Aside from being the bloodiest war in terms of American casualties—more than any other United States conflict—the Civil War also led to groundbreaking innovations in fields like communications, transportation, and weaponry. In a strange twist of fate, one wartime tragedy would go on to revolutionize forensic science more than a century later. 

It started with a 1970s murder mystery

In 1971, forensic researcher Dr. William Bass was appointed head of the anthropology department at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. He had been examining human and animal remains for years as both a student and a professor, and his expertise was frequently requested by law enforcement to assist in murder investigations. 

Despite this proficiency, his forensic knowledge was missing a key element. Bass could not accurately determine how long a subject had been deceased, which is a crucial component of solving murder cases. At the time, there wasn’t much research available about establishing a time of death. “Law enforcement officers [would] bring me a skeleton,” Bass later told WBIR Knoxville, but he could only “[guess] at how long that individual has been dead.” 

Bass knew he needed to study the decomposition process up close and personal, but he didn’t have an appropriate place to store human cadavers. In the WBIR interview, he revealed that he once stashed a “really smelly decaying body” in a university bathroom, earning the rightful anger of a janitor who encountered the disturbing scene. There had to be a better way to observe and measure natural human decomposition.

One day in late December of 1977, Bass was called to a bizarre homicide case that would underscore the need for a facility that could help researchers improve their time-of-death estimates. 

The strange case

The fateful phone call came from law enforcement officials investigating a headless body that had been discovered on top of a casket in an unearthed Civil War-era grave near Nashville. Police assumed the remains probably belonged to a murder victim who’d been hastily hidden in the old grave before his assailants fled the scene. They requested Bass’s expertise to identify the man.

The body was dressed in the remnants of a tuxedo. Upon examination, Bass noted that the remaining flesh was pinkish in color with a foul odor, and the deceased’s intestines were still discernible. The missing head was located nearby and indicated that the cause of death was likely a sharp blow. As reported in The Confederacy’s Last Hurrah by Wiley Sword, Bass determined that the victim was a white male, “five feet eleven inches, 175 pounds, and about twenty-six years old.” 

Bass initially estimated that the death had occurred six to 12 months earlier. But a more thorough investigation of the corpse’s clothing and skull fragments revealed instead that this was the person named on the headstone: Lieutenant Colonel William M. Shy, who had died in 1864 at the age of 26. 

A beautiful corpse

“In the rush to provide answers to a curious public and press,” said Sword, “no one had considered that a body in such an excellent state of preservation could be that of a long-dead Civil War officer.” 

“I got the age, sex, race, height and weight right but I was off on the time of death by 113 years,” Bass later admitted. He was thrown off because Shy had been embalmed before burial; he was one of the first people ever to undergo the preservation process in Nashville. The tightly sealed iron coffin further helped slow decomposition and gave the impression of a much more recent death.

Investigators concluded that grave robbers had cut a hole in the top of Shy’s iron coffin and dragged his body out, separating his head in the process. After removing any valuables they fled the gruesome scene, leaving behind a historic mystery. 

Who was William M. Shy, the Civil War veteran who seemingly time-traveled to advance modern forensics? 

Civil War Colonel William M. Shy

William Mabry Shy was born in Bourbon County, Kentucky, in 1838. Upon the outbreak of the Civil War, he enlisted as a private in the 20th Tennessee Infantry Regiment of the Confederate Army. He rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel and then colonel, serving under General John Bell Hood. 

Shy proved himself a fearless fighter during the two-day Battle of Nashville in December of 1864. This was one of the most decisive Union victories of the Civil War. Hood’s troops were greatly outnumbered by 60,000 Union soldiers. 

The close-fought combat was brutal but Shy didn’t surrender, even when besieged by Union forces. He went down fighting, “Enfield rifle musket in hand, when he was shot through the head at point-blank range.” The battle site was later renamed Shy Hill in honor of his valiant efforts to repel Union forces.

As he was unmarried, the duty of claiming Shy’s body fell to his parents. They enlisted family friends, who traveled across Northern lines to bring Shy home. It is believed that one of these close friends, a doctor, also embalmed Shy’s remains before his (first) funeral in the family cemetery in Franklin, Tennessee. 

William Shy was reinterred on February 13, 1978. A great-great-granddaughter of Shy’s brother and members of the Sons and the Daughters of the Confederacy were present to watch as he was buried in a new casket. Although a suspect was reportedly identified, according to the Williamson Herald, no one was ever arrested for the 1977 grave robbery.

The world’s first body farm

This historic timeline mixup highlighted a need for more advanced dating techniques, and Bass redoubled his efforts to improve the study of human decomposition. He asked the university’s chancellor for a “small plot of land,” a request which was granted. Bass was given a couple of acres near the school’s medical center, and he and his students got to work constructing an outdoor lab. The University of Tennessee Anthropological Research Facility, also known as the “body farm,” was officially established in 1980.

The first such complex in the world, the body farm is a secure outdoor site where cadavers are placed in a variety of circumstances: “buried, partially covered, or left out in the elements.” Researchers can observe firsthand the effects of different conditions on human decomposition, allowing for more precise time of death determinations that can establish a timeline of events and narrow down the window of potential suspects in criminal cases. Bass told The Pennsylvania Gazette he estimates 65 percent of active forensic scientists in the U.S. have trained at the facility.

The body farm obtains its subjects through a cadaver donation program. It’s impossible to know whether William Shy would have willingly given his body to the cause. But as one of Dr. Bass’ first test subjects, he’s inadvertently partially responsible for establishing the unconventional educational program. 

“Lieutenant Colonel William M. Shy had died almost instantly atop the hill that now bears his name in Nashville,” declared Wiley Sword. “Yet in death, he was to receive a prominence more than a hundred years later that few could have imagined.”

Book cited

Sword, W. (1993). The Confederacy’s Last Hurrah: Spring Hill, Franklin, and Nashville. University Press of Kansas.