As this is a Nightmare Fuel page, spoilers will be left unmarked. You Have Been Warned!
While most of the victims' bodies you examine are fairly mundane if they were stabbed or shot, cases involving women that were beaten or strangled will have very realistic looking bruises and cuts that are downright horrifying. Moreso if the bodies are naked.
In the intro for nearly every case on the Homicide desk, a woman is seen in a secluded area before being attacked by the killer. In the first case, a victim can be seen tied up and dragged out of a car, whimpering and crying in fear. The kidnapper takes a tire iron and smashes her skull, causing her to let out a very high pitched scream of pain. Every smash the murderer makes has the woman's screams grow more and more quiet until she is completely silent. While everything is done without any light at all so you can't see the details, the sounds alone are more than terrifying enough.
The entire Black Dahlia case is just a very unsettling matter to deal with, almost going into a horror movie type deal. Especially since every case (including the titular Black Dahlia murder) are based on real murders that happened around Los Angeles during 1947.
Garrett Mason's hideout in the old Christ Crown of Thorns Church is straight out of a horror film. Complete with bloodied surgical tools, anatomy diagrams, lit candles and a bathtub soaked in blood and chunks of flesh. Phelps even wonders if the bathtub is the very one Mason murdered Elizabeth Short in.
In "The Consul's Car", you find a notebook filled with names belonging to the titular consul. All of them belong to children. And then there are the descriptions under each name.
When you hear the explanation on why the corpses of the victims of an arson case look like they're praying, you'll feel something in your stomach.
While Phelps and company discuss the evidence, or lack thereof, one of the corpses crumbles. It's too much for even Biggs to handle.
If you want to make it worse, after checking the corpse, listen to this piece of soundtrack.
Ira Hogeboom: You said the house would be empty!
During the "Manifest Destiny" case in Vice, you inspect the Hollywood Post Office after finishing a shootout there...and find a wounded shooter who dies shortly after. The look in his eyes just as he dies... Yeesh.
Not as bad as the other examples, but hearing Jack's scream as he's run over by the bulldozer if you don't move fast enough is pretty shudder-worthy.
The penultimate war flashback. In the one before it, Cole sends a man, flamethrower-wielding Ira Hogeboom, to clear out a cave complex suspected to be filled with Japanese. While he does it successfully, it turns out that the cave complex was being used as a makeshift hospital, with several civilians in it. The game thankfully doesn't show too many of them burning, but it certainly shows enough to get the point across. The guilt and horror of this is what ended up causing Ira to go insane, and even then he seemed to already be losing his grip on sanity, as he needs to be held down by other guys while screaming and wailing.
John Ferdinand Jamison, the man who discovered Evelyn Summers' body. Something seems a bit...off about him at first and you'll soon find your suspicions justified. When investigators find her lipstick freshly applied, it's revealed that it's because John was kissing her. Cue Rusty decking him in the face. Twice.
Even worse? Jamison mentions that he has "Friends" who share the same interest. One of said friends was The Coroner's Chief Assistant!
Carruthers: who knows what he could have gotten up to!?''
In the case, "A Polite Invitation", You are to visit Curtis Benson's Apartment, likely only expecting to find evidence of Benson's participation in corruption and insurance fraud for the Suburban Redevelopment Fund. You find that, but if you refuse to heed Benson's pleas to leave, you kick open the door to his bedroom, finding... a girl in his bed.
Benson: (without a hint of guilt) You take love where you can find it as you get older-
Kelso: LOVE?! That has nothing to do with love Curtis!
Shortly thereafter, Page Franklin says this nauseating line:
Page: He's not so bad. He just lays on top of me and grunts for a few minutes. He's kind and he buys me nice things.
And when Kelso finally forces her to leave, Benson caps it off with a chilling line
Benson: She will only come back.
In "A Different Kind of War", when Phelps examines Fontaine’s body, his neck has realistic bruising from his neck being snapped, and when you turn his head you can hear his broken bones crunching.
The DLC "Nicholson Electroplating" case in the Arson desk. The whole case revolves around a massive explosion at the titular industrial plant that destroys not only the plant, but most of the surrounding block, leaving Oakwood Ave in such a state that Biggs first assumes that it was an attack by the Soviet Union. While the main crux of the case involves investigating a seemingly mundane case of cross-corporate espionage, imagine the events of the case in the perspective of a normal, everyday citizen... Even worse is that it was based on a real life explosion. The aftermath is straight up apocalyptic.
.Ira Hogeboom: You said the house would be empty!