CRIME SCENE CLEANERS
A grisly body of work
PAUL PRITCHARD was a lad of just 16 when he found himself on his hands and knees in a motel room in South Auckland cleaning congealed blood off the floor.
Mangere’s Gold Star Auckland Airport Motel in 1979 was at the centre of a bizarre, and grisly, affair.
As ship’s cook Keith Phillip Entwistle told it, he had come home to the unit one night and found two men waiting for him.
Before he could get a good look at them they’d roughed him up, thrown a wet blanket over his head, strapped his lower legs with explosives, then blew them off, Entwistle told detectives.
The force of the blast sent his left foot flying and collapsed the ceiling, the Evening Post reported. It landed in the bath, some of his right foot landed just outside it, and the rest was found outside the unit.
His friends were bewildered. Entwistle was ‘‘such a nice sort of chap’’, they told the Post.
From his hospital bed, Entwistle told police he owed his survival to the bombers letting him tie tourniquets around his legs before they blew them off.
At this, detectives smelled a rat. Entwhistle eventually confessed he had used a slow-burning fuse pipe packed with gelignite to maim himself, in a desperate bid to claim $47,000 in shipping company insurance and accident compensation.
He was unpopular with his shipmates, owed a tonne of money, and had marriage troubles.
Pritchard and his brother, who had just got a contract to clean the Otahuhu police cars and cells, had to clean up the aftermath.
‘‘There wasn’t a lot of spatter,’’ he recalls, 36 years on.
‘‘Fortunately, because of the way he’d done it, it was confined to where he was on the bed. It had a wooden head and foot board and that absorbed a lot of the explosion.’’
Entwistle’s deceit provided a memorable foray into the world of forensic cleaning, Pritchard reckons. ‘‘Needless to say, I don’t think he got paid out.’’
THE JOB SOMEONE’S GOT TO DO
Bodies are sometimes kept at a crime scene for days, decomposing, while detectives and forensic scientists go to work.
Long after the sirens fade away and the cordon is lifted, technicians known as forensic or trauma cleaners are called in. Police stations, Housing New Zealand, and councils tend to use their preferred cleaners.
In March this year Dean Stewart’s body was found in Wellington City Council flats in Berhampore. His body had been there about eight months.
Wiremu Whakaue had died in the very same flat. He is thought to have perished about June 2009, though his body was not discovered until March 2010.
Pensioner Michael Clarke lay dead in his Newtown unit for more than a year without neighbours or the council noticing.
More recently a man, thought to be Debiprasad Majumdar, lay dead for weeks in his Titahi Bay flat. The smell finally forced neighbours to call police, who found him on August 30.
It emerged his wife had been living alongside his body for weeks. A neighbour tried to coax her through a crack in the window to give up his decomposing body and police are exploring the possibility they uncovered a religious after-death ritual.
Pritchard says such cases are known in the industry as a ‘‘decomp’’.
‘‘Those types of incidents are the worst because of the amount of decomposition and the odour that can be present. Fortunately, it tends to be contained – often they’ve died in bed or on a chair.’’
When cleaners go in, they first check with police or a funeral director where the bodily fluids were. They suit up in bio-hazard gear and begin with the rubbish.
Stained furniture and carpets are chopped up into pieces and bagged in black polythene for hygiene and discretion.
The cleaners cut away carpet and ceilings to decontaminate porous underfloors that fluids seep into. A lot of their private work comes from insurance companies. Where there is no insurance, the victim’s next-of-kin must pay for the cleanup.
Victims of crime can receive grants of $2000 for emergency accommodation and house and car cleaning. The money comes from a $50 offender levy imposed on all criminals sentenced in court – 20,674 was paid out between 2009 and 2014.
In Pritchard’s book, a good forensic cleaner must consider whose money is on the table.
If it is an insurer’s, they will cut out ceilings and floors to remove deep seeping stains.
If the victim’s family is paying, cleaners try to remove marks without damaging the house.
Cleaners don’t have a lot to do with the victims’ families. The kit they wear tends to ‘‘isolate’’ them from the horror and smell of the scene too, Pritchard says.
In his cleaning days, suicide scenes affected him emotionally the most. ‘‘You’re running thoughts through your mind, firstly, why would you do it, but secondly, why would you choose that method? It’s just very, very sad.’’
They could also be technically difficult. ‘‘One that sticks in my mind was a gentleman who committed suicide using a shotgun. He literally blew his head off. What made it difficult was that he was standing up against a doorframe for some reason. So what happened was a tremendous amount of spatter.
‘‘It actually went into the next room. He fell down and bled on the floor. But what presented a real challenge was he hit the actual ceiling on both sides.
‘‘There were tiny bone fragments in the ceiling.’’
Cleaners must feel compassion, Pritchard says.
‘‘The ultimate goal is the victim – the family of the victim – when they’re relocated back in there that we’ve removed anything there that reminds them of the tragedy.’’
NEW TO THE WORLD OF FORENSIC CLEANING
Most of us would run a mile sooner than get up close to a hoarder’s homes, with rubbish piled to the ceiling, and walls and floors covered in mould and faeces.
Rob Cousins grits his teeth, and goes in.
His cat, Twinkles, scampers away in fright at the sight of him: togged out in a spotless white boiler suit, rubber gloves ducttaped to sleeves covering his tattooed forearms.
He looks like a meth cook, he laughs from behind his respirator mask. The family man and musician is seven months into a forensic cleaning business. He moved here from South Africa eight years ago because he was tired of living in fear of violent crime.
He began in security and commercial cleaning but stumbled into the forensic cleaning world after a tipoff from a lawyer about a filthy deceased estate.
Cousins admits he went in with little idea of what to expect. ‘‘I just went in – ‘Oh yep’,’’ he recalls, mocking his own naivety. ‘‘Go in with gloves, you know, and at the end of it you can’t breathe because there’s so much dust.’’
He was surprised to find it fulfilling. ‘‘I felt like I was helping someone.’’
He liked Sunshine Cleaning ,a 2008 black comedy film about two sisters who blunder into the crime scene cleaning business to make a buck but grow sentimental.
But it’s nothing like the real job, Cousins laughs. ‘‘It’s not fun. I never have fun.’’
He estimates he has now done about eight hoarders’ houses, scrubbing away faeces, rotting food, fly-droppings, spiderwebs, and mould in all colours of the rainbow.
The family usually stay outside while he gets rid of the rubbish. He brings out keepsakes: wedding rings or coin collections.
If he finds porn, which he does, it goes straight into the bin, ‘‘to save some dignity for the guy who died’’.
It took Cousins 12 weekends’ work and 14 skiploads of rubbish to clean out one hoarder’s twobedroom home.
Cleaning bathrooms are the worst. ‘‘The toilet. Once that’s full, that’s full and they’ll start using buckets, bottles. Once you move everything out of the bathroom area, you see, oh … there’s shit all over the walls.’’
Often, he’ll find a photo of the person who has died, and it brings the humanity of what he’s doing there.
‘‘You sit outside, have a smoke, and think, ‘This is somebody’s life, you know’. This is his belongings, this is what he loved. He loved the rubbish. And you just go back in, slow down.
‘‘Because . . . it’s their whole life that you’re throwing away.’’
Once all the bio-hazards have been removed, he brings his 17-year-old son in to help with the actual cleaning.
He can make $14,000 to $28,000 per hoarder house.
If he jostled for a lucrative insurance company or police contract, he could give up his day job.
Right now, he is not ready to step up to crime scene cleaning, no matter how good the money is. ‘‘It’s not all about the money.
‘‘I don’t want to actively seek it,’’ Cousins shakes his head.
‘‘I don’t want to come to the point where I need somebody to die before I go to work. ‘‘I don’t want to pray for death.’’ His own household is bare, flawless. Surely cleaning up after hoarders turns a man clinical?
‘‘Actually, my wife does the cleaning.’’