Placing the time of death is very important in homicide investigations and in identifying decayed remains. Yet the exact measure of time of death has challenged people for the past 2000 years. The former editor of Science Digest, Jessica Snyder Sachs is a freelance science and health writer. In her book, Ã'CorpseÃ", Sachs details the intricacies of human decay as it relates to deducing a time of death from a corpse.