How long before a body starts to decompose, without embalming?
Well, it depends on the circumstances just before death. If a person is very, very thin or malnourished, decomposition will usually be slower in onset. If a person had, say, diabetes and his blood is loaded with glucose, which is characteristic of diabetes, the remains will start to decompose almost as soon as death occurs. Once, when I worked for the San Francisco Coroner’s office, we had a man who had left work at 3:30. He was feeling poorly and he caught a bus or caught a cab and went home. One of his co-workers dropped by his apartment to see how he was doing, and discovered that his friend had opened the door and collapsed dead. We arrived at about 7 o’clock and he was already starting to show evidence of decomposition. That’s why the coroner or the medical examiner can’t state that a person died at a particular time based on the onset of decomposition. They can determine what season a person died. Entomologists, who study insects, can look at the pupa of the larva and identify th
