For more than four decades, Bill Bass has been one of the top death experts in the United States. He's best known for developing the Body Farm, a 2.5-acre plot of land in Tennessee filled with some 150 corpses in various states of decay. The farm – officially known as the Forensic Anthropology Research Facility – allows scientists to study decomposition and make better estimates of time of death in criminal cases.

In an interview with Wired News, the 79-year-old forensic anthropologist and co-author of the new book Beyond the Body Farm described the lessons learned from his seemingly macabre corpse farm, and previewed his upcoming exhumation of the world's greatest escape artist.

Wired News: What is at the Body Farm?

Bill Bass: We have clothed and unclothed bodies, in the sun and the shade, in water. They're in automobiles, trunks of cars, houses. What we've tried to do is reconstruct as many situations in which police find skeletal remains as possible.

WN: How good could forensic scientists get at estimating time of death?

Bass: I'd hope that we could get to the stage that after looking at everything in the body, we could tell you within a half-day how long that individual has been dead.

The further out you get, the range gets wider and wider. If you find an individual that's been dead a year, you might be able now to say, well, that individual has been dead between six months and a year-and-a-half. What we're trying to do is narrow those ranges so we get it down to where it is more specific.

WN: How did you get the idea to create the Body Farm?

Bass: I taught at the University of Kansas for 11 years and identified skeletal remains, but I don't remember ever getting a maggot-covered body. They were always bones.

Then in 1971, I came to the University of Tennessee, and instead of just skeletal remains, about half the first 10 cases were maggot-covered bodies. In those cases, the police don't ask, 'Who is that?' They ask, 'How long have they been there?'"

I didn’t know anything about maggots and thought if I'll be talking to police about how long somebody has been dead, I'd better know something about it. So in the fall of 1971 I went to the dean and said I needed some land to put dead bodies on. That was the beginning of the Body Farm.

WN: Will the Body Farm grow in the future?

Bass: It's greatly overused. We have about 150 bodies out there right now, and we need land that has not been contaminated by other burials, by other decays. We need more land, and talked to the university a while back. They've given us another 12 to 15 acres. It's going to be about a half-mile away from where the 2.5 acres is now.

WN: Are you learning about topics besides time of death?

Bass: We are doing a long-term project dealing with the compounds given off by bodies if they're buried. Today if someone is missing, they call out a dog. But as you and I talk today, we don't know what the dogs are smelling.

We've found that there are more than 400 compounds given off by dead bodies. We can chemically reconstruct each of those 400 compounds, and we're at the stage where we can bring in the dogs and say, 'Do you smell A or B?'"

WN: You also have one of the country's largest and most modern collections of skeletons, correct?

Bass: The ultimate goal of the Body Farm originally was not only to learn what happens in the decay of a body and how long does it take, but also to build up a collection of modern skeletal remains.

The problem with anatomical collections – up until now, there have been three, done by anatomists starting in the early 1900s – is that they're notorious for having people in the older age ranges.

Most (specimens) were in their 60s or 70s or 80s (when they died). Let's say you were 80 years old, you died in 1920 and you were in one of these collections. You were born in 1840, 20 years before the Civil War. What you're looking at are individuals that are older and were born over 100 years ago.

We know there have been changes in population through time. I wanted to build up a collection of known materials, known by age, race and sex.

We have a little over 700 skeletons in our collection, and we're building a $2 million building (to house them). It's something that the university is committed to. I would like to see it get to the stage where we really have a population big enough to do (more extensive research).

WN: Are people signing up to donate their bodies to the Body Farm when the time comes?

Bass: We have over 1,000 people who have willed their bodies, actually their skeletons, to the anthropology department at the University of Tennessee.

Up until 2003, the most bodies in any one year came from the medical examiners. We get unclaimed bodies from them. But in 2003, the willed bodies surpassed those.

We have a form that you can fill out, and we ask for more information than we did in the past. We're asking for medical histories, and we'd like to have a picture of the individual for facial reconstruction. We're trying to get better at predicting from the skeleton what that individual would look like.

WN: Is there a holy grail in forensic science, a goal that remains elusive despite technological advances?

Bass: The ultimate goal is to get enough data so you can look at any skeleton and make a 100-percent estimate of the age, sex, race and stature. I think it may come, that it is a possibility. It's a long way down the road, but that's what we're all looking for.

WN: For the moment, you have another goal – digging up Harry Houdini. What's the status of that case?

Bass: There are descendants, and they have agreed to the exhumation to settle some of these theories that are out there.

I'm a member of the committee that is supposed to exhume him, once they get all of the legal things taken care of.

A book suggests that instead of dying from a ruptured appendix, he was poisoned. The committee consists of toxicologists, dentists and anthropologists. The toxicologists will take samples to see if there are any chemicals that shouldn't be there.

I'm the one that's supposed to make the positive identification. When he was living, he apparently fractured one of his ankles. Along with other data, we want to make sure there's a healed fracture to the ankle.

WN: Is there a question about whether the body is really his?

Bass: I don’t think so, but you want to make sure that the person is the person you're supposed to have dug up. You want to make sure that if you're looking for Houdini, that it is Houdini. You don’t want to do all that and then a year from now hear from someone who says they dug up the wrong body.