Cleaning up after a murder

One night during TV crime drama, my wife asked, “Who cleans up all the blood when there’s a murder?” I said I didn’t know. She asked, “Do the police clean it up?” I doubt that, I said. She wondered, “So the family has to clean up all the blood? Or, maybe there are companies that do that.”

During coverage of a murder trail in Texas, I found out the answer.

A man killed his live-in girlfriend, in the kitchen of their house, with a 12-guage shotgun. He was known to have beaten her several times. She had left him, or thrown him from their house several times.

Her friends all told her, “Leave him. Make him go away. One of these days he will kill you.”

She responded with the usual “But he loves me” and “He promised to stop.” So, she always brought him back home.

In studying that kind of violence, my wife said she read that killing the abused person occurs after more than two or three forgivenesses.

That was what happened in this case.

The man had a defense, other than he was a worthless SOB.

On the night the murder happened, he said, he came home from hunting and had his shotgun in his hand when he went into the kitchen. His girlfriend, he said, started arguing about his absences. She had a butcher knife, he said, and at one point walked toward him, waving the knife. He said he had been stabbed several years before, and developed post-traumatic stress.

He shot his girlfriend in self-defense, he said. He shot her two times.

He was arrested, charged and indicted. His court-appointed attorney got a change of venue, from Clarksville, Texas, to Paris. Location of the trial did not matter. Everybody knew the man would receive a fair trial and a guilty verdict in any court in Texas. The trial took little more than an hour, the verdict substantially less time.


The mother of the dead woman’s son’s fiancé was a deputy sheriff in Red River County. She and her husband, the county constable, cleaned up the murder scene. The dead woman had no relatives, other than her son.

“We used more than two big rolls of paper towels,” the deputy later told me. “It was …” She just lapsed off and stopped talking.