May 30, 2017

New Body Farm To Study Cold Weather Decomposition

May 30, 2017/ Jen Danna

Since the early 1980s, forensic anthropology research centers have been crucial to our knowledge surrounding human death and decomposition and their contributions to the scientific field have allowed for decades of successful criminal investigations.

Leading the field is the original facility, the University of Tennessee at Knoxville’s Forensic Anthropology Research Center, better known by its original name, The Body Farm, a catch-all term that now applies to all similar research centers. Years ago, Skeleton Keys blogged about both the Body Farm and Dr. William Bass, the man who started the farm in 1980 with its first research subject arriving in May of 1981. Both law enforcement and the scientific community owe Dr. Bass a debt of gratitude for his efforts to dramatically expand an area of science that was just in its infancy.

Since the original body farm, a number of other American facilities have opened: the Forensic Osteology Research Center (FOREST) at Western Carolina University in Cullowhee, North Carolina; Texas State University-San Marcos’s Forensic Anthropology Center at Texas State (FACTS); the Center for Biological Field Studies at Sam Houston State University, near Houston; the Complex for Forensic Anthropology Research (CFAR) at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, Illinois; and the Forensic Investigation Research Station (FIRS) at Colorado Mesa University in Grand Junction, Colorado.

A quick scan of the existing body farms reveals a significant issue: they are overwhelmingly situated in the southern United States. Since environment and climate play a crucial role in human decomposition, this has a major impact on results and leaves a large gap in our knowledge base.

Enter the newest facility to open at Northern Michigan University in Marquette, Michigan. Recently, Michigan’s governor has granted the university 2.5 acres of land adjacent to the Marquette Branch Prison to open a facility that will focus on the yet-to-be-explored issues of freezing, thawing, and weathering of victims in northern climes. As important as human decomposition research is, it’s often difficult to find sites in a community to house what can often be an aromatic outdoor laboratory, and people are often uncomfortable knowing that research on human remains is going on nearby. What they may not realize is that many people donate their own bodies following death to these facilities specifically, knowing that they would be contributing to important research, and that all human remains are treated with respect and dignity.

Living in Canada myself, I see this research as being incredibly important and that it will only strengthen the legal and law enforcement community’s drive to find justice for victims of lethal crimes when they can’t speak for themselves. We wish them luck in their new venture.

Photo credit: Northern Michigan University

Blogging over the next little while is going to be somewhat sporadic for us. We’ll be back whenever we have news about our upcoming release BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE, but we need to buckle down and concentrate on writing its sequel, the third book in the FBI K-9s series. As a result, the blog will be a little quiet for the next 4 or 6 weeks, but we’ll be back full time as soon as the first draft is complete. See you soon!

May 23, 2017

The Legacy of Mississippi Asylum Life… and Death

May 23, 2017/ Jen Danna

In 2013, while constructing a road on campus at the University of Mississippi in Jackson, workers uncovered sixty-six previously uncharted coffins. Work stopped to allow their removal to the university’s archeology center and the administration considered the matter closed. Then in 2014, during construction of a parking garage, approximately two thousand additional coffins were identified using ground penetrating radar; and the university realized it had a much larger issue on its hands. Now, three years later, the university administration believes it has finally discovered the scope of the bodies buried on campus after a larger radar investigation identified more than 7,000 coffins buried in twenty acres of land. Where did the bodies come from and how will the university deal with so many dead?

The source of the bodies is clearly based in the history of the area—the site was the location for the Mississippi State Lunatic Asylum, later called the Insane Hospital, which opened in 1855 and functioned until its closure in 1935. That hospital was later torn down to allow for the building of the current University of Mississippi Medical Center. People suffering from mental illnesses such as depression and schizophrenia were sent to live at the asylum where they could be treated as medical knowledge of the time dictated. Thousands died while still in the care of the state, and if their bodies were not claimed by family, they were buried in unmarked graves to the east of the asylum. The hospital kept records, and while some still remain, many are lost to history. While hand-drawn maps from the nineteenth century suggested the possible location of the cemetery, they did not indicate the scale—so the sheer size of the cemetery was a surprise to the university administration.

While the university is thrilled with the archeological and forensic treasure trove, practicalities must be considered. The cost of excavating over 7,000 coffins and reburying the remains is immense—an initial estimate placed it around $21,000,000 (approximately $3,000 per body). But the university plans to do the excavations in-house with their own Department of Anthropology, bringing the cost down to just over $3,000,000 over eight years. They intend to open a memorial and a new visitor center to highlight the history of the asylum, institutionalization, and healthcare in the pre-modern period. There are also plans to open a lab to study the remains.

Researchers hope to shed light on the institution itself and their methods of treating mental illness. Previous to the asylum, those suffering from mental illness were often jailed or kept prisoner in attics. Life in the asylum was likely not much easier, and the institution’s nineteenth century death rate averaged over twenty percent each year. Despite this, its population soared by 1900%—from approximately 300 patients in the late nineteenth century to the early twentieth century when it housed 6000 patients at its zenith. When the hospital closed, the patients were relocated to the state hospital in Whitfield, which is still open today.

There is a lot of personal interest within this discovery as well. Mental illness was so stigmatized in the past that suffering relatives simply ‘disappeared’ when they were shipped off to facilities such as the Mississippi State Lunatic Asylum. Within the local community there is a movement for possible descendants to donate DNA for comparison to the DNA of the remains in hopes of finding some of their own past.

Photo credit: University of Mississippi Medical Center

May 09, 2017

Crawling Fingerprints?

May 09, 2017/ Jen Danna

Fingerprints have long been one of the cornerstones of forensic crime scene analysis. From their early use in the late 19th century, to their first role in a murder conviction in New York in 1902, to their standard use as we know it today, fingerprints and their analysis have become crucial tools for investigators in their pursuit of criminal justice. Where some other techniques have come into question—such as bite mark analysis—fingerprints have always been considered reliable. There are surfaces that prove problematic, or visualization techniques may not be powerful enough, but the concept of the ability to match a single individual to a single print has never been shaken.

Fingerprints are, in essence, biological traces left by individuals marking their contact with a surface. As Matt Lowell put it in TWO PARTS BLOODY MURDER, a fingerprint is “an organic slurry of amino acids and fats with some inorganic compounds mixed in” we leave behind when we touch a surface. Patent prints are left when a substance is transferred by a finger, leaving a visible print behind i.e. ink or paint. Latent prints are invisible impressions of the slurry Matt describes that need to be processed to be visualized, and are the majority of the prints law enforcement deals with. Fingerprinting can be a difficult endeavor as a pristine, complete print is rarely deposited. Instead, prints overlap, only consist of a partial impression, smear or smudge, or are a mixture of different individuals. Adding to that is the composition of the surface the print is on, the age of the print, and the type of processing involved. It’s a complicated process, but when it works well, the answer is definitive.

A paper was recently released discussing how latent prints change over time, and how they change shape and can actually migrate over certain surfaces. Over time, any fingerprint will lose water content and the bulk of the print ridges will decrease. But it was the placement and positioning of those ridges that was the key to this study.

Some surfaces do not maintain fingerprints well—prints on certain types of plastics will disappear in about four days, where a similar print on glass will remain for months. Porous surfaces such as paper and wood absorb some of the oils and are excellent matrices for locking the print into place. But some materials actually allow the print structure to change as the ridges decrease in height, but increase in width, while the space between the ridges increases. In essence, the print spreads laterally, migrating outward, covering up to 140% of the original surface in just over a week. However, given sufficient time—up to eight weeks—the print will contract, eventually only taking up 69% of the original size.

How does this kind of migration affect a print in a criminal investigation? The authors suggest that this kind of print expansion and contraction could be responsible for a number of the print mismatches that still occur today. They also suggest that if a timetable of migration could be determined, digitized prints could be reverse-aged back to their original structure, which would allow for direct comparison to fresh suspect prints. The authors have suggested this technique would be particularly useful on new polymer banknotes which are already proving a challenge for traditional fingerprinting methods. This technique could prove to be beneficial as it could help investigators overcome a significant problem with fingerprints—a timeline. The presence of a print linked to an individual is a crucial piece of information. But knowing when that print was deposited—yesterday, last week, or last month—could be the difference between a suspect who was in the room at the time of a murder, or a week before, when the victim was still hale and healthy.

Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons

May 02, 2017

It’s Mystery Week at Goodreads!

May 02, 2017/ Jen Danna

May 1st to 7th is Mystery Week at Goodreads and we’re jumping into the fun to celebrate with two book giveaways.

Go back to the very beginning of the Abbott and Lowell Forensic Mysteries with DEAD, WITHOUT A STONE TO TELL IT. This first book in the series joins Leigh Abbott and Matt Lowell at their very first meeting. Things are a little bumpy at first as Leigh and Matt try to figure out a way to merge their very different strengths in the quest to find justice for victims in a case that quickly starts to spin out of control.

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Dead, Without a Stone to Tell It

by Jen J. Danna

Giveaway ends May 08, 2017.

See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

Enter Giveaway

Jump into our FBI K-9s series with LONE WOLF before the sequel, BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE arrives on September 26th. Meet Meg Jennings and her black Labrador, Hawk, as they and the other K-9 teams of the FBI’s Human Scent Evidence Team track down a deadly spree bomber.