November 28, 2023 • 37 mins
Nohema Graber is a beloved Spanish teacher in the small town of Fairfield, Iowa. When she goes missing during her everyday after school walk in the park, the small town is worried. When her body is found in the park, hidden under a tarp, the town of less than 10,000 is shocked. Shock turns to disgust when police arrest two 16-year-old students for the murder after one of them writes on snapchat about the planning, execution, and disposal of evidence.
Join Joseph Scott Morgan and Dave Mack as they break down the story of Nohema Graber, a beloved teacher who deserved a much better fate and the two 16-year-olds that broke the heart of a small town.
Time Code Highlights.
00:02:54 Nohema Graber goes missing during her regular walk in the park
00:03:06 Body of Nohema Graber found in park under a tarp, Two 16-year-old students arrested
00:05:19 Joseph Scott Morgan talks about first homicide he worked was a brother who beat his brother to death with a baseball bat
00:07:11 discussion about what teachers are faced with every day
00:08:47 Talk about how this case begins with a bad grade
00:10:11 Talk about two students feeling like they were owed something
00:11:44 Discussion of Timeline of events
00:14:24 Talk about two friends decide to murder teacher
00:15:20 Discussion of the plan the perpetrators had and that it wouldn't change the grad
00:16:22 Talk about the type of weapons teens might have access, baseball bat is weapon of opportunity the routine of victim
00:19:40 Discussion of Both perpetrators were tracking victim in park
00:21:10 The perpetrators discuss the plan on snapchat
00:22:23 Discussion of Nohema Graber and people seeing Chaiden Miller arguing with her about his grade
00:24:03 Discussion of Nohema Graber van being driven away from park by two males and how perpetrators hide her body
00:25:11 Joseph Scott Morgan points out how everything used in a crime can be traced
00:26:27 Discussion of perpetrators taking the bloody bat, bloody clothes, back home. Friend shows snapchat messages to law enforcement
00:28:08 Discussion of damage bat can do to a body
00:30:44 Description of the marks the bat will make with contact
00:34:11 Talk about is it possible to determine who swung the bat
00:35:45 Discussion about Jeremy Goodale sentenced to life with possible parole after 25 years, Chaiden Miller sentenced to life with possible parole after 35 years
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:08):
Bodybacks with Joseph Scott Morgan. It's a tired morn statement.
The three toughest jobs out there firefighter, police officer, and
school teacher. In each one of those categories you talk
(00:30):
about underpaid, underappreciated, abused, all the sorts of things that
come along with that territory. Now, I can't speak to
teaching public school, you know. I can speak to you know,
being a college professor. It ain't the same thing, trust me.
But I'm married to a public school teacher, former public
(00:53):
school teacher now, which I'm very happy about because I
get to be with her all the time. But I
would listen to her if she would come home in
the evenings, dog tired, underappreciated, and anxious for what would
happen the next day at work. And it was like
every day was like that. It almost became a running
(01:16):
joke for us. You know, what do you have to
overcome today, hunh in order to get back home to me.
There are times when you think about that, and you
might say it with a bit of levity, but there
are times when people that work in public service, they
(01:38):
don't come home, They don't see their babies anymore, they
don't see their spouse. They don't see those that they love.
They pour themselves into a job that is thankless, only
to be discarded. Today we're going to talk about a
(01:59):
woman who poured her heart and soul into teaching public school,
into teaching individuals Spanish, a language which was her first language.
A woman that had carved out a life here in
the United States, a woman who met her end on
(02:21):
a dark trail in a little town in Iowa. Her
name Jahima Graver. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is
body bags. My precious wife spent many many years teaching
in public schools, and when this case came about for me,
(02:45):
I knew that it was something that I wanted to
address and talk about the forensics of it. But you know,
I also wanted to mention the life of missus Graver
and what she had endured.
Speaker 2 (02:57):
Joe Milimacgraver is a which beloved Spanish teacher at Fairfield
High School. Students say she is tough but fair and
they like her. When she goes missing during her every
day after school walk in the park. The small town
of Fairfield, Iowa, is worried when the body of Louie
mcgrabor is found in the park, hidden under a tarp.
The town of less than ten thousand is shocked, But
(03:19):
when two sixteen year old students are arrested for the
murder after one of them writes on snapchat about the planning, execution,
and disposal of evidence, worry in shock turns to disgust.
Speaker 1 (03:31):
Before I go down that path, I wanted to mention
something to you that had occurred to me. I've shared
a few things along the line we do about my
background and about what my world was like as a
death investigator based upon what we know of this case.
To start off with, what do you think was the
(03:55):
modality of death in the first homicide case ever worked?
Speaker 2 (04:00):
I'm clueless. I have no IDEA baseball bat to the
side of the.
Speaker 1 (04:03):
Head, all over the head. I have a guy that
beat his brother to death with a baseball bat. That
was the very first homicide I ever worked. And I
don't know if it's something in the back of my
mind coupled along with this idea that this poor woman
is a public educator, that it kind of it kind
(04:24):
of hooked together in this weird way for me. But yeah,
the first first homicide, I think a lot of people
would think, oh, yeah, you know, Morgan, he probably you know,
it's probably a gunshote.
Speaker 2 (04:34):
I actually thought you were going to I thought you
were going because you know, yeah, yeah, yeah exactly beat
him outside the head.
Speaker 1 (04:42):
Yeah. And no. It was a guy that had beaten
his brother to death with a baseball bat in South Louisiana.
And the reason he had done it is that he
was the younger brother the perpetrator was, and the older
brother bullied the entire family and had knocked his brother around.
And these were older fellows, they were not young guys.
(05:02):
And the younger brother finally had enough, yeah, retrieved a
baseball bat and beat his brother to death in the
front yard of their home. Yeah. Wow. So yeah, that
was the first case. So my first homicide was actually
a blunt force trauma homicide. It was not a gunshot wound,
it was not a stab wound, it was not poisoning.
(05:23):
It was blunt force trauma with a baseball bat.
Speaker 2 (05:25):
All right. So when you're dealing with this, and it
goes back to your first case as a death investigator,
you're all ready every time there's a baseball bat in
the head, because you know you're gonna if you get
into a fight with somebody. They can use a Louisville
slugger to do damage on your ribs, your legs, your arms,
you know all of that. But ultimately you're not gonna
(05:46):
die from getting hit in the shoulder.
Speaker 1 (05:48):
No, you're not getting hit in the head.
Speaker 2 (05:49):
Though, with a baseball bat is going to be deadly.
Speaker 1 (05:51):
It absolutely is. And it's a very intimate thing. Do
you remember when we were kids, they would take an
old car tire and cut it in half and nail
it to a telephone poll Do you remember that? And
you would take swings on the tire that half of tire,
and you know, I actually had two buddies that were
doing that and that were taking turns, and guess what happened.
My friend was staying standing too close to the other
(06:13):
guy right behind him as he was swinging. The bat
comes off of the tire and hits my friend right
in the face and breaks his nose. So there's even
that kind of secondary energy can be transferred with a
baseball bat to a a very focal area on that bat.
So you're transferring all of that energy to once you know, hey,
(06:34):
you know what it's called. It's called sweet spot, and
say and every bat has one and so you might
not hit it every single time, but boy, when you do, boy,
the level of damage that can be accomplished with this
is beyond the pale.
Speaker 2 (06:49):
We've got a story today, Joe Scott Morgan that it
is the fear of everybody who has a loved one
that is a teacher. Yes, and I count myself with that.
When I met your sweet wife, Kim, who I think
her first name is at first and middle name is
sweet wife. You know that she had a three first name.
It's not you know, Betty Lynn Thomas. It's sweet wife Kim.
(07:12):
Because of students, these days are different. I know that's
something that tends to be said of every generation. But
Joseph Scott Morgan, I have walked down the halls of
public schools in the last five years doing career day
and other things, and the noise I hear and the
volume I hear coming from classrooms while teachers are teaching
(07:33):
is something that we did not experience as children growing
up in the public school system. Teachers now are faced
with a much different day when they start teaching. And
in this particular case, you have a teacher who was
this is a woman Noema grab loved by the community,
loved by her school, loved by her students. Even a
(07:54):
student said she was hard. She was a hard teacher
because she was teaching her native language. She was teaching Spanish,
and she took great pride in teaching Spanish. But she
was hard. That fear of any teacher that does their
job and tries to raise children to a respectable level
of accomplishment. In that course, what happens when the students
(08:16):
lose it and kill their teacher with a baseball bat,
Because that's what happened, Joe.
Speaker 1 (08:21):
You know, there's all boils down to a bad grade.
And listen, I made my share. I made my share
over the course of my academic career to include college
as well. But you know, there's a there's not a
single bad grade that I didn't earn. I would have
(08:43):
liked for someone to have waived a wand and you know,
and the grade had been miraculously transformed for something that
was a bit more acceptable and appealing. But of course
that's not the case. And it would seem to me
that when with Nahema, she she had this this ability
(09:07):
uh to say, okay, this is you know, this is
the line in the sand. Uh, then and if you
crossed this line on the sand, this is these are
going to be the consequences. And that's isn't that you
know kind of this theme that runs through nowadays. It
seems like there are no consequences for for your actions.
And when you think about, you know, well, what's going
(09:30):
to happen if I do poorly in this class? Well,
it's going to drop my GPA. Maybe the promise that
I made to my parents, uh is not going to
be upheld because I haven't focused, I haven't asked for help.
I don't understand what I'm being taught. And let me
tell you something, it's not always the teacher's fault that
(09:51):
you don't understand. It's it's the fact that you haven't
applied yourself many times. But people, you know, they want
things handed to them. In this case, I think that we'
got not one, but two perpetrators that you know, kind
of we're singing that same tune along the way that
they felt like that this victim owed them something, and
(10:13):
by extension, because of what happened and what this community
was robbed of, I think they felt as though that
the rest of the community owed them something too, and
they were going to take their payment in blood. As
(10:48):
we've previously mentioned on multiple episodes, Dave, I think one
of the problems that perpetrators encounter and keep in mind
most of the time we don't discuss the actions of
professional hittman on this podcast. We talk primarily about perpetrators
(11:13):
who have no experience. Not only not only do they
not have experience with homicides, I have an experience with death,
and you're faced with the proposition that, Okay, I've committed
a homicide. What in the world do I do with
a body? But let's back up a little bit before
we get there and just kind of go through kind
(11:35):
of the timeline and what happened in this particular case.
Speaker 2 (11:39):
Nohe mcgrabor sixty six year old Spanish teacher. She was
well thought of, and I mean this in the broadest
sense of the word. Even the students who had her class,
had her for Spanish, said she was hard but fair.
I get having that discussion, but raising your voice arguing
(11:59):
over great it is usually pretty black and white. Either
you got the answer right or you got it wrong
on the test. Isn't am I wrong in that? Am
I missing something here?
Speaker 1 (12:10):
No, no, no, you're you're absolutely right. And again this
goes to it fascinates me how how students now talk to, uh,
talk to teachers as if they are peer and that
that that's the strange thing, because generally you don't associate
yourself with learning from peers. You learn from those that
have mastered a craft. And unfortunately most students don't understand that.
Speaker 2 (12:32):
I actually got this quote. Well, there's this guy named
Sawyer Mast. He was a student with with our our
two suspects here, Jeremy Gooddale and Willard Chaden Miller. And
he said, having known Chaden and having him in my
math class, he did not speak in a murderous way,
(12:55):
but in a very aggressive way, for like, in this way,
just like towards Missus Graeber. Now, Sawyer Mass said he
heard Chaden Miller taking this tone, arguing over a grade
in Spanish two or three, depending on they were. I'm
(13:15):
not sure which one it was. It was, but it
was not just entry level of Spanish. It was a
it was a class that you're expected you need it
for college back in the day where you had to
have two years of a foreign language to get in.
And so he's arguing, wanting a better Joe arguing with
the teacher over a grade.
Speaker 1 (13:32):
You know, she had told the young man that he
he is going to receive a particular grade, and he
was dissatisfied with that. And that's where this idea, you know,
took root of. Okay, well, I'm not going to try
to do extra credit. I'm not going to beg to
(13:53):
maybe retake an examination. I'm going to beat her to death.
And that that's you know, I don't know how you
make that leap from here to here in that sense,
and I don't know that there's really any way to
excuse it. You know. I think that some people have
(14:14):
tried to apply, you know, things like mental mental illness
and all those sort of things. And the thing about
it is, okay, mental illness maybe, but are we talking
about two mentally ill people that enter into a confederacy
with one another.
Speaker 2 (14:25):
That's the thing. You've got two friends, two male friends,
get together. Apparently my talk with missus Graver didn't go
as expected. I thought I could argue my way into
a better grade. It didn't happen. So Jeremy, what do
you think I should do? And that's this conversation. What
level do you go? You mentioned learning from peers and
how they can talk to teachers now with disrespect, like
(14:47):
they don't owe them any kind of respect. But this
goes beyond that. This now goes past to I need
a much better grade than I got. She's not going
to give it to me. What do you think I
should do? Well, you had a baseball bat.
Speaker 1 (15:00):
Handy, Yeah, let's disappear her. And and so the choice
that is made at this point is we need to
try to plan how we can get rid of her.
And now you know where this plan was going to
go after that, I have no idea. You know what
what are you going to do? I mean, what what's
the deal here? Is this?
Speaker 2 (15:21):
Uh A?
Speaker 1 (15:22):
Is this an idea of vengeance? Or is it okay? Well,
if we make her disappear, uh ergo, the grades will disappear.
Speaker 2 (15:30):
You know.
Speaker 1 (15:30):
Here's the thing, even if you hadn't gotten caught at
what you were doing, you're still going to get the
same damn grade. Uh. That's that's how that's going to
work out for you. I can tell you that. And
so you're it's again it comes down to uh to
an idea that I like to state over and over
again uh metaphorically. Uh, and it's it's throwing the brick
(15:54):
through the stained glass window. Uh. You know that you
you're you're willing to destroy some being so incredibly beautiful
because it doesn't suit you. It doesn't suit who you
are or what you are, and that sort of thing.
So you're now going to choose. And when perpetrators are
trying to determine what type of weapon to utilize, well
(16:16):
what's at their disposal. Well, if you're talking to a
couple of teen boys, you would think, well, perhaps perhaps
they're not going to have firearms at their disposal. Maybe
they do, maybe they don't. But you and I I
know certainly you I can speak to me. Even in
my limited sense. I had quite the collection of baseball
(16:37):
bats when I was a kid, still had them until
you know, I reached college. I don't know whatever happened
to them, but I had them. And so you know,
you have those that are there. So it's a weapon
of opportunity. But this is not Here's the other thing
about this particular homicide, Dave, because we've talked about weapons
of opportunity as it applies to when somebody's blood is up,
(17:00):
as they say, if if if you have a reactive
event within say a home, all right, you're going to
pick up the weapon that is closest to you and
you're going to utilize it. Could be a gun, could
be a knife, could be at a blunt object. That's
not what they did. They selected a weapon and then
(17:20):
after they had selected the weapon, they knew where she
was going to be. So it's a matter of the
perpetrators understanding the timeline as as it applies to We
know that she leaves school at this particular time.
Speaker 2 (17:36):
She has a regular routine she she.
Speaker 1 (17:38):
Does and it's something she follows, and they knew that
her This is her day. She goes and walks, you know,
to just kind of let her mind go. And then
every day, you know what she went and did after that,
She went to Mass every day and she prayed and
that's every day of the week. She was that involved
in her church, and so she would leave the walking
(18:00):
path and go to Mass. And that was people knew
that about her.
Speaker 2 (18:04):
The students knew. The two perpetrators here knew her routine
of after school going to the park. They put together
a minimal plan. They know where she's going to be
by herself, they know the opportunity they will have, but
beyond that, they don't really plan out a whole lot more,
including what to do after we do the deed. They
(18:25):
don't plan what to do with much else except this
emotional desire to take her life, and they really don't
get past that much. And then they use social media
Snapchat to actually share information that they ought not know
with other people, including a friend who is the reason
we know what happened because she turned on them, you know,
(18:47):
because what they did was heinous. But the whole point
being they had a plan, it just wasn't a complete plan.
Speaker 1 (18:55):
Yeah, it's one of these events where you think that
maybe you universal you you believe that you've got everything
planned out so that it's all going to come off
with without a problem. But when both of both Miller
and good All showed up at the park, they were
(19:17):
tracking her there at the park, and it's quite chilling.
It sounds like something out of a horror movie because
good Ale actually approached her. I die and he's wearing
a mask, and she's quite taken aback by this. She's
(19:38):
on this walking trail, Okay, it's this little walk with
this little park. Her car is parked there. He approaches
her and he's wearing a mask, and then as he
gets closer, he pulls the mask down and smiles at her,
and immediately it stated that she felt relief. She felt relief.
She it's a person she recognizes. And then all of
(19:59):
a sudden, Miller just appears from the rear and starts
to swing this bat and begins to strike her about
the head and about her upper torso. And they're into
it at this point in time. I mean, they're you
know you I guess it's at this point that they
knew that they had to go forward with what had happened.
(20:21):
And after she has struck, she's taken off of the trail.
Miller reports that he witnessed good Al begin to continue
to beat her with the same baseball bat off of
the trail at this point in time. As a matter
of fact, he had to come and take him away
(20:44):
from the situation. It had actually been put forward that
good Al was quote unquote trying to put her out
of her misery, as it were. You know, when this
is being documented all along by them in retroactively. They've
talked about this on snapchat, how they're going to plan
(21:04):
this thing out and they're documenting electronically. And then the
big thing that they're faced with now is we've got
a dead body. It's our teacher. What are we going
to do? How do we obscure our presence here? And
how do we obscure the body? Once death arrives, you're
(21:45):
free of the pain of this world. I don't know
how much pain you know he endured in life. I
know that she had a son that had issues physically
and mentally, and she loved that child and took care
of him. Her and her husband both did her husband,
who she had been married to for a number of years.
(22:07):
They were divorced, but yet they were great friends and
still interacted with one another and their adult children. No
one gets out of the out of life pain free.
That's the reality of it. But for her life seemed
to have been quite joyful. She certainly brought joy to
(22:27):
a lot of the places that she went to. We've
heard that over and over. But in her wildest dreams,
I don't think she would have envisioned her life ending
along a walking path in this little town in Iowa
and her mortal remains being abused by being drug off
into the weeds.
Speaker 2 (22:46):
Joe. When you back up to her final day that
day November two, she was actually in a discussion where
Jaden actually was raising his voice in an argument with
her over a grade, and that was seen by people
at school. They saw him really being aggressive towards her
(23:09):
about his grade. She does her normal routine, goes for
a walk in the park, and that's the last time
she has seen alive. Is when she's going to do that,
when she doesn't follow the rest of her normal routine.
As you mentioned earlier, she goes to mass every day
before going home, so it's school walk mass home and
(23:30):
she was reported missing it it didn't take that long
because of her routine to actually find her body. She
was not missing for a very long period of time.
As they mean, law enforcement started looking into where where
are the possible places she could be. They were able
to find that she had gone to the park because
witnesses actually saw saw her vehicle being driven away from
(23:54):
the park.
Speaker 1 (23:55):
With two males in the vehicle in the vehicle, and
that's a bit when these perpetrators drove away in her
vehicle and it was it was essentially abandoned down a
road some distance away and was eventually found, but they're
having to hoof it back to wherever it is. Their
point of origin is their respective homes. Now that they're
(24:17):
faced with this idea and this is this is so ridiculous.
The body is still approximating the area where they I'm
just going to say it out loud, where they beat
her to death or a baseball bat. They then take
up a wheelbarrow, a tarp and crossties to cover her
(24:42):
body and obscure her body along the trail. I guess
thinking that the obscuring is going to wind up providing
cover for them to certain to a certain level. But
here's the thing. You know, every time, every time in
forensics you handle something, every time you try to make
(25:03):
adjustments that is the perpetrator and a scene, you're adding
elements to this that you can be tracked with forensically,
whether it's fingerprints or touch DNA, are just at a
baseline ownership. Let's say that you got your wheelbear from
Ace Hardware. Well, that wheelbear is unique to that particular brand.
(25:27):
We can track that. Eventually, it might take some work,
but we can track that. The tarp that you bought,
I don't know where you bought it, but it's a
very specific tarp, and we know the age of it.
We can assess what lot it came out of, perhaps
and maybe if there's something that that tarp has been
used for before at your home that specifically identifies and
(25:47):
links it back to your home, that's transferred now onto
the body. From a forensic standpoint, we're going to collect
that evidence. And when you when you consider what they
had done to this poor public school teacher, Dave, and
they beat her to death with this bat. Did they
(26:08):
get rid of the bat?
Speaker 2 (26:09):
No?
Speaker 1 (26:10):
Did they get rid of their clothing? No? They took
the clothing, the bat, bloody towels all back home.
Speaker 2 (26:17):
Right, So how.
Speaker 1 (26:18):
How is it? I think that a lot of people
will ask, you know, what do you expect to happen here?
Because when you know when they're when they're found out,
eventually found out, the investigators are going to find these
items in the house, and that's that's one of these
forensic tie backs that we look for, David.
Speaker 2 (26:34):
That's where the friend as this story started breaking, as
missus Graeber is missing and the town is looking for her,
and a friend looks at snapchat messages and says, this
is crazy. They're involved, and it's bad.
Speaker 1 (26:51):
You know.
Speaker 2 (26:51):
It's one thing for young people to say they're going
to do something weird or mean or whatever. But now
it looks like they have done something, and this friend
goes to police. That was the first thing. Police right away,
right away knew who their main suspects were. That it
was these two boys, these two at the time sixteen
year olds. Sixteen year old, sixteen years old. We're talking
(27:12):
about Chadon Miller. His name's Willard Miller. But he goes
by Chaden and Jeremy Goodale. This friend gave the snapchat
stuff to police. Police looked at it and when those are
our boys, they went and did the They search, got
a search warrant. That's where they found the bloody stuff,
the bloody clothing, bloody towel. But Joe, I want to
back up to the murder scene. Yeah, we know that
they beat her with a baseball bat, according to Jaden.
(27:35):
Jayden claims that Jeremy also used the bat and beat her. Yes,
but the only thing we really know is that Chaydon
Miller beat her in the head. Now that had she
had to have been knocked unconscious at some point fairly quickly.
I'm thinking, I don't know how many shots to the
head you can take before you go unconscious.
Speaker 1 (27:51):
Joe, Well, it a lot of that depends, Okay, depends
on a couple of things relative to blunt force trauma.
First off, it depends upon the strength that the individual possesses.
It's wielding this bat. We're talking about a you know,
a relatively robust, healthy teenage male. He's got enough arm
(28:12):
strength to do damage enough for bodies. Because we know,
it's not just in the arms. It's the turning, it's
the rotation of his hips, it's the wielding of the
bat from a several different Because you're not going to
swing this thing most of the time like you swing
it at the plate, You're many times you'll see this
(28:34):
kind of tomahawking motion that comes down with both hands
where you're crashing down. Now, she's diminutive, she's not that tall,
so automatically you've got leverage over her. It's it's an
asymmetrical situation. You crash down her from the back. Okay.
One of the things that's going to happen with that
first blow is you might not know this, but with
(28:57):
the first blow, you're not necessarily going to have blood
that's going to be transferred to the weapon. So you're
going to break the skin perhaps that first blow, but
when you begin to strike again, okay, and you rain
down in that area where you may have lacerated the
area because lacerations arise from blood forced traumas a tearing
(29:19):
of the skin, the next time you draw that bat back,
you're going to have a mass of blood. And because
you're striking in the head, one of the other things
that you're going to have is hair, and the hair
blood is so tacky everybody at home can identify the
attackiness of blood. The hair actually actually is adherent to
(29:43):
the bat, per the per the blood that's there, and
you take that away, well, that's an element of this
poor woman's body that can be tied back to her. Now,
the underlying trauma that she's sustaining is going to be
not just these lacerated marks on her head. You've got
the potential of skull fractures, particularly depressed skull fractures, as
(30:08):
this barrel of that bat is hitting her. You've also
got these kind of weird linear contusions that will happen
on the softer sections of the body like I see
them on the shoulders and the neck where you start
striking these soft tissues, and you get these with a bat.
In particular, a bat is kind of graduated out, you know,
(30:29):
closer to the handle, more narrow it is. The further
you get down down the shaft of that bat, the
wider it is, so you'll have this kind of V
shaped it's almost a V shaped pattern where the lines
are kind of splitting off that skins. As you rain
down onto the skin with the bat, the skin actually
for a second day wraps up on the sides of
(30:51):
the bat, so the contusion is going to look bigger
than the surface of the bat. It's a weird thing.
As matter of fact, I reckon anybody do this. Go
online and look up videos of slow motion baseball pitches
that are struck with a bat, and you will see
that for a second, at that moment time when the
(31:11):
bat makes contact with the baseball, the baseball will actually
flatten for a second, and if you pay real close attention,
the sides of the baseball just for an instant, now
that's firmer than skin, will actually slightly bend around the
bat and wrap. Well. Imagine striking skin like that, and
that's that contusion that you're going to get. So you'll
(31:32):
get those contusions, you'll get underlying fractures, and you're pulling
away this hair. These people, after they attacked her, Dave
never even bothered to clean the bat. So they took
home elements of Nohemo with them. They took elements of
her body on their person in the form of their clothes.
(31:54):
Maybe they had a towel they were trying to because
they found a bloody towel and this poor precious woman
they found all that remained of her in this sense
as it relates to the murder weapon. They found all
that remained of her in blood stains and hair on
the surface of this bat.
Speaker 2 (32:11):
One thing you mentioned, Joe, linear skull fracture and is
it compressed depressed skull fracture.
Speaker 1 (32:18):
Yeah, you've got What will happen is that you can
have a depressed skull fracture. And the depressed gull fracture
is unique because if you can concentrate enough energy with
the item that someone is being bludgeoned with, it will
kind of separate out the bone. Let me give you
(32:39):
a good for instance, we're coming into the holiday season
now and so people buy they get peanut brittle. Okay,
if you look at a piece of peanut brittle, it's
not that much different than the external table of a skull.
You can take a piece of peanut brittle and you
can kind of lightly tap it with your hand on
(33:00):
a firm surface, and you'll get this kind of splitting
that carries on in a fracture. Okay, if you hit
it hard enough, though, you'll see that you can create
almost this little island in it and it fractures away
from all the other areas of that piece of print
peanut brittle, and it'll create like a little plug of
peanut brittle. That's a depressed skull fracture. If you can
(33:22):
concentrate enough energy on that specific area, you'll literally plug
the bone so that it is free floating from the
rest of the table of the skull. It won't just
be like this kind of curveliney or fracture that you get.
And so that's one of the little nuanced things that
you look for when you're trying to assess these these injuries.
You know, at autopsy, which would have been done with
(33:44):
the hemu's.
Speaker 2 (33:44):
Bi Now, when we know that that Jeremy Goodell was
set to testify against Jaden Miller, and I keep going
back to the bat and Chaden Miller being the one
who was seen in the argument arguing with his teacher.
(34:07):
You know, he's arguing with Missus Graeber over his grade.
We don't hear Jeremy having that same thing. Is there
a way to tell who was singing the bat?
Speaker 1 (34:17):
I don't know that there's necessarily any physical way. I
guess that first off, it would require quite a bit
of calculus in order to be able to compute that,
I think, but given the dynamic of the environment, it
would be great if you could, you know, perhaps think about, well,
(34:39):
what's the maximum height Chaden could have reached with the
extension of his arms. One of the things that we
do that has been done in cases past with attacks
like this is that if you have a perpetrator that's
wielding an instrument, many times you'll measure their arm length.
We do this with the dead as well. We will
measure arm length, for instance, the dead's ability to facilitate
(35:03):
handling a weapon. If it's say a self inflicted event,
or if they're operating a vehicle, could they have reached
the gear lever where they were positioned at or is
it possible that they could have been in this position
and sustained this particular injury. And a lot of that
comes down to the to the measurements of the dimensions
(35:24):
of the body in this particular case. I don't necessarily
know if it would be possible to scientifically prove that,
and so based upon that you would you're leaning heavily
on testimonial and circumstantial level.
Speaker 2 (35:37):
Jud The reason I asked is Miller had claimed all
along he didn't hit missus grab with the bat, But
when it came right down to negotiations and ampleat, they
both played not guilty at first, but Jeremy Goodell did
cut a deal with prosecutors to take a plea and
testify in court against his lifelong pal Jaden Miller. When
Miller found out that, well, he cut a deal as
(35:59):
well and played guilty. It was the sentencing that showed
me who was the major aggressor of these two. They
were sixteen years old at the time, they certainly knew better.
But Jeremy Goodell got life with the possibility for parole
after twenty five years. Miller got life with the chance
of parole after thirty five years, but it still doesn't
explain how they thought this was the answer to the
(36:23):
problem of a bad grade.
Speaker 1 (36:24):
I don't know that there really is a way to
explain a way the destruction of a life, but to
kind of sum it up, I would like to say this.
One of the Snapchat comments that was that had been
posted merely said this tom to hot a body showing
(36:47):
the picture of a jug of clorox, and a second
post with a selfie stated POV, you're my Spanish teacher
and this is the last thing you see. Let that
see just for a second, because now these two perpetrators
are behind bars for many many years to come. I'm
(37:09):
Joseph Scott Morgan and this is bodybacks
Bodybacks with Joseph Scott Morgan. It's a tired morn statement.
The three toughest jobs out there firefighter, police officer, and
school teacher. In each one of those categories you talk
(00:30):
about underpaid, underappreciated, abused, all the sorts of things that
come along with that territory. Now, I can't speak to
teaching public school, you know. I can speak to you know,
being a college professor. It ain't the same thing, trust me.
But I'm married to a public school teacher, former public
(00:53):
school teacher now, which I'm very happy about because I
get to be with her all the time. But I
would listen to her if she would come home in
the evenings, dog tired, underappreciated, and anxious for what would
happen the next day at work. And it was like
every day was like that. It almost became a running
(01:16):
joke for us. You know, what do you have to
overcome today, hunh in order to get back home to me.
There are times when you think about that, and you
might say it with a bit of levity, but there
are times when people that work in public service, they
(01:38):
don't come home, They don't see their babies anymore, they
don't see their spouse. They don't see those that they love.
They pour themselves into a job that is thankless, only
to be discarded. Today we're going to talk about a
(01:59):
woman who poured her heart and soul into teaching public school,
into teaching individuals Spanish, a language which was her first language.
A woman that had carved out a life here in
the United States, a woman who met her end on
(02:21):
a dark trail in a little town in Iowa. Her
name Jahima Graver. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is
body bags. My precious wife spent many many years teaching
in public schools, and when this case came about for me,
(02:45):
I knew that it was something that I wanted to
address and talk about the forensics of it. But you know,
I also wanted to mention the life of missus Graver
and what she had endured.
Speaker 2 (02:57):
Joe Milimacgraver is a which beloved Spanish teacher at Fairfield
High School. Students say she is tough but fair and
they like her. When she goes missing during her every
day after school walk in the park. The small town
of Fairfield, Iowa, is worried when the body of Louie
mcgrabor is found in the park, hidden under a tarp.
The town of less than ten thousand is shocked, But
(03:19):
when two sixteen year old students are arrested for the
murder after one of them writes on snapchat about the planning, execution,
and disposal of evidence, worry in shock turns to disgust.
Speaker 1 (03:31):
Before I go down that path, I wanted to mention
something to you that had occurred to me. I've shared
a few things along the line we do about my
background and about what my world was like as a
death investigator based upon what we know of this case.
To start off with, what do you think was the
(03:55):
modality of death in the first homicide case ever worked?
Speaker 2 (04:00):
I'm clueless. I have no IDEA baseball bat to the
side of the.
Speaker 1 (04:03):
Head, all over the head. I have a guy that
beat his brother to death with a baseball bat. That
was the very first homicide I ever worked. And I
don't know if it's something in the back of my
mind coupled along with this idea that this poor woman
is a public educator, that it kind of it kind
(04:24):
of hooked together in this weird way for me. But yeah,
the first first homicide, I think a lot of people
would think, oh, yeah, you know, Morgan, he probably you know,
it's probably a gunshote.
Speaker 2 (04:34):
I actually thought you were going to I thought you
were going because you know, yeah, yeah, yeah exactly beat
him outside the head.
Speaker 1 (04:42):
Yeah. And no. It was a guy that had beaten
his brother to death with a baseball bat in South Louisiana.
And the reason he had done it is that he
was the younger brother the perpetrator was, and the older
brother bullied the entire family and had knocked his brother around.
And these were older fellows, they were not young guys.
(05:02):
And the younger brother finally had enough, yeah, retrieved a
baseball bat and beat his brother to death in the
front yard of their home. Yeah. Wow. So yeah, that
was the first case. So my first homicide was actually
a blunt force trauma homicide. It was not a gunshot wound,
it was not a stab wound, it was not poisoning.
(05:23):
It was blunt force trauma with a baseball bat.
Speaker 2 (05:25):
All right. So when you're dealing with this, and it
goes back to your first case as a death investigator,
you're all ready every time there's a baseball bat in
the head, because you know you're gonna if you get
into a fight with somebody. They can use a Louisville
slugger to do damage on your ribs, your legs, your arms,
you know all of that. But ultimately you're not gonna
(05:46):
die from getting hit in the shoulder.
Speaker 1 (05:48):
No, you're not getting hit in the head.
Speaker 2 (05:49):
Though, with a baseball bat is going to be deadly.
Speaker 1 (05:51):
It absolutely is. And it's a very intimate thing. Do
you remember when we were kids, they would take an
old car tire and cut it in half and nail
it to a telephone poll Do you remember that? And
you would take swings on the tire that half of tire,
and you know, I actually had two buddies that were
doing that and that were taking turns, and guess what happened.
My friend was staying standing too close to the other
(06:13):
guy right behind him as he was swinging. The bat
comes off of the tire and hits my friend right
in the face and breaks his nose. So there's even
that kind of secondary energy can be transferred with a
baseball bat to a a very focal area on that bat.
So you're transferring all of that energy to once you know, hey,
(06:34):
you know what it's called. It's called sweet spot, and
say and every bat has one and so you might
not hit it every single time, but boy, when you do, boy,
the level of damage that can be accomplished with this
is beyond the pale.
Speaker 2 (06:49):
We've got a story today, Joe Scott Morgan that it
is the fear of everybody who has a loved one
that is a teacher. Yes, and I count myself with that.
When I met your sweet wife, Kim, who I think
her first name is at first and middle name is
sweet wife. You know that she had a three first name.
It's not you know, Betty Lynn Thomas. It's sweet wife Kim.
(07:12):
Because of students, these days are different. I know that's
something that tends to be said of every generation. But
Joseph Scott Morgan, I have walked down the halls of
public schools in the last five years doing career day
and other things, and the noise I hear and the
volume I hear coming from classrooms while teachers are teaching
(07:33):
is something that we did not experience as children growing
up in the public school system. Teachers now are faced
with a much different day when they start teaching. And
in this particular case, you have a teacher who was
this is a woman Noema grab loved by the community,
loved by her school, loved by her students. Even a
(07:54):
student said she was hard. She was a hard teacher
because she was teaching her native language. She was teaching Spanish,
and she took great pride in teaching Spanish. But she
was hard. That fear of any teacher that does their
job and tries to raise children to a respectable level
of accomplishment. In that course, what happens when the students
(08:16):
lose it and kill their teacher with a baseball bat,
Because that's what happened, Joe.
Speaker 1 (08:21):
You know, there's all boils down to a bad grade.
And listen, I made my share. I made my share
over the course of my academic career to include college
as well. But you know, there's a there's not a
single bad grade that I didn't earn. I would have
(08:43):
liked for someone to have waived a wand and you know,
and the grade had been miraculously transformed for something that
was a bit more acceptable and appealing. But of course
that's not the case. And it would seem to me
that when with Nahema, she she had this this ability
(09:07):
uh to say, okay, this is you know, this is
the line in the sand. Uh, then and if you
crossed this line on the sand, this is these are
going to be the consequences. And that's isn't that you
know kind of this theme that runs through nowadays. It
seems like there are no consequences for for your actions.
And when you think about, you know, well, what's going
(09:30):
to happen if I do poorly in this class? Well,
it's going to drop my GPA. Maybe the promise that
I made to my parents, uh is not going to
be upheld because I haven't focused, I haven't asked for help.
I don't understand what I'm being taught. And let me
tell you something, it's not always the teacher's fault that
(09:51):
you don't understand. It's it's the fact that you haven't
applied yourself many times. But people, you know, they want
things handed to them. In this case, I think that we'
got not one, but two perpetrators that you know, kind
of we're singing that same tune along the way that
they felt like that this victim owed them something, and
(10:13):
by extension, because of what happened and what this community
was robbed of, I think they felt as though that
the rest of the community owed them something too, and
they were going to take their payment in blood. As
(10:48):
we've previously mentioned on multiple episodes, Dave, I think one
of the problems that perpetrators encounter and keep in mind
most of the time we don't discuss the actions of
professional hittman on this podcast. We talk primarily about perpetrators
(11:13):
who have no experience. Not only not only do they
not have experience with homicides, I have an experience with death,
and you're faced with the proposition that, Okay, I've committed
a homicide. What in the world do I do with
a body? But let's back up a little bit before
we get there and just kind of go through kind
(11:35):
of the timeline and what happened in this particular case.
Speaker 2 (11:39):
Nohe mcgrabor sixty six year old Spanish teacher. She was
well thought of, and I mean this in the broadest
sense of the word. Even the students who had her class,
had her for Spanish, said she was hard but fair.
I get having that discussion, but raising your voice arguing
(11:59):
over great it is usually pretty black and white. Either
you got the answer right or you got it wrong
on the test. Isn't am I wrong in that? Am
I missing something here?
Speaker 1 (12:10):
No, no, no, you're you're absolutely right. And again this
goes to it fascinates me how how students now talk to, uh,
talk to teachers as if they are peer and that
that that's the strange thing, because generally you don't associate
yourself with learning from peers. You learn from those that
have mastered a craft. And unfortunately most students don't understand that.
Speaker 2 (12:32):
I actually got this quote. Well, there's this guy named
Sawyer Mast. He was a student with with our our
two suspects here, Jeremy Gooddale and Willard Chaden Miller. And
he said, having known Chaden and having him in my
math class, he did not speak in a murderous way,
(12:55):
but in a very aggressive way, for like, in this way,
just like towards Missus Graeber. Now, Sawyer Mass said he
heard Chaden Miller taking this tone, arguing over a grade
in Spanish two or three, depending on they were. I'm
(13:15):
not sure which one it was. It was, but it
was not just entry level of Spanish. It was a
it was a class that you're expected you need it
for college back in the day where you had to
have two years of a foreign language to get in.
And so he's arguing, wanting a better Joe arguing with
the teacher over a grade.
Speaker 1 (13:32):
You know, she had told the young man that he
he is going to receive a particular grade, and he
was dissatisfied with that. And that's where this idea, you know,
took root of. Okay, well, I'm not going to try
to do extra credit. I'm not going to beg to
(13:53):
maybe retake an examination. I'm going to beat her to death.
And that that's you know, I don't know how you
make that leap from here to here in that sense,
and I don't know that there's really any way to
excuse it. You know. I think that some people have
(14:14):
tried to apply, you know, things like mental mental illness
and all those sort of things. And the thing about
it is, okay, mental illness maybe, but are we talking
about two mentally ill people that enter into a confederacy
with one another.
Speaker 2 (14:25):
That's the thing. You've got two friends, two male friends,
get together. Apparently my talk with missus Graver didn't go
as expected. I thought I could argue my way into
a better grade. It didn't happen. So Jeremy, what do
you think I should do? And that's this conversation. What
level do you go? You mentioned learning from peers and
how they can talk to teachers now with disrespect, like
(14:47):
they don't owe them any kind of respect. But this
goes beyond that. This now goes past to I need
a much better grade than I got. She's not going
to give it to me. What do you think I
should do? Well, you had a baseball bat.
Speaker 1 (15:00):
Handy, Yeah, let's disappear her. And and so the choice
that is made at this point is we need to
try to plan how we can get rid of her.
And now you know where this plan was going to
go after that, I have no idea. You know what
what are you going to do? I mean, what what's
the deal here? Is this?
Speaker 2 (15:21):
Uh A?
Speaker 1 (15:22):
Is this an idea of vengeance? Or is it okay? Well,
if we make her disappear, uh ergo, the grades will disappear.
Speaker 2 (15:30):
You know.
Speaker 1 (15:30):
Here's the thing, even if you hadn't gotten caught at
what you were doing, you're still going to get the
same damn grade. Uh. That's that's how that's going to
work out for you. I can tell you that. And
so you're it's again it comes down to uh to
an idea that I like to state over and over
again uh metaphorically. Uh, and it's it's throwing the brick
(15:54):
through the stained glass window. Uh. You know that you
you're you're willing to destroy some being so incredibly beautiful
because it doesn't suit you. It doesn't suit who you
are or what you are, and that sort of thing.
So you're now going to choose. And when perpetrators are
trying to determine what type of weapon to utilize, well
(16:16):
what's at their disposal. Well, if you're talking to a
couple of teen boys, you would think, well, perhaps perhaps
they're not going to have firearms at their disposal. Maybe
they do, maybe they don't. But you and I I
know certainly you I can speak to me. Even in
my limited sense. I had quite the collection of baseball
(16:37):
bats when I was a kid, still had them until
you know, I reached college. I don't know whatever happened
to them, but I had them. And so you know,
you have those that are there. So it's a weapon
of opportunity. But this is not Here's the other thing
about this particular homicide, Dave, because we've talked about weapons
of opportunity as it applies to when somebody's blood is up,
(17:00):
as they say, if if if you have a reactive
event within say a home, all right, you're going to
pick up the weapon that is closest to you and
you're going to utilize it. Could be a gun, could
be a knife, could be at a blunt object. That's
not what they did. They selected a weapon and then
(17:20):
after they had selected the weapon, they knew where she
was going to be. So it's a matter of the
perpetrators understanding the timeline as as it applies to We
know that she leaves school at this particular time.
Speaker 2 (17:36):
She has a regular routine she she.
Speaker 1 (17:38):
Does and it's something she follows, and they knew that
her This is her day. She goes and walks, you know,
to just kind of let her mind go. And then
every day, you know what she went and did after that,
She went to Mass every day and she prayed and
that's every day of the week. She was that involved
in her church, and so she would leave the walking
(18:00):
path and go to Mass. And that was people knew
that about her.
Speaker 2 (18:04):
The students knew. The two perpetrators here knew her routine
of after school going to the park. They put together
a minimal plan. They know where she's going to be
by herself, they know the opportunity they will have, but
beyond that, they don't really plan out a whole lot more,
including what to do after we do the deed. They
(18:25):
don't plan what to do with much else except this
emotional desire to take her life, and they really don't
get past that much. And then they use social media
Snapchat to actually share information that they ought not know
with other people, including a friend who is the reason
we know what happened because she turned on them, you know,
(18:47):
because what they did was heinous. But the whole point
being they had a plan, it just wasn't a complete plan.
Speaker 1 (18:55):
Yeah, it's one of these events where you think that
maybe you universal you you believe that you've got everything
planned out so that it's all going to come off
with without a problem. But when both of both Miller
and good All showed up at the park, they were
(19:17):
tracking her there at the park, and it's quite chilling.
It sounds like something out of a horror movie because
good Ale actually approached her. I die and he's wearing
a mask, and she's quite taken aback by this. She's
(19:38):
on this walking trail, Okay, it's this little walk with
this little park. Her car is parked there. He approaches
her and he's wearing a mask, and then as he
gets closer, he pulls the mask down and smiles at her,
and immediately it stated that she felt relief. She felt relief.
She it's a person she recognizes. And then all of
(19:59):
a sudden, Miller just appears from the rear and starts
to swing this bat and begins to strike her about
the head and about her upper torso. And they're into
it at this point in time. I mean, they're you
know you I guess it's at this point that they
knew that they had to go forward with what had happened.
(20:21):
And after she has struck, she's taken off of the trail.
Miller reports that he witnessed good Al begin to continue
to beat her with the same baseball bat off of
the trail at this point in time. As a matter
of fact, he had to come and take him away
(20:44):
from the situation. It had actually been put forward that
good Al was quote unquote trying to put her out
of her misery, as it were. You know, when this
is being documented all along by them in retroactively. They've
talked about this on snapchat, how they're going to plan
(21:04):
this thing out and they're documenting electronically. And then the
big thing that they're faced with now is we've got
a dead body. It's our teacher. What are we going
to do? How do we obscure our presence here? And
how do we obscure the body? Once death arrives, you're
(21:45):
free of the pain of this world. I don't know
how much pain you know he endured in life. I
know that she had a son that had issues physically
and mentally, and she loved that child and took care
of him. Her and her husband both did her husband,
who she had been married to for a number of years.
(22:07):
They were divorced, but yet they were great friends and
still interacted with one another and their adult children. No
one gets out of the out of life pain free.
That's the reality of it. But for her life seemed
to have been quite joyful. She certainly brought joy to
(22:27):
a lot of the places that she went to. We've
heard that over and over. But in her wildest dreams,
I don't think she would have envisioned her life ending
along a walking path in this little town in Iowa
and her mortal remains being abused by being drug off
into the weeds.
Speaker 2 (22:46):
Joe. When you back up to her final day that
day November two, she was actually in a discussion where
Jaden actually was raising his voice in an argument with
her over a grade, and that was seen by people
at school. They saw him really being aggressive towards her
(23:09):
about his grade. She does her normal routine, goes for
a walk in the park, and that's the last time
she has seen alive. Is when she's going to do that,
when she doesn't follow the rest of her normal routine.
As you mentioned earlier, she goes to mass every day
before going home, so it's school walk mass home and
(23:30):
she was reported missing it it didn't take that long
because of her routine to actually find her body. She
was not missing for a very long period of time.
As they mean, law enforcement started looking into where where
are the possible places she could be. They were able
to find that she had gone to the park because
witnesses actually saw saw her vehicle being driven away from
(23:54):
the park.
Speaker 1 (23:55):
With two males in the vehicle in the vehicle, and
that's a bit when these perpetrators drove away in her
vehicle and it was it was essentially abandoned down a
road some distance away and was eventually found, but they're
having to hoof it back to wherever it is. Their
point of origin is their respective homes. Now that they're
(24:17):
faced with this idea and this is this is so ridiculous.
The body is still approximating the area where they I'm
just going to say it out loud, where they beat
her to death or a baseball bat. They then take
up a wheelbarrow, a tarp and crossties to cover her
(24:42):
body and obscure her body along the trail. I guess
thinking that the obscuring is going to wind up providing
cover for them to certain to a certain level. But
here's the thing. You know, every time, every time in
forensics you handle something, every time you try to make
(25:03):
adjustments that is the perpetrator and a scene, you're adding
elements to this that you can be tracked with forensically,
whether it's fingerprints or touch DNA, are just at a
baseline ownership. Let's say that you got your wheelbear from
Ace Hardware. Well, that wheelbear is unique to that particular brand.
(25:27):
We can track that. Eventually, it might take some work,
but we can track that. The tarp that you bought,
I don't know where you bought it, but it's a
very specific tarp, and we know the age of it.
We can assess what lot it came out of, perhaps
and maybe if there's something that that tarp has been
used for before at your home that specifically identifies and
(25:47):
links it back to your home, that's transferred now onto
the body. From a forensic standpoint, we're going to collect
that evidence. And when you when you consider what they
had done to this poor public school teacher, Dave, and
they beat her to death with this bat. Did they
(26:08):
get rid of the bat?
Speaker 2 (26:09):
No?
Speaker 1 (26:10):
Did they get rid of their clothing? No? They took
the clothing, the bat, bloody towels all back home.
Speaker 2 (26:17):
Right, So how.
Speaker 1 (26:18):
How is it? I think that a lot of people
will ask, you know, what do you expect to happen here?
Because when you know when they're when they're found out,
eventually found out, the investigators are going to find these
items in the house, and that's that's one of these
forensic tie backs that we look for, David.
Speaker 2 (26:34):
That's where the friend as this story started breaking, as
missus Graeber is missing and the town is looking for her,
and a friend looks at snapchat messages and says, this
is crazy. They're involved, and it's bad.
Speaker 1 (26:51):
You know.
Speaker 2 (26:51):
It's one thing for young people to say they're going
to do something weird or mean or whatever. But now
it looks like they have done something, and this friend
goes to police. That was the first thing. Police right away,
right away knew who their main suspects were. That it
was these two boys, these two at the time sixteen
year olds. Sixteen year old, sixteen years old. We're talking
(27:12):
about Chadon Miller. His name's Willard Miller. But he goes
by Chaden and Jeremy Goodale. This friend gave the snapchat
stuff to police. Police looked at it and when those are
our boys, they went and did the They search, got
a search warrant. That's where they found the bloody stuff,
the bloody clothing, bloody towel. But Joe, I want to
back up to the murder scene. Yeah, we know that
they beat her with a baseball bat, according to Jaden.
(27:35):
Jayden claims that Jeremy also used the bat and beat her. Yes,
but the only thing we really know is that Chaydon
Miller beat her in the head. Now that had she
had to have been knocked unconscious at some point fairly quickly.
I'm thinking, I don't know how many shots to the
head you can take before you go unconscious.
Speaker 1 (27:51):
Joe, Well, it a lot of that depends, Okay, depends
on a couple of things relative to blunt force trauma.
First off, it depends upon the strength that the individual possesses.
It's wielding this bat. We're talking about a you know,
a relatively robust, healthy teenage male. He's got enough arm
(28:12):
strength to do damage enough for bodies. Because we know,
it's not just in the arms. It's the turning, it's
the rotation of his hips, it's the wielding of the
bat from a several different Because you're not going to
swing this thing most of the time like you swing
it at the plate, You're many times you'll see this
(28:34):
kind of tomahawking motion that comes down with both hands
where you're crashing down. Now, she's diminutive, she's not that tall,
so automatically you've got leverage over her. It's it's an
asymmetrical situation. You crash down her from the back. Okay.
One of the things that's going to happen with that
first blow is you might not know this, but with
(28:57):
the first blow, you're not necessarily going to have blood
that's going to be transferred to the weapon. So you're
going to break the skin perhaps that first blow, but
when you begin to strike again, okay, and you rain
down in that area where you may have lacerated the
area because lacerations arise from blood forced traumas a tearing
(29:19):
of the skin, the next time you draw that bat back,
you're going to have a mass of blood. And because
you're striking in the head, one of the other things
that you're going to have is hair, and the hair
blood is so tacky everybody at home can identify the
attackiness of blood. The hair actually actually is adherent to
(29:43):
the bat, per the per the blood that's there, and
you take that away, well, that's an element of this
poor woman's body that can be tied back to her. Now,
the underlying trauma that she's sustaining is going to be
not just these lacerated marks on her head. You've got
the potential of skull fractures, particularly depressed skull fractures, as
(30:08):
this barrel of that bat is hitting her. You've also
got these kind of weird linear contusions that will happen
on the softer sections of the body like I see
them on the shoulders and the neck where you start
striking these soft tissues, and you get these with a bat.
In particular, a bat is kind of graduated out, you know,
(30:29):
closer to the handle, more narrow it is. The further
you get down down the shaft of that bat, the
wider it is, so you'll have this kind of V
shaped it's almost a V shaped pattern where the lines
are kind of splitting off that skins. As you rain
down onto the skin with the bat, the skin actually
for a second day wraps up on the sides of
(30:51):
the bat, so the contusion is going to look bigger
than the surface of the bat. It's a weird thing.
As matter of fact, I reckon anybody do this. Go
online and look up videos of slow motion baseball pitches
that are struck with a bat, and you will see
that for a second, at that moment time when the
(31:11):
bat makes contact with the baseball, the baseball will actually
flatten for a second, and if you pay real close attention,
the sides of the baseball just for an instant, now
that's firmer than skin, will actually slightly bend around the
bat and wrap. Well. Imagine striking skin like that, and
that's that contusion that you're going to get. So you'll
(31:32):
get those contusions, you'll get underlying fractures, and you're pulling
away this hair. These people, after they attacked her, Dave
never even bothered to clean the bat. So they took
home elements of Nohemo with them. They took elements of
her body on their person in the form of their clothes.
(31:54):
Maybe they had a towel they were trying to because
they found a bloody towel and this poor precious woman
they found all that remained of her in this sense
as it relates to the murder weapon. They found all
that remained of her in blood stains and hair on
the surface of this bat.
Speaker 2 (32:11):
One thing you mentioned, Joe, linear skull fracture and is
it compressed depressed skull fracture.
Speaker 1 (32:18):
Yeah, you've got What will happen is that you can
have a depressed skull fracture. And the depressed gull fracture
is unique because if you can concentrate enough energy with
the item that someone is being bludgeoned with, it will
kind of separate out the bone. Let me give you
(32:39):
a good for instance, we're coming into the holiday season
now and so people buy they get peanut brittle. Okay,
if you look at a piece of peanut brittle, it's
not that much different than the external table of a skull.
You can take a piece of peanut brittle and you
can kind of lightly tap it with your hand on
(33:00):
a firm surface, and you'll get this kind of splitting
that carries on in a fracture. Okay, if you hit
it hard enough, though, you'll see that you can create
almost this little island in it and it fractures away
from all the other areas of that piece of print
peanut brittle, and it'll create like a little plug of
peanut brittle. That's a depressed skull fracture. If you can
(33:22):
concentrate enough energy on that specific area, you'll literally plug
the bone so that it is free floating from the
rest of the table of the skull. It won't just
be like this kind of curveliney or fracture that you get.
And so that's one of the little nuanced things that
you look for when you're trying to assess these these injuries.
You know, at autopsy, which would have been done with
(33:44):
the hemu's.
Speaker 2 (33:44):
Bi Now, when we know that that Jeremy Goodell was
set to testify against Jaden Miller, and I keep going
back to the bat and Chaden Miller being the one
who was seen in the argument arguing with his teacher.
(34:07):
You know, he's arguing with Missus Graeber over his grade.
We don't hear Jeremy having that same thing. Is there
a way to tell who was singing the bat?
Speaker 1 (34:17):
I don't know that there's necessarily any physical way. I
guess that first off, it would require quite a bit
of calculus in order to be able to compute that,
I think, but given the dynamic of the environment, it
would be great if you could, you know, perhaps think about, well,
(34:39):
what's the maximum height Chaden could have reached with the
extension of his arms. One of the things that we
do that has been done in cases past with attacks
like this is that if you have a perpetrator that's
wielding an instrument, many times you'll measure their arm length.
We do this with the dead as well. We will
measure arm length, for instance, the dead's ability to facilitate
(35:03):
handling a weapon. If it's say a self inflicted event,
or if they're operating a vehicle, could they have reached
the gear lever where they were positioned at or is
it possible that they could have been in this position
and sustained this particular injury. And a lot of that
comes down to the to the measurements of the dimensions
(35:24):
of the body in this particular case. I don't necessarily
know if it would be possible to scientifically prove that,
and so based upon that you would you're leaning heavily
on testimonial and circumstantial level.
Speaker 2 (35:37):
Jud The reason I asked is Miller had claimed all
along he didn't hit missus grab with the bat, But
when it came right down to negotiations and ampleat, they
both played not guilty at first, but Jeremy Goodell did
cut a deal with prosecutors to take a plea and
testify in court against his lifelong pal Jaden Miller. When
Miller found out that, well, he cut a deal as
(35:59):
well and played guilty. It was the sentencing that showed
me who was the major aggressor of these two. They
were sixteen years old at the time, they certainly knew better.
But Jeremy Goodell got life with the possibility for parole
after twenty five years. Miller got life with the chance
of parole after thirty five years, but it still doesn't
explain how they thought this was the answer to the
(36:23):
problem of a bad grade.
Speaker 1 (36:24):
I don't know that there really is a way to
explain a way the destruction of a life, but to
kind of sum it up, I would like to say this.
One of the Snapchat comments that was that had been
posted merely said this tom to hot a body showing
(36:47):
the picture of a jug of clorox, and a second
post with a selfie stated POV, you're my Spanish teacher
and this is the last thing you see. Let that
see just for a second, because now these two perpetrators
are behind bars for many many years to come. I'm
(37:09):
Joseph Scott Morgan and this is bodybacks
Host
Joseph Scott Morgan
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