Funky See Funky Do posted:

Page 900
Sentence 11

Pick posted:

"Cherry-red discoloration of the skin and underlying muscle surrounding a chest wound may be due to carbon monoxide from the yellow flame of the muzzle blast, but more likely is the result of oxyhemoglobin due to the presence of arterial blood from the injury of the lung or the left side of the heart."

Pick posted:

"The cause-of-death opinion must be expressed in such a way that the public is served well and fairly."

Pick posted:

"However, it is significant that all testing done to determine the safety of these weapons has been carried out by the Taser manufacturers or on their behalf."

Patrick Spens posted:

Page 1128

Sentence 3

Colonel Cancer posted:

Page 444
Sentence 4

mind the walrus posted:

Page 83

Sentence 55

Frank Frank posted:

Page 33

Number 33

Arrhythmia posted:

PAGE 420

SENTENCE 69

RIDE OR DIE

Edgar Allan Pwned posted:

thinking hard whether i also want this book. pg 789, sentence 29

assuming the blocked pages are dead/abused kids

George H.W. oval office posted:

Page 666

Sentence 69 (35 otherwise)


The devils page the devils sex position

TheAardvark posted:

Page 1017 sentence 7

Big Beef City posted:

Page 91
Sentence 18

By popular demand posted:

Page 144 sentence 6
(Had to solve an adventure game puzzle related to the Christian revelations)

Funky See Funky Do posted:

Page 900
Sentence 11

PhysicsFrenzy posted:

This seems neat. Page 743, sentence 14

Rock Paper Tongue posted:

The effects of electricity on the body?

humpthewind posted:

"Determining cause of death"?

HOMO ERECTUS posted:

Is this a chapter about the effect getting hella shot with a gun does to the body

Simone Magus posted:

I'm going to say, something involving identifying contusion marks

Simone Magus posted:

... was I right?

Pick posted:

"We prefer to avoid the term 'brain death' because it fosters an erroneous impression here that there are two kinds of death, with brain death less certain and subordinate to cessation of cardiac action and respiration."

Pick posted:

Page 900 is mostly images, as is 899. On page 898: "The blast effect due to extreme changes in air pressure caused by the lightning discharge, occasionally throws the victim several feet, resulting in blunt injuries, and may rip his or her clothing, including shoes (See figs XVI-18 and XVI019a-b)."

Pick posted:

"The cause-of-death opinion must be expressed in such a way that the public is served well and fairly."

TeachesOfPeaches posted:

Communicating findings with the public/discussing them with members of the media?

TheAardvark posted:

i hope that ones actually from the chapter on autoerotic asphyxiation

quote:

But accidental self-inflicted deaths can spring from darker roots. In these deaths a certain type of aberrant sexual behavior reaches a different climax than that expected. I am referring to autoerotic asphyxiation.

This practice is very old, and very dangerous. In his perverse 1791 novel, Justine, the Marquis De Sade describes a French nobleman who is in the habit of hanging himself nearly to death, to enhance the intensity of orgasm during masturbation by restricting the flow of oxygen to his brain. By slow degrees, over a period of months, the nobleman increases the duration of the torture and the tightness of the noose, until at last he kills himself. Sade was a keen and clinical observer of aberrant behavior—not least his own—and people would do well to heed this cautionary tale. Sad to relate, this bizarre practice still flourishes today and is a well-recognized pattern of deviant behavior, one that often leads to disastrous results.

Whether this self-torture “works,” whether there really is an intensification of sexual sensation in an oxygen-starved brain, or whether it is merely a ritualistic reenactment of execution fantasies or other sadomasochistic acts, I leave to the pathologists and the psychiatrists. What I do know, and what all of us who see these cases know, is that such behavior, once begun, goes from peak to peak and becomes increasingly dangerous the more it is practiced. And the strangulation ritual tends to be repeated, over and over again, over considerable periods of time. We know this because the beam, or pipe, or other solid object used to attach the other end of the rope is often found worn into a groove by long repetition of this activity.

Typically, the victim will knot a rope over a wooden beam, or a pipe in the basement, or a tree limb. He will then tie the other end of the rope around his neck, usually padding the neck with a towel or other materials to avoid rope burns or chafes. The hands may also be tied, usually with some sort of fast-release slip knot. Very often the victim is cross-dressed with panty hose and other items of women’s attire. Often, too, explicit photographic pornographic material will be found on the floor near the victim.

Those who indulge in these perilous high jinks are courting death. They believe they can stop at any moment, but what they do not realize is that the inhibition of oxygen to the brain can cause the loss of consciousness at any second, without any warning. No one sends the man in the noose a telegram saying: “Your brain is about to shut down.” And so they suddenly slump, inert, and then the constriction is intensified. Suffocation, asphyxiation without regaining consciousness, occurs in a matter of seconds. The victim will be found dead, in circumstances that would be excruciatingly embarrassing to him, if he were yet alive to see himself.

In the past, before this aberrant behavior was well documented, many of these cases were treated as homicides and suicides, instead of accidents. But crime marches on: murderers have learned this obscure wrinkle in human behavior and now attempt to set up false autoerotic asphyxiation scenes to throw investigators off the scent. In such cases, the presence or absence of the repetitive groove in the overhead beam can be all-important. Investigators will take note, too, of the fact that almost all practitioners of autoerotic asphyxiation are white males. No one knows why, but this is a statistical fact.

Nor are these deaths unusual. There is probably an average of one a month in my state, Florida. Occasionally we see some truly bizarre cases. Some men, literally afraid to risk their necks, have wrapped chains around their waists to cut off their breathing. This method of constriction is also effective in depriving the brain of oxygen. The victims then haul themselves aloft with chain hoists—from which they are later found dangling and dead. One wretch apparently enjoyed having his Volkswagen Beetle pull him slowly around with a chain wrapped about his waist. Unfortunately the chain got wrapped around a wheel and the car reeled him in, thrashing like a giant marlin, until he was crushed.

Another poor soul, for whom pain and pleasure were obviously closely akin, attached an electric train transformer to his penis with alligator clips and was in the habit of administering mild shocks to his genitals. Regrettably, on one occasion—the last!—the transformer shorted out, and he received the full 110-volt household electrical charge. He was instantly and ignominiously electrocuted. This case, when presented at one of our meetings, was interesting because the parents of the deceased had removed all evidence of the transformer before the police investigators showed up. They were understandably horrified and chagrined to discover their son dead under such sordid circumstances and did their best to conceal the manner of his death. But alligator clips leave very characteristic marks and these were plainly visible at the autopsy. After a few shrewd, discreet questions on the part of investigators, the unhappy parents broke down and revealed the full, shabby truth of the matter. The death was ruled accidental.

Milton Helprin, longtime chief medical examiner in New York City, used to tell the story of a young Irishman seen standing on the far reaches of a subway platform by several witnesses. At a certain point he suddenly and silently pitched forward right in front of an oncoming train. He was found dead beneath the wheels, horribly mangled. But his family was Catholic and did not readily accept the initial conclusion of suicide. They were quite certain their son had no reason to commit suicide, and in the end they were proved right. Helprin reexamined the mangled body and noticed tiny burn marks on the right thumb, index finger and the tip of the penis. He was able to reassure the family their son had died accidentally. He had been urinating on the subway tracks, and the stream had accidentally reached the third rail. The arc of falling water, rich with salts favoring conduction, instantly became an arc of lethal electricity. The lad was probably dead before he hit the tracks.

Of all the deaths I am called upon to investigate, suicides are among the most frustrating. Bones are my province, and most methods of suicide leave no evidence upon the skeleton. When we find a skeleton in the woods, fallen apart or disarticulated, I immediately look up, scanning the tree limbs above the skeleton, searching for some long-forgotten noose. As decomposition takes place in a hanging victim, the neck begins to stretch, until it may be several feet long. Finally the drying, mummifying skin will tear, head and trunk part company, and all falls down to earth, sundered in twain. The noose, however, may survive and point its hempen finger down at the truth.

TeachesOfPeaches posted:

Yeah that’s probably the most well-written account of the topic. Those people have seen some poo poo.

quote:

One of the most revolting, yet instructive, burial cases in my experience involved a terrible old man who lived in Miami and who finally died, aged ninety-five, a few years ago. This man was in the habit of threatening his neighbors with all sorts of dark menaces, telling anyone who would listen that he had murdered his son-in-law and disposed of the body in a septic tank, and he would do the same to anyone who crossed him.

No one took the old devil seriously, and he finally died. His house was sold, and the new owner opened the septic tank in the backyard, in order to clean it. The tank was a huge affair, ten feet long, with three concrete slabs over its inlet—and inside its dark, malodorous depths was found the half-skeletonized remains of a middle-aged man, with a .22-caliber bullet hole drilled neatly through the center of his forehead, right between the eyes. The old man had not been idly boasting: he really had murdered his son-in-law.

Septic tanks are common in Florida, where many neighborhoods still lack sewer lines. Few people have the stomach to look inside them, but they are interesting places, containing several widely disparate microenvironments. You would have to go to Hawaii to find the extraordinary range of atmospheric conditions that you encounter in a common septic tank, with its extremes of aridity and moisture, which in turn create conditions equally favorable to extraordinary preservation and extraordinary decay.

Within the average septic tank there is a large mass of dry material, which floats like a matted crust over the fluid below. The active decomposition takes place within the fluid, and on the underside of the mat. But above the mat all is quite dry, and beneath the fluid, at the very bottom of the tank, there is usually a very compact mass of clay and sand, devoid of oxygen. This dark world has its own peculiar fauna: very often, millions of cockroaches will scuttle and seethe in vast colonies above the mat, sometimes crawling up the drainpipes and back into the house above them.

The murdered son-in-law had been cast into the tank still clad in his shirt and trousers. There he had floated for years, face down, his hands and feet dangling down into the liquid. As the flesh on his limbs decomposed, the various bones gently fell away from the trunk and descended to the bottom of the tank, where they were embedded in the clay and sand, and in this oxygenless environment they were preserved from further decay. The skull, too, finally fell away as the neck vertebrae came loose and drifted down into the silt at the tank bottom.

But the rest of the body, which remained trapped in and above the mat for fifteen years, was badly damaged and almost unrecognizable. The cockroaches had nibbled at the upper surfaces, and the bacteria-rich fluid had gnawed away at the lower surfaces. They presented a scene of almost total dissolution.

But the preserved bones of the hands and feet, together with the skull, had survived and from these the unfortunate young man was finally and unequivocally identified. He had been missing for a decade and a half, and his homicidal father-in-law had been a spry old eighty years of age when he killed the younger man, single-handedly lifted the concrete slab at the entrance to the septic tank, and stuffed the body in. The aged murderer was beyond earthly justice, but the case of his missing son-in-law could finally be closed.

quote:

Another poor soul, for whom pain and pleasure were obviously closely akin, attached an electric train transformer to his penis with alligator clips and was in the habit of administering mild shocks to his genitals. Regrettably, on one occasion—the last!—the transformer shorted out, and he received the full 110-volt household electrical charge. He was instantly and ignominiously electrocuted. This case, when presented at one of our meetings, was interesting because the parents of the deceased had removed all evidence of the transformer before the police investigators showed up. They were understandably horrified and chagrined to discover their son dead under such sordid circumstances and did their best to conceal the manner of his death. But alligator clips leave very characteristic marks and these were plainly visible at the autopsy. After a few shrewd, discreet questions on the part of investigators, the unhappy parents broke down and revealed the full, shabby truth of the matter. The death was ruled accidental.

TheAardvark posted:

if i die from zapping my wiener w/ a model train transformer please ensure everyone knows and put it on my tombstone,

quote:

I know of one remarkable case in which a young man killed himself utterly by accident after he dressed himself up as a vampire, to go to a Halloween party. He wore a shirt stained with fake bloodstains, and beneath the shirt he had placed the end panel of a wooden apple crate, made of soft pine. As a final touch, for gory effect, he planned to appear at the party with a “stake” driven into his own heart. The stake would be transfixed in the soft pine panel underneath his shirt. Unfortunately, things did not work out as planned. The youth opted to use a sharp-pointed knife in lieu of a stake, and to tap the knife into the pine panel with a hammer. Obviously he believed the hidden wooden crate panel would shield him from harm. It didn’t. The soft wood split easily beneath the hammer-driven knife point, and the blade plunged deep into the young man’s heart. His last words, as he staggered out of his room, were a gasp of disbelief: “I really did it!” Then he toppled forward, dead. This was no true suicide, but instead an absurd and tragic accident.

Pick posted:

"Criminal abortion, whether self-induced or performed by a non-medical person, is generally done by administering toxic abortifaciants, such as quinine, or by applying intrauterine trauma using a variety of non-sterilized objects (metal rods, clothes hangars, wooden sticks, etc.)"

Edgar Allan Pwned posted:

thinking hard whether i also want this book.

Pick posted:

Oh also my advice from someone who reads too much generally, and too much of this stuff, is try stuff like Dead Men Do Tell Tales first. This one is very interesting from a purely dry, scientific standpoint but hoh-poo poo the photos are something else. The book even says they're not in color to discourage gorehounds, because the authors will send you the color ones if you have a legitimate need. However, they definitely confirm some things you might wonder about as "tall tales", e.g. that small pet dogs absolutely do nibble on corpses if they're stuck in the house. And apparently they love the taste of face.

Also, if you have a male corpse that died in the heat and produced a lot of methane in the decomposing scrotum, you can vent it off with a special needle and ignition of the scrotal gasses ()

Pick posted:

Death's Acre is good. tbh I cannot stand anything by Mary Roach, I hate her writing style and think it's twee, self-aggrandizing, and disrespectful.

CaptainSarcastic posted:

Yeah, these weren't personal recommendations, although I think I did read at least some of the Bass book. The subject matter just brought those vague memories to mind.

Pick posted:

Wifi Toilet posted:

Flammable gas is stored in the balls

Pick posted:

"Although Dr. Whydoc did not have many details, she knew the case involved a 35-year-old woman on TPN following bowel resection."