Dr. William Bass, Creator of The Body Farm

It was a pleasure this past weekend to meet a living legend in the field of forensic anthropology ― Dr. William Bass. Dr. Bass is half of the writing partnership of Jefferson Bass (with Jon Jefferson), but in the world of science, his claim to fame is as the creator of the University of Tennessee’s Forensic Anthropological Research Facility, better known as 'The Body Farm'.

Even though he has supposedly been ‘retired’ for 16 years, Dr. Bass is still an active part of the University of Tennessee (UT) and the research center he created. He’s very proud of his time at UT and stated that, as of that day, he’d been there 40 years, 1 month and 6 days. He started 'The Body Farm' in 1980 to increase scientific understanding of what happens to the human body following death with the direct intent of assisting in crime scene investigation. Over the years, he and his students have studied as many variables as possible ― outdoor surface vs. burial decomposition, indoor decomposition, insect infestation/maturation as an indicator of time since death, carnivore scavenging, chemical substances produced during decomposition, the effect of trauma on decomposition, race determination through computer analysis and much more. What started as a little known facility with only a few donations per year is now a major center for scientific investigation with more than 100 cadaver donations annually. After decomposition, all remains are finally stored at UT in what is now the world’s largest skeletal collection, the William M. Bass Skeletal Collection.

Dr. Bass was the speaker for the opening session of Killer Nashville with a talk entitled ‘Bones Do Talk’. A very spry 83 (today is, in fact, his 83rd birthday), he was an immensely entertaining speaker, sharing his own personal stories from a varied and colourful career in academia and while assisting law enforcement. To illustrate his teachings, he brought along a box of ‘friends’ ― skeletal specimens from past cases. It was an interactive lecture, with members of the audience assisting with his case-by-case analyses. He led us through blunt force trauma slayings as well as piecing together a death scene and cause of death from a skull with three apparent bullet defects (the fourth defect was hidden as the bullet exited through the eye socket).

He also included interesting facts on bone growth from infancy to adulthood, comparing a newborn femur to an adult femur to illustrate the process of growth ending in epiphyseal fusion to seal with growing ends of the bone to the shaft.

From a personal standpoint, Dr. Bass has been my scientific companion through my writing career. I have binders full of his papers (and those of his students) that have been instrumental in allowing me to create crime fiction grounded in scientific truth. So, it was the highlight of the conference for me to sit through one of his lectures and a personal thrill to make his acquaintance. He’s a very friendly and gracious Southern gentleman who shows no sign of slowing down, no matter what his age. Clearly, he loves what he does and knows what a difference it makes, and will continue to do what he can to expand upon our knowledge and to bring the missing home.

Knowing When It's Time To Take A Break

As writers, we work hard to keep all the balls in the air. Research, writing drafts, revising manuscripts, producing proposals for future projects, blogging and maintaining multiple social media platforms, as well as our own websites. Those of us that don’t have the luxury of writing full time have a 40-hour workweek to manage as well. Add to that the fact that many of us have spouses and families, and life for a writer can be... well... crazy at the best of times.

Last week I hit a wall. My trip to Massachusetts had been planned for months when my agent requested some extra work be done on a particular project a week before we left. Knowing that I was going to lose a week to my working vacation added extra stress, but I got right to work as requested. But the load really hit once I got back from vacation. The daily grind of working all day in the lab and then putting in another six hours or so on the project when I got home as well as 18-hour days on week-ends took its toll after about a week and a half. I really knew I was pushing it when I started getting dizzy spells at work (which is never good from a safety standpoint, especially when you work with HIV). But when a project has to be completed, you power through until it’s done. And you go through a lot of coffee in the process.

Last Thursday night, I sent that project to Nicole. On Friday, I was an absolute mess. Even my lab mates were teasing me good-naturedly that I was there in body but not in mind, and that I was being uncharacteristically klutzy. I think my brain and body had jointly decided that now that the pressure was off, they were taking a vacation whether I wanted it or not. So, I treated myself to two whole days of doing almost nothing ― relaxing in front of the TV with my husband, taking my girls swimming, hanging out for an afternoon with my mother (who’d almost forgotten what I looked like by that time) and generally giving my brain permission to recharge. After that brief break, I felt like myself again and now I’m back on track prepping for my editor pitches at Killer Nashville this week.

There definitely comes a time when we can’t keep pushing ourselves because what we produce won’t be worth the effort. Sometimes we need to give ourselves permission to recharge and then come back to the game rested and ready to do the job right.

How do you manage to keep all the balls in the air when the combined pressures of life and your job(s) threaten to take everything out of you?

Photo credit: hpaich

Creative License ― How Much Is Too Much?

The writing that Ann and I do together is known for its realistic edge ― from the forensic science to professional roles to locations, it’s all highly researched and portrayed as it exists in real life. So it was a shock to find out during my recent trip to Boston that the professional duties of one of the characters we portrayed in our series was, in reality, quite different from what we had written. More than that, this new information impacted the core case of the novel from a forensic standpoint. This left Ann and I with quite a dilemma ― do we rewrite our manuscript around this new information, or do we use creative license to ignore it?

The Mirriam-Webster dictionary defines creative license as a “deviation from fact, form, or rule by an artist or writer for the sake of the effect gained”. Those writers who write fantasy have the advantage of never needing to use creative license because they can alter reality as it suits them during the worldbuilding stage of their process. But for those of us who try to portray reality as accurately as possible, creative license is almost a four-letter word. Because of our intention to write about local forensic and law enforcement processes as they actually occur, this was a huge stumbling block for us.

What we had written was actually correct… for any other state except Massachusetts, it seems. We had done our research and knew the facts, but this was a matter of local budgets butting up against the scientific process. In this case, the budgets won. From the standpoint of someone standing on the outside looking in, I can only wonder how many convictions are lost because budgetary restrictions allow reasonable doubt to form in the mind of the jurors. I’m betting it’s quite a few.

In the end, it was my agent Nicole who suggested the best work-around for this issue, one that used only a minimum of creative license. Her solution not only brought to light the reality of the situation but also put a twist on it, so we can still use what we had already written. It also allows us the latitude to continue as we had planned concerning this character in our continuing series. Let's hear it for teamwork!

How do you use creative license in your writing? Do you consider it a godsend or a necessary evil only to be used when you have no other choice? I’d love to hear your thoughts on it…

Photo credit: Bright Meadow

The Salem Witch Trials Memorial ― Remembering Those Lost in 1692

In 1692, led by the hysterical accusations of a handful of bored Puritan teenage girls, over one hundred and fifty innocent men and women were accused and imprisoned under the charge of witchcraft in Salem, Massachusetts. Of those, twenty-nine went to trial and all were found guilty. It was a true kangaroo court: The girls came to court to accuse their ‘tormentors’ and would often throw hysterical fits, claiming to see the spectral evidence of the devil, sent by the accused to attack them. If a verdict of not guilty was handed down, the testimony from the girls would simply continue until the jury could comfortably settle on a guilty verdict. From June to September of 1692, twenty innocents were publically executed under the pronouncement that they were witches, and at least another five perished due to the deplorable conditions of imprisonment in the witches’ dungeon.

All the victims except Giles Corey were hung at Gallows Hill; he was pressed to death. The law of the time demanded that your lands would be forfeit as soon as a plea of guilty or not guilty was entered for the charge of witchcraft. Knowing he would likely die, and in order to ensure that his lands were passed down to his family, Corey refused to enter any plea. The magistrates attempted to force a plea from him by strapping him under a wide plank or door and adding hundreds of pound of rocks to crush him into an admission. The story is told that Giles Corey remained silent for three days, slowly being crushed to death. His final words were simply ‘more weight’. After he died, his lands passed on to his children.

Was witchcraft really involved? Were these men and women tried for practicing the old Celtic traditions of the Goddess? No, the accused were all devout Christians, but the prevalent fear of the time that Satan actively walked the earth among them fueled the panic. Laurie Cabot, the official Witch of Salem puts it best when she describes the hysteria as “what can happen to a Christian community that succumbs to an irrational fear of the devil and projects this evil image onto members of the community”.

When the hysteria died down following the final deaths in September of 1692 and the close of the regional trials in 1693, calls for justice came from the community and petitions were filed to reverse the convictions of those who were convicted but not yet executed. Those who were still imprisoned were released and the community returned to normal. Years later, Ann Putnum, one of the girls involved in the hysteria, gave a public apology, stating that she had been deluded by Satan into denouncing innocent victims.

In 1992, on the three-hundredth anniversary of the trials, the City of Salem opened the Salem Witch Trials Memorial Park as a tribute the twenty victims killed in 1692. It is located adjacent to the historic Old Burying Point on Charter Street, where Jonathan Corwin and John Hawthorne, judges in the Salem Witch Trials, are buried. The park consists of a large area of open green space, surrounded on three sides by a granite wall. Six locust trees grace the center area, chosen intentionally as they are the last to flower in the spring and the first to lose their leaves in the fall, representing the stark injustice of the trials. Twenty cantilevered stone benches, one for each victim, encircle the park.

The entranceway to the memorial is carved with quotes from the victims, all emphatically stating their innocence and crying out to their God for help. Many of the quotes are abruptly cut short, just like those twenty lives.

Remembrances for the victims are left by visitors and members of the community alike ― fresh and dried flowers, candles, corn husk dolls, wreaths and hand written notes. The presence of the witchcraft community is felt as well. Pictured above is a crystal surrounded by small circle of charged herbs and flowers; this is a token from the very active witchcraft community of Salem.

A fresh red carnation lay on Rebecca Nurse's bench along with a florist’s card that read ‘In loving memory, from your great... granddaughter’ and a signature. It’s amazing to think that over 300 years later, relatives of those slain during the hysteria still come to remember them.

This park is also the centerpiece of the annual Samhain (Halloween) candlelight vigil and ceremony of the witchcraft community within Salem, the park being large enough to accommodate a circle of several hundred people. Each Samhain, a time when they consider the veil between this world and the next is at its thinnest, members of the community gather to celebrate and remember those that have gone before them, surrounded by the memory of those who were wrongly accused and executed.

In remembrance:

Bridget Bishop, hanged on June 10, 1692

Sarah Good, hanged on July 19, 1692

Rebecca Nurse, hanged on July 19, 1692

Susannah Martin, hanged on July 19, 1692

Elizabeth How, hanged on July 19, 1692

Sarah Wilds, hanged on July 19, 1692

George Burroughs, hanged on August 19, 1692

John Proctor, hanged on August 19, 1692

John Willard, hanged on August 19, 1692

George Jacobs, Sr., hanged on August 19, 1692

Martha Carrier, hanged on August 19, 1692

Giles Corey, pressed to death on September 19, 1692

Martha Corey, hanged on September 22, 1692

Mary Eastey, hanged on September 22, 1692

Alice Parker, hanged on September 22, 1692

Ann Pudeater, hanged on September 22, 1692

Margaret Scott, hanged on September 22, 1692

Wilmott Reed, hanged on September 22, 1692

Samuel Wardwell, hanged on September 22, 1692

Mary Parker, hanged on September 22, 1692

A Return Trip to Salem and Boston

A few months ago, I wrote a blog post entitled The Kindness of Strangers When Researching Your Novel that I’d like to expand on. In that post, I talked about the how the contacts I made while researching my first novel (prior to actually writing it) made all the difference in how that manuscript turned out.

I learned my lesson well from that trip and planned this summer’s family vacation around a second trip to Massachusetts, this time with my daughters in tow (my poor husband got stuck at home...). It was a real pleasure to be able to show them an area that I’ve loved since I was their age, but, more than that, it was great to be able to involve them in my novel planning. Writing takes a huge amount of my time, so if they can be involved in the process, it makes it a more enjoyable experience for all of us. There’s nothing better than being boots-on-the-ground in the places I’m writing about to achieve that.

But this trip ended up being about more than just my work-in-progress. Through the kindness of my contact at Boston University, Dr. Tara Moore, I was able to get into their forensic anthropology labs to talk to the researchers and instructors there about their current research, their body farm program that is just getting off the ground, and the trials and tribulations of being involved with law enforcement.

 

In a marathon four-hour session, we met with the retired FBI agent who teaches their crime scene courses at Boston University, the neurobiologist who now works as a forensic anthropologist/osteologist, the Massachusetts State Police Crime Scene Services lab in Boston, and the State Police liaison with the Massachusetts Medical Examiner’s Office. The information I learned applies to the entire series and was pure gold in terms of writing their world correctly. To top it off, my youngest daughter (those are her hands, above, holding the skull) was offered a position next summer sorting bones for a week, which she would love to do. Lucky kid... what an offer for a grade nine student!

We met with the Salem Fire Department, laying the ground work for much of the fire investigation in our work-in-progress. Ann and I are already working with our California fire contact, Captain Lisa Giblin, however, we wanted to make sure that our protocols were firmly east coast vs. west coast ― getting into the fire department ensured that. We met with many members of the department; everyone was very friendly and willing to share their own personal knowledge.

 

 

We toured the sites in Salem that will be used for scenes in the book as well. As a visual writer, getting pictures of places I want to write about is absolutely crucial. Google Earth is great, but this is the kind of detail that I really need.

Our biggest adventure was when we attempted to cross the salt marsh on the Essex coast. This site plays a major role in DEAD, WITHOUT A STONE TO TELL IT, but when I visited two years ago, I didn’t actually enter the marsh as I was on my own and was worried I might get into trouble. Well, this was an eye opener. The marsh looks so pretty, but try to cross it and you can get into some major trouble very quickly. Both myself and my older daughter had to be pulled free from the very deep, sucking mud in the Essex River channels, and when we finally admitted defeat after over a half hour later, it was to emerge bloody from marsh saw grasses, covered with greenhead fly bites and literally covered up to our knees in mud. It's a beautiful and tranquil area... and is incredibly treacherous!

 

 

It was a great trip and I made some fantastic new contacts that will really go a long way in writing this new manuscript. There are a few things I’d like to tweak with the currently submitted manuscript, but it’s all good and just adds richness to the detail already there. A big thanks to both of my daughters for being the best traveling companions a gal could ask for, and as well to my oldest daughter, Jess, who was my official photographer on the trip.

Next week, I’d like to talk about Salem, specifically about the new memorial they’ve built there in memory of the 20 innocent victims killed in the 1692 witch trials. They did a really wonderful job, so much so that I think it deserves its own blog post. So, more to come next week...

Photo credit ― Jess Newton