Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff you Should Know from House Stuff Works
Speaker 1: dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark.
Speaker 1: There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and uh that makes the
Speaker 1: Stuff you Should Know freshly shaven. Mm hmm. I got
Speaker 1: rid of the beard. Yeah, I cleaned up this crime
Speaker 1: scene of the face, your hair sticking on a really
Speaker 1: weird way? Is it out from my hat? Thank you?
Speaker 1: Now it's even crazier. Please don't like, lick your thumb
Speaker 1: and come over like mommies to do the I should
Speaker 1: say for those of you who might be experiencing some
Speaker 1: sort of alarm or terror right now. Chuck kept the goatee.
Speaker 1: He just shaved the beard. Part of the parts that
Speaker 1: made it a beard, I guess the burnside mutton chops yeah,
Speaker 1: and the neck fuzz Yeah. Looking good, Thank you, Chuck.
Speaker 1: Have you ever seen a movie called Curdled No, it's
Speaker 1: a little sleeper produced by one Quentin Tarantino. It's about
Speaker 1: this very quiet, kind of demure woman who um gets
Speaker 1: a job as a crime scene clean up person. It's
Speaker 1: the girl from pulp fiction the cab driver, right. I
Speaker 1: believe she. I believe she was the taxi driver who
Speaker 1: drove Bruce Willis around after the boxing match from Pulp Fiction.
Speaker 1: Oh really heard of that movie. I haven't seen it,
Speaker 1: but I think that's her. It's worth seeing, is it.
Speaker 1: But now that i've I've read this crime scene cleanup
Speaker 1: article on our fair site how stuff works dot com. Um,
Speaker 1: I realized just how far off the mark some of
Speaker 1: the details were on that was it pretty far? Yeah,
Speaker 1: a little bit. Have you seen Sunshine Cleaning? No, but
Speaker 1: from the previous that one looks pretty far off the
Speaker 1: mark to like I remember seeing them carrying out like
Speaker 1: a mattress and just like you know, um, Mrs Brady
Speaker 1: spring cleaning type outfits, you remember that was she had
Speaker 1: like the little de rag and she had like the
Speaker 1: little clam diggers rolled up and like some converse on,
Speaker 1: just like cute is a button. That was one of
Speaker 1: the jokes of the scenes. Actually, they were carrying out
Speaker 1: this Amy Adams and the other girl carrying out this
Speaker 1: nasty like bloody mattress and one of them dropped her
Speaker 1: end and the other one fell on the bloody stain,
Speaker 1: and it was just like it's really good movie though,
Speaker 1: actually was it? Yeah? That's great? Is it by the
Speaker 1: people who made a little Miss Sunshine or am I
Speaker 1: just confusing that because the name it's a little indie
Speaker 1: though Alan Arkin was in it, so maybe so I
Speaker 1: wonder it's good. All right, Well, um, both of these
Speaker 1: movies are utter frauds when it comes to the details,
Speaker 1: right chuck uh yeah for the most part. Okay, let's
Speaker 1: talk about crime scene clean up, the real stuff, because
Speaker 1: there's nothing cute or about it. It's actually horrific work
Speaker 1: and it takes a very specific kind of person and
Speaker 1: the those people last in average of about eight months
Speaker 1: before they get burned out in this business, right yeah, alright,
Speaker 1: So it's actually called it's it's part of the cleaning industry,
Speaker 1: and the it's a niche part of the cleaning industry,
Speaker 1: very niche, not very heavily marketed in traditional channels. Ext
Speaker 1: it's not how it works. Um, but it's called CTSD
Speaker 1: con Crime and Trauma Scene decontamination, right and um, basically
Speaker 1: what it is is it is a cleaning service on steroids.
Speaker 1: There's no Mrs Brady outfits. You're wearing full bio hazard
Speaker 1: has matt suits, no French Maids going on here, nothing
Speaker 1: like that, because you're dealing with some really dangerous stuff.
Speaker 1: You're dealing with um blood which often feature appropriately enough
Speaker 1: blood borne pathogens. Um, you're cleaning up meth labs. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's um. And a lot of times you're you're um.
Speaker 1: And we should probably warn people this. This is gonna
Speaker 1: get a little graphic here. You can do what I'm
Speaker 1: seeing without being a little graphic, right, But I mean
Speaker 1: you're cleaning up like there may not be a body
Speaker 1: there anymore, but you're picking up pieces of bone that
Speaker 1: the the crime scene investigators missed. Um, you're scraping brain
Speaker 1: off of walls. It's not normal work, right, Yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean I think that's where the decontamination part of the
Speaker 1: CTS deacon comes in. It's not just cleaning. You're you're
Speaker 1: actually your goal is to return the spot to its
Speaker 1: original condition. So like, you don't it made a point
Speaker 1: in this article, like you don't just clean the carpet
Speaker 1: because if the carpet has a two inch blood stain
Speaker 1: on the carpet, there's probably a two foot blood stain
Speaker 1: under the carpet on the floorboard. Right, Yeah, So cleaning
Speaker 1: the carpet doesn't work. You gotta cut the carpet out,
Speaker 1: maybe cut the base baseboards outright. So it is Decontaminations
Speaker 1: who wrote this. Julia Layton, she's she's got the goods.
Speaker 1: She definitely has the goods, but the way she put
Speaker 1: it has to be actually clean, not just apparently clean, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: which I do apparently cleaning in my house, but I
Speaker 1: mean we're not cutting up carpet and replacing floorboards or anything.
Speaker 1: Um So, it takes a very certain type of person
Speaker 1: um because of the gore that you're going to have
Speaker 1: to deal with in a large number of your cases.
Speaker 1: Um So, a lot of the people in um the
Speaker 1: ct S dacon industry, or former or maybe even current
Speaker 1: e M t S emergency room nurses, people who are
Speaker 1: already trained to deal with this kind of thing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that that one articles. And you know, I think that
Speaker 1: that company said they hire a lot of former firemen,
Speaker 1: and I would think probably military people, people that have
Speaker 1: dealt with high stress and uh, dead bodies basically. But
Speaker 1: it's not just that, I mean you have to um also,
Speaker 1: as a crime scene clean up person, you have to
Speaker 1: have a sympathetic nature, is one of the points in
Speaker 1: this article. Right, sympathetic but not empathetic, right, because there's
Speaker 1: a lot of times when all the the ambulance is gone,
Speaker 1: the cops are gone, but the family is still there
Speaker 1: and they may be sitting there sobbing while they're watching
Speaker 1: you clean the house. Um. And you you have to
Speaker 1: be able to, yeah, sympathize with them without getting caught
Speaker 1: up in what they're experiencing, right, and you have to
Speaker 1: be able to remain detached, but you have to be um. Uh,
Speaker 1: you have to be understanding to what they're going through too. Yeah.
Speaker 1: The one guy in that article that they interviewed said
Speaker 1: that he's cried along with families and stuff like that.
Speaker 1: And um, I think they also said that some companies
Speaker 1: offer grief counselors along with their service. Yeah, the upon
Speaker 1: request apparently, if you want a grief counselor usually that
Speaker 1: can be factored into the price or else the company
Speaker 1: will will give it to you for free. Yeah. In
Speaker 1: Sunshine Cleaning, there was never anyone at the scene, but um,
Speaker 1: it was realistic in some ways because one of the
Speaker 1: subplots involved um. One of the girls found a wallet
Speaker 1: and an identification from the deceased and ended up looking
Speaker 1: up her daughter and befriending her daughter, but not telling
Speaker 1: the daughter that she had cleaned up her mother's suicide
Speaker 1: or homicide scene. So they kind of dealt with that,
Speaker 1: you know, delicately. That's great. Yeah, that's probably the one
Speaker 1: thing you should deal with delicately, right, UM, because some
Speaker 1: of the stuff that you're cleaning up is pretty rough stuff.
Speaker 1: So let's talk about the three main scenes that you're
Speaker 1: going to encounter as a UM clean up technician, Joshes
Speaker 1: Number one, you've got violent death, which is homicide, suicide
Speaker 1: or bad luck accident type of thing. You've got a decomposition,
Speaker 1: decomposing body happening, and meth labs is a lot of
Speaker 1: their business comes from meth labs that have exploded. Because
Speaker 1: meth labs are known for exploding. I don't even know
Speaker 1: that they necessarily have to have exploded. I think just
Speaker 1: the fact that there is a meth lab there that
Speaker 1: it means that you have to decontaminate the scene absolutely. Apparently,
Speaker 1: meth labs UM are so toxic that they're UM capable
Speaker 1: of making people who live in a former meth lab
Speaker 1: sick like a decade on UM. Some of the toxins
Speaker 1: that you're running into are things like acetone, methanol, benzene, iodine,
Speaker 1: hydrochloric acid. This is like the ingredients of meth. Right,
Speaker 1: this is what people are snorting. Kids. Unless you want
Speaker 1: to turn into a disgusting, haggard wreck mess of a human,
Speaker 1: stay away from meth. Meth equals death. Just look at
Speaker 1: those pictures. You've seen those pictures on the internet that
Speaker 1: showed the before and after. Yeah, oh god, that that
Speaker 1: should be like on billboards in Oklahoma. We should probably
Speaker 1: podcast on meth sometime. We have a good article. It's
Speaker 1: liked tom she wrote it. Really, yeah, we absolutely should.
Speaker 1: Um So one of the one of the reasons why
Speaker 1: meth labs are so dangerous is because you are going
Speaker 1: to absorb the stuff through your skin. You leave the
Speaker 1: toxic breads to do not just on walls, but on
Speaker 1: the air as well. So another UM, I guess prior
Speaker 1: job experience that is good to bring to the table
Speaker 1: if you're a crime scene clean up person is construction
Speaker 1: background or at the very least militian, because a lot
Speaker 1: of cases, like with UM meth labs, like if it
Speaker 1: was a house or an apartment or something, you have
Speaker 1: to knock everything out. Anything that UM can't be put
Speaker 1: in some sort of decontaminating chemical. UM has to be
Speaker 1: taken out, thrown away. That includes drywall, floorboards, carpet, all
Speaker 1: this stuff until it's just down to the bones of
Speaker 1: the building. Yeah, or they will tear it down or
Speaker 1: more likely, uh, haul the trailer away. Well, let's talk
Speaker 1: about this. We said that you're not wearing, um, just
Speaker 1: normal everyday spring cleaning clothes. You're wearing like a full
Speaker 1: on biohezard suit. Right. What are some of the other, um,
Speaker 1: I guess tools of the trade chuckers. Well, there's there's
Speaker 1: a laundry list, Josh. You you definitely want your protective gear. Um,
Speaker 1: you have to have biowaste containers like big fifty five
Speaker 1: gallon drums to hold this stuff. You can't just throw
Speaker 1: it in a bag into the back of your van. No,
Speaker 1: there's regulations you gotta follow. Um, you're gonna have your
Speaker 1: regular cleaning supplies that you would need to clean up
Speaker 1: any kind of you know, mops and disinfectants and that
Speaker 1: kind of thing. You've got your more hardcore supplies like
Speaker 1: industrial strength, like hospital strength, the disinfectants, right, which only
Speaker 1: allow the merca bug to survive. Really, now, there's like
Speaker 1: hospital acquired mercer infections. I don't know anything about that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: or they like get used to the industrial cleaners in there,
Speaker 1: Like these superbugs are like bring it when you spray
Speaker 1: it on them, it's worse than ticks. You can have
Speaker 1: an ozone machine which removes odors. You can have a
Speaker 1: fogger which they will use to shoot um stuff into
Speaker 1: like air ducks to get rid of odors. Right, well,
Speaker 1: it'll um. It takes a chemical and kind of gets
Speaker 1: it around corners and stuff. You get everywhere with it
Speaker 1: when you have when you run it through a fogger,
Speaker 1: apparently you've got some enzyme solvents you want to kill bacteria,
Speaker 1: and it can also liquefied dried blood, which can be
Speaker 1: pretty nasty to get out once it's equagulated and dried, right,
Speaker 1: which is why you want shovels. Yeah, Apparently chuck after
Speaker 1: what three hours to two hours and blog coagulates into
Speaker 1: kind of a jelly like goo that you can shovel
Speaker 1: into bags. So gross, but very very thick bags, biohezard bags.
Speaker 1: They also include in this article putty knives to scrape
Speaker 1: brain matter from the wall because apparently brain when it
Speaker 1: dries becomes like cement, and we'll stick to something like
Speaker 1: cement which is really gross and sad. You can also
Speaker 1: use a steam basically a steamer to steam it back
Speaker 1: into gooiness. Yeah. And then my favorite thing, which is
Speaker 1: be the first thing in my van, would be the
Speaker 1: no touch cleaning system. And these are like big long
Speaker 1: scrubbing brushes, uh, heavy duty sprayers, things like that, like
Speaker 1: pressure washers and no touch cleaning system seems like the
Speaker 1: smartest cleaning system, yes it is. Yeah. Then, like you said,
Speaker 1: you want some carponry tools, probably ladders, stuff like that,
Speaker 1: and then a camera because you need to take before
Speaker 1: and after pictures for insurance, and you wouldn't think about that, right,
Speaker 1: And actually apparently most insurance covers this, right, Yeah, insurance
Speaker 1: covers it a lot of times. Or if it's a homicide,
Speaker 1: I think it's paid for by the state, by the
Speaker 1: federal government really Crime Victory Victim Reparations Agency. Okay, and
Speaker 1: I know the state agencies that do that too. So well,
Speaker 1: we're getting aheair of ourselves. I don't mean to jump
Speaker 1: the gun, but let's talk more about some of the scenes. Specifically,
Speaker 1: we talked about meth labs, Chuck. One of the other
Speaker 1: big ones that you'll be called out too, that makes
Speaker 1: quite a message when a decomposing body is found, right, absolutely,
Speaker 1: he had to call him decomps in the in the trade. Uh,
Speaker 1: that's not gonna be like usually, it's not gonna be
Speaker 1: some big nasty um blood sprays and like brains and things.
Speaker 1: It's not gonna be all over the place, but it
Speaker 1: can be pretty nasty because a decomposing body, Josh, is
Speaker 1: really gross. Your body swells up, um insects move into
Speaker 1: your body and take up residence. Your organs are going
Speaker 1: to digest themselves, and your skin liquefies. Yeah. Remember we
Speaker 1: talked about um rick or mortis or no I think
Speaker 1: it was on the Body Farms episode. We talked a
Speaker 1: lot about how decomposition works. So if you want to
Speaker 1: know more about d COMP, go listen to our Body
Speaker 1: Farms um eppie right. Yeah, And of course there's the smell.
Speaker 1: You can't talk about decomposition without the smell. And as
Speaker 1: Julia Layton puts it, it would bring an average person
Speaker 1: to his knees. Yeah that's bad. Yes, apparently it's ammonia.
Speaker 1: It's an ammonia based smell created by d COMP like
Speaker 1: the litter box. Yeah, you ever cleaned out of litter box.
Speaker 1: I have toxic plasmos is all over the place, that's right. Um.
Speaker 1: The other thing too with a d comp is and
Speaker 1: this you know, you don't think about these things when
Speaker 1: you hear about it on the news. But someone actually
Speaker 1: has to go behind after the body has been removed.
Speaker 1: There's probably liquefied parts of the body there. And there's
Speaker 1: also maggots that have already feasted and have the blood
Speaker 1: inside of them, and you gotta get it. You gotta
Speaker 1: get rid of them too, because they're carrying you know,
Speaker 1: disease maybe right, And you have to basically scour the
Speaker 1: place looking for maggots, collect the maggots, and then you
Speaker 1: dispose of them through burning, right, tastes like burning. That's dcompey,
Speaker 1: that's dcom. Now let's get down to the one that
Speaker 1: everybody's fascinated with that all the movies are about. And
Speaker 1: those are murder scenes, suicide scenes, accidental shootings, basically where
Speaker 1: somebody was shot it's specifically in the head, I guess
Speaker 1: is the worst. I mean, you've seen Full Metal Jacket, right,
Speaker 1: remember pile? Yeah, someone had to clean that up. Somebody did. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'll bet it was a joker. Well, somebody in the
Speaker 1: art department for the movie. But uh, yeah, a violent
Speaker 1: death is not good because there's gonna be lots of blood,
Speaker 1: especially sue sides they say are probably the worst for
Speaker 1: the blood. Yeah, which is why I guess I can't
Speaker 1: see shooting yourself in the head at home. That's just
Speaker 1: so so much of a problem. It's just a huge problem.
Speaker 1: At least go to a hotel or a motel. And
Speaker 1: that Hunter Thompson did, he shot himself in his basement
Speaker 1: while he's on the phone with his wife. But I mean,
Speaker 1: I think it's fine for him that he was on
Speaker 1: the phone with her because apparently he'd let her know
Speaker 1: that this was happening. This wasn't like a she had
Speaker 1: no idea that something like this was going to happen.
Speaker 1: But at home. He did it at home, which I
Speaker 1: can understand wanting to be at home. But yeah, I
Speaker 1: guess shooting yourself in the head if you're going to why,
Speaker 1: I don't see why you would do it at home. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I agree. Uh, And like we said earlier, it has
Speaker 1: to be really, really clean, So any bodily fluid is
Speaker 1: a potential pathogen. And not only that, but after you leave,
Speaker 1: if you don't get it all up, it can lead
Speaker 1: to mold and bacteria and cause people to get sick
Speaker 1: like months afterward. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, you have to, like
Speaker 1: you said, restore this place to the state it was
Speaker 1: in before the trigger was pulled, right, Yeah. And it
Speaker 1: can take up to I mean a few hours to
Speaker 1: up to like forty eight hours to do this. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And apparently a good crime scene clean up company is
Speaker 1: gonna charge you about six hundred bucks an hour. It
Speaker 1: ain't cheap, um for one room with lots of blood
Speaker 1: for a homicide or suicide, it's gonna cost between three
Speaker 1: and sixth grand I guess right. One of the reasons
Speaker 1: why it's so expensive is because these people don't just
Speaker 1: take the stuff home and throw it in their trash
Speaker 1: out front. Right. There are really specific permits and rules
Speaker 1: that govern disposal of this, which, by the way, we
Speaker 1: should say the actual industry itself is not regulated. It's
Speaker 1: not nationally regulated. No, but they generally follow Ocean's bloodborne
Speaker 1: pathogen standards, which requires training and certification itself. Um, But
Speaker 1: to be a crime scene cleanup technician that you don't
Speaker 1: there's no national certification or even state or local certification.
Speaker 1: It's just company training. Yeah yeah, right, and but um,
Speaker 1: you know, we'll talk about the training in a minute.
Speaker 1: But they obviously want to do a good job because
Speaker 1: the last thing you want is I mean, the turnover
Speaker 1: is already high enough, you know. Um. But like we said,
Speaker 1: there is plenty of permits and um standards and procedures
Speaker 1: to follow in disposing of this waste. Right, yeah, you
Speaker 1: can't just like you said, you can't throw in the
Speaker 1: dumpster like they do in Sunshine cleaning. You have to
Speaker 1: incenterate it. And there are medical waste incinerator companies and uh,
Speaker 1: the one thing I thought they charged by the pound,
Speaker 1: which I thought was kind of gross. But how else
Speaker 1: are you gonna do it? Because it's a pound of nastiness. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And the other thing I thought was kind of gross
Speaker 1: was they a lot of them have minimum charges. So
Speaker 1: if you don't have the minimum you have to keep
Speaker 1: this uh bio human bio waste in van, well, not
Speaker 1: in your van, but if it's hot and in like
Speaker 1: a refrigerated space until you have collect enough of it
Speaker 1: to go to the incinerator. You know, I'll bet it's funny.
Speaker 1: I'll bet the same um, the same companies that that
Speaker 1: operate medical waste incinerators also just so happen to have
Speaker 1: some cold storage units that you can put your waist
Speaker 1: in until you have enough to burn to But I'll
Speaker 1: bet it's I'll bet if you're in the industry for
Speaker 1: a while you're friends with some guy who operates it
Speaker 1: and you kick him like fifty bucks to throw your
Speaker 1: stuff in with somebody else's or whatever. But you better
Speaker 1: be incinerating it following proper procedure, else you're a horrible jerk, right,
Speaker 1: And it's not just the gore that has to be
Speaker 1: disposed of. Um, if you have just deconstructed a house
Speaker 1: that was a meth lab, you've got to do something
Speaker 1: with this waste. Again. Can't just take it to the
Speaker 1: dumpster you came and take it to a normal dump.
Speaker 1: You have to take it to special dumps that are
Speaker 1: um out of public reach, right right, Um, And just
Speaker 1: transporting it you have to have a special permit for that, right,
Speaker 1: You have to have a has Met permit. Yeah, my friend, uh,
Speaker 1: my friend Timmy has he works in has Matt Disposal
Speaker 1: And now yeah you met Timmy. Now he does a
Speaker 1: lot of um like trained derailments and stuff like that,
Speaker 1: but he used to live in Oklahoma, and in Oklahoma
Speaker 1: nothing but nothing but meth labs and he had to
Speaker 1: do He didn't do crime scene cleanup, but he he
Speaker 1: worked on teams that investigated sites, I think. And he
Speaker 1: said that he saw bodies that had dirt the body
Speaker 1: that they've shoveled dirt in their mouths and would choke
Speaker 1: on it sometimes because apparently once whatever badness happens and
Speaker 1: it becomes airborne, it's such a like awful reaction, like
Speaker 1: that you're breathing this in, they start just putting something
Speaker 1: in their mouth to try and quell this nasty taste.
Speaker 1: So they would like stuff dirt in their mouths until
Speaker 1: they died. It's not nasty, said, that's horrible. It's another
Speaker 1: reason not to cook or do meth. What a mini um.
Speaker 1: So let's say you all this is like yeah, yeah, yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: and you're looking to earn no, I don't know, between
Speaker 1: thirty five and fifty grand without a high school diploma.
Speaker 1: We should say, um, what what do you need to
Speaker 1: do to be come a crime scene clean up technician? Well,
Speaker 1: we already talked about some of the UH traits they
Speaker 1: look for in somebody like to be empathetic and maybe
Speaker 1: to have prior training with the dead bodies and stuff
Speaker 1: like that. But they will actually give you test um
Speaker 1: to make sure that you won't like throw up on
Speaker 1: the scene in front of a family. Yeah, it's like
Speaker 1: monster's ball. Yeah, that would be awful to go. Can
Speaker 1: you imagine losing a family member in your home and
Speaker 1: then someone coming in to clean it and then they
Speaker 1: start throwing up all over the place. Plus, if you're
Speaker 1: the owner of the company, that's just extra work, that's
Speaker 1: more clean up that you can't charge for. Right, So
Speaker 1: they will actually put you through a test to pass
Speaker 1: a gross factor that um. It ranges from like looking
Speaker 1: at pictures of dead bodies to actually cleaning up dead
Speaker 1: animals carcasses to make sure that you won't vomit. And
Speaker 1: I wonder if they tell you that it's actual like
Speaker 1: human stuff, but it's actually like a fox. Oh like
Speaker 1: Halloween when you when you reach into the shape grapes
Speaker 1: and their eyeballs. Yeah. Um. You also really really really
Speaker 1: need to get a hepatitis B vaccine every five years.
Speaker 1: As a matter of fact, as many letters as there
Speaker 1: are types of hepatitis I would get a vaccine for
Speaker 1: each of them probably every month. Yeah, what do we
Speaker 1: get for Yeah, so we can still wouldn't qualify huh. Um. Also, Chuck,
Speaker 1: even if you are a very strong person, we like
Speaker 1: we said, the turnovers about eight months on average, and
Speaker 1: you are um really at risk for a couple of
Speaker 1: stress disorders UM, critical incident stress syndrome and secondary traumatic
Speaker 1: stress disorder. And basically the first one is you were
Speaker 1: on site of like horrific events routinely it's tough to
Speaker 1: shake off. And then the other one is if you
Speaker 1: become too attached to the families grief you're you, you
Speaker 1: basically can leach off of their post traumatic stress disorder
Speaker 1: and have secondary stress disorder, can very traumatic stress disorder. Yeah.
Speaker 1: They also obviously look for people going in that don't
Speaker 1: have any sort of like depressive disorders to things like
Speaker 1: that that probably wouldn't be a good job to put
Speaker 1: someone who was manic depressive to crimes and cleanup situation. Chuck,
Speaker 1: not at all. Uh. Let's talk about the business a
Speaker 1: little bit. I think you said six hundred dollars an hour,
Speaker 1: but a room can like a bloody room can cost
Speaker 1: up to like three thousand dollars to get clean. I
Speaker 1: thought it was three to six. Yeah, it's one to three.
Speaker 1: I misspoke. I'm sorry. Well, it could be six depends
Speaker 1: on how many people were killed in there. I mean,
Speaker 1: if it was a really nasty scene, it could be six.
Speaker 1: I'm sure. And you said also that the Crime Victim
Speaker 1: Reparation Act pays for agency. Agency pays for, um, the
Speaker 1: cleaning bill if it's a homicide. UM, if it's I
Speaker 1: don't know if it's a suicide, because I know that
Speaker 1: insurance generally doesn't cover suicides for anything. But maybe if
Speaker 1: it's an accidental death or something like that, your homeowners
Speaker 1: insurance will cover it. In most cases, you're not going
Speaker 1: to have to pay the bill. Um. And we said
Speaker 1: also that marketing and advertising can be tricky. Hotels and
Speaker 1: motels are the two largest businesses that have to deal
Speaker 1: with this suicide. So if you own a ctsdcon company,
Speaker 1: you probably go to every hotel and motel convention there is,
Speaker 1: which appropriately are held in hotels. Uh. And you hand
Speaker 1: out cards, right, You hand out cards to homicide detectives,
Speaker 1: You make friends with ambulance drivers. You just make sure
Speaker 1: that everybody is going to contact these families first if
Speaker 1: they're asked, you don't want to pimp in your card.
Speaker 1: But if if the families like, what are we gonna
Speaker 1: do about this, they can say, well, I know this
Speaker 1: guy is good. Yeah, that's actually how it worked in
Speaker 1: Sunshine Cleaning. Yes, Amy Adams was a regular house cleaner
Speaker 1: making beans, and her boyfriend was Steve Zon and he
Speaker 1: was a homicide detective. Steven is great and he's awesome
Speaker 1: and he um he he told her like, you know,
Speaker 1: you can make a lot more money by doing this,
Speaker 1: and he got her her first job and first referral,
Speaker 1: and it just kind of grew from there. Um, it's
Speaker 1: a burgeoning business, right. Yeah. And apparently if you like
Speaker 1: to name your business after yourself first day and last name,
Speaker 1: this is the this is the industry for you. This
Speaker 1: in waste disposal. Yeah, what was the company from San Francisco?
Speaker 1: In there there is um Neil Smithers crime Scene Cleaners, Inc. Right,
Speaker 1: And and they have people they send out all over
Speaker 1: the country. Now, but I think it said that they
Speaker 1: do about four hundred cleanups in San Francisco alone each year.
Speaker 1: This is two thousand six. That's more than one a day.
Speaker 1: Is well, And here we reach to the debate right.
Speaker 1: The crime scene cleanup companies literally make money off of tragedy, right,
Speaker 1: horrific tragedy. And a lot of people argue like that
Speaker 1: there's this kind of commercialization of death, of tragedy, and
Speaker 1: and that why are we so okay with this? Um?
Speaker 1: And I can kind of see that, like maybe this
Speaker 1: is something that should be a free service of a
Speaker 1: police department, worked into the budget or something that a
Speaker 1: city does, right. Um. But at the same time, you
Speaker 1: can really make a case like, if you need someone
Speaker 1: like this, it's a really good thing that they're around,
Speaker 1: whether it's a commercialization of death or not, because before
Speaker 1: this it was up to the family to do it,
Speaker 1: or maybe some friends of the family or something like that.
Speaker 1: But isn't that just way way worse. I don't even
Speaker 1: cleaning up your loved one's brains in your home, Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's obviously way way work. But like a private toach
Speaker 1: truck company comes and gets a car after car accident,
Speaker 1: so that's not taken care of by the police, so
Speaker 1: sort of sort of the same thing. I definitely fall
Speaker 1: in the line like, yeah, this is fine, this is
Speaker 1: perfectly acceptable capitalism. Yeah, well, and until it is covered
Speaker 1: by the police department. Then somebody's should be making money,
Speaker 1: and it should be top dollar because it's no fun
Speaker 1: to clean up brains and bone out of drywall. You know,
Speaker 1: I know, And I mean if you leave it to
Speaker 1: the city, can you imagine the job of a city
Speaker 1: worker would do. And well, that's the other point, man.
Speaker 1: These people are paid good money because they restore it
Speaker 1: to its original condition, and your right, I would not
Speaker 1: want to see the employee doing it. If you're a
Speaker 1: city employee who is good at your job, we apologize
Speaker 1: in advance. It's the rest of the people in your
Speaker 1: field that make it hard on you. Um. And if
Speaker 1: you are a crime scene cleanup technician, we want to
Speaker 1: hear from you. Oh yeah, Uh send us an email
Speaker 1: uh to the email address that I will give at
Speaker 1: the end of the show because I got ahead of myself.
Speaker 1: If you want to learn more about crime scene clean up,
Speaker 1: go type that into our search bar. Crime scene is
Speaker 1: crime hyphen scene clean up is clean hyphen up uh,
Speaker 1: and we'll take you to this really really good article. UM.
Speaker 1: And that means now, friends, that it's time for listener mail.
Speaker 1: Jerry had a big problem with the hyphen thing. Like
Speaker 1: you were you were out of the room getting some coffee,
Speaker 1: and I had to explain to the hyphens and that
Speaker 1: you've capitalized the first one and you don't capitalize the second.
Speaker 1: I can see that. And she said, this is the
Speaker 1: most difficult title we've ever had, Is it really? She said?
Speaker 1: She said, yes, Okay, she's tittering. H Josh. This is
Speaker 1: prison email part two. We had part one? Was it
Speaker 1: right before this one? Are we going to split those up? Uh?
Speaker 1: We have to have the one that we recorded go first,
Speaker 1: or else we've got two and then one. Okay, so yeah,
Speaker 1: this came out on this is Thursday. Right. That's more
Speaker 1: confusing than college football rankings in quantum physics. Uh so
Speaker 1: this is the end of the prisoners email the guy
Speaker 1: who was busted for math and then went on the
Speaker 1: lamb and then went to prison and is now a fine,
Speaker 1: upstanding citizen. We will continue with this. Food items available
Speaker 1: from the commissary like ramen noodles, can corn or chicken,
Speaker 1: and soda pop were valuable for trade as well. Pack
Speaker 1: of rama noodles were often uses currency for bets on
Speaker 1: things like football games. To the betting rama noodles on
Speaker 1: a football game, I guess when you're in the whoscal
Speaker 1: you're doing what you can to, you know, make it
Speaker 1: just like the outside. Or prizes and handball tournaments organized
Speaker 1: by enterprising inmates who would often keep five as an
Speaker 1: entry fee for putting the tournament together. Huh that crazy.
Speaker 1: I think it's crazy that this guy wasn't in a
Speaker 1: minimum security federal prison and he was still playing handball. Yeah. Uh.
Speaker 1: There were two escapes during the year that I was
Speaker 1: at the camp. One person took a blanket and threw
Speaker 1: it over the top of the barbed war fence. That
Speaker 1: was just regular barbedar, he said, not razor wire, and
Speaker 1: he climbed over in the middle of the night, and
Speaker 1: that was pretty much how he got out. Did they
Speaker 1: catch the guy? Uh, Yes, both were caught. The second
Speaker 1: guy left his job at the State and motor pool
Speaker 1: during the day, so I guess he just got in
Speaker 1: one of the cars and left, which is pretty smart
Speaker 1: way to escape. It's a pretty typical way to escape. Again, Well,
Speaker 1: that's actually what he says. He stole a state vehicle
Speaker 1: and he said both were caught in under forty eight hours. Shank,
Speaker 1: And here's just some little points he makes. Shank is
Speaker 1: indeed both a bourbon and noun, although shiv was much
Speaker 1: less common in usage. Somebody said it was east coast,
Speaker 1: west coast, but another credibility, well, this is Nevada, so
Speaker 1: shank is what they said there. In addition to the whole,
Speaker 1: the special housing unit was known as the shoe as
Speaker 1: an s h U, and it was more frequently referred
Speaker 1: to as the shoe than the whole, So we were
Speaker 1: sort of wrong in that one. And one of the
Speaker 1: more colorful terms that you can here in prison was
Speaker 1: to key stir something. Yeah, and can you imagine what
Speaker 1: that might be? Of course, I mean to hide something
Speaker 1: in a very uncomfortable place. You wreck them, yeah, not
Speaker 1: like this stop watch? Did you not know that you did?
Speaker 1: You get dysenterry from that when you put a watch
Speaker 1: in your keys there or a wrist watch. Sorry, it
Speaker 1: wasn't a stop I got dyson. Tearry little man. Another
Speaker 1: term was man walking, which meant that correction officer was
Speaker 1: out in the yard walking around, so someone would yell
Speaker 1: out man walking, and that was a cue to hide
Speaker 1: any contraband or desist any activities like tattooing, which was
Speaker 1: you didn't want the corrections guys to see tattooing each other.
Speaker 1: They're heavy critics. Exactly. I've already written much more than
Speaker 1: I intended, Guys. I could go on for much longer
Speaker 1: about many of the topics, including racism, which was extreme,
Speaker 1: the power structure, and what it was like not having
Speaker 1: freedom even though I worked outside the camp and mostly
Speaker 1: an unsupervised fashion. Uh, favor trading and so on and
Speaker 1: so on. It's weird that I have so much to
Speaker 1: write about even though I was only in total for
Speaker 1: about eighteen months. So it wasn't three years. It was
Speaker 1: eighteen months total. Eighteen months, man, can you imagine? Oh
Speaker 1: my god. So that's the end of part two of
Speaker 1: the prison prisoner email. It's part two of two. Huh yep.
Speaker 1: And he's on the up and up now and we
Speaker 1: wish him all the best. It sounds like he's doing
Speaker 1: really good. Thank you, anonymous jail bird. We appreciate you.
Speaker 1: Who doesn't work here? Right? It is not Jonathan Stricklin. Okay, um,
Speaker 1: let's see if you have a we already did this
Speaker 1: this whole email thing, right, crime scene clean up? Uh,
Speaker 1: just say the email address. Yeah, Just send your emails
Speaker 1: to Stuff podcast at how stuff works dot com for
Speaker 1: more on this and thousands of other topics. Does it
Speaker 1: how stuff works dot Com. Want more house stuff Works,
Speaker 1: check out our blogs on the house stuff works dot
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