FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Vice Blog

LONDON - CRIME SCENE CLEANERS

When it’s your job to hoover up AIDS and scrub faces off the floor, you could be forgiven for being pretty grumpy about it all. But David Ronan and Rob Philips prove that all you need is a good work ethic. Together they make up Crime Scene Cleaning, specialists in mopping up drug dens, contaminated police cells, and trauma scenes. The guys took some time out of their grisly schedule to share some stories with us.

Advertisement

Vice:  What’s the worst thing you’ve seen?
David Ronan: I haven’t done anything too bad, but Rob was called to a suicide with shotgun. Once the police removed the body, he had to pick up the bits and pieces. It’s our job then to gather it all, bag it, clean up all the spray and hand whatever’s left over to the police.

Rob Phillips: The gentleman blew the top of his head off in a car park. When I arrived there were bits of skull, eyebrow, and human tissue hanging in the trees and grass. So I got suited up in the PPE kit—mask, boots, suit, and the all the rest of it—and basically because it was outside it was a bit more involved. We were trying to clear the bushes and trees. I’ve actually done two like that now, the one in the car park and another in a barn. Obviously a shotgun to the head doesn’t leave much to the imagination. It’s complicated when it's outdoors because fragments of skull and other bits of human tissue tend to travel quite a way.

You must be pretty tough to shock. When was the last time something gave you the heebie jeebies?
RP: Once, a few years back. It was just the sheer volume of the blood. Obviously the person had lost their life, but it was practically all over the place. They’d evidently been chased around the house and they’d been attacked in virtually every room they were in. You’ve got nine pints of blood in your body but this was in every nook and cranny. They must have been in there for a while too, since there was an outline on the carpet—you could see where the eyeball, the nose, the lips had been resting against it. That’s the problem when bodies have been left to bloat. They either explode or they melt.

Advertisement

Yeesh. Can you imagine doing anything different?
RP: Actually, I can’t. I quite enjoy myself. I like the fact that every situation’s different. Every scene you go to, you could be facing something new.  It’s one of those jobs you sort of fall into and enjoy, or you don’t. It’s a job that’s got to be done, correctly, professionally, for the family or the people involved.

Do you ever get people asking if you can clean their house?
DR: We’re not everyday cleaners. We do go into trashed houses and drug dens. We’ll take everything out and do an HIV screening, looking for sharps or syringes. Then we box them up and send them to be destroyed.

What about old pensioners pegging it on their lonesome?
DR: If somebody has died and hasn’t been found for a few days or a few weeks, you’ve got to put the house back in the way it should have been. In that case the coroner would take the body and we would clean the house from top to bottom. The bloated body may stain or seep into the bed, in which case we would take the mattress away to be destroyed. It is not a pleasant smell. It stays with you for a long time, and whenever anybody talks about the job that’s what they always come back to.

How do you deal with it?
DR: You’ve just got to treat it as a job. You’ve got to put on the kit and think of it as something that has to be cleaned. That’s what I concentrate on.

Do you ever get CSI fans approach you, thinking they’ve got what it takes?
DR: Before we take on any youngsters we take them to the sewer system and just watch their reactions. We don’t need somebody flaking out or whatever because of the sight of what’s left there.

DAVE REGAN