It’s five o’clock in the morning. A thick haze hovers over the city of Richmond, a region notorious for its high murder rates. On a cool spring morning, a white truck pulls up next to three police cars and a former U.S. soldier, Matthew Bradley, gets out of the vehicle. He is given the rundown on the situation.

A man was shot on the left side of his head and fragments of his brain leaked out nearly four hours earlier. Since then the body has been taken to the hospital. Presumably, this twenty-six-year-old is dead. Brains and blood are spattered on the pavement. The remains, once cleaned, fill an entire liter bottle.

Bradley’s task is to clean the murderous mess and make sure no visible signs of death remain on the block. This is just another day on the job for Bradley, who has been cleaning wastes for nearly four months. He puts on his white Hazmat suit and mask and begins to clean the bodily remains by spraying solution on the stain-ridden pavement. The job takes nearly forty-five minutes to complete.

Bradley is accustomed to seeing capacious maggots feeding off decaying flesh, bits of brain splattered everywhere, and pools of dripping blood, because he works for Neal Smither—the man who has built an
enterprise by cleaning the remains of deceased humans and other hazardous wastes with his Oakland-based company, Crime Scene Cleaners Inc. Smither and Bradley work around the clock and are on-call twenty-four hours a day, because they specialize in homicide, suicide, and accidental deaths. There’s never a dull moment in this line of work.

“There is always action and something to do. People are always dying and crimes [are] always being committed,” says an eager, twenty-four-year-old Bradley. “There is always a need for our services.”
This job may be gruesome, but Smither makes a living doing things that most people do not want to even know about. Families are rarely inclined to stick around and clean up their late loved ones’ remains. It is simply not the last memory they want. So, when police contact Smither to do a clean up, his Crime Scene crew promises to arrive at the scene within an hour. They charge their clientele anywhere from two-hundred to eight-hundred dollars for the services, and they do it efficiently, which Smither says makes them the “best in the business.”

Being at the top of the crime scene cleaning industry didn’t happen over night. It took years before Smither could actually make money and take pride in his job.

Smither hails from Capitola, a city in Santa Cruz County, where he worked at a local appliance store. He always had an interest working with the departed. He had ambitions of becoming a mortician, yet he had a career change-of-heart when he saw the character Wolf help Samuel L. Jackson and John Travolta clean a brain-splattered car in the movie Pulp Fiction. “If I could stuff bodies, I can clean them up,” says Smither. After doing six months of research, he set forth in the summer of 1998 cleaning the messes involved in fatalities. In his first year, Smither had only one cleaning job. It wasn’t until nearly two years later that business started picking up. Now, not only is Crime Scene one of the premiere death cleaning services in the Bay Area, it is one of the best in the nation, since Smither is willing to send his employees to clean-ups anywhere in the country.

Smither waits for death to happen. There are days when the company gets constant phone calls for a cleanup, and there are instances when the phone is dead.

On a cold March morning in an old warehouse, Smither sits in his second story office dressed in khaki shorts, a grey button-up shirt, and red-and-black Nikes to match his Crime Scene Cleaners hat. He’s looking at the blank calendar on the screen of his laptop—no potential appointments. To pass time, Smither plays games and watches movies. Across his desk is a 1980s-style arcade machine, and behind him is an electronic drum-set to amuse him when his mobile phone isn’t ringing. Smither hopes that his cell will ring at any moment with the news that his entourage needs to go out and clean up tragedy. It doesn’t faze Smither that he makes money off someone’s misfortune.

“It doesn’t bother me a bit,” says a stoic Smither. “Crime Scene is like any other cleaning service. If you want your carpet cleaned, you call Coit. If you want fucking blood cleaned off your walls, you call Crime Scene Cleaners.”

Paramedics or police officers are rarely responsible for cleaning up messes left over from death. Normally, this grim task is the responsibility of the victim’s family or the landlords whose property has
regrettably been blessed with dilapidated flesh. It is against California law for people to dispose of hazardous wastes on their own, and, since blood can contain deadly viruses, it has to be handled by professionals.

It doesn’t necessarily take a special person to work for the Crime Scene Cleaners, but hopefuls wanting to work for Smither have to be able to deal with grotesque wastes, have a clean driving record, and do the job well.

“Some people can hack it and some people can’t,” says Bradley. “People who work for Crime Scene can definitely hack it.”

Death is a personal experience involving tears, confusion, and anxiety—yet the trio of cleaners has been desensitized because they see calamity almost everyday. For them, this is just a job.

“I don’t look forward to cleaning up somebody’s remains, but somebody’s gotta do it,” says Todd Stanley, a cleaner at Crime Scene for the past month.

“You do so many [jobs] working in this business that you just become immune to it,” explains Smither.

Stanley and Bradley admit that this job is a steppingstone in to a career in law enforcement. The work gives Stanley a different perspective on what policemen experience on a day-to-day basis. Bradley, who served two duties in Iraq, says he “might just stick with this job” because of the exhilaration this occupation offers.

The turnover rate at the company is relatively high, and many employees don’t last six months, explains Smither. But, he says, if the employees can last half a year, “they turn out to be pretty decent.” Still, Smither is always looking for new talent.

A tall man walks into the warehouse wearing an all black suit and carrying a briefcase. He is waiting for an interview for a position at the company. Unmotivated to conduct the interview, Smither makes the applicant wait. This potential employee doesn’t know that he will be grilled with questions and given an extensive background check, ensuring that Smither doesn’t hire a deviant.

“It’s going to take two to three months to see if he is a fucking wacko,” says Smither as he rocks back in forth in his chair. “There is no barometer [in judging these guys]. We all want to be perfect, but most perfect people are not going to scrub brains off a fucking wall.”

This isn’t an ideal job, but the crime scene guys are relatively normal. A ghoulish psyche is not required in
this profession.

“You don’t have to have a sick mind to enjoy this job. I do my job and I go home,” says Stanley, a twenty-nine-year-old East Bay native. “I am a regular guy [who] sits and watches American Idol.”

Smither, too, is an ordinary guy, and despite having an entrepreneurial mindset, he doesn’t hope to expand Crime Scene Cleaners. He is not trying to get rich off this business, though he has heavily profited from it. Instead Smither strives to continuously provide “killer service” to his clients. Like any other business, it is all about customer service—except that his patrons are dead.