A grisly business

Sometimes it's gruesome. Often it's traumatic. But someone has to clean up after murders. In America one woman and her team are glad to help. Julian Borger on the squad in white suits who see it all

The scene is familiar from a thousand cop shows and news bulletins. The chalk outline where the body lay. Yellow tape marking off the scene, and the flashing red lights as the ambulance pulls away. But what we never see is what happens next. In the wake of each brutal murder or desperate suicide, who stays behind to clear up the mess?
That is what Becky Della-Rodolfa wanted to know when a policewoman friend described a particularly nasty day at work on the troubled streets of Philadelphia.

"I said: 'Did you clean it up?'," Della-Rodolfa recalls. "She laughed at me, and she said: 'Are you kidding? The family cleans it up.' And that seemed so sad to me."

Sad, and commercially intriguing. Della-Rodolfa had a business degree and had had enough working for a government debt recovery department, sending in the bailiffs to bankrupt small enterprises. Here was the chance of filling a market niche, being her own boss, and perhaps sparing bereaved families some agony along the way.

Less than four years later, she is one of the partners in Trauma Scene Restoration, with up to 17 workers on call, ready to don white bio-hazard suits, gloves and rubber gas masks, and do what no one else is prepared to do. They will mop up the blood, scrape away human tissue, rip up floorboards, knock through walls, and restore everything until you would never guess anyone had died.

In Britain this unpleasant task is normally carried out by the police, but in the US, with a much higher rate of violent crime, the police are increasingly unwilling to handle more than they strictly need for evidence. So an industry is emerging to fill the gap, with more than 200 firms across the nation. The burgeoning business now has its own lobby group, the American Bio-Recovery Association (ABRA). It held its first convention in September in Las Vegas, where bio-recovery entrepreneurs schmoozed, swapped grisly tales and agreed to push Washington towards legislating federal standards. "We want to be regulated like any other industry," says Ron Gospodarski, ABRA's president. He is worried about the spread of cowboy outfits with no training and no safety regulations, who bulldoze their way into the homes of bereaved families.

Della-Rodolfa calls them "bleach-bottle companies" because "they just pour bleach over everything". Trauma Scene Restoration uses more sophisticated chemicals and enzymes. They arrive on the scene in a discreet white van, whereas the nearest competition in Baltimore parks outside in a bright red lorry emblazoned with the words: Crime Scene Cleanup. Unsurprisingly, the press are seldom far behind.

The delicate dilemma facing Trauma Scene Restoration was how to avoid being so crass, yet spread the word that the service existed. As Justin Jaconi, one of the company's white-suited cleaners, puts it: "What are we gonna say? 'If you die - call us?' It's one of those things - if you hear about it you hope you never have to use it."

In the end the new firm opted to place an advertisement in the Yellow Pages under house-cleaning, and Della-Rodolfa goes to police detectives conventions cvarrying golf tees inscribed with the firm's slogan - Restoring The Scene And Peace of Mind. "A lot of detectives and medical examiners play golf," she explains. This year, the firm is even sponsoring a police golf tournament.

Once ABRA has established itself, Della-Rodolfa expects it to start winning the big contracts - universities, hotel chains, the US postal service (in recent years a byword for murderous rampages by disgruntled employees) - who need a company they can trust on standby, to make the mess disappear in the event of "incidents".

Everyone in this business could spend all day reciting from the litany of horror stories which constitute their careers. If it isn't nasty they don't get called. Ron Gospodarski was summoned one night by a New York fast-food restaurant. There had been an argument in the queue. Someone got shoved and returned with a gun to shoot four people dead.

"There were blood smears along the walls and bullet holes everywhere, but the restaurant owner got us in straight away. As the medical examiners got through with each section, we moved in there, and the place was open the next day," he says.

Last week, Trauma Scene's van was outside a two-storey white house in south Philadelphia. A 300lb man, a recluse, had died in his home surrounded by the grimy bric-a-brac he had been buying from flea-markets for the past 15 years. There was plumbing, welding equipment, televisions and unidentifiable junk piled up to the ceiling in every room. The house was filthy and a pack of cats roamed at will.

By the time Della-Rodolfa reached the scene, the cats had gone and the main challenge was an infestation of maggots and cockroaches. She had to open the refrigerator, throw an insecticide canister in like a hand grenade and slam the door shut. "That was a screamer," she says, shivering at the memory.

Outside on the street, Justin Jaconi, a former demolition worker who by now is a 19-year-old veteran of putrid human debris, is talking about how to deal with the psychological hurdles involved in the job. He says: "You can't sit there and think: 'Well that sucks for that person'. If you sit there and think about it, you're going to get yourself into a bad situation."

The main challenge is to avoid either vomiting or weeping. On one of her first jobs, Della-Rodolfa started crying uncontrollably. "I just started looking at pictures of the family. The others were looking and telling me: 'Stop crying' but I just couldn't. I started to personalise it. Now I try not to look at the pictures. If they're tempting you, take them off the wall and turn them upside down."

Can there be possibly be a worse job anywhere? Della-Rodolfa does not see it that way. Firstly, Trauma Scene Restoration turned a small profit in its first year - unusual for a new small business. But more importantly, she insists, she is providing a service people desperately need at their worst imaginable moments.

"How can you walk away from the scene when the family is begging you for help? One of the first jobs I was on, the mother just hugged me for 10 minutes and kept telling me: 'You're like an angel.' People always ask me: 'How could you do it?', but it's more like 'How could you not?'"