TROIS-RIVIÈRES, QUE.—Rotting pig carcasses are best left to maggots and beetles, undisturbed. Unless, like Shari Forbes, your job is to lift a flap of the crusty skin and see how the bugs and decaying parts are doing.

The unfortunate result of such handling is a stomach-turning olfactory assault which Forbes, a professor of forensic chemistry, somehow barely notices. Prompted, she describes the stench like a sommelier of the putrid: “It’s a musty, musky smell … like a landfill or roadkill.”

Or a rotting human cadaver, which is Forbes’s specialty.

In the spring, she will open Canada’s first “body farm,” an outdoor site in Quebec to research the decomposition of human cadavers. Until then, she’s using pigs as human analogs.

Ghoulish and morbid are words that often get thrown Forbes’s way. Some who meet her are even shocked to find that she looks, well, normal.

“I hear that all the time: ‘You don’t look like somebody who studies death,’ Forbes, 42, says in an interview at her office at the University of Quebec in Trois-Rivières, a town halfway between Montreal and Quebec City.

“I understand people’s perception that (my work) is creepy,” she adds. “But I’m a professor in forensic science — what were you expecting, Morticia Addams?”

The body farm’s practical goals are to help police determine the time of death of potential victims, whether death was natural or criminal, and to better train dogs to search for cadavers.

The high-security site will be in a wooded area in Bécancour, a largely agricultural town across the St. Lawrence River from Trois-Rivières. The bodies — no more than 10 at any one time — will be placed in scenarios to mimic police work.

Some will simply decompose on the ground, like a missing hiker who suffered a fatal accident. Others will mirror crime scenes and be covered with twigs, leaves or brush, or placed in shallow graves. Others still might be in vehicles, or in a cabin.

RCMP Insp. Diane Cockle says research at the body farm will help police investigators answer a question always asked when examining the state of a body: Is this normal?

“Is it suicide? Is it an accidental death? Was it caused by scavenging or a criminal? Was the body dumped here?” she says. “It’s really difficult to answer those questions if you don’t know what a body looks like when it decomposes normally,” adds Cockle, commander of the detachment in Newmarket, Ont., and former forensic identification co-ordinator for the force in B.C.

“It’s difficult to know what’s hinky if you don’t know what’s normal.”

Since word spread through the first media stories last year, Forbes says people have been lining up to donate their bodies. Only Quebecers are accepted as donors, and callers from the rest of Canada and the U.S. have been turned away.

Some donors are terminally ill, others don’t expect to be of service until many years in the future. Some have had a personal experience with crime and hope to help police catch future murderers. Others consider it a form of green burial.

“Those who donate to us want to give back to science — that is truly the common denominator,” says Forbes, adding that all will have given written consent to the research while still alive.

You might expect scientists to have studied death extensively. But public squeamishness, regulatory obstacles to body farms, and a debate within the forensic community about their scientific value have resulted in few such sites around the world.

Eight body farms are in the U.S., one is in the Netherlands and one in Australia, which Forbes set up and directed until 2018. She was then lured back to Canada when she was awarded the Canada 150 research chair in forensic thanatology, and funding to set up a farm here.

“I thought, well, that sounds like fun,” said Forbes, who also founded and directed the forensic science program at University of Ontario Institute of Technology from 2005 to 2011, before leaving for Australia.

“Body farm” is a colloquial misnomer because, of course, body parts aren’t grown at such sites. The term stuck when crime writer Patricia Cornwell made it the title of her 1994 novel. The scientific description is “outdoor human taphonomy facility,” a place that studies what happens to bodies after death.

The first site appeared at the University of Tennessee in 1981 and is used by the FBI to train agents. Since then, Forbes says forensic scientists have generally agreed that a body typically goes through five stages when decomposing

There’s a “fresh” stage immediately after death, before the body bloats with gases built up by bacteria and enzymes at work. Then, soft tissue liquefies during “active decay,” until “advanced decay” kicks in and everything starts to dry out. The final stage is skeletonization.

Still, taphonomy is far from a perfect science. The environment has much to do with how — or if — all this happens.

At the Australia farm, where temperatures can reach scorching heights, skeletonization is uncommon. The body’s fat tends to transform into a waxy substance that preserves and mummifies the parts exposed to the sun.

Colorado’s body farm sees mummification of the whole body, Forbes says, while the Texas site tends to get more skeletonization. Some sites are finding bodies that skip the bloating stage altogether.

Perhaps the biggest mystery in taphonomy is how bodies decay in a country with cold winters. What happens when they begin to decompose outdoors, then freeze with the onset of winter, thaw in spring and again decompose? What smells do they emit that a police cadaver dog might be trained to detect?

No body farm operated in a winter climate when the University of Quebec came up with the idea for a Canadian site. A body farm has since been opened by Northern Michigan University. But Michigan’s bodies are studied in a grassland environment; Forbes’s bodies will decompose in a forest, and she expects the results to be different.

“We need the site,” says Cockle. “We need to understand how bodies decompose in a Canadian environment.”

Variation is so far taphonomy’s uncomfortable norm.

It has also become clear to forensic scientists that everyone is unique in death as in life. Bodies will decompose differently depending on a person’s age, diet, gut bacteria, regular use of prescription drugs, chemotherapy and, as Forbes puts it, “metabolism, genes — the whole lot.”

It has some in the scientific community, including leading British forensic anthropologist Susan Black, arguing that data from a specific human cadaver is unreliable because it can’t be reproduced.

They also note that body donors are often elderly people who die of natural causes. The way they decompose differs from bodies found in typical forensic crime cases — younger adults who died of unnatural causes.

They argue it’s best to restrict decomposition research to pigs. Their anatomy is similar to humans in significant ways and their age, size and traits can be controlled for more reliable data. They’re also easier to source and “less ethically complex to deploy,” as the authors of the research paper “Pigs vs. people” recently put it.

Forbes counters that individual pigs, in her experience, decay every bit as uniquely as humans. As for ethics, has any scientist ever got consent from a pig?

A decomposing pig carcass at the research site in Trois-Rivieres. Some scientists say it's more useful to study pigs after death than humans. GRAHAM HUGHES for the Toronto Star

The goal in studying human decomposition, Forbes argues, is to identify trends. In any event, Forbes’s team will study both species at her farm.

The 0.4-hectare (one-acre) site will be secured by cameras and a two-metre-high fence with barbed wire at the top. The fencing is to protect the privacy of donors and keep animals from scavenging human remains.

Forest animals will have access, however, to pig carcasses. Understanding the impact of scavengers on bodies is important for police investigations and the pigs will be used as human analogs partly for that purpose.

An internal fence will separate the pig from the human part of the site to make sure scavengers don’t mingle the remains or remove human parts.

“We have to make sure that every bone in that body is still in our facility when it comes time to return the remains back to the family,” says Forbes, adding that human remains will be cremated and returned to families within four years.

Forbes is already studying how pigs decompose as part of her work at the University of Quebec in Trois-Rivières. Since June, three carcasses have been decaying in a small wooded area on campus, fenced off by a green tarp.

When the Star visited in early November, death hadn’t quite finished with pig number one, although a lot of the work had clearly been done.

The once plump body lay like a rag on the forest floor, the skull a frame of dark bone with empty eye sockets. Near withered hind legs, a tiny marker planted in the ground identified the remains, simply, as Pig 1.

Forbes seemed delighted to see bugs feasting on a waxy layer of what used to be the pig’s insides.

“This is all mummified tissue,” she said, noting that while the carcass had been placed on the ground five months earlier most of the decomposition occurred in the first six to eight weeks.

Maggots swarmed the carcass during the warm summer months. But by early November they had burrowed out of sight, deep into the remains or ground to hibernate.

“The life cycle of flies we use to estimate time since death,” Forbes said. “And the beetles, which we see here, tend to come much later. They like the mummified tissue or the older remains.”

That kind of image made the idea of a body farm in the town’s forested backyard seem rather unpleasant to Bécancour’s town councillors when it was first proposed.

“It sounded a little macabre,” Mayor Jean-Guy Dubois said in an interview. “The idea of having cadavers on a site in our industrial park was hard to swallow.”

But to Dubois’s surprise the residents didn’t seem to care. Only a handful showed up for a town hall on the matter in November 2018. The isolated site in a wooded area of the industrial park is kilometres from the nearest home, and university officials assured residents that decomposing odours would never reach them.

Even the chancellor of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Nicolet expressed support at the town hall, noting the church backs science that advances human progress. Its concern, he added, is that the last wishes and religious faith of donors are respected, and their bodies treated with dignity.

“In the end, it’s a laudable project that helps police and the university and it doesn’t cause us any harm,” Dubois said.

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The idea for the body farm came from the directors of the anatomy and forensic science departments at the University of Quebec in Trois-Rivieres. They reached out to Shari Forbes in Australia . Graham Hughes for the Toronto Star

The idea for the body farm came from the directors of the anatomy and forensic science departments at the University of Quebec in Trois-Rivières. They reached out to Forbes in Australia and nominated her for the Canada 150 research chair in thanatology, which came with a federal government grant of $350,000 annually for seven years to establish courses and a forensic lab at the university.

The university funded another $350,000 to build the outdoor body farm.

Forbes’s field of research is taphonomy. But Quebec authorities couldn’t find a French equivalent to the term, so they insisted that her research chair be assigned in thanatology, a much broader field of death research that includes bereavement and terminal illness.

“I kept saying, ‘No, it’s taphonomy.’ They said, “We just can’t. It’s not an argument you’re going to win.’ ”

Forbes was born in Dubbo, a largely agricultural town in New South Wales, Australia. She was drawn to sciences that had a direct impact on people, and her university studies focused on examining trace evidence at crime scenes. But for her honours thesis she chose the only topic from a list that wasn’t about crime scenes.

A cemetery in Sydney had a curious problem: bodies buried in one section were not decomposing into skeletons after 50 years, like those in the rest of the cemetery. That meant those plots could not be exhumed, leased to new customers, and the bones stored in an ossuary. Forbes investigated.

She discovered that, due to the slope of the cemetery grounds, graves in that section were closer to groundwater. When the water level rose, the graves flooded. Bodies in water decompose more slowly. Soft tissue liquefies and can preserve through a process called adipocere formation, which produces a waxy or soapy substance most insects don’t like eating. Forbes was hooked.

“I just thought, wow, I didn’t even think about bodies preserving. We just always think of them as decomposing.”

She later wrote her PhD thesis on bodies buried in shallow graves and quickly became the go-to person for Australian police forces. “She’s a bit of a wunderkind,” says the RCMP’s Cockle, a forensic anthropologist who had Forbes as an external examiner for her own PhD thesis on decomposing bodies.

“I truly know what happens after death,” Forbes says. Well, at least from a purely physical perspective. Asked if she believes in an afterlife, Forbes blurted, “Well, gosh, that’s a good question,” and took a moment to answer.

“I like to think we all return in some other form,” she said, sounding sheepish. “I don’t know what that is. So, I guess some people would consider that an afterlife.”

She encourages people to talk to their families about death, especially if they plan to donate their bodies to science, a decision that can be traumatic for loved ones if they haven’t been informed.

She recently returned from Mexico, where she witnessed celebrations for the annual Day of the Dead, and wonders why other societies can’t be as comfortable with death. On a shelf in her office she displays a doll she brought back from her trip, a skeleton presumably intended to appear weirdly sexy with a tight dress and an hourglass figure.

Forbes leaves no doubt that her top priority is to treat body donors ethically and with dignity. But she retains a sense of humour, aware that to the outside world, her work is “creepy.”

In her lab at the university — on the door of a big white fridge that stores human tissue and other bits — is a sign that says, “WARNING: IF YOU ARE HUNGRY DO NOT EAT WHAT IS INSIDE.”

A warning sign in the lab fridge, which stories human tissue and other bits. Sandro Contenta/Toronto Star

She finds herself often debunking kooky public perceptions, including CSI TV myths about the investigative prowess of forensic scientists, although she appreciates those shows for creating interest in her work.

Public reaction is equal parts repulsion and fascination. At dinner parties, Forbes is inevitably asked for unappetizing details.

“It’s amazing how often people want to talk about this during a meal,” she says. “I always say, ‘I’m not sure this is appropriate,’ and people always say, ‘No, no, we definitely want to hear about it.’ ”

When the conversation turns to Forbes’s work helping police with crime scenes, “The number one question I get is, “How do you commit the perfect murder?’ ” she says with a laugh. “I don’t know the answer, to be honest.”

On her desk are three stuffed dogs representing the cadaver canines she helped train with the OPP, the New South Wales force and Toronto police. Propped up against the stuffed Toronto dog is a picture of Major, the German shepherd and Belgian malinois mix that discovered the dismembered remains of victims of Toronto serial killer Bruce McArthur. Some were buried in large garden planters.

“Major is one of our stars,” Forbes says.

Toronto police consulted Forbes by email about the chances of Major detecting decomposition odours of body parts that might have been buried for several years. (Forbes says she gets consulted almost weekly by police forces in Canada and abroad.)

Major is seen sniffing out training samples with the odour of human remains in May 2018, working with Sgt. Derrick Gaudet of Toronto police. Shari Forbes helped train Major, the dog that discovered dismembered remains of victims of serial killer Bruce McArthur. Richard Lautens

She began working with Canadian cadaver dogs while at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology near Toronto. Ontario Provincial Police called her in 2008, requesting her expertise on how to use ground-penetrating radar to find bodies.

She recalls the radar being used in 2010 on the most disturbing case she worked on with police, the search for a two-year-old killed by her mother near London. The toddler was murdered in July, and Forbes was called to a wooded area in October.

The radar found nothing, but the dogs showed interest in a general area. Heavy equipment dug and found the body.

“We sought justice for her,” Forbes says. “It’s not a happy story, but we did what we needed to do.”

Forbes began working with OPP cadaver dogs in 2008. While working with police dogs in Australia, she met Izzy, a dog too easily distracted for the work. So Forbes adopted Izzy as her pet.

“She’s a failed cadaver dog,” Forbes says. “She was trained on cadavers but she’ll look for anything. In Australia it was lizards — she loves lizards. Here, it’s squirrels. If we ever need a squirrel detection dog, I’ve got one.”

Odour from human decomposition is made up of more than 600 compounds. Dogs likely focus on only a few of them to detect human remains, Forbes says. The challenge is to figure out which compounds those are.

So training proceeds through trial and error, with dogs sniffing a spectrum of compounds and being rewarded when they signal an alert to what researchers describe as “authentic odour.” But if dogs pick up the odour of a dead animal, does that mean the odour is the same as for a human body? The last thing trainers want to do is reward dogs for the wrong odour.

Police forces aren’t permitted to hold human remains. So training is often done with blood samples, decomposition fluid, soil from graves, or gauze pads that collect decomposition odours from bodies in morgues. But it’s unclear how “authentic” these samples are compared to a whole body decomposing.

The OPP has a program with Queen’s University using live donor amputated tissue from diabetic patients. Forbes runs a project that monitors odours from those limbs to determine when the smell might no longer be useful in a search.

On rare occurrences, a coroner allows human remains to be used, and police from across the country gather there to train.

It’s no surprise, then, that Quebec’s police forces have already lined up to train their dogs at Forbes’s body farm when it opens. And she expects police across the country will do the same.

“It’s only a small facility initially,” says Forbes, noting that the biggest, operated by Texas State University, is about 10 hectares (26 acres). “We want to just make sure we do it correctly and make sure everyone is OK with it.

“And then we’ll look to expand it in the future.”

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