CSC: Crime Scene Cleanup

A woman sits on the edge of the sofa in the living room of her ranch-style house in Romeoville, Illinois, fingering her First American Casualty Insurance policy and crying softly. She watches her husband lead two men down a narrow hallway to their teenage daughter's bedroom. He points through an open door and says, without emotion, "It was a shotgun." Then he goes back to his wife as one of the men begins taking photographs of the room.

There are posters of rock stars on the walls. Eminem. Korn. Limp Bizkit. There is a big television, a VCR, stereo, stacks of videos (Titanic), piles of CDs (Britney Spears, Wynonna Judd) and a glass bookcase filled with limited-edition Barbie dolls in wedding and evening gowns, swimsuits and jogging outfits. On top of the bookcase are softball trophies and a photograph of the girl: a pretty, strawberry blonde, hugging her boyfriend, a slim, unsmiling kid in glasses. On her unmade bed lies a piece of lined paper with neatly printed letters that read CARRIE 'N' KYLE. There is no body in sight, but on the rug next to the bed a teddy bear sits about two feet from a pool of coagulating blood that, after six hours, has turned from red to burgundy. White bits of skull and gray brain matter are evident in the blood, which is also splattered across the TV, the CDs, the walls, the door and the bedsheets.

"The halo effect," says Kevin Reifsteck, 29, a short man with a crew cut and bodybuilder's bulk.

"Her boyfriend probably broke up with her," whispers Greg Banach, 33. "That's the main cause of teen suicides." Greg looks like a thin, young Buddy Hackett in a black T-shirt that reads OUR DAY BEGINS WHEN YOUR DAY ENDS.

Kevin goes to the kitchen to show the parents the contract he wants them to sign. He explains that he and Greg will have to throw out a lot of bloodstained items but that their homeowners' insurance policy will cover the cost of cleaning up the room. "We can probably save the mattress," Kevin says.

"No. Throw it out," the father says.

"She barely even knew him," says the mother. Kevin raises an eyebrow quizzically. She explains that her 17-year-old daughter had been stalked by a 19-year-old boy who once worked with her. The boy phoned the house that morning to say he was coming to kill himself in front of the daughter. When he arrived, he broke through a living room window while the mother and daughter fled out the back door to a neighbor's house. The boy went to the daughter's room, knelt on the rug, tilted his head back, put the shotgun in his mouth and blew half his head off.

Greg, listening in the doorway, says, "There are a lot of whack jobs out there.

Unfortunately you met one. Thank god he only killed himself."

After the police came and took the mother's statement and carted off the body, she waited for them to clean up the room. That wasn't their job, they explained. Then one of the officers gave her a name, Aftermath, Inc., and a telephone number: 877-TRAGEDY.

•

Aftermath, Inc. of Plainfield, Illinois is a biohazard recovery company licensed by the Environmental Protection Agency and certified by the Occupational Safety and Health Association to clean up and dispose of hazardous waste. Or, in the words of the company's brochure, Aftermath specializes in "easing emotional trauma at a time when it matters most. We provide specially trained technicians who remove your burden during the untimely death of a loved one." In short, Aftermath crews-- including the two-man team of Greg Banach and Kevin Reifsteck--clean up the body parts and blood police leave behind. Registered in 19 states, Aftermath is one of the largest and most respected companies of its kind, which until recently were of the mom-and-pop variety--husbands and wives working parttime to clean up various crime scenes while holding down full-time jobs. Aftermath has been described by Illinois police as "providing an irreplaceable service" and as "extremely professional and reliable."

Say hello to America's newest growth industry. Look at any tabloid or local newspaper: Death is mentioned on every page. As the culture becomes simultaneously more sanitized and more violent, death cleanup has become a specialty market. And when the misfortune of suicide or murder or unattended death intrudes on our TV time, who are we going to call? Aftermath is one of many companies that have sprouted to fill a contemporary need. They even have a lobbying group, the American Bio-Recovery Association (founded in 1996), which puts the annual revenue for the fledgling industry at $20 million to $25 million, showing growth every year.

Aftermath employs 20 technicians, who receive 12 hours of cleanup training and many more hours of sensitivity training. They are also required to get three vaccinations for hepatitis B, which is their biggest health hazard. (Some pathogens, like tuberculosis, can be killed on contact with decontaminating sprays. Others, including HIV, can live for days outside a body, and hepatitis B can live much longer than that and reanimate itself.) Most of Aftermath's technicians have backgrounds in law enforcement or medicine and are accustomed to gruesome crime scenes. They are paid between $25 and $40 per hour, with some earning $70,000 per year.

The average cost of an Aftermath job is $2500, though price will vary widely, depending on the time required (a few hours to as long as a month). Typical fees are $100 per hour, per technician, $500 for supplies and $200 for the disposal of hazardous waste. Most body fluids seep into walls and floors, so technicians spend less time wiping away such things than they do cutting out and disposing of parts of a room. Aftermath has a construction crew, Force Construction, that will completely rebuild a room or rooms so they look exactly as they did before the incident.

In 1995, Chris Wilson and longtime friend Tim Reifsteck (Kevin's brother) worked selling newspaper subscriptions. They always talked about becoming entrepreneurs but hadn't yet come up with their big idea. Then a neighbor's son committed suicide with a rifle. The parents were horrified when the police didn't clean up the area after the body was removed from their home. Chris and Tim offered to do it. They spent two and a half hours scraping off bits of brain and skull from walls and sopping up blood from carpets. Halfway through the process, it occurred to them: They had discovered their niche business. The next day they called funeral parlors and coroners offices to ask who provided such a service. They were told, "We wish someone did."

Before they opened for business, Chris and Tim spent six months researching crime scene cleanups. They learned about OSHA certification, vaccinations and medical waste disposal licenses. Most important, they discovered there were no books or courses on such cleanups; they would have to figure it out on the job. Then they opened for business in a small office in an industrial strip mall in Plainfield.

During the next two years they would learn many things: the proper technique for cleaning up blood, the equipment and disinfectants that kill germs and odors, the difference between a fresh death and an unattended death, the various stages of corpse decay, the reasons people die, the ways people die, the legacy of death for the families left behind. In time, they would learn more about death than they ever wanted to know.

The technicians at Aftermath are intimately familiar with the smell of decay--a sickly combination of vomit and flowery perfume. They can judge the time of death by how blood clumps and coagulates; they can instantly distinguish fluids of a fresh corpse from those of an aged one. They have dealt with the consequences of someone who has expired in the night with a whisper of death on his lips, and they have seen the destruction and butchery of murderers. They know, odd as it seems, that the scene left by a quiet, lonely demise can often be more gruesome than the most violent death. They are janitors of the human condition.

•

A typical Aftermath workweek has Wilson and Reifsteck monitoring the activities of teams operating in various states. Theirs is a cell phone-driven business. I join them on a Tuesday, with the expectation that I will be sent on a job as soon as one comes in. We're getting acquainted over lunch in a Mexican restaurant when Chris, a handsome 30-year-old with slicked-back hair, gets a call about a suicide in Michigan. "Shotgun or handgun?" he asks. He's told a shotgun, which means the cleanup will take much longer. He starts arranging a team.

"About 30 percent of our deaths are suicides," Tim explains, pointing out that most happen during the holidays, in January (after people receive their Christmas credit card bills and tax forms) and in summer (when heat tends to bring out people's hostilities).

"Only 10 percent are homicides, which usually occur outside of homes," he says. Chicago had 645 homicides last year; more than 500 of those occurred outdoors--no-man's-land. "The cops just hose down the street," Tim says. "About 10 percent of our deaths are accidents. The rest are natural causes, with almost 50 percent being unattended deaths"--an industry term for a body that is discovered after as long as two years.

"Most suicides we see are influenced by divorce, child custody problems or depression," Chris says.

"We had one guy who hung himself," says Tim, "but he wasn't dying fast enough, so he shot himself (continued on page 148) CSC (continued from page 117) too. There was also a kid who shot himself twice in the head and lived. He called his father and said, 'Dad, I can't do anything right.' "

The waitress brings our food and we begin to eat. Chris says, "Remember the guy who failed his paramedic's exam? He put a stick of dynamite in his mouth and blew his teeth through a wall." My companions dig into their burritos without hesitation.

"Another guy," Tim adds, "a disc jockey, put in earplugs and taped his eyes shut so they wouldn't blow out. Before that he put down plastic so that the blood would go down the bathroom drain, then stuck the gun in a pillow."

"I remember that one," says Chris. "It made for a quick cleanup."

Grim as these deaths are, the worst involve children. Aftermath's youngest suicide was a nine-year-old boy who shot himself in the head because he was being tormented in school. The youngest body the team has dealt with was eight months old--a distraught ex-boyfriend shot and killed the baby, his two siblings, the mother and then himself.

"How could anyone kill a baby?" says Tim, the father of two small children. He's boyish-looking in jeans and T-shirt, with a crew cut. "I mean, there was a Winnie the Pooh toy in the crib. Soon after that my little niece got the same toy for Christmas, and I was devastated."

Chris and Tim have mopped up after people who have died in every conceivable way and for every conceivable reason. They freely discuss their experiences, as if they've compartmentalized them in order to cope.

They say the most vicious death they have seen was a murder-suicide. In late August 1998, Daniel Jones of Lynwood, Illinois got tired of being kidded about the affair he believed his estranged wife, Tammy, was having with his co-worker James Castronovo. Jones put on a suit of body armor, gathered two handguns, a shotgun and a semiautomatic AR-15 rifle and set his trailer home on fire. He then went to his wife's Schererville, Indiana apartment, where he pumped more than 300 bullets into Castronovo and used the AR-15 to sever the man's arms and legs. When Castronovo pleaded with Jones to kill him, Jones set his testicles on fire, and finally finished Castronovo off by shooting him in the head. Then Jones killed himself. When Tim and Chris arrived on the scene, they say, they were stunned by the palpable hatred of the act.

"It took six technicians two days to clean up that place," says Tim. "The neighbors sat outside on deck chairs and watched us work. They brought coolers of beer as if it were entertainment."

•

Later in the week, I am teamed with the two-man crew of Kevin Reifsteck and Greg Banach, just back from a suicide job in Detroit. "We haven't seen our wives in two days," says Greg. "We just spent 15 hours cleaning up a self-inflicted death. But we once worked for nine days straight. We lived on Slim Jims and Mountain Dew."

From Detroit, they went directly to a gruesome unattended death in Crystal Lake, Illinois, where they were confronted with a situation that has caused more than one Aftermath technician to quit on the spot. The body was at least a month old--what is known as a "filth job."

"Most can't deal with this type of situation," says Greg. "Especially the maggots. We've walked into rooms that have a wall of flies. They eat off the body first, then lay their larvae, which become maggots. The maggots feast on the corpse, then hide in the walls until they become flies. Sometimes it takes three weeks to get rid of them. Rats and mice just run away when we come. Even worse than maggots are roaches. They get into your clothes."

"I remember one cleanup where the scalp of the corpse had separated from the head," says Kevin. "The maggots were inside the scalp, and it appeared to be actually crawling across the floor."

"I'm immune to it," Greg says. "There is no scene I can't handle, but I'll take a blood job over a filth job any day. It's different every time. It's interesting to learn the inside story of a crime."

Unattended deaths are a preoccupation for those working at Aftermath: Paradoxically, they are often the saddest deaths, the most unsettling scenes, the most challenging to clean. Chris Wilson delves into the subject. "A lot of unattended natural deaths happen on the toilet," he says. "Defecating slows the heart rate, which can cause a heart attack. If a corpse is unattended for more than two days, it begins to bloat. By the third day, gas and fluids explode through the navel and mouth. They drain out and seep into everything: floorboards, cracks in tile, the walls. The stench is so bad even the things the fluids don't touch have to be thrown out. After three to four weeks the body begins to liquefy. I remember a guy who was dead for more than two years. His daughter kept him in a room she had sealed off, and she'd put 150 air fresheners around to mask the stench. She didn't want anyone to know he'd died, so she could collect his Social Security checks. By the time we got there, there was nothing but the sweet smell of death and a filmy substance on the floor. That muck was once his body."

In the worst unattended deaths, not only does a room stink of rotten meat and spoiled body fluids, but it also stinks of the filth that the person lived in when he was alive. Such was the case of a 450-pound man who lived in a room that reeked of dirty clothes, decaying food and cigarette butts. He drank himself to death and lay unattended for a week. When his body was finally removed it fell off the stretcher and literally exploded in the hallway. Aftermath technicians cleaned up the hall, then went into the bedroom where the corpse had been. It was crawling with maggots.

"That's the worst part of our job," says Tim, "dealing with those little buggers after they've been hosting on a body. They're hard to kill. When you disturb them they scatter everywhere, into the walls, and we have to track them for weeks. A lot of our guys don't have the stomach for it. Maggots bother them because they're alive."

It takes a certain kind of person to be an Aftermath technician, say Chris and Tim. Obviously, he or she must develop an insensitivity to blood and gore. Most of Aftermath's technicians are men; of the three women at one time employed by Aftermath, one, college student Stephanie Hayes, went on to work for the New York City Medical Examiner's office, taking photographs and writing up reports at death scenes. Another, Cassandra Seaburg, worked as a technician until she hurt her back. She became a secretary for the company and will soon open a branch of Aftermath in Hawaii. The third female tech quit because of trauma, referred to in the trade as critical incident stress syndrome. It is not uncommon for Aftermath technicians to be haunted by what they see. Some have terrible nightmares; others form an aversion to eating red jelly or rice.

"We get them counseling," says Chris. "A lot of them quit because they can't believe what people are capable of."

"They burn out," says Tim. "They can't deal with families pleading with them to 'bring back my son.' "

Aftermath makes a point of not hiring people who, Chris says, "are intrigued by crime scenes. We avoid those guys who just want to go under the yellow tape."

"Crime scenes get those types of people overly excited," says Tim. "They scare the hell out of us. The best guys can handle blood, but more important, they can communicate with distraught people. They have to be meticulous, serious, no kidding around. Just focus on the mechanics of the scene. If the family sees you're distraught too, it makes them worse. You have to see this job as part of a healing process."

"After we do a job," says Chris, "most families hug us. 'Who would we have turned to?' they say. We can't bring back their loved ones, but we can help them move on with their lives. I remember one scene in which the coroner was removing a kid's body and he hit the kid's head against a wall and laughed. The mother went ballistic until we calmed her down. It can be hard to deal with the emotional trauma of cleaning up one room while the family is crying in another room because a husband of 32 years committed suicide."

Often, Aftermath gets letters of thanks. One man wrote that his family "was deeply touched and appreciative. Your kindness has helped restore our faith that good people do exist." Another woman wrote, "Thank you so much for all your help cleaning up my father's apartment. This has been a very difficult time and your assistance has made it a bit easier. Also, thank you for working with me on the price. Things have been tight, not to mention unexpected."

•

Tim takes me into a garage behind his office to explain the company's techniques. When they started in the business, Aftermath techs would appear on a job with a shop vac, mop, broom, scrapers, rags, buckets and a variety of decontaminate chemicals. They soon learned that a simple wipe-down of some scenes was insufficient. "Before we came along," Tim says, "the cops used to just throw coffee grounds around to kill the smell."

The company has since developed a process to completely clean a death scene. First, they use a pump spray with Microband-X disinfectant to sanitize a room and kill bloodborne pathogens that could cause HIV, TB and hepatitis B and C. Then they wipe down the room with lemon-scented TR-32, which deodorizes and sanitizes, and properly dispose of anything that can't be salvaged. For any lingering odor they use a UV fogger that sprays a mist to counter airborne particles.

Tim points out equipment lined up against the walls. A fan. A pressure sprayer--"for jumpers," he says. A generator. A portable heater. Air filters. Fifty-gallon drums for fecal matter. Shop vacs. "We go through 40 a year," Tim says. He points to a pile of black garbage bags. "The bags have to be three millimeters thick." He looks down at the floor and smiles. "Watch where you step," he says. A maggot.

The second floor of the garage is where they keep the towels. "We spend at least $60,000 a year on towels," Tim says. On shelves are chemicals such as Cavicide, muriatic acid, Unsmoke and UN-Duz-It to kill germs, and protective equipment such as Code Blue gloves, Knot-a-Boots and Tyvek suits with hoods and masks. They also use respirators, like the kind in the movie Outbreak.

"We spend over $300,000 a year just on supplies," Tim says. Aftermath's total expenses run around $1 million. The company, which Reifsteck and Wilson co-own, grosses about $1.75 million annually and has made both partners relatively well-off. Chris drives a two-seater Mercedes-Benz; Tim drives a Hummer.

•

The phone rings in my hotel room. "We have a shotgun suicide for you in Romeoville," Chris says. "One body." It's a bloody scene, he says, but a fresh one, so it won't be too gory. I should have eaten earlier, I think. Then I drive to the scene, where I will meet the distraught mother and angry father before walking into the bedroom of their daughter, ruined by the suicide of her stalker.

It's a beautiful late spring day. The sun is shining on the neat ranch homes that line the street. A young girl is jumping rope in her front yard and young boys are riding their bicycles. A man is walking his dog. There is a red-white-and-blue GOD BLESS AMERICA sign on a fence. A woman is standing in her yard, smoking a cigarette, talking on a cell phone and staring across the street at the white Aftermath van in the driveway of her neighbor's home.

After Kevin and Greg talk to the parents and make their initial inspection of the bedroom, they go back outside. Kevin spreads a large blue plastic sheet on the front lawn. He puts cardboard boxes labeled "hazardous waste" on the sheets, then ties orange biohazard crime scene tape to one end of the house, and around the front lawn. He and Greg go into the van to change. They strip down to underwear and put on Tyvek suits, plastic booties, Code Blue gloves, protective eyewear and respirators.

In their extraterrestrial gear, they step out of the van, adrenaline pumping, ready for action. The parents have left the house, the way the men prefer it. Greg shuts off the heat in the living room; the Tyvek suits are hot. He walks down the hallway to the girl's room.

"This is a clean scene," he says. "No smell, no decay. We should clean it up in a few hours."

Greg kneels on the rug near the large puddle of blood and begins cutting a large swath with a razor.

"You have to be careful with rugs," Greg says over his shoulder. "Carpet tacks can cut you just like drug needles." Kevin examines the girl's open closet to see if any blood has hit her clothes. He picks up her phone, sprays a lemon cleaner on it and wipes it off. When he examines the girl's bed, he finds blood splattered on the sheets and pulls them off. He takes the sheets outside and drops them into an empty box on the blue plastic.

Greg rolls up the large piece of bloody carpet and puts it into a black plastic bag. The wood floor underneath is saturated. "We'll have to cut out the floor," he says, "but first I have to sop up the blood so it doesn't splatter." He puts towels soaked in disinfectant on the bloody floorboards and throws them into the plastic bag.

Kevin carts out the mattress, passing Greg in the hallway. Greg points down at his foot. "Watch your step," he says. He's found a skull fragment. "I've got an eye for body parts," he says to me. "At one suicide, the cops told us the guy had shot himself in the room where the body was discovered. But I found part of his lips in another room. I told the cops he shot himself once there, and then a second time in the room where he died." Often, Aftermath technicians find things the police have missed--a knife, bullet casings, a gun, even a suicide note.

Kevin kneels on the floor to inspect the girl's CD boxes, which are splattered with blood. He takes the discs out of the jewel boxes and throws them into a dresser drawer. The boxes are then tossed into the garbage bag. He stops, pulls the girl's hair drier out of the drawer, wipes off a tiny spot of blood and puts it back.

Behind him, Greg says, "You can't hurry on this job or you'll miss things." That's why Greg and Kevin always "blue light" (use an ultraviolet light to illuminate any remaining traces of blood) a room. "Actually we call it a black light," Greg says.

After working for a few hours, Greg and Kevin go outside for a break. They discard their booties and gloves. Before they reenter the house they will put on new ones.

•

Before working for Aftermath, Greg had a job with the Illinois Department of Public Health, disposing of hazardous materials. When he read about Aftermath in a newspaper article three years ago, he applied for a job and hasn't looked back. "I always liked horror movies," he says.

Kevin liked horror movies, too. He also raised snakes and fed them live mice. His ambition was to become a doctor, but at 20 he joined the Army to be a medic. He left the service as a sergeant five years later and began to work for his brother at Aftermath. His first job was a two-day "bleed out" (suicide by razor blade). "It didn't bother me," he says. What does bother him are some of the people he comes into contact with at death scenes.

"People will walk over their dead grandmother to get her Social Security check," he says.

"I won't let my wife go into a highway rest stop without me," says Greg, "ever since I cleaned up a rest stop where some scumbag had beaten a woman to a bloody pulp, then raped her."

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"You become suspicious," says Kevin. "Most people never see what we see, like a guy who's excited he found $2000 in his grandma's room, where she's bleeding out on the floor, or two guys fighting over a dead relative's TV."

"Even some of the families we clean up for are unpleasant to us," says Greg. "There's no tipping in our job. It's not like delivering pizzas. We take away loved ones, and sometimes people want to lash out. I once found a clean skull fragment from an 18-year-old boy, and when his mother saw that it had her son's hair on it, she wanted to keep it. She went nuts on me."

When we go back into the home, I ask Greg and Kevin if this is one of their better scenes. Greg says, "There's no such thing as a good death." As proof, he goes to the van and returns with photographs of bodies he has cleaned up: a man whose arm was caught in a printing press and whose entire body was then sucked into the machine; another man who had been dead a week and whose skin had turned black; a man lying in the road whose head had been crushed by a truck. "People were just driving around him," Greg says. Then he describes the most difficult scene he has cleaned: a man who had fallen 46 floors down an elevator shaft.

"I had to clean up body parts and blood on every floor in the shaft," he says. "I rappelled down the shaft, picked up parts on each floor and handed them to my workers. The guy's arms weighed as much as a dog. It took us six days to complete the job."

Greg and Kevin finish the cleanup around midnight. The last thing they do is run a fogger to remove any lingering odor in the room. Then they talk to the girl's parents, who have returned home. The mother is still upset. Greg tries to reassure her. "This is a happy ending," he says. "That guy won't harass your daughter anymore."

The following morning I'm back at the Aftermath office. Cassandra is making calls. Chris is on his cell phone. Tim is sitting beside me at a card table piled high with Aftermath brochures.

"So, how did you like your first suicide?" he asks with an impish grin.

"Not as bad as I expected," I say. "I went out to dinner afterward."

"Really?" Tim reaches down and brushes something off my shoe.

"Just a maggot."

I shake my foot quickly.

He grins. "Just kidding."

Chris gets off his cell phone. "You didn't throw up?" he asks me. I shake my head. Chris looks crestfallen. Then he brightens, "Your photographer almost did." It seems to make him feel better. Despite their protestations, they all feel a certain macho pride in their ability to do a job most people can't stomach. It requires a special temperament, like that of soldiers in battle who devise various mind-sets to get through the horrors they must face. Chris jokes about the things he sees. Tim is coolly detached from them. Kevin focuses on the mechanics of "tidying up." Greg reduces his job to a contest, like a puzzle, finding the clues that others miss.

What these guys have in common is the tendency to see in life's cruelties the natural order of man. They don't see the murder and suicide and inhumanity through a moral prism. That would be psychologically debilitating. Instead, they see the scenes of destruction as the facts of man's existence. Kevin once said, "We human beings like to separate ourselves from animals, but we're just like them--only they're better."

"Someone has to do it," Tim says of the job. He adds that this is not exactly the kind of career he aspired to when he was eight years old. But it's a job he has the perfect temperament for. "I'm able to separate myself from my work and my life. Some people say we're sick, but they don't see what we do for families. I'm very happy in my job. I'll retire doing this and pass it on to my kids--if they want to do it." I ask him what he has learned over the years. He says, "If a person wants to kill himself, you can't stop him."

"Exactly," says Chris. "Suicide is such a selfish act. Most suicides are attempts to get back at someone."

Before I leave, I ask Chris one more question: "Are you religious?" He smiles, then shrugs. I look at Tim.

"No," he says. "This job makes you not believe in much."

"One Kid Shot Himself Twice In The Head And Lived. He Called His Father And Said, 'Dad, I Can'T Do Anything Right.' "

Six Feet Under

What Happens After Death?

State: Algor Mortis

Onset Time After Death: Immediate

What Happens: Brain functions, respiration and heartbeat stop. Urine and feces are expelled if gravity allows. Body temperature drops an average of one and a half degrees per hour for the first few hours--critical Information in determining time of death with-in the first 24 hours postmortem. (Actual rate varies with environmental temperature, and is useful only in temperate climates. In extreme climates, such as the Australian outback, body temperatures may even rise.)

Stage: Livor Mortis

Onset Time After Death: 30 Minutes

What Happens: Blood begins to pool at the lowest portions of the resting body, a process called lividity. The body becomes extremely pale while purple splotches form on its underside--earlobes and finger-nail beds are usually marked by lividity during this period, too. By 10 to 12 hours after death, the lividity is fixed, and even if the body is moved, the discoloration will remain (though a secondary set of splotches can also form based on the new position of the body).

Stage: Rigor Mortis

Onset Time After Death: Six Hours

What Happens: Chemical changes cause muscular stiffening, which first locks small muscles in the eyelids, then moves to neck and hands. Last areas to stiffen are large muscles in limbs. Rigor mortis takes about six hours to start, another six to complete, and then passes in another 12 hours. Process is accelerated by high temperatures and by extreme muscle activity prior to death. Autolysis may start--organs that contain digestive enzymes begin to digest themselves.

Stage: Putrefaction

Onset Time After Death: 36 Hours

What Happens: Streaks of surface discoloration appear on abdomen and spread to flanks, limbs and face as soft tissue is broken down by bacteria and enzymes. Discoloration of veins causes marbling. Large sheets of skin may fall off. Blisters filled with fluid and gas from. After two to three days, Internal pressure expels putrid fluid via orifices. Fingernails and toenails, detach, often pulling off glove- and sock-like pieces of skin. Within weeks, body bursts open under pressure.

Stage: Mummification and Adipocere

Onset Time After Death: Weeks to Months

What Happens: Both depend on unique conditions. Mummification occurs only in dry heat--e.g., deserts. The body shrivels and is converted into a leathery mass. Adipocere, which takes at least six months, occurs in warm, moist, anaerobic conditions, such as under water, or a particularly well-sealed coffin. Instead of breaking down as in normal putrefaction, fatty tissue is converted into a yellowish waxlike mass. It's flammable. And it can remain in this form for years.

"That's the worst," says Tim, "dealing with those little buggers after they've been hosting on a body."