Now For Something Really Gross...

Whenever I tell people I've worked on homicide cases in the past, I'm often asked if I've seen some particularly gruesome crime scenes. I suppose it's just human nature to see just how far we can handle gross disgusting things before we break, who knows.

One particular case comes to mind though and I've shared this with many friends before so I thought I'd share this with the rest of you! :)

It was a Saturday and I had just gone to my first homicide scene and autopsy. While at the autopsy (which was very interesting by the way) I happened to comment that it wasn't as bad as I thought it was going to be. "Well at least it wasn't a stinker," I said. A stinker is a body that's been decomposing for a while. If you've never smelled a decomposing body before (most people haven't), believe me... you'd never forget that smell.

The evidence technician on the case who had brought me to this crime scene and autopsy quickly said, "You shouldn't have said that. Usually once that's mentioned, that's the next case you'll work on." "Yeah right," I said totally thinking he was just kidding.

On Monday when I reported for work at the crime lab, the evidence tech from my first homicide scene started in on me... "You just HAD to say it didn't you? Do you know what kind of scene I had to work on yesterday? You're coming with me to the autopsy!"

"What are you talking about?" I asked.

"Just get in the van. We're going to the morgue," he said.

At the morgue, I saw a refrigerator that was found at the crime scene on Sunday. Inside the refrigerator was a body. Now normally if a body is inside something, it's removed and just the body would be transported to the morgue. Not in this case. It was easier to move the whole refrigerator than to remove the body. The refrigerator had been unplugged and sealed with duct tape and left in the backyard of a house in the hot San Diego sun for over two weeks. Neighbors had been smelling something awful and finally called the police to investigate two weeks later.

Well, we lifted the refrigerator onto the examination table and opened the door. Inside was the decomposed body of a caucasian man, but you'd never would have known that because he wasn't white any more. He was more like brownish and greenish in color. Well, we literally "poured" out his body onto the table because he was so decomposed. He was covered in body fluids. The smell was terrible. I had been wearing scrubs and a mask at the autopsy to help lower the smell, but it didn't help. I was gagging.

After the autopsy, we loaded the refrigerator onto a flatbed truck so we could transport it back to the police departement for processing of prints. The clothing of the man (now soaked in body fluids) was placed into bags and we put that inside our van for transport back to the lab. All clothing is collected from bodies for examination at the crime lab, including this one. The smell was just awful as we took the 20 minute drive back to the PD.

After I got home, I jumped in the shower. It didn't help. My wife said I smelled of that body for several days even after I tried shower after shower. I almost quit the program after that autopsy, but was convinced that if I could handle that, I could handle anything.

Now that in itself would be a great story, but it doesn't end there. About a year and a half later, while working now for the District Attorney's office, I was given a case file for a case about a man who was up for murder. After looking closely at the photos of the autopsy, I told my supervisor that I could not work on the case. "Why not?" he asked. So I told him I was at the autopsy of the case and could be called as a potential witness on it. He reassigned it to another tech.

It took a year and a half to get that case to trial. It turned out that the person who murdered the "refrigerator man" was the gay roommate of the man. They were both in the Navy and we had to wait for the accused man to come back from his six month deployment at sea before placing him in custody. Besides, it takes time to work on a case and of course to prepare the case for trial.

We had found a print on the sticky part of the duct tape that was used to seal the refrigerator linking him to the crime. Unless you were the guy who sealed the refrigerator with the tape, how would your prints be found on the inside sticky part of the tape? A purple dye called Gentian Violet was used to process the tape. It turns fingerprints purple. So forensic science was totally responsible for sending him to prison.

I believe this case was mentioned on one of the forensic science shows on TV.

Cool, huh? :)