Some seasons carry a particular kind of memory.
Michigan in the fall.
The air cools. The sun recedes. The leaves color, brown, and drop.
In many ways, memory behaves the same way. Certain experiences fade. Others remain intact, preserved beneath the surface, waiting for the right season to rise again.
People often ask me, as a coroner’s daughter, whether there was a first body I never forgot.
There were many. But it started with this one.
Growing Up in a Medical Examiner’s Family
I was eight years old. My younger sister was six. A dual engine airplane had crashed in a field near our town’s small airport in rural Michigan. On a Sunday afternoon, instead of errands or rest, our father took us along to assist in the search for remains.
We walked the field with him.
We found fragments of brain matter and pieces of skull scattered in the grass.
When people hear that detail, they expect horror. Trauma. Shock.
What I remember is something else entirely.
My father treated the moment as he treated many moments in our childhood. He turned it into a lesson. He explained that the brain is the body’s central organ, the command center responsible for every signal that allows us to move, breathe, think, and live. He described the skull as a bone helmet designed to protect that fragile and essential organ.
His voice was steady. Clear. Clinical.
Respectful.
Those are the details that imprinted themselves in my mind.
I don’t remember fear. I don’t remember disgust. I don’t remember feeling emotionally overwhelmed. I remember being included. I remember being trusted. I remember wanting to help.
That response makes more sense when you understand the environment in which I was raised.
For nearly twenty five years, my parents ran the Medical Examiner’s office in three rural counties in northern Michigan. An expanse of territory hundreds of miles deep and wide.
My sisters and I were often alongside them. Death investigation was part of our daily vocabulary. It was never sensationalized. It was never treated as a spectacle. It was handled with professionalism and dignity.
Growing up in a medical examiner family shapes your understanding of death from a young age. You learn that death is part of life. You learn that answers matter. You learn that families need clarity as much as they need comfort.
And above all, you learn to pay attention.
Understanding Death Before You Understand Its Weight
At eight years old, I didn’t grasp the larger significance of what we were doing in that airfield. Even today, that memory feels almost secondhand. I know the event happened because my parents retold it. I can’t fully reconstruct the sensory experience in vivid detail.
What I understood at the time was simple.
Death exists. It deserves respect. It requires careful attention.
Justice requires patience. Often into years or decades.
Emotion needs to be tampered so that logic can shine through.
Truth requires the discipline of careful examination and record keeping.
In our bucolic farming community, most cases that came through the coroner’s office weren’t homicides. They were accidents, natural causes, and sometimes suicides. Farm equipment incidents. Drunk driving fatalities. Motorboat collisions on Lake Michigan. Hunting accidents. Cardiac events in barns and fields. Self inflicted gun shot fatalities.
Some deaths were preventable. Some were tragic coincidences.
When a combine flipped over or a drunk driver got behind the wheel and killed an innocent family, grief often carried an undercurrent of regret. Loved ones would ask whether a different decision could have changed the outcome. In death investigation, those questions linger.
Homicides were rare. But when they did occur, the emotional atmosphere shifted dramatically. Grief braided itself with anger and fear. Loved ones demanded justice. There was sometimes a temptation toward vigilante resolution. Small towns feel violence deeply because everyone knows everyone.
Watching my parents navigate those tensions taught me something that would later influence my crime fiction.
Why Certain Cases Stay With Investigators
One of the most common misconceptions about death investigation is that cases linger because of their graphic nature.
That’s not necessarily how it happens.
Cases stay with investigators because of the people attached to them.
If a particular case lingers with me, it’s because it carries emotional value that aligns with something I believe deeply. Justice. Restoration of order. Redemption. The protection of the vulnerable.
The human mind holds onto story longer than it holds onto gore.
Cases stay with investigators, coroners, detectives, or forensic professionals, because the imprint is relational. It’s about the life behind the body.
Who were they?
How did they live?
Who loved them?
Were they protected?
Were they failed?
In death investigation, you quickly realize that Cause and manner are clinical determinations. They matter legally. They matter for closure. But they don’t fully explain a person’s flesh and blood life.
The Emotional Cost of Paying Attention
When people ask if there was a high emotional cost of growing up around death investigation, I often pause before answering. If there’s an emotion that still lingers, it is that of empathy and compassion and deep respect for human life.
In the airplane crash case that I attended when I was a child, there was no emotional cost for me at the time. I was too young. Only eight. My father’s calm demeanor shaped the emotional tone. Everything he did became a lesson. He was a natural teacher. He approached each case with steadiness and thoroughness.
Over the years, what embedded itself in me wasn’t trauma.
It taught me the importance of responsibility and work ethics.
Do a good job.
Look closely.
Listen attentively.
People were looking to my dad for answers that would help them understand a loved one’s death. That understanding matters deeply to them. It mattered to him.
In professional death investigation, attention to detail isn’t optional. A missed observation can alter the trajectory of justice. A rushed conclusion can harm a family’s ability to heal. That discipline shaped my worldview long before I ever put pen to paper.
The emotional fallout you witness from a life ripped apart from his loved ones comes in ripple effects.
It comes when you see how preventable some tragedies were.
It comes when you watch families fracture under the weight of unanswered questions.
These are lessons that I remember learning growing up around other people’s tragedies.
How This Shaped Emily Hartford
Readers of the Coroner’s Daughter mystery series often ask whether Emily Hartford reflects my upbringing.
She does. In many ways.
In The Coroner, Secret Remains, Last One Alive, Frozen Lives, and What Darkness Does, and in next month’s new release, WALKING ON WHITE, Emily approaches each death with tenacity and persistence. She refuses to accept partial answers. She won’t close a case prematurely. That’s by design.
Emily doesn’t have closed cases in the emotional sense. She carries them until resolution is achieved. That mirrors how my parents ran the Medical Examiner’s office. They investigated thoroughly. They persevered. They believed that accuracy and truth were due the public they served.
They sought to provide answers and close doors on the investigations. In the same way, crime fiction tries to do the same thing. In crime fiction, readers can depend on a story paradigm where justice is achieved by the final page. Order is restored. Chaos is addressed. Hope and redemption are offered.
They offer a framework in which good confronts evil and resolution follows.
At its core, crime fiction is built around a moral architecture of good versus evil.
Crime Fiction Rooted in Real Forensics
When writers ask me about what inspires my crime fiction, they often expect dramatic anecdotes. They imagine the most violent cases shape the narrative. It’s true that I like my forensics to “make sense” and I strive to be authentic in my telling.
However, the most powerful inspiration stems from how families navigate trauma, grief, and loss.
It stems from how investigators handle dark situations and dark people in a delicate balance of empathy and objectivity.
It stems from seeing how a community responds when something disrupts its sense of safety.
My mission as a storyteller has always been to shed light and hope into the darker recesses of human experience.
Growing up as a coroner’s daughter gave me early exposure to those recesses. Writing allows me to explore them and provide the anecdotes of hope and redemption and resolution.
It’s Never the Body
Why do we love this genre?
Because we care more about the person who lived and loved, than the dead body they become.
We fight to preserve their legacy. We fight to remember the good they gave the world. We fight to restore dignity when violence has stripped it away.
Whether in real life death investigation or in crime fiction, the ultimate question is the same.
Did this life matter?
The answer is always yes.
That’s why certain cases linger.
That’s why investigators keep pushing.
That’s why readers turn pages late into the night.
Behind every autopsy report, every forensic detail, every courtroom proceeding, there is a living, human story.
These stories remind us that paying attention preserves human dignity and significance.
Perhaps that is the truest inheritance of being a coroner’s daughter.
Jennifer Dornbush is an author, screenwriter, and forensic specialist who brings crime stories to life with authenticity and heart. With a background rooted in real-world forensics and a passion for crafting unforgettable mysteries, Jennifer offers readers and viewers a front-row seat to the intersection of science, justice, and human nature.Jennifer’s crime expertise has made her a sought-after speaker, consultant, and educator. Through her webinars and master courses, Jennifer guides writers in melding suspenseful storytelling with forensic realism to the screen and page. Meet her at www.jenniferdornbush.com
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Spector case (which, oddly enough, wasn’t nearly as disturbing. But then, what happened to Lana Clarkson wasn’t as terrible as what was done to that little girl). We also had a fantastic presentation from a “Questioned Documents” examiner who explained exactly how easy it is to forge a signature, and what to do to combat that (sign your name over itself 2-3 times) and we toured the labs, including the rooms that hold stainless steel water tanks where guns are fired to match ballistics from crime scenes. Very cool. More information on the lab and the Crime Lab project is available