My First Dead Body
TW: This piece mentions death, suicide and graphic detail.
No, this is not the confession of a serial killer, body snatcher or a celebrity with a weird sexual appetite. If it were, this would be part of a book deal and my agent would be asking for more money.
I have dealt with a lot of death but I’m fully aware there are plenty of people, some due to their professions, that have dealt with it more often and some in more horrific circumstances so this is not a competition. We all deal with life because we live it but death deals with all of us. Although the following is graphic and in part flippant, it is true.
Maybe, like me, you’re used to dealing with dead bodies. Whether it’s one of those quietly gone to sleep in their beds, or one that’s mashed up in a heap of metal in a car accident or one you’ve woken up with after ‘one of those parties’. But perhaps the memory of your first sticks in your mind, perhaps you haven’t dealt with one yet and you’re anticipating how you may feel and react, or maybe this is a subject you’ve never contemplated.
As a police officer, I dealt with quite a few and knew I would. Some police forces arrange for their young bobbies to attend a post mortem supposedly to get them used to seeing a dead body. What a load of bollox! Most times the police’s involvement with a dead body is simply when someone, usually elderly, has died at home in their sleep. They haven’t been seen by a doctor in the previous two weeks so it’s technically regarded as a ‘Sudden Death’. Certain procedures are followed and in 99% of cases the person simply died of an illness that’s been making them ill for sometime, so there’s nothing gruesome or particularly distressing. A doctor attends to certify death, and after medical record checks it’s no longer a police matter (assuming no bullet wounds, loss of body parts or sharp implements protruding from a gaping gash!)
I say 99% are straight forward. My first dead body was a suicide on a railway line. I was only a couple of months out of training school. This was 1981. I was 18.
I was on foot patrol in Oxford at about 4am when I was picked up by my Inspector and we drove to the village of Kennington a few miles away. I was happy with this as I was bored to death wandering around the empty streets and it was cold.
‘How many dead bodies have you dealt with?’ he asked. ‘We’ve got a good one to go to - a train job.’
If the Inspector was going, this was definitely not one of the 99% straightforward ones. Even with just a couple months in the job, I was aware that the term ‘a good one’, in a variety of circumstances, was shorthand for ‘interesting’.
We weren’t the first police officers to arrive at the railway line; a couple of local bobbies from Abingdon had already recovered the deceased.
As we approached, with a torches, I could see a fully formed body a few yards from the line. I was surprised to see it was in one piece as my thoughts, as we were diving over, were that my role would be picking up body parts for miles along the track. This is one of those times when it hits you how dark a place can be when you’re trying to look at detail and railways lines don’t have street lighting. The body, an adult male, was on his front with his head face down in gravel. The first thing I noticed were his clenched fists. His arms were by his side, parallel to his body, and his hands were closed tight as if he’d been trying to grip something. He had messy, long hair that was all over the place. It hung across his head in a way I found difficult to understand. There was something odd, something out of place, something I struggled to get my head round. One of the other PCs pointed to a large, clear, heavy-duty polythene bag - the type we used in the property store for storing evidence - and said, ‘Take a look in there.’ Inside was mush mixed with very jagged bits.
I looked at the body again and realised what was odd about it. His face wasn’t in the gravel - there wasn’t a face. Half of the head was missing. He must have placed his head on the line and the train removed the top half from the upper jaw upwards. There was a lower jaw with a full set of exposed teeth and maybe a tongue. In the real world we only see a person’s teeth from the front and then just half of what they have. Here, in the world of death, the lower jaw gave more access to teeth than a dentist has with a little mirror. The precision of the cut, despite the violent and horrific means that was undertaken to achieve it, drew a straight line from the front to the back of the neck in line with the lower jaw. It reminded me of a cut of pork jowls hanging in a butcher’s window. There was hair covering the point where the spinal cord would have met the brain. But how could this be as most hair grows from the top and back of the head, which he didn’t have. Very little grows from the back of the neck and he didn’t have much of that either.
I looked in the bag again. I knew what I was looking at, I knew what the pinky white mush and sharp bits, that almost looked like enamel, were, but I couldn’t relate them to a person, a human, someone who had been alive about 30 minutes ago. I touched his hand and it still had some warmth. There were also large grey solid chunks mixed in the bag, misshapen and larger than teeth or any bone that would be found in the head.
‘What are those?’
One of the other PCs peered in, hesitated, shook his head and said, ‘I must have shovelled in bits of gravel. It is dark.’
‘But is that all of his brain and skull?’
‘Probably not. I suppose bits of it will be half way to Birmingham’. He looked at the dead body and added, ‘Oh and there’s that bit. I put it there before I got the property bag’.
Closer inspection with a torch revealed that the hair covering where the spinal cord would have joined the head was actually a loose piece of skull covered in hair which had been plonked on top of the neck.
When the mind is faced with something so extreme, something outside the norms of the everyday, it’s difficult to articulate, even inside your own thoughts, that you don’t know what it is that you’re not comprehending. This was perhaps understandable as it was my first dead body. And the term ‘this will take time to process’ wasn’t invented for at least another 10 years.
After the doctor had attended and certified death (yes, even after such obvious indications that a body was not functioning in a recoverable manner, a doctor was still required to attend the scene to confirm death) the undertakers were allowed to remove the body and sundry bits. We gave them the polythene bag of contents, said they could keep the bag, and also pointed out the loose bit on the top of the neck.
On this occasion, I wasn’t involved with the case after the undertakers left. I have no knowledge of the deceased's background, what brought him to take such action or whether he left a note. I don’t even remember wondering what he might have been thinking or what his family would go through. My thoughts were more down-to-earth if not gruesomely matter-of-fact. I thought that when he laid his head on the track he would have seen the train coming, heard it coming and felt the vibrations along the rails. Were his hands clenched as a result of the automatic nervous muscle spasm from the impact or were they already gripped as part of his gritted determination to see it through? There are levels of desperation in some people’s lives I couldn’t understand, but I don’t remember even considering them.
The only memory I have of my feelings was consciously thinking, ‘I should be feeling something about this’, but I don’t recall getting to the feeling stage. I can’t claim I was already institutionally brutalized, cynical or hardened by the job as this was within a few months of joining the police, (There would be plenty of time for that later.) I wasn’t trained for this. I don’t believe there could ever be any training for this. Should we have been shown explicit horror movies in training school to numb us? You’re trained in procedures: follow the procedures, move onto the next job. But I don’t remember being concerned about it. Perhaps my lack of emotional response was more of an indication of my already established, despite my young age, character and mental make-up. Maybe that’s worrying, or maybe that level of detachment is what enabled me to do the job for the next thirty years.
No one asked me how I felt and I never expected anyone to ask. Counselling in 1981 consisted of my Inspector saying, ‘The only way to look at this is to be thankful it’s not you or anyone you know.’
Maybe things are different these days. I hope so.
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email them at jo@samaritans.org, or visit samaritans.org to find your nearest branch.
Written by Sean Hodgson
Sean Hodgson lives in Oxfordshire, with a garden that has three plastic pink pigeons because this is Faringdon, Oxfordshire. He used to be a police officer but since getting better he generally keeps quiet about that.