Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Each month, Texas State University President Dr. Kelly Damphousse sits down with faculty members, staff, students, alumni, and community members for a conversation about all things TXST — the past, the present, and the bright future of the university.
Part of the TXST Podcast Network: https://www.txst.edu/podcast-network.html
- They live in ambiguous loss. Every day, they don't know what happened.
- You don't know. Not knowing is almost worse than knowing.
- It is. I think it is based on families that I've spoken with. So every day is almost like torture for them. So, we give them answers through working with a lot of collaborators and lots of people in the community. And it's not what they wanna hear, but they know. They know what happened and now they're gonna get the remains of their loved one back. They're gonna be able to have a burial and go, and visit, and bring flowers.
- Welcome to "The Current", where we learn more about what's happening at Texas State University, by talking to faculty, staff, students, and alumni, friends of the university, here in this podcast. My name is Kelly Damphousse. I'm the president here at Texas State, and I'm super excited to welcome my friend Kate Spradley here. I know Kate is one of our professors in the Department of Anthropology. It's actually forensic anthropology is your background. And I think you're probably, in my mind, when I was thinking about coming to Texas State, you're actually one of the first people I thought about. That's how famous you are.
- Wow.
- And I've been looking forward to having you on the podcast because I think what you do is so interesting. How's that for a setup? You're the most famous person here at Texas State. But I think what you do is so interesting. But before we get to what you do, let's talk about what you did and how you got here. So, where'd you grow up?
- I grew up in Little Rock, Arkansas.
- Little Rock. I did not know that.
- Yes.
- So I spent some time there. I spent five years up in Jonesboro.
- Yes, I was in Fayetteville.
- Oh, well that's too bad.
- It is, yes.
- So you went to Fayetteville. So what high school did you go to?
- I went to Little Rock Central High.
- Okay, what is their mascot?
- Tigers.
- The Tigers, okay, very good. Now that's got a kind of a famous story there, that high school, right?
- It does.
- Yeah, tell us about, in case people don't know about it.
- So, it's home of the Little Rock Nine. It was a time of integration. They were trying to integrate the school, and there was a lot of people trying to prevent it at the time and it was a very big deal.
- Yeah, way before your time.
- Way before my time, yes.
- Yeah, and so you grew up, what'd your parents do?
- My father is a lawyer, and my mother for most of her life worked in human resources at Dillard's department store.
- Okay, that's a big deal. And you know, I don't think people realize, Dillard's is big in Little Rock.
- It is.
- And then Walmart of course, up in northwest part of Arkansas.
- Absolutely, yes.
- Well, so you graduate in high school and then go up to Fayetteville, unfortunately. And so what, I'm sorry, I shouldn't say that. But anyways, you go to Fayetteville, and go to University of Arkansas, what happens up there?
- Actually took a gap year before they were called a gap year.
- Oh really?
- I did. And then I went to UALR, and I just took an anthropology class on a whim and I didn't know what it was, but it sounded interesting and it was the only thing that interested me. So when I took every anthropology class there, I went up to Fayetteville, and finished my degree, and I stayed there for a master's as well.
- You know, I think that's so telling, most students, if you ask them when they're in high school to just give 'em a blank piece of paper, write down all the majors you can think of, they can only think of five or six.
- Right.
- In psychology, biology, chemistry, and they start running out of things. And then they go to college and they go, oh, there's 200 degrees I can choose from. And that's why there's so much, I think swirl among freshmen, they start running into classmates going, oh, I didn't know I could study film, or I could do whatever, or anthropology.
- Right, yeah. Much bigger world. My parents wanted me to go into accounting, but it just-
- My dad did too. He said, the world's always gonna need an accountant.
- Right.
- And actually, now maybe not. So what was your master's thesis on?
- We actually had an internship option-
- Oh, okay.
- at the University of Arkansas. And I did an internship in a medical examiner's office.
- Oh.
- Because I was really interested in forensic anthropology at that time.
- Was that a big deal at Arkansas?
- It caught the attention of people, but it wasn't a huge deal at the University of Arkansas.
- You wouldn't say they were known for that.
- No, they weren't known for that at all. But there was someone there who did forensic work and she was a mentor to me, and you know, took me on some cases.
- That's how that happens, right?
- It is.
- You meet someone and they say, hey, let me show you something. And next thing you know, you show back up again, and they say, well, she must be interested.
- Yes, that's exactly how it happened.
- Yeah, so, very good. So then, you're kind of hooked, right?
- Yes.
- And so, where's your doctoral program taking you?
- I went to the University of Tennessee in Knoxville.
- Yeah.
- Home of the first, as they say, body farm.
- First body farm there.
- Yes.
- And I remember hearing about that, because I was a criminal justice undergrad hearing about the body farm, which sounded so intriguing, but it's before the internet, so I really didn't understand what it was.
- Right.
- Explain a little bit what they're doing there at Tennessee.
- They call it the Anthropological Research Facility.
- It's probably safer.
- Yes, it is much safer, more clinical.
- ARF.
- ARF. Absolutely, I was just about to say that. So they call it ARF, and since the 1980s, early 1980s, people have been donating their bodies to the body farm. Really, it's a willed body donation program run through the University of Tennessee by the anthropology department. So, they know why they're donating because when bodies are placed out there, we're looking at lots of different things, but most famously, how long it takes for the body to decompose. And then other scientists come in and look at insects, you know, to estimate time since death. So there are a lot of body donations. I think they were up to about a hundred a year. And that leaves a lot of skeletons to study.
- And that's really the goal is, there's a criminal justice and investigation aspect. So when you find a body in the woods, one of the things you wanna do is like, when did this person pass away?
- Yes, when is the key thing.
- Yeah, time and date of death, so you can go back backwards, and there's a natural decomposition, but if you're in the wild, it's different from if you are in a house or something like that.
- Yes, it is.
- Yeah.
- Yes.
- I'm telling you something you don't already know.
- No, but let me-
- I'm just actually reasoning through it myself, what little I know, but that's what make it special, 'cause it's outside.
- It is outside, and people are familiar with donating their body to a medical school for dissection, but not as many people are familiar with donating for decomposition research. But there was a poll once at the University of Tennessee while I was there that asked people in the community, "What is the number one thing you think about when you think about the University of Tennessee?" Football was number one of course, but number two was the body farm.
- That's why you're so famous. Because eventually you get here. But, so how do you get to Texas State from there?
- Well, I graduated in 2006, and I postdoc there for a year.
- You know, that's 19 years ago.
- Yeah-
- I don't wanna remind you of that, but sometimes I forget like, 2006 just seems like yesterday, but-
- It really does. But yeah, almost 20 years ago. And I postdoc there for a year, and I worked on a project for the FBI, and then I got my first academic job in Florida at the University of West Florida.
- Okay.
- And back then, working in a medical examiner's office or working at a university were really the two choices now there's so much more you can do.
- Really?
- Yes, yes. So I got a job at Pensacola, Florida, and it was lovely. They had a great underwater archaeology program, but it wasn't a border state. I really wanted to work in a border state. And three months into the job, someone called me here, actually Michelle Hamilton from Texas State.
- Oh yeah.
- And she said, "Would you apply for a job here?" And I said, "Absolutely."
- She's very convincing, by the way.
- She is very convincing, yes.
- And so you applied here. And so when did you come to Texas State? I came in 2008.
- Okay, 2008.
- So right as things were really getting started.
- Tell me more about the body farm. People talk about it here locally, and I don't think they really understand it. And I think it is one of the signature things that kind of separates Texas State from other universities, and it really is kind of your baby, right?
- I would say that it really started before I got here. But yes, I think for all of the faculty here, we really appreciate this body farm. Some people think that maybe it should be called a ranch, since this is Texas, but it's never really caught on. The body farm in Tennessee or the ARF, is located near the hospital and it is surrounded on three sides by a parking lot.
- Okay.
- It is one and a half acres.
- So super small concentrated.
- It's really small and you have about a hundred donations set out at any time. So you don't have a lot of room to walk. Here in Texas, at Texas State, our body farm is 26 acres.
- Wow.
- So we really have a lot of space, and you know, that allows us to do different types of research-
- Sure.
- there, so there's-
- About where they're located and-
- Exactly, where they're located, we can put a lot, we can put some in the sun, we can put some in the shade, we can put some in water. We have water tanks out there. At Tennessee, you only have shade. I never saw a skeleton in my six years there even remotely turned white. You know, and the leaves fall every year, so they were usually stained a brown color. But here in Texas, the sun is so intense. You see these white, bleached out bones within six months.
- Wow.
- That's something I'd never see in Tennessee.
- It's unbelievable how quickly that happens though.
- Yes.
- Yeah.
- And that's why these research facilities are needed, because, people decompose in different environments.
- And that's the beauty of it. If you find a body in a certain situation, go back into the research archives and go, here's kind of the setting, temperature, and-
- Right.
- time of year,
- Right.
- and wet or dry, sunny or shade. And then based on that, say, well here's where you are. And actually there's- I had a colleague at University of Oklahoma, who actually had a different kind of approach to, not just looking at this, but with, I'm forgetting the term that was used.
- Entomology?
- Entomology, yeah.
- Yes, yes.
- Thank you.
- And entomology is really a more precise way to do it. Anthropologists can take you so far, but we can, we provide some pretty reliable estimates, but I would always go with entomology.
- So let's talk about what you've got going on here now, which is, I think probably has its roots in Tennessee, philosophically, but you probably, it's different in many ways, right?
- It's so different, it's so different. So, when I was at the University of Tennessee, taking a forensic anthropology class, we learned how to estimate the biological profile. How to tell where in the world somebody was from, how old they are, how tall they were, and interpret trauma and events surrounding death. And we were trained to write a really good report, you know, in our minds probably the lengthier the better, and give it over to law enforcement. Today, that has totally changed, with the advent of databases like the missing and unidentified person's database, forensic anthropologists take a bigger role in actually case management, and ensuring that cases don't fall through the crack and continue to be unidentified.
- Which was actually kinda interesting because we have a- We also have this cold case program that our students are starting to get involved with as well.
- Yes.
- Which, some of those cold cases were kind of traditional homicides, but some of them are found bodies as well.
- Absolutely.
- So talk about, what we're doing here at the Texas State body farm.
- So Operation Identification, is an initiative that I founded in 2013. And it was really because of the influx of migrants who were coming across the border from Central America. There was a big crisis, lots of gang violence and you have a lot of people migrating over here, and as a result you have a lot of deaths. And I heard about this one county in particular, Brooks County, which has a border patrol checkpoint, which many people try to evade, as they travel north, continuing to Houston. And I heard that they were burying all of the people. One year they had 60 unidentified deaths, the next year it was 130, so that's a big boom.
- Wow.
- And I heard that they were burying people and not taking DNA samples, not taking fingerprints, not keeping track of where they buried people. And essentially they were ensuring that, that person would never be identified.
- Yeah.
- And that really caught my attention. So, I wanted to help with this matter, and I'm pretty naive in a lot of things. So, some of my colleagues and I went down there and offered to help and, you know, it's 2025 and we're still doing this work.
- Wow.
- Not necessarily in- We're still working in Brooks County, but we're working in a lot of other counties that were functioning like Brooks County.
- Yeah, can you imagine knowing that your family member left and then never hearing from 'em again. That's gotta be tragic. And so, for you to be helping them find out the end of the story, if there was an end of the story.
- Right, they live in ambiguous loss. Every day, they don't know what happened.
- You don't know. Not knowing, it's almost worse than knowing
- It is. I think it is based on families that I've spoken with. So every day is almost like torture for them. So we give them answers through working with a lot of collaborators, and lots of people in the community, and it's not what they wanna hear, but they know. They know what happened and now they're gonna get the remains of their loved one back. They're gonna be able to have a burial, and go and visit, and bring flowers.
- Do they repatriate the body too, taking it back to the home country sometimes?
- Yes, absolutely. We work with consulates, and we ensure repatriation back to the country of origin. We work with the justice of the peace, the funeral homes, a variety of people are involved in this process.
- It's really interesting.
- Yes. And the consulates will typically pay for it.
- Oh is that right?
- If it's going out of country, yeah.
- It's part of the world that I don't know much about, for sure.
- Right.
- So we do everything from start to finish. You know, we usually, we go into counties, they don't even ask us to come in, but we know that we need to come in, and we start working within the county and they're usually pretty welcoming to us.
- So are you creating a database based on remains and then someone comes forward and says, hey, I'm missing someone, and then you're trying to make a connection?
- Yes. So fortunately, we didn't have to make the database. There already is a national database, called the National Unidentified and Missing Person System. It's been around since about 2008. And so, every skeleton that's unidentified that we are involved with, we put all the information that we have into NamUs, we wash all of the personal effects, we have a forensic washing machine, and then we photo them and upload 'em to NamUs. And it's usually the personal effects that they recognize. And they call, and then that kicks off a DNA comparison, and then we'd get an identification.
- Now are students involved in this?
- 100% they are. So, I employ student as master's and Ph.D. level assistants to work in the lab. I employ some undergraduates, but we have volunteers from undergraduate to graduate. And so, what I think is really important is that they get to see every aspect of this.
- Yeah.
- I take them with me to go into counties to introduce myself and to talk about what we do. I take 'em to do geophysical surveys, cemeteries, and to exhume, you know, lots of volunteers to go and do exhumations. And right now we've been trained by the FBI how to take fingerprints from decomposing bodies.
- Oh, interesting.
- And that has upped our identification rate considerably. But students are involved in all aspects. So from start to finish. And I think that's why we are the most unique program, in the country, not only, we just have a huge Forensic Anthropology Center, but our students are learning more than just how to write a report. They're going out, and they're working in a humanitarian context. Globally there's a lot of migration, and there's a lot of death. And they're gonna be able to take these skills and go work anywhere in the world, and apply them.
- It's really interesting. You mentioned fingerprints, because I think people are fast forwarding to DNA and DNA is is becoming a little bit more ubiquitous. But, fingerprints is the old fashioned system. It still works, right? And we have a much larger database to compare things to.
- Yes, fingerprints are the best way to go. They're the quickest way to resolve an identification and the quickest way to get somebody home to their loved ones.
- Yeah.
- And as an anthropologist, we are not trained in fingerprints. Nobody said the word fingerprint when I was in school, and I had the FBI latent print analyst, he is really a go-getter contact me and said, "I know what you're doing and I would like to come and train you to take fingerprints." And I was like, "Well, are we gonna be able to take fingerprints? We're dealing with skeletons and really decomposed people." And he said, "Yes, you can do it from decomposed people." And it's more work, it's a little bit more effort, but you can get a result in hours.
- It's interesting 'cause in the olden days you'd get a fingerprint, and then you'd have to go through a file cabinet of pictures and try to figure things out. And they've computerized in such a way, the technology is such is that, you can put a fingerprint into a database-
- Yes.
- and the computer can find the match.
- Absolutely. We send off our fingerprints to Brian at the FBI, and he runs them through, you know, all of the US databases including DHS databases. And then, they're also run through foreign government fingerprint databases as well. So sometimes-
- Oh, that's interesting.
- Yes, the FBI can get you into a much wider, cast a wider net on the fingerprints. So sometimes we have an ID within an hour, you know, at most, it's been a couple of days.
- So, you've got these great programs and I love it because our students are learning something that's gonna be very practical. I think one of the hallmarks of Texas State is our faculty are not just interested in what happens in the classroom but outside the classroom as well. But let's talk about what happens in the classroom, because I think a lot of our students also learn a lot there. And you're teaching a really unique curriculum here that is not available at very many universities. And tell us a little bit more about some of the classes you're teaching.
- I teach the skeletal methods class, which is, basically forensic anthropology analysis, bio archeological analysis. There's two classes at the master's level, one class at the Ph.D. This semester I'm teaching the Ph.D. level class. And so, you know, one of the things also about the body farm that we have here, we have all of these skeletons at our disposal of known age, known sex, you know, have all different types of traumas so we can use those in our classrooms as well. So this is hugely beneficial to our students. Most people don't have this resource. And when you go to school at a place that has this resource, you wanna teach at a place that has this resource. Why Texas State was a big draw for me. So, we're learning everything forensic anthropology in that class. I'm trying to train them to be the next generation of forensic anthropologists. And then I teach the biological anthropology theory class for Ph.D. students. I love theory, I love data analysis. I like to sit in my office and just take data, and run a lot of statistical programs. I don't get to do that as much these days, but that is one of my favorite things. So, in that class I teach Ph.D. students theory and method on how to write up, basically their dissertation proposal.
- That's awesome.
- And then I teach a research design class for master's students that I love, and really kind of guide them through the process of writing a thesis proposal.
- So what would be a typical master's thesis proposal or project for your students, or dissertation?
- One of my master's students, Daniela, she is writing, she's doing an ethnographic project. So she's working with both me and our cultural anthropologist, and she's trying to figure out why people, or why law enforcement, and county officials in Maverick County are not taking fingerprints, when that is the easiest thing they could do. They don't do it. I'm just gonna say the law enforcement refuses to do it. Part of the Border Patrol will do it, but why aren't they doing this, when this could really improve identification rates and repatriation rates? And I have another master's student who is working on something called the structural vulnerability profile. There's lots of forensic anthropologists say, that we need to incorporate signs of stress markers in our forensic anthropology analysis, because that is gonna be helpful in casting a wider net looking for them. And I think that sounds like a great idea, but no one's ever tested whether or not those are associated with vulnerability. So I have a student right now testing that, is this really something that is useful? Are these biomarkers really associated with vulnerability?
- One of the things as you know, we're looking towards is, in addition to focusing on student success, about becoming a Research 1 or Tier 1 university, depending on how, who you're talking to. And can you talk a little bit about what it means for a faculty member like you to be at a Research 1 university?
- So being at a Research 1 institution, R1 institution, really helps recruit students. Especially for the Ph.D. students, they're looking for an R1 institution and it helps recruit and retain faculty as well.
- We tend to recruit from R1 institutions. They want to come to schools, that are like the place they left, right?
- Yes.
- Yeah. And so that helps with recruiting great students, but also great faculty.
- Great faculty as well.
- And retaining them, yeah.
- Yes. And yes, retaining students and faculty is very important.
- We talk about retaining students all the time, but we don't talk enough about retaining our faculty.
- Yes, retaining faculty is important. And the research support as well. So, with R1 comes more of an infrastructure for doing research and getting that support we need to do the research.
- I don't think people who are at a Research 1 university understand that being R1 means you have a lot of people who are doing research that's funded by the federal government. There's a lot of conversation right now about, you know, how much federal money gets spent on research. But to do the kind of research we need to do, it has to be funded somehow.
- Yes.
- And writing those grants, there's some art to it, there's some science to it, but there's just some practical stuff like how do I upload it into the-
- Yes.
- Into the whatever technology it takes to accept it. How do you manage a grant when you get it? How do you hire people? How do you expend the funds? How do you get a grant renewal? How do you write a grant report at the end? How do you get the next grant? All those things that takes support, right?
- Absolutely, so I really like writing grants. I took a writing class twice during my Ph.D. because it helped me finish my dissertation, but it also taught me a lot about writing.
- Yeah.
- So I really enjoy writing grants, but when you want me to do my own budget, or if I had to upload it, I would not know how to do anything. So I am always very grateful for the people here that do that for me. And I think it is always a team effort.
- What's your favorite thing about being at Texas State University?
- I really like Texas State University a lot. I wanted to come to a university in Texas, after I got my job in Florida. And I couldn't think of a better place than Texas State because of the resources it offers for forensic anthropologists.
- Yeah.
- I love that. But I also love the students, and the faculty, and the community.
- I think we're different because of that, the kind of students that want to come here.
- Yes.
- The faculty, therefore are attracted to those kind of students. And if you're like-minded, it's like you wanna be with people who are like you.
- Yes.
- And so, many of our faculty, like you could go anywhere else, but I think when they come here and say, oh, I'm a lot like these people here.
- [Kate] Yes.
- Because they're attracted to the mission, which is not just a sole focus on research for the sake of research, but research that means something and also how we can get our students involved with research.
- Absolutely. Students are always involved. I write 'em into the grants, we get 'em working on things, and get 'em publications.
- What I like to do, is ask our guests to become the host of the podcast. As I'm answering the question, you might get ready to answer it yourself, 'cause sometimes they apply to you as well, so I'd like to hear what you think.
- Okay, so I'm Kate Spradley asking the question here.
- Welcome to your podcast.
- Thank you. So this question is, what's the one thing that always reminds you of home?
- Oh my goodness gracious. So, for me, home is Canada. And you know, for some reason my mom thought breakfast was the most important meal of the day. And our lives were kind of oriented around that. And so, we would get up in the morning and we grew up, I grew up in the trailer court, and so the trailer court was always cold or the trailer we lived in, it was always cold. And I remember getting out and getting over the- Like my dad would turn the heat down at night, and he would turn on in the morning, and getting over the register with my T-shirt and have the warm air blow on me. And so, sometimes just smelling the furnace will trigger a memory of, and I'll go back to huddling over that. But then, we'd go to the kitchen and mom would make breakfast. And for us, it was almost always like oatmeal, or blueberry pancakes, or pancakes, but we had wild blueberries out there, so we'd go pick blueberries and if we were lucky, she still had some leftovers, she'd throw 'em in the pancakes. And so for me, whenever I go to- I love to go to diners, and having a blueberry pancake, I think of my mom every time. So it brings back a lot of great memories. What about you? What's a great memory for you?
- I would say the thing for me is, watching the leaves change colors.
- Yeah.
- So I grew up in Little Rock, but I was- My dad had some property near a river, and we spent almost every weekend just out in the woods, you know, sleeping in the back of the truck. We would always go there in the fall. And the leaves were so beautiful. And, I don't see that very much around here.
- You don't, you don't. But you know, up towards the Ozarks, and up towards northwest Arkansas, it's some of the most beautiful parts of the entire country. People don't realize, people think you gotta go to the northeast to see the leaves change. But that area, Springdale-
- Springdale, Fayetteville, it's all, it's so beautiful. And that, just seeing leaves change colors reminds me of home and just, you know, good memories.
- Well, thanks for sharing that memory, it's awesome to hear that from you. And thank you all for joining us here on "The Current", where we get an opportunity to learn about what's happening at Texas State, by talking to faculty, staff, students, and alumni, and friends of the university. Can't wait to have you back for the next edition of "The Current", and until then, States Up everyone.