What the Nose Knows - Avery Gilbert [59]
With the exception of the first, each of Payne’s stages has a characteristic odor profile. Stage two (bloat) begins on the second day postmortem and lasts one or two days, depending on environmental conditions. Gut bacteria produce sulfur dioxide, and the skunklike smell is often mistaken for a natural-gas leak. (This gives rise to an entire subgenre of New York deaths discovered when a landlord calls utility workers to check out a gas leak. Sometimes there is an ironic twist. In the South Bronx in 2002, an apartment building superintendent and a Con Ed worker sniffing for a gas leak found three people bound and stabbed to death. The telltale gas smell was, in fact, caused by gas. The killers had left the oven open and turned on, and votive candles burning in the living room, hoping that an explosion would obliterate evidence of their crime.)
Active decay—stage three—brings the intense stench of putrefaction. Body tissues liquefy and ferment, giving off a paradoxically sweet smell (and drawing a cheerier crowd of insects such as bees and butterflies). By day six (advanced decay) the breakdown of amino acids produces the accurately named chemicals cadaverine and putrescine, and the superoffensive smell of rot is replaced by an ammonia-like scent. (Cadaverine is sometimes found in bad breath.) Dry decay, which begins about a week postmortem, has a smell reminiscent of “wet fur and old leather.” The final stage, like the first, is nearly odorless. All that’s left are teeth, bones, and hair.
With this chronology of stench in mind, we can understand why it takes days before motel guests complain. Lynn Nakamura and her brother Dennis Wakabayashi checked into a Travelodge in Pasadena, California, in July 1996. They didn’t like the first room they were given, and when the next one proved to have an off-putting odor, they were reluctant to ask for yet another. Two days after they checked out, the motel manager found the body of a murdered young woman hidden in the wooden platform under a twin bed. How could people picky enough to ask for a new room tolerate the smell of death? Easy: they rationalized the problem away. Dennis Wakabayashi said that, to him, the room “smelled like kim chee.”
A DECOMPOSING VICTIM is a special challenge for the murderer who lives at the scene of the crime. Most perps fold after a couple of days. From the New York Daily News: “A 65-year-old woman was shot dead by her husband and left to rot in the basement of their Staten Island home for two days, police sources said yesterday. The slain woman’s 67-year-old husband called cops yesterday because the stench of her decomposing corpse became unbearable.” In Foley, Alabama, a thirty-nine-year-old mentally handicapped man died of malnutrition after being kept in a lightless room for ten years by his mother and stepfather. They left his body there for several days, until they could no longer tolerate the smell, at which point they called 911 and were charged with murder.
Some perps are made of tougher stuff. In Tucson, Arizona, a man was found living in an apartment with a the body of a woman who had been dead for almost two years. Police investigated after (yes, you guessed it) “neighbors complained of a foul odor.” The man had been paying the rent with the dead woman’s checkbook. He told a nosy maintenance man that the odor came from food that had spoiled during a power outage. This guy should be nominated for a Norman Bates Award. Another nominee might be the woman found wandering incoherently inside a Wal-Mart store in Palm Coast, Florida.