Without a Trace

With several years' experience among them, the trio was done in a few hours. The job was nothing like the time the team worked through the night cleaning up the remains of a shotgun suicide in a garage covered in junk, or when they went to New Orleans post-Katrina and had to deal with the remains of eight or nine people who'd been abandoned in a hospice during the storm. That was the time they found a box on the roof full of emergency amputations: a femur, a knee joint, a bunch of decomposed flesh.

The team never learned exactly how long it took the folks to die or, for that matter, how the hell the box of flesh ended up on the roof.

It's not a death cleaner's job to ask questions.

Crime-scene and trauma cleanup services have been around for a while, but the public has been slow on the uptake.

The business got its start in the mid-'80s, according to Dale Cillian, president of the American Bio-Recovery Association. Companies began dotting the nation in the '90s, and the last few years have seen explosive growth, although getting the word out hasn't been easy. The bereaved often don't realize the cost of cleanup can be covered by homeowners insurance or even the state's crime victims' assistance fund.

"Most people just think they've got no choice but to do it themselves," says Eric Thode, former chairman of the Fort Bend County Republican Party, who worked in the death-cleaning industry for several months after being laid off by Enron. "I can't even imagine, if you have just lost a son, a daughter, a husband, a wife, some sort of family member, that the next thing you have to do is go in there and clean it up."

Thode handled mainly suicides, and one sticks out in his mind. A father led him into a house, pointed at a pool of blood and said, "This is my daughter." While Thode worked in the bedroom, he could hear the man yelling in another part of the house at no one. Eventually the man came back, hurried Thode along and locked the bedroom door behind them.

"I realized then that he hadn't told his wife yet," says Thode. "He wanted it completely cleaned up before his wife came home."

Another suicide he did got reclassified as a homicide, he says. Thode cleaned up after Dan R. Leach, a.k.a. The Passion of the Christ Killer, who hung his pregnant girlfriend to make it look like suicide (a trick he learned from CSI) only to confess two months later (after watching the Jesus movie).

What got Thode were the decomposition jobs, the thought that sometimes it takes weeks for neighbors to realize someone has passed. "The mail was overflowing; the mailman never thought anything weird," he says. "The newspaper person who delivered paper after paper -- you kind of realize sometimes how disconnected people can be."

The rate of human decomposition varies according to the environment, but the Houston heat definitely helps speed things along. You body is full of millions of micro-organisms that live on after death, and it doesn't take long for the little fellas to go after your intestines. Around the same time, your dead cells begin releasing digestive enzymes and the body starts eating itself. Then come the maggots.

Every local cleaner has horror stories, but perhaps no one more than David McGahan, a registered nurse who's been in the biz since 1993. McGahan got his start when his friend's sister "was robbed, raped and bludgeoned to death," he says. "It was true baptism by fire."

McGahan has a blond flattop and a measured manner. He runs Special Needs Cleaning Service with his mother, Marilyn Johnson, who does the books and occasionally suits up.

"All these people, boy, they'll read these old murder mysteries and watch these homicide shows and just carry on; you can't even get them to go to a funeral home and look at a dead body," says Johnson. "There's just nothing pretty about death."

And nothing too private, either, or at least that seems to be the reasoning behind the family's Web site. There's a link for photos, but when you click you're told, "We would not allow any photos to be shown if this were to happen to one of our family members or friend. Therefore, we elect to show our clientele the same respect."

In other words, "You should be ashamed of yourself for wanting to see pictures of other people's misery, you macabre bastard."

Johnson didn't feel right about letting the Houston Press on a job site, but McGahan did sit down over lunch to talk about his experiences.

"I have a good reputation," he says. "I've been around a while. So at this point I suppose I'm doing something right."