October 8, 2025 • 11 mins
Content Warning: This episode contains graphic descriptions of autopsy practices and morgue mishaps. If you’re sensitive to these topics, this episode may not be for you.
A $50-a-case job, a scalpel, and almost no training. In this episode of Mayhem in the Morgue, Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Kendall Crowns looks back on his early days as an autopsy technician. From botched haircuts and awkward funeral home encounters to wheeling a body across a sunny hospital parking lot, these road trip mishaps show how even mistakes can shape a medical examiner’s career.
Highlights
- (0:00) Welcome to Mayhem in the Morgue with Dr. Kendall Crowns
- (0:15) Landing a $50-a-case job as an autopsy technician in the 1980s
- (1:15) Training on the fly with little more than a scalpel and a saw
- (2:00) A less-than-friendly resident, endless “running the intestines,” and a bag of hair for the funeral home
- (4:30) Moving a body to the “mysterious white building” across the parking lot in broad daylight
- (9:15) A windowless van, a collapsing gurney, and a body on the pavement
About the Host: Dr. Kendall Crowns
Dr. Crowns is the Chief Medical Examiner for Travis County, Texas, and a nationally recognized forensic pathologist. He las led death investigations in Travis County, Fort Worth, Chicago, and Kansas. Over his career, he has performed thousands of autopsies and testified in court hundreds of times as an expert witness. A frequent contributor to Crime Stories with Nancy Grace, Dr. Crowns brings unparalleled insight into the strange, grisly, and sometimes absurd realities of forensic pathology.
About the Show
Mayhem in the Morgue takes listeners inside the bloody, bizarre, and often unbelievable world of forensic pathology. Hosted by Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Kendall Crowns, each episode delivers real-life cases from the morgue, the crime scene, and the courtroom. Expect gallows humor, hard truths, and unforgettable investigations.
Connect and Learn More
Learn more about Dr. Kendall Crowns on Linkedin, catch him regularly on Crime Stories with Nancy Grace and follow Mayhem in the Morgue where you get your podcasts.
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Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Today's episode does not discuss the death of an individual,
and if this sort of thing upsets you, maybe this
is not the episode for you. Welcome to Mayhem in
the Morea with their host, doctor Kendall Crowns today's episode
(00:21):
road Trip. Nearly forty years ago, in the late nineteen eighties,
I got a job as an autopsy technician. I was
in college at the time, and a hospital recruiter came
through my school looking for students that were interested in
doing autopsies, which I was one of. I applied and
I got the job. It was at a local hospital
and I worked on the weekends and afternoons. I got
(00:43):
paid fifty dollars an autopsy, and no matter how long
it took the doctors to get them done, I always
got paid the same. So efficiency was a key to
being paid better. I worked with experienced pathologists and residents,
and they ranged in quality from being very nice and
pleasant and teaching to really pleasant kind of jerks. I
learned from this job it was better to be in
(01:04):
charge than to be as subordinate and always talk down to.
I also learned from this experience to always treat people
you work with with respect, no matter who they are
because you never know one day who those people might become.
Like me. Once I was an autopsy technician and now
I'm a chief medical examiner. So when I started my
job at the hospital, I did not receive much training.
(01:25):
My supervisor basically handed me a scalpel and a striker
saw and said, you make a wide shaped decision, you
pull the skin back, and you take out the organ.
It wasn't the best training. His one piece of advice
was don't cut the head down the center. Cut around
the head because the guy we just fired cut the
head into two halves instead of following proper procedure for
(01:46):
removal of the brain. And that was the extent of
my training. I actually learned a lot by doing, and
I had learned from the doctors and the residents that
were patient, and they taught me really well how to
do autopsies. Over those first few months. There was one resident.
He was very cruel and unpleasant. He used to be
a surgeon. Now granted used to be a surgeon and
(02:07):
now he was a pathology resident, so who knows what
happened there. He was very demanding. He actually at autopsies
would not be there for most of this session. He
would always have me take the organs out, pat them
dry of blood, place them on clean paper towels on
a clean gurney, and then call him down. He'd have
me do the autopsy diagrams. He wouldn't do much at
(02:29):
all except yell at me. One of his main things
he always had me do was run the intestines, which
means placing a scissor at the intestinal opening and then
splitting it open. You clean all the fecal material out
of it so you could look at the mucosal surface
of the intestines for any lesions or anything like that.
But he hated that job and said it stanked, and
(02:49):
he always made me do it. I didn't much care
for him at all, and when there were opportunities for
him to get in trouble, if I didn't do something,
I usually just let it happen. One of these times
was when he was told to take the brain out.
The senior pathologist told him, today, you're going to take
the brain out, and Kendall's going to just stand and watch.
(03:11):
So he walked over to get ready to take the
brain out, and the first thing he started doing was
shaving the head. At autopsies, we don't shave the head
unless we absolutely have to, like inn a homicide. But
if you're in a hospital, there's no need to ever
shave the hair off the head. What you're supposed to
do is make an ear to ear incision along the
top of the head through the hairline, and then peel
(03:32):
the scalpskin forward and backward, kind of like peeling an orange,
exposing the skull. But instead he decided to shave the head.
And when I said to him, hey, don't shave the head,
he said, oh, shut up, you don't know what you're doing, tech,
and he proceeded with what he thought was right. The
attending physician came back in the room and saw the
head shave and started screaming, what is going on? Why
(03:54):
did you do this? And the residents said, well, this
is what we did in surgery, and Cheeks said, you're
not in so anymore. This is pathology. You don't ever
do this, Kendall, Why didn't you stop him? And I said, well,
he's the doctor. He told me he knew what he
was doing, and she became frustrated and told him to
get the brain out and listen to the technician in
the future, which he begrutulingly listened to me until he
(04:15):
got the brain out. In that particular case, I gathered
up all the hair into a bag, and then when
the funeral home came, I handed them the hair. They
said to me, well, what the heck happened? And I said, well,
there was an accident with the hair, and they were like, okay,
well we'll take care of it. And the funeral home
took care of it like they always do. So I
had a lot of trouble with this resident, and on
a particular day in July, I got a call that
(04:37):
there was an autopsy to be done, and when I arrived,
that resident was sitting there in the morgue waiting for me,
and he told me that this case was an infectious
disease case, so we couldn't do it in the normal
morgue and we had to take it to the infectious
disease morgue. I said to him, well, I did not
know where that was, and he said to me, it's
that white building across the street from the hospital. And
(05:00):
that building I knew very well because one of my
other jobs as an autopsy technician was to dump hazardous
waste for the laboratories of the hospital. Every Friday, I
would get several gasoline cans full of hazardous chemical waste
and walk it across the parking lot to this white
building that had multiple rusted oil drums sitting outside of it.
(05:21):
I would pour the hazardous waste into the oil drums
and then take the empty containers back to the laboratories.
When these oil drums would get full, I would tell
my supervisor and they would mysteriously disappear and be replaced
by new oil drums. I got paid five dollars a
week for doing that, and this process went on and
on all the time. So I knew that area. That
(05:43):
building was a small, white, rectangular building that had a
single metal door, no windows, and a giant ventilation system
on the top of it. So I said to the resident,
I know that building quite well because it's my toxic
waste dumping zone. And he said, okay, we'll get body
over there and call me when you have everything ready.
And I said to him, well, how do I get
(06:05):
the body over there? And he told me, I don't know,
figured out tech and he left. I sat in the
mord for a while, thinking how am I going to
get this body over there? And After a little while,
I knew time was running out because if I didn't
get it over there soon the resident was going to
become extremely angry. So I thought, well, the gurneys have
wheels on them, I could just wheel it over there.
(06:27):
And that's what I did. I got the body out
of the cooler and wheeled it into the hallway and
began walking down the hallway at the basement of this hospital.
I got to the elevator, stepped in with the body,
no one was on it, and went up to the
first floor. Once I got out of the elevator on
the first floor, there were people around, but I just
continued nonchalantly wheeling down the hallway past them, not saying anything.
(06:50):
Nobody asked me what I was doing, so I didn't
say anything to them. I walked past the floral shop
and up a ramp and I got to these sliding
glass doors. I waited for the glass doors to open,
and then I wheeled outside. It was a bright, sunny
July day. The birds were chirping. It was around nine am.
There wasn't a lot of traffic, and I started heading
(07:11):
out down the sidewalk, me and the body. We got
to the stop sign where the crosswalk was. I waited,
looked both ways across the street, and I got to
the parking lot, which was about the size of two
football fields. And I wheeled across this parking lot and
got to the infectious disease morgue and I had a
key to open the door, so I opened the door.
And when I opened the door, the phone was already ringing.
(07:34):
I went over there, picked up the phone, hoping it
wasn't the resident calling the sea where I was at
because I hadn't even started yet. But instead, this time
it was my supervisor and he was yelling at me,
and he said, Kendall, what the hell is going on?
And I was like, what do you mean? What's going on?
He said, the entire east wing of the hospital is
calling because they saw someone walking with a dead body
(07:55):
across the parking lot to this mysterious white building. Is
that you did you do that? And I said, well, uh, yes, sir,
I did. I was told to get this body over
here because it had an infectious disease. My supervisor said,
why did you walk it across the parking lot and
brought daylight? I say, I didn't know how else to
get it over there, and he told me, well, you
(08:17):
call security and security helps you get it over there.
You don't walk a body across the street in front
of the entire hospital. All these people and their families
are freaked out because they saw a body taken to
a mysterious white building, and they want an explanation. And
I said to him, well, I'm so sorry, sir, I
just didn't know. And he goes, well, don't ever do
(08:39):
it again, and he hung up. Now I don't know
what he told the hospital or what they told families,
but all I know is I never did that again,
and it was never spoken of again. I got everything ready,
started the autopsy, took the organs out, followed the procedure
that I always had to follow, got everything padded down
and dried out, put on a gurney, and all ready
(08:59):
for the doctor. He came down, looked at it, did
his diagnoses, and he left. And when he left he said, well,
make sure you clean up after yourself. I was like, yes, sir.
So I got the body already to be transported back
to the main hospital, and this time I called security.
They showed up in a large white van with no windows,
and the security guy got out in his tan shirt
(09:20):
and brown pants and opened the back door for me.
The body was on a collapsible gurney like paramedics use,
and I had seen a lot of TV shows where
they went running up to the ambulance and the gurney
would collapse and go flying in and I thought that's
how this one would work. So I lined up and
I started running towards the back of the security vehicle,
(09:41):
and when the gurney hit I didn't realize he had
to go in a specific direction, and the legs collapsed,
but they collapsed the wrong way, and they got hooked
up in the bumper of the vehicle, and the gurney
fell and then fell on its side and the body
flopped onto the ground. Thankfully I was in an area
where the hospital couldn't see me time, because that probably
would have upset quite a few patients as well. The
(10:04):
security guy said to me, what are you doing? And
I said, well, I thought the gurney would collapse. I
just didn't understand how it worked. He said, well, okay, whatever,
hurry up. I picked the body in the body bag
back up, got it back on the gurney, turned the
gurney around, and then ran it at the vehicle. This
time it collapsed appropriately and started sliding in, but it
(10:26):
got hooked up a little bit on the bumper, and
I was standing at the edge of the gurney trying
to trying to get it to get over that bumper,
and I couldn't quite do it. And the security guy
would grudgingly walked over and help me get it over
the lip of that bumper, and I got the body in.
He transported me back to the hospital, and I unloaded
the body and went took it back to the morgue.
(10:48):
And that was the end of it. And I never
did it again. I never walked a body across the
street on a bright, sunny summer day ever. Again. I
always made sure I called security and loaded the body
in a windowless fan and properly transported to the mysterious
white morgue on the east side of the hospital. And
(11:10):
that brings us to the end of the story. I
hope you learned something like it's upsetting to see a
body wheel to a mysterious white building across from a
hospital when you're a patient laying in the bag. And
I hope you were entertained until the next dome
Today's episode does not discuss the death of an individual,
and if this sort of thing upsets you, maybe this
is not the episode for you. Welcome to Mayhem in
the Morea with their host, doctor Kendall Crowns today's episode
(00:21):
road Trip. Nearly forty years ago, in the late nineteen eighties,
I got a job as an autopsy technician. I was
in college at the time, and a hospital recruiter came
through my school looking for students that were interested in
doing autopsies, which I was one of. I applied and
I got the job. It was at a local hospital
and I worked on the weekends and afternoons. I got
(00:43):
paid fifty dollars an autopsy, and no matter how long
it took the doctors to get them done, I always
got paid the same. So efficiency was a key to
being paid better. I worked with experienced pathologists and residents,
and they ranged in quality from being very nice and
pleasant and teaching to really pleasant kind of jerks. I
learned from this job it was better to be in
(01:04):
charge than to be as subordinate and always talk down to.
I also learned from this experience to always treat people
you work with with respect, no matter who they are
because you never know one day who those people might become.
Like me. Once I was an autopsy technician and now
I'm a chief medical examiner. So when I started my
job at the hospital, I did not receive much training.
(01:25):
My supervisor basically handed me a scalpel and a striker
saw and said, you make a wide shaped decision, you
pull the skin back, and you take out the organ.
It wasn't the best training. His one piece of advice
was don't cut the head down the center. Cut around
the head because the guy we just fired cut the
head into two halves instead of following proper procedure for
(01:46):
removal of the brain. And that was the extent of
my training. I actually learned a lot by doing, and
I had learned from the doctors and the residents that
were patient, and they taught me really well how to
do autopsies. Over those first few months. There was one resident.
He was very cruel and unpleasant. He used to be
a surgeon. Now granted used to be a surgeon and
(02:07):
now he was a pathology resident, so who knows what
happened there. He was very demanding. He actually at autopsies
would not be there for most of this session. He
would always have me take the organs out, pat them
dry of blood, place them on clean paper towels on
a clean gurney, and then call him down. He'd have
me do the autopsy diagrams. He wouldn't do much at
(02:29):
all except yell at me. One of his main things
he always had me do was run the intestines, which
means placing a scissor at the intestinal opening and then
splitting it open. You clean all the fecal material out
of it so you could look at the mucosal surface
of the intestines for any lesions or anything like that.
But he hated that job and said it stanked, and
(02:49):
he always made me do it. I didn't much care
for him at all, and when there were opportunities for
him to get in trouble, if I didn't do something,
I usually just let it happen. One of these times
was when he was told to take the brain out.
The senior pathologist told him, today, you're going to take
the brain out, and Kendall's going to just stand and watch.
(03:11):
So he walked over to get ready to take the
brain out, and the first thing he started doing was
shaving the head. At autopsies, we don't shave the head
unless we absolutely have to, like inn a homicide. But
if you're in a hospital, there's no need to ever
shave the hair off the head. What you're supposed to
do is make an ear to ear incision along the
top of the head through the hairline, and then peel
(03:32):
the scalpskin forward and backward, kind of like peeling an orange,
exposing the skull. But instead he decided to shave the head.
And when I said to him, hey, don't shave the head,
he said, oh, shut up, you don't know what you're doing, tech,
and he proceeded with what he thought was right. The
attending physician came back in the room and saw the
head shave and started screaming, what is going on? Why
(03:54):
did you do this? And the residents said, well, this
is what we did in surgery, and Cheeks said, you're
not in so anymore. This is pathology. You don't ever
do this, Kendall, Why didn't you stop him? And I said, well,
he's the doctor. He told me he knew what he
was doing, and she became frustrated and told him to
get the brain out and listen to the technician in
the future, which he begrutulingly listened to me until he
(04:15):
got the brain out. In that particular case, I gathered
up all the hair into a bag, and then when
the funeral home came, I handed them the hair. They
said to me, well, what the heck happened? And I said, well,
there was an accident with the hair, and they were like, okay,
well we'll take care of it. And the funeral home
took care of it like they always do. So I
had a lot of trouble with this resident, and on
a particular day in July, I got a call that
(04:37):
there was an autopsy to be done, and when I arrived,
that resident was sitting there in the morgue waiting for me,
and he told me that this case was an infectious
disease case, so we couldn't do it in the normal
morgue and we had to take it to the infectious
disease morgue. I said to him, well, I did not
know where that was, and he said to me, it's
that white building across the street from the hospital. And
(05:00):
that building I knew very well because one of my
other jobs as an autopsy technician was to dump hazardous
waste for the laboratories of the hospital. Every Friday, I
would get several gasoline cans full of hazardous chemical waste
and walk it across the parking lot to this white
building that had multiple rusted oil drums sitting outside of it.
(05:21):
I would pour the hazardous waste into the oil drums
and then take the empty containers back to the laboratories.
When these oil drums would get full, I would tell
my supervisor and they would mysteriously disappear and be replaced
by new oil drums. I got paid five dollars a
week for doing that, and this process went on and
on all the time. So I knew that area. That
(05:43):
building was a small, white, rectangular building that had a
single metal door, no windows, and a giant ventilation system
on the top of it. So I said to the resident,
I know that building quite well because it's my toxic
waste dumping zone. And he said, okay, we'll get body
over there and call me when you have everything ready.
And I said to him, well, how do I get
(06:05):
the body over there? And he told me, I don't know,
figured out tech and he left. I sat in the
mord for a while, thinking how am I going to
get this body over there? And After a little while,
I knew time was running out because if I didn't
get it over there soon the resident was going to
become extremely angry. So I thought, well, the gurneys have
wheels on them, I could just wheel it over there.
(06:27):
And that's what I did. I got the body out
of the cooler and wheeled it into the hallway and
began walking down the hallway at the basement of this hospital.
I got to the elevator, stepped in with the body,
no one was on it, and went up to the
first floor. Once I got out of the elevator on
the first floor, there were people around, but I just
continued nonchalantly wheeling down the hallway past them, not saying anything.
(06:50):
Nobody asked me what I was doing, so I didn't
say anything to them. I walked past the floral shop
and up a ramp and I got to these sliding
glass doors. I waited for the glass doors to open,
and then I wheeled outside. It was a bright, sunny
July day. The birds were chirping. It was around nine am.
There wasn't a lot of traffic, and I started heading
(07:11):
out down the sidewalk, me and the body. We got
to the stop sign where the crosswalk was. I waited,
looked both ways across the street, and I got to
the parking lot, which was about the size of two
football fields. And I wheeled across this parking lot and
got to the infectious disease morgue and I had a
key to open the door, so I opened the door.
And when I opened the door, the phone was already ringing.
(07:34):
I went over there, picked up the phone, hoping it
wasn't the resident calling the sea where I was at
because I hadn't even started yet. But instead, this time
it was my supervisor and he was yelling at me,
and he said, Kendall, what the hell is going on?
And I was like, what do you mean? What's going on?
He said, the entire east wing of the hospital is
calling because they saw someone walking with a dead body
(07:55):
across the parking lot to this mysterious white building. Is
that you did you do that? And I said, well, uh, yes, sir,
I did. I was told to get this body over
here because it had an infectious disease. My supervisor said,
why did you walk it across the parking lot and
brought daylight? I say, I didn't know how else to
get it over there, and he told me, well, you
(08:17):
call security and security helps you get it over there.
You don't walk a body across the street in front
of the entire hospital. All these people and their families
are freaked out because they saw a body taken to
a mysterious white building, and they want an explanation. And
I said to him, well, I'm so sorry, sir, I
just didn't know. And he goes, well, don't ever do
(08:39):
it again, and he hung up. Now I don't know
what he told the hospital or what they told families,
but all I know is I never did that again,
and it was never spoken of again. I got everything ready,
started the autopsy, took the organs out, followed the procedure
that I always had to follow, got everything padded down
and dried out, put on a gurney, and all ready
(08:59):
for the doctor. He came down, looked at it, did
his diagnoses, and he left. And when he left he said, well,
make sure you clean up after yourself. I was like, yes, sir.
So I got the body already to be transported back
to the main hospital, and this time I called security.
They showed up in a large white van with no windows,
and the security guy got out in his tan shirt
(09:20):
and brown pants and opened the back door for me.
The body was on a collapsible gurney like paramedics use,
and I had seen a lot of TV shows where
they went running up to the ambulance and the gurney
would collapse and go flying in and I thought that's
how this one would work. So I lined up and
I started running towards the back of the security vehicle,
(09:41):
and when the gurney hit I didn't realize he had
to go in a specific direction, and the legs collapsed,
but they collapsed the wrong way, and they got hooked
up in the bumper of the vehicle, and the gurney
fell and then fell on its side and the body
flopped onto the ground. Thankfully I was in an area
where the hospital couldn't see me time, because that probably
would have upset quite a few patients as well. The
(10:04):
security guy said to me, what are you doing? And
I said, well, I thought the gurney would collapse. I
just didn't understand how it worked. He said, well, okay, whatever,
hurry up. I picked the body in the body bag
back up, got it back on the gurney, turned the
gurney around, and then ran it at the vehicle. This
time it collapsed appropriately and started sliding in, but it
(10:26):
got hooked up a little bit on the bumper, and
I was standing at the edge of the gurney trying
to trying to get it to get over that bumper,
and I couldn't quite do it. And the security guy
would grudgingly walked over and help me get it over
the lip of that bumper, and I got the body in.
He transported me back to the hospital, and I unloaded
the body and went took it back to the morgue.
(10:48):
And that was the end of it. And I never
did it again. I never walked a body across the
street on a bright, sunny summer day ever. Again. I
always made sure I called security and loaded the body
in a windowless fan and properly transported to the mysterious
white morgue on the east side of the hospital. And
(11:10):
that brings us to the end of the story. I
hope you learned something like it's upsetting to see a
body wheel to a mysterious white building across from a
hospital when you're a patient laying in the bag. And
I hope you were entertained until the next dome
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