She laid a microphone on the desk. “You admit that you’re experimenting on the bodies of military veterans,” she began. “How do you justify that?”
“Let me back up and give you a little background first,” I began. “So you’ll have some context. We get bodies in two ways. From two different sources. About half are donated—in a person’s will, or by their next of kin—in exactly the same way bodies are donated to Vanderbilt Medical School, there in Nashville.” She seemed on the verge of interrupting, but I held up a finger and kept talking. “Others—and this is the category that includes the four veterans you’ve asked me about—are bodies that are unclaimed after death. These come to us from medical examiners all over the state.” As she processed this piece of information, I hurried on. “If a body goes unclaimed—maybe the person is an unidentified John or Jane Doe; maybe they’ve got no relatives; maybe their relatives are estranged—whatever the reason, if a body’s unclaimed, the cost of burying that body falls on the county where the death occurred. Now, bear with me just a minute more. It costs about a thousand dollars to bury a body, and a lot of Tennessee counties don’t have that kind of money to spare. If they send the body to me, it’s a win-win: They save money, and our research program grows. And the more research we do—the better we understand how bodies decay after death—the more help we can give police in solving murder cases.”
“How? How does letting veterans’ bodies rot in the woods help solve murders?”
She wasn’t making this easy. I took a breath to collect myself before going on. “By giving us more data on which to base our estimates of time since death. Our research lets us tell the police, with a high degree of scientific certainty, how long ago someone was killed. By comparing the decomposition of the victim’s body with what we’ve observed in our research—and by taking variables like temperature, humidity, and so forth into account—we can help the police narrow down the time of the murder, to within a matter of days or even hours. Earlier, you sounded distressed when you mentioned bugs. Even the bugs are an important part of our research. By knowing what bugs come to feed on a body—and when, and how fast they grow—we can be even more precise.”
Her cameraman, I noticed, looked interested in this, but her face registered nothing but disgust. “You still haven’t explained why you’re conducting these experiments on the bodies of U.S. military veterans.”
“It’s not like I’m seeking the bodies of veterans. Look, when a funeral home or a medical examiner sends me a body, I don’t do a background check. I don’t investigate whether the deceased was a veteran, just like I don’t investigate whether he was a priest, or a prisoner, or a teacher, or a TV reporter. I say, ‘Thank you very much,’ and I assign a case number and a research question, and I try to learn something from that body.”
“But why don’t you think veterans deserve a dignified burial?”
“I do.” I turned my palms up. “I think everybody deserves a dignified burial. The last thing I’m trying to do is keep a veteran—or anyone else, for that matter—from getting a decent, dignified burial. The thing is, Ms. Demopoulos, when these four men died, no one claimed them. No one tried to arrange a dignified burial for them. If you’ve come across relatives who want these bodies, I’m happy to give them the bodies. They’ll be a little the worse for wear now, but unfortunately, I can’t help that.” I shrugged, trying to read her expression. “Does that answer your questions?”
“It’s a step in the right direction,” she said. “But we also need to see your facility. The Body Farm, that’s what you call it, right?”
I felt myself getting testy again. “That’s what a lot of people call it.”
“And you think that name shows respect for the dead?”
This woman had a knack for nettling me. “I’m not the one who came up with it,” I snapped. “An FBI agent coined the name, and it stuck. So that’s what it’s usually called—by police, by medical examiners, and by reporters. Reporters who—up until now—have been able to understand that our research helps the good guys catch the bad guys.” I shouldn’t have needled her that way, but she’d gotten under my skin, and I was mad. What was it Mark Twain said about journalists—“never argue with people who buy ink by the barrel”? I was battling a person who bought videotape by the truckload, but it was too late to back out now. “As for taking you out there and showing you around—letting you shoot footage—I can’t do that.”
“Why not?”