Death Scenes: A Homicide Detective's Scrapbook

The infamous LAPD archive of crime-scene photography—Los Angeles noir in its most unfiltered form.

Death Scenes collects the stark black-and-white crime-scene photographs taken by LAPD detective Jack Huddleston across Southern California during the mid-twentieth century. Originally created as investigative reference material by LAPD detective Jack Huddleston, these images document homicide scenes, interiors, streets, and anonymous lives at the moment when police first encountered them—capturing a raw visual record of Los Angeles during its noir era.

Edited by Sean Tejaratchi and the late novelist Katherine Dunn, this volume presents the photographs within a broader context of police documentation, forensic culture, and urban history. The images—often stark, unsettling, and historically revealing—show not only the mechanics of crime investigation but also the social landscape of postwar Southern California. Since its publication, Death Scenes has become one of the most widely recognized books of archival crime photography and a touchstone for later volumes exploring similar material.

Long out of conventional circulation and frequently discussed among collectors, photographers, and true-crime readers, the book stands as both a visual document of police work and a record of Los Angeles’s darker historical reality. It continues to attract readers interested in crime history, forensic photography, and twentieth-century urban culture.

Warning: this sad, powerful, grotesque collection of black-and-white photos of mostly dead, often naked, human beings is not for the easily disturbed. The introductory text by Katherine Dunn (author of Geek Love) helps give a context to the macabre scrapbook, and the handwritten captions display irony and sometimes humor; but this is no antiquarian's sentimental portrait of the past. This book documents butchery and brutality, horrible disease and mental illness, suicide and murder. And as Dunn observes, the eye of the beholder is not innocent: "The old cop, like the old con, tries to trick us into forgiveness and complicity. By witnessing he has participated, by understanding he is culpable. And his real purpose is to disguise the truth--that he started out terrified and ended up liking it, fascinated, an aficionado."