Summary

In Chapter 4, Bass writes that while he was teaching in Kansas, he often conferred with the Kansas Bureau of Investigation’s director Harold Nye on cases. He explains it was a question posed to him by Harold that inspired the creation of the Body Farm. Harold asked if Bass could examine a cow’s skeleton and tell how long that cow had been dead. Bass replied that he had no way to determine how old a skeleton might be, but if a farmer was willing to kill a cow and let it decompose naturally, they could build up some forensic information about decomposition that would later allow them to answer that question.

Bass next describes a case in which he was able to positively identify a little girl’s remains based on an anomaly in which there were notches on the corners of...