The Body Farm

Patricia Cornwell’s crime fiction, The Body Farm (1994), is the fifth book in the lengthy Dr. Kay Scarpetta series. Like all books in the series, The Body Farm follows Dr. Kay Scarpetta, the Chief Medical Examiner for the Commonwealth of Virginia and her use of the latest in forensic investigative science to solve a grisly murder case.

The story begins at the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) training academy in Quantico, Virginia. Scarpetta and the FBI’s Investigative Support Unit consult on the brutal murder of eleven-year-old Emily Steiner. Five days after disappearing, her body was found in a nearby lake naked with pieces of flesh cut out and a bullet wound to the head, with signs of gagging and sexual assault. The work matches that of serial killer Temple Brooks Gault, who is one of the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted, and a killer whom Scarpetta had failed to capture in a previous novel in the series. The guilt continues to haunt her. Even though a local doctor has already performed an autopsy, Scarpetta decides to have the body exhumed in the hopes of uncovering a clue.

However, distractions befall the investigation, providing false leads. Scarpetta, along with her love interest, FBI Unit Chief Benton Wesley investigate the apparent suicide of local FBI agent Max Ferguson, en route back to North Carolina from Quantico. Found wearing women’s underwear, he appears to be the victim of an accidental hanging after a night of autoeroticism. What’s more, the missing pieces of Emily Steiner’s body are in his refrigerator. Meanwhile, his local contact suffers a heart attack and is sent to the hospital. Other leads include a school friend of Emily’s and the school’s janitor, who is rumored to have perhaps developed feelings for the girl and is a suspect of a hit-and-run at another school.



Further distracting Scarpetta is her loner niece Lucy who is an intern at Quantico in the classified research facility. She is informed that Lucy has been caught in an unauthorized area after hours. Lucy is charged with espionage, dismissed from the academy, and is later seriously injured in a car accident when she was driving Scarpetta’s vehicle after drinking too much. Still, Lucy does not share all the information about the situation with Scarpetta. It turns out that Lucy has been having a secret love affair with a woman named Carrie. Scarpetta is convinced that Carrie created a cast of Lucy’s fingerprint to infiltrate the facility. Lucy’s secrecy, as well as Richmond police officer Pete Marino’s increasing emotional involvement with Emily’s mother, clouds the case.

Gault remains the prime suspect, but Scarpetta is unconvinced based on the condition of the girl’s body and the unusual behavior of the mother the night of Emily’s disappearance. For further information on the nature of body decay, Scarpetta heads to the University of Tennessee’s Decay Research Facility, otherwise known as The Body Farm, where information from forensic scientist Thomas Kats provides a pivotal lead in cracking the case.

In the end, Scarpetta suspects that Emily’s mother Denesa suffers from Munchausen’s syndrome, in which the sufferer fabricates emotional or physical trauma to attract sympathetic attention.  She also realizes that Denesa’s car is the same color as the car that drove Lucy off the road in the accident. She confronts Denesa at her house, where Marino has been staying to console the supposedly grieving mother. When she finds them, Denesa has a plastic bag over his head. Denesa reaches for Marino’s gun, but Scarpetta shoots and kills her with Marino’s shotgun from the car just in time to save his life and her own.



The book’s title refers to the real-life University of Tennessee’s Anthropological Research Facility, one of the world’s foremost centers of body decomposition research. The center’s research is a crucial plot point in Scarpetta’s identification of the murderer.

Some critics find The Body Farm’s myriad subplots, “whose interconnection is never quite clear” according to Kirkus Reviews, distracting and disjointed from the central narrative. Cornwall spends much of the book focusing on Lucy or Marino rather than Emily. Released in 1994, the book’s technical jargon and procedures—state-of-the-art and a product of extensive research at the time—are now largely outdated which some critics also find distracting. Overall, critics seem to agree that while entertaining, The Body Farm is not the best of the series.

Author Patricia Cornwall worked for six years at the Office for the Chief Medical Examiner in Virginia, where she worked as a technical writer and then as a computer analyst. She volunteered her time at the Richmond Police Department, during which time she wrote the first of the Kay Scarpetta series—Postmortem—based on true criminal activity in the area.