Forensic doctor Philippe Boxho believes that the reason why the human being feels attraction for the macabre has to do with death scares and is taboo. Although it is the only certainty we have, “enough with … To consider how many bodies have been seen in life to realize that it is very rare to be in contact with it, ”he emphasizes.
This fascination has echoed in the rise of ‘True Crime’, a phenomenon that Boxho arrived at the right time. With three thousand autopsies behind him, the director of the Institute of Legal Medicine of the University of Liege ten million visualizationS, was the most watched in its history.
An editor proposed to write a book and has become a non -fiction editorial success in both Belgium and France, where it has more than one million specimens sold. “He calculated to sell five thousand, with that figure,” Best Seller ‘is already considered in Belgium, “confesses the author of ‘The dead have the word’ (Plaza and Janés), which is now published in Spain.
From the case of a daughter convinced of having murdered her father after shooting her in bed – but he had died moments before for a heart attack -, to the suicide that came to invent a complex system to electrocute himself with a night erection, or that of man of man that he threw His wife’s body to pigsthe coroner collects the most unusual stories of his thirty years of career. «These are the cases that I usually tell my students every year and, in general, we see once in life. I have only seen a man who has died for swallow a fork And I have not seen twice that anyone Try fourteen times To commit suicide, ”explains Boxho, who is also a professor of Forensic Medicine and Criminology.
The author of ‘The dead have the word’ does not spare in details of the crime or autopsy scene. «Everything that I count on violence, the examination of the body, of the conversation with the police, of the passage through the court … everything is true. I insist on this because there are those who believe they are not real cases. A Belgian journalist doubted it and invited my office. There I told him to choose a story and chose the man who had died for swallowing the fork. I taught you all the images on my computer. He did not have as good face as at the beginning, but he understood that Everything I had was real», He explains.
Choosing true stories and narrating them in a brief and self -clusive way is what most captivates their readers. «They tell me the people who come to sign the book. Also They like humor», He says. It is true that there is, but Boxho specifies that he laughs at the deaths, never of the dead. «It is forbidden. In the autopsy room if someone laughs at the dead for any reason, it goes directly, ”he emphasizes. This specialist, who affirms that general medicine bored him and that at least now his patients do not complain, take the unexpected tip of the situations he has to deal with, but always with sensitivity.
Particularly surprising was the case of a woman who confessed that killed to his ex -husband with an axhe dismembered him and put his pieces in bags that he frozen, to burn them on successive days during the night in the stove of his house.
«It is nothing common. The judge sent a psychiatrist to evaluate it and ruled that he had invented it, but decided to rebuild the crime scene and called me. I told him that I had no corpse, I didn’t know what I could help him. He told me to ask him questions that could verify if what he told was true. It was very intelligent. I asked him what bone fragments they had not disappeared because wood fires do not make everything disappear. They are not like cremations incinerators. She described me exactly what were the left pieces and what was their color. I said: ‘But, what part was the most difficult?’ ‘The head, I had to put on the fire three times,’ he replied. Everyone stayed speechless ».
More autopsies
What does not joke is with loneliness and social exclusion, much more stark than direct contact with death. «There is a suffering here. I detail several very striking cases. The record is that of a man who carried five years dead When his body was discovered, ”he says. Boxho has seen so much in reality, that fiction falls short. That is why the falsehood of the series bothers him (myths fall like a single hair found in the crime scene usually resolves cases or the glamor of the forensic, who never carry the mandatory protection suit), but recognizes the ability to observe Funeral services: «If they find something weird, you always have to take it into account. They are very accustomed to seeing corpses, ”he says.
With ‘The dead take the floor’, Boxho undertook a crusade to claim the importance of the work of forensics, often distorted by the series or cinema. And it highlights a chilling fact: «Well, because they are faces or because it usually disturbs that we will all the integrity of the bodies, all the autopsies that should be made, so many Homicides go unnoticed. The average in Europe is 12%; Belgium’s is 2%. That is, we have calculated that we overlook about 70-80 homicides per year ».
His experience as a coroner has taught him that, behind each homicide, there is usually a reason related to the money or sex. However, it emphasizes with concern an increasing phenomenon: «We see more and more free homicides in quotes. People who kill their neighbor because it makes too much noise or a driver who gets out of the car with one bat and crushes the skull to another ». He attributes this type of violence, apparently meaningless, to a society that is more stressed and in which there is less security: «I think people enjoy less living than in the past. Have less resistance to frustration», Concludes Philippe Boxho.
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