Knoxville’s Bill Bass is one of the top experts in the nation when it comes to studying corpses—and, boy, do they have stories to tell
For decades, the bodies have been piling up underneath the University of Tennessee’s football stadium in Knoxville.
Dead bodies—in office rooms.
Some are studied in murder cases. Some are the skeletal remains of unknown victims. Some loyal Volunteer fans even want nothing more than to see their bodies preserved for posterity under the hallowed gridiron field.
This is not some urban legend told to scare students. Neyland Stadium’s underbelly is actually home to the University of Tennessee’s department of anthropology and the headquarters for one of the nation’s foremost forensic anthropologists, Bill Bass.
Forensic anthropology is the science behind solving crimes that involve dead bodies. What the CSI TV shows have made popular over the last decade, Bill Bass has made a lifetime out of—and though he’s now retired, he’s still actively involved with the program he’s helped build. In fact, he’s trained more forensic anthropologists during his university tenure than just about anybody in the country, if not the world. If you’ve ever seen Kathy Reich’s TV show “Bones” or read a crime thriller by Patricia Cornwell, both have drawn inspiration and expertise from Bill Bass. He’s helped solve scores of murder cases for the local police on up to the FBI and even authorities outside the U.S.
But unlike his Hollywood counterparts on crime shows, Bass and his colleagues don’t have the luxury of wrapping up a case in an hour.
“We don’t do it as quickly as they do it on TV,” he says. Sometimes just locating a missing body can take weeks, months or years. “Finding a body is like finding a needle in a haystack—it’s harder than people think.”
Bass is also credited with starting the world’s first “Body Farm” just outside of Knoxville. Dozens of cadavers are scattered over a two-and-a-half acre site to help forensic anthropologists learn more about how bodies decompose and to improve techniques for determining factors like cause of death, race, age and gender.
Carpooling into a career
You could say Bill Bass loves studying dead people, but it almost didn’t turn out that way.
He was graduate student studying counseling at the University of Kentucky in Lexington when a fatal traffic accident in the winter of 1954 brought him face to face with a totally new career. Two trucks had crashed into each other, killing three people. The two drivers were identified, but a third victim, a female passenger, was still yet to be identified. Investigators assumed the woman was the common law wife of one of the truck drivers. Or was she?
Bass was taking an anthropology class at the time, when his professor, Charles E. Snow, was called in to investigate the true identity of the woman. Snow asked Bass to tag along and get some real-world experience.
Apparently the body had to be exhumed, so Bass drove Snow out to the cemetery. It wasn’t the sort of neat and clean skeleton you’d find in a classroom, Bass recalls. This one was rotten, smelly and burned. It would be the only time Bass threw up after smelling a dead body up close.
Snow helped solve the mystery using dental and X-ray records. The woman was from East Kentucky and had been missing after going off with one of the truck drivers, a longtime boyfriend. The other truck, which belonged to a large grocery store chain, had swerved into their path. Snow’s findings offered some consolation to the family of the deceased woman and helped give her relatives a solid legal claim for a lawsuit against the grocery store chain. When Snow received his $25 fee for the case, he gave $5 to Bass for driving him out to the cemetery.
But it wasn’t the money that got Bass hooked. It was the real-life puzzle he wanted to solve. The scientific reasoning he loved to use. The secrets waiting to be discovered. It was all there in forensic anthropology.
“That’s what I wanted to do,” he says.
So, he switched gears to study anthropology. The next year, he was accepted into Harvard University’s anthropology program, highly regarded as one of the best in the country. But he turned it down to study at the University of Pennsylvania, which had the most famous bone detective in the nation, Wilton Krogman.
Bass was a Ph.D. student, married with a young son and renting an apartment outside of Philadelphia when he found himself once again in the fortunate position of driving a professor to his destination.
Krogman, it seems, had accidentally fallen down the stairs at his home, and riding the bus to work with a hip-length cast proved quite cumbersome, so Bass offered to drive the professor to and from college. What started as a few months of carpooling turned into a two-and-a-half year friendship with one of the world’s most knowledgeable bone experts. Bass only took a single course from Krogman, but all those rides in the car proved to be a lifetime’s worth of insights into forensic anthropology.
“It was like an automobile-age version of the Socratic dialogue,” Bass explains in his memoir, Death’s Acre, co-written with Jon Jefferson, “but unlike Plato, I had the great teacher all to myself.”
The Body Farm
In his research, Bass excavated Native American sites in the Midwest during the 1950s, a job that earned him the not-so-notable nickname, “Indian grave robber number one.” But it was his meticulous work in documenting bones and human remains that earned him a growing reputation in the field. By 1960, he was hired by the anthropology department at the University of Kansas and helped build a Ph.D. program there. After 11 years at Kansas and having waded through the turf wars of academia, Bass grew restless and looked east.
He moved to Tennessee in the spring of 1971, where he became professor in the anthropology department at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. He also went to work as a forensic anthropologist for the medical examiner of Tennessee. All the medical examiners throughout the state were soon alerted to the fact that Bass would be their go-to guy to help identify dead bodies.
In Tennessee, Bass found himself encountering something he’d never seen before in Kansas—maggots. Since Kansas has a much larger land area and a much smaller population, bodies, when they are found, tend to be already mostly bones by the time anyone has had a chance to discover them outdoors. No maggots.
Quite a different story in Tennessee. And aside from the maggots, Bass was continually dogged by that same question all investigators want to know: How long has that dead body been there?
“I didn’t know anything about maggots,” Bass recounts, “and I looked in the literature, and there was very little in there.”
So he thought to himself, “If I’m going to be working with the police, I’d better know what I’m talking about.”
As a way to further his study of body decomposition, he went to the dean at the University of Tennessee in the fall of ‘71 with an odd proposal: “I need some land to put dead bodies on.”
Rather than shrug off the request, the dean made a call right away to find some land. Surprisingly, there was very little resistance to the idea. In fact, the Body Farm has become a point of pride for the university, a nationally respected site for research that continues to get publicity in news features and fictional crime stories.
Thirty-eight years ago, Bass took over a three-person undergraduate program and doubled it within a year. What started with about eight former athletic dorm rooms underneath the football stadium now encompasses more than 150 rooms.
Picking up the pieces
Forensic anthropologists working as crime-fighting detectives are certainly nothing new. Bass relates a story from the Chinese Song Dynasty around 1200, when a judge was called in to investigate a murder in which a man was killed by a sickle. When no one came forward to admit to the crime, the judge had all the sickles in the area confiscated. One suspicious sickle drew many flies to it. Apparently, this sickle still held the scent of blood. When the judge confronted the sickle’s owner, the man confessed to his crime.
Over the years, Bass has learned to use this kind of deductive reasoning as he gathers the remains of bodies as part of crime scene investigations.
In 1982, Bass and his team were called in to Benton, Tenn., in the southeastern corner of the state. A barn disguised as a fishing bait farm had been operating as one of the largest illegal fireworks factories in the country. A massive explosion destroyed the building and sent dismembered bodies flying through the air. Arms, legs, heads and torsos were littered all over the woods. Some of the gruesome wreckage ended up strung alongside Christmas ornaments in a macabre juxtaposition. Seared burns on the bodies looked more like a mining disaster.
Bass set up two refrigerated trucks to handle all the body parts—one truck for torsos and one for the remaining parts—but none of the local residents wanted to offer up names of the missing for fear of incriminating themselves or the deceased in an illegal operation. So Bass had to use his own reasoning to figure out the ages and genders of the bodies. One helpful method was to separate hairy legs (the men) from shaved legs (the women). In the end, 12 bodies were recovered from the site over two, arduous 16-hour days.
When it comes to carrying a maggot-infested body back to the crime lab, there are careful logistics to consider.
It’s not like you can just throw a body into the back of a police car or take it to the funeral home in a hearse. Over the years, Bass has developed a forensic recovery team with graduate students who are on-call to drive out to crime scenes. A typical site needs five assistants—two with rubber gloves to handle the body, one to take pictures and one to write down notes on everything. The rule is you can’t cut class to come to a crime scene. The forensic anthropology department uses two extended cab pick-up trucks, which can haul bodies in an encased container.
Once they get out to a crime scene, it can take half a day—or more—to gather all the evidence and collect the body (or bodies).
“We don’t meet with the families,” Bass explains.
That’s the job of the police. His task is to take the body for analysis.
There are all sorts of details to remember. For example, you don’t want to take off a dead person’s belt until you measure it around their waist. That way, you can measure the waistline to know how big the body was when it was alive. Items such as belt buckles, wallets or rings go to the police.
When Bass and his team are hauling a body back to the university, it may be late in the day or far enough of a drive to require a stop at a restaurant. Having grown weary of fast food joints, Bass and his assistants tend to stop at a sit-down restaurant.
From trial and error, he’s learned to park in the right place—certainly not up front close to the entrance. More like the back corner. You don’t want to come back to your truck and have a horrendous cloud of flies hanging over your parking space.
No doubt, there’s a little gallows humor necessary to survive a job that deals with death.
“I can see the humor in death,” Bass says. He’s been dangled by his ankles into a Civil War-era grave. He’s come across bizarre scenes of dead bodies in all sorts of odd places.
He does the dirty jobs that no one seems to want.
But he’s also been painfully close to personal tragedy. He lost two wives to cancer. His father committed suicide when Bass was just three years old. The veteran professor also served three years in the Army during the Korean War. He’s seen enough death in his personal life, you’d think he would turn to a more, let’s say, animated career.
“I hate death,” he says. “I hate mourning. I hate funerals. I don’t like that scene at all. But I never see a forensic case as a body. I see a forensic case as a puzzle. Do I have the ability to figure out who that individual is and what happened to him?”
And in the end, that helps gives closure to a grieving family. It helps the police catch the bad guys.
“And, ultimately, you are expanding the knowledge of forensic anthropology.”
Sharing expertise
At 80 years old, Bass is retired. He doesn’t travel as much, but he’s hardly slowing down. In recent years, he’s teamed up with journalist Jon Jefferson to write fictional crime stories about the life and times of a forensic anthropologist. The “bone” series includes Carved in Bone, Flesh and Bone, The Devil’s Bones and the latest, Bones of Betrayal, about a mysterious murder at the Oak Ridge, Tenn. nuclear facility during the Manhattan Project years of World War II. Their next book, The Bone Thief, is due out in February 2010.
Jefferson met Bass about a decade ago while doing a documentary on the Body Farm for National Geographic.
“We really hit it off together,” Jefferson says.
Bass was looking for someone to help write a book on his career, and Jefferson admired Bass’ experience in the field and his ability to recall so many fascinating cases.
“I think his memory is better than mine—and he’s got 27 years on me,” Jefferson says. “He’s also an amazingly nice guy.”
When they work together, they often have a lot of give and take, bouncing around ideas for a manuscript. Jefferson hammers out a strong narrative while Bass makes sure the science behind the story is accurate.
As their friendship developed, Jefferson found that Bass is not the sort of person who brags about winning a national teaching award or that he once kept President Ronald Reagan waiting for a meeting with university faculty because he had a scheduled class to teach.
At the North Carolina Center for the Advancement of Teaching in Cullowhee, N.C. (just across the highway from Western Carolina University), teachers from across the state enroll in a five-day seminar that explores the latest techniques of crime scene investigation. Bass is one of the guest instructors for the seminar. It’s a unique opportunity for classroom teachers to use science, math, writing and technology as detectives solving the kind of make-believe murder you’d find on the hit TV series, CSI.
“That’s the natural hook into learning,” says Renee Coward, director of programming at NCCAT in Cullowhee. “They’re using this knowledge to solve a mystery.”
In one particular morning activity, teachers go out to a site to collect samples from a decaying body. They return with maggots and beetles and other assorted goodies in vials they’ll study closer in order to learn about the effects of human decomposition.
There’s no one grossed out by this eager fascination with death. Quite the contrary, the teachers are lively and talkative when they return from their expedition. West Stanly High School math teacher Lori Evans is especially excited with her findings, declaring that rotten potatoes actually smell worse than a dead body.
“We’re gonna make a forensic anthropologist out of you yet,” Bass tells her, grinning.
The mystery-solving seminar includes examining skeletal remains, learning the life cycle of insects, fingerprinting, wilderness tracking, hand-writing analysis, and DNA profiling. It all taps into the natural curiosity of these teachers-turned-students. The idea is for teachers to bring best practices in teaching—like cooperative learning and developing problem-solving skills—along with an infectious excitement for learning back into the classroom, Coward explains.
NCCAT’s CSI seminar began in 2002 and has since grown to become more and more elaborate. And with instructors like Bill Bass, teachers get to study with some of the finest experts in the field. For Bass, who has had a lengthy career teaching at the university level, NCCAT offers him the chance to work with public school teachers.
Cold Cases
Several times a year, lawyers call on Bass’s expertise to help solve various investigations.
“You’d be surprised how many people want to know how long somebody’s been dead,” Bass says.
This past summer, Bass spent time on an unsolved case that dated back to 1975. A 9-year-old Girl Scout was out selling cookies and didn’t come home. Thirty-three days later, a search party found her dead in a garage. An investigation failed to turn up a suspect, so the case went cold.
Then in 2002, one of the detectives sent in some DNA samples from the original crime scene, and the results flagged a prison inmate who had just been released. The inmate was picked up and charged with murder, but another matter still remained. Years back, during the search for the missing girl, police had looked in the very building where the girl’s body was later found but initially didn’t find a body. All these years later, authorities wanted to settle the case to see if the girl had been dead in the garage all along.
Looking over the autopsy information and photos from the crime scene, Bass found that the girl had, indeed, been dead for 33 days. She’d been in the same spot all that time.
After a body dies, the blood stops pumping and lividity sets in—the process by which the blood settles after death. Gravity naturally pulls the blood down to the lowest place, so if a person dies face down, the blood gathers in the face and chest areas closest to the ground. In these areas, the skin turns dark purple. But if a body has been moved, an investigator might find multiple purplish stains in various parts throughout the body, suggesting that the blood settled in different areas. In the girl’s case, lividity had been fixed from the time of her death. She hadn’t been moved.
With all the cases he’s helped solve, you’d think Bill Bass would be content to ease into retirement and gladly pass on the mantel to another gifted mind. But there are those eight to 10 skeletons lurking back at his offices under Neyland Stadium that haunt him. Skeletons of young females found along interstates that no one has been able to identify. Deductive reasoning suggests they were prostitutes murdered and dumped along the sides of highways, only to be found months later by mowers cutting the grass. DNA testing proves useless if the family of an estranged woman doesn’t know she’s missing and hasn’t entered her into a database system for law enforcement to check. So the cold case stays cold.
“There’ve always been cold cases,” Bass says, but more and more cold cases are being solved today because of DNA and other tools that police can use.
“The techniques in forensic anthropology have really increased,” he adds. “We can tell more about individual bones now.”
In the days when Bass first started, he used to rely on the skull or pelvis bone to determine a person’s race or gender. Now, thanks to developments from people like Emily Craig, a forensic anthropologist in Kentucky, there are ways to determine a body’s race using femurs, or leg bones. Apparently, the different angles measured at the end of a femur bone can predict a person’s race in about nine out of ten cases, Bass explains.
Still it’s surprising to know—even with all the advances in DNA testing and research—how little we actually know about dead bodies. For instance, Bass poses a simple question that could launch a series of doctoral dissertations: “Do dead bodies smell differently?”
Helping to answer that question, one of Bass’ former students, Arpad Vass, a senior research assistant at Oak Ridge, Tenn., has designed a type of “sniffing” machine that can detect about 30 chemical compounds found in a dead body, according to Bass. There are more than 500 of these compounds given off by a decaying corpse, Bass says, and this new machine sucks in air from the ground, filters it through a screen and alerts sensors that squawk and beep when it detects some of these compounds. It looks like a vacuum cleaner, but it works like a metal detector for finding dead bodies. Already the Justice Department and crime-fighting agencies around the country are looking into using such a tool. It could help human rights groups find mass graves or help the FBI find victims of a serial killer. For years, dogs were used to sniff out dead bodies because they have such a sensitive gift for smells, but dogs get tired. This device, Bass says, would not only last longer, it could be mounted on a van and driven across a field as a search party looked for a missing body.
And you can bet Bass would love to be driving that van, leading the charge, helping to solve another mystery, furthering the science to which he has devoted a lifetime.