Kansas City, Mo ? Suicide. Homicide. Death cleaning.

The words are as subtle as the outline of a human body — its head haloed by a pool of bright red blood — that accompanied them on a billboard not far from downtown Kansas City.

Don McNulty, owner of Bio Cleaning Services of America Inc., makes no apologies for the graphic nature of the two billboards he had in the city or the gruesome realities that make his business necessary.

“What we needed was something that was in your face,” said McNulty, a former Baptist minister who started his death-cleaning business in 1993. “We wanted something that told exactly what we did, who we are and how to get a hold of us. I want you to know our service exists.”

What many people don’t realize, he said, is that property owners are responsible for cleaning up their homes after someone is killed there, commits suicide or simply dies and isn’t found for a few days.

His company is a member of the American Bio-Recovery Assn., a 52-member organization of biocleaning firms that was founded in 1996 by Kent Berg in Greenville, S.C.

Berg said ABRA provided resources and a voice for companies in a relatively new industry.

The association offers training and certification in death cleaning, though such certification is not legally required for a person or company to conduct business.

McNulty’s business is a member of ABRA, but Berg said the two had differing approaches to the death-cleaning trade — especially when it came to marketing.

“I like to think of our industry along the same lines as the funeral industry,” Berg said. “If a funeral home put a billboard up like that, it would probably get a lot of bad press. I think there can be billboards, but I just think I probably would take a softer approach.”

Despite his distaste for McNulty’s form of advertising, Berg admits that it does seem to be effective.

“I have heard that for some companies, although controversial, it has certainly raised awareness,” Berg said.

Unpleasant business

As of early December, McNulty’s business had handled more than 340 jobs in western Missouri and eastern Kansas. With invoices averaging between $1,800 and $2,000 each, the death-cleaning business can be lucrative, he said.

He said his work was not pleasant and could take a psychological toll. Family members of victims usually are too emotionally traumatized to do the cleaning themselves, and in a world of blood-borne infections, such as hepatitis and AIDS, it’s not a task just anybody should be doing.

Dave Salas, owner of Phoenix Restoration in Garden City, Kan., said his company handled an occasional suicide and unattended death in southwest Kansas. In a small town, it’s not necessary to advertise the death-cleaning part of his disaster-services company because word of mouth works just fine, he said.

Typically, death-cleaning jobs are done by men, Salas said. The employees are trained in blood-borne pathogens and wear full biosuits when on the site.

“Some of these suicides are so graphic that it makes you think of your own life situation,” Salas said. “Your problems melt away when you look at the remains of someone who just couldn’t take it anymore.”

Going beyond clean

McNulty, who was a minister at a Kansas City Baptist church in the late 1970s, said he has to balance the physical requirements of his job — such as wearing a hazardous materials suit — with the mental implications of working with grieving clients.

“I had to work at desensitizing myself,” he said. “We all seem to have our own feeling about death. For me, death has become more factual. This business has taken away the mysticism of death; you see that life is so fragile. The hardest thing to desensitize yourself to is grief.”

A body is removed from a home by a transportation company, he said, not a coroner.

An untrained person cleaning up such a mess with the wrong equipment can send invisible blood residue into the air with a vacuum cleaner, or leave it on personal items that otherwise appear clean, he said.

“A lot of people think we’re going to come in and clean things,” he said. “We’re not. We’re going to destroy it.”