BATON ROUGE — Larry Douglas is getting his Baton Rouge-based business ready for its international close-up. Douglas owns Xtreme Cleaners, which has been cleaning up crime scenes and biohazard sites for more than two decades, and will soon be featured on a new docuseries airing in England.
Douglas went from helping solve murders as a police officer and detective in New Hampshire to cleaning them up. He moved to Louisiana shortly after Hurricane Katrina and worked in construction before transitioning to crime scene and biohazard cleanup in 2010.
Xtreme Cleaners visits crime scenes after law enforcement has investigated and the coroner’s office has retrieved bodies for autopsies, if necessary.
Companies like Xtreme Cleaners are responsible for cleaning up things like blood spatter, stains and smells, and anything else that may have been left undiscovered by law enforcement during their preliminary investigation. Sometimes, the cleaning crews even provide evidence that helps solve a crime.
“We do an evaluation of what occurred on the scene, and see if things match up with what we’re told. And we recover evidence a lot. We find rounds that are dispensed. We find the casings that are missed sometimes because we’re digging really deep and puling everything out,” Douglas said.
Throughout his years working in Baton Rouge, Xtreme Cleaners has been involved in a lot of high profile and sensitive cases, including cleaning the BearCat units that were used to transport wounded and fallen Baton Rouge officers after the 2016 ambush attack, sterilizing the Baton Rouge courthouse during the Covid-19 pandemic, and cleaning the River Center following the 2016 flood.
On June 30, Xtreme Cleaners will be featured on a new docuseries overseas, called Crime Scene Cleaners. Douglas says it is a documentary style program that follows his team as they cleaned up crime scenes and meth labs.
The show will air on England’s Channel 4, and will not be available to U.S. residents. Douglas said clips are expected to be posted on Youtube after the show airs.
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“What they wanted to do was take a number of United States companies and UK companies and follow them around and have us do self recordings with GoPros,” Douglas said
The show will consist of ten one-hour episodes, with Xtreme Cleaners being featured on eight segments throughout the series.
This isn’t Xtreme Cleaners’ first time being featured on TV. In 2011, Douglas’ company caught TLC’s attention when the network launched Ultimate Cleaners. The reality show followed Douglas and his crew around as they tackled messes most others wouldn’t want to clean, or weren’t equipped for.
In 2015, the company was tapped for another reality show on Oxygen. Dead Clean followed a group of millennial women working for Douglas’ company, cleaning crime scenes, hoarders’ homes, and meth labs from New Orleans to Baton Rouge. Douglas noted some major differences between filming a reality TV show versus a documentary.
“With reality TV, you can do scenes over again with different people and different interactions. You might be prompted by production on interactions with each other. They might go, ‘Oh, talk to your brother about taking out the cabinets over there,’ so you’d go over there. Whereas here, there’s no prompting. It’s all just whatever is happening and our team doing it. That’s what’s being recorded, so there’s no outside influence,” Douglas explained.
Douglas said Channel 4 has already reached out to him about content for a potential second season.
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