Body farm using technology in a different way to solve crimes and bring justice

Drones, ground penetrating radar being used at Virginia body farm to train the next generation of forensic experts

This article is part of “Solutionaries,” our continuing commitment to solutions journalism, highlighting the creative people in communities working to make the world a better place, one solution at a time. Find out what you can do to help and subscribe to our Solutionaries channel on Youtube.


Seeing underground and high above ground.

“The use of drones has been around for a number of years, but the actual application for forensic science is relatively new,” Steve Burmeister, who teaches classes for the Forensic Science Program and George Mason University said.

He also has more than two decades of FBI experience and is an explosive expert. Burmeister said if they would have drones in the FBI 20 years ago, it would have saved him hours of work. He documented crime scenes from eye level, with a camera instead of from a drone’s aerial view.

The drones are being used at the GMU body farm to train the next generation of forensic experts. The university has one of only eight body farms in the country.

“In one scenario we’re going to bury the body under the ground, other scenarios we’ll have it on the ground. What this allows us to do is to observe the actual body from different angles up in the air and actually collect a number of pieces of data,” Burmeister said.

Students get hands-on experience as drone pilots.

“I really like facial recognition and hoping to sort of mirror that like with the photography and maybe drones and see how those two can work together. Possibly looking for people that might be on watch lists or helping find missing children or missing persons,” Yvette Jackson, a graduate student at GMU said.

Back on the ground, they’re also using ground penetrating radar, also known as GPR.

“If there’s an object, such as a body, a gun, could even be a rock in the ground, you would see a signal on here, it’s all dependent again on the type of soil as far as how deep it will go, but it’s able to see things that are buried underneath the ground,” Burmeister, who adds that the technology is just like sonar, said.

“We’re standing in probably the most complex environment that you’re going to use this device,” Burmeister said as he looks around at the wooded area we are standing in outside the body farm and GMU. “A very skilled operator has to interpret the data to understand what is a root versus something else. What we’d like to do here at the body farm is to put a donor into the ground and study it over the course of time. That way we will have empirical data to show what does it look like over time as a body decomposes.”

Its technology is used in a different way to solve crimes and bring justice.

“It’s something that the research community will certainly benefit from. Forensic scientists will benefit from because we’re really looking for data and anytime you go into any type of a court scenario, you have to have data,” Burmeister said. “The technology now allows scientists to know things that they didn’t know before and I think that’s where the secret here. We’re using technology to leverage it.”

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This article is part of “Solutionaries,” our continuing commitment to solutions journalism, highlighting the creative people in communities working to make the world a better place, one solution at a time. Find out what you can do to help and subscribe to our Solutionaries channel on Youtube.


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About the Author
Jenna Zibton headshot

You can see Jenna weekday mornings at the anchor desk on WSLS 10 Today from 5-7 a.m. She also leads our monthly Solutionaries Series, where we highlight the creative thinkers and doers working to make the world a better place.