There are 6000 year old tattoos on the desiccated ( mummified ) body of the Ice Man (found in the Alps). There are older tattoos than that in the anthropological record. The skin can desiccate and still exist, just in dry form. H20 can be absent from a body, including the skin. That's what the word means.
TL;DR for the following: decomp is complex, it's not a single linear process.
And, given the conditions here in SoCal this summer, CRH's body could have been partly or mostly desiccated. It doesn't take complete desiccation for the bones to start to separate from each other (particularly in areas like the wrists and ankles, with the decomp of tendons (the attachments in the wrists are particularly thin, thinner in girls and women than in boys and men).
Both putrefaction/liquefaction and desiccation can occur
at the same time. Liquefaction occurs as the body's fluids are expelled from dead cells as cellular membranes break down (decompose). The liquid is mainly H20. Left behind are the proteins and enzymatic byproducts, now resting on ever deeper layers of the body and eventually, there's just residue on the bones. If one part of the body is more protected from the elements than some other part, the ratio and rate of those processes will be distinctive.
I think most people also know that lividity is the initial pooling of blood (again mostly H20) in parts of the body due to gravity. This starts immediately upon death. It can be detected via its residues on bones (or tissues) and this tells medical examiners a few things. It shows how the body was positioned when death occurred. It shows whether the body was moved from that position (typically, if someone finds a dead person and wishes to administer aid, not knowing whether they are really dead, they turn them over on their backs - this is one of the most common positions for a body to be in as it begins the immediate process of decomp).
She was stated to be in an "advanced state" of decomp, meaning that some hydrated tissue was still available/visible, but to get to that state, the body has to begin the process of disarticulation (which is caused by decay and then drying of tendons and ligaments). In that stage, both things are going on - and the last phase is when the body is completely skeleton. I'm not saying she was completely desiccated, only that in that next to last phase of decomp, some parts of her body had lost enough H20 such that tendons and ligaments no longer were intact. They broke down, which is why the police report mentioned disarticulation (later misinterpreted by media outlets as "dismembered," which is not at all what the police report said - according to the LA Times; I do not have a copy of the police report).
Naturally, if the body were undisturbed from the moment of death until weeks or months later, the part of the body subject to lividity would have more liquid than the top part of the body (which would enter into the final phase BEFORE the underside of the body in most situations - also, if the body is inside of something, like a trunk or coffin, it would be the TOP part of the body that underwent this process first). All of this is documented the the ME, so that a rough time of death can be worked out in a case like this. If she died in the trunk (because she climbed in it herself and no one knew she was there), she likely would have been curled up in a fetal position or some other position to fit into the trunk; it's unlikely she'd be laying flat on her back - but the lividity analysis would show that; it would have given a strong clue as to manner of death, but of course, the toxicology report should also help establish if she was using drugs or alcohol at the time she decided to get into the trunk - or the swimming pool if they decide she drowned).
At that stage of advanced decomp, it's possible the lungs were so lacking in fluid and dry that direct evidence of drowning would have to depend on finding pool chemical traces within the remnants of those organs (or evidence of minerals consistent with sea or lake water). That analysis is usually done by a lab right in the coroner's office - so I am assuming they have ruled that out.
My own interest is in skulls and brains, as those are the most anthropological valuable parts of a dead body. The brain typically dries out and wilts down to a thick paste by 4-7 days. It will become increasingly "crispy" and powdery during Stages 2 and 3 of decomp. During stage 4, the brain is losing most of its cellular structure, indeed, studying the neuron morphology at this stage is impossible, the neurons are gone. The carbon that was part of their structure is still there, but the fluid part is gone (wet chemistry of the brain disappears starting in Stage 3 of decomp). The brain is very delicate, the neurons are not like skin cells at all - skin cells and hair cells are far more durable. Think of toothpaste drying on a surface - it would be like that. But, we can still examine that dried paste under microscopes and find various kinds of evidence (some of it not particularly forensically valuable). The distribution of this dried paste in Stage 4 will help reveal positioning of the body as well. It could even reveal whether the body had been moved in the first days or weeks of decomp.
And, of great interest to me, as we discover the markers of various neurotransmitters (this project is in no way complete), we can also analyze either the dried paste of the brain OR scrape on the inside of the skull to get microscopic amounts of material and begin to look, in a shadowed way, at the wet chemistry of the brain. For example, the biggest molecule floating in the brain is serotonin. There's a range of values for how much serotonin should be present inside the skull of a dead person. In theory, we could postulate such things as whether or not an ancient body was inhabited by a depressed brain - once we know the values for the population in question. It's called orthomolecular psychiatry. Even without those values, we could know whether the values are outside a healthy
sapiens range. Other molecules are associated with certain mental illness, so people who do this research are very excited about finding out the evolutionary history of schizophrenia and other major mental illnesses (some are better explained through brain morphology, though, which is usually lost to us during stages 2 and 3 of decomp).
IMO
