I've probably cleaned up
close to three or 400 different scenes
where people have disembowelled themselves,
put a knife in their stomach
and cut themselves open while they're alive.
Even one gentlemen decided to take some scissors
and cut his intestines while he'd done it
and throw them in the bath.
[Interviewer] So Ben, how did you enter
the cleaning business?
So, I started window cleaning
just as a lifestyle choice, really.
I could earn a few hundred pounds a day
and then work a couple of days a week
and then just do what I wanted to do the other days.
And one of the ladies who I cleaned the windows for,
and she asked me whether we would clean
one of her properties
where someone had been in for 10 years
and no one had been able to go and see this person.
It was a warden-assisted flat
but it was so bad, the state of it, that no one would go in.
[Interviewer] In what way was it bad?
So, when we opened the door
the floor was kind of moving with fleas,
that was the first thing,
which we'd not really encountered, so...
we had to deal with that,
get some specialist chemicals to deal with it.
And then I went into the bathroom.
One of the lads who worked with me went into the kitchen.
The bath that I was dealing with
was completely full of faeces, right to the top.
And the toilet was as well.
And he was in the kitchen,
which was also in a terrible state.
The third lad that was with us,
threw up in his face mask and nearly choked.
So we had to rip his mask off
and he went and sat in the van,
and then we carried on cleaning it.
And yeah, so we kind of got it, all of that muck,
body fluid, 10 years of grot and grime,
cleaned it all up and deodorised it.
There are some people who won't do it for anything,
all the money in the world, you know?
There's people who are scared of blood
and scared of needles and all that goes with it.
But most people have got a threshold
that as long as you give them enough money for it,
they'll do it.
[Interviewer] How much did they pay?
Yeah, so she came in
after we'd finished and she was, like, overjoyed.
So we said it's £2,000, okay?
And she was like, yeah, fine.
Wrote us a cheque there and then for it,
and I was kind of 20 years old
and just thought, 'I've earned two grand,
less £300 to pay one of the lads,
so £1,700 for a day's work.
I'm not gonna look back.'
But to be honest with you, I just saw pound signs
instead of seeing anything else.
I just saw...
So actually, if we can solve this problem
what can we charge?
And that's how it started.
We realised if we were gonna go to local authorities,
police, undertakers
and offer them our services,
that we'd have to have something to, kind of, shore us up
or to be recognised that we knew what we were doing.
I went to a college in Birmingham
to learn how to clean crime scenes,
which was hilarious because it was just
a lady in a mini skirt and high heels
that poured some tomato sauce on a desk.
We learned how to do that,
how to clean that up
and walked away with a certificate
saying that we were crime scene cleaners.
The first job that came in
was about 10 miles from where I live
and it was a solicitor that asked for our help.
There was a property where a gentleman had passed away
and he'd been there for eight weeks,
and his dog had eaten his face and his leg.
And we were faced with loads of weird things.
So I opened the door initially
and a swarm of blue bottles flew past me
and I had no idea whether
they would carry any pathogen.
Didn't know whether I should have killed them
before I let them out.
The smell was horrendous
and the masks we had at the time weren't very good,
but you could smell this horrible, decomposed odour.
And it was nothing like dead animals,
it was nothing like I'd been used to in the past.
The gentleman had, I think, had fallen off
of a sofa and died on the sofa
or died on the floor,
and we could see this big black outline.
So it's all black body fat.
So the body kind of initially blows and then bursts
and then all that fluid comes out.
So, the heavier the person,
the more body fat that comes out of the person.
His body fat had decomposed through the carpet,
into the wooden floor and then into the concrete.
So it took me about three hours
to get his body fat out of the concrete.
And then we realised that there was a shop underneath.
So we went round the other way
and came in through the roadway and it was a clothes shop.
And we said to the lady who was running it,
did she know that...
Had she had any experience with bad smells?
And she said,
"I think there's a dead rat above the ceiling
because maggots keep falling into the changing rooms."
We were like, "Really sorry, it's not a dead rat.
Someone's actually passed away up there."
And then she kind of screamed
and she didn't realise what was going on.
So that was a kind of a strange one
but it was great for us
because we got two places to clean up.
We got the shop and the flat.
So yeah, it was all a bit of a learning curve
but nothing like that desk with tomato sauce on it at all.
[Interviewer] What does a decomposing body smell like?
The smell is a very strong ammonia smell.
If you think of leaving a chicken breast in the fridge
that doesn't work for a few weeks,
it's kind of that but, kind of times 10.
When I was in South America a few years ago,
somebody kindly gave me-
we were in a Thai restaurant-
gave me some rotting Thai fish sauce.
And it's the first time I've ever, kind of, linked the smell
with anything horrendous when I've eaten something.
And that reminded me very much of it, so that...
A decomposed fish, bizarrely,
was very similar to a decomposed body.
But again, not the same.
[Interviewer] What's the most disgusting thing
you've ever seen?
Probably the worst thing I've done was,
I had a phone call from our local police authority
to go to a property where a gentleman had died
and he was a hoarder.
So they opened the front door and it was just like a tunnel.
There was a suitcase and another suitcase
and everything else just boxes.
So, I kind of crawled in and went up
and got to a door and I couldn't get through the door.
So I came back and said...
and I was kind of naive to what was going on a little.
And then they ended up breaking the window.
So by this point, there was about 80 people watching
from this council estate.
And as soon as they broke the window,
the smell, everybody just kind of ran into their houses.
So, the fire brigade took the window out.
And then all of the items that he'd hoarded
had fallen on top of him.
So we had to uncover them
for the scenes of crimes officer
to come and take a photo of the body.
So that was...
Not very often do we go there and the body is still there,
but with this situation it was,
so we uncovered everything
and sadly, I moved a bag and the gentleman's foot came off
and I had to put that back for them to take a photograph.
And then when we got down to the body,
then the scenes of crimes officer could come in
and take a photograph.
Bizarrely, they had to have two doctors come in
to pronounce that the person was actually dead.
Even though they'd been there for eight, 10 weeks.
And they'd decomposed,
they were on about four or five mattresses, the body was,
and it had gone through about three of them.
So that was pretty horrendous
from a visual, smell, whole kind of situation.
In fact, I had two friends that were helping me.
We were supposed to be going fishing that day.
And I had to put the fishing trip off
because this job came in.
And so both of my friends came with me
so that we could get it done quickly,
so we could go fishing.
And they'd never seen anything like it before.
One of the lads, his wife is a vegetarian,
and it was the first time that she'd cooked him meat.
And she did him a leg of lamb
and he got home to this leg of lamb,
but he said, "I just can't eat it."
And it was just ...
I felt so sorry
for what I'd, kind of, impacted him with.
[Interviewer] What's a normal day in the life
of a crime scene cleaner?
From day-to-day, you never know what's gonna happen
when the phone rings.
It could be something simple,
where somebody has taken an overdose
and there's very little to clean.
It could be where somebody has committed suicide.
and we've had some horrific situations.
I've probably cleaned up close to three or 400
different scenes where people have disembowelled themselves,
put a knife in their stomach
and cut themselves open while they're alive.
Even one gentlemen decided to take some scissors
and cut his intestines while he'd done it
and throw them in the bath.
We've had situations where
people have killed themselves with a shotgun
in the conservatory.
So their whole head has gone through a polycarbonate roof,
all over the ceiling and all over the room.
Some were outside in piggeries and dairies
and most farmers have got a shotgun,
so it happens quite a lot on farms.
We've had lots of other situations as well
where there have been crimes committed,
where people have killed their partners
or people have just murdered people.
To have to go to a family home
and clean up after that is really sensitive and difficult.
I've just wanted to make the place better for people.
And when you know the story, it gets quite sad sometimes.
We very often come across suicide notes that are left
and you can then grasp what's happened.
Some are kind of, you know,
a father has lost custody of his son
and he's committed suicide,
then that has an impact because I've got children
and I don't know how I would feel if that happened to me.
One of the first ones that kind of got me,
I don't know if it's emotionally or mentally, really,
but we went to Bournemouth
and a chap had bludgeoned-
two professional people.
The gentleman had bludgeoned his wife to death
and it was so violent,
there was literally blood everywhere.
I mean, you could open a drawer
and there was blood in with the cutlery.
And then if you looked underneath the drawer,
there was blood underneath the drawer.
It was even in the washing machine,
it had gone through the washing machine seal.
In the lights, on the lights, everywhere.
It was, kind of, this fine mist.
And so you realise how violent it had been.
But then the police officer told us
that the lady had survived for three days on the floor
and then her neighbour found her
and she died on the way to hospital.
And that was really sad that that had happened.
But also, I'm married
and I've had an argument with my wife
and you get to that point where you just walk
out and come back an hour later and say sorry.
But for someone to not do that
and flip and kill someone
or take someone's life, that kind of messed me up a bit.
[Interviewer] You see so much of darkness of humanity,
does that leave a lasting impact
of how you think about people?
I suppose I would love to say
that I'm a real positive person.
I'd loved to say the society is getting better and better.
And I know there's people out there who really think that,
but they probably have never done what we do.
I've never seen such an increase in drug abuse.
You know, since we started this 20 years ago,
we were maybe getting one needle pick
every two or three weeks.
Now we get five or six a day.
We get loads of suicides, loads of murders.
I think suicide now is the biggest killer
of men under the age of 30,
which is a horrific situation.
People go to colleges and universities
and they don't realise
why the window's only open four inches.
It's because before they did that,
we were going there cleaning up loads of suicides
where people had jumped out of buildings.
It makes me want to be a better person,
I think, with my family and with my friends
and make sure that I'm not sucked into that spiral, I think.
[Interviewer] Do you love the job?
Yeah, I do, I do.
I get incredibly bored incredibly quickly.
So, I... even if I'm working on one building
for more than a couple of days,
I can't cope with that.
I need to get out and change my surroundings.
And so this job changes every single day.
I love that about it.
I love that we help families.
I love that we help make things better.
I love that we undo problems for people.
But I really, really love
that I never know what we're going to be doing the next day
or what I'm going to be dealing with.