Since May 2024, four donor bodies have been studied at this five-acre laboratory in the Manassas woods. The dead would soon arrive in a white van. A crowd had already formed outside the barbed-wire fence, which stood eight feet tall. The long shadow offered spectators a temporary refuge from the sw eltering heat. The memorial service was austere. There were no soul-stirring hymns. Instead, a fire-haired woman, slight and charismatic, spoke from a portable karaoke machine. “This is beyond what anyone is expected to do,” she said of the deceased. “They’re giving themselves over to us, trusting that we’ll do the right thing. We need to cherish the entire time that we have with them.” The eulogy concluded, and teenagers wiped away tears while 16 volunteers loaded two bodies on stretchers draped in splendid velvet. The pallbearers wove through a grove of hickory and poplar trees, high-­stepping over brush and roots. Once the dead reached their destination, a quiet parcel of forest in Manassas, they were laid to rest—one in a shallow grave and one on top of the dirt. Then the scientists went to work. A man vacuumed fetid gas from the body bags, saving it for his personal experiments. Another woman collected fingernails, hair, and blood for her own records. They’d waited years for this moment: The “body farm” was finally open for business. Since May 2024, researchers at George Mason University have been studying human decomposition in real time, taking meticulous notes as their donors melt into turmeric-colored puddles. The work is thankless, underfunded, and extraordinarily smelly. But it also has the potential to transform how homicide cases are solved—and drag the field of forensic anthropology, concerned with scientific analysis of human remains, into the 21st century. “For thousands of years, we’ve watched people decompose, and it’s a mystery,” says Mary Ellen O’Toole, the eulogist and head of George Mason’s forensic-­science department. “We’re breaking through the mystery.” I n the winter of 1977, police summoned Bill Bass, an acclaimed forensic anthropologist, to an antebellum manor outside Nashville. The scene was ugly. Under cover of darkness, someone had desecrated an old grave, then dumped a headless man into the open pit. The victim’s tuxedo was in respectable condition, and muscles still clung to his bones. Bass reckoned that the man was in his mid-twenties, dead for a year at most. Bass was half correct. Colonel William Shy lived to 26 years old. But he was killed in 1864, shot in the head during the Confederate retreat from the Battle of Nashville. An airtight iron casket helped maintain his youthful vim—and most of his soft tissue—until he was disturbed by grave robbers more than a century later. “It made me realize how totally clueless we were about death,” Bass later told the New York Times Magazine. Five decades have passed since that incident, and we’re still mostly clueless. The science of death investigation is nascent. It’s nothing like prime-time television. In the universe of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, the future has always been now. Fictional detectives can pull partial fingerprints from a rusty chain-link fence and synthesize the fragments into a pristine composite. They can pour plaster into a stab wound, wait for it to solidify, and identify the exact knife used by the freak of the week. DNA is everywhere, and—great news—the lab can have a full genetic readout by lunch, instead of ten to 15 business days from now. But TV death investigations are high-tech hooey. In reality, even the most fundamental questions are difficult to answer, including When did this person die? The time since death, also known as the “postmortem interval,” is paramount to any criminal investigation. That information helps police attach names to unidentified victims, include and exclude suspects, and reconstruct the chain of events leading to a person being dumped in a creek. For the most part, investigators are stuck using old-school tools. They collect rectal temperatures and cross-reference those numbers with an outdated chart. They search the crime scene for maggots and cocoons, hoping the fly life cycle might shed light on the time since death. There’s a lot of room for error, which can cause big problems down the line. For centuries, investigators believed they could determine the postmortem interval solely by the victim’s appearance. That is pseudoscience. When a detective eyeballs a pallid exotic dancer, yanks off his sunglasses, and concludes that the woman has been dead for three days, he’s either too green to make grand proclamations, too old to still be working, or an actor preparing for a guest role on Law & Order. Today, researchers understand that two bodies will never decompose at exactly the same rate. The process will accelerate and decelerate, pause and restart, based on dozens of climatic and anatomical variables. If a body is buried underground or tossed into the bay, for example, the shortage of oxygen will slow the process. That means investigators can’t rely on intuition alone. They need data, and mathematical formulas, to make reliable estimations. After the Colonel Shy fiasco, Bass resolved to bring some scientific rigor to the field. The only way to do it, he believed, was to let a body rot—and watch what happens. T he George Mason University Science & Technology Campus is sandwiched among weapons manufacturers and data centers, the offices of 1-800-PACK-RAT, and an “award-winning” diabase quarry that plunges some 50 stories into the ground. It lacks many of the amenities of a traditional college. There are no undergraduate dorms. There’s no obvious spot to huck a Frisbee or drink malt liquor in the grass. At the center of campus, in place of a quadrangle, is a five-acre wood—probably haunted—where donors will remain for the rest of time. I’ve come to meet the body farmers responsible for overseeing their slow decay. “I hope I got all my rollers out,” mutters O’Toole, whose auburn bob is immediately recognizable from across the parking lot. A world-­renowned authority on psychopathy—a personality disorder often associated with crime and violence—O’Toole was hired as department chair ten years ago. Since she took the helm, the program has become a national destination, growing from 197 to roughly 600 students—four in ten come from out of state, and nine in ten are women. In 1981, O’Toole was recruited by the FBI, where she spent the next 28 years apprehending, interviewing, and profiling a murderers’ row of mass murderers. Her case résumé includes the Zodiac Killer, the Unabomber, the Green River Killer, the Monster of Florence, the Columbine High School shooting, and the abduction of Elizabeth Smart—but her biggest claim to fame is persuading the Washington Post and New York Times to publish the 35,000-word Una­bomber manifesto, a decision that led to the arrest of Ted Kaczynski in 1996. That job was bliss for O’Toole. “I’ve only met one serial murderer who was kind of a dud,” she says. “The rest of them are funny, delightful, great sense of humor. If you met them in a pub, you’d never know what they did in their secret life.” O’Toole is joined by a pair of graduate students, the university communications director, and two members of her faculty. The first is An-Di Yim, a Taiwanese scholar of limbs and bones. During his doctoral years, Yim raised the dead from shallow graves in Somaliland—and also published a riveting journal article titled “A Retrospective Study of Intentional Body Dismemberment in New York City, 1996–2017.” To his right is Emily Rancourt, a former homicide investigator with Prince William County and the mastermind behind the body farm at George Mason. When former Prince William County homicide investigator Emily Rancourt (left) first proposed the body farm to George Mason forensic-science head Mary Ellen O’Toole, O’Toole looked at Rancourt “like she had two heads.” She first proposed the idea in 2015, when O’Toole started drafting a departmental wish list. Most of her colleagues asked for normal things: new smartboards or genetic-­sequencing equipment or a dedicated space for crime-scene simulations. Rancourt, on the other hand, urged O’Toole to turn the campus into an open-air morgue. “I looked at her like she had two heads,” says O’Toole. Rancourt wasn’t the first to propose the idea. In 1980, Bill Bass established the world’s first body farm at the University of Tennessee, and over the next four decades, his apostles watched thousands of bodies turn to bones. They defined the stages of decomposition: fresh, bloat, decay, and dry. They studied how variations in oxygen, temperature, and humidity influence the body’s progression through those stages. They also documented how insects and other critters influence the process. Their work revolutionized death investigation in Tennessee. It minimized guesswork and lent scientific credibility to investigative techniques, which are commonly picked apart in court by defense attorneys eager to seize on uncertainty. But the data from Knoxville isn’t easily applied elsewhere. Geography matters. In a balmy place like Biloxi, a person could skeletonize in two weeks. In frigid Fairbanks or high-altitude Alma, it might take two years. Over time, body farms emerged at seven other universities, spanning nearly every region in the country—except for the Mid-Atlantic. “I wanted to give answers to families. They want to know what happened. Were they immediately murdered? Did they suffer? Were they tortured?” “This was a dream born out of frustration,” says Rancourt. “I’d work these cases where somebody’s been murdered and dumped outside, and because we’re using data from Tennessee, Texas, or Illinois, we’d literally say they could have been killed 12 hours ago or three weeks ago.” A body farm, she argued, would benefit the entire faculty. With a multi-acre laboratory, they could do more than just watch people decay—they could test new imaging technology, study the chemistry of death, and otherwise help investigators overcome their most vexing challenges. “I wanted to give answers to families,” says Rancourt. “They want to know what happened. Were they immediately murdered? Did they suffer? Were they tortured?” She made a strong case. University administrators backed her proposal. The county government approved all the requisite permits. By 2021, everything was ready to go, except for one significant holdup: finding someone willing to donate their body to the farm. F or thousands of years, only the unclaimed, undesirable, or unsuspecting became cadavers. Anatomists studied the bodies of vagrants and violent criminals, and when they fell into short supply, drunks were commonly hired to steal bodies from the cemetery, tie them up like rib roasts, and stuff them into wooden crates. Things are different now. You can become a tissue donor at the Department of Motor Vehicles. Each year, about 20,000 people donate their entire body to science—and they are always in high demand. Most cadavers are sent to medical schools, where they’ll help separate the future surgeons from the fainters. If the donor’s innards are particularly handsome, their body might be sawed into horizontal cross-sections, laminated in resin, and turned into visual aids. Other donors will be scrapped for parts and turned into medical supplies: Their skin might be freeze-dried, rehydrated, and used to plump someone’s upper lip or enlarge their penis; their bones could be ground into a mealy flour, emulsified into a paste, and used to treat periodontal disease. For a cadaver, these are top-flight placements, like receiving a naval commission in Key West. Weirder fates await those who consign their bodies to private “tissue banks”—unregulated brokers known to sell donors to anyone with a few thousand dollars. Bodies might be shipped to a proving ground and blown to smithereens via drone strike; set ablaze and extinguished with experimental firefighting foams; or chucked into the water and run over repeatedly to safety-test a cigarette boat. If you’re a body farmer, you have three options. You can conscript bodies—unclaimed by families or unidentified by the medical examiner—into eternal service. You can purchase donors from a shady broker, who may or may not work out of a strip mall. (A prominent Las Vegas broker, who has faced numerous lawsuits, stored his bodies between a tattoo shop and a psychic parlor.) If those two strategies feel odious, you can try your luck at persuading people to voluntarily consent to “encasement in, around, and under cement,” “mutilation,” and “burning, fire, and other attempts to destroy a body.” While waiting for human donors, researchers studied deceased pigs, which are considered the best animal proxy for human decomposition due to similarities in bleeding, body fat, skin, and microbiome. George Mason opted for the third approach. For three years, researchers waited for a human donor, studying deceased pigs to pass the time. Pigs have been considered the best proxy for human decomposition, due to similarities in bleeding, body fat, skin, and microbiome. “We wrapped a pig in a carpet. Then we did a pig with a T-shirt and a pair of shorts. We did a nude pig, too,” says Rancourt, without a hint of mirth. (Her main takeaway: The pigs smell way worse than people.) While our group schleps into the forest, I ask my hosts for their feelings about crime television. There are groans, followed by a chorus of jeers: bullshit, hate it, ridiculous. But the tenor changes when I ask whether the public’s fascination with crime has helped or hindered their research. “Those shows bring me the best students,” says Rancourt. It’s also helped them attract body donors, including their very first. When Donor No. 1 passed away, he was deemed ineligible for educational use. While medical schools routinely exclude cadavers with major physical trauma, cancers, or missing organs, the body farmers have no right to be picky. “If they’re dead, we’ll take them,” says O’Toole. The man’s brother got in touch with O’Toole, who explained her program over the phone. “My brother loved those crime shows,” he told her. “This is exactly what he would have wanted.” Over the past year, George Mason has received four bodies in total—three middle-­aged men and one elderly woman. Donor No. 1 was buried in a three-and-a-half-foot-deep hole, dug using heavy machinery. It’s shallower than a conventional grave but “still generous,” according to Rancourt. This was intentional. In Virginia, the clay is punishing, and murderers, weary from the murdering, tend to cut corners. “With a few exceptions, they just leave them on the ground, throw them down in a gully, or put them under a tree,” says O’Toole. “They’re lazy, and they’ll tell you afterwards that it was hard on their knees.” For that reason, the subsequent three donors were left to decompose on the surface. Since Donor No. 1 is buried under several tons of dirt, he isn’t subject to routine observation. But make no mistake, he’s still producing valuable data. Every month, researchers collect samples from the soil around his grave, which is shedding new light on how to find trace evidence in the environment. “If I’m dealing with a serial killer and somebody says the bodies are buried [in this general area], where do we start?” says O’Toole. “How do we determine where to start digging?” I n 2002, O’Toole traveled to Seattle to interrogate Gary Ridgway, a serial murderer known as the Green River Killer. In state court, Ridgway pleaded guilty to murdering 48 women over at least two decades, though the true number could be much higher. “Gary traveled to Idaho, to Spokane, to California. He’d been in the Navy, so he’d been overseas and all over,” says O’Toole. “What’s the likelihood that he only killed in King County?” Under the terms of his plea bargain, Ridgway would be spared the death penalty if he agreed to help authorities locate his victims’ remains. The resulting search tested everyone’s patience. Eventually, police recovered the bones of three women, but only after they’d spent a great deal of time digging holes across King County based on decades-old recollections. For investigators, time is always the enemy: Memories fade, and all physical evidence will eventually disappear from view. Even under ideal search conditions—great visibility, detailed confession, recent murder—looking for a body is hard work. Police will scour hundreds or thousands of acres, often guided only by the nose of a bloodhound. A well-trained dog can correctly identify grave soil almost 100 percent of the time, even years after a person’s death. But they’re still dogs. They get tired and they get distracted, producing false positives. “We’re out there for days, weeks, months, and you never find anything,” says Rancourt. Forensic chemist Brian Eckenrode (left) is working to identify combinations of compounds associated with human decay—the better to locate missing bodies—While colleague An-Di Yim is a scholar of limbs and bones. Her colleague at George Mason, Brian Eckenrode, is trying to develop new tools for detecting decay. Today, Eckenrode is a professor of forensic chemistry, but previously he was employed at the FBI Laboratory in Quantico, where he worked closely with the Bureau’s dog handlers. “The canine nose is built for measuring chemistry,” he tells me. “The dogs were so much better than anything I could do in the laboratory.” Eckenrode studies volatile organic compounds, the airborne molecules that create aromas. Almost everything—living and nonliving—sheds VOCs, and natural variation among objects is why dirt smells earthy but paint smells acrid. For decades, researchers have tried to define the chemistry of human decomposition. With that sort of information, they could potentially develop an “artificial nose” to use in the field. But nobody’s cracked the case yet. The problem, according to Eckenrode, is that they’re seeking certainty—as scientists tend to do—and that’s a fool’s errand. “Everything is decomposing, all the time,” he says. “This pen is decomposing.” Samples often contain thousands of compounds, and it’s difficult to decipher which ones originate from a human body and which are already present in the ambient air. The other challenge is overlap. A dead human will release hundreds of different compounds into the environment—and many are also associated with pigs, deer, and compost. Short of sampling every single object and organism on the planet, there’s no way to determine if a compound is exclusive to our species. A beehive outside the body farm; honey analysis could someday help locate nearby bodies. After nearly three decades of toil, Eckenrode is trying a new approach: settling for “good enough.” Using data from several body farms, including George Mason’s, he has identified 30-odd compounds that are almost certainly associated with human decomposition—and he doesn’t care if they’re unique. When those compounds appear in nature together, in the right proportions, it’s time to start digging. Though Eckenrode is hesitant to overshare in the middle of criminal proceedings, he claims to have successfully applied this new methodology to real-world investigations, and he hopes to publish his findings later this year. While Eckenrode focuses on soil, Rancourt believes clues might also be found in honey. Every day when bees go about their business, they come into contact with thousands of objects—hydrangeas, puddles of mud, locks of human hair. Eventually, they return home covered in debris, and those trace chemicals are stored inside the hive’s chemical memory: the honey. Since bees do not travel far from home, scientists have used honey samples to monitor for pesticides, heavy metals, and industrial waste. All the same, if a human body is near, and bees have flown near it, there should be traces of decay inside local hives, which would help investigators shrink their search radius. “All it takes is a teaspoon,” says Rancourt. It’ll take time to validate her theory, perhaps several years. She’s recently acquired 30,000 bees and planted a ring of goldenrod and coneflower around the donors, which has brought some much-needed color to the property. I n late autumn, the body farm is many shades of brown. The trees are nude, and the creek is dry. As we trudge through dead leaves, the air fills with mold and ragweed, and O’Toole cannot stop coughing. The facility is unmanicured and uninviting, as expected. But there’s no forbidden odor, no primordial funk. Instead, the whole place smells like a Spirit Halloween. Before I can ask, Rancourt points out plastic bones scattered around the property. “Those aren’t real,” she says, stating the obvious. She placed the props over the weekend so university administrators would have something to see when they visited. Civilians aren’t permitted to view the bodies, which are hidden behind yet another perimeter. O’Toole, who is constitutionally squeamish, considers it an act of mercy. She’s afraid of blood, and she cannot tolerate the stench of death, which is said to smell like jet fuel, stale refrigerator, and raw herring. She keeps her distance from the donors, relying largely on graduate students to collect daily decomposition measurements. Jessica Ross, a first-year master’s student, is among the lucky few. Ross came to George Mason for two reasons: the body farm and the proximity to the local morgue. She aspires to be a medical examiner, performing, in her words, “autopsies and all that good stuff.” Several times a week, she commutes three hours to take notes on the donors, snap photographs, and observe a sublime process that few will ever witness firsthand. When a human dies, the decomposition process begins within minutes. The waste-pumping mechanisms inside our cells shut down, and corrosive liquids start to accumulate. Eventually, the dam breaks and cells begin exploding. After their contents flood the body, trillions of microorganisms ride the tide into parts unknown, seeking exotic cuisine. Within a few hours, muscles begin to seize and blood starts to pool in unusual places. The jaw drops, lips engorge, and the tongue hangs out. Testicles swell to the size of softballs. Eventually, the skin marbles like a dry-aged steak. As the great bacterial horde pillages and plunders through the body, it releases immense quantities of sulfurous gas, which will inflate the stomach until it bursts—and thus begins the long march to skeletonization. “I do a mental thank-you every single time. I don’t know who you are, but you gave me this incredible opportunity to learn.” Ross is unfazed by body horror. “If there’s a mass of maggots on the face, we’ll make note of it,” she says without any inflection. She relishes her time with the donors. She uses human pronouns: “he” or “she” rather than “it.” Sometimes, she talks to them. “I do a mental thank-you every single time,” she says. “I don’t know who you are, but you gave me this incredible opportunity to learn.” Though this project is only nine months old, body-farm researchers have already learned a great deal about stages of decay. The most important lesson: Assume nothing, because nature will break every rule. Donor No. 2 never bloated at all, because all the bacterial gas escaped through a surgical incision—and he went from “beginning to decompose” to “monstrous-looking” within a period of 12 hours. Donor No. 4 stayed fresh for at least three weeks due to the freezing temperatures and significant snowfall. “Our [progression] is so different from all the other body farms,” says Rancourt. “We don’t follow a nice curve.” After collecting observations for two or three dozen donors, they’ll have enough data to create a formula for estimating postmortem intervals throughout the region. Then, with new baselines, they can start investigating other factors: skin tone; height and weight; biological sex; injuries; cause of death. “Eventually, we’ll do more specific research,” says Rancourt. “We’ll wrap them in carpet, put them in the trunk of a car, dismember them, then stuff them into plastic tubs, suitcases, and what have you.” None of this talk is flippant. These are serious people, and they’re aware that their pathological honesty might discourage prospective donors. “It’s a tough thing to do,” says O’Toole. “I’m sure Emily will also tell you about the birds.” Several hundred feet away, two turkey vultures keep watch from a power line. “They play games with us,” says Rancourt, who cracks a smile. She and Yim have been locked in a battle of wits with the scavengers, which can strip a body down to the studs in mere hours. They placed steel cages over their donors. They tied chiffon sacks over their hands and feet, then zip-tied the sacks once the vultures learned to untie knots. Nothing works. Fingers and toes keep disappearing. Donor No. 2 lost an entire hand. “We only found 30 percent of it,” admits Rancourt. “You’re going too far, Emily,” says O’Toole. “You know this is going in a magazine, right?” Rancourt shrugs. It’s useful information for investigators, who could easily mistake animal damage for stab wounds, bruising, or dismemberment. The vultures, she tells me, aren’t even the worst part. Last August, special agents from the FBI visited the body farm, and when they came upon Donor No. 2, they stood over the cage in stunned silence. A box turtle wedged itself between the steel slats, severed the man’s head, and began dribbling his skull like a soccer ball. This is science at work. It was the first time anyone had ever witnessed a turtle decapitate a man. There’s only one way to make that kind of discovery: Let a body rot, and watch what happens. The dead would soon arrive in a white van. A crowd had already formed outside the barbed-wire fence, which stood eight feet tall. The long shadow offered spectators a temporary refuge from the sweltering heat. The memorial service was austere. There were no soul-stirring hymns. Instead, a fire-haired woman, slight and charismatic, spoke from a portable karaoke machine. “This is beyond what anyone is expected to do,” she said of the deceased. “They’re giving themselves over to us, trusting that we’ll do the right thing. We need to cherish the entire time that we have with them.” The eulogy concluded, and teenagers wiped away tears while 16 volunteers loaded two bodies on stretchers draped in splendid velvet. The pallbearers wove through a grove of hickory and poplar trees, high-­stepping over brush and roots. Once the dead reached their destination, a quiet parcel of forest in Manassas, they were laid to rest—one in a shallow grave and one on top of the dirt. Then the scientists went to work. A man vacuumed fetid gas from the body bags, saving it for his personal experiments. Another woman collected fingernails, hair, and blood for her own records. They’d waited years for this moment: The “body farm” was finally open for business. Since May 2024, researchers at George Mason University have been studying human decomposition in real time, taking meticulous notes as their donors melt into turmeric-colored puddles. The work is thankless, underfunded, and extraordinarily smelly. But it also has the potential to transform how homicide cases are solved—and drag the field of forensic anthropology, concerned with scientific analysis of human remains, into the 21st century. “For thousands of years, we’ve watched people decompose, and it’s a mystery,” says Mary Ellen O’Toole, the eulogist and head of George Mason’s forensic-­science department. “We’re breaking through the mystery.” I n the winter of 1977, police summoned Bill Bass, an acclaimed forensic anthropologist, to an antebellum manor outside Nashville. The scene was ugly. Under cover of darkness, someone had desecrated an old grave, then dumped a headless man into the open pit. The victim’s tuxedo was in respectable condition, and muscles still clung to his bones. Bass reckoned that the man was in his mid-twenties, dead for a year at most. Bass was half correct. Colonel William Shy lived to 26 years old. But he was killed in 1864, shot in the head during the Confederate retreat from the Battle of Nashville. An airtight iron casket helped maintain his youthful vim—and most of his soft tissue—until he was disturbed by grave robbers more than a century later. “It made me realize how totally clueless we were about death,” Bass later told the New York Times Magazine. Five decades have passed since that incident, and we’re still mostly clueless. The science of death investigation is nascent. It’s nothing like prime-time television. In the universe of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, the future has always been now. Fictional detectives can pull partial fingerprints from a rusty chain-link fence and synthesize the fragments into a pristine composite. They can pour plaster into a stab wound, wait for it to solidify, and identify the exact knife used by the freak of the week. DNA is everywhere, and—great news—the lab can have a full genetic readout by lunch, instead of ten to 15 business days from now. But TV death investigations are high-tech hooey. In reality, even the most fundamental questions are difficult to answer, including When did this person die? The time since death, also known as the “postmortem interval,” is paramount to any criminal investigation. That information helps police attach names to unidentified victims, include and exclude suspects, and reconstruct the chain of events leading to a person being dumped in a creek. For the most part, investigators are stuck using old-school tools. They collect rectal temperatures and cross-reference those numbers with an outdated chart. They search the crime scene for maggots and cocoons, hoping the fly life cycle might shed light on the time since death. There’s a lot of room for error, which can cause big problems down the line. For centuries, investigators believed they could determine the postmortem interval solely by the victim’s appearance. That is pseudoscience. When a detective eyeballs a pallid exotic dancer, yanks off his sunglasses, and concludes that the woman has been dead for three days, he’s either too green to make grand proclamations, too old to still be working, or an actor preparing for a guest role on Law & Order. Today, researchers understand that two bodies will never decompose at exactly the same rate. The process will accelerate and decelerate, pause and restart, based on dozens of climatic and anatomical variables. If a body is buried underground or tossed into the bay, for example, the shortage of oxygen will slow the process. That means investigators can’t rely on intuition alone. They need data, and mathematical formulas, to make reliable estimations. After the Colonel Shy fiasco, Bass resolved to bring some scientific rigor to the field. The only way to do it, he believed, was to let a body rot—and watch what happens. T he George Mason University Science & Technology Campus is sandwiched among weapons manufacturers and data centers, the offices of 1-800-PACK-RAT, and an “award-winning” diabase quarry that plunges some 50 stories into the ground. It lacks many of the amenities of a traditional college. There are no undergraduate dorms. There’s no obvious spot to huck a Frisbee or drink malt liquor in the grass. At the center of campus, in place of a quadrangle, is a five-acre wood—probably haunted—where donors will remain for the rest of time. I’ve come to meet the body farmers responsible for overseeing their slow decay. “I hope I got all my rollers out,” mutters O’Toole, whose auburn bob is immediately recognizable from across the parking lot. A world-­renowned authority on psychopathy—a personality disorder often associated with crime and violence—O’Toole was hired as department chair ten years ago. Since she took the helm, the program has become a national destination, growing from 197 to roughly 600 students—four in ten come from out of state, and nine in ten are women. In 1981, O’Toole was recruited by the FBI, where she spent the next 28 years apprehending, interviewing, and profiling a murderers’ row of mass murderers. Her case résumé includes the Zodiac Killer, the Unabomber, the Green River Killer, the Monster of Florence, the Columbine High School shooting, and the abduction of Elizabeth Smart—but her biggest claim to fame is persuading the Washington Post and New York Times to publish the 35,000-word Una­bomber manifesto, a decision that led to the arrest of Ted Kaczynski in 1996. That job was bliss for O’Toole. “I’ve only met one serial murderer who was kind of a dud,” she says. “The rest of them are funny, delightful, great sense of humor. If you met them in a pub, you’d never know what they did in their secret life.” O’Toole is joined by a pair of graduate students, the university communications director, and two members of her faculty. The first is An-Di Yim, a Taiwanese scholar of limbs and bones. During his doctoral years, Yim raised the dead from shallow graves in Somaliland—and also published a riveting journal article titled “A Retrospective Study of Intentional Body Dismemberment in New York City, 1996–2017.” To his right is Emily Rancourt, a former homicide investigator with Prince William County and the mastermind behind the body farm at George Mason. When former Prince William County homicide investigator Emily Rancourt (left) first proposed the body farm to George Mason forensic-science head Mary Ellen O’Toole, O’Toole looked at Rancourt “like she had two heads.” She first proposed the idea in 2015, when O’Toole started drafting a departmental wish list. Most of her colleagues asked for normal things: new smartboards or genetic-­sequencing equipment or a dedicated space for crime-scene simulations. Rancourt, on the other hand, urged O’Toole to turn the campus into an open-air morgue. “I looked at her like she had two heads,” says O’Toole. Rancourt wasn’t the first to propose the idea. In 1980, Bill Bass established the world’s first body farm at the University of Tennessee, and over the next four decades, his apostles watched thousands of bodies turn to bones. They defined the stages of decomposition: fresh, bloat, decay, and dry. They studied how variations in oxygen, temperature, and humidity influence the body’s progression through those stages. They also documented how insects and other critters influence the process. Their work revolutionized death investigation in Tennessee. It minimized guesswork and lent scientific credibility to investigative techniques, which are commonly picked apart in court by defense attorneys eager to seize on uncertainty. But the data from Knoxville isn’t easily applied elsewhere. Geography matters. In a balmy place like Biloxi, a person could skeletonize in two weeks. In frigid Fairbanks or high-altitude Alma, it might take two years. Over time, body farms emerged at seven other universities, spanning nearly every region in the country—except for the Mid-Atlantic. “I wanted to give answers to families. They want to know what happened. Were they immediately murdered? Did they suffer? Were they tortured?” “This was a dream born out of frustration,” says Rancourt. “I’d work these cases where somebody’s been murdered and dumped outside, and because we’re using data from Tennessee, Texas, or Illinois, we’d literally say they could have been killed 12 hours ago or three weeks ago.” A body farm, she argued, would benefit the entire faculty. With a multi-acre laboratory, they could do more than just watch people decay—they could test new imaging technology, study the chemistry of death, and otherwise help investigators overcome their most vexing challenges. “I wanted to give answers to families,” says Rancourt. “They want to know what happened. Were they immediately murdered? Did they suffer? Were they tortured?” She made a strong case. University administrators backed her proposal. The county government approved all the requisite permits. By 2021, everything was ready to go, except for one significant holdup: finding someone willing to donate their body to the farm. F or thousands of years, only the unclaimed, undesirable, or unsuspecting became cadavers. Anatomists studied the bodies of vagrants and violent criminals, and when they fell into short supply, drunks were commonly hired to steal bodies from the cemetery, tie them up like rib roasts, and stuff them into wooden crates. Things are different now. You can become a tissue donor at the Department of Motor Vehicles. Each year, about 20,000 people donate their entire body to science—and they are always in high demand. Most cadavers are sent to medical schools, where they’ll help separate the future surgeons from the fainters. If the donor’s innards are particularly handsome, their body might be sawed into horizontal cross-sections, laminated in resin, and turned into visual aids. Other donors will be scrapped for parts and turned into medical supplies: Their skin might be freeze-dried, rehydrated, and used to plump someone’s upper lip or enlarge their penis; their bones could be ground into a mealy flour, emulsified into a paste, and used to treat periodontal disease. For a cadaver, these are top-flight placements, like receiving a naval commission in Key West. Weirder fates await those who consign their bodies to private “tissue banks”—unregulated brokers known to sell donors to anyone with a few thousand dollars. Bodies might be shipped to a proving ground and blown to smithereens via drone strike; set ablaze and extinguished with experimental firefighting foams; or chucked into the water and run over repeatedly to safety-test a cigarette boat. If you’re a body farmer, you have three options. You can conscript bodies—unclaimed by families or unidentified by the medical examiner—into eternal service. You can purchase donors from a shady broker, who may or may not work out of a strip mall. (A prominent Las Vegas broker, who has faced numerous lawsuits, stored his bodies between a tattoo shop and a psychic parlor.) If those two strategies feel odious, you can try your luck at persuading people to voluntarily consent to “encasement in, around, and under cement,” “mutilation,” and “burning, fire, and other attempts to destroy a body.” While waiting for human donors, researchers studied deceased pigs, which are considered the best animal proxy for human decomposition due to similarities in bleeding, body fat, skin, and microbiome. George Mason opted for the third approach. For three years, researchers waited for a human donor, studying deceased pigs to pass the time. Pigs have been considered the best proxy for human decomposition, due to similarities in bleeding, body fat, skin, and microbiome. “We wrapped a pig in a carpet. Then we did a pig with a T-shirt and a pair of shorts. We did a nude pig, too,” says Rancourt, without a hint of mirth. (Her main takeaway: The pigs smell way worse than people.) While our group schleps into the forest, I ask my hosts for their feelings about crime television. There are groans, followed by a chorus of jeers: bullshit, hate it, ridiculous. But the tenor changes when I ask whether the public’s fascination with crime has helped or hindered their research. “Those shows bring me the best students,” says Rancourt. It’s also helped them attract body donors, including their very first. When Donor No. 1 passed away, he was deemed ineligible for educational use. While medical schools routinely exclude cadavers with major physical trauma, cancers, or missing organs, the body farmers have no right to be picky. “If they’re dead, we’ll take them,” says O’Toole. The man’s brother got in touch with O’Toole, who explained her program over the phone. “My brother loved those crime shows,” he told her. “This is exactly what he would have wanted.” Over the past year, George Mason has received four bodies in total—three middle-­aged men and one elderly woman. Donor No. 1 was buried in a three-and-a-half-foot-deep hole, dug using heavy machinery. It’s shallower than a conventional grave but “still generous,” according to Rancourt. This was intentional. In Virginia, the clay is punishing, and murderers, weary from the murdering, tend to cut corners. “With a few exceptions, they just leave them on the ground, throw them down in a gully, or put them under a tree,” says O’Toole. “They’re lazy, and they’ll tell you afterwards that it was hard on their knees.” For that reason, the subsequent three donors were left to decompose on the surface. Since Donor No. 1 is buried under several tons of dirt, he isn’t subject to routine observation. But make no mistake, he’s still producing valuable data. Every month, researchers collect samples from the soil around his grave, which is shedding new light on how to find trace evidence in the environment. “If I’m dealing with a serial killer and somebody says the bodies are buried [in this general area], where do we start?” says O’Toole. “How do we determine where to start digging?” I n 2002, O’Toole traveled to Seattle to interrogate Gary Ridgway, a serial murderer known as the Green River Killer. In state court, Ridgway pleaded guilty to murdering 48 women over at least two decades, though the true number could be much higher. “Gary traveled to Idaho, to Spokane, to California. He’d been in the Navy, so he’d been overseas and all over,” says O’Toole. “What’s the likelihood that he only killed in King County?” Under the terms of his plea bargain, Ridgway would be spared the death penalty if he agreed to help authorities locate his victims’ remains. The resulting search tested everyone’s patience. Eventually, police recovered the bones of three women, but only after they’d spent a great deal of time digging holes across King County based on decades-old recollections. For investigators, time is always the enemy: Memories fade, and all physical evidence will eventually disappear from view. Even under ideal search conditions—great visibility, detailed confession, recent murder—looking for a body is hard work. Police will scour hundreds or thousands of acres, often guided only by the nose of a bloodhound. A well-trained dog can correctly identify grave soil almost 100 percent of the time, even years after a person’s death. But they’re still dogs. They get tired and they get distracted, producing false positives. “We’re out there for days, weeks, months, and you never find anything,” says Rancourt. Forensic chemist Brian Eckenrode (left) is working to identify combinations of compounds associated with human decay—the better to locate missing bodies—While colleague An-Di Yim is a scholar of limbs and bones. Her colleague at George Mason, Brian Eckenrode, is trying to develop new tools for detecting decay. Today, Eckenrode is a professor of forensic chemistry, but previously he was employed at the FBI Laboratory in Quantico, where he worked closely with the Bureau’s dog handlers. “The canine nose is built for measuring chemistry,” he tells me. “The dogs were so much better than anything I could do in the laboratory.” Eckenrode studies volatile organic compounds, the airborne molecules that create aromas. Almost everything—living and nonliving—sheds VOCs, and natural variation among objects is why dirt smells earthy but paint smells acrid. For decades, researchers have tried to define the chemistry of human decomposition. With that sort of information, they could potentially develop an “artificial nose” to use in the field. But nobody’s cracked the case yet. The problem, according to Eckenrode, is that they’re seeking certainty—as scientists tend to do—and that’s a fool’s errand. “Everything is decomposing, all the time,” he says. “This pen is decomposing.” Samples often contain thousands of compounds, and it’s difficult to decipher which ones originate from a human body and which are already present in the ambient air. The other challenge is overlap. A dead human will release hundreds of different compounds into the environment—and many are also associated with pigs, deer, and compost. Short of sampling every single object and organism on the planet, there’s no way to determine if a compound is exclusive to our species. A beehive outside the body farm; honey analysis could someday help locate nearby bodies. After nearly three decades of toil, Eckenrode is trying a new approach: settling for “good enough.” Using data from several body farms, including George Mason’s, he has identified 30-odd compounds that are almost certainly associated with human decomposition—and he doesn’t care if they’re unique. When those compounds appear in nature together, in the right proportions, it’s time to start digging. Though Eckenrode is hesitant to overshare in the middle of criminal proceedings, he claims to have successfully applied this new methodology to real-world investigations, and he hopes to publish his findings later this year. While Eckenrode focuses on soil, Rancourt believes clues might also be found in honey. Every day when bees go about their business, they come into contact with thousands of objects—hydrangeas, puddles of mud, locks of human hair. Eventually, they return home covered in debris, and those trace chemicals are stored inside the hive’s chemical memory: the honey. Since bees do not travel far from home, scientists have used honey samples to monitor for pesticides, heavy metals, and industrial waste. All the same, if a human body is near, and bees have flown near it, there should be traces of decay inside local hives, which would help investigators shrink their search radius. “All it takes is a teaspoon,” says Rancourt. It’ll take time to validate her theory, perhaps several years. She’s recently acquired 30,000 bees and planted a ring of goldenrod and coneflower around the donors, which has brought some much-needed color to the property. I n late autumn, the body farm is many shades of brown. The trees are nude, and the creek is dry. As we trudge through dead leaves, the air fills with mold and ragweed, and O’Toole cannot stop coughing. The facility is unmanicured and uninviting, as expected. But there’s no forbidden odor, no primordial funk. Instead, the whole place smells like a Spirit Halloween. Before I can ask, Rancourt points out plastic bones scattered around the property. “Those aren’t real,” she says, stating the obvious. She placed the props over the weekend so university administrators would have something to see when they visited. Civilians aren’t permitted to view the bodies, which are hidden behind yet another perimeter. O’Toole, who is constitutionally squeamish, considers it an act of mercy. She’s afraid of blood, and she cannot tolerate the stench of death, which is said to smell like jet fuel, stale refrigerator, and raw herring. She keeps her distance from the donors, relying largely on graduate students to collect daily decomposition measurements. Jessica Ross, a first-year master’s student, is among the lucky few. Ross came to George Mason for two reasons: the body farm and the proximity to the local morgue. She aspires to be a medical examiner, performing, in her words, “autopsies and all that good stuff.” Several times a week, she commutes three hours to take notes on the donors, snap photographs, and observe a sublime process that few will ever witness firsthand. When a human dies, the decomposition process begins within minutes. The waste-pumping mechanisms inside our cells shut down, and corrosive liquids start to accumulate. Eventually, the dam breaks and cells begin exploding. After their contents flood the body, trillions of microorganisms ride the tide into parts unknown, seeking exotic cuisine. Within a few hours, muscles begin to seize and blood starts to pool in unusual places. The jaw drops, lips engorge, and the tongue hangs out. Testicles swell to the size of softballs. Eventually, the skin marbles like a dry-aged steak. As the great bacterial horde pillages and plunders through the body, it releases immense quantities of sulfurous gas, which will inflate the stomach until it bursts—and thus begins the long march to skeletonization. “I do a mental thank-you every single time. I don’t know who you are, but you gave me this incredible opportunity to learn.” Ross is unfazed by body horror. “If there’s a mass of maggots on the face, we’ll make note of it,” she says without any inflection. She relishes her time with the donors. She uses human pronouns: “he” or “she” rather than “it.” Sometimes, she talks to them. “I do a mental thank-you every single time,” she says. “I don’t know who you are, but you gave me this incredible opportunity to learn.” Though this project is only nine months old, body-farm researchers have already learned a great deal about stages of decay. The most important lesson: Assume nothing, because nature will break every rule. Donor No. 2 never bloated at all, because all the bacterial gas escaped through a surgical incision—and he went from “beginning to decompose” to “monstrous-looking” within a period of 12 hours. Donor No. 4 stayed fresh for at least three weeks due to the freezing temperatures and significant snowfall. “Our [progression] is so different from all the other body farms,” says Rancourt. “We don’t follow a nice curve.” After collecting observations for two or three dozen donors, they’ll have enough data to create a formula for estimating postmortem intervals throughout the region. Then, with new baselines, they can start investigating other factors: skin tone; height and weight; biological sex; injuries; cause of death. “Eventually, we’ll do more specific research,” says Rancourt. “We’ll wrap them in carpet, put them in the trunk of a car, dismember them, then stuff them into plastic tubs, suitcases, and what have you.” None of this talk is flippant. These are serious people, and they’re aware that their pathological honesty might discourage prospective donors. “It’s a tough thing to do,” says O’Toole. “I’m sure Emily will also tell you about the birds.” Several hundred feet away, two turkey vultures keep watch from a power line. “They play games with us,” says Rancourt, who cracks a smile. She and Yim have been locked in a battle of wits with the scavengers, which can strip a body down to the studs in mere hours. They placed steel cages over their donors. They tied chiffon sacks over their hands and feet, then zip-tied the sacks once the vultures learned to untie knots. Nothing works. Fingers and toes keep disappearing. Donor No. 2 lost an entire hand. “We only found 30 percent of it,” admits Rancourt. “You’re going too far, Emily,” says O’Toole. “You know this is going in a magazine, right?” Rancourt shrugs. It’s useful information for investigators, who could easily mistake animal damage for stab wounds, bruising, or dismemberment. The vultures, she tells me, aren’t even the worst part. Last August, special agents from the FBI visited the body farm, and when they came upon Donor No. 2, they stood over the cage in stunned silence. A box turtle wedged itself between the steel slats, severed the man’s head, and began dribbling his skull like a soccer ball. This is science at work. It was the first time anyone had ever witnessed a turtle decapitate a man. There’s only one way to make that kind of discovery: Let a body rot, and watch what happens. Photograph of bones by FlamingPumpkin/Getty Images. This article appears in the April 2025 issue of Washingtonian. The post Human Decomposition Has Been a Mystery–Until Now first appeared on Washingtonian. ...read more read less