Mop Men: Inside the World of Crime Scene Cleaners

by Alan Emmins

  “No, ma’am, you won’t even know what’s happened in this room after we’re finished with it … except for the fact that … well, you know.” Neal seemed to freeze for a second. I was wondering what had happened—had he said the wrong number? Had he meant twenty-one hundred and just realized his error? “Hey,” he said with some urgency. “Is that an original Nagel on the wall?” asked Neal, drawing everybody’s attention to an 1980s art-deco-style painting of a woman with her hair tied up as she looks back over her shoulder, out of the canvas.

  “Yeah,” the wife replied. “Do you know the artist?”

  “Sure. That’s gotta be worth some bucks right there, an original signed Nagel, especially now that he’s dead.”

  “Well, we paid twenty-five hundred for it about ten years ago.”

  “It’s gotta be worth three or four times that now … you know, what with him being dead.”

  As Neal said this I couldn’t help but wonder how he knew of this artist; he didn’t strike me as an art lover. How did he know Nagel was dead? Maybe he cleaned up the artist … you know, what with him being dead.

  I asked him when we were alone if that was the case. “Dude,” he replied. “I like art!”

  MAN IN THE BATH PART I: THE VIRGIN AND THE FLY

  Neal discovered my disgust for the maggot on the job where he spotted the Patrick Nagel painting. The deceased had been on the outer circle of the Hells Angels. He had taken himself on a major meth binge and blown his brains out all over the walls. It was a hot day, and stupidly, I admit now, I was wearing shorts and sandals. I remember looking at the bed as a maggot fell to the floor. I looked at the floor and discovered it was covered in maggots. I followed their pattern and discovered that they were everywhere. They were scattered around my sandaled feet.

  I started to run.

  As I dashed across the room I could see the maggots flicking up around me; I could feel them as they bounced off my calves and landed on top of my feet.

  A couple caught in my leg hair.

  I tried to brush them off as I ran down the stairs. At this point I knew vomit to be inevitable. I tripped and fumbled my way to the front door and managed to drag myself outside quickly enough to throw up in a plant pot.

  Neal, as well you can imagine, was duly entertained. He gave me a plastic bag to collect my vomit in.

  Last summer, while I was talking to publishers about this book, I called Neal. It was midmorning in San Francisco. He answered the phone with his usual aplomb.

  “Neal!”

  “Hey, Neal, it’s Alan.”

  “Oh, Alan dude, you’ve got to see what I have in front of me right now!” Neal’s volume jumped several decibels. “This guy has been murdered by his gay lover, who left him in the bathtub, where he decomped for a month. This is some funky, off-the-chart shit. And I know you love maggots. Here, listen to this—you can hear them. Can you hear that?”

  The line went silent for a few seconds while Neal held the phone over the bathtub so that I could enjoy the maggots. He was right, I could hear them, crawling around in a frenzy, sucking, nibbling, and generally getting their fill of what used to be Gary Lee Ober. They made a sound of hamburger meat being kneaded and mashed.

  “The smell is just off the fucking chart!” Neal said, jumping back on the line. “You can smell it down the street!”

  Although the body appears free of decay immediately after death, there are bacteria inside that feed off the contents of the intestines. When the body dies, the bacteria start eating the intestine itself. Eventually, they eat their way out of the intestine and start eating the surrounding organs. Certain flies (if you are interested in who these chaps are, I refer you to the blowfly, the bottle fly, and the common house fly) can pick up the scent of death as if they knew beforehand that a life was about to be extinguished. They are not fussy: natural causes, suicide, murder—it means nothing to the fly. They arrive on the scene within minutes to deposit their eggs in the still-tender flesh that will nurture the eggs until they hatch. They go for openings—nostrils, ears, eyes, or wounds. Once the flies have housed their eggs, it would normally take about eight to fifteen hours for the eggs to hatch (although this varies according to temperature). It takes a similar amount of time for the first larvae to develop. They feed on liquid protein. Once fully developed, they spend a few days dining on the delicacies of the flesh, using their sharp-hooked mouths to tear at it. Another week and the maggots complete their growth and leave the body to become pupae, soon themselves to become airborne, dive-bombing flies planting their own eggs to start the next generation. The cycle from egg to maggot to fly takes from two to three weeks.

  A pack of maggots can devour human tissue at startling speed. When they swarm, they dive into the flesh and rip away at it, then wiggle to the top of the swarm for air before they dive back again for another mouthful. It’s a frenzied pack, maggots going up and maggots going down. The heat produced by the all-consuming pack is enough to maintain larvae growth at low temperatures.

  The bacteria are also at work breaking down tissues and cells. Fluids are released into body cavities and various gases are produced: hydrogen sulfide, methane, cadaverine, and putrescine. The gases intensify the growth of the bacteria, which in turn creates a pressure buildup. This pressure inflates the body and forces fluids out of cells and blood vessels and into the body cavity.

  The decay process gathers speed as it goes. The fluids and gases that leak from the body attract even more blowflies, flesh flies, beetles, and mites. Some of the latecomers are themselves predatory, and eat the maggots as well as the rotting flesh.

  By week two, the body will probably collapse. Exposed body parts and flesh are blackened, and the smell is intense. Large amounts of body fluids seep out, attracting other insects to feed. At this point, there are generally several generations of insects feeding on the body.

  “Alan, this is Shawn,” says Neal, introducing one of his employees. We are at the scene of a shotgun suicide that has for the most part been cleaned up. Shawn has just finished emptying the place out to get it ready for renting again.

  “You remember when I spoke to you last year, the dead gay guy? The maggots?” Neal continues. “It was Shawn that did the cleanup. You guys should hang out; Shawn will have some good stories for you.”

  “That would be great if you have time one day,” I say to Shawn. “When would be good for you?”

  “Well, I’m done for the day,” Shawn says. “So, you wanna go grab a beer?”

  In my rental car, I follow Shawn’s white Crime Scene Cleaners truck as we drive to a bar on his route home. We install ourselves on bar stools, order drinks, and quickly get down to it.

  “I was still pretty much a virgin,” begins Shawn.

  I can tell straightaway, from the way Shawn delivers this line, from his tone, that he is no stranger to telling stories. He has a wonderful energy. There’s a bright light burning inside Shawn. I know already that I am going to like him.

  The bar we are sitting in is called The Ivy Room. It’s dark and murky, with a long black bar. Most of the people at the bar are drinking shots. The music is loud; the conversation, when it sporadically exists, is louder. It’s exactly the kind of place where you would expect to have found Charles Bukowski, quietly necking whiskeys before punching a loudmouth in the face. It’s five in the afternoon and the handful of bar patrons are drunk. This is a place where the men wear vests and baseball caps or have slicked-back hair. The women seem to make a bit more effort, but are clearly overdone. So overdone, in fact, that I am wondering what they charge. The two women sitting next to us at the bar are plastered, both physically and metaphorically.

  Shawn is wearing jeans and his white Crime Scene Cleaners, Inc. T-shirt. His company baseball cap sits on the bar. It’s an odd place to bring me, this rundown little whiskey joint, but it sure beats shiny and new Walnut Creek, the town where I am staying while working on this story. Maybe Shawn knew that I needed to get away from the Gap kids, that I was
in desperate need of something more working-class, closer to my own roots.

  Shawn is a very interesting character. From the outside, you could expect anybody working as a crime scene cleaner to be, as Shawn so delicately put it, a “knucklehead.” But Shawn is no knucklehead. He is a smart guy. He studied art history and has had his own work shown at the San Diego Modern Art Museum. He’s not what you might call typical for the job, but then those who want the job purely for the blood generally burn out after a few months. Shawn is the company’s longest-lasting employee, having been with Neal for eighteen months. One and a half years of death have not dampened his warm smile and excellent manners. You get what you see with Shawn, a well-mannered, handsome, if a little baby-faced, guy. I imagine that his girlfriend is spoiled with chivalry.

  “I think the guy in the bath was actually my first decomp,” he continues. “You know, Neal was there with me, I guess at the start. For my first three months Neal was at every job I did. He was there before me every time. On this job, I guess he knew what I was about and he was just like, here’s what you gotta do, here’s what you gotta do, here’s what you gotta do, and he just left.”

  “Really? It was that bad and he left it to you?”

  Shawn laughs. “Basically, yeah. He did all the shuck-and-jive bullshitting with the client and then just left me there. The entire apartment was just packed, I mean literally just packed full of stuff, and disheveled, too. I opened up the bathroom and the bathroom was black. There were so many flies and maggots, and when the maggots hatch they come out of these little tiny cocoon-type deals and they get dry and crusty. Basically, they’re like Rice Krispies, but they’re black! And then the flies eat everything, and flies regurgitate this enzyme to break down what they eat and then they suck it back up, so they’re just sitting there doing this just all over every surface in this bathroom from floor to ceiling. So I open it up, and, literally, everything is stained. It was a typical bathroom, white walls, white toilet, white sink, and everything’s just covered in these brown and black specks. The bathroom floor was covered in an inch of dead flies and the husks left by the maggots when they hatch. There’s still, like tons of live flies floating around, and they’re so heavy, so fat and bloated from eating on this guy. I mean they weren’t even like flying. They were just hopping around. They were getting ready to lay their next round. I could not believe what I was seeing. I was just blown away, literally blown away.”

  “How did all the stuff get all over the walls?” I ask.

  “Oh, that’s the flies. It’s just them landing and stuff. I mean this guy had been there for so long there was a puddle in the tub. The tub was half full with body fluids, and the kicker of it was, this is just my assumption, the guy—jilted lover or what have you—I think after he had committed the murder he was just in there taking a dump on the body. I mean, I don’t know why. There was so much actual human waste in the tub, it didn’t seem feasible that it could have gotten in there any other way. The fluid in the tub was just goo, thick black goo, with a consistency like thick honey. It was actually my first experience of dealing with feces in any volume. You wipe your ass every day, but you have tissue, so … This stuff is just like glue, like this oily, nasty errrrrrrrrrgh! And the … the smell? If you smell fresh blood in any kind of quantity … the only way I can describe it … you know, have you ever licked a nine-volt battery? Forget the shock, but the taste of the battery. That’s fresh blood. But this smell was like every nasty funk you can possibly imagine, all wrapped into one.”

  Shawn’s face is starting to screw up a little. Jim McKinnon, the man charged with Gary Lee Ober’s murder, had lived in the apartment while Ober decomposed in the bathroom. You can tell that Shawn struggles to understand how he lived with it.

  “Did it make you sick, the bathroom?”

  “I’ve only gotten close to throwing up on one job. It was a fridge that we were stripping from a house and it had rotten meat in it. It cracked open when we moved it and little bit of juice hit the floor, and it was just funk and I had to get out. So the only time I have come close to being sick on a job it was because of rotten meat in the fridge, not the mess I was there to clean. But no, I’ve never lost it. This was my first major job and I wanted to keep it together. I told myself I was gonna do a bang-up job. I put my respirator on, I double gloved, I put my Tyvek on, and I literally just started cleaning my way in. You know, I just kept chipping away and scrubbing with my brushes. I mean it took me eight hours of doing this over and over and over again. Eight hours of spray-wipe-scrub, spray-wipe-scrub, spray-wipe-scrub until I got to the bathtub, and then I was excited. I was like, ‘I’m finally at the bathtub.’ You gotta realize it was only like four feet away, you know. I mean I was focusing on the floor, the walls, the door, the ceiling, the toilet. I was standing on the toilet to reach the ceiling. The ceiling actually wasn’t that bad. I guess it’s hard for the flies to hang upside down there when they’re, like, all gorged on this dude.”

  “How much mess can these flies really make?” I ask, somewhat doubtfully.

  “A lot! I mean it was like … a lot! You have to remember they had been there for weeks.”

  “But I understand that they land on the guy, in all the gore, they get this stuff on themselves and then fly off and land somewhere else, but can they really cover the walls? Were the walls really covered?”

  “With their shit—dude, flies shit, too!” Shawn’s tone, expression, and the way he fidgets in his seat tell me that he means business. “You know, so they flew, took a shit, landed in the decomp, flew, spread that junk around, went back, ate some more, flew, took another shit. We’re talking about thousands upon thousands of flies here.”

  Shawn and I refresh our drinks. While the barman is pouring, I sit back and try to take on board the scene Shawn is describing. It’s not easy to do. I can’t even begin to imagine how I would cope with cleaning such a scene.

  “So I finally make it to the tub and I just reach my hands in. I made sure my gloves were pulled all the way up so that nothing went inside. You know, I’m trying to think of the logical way to do it. Nobody’s in there holding my hand, I’m totally alone, freaking out! I reached in there and at the bottom, below the liquid, it was like hitting clay. And so I’m like, whatever this is, I’m gonna just scoop it up and put it in my bag, and of course I have both hands in there and I go to scoop it out and I go to put it in the bag and it won’t even let go. I mean it was like … it was just stuck to my hands and I was like, fuuuuuck! What the fuck? This is bullshit! ’Cause I was double gloved, I just eased out of the gloves over the bag and put on another two pairs. Then I thought, Well, I’m gonna wait on doing this bottom part. I’m gonna clean everything else and do the tub last. So I grabbed the shower and used it to spray stuff down. And so I was scrubbing and doing the enzyme and spraying and I thought, Wow, this is great, and I started spraying other stuff, you know,the walls and fittings, and I was just letting it go on the floor and I was gonna wipe all that up. And the tub’s filling, and the tub’s filling and it’s getting to the point where, you know, it’s getting close to the top. And I’m just about done cleaning most of the walls at this point and it dawns on me, I’m like, I don’t even know if this tub works. So I start hitting the little lever and it’s plugged! The tub! The guy’s been in it for so long that his goo plugged up the bathtub. And I’m like, oh, great, so now I have a bathtub full of this just awful … And I’m freaking out. I’m like, the last thing I have to do is clean out this tub and work my way out and I’m fucked. I need a plumber. I got myself so stressed out that I had to call Neal and said, ‘Look, Neal, I thought I was doing the right thing but it looks like I’ve really fucked up,’ and he was like, ‘Well, does he have any towels? Any sheets, any blankets?’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah, there’s a whole house full of shit.’ He was like, ‘Well, grab every blanket, towel, pillow—whatever you can get your hands on, and soak it all up.’ And that’s exactly what I did. I just soaked it up, just sponged it up. A
nd it was great because it was all the dead guy’s stuff, so I could just take all these towels and just soak that shit up. I was soaking, scooping, and wrapping—and the towels ended up like these oversized raviolis, you know. They were nasty. The soaking up took about two hours. Then I went down and got a putty knife, and I was just scraping and scooping the claylike goo with the putty knife, until I got to the point where it was doable and I could do what I’m used to doing and that’s spraying the enzyme and cleaning. Then I took a gallon bottle of bleach, pumped it up in the pressure spray and just pushed it down that drain and just blasted the hell out of it. But still, I told them they needed a plumber. Then (and this really pissed me off) I picked the bag out of the bin in the kitchen. I was just thinking I should take the garbage out—that’s gonna rot and go nasty, I can just take it with me. So I lift the bag out, I look back in the empty bin, and it was just full of maggots and I was like, why are there so many maggots there? I opened up the bag and it was just full of shit! I couldn’t fucking believe it. I said it out loud: ‘This is a big bag of shit! ’”

  A week or so later, Shawn was called back to the apartment to empty it of all its remaining possessions. He began to find things out about the fluids that he had previously removed, little details that stopped Gary Lee from being a blocked bathtub and reminded Shawn that he was a human being.

  “It’s so sad, you know, when you learn a little something about the people who you’re cleaning. And this guy, whoever he was, was into classical music and wood carving. He was a coin collector, a Vietnam veteran. It wasn’t bad enough that this other guy killed him; one of the downstairs neighbors told me that this guy had been selling all his stuff to fund his partying and even had them over for drinks one night while the dead guy was rotting in the tub. Like at the very beginning. He had told them the toilet was out of order so they wouldn’t go in the bathroom.”