by: Maddie Rowley
Do you ever wonder what happens after a homicide or an unattended death? I’m talking about logistics. For example, let’s say there’s a homicide victim inside a home and someone calls 911. The police come out to the scene to cordon off the area and take down a report and then the forensics team dusts for fingerprints and gathers evidence. The morgue or medical examiner comes to retrieve the body, and then? Criminal Minds never shows these next steps on TV.
What about the blood spatter all over the walls and ceiling? The pools of red drying into crusted puddles on the floor? The smell of ammonia and death that expands throughout the house? Well, that’s where people like Neal Smither come in.
Smither is the owner and president of Crime Scene Cleaners Inc. He started the company in 1996 after watching the car cleaning scene in Pulp Fiction and he’s never looked back.
“I was not what you would call educated,” said Smither. “I dropped out of school at a very early age...I knew I wanted to be self-employed and I just had to find the right area for me. I was training to become a mortician and I was sitting on my couch watching Pulp Fiction. They killed the guy in the car and... frankly it was an epiphany for me.”
Smither said it took about a year to book his first job and then business took off.
While cleaning crime scenes that range from murders to suicides to feces in public places, Smither has become somewhat of a social media savant on the side—particularly on Instagram, where he has over 478,000 followers. Smither posts pictures of scenes he cleans up during the day and **warning** some of them are very graphic.
“I think it comes down to the fact that I post interesting content. My pictures are interesting and I think my captions hook you. Really, all I’m showing is gore,” said Smither. “I keep it very curt, so a lot of the power of my page’s success is frankly my guts in saying what I say, and the imagination of the viewer. My audience is very active in their comments.”
Examples of captions include, “Fentanyl overdose in local coffeehouse restroom #death #7difficult.” Smither rates each crime scene from 1-10 according to how difficult it is to clean up and he makes it clear whether a death or #nodeath occurred via his hashtags. There are hundreds of comments below each bloody photo, most of which are questions about what happened, or questions about the surrounding scene itself. And Smither is right about the curiosity factor regarding the photos—with each picture I find myself reenacting what could have happened at the scene—my mind filling in the gaps as I swipe right to see the next photo.
Smither’s account certainly isn’t for the faint of heart.
“People don’t know alot about death, they don’t get exposure to it, and they’re afraid of it,” said Smither. “The rating system is just how severe that job is for me. From the time I get out of my truck to the time I get back in my truck and I’m ready to split...how much of a hassle is this job going to be?”
Smither said that some jobs aren’t particularly strenuous but they’ll be a 9 on the rating scale because they’re so nasty.
“The least of the job is really the crime and the shocking stuff, most of our work is really boring, non-shocking hard manual labor,” said Smither.
Smither and his team of hand-picked employees deal with the aftermath of murders, suicides, feces in public places and in jails, homeless camps, hoarding situations, and more. He says that nothing he’s seen has been so shocking that he has nightmares about it.
“I honestly don’t dream about my work,” said Smither. “I remember lots of jobs, but I’ve done so many jobs that they all kind of mesh into one. I’ll remember little snippets of a particular job, but we’ll do upwards of 1,000 jobs per month.”
Smither says when they get to a scene, they’re usually the only ones there after the police or family member has turned over the home for cleaning.
“We don’t have to deal with the grief or sadness, we’re just dealing with the mess. My team doesn’t know the details of the scene unless I tell them. We don’t get personal with it,” said Smither. “When you see the blood, you’re cognizant of what it is, but you just have to stop it at that point or else you can’t do the job.”
As far as posting photos of actual bodies, Smither says he stays away from that. “I won’t post any personal information but short of that, if I clean it, yeah I’m going to post it. I post the most visual or weirdest job from the previous 24-hour set of jobs, so they’re all pretty recent.”
The crime scene cleanup guru has been interviewed by A&E, the Daily Beast, and was featured on a show called True Grime: Crime Scene Cleanup.
To see more from Crime Scene Cleaners Inc. you can follow them on Instagram or on Facebook, where the company has over 10,000 followers.