May 19, 2026 • 43 mins
The headlines scream "87-year-old Serial Killer, Paroled Twice, Convicted of Murdering and Dismembering 3rd Victim." Joseph Scott Morgan and Dave Mack look back at the life and crimes of Harvey Marcelin. Marcelin was sentenced to "life" in prison in 1963. Paroled in 1984, he killed again and was sent back to prison in 1985. Paroled again in 2019.....Marcelin kills again. In 2022 Marcelin was captured on surveillance video Shopping in a 99-cent store in Jamaica, Queens, with his latest victim's dismembered leg in his electric wheelchair/scooter.
Host Joseph Scott Morgan
Co-Host Dave Mack
Transcribe Highlights
00:00.58 Introduction - Deception
01:01.18 87-year-old Serial Killer
02:47.77 Serial Killer standard is Three or more
06:22.92 Focus on Female victims
10:44.66 Marcelin went shopping with severed leg
15:15.20 Body found in multiple places
20:03.21 Marcelin kills in 1963
25:06.17 Marcelin in prison 1963-1984, part of the Attica Prison Riot
30:11.06 Marcelin picks weakest victim
35:14.68 Taking photos of body from overhead
40:40.89 Marcelin tells judge 2019, "I will never re-offend"
43:21.75 Conclusion
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Quody balance with Joseph Scott More.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
I think, above all things in this world, one of
the most insidious elements is the element of deception.
Speaker 1 (00:14):
Now that you lie.
Speaker 2 (00:17):
To somebody, you create something out of nothing, You create
something that misleads folks. Sometimes it's rather benign, maybe it's
just maybe.
Speaker 1 (00:30):
A little white lie right.
Speaker 2 (00:32):
To put them off sin, if you will, But then
they are bigger lies that come about, and you wonder
what's the purpose of this, and then at the end
of the day you realized that you have been scammed.
Today we're going to discuss a case that has recently
(00:55):
been in the news, and to say that it is
interesting is an understatement. It actually involves an eighty seven
year old purported serial killer who has had many changes
(01:15):
in his life relative to his identity. We'll get into
that in just a moment, but just let me tell
you this. He started killing people all the way back
in the sixties and he hasn't finished until just recently.
I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is body Bags David.
(01:44):
When I came across this case, and our friends, our
friends up in the New York area are going to
be very familiar with this because I think I first
came across it in the post and it caught my
eye because I was I guess it caught let me say,
let me see, how can I say? My eye caught
(02:04):
it and it put a hook in my brain because
I was confused.
Speaker 1 (02:08):
I didn't know.
Speaker 2 (02:09):
Yeah, no, kidd yeah, bless my heart, and I confused
most of the time, and in this case, just such
a such a bizarre set of circumstances.
Speaker 3 (02:18):
Well, okay, let's let's we've got to get a couple
of things on the table. Because I was looking over
a number of different headlines and they all include the
term eighty seven year old serial killer. You know, they
include the age of the person and the serial killer.
Aspect of this particular case, What is the definition of
(02:41):
a serial killer as you know it, or that you
would apply to someone. What is the threshold the benchmark?
How many people do you have to kill to be
a serial killer? Uh?
Speaker 2 (02:51):
No?
Speaker 1 (02:51):
Does trace? Three's?
Speaker 2 (02:53):
That has been kind of the standard that everybody has
put out there. If you talk to profilers, and some
of them vary, but for years and years it was
always three or more. I've had people say five and more,
and I'm thinking dude, five five. You got to hit
five in order to be I'm thinking, you know, man,
(03:14):
you kill two people unrelated. You know, you can have
a I don't know, you have a robbery where somebody
walks into four and they shoot the clerk and maybe
the assistant clerk or maybe a customer. I'm not saying
that's a serialized event, right. What I'm saying is you
generally have to have three and the three cannot be
(03:34):
all in the same location.
Speaker 1 (03:35):
They have to be spread out, all right, And that
makes sense.
Speaker 3 (03:38):
That makes sense, and I'm good as far as definitions go.
Speaker 1 (03:42):
I'm good with that. Now.
Speaker 3 (03:43):
I understand this does fit the serial killer definition. And
actually there's a profile that can be built. There is
an mo there is actually and other than if you
take away the years in between, because this person isn't
and we cant just I'm gonna throw this out there, Okay.
(04:06):
During his life in prison, he made changes and identified
as a transgender woman in a man's prison. Okay, he's
still in a male prison. And I'm saying that because
it came up in the most recent case when he
was in court and the judge they out of polite society.
(04:27):
Now I guess, or maybe it's the rule of law.
They asked, how do you want to be referred to?
Do you want us to refer to you as Marcelline
Harvey the woman or Harvey Marshal Marcellin, you know, the man?
And in court recently in the last few weeks, he said,
(04:47):
call me Harvey. I'm a man. So there we're going
to be clear on this. And the reason I wanted
to be clear is because I looked it up to determine.
I don't look a minute whether what I believe is
is immaterial. I don't want to offend anybody. I don't
hurt anybody's feelings over what they feel strongly about. And
I don't want to say that this is a guy
(05:08):
if he really identifies as a woman, I wouldn't do
that intentionally, and I wouldn't do it willfully, I guess.
Is the whole point now. It plays a major part
in this case and how this individual was released.
Speaker 2 (05:25):
This individual, this individual Marcelon, he early on in his life,
and I don't know how retroactive this diagnosis was, because
they're claiming that all the way back in the sixties
that he and I don't know if I buy this
or not, but he had been diagnosed with gender dysphoria
(05:48):
at that point in time. But the other thing he
had been he had been diagnosed with was schizophrenia. And
so when you begin to see that world that he
inhabited and his focus, his focus was, I think with
(06:08):
victims that came into his life were female. They were
not male, they were females who he really and I
meanness truly, they truly brutalized, the last two victims in particular.
And I'll be glad to get into that, but I
have to, yeah, because it's very confusing. It's confusing from
(06:32):
an investigative standpoint because because you're as an investigator, one
of the most important things that we do that we
do is identify people, right because if you can identify victims,
if you can talk about their lifestyle and try to
understand who their social group is, who they hang with,
(06:55):
who they are in romantic relationships with, who they get
dinner with, who they work with, all those sorts of things,
it's very important. Now that's that's the victims, but that
also applies to potential perpetrators. So if you've got somebody
that has the ability and it would appear that Harvey
Marcelin as he is, you know, has asked to be
(07:17):
identified as now.
Speaker 3 (07:20):
Seven year old sailor serial killer.
Speaker 2 (07:22):
He is that, he is that, and he almost seems
chameleon like. So for those individuals out there that truly
do and have been diagnosed with gender dysphoria, you take
somebody like this individual, it's a real I don't know,
to me, it's a real slap in a face to
that particular group of people because you're you're actually saying
(07:46):
or acting as if you were something that you are
not when people really struggle, okay, and so I submit
to you almost chamellion like he could slip in and out.
But haven't we heard that before about serialized homicides. And
again I hate to say his name, but all you
got to do is look at Bundy. Bundy had the
ability to morph in and out of these various roles.
(08:09):
What was it that the judge famously said to Bundy
in court he was admonishing him, or maybe it was
during sentencing, he said, I think that you would have
been a fine lawyer, and I would have and I'm paraphrasing,
and I would have welcomed to have seen you argue
cases before me, you know, but you're a serial killer,
you know. So yeah, yeah, so it this makes this
(08:31):
case and I don't want to shy away from it.
It makes this case all the more compelling. It's intellectually stimulating,
and it's it's rather confusing. So yeah, what has brought
us to this point? Though?
Speaker 1 (08:46):
I've got to ask you? Okay?
Speaker 3 (08:47):
And I was wondering how we're going to do this.
So let's start at the begin, let's start at the end.
The reason we're covering the story today. Eighty seven year
old man is convicted for killing a sixty eight year
old woman named Susan Laden. They had been involved together romantically,
(09:14):
and they had been They met in a homeless shelter
specializing in LGBTQIA people, and they met there. They began
a relationship, and using their disability checks and government checks,
they rented a place in Manhattan, small apartment. Now, oftentimes,
(09:36):
when people think of Manhattan that don't live there, we
think of high rises and rich people and things like that.
And that's not Manhattan. That's not all of it. There
are places in Manhattan that you would be afraid to
be near. And that's where they lived. And during their
couple of years together, Harvey Marcelyn as living as Marceline
(10:00):
Harvey was involved with many women. I know this sounds strange,
but these are the facts of the case. And during
their time together as a couple and beyond that, Susan
began getting her life together. She'd had problems with some
mental health issues and some addiction issues. There was a
(10:22):
separation from her family. So really, when she met Harvey,
it's all she had and she had started getting her
life back together and she started separating from Harvey. And
Harvey was accused of many things in his life, and
we have to cover those because it's what made him
into a serial killer. It's what happened to Susan Leyden
(10:42):
though at the age of sixty eight, at the hands
of Harvey Marcelin that we're covering today because Harvey Marcellin
is accused of killing Susan Leyden, dismembering her body, and
being featured on surveillance video in a retail establishment shopping
(11:10):
with the severed leg of Susan Layden in the basket
with him.
Speaker 2 (11:16):
Yep, let me tell you something, Dave. We cover my
Lord's Son three episodes a week for as long as
we've done it, dude, we're heading towards six hundred episodes.
We cover a lot of ghastly things. I'm not saying
this is the most ghastly, However, I kind of tell you,
(11:38):
given our now kind of robust history of dismemberment cases,
we always hear about elements of bodies being cast aside.
Right anyway, we got here, bro.
Speaker 1 (11:49):
That's still. That's still.
Speaker 2 (11:51):
And I urge anybody, any of our friends listening to
us right now, if you don't believe me, assume Morgan's
line here, go look it up yourself, all right, you'll
be shocked. There is actually one of these, you know,
the electric scooters. That's what this thing is. It's marooning color.
It's got four wheels on it, you know, and you
kind of cruise around. You're going through all the shops
and whatnot. You see people on sidewalks, see a lot
(12:14):
of people at Disney World. If you're brave enough to
go down there and Dave, there is a black plastic
back wrapped up that is directly beneath the seat of
this thing. And guess what authorities are saying. Authorities are
saying that contained and this is on surveillance video. Contained
(12:38):
inside this black bag is a leg and it belongs
to this poor woman, Dave, and it begs the question,
and I hate why. Let's say what, Harvey, what was
the point? What was the point in holding onto this
element of the body of this poor woman that you
(13:03):
have taken a saw to and particulated and you want
to hang on to it because this isn't you know,
we hear about these serial perpetrators, Dave, that you know
have trophies, right, Yeah, When I think trophy, you know,
I think obviously a trophy. You know, you walk in
you've got a bowling trophy, or maybe your Little League
(13:24):
baseball trophy or whatever it is. Or you think about hunters,
right and they've got a deer head on a wall
or whatever it is, a hoghead. This isn't like a trophy,
you know in that classic sense. This is this is
something else. I don't know. I got to ask you
here just for the sake of my on sanity. Have
we have we gone to another plane here? Because you've
(13:46):
got a guy riding around with human parts on this
this bluggy.
Speaker 3 (13:50):
You have asked, Joe, have we reached the bottom? Have
we dug deep enough to and we haven't. This proves it.
And the real weird part. Wait a minute, this entire
story is really weird. But I actually look at it
from the standpoint of media. Why is this story getting
attention in others or not? And the reason is if
you just start with an eighty seven year old individual
(14:12):
on video rolling around a store shopping with a bloody,
severed limb in a bag, that's enough to get your
you know, get you following the story. But as you
peel the layers of onion here, it gets worse and
worse and worse. And the thing is, when you actually
look at the suspect in this case, you realize that
(14:35):
other than the time he's spent in prison, if you
remove that time, this is a serial killer who began killing,
and he changed his mode between kill number one and
number two. But number two and number three are very similar, Joe,
And the only reason there aren't more dead bodies is
(14:58):
that he got caught early on after each one. He
didn't have a lot of free time after he kills
Susan Layden. We're talking a matter of days, Joe, before
they had this man in custody, had the video of him,
you know with the bloody leg and they he disarticulated
her to the point where they found torso here, leg
herehead here, And it was a person living in the
(15:22):
apartment complex, a man who came forward and said, Hey,
I saw this, I saw blood, I saw him, and
I haven't seen her, you know. The assistant DA opened
up the case by saying, on February twenty seventh, twenty
twenty two, Susan Layden went over to the Marshalon's apartment
(15:44):
at fifty Pennsylvania Avenue, carrying his gray and black rolling
bag with her there to see her friend. Susan Layden
walked into that building, not knowing she would never walk
out again. Marshlyn wound up using that very bag to
dispose of Leyden's torso. After buying a reciprocal saw from
(16:08):
a Manhattan home depot, Marcelen started cutting through the skin,
cutting through the flesh, through tissue, through bones, so many bones,
so many cuts. He packages Susan's body up in plastic bags.
That's the opening of the case, Joe. And it gets worse.
Speaker 2 (16:30):
Yes it does. And let me tell you why it
gets worse. And this question, if I had Marcelyn Harvey
or Harvelyn, Marcy, or whatever name they want to go by.
At this point, Tom sitting before me, my question would
not be directed toward that individual. It would be directed
toward our friends and then your court system and the
(16:53):
correctional system, and the question would be a question I
hate to ask, why why is this person on the streets?
(17:21):
You know Dave, dating back with Marcel and dating back
all the way to I don't know, the mid fifties.
This individual had been had had you know, diagnoses, you know,
relative to psychiatric issues and this sort of thing. Also
(17:43):
had had had had brushes with the law, I think,
like in fifty seven, hooked up on things like burglary,
and had had some mental illness and drug addiction problems.
Speaker 1 (17:58):
And in addition to the that.
Speaker 2 (18:02):
I talked about this diagnosis of schizphrenia, and they were
also paranoid as well.
Speaker 3 (18:11):
Usually hear those two words together, that paranoid schizophrenia, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1 (18:16):
And delusional.
Speaker 2 (18:17):
You know, there's a multiplicity of these diagnoses and it's
really hard to try to you know, peg it because
the psychiatric community has a way, they have these markers
that they look for and you know, they'll you can
be you can be delusional without necessarily being schizophrenic, right,
(18:39):
and you can be paranoid without being schizophrenic.
Speaker 1 (18:42):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (18:43):
I've been slapped down many times by people in the
mental health community when I try to discuss these things.
So I'm just trying to keep it in kind of
a manageable state, because they've got a whole book of things,
the d s M that helps them make diagnoses. I
do know that this individual was in fact married in
(19:05):
the early sixties and had already started with women during
their marriage. That initial marriage. I think his first wife
was like Florence, had been unfaithful, he had been aggressive,
he had had a girlfriend wound up stalking this individual,
(19:28):
and of course it led to I think back in
I think it was like sixty three as an adjunct
to this, you know, to this stalking behavior that they
were engaging. He was a killing her. I mean, he
kills this woman. Actually uses a thirty two caliber revolver,
which we really which is you know, if that catches
(19:49):
my eye from a forensic standpoint, you don't see these
very often anymore, thirty two caliber revolvers.
Speaker 3 (19:54):
I wondered what that meant to you, because when I
saw this in the report a marshal and this ex
girlfriend of his three times. He shot her once as
she was trying to get away from him from the
living room towards the bedroom. And she's in the bedroom
and she realizes she's been shot and starts coming back,
where he plugs her two more times. Three shots. What
(20:16):
would three shots from a thirty two do to an individual?
Speaker 2 (20:20):
Well, you know, well, of course that all depends on
anatomical placement. You could use a caliber as small as
a twenty two, and if the placement of the shot
is in a critical area, you're going to drop them,
just as if you were using you know, forty five
acp round. All right, So it talked. You know, what
you're thinking about is accuracy. So depending upon where I
(20:43):
do know that she she stumbled in order to try
to get away, and that you know, you finally had
to kill what we would call, you know, a kill shot.
Here's an interesting little tidbit about this individual when he
went to trial on this particular case, Dave, Now this
(21:04):
this is going back you know sometime, this is when
New York still had the death penalty and that they
would use it, right, and so the jury got deadlocked
on that in that particular trial. I mean they it
was it was at least whispered, you know that there
could be a death sentence involved in this, and of
(21:26):
course they factored in he's taken back to Bellevue diagnosed
with skizoid personality disorder, which I've always wondered, you know,
with schizoid personality disorder, I've never been a big believer in, like,
you know, where people present with multiple multiple personality disorder
(21:48):
where they're displaying like what was that book back in
the seventies, Sybil was that the name of it had
Sally Field in it. I never bought that. It just
didn't seem it didn't seem right. And then when I
saw Kenneth Bionki mi Ami feigning that condition with the
Hillside Stranglers, I was like this, and he was doing
this in front of like this esteemed psychiatics psychiatric guy,
(22:11):
and I was thinking, You're going to have to go
a long way to sell me on this. You know
that this is actually a real thing. So with this
this you know, this personality disorder, I'm really wondering if
this is playing into this vacillation that this guy has.
You know, you can't decide if he's this or that,
but he identifies in the feminine, but yet he dates women. Yeah,
(22:36):
so it sounds I don't know what to believe in
this case, but I do know that he killed his
first person all the way back in sixty three. Here
in this twenty twenty six, and we're still talking about
this guy.
Speaker 3 (22:49):
When you mentioned he went in, he was accused convicted
burglar in nineteen fifty seven. He spends a year in
county jail, and when he comes out, he moves in
with his mother. He had been having psychiatric issues for
some time and that led to alcohol and drug addiction
issues as well. In nineteen sixty two, before the murder,
(23:09):
he was he checked himself into Bellevue. Bellevue is a
place we all have heard of, you know, from a
psychiatric standpoints, well known. He checked himself in for two
weeks at Bellevue and when he came out. You know,
you mentioned he was married. First wife, I think her
name was Florence, but then he started cheating on her.
And the woman he killed was an ex girlfriend. Okay,
(23:31):
you're married and you have enough girlfriends that you also
have an ex girlfriend here, Now, what was going on
that you really have to peel back even further. Every
crime that Harvey was accused of doing had to do
with hurting women, being violent towards women. Harvey was accused
of with his current girlfriend back in nineteen sixty three,
(23:54):
of a sexual assault and against another woman. And as
weird as this sounds, there was a sexual assault in
burglary or robbery that they had arrested Harvey on, but
they also arrested Harvey's girlfriend, I think her name was Benefield.
(24:15):
And when Harvey is sitting there talking to the cops
and they're.
Speaker 1 (24:18):
Like, what were you guys doing.
Speaker 3 (24:19):
You're trying to have You're trying to rape this girl
and rob her. And he's like, yeah, but hey man,
my ex girlfriend she's involved too, And so police bring
her in, they charge her. She rolls over, She's like,
I didn't know very much about this, but she did
know something, and so she had agreed. She got amenity
from prosecution, and she became a witness for the police
(24:41):
for the prosecution, and that's when Harvey went over and
killed her. Now, Harvey claims that they had a falling
out and he was jealous of her dating other people.
Speaker 1 (24:50):
That's not it.
Speaker 3 (24:51):
He killed her because she was the witness against him
in court. That's why she killed him. He still got hung,
I still got strong. Granted he did get life in prison.
Would not settle on the death penalty. They were looking
at his psychiatric background, and they settled on life in
prison with the possibility of parole, and that's exactly what
he got. He goes to prison in nineteen sixty three, Joe,
(25:13):
he doesn't stay there, though, he stays there a while.
I got to give him that. He did stay from
sixty three to eighty four.
Speaker 1 (25:22):
Yeah, it was. It was in that.
Speaker 2 (25:23):
But you know what famous or infamous event he participated
in Attica. Yeah, he was part of the Attica prison
riots back in I think it was September of seventy one.
And there was actually an interview with this guy that
took place because he was, I don't know, bringing attention
(25:44):
to abuse of the prisoners by the guards.
Speaker 1 (25:47):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (25:48):
So it's the tally that this guy has of you know,
kind of you know, winding his way through this odd
life that he's been a part of and seeing.
Speaker 3 (26:00):
Teaching all these major events.
Speaker 2 (26:02):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely all the way along, and yeah, it
was really super bizarre. But yeah, they cut this guy loose,
to cut him loose and twenty years. Yeah, and he's
been on the streets.
Speaker 3 (26:16):
Oh yeah, something I did find interesting. I looked at
he was denied parol a bunch because of his violence
towards women while he was in prison. He showed violent
tendencies towards women while he was in prison, including female
volunteers at the hospital. Female hospital volunteers were not safe
(26:38):
from this guy. That's why he could have got out
a lot earlier than twenty years. But after twenty years
life with for all he you know, they let him out.
But that was why he stayed so long, didn't stay
out for very long, but that's why it took him
so long to get par all and how quickly he
was right back in.
Speaker 2 (26:57):
Yeah, and I'm really wondering, you know, would that touch
on that piece in place. I'm really wondering if somebody
like him, who obviously has a history of psychiatric issues,
has been diagnosed multiple times, what are the people in
the prison doing that are supposed to be doing therapeutic
assessments on an individual like this, Because you know, that
kind of behavior, that anger toward women who you know,
(27:23):
I got to tell you need to be protected from
somebody like this, What kind of assessments were they doing?
You're telling me that suddenly, all of a sudden there
was this burning Bush moment in his life in nineteen
eighty four that was transformative. That suddenly all of that
(27:45):
anger toward women where he's wanting to harm them and
you know, mutilate them and all this stuff, suddenly it's
just dissipated. Well, let me tell you this, it wasn't
because after he gets out, big surprise coming up, he
(28:05):
does it again. It pretty much goes without saying that
if you're looking in to a serialized event like homicides, you're,
(28:31):
you know, one of the big things that profilers, you know,
beat their chest over and you know where they have
expertise if you will. Is this idea of being able
to find patterns?
Speaker 1 (28:46):
Right?
Speaker 2 (28:47):
I don't know that there was any kind of pattern
established with with you know, this individual's first kill. But
we begin to see this because after he is released
a from prison, he gets involved with a poor woman
(29:08):
that is well, I'll put it to you this way.
She's prostituted. She's a heroin addict and for whatever reason,
and God bless her. Her name was Anna Laura Sierra Miranda.
She gets involved with this person, all right, and they
(29:28):
become roommates, and it's according to the story. And of
course this is happening back in early of early eighty five.
Now he's just been released from the.
Speaker 3 (29:44):
Time he gets released in May of eighty four after
serving twenty plus years in prison for a murder.
Speaker 1 (29:50):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (29:50):
Yeah, he's out for eighteen months. October nineteen eighty five.
Eighteen months, friends, that's it. And October twenty nine, nineteen
eighty five, this happens show.
Speaker 2 (30:02):
Yeah, I'm I'm you know, i'd like to say, and
I'm being kind of snarky here, I'd like to say, uh,
you know, gee, what a surprise. Right, But this poor
soul who is you know, let's let's face it, Dave
is probably the the most defensiless person that you could
ever choose. You know, he's he's not going he's not
(30:24):
going to down to Manhattan, down down into Manhattan where
there's a building site and picking on picking on a
construction worker down there that would probably have beat him
to death with his bare hands. Now he's he's going
after this poor woman who is living on the streets.
It's a heroin addict and is working as prostitute. Isn't
(30:45):
that the way it happens? You know, you know, and
you see this over and over again with bullies in
the world, just like Rex Huremann, right, you know, that's
who they're picking on the same it's the same mo
o here, and you know, and it begs a question
and on a little aside, I wonder if there were
others too. Okay, you know we're talking about serialized events here.
(31:08):
We've got three to his credit at this point in time.
Who's to say that there weren't more along the way,
and granted he had been incarcerated, but lord only knows,
you know, he gets a taste, you know, a taste
for this sort of thing. But back, but back to
miss Miranda. He did in fact kill her, and you
(31:29):
know it was she would disappear, reappear. He wound up
killing her. And when he did, Dave, he cut her
into multiple pieces. Here we have this idea of dismemberment.
When the OCME did the examination, the autopsy on her day,
they found now get this, thirty three stab wounds to
(31:53):
her body.
Speaker 1 (31:54):
Thirty three.
Speaker 3 (31:56):
Yeah, we know that he dismembered her, yes, and that
he took and put her body parts into bags and
basically dump them all over Central Park in different areas.
Speaker 1 (32:08):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (32:08):
When and I'm not being gross, I'm just curious. I
mean they have to get you have to reassemble the person.
You have to take these body parts and really do
they actually lay them out on a table and try
to put it back together like a puzzle.
Speaker 1 (32:23):
Yeah, you have to.
Speaker 2 (32:25):
Wow, you better be damn careful with those bags too,
because each one of the bags, these plastic bags, which
is a non poor surface, they're going to have, well,
they've got a different they've got several different type of
potential fingerprints left behind. So you've got fingerprints. You're talking
about a dismemberment. First off, you're going to have you're
(32:47):
going to have the medium of blood that's going to
transfer to the pads of your fingers. And if you
touch that surface, and we all know what a black
trash bag looks like. You know, you can stain a
black trash bag with something like blood, and you're not
necessarily going to see that stain there, okay, or you're
going to leave that remnant there with your fingerprints intact.
And then in addition to that, because it's a smooth surface,
(33:10):
he can transfer. If he's not wearing gloves, he can
actually transfer a latent print with the fatty lipid oils
off of his fingerprint. So you know when you're saying,
do they lay the body out?
Speaker 1 (33:25):
Yeah, they do.
Speaker 2 (33:26):
And so you have to take each part out piece
by piece after each bag has been individually X rayed,
and then you try to it's not really reassemble because
that implies that you're kind of reconnecting things. That's not
what you do. You leave the body in its parts,
our individual fragments, if you will. And you take a
(33:51):
bird's eye view, and we can do this in the morgue.
We actually do photography where some morgs will have cameras
that are actually suspended from the ceiling. They'll be in
the ceiling and so you can get like a bird's
eye view. They're called slab shots, is what they're called.
And so the camera lens is actually looking down on
the body and you can remotely operate the camera and
(34:13):
you do a snap. So you're looking down and I
urge all of our friends, this is fascinating. What's old
is new again? If you go back and if you
look at and there's a bunch of them from New York.
I love looking at these old crom seen photos. In
the early days of police photography, they had this contraption
(34:33):
day that they would use that had four legs on
it and it was a gigantic pedestal for a camera
or remotely operate, you know, the old button flash that
they had where they would take this thing and set
it up in an apartment with people laying on beds.
And these images are incredible. They're all in black and white.
(34:54):
If you get a chance to check these out online,
it'll blow your mind. Where it's a bird's ee view
the scene. And it's a beautiful way to do this
because you know, we think in terms of being on
the same plane with the body, but even back then
they were taking these gigantic photos looking down on the body.
So that's one of the things we can do in
the morgue and it gives you a sense. It's really
(35:16):
powerful when you see the damage that has been done
to a fellow human being, you know, like Mss Miranda here,
you know where she's particulated, and each piece is laid
out and you're going to get an.
Speaker 1 (35:31):
Overall idea as to well.
Speaker 2 (35:34):
First off, what's there and what isn't right, and then
you're going to document it photographically to represent this poor woman,
to say that she even existed at all. So another
view of this is you want to capture everything here
in the morgue. This is your one chance to be
(35:54):
able to demonstrate to not just the investigative community, but
also to those individuals that are going to sit on
a jury so they can see what he did. And
defense attorneys want to shy away from that. They don't
they don't want the court to see this. They'll say
that it's prejudicial or whatever. Well, actually you're demonstrating what
had happened, and you're going to talk about the over
(36:17):
thirty stab wounds that she's had, You're going to talk
about how her body was abused, and then you're going
to demonstrate that it was abuse so badly and fragmented
so badly that all of these different parts came from
different locations. Okay, And so that's a big that's a
big part to what you have to do in this
environment to document this. Well, Dave, if I'm not mistaken,
(36:39):
he he did go he was convicted of this crime
and goes back to prison.
Speaker 1 (36:49):
At this point in time, correct.
Speaker 3 (36:51):
I do remember now he went to prison from nineteen
sixty three to nineteen eighty four. He's let out in
May of eighty four. Seventeen and a half months later
he killed again and goes back to prison. So he
is in prison and applying for parole a total of
fifteen times over the years. And there's something happened while
(37:15):
he was in prison. Minute. You mentioned Attica a little
while ago. After he was in prison seven eight years.
He's at Attica when they had the uprising against the.
Speaker 1 (37:24):
Regime of the torturing guards.
Speaker 3 (37:26):
Well, this time he goes to prison in eighty five,
and I think it was long about ninety three marcell
Harvey Marcellin. Well, wait a minute, I need to clarify something.
See the original sentence in sixty through his life with
(37:47):
the possibility for parole. With the second murder in nineteen
eighty five, rather than go through a long drawn out
trial and risk getting a difference, he actually was allowed
to plead guilty to a lesser charge show And because
the minute he was arrested on the charge and the
death of Miss Miranda, they revoked his parole.
Speaker 1 (38:08):
So he was.
Speaker 3 (38:09):
Immediately sent back to prison and he actually plea bargain
and got twelve more years added onto that original life sentence.
That's what he was serving when he kept applying for parole. Well,
in nineteen ninety three, he meets a guy in a
transsexual in prison who convinces him well that he needs
to take a hormone therapy drug. And yeah, it's Premarin Premier.
(38:37):
He starts taking Premier in and I don't know how
somebody in prison that kills two women as a man
all of a sudden decides after thirty years of you know,
prison life, except for the eighteen months he was out,
that he all of a sudden has decided that he
is actually a woman in this man's body and can
get because I mean, we're paying for that, right, our
tax dollars pay for prisoners anyway. So he gets up
(39:02):
Premier and and commits this is what it says. He
commits to transitioning to female. Fully committed on this. So
he applies from parole over and over and over again,
but again, remember the guy's getting older. Finally, twenty nineteen
rolls around. Joseph Scott Morgan. He applied for all fifteen
times between nineteen eighty five and twenty nineteen, he was
(39:22):
granted parole. This is the second time he is being
granted parole on the life sentence from nineteen sixty three.
First time they gave him parole, he killed again. What's
it going to do when they give him parole the
second time? Well, you know, they gave a reason, Joe.
At the time, Harvey Marcelon was eighty one years old,
(39:42):
and the board parole, the parole board looked upon his
advanced age in that consideration for giving him parole, and
of course the fact that well he's transitioned. He's a
woman now, you know, he's not a man. So he's
an old woman, not a violent man. That's why they
cut him loose.
Speaker 2 (40:04):
That's why I think that for anybody that's out there,
that's you know, for anybody that deals with, you know,
gender dysphoria that has legitimately been diagnosed, you know, in
their own hormone therapy or whatever whatever therapeutic treatment they're
(40:24):
going through, this guy's used the system. You'll never convince
me otherwise because let me tell you how, I know
you used assistant Dave. Do you know what he actually
actually tell the court when they cut him loose in nineteen.
He looked at Judge in the face at that point,
Tom and said, I give you my word, I will
(40:48):
never re offend. Well guess what, guess what? Wow, he did, Susan.
You know, Susan Leyden sixty eight years old is a
testament to his reoffending. Are all that remains of.
Speaker 4 (41:09):
Her very clolar to what happened in It's like a
blueprint that was laid out from back in eighty five
with Miss Miranda.
Speaker 2 (41:20):
Yeah, and you know it's the same, and not only
I think that the thing that's really striking here is
that with this deception, this level of deception, and how
bold he had been in the Miranda case, you jumped
forward to Miss Leyden's case and it's almost like he's
(41:45):
thumbing his nose at everybody. Who Dave, I ask you, brother,
who dismembers a poor woman's body like this again? Lady
to spent through a lot that has a long history
of drug addictions. She's trying to get her life back
on track and he breaks her body apart to the
(42:09):
point after he has killed her and Dave like a trophy,
he rides around with her remains in public on a scooter.
Who does that you know the depth of depravity in here.
I don't know that we can necessarily plummet. You know,
we try many times, and you know, just when you
and I think that we have seen everything that we
(42:32):
possibly can see. That's why I always tell my students
if they ever come across somebody in forensics that says, yeah,
I've seen it all, don't walk away from them. Run
away from them because they're lying. Just like if I
said that I'm lying because I haven't seen everything. Because
you know, I'm looking at this case and it's really
easy to Monday morning quarterback. But you know what, this
(42:57):
isn't a football game.
Speaker 1 (43:00):
This is life that.
Speaker 2 (43:04):
For whatever issues Harvey Marcelyn is suffering from, it doesn't
match up to what these victims have gone through because
it's not about life with him, it's their death at
his hands. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is body
(43:29):
bags
Quody balance with Joseph Scott More.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
I think, above all things in this world, one of
the most insidious elements is the element of deception.
Speaker 1 (00:14):
Now that you lie.
Speaker 2 (00:17):
To somebody, you create something out of nothing, You create
something that misleads folks. Sometimes it's rather benign, maybe it's
just maybe.
Speaker 1 (00:30):
A little white lie right.
Speaker 2 (00:32):
To put them off sin, if you will, But then
they are bigger lies that come about, and you wonder
what's the purpose of this, and then at the end
of the day you realized that you have been scammed.
Today we're going to discuss a case that has recently
(00:55):
been in the news, and to say that it is
interesting is an understatement. It actually involves an eighty seven
year old purported serial killer who has had many changes
(01:15):
in his life relative to his identity. We'll get into
that in just a moment, but just let me tell
you this. He started killing people all the way back
in the sixties and he hasn't finished until just recently.
I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is body Bags David.
(01:44):
When I came across this case, and our friends, our
friends up in the New York area are going to
be very familiar with this because I think I first
came across it in the post and it caught my
eye because I was I guess it caught let me say,
let me see, how can I say? My eye caught
(02:04):
it and it put a hook in my brain because
I was confused.
Speaker 1 (02:08):
I didn't know.
Speaker 2 (02:09):
Yeah, no, kidd yeah, bless my heart, and I confused
most of the time, and in this case, just such
a such a bizarre set of circumstances.
Speaker 3 (02:18):
Well, okay, let's let's we've got to get a couple
of things on the table. Because I was looking over
a number of different headlines and they all include the
term eighty seven year old serial killer. You know, they
include the age of the person and the serial killer.
Aspect of this particular case, What is the definition of
(02:41):
a serial killer as you know it, or that you
would apply to someone. What is the threshold the benchmark?
How many people do you have to kill to be
a serial killer? Uh?
Speaker 2 (02:51):
No?
Speaker 1 (02:51):
Does trace? Three's?
Speaker 2 (02:53):
That has been kind of the standard that everybody has
put out there. If you talk to profilers, and some
of them vary, but for years and years it was
always three or more. I've had people say five and more,
and I'm thinking dude, five five. You got to hit
five in order to be I'm thinking, you know, man,
(03:14):
you kill two people unrelated. You know, you can have
a I don't know, you have a robbery where somebody
walks into four and they shoot the clerk and maybe
the assistant clerk or maybe a customer. I'm not saying
that's a serialized event, right. What I'm saying is you
generally have to have three and the three cannot be
(03:34):
all in the same location.
Speaker 1 (03:35):
They have to be spread out, all right, And that
makes sense.
Speaker 3 (03:38):
That makes sense, and I'm good as far as definitions go.
Speaker 1 (03:42):
I'm good with that. Now.
Speaker 3 (03:43):
I understand this does fit the serial killer definition. And
actually there's a profile that can be built. There is
an mo there is actually and other than if you
take away the years in between, because this person isn't
and we cant just I'm gonna throw this out there, Okay.
(04:06):
During his life in prison, he made changes and identified
as a transgender woman in a man's prison. Okay, he's
still in a male prison. And I'm saying that because
it came up in the most recent case when he
was in court and the judge they out of polite society.
(04:27):
Now I guess, or maybe it's the rule of law.
They asked, how do you want to be referred to?
Do you want us to refer to you as Marcelline
Harvey the woman or Harvey Marshal Marcellin, you know, the man?
And in court recently in the last few weeks, he said,
(04:47):
call me Harvey. I'm a man. So there we're going
to be clear on this. And the reason I wanted
to be clear is because I looked it up to determine.
I don't look a minute whether what I believe is
is immaterial. I don't want to offend anybody. I don't
hurt anybody's feelings over what they feel strongly about. And
I don't want to say that this is a guy
(05:08):
if he really identifies as a woman, I wouldn't do
that intentionally, and I wouldn't do it willfully, I guess.
Is the whole point now. It plays a major part
in this case and how this individual was released.
Speaker 2 (05:25):
This individual, this individual Marcelon, he early on in his life,
and I don't know how retroactive this diagnosis was, because
they're claiming that all the way back in the sixties
that he and I don't know if I buy this
or not, but he had been diagnosed with gender dysphoria
(05:48):
at that point in time. But the other thing he
had been he had been diagnosed with was schizophrenia. And
so when you begin to see that world that he
inhabited and his focus, his focus was, I think with
(06:08):
victims that came into his life were female. They were
not male, they were females who he really and I
meanness truly, they truly brutalized, the last two victims in particular.
And I'll be glad to get into that, but I
have to, yeah, because it's very confusing. It's confusing from
(06:32):
an investigative standpoint because because you're as an investigator, one
of the most important things that we do that we
do is identify people, right because if you can identify victims,
if you can talk about their lifestyle and try to
understand who their social group is, who they hang with,
(06:55):
who they are in romantic relationships with, who they get
dinner with, who they work with, all those sorts of things,
it's very important. Now that's that's the victims, but that
also applies to potential perpetrators. So if you've got somebody
that has the ability and it would appear that Harvey
Marcelin as he is, you know, has asked to be
(07:17):
identified as now.
Speaker 3 (07:20):
Seven year old sailor serial killer.
Speaker 2 (07:22):
He is that, he is that, and he almost seems
chameleon like. So for those individuals out there that truly
do and have been diagnosed with gender dysphoria, you take
somebody like this individual, it's a real I don't know,
to me, it's a real slap in a face to
that particular group of people because you're you're actually saying
(07:46):
or acting as if you were something that you are
not when people really struggle, okay, and so I submit
to you almost chamellion like he could slip in and out.
But haven't we heard that before about serialized homicides. And
again I hate to say his name, but all you
got to do is look at Bundy. Bundy had the
ability to morph in and out of these various roles.
(08:09):
What was it that the judge famously said to Bundy
in court he was admonishing him, or maybe it was
during sentencing, he said, I think that you would have
been a fine lawyer, and I would have and I'm paraphrasing,
and I would have welcomed to have seen you argue
cases before me, you know, but you're a serial killer,
you know. So yeah, yeah, so it this makes this
(08:31):
case and I don't want to shy away from it.
It makes this case all the more compelling. It's intellectually stimulating,
and it's it's rather confusing. So yeah, what has brought
us to this point? Though?
Speaker 1 (08:46):
I've got to ask you? Okay?
Speaker 3 (08:47):
And I was wondering how we're going to do this.
So let's start at the begin, let's start at the end.
The reason we're covering the story today. Eighty seven year
old man is convicted for killing a sixty eight year
old woman named Susan Laden. They had been involved together romantically,
(09:14):
and they had been They met in a homeless shelter
specializing in LGBTQIA people, and they met there. They began
a relationship, and using their disability checks and government checks,
they rented a place in Manhattan, small apartment. Now, oftentimes,
(09:36):
when people think of Manhattan that don't live there, we
think of high rises and rich people and things like that.
And that's not Manhattan. That's not all of it. There
are places in Manhattan that you would be afraid to
be near. And that's where they lived. And during their
couple of years together, Harvey Marcelyn as living as Marceline
(10:00):
Harvey was involved with many women. I know this sounds strange,
but these are the facts of the case. And during
their time together as a couple and beyond that, Susan
began getting her life together. She'd had problems with some
mental health issues and some addiction issues. There was a
(10:22):
separation from her family. So really, when she met Harvey,
it's all she had and she had started getting her
life back together and she started separating from Harvey. And
Harvey was accused of many things in his life, and
we have to cover those because it's what made him
into a serial killer. It's what happened to Susan Leyden
(10:42):
though at the age of sixty eight, at the hands
of Harvey Marcelin that we're covering today because Harvey Marcellin
is accused of killing Susan Leyden, dismembering her body, and
being featured on surveillance video in a retail establishment shopping
(11:10):
with the severed leg of Susan Layden in the basket
with him.
Speaker 2 (11:16):
Yep, let me tell you something, Dave. We cover my
Lord's Son three episodes a week for as long as
we've done it, dude, we're heading towards six hundred episodes.
We cover a lot of ghastly things. I'm not saying
this is the most ghastly, However, I kind of tell you,
(11:38):
given our now kind of robust history of dismemberment cases,
we always hear about elements of bodies being cast aside.
Right anyway, we got here, bro.
Speaker 1 (11:49):
That's still. That's still.
Speaker 2 (11:51):
And I urge anybody, any of our friends listening to
us right now, if you don't believe me, assume Morgan's
line here, go look it up yourself, all right, you'll
be shocked. There is actually one of these, you know,
the electric scooters. That's what this thing is. It's marooning color.
It's got four wheels on it, you know, and you
kind of cruise around. You're going through all the shops
and whatnot. You see people on sidewalks, see a lot
(12:14):
of people at Disney World. If you're brave enough to
go down there and Dave, there is a black plastic
back wrapped up that is directly beneath the seat of
this thing. And guess what authorities are saying. Authorities are
saying that contained and this is on surveillance video. Contained
(12:38):
inside this black bag is a leg and it belongs
to this poor woman, Dave, and it begs the question,
and I hate why. Let's say what, Harvey, what was
the point? What was the point in holding onto this
element of the body of this poor woman that you
(13:03):
have taken a saw to and particulated and you want
to hang on to it because this isn't you know,
we hear about these serial perpetrators, Dave, that you know
have trophies, right, Yeah, When I think trophy, you know,
I think obviously a trophy. You know, you walk in
you've got a bowling trophy, or maybe your Little League
(13:24):
baseball trophy or whatever it is. Or you think about hunters,
right and they've got a deer head on a wall
or whatever it is, a hoghead. This isn't like a trophy,
you know in that classic sense. This is this is
something else. I don't know. I got to ask you
here just for the sake of my on sanity. Have
we have we gone to another plane here? Because you've
(13:46):
got a guy riding around with human parts on this
this bluggy.
Speaker 3 (13:50):
You have asked, Joe, have we reached the bottom? Have
we dug deep enough to and we haven't. This proves it.
And the real weird part. Wait a minute, this entire
story is really weird. But I actually look at it
from the standpoint of media. Why is this story getting
attention in others or not? And the reason is if
you just start with an eighty seven year old individual
(14:12):
on video rolling around a store shopping with a bloody,
severed limb in a bag, that's enough to get your
you know, get you following the story. But as you
peel the layers of onion here, it gets worse and
worse and worse. And the thing is, when you actually
look at the suspect in this case, you realize that
(14:35):
other than the time he's spent in prison, if you
remove that time, this is a serial killer who began killing,
and he changed his mode between kill number one and
number two. But number two and number three are very similar, Joe,
And the only reason there aren't more dead bodies is
(14:58):
that he got caught early on after each one. He
didn't have a lot of free time after he kills
Susan Layden. We're talking a matter of days, Joe, before
they had this man in custody, had the video of him,
you know with the bloody leg and they he disarticulated
her to the point where they found torso here, leg
herehead here, And it was a person living in the
(15:22):
apartment complex, a man who came forward and said, Hey,
I saw this, I saw blood, I saw him, and
I haven't seen her, you know. The assistant DA opened
up the case by saying, on February twenty seventh, twenty
twenty two, Susan Layden went over to the Marshalon's apartment
(15:44):
at fifty Pennsylvania Avenue, carrying his gray and black rolling
bag with her there to see her friend. Susan Layden
walked into that building, not knowing she would never walk
out again. Marshlyn wound up using that very bag to
dispose of Leyden's torso. After buying a reciprocal saw from
(16:08):
a Manhattan home depot, Marcelen started cutting through the skin,
cutting through the flesh, through tissue, through bones, so many bones,
so many cuts. He packages Susan's body up in plastic bags.
That's the opening of the case, Joe. And it gets worse.
Speaker 2 (16:30):
Yes it does. And let me tell you why it
gets worse. And this question, if I had Marcelyn Harvey
or Harvelyn, Marcy, or whatever name they want to go by.
At this point, Tom sitting before me, my question would
not be directed toward that individual. It would be directed
toward our friends and then your court system and the
(16:53):
correctional system, and the question would be a question I
hate to ask, why why is this person on the streets?
(17:21):
You know Dave, dating back with Marcel and dating back
all the way to I don't know, the mid fifties.
This individual had been had had you know, diagnoses, you know,
relative to psychiatric issues and this sort of thing. Also
(17:43):
had had had had brushes with the law, I think,
like in fifty seven, hooked up on things like burglary,
and had had some mental illness and drug addiction problems.
Speaker 1 (17:58):
And in addition to the that.
Speaker 2 (18:02):
I talked about this diagnosis of schizphrenia, and they were
also paranoid as well.
Speaker 3 (18:11):
Usually hear those two words together, that paranoid schizophrenia, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1 (18:16):
And delusional.
Speaker 2 (18:17):
You know, there's a multiplicity of these diagnoses and it's
really hard to try to you know, peg it because
the psychiatric community has a way, they have these markers
that they look for and you know, they'll you can
be you can be delusional without necessarily being schizophrenic, right,
(18:39):
and you can be paranoid without being schizophrenic.
Speaker 1 (18:42):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (18:43):
I've been slapped down many times by people in the
mental health community when I try to discuss these things.
So I'm just trying to keep it in kind of
a manageable state, because they've got a whole book of things,
the d s M that helps them make diagnoses. I
do know that this individual was in fact married in
(19:05):
the early sixties and had already started with women during
their marriage. That initial marriage. I think his first wife
was like Florence, had been unfaithful, he had been aggressive,
he had had a girlfriend wound up stalking this individual,
(19:28):
and of course it led to I think back in
I think it was like sixty three as an adjunct
to this, you know, to this stalking behavior that they
were engaging. He was a killing her. I mean, he
kills this woman. Actually uses a thirty two caliber revolver,
which we really which is you know, if that catches
(19:49):
my eye from a forensic standpoint, you don't see these
very often anymore, thirty two caliber revolvers.
Speaker 3 (19:54):
I wondered what that meant to you, because when I
saw this in the report a marshal and this ex
girlfriend of his three times. He shot her once as
she was trying to get away from him from the
living room towards the bedroom. And she's in the bedroom
and she realizes she's been shot and starts coming back,
where he plugs her two more times. Three shots. What
(20:16):
would three shots from a thirty two do to an individual?
Speaker 2 (20:20):
Well, you know, well, of course that all depends on
anatomical placement. You could use a caliber as small as
a twenty two, and if the placement of the shot
is in a critical area, you're going to drop them,
just as if you were using you know, forty five
acp round. All right, So it talked. You know, what
you're thinking about is accuracy. So depending upon where I
(20:43):
do know that she she stumbled in order to try
to get away, and that you know, you finally had
to kill what we would call, you know, a kill shot.
Here's an interesting little tidbit about this individual when he
went to trial on this particular case, Dave, Now this
(21:04):
this is going back you know sometime, this is when
New York still had the death penalty and that they
would use it, right, and so the jury got deadlocked
on that in that particular trial. I mean they it
was it was at least whispered, you know that there
could be a death sentence involved in this, and of
(21:26):
course they factored in he's taken back to Bellevue diagnosed
with skizoid personality disorder, which I've always wondered, you know,
with schizoid personality disorder, I've never been a big believer in, like,
you know, where people present with multiple multiple personality disorder
(21:48):
where they're displaying like what was that book back in
the seventies, Sybil was that the name of it had
Sally Field in it. I never bought that. It just
didn't seem it didn't seem right. And then when I
saw Kenneth Bionki mi Ami feigning that condition with the
Hillside Stranglers, I was like this, and he was doing
this in front of like this esteemed psychiatics psychiatric guy,
(22:11):
and I was thinking, You're going to have to go
a long way to sell me on this. You know
that this is actually a real thing. So with this
this you know, this personality disorder, I'm really wondering if
this is playing into this vacillation that this guy has.
You know, you can't decide if he's this or that,
but he identifies in the feminine, but yet he dates women. Yeah,
(22:36):
so it sounds I don't know what to believe in
this case, but I do know that he killed his
first person all the way back in sixty three. Here
in this twenty twenty six, and we're still talking about
this guy.
Speaker 3 (22:49):
When you mentioned he went in, he was accused convicted
burglar in nineteen fifty seven. He spends a year in
county jail, and when he comes out, he moves in
with his mother. He had been having psychiatric issues for
some time and that led to alcohol and drug addiction
issues as well. In nineteen sixty two, before the murder,
(23:09):
he was he checked himself into Bellevue. Bellevue is a
place we all have heard of, you know, from a
psychiatric standpoints, well known. He checked himself in for two
weeks at Bellevue and when he came out. You know,
you mentioned he was married. First wife, I think her
name was Florence, but then he started cheating on her.
And the woman he killed was an ex girlfriend. Okay,
(23:31):
you're married and you have enough girlfriends that you also
have an ex girlfriend here, Now, what was going on
that you really have to peel back even further. Every
crime that Harvey was accused of doing had to do
with hurting women, being violent towards women. Harvey was accused
of with his current girlfriend back in nineteen sixty three,
(23:54):
of a sexual assault and against another woman. And as
weird as this sounds, there was a sexual assault in
burglary or robbery that they had arrested Harvey on, but
they also arrested Harvey's girlfriend, I think her name was Benefield.
(24:15):
And when Harvey is sitting there talking to the cops
and they're.
Speaker 1 (24:18):
Like, what were you guys doing.
Speaker 3 (24:19):
You're trying to have You're trying to rape this girl
and rob her. And he's like, yeah, but hey man,
my ex girlfriend she's involved too, And so police bring
her in, they charge her. She rolls over, She's like,
I didn't know very much about this, but she did
know something, and so she had agreed. She got amenity
from prosecution, and she became a witness for the police
(24:41):
for the prosecution, and that's when Harvey went over and
killed her. Now, Harvey claims that they had a falling
out and he was jealous of her dating other people.
Speaker 1 (24:50):
That's not it.
Speaker 3 (24:51):
He killed her because she was the witness against him
in court. That's why she killed him. He still got hung,
I still got strong. Granted he did get life in prison.
Would not settle on the death penalty. They were looking
at his psychiatric background, and they settled on life in
prison with the possibility of parole, and that's exactly what
he got. He goes to prison in nineteen sixty three, Joe,
(25:13):
he doesn't stay there, though, he stays there a while.
I got to give him that. He did stay from
sixty three to eighty four.
Speaker 1 (25:22):
Yeah, it was. It was in that.
Speaker 2 (25:23):
But you know what famous or infamous event he participated
in Attica. Yeah, he was part of the Attica prison
riots back in I think it was September of seventy one.
And there was actually an interview with this guy that
took place because he was, I don't know, bringing attention
(25:44):
to abuse of the prisoners by the guards.
Speaker 1 (25:47):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (25:48):
So it's the tally that this guy has of you know,
kind of you know, winding his way through this odd
life that he's been a part of and seeing.
Speaker 3 (26:00):
Teaching all these major events.
Speaker 2 (26:02):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely all the way along, and yeah, it
was really super bizarre. But yeah, they cut this guy loose,
to cut him loose and twenty years. Yeah, and he's
been on the streets.
Speaker 3 (26:16):
Oh yeah, something I did find interesting. I looked at
he was denied parol a bunch because of his violence
towards women while he was in prison. He showed violent
tendencies towards women while he was in prison, including female
volunteers at the hospital. Female hospital volunteers were not safe
(26:38):
from this guy. That's why he could have got out
a lot earlier than twenty years. But after twenty years
life with for all he you know, they let him out.
But that was why he stayed so long, didn't stay
out for very long, but that's why it took him
so long to get par all and how quickly he
was right back in.
Speaker 2 (26:57):
Yeah, and I'm really wondering, you know, would that touch
on that piece in place. I'm really wondering if somebody
like him, who obviously has a history of psychiatric issues,
has been diagnosed multiple times, what are the people in
the prison doing that are supposed to be doing therapeutic
assessments on an individual like this, Because you know, that
kind of behavior, that anger toward women who you know,
(27:23):
I got to tell you need to be protected from
somebody like this, What kind of assessments were they doing?
You're telling me that suddenly, all of a sudden there
was this burning Bush moment in his life in nineteen
eighty four that was transformative. That suddenly all of that
(27:45):
anger toward women where he's wanting to harm them and
you know, mutilate them and all this stuff, suddenly it's
just dissipated. Well, let me tell you this, it wasn't
because after he gets out, big surprise coming up, he
(28:05):
does it again. It pretty much goes without saying that
if you're looking in to a serialized event like homicides, you're,
(28:31):
you know, one of the big things that profilers, you know,
beat their chest over and you know where they have
expertise if you will. Is this idea of being able
to find patterns?
Speaker 1 (28:46):
Right?
Speaker 2 (28:47):
I don't know that there was any kind of pattern
established with with you know, this individual's first kill. But
we begin to see this because after he is released
a from prison, he gets involved with a poor woman
(29:08):
that is well, I'll put it to you this way.
She's prostituted. She's a heroin addict and for whatever reason,
and God bless her. Her name was Anna Laura Sierra Miranda.
She gets involved with this person, all right, and they
(29:28):
become roommates, and it's according to the story. And of
course this is happening back in early of early eighty five.
Now he's just been released from the.
Speaker 3 (29:44):
Time he gets released in May of eighty four after
serving twenty plus years in prison for a murder.
Speaker 1 (29:50):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (29:50):
Yeah, he's out for eighteen months. October nineteen eighty five.
Eighteen months, friends, that's it. And October twenty nine, nineteen
eighty five, this happens show.
Speaker 2 (30:02):
Yeah, I'm I'm you know, i'd like to say, and
I'm being kind of snarky here, I'd like to say, uh,
you know, gee, what a surprise. Right, But this poor
soul who is you know, let's let's face it, Dave
is probably the the most defensiless person that you could
ever choose. You know, he's he's not going he's not
(30:24):
going to down to Manhattan, down down into Manhattan where
there's a building site and picking on picking on a
construction worker down there that would probably have beat him
to death with his bare hands. Now he's he's going
after this poor woman who is living on the streets.
It's a heroin addict and is working as prostitute. Isn't
(30:45):
that the way it happens? You know, you know, and
you see this over and over again with bullies in
the world, just like Rex Huremann, right, you know, that's
who they're picking on the same it's the same mo
o here, and you know, and it begs a question
and on a little aside, I wonder if there were
others too. Okay, you know we're talking about serialized events here.
(31:08):
We've got three to his credit at this point in time.
Who's to say that there weren't more along the way,
and granted he had been incarcerated, but lord only knows,
you know, he gets a taste, you know, a taste
for this sort of thing. But back, but back to
miss Miranda. He did in fact kill her, and you
(31:29):
know it was she would disappear, reappear. He wound up
killing her. And when he did, Dave, he cut her
into multiple pieces. Here we have this idea of dismemberment.
When the OCME did the examination, the autopsy on her day,
they found now get this, thirty three stab wounds to
(31:53):
her body.
Speaker 1 (31:54):
Thirty three.
Speaker 3 (31:56):
Yeah, we know that he dismembered her, yes, and that
he took and put her body parts into bags and
basically dump them all over Central Park in different areas.
Speaker 1 (32:08):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (32:08):
When and I'm not being gross, I'm just curious. I
mean they have to get you have to reassemble the person.
You have to take these body parts and really do
they actually lay them out on a table and try
to put it back together like a puzzle.
Speaker 1 (32:23):
Yeah, you have to.
Speaker 2 (32:25):
Wow, you better be damn careful with those bags too,
because each one of the bags, these plastic bags, which
is a non poor surface, they're going to have, well,
they've got a different they've got several different type of
potential fingerprints left behind. So you've got fingerprints. You're talking
about a dismemberment. First off, you're going to have you're
(32:47):
going to have the medium of blood that's going to
transfer to the pads of your fingers. And if you
touch that surface, and we all know what a black
trash bag looks like. You know, you can stain a
black trash bag with something like blood, and you're not
necessarily going to see that stain there, okay, or you're
going to leave that remnant there with your fingerprints intact.
And then in addition to that, because it's a smooth surface,
(33:10):
he can transfer. If he's not wearing gloves, he can
actually transfer a latent print with the fatty lipid oils
off of his fingerprint. So you know when you're saying,
do they lay the body out?
Speaker 1 (33:25):
Yeah, they do.
Speaker 2 (33:26):
And so you have to take each part out piece
by piece after each bag has been individually X rayed,
and then you try to it's not really reassemble because
that implies that you're kind of reconnecting things. That's not
what you do. You leave the body in its parts,
our individual fragments, if you will. And you take a
(33:51):
bird's eye view, and we can do this in the morgue.
We actually do photography where some morgs will have cameras
that are actually suspended from the ceiling. They'll be in
the ceiling and so you can get like a bird's
eye view. They're called slab shots, is what they're called.
And so the camera lens is actually looking down on
the body and you can remotely operate the camera and
(34:13):
you do a snap. So you're looking down and I
urge all of our friends, this is fascinating. What's old
is new again? If you go back and if you
look at and there's a bunch of them from New York.
I love looking at these old crom seen photos. In
the early days of police photography, they had this contraption
(34:33):
day that they would use that had four legs on
it and it was a gigantic pedestal for a camera
or remotely operate, you know, the old button flash that
they had where they would take this thing and set
it up in an apartment with people laying on beds.
And these images are incredible. They're all in black and white.
(34:54):
If you get a chance to check these out online,
it'll blow your mind. Where it's a bird's ee view
the scene. And it's a beautiful way to do this
because you know, we think in terms of being on
the same plane with the body, but even back then
they were taking these gigantic photos looking down on the body.
So that's one of the things we can do in
the morgue and it gives you a sense. It's really
(35:16):
powerful when you see the damage that has been done
to a fellow human being, you know, like Mss Miranda here,
you know where she's particulated, and each piece is laid
out and you're going to get an.
Speaker 1 (35:31):
Overall idea as to well.
Speaker 2 (35:34):
First off, what's there and what isn't right, and then
you're going to document it photographically to represent this poor woman,
to say that she even existed at all. So another
view of this is you want to capture everything here
in the morgue. This is your one chance to be
(35:54):
able to demonstrate to not just the investigative community, but
also to those individuals that are going to sit on
a jury so they can see what he did. And
defense attorneys want to shy away from that. They don't
they don't want the court to see this. They'll say
that it's prejudicial or whatever. Well, actually you're demonstrating what
had happened, and you're going to talk about the over
(36:17):
thirty stab wounds that she's had, You're going to talk
about how her body was abused, and then you're going
to demonstrate that it was abuse so badly and fragmented
so badly that all of these different parts came from
different locations. Okay, And so that's a big that's a
big part to what you have to do in this
environment to document this. Well, Dave, if I'm not mistaken,
(36:39):
he he did go he was convicted of this crime
and goes back to prison.
Speaker 1 (36:49):
At this point in time, correct.
Speaker 3 (36:51):
I do remember now he went to prison from nineteen
sixty three to nineteen eighty four. He's let out in
May of eighty four. Seventeen and a half months later
he killed again and goes back to prison. So he
is in prison and applying for parole a total of
fifteen times over the years. And there's something happened while
(37:15):
he was in prison. Minute. You mentioned Attica a little
while ago. After he was in prison seven eight years.
He's at Attica when they had the uprising against the.
Speaker 1 (37:24):
Regime of the torturing guards.
Speaker 3 (37:26):
Well, this time he goes to prison in eighty five,
and I think it was long about ninety three marcell
Harvey Marcellin. Well, wait a minute, I need to clarify something.
See the original sentence in sixty through his life with
(37:47):
the possibility for parole. With the second murder in nineteen
eighty five, rather than go through a long drawn out
trial and risk getting a difference, he actually was allowed
to plead guilty to a lesser charge show And because
the minute he was arrested on the charge and the
death of Miss Miranda, they revoked his parole.
Speaker 1 (38:08):
So he was.
Speaker 3 (38:09):
Immediately sent back to prison and he actually plea bargain
and got twelve more years added onto that original life sentence.
That's what he was serving when he kept applying for parole. Well,
in nineteen ninety three, he meets a guy in a
transsexual in prison who convinces him well that he needs
to take a hormone therapy drug. And yeah, it's Premarin Premier.
(38:37):
He starts taking Premier in and I don't know how
somebody in prison that kills two women as a man
all of a sudden decides after thirty years of you know,
prison life, except for the eighteen months he was out,
that he all of a sudden has decided that he
is actually a woman in this man's body and can
get because I mean, we're paying for that, right, our
tax dollars pay for prisoners anyway. So he gets up
(39:02):
Premier and and commits this is what it says. He
commits to transitioning to female. Fully committed on this. So
he applies from parole over and over and over again,
but again, remember the guy's getting older. Finally, twenty nineteen
rolls around. Joseph Scott Morgan. He applied for all fifteen
times between nineteen eighty five and twenty nineteen, he was
(39:22):
granted parole. This is the second time he is being
granted parole on the life sentence from nineteen sixty three.
First time they gave him parole, he killed again. What's
it going to do when they give him parole the
second time? Well, you know, they gave a reason, Joe.
At the time, Harvey Marcelon was eighty one years old,
(39:42):
and the board parole, the parole board looked upon his
advanced age in that consideration for giving him parole, and
of course the fact that well he's transitioned. He's a
woman now, you know, he's not a man. So he's
an old woman, not a violent man. That's why they
cut him loose.
Speaker 2 (40:04):
That's why I think that for anybody that's out there,
that's you know, for anybody that deals with, you know,
gender dysphoria that has legitimately been diagnosed, you know, in
their own hormone therapy or whatever whatever therapeutic treatment they're
(40:24):
going through, this guy's used the system. You'll never convince
me otherwise because let me tell you how, I know
you used assistant Dave. Do you know what he actually
actually tell the court when they cut him loose in nineteen.
He looked at Judge in the face at that point,
Tom and said, I give you my word, I will
(40:48):
never re offend. Well guess what, guess what? Wow, he did, Susan.
You know, Susan Leyden sixty eight years old is a
testament to his reoffending. Are all that remains of.
Speaker 4 (41:09):
Her very clolar to what happened in It's like a
blueprint that was laid out from back in eighty five
with Miss Miranda.
Speaker 2 (41:20):
Yeah, and you know it's the same, and not only
I think that the thing that's really striking here is
that with this deception, this level of deception, and how
bold he had been in the Miranda case, you jumped
forward to Miss Leyden's case and it's almost like he's
(41:45):
thumbing his nose at everybody. Who Dave, I ask you, brother,
who dismembers a poor woman's body like this again? Lady
to spent through a lot that has a long history
of drug addictions. She's trying to get her life back
on track and he breaks her body apart to the
(42:09):
point after he has killed her and Dave like a trophy,
he rides around with her remains in public on a scooter.
Who does that you know the depth of depravity in here.
I don't know that we can necessarily plummet. You know,
we try many times, and you know, just when you
and I think that we have seen everything that we
(42:32):
possibly can see. That's why I always tell my students
if they ever come across somebody in forensics that says, yeah,
I've seen it all, don't walk away from them. Run
away from them because they're lying. Just like if I
said that I'm lying because I haven't seen everything. Because
you know, I'm looking at this case and it's really
easy to Monday morning quarterback. But you know what, this
(42:57):
isn't a football game.
Speaker 1 (43:00):
This is life that.
Speaker 2 (43:04):
For whatever issues Harvey Marcelyn is suffering from, it doesn't
match up to what these victims have gone through because
it's not about life with him, it's their death at
his hands. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is body
(43:29):
bags
Host
Joseph Scott Morgan
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