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A couple of months ago I spent an uncomfortable 20 minutes on the basement "service floor" of the L.A. County coroner's office. I was there for a magazine article, those with me were drunk drivers doing their penance. The first thing you sense, of course, is the smell of decomposition. It smacks you at the foot of the stairs and won't let go. Our paper masks cut the odor not one bit, so you breathe through your mouth. After that the experience is all visual. Corpses wrapped in plastic sheeting gathered with thick rope, dozens and dozens, stacked on open steel shelves. Aides harvesting eyes and organs. In the autopsy room, open chests and visible faces. In the refrigerated crypt, a wall rack that resembles the square cubbies you see in nursery schools, except these are of cold stainless and filled with tiny plastic bundles.
It all came back tonight when I browsed the Autopsy Report, purported to be the blog of an intern at an unidentified -- but busy -- medical examiner's office. He just started but claims to have worked on or observed murder-suicides by gunfire, knifings, bad car accidents, and last Thursday two unrelated suicides by hanging. It's graphic and gruesome stuff, delivered somewhat irreverently, but is it authentic? Impossible to tell. He (apparently a male, based on a reference to female colleagues) prefers to remain anonymous.