The Body Farm was perched on a hillside high above the Tennessee River. Here, a mile downstream from the heart of Knoxville, more than a hundred corpses in various states of disrepair were dispersed across the facility’s three fenced-in acres. Most of the bodies lay above ground, though some were buried. And in a far corner of the facility, looking like eerie sentinels standing at attention, were three nude men: not standing, actually, but hanging, suspended by the neck from wooden scaffolds. With some misgivings, we had carried out three postmortem lynchings so we could observe the difference in the decomposition rate when bodies decayed off the ground, where they were less accessible to insects. We’d hung the three in the most isolated part of the facility, because important though the experiment was—the research data would help us determine time since death when a hanged body wasn’t discovered for weeks or even months—the dangling corpses were a shocking sight. I’d seen them dozens of times by now, yet I still found it unnerving to round the bend in the trail and suddenly encounter the trio. Their necks were stretched a few inches, their faces downcast, their arms and legs angled outward, as if accepting their grim fate with a mixture of resignation and shame. The NFA class included four African-American men, and if I, a privileged white man, felt disturbed by the hanging bodies, I could scarcely imagine the complicated response the black men might feel at the sight of dangling corpses in the woods of Dixie.
Maybe I needn’t have worried. Everyone in the class was a seasoned forensic professional, after all; cumulatively, the two dozen students had worked hundreds of death scenes, and some of those had probably included suicide by hanging. The students had competed fiercely to get into the NFA course, and several had told me how thrilled they were to train at the Body Farm—probably the only place on earth, after all, where cinching a noose around a neck was an act of scientific inquiry rather than of suicidal despair or racist hatred or—very rarely—state-administered execution. Here at the Body Farm, as nowhere else on earth, we could replicate death scenes with utter authenticity, even lynchings or mass murders. This particular NFA class—one of two groups that would rotate through the course this year—included crime-scene and crime-lab specialists from as far away as the United Kingdom. They’d spend the morning recovering scattered skeletal remains and other evidence Miranda and I had planted in this part of the woods. After a quick picnic lunch on a strip of grass outside the fence, they’d spend the afternoon locating and excavating a shallow, unmarked grave where Miranda and I had buried three fresh corpses, simulating a gang-style execution by drug traffickers.
She and I had spent the prior afternoon digging the grave and then refilling it once we’d laid the bodies in it. We’d clawed into the clearing’s rocky, red-clay dirt with a Bobcat—a pint-sized bulldozer—that a local building contractor had recently donated to the Anthropology Department. The Bobcat was a useful tool; it was also—for me, a guy who’d grown up driving dump trucks at my stepdad’s quarry—a fun toy.
Excavating the buried bodies in the afternoon heat was going to be sweaty, smelly work for the NFA class. Already, by midmorning, the temperature was above eighty degrees, and the humidity had topped 90 percent; by late afternoon, East Tennessee would feel like the tropics. Divide the year’s 365 days by the number of seasons, and you might think there’d be four seasons of 91.25 days apiece, each season serenely easing its way into the next. Not this year in Knoxville; not on this steamy, smelly day in mid-May.
My own body was doubtless contributing a bit to the scent wafting across the hillside, and not as pleasantly as the honeysuckle was. Like Miranda, I wore an official-looking black jumpsuit, the shoulders trimmed with the skull-adorned patches of the Forensic Anthropology Center. The jumpsuits looked cool, as in stylish, but they were woven of Nomex, a flameproof fiber that, ironically, made them hotter than hell. Despite the heat, Miranda and I had suited up to give the training exercise a more authentic look—and to let the trainees know we took them seriously.
The forensic techs weren’t exactly dressed for cool comfort, either. Over their clothes they’d donned white biohazard coveralls made of Tyvek, the slippery, indestructible stuff of FedEx envelopes. Tyvek was featherlight, but I knew from experience that it didn’t breathe worth a damn. As the techs knelt, stooped, squatted, and crawled their way up the hillside, setting numbered evidence markers beside the bones and artifacts they found, I could hear, or at least imagined I could hear, the steady patter of droplets on dry leaves: droplets not of rain, but of sweat. If this were an actual crime scene, they’d need to be concerned about contaminating the bones with their own sweaty DNA. I made a mental note to mention that to them once they’d rounded up all the bones. Did the glamorous stars of CSI and Bones ever shed buckets of perspiration, ever rain monsoons of sweat?