Police are called to a "mental health crisis" involving the 2025 "Chef of the Year" at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and his wife, the supervisor of the Campus Dining, at UMass Amherst. Joseph Scott Morgan and Dave Mack breakdown the police reports of what happened the night Emma MacDonald was beaten to death....allegedly by her husband Jeffrey MacDonald. What will investigators find as they examine the hands and feet of the alleged killer as well as other items in their room that might have been used in the beating death.
Host Joseph Scott Morgan
Co-Host Dave Mack
Transcribe Highlights
00:00.86 Introduction - "Follow Your Passion"
03:06.46 Jeffrey and Emma MacDonald
08:20.55 Defining Mental Health Crisis
13:20.16 Forensic Pathologist will conduct exam at the hospital
19:08.25 Everything Jeffrey had, he got because of Emma
24:22.71 What made Jeffrey attack Emma?
29:01.72 MacDonald Statements to police....
34:16.52 Determine what was used as weapon
38:06.38 Blood on the cuff of shirt
41:15.16 Conclusion
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Quality dance with Joseph's gotten more in my experience, there's
I don't put a lot of weight into people following
their passion. I've never bought into that because I've always
thought that, you know, if you want to follow a passion,
first off, get a job where you can make some money,
(00:22):
I don't care what it is, and then you follow
your passion, right because to say that you're going to
earn money at your passion, that's kind of a slippery
slope and it can actually make you real downcast if
you fail in that area. But there's certain things, certain
practices out there in life where people do, in fact
(00:45):
become true tradecraft folks, where they fine tune their skill
set and it sets them apart from everybody else. I
cannot think of another group of people that kind of
embody that more so than people that are in the
(01:09):
culinary arts. Okay, it's fantastic because you literally get to
create something and present it to a consumer, and I
mean consumer in the literal sense. They're going to pay
you for it and they're going to eat it, and
then you get feedback. Sometimes it's instantaneous. But what happens
(01:34):
to someone that is at the top of their game
and suddenly they go over the edge. I'm not saying
they're pushed over the edge. I'm just saying they go
over the edge. The response that is elicited from them
(01:55):
is something that leads to the ultimate horror. Today on Bodybacks,
we're going to talk about two people. Their names are
Jeffrey McDonald and Emma McDonald, and it should be noted
that Emma is no longer with us. I'm Joseph Scott
(02:19):
Morgan and this is Bodybacks. When I heard about this case,
automatically I began to think about, Wow, this individual was
a chef and his wife, Emma, was also involved in
(02:42):
culinary arts as well. And it's just it's kind of
a unique set of circumstances and among a very unique
group of people. And I think you know this too,
know that you know culinary working in this world, in
the world of fine dining, it's a I mean it
truly is. It's one of these it's a grind. People
(03:05):
that are out there that you know, do our food services.
They work twenty four to seven and it takes a
lot to make it to the top because it is
so highly competitive. Dave.
Speaker 2 (03:16):
The story today is by Emma McDonald and Jeffrey McDonald.
Now you know me, as soon as I saw the
name Jeffrey McDonald, I thought nineteen seventy, you know.
Speaker 1 (03:26):
And yeah, I got to tell you, I thought of
you most immediately when I well, I said, what are
the odds? What are the odds this name coming up exactly?
Speaker 2 (03:35):
And so if if I may, let me just tell
you what happened and then we'll back out of this.
Because Emma McDonald was beaten to death and her husband,
Jeffery McDonald, has been charged with that beating to death.
(03:56):
But Joe, this is a couple that met at mass
at Amherst. And in reality, Emma was Jeffery McDonald's boss.
She worked in this kitchen department overall, you know, she
was a supervisor. He was what is called a sue chef.
So o us sue chef. This is not the head chef.
(04:18):
This is the chef just under the head chef. But
Jeffery McDonald an award winning Sioux chef. I think in
the I don't know all about chefing, Okay. I know
there are talented chefs, okay, and I know they don't
all go crazy like the guy the British guy that
(04:39):
does the show Kitchen Nightmares and things like that. I'm
assuming yeah, yeah, I kind of, because I'm gonna be honest, Joe.
If I'm sitting in a restaurant and i hear that
coming out of the kitchen, I'm up and out. Yeah gone.
But here's the thing. Police were called, and the call
that went out was about a mental health emergency. This
(05:02):
was a nine to one one call to room four
thirteen at the UMass Campus Center hotel. The call comes
in at seven forty two pm or that's when police
arrived on the scene to this mental health emergency. When
officers arrived, they're trying to find out what's going on.
(05:24):
And I listened to the police dispatch talking to officers
on the scene and back and forth about what they
were asking you, because a lot goes on once police
get on the scene. They started saying, oh, I need
more help, or we need maddics, we need this than that,
and that you could actually see this devolving from a
(05:44):
mental health crisis, possibly involving a couple two. Oh my gosh,
we got a problem because when police arrived, Jeffrey McDonald
fought with police. He's throwing objects at them, Joe, he
even struck an officer in the face. That was bad
enough that he picked up an additional charge for the
(06:05):
violence against the officers. Now, when police got inside, they
found him in MacDonald dead from what investigators described as
a violent assault. Joe.
Speaker 1 (06:18):
In your world of.
Speaker 2 (06:21):
Death investigations, is it a common occurrence to show up
at what is called a mental health crisis and finding
a dead body?
Speaker 1 (06:33):
Yeah, yeah, it's happened any number of times, you know,
because what does that translate into if you've got somebody
that is so angry and distraught and you know, you're
you're kind of you know, think about it is when
you say mental health crisis, it I guess that that's
(06:55):
the descriptor that's going on. Maybe it's the thing that
they grabbed out of the air. You know, you never
know about the local jurisdiction, how they frame these sorts
of things.
Speaker 2 (07:05):
Okay, I did not even think about that, Joe. That
never occurred to me. No, I that did not occur
to me. I thought mental health crisis can be this
broad spectrum of things. I didn't realize that it was regional.
I didn't realize that.
Speaker 1 (07:17):
And yeah, I mean, you know, it's one thing. Okay, Now,
how do you interpret that? Not you, but the universal you.
You know, it's like, okay, so we've got somebody shouting
and screaming, right, right, So the person that's calling us in,
if they've heard shouting and screaming, if they've heard somebody
banging their head on the wall, maybe they heard a
(07:38):
lady scream. Okay, they might say, hey, look, I hear
loud noises next door, the guy's screaming, he's erratic, all
this sort of stuff. When you say that, all right,
and then the dispatcher interprets that as a mental health crisis,
(07:58):
you know what that does. I'd go ahead. You go ahead,
and you lay the groundwork, believe it or not, believe
it or not for what a defense might be, Okay,
because that's that's going to be in the official record.
How in the world do you know that this is
a mental health crisis, because you know, you just might
(08:21):
have somebody that's just mean, you might have somebody that
wants to harm people. That doesn't make it a mental
health crisis. So you have to kind of define that. Well,
they're talking about this in broad strokes. Now I understand
from the perspective of officer safety, all right, because they're
(08:42):
what the officer, you know, the officer doesn't get the call,
they don't take the call off of the phone, you know,
they'll hear it, it'll be transmitted to them, and by
the time it gets to the officer, Dave, this information
may have passed through three hands already. All right. You
remember the telephone game yep i geah. Yeah, And so
this is a perfect example of it a mental health crisis.
(09:05):
So what are we going to do. Do we have
somebody that's up on the roof that's about to jump off?
Is that what you're saying? You know, how exactly do
you define this? Do you have somebody that's running up
and down the hallway nude and saying they're being chased
by pink elephants? All right, well that could be a
mental health crisis, you know, so let's put a fine
point on this. How are you exactly defining a mental
(09:28):
health crisis here? All right? So that's going to be
very important to dig into now if you show up
and again, for all of our beloved friends that have
to roll out to these cases and they don't know
what they're walking into. This is kind of an indication.
(09:51):
I think that when they show up, they've got an
individual that is non compliant. We don't necessarily know if
they saw Emma immediately, but what they do see is
an individual that is not obeying commands and that you know,
we'll we'll submit to them as a matter of fact.
(10:14):
Just the opposite, right, you've got an individual that we
we I've heard the word and uh, you know attack, assault,
I've heard you know there could be multiple objects involved.
What was he said? The one one police officer is
like injured, yes, in the faith.
Speaker 2 (10:35):
With an object, with some type of object. But it
did say that this end of this officer was injured
in the face with an object to the point where
it elevated the charges that that became part of this case.
Just to give you an idea of friends, we are
looking at what Jeffrey McDonald later told police. And that's
(10:56):
why I was kind of getting at this shoe. Is
that from an investigation standpoint, to determine how a person died,
and you realize that what this suspect is saying it
might not be the truth. They might be telling you
what you know, they what they might be telling you
what happened, and then again they might be not telling you.
(11:17):
I mean, you have to figure that out when you
get the body back to your room, you know. Yeah,
And that's what got me because he told police. Jeffer
McDonald told police. And I will add Jeffer McDonald has
pleaded not guilty to killing his wife. He is being
(11:37):
held without bail, so he hasn't he hasn't even gone
through the process yet where they have set bail. Okay,
that'll come, Yeah, it'll come in the next couple of weeks.
But I'm just letting you know that ahead of time because,
as you know, we normally deal with adjudicated cases, but
in this particular case, it hasn't been. So when we
(11:57):
talk about this, we have to be careful and say,
you know, he's accused because even though Jeffer McDonald told
police that he intentionally beat his wife, Emma to death,
he told police he used his hands, feet as well
as and I'm taking this right out of the police report, Joe,
a variety of other objects. Now, what does that mean
(12:22):
when you sit down and start investingg Have you ever
had something like this where you didn't even know what
they beat the person with?
Speaker 1 (12:28):
Yeah, and this comes to pattern injuries, you know, which
is something we can go into. But I think when
you think about your initial information from police officers, which
by the way, they were subject to this, to this violence.
This is not like they're coming in in a vacuum
where this is kind of isolated. To where you find
(12:49):
a body and you have a body that is showing
signs of having extensive trauma. The police have been subjected
to trauma. Now, okay, we have to and that's a
weird thing, you know when you think about it, Dave,
We've I've kind of briefly touched on this before, and
I think it bears repeating. We actually, in forensics, there's
(13:13):
actually something called living forensic pathology where you have and
I've been a party to some of these examinations in
the past where I've had to go to the hospital
with a forensic pathologist where they've been and it's always
attached to the death of somebody else. But the forensic
(13:35):
pathologists will actually go to the hospital and conduct an
examination of an alleged perpetrator. Now what's the reason for that. Well,
if you're receiving a story about how something happened, if
you can get to the alleged perpetrator, and enough time,
(13:57):
the pathologists will say, you know, uh, well, you allow
me to look at your hands, and just by taking
a cursory look at the hands, they can they can see,
you know, whether or not, uh, what type of injuries
are being displayed on those hands, and how do they
kind of marry up with what you might be seen
back at the more. We also have individuals that in
(14:21):
the area of living forensic pathology. Let's say you've got
two victims. One is deceased and you've got another one
that has been rolled into the hospital and they're still alive.
They might be hanging. I remember going to the bedside
of an individual that was in I See You with
a forensic pathologist, and that individual had been attacked in
(14:48):
connection to these to these events, and their friend was dead.
We had the body of the friend, and we had
the we had the individ that was in ICU, that
was in and out of consciousness, and the forensic pathologists
actually examined that person. And here's the thing about it, Dave,
(15:09):
did you know on the living after having seen the deceased,
the pathologist was able to find similarities between a living
person and the deceased person. And this involved this case
that I'm talking about right now actually involved a beating.
It involved a beating. Now I can't say that there
were multiple instruments that were used. Now in the McDonald case,
(15:35):
I think that it would have been very important and
I'd like to know kind of the progression of this.
It's always very, very important that you take pictures of
the alleged perpetrator's hands. Okay, you see these images that
have popped up over the year years of these cases
(15:57):
where you'll see an individual kind of stand in there,
you know, with this blank, dead eyed stare, and it's
an accused person and they're holding their hands up. They're
having to show the ventral side and you know, the
dorsom of the hands and the arms. They'll display the
things I've actually seen them where they're lifting up their
(16:19):
pant leg to show, you know, to show their legs,
and they can be compelled to show these to show,
and they'll be snapping images of this. And just as
you have injuries on the deceased, there might be an
indication that, say, for instance, on the hands of the perpetrator,
they might have insults to their hands that will marry
(16:41):
up with the deceased. So it's an interesting little perspective.
And guess who else is going to be photographed here? Well,
it's going to be the police officer that was attacked.
As a matter of fact, I would imagine that that
police officer would have been taken to medical center as well.
(17:04):
They're going to be treated by a physician. And guess
what else along with that police officer, there's going to
be a forensic photographer that will trail them to the hospital,
probably part of the crime scene unit, and they're going
to take detailed images of the officer. And wouldn't it
be interesting if the officer's injuries might very well marry
(17:28):
up with the decedent's' injuries. Jeffrey McDonald in this case,
he's not the only accomplished person here in this pair. Emma.
(17:51):
Emma McDonald in her own right, now, we know that
she was managing the culinary side of things, but you know,
in her own right, she was a well known baker.
You know that actually had her own bakery, Dave, And
I'm very interested in this, this kind of dynamic you
(18:14):
know that they had as couple, and what in the
world if we are to believe what the police are
saying because they've charged him. He hasn't been convicted, I
tried or convicted. What is it that kind of makes
this case? You know, take this huge u turn where
(18:34):
you know this, this life spent in the world of
food suddenly goes south, very very quickly. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (18:41):
Let me let me give you the heads up on
Emma because Emma at thirty one years old okay Is
has an eleven year old daughter. She and UH and
Jeffrey are married. She is the supervisor, as you mentioned
in this restaurant at UMass where Jeffrey works as the
(19:01):
Sioux chef, and he has become a very accomplished chef
in his own right. And they say that those people
around amhers say that everything Jeffrey has is because of
Emma working with him, helping him, supporting him. But she
was his boss, but jeff The thing that really hits me.
I know you liked this part too, Joe. Joe and
(19:24):
I both like to encourage young people to hop aboard
your education, get that and get to work. Man. The
world is wide open to you. Well, Emma at thirty
one years old, Joe, you mentioned that she had run
her own bakery. Well, She worked at a bakery in
high school and then bought into the bakery and became
a partner in this bakery where she was a baker
(19:47):
and was such an accomplished baker that they were like, yes,
come on, you know, the owners knew having her as
a partner was only going to make things that much better.
So she's again in her onies single mom at the time,
and she's a partner in a bakery. This is some
This is a woman not to be trifled with when
(20:08):
it comes to accomplishment, So it's important to know the
dynamic between the two. She wasn't. The reason I'm pointing
this out is some of the some of the things
that I've read made it sound like here is this.
He is an award winning chef. Jeffrey McDonald is the
executive Sioux chef of UMass Amherst. He was the twenty
(20:31):
twenty five Chef of the Year at the University of
Massachusetts Amherst. And it sounded like she was the server.
When I first started reading about this, I thought, was
she a waitress in the coffee shop? I mean? And
then I found out Nope, this is a woman who
owned her own bakery. You know, and excelled at her work.
(20:53):
This commitment, pride, and they always to Everybody talks about her.
Do you know what they talk about. It's so funny
because it's almost like it's on a menu. Her signature smile.
She had a great smile. People loved Emma. I don't
know how they felt about Jeffrey. I know how they
feel about him now. But you know, Joe, I thought
(21:15):
that was important for us to point out. And I'm
glad you allowed for that because she wasn't a shrinking violet.
She's a strong woman. And I don't know what all happened,
but I know that something was going on in the
world of Jeffrey McDonald in the time leading up to
this assault that led to Emma's death. Allegedly, Joe, two
(21:36):
weeks before the death of Emma McDonald, Jeffrey McDonald and
Emma were planning a trip to Disney, going to take
her eleven year old daughter and his two children from
a previous marriage, and they were planning a trip to
Disney World Joe two weeks before this attack. Then a
week later, one week before this attack, Jeffon McDonald out
(22:01):
of the Clear Blue Sky tells Emma he wants a divorce.
A week later, the nine won one call. How do
you go from planning a family vacate to wanting a
divorce to murder in the space of fourteen days.
Speaker 1 (22:17):
I don't know, I mean, and there are a lot
of cases out there, you know, to go from literally
go from zero to one hundred in the twinkling of
an eye. And I think, and look, I'm not trying
to be all gloom and doom here. Sometimes we never
find out what the answer is. It can be the
(22:39):
smallest thing relative to you know, what the what your
perception of things are, what your perception of reality is.
You you know, they'll you know Charlie Ridge song, you
never know what's going on behind closed doors? Oh wow, Yeah,
I mean you really don't. And you know, I can't
(23:02):
fathom that. How how you could go from planning a
family vacation and a get away from the troubles and
the pressures. Because I can tell you this, in the
culinary world we all have different types of pressures. But
if you're trying to run run a restaurant kitchen, it's crushing.
(23:25):
I mean it is. I don't know how people do it.
I could not work in food service on any level,
certainly in the culinary arts, because it's it's such a
hustle and it's so absolutely soul crushing. Many times, I
can understand why you would want to take a vacation
with your family and get away and kind of depressurize
(23:47):
before you have to step back into But it's still
that's no, it's only been charged. Still no excuse for
using multiple, multiple methodologies to attack the person that you're
supposed to be in love with and that you've created
a life with, uh and that you have family with.
(24:11):
You know, what is it that that made you turn
on the individual that you know you're you're sharing a
life with uh and and strike out at them. I've
actually I've read something about this case where they're talking
about he was kind of no nonsense, kind of even keeled.
Speaker 2 (24:36):
That was the cucumber.
Speaker 1 (24:38):
Thank you. Yeah, you're absolutely right. But yet you can
be cool as a cucumber, but you feel comfortable enough
to rip your personal life to shreds. I think that
it's that's a fascinating aspect to this case. We can
(25:07):
dress it up in church, it up all we want
talking about careers and familial relationships and all that sort
of thing. But from a nuts and bolt standpoint, which
you know, Dave, that I love scientifically, it's important that
we try to assess what kind of what kind of
(25:33):
trauma we're dealing with. And we're up in Massachusetts, and
I love to add these little things along the way,
just kind of little sidebars, if you will. Massachusetts, did
you know hasn't had corners in a long long time.
They have statewide medical examiner. Okay. And as a matter
(25:56):
of fact, another little side note about Massachusetts, Massachussets is
the first state where the term medical examiner was actually
ever used. And this is back in the eighteen seventies.
Isn't that curious?
Speaker 2 (26:10):
Wow?
Speaker 1 (26:11):
And it was because they saw a need back then
to bring in a doctor as a consultant the coroners
did who were not physicians back then, and that's where
we actually get the term medical examiner from. That was
kind of the genesis of that term, and of course
it expanded out up in the Northeastern corridor before it
(26:31):
really hit anywhere else. New York is probably the biggest,
biggest example of this with the OCUME what became the
OCEUME Office Chief Medical Examiner in Manhattan, but in New
York City, but New York cannot like claim to being,
you know, kind of the place where this all spawned.
It actually happened in Massachusetts. So you've got you've got
(26:57):
the medical examiner trying to make of this. There is
a term that we use in forensics, forensic pathology in particular,
and the way it kind of comes about, particularly when
(27:18):
you're talking about things that I'm assuming a lot of this,
and you know what they say about assuming, but you
have overlapping injuries. Okay, So you couple the idea of
overlapping injuries, say, for instance, someone is beaten with a
fist and then approximating that same area or overlapping that
(27:41):
same area, they might pick up a heavy object and
strike somebody in that same approximate area. And I'm thinking, head, okay,
it's a very difficult thing in the morgue to be
able to understanding the initial underlining injury and then the
(28:02):
overlapping injury or overlying injury that is also impacted here.
And you apparently you've got multiple insults all over Emma's body.
Now you know, I always qualify things by saying and
I know that you can testify this, brother, Dave, there's
(28:24):
it's very, very difficult and almost impossible for us to
sequence injuries. And what I mean by that is like,
in what order did they fall? You know, what was
the initial strike point? Okay, for instance, where was it
that she was impacted first. I don't know that anybody
(28:44):
can ever unless you unless you have somebody that is
accused and they say this is how it started, all right,
So it's it's a heck of a job that the
forensic pathologist has before them because you're having to deal
with multiple injuries here. And from what we understand, Dave,
can you feed that back to me relative they they're
(29:06):
because the language is kind of confusion, confusing because they're
talking about multiple objects or multiple injuries. I don't know how.
Speaker 2 (29:17):
It comes from him. It comes from Jeffer McDonald and
what he told police. Okay, he told police that he again,
this is what Jeffery McDonald said. It's not what Dave
Mack and Joe Scott Morgan are saying. I'm just being
clear on this because this is still a case that
has yet to get to a trial. So, according to
(29:37):
statements made by Jeffer McDonald to police, he intentionally beat
his wife to death. He told them that, meaning I
knew what I was doing. I was trying to kill her.
He used his hands, his feet, and then as well
as a variety of other objects. We pointed out from
(30:02):
the very beginning that he also fought with police when
they got there. He was throwing objects and he hit
an officer in the face that the officer required medical attention.
So going back to it, hands, feet, and other objects.
So I'm guessing what whatever's laying around?
Speaker 1 (30:19):
Yeah, yeah, Yeah, what have we talked about before? We've
talked about weapons of opportunity, haven't we Yeah, because this
goes to kind of a and don't misinterpret what I'm
saying here relative to mental health, all right, that's not
what I'm saying. I'm talking about weapons of opportunity. Just
because you use weapons of opportunity doesn't put you doesn't
(30:45):
give you an automatic diagnosis from the DSM. All right.
People conflate those two things. Do not do that, all right,
Because I'm certainly not going to from a forensic standpoint,
what I'm going to look at is what were those
tools available to him at the time. Well, it's you
got to tell you, it's very primal. When you think
about beating, you know, with the hands. But brother, when
(31:09):
you start to get off into kicking and stomping, just
think about that just for a second. I've had people
that have literally been stomped to death. One of the
most impactful cases in my entire career, something that gave
me nightmare or something that gave me anxiety, involved a
little girl that had literally been stomped to death bisexual predator.
(31:32):
And the reason that it kind of brings it home
for me is that with when you talk about individuals
that have been stomped in, you know, in the vernacular
of the modern world, stomped out. You know we've heard
that term, but literally stomped to death. If an individual
(31:53):
is wearing shoes, okay, that's a very distinctive pattern that
we're looking at, you know, on human remains, so you
can see the outline is shoe. You can see tread
patterns on the individual. Where are they Is it random
or do the stomping And here's something to kind of
chew on for a second. From a forensic standpoint, were
(32:15):
the insults that resulted as a result of that was
kind of redundant, But as a result of applying the
foot to an individual. Is it on the chest, is
it on the head, is it on the legs, is
it on the abdomen? Or is it concentrated in one area?
(32:36):
I go back to overlapping injuries. Do we have multiple
stomps in one spot? Oh, by the bye, we go
back to our weapons of opportunity. Are we talking about
snow glow? Are we talking about an award that someone
won as a result of being a fantastic chef? Are
we talking about a baseball bat? Because each one of
(32:59):
these things is going to have a distinctive pattern. You
think about well, you know, I kind of said a
tongue in cheek, but not really. You think about a trophy, right,
anybody's got a trophy at home, all right? It has
very distinctive margins, patterns, edges. It's uniquely designed. If you're
using this as a what I would refer to as
(33:20):
a bludgeon, and you're impacting somebody, say, with the base
of a trophy, well, those patterns are going to have
this kind of curve linear mark that leaves around leaves
in a braided area. It might be deep impacted, it
might crush the skull. You never know.
Speaker 2 (33:40):
Jill, let me ask you something right here, because with
all these possibilities, when officers describe the scene and they
go into detail, but as a legal death investigator, when
you get the body at them, do you go back
to the scene while they're still I mean, when does
this happen? Because you're trying to figure out what all
(34:00):
weapons were used? And how I mean I was just
thinking about that from like the trophy, the Dolph club, baseball,
about fork knife, whatever. How does this get collected to
do the police and investigators sit there and start looking
over this or do they bring in somebody like you
that says, we've got all these injuries, let's see what
we can find.
Speaker 1 (34:20):
Yeah, yeah, and they will. And I'm so glad you
mentioned this because this is an interesting thing. People don't
realize this happens, so that any kind of weapon that
is used in a homicide, all right, get you got
to protect that. Let's see, how can I phrase this?
You have to treat this element of the investigation as
(34:44):
if it's sacred because you've got to maintain this thing,
all right, So what will happen is that if you
collect an item at the scene. Let's go back to
the thought about a trophy did you know that the
we'll actually collect that and they will bring it to
the morgue. And so as we're examining, as we're examining
(35:08):
the injuries, all right to the head face, you know, scout,
you know whatever shoulders?
Speaker 2 (35:15):
All right?
Speaker 1 (35:16):
You know, we might because sometimes the stuff that you
do in the morgue is abstract. I know that sounds wild,
but it's like, you don't when you're at the morgue
and you have a body, you don't necessarily you see
these patterns. And I can't tell you how many times
I've been with a forensic pathologists and we've been scratching
our heads over something I look at. It's like, wonder
(35:37):
the world created this? Well, just imagine, in a kind
of a weird alternate universe, you're actually doing the autopsy
at the scene. All right, I know this sounds crazy,
but just go with me. Here, go with my insanity
for a moment. You're doing this autopsy at the scene
where this occurred. You might have the ability to look
(35:57):
around and say, oh, okay, wow, that instrument it may
have generated. You can't say it definitively, but you say, wow,
look at the patterns on that Look at the patterns
we have here on the whatever part of the body.
Could that marry up? Possibly? I don't know, but it
gives you something to go do. So sometimes the police
will bring the evidence people will bring and they have
(36:20):
to keep tight control over this, all right, And you
have to document, you literally have to document this thing
making its way into the Mork and then it leaving
the Mork in whose hands it was in. All right,
you can't break that chain. But the pathologists will say,
let me take a look at this, and this. You
can write an entire report from an evidentiary standpoint of
(36:44):
what went into the friends of pathologists handling this theme
whatever it is, and it might be multiple things, it
might be multiple instruments. And that's why that's what makes
this case kind of complex, because you've already got a guy,
according to what the police have said, that admitted to this.
(37:04):
And it wasn't just his hands, Okay, it was his feet.
He's kick stomped. My lord, I'm my mind is kind
of awakened. Now I'm flooding, flooding my recesses with all
of this. I'm thinking, what happened to his shoes, what
happened to the rest of his clothes. Did they take
(37:27):
all of his clothes into evidence? I pray that they did,
because if he's injured in any way, you're going to
see evidence of his injuries on the clothing. I'm thinking bleeding,
certainly in Emma's From Emma's perspective, you're going to find
her her blood. Just think about this just for a second.
(37:50):
We're talking about hands. So if he's wearing a cuffed shirt,
all right, if he has struck her with his fist,
guess what happens. And that's an open injury. He's going
to have blood, literally, and I've seen this before, on
the cuff of his shirt. He might have it up
his arms. I hope that they took photographs of his arms.
He might have it, you know, on the chest, the
(38:12):
chest area of his shirt. Dave. I've seen cases where
individuals have struck people with things, and it's like dipping
a paintbrush into a pool of blood and bringing it
back up. I've seen blood patterns on the backs backs
of perpetrators where it kind of showers down. So every
(38:32):
bit to this is important, and all of those and
here's the thing about it. He said that he used
multiple instruments, big question here, and I'm asking this to
all of our friends. How do you decide what to collect?
Did he take time to beat her with something and
(38:55):
then take it and place it back on the shelf
or place it back in the cabinet drawer. Well, that
opens up that spectrum, is why, man, you know, and
you kind of have to think like this forensically, you
know what is going to Are you just looking for
stuff that's discarded, toppled over, just laying about? Did he
make any efforts whatsoever to clean any instruments? Did he
(39:18):
wash his hands? And that brings us to another point
from a scene perspective, I'm going to be checking the drains.
I'm going to be looking for any kind of blood deposition,
you know, that might be in the bathroom or be
at the kitchen sink, or whatever the case might be,
because every little bit does, in fact tell a story
(39:40):
when it comes down to Emma. Now, friends, I'll tell
you this, Jeffrey McDonald, the chef, has in fact been charged.
That doesn't mean he's guilty. We have to understand that.
(40:03):
But I do know this. I know Emma is gone
and I know this as well. Their children, a child
that's now been orphaned. Let that sink in just for
a second, because at the end of the day, the
(40:25):
story is not, in fact about mister McDonald. It's about
a mother, Emma, And as we always do on body bags,
the dead are our focus. Remember Emma, remember the life
that she led. And let's see what additional information develops.
(40:50):
Because as cases go in the world of forensics, it
might seem brutal, it might seem let's see, very prominal,
but I can tell you what it is. In fact,
it's very complex because we're going to need somebody that
can interpret all of this and ultimately present it in court.
(41:18):
I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is bodybacks.
Quality dance with Joseph's gotten more in my experience, there's
I don't put a lot of weight into people following
their passion. I've never bought into that because I've always
thought that, you know, if you want to follow a passion,
first off, get a job where you can make some money,
(00:22):
I don't care what it is, and then you follow
your passion, right because to say that you're going to
earn money at your passion, that's kind of a slippery
slope and it can actually make you real downcast if
you fail in that area. But there's certain things, certain
practices out there in life where people do, in fact
(00:45):
become true tradecraft folks, where they fine tune their skill
set and it sets them apart from everybody else. I
cannot think of another group of people that kind of
embody that more so than people that are in the
(01:09):
culinary arts. Okay, it's fantastic because you literally get to
create something and present it to a consumer, and I
mean consumer in the literal sense. They're going to pay
you for it and they're going to eat it, and
then you get feedback. Sometimes it's instantaneous. But what happens
(01:34):
to someone that is at the top of their game
and suddenly they go over the edge. I'm not saying
they're pushed over the edge. I'm just saying they go
over the edge. The response that is elicited from them
(01:55):
is something that leads to the ultimate horror. Today on Bodybacks,
we're going to talk about two people. Their names are
Jeffrey McDonald and Emma McDonald, and it should be noted
that Emma is no longer with us. I'm Joseph Scott
(02:19):
Morgan and this is Bodybacks. When I heard about this case,
automatically I began to think about, Wow, this individual was
a chef and his wife, Emma, was also involved in
(02:42):
culinary arts as well. And it's just it's kind of
a unique set of circumstances and among a very unique
group of people. And I think you know this too,
know that you know culinary working in this world, in
the world of fine dining, it's a I mean it
truly is. It's one of these it's a grind. People
(03:05):
that are out there that you know, do our food services.
They work twenty four to seven and it takes a
lot to make it to the top because it is
so highly competitive. Dave.
Speaker 2 (03:16):
The story today is by Emma McDonald and Jeffrey McDonald.
Now you know me, as soon as I saw the
name Jeffrey McDonald, I thought nineteen seventy, you know.
Speaker 1 (03:26):
And yeah, I got to tell you, I thought of
you most immediately when I well, I said, what are
the odds? What are the odds this name coming up exactly?
Speaker 2 (03:35):
And so if if I may, let me just tell
you what happened and then we'll back out of this.
Because Emma McDonald was beaten to death and her husband,
Jeffery McDonald, has been charged with that beating to death.
(03:56):
But Joe, this is a couple that met at mass
at Amherst. And in reality, Emma was Jeffery McDonald's boss.
She worked in this kitchen department overall, you know, she
was a supervisor. He was what is called a sue chef.
So o us sue chef. This is not the head chef.
(04:18):
This is the chef just under the head chef. But
Jeffery McDonald an award winning Sioux chef. I think in
the I don't know all about chefing, Okay. I know
there are talented chefs, okay, and I know they don't
all go crazy like the guy the British guy that
(04:39):
does the show Kitchen Nightmares and things like that. I'm
assuming yeah, yeah, I kind of, because I'm gonna be honest, Joe.
If I'm sitting in a restaurant and i hear that
coming out of the kitchen, I'm up and out. Yeah gone.
But here's the thing. Police were called, and the call
that went out was about a mental health emergency. This
(05:02):
was a nine to one one call to room four
thirteen at the UMass Campus Center hotel. The call comes
in at seven forty two pm or that's when police
arrived on the scene to this mental health emergency. When
officers arrived, they're trying to find out what's going on.
(05:24):
And I listened to the police dispatch talking to officers
on the scene and back and forth about what they
were asking you, because a lot goes on once police
get on the scene. They started saying, oh, I need
more help, or we need maddics, we need this than that,
and that you could actually see this devolving from a
(05:44):
mental health crisis, possibly involving a couple two. Oh my gosh,
we got a problem because when police arrived, Jeffrey McDonald
fought with police. He's throwing objects at them, Joe, he
even struck an officer in the face. That was bad
enough that he picked up an additional charge for the
(06:05):
violence against the officers. Now, when police got inside, they
found him in MacDonald dead from what investigators described as
a violent assault. Joe.
Speaker 1 (06:18):
In your world of.
Speaker 2 (06:21):
Death investigations, is it a common occurrence to show up
at what is called a mental health crisis and finding
a dead body?
Speaker 1 (06:33):
Yeah, yeah, it's happened any number of times, you know,
because what does that translate into if you've got somebody
that is so angry and distraught and you know, you're
you're kind of you know, think about it is when
you say mental health crisis, it I guess that that's
(06:55):
the descriptor that's going on. Maybe it's the thing that
they grabbed out of the air. You know, you never
know about the local jurisdiction, how they frame these sorts
of things.
Speaker 2 (07:05):
Okay, I did not even think about that, Joe. That
never occurred to me. No, I that did not occur
to me. I thought mental health crisis can be this
broad spectrum of things. I didn't realize that it was regional.
I didn't realize that.
Speaker 1 (07:17):
And yeah, I mean, you know, it's one thing. Okay, Now,
how do you interpret that? Not you, but the universal you.
You know, it's like, okay, so we've got somebody shouting
and screaming, right, right, So the person that's calling us in,
if they've heard shouting and screaming, if they've heard somebody
banging their head on the wall, maybe they heard a
(07:38):
lady scream. Okay, they might say, hey, look, I hear
loud noises next door, the guy's screaming, he's erratic, all
this sort of stuff. When you say that, all right,
and then the dispatcher interprets that as a mental health crisis,
(07:58):
you know what that does. I'd go ahead. You go ahead,
and you lay the groundwork, believe it or not, believe
it or not for what a defense might be, Okay,
because that's that's going to be in the official record.
How in the world do you know that this is
a mental health crisis, because you know, you just might
(08:21):
have somebody that's just mean, you might have somebody that
wants to harm people. That doesn't make it a mental
health crisis. So you have to kind of define that. Well,
they're talking about this in broad strokes. Now I understand
from the perspective of officer safety, all right, because they're
(08:42):
what the officer, you know, the officer doesn't get the call,
they don't take the call off of the phone, you know,
they'll hear it, it'll be transmitted to them, and by
the time it gets to the officer, Dave, this information
may have passed through three hands already. All right. You
remember the telephone game yep i geah. Yeah, And so
this is a perfect example of it a mental health crisis.
(09:05):
So what are we going to do. Do we have
somebody that's up on the roof that's about to jump off?
Is that what you're saying? You know, how exactly do
you define this? Do you have somebody that's running up
and down the hallway nude and saying they're being chased
by pink elephants? All right, well that could be a
mental health crisis, you know, so let's put a fine
point on this. How are you exactly defining a mental
(09:28):
health crisis here? All right? So that's going to be
very important to dig into now if you show up
and again, for all of our beloved friends that have
to roll out to these cases and they don't know
what they're walking into. This is kind of an indication.
(09:51):
I think that when they show up, they've got an
individual that is non compliant. We don't necessarily know if
they saw Emma immediately, but what they do see is
an individual that is not obeying commands and that you know,
we'll we'll submit to them as a matter of fact.
(10:14):
Just the opposite, right, you've got an individual that we
we I've heard the word and uh, you know attack, assault,
I've heard you know there could be multiple objects involved.
What was he said? The one one police officer is
like injured, yes, in the faith.
Speaker 2 (10:35):
With an object, with some type of object. But it
did say that this end of this officer was injured
in the face with an object to the point where
it elevated the charges that that became part of this case.
Just to give you an idea of friends, we are
looking at what Jeffrey McDonald later told police. And that's
(10:56):
why I was kind of getting at this shoe. Is
that from an investigation standpoint, to determine how a person died,
and you realize that what this suspect is saying it
might not be the truth. They might be telling you
what you know, they what they might be telling you
what happened, and then again they might be not telling you.
(11:17):
I mean, you have to figure that out when you
get the body back to your room, you know. Yeah,
And that's what got me because he told police. Jeffer
McDonald told police. And I will add Jeffer McDonald has
pleaded not guilty to killing his wife. He is being
(11:37):
held without bail, so he hasn't he hasn't even gone
through the process yet where they have set bail. Okay,
that'll come, Yeah, it'll come in the next couple of weeks.
But I'm just letting you know that ahead of time because,
as you know, we normally deal with adjudicated cases, but
in this particular case, it hasn't been. So when we
(11:57):
talk about this, we have to be careful and say,
you know, he's accused because even though Jeffer McDonald told
police that he intentionally beat his wife, Emma to death,
he told police he used his hands, feet as well
as and I'm taking this right out of the police report, Joe,
a variety of other objects. Now, what does that mean
(12:22):
when you sit down and start investingg Have you ever
had something like this where you didn't even know what
they beat the person with?
Speaker 1 (12:28):
Yeah, and this comes to pattern injuries, you know, which
is something we can go into. But I think when
you think about your initial information from police officers, which
by the way, they were subject to this, to this violence.
This is not like they're coming in in a vacuum
where this is kind of isolated. To where you find
(12:49):
a body and you have a body that is showing
signs of having extensive trauma. The police have been subjected
to trauma. Now, okay, we have to and that's a
weird thing, you know when you think about it, Dave,
We've I've kind of briefly touched on this before, and
I think it bears repeating. We actually, in forensics, there's
(13:13):
actually something called living forensic pathology where you have and
I've been a party to some of these examinations in
the past where I've had to go to the hospital
with a forensic pathologist where they've been and it's always
attached to the death of somebody else. But the forensic
(13:35):
pathologists will actually go to the hospital and conduct an
examination of an alleged perpetrator. Now what's the reason for that. Well,
if you're receiving a story about how something happened, if
you can get to the alleged perpetrator, and enough time,
(13:57):
the pathologists will say, you know, uh, well, you allow
me to look at your hands, and just by taking
a cursory look at the hands, they can they can see,
you know, whether or not, uh, what type of injuries
are being displayed on those hands, and how do they
kind of marry up with what you might be seen
back at the more. We also have individuals that in
(14:21):
the area of living forensic pathology. Let's say you've got
two victims. One is deceased and you've got another one
that has been rolled into the hospital and they're still alive.
They might be hanging. I remember going to the bedside
of an individual that was in I See You with
a forensic pathologist, and that individual had been attacked in
(14:48):
connection to these to these events, and their friend was dead.
We had the body of the friend, and we had
the we had the individ that was in ICU, that
was in and out of consciousness, and the forensic pathologists
actually examined that person. And here's the thing about it, Dave,
(15:09):
did you know on the living after having seen the deceased,
the pathologist was able to find similarities between a living
person and the deceased person. And this involved this case
that I'm talking about right now actually involved a beating.
It involved a beating. Now I can't say that there
were multiple instruments that were used. Now in the McDonald case,
(15:35):
I think that it would have been very important and
I'd like to know kind of the progression of this.
It's always very, very important that you take pictures of
the alleged perpetrator's hands. Okay, you see these images that
have popped up over the year years of these cases
(15:57):
where you'll see an individual kind of stand in there,
you know, with this blank, dead eyed stare, and it's
an accused person and they're holding their hands up. They're
having to show the ventral side and you know, the
dorsom of the hands and the arms. They'll display the
things I've actually seen them where they're lifting up their
(16:19):
pant leg to show, you know, to show their legs,
and they can be compelled to show these to show,
and they'll be snapping images of this. And just as
you have injuries on the deceased, there might be an
indication that, say, for instance, on the hands of the perpetrator,
they might have insults to their hands that will marry
(16:41):
up with the deceased. So it's an interesting little perspective.
And guess who else is going to be photographed here? Well,
it's going to be the police officer that was attacked.
As a matter of fact, I would imagine that that
police officer would have been taken to medical center as well.
(17:04):
They're going to be treated by a physician. And guess
what else along with that police officer, there's going to
be a forensic photographer that will trail them to the hospital,
probably part of the crime scene unit, and they're going
to take detailed images of the officer. And wouldn't it
be interesting if the officer's injuries might very well marry
(17:28):
up with the decedent's' injuries. Jeffrey McDonald in this case,
he's not the only accomplished person here in this pair. Emma.
(17:51):
Emma McDonald in her own right, now, we know that
she was managing the culinary side of things, but you know,
in her own right, she was a well known baker.
You know that actually had her own bakery, Dave, And
I'm very interested in this, this kind of dynamic you
(18:14):
know that they had as couple, and what in the
world if we are to believe what the police are
saying because they've charged him. He hasn't been convicted, I
tried or convicted. What is it that kind of makes
this case? You know, take this huge u turn where
(18:34):
you know this, this life spent in the world of
food suddenly goes south, very very quickly. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (18:41):
Let me let me give you the heads up on
Emma because Emma at thirty one years old okay Is
has an eleven year old daughter. She and UH and
Jeffrey are married. She is the supervisor, as you mentioned
in this restaurant at UMass where Jeffrey works as the
(19:01):
Sioux chef, and he has become a very accomplished chef
in his own right. And they say that those people
around amhers say that everything Jeffrey has is because of
Emma working with him, helping him, supporting him. But she
was his boss, but jeff The thing that really hits me.
I know you liked this part too, Joe. Joe and
(19:24):
I both like to encourage young people to hop aboard
your education, get that and get to work. Man. The
world is wide open to you. Well, Emma at thirty
one years old, Joe, you mentioned that she had run
her own bakery. Well, She worked at a bakery in
high school and then bought into the bakery and became
a partner in this bakery where she was a baker
(19:47):
and was such an accomplished baker that they were like, yes,
come on, you know, the owners knew having her as
a partner was only going to make things that much better.
So she's again in her onies single mom at the time,
and she's a partner in a bakery. This is some
This is a woman not to be trifled with when
(20:08):
it comes to accomplishment, So it's important to know the
dynamic between the two. She wasn't. The reason I'm pointing
this out is some of the some of the things
that I've read made it sound like here is this.
He is an award winning chef. Jeffrey McDonald is the
executive Sioux chef of UMass Amherst. He was the twenty
(20:31):
twenty five Chef of the Year at the University of
Massachusetts Amherst. And it sounded like she was the server.
When I first started reading about this, I thought, was
she a waitress in the coffee shop? I mean? And
then I found out Nope, this is a woman who
owned her own bakery. You know, and excelled at her work.
(20:53):
This commitment, pride, and they always to Everybody talks about her.
Do you know what they talk about. It's so funny
because it's almost like it's on a menu. Her signature smile.
She had a great smile. People loved Emma. I don't
know how they felt about Jeffrey. I know how they
feel about him now. But you know, Joe, I thought
(21:15):
that was important for us to point out. And I'm
glad you allowed for that because she wasn't a shrinking violet.
She's a strong woman. And I don't know what all happened,
but I know that something was going on in the
world of Jeffrey McDonald in the time leading up to
this assault that led to Emma's death. Allegedly, Joe, two
(21:36):
weeks before the death of Emma McDonald, Jeffrey McDonald and
Emma were planning a trip to Disney, going to take
her eleven year old daughter and his two children from
a previous marriage, and they were planning a trip to
Disney World Joe two weeks before this attack. Then a
week later, one week before this attack, Jeffon McDonald out
(22:01):
of the Clear Blue Sky tells Emma he wants a divorce.
A week later, the nine won one call. How do
you go from planning a family vacate to wanting a
divorce to murder in the space of fourteen days.
Speaker 1 (22:17):
I don't know, I mean, and there are a lot
of cases out there, you know, to go from literally
go from zero to one hundred in the twinkling of
an eye. And I think, and look, I'm not trying
to be all gloom and doom here. Sometimes we never
find out what the answer is. It can be the
(22:39):
smallest thing relative to you know, what the what your
perception of things are, what your perception of reality is.
You you know, they'll you know Charlie Ridge song, you
never know what's going on behind closed doors? Oh wow, Yeah,
I mean you really don't. And you know, I can't
(23:02):
fathom that. How how you could go from planning a
family vacation and a get away from the troubles and
the pressures. Because I can tell you this, in the
culinary world we all have different types of pressures. But
if you're trying to run run a restaurant kitchen, it's crushing.
(23:25):
I mean it is. I don't know how people do it.
I could not work in food service on any level,
certainly in the culinary arts, because it's it's such a
hustle and it's so absolutely soul crushing. Many times, I
can understand why you would want to take a vacation
with your family and get away and kind of depressurize
(23:47):
before you have to step back into But it's still
that's no, it's only been charged. Still no excuse for
using multiple, multiple methodologies to attack the person that you're
supposed to be in love with and that you've created
a life with, uh and that you have family with.
(24:11):
You know, what is it that that made you turn
on the individual that you know you're you're sharing a
life with uh and and strike out at them. I've
actually I've read something about this case where they're talking
about he was kind of no nonsense, kind of even keeled.
Speaker 2 (24:36):
That was the cucumber.
Speaker 1 (24:38):
Thank you. Yeah, you're absolutely right. But yet you can
be cool as a cucumber, but you feel comfortable enough
to rip your personal life to shreds. I think that
it's that's a fascinating aspect to this case. We can
(25:07):
dress it up in church, it up all we want
talking about careers and familial relationships and all that sort
of thing. But from a nuts and bolt standpoint, which
you know, Dave, that I love scientifically, it's important that
we try to assess what kind of what kind of
(25:33):
trauma we're dealing with. And we're up in Massachusetts, and
I love to add these little things along the way,
just kind of little sidebars, if you will. Massachusetts, did
you know hasn't had corners in a long long time.
They have statewide medical examiner. Okay. And as a matter
(25:56):
of fact, another little side note about Massachusetts, Massachussets is
the first state where the term medical examiner was actually
ever used. And this is back in the eighteen seventies.
Isn't that curious?
Speaker 2 (26:10):
Wow?
Speaker 1 (26:11):
And it was because they saw a need back then
to bring in a doctor as a consultant the coroners
did who were not physicians back then, and that's where
we actually get the term medical examiner from. That was
kind of the genesis of that term, and of course
it expanded out up in the Northeastern corridor before it
(26:31):
really hit anywhere else. New York is probably the biggest,
biggest example of this with the OCUME what became the
OCEUME Office Chief Medical Examiner in Manhattan, but in New
York City, but New York cannot like claim to being,
you know, kind of the place where this all spawned.
It actually happened in Massachusetts. So you've got you've got
(26:57):
the medical examiner trying to make of this. There is
a term that we use in forensics, forensic pathology in particular,
and the way it kind of comes about, particularly when
(27:18):
you're talking about things that I'm assuming a lot of this,
and you know what they say about assuming, but you
have overlapping injuries. Okay, So you couple the idea of
overlapping injuries, say, for instance, someone is beaten with a
fist and then approximating that same area or overlapping that
(27:41):
same area, they might pick up a heavy object and
strike somebody in that same approximate area. And I'm thinking, head, okay,
it's a very difficult thing in the morgue to be
able to understanding the initial underlining injury and then the
(28:02):
overlapping injury or overlying injury that is also impacted here.
And you apparently you've got multiple insults all over Emma's body.
Now you know, I always qualify things by saying and
I know that you can testify this, brother, Dave, there's
(28:24):
it's very, very difficult and almost impossible for us to
sequence injuries. And what I mean by that is like,
in what order did they fall? You know, what was
the initial strike point? Okay, for instance, where was it
that she was impacted first. I don't know that anybody
(28:44):
can ever unless you unless you have somebody that is
accused and they say this is how it started, all right,
So it's it's a heck of a job that the
forensic pathologist has before them because you're having to deal
with multiple injuries here. And from what we understand, Dave,
can you feed that back to me relative they they're
(29:06):
because the language is kind of confusion, confusing because they're
talking about multiple objects or multiple injuries. I don't know how.
Speaker 2 (29:17):
It comes from him. It comes from Jeffer McDonald and
what he told police. Okay, he told police that he again,
this is what Jeffery McDonald said. It's not what Dave
Mack and Joe Scott Morgan are saying. I'm just being
clear on this because this is still a case that
has yet to get to a trial. So, according to
(29:37):
statements made by Jeffer McDonald to police, he intentionally beat
his wife to death. He told them that, meaning I
knew what I was doing. I was trying to kill her.
He used his hands, his feet, and then as well
as a variety of other objects. We pointed out from
(30:02):
the very beginning that he also fought with police when
they got there. He was throwing objects and he hit
an officer in the face that the officer required medical attention.
So going back to it, hands, feet, and other objects.
So I'm guessing what whatever's laying around?
Speaker 1 (30:19):
Yeah, yeah, Yeah, what have we talked about before? We've
talked about weapons of opportunity, haven't we Yeah, because this
goes to kind of a and don't misinterpret what I'm
saying here relative to mental health, all right, that's not
what I'm saying. I'm talking about weapons of opportunity. Just
because you use weapons of opportunity doesn't put you doesn't
(30:45):
give you an automatic diagnosis from the DSM. All right.
People conflate those two things. Do not do that, all right,
Because I'm certainly not going to from a forensic standpoint,
what I'm going to look at is what were those
tools available to him at the time. Well, it's you
got to tell you, it's very primal. When you think
about beating, you know, with the hands. But brother, when
(31:09):
you start to get off into kicking and stomping, just
think about that just for a second. I've had people
that have literally been stomped to death. One of the
most impactful cases in my entire career, something that gave
me nightmare or something that gave me anxiety, involved a
little girl that had literally been stomped to death bisexual predator.
(31:32):
And the reason that it kind of brings it home
for me is that with when you talk about individuals
that have been stomped in, you know, in the vernacular
of the modern world, stomped out. You know we've heard
that term, but literally stomped to death. If an individual
(31:53):
is wearing shoes, okay, that's a very distinctive pattern that
we're looking at, you know, on human remains, so you
can see the outline is shoe. You can see tread
patterns on the individual. Where are they Is it random
or do the stomping And here's something to kind of
chew on for a second. From a forensic standpoint, were
(32:15):
the insults that resulted as a result of that was
kind of redundant, But as a result of applying the
foot to an individual. Is it on the chest, is
it on the head, is it on the legs, is
it on the abdomen? Or is it concentrated in one area?
(32:36):
I go back to overlapping injuries. Do we have multiple
stomps in one spot? Oh, by the bye, we go
back to our weapons of opportunity. Are we talking about
snow glow? Are we talking about an award that someone
won as a result of being a fantastic chef? Are
we talking about a baseball bat? Because each one of
(32:59):
these things is going to have a distinctive pattern. You
think about well, you know, I kind of said a
tongue in cheek, but not really. You think about a trophy, right,
anybody's got a trophy at home, all right? It has
very distinctive margins, patterns, edges. It's uniquely designed. If you're
using this as a what I would refer to as
(33:20):
a bludgeon, and you're impacting somebody, say, with the base
of a trophy, well, those patterns are going to have
this kind of curve linear mark that leaves around leaves
in a braided area. It might be deep impacted, it
might crush the skull. You never know.
Speaker 2 (33:40):
Jill, let me ask you something right here, because with
all these possibilities, when officers describe the scene and they
go into detail, but as a legal death investigator, when
you get the body at them, do you go back
to the scene while they're still I mean, when does
this happen? Because you're trying to figure out what all
(34:00):
weapons were used? And how I mean I was just
thinking about that from like the trophy, the Dolph club, baseball,
about fork knife, whatever. How does this get collected to
do the police and investigators sit there and start looking
over this or do they bring in somebody like you
that says, we've got all these injuries, let's see what
we can find.
Speaker 1 (34:20):
Yeah, yeah, and they will. And I'm so glad you
mentioned this because this is an interesting thing. People don't
realize this happens, so that any kind of weapon that
is used in a homicide, all right, get you got
to protect that. Let's see, how can I phrase this?
You have to treat this element of the investigation as
(34:44):
if it's sacred because you've got to maintain this thing,
all right, So what will happen is that if you
collect an item at the scene. Let's go back to
the thought about a trophy did you know that the
we'll actually collect that and they will bring it to
the morgue. And so as we're examining, as we're examining
(35:08):
the injuries, all right to the head face, you know, scout,
you know whatever shoulders?
Speaker 2 (35:15):
All right?
Speaker 1 (35:16):
You know, we might because sometimes the stuff that you
do in the morgue is abstract. I know that sounds wild,
but it's like, you don't when you're at the morgue
and you have a body, you don't necessarily you see
these patterns. And I can't tell you how many times
I've been with a forensic pathologists and we've been scratching
our heads over something I look at. It's like, wonder
(35:37):
the world created this? Well, just imagine, in a kind
of a weird alternate universe, you're actually doing the autopsy
at the scene. All right, I know this sounds crazy,
but just go with me. Here, go with my insanity
for a moment. You're doing this autopsy at the scene
where this occurred. You might have the ability to look
(35:57):
around and say, oh, okay, wow, that instrument it may
have generated. You can't say it definitively, but you say, wow,
look at the patterns on that Look at the patterns
we have here on the whatever part of the body.
Could that marry up? Possibly? I don't know, but it
gives you something to go do. So sometimes the police
will bring the evidence people will bring and they have
(36:20):
to keep tight control over this, all right, And you
have to document, you literally have to document this thing
making its way into the Mork and then it leaving
the Mork in whose hands it was in. All right,
you can't break that chain. But the pathologists will say,
let me take a look at this, and this. You
can write an entire report from an evidentiary standpoint of
(36:44):
what went into the friends of pathologists handling this theme
whatever it is, and it might be multiple things, it
might be multiple instruments. And that's why that's what makes
this case kind of complex, because you've already got a guy,
according to what the police have said, that admitted to this.
(37:04):
And it wasn't just his hands, Okay, it was his feet.
He's kick stomped. My lord, I'm my mind is kind
of awakened. Now I'm flooding, flooding my recesses with all
of this. I'm thinking, what happened to his shoes, what
happened to the rest of his clothes. Did they take
(37:27):
all of his clothes into evidence? I pray that they did,
because if he's injured in any way, you're going to
see evidence of his injuries on the clothing. I'm thinking bleeding,
certainly in Emma's From Emma's perspective, you're going to find
her her blood. Just think about this just for a second.
(37:50):
We're talking about hands. So if he's wearing a cuffed shirt,
all right, if he has struck her with his fist,
guess what happens. And that's an open injury. He's going
to have blood, literally, and I've seen this before, on
the cuff of his shirt. He might have it up
his arms. I hope that they took photographs of his arms.
He might have it, you know, on the chest, the
(38:12):
chest area of his shirt. Dave. I've seen cases where
individuals have struck people with things, and it's like dipping
a paintbrush into a pool of blood and bringing it
back up. I've seen blood patterns on the backs backs
of perpetrators where it kind of showers down. So every
(38:32):
bit to this is important, and all of those and
here's the thing about it. He said that he used
multiple instruments, big question here, and I'm asking this to
all of our friends. How do you decide what to collect?
Did he take time to beat her with something and
(38:55):
then take it and place it back on the shelf
or place it back in the cabinet drawer. Well, that
opens up that spectrum, is why, man, you know, and
you kind of have to think like this forensically, you
know what is going to Are you just looking for
stuff that's discarded, toppled over, just laying about? Did he
make any efforts whatsoever to clean any instruments? Did he
(39:18):
wash his hands? And that brings us to another point
from a scene perspective, I'm going to be checking the drains.
I'm going to be looking for any kind of blood deposition,
you know, that might be in the bathroom or be
at the kitchen sink, or whatever the case might be,
because every little bit does, in fact tell a story
(39:40):
when it comes down to Emma. Now, friends, I'll tell
you this, Jeffrey McDonald, the chef, has in fact been charged.
That doesn't mean he's guilty. We have to understand that.
(40:03):
But I do know this. I know Emma is gone
and I know this as well. Their children, a child
that's now been orphaned. Let that sink in just for
a second, because at the end of the day, the
(40:25):
story is not, in fact about mister McDonald. It's about
a mother, Emma, And as we always do on body bags,
the dead are our focus. Remember Emma, remember the life
that she led. And let's see what additional information develops.
(40:50):
Because as cases go in the world of forensics, it
might seem brutal, it might seem let's see, very prominal,
but I can tell you what it is. In fact,
it's very complex because we're going to need somebody that
can interpret all of this and ultimately present it in court.
(41:18):
I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is bodybacks.
Host
Joseph Scott Morgan
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