Finding bodies in forests

THE BODY FARM, known officially as the University of Tennessee Anthropological Research Facility, is a gruesome place. It is a hectare of land near Knoxville, cut off from the rest of the world by razor wire, that has, for more than three decades, been at the forefront of forensic science. It is both a laboratory which examines how corpses decay in different circumstances, so that matters such as time of death can be established more accurately, and a training facility for those whose jobs require an understanding of such processes.To study a body forensically, though, you first have to find it. For a corpse dumped in a city this is hard enough. If the burial site is a forest it can be nigh impossible. Searchers must cover huge amounts of ground, and may therefore not do so as thoroughly as might be desirable. Vegetation broken by people burying bodies is easy to overlook. And soil perturbed by digging tends not to remain perturbed for long once it has been exposed to wind and rain.