Thread: Bodies

Can anyone direct me towards a site which would help in working out what a corpse would look like after it's been buried for three weeks in a shallow grave? I've found plenty of general info about what happens to the body after death etc but I need to know what my MC would see when she stumbles on a body in the woods.

You can start by contacting your city or county's Office of Medical Examiners. Send an email or call, but warning: You'll probably get a gatekeeper who will stand in the way of you finding a real dcotor to speak with, unless you're lucky enough to get one of their personal email addresses. Just be persistent.

The answer to this question rather depends on where you live. Your local pathologist would be the person to speak to, but I would think your request rather unusual if not merely prurient. There is a website http://www.seemerot.com/on which you are, apparently, able to view via live webcams, a body degenerating in its coffin. I would have thought your best bet might be text-books on forensic pathology available from companies such as Blackwell's http://bookshop.blackwell.co.uk/jsp/bsearch/-14703/MED067000/Pathology?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_ter m=+pathology +books&utm_campaign=Medicine It is also possible that you might find such books interred in university libraries.

You can do your own experiments if you can get hold of an animal corpse. I have to say I've learned a great deal by watching shows such as CSI, too.

You don't even really need a whole body if you can get something that has skin, hair (or feathers) etc. Pig meat is closest in composition and texture to human flesh; see if you can get part of a leg with skin from a butcher. Barring that, you can always buy a chicken at the grocery store, which will work in a pinch (if you can find a place to put it where it won't be in danger of getting carried off by animals or hungry homeless people).

A friend of mine had a great collection of animal skeletons of all types, mostly roadkilled critters she was industrious enough to collect and denude of skin; she would keep the animal carcass on the roof of her apartment building until almost all the meat was gone and then boil the skeleton to get the last bits of meat & gristle off the bones. If you have a strong stomach, and don't mind being thought of as a little eccentric, you can probably find roadkilled critters somewhere in your community if you know where to look. (This is not my idea of a good time, but I'm just putting it out there in case you need to exercise your morbid streak a bit.)

But there's the deal about dead (human) bodies: They decompose at different rates in different settings. If your body is in a moist, swampy area it will decompose quickly and there may be very little tissue left when your story's character stumbles upon it even after only three weeks (it will be bloated at first, but usually that only lasts for a few days, and then after three weeks if there's anything left it's gonna look and smell pretty darned bad). If your corpse is in a pine woods with a deep floor of needles, it may not decompose quickly, but it will be more likely to have been gnawed and strewn around by critters. If the body has been well-covered-up by leaves, it may have decomposed very little and may scarcely smell at all. If your finding someone who fell in rocks the birds might have picked at them but they will be mostly intact.

I would say "three weeks in a shallow grave" could go either way; you could either be looking at lots of bugs and rot if it's a damp woods or a nearly-intact corpse if it's kinda dry. So my advice is figure out which suits the action of your story the best and go with it. If the body is more intact then your character may be able to recognize the person "instantly"--if not, there may be some macabre irony in the fact that the character doesn't recognize the corpse of someone near and dear to him/her. (And so on. Make that corpse work for your story!)

One thing that happens to all corpses that are not embalmed before being interred is that the tendons and muscles tend to shrink, then eventually get brittle and hard. This starts to happen fairly soon after death, and will have happened after three weeks. The fingers and arms of the corpse may be clasped in weird positions; the mouth will almost always be open and the corpse will look like it's screaming. There will be bloating of the abdominal cavity and a bad, bad smell. So one thing about your woods, they're gonna have to be a fair distance from anyplace with humans, because that smell is unbelievably powerful. Also whatever skin is exposed will be mottled with large greenish-purple blotches that look like bruises.

Well, I hope this helps! Good luck with your gruesome task!

And don’t forget, if s/he fell/jumped/was pushed into a peat bog, s/he could stay there for a great many years in a totally unchanged form.

“Hello, Auntie Phyllis, I wondered where you’d gone. How’ve you been?”

Thanks everyone for your suggestions - problem is I live in France and I know from experience that asking a question such as 'If I buried a body in the forests of Les Landes, how long would it take to decompose?' would meet with a frosty response.

The soil is dry and sandy there and the body would have been buried in Octoberr when the nights are cool but the days can still be quite hot (85°F here yesterday, that's exceptional but days of 70° + are quite common) and it can also tip down with rain. So you've got the lot really. The main thing is i wan the corpse to be unrecognisable so I'd better have it knawed by animals. Lovely.

If you call a pathologist/mortuary/other specialist, and the reaction worries you just present yourself as a writer. If you start off by saying that you are a writer and that you wish to confirm some of the details to ensure quality, you should probably be able to get the information you need. Most specialists, regardless their area, have run into a great deal of books, movies, and other media, that don't have the proper research behind them and it bugs the hell out of them. As long as they know why you ask they will often be delighted to help. I've even heard comments like "Thank God someone actually takes the time to get these things right".

I'm with Wolfie on this: Ask nicely and tell them why you're asking first. It shows respect to their field. And ask the people who know the answers-not all the door guards. Cops are suspicious; scientists are proud.

What it looks like also depends on what happened to it before it was buried. How long was it dead before it was buried? Was it flayed or otherwise dismembered before being interred? Are all of its pieces together? Were there any attempts at making the corpse unrecognizable? Were there any attempts at hiding the smell--like wrapping it in plastic sheeting, sealing it in a Rubbermaid bin?

If I was wanting to know such information, I would contact the Body Farm at University of Tennessee in Knoxville, TN. The author Patricia Cornwell has recommended it and even has mentioned it in some of her books. They have bodies in different degrees of decomposition and different temperatures and weather.