BENELUX CHARTER
In his small office in the former forensic institute in Liège, Dr Philippe Boxho, 59, is looking for Polaroid photographs of his first professional experience: one autumn morning on a motorway in Wallonia, a motorist had been decapitated after running into a guardrail and an expert examination was ordered. That was thirty-three years ago and since then the pathologist has carried out, he estimates, some three thousand autopsies.
In 2021, he pulled out of his archives the strangest, craziest and sometimes saddest cases he faced. To a publisher who asked him to publish a book, he first responded “I don’t know how to write”before changing his mind. Today he moves, astonishes and horrifies with his stories, all forensically true but anonymized so that the cases cannot be identified. “I didn’t invent anything, because reality is enough on its own; human imagination is unleashed when it comes to killing, committing suicide or making a body disappear.”said.
This forensic scientist, criminologist, university professor and president of the board of the University Hospital of Liège has become a publishing phenomenon in Belgium, France and Switzerland. Some 400,000 copies of his first two books published by Kennes (The dead speakin 2022, Interview with a corpsein 2023) have been sold. Three hundred thousand copies of the third (Death in the face) have been printed and around thirty translations are planned. On Tuesday 20 August, the day of the book’s publication, a thousand people queued in Charleroi for a signing session, from midnight until 6:30 in the morning.
The farmer eaten by pigs
The man who tried to commit suicide and had to try fourteen times because his arms were too short to pull the trigger of his rifle; the farmer who was handed over by her husband to the pigs who devoured her; the walker whose throat was cut by the blade of a lawnmower launched at high speed when it hit a rock: these are some of the most “crazy” – this is the adjective he uses – experienced by Philippe Boxho. There are many others in his books, supplemented by detailed medical explanations and precise descriptions of certain autopsies. The first work was also accompanied by a warning in the form of a wink: “Sensitive souls abstain”. Accurate and useful for those who fear details about the use of the plaster saw, the putrefaction of bodies or the role of flies in dating a death.
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