Coupling Ground Penetrating Radar Applications with Continually Changing Decomposing Human Remains

Locating the clandestine burial of human remains has long perplexed law enforcement officials involved in crime scene investigations, and continues to bewilder all the scientific disciplines that have been incorporated into their search and recovery. Locating concealed human remains can often be compared to the proverbial search for a needle in the haystack. Many notable forensic specialists and law enforcement agencies, in an effort to alleviate some of the bewilderment that commonly accompanies the search for a buried body, suggest that multidisciplinary search efforts are becoming more of a necessity, and less of an option.

Research at the University of Tennessee’s Anthropological Research Facility (ARF) in Knoxville supports this theory through a collaborative research effort directed toward the development of more efficient and effective methods in the search for, and detection of, buried human remains. The Department of Anthropology, in conjunction with the University’s Department of Biosystems Engineering and Environmental Science, has correlated the use of ground penetrating radar (GPR) with postmortem processes of decomposing human targets. Two and three dimensional imagery programs were utilized to optimize the analysis and interpretation of the data acquired over the past eight months. The processed images were then compared to models of human decompositional stages. The results of this research support and acknowledge that GPR is only capable of enhancing field methods in the search for clandestine burials, and when coupled with target-specific geophysical imagery software, contributes valuable working knowledge in regards to the contents of the burial itself. Hence, such resources can only be seen as beneficial to a search teams’ endeavors.