Dr. Bellis

That's a day that will be ingrained in my head forever.

We have an amazing state-of-the-art building here and we conduct approximately 6,500 autopsies a year for people that die suddenly and unexpectedly.

The call came in to me to say that there was a vehicle that had been on fire and there was a body inside.

Badly burned bodies are one of the most difficult type of autopsy to conduct.

And I said, bring the car here.

We have to put it in the extrication bay to extricate the body.

Because you have to remember when a body comes from fire, the body can fracture from the fire.

Heat effects.

If the extrication happened at the scene, there would be the chance of, you know, an open environment losing important pieces of evidence.

When I first examined the remains, there was a body on the passenger side.

When we removed a sock from her left foot, the sock smelled of gasoline.

It was not clear what the circumstances of death were.

However, the smell of gasoline was somewhat suspicious.

I wanted to know if there was any evidence that she might have inhaled gasoline while she was alive, if there was any traces of gasoline in the lungs.

It was her body that yielded all those clues.

It was part of the aha moment.

My alarm bells go off.

I took samples of lung so they could be examined for volatile substances, including gasoline.

The alarm bells went off in my head.

There was no soot in the airway, which indicated that she was dead before the fire started.