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Recently, I came across this Reddit thread asking, “Forensic investigators of Reddit: What are some of the most disturbing and horrific cases you’ve worked on?” and was stunned by some of the responses. Here are the most interesting ones:
Just a heads up: some of these stories can be quite gruesome.
1. “A man had a heart attack and died on his waterbed. It broke and the sun heated the water (this is Arizona by the way) and cooked him like a f*cking stew.”
 and cooked him like a f*cking stew.”
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2. “Had someone who forced his older mother to eat rocks, and I mean a sh*tload of rocks, to the point where she died. He told the police that he was feeding her rocks to weigh her down so God couldn’t take her yet.”
3. “An adult son died in his room, and it caused his mother to snap. One of her children came over, unaware of what had happened, and noticed a smell in the house. The mother explained that he was going to wake up like Jesus did. The daughter called 911 and fled the house. She barricaded herself in the house for five more days with the body.”
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4. “I did a case once where the home had burnt down. As was always the case, the homeowner was asked to provide a list of everything in the home. So, the homeowner emails me a list, comprising all 190 pages in 12-point Arial font, single-spaced. The first 48 pages were all the books in the house. Every single book, and I mean ALL of them, over 3,200 in total, were biographies, memoirs, and other books related to serial killers. Police arrested him two months later when the house was demolished and six bodies were found in the crawl space under the house.”
5. “I do fire investigations, and one that stuck with me was a girl who started ‘speaking to god’ at the dinner table. Then, that night, she lit her room on fire with her in it. I think about that one a lot.”
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6. “I worked in CSI in Mexico. Once, we went to a safe house where the police found 14 people who were tortured and executed. You could smell the iron from the entrance. In the upstairs bathroom, they found a woman tied to the toilet, who had died of dehydration, had urinated and defecated on herself for days. One of the rooms had five shackles on the wall and in the center a metal bucket with water. The five people died of hunger and from beatings. The sickest was in the backyard, in a warehouse without windows, where there were several bodies that had their faces and hands removed. It was like watching a horror movie.”
Related: My Innocence Has Been D-E-S-T-R-O-Y-E-D After Learning These Terrible, Disturbing, And Creepy Things
7. “Used to work in the field. The wildest case was a chap who tied a steel cable to a tree, then through his car window, secured it around his neck, then floored the car. The cable ran out of slack, and, well, ‘pop!’ It always amazed me how clean it came right off. Decapitations are normally pretty messy, but this guy’s creativity led to a fairly clean, instant, and memorable death for those who worked his case.”
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8. “A fair few years ago now, I was involved in an investigation where a zookeeper who had nurtured this pack of male wolves from pups was, out of the blue, attacked and eaten by them. That was a bit gruesome, shall we say.”
9. “I was an intern, but... a guy found out his lover was cheating on him, flew into a jealous rage, and stabbed the guy to death with the handle of a frying pan. He got him the first time in the kitchen. The victim managed to get free and ran up the stairs. Got caught and stabbed again. Got free again and made it to the bathroom, where he got cornered in the tub and stabbed to a bloody pulp. Another intern and I were tasked with picking bits of organic matter from the drain with tweezers.”
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10. “We had an older couple who were found frozen to death under a foot of nearly perfectly clear ice.”
11. “I was a med student doing a trauma rotation in NYC. A guy came into the ER super torn up, escorted by more than a few police officers, and handcuffed to the gurney. Long story short, he snapped that morning, stabbed both of his parents a bunch of times, then jumped in front of a subway train and got rolled up underneath it. He survived and remained conscious and even conversational as we literally cleaned tar off his skull. Not head, skull. Like holding flaps of skin back and pulling sticky tar and dirt from the bone. He couldn’t see anything because his face was so badly injured.”
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12. “My dad used to be a HERO driver. It’s the people who help you when you have a flat tire and stuff like that. Sometimes they are at accident scenes. So, my dad was the first at the scene of a woman who was driving the wrong way on the highway and hit someone in a head-on collision. It caused her to fly out of the windshield and end up being run over and trampled by cars. Her jaw looked so broken that her lower face was flat and her eyes were wide open.”
13. “I’m a cop, and my first body on the job was interesting. A man who had very little contact with the family hadn’t checked in for over five weeks. The niece popped over, and the locks were changed so she couldn’t get in. However, there was a bad smell at the front door. We arrived, forced entry into the property, and there he was, dead for a long time, and the smell was atrocious, all through the house. He had decomposed that badly in the locked-up house. Mold was on the walls, and he had begun to liquify into the sofa he was on and into the carpet. I also remember that he had no eyes, and the mould around them turned him into nightmare fuel. The coroner has to double bag him as he was quite ‘liquidy.’”
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14. “My mother knew a coroner in the 1990s. The IRA tried bombing our local theatre, but it went off prematurely outside, killing both of the bombers. I am told it looked like someone emptied a butcher’s shop onto the street.”
15. “I work at a funeral home, and one night I was asked to help pick up the body of an overweight male. The guy had been dead for a few days, and the stench was horrific. The corpse was infested with maggots, not to mention incredibly bloated. He died on the floor of his upstairs bedroom, and we had some trouble getting him to the van. We ended up loading him into a disaster bag and sliding him down the stairs.”
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16. “Former SCADA technician here. Once, a high-voltage transformer blew, causing a blackout for the entire town. When we arrived on site, we found the man burned to a crisp. It turned out he was trying to steal copper when he touched the live wires. The wires arced with him in the middle, and he shorted out all of the electricity coming into town.”
17. “My father was a firefighter for over 30 years and had to investigate causes for some fires. He always said the worst were the two or three people a year who would smoke while using the nasal oxygen things. It was almost always compounded by their being on a mattress. He responded to one where the spouse reached in to try to pull them off the bed by the arm, but the skin just slid off. Also, apparently, the smell of burnt flesh never leaves you.”
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Responses have been edited for length/clarity.
So, crime scene investigators of the internet: What are some of the most disturbing and horrific cases you’ve worked on? Let us know in the comments. Or, if you prefer to remain anonymous, leave your submission in the form below.
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