What is a body farm?

the outside of campus. Um, we are in the woods basically. Yeah, it's a little creepy out here, it is, Chuck, and you're about to find out what actually, Chuck, watch out what don't? Oh? Chuck? Wow, you just stepped in a corpse. Yes, in a corpse. Yeah. That that thing really opened up a lot more than I thought it would. Kind of like a right cannamelon. Yeah, but it went right through. That's gross. Yeah, I'm not sure what the cannon melon is, but it doesn't sound like that. It's a lot nicer

than that. So okay, well, I guess we can get out of Knoxville before anybody says anything, right, what is this place? I'll tell you. Let's just get out of here, okay, all right, okay, chuckers Wow, and I'm really glad you washed your foot off back to the students through your shoe away, got ready to jeans. It's a good thing

you weren't wearing shorts. That was groups I was up to my ankle and body, so Chuck, I know that was patently unnecessary that we went all the way to Knoxville for that, but um, what we were just at is called the body farm, right, that's the best setup we've ever had. I know it's just for that. I'm taking my shirt off for the rest of the podcast. Do that. Oh dude, Okay, Chuck, I can't do that. Yes you can. Let's talk about death baby. There's yeah,

you kid. I can't Chuck, settle it. No, he's really gonna mess me up. Okay, all right, I'll put my shirt back on. Hold on. Wow, we've reached new new bows here. Okay, are you better now, big baby? I think you can't do a podcast with a shirtless Josh. I'm sorry. All right, Well, let's let's get back to the to the issue at hand, body farms. Okay, Okay, so Chuck, do you know me? I'm all about like death, Like, well, I'm gonna die someday. I can't wait to find out

what happens. Right, So this is right up my alley. Yeah, I thought it's a cool article. So you liked it as well? Yeah? Written by your boyfriend Tom? Uh huh long long time boyfriend time. Uh yeah it was good body farms, very gruesome but necessary, cool, interesting topic. Yeah, you just won't kick this one off of you. Well, what do you want me to do? No, let's talk about death first. So what the whole point of a body farm? Is a study decomposition? Right right? That people

might not even know what one is. It's where you study a dying or a corpse in a state of decay, so you can learn things from that. Well, put, I think that's right out of there. Was Actually, so there's actually three body farms around the country, right, There's one at Western North Carolina University, go, um some things. Uh. There is a University of Tennessee at their main campus at Knoxville, where we just words you're kind of volunteers.

Yeah I won't say go valls though, and you know why? Um. And then there's another one at Texas State University, San Marcos. That's it. Three body farms in the entire country. Are they are really churning out the information? Right? And now? One of the researchers pointed out that they think it would be nice one day if there was a body farm in each state because it's so geographically specific that it would help to know these kind of things. Yeah, yeah,

makes sense. Yeah. I think Tennessee's got much of the southeast covered because it's just wet and sticky down here everywhere, and it's it's muggy and uh yeah, so any information coming out of Tennessee probably applies to much of the South Texas. Probably you cover the sand in the rocks of the of the West. I would imagine what I mean, in the sun, what happens if you die in Idaho? Well exactly. You know, maybe it should open one in

the Pacific Northwest. Okay, suggestion, I agree? I agree? Um, alright, so Chuck, what we're talking about his body farms. Basically, essentially, it's just a an area attractive land. I think, um, Knoxville's is like three hundred acres or something like that. Yeah, it's a big one. Yeah, and then Texas is even I think it's about ten times the size that I think it's three thousand acres. Uh and they have um

dead bodies scattered across it. Uh. And I know Tennessee was the first one to ever open this up, and it was there was a guy named Dr. Bill Bass, who you sent me a video that was awesome, Such an affable man, I should say, Joshua. The Tennessee one is three acre inside of a three acre area, so the farming is actually smaller, which is one of the reasons the residents signed off on it, because they were a little uh skeptical. Yeah, and I can understand, I

can understand how someone would be sure. Yeah. Um, back to bas Yeah, so Bass opened this uh the first one in one at the University of Tennessee. And he did it because the cops kept coming to him and asking him, you know, if they could, um, if he could help you know with this, uh some murder investigations or anything like that. And um, he finally realized that we don't know nearly enough about um decomposition as far

as it pertains to criminal investigations. So he took it upon himself to start collecting corpses, and actually the first ones he got were unclaimed corpses from local morgues. And he just took him out to the body farm, which is actually the technical name for it is the University of Tennessee Forensic Anthropology Facility UM. And he just started scattering him around the place and study studying them and taking journals and logs and photos and uh noting the

rate of decay that kind of thing. Yeah, so let's talk about the rated decay. Let's talk about decompetition. We already handled rigor mortists and liver mortis and uh what is alger mortis um in our rigor mortis podcast? We want need to talk about that. We already talked about idle auto licens too, but there's some other stuff too, like the putrification process and the effects that has in the body. Let's talk about that because it's gnarly. Okay, Okay, yeah,

it sounds good. Now you're talking about the flies and the maggots. Sure, okay, we'll start there. One one way that uh, insects actually give a lot of insight into how long a body may have been lying there in a state of decay. Um. I think they said flies will go in through the orifices like the nose and the ears. And in one of those videos that you sent me, it shows flies going into a nose and the the eyeball liss eye sockets. It's awesome. Yeah. So they'll do this um within like a day of the

body dying if they have access to it. Give the bodies outside because the body the flies and then the lay eggs and then in twenty four hours the eggs are hatched into larva. Yes, which a k a. Maggots, Right, and these maggots are decaying flesh eating machines. Actually apparently they can consume sixt of human corpse within ten days from the inside out. And actually no, they start from the outside in because it's laid on the fly legs, the eggs on the skin, and then they start burrowing

in and eating and eating and eating. Well, dude, I'm very wrong then, so um and they actually grow about ten times in five days because they eat so much and they're built for it too, right, right, they have like a mouth hook what is it called. Yeah, that that's a mouth hook that that scoops the the goo into their mouths and then I think they're their mouth is on one end, and they're breathing apparatus is on the other end, so that they're just a little eating

machines and don't have to stop to breathe there. They can just keep going literally built for it. So back to what I was saying about the rate of decay. They can take a look at the size of the maggots and determine it. While if a maggot is this long, then it's been in the human body growing for this many days and it was probably hatched on this day, so the body has been there for X number of days or weeks. And that's just one type of fly.

And and this this is actually um they're called corpse fauna. No, yeah, corpse fauna um, and just just the I think the common house flies, the one that Tom's talking about in this article, possibly the bottle fly. But it turns out there is a whole ecosystem of flies that start to come in at different stages of the decomposition process. So some really love to pick you know, the little remnants

off a skeleton. Um. Others you know, start the whole decomposition process and aid others like to show up when you know, with the bodies really starting to turn to goo. And but yeah, they study the flies and they can figure out how long the body has been out there, which is a big one. Yeah, this is a big indicator for helping cops kind of figure out not motive, but time of death stuff like that. And also, Um, from this article, I found out that c s I

is a bunch of liars. Yeah, they never do that stuff. No, I didn't know that blood blood stained pattern analysis, that's not forensic. No. Um, handwriting analysis, Nope. Shooting guns into that gel, yeah, that's all. That's not true theirs. Yeah, which irks me to no end. Yeah, but you know we've talked about this before. TV always sensationalizes, is that just get over it. It wouldn't be very entertaining if they just came by and said, well, the maggots are

twenty millimeters long. Case closed. I gotta tell you that those videos you sent me were pretty entertaining and gruesome. Yeah. Did you see that one guy with a big distended belly. Yes. And actually one of the things that happens to a corpse as well is the skin black ends right, Yeah, and that video did point that out that certain parts turn black. And I know when the blood collect in certain parts. We talked about that before, certain parts of

the body will be darker and some will be more pale. Yeah, lividity. Can we talk about deep gloving? I can't wait. I think you should talk all about it. Yeah, it's pretty cool. We learned this from the video as well. When um, let's say you look at a human hand that's been lying in the woods over the period of the days of decay, it'll start to look really raising e like

it's been in dishwater, you know. Yeah, and then it starts to literally you see, it starts to kind of gather up and slide off the hand, and the epidermis literally comes off of the hand. And they call it d gloving. Yeah, and they actually figured out that, um, you can take this glove, this d glove skin, so that's kind of laying nearby the hand if you can get to it before an animal comes up and it's

like hey yeah glove, Um you can. You can take it into the lab, put a rubber glove on and then put this human skin on like a glove and then fingerprint that way. Because you know, once the one the epidermis comes off, there goes the fingerprints, and and forensic anthropologists like Dr Bass at the Body Farm have figured out that you can do this. I mean, how many just figuring that out? How many crimes have been

solved because somebody figured out you could do that? I don't know, probably a bunch that pays for itself as far as I'm concerned, because before that they just had no fingerprints. They lost the finger They're like, oh well, and now they do the buffalo bill thing and it's all good, yeah, good bye. It puts a lotion in the basket. That was very good. That was pretty pretty good. Okay,

So um yeah, that's dead body stuff. I'm sure we'll get to more of it in a few um, but really, forensic anthropologists come in most handy when there is no flesh any longer. Yeah, but it's just bones, right because think about it, you've you've lost any uh, any visual identification of even you know, whether it was a man or a woman, ethnicity, yeah, um age anything like that.

You can't just look at it like you can, you know, like that time we found that drifter in the woods, that one time, he was pretty new you could tell, and we knew it was like a white probably mid thirties. Uh, you know, male and you know, we just walked along and minded our own business. Whatever happened to that guy? I have no idea anyway. Um, if you if it's just a skeleton, if that dead drifter had just been a skeleton, then we wouldn't have been able to say

any of those things with any kind of certainty. So when just a skeleton is found, Uh, they call in a forensic anthropologist and they go to town. Chuck, Right, they can still learn some of these things, Josh, as you know, they can look at I guess the easiest thing they can do to determine gender is to look at the size of the bones, because typically men's bones are larger where it attaches to the muscle. Not a dead giveaway, no pun intended, but a good one. And

there's differences in the pelvic bone apparently. Uh. The forehead is also a big tail tale sign and gender and race. Well, men's foreheads tend to slope backwards and women's are more rounded. Yeah, and looking at you, you have a very sloped rear forehead. You can tell that's not your forehead, dude, that's your the top of your head. And females chins usually come to a point where a man's chin is a little more squared off. How's my chin? It's uh beautiful, Josh,

it's beautiful. Ribs apparently can help determine age a lot more ragged in our age they get ragged out. Yeah. Um. And also with with men and women, and giveaway is especially post adolescent men and women. Um is a the pelvis, Yes, the pelvic inlet is much wider in women. Basically, the hole in your pelvic pelvic bone is is much bigger in women than it is in men, to allow for easier childbirth. You got it. You don't want to pass a kid through the pelvic inlet of a man. No,

that would be painful, Like it's not painful enough already. Um. And then when it comes to the race, they don't get too specific. They kind of want to say African, Asian or European. They try to get you know, stay pretty broad there, well, at least at first. And then apparently there's some other signs that you can you can kind of narrow it down even further. But those are the first three categories they lump them in, right. Actually,

I thought it was an interesting fact. Tom hadn't here that there were more differences within each racial group than there are between each group as a whole, which I don't thought it was kind of cool. Yeah, that is interesting. And so those are bones, right, yeah, those are bones, dem bones, dem bones. Yeah, Josh, you want to talk about disease, of course. And then one of the big concerns for residents that live near these body farms is,

wait a minute, they just let these bodies. I mean sometimes as many as forty and fifty bodies out there. We're worried about buzzards disease there. They're bad stuff get into the water and shore by creeks, but it doesn't happen. No one wants to drink dead body. Uh do you know why? Why? Because if you have an infectious disease, it's not gonna still be around after your body is decomposing. Yeah, the the um, the infectious disease organisms also decomposed. They

don't stick around too long. But just to be certain, any faculty or students who are you know, interacting with these body farms, they're innoculated against all manner of stuff because you know, you don't want to really take a chance. Sure, um, but also they go out of their way. I think the test um all all corpses that are donated to them for any kind of infectious disease diseases beforehand. So you gotta clean, clean, living corpse that you just have

out there. That's not really going to cause much problem, right, and it should be noted too. Like you said, people do donate. I think the one in Tennessee said they had a list of either a list of three hundred or they had already had three hundred bodies donated. And you can do that just like your an organ donory. You can say I'd like my body to go to a body farm. After that, well, I think you want to contact the body farm first. Hey, here's a fun

fact for you, Okay. In two thousand and six, the University of Tennessee had more corpses and skeletons on its campus than it had Asian students enrolled. We're about UM nine hundred in the osteopathological collection, nine skeletons, another seven hundred in two other skeletal collections, and then forty or so bodies on the body farm and there are only six D seventy three Asian students on campus. Isn't that crazy? Yeah? Yeah, crazy.

I wonder if they had any Asian bodies. I don't know with that canceled out, okay, or maybe it would count toward the total count both ways though, So we canceled one another out. Okay, sure, But I mean everybody likes to be count so counted. So what else, Josh? Shall we talk about some of the the ways that the body farms have helped out? You mean specifically, yeah, e g. John Wayne Gaycy. Yeah, that's a good one. Go ahead. And I've long been in pursuit of a

John Wayne Gacy um painting. You know, he's a prolific painter, and I found a website finally. Yeah that he wasn't a very good painter, but you know, just to have a John Wayne Gaycy, it's crazy. He also loved them. The Seven Dwarfs were a common theme of his. Really fascinated by the Seven Dwarves for some reason. What a creep he was a creepy dude. Yeah, yeah, Well when

Gaycey got popped in what the seventies? Yeah, I guess if for the two of you who don't know who that is, John Wayne Gacy is a famous serial killer he was a serial killer of young men. Yes, he killed. Yeah, he buried twenty nine of them under his house. Uh yeah, I think it's not a good place. Which wasn't even necessarily his house. It was his mother's apartment, which goes a long way in explaining you know, John Wayne gayzy Um.

But when he finally got got busted and he started telling the cops about how many people he had killed that he they went out to his mother's apartment complex and use ground penetrating radar and found basically a mass grave. The problem is is like these bodies have been there for a while, They've been killing kids for a real long time, and uh, the the bones have become entangled and they didn't know who was who or anything like that.

So they brought in forensic anthropologists and I believe they helped to successfully identify uh most, if not all of them, right, Yeah, So you know that's one way the body farms are contributing. Sure, that's pretty cool. You know, they'll they'll profile the bones and then they'll match that with data for missing kids, and you know, one kind of leads to the other, and that I know, it's closure somewhat for families. In this kind of situation. Oh yeah, which is what we're

going to talk about with the Big Bopper. I think you should talk about the Big Bopper. The Big Bopper was a singer that perished in the plane crash with Richie Valence and Buddy Holly back in the day, and his son, the Big Bopper's son apparently got in touch with Dr bat Ass because the body of the Big

Bopper was found. His name was J. P. Richardson was found forty ft from the plane, and the Sun wanted to know, Hey, did my dad actually die in the crash or was he trying to go get help and then died, you know, forty later, because I don't know that would have made a difference in and how he felt about Well, apparently there was a long persisting legend too, and I guess you want to put it a rest,

and he did put a dress. Dr Bascott involved exhumed the body and basically said, every bone in this guy's body was crushed and there's no way that he survived the crash and he was thrown from the plane and uh, that's scene of that story. Yeah, so the Sun got that that kind of closure. Can I tell one more.

All right, So there's this um this case in n three in San Diego, a little seven year old named Delbert apogean Um was found floating in San Diego Bay uh, and the coroner, I guess, ruled that he had been sodomized and um sexually assaulted in other ways before being murdered. But they never found the killer. And then apparently San Diego got some federal funding uh for opening cold cases, and this was one of the ones they went after.

So they hired a forensic anthropologist and showed him, you know, old crime scene photos and notes from the detectives that worked the case. And I imagine it probably took the forensic anthropologists an hour or ten minutes to say, no, this kid wasn't sodomized or murdered. Yeah, the thing is back then, no idea, No one was studying this kind of thing. Nowadays, we know that when the body reacts

with water, all manner of nasty things happened. Bodies breakdown twice as fast in the water, right, which is why a lot of people dispose of murder victims in in lakes or exact. And I guess why these cops weren't able to really tell much, right, I think, well, not only that they were just misling over the course of these this the decades of study of decomposition, this forensic if the apologist was able to say this kid wasn't murdered,

close your cold case, right yeah cool. Yeah. And then one of the researchers I saw from that video at Tennessee is trying to put together a book, like a reference guide for various states of the case. It was really yeah, cops kind of look at this instead of having a truck all the way up to the body

farm like we did. Well, yeah, and I got the the idea it was going to be like, Okay, here's a picture of a body that's been underwater for seven days, um, and you know, hold it up against your body, and what doesn't look the same will continue to the next page. So yeah, I guess it's going to be like a an illustrated atlas of decomposition, the old guide, right. I would love to get my hands on that one day when it's done. Yeah, I'd love to go to the body farm. I mean again, you know, you mean go

back here right right. Yeah. They talked to Tom and I asked him if he had gone, uh, And he was like, no, they don't. They learned a long time ago not to let journalists are weirdos in Yeah. Yeah. So the guy us describing the smell in the video. I thought that was interesting. He said. It was didn't smell like a dead animal, like that familiar smell of that when you smell a dan animal. He said, it's very different. He said it's unmistakable. Yeah. He said it

was pungent and sweet. Yeah, well you smell that interesting. Sure, So that's body farms. Um, yeah, anything else, I don't. I don't really have anything else about two. Nope. All right, So I guess let's just go straight to listener mail. Josh, we're going to uh, we're gonna ask our listeners for a little information here. Because I didn't know the answer to this question. We rarely tossed that out. So we had Poloma right in from California. And Poluma said, a

longtime listener, I love your podcast. It makes my commute enjoyable. And Josh, you chose Chuck as your partner in crime, and you all have the great chemistry. Blah blah blah. Could we resist each other now? It's destiny? Uh? So she says this. I had a very variants. A few days ago. It was a soupy day, a bit chilly, with a few sprinkles of rain here and there. I was over at my mother's house having a chat inside when suddenly there was an incredibly bright, white and blue

flash and a quick zapping sound. I thought a light bulb had burned out in the room or something. My mother said that she saw a white bolt come through the wall, passed just in front of my face, and then go through the opposite wall of the room. We looked everywhere and tried to think of any kind of rational explanation. No bull would gun out, no strobe lights or camera to flash. Thirty seconds after this weird phenomenon happened, we heard thunder rumble very nearby. After calming down, I

immediately thought of YouTube. You have answers for everything, so she will think of us when they narrowly escaped death. Where their first thought? So she says, what in the world happened? Do you think it was lightning? Was its static electricity? What's going on here? Has anyone died of static electricity? So I don't know the answer. I did look up and found out that no one can die of statical like tricity that I found that unless unless

results in spontaneous human combustion. H And as far as I don't know, I don't think lightning can pass through the room of a house like that, So so I don't think it goes right in front of your face. I think if it's coming that close to you, goes right into you right and you would know. Well, because we had the other listener mail that I think had

the side strike three blocks away he was at. So Paloma, we don't have an answer, but I'm hoping some listeners out there that are smarter than we are might have a clue as to what happened that day. My money's on unicorns, So maybe we'll follow up on this if we get some feedback. Yeah, if you have an answer for Paloma, especially if it's unicorns, you can send us an email solving this mystery to stuff podcasts how stuff works dot Com for more on this and thousands of

other topics. Does it how stuff works dot Com. Want more how stuff works? Check out our blogs on the how also works dot Com home page. Brought to you by the Reinvented two thousand twelve camera it's ready. Are you