It's A Crime If You Can't Clean Up In This Industry 

Eric Ellis Los Angeles 

09/19/1996 

Jeff Kennett, Australia's privatisation champion, might find it useful to speak to Kathie Jo Kadziauskas if he is looking for new ways to save taxpayers' money.

Kathie Jo has taken over what is normally a grisly government task, cleaning up crime scenes with her Crime Scene Steam and Clean operation in Ventura County, just north of Los Angeles.

"It's certainly a growth industry," this 46-year-old grandmother said at her chintzy home in Santa Paula, a town that is the epitome of white picket fence America.

"A healthy crime rate is good for us," she explained, stroking her two cats - Velvet and Beauregarde - as she prepared to serve mock cream cake and Earl Grey tea.

Kathie Jo is exploiting a clear opportunity that has arisen from America's retreat from big government and towards privatisation of just about all basic public services.

Operating with the motto "We Leave the Scene Clean and Pristine", Kathie Jo and her six employees do the work no-one else wants to, cleaning up homes after murders, suicides and accidental deaths.

Clad in canary-yellow plastic fumigation gear, she and her team charge a basic $US550 ($700) for a clean-up - more for messier work such as that involving decomposition.

The average time is two to six hours - "small handgun is two, shotgun is six" - and her longest job, worth $US2,500, was the 11-hour clean-up of a corpse that had been decomposing for four weeks in an apartment.

"You need a certain amount of gallows humour with this line of work," Kathie Jo said.

"We were going to have a slogan of 'You Tag 'Em and Bag 'Em, We Steam 'Em and Clean 'Em', but we didn't think that was appropriate."

In the year since she began plying county police, sheriffs and coroners' offices with her canary-yellow business card, Kathie Jo has done about 70 jobs, yet believes she is only now beginning to get known.

She tendered for Margaux Hemingway's corpse removal last month, but a competitor, one of four she knows of in the LA area, got there first.

"It's a niche industry that has a certain function in our community," said Los Angeles County Coroner investigator Captain Dean Gilmour, one of Kathie Jo's contacts.

Although it is illegal for US Government agencies to solicit business on behalf of third parties, Kathie Jo's "schmoozing" of homicide investigators and county coroners gets her lots of referrals.

But the big money, she said, is in "body transport", which government agencies are now handing over to Californian funeral directors and mortuary companies.

"I get involved after the coroner has taken the body away ... There are guys out there making millions doing that for the Government."

It is a business that also requires a certain amount of diplomacy and compassion.

"I find people want to talk about the person who I'm cleaning up," Kathie Jo said. Usually there are two people to one job - one to do the legwork and one who also acts as the "ear", listening to the aggrieved relatives.

"But I draw the line at family albums. I don't think it's a good idea to look at pictures of Uncle Joe while I'm cleaning his brains off the ceiling. You've got to be sympathetic, but you've got to keep moving. We are immediate response and we like to do the job within 24 hours of getting the call.

"I've had people having a picnic out in the backyard while I'm cleaning up Pop in the kitchen.

"If it's a murder or a suicide, the family always wants to be around; but if it's a decomp(osition), they clear out. It's the smell."

But her operation was environmentally sensitive, she claimed.

"We try to only use non-hazardous, biodegradable materials where possible, although some stains are just too hard to shift."

The most effective product she uses is an Australian one, a powder called Ex-Stink, produced in Queensland by Natural Resources Australia.

"It's very good stuff," she said, adding that she leaves a container after the job is done for the client "as a goodwill gesture".