The Case of the Drowning Men Read Free Page A

spasm, a posture in death borne out of extreme mental anguish and which reveals the person’s final thoughts and movements as they frantically fought to stay alive.
    If a victim is not promptly retrieved at death, then, without exception and no matter how deep or how swift the water may be, their corpse will continue to drift downward until it reaches the bottom. This is where it will remain in a somewhat fetal position until gases from putrefaction cause it to rise to the surface once more . A semi-fetal posture is the norm for all drown victims , so i f divers do locate such a body before it ascends , but it isn’t in this pose and/or the head is seen to be tilted to one side, they will include these observations in their police recovery report , as it reveals the victim died on land and was put in the water post-rigormortis.
    Typically, once the body does emerge on its own, it will surface in the general vicinity of where the victim originally went under. From this location the water may then carry the corpse along for quite a distance, depending on the strength of the currents or if it becomes ensnared and is thereby prevented.
    Refloat largely varies on the water’s depth and temperature, taking only a matter of hours to occur if extremely warm and up to two weeks or longer if at 40 degrees Fahrenheit or less. The timetable, therefore, is not fixed but is loosely as follows: at 40 degrees Fahrenheit it takes approximately fourteen to twenty days for a drown victim’s corpse to resurface; at 50 degrees ten to fourteen days; at 60 degrees seven to ten days; at 70 degrees three to seven days; and at 80+ degrees one to two days or sooner. In very cold and very deep bodies of water, like certain oceans or the Great Lakes of North America, it’s not unusual at all for a drown victim to never resurface, lying on the bottom in a state of suspended decomposition until their body eventually disintegrates or is otherwise destroyed.

    But in temperate oceans, rivers, lakes, ponds, pools, reservoirs, quarries , or the like, a corpse will inevitably rise again , sooner or later , occasionally exploding to the surface if it was deliberately anchored . And w hen it does reappear, if the person did genuinely die from drowning, then they will always be discovered floating face down in the water, with the head drooping forward and lower than the rest of the body. Lividity, the pooling of blood and fluids, will then have permanently settled into the under regions of the corpse by then , weighting it from beneath and essentially acting as a ballast so that, even when disturbed, say by a collision with a boat, it will return to this original position.
    I f one can stomach a physical inspection of the body and knows what to look for, at this point it becomes relatively easy to determine the length of time a victim’s actually been submerged . However, because a previously sunken body could have been slowly dragged along the water’s bed by currents and thereby further damaged against rocks and similar objects, or even partially eaten by marine animals, it may be difficult for the layperson to ascertain if any visible injuries happened in life or were obtained postmortem.
    D amaged or not, though, if a body has been in the water for at least one to 48 hours, wrinkling of the skin will be present already , particularly on the palms of the hands and fingertips and on the soles and toes of the feet. Noticeable blanching and bloating of the epidermis may also be underway too, with pronounced blotches and discolorations ranging in hue from pink to dark red distributed unevenly across the body.
    In excess of the above time period, the victim’s epidermis may look a greenish bronze and will have begun pimpling and even pre-peeling as fat deposits just beneath it slowly transform into a soapy material and loosen the sk in. This is especially true of the flesh on the hands and feet which will slip off on their own―or when tugged on―just like