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COPYRIGHT 2003 Las Vegas Review-Journal
BYLINE: J.M. KALIL, REVIEW-JOURNAL
From fresh corpses to the most badly decomposed bodies, forensic scientists strive to answer three key questions: who is the victim, when did he die and how did he die?
Many advances in that field can be traced to the famed "Body Farm," located at the University of Tennessee's Forensic Anthropology Center.
There, scientists have placed dozens of donated corpses underwater, in car trunks, in shallow graves and in numerous other places to study how the human body decomposes.
Dr. Murray Marks, a forensic anthropologist at the Body Farm, spoke with the Review-Journal recently about how bodies decay in different conditions and the impact that has on solving murders.
DISMEMBERING
Analysis: When murder victims are dismembered, investigators often don't recover all the body parts. But because of DNA testing and other strategies, they often can still make an identification. "Scars and other things can be rather distinctive," Marks said. Authorities also can advance a case by examining how the body was dismembered. "We may not find the skull, but if we have the torso it was attached to, we have experts in saw marks," Marks said. "These forensic anthropologists can look at it and figure out what...
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