Warning: contains graphic content and discussions of suicide and murder
Most of us can only imagine the horrors of what it would be like walking into a crime scene, but for Tom DeSena and Steve Walters, it’s just a day in the life of their ‘wild’ job.
“I never really saw myself doing something like this,” admits Tom, who’s been working as a crime scene cleaner for over three years now. “I never was into gruesome things like that. I wasn't turned away from it - it just wasn't a thought.”
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Having graduated from university with a degree in criminal justice, Tom, from New York, struggled to find the right job until an ad for his current company popped up on Indeed and he just ‘ran with it’.
“I was like, You know what? This looks interesting. It's not something that I'm scared of. It said, 'a lot of travelling, you see a lot of gruesome things'. But there were a lot of incentives like paid hotels and a company vehicle.” he said.
His colleague Steve, however, was already well-versed in the world of death.
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Steve was a licensed funeral director for a decade before swapping over to crime scene cleaning to ‘help families another way’.
Having worked in the cleaning industry for 11 years, he moved to the company he currently works for alongside Tom.
While most of what we know of crime scenes comes from true crime documentaries and nail-biting thrillers, Tom shares a real-life glimpse into what it’s really like over on his TikTok account @thesoulmediators, where he boasts close to 300,000 followers who watch as he documents some of the most gruesome and shocking fatalities he cleans up across the US.
His videos show the harrowing extent of what’s left behind at a scene after police have collected evidence, with several of the gruesome clips going viral among true crime fans with a morbid fascination for a side of the world often left behind closed doors.
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When a job comes in, the pair will be sent a document containing the location, a brief description of what’s happened at the crime scene and some contact information.
“Usually, the first thing we'll do is we'll go in, we'll meet the family, we’ll say sorry for your loss, or we'll give condolences, try and make it a little more comfortable for the family or whoever it is,” Tom explains.
“We'll take pictures, we’ll update our office. They'll kind of see the damage, or they'll see what exactly we're dealing with. We take room measurements. There's a lot of paperwork that goes into it, too. So, we do that stuff. We start setting up machines.
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“Each job is different, though. Sometimes, if it's not a long [body] decomposition, maybe we'll clean a little first. If it's been a long time, we'll run some certain machines and we'll let it sit for a little bit. If there's a lot of bugs, like roaches, we'll run bug bombs.
"Not that they always work, but we'll do things like that.”
The Florida-based duo have seen it all - from unattended deaths to gruesome shootings and even murder-suicides, and while they have never turned a job away for being too grisly, they have for another reason.
Tom explained that the ‘really bad’ job came in a ‘couple of months ago’.
He told Tyla: “We were in a horrible area, and I used to work in New York, so we did jobs in the Bronx and we did jobs in these community project buildings where it's free housing for drug addicts and mental health patients. But this one job Steve and I did, it was really bad.
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“It was obviously some type of gang situation. And when we opened up the door, there were about 10 guys there, guns everywhere.
“It was a shooting upstairs in the bedroom, and they were all there.
"There were four dudes sitting at the table on the bottom, two guys standing on the staircase, one guy up top by the bathroom on his phone, two guys in the actual bedroom where the incident happened, and there were machine gun magazines full on the bed, where the blood was.
“Me and Steve, we gave each other a look. We're like, ‘oh yeah, we'll take pictures. We'll go update our office’. We went downstairs. We were like, ‘you gotta get us out. This is not a good job, this is not safe’. And the company did get us out.”
While Tom admitted the pair have ‘cleaned up every bad thing, from garbage to the amount of blood’, they don’t ‘play’ when it comes to their safety.
“We were like, ‘this isn't worth it’. And thank God the office was like, ‘yeah, it's not’, because even in the pictures, I try not to get people in the pictures because you're not really even supposed to be in the house when we're doing this, and they were all over, people were sitting on the bed.
“It was really crazy. It was a crazy time. So I'm glad we didn't do that.”
“You can tell they wanted us in and out of there so quick that you could just tell they were trying to hide something,” Steve added. “They wanted us to do our job before, I don’t know, they called anybody else to come in.”
While the incident made them fear for their safety, it's certainly not the worst cleanup they've dealt with.
In late 2022, Tom walked into the job he’ll ‘never forget’.
“The customer was a man maybe in his 50s. The incident was a suicide-homicide. So they were all military veterans, three brothers. The youngest brother, I guess he had a lot of issues. It was a while ago, but I remember - and the older brother came to the house. The younger brother lived with the mum because I guess he wasn't in good shape." he said.
"Something happened. They got in some disagreement or whatnot, and the older brother came in, and he had a key to the house, and he went in the house when the brother was by himself, and he must have been going through some episode, and he had a machine gun, and he had a whole barricade set up in the living room, he set up the couches, and he set up blankets and stuff. And it was kind of sheltering himself, like he was in a war.
“And you can imagine, as soon as the older brother opened the door, he did that [killed him], and then he went down in the basement, and he took his own life as well. And it was really wild. I mean, it was really, really wild.”
For Tom and Steve, death is just a part of their daily lives, but there are still some aspects that continue to horrify them even now - one being the smell.
It’s the kind of thing that ‘stays on our clothes’, says Tom, who admitted the duo can change their outfit two or three times during a ‘big job’.
“The smell stays and it sticks on porous surfaces. So let's say you pass away in the bedroom. Closet door’s open. All the clothes in the closet stink, all the couches if the door’s open in the living room, all fabric, window blinds and stuff. They all stink.
"They're not necessarily contaminated with blood, but there's definitely bacteria. I mean, definitely it stinks. It's gross.
"A lot of times there are flies as well if it goes longer than a couple days. So, those flies fly around the house. They fly into the buyouts. It gets nasty. The smell is horrible.”
“The only way to really describe it is it's a smell you can taste,” says Steve.
Of course, given the grim nature of any job dealing with death, it tends to be met with the same question: Why do you do it?
But for Tom and Steve, the answer is clear - who else is going to?
“Maybe people don't want to do it, but who's going to do it?
"Who's going to do it for these families and help them? Because they're not going to do it and we're not going to do it. So who's going to do it? The police don't do it.
"If we like it and we do it, well, that's all that really matters."
Behind the Crimes is a limited series on Tyla delving into the reality of those who work behind the scenes of crime
Topics: True Crime
Chloe Rowland