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I SECOND THAT EMOTION, PART II: I am not a ghoul!

© Elizabeth Becka Lansky

Dealing with dead bodies every day, no matter how much professional distance you install around yourself, does affect you; but not as it appears on TV, with forensic scientists tying themselves in knots over a dead victim. I’ve never lost sleep over a victim. I don’t have nightmares. I’ve never shed a tear at the morgue. But if this makes me a cold, unfeeling ghoul, then how to explain the fact that years later, I can still name most of my unsolved female homicides? That you could ask me, if there was one case you could solve, which would it be? and I would answer immediately, Renee W. That I still recall the name of a man on his way home from work for his son’s birthday party, shot for his paycheck. That of all the things I’ve found in people’s pockets, the most affecting was a small glass bluebird in the pocket of a twelve year old girl, gunned down in the street on her way to school by a maladjusted 20 year old with a crush on her. Maybe I noticed it particularly because I had one just like it. It was a celebratory gift from my mother-in-law, when I first got the job at the coroner’s office.

Are these the thoughts of an unfeeling ghoul?

We don’t think of victims as pieces of meat, although it may appear that way to outsiders. Instead, we see the similarities to ourselves, feel the weight of ‘There but for the grace of God, go I.’ People who are parents identify with other parents, particularly those who have children about the same age. Parents are also more affected when the victim is a child. Everyone notices when the victim is the same age, in the same job they once had, lives in the same area, or has something else in common. My personal sympathy is, and don’t ask me why, for people killed at work. Somehow it just seems worse to me that here is this poor schmuck whose only crime was to show up for work that day, just trying to make a living, and they wind up dead. I still remember one of my first cases, a nattily dressed shopkeeper, dead of a close gunshot to the chest. His preppy, V-neck sweater lit up like a Christmas tree when I did the Griess test, which shows particles of gunpowder. The Christmas lights indicated that he was shot at nearly point-blank range. I remember a construction worker who was working in a ditch when the backhoe slipped and fell in on top of him. One of his six layers of muddy clothing was a Cleveland Browns T-shirt, right after the team had been moved to Baltimore, and I thought, when this guy woke up this morning, probably the biggest aggravation in his life was the loss of his football team. And now he’s dead.