My cop cousin has photos he pretends he never saw

I wasn't going to post this but my cousin works as a cop and he told me some stuff that I genuinely cannot stop thinking about.

So apparently crime scene photographers end up with THOUSANDS of photos and sometimes. sometimes there's one in the batch that just. shouldn't exist.

First one: highway accident. He's flipping through a series of shots taken back to back, normal stuff, and then one photo has the dead guy STANDING THERE looking down at his own body. Same clothes. Same hair. Exact same everything. And then the next photo, gone. Like it never happened. Oh but wait it gets worse because a DIFFERENT photo from the same scene shows more than ten people standing in a circle around the corpse. Expressionless. Just. staring. None of them were supposed to be there.

Second one: arson murder scene. Someone was photographing the crowd of bystanders (standard procedure, killers love to watch) and in one shot, one guy in the crowd is facing the OPPOSITE direction from the fire. Everyone else is rubbernecking at the flames and this one dude is just. looking the other way. They only figured it out later after the case wrapped up. that guy had died in the fire. Some people think maybe he was looking toward where the killer was standing. Didn't help the investigation though.

Third one: suicide scene. Body's already been removed, they're doing a final sweep and taking photos of the empty room. One photo, just one, has a completely different person collapsed on the floor covered in blood. Not the person who died there. Different person entirely. No shoes on. People started saying maybe it was someone who had killed themselves in that same spot years before. nobody knew for sure.

Fourth one: body dump. The site used to be a military training ground during WW2. Photo of the dumping site comes back and in the background, under the trees way off in the distance. Japanese soldiers are doing bayonet drills. In a 2024 crime scene photo.

Last one is the one that got me. Murder case reenactment, they make the suspect walk through what happened while someone photographs it. One photo comes out with a crack across the guy's FACE. and through the crack you can see a skull. Just sitting there inside his face. That suspect died in prison a few months later. Acute pneumonia.

My cousin laughed while telling me all this. Said he used to freak out and report it to his supervisor every time. Supervisor would just laugh and tell him to leave it alone.

Now he just. doesn't look too closely.

"I just tell myself I didn't see it," he said. "It's not like I can show anyone anyway."