CCSN may become home to forensic lab, ‘body farm’

Jennifer Knight

Monday, Sept. 8, 2003 | 11:18 a.m.

Unofficially it is called a "body farm."

It's a pathologist's playground of sorts, where human bodies decay in the open air in pursuit of medical knowledge -- and Las Vegas could be the second city to have one.

The forensic facility at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville is the only one of its kind to research decaying human remains.

The Community College of Southern Nevada, however, could be the next place to create such an outdoor laboratory. The research could help police and other experts in the region understand the climate's effect on a body.

"A major part of the Southwest and the West could be helped by something like this," said Sen. Ray Rawson, R-Las Vegas, an expert in forensic dentistry and a professor of dental hygiene at CCSN. Rawson is among those exploring the idea of establishing a body farm.

The forensic facility is part of a bigger plan to move the Metro Police Crime Scene Investigation labs to CCSN land. The joint venture would provide a teaching component for criminal justice students, and the outdoor forensic lab would serve as a regional training ground for forensic scientists and crime scene analysts.

"It seemed natural to me that we should build a joint-use facility," Rawson said. "The body farm is a very small piece of that, and the research that the crime lab would do would be a substantial piece of this."

With 22 months left on its lease, Metro's CSI unit is looking for a place to move, and a partnership with CCSN may provide the extra space it needs, Lt. Rick Alba, the director of CSI, said.

"Personally, we would love it," Alba said. "We are pretty packed in here. With the growth of the city and increase in the volume of crimes, we're running out of space."

CSI, which is normally responsible for collecting evidence at crime scenes and then analyzing it, would not be directly involved in the body farm -- but it could indirectly benefit from it.

For years coroners and crime scene analysts have studied the work done at the body farm in Tennessee. "The facility," as researchers prefer to call it, on any given day has bodies stuffed in the trunk of a car, wrapped in plastic, submerged in water or just dumped on the grounds of the three-acre cloistered facility -- all for the purpose of fine-tuning the science of establishing time of death, a crucial factor in any murder case.

But Tennessee's hot and humid summers can lick a skeleton clean in two weeks and the cold winters can preserve a corpse months longer than in Las Vegas.

While the body farm has been the basis for much of the scientific information about how human bodies decay, the information can be difficult to apply to cases that take place in an arid environment such as Las Vegas, officials said.

"The studies that come out of that organization are very, very good, but unfortunately they are not relevant to our environment," Clark County Coroner Mike Murphy said.

Both Murphy and Rawson stressed that none of the bodies used in the experiments would come from unidentified bodies in the morgue. They would come from a medical donor network.

Such a macabre lab in Las Vegas could be controversial, however. Rawson said he and the others exploring the idea are sensitive to that and so are also considering sites in remote desert areas -- perhaps near the Nevada Test Site, where the facility would be secure from onlookers and residents.

Richard Jantz, director of the Forensic Anthropology Center at the University of Tennessee, said that other states could benefit from such a facility.

"At the moment, we are the only facility like this in the United States and, as far as we know, the world," Jantz said. "Even if the science we do here is applicable to all areas, we can't do it all. There's too much science to be learned."

Jantz said the desert has other unique factors, such as the fact that bodies tend to mummify under certain conditions. The types of insects associated with human remains and the kind of animals that scavenge in the desert are different from those in the East, he said.

Rawson admits that the idea might not be popular but said it is necessary for forensic scientists to gain information from dead and decaying bodies.

"It's kind of a gruesome thing to think about a body farm," Rawson said. "You don't see a lot of people trying to develop these. But forensic science has to go on."