A Crime Scene Cleaner or Forensic Cleaner comes in for the jobs that none of us really ever want to think about, and never want to need the services of in our own homes. But… maybe you’re a bit curious, like I was, about what they really do and how they do it and what it’s really like? Here’s what we found out…
Disclaimer: Don’t read this story. Honestly, just don’t, it’s not for the faint hearted. I did the interview (mainly because I’m a true crime fan?) and wrote it and I don’t think I want to read this story again ever. It’s the honest account of a (surprisingly lovely?) woman who is a forensic cleaner. She cleans crime scenes and all kinds of hideous situations. A particular disclaimer here that there is talk about dead bodies, and what’s left behind. There are also mentions of murder and suicide. Don’t read this if you’re eating lunch. Maybe just don’t read it at all. Ever. If you’re still reading this though and keen to keep going, I’ll pop back and warn you about when there’s a particularly gross story! Good luck to you.
If you’re ever invited over to Kellie Polashcek’s place for dinner, you might want to have a good think about it before saying yes.
For a start, you’re going to need to have one hell of a strong stomach.
Kellie and her husband, Andrew, run a forensic cleaning business in Sydney. It’s something they almost fell into, after starting a cleaning company and realizing that there was a demand for more challenging jobs – the kind of stuff that not many people would say yes to doing, that people are therefore willing to pay good money to find someone who’ll do it. The demand existed, and Kellie and Andrew have the right temperaments to do it. They’re empathetic and caring, but can also shut their minds off when needed, and use some black humour to get them through.
Their children now work for them, as well as their neighbours, and Kellie says it makes for some interesting times around the dinner table.
“Yeah, dinner conversation is normally about what we do,” she says. “We’re very used to it and do use some dark humour to get through it. If a stranger joined us, they’d probably think we were mad!”
Kellie and her husband clean up after things go seriously wrong. They’re called in to clean up everything from grisly murder scenes, unexplained deaths, crime scenes, meth labs, suicides, hoarding cases or anything that ‘regular’ people just can’t or won’t touch.
I listen to my fair share of true crime podcasts so when our friends at Shark got in touch about Kellie, who is one of their ambassadors, and asked if we wanted to have a chat, I immediately put my hand up.
Now, I’m not so sure that was a great idea. What Kellie does for a job is pretty disturbing. Thankfully, she has the kind of personality and mindset where she can switch off and not think about. “You have to, otherwise you’d go mad,” she says.
She never thinks about it as being a human who has died when she’s at a crime scene, she just thinks about it as a mess she’s there to clean. She never goes alone – she either goes with her husband or one of their staff members, who they offer counselling to for getting through some of the hard cases. For Kellie, the hardest part of the job is talking to the grieving families – she makes sure she’s the one to do it and that she gives them all the respect, empathy and kindness she can, to let them know she’s got it. She’ll make things right and she’ll do it with dignity.
In chatting to her, I found out lots of things I never knew (and perhaps didn’t ever need to know), so if you have the stomach for it, here are the disturbing facts I discovered:
Disturbing Fact #1: If there’s been a crime/murder/suicide at your home, it’s up to you to clean it up
The very first thing I learned that came as a surprise from talking to Kellie is that if someone has been killed at your home, yes, the police come in, the coroner takes the body away and then they do all their detective work analyzing the scene. But then… they just leave.
For some reason I assumed that they’d be the ones contacting a crime scene cleaning company to come help you out.
“No, that’s a common misconception though!” says Kellie. “It’s all up to the family to clean it up. Some people think that the people who are coming to get the body are also going to clean it up for them, and they’re quite surprised when they don’t.”
“A lot of people don’t know that there are forensic cleaners out there, so when they get into the house again, they’ll try to clean it up themselves. You can get really sick doing that type of thing. The police might say to you that you will need a forensic cleaner before you go in there, but maybe not, and they won’t give you a business name or anything – they might just tell you to Google it.
Disturbing Fact #2: ‘Cleaning up’ a site can often mean a lot of demolition work
While Kellie says her go-to’s on the job when cleaning are Shark products – particularly if there are carpets to clean up – if a dead body is involved, they have to take a different approach.
“Mostly when it’s a deceased person, anything that gets body fluids on it, has to be removed and we then put that into medical waste,” she says. “So it’s less about cleaning it up and more about removing it. So if it’s gone on the floor, the floor has to be removed. If it’s leaked into the wall, the whole wall has to be taken out. Anything it touches has to be removed because you never get that smell out.”
[DISCLAIMER: the ‘oh holy heck this is gross’ story that I warned you about is coming up. Read this next bit at your own risk, or skip ahead now!]
Kellie says one of the worst examples she has of having to remove a great deal of the actual home was a man who had died of natural causes at his home.
“We had a guy who died in the shower,” she says. “He had a heart attack and lived alone. The hot water was running on him for weeks. To the point where he melted in the shower, blocked the drain, and it went right throughout the house. It was coming out the doorway of his house before anyone noticed. We had to clean that up, cut out a lot of the flooring and parts of the walls so that could be done.”
Disturbing Fact #3: Kellie says the cases that have disturbed her the most, didn’t actually involve dead bodies
Once Kellie told me that last story, I very nearly didn’t ask her the next question I had, which was ‘have you ever had to walk away from a job because it was just too awful?’ I figured, well, if she hadn’t walked away from that last one, could it really get any worse?!
I went ahead and asked it anyway and the answer really surprised me. There are jobs that she won’t do and what disturbs her or icks her out the most, might just be different to my worst nightmares.
For Kellie, it’s “anything that involves vomit or poo” that she passes on.
“We’ve had jobs where there has been blood from one end of the house to the other,” she says. “I’d rather do those. I’d rather be cleaning brains out than vomit.”
Luckily, in those instances she can sent her husband in. Which is what she did when this next job was given to them – she set off to do a dead body, while she sent her husband to a case that was too disturbing for her.
“This is pretty gross,” she says. “We called him ‘The Poo Man’. His toilet worked, but he wasn’t using it – he would make little pyramids of poo all throughout his unit.”
Apparently this had been going on for quite some time by the time anyone discovered his dirty little secret – which he was doing in a rental apartment.
“The only way they found out what he had done was, at the time they were bringing in a law where all apartments above the second floor had to have locks on the windows, basically so kids couldn’t fall or jump out the window,” she says. “They were doing an inspection for that and the gentleman wasn’t home, so the supervisor got the key to let this guy in to check the window and he was the one who found it. He vomited there and then when he came to tell the supervisor what he had found. There were dead fruit flies all along the walls too where he was squishing them. But, if you went into his bedroom it was clean and his bed was made and his clothes were hung up neatly. It was like a fetish thing. I left that one for my husband because I don’t do poo and vomit.”
I told you not to read this story.
Disturbing Fact #4: Cases of hoarders can often be the most confronting.
Kellie says that she never thinks about too much when she’s going to a scene where someone has died. She puts that out of her head and treats it as though she’s just having to clean up a scene.
“There’s never a dead body, so that makes it easier to do,” she says. “I can think of it as just being a mess.”
The real messes she says, that she finds confronting are often cases of hoarders.
“They’re often really interesting, because these people will meet you at the door and say, ‘hi how are you, I’m sorry about the mess!’ she says. “Now, I’d normally say that to people, but not because my house is messy, it’s just not immaculate, y’know? This one woman said that to me and when I walked in the door, I couldn’t see the kitchen bench. They lived in an apartment and they’d go upstairs and bring food in, but it was too much to take it out, so they’d throw it in the kitchen. The kitchen was full of food – chicken carcasses, bottles, absolutely anything you could think of. To the point where it was almost at the ceiling. And she answered the door by just saying ‘sorry about the mess!’”
Those jobs are often particularly hard if the hoarder is at home while she’s there.
“It’s much easier to do a hoarder house if the person isn’t home,” she says. “If they’re there I charge extra because they’re going to want to go through everything and keep everything. With a lot of hoarders, you don’t end up getting to throw anything out, you’re just organizing and storing things so they have clear paths to walk through their home.”
The non-disturbing, great parts of Kellie’s job!
The good news is, Kellie finds there’s a lot of good in the work she does. She’s able to help people in what can be the darkest, most traumatizing time of their lives.
“It’s a very rewarding job that you’re able to do this for people,” she says. “Being able to put things right in their home, or just take that pressure off by sorting out a situation they should never have to see, is really rewarding.”
Kellie says another thing she loves about this job is getting a very unique glimpse into how other people live.
“That’s what I love about it because you get a glimpse into exactly how other people live,” she says. “Each person is very different about what things they keep, put aside and count as valuable.”
Sometimes, she’s been able to find other valuables to pass onto family members, that they didn’t even know existed in their loved one’s home.
“We had a situation where the man had passed and the family that asked us to clean their place out,” she says. “The family went through the place and said they’d got all the valuables out, they just wanted us to take the rest to charity or to the tip. We went through the place and found $13,000 worth of bills that had been stashed away in envelopes hidden all throughout the house that they’d missed. They were very happy when we handed them the money.”
Kellie’s Top Cleaning Items
Kellie says that when she’s at home, as you might imagine, she hates to clean. She says that means she’s not someone who does a big weekly clean – her family just cleans as they go and when it’s needed. She doesn’t want to have to spend a lot of time cleaning, so she always looks for things that do the job well and thoroughly, but quickly.
Here are her three favourite tools
- My very favourite tool is the Shark Hydrovac 3-in-1 because it vacuums, mops and it cleans itself when you’re done. It’s not mucking around. I love it for at home because it’s fast and effective.
- The Shark Mess Master – it’s a little wet and dry vacuum. It’s legendary. It vacuums the un-vacuumable and I can tell you from my line of work and experience, that’s true. It cleans itself too. And you can carry It around easily – it’s like the size of a suitcase.
- The Shark Stainstriker – it’s a little portable stain remover tool and it’s so good at home when you have a spill or something and you can get it out right away. It’s just easy.
