Without a Trace

"I have to treat it like a business," he continues. "I have to keep my psychological distance."

Death cleaning has its perks.

The pay's pretty good, typically somewhere between $500 and $3,000 per job. You're rarely stuck in an office, or at least not your own. And there's always plenty of variety.

"One day I could be handling a Web site, developing training materials and cleaning up a suicide," says DiGulio. "You're never going to get stale."

DiGulio says he feels a serious sense of accomplishment every time he turns a horror show into something presentable.

He remembers his first cleanup, about a year ago, back when Demaret had decided to diversify his mold remediation business. DiGulio volunteered to help, and the two drove down to a house in South Texas where a man had begun decomposing. While they were inside dealing with the stink and the heat, the man's brothers sat outside drinking and crying, making it a little difficult for the duo to take breaks.

"I lost nine pounds in one day," says DiGulio. "It looked like a lot of it came from my face."

They loaded up the van with boxes of bio waste, showered in a truck stop and drove back to Houston. Not the most auspicious of beginnings, but DiGulio kept at it, often calling in sick to his accounting job after working on a cleanup through the night. Last month he quit the corporate world and devoted himself full-time to USA Decon. People die at all hours, and a cleaner has to be available.

Marketing is always a problem for startups, but it's more acute with trauma cleanup: You can't exactly walk up to a mom and tell her you'd like to clean up the mess in the event one of her kids decides to commit suicide. You can place an ad in the Yellow Pages under "Crime Scene and Trauma Cleanup," but you mainly rely on referrals from funeral homes and first responders. The business is out there.

According to the Houston Police and the Harris County Sheriff's Department, there were 403 homicides throughout the county last year, up from 334 in 2004. Add in the 399 suicides recorded by the medical examiner over the same two years, and you've got a lot of messes to clean. All an aspiring entrepreneur needs are some chemicals and equipment, maybe a little insurance for protection. It's not like Texas has tons of regulations to get in your way.

"We could go in there, we could bag this up in Husky bags and take it to a landfill and dispose of it," says Demaret. "It happens every day. Even though it's not really enforced here, we choose to do it the right way."

All the cleaners interviewed in this story say they go the extra mile, bagging everything in clearly marked containers, driving it back to the shop and having a licensed transporter take it to an incineration facility.

Anything questionable has to be removed. A drop of blood on the carpet often indicates a large puddle on the concrete underneath.

"When in doubt, pull it out," says Demaret.

The Texas Department of State Health Services doesn't regulate crime and trauma scenes. The waste isn't considered medical. The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality doesn't deal with it unless something goes wrong in transport.

"Texas does need some regulations," says Demaret. "There are federal regulations in place, and all they have to do is just mirror those and actually put some enforcement out there."

Occupational Safety and Health Administration standards kick in when apartments and hotels try to send employees in to clean up bodily fluids -- anyone in there is supposed to be blood-born-pathogen-certified -- but every cleaner has been turned away from a job where he knew the janitor was going to be the one mopping up the slop. Without decontamination materials or protective equipment. Just a bottle of bleach and the orders to make the room rentable again.

"I can go to a suicide at a hotel room, pick up a handful of human brain tissue and completely, legally put it in the regular trash to be set out on the curb," says Michael Tillman, owner of Amdecon, an Irving-based trauma cleanup service. "But you take a bloody Band-Aid at a hospital: It has to be treated as medical waste. I can take a mattress that's totally saturated in blood and set it out on the curb for trash pickup, and it's perfectly legal."

Tillman isn't happy with this possibility, which is why he set up BloodyShame.com, an outcry site with images that look straight off Rotten.com.

It's tough to tell which of Tillman's 15 photos is the most gruesome. Perhaps it's the bright red aftermath of a suicide in a strip-center office, complete with the caption "Right now there are no regulations regarding the disposal of this blood, tissue and skull fragments. Would you like to rent this office space next?" Or maybe the bloody bathtub: "Texas law does not require this to be cleaned and decontaminated by properly trained personnel. Texas law does not even require that a disinfectant be used."