“The detectives high-fived each other when we told them he’d been shot and that it was definitely homicide.”

I'm a Senior Staff Writer based in New York City, where I've been covering classic BuzzFeed-style content since 2020.

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NOTE: Some of these stories are pretty graphic, so if you're sensitive to death or gore, you may want to skip this one! However, know that we did not include stories featuring suicide or the death of a minor.

"Detectives arrived at the morgue. They said they had the homeowner/roommate in custody and were interrogating him. He owned a gun. He'd been having frequent noisy arguments with the dead guy (his tenant) that were observed by neighbors and reported to the police. He was away from home when the fire happened, claimed no knowledge of any of this, and had no idea what happened to either his house or the dead guy. 

The detectives high-fived each other when we told them he'd been shot and that it was definitely homicide. We found out later, after they fully interrogated the homeowner, that he confessed to shooting the tenant in the back while he was sleeping and then torching his own house to try to hide the evidence. (!) The tenant wouldn't move out, so he killed him (!!!) Scary stuff."

"I talked with a friend in the running investigation to find out more about her, and there was a final query made on her personal life.

It turns out that she had been getting back together with the father of her kids, and he had been poisoning her every night they had dinner. When she blacked out, she was 'sold' to the killer in question, as the father did not want to pay child support."

"I got a case where it's a 'house fire' death. On exam, he's got multiple, textbook stab & incised wounds. I spent the next 30 minutes getting gaslighted and quizzed by PD about 'Are you sure?' because they thought this was a straightforward house fire. Un-fun fact: fires are not an uncommon way for people to try to conceal a homicide."

"They got a body, and for legal reasons, they weren't told much about the person aside from medical history. They were told that the older man was a sort of rock star type who had been a one-hit wonder in his youth, and to use extra discretion with him in particular/not to tell the students, who might recognize him. The lab was full of 20-year-olds, and so nobody recognized who he was (I'm unsure if the teacher even knew, but it didn't sound like she did) or what his deal was, so they wrote it off as non-useful information aside from his lifestyle. He had drug use and alcohol issues in his life, and they were told he partied a lot. Cool.

The body had a raging boner like 100% of the time. The teacher didn't think much of it aside from the fact that he was particularly endowed, and everybody wrote it off as not necessary to their studies. So they went through the general dissection. One kid wanted extra credit, and the teacher said, 'Sure, dissect his penis/see why it's still hard, and write a report (apparently they don't usually do that for that particular class; the penis itself goes untouched during their dissection, so it would have otherwise always been a mystery).

The kid found an actual rod that he had medically inserted under the table (it was not in his medical records) so that he would always have a boner and could get it up while on drugs. They suspect it was done over 30-40 years before his death.

They removed it and kept it in the lab, I believe, to show their students as part of a section on under-the-table medical surgeries.

Anyways, that was probably the best day in figure drawing class I've ever had."

"Hazmat suits up — whatever was in there was not a tumor, and the smell wouldn't be friendly if it was even safe. They opened the stomach up, and something brown, metallic, rusted, and almost welded together came out. It was a bit bigger than a baseball, heavy as fuck, but not a bomb. It seemed made of other crap — the thing made a kind of clicking sound inside when moved. They opened it up; the ball was made of various materials, including bent pins, disassembled watches, dull knives, forks, spoons, paper clips, needles, and other metallic objects. The intestines told the same story; the guy died choking on a small metallic ball that just didn't want to be eaten.

The family denied everything and even said the psychiatric hospital was harming him. After investigating the man, they discovered the guy was eating metallic objects for fun. His family denied that anything was wrong, despite entire collections of cooking utensils disappearing, and even expensive items like watches, jewels, and gold necklaces, because they believed God was telling them to keep the fortune inside of him to take it to the heavens to pay for everyone's entry. The entire family was bonkers."

"In my final year of training, we had a cadaver lab to practice advanced airway management techniques (e.g., difficult intubation, Cricothyroidotomy, etc.). While I was helping an intern do a basic intubation, she commented that the tube wouldn't pass. 'I think she has some kind of growth or mass in her airway.' I took a look, asked for some foreceps, and pulled a half-eaten hot dog out of her larynx. It, of course, had been embalmed along with the rest of her. Cause of death identified."

"But when the doctor pointed out a half dozen or so marks that looked like freckles around the wound, he swabbed a developer solution that clearly showed they were tiny little poke marks. I was able then to get her to confess that he was goading her, 'Go ahead, do it,' until she hauled off and stabbed him. It's not always like TV shows where the autopsy is the 'aha!' moment that solves a case, but sometimes it really is."

"I saw hundreds of maggots crawling all over, and they started to fall off the cart. I was then informed I had to stomp on all the maggots as they fell so that they wouldn't spread throughout the building. So here I was, playing the worst game of Dance Dance Revolution in history over a half-liquified skeleton, holding my nose so I wouldn't puke.

The other story is that in the basement, where we would keep all the organ bags and stuff like that, we also had notable objects from old crime scenes, like murder weapons, etc. Anyways, there was a buttplug in a bag that had the case number written on it. Now I found this during the first week of my internship, and I kept wondering, how does someone die by a buttplug? Now I had access to all case files as I had to enter data and all that jazz. So, eventually, I ended up looking up the case, and it turns out an older guy had it in as he was jacking off to a magazine called 'The Spanking Times.' Obviously, he died, as his buttplug was in our office, but the autopsy showed he had a heart attack, presumably as he climaxed. I suppose there are worse ways to go."

"I went first, for whatever reason, and the instructor lifted the enlarged heart out of its preservative bath and placed it in my hands. I damn near dropped the thing when it shocked me with what felt like a jolt of electricity. I (understandably, I think) made a startled noise, and the instructor took the heart back before I could juggle it onto the floor.

'Oh,' she said. 'I forgot to warn you, look out for the pacemaker.'

Apparently, when someone has a pacemaker, there's a battery too, and they don't bother taking it out/off. They simply snip the leads and leave them there, so if you touch both bare leads, you get a mild shock, even through your exam gloves.

That was a mildly disturbing experience."

"I was a high school senior at the time, and very, very puzzled by that answer.

As an attending radiologist, I see vegetations all the time in vivo now, and I will always think of them as green because of that first autopsy. Except for Aspergillus, which is black.

A vegetation is a growth of a foreign plant-like lifeform, such as bacteria or fungi."

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