July 2, 2025 • 49 mins
Blunt Force Trauma and the trial of Karen Read in the death of her boyfriend, police officer John O'Keefe. Read was accused of hitting O'Keefe with her SUV in 2022 and leaving him to die in blizzard like conditions. Joseph Scott Morgan and Dave Mack discuss the case and how Blunt Force Trauma plays a critical part in the death of O'Keefe. Joe Scott also talks about a case involving the death of a woman confined to a wheelchair and requiring 24 hour care. At first glance her death seemed natural due to her medical conditions, but upon examination determined to be a homicide due to blunt for trauma. The woman had over 160 contusions on her body caused by a dryer belt.
Transcribe Highlights
00:00.03 Introduction - Blunt Force Trauma
04:21.19 Taking a hit from Jesse Tuggle
05:04.72 Motor Vehicle accidents, number one cause of blunt force trauma deaths in USA
10:11.73 Bleeding out due to blunt force trauma
15:45.67 Brain injuries
20:01.76 Abrasions caused by blunt force
25:17.35 Describing victim with 167 contusions
30:05.95 Looking for item that caused injury
35:06.97 O'Keefe injuries, Karen Read case
40:13.55 "Grading" Bruises - age of bruise
45:00.87 Bruise created by a bat
49:46.82 Conclusion
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Quality times, but Joseph's gotten more many years ago. When
I was in high school played football. I was never
a great football player, but I was like second tier.
I guess I had an opportunity to attend service academy.
(00:23):
Two of them, Naval Academy and West Point VMI. They
had reached out to me in Central. I was a linebacker.
I was never like, you know, top tier, but I
didn't mind getting hit. And that's what happens when you
(00:44):
play football. It's like going through a car accident every
single day that you go to practice. Practice for me
was always worse than games. But you know, my football
career came to an end as a result of a
car accident that I was in and guy ran a
(01:05):
red light. And I had this beautiful nineteen sixty eight
Mustang that had been restored three speed transmission.
Speaker 2 (01:13):
Love that car.
Speaker 1 (01:15):
And I was actually on a way to a key
club meeting in high school and a guy blew the light.
He was driving to ford pickup truck, and he had
five people in the front seat on a bench seat
in this thing and hits me in the front right
quarter panel of my car. I had the right away
at four lane Street. I was going green, he blew
(01:38):
the light hit me, and I wound up being in
hospital for about a month, lost the sensation on the
left side of my body, hurt my C five, C four,
and eventually through traction, those were things they relieved that problem,
but I've never completely recovered from that. My neck still cracks,
it still hurts. It hurts too because I always think
(02:01):
of about what if you know, well, what I went
through that day is something that I'm sure that many
of you guys have gone through throughout your lives, and
that is being involved in a motor vehicle accident. You
can bear witness to them, and that's terrifying enough. But
you know, when you're suddenly rear ended or somebody just
comes out of nowhere and hammers you, it's one of
(02:24):
the most terrifying experiences of your life because you're like
you're at the mercy of a machine at that point
in time, and all of that energy is transferred into
your body. Well, today we're going to talk about that
energy transfer, and we're going to talk about it in
(02:45):
various modalities, but the theme today on bodybacks is going
to be blunt force trauma, and I think it's going
to make for an interesting conversation, and I'm hoping that
you'll learned something along the way. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan
(03:05):
and this is Bodybacks brother Dave. I was on the
same defense in high school as Jesse Tuggle was. Jesse
Tuggle is the career leading tackler in NFL history. They
called him the Hammer. Played his entire career as a
walk on by the way, as a free agent, a
(03:26):
walk on in college, and as a free agent. He
was non drafted and wound um being And I've never
been hit so hard in my life, and by Jesse Tuggle.
Sweet guy, but he's the only person I ever saw
talk about blunt forces trauma. He's the only guy ever
saw in football that. And he played defensive end in
high school that actually caved another person's face mask in
(03:50):
with a single blow from his forearm.
Speaker 2 (03:52):
Wow, a right.
Speaker 1 (03:54):
Right all face mask that had the center bar that
ran right and it actually bent. And a couple of
guys I'd never seen that before. That's the kind of
power he had, you know, And he never He's one
of these guys kind of like herschel Walker that never
like dedicated himself to the weight room he's just naturally strong, wow,
and a force of natures like he's kind of like
(04:16):
getting hit by Ford f one fifty.
Speaker 3 (04:18):
I was looking over the list of blunt forest deaths
because as we were talking about doing this show, Yeah,
I realized how ignorant and I mean unknowing of what
that is. And looking at some of the pictures of
the different aspects of blunt force trauma. You know, I've
learned so many things from you doing this show, and
(04:40):
I thought one of the most common modes of blunt
forest death if you have to, is there like a
graph anywhere where you can look at these and go, yeah, here's.
Speaker 1 (04:50):
The Yeah, you could probably dig it up. I'm going
to go ahead and give it away right now. The
number one source of fatal lunt force trauma in America,
and I would probably say in the world, are motor
vehicle accidents. You know, people always talk about people always
talk about gun violence and all these things, and yeah,
it's real, it's out there, but it nothing comes close
(05:13):
to motor vehicle accidents, particularly in America.
Speaker 2 (05:16):
Have you been any more accidents than the one you
talked about Let's see.
Speaker 1 (05:20):
Yeah, I've been rearing into it a couple of times,
but never anything other than that that was so traumatic.
And listen, I have had I've had, you know, I've
had As a practitioner, I've had I've had multiple car
(05:41):
accidents that I've worked, not just car on car, but
pedestrian on car or car on pedestrian, which is horrible. Yeah,
I actually and even as a professor, I actually had
a kid that was hit in a crosswalk on the
way to my lecture, I mean right in front of
(06:04):
the campus. And this was when I was over in
Georgia teaching and one of their colleagues, one of their students,
fellow students, came up in the class and said, hey,
Professor Morgan, you know so and so has been hit.
They're on the way to the hospital, you know. And
sure enough, I looked out in my classroom winning I
could see the flashing lights. I felt a little guilty
because I was back then. I was very stringent about
(06:26):
showing up on time and for the day. I'm not
that brutal, but they were probably sprinting and not paying
attention to.
Speaker 3 (06:33):
The JSM is gonna get me, man, No, No, I'm
not that cruel of a teacher.
Speaker 1 (06:40):
But yeah, and and most of the time. Most of
the time, if you have car versus pedestrian, it goes
out saying car is gonna win every single time. And
you can sustain blunt force trauma in motor vehicle accidents
in any number of ways. And let me let me
(07:00):
just kind of tell you how this breaks down, because
it's kind of interesting, particularly from just a physics standpoint.
Let's say an individual is traveling down the road and
they're riding in their motor vehicle. Well as let's say
they are struck head on by another approaching vehicle. Well,
(07:25):
the vehicle or they hit a fixed object, that vehicle
that they're traveling in is going to come to a
dead stop theoretically, Okay, well, not everything in the vehicle
comes to a dead stop, all right, because just because
you're anchored with a safety belt, or just because an
air bag deploys, you still have this energy that is
(07:48):
going to be transferred from that impact. And as the
car comes to a dead stop, your body for that moment,
Tom is still traveling. Let's just pick a number. Let's
say still traveling at forty five miles per hour. The
head on collision may have taken place at forty five
miles per hour and your body is still traveling through
space at that point, and you know, the seat belt
(08:10):
catches you. You know, I've had people that have been
killed by their seat belts, Dave. And one of the
main things that happens, Just to give you a sense
for this, if people will take there, you can use
your left or your right hand and find your sternum
and move it about. Go kind of high up on
(08:31):
your sternum and just below your about two inches below
your collar bone, your left collar bone, and go down
about two inches stop right there, just to the side
of your sternum. That's where your aortis is. And your
aorta is like the major gigantic vessel that comes off
of your off of your heart, and that's where you know,
like oxygen, aitty blood is pumped through that. It runs
(08:54):
all the way down your spine, it bifurcates, comes into
your fenmeral arteries, it goes up and transfers out to
your arm through your brachial arteries. It's a major source.
So what happens is, Dave, that arch, it's the aortic
arch is so fragile. So when your body stops, guess
what your internal organs are still moving. People don't think
(09:18):
about that. Your internal organs are still moving like your
body doesn't. The shell of your body might cease motion,
but for a millisecond, the organs within your body are
actually still traveling. I've had cases over the course of
my career where the heart will slam up against the
backside of the sternum, and when that happens, the order
(09:40):
will tear and there's a very fragile area where it
kind of it's kind of the root of the order,
where it comes off of the heart and it literally
and look at it. Just do a Google search on
aortic arch and you'll see it. It's curved. There's a
real fragile area right there where it kind of roots
off of the heart and begin it's downward descent and
(10:02):
you get these little rips in it. And let me
tell you something, even if you've got a team of
cardiothoracic surgeons that are standing right there, there's a high
probability they're not going to save you, all right, And
so you're going to bleed out. And that's as a
result of blunt force trauma. You have cardiac contusions where
(10:23):
you'll have you know, the heart slam up against the
chest wall. I've seen that you get what's called a
cardiac tampa nod where the pair of cardial sack will tear.
It's that this, for lack of a better termam it
is a sack that your heart is encasing that autopes.
We have to cut this thing open, and it's filled
(10:44):
with cardiac fluid in there. It kind of bathes the
heart and when you that is compromised, the sack fills
up with blood and it compromises the heart's ability to beat.
So you've got all of this stuff. Another fragile organ
in your body. That's that is I was going to
say impacted, which is kind of accurate. It's the liver
(11:06):
and the spleen as well, because they will slam forward
liver when you get a rip in the liver. Physicians
particularly I don't I can't speak to any other physicians,
but forensic pathologists they refer to those as liver fractures.
And you think about fracture relative to the bone, but
when you look at the surface of the liver, it'll
(11:27):
have this kind of irregular, jagged kind of tear in it,
and they'll call that a hepatic fracture many times and
it rips open, and buddy, if your liver splits like that,
your gut's going to fill up with blood. Spleen is
very fragile. You'll have that. My favorite aunt in the
world died as a result of a car accident. She
(11:48):
got t bone. The thing that killed her. She got
hit on the driver side of her door in her
Chrysler Imperial. It's like a nineteen seventy four Chrysler Imperial.
You could put eight bodies in the trunk of the thing.
And my aunt Roxy, that was her name. She died
as a result of three of her ribs on the
left side being fractured and driven into her lung. Lung deflates,
(12:12):
chest fills that with blood. They put a chest tube in.
She lasted from maybe two or three days, but you
know she was older. You can't recover from that sort
of thing. So you get all of these types of
injuries that arise from the number one source of blunt
force trauma that we experience in America, and that's motor
vehicle accidents. That's why they try to make them. They
(12:34):
try to make motor vehicles safer than they used to
be many times, and people really take exception when you
start to talk about this sort of thing many times.
And I know, seat belts saved lives. You know how
many times have we heard that over the years, And
that's all find good, and yeah they do. But in
my world, we see seat belt injuries. You know, you'll
(12:57):
have these big diagonal marks that'll run from the apex
of the right shoulder all the way down to like
your left iliac crest, which is you know where your
pelvis is on the left side of your hip there,
and you'll have this big, nasty, abraided area that runs
through there and it's you know, that's where that locking
mechanism kicks in with the seat belt and your body
(13:17):
stops and you kind of fold like in this weird way.
If you could see it in slow motion, it's kind
of ghastly to watch. And if you go back when
I first started my career, you had shoulder belts, but
majority of people still had lap belts in their cars. Well,
that energy transfer with lap belts. If people you remember,
(13:39):
people never wore lap belts, people didn't wear safety belts,
and people that did wear lap belts when they would
hit a fixed object This is so gruesome. It's one
of the most gruesome injuries you can sustain. They would
have we had there's like a cluster of these things
pelvic fractures. So when the pelvis fractures, which is horrific
(14:04):
in and of itself. I've got a great story about
when I worked as an er tech setting a fracture
of pelvis on a twelve year old boy that had
slid into home plate catcher fell. He impacted the catcher
and fractured this kid's pelvis. The pelvis would fracture. And
if you you know I've talked about the federal arteries
that run they run through the floor of the pelvis.
(14:27):
There's these holes in bone are referred to as framing,
and so there's these little framing that these vessels run through,
and if any of those are fractured in any way,
they create these sharp edges and you can you know,
those vessels are severed, and again they're hard to get to,
to dig into, to try to you know, try to
(14:49):
tie them off. People bleed out, you know from that
and having touched on you know what happens to the
brain because again you're in you in motion, and your
your brain is encased in this rock hard rock hard
bony uh uh I don't know, vault. It's called the
(15:14):
cranial vault. Not a lot of cushion. Your brain is surrounded.
It's actually contained in a sack as well with within
within your brain. It's called the dura and it's bathed
in uh in cerebral spinal fluid, and it's it's supposed
to act as a kind of a shock absorber. Uh
(15:35):
And if you ever see the inside of a skull,
it's got these really nasty kind of you know, uh,
undulations in it and that sort of thing. So when
the brain, if you didn't have that cushion in there,
we'd have a lot more people did. But if you
get hit from the side, you have an initial energy transfer,
and these are called coup and contracoup injuries where the
(15:57):
brain will if you're hit from the left side, well
the brain. Let me get this straight. So your head
in reaction to being struck on the left side will
go to the left, but your brain is traveling to
the right, Okay, And as you come back, the brain
is traveling from the right to the left, so it'll
(16:18):
slam up against both of those walls and you get
these big indwelling subdural subarachnoid hemorrhages that are in there,
and you begin to bleed out in your brain and
those little vessels in there can get clipped. There's so
many things that can happen to you in a car
accident that it's quite quite striking on one level. Remember
(16:44):
when we did the episode, and I recommend to anybody
that hasn't. We did an episode on Sharpfort's injuries very recently,
and I talked about people being impaled. In Sharpfort's injuries.
You have objects that come through cars that sort of thing,
and again those are puncture wounds. But you know, you've
also got items that are in cars, okay, and they're
(17:08):
not buckled down. So let's say you're traveling down the
road and in your back window, your kid at vacation
Bible School painted you a stone to use as a doorstop,
you know, and it's in the back window. Well, there's
certain ways you can be hit in that car, and
(17:30):
that stone that's free floating or is not anchored down
in the car suddenly becomes a projectile in that environment.
That's why if you see like have you ever seen
delivery trucks, dave that like vans that have that screen
that's between the front two seats in the van. It's
a metal screen. Well, there's a reason they have the
(17:52):
metal screen. It's it's not to like I mean, I
guess they have them in prison vans. There's a reason
that companies have been encouraged by insurance companies to put
these things in because anything's being carried in the back
suddenly becomes a projectile and it is flying through the air,
so you can be impacted that way to day. Well,
(18:25):
they you know, some of the most brutal cases I've
ever worked were resulting from blunt force trauma within a household.
You know, we talk a lot about knives, but knives
are in a sense are weapons of convenience because you
(18:45):
walk in the kitchen and maybe if your dishes are
clean and you put them away, you might run across
a knife. But with blunt force trauma, those are what
we refer to many times in homes as weapons of convenience.
And you know, it reminds me of the game Clue,
And I got to give you an insight. I think
I've said this before. I've never won a game of Clue.
(19:08):
And I'm a forensics guy. I don't do well much.
Speaker 2 (19:11):
Get in the library with a lead pipe.
Speaker 1 (19:13):
With a lead pipe, there's a candle holder. You know,
there's all these other things that are out there. You
know that that can be utilized. And what's fascinating to
me scientifically is that when you begin to examine a
body that has been subjected to blunt force trauma, all
of these instruments, particularly weapons of convenience, you can actually
(19:36):
see a pattern that develops that is unique to that item.
For instance, if you have a pipe, okay that has
a threaded end on it, and someone is struck with
that pipe, you can see the impression of the of
(19:57):
the threads from the pipe, particularly how much force. And
you know what those threads are, how they're being displayed, Well,
they're being displayed actually dave through an abrasion because abrasions
come up. Man, we can all identify with abrasion. So
I would submit to you that everybody has sustained a
blunt force trauma at some point in time in your life,
even when you were a little kid. If you fall
(20:18):
down on the ground and go boom, if you have
had a skin knee, a skinned elbow, skin, shoulder knows
whatever it is that is evidence of blunt force trauma.
And what happens is those abraided areas that you see,
the skin is literally being kind of plowed through at
a very superficial level, and that top layer of skin
(20:41):
down to the dirt. You know, you peel back that epidermis,
you've got the dermis. It's going to hemorrhage, and it's
going to hemorrhag slightly. It's why it has that red discoloration.
It begins to dry out after sometimes you'll get a
scab on it, that sort of thing. Well, that's kind
of the superficial level. If you're at the top end.
It depended upon how much force is behind that strike
(21:03):
that will travel down through the dermas and into what's
called the sub q fat, that kind of cushioned area
that protects the outside of our body and overlies the musculature.
And so with that depth, you're going deeper and deeper
and deeper. Depended upon how much forces applied, and also Dave,
(21:25):
how much how many times they've been struck. And I
got to tell you the story about the worst.
Speaker 3 (21:32):
It never occurred to me. You know that you would
have to figure out. Yeah, how many times in a
how many times somebody got hit?
Speaker 2 (21:41):
Oh?
Speaker 1 (21:42):
Yeah, you do, and you try to figure out. And
again I'm full disclosure here, I have to say that
you can never you can never ever determine order most
of the time, except in the case I'm about to tell
you about, and it's probably one of the most gut
wrenching things I've worked. I had a case in Atlanta
(22:02):
of a lady that lived in public housing and she
lived there. I'm doing air quotes right now with her boyfriend.
I love it when they're referred to as a fiance
There've been a fiance for like the last decade. Well,
he's like a raging, angry alcoholic and his fiancee is
(22:22):
suffering from all kinds of debilitating physical problems. They had
a studio apartment in public housing. I'd never seen one
of these before, and she slept on the pullout sofa
in the front room of the house, and she was
always covered in blankets and she couldn't move. She had diabetes,
(22:46):
she had had a partial amputation of one of her feet,
heart disease. I mean, the list just goes on and on.
So you know, he's what's referred to as a mean drunk. Well,
I got called out in Atlanta. This radio signal for
death is forty eight, so they call it a signal
forty eight, and it came out initially as a forty
(23:08):
eight natural is the way that the radio call. But
she's found dead, so I'm mandated to have to go
out to the scene just examine her. And I roll
out there and I met by a young uniformed officer
and this male that's hanging outside and he is hammered, hammered,
and there are these cans of beer that each individually.
(23:32):
They're big Mont liquor cans that are still wrapped in
paper bags, empty, but they're laying all over the place
and sitting up on the stairs. And when he greeted me,
he's like, hey, Cap, how you doing? And so for me,
and I had police officers that were telling me that
if someone calls you cap, and I'm wearing a bage
they call you Cap, there's a high probability they've done
(23:54):
time because it's like a formal address, you know, hey captain,
like captain of the Guard and that sort of thing.
I said, Hey, how are you? And I didn't want
to talk to him at that point, I just wanted
to go in and see this Lely's body. Well, the
young officer followed me in and said, yeah, he came home.
He's been out all night. He came home and found
(24:15):
her dead in the bed. And it was hot, I
mean it was so hot in this apartment. And she's
covered in like three layers of blankets. Well, I'm looking
at her. I pulled the blankets back, Dave, and she's
got this dirty nightgown on. And you can when you
pull the blanket back, the smell just kind of rushes
(24:37):
out and hits you. And it's not dcom it's a
smell of feces. It's a smell of urine. It's kind
of stale urine smell. And as it turned out, it
was also a smell of bed sores. And so I
began to examine her. And day when I pulled back,
(24:57):
pulled back these blankets and pulled up her just a dirty,
filthy nightgown that she had on. That she had all
of these contusions, which remember it goes abrasion in contusion.
So contusion is deep tissue. It's a bruise. It's a
fancy term for a bruise. So you have to get
past the abrasion. One hundred and sixty seven of them,
(25:22):
one hundred and sixty seven of them. The reason I
know that is they were in this odd shape. They
were shaped. See how can I describe it? They were
about each one of them was about an inch in width.
They had a it almost looked like a saw tooth
(25:44):
end at the terminal end of each one of them.
And I say saw tooth, kind of jagged, and each
one of them varied in length from about twelve inches
up to about sixteen inches. She's covered with them, Dave.
And when I saw that, I looked at that officer.
(26:05):
I said, put his ass in handcuffs, put him in
the back of the unit out there, called detectives, get
CID in route. I've got a call back to my office.
Call back to my office because I'd never seen anything
like this. And when I'm describing this, I get the
(26:27):
pathologist that happened to be a friend of mine that
was on duty. I said, look, man, I said, I've
never seen this. I would really prefer that you'd come here.
He's like, come pick me up. And we were not
that far away from the office. I ran, you know,
blasted over the office, grabbed him when we came back,
and I'll never forget this friend mine. He's from North
Dakota and he he's got this real thick North Dakota accident.
(26:49):
He's like, oh my like that, and he said, I've
got it. We've got to get heard her good lighting
so I can better examine her and took her back
and I was with him in the morgue and I
suited it up for this and we start taking photos
of these injuries all over her body, Dave, and you
(27:10):
couldn't They were mostly intire on the front of her
body because she was bedridden and laid in one spot,
and she had these big ulternated bedsores. It was one
hundred and sixty seven of them. And the physician looked
at me and said, there is something in that house
that matches this pattern. You got to go find it.
So myself the homicide detectives went back out there and
(27:33):
in their laundry room day there's a shelf over and
people can identify, you know, the shelf that you have
over your where you keep your detergent and your fabric
softener and all that. And I started moving things around
and in the back behind like where the detergent was,
there was a busted or fractured dryer belt. Now, if
(27:58):
you've never seen a dryer belt, there actually more robust
than car belts than car fan belts. They're big in diameter.
And sure enough, Dave, the thing matched the pattern on
the end of this thing that every time he came home, blistered, drunk,
he would grab this thing. And this poor woman who's
(28:20):
so debilitated, is completely dependent upon her fiance, he would
beat her every single time. This and again this is
a first for me. When we were in the morgue,
you've heard have you ever heard the old term beaten
to a pulp? When the physician, because we were trying
(28:43):
to age what they call age the wounds or age
the bruises contusions, you create these external incisions just to
go down specifically into that area. She had been beaten
so faroosle Dave that her subkey fat in many spots
(29:05):
had liquefied, and when the incision was made, it, along
with blood, came porn out. Look, there are any number
(29:29):
of ways that blunt force trauma can be sustained. I'm
thinking right now many times about our elder population I'm
sure that many of us can identify. We've had elderly
the old ones that have fallen and you know, broken
a hip, that sort of thing. Our bones are not
as robust as they were when we were younger. That's
(29:56):
a form of blunt force trauma. And you'll find people
that are not in necessary haven't necessarily had a heart attack,
but they they're they're lightheaded, they don't have the same
gait that they once did their steady and they can
fall and crack their heads. You'll see that many times
the manifestos seen and sometimes you see that and you're thinking, oh,
my lord, you know they've been beaten and that's not
(30:16):
the case. But for us in the field, Dave, we
look for any manner of injury that we can tie
back to a specific object that may have created it.
Speaker 2 (30:31):
Wow, got can I ask you something?
Speaker 1 (30:34):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (30:34):
Sure.
Speaker 3 (30:36):
When the Karen Reid trial took up a lot of
prime time crime coverage and there were two of them, Yeah,
and I think sometimes the victim, John O'Keefe kind of
got lost in the shuffle between whatever kind of investigation happened,
(30:57):
and but who Karen Reid was or is? And I
did look at pictures and things that were made available.
You're familiar with the case enough that he suffered blain
force trauma.
Speaker 1 (31:08):
Correct, Yes he did, Yeah, he did, and it and
the blot force trauma that I was particularly focused on
in that case was going to be the head trauma,
because that, along with hypothermia, is probably what brought about
his death.
Speaker 3 (31:21):
Okay, that's what I was wondering, because I knew that
he was out there in a blizzard, you know, and
that had to have some type of an impact. But
there had to be something that made him where he
couldn't get up and get himself warm.
Speaker 2 (31:32):
So that's where the head trauma comes Yeah.
Speaker 1 (31:34):
Yeah, that's where the head trauma comes in. And what
was fascinating about that, you know, I remember distinctly looking
at the sketch that the forendsic pathologist had created with
the interior of his skull. And we do these we
do these sketches or we have we have their templates
(31:56):
that you use in them. Morg. Everybody's seeing these things.
They're kind of you'll see a man or a woman,
and you'll have an anterior view, posterior view, you'll have
a lateral view. Then they do specific close ups of
the body like they'll be one completely devoted to the head,
one devoted to the hand, and it can be left
or right hand if you want to get very specific.
(32:16):
And they do one where the top of the head,
the calvarium top of the skull is missing and you're
looking down into the cranium vault well with a Kief's
the thing that I noticed about his it was so
very no pun intended striking, was the fact that he
had two separate groups of fractures. He's got this kind
of anterior thing that's going on with the right eye
(32:40):
where that fracture goes through the floor of the skull. Okay,
and it ceases before it gets to the frame and magnum,
which is where your spinal cord dumps dumps down, you know,
where your brain stem turns into your spinal cord. It
ended before that, but and it's kind of a spider web.
It looks like spider web when you see it. He's
(33:01):
got one of those on the backside too. These are
two separate events, so you've got an initial impact boom,
you know, being hit. You know, they've described this trauma
on the right aspect of his face, and then you've
got concurrently, you've got this strike and there's this laceration
on the backside of his head. Well, when he impacts
(33:23):
whatever surface he impacted, if you're particularly hit by car,
you can that energy transfer is pretty tremendous, you know.
And I know a lot of people are saying, well,
he was beaten up by other people and dumped out there. Well,
if you say that he was beaten by other people,
(33:45):
my question would be would be what was he beaten with?
Because hands are not going to generate those kind of
fractures inside that maybe I guess if he could if
he got stomped on. But if somebody gets stomped on,
you pattern abrasion.
Speaker 3 (34:00):
Us the other I would I would think if it
was in a beating, you would see other injuries around
the body because if any fight I've ever seen people
get hit all over the place, you don't get you know,
you get several And.
Speaker 1 (34:13):
One of the more interesting kind of hypotheses that was
pushed out there was a head strike, a poster head
strike on the leading edge of a step, and it's
because you've got this kind of linear, linear lacerational backside.
And by the way, I'm going to go into this.
(34:33):
Lacerations are different than cuts. We kind of talked about
this in sharpforce's injury. I hope everybody will go back
and listen to that. This is this is a lacerational
in back of his head. That's blunt force trauma. That
it's you know, maybe a little bit larger than an inch,
and it runs east and west. It's in the horizontal plane.
And so that energy from that created this other, this
(34:57):
other fracture on the floor of the skull. So when
you look at that, you you know, you begin to
you know, kind of try to assess and O'Keefe is
merely an example of this. In a morgue, we try
to assess what, first off, what instrument could have caused this,
and also what instrument could have caused this it would
(35:20):
have sufficient force to do this, okay, because you're not
just going to like fall down, go boom, and you
get this kind of complex fracture pattern in the on
the floor of the skull. That's not the way that happens.
It's not the way this works. It's not the way
how any of this works. All right, It just doesn't
you go and push that out here.
Speaker 3 (35:40):
So weird because you know, Joe, there's things that you
know that people like me I have no clue. Okay,
I see things a certain way. But then when I'm
talking to you and you start explaining how these things look,
I'm thinking, how does anybody ever get away with anything?
I mean that because you look at something so different
than the way those people do.
Speaker 1 (36:01):
And that's a good question. I don't know the the
way people get away with things, and I know I
have missed things personally.
Speaker 3 (36:11):
Uh.
Speaker 1 (36:11):
And that's the way you become a better investigator is
not through success but through failure. You It all depends
on how much it's generally some kind of human error
where you miss something. And going back to the Keith seeing, uh,
so much was lost in that that period of time,
(36:31):
the way it was handled, you know, the way people
responded to it. And look, there'll be people that will
be lecturing about the case for years and years to come.
I mean, it's it's done and now except.
Speaker 3 (36:41):
You know, yeah, Karen Reid cannot be tried again. She
was judging not guilty. Yeah, precisely.
Speaker 1 (36:48):
You know. Now it's going to be a liability phase
where you're gonna got in the civil court and that
might be a bit of a different uh lower there. Yeah,
it's preponderance of the evidence. You know. I guess if
Nancy was here, she'd say, are you a lawyer, just Scott, No,
I'm not, but you upset depositions, There enough depositions to know.
(37:12):
But yeah, I mean he you can look at that.
You can look at that and try to understand, you know,
how how this would have happened. You try to explain it.
And all you can do is give that information back
to the police that are trying to understand circumstances. And
that's what circumstantial evidence. You present them with the physical
findings you know that you have there, provided that the
(37:36):
information that was gleaned at the scene is sufficient to
the task, because sometimes in our world you don't necessarily
have all the data that's coming in.
Speaker 3 (37:45):
Well, and you and I've noticed that in covering stories
where there will I'll give you like Harmony Montgomery comes
to mind. Oh, where we had a lot of information
on that story as it was, because it came in
late and we were figuring out and I remember you
and I were talking about it and more information came
out and it was like, wait a minute, that explains
(38:07):
so much something small, and it basically for you could
break the case wide open because you knew based on
all of the information you had, on the physical evidence
of what we had for that point that even without
a body, based on what you were told, you were
able to figure out what happened.
Speaker 1 (38:24):
Well, yeah, and with that he and father, with that person,
you know, even he infamously said, I think I really
hit her hard this time. And that precious baby, you know,
(38:46):
died in the backseat of a convertible seabreing in the
dead of winter in our northeast. Great job of providing
such a wonderful life for that little angel. And you know,
still to this day, but you know, hearing we know
that he had struck her on various occasions, and I
(39:07):
felt like and poor, poor poor angel. You know she's
blond anyway, Dave, I remember that, you know, she's blond
and she has to wear glasses. I know what a struggle.
Speaker 3 (39:18):
I mean, what I could think of it as anybody
that saw that case. Yeah, I just remember thinking, why
come on, I would have taken her, you.
Speaker 1 (39:28):
Know, no questions asked, Just bring her, bring her to
my doorstep. You know what I'm saying. We'll find somebody
and you know this had been a progression, and that's
that goes into also assessment of blunt force trauma. Because Dave,
in our world, in the world of death investigation and
also with child abuse cases, Dave, what what kind of
(39:52):
happens is we we actually grade grade bruises. And it's
when when you're working as a child and child abuse investigator,
which God bless those people that do that job. I
don't know how in the world that could do it,
but I think that everybody that's hearing me right now
(40:13):
can understand this. Let me kind of run down the
timeframe so that everybody understands about blunt force trauma. And
one of things we look at not only in the morgue,
but when you have a social worker or a physician
that's working for law enforcement that's assessing child abuse cases,
one of the things they do is they will age
(40:34):
bruises and just give me a little latitude here and
let me break it down. So when you initially get
a contusion on an impact injury, you're going to be
looking at the surface of the skin will be kind
of red. It's like that irritation. Remember how I talked
about with an abrasion anything that makes contact with the skin,
(40:54):
even a fist, a closed fist, it'll have that kind
of red discolouration and you'll see that in the immediate
Then it'll take about one to four hours and you'll
begin to see blue and purple, okay in the color.
Just think about this on your own body. You know,
generally about four days down range, that purplish area will
(41:18):
begin to turn that creepy green color, okay, and that's
gonna last about four to seven days. Then you're gonna
get the really disgusting color, which is yellow. If and
that's just part of the healing process, and that's the
blood that's contained in that contused area that is resolving.
(41:39):
All right. It's kind of dissipating because it's often interstitial tissue.
You've got broken vessels. The vessels are healing, and that
blood just kind of it disappears over period time. Will
the yellow will stay around seven to ten days, and
then after about fourteen to twenty one days, you're back
to normal. We say, Morgan, what difference does that make.
I'll tell you what difference it makes. If you've got
(41:59):
an old going case of abuse, all right, if you
if you're interviewing a child, and I'm talking now to
people that deal with the living. They will have that
child assessed by maybe a nurse practitioner or maybe even
a physician, and if they notice that you have bruises
(42:20):
on a body that are in these different states of healing,
they're going to know that this is Dave, not a
one off event. Okay, I can't tell you how many
these cases I've worked over the years where you'll have
an individual that is their body is little bodies are
just littered with contusions, and you'll have the suspect that
(42:42):
will say, well, oh yeah, well they fell down the stairs.
You know, my next question is how many times and
what days did they fall down the stairs? Because you
because of those color changes, you know that these are
not one off events. You'll have these layer things. It's
kind of like the woman that I was mentioning that
was beaten to death with the dryer belt over and
(43:05):
over and over again, and these things are layered on
top of one another. So it's very important for us
to be able to assess, you know, assess these injuries,
to contextualize it relative to relative to know what's going
on and again with her, one of the things that
we're looking at is what's referred to as pattern impact trauma.
(43:28):
What could have generated We were talking about baseball bats
just a minute ago, and let me tell you how
this kind of breaks down. You'll find this fascinating if
you ever seen a slow motion the slow motion, super
slow most shots of a baseball being struck by a bat,
where it's going through the strike zone and the ball
you can see just for a millisecond, the ball bends,
(43:50):
It literally bends and wraps, particularly with an aluminum bat
or metal bat, it'll rap. Just for saying, you'll see
an indentation. Do you know. Our skin works the same way,
So if you get struck, if somebody gets struck in
the arm with like a baseball bat or any solid object,
for an instant, the skin will wrap around the circumference
(44:12):
let's say it's a cylindrical object, around the circumference of it,
and then pop back into place after being struck. So
that's why many times these contusions actually appear a bit
larger than the actual instrument that generated it. So if
somebody struck with a barrel of a right in a
sweet spot as you guys call it, right in sweet
spot of the bat, that contusion is going to have
(44:35):
the appearance of a much larger object. But what's happening
as that central point of impact is hang on, I'm
showing Dave. I got to demonstrate to him that I
know how to roll my wrist. So as you roll
your wrists through the swing, the tissue will wrap around
the barrel of the bat. So even something that's not
directly struck will slap that outer portion of the bat
(44:58):
and you'll get this real broad ranging contusion. And that's
one of the things you kind of assess now if
you're using something like a hammer, because we have people
that have hammer attacks where they're struck it it's not
necessarily the same shape. What's fascinating like hammer attacks and
(45:20):
blunt force trauma is that if someone is struck in
the skull, you'll have a coin shape, if you're thinking
about standard finishing hammer, a coin shape, a braided area
in the skin, and then when you reflect the scalp,
you'll have these perfect plugged areas of fracture, and it's
(45:40):
a circular fracture, which you don't see a lot in
the skull and these things. Many times, what happens is
is that as the skull. The external table of skull
is fractured away from those anchor points around it structurally
that it's not the hammer being driven into the brain,
it's actually that plug of bone that's being driven into
(46:03):
the brain. So you've got this layered event and you
get multiple of these, the skin is not necessarily going
to appear the same either. We've got all over the body,
and surgeons know this. We have what are referred to
as lines of Langer. And if people are out there
(46:26):
that have been in the military, one of the first
things they teach you to do in the military is
to study contour maps and it gives you height, elevation,
that sort of thing. So the tighter those lines with elevation,
they follow the pattern of the ground. Well, we have
those patterns all over our body and they're very predictable.
As a matter of fact, when people are when med
(46:49):
school students are studying human anatomy, they learn the lines
of Langer. So if you make an incision like classic
concision everybody's familiar with is what's referred to as the
McBurnie incision, and that's for an appendectomy. For years people
you know, it wasn't always done laparoscopically where they're gonna
go through your belly button. They make this diagonal scar.
(47:11):
It's on the right lower quadront of your abdomen, and
it runs it runs diagonally opposing to where the actual
appendix is. The reason they make that incision that way
is because it follows the line of langer, essentially, like
if you're talking about furniture, it follows the grain. So
if you cut across the lines of Langer, it opens
(47:33):
up into this really ghastly injury. Okay, Well, when you
have someone struck by an instrument, okay, like a bat
or a hammer or whatever it is, a car, they
get these big nasty lacerations that are abnormal in appearance,
that the sides don't appear to marry up, you really
(47:55):
have to, like like in the morgue, we'll use tape.
Many times, we'll use really strong medical tape to try
to pull the side together, just so that we can
appreciate how the two things connect, because when you take
the tape off, it's just going to spring back out
to this real irregular I don't know the best way
I can say it is like a Frankenstein, you know,
(48:16):
cut because it's so odd when you see it and
you know that you're dealing because that's a true laceration,
you'll have these little bits of skin that attach to
either side. That's called tissue bridging, so it's not completely
cut through. So you're going to see that with blunt
force trauma in particular. So it's I would say, dave
(48:41):
that compared to gunshot wounds and anything I ever had
to assess in the medical legal context, blunt force trauma
by far is the most difficult thing to assess, make
a record of, to try to connect with some specific
object that's out there. It takes time, Unlike I mean,
(49:06):
everything that we assess takes time. There's a learning curve
with it. But I still to this day, to this day,
at this age and stage in my life, there are
still things daily that I can learn about blunt force
trauma and the scars that are left behind. I'm Joseph
(49:26):
Scott Morgan and this is body bags
Quality times, but Joseph's gotten more many years ago. When
I was in high school played football. I was never
a great football player, but I was like second tier.
I guess I had an opportunity to attend service academy.
(00:23):
Two of them, Naval Academy and West Point VMI. They
had reached out to me in Central. I was a linebacker.
I was never like, you know, top tier, but I
didn't mind getting hit. And that's what happens when you
(00:44):
play football. It's like going through a car accident every
single day that you go to practice. Practice for me
was always worse than games. But you know, my football
career came to an end as a result of a
car accident that I was in and guy ran a
(01:05):
red light. And I had this beautiful nineteen sixty eight
Mustang that had been restored three speed transmission.
Speaker 2 (01:13):
Love that car.
Speaker 1 (01:15):
And I was actually on a way to a key
club meeting in high school and a guy blew the light.
He was driving to ford pickup truck, and he had
five people in the front seat on a bench seat
in this thing and hits me in the front right
quarter panel of my car. I had the right away
at four lane Street. I was going green, he blew
(01:38):
the light hit me, and I wound up being in
hospital for about a month, lost the sensation on the
left side of my body, hurt my C five, C four,
and eventually through traction, those were things they relieved that problem,
but I've never completely recovered from that. My neck still cracks,
it still hurts. It hurts too because I always think
(02:01):
of about what if you know, well, what I went
through that day is something that I'm sure that many
of you guys have gone through throughout your lives, and
that is being involved in a motor vehicle accident. You
can bear witness to them, and that's terrifying enough. But
you know, when you're suddenly rear ended or somebody just
comes out of nowhere and hammers you, it's one of
(02:24):
the most terrifying experiences of your life because you're like
you're at the mercy of a machine at that point
in time, and all of that energy is transferred into
your body. Well, today we're going to talk about that
energy transfer, and we're going to talk about it in
(02:45):
various modalities, but the theme today on bodybacks is going
to be blunt force trauma, and I think it's going
to make for an interesting conversation, and I'm hoping that
you'll learned something along the way. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan
(03:05):
and this is Bodybacks brother Dave. I was on the
same defense in high school as Jesse Tuggle was. Jesse
Tuggle is the career leading tackler in NFL history. They
called him the Hammer. Played his entire career as a
walk on by the way, as a free agent, a
(03:26):
walk on in college, and as a free agent. He
was non drafted and wound um being And I've never
been hit so hard in my life, and by Jesse Tuggle.
Sweet guy, but he's the only person I ever saw
talk about blunt forces trauma. He's the only guy ever
saw in football that. And he played defensive end in
high school that actually caved another person's face mask in
(03:50):
with a single blow from his forearm.
Speaker 2 (03:52):
Wow, a right.
Speaker 1 (03:54):
Right all face mask that had the center bar that
ran right and it actually bent. And a couple of
guys I'd never seen that before. That's the kind of
power he had, you know, And he never He's one
of these guys kind of like herschel Walker that never
like dedicated himself to the weight room he's just naturally strong, wow,
and a force of natures like he's kind of like
(04:16):
getting hit by Ford f one fifty.
Speaker 3 (04:18):
I was looking over the list of blunt forest deaths
because as we were talking about doing this show, Yeah,
I realized how ignorant and I mean unknowing of what
that is. And looking at some of the pictures of
the different aspects of blunt force trauma. You know, I've
learned so many things from you doing this show, and
(04:40):
I thought one of the most common modes of blunt
forest death if you have to, is there like a
graph anywhere where you can look at these and go, yeah, here's.
Speaker 1 (04:50):
The Yeah, you could probably dig it up. I'm going
to go ahead and give it away right now. The
number one source of fatal lunt force trauma in America,
and I would probably say in the world, are motor
vehicle accidents. You know, people always talk about people always
talk about gun violence and all these things, and yeah,
it's real, it's out there, but it nothing comes close
(05:13):
to motor vehicle accidents, particularly in America.
Speaker 2 (05:16):
Have you been any more accidents than the one you
talked about Let's see.
Speaker 1 (05:20):
Yeah, I've been rearing into it a couple of times,
but never anything other than that that was so traumatic.
And listen, I have had I've had, you know, I've
had As a practitioner, I've had I've had multiple car
(05:41):
accidents that I've worked, not just car on car, but
pedestrian on car or car on pedestrian, which is horrible. Yeah,
I actually and even as a professor, I actually had
a kid that was hit in a crosswalk on the
way to my lecture, I mean right in front of
(06:04):
the campus. And this was when I was over in
Georgia teaching and one of their colleagues, one of their students,
fellow students, came up in the class and said, hey,
Professor Morgan, you know so and so has been hit.
They're on the way to the hospital, you know. And
sure enough, I looked out in my classroom winning I
could see the flashing lights. I felt a little guilty
because I was back then. I was very stringent about
(06:26):
showing up on time and for the day. I'm not
that brutal, but they were probably sprinting and not paying
attention to.
Speaker 3 (06:33):
The JSM is gonna get me, man, No, No, I'm
not that cruel of a teacher.
Speaker 1 (06:40):
But yeah, and and most of the time. Most of
the time, if you have car versus pedestrian, it goes
out saying car is gonna win every single time. And
you can sustain blunt force trauma in motor vehicle accidents
in any number of ways. And let me let me
(07:00):
just kind of tell you how this breaks down, because
it's kind of interesting, particularly from just a physics standpoint.
Let's say an individual is traveling down the road and
they're riding in their motor vehicle. Well as let's say
they are struck head on by another approaching vehicle. Well,
(07:25):
the vehicle or they hit a fixed object, that vehicle
that they're traveling in is going to come to a
dead stop theoretically, Okay, well, not everything in the vehicle
comes to a dead stop, all right, because just because
you're anchored with a safety belt, or just because an
air bag deploys, you still have this energy that is
(07:48):
going to be transferred from that impact. And as the
car comes to a dead stop, your body for that moment,
Tom is still traveling. Let's just pick a number. Let's
say still traveling at forty five miles per hour. The
head on collision may have taken place at forty five
miles per hour and your body is still traveling through
space at that point, and you know, the seat belt
(08:10):
catches you. You know, I've had people that have been
killed by their seat belts, Dave. And one of the
main things that happens, Just to give you a sense
for this, if people will take there, you can use
your left or your right hand and find your sternum
and move it about. Go kind of high up on
(08:31):
your sternum and just below your about two inches below
your collar bone, your left collar bone, and go down
about two inches stop right there, just to the side
of your sternum. That's where your aortis is. And your
aorta is like the major gigantic vessel that comes off
of your off of your heart, and that's where you know,
like oxygen, aitty blood is pumped through that. It runs
(08:54):
all the way down your spine, it bifurcates, comes into
your fenmeral arteries, it goes up and transfers out to
your arm through your brachial arteries. It's a major source.
So what happens is, Dave, that arch, it's the aortic
arch is so fragile. So when your body stops, guess
what your internal organs are still moving. People don't think
(09:18):
about that. Your internal organs are still moving like your
body doesn't. The shell of your body might cease motion,
but for a millisecond, the organs within your body are
actually still traveling. I've had cases over the course of
my career where the heart will slam up against the
backside of the sternum, and when that happens, the order
(09:40):
will tear and there's a very fragile area where it
kind of it's kind of the root of the order,
where it comes off of the heart and it literally
and look at it. Just do a Google search on
aortic arch and you'll see it. It's curved. There's a
real fragile area right there where it kind of roots
off of the heart and begin it's downward descent and
(10:02):
you get these little rips in it. And let me
tell you something, even if you've got a team of
cardiothoracic surgeons that are standing right there, there's a high
probability they're not going to save you, all right, And
so you're going to bleed out. And that's as a
result of blunt force trauma. You have cardiac contusions where
(10:23):
you'll have you know, the heart slam up against the
chest wall. I've seen that you get what's called a
cardiac tampa nod where the pair of cardial sack will tear.
It's that this, for lack of a better termam it
is a sack that your heart is encasing that autopes.
We have to cut this thing open, and it's filled
(10:44):
with cardiac fluid in there. It kind of bathes the
heart and when you that is compromised, the sack fills
up with blood and it compromises the heart's ability to beat.
So you've got all of this stuff. Another fragile organ
in your body. That's that is I was going to
say impacted, which is kind of accurate. It's the liver
(11:06):
and the spleen as well, because they will slam forward
liver when you get a rip in the liver. Physicians
particularly I don't I can't speak to any other physicians,
but forensic pathologists they refer to those as liver fractures.
And you think about fracture relative to the bone, but
when you look at the surface of the liver, it'll
(11:27):
have this kind of irregular, jagged kind of tear in it,
and they'll call that a hepatic fracture many times and
it rips open, and buddy, if your liver splits like that,
your gut's going to fill up with blood. Spleen is
very fragile. You'll have that. My favorite aunt in the
world died as a result of a car accident. She
(11:48):
got t bone. The thing that killed her. She got
hit on the driver side of her door in her
Chrysler Imperial. It's like a nineteen seventy four Chrysler Imperial.
You could put eight bodies in the trunk of the thing.
And my aunt Roxy, that was her name. She died
as a result of three of her ribs on the
left side being fractured and driven into her lung. Lung deflates,
(12:12):
chest fills that with blood. They put a chest tube in.
She lasted from maybe two or three days, but you
know she was older. You can't recover from that sort
of thing. So you get all of these types of
injuries that arise from the number one source of blunt
force trauma that we experience in America, and that's motor
vehicle accidents. That's why they try to make them. They
(12:34):
try to make motor vehicles safer than they used to
be many times, and people really take exception when you
start to talk about this sort of thing many times.
And I know, seat belts saved lives. You know how
many times have we heard that over the years, And
that's all find good, and yeah they do. But in
my world, we see seat belt injuries. You know, you'll
(12:57):
have these big diagonal marks that'll run from the apex
of the right shoulder all the way down to like
your left iliac crest, which is you know where your
pelvis is on the left side of your hip there,
and you'll have this big, nasty, abraided area that runs
through there and it's you know, that's where that locking
mechanism kicks in with the seat belt and your body
(13:17):
stops and you kind of fold like in this weird way.
If you could see it in slow motion, it's kind
of ghastly to watch. And if you go back when
I first started my career, you had shoulder belts, but
majority of people still had lap belts in their cars. Well,
that energy transfer with lap belts. If people you remember,
(13:39):
people never wore lap belts, people didn't wear safety belts,
and people that did wear lap belts when they would
hit a fixed object This is so gruesome. It's one
of the most gruesome injuries you can sustain. They would
have we had there's like a cluster of these things
pelvic fractures. So when the pelvis fractures, which is horrific
(14:04):
in and of itself. I've got a great story about
when I worked as an er tech setting a fracture
of pelvis on a twelve year old boy that had
slid into home plate catcher fell. He impacted the catcher
and fractured this kid's pelvis. The pelvis would fracture. And
if you you know I've talked about the federal arteries
that run they run through the floor of the pelvis.
(14:27):
There's these holes in bone are referred to as framing,
and so there's these little framing that these vessels run through,
and if any of those are fractured in any way,
they create these sharp edges and you can you know,
those vessels are severed, and again they're hard to get to,
to dig into, to try to you know, try to
(14:49):
tie them off. People bleed out, you know from that
and having touched on you know what happens to the
brain because again you're in you in motion, and your
your brain is encased in this rock hard rock hard
bony uh uh I don't know, vault. It's called the
(15:14):
cranial vault. Not a lot of cushion. Your brain is surrounded.
It's actually contained in a sack as well with within
within your brain. It's called the dura and it's bathed
in uh in cerebral spinal fluid, and it's it's supposed
to act as a kind of a shock absorber. Uh
(15:35):
And if you ever see the inside of a skull,
it's got these really nasty kind of you know, uh,
undulations in it and that sort of thing. So when
the brain, if you didn't have that cushion in there,
we'd have a lot more people did. But if you
get hit from the side, you have an initial energy transfer,
and these are called coup and contracoup injuries where the
(15:57):
brain will if you're hit from the left side, well
the brain. Let me get this straight. So your head
in reaction to being struck on the left side will
go to the left, but your brain is traveling to
the right, Okay, And as you come back, the brain
is traveling from the right to the left, so it'll
(16:18):
slam up against both of those walls and you get
these big indwelling subdural subarachnoid hemorrhages that are in there,
and you begin to bleed out in your brain and
those little vessels in there can get clipped. There's so
many things that can happen to you in a car
accident that it's quite quite striking on one level. Remember
(16:44):
when we did the episode, and I recommend to anybody
that hasn't. We did an episode on Sharpfort's injuries very recently,
and I talked about people being impaled. In Sharpfort's injuries.
You have objects that come through cars that sort of thing,
and again those are puncture wounds. But you know, you've
also got items that are in cars, okay, and they're
(17:08):
not buckled down. So let's say you're traveling down the
road and in your back window, your kid at vacation
Bible School painted you a stone to use as a doorstop,
you know, and it's in the back window. Well, there's
certain ways you can be hit in that car, and
(17:30):
that stone that's free floating or is not anchored down
in the car suddenly becomes a projectile in that environment.
That's why if you see like have you ever seen
delivery trucks, dave that like vans that have that screen
that's between the front two seats in the van. It's
a metal screen. Well, there's a reason they have the
(17:52):
metal screen. It's it's not to like I mean, I
guess they have them in prison vans. There's a reason
that companies have been encouraged by insurance companies to put
these things in because anything's being carried in the back
suddenly becomes a projectile and it is flying through the air,
so you can be impacted that way to day. Well,
(18:25):
they you know, some of the most brutal cases I've
ever worked were resulting from blunt force trauma within a household.
You know, we talk a lot about knives, but knives
are in a sense are weapons of convenience because you
(18:45):
walk in the kitchen and maybe if your dishes are
clean and you put them away, you might run across
a knife. But with blunt force trauma, those are what
we refer to many times in homes as weapons of convenience.
And you know, it reminds me of the game Clue,
And I got to give you an insight. I think
I've said this before. I've never won a game of Clue.
(19:08):
And I'm a forensics guy. I don't do well much.
Speaker 2 (19:11):
Get in the library with a lead pipe.
Speaker 1 (19:13):
With a lead pipe, there's a candle holder. You know,
there's all these other things that are out there. You
know that that can be utilized. And what's fascinating to
me scientifically is that when you begin to examine a
body that has been subjected to blunt force trauma, all
of these instruments, particularly weapons of convenience, you can actually
(19:36):
see a pattern that develops that is unique to that item.
For instance, if you have a pipe, okay that has
a threaded end on it, and someone is struck with
that pipe, you can see the impression of the of
(19:57):
the threads from the pipe, particularly how much force. And
you know what those threads are, how they're being displayed, Well,
they're being displayed actually dave through an abrasion because abrasions
come up. Man, we can all identify with abrasion. So
I would submit to you that everybody has sustained a
blunt force trauma at some point in time in your life,
even when you were a little kid. If you fall
(20:18):
down on the ground and go boom, if you have
had a skin knee, a skinned elbow, skin, shoulder knows
whatever it is that is evidence of blunt force trauma.
And what happens is those abraided areas that you see,
the skin is literally being kind of plowed through at
a very superficial level, and that top layer of skin
(20:41):
down to the dirt. You know, you peel back that epidermis,
you've got the dermis. It's going to hemorrhage, and it's
going to hemorrhag slightly. It's why it has that red discoloration.
It begins to dry out after sometimes you'll get a
scab on it, that sort of thing. Well, that's kind
of the superficial level. If you're at the top end.
It depended upon how much force is behind that strike
(21:03):
that will travel down through the dermas and into what's
called the sub q fat, that kind of cushioned area
that protects the outside of our body and overlies the musculature.
And so with that depth, you're going deeper and deeper
and deeper. Depended upon how much forces applied, and also Dave,
(21:25):
how much how many times they've been struck. And I
got to tell you the story about the worst.
Speaker 3 (21:32):
It never occurred to me. You know that you would
have to figure out. Yeah, how many times in a
how many times somebody got hit?
Speaker 2 (21:41):
Oh?
Speaker 1 (21:42):
Yeah, you do, and you try to figure out. And
again I'm full disclosure here, I have to say that
you can never you can never ever determine order most
of the time, except in the case I'm about to tell
you about, and it's probably one of the most gut
wrenching things I've worked. I had a case in Atlanta
(22:02):
of a lady that lived in public housing and she
lived there. I'm doing air quotes right now with her boyfriend.
I love it when they're referred to as a fiance
There've been a fiance for like the last decade. Well,
he's like a raging, angry alcoholic and his fiancee is
(22:22):
suffering from all kinds of debilitating physical problems. They had
a studio apartment in public housing. I'd never seen one
of these before, and she slept on the pullout sofa
in the front room of the house, and she was
always covered in blankets and she couldn't move. She had diabetes,
(22:46):
she had had a partial amputation of one of her feet,
heart disease. I mean, the list just goes on and on.
So you know, he's what's referred to as a mean drunk. Well,
I got called out in Atlanta. This radio signal for
death is forty eight, so they call it a signal
forty eight, and it came out initially as a forty
(23:08):
eight natural is the way that the radio call. But
she's found dead, so I'm mandated to have to go
out to the scene just examine her. And I roll
out there and I met by a young uniformed officer
and this male that's hanging outside and he is hammered, hammered,
and there are these cans of beer that each individually.
(23:32):
They're big Mont liquor cans that are still wrapped in
paper bags, empty, but they're laying all over the place
and sitting up on the stairs. And when he greeted me,
he's like, hey, Cap, how you doing? And so for me,
and I had police officers that were telling me that
if someone calls you cap, and I'm wearing a bage
they call you Cap, there's a high probability they've done
(23:54):
time because it's like a formal address, you know, hey captain,
like captain of the Guard and that sort of thing.
I said, Hey, how are you? And I didn't want
to talk to him at that point, I just wanted
to go in and see this Lely's body. Well, the
young officer followed me in and said, yeah, he came home.
He's been out all night. He came home and found
(24:15):
her dead in the bed. And it was hot, I
mean it was so hot in this apartment. And she's
covered in like three layers of blankets. Well, I'm looking
at her. I pulled the blankets back, Dave, and she's
got this dirty nightgown on. And you can when you
pull the blanket back, the smell just kind of rushes
(24:37):
out and hits you. And it's not dcom it's a
smell of feces. It's a smell of urine. It's kind
of stale urine smell. And as it turned out, it
was also a smell of bed sores. And so I
began to examine her. And day when I pulled back,
(24:57):
pulled back these blankets and pulled up her just a dirty,
filthy nightgown that she had on. That she had all
of these contusions, which remember it goes abrasion in contusion.
So contusion is deep tissue. It's a bruise. It's a
fancy term for a bruise. So you have to get
past the abrasion. One hundred and sixty seven of them,
(25:22):
one hundred and sixty seven of them. The reason I
know that is they were in this odd shape. They
were shaped. See how can I describe it? They were
about each one of them was about an inch in width.
They had a it almost looked like a saw tooth
(25:44):
end at the terminal end of each one of them.
And I say saw tooth, kind of jagged, and each
one of them varied in length from about twelve inches
up to about sixteen inches. She's covered with them, Dave.
And when I saw that, I looked at that officer.
(26:05):
I said, put his ass in handcuffs, put him in
the back of the unit out there, called detectives, get
CID in route. I've got a call back to my office.
Call back to my office because I'd never seen anything
like this. And when I'm describing this, I get the
(26:27):
pathologist that happened to be a friend of mine that
was on duty. I said, look, man, I said, I've
never seen this. I would really prefer that you'd come here.
He's like, come pick me up. And we were not
that far away from the office. I ran, you know,
blasted over the office, grabbed him when we came back,
and I'll never forget this friend mine. He's from North
Dakota and he he's got this real thick North Dakota accident.
(26:49):
He's like, oh my like that, and he said, I've
got it. We've got to get heard her good lighting
so I can better examine her and took her back
and I was with him in the morgue and I
suited it up for this and we start taking photos
of these injuries all over her body, Dave, and you
(27:10):
couldn't They were mostly intire on the front of her
body because she was bedridden and laid in one spot,
and she had these big ulternated bedsores. It was one
hundred and sixty seven of them. And the physician looked
at me and said, there is something in that house
that matches this pattern. You got to go find it.
So myself the homicide detectives went back out there and
(27:33):
in their laundry room day there's a shelf over and
people can identify, you know, the shelf that you have
over your where you keep your detergent and your fabric
softener and all that. And I started moving things around
and in the back behind like where the detergent was,
there was a busted or fractured dryer belt. Now, if
(27:58):
you've never seen a dryer belt, there actually more robust
than car belts than car fan belts. They're big in diameter.
And sure enough, Dave, the thing matched the pattern on
the end of this thing that every time he came home, blistered, drunk,
he would grab this thing. And this poor woman who's
(28:20):
so debilitated, is completely dependent upon her fiance, he would
beat her every single time. This and again this is
a first for me. When we were in the morgue,
you've heard have you ever heard the old term beaten
to a pulp? When the physician, because we were trying
(28:43):
to age what they call age the wounds or age
the bruises contusions, you create these external incisions just to
go down specifically into that area. She had been beaten
so faroosle Dave that her subkey fat in many spots
(29:05):
had liquefied, and when the incision was made, it, along
with blood, came porn out. Look, there are any number
(29:29):
of ways that blunt force trauma can be sustained. I'm
thinking right now many times about our elder population I'm
sure that many of us can identify. We've had elderly
the old ones that have fallen and you know, broken
a hip, that sort of thing. Our bones are not
as robust as they were when we were younger. That's
(29:56):
a form of blunt force trauma. And you'll find people
that are not in necessary haven't necessarily had a heart attack,
but they they're they're lightheaded, they don't have the same
gait that they once did their steady and they can
fall and crack their heads. You'll see that many times
the manifestos seen and sometimes you see that and you're thinking, oh,
my lord, you know they've been beaten and that's not
(30:16):
the case. But for us in the field, Dave, we
look for any manner of injury that we can tie
back to a specific object that may have created it.
Speaker 2 (30:31):
Wow, got can I ask you something?
Speaker 1 (30:34):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (30:34):
Sure.
Speaker 3 (30:36):
When the Karen Reid trial took up a lot of
prime time crime coverage and there were two of them, Yeah,
and I think sometimes the victim, John O'Keefe kind of
got lost in the shuffle between whatever kind of investigation happened,
(30:57):
and but who Karen Reid was or is? And I
did look at pictures and things that were made available.
You're familiar with the case enough that he suffered blain
force trauma.
Speaker 1 (31:08):
Correct, Yes he did, Yeah, he did, and it and
the blot force trauma that I was particularly focused on
in that case was going to be the head trauma,
because that, along with hypothermia, is probably what brought about
his death.
Speaker 3 (31:21):
Okay, that's what I was wondering, because I knew that
he was out there in a blizzard, you know, and
that had to have some type of an impact. But
there had to be something that made him where he
couldn't get up and get himself warm.
Speaker 2 (31:32):
So that's where the head trauma comes Yeah.
Speaker 1 (31:34):
Yeah, that's where the head trauma comes in. And what
was fascinating about that, you know, I remember distinctly looking
at the sketch that the forendsic pathologist had created with
the interior of his skull. And we do these we
do these sketches or we have we have their templates
(31:56):
that you use in them. Morg. Everybody's seeing these things.
They're kind of you'll see a man or a woman,
and you'll have an anterior view, posterior view, you'll have
a lateral view. Then they do specific close ups of
the body like they'll be one completely devoted to the head,
one devoted to the hand, and it can be left
or right hand if you want to get very specific.
(32:16):
And they do one where the top of the head,
the calvarium top of the skull is missing and you're
looking down into the cranium vault well with a Kief's
the thing that I noticed about his it was so
very no pun intended striking, was the fact that he
had two separate groups of fractures. He's got this kind
of anterior thing that's going on with the right eye
(32:40):
where that fracture goes through the floor of the skull. Okay,
and it ceases before it gets to the frame and magnum,
which is where your spinal cord dumps dumps down, you know,
where your brain stem turns into your spinal cord. It
ended before that, but and it's kind of a spider web.
It looks like spider web when you see it. He's
(33:01):
got one of those on the backside too. These are
two separate events, so you've got an initial impact boom,
you know, being hit. You know, they've described this trauma
on the right aspect of his face, and then you've
got concurrently, you've got this strike and there's this laceration
on the backside of his head. Well, when he impacts
(33:23):
whatever surface he impacted, if you're particularly hit by car,
you can that energy transfer is pretty tremendous, you know.
And I know a lot of people are saying, well,
he was beaten up by other people and dumped out there. Well,
if you say that he was beaten by other people,
(33:45):
my question would be would be what was he beaten with?
Because hands are not going to generate those kind of
fractures inside that maybe I guess if he could if
he got stomped on. But if somebody gets stomped on,
you pattern abrasion.
Speaker 3 (34:00):
Us the other I would I would think if it
was in a beating, you would see other injuries around
the body because if any fight I've ever seen people
get hit all over the place, you don't get you know,
you get several And.
Speaker 1 (34:13):
One of the more interesting kind of hypotheses that was
pushed out there was a head strike, a poster head
strike on the leading edge of a step, and it's
because you've got this kind of linear, linear lacerational backside.
And by the way, I'm going to go into this.
(34:33):
Lacerations are different than cuts. We kind of talked about
this in sharpforce's injury. I hope everybody will go back
and listen to that. This is this is a lacerational
in back of his head. That's blunt force trauma. That
it's you know, maybe a little bit larger than an inch,
and it runs east and west. It's in the horizontal plane.
And so that energy from that created this other, this
(34:57):
other fracture on the floor of the skull. So when
you look at that, you you know, you begin to
you know, kind of try to assess and O'Keefe is
merely an example of this. In a morgue, we try
to assess what, first off, what instrument could have caused this,
and also what instrument could have caused this it would
(35:20):
have sufficient force to do this, okay, because you're not
just going to like fall down, go boom, and you
get this kind of complex fracture pattern in the on
the floor of the skull. That's not the way that happens.
It's not the way this works. It's not the way
how any of this works. All right, It just doesn't
you go and push that out here.
Speaker 3 (35:40):
So weird because you know, Joe, there's things that you
know that people like me I have no clue. Okay,
I see things a certain way. But then when I'm
talking to you and you start explaining how these things look,
I'm thinking, how does anybody ever get away with anything?
I mean that because you look at something so different
than the way those people do.
Speaker 1 (36:01):
And that's a good question. I don't know the the
way people get away with things, and I know I
have missed things personally.
Speaker 3 (36:11):
Uh.
Speaker 1 (36:11):
And that's the way you become a better investigator is
not through success but through failure. You It all depends
on how much it's generally some kind of human error
where you miss something. And going back to the Keith seeing, uh,
so much was lost in that that period of time,
(36:31):
the way it was handled, you know, the way people
responded to it. And look, there'll be people that will
be lecturing about the case for years and years to come.
I mean, it's it's done and now except.
Speaker 3 (36:41):
You know, yeah, Karen Reid cannot be tried again. She
was judging not guilty. Yeah, precisely.
Speaker 1 (36:48):
You know. Now it's going to be a liability phase
where you're gonna got in the civil court and that
might be a bit of a different uh lower there. Yeah,
it's preponderance of the evidence. You know. I guess if
Nancy was here, she'd say, are you a lawyer, just Scott, No,
I'm not, but you upset depositions, There enough depositions to know.
(37:12):
But yeah, I mean he you can look at that.
You can look at that and try to understand, you know,
how how this would have happened. You try to explain it.
And all you can do is give that information back
to the police that are trying to understand circumstances. And
that's what circumstantial evidence. You present them with the physical
findings you know that you have there, provided that the
(37:36):
information that was gleaned at the scene is sufficient to
the task, because sometimes in our world you don't necessarily
have all the data that's coming in.
Speaker 3 (37:45):
Well, and you and I've noticed that in covering stories
where there will I'll give you like Harmony Montgomery comes
to mind. Oh, where we had a lot of information
on that story as it was, because it came in
late and we were figuring out and I remember you
and I were talking about it and more information came
out and it was like, wait a minute, that explains
(38:07):
so much something small, and it basically for you could
break the case wide open because you knew based on
all of the information you had, on the physical evidence
of what we had for that point that even without
a body, based on what you were told, you were
able to figure out what happened.
Speaker 1 (38:24):
Well, yeah, and with that he and father, with that person,
you know, even he infamously said, I think I really
hit her hard this time. And that precious baby, you know,
(38:46):
died in the backseat of a convertible seabreing in the
dead of winter in our northeast. Great job of providing
such a wonderful life for that little angel. And you know,
still to this day, but you know, hearing we know
that he had struck her on various occasions, and I
(39:07):
felt like and poor, poor poor angel. You know she's
blond anyway, Dave, I remember that, you know, she's blond
and she has to wear glasses. I know what a struggle.
Speaker 3 (39:18):
I mean, what I could think of it as anybody
that saw that case. Yeah, I just remember thinking, why
come on, I would have taken her, you.
Speaker 1 (39:28):
Know, no questions asked, Just bring her, bring her to
my doorstep. You know what I'm saying. We'll find somebody
and you know this had been a progression, and that's
that goes into also assessment of blunt force trauma. Because Dave,
in our world, in the world of death investigation and
also with child abuse cases, Dave, what what kind of
(39:52):
happens is we we actually grade grade bruises. And it's
when when you're working as a child and child abuse investigator,
which God bless those people that do that job. I
don't know how in the world that could do it,
but I think that everybody that's hearing me right now
(40:13):
can understand this. Let me kind of run down the
timeframe so that everybody understands about blunt force trauma. And
one of things we look at not only in the morgue,
but when you have a social worker or a physician
that's working for law enforcement that's assessing child abuse cases,
one of the things they do is they will age
(40:34):
bruises and just give me a little latitude here and
let me break it down. So when you initially get
a contusion on an impact injury, you're going to be
looking at the surface of the skin will be kind
of red. It's like that irritation. Remember how I talked
about with an abrasion anything that makes contact with the skin,
(40:54):
even a fist, a closed fist, it'll have that kind
of red discolouration and you'll see that in the immediate
Then it'll take about one to four hours and you'll
begin to see blue and purple, okay in the color.
Just think about this on your own body. You know,
generally about four days down range, that purplish area will
(41:18):
begin to turn that creepy green color, okay, and that's
gonna last about four to seven days. Then you're gonna
get the really disgusting color, which is yellow. If and
that's just part of the healing process, and that's the
blood that's contained in that contused area that is resolving.
(41:39):
All right. It's kind of dissipating because it's often interstitial tissue.
You've got broken vessels. The vessels are healing, and that
blood just kind of it disappears over period time. Will
the yellow will stay around seven to ten days, and
then after about fourteen to twenty one days, you're back
to normal. We say, Morgan, what difference does that make.
I'll tell you what difference it makes. If you've got
(41:59):
an old going case of abuse, all right, if you
if you're interviewing a child, and I'm talking now to
people that deal with the living. They will have that
child assessed by maybe a nurse practitioner or maybe even
a physician, and if they notice that you have bruises
(42:20):
on a body that are in these different states of healing,
they're going to know that this is Dave, not a
one off event. Okay, I can't tell you how many
these cases I've worked over the years where you'll have
an individual that is their body is little bodies are
just littered with contusions, and you'll have the suspect that
(42:42):
will say, well, oh yeah, well they fell down the stairs.
You know, my next question is how many times and
what days did they fall down the stairs? Because you
because of those color changes, you know that these are
not one off events. You'll have these layer things. It's
kind of like the woman that I was mentioning that
was beaten to death with the dryer belt over and
(43:05):
over and over again, and these things are layered on
top of one another. So it's very important for us
to be able to assess, you know, assess these injuries,
to contextualize it relative to relative to know what's going
on and again with her, one of the things that
we're looking at is what's referred to as pattern impact trauma.
(43:28):
What could have generated We were talking about baseball bats
just a minute ago, and let me tell you how
this kind of breaks down. You'll find this fascinating if
you ever seen a slow motion the slow motion, super
slow most shots of a baseball being struck by a bat,
where it's going through the strike zone and the ball
you can see just for a millisecond, the ball bends,
(43:50):
It literally bends and wraps, particularly with an aluminum bat
or metal bat, it'll rap. Just for saying, you'll see
an indentation. Do you know. Our skin works the same way,
So if you get struck, if somebody gets struck in
the arm with like a baseball bat or any solid object,
for an instant, the skin will wrap around the circumference
(44:12):
let's say it's a cylindrical object, around the circumference of it,
and then pop back into place after being struck. So
that's why many times these contusions actually appear a bit
larger than the actual instrument that generated it. So if
somebody struck with a barrel of a right in a
sweet spot as you guys call it, right in sweet
spot of the bat, that contusion is going to have
(44:35):
the appearance of a much larger object. But what's happening
as that central point of impact is hang on, I'm
showing Dave. I got to demonstrate to him that I
know how to roll my wrist. So as you roll
your wrists through the swing, the tissue will wrap around
the barrel of the bat. So even something that's not
directly struck will slap that outer portion of the bat
(44:58):
and you'll get this real broad ranging contusion. And that's
one of the things you kind of assess now if
you're using something like a hammer, because we have people
that have hammer attacks where they're struck it it's not
necessarily the same shape. What's fascinating like hammer attacks and
(45:20):
blunt force trauma is that if someone is struck in
the skull, you'll have a coin shape, if you're thinking
about standard finishing hammer, a coin shape, a braided area
in the skin, and then when you reflect the scalp,
you'll have these perfect plugged areas of fracture, and it's
(45:40):
a circular fracture, which you don't see a lot in
the skull and these things. Many times, what happens is
is that as the skull. The external table of skull
is fractured away from those anchor points around it structurally
that it's not the hammer being driven into the brain,
it's actually that plug of bone that's being driven into
(46:03):
the brain. So you've got this layered event and you
get multiple of these, the skin is not necessarily going
to appear the same either. We've got all over the body,
and surgeons know this. We have what are referred to
as lines of Langer. And if people are out there
(46:26):
that have been in the military, one of the first
things they teach you to do in the military is
to study contour maps and it gives you height, elevation,
that sort of thing. So the tighter those lines with elevation,
they follow the pattern of the ground. Well, we have
those patterns all over our body and they're very predictable.
As a matter of fact, when people are when med
(46:49):
school students are studying human anatomy, they learn the lines
of Langer. So if you make an incision like classic
concision everybody's familiar with is what's referred to as the
McBurnie incision, and that's for an appendectomy. For years people
you know, it wasn't always done laparoscopically where they're gonna
go through your belly button. They make this diagonal scar.
(47:11):
It's on the right lower quadront of your abdomen, and
it runs it runs diagonally opposing to where the actual
appendix is. The reason they make that incision that way
is because it follows the line of langer, essentially, like
if you're talking about furniture, it follows the grain. So
if you cut across the lines of Langer, it opens
(47:33):
up into this really ghastly injury. Okay, Well, when you
have someone struck by an instrument, okay, like a bat
or a hammer or whatever it is, a car, they
get these big nasty lacerations that are abnormal in appearance,
that the sides don't appear to marry up, you really
(47:55):
have to, like like in the morgue, we'll use tape.
Many times, we'll use really strong medical tape to try
to pull the side together, just so that we can
appreciate how the two things connect, because when you take
the tape off, it's just going to spring back out
to this real irregular I don't know the best way
I can say it is like a Frankenstein, you know,
(48:16):
cut because it's so odd when you see it and
you know that you're dealing because that's a true laceration,
you'll have these little bits of skin that attach to
either side. That's called tissue bridging, so it's not completely
cut through. So you're going to see that with blunt
force trauma in particular. So it's I would say, dave
(48:41):
that compared to gunshot wounds and anything I ever had
to assess in the medical legal context, blunt force trauma
by far is the most difficult thing to assess, make
a record of, to try to connect with some specific
object that's out there. It takes time, Unlike I mean,
(49:06):
everything that we assess takes time. There's a learning curve
with it. But I still to this day, to this day,
at this age and stage in my life, there are
still things daily that I can learn about blunt force
trauma and the scars that are left behind. I'm Joseph
(49:26):
Scott Morgan and this is body bags
Host
Joseph Scott Morgan
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