Death's Acre Summary

Introduction

“Death's Acre” tells about the career of a forensic hero, Dr. Bill Bass, creator of the famous "Body Farm" at the University of Tennessee-the world's only research facility devoted to studying human decomposition. He tells about his life and how he became an anthropoligist. He tells about the Lindbergh kidnapping and murder, explores the mystery of a headless corpse whose identity surprised police.

Key Idea 1 Dr. Bass's Body Farm is a small patch of land that is located near the University of Tennessee Medical Center. This place was where bodies were locked in the trunks of cars, submerged in water, concealed under concrete slabs, and buried in shallow graves. All of these things were done to the bodies because

Bass's first official anthroplogy case was the result of an early morning traffic accident that happened outside of Frankfort, Kentucky, in the winter of 1954. The two trucks collided and when the fire was out, three bodies were found. The identities of the two drivers were identified but the third body was a mystery. Dr. Charles E. Snow, an anthropology professor at the University of Kentucky, was requested to identify the third body. He agreed to examine the remains. At the same time Dr. Bass was taking a class that Dr. Snow was teaching. Dr. Snow wanted Dr. Bass to tag along with him so he could have a hand's on experience of anthropology. The police already had a really good idea of whose body this was, because they looked at a list of missing people and found a match. Dr. Snow's job was to confirm that this was the right body. They had to dig the body up because it had been buried, so they drove to the cemetery. They matched the identity of the woman and Dr. Snow gave Dr. Bass five dollars for driving them to the cemetery. From that day on, Dr. Bass was hooked on anthropology and he went to college at the University of Pennsylvania to study anthropology. He chose this college because he wanted to learn from Dr. Krogman. Dr. Bass developed a strong relationship with Dr. Krogman because when Krogman fell down the stairs and broke his leg, Dr. Bass would drive him to and from the college. During this time, Dr. Krogman would assign readings and teach to Dr. Bass while

For example, we learned about the skin of a human body and this book can relate to that in some way. We also learned about bones and that is basically what this whole book is about, the importance of bones and how people can use bones to put together crime cases and to study history. This book is anatomy-based because it talks about some things that we learned this past sumester.

Conclusion

In this book, Dr. Bass takes us behing the scenes of the Body Farm. An engaging storyteller, he reveals his hardest and best cases. While this book tells about Bass’s life, it is centered around the Body Farm itself because it tells of how it was started. This book is very informative and it tells you that even though it is a dead body, it can still tell many tales and it can mean a lot to history, This book shows just how the dead can come to