All the Time in the World

fall is here and that means the pumpkin spice latte is back at starbucks it's the one we've been waiting for so whether you're a fan of the original pumpkin spice latte or ready to mix it up with an iced pumpkin cream chai the new iced pumpkin cream matcha or the new iced pumpkin cream shaken espresso you can find your favorite taste of fall only at starbucks fall is here and that means the pumpkin spice latte is back at starbucks it's the one we've been waiting for so whether you're a fan of the original pumpkin spice latte or ready to mix it up with an iced pumpkin cream chai the new iced pumpkin cream matcha or the new iced pumpkin cream shaken espresso you can find your favorite taste of fall only at starbucks this week we wanted to share one of our very favorite episodes we released it back in 2017 and people still write to us about it all the time and i still think about the day we recorded it what is that you're holding this is a mandible the jawbone and that skull is in half yeah this person was autopsied so this is an autopsy cut interesting so that they can examine the brain so there's a little bag here that says hands and feet do those usually get separated because it's it's just there lots of little small bones so we put them in a separate bag just so that they don't get scattered out throughout the box it's easier to keep them together this is dr daniel westcott the director of the forensic anthropology center at texas state university in san marcos texas about 30 miles from austin we met with him in a nondescript building a warehouse really so plain we drove right past it twice but when you get out of the car and walk to the door you see a small paper sign with a vulture and a skull and you know you found it there are very few places in the world that do what they do here while you would think that we would know a lot about how bodies decompose it actually turns out that we really know very little about what's going on so this is a very interesting story and i think it's a very interesting story and i think it's a very the work that's done here is pretty vital to that at dr westcott's center they deliberately set out human bodies to decompose in nature most of the bodies are lying on the ground face up with their arms at their sides but researchers also place bodies in trunks of cars wrap them in tarps and bury them in shallow graves as a culture in some ways we actually are kind of scared of death and and you know we embalm bodies so that they don't decompose as fast and um we don't want to see that process going on but that process does go on and we need to be able to understand how it works how big is the facility and how many bodies are here the facility is 26 acres and it sits on a 4200 acre ranch and we get about 70 donations a year so um and then the bodies are used to usually left um to decompose for about six months to several years depending on the research protocol um and then the skeletons come back here and so we added about 70 skeletons per year to collection so if you had to guess how many bodies are in some state of decomposition here right now do you know probably about 60 the bodies are donated they're called gifted bodies and the people who plan to donate themselves to the research when they die are called living donors you know if they want to do something like put me in the trunk of a car to see what happens there or under a tarp or a slab of concrete i i got no problem with that this is grady early a retired computer science professor who decided long ago that he wanted his body to go to the forensic anthropology center why did you decide to become a donor i think that everyone should be useful in life and if you can be useful after death as well so much the better after all which would you rather do wind up in a box in the ground just wasting real estate or be in a box in the lab and at least potentially useful to a researcher sometime in future um grady early remembers when the facility was getting established more than 10 years ago and the university was struggling to find the right location they needed enough space but they also needed a place that wouldn't freak people out we looked at a site out at the airport some of the neighbors didn't like the idea and they said well that's going to attract vultures so we'll have birds interfering with the aircraft side over behind the outlet mall and uh there were some people that were um unhappy with that idea there's there's always nimbies around he's given money to the facility and become fascinated by what he describes as quote helping bones tell their story when his body eventually becomes part of the research he'll be joining his mother she's already there it was an astonishing thing uh although in retrospect i suppose it shouldn't have been when i told my mother what i was planning on doing she being a fairly practical woman said that sounds like a wonderful idea sign me up so i did she died at 102 grady says he doesn't really care what happens to him when he goes into the field some bodies are placed in the open with the vultures and coyotes and some are protected by long low cages some are clothed and some aren't it all depends on the nature of the experience and the nature of the environment and the nature of the environment and the nature of the experiment it's odd to think that if all goes as planned grady early will one day return to the very building where he sat and talked to us packed in cardboard with the bones of his hands and feet in a small paper bag what i would really like to do is have my skeleton articulated and hung up somewhere in the facility so i can keep my eye on what's going on in his work at texas state dr westcott is following the work of a professor at the university of Minnesota and a professor at the university of Minnesota and a professor at the university of Minnesota and a professor at the university of footsteps of his professor the biggest name in this field dr bill bass dr bass opened the university of tennessee anthropological research facility in 1981 it was the first of these so-called body farms although we learned no scientists call them that and he pioneered the idea that we needed a death database if too much time has passed when law enforcement encounters a body they have no way to tell when the person died and they have no way to tell when the person died and they have no way to tell when the person died and they have no way to tell when the person died much less who they were or what happened and the only way to answer these questions is to put a body outside and watch it decompose i'm phoebe judge this is criminal we'll be right back to listen without ads join criminal plus fall is here and that means the pumpkin spice latte is back at starbucks it's the one we've been waiting for so whether you're a fan of the original pumpkin spice latte or ready to mix it up with an iced pumpkin cream chai the new iced pumpkin cream matcha or the new iced pumpkin cream shaken espresso you can find your favorite taste of fall only at starbucks your favorite fall flavors are back at starbucks the one and only pumpkin spice latte and the deliciously smooth iced pecan crunch latte have arrived and are ready to sip all season long or find a new favorite like the new iced banana bread latte that tastes just like fall in a cup you can find your favorite taste of fall only at starbucks here's what happens when you die after your heart stops beating you're back at starbucks your muscles start to stiffen and rigor mortis sets in over the next few days the bacteria that's already in your body just starts to take over and so as they do they start to produce gases and these gases initially will just kind of work their way through the arteries and veins stuff like that and you get what's called marbling and then it also then the next kind of step to this is that that gas starts to build up and causes the body's to go through what's called a bloat stage so they'll actually kind of puff up how long after death does that happen it depends on the time of year but it can it can range from three or four days to a few weeks usually here probably within about five days they're going into bloat once that happens so then the other thing that's happening is is that you're also going to you're also getting flies that are attracted to the body and those flies are laying eggs and they tend to lay eggs in natural orifices so they like the eyes ears nose mouth stuff like that and then they so those maggots will hatch and there again depends on the species and and the temperature and depends on how long it takes but usually a few days to a week or so and they start feeding on the body as well so you've got that process going on and then you've got the internal organs are decomposing and so those internal organs are kind of liquefying and with the gas that's building up that liquid gets pushed out and that's what we call the purge phase so that you get what's called purge fluid and so it's just a dark fluid dark yeah what is it it's not blood what does it no it's just a combination of all the internal organs organs that have decomposed this is a big place it is a big place all right so we turn between the two first two telephone the bodies are placed on freeman ranch which sits off a small highway just a few miles from the lab once you pass through the gates you see what i only imagine you might see on any number of ranches in texas cactus tall green grass and cows we just kept driving down a dirt road taking a left or right whenever we were told to and then we arrived the only difference between this part of the ranch and any other was the giant fence and locked gate so our first stop will be at the shed there to put on booties okay and in reality what the booties are for is so that in case you actually it'll step in something you don't drag it back to your car are you wow are you kidding that's exactly why everybody thinks it's so that's like protecting the scene but it's actually so that you don't drag home decomp fluid on your shoes the purge fluid right into the back into the minivan right all right uh let's see we'll start this way so typically the way that this works is the way the bodies are placed depends on what research protocol they're being used in but typically they're left uncaged on the surface caged on the surface buried or wrapped in something so this is one that's left on the surface only a few feet from the gate sits the first body it was hard to pick out at first because of the tall grass around it and this is where the individual was originally clothed and then the scattering is from from uh this different scavengers that have come so we can see a pair of sneakers and a pair of pants and a sock but then the bones are all kind of broken apart yeah they're kind of pulled apart at different places who what animals are they they're all kind of broken apart yeah they're all kind of split apart yeah they're all kind of torn apart yeah they're all kind of torn apart well mostly it started out with vultures uh and then probably you've had some raccoons and other things come since then but most of this is vulture activity i had no idea what to expect when we walked into that field i was nervous about a lot of things wondering whether i'd be able to get these images out of my head that night when i went to sleep trying to figure out how i would carry on an interview while not breathing through my nose regretting not bringing a change of clothes but i'm not sure i'm going to be able to do that i'm not sure i'm going to be able to do that i'm not this actually seemed okay that first body hadn't been that bad and then we turned a corner all right so the area that we're getting ready oh look at this the area we're getting ready to path actually this right here is as researcher uh actually from new york that's here so she's got bodies on the surface and bodies that are buried oh this is really something so um there was a field of bodies or cages and unlike what we had just seen these bodies seemed kind of new all were unclothed i could see one man in a cage out of my right eye his stomach was so bloated that it almost touched the top of the cage and his limbs were spread out to the sides his skin was a mix of black and brown and purple splotches i was trying to stay back but dr west got one straight form you can see the maggots pretty active yeah um at this time stage and then so this person has gone through bloat you guys all right yeah but this is wild stuff this is wild stuff i don't think many people in their lives see stuff like this so you can see i was talking about the skin kind of becomes really dark uh associated with the sulfuric gas that's produced by the bacteria and stuff and then you get the active maggots and then you get the active maggots and then you get the active maggots masses going on he kept drawing our attention to things that none of us actually wanted to see up close so we were trying to stay with him but also just trying to keep our eyes straight ahead it was hard to know what to do and it was hot over 90 degrees and then dr west got took us to a row of bodies under cages which seemed to be showing a progression going through time and in a sense you can see that they've gone through bloat they're actually starting and you can see they're starting to dry out yep so this is we're kind of going through the process here walking down the line yeah so you can see there's these are starting to get skeletonized how long have these guys been out here do you think these have been out here probably a little over a year but you can see now you can't even see them see the cadaver decomposition as a matter of fact you can barely see the body anymore because all that vegetation around it purge fluid is so nutrient rich that it acts like a super fertilizer and so bodies in the final stages of decomposition are surrounded by bunches of these tall healthy wildflowers the flowers are back the flowers are back yeah dr west got is working on a project that uses drones and infrared cameras to detect how much organic material is in the soil if law enforcement is trying to locate a missing person in a huge area five thousand acres they can use the drone technology to narrow things down looking for spots with a lot of organic material they're also working with police dogs most cadaver dogs are trained with small tissue samples but it turns out the dogs don't always know how to react when they encounter a whole body so police bring their dogs to the ranch to get used to finding the real thing these different experiments are spread around the ranch and texas state collaborates with other facilities dr west got showed us an experiment where three different centers across the country placed a body on the exact same day to compare regional differences so the the the body that we're looking at right there uh-huh seems to me to be rather new yeah this individual was probably placed yesterday oh that's a brand new body yes it is oh isn't that something we'll be right back running a business shouldn't feel like surviving a software group project one app for accounting another for inventory another for sales and somehow none of them talk to each other that's where odoo comes in an all-in-one business management software that brings every part of your business together from sales and accounting to inventory and marketing all-in-one powerful platform no messy integrations no bouncing between tabs and best of all no spreadsheets stop managing software and start managing your business with one unified system try for free today at odoo.com slash vox that's odoo.com slash vox so support for the show comes from engine running a small business means every dollar has to work hard but if your team is still booking travel the old way it's costing you more than you think engine is the fastest growing travel and spend platform in the country built specifically for businesses like yours book a trip in as little as two and a half minutes earn up to 10 back on hotels and in 2025 engine customers save more than 300 million dollars on travel with zero booking fees no contracts and no beer yes more than a thousand businesses join engine every month join them and get five hundred dollars when your business signs up and starts traveling at engine.com slash box our last stop was a clearing with three shallow graves on the day we visited they were in the process of excavating the skeletons the excavation was being done by more than 20 students all women a lot of this work is done by women Dr. Westcott is the only male director in the country. and almost all of his colleagues and his graduate students are women. Dr. Kate Spradley was in charge of the excavation. It's interesting, I think, to do this kind of work, to look at all of these dead bodies, basically, and all of these human remains in the lab, I see a skeleton, I see a task at hand, I see a job that I have to do, particularly with the forensic cases that come in. We have a job to help identify those, so going in there, analyzing the skeleton, that's what we do. For me, it's different when I walk out to this, the Forensic Anthropology Research Facility, where people donate their bodies, because here, when I see remains, I see people who donate their bodies. This was their last wish, this is what they wanted to do, so for me, it's very nice coming out here, seeing them in their final resting place, and it's very natural, they just return to the earth. Are you a donor? I am a donor. Are other members? Are you a member of your family? No, nobody else wants to do this but me. My husband is pretty uneasy about it, but I've looked at so many skeletons, I've built my career on looking at skeletons, so I think it's only right that I give back. Just listen to the birds. Yeah, it's incredibly peaceful. Yeah, it's a beautiful place to be. On our way out, we made one last stop. The same stop that all the bodies make before they leave the ranch, the processing lab. What does the kettle do? It just simmers them for a little bit, so it loosens up all the soft tissue. Huh. Yes, they really are just giant soup kettles. But then. What's the crock pot for? Small. Hands and feet and stuff like that, and small bones, so a lot of times it's easier to finish them off in there. And then, so they're cooked in here, and then they're brought over here, and they scrub them all down. What are these little guys down here? Tips of your fingers. That's a fingertip. Yeah. And then these are all toes, and you can see the little teeny toes. And then these little things right there, these are actually extras. They're not even included in the 206. You know, it looks like wood. This bone almost looks like wood. Yeah. It takes on the color of the soil. We saw two complete skeletons laid on metal gurneys and organized anatomically. It's amazing to see how fragile our ribs are. We were very lucky to be permitted to visit. Normally, only law enforcement and researchers are allowed in. Even if you decide to donate your body, you'll never be able to see this place while you're alive. But people do ask. Well, usually when someone calls, they say something along the lines of, I'm interested in donating my body to science, and I hear that you take bodies. If you call for information, you'll speak with Lauren Meckel. And so I let them know about the Forensic Anthropology Center and how their body can help identify missing persons. And they usually get very excited about that. And they ask me a lot of questions. They ask about some of the research projects that we're doing, specifically about the vulture studies. People are really interested in vulture consumption of human remains. Like they want to be part of that study, or they do not want to be part of that study? Many people actually are very interested in being part of that study. They see it as a sky burial. So it's something that seems peaceful, I suppose. They actually make requests, and they'll try to honor them. You can ask to wear a certain item of clothing, or a piece of jewelry. You can ask to be placed under a tree. One man asked to be placed with a cell phone, and they did it. People also call to ask about the status of a friend or family member. So people say, I'm just wondering if they're all decomposed now, and they're back inside. Yes. I think I would, that's the question I would want to know too, if someone was, if you had got them off the ground, and back in the box. Yes, and usually people are surprised by how long it takes to, because sometimes it can be six months if we're doing a study where someone dropped in a tarp, for instance, and they skeletonized really quickly, and then we can pick them up really fairly soon after their death. But for the most part, they stay out there for about two years. Many of the donors have spent their life in education, and see this as a way to continue teaching after they've died. And many work in law enforcement, and have seen the value of the research firsthand. I kind of see it as an extension of being an investigator. Elaine Walker is a retired private investigator, and last year, she made the decision to donate her body to the Forensic Investigation Research Station in Colorado. How do you like retired life? It's the best job I've ever had. Oh, good. I loved my job, but this is the best job I've ever had. May I ask how old you are? 67. You're 67. But why not donate your body to science in another way, like an organ donor? Is there something about the. I guess there's no investigative quality when you donate your liver. Well, no, but I am an organ donor. However, at my age, some of my organs are, you know, wouldn't really work out in somebody else's body. They're a little on the. on the old side. How do you imagine the body farm? Peaceful? Have you seen pictures? No, I haven't seen pictures. I would imagine it's peaceful. It is out away from civilization, and I imagine that there are just bodies laying there and birds coming in to feast on them. That doesn't bother me at all, that I'm going to be eaten. That's a wild thing to be talking about, isn't it? Yes, it is. What did you tell your family when you signed up? How did they respond? My husband isn't very excited about it, but he respects that that's what I want to do. What will your husband do? When he dies? That's a good question because he won't discuss it. He's so terrified of death, he won't discuss it. Wasn't that interesting? Yes. It's like opposites. It's at the ends of the spectrum. Yes, it really is. But I did tell him that I was going to send him off the cheapest way possible if he doesn't tell me what he wants. But he still won't tell me what he wants. Elaine was the fourth person we spoke with who planned to donate their body to a body farm, but whose spouse refused to even talk about it. Even Dr. Bill Bass, the pioneer of the body farm, is leaving the decision up to his wife. Since that trip, I keep thinking about one particular part of Freeman Ranch, a patch of woods off the main path. It was greener than other places, shady. Dr. Westcott stopped us there and asked us to listen to the birds. Right in front of us, there was a body under a tree, protected from the sun. Someone who thought they might be able to do some good. Someone who agreed to be placed outside, under the tree. The trees, with the bugs, until they disappear. Criminal is created by Lauren Spohr and me. Nadia Wilson is our senior producer. Katie Bishop is our supervising producer. Our producers are Susanna Robertson, Jackie Sajico, Lily Clark, Lena Sillison, and Megan Kinane. This episode was originally mixed by Rob Byers. Our show is mixed and engineered by Veronica Simonetti. Special thanks to Sergeant Zachary McBride of the Guadalupe County Sheriff's Office and Alice Wilder. Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at thisiscriminal.com and you can sign up for our newsletter at thisiscriminal.com slash newsletter. We hope you'll consider supporting our work by joining our membership team at thisiscriminal.com. We hope you'll consider supporting our membership team at thisiscriminal.com. The ball is here, and that means the pumpkin spice latte is back at Starbucks. It's the one we've been waiting for. So whether you're a fan of the original Pumpkin Spice Latte or ready to mix it up with an iced pumpkin cream chai, the new iced pumpkin cream matcha, or the new iced pumpkin cream shaken espresso, you can find your favorite taste of fall only at Starbucks. Your favorite fall flavors are back at Starbucks. The one and only Pumpkin Spice Latte and the deliciously smooth Iced Pecan Crunch Latte have arrived and are ready to sip all season long. Or find a new favorite like the new Iced Banana Bread Latte that tastes just like fall in a cup. You can find your favorite taste of fall only at Starbucks.