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.

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.

Takes mine about 2 weeks of elk hunting unless i make a mistake and shart.

Some bodies smell before they are dead!

your open window will have flies causing a hell of a noise in 3 days tops and maggots in 4

I like the way you think. That's a good idea. I'm still mulling over how the deed got done. I've got 10 chapters before I have to deal with it. My guess is the autopsy would turn up the first conclusive signs of foul play and rule out suicide. The first third of the book is styled as a classic hoodunit with the apartment maintenance man cast in the role of sleuth. The second third, after it turns out it's cold blooded murder, is a spies-among-us tale and the last third will be lots of paranoia, terror and mayhem.

You are wrong about the bleeding. I have worked lots of gunshot wounds as a paramedic. A shot to the head, even from a little .32 would bleed out several quarts of blood.
Think of the two huge carotid arteries that run up the neck and supply blood to the brain.

Though the brain is shot, to coin a phrase, the heart is still beating and that blood is going to come out of the hole in the head. It coagulates and I have seen the blood from a head shot piled up 6 inches high, looks like a slightly red chocolate Jello pudding.

Have worked lots of dead, smelly corpses, unfortunately.

I would say that at room temp it would take 2 or 3 days for the body to get to smelling real bad.

How about one of those handheld crossbows? Quieter than a gun and a similar size hole, less splatter, too. At least theoretically anyway, never have owned one.

"No Country for Old Men" had a unique solution.

"Murder Inc." had an interesting way to deal with this. They would first shoot the victim in the side of the head. The second guy, completely naked to avoid getting blood on his clothes, would jump out, wrap a towel around the head and stab they victim in the heart to stop the heart from pumping. They would drain 'em in the tub, dismember them, bag 'em and leave the victim in a dumpster to be disappear in the landfill.

Kinda hard to have that determined suicide.

Good Spies tend to like simple and subtle solutions.

1975 also give you some interesting technology gaps. GSR and Blood spatter tests were both in their infancy, so you could out right ignore them, or, it would be plausible an intelligent person would not think of these avenues of investigation and make leave some evidence.

Very true.

Just an interesting side story.

Shot in the correct spot, one shot from even a 22 is pretty much instant death.

I have had the unfortunate opportunity to work a number of dead bodies in all stages, from still warm to mummified, natural to murder. There are far, far too many factors at play to make even one general statement other than "Maybe."

I have seen more than one gunshot wound to the head with little to no blood loss. I have seen .45 Ball at contact range enter with no exit, while .22s cause injuries far worse then they should.

If I had to make an educated guess, based on your criteria and my experience...

Lets assume for simplicity that the small caliber gunshot was a contact shot, and was immediately effective. Some bleeding would be expected, but would depend largely on the location of the wound, the angle of the shot, and the position in which the decedent came to rest.

In the climate you describe, with no HVAC present, and in a well sealed room, I would expect that the three day timeline you present is probably unrealistic for preoccupied neighbors to notice. He isnt going to smell good, but the odor wont be so horrendous that it will alert the entire complex. At three days postmortem, you may not even be able to smell him at the front door until you open it, but you would be getting close. Day 5 would be about where it would become quite obvious.

A lot of this depends on the victim. Size, health, clothing, even diet plays a role in this. Insect activity can accelerate the decomp timetable somewhat, as well as direct sunlight. In a dark, well sealed, fairly cool room...the timeline will be retarded to an extent.

I can assure you, though...at three days postmortem, hes gonna be ripe when you move him.

This woman lay dead in her home for 8 yrs before anyone found her.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...ean-Wood-lay-dead-house-EIGHT-YEARS.html

Not so.

Lots of variables.

wonder if there could be a bit of a sidebar about a little bird fluttering in the window and trying to escape in the room where the murder/suicide occurred?

maybe it had gotten in earlier in the day when the window was ajar. once the victim got home, he closed the window as the day was cooling off thusly trapping the bird. maybe a sparrow, or a a wren or something like that.

another one for you, guys shot thru the eye ball with 22bbcap no blood.

rest is up to room conditions and cockroaches.


norm

This has got to be the most unusual thread I've ever read.

I'm glad I've never seen this type of schit.

I've seen GSW's that bled a lot and I've seen GSW's that hardly bled at all. Like Simon said, usually there's a lot of blood and it coagulates fast, just like bright red pudding. It depends on how long the heart kept pumping.

It's a hell of a thing trying to save the life of someone so intent on ending it.

I think when the sphincter muscle relaxes and the bladder empties,that smell starts right away

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=55j-nVwHa_c&feature=youtu.be

For an interesting method to disguise murder as suicide research auto-erotic asphyxia. This is actually somewhat common and is frequently mislabeled as suicide or even murder. Telltales are friction marks over doors and beams.

It sounds like a cool plot.


mike r

Do yourself a favor and look up the Body Farm at UT Knoxville.

https://fac.utk.edu/

Then read anything and everything Dr William Bass wrote.

We like dead things in TN...

I worked a death like that.

Guy was handcuffed behind his back, and had a HUGE cigar taped into his mouth. He got naked and climbed on a big exercise ball, and rolled it along a wall, rubbing his little pee pee on the wall until he got his cookies... Or, in this case, until he fell off the ball face forward, and crammed that big cigar down his throat so that he couldn't breathe.

Summoned the JP to come to the scene to pronounce death.

We were taking photos when he got there.

Heard the judge hollering about "Which cop handcuffed this guy?"

Umm... he cuffed himself, judge.

It went completely over his head. I had to explain the entire thing to him. I don't think his brain registered what I was telling him, though...

As a matter of fact, I had a buddy who did a crime novel about twenty years ago with auto-erotic asphyxia as the central crux. It was a hell of a good novel too, but I don't think he ever sold it. The murders were taking place on a small college campus, and made to look like suicide.

The fellow who wrote it and did a lot of research. He was going for a Phd. in Pop Culture studies and got intrigued by the fact that no one wanted to talk about this as though it was the ultimate taboo.

I won't go into details, but the rate of this sort of thing causing death is still vastly under-reported . My buddy's revelations caused me to include a word on it in the coming-of-age discussions I had with my sons. The general gist of my message was just don't ever get into it, PERIOD! The problem is that it does produce an incredible sensation, but it quickly becomes addictive and folks go chasing the high.

I always enjoyed weird scenes, once had a dead pony in the room w/ the vic, but yours is a classic. How did you figure out the scenario? We need details says the morbid guy.


mike r

Have had cases of decedent estates where elderly person was overheated and dehydrated, finally dying of self-neglect.

Died and dried in a warm dry house with good ventilation--a mummy of sorts.

If they are old enough, dehydrated enough, lay flat on non-absorbent flooring, it can happen.

Lots of factors.

BMT

It wasn't too much of a mystery, once you just sat back and looked at the scene.

Auto-erotic deaths nearly always are due to lack of oxygen due to restriction. In this case, it was the cigar taped to in his mouth.

The items he used for his satisfaction were openly about the room. Tape was on a table, as were a box of cigars and condoms, and key to the handcuffs he was wearing.

There were also marks on and along the wall from previous sessions.

Only sign of struggle was right where he fell where he writhed and died. Not much, at that.

Not too hard to figure out. More imaginative than the usual auto-erotic death where the vic is found hanging in the closet with a belt loosely around their neck and their pecker in their hand.

Fun fact: The breakdown of amino acids during putrefaction of a cadaver result in the release of the appropriately named gases putrescine and cadaverine.