Just Finished Reading: Time of Death – The True Story of the Search for Death’s Stopwatch by Jessica Snyder Sachs (FP: 2001) [258pp] 

It’s probably the first thing a fictional detective asks: Doc, can you tell me the time of death? At which point the medical examiner/coroner usually says something like: Sometime between midnight and 2am... That’s with only a cursory examination of the body and no time or opportunity to do any further probing back at the lab. Which is, pretty much, why this sort of thing shows up in fiction, because it’s fictional (if not actually fantasy). 

It used to be thought – back in the 18th/19th century at the dawn of scientific forensics – that such accurate timings of death where possible because of the general understanding of the decay process. But as scientists across the world looked to make Time of Death even more accurate, they instead produced the opposite effect. The more they discovered about what happens to the human body post-mortem the more they realised that the hard and fast rules of decay were nothing of the sort. The so-called ‘standardised’ process depended on sex, local environment, what the cadaver was wearing, what they had been doing just prior to death and a whole host of other things. It soon became almost impossible to show (and to PROVE in court) exactly when someone died within a 24–48-hour window. Something else needed to be added to the mix. This is that story. 

The suprising thing about the ‘knowledge’ of what happened soon after death was that it was, by and large, nothing of the sort. It was a mixture of assumption, guess work and a scattering of laboratory observations in ideal conditions. The relation of this science to what happened to a human body left in a ditch or in a shallow grave was tenuous at best. The only way to find out for sure was to study a body as it decayed outside the laboratory – literally in the field. Another aspect of the process investigators started looking at was bugs – both their impact of the decay process and what information can be derived from their activities and life cycles (and, again, PROVEN in court). 

As you can imagine, this isn’t exactly a fun experience for the casual reader. Not only does it deal with a rather gruesome subject – with case studies – it also goes into a fair amount of detail of the process of death and human decay and pulls few punches in the telling. Added to this is the rather unsavoury subject bugs/flies/various insects, how they develop and what they do to a body in the exercise of their life cycles. Although I’m not exactly easily ‘grossed out’ I did find myself either micro-skim reading or wrinkling my nose from time to time. There’s always the running gag that people working in morgues either had a (often very) weird sense of humour or are completely oblivious to what makes other people look for a receptacle to vomit into. Well, the people running the experiments in this book are those people!  

Although this is now 20 years out of date and, no doubt MUCH more has been learnt about the immediate post-mortem ‘experience’ since publication, this is still an interesting insight into the issues surrounding determining exactly when someone died which is fundamental in determining exactly who could have been the person who ‘helped’ them to shuffle off this mortal coil. Recommended if you have a reasonably strong stomach.  

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