Here kitty, kitty...

"It’s a hoarded house…" the deputy mumbled to me- as discretely as possible, what with the family within ear-shot and all.

I nodded, careful to keep my face as placid as possible. That’s one of the tricks no one tells you to learn… one of the lessons you pick up from experience: look unruffled and distantly concerned…. But not too concerned.

If you look bored, the family will think you’re not taking their loved one’s death seriously. 

But if you look horrified, or astonished, or disgusted… they will suspect you’re judging them, judging the dead person- thinking all kinds of horrible things about them… which, of course... maybe you ARE, but they don’t need to know that- or at least they don’t need to read it all over your face.

If a family does feel judged, or "looked down on" they clam up like murder suspects and later complain to your bosses. Their accusations are usually vague, claiming "she was rude" or "she was unprofessional".  Once, I even had one guy complain because I was writing things down in my notebook. Specifically, he was upset that I made note of his wife’s statement that their dead son had a history of drug use. It sounds ridiculous but ultimately, even in the midst of an unfathomable tragedy, people are still concerned about "what the neighbors will think." I can't blame them, I suppose.  It makes sense that people are sensitive about the questions presented by a loved-one's death- they're ashamed of how they have to answer, and ashamed of the fact that this person died in a fashion that resulted in certain "dirty laundry" being aired in public. And it gets dirty- very dirty, as dirty as… a hoarded house. 

I had just picked my way through a jungle-gym of garden tools and lawn equipment that cluttered and choked the front yard and walk-way. I was standing on the front porch as the sheriff’s officer briefed me on what I was about to confront inside. As I listened, I watched the family watching me from the road where they huddled by their vehicles in the rain, arms around one another for warmth and comfort. They were checking me for a reaction, I knew.  None of them knew the details just yet, but they were well aware of the fact that nothing about this situation painted them in a good light. They wanted the whole situation to be "not that bad", and were watching for any sign of surprise or astonishment. This whole situation was going to suck, I could feel it. But I kept my face impassive as the officer relayed the story to me.

Inside was a dead guy… no surprise, since I was a deputy medical examiner and for me to be called to any residence someone nearby had to be dead. 

Fortunately, it was easy to stay poker-faced since the dead guy’s story was far more common than I think anyone could realize. The guy had been unemployed and living in that house with his mother for the last 10 years. While the other kids would come by and check to make sure everyone was still breathing, no one had actually entered the residence in over a decade. The mother had suffered a debilitating stroke a month ago and was moved to a local nursing home. The son, our dead guy, was being evicted from the house since he couldn’t afford the rent without his mother’s social security. Keeping with tradition, his sister had come by almost daily to make sure he was okay, but never actually came into the house. She would pull up to the end of the driveway in her car and honk. Then her brother would come out and give her a status update. She would remind him that he needed to get the house packed up, and that would be that. Except this last time, she pulled up and honked her horn, but no one came out.

The officer went on to tell me that the guy had a history of drug use, and at least 2 overdoses under his belt prior to this… the incident which we sanitized by calling it his "terminal event" as opposed to his "latest and greatest adventure with controlled substances" or his "epic fail" or his "personal quest for room temperature."

The officer, who apparently had not yet learned the "straight face" lesson, emphasized with a wide eyed grimace, "It’s REALLY bad in there!"

I had been eyeing the doorknob and suspected he was right. Doorknobs are one of the first things I evaluate when I enter a house. I’ve come to realize that the degree of filth inside a residence is directly proportional to the diameter of the greasy stain that halo-es the doorknob…. The dirt and oil from unknown years of comings and goings.  The residue from people's hands deposits grime around the doorknob- even just the slightest touch of a clean hand- will leave something. If people don't clean it off, or stop cleaning it off- or don’t wash their hands, all that crap collects around the doorknob like rings in a tree stump. This guy had the equivalent of a California Redwood smeared on his door. 


I took a deep breath, realizing it might be the last whiff of fresh air I may catch for a few hours, and swung the door open.

I entered the home with the officer hovering behind me, waiting for my expletive. 

I’m relieved to say, that while the house was, in fact, disgusting… I have seen much, much worse. Additionally, while our dead guy was undoubtedly past his expiration date, he was NOT the most decomposed body I’ve ever examined… not even close. The most decomposed body I’ve ever had to examine had long since re-discovered his role in the food chain and was the unwitting benefactor for approximately 10 generations of maggots and blow-flies.  This guy, at least, still looked vaguely human.
I resisted the urge to rib the officer for exaggerating. He was obviously new at the job and, by the look of him, barely old enough to buy beer. In fact, I couldn’t help but suspect his crisp, stiff uniform had been rendered so by his mother whom he likely still lived with. I’ve never known a guy in his twenties to look so "pressed" without help. That’s something you notice when you work with the police a great deal, you stop seeing the uniform and start seeing the people underneath them- and you realize how young a lot of these beat cops really are… adolescents paying their dues.


As I stepped into the littered front foyer, the boy-sheriff and I were greeted by a sergeant who had been inside, herding the decedent’s berserk dogs into the garage. The house was not so much hoarded as it was trashed. Clearly the guy would have been a hoarder, if he’d had more stuff to hoard. He had gotten as far into the "packing up" process as he could before clearly giving up and opting to instead take a handful of his mother’s leftover morphine tablets before he passed out on the living room floor. 

There were empty book-shelves and drawers, positioned haphazardly about the house with all the contents spread out all over the floor. Other furniture was tipped on it’s side. It appeared as though the guy knew these things needed to be taken out of their respective locations and packed up, but he forgot to locate any boxes in which to pack them. Each bedroom contained a bare mattress, piles of clothes, newspapers, shoes… and animal feces… everywhere you looked. The entire residence had been turned into a giant cat-box, and before you could sneeze and scratch at the hives forming on your face from being exposed to such a mess… the cats themselves began floating to the surface. 

I was in the master bedroom, sifting through a pile of blue-jeans with a pair of barbecue tongs I had found on the mattress when I spotted the first cat… staring at me quizzically from it’s perch on an over-turned 5-gallon bucket. But it wasn’t a cat… it was a kitten.


I don’t like cats, as a rule. First of all I’m allergic to them. Secondly, cats are neurotic, unpredictable schizophrenics who don’t have owners as much as they have staff. I tend to like animals that like me back (which may explain my ability to attract gamers, musicians and other fringe personalities.) Kittens, on the other hand, are a horse of a different color. There is very little in this world as endearing and loveable as a kitten. The sudden presence of that fluffy little face completely derailed my death investigation, and the next thing you know, my hunt for the dead guy’s driver’s license in order to establish positive identification was completely abandoned in favor of finding something shiny and fascinating to dangle in front of the kitten's face.


"Hey guys… there are KITTENS." I squealed to the officers who were, likewise, tossing the other bedrooms on a hunt for the missing license.


"Yeah, I know," the sergeant called back to me, "I’ve spotted at least two so far."

"Oh my GOD, they are SOOOOOOOOOO cute!" I cooed, extending my hand to the little black scamp, who was having nothing of it and leapt off the bucket, dashing back into the living room. I followed, deciding that the dead guy leaving his driver’s license in his mother’s bedroom made about as much sense as keeping a pair of barbecue tongs on the mattress. 

"I didn’t find anything." The younger officer said to me as he joined me in the living room. We both watched as one large cat, presumably the brood’s mother, wandered out of her home in the dilapidated entertainment center and stood before us with an expectant, almost polite, gaze.



"Terribly sorry about the state of the place," she seemed to say "I don’t suppose any of you could be troubled to feed us?"

I tried to refocus as the police officers went outside to question the family about tattoos and scars for identification purposes. I pulled out my camera and addressed the stiff and bloated gentleman laying on the living room floor. With each "click" of my camera as I photographed our decedent, another kitten meandered into the room to observe me at work. When I looked up, I had no less than 4 kittens, either lounging on the overturned television, or tip-toeing closer to me and the dead body to determine what was so fascinating about the stiff who had been lying on the floor for at least 4 days and was officially old-news in their opinion. I couldn’t help myself.

Click- and I had an adorable rendering of a kitten wrestling with the empty morphine bottle.

Click- and I had a darling photograph of a tiny calico kitten tentatively sniffing the out-streched, rigored hand of the corpse. 

Click- and I had a desk-top worthy pic of the little black kitten demurely seated on the dead guy’s chest with her tail curled around her feet-

The more photos I took, the more the kittens seemed to enjoy the whole "Kittens with Corpses" theme we had going on.

Eventually, the police came back in, and I had to be a little more… tactful with my photography. But I still collected a slew of pictures of the kittens climbing the filthy kitchen counter, batting around loose morphine tablets in the bathroom and I captured a particularly endearing photo of the kittens swatting at the sergeant’s radio as he waved the antennae in front of them.

We all had to thoroughly compose ourselves when we left the house to address the family about our findings. It was the first time I ever ad to employ the "keep a straight face" tactic because I’d had so much damnned fun.

Furthermore, I had to resist the urge to ask the family if I could take one of them home with me… but I couldn’t imagine how I’d explain to my husband (who’s ALSO allergic to cats) how I came to return from a death scene with a little black kitten that smelled like decomp.

"Please baby, can’t we keep him?" I heard myself begging, "he’s not just a kitten… he’s a CADAVER kitten."

I’m going to have a hard enough time explaining to my boss why all of my scene photos prominently feature a corpse, heavily decorated with kittens. But honestly, what are they going to say? Everyone at the scene was much more at ease due to the kitten factor. I think my own hard edged demeanor may have been dulled a bit due to the fact that I had spent most of my time "frolicking" through the scene instead of "trudging" through it. Maybe we can talk finance into investing in a crate of kittens for the deputy medical examiners and sheriffs' officers. I think there would be a lot fewer complaints.  Imagine it:

"Well, at first I was kind of offended by all the questions the medical examiner was asking me about my husband's death... things like, 'did he ever use recreational substances' or 'Did he have a history of depression or suicide attempts.'  I was GOING to complain... but.. you know... she had that kitten with her..."