May 11, 2023 • 30 mins
In this episode of Body Bags, hosts Joseph Scott Morgan and Dave Mack delve into the tragic and unsettling death of 17-year-old Tylee Ryan. They discuss Tylee's tumultuous family life, her struggle with pancreatitis, the discovery of her remains, the challenges forensic experts faced in determining the cause of death, and they provide insight into the methods and findings of the forensic anthropologist and pathologist.
Time-codes:
00:34 - Introduction to Tylee Ryan's tragic story and difficult life.
01:22 - Tylee's horrifying death and forensic pathologist insights.
03:26 - Tylee's body is discarded and attempts to cover up.
03:15 - The impact of Tylee's mother's multiple marriages on her life.
04:51 - Tylee's medical records reveal stress and anxiety.
06:20 - Explanation of pancreatitis and potential causes.
07:08 - Tylee's stressful family life and stepfather's murder.
08:14 - Tylee's resistance to her mother's manipulations.
09:22 - Lori Vallow's justification for Tylee's murder.
09:37 - Location of Tylee's remains on Chad Daybell's property.
11:41 - Stratification concept in the burn pile investigation.
12:42 - Discovery of Tylee's remains and difference in location from JJ's remains.
13:16 - Importance of multiple senses in an investigation.
15:00 - The crucial role of a forensic anthropologist at the scene.
16:33 - Difficulty in recovering Tylee's fragmented remains.
18:34 - Relationship between forensic pathologists and forensic anthropologists.
20:19 - Odor differences between bones and soft tissue decomposition.
21:00 - Dr. Christensen finds 100 bones of Tylee's remains.
21:13 - Difficulties in identifying specific causes of death for Tylee.
22:09 - Classification of Tylee's death as nonspecific homicidal trauma.
24:10 - Speculation on Tylee's skull fracture cause.
26:12 - Attempt to dismember Tylee's body.
27:48 - Challenges of rendering a body down through fire.
28:18 - Sharp force trauma on Tylee's left hip bone.
29:03 - Tools for dismemberment and potential trace evidence.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:08):
Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan fending for yourself. How
many kids does that apply to in this world we
live in now? I know one that it did, in fact,
applied to Tylie Ryan. Tilly was a young lady. She
(00:32):
had seen the life that her mother had lived. Five husbands,
multiple moves to settlement. Tillie had essentially become the anchor
in her family, certainly as that applied to her little brother.
To ju Valo always envisioned them clinging to one another.
(00:55):
There's that image where they're hugging each other very tightly,
and I would think that in their world that's really
all they had to hold on to for stability was
one another. But just like with JJ, we found out
a lot of disturbing news about how Tiley met her
end because we've heard from the forensic pathologists that did
(01:15):
her examination. In this episode, we're gonna break it down,
We're going to discuss it, the horror of Tiley's death.
I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is Body Bags. There
is no satisfaction. And my listeners know how much I
(01:40):
hate the work closure because it doesn't exist, particularly when
it comes to death. You get answers, and some answers
are just wanting their unsatisfying, I think because you haven't
quite filled in all of the blanks, and unfortunately, with
Tyler Ryan's death, that's that's kind of the situation we
(02:01):
find ourselves in right now. But what I can say
is that her death was horrific. Dave Mac, would you
agree with that assessment?
Speaker 2 (02:12):
On what we know about Tyler Ryan and her passing
is it's frustrating and sad, I say that not lightly frustrating,
because we don't still to this moment, know all the
things you would normally know about somebody who died when
you have remains to examine. I say remains, because there
(02:38):
was not a body to examine as one would expect
when you say body. What happened to Tyler Ryan? And
we don't even know exactly when. What we do know
is that Tyler Ryan was last seen September eighth in
Yellowstone Park in a picture with her mother, her little
brother JJ, and her uncle Alex Cox, who was Lori
(02:58):
Valo's brother. We have that picture and we have some
other information that we know she was alive with the
family September the eighth, and then we know she's missing
until June ninth of twenty twenty. What took place in
the infram is where people like you come in. How
did they find Tylee Ryan?
Speaker 1 (03:19):
I think that to say buried is inaccurate. I prefer
the term discarded with an attempt to cover up burial.
To me, when you say that, it goes to honoring,
you know what I'm saying, Dave. When we honor someone,
we bury them. She was not this young woman. She's
(03:41):
in that weird space in time. She's seventeen.
Speaker 2 (03:45):
Actually she died too. She died two weeks before her
seventeenth birthday.
Speaker 1 (03:48):
Yeah, I mean, right on the cusp, and you know,
the world's about to open up to her, and unfortunately,
I think in a very bad way, it had already
opened up to her. She had seen things that I
think that by virtue the way that her mother chose
to live her life, she had been exposed to just
the dissettlement in and of itself that she had had
(04:11):
to endure for all those years.
Speaker 2 (04:13):
It's very important to note two things really quickly. One,
when we did a program about JJ Vallo and how
his body was recovered, and his body was recovered and
if you haven't listened to it. I encourage you to
do so. But what happened with Tyler Ryan totally different.
It was like two totally separate things, not connected by anything.
(04:34):
And you mentioned that Tylie had been through a lot
with her mother, Well, her mother was married five times.
When you watch the interview of Tylli Ryan with police
after Joe, after Charles Vallo was murdered by Alex Cox,
watched that interview and in the times after, she seems unaffected.
Tyler Ryan seemed totally unaffected. She actually was emulating what
(04:55):
her mother was doing. They were joking, talking like it
was just another day. She's copying her mother and no emotion, giggling, laughing,
moving on. So, Tylie Ryan was so impacted by the
lifestyle that her mother led that her demise and the
way she was discarded shows something a total disconnect from
(05:16):
life and love.
Speaker 1 (05:17):
That's rooted I think in something else, that touch of reality,
that dose of reality in her short life. It was
read into the record in trial. By the way, Laurie
Valo's trial has actually going on right now as we're
laying this down. It came out in testimony on the
part of the forensic pathologist that he had had a
(05:38):
chance to review Tillie's medical records, and I was kind
of surprised by this. She had lived a very short life,
but in that time she had been diagnosed with anxiety,
she had gone through having OVERI insist, and get this,
(05:59):
she had actually suffered pancreatitis in that short life. Pancreatitis
is a miserable condition and over insists or certainly unpleasant
as well. And then you have this anxiety. You know what,
seventeen years old, wash have anxiety. I'm a firm believer.
You know that many times illnesses manifest themself as a
(06:20):
result of stressors in your life and that sort of thing.
And you take its measure by thinking that this person
that she's attached to at the hip, her mother has
literally drugged this child through a keyhole her entire life,
through all these various relationships and situations that they've been in.
You'll never convince me, you know, you're not going to
(06:41):
have things manifest manifest in your life physically.
Speaker 2 (06:45):
What is pancreatitis exactly, Joe, I have no idea.
Speaker 1 (06:47):
Well, it's an inflammation of the pancreas and it's deadly actually,
I mean it is it's super deadly and many times
it's associated with things like elevated cholesterol. Not that she was,
but you know, you'll have people that have problems with
chronic alcoholism develop pancreatitis. There's any number of reasons why
(07:08):
you can develop it. But it is an infection of
the pancreas, very painful. I mean, it comes along with
like horrible abnominal pain, high fever, It can give systemic as,
It impacts your the totality of your system, the way
your pancreas functions. Remember the pancreas, you know, controls insulin
in your body. Just a horrible set of circumstances. And
(07:29):
you couple that with everything that she was having to endure,
you know, right right before she was murdered. She's not
yet seventeen, and she's dealing with the homicide of her
stepfather at the hand of her uncle.
Speaker 2 (07:46):
And please add in there, Joe, that Tyler Ryan was
at home and knew the truth of what had transpired.
You mentioned stress and worry, and that can lead to
some of these things that she was experiencing.
Speaker 1 (08:00):
Yeah, and here's another little nugget kind of picked up
on friends of mind that are in the media that
have been following kind of the family dynamic of this,
more so than I have try to stick more with
the forensics, even though in this case is really hard,
as you can see, to kind of hide my feelings
relative to it. But in this particular case, from what
(08:21):
I'm hearing, she would not stand for some of the
stuff that her mother would engage in. She would be
combative with her, She would make comments to her. She
was not just going to go along with the mom
because mom said that this is what she could do.
You know, She's not another man coming into her mother's
life that her mother can manipulate with her beauty and
(08:43):
sex appeal and whatever else that she's you know, trying
to sell to whomever it's coming down the track. Kyleie
has seen behind the curtain, you know what I'm saying.
Speaker 2 (08:51):
And you know what she showed that to people that
came into Laurie's life. For instance, that Lorie Valo's best
friend was Melanie Gibb and Elanie Gibb. It was brought
up in trial that Tyler Ryan didn't particularly care for
Melanie Gibb. So I think that while she has a
mother that is dragging her, that you mentioned dragging through
a keyhole. I think that's a great that's a great
identifier there, but that maybe Tilly didn't overreact with her mother,
(09:17):
but it manifested itself in the way that Tyley looked
at Lourie's friends that were also part of this crazy
world that Tyler wasn't buying into, which is why Tyler
had to go. Tyler wasn't on board.
Speaker 1 (09:28):
They had made an assessment that she's one of these
dark spirits, or however they were framing it, you know,
as a justification for these things. But what we do
know this new space that her mother had chosen to
occupy or was planning on occupying, this place that's out
in this beautiful area of the country out there in
(09:51):
the Eastern I hope it ended in sheer horror and
it actually wound up being Tyler's resting place after she
was apparently murdered. If you're spending time out in rural America,
(10:24):
if you're out on a farm, I don't know of
any farm that doesn't have a place where you burn
brush down Here in South they called a burn pile
where you can take limbs and things that break off
of trees and whatnot. And you can you save it
up and kind of gather it and maybe you'll have
a bonfire, and maybe you'll just stand out there and
burn it and make sure it doesn't spread, and then
(10:46):
you walk away and everything is said and done. They
had a place like this. There was this location that
Chad Dave Bell had you on the backside of his property,
adjacent to this big red building which I've always suspected
had something to do with the deaths of these children,
that was just out back of it where it looked
(11:08):
more like a fir ring actually, but it was also
known as a location where Chad da Bell and his
wife Tammy would bear pets. And as it turned out,
this is where Tyler Ryan's body was found.
Speaker 2 (11:24):
Duar, and you mentioned that it was a burn pile,
you know, a burn pile you burn trash and rubbish.
But also in that same ring, as you mentioned, there
were benches around there where that family roast in marshmallows, havingsmores,
and they chose that location, the pet cemetery location, to
actually dispose discard the body of Tiller Ryan. I don't
(11:46):
know how that impacted the investigation, but I'm really curious, Joe,
when you start digging around something like this, and you
have what you know is a pet cemetery area, and
you have obviously fire. What are you finding as an
investigator as you start looking for remains?
Speaker 1 (12:05):
Throw a word out to you, stratification. I don't mean
that in a sociological standpoint. I'm talking about from a
geological standpoint. We have STRATAI relative to the ground where
you have various layers of earth, and this would have
been stratification in the sense of recent. When I say recent,
I'm not talking at one hundreds and thousands of years.
(12:27):
I'm talking about in the recent history where you do
this layering, if you will, of things. So for every
bit of wood that you burned, are other items that
you're trying to dispose of by fire. It burns down,
it settles, right, and then just to imagine that progressively
becomes more compressed over period times, you burn more items,
(12:49):
you throw more stuff in. You're getting this strata of
all of these elements that have been burned down and
rendered down over the years, and where they found Highley's remains.
This earth would have been probably a bit more loose,
if you will, you know it had been The earth
(13:10):
was probably turned more regularly with JJ's remains. When they
went out to that retention pond or dried up pond
or whatever that area is, whatever they're calling it where
his remains were found, that earth had not been turned
beautiful green grass all around except for that one area.
But when you get to an area where you've got
(13:31):
a lot of debris that's just been settling there for
a while, and you might add to it, the soil
is going to look disrupted as well. So when you
show up as an investigator, you're going to have to
take a long, hard look. And it might not just
be your sight that you're relying on when you're looking around.
It might be smell. It very well might be smell
(13:53):
because you're sitting there and you're thinking, I'm smelling something
that is obviously organic, it is decomposing, and you catch
wind of it. And the reason that you might catch
wind of it, and this is absolutely horrible. But the
forensic anthropologist in this case, her assessment of Tyler's remains,
(14:16):
she said that there had been animal activity in her remains,
So she's referring to a small mammal. She doesn't know
what type of small mammal, but you know you've got possums. Famously,
Chad Dave Bell had mentioned a large raccoon part of
this alibi he had put forward when he was socking
to his wife Tammy. Raccoons will feast as well. You
(14:37):
have any number of rodents that will do this. If
in fact, rodents or some small mammal hadn't made their
way to all the remain of Tyley, that means that
they would have disrupted the soil. And when they disrupt
the soil, they open it up. They're not going to
go back and recover it. Okay, So if you get
close enough, you begin to detect an odor, Okay, if
(15:01):
you look very carefully. That's why it's always very important
with the case like this to not just simply have
a forensic anthropologist consult on a case where they're back
at a laboratory. You physically need them out there. They're
amazing people. I've got a couple of friends that are
forensic anthropologists, and they are I'm not going to say
(15:22):
they're ocd by nature. They're the type of people that
can look at ground and they see things that I
might just regard as a rock and an't rock. They
have the ability to read ground the way that nobody
else can. And so if you physically have the forensic
anthropologists out there, which they actually did, they actually at
(15:45):
the scene, they can take a look at a space
of ground, even in a burn area, and they can
see lines of demarcation that might indicate where burial has
taken place, kind of the margins or the borders, if
you will, of where the soil has been disrupted, where
they actually detect a pattern. And I've had this happen
a couple of times over my career where I would
(16:07):
be staring at something and I was staring at what
I should stare at, but I don't recognize it. And
then it takes the forensic anthropologists to say, okay, do
you see this deviation right here? This delineates the borders
and you start to stare at it, and it's like
you remember those old three D paintings that you would
look at and they say, you got to stare at
it long enough, and it's kind of like that.
Speaker 2 (16:28):
All of a sudden, you see the old woman.
Speaker 1 (16:29):
Yeah, the image just kind of pops for you all
of a sudden, and it's revelatory at that moment, and
once you identify it the tough part really begins in
because you have to begin to lay your grid out.
And of course with Tyly, our body's not intact, so
you've got deposition of human remains that are spread out
over an area. I can't give you the exact dimensions,
(16:53):
but I know that they're spread out. They were not
recovered in one piece. And if this helps it all. Warren,
the forensic pathologist, actually made a statement. I'm kind of
paraphrasing right now, but you know he did make this
kind of offhanded remark in his testimony under direct when
he was being asked about the receipt of Tyler's remains
(17:15):
at the Ada County Corner's office. How do you receive remains?
He said, Well, normally I receive remains in a body bag,
So how did you receive these in multiple backs? Tyler
arrived at the Corner's office in Ada County, Idaho in pieces,
(17:36):
not one intact body. It's a partnership when you work
(18:02):
together in forensics. There's multiple practices that forensic pathologists can
align themselves with in their forensic practice. First thing I
think that probably comes to mind is traditionally, like forensic
pathologist and forensic odentologists, a forensic dentist. Toxicology. Certainly, you're
always trying to decide what was going on with the
(18:24):
chemistry of the body, you know, what was going on inside.
There's some peripheral people sometimes will consult radiologists, a certainly
neurologists that will examine brains. But I don't know if
any other marriage that exists in forensic practice that is
so kind of conjoined as that between the forensic pathologist
(18:48):
and the forensic anthropologist. They're kind of doing the same thing,
only the forensic anthropologist is really focused on human skeletal
remains and what they can learn from the bone. Physics
can point you in the right direction with it, but
these people, they spend years and years going through their
doctoral programs out there to learn how to read bones
(19:10):
and tell the story that's left behind, because sometimes that's
all that remains.
Speaker 2 (19:16):
The autopsy for JJ took about four hours. The autopsy
for Tyler Ryan took him about a week. The body
was burned. Was there an odor that would be recognizable
as that of a decomposed individual even after being in
the elements buried in the dirt burned? What kind of
(19:38):
condition are we expecting out of this. Are you going
to smell it when you start digging? Are you going
to smell it when you're standing on top of the ground.
Speaker 1 (19:45):
In the state in which they have mentioned that Tyler's
remains were in. Probably once you start, once you break
the earth, I mean really substantially break the earth. You know,
a cadaver dog would hit immediately, But for kind of
our spectrum our all factory spectrum as humans, it would
take turning the earth to really smell it. The decomposition
that you smell relative to a decaying or remain has
(20:08):
to do with soft tissue. Bones will have an odor
to them, but it's not as profound as is associated
with with soft tissue. And Tyley she still had and
this is horrible to say, but it's body bags. We're
going to talk about this. But she still had her
bowel was still present. Her heart and though compromise and
(20:30):
kind of shrunken I think probably as related to heat,
was still there. Her lungs were still there, so not
everything had been eradicated. In total. The forensic anthropologists doctor
Christensen had stated that she had one hundred bones that
were found, and of course human bodies got over two
(20:52):
hundred so some had been rendered down or just impossible
to have recovered. She had also mentioned that there was
some type of animal is out there, and animals will
take away bones as well. You begin to think about
the bones of the fingers and toes and the feet
and all those sorts of things. But they found a
goodly portion of the remains that were left behind, but
(21:12):
they had been burned. That makes this kind of a
daunting challenge. The forensic anthropologists will do their assessment on
the body, but it's at the end of the day
that the forensic pathologist is the one that actually signs
a death certificate. In the list what the cause and
manner of death is. They classified Tiley's manner of death.
(21:36):
Remember we have five. We've talked about this before, but
we have five and they classified her manner of death
as homicide. But the cause is very interesting. Her cause
of death is non specific homicidal trauma. And you hear
that many times when you have these kind of fragmented
bodies like this, you know the cause of death was
something that was at the hand of another, and that's
(21:57):
what defines a homicide death at the hand of another.
That's what you're saying when you actually use that term,
it's going to be violent traumatic. But beyond that, they
can't say. It's like saying gunshot wound or strangulation or
bludgeoning or stabbing or some kind of blunt force trauma.
(22:17):
The forensic pathologist said he couldn't go any further than that.
So this becomes at that point in time in our world,
in the medical leal world, that this becomes a kind
of a circumstantial event, right, and you're assessing what you
have remaining from the physical remains, and then you're coupling
that with the circumstance in which the body is found.
(22:39):
You've got a body that there has been great effort
that has been put forth to render the body down
by fire and then cover it to obscure it from view.
So that in and of itself gives us an indication
that you've got something very very nefarious at work here,
and that's what the forensic pathologists had to work with
(22:59):
and that was their fine. Ruly.
Speaker 2 (23:00):
But there was one part of this that kind of
stood out to me, and that is the identified heart,
both lungs, one kidney. You mentioned portions of bowel and liver,
but they found small fragments of brain matter. I know
obviously that they've got multiple bags. Her body didn't come
(23:22):
in intact, but are we talking about the total destruction
of a human being beyond It's enough that she's dead,
but now we're smashing her head. Is that what had
to happen for there to be brain matter?
Speaker 1 (23:34):
Hard to say, And let me tell you why. You've
got a real feel for this, Dave. When you have
thermal injuries, okay, and thermal injuries can it's not just
an anti mortem event. You can have thermal injuries to
a body post mortem. Many things happen dynamically. You can
get heat related fractures of the body, okay, of the
(23:57):
bone itself, so the bone will actually crack as a
result of exposure to heat as it's beginning to break down.
If you have the skull and they don't. They didn't
have the intact skull they talked about. Like the area
around the super Orrible ridges, there's a few focal areas
that remain. You have to wonder did Tilly's skull fracture
(24:23):
as a result of a heat fracture being exposed to
intense flame and then you've got brain matter that's leaching
out or is this something that was maybe part of
the causation of her death and you had brain matter
that was extruding in some way at the time of
death and then they find it there. So that again
(24:44):
is one of these things that's very difficult to assess.
And heat fractures, anything that occurs in death, those fractures
are going to appear differently, particularly to the trained eye
of a forensic anthropologist. You know, where you have some
kind of anti mortal event where you'll have associated hemorrhage
rounding the points of fracture and all that stuff. You
don't have a lot to go on here because a
(25:04):
lot of the soft tissue has been rendered down. And
that's one of the big things that we look tough
in forensic pathology is if we have soft tissue that's
going to give us an indication of things like bruises
or contusions and scratches, marks, literature marks, you know, even
gunshot ones. We've talked about a range of fire on
the show before. You know, deposition of sood. Somebody's been
(25:26):
cracked in the head with a hammer, Perhaps you'll have
markings on the outer soft tissue that give me an
indication of laceration. And you don't have that to deal with.
And that's very non specific. But my eye in this
case is drawn to something that the forensic anthropologists mentioned
(25:47):
on the stand, and that is that she, given her
extensive training and background, she saw striking evidence found on
the pelvis. Opined from the stand that what she saw
was an attempt at dismemberment. And we had heard this,
(26:09):
we had heard this before, but they were very non
specific about this dismemberment, this whole issue with dismemberment. My
thought was, where are they getting it from? Did you
see saw marks on the bone. That's not what she see,
you know, according to doctor Christiansen, she had seen great
external force that was exerted to the bones of the pelvis.
(26:32):
It's very non specific, but it's I hesitate to say crushing,
but there's kind of these like linear marks that gives
you an idea of a downward strike of something. So
I mean, are we talking about an axe? Are we
talking about a pick axe? Which I think has been
mentioned before. In order to break the body apart to
try to render it down, because you have to make
(26:54):
a body manageable if you're going to try to render
it down, and sometimes that just doesn't happen. She did
the forends against polygist did mention that this is not
typical of a traditional quote unquote dismemberment, where you would
go to a joint perhaps and saw through a joint
break down the elements of the body. That's not what
(27:15):
was happening. That's not what they were seeing. This is
an odd place day. It's very odd that you would
have fractures in the pelvic region of Tilly's body that
are associated with some kind of strike downward force that's occurring.
It sounds almost half hearted, just like the burning, because
her body was not totally rendered down. You know, it
(27:36):
takes eighteen hundred degrees fahrenheit in a crematory well of
like constant fire. They're not doing that here. They're using
wood apparently in order to fuel this. They did a
very shoddy job because they left behind all of these
remnants of bone and organs as well. They did not
finish the job. It seems like it was something that
(27:57):
was done quite hastily.
Speaker 2 (27:59):
In reality, Could they determine that the markings that showed
they were trying to dismember occurred before or after fire?
Speaker 1 (28:06):
These are going to be post mortem injuries, and the
direct quote from doctor Christians is that there were five
areas of sharp force trauma to the left hip bone
and they were not the result of a disease process.
You know, this is kind of speculative, but you're thinking
about someone that's going to go to the trouble of
conducting a dismemberment. You have to have the right tools
(28:28):
for the job. And if you're talking about strikes with
some kind of weapon that's being swung downward, that sounds
like bad preparation. You're not thinking this process through. It's
certainly not somebody that would have had experience with butchering, say,
for instance, an animal like a deer. You know what
(28:49):
you need. You're going to have to have a hacksaw,
you're going to have to have sharp knife, all these
things that come along with that kind of experience. You're
using some type of item that's just a weapon or
pool of convenience. I'll be very interested to see what
the trace evidence people have to say about this case.
What did they find? All signs from me point to
(29:10):
that red barn out there. I've always thought that something
had happened, because if you're going to purpose yourself to
dismember or render down human remains. You have to have
a sequestered area to do that. Do you have to
have a location where you can do this under cover,
where nobody is going to take notice of it. You
have to have a certain amount of privacy. This is
(29:32):
not something that you're just going to do out in
the open in your backyard. This is something where you're
going to need cover for it. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan
and this is body backs assass
Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan fending for yourself. How
many kids does that apply to in this world we
live in now? I know one that it did, in fact,
applied to Tylie Ryan. Tilly was a young lady. She
(00:32):
had seen the life that her mother had lived. Five husbands,
multiple moves to settlement. Tillie had essentially become the anchor
in her family, certainly as that applied to her little brother.
To ju Valo always envisioned them clinging to one another.
(00:55):
There's that image where they're hugging each other very tightly,
and I would think that in their world that's really
all they had to hold on to for stability was
one another. But just like with JJ, we found out
a lot of disturbing news about how Tiley met her
end because we've heard from the forensic pathologists that did
(01:15):
her examination. In this episode, we're gonna break it down,
We're going to discuss it, the horror of Tiley's death.
I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is Body Bags. There
is no satisfaction. And my listeners know how much I
(01:40):
hate the work closure because it doesn't exist, particularly when
it comes to death. You get answers, and some answers
are just wanting their unsatisfying, I think because you haven't
quite filled in all of the blanks, and unfortunately, with
Tyler Ryan's death, that's that's kind of the situation we
(02:01):
find ourselves in right now. But what I can say
is that her death was horrific. Dave Mac, would you
agree with that assessment?
Speaker 2 (02:12):
On what we know about Tyler Ryan and her passing
is it's frustrating and sad, I say that not lightly frustrating,
because we don't still to this moment, know all the
things you would normally know about somebody who died when
you have remains to examine. I say remains, because there
(02:38):
was not a body to examine as one would expect
when you say body. What happened to Tyler Ryan? And
we don't even know exactly when. What we do know
is that Tyler Ryan was last seen September eighth in
Yellowstone Park in a picture with her mother, her little
brother JJ, and her uncle Alex Cox, who was Lori
(02:58):
Valo's brother. We have that picture and we have some
other information that we know she was alive with the
family September the eighth, and then we know she's missing
until June ninth of twenty twenty. What took place in
the infram is where people like you come in. How
did they find Tylee Ryan?
Speaker 1 (03:19):
I think that to say buried is inaccurate. I prefer
the term discarded with an attempt to cover up burial.
To me, when you say that, it goes to honoring,
you know what I'm saying, Dave. When we honor someone,
we bury them. She was not this young woman. She's
(03:41):
in that weird space in time. She's seventeen.
Speaker 2 (03:45):
Actually she died too. She died two weeks before her
seventeenth birthday.
Speaker 1 (03:48):
Yeah, I mean, right on the cusp, and you know,
the world's about to open up to her, and unfortunately,
I think in a very bad way, it had already
opened up to her. She had seen things that I
think that by virtue the way that her mother chose
to live her life, she had been exposed to just
the dissettlement in and of itself that she had had
(04:11):
to endure for all those years.
Speaker 2 (04:13):
It's very important to note two things really quickly. One,
when we did a program about JJ Vallo and how
his body was recovered, and his body was recovered and
if you haven't listened to it. I encourage you to
do so. But what happened with Tyler Ryan totally different.
It was like two totally separate things, not connected by anything.
(04:34):
And you mentioned that Tylie had been through a lot
with her mother, Well, her mother was married five times.
When you watch the interview of Tylli Ryan with police
after Joe, after Charles Vallo was murdered by Alex Cox,
watched that interview and in the times after, she seems unaffected.
Tyler Ryan seemed totally unaffected. She actually was emulating what
(04:55):
her mother was doing. They were joking, talking like it
was just another day. She's copying her mother and no emotion, giggling, laughing,
moving on. So, Tylie Ryan was so impacted by the
lifestyle that her mother led that her demise and the
way she was discarded shows something a total disconnect from
(05:16):
life and love.
Speaker 1 (05:17):
That's rooted I think in something else, that touch of reality,
that dose of reality in her short life. It was
read into the record in trial. By the way, Laurie
Valo's trial has actually going on right now as we're
laying this down. It came out in testimony on the
part of the forensic pathologist that he had had a
(05:38):
chance to review Tillie's medical records, and I was kind
of surprised by this. She had lived a very short life,
but in that time she had been diagnosed with anxiety,
she had gone through having OVERI insist, and get this,
(05:59):
she had actually suffered pancreatitis in that short life. Pancreatitis
is a miserable condition and over insists or certainly unpleasant
as well. And then you have this anxiety. You know what,
seventeen years old, wash have anxiety. I'm a firm believer.
You know that many times illnesses manifest themself as a
(06:20):
result of stressors in your life and that sort of thing.
And you take its measure by thinking that this person
that she's attached to at the hip, her mother has
literally drugged this child through a keyhole her entire life,
through all these various relationships and situations that they've been in.
You'll never convince me, you know, you're not going to
(06:41):
have things manifest manifest in your life physically.
Speaker 2 (06:45):
What is pancreatitis exactly, Joe, I have no idea.
Speaker 1 (06:47):
Well, it's an inflammation of the pancreas and it's deadly actually,
I mean it is it's super deadly and many times
it's associated with things like elevated cholesterol. Not that she was,
but you know, you'll have people that have problems with
chronic alcoholism develop pancreatitis. There's any number of reasons why
(07:08):
you can develop it. But it is an infection of
the pancreas, very painful. I mean, it comes along with
like horrible abnominal pain, high fever, It can give systemic as,
It impacts your the totality of your system, the way
your pancreas functions. Remember the pancreas, you know, controls insulin
in your body. Just a horrible set of circumstances. And
(07:29):
you couple that with everything that she was having to endure,
you know, right right before she was murdered. She's not
yet seventeen, and she's dealing with the homicide of her
stepfather at the hand of her uncle.
Speaker 2 (07:46):
And please add in there, Joe, that Tyler Ryan was
at home and knew the truth of what had transpired.
You mentioned stress and worry, and that can lead to
some of these things that she was experiencing.
Speaker 1 (08:00):
Yeah, and here's another little nugget kind of picked up
on friends of mind that are in the media that
have been following kind of the family dynamic of this,
more so than I have try to stick more with
the forensics, even though in this case is really hard,
as you can see, to kind of hide my feelings
relative to it. But in this particular case, from what
(08:21):
I'm hearing, she would not stand for some of the
stuff that her mother would engage in. She would be
combative with her, She would make comments to her. She
was not just going to go along with the mom
because mom said that this is what she could do.
You know, She's not another man coming into her mother's
life that her mother can manipulate with her beauty and
(08:43):
sex appeal and whatever else that she's you know, trying
to sell to whomever it's coming down the track. Kyleie
has seen behind the curtain, you know what I'm saying.
Speaker 2 (08:51):
And you know what she showed that to people that
came into Laurie's life. For instance, that Lorie Valo's best
friend was Melanie Gibb and Elanie Gibb. It was brought
up in trial that Tyler Ryan didn't particularly care for
Melanie Gibb. So I think that while she has a
mother that is dragging her, that you mentioned dragging through
a keyhole. I think that's a great that's a great
identifier there, but that maybe Tilly didn't overreact with her mother,
(09:17):
but it manifested itself in the way that Tyley looked
at Lourie's friends that were also part of this crazy
world that Tyler wasn't buying into, which is why Tyler
had to go. Tyler wasn't on board.
Speaker 1 (09:28):
They had made an assessment that she's one of these
dark spirits, or however they were framing it, you know,
as a justification for these things. But what we do
know this new space that her mother had chosen to
occupy or was planning on occupying, this place that's out
in this beautiful area of the country out there in
(09:51):
the Eastern I hope it ended in sheer horror and
it actually wound up being Tyler's resting place after she
was apparently murdered. If you're spending time out in rural America,
(10:24):
if you're out on a farm, I don't know of
any farm that doesn't have a place where you burn
brush down Here in South they called a burn pile
where you can take limbs and things that break off
of trees and whatnot. And you can you save it
up and kind of gather it and maybe you'll have
a bonfire, and maybe you'll just stand out there and
burn it and make sure it doesn't spread, and then
(10:46):
you walk away and everything is said and done. They
had a place like this. There was this location that
Chad Dave Bell had you on the backside of his property,
adjacent to this big red building which I've always suspected
had something to do with the deaths of these children,
that was just out back of it where it looked
(11:08):
more like a fir ring actually, but it was also
known as a location where Chad da Bell and his
wife Tammy would bear pets. And as it turned out,
this is where Tyler Ryan's body was found.
Speaker 2 (11:24):
Duar, and you mentioned that it was a burn pile,
you know, a burn pile you burn trash and rubbish.
But also in that same ring, as you mentioned, there
were benches around there where that family roast in marshmallows, havingsmores,
and they chose that location, the pet cemetery location, to
actually dispose discard the body of Tiller Ryan. I don't
(11:46):
know how that impacted the investigation, but I'm really curious, Joe,
when you start digging around something like this, and you
have what you know is a pet cemetery area, and
you have obviously fire. What are you finding as an
investigator as you start looking for remains?
Speaker 1 (12:05):
Throw a word out to you, stratification. I don't mean
that in a sociological standpoint. I'm talking about from a
geological standpoint. We have STRATAI relative to the ground where
you have various layers of earth, and this would have
been stratification in the sense of recent. When I say recent,
I'm not talking at one hundreds and thousands of years.
(12:27):
I'm talking about in the recent history where you do
this layering, if you will, of things. So for every
bit of wood that you burned, are other items that
you're trying to dispose of by fire. It burns down,
it settles, right, and then just to imagine that progressively
becomes more compressed over period times, you burn more items,
(12:49):
you throw more stuff in. You're getting this strata of
all of these elements that have been burned down and
rendered down over the years, and where they found Highley's remains.
This earth would have been probably a bit more loose,
if you will, you know it had been The earth
(13:10):
was probably turned more regularly with JJ's remains. When they
went out to that retention pond or dried up pond
or whatever that area is, whatever they're calling it where
his remains were found, that earth had not been turned
beautiful green grass all around except for that one area.
But when you get to an area where you've got
(13:31):
a lot of debris that's just been settling there for
a while, and you might add to it, the soil
is going to look disrupted as well. So when you
show up as an investigator, you're going to have to
take a long, hard look. And it might not just
be your sight that you're relying on when you're looking around.
It might be smell. It very well might be smell
(13:53):
because you're sitting there and you're thinking, I'm smelling something
that is obviously organic, it is decomposing, and you catch
wind of it. And the reason that you might catch
wind of it, and this is absolutely horrible. But the
forensic anthropologist in this case, her assessment of Tyler's remains,
(14:16):
she said that there had been animal activity in her remains,
So she's referring to a small mammal. She doesn't know
what type of small mammal, but you know you've got possums. Famously,
Chad Dave Bell had mentioned a large raccoon part of
this alibi he had put forward when he was socking
to his wife Tammy. Raccoons will feast as well. You
(14:37):
have any number of rodents that will do this. If
in fact, rodents or some small mammal hadn't made their
way to all the remain of Tyley, that means that
they would have disrupted the soil. And when they disrupt
the soil, they open it up. They're not going to
go back and recover it. Okay, So if you get
close enough, you begin to detect an odor, Okay, if
(15:01):
you look very carefully. That's why it's always very important
with the case like this to not just simply have
a forensic anthropologist consult on a case where they're back
at a laboratory. You physically need them out there. They're
amazing people. I've got a couple of friends that are
forensic anthropologists, and they are I'm not going to say
(15:22):
they're ocd by nature. They're the type of people that
can look at ground and they see things that I
might just regard as a rock and an't rock. They
have the ability to read ground the way that nobody
else can. And so if you physically have the forensic
anthropologists out there, which they actually did, they actually at
(15:45):
the scene, they can take a look at a space
of ground, even in a burn area, and they can
see lines of demarcation that might indicate where burial has
taken place, kind of the margins or the borders, if
you will, of where the soil has been disrupted, where
they actually detect a pattern. And I've had this happen
a couple of times over my career where I would
(16:07):
be staring at something and I was staring at what
I should stare at, but I don't recognize it. And
then it takes the forensic anthropologists to say, okay, do
you see this deviation right here? This delineates the borders
and you start to stare at it, and it's like
you remember those old three D paintings that you would
look at and they say, you got to stare at
it long enough, and it's kind of like that.
Speaker 2 (16:28):
All of a sudden, you see the old woman.
Speaker 1 (16:29):
Yeah, the image just kind of pops for you all
of a sudden, and it's revelatory at that moment, and
once you identify it the tough part really begins in
because you have to begin to lay your grid out.
And of course with Tyly, our body's not intact, so
you've got deposition of human remains that are spread out
over an area. I can't give you the exact dimensions,
(16:53):
but I know that they're spread out. They were not
recovered in one piece. And if this helps it all. Warren,
the forensic pathologist, actually made a statement. I'm kind of
paraphrasing right now, but you know he did make this
kind of offhanded remark in his testimony under direct when
he was being asked about the receipt of Tyler's remains
(17:15):
at the Ada County Corner's office. How do you receive remains?
He said, Well, normally I receive remains in a body bag,
So how did you receive these in multiple backs? Tyler
arrived at the Corner's office in Ada County, Idaho in pieces,
(17:36):
not one intact body. It's a partnership when you work
(18:02):
together in forensics. There's multiple practices that forensic pathologists can
align themselves with in their forensic practice. First thing I
think that probably comes to mind is traditionally, like forensic
pathologist and forensic odentologists, a forensic dentist. Toxicology. Certainly, you're
always trying to decide what was going on with the
(18:24):
chemistry of the body, you know, what was going on inside.
There's some peripheral people sometimes will consult radiologists, a certainly
neurologists that will examine brains. But I don't know if
any other marriage that exists in forensic practice that is
so kind of conjoined as that between the forensic pathologist
(18:48):
and the forensic anthropologist. They're kind of doing the same thing,
only the forensic anthropologist is really focused on human skeletal
remains and what they can learn from the bone. Physics
can point you in the right direction with it, but
these people, they spend years and years going through their
doctoral programs out there to learn how to read bones
(19:10):
and tell the story that's left behind, because sometimes that's
all that remains.
Speaker 2 (19:16):
The autopsy for JJ took about four hours. The autopsy
for Tyler Ryan took him about a week. The body
was burned. Was there an odor that would be recognizable
as that of a decomposed individual even after being in
the elements buried in the dirt burned? What kind of
(19:38):
condition are we expecting out of this. Are you going
to smell it when you start digging? Are you going
to smell it when you're standing on top of the ground.
Speaker 1 (19:45):
In the state in which they have mentioned that Tyler's
remains were in. Probably once you start, once you break
the earth, I mean really substantially break the earth. You know,
a cadaver dog would hit immediately, But for kind of
our spectrum our all factory spectrum as humans, it would
take turning the earth to really smell it. The decomposition
that you smell relative to a decaying or remain has
(20:08):
to do with soft tissue. Bones will have an odor
to them, but it's not as profound as is associated
with with soft tissue. And Tyley she still had and
this is horrible to say, but it's body bags. We're
going to talk about this. But she still had her
bowel was still present. Her heart and though compromise and
(20:30):
kind of shrunken I think probably as related to heat,
was still there. Her lungs were still there, so not
everything had been eradicated. In total. The forensic anthropologists doctor
Christensen had stated that she had one hundred bones that
were found, and of course human bodies got over two
(20:52):
hundred so some had been rendered down or just impossible
to have recovered. She had also mentioned that there was
some type of animal is out there, and animals will
take away bones as well. You begin to think about
the bones of the fingers and toes and the feet
and all those sorts of things. But they found a
goodly portion of the remains that were left behind, but
(21:12):
they had been burned. That makes this kind of a
daunting challenge. The forensic anthropologists will do their assessment on
the body, but it's at the end of the day
that the forensic pathologist is the one that actually signs
a death certificate. In the list what the cause and
manner of death is. They classified Tiley's manner of death.
(21:36):
Remember we have five. We've talked about this before, but
we have five and they classified her manner of death
as homicide. But the cause is very interesting. Her cause
of death is non specific homicidal trauma. And you hear
that many times when you have these kind of fragmented
bodies like this, you know the cause of death was
something that was at the hand of another, and that's
(21:57):
what defines a homicide death at the hand of another.
That's what you're saying when you actually use that term,
it's going to be violent traumatic. But beyond that, they
can't say. It's like saying gunshot wound or strangulation or
bludgeoning or stabbing or some kind of blunt force trauma.
(22:17):
The forensic pathologist said he couldn't go any further than that.
So this becomes at that point in time in our world,
in the medical leal world, that this becomes a kind
of a circumstantial event, right, and you're assessing what you
have remaining from the physical remains, and then you're coupling
that with the circumstance in which the body is found.
(22:39):
You've got a body that there has been great effort
that has been put forth to render the body down
by fire and then cover it to obscure it from view.
So that in and of itself gives us an indication
that you've got something very very nefarious at work here,
and that's what the forensic pathologists had to work with
(22:59):
and that was their fine. Ruly.
Speaker 2 (23:00):
But there was one part of this that kind of
stood out to me, and that is the identified heart,
both lungs, one kidney. You mentioned portions of bowel and liver,
but they found small fragments of brain matter. I know
obviously that they've got multiple bags. Her body didn't come
(23:22):
in intact, but are we talking about the total destruction
of a human being beyond It's enough that she's dead,
but now we're smashing her head. Is that what had
to happen for there to be brain matter?
Speaker 1 (23:34):
Hard to say, And let me tell you why. You've
got a real feel for this, Dave. When you have
thermal injuries, okay, and thermal injuries can it's not just
an anti mortem event. You can have thermal injuries to
a body post mortem. Many things happen dynamically. You can
get heat related fractures of the body, okay, of the
(23:57):
bone itself, so the bone will actually crack as a
result of exposure to heat as it's beginning to break down.
If you have the skull and they don't. They didn't
have the intact skull they talked about. Like the area
around the super Orrible ridges, there's a few focal areas
that remain. You have to wonder did Tilly's skull fracture
(24:23):
as a result of a heat fracture being exposed to
intense flame and then you've got brain matter that's leaching
out or is this something that was maybe part of
the causation of her death and you had brain matter
that was extruding in some way at the time of
death and then they find it there. So that again
(24:44):
is one of these things that's very difficult to assess.
And heat fractures, anything that occurs in death, those fractures
are going to appear differently, particularly to the trained eye
of a forensic anthropologist. You know, where you have some
kind of anti mortal event where you'll have associated hemorrhage
rounding the points of fracture and all that stuff. You
don't have a lot to go on here because a
(25:04):
lot of the soft tissue has been rendered down. And
that's one of the big things that we look tough
in forensic pathology is if we have soft tissue that's
going to give us an indication of things like bruises
or contusions and scratches, marks, literature marks, you know, even
gunshot ones. We've talked about a range of fire on
the show before. You know, deposition of sood. Somebody's been
(25:26):
cracked in the head with a hammer, Perhaps you'll have
markings on the outer soft tissue that give me an
indication of laceration. And you don't have that to deal with.
And that's very non specific. But my eye in this
case is drawn to something that the forensic anthropologists mentioned
(25:47):
on the stand, and that is that she, given her
extensive training and background, she saw striking evidence found on
the pelvis. Opined from the stand that what she saw
was an attempt at dismemberment. And we had heard this,
(26:09):
we had heard this before, but they were very non
specific about this dismemberment, this whole issue with dismemberment. My
thought was, where are they getting it from? Did you
see saw marks on the bone. That's not what she see,
you know, according to doctor Christiansen, she had seen great
external force that was exerted to the bones of the pelvis.
(26:32):
It's very non specific, but it's I hesitate to say crushing,
but there's kind of these like linear marks that gives
you an idea of a downward strike of something. So
I mean, are we talking about an axe? Are we
talking about a pick axe? Which I think has been
mentioned before. In order to break the body apart to
try to render it down, because you have to make
(26:54):
a body manageable if you're going to try to render
it down, and sometimes that just doesn't happen. She did
the forends against polygist did mention that this is not
typical of a traditional quote unquote dismemberment, where you would
go to a joint perhaps and saw through a joint
break down the elements of the body. That's not what
(27:15):
was happening. That's not what they were seeing. This is
an odd place day. It's very odd that you would
have fractures in the pelvic region of Tilly's body that
are associated with some kind of strike downward force that's occurring.
It sounds almost half hearted, just like the burning, because
her body was not totally rendered down. You know, it
(27:36):
takes eighteen hundred degrees fahrenheit in a crematory well of
like constant fire. They're not doing that here. They're using
wood apparently in order to fuel this. They did a
very shoddy job because they left behind all of these
remnants of bone and organs as well. They did not
finish the job. It seems like it was something that
(27:57):
was done quite hastily.
Speaker 2 (27:59):
In reality, Could they determine that the markings that showed
they were trying to dismember occurred before or after fire?
Speaker 1 (28:06):
These are going to be post mortem injuries, and the
direct quote from doctor Christians is that there were five
areas of sharp force trauma to the left hip bone
and they were not the result of a disease process.
You know, this is kind of speculative, but you're thinking
about someone that's going to go to the trouble of
conducting a dismemberment. You have to have the right tools
(28:28):
for the job. And if you're talking about strikes with
some kind of weapon that's being swung downward, that sounds
like bad preparation. You're not thinking this process through. It's
certainly not somebody that would have had experience with butchering, say,
for instance, an animal like a deer. You know what
(28:49):
you need. You're going to have to have a hacksaw,
you're going to have to have sharp knife, all these
things that come along with that kind of experience. You're
using some type of item that's just a weapon or
pool of convenience. I'll be very interested to see what
the trace evidence people have to say about this case.
What did they find? All signs from me point to
(29:10):
that red barn out there. I've always thought that something
had happened, because if you're going to purpose yourself to
dismember or render down human remains. You have to have
a sequestered area to do that. Do you have to
have a location where you can do this under cover,
where nobody is going to take notice of it. You
have to have a certain amount of privacy. This is
(29:32):
not something that you're just going to do out in
the open in your backyard. This is something where you're
going to need cover for it. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan
and this is body backs assass
Host
Joseph Scott Morgan
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