He sees dead people at the rate of roughly 1,000 a year. He autopsies about 450 of them.

And he's a consultant to "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation," the Emmy-Award-winning CBS-TV show with the famously diabolical murder plots.

So you can forgive forensic pathologist Dr. Gary D. Telgenhoff his black humor.

And you can shiver over his gruesome stories, such as the one about the teenager who climbed into a pizza shop chimney and got stuck.

(The body was discovered only after a strange odor began emanating from the oven.)

Telgenhoff, who still eats pizza, will tell you all about such stuff when he delivers the Millersville University 2007 Brossman Science Lecture at 7 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 8, in Lyte Auditorium.

Tickets are required, but the talk is free and open to the public. (Please see Page B6.)

It just won't necessarily be light and frothy.

"My perception of humanity is very, very jaded," reinforces Telgenhoff, who is deputy medical examiner for the Clark County Coroner's Office in Las Vegas, Nev., a city known, among other features, for its suicide leapers.

And so Telgenhoff has come to view human beings as hapless, helpless slaves to passion and circumstance. Pinballs, if you will, knocked this way and that by fate.

"So the hamster wheel keeps spinning," he writes in an e-mail interview, "and the rats keep running through the maze. Depressing enough for ya yet?"

Well, um, yeah.

But there are upsides. All that exposure to death and "spooge," which is Telgenhoff-speak for putrefied flesh, has made him hold life more dear.

Then there are those amazing stories. Telgenhoff is one in his own right.

Path to pathology

The tale starts in Cadillac, Mich., where he was born in 1957. The short version of his middle-class childhood goes something like this:

Self-described former "weird" kid develops interest in dissecting animal parts (Telgenhoff had a friend who was a meat inspector) and playing Beatles records. Spatters basement with broken glass and pieces of fruit while trying to make wine. Freaks out parents by stowing carcass of piglet in freezer. Grows up and majors in chemistry and biology.

And drums.

Telgenhoff ascended the rock 'n' roll hierarchy, eventually performing with name musicians such as Bob Seger. But his abiding dream to be widely "recognized and adored" fell short.

Whack went the pinball paddle.

"I started back to school," Telgenhoff reflects. "Before I knew it I had a master's degree and was applying to medical school."

Fourteen years of sacrifice later, as if from a chrysalis, he emerged a forensic pathologist. He moved to Nevada and encountered would-be television writer Anthony Zuiker.

The script Zuiker was shopping around at the time became the top-rated "CSI."

During his talk here, Telgenhoff will compare true-life forensics with those on the show.

"I don't get a chance to watch it much," he notes. But he has good words for the cast and crew, who he says have become his friends. He says "CSI" tries hard to portray realistic medical scenerios.

On the other hand, it is Hollywood. And so Dr. Gil Grissom (William Peterson) and the other "CSI" heroes routinely run their own investigations. They establish time of death to the minute. They complete DNA tests in a matter of hours. And, of course, they uncover lurid homicides each week.

None of this happens in real life.

In actuality, Telgenhoff says, the whoppers come along once a year "if you are lucky." A few stand out.

In a 2002 interview by Elyse Dickenson, posted online, Telgenhoff recalled a case in which a woman murdered her mother and then maneuvered the body into a waste bucket. The taped-shut bucket sat in a rented storage unit under the hot Nevada sun for a couple of years.

By the time Telgenhoff opened the foul-smelling container, he reported, the rotted corpse rolled out "like a cheeseball."

When bodies don't have a chance to liquify, however, Telgenhoff says, one might identify their internal organs by feel.

"The pancreas is about the size of an average fish fillet at a seafood counter," he notes on his Web site, www.skinnerrat.com. "It has about the same firmness but 'lumpier.'

"A kidney fits nicely into the palm of your hand. It has a firm rubbery texture. The surface is smooth. A liver is a large heavy thing ... hard to mistake. It usually requires two hands to lift."

Such noirish particulars have firmly grounded Telgenhoff in the here and now.

"The questions of death and afterlife were always central to me," reflects Telgenhoff, who attended a Christian college.

"I finally realized that priests and preachers had no more insight or access to knowledge than any of the rest of us. Why talk to the clergy about afterlife? They've never been there either. At best, it's all unknowable."

But that doesn't mean scientists won't continue to probe death with increasing expertise.

Forensic tools will never match the public's expectations, according to Telgenhoff, but they're improving.

One promising technology is the "virtopsy," a kind of virtual autopsy done with a specialized CAT scan.

"It will be a long time in coming and faces a great hurdle in its acceptance," predicts Telgenhoff. "The CAT scan interpretations we have now have large margins of error. Of course, this depends on who is doing the interpreting."

Still, he says, the science has gotten better since the first O.J. debacle "because the public now knows who we are and what we do and demands more from us."

Telgenhoff often helps spread the word by testifying in court. He gives talks around the country, and he's appeared on CNN's high-profile "Nancy Grace" talk show.

Yet, the Las Vegas movie star world of neon and shrimp cocktails has thus far failed to penetrate more than skin deep.

"I'm older, uglier, fatter and much more cynical," Telgenhoff observes, but "I don't need a Jag or a Porsche. I don't relate to those that do."

Nor does he subscribe to a doomsday vision. Society is just getting more crowded, Telgenhoff points out comfortingly, not more violent.

"Remember the Coliseum? How about the French Revolution, the Inquisition, the Holocaust? Pretty stiff competition (if you don't mind the pun)."

He's found a comfortable niche among the mayhem.

"I feel like I serve a function," says Telgenhoff, who has long abhorred the idea of dealing with living patients and witnessing their pain.

He still records music (some of which has been aired on "CSI") and he maintains his Web site.

The Skinner rat moniker pays homage to B.F. Skinner, the psychologist who concluded from tests on rats that changes to individual behavior are the result of conditioning by outside stimuli.

"I see humans as being rats in a Skinner box," Telgenhoff explains. "Their demise is as expected and anticipated as the sunrise."

But at least there is a sunrise.

"I have faith that tomorrow could be better somehow," Telgenhoff amends. "I have faith that there may be more challenges ahead for me and perhaps more enjoyable moments. Seeing death every day forces me to appreciate life."n

FOR TICKETS

Tickets are available starting Tuesday, Oct. 16. They may be picked up at the Student Memorial Center ticket window from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. weekdays. Tickets may also be ordered by calling 872-3811 and picking up tickets at Will Call. Online ticketing is available at www.muticketsonline.com, but there is a processing charge for each ticket.

Jon Rutter, Sunday News staff writer, can be reached at jrutter@lnpnews.com.