Philippe Boxho, the Belgian forensic doctor who became a publishing phenomenon

LETTER FROM BENELUX

In the small office he keeps at the former forensic institute in Liège, Dr. Philippe Boxho, 59, looks for Polaroid photos of his first professional experience: one autumn morning, on a motorway in Wallonia, a motorist was decapitated after hitting a guardrail and an expert appraisal was ordered. That was thirty-three years ago and, since then, the coroner has, he calculates, carried out some three thousand autopsies.

In 2021, he took out of his files the strangest, craziest, sometimes saddest cases he had ever faced. When a publisher asked him to publish a book, he initially replied “I don’t know how to write”before changing his mind. Today, he moves, astounds, horrifies with his short stories, all forensically true but anonymized so that the cases cannot be identified. “I did not invent anything, because reality is sufficient in itself; human imagination is freed when it comes to killing, committing suicide or making a body disappear.”he said.

The forensic scientist, criminologist, university professor and chairman 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 Have the 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, August 20, the day the book was released, a thousand people queued in Charleroi for a book signing session from midnight to 6:30 in the morning.

The farmer’s wife eaten by pigs

The man who wanted to commit suicide and had to try fourteen times because his arms were too short to pull the trigger of his rifle; the farmer’s wife who was left by her husband to be eaten by pigs; the walker whose throat was slit by the blade of a lawnmower that was ejected at high speed when it hit a stone: these are some of the most memorable episodes. “crazy” – this is the term 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 book was also accompanied by a warning in the form of a wink: “Sensitive souls please refrain”. Judicious and useful for those who would dread the details on the use of the plaster saw, the putrefaction of bodies or the role of flies in dating a death.

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