Respected ACT chief forensic pathologist Professor Johan Duflou is rarely perplexed.
But he knew the deceased person in front of him on the stainless steel slab definitely had not died from injuries suffered in a car crash, as the police report had indicated.
"It looked like a gunshot wound," he said.
"The torso was riddled with shrapnel-like material."
He had read the Takata airbag reports out of the US but this was the first time he had witnessed first-hand what the detonation of defective explosive propellant inside a driver's airbag could do to a human chest less than a metre away.
At the time, the rare but deadly Takata airbag "misdeployments" had been swept under the carpet by the car companies in Australia but the seriousness of this incident, and others which followed, set in train a multimillion-dollar national vehicle recall which continues even today.
Belgian-born, South African-educated Prof Duflou could well be described as Canberra's "safe pair of hands", the physician who studies our city's dead in order to support justice and save the lives of others.
While he calls Sydney home, he has been the ACT's lead forensic medical examiner since 2017.
Twice a week he meets with ACT coroner Ken Archer to assess those cases that will require his physical investigation: pulling on the personal protection gear, gumboots, facemask and face shield, and begin cutting, often with surgical power tools.
"But full autopsies are not always required," he said.
"If you can do an external examination of the body then awesome; that's better than cutting up the body.
"If you can just look at one part of the body, then that's excellent; if all you need is a CT scan, or a physical examination to confirm cause of death, then that's preferable. Then there are the partial examinations, such as the chest, or chest and abdomen.
"Today, for instance, I did one full autopsy; I did one that involved the chest and abdomen, and one of the chest."
His patients are all people who have died in suspicious or unexplained deaths in Canberra, from car crashes to homicides, drownings and heart attacks.
In any situation outside the Canberra Hospital where a general practitioner can neither attend a death nor issue a death certificate, or is unwilling to do so, the body is brought to the Forensic Medical Centre in Phillip and stored away in one of 42 receptacles inside a huge walk-in, industrial-sized refrigerator until a decision is made on the next process.
There are also 12 freezer compartments operating at minus 20 degrees. These are for bodies which need immediate protection from decomposition.
The nondescript, highly secure FMC building where he works is tucked away in industrial Phillip, a stone's throw from the local KFC, kebab shop and wine merchants.
It's understood the Phillip site was once the old Woden bus depot rebuilt and repurposed to replace the decrepit old Canberra morgue, with its water-stained ceilings and resident possums, which was closed down in 2011. Ironically, the old morgue site is now built out with multimillion-dollar Kingston foreshore apartments.
Prof Duflou described his primary role as serving the coroner, whose responsibility it is to take all the evidence provided and make a legal determination.
"Police do the lay work investigation of a death, a pathologist does the medical investigation of a death," he said.
"The work I do is to help the living. As a medical practitioner, my view is that I'm treating the dead to look after the living."
For a bloke who has dissected, weighed and studied dead bodies - around 200 a year on average - for some 40 years, Prof Duflou is charming, genial and unusually forthcoming about what got him into the job in the first place.
When he first entered medicine, he discovered a serious flaw in his prospects of pursuing a career in general practice: he didn't particularly like patients.
"They whinge, they wail, they lie. Some people [in the medical profession] really like patients; it's their life. But it's not for me," he said with disarming candour.
"So I landed up at a bit of a loss after six years of medical training; there was a limited series of options presented to me: radiology, pathology, administration and that's about it.
"But I liked pathology, and I particularly like chemical pathology."
Fast-forward decades and Prof DuFlou's work for the ACT community and his academic contributions are highly valued. In his spare time, he often gives advice to crime novelists and crime shows and strives hard to ensure they get the detail right.
Like all of us, he is a consumer of media and generally finds the portrayal of his profession annoying, particularly popular television shows like CSI.
"What we do is not CSI; it's absolutely not like that at all," he said.
"We don't solve crimes; that's not what we are about - and we definitely don't solve them in 45 minutes with 15 minutes of ads. That's not going to happen."
