A book on how to cut up a body. A skeleton with removable organs. Postcards from Alcatraz. A souvenir newspaper headline asking, “Where are all the boy toys?”

If you didn’t know what Stephanie Page does for a living, these office accoutrements might make you queasy.

But for a public defender, such unique and often gruesome items build the four walls in which you live your life. Of course, there’s the occasional inspirational quote from Amelia Earhart to add some balance to the environment.

“Women must try to do things as men have tried,” Page says, reading from a poster featuring the famous aviator. “When they fail, their failure must be but a challenge to others.”

A career public defender, Page is no stranger to the bizarre, the grotesque, the truly horrific. She represents indigent defendants accused of everything from felony drug possession to rape and murder.

While you might not recognize her name, you’ll likely recall some of the more salacious cases in which she’s been involved. Remember the dominatrix accused of cutting up her client’s body and tossing him in a dumpster in Maine? Page won the woman her acquittal. But it wasn’t without first immersing herself in the mysterious world of S&M.

“As anyone knows who has gone into a toy shop, an erotic shop, it’s another world,” says the pint-sized, 58-year-old lawyer. “The chains, the ties, the leather — all that stuff.”

More important than defending her client’s S&M lifestyle in that case, Page says, was proving how difficult it would have been for the 56-year-old dominatrix to cut up the body of her 260-pound client without leaving a trace.

“The facts of that case were a huge body was supposed to have been cut up in a bathtub,” says Page of the high-profile trial that made more then a few headlines last year. “Anybody who cooks knows when you cut up a chicken on a cutting board, you leave a mark.”

Page soon found herself reading books about how to cut up a body and interviewing experts from the Body Farm, a facility at the University of Tennessee where decomposition is studied. There, bodies are exposed in numerous ways — from being buried in shallow graves to left rotting in the trunks of cars — to show how they decompose under varying conditions. The Body Farm has been featured in “CSI” and replicated on episodes of “Law & Order,” and it is also a training ground for the FBI.

While Page was unable to attend a live autopsy to further research her case, she discovered another way to get up to speed in that area.
“You can actually see autopsies online,” she says, somewhat incredulously. “You just put in ‘autopsy’ under Google.”

It was on the Internet that Page was also able to find “The Visible Man” — a skeletal model with removable bones and organs.

“It used to be very popular for young kids as a Christmas present in the ’60s,” she says. “I had to go on eBay to get it.”

But, for the purposes of her client’s defense, Page soon found that “The Visible Man” “wasn’t messy enough; it was too neat.”

Perhaps the most potentially damaging pieces of evidence in the dominatrix case were the photos: salacious images of the S&M underworld that Page worried would frighten and prejudice the jury against her client.

Photos like that often become wallpaper in Page’s office, as she attempts to desensitize herself to the imagery while gauging the reactions they cause in random visitors. As she recalls the gruesome images of her nearly 30-year career, one can almost sense that they’ve become a blur. Then, suddenly, something unforgettable springs to mind.

“I had a bomb case where somebody was blown up,” remembers Page. “It was horrific.”

The attorney has found herself everywhere from the basement of a Quincy home where investigators were digging for a body to a Route 66 motel room in New Mexico where a kidnapping victim was supposed to have been held. There, she and another public defender talked their way into the room by claiming it was their honeymoon suite.

“It was a dive!” laughs Page. “Comparable to the old parts of Route 1 up north.”

Asked if these gritty scenes ever scare her, Page shrugs it off as par for the course. And considering the fact that she’s outstayed most of her public defender colleagues, it doesn’t seem she would have it any other way.

“The reason you’re doing it is because someone’s life is in your hands,” she explains. “Obviously you’re careful. But I’m often more afraid of the police than I am of the places where I’m investigating.” {EXA}

Jeannie Greeley, formerly a reporter for Lawyers Weekly, is a freelance writer.

Learning to cut up bodies all in day’s work for public defender