Former Crime Scene Cleaner Reveals Chilling Scenes That Still Haunt Her Today

A former Australian crime scene cleaner is opening up about some of the scenes she witnessed on the job that continue to haunt her years after leaving the industry.

Donna Nayler spent six years cleaning homes after murders, suicides, and unattended deaths. Though she eventually returned to her former career as a hairdresser, she said the emotional weight of the work never fully left her.

“The one thing that I struggle with is the amount of loneliness that’s around,” Nayler said during an interview with Mamamia’s “True Crime Conversations” podcast. “I’m a better person, I’m nicer to people because you just don’t know how people are living.”

Nayler started working as a crime scene cleaner at age 25 after learning about the job on a television show. At the time, she had gathered eight years of work experience as a hairdresser.

“I’d never heard of it before, and it just sparked something inside me,” she said.

She said crime scene cleaning was highly profitable when she started because few people worked in the field. But the work exposed her to violence and tragedy regularly.

One of the many cases that still haunts her involved a woman killed by her husband after a night of drinking turned violent.

“What I saw I will never unsee,” Nayler said. “Her blood was over pretty much everything.”

She described blood smeared through a hallway and a destroyed bedroom where the woman was later found dead. Nayler said she often replayed the victim’s final moments in her mind.

“I wish she had just made her way around him somehow and gotten out the front door,” she said.

Nayler had encountered numerous troubling cases during her profession as a crime scene cleaner. Another scene involved a woman who had been stabbed to death while her husband allegedly spent hours attempting to remove evidence before fleeing and abandoning their baby at a church.

“The mattress was so drenched with blood that most of the padding inside had to be removed,” Nayler said.

The man had used heavily scented laundry detergent while cleaning, she recalled. She added that she can no longer tolerate the smell of the product.

Nayler said one of the hardest parts of the job was handling deaths where victims had gone unnoticed for weeks.

“If somebody’s sitting on a chair, it will go through the chair,” she said, describing the challenges caused by decomposition. “It will seep up the walls as well.”

She also recalled the murder of a baby as one of the most painful moments of her career. “Nobody wants to see what I saw that day,” she said. “I remember every single person.”

Despite the trauma, Nayler said the work changed the way she perceives relationships, grief, and human connection.

She remembered arriving at one home where the aunt of a deceased man was crying while helping clean because she could not afford the full cost.

After that encounter, Nayler said she immediately called her own family. “To tell them I love them,” she said. “You just don’t know the last time that you’ll be able to call them.”

Nayler later wrote about her experiences in her book, “Bloodstains and Ballgowns,” which details the hidden realities of crime scene cleaning and the emotional toll it took on her life.

“I missed friends’ weddings,” she said. “There were certain things in life that I wanted to enjoy.”

Eventually, she left the industry to settle down and enjoy parts of life she had missed while being on call around the clock