Bytheway Awarded Grant To Study Human Decomposition

Dec. 15, 2014
Story By: Andrew Devey
SHSU Media Contact: Julia May

The Sam Houston State University forensic science department has a long history of innovative research that can change the way the industry works.

Associate professor Joan Bytheway looks to continue that trend with a recently awarded project from the U.S. Department of Justice.

Bytheway was awarded more than $495,000 of funding to research the decomposition of human remains, with the goal of creating a formula to quantitatively determine time duration and different stages of decomposition of human remains based on a non-subjective approach—a method that may change the way evidence is observed and cases are solved.

Forensic anthropologists, like Bytheway, are often brought into homicide cases to determine what stage of decay the body is in following death and how long a body has been decomposing. This observation is important to investigators to help give a specific timeframe for the deceased and even authenticate testimonies. When dealing with bodies that are weeks and months old, determining an accurate and quantifiable postmortem duration is key.

“Forensic anthropologists who work with decomposed remains need some type of a quantitative method that is similar to the hard science out there,” Bytheway said. “I get quite a few cases where I’m called and asked, how long has this body been there. The results of this study will be most helpful and applicable for forensic anthropologists, but will also help forensic pathologists because they get a lot of bodies in the medical examiner offices that are pretty well decomposed.”

For years, forensic scientists have struggled to provide quantifiable evidence and statistics to aid homicidal cases. This is especially difficult to do through observation, but is not impossible.

“You quantify regions of the body, like the head and the trunk and limbs and give it a score,” Bytheway said. “Then you total that score up and you correlate that with accumulated degree days. Then you can obtain a fairly accurate assessment of the stage of decomposition the body should be in.”

In a pilot study, Bytheway and others were able to quantitatively determine their findings through observation and hope to be able to do the same by just looking at photos.

“We’re trying to do it based on visual observation like police would do in a case report and see if we can still do it as well in photos. As long as we can find those identifiers that you can obtain through gross observation, we should be able to do it.”

Bytheway has teamed up with colleagues at similar facilities at the University of Tennessee and Texas State University to bolster a similar study done by Mary S. Megyesi in 2005, published in the Journal of Forensic Sciences.

“The three locations have different climates and levels of humidity and soil composition,” Bytheway said. “We decided that we would place four bodies, four times per year, over the next two years. This is so we can develop a baseline of how long it takes a body to decompose without variables and then apply this scoring method and develop a new equation.”

At the end of the study, more than 100 bodies will have been observed, the largest sample size ever for a study of this kind. However, Bytheway believes this is just the beginning.

“This has to be a continuing study. Once we have a baseline figured out, we can explore other variables,” Bytheway said. “Then you have to have the mindset of ‘what do criminals do to their victims.’ We can add a variable of clothing, or wrapped in blankets, or buried, submerged in water. All of that has to be studied, so we can see how the bodies decompose in these various states. We see different things in each of these different situations and need to discover if the equation will be different for each of these variables.”

The potential seismic impact of the study may seem daunting, but that doesn’t deter Bytheway from the possibilities that can be discovered in its findings.

“I was elated to receive the grant,” Bytheway said. “I think it’s a very valid study that’s applicable to the entire criminal justice system.”

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