January 1999 Volume 80 Number 1 "serving the protectors"
Deathly Investigations
By Brett Williams

When vehicle wrecks and dead bodies pile up on blood-soaked highways, men and women of the Major Crash section respond. But just how powerfully are their emotions challenged by so frequently staring into the face of violent death, and constantly interacting with those who survive the dead?

Constable Gerry Powell was willing to confront gruesome sights of dead, mangled bodies in twisted wrecks as a Major Crash investigator. To move from traffic cop to investigator, and prepare himself for the role, he used to volunteer to book dead bodies into the mortuary.

Joining SAPOL’s band of elite investigators - whose job is to uncover the causes of every one of the State’s tens of road fatalities each year - meant that much to him.

Now attached to the section temporarily, he’s investigated several accidents, including two fatalities in the three months from September last year. Not yet faced with scenes which he considers “really bad”, Powell, 34, has so far coped quite adequately.

But the endless death and destruction which investigators must so regularly witness can be a guaranteed recipe for sapping officers’ spirits and deadening their emotions. Only a certain type of police officer can survive Major Crash’s arduous responsibilities.

“It would be one of the most stressful jobs in the department,” says 16-year Major Crash veteran, Sergeant Kym Driscoll.

“It’s not a job that just anybody in the department would want to do. People say: ‘My God, how could you possibly work there?’

“Over the years there have been quite a few who have gone through our section, had a look at things, and said: ‘This is not for me.’

“One chap who walked in did his first crash on his first day and wanted ‘out’ the next.”

And many of the mind-numbing images from Driscoll’s own days as an investigator remain clear in his memory today.

Five minutes into his first ever shift in 1974, he responded to an accident on South Road, Morphett Vale. A car had mounted the kerb and struck a young mother and her child standing at a bus stop.

“Unfortunately, mum died in the accident,” he says. “I have total recall of the circumstances - I can remember seeing her lying (dead) on the footpath.

“We had to go through the process of the notification of the husband, and then there was the identification that took place after that. It was a bit of a traumatic day for me, I must admit. It (the image) does come back - and quite strongly.”

Constable Gerry Powell: “It does get a bit draining...”	Sergeant Kym Driscoll: “If you ‘crack up’, there’s nobody else to do the job.”	Senior Constable Nicolle Dempster: “They know straight away that something’s wrong.”	Senior Constable Neville Logan: “It can get very intense.”

In the eight years which followed, Driscoll investigated 1,000-odd fatal accidents which involved around 1,500 deaths. He saw extensively mutilated bodies after high-speed accidents; a man incinerated after colliding with a fuel tanker; and pedestrians left dismembered after being struck by trains.

But these are precisely the scenes upon which investigators gaze week after week. Conditioning themselves to face them, Driscoll says, takes a long time.

After six years and hundreds of fatal accident investigations, Senior Constable Nicolle Dempster, has seen more blood and severed limbs than most family doctors. Of the many horror images her memory has recorded, few are ever likely to fade completely.

Her most grisly investigation - which she politely understates as “the messiest one I had” - was a horror smash at Port Augusta in 1994. Two were left dead after a car and a passenger bus collided. She describes the skull of one of the dead as being “pushed out”, leaving only the sunken features of what was the man’s face.

“...we sent the body down for a dental ID and found his jaw bone on the side of the road later, but he was totally mangled,” she says. “(With) that sort of thing you catch your breath and think: ‘How the hell am I going to lift him into the (body) bag.’ ”

Just as distressing to her was a six-year-old boy killed on Mothers’ Day, 1996. He had ridden his bike onto the road from an Aldinga property when he was run down by a car.

“I got back in the police car and I was quite upset,” she says. “I’d just come back to work after having my little girl. I said to my partner: ‘What would you do if it was yours?’ ”

Dempster’s partner reassured her and insisted that she not think about the tragedy. But when she turned toward him, she saw that his knuckles had turned white from his grip on the steering wheel: his emotions too had been greatly moved.

It’s through these ugly scenes of violent death that investigators must sift to establish accidents’ causes. Whether it’s the bodies of four adults or a dismembered child which lies before them, they can’t afford the indulgence of personal thoughts or perspectives.

They must move routinely among the carnage to draw plans, take photographs and measurements, and interview survivors.

Dempster, 32, likens some scenes to “a bomb site”: debris scattered over the road; mutilated corpses; helicopters poised for rescues; fire and ambulance officers releasing the trapped and tending the injured.

The duty to extricate bodies from wreckage, and the distasteful clean-up responsibility also often rest with investigators. “It’s generally us,” says Driscoll, “who walk around the scene with a shovel (collecting) body parts.”

But Senior Constable Neville Logan, an investigator with 14 years’ experience, says the duty to investigate overrides inclinations toward personal thoughts. He concedes, however, that investigators can rarely avoid relating child deaths to their own children.

“That makes it pretty hard,” he says, “especially when they’re in a similar age group.”

Even more burdensome to some investigators is their responsibility to notify relatives of the loved who will never come home again. When she realizes that the corpse upon which she’s gazing is a child, Dempster despairs and thinks: “Oh, my God, I’ve got to tell the parents”.

And that dreaded early-hours-of-the-morning notification is a duty she loathes. “I hate that five-second wait between knocking on the door in the middle of the night and seeing the light going on and hearing them walking to the door,” she says.

“They know straight away that something’s wrong. Once you’ve told them, you just weather the storm of their reaction. You get everything from just stunned acceptance to denial and anger - and turning around (and) throwing up.”

Logan, 50, has experienced similar reactions. He says that some relatives “go right off”, while others seem, on the surface, to handle the news “quite well”. “It can get very intense,” he says. “Other times, they just don’t want to know you.”

As inquiries unfold, some relatives remain in almost daily contact with the investigators concerned. Says Powell of grieving relatives who come to over-rely on investigators for their own emotional healing: “They do use us as a bit of a crutch sometimes. They rely on us for emotional support.

“It does get a bit draining when they’re on the phone to you all the time.”

And when convicted offenders are only fined and disqualified from driving, hurt and confused relatives - who expect imprisonment - often turn to investigators for answers. Those investigators do their best to enlighten them as to the legal realities.

In line with Major Crash policy, investigators must make contact with relatives within one week after an accident. Contact is also made after one month, and then again at the end of the investigation. But as Driscoll explains, many more contacts occur besides “the obligatory ones”.

An investigator may be required to maintain contact with as many as 60 relatives associated with different cases at one time. “I know people who have actually got out of the section because they just couldn’t handle the constant (contact) which, in some cases, almost borders on badgering,” Driscoll says.

Also brutally exacting on investigators is their commonly heavy workload. “Sometimes you could be carrying five or six jobs - or even more,” says Logan. “When it gets to that stage, you’ve got so many people to see and so much work involved in catching up. Then it becomes a bit demanding.”

Although most outside the police occupation see fatal accident investigation work as emotionally destructive, SAPOL’s contingent of 30 investigators and three supervisors copes extraordinarily well. Major Crash’s officers are attached to the section by choice and generally fulfilled by their work.

But the extreme, ceaseless trauma associated with the job can be damaging to any one of them.

Today, as a supervisor, Driscoll, 50, monitors his team members’ demeanour closely. He knows only too well the personality changes in an investigator struggling to cope.

“Sometimes there’s a loss of temper - they’re very fragile in that regard,” he explains. “Their work performance is not up to date; sometimes you can’t get them on the radio when they’re required; and their general work output drops off.”

Logan also recognizes the signs which tell the true stories of investigators’ emotions. He says some become excessively talkative, while others “go within themselves”.

“Those who are very talkative sometimes, at certain scenes, go very quiet,” he says. “They totally change and you know there’s a problem.”

Dempster speaks of the tendency to take the job personally. She says one can become overwhelmed through constant dealing in death.

“You start to carry it over into your personal life,” she says. “I found myself heading that way, particularly since I’ve had a child. I’ve got to work hard not to personalize what someone else is going through.”

Dempster has seen some investigators suffer “burn-out”, but says they’re essentially cured after a period of leave.

So, other than leave, what coping mechanisms do investigators employ to survive the job’s intense emotional strain?

Those who become somewhat desensitized seem able to use that condition as a survival tool. But just as important, Driscoll believes, is the ability to “switch off at the end of the day”. He insists that those who don’t are destined to take the job home.

But “self-help” and workplace support are Driscoll’s favoured methods of surviving life in the trenches of fatality investigation.

“When somebody comes back from an accident scene,” he says, “there’s a lot of self-help goes on in our office. If somebody hasn’t been out to the scene they’ll say: ‘What was it like?’ The investigator will tell all the details.

“That, to them, is a relief, because they’re getting it over - the blokes help each other in that regard. They encourage each other to talk about what they’ve seen. Hopefully, by doing that, they’re not taking it home.

“You have to be able to say to yourself: ‘That job I did last night had an effect on me - I should do something about it.’ It’s got to be very much a self-analysis and a self-help process.

“If you ‘crack up’, there’s nobody else to do the job.”