Cut to the Bone: A Body Farm Novel

Author’s Note: On Fact and Fiction

Those of you who are astute at arithmetic may have noted that Dr. Bill Brockton, our fictional hero, is slightly younger — by some thirty years — than Dr. Bill Bass, who turned a remarkably youthful eighty-five in August 2013. Making Brockton so much younger has much to recommend it, fictionally speaking, as it allows Brockton (and us!) to be still employed, rather than retired.

But all choices have consequences, and in this book’s case — specifically, the case of the Body Farm’s genesis — Brockton’s relative youth has required us to fudge the birth year of the real-life research facility. In Cut to the Bone, we give that year as 1992. In real life, it’s considerably earlier, as well as more complex. The sow barn described in the book is quite real, but it was back in 1971 that it became the location for the Body Farm’s first incarnation: a distant, smelly place where decomposing bodies could be stashed before they were processed into clean skeletal remains.

The Body Farm’s second incarnation — its metamorphosis, to borrow an entomological term from the realm of blowflies and maggots — didn’t occur until a decade later. In the spring of 1981, the first research project began in a new sixteen-by-sixteen-foot chain-link cube at the facility’s current location, behind the University of Tennessee Medical Center, on the south shore of the Tennessee River. That project, which commenced with donated body 1-81, was a pioneering study of insect activity in human corpses. Corpse 1-81 and its successors (2-81, 3-81, and 4-81) served as the research subjects for a master’s degree thesis by Dr. Bass’s student William Rodriguez. Rodriguez’s pioneering research, documenting the relationship between the insects’ activity and the cadavers’ decay rates, remains a classic — one of the most frequently cited studies in both forensic anthropology and forensic entomology.

There are, of course, more stories behind those stories. Readers who are interested in the factual history of the Body Farm might enjoy our first book, the nonfiction memoir Death’s Acre. That book also contains a chapter on the “Zoo Man” case, a series of murders that electrified and terrified Knoxville in the early 1990s. Our fictional story here borrows freely from the factual case, in which Knoxville prostitutes were taken into the woods off Cahaba Lane and then murdered. We feel entitled to borrow, as both Dr. Bill Bass and KPD fingerprint expert Art Bohanan played key roles in the prosecution of Thomas “Zoo Man” Huskey for the Cahaba Lane murders.

We’ve endeavored to be accurate in our depiction of KPD’s SWAT team, which was relatively new at the time of our story. We have, however, taken one large liberty in our depiction of KPD’s bomb squad, which did not yet have a bomb-sniffing dog in 1992.

The book’s central premises were true then, and, sadly, remain true now: Women — especially young, poor women driven by desperation to prostitution — are among the most vulnerable members of our society; they’re often preyed upon, largely scorned, and easily overlooked if they go missing. And sadistic sexual predators — embodiments of cunning and evil, created by a tangled, terrible confluence of nature and “nurture”—still coil unseen among and around us. As ever, there are serpents in the garden in which we dwell. Even so, it is a lush and lovely garden.