SapphireSteel
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An interview at the Body Farm, University of Tennesee, with emeritus Professor Bill Bass, the founding father of this science.
In 1977, Bass's ignorance was brought home to him when he identified a well-preserved corpse with a gunshot wound to the head as being merely one year old. There was, he reasoned, flesh still hanging on the bones, much of it still noticeably pink. In fact, it was the body of William Shy, a Civil War colonel killed in battle and buried in a sealed lead coffin. "Well," Bass muses, "I only missed it by 113 years! It made me realize how totally clueless we were about death. The only way to do it, I realized, was to let a body rot and watch it."...THE TECHNIQUES FOR RETRACING the evolution of a murder are getting ever more refined. Take soil samples. As bodies decompose, they leak five fatty acids into the ground beneath them. Each day after death, the various profiles of these acids will vary. Analysis of them can reveal the time of death, as well as pinpoint exactly how long any given body has been lying in a particular place. The soil can also reveal the presence of a corpse, even if the body itself has been removed or destroyed. The "stain" left by a body's volatile acids, which also suppresses plant life around it, can last for up to two years, leaving a kind of phantom fingerprint in the earth...Thus, soil, like maggots, becomes an "information bomb," and the dead can be reconstructed (if not resurrected) long after they have disappeared physically. In a recent case in Florida, a prison inmate confessed to a cellmate to having raped and murdered a woman he had abducted from a convenience store. Police couldn't find a body, but soil samples in several sites named by the inmate proved that one had indeed been there. The samples of earth saturated with bone minerals and fatty acids were enough to convict him...other areas still to be explored are DNA extraction and putrefaction in different contexts — like inside plastic bags. It's fascinating." A recent grisly find in a Minnesota cornfield revealed two bodies wrapped in plastic that had remained well preserved in direct sunlight. "Why?" Bass grins. "We have no idea."
http://www.aintnowaytogo.com/bodyfarm.htm
There is no way we here on this board can confidently predict the state of the bodies, in my opinion. Even the experts struggle with it.
ETA: ugh at the fingerprint of decomposition in the soil.
In 1977, Bass's ignorance was brought home to him when he identified a well-preserved corpse with a gunshot wound to the head as being merely one year old. There was, he reasoned, flesh still hanging on the bones, much of it still noticeably pink. In fact, it was the body of William Shy, a Civil War colonel killed in battle and buried in a sealed lead coffin. "Well," Bass muses, "I only missed it by 113 years! It made me realize how totally clueless we were about death. The only way to do it, I realized, was to let a body rot and watch it."...THE TECHNIQUES FOR RETRACING the evolution of a murder are getting ever more refined. Take soil samples. As bodies decompose, they leak five fatty acids into the ground beneath them. Each day after death, the various profiles of these acids will vary. Analysis of them can reveal the time of death, as well as pinpoint exactly how long any given body has been lying in a particular place. The soil can also reveal the presence of a corpse, even if the body itself has been removed or destroyed. The "stain" left by a body's volatile acids, which also suppresses plant life around it, can last for up to two years, leaving a kind of phantom fingerprint in the earth...Thus, soil, like maggots, becomes an "information bomb," and the dead can be reconstructed (if not resurrected) long after they have disappeared physically. In a recent case in Florida, a prison inmate confessed to a cellmate to having raped and murdered a woman he had abducted from a convenience store. Police couldn't find a body, but soil samples in several sites named by the inmate proved that one had indeed been there. The samples of earth saturated with bone minerals and fatty acids were enough to convict him...other areas still to be explored are DNA extraction and putrefaction in different contexts — like inside plastic bags. It's fascinating." A recent grisly find in a Minnesota cornfield revealed two bodies wrapped in plastic that had remained well preserved in direct sunlight. "Why?" Bass grins. "We have no idea."
http://www.aintnowaytogo.com/bodyfarm.htm
There is no way we here on this board can confidently predict the state of the bodies, in my opinion. Even the experts struggle with it.
ETA: ugh at the fingerprint of decomposition in the soil.
