Accessible News

Top storiesNew ZealandPoliticsBusinessEntertainmentSportsWorld

‘There’s no job like it’: Behind the silent work of a forensic cleaner

Friday, 27 February 2026

Warning: This story contains details some readers may find distressing

When someone dies alone, the room around them tells a story.

A phone lies on the floor beside a bed. A sick bucket sits close at hand. A smear of blood marks the doorframe.

For years, Rob Cousins has walked into rooms like these across Wellington and, when needed, the wider North Island.

He works long after police and paramedics have left the scene, and is left with the job few others want – the clean-up.

Read more:

In the four and a half years since founding forensic cleaning business Capital City Crime Scene, Cousins has attended more than 1400 jobs. Before that, he estimates another 4000 in Australia.

When you attend the site of so many unattended deaths – where someone has died alone and not been found for days or even weeks – patterns emerge, Cousins explains.

Doorways and beds are the most common places to die: “People tend to either die in their sleep, or they start to feel ill, get up, and then don’t make it where they’re going.”

Rob Cousins, owner and founder of Capital City Crime Scene, has attended more than 4000 jobs across the decade he’s worked as forensic cleaner.
Rob Cousins, owner and founder of Capital City Crime Scene, has attended more than 4000 jobs across the decade he’s worked as forensic cleaner.

You learn to read the room for hints about what might have happened and how far the mess of it might have spread.

“I’m not a detective and I don’t pretend to be one,” he says. “But you get a sense of what happened. There’ll be a start and an end to it.”

Cousins largely works alone, often an anonymous figure in his mask and suit.
Cousins largely works alone, often an anonymous figure in his mask and suit.

The phone that slipped from their hand a sign they were trying to call for help, the bucket beside a bed evidence of more prolonged illness, the faint smear along the wall now all that remains of an attempt to steady a failing body.

It’s a peculiar intimacy. He witnesses people’s final moments, the collapse of status into a single, shared fact: that they are dead. In that moment, everyone is equal.

Sometimes, when the house is empty, he speaks to the person who has died.

He remembers one particular death in Australia, a young man whose blood he was cleaning from the floor, when the front door slammed shut.

“It was like he knew he could go now. I know I locked the front door, I know for sure I did.”

But Cousins chooses to work as a forensic cleaner for the living, not the dead.

“It’s hard for me, but it’ll be even harder for the family, who have that emotional attachment. I just think, if I can do it, no-one else has to.”

What it takes to be a good crime scene cleaner

Forensic cleaning, strictly speaking, is the decontamination of blood and bodily fluids to “make a space liveable again”. But in practice, the work sits somewhere between industrial hygiene, pastoral care and the management of grief.

“It’s not easy. We’re not just cleaners. A lot of it is about attitude and bringing calm to a space that’s chaotic, and helping the family deal with what’s left behind after tragedy.”

Cousins doesn’t have an office or workshop, he instead travels from job to job in his van.
Cousins doesn’t have an office or workshop, he instead travels from job to job in his van.

Cousins still remembers the first job, when he was called to a house in Porirua after a grieving woman had kept her husband’s decomposing body in the house for weeks.

She moved him from room to room, bathing him, and attempting to feed him. By the time the man’s body was found, police had to use dental records to identify him.

“I’d never even cleaned up after a paper cut before that. Wherever she’d taken him, there was bodily fluid, and skin and hair.”

That night in 2015 marked the beginning of a career that’s now spanned more than a decade and crossed the Tasman Sea.

From homicides and suicides, to hoarding, traumatic accidents and violent crime scenes, there isn’t a lot Cousins hasn’t seen.

But the hardest aspect – no matter the job – is dealing with the families of the dead.

Families rarely grieve neatly. Some are united in loss; others fracture instantly, old resentments surfacing in arguments over possessions.

Physical risk is part of the terrain too. Needles concealed in laundry piles or behind skirting boards, rusted nails through floorboards.

Gloves are prick-proof, masks are a staple. Disposable suits are worn when necessary, bagged and incinerated afterwards. A fresh pair of gumboots is worn for each job.

Training, he says, is largely about health and safety – how to don and remove protective equipment without contaminating yourself, remembering to avoid touching your face or eyes, and so on.

The rest is learned on the job. Disinfectants vary. Some products reveal where blood has seeped into porous surfaces. Others neutralise odour, though nothing erases it entirely.

“You don’t smell it when you’re doing it,” he says. “Then you walk out four days later and it’s still there, in your pores and on your clothes.”

Unpredictable days

Importantly, Cousins has learned how to compartmentalise – to leave work at work.

And the importance of never asking what happened ‒ he doesn’t want or need to know: “Knowing the story of the person and what happened to them only makes it harder. The less you know, the better.”

His days are unpredictable. On the morning Cousins spoke to The Post, he’d already finished one callout – a smoker’s room and bathroom, standard work – but is heading off to another: a man who slipped in the shower, struck his head and lay undiscovered for 10 days.

“This week is slow,” he says. “Six jobs so far. Next week’s calendar is empty, but by Friday it’ll be full. That’s the rhythm.”

Days off are theoretical. Christmas Day and New Year’s Day are often the busiest – public holidays have their own dark predictability.

But even out of the thousands of jobs he’s attended, some are unforgettable.

One apartment, abandoned by drug users and overrun by pigeons, had become a chaotic ecosystem of fur, feathers, droppings, and human waste.

Opening the kitchen cupboard released a flurry of terrified birds into the room. “You can’t fight them,” he says. “They just fly everywhere. It's absolute sensory overload.”

For hours, he worked through layers of contamination, removing rubbish and decaying matter.

Another involved a self inflicted death by shotgun. Matter had dispersed across walls and ceilings, and into open drawers, but he cleaned it before the family could see: “The less they know, the better”.

Deaths resulting from trains are a challenge too, pulling flesh and hair from the underside of carriages back at the depot.

But Cousins doesn’t just deal with unattended deaths.

Another major challenge is clearing out the homes of hoarders, spaces that are simultaneously prisons and archives, precious items hidden among layers of detritus.

Here, Cousins works differently: rubbish cleared first, valuables set aside, family invited to recover mementoes before the remainder is discarded. “There’s a difference between just clearing a place and doing it properly,” he says.

He keeps his own overheads low – a van, equipment, protective gear. No warehouse. No large staff. A contractor works with him; his 27-year-old son helps occasionally, although Cousins shields him from the worst scenes.

Offers to buy the business have been declined. Freedom, even of a constrained sort, matters.

From security guard to business owner

Before forensic cleaning, Cousins worked as a security guard at a law firm – steady, predictable work that followed the same cycle each day.

Part of his role involved cleaning the premises, and it was a task he took seriously. People began to notice, with staff and visitors commenting on how clean the floor was compared to others in the building.

In time, he built his own small cleaning company.

But then one of the lawyers at the firm approached him with an unusual request: would he be willing to clear and clean several tenanted properties belonging to a deceased estate client, preparing them for sale?

It was through that job Cousins saw a gap in how trauma scenes were being dealt with.

“Families were being left to clean up the worst moments of their lives.”

He recognised a different kind of need – practical, immediate help for people already navigating shock and grief, restoring order and something approximating dignity to spaces they couldn't face themselves.

“There’s no other job like it. Before, as a security guy, I’d just work, go home, and repeat. This is different. You’re helping somebody out in a real situation.”

Whether that be by removing mattresses soaked with body fluids, cleaning bathrooms cloaked in blood, or restoring carpets hacked away by emergency services, Cousins sees his work as a strange kind of privilege. He’s able to step into a gap so others don’t have to.

Through the years he’s worked in the forensic cleaning space, Cousins has noticed a shift: more drug-related deaths, more suicides, more calls involving chemical residues and needles.

When asked if this job has aged him, he says it’s not the work itself but the constant phone calls – another house, another room, another death.

Still, he reminds himself that “90% of people I meet are real good people” and it’s that thought that keeps him going.

Surrounded by chaos, decay and grief every day, he carries the weight of others’ worst moments, tempered by a quiet tally of trust and small acts of dignity preserved for families.

It’s in that balance – between the darkness he cleans and the good he preserves – that Cousins finds his purpose.

Where to get help