Criminal - A Bucket, a Mop, and a Sledgehammer

Episode Date: October 11, 2019

After a crime occurs, or when someone dies, the police aren’t responsible for cleaning up. That’s not their job. The coroner takes the body, the police conduct their investigation, and then everyone leaves. But the blood, and the rubber gloves, and the uneaten food in the refrigerator are all left behind. Sandra Pankhurst didn’t like imagining that. So she decided to clean it up. She became a crime scene cleaner. To learn more about Sandra’s story, you can read The Trauma Cleaner, by Sarah Krasnostein. Say hello on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Sign up for our occasional newsletter, The Accomplice. Follow the show and review us on Apple Podcasts: iTunes.com/CriminalShow. We also make This is Love and Phoebe Reads a Mystery. Artwork by Julienne Alexander. Check out our online shop.  Episode transcripts are posted on our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Support for Criminal comes from Apple Podcasts. Each month, Apple Podcasts highlights one series worth your attention, and they call these series essentials. This month, they recommend Wondery's Ghost Story, a seven-part series that follows journalist Tristan Redman as he tries to get to the bottom of a ghostly presence in his childhood home. His investigation takes him on a journey involving homicide detectives, ghost hunters, and even psychic mediums,

and leads him to a dark secret about his own family. Check out Ghost Story, a series essential pick, completely ad-free on Apple Podcasts. Botox Cosmetic, Adabotulinum Toxin A, FDA approved for over 20 years. So, talk to your specialist to see if Botox Cosmetic is right for you. For full prescribing information, including boxed warning, visit BotoxCosmetic.com or call 877-351-0300. Remember to ask for Botox Cosmetic by name. To see for yourself and learn more, visit BotoxCosmetic.com.

That's BotoxCosmetic.com. That's BotoxCosmetic.com. This episode contains descriptions of crime scenes and may not be suitable for everyone. Please use discretion. I have this disease to please, as Oprah would say, and I have the need to sort of help people through their issues or help people with their problems. And so with the funeral home, I was really, really in my element. I could just sort of help people through, talk them down, make them feel more at ease after what they've just been through. In 1987, Sandra Pankhurst was working at W.D. Rose and Son Funeral Home

in Melbourne, Australia, where, she says, she pretty much did everything. She prepared bodies for viewing, helped families plan all the details of the funeral, and then oversaw the ceremony itself. She says it was the perfect job for her because she isn't afraid of death or dead bodies, and she loved the work. It was at the funeral home that she met the man she'd later marry. The joke of it is, and as serious as it is, people used to say to me, how did you meet

your husband? I go, buried his wife. You know, it was a joke, but it was sort of serious in the same token. After they'd been dating for a while, Sandra sat him down and said she had something to tell him. And he said to me, well, come on, tell me what's going on, tell me what's going on. And I said, well, George, I said, look, the way you see me is not always the way I've been. He said, well, what is it? I said, well, I don't quite know how to explain it to you. I said, but I had to be surgically enhanced to become the person that you see me as being.

And with that, it just went deadly quiet. And he said to me, well, I met Sandra. I fell in love with Sandra, and I'm going to marry Sandra. Sandra says being trans in Australia in the 1970s and 80s wasn't easy. She says she had trouble finding work where she felt comfortable. People didn't always treat her well or take her seriously. She thinks that in a way, that turned her into an especially hard worker. Everything I do, I do 150%. Because I was so busy hiding my identity and just concentrating on work,

that that's how I lived. She worked in a lab. She worked as a taxi dispatcher. She worked in the sex trade. She was in her 30s when she was hired by W.D. Rose and Son Funeral Home, and she says it was the first time she felt like she could be herself and be not only accepted by her colleagues but given more and more responsibility. She was one of the first women in Australia to become a funeral director. Being that close to death constantly, Sandra started to notice something. Families would say to her that they didn't know if they could handle going

back to the place where their loved one had died. After a crime occurs, or when someone dies, the police aren't responsible for cleaning up. That's not their job. The coroner takes the body, the police conduct their investigation, and then everyone leaves. But the blood and the rubber gloves and the uneaten food in the refrigerator

is all left behind. Sandra didn't like thinking about that. She didn't think anyone should have to walk back into that. So, she decided to clean it up. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. I thought, I'll go, I'll try this niche market and see how I go. She says she started by buying a van. I'm just confused. I mean, all you have to do is get a van and some cleaning materials

and then in the beginning you can just start? I'm just confused. I mean, all you have to do is get a van and some cleaning materials, and then in the beginning you can just start? Well, it was like that because it was a niche industry. No one was really doing it here in Australia. She established herself as a trauma cleaner, sometimes called an aftermath technician. Here in the United States, they're often called crime scene cleaners. For the last 26 years, Sandra has owned and operated her own trauma cleaning business. On her business card, it says, excellence is no accident. We do deceased estates. We do pet and hoarder cleanups.

We do squalor and trashed houses. We pay homes for the home help for agencies to attend. We do odour control, homicide, suicide, unattended death scenes, mould, flood, fire remediation, meth lab cleaning, bio cleans for the cells and the vehicles for the police, and industrial accidents. So that's a pretty wide range of things that we do. The trauma cleaning industry really took off in the 90s when people began to be worried about the transmission of HIV. Before that, family and friends would be the ones

who would take care of the aftermath of a crime or a death. Now these types of cleanings are often covered by insurance and victim funds. Sandra says she's never said no to a job. So, you know, you see some pretty gruesome things, and some you think, oh, this is not so bad, you know, like the police would go, oh, this is one of the worst ones we've seen. And when we get there, we think, gorgeous, we could out more often. This is easy, you know.

So you get up to a crime scene and everyone, all the police are outside and they're saying, this is bad. We've never seen anything like this. And you say, don't worry, boys, we've got it covered. Yeah. We make them feel calm and comfortable and everything as well. And we talk to the family. Yeah. We make them feel calm and comfortable and everything as well. And we talk to the family and say, look, we're here to restore the house to its former glory for you. It's not just a cleaning job. It's looking after people's mental health and stability as well, I believe.

Because we're not just cleaners. She says she could get a call any time. At three in the morning, while she's working on another job, while she's eating dinner, she has two hours to get to the scene. This morning I had a call at 3.30 this morning for her to wake a team up, get them out, get a job done. We're not allowed to discuss the jobs in particular that we do because it's part of our privacy concerns. But we had a team out at 3.30 this morning.

So you can see I haven't had a lot of sleep and then up at 6.15 this morning to get ready and look like a normal person. Her first case came to her from former colleagues at the funeral home. A man with a hoarding disorder had passed away in his rental property. The clean-up took 72 hours. It was a rat-infested, filthy den of iniquity that I'd never seen the likes of because I used to have a nickname as Sparkle because my house was always tip-top shape. And to walk into this place here was like,

oh my God, I can't believe people could live like this rats and mice running everywhere you felt like you had to be you know a field officer to deal with the animals that were there it was just really really spooky but in the end we had to do I think the fifth layer of flooring to come off in the kitchen because it was so contaminated. And with that, we were slicing the last bit of vinyl, pouring boiling water over to break the glue down and then putting spades under it to sort of lift it up. But not only was it glued down, it was riveted down. And so every time we'd hit a rivet, it would ricochet on our hands and our hands ended up looking like the size of watermelons. And we were sort of going, oh my God, we're in so much pain. And like we'd finished the job and I was really depressed. And I thought, I don't think I can do this. I really don't think

I can do this. But then you get over a quick smart and then you move on. She says, people think you need a bucket of water and a cloth to do this job. But we need crowbars, rakes and a sledgehammer. This month they recommend Wondery's Ghost Story, a seven-part series that follows journalist Tristan Redman as he tries to get to the bottom of a ghostly presence in his childhood home. His investigation takes him on a journey involving homicide detectives, ghost hunters, and even psychic mediums, and leads him to a dark secret about his own family. Check out Ghost Story, a series essential pick, completely ad-free on Apple Podcasts. Hey, it's Scott Galloway, and on our podcast, Pivot, we are bringing you

a special series about the basics of artificial intelligence. We're answering all your questions. What should you use it for? What tools are right for you? And what privacy issues

should you ultimately watch out for? And to help us out, we are joined by Kylie Robison, the senior joined by Kylie Robeson, the senior AI reporter for The Verge, to give you a primer on how to integrate AI into your life. So, tune into AI Basics, How and When to Use AI,

a special series from Pivot sponsored by AWS, wherever you get your podcasts. Sandra Pankhurst now operates her trauma cleaning business with 24 employees and nine vans. She says she gets calls every single day, and that when it comes to hiring new people, she says she likes to hire people like her, who come from, as she puts it, the school of hard knocks. When she meets with someone for an interview, she shows them photographs of the kinds of scenes they might encounter,

and she watches their face to see how they react to the photos. She's looking for empathy. She says it takes a special kind of person to handle blood and to do it with empathy. The next step is to shadow her on a job, and she says it doesn't take long at all to determine whether someone is cut out for this type of work. If they're not, no trouble.

She says she would never tell someone to, quote, take a teaspoon of concrete and toughen up. She knows it's not for everyone. When she does hire someone, she tells them to prepare to work harder than they've ever worked in their lives. She tells them they can cancel their gym membership. They won't need it.

Each employee goes through a four-day training course. The first three days, they study theory and equipment and how certain solvents interact with body fluids. On the fourth day, they practice. Sandra gets blood from a slaughterhouse and pours it over furniture and carpets. When they go into crime scenes, she says they take a lot of photographs

of how it looked before and after, and says they take a lot of photographs of how it looked before and after, and that they have a system in which each person's work is double-checked by someone else. Her greatest fear is missing something and having a family member see something that might scare or upset them. So let's say you get a call that you're going to a crime scene. Tell me the steps that you go through after you get that call. Right. So what I do then is I bring the staff members involved to go that are going out on the job. And it used to be always me until the last couple of years. And we'd go there and I'd say, now now this is what we're going to be confronted with if I

was on the tools then I would go in survey the house see what it is come out explain to the staff this is what you're going to be confronted with are you okay with this and they go yep yep yep we're fine we've had the odd occasion where we've had a staff member that's just broken down and they can't do it. They might have been a fairly newbie person. And we said, OK, that's all right. It's not for everybody. So you just go and wait out in the car and we'll get this job done here. So we go through the scenario of what's in the house, what to expect, how things have happened.

The police will probably still be there. The coroner's been, the body's gone, forensics have been, they've taken all the testing and fingerprint dusting and everything that they want to do, and then we have to restore the house back to somewhat its former glory, which sometimes is quite challenging because if we have to remove carpet we then have to get permission to do that we can't just pull the property apart without giving them the Department of Justice or whoever's employing us full recognition of everything that's going to happen but in the same token we are not to leave the scene if there's any

bacteria or pathogens still in the property and then afterwards when we've done the job we'll all gather outside as we're cleaning down the equipment and putting our taking our suits and gloves and masks and all this sort of stuff off that we would have a chat and have a a talk around quite often we'd go and stop off at a hotel or something like that and we'd have a drink or a cup of tea or something like that and and just chew the fat and sort of have a a general conversation now how did you find that how did you how do you feel about that because sometimes you'd find things that would be quite confronting, like a gentleman, one stage blue, his head off, but he still managed to live. So he tried it again.

So half of the roof of his mouth was on one side of the room. His eyelashes were on the other side of the room. Brain matter was on another part of the room. And this was quite a large room. And then he ended up doing it again and yet still lived. What is it like to see someone's brains on the wall? Look, it's just another job. I know that sounds cruel, but it would be a different story if you knew the person.

And if you knew the person, you wouldn't be allowed. I wouldn't let you do the job. What do you wear into the crime scene? Well, we've got like the big white suits. We've got foot coverings on our feet. We have hairnets on. We have goggles on and a mask on. We're double-gloved. That's how we would go into a scene. So we look like something out of the Aliens. What do you do about the smell? Oh, the smell's nothing. Once you get rid of the sauce and the chemicals and things that we leave, the house smells as fresh as a daisy by the time we've gone that's not an issue and like if it's been there for some time and it's

a decomposition yes we either fog master we ozone or or we put on these um amazing machines that might have to run for a couple of days and they filter all the air and so it can eliminate a lot of that but if it's been a decomp the bodies the gases and everything's that have been released from the body go all over the wall so the walls all have to be washed down the main problem then is the fabrics that absorb the odor and that's when we'd use the the machines to dispose of the um smell What's the worst smell? Death. Long-term death, where they've been there for quite some time and no one's known about them being there. That's a smell you'll never, ever, ever forget.

When she gets a call, she's not only told what happened, but she's also told who's at the scene. Sometimes there could be a family there that are hell-bent on wanting to go into the house, but we have to talk them down and make them feel like, you know, this is not how your parents, I say to them, do you love your parents? They go, yep. I say, do your parents love you? Yep.

Is this the last memory that you think your parents want of you and oh no no no but we just need to see I said no you just need to see but that's not really what you will want to live with because this is the last memory you're ever going to have let us just cover the area over and show you roughly where it happened and we'll get say I'll get permission to get some linen out of the linen press and we'd cover the area over and show you roughly where it happened, and we'd say, I'd get permission to get some linen out of the linen press, and we'd cover the area over and show them roughly where it happened. And they're usually quite satisfied with that, but sometimes that could take an hour or two hour to talk the family down.

Sandra says this is the part of her work she cares about most, protecting the people who are left behind. It's our job to sort of make sure that their mental health is looked after as well. Sandra told us that if someone dies in a particular part of a room, she won't just cut the carpet out in that spot. She always gets permission to take the carpet out of the whole room, so that when she's done and the family returns to the house, they never know exactly where the body was found.

Sometimes she sets things aside that the families may want, things that may mean something, things with handwriting, pictures, birthday cards. What's the most important thing that you've learned from this work? Don't judge anybody. You never know what's going to happen to you next. Just, you know, just show some compassion and care because, as I say, by the grace of God, it could be you tomorrow.

She's 65 now and has no plans to retire. She says she's had a long, sometimes difficult life, and she's happy to have found work that makes her feel like she's contributing, and as she puts it, looking after people correctly. Criminal is created by Lauren Spohr and me. Nadia Wilson is our senior producer. Susanna Robertson is our assistant producer. Audio mix by Rob Byers. Julie and Alexander makes original illustrations

for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at thisiscriminal.com. We're on Facebook and Twitter, at Criminal Show. Criminal is recorded in the studios of North Carolina Public Radio, WUNC. We're a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a collection of the best podcasts around. I'm Phoebe Judge.

This is Criminal. Radiotopia. From PRX. Crow's feet and forehead lines look better in adults. Effects of Botox Cosmetic may spread hours to weeks after injection causing serious symptoms. Alert your doctor right away as difficulty swallowing, speaking, breathing, eye problems, or muscle weakness may be a sign of a life-threatening condition. Patients with these conditions before injection are at highest risk. Don't receive Botox Cosmetic if you have a skin infection. Side effects may include allergic reactions, injection site pain, headache, eyebrow and

eyelid drooping, and eyelid swelling. Allergic reactions can include rash, welts, asthma symptoms, and dizziness. Tell your doctor about medical history, muscle or nerve conditions, including ALS or Lou Gehrig's disease, myasthenia gravis, or Lambert-Eaton syndrome in medications, including botulinum toxins, as these may increase the risk of serious side effects. For full safety information, visit BotoxCosmetic.com or call 877-351-0300. See for yourself at BotoxCosmetic.com. Your own weight loss journey is personal. Everyone's diet is different. Everyone's bodies are different. And according to Noom, there is no one size fits all approach. Noom

wants to help you stay focused on what's important to you with their psychology and biology based approach. This program helps you understand the science behind your eating choices and helps you build new habits for a healthier lifestyle. Stay focused on what's important to you with Noom's psychology and biology-based approach. Sign up for your free trial today at Noom.com.