New Science for the Murder Victim Search

A biochemist by training, Vass traces his interest in decomposition to a highly publicized blunder on the part of the Body Farm?s esteemed founder, William Bass. Instead of hiding what a lesser anthropologist would have considered a humiliating error, Bass published a paper describing how he had mistaken the well-preserved body in a vandalized Civil War grave for a modern murder victim. When Vass read the account in the late 1980s, he realized that leachate from the Confederate soldier?s solid lead coffin might explain why bacteria never consumed his 113-year-old corpse. A case of preservation by lead poisoning, as it were. The young chemist decided to enroll in Bass? world-renowned research program.

Now Vass works out of nearby Oak Ridge National Laboratories, where he has access to the equipment and expertise needed to develop the electronic body sniffer.

Vass? Oak Ridge collaborator, chemical engineer Rob Smith, has identified hundreds of compounds from the vapor samples pulled from 02-25?s grave, many never before associated with human decomposition.

Smith accomplishes this feat by extracting the chemicals caught in Vass? triple-sorbent traps and running them through a gas chromatograph?mass spectrometer. The GC-MS separates out the sample?s compounds and helps Smith run them against a computerized library of hundreds of thousands of chemicals.



Among the most interesting so far has been an uninterrupted series of organic molecules known as alde-hydes. This ?seven card straight? of
chemical markers runs from the four-carbon aldehyde butanal (C3H7CHO) up through the 10-carbon decanal (C9H19CHO). Best of all, the series has been present in every one of 02-25?s vapor samples analyzed to date.



If even one of these markers persists over the next year, it could become the target for Vass? planned grave detector. If several persist in amounts that change predictably over time, the detector technology could evolve into the postmortem clock that has long been the dream of forensic scientists.