by Gil Reavill
There is a logical disconnect to that observation—Ed Gein might have liked Oreo cookies, too, and that doesn’t make Oreos any less sweet—but the Body Worlds enterprise struck, for me, a very familiar note. As with Aftermath, Incorporated, Body Worlds was fraught—fraught with controversy, fraught with emotion, fraught as a target for moral judgments.
To a certain degree, von Hagens played off these controversies. As a publicity stunt for one of his German shows, he seated a plastinated pregnant woman on a public bus and sent her around Berlin. He was quoted as saying he wanted to display plastinates having sex, and that he wanted to pose one crucified on a cross.
I found what I was looking for in an obscure corner of the exhibition featuring stand-alone displays of various human organs, diseased and otherwise. The smoker’s lungs looked predictably gruesome, with an ugly gray-black color to them that couldn’t be good. But I stopped longest in front of a case containing two cirrhotic livers.
Even if you had never seen a human liver close up, and thus had nothing to compare, you would instantly conclude there was something irregular about these gnarled, fibrous hunks of diseased tissue. The specimens were under glass, but I wouldn’t have wanted to touch them. They looked like tree boles. A small card informed me that one of the organs had come out of the body of a hep C sufferer, and I idly wondered how von Hagens and his technicians decontaminated the thing. Some thinly sliced cross-sections of cirrhotic livers, looking equally gnarly, were mounted nearby.
So this was what all the fuss was about. Without HCV, without HIV, Aftermath could be just another janitorial concern—no hazmat suits, no $191-a-throw bioboxes, no Universal Precautions. Staring into the vitrine at a squamous football twice the size of a healthy liver, all warty and misshapen, the fuss seemed worth it.
I took the train back to the western suburbs, passing directly by, I noticed, the site of the infamous Murder Castle of Dr. H. H. Holmes, on Sixty-third Street just east of Halsted.
The math in the word aftermath comes from the Old English word maeth, “to mow grass.” So aftermath means “after the mowing.” During New York City’s wilding craze during the 1980s, the teenage gangs of muggers used to call their victims “wheat,” boasting that they mowed them down just like threshing machines. “All flesh is grass,” said the cold-eyed prophet Isaiah. “Surely the people are grass.”
A public relations consultant gave Aftermath its name in 1999. “After Crime Clean-Up” wasn’t working out. The company’s original name ruffled too many feathers and raised too many hackles. So Chris and Tim looked for something that was suggestive, but not too suggestive.
Sterling, Illinois, where they both grew up, and where they had known each other since second grade, used to bill itself as “the Hardware Capital of the World,” due to the dominating presence of smokestack industries such as Northwestern Steel & Wire, Lawrence Brothers Hardware, and the Wahl Clipper Corporation. The working-class town situated itself at a falls on the Rock River in Whiteside County, a hundred miles west of Chicago. Tim’s father worked at Northwestern Steel and Wire, the medium-sized steel stamping mill that employed half the town’s fifteen thousand population, turning out “long products”: nails, wire, bar, rod, and structural rolling.
Northwestern Steel had a contentious labor history throughout the period when Chris and Tim were growing up. Steel dumping from Japan and Germany killed off a huge sector of the American steel industry, and Northwestern saw a three-year strike in the mid-1980s. Reorganized, the mill started up again, and after high school Tim followed his dad by taking a job there. He signed up for the hottest, dirtiest, most dangerous work in the place, the furnace crew, because it paid a premium.
His experiment with old-style rust-belt industry ended badly. Working one day under a smelting furnace in temperatures of two hundred or three hundred degrees Fahrenheit, issued wooden shoes because the soles of ordinary boots melted in those conditions, Tim dehydrated and collapsed. They had to carry him out.
“I quit and never went back,” he said. He began searching for ways to make a living that were not quite so nineteenth century. When he partnered with Chris after college in their newspaper subscription business, they were both just treading water. They looked for the next big thing, and thought they might have found it in Aftermath.
Working side by side on cleanup jobs, they discovered that they complemented each other. “Chris and I are so different,” Tim said. “He’s a lot more outgoing, and I’m almost a recluse. So he does the talking, the letter writing. I became more the technical person.”
In the beginning and all through the late 1990s, the company was still very much a break-even proposition. “Anything we made we plowed straight back into it,” Chris said.
Tim still lived in the apartment building across the street from that first volunteer cleanup job. As Aftermath ramped up, he focused on his work, played basketball a couple times a week, and maintained a nonexistent social profile. He kept his apartment decor bachelor Spartan: a big-screen TV, a recliner, a bed. That was it. Most nights, he wouldn’t get home until ten or eleven.
A dark-haired beauty in her early twenties lived across the street. She would watch Tim walk out to the mailbox in his basketball sweats, his head down. “I could see straight through to his house when he opened the door and I could see he didn’t have any furniture,” the former Sara Muse recalled.
“She used to look in my window,” Tim said, laughing.
Sara had to make all the moves for the shy, work-focused Tim. She got his phone number from her mother, who worked as a concierge at his apartment building. She called him up and the two began dating. In the winter of 2001, they were married.
Sara Reifsteck bears a striking resemblance to the movie actress Selma Blair. She was there at the company’s beginning, through its days as a shaky start-up concern, with the subscription service covering the bills. She watched Aftermath expand and develop into a commercial juggernaut, and is quite obviously proud of her husband’s success. When she worked for a time in the Aftermath office, her firsthand experience of man’s inhumanity to man affected her deeply.
“I couldn’t believe all the horrible measures people dream up to do to one another,” she says. “It’s like a whole spectrum of hurt.”
Sara and Tim have two young sons and want more children, but divulge information about Aftermath to their kids on a strict need-to-know basis. “I own a restoration company,” Tim tells them.
Chris Wilson was also raising a child, his daughter, Avarie, who was a little older than Tim’s sons. Chris treaded lightly around her as far as Aftermath was concerned. “My daddy’s an entrepreneur” was how Avarie used to describe her father’s work. In a kindergarten exercise about what parents do, she told her teacher that her father was a “house fixer.” Now in second grade, she’s graduated to a more graphic description: “My dad helps people out in places where there’s blood.”
The summer that I started job-shadowing at Aftermath, Chris married a gorgeous, vivacious Plano woman named Kelli Mc-Kirgan. She also worked in the Aftermath office for a stretch, and brought friends and relatives into the company. A natural-born saleswoman, she traveled for weeks at a time cold-calling sheriff’s departments, funeral homes, and medical examiners’ offices, publicizing Aftermath’s services. I asked her if the nature of the job affected her.
“It’s not the murder and suicides or the brains on the wall that got to me,” Kelli said. “It’s the filth jobs. We’re not talking about people who don’t dust their mantels. When I was in the office a job came in that was a mother who was deranged, who never cleaned up at all. She kept all her garbage like it was precious.”
Kelli saw the site photos that the techs brought back to the office. Used toilet paper, diapers, and feminine products trailed out of the house’s single bathroom. The woman’s toddlers finger-painted with their own feces.
“Okay, I know you’re abnormal,” Kelli said. “But why can’t you flush the toilet?”
&n
bsp; Both Aftermath wives worry less now that their husbands have taken on executive duties and don’t work in the field much anymore. They cited what they see as Chris and Tim’s commitment to tech safety and the principle of Universal Precaution.
“If I had a bioremediation job, and I was looking to hire a company,” Kelli said, “and I looked outside and I saw someone roll up in a pickup truck with a bunch of mops and a Wet Vac, you know, like a mom-and-pop deal, I swear I would lock the door and hide. Knowing what I know, you can’t do this job safely with half measures.”
The Moral Compass thought that all of Aftermath’s precautions were at least partly a way to pump up their fees.
“You know what a cynic is?” I asked her after she trotted this theory by me on the phone.
“I know what a cynic is,” she said.
“A cynic takes the worst aspect of anything and says that it’s the most important aspect,” I said.
“Okay, okay,” she said.
“You haven’t been on these jobs,” I told her.
“No, I haven’t. But you shouldn’t swallow the company line whole hog either. Maybe you need some cynicism. You’re supposed to be a journalist.”
Insurance companies were indeed on the warpath against Aftermath. Cleaning up a trauma scene Chris and Tim’s way cost a certain amount of money. But as far as I could see, the company’s precise and careful adherence to Universal Precaution was the only approach that made any sense.
At a family mass murder that occurred less than two miles from my Naperville Extended Stay refuge soon after I took up residence, I got a firsthand look at another company’s approach to bioremediation.
Daniel Dellenbach’s friends sometimes invoked the word charismatic to describe the twenty-eight-year-old health insurance broker. At parties and gatherings around the chain restaurants and brewpubs of the suburbs west of Chicago, he proved himself smart, witty, and charming, a blond, blue-eyed ex-jock with a steady girlfriend and a good job.
Most of his Chicago friends didn’t know about Dellenbach’s dark side. During an aborted stint at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, a nineteen-year-old Dellenbach had been arrested on four counts of what the Iowa authorities characterized as “home invasions”—he burglarized residences when the occupants were at home. He washed out of juvenile boot camp on that charge, and wound up spending six months in county. He moved back to his parents’ house in the western Chicago suburb of Wheaton, but was nabbed on a shoplifting charge.
Slowly, in his mid-twenties, Danny seemed to right himself. His parents, Ginny and Mark, were rock-solid citizens, both hard workers, with Ginny relishing her reputation as the Betty Crocker of Wheaton. Life went especially well for his sister, Brenda, who was waiting tables at Famous Dave’s barbecue when she met a young, moneyed computer programmer named Rick Livolsi. He was on a date with another woman and Brenda served them at the restaurant. Surreptitiously asking for the pretty brunette waitress’s phone number, Livolsi took Brenda out the next night. They’d been together ever since, even eloping to Reno on a lark.
Danny looked on, a shade jealous, as his formerly prospect-less younger sister moved into a four-bedroom luxury home in a Warrenville golf course development called River Hills. The “river” was the West Branch of the DuPage, just a creek really, but it flowed prettily through the eighteen-hole golf course just outside Brenda and Rick’s front door. Livolsi wrote code, owned his own computer programming firm, and drove a Ferrari.
When anyone asked Rick how things were going, or even casually inquired how he was doing, he always gave the same answer. “Life is superb.”
Danny had a good job, too, but he couldn’t quite keep up with his sister and her new husband. He sold health insurance to the small and medium-sized companies that flocked to Chicago’s exurban ring cities. With commissions and bonuses, he pulled down fifty thousand dollars. But it never seemed enough. Part of the reason was the nasty little blow habit he’d imported from Iowa City. He needed money, always more money. Money to party, and money to be the life of the party, which was what Danny Dellenbach always had to be.
So he began to steal from his family. Nickel-and-dime stuff at first. His father, a straight-arrow salesman who loved to help his wife throw large family gatherings, noticed that a few hundred dollars would be missing from his bureau-top money cache every time Danny attended one. Then Rick missed a twenty-five-hundred-dollar money roll left in an upstairs bedroom, also just after Danny visited.
Finally, his sister, Brenda, confronted him. “I know what you’re doing, Danny,” she said. “I know about the credit cards.”
Dellenbach had secretly filled out applications for plastic using his parents’ sterling credit information. A lot of plastic. All told, he had taken eighty thousand dollars from credit card companies, mostly under Mark’s and Ginny’s names, but using Brenda’s and Rick’s too. Most of the money went up his nose and those of his friends. The life of the party.
“Don’t tell Dad,” Danny pleaded to Brenda. He knew what straight-arrow Mark would do if he found out his son was engaged in credit card fraud. There wouldn’t be any coddling or restitution. Mark would go straight to the authorities, and Danny would go straight back inside.
It wasn’t a prospect Danny felt he could face. County time was well known to be the worst kind of time there is, and Danny’s six-month stretch in Johnson County Correctional had been pure despair—horrific food, crazed fellow inmates, constant sexual and physical intimidation. He could not do another stretch. He just couldn’t.
“Danny, of course I have to tell Daddy,” Brenda said. “How can I not? Where would you come up with the money to make this good?”
Danny erupted. “You tell Dad and I will kill you,” he shouted. “I’ll kill you, Brenda!”
His sister wasn’t much impressed. She’d had put up with a lifetime of Danny’s tantrums. Danny could scream all he wanted. Brenda kept finding new fraudulent credit lines, and the losses spiraled upward. The other shoe was going to have to drop.
Danny made his move before Brenda made hers. The night before Halloween, two weeks after he had made his threat against his sister’s life, Danny Dellenbach again showed up at River Hills. The gatehouse guard recognized Danny and waved him through. He pulled up in front of Rick and Brenda’s palatial home on the golf course. Rick was at his computer in the den, and Brenda was watching television. Danny angrily confronted his sister. Had she told their father about his misdeeds?
Before Brenda could answer, Danny was on her, pummeling her with his fists. She yelled for Rick, and Danny seized a fire-place poker and smashed her across the head with it. When Rick rushed into the living room, Danny swung the poker at him, catching the left side of his head, knocking him to the carpet. Danny hit Rick a dozen more times, great pummeling blows, any one of which could have been fatal. Then, with his brother-in-law safely out of the way, he returned to his sister and finished her off, slugging her savagely to cave in her skull.
He wasn’t through yet. As it neared midnight on Halloween eve, he drove back out through the River Hills gate and headed east to his parents’ modest ranch home in Wheaton. He carried a.44-caliber pistol. Mark and Ginny were asleep. Danny fired at his father first, a kill shot to the left side of the back of the head. His mother woke at the explosion and turned groggily to face her son. Danny shot her once in the face, the bullet entering above her lip and ripping through her cerebral cortex.
Intent on his business now, Danny loaded up the bodies into his leased Toyota sedan. It could not have been anything else but a terrifyingly surreal drive, heading through the suburban landscape on a raw October night, his dead mother and father in his trunk. Through the River Hills gate with his dark cargo, back to Brenda and Rick in the bloody living room. He carried his parents’ bodies into the house.
A Halloween family reunion of sorts. They were all together now. Danny didn’t belabor the festivities. He drove past the gatehouse guard for the fourth and final time that night, and caught
the last flight out of O’Hare to Atlanta.
It was an odd coincidence, and it made me feel all the more like the Angel of Death, for a quadruple murder to happen in my immediate neighborhood just as I was waiting around for quadruple murders to happen in my immediate neighborhood. If I stepped out of my Extended Stay enclave to the hotel parking lot, I could look across the interstate and see the southernmost edge of the River Hills development. It was that near.
I called the Aftermath office and spoke to Chris. “You guys didn’t have anything to do with this, did you?”
Chris laughed. “Too close for comfort, huh?”
“I just feel strange,” I said. “The worst news possible for somebody else is pretty good news for me.”
“You’ll get used to it,” Chris said. “And you’ll be glad to hear that it looks as though we are going to get both jobs, the sister’s place near you, and the parents’ house over in Wheaton.”
Danny Dellenbach fled to a friend’s house in Atlanta, but then turned around the next day and flew back into Chicago. He rented a car and drove toward his old college neighborhood in Iowa City. An Iowa state patrol officer spotted him on I-80 and pulled him over. He was in jail in Iowa on a felony menacing charge (his threat against his sister), fighting extradition to Illinois.
Aftermath did not get the contract to clean up the horror house at River Hills. At the last minute, the insurance company stepped in and insisted the family hire a cheaper national cleaning chain to do the work. Greg and Greg did clean the master bedroom where Mark and Ginny Dellenbach died in Wheaton, and I briefly visited the scene.
It was, as Aftermath jobs went, very simple. Head wounds tend to bleed out egregiously, but the blood was contained on the mattress. The carpet did not have to be ripped up. The bullet that killed Mark Dellenbach tore a groove in the headboard, so the techs packed that up and disposed of that too.
