Cats and Cobwebs

Local Forensic Pathologist Shares Disturbing Case Files

Dr. Roland M. Kohr, a seasoned forensic pathologist and host of the podcast Kohroner Chronicles, recently shared a shocking account from his career that illustrates the often grim and revolting reality of crime scenes. Unlike the pristine, organized settings depicted in television dramas, real crime scenes frequently offer a far more chaotic and repulsive picture.

One case stood out in particular for Dr. Kohr due to its extreme nature. The call originated from concerned neighbors requesting a wellness check after noticing the immaculate lawn of their reclusive neighbor had gone untrimmed for nearly a week—a stark departure from his usual twice-weekly mowing routine. This observation led police to a shocking discovery.

A Disturbing Scene

Officers arrived at the modest home within city limits and knocked on the front door. When no one answered, they circled the property and peered through a window, spotting the homeowner lying face down on the sun porch floor. After forcing entry into the home, they were immediately confronted by an overwhelming stench and an infestation of cockroaches, prompting an unusual sight: officers standing outside with their pant legs tucked into their socks.

“When I arrived, it was clear this wasn’t your typical crime scene,” Dr. Kohr recounted. “The officers explained the precaution of tucking their pants, which made sense as soon as I stepped inside.”

The home was in complete disarray. The living room floor was buried under knee-high piles of magazines, books, food wrappers, and miscellaneous debris. A narrow path, just wide enough for one person, snaked through the mess. The air was stifling, filled with a rancid combination of rot and neglect.

Transcript

You're listening to Corner Chronicles with Dr. Roland M core forensic pathologist. One of the things that bothers me frequently when I watch TV shows and other depictions of Uh crime scenes, is that it's almost like we're going through a architectural digest or home of beautiful type of setting. Everything's neat Furniture as well.

Maintained the houses are clean. Everything is in its place, but such could be the furthest of the truth. In a lot of the scenes we deal with Some of the most memorable because of their disgusting. Nature scenes I've ever been at Have happened, uh, literally within the city limits.

One case particularly comes to mind, just because of the Extreme amount of insect activity to put it mildly. I've been called with Shane a gentleman been found dead because neighbors had called for a wellness check. Hey, when police arrives the scene, no one answered the door. So, circling the house.

They finally looked through a back window and could see him laying dead on the floor of the sun deck. Were called including detectives evidence technician and myself. In the meantime, they gained entrance to the house by forcing a door open. But when I first got there, I was greeted by several officers, all standing in the front yard, which was a little unusual given that it was a crime scene.

Usually cops are inside Milling around taking gnosis or that but everybody was standing on the front stoop. Very unusual. Is they all had their pants legs tucked into their socks. Now, that's kind of a weird scenario to imagine and I just, I couldn't quite understand why, and when, Mention to my chief.

Deputy what's going on. He said, well, you'll see soon enough.

Then followed him into the front entrance way as we entered the front room, which was clearly a living room. I noticed that this guy was a quarter to an extreme degree. Uh, there were stacks of books papers, empty mailing containers magazines, you name it. Everything piled throughout the room to almost knee-high level with a narrow path.

Maybe 18 inches wide to kind of meandered through the room. Uh, wasn't especially well lit. Of course, there were food wrappers as well as everything else. As we wandered back through the main entry room area, we headed into the dining room area and you can see the dining room table was covered with more junk every place.

Uh, walk through the other reps briefly, there was, uh, two bedrooms at this location. First one was toward the front of the house and had what looked like a rotting mattress. I mean, it was just disgusting to look at Sheets, no blankets. I do remember there was a Cheetos container.

One of the ones looks like a Yeah, oatmeal, you know, round cylinder box sitting on there but I thought, you know, I wouldn't be caught dead sitting on that thing with two three towels laying on it, let alone ever sleeping in it but uh, we found out that was really the only sleeping surface in the entire residence.

Went to the second bedroom which was equally disgusting. Uh this one, so much stuff piles on the bed. There's no way you could have gotten any play place to sit, let alone lay down. Hanging from the bed. Post were several. Pair of fecal. Soiled Men's briefs. You know, again a great sort of image to sear into your mind.

The bathroom uh, is really hard to describe, uh, bare wooden floors of which they had eroded through. And you could actually look down through a six to eight inch hole into the basement. Toilet hadn't been flushed and Lord knows how long it looked like he was filled with uh, a uniform black to Brown pudding type of material.

Rust stains other debris in the sink. The bathtub was not quite as disgusting, but not far behind clearly had been used for a long long time. Uh, and there was a separate plastic bucket about half filled with cloudy looking water there. Uh, we can only imagine that. That was probably where he uh, urinated.

Uh, when he had to do his business, so I'm not really sure where he did the other business because the toilet certainly was non-functional. Welcome back down through the dining room. Toward the kitchen. We found again more and more food containers, piled everywhere. Stuff piled in the sink on the stove.

Top empty food wrappers. On the kitchen table. Uh, and then in the corner, not in the kitchen, but actually still in the dining room. Apparently was where he used to feed his cat. I don't know if this is a commonality that people that have disgusting houses. You know, tend to have cats.

And I don't mean to offend any cat lovers, but this really just kind of jumped out. There were several bags of 10 pound dry, cat food that had been ripped open and just left in the corners. So the cat could kind of be a cell feeder. Are also on a small.

Uh, end table type of arrangement. Cans of little Friskies type cat food type, you got to open with a can opener and that's, you know, the moist stuff and when we glanced in that direction, none of them had any food in them, but they did have movement stuck, a little closer.

When we looked in the movement was fact that each one of these cans had probably 25, 30 roaches, crying along the bottom. Getting every last food Marshall off the surface of the can Additional roaches crawling over the dry cat food bags. The wall, right above. This site had kind of a brown black speckled pattern on it which were clearly roach droppings.

So it become really obvious to me by this point. Why all the cops had their pants legs tucked into their socks? Less than anybody wanted. Was have a roach, crawl up their leg. Ah, of course, I took several pictures because you know Picture is worth a thousand words and this place, really can't be adequately appreciated.

Without seeing pictures Uh, after having seen the Stellar condition of this house, we then moved toward the back, door off, the kitchen onto the sun porch, where the gentleman was And there he was laying face down and fortunately the bugs hadn't found him yet for whatever reason. There's no signs of any type of roach activity around his body.

Him laying on the floor. Uh, don't even recall if there's any type of patio French or anything there. Well anyway, I still have my camera. So Raise the camera flip the switch on so I could get flash want to take his picture in the position. He was found And as I did.

So, my Deputy coroner who's also a police Captain. Uh, took a couple steps backwards, so he would not be included in the picture. Now, here's where it got really funny because as he backed up, without knowing it, he backed right into a string hanging from a ceiling light fixture.

And as the string touched, the top of his head, he just almost jumped out of his clothes. He was sure. Roacha dropped on him and he was hopping around and just madly flailing at the top of his head, to get whatever it was knocked off. Of course, I started laughing because I knew exactly what it was.

There was no roaches, just the strain at his head. About 5-10 seconds, I pointed the string. He let out just a Now, the other thing that was ironic about this whole disgusting scene, Is the reason that the neighbors would call for a wellness check in the first place. This guy was a lawn fanatic, probably OCD.

Ah, he cut his grass, not once, but twice every week, it was immaculate and the neighbors. This was you know, early summer had noticed that the lawn had gone. Without being cut for almost a week and they said, oh, something must be wrong with this guy, because he wouldn't let his lawn get this bad.

So, you know, for want of having neighbors attended to how he kept his law, he could have laid there for, who knows how much longer, and eventually the roaches and other insects would have found him. The other thing was there was a detached garage to this house. And the garage was Immaculate.

Um, you could have almost, you know, You know, sat down on the floor and you know, had a party. There was uh probably a 15 year old Buick parked in there. That also looked very clean, all the tools were neatly hung on a tool rack in the garage. This floor had been swept.

So I mean we had essentially an Immaculate yard in Immaculate garage and a total Fire for what's going on in his house. And how I can reconcile that I really don't know. Just again you see some of these things over the course of your career and think, oh my God, what was this person thinking?

Um, as we got some more background turnout, kids lived in this house with his mother until she passed away. And once she had passed, he continued to live there alone and not married and not exactly the place. You'd bring a date back to But uh, Yeah, which is phenomenal, of course.

Like I said, we had a cat now. We never saw the cat the whole time. We were there because the cat was kind of, uh, skittish around other people, but clearly the signs of having fed a cat for so long were, you know, Now, the other thing was interesting about this case where it was located was not too far from the campus of local University, that's in town.

And there was directly across the street from this residence. What had been probably a filling station back in the 50s. Maybe early 60s, you know, kind of mom and pop thing on a corner lot. Very small, not like a convenience store of today. Well, it seems being a filling station.

I don't know how many years earlier, and it now was like a mom and pop, you know, carry out pizza place. I could only imagine what was going to happen when the foods. Apply for these roaches ran out because they're not just going to say ah it was a nice while it lasted and let's pack up and move somewhere else they were going to smell the food odor comes from across the street from this pizza place.

Again probably just cross the street by the thousands to get to this guy's place. So wouldn't have wanted had be working there? Place like that. You want to, you know, do they just demolish it, bulldoze it and whatever or do they try to rehab it? Well, Years later, I went by the places again being lived in.

So somebody came in and uh must have had to park. A major dumpster outside to clear all this junk out, done a extensive remodeling of the place, you know, replaced the bathroom fixtures, the floor and everything else. Is once more lived in now whether it's been a long-term person owning this now or what It'd probably be really fun to take pictures back to the current residence and say, hey, this is what this place looked like in such and such a year.

Well, cases like that just you never forget.

Eventually we got the guy back to the morgue did an autopsy was natural causes heart disease so no major crime taking place but again the Very aware of this sort of thing, and They've seen bad ones before but everybody had to agree this one really stood out as being Kind of the worst anybody had ever done.

All right. Flash Forward a couple years later got called out to another scene. And this one happened to be on a Sunday afternoon and interrupted my afternoon sitting on the couch watching football games. Um, Got to the scene and, uh, not quite as bad. No pants. Legs tucked in, but In front of the house cops said that you can't get to the front door, you're gonna have to be Going around the back.

And so one of them walked me around to the back came through a back door which was off the kitchen. Well it turned out the reason we couldn't get in the front door is there was so much junk piled in front of the door on the floor, there's no way to have forced it, not to mention that it was locked.

To add everything else in this house. Before we get into the more graphic details of what was like. There was only a single light in the entire place that worked there was a lamp on a coffee table. Next, to the couch, where the body was found, But no, the light switches worked.

None of the chandelier or other lamps seem to be working. So, I don't know if just fuses has blown light, bulbs, burned out or what? Uh, this woman was dead laying on a couch. Uh, and her skin color was kind of a mahogany. Now it turned out, she was Caucasian.

So she'd been there long enough that the uh the scan had discolored through the decompositional process? Uh, and the early decompositional smells were starting to Wolf about. Huh, what differed in this house? From the other one was there was not a path through the junk in this place. Again we're knee high for the most part but you had to walk over the top of all the junk as opposed to walk through the narrow path that may have been cleared.

Just junk everywhere. She was into cats again and in addition to evidence of having a cat with cat food bags laying around She had pictures of lions and tigers, and cougars and things like that on the wall. Now, the evidence we had of her having a cat was even harder to find because without any lights other than the one lamp next to the couch, Uh, we were working with flashlights.

It was late enough in the on a Sunday afternoon and with the drapes drawn and so forth. We just we are operating purely on flashlights and trying to, you know, grow up our way around in the very dim light provided by this one light bulb. In what was probably a kitchen/ laundry room, really can't remember.

Exactly. There was literally about 15 bags of dry cat food stacked up. Almost like they'd sandbagged the wall to keep flood waters from getting in. There is a cat litter box, it looked like it had not been used for a long, long time. Uh, no, uh, wet cat food containers.

So we didn't have to deal with roaches. Um, But again. Filthy, I mean just no surface was left uncovered with something. On top of all that the amount of dust and cobwebs was unbelievable. You know, I could go down to the local party store where you'd buy Halloween decorations.

And you get the, you know, the spray cobwebs and can and gone through three or four cases and not duplicated how bad this place. Looked The the one lamp we had that was functioning looked like it was covered in fur because there was about an inch thick layer of dust and cobwebs on it.

Cobwebs were hanging from a chandelier light fixture in the ceiling. Uh, and as we looked around and about for various other markers of what might have been going on. We happen to see on the side of the room, a bird cage. Uh, looked a little closer and there was a live bird in it.

The parakeet, something like that but the bird cage was about 2 in deep in bird poop that had not been changed in a long time. And I can only imagine what the bird was thinking. When he finally saw people like thank God. I'm saved. Um, again never saw the cat the whole time we were there.

So I know there was one or more. But when I got my pictures back from The Flash and I'm going through those the next day, Now again this was in the pre-digital era as I'm leafing through my pictures. Suddenly, there's a cat staring back at me from the dark and corner of a room that we had not seen otherwise, but the, the, you know, the flash attachment had caught his eyes and he just used glaring back at me.

This house also had a hole in the ceiling. That went all the way through the roof, so I'm sure that Other birds probably come and gone from time to time, and maybe that's how the cat was surviving, without anybody there for a couple days to feed him.

Well, decomposition will vary depending upon the temperature. The fact that this place had a essentially, a open ceiling to the roof went that cool air was there and it was fall because it was football season late enough in the fall, that it was getting dark along about 5 30 or 6.

So the cooling had slid everything down, but she'd probably been there. I'm guessing a week to 10 days, maybe a little bit longer. Highly ironic as this woman had sitting on the coffee table. Next to where her body was an uncashed, check for ten thousand dollars that appeared to have been from an insurance company for several of some type.

So here, it's not like she was destitute couldn't afford to do something. Uh, just obviously chosen not to Uh, this woman did have family living in town. We contacted them. They indicated, they hadn't seen her for a while and when they did see her, it was never in her house, she would not allow them into our house.

So, she knew how bad it was, and, you know, really chose to exclude people, but in the meantime, it just let things get absolutely positively. Filthy Beyond rehab. Else I understood from police. Over the next couple months, this place did get bulldozed because it was not salvageable. You know, large hole in the roof into the ceiling attics.

You had no idea what all was living there up in the attic space. Could have been Birds raccoons bats. But just again, Far cry from what you see on the TV shows where everything looks like it's been Tastefully decorated by, uh, you know, an interior designer. Uh, so whenever I see things like that on TV again, I become just a little amused.

And I think back to, you know, classic cases like this. Now, there was, there was yet another one that kind of evokes memory because it was early in my career. It was a slightly different type of hoarding. This was an older gentleman lived alone. I think he was probably in his late '70s, and not early 80s.

And he was a hard hoarder of cardboard boxes. Uh, when he hadn't been heard from by family for a couple days, police were called, and they were able to gain entrance. And as we walked through this house, there were stacks of collapsed cardboard boxes. Six to eight feet tall.

And again, a narrow path. So you were kind of like walking through a canyon Uh, in addition to the typical Brown cardboard boxes, they were collapsed Wheaties boxes and other cereal boxes other food containers who apparently the guy was saving, cardboard, never wanted to throw away cardboard. And that may hurricane back to the old days when people actually would, you know, take this stuff down and sell it and recycle it.

But uh, really bad. Uh, when we finally made it into his bedroom where I was, he was laying naked on top of the bed surrounded by cardboard throughout the bedroom. Um no signs of Foul Play and apparently it, you know, had his heart attack while I laid there, uh, Now he could have just easily been killed and suffocated by, you know, collapsing wall of cardboard at some point, never gotten out of it.

And it was a great challenge, trying to get his body out through this very narrow passageway, on a, uh, you know, So they had to actually bring in a body bag that was flexible. And with several police officers holding the handles kind. You know, follow the Crooked path to get him back out but um A little bit different.

No signs of cats in this one. Luckily but uh and no filth but just uh Something different. So it's always amazing. Uh what you see what you don't see. And how Popular media portrays these things because people have no clue whatsoever. Uh, how a lot of people actually live.