Stuff You Should Know - What is a body farm?

Episode Date: July 16, 2009

Most farms host crops and animals, but body farms specialize in corpses. Join Josh and Chuck as they tackle the fascinatingly gross phenomenon of body farms in this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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So head on over to Squarespace.com slash S-Y-S-K for a free trial and when you're ready to launch, use offer code S-Y-S-K to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Brought to you by the reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you? Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from Houseforks.com. Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, Chuck Bryant's here.

Wow. That's right, Chuck. How are you doing? I am well. How are you? All right, Chuck. Let's go for a little walk, shall we? Okay.

Let's do. So Chuck and I are here at the University of Tennessee campus in beautiful Knoxville, Tennessee, isn't it? Go balls. We're kind of on the outside of campus. We are in the woods, basically. Yeah, it's a little creepy out here, I've got to tell you. It is, Chuck.

And you're about to find out what. Actually, Chuck, watch out. What? Oh. Chuck. Wow. You just stepped in a corpse. Yes.

In a corpse. Yeah, that thing really opened up a lot more than I thought it would. Yep. Kind of like a right cannamella. Yeah, foot went right through. That's gross. Yeah. I'm not sure what a cannamella is, but it doesn't smell like that.

It's a lot nicer than that smell. That's gnarly. So, okay. Well, I guess we can get out in Knoxville before anybody says anything. Right. What is this place? I'll tell you. Let's just get out of here.

Okay. All right. That's gross. Wow. And I'm really glad you washed your foot off. Back to the studio. Throw your shoe away. Uh-huh.

Got rid of your jeans. Yeah. It's a good thing you weren't wearing shorts. That was gross. Ugh. 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 what we were just at is called the body farm.

Right. The body farm. That's the best setup we've ever had. I know. And just for that, I'm taking my shirt off for the rest of the podcast. Don't do that. Oh, dude. Okay, Chuck.

I can't do this. Yes, you can. No. Let's talk about death, baby. There's no way. Yeah, you can. I can't. Chuck, settle in.

No. Come on. It's really going to mess me up. Okay. All right. I'll put my shirt back on then. Hold on. Wow.

We've reached new bows here. Okay. Are you better now? Yeah. Big baby? I am. Like you can't do a podcast with a shirtless Josh? I know.

I'm sorry. Okay. Okay. So Chuck, do you know me? I'm all about like death. Like, oh, I'm going to die someday. I can't wait to find out what happens. Sure.

Right? So this is right up my alley. Yeah. I thought it was a cool article. So you liked it as well? Yeah. Written by your boyfriend, Tom. Uh-huh.

Long time boyfriend, Tom. Yeah. It was good. Body farms is very gruesome but necessary. Cool, interesting topic. Yeah. You just won't kick this one off, will you? Well, what do you want me to do?

Let's talk about death first. Okay. So the whole point of a body farm is to 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 Webster's actually. So there's actually three body farms around the country, right? There's one at Western North Carolina University. Yep. So some things. There is the University of Tennessee at their main campus at Knoxville where we just were. Sure. Kind of.

The volunteers. Uh-huh. Yeah. I won't say go volse though and you know why. I know. And then there's another one at Texas State University, San Marcos. Uh-huh. That's it.

Yeah. Three body farms in the entire country. I'm surprised you're still here. And these people are really churning out the information. Right. And 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. Yeah. Because it's just wet and sticky down here everywhere. Right.

It's muggy. Yeah. And yeah. So any information coming out of Tennessee probably applies to much of the south. Yeah. Texas probably you cover the sand and the rocks of the west. Yeah. I would imagine.

But I mean. And the sun. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

I agree. I agree. All right. So Chuck. What we're talking about is body farms basically essentially it's just an area attractive land. I think Knoxville's is like 300 acres or something like that. Yeah. It's a big one.

Yeah. And then Texas is even I think it's about 10 times the size of that. I think it's 3000 acres. And they have dead bodies scattered across it. And I know Tennessee was the first one to ever open this up. And it was 1971. Yeah. There was a guy named Dr. Bill Bass who you sent me a video.

Yeah. That was awesome. He seems like such an affable man. I should say Josh. So the Tennessee one is a three acre in side of a 300 acre area. Gotcha. So the farm is actually smaller. I got you.

Which is one of the reasons a resident signed off on it because they were a little skeptical. Yeah. But I can understand I can understand how someone would be. Sure. Yeah. So back to Bass. Yeah. So Bass opened this the first one in 1971 at the University of Tennessee.

And he did it because the cops kept coming to him and asking him you know if they could if he could help you know with this some murder investigations or anything like that. And he finally realized that we don't know nearly enough about decomposition right as far as it pertains to criminal investigations. Sure. So he took it apart himself to start collecting corpses. And actually the first ones he got were unclaimed corpses from local morgues. And he just took them out to the body farm which is actually the technical name for it

is the University of Tennessee forensic anthropology facility. Right. And he just started scattering them around the place. Yeah. And studying them. And taking journals and logs and photos and noting the rate of decay that kind of thing. Yeah. So let's talk about the rate of decay.

Let's talk about decomposition. We already handle rigor mortis and liver mortis. And what is it? Algorithm mortis? Algorithm mortis. In our rigor mortis podcast we don't need to talk about that. We already talked about autolysis too. Sure.

But there's some other stuff too like the putrification process and the effects it has on the body. Let's talk about that because it's gnarly. Okay. Okay. Yeah. Sounds good. Now are you talking about the flies and the maggots?

Sure. Okay. There's a way that insects actually give a lot of insight into how long a body may have been lying there in a state of decay. I think they said flies will go in through the orifices like the nose and the ears. Yeah. And in one of those videos that you sent me, it shows flies going into a nose and the eyeball-less eye sockets.

It's awesome. Yeah. So they'll do this within like a day of the body dying if they have access to it. Yeah. They'll give the bodies outside. Yeah. The body. Oh, the flies?

Sure. Sure. And then the lay eggs. And then in 24 hours, the eggs are hatched into larvae. Yes. Which, a.k.a. maggots. Right. And these maggots are decaying flesh-eating machines.

Big time. Actually, apparently they can consume 60% of human corpse within 10 days. From the inside out. And actually, no, they start from the outside in. Oh, really? Yeah, because it's laid on the fly legs, eggs on the skin, and then they start burrowing in and eating and eating and eating. Oh, well, dude, I'm very wrong then.

So, and they actually grow about 10 times in five days because they eat so much. And they're built for it, too. Right. Right. They have like a mouth hook, is it called? Yeah. That's a mouth hook that scoops the goo into their mouths. And then I think their mouth is on one end and they're breathing apparatus is on the

other end. So they're just little eating machines. They don't have to stop to breathe. Right. They can just keep going. They're 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, well, 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's been there for X number of days or weeks. And that's just one type of fly and this is actually, they're called corpse fauna. Uh-huh. No. Yeah. Corpse fauna. And just the, I think the common house fly is 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. Right. So some really love to pick the little remnants off of skeletons, others start the whole decomposition process and aid others like to show up when, you know, the body's really starting to turn to goo and, right. But yeah, they study the flies and they can figure out how long the body's 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 and stuff like that. It's been said that a day of traveling will bring a basket full of learning. Fill your basket to the brim in Mississippi with family friendly experiences like the new Mississippi Aquarium, the recently expanded Hattiesburg Zoo, the Tupelo Buffalo Park and Zoo, and sports and literary attractions too.

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Yeah. They never do that stuff. No. I didn't know that. Blood, bloodstain pattern analysis? Uh-huh. Don't that? That's not forensic.

No. Um, handwriting analysis? Nope. Shooting guns into that gel? No. That's all, that's not true. They're liars. It's TV.

Yeah. Which irks me to no end. Yeah, but you know, we've talked about this before. TV always sensationalizes it. Just get over it. Okay. It wouldn't be very entertaining if they just came by and said, well, the maggots are 20 millimeters long.

Case closed. I gotta tell you that those videos you sent me were pretty entertaining and gruesome. Yeah. God, did you see that one guy with the big, distended belly? Yes. And actually, one of the things that happens to a corpse as well is the skin blackens. Right? Yeah.

And that video did point that out that certain parts turn black. And I know when the blood collects 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 de-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 a period of the days of decay, it'll start to look really, uh, raisiny, like it's been in dishwater, you know? Yeah. So 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 de-gloving. Yeah. And they actually figured out that, um, you can take this glove, this de-gloved skin that's kind of laying nearby the, uh, hand, if you can get to it before an animal comes up and is like, heck yeah, a glove. Right. Um, you can, you can, uh, take it into the lab, uh, 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, once the epidermis comes off, there goes the fingerprints and forensic anthropologists like Dr. Bass at the body farm have figured out that you can do this. I mean, how many, uh, 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. But that pays for itself as far as I'm concerned because before that they just had no fingerprints.

They'd lost the fingerprint. They're like, oh well. And now they do the buffalo bill thing and it's all good. Yeah. Goodbye horses. It puts a lotion in the basket. No, that wasn't very good. It 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, uh, when there is no flesh any longer. Yeah. And it's just bones. Uh-huh.

Um, 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 race, 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, right? He was pretty new. You could tell. And we knew it was like a white, probably mid thirties, uh, you know, male.

And we just walked along and minded our own business. Never 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, uh, men's bones are larger where it attaches to the muscle, not a dead giveaway, no pun intended, uh, but a good one. And there's differences in the pelvic bone. Uh, apparently, uh, the forehead is also a big telltale sign and gender and race.

Well, men's, uh, foreheads tend to slope backwards and women's are more rounded. True. Yeah. And looking at you, you have a very sloped rear forehead. Do I? You can tell. That's not your forehead, dude. That's your, the top of your head.

Oh, I gotcha. And a female's chins usually come to a point where a man's chin's a little more squared off. How's my chin? It's, uh, beautiful, Josh. Okay. It's beautiful. Uh, ribs apparently can help determine age.

Well, they have. Ragged ribs. Get a lot more ragged in our age. They just get ragged out. Yeah. Um, and also with, uh, with men and women, a dead giveaway is especially post adolescent men and women, um, is a, uh, 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 a man to allow for easier childbirth. You got it. Yeah. 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.

Sure. Um, and then when it comes to, uh, the race, they, they don't get too specific. They kind of want to say African, Asian or European. They try to get the estate 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 had in here that there were more differences within each racial group than there are between each group as a whole, which I thought it was kind of cool. Yeah. That is interesting. Yeah. So those are bones, right? Yeah.

Those are bones. Dimm bones. Dimm bones. Yeah. Josh, you want to talk about disease? Of course. And 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 40 and 50 bodies out there were worried about buzzards, disease, uh, their, their bad stuff getting into the water and nearby creeks, but it doesn't happen. Yeah. No one wants to drink that body. No. Uh, do you know why? Why? Because if you have an infectious disease, it's not going to still be around after your

body is decomposing. Yeah. The, uh, the, um, the infectious disease organisms also decompose. Absolutely. 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 inoculated against all manner of stuff. Yeah.

Because, you know, you don't want to really take a chance, sure. But also they, they go out of their way, I think, to test, um, all, all corpses that are donated to them, uh, for any kind of infectious disease diseases beforehand. So you got to clean, clean live in 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 300 or they had already had 300 bodies donated and you can do that just like you're an organ donor. You can say I'd like my body to go to a body farm after I die. Well I think you want to contact the body farm first. Well, sure. See you at the bedroom. Hey, here's a fun fact for you. Okay.

Uh, in 2006, the University of Tennessee had more corpses and skeletons on its campus than it had Asian students enrolled. Yeah. There were about, um, 900 in the osteopathological collection, 900 skeletons, another 700 in two other skeletal collections and then 40 or so bodies on the body farm. Uh, and there were only 673 Asian students on campus. Wow. Isn't that crazy?

Yeah. Yeah. Crazy. I wonder if they had any Asian bodies. I don't know. Would that cancel out? No. Probably not.

Okay. Or maybe it would count toward the total count. Both ways though. So it'd cancel one another out. Oh, okay. Sure. But I mean, everybody likes to be counted. So counted.

Yeah. So what else, Josh? Should we talk about, uh, some of the ways that body farms have helped out? You mean specifically? Yeah. E.g. John Wayne Gacy? Yeah. That's a good one.

Go ahead. I've long been in pursuit of a John Wayne Gacy, um, painting, you know, he's a prolific painter. Yeah. And I found a website finally. Oh, really? Yeah. That he, he wasn't a very good painter, but you know, just to have a John Wayne Gacy,

it's crazy. He also loved the, um, the seven dwarfs were a common theme of his. Oh, really? He was fascinated by the seven dwarfs for some reason. What a creep. He was a creepy dude. Yeah. Yeah.

Uh, well, when Gacy got popped in what, the 70s? Yeah, I guess 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 33 men. Yeah. And he buried 29 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 Gacy. Sure. Um, but, uh, when he finally got, got busted and he started telling the cops about how many people he had killed, right, uh, that he, they went out to, uh, 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.

He'd been killing kids for a real long time and, uh, the, the bones had become entangled and they didn't know who was who or anything like that. So they brought in forensic anthropologists and I believe they, they helped to successfully identify, uh, most if not all of them. Right. So, you know, that's one way 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, uh, data for missing, uh, kids and, you know, one kind of leads to the, the other and I know it's closure somewhat for families in this kind of situation. Oh yeah. 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, uh, Richie Valens

and Buddy Holly, uh, back in the day and his son, uh, the big bopper son apparently got in touch with Dr. Bass because the, the body of the big bopper was found, his name was JP Richardson was found 40 feet from the plane and the son wanted to know, Hey, did my dad actually die in the crash or was he, uh, trying to go get help and then died, you know, 40 feet later? Cause I don't know that would have made a difference in, in how he felt about, well, apparently there was a long persisting legend too, right? And I guess he wanted to put it to rest and he did put it to rest.

Dr. Bass got 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 the end of that story. Yeah. So the son got that, that kind of closure for food lovers. There's no place on earth like Mississippi where sweet, spicy and smoky flavors satisfy your spirits wherever you wander. And today visit Mississippi.org slash dining, Mississippi wanderers welcome.

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Yeah. All right. So there's this, um, this case in, uh, 1933 in San Diego, uh, little, uh, seven year old named Dalbert Apposian, 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. Wow. Uh, but they never found the killer.

Right. 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, uh, crime scene photos and, uh, notes from the detectives that worked the case. And I imagine it probably took the forensic anthropologist an hour or 10 minutes to say, no, this kid wasn't sodomized or murdered. Really?

Yeah. The thing is, back then, they had no idea, no one was studying this kind of thing. Right. Nowadays we know that when the body reacts with water, all manner of nasty things happen. Yeah. The bodies break down, uh, twice as fast in the water. Right. Which is why a lot of people dispose of murder victims in, in lakes or, you know, rivers.

And I guess why these cops weren't able to really tell much, right? Uh, I think, well, not only that, they were just misled and over the course of these, the decades of study of decomposition, this forensic anthropologist 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, uh, 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 interesting. Yeah. Cops kind of look at this instead of having to truck all the way up to the body farm like we did. Well, yeah.

And I, 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, right? And you know, hold it up against your body and what does it look the same? No, we'll continue to the next page. So yeah, I guess it's going to be like a, an illustrated Atlas of decomposition, like a field 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. Yeah. Right. Right. Yeah. I talked to Tom and I asked him if he had gone and he was like, no, they don't, they learned a long time ago not to let journalists or weirdos in.

Yeah. I bet. Yeah. So the guy was 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 that when you smell a Dan animal. Right.

He said it's very different. He said it's unmistakable. Yeah. He said it was a 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 you. Nope. So, uh, I guess let's just go straight to listener mail. Josh, we're going to, uh, we're going to ask our listeners for a little information here because I didn't know the answer to this question.

Oh, no. And we rarely toss that out. So we had, uh, Paloma right in from California and Paloma said, uh, long time listener. I love your podcast, uh, makes my commute enjoyable and Josh, you chose Chuck as your partner in crime and you all have a great chemistry, blah, blah, blah. Did I have any choice? Could we resist each other? No, no, no.

It was destiny. Yeah. Uh, so she says this, I had a very odd experience 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, pass 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 bulb had gone out. No strobe lights or camera to flash, uh, 30 seconds after this weird phenomenon happened, we heard thunder rumble there nearby. After calming down, I immediately thought of you two, you have answers for everything. So people think of us when they narrowly escaped death where their first thought. So she says, uh, what in the world happened?

Do you think it was lightning, was it 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, uh, no one can die of static electricity that I found that's an only healthy human. Unless it results in spontaneous human combustion. And as far as I don't know, I don't think a lightning can pass through a room of a house

like that. Plus I don't think it goes right in front of your face. I think if it's coming that close to you, it goes right into you. Right. It's not because we had the other listener mail that I think had the side strike three blocks away. Right. He was zapped.

Yeah. 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 stuffpodcasts.howstuffworks.com.

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