Learn To Calculate Time Of Death

Become a pathologist and Forensic Scientist when someone has passed before your eyes and there is no time to waste for these agents to arrive. Here are the basic steps.

Take the Rectal Temperature

1. Starting from a normal temperature of 98.4 degrees F, a fresh corpse chills at the rate of about one and a half degrees an hour, until it reaches the temperature of the environment. The skin gets colder about three times faster than the body's core but, if the person is lying on an electric blanket, or has fallen through ice, things are going to vary a bit--obviously.

Wiggle the Limes Around

2. Owing to chemical changes in the muscles, a body starts to become rigid about three hours after death. This is called rigor mortis. A high ambient temperature speeds the process and a low are slows it. This stiffening begins in the eyelids, working its way down the face and body, with the stiff becoming fully stiff in about 12 hours. Between 10 and 48 hours later, things start to go floppy again.

What's Underneath?

3. As soon as a person's heart stops beating, gravitation causes the blood to drain downward and settle (hypostasis). The parts of the body where this blood is now resting go dark blue and splotchy, taking on the appearance of bruises. After 5-6 hours, the skin will be blue all over but will go white if you push it with your finger. If it stays blue, the body has probably been dead for at least 10 hours. Non-blue patches will now be present where the body is touching the ground. If it has been moved after death, revealing discrepancies will be visible.

The eyes have it first

4. Signs of death appear in the eyes in just a few minutes. The whites go a sort of grey color and the cornea acquires a "film." After two hours or more the cornea becomes cloudy, and within a couple of days is generally opaque. These signs are a useful guide to undertakers, who like to check that the person they are about to put in a coffin, is actually dead.

Examine the Stomach Contents

5. How? Use a siphon. It takes between one and a half and six hours for a meal to be processed by the stomach. A cheese sandwich is in and out quicker than am five course meal with half a bottle of wine, chocolate mouse, and an after dinner drinks.

Creepy-crawlies come out

6. Within three days your cadaver will probably be host to the excited larvae of insects, unless you're a fruitarian or vegan. Flies lay eggs in the body's openings and they hatch quickly, sometimes in less than a day. The process continues over a couple pf weeks, with maggots getting progressively bigger. They are fat-eaters and there's no shortage of food. Notice a cooked chicken covered for days and see worms come out.

After five or six days, skin begins blistering and slipping off the hands like gloves. Within three weeks or so, tissues begin to soften, things start to go bang inside, and fingernails fall off. It takes about a month for liquefaction to take hold with the eyes "melting" and the features of the face becoming unrecognizable. Autolysis (cellular self-eating) is now well under way.