Cleaning the scene

From wiping up bloody fingerprints to pulling hair from nasty drains, crime scene cleaners get the job done

By KATHLEEN CULLINAN

As Atlanta burned and her family starved and suffering closed in, Scarlett O’Hara, heroine of that epic tale, raised her fist to the sky and vowed to make things better. Whatever it took. After all, as she liked to say, tomorrow is another day.

But Scarlett never pulled clumps of hair enrobed in mucus out of her shower drain to make sure she could hack it on her own.

Tracy Gunn did.

She reached in one day and scooped up the slimiest, squishiest wads of who-knows-what in there. And she didn’t vomit. That’s how Gunn knew, in her despair over marital woes, desperate for a steady income in Golden Gate Estates, that she could be a crime scene cleaner.

"To this day," Gunn says, four years later, "I still think drains are one of the nastiest things."

Gunn and her best friend of 10 years, Alice Jackson, are the women whose business cards you hope never to need. From Orlando to Key West, and all around Southwest Florida, the 38-year-old mothers pull on biohazard suits and go where people have died violent or bloody or long-unnoticed deaths.

Into a Punta Gorda motel room, where a dead child’s bloody fingerprints are smeared across the walls.

Into a condo in Collier County, or the front seat of a car in Port St. Lucie, the tangy smell of body decay settling into their pores as they scrub out sinks and yank up carpet.

The body is removed, the crime scene tape comes down, the house is returned to the owner. Jackson and Gunn wipe away the remnants of death and make it a home again.

"It’s the women," Gunn said one morning recently, describing their customers over a plate of scrambled eggs and bacon at Bob Evans. "It’s the mothers, the daughters, the sisters, the wives; it’s those women who end up going into those scenes and doing what women do ... trying to clean it up."

"First they go, ‘Huh, you’re two ladies,’" Jackson said. "You’ll hear that in the background."

"And they think, like, we’re Merry Maids," Gunn added, with a laugh. "It’s like, we ain’t Merry Maids."

"Here we are ripping out floors, you know? We’re chicks with power tools," Jackson said. On the drive home, "We’re usually making fools of ourselves. But you need to let that out. You need that outlet."

It sinks in deep, seeing what people do to each other.

Ruth Ann Burns was schizophrenic. She believed her 7-year-old daughter Hannah was being abused. So in June 2004, she went to a motel room in Punta Gorda and stabbed the girl to death with a kitchen knife.

This was early in the history of Scene Clean. Gunn and Jackson wanted the work, and the bid they gave was rock-bottom.

But they weren’t hired. Maybe it’s just as well. In a draft of a memoir Gunn recently typed up, she described that blood-soaked room.

"As soon as you stepped in, you could smell death," Gunn wrote. "Once you absorbed that ... you saw the crime, I saw the horror. The little fingerprints on the wall."

"I heard her laughter, then her screams and cries."

Going back in time: Scene Clean was a nameless, formless dream when Jackson and Gunn, while their kids were asleep or at school, would sit on the phone watching "Forensic Files" and other autopsy shows on television.

Jackson had grown up in her family’s funeral home in New Jersey. Now she and Gunn were neighbors, each cleaning houses to fill time and pick up extra cash. The idea of parlaying that work into a business was tossed about but didn’t seem urgent until the winter of 2003.

Gunn’s marriage hit a sudden and deeply painful bump. Jackson’s father died after a long illness. One day in January of 2004, the pair met at Jackson’s front gate.

"We’ve been waiting, we’ve been talking about it, we’ve been hitting it around, but I’m tired of waiting," Gunn recalled saying. "Let’s do this. Let’s take our money and go down and let’s do this. And we did."

They launched the business within days. They found the training they needed for dealing with blood-borne pathogens and the handling and packaging of medical waste.

They got the supplies, the necessary shots. Looked for gross things and challenged each other to touch them.

Jackson once reached into a dead opossum to pull out the live babies inside.

Just to make sure she could.

Their first job came in the spring of 2004. It was an esophageal rupture, evidently a massively bloody way to die. They cut up the mattress and scrubbed the kitchen floors.

The man’s children lived out of town. Gunn and Jackson got $1,200 for four hours of cleaning.

But work was scarce in that first year. Months would go by between jobs.

Gradually, they got Scene Clean on the state and local lists that go out to families in this sort of need. They tacked a decal advertising the company in the back window of their sport utility vehicle and hooked up with insurance companies as preferred vendors.

Things started picking up.

These days, a call might be for a distressed house, where dozens of cats have lived in their own urine and feces for years. It might be a suicide or a gunshot wound to the head or slit wrists.

Or a woman stabbed to death by her husband as she raced through her house for the phone.

Or someone who died quietly. So quietly that no one noticed for weeks.

The families are in shock, traumatized, sometimes mortified to let Gunn and Jackson see what’s become of the home. Occasionally, there’s no real way to salvage it.

Gunn and Jackson love to point out the poetry. They built a company to sweep away pain — theirs, and their customers’.

Gunn is chattier, the one who answers the phone when customers call. Jackson’s more reserved. But they tumble over each other in conversation. One fills in the other’s pause, or pins on a quick word where her thought trailed off.

Sometimes they just have to bust out and sing. Beyonce, Gloria Gaynor. At Bob Evans, looking back on that day at Jackson’s front gate, they launched into the opening lines of "Lean On Me." Fingers snapping to the imaginary beat.

"We don’t look at the person who’s died as the victim," Gunn said, in a quieter moment. "We look at the family as the victim."

"Because they’re left," Jackson said.

"That’s the hardest thing for us, is knowing they’re meeting Scene Clean on one of the worst days of their lives, and we have to somehow make a business transaction," Gunn said.

"And they’re trusting us, and we can’t steer them the wrong way," Jackson said. "They cannot be victimized twice."

As for the future, maybe someday their kids will take over the company. But no outsiders.

"Everything that Scene Clean represents," Gunn said, sticking out a fist out for Jackson to top with hers, "it’s you and I, girl."

"That’s right, girl," Jackson said.