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

What did the vic have for dinner?



P

Shaman, no decent homicide detective would assume suicide. All other possibilities would have to be disproven in the case of a GSW death. Bleeding from a wound becomes gravitational after the heart stops pumping.



mike r

My experience, two or three days the smell isn't that bad. Gets worse as you begin to move the body. Size of the apartment, how well sealed the doors and windows are, temperature, proximity to the door for passers-by, too many variables to either support or refute your scenario.

Around two weeks decomp is in full swing, maggots and big odor.

Remove drapes, upholstered furniture, carpet, then clean and fog the interior (companies like Serv-Pro do an amazing job) and the place is ready to rent in a few days.

Save yourself some trouble. Say the space heater was on. Even so, it takes a week or so before anybody notices.

You want an interesting experience. Try a guy who caps himself in his truck with the windows rolled up, temp in arizona around 100, and he isn't found for about a week.
Oh my.

friend of mine got a welfare check call one winter day.
he goes up to the window, looks in, and says yep, they are both dead. Dispatcher trying to protect deputy says "you sure about that?" only m.d. or cornoner can say death.
he responded on the radio, yeah they are dead all right, i'm watching the flies crawl in and out of their noses.
I think that was a week suspension after the calls started coming in from those monitoring the frequency.

LOl...cops ain't 'sposed to say somebody is dead. Even if they don't have a head. Only politicians and doctors can say that.

Depends how cold it is

That is believable Shaman and .22, .25 & .32 do not always exit the skull,even at contact range. Really not a heck of a lot of mess but the body would be black in that time, covered with flies and maggots.

With the chair gone plus a good cleaning of hard surfaces with Spic & Span, good to go.

I have answered calls here where the A/C was on and the body was not too bad after a week but needed careful handling, a couple of days here in summer without A/C and an awful stinker smelled for a city block.

It really depends on the temperature of the environment. I've had corpses that started to "suggest" an odor after as little as 8 hours in an 80 degree apartment. After that, it can happen really quickly.

If the bowels haven't let loose, the odor is muted, but there is no doubt something isn't quite right. All bets are off if they've evacuated.

Blood caught in chair and sofa cushions or car seats can really start to smell quickly. The temp of the body starts that process quickly. But if all you have is a dead body, the carcass is pretty good at containing most of the smell until rigor starts to relax again.

Put the vic in the backyard, sitting under a tree. The buzzards will be circling by noon.

Mike, you've managed to pick up on an aspect of the plot that I was going to save for later in the book. Specifically, the detective is receiving pressure from a counter-espionage group that wants this case bottled up. If the perp thinks they buy the suicide, then he might relax a bit.

The poor maintenance man spends several chapters trying to convince people that it's not suicide, only to find out he's right and the perp now has him in his sights. The counter-espionage group is using the schlep as bait. Furthermore, the guy that takes the apartment next is actually the perp, and the maintenance guy keeps mouthing off to the perp about how he's sure it's murder, but no one will listen.

What I am looking for is a quick and easy way to off the victim without causing a lot of muss, fuss, and messy cleanup. I remember one of our tenants offing herself in the bathtub with a 22. She had wrapped her head in a towel so she wouldn't make a mess. Our resident manager got the call to open up the place for the police after 3 days. Pros cleaned up the bathroom. There was no hoo-hah. Dad and I got the contents cleared out and the apartment rented in three weeks.

I've been to suicide calls and a GSW to the head at PBR doesn't always mean an exit wound. One WWll veteran found out he had cancer and decided to take his life. He used his old WWll 1911 and FMJ, perfect entrance wound with powder burns to the middle of his temple and no exit. Very clean and very little blood. The only bleeding occurred during each compression.

I figured you'd be checking in on this, Mister Lee. Thanks, you give me confidence.

BTW: I picked 32 ACP, because I saw someone try to finish off a spine-shot doe with 6 shots of that chambering at close range to the head. The bullets went in, but didn't come out and the doe managed to crawl off another 50 yards before expiring. It was the fellow's first time out deer hunting, so I cut him some slack. The head shots never bled. The fellow had been using the 32ACP as his carry pistol for 10 years and sold it shortly thereafter for a 9mm.

I have the same thing happen when I take a nap in the backyard. That was the turkey buzzards. Nowadays we have black buzzards as well. I had to move my napping indoors.

I made the mistake of falling asleep while turkey hunting two years ago. Yikes! Those black ones don't wait until you're dead. I woke up when a buzzard sailed about 3 feet over my head and lit on the grass next to me. I scared a dozen of them off the trees when I sat up. Those were some sorely disappointed birds.

Blacks are not taking over completely. Reason? They get greedy on roadkills and tarry too long in the face of approaching traffic. The ditches were filled with them this fall. I managed to ace one with the Silverado just before deer season. Yippie!

Bullet placement is key Shaman, in the case of the deer it was lousy! Have worked 3 murders in 26 years where 1 .22 lr to the head was instantly lethal and one was out of the hospital in 3 days. Bullet placement, bullet placement, bullet placement.

If you'd ever picked cotton....you'd know the answer!!

Pats right on this, basically the longer the recipient stays alive, the more he bleeds. When the brain is injured blood is p[umped up to it at a furious pace,so until the recipient of the bullet either stops ticking, or the hydraulics run out, he will bleed, but as Pat said, in an upright position more will be contained.

Shaman,

About 2 decades ago, one of my relatives ended it all.

He uses a Ruger Mark 1 in .22 LR, and placed it against the roof of his mouth. The bullet bounced off the back of his skull and remained inside the cranium. As a result, there was virtually no blood.

If a confrontation is involved, the bad guy cold place the barrel in the victim mouth, walk him back to, and seat him in the chair, before pulling the trigger. As an additional benefit for your story, the barrel against the roof of the mouth would also act as a silencer, to not wake the neighbors.

Of course I have no idea if this scenario would conflict with the character of the characters, but it could address some of your technical issues.

Can't contribute to the question as I've never been in that situation. Thank God!

BUT congrats on the book! Good stuff.