There is a body farm in Florida
Article from 2007
There are only two body farms in the country, the more famous one run by the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, which over the years has held a morbid grip on pop culture.
Its most fascinating details inspired crime novelist Patricia Cornwell's "The Body Farm" in 1994. More recently, the television series "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation" and "The Dead Zone" co- opted deliciously grim scenarios from the farm. The second body farm is at Western Carolina University.
Now, in the Lee County (Fla.) Medical Examiner's Office, Walsh- Haney talks breathlessly about converting four or five acres of pasture in Port Charlotte into the third U.S. body farm.
"In Florida, with everything being perfect -- the weather not being too hot, it's not too shady, there are just enough insects, it's not too rainy -- we can have a skeleton in one week," says Walsh-Haney, who consulted on a "CSI: Miami" episode last year.
"That kind of time frame makes it urgent that we study how the body decomposes. It would go a long way in our efforts to determine time of death."
In March, Walsh-Haney was among the first investigators to arrive at a wooded Fort Myers lot thick with leaves, branches and the bones of eight men.------------
Florida's proposed body farm would be attached to a $100 million, 3,000-acre Homeland Security training complex scheduled to break ground early next year. The facility, called The Grove and set up like a university campus, is designed to train military personnel and emergency responders. It would include gun ranges, tunnels, a lake and caves, says director Stephen Alexander.
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4176/is_20070928/ai_n21025447
Anatomy of death embodies life's work
Oakland Tribune, Sep 28, 2007 by Audra D.S. Burch, McCLATCHY NEWSPAPERS
