In the middle of a July heat wave, a circle of students knelt around a hole in the ground in a partly shaded grove at George Mason University, digging for dead bodies. While gnats clung to their sweat, Amanda Guszak and her classmates filled five-gallon drums with discarded soil. Their professors, former crime scene investigators in Prince William County, broke the tedium with stories about their days on the police force — the time one exhumed the soupy graveyard remains of a puppy mill or the homicide scenes they worked with vultures circling overhead. Read full article >>