Companies Clean Up at Crime Scenes

Kathy Jo Kadzuiauskas’ friend phoned her from Chicago, sobbing. The friend’s boyfriend had killed himself with a 12-gauge shotgun, and she needed help. The police and coroner were gone, but the act left a bloody mess in the boyfriend’s apartment.

“Everyone assumes that the police, the sheriffs and the coroners clean it up,” Kadzuiauskas said. “She was shocked to know that wasn’t the case.”

Kadzuiauskas headed for Chicago to do the dirty work. When she returned to her Riverside apartment, she knew she had found her calling: She would clean crime scenes for a living.

Since that beginning in August 1995, Crime Scene Steam and Clean has tidied up more than 180 murder, suicide and natural death scenes in Southern California. Kadzuiauskas, who takes death-scene cleanup referrals by beeper, is one of a few hardy entrepreneurs in her field.

There are now at least six death-scene cleaners operating in Los Angeles County--twice as many as last year--and several more in nearby counties. Businesses have also opened in New York, Chicago, Baltimore and Las Vegas. Insurance companies now reimburse property owners for death cleaning services and many lawyers advise landlords to hire cleaners when someone dies on their property.

After homicide detectives and coroners leave the scene, Kadzuiauskas, or someone like her, stays behind, sometimes for hours, scrubbing stains on their hands and knees, collecting fragments of remains, tearing out ruined carpets, spraying away the stench of death.

An indication of the growth potential of Kadzuiauskas’ business are the daily international phone calls she has been receiving from aspiring death cleaners since her company was featured on a TV news show. Prices range from $250 for a blood-spattered wall to $2,500 for cleaning up after a decomposed body.

The cottage industry is unregulated by the government, but that will change a year from now if a new bill is signed into state law. The Trauma Scene Waste Management Act would place death scene cleaners under the jurisdiction of the state Department of Health Services. Trauma waste would be treated as medical waste.

Those who take up this trade have often proven their mettle in other strong-stomach occupations.

Mellany Miller, founder of Miller’s Crime Scene Restoration in Riverside County, says her father’s butcher shop prepared her for her present work. Kadzuiauskas says her childhood experiences on a farm in the Ozarks taught her the grim realities of death. And the founder of Los Angeles-based Crime Scene Services, Michael T. Nicholson, was a mortuary body-transporter and then a lab worker for the L.A. coroner’s office until he became a death scene cleaner in September. One of his recent jobs was the double-murder suicide of a family in Porter Ranch.

David Goforth’s firm was hired in the aftermath of the April 1995 Unabomber blast that killed the president of the California Forestry Assn.

“I’ve had people try out for a job and they get sick, they throw up, they get nightmares and then they don’t come the next day. It’s not easy for anyone to see their own species take each other out,” says Goforth, who started a Sacramento-based cleaning company, Hygentek Inc., six years ago.

Perhaps the toughest challenge for death scene cleaners is soliciting business. “What would you put it under in the yellow pages?” asked Capt. Dean Gilmour of the coroner’s office.