By Jill Laster

The first thing students notice when they walk into Bill Bass's office is the smell. "Have you ever, when you're driving down the road, smelled a (dead) possum?" Bass said. "It's like that but magnified a hundred times." Bass, a professor emeritus at the University of Tennessee, is the founder of the Forensic Anthropology Research Facility, often called the "Body Farm."

Bass, a UK graduate, will be speaking about his work as a forensic anthropologist at 7:30 tonight in Memorial Hall.

At the Body Farm, Bass uses bodies that are donated, as well as unclaimed bodies from the medical examiner's office. He allows the bodies to decay in varying elements, including weather, insects and light, and then examines the bodies to determine the cause of death.

Bass, along with students and faculty in the anthropology program at UT, analyze the different ways the bodies decompose, which can help police when they are working on a criminal case. The Body Farm will examine about 135 bodies this year.

"The police, by the way, don't ask who it is, but how long they've been there," he said.

Bass will be showing slides of some of the cases he's worked on with Tennessee State Police and the FBI, helping them determine how long victims had been dead.

"I get the bodies when their soft tissue is decayed," Bass said. "I've got to get down to the bones."

Based on what he has seen as a professor,
slides showing dead bodies might make students uncomfortable, Bass said.

"You always have some who can't handle it," Bass said. "But we have 100 graduate students in our program and we could have 1,000."

Bass isn't showing the slides to make students queasy, but to tell them about his job.

"I thought students might like to know what a forensic anthropologist does," Bass said.

Bass' interest in forensic anthropology began as a UK student. As a graduate student at UK in the 1950s, Bass started working on his first case - two trucks collided and burned outside Frankfort, killing three people. After a court order to exhume one of the bodies, Bass worked with his professor to identify it.

"I thought, 'Ah, that's what I want to do,'" Bass said.

Since then, Bass has co-written three books, including two fictional ones. The Body Farm has been the subject of four books by Patricia Cornwell, who coined the facility's nickname in a book by the same name.

Episodes of shows like Law & Order: SVU and CSI have also featured Bass' Body Farm although Bass said the shows don't portray forensic anthropology realistically.

"It does not work like CSI says it does," Bass said. "It takes, like, 15 minutes (on the show) and the result shoots out. It doesn't work like that."

Bass also said the dead bodies on CSI, with hair in place and makeup on, are far from the truth.

"In 54 years looking at dead bodies, I've never seen a woman looking like that," Bass said.

Bass is currently retired, but is working on a new book and said he still goes out to the Body Farm once a week to work.

Just because Bass works with dead bodies, though, doesn't mean he's at ease with death.

"I lost two wives to cancer," Bass said. "I hate death, I hate mourning, I hate funerals - I hate that whole scene."

Still, that doesn't stop Bass from doing his job.

"I don't see the bodies as dead bodies, but as challenges," Bass said.

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