In her career as a forensic anthropologist, Dr. J had consulted on countless missing person cases, usually centered in the dense woods of the surrounding mountains. After witnessing firsthand the difficulty officials had in locating the dead, Dr. J opened the FOREST facility to law enforcement and search and rescue volunteers with their cadaver dogs. It is a huge benefit to the trainers to have access to real decomposed bodies, in conditions similar to how they might be found in the wild. After a week of training at the FOREST facility, Dr. J sends the trainers home with a sample of what she calls “dirty dirt”—soil from underneath the decomposed bodies, which the officers can continue using for instruction back home. “You should see how thrilled they are when we give them vials of dirt or bits of decomp-soiled clothes. It’s like Christmas,” Dr. J told me. As the old carol goes, “. . . my true love gave to me, two turtle doves and a dirt vial from under a body.”
Why would the cadaver dogs ignoring the composting mounds be a big deal? The dogs work by smell and have no trouble sniffing out bodies laid out in the open, or even those buried in shallow graves. But inside a compost pile, the moisture, aeration, carbon, and nitrogen are balanced to trap the odor within the pile. Katrina is aware that the public will not accept this new method of body disposal if the recomposition facilities, meant to be places of grieving and ritual, reek of human decay. The dogs’ complete lack of interest in the body-mounds was great news for the future of the project.
It was decided that the male donor, John Compost, would be uncovered first. He was a tall, burly gentleman in his mid-sixties who had died in March, meaning he had been inside his woodchip and alfalfa pile for five months. His position at the top of the hill meant more direct sunshine, and a higher overall ambient temperature. The whole mound had been covered in a silver tarp.
Digging right into the mound with full-sized metal shovels and spades would run the risk of destroying whatever might be inside. So we used small hand-held shovels and heavy plastic rakes instead. As we cautiously dug into the pile, the bright purple and yellow color of the shovels made us look like children building a morbid sandcastle.
Then, all of a sudden, we hit bone. Dr. Johnston stepped in and used a delicate brush to dust off and reveal the man’s left clavicle.
Katrina was crushed by this discovery. “I won’t lie. I wanted there to be nothing there. I wanted us to dig and dig and just . . . soil.”
Dr. J smiled. “See, I did want something to be there.”
“Wait,” I asked, “we’re going for the four-to-six-week complete body compost here, why did you want there to be bones?”
Katrina piped in, “Because Dr. J has different motives, she wants the bones.”
Although Dr. J was enthusiastic about Katrina’s project, as far as she’s concerned there are never enough skeletons. Forensic collections, like the one she runs at Western Carolina, have nowhere near the amount of bones they need. A collection requires a large enough sex and age range to create true, beneficial comparison.
Dr. J believes if she can nail the right removal time from the mounds, she can develop a system that will take a human from flesh to skeleton much faster than the current method—laying them out and waiting for bugs, animals, and nature to do their work.
On the day John Compost was first put in the woodchips, a layer of vivid green alfalfa had been spread over his body in an attempt to raise the temperature of the mound—which it seems to have done. But composting also needs moisture to work, and as we pulled off more of the pile, it became apparent that the alfalfa layer had had the effect of zapping the moisture from his body. John Compost was essentially mummified, his white papery flesh still stuck to the bones along his iliac crest and femur, which I brushed clean in soft strokes. Harsh body composting lesson number one: don’t overdo the alfalfa layer.
Dr. J discovered something interesting as she uncovered his head and the top of his right shoulder, the only body parts not covered in the alfalfa. Heavy spring rains had trickled down from the top of the hill and underneath the tarp, soaking that area. Here, far from being mummified, the bones were clean, dark—no flesh to be found. In fact, on his sternum were the beginnings of Swiss cheese-like holes, where even bone had begun to decompose.
Despite that encouraging discovery, John Compost was far from transformed into rich, dark soil, as Katrina had hoped. John had been encased in that mound for five whole months, and there he was, still hanging out, mummified. Livestock composting of a full-grown steer can take as little as four weeks when mechanical aeration is involved. Offal from a butchery only takes five days. Human composting had a long way to go.
Dr. J was unfazed. “You learn a little bit each time,” she shrugged, and signaled us to begin covering John up again (after adding more water and dismantling the ill-fated alfalfa layer).
The experiments being done at FOREST recall Italian anatomy professor Lodovico Brunetti’s attempts in the late 1800s to create the first modern cremation machine. Brunetti’s methods were very on-brand for the Industrial Era, employing what scholar Thomas Laquer called an “austere technological modernism.”
Brunetti presided over multiple failed experiments, but those experiments represented “the beginning of a new era in the history of the dead body.” After all, industrialized cremation machines are today the dominant mode of body disposal in almost every developed country.
The first corpse that Brunetti cremated was the body of a thirty-five-year-old woman placed in a brick furnace. The experiment was not unsuccessful, as the furnace did reduce her body down to five and a half pounds of bone chunks. But the method took too long for the professor’s satisfaction—four hours.
Brunetti thought it might expedite the process to chop up the body pre-cremation. Corpse number two, a forty-five-year-old man, went into the same brick furnace in three layers: level one for limbs, level two for the head, chest, and pelvis, and level three for organs and other viscera. The cremation still took a frustrating four hours to complete, but now the bones that remained weighed only two and a half pounds.
Katrina has considered this tactic. Multiple composting experts have told her, “If you really want to compost efficiently you’d chop up the body first.” The unsettling suggestions from experts don’t stop there. There are those who say she must add manure to the pile, and one avid composter who sent her an email reading, “Dear Ms. Spade, I am interested in your project. I have had excellent luck with my compost pile because I use leftover urine from hospitals. Have you considered that?”
“Did you write back?” I asked.
“I had to politely decline on the hospital urine. Is it a good source of nitrogen? Yes. Is it fast? Probably yes. Am I going to put a body into it? No.”
Brunetti, undeterred by the thought of pulling the dead apart, decided in his next round of experiments to go hotter, putting various body parts into an altogether different furnace that produced coal gas, a substance used for electricity in the nineteenth century. This furnace was several hundred degrees hotter and took two hours longer (six hours total). But the end result was bones that were completely carbonized, zapped of all organic material. All traces of what made the human a human, including the DNA— though the professor would not have understood this at the time—were gone.
In his 1884 paper, Brunetti wrote of cremation: