Joseph Scott Morgan dissects the forensic controversies surrounding Jeffrey Epstein's death, highlighting inconsistent ligature marks and missing skeletal evidence that challenge the official suicide narrative. He contrasts this with the brutal Idaho 4 massacre, where TikTok videos revealed the victims' home layout, and analyzes George Floyd's autopsy as a "perfect storm" of intoxication and asphyxia often overshadowed by ideology. Morgan further details his career as a death investigator, recounting traumatic notifications and PTSD, while advocating for forensic genetic genealogy to identify unknown remains and ensure scientific rigor prevails over political expediency in determining cause of death. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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What Is a Death Investigator00:12:36
What's a death investigator?
A death investigator?
Well, we investigate all manner of death.
So it's not.
Most of the time, when people think about death investigation, you tie back to that idea of investigations.
They think of a criminal act.
Well, not all deaths are related to criminal activity.
So, you know, you begin to think about.
Homicide detectives.
Well, what's the focus of a homicide detective?
Well, is it dealing with the body specifically, or is it from a police perspective trying to track down someone that committed a crime that brought this individual to their end?
For us in the medical legal world, I don't, I mean, yeah, I'm just like anybody else, I don't want to see murderers walking up and down the street.
But our spectrum is very broad.
So we do homicides, accidental deaths, suicides, undetermined.
You know, so accidental, I think I mentioned accidental, but natural deaths.
And for me, you know, working in the world that I inhabited for so long and now teaching for so long, I always found that the natural deaths were probably more intellectually stimulating than homicides most of the time.
Interesting.
Yeah.
So, what is your job when you get to a crime scene?
We are the eyes and the ears of the forensic pathologist in the field.
So, if you work for a coroner's office or a medical examiner's office, which they do the same thing, but they're distinctly different, okay?
The coroner and the medical examiner.
Mm hmm.
Okay.
Yeah.
And like in Florida, they don't have coroners here, they have medical examiners.
As a matter of fact, the medical examiners in Florida are regionalized.
So, you've got various regions throughout the state.
And each one of those offices is headed up by a forensic pathologist.
Whereas, if you go to a state that still has a coroner system, which there's approximately 24, I think, they're elected officials and they may or may not be physicians.
So, you come to some place like Florida where the person running the office is actually not just a physician, they're a board certified forensic pathologist.
I started my career in Louisiana.
Way back when, when dinosaurs were on the earth.
And in that world, the parish coroner was elected.
But in order to.
Steve, that's really loud, bro.
You're chewing.
Really?
Yeah.
The chewing returns.
It's kind of.
Yeah.
You're masticating over there.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
In order to run for the office of coroner in Louisiana, you have to be.
Physician, but if you go to say another state that has a coroner system, you don't even have to have a high school degree, you can just merely have a GED.
And look, some of the brightest people I've ever met are don't have formal education.
All right, I come from a family that doesn't have much of an educational background, right?
So, but you lack an understanding of basic human disease pathology.
You know, understanding that.
How does the mechanism of death work if you're absent that kind of foundational training?
And the way I've always looked at it is that we give a lot of lip service in this country to what we're going to do for our kids educationally or some special project that the government wants to fund, a new after-school program or a new playground and that sort of thing.
where you've still got coroner's offices that don't have coolers that function.
And people don't think about the dead.
They never have.
They don't want to think about the dead.
They want to think happy thoughts.
But the dead are probably, in many places, one of the most underserved populations that are out there.
And by extension, their families are underserved.
Let that sink in just for a second.
I mean, I don't know how many folks that are watching this conversation right now, but everybody can kind of tie back to that moment in time when you found out you had a loved one that died.
And you don't, you're in a vacuum with that.
It's something that's very personal.
It's something that's very, very personal to that individual.
And it's a hell of a burden to bear.
You know, it's a final moment that you can't retreat from.
They're gone forever and ever.
Amen.
There will always be an empty chair at Thanksgiving.
And most governments that fund these kinds, you know, whatever their medical legal system happens to be, whether it's coroner or medical examiner, they don't, people don't understand, you know, the politicians don't understand the dead and they don't understand their families.
And they'll go pay lip service to it and say, well, we've had another person shot down in the street.
You know, this scourge can't go on.
You never think about what happens to the body, how that government agency is going to handle the body, how they're going to take care of them, how they're going to get them identified, which has always been a major problem right now.
You know, the NAMIS list, which is the database that we have nationally, is filled with in excess of 30,000 unidentified bodies.
You know, and going back ages and ages, you know, people that have remained unidentified for years and years.
Whoa.
Yeah, it's quite striking when you think about it.
And, It's a real shame.
I mean, it's heartbreaking.
So, what typically happens to bodies that are recovered that are not identified?
What's the standard protocol?
Well, up until a few years ago, many medical legal organizations would merely have the body cremated after they had done a dental exam, perhaps had taken some kind of biological sample that could be retained for the purposes of DNA in the future.
But there's kind of this seminal moment that took place in South Carolina where the body of a decomposing African American male was found in a creek.
And that creek cut through Marlborough County, South Carolina, that on the other side of the creek was North Carolina.
But the body happened to be in Marlborough County.
And the body was severely decomposed, obviously a homicide victim.
Couldn't get him ID'd.
And the little coroner, little coroner's office that was in Marlborough County, didn't have space for the body.
None.
They didn't have a cooler or anything.
Well, they had the body cremated.
That was Michael Jordan's father.
What?
Yeah.
So you can imagine the Jordan's family, you know, Jordan's family, how taken aback, but, you know, because you hand them over.
You know, some type of receptacle containing ashes, and that's all you have left.
Even if the body is decomposed, I can't necessarily fault the guy in the coroner.
You know, he can't take the body home with him.
You know, what's he going to do with the body?
They just didn't have the resources for that.
And that's not an isolated event.
I mean, that happened, you know.
But now I think that people, that was kind of a wake up call.
I think.
How long was his body out there before they found it?
For, like, I can't tell you, yeah, it was long enough for him to be in a moderate to advanced state of decomposition.
And if you remember, he was essentially carjacked, right?
And his car was that luxury sports car looking Lexus thing that he did a two door thing, you know, that he drove.
This was early 90s, no, no, this is back in the 2000s, early 2000s.
This is that late, yeah.
Oh, wow, I thought it happened way earlier than that.
So it says '93 here, maybe that's wrong.
Oh, his body was found August 3rd, 1993.
Yeah, sorry.
Oh, okay.
1993.
Right, okay.
So, you know, it's problematic.
It's problematic when you begin to think about it.
And it would take a case like that, I think, to give a wake up call to some of these isolated locations.
But again, yeah, they could be facing the same thing.
You never know where death is going to visit at any moment in time.
Now, I want to talk about, I mean, I want to talk.
about the Coburger stuff.
I wanted to ask you about the Epstein stuff.
But before we do all that, can you sort of walk me through how you got from your upbringing in, I think you were like raised in like a trailer park in Florida, is that right?
Louisiana.
Louisiana.
Oh, it was Louisiana.
I thought it was Florida.
Yeah, another trailer park in Georgia.
So like start like from there leading into how did you get interested into doing this stuff, investigating these homicides and even working in like a coroner's office and all this?
Yeah, I kind of came backwards into my career, I think, and a lot of it had to do with, to a certain degree, my upbringing.
I think early on, when I was born, I was actually named in honor of a great uncle that was a homicide victim.
And he was shot down in the streets of West Monroe, Louisiana.
And his name was Joseph, and he was the brother of my.
Paternal grandmother who I adored that essentially had a big hand in raising me.
And when my father got home from his service in the Marine Corps, which was mandatory, by the way, because he had attempted to kill our whole family.
What?
Yeah.
Yeah.
My grandmother hid me beneath a bed.
And I write about it in my memoir from several years back.
But he was, there used to be this kind of rule, you know, back in the late.
60s, early 70s, you know, Vietnam had spun up, and it's like, all right, you're either going to go to the penitentiary or you can join the Marine Corps.
And he chose Marine Corps.
And so, but as soon as he got out of the Corps, he promptly picked me and my mother up, and we headed out to Georgia, left Louisiana, which I am a proud Louisianian, my home state.
When he got to Georgia, he lived there with us for about a year and then abandoned me and my mother.
Again, in another trailer.
And so he's off.
I don't really see him again.
And my mother remarried, to say the very least, a very interesting person.
And it set a fire within me because of the experience I had with stepfather.
Because I was, as a child, I was always told that you're going to turn out just like your dad, you're going to be him.
That's what was going to happen.
HelloFresh and Family Secrets00:02:22
And.
It's kind of funny.
I had this revelation many years later.
I was a Seinfeld fan, still am.
And the episode where George is going to do the opposite.
And in there, he'll do the opposite of anything else he's ever done.
His life will work out.
Well, I've been doing the opposite for years and years.
And I think a lot of people that come up in these worlds of abuse and all that sort of stuff say, I'm not going to be like that.
But I was purposed in my life that I was not going to be.
Like him, that I was going to achieve something, that I was going to set a standard, you know, perhaps for myself, most importantly.
But more importantly, I was going to be a good husband and a good father, you know, in addition to being a success.
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The Burden of Daily Deaths00:10:50
It's linked down below.
Now back to the show.
And the fatherhood and marriage were down the line for me.
When I finally got back to Louisiana as a very young man, I happened to.
Be working in a hospital doing orderly work as I was attending a junior college, community college down there, Delgado, and the parish morgue was being renovated, parishes instead of counties, and the coroner's office was coming there to do autopsies.
I happened to meet the coroner investigator for that office, happened to meet the forensic pathologist.
And I was a guy, I was just like an orderly, and I was bringing the bodies in and out of the morgue.
They just asked you one day.
Yeah, well, I mean, it was just kind of what you did.
And they took a liking to me.
I started attending autopsies on my own in my free time in between working and going to school.
And I was studying criminal justice and biology, which is kind of an interesting mix.
And I started attending autopsies on my own, even though I never got paid for it.
And then I started volunteering to clean the morgue.
Which if you think you've ever had a mess at your house, just imagine sweeping up maggots and cleaning up blood and decomp fluid and all that.
But I just kind of immersed myself into this environment because as horrible as those things are, I began to realize that I had an opportunity to sit at the feet of these very learned people and do essentially their bidding in that.
But it's this kind of transactional relationship where I was gaining knowledge.
And they didn't mind me asking questions, man.
And the next thing I know, one day they're like, You want to close?
And I was like, Yeah, close it down every day.
And they're like, No, we want you to close.
We want to teach you how to close.
And they hand me the.
Close up the body.
Yeah, yeah.
And I'd seen them string needles.
It's not like doing suturing.
If you've ever been in an emergency room and gotten sutures, it's not like that.
So you use a baseball stitch.
With a big S needle, and you're using kite string.
So, you know, you're sewing the body up with the standard wine, you know, the wine scission they make to open the bodies.
Everybody's seen this on TV shows, references made to this.
And I had to close the head up, you know, had to bag the organs.
All the organs go into one bag and they're placed down into the chest cavity, and then everything's sewed up.
But, you know, while I was doing that, because they saw that I had a willingness to, To learn, and then I was doing a good job cleaning up.
Eventually, the pathologist looked at me and said, You want to open?
And I was like, Yeah, dude, sure, I'll give it a shot.
So here I am, this 21 year old kid with no real formal education or training.
They handed me a scalpel, and I've never been so terrified in my life when I was opening a body for the first time because.
First off, the one thing I kept thinking about, I'm going to cut myself.
And then the other thing that comes into this is you don't know how much pressure to apply.
You know, how much pressure do I apply to this fine edge of this scalpel to press down and initiate that?
Do you use a marker and draw out where you're going to cut first?
No.
You just freehand it.
Freehand it, yeah, because you've been watching them do it.
And, you know, in forensic autopsies in particular, You don't want to make any marks on the body whatsoever, other than to facilitate the opening of the body.
And that's after you've completely examined the body externally.
Because if you make any kind of marking on a body, you might be disrupting evidence.
So it's not like you're going to make a dotted line on the body and follow that.
But after a while, you get grooved with it.
And, you know, I've done thousands, I've participated in thousands of autopsies.
But, Danny, I tell you this, man, out of all of my education I received subsequent to that, the best classroom I was ever in.
And we'll.
Ever be in was the autopsy suite.
It made me a really good death investigator because in that environment, you begin to learn what the forensic pathologist wants.
Right.
Okay.
And contrary to what you see, you know, these new TV programs, forensic pathologists don't go out to crime scenes.
They just, you know, they show them, you know, these.
Showing up.
They will if there's like some kind of like mass fatality event or something that's going to be really high profile.
You know, you take a look at Tom Noguchi, Dr. Noguchi, who was the corner medical examiner in LA for years and years.
He was called the corner of the stars because he did Belushi's autopsy.
He did Sharon Tate's autopsy.
Oh, really?
Oh, yeah.
Bobby Kennedy's.
I mean, the list goes on and on.
Oh, God, an autopsy of a Pregnant woman.
Yeah, I know.
Isn't that something?
And I participated in many of those over the years.
Yeah.
And you're doing, you're doubling up at that point because you're doing two autopsies.
See, most people can't plumb the depths of this most of the time.
And he, Dr. Noguchi, unlike many of his colleagues, you know, he even writes about going out to the Tate house and seeing things.
And I learned he wrote a book, maybe 83 ish.
I think it was called Corner at Large.
And it's, Kind of a quick read.
It's interesting.
And he talks about some of these cases.
Naguchi?
Yeah, Naguchi.
Dr. Thomas Naguchi.
Fascinating character.
As a matter of fact, recently someone has, there you go, has recently written a biography about him.
He's still alive to this point.
He's one of my heroes.
I've had an opportunity to meet him a couple of times.
Dr. Naguchi passed on a bit of great information.
And it's applicable to anybody I'm teaching nowadays.
Our tendency as humans, when you, even as a death investigator, even as a homicide investigator, if you have a deceased individual in a room, in a space, our eyes are drawn to that body.
And he realized, he stated this kind of plainly, he realized that the body is intellectually distracting.
And so it's a very Eastern way of thinking.
He trained himself that He knew that the body was going to be there when all is said and done.
So he trained himself.
If he would go out on scenes, he would force himself to look up.
He would look up and he would start in the superior space like this and he would begin to kind of pivot around, look at the ceiling, the walls, being able to contextualize the body in its environment.
And then finally, his eyes made it to the body.
He wasn't distracted by the body and then everything else.
Becomes an adjunct to it.
Yeah.
And, you know, there are cases out there where people get so laser focused on the body, they don't appreciate the periphery.
And many times the tale is actually told in the periphery when, you know, you begin to think about blood splatter deposition, or you begin to think about broken furniture or broken window and all those sorts of things.
And you haven't really been an empty pill bottle that maybe because your brain is so affected by that information that's coming in from this person that's.
This life has ended in such a horrible way.
Rather distracting.
And he understood that.
But he's the exception relative to forensic pathologists.
The lion's share of them do not go out to scene.
So for me, as a medical legal death investigator, first off, I understood my place in the pecking order.
They're the boss, but we're the eyes and the ears of that person at the scene, and we collect the data, contextualize the body, examine the body at the scene, take all the preventative measures.
That's where we can guard any kind of trace evidence or contact evidence that's on the body.
We have to make sure that the body remains as pristine as possible.
And then we relate that information to the forensic pathologist because they might be back at the shop doing autopsies.
You know, they're, you know, elbow deep in maybe five cases that day.
And just because they're doing cases doesn't mean that death stops, it continues on.
It's 365 days a year, brother.
It never stops for Christmas.
It doesn't stop for Thanksgiving.
It doesn't care if you've got a birthday party for your kids or baseball or a dance, you know, whatever.
It just keeps coming day in and day out.
And that's kind of where my field varies from like policing.
There's no getting kitty cats out of the trees.
There's no reuniting a lost child with a parent.
None of that stuff exists in our world.
It's death day in and day out.
find out who they are and getting the families notified, which is one of the worst aspects in my world because I did, I don't know, roughly 2,000 in-person death notifications as well.
Oh, my God.
And so that weighs really heavy on you because the first one I ever did, I still remember it to this day.
And the last one was just as bad as the first one.
That almost has to be worse than dealing with the dead bodies.
Worst Aspects of Notifications00:06:48
It is because, you know, at that point, they're inanimate.
You know, they're changing their lives forever.
Yeah, you are.
I've equated it to pulling a pin on a grenade and throwing it into the room, shutting the door behind you.
And you hear the yells and the screams and that sort of thing.
And, you know, there's an old saying in the South where people say it's all over but the shouting.
Well, the shouting never ends.
And even for these families years later, that screaming in their brains, it's always screaming.
And you'll, I'll tell you a quick story, something that, I've related before, but I had a young man that was just absolutely high off his ass.
He had been smoking weed, you know, all morning long.
He had a dirt bike.
And in New Orleans, they have what's referred to people outside of New Orleans don't really understand this, but they have the center of the road, which most people call the median.
They call it the neutral ground.
There's a long history behind that term.
People can look it up.
But he was.
He was on his dirt bike on this four lane road that is separated by canal.
You know, eastbound lanes are separated from the westbound lanes by canal, and there's a power line that runs, you know, following the canal.
And he's just racing up and down.
So in Louisiana?
Yeah, this is in the New Orleans metro area.
And this kid was on this bike.
He's in his early 20s, and he hits a guide wire that comes down to hold these power lines in place.
And it diagonally decapitates him.
And there were a group of kids standing there, and they watched this whole thing.
We interviewed them, and they were.
They gave a great description, but they talked about the bike tumbled, his body tumbled, and then his head kind of rolled behind it.
And that's literally the position that I found him in when I got there.
Well, I went and examined his body, pulled out his wallet, found his driver's license, and we collected all of his remains, took our photos and measurements and all this stuff.
And I grabbed a deputy sheriff and I said, They're sitting too far away.
Let's roll over here and notify, you know, see if anybody's at home.
Rolled up, and it's kind of a typical, much like Florida, it's kind of a typical New Orleans home.
There's a boat in the driveway on a trailer, you know, and very Florida.
Live oak tree in the front yard.
Get out of my car, got the deputy with me.
I go up to the door, pull up my badge, I badge them, you know, I knock on the door, badge them.
This lady comes to the door, and I said, ma'am, I need to talk to you.
Um, are you related to this kid?
And she said, Yes, that's my son.
And immediately she's, you know, she goes into what's wrong, what's happened, you know, on and on.
Her husband comes down and he immediately screams out, What are you doing here?
What are you asking about our son?
I said, We need to sit down.
I go in, I said, And this is kind of the way I notify you can hem and haw around it.
So you go inside and sit down.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
And I sit down and I tell him, You know, your son.
Has been killed in an accident.
And of course, she's screaming, carrying on, which is understandable.
And, you know, you leave him with a card, that's what you do.
You know, your business card, and it has here, call this number.
This is where his remains will be.
You don't need to make funeral arrangements.
We're going to take him back to the office.
We're going to do an autopsy, do an examination.
That went in that direction, and it was, Probably six months later, I was on duty.
I got a call from police.
We need you out at this address.
And this address was on Airline Highway in New Orleans.
And if anyone's familiar with Airline Highway, this is where all the no-till motels are.
It's where famously Jimmy Swagger just gacked out a couple of weeks ago.
That's where he got caught with the prostitutes.
He'd come down to New Orleans.
He, you know, he'd.
Pick up a prostitute and really disgusting stuff.
It's that same collection of these no-till motels.
And a guy had barricaded himself in a room, and he was apparently a deputy sheriff.
And they'd called SWAT out.
He popped himself in the head and he died, right?
So I go out and I'm looking over the scene, and this is one of these little slices of life, you know, that you don't really get in any other context.
His badge case is there, which commonly, if you're in law enforcement, you'll put your license in your badge case so you can get out of a ticket.
You know, you put, oh, yeah, well, yeah, my license is in here somewhere.
And they say the badge.
Oh, well, who do you work for?
Just go on.
And so, and he had a Beretta nine millimeter pistol.
It was his service weapon.
He was a reserve deputy in an adjacent parish.
And this guy was just like super jacked.
It turned out he had had roid rage.
You know, he just, he was always angry, aggressive, and all this sort of thing.
Suffered also from depression, shot himself, pulled out his driver's license, and the address was familiar.
And I grabbed a deputy, and off we go.
Now, this is pre Katrina.
So New Orleans was in excess of a million people at this time, the greater New Orleans area.
And pulled up at the house.
Boats in the driveway, live oak trees in the front yard.
And this was probably about 11 o'clock at night.
It was a dad?
Mom and dad were both there.
And I knocked on the door.
And this is not the greatest face in the world, but you would think that she had seen a demon rise from hell.
The scream that went out, and I put my badge up and I said, I need to talk to you.
That's the kind of thing that happens when you notify families.
You never know where it's coming from.
So, this, who was the cop?
He was the brother of the guy that got his head cut.
Minnesota Nice vs. Nightmares00:02:22
An older brother or something?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Both sons.
Yeah.
Whoa.
Yeah.
So, you work in this world where you never really know where anything's going to come at any point in time.
You know, it's a, you know, where it kind of intersects.
Intersects with these kinds of things, I don't know, it's almost like a weird spiritual kind of thing, you know, because you kind of have to rise above it and understand that the thing that I had to do and didn't do it very well was that I had to convince myself that this is not my grief.
It's not my tin folks.
And you can only do that for so long.
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It takes toll.
Horrific Cases in Trucks00:09:53
Death always takes toll.
Death, when I wrote that book many years ago, I, you know, I anthropomorphized death.
And, I talked about how death was actually a figure in my life that rode along with me.
And it got so bad, particularly toward the end of my career, where it would, you know, death would be there whispering in my ear, You see this boy?
I can do this to you anytime I want.
And I bear witness to death day in and day out.
And listen, I'm not alone.
Right now, as we speak, Nanny, there are people that are out there.
They're doing this job.
They've been doing it for years.
And they're going out on some of the most horrible things that you can imagine decomposed bodies, abused kids that have died, some grandma that has died in the house where the kids didn't give two hoots in hell about her and she's found decomposing her bed because no one's visited her.
And so they're bearing witness to all of this horror day in and day out.
And they're trying to cope with it, but it's really hard if you don't have somebody to talk to about it.
When you were a kid, did you think about death often?
Yeah, I did.
I thought about it first off because named after a homicide victim.
Right.
And that was a big deal in my family.
Well, your Uncle Joe would be real proud of you, you know.
And then the event with my father.
And then reinforced by my stepfather, who I thought was going to kill me.
You know, so when.
Did he actually try to kill you physically?
I got beatings every week, and they were on a schedule.
Jesus Christ, man.
Yeah.
So I used to tell myself when I was a kid that I'd say to God, okay, God, I'm getting all the bad stuff out of the way early in my life.
I don't know how I had the ability to do that because the next part of my life is going to be great.
It's going to be great, man.
I'm getting past all this, but the next part of my life is going to be great no matter what.
And listen, You know, everybody's got a somebody done somebody wrong song, you know.
But in my world, uh, that's kind of how I looked at it and tried to rationalize it and try to understand it.
And it was something to do with you being named after the great uncle and the abuse you had to suffer under your stepfather.
Something flipped a switch in your brain, rewired you in a way where you were just drawn to this.
This stuff, yeah, and first off, I've always been curious, I've got a scientific mind, I enjoy scientific inquiry, particularly when it comes to the biological sciences and trying to understand the mechanism of death.
Um, and I was able to function in the morgue very much easier to function in than being out on the street as an investigator, and so I had to do both those things.
So I would be in the morgue during the day, and then at night.
I would be an investigator.
And so I would take a call at night and run all the cases.
And back then, we had a really small office.
There were only, when I started, we only had three investigators.
And then two of us worked in the morgue.
So you'd have one week off, one week off from working in the morgue.
And then at night, you know, you're rolling on cases and you have to get that body into the morgue.
You have your livery service that takes the body and you're having to fill out paperwork because you don't, most of the time, you don't go to the morgue with the body because there are other calls holding.
And it can be anything.
It's a grab bag.
You never know what's next.
That's one of the things.
First off, when you're young, it's exhilarating.
You know, you get a call from dispatch that they need you at this, and you don't know what it is.
And, you know, you're jacked on that.
You know, when you're a kid, after a while, it gets rote.
And then, even further down the road, it's horrific.
I don't want to do this anymore.
I don't want to do it.
Yeah, I've always looked at people who do this kind of thing, this type of stuff, whether it be what you did.
Or even firefighters who see some terrible stuff as like a different breed of human, you know, because I could never, I could never see myself not in my wildest dreams, like ever.
I would do anything in my power to not do this kind of stuff.
Like, I want to be nowhere near anything like this.
Yeah.
You would think that I think you'd go to a default where you would recoil.
Yeah.
But that flame that had started in me and that was further.
Exacerbated by what I went through, you know, growing up through my teenage years.
I could go out on something because I was trying to prove myself.
You know, I was trying to prove that I was, you know, I was capable of handling anything and that I was going to shine through and be a real success.
I could go out on some of the most horrific cases where you got like multiple homicides or you've got, you know, You're inside of a piggly wiggly refrigerated truck with 16 unidentified bloated bodies, and you're having to take the jaws out of all of them because a jackup barge in the Gulf of Mexico was trying to outrun a hurricane or a tropical storm.
You wind up getting these bodies, and you're in there and you smell like the dead.
That happened to me in the back of a refrigerator piggly wiggly truck because we didn't have enough room for the bodies.
Oh my god, yeah!
So, next time you see a piggly wiggly truck going down the road, a refrigerator truck, just think about that.
I will, yeah.
Uh, but yeah, so.
Based upon that, and based upon what that was that I went through as a child, I could look at that.
And my stepfather's name was Bruce.
And so I would look at a maggot infested body, bloated, dead for a protracted period of time.
And I would look at it and I'd say, This is bad, but it's not Bruce.
And that's kind of the way I.
I marked myself relative to that, saying, Bruce, it's not Bruce.
I can do this.
And so when I could flip that switch in my brain and I could make detailed notes, I could go and sit down with a forensic pathologist and engage in conversation, passing information on, receiving information back.
That's kind of the marker that I would use for that.
And it wears thin after a while.
How do you compartmentalize this stuff that you see on the job when you were doing it?
Every day.
You don't.
From going home at night.
You don't.
Never.
No.
Do you constantly have these images flashing through your mind?
Yeah, particularly when you're in practice with it.
Yeah.
As a matter of fact, your family gets drawn into it.
When my wife and I first got married, it was kind of an interesting story.
Let me back up a second.
I got the best wife in the world, Kim, Kimmy.
And she went on our first date.
It was a blind date.
And we were in Atlanta and we're sitting across from one another at this pizza joint in Atlanta.
And.
Uh, she was a teacher by trade, public school teacher, and she's like, Now, what is it you do for a living?
And I was like, Well, I'm a medical legal death investigator, that's what I do.
I work at the medical examiner's office and I go out and examine the dead and try to, you know, determine what their manner and cause of death are.
And as we're leaving the pizza restaurant, see, I'm she's absolutely beautiful, and I'm thinking, you know.
My scruffy ass is not going to get another shot at a woman that looks like this.
And so I'm thinking, I got to make the most of this.
And so we're going to the car and we get in the car.
And she said, You know, I never thought about death till I met you.
And you can take that any number of ways.
It's like, I've had enough of this date.
I'm going to go end my life, you know.
Or it's like most people don't, you know, they kind of don't really know what happens to the dead after they're gone.
And so you, the world that, That we inhabit, most people cannot.
When you try to talk to them about it, if you're at a cocktail party or you're having dinner, they want to hear your ghastly stories, but they don't want to hear the price that you've paid for those ghastly stories.
So, back to my wife, once we got married, to give you an indication as to what it was like, when I would get home in the evenings, we had a laundry room, kind of like a mud room on the back of the house.
I'd park in the back of the house, I'd walk up to the steps.
And she would meet me at that back door and she would say, Do you have a decomp today?
And this is a common occurrence, a common conversation.
Ghosts in Our Neighborhoods00:03:20
Now, I didn't have one today.
Next day, did you have a decomp?
Yeah.
Okay.
Go ahead and take your clothes off.
And I take my clothes off on the stoop.
And she, you know, she burned them.
No.
She'd clean them for me.
Wow.
And so, with, you know, the spouses, they have.
Have a loved one that are involved in this.
You can't escape it.
It's like, you know, when we were dating, we'd ride through Atlanta and I wouldn't say, hey, look at that beautiful building.
I'd say, I had a homicide there, had suicide there.
I worked a multi car fatality right there.
One of the original Krispy Krems in the South is located on Ponce, Ponce de Leon Avenue.
And like many people, I enjoy Hot Fresh now.
So there you go, free plug.
We would.
In our dating years, we would go there and watch them come off the line.
And I would sit there and I'd get these donuts off the line.
And across the street from where we were, I'd had on one street corner, I'd had two homicides and I'd had a motor vehicle accident where a guy was driving a Ferrari that had him and his girlfriend had wrapped around a pole and they'd both died.
So that's just inhabiting that one geographic location.
And so when you live in a place like that, Your brain is populated, for lack of a better term, with cases, or if you want to go more spiritual, ghost.
Ghost of all of these cases.
So, in the area you lived, obviously, you would like what's the farthest you would travel out to go to a crime scene or something like this?
Would you go?
Did you have like a 10 mile radius, a 50 mile radius?
No.
Fulton County is huge.
I work for Fulton County.
So, in, well, in Atlanta, well, New Orleans as well.
I worked in Fulton County and to drive on a non track, I mean, Atlanta's notorious for traffic, right?
So, if you went from the most distal location in the north part of the county, which In the north part of Fulton County, you can almost see the Blue Ridge Mountains.
If you wanted to drive all the way to the most distal southern portion of it, even at midnight, it would take you, I don't know, maybe an hour and 45 minutes with no traffic.
And then in New Orleans, where I worked in Jefferson Parish, Jefferson Parish Coroner's Office, which is the parish that's immediately adjacent to Orleans Parish.
We went from half, you've heard the world's longest bridge, the causeway that goes across Lake Ponchatrain.
So it's 26 miles long.
Halfway on that bridge is our northernmost portion of the jurisdiction, all the way to the Gulf of Mexico.
And so there were certain parts in that environment where I've gone out on an airboat.
Just to get to a body, to a homicide victim's body.
So it's a vast area and you're servicing.
Memories Seared at Front Doors00:03:17
But you live in this area.
This is like your sister's home.
I lived, yeah, I lived right there in Atlanta.
There's no way.
I didn't live in Atlanta.
I lived a great distance out.
I'd drive 60 miles one way to get to work.
That's got to be a crazy thing because doing this kind of stuff in the place you live in to where like you can't go anywhere for fun or recreation without associating some.
Terrible crime scene with where you're at.
I mean, that's an interesting thing about memory.
I'm reading this book about memory, and there's this ancient Greek writer who wrote about a memory palace, how you can create memory palaces.
And the story goes they were in a big dining hall in ancient Greece, and the place collapsed.
And he was trying to rescue everybody that got trapped under rubble and underneath parts of the building.
And he used his memory.
To sort of like play the event backwards so he could remember who was trapped under what, so he could help rescue people.
And that's how they coined this term memory palace.
And now, what these memory champions do, or these kids who compete all around the world in memory competitions, where they can memorize like a deck of cards backwards, just looking at it once, is they create these memory palaces where they associate memories, visual memories, with specific physical locations.
So they can like go to a building, right?
Like a building like this, and they start at the front door.
And they intentionally place a memory right there at the front door.
Then they'll move into the building and take a left and like walk down a hallway.
They'll place another memory right there and they'll put these memories in specific orders.
So now, all they have to do is once they do that once or twice and think about walking through that building and where they placed each memory physically, associating an image with it.
Now, whenever they just visualize the interior of that building, those memories just come right to them.
So, do they anchor it with like, A red chair, even though a red chair might not be in that space, or how do they anchor that memory in place so that they can go back and recall it?
I think it would be my biggest thing to try to understand.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So, one of the things they would do, like if you wanted to remember, like you said, like a red chair or whatever, they would say, like, if the red chair is the first part of the memory that they have to recall, they would put the red chair by the front door and they would do something, animate it somehow.
Like, think of something novel or unique that you could do with the red chair in your mind's eye to make it, Stand out more or to make it memorized, like anthropomorphize it, give it two eyes, whatever, cover it in blood.
That would be a great way.
A big bloody red chair.
You're never going to forget that.
And that's the first part of what you have to recall about the memory.
So that was like, just say the first card out of the deck of cards.
So you're always going to remember that and associate it with that being the front door is going to be that red bloody chair.
It's like, just gets seared into your memory.
So, anyways, that idea and of experiencing all these crazy.
Overcoming Agoraphobia and PTSD00:06:15
Homicides and suicides and these just awful scenes and living in the same town and being there all the time has to be so traumatic for you.
Yeah, nothing personal against Atlanta, but it's like I don't go there to catch planes.
That's the only reason I go to Atlanta.
If somebody gave me tickets behind home plate for a Braves game, I wouldn't take them.
I'd give them to it.
Yeah, I just, and of course, it.
I say that now, Braves don't play in Atlanta anymore.
They play up north.
So, yeah, maybe I'd take those tickets because I haven't worked in that area.
But there's like, it's so.
And you know, the really insulting thing, Danny, was that when I had like the major break that, you know, kind of put the stake through the heart of my career, I left the office in an ambulance, thought I was having a heart attack.
My wife, I was infantile.
I mean, I was shaking all the time.
It was just, it was horrible.
It was a horrible period of time, real dark, very, very dark, just total mental collapse.
When my wife, and this is before it was cachet to talk about PTSD, all right?
So this was like 2004, 2005.
People were talking about it, but not like they, it seems like everybody in the world's got, I've got PTSD.
She called up, you know, to try to get, try to understand what kind of services there were for me.
And this is kind of seared into her brain.
Lady she was talking about, she said, Well, I can tell you this you're not going to get any disability for PTSD through Fulton County.
Too many people can fake it.
You know, and maybe they can.
I don't know.
I know in my case, though, you know, it kind of left us.
You know, in the lurch as a family.
How did you end up dealing with it?
Started therapy.
I went through three different therapists, and one therapist was so, when I began to tell, I had reoccurring nightmares where I was on the Mississippi River nude on a barge that had broken away, and I was almost tied.
Frozen to the deck of this thing, surrounded by decomposing bodies, and I can't close my mouth.
Flies are coming off the bodies and they're crawling in my mouth.
And that was a reoccurring nightmare.
And the first therapist that I had said, I don't know that I'm going to be able to help you.
And the second therapist I had kind of stared out the window.
Third guy I hit was a PhD psychologist that was a Vietnam vet.
And he helped significantly.
He's kind of the guy that got me prompted initially toward writing.
Because I'd, look, dude, I'd always written like, Technical stuff, you know, forensic reports.
Right.
You know, I was one of those kids in school.
I detested when the teacher said, okay, we're going to journal.
I was like, I hate that crap.
I have no interest in doing this.
Right.
But it planted a seed in me.
And so the best thing that happened, one of the best things that happened for me was I began writing this book.
We lived in a little cabin up in the mountains and I'd gotten an appointment academically.
It was my first stop.
At a college that was up in the North Georgia Mountains.
And I did it.
He was not pleased that I took the job in academia because he said that because they hired me to start a forensics program.
Who was not pleased?
My therapist.
Oh, gosh.
Yeah, he was not pleased with that.
And he said, You're going to go back through this again and again and again.
And of course, you know, I started teaching a course that I designed called Medical Legal Death Investigation at this college.
And he's right, I did relive it.
But you know, it turned out that along with writing the book and talking about this to these kids, where it drew me back to the science of it.
And I knew that I didn't have to go back to the office.
My office now was on campus in this bucolic, beautiful campus place, gorgeous.
And I landed there, and there were still the nightmares that didn't subsist for quite some time.
There was the agoraphobia, you know.
Someplace like Walmart, complete no no, you know, because, or even in restaurants where you, you, what do you call it agoraphobia?
Yeah, agoraphobia, fear of like crowds and being crowded and kind of herded into places.
You don't, and I'm from New Orleans, baby.
I've been going to Mardi Gras for years.
And you can, you know, for me, it unnerves me.
Like if I'm, really?
Yeah, still to this day, if I'm in the bathroom, like at the mirror, my wife walks in the door in the bathroom just to talk to me, I can't stand there.
I have to, you know, I'll shuffle outside the door and, you know, go into a bigger space and talk to her, you know.
Never shared that with anybody.
But yeah, it's just like one similar to claustrophobia.
Yeah, it's claustrophobia and agoraphobia.
Agoraphobia has to do with people.
You have to have people there.
Yeah.
So you could be in a small room by yourself and you're not bothered by it.
If no one else is there, I'm okay.
Wow.
That's cool.
You know, like the space we're in right now, I'm cool, man.
I'm cool.
You know, I know the exit's there, there, there.
You know, I have no problem.
But yeah, it's a combination of the agoraphobia and also being claustrophobic as well.
Brunt Boots for Tough Work00:02:54
Yeah.
I think my biggest tip of the cap to them, hell for me would be on a submarine.
I don't know how people do that.
Oh, my God.
I know, right?
I'm with you there.
I couldn't.
There's no way I could do that.
I was in the National Guard and the Army National Guard.
The reason I joined the Army instead of the Navy is I felt like I could always run, I could always get away from somewhere.
But yeah, there's no way that I could.
Especially one of those tiny submarines like the one that went to the Titanic.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That, yeah.
This thing collapsing in around you.
That's the ultimate.
And that's a nightmare.
That's a reasonable fear for everybody to have, right?
But my fear, this is what my fear was rooted in.
My fear is always the fear of death.
And it comes on you, starts here in the chest, and you shallow breathe.
You start to sweat, get palpitations.
You think you're having a heart attack.
You get lightheaded.
Dizzy, and you feel like you're smothering, you know, like you can't catch your breath.
And again, I go back to the idea of anthropomorphizing death, you know, that specter is kind of not as much today as it once was, but that specter is always there.
You know, I can do this to you anytime I want to.
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Now back to the show.
Well, there's that famous psychologist, Ernest Becker.
Paying Attention to Details00:11:39
Have you ever heard of him?
Yeah, where he talks about the fundamental driver of the human psyche is the fear of death.
Yeah.
That's what drives humans to do everything they do and create art and to leave things behind them that have this symbolic immortality, right?
Kids, art, all kinds of things like that.
Yeah.
It's interesting you should say that.
I hadn't really thought about this too much, but I tell my kids, where I teach now at my university at Jacksonville State, I tell my kids there, you know, you teach them the science of death and you talk about it, you walk them through it, you know, you walk them through, you know, kind of an imaginary crime scene, or you demonstrate images to them, things that you experienced.
But one thing I always come back to is it kind of dovetails with what you're saying here.
I tell these kids, look, no matter what you do, the quality of the report that you write, your observations that you make, 100 years from now, they're not going to view you as a scientist or an adjunct to a scientist or whatever the case might be.
They're going to view you as a historian.
Those things that you write down, the things that you communicate to other people about this death that happened in a very quiet place that no one else took notice of, that the rest of the world probably didn't even know this person was alive.
That's what you're going to leave behind.
And whoever goes back to read that report, for whatever reason, maybe it's a cold case, or maybe they're doing genealogy research just to try to find out about their family.
They're going to learn a lot about you as a person by the level of attention and respect you pay to the dead.
That's forever emblazoned on whatever data source that you're using, whatever platform they'll be using then.
It's a recollection of that.
And that's, you know, in the medical legal world, there's this kind of trite term that's used that's kind of trite, I guess.
We speak for those that can no longer speak for themselves.
You know, how many times have you heard that term?
There's a lot of truth in that, though, because we, I don't view myself as an advocate for justice.
All right.
There's tons of other people that go out screaming about justice.
They want to do this.
I advocate for the dead to try to tell their stories scientifically and let the chips fall where they may.
Right.
But they deserve to have a story told about them.
And there's a fine line to walk here because are you writing a scientific report or are you writing.
A narrative about their life, but you honor them through how much attention to detail.
What draws your eye?
Are you up on your training?
Do you pay attention to everything that's in that environment?
Because you only cross a threshold at a death scene for the first time once.
That's it.
You can't go back and put the genie back in the bottle.
Whatever decisions you make before you enter that space are made.
Period.
End of paragraph.
You have to be so up on your game and paying attention.
Again, it doesn't matter what you got going on at home.
It doesn't matter, do you have enough money in your checking account?
It doesn't matter, oh, yeah, I got to get my oil changed.
None of that stuff matters.
All that matters is in that moment.
And can you summon the will to be in that moment?
People always talk about being in the moment.
Well, we've been doing that for years.
Do you have the capability of Being present in that space and appreciating the environment and appreciating, you know, I don't know what the dead went through.
Can you tell their story?
How much do you know about how the death happened before you get there?
Like, does anyone like say, hey, Joseph, this guy, he was trying to some girl and the dad came and blew his brains out or something like that?
And then, like, you get there and you kind of already have a preconception of like who this guy is.
This guy was a scumbag, you know, or this guy was trying to save somebody's life.
He was a hero.
Yeah, I used to.
I'm glad you brought that up because I used to have this idea in my mind when I would show up at a scene, it's like you're getting bombarded with information.
They're like lobbing grenades at you.
Whether it's the youngest uniformed cop or it's a salty detective, they're throwing information at you.
And it's kind of like Naguchi looking up the ceiling.
I would just as soon go into a scene and not know anything.
I don't want to know what your opinion is.
I don't.
I want you to tell me that this is, yeah, he took the gun, stuck in his mouth, you know, end of story.
I don't want to know that at all.
You can tell me there's a gun there.
You can tell me there's a dead body there.
But other than that, keep your worldview to yourself or whatever has been passed down to you.
I want to see it with my own eyes.
I want to observe it.
I want to photograph it.
And then afterwards, we have a conversation.
We'll have a roundtable discussion.
Hell, we'll hop in the car and go to Denny's or wherever it is and hang out in the back.
I say that because we used to do that actually in New Orleans.
There'd be an area where we would leave a homicide scene.
And we'd gather together and talk about what we'd seen and that sort of stuff.
And you don't have time for that most of the time, but I want to be as uncorrupted as I possibly can.
Because, again, it goes back to how thorough am I going to be with what I'm documenting and passing that information on to whoever wants to use it.
Because, again, back to the medical legal world, I don't care if you're a prosecutor or a defense attorney, we're unbiased.
You know, I don't have a dog in the fight with trying to get somebody that has been accused of something off the hook.
And I don't have a dog in the fight with the prosecutor and they're wanting to seek justice and put this person away for a thousand years.
That's not my job.
That's somebody else's job.
My job is to be focused on the body and relate that information.
But your flesh becomes involved.
You know, you see things, you know.
The, you know.
Yeah, how does it change your views or your worldview?
It really makes you hug your kids a lot tighter and then they don't understand why you get quiet.
That's, you know, when you see a kid, which I did, family had two kids, family had moved 24 times in one year, and the oldest kid was, I don't know, I don't want to state the age, but it was, they should have been up thriving.
They were living off of dirty mop strings in one instance.
They were eating actually dirty diapers.
Oh, God.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And, you know, you look at that and you is it New Orleans?
That one was in New Orleans.
Or you look at, you know, the grandmother who's, you know, that's locked in the basement and she's got erosive breast cancer.
So much so that, you know, when I went to examine her body, the intercostal spaces, the, you know lack of a better term, the rib meat.
You know, if you've ever pulled an intercostal muscle, you know, working out or whatnot, completely gone.
That was in life.
You can actually see her lung.
So she was rotting while she was alive.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And the daughter kept her in the basement.
Both of her breasts were completely gone.
She kept her mom locked in the basement.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And to collect her money.
Oh, my God.
You know, and you tell people those kinds of stories and they don't, they think that it's, It doesn't happen.
It does happen.
It's a reality of the world.
Death is a reality of life.
I had one old pathologist I used to work with say, he used to call me Joey.
He'd say, Joey, he said, the moment you come screaming into this world, you start dying.
Yeah, it's kind of true, man.
That's why at this stage of my life, I'm so very thankful for it.
Every single breath that I draw right now.
Because I don't, you know, I've lived more life than I have to live.
Okay.
You got to look at it that way.
That's the reality of it.
And you have to embrace that because I work so many cases, Danny, where the person got up in the morning, they had a bowl of cornflakes or made an omelet, maybe sat around the table with their wife and walked out the door and they never walked back through the door again.
It ends that quickly.
And you see it in a flash on the news.
Mm hmm.
You know, that continues on, you know, for years and years to come.
You know, it does.
Man, when I had my first kid in like 2019, there was this weird thing that happened to me.
For like the first couple months, I was constantly just thinking about my own death.
It didn't happen with my second or third, just my first.
I would be like, I'd be like, it'd be the middle of the night.
I'd be in his room, like feeding him a bottle or like trying to rock him back to sleep.
And I'd just be thinking about, Like, what it's going to be like when I'm dead, or like, what if I die tomorrow?
Yep.
And I just couldn't shake this.
I was in this weird funk for a couple months.
I think it's kind of normal.
You think?
Yeah, I think so, particularly for new dads.
You feel like you need to, you're the provider.
You want to provide for your kids, make your family safe, all these sorts of things, and all this stuff comes rushing in.
Yeah.
And a flip got switched in me.
Yeah.
Your world, all that.
A switch, I said it backwards.
A switch got flipped in me.
All that crap that seems so very important beforehand is.
It's nothing.
It absolutely means nothing.
And, you know, when you're notifying families, you witness that.
You witness that switch being flipped in families.
And it's not as deep as it's going to go.
But you see them in kind of a moment where they're sitting there, Danny, and they're thinking, They're not coming back.
They're not coming back.
And this is kind of third party.
You've delivered this information.
You're chatting with them or you're trying to chat with them.
You know, they say there was a study that was done years and years ago.
They say when you go out to notify family, they literally only hear about 10% of what you say to them.
Families Witnessing the Switch00:10:04
Yeah.
And then that makes sense.
And let me tell you something, bro.
When it was inevitable, I would be on duty the next day and.
They would have my card.
They would call, and they'd probably been calling through the day until I got back.
And they would say, Look, you told me something yesterday.
You came to my home and told me my son died.
I can't remember what you told me.
And that's like this thing that happens.
You know, all they hear is dead.
And then almost everything else is static afterwards because you've traumatized them so desperately in that moment.
And again, you know, as this kind of messenger of death, you know, where you're going across the countryside and you're delivering this information.
And listen, it's really hard to know when to kind of peel it back a little bit, you know, how much information.
I had a case where I had a guy that was found decomposing in his home.
He had, I don't know how gory I can be with this, but let's just say that he was involved in autoerotic activity.
What is it?
Autoerotic, you know, like getting himself off by asphyxiating himself.
And so he, yeah, and there's been, most of the time people associate with like hanging.
But every now and then people will use like an oxygen deprivant.
And he had an aerosol can that used a compound that in the past dentists had used for deadening of an area around a gum.
And they actually sold it in, for a time, they had been selling it in sex shops in New Orleans in the French Quarter.
And I'll never forget the name of the stuff was called GAS.
It had a big laughing face on the front of it, and it's G A Z Z.
We arrived at the scene, and there's like fruit that's laying whole pieces of fruit, and it's covered with this kind of slimy fecal residue.
Cans of Crisco that are everywhere.
He's bent back on his knees.
He's wearing fish nets, nine inch heels.
He's wearing what I came to find out was a widow's bra.
Didn't know what a widow's bra was, but it's like a corset with a bra built in.
He's got pantyhose stuffed in it, a blonde wig, and he's got a plastic bag over his head that has a can of this stuff, and he'd spritz it.
And oh, by the by, he's got a hand massager, which is plugged directly into the wall, not battery operated.
And it's got two elastic straps.
The theory is you're supposed to use this to, you put this thing on the back of your hand, you massage somebody's back.
That's not what he used.
He had taken his testicles, clamped them off with one of the straps, wrapped the other strap around his penis, and he'd been down for days.
His penis looked like a piece of bacon, it was about that thick.
And so he dies in this environment squalid environment, you know, fecal covered fruit everywhere.
And it was one of the most disgusting things I'd ever seen, even by my measure.
And I was young, very young as an investigator when I. Worked at Case.
And this guy was a computer engineer.
He's highly educated.
And he's from Virginia originally.
He graduated from Virginia Tech, if I remember correctly.
And I had to get his mother notified.
And she lived like in the Tidewater area of Virginia.
And she had that kind of soft, gentle tone, you know, when she talked.
And she was an older lady.
And I'd sent a police officer out to her house.
Had her get on the phone so that I can, you know, notify her over the phone, but with a police officer there.
The ideal thing is, how old was he?
How old was he?
I guess he was probably in his late 30s, probably.
This is back in the 80s in New Orleans.
And in my arrogance, I'm talking about giving people too much information.
In my arrogance, I guess I wanted to impress this little old lady that I had just told her son had died.
She says, How did he die?
And I made the mistake of saying, well, it was autoerotic asphyxia.
She didn't need that information because you know what the next question was?
What you just asked.
What is that?
What's autoerotic asphyxia?
So now I have left her with this scarring stain in her mind of her son being found decomposing on the floor with.
This vibrator attached to plugged into the wall.
Yeah.
I had a moment where I remember, you know, of course, all the cops are standing around and they're like smiling.
The thing was still going when I got there.
They were not going to touch it.
And they were all like looking at me like, who's going to do this?
And I remember thinking in my mind, please, dear God, don't let this be the last thing I see because I don't know.
It wouldn't have been running, I guess, if it had shorted out.
But I had visions for a millisecond that I was going to grab hold of this wire and unplug it and I'd be electrocuted and this would be the last thing I'd see.
But, you know, it was.
Yeah, it would have been.
I guess after a period of time, she wanted to ask that question.
It would have been appropriate to give her that information.
But it's like, you know, the term pabulum, which is something you feed a baby.
She needed pabulum at that moment in time, just enough to sustain her before you move her up.
And it's hard to understand because families will come at you.
They'll say, You tell me how he died.
You know, tell me.
And I can take it.
Huh?
Like, I can take it.
Yeah, I can take it.
You tell me.
And, you know, I've had people, they want to see the body.
You know, I want to see my family's body.
You know, I've had people throw punches, push, all that stuff because the body's in the morgue.
And you tell them, look, you're not going to see the body here.
You need to go ahead and make arrangements at a funeral home.
And I've had on two occasions where I've had families reach out to their attorneys and threaten us if we don't allow them to see the body.
And we acquiesce, okay, but you're going to sign a whole harmless agreement.
And, you know, in two of those cases, families said, guess what they said?
I wish you hadn't let us see the body.
Because the body was just ravaged.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But people don't.
You don't want to remember this person that way.
Personally, you don't want to subject them to this.
It's cruel.
I would not want them to do it.
But, you know.
The craziest thing to think about for me, which I've been thinking about a lot lately, is like when you see people like that guy who just explained that auto asphyxiated himself to death, you know, wearing what he was wearing.
When you see stuff like that, like just imagine.
There was a day in a hospital delivery room where that person was born, and people were so excited.
They just like this baby just was born into this world.
Right.
And it was like the best day of these people's lives.
Yeah.
And this mother that I just assaulted held him close to her chest and she felt him breathe.
She heard his first cry.
Yeah.
She fed him.
Yeah.
That's somebody's child, you know, and it's a that's why death investigation is an.
Interesting space to enter into because you're seeing this huge finale.
You don't have privy to the prelude.
You know that there was a prelude, but you're seeing this huge finale.
And many times it's this fantastical crash.
On the other hand, I've had a lady, I wrote an art, I saw you had Gavin from Vice.
A couple weeks ago, I wrote an article for Vice.
I didn't even know what Vice was.
This is back in 2014.
I told my students at the time, I said, I got an email from somebody at a place called Vice, and they want me to write an article.
How long ago was this?
2014.
Okay.
And they were like, Yeah, I think that's when they were still cool.
Yeah.
And they were like, Vice contacted you, Professor Morning.
I was like, Yeah, who are they?
Then I went and looked at it, and I was like, I don't know if I want to write.
You know, write this, but they did a true crime edition.
And I wound up, you know, writing that article.
And in doing so, you know, I kind of opened up my life to them.
People that hadn't read the memoir and just kind of talked about what it was like out in the field, being a death investigator and the scars that come along with it, the things that you see, the things that you kind of carry around with you forever and ever.
And I think they wound up republishing the thing in seven different languages and all that sort of thing.
And I didn't expect.
You know, what was going to happen happened, you know, with it, and couple that with the book.
And that's how the news media kind of found out about me.
And I've been, you know, kind of indwelling that world ever since, you know, since that period of time.
Thoughts on the Death Penalty00:15:45
What are your thoughts on the death penalty?
My thoughts?
Yeah.
Do you think about it much?
Yeah.
Yeah.
As a matter of fact, I actually do episodes on my show about.
Death penalty and about, but here's kind of the thing when someone it's announced that someone is going to is facing, you know, whatever it is, nitrogen deprivation, which they're using now.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
And they used it in Alabama recently, well, a couple of times.
Nitrogen deprivation.
They put them in a room and sucked.
It looks like a firefighter's mask they put on their face.
Wow.
Yeah.
Is that what they're doing?
Because they never can't get the damn formula right for lethal injection, or people are always protesting about it.
It's not a very pleasant way to die.
I know there's people who say, well, it shouldn't be pleasant.
You know, they did, and, you know, you returned.
And then, you know, you've got these people that are using firing squad now.
And I think they.
South Carolina, I think.
They tried it, and the guy eventually died.
There were.
Some of the shooters that missed the mark.
I don't know how you can miss it.
Right.
Because there's a patch.
You're pretty close up.
Here's the thing about the death penalty.
And I've actually assisted in three autopsies on people that were executed.
So one was an electrocution, and two were lethal injection.
Why would you do an autopsy on somebody?
Because they're in state custody when they die.
Let me ask you this How do you classify the death?
Is it an accident?
That's a good question.
No, it's not an accident.
Is it a suicide?
It's a murder.
It's a homicide.
Yeah, it's a homicide.
It's done at the hand of the state.
It's a legal homicide.
Yeah.
I'm not a big fan of the term murder.
Murder is a lawyer's word, it's very dramatic.
So, homicide is very clinical, you know, and that's one of the five manners of death.
And so, they're in state custody.
As a matter of fact, autopsies on any prisoner, but particularly when it comes to executed individuals, Are more detailed than anything you can possibly imagine.
I'm talking about the soles of the feet are dissected.
What?
Palms of the hands, up and down the arms.
The back is completely dissected out.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Everything stem to stern.
Because what their goal is, they want to, you want to be able to prove this person wasn't tortured in any way prior to the state killing them.
It's an interesting thing.
So, yeah.
So, anyway, I. Who.
Makes the call?
Who dictates that autopsies for these people who have been executed by the state?
Who made the law or the rule that you have to do such an extensive deep dive on the autopsy?
You know, I don't know that they, most states say that they have to be autopsied.
The extent of the autopsy, I think, traditionally has been dictated by the forensic pathology community because they know where problems will arise.
It's like if you have someone that dies in the back of a cruiser, all right, and they're in custody, all right, there will be so much more detail given to that autopsy than any other kind of case.
And the same kind of dissection will generally be done on those individuals that die in police custody.
Even if you have someone that dies in custody of an apparent cardiac event, they're still going to be autopsied because you can't go back and wish that it had been done.
All right.
It has to be done.
If you don't do it at that moment in time, one, they're either going to be buried and vaulted down in the ground.
So you're going to have to have them exhumed.
Or.
They're going to be cremated.
There won't be anything left at that point in time.
So they're going to do it.
So if somebody dies in the state's custody or in the government's custody, you have to be absolutely sure there was no foul play.
There was no.
You don't want there to be any question whatsoever.
That's why so many offices will do things like partial autopsies where they might only open the head or they might only open the chest.
I'm not a proponent of that.
I've always felt like in for a penny, in for a pound.
You got one foot in a boat and one foot in the water.
Make up your mind.
Either do the autopsy or don't do the autopsy with an external exam.
And they'll rationalize in a variety of ways.
But if you're going to go ahead and put the cold steel to a body, you need to do it as thoroughly as you can because we've seen cases where people have been bitten by that.
I covered the Daybell cases up in Idaho, which you had two kids that were murdered.
One of the kids was.
There we go.
Use the word murdered.
Brutally murdered.
I'll put it to you that way.
One of the kids was cocooned and buried on a piece of farmland.
Cocooned?
Yeah, cocooned, like wrapped.
They're wrapped in plastic.
The body was?
Yeah.
And we view that as there's a certain way we view how people, how perpetrators treat bodies after death.
Like cocooning of a body, burying a body, that's memorialization of a body.
That means that you have kind of a tie.
Even the most brutal murder, they're trying to, in their own way, first off, they might be trying to hide the body, obviously, but they're honoring the body.
Whereas this kid's sister was within 50 yards and they used a pickaxe to break her body apart as she's been thrown onto a fire and try to render her down.
Well, the same guy that did this is now on death row in Idaho for killing his wife as well.
And They went out to the scene when she died.
She had a frothy cone.
She had a frothy cone that was coming out of her mouth, which means she was in some kind of congestive failure.
You see it a lot with drug ingestion.
And they were like, yeah, we're not going to do an autopsy.
Well, it turns out that was homicide.
And they transported her from Idaho to Utah, where she was buried there.
And you had to get the Utah State Medical.
Examiner involved in this thing, and her grave was also compromised.
So there had been some water, I think, water intrusion and that sort of thing, and she had already been embalmed.
So, my point of my rambling here is the fact that you need to go ahead and do it.
If you're going to do it, do it.
You don't want to dilly dally around with this because you get that's the thing, you know, death is final in many ways.
It's final because it ends somebody's life, but it's also final in a sense from an investigative perspective that.
If you do not strike while the iron is hot, you're going to find yourself wedged into a horrible position down the road if somebody comes forward and says, Yeah, well, you know, they may have died at somebody else's hand or they may have died in a manner in which it's not consistent with the story we were initially given.
The crazy thing is, so many people get exonerated off death row from new evidence.
I know.
And that's DNA evidence.
Yeah.
And again, that's the only thing that I would say that's well, with the technology that we have now.
I am not as inclined as I once was towards it because there have been screw ups in the past where we know for a fact that people have been executed that were not responsible.
And you can dismiss that if you want to.
I don't mean you, I mean like universally.
You can dismiss that if you want to.
However, you can't reclaim that life, you can't bring it back.
I've actually heard people make the argument, they'll say, well, I'm sure they were guilty of something.
Really?
That rose to the death penalty, that you're going to kill them.
So I think that it is warranted.
It is warranted, but it has to be very specific.
And, buddy, it better be very, very thorough, the investigation.
Do you think it helps victims, families of victims, when the guy who committed the crime gets executed?
I have never, well, Do you think it like psychologically closes any of those doors?
They'll say, well, we can close that chapter, but they're always left wanting.
And here's the other thing if you try to make the argument for deterrence, that argument is facile.
It doesn't exist.
You can't, there's no deterrent that you can connect.
Oh, gee whiz, that guy got executed.
Oh, I better not do this.
I could do it.
25 years later.
So, how does it act as a deterrent?
I always cite, I was just having this discussion the other day with somebody.
There's this, I urge anybody to look this image up because it's a classic image.
It's from the Old West.
Everybody's dressed in black, you know, they're black broadcloth, you know, jackets and all that sort of thing.
And it's a huge crowd that's in the center of this town, and there's a gallows there.
And you can see fathers in the image.
I guess they're fathers, they're grown men, and they have the kids up on their shoulders.
And they're facing the gallows.
You don't see the accused on the gallows.
I don't think you see the accused on the gallows.
But people would bring their kids to these things.
And in our mind, you know, it's like clutch the pearls, you know, that's horrible.
But I don't know it for a fact.
I can actually probably say that the dad was saying, boy, let me tell you something.
If you do this, cause and effect, this is where you're going to wind up.
Right.
And, or just the average citizenry.
You know, yeah, I guess it's a blood sport.
You know, people want the gore of it, you know, kind of like, you know, the terror in France where everybody show up for the guillotining of everyone.
I wasn't necessarily, well, I guess you could drive people with fear that, you know, this can happen to you.
But to my way of thinking, none of these executions have ever, you know, in modern times have never been done so that the public can see it.
And again, it's like anything else with death.
Most people.
Don't realize the reality of death until it happens in their little space.
Yeah.
They don't think it's going to visit them.
That's the weird thing about the executions, too, is they put you in a little theater.
Yeah.
They put the guy, they strap him to the chair, whatever, in this room surrounded with a glass separator, and these people sit in this little peep show.
It's like a little death peep show for the people.
It's such a weird thing.
It is weird.
I got invited to one when I was assigned to the state medical examiner in Georgia for a while.
As a liaison, long story.
But anyway, that's where I participated in these autopsies.
And I had the sense about me at that moment in time that I knew that I didn't want to subject myself to it.
And the way the law is, I think, I'm not sure, don't quote me on this, the medical examiner for the state in Georgia, I think, Will actually attend the execution.
And I got invited, you know, like, once you come, you know, it's like, I don't want warranty.
I got enough horror, you know, sort of rambling around in my brain.
I don't want to watch this.
It's kind of like people that sit around and watch beheading videos.
Why are you doing that?
Yeah, no, yeah.
I went to a, I have a friend who is a lawyer around here who represents, A lot of murder suspects, a lot of people who committed murders, and he defends them for whatever reason.
He's drawn to this kind of stuff.
And there was one specific guy who he was defending who was on death row.
He's been on death row since 1990.
And his name was Ray.
I can't remember his name.
Steven Search Bjorn Brunvond.
B J O R N B R U N B A N D. That's the lawyer.
And then search Ray, murder, death row.
His name was Ray.
He was on death row.
This was like 2015, I remember.
Anyways, he was.
Ray Krohn?
Huh?
Ray Krohn?
No.
He was at the prison in Stark, Florida, where is one of the, I think, one of the two prisons in Florida that they still do executions.
And he was scheduled to be executed.
That evening, that we drove up there, me and my friend with cameras, we were doing a documentary on the whole process of him defending this guy.
And he was like, Yo, there's going to be a crowd across the street.
He's like, Come on, if you want to come interview people, he's like, Go ahead, I'll be there.
So, so we went, and there was this big empty field on one side of the field.
They had, or they, first of all, they had the giant field.
Two specific segments of the field were roped off with caution tape.
One big area that was caution taped off was the people who were basically protesting.
The execution of the guy.
And there were a couple people there who had previously been on death row who had just been exonerated.
Basically, people who were against the death penalty in general had no direct connection to the case or the guy.
The other side were friends and family of the victims that the guy had allegedly murdered.
And it was such a crazy experience going back and forth talking to both of them.
And there was one guy on the pro death crowd who had his daughter.
His daughter was like, Murdered by a guy, and he this was like 10, 15 years before this.
He went there for that execution for that guy, and every single execution he goes to to like help the families and like be there with the families.
But it's like these people aren't even in the little room on the prison, these are they're across the street, just like looking at the prison.
And like it's crazy, there's news cameras everywhere interviewing people, interviewing the lawyers, and like the guy is strapped up on the gurney in that room in that prison.
The Perfect Storm Case00:15:28
While they're waiting for the call from the Supreme Court to whether or not they're going to stay the execution or not.
And sometimes they'll be there for like 10 hours.
I mean, we were there for like probably six hours.
And eventually they said, kill him.
They executed him.
No, this guy wasn't falsely.
This guy.
No, it's not the same guy.
This guy was actually executed.
And they don't know whether it's going to be stayed or not.
So they're literally in that room, I guess, strapped up, getting ready to be injected.
While they're waiting for the Supreme Court to come down.
No, no, no.
They're in an antechamber.
They're not going to leave them because that would be considered to be cruel and unusual.
Right, okay.
So they will, once the call goes in, they'll actually leave them in.
And once the final call has been given, they're not going to leave them strapped down for 10 hours or whatever like that.
They're going to put them in a holding cell.
Right, okay.
Now, I don't, you know, procedurally, you know, corrections is outside my realm, but I do know that.
But that's got to be so psychologically.
Torturing.
Yeah.
Like, I'm sure they, I don't know if they give them last meals anymore or whatever, but like, yeah, they do.
Have your last meal.
You're, you're going to be executed at 10 p.m. tomorrow unless they stay the execution.
And you're like, you're in limbo.
Yeah, you are.
And you don't know if it's, and I think that everybody has this idea that there's going to be this white knight riding on a horse that's going to, you know, if you're, if you're against the death penalty, that they're going to exonerate this thing or somebody, you know, the, the families might actually see, You know, the governor is being their white knight, you know, that's going to, you know, get vengeance for their family.
I don't, I have to be very frank with you.
With the advance of.
That's him, Oscar Ray Bolin.
That was the guy.
With the advance of technology that we have now and what we can learn and what we've learned, particularly about the way certain investigations are conducted.
It gives you pause.
One of the things that I do, I got sidetracked, I was rambling, but I will cover executions from the perspective of the deceased.
Because most of the time when these things splash across the headlines, it's always about the person that's about to be executed.
So we'll go back and And cover what happened.
You know, like who were the victims?
We'll give their background story about the victims and what they were subjected to, how this was handled, what kind of conclusions that the police reached at that point in time.
Because that's what I do with my show.
You know, I try to teach, I use these real world cases to try to teach basic forensics to people that are interested in the true crime world.
So, for me, though, I just know because I've seen what's happened.
I'll give you, for instance, I see what's happening in real time right now with like my friends at Othram Labs down in Texas that are, their goal is to clear out that list I was telling you about, the Namus list, where their goal is to try to, Up in that list and get people identified.
That technology has not existed before.
And what they're doing, I think they've gotten just under 500 people identified now that have been moldering somewhere for years and years, their bones just setting up because they're using forensic genetic genealogy in order to facilitate this.
And they're using open source databases where they can go in and essentially, and this is not about.
Crime.
This is not about, you know, like the Golden State Killer, which was a big deal.
They used forensic genetic genealogy to catch this guy.
But what I'm talking about is just somebody that's found out in the woods.
And I've had tons of these cases that haunt me over the years where you never know who they were.
You might find a single bone.
You might find a skull.
Who knows?
You might have a clandestine burial where somebody just stuffed somebody in the ground and walked away from it and they've been there forever and ever.
But to be able to.
Find out who they are and then pass that information on to the family and say definitively, scientifically, we've identified your loved one.
Do you have somebody missing in your family?
Well, yeah, we had a rumor.
They dropped off the face of the planet.
Well, his body is so and so.
It's in this location and we've confirmed this.
And that person is taken off the list.
And it's an amazing technology.
So, what I'm saying here is that just like that technology is being used in the case of these unidentified bodies, There's new technology that's out there, generally has to do with DNA, where you have to do a deeper dive with some of these cases to make sure that everything is above board, up to speed, that everything was done from an investigative perspective back then,
that it would still stand the scientific test at this point before you push the plunger, pull the trigger, or turn on the gas.
I wonder how they could use AI to do this stuff.
I don't know.
There's been a lot of talk about that, and it certainly would.
You know, these numbers that you deal with in DNA are so mind blowing.
Right.
You know, you begin to think about the expanse of that and how quickly it could be done with AI, you know, applying this and this thing's, and they never, it doesn't sleep.
Right.
It's always working.
And that you have a human that can go back and fact check it.
Mm hmm.
Yeah.
Now, with cases that come up still today, obviously you're not in the field doing this stuff anymore.
You're teaching and you're, um, Getting the word out about it.
But when stuff comes in the news, like this thing that happened with this Koberger guy in Idaho, what prompts you to get involved in it?
And do you actually get involved with them or do you just sort of analyze them?
Analyze.
And how do you analyze this without being hands on or without being.
It can be difficult.
And I try to talk about it in as broad a terms as I possibly can without pointing the finger.
I try to remain a neutral force in this.
Anytime you get into.
The news, media coverage.
It's like I covered the Chauvin case, Derek Chauvin.
Oh, really?
George Floyd, yeah.
That was a controversial one.
Oh, my God.
Yeah, I covered it on air, did it for 18 days, always on air.
I think it was like four hours a day for 18 days.
Interesting.
What did you come up with on that one?
It was horrible.
I hated covering it.
And this is just my personal perspective because the network that I was covering it with at the time would bring in.
Essentially, attorneys that wanted to fight.
I'm kind of the one constant right here.
I'm the science guy, you know, kind of talking about what, trying to explain what they're talking about on the stand from a scientific standpoint and trying to remain as neutral as I possibly can be because so many people had an opinion about that case, you know, one way or another.
It was ideological.
Yeah, it was ideological.
And that's a weird place to be in from a forensics standpoint, you know.
And so I tried to walk that line.
To be very, very careful and purposed in what I was saying, so that you know, if you want to go back and look at it scientifically and understand that you know, with Floyd's death, it was a perfect storm, I think.
Um, you know, you think about the drugs that he had on board, uh, and then you think about the actions that were taken with him, um, and it wound up bringing about his death, regardless of how you know you might personally feel about it from a political standpoint or whatever your worldview is, um, and.
But the most important thing was, are the scientists that are on the stand, how is this going to impact the jury or the judge in making a decision?
Is what they're saying actually feasible?
Okay, because, you know, both sides have their own group of scientists that they're going to call upon.
The defense was at a real disadvantage, I think, because they had very, very little resources to call on relative to.
Medical experts that could address this.
It's the only case that I've ever seen, I think, when it comes to the prosecution, when it came to the medical examiner, that one medical examiner did the autopsy and then the same prosecution offered up,
I think it was a total of two other opinions by forensic pathologists, one of which used to work at the same office that differed from what the Actual pro sector of record said.
That was a real weird kind of thing to observe there, you know, just trying to take it all in and understand that.
You know, what would possess the prosecutor to want to bring in, I think, a total of three forensic pathologists?
And then they've got a guy that deals with cardio respiratory stuff, you know, this, I think he was an Irishman, you know, that had appeared.
He was for the prosecution.
They threw a lot, you know, in that case.
For the jury to take a look at and understand.
And it was really hard, kind of cutting through a lot of the minutiae that was out there.
Yeah, that's the thing.
The phenomena that happens over time with things like this is like you remember it when it happens.
Like I remember watching the video, right?
And then afterwards, after that happens, then you have everyone's opinion online.
And then you have time goes by and time goes by, and people's, when you start reading, These opinions, everyone layering their opinion.
And this happened now, what was it, five years ago, something like that?
Yeah.
Six years ago, whatever it was.
Now it's like you're so far removed from it and you want to remember something that happened.
It's like, well, I remember watching the video for 10 minutes five years ago, and I also have like hours and hours and hours of reading people talking about it and people's opinions of it that have nothing to do with what actually happened.
Right.
You know?
Just trying to understand the facts.
The narrative evolves.
Yes, it does.
It becomes so disconnected from the reality of what actually happened.
And when I saw it, I saw a dude with his knee on the guy.
I don't know if I remember it was on his neck.
I don't remember exactly, but the cop had his knee on the guy's neck forever.
And he was like saying, you know, like, let me go, let me go.
I can't breathe, can't breathe, whatever.
And then eventually the guy stopped moving, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
He arrested there at that moment.
And was he dead on the ground?
Did he die right there next to the car on the ground?
They rolled him into the emergency room.
And if I remember correctly, I think he still had like agonal respirations.
You know, it's like, you know, kind of like this.
And they called it, you know, they called it there in the ER.
But I think for all intents and purposes, he was probably gone.
At that moment in time, there in that gutter adjacent to the sidewalk.
Right, right next to the tire of the car.
Yeah, right there.
And you never know about restraint deaths because they happened, they used to happen a lot more frequently.
You would get, we kind of evolved, and I'm saying this from the medical legal perspective.
I'm not saying this from a police practitioner perspective.
I'm talking about what.
We observe because we have to handle these cases in our field and be as objective as we possibly can.
Form, function, what were the mechanics involved in all of this?
How did it actually go down?
And then that's what I'm talking about trying to remain neutral in this world and present the findings as to what the mechanism of death actually was.
Were there any other contributing factors?
Drugs, that sort of thing.
Well, there's two camps.
It's binary with George Floyd.
It's either the camp where he only died because he was high on drugs, on fentanyl, and there's another camp that says, No, the cop basically strangled him to death and he died because the cop had his knee on his neck.
Yes.
But there's also like some people are saying maybe it was a combination of the both.
Yeah, I think that it probably was.
You know, here's the question, and you can't get past this.
If Floyd had those substances on board, would he otherwise have died while he was walking down the street?
Were they at lethal levels at that point in time?
Remembering back.
Was it just a perfect coincidence that that was the one time he was about to overdose when the cop put his knee on his neck?
Yeah.
And then, you know, because here's the thing if you've got these drugs on board, they're going to compromise your ability to uptake oxygen anyway.
And so you get this individual in this asymmetrical position where they're flat on the ground.
You've got, you know, just the chest being able to rise and fall is going to compromise their ability to process oxygen.
You've already got a system that's being affected by a substance that's bounding through your system already.
It's a perfect storm.
And it was very unfortunate that it happened.
I don't know, and it's not really my place to know whether or not they got it right or not.
I know that had those two individuals not met at that point in time, it'd probably be a different story.
Totally.
Now, when did you decide to do a deep dive on the Idaho case?
It was a number of reasons.
First off, I started covering Idaho on national news platforms.
I've been on, I think, every single one of them.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure I have been.
Every major network, I think, over that period of time.
I started covering this thing the day after it happened.
I think I was up at probably a matter of fact, there's like a show that Fox does that's a precursor to Fox and Friends.
I don't even know if they still do Fox and Friends.
Yeah, I didn't know anything about this case until a couple weeks ago.
I started seeing the guy's face on TV, and I guess it happened a long time ago.
2002, November.
2002.
And then I knew nothing until Julian told me about it.
Shout out to Julian.
By the way, shout out to Julian Doria for introducing us.
Fraternity Row Murders00:14:04
God bless him.
Yeah.
Please check him out.
Yeah.
He's amazing.
He is.
And he knew everything.
When I listened to you guys discuss this, he knew every single detail.
He knew the kids' first, last, and middle name, every single one of them.
He knew what they all had for breakfast that morning.
I don't know anything about this case.
From a personal perspective, let me tell you why this case affected me.
And I cover.
A lot of cases, all right, in the news.
This case affected me personally, which is not a good idea, because I'm a college professor and my son at that point in time was a sophomore in college.
And the university where I teach in Alabama, Jacksonville State, was roughly the same size as.
their university.
It's a rural university.
Many first-generation students, you know, those sorts of things.
We have that commonality.
These are not kids that are striving to get into Harvard.
These are kids that are looking to get a degree so they can go out into the world and be a nurse or a teacher or, you know, they just want to live that solid middle-class life.
Or business degree, you know.
And so we had a lot of similarities with that.
And when I, the information began to kind of leach out, if you will, regarding the suspected brutality that had taken place in this house.
And no one knew who did it because this place, Danny, this place is in such an isolated spot that they don't have this kind of thing happen.
It's not like it's in.
Downtown Philly, all right.
No insult to Philly, but I'm just saying it's not like you've got this huge population of suspects that are out there.
You're going to have kind of a very narrow spectrum here.
Who would do this?
And there are all kinds of things that were floating around at that point in time that it was, there was allegedly been a fight at a fraternity, which this house, the off campus house, was not too far away from Fraternity Row.
Then we heard about stalkers.
Then we heard about jealous boyfriends.
We heard this litany of who people thought that it could be.
But for me, I began to look at this thing, and it broke my heart for these families and, well, the kids, but the families, because families are left behind.
And you send your kid off to college, you don't expect them to be stabbed 50 times, which it turns out one of these victims was.
One of them was stabbed over 50.
Yeah, another was stabbed over 30 with disfigurement, blunt force trauma to the face, and sharp force injuries to her face as well.
It's hard to comprehend that that's going to happen.
And in this weird house that they lived in, it's like if you go to any college campus, pretty much, you're going to have weirdo housing that surrounds it.
You're going to have these off campus rental homes that have been lived in by generations of people that have gone to school there, and they do these weird add ons.
This thing was particularly weird because it was built, the original house was built where it was kind of carved into a bank.
Like a hill.
Right.
And it was originally a two story structure.
And then they added a third layer.
I'd actually been on the air on one program with a gentleman who was the former attorney general for the state of Idaho, as well as former lieutenant governor of Idaho.
And dig this man, he had actually been to this house before because.
His, one of his fraternity brothers, he was there for homecoming.
One of his fraternity brothers was, his kid was living in the same house years ago when it was only a two story structure.
And he was even telling us in, it's like, yeah, it was kind of a weird, you know, but you expect that at a college town because landlords want to try to squeeze as many butts into these places as they can to make a dime.
Exactly.
Nothing wrong with that, brother.
And so they added this third floor.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And, you know, it, I began to think about it from, you know, how did this person know the layout of the structure?
Because it's this weird thing where they've got on what would be called the ground level, there's a parking pad where you can park your car.
There's a digital pad to gain access to the bottom floor door.
Apparently, everybody knew the passcode for this thing.
Of course.
Yeah, it's college, man.
Right.
Kids are going in and out, boyfriends, ex boyfriends, ex boyfriends, part, you know.
Showing up for parties and whatnot.
And the second.
Drug dealers.
No comment.
But yeah, you're right.
Anybody that wanted to come in there, hey, there's going to be a party at so and so.
You don't know who's going to be in the house.
I mean, it could be anybody.
Of course.
Second floor had sliding glass doors, and that was facing the remainder of the hill.
You could step off of that second floor through the sliders and walk up the hill behind the house.
It was like woods behind the house or something?
Yeah, it's kind of like a tree line.
If you imagine kind of an amphitheater style, That's the way I've always envisioned it.
Steve, see if you can find a diagram of the house to give us a cool visual.
I'm sure there's been recreations or animations of the whole thing that shows the house on the hill and the bedroom layout.
You look at this thing, and when we first, I think my first true view of it was a Zillow, an old Zillow view of it, where trying to rent the thing, people had this view of all of these rooms.
I say, geez, man, in the.
Dark of night, somebody's going to negotiate this thing when all the lights are off in the house.
When all the lights are off in the house, how do you have that kind of information, Steve?
That's like one floor.
See if we can find like a side view of the whole thing.
There we go.
That's like a 3D view right there.
Okay.
We'll keep looking.
Find something.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Sorry.
Continue.
How are you going to know how to navigate your way through this?
Because if you enter on the parking pad, you go up, there's a landing, you kind of switch back and go up, and there's a second floor up there.
Then, once you get to the second floor, which you've got two bedrooms in the bottom, you've got two bedrooms on the second floor.
In addition to that, you've also got like a great room that's a dining area, kitchen.
It's like a fireplace.
So it's like a gathering area.
Matter of fact, there's kind of this famous shot where you can look through the window and see the table in the dining area.
It's covered with solo cups.
Earpong.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
You know, you're thinking, well, these kids, you know.
There we go.
Yeah.
So when.
You look at that, you can see the interior of the place.
And in addition to that, you appreciate that there's another staircase that goes up internally where you're going to have to negotiate that third floor and try to understand who's up there.
Right.
How are you going to be able to do that without having prior knowledge of this place?
Pause it on the view of the house, Steve, that you were just on.
Okay.
So it's a maze.
It's a for somebody who's not familiar, intimately familiar with the house, who hasn't been there before, it would be tough.
That hasn't been there before, it would be tough.
Yes.
Yeah.
And what's really kind of chilling about this, and again, this is one thing that really kind of really impacted me there's this TikTok that these girls that lived here put together and they're imitating one another.
You know, like it's a comedy kind of thing that they're doing where they're.
They're imitating, you know, how the behavior of their roommates.
You know, this one is very stoic, this one is like always anxious, you know, this sort of thing.
They're imitating one another.
And Danny, the entire time this thing is like panning around, and everybody had access to this.
It's like panning around, you can kind of see the layout of that second floor.
And it was so chilling to me in the world that we currently live in.
I don't know about you, man, but it's like a place I lived in in college.
You wouldn't know anything about the interior of my house unless I specifically invited you over.
Maybe you were.
One of my buddies came over.
We drank beer together, you know, hung out.
Other than that, it's not going to be broadcast to the entire damn world.
And so you have to be able to.
And they were posting these TikToks before the murder happened.
Oh, yeah.
I'm sorry.
What year did this happen again?
2022.
2022.
Okay.
Yeah.
2022.
So you've got this environment, and people have an awareness of the interior of this thing.
I think the big question, and maybe one of the things that is going to be, I don't know if it'll ever be answered at this point, but what.
What knowledge, what foreknowledge did he have of this place, this reptile that went in there and did this?
What kind of knowledge did he have of the layout of it?
And there's been a lot of talk about this individual had cruised by this house multiple times in the preceding weeks.
They pinged his phone at a variety of locations or found it, that he's kind of circling this, circling the area.
Did he ever make his way in there?
And if he is in a hide above the house, okay, and I dig this, he's in that back area, he's in that brush line.
At night, it's like going to a drive in movie.
Because the house is all lit up and it's glass walls.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And so Kaylee and Maddie, that are in the top bedroom, it's believed that one of the two of them were his actual targets.
Most people believe it was Maddie.
Do we have any idea why he would have targeted one of those girls?
Again, for people who are familiar with tasting, sorry for the dumb questions.
No, no, no.
He's a vegan, and there's a restaurant in Moscow, which I found out you have to pronounce Moscow, not Moscow.
They take exception to that.
So you have to think Costco.
So Moscow.
She worked at the Mad Greek restaurant, and some people believe that he had contact with her there, saw her there.
That's just one theory that's been thrown out.
There's Multitude of other theories, everything from.
He was a vegan.
Yeah, he was.
And he makes a big deal out of it.
You know, the old adage about how do you know somebody's a vegan?
They tell you.
Right.
Yeah.
And so they had a vegan menu.
The question is I think one of the big questions is this lizard was a student in Pullman, Washington at Washington State University, which by all accounts is only 10 miles away.
When the hell are you doing in Moscow, Idaho?
Right.
And he's a.
He is at the beginning of his PhD program.
For people that are not familiar with PhD programs, particularly if you're thinking about something like criminology, which he went there to study, for your first year, you're like an indentured servant and you have a supervisor.
You're assisting with teaching, which he was a TA.
You're meeting with an advisor.
It's very labor intensive, but yet he's got enough time to go to, and again, it's only 10 miles away.
Some people say eight, 10, drive across state lines, and then kind of orbit this one location over and over and over again.
You know, what's up with that relative to his behaviors?
Because if he is in a PhD program, he's committed to it.
How do you have time to do this?
Yeah.
Because the work is so very intense.
This guy had no history of any weird stuff, nothing.
He was a former heroin addict.
Oh, yeah.
I guess I don't know if that feeds into it.
I know former heroin addicts that don't go in and commit mass murder.
Some of the most gentle people I know had a problem with heroin in the past and they kicked it.
Yeah.
So that's not, you know, I don't think you can use that to indict him.
Definitely not.
But he, you know, he sent out questionnaires.
He had gone to undergraduate and graduate.
School at DeSales University in Pennsylvania, which is where he hails from.
And he had sent out this questionnaire to violent offenders in prisons.
And it was, you know, and I mean, really violent offenders asking questions about what did you feel?
Sexual Stimulation and Injuries00:15:20
What did you feel before you committed this act?
What did you feel after you committed this act?
Oh, by the way, what did you do to clean up?
What did you do to, you know, Get any evidence, get rid of any.
And that was kind of the nature of this questionnaire.
And the thing about it is, you can take that and kind of mask it in academic pursuits and push that thing out there like that.
And there was great talk about that, you know, that's kind of floated around for some time as well.
Steve, let's go ahead and play this.
I want to watch this video from the top and just see.
Is it like play through the whole thing?
Yeah, it's like a diagram.
Okay, play it.
Yeah, play it from the beginning, real quick.
You gotta bring it.
Yeah, there you go.
All right, go ahead.
Hit it.
Give us some audio.
Is there no audio?
I can't hear anything.
I guess it doesn't have any audio.
You gotta turn it up.
Is there volume on the oh, there it's up.
Okay, there's no audio.
Maybe that's for the best.
Puppy in one room.
Yeah.
Okay, so there's one, two, three, four bedrooms with people in it.
4-0-4 a.m. on-camera parking.
So he just drives his car to the driveway and gets in the house at 4-0-9.
He leaves the house at 4-18.
He's only in there for nine minutes.
Nine minutes, dude.
Wow.
Yeah.
And he came.
There you go.
So, okay, so he walks her.
Enters on the second floor, goes up the staircase.
Walks right past the first bedroom.
Yeah, goes up the staircase.
Landing.
Now, that bedroom is empty.
There's just a dog.
He didn't mess with the dog?
No, the dog stayed in there.
And that's Kaylee's dog, by the way.
She was visiting.
She had already finished up her requirements for school.
She was coming back to.
Visit, and that's if I'm seeing this correctly.
That's Dylan, I think, hearing something on the bottom floor directly below them.
Yeah.
413, he goes to the bottom floor room with two people.
There was a boy and a girl.
Yeah.
Xana and Ethan are in this room.
Xana fights like a wildcat.
He's cut, she's grabbed hold of the blade of this K bar and it's cut all the way down to her tendons.
And she is stabbed 50 times, at least, that we know of.
The girl on the bottom floor.
Yeah, well, second floor.
Yeah, Zana is.
The second floor.
Her boyfriend has got multiple injuries to his neck.
As a matter of fact, the complex, where the subclave artery is, you've got the subclavian artery that runs here.
There's also the jugular vein that's in here as well.
He's injured right here.
They don't believe he ever got up out of bed.
And there's the infamous image that they had been showing for some time of what appeared to be blood coming out of the house.
And it's on the foundation of the house.
As a forensics guy, if someone would ask me on air, is that blood?
I'd say, I have no idea.
They haven't released information for all I know.
It could be rust.
But as it turns out, it's typed back to him, to Ethan.
So he was stabbed in the bed.
And it's so, he's bleeding so profusely.
It's, Leaching down the wall, and it's actually presenting itself.
Coming out of the wall.
Yeah, it's leaching down the side.
So it's on the center block.
There are tons of these images that you can actually see.
This is going to be, for lack of a better term, it's going to be a bloody mess.
Dylan, the gold figure that they have in this diagram, that's right there, she's the one that saw him.
She made the description.
Now, kind of infamous description of him being the guy with the bushy eyebrows.
Interestingly enough, when.
He's wearing a mask, right?
He's wearing a balakava.
It's one of these things, a balakava that you pull over your head.
All you can see are the eyes.
Okay.
You know, hunters wear them.
Like a ski mask.
Yeah, kind of like a ski mask, but it's made out of, it's not neoprene, whatever, you know, like underarm.
Like rash guard material.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
Here's an interesting thing that in the victim impact statements.
And she was in the doorway standing there, and he looked at her and just continued to walk right past her.
Yeah.
And I've got.
Strange.
Well, I think that, first off, remind me to come back to the eyebrows.
But let me, while we're on this topic, just let me tell you what had happened, in my humble opinion.
This is what in the old days they would refer to as a lust murder.
I think that probably he had set his sights on one of the young women up in that top room.
He did not expect to find the other one.
And he attacked her.
On the bed.
He probably had some kind of fantasy worked out in his mind where he's going to sexually attack her.
He didn't count on two women being up there.
Not that he's in his right mind, but I don't think anybody in their right mind would go into that environment armed only with a knife.
And you've got to go head to head with two people, even if they are smaller than you and they're women.
He is sexually stimulated before he goes in there.
And it doesn't, you don't have to know.
Because I think that this is one of the drivers behind what he had done.
I think that that's the only logical conclusion that you can reach.
A lot of people have stated over the years, not just me, but the fact that it doesn't necessarily have to do with this case, but stabbings in particular, when you get multiple stabbings, the knife actually substitutes as a phallus.
So as this knife is being driven in over and over and over and over again, There's like some kind of psychological release.
I think that he was probably sexually stimulated.
He went up there.
He's got this adrenaline bump that he goes up on.
And as he, you know, he didn't count on the other person.
So he's now murdered two people face to face with him with this really robust combat knife made specifically for this purpose.
Marine Corps has used it for years and years.
As he descends, he is spent.
Well, Zanna, who was in bed with her boyfriend, Ethan, some believe that she heard Kaylee cry out.
There's somebody in the house.
She gets up.
She's just taken a food delivery, jack in the box, food delivery from one of these food delivery services.
She's up.
She hears something upstairs, comes to the staircase, and walks partially up it.
As he's exiting that top bedroom, he sees her.
And then he proceeds to chase her back into her bedroom, stabs her over 50 times.
I mean, she is just decimated.
She's grabbed the blade multiple times.
She's tried to parry his thrust, you know, with her arm.
She's got slices on her arms.
Good Lord.
Goes over, kills Ethan.
Ethan's asleep in bed.
We don't know what, I think a lot of people are wondering because they had been out partying.
They're wondering what his blood alcohol level was.
He must have been killed first, right?
Because he would have woken up.
Either that or inebriation.
Don't really know because they haven't released any information.
You have to be able to explain it scientifically, though.
And that's the two, that's kind of the supposition here.
The question to ask is what did he have on board?
He's underage.
You know, he's not old enough to drink, so we don't think that he's probably got a long history of drinking.
Um, I don't know about you, but you know, the first time alcohol passes your lips when you're young, you know, you don't have the same tolerance.
Say, for instance, um, he's blacked out, yeah.
Well, I don't know that for a fact, but maybe.
And maybe to the point where he has no awareness that what's going on.
But she's struggling in there, man.
Xana is.
And he's finished that brutality off.
As he's exiting, he's gotten another adrenaline bump at this.
It's survival mode at this point.
I've got to put as much distance between myself and this house as I possibly can.
He steps back out.
Dylan gets by the bed again.
She came to the door a couple of times.
This is when she.
Meets him eye to eye, and she sees over the balakava or within that framework of the balakava the bushy eyebrows.
And he did have bushy eyebrows.
Keep that term in mind because I said did have bushy eyebrows.
When Kaylee Gonzalez's sister got up, and this is one of the most powerful moments, her name is Olivia, spelled with an A, Olivia.
She asked him, and it's a rhetorical question because she's addressing him directly.
She says, When did you start plucking your eyebrow?
When did you start pulling your eyebrows out?
Because if you see him now, he's kind of very thin.
Her thought was that he sat there just plucking his eyebrows out by hand over and over to try to knock that down in some way.
She had insight into him.
She really made him squirm as he's sitting in that chair and he's having to listen to all of this.
And she just knocked it out of the park.
I recommend anybody.
Go and listen to this impact statement she's made.
It might be one of the most powerful things I've heard.
Olivia?
Yeah.
Olivia Gonzalez that I have heard in a courtroom.
And I've been covering cases, live trials for a long time with Court TV and Law and Crime Network.
I've never heard anything like that.
So she's questioning him in the courtroom?
Well, she's not questioning him.
She's direct and she has planned these things out.
I mean, she's got a statement.
Yeah, it's a statement.
How, you know, victim impact statement.
And, you know, because he's rolled over on this.
He said that, yeah, he.
Pleads guilty to four counts, four counts of homicide and also an additional count of burglary with the intent to commit homicide, by the way.
Yeah.
And it was just for so long, it took, you know, the whole thing.
I think a lot of people really got antsy over this case.
First off, that you had a madman running around the countryside here.
It couldn't be solved or resolved fast enough.
You add the inner internet into this, the digital world.
And so, It's really weird with these cases, Danny, that you see there's like a fire that has lit in the true crime community or people that are just curious, why haven't you done anything yet?
Why haven't you?
They catch this guy within six weeks.
All right.
There are a lot of cases out there that are unsolved to this day that may have happened several years back.
It couldn't happen fast enough for people.
So, I mean, law enforcement really did their job here.
And then, you know, they tie him back through his.
Through forensic genetic genealogy, through the trash pull that they did at his house there in the Poconos at his parents' house, it came back to his dad.
And so, by process of elimination, it was him.
Have you ever heard of the Danny Casalero case?
I have not.
He was a reporter who was murdered in Virginia.
I want to say West Virginia.
I'm sorry, it was a suicide.
But there's a huge conspiracy behind it that people, there's a whole documentary called The Octopus Murders that was on Amazon.
or on Netflix, rather, where they do a deep dive into the history of this guy and who he was connected with.
And he was basically shaking the wrong trees of people in government and in intelligence.
And there's a theory that he was actually murdered.
He was found in a bathtub in a motel room with both of his wrists slashed.
And the wrists were slashed.
There were multiple cut wounds on his wrists, and all the tendons were severed.
And somebody made the case, and it was with glass, it was a broken glass bottle.
Oh, my Lord.
So, the case is basically one of the biggest pushbacks against this case is that in the documentary, they said that if people are going to commit suicide and cut their own wrists, it's going to be almost impossible for the tendons on both wrists to be completely severed.
Because, how do you sever the tendons on one wrist, then go use that hand and do the same thing on your other wrist?
It's very difficult.
And that scenario has been floated for years and years that.
And you know, you don't get many wrist slashings, just so you know, in psychology.
They're not real common.
I've had them, but they're not as common as maybe you see in movies and that sort of thing.
So it's kind of.
Oh, there it is.
Yeah, wow.
Don't show that on the podcast, but it's good for us to see.
Yeah, it's quite striking.
And yeah, these are deep injuries.
I don't see how anybody could self inflict on both hands with these injuries.
Right.
Because, you know, just structurally, you're.
You're compromising your ability to actually grip anything.
Yes.
And certainly facilitate.
I had a kid one time that was a paranoid schizophrenic that lived in his mom and dad's attic.
And it was a full time job to take care of him.
He's very paranoid.
He thought the CIA had put a listening device in his forearm.
This is the kind of thing that we kind of do mental gymnastics with in the medical legal world.
Is this a suicide or is it an accident?
So he took a fillet knife in order to find the microphone and sliced from the base of his hand all the way up to his left ACF and cubital fossa 32 times.
Just like this.
His arm looked like a book that you could flip through the pages on.
Ligatures and Mental Gymnastics00:14:50
Oh my God.
And he obviously bled out.
But unlike this, you know, that's in the, that's in the, Vertical plane as opposed to in the horizontal plane where you're going across this way.
You do see lethal, but it requires, if you're going to go in the horizontal plane slicing a wrist, it's going to require a lot of force because you're going to go across tendons here.
And tendons are not like cutting flesh, it's not like going into really soft tissue.
So it's almost a sawing mechanism that takes place.
And you're using it with a piece of glass.
This case is fascinating.
I'd love to look into it.
Yeah, I highly recommend the documentary.
It's called The Octopus Murders on Netflix.
I want to talk to you about Epstein.
Yeah.
I want to take a leak real quick, though.
Yeah, sure.
We'll be right back.
All right.
All right.
So the Epstein case is fascinating, and it's a hot topic right now.
Yes.
Everyone debates about it.
It always comes up right now, especially because of this, everyone talking about these Epstein files.
But, and the footage that recently came out as well of the the orange blob?
Yeah, the orange blob, the footage in front of his cell.
Yep.
There's all kinds of conspiracies about this.
But when this thing first came out, allegedly, he was in a maximum security prison in New York.
And he was on suicide watch, I think.
Yeah.
Or no, they had recently taken him off suicide watch.
Recently taking him off.
Yeah.
And, you know, there's all kinds of things that outside of the actual, like, what happened in the cell, there's all sorts of things that were happening.
Like, he was meeting with people and he was looking at doing, getting another hearing really soon.
He was filing for something in the court where he was going to go back to court and try to fight it again and get off.
And it seemed like.
He was optimistic about getting out of there still.
And, you know, that, you know, you don't even have to mention the fact that, you know, he was obviously a narcissistic sociopath who had lots of money and probably thought that, you know, he probably wasn't suicidal if I was to guess.
But one of the biggest pieces of evidence that I've been aware of about Epstein's case is that he had the hyoid bone fracture in his neck, right?
And that's one of the bones where I could be wrong, but I think they did, like a, I read one time there was a study across, all the hanging hangings across a.
They took a bunch of hanging victims and that hyoid bone was only broken in like a small subset of those hangings.
Yeah and um, I guess there has to be a ton of trauma for the specific bone to break.
And in his neck it was broken.
Yeah, it was, and it's not just his hyoid bone.
He's got two uh fractures of his cartilage um, in his larynx, which if you find your adam's apple it's like Right, and it's bilateral.
So you've got a fracture, and again, using this term, they're both in the vertical plane.
So you've got one here, you've got one here, and then the hyoid.
Hyoid's an interesting bone.
It's the only bone in the human body that does not articulate with another bone.
Just let that sink in for a second.
It's stationary?
Yeah, in soft tissue, its sole purpose actually anchors our tongue in the back of our throat.
It holds it in place and it's bird.
Oh, wow.
It's kind of bird like in shape.
And it's got two greater horns and two lesser horns.
And some people describe it as a bird like structure.
Some people say that it's got the appearance of a horseshoe.
I've heard that.
But it's kind of crescent shaped.
Okay.
So it's anchoring the tongue back here.
The one of the, let me just run down the list.
Yeah.
One of the problems is that with hyoid, one of the reasons you don't see it commonly fractured in hangings is that it's so high up in the neck.
Right.
I mean, it is superior just about to everything else right here.
I borrowed this cord real quick.
Of course.
If it's not anchored in something, it can pull out.
Sorry.
So let's just think about for a second classic hanging, okay?
Mm hmm.
So, classic hanging, you have to be most of the time suspended or partially suspended.
So, if you think about a noose, it's better if you use your hand.
Think about a noose that runs up like this, okay?
Now, it goes up generally behind your ears, okay?
And it comes to an apex back here.
That's what, in our parlance, it's what we refer to as a.
Tinting features, T E N T I N G.
So you get this apex at the top right here.
It travels upward, comes to the apex right here, and all your body weight essentially is being supported by this location right here.
Okay.
Suspended.
Now, you can have a partial suspension, okay?
The medical examiner in New York, OCME, referred to it as a soft hanging, which to me implies that you're not.
Suspended, like classic.
You can sit.
And yes, people hang themselves by sitting.
Aside from gunshot wounds relative to hanging, in my little slice of the pie, was the most frequent mode because everybody owns a ligature.
Not everybody owns a gun.
Everybody owns a ligature.
You can make them, I've seen them made out of bed sheets, rope, belt.
Belt is very common.
So with that said, how do you get The hyoid fractured so high, and particularly so that you have to have enough velocity to drop and get this thing to fracture.
Now, one of the things that she said was that he, due to his age, that she believes that his hyoid had ossified to the point where it was fragile.
Okay, I'll go down that road with you, but how are you going to explain these fractures here in kind of the soft, more malleable?
Cartilage and it's running, Danny, it's running bilateral.
They're running north and south, vertical plane right here, and they're on either side.
It takes that kind of pressure in order to do that, or maybe a readjustment.
Also, the ligature mark that he has on his neck does not go up and down, it's horizontal, running parallel to the shoulders.
Wow.
Wow.
You don't have this thing that's going up behind his ears like you normally see.
I got to tell you, when I'm just looking at the images, and anybody can see these images.
These are just public images that you found.
Yeah.
You know where they come from?
The 60 minute special that was ran back in, what was it, 19 or whenever it was?
Yeah.
And I was, you could have knocked me over with a feather because you got to see all of these images and the interior of the cell.
They're out there.
Just check them out for yourself.
Don't believe a damn thing I say.
Right.
Just go look at them.
So, if you're trying to sell me on the idea that first off, he has hung himself and you're absent the tinting feature, what did he do?
Did he lay down flat on the floor and the ligature went around his neck?
And it looks like the ligature has been readjusted because you've got this kind of deep, it's an abraded furrow.
Yeah, there you go, right there.
This abraded furrow that's running.
Again, Steve, don't put this on the podcast.
That's running parallel, as you can well see.
Do you see how one mark.
Is low right there.
It's really low.
Yeah, they're up.
It looks like it was adjusted.
Another one.
And then you've got another one that is superior that comes to like a little point right there.
The sink's been moved in some way and it's more dependent on his right side as opposed to the left side.
Yeah.
And there's another mark up there by his jaw.
Yeah, I'll give you another one.
And this is available out there.
Do you know he's got a deep tissue bruise right here in his trap?
Really?
Yeah, it's right here.
You can see it.
It's out there on the images too.
Because I got to tell you, I've.
I don't know.
What did he do?
Bump into a wall backwards?
I don't know how you get this manifestation.
Yeah, that's it right there.
I don't know how you get that manifestation right there.
Because it doesn't correlate with what you're seeing on the front.
I just have you mentioned the study about the fractured hyoids.
Yep.
Why does he have facial hair in the second one?
Not the first one.
No, that's the back of his head.
Oh, that's the back of his head.
Yeah, that's like descending down the back right there.
I've had one fractured hyoid that was not related to manual strangulation.
You know what it was?
A guy went over a three story.
Off ramp in New Orleans, three story, two story, doesn't matter.
But in like a 1968 Pontiac that had the gigantic steering wheel, you know, like Mammal drives, you know, like this.
Oh, he's lined himself on it?
Non belted.
He nosedived into the ground and the 12 o'clock position of the steering wheel hit him right here and it fractured his hyoid.
It doesn't mean that it does happen.
Okay.
Again, it's just my little slice of the world.
But But again, how do you account for this injury here?
It's almost like there were two modalities being utilized here, or methodologies rather a ligature and possibly either throttling.
This is throttling.
You can do it either anteriorly, or you can do it posteriorly.
This is C clamping, where you do this.
Like this.
Yeah.
So, do you have some kind of fight that's going on with, I don't know, himself?
I have no idea.
How do you get these manifestations injury wise in the neck?
You know, Baden was present.
Dr. Michael Baden was present for the autopsy.
He is retained by Mark.
I think it's Mark.
I hope that's right.
Mark Epstein, who is this guy's brother.
So, he was physically there.
And his conclusions.
Varied from hers.
You know, you can say, well, yeah, Mark's got a dog in the fight.
Sure.
I don't think it's a matter of him looking for money or anything like that.
He thinks his brother was a victim of homicide.
That's the reason he retained Dr. Baden.
You just don't go off the street and say, hey, want to go to an autopsy, Dr. Baden?
He's been retained.
Okay.
So he's working for Mark or he's Mark's eyes and ears at a very high end.
He's worked multiple.
Over the course of his career, he was the chief medical examiner for the state of New York.
I think he was either the deputy or chief medical examiner for the city of New York for a time.
He consults on cases all over the country.
I don't agree with everything that all of the conclusions he's reached in his life.
The Michael Brown case in particular comes to mind.
But he is respected and he was physically there to watch this autopsy being performed, this examiner.
So he just watched it.
Yeah.
It's not like he's participating.
Right.
I've been present for autopsies like that where you have an interested third party that will be there.
And most of the time, there'll be some chatter, but most of the time, they're merely observing.
It's not like he went in and actually did the dissection of the neck, okay, where you're taking out the organs of the neck as they're referred to.
That's going to be part of OCME's team that does that and they'll retain them.
I hope they've retained them.
I hope they've retained the larynx.
I hope they've retained the hyoid bone.
Hope that didn't go with his body, you know.
Be cremated, which it has been, and then placed in there's a cemetery here in Florida where his remains are.
Oh, really?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And they're in a vase, a vase, stuffed into one of these places.
Stuffed, that's not accurate, but it's placed in there and it's unmarked.
So, yeah, I hope that those essential elements were retained so that, I don't know, if it comes up again, somebody else, another person can take a look at it.
But you kind of lose, you know, we were talking about a little while ago how, you know, you don't have a sense for what happened.
You know, five years ago or whatever.
Yeah.
That's the way things work out in forensics many times.
You have to go back and review years and years and years from now.
And I don't know whether kind of conclusions he'll draw.
I haven't personally seen the autopsy photographs at all.
I think that that would be quite interesting, you know, to see.
Who's trying to understand?
Are they, I'm sure they're still somewhere where you can get, if you wanted to get access to them, could you?
I don't know.
I don't know how the laws are set up with the state of New York.
I don't know if you can.
File a FOIA request and actually get those or not.
What other elements of this murder do you find most interesting other than the large?
The ligature they're trying to sell me on.
The ligature.
Yeah, that piece of cloth, which the corrections officer claimed that he claimed, not Morgan.
The corrections officer claimed that he cut it away.
Well, the ligatures that you see, like this one.
Go to that orange thing, yeah.
Punch it up.
It has no tool marks on it.
At all.
Unmarked Ligature Mysteries00:15:09
It hasn't been cut.
All right.
So I don't know.
And you can see the base knot right there is tied.
It's still intact.
I'm assuming that he used some kind of odd slip knot there.
I can't manipulate it to hold it to try to understand it.
But that's not, that has not been cut.
This guy claims that it had been.
Again, how are you, where are you going to tie off from in there in order to?
Generate this kind of force in order to have this level of trauma that was supposed to be inflicted by that thing there?
And was it collected?
Was it collected, and that there was transfer evidence on it that's indicative of in multiple locations?
So, if it's going circumferentially, you know, going around the neck, are there multiple points where you're collecting DNA specific to this injury?
You look at that, the area on his neck, and Danius abraded.
It's like an abrasion, so it's very deep.
Not only just trace elements or touch DNA, I'm talking about do they actually have, did they actually find skin?
Did they actually find hair, you know, from facial hair from his neck?
Was any of that stuff retained?
Did they examine all of that?
Inquiring minds want to know.
I want to know about this, you know, and try to understand it and try to understand it.
And then you got the time element that's involved.
You know, when they got to his body, he was cool to the touch.
You know, he'd been down for some time.
And he's cyanotic.
You know, you can see they've actually got photos of him being wheeled in, if memory serves me correctly.
And he's got kind of the eggplant head, which you see with people that are in a cyanotic state, you know, where they're turning purple, you know, like this.
So something has happened that's compromised his airway.
Could it be suicide?
Yeah, sure.
It could be.
But if I were a betting man, you would say murder.
At this point, I'd say undetermined, perhaps.
I'd have to know more information.
The problem with working anything in a correctional facility is that it's very difficult.
I've worked cases in correctional facilities, and it is not the most ideal set of circumstances to be in.
Have you ever seen another hanging like this in a correctional facility, in a prison?
Not like this, no.
Do you know what the most common forms of suicide are in prisons?
If I were betting on it, I'd say probably.
The same thing?
Yeah.
That's the most common.
Yeah.
There's something else that.
Here's something else that was fascinating to me about this whole circumstance.
We had this, okay, I think most of us, I love the movie Shawshank.
I love that movie.
It's like a remote drop.
It doesn't matter where it's at in the movie, I'm going to watch Shawshank Redemption.
I know that this is a Hollywood depiction, but every prison I've ever gone in or correctional facility I've ever gone in to work a case, there was a certain level of order when you go into the cell.
Have you seen the images from inside the sky cell?
It looks like a pigsty.
Right.
There's ripped up material all over the place.
He's got a bunk.
Can you find photos, Steve?
He's got a bunk that's absent a mattress.
And there are drugs, prescription meds that are all on the top.
You can see the med vials.
You know, most of the time, if you're on medication in a prison, first off, you're in custodial care of the state.
All right.
I say state, I mean, you're in custodial care of right there, the one to the left.
You can see it.
Duh.
Yep.
Oh, it's, oh my God, look at that.
That's crazy.
Just a bunch of prescription drugs and stuff on the top bunk.
Like it's a little pharmacy up there.
Yeah, yeah, precisely.
And so there would be like a nurse that would come by and they'd give you the little white paper containers that contain your meds.
They keep control over your meds, they watch you take your medication, you wash them down.
This guy's got, and I have yet to be able to determine what all of that stuff is, but there is a slew of it that's up there.
The floor is littered.
With these ripped up bits of cloth.
What's that photo on the top left, Steve?
It has three photos.
Yeah.
Zoom in on that one on the left.
What the fuck?
Hmm.
Oh, it's a YouTube.
It's a screen capture.
Well, there's another picture of it.
There you go.
Zoom in on the one on the left.
Wow.
Look at that.
It's a mess.
Do you notice what's down the right hand corner there, Danny?
Is it like a boombox?
It's a C, I think it's a CPAP machine.
And he's got that in there with an electrical cord.
That's an electrical cord.
I've had multiple homicides over the course of my career that have been committed with utilizing some type of cord that comes off of a device or like a drop cord, like an extension cord.
It creates kind of a more narrow furrow.
They're abrasive.
Yeah.
When you apply them to the skin, how does this guy even have access to all this stuff?
And I understand if he's got sleep apnea, he has to be on a CPAP machine.
Okay, that's cool.
But that should be integrated into the investigation.
Was that thing collected?
Did they run down the length of this cord just to look for DNA?
And yeah, by virtue of the fact that it's in his space, his DNA is going to be on it.
But what areas of that cord is his DNA in?
Okay.
It's not just saying, well, yeah, his DNA was in it.
That's.
Intellectually lazy.
So, were there particular areas where it was concentrated along the cord?
That sort of thing.
You know, just looking at this.
And look, again, I've got folks I teach with that are correction specialists, you know, that teach corrections.
I've actually talked to them about this.
And one of the things that you want in an environment, in a corrections environment, is you want order.
Because if you have chaos in that environment, that chaos spills over to other inmates and, you know, the staff and everything else.
Who's watching over this guy?
Because this thing is squalid.
I mean, it's absolutely positively squalid.
He has no order in this environment whatsoever.
And he's just come off of the sidewalk.
How does he have access to this stuff?
And if he's got these problems, there was.
It was like a day before, I think, that he was taken off the sidewalk.
Precisely.
And there was some other.
It has been alluded to that there was some kind of Donnie Brooke with somebody else at some point in time that I've heard people talk about.
Well, did he.
Was his.
Was his hyoid fractured prior to this event?
And because he was cellies with somebody else or he had a confrontation with somebody else, is that a survivable thing?
I can't answer that question.
I think that I would want to know was there any focal areas of hemorrhage where this thing had hemorrhaged out and that there were signs of the bone?
You get this kind of modeling that goes on with bone.
Even Kind of in the immediate, if you've got this pre existing fracture, which I'm highly doubtful of this, where the bone is trying to heal itself, and you can see evidence of that.
So, how fresh was this?
You know, did it happen as a result of this?
Does he have, and again, this stray mark that's on, you know, back here at the base of his neck is an odd, odd finding as well.
There's a lot here that doesn't marry up.
Timing is a big element here, a lack of accountability.
And, you know, if we were in my field, if we were working this case, we would want to be very, very exacting about who saw him.
What was his affect like at that point in time?
Was it down, up?
Was it flat?
You know, how was he behaving?
Had he requested any kind of special treatment?
Gee, I'm feeling really blue right now, even though I've just come off the sidewalk.
You know, because even in a case like this, in the medical legal world, we're going to track down the psychiatrist.
We're going to have a conversation with him because we.
We want to know everything about this guy.
And so far, it's such a damn muddled mess at this point and has been since the beginning.
You know, if you do your job in the beginning and you stay the course and you keep things really, really simple, you're able to kind of cut through all of the static.
The problem is this is a monster of their own making because they failed so miserably.
The prison system failed.
I think, monumentally, where he was housed, which I think if he is this valued, why do you have this guy in this particular location?
Why has it been moved somewhere else where he can really be watched carefully?
I've been on air with guys that practice in, not forensic scientists, with attorneys that practice in New York that would go and visit.
Clients that were housed here.
I've had multiple of these people say, We were terrified to go to this place.
It was like Thunderdome.
Wow.
Yeah.
And so you're going to stick him in here?
Okay.
Well, it's your business, but it just, you know, I don't know.
It just doesn't add up to me.
And the other thing that's very odd is that I believe Bill Barr officially labeled this thing a suicide before the forensic analysis was even done.
He did.
Yeah.
And I got to tell you, an attorney is probably the last person I'm going to go to for an opinion about manner and cause of death.
Right.
You know, I don't care what kind of sheepskin they have hanging on their wall.
They're not qualified to do that.
Particularly something that is this delicate.
Now, I think that he even stated that he had watched the video.
You're talking about the one with the orange blob or the minute that is allegedly missing or all that.
You're talking about that video?
Right.
Because, you know, it was implied that, you know, you kind of saw what happened.
Well, that's an empirical impossibility.
You cannot see what happened in there unless there's some other kind of videography that they have access that we don't have access to.
Right.
It's all very odd.
Do you think there has there also ever been another case where somebody where a high level murder or suicide like this with like a person of his notability was where it was labeled to be either a homicide or a suicide before the medical examination has been done?
Oh, I'm sure that they exist.
Yeah.
But it's not common.
No, it's not.
But anytime you get bureaucrats or politicians involved in anything, in my experience, relative to.
Our field, it's a dangerous mix.
You know, you're running your mouth before your brains in gear at that point in time.
And that, you know, that happens.
It has happened in local cases.
And then, you know, if you come back and say something to the contrary, then you have these little stories that begin to bubble up.
Well, there's a conspiracy or, you know, this and that.
And again, do your damn job on the front end.
You won't have to go back and clean up messes at the end.
Right.
Yeah.
It's craziness, man.
I don't know.
I think they just moved Guy Lane to a camp, a low level security prison in Texas.
Yeah, they did.
And, you know, who knows what's going to happen to her?
Well, you know, they.
I mean, I don't know if you want to go with the conspiracy route and they say that he was murdered to protect billionaires and powerful politicians that he would have had blackmail on.
To cover up for those people, if you want to take that crazy route and believe that's true, which I don't think is that crazy.
To think that they would be arrogant enough to do the same thing to Gaylane Maxwell is a stretch.
I don't think they would do it, but who knows?
Well, you want to go down a real rabbit hole?
Of course.
Epstein's one thing, okay?
Here's my question.
I'd like to know the information about Epstein just to, I don't know.
I don't know.
Personal curiosity, I don't know who it's really going to aid.
The people I'm really interested in are the victims.
And the victims, from the sense, from this perspective, we've heard about this collection of all of these women that have talked about it.
This is who I want to know about.
It has been alleged that there are.
Eastern European girls that materialized at somebody's hand, you know, in his space.
You're talking about non-English speakers.
You're talking about allegedly they are underage.
Where are they?
Did you just go from your mansion, which I was talking to a friend of mine the other day who lives in Manhattan, and it's like, yeah, dude, it's actually the largest house in Manhattan.
There's a photo of, I should send it to you, Steve, so you can pull it up.
There's a photo of me standing in front of it.
I did.
I saw it.
Did you see it on the Julian show to you?
I did.
Julian Doyle took it back.
Julian showed it to me.
I was like, if there's one thing I got to see while I'm down here, I got to see that fucking mansion.
Dark tourism, man.
It's like a mansion townhouse.
Yeah, that's.
And it's.
It used to be a school.
Did they just cut them loose on the street of Manhattan?
What about any kids he took to New Mexico?
Where are they?
What about any girls that went to Little St. John or St. James?
Where are they?
Did you put them back on a plane?
Did you fly them back to Eastern Europe?
Dark Tourism at Mansions00:02:11
13, 14, 15 years old?
Do we have kids that young?
I've heard people in the media say those ages.
Well, there was the Epstein fund that Nick Bryant told us about.
It's the compensation fund for the victims, where they basically had a pool of money that they were going to give all the victims of Epstein for all of his crimes.
And one of the contingencies for that compensation for the victims was that they had to sign an NDA to never talk about it again.
Mm hmm.
A lot of them got that.
Some of them didn't.
Well, I can't imagine that a child of 13 or 14, 15 years old can enter into a contractual agreement with anybody and be binding.
So, look, if you view his alleged behavior, to me, it smacks of devaluing life.
And the lives of these people.
Totally.
They're essentially disposable to him.
Yeah.
So, what's, you know, where did they wind up?
I just, inquiring minds want to know because we keep hearing about these vast numbers and this had gone on for so long.
All the way back from the early 90s, we've heard, you know, these things.
Where did they wind up?
You know, what happened to them?
Because it's not just ones that are so high profile that have retained legal counsel and this sort of thing.
You know, these kids that can't even speak English.
Right.
And I think that even.
There's so many of them.
Yeah.
Where are.
Yeah.
Dufresne actually.
Is that how you pronounce her name?
Virginia Roberts.
Dufresne.
Yeah.
Dufresne.
Dufresne.
Yeah.
Yeah.
We'll just call her Virginia Roberts.
She actually talked about that she bore witness to young women that would be qualified as children that were physically there while she was there and that she actively participated in activities with these children.
Scott Morgan's Underworld00:03:42
Right.
Yeah.
I don't know.
It's, it's, uh, well, it's more than water cooler talk.
I think that it's something that.
What do you think happened to them?
I don't know.
I really don't know.
That's, that's why I asked the question.
What did happen to them?
Where, where did they land?
What, what became of them?
I don't know.
It gets really, really dark really, really quick.
And all of this stuff has been dark for a long, long time.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, the darkest part about, I mean, it's all terribly disturbing and evil at every level.
But when you start to learn about the connections to like the criminal underworld and the espionage underworld, and there's very, there's a very blurry line between the two.
They work hand in hand.
If you want to talk about things like the Iran Contra case and how they were basically working with organized crime to do things and how he was working with them.
And I mean, there's endless amounts of documentaries and podcasts and books you can read about all this stuff.
But he was, you know, deeply connected to the people that run the world.
And that's the scariest part about the whole thing for me.
It's absolutely terrifying.
And he just happens to be one little space that a crack of light has kind of blasted through.
And again, I'm really getting outside of my sphere.
But, you know, I am interested in the dynamics of his death.
Can you empirically prove that this was, in fact, something other than suicide?
I think there's enough information there, enough data, observable data.
That question should be asked and it should be answered.
And again, if he's associated with this type of behavior, and there are so many alleged victims, they didn't just fall off the face of the planet.
You got to try to figure out where they are.
Right.
Well, Joseph Scott Morgan, this has been a fascinating conversation, man.
Thanks for having me.
I really appreciate you taking the time to come down and chat.
I'm glad that Julian connected us.
Me too.
I've been a big fan of him.
It's been a long time coming.
Yeah, absolutely.
I'm.
Flattered that you're there's a lot of stuff I know we haven't covered that uh we should definitely do a part two and cover.
I know there's a lot of stuff about JFK, um, that we can go down that rabbit hole.
I've been geeking out on all the JFK history for years, so I would love to, yeah, I would love to go down that just the medical legal perspective on JFK and how that's arguably one of the most botched, high profile autopsies that has ever been conducted.
100, yes, we should do that.
Um, but tell people.
Out there listening or watching, where they can find more of your stuff, get in touch with you, find some books, and all that good stuff.
Yeah, I'm on Instagram.
You can find me there, Joseph Scott Morgan.
I'm on X, Joseph Scott Forensics, I think is it.
My podcast is Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan.
I'm platformed on iHeart, Apple, Spotify.
You can find me there.
And then, of course, check out my university.
I teach there, I teach forensics there.
I'm the distinguished scholar of.
Forensic investigations.
Jacksonville State University in Alabama, not Florida.
People think that it's Jacksonville State University in Alabama.
We've got a fantastic program there.
Actually, got a cadaver lab this year.
So we're going to be having cadavers for our students.
Whoa.
Yeah.
And Crime Scene House and all that good stuff.
So really proud of the work we're doing there.
Yeah.
Absolutely.
So yeah, check me out there.
I'll be around.
Cool.
Always around.
Well, we'll link it all below.
And I look forward to doing part two with you, man.