Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire How long before a body starts smelling?

First off, I want to thank y'all for buying my first novel.



Water, Fire & Sword

One of y'all gave me a good review too. Thanks!


I'm taking a brief time out from that trilogy, and starting a suspense/thriller/murder mystery book before I delve back into time travel. A man is found dead in a locked room. It looks like suicide, but the apartment maintenance man realizes its murder.

I've got a question for y'all regarding this new book. I've smelled dead bodies before. I've heard about floaters, but for all the years I worked for my Dad in apartment maintenance, I never had to deal with one that wasn't fresh. My question is for those of you who have.

Let's say you've got a man who dies from a small-caliber shot to the brain in a faked suicide. He's seated in an overstuffed chair when the homicide occurs.

1) How much of a mess does it create? If he got done in with a 32 ACP to the temple, there would not be a whole lot of spatter and not much blood outside the body. The chair would absorb most of it. Am I wrong?

2) Given the above scenario, how long would it take the neighbors in the apartment below and to the side of this guy to notice a smell and call someone?

3) Given that amount of time, what distinguishing characteristics besides the smell would be evident on the body.


Many thanks in advance. I'm trying to write this accurately, but do it with only a minimum of yuck.

John 11:39
Jesus said, Take ye away the stone. Martha, the sister of him that was dead, saith unto him, Lord, by this time he stinketh: for he hath been dead four days.

1. Head wounds bleed a LOT...even from a .22

2. At Room temp ( 70 degrees) about a week before it seeped through the doors and walls.

3.Lividity on the lower parts of the corpse.

Thanks guys.

Ingwe: You say a LOT of blood. I'm hoping this could be contained by the chair and perhaps a wool rug. I don't want to ruin floors or have it dripping in the downstairs kitchen. Is that possible? Bottom Line: I don't want to have a big clean-up requiring a professional crew.

Depends entirely upon heat, moisture, humidity, and other factors including cause of death.

It all depends on how long, and what temperature. Head wounds DO bleed a lot...if they are prostrate. If they are sitting up, they may not bleed at all.

Clothing as insulation...
Body mass...
Slower cooling leads to faster/bigger bloating...

For the time of the murder, this would have been around Halloween, 1975. In Cincinnati, the highest High was 70F. Lowest low was around 50F. The windows would be shut, and the heat would not have been turned on.

Yes, the vic was caught sitting in an overstuffed chair.

Depends on a lot of factors.
Could be a week or much longer, I've seen a case where a very badly decomposed body in a big and high class apartment was apparently not noticed by neighbors for weeks.
Upon opening the door, the flies and odor were horrendous.

How well sealed was the house? Any vents to the outside like a chimney, especially in the room?

See if this is a believable scenario.

The victim is killed on Wednesday evening after 10 PM by a single shot to the head from a 32 ACP. He's sitting in a chair. The perp finds a way to lock the door on the way out and makes it look like suicide.

On Saturday, neighbors begin smelling something and it gets bad enough that they call the police on Sunday afternoon. The maintenance man arrives at 2PM and lets police in.

A homicide detective is assigned to the case and shows up and starts taking statements, assuming suicide.


Follow-on question: when would the apartment be turned back over to the owner for renovation and assuming there was minimal mess, when would the apartment be ready to rent?

In a few days when the neighbors notice the smell, it'll be more of a mess than you want...

The body will be bloated, black, swelled and splitting, as well as leaking juices all over the area the body is making contact with... including the floor if his legs are off the chair.

The face won't be recognizable. It may not even be evident that death was a gunshot wound without an autopsy.

The smell will be the worst.

I've seen bodies a couple days in summer heat, stink up an entire block when they are moved from where they were found.

You disturb the body in that condition and the really, really nasty stuff starts happening.

The time line is probably too short. Clean-up would be fast (couple or three days; five at the outside) once it was turned back over to the landlord. Rentalqouls be Market dependent.

Did the Vic have a pet? Might shorten the timeline (and make things...messier...)

Ingwe gave solid advice. Lividity is almost instantaeous as it is just the pooling of blood in dependent portions of the body (think deep purple), once circulation stops. Rate of decomp. is very heat and condition dependent. For your situation, I agree with the poob. This does not mean that 3-4 days would not leave an unpleasant situation within the room.

Bodies (caucasian), getting on, tend to get maroon colored with pink mottling and progress to the nasty of nasties which is skin slip.

I have seen small caliber wounds to the head that did not bleed so much, depending on the body position. Your subject, in a chair, at a desk would have blood pooling to dependent body parts almost immediately, with less than usual out the wound.

Now I gotta go put some cologne up my nose.

POP! Goes the weasel....

What did Mrs. Shaman do?

In those temps you mentioned, I doubt a body would decompose enough to alert the neighbors in that time frame.

To start stinking through a closed up residence, it would take a week or more at least.

Hmmmm. I'm trying not to make this grotesque, but this is a middle-aged guy that no one is going to miss.

Let's revise this:

Perp shoots the vic on Thursday night. Windows are open. It's an old building with a good crack under the front door. Folks start noticing an odor in the hallway outside the apartment and out on the sidewalk by the open window on Saturday and call police Sunday Afternoon after nobody responds to the door after repeated knocking.

The apartment gets released to the cleanup crew at the end of the next week and the apartment is ready for occupancy for a December 1 move-in.

Plausible?

32 ACP might not make it thru the head, temple to temple, but it might. If it does, blood letting would be greater.
If the body is in a large, overstuffed chair, then most of the blood could be absorbed by it.

Remember the photo of the VN general executing a Viet Cong in Saigon (TET) back in the day? That was a .38 spec and when the body hit the ground, there was a geyser of blood spurting up about 8 inches and that round did not appear to make it thru the cranium.

Four days does not sound reasonable at room temp. I know of a person that died in an apartment and when discovered, the medical examiner placed the time of death ten days to two weeks prior to that discovery. The person living one story below was how the death was noticed (odor) and this was summertime in Cedar Rapids. Death causation was a slit throat.

Hope this helps.

My uncle died this last August. Alone in his non air-conditioned house, and wasn't found for 10 days. They found him by the smell from well outside the house when the deputy made a welfare stop.

I think the house is now a teardown. Can't imagine how bad it was really.