JA: "What method did you come to to explore to find clandestine graves?"
Dr. Vass: "Because the most successful method at that time was cadaver locating dogs, we looked at odor evolution from decompositional events. And in order to study that we utilized the anthropological research facility, the body farm, and we actually buried a number of individuals. Now, these graves were kind of special because we put in a piping system underneath the bodies, above the bodies and at the surface of the soil. And these bodies were buried at various depths down to 3 1/2 feet, I think was the deepest burial we had and them there was some shallow ones and we began monitoring which chemicals are being produced during a burial situation and these chemicals are produced either at the body that was the pipe underneath the body, or they could have produced then began migrating upward through the soil columns. The soil column is the amount of soil over the body in a burial situation, those would then be recorded in the piping system above the body. And then, we looked at finally, which compounds produced at the body made it all the way up through the soil column and escaped at the surface. Now the importance of that is because those are the chemicals that a cadaver locating dog would have been able to smell and also it allowed for the initial development or potential development of instrumentation that detect those particular compounds."
