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Crime scene cleaners
It's a dirty job, but they want to do it.
By Hank Hyena
WHO ARE YOU going to call?
When a homicidal maniac's shotgun blasts a victim's flesh on walls and windows? When a sickly suicidal fillets his arteries in bed, drowning mattress and carpet in hemoglobin laced with hepatitis? When a weird recluse expires and decomposes for two weeks in a disheveled dwelling that's waist-deep in fetid debris and the feces of nine generations of cats?
Who are you going to call? Who is willing to shovel and scrub up the macabre and pungent chunks and fluids of violent death? Who is ready to do the dirtiest, unhealthiest, most repulsive tasks on earth?
Crime Scene Cleaners! This fearless sanitizing squad – armed with sturdy solvents, helmeted in full-face filter respirators, costumed in white nonporous disposable suits – doesn't gag when bagging up the grossest viscera imaginable. Rotting flesh, blobs of brain matter, and gallons of gooey mahogany turds can't nauseate these strong-stomached stalwarts who are, ironically, headquartered in the leafy, antiseptic Contra Costa village of Orinda.
With its informative Web site at www.crimescenecleaners.com, an 800 number, and a guarantee of 24-hour service, seven days a week, Crime Scene Cleaners has turned horror into a business. It serves law enforcement agencies, businesses, and private individuals, even offering special deals on hard-to-clean messes like methamphetamine labs and hantavirus-infested homes. And its staff are artists, too: Crime Scene Cleaners employees exhibited some of their photographs in a slide show laced with dark humor and morbid flair.
Horrible sights that would make an average person upchuck uncontrollably are just part of the mundane daily routine to Neal Smithers, Wayne O'Donnell, and Matt Jones, the current Crime Scene Cleaners tough-tummied trio.
"Gore sells," explains entrepreneurial Smithers, the witty whiz-kid owner who has franchised his bloody business to nine other cities in the United States, with an additional six in negotiations. "We play on fear." Smithers brazenly promotes his scrub-the-blood service with large crimson letters splashed on his white trucks; he also distributes a monthly average of 800 free Crime Scene Cleaners T-shirts to the fascinated public. His marketing plan has steadily pulsed with success: Hustler, Spin, Harper's, Evening Magazine, the SFChronicle, CNN, and NPR have featured his company's gritty activities, and a documentary film, Crime Scene Cleaners: Neal Smithers, has toured extensively, winning a Newport Film Festival award for best documentary.
What's the job like? Gross, nauseating, depressing? Smithers seems stupefied by the public's wimpy reaction to his necrotic vocation. "Emotionally, I don't have a problem with this work at all. Human tragedy? I swim in this crap; it doesn't bother me, and I've been doing it every day for four years." OK, tough guy, it's your business – but what about your employees? Are they thinner-skinned? "Yeah, they do find it stressful," he admits. "Most of them burn out after eight months. They have to be on call 24 hours a day, and then they suddenly need to clean up a huge mess calmly and efficiently while simultaneously dealing with a mom and dad that are crying over their son Johnny who just blew his brains out in the bedroom."
Eee-yuck! Brains splattered everywhere – how do you clean that? "Brain dries like cement," the Crime Scene Cleaners tycoon sighs. "Solidifies like superglue. We use putty knives to knock down the high parts, then firm-bristled brushes to scrub it. If that doesn't work, we bring in a giant truck-mounted steam-injection machine that melts the dried brains and blood and sucks it up into a chemical treatment tank. And if a carpet is too gore-soaked to save, we cut out the stained chunks with razor blades."
The muscular Smithers and his two well-built employees emphasize that death cleanup requires massive elbow grease and physical energy. "It's depressing to start a rough job where you're scrubbing up dried blood for five hours, but we have to do it as quickly as possible for our clients," Smithers explains. "Last month we cleaned up a murder-suicide in Union City, after a guy used a shotgun on his wife and himself. He totaled two different bedrooms, and he ruined all the furniture. Cleaning it required moving three truckloads of waste and seven hours of scrubbing – it was one of the most exhausting jobs I've ever done."
A tidy man who is teased by his employees for being a "neat freak," Smithers found himself miserably unemployed at the age of 29 when the local mortgage banking business he worked for got downsized. After tentatively deciding to become a mortician ("it seemed like a job with great security"), he experienced an occupational epiphany while viewing Pulp Fiction on June 2, 1996. "After Travolta and Jackson wasted the dude in the car, they brought in 'the Wolf,' played by Harvey Keitel, who cleaned up the mess, and I realized, that's it! That's what I'll do! I started soon after that, working out of my El Sobrante home with just Simple Green and a scrub brush. I did the first 700 jobs by myself." Smithers believed that he could compete because "frankly, the competition didn't know how to do marketing. I hit the pavement hard, talking death. I bought lots of addresses, and I mailed out trifolds to any business that might have a bloody problem someday."
Regulation passed by the Medical Waste Management Act of 1988 forbids cleanup of bodily fluids to anyone unregistered by the state, owing to concerns about infectious diseases like AIDS (which dies in three to six hours) and hepatitis A, B, and C (airborne, they're nearly immortal). The legislation forced hospitality and service industries to scramble for scouring help when emergencies occurred on their premises; Crime Scene Cleaners has subsequently mopped up contracts with many big clients (who insist on keeping their identities secret). Many of these corporate octopi have already relieved their panic by dialing Crime Scene Cleaner's 800 number: a prominent hotel chain called when a beserk lodger pummeled his dad with a baseball bat; a transportation giant rang when a woman was crushed and killed by their train; a major airline gasped for help when a passenger lost control of his sphincter on a flight – after defiling his economy seat, he dashed through the kitchen, dripping "raw waste."
"We guarantee a two-hour arrival time," Smithers explains. "Plus 100 percent satisfaction. If clients smell something after we clean, we'll go in and 'bomb' it with disinfectants again, even though the customer was probably just being psychosomatic."
Crime Scene Cleaners' flyer offers a plethora of reassuring phrases: "code compliant," "approved HazMat technique," "a Certificate of Fitness can be obtained," "distressed property rehabilitation," etc. Beyond the mere removal of carnage by the "staff hygienists" (the gnarly dudes in the trucks), Crime Scene Cleaners additionally supplies free, unlimited grief counseling to its customers, plus legal advice. The result of the company's spotless service and relentless marketing is a total of more than 400 local and more than 1,500 national jobs in the last year, with services supplied to customers at a cost that they claim is 30 to 40 percent below any competitor.
Smithers explains that his price tag for cleaning up a mortal mess "depends on severity. It's more gruesomely tedious to repaint a room that has blood showered on the ceiling from a gun blast than it is to simply wash out a bathtub." Generally his bill runs from $100 to $575. A peculiarly ghastly budget item is the expense of burning gore in Oakland's medical waste incinerator: although it costs only $3 to $7 a pound to inflame bloody gunk, the oven operators demand an accumulated minimum of 100 pounds. To accommodate this requirement, Crime Scene Cleaners needs to store its butchered scraps and soaked couch pads under ice in its Richmond warehouse until it reaches the centennial total.
Smithers doesn't clean anymore; he just sells the business all day while keeping in touch via cell phone with mustachioed O'Donnell (age 42) and husky Jones (22), who sop up the detritus in the field. Although the average work life of a cleaner is short, Crime Scene Cleaners has never had any trouble luring in applications. "I get a ton of dirtbags and freaks asking for work," Smithers growls. "Once I caught a wanna-be-Dracula dude that I hired stealing bloody stuff from sites out of the trucks for his perverted collection." When he interviews potential employees, Smithers exhibits a photo scrapbook documenting past cleaning excursions to weed out the "pukers"; if they blanch examining this, they're obviously going to barf up some sandwiches on the job.
After studying the scrapbook for two hours, this reporter was plagued for a month with nightmares about the massacres he had viewed. Smithers pressed me to visit an actual blood site, calling me almost daily to urge me to drive quickly to a double suicide in Oakland or a triple homicide in San Jose or a local prison where "some nutcase ripped off his scabs and wrote in blood on the walls," but I consistently demurred because my present insomnia is disabling enough. I saw images in the scrapbook that I wish I could forget, like 90 percent of a human brain resting on a linoleum bathroom floor while the remainder clung to the shower curtain above it. "An old guy in Belmont put a 30/30 hunting rifle to his head," Smithers yawned. "The energy exploded his skull, and his noggin popped out. I feel sorry for his wife, who walked in and found this."
Sixty percent of Crime Scene Cleaners' business is suicide, Smithers informs me, with the highest demographic being men in their late 30s and early 40s who snuff themselves with a gunshot or a wrist slashing. But, he adds, "There's always also old people, sick people, and alone people." An additional 33 to 37 percent are accidents, with homicide accounting for the final 3 to 7 percent.
The harrowing scrapbook includes many high-profile events that garnered copious ink in the regional dailies. The June 21 San Leandro sausage massacre, during which three federal and state meat inspectors were slaughtered by the ballistic owner of the Santos Linguisa factory, is a recent entry in the Crime Scene Cleaners résumé. "It was really depressing," Smithers moans. "I feel sad for the murderer's mother, who has endured lots of family tragedy." The Sikh temple assassination (Jan. 23), when leader Ajmer Singh Malhi was executed in front of his El Sobrante congregation by an assailant with an AR-15 assault rifle, is also included, in a creepy soaked-carpet series. "The blood coagulated into a Jell-O substance – it does that in a couple of hours," O'Donnell explains. "It's easier to clean when it does that, because you can just shovel it up into one big pile and bag it. But if you spray it with enzymes before you bag it, it'll just turn back into a liquid, and you're stuck with the original mess."
Another famous cleanup depicts the crashing casualty at Paramount's Great America's Drop Zone Aug. 22, 1999, when a mentally retarded 12-year-old boy inexplicably fell out of his vehicle on the free-fall thrill ride, plunging 200 feet to land headfirst on the bolts of a steel pole. "Before" photographs show a battalion of wasps slurping on the 20-plus pieces of shattered skull fragments, with wide sprays in all directions that suggest that the head exploded like a water balloon. Close-ups of several cranial chips follow. Crime Scene Cleaners scooped up the solid material, scoured up the blood, and treated the scene with its enzymes, but I don't think I'll ever go near a roller coaster again without encountering a hallucination of red bones.
Jones, who is still a cleaner-in-training, was my verbal escort through a particularly smelly sequence of beige and chocolate photos documenting a crappy assault on an elderly Oakland woman. The poor lady, Jones reports, "was in a feud with three fat next-door neighbors about a parking dispute." The disgruntled trio expressed their displeasure with her by defecating straight into flimsy plastic bags for several months and then depositing the massive mess on her doorstep. "The shit weighed 50 pounds," Jones continues, wide-eyed. "I triple-bagged it in thick bags so it wouldn't break. I was shoveling it in and laughing because that's the only way I could cope with the task; it was so horrible, the sickest thing I've ever seen."
Pictures of a wrist-slashing suicide in Milpitas reveal how six quarts of blood can flow through blankets, a mattress, and box springs before penetrating deeply into a wooden floor. Blood flying upward to splatter a ceiling is a prominent theme in several other photos that depict sites selected by suicides who put guns in their mouths.
"Garbage houses" are a messy and prolific curiosity in Crime Scene Cleaners' repertoire. ("These jobs pay great," Smithers notes. "It takes days to clean them.") A dilapidated dwelling occupied by filthy eccentrics on Bethel Island in the Sacramento River delta contained trash and newspaper columns piled high in the living room, topped by jars of amber urine. Another clogged house in Oakland, Wayne tells me, was crammed with "two to four feet of garbage, full of dangerous stuff, like needles and bottles of piss and shit." A final Stockton catastrophe contained the excrement of 30 to 40 cats that used the entire house as a litter box after their female owner perished and decomposed on the premises.
"De-comps" are probably the most malignant chores that Crime Scene Cleaners is ever asked to perform. "A rotting body's odor is far beyond any roadkill stink," Smithers tells me. "You taste it for days afterwards, psychosomatically, in your mouth." Although the bulk of a cadaver is removed by county officials, the process of putrefaction inevitably leaves rotten liquid and insectoid evidence in its wake. A dope dealer in Hayward "just melted," Smithers claims, when his murdered body was stashed in the trunk for two weeks. His cranial fluid leaked out of his facial orifices, and his spinal fluid emerged from his splitting skin to pool in the spare-tire indentation. Crime Scene Cleaners diligently scrubbed up the dried crud, but maggots also had to be stalked down and annihilated, because they carried the germs of their host. The fly larvae had squirmed into crevices in the car's interior.
"Maggots are smart and strong," O'Donnell swears. "They'll hide when you arrive, and when you pour industrial bleach on them, they'll just do the backstroke and give you the finger. Maggots don't die easy; you can stomp on them and they'll laugh. The only way to kill 'em is to scoop 'em up in a bag and burn them." Boss Smithers shivers, for the first time. "I don't like maggots," he admits. "I hate them. They make me crawl."
Maggots hatched and thrived on June 20, that scorching Bay Area record-breaking day when thermometers climbed to more than 100 degrees. An elderly San Rafael woman had not been seen for at least 13 days because she had died peacefully in her apartment's bathroom. Eventually, neighbors suspected her demise when 200 maggots crawled through light fixtures into their abode. The appalled property manager contacted Crime Scene Cleaners, who sped O'Donnell over to clean up everything that had poured out of her sweltering corpse and to vanquish the accompanying stench. "When I arrived, her hair was on the floor like a scalp because it had slipped off her rotting skull," O'Donnell remarks. "It looked like the hair was crawling across the rug because there were so many maggots rustling in it. They made a crispy, chattering sound."
O'Donnell, who has handled the bulk of Crime Scene Cleaners' dirty work for more than a year, is relocating to Salt Lake City soon to manage the company's Utah franchise. Fresh-faced Jones will step into his place as the Bay Area's number-one cleaner. Will he survive past the eight-month average? "I like the job," he smiles. "Because everywhere I go, when I wear my job shirt or I'm driving the truck, people walk up to me and ask me to tell them some stories. They want to know all about my job. It's a great attraction. But that's not the only reason I like it."
Jones pauses, picking his honest words carefully. "I didn't know this would happen," he continues. "But almost every cleaning job I do, somebody thanks me, very sincerely. They tell me, 'You guys are doing a great service that few people can do. You people are wonderful.' And that makes me feel good." His eyes shine as he says, "Just imagine, if one of your loved ones died, how happy you'd be to get the physical evidence out of sight. I could do that for you."
There are many bad dirty jobs in the world, but there are also good dirty jobs that are heroic and compassionate and crucial because somebody has to do them, but few have the nerve. Jones's horrible tasks remind me of the occupation of the recently blessed Mother Theresa, except that he doesn't receive any of her accolades. "I provide a difficult service," he concludes. "My customers are all very grateful – they hug me and tip me on the way out – and I'm very happy that I can help them."
How many lawyers and hucksters and dot-com programmers serve humanity as unselfishly as Jones? Crime Scene Cleaners appears ghoulish at first glance, but isn't it actually an immaculate angel that erases the ugly smears and odors of death and decay? Jones, Smithers, and O'Donnell: think of them as saintly janitors scrubbing away to make the world a safe space for the living.
It's a dirty job, but they want to do it.
By Hank Hyena
WHO ARE YOU going to call?
When a homicidal maniac's shotgun blasts a victim's flesh on walls and windows? When a sickly suicidal fillets his arteries in bed, drowning mattress and carpet in hemoglobin laced with hepatitis? When a weird recluse expires and decomposes for two weeks in a disheveled dwelling that's waist-deep in fetid debris and the feces of nine generations of cats?
Who are you going to call? Who is willing to shovel and scrub up the macabre and pungent chunks and fluids of violent death? Who is ready to do the dirtiest, unhealthiest, most repulsive tasks on earth?
Crime Scene Cleaners! This fearless sanitizing squad – armed with sturdy solvents, helmeted in full-face filter respirators, costumed in white nonporous disposable suits – doesn't gag when bagging up the grossest viscera imaginable. Rotting flesh, blobs of brain matter, and gallons of gooey mahogany turds can't nauseate these strong-stomached stalwarts who are, ironically, headquartered in the leafy, antiseptic Contra Costa village of Orinda.
With its informative Web site at www.crimescenecleaners.com, an 800 number, and a guarantee of 24-hour service, seven days a week, Crime Scene Cleaners has turned horror into a business. It serves law enforcement agencies, businesses, and private individuals, even offering special deals on hard-to-clean messes like methamphetamine labs and hantavirus-infested homes. And its staff are artists, too: Crime Scene Cleaners employees exhibited some of their photographs in a slide show laced with dark humor and morbid flair.
Horrible sights that would make an average person upchuck uncontrollably are just part of the mundane daily routine to Neal Smithers, Wayne O'Donnell, and Matt Jones, the current Crime Scene Cleaners tough-tummied trio.
"Gore sells," explains entrepreneurial Smithers, the witty whiz-kid owner who has franchised his bloody business to nine other cities in the United States, with an additional six in negotiations. "We play on fear." Smithers brazenly promotes his scrub-the-blood service with large crimson letters splashed on his white trucks; he also distributes a monthly average of 800 free Crime Scene Cleaners T-shirts to the fascinated public. His marketing plan has steadily pulsed with success: Hustler, Spin, Harper's, Evening Magazine, the SFChronicle, CNN, and NPR have featured his company's gritty activities, and a documentary film, Crime Scene Cleaners: Neal Smithers, has toured extensively, winning a Newport Film Festival award for best documentary.
What's the job like? Gross, nauseating, depressing? Smithers seems stupefied by the public's wimpy reaction to his necrotic vocation. "Emotionally, I don't have a problem with this work at all. Human tragedy? I swim in this crap; it doesn't bother me, and I've been doing it every day for four years." OK, tough guy, it's your business – but what about your employees? Are they thinner-skinned? "Yeah, they do find it stressful," he admits. "Most of them burn out after eight months. They have to be on call 24 hours a day, and then they suddenly need to clean up a huge mess calmly and efficiently while simultaneously dealing with a mom and dad that are crying over their son Johnny who just blew his brains out in the bedroom."
Eee-yuck! Brains splattered everywhere – how do you clean that? "Brain dries like cement," the Crime Scene Cleaners tycoon sighs. "Solidifies like superglue. We use putty knives to knock down the high parts, then firm-bristled brushes to scrub it. If that doesn't work, we bring in a giant truck-mounted steam-injection machine that melts the dried brains and blood and sucks it up into a chemical treatment tank. And if a carpet is too gore-soaked to save, we cut out the stained chunks with razor blades."
The muscular Smithers and his two well-built employees emphasize that death cleanup requires massive elbow grease and physical energy. "It's depressing to start a rough job where you're scrubbing up dried blood for five hours, but we have to do it as quickly as possible for our clients," Smithers explains. "Last month we cleaned up a murder-suicide in Union City, after a guy used a shotgun on his wife and himself. He totaled two different bedrooms, and he ruined all the furniture. Cleaning it required moving three truckloads of waste and seven hours of scrubbing – it was one of the most exhausting jobs I've ever done."
A tidy man who is teased by his employees for being a "neat freak," Smithers found himself miserably unemployed at the age of 29 when the local mortgage banking business he worked for got downsized. After tentatively deciding to become a mortician ("it seemed like a job with great security"), he experienced an occupational epiphany while viewing Pulp Fiction on June 2, 1996. "After Travolta and Jackson wasted the dude in the car, they brought in 'the Wolf,' played by Harvey Keitel, who cleaned up the mess, and I realized, that's it! That's what I'll do! I started soon after that, working out of my El Sobrante home with just Simple Green and a scrub brush. I did the first 700 jobs by myself." Smithers believed that he could compete because "frankly, the competition didn't know how to do marketing. I hit the pavement hard, talking death. I bought lots of addresses, and I mailed out trifolds to any business that might have a bloody problem someday."
Regulation passed by the Medical Waste Management Act of 1988 forbids cleanup of bodily fluids to anyone unregistered by the state, owing to concerns about infectious diseases like AIDS (which dies in three to six hours) and hepatitis A, B, and C (airborne, they're nearly immortal). The legislation forced hospitality and service industries to scramble for scouring help when emergencies occurred on their premises; Crime Scene Cleaners has subsequently mopped up contracts with many big clients (who insist on keeping their identities secret). Many of these corporate octopi have already relieved their panic by dialing Crime Scene Cleaner's 800 number: a prominent hotel chain called when a beserk lodger pummeled his dad with a baseball bat; a transportation giant rang when a woman was crushed and killed by their train; a major airline gasped for help when a passenger lost control of his sphincter on a flight – after defiling his economy seat, he dashed through the kitchen, dripping "raw waste."
"We guarantee a two-hour arrival time," Smithers explains. "Plus 100 percent satisfaction. If clients smell something after we clean, we'll go in and 'bomb' it with disinfectants again, even though the customer was probably just being psychosomatic."
Crime Scene Cleaners' flyer offers a plethora of reassuring phrases: "code compliant," "approved HazMat technique," "a Certificate of Fitness can be obtained," "distressed property rehabilitation," etc. Beyond the mere removal of carnage by the "staff hygienists" (the gnarly dudes in the trucks), Crime Scene Cleaners additionally supplies free, unlimited grief counseling to its customers, plus legal advice. The result of the company's spotless service and relentless marketing is a total of more than 400 local and more than 1,500 national jobs in the last year, with services supplied to customers at a cost that they claim is 30 to 40 percent below any competitor.
Smithers explains that his price tag for cleaning up a mortal mess "depends on severity. It's more gruesomely tedious to repaint a room that has blood showered on the ceiling from a gun blast than it is to simply wash out a bathtub." Generally his bill runs from $100 to $575. A peculiarly ghastly budget item is the expense of burning gore in Oakland's medical waste incinerator: although it costs only $3 to $7 a pound to inflame bloody gunk, the oven operators demand an accumulated minimum of 100 pounds. To accommodate this requirement, Crime Scene Cleaners needs to store its butchered scraps and soaked couch pads under ice in its Richmond warehouse until it reaches the centennial total.
Smithers doesn't clean anymore; he just sells the business all day while keeping in touch via cell phone with mustachioed O'Donnell (age 42) and husky Jones (22), who sop up the detritus in the field. Although the average work life of a cleaner is short, Crime Scene Cleaners has never had any trouble luring in applications. "I get a ton of dirtbags and freaks asking for work," Smithers growls. "Once I caught a wanna-be-Dracula dude that I hired stealing bloody stuff from sites out of the trucks for his perverted collection." When he interviews potential employees, Smithers exhibits a photo scrapbook documenting past cleaning excursions to weed out the "pukers"; if they blanch examining this, they're obviously going to barf up some sandwiches on the job.
After studying the scrapbook for two hours, this reporter was plagued for a month with nightmares about the massacres he had viewed. Smithers pressed me to visit an actual blood site, calling me almost daily to urge me to drive quickly to a double suicide in Oakland or a triple homicide in San Jose or a local prison where "some nutcase ripped off his scabs and wrote in blood on the walls," but I consistently demurred because my present insomnia is disabling enough. I saw images in the scrapbook that I wish I could forget, like 90 percent of a human brain resting on a linoleum bathroom floor while the remainder clung to the shower curtain above it. "An old guy in Belmont put a 30/30 hunting rifle to his head," Smithers yawned. "The energy exploded his skull, and his noggin popped out. I feel sorry for his wife, who walked in and found this."
Sixty percent of Crime Scene Cleaners' business is suicide, Smithers informs me, with the highest demographic being men in their late 30s and early 40s who snuff themselves with a gunshot or a wrist slashing. But, he adds, "There's always also old people, sick people, and alone people." An additional 33 to 37 percent are accidents, with homicide accounting for the final 3 to 7 percent.
The harrowing scrapbook includes many high-profile events that garnered copious ink in the regional dailies. The June 21 San Leandro sausage massacre, during which three federal and state meat inspectors were slaughtered by the ballistic owner of the Santos Linguisa factory, is a recent entry in the Crime Scene Cleaners résumé. "It was really depressing," Smithers moans. "I feel sad for the murderer's mother, who has endured lots of family tragedy." The Sikh temple assassination (Jan. 23), when leader Ajmer Singh Malhi was executed in front of his El Sobrante congregation by an assailant with an AR-15 assault rifle, is also included, in a creepy soaked-carpet series. "The blood coagulated into a Jell-O substance – it does that in a couple of hours," O'Donnell explains. "It's easier to clean when it does that, because you can just shovel it up into one big pile and bag it. But if you spray it with enzymes before you bag it, it'll just turn back into a liquid, and you're stuck with the original mess."
Another famous cleanup depicts the crashing casualty at Paramount's Great America's Drop Zone Aug. 22, 1999, when a mentally retarded 12-year-old boy inexplicably fell out of his vehicle on the free-fall thrill ride, plunging 200 feet to land headfirst on the bolts of a steel pole. "Before" photographs show a battalion of wasps slurping on the 20-plus pieces of shattered skull fragments, with wide sprays in all directions that suggest that the head exploded like a water balloon. Close-ups of several cranial chips follow. Crime Scene Cleaners scooped up the solid material, scoured up the blood, and treated the scene with its enzymes, but I don't think I'll ever go near a roller coaster again without encountering a hallucination of red bones.
Jones, who is still a cleaner-in-training, was my verbal escort through a particularly smelly sequence of beige and chocolate photos documenting a crappy assault on an elderly Oakland woman. The poor lady, Jones reports, "was in a feud with three fat next-door neighbors about a parking dispute." The disgruntled trio expressed their displeasure with her by defecating straight into flimsy plastic bags for several months and then depositing the massive mess on her doorstep. "The shit weighed 50 pounds," Jones continues, wide-eyed. "I triple-bagged it in thick bags so it wouldn't break. I was shoveling it in and laughing because that's the only way I could cope with the task; it was so horrible, the sickest thing I've ever seen."
Pictures of a wrist-slashing suicide in Milpitas reveal how six quarts of blood can flow through blankets, a mattress, and box springs before penetrating deeply into a wooden floor. Blood flying upward to splatter a ceiling is a prominent theme in several other photos that depict sites selected by suicides who put guns in their mouths.
"Garbage houses" are a messy and prolific curiosity in Crime Scene Cleaners' repertoire. ("These jobs pay great," Smithers notes. "It takes days to clean them.") A dilapidated dwelling occupied by filthy eccentrics on Bethel Island in the Sacramento River delta contained trash and newspaper columns piled high in the living room, topped by jars of amber urine. Another clogged house in Oakland, Wayne tells me, was crammed with "two to four feet of garbage, full of dangerous stuff, like needles and bottles of piss and shit." A final Stockton catastrophe contained the excrement of 30 to 40 cats that used the entire house as a litter box after their female owner perished and decomposed on the premises.
"De-comps" are probably the most malignant chores that Crime Scene Cleaners is ever asked to perform. "A rotting body's odor is far beyond any roadkill stink," Smithers tells me. "You taste it for days afterwards, psychosomatically, in your mouth." Although the bulk of a cadaver is removed by county officials, the process of putrefaction inevitably leaves rotten liquid and insectoid evidence in its wake. A dope dealer in Hayward "just melted," Smithers claims, when his murdered body was stashed in the trunk for two weeks. His cranial fluid leaked out of his facial orifices, and his spinal fluid emerged from his splitting skin to pool in the spare-tire indentation. Crime Scene Cleaners diligently scrubbed up the dried crud, but maggots also had to be stalked down and annihilated, because they carried the germs of their host. The fly larvae had squirmed into crevices in the car's interior.
"Maggots are smart and strong," O'Donnell swears. "They'll hide when you arrive, and when you pour industrial bleach on them, they'll just do the backstroke and give you the finger. Maggots don't die easy; you can stomp on them and they'll laugh. The only way to kill 'em is to scoop 'em up in a bag and burn them." Boss Smithers shivers, for the first time. "I don't like maggots," he admits. "I hate them. They make me crawl."
Maggots hatched and thrived on June 20, that scorching Bay Area record-breaking day when thermometers climbed to more than 100 degrees. An elderly San Rafael woman had not been seen for at least 13 days because she had died peacefully in her apartment's bathroom. Eventually, neighbors suspected her demise when 200 maggots crawled through light fixtures into their abode. The appalled property manager contacted Crime Scene Cleaners, who sped O'Donnell over to clean up everything that had poured out of her sweltering corpse and to vanquish the accompanying stench. "When I arrived, her hair was on the floor like a scalp because it had slipped off her rotting skull," O'Donnell remarks. "It looked like the hair was crawling across the rug because there were so many maggots rustling in it. They made a crispy, chattering sound."
O'Donnell, who has handled the bulk of Crime Scene Cleaners' dirty work for more than a year, is relocating to Salt Lake City soon to manage the company's Utah franchise. Fresh-faced Jones will step into his place as the Bay Area's number-one cleaner. Will he survive past the eight-month average? "I like the job," he smiles. "Because everywhere I go, when I wear my job shirt or I'm driving the truck, people walk up to me and ask me to tell them some stories. They want to know all about my job. It's a great attraction. But that's not the only reason I like it."
Jones pauses, picking his honest words carefully. "I didn't know this would happen," he continues. "But almost every cleaning job I do, somebody thanks me, very sincerely. They tell me, 'You guys are doing a great service that few people can do. You people are wonderful.' And that makes me feel good." His eyes shine as he says, "Just imagine, if one of your loved ones died, how happy you'd be to get the physical evidence out of sight. I could do that for you."
There are many bad dirty jobs in the world, but there are also good dirty jobs that are heroic and compassionate and crucial because somebody has to do them, but few have the nerve. Jones's horrible tasks remind me of the occupation of the recently blessed Mother Theresa, except that he doesn't receive any of her accolades. "I provide a difficult service," he concludes. "My customers are all very grateful – they hug me and tip me on the way out – and I'm very happy that I can help them."
How many lawyers and hucksters and dot-com programmers serve humanity as unselfishly as Jones? Crime Scene Cleaners appears ghoulish at first glance, but isn't it actually an immaculate angel that erases the ugly smears and odors of death and decay? Jones, Smithers, and O'Donnell: think of them as saintly janitors scrubbing away to make the world a safe space for the living.
