‘You have to be slightly tapped in the brain to do this job. You have got to be mentally strong.’
When Lauren Baker originally took a course on biohazard cleaning, she didn’t realise that it involved learning about cleaning dead bodies.
After doing her training, she eventually went on to become a professional crime scene cleaner, encountering people’s worst nightmares daily.
She appears in Channel 4′s new TV series Crime Scene Cleaners, which follows cleaning teams in areas including Kent, Newcastle, Florida and Las Vegas as they face situations such as murders and overdoses in drug dens.
Lauren, a trauma cleaning expert based in Kent, brings years of experience to some of the most harrowing and dangerous scenes imaginable.
Speaking to Metro, the mother-of-two reveals how she went ‘straight in the deep end’ with the first crime scene she cleaned, in a moment that ‘lives in her head a lot’.
‘The first job I ever did was a suicide. I went straight in at the deep end and it’s always stuck with me. The person had planned every step and left notes saying not to come in and we had to tell the family,’ she shares.
‘That lives in my head quite a lot – I’ll never forget that. There are other tough cases as well where I’ve come home and had a little cry in the shower and I’ve taken it home with me. But I am very headstrong and most of the time I’m able to sit on the sofa and switch off.’
Discussing the most shocking moments she has dealt with, Lauren adds: ‘You’ve got to be slightly tapped in the brain to do this job. You have got to be mentally strong.’
Lauren admits that at the start of her crime scene cleaning career, she ‘didn’t always have a strong stomach’ – but this is something that she’s developed over time.
‘I used to gag quite a bit but I learnt that on the job. I’ve never refused to go in somewhere. The worse the better, I think, because I get more satisfaction out of it,’ she shares.
‘In some cases, there have been times where the smell of death just hits you and I’ve had to walk out for a second. It is so distinctive, it’s like nothing else. I don’t even know how to describe it.’
When Lauren faces a particularly ‘bad’ crime scene to clean, she goes home and washes herself ‘three or four times’.
But even then, she can ‘still smell it on skin’. ‘Even though it’s psychological I sometimes have to use Dettol,’ she says.
Lauren goes on: ‘I’m not really shocked anymore – but don’t put a spider in front of me, I will have a meltdown! That’s the only time I get really shocked or like when a rat runs across your foot.’
One might assume that a job like Lauren’s could impact her relationships, and she acknowledges that her career is a topic of interest for people who talk to her.
However, she admits that her partner has to keep reminding her not to talk about dead bodies when they sit down for dinner.
An important point that Lauren raises is that people who clean crime scenes are not just cleaners – the Channel 4 series sheds light on how they’re also there for people when they’re enduring some of the darkest moments of their lives.
Across 10 episodes the series tracks elite specialists from the UK to the US and features detectives and other forensic specialists who unpack the crime and analyse the scene.
As well as cleaning up the mess, the cleaners help people get back to normal after the most traumatic events imaginable.
This article was originally published on June 30.
Crime Scene Cleaners is available to stream on Channel 4.
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