Why I didn't pursue forensics.

A lot of people I meet seem to be interested in forensics in general, and then my particular experience with it. While I never had a career in it, I helped my professor do volunteer work during my last few quarters of school. Here, I will give a very specific account of why I didn’t pursue a career in forensics after I graduated with a degree specializing in the field, over ten years ago. My professor, Dr. Bruce Wheatley, noticed I had a knack for identification of random bones and bits of bone, so he asked me to help him identify the bodies that the state would send him. We were in Birmingham, Alabama, and he would volunteer his skills to help find missing persons via the remains that the Alabama state police would send him. My brain has a tendency to work fairly well in a spatial sense, which was a skill that lent itself to bone identification.

Working with femurs, ribs, skulls etc., is relatively inoffensive to the senses when you are looking at bones that have been sitting on a forest floor for a few years. They resemble pieces of wood. In terms of psychological toll, it's very easy to objectify the situation and just do your analysis. I was all set to make this my career, until the last body I helped identify showed up. My professor asked for my help, and invited me to meet him in the lab after my classes were over. When I arrived, I opened the front door and immediately smelled the sweet sickly odor of decaying garbage mixed with some kind of boiling meat. I step inside and my professor says "this one is kind of nasty". I look up, and Dr. Wheatley has his wife's crockpot on top of a file cabinet with a femur sticking out of it. Tendons and muscles were hanging off its end. Apparently, the police didn't disarticulate the muscle from the bone like they were supposed to, and Dr. Wheatley was trying to do this himself. He was right, it WAS messy. Next, he gave me some details about the case: the body was a female wh had been found in a garbage dump in my hometown county. It appeared she had been there for about a year, and all that was left of her, besides bone, was what had been covered by her jeans. The rest of her had decayed due to the elements and scavengers in the area. He asked me where I wanted to start, so I asked for the skull. I get to work, taking measurements, writing them down, looking for peculiar traits in the bone, but the skull is covered in blood and slimy. It starts to get into my head that this girl was murdered. Who knows why she was murdered? Was it a jealous lover/ex-lover? Was she involved in shady business? Was she the victim of a serial killer? This train of thought begins to upset me. I was thinking about her family, and how they most likely missed her and probably had some tiny sliver of hope left that she might be alive. The blood really brought home the humanity of the situation. Like I said earlier, old bone seems like wood. I was losing my objectification of the process, fast, and beginning to get emotional, so I tried to stuff it inside for now and keep working. I finished the measurements, wrote them down, and I decided to lift up the skull to look at it face to face to maybe find some surface clues. Everything that was left of her brain dripped out of her foramen magnum, and all over my pants. I set the skull down, took off my gloves, gave my measurements to the professor and said, "Yeah, um, I have to go now". On top of the psychological discomfort, I had terrible Alabama style allergies that day and my nose was running like a faucet. I entered my numbers into the analysis program and I went home.

I knew that I technically could do that job everyday, but it would change who I was dramatically, and it would change how I thought about humanity, death, society, and probably not necessarily for the best. That was the last time I assisted Dr. Wheatley with identification. I think he was a little disappointed in me after that, but it was too much 'grim and bleak' for my young mind at the time. Now, I make stupid cute animals fuzzy.