[UPDATE MAY 23: More crime scene cleanup photos here.]
UNDISCLOSED LOCATION —There was blood on the front porch, blood in the entrance hall, blood in the living room, and blood on the landing downstairs. There was blood on the floor, blood on the walls, blood on the door handles, and blood inside the closet.
In the basement office where the stabbing took place the day before, there was blood on the rug, blood on the carpet and blood on the doorframes. A huge blood stain decorated the center of the sofa. The victim had been sitting there when he was attacked with a knife.
The bloody hand prints on the walls and door handles were just faint smudges now, but the floor was still streaked with bloody spots and spatters. The spots of blood were only small — the width of dimes and loonies — but they were everywhere: little ruby-red dots, raised around the edges like scabs.
This was going to be an easy job.
"This is a pretty basic cleanup," said Christian Cadieux, as he made a preliminary survey of the scene in his protective white booties and blue gloves. "Pretty run-of-the-mill stuff."
Cadieux (pictured at left) is the president of Crime & Trauma Scene Cleaners (CTSC) the largest specialist decontamination organization in Canada. A gregarious thirtysomething Greek-Canadian with an MBA in marketing, Cadieux first worked as a crime scene cleaner in Texas, before moving back to Toronto to start his own business in 2003.
"The beautiful thing about a mess is that it can be cleaned," Cadieux told me. "Any mess, any odour, any stain, fecal matter, larva or bodily fluid can be cleaned and decontaminated, and I challenge anyone in Canada — no, anyone in North America — to do it better than us."
Last Friday, I accompanied Cadieux and his crew to a job, to clean up after an attempted homicide. (The stabbing victim has since recovered. At Cadieux's request, some details have been changed to respect the victim's privacy.)
The house was empty when we arrived. For insurance purposes, in the event of an accident, only Cadieux's staff are allowed at a crime scene during the cleanup.
"You have to assume that everything here is contaminated," Cadieux said, as he and his partner Darrell Pye donned protective suits and masks. "HIV is bad news, but it dies quickly. Hepatitis, on the other hand, can live outside the body for weeks or even months. If you breathe any of that stuff up your nose or mouth, or something gets into your eyes, that's a contamination incident."
First, Pye bent down to pour indicator fluid over one of the larger blood spots on the floor, making it turn puffy and phosphorescent. "When the indicator oxidizes and turns white, that's a reaction to the iron in the blood," says Cadieux. "So that mess on the floor is definitely blood."
Most crime scene investigators use a substance called luminol to detect the presence of blood. (It's the same compound that lights up a raver's glow stick.) Cadieux uses a different chemical — although for business reasons, he didn't want to disclose the name of his mystery product.
"Luminol is expensive, carcinogenic, and needs an entirely different type of breathing mask with goggles," he said. Instead, CTSC only use luminol at the end of a scene, in conjunction with ultraviolet and infrared light, to show up trace elements of blood that might otherwise be invisible to the naked eye.
"It's a quality control measure," he said.
This being a simple job, it only required simple tools: paper towels, a industrial-strength disinfectant called Virkon, and a whole lot of bending over and scrubbing. "Virkon is like a magic bullet," Cadieux said. "It's the wonder pill, the miracle tablet. It cleans everything. I've showered with this stuff."
Pye did most of the scrubbing himself, on bended knees, while Cadieux looked on and discussed the tickets he'd just bought for a Celine Dion concert in August. "She's got the best pipes of any vocalist in the industry," Cadieux told me. "You've got to respect that talent."
"I don't know if I can work for a boss who's going to a Celine Dion concert," said Pye.
Pye, who drives a 1965 Cadillac Hearse and is also in his thirties, has been in the death business for over a decade. As a high school student, he interned at a funeral home, and worked at a cemetery in his twenties. He joined CTSC last year.
"I love this job," Pye said. "A few months ago, I spent two hours on a decomp[osition] scene cleaning out a bathtub where this woman had committed suicide. You can really lose yourself in this work. It's my dream job."
With Virkon, Pye easily wiped away the bloody mess on the floor, but getting the blood out of the lining of one of the closets proved more problematic. "I wish I'd brought a toothbrush," he told Cadieux. "That would've worked better."
All in all, the job took about three hours for Pye and Cadieux to complete, along with a third technician, Mike Frampton, who got to work on the sofa downstairs with a scrubbing brush and some pet stain remover. Cadieux seemed almost disappointed that he wasn't able to show off some his groovier, more complicated crime scene-cleaning tools, like the personally-engineered biohazard vacuum he created especially for CTSC.
"Floors, grout, tiles, stairs: that vaccuum will suck blood up from anything," Cadieux said. "But we don't need it here. There's not even any odour."
Still, even a basic job like this can be hot and heavy work. "If you wanna sweat, try wearing one of those protective suits. They don't breathe," Cadieux said. "We only have to shower after every job because we get so hot."
Cadieux said that one of his technicians, Rachel, sweated off seven pounds cleaning up after a shotgun suicide in Port Perry. "That was a pretty bad decomp. The guy shot himself in the head, and no one found him for three months. They were hundreds of maggots underneath the mattress where he died. After you've done a maggot job, you can't eat rice for a long time."
I asked Cadieux if he could think of the worst crime scene he'd worked over.
"What, do you mean psychologically, visually, or just the smell?" he said.
Cadieux considers himself more-or-less unshockable, but there was one job last year in Etobicoke that he says was "one of the top five worst things I've ever seen."
"This guy had been leaving fecal matter in different corners of his apartment for over three years, and there were several piles of feces, each about four feet high," Cadieux said. "I've seen some fucked-up shit, but this was Ivy League."
Eric Westermann, who works as CTSC's photographer and archivist (and took the photo at the top of this post), was also at the Etobicoke job.
"The toilet in the bathroom had a mountain of shit emerging from its bowl," he told me. "I'm not talking about a simple pile, I'm talking about a mountain that extended past the tank and had shitty stalactites connecting it to the floor. It had hardened to the consistency of concrete and was inhabited by spiders. Mike [Frampton, his colleague] and I actually admired this creation, this outsider art if you will, for some time. You have to imagine the commitment it must take to make something like that."
Feces and animal waste cleanup jobs now constitute a high proportion — if not a majority — of CTSC's work.
"We now have one guy dedicated to wildlife feces cleanup," he said. "Histoplasmosis — which is to say, pigeon shit — is just as bad, if not worse than asbestos. And raccoon ringworm is plain deadly. It's like the Canadian equivalent of bird flu."
For Cadieux, if not the people he cleans up after, the outlook is good. Business is regular, and Cadieux recently bought himself and his wife a new Pontiac Solstice, with revolving number plates and flamethrower exhausts.
"Wildlife feces is the up-and-coming money maker here in Canada. It's the next big thing," he said. "There's no shortage of work, that's all I'm gonna say. This business is recession proof."