Bloke uses bizarre 'witching' technique to help teach police to find corpses

dailystar.co.uk:

murder.He’s working on a technique called "decomposition odour analysis", or "DOA", which he claims will help to identify the distinctive gases that are produced by decomposing human bodies and has even suggested the use of “cyborg” flies implanted with a tracking chip to find dead bodies.Using flies as detectives “would have worked great,” he said, “but birds eat flies.

I lost most of my trackers.”But perhaps Vass’s strangest crime-detecting innovation is an ancient paranormal technique that was once seen as “witchcraft”.Vass, 62, is teaching detectives the ancient art of “witching,” or “divining” in order to locate buried human remains.He teaches the technique at the University of Tennessee's renowned Forensic Anthropology Centre, known to Vass’s students as the Body Farm.At the Body Farm, detectives learn everything there is to learn about how the human body can be damaged and distorted by bullets, bombs, fire and knives.

Students study techniques such as bite mark analysis, blood spatter analysis, bullet matching, DNA matching. The facility has been described by the Washington Post as “Harvard of hellish violence”.And Vass is determined to use every tool to to help bring killers to justice – even “witching”.He told The Marshall Project that metal dowsing rods can pick up on microscopic electrical charges that build up in bones under pressure – for example bones buried in a shallow grave.Not everyone can dowse for bodies, he says, because “if people don’t have the right voltage, it’s not going to work.”Vass says that the technique will only work to find dead bodies.