Just finished reading Death’s Acre, all about the “Body Farm,” (which is the world’s only facility dedicated to understanding how human bodies decompose), and how the information gleaned from that facility has helped to solve crimes.
It’s written by the founder of the body farm, Bill Bass, and a journalist co-writer.
If you can handle the descriptions of maggots eating faces, or steam rising off a corpse in the early evening, then the book may be for you. (Maybe not, because there’s more than that to make you feel queasy, which I’ll mention below.) I thought the cases were incredibly interesting, though I was a little bored by all the stuff about Bass’s home life.
Oh, and I did get tired of some of the literary techniques:
1. Practically every case seemed to open, then cut to something unrelated (or marginally related) for a while, then come back to the case.
2. “I was driving along the road until dawn. Meanwhile, something was driving a man to kill his ex-wife in Tuscon.” That isn’t an actual quote, but you get the point. The book is packed with cutesie stuff like that, which people probably love, but I hated.
But forget about that stuff, because the cases are so fascinating that I can forgive a lot of crap along the way.
Forensic Anthropology is a close relation to forensic entomology, so of course this book reminded me of one I read a couple of years ago called, Maggots, Murder, and Men. That one was restricted to bugs. Those guys solve crimes (or at least try to figure out the time and place of death) by noting the kinds of bugs on a corpse, and what stage they’ve reached in their life cycles.
I guess I love gruesome stuff, but only when it’s real.
At the same time, and this is the other stuff to make you queasy, it was disturbing knowing that each one of these cases, by definition really, began with a dead person. The horror had already happened. Little kids were choked to death or raped and stabbed; women were brutalized and suffered “defensive” wounds on their arms as they failed to fend off fatal knife attacks. And plenty more. Lots and lots of death.
My wife tells me that I’m going to have nightmares.
It’s weird hearing you describe these two books. I take it you don’t watch CSI, because you’re describing the exact premise of this television show as if we don’t have it as a common point of reference. The show starts with a dead body, and then they figure out which bugs ate which body part and how much decomp and all that disgusting stuff to solve the crime.
It’s a fascinating show, but I actually wind up spending half the show looking away from the screen. It’s quite disgusting at time. I never asked to be shown how you can determine time of death from the viscosity of the fluid behind the eyeball, and I’m not sure I’m better off now that I know it can be done.
Yuck.
The two big differences between CSI and this guy are that:
1. This guy is REAL. So the dead people were really living people, and the stories are more affecting.
2. This guy doesn’t usually have anything to do with fresh corpses. If they haven’t been dead for a while, then he’s not the guy to call. He doesn’t deal with eyeballs. They’re gone by the time he has anything to do with it.
In fact, he says that many forensic anthropologists never visit the scene of the crime (they never do a CSI). They have the bones sent to them. But he thinks that’s a mistake, and when he can, he DOES visit the scene of the crime.
There is a show on the air called Bones, which I’ve never seen, but is apparently about a forensic anthropologist. That may fit more perfectly.
As for the viscosity thing, I think it’ll make me a better murderer. Now I know to remove the eyeballs.