The Body Farm is the only facility I know of that makes it possible for death investigators and scientists to conduct important experiments that are not permitted in morgues, funeral homes, or medical schools. But when bodies are donated to The Body Farm, it is known up front and approved that the remains will be used for research, which in this instance included setting an amputated leg on fire to see if it could sustain almost complete combustion in the absence of external fuel.
I can summarize anthropologist Dr. Angi Chris-tensen’s brilliant work by saying that the tissue was ignited by a cotton wick, and the sample continued to burn for forty-five minutes as it was fueled by melting fat which was absorbed by the wick (known as the wicking effect). Further experiments on burning bones showed that osteoporotic or thinning bones burn much more readily and completely than dense healthy bones. After many meticulous tests and mathematical calculations,
Christensen concluded that in some instances, the human body can indeed burn itself up at a very low heat if it is aided by cotton clothing that serves as a wick.
Obese elderly women with thinning bones and cotton house dresses are most likely to fall victim to this rare but ghastly phenomenon, and I offer here the sad case of Ivy, whose last name I will withhold out of respect for her privacy.
Ivy was a seventy-four-year-old white female who, at four-foot-eleven, weighed almost two hundred pounds, according to her driver’s license and descriptions given by people who last saw her in the neighborhood. Up until two years before her strange, fiery death, she worked as a babysitter in Miami to supplement her modest income from Social Security checks and the small amount of cash her husband, Wally, had left her upon his sudden death. Ivy never worked for the same family longer than six months, as she would inevitably alienate the parents after they were subjected to one suspicious situation after another until finally they dismissed the peculiar woman even if they couldn’t prove that she had actually done anything wrong.
Ivy had an insatiable need to be needed, and by her way of thinking, no one was needier than a sick or frightened child. She was careful never to take jobs if the children were old enough to talk intelligently and credibly, and therefore the parents never heard the truth about her misdeeds but certainly became concerned when they would return from outings and discover little Johnny or little Mary with stomach cramps, diarrhea, unusual bumps and burns, or in hysterics.
Several former clients of hers called her Poison Ivy behind her back and claimed she doctored their children’s food with laxatives and other medicines, and by overspicing. One couple was certain the woman had burned their two-year-old with a cigarette deliberately, although Ivy claimed the child had grabbed the cigarette out of the ashtray and stomped on it, thus explaining the eight burns on the bottom of his tiny feet. Tales and scandals swirled about Ivy, and she finally decided it was best to retire, which was when her real problems began.
Home alone most of the time in her tiny stucco house, Ivy spent her days drinking cheap port, smoking, and eating snacks in front of the television. She was very stooped and round-shouldered from osteoporosis, and her arthritis seemed to flare up more often. No one called anymore or needed her for a thing. She grew to hate her life and everybody who had ever touched it, and never imagined that she was well on her way to becoming a case study in spontaneous human combustion.
As fate would have it, Ivy was in an especially foul mood on Christmas Day, 1987, when she put on a long-sleeve cotton housedress because the weather was a bit nippy. She fixed herself a strong screwdriver after opening the deluxe box of Whitman chocolates that were a gift from her son, who lived nearby but never came to see her and rarely called. She parked herself on the vinyl couch in front of the TV and drank and smoked the morning away. It was here on this very couch that her badly burned body was discovered two days later when the Cuban lady who lived next door became concerned because Ivy had not picked up her newspapers.