Solving murders: inside Australia’s first ‘body farm’
Deep in NSW’s picturesque Blue Mountains, a team of scientists is working on a macabre – but essential – new project. Journalists have never before been invited inside the “body farm”, where scientists exhume and examine human bodies as they strive to sol
SHARI FORBES USED to love spending Saturday mornings at the cemetery digging up bodies. While most of her university friends were sleeping off hangovers or still coming home from the night before, the 21-year-old honours student would be kneeling graveside, latex gloves on, waiting for dawn to break so she could help the dearly and often long departed rise one more time.
This wasn’t some sadistic ritual but a crucial first step in her becoming one of the world’s most sought after forensic scientists, the go-to-girl for finding bodies and solving gruesome crimes.
“Some bodies were exhumed for reburial,” she says, at pains to point out that she was not randomly robbing graves. “Some were for
DNA testing, sometimes a husband or wife had passed away and the family wanted them buried with a loved one, there was a lot of that. It allowed me to see bodies at various states of decomposition, to see whether tissue samples could be achieved and it got me used to the unique and sometimes confronting sights and smells of decomposing bodies.”
Today, Professor Shari Forbes still spends much of her time with the dead, but instead of the pre-dawn visits to cemeteries, she can be found at Australia’s first body farm, a cuttingedge forensic facility she initiated for Sydney’s University of Technology.
Based on the FBI’s body farm in Knoxville, Tennessee, made famous by Patricia Cornwell’s book The Body Farm, the human seeds Shari plants today are slowly cultivating clues that will solve the murders of tomorrow.
“The cadavers are resting in shallow graves in a natural setting to replicate the conditions where police might have to find the body of a lost bushwalker or a homicide victim, we just allow nature to take its course,” Shari says. “We study how they decompose in the Australian environment because it helps us improve every element of a death investigation, how we search for victims, how we recover them and how well we can estimate the time of death. If you happened to stumble across it, you would never know what it was or what scientific work is being done here.”
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THE BODY FARM or the Australian Facility for Taphonomic Experimental Research (AFTER) as it is known, is the first of its kind anywhere in the world outside the United States. On the face of it, it looks like a rather pleasant acreage of undulating Australian bushland one hour’s drive from Sydney, but it is in fact a highly sophisticated scientific hub.
Six bodies are buried here, but unlike the FBI’s Knoxville, where about 70 bodies are resting in various states of decomposition largely uncovered, all cadavers at AFTER are discreetly hidden from view. In fact, the only tell-tale sign that something unusual happens here is the CCTV cameras tucked among tall eucalypts and shrubs, and a fairly imposing high wire fence that suggests strangers are not welcome.
On any given day, Shari and a team of researchers from 10 different universities, police forces and forensic institutes will be scattered among the bush, tending to the cadavers. “Our priority is to protect the privacy and dignity of our donors, so it looks just like bushland through a fence – there’s nothing really distinguishable about it at all,” she says. “Every project we do is driven by a request that has come from police agencies either in Australia or overseas and we are constantly searching for answers to questions that emerge during their investigations.”
Shari was always attracted to the practical. As a young girl growing up on a farm in Brewarrina, in north-west NSW, she learned from an early age that animals live and animals die, it’s just a fact of life. She loved science at school and was a very hands-on learner, wanting to do projects or experiments that gave her instant results. Like many teenagers, she devoured crime novels, which ignited a passion for forensics, but says it was seeing human remains for the first time – at an autopsy during an undergraduate program – that “really sparked an interest for me”.
“It was pretty gruesome, of course,” she says. “It’s always confronting when you see a dead body for the first time, but I was very interested in the science behind it all.”
The highly acclaimed academic was quickly head hunted to study at the prestigious University of Ontario Institute of Technology in Canada, looking at how bodies decompose in a wide variety of environments and assisting the Mounties locate homicide victims, before being lured back to Australia to set up the body farm.
Shari has now helped police solve dozens of murders in Australia, the US and Canada and, at just 38, her extraordinary contribution to forensic research has been recognised with a string of elite international academic awards and fellowships.
“I get a call at least once a month asking for help to solve a crime or find a body,” she says. “A lot of my work I can do from my office because it’s often after a body has been found that detectives are trying to determine how long an individual has been in that state. It’s always a very sombre time when those calls come through and I take it very seriously because someone has died and it’s never a happy scenario. I am very mindful of the victim and the family that has been left behind.”
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IT’S NOT HARD to compare the talented forensic scientist to Patricia Cornwell’s famous character Dr Kay Scarpetta, and Shari laughs when I suggest she could have walked right
“We’ve been inundated by people signing up, IT’S INCREDIBLE. THE DONORS are helping us make scientific history.”
off the set of CSI, but she says that, all jokes aside, the genre of best-selling books and the hit TV series have, in fact, had an enormous impact, inspiring young women to take up studying forensics.
“When I first began studying, our classes were evenly spilt female to male, but since CSI went to air, forensic programs around the world have seen a huge influx of women. Typically now the ratio of students is 75 per cent female to male. It’s huge, given how difficult it is attract women to other science streams, so we are well above the average. It’s fantastic for forensic science and there’s no doubt the murders committed in the future will be solved by today’s generation of women students. I was too old for CSI, but I read all of those gritty crimes novels when I was growing up. I loved Kathy Reichs and Patricia Cornwell, so I’m sure they played some part in me going down this path.”
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MAIKEN UELAND, a research associate at the UTS Centre for Forensic Science, was also lured in by the crime-writing queens, who between them have sold about $100 million worth of books. She says she was a massive fan of crime stories which prompted her love of science.
“I always loved solving puzzles, too, and I could spend hours doing them and the challenge of finishing got me hooked,” says Maiken, a Norwegian who first met Shari in Canada and was invited to take part in the AFTER project. “My love for science and my fascination with unsolved mysteries and puzzles actually all goes perfectly hand in hand with forensic science.”
Maiken spends much of her time at the body farm, working on research to find different ways to determine how long someone has been dead. One of her projects is working with clothing and fabric to assess how long it takes for clothing to break down, another is taking tissue samples of particular parts of the body to see how they decompose too. She hopes both will help police accurately assess a victim’s time of death.
“Throughout my research I have focused on different ways of estimating how long someone has been dead because I know this can be crucial information for the investigators and may lead to helping put the person responsible behind bars.”
Maiken says she is not at all fussed by spending her days with the dead. “It’s quite surreal in a way, but it never feels uncomfortable because the donors are there for a purpose and they are treated with the utmost respect. For some, it’s probably an odd way to spend your day, but knowing that you are part of a really important research makes it worthwhile.”
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PRUE ARMSTRONG has just finished her Master of Science and is working with Shari on soft tissue decomposition too, specifically identifying the odour of death so that rescue dogs can differentiate between the living and the dead. They hope that their findings can be put to use during mass disasters such as earthquakes or tsunamis.
“I have been sampling decomposition odour during the early post-mortem period, the first 72 hours after death, to better understand how the odour shifts from the scent of the living to the odour we associate with death,” says Prue, also a CSI fan. “There is always a question whether to send in the dogs that are looking for live victims, we hope to identify which dogs are best to send in to the different emergency situations.”
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WHILE FOR SOME, the concept may be macabre, there’s no shortage of people willing to donate their bodies to this unusual scientific exchange. In fact, Shari has hundreds of potential donors on a waiting list and receives calls every day from members of the public wanting to offer their bodies to AFTER.
“We have six donors at the facility at the moment and we’ve had a lot more we haven’t been able to take because we only take a donor when we have a research program ready to go,” says Shari, adding that the response to the calls for donors surprised her. “We’ve been inundated with people signing up, it’s incredible. Australians are very altruistic, generous people because without donor bodies we can’t run our research.” Shari works closely with potential donors to ensure they understand what they are donating their body to. When the research projects are complete, the remains of the cadavers are returned to their families for burial.
“This is not CSI,” she says, smiling, “but I’m sure some people never realise how amazingly altruistic it is that they donate their bodies to science. These donors are contributing to amazing work so they are helping us make scientific history and for that we are really grateful. They are our partner in this, we couldn’t do it without them.”
“The murders of the future WILL BE SOLVED by today’s women students.”