by Gil Reavill
The first clue was a tooth, its bloody root still attached, on the narrow carpeted stairway to the second floor. We had come in through the gloomy, darkened first floor of the house, cluttered with the ordinary clothes-food-paper disarray of day-to-day life. Off the hall between the living room and kitchen, the stairway took two sharp turns upward, and we found the tooth on the first landing. There didn’t seem to be any possible way it could have been blown down two ninety-degree turns to wind up where it was.
Ryan picked it up with a gloved hand. “How do you think that got there?” I said.
“You won’t believe what a shotgun blast does to the human body,” Ryan said. “I’ve seen blood spatter make it around corners. It can get under doorways and bounce up over the wall in the next room even when a door is closed.”
At the second landing I could look upward and see the first markings of blood on the white ceiling above me. The second floor was really a narrow finished attic with two rooms in line, and the suicide had pulled the trigger in the first of these. A blood bomb had exploded, and all four walls were covered with gore. Most of it had been propelled toward us, toward the stairway and a closet next to it.
The floor of the closet was piled high with clothes, a teenage boy’s disorganization. The blast covered the clothes on the floor and those hanging against the back wall of the closet in a fine spray of blood, small clots of brain, and bits of skull and flesh. Amid the mess I saw something I had never seen exposed before, the white matter of the brain, nerve bundles surrounded by sheaths of fatty myelin, normally tucked away deep inside solid gray masses of neurons.
“Jesus,” Ryan said about the contents of the closet. “All that is going to have to be bio.”
He stepped back to survey the room, putting on his Gil Grissom hat.
“He must have been sitting here,” he said, “with the shotgun on the bed beside him, pointing into the room. So he reaches back for the trigger—look, you can see where the stock kicked back and hit the wall.”
A small oval dent in the white wallboard. Was it really the mark of a gun stock? Or maybe the indentation of a heel, made long before in happier times. I couldn’t really tell, but no one said anything to challenge Ryan. It was just a theory, a “what happened here?” puzzle game. Nothing rode on the truth of it. The Winnebago County coroner had already ruled the death a suicide.
Everything in the room was absorbent: the wallboard, the stain-mottled indoor-outdoor carpeting, the green coverlet on the bed, even the bulletin board tacked up on the door to the second bedroom. Ryan opened the door.
“I don’t see anything in here,” he said, after kneeling to make an inspection. “I think this room is okay.”
Dave clattered upstairs, somehow managing to carry three bioboxes at once. He put them on the floor in one of the few clean areas in the room. “I’ll start on the closet,” Ryan said. He reached down for a load of the blood-soaked clothing and transferred it to one of the boxes. “Jesus, there’s a lot of shit in here.”
“It all has to go?” Dave asked.
“It all has to go,” Ryan said.
Joe, the rookie, worked the far side of the bed. “What’s this here?” he said, bending down, and then straightened up with a yelp.
“It’s an eye,” he said.
A folded-over flap of blood-soaked skin had concealed a perfectly preserved eyeball, its blue iris flecked with black, and the eggshell-colored sclera still moist with lubricant tears. All four of us gathered around to examine the gory remnant.
“Holy shit,” Joe said. “What’s the last thing it saw, do you think?”
Dave and Ryan laughed, teasing him. “You yelled like a little girl when you picked it up,” Dave said.
“It just surprised me, that’s all,” Joe said.
Although they politely put up with my retching, reeling, and absurd fluttering “vapors,” the techs were merciless with each other. Any hitch, any startle, any bridling, was grounds for instant derision. The merest shiver in the face of the most horrific scene imaginable was seized upon with a happy viciousness.
To a man, all of the techs swore they had never vomited on the job. They called it “pulling a Bushie,” after the memorable incident in 1992 when the first President Bush puked all over the prime minister of Japan at a state dinner. It didn’t matter how much brain matter splattered on the wall, how gross the maggot mass was, how clogged the toilet was with feces—none of the techs had ever pulled a Bushie.
Joe placed the eyeball reverently into a biobox. On the bed, at the source of the 270-degree fan of blood spatter, lay an open high school yearbook.
“That’s him,” Dave said, gesturing to a black-and-white junior-class portrait of a thin, pimply youth with a thick sweep of hair across his forehead—some of the hair, and some of the forehead, that we were picking out of the wallboard of the room we were in.
“Hell, that photo’s not that bad,” Ryan said. “Not bad enough to kill yourself over.”
Dave laughed and moved to help him clean out the blood-painted clothes closet.
From studies by psychiatric academics, we know quite a bit about suicide. Generalities about gender, for example: that men tend to use guns and women pills, or that men complete suicide at a rate higher than women, but women attempt suicide more often than men.
As one would expect, Monday is the prime day for suicide. Less explicable is that Tuesday has the lowest rate (all the gloom got sucked up by Monday?). There is a peak in the spring (April is the cruelest month) and a lesser one in September. Late afternoon, from 4:00 to 6:00 P.M., are the witching hours, actually better and, in this context, more ironically known as Happy Hour. The fourth through the sixth of every month are the favored dates. Astrological signs do not correlate to rates of attempt or completion. Capable as always, firstborns complete more often.
Contrary to popular belief, there is no spike in the suicide rate on Christmas, although the rate of attempts rises slightly on New Year’s Day. People don’t commit suicide any more often on their birthdays.
There is also no rise in suicide rates on Super Bowl Sunday, during the final game of the World Cup or seventh game of the World Series, but the rate dropped in Scotland for four years after the Scottish team was in the Cup. Athletes involved in club sports commit suicide less often when compared to the general population.
We know that of all countries in the world Hungary has the highest suicide rate, and Hungarian immigrants have elevated rates when compared to other immigrant groups. Communist and Socialist voters in European elections have higher rates, capitalists lower. In the UK, suicides drop after a Labor victory and rise after a Conservative victory. Suicide rates in October and November 1929, around the time of the “Black Tuesday” stock market crash, were the same as those in January, February, and September of that year, belying the widely held image of defenestrating stockbrokers.
Physicians (especially female doctors and psychiatric specialists) and pharmacists have elevated rates, while dentists and nurses have average rates. Rates of farmers and foresters are higher than truckers. Rates of police are second highest of all professions, behind only psychiatrists (physician, heal thyself).
We know other odd, mostly gender-related differences. In cases of suicide by burning, men tend to pour flammable liquid on themselves and light it, while women tend to walk into already-burning flames; men more often shoot themselves in the head, women in the torso. Male jumpers leap from greater heights than female ones. Men, uncommunicative brutes that they are, don’t leave as many suicide notes as women. Males with tattoos are more likely to use guns as their method of choice, and brown-eyed males are more likely to use hanging or poison.
Some suicide studies slice the demographic pie a bit thin: Self-poisoners in Sri Lanka, for example, do not exhibit gender differences when they choose between rat poison or agrochemicals. Other studies provide eureka moments. From the 1970s on, when emission standards cut the amount of carbon monoxide in car exhaust, that method of s
uicide drastically declined.
Prisoners in World War II concentration camps had lower suicide rates than the general population, which leads some theorists to conclude that the act may be less likely if you can blame exterior factors for your misery. Suicide rates for teenagers in the West went up as their living conditions improved. A free press increases the homicide rate but not the suicide rate. Finally, psychiatrists and sociologists who study suicides (suicidologists) have an elevated rate of self-authored death.
As a species, we are not alone. Monkeys self-mutilate in zoo environments, sometimes to the point of death. Iguanas can end their own lives. Likewise certain protozoa, pink bollworm moths, and some species of wasps and butterflies.
It was difficult, within the circumstances of their jobs, for Aftermath techs to maintain the type of equilibrium set forth in the ancient Hindu text of the Bhagavad Gita: “For certain is death for the born, and certain is birth for the dead—therefore over the inevitable thou shouldst not grieve.”
“Easy for him to say” was the only way to respond after a hard day at Aftermath, Inc. Chris and Tim employed a grief counselor, Mary Ellen McSherry, to help clients deal with the bruising new reality of their lives. But McSherry often wound up counseling Chris and Tim and other Aftermath employees too. Sometimes it wasn’t just a job, it was an emotional obstacle course.
This was especially true for the thorny existential puzzle of self-authored death. Chris and Tim were consistently amazed at the persistence of the destructive impulse in suicides. Time and again, they witnessed victims who had purchased a gun at Wal-Mart, sat out the obligatory three-day waiting period, then taken the weapon home and killed themselves.
“The Wal-Mart sales slip is right there on the bed beside the body,” Chris said, shaking his head in disbelief.
Method was sometimes as strange as timing. Not once, but several times, Aftermath cleaned up after suicides that were committed by table saw, including one instance where the victim purchased the saw, lugged it home, set it up, and then lowered his neck onto the blade.
The most destructive suicide Chris and Tim witnessed was that of a young man, a federal judge’s son, who was despondent over failing his EMT test. The son went into the family’s basement den, placed a stick of dynamite between his teeth, and lit the fuse. The wick had a three- or four-second burn time, so the judge’s son had a long moment to meditate on what was about to happen.
The blast destroyed the den, rendering the wood-paneled walls into shredded, paper-thin remnants of what they had once been. A patch of the ceiling blew upward and punched a hole into the first floor, where the judge was sitting at the kitchen table having coffee. The body itself sat intact on the couch in the basement—but only from the waist down. The rest of the remains were exploded around the room, teeth embedded in the shredded paneling.
Chris and Tim learned a good lesson about the media on the day they came to clean up the basement den. Because of the prominence of the father, the son’s suicide was big local news. They had difficulty maneuvering their Aftermath van close to the house, amid the cluster of news vans, each with a satellite antenna reaching toward the sky. It was August 31, 1997. They had to get a police officer to guide the Aftermath van through to the site.
But suddenly, the tight traffic jam of media broke up. Reporters ran to their vehicles and roared away, burning rubber. It was like magic. Only a few minutes had passed since the house had been besieged, ringed by news vans. Now the street was empty. What had happened?
The news that Princess Di had perished in an automobile crash suddenly dwarfed all other events. The horrific suicide of a federal judge’s son was no longer deemed newsworthy.
“We never took media attention quite as seriously ever again,” Wilson says. “Something else can always come along and bump you off the front page.”
Ryan and Dave were careful and sedulous workers. The suicide in Irene required ripping up large sections of carpet and the removal of a six-by-eight patch of wallboard. The shotgun pellets had torn up the drywall to the degree that it proved impossible to clean. Ryan and Dave did most of the work, a machine well-oiled by years of experience.
It helped that they had been friends for so long. They had developed an almost psychic way of working with one another, in which many of their exchanges consisted of two or three clipped words, mystifying to outsiders but perfectly intelligible to the two of them.
Joe and I tried gamely to keep up. I didn’t feel I had the expertise to work on the more contaminated areas of the bedroom. Mostly I lugged the bioboxes down to the truck.
Dave recalled that his first job, after hiring on at Aftermath, was a shotgun suicide.
“A trial by fire,” he said. “The guy shot himself in the bathroom, and there were big chunks of brain in the bathtub. Once you smell brain, you never forget it.”
“You can smell it right now,” Ryan said from his position on his knees behind the blood-spattered bed. There was an acidic, chemical stench to the air, lingering underneath the more metallic smell of blood.
Ryan and Dave came out of Plano and Sandwich, two small farmland communities next door to each other west of Chicago. Dave grew up in a semirural setting, in a house built by his grandfather and set on nine acres of fields and woodland. He was all of nine years old when his father, Jack, who worked at the big Caterpillar factory in Montgomery, stuck him in the driver’s seat of a bulldozer and unleashed him to help carve out a fishing lake in front of the house.
He had two brothers, Jack Junior and Paul, and a host of cousins. It was an idyllic childhood, especially during the thick Illinois summers in the gently rolling farm country outside of Sandwich. “We were outside playing around all day and most of the night,” Dave said. “The only way you could get us inside the house was by yelling the word food.” Willie Nelson has a song, “Me and Paul,” about his longtime drummer Paul English, but Dave always liked to think it referred to him and his brother.
“I was always a motorhead,” Dave said. When he was eighteen years old he got his hands on a ’67 Corvette with a 454 “big block” engine that he rebuilt, racing with it on the deserted back roads between Sandwich and Plano. He was too restless for the classroom (“You can’t put me behind a door—I just go crazy”) but excelled in school sports, especially basketball and football, with a 4.4 forty and a forty-inch vertical jump. The local school teams were called the Plano Reapers.
At a party in high school he encountered a rock-solid middle linebacker named Ryan O’Shea—nicknamed “Rhino” as a play on “Ryan O,” but also because of his pugnacious personality (“O’Shit” was a less kind sobriquet). Ryan had not quite as stable a family environment as Dave did.
“I watched my dad get last rites five times,” Ryan said, whose remote, disengaged father suffered under assaults from diabetes, cancer, and a dangerous blood condition called a cholesterol shower. Perhaps because of his terrible health problems (exacerbated by a three-pack-a-day cigarette habit), Ray O’Shea was never there for his son. He passed on his Irish bulldoggedness to Ryan, but not much else.
“He’s always going to be my father but he’s not really my dad,” Ryan said.
Instead, Ryan helped circle the wagons around a tight family trio of his mother, Pat, and his little sister, Katy. He started working at thirteen, picking apples in an orchard, and never stopped. He tried to convince his mother to accept reality and divorce his father. The family endured foreclosure and food stamps, and Ryan had the humiliation of his schoolmates holding fund-raisers to benefit the O’Sheas.
He took out all his aggressions on the football field. The middle linebacker position is among the most brutal in sports, but Ryan excelled at it, copping All-State Illinois honors two years in a row. He and Dave buddied up at parties, off-road excursions, and motorcycle forays around Plano and Sandwich.
“It wasn’t a good weekend unless we got into at least one fist-fight,” Dave said.
“Crazy Creager and Psycho Rhino,” Ryan recalled.
“We scared the shit out of people.”
After aborted careers in collegiate sports, Dave and Ryan both wound up driving trucks for a living. They both made plans to go into law enforcement. Dave took his civil service exam and was waiting to hear from several small police departments in the western suburbs. But when his cousin Kelli told him about a company called Aftermath that her boyfriend, Chris Wilson, had started, Dave signed on. He eventually brought his best buddy Ryan in, and the two partnered up on the company’s second crew.
Soon afterward, Dave’s brother Paul came near to death in a downstate auto accident. “I went down there to visit him, because he was too banged up for them to move,” Dave said. “He was in real bad shape.”
Peel back the surface of any life and you will find plenty of misery, misery enough to provide abundant reason to do yourself in. “For the world’s more full of weeping,” says Yeats, “than you can understand.”
Somehow, humans locate powers of endurance that are beyond all expectation, beyond all logic. Despite onslaughts of tragedy in their lives that would bring lesser creatures to their knees, when I suggested that for some people suicide was a way out, both Ryan and Dave dismissed the idea out of hand.
“Maybe life just gets too much to bear for people at times,” I said.
“Fuck that,” Ryan said. “You fight.” He wasn’t laying judgments on anyone who killed himself, he said, but it would never be something he’d even consider. He mentioned his love for his sister, Katy, who he had watched out for since she was a small child. He rolled up his sleeve to show me a matching tattoo, a Celtic heart that he got after Katy got hers.
“I’ve seen too much of what you leave behind when you kill yourself,” Dave said. “Families are just distraught. You can’t know the pain you cause.”
Dave Creager took me on a driving tour of Sandwich and Plano, pointing out the stomping grounds of his high school years with Ryan. The countryside around that area, on the far eastern rim of the Great Plains, has a fecund, Land-of-Goshen feel to it. It reminded me a lot of the dairy country of central Wisconsin, where I grew up. Dave drove by both their houses, and the football fields of their glory days. A prominent feature of the tour was the package goods store where the two of them had bought their beer during high school.
