Dr. Vass: If you leave here today and walk down the street you will encounter many odors...each of those odors is comprised of dozens of chemicals. A rose may have 12 chemcials that make up that fragrance. Trash may have 20 chemicals that make up that odor. There could be cross odorization (Little Bitty made this word up) between the rose and the trash. in the car sample there were 51 individual compounds. 41 of those were related to decomp. Some of the others were related to gasoline (think gas cans peeps). So they elimated those compounds. And then they elimated other chemicals from their CONTROL sample. They looked at the trash, garage air, stuff that would have been in the car already. That left 16 compunds. of those 16, 7 of those are significant. of the huge number of compounds...on a list, they paired it down to 30 (when it comes to a human being)...gasoline in the trunk confused stuff. Just because gasoline overlapped with the decomp doesn't mean that the decomp compounds are not there.