“Please let me have just a moment alone with her in the viewing room, ” he would ask Dr. Scarpetta. “This is all my fault. I was afraid to show her how much I really cared and needed her, and now it’s come to this! The stress of her life and my unkindness toward her were too much and she burst into flames!”
Perhaps it was a touch of clairvoyance on Regina’s part, but even as she was fantasizing about spontaneous human combustion, Andy was speeding back to headquarters to post a Trooper Truth essay on that very subject.
THE TRUTH ABOUT SPONTANEOUS HUMAN COMBUSTION
by Trooper Truth
Although there is no evidence that people literally blow up without some mechanical or chemical assistance, it is a fact that living human beings can burn up in the absence of any external fire. I make this distinction because many of you, my readers, mistakenly believe that combust means to blow up, when it doesn’t mean that at all. Now, it is true that combustion can refer to agitation or tumult, but for the purposes of this essay, when I mention combust, combustion, or combusting, I am talking about something or someone burning up.
For centuries spontaneous human combustion (SHC) has been written about but not always persuasively. Novelists like Melville and Dickens, for example, use SHC to demonstrate that what goes around comes around, and if you are evil and unfair to others, then it is poetic justice if you burst into flames one day while you’re minding your own selfish business in your castle or house.
What may perhaps surprise the reader is that there is a scientific explanation for SHC. Experiments on dead human bodies and body parts donated to The Body Farm in Knoxville, Tennessee, have shown it is possible, given certain conditions, that if a body is ignited, it can continue to burn until it is almost completely cremated. Normally, it takes one to three and a half hours for a body to be reduced to bits of bone and ash, and this only occurs in an extremely hot fire or a crematorium oven.
So I have to admit that when forensic anthropologist Dr. Bill Bass first mentioned to me that one of his graduate students had written her master’s thesis on SHC, I thought he was joking.
“People don’t just burst into flames, ” I protested as we ate barbecue at Calhouns in Knoxville. “I can’t believe I’m hearing this. ”
“Not literally burst into flames, ” he said, drinking iced tea from a jelly jar as the setting sun played across the Tennessee River. “But burn for considerably long periods of time. ”
This strange conversation over baby back ribs occurred last spring when I happened to drop by The Body Farm to see if the scientists there had ever done any experimenting on mummification. I had just returned from Argentina and was still very interested in mummies, and hoped Dr. Bass might be inclined to attempt an old-style Egyptian embalming on one of the bodies donated to the Farm. He saw no good purpose in this and explained that finding an apothecary shop that sold what we needed would be very hard and probably would exceed the budget.
However, Dr. Bass told me, and I sensed he hated for me to go away disappointed because he is a kind, humble man, The Body Farm was doing some rather unusual research on spontaneous human combustion, if I was interested. I replied that I certainly was, and over a period of weeks, I visited The Body Farm numerous times. It is not a pleasant place, and for those readers who are unfamiliar with it, I offer a brief description.
The University of Tennessee’s Decay Research Facility, or The Body Farm as most of us call it, is several wooded acres surrounded by a tall wooden fence topped with razor wire. For some twenty-five years, anthropologists and forensic experts have devoted themselves to studying decomposition, for reasons that should be fairly obvious. Without knowing how the human body changes in different conditions over periods of time, we would have no data to help us determine time of death.