Guardians of the Dead podcast: Weird ways to die

He’s carried out 6000 autopsies but forensic pathologist Roger Byard is still frequently baffled by bizarre cases that defy explanation or are just plain weird. Listen to the podcast.

WARNING: This podcast series features graphic descriptions of forensic pathology techniques, and descriptions of violent crimes, accidentsand traumatic incidents that some listeners may find distressing or upsetting.

Brutal murders, horrific animal attacks, shocking traffic and workplace accidents. In a career spanning almost 40 years and more than 6000 autopsies, Roger Byard has, as you might expect, seen every common way there is to die.

But as he explains in a new episode of the Guardians of the Dead podcast, the veteran forensic pathologist and academic has also seen his share of cases that can only be properly categorised as freakish, baffling and bizarre, from selfie deaths and parasites to rare diseases and electrocution.

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“At Forensic Science we’ve probably had 100 years’ worth of experience but we’re constantly seeing stuff that we’ve not seen before”.

“One of the interesting things about forensics is you find people who are just unexpectedly dead,” Prof Byard says.

He recalls the case of a young boy who was found dead in his bed with no obvious cause.

“When I did the autopsy I found it was an old sticker from a VCR cassette that he’d obviously been chewing on and fallen asleep and inhaled it, so it blocked off his airway,” Prof Byard says.

“Airway blockage can be really hard to pick and you can die very quickly”.

“Problems with airway obstruction can occur in industry as well when people are working.

“I was involved with a case where a man had fallen into a vat of perlite, which is powdery stuff used to break up clay but it absorbs water.

“He’d inhaled and it had gone into his airway and then this stuff, it absorbed water and it formed a cast of his trachea and bronchi.”

Prof Byard says death by choking or by inhaling objects and substances can happen to anyone in situations you might not expect.

“You can inhale anything. Kids who are digging tunnels inhale soil.

“I’ve had a case where a boy was in a cabin of a truck that flipped and it was going along the verge and it was basically shovelling soil into the cabin so he’s surrounded by this so he inhaled that and died.

“People in rollovers in cars sometimes get caught under the car with their head pressed into sand or soil and they can breathe it in.

“Clearly with that you know what’s happened, but sometimes you don’t.”

Selfie deaths have become a modern phenomenon since the explosion of the smartphone. It’s just one of the many weird ways to die highlighted in the latest episode of Guardians of the Dead.

Prof Byard also describes several cases where the cause of death was a foreign object that had made it into a person’s body, sometimes intentionally, sometimes accidentally.

“I found a wood screw in one young boy’s abdomen.

“He had mental difficulties and he used to eat a lot of objects and so he’d obviously eaten this wood screw that had perforated his stomach and there it was, just lying there.

“Another time, it was an elderly woman and she had an abscess just next to her liver and in the middle it was a chicken bone so again another foreign object that she’d swallowed that had caused this sort of damage.”

Deaths caused by the presence of a foreign object, such as a pencil, chicken bone or wood screw, may make for open and shut cases.

But Prof Byard says it’s important not to make assumptions or rush to judgment because in some cases the seemingly most obvious cause of death is not, in fact, the true cause of death.

For example, he says, people without spleens have a higher risk of dying unexpectedly from infections, which may go undetected without a thorough examination.

Prof Byard recalls discussing one such case with his university students; a man in his fifties with bad coronary arteries, who on the face of it, died of ischaemic heart disease.

But because the man had no spleen, Prof Byard took a blood culture to look for bacteria and discovered the man had pneumococcal sepsis.

“So you’ve got to be really careful in pathology attributing the cause of death,” he says.

You know they may have died with this, rather than from this.

“I see the ischaemic heart disease and say ‘oh it’s pretty obvious’ but I said to the students we just should check and there was this hidden pneumococcal sepsis.

“So unless you look you don’t find.”