164: Crime Scene (2000)

Ira Glass

I'm in the Office of Dr. LJ Drakovic, who examines dead bodies for the police in Pontiac, Michigan. And he's running through this carousel of slides, all of them murder victims. There are closeups of body parts.

Ira Glass

To illustrate, he tells me this story. When he worked for the Wayne County coroner's office back in Detroit, there was a young woman. This story, by the way, might not be suitable for younger children.

Anyway, there's this young woman who apparently killed herself by taking her boyfriend's gun, putting it in her mouth and firing. The police, the other medical examiners, everybody thought it was a suicide. But something about the case bothered Dr. Drakovic. The woman didn't have a history of depression. There was no note.

Ira Glass

This is very strange, Dr. Drakovic explained, because usually-- again, this gets a little explicit-- usually, when people shoot themselves in the mouth, they kind of point the gun upward, toward the brain. Their tongue does not get injured at all. But here, the tongue must have been all bunched up, pushing hard against the muzzle of the gun.

Ira Glass

Of course, why call the coroner's office to ask that question if you're not planning on killing anybody? It did not take very long for the police to get a confession out of this guy. As Dr. Drakovic says, every crime scene is a novel.

Today in our radio program, crime scenes and the stories behind them. For WBEZ Chicago and Public Radio International, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass.

Act One of our show today, How Do We Know? A forensic criminologist explains exactly what it is that we can learn from evidence at a crime scene.

Act Two, Grime Scene. Nancy Updike reports on how watching the movie Pulp Fiction led one man to a life coming in after the police and the investigators are done.

Act Three-- in the second half of our show, I have to say, everything gets a little less grisly. Act Three, A Criminal Returns to the Scene of the Crime, a story of a thief who returns to the neighborhood where he robbed and conned people, to coach little league.

Act Four, What Police Cannot Do. We have this completely beautiful, haunting story by Aimee Bender about a little boy who can find any lost object, any stolen object, from any crime scene. Stay with us.

Ira Glass

Act One, How Do We Know? Well, we thought we would start this hour with a quick primer on some of the kinds of evidence that investigators find at crime scenes and what it tells them. Enrico Togneri is a former forensic criminologist in Nevada. He says there's a lot of information contained in something as simple as the shape of a blood stain. He talks about high-velocity blood stains and low-velocity blood stains.

Nancy Updike

Other drivers stare at Neal Smither's truck and sometimes take pictures. On the sides and back of it, in big red letters, is the company name-- "Crime Scene Cleaners, specializing in homicides, suicides, and accidental deaths."

Ira Glass

Well, this is Nancy Updike, and this is act two of our show-- Act Two, Grime Scene. Nancy went to the San Francisco Bay area to see Neal Smither, who cleans up crime scenes for a living. A quick warning-- some of this might not be suitable for younger listeners, the squeamish, and wussies.

Nancy Updike

After spending two days with Neal Smither, I was this close to signing up to open his Los Angeles franchise. I'm not joking. Neal spends all day, every day, speeding around in a huge white pickup truck with a cell phone glued to his ear, making sure his company gets to dispose of every drop of blood within driving distance of Orinda, California, and his franchises in Utah, Kansas, Texas, Las Vegas, and Alabama.

Mostly, he doesn't leave the truck. He's had this one for about a year, and it's got 90,000 miles on it. Neal is absolutely blunt about his job, to the point of crassness.

Nancy Updike

The only time he speaks gently about what he does is on sales calls.

[PHONE RINGS]

By the way, have you noticed Neal's southern accent? He made it up. He borrowed it from his Arkansas grandparents so he could play Steel Magnolia during business negotiations. He grew up in Santa Cruz. He has no problem admitting the accent is cultivated.

Nancy Updike

Neal has that tightly-wound energy like Jim Carrey. He's 5'5" with short brown hair under a baseball cap and sunglasses. He smokes Kools, does not stop for lunch, and drives way too fast. The directness, the crassness, is all deliberate. It's his marketing strategy.

Nancy Updike

Neal describes for me the outline left on a leather couch by a body that has decomposed into it over the course of 60 days. And I want to stop here and acknowledge that this is gross. It is. It's gross. But it's interesting. And to me, it's much more interesting than it is gross. I mean, think of it-- a melted person.

Four years ago, Neal had never seen a dead body. He was a laid-off mortgage broker, for God's sake. Then he saw Pulp Fiction. Remember that scene where John Travolta blows the guy's head off in the back of the car by mistake, and they have to call in Mr. Wolf to fix everything?

Nancy Updike

Neal is possibly the only person in America who saw that scene and thought, wow, I want that job. And it turns out it is a real job. If someone dies in your house, it's up to you to get it clean.

But doing it yourself, even if you wanted to, raises all sorts of problems. Are you complying with the state and federal laws governing the disposal of bodies and bodily fluids? Do you have the proper permits and liability coverage? No, you don't. So you call Neal.

Here's how his job breaks down. Murders are the least of his business. Most of the cleanups are either decomps-- bodies that have sat for a while and started to decompose--

Nancy Updike

--or suicides. Suicides and attempted suicides are a surprisingly big part of his job. The rest of Neal's business consists of meth labs and kitty houses. Kitty houses are those places, usually full of old newspapers and other garbage, that have dozens of cats everywhere, eating and peeing and crapping.

Meth labs are usually hotel accounts. Neal has a few national chains on contract. Hotel rooms get used all the time to cook methamphetamine, Neal says. He does a lot of business with hotels. He claims, hyperbolically, that there's no hotel in the country that hasn't had a murder or suicide in one of its rooms.

The second day I spend with Neal, he gets called out to a jail to clean up after a woman who tried to kill herself in the bathroom off the prisoners' waiting room. I'm not allowed to record anything. I have to just watch.

I hold open the bathroom door with my foot while Neal sets up his stuff. Next to the sink are several thick, dark red drops of blood. And there are a few streaks of blood on the wall. Inside the sink is more blood. It isn't a lot, maybe 1/3 of a cup overall. But clearly, she did some damage.

Then, while Neal is getting into his protective suit, a woman in the waiting room behind us-- a tweaker, Neal confided to me later, meaning a meth user-- reads the back of Neal's shirt out loud. "Crime scene cleaners," she says. "You cleaned my mother's house."

Neal turns around. "Yeah? Which one was that?"

Without any emotion, the woman says her mother and cousin were murdered by her mother's boyfriend a while ago. "You guys cleaned the house," she repeats.

"Oh, yeah, I remember that one. That was on the news," Neal says.

The woman nods and doesn't say anything. So Neal goes back to cleaning. He whips through it in about 10 minutes, like it's spilt milk. In fact, it's exactly like cleaning up a mess at home, except with industrial-strength cleansers and equipment. He snaps on some rubber gloves, sprays the whole area with a special enzyme to neutralize the blood and kill any bacteria or viruses, scrubs any tough spots with a little brush, and then wipes everything clean with heavy-duty paper towels. It isn't hard, just depressing.

Nancy Updike

Neal's plan is to retire in seven years at 40 and be rich. But in the meantime, the job is changing him. Seeing so many crime scenes, seeing the way so many people die, he's also seen how they live-- in houses filled with old newspapers, dirty dishes, and too many cats, never cleaning the bathroom.

Nancy Updike

Neal's thought a lot about his own death in the last few years, not surprisingly. He says he wants to die slowly, so he can say goodbye to everyone. He doesn't want to be found by a company like his and cleaned up, with his family off somewhere wondering what happened.

He doesn't even care if it's a painful death, he says, as long as it's slow. Cancer would be fine, he says. He'd take cancer. When was the last time you heard someone say that?

Ira Glass

Nancy Updike is the biggest producer for our program. We heard about Neal Smither from the book Gig, which is a kind of unofficial sequel/tribute to Studs Terkel's classic book about Americans and their jobs, Working.

[MUSIC - JAMES BROWN, "PAPA DON'T TAKE NO MESS, PT. 1"]

Ira Glass

Coming up, no more grossness, promise. And what's it mean when you get out of prison, kick a drug habit, return to the scene of your crimes, and little kids make fun of you? Kindergarten con in a minute by Public Radio International when our program continues.

Ira Glass

It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week, of course, we choose some theme, bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's program-- crime scenes and the stories they tell. We've arrived at Act Three of our show. Act Three, Return to the Scene of the Crime.

There's a truism in detective fiction that a criminal always returns to the scene of the crime. But it turns out, in real life, that actually is not very common, except maybe among arsonists. Arsonists like to see the fires they've set, apparently, and some of them are caught when police look at pictures taken of the crowd at various fires.

And then-- maybe it's very rare, maybe not. Nobody really tracks this kind of thing. There are the people who circle back to the scene of their crimes to undo, to erase something, or at least to promise it'll never happen again. Katie Davis discovered that one of her own neighbors in Washington, DC, an old friend, was trying to do just that.

Katie Davis

Bobby comes up my street one afternoon in March. I haven't seen him in a few months. And he's kind of gliding along, smoking a Marlboro. That's the way he's carried himself since sixth grade, when I first met him-- one of the bad boys from over on Calvert Street.

Bobby tells me he's going to coach a Little League team with some neighborhood kids. "Great," I say from up on my porch. Inside, I'm thinking, "Who's he kidding? He's rail-thin. He's sweating. It looks like he's been using all winter."

Bobby flicks his burning cigarette into the street and watches me, waiting for more reaction. This is the same Bobby I loved and tried to save for a whole year, Bobby who stole $60 from my house to buy heroin and swore to God, swore to his own dead daughter, that my dog Purdy ate the money. And this is his latest plan to get clean, coaching a bunch of 10, 11, and 12-year-olds, rounded up by the DC Department of Recreation. All I can say is, "That's great."

A week later, Bobby's back, this time on my machine.

Katie Davis

My machine cuts him off. But now I know Bobby's clean because if he were still using heroin, nothing could puncture his detached haze. He's sounding awake and rattled.

Bobby, who spent two and 1/2 years in Lorton prison on assault and possession charges, rattled by a bunch of kids at their first baseball practice.

Katie Davis

Three days later, they hold a second practice, this time at a field in our neighborhood. Bobby's back for more salvation through Little League.

Katie Davis

This second practice is going a lot better. The only tantrums being thrown are by the kids. Bobby stands by the backstop in our park, pushing away a locust sapling that's grown up through the fence.

There are no bases and only a warped piece of rubber for the pitcher's mound. That's how it goes around here. Anyone with any money drives their kids to the wealthier neighborhoods to play, leaving this misshapen field for Bobby's team.

Katie Davis

The third practice starts around 5 o'clock on a humid April afternoon. Kids are scattered around the field, squatting down, twirling their gloves. Joey is throwing rocks at his brother. Joey is always throwing rocks. Benjamin thinks he should be pitching. Bobby tells him to stay right where he is and keep catching.

Katie Davis

After a half hour, things start to spin out of control. Benjamin, the most volatile of the kids, throws a rock at Joey. Bobby tells him to run a lap. "You must be tripping," says Benjamin.

"I might be tripping, but you need to be lapping," says Bobby.

Katie Davis

Bobby finally asked Benjamin to go home and come back next practice. Instead, Benjamin stands over my microphone and starts calling the game as he sees it.

Katie Davis

Bobby pauses as Benjamin mimics him, then throws the ball up and cracks it to the outfield.

Katie Davis

A few minutes later, Benjamin finally does a lap, but he walks it.

Katie Davis

When he was these kids' ages, Bobby ran wild at night, taking money, stealing bikes. Most kids were afraid of him, but he never messed with me and my brothers. I even remember Bobby and his sister eating with us a couple of times because his mom never made dinner.

When Bobby was 13, his mother caught him stealing change out of her purse and kicked him out of the house. The only place Bobby knew to go was right here to this field, where he now coaches baseball.

Katie Davis

It used to be an abandoned lot full of old cars and refrigerators. Here in the left outfield-- where Joey's pacing and muttering because Bobby told him to quit looking for a fight-- right here, there used to be a white '69 Ford Falcon. That's where Bobby went when his mother threw him out.

Katie Davis

Bobby says that alcohol helped him feel less afraid late at night in that old Ford. Soon, he found pot, then PCP. In his 20s, he started shooting heroin.

Katie Davis

Trash is talked at every practice, and Bobby is teased relentlessly for wearing Payless shoes, which the kids would never be caught dead in. Brandon, the eight-year-old, calls Bobby powdered doughnut because he's white. And he likes to lean into Bobby and whisper, "Punk."

Mostly, Bobby laughs. Other times, though, especially when the kids start in on each other, it can get to him.

Katie Davis

Bobby picks up the bat bag and slams it against a brick wall.

Katie Davis

Somewhere around the third or fourth practice, without announcing it in any way, the boys start calling Bobby "Coach." "Coach, can you fix this glove? Coach, which bat should I use?"

Katie Davis

The Department of Recreation gives Bobby an ID badge, which he wears around his neck when he comes down to the neighborhood, like a sign-- I am no longer a dope fiend. I'm doing something good. Most people might keep it in their pocket. Bobby wears it right on his chest.

Katie Davis

The skeptics are everywhere, though-- neighbors who gave him advances for paint jobs he never did, people he stole bank cards from, people he actually spit on.

Katie Davis

It's early May. And after 10 practices, the kids are finally stepping into their uniforms at the local recreation center. This is the first new thing they've seen all season. Their bats and gloves are splintered and old. But the uniforms are bright blue and gray, Texas Ranger uniforms with red caps.

Bobby is tanned and relaxed, dancing around, faking jabs, counting the kids to see if he can field a team-- never a sure thing. Today, they're exactly nine boys, the day of their first game against another team.

The recreation bus is an hour late to take the team to their game, so some of us go on a taxi, six kids and I all squished together. Bobby and the others are hailing a cab when the bus finally shows up. We all pile out at what is supposedly the best Little League field in the city. The grass is shin-high. There's a pile of dirt in the outfield. No fans, no parents-- just Bobby and the team.

Katie Davis

The other team never shows, so Bobby's team wins by default. Some other kids are in the same boat, so there's an impromptu scrimmage. And official or not, this is the first baseball game that most of these kids have ever played.

Katie Davis

The other team is small but very fast, and they have three coaches who tell them when to steal bases. So a line drive becomes a run, then another run, and another run. And it's 5-0.

Katie Davis

The season lurches forward with DC Recreation canceling games for no reason, never rescheduling rainouts. The uniforms are not washed for three weeks. And one day, no one shows up to let the boys in to suit up for a game, so they have to forfeit. By June, Bobby's team has only played one real game-- one game in four months.

In this inconsistent world, Bobby is someone the kids can count on. He never misses practice, coming in his painter's pants most days to hit the ball to them. And while it might seem like Bobby's keeping the kids in line, he'll tell you that's what they're doing for him.

Katie Davis

By June, Bobby's team gets its first win with some great pitching from Donald and a catch by Ricardo in the third inning that looks more like a football interception.

Katie Davis

And while they wait for their bus to take them back home, the boys start tussling with each other, rolling around on a grassy hill.

Katie Davis

This is easily the sweetest moment of the season, not only because of the win, but because it's amazing to see the boys so happy. And this is what Bobby will remember when Justin and Ricardo get in a real fight an hour later, when he has to suspend Benjamin not once, but twice, and when Joey threatens to beat up a kid from another team. Always that delicate balance-- fragile, like sobriety.

Katie Davis

By the end of the season, the kids have a record of two wins and no losses. Playoffs never get scheduled, so there's no reason to practice anymore. No one knows where Benjamin is these days. And just this week, I saw Joey stealing a soda from the corner store, and I made him take it back.

Bobby still comes around, though, and hangs out in the park, talks with the boys. And he sometimes shoots one-on-one with them. And he says, "Stick with me. I'm going to have tryouts for 12-and-under basketball team. I'm going to still be coming around here."

Ira Glass

Katie Davis, in Washington, DC.

Ira Glass

Act Four, What Police Cannot Do. The clues at a crime scene are not always conclusive, of course. Lots of crimes are forever unsolved. People die and it's never explained why. Stuff disappears and is never found again, though we want it to be. We end our program today with this crime scene story from writer Aimee Bender, read for us by Matt Malloy.

Matt Malloy

Once there was an orphan who had a knack for finding lost things. Both his parents had been killed when he was eight years old. They were swimming in the ocean when it turned wild with waves, and each had tried to save the other from drowning. The boy woke up from a nap on the sand, alone.

After the tragedy, the community adopted and raised him. And a few years after the death of his parents, he began to have a sense of objects, even when they weren't visible. This ability continued growing in power through his teens. And by his 20s, he was able to actually sniff out lost sunglasses, keys, contact lenses, and sweaters. The neighbors discovered his talent accidentally.

He was over at Jenny Sugar's house one evening, picking her up for a date, when Jenny's mother misplaced her hairbrush and was walking around complaining about this. The young man's nose twitched, and he turned slightly towards the kitchen and pointed to the drawer where the spoons and knives were kept.

His date burst into laughter. "Now, that would be quite a silly place to put the brush," she said, "among all that silverware." And she opened the door to make her point, to wave with a knife or brush her hair with a spoon. But when she did, boom-- there was the hairbrush, matted with gray curls, sitting on top of the pile.

Jenny's mother kissed the young man on the cheek, but Jenny herself looked at him suspiciously all night long. "You planned all that, didn't you?" she said over dinner. "You were trying to impress my mother. Well, you didn't impress me," she said.

He tried to explain himself, but she would hear none of it. And when he drove his car up to her house, she fled before he could even finish saying he'd had a nice time, which was a lie anyway. He went home to his tiny room and thought about the word "lonely," and how it sounded and looked so lonely, with those two Ls in it, each standing tall by itself.

As news spread around the neighborhood about the young man's skills, people reacted in two ways. There were the deeply appreciative and the skeptics. The appreciative ones called up the young man regularly. He'd stop by on his way to school, find their keys, and they'd give him a homemade muffin.

The skeptics called him over, too, and watched him like a hawk. He'd still find their lost items, but they'd insist it was an elaborate scam and he was doing it all to get attention.

"Maybe," declared one woman, waving her index finger in the air, "maybe," she said, "he steals the thing so we think it's lost, moves the item, and then comes over to save it. How do we know it was really lost in the first place? What is going on?"

The young man didn't know, himself. All he knew was the feeling of a tug-- light but insistent-- like a child at his sleeve. And that tug would turn him in the right direction and show him where to look. Each object had its own way of inhabiting space, and therefore, messaging its location. The young man could sense, could smell an object's presence. He did not need to see it to feel where it put its gravity down. As would be expected, items that turned out to be miles away took much harder concentration than the ones that were two feet to the left.

When Mrs. Allen's little boy didn't come home one afternoon, that was the most difficult of all. Leonard Allen was eight years old and usually arrived home from school at 3:05. He had allergies and needed a pill before he went back out to play.

That day by 3:45, alone, Mrs. Allen was a wreck. Her boy rarely got lost. Only once had that happened in the supermarket, but he'd been found quite easily under the produce tables, crying. The walk home from school was a straight line, and Leonard was not the wandering kind.

Mrs. Allen was just a regular neighbor, except for one extraordinary fact. Through an inheritance, she was the owner of a gargantuan emerald she called the Green Star. It sat glass-cased in her kitchen where everyone could see it, because she insisted that it be seen. Sometimes, as a party trick, she'd even cut steak with its beveled edge.

On this day, she took the Green Star out of its case and stuck her palms on it. "Where is my boy?" she cried. The Green Star was cold and flat. She ran weeping to her neighbor, who calmly walked her back home. Together, they gave the house a thorough search, and then the neighbor, a believer, recommended calling the young man.

Although Mrs. Allen was a skeptic, she thought anything was a worthwhile idea. And when the phone answered, she said in a trembling voice, "You must find my boy."

The young man had been just about to go play basketball with his friends. He'd located the basketball in the bathtub. "You lost him?" said the young man.

Mrs. Allen began to explain, and then her phone clicked. "One moment, please," she said. And the young man held on.

When her voice returned, it was shaking with rage. "He's been kidnapped," she said. "They want the Green Star."

The young man realized then that it was Mrs. Allen he was talking to and nodded. "Oh," he said, "I see."

Everyone in town was familiar with Mrs. Allen's Green Star. "I'll be right over," he said. The woman's voice was too run with tears to respond.

In his basketball shorts and shirt, the young man jogged over to Mrs. Allen's house. He was amazed at how the Green Star was all exactly the same shade of green. He had a desire to lick it.

By then, Mrs. Allen was in hysterics. "They didn't tell me what to do," she sobbed. "Where do I bring my emerald? How do I get my boy back?"

The young man tried to feel the scent of the boy. He asked for a photograph and stared at it, a brown-haired kid at his kindergarten graduation. But the young man had only found objects before, and lost objects at that. He'd never found anything or anybody stolen. He wasn't a policeman.

Mrs. Allen called the police, and one officer showed up at the door. "Oh, it's the finding guy," the officer said. The young man dipped his head modestly. He turned to his right, to his left, north, south. He got a glimmer of a feeling towards the north and walked out the back door through the backyard. Night approached, and the sky seemed to grow and deepen in the darkness.

"What's his name again?" he called back to Mrs. Allen.

"Leonard," she said.

He heard the policeman pull out a pad and begin to ask basic questions. He couldn't quite feel him. He felt the air, and he felt the tug inside the Green Star, an object displaced from its original home in Asia. He felt the tug of a tree in the front yard, which had been uprooted from Virginia to be replanted here.

And he felt the tug of his own watch, which was from his uncle. In an attempt to be fatherly, his uncle had insisted he take it, but they both knew the gesture was false. Maybe the boy was too far away by now.

He heard the policeman ask, "What is he wearing?"

Mrs. Allen described a blue shirt, and the young man focused in on the blue shirt. He turned off his distractions, and the blue shirt came calling from the northwest, like a distant radio station. The young man went walking and walking. And about 14 houses down, he felt the blue shirt shrieking at him.

And he walked right into the backyard, right through the back door. And sure enough, there were four people watching TV, including the tear-stained boy with a runny nose eating a candy bar. The young man scooped up the boy while the others watched, so surprised they did nothing. And one even muttered, "Sorry, man."

For 14 houses back, the young man held Leonard in his arms like a bride. Leonard stopped sneezing and looked up at the stars. And the young man smelled Leonard's hair, rich with the memory of peanut butter. He hoped Leonard would ask him a question, any question. But Leonard was quiet.

The young man answered in his head. "Son," he said to himself. And the word rolled around the marble, on a marble floor. "Son," he wanted to say.

When he reached Mrs. Allen's door, which was wide open, he walked in with quiet Leonard, and Mrs. Allen promptly burst into tears. And the policeman slunked out the door. She thanked the young man a thousand times, even offered him the Green Star, but he refused it.

Leonard turned on the TV and curled up on the sofa. The young man walked over and asked him about the program he was watching, but Leonard stuck his thumb in his mouth and didn't respond. "Feel better," he said softly.

Tucking the basketball beneath his arm, the young man walked home, shoulders low. In his tiny room, he undressed and lay in bed. Had it been a naked child with nothing on-- no shoes, no necklace, no hair bow, no watch-- he could not have found it.

He lay in bed that night with the trees from other places rustling, and he could feel their confusion. No snow here, not a lot of rain-- where am I? What is wrong with this dirt?

Crossing his hands in front of him, he held on to his shoulders. Concentrate hard, he thought. Where are you? Everything felt blank and quiet. He couldn't feel a tug.

He squeezed his eyes shut and let the question bubble up. Where did you go? Come find me. I'm over here. Come find me. If he listened hard enough, he thought he could hear the waves hitting.

Ira Glass

Aimee Bender's short story is called "Loser." It's from her collection of short fiction called The Girl in the Flammable Skirt. It was read for us by Matt Malloy.

Ira Glass

Well, our program was produced today by Alex Blumberg and myself, with Susan Burton, Blue Chevigny, and Julie Snyder. Contributing editors, Paul Tough, Jack Hitt, Margy Rochlin, Alix Spiegel, Nancy Updike, and consigliere Sarah Vowell. Production help from Todd Bachmann and Mary Wiltenburg. Marketing help from Marijus Drousceau and the folks at PRI.

Special thanks today to Marion Roach, Cheryl Miller, Bob Cargee, Robert Kershner, and John O'Leary.

To buy a cassette of this or any of our programs, call us here at WBEZ in Chicago, 312-832-3380. Or you know you can listen to most of our programs for free on the internet at our website, www.thislife.org.

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Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of This American Life.