Anderson Cooper 360 Degrees

ANDERSON COOPER 360 DEGREES
Aired December 9, 2005 - 22:00 ET

KING: Lots of cleaning companies make house calls. But you don't want these guys showing up at your door. These cleaners make a living from the dead. Their specialty, crime scenes. Gruesome but never dull. CNN's Randi Kaye has more but first, we must warn you, some of the images you are about to see are quite graphic.(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

RANDI KAYE, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): In the dead of night, Neal Smither arrives at a California hotel. Then quietly slips inside this hotel room. Unsure what he'll find inside. But he knows it won't be good. Neal is a crime scene cleaner.

NEAL SMITHER, OWNER, CRIME SCENE CLEANERS: This is pretty typical.

KAYE: Typical and gruesome. This hotel room bathroom streaked with blood. The bathtub full of bloody water. Someone died here just hours earlier. And it's Neal's job to clean it up. Quickly and quietly to preserve the hotel's reputation.(on camera): So now having surveyed the scene here ...

SMITHER: It's not bad. This is a fairly typical, you know, knife suicide. Razor blade situation. Generally there is more in the main room and around the door because they freak out and go, what have I done and try to call for help. And in this case it doesn't look like that happened.

KAYE (voice-over): Neal got the idea to start Crime Scene Cleaners from the movie "Pulp Fiction."

SMITHER: I watched "Pulp Fiction" and they killed the guy in the car and brought the Wolf in and cleaned it.

HARVEY KEITEL, ACTOR: You're Jimmy, right? This is your house?

QUENTIN TARANTINO, ACTOR AND DIRECTOR: Sure is.

KEITEL: I'm Mr. Wolf. I solve problems.

SMITHER: Did some research and here we are.

KAYE: Ten years later, Crime Scene Cleaners has offices in 18 cities and grosses more than $7 million a year. In the San Francisco area alone, Neal's company cleans up as many as 350 trauma scenes a month. Suicides, murders, natural deaths, drug overdoses, you name it. The work has hardened Neal.

SMITHER: You know? You have to be able to deal with it somehow, I guess. With me, I couldn't care less. You want to blow your brains out? It's fine with me. Just make sure you have my number.

KAYE: Neal gets to work. First suiting up and then cleaning up.

SMITHER: So I'm going to bag the stuff in the way initially. Probably going to hit the plunger on the tub.

KAYE: While he cleans, Neal recounts past jobs like a best of sports wrap.Tell us some of the worst things you have encountered.

SMITHER: Well, it -- it kind of doesn't work that way. You know? It is kind of you have a like a world series of 10 in your head. Probably for me, was a guy that broke into his wife's house while she was away on business in Japan. And proceeded to kill himself in her bed. By time I got there, the bed was the Shroud of Turin and it was walking across the floor and it was black with flies. It was like stepping on Wheaties. That was radical. That was a good one.

KAYE: Memories like that have taken their toll. Neil is getting burnt out. But not so much from the dead. As from the living.

SMITHER: What bothers me most in my dealing with day-to-day stuff, the deaths that are involved the next of kin. Without a doubt. They disgust me in most cases. We get there, we're cleaning grandma's puddle and cousins and extended family who are there fighting over the belongings.

KAYE: In the motel room, the person died alone. No family, just the remains of a tragedy. In the tub, Neal finds the razor blade the victim used to cut the wrists.

SMITHER: That's our honey.

KAYE: For the average job, Neal Charges $100 to $1,000. Making him a very well paid janitor.(on camera): Which may explain why more companies like Crime Scene Cleaners are starting up. The American Bio-Recovery Association, a non-profit organization that certifies clean scene cleaning technicians says there are about 500 crime scene cleaning companies in the United States. Almost a decade ago, there were less than 12.

(voice-over): Ron Gospodarski was a paramedic in New York City for 23 years before starting the Bio-Recovery Corporation. So bothered by what was left behind at crime scenes after bodies removed, syringes, flesh, fingerprint dust, he decided to do something about it.

RON GOSPODARSKI, OWNER, BIO-RECOVERY CORPORATION: This is the hardest part.

KAYE: We tagged along with Ron to this Queens apartment where a man had collapsed. He'd been here for days before police found him. Ron was called in to clean up after the man was taken to the hospital.

GOSPODARSKI: The smell is pretty -- pretty grotesque, honestly. Because it's a lot of - it's mixture of trash, dirty trash and padded down and mixed with human feces and urine and food stuffs and things of that nature. And you can tell just by the bugs and stuff crawling around and it's pretty nasty. They've been -- the bugs and stuff have been eating pretty well.

KAYE: Ron and his team clean for eight hours. By the time it's all over, they fill this giant dumpster with trash. For this cleanup, Ron will charge $7,000. It's good money.

GOSPODARKSI: But the worst it is, the better off we like it. The better we are because we can charge more and more people don't want to do it. So there are not a lot of people out there that do this.

KAYE: But for Ron, it's about more than just cash. For is survivors, Ron is a shoulder to cry on.

GOSPODARSKI: You're the saviors. You're the guys coming in. You're going in where nobody else wants to and it's pretty amazing.

KAYE: Back in California, Neal has the hotel bathroom sparkling in about an hour. Thanks to a special enzyme cleaner that eats away the blood.(on camera): I can check into the hotel room tomorrow, you cleaned the bathroom. I have no idea what's gone on in here.

SMITHER: That's the whole idea. The client doesn't want you to know. Yet they need it done safely. Liability dictates they must get it done safely. So it's ideal. We come. Get it done quickly, quietly. Safely.

KAYE: And nobody ever knows.

SMITHER: No one ever knows.

KAYE (voice-over): And if he does it right, what we don't know won't hurt us. Randi Kaye, CNN, San Francisco