22 | January 2019
This Is What It's Like
to Be a Crime Scene Cleaner
Blood, guts, and trauma are just part of the job description.
By Carson Kessler
A
parade of men in hazmat suits gather
outside a quaint suburban home tan-
gled in withered vines. The front door
opens and the smell of death bleeds
into the uncontaminated December
air. They walk through the kitchen lit-
tered with open cans of diced tomatoes
and Campbell's Chicken Noodle soup, past the six pairs
of shoes meticulously lined up against the wall, where a
bloodstained imprint of a life sits in the living room. He sat
there for almost four weeks before someone complained
about the stench. His blood had settled and seeped deep
into the recesses of his beloved leather recliner and through
the floor below.
And it's Scott Vogel's job to clean it up.
Vogel, 32, works in an industry that not many people know
exists, until they need it. The bio-recovery industry—often
referred to as crime scene cleanup, biohazard remediation,
or trauma scene restoration—specializes in the cleaning of
blood, bodily fluids, and other potentially dangerous materials.
As a Certified Bio-Recovery Master at Emergi-Clean
Inc., Vogel cleans up after suicides, homicides, and decom-
position after unattended deaths. "You name it, I've seen
it," he says, casually rattling off recent jobs as if they were
items on a grocery list. "I've seen people cut in half, mass
shootings, and even a scene where there were probably
600,000 maggots feeding off of a body." He's become so
used to the smell that he often opts for a thin surgical mask
