Episode #4 - Homicide

In this episode, we take a look at homicide.  An unimaginable concept that many people have had to suffer through in their lives.   We'll be taking you back to a project we did in 2013, involving a domestic dispute that ended in the bludgeoning death of a woman in her early forties.   Some of the content of this episode may be disturbing, so please tale due consideration prior to listening.  

Transcript

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Hello and welcome back to After the Tape, True Crime Scene Cleanup, the podcast where we dive into stories and perspectives that often go unnoticed. Today we're talking about one of the most difficult but essential aspects of a homicide investigation, the crime scene cleanup. We're going to take a quick look at the psychological toll it has on the families and friends and how the workers who do this work are also affected. It's a subject that most people don't really want to talk about or don't even want to think about, but it's an important one and it's an important one to understand. Now, when a violent crime happens, whether it's a suicide, a homicide, an accident, the police and the detectives initially take over the investigation of the scene. They're going to process the scene, collect the evidence, and try to uncover what actually happened. But after that initial work is done, what happens next is what we do, the crime scene cleanup. Like I said earlier, crime scene cleanup's not a job that many people talk about or really even think about. But it's essential for restoring a sense of normalcy to homes or to businesses that are impacted by these tragedies. So today let's break down what happens during the cleanup of a homicide. Who's involved and what it means for everyone from the victim's family to the workers actually handling the aftermath. After a homicide occurs, it's often a bloody and violent scene. Law enforcement officers and forensic teams process the area. They document evidence, ensuring everything's preserved for the investigation. But once they've completed their work, someone has to clean up the remains of the scene. That's where the crime scene cleaners come in. Now, for the families who are left behind, this is an unimaginable burden. I mean imagine losing a loved one to a violent act and then having the reality of cleaning up their blood and personal items from the very place where their life was actually taken. The definition of homicide is the taking of a human life by another human being. This can happen between strangers, it can happen between family members, it can happen between a husband and a wife. There are lots of different reasons why homicides occur. It can be a botched burglary. It can be revenge. It can be a crime of passion. Over the years, we've done so many homicides I can't even tell you. Now, understand that homicide is probably one of the least type of scenes we actually do have to clean up. If asked, I'd have to say the number one cleanup that we do is called unattended death. That was in our last podcast, number three, if you want to go back and take a listen to that. Number two is probably suicide. And then the bottom of the list is homicide, believe it or not. You might think living in New York City that that would be one of the number one types of scenes that we process, but it really isn't. As a crime scene cleaner, it's not our job to do any kind of an investigation. But while we're at the scene, while we're cleaning up, if we do run into anything that does look like evidence, possibly a knife or a gun that was not discovered by the police or shell casings, we immediately have to shut down the job, contact the police and give them the opportunity to come back in to collect what might be crucial evidence that they might need to use for this case. I'm going to talk about a specific homicide that we handled. I'm going to take it way back, way back when, 2015. I think when I first really started doing this, we were called in on, unfortunately, a crime of passion. This was a situation where the husband had bludgeoned his wife to death after evidently finding text messages to another man. Understand that the information that we get about what actually happened is usually secondhand. Sometimes the police are still on the scene and they'll tell us a little bit about what they know. But believe it or not, when you walk into a homicide or any crime scene, just looking around, You can kind of tell what happened if you really take the time to think about it. And I want to tell you a little bit about this one. It was a little bit disturbing, as all of these are, obviously. But as I go through this story, you'll start to understand why it affected me. First things first, this was a family with children. So we're called in, and by the time we arrive, the mother had been killed. The father is now in custody and the surviving family members are left with an unimaginable processing task here. What do we do? Who's going to take over for the kids? What's going to happen with the house? We have to make funeral plans. I mean, this is stuff that you just get thrown into that there's no way that you could possibly know how to handle this from the outset. So immediately, part of what we have to do is offer whatever kind of advice we can, which sometimes is very limited, obviously. You know, I've never been in this situation myself. I've cleaned these situations. I've dealt with the families. But it's not the same when it happens to you. So one of the things you can never say to somebody is, I understand. Because you don't, unless it's actually happened to you. As with any kind of crime scene, whether it's a homicide or a suicide or an industrial accident, the first thing we have to do is a hazard assessment. We have to walk into the scene, take a look what happened, and figure out how we start to clean, how we continue to clean, and how we finish the job to make sure everything is safe for reoccupancy. Now, in this particular case, the husband bludgeoned the wife to death, which is really... Just an unimaginable footprint in the rooms where it happened. It happened in several rooms and you could see where it started, you could see where a chase ensued, you could see where the victim was actually trying to hide. Very, very difficult to see for me actually and I'll explain in a little bit why. But you also have to remember that the police had also been there to process the scene and sometimes They'll go in, they'll open drawers, they'll close drawers. So you can't take for granted that the scene that you're looking at is exactly how it was when it all ended. The minute I walked into the area where everything had basically finished up, where the decedent had laid where they found her, the first thing I'm seeing is pictures on the the dressers and on the nightstands of a happy couple probably on a vacation somewhere with drinks with little umbrellas coming out of them and the first thing that goes through my mind is man what happened you know here is this couple that just they look so happy they look like any couple any of your friends any of your relatives and it it came to this where someone was actually beaten to death it's it's almost impossible to imagine I don't like to imagine what happened in situations like this. But unfortunately, to do our job the right way, we kind of have to. This was a murder involving a bat being the murder weapon. So with every swing of the bat, blood is going to spatter. So it's not just going to be on the floor where the person had finally passed away. it's going to be on the walls, the floors, the contents, the ceilings. So you really need to think about what happened in order to properly assess a scene and make sure that you're getting everything cleaned the way it should be. Like I said earlier, this happened in several rooms. It looks like it began in the kitchen. It continued into the hallway and then finally ended in the bedroom. And I remember I could follow footsteps. I could follow the spatter patterns. And once I got into the bedroom, what really got to me, it still gets to me if I think about it, is I could see that the wife had actually tried to hide under the bed from the husband while this attack was going on. And she was then possibly dragged out. And I remember moving the bed and seeing the scene and standing there for a few minutes and just trying to put it out of my mind. the best that I could because at some point you have to just let that kind of transference go because you have to do your job. You can't just sit there and imagine what happened over and over. You would never be able to do this job if that's what you did. So you have to disassociate and then really begin the work. The first thing you have to remember is the rules of cross-contamination. You need to make sure that you're not stepping in an area where there is blood or bodily fluids and then walking into another unaffected area, bringing those blood spatter patterns and bodily fluids with you into another room. One of the difficult parts of this job was it was a textured ceiling in the bedroom or what they call a popcorn ceiling. This is not something you can simply use a rag or a sponge to clean you actually have to scrape the texture off the ceiling prior to actually cleaning the sheetrock that's beneath it now that presents a problem of its own because once you start scraping a ceiling it's going to be falling down onto the floor or whatever is beneath you onto your ladder so you're going to have to clean the area where you're gonna set your ladder up first, then you're gonna have to cover that area, put your ladder down, go up, start to scrape the ceiling, and then re-clean the floor a second time. So this is why some of these scenes can take maybe a full day or possibly several days to really get everything done. So once all the bulk material was scraped and the ceiling was scraped and cleaned, The bedroom did have a wood floor and unfortunately blood and bodily fluids had compromised the wood floor, which they often do. Which means you have to literally cut up the affected areas of the wood floor in order to access and decontaminate the subfloor below, which is what we had to do in this case as well. The other unfortunate thing that we had to do was actually go through some of the drawers in the dressers and the nightstands. And it's a good thing that we did because we opened up one of the drawers and when we did, we did find blood and fluids in the drawer as well, which probably means that one of the detectives on the scene had either opened the drawer and closed it inadvertently or was looking for evidence. So like I said, you can't take for granted that the scene that you're looking at is exactly how everything was. when the police left. You have to do your own investigation to make sure that you get everything. I mean imagine somebody coming back into the house opening up a drawer and finding blood in the drawer that we missed. It's not something you ever ever want to think about. Now while you're working a scene like this as the owner of the company or a project manager on the scene, one of the things you need to do is continually check on the other workers that are involved in the cleanup. Don't forget that this kind of scene, it's one thing to see it in the movies, it's another thing when it's real life and you need to make sure that the people who are working the scene are okay with it. You need to pull them aside, Take them out for a break. Ask them how they're doing. Is everything okay? Do they need more time? It's a very important part of what we do because this can take a real psychological toll on anyone, especially when it's a violent crime like a homicide. You know, to an extent, over the years, you can become somewhat desensitized to these scenes because you really have to be in order to do it. But it's never 100%. There is always... a scene or times where you walk into an area and it specifically affects you more than something you may have done two days ago. One of the other things that happens with homicides specifically are they are typically what we call a high profile scene. News and journalists will be on the scene when we arrive and a lot of times They want to get into the scene. They want to know what happened so they can have the story, which, I don't know, to me just is a little bit ghoulish. But I understand that they have to report the scene. But we will never let journalists into the scene. The privacy of our clients is paramount in any crime scene that we handle. Don't forget, when we're working these scenes, we are in full personal protective gear. We're in a disposable Tyvek suit, which is usually made of a non-breathable plastic. It has to be splash-proof, obviously, because we're dealing with fluids. We're wearing full-face respirators, double gloves, shoe covers, and it gets hot in these suits. So we'll have to change these suits two, sometimes three times during work. remediation process and don't forget that toll that it takes on your body that labor breathing through a mask and just heat stress on top of this emotional scene so after dodging the media wearing this tyvek suit cleaning up the scene and getting it safe for reoccupancy once everything's done We have to do a final walkthrough and make sure that we got everything. Now, we use things like black lights and indicators that are a very high powered hydrogen peroxide to show us if there's anything remaining when we're done now black lights are a little bit deceiving because they don't just show bodily fluids like blood it can show mucus saliva semen so what you see with a black light may not be something that was directly affected to the homicide itself but at the same time you don't know so if you do see something with a black light you should definitely clean it up regardless of what it is. Once we're done with our walkthrough and we're confident that we can sign off and say that the area is safe for reoccupancy, we need to take our red boxes, get them into the truck, and head back to the warehouse to end the day. Now the red boxes are where any of the affected material is disposed of. Those red boxes have to be taken to a specific facility and incinerated. That is part of the rules of regulated medical waste. So don't forget, once we're done cleaning the scene and we're back to the warehouse, the job is not 100% over for us. There's still some final things that we have to do to adhere to state and federal regulations of regulated medical waste and disposal. So at the end of the day, after we get back to the warehouse, we go home to our families. We shower, we eat dinner, and we finish our day. So it's not just a typical job where you come home, you talk about what you did during your day. You need to separate what you did during the day and not take it home with you because if you do, it can start to become a problem. In my tenure of doing this, only once or twice has anything really affected me to the point where it affected somebody else in my family. I regret that, but sometimes it's unavoidable. So what I want you to take with you after listening to this episode is... You know, you'll see on the news that there was a homicide, whether it was around the corner or in the city or across the country. And, you know, you hear about it and then the next story comes on and you change the channel. Just remember that there's much more to what happens after you see this news story, what I just went through in this entire episode, that has to happen in just about every single homicide that you hear about. So, thanks again for listening. If you like what you heard on this episode, please feel free to subscribe or leave us a nice five-star review. If you have something you want to tell us, please hit us up on Instagram at AfterTheTapePodcast. Remember, Every day you wake up is another day that's given to you, so make it count. Until next time, stay safe, stay curious, check in on your loved ones, and don't forget what happens after the tape.