Bass has also described the body farm as "Death's Acre" – the title of the book on his life and career, co-written with journalist Jon Jefferson.

[4] Bass attended Hampden-Sydney College before transferring his junior year to the University of Virginia for his undergraduate degree in psychology, which he received in 1951, and was a scholar at the US Army Medical Research Laboratory from 1953 to 1954, where he studied psychophysiology.

His research career began as an archaeologist, excavating Native American grave sites in the Midwestern United States during the latter 1950s and 1960s.

[4] Bass first got the idea for what would eventually become the body farm while he was at the University of Kansas in the 1960s, and was asked if it was possible to determine the time of death of a partially decomposed cow.

He determined that additional research was need for this, and suggested that this could be accomplished by allowing a deceased cow to decompose in a field while studying the process.

[6] While this experiment was never conducted, Bass further realized that additional research on human decomposition was needed after he was summoned in December 1977 to examine what was initially assumed to be a recent murder victim that had been buried on top of the grave of a Confederate soldier in Franklin, Tennessee who had been killed at the Battle of Nashville in 1864.

His research has formed the basis of techniques used by medical examiners, forensic pathologists, homicide detectives, and other law enforcement personnel in postmortem investigations.

[10] He has investigated multiple high-profile cases, including the 1983 Benton fireworks disaster,[11] the Tri-State Crematory scandal,[12] and the 2007 exhumation and autopsy of The Big Bopper, in which he determined the cause of death, which had not been confirmed initially.