Working Stiff: What it’s really like to see dead people and work with rotting corpses full of maggots
HOW does one deal with rotting bodies, the stench of death and maggots oozing out of decomposing flesh? Here’s a career where brain-eating maggots is part of the job.
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FEW would consider making a career from working with rotting corpses but forensic pathologist Dr Judy Melinek has done just that.
Dr Melinek’s hunt for death clues has revealed murder, suicide, rare genetic diseases and some horrific accidents.
But behind the science lives another tale — of maggots eating flesh and the pungent smell of decomposing bodies
She details her experiences in her new book Working Stiff.
Here she reveals in intimate detail just what happens to the dead as they start to rot.
If you ever wanted to know what it’s like to walk into a room where insects have already started eating away at human flesh, read on.
News.com.au has been given a look at the book which will no doubt open your eyes to the dark side of death.
Here is Dr Melinek’s story.
Stinks and bones
CURIOUS strangers at cocktail parties love to ask how I deal with the rotting bodies, the stench of death, the maggots.
The answer: You get used to it.
Nobody enjoys examining decomposed bodies, but some of the cases are fascinating. Learning to handle human beings who have begun to return to the soil cycle has, more than any other aspect of the job, made me more comfortable with death — though it’s also made me much, much less comfortable with houseflies, and leery of cats.
It was during the ride-along rotation with our death scene investigator Russell Dunn that I first saw those flies at work.
That week with the MLI team showed me how much information I was missing when I considered the dead body on the autopsy table, out of context.
The door to the old man’s spotless apartment was wide open when Russell and I arrived. Neighbours had called the police after ten days’ worth of mail piled up.
Somebody had lit incense in the hallway, which infused an exotic nuance to the oppressive odour of decomposition.
If you’ve ever had a mouse crawl into the dashboard of your car and die there, or if you’ve ever had a rat expire inside a wall of your home, you know its kind but not its force.
A dead man stinks the same way — a sickly-sweet bacterial reek — but much stronger.
It hits you — an assault, not a scent.
You flinch, heave back in revulsion.
It invades your throat, assails your tastebuds, even stings your eyes.
This corpse belonged to a small man, but the smell was powerful.
We donned plastic shoe covers and latex gloves, and Russ flipped through some envelopes in the pile of mail.
Errico Lavagnino, our John Doe, lay facedown on the kitchen floor, a glass mason jar with something pickled, wax peppers maybe, still in his hand.
I’d never seen so many maggots.
Carrion flies swarm around dead bodies not because they eat them, but because their offspring do.
If the weather’s warm enough and not too dry, maggots will make a feast of a dead body.
The female fly likes to lay her eggs in moist, warm areas: the angle of the mouth, the groin, the armpits.
But she goes for the eyes first, where she lays hundreds of eggs, sometimes within an hour or two of the death, before rigor mortis even sets in.
The eggs look like shredded Parmesan cheese sprinkled around the tear ducts.
In less than a day the maggots hatch and start feeding.
Most blowfly species reach reproductive maturity in a week to ten days, so two generations of flies had already gone to town on the corpse in front of me.
I had only the gloves and bootees — no surgical mask, even.
I felt naked.
In the morgue, I can hose the maggots off the body and forget about them.
Not so in this apartment.
Maggots prefer vital organs, so they dig into the body.
Some chew their way across the surface of the skin, while others head straight for orifices and defects in the dermis, favouring the squishy tissues over harder ones.
These had skeletonised Mr. Lavagnino’s face, leaving only scraps of connective tissue.
I could see them crawling in and out of his nose and ears to get to his brains.
Mr. Lavagnino’s silky white hair had entirely sloughed off and was lying over his right ear like a jostled wig.
Maggots don’t like hair and bone, so they eat their way underneath the scalp tissue, marching along a plane.
They leave each hair follicle a dimple, the bald bone of the skull exposed in their wake.
I held my breath and moved in for a closer look.
There was a dry crunch when I put my foot down near the body, and I drew back in alarm.
I’d stepped on a pile of pupal casings.
They were each the size and shape of a grain of puffed rice, littering the perimeter around the body.
In the wild the maggot digs underground before it transforms into a pupa, but on this hard kitchen floor hundreds of them were scattered in all directions.
Crouching there on the pile of pupae, I leaned in to examine the torso — and then jerked back.
The dead man’s clothes were moving.
A mass of maggots writhed beneath them, making the body quiver.
My nausea grew more urgent.
Maggots tend to stay away from the arms and legs because there’s not as much soft tissue there, so I turned my attention to the extremities in the hope they might be less gruesome.
The visible skin had desiccated to a deep, leathery brown.
I could see the outline of finger bones and knuckles grasping the pickle jar.
A gold ring with a lovely emerald hung loosely on his third finger.
***
Russ pulled four towels out of his duffel bag and wrapped one around each of the corpse’s arms and legs.
I asked him why. “Traction,” he replied.
“Sometimes the skin peels right off, you never know. Towels are better than hands on a bad decomp.”
Russ and the van driver grabbed the corpse by the towels and heaved it into the body bag.
A horde of maggots fell off the torso and performed squirming, frantic backbends in the puddle of decomposition fluid, the colour and consistency of crankcase oil, left behind on the floor.
I knew I would find the words “neighbours reported a foul odour” on the MLI report.
“The stench of loneliness,” Hirsch calls it.
This is an edited extract from Working Stiff by Dr Judy Melinek and TJ Mitchell, published by Allen & Unwin, RRP $29.99.
More information on the book can be found at Allen & Unwin.
Originally published as Working Stiff: What it’s really like to see dead people and work with rotting corpses full of maggots