By CINDY SIMPSON/Roane Newspapers

Bill Bass has made a living out of the dead. He has been all over the state - including Roane County - studying skeletal remains to answer the questions of who they belonged to and how they died.

Bass came to Tennessee in the early 1970s to build a graduate program in anthropology at the University of Tennessee.

Soon he was asked to serve as the forensic anthropologist for the state.

"It was not long before bodies started coming in," Bass said.

It was in that position that he started his collection of human remains - not at the current site of his now-famous body farm, but at a sow farm near the campus.

One of the first bodies came from Roane County, according to Bass.

The body was just that, Bass said. It was headless. It was found by a fisherman who snagged his line on the remains.

"We needed to find the skull, the best means of identification," Bass said.

Bass said two skulls came in after an article on the headless body appeared in the Roane County News.

One had been sitting in the motor compartment of a car in Morgan County, but it was ruled out. The Roane County body was of a Caucasian male, and the Morgan County skull was not Caucasian.

"It just did not fit," Bass said.

Police tracked the previous owner of the old vehicle down and were told that skull was a trophy from a Japanese fighter pilot killed in the South Pacific.

The second came from an American Indian and was also ruled out.

"I don't think he (the body) was ever identified," Bass said.

But what to do with the corpse?

"I went to the dean and said I needed somewhere to put the bodies," Bass said.

The body was taken to the sow farm, which Bass used from 1971 to 1980.

"We simply began to document what happens when a body decays," he said.

The research facility, now behind the University of Tennessee Medical Center, came later, several years after bodies accumulated at the farm. The body farm was the source of his popular book, Death's Acres, which has been printed in nine languages.

Bass has helped with a number of cases in Roane County, according to Sheriff David Haggard. And although Bass is supposedly retired, he still is called to help with cases today.

One of those cases involves an unsolved case District Attorney Scott McCluen's team is bringing back to light.

"We are starting to explore cold cases, bringing back retired investigators and now have the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation involved," McCluen said.

Bass is returning to one case he was first involved with in 1987, when the body of a woman was found burning near a South of the River Dumpster.

The woman, as Bass and his colleagues deduced, provided important information through her skeletal remains.

Investigators are also hoping to use clues left behind from her body to pinpoint who she might be, including the woman's cosmetic implants.

Bass recently began working on a separate case in Anderson County involving the remains of a missing woman there.

The family of Leoma Patterson never believed the remains that were buried in 1979 belonged to her. Last year, they asked Bass to investigate.

The family was right, Bass said.

"What we need to do now is get the skull out of the grave and see if we can make an identification," Bass said.

"The woman in the grave may be someone from Roane County. It could just as easily be Roane as Anderson or Campbell," Bass said.

While Bass has cut back to a few cases here or there, his legacy lives on in former students Lee and Richard Jantz, who are now teachers in the program at the University of Tennessee.

It is Lee Jantz who has taken his role of dealing with identifying the dead according to law enforcement.

Jantz's most recent visit into Roane County was to help in identifying the remains of murdered Harriman grandmother Kathleen Taylor. Jantz came to the scene when human bones, were found on Mount Roosevelt.

Taylor's grandson Christopher Zamisz was charged with theft of her vehicle. Her grandson's partner, David William Cosgrif III, was charged in her murder.

At the time those remains were found, most of Jantz's students were on vacation. She brought her two sons to help her excavate the body, according to Roane County Sheriff's investigator Bob Childs.

Bass has the respect of investigators across the area.

"He is a walking library. He used to conduct four-hour seminars, and you would feel like you have been there 15 minutes," Haggard said.

"He taught you what to look for if you find a body - what to do," Sheriff's Investigator Jon French said.

Investigator Dennis Moldenhaur said Bass' presentations to law enforcement over the years has led to a lot of changes in the way investigations are handled.

"More investigators pay attention to the surroundings more than they used to, not just the body," Moldenhaur said.

Footnote- The family hired Dr. Bass for the exhumation in August of last year. Dr. Bass took DNA samples from various parts of the remains including the teeth. The DNA did not match DNA taken from two of Leoma's children in independent tests. These two DNA tests were paid for by the family of Leoma Patterson. The family also paid for exhumation costs

Information Provided by: Roane County News