Grisly welcome to the Body Farm

It’s the smell that assaults the senses first, a smell that will linger for a lifetime.

Dozens of rotting corpses. An odour that’s as pungent as it is unforgettable.

Decomposing bodies are in every conceivable location. Cars, wheelie bins, hanging from trees, buried underground, lying out in the open where millions of maggots move as one mass.

You’d be forgiven for thinking you’d walked on to a TV or movie set, half expecting Kathy Reichs, who inspired the TV show Bones, to pop up from under a cadaver.

But nothing here in the Tennessee fog is fantasy. It’s all real. As real as the Aussie accent which welcomes students to the Body Farm, the University of Tennessee’s Anthropological Research Facility.

“G’day,” he drawls. “My name’s Ian.”

Ian Dadour is a forensic entomologist, based at the University of WA.

He’s the only Australian scientist hired to train America’s elite FBI agents and one of only three forensic entomologists used by Australian police to probe suspicious deaths.

He has lent his insect expertise to high-profile cases such as the Claremont serial killings and the 1997 murder of 11-year-old Gerard Ross, in Rockingham. “Most of the big cases I’ve worked on remain unsolved,” he quips modestly.

The truth is, that Dr Dadour’s expertise is so great the Perth professor has been invited to the Body Farm in Knoxville, Tennessee, to show 40 FBI agents how insects can solve murders.

The class begins with Dr Dadour displaying his tools of the trade — an insect net, forceps of varying length, specimen jars and gloves.

The FBI agents slip into white, plastic, full-body suits and rubber boots.

They look like they’re about to be launched into space. Instead, they’ll be propelled into a grisly world of forensic crime-solving.

Then, as casually as you or I would open a curtain, Dr Dadour peels back a sheet of black plastic to reveal a decomposing, maggot-infested corpse. The forceps are used to extract an insect sample and, almost instantly, our expert can calculate the time of death.

Insects operate like clockwork. The first flies arrive within an hour of death. They travel inside the body and lay eggs. Twenty-four hours later those eggs produce maggots. When the maggots reach 15mm, they’ve been fed for about one week.

Incredibly, up to seven days after someone dies, Dr Dadour can pinpoint the time of death to within a couple of hours. After two weeks, the accuracy is reduced to about half a day.

Opened in 1981, the Body Farm remains one of the few places in the world where scientists can study decomposition on humans.

The facility relies on people signing over their bodies to science and, believe it or not, there’s no shortage of donors.

People can and do get away with murder. But with scientific breakthroughs and experts such as Ian Dadour, it continues to become that little bit harder.