SA’s trauma cleaners discuss their toughest jobs

When someone dies, the reality is it can be messy. In the most gory of those cases, this grim job falls to SA’s trauma cleaners. Warning: Extremely graphic content

Warning: Extremely graphic images.

Like a highly-functioning team of ants working meticulously beneath the ground, these vital workers are rarely sighted.

But their work is almost always at the point in one’s life that is likely unforgettable.

Trauma cleaners work at the intersection between the worst grief one can imagine, and whatever happens next – whether it’s a police investigation, the death of someone undiscovered for weeks or something else.

Australia’s most famous trauma cleaner, Sandra Pankhurst, and her team of cleaners. Picture: Jason Sammon

For cleaners like Eddy Kazaniecki and Blair Swanson from O’Shea’s Organisation, tasks like scouring away the bodily fluids of an elderly person left dead, for weeks, is all in a day’s work.

Even attending in the aftermath of what most people would consider an horrific shooting hardly rates a mention over the dinner table when asked, “how was your day?”

Then there’s cleaners like Michelle Williams from Lillium Cleaning.

A former nurse, Michelle has an almost all-woman cleaning crew.

About 40 per cent, she estimates, of their jobs are as a direct result of the fallout of vicious family violence.

Then there’s “unattended deaths” – where somebody may have been laying undiscovered for months.

She says she likes to humanise those she cleans up because in almost every case where somebody has died she is the second last person to see them before a mortician.

Above image: A clean up after a crime scene not related to suicide.

Michelle says people are interested in death and tragedy – she sees it when people try to grab a peek at what she’s doing or try to work out what the thing is that looks like blood in the pile of rubbish she’s holding.

“It’s a bit of a macabre thing,” she says.

“It’s fascinating to think what happens with us when we die.

“And what I’ve noticed with a lot of families is there’s like a fear of dying. People have this fear of what happens to us after we go.

“There’s that fear like, ‘do I just disappear into thin air? Am I going to be reincarnated?’

“I think that fear of the unknown is what then causes people to be fascinated with what happens when we do die, because that helps us explain or feel better about it.

“That’s why people are fascinated. They’re frightened of death and they don’t know what’s going to happen and they hope this will give them something.”

These are the people behind SA’s trauma cleaning scene, and their toughest cleans.

Eddy Kazaniecki – O’Shea’s Organisation

O’Shea’s Specialised Cleaning Manager Eddy Kazaniecki. Picture: Matt Loxton

Title: Senior specialised cleaning manager.

Experience: 15 years.

Expertise: Trauma and forensic, meth lab decommission.

Above images: Clean ups after crime scenes not related to suicide.

Toughest job – Murder clean: Following a high-profile murder in the southern suburbs, Eddy and his crack crew are called almost immediately.

It’s the kind of murder scene even the most hardened cleaner remembers in detail years later.

From latex gloves and white dust used to detect fingerprints to the blood, this is the shocking reality of a murder scene.

When they arrived blood was still covering parts of the bedroom – the gory result of the victim being repeatedly and brutally stabbed.

“That was bad,” he recalls.

“That was one of the worst ones I’ve seen with the amount of blood and all the rest of it involved in that one.

“Media was everywhere, the street was shut down.

“That was probably the biggest one I’ve been involved with, and bad.

“The amount of blood that was there on site it was just …”

Toughest job – suicide clean: Again called in with police on the scene, Eddy and co. kick into discrete mode because the wife of a man who has died by suicide is still in the home.

Mere hours earlier, this man took his own life, leaving his wife to discover the bloody scene.

Quickly trudging past the woman, hysterical in the hands of police, Eddy has to make the death scene look like nothing had ever happened, opening the doors for the wife to begin her recovery from the immense trauma.

“Police were trying to look after the wife, she was quite distraught, and another officer took me (to where he had killed himself),” he said.

“The whole overall scenario was not very pleasant, and at the end of the day you have to be pretty discrete.

“We suited up in the backyard so there’s nobody in the street looking in.

“We got told not to speak to the owner at all.”

With some elbow grease and the requisite safety gear, Eddy leaves the death scene both physically and metaphorically gone – and any obvious visual reminder of the death erased.

Michelle Williams – Lillium Cleaning

Lillium Cleaning managing director Michelle Williams. Picture: Supplied

The Lillium Cleaning team undertakes a clean. Picture: Supplied

Title: Managing director, cleaner.

Experience: 17 years.

Expertise: Domestic violence cleans, unattended deaths.

Toughest job – domestic violence cleans: Michelle and her team walk into a house strewn with blood from one end of a hallway to the other.

A woman and her children are still there, crying, screaming.

Michelle knows what’s happened.

Like a song stuck on repeat, she’s become too familiar with scenes like these.

In this particular instance, like many others, a man feels like he’s losing control over his partner so he tries to take his own life to show her he means business, claiming that’s the point she has driven him too.

At least, that’s what Michelle’s experience has led her to understand.

This time, it’s at a women’s shelter.

“They’re supposed to be safe, but the partner has worked out where they are and how to break in,” she says.

“They’ve traumatised the wife and then they’ve ended up trying to hurt themselves.

“You’ve got blood from one end of the house to the other because they’ve (hurt themselves) and run around the house.”

Michelle says these types of cleans are her team’s biggest strengths, and where they’ve carved out their niche.

They’re often working alongside police, child protection and social workers, all while a mum and her children are experiencing one of the worst moments of their lives.

Discretion, like during Eddy’s suicide cleans, is paramount.

Toughest job – suicide: For all forensic and trauma cleaners suicide is a brutal and heartbreaking side of life they see every day.

Michelle says those jobs, cleaning up after a death the public is deliberately shielded from, are made even more difficult when families are present.

Scurrying quickly to wipe away the smell and sight of death is hard – and harder when people are getting in the way.

But emotionally, it’s even harder when those people are partners and children.

“Even though they’ve gone and taken this person away and done whatever, you’re there to clean up the mess underneath, but it’s a bit harder,” she said.

“It’s harder because you can see that there’s a normal family, and what looked like a happy family up until this occurred earlier in the day while the wife was at work or happened overnight while the wife was in bed.

“You just think, ‘oh my god, was there something that could have been done?’

“This was an absolutely normal family 12 hours ago, and now they’re anything but.”

Toughest job – long-time unattended death, with dogs: Most people have heard the fable of somebody dying and not being discovered for a long time.

For Michelle, it’s reality.

She recalls one job in the mid-north of the state where a man had died alongside his dogs.

By the time she was there, these was virtually no trace of the man.

“When he was found there was only the bones left, and then they’d been spread through the house and the backyard,” she recalls.

“But they weren’t sure whether or not the person had died of natural causes and the dogs had no choice, or whether or not the dogs had actually caused the death.

“There wasn’t enough left for police to actually establish what had happened.

“That was quite interesting, we haven’t had that before and it probably sticks out as the most unusual and a bit gruesome.”

Above images: Clean ups after crime scenes not related to suicide.

Blair Swanson – O’Shea’s Organisation

Title: Operations manager.

Experience: 3.5 years.

Expertise: Hoarding cleans.

Toughest job – hoarding coupled with unattended deaths: Blair is a straight shooter.

As the operations manager of O’Shea’s, Blair is particularly loathe to expose the warts and all side of trauma cleaning.

He also treads carefully as to not glamorise or sensationalise what is, in reality, the end result of what is an often sad and heartbreaking situation.

After describing a hoarding clean in which he was part of the team that removed 360 cubic metres of rubbish from a property, he goes into more detail about what can confront a cleaner tasked with packing away the life of somebody who in life could not get rid of anything.

The house is a mess.

Bedrooms jammed shut by the weight of a lifetime’s worth of stuff, lounge rooms so cluttered you can’t see the ground or hallways shoulder high with boxes or papers ready to tumble at any stage are regular occurrences.

“You get ones where an unattended death crosses over with someone with a hoarding disorder,” he says.

“It’s just seeing the circumstances that someone’s lived in and passed away in can be confronting.

“You would hope there could have been some intervention in the meantime so that wouldn’t be the environment you’ve had to die in.”