeah, those are bones,
dem bones, dem bones. Yeah, Josh, you want to talk
about disease, of course. And then one of the big
concerns for residents that live near these body farms is,
wait a minute, they just let these bodies. I mean
(14:52):
sometimes as many as forty and fifty bodies out there.
We're worried about buzzards disease there. They're bad stuff get
into the water and shore by creeks, but it doesn't happen.
No one wants to drink dead body. Uh do you
know why? Why? Because if you have an infectious disease,
it's not gonna still be around after your body is decomposing. Yeah,
(15:15):
the the um, the infectious disease organisms also decomposed. They
don't stick around too long. But just to be certain,
any faculty or students who are you know, interacting with
these body farms, they're innoculated against all manner of stuff
because you know, you don't want to really take a chance. Sure, um,
(15:36):
but also they go out of their way. I think
the test um all all corpses that are donated to
them for any kind of infectious disease diseases beforehand. So
you gotta clean, clean, living corpse that you just have
out there. That's not really going to cause much problem, right,
and it should be noted too. Like you said, people
do donate. I think the one in Tennessee said they
had a list of either a list of three hundred
(15:58):
or they had already had three hundred bodies donated. And
you can do that just like your an organ donory.
You can say I'd like my body to go to
a body farm. After that, well, I think you want
to contact the body farm first. Hey, here's a fun
fact for you, Okay. In two thousand and six, the
University of Tennessee had more corpses and skeletons on its
campus than it had Asian students enrolled. We're about UM
(16:22):
nine hundred in the osteopathological collection, nine skeletons, another seven
hundred in two other skeletal collections, and then forty or
so bodies on the body farm and there are only
six D seventy three Asian students on campus. Isn't that crazy? Yeah? Yeah, crazy.
I wonder if they had any Asian bodies. I don't
(16:44):
know with that canceled out, okay, or maybe it would
count toward the total count both ways though, So we
canceled one another out. Okay, sure, But I mean everybody
likes to be count so counted. So what else, Josh?
Shall we talk about some of the the ways that
the body farms have helped out? You mean specifically, yeah,
(17:04):
e g. John Wayne Gaycy. Yeah, that's a good one.
Go ahead. And I've long been in pursuit of a
John Wayne Gacy um painting. You know, he's a prolific painter,
and I found a website finally. Yeah that he wasn't
a very good painter, but you know, just to have
a John Wayne Gaycy, it's crazy. He also loved them.
The Seven Dwarfs were a common theme of his. Really
(17:25):
fascinated by the Seven Dwarves for some reason. What a
creep he was a creepy dude. Yeah, yeah, Well when
Gaycey got popped in what the seventies? Yeah, I guess
if for the two of you who don't know who
that is, John Wayne Gacy is a famous serial killer
he was a serial killer of young men. Yes, he killed. Yeah,
he buried twenty nine of them under his house. Uh yeah,
(17:45):
I think it's not a good place. Which wasn't even
necessarily his house. It was his mother's apartment, which goes
a long way in explaining you know, John Wayne gayzy Um.
But when he finally got got busted and he started
telling the cops about how many people he had killed
that he they went out to his mother's apartment complex
and use ground penetrating radar and found basically a mass grave.
(18:07):
The problem is is like these bodies have been there
for a while, They've been killing kids for a real
long time, and uh, the the bones have become entangled
and they didn't know who was who or anything like that.
So they brought in forensic anthropologists and I believe they
helped to successfully identify uh most, if not all of them, right, Yeah,
So you know that's one way the body farms are contributing. Sure,
(18:29):
that's pretty cool. You know, they'll they'll profile the bones
and then they'll match that with data for missing kids,
and you know, one kind of leads to the other,
and that I know, it's closure somewhat for families. In
this kind of situation. Oh yeah, which is what we're
going to talk about with the Big Bopper. I think
you should talk about the Big Bopper. The Big Bopper
was a singer that perished in the plane crash with
(18:52):
Richie Valence and Buddy Holly back in the day, and
his son, the Big Bopper's son apparently got in touch
with Dr bat Ass because the body of the Big
Bopper was found. His name was J. P. Richardson was
found forty ft from the plane, and the Sun wanted
to know, Hey, did my dad actually die in the
crash or was he trying to go get help and
(19:14):
then died, you know, forty later, because I don't know
that would have made a difference in and how he
felt about Well, apparently there was a long persisting legend too,
and I guess you want to put it a rest,
and he did put a dress. Dr Bascott involved exhumed
the body and basically said, every bone in this guy's
body was crushed and there's no way that he survived
(19:34):
the crash and he was thrown from the plane and uh,
that's scene of that story. Yeah, so the Sun got
that that kind of closure. Can I tell one more.
All right, So there's this um this case in n
three in San Diego, a little seven year old named
Delbert apogean Um was found floating in San Diego Bay uh,
(19:54):
and the coroner, I guess, ruled that he had been
sodomized and um sexually assaulted in other ways before being murdered.
But they never found the killer. And then apparently San
Diego got some federal funding uh for opening cold cases,
and this was one of the ones they went after.
So they hired a forensic anthropologist and showed him, you know,
(20:17):
old crime scene photos and notes from the detectives that
worked the case. And I imagine it probably took the
forensic anthropologists an hour or ten minutes to say, no,
this kid wasn't sodomized or murdered. Yeah, the thing is
back then, no idea, No one was studying this kind
of thing. Nowadays, we know that when the body reacts
(20:38):
with water, all manner of nasty things happened. Bodies breakdown
twice as fast in the water, right, which is why
a lot of people dispose of murder victims in in
lakes or exact. And I guess why these cops weren't
able to really tell much, right, I think, well, not
only that they were just misling over the course of
these this the decades of study of decomposition, this forensic
(21:01):
if the apologist was able to say this kid wasn't murdered,
close your cold case, right yeah cool. Yeah. And then
one of the researchers I saw from that video at
Tennessee is trying to put together a book, like a
reference guide for various states of the case. It was
really yeah, cops kind of look at this instead of
having a truck all the way up to the body
farm like we did. Well, yeah, and I got the
(21:22):
the idea it was going to be like, Okay, here's
a picture of a body that's been underwater for seven days, um,
and you know, hold it up against your body, and
what doesn't look the same will continue to the next page.
So yeah, I guess it's going to be like a
an illustrated atlas of decomposition, the old guide, right. I
would love to get my hands on that one day
(21:42):
when it's done. Yeah, I'd love to go to the
body farm. I mean again, you know, you mean go
back here right right. Yeah. They talked to Tom and
I asked him if he had gone, uh, And he
was like, no, they don't. They learned a long time
ago not to let journalists are weirdos in Yeah. Yeah.
So the guy us describing the smell in the video.
I thought that was interesting. He said. It was didn't
(22:03):
smell like a dead animal, like that familiar smell of
that when you smell a dan animal. He said, it's
very different. He said it's unmistakable. Yeah. He said it
was pungent and sweet. Yeah, well you smell that interesting. Sure,
So that's body farms. Um, yeah, anything else, I don't.
I don't really have anything else about two. Nope. All right,
So I guess let's just go straight to listener mail. Josh,
(22:30):
we're going to uh, we're gonna ask our listeners for
a little information here. Because I didn't know the answer
to this question. We rarely tossed that out. So we
had Poloma right in from California. And Poluma said, a
longtime listener, I love your podcast. It makes my commute enjoyable.
And Josh, you chose Chuck as your partner in crime,
(22:50):
and you all have the great chemistry. Blah blah blah.
Could we resist each other now? It's destiny? Uh? So
she says this. I had a very variants. A few
days ago. It was a soupy day, a bit chilly,
with a few sprinkles of rain here and there. I
was over at my mother's house having a chat inside
when suddenly there was an incredibly bright, white and blue
(23:11):
flash and a quick zapping sound. I thought a light
bulb had burned out in the room or something. My
mother said that she saw a white bolt come through
the wall, passed just in front of my face, and
then go through the opposite wall of the room. We
looked everywhere and tried to think of any kind of
rational explanation. No bull would gun out, no strobe lights
or camera to flash. Thirty seconds after this weird phenomenon happened,
(23:34):
we heard thunder rumble very nearby. After calming down, I
immediately thought of YouTube. You have answers for everything, so
she will think of us when they narrowly escaped death.
Where their first thought? So she says, what in the
world happened? Do you think it was lightning? Was its
static electricity? What's going on here? Has anyone died of
static electricity? So I don't know the answer. I did
(23:55):
look up and found out that no one can die
of statical like tricity that I found that unless unless
results in spontaneous human combustion. H And as far as
I don't know, I don't think lightning can pass through
the room of a house like that, So so I
don't think it goes right in front of your face.
I think if it's coming that close to you, goes
(24:16):
right into you right and you would know. Well, because
we had the other listener mail that I think had
the side strike three blocks away he was at. So Paloma,
we don't have an answer, but I'm hoping some listeners
out there that are smarter than we are might have
a clue as to what happened that day. My money's
on unicorns, So maybe we'll follow up on this if
we get some feedback. Yeah, if you have an answer
(24:37):
for Paloma, especially if it's unicorns, you can send us
an email solving this mystery to stuff podcasts how stuff
works dot Com for more on this and thousands of
other topics. Does it how stuff works dot Com. Want
(24:57):
more how stuff works? Check out our blogs on the
how also works dot Com home page. Brought to you
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