Jon Jefferson

Forensic scientist Bill Bass describes his decades of work at the University of Tennessee's Anthropology Research Facility, a hillside lab dedicated to the study of human decomposition, and discusses several criminal cases.

Nowhere is there another lab like Dr. Bill Bass's: On a hillside in Tennessee, human bodies decompose in the open air, aided by insects, bacteria and birds, unhindered by coffins or mausoleums. At the "Body Farm," nature takes its course, with corpses buried in shallow graves, submerged in water, concealed beneath slabs of concrete, locked in trunks of cars. As stand-ins for murder victims, they serve the needs of science — and the cause of...