Mid 90’s. I had to tell a family that their husband and father had died on the way to work one morning and he was at fault. He’d looked away from the road while getting an apple from his lunchbox and driven under a truck, effectively but not neatly decapitating himself.
The car kept going under the truck and out the other side eventually stopping when it hit the gutter fifty metres or so up the street. The body was still in the car and his hand clutching the apple. When I got there it had been covered over with a tarpaulin.
When I finished the investigation and it was time to move the body, we surrounded the car by holding up a screen to stop the ghouls from leering at it. When the decapitated corpse was uncovered, the little police woman next the me gasped and took an involuntary step backwards in shock (it was really bad), her crusty old Sergeant reached past me and grabbed her by the shoulder, dragging her forward and said, “Come on, you’ve got to get used to it”, I was thinking to myself “No, no she doesn’t. She still has to do her job but she does not have to get used to it.” It was then I noticed the older Sergeant’s Peer Support Officer’s badge, so much for that.
Anyway one of the family (the widows brother) was nominated by them as the contact point. He was the one I spoke to in relation to the investigation and kept update and he was the one who told the rest – nothing, absolutely nothing as it worked out. So when I spoke to the wife it was with due pause and sympathy, I expressed my condolences and during the course of the conversation I learned that the gutless bastard of a brother hadn’t told her a thing.
She thought someone was going to hit the dock over her husband’s death. I had originally told her it looked as if her husband was at fault but this was even before his funeral, I doubt she could have remembered it and since then she hadn’t been updated at all by her brother.
I arranged a meeting and spent 4 long and arduous hours going over everything with the wife, her brother (the gutless one) and the sister in law. The wife took it all well-ish but the sister in law! In a shrill Irish screech she called me evil, a devil and hoped the same thing happened to my family, and afterwards the phone calls started. Even at the coronial inquiry, the sister in law was attacking me personally even though I was simply a messenger, their barrister (duly instructed to have a personal attack on me) had a go but was half hearted and shut down by the State Coroner.
I’d’ve cursed the sister in law like she cursed me but I suppose she was only grieving.
