All the Time in the World

Criminal

A deep dive into Texas State's Forensic Anthropology Center, a 'body farm' where donated bodies decompose to aid criminal investigations. The episode explores death, decomposition, and the ethics of posthumous contribution.

Key takeaways

• Bodies decompose in stages: bloat, maggot activity, purge, and skeletonization.
• Decomposition varies by environment, clothing, and scavenger activity.
• Donors often choose to contribute for scientific and educational impact.

Transcript preview

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And I still think about the day we recorded it. Oh. Let's see. Let's see. Look that. And that skull is in half. Yeah, this person was autopsied. So that's an autopsy cut. Interesting. So that they can examine the brain. There's a little bag here that says hands and feet. Do those usually get separated because it's. So we put them in a separate bag just so that they don't get scattered out throughout the box. It's easier to keep them together. This is Dr. Daniel Westcott, the director of the Forensic Anthropology Center at Texas State University in San Marcos, Texas, about 30 miles from Austin. We met with him in a nondescript building, a warehouse really. So plain we drove right past it twice. But when you get out of the car and walk to the door, you see, a small paper sign with a vulture and a skull and you know you found it. There are very few places in the world that do what they do here. Well you would think that we would know a lot about how bodies decompose it actually turns out that we really know very little about what's going on so this the work that's done here is pretty vital to that. At Dr. Westcott's center they deliberately set out human bodies to decompose in nature. are lying on the ground, face up with their arms at their sides. But researchers also place bodies in trunks of cars, wrap them in tarps, and bury them in shallow graves. As a culture in some ways, we actually are kind of scared of death and, you know, we embalm bodies so that they don't decompose as fast and we don't want to see that process going on, but that process does go on. we need to be able to understand how it works. How big is the facility and how many bodies are here? The facility is 26 acres and it sets on a 4,200 acre ranch and we get about 70 donations a year. So and then the bodies are usually left to decompose for about six months to several years depending on the research protocol and then the skeletons come back here and so we added about 70 skeletons per year to collection. So if you would guess how many bodies are in some state of decomposition here right now, do you know? Probably about 60. The bodies are donated. They're called gifted bodies, and the people who plan to donate themselves to the research when they die are called living donors. You know, if they want to do something like put me in the trunk of a car to see what happens there or under a tarp or a slab of concrete, I've got no problem. with that he wanted his body to go to the forensic anthropology center. Why did you decide long ago that he wanted his body to go to the forensic anthropology center? Why did you decide to become a donor? I think that everyone should be useful in life and if you can be useful after death as well so much the better. After all, which would you rather do? wind up in a box in the ground just wasting real estate or being a box in the lab and at least potentially useful to a researcher sometime in future. Grady early remembers when the facility was getting established more than 10 years ago and the university was struggling to find the right location. They needed enough space but they also needed a place that wouldn't freak people out. We looked at a site out at the airport. neighbors didn't like the idea and they said well that's gonna attract vultures so we'll have birds interfering with the aircraft side over behind the outlet mall and there were some people that were unhappy with that idea there's there's always nimbies around he's given money to the facility and become fascinated by what he describes as quote helping bones tell their story When his body eventually becomes part of the research, he'll be joining his mother. She's already there. It was an astonishing thing, although in retrospect I suppose it shouldn't have been. When I told my mother what I was planning on doing, she, being a fairly practical woman, said that sounds like a wonderful idea. Sign me up. So I did. She, being a fairly practical woman, said, that sounds like a wonderful idea. Sign me up. So I did. She died at 102. Grady says he doesn't really care what happens to him when he goes into the field. Some bodies are placed in the open with the vultures and coyotes, and some are protected by long low cages. Some are clothed and some aren't. It all depends on the nature of the experiment. It's odd to think that if all goes as planned, Grady early will one day return to the very building where he sat and talked to us, packed in cardboard with the bones of his hands. feet in a small paper bag. What I would really like to do is have my skeleton articulated and hung up somewhere in the facility so I can keep my eye on what's going on. In his work at Texas State, Dr. Westcott is following in the footsteps of his professor, the biggest name in this field, Dr. Bill Bass. Dr. Bass opened the University of Tennessee Anthropological Research Facility in 1981, It was the first of these so-called body farms, although we learned no scientists call them that. And he pioneered the idea that we needed a death database. If too much time has passed when law enforcement encounters a body, they have no way to tell when the person died, much less who they were or what happened. And the only way to answer these questions is to put a body outside and watch it decompose. This is Criminal. We'll be right back. To listen without ads, join Criminal Plus. Square Space for their support. Making a website can be