20 Disturbing Crime Scene Stories Told by Those Who Have Worked Them

1.

Not a clean up crew but attend the scenes. An old gentleman had died in the bath. The top half of his body was all swollen and puffy, whereas his legs and lower torso and almost melted away. Essentially created a horrendous soup/casserole mix in the bath. The coroners had to sift through the bath to find his liver which had come out.

During the post mortem (autopsy ) his testicles were so swollen they had to prick them just to drain out all the liquid. I just hate the smell, it seems to stick on your clothes. You come back into the office and everyone can smell it on you. -deleted

2.

I’m not a professional cleaner, but I have cleaned a murder scene before unfortunately. My best friend was beat to death with a baseball bat in his home. It’s apparently pretty expensive to have these people come out and clean and his parents didn’t have it.

Trying to do what we could to help out, a few of his friends got together to clean it. I don’t have anything crazier to say that I haven’t already about the scene. The entire experience was extremely surreal and not something I think about often. I’d say the craziest thing would have to be the weird places we’d find a spec of blood with seemingly no logical way for it to have gotten there. Logic, of course, had left that room before we got there. -Hueyandthenews

3.

I didn't do a lot of "crime scenes", unless you consider suicide a crime. We called it trauma clean up. I cleaned what was once a beautiful three story home that belonged to successful surgeon. This Dr. had devoted her life to her work and after an injury she had to retire early.

She didn't have any family and she got depressed and started collecting cats. By the time we were called the cats completely took over the house and she lived in a tiny room in the basement. The ASPCA said they took about 60 living cats.

We found dozens of dead and some mummified cats as well as several litters of kitten skeletons. It was like a waking nightmare. The smell of ammonia was so intense the air felt thick. Every surface in the house was completely covered in several inches of mated cat hair and shit. The walls had so much fly shit on them it looked like they had tar smeared on them. The bathtubs had at least three inches of shit.

All the metal in the house like cabinet hinges or cans of food were completely oxidized or rusted from all the ammonia. -3rdeyeandi

4.

Not my experience, but a friend of the family who was a first responder. A teenage couple, boy and girl, were driving upwards of 100 mph down a country road in Wisconsin at night. The male was driving and was wearing a seatbelt. The female was the passenger and was not wearing a seatbelt. The driver lost control and slammed into a tree.

Our friend arrived first on the scene and found the teenage female had been thrown through the windshield and was in many pieces in the branches of the tree. The teenage male driver who was seat-belted in was found nearly completely decapitated from his head to his body, with only a strip of neck flesh keeping his head attached. He had been driving so fast that the impact caused his seatbelt across his chest to nearly slice his head from his body. -rockpuma

5.

Not a cleaner but when mum died of a brain aneurysm she was dead on the sofa for about 5 hours in front of the fire. I was the one who found her. The only way to describe that smell was cooking pork. I now cannot eat pork or cook pork for that reason as that smell will stay with me forever. -Princessdelrey

6.

My dad's friend is a cop who works a rural area and loves to tell my dad about the fucked up stuff he’s come across. One of them being the time he was sent to a call of a large group of people crying and coughing in an apartment.

He gets there and it’s a large group of family members there cleaning up the shotgun suicide of a relative. That’s when I learned that it’s sometimes up to the family of the departed to clean up after the death and it’s not always people in hazmat suits. -gamageeknerd

7.

Police detective here. In a rural area a guy had passed away in his yard. In July. It was 8 days before someone found him. He was partially liquified, there were flies everywhere and the stench was quite nasty. The knowing where these flies were before they landed on your face did not help. Had to shovel him in the bag with gas masks. FYI liquid people are quite toxic. -deleted

8.

I have cleaned up crime scenes for the last 15 years, so I have literally dozens of stories. One woman started her car in her garage and then climbed into the trunk. It was an older model without a safety release inside the trunk. By the time her family came looking for her, the car had run out of gas and the fumes had dissipated. It took them a while to find the body. The police and I figure that she had made the attempt before, but changed her mind, and by getting in the trunk she wouldn't be able to stop herself. -phurt77

9.

Interning with a forensics unit. First real crime scene. Guy found out his boyfriend was cheating on him and flew into a jealous rage. Stabbed the guy to death with the handle of a frying pan.

Chased him through the house and finished him off in the bathtub, where he stabbed him an estimated 200 additional times. His head was a ruin of pulp and bone shards. The guy I was working with tasked me with digging bits of skull from the drain with tweezers. -z0mbiegrl

10.

I used to do auto detailing in college for a car dealership. I was scrubbing the floor of a car and no matter what I did the water kept having a red tint to it. So I pulled the seats and found about an inch of dried crusted blood and what I can only guess was brain matter/skull fragments. Turns out it was a suicide car that the dealership bought at auction. It had been detailed before being sold but they never pulled the seats.

We called the cops to confirm it was all logged and shipped the car back to auction. The dealership lost their ass on it but wanted it as far away from their lot as possible. -korbendaIIass

11.

A friend of mine is a cop. He just told me of a guy they found dead in his kitchen. The stove and heater were on and he was naked. They assumed he was just cooking while naked. You know, how we all do from time to time.

Can’t remember how long he said he was dead for. When they lifted him up to turn him around, his penis had sort of melted to the kitchen floor. As they pulled him upwards, the dangling participle stretched off the floor like a rubber band and released. Slingshotting back to the body. It sounded absolutely disgusting as he described it. -talhindi416

12.

Not a crime-scene clean-up, but ex-(volunteer)firefighter. Got a wake-up one morning (somewhere before 5am; the sun wasn't even coming up yet) to hear my pager going off. The incident came through as 'BIO-WASHAWAY', something I'd never seen before. Reported location was the local train station. I turned up at my station, entirely curious and still bleary-eyed and half-asleep.

Spent the next hour-and-a-half trudging through cold and wet dewy grass as the sun came up, revealing the fact that half the grass was actually stained bright red. Bits of brain (you could definitely recognize it...) and bone everywhere. One of my colleagues found four bloody teeth. Paramedics carted off a body bag that definitely wasn't full enough to contain an entire body.

At least half the time was spent flushing the area with water, and it took an unbelievably long time for the water to stop splashing up red. Turns out 'BIO-WASHAWAY' means cleaning up biological waste. Said waste being the guy who threw himself under the last train for the night, and was distributed across some fifty or so metres of train tracks. -Prox

13.

I'm not a crew member but I got a story. A few years back I couldn't get a hold of my brother so my stepmom and I drove out to make sure he was okay. He lived 2 hours from me and we haven't heard from him in two weeks. Not uncommon for him he did do a lot of drugs and was a very solitary guy.

I crawled in a window and I didn't smell anything nasty just smelled like a musty old house. Anyway got the door open and we found him in his room he was definitely a few weeks into decaying, he was very bloated and there was blood all over the room. I didn't initially see maggots but from the report there was a ton in him that they mistook for the bullet in his on the x-ray.

We had to go back the next day to his house and I found his tooth in the closet door rails on the floor. Also the house smelled horrible, oddly after the body was removed. His hair was stuck to the carpet and a few maggots were on the floor. To deter anyone from suicide, he shot himself in the head and lived long enough to put the gun under his mattress and he laid down waiting for death getting blood all over his mattress. -skullyjacxs

14.

I'm a police officer and have been on a good number of death scenes. One that sticks out in particular was a suspicious death on the top floor maintenance stairwell of a 5 story apartment building. I arrived and could smell the body from the bottom floor in the lobby. How it took this long for anyone to call in a building filled with a hundred people is beyond me.

I got in the elevator and began to go up, the smell getting worse with each floor. My corporal was with me and he started to look a bit sick. The door to the 5th floor opened and I was hit with a smell I will never forget. The poor man was laying face down on the top floor landing, just inside the doorway to the stairwell.

He had been there for about 2 weeks in the middle of July in the Southeastern United States. The top floor was not air conditioned as it was storage and maintenance, so it was around 100 degrees inside. The man was bloated, leaking his juices everywhere, and his skin was a necrotic black color. The juices were leaking down the stairs, dripping onto the landings of the 4th and 3rd floor. -KayTeePerry

15.

I was a tow truck driver and the worst are motorcycle accidents usually. I've seen some really messed up car accidents but I've seen motorcycle accidents where the driver was spread out several dozen yards across pavement. -MichiganBrolitia

16.

Paramedic story time: So a woman calls 999, says she thinks her father is dead, call handler advises CPR but caller states it is too late. Crew arrives and paramedic approaches remote house, speaks to daughter, who is upset but advises she “thinks it’s too late.”

Paramedic enters property and finds what is effectively a skeleton in the kitchen laid on the floor. History is daughter is fairly estranged and lives overseas from Her father, normally send Christmas cards and no other communication really. After 2 years of no cards, and him not answering the phone, she flies home and finds him dead in his home. -meehaja

17.

I'm not a crime scene cleanup crew, but I did have to clean up my father's brains and blood from the room he killed himself in.

The people basically just didn't do a thorough job. There were red streaks down the hallway walls from the blood soaked bed being taken out, and it's like they didn't have a ladder because the walls of the room were clean until nearly the roof then you could see splatters. I found a piece of rotted (I'm pretty sure) brain stuck to the top of the curtain rails.

There was also a smell we believe was from the blood soaking into the wooden floors, so we had to have those floors replaced. -Accent-man

18.

Hey, search and rescue personnel here. Working in Las Vegas we see a ton of really messed up stuff, chances are pretty high that if we’re looking for a missing person we’ll find an unrelated subject.

Worst one was when we were deployed to find a female stuffed in a suitcase, after recovering the female in the suitcase, the coroner said it was the wrong female in a suitcase and we were sent back out to find the right one.

I guess I should clarify, though we aren’t a cleanup crew, we are often tasked with body recovery. The coroner’s office does the packaging and LE does the investigation, we then solemnly carry them out. Everyone needs to come home eventually, there’s someone out there who cares for them. -DeltaSandwich

19.

A doctor I used to work with at an urgent care drove to a big hospital and parked. Called them, told them he was sitting in the lot and what his car looked like. He said he was going to commit suicide and wanted them to harvest his organs. He immediately hung up and shot himself in the head. When they got to him, the entire inside of the car was wrapped with Saran Wrap. I'd assume it was an easier clean up. -alienlover69

20.

I heard a story of a guy who cleans up bodies from people jumping in front of trains. In this one case they found a body with no head and couldn’t for the life of them find the rest of it. In the autopsy room they saw a tuft of hair coming out of where the head should be and realized he hit the train head on and his head had caved into his chest through his neck. -prestog1