For decades, Assistant Special Agent in Charge Brandon Elkins of the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation (TBI) referred to the deceased only as “Baby Girl.” But thanks to advances in forensic genetic genealogy and free lab testing, his team identified the teen in 2022 as Tracy Sue Walker. 

Tracy Sue went missing from Lafayette, Indiana, in 1978 at age 15, and her body was found in a trash dump in rural Campbell County, Tennessee, in 1985. Her homicide is still unsolved.

“When Brandon called me with that information a couple of years ago, it was the happiest day of my life,” Tracy’s brother, Randy Walker, said in a TBI news release. “I never did forget about her. It was so hard not knowing.”

Tracy Sue’s identification “was the impetus of the entire TBI unidentified human remains initiative,” Elkins told GraveSite of the program that has since identified 10 more deceased individuals. “She was the proof that this could work.”

Elkins worked on the case alongside forensic anthropologists at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville’s Forensic Anthropology Center (FAC), world-renowned for advancing knowledge on how human bodies decompose.

Today, as the science continues to improve, this center — at the heart of many of its breakthroughs — is growing. In April, UT Knoxville cut the ribbon on a 2,725-square-foot facility that will let the center triple its annual forensic caseload from 30 human-remains cases to 90. The institution is also on track to house the first academic forensic anthropology lab accredited under the International Organization of Standardization (ISO) standards, likely within the year, according to the university’s blog. 

UT began accepting donated bodies in 1981 and formally established the center in 1987. FAC is perhaps best known for its body farm, an outdoor lab where researchers study how bodies decompose with the help of donations from deceased benefactors. According to the center’s website, their donated skeletal collection comprises more than 2,500 donated bodies and 6,000 registered future donors.

UT Knoxville’s body farm was the world’s first, and facilities have since opened in Illinois, Texas, Colorado, Florida, North Carolina, Michigan, and Virginia, as well as in other countries, including Australia, The Netherlands, and Canada. Research at these labs has improved the science used to determine someone’s time of death based on insect activity and decomposition, the biological profile of a set of human remains (e.g., height, sex, and other identifying features), and best practices for investigators in the field.

“We welcome more facilities because although some of our research is translatable to any environment, some questions are environment specific,” Dawnie Wolfe Steadman, director emeritus of the center, told Undark in 2019. “We’re in an age of technology where the microbes can help provide new answers about time of death, but also whether a body was moved, and medical conditions inside the body that can help identify a person.” 

Though investigators praise such efforts, neighbors aren’t always as enthusiastic. In 2013, a woman who lived on a cattle and horse farm in Jefferson County, Tennessee, sued her local zoning board for approving a college’s proposed body farm on an adjacent piece of land, citing groundwater contamination concerns. The project was ultimately abandoned. In April, residents in the town of Kingsville, Ontario dropped the plans of a body farm, fearing odors and lost tourism.  

According to the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NamUs), more than 600,000 people go missing and 4,400 unidentified bodies are recovered annually in the U.S. Approximately 1,000 of those bodies remain unidentified for more than a year. Body farms, proponents say, play an important role in narrowing the gap between the found and the identified.

“The trickle-down effect is basically really incredibly helpful for us because then we’re getting better data. We’re getting better information,” said Tara Kennedy, a volunteer spokesperson for The Doe Network, an international nonprofit that helps solve missing-persons cases and cold cases online through crowdsourcing. As of May 2026, the group’s website credits it with helping solve 143 cases.

The Doe Network’s volunteers review hundreds of tips from internet sleuths using missing-persons databases such as NamUs to suggest possible matches to missing individuals and unidentified human remains. But many cases are old, and the technology historically used to provide the basic biometrics — e.g., age, sex, date of death — was often rudimentary by today’s standards, limiting what groups like The Doe Network can contribute.

“We’re only as good as the information we receive,” Kennedy said. 

Body-farm backers hope the center’s expansion will allow that information to keep improving.

“Forensic anthropologists are called upon by law enforcement and medical examiners when human remains are in the most challenging of conditions,” Steadman said in a press release on FAC’s expansion. “Through our work we help to restore a name to a missing person.”