June 18, 2025 • 57 mins
A lot of information has come out about the victims in Moscow, Idaho, and the condition of their bodies as well as location and injuries. Latah County Coroner Cathy Mabutt made many public comments in the first days of the investigation that in retrospect might have been misguided, at best. Joseph Scott Morgan and Dave Mack discuss the case, the evidence, and what was stated as fact early in the investigation that doesn't match up with current facts. Joe Scott Morgan explains the forensics of death, Livor Mortis, Rigor Mortis, as well as PMI, Post Mortem Interval, and how the delay in reporting the bodies could be problematic for the prosecution in the upcoming trial of Brian Kohberger.
Transcribe Highlights
00:00.19 Introduction
01:48.68 Decomposition - PMI
03:32.16 Elderly people are cold when it is hot
07:00.30 Rigor Mortis, Livor Mortis
11:48.60 Environmentally dependent
15:33.11 Stiffening of jaw
19:56.67 Latah County Coroner said Idaho students killed in their sleep
23:19.82 Strength of Rigor Mortis
28:22.59 Using digital turkey thermometer to get body temp from liver
32:54.33 Assuming room temperature
38:11.60 Latah County Coroner told family member about injuries
43:00.35 Removing stomach and collecting contents
49:49.70 Gastric content
53:08.10 Post Mortem lividity
58:25.86 Conclusion
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Quality diamonds, but Joseph's gotten more. I don't know about y'all,
but I think about temperature every day, and generally it
has to do with determining how much money I'll have
at the end of the month to pay for my
air conditioning bill, because I hate being an old I
(00:23):
don't even like I'm not even gonna say hot. I
hate being in a warm house. I like being in
a cool house. And unfortunately my desire for physical comfort
is noncompatible with summertime in the Deep South. I'm gonna
wind up having a huge electric bill at the end
(00:44):
of every month, guaranteed. I think about temp in that sense.
But you know, I thought about temp for a long
time as a death investigator, because we use temperature in
order to determine how long it's been since someone has
(01:06):
I don't know, been cast off this mortal coil in
the words of the Bard, and there are a lot
of indicators that we look for, and today on bodybags,
we're going to have a discussion about PMI post mortem interval,
(01:27):
and in particular, we're going to have a discussion that
ties back to a case that it's currently in the
news and will be for months and months to come
the murder of the four students in Idaho. I'm Joseph
Scott Morgan and this is bodybacks, David. I don't know
(01:52):
if you recall this, but have you have you ever
been around in it's generally a grandparent. It doesn't matter
if it is as hot as the surface of the
sun outside. They're going to run the heat. They're going
to put a shawl around them or a blanket. Yeah,
(02:14):
they're going to have like woolen socks on. And a
part of that is getting old, you know, you lose
muscle masks.
Speaker 2 (02:22):
You you funny bit about old people being cold? Why
is this so cold in feezing?
Speaker 1 (02:31):
It's so cold in it? Thought about that in years. Yeah,
what a great stand up that was. Uh yeah, it's
so cold in heal baby.
Speaker 2 (02:41):
But why is that? Because I had these two women
that were they were sisters and they were like the
Snoop sisters back in the day on the Waltons. Yeah yeah,
I think they're combined age with three hundred and fifty seven.
But I remember my mother in law was afraid something
had happened to one of them and asked me to
take were over there because they wouldn't answer the phone.
(03:02):
And as we got to the house, Joe, it was
August in Alabama, so it was probably in the upper nineties,
late afternoon. We were already sweating from the humidity, and
I could hear their TV as we got to the door.
They had it turned up very loud. And when my
mother in law opened the door, just you know, was
knocking on it and the door cracked open, I felt
(03:23):
the heat hit me. I actually backed up the heat
from the house and I thought, oh, they're dead. Yeah,
And they were in there and they were bundled up,
both of them, both of them bundled up with the
heat going. And it's ninety eight degrees outside. That was
freaky to me.
Speaker 1 (03:37):
Yeah, and it's probably equally as hot in that house,
yeahsty Yeah, And it's terrifying on one level. Do you remember,
I know, I know that you do. The summer God,
it was I know, well over a decade. You remember
that summer of horror they had in Chicago. Oh yeah,
(03:57):
where it was so hot. Yep, the old people were
dying in their homes. And I knew the chief and
me at the time for Cook County, which is Chicago,
Ed what's his name, doctor Ed Donahue, I think, great
forensic pathologist and a heck of a nice guy. I mean,
(04:18):
just a really really cool cat. And anyway, it was
and this happened right before this happened right before he
retired from Cook County. I can see why this would
be something that will push you over this because they
had people that were dying left and right, and you know,
that's that's kind of a story for another day, but
it's you know, it's deaths related to hypothermia, uher hyper thermia, Yeah,
(04:43):
as opposed to hypo.
Speaker 2 (04:44):
So I had me to run with that. But I'm
just curious, man, that you mentioned the old people and heat.
Do they really I mean, do as we age, do
we feel colder?
Speaker 1 (04:54):
I mean, yeah, I think I think the perception is right.
I'm not a geriatric specialist, but.
Speaker 2 (05:02):
I'm becoming a geriatric. You'll have to, you're qualified. I
think that one of the things that occurs. First off,
you're losing you're losing mass in your body. You know,
your insulation is kind of dwindling away, fat layer, muscle layer,
And in addition to that, you don't have the same
(05:24):
robust circulatory system that you once had. And so therefore
you're gonna feel cooler or you'll feel like, you know,
I know, my grandmother always said she feel like she
had a chill on her, you know, And that's that's
kind of a common theme, you know, that kind of
runs through it as you get older.
Speaker 1 (05:42):
It hadn't hit me yet. I mean, I can tell you.
I'll sit around and I'll be sweating, and I'll look
at him and I'll say, hey, what's the air conditioning on?
She'll say sixty eight. I'll say, wow, it's really hot
in here, and she'll say, turn the fan up her.
And that's another thing. We can't sleep without a fan on.
I'm addicted to it. I even use a fan. I
(06:04):
use a fan app on my phone when I'm traveling.
That's how addicted to fans I am. And it lasts
for it lasts literally for ten hours.
Speaker 2 (06:13):
So on meeting one Dago, my name's Dave, that's it.
I'm addicted of.
Speaker 1 (06:19):
Hey, all right, so pos yeah, yeah, yeah, post warum
interval I it's it's you know, you hear this term
is thrown around. I'm guilty of using it. I can't
say guilty because it's an abbreviation, but h you know,
so it's it's p M. I you'll hear use that
(06:39):
term constantly, but it is postmar interval and the the
four big categories that we look at when we're trying
to assess the dead, and that is going to be
riger mortise or rigor it's pronounced both ways. Uh. We
(07:00):
have post mortem lividity, which is also uh the term
uh live or mortise. Then we have alger mortise, not
to be confused with a former vice president and it
and and then we have then we have gasterric content.
(07:20):
So you have four areas that are really kind of
exploited by us in in circles of death investigation to
give us, you know, to try to do. And really
what it is, Dave, it's a it's a snapshot of time. Okay,
and we go out and we try to do these assessments.
(07:43):
Let me tell you this, and I'll say this right
up front. This is kind of my you know, word
of warning here. None of the stuff is accurate to
the point where you could bet your life on it. Okay,
It's not like it's not a true quantitative measurement where
(08:07):
you can say with precision. I'm talking about like Swiss
watch precision where you can say this is the exact
moment in time when they took their last breath. That's
mathematically it's impossible to do that. You cannot do that.
I actually went to I'll never forget it. I was
(08:30):
at a conference one time. By the way, I recommend
highly that if you're interested in becoming a medical legal
death investigator. The mother church of all medical legal death
investigation is Saint Louis University in Saint Louis, Missouri, School
of Medicine, Department of Forensic Pathology. There are four classes
(08:50):
that are offered every year in intro to medical legal
death Investigation. I went through the class in I finally
got a spot in nineteen eighty seven. I've been working
looking for over two years by that time. And it
is a rigorous program.
Speaker 2 (09:04):
You go for.
Speaker 1 (09:08):
Five days, it's eight hours a day, and it is
they don't knowledge into your brain in this place, like
you can't imagine. There's no really no breaks in here.
So you're you're learning among the finest. You're learning from
the finest at the medical school. And it was there
(09:28):
that I first got, you know, really my intro in
a class sense. At Saint Louis University to how do
we how do we determine, you know, how somebody how
long someone has been dead. And there's a program called
the Master's program that's only offered like every other summer,
and you have to have attended the basic course first.
And I went to this thing. They had this guy
(09:48):
from Germany and Dave. This is in the days. It
wasn't a chalkboard, but he had a whiteboard up on
the stage and it wasn't one, it was three. And
he had created a formula that extended over the surfaces
of three whiteboards. And he claimed that he had the
magic bullet to determining time of death. And I remember
(10:13):
there were a bunch of us sitting there and we
just we're just kind of rolling our eyes. First off,
no one has this much time. This is only something
a university professor could do. When you're in tempo and
you're out in the field and you're you've got a
homicide that you're working, and you might have a suicide holding,
a motor vehicle accident holding. You're going to glean as
(10:34):
much information at the homicide as you possibly can. You
got to move on to the next case. He had
taken years to compile this data in a perfect world,
you know, maybe it had some utility maybe, but still
to this day, they can't give you a specific time
of death. So that's kind of my warning before we
(10:54):
get into all of this. So if you ever come
across someone that actually tells you that they can do it,
that they can give you an exact time, run, don't
walk out away.
Speaker 2 (11:05):
For years, I really did think you could come within
fifteen minutes of knowing. I really did until I talk
to you about it, because I didn't know. I mean,
you watch TV. Oh I see he had a corn
in his diarrhea. That means you know.
Speaker 1 (11:19):
Yeah, it's the best we can do. And I'd say
the best I've ever been able to do just looking
at the numbers alone that we collect and the examination
that we do at the scene. Maybe maybe four hours,
maybe four to five.
Speaker 2 (11:34):
And now can you take this in with the other timeline, right, I.
Speaker 1 (11:36):
Mean right, you have to. That's that's to the exclusion
of circumstantial you know, I last saw him at this time. Okay,
I'm just talking about pure science now, as pure as
it can be in that kind of environment. So it's
a not controlled, a non controlled environment and everything, and
I mean just about everything we're going to discuss right
now is environmentally dependent. So I think that it's really
(11:57):
important that we keep our wits about us and just
understand that.
Speaker 2 (12:00):
So it's fascinating. It's amazing that you have to truly
know investigation beyond just the like you mentioned the guy
uses three whiteboards to write a formula down to put
this to get it, and yet it actually does. There's
more to it than just the nuts and bolts. You
have to actually investigate the person's life to know about
(12:22):
their death.
Speaker 1 (12:24):
Yeah, and that lecture lasted for it was like two
hours and forty five minutes, and I wish I had
that time back. It did demonstrate to me. It did
demonstrate to me, however, that nobody really knows. I mean,
nobody really knows. And you know, I guess you could say, well,
somebody's sitting in front of a clock, and this is
(12:45):
an old example people have used before. I've heard it stated.
And they're shot and it's a thurn through wound and
it hits the clock and the clock stops. And so
you marry that up with it if you get to
the body at you know, what is it? They say?
A broken A broken clock is right twice a day,
so even that has a caveat to it. But for me,
(13:06):
for me, I think starting off with rigidity otherwise known
as riger mortis.
Speaker 2 (13:14):
When does that happen?
Speaker 1 (13:14):
Jim, Well, it begins, you know, you first begin to
appreciate it pretty It's not immediate, and this is kind
of how it works. So if you think about the
muscle groupings in your body, and I'm talking about like
the tiny muscles that you even have, like that surrounds
(13:38):
your eyelids, it happens everywhere. Okay, it happens simultaneously where
you have this rigidity that begins to set in throughout
the body. And a lot of people will say it
starts in the small muscles of the body and extends
out to larger ones. That's a fallacy. That's inaccurate. It
(14:00):
starts everywhere, everywhere simultaneously. However, it's most appreciated in the
small muscles, and then the larger muscle groups are slower,
you know, to kind of come around. So I'll give
you a great example of this. You might not have rigidity,
say in the elbows, the wrist, maybe the shoulders, and
(14:23):
certainly in the knees. But if you and this is
one of the things. This is the first area I
always go to to check a body for rigidity, and
that's the mouth. If I press down on the chin
in order to try to open the mouth and I'm
struggling with it. This is what I know. That muscle
grouping that is adjacent to where your jaw fits in
(14:47):
de mandible actually fits in to that joint like the
TMJ when it goes in there, those muscle groups are
most affected. They're tiny, Okay, So you get this rigidity
that sets and the jaw. And yet people say you
can appreciate it in the eyelids. I've never really seen that.
I guess clinically they say you can. But for me
(15:09):
as a practitioner on the field, the jaw would be
where I would go to first, and then it kind
of extends out from there. You know, the smaller, smaller
muscle groups, you'll see it, you know, like in the fingers,
you know, or in the toes before you're going to
see it in the ankles or the knees, are certainly
in the hips. But what's what has occurred is that
(15:32):
we are dependent. We are dependent in life on what's
called cellular respiration. And so those cells are living, breathing
all right. When they begin to shut down. When they
begin to shut down, cellular respiration has ceased, and so
(15:53):
the body, the body generally you I'm not going to
go into great detail, but there's crib cycle and it
throws off these little balls of energy. Okay, ATP, Well
that ceases, then you begin to produce ADP. And one
of the products of ADP is actually lactic acid. So
(16:13):
if you have ever worked out, if you've ever worked
out in your life, and you hadn't done it in
a while, and you wake up the next morning and
you're stiff as a board, Look, you can go take
all the motrin and tile and all and aspirin and
everything else you want to take, but sooner or later,
that rigidity is going to leave your body. That's actually
(16:33):
a lactic acid build up that you're having, you're experiencing
and your joints. The reality is, because we're upright and
still breathing, our body metabolizes that. Okay, the dead can't,
the can't. The can't, they can't do it at the
same rate that we do in life. Now after a
period of time, and this is one of important things
(16:56):
about rigidity. After a period of time, time that lactic
acid build up in the dead begins to back out
and it leaves all right. So there's I think that
there's a common common thought where people believe that, hey,
you know what, once you're here, here's and we've heard
(17:18):
this before, once you're cold and stiff, man, you're cold
and stiff. Well, no you'll be you'll be cold, but
you ain't gonna be stiff because that your your arms,
your legs, your hips, your jaw, everything becomes flacid. Once again,
you revert back. So you have to you have to
(17:40):
be there like Johnny on the spot. So what are
you looking at relative to this, Well, it's first noticeable.
The rigidity, the ryger mortis is first noticeable. It's going
to take about one to three hours. A lot of
it's going to be, first off, dependent upon the physiology
of the person, and then it's also going to be
(18:01):
dependent upon the ambient environmental temperature. And we always have
to remember that anything that involves heat speeds things up.
So it's going to take about ten to twelve hours
for it to be complete. So why is that important
if we're death investigators. Well, it's very important because if
I show up at a scene, Dave, and the body
(18:23):
is completely rigid, like you can't move it, then I'm
going to hazard guests. Based on ryger morts loan, that
person's been dead for ten to twelve hours perhaps, So
my question is going back to Idaho. I'm not being
(18:49):
disrespectful here. It's a legitimate question. We have such a
delay and when those students were last known alleged to
have been alive. Okay, the big number that everybody talks
about is slightly after four am, roughly, okay, give or
(19:09):
take all, right, going down until you know about half
past the hour. That nine one one call doesn't originate
until like eleven something am almost so yeah, almost twelve,
So you know you're looking at seven seven hours, I
(19:29):
guess roughly, and you'd have to bracket that very carefully.
I'm I'm curious. This is dangerous ground here. I'm curious
as to what the coroner saw because she said in
one report, Dave, that huh that these kids were obviously
(19:55):
asleep when this happened. So my question based upon on
that statement that she made in an interview, like within
like two days, two or three days after this happened.
So talk to me about rigidity. Did you measure rigidity?
Because I don't know, you're telling me that everybody was
(20:16):
obviously asleep, all right, Well, according to what we're hearing now,
particularly based upon the dateline dump that came out, these
bodies were not in the position that we were led
to believe. They certainly weren't tucked into beds, you know,
all snug in the bed. So for the medical legal authority,
(20:36):
I would have to ask what was the extent of
your examination at the scene. Did you check for rigidity
in the bodies? You know, was there stiffness in the jaw,
stiffness in the limbs? You know, where the bodies flaccid? Still?
Could were they movable? And that's that's just on the
point of Roger Mortis alone. I think that that's a
(20:57):
legitimate question that's going to come out. Of course, if
the case goes off in August, which you know we're
thinking it might. I don't know. I sit back and
I think about that data and how it was collected
that's scene. Was rigidity measured? Because you know, my friends,
(21:18):
I got to tell you, you can't measure the stuff at
the morgue. The forensic pathologist if you ever read an
autopsy report, they'll say that when I received the body,
the body was cool to the touch, rocking mortis was
present in the jaw and the extremities. That's their boilerplate,
and they'll talk about post warmal Avidity, we'll get into
(21:40):
that in a second. But you can't that assessment at
the morgue by the forensic pathologist be honestly, you ain't
worth a gunpowdered blow at hell because that data really
doesn't mean anything. The body has been taken out of
context by that time, David. It's a three hour drive
a Moscow to Aida County where these autopsies were done,
(22:05):
and once the bodies are removed, they're going to go
into a cooler, so that's going to affect the data.
You can't and then if there was air conditioning or
no air conditioning running in the van, that's going to
impact once you take those bodies out of that environment.
If you don't do that assessment right then and there
at that moment, it's not worth doing. So that's I
(22:28):
think that's a legitimate question. The stiffness that you encounter
with the human remain it's shocking, you know, when you
(22:52):
and even for me, as you know, a guy that
was involved in this field for a long time, it
was shocking for me. You know, when I would you
still have an expectation when you're around the dead. I mean,
obviously they're human. You still have an expectation they're going
to respond to you like any other human. But the
dead don't respond that way. There is a stiffness that
(23:17):
they have that you don't encounter in any other context.
You can even think about, say, for instance, if there's
somebody resisting you and they're holding their arm like you've
grabbed them by their arm, and that resistance they are
still not the strength of riger It's quite striking. But
(23:39):
here's another thing. You think about the changes in bodies
relative to temperature. If any of you have ever lost
a loved one, and in those last moments when you're
(24:01):
at a funeral home or wherever it is, maybe you're
sitting with a loved one and they pass on, there's
something about the coolness of death. It's it's like no
other type of sensory perception on your part like the
(24:24):
coolness of death. It's like you can, like if you
go outside in the wintertime and your fingers are cold,
or your.
Speaker 2 (24:30):
Nose is cold.
Speaker 1 (24:32):
You've got you've always got the friend that walks up
to you and says, hey, feel this, and they put
their hands on your face, you know, and you retract.
There's something about the coolness of death, and that's one
of the reasons. Even in literature you'll hear terms like
the icy fingers of death. And it's a real thing.
(24:52):
I mean, if you've ever been next to an open
casket and you touch someone in there, there's something it's
the absence of of any kind of life, I think.
And when you're attempting to assess the dead based simply
upon temperature, this is something that most people, I think
(25:17):
out there believe that this is our go to and
for me, it's probably some of the most worthless data
that exists. The reason is is that there are too
many variables involved, and no one can quite seem to
come up with a methodology where they want to measure
(25:38):
the temperature of a body. And let me give you
an example. So you've got a real baseline here when
you're talking about how cool or cold body is, and
you touch the body and people will either say, well,
the body is warm to the touch or cool to
the touch. That's very baseline, very base, right. Then you
(26:01):
have other methodologies that are employed, like using a thermometer. Well,
you run into a lot of problems using a thermometer,
and here are a few. Many people will try to
do what's called an axillary temperature, and that means that
you take a glass thermometer and you place it in
(26:22):
the armpit externally and you place the arm against the armpit,
holding the thermometer in place for about five minutes so
you can get an accurate reading, and all the while
you have another thermometer hanging in the air, suspending the air,
taking the ambient environmental temperature. Now, you can either do
(26:44):
that with an analog thermometer like an old glass thermometer
mercury thermometer, or you can do a temperature reader in
a room which exists widely. Now, and you have to
do this like every I think it's like every You
do it in twenty men in at intervals while you're
at a scene to try to get an idea if you
can get an idea of how the temper here is
(27:05):
dropping off on a body, but it's still wildly inaccurate.
Now there's a whole group of people out there in
medical legal debt investigation. Now I'm about to blow your
mind with what I'm going to tell you. They believe
that it is good practice to take a human body
(27:32):
at a scene. Remember, we have to do everything that's seen.
You can't do it, the more it's worthless data. And
you take scalpel and you take a digital Turkey thermometer.
You make an incision beneath the last rib on the
right side, which is that overlays your liver, which is
(27:55):
the most dense organ in the body. And so you're
looking for what's called and you guys have heard this before,
core body temperature. So once you make that incision, you
take the thermometer and insert it into deliver and it
gives you a pretty instantaneous reading. But here's the problem
(28:15):
with it. If that's your methodology you're going to employ,
it doesn't matter what the case is. If you try
to go to court with that, you better be doing
it every damn time. So that means that did you
get a core temperature on the multiple stablind victim? Just
think about just for a second. Let that seep into
(28:37):
your ground water. So you've got a body at a scene,
a homicide that's got multiple stab wounds. Now you're going
to take a scalpel and make another incision into the
body and then insert the thermometer. Oh and by the way,
this is what they tell you to do. After you've
(28:58):
done this, man marks a lot and make a circle
around your incision and put your initials on it. Now.
I remember the first time I was taught this, I
was thinking, okay, so let me get this straight. You
want me to open a body at a scene where
I'm surrounded by not just police officers, but if I'm outside,
(29:20):
which I have been before, surrounded by angry group of
people and they see me whip out the cold steel
and I'm kneeling over somebody's son. In this environment, I'm
to make an incision in front of this group of
people and insert a digital thermometer. That's what you're asking
me to do. Got it? Good idea? So you know
(29:42):
the problem is is that your adopted practice. You have
to do that every single time. You know, you can't say, well,
I'm going to do it on some cases, I'm not
going to do it on the others. Because if you
take that in that your office adopted policy and you
go into court with it. Defense attorneys can potentially eat
you up. They'll say, well, you did it on all
(30:02):
these other cases, what do you do in this case?
In your data kind of invalid at this point, and
you see how this can become a real problem. And plus,
I don't know, I'm just not a fan of making
incisions in dead bodies at the scene in an uncontrolled environment.
And look, maybe that is very accurate, but I have
(30:22):
to ask this question, and I don't know, is the
data that you're going to glean from that one procedure
is it worth compromising a case. It's kind of like,
you know, for years there were people that said, oh,
well we need to do a rectal temperature at a
(30:44):
scene on a dead body. Well, if that's going to
be your office policy, what about rape cases? Are you
going to take a foreign object at a suspected rape
homicide case and do a rectal temperature at the scene
because you're getting close to the core kind of And
maybe the data is valid, but I think there's more
(31:07):
important evidence that can be gleaned from I don't know, directum.
Speaker 2 (31:12):
Than be destroying evidence. You're ready to get the temperature.
Speaker 1 (31:15):
Absolutely, so is the data actually worth it? Now let
me run this down to you. So with about the
first hour after death, you're going to lose about a
degree and a half to two degrees of temp that's
been generated in life. You're going to lose that temperature
(31:36):
off the body after the first hour. Then for the
next next twelve hours up to the twelfth hour, you're
losing one degree. Okay, So if you start off at
ninety eight point six, you can do the math from there.
So when you get to that twelfth hour after death,
you've heard people say, well, you've assumed room temperature. That's
(31:58):
kind of what it means. That means that you're and
I teach my classes at Jacksonville State this and it's
kind of gruesome, I know, but it's reality. You're just
like any other inanimate object that dwells that same space,
So a piece of furniture, a desk, you know, a
book bag, whatever it is. Because the life that once
(32:19):
existed within that shell of a person, you're no longer
going back cellular the respiration.
Speaker 2 (32:26):
Your body's not.
Speaker 1 (32:27):
Producing anything at that point, Okay, you are truly dead
at that point, and so there's nothing coming off of
the body as far as ratiing heat. Or anything like that.
So that can be it can be a real problem.
That's why my default position, I think pretty much throughout
my career was always either warm to the touch or
(32:48):
cool to the touch. But beyond that, what am I
going to glean by? You know, what they're saying nowadays
is kind of the industry standard of making an incision
and embodying and inserting. And this is happening. You know,
people think, oh, come on morning, now it happens. It
happens out there, there are people engaging in this practice.
I think it's foolhardy, it's reckless. It truly is, because
(33:11):
I think that the data that is obtained from that
that particular procedure, it's not worth the risk of ruining
an entire investigation. So at the risk of being crass,
(33:40):
if you've ever had a stomach virus at any point
in time and you've had to go in to make
an offering to the porcelain God, you have seen your
stomach contents, okay, and it's not a lot different from
what we see in the morgue. The only thing is
is that when you're kneeling before the porcelain God, you're
(34:01):
not studying it as a matter of fact, you're holding
your head and you're thinking, God, please stop the room
from spending. Please, I promise I'll do whatever. I guess
I'm talking about being drunk now, I guess I promise
I'll never do this again. You know, you're making all
these promises to God that I won't do this again.
And if you've got a bug, it's it's horrible as well.
You know, you're you're not thinking about necessarily what's coming
(34:24):
out of you. You just know that it's coming out of you.
And for us in medical legal death investigation, Dave, that's
something that, as disgusting and gross as it sounds, that's
something that we actually take our time trying to understand.
Speaker 2 (34:38):
You know, I told you this before we started. When
Loadanna's nephew was murdered, there was a question he was
giving a friend a ride home and you know, attacked
the victim kind of thing. He was in the wrong
place at the wrong time. Talk about your innocent victim.
He really was. But because he was in his early
twenties and he was out late. It was two thirty
(34:58):
in the morning. They want to know alcohol, drugs, and
stomach contents. Were their pills in there what was going on,
And what they found out was that there was no alcohol,
there was no drug, there was no pills. They actually
had the food that he had when he drove through
Hearty's late at night and got a traditional meal because
he was hungry, and that was one of as weird
(35:21):
as it sounds, it was very comforting for the family
because they had been put through all of this idea
that somehow their dead nephew, their dead grandson deserved it,
you know, And it was like he was giving a
guy a ride home and talk about your innocent victim.
But that was one thing, and we actually they asked
me about that. The family did later on about a
number of things with the case, and is something I
(35:43):
told you too many times people go through an entire
case with a loved one who dies in a way
other than natural, and there is so much going on,
they don't get answers that years later mean something. You know,
why did this happen? Or what does this mean? And
I'm thankful I was able to answer those questions. So
I had to look up a lot of them I knew,
(36:03):
but still I got them those answers, and it really
did help. There was a grieving process that had continued
for fifteen years, and I was able to help with
that in the end. And I did want to ask
you to mention something about Kathy maybut that was the
corner in Idaho. Yeah, you mentioned a few minutes ago,
and I went back and I pulled up my notes
from what did we learn in the first three days?
(36:25):
Because she remember, she was all over the place.
Speaker 1 (36:27):
Yeah, which I gotta let me interject real quick, and
I'll shut my mouth.
Speaker 2 (36:31):
No.
Speaker 1 (36:32):
The thing, no, no, no, The thing about it is
that's foreboden in my world. Yes, you're a corner or
medical examiner, you know, to keep your mouth shut. You're
inside the investigative bubble. You take your cues from the police. Now, look,
if you're an elected corner, godspeed. I mean, you can
do what you want to do, all right.
Speaker 2 (36:51):
And that's what this was correct.
Speaker 1 (36:53):
Oh yeah, yeah, she's and she's a nurse and an attorney, right,
and she got elected to the office of corner, which
is cool. I have no problem with that. However, if
you're inside the investigative bubble, there's just certain things that
we know that we don't because you still have killer
on the loose at this point in tom.
Speaker 2 (37:13):
Right, we're talking two days after Yeah, Yeah, and Joe,
this is what this is a summary, this is what
I've got from it. I was shocked, and I remember
when we had this information of double checking because I thought,
this has got to be wrong. This has got to
be internet rumor. You know, it can't be right, because
I've never heard this coming out of somebody's mouth this
(37:33):
close to an investigation. Multiple stab wounds. She stated that
each victim suffered multiple stab wounds, pretty extensive wounds. Actually,
she described the wounds as pretty extensive, set a large knife.
Victims were likely attacked with a large knife, according to
preliminary autopsy, some defensive wounds. At least one victim showed
(37:54):
signs of defensive wounds, suggesting they may have woken up
during the attack, because if you remember, they were all
attacked while they were sleeping. Yeah, she said some defensive
wounds tears or tears rather tears and big open gouges.
Speaker 1 (38:15):
Not a term I would use, but.
Speaker 2 (38:16):
This is what kaylgan Zava's father said. Kathy Maybe shared
with him, described those wounds on his daughter as big
open gouges and tears. Now. She also said that based
on that the murderer was pretty angry. It was a
pretty angry attacker. They were killed in their beds. Now
(38:41):
we have actually heard a little bit different on this.
Speaker 1 (38:46):
But yeah, we have. Yeah, there's you know, there's a
number of things floating around right now. And again it
comes comes back from of the day Line, the dump
that happened with date Line, which we're still waiting to
find out who leaked that information. It doesn't surprise me
in the news media ran with it, but it's just
the fact that it was, that it's out there. And
(39:07):
again going back to the corner's assessment, you know, you
can talk about I guess if you want to tears
and goalges, which is I.
Speaker 2 (39:17):
Want to ask you something that you could say that
I've got to ask you if what it means? What's
that she said there were no significant bruising. Now we
know that there is a seven hour interval at least
between the times of the murders and the time that
nine one one was called. At least seven hours. Kathy
may but at the time said she thought that might
(39:40):
have been killed around two am. Now they now have
moved that time to after four am, before four thirty am,
before four to twenty actually, but no significant bruising. But
there was a little bit of bruising, but nothing significant.
Is that not an uncommon occurrence in a We're seeing
(40:00):
bodies at least seven and by the time she got
out there, it had to be even more than just seven.
It had to have been closer to ten hours by
the time she got out there. She didn't get out
there in the first thirty minutes or so.
Speaker 1 (40:10):
No, I can't imagine they would have locked They would
have locked the scene down. Police would have had had
a what's over? But if you remember as well, the
DA showed up out there too, I'll never forget, you know,
And apparently he had walked the guy with a big
beard he'd walked through as well at some point in time.
So I guess what it comes down to as far
(40:31):
as the duties of the corner and the assessment of
these kids, is how much data was collected at the
scene relative to you know, we had talked about rigidity,
we had talked about we talked about body temperature. Do
we even have an understanding as to whether or not
(40:51):
the bodies were cool or worn to the touch? I
think that's important. And then you know, bringing it back
to Zanta. What what's the one thing here, and this
isn't a trick question, what's the one thing that we
know that Xana was doing that was she was one
of the last things that she was reportedly doing relative
(41:11):
to food, door Dash she was in door Dash showed
up and you know, one of my questions is what
kind of food was it?
Speaker 2 (41:19):
Was?
Speaker 1 (41:19):
Any of it consumed? And going back to earlier in
the evening when Maddie and Kaylee had one for you know,
they went to the grub truck, right, so they're going
to have food on board as well.
Speaker 2 (41:36):
And would that would that be in their stomach contents?
I mean I don't know enough yah. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (41:40):
So so with generally, generally we as humans and this
this is this is heavily depended upon whether or not
we have we have some kind of gastrointestinal problem. You know,
is our stomach and digestive system functioning normally? Okay, So
(42:03):
that's the caveat to this. So it takes it takes
about four to six hours four to six hours for
the stomach to empty. So where is it empty? It
empties into the small intestine. The small intestine is slower,
you know, small intestine. You know, you heard these wild
(42:23):
stories about how long the small intestine is. Well it
the small intestine takes about twelve hours to eliminate. Okay,
it's going to be So if you block that and
you say, well, what happened, you know during this period
of time, there's not a lot you know, you can
there's some appreciable evidence in the small intestine. But if
(42:47):
you go back to the stomach and you have you
have food remnant in the stomach, gastric content as it
referred to. When you open that stomach, and when we
take out the stomach at autopsy, you clip it at
where essentially I won't go into all the specific anatomical terms,
but just think about where the esophka is coming down,
(43:07):
descending out of the mouth, descends right before it gets
his stomach. You tie it off and you clip it. Okay,
Then you clip the end of the stomach after tying
it off, where it's about to dump into the small intestine,
so you can remove the stomach completely intact without spilling
the contents. It's messy business and most of the time
(43:30):
we will take the stomach away from the body over
to a sink and we've got a pan. If you've
ever seen you know, when you go to a grocery
store and you're going to put produce in a scale,
that pan that you put produce in the scale with,
that's what it looks like. We have those in the morgue.
(43:51):
So we will have the stainless steel pan. We'll open
the stomach in the pan and dump out the contents
in there, and that way we don't lose anything. Because
I've worked with forendsic pathologists in the morgue before that
would literally open the stomach inside the cavity. Well, that's
that's dangerous business because if you don't, if you don't
(44:13):
dissect out the stomach and per the evisceration and you
remove the stomach, if you just try to do it
in there the interior of the body or the cavity, okay,
it's very bloody stuff. You've got standing blood that's in there.
So now you're going to commingle the stomach contents. Everything
(44:34):
gets very confused, so it's best to take it out.
And so if you have stomach content, you know that
this person had eaten four to six hours roughly, because
it takes that time for the stomach to clear all right.
Another thing that's dependent is if you drink. If you
drink a sports shake, okay, that ain't the same as
(44:56):
going and eating a Porterhouse steak and a baked potato.
It's going to take a lot, a lot longer for
that pass through your system. Okay, so you have to
take that into account. But here's what's kind of interesting.
Day you had talked about this loved one of yours
that had died, and he had gone I think you
said he'd gone to Hearty's, which serves these giganic hamburgers.
(45:18):
All right, Well, you know when you get when you
open up the stomach, you can actually appreciate. People think
they chew their food really well, they really don't. You
can actually look. You can see ground beef. Pasta is
one of the worst things. You can see spaghetti. You
can make out what kind of noodles there are. Hot
Dogs are probably at the top of list because they're encased,
(45:39):
so you either have a natural casing, which is like
an intestine, or you have one of the disgusting I'm
a big Nathan's hot dog fan. I love Nathan's because
there they have a natural casing. All right, I'm not
a fan of like things that have I won't name
(46:01):
a brand, things that have synthetic case intona. And so
even with that, hot dogs will remain in place. You'll
see that anything like grains, corn rice, vegetables, broccoli for instance,
Lettuce doesn't. It's not like you chew it up and
it's gone. Generally, things like soups, those sorts of things
(46:24):
where the vegetables that are contained in there are cooked down.
But there's a lot that you can recognize. And the
reason I'm not saying this in order to discuss listeners
what I'm The reason I'm saying this is because there's
valuable information contained in the stomach, particularly if you're talking
about a drug. God, maybe somebody has ingested something that
(46:46):
was toxic. That's why that from that, when we remove
the stomach, will actually get a very large plastic test
tube and will collect the stomach contents and put a
lift on it. We actually submit that to the state
crime lab because you can run you can run test
on that, you can actually do toxicology off of that.
Speaker 2 (47:08):
That's I was going to ask you, how does alcohol
play a factor in what is in your stomach? Like
is wine different than beer? And is whiskey different than
what yeah, well.
Speaker 1 (47:19):
Yeah, well. The thing about it is, this is kind
of an interesting little side. If you've ever been around
somebody that had been as my granddaddy, you say, pulling
a cork the night before, the next the next morning,
I don't care if they brush your teeth, showered, shaved,
(47:39):
put on aqua velva, high karate, English leather, pick your
poison or Georgio. You can still smell the alcohol coming
off their body. If you think that's intense around a
living person. If you've got somebody that has been drinking
the night before and they died, like in a car crash,
(48:01):
or maybe they got no fight and they were hammered,
you know when they when you open the body, and
I'm talking about not even opening some I'm just talking
about the initial opening of the body, it like rushes
out like a big gasse at fist and punches you
right in the nose. You have that smell that like
permeates everything. It's everywhere, and so you can It's the
(48:27):
only way I can really describe it is that it's
sickly sweet. It's got this sickly sweet odor to it,
much like you know the smell that comes off of
somebody's body that's been drunk. They have that kind of
sickly sweet smell. It's even more pronounced in the dead
when you open the body. I used to work with
forensic pathologists. Guy's dead now. He was really, really old
and very listen. To say that forensic pathologists are eccentric
(48:54):
is an insult to eccentric people, because they are so
so eccentric. This guy used to claim, and he was
he he fancied himself a wine connoisseur. He was in
New Orleans, so you'd go to all of these beautiful
creole restaurants and he would always sample wise. He used
to claim that just by the odor, he could claim
(49:14):
he could state what type of wine they had been drinking.
I'm thinking, you're so full of it's you're so full
of it. You can't do that. But for us, you know,
in the morgue, the gastric content tells a lot about
the activity of an individual. You know, we don't think
about like passively. If we're if we're eating, if we're
(49:37):
eating either for nutrition or we're eating because of stress
or whatever. We might pick up a handful of something
We're gonna pop it in our mouth or we just
grab a quick something to eat. Well, you don't know
if that ingestion of that thing is going to be
the last thing you ever consume and that's going to
travel with you. So that's one of the reasons. And
(49:59):
I from a scientific standpoint, I value the information that
I gleaned from gast content. But probably out of all
of the postmarm interval elements, it has to be postmarmal
avidity or live mortis for me. And here's why all
(50:20):
of these other things are so and particularly riger mortis
and an alger mortise, which is body temperature, they're so
heavily environmentally dependent, Dave liver mortis is not so. Just
imagine if you've got someone that dies sitting like the
(50:42):
guy you know, I showed you the image the other
day when we did the first segment of this teaching
series about decomposition. The guy that was seated in the chair, well,
the guy that was seated in the chair that died
of an m I just a natural death, had a
heart attack based upon how he seated. The blood because
(51:02):
it's no longer pumping through the body, it's going to
settle to the gravitationally dependent areas of his body. Gravity
is like the one constant universe that kind of never changes. Now,
if I had I've got an old friend that's an astrophysicist,
probably one of the brightest people I've ever met in
my life. As you can imagine Country's butter too. You
wouldn't you wouldn't suspect this guy's got PhD In astrophysics
(51:25):
from Clemson. I used to eat lunch with him. I
just sit there amazed by this guy. He would dispute
this with me because you know, I'd say gravity is
the one constant, it doesn't vary. He say, oh, well,
if you go to the poles, it's different. You know,
if you're on the equator, it's different. We understand what
we're saying here. It's not as it's not as variable
as temperature.
Speaker 2 (51:45):
All right.
Speaker 1 (51:46):
So if you're seated in a chairing and you have
somebody that passes away, the blood is going to settle
well to the ankles, the feet. We'll actually see the
feet swell, they'll turn purple. That's why it's called How
many times have you ever heard somebody say they didn't
have another adjue to describe how angry they were, and
(52:08):
they said, I was livid like that. Well, that's where
we get this term live or mortis. It's or post
mortem lividity. It's that kind of purple coloration that comes
on the body. And it's not a decompositional change, you know,
where you'll see bodies that will go kind of purple
and black and that sort of thing. It's not like that.
This is the blood pooling. It goes first to the vessels,
(52:32):
the capillary beds. They're not meant for storing blood, they're
meant for moving blood. And those little beds burst and
when they burst, it leaches out into what's called the
interstitial tissue, the kind of the fatty tissue that surrounds
all the vessels and it stains it. And dude, once
it's gotten in there, you can't change it. So if
(52:54):
you like, for instance, we have cases where people will
be killed in one location, the person might think about
whether they're going to do with the body. They'll crumple
up the body after it's been laying on the floor
for about an hour or two hours, and they'll put
them in a trunk. Well, the first time they lay
them on their left side, they've been laying on the
left side where they were killed, they place them on
(53:14):
the trunk, laying on the right side. So you might
have two presentations of post mortal avidity. And before it
gets fixed, it can actually migrate around, and that's a
real problem, you know, if you're trying to do an assessment.
So it takes a measured point in time for post
mortal avidity to fix, and once it's fixed and it
(53:36):
stains the skin, it's not going to move. And so
if you've got a body, if we come to a
scene and we've got an individual that is lying in
a prone position, which means their chest is in contact
with the ground, and I show up at the scene
and they're laying like that, but yet they've got post
mortal avidity between their shoulder blades, I'm going to know
(54:00):
that before I arrived, somebody moved that body. At one
point in time, they were face up and then all
of a sudden, someone got the grand idea to either
flip them or move them, you know. And this goes
to scene staging as well. Well. Going back to our
four unfortunate students in Idaho, based upon the timeframe of
(54:24):
postmartal lividity, I can tell you this post wal avidity
is close to being completely fixed by the time the
corner shows up at the scene. That's how much of
a lag time you've had. And the way we test
it in the way I would hope that she had
tested it at the scene is if you get one
(54:45):
of these big purple, vivacious areas, if you take your
thumb on a gloved hand and you depress that area
that's purple and it doesn't blanch, it still stays. That
means it's fixed. That means that those little appt their
beds have erupted and it's still you know, it's no
longer blanchable, whereas you can get that staining.
Speaker 2 (55:08):
But if you.
Speaker 1 (55:09):
Press it and it blanches, that's called blanchable avidity. That
means that it hasn't fixed yet. And so for both
of those, both those instances, there's a measured amount of
time that you know, it takes for this to occur.
So when we're looking it'll be a parent. You can
(55:31):
see it kind of pop up on the radar within
twenty to thirty minutes after death. It's kind of like
the kid that you saw when you I wasn't one
of these kids that could do that that you go
to playground with and they can hang upside down the
monkey bars and their head turns the red and it
kind of swells. Less blood set now it still moving,
(55:52):
but you know what I'm saying. So if within twenty
to thirty minutes, you'll see the blood kind of pooling
in these areas and it's going to take and intensity
is going to increase up until about the seventh or
eight hour, and then it's there. It's not moving. So
wouldn't that be an interesting set of data to have
(56:15):
about the cases in Idaho? Was a lividity fixed where
there are multiple presentations of lividity. And I hope, I
certainly hope that coming up in August that all of
these questions there are many, but all of these questions
(56:37):
that can be answered, and that can be answered through
science and that assessment that hopefully took place on that
day back in twenty twenty two in November, I hope
it will thorough and I hope that we learned more
about what happened that night. I'm Joseph got Morgan and
(57:00):
this is bodybags.
Speaker 2 (57:10):
H
Quality diamonds, but Joseph's gotten more. I don't know about y'all,
but I think about temperature every day, and generally it
has to do with determining how much money I'll have
at the end of the month to pay for my
air conditioning bill, because I hate being an old I
(00:23):
don't even like I'm not even gonna say hot. I
hate being in a warm house. I like being in
a cool house. And unfortunately my desire for physical comfort
is noncompatible with summertime in the Deep South. I'm gonna
wind up having a huge electric bill at the end
(00:44):
of every month, guaranteed. I think about temp in that sense.
But you know, I thought about temp for a long
time as a death investigator, because we use temperature in
order to determine how long it's been since someone has
(01:06):
I don't know, been cast off this mortal coil in
the words of the Bard, and there are a lot
of indicators that we look for, and today on bodybags,
we're going to have a discussion about PMI post mortem interval,
(01:27):
and in particular, we're going to have a discussion that
ties back to a case that it's currently in the
news and will be for months and months to come
the murder of the four students in Idaho. I'm Joseph
Scott Morgan and this is bodybacks, David. I don't know
(01:52):
if you recall this, but have you have you ever
been around in it's generally a grandparent. It doesn't matter
if it is as hot as the surface of the
sun outside. They're going to run the heat. They're going
to put a shawl around them or a blanket. Yeah,
(02:14):
they're going to have like woolen socks on. And a
part of that is getting old, you know, you lose
muscle masks.
Speaker 2 (02:22):
You you funny bit about old people being cold? Why
is this so cold in feezing?
Speaker 1 (02:31):
It's so cold in it? Thought about that in years. Yeah,
what a great stand up that was. Uh yeah, it's
so cold in heal baby.
Speaker 2 (02:41):
But why is that? Because I had these two women
that were they were sisters and they were like the
Snoop sisters back in the day on the Waltons. Yeah yeah,
I think they're combined age with three hundred and fifty seven.
But I remember my mother in law was afraid something
had happened to one of them and asked me to
take were over there because they wouldn't answer the phone.
(03:02):
And as we got to the house, Joe, it was
August in Alabama, so it was probably in the upper nineties,
late afternoon. We were already sweating from the humidity, and
I could hear their TV as we got to the door.
They had it turned up very loud. And when my
mother in law opened the door, just you know, was
knocking on it and the door cracked open, I felt
(03:23):
the heat hit me. I actually backed up the heat
from the house and I thought, oh, they're dead. Yeah,
And they were in there and they were bundled up,
both of them, both of them bundled up with the
heat going. And it's ninety eight degrees outside. That was
freaky to me.
Speaker 1 (03:37):
Yeah, and it's probably equally as hot in that house,
yeahsty Yeah, And it's terrifying on one level. Do you remember,
I know, I know that you do. The summer God,
it was I know, well over a decade. You remember
that summer of horror they had in Chicago. Oh yeah,
(03:57):
where it was so hot. Yep, the old people were
dying in their homes. And I knew the chief and
me at the time for Cook County, which is Chicago,
Ed what's his name, doctor Ed Donahue, I think, great
forensic pathologist and a heck of a nice guy. I mean,
(04:18):
just a really really cool cat. And anyway, it was
and this happened right before this happened right before he
retired from Cook County. I can see why this would
be something that will push you over this because they
had people that were dying left and right, and you know,
that's that's kind of a story for another day, but
it's you know, it's deaths related to hypothermia, uher hyper thermia, Yeah,
(04:43):
as opposed to hypo.
Speaker 2 (04:44):
So I had me to run with that. But I'm
just curious, man, that you mentioned the old people and heat.
Do they really I mean, do as we age, do
we feel colder?
Speaker 1 (04:54):
I mean, yeah, I think I think the perception is right.
I'm not a geriatric specialist, but.
Speaker 2 (05:02):
I'm becoming a geriatric. You'll have to, you're qualified. I
think that one of the things that occurs. First off,
you're losing you're losing mass in your body. You know,
your insulation is kind of dwindling away, fat layer, muscle layer,
And in addition to that, you don't have the same
(05:24):
robust circulatory system that you once had. And so therefore
you're gonna feel cooler or you'll feel like, you know,
I know, my grandmother always said she feel like she
had a chill on her, you know, And that's that's
kind of a common theme, you know, that kind of
runs through it as you get older.
Speaker 1 (05:42):
It hadn't hit me yet. I mean, I can tell you.
I'll sit around and I'll be sweating, and I'll look
at him and I'll say, hey, what's the air conditioning on?
She'll say sixty eight. I'll say, wow, it's really hot
in here, and she'll say, turn the fan up her.
And that's another thing. We can't sleep without a fan on.
I'm addicted to it. I even use a fan. I
(06:04):
use a fan app on my phone when I'm traveling.
That's how addicted to fans I am. And it lasts
for it lasts literally for ten hours.
Speaker 2 (06:13):
So on meeting one Dago, my name's Dave, that's it.
I'm addicted of.
Speaker 1 (06:19):
Hey, all right, so pos yeah, yeah, yeah, post warum
interval I it's it's you know, you hear this term
is thrown around. I'm guilty of using it. I can't
say guilty because it's an abbreviation, but h you know,
so it's it's p M. I you'll hear use that
(06:39):
term constantly, but it is postmar interval and the the
four big categories that we look at when we're trying
to assess the dead, and that is going to be
riger mortise or rigor it's pronounced both ways. Uh. We
(07:00):
have post mortem lividity, which is also uh the term
uh live or mortise. Then we have alger mortise, not
to be confused with a former vice president and it
and and then we have then we have gasterric content.
(07:20):
So you have four areas that are really kind of
exploited by us in in circles of death investigation to
give us, you know, to try to do. And really
what it is, Dave, it's a it's a snapshot of time. Okay,
and we go out and we try to do these assessments.
(07:43):
Let me tell you this, and I'll say this right
up front. This is kind of my you know, word
of warning here. None of the stuff is accurate to
the point where you could bet your life on it. Okay,
It's not like it's not a true quantitative measurement where
(08:07):
you can say with precision. I'm talking about like Swiss
watch precision where you can say this is the exact
moment in time when they took their last breath. That's
mathematically it's impossible to do that. You cannot do that.
I actually went to I'll never forget it. I was
(08:30):
at a conference one time. By the way, I recommend
highly that if you're interested in becoming a medical legal
death investigator. The mother church of all medical legal death
investigation is Saint Louis University in Saint Louis, Missouri, School
of Medicine, Department of Forensic Pathology. There are four classes
(08:50):
that are offered every year in intro to medical legal
death Investigation. I went through the class in I finally
got a spot in nineteen eighty seven. I've been working
looking for over two years by that time. And it
is a rigorous program.
Speaker 2 (09:04):
You go for.
Speaker 1 (09:08):
Five days, it's eight hours a day, and it is
they don't knowledge into your brain in this place, like
you can't imagine. There's no really no breaks in here.
So you're you're learning among the finest. You're learning from
the finest at the medical school. And it was there
(09:28):
that I first got, you know, really my intro in
a class sense. At Saint Louis University to how do
we how do we determine, you know, how somebody how
long someone has been dead. And there's a program called
the Master's program that's only offered like every other summer,
and you have to have attended the basic course first.
And I went to this thing. They had this guy
(09:48):
from Germany and Dave. This is in the days. It
wasn't a chalkboard, but he had a whiteboard up on
the stage and it wasn't one, it was three. And
he had created a formula that extended over the surfaces
of three whiteboards. And he claimed that he had the
magic bullet to determining time of death. And I remember
(10:13):
there were a bunch of us sitting there and we
just we're just kind of rolling our eyes. First off,
no one has this much time. This is only something
a university professor could do. When you're in tempo and
you're out in the field and you're you've got a
homicide that you're working, and you might have a suicide holding,
a motor vehicle accident holding. You're going to glean as
(10:34):
much information at the homicide as you possibly can. You
got to move on to the next case. He had
taken years to compile this data in a perfect world,
you know, maybe it had some utility maybe, but still
to this day, they can't give you a specific time
of death. So that's kind of my warning before we
(10:54):
get into all of this. So if you ever come
across someone that actually tells you that they can do it,
that they can give you an exact time, run, don't
walk out away.
Speaker 2 (11:05):
For years, I really did think you could come within
fifteen minutes of knowing. I really did until I talk
to you about it, because I didn't know. I mean,
you watch TV. Oh I see he had a corn
in his diarrhea. That means you know.
Speaker 1 (11:19):
Yeah, it's the best we can do. And I'd say
the best I've ever been able to do just looking
at the numbers alone that we collect and the examination
that we do at the scene. Maybe maybe four hours,
maybe four to five.
Speaker 2 (11:34):
And now can you take this in with the other timeline, right, I.
Speaker 1 (11:36):
Mean right, you have to. That's that's to the exclusion
of circumstantial you know, I last saw him at this time. Okay,
I'm just talking about pure science now, as pure as
it can be in that kind of environment. So it's
a not controlled, a non controlled environment and everything, and
I mean just about everything we're going to discuss right
now is environmentally dependent. So I think that it's really
(11:57):
important that we keep our wits about us and just
understand that.
Speaker 2 (12:00):
So it's fascinating. It's amazing that you have to truly
know investigation beyond just the like you mentioned the guy
uses three whiteboards to write a formula down to put
this to get it, and yet it actually does. There's
more to it than just the nuts and bolts. You
have to actually investigate the person's life to know about
(12:22):
their death.
Speaker 1 (12:24):
Yeah, and that lecture lasted for it was like two
hours and forty five minutes, and I wish I had
that time back. It did demonstrate to me. It did
demonstrate to me, however, that nobody really knows. I mean,
nobody really knows. And you know, I guess you could say, well,
somebody's sitting in front of a clock, and this is
(12:45):
an old example people have used before. I've heard it stated.
And they're shot and it's a thurn through wound and
it hits the clock and the clock stops. And so
you marry that up with it if you get to
the body at you know, what is it? They say?
A broken A broken clock is right twice a day,
so even that has a caveat to it. But for me,
(13:06):
for me, I think starting off with rigidity otherwise known
as riger mortis.
Speaker 2 (13:14):
When does that happen?
Speaker 1 (13:14):
Jim, Well, it begins, you know, you first begin to
appreciate it pretty It's not immediate, and this is kind
of how it works. So if you think about the
muscle groupings in your body, and I'm talking about like
the tiny muscles that you even have, like that surrounds
(13:38):
your eyelids, it happens everywhere. Okay, it happens simultaneously where
you have this rigidity that begins to set in throughout
the body. And a lot of people will say it
starts in the small muscles of the body and extends
out to larger ones. That's a fallacy. That's inaccurate. It
(14:00):
starts everywhere, everywhere simultaneously. However, it's most appreciated in the
small muscles, and then the larger muscle groups are slower,
you know, to kind of come around. So I'll give
you a great example of this. You might not have rigidity,
say in the elbows, the wrist, maybe the shoulders, and
(14:23):
certainly in the knees. But if you and this is
one of the things. This is the first area I
always go to to check a body for rigidity, and
that's the mouth. If I press down on the chin
in order to try to open the mouth and I'm
struggling with it. This is what I know. That muscle
grouping that is adjacent to where your jaw fits in
(14:47):
de mandible actually fits in to that joint like the
TMJ when it goes in there, those muscle groups are
most affected. They're tiny, Okay, So you get this rigidity
that sets and the jaw. And yet people say you
can appreciate it in the eyelids. I've never really seen that.
I guess clinically they say you can. But for me
(15:09):
as a practitioner on the field, the jaw would be
where I would go to first, and then it kind
of extends out from there. You know, the smaller, smaller
muscle groups, you'll see it, you know, like in the fingers,
you know, or in the toes before you're going to
see it in the ankles or the knees, are certainly
in the hips. But what's what has occurred is that
(15:32):
we are dependent. We are dependent in life on what's
called cellular respiration. And so those cells are living, breathing
all right. When they begin to shut down. When they
begin to shut down, cellular respiration has ceased, and so
(15:53):
the body, the body generally you I'm not going to
go into great detail, but there's crib cycle and it
throws off these little balls of energy. Okay, ATP, Well
that ceases, then you begin to produce ADP. And one
of the products of ADP is actually lactic acid. So
(16:13):
if you have ever worked out, if you've ever worked
out in your life, and you hadn't done it in
a while, and you wake up the next morning and
you're stiff as a board, Look, you can go take
all the motrin and tile and all and aspirin and
everything else you want to take, but sooner or later,
that rigidity is going to leave your body. That's actually
(16:33):
a lactic acid build up that you're having, you're experiencing
and your joints. The reality is, because we're upright and
still breathing, our body metabolizes that. Okay, the dead can't,
the can't. The can't, they can't do it at the
same rate that we do in life. Now after a
period of time, and this is one of important things
(16:56):
about rigidity. After a period of time, time that lactic
acid build up in the dead begins to back out
and it leaves all right. So there's I think that
there's a common common thought where people believe that, hey,
you know what, once you're here, here's and we've heard
(17:18):
this before, once you're cold and stiff, man, you're cold
and stiff. Well, no you'll be you'll be cold, but
you ain't gonna be stiff because that your your arms,
your legs, your hips, your jaw, everything becomes flacid. Once again,
you revert back. So you have to you have to
(17:40):
be there like Johnny on the spot. So what are
you looking at relative to this, Well, it's first noticeable.
The rigidity, the ryger mortis is first noticeable. It's going
to take about one to three hours. A lot of
it's going to be, first off, dependent upon the physiology
of the person, and then it's also going to be
(18:01):
dependent upon the ambient environmental temperature. And we always have
to remember that anything that involves heat speeds things up.
So it's going to take about ten to twelve hours
for it to be complete. So why is that important
if we're death investigators. Well, it's very important because if
I show up at a scene, Dave, and the body
(18:23):
is completely rigid, like you can't move it, then I'm
going to hazard guests. Based on ryger morts loan, that
person's been dead for ten to twelve hours perhaps, So
my question is going back to Idaho. I'm not being
(18:49):
disrespectful here. It's a legitimate question. We have such a
delay and when those students were last known alleged to
have been alive. Okay, the big number that everybody talks
about is slightly after four am, roughly, okay, give or
(19:09):
take all, right, going down until you know about half
past the hour. That nine one one call doesn't originate
until like eleven something am almost so yeah, almost twelve,
So you know you're looking at seven seven hours, I
(19:29):
guess roughly, and you'd have to bracket that very carefully.
I'm I'm curious. This is dangerous ground here. I'm curious
as to what the coroner saw because she said in
one report, Dave, that huh that these kids were obviously
(19:55):
asleep when this happened. So my question based upon on
that statement that she made in an interview, like within
like two days, two or three days after this happened.
So talk to me about rigidity. Did you measure rigidity?
Because I don't know, you're telling me that everybody was
(20:16):
obviously asleep, all right, Well, according to what we're hearing now,
particularly based upon the dateline dump that came out, these
bodies were not in the position that we were led
to believe. They certainly weren't tucked into beds, you know,
all snug in the bed. So for the medical legal authority,
(20:36):
I would have to ask what was the extent of
your examination at the scene. Did you check for rigidity
in the bodies? You know, was there stiffness in the jaw,
stiffness in the limbs? You know, where the bodies flaccid? Still?
Could were they movable? And that's that's just on the
point of Roger Mortis alone. I think that that's a
(20:57):
legitimate question that's going to come out. Of course, if
the case goes off in August, which you know we're
thinking it might. I don't know. I sit back and
I think about that data and how it was collected
that's scene. Was rigidity measured? Because you know, my friends,
(21:18):
I got to tell you, you can't measure the stuff at
the morgue. The forensic pathologist if you ever read an
autopsy report, they'll say that when I received the body,
the body was cool to the touch, rocking mortis was
present in the jaw and the extremities. That's their boilerplate,
and they'll talk about post warmal Avidity, we'll get into
(21:40):
that in a second. But you can't that assessment at
the morgue by the forensic pathologist be honestly, you ain't
worth a gunpowdered blow at hell because that data really
doesn't mean anything. The body has been taken out of
context by that time, David. It's a three hour drive
a Moscow to Aida County where these autopsies were done,
(22:05):
and once the bodies are removed, they're going to go
into a cooler, so that's going to affect the data.
You can't and then if there was air conditioning or
no air conditioning running in the van, that's going to
impact once you take those bodies out of that environment.
If you don't do that assessment right then and there
at that moment, it's not worth doing. So that's I
(22:28):
think that's a legitimate question. The stiffness that you encounter
with the human remain it's shocking, you know, when you
(22:52):
and even for me, as you know, a guy that
was involved in this field for a long time, it
was shocking for me. You know, when I would you
still have an expectation when you're around the dead. I mean,
obviously they're human. You still have an expectation they're going
to respond to you like any other human. But the
dead don't respond that way. There is a stiffness that
(23:17):
they have that you don't encounter in any other context.
You can even think about, say, for instance, if there's
somebody resisting you and they're holding their arm like you've
grabbed them by their arm, and that resistance they are
still not the strength of riger It's quite striking. But
(23:39):
here's another thing. You think about the changes in bodies
relative to temperature. If any of you have ever lost
a loved one, and in those last moments when you're
(24:01):
at a funeral home or wherever it is, maybe you're
sitting with a loved one and they pass on, there's
something about the coolness of death. It's it's like no
other type of sensory perception on your part like the
(24:24):
coolness of death. It's like you can, like if you
go outside in the wintertime and your fingers are cold,
or your.
Speaker 2 (24:30):
Nose is cold.
Speaker 1 (24:32):
You've got you've always got the friend that walks up
to you and says, hey, feel this, and they put
their hands on your face, you know, and you retract.
There's something about the coolness of death, and that's one
of the reasons. Even in literature you'll hear terms like
the icy fingers of death. And it's a real thing.
(24:52):
I mean, if you've ever been next to an open
casket and you touch someone in there, there's something it's
the absence of of any kind of life, I think.
And when you're attempting to assess the dead based simply
upon temperature, this is something that most people, I think
(25:17):
out there believe that this is our go to and
for me, it's probably some of the most worthless data
that exists. The reason is is that there are too
many variables involved, and no one can quite seem to
come up with a methodology where they want to measure
(25:38):
the temperature of a body. And let me give you
an example. So you've got a real baseline here when
you're talking about how cool or cold body is, and
you touch the body and people will either say, well,
the body is warm to the touch or cool to
the touch. That's very baseline, very base, right. Then you
(26:01):
have other methodologies that are employed, like using a thermometer. Well,
you run into a lot of problems using a thermometer,
and here are a few. Many people will try to
do what's called an axillary temperature, and that means that
you take a glass thermometer and you place it in
(26:22):
the armpit externally and you place the arm against the armpit,
holding the thermometer in place for about five minutes so
you can get an accurate reading, and all the while
you have another thermometer hanging in the air, suspending the air,
taking the ambient environmental temperature. Now, you can either do
(26:44):
that with an analog thermometer like an old glass thermometer
mercury thermometer, or you can do a temperature reader in
a room which exists widely. Now, and you have to
do this like every I think it's like every You
do it in twenty men in at intervals while you're
at a scene to try to get an idea if you
can get an idea of how the temper here is
(27:05):
dropping off on a body, but it's still wildly inaccurate.
Now there's a whole group of people out there in
medical legal debt investigation. Now I'm about to blow your
mind with what I'm going to tell you. They believe
that it is good practice to take a human body
(27:32):
at a scene. Remember, we have to do everything that's seen.
You can't do it, the more it's worthless data. And
you take scalpel and you take a digital Turkey thermometer.
You make an incision beneath the last rib on the
right side, which is that overlays your liver, which is
(27:55):
the most dense organ in the body. And so you're
looking for what's called and you guys have heard this before,
core body temperature. So once you make that incision, you
take the thermometer and insert it into deliver and it
gives you a pretty instantaneous reading. But here's the problem
(28:15):
with it. If that's your methodology you're going to employ,
it doesn't matter what the case is. If you try
to go to court with that, you better be doing
it every damn time. So that means that did you
get a core temperature on the multiple stablind victim? Just
think about just for a second. Let that seep into
(28:37):
your ground water. So you've got a body at a scene,
a homicide that's got multiple stab wounds. Now you're going
to take a scalpel and make another incision into the
body and then insert the thermometer. Oh and by the way,
this is what they tell you to do. After you've
(28:58):
done this, man marks a lot and make a circle
around your incision and put your initials on it. Now.
I remember the first time I was taught this, I
was thinking, okay, so let me get this straight. You
want me to open a body at a scene where
I'm surrounded by not just police officers, but if I'm outside,
(29:20):
which I have been before, surrounded by angry group of
people and they see me whip out the cold steel
and I'm kneeling over somebody's son. In this environment, I'm
to make an incision in front of this group of
people and insert a digital thermometer. That's what you're asking
me to do. Got it? Good idea? So you know
(29:42):
the problem is is that your adopted practice. You have
to do that every single time. You know, you can't say, well,
I'm going to do it on some cases, I'm not
going to do it on the others. Because if you
take that in that your office adopted policy and you
go into court with it. Defense attorneys can potentially eat
you up. They'll say, well, you did it on all
(30:02):
these other cases, what do you do in this case?
In your data kind of invalid at this point, and
you see how this can become a real problem. And plus,
I don't know, I'm just not a fan of making
incisions in dead bodies at the scene in an uncontrolled environment.
And look, maybe that is very accurate, but I have
(30:22):
to ask this question, and I don't know, is the
data that you're going to glean from that one procedure
is it worth compromising a case. It's kind of like,
you know, for years there were people that said, oh,
well we need to do a rectal temperature at a
(30:44):
scene on a dead body. Well, if that's going to
be your office policy, what about rape cases? Are you
going to take a foreign object at a suspected rape
homicide case and do a rectal temperature at the scene
because you're getting close to the core kind of And
maybe the data is valid, but I think there's more
(31:07):
important evidence that can be gleaned from I don't know, directum.
Speaker 2 (31:12):
Than be destroying evidence. You're ready to get the temperature.
Speaker 1 (31:15):
Absolutely, so is the data actually worth it? Now let
me run this down to you. So with about the
first hour after death, you're going to lose about a
degree and a half to two degrees of temp that's
been generated in life. You're going to lose that temperature
(31:36):
off the body after the first hour. Then for the
next next twelve hours up to the twelfth hour, you're
losing one degree. Okay, So if you start off at
ninety eight point six, you can do the math from there.
So when you get to that twelfth hour after death,
you've heard people say, well, you've assumed room temperature. That's
(31:58):
kind of what it means. That means that you're and
I teach my classes at Jacksonville State this and it's
kind of gruesome, I know, but it's reality. You're just
like any other inanimate object that dwells that same space,
So a piece of furniture, a desk, you know, a
book bag, whatever it is. Because the life that once
(32:19):
existed within that shell of a person, you're no longer
going back cellular the respiration.
Speaker 2 (32:26):
Your body's not.
Speaker 1 (32:27):
Producing anything at that point, Okay, you are truly dead
at that point, and so there's nothing coming off of
the body as far as ratiing heat. Or anything like that.
So that can be it can be a real problem.
That's why my default position, I think pretty much throughout
my career was always either warm to the touch or
(32:48):
cool to the touch. But beyond that, what am I
going to glean by? You know, what they're saying nowadays
is kind of the industry standard of making an incision
and embodying and inserting. And this is happening. You know,
people think, oh, come on morning, now it happens. It
happens out there, there are people engaging in this practice.
I think it's foolhardy, it's reckless. It truly is, because
(33:11):
I think that the data that is obtained from that
that particular procedure, it's not worth the risk of ruining
an entire investigation. So at the risk of being crass,
(33:40):
if you've ever had a stomach virus at any point
in time and you've had to go in to make
an offering to the porcelain God, you have seen your
stomach contents, okay, and it's not a lot different from
what we see in the morgue. The only thing is
is that when you're kneeling before the porcelain God, you're
(34:01):
not studying it as a matter of fact, you're holding
your head and you're thinking, God, please stop the room
from spending. Please, I promise I'll do whatever. I guess
I'm talking about being drunk now, I guess I promise
I'll never do this again. You know, you're making all
these promises to God that I won't do this again.
And if you've got a bug, it's it's horrible as well.
You know, you're you're not thinking about necessarily what's coming
(34:24):
out of you. You just know that it's coming out of you.
And for us in medical legal death investigation, Dave, that's
something that, as disgusting and gross as it sounds, that's
something that we actually take our time trying to understand.
Speaker 2 (34:38):
You know, I told you this before we started. When
Loadanna's nephew was murdered, there was a question he was
giving a friend a ride home and you know, attacked
the victim kind of thing. He was in the wrong
place at the wrong time. Talk about your innocent victim.
He really was. But because he was in his early
twenties and he was out late. It was two thirty
(34:58):
in the morning. They want to know alcohol, drugs, and
stomach contents. Were their pills in there what was going on,
And what they found out was that there was no alcohol,
there was no drug, there was no pills. They actually
had the food that he had when he drove through
Hearty's late at night and got a traditional meal because
he was hungry, and that was one of as weird
(35:21):
as it sounds, it was very comforting for the family
because they had been put through all of this idea
that somehow their dead nephew, their dead grandson deserved it,
you know, And it was like he was giving a
guy a ride home and talk about your innocent victim.
But that was one thing, and we actually they asked
me about that. The family did later on about a
number of things with the case, and is something I
(35:43):
told you too many times people go through an entire
case with a loved one who dies in a way
other than natural, and there is so much going on,
they don't get answers that years later mean something. You know,
why did this happen? Or what does this mean? And
I'm thankful I was able to answer those questions. So
I had to look up a lot of them I knew,
(36:03):
but still I got them those answers, and it really
did help. There was a grieving process that had continued
for fifteen years, and I was able to help with
that in the end. And I did want to ask
you to mention something about Kathy maybut that was the
corner in Idaho. Yeah, you mentioned a few minutes ago,
and I went back and I pulled up my notes
from what did we learn in the first three days?
(36:25):
Because she remember, she was all over the place.
Speaker 1 (36:27):
Yeah, which I gotta let me interject real quick, and
I'll shut my mouth.
Speaker 2 (36:31):
No.
Speaker 1 (36:32):
The thing, no, no, no, The thing about it is
that's foreboden in my world. Yes, you're a corner or
medical examiner, you know, to keep your mouth shut. You're
inside the investigative bubble. You take your cues from the police. Now, look,
if you're an elected corner, godspeed. I mean, you can
do what you want to do, all right.
Speaker 2 (36:51):
And that's what this was correct.
Speaker 1 (36:53):
Oh yeah, yeah, she's and she's a nurse and an attorney, right,
and she got elected to the office of corner, which
is cool. I have no problem with that. However, if
you're inside the investigative bubble, there's just certain things that
we know that we don't because you still have killer
on the loose at this point in tom.
Speaker 2 (37:13):
Right, we're talking two days after Yeah, Yeah, and Joe,
this is what this is a summary, this is what
I've got from it. I was shocked, and I remember
when we had this information of double checking because I thought,
this has got to be wrong. This has got to
be internet rumor. You know, it can't be right, because
I've never heard this coming out of somebody's mouth this
(37:33):
close to an investigation. Multiple stab wounds. She stated that
each victim suffered multiple stab wounds, pretty extensive wounds. Actually,
she described the wounds as pretty extensive, set a large knife.
Victims were likely attacked with a large knife, according to
preliminary autopsy, some defensive wounds. At least one victim showed
(37:54):
signs of defensive wounds, suggesting they may have woken up
during the attack, because if you remember, they were all
attacked while they were sleeping. Yeah, she said some defensive
wounds tears or tears rather tears and big open gouges.
Speaker 1 (38:15):
Not a term I would use, but.
Speaker 2 (38:16):
This is what kaylgan Zava's father said. Kathy Maybe shared
with him, described those wounds on his daughter as big
open gouges and tears. Now. She also said that based
on that the murderer was pretty angry. It was a
pretty angry attacker. They were killed in their beds. Now
(38:41):
we have actually heard a little bit different on this.
Speaker 1 (38:46):
But yeah, we have. Yeah, there's you know, there's a
number of things floating around right now. And again it
comes comes back from of the day Line, the dump
that happened with date Line, which we're still waiting to
find out who leaked that information. It doesn't surprise me
in the news media ran with it, but it's just
the fact that it was, that it's out there. And
(39:07):
again going back to the corner's assessment, you know, you
can talk about I guess if you want to tears
and goalges, which is I.
Speaker 2 (39:17):
Want to ask you something that you could say that
I've got to ask you if what it means? What's
that she said there were no significant bruising. Now we
know that there is a seven hour interval at least
between the times of the murders and the time that
nine one one was called. At least seven hours. Kathy
may but at the time said she thought that might
(39:40):
have been killed around two am. Now they now have
moved that time to after four am, before four thirty am,
before four to twenty actually, but no significant bruising. But
there was a little bit of bruising, but nothing significant.
Is that not an uncommon occurrence in a We're seeing
(40:00):
bodies at least seven and by the time she got
out there, it had to be even more than just seven.
It had to have been closer to ten hours by
the time she got out there. She didn't get out
there in the first thirty minutes or so.
Speaker 1 (40:10):
No, I can't imagine they would have locked They would
have locked the scene down. Police would have had had
a what's over? But if you remember as well, the
DA showed up out there too, I'll never forget, you know,
And apparently he had walked the guy with a big
beard he'd walked through as well at some point in time.
So I guess what it comes down to as far
(40:31):
as the duties of the corner and the assessment of
these kids, is how much data was collected at the
scene relative to you know, we had talked about rigidity,
we had talked about we talked about body temperature. Do
we even have an understanding as to whether or not
(40:51):
the bodies were cool or worn to the touch? I
think that's important. And then you know, bringing it back
to Zanta. What what's the one thing here, and this
isn't a trick question, what's the one thing that we
know that Xana was doing that was she was one
of the last things that she was reportedly doing relative
(41:11):
to food, door Dash she was in door Dash showed
up and you know, one of my questions is what
kind of food was it?
Speaker 2 (41:19):
Was?
Speaker 1 (41:19):
Any of it consumed? And going back to earlier in
the evening when Maddie and Kaylee had one for you know,
they went to the grub truck, right, so they're going
to have food on board as well.
Speaker 2 (41:36):
And would that would that be in their stomach contents?
I mean I don't know enough yah. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (41:40):
So so with generally, generally we as humans and this
this is this is heavily depended upon whether or not
we have we have some kind of gastrointestinal problem. You know,
is our stomach and digestive system functioning normally? Okay, So
(42:03):
that's the caveat to this. So it takes it takes
about four to six hours four to six hours for
the stomach to empty. So where is it empty? It
empties into the small intestine. The small intestine is slower,
you know, small intestine. You know, you heard these wild
(42:23):
stories about how long the small intestine is. Well it
the small intestine takes about twelve hours to eliminate. Okay,
it's going to be So if you block that and
you say, well, what happened, you know during this period
of time, there's not a lot you know, you can
there's some appreciable evidence in the small intestine. But if
(42:47):
you go back to the stomach and you have you
have food remnant in the stomach, gastric content as it
referred to. When you open that stomach, and when we
take out the stomach at autopsy, you clip it at
where essentially I won't go into all the specific anatomical terms,
but just think about where the esophka is coming down,
(43:07):
descending out of the mouth, descends right before it gets
his stomach. You tie it off and you clip it. Okay,
Then you clip the end of the stomach after tying
it off, where it's about to dump into the small intestine,
so you can remove the stomach completely intact without spilling
the contents. It's messy business and most of the time
(43:30):
we will take the stomach away from the body over
to a sink and we've got a pan. If you've
ever seen you know, when you go to a grocery
store and you're going to put produce in a scale,
that pan that you put produce in the scale with,
that's what it looks like. We have those in the morgue.
(43:51):
So we will have the stainless steel pan. We'll open
the stomach in the pan and dump out the contents
in there, and that way we don't lose anything. Because
I've worked with forendsic pathologists in the morgue before that
would literally open the stomach inside the cavity. Well, that's
that's dangerous business because if you don't, if you don't
(44:13):
dissect out the stomach and per the evisceration and you
remove the stomach, if you just try to do it
in there the interior of the body or the cavity, okay,
it's very bloody stuff. You've got standing blood that's in there.
So now you're going to commingle the stomach contents. Everything
(44:34):
gets very confused, so it's best to take it out.
And so if you have stomach content, you know that
this person had eaten four to six hours roughly, because
it takes that time for the stomach to clear all right.
Another thing that's dependent is if you drink. If you
drink a sports shake, okay, that ain't the same as
(44:56):
going and eating a Porterhouse steak and a baked potato.
It's going to take a lot, a lot longer for
that pass through your system. Okay, so you have to
take that into account. But here's what's kind of interesting.
Day you had talked about this loved one of yours
that had died, and he had gone I think you
said he'd gone to Hearty's, which serves these giganic hamburgers.
(45:18):
All right, Well, you know when you get when you
open up the stomach, you can actually appreciate. People think
they chew their food really well, they really don't. You
can actually look. You can see ground beef. Pasta is
one of the worst things. You can see spaghetti. You
can make out what kind of noodles there are. Hot
Dogs are probably at the top of list because they're encased,
(45:39):
so you either have a natural casing, which is like
an intestine, or you have one of the disgusting I'm
a big Nathan's hot dog fan. I love Nathan's because
there they have a natural casing. All right, I'm not
a fan of like things that have I won't name
(46:01):
a brand, things that have synthetic case intona. And so
even with that, hot dogs will remain in place. You'll
see that anything like grains, corn rice, vegetables, broccoli for instance,
Lettuce doesn't. It's not like you chew it up and
it's gone. Generally, things like soups, those sorts of things
(46:24):
where the vegetables that are contained in there are cooked down.
But there's a lot that you can recognize. And the
reason I'm not saying this in order to discuss listeners
what I'm The reason I'm saying this is because there's
valuable information contained in the stomach, particularly if you're talking
about a drug. God, maybe somebody has ingested something that
(46:46):
was toxic. That's why that from that, when we remove
the stomach, will actually get a very large plastic test
tube and will collect the stomach contents and put a
lift on it. We actually submit that to the state
crime lab because you can run you can run test
on that, you can actually do toxicology off of that.
Speaker 2 (47:08):
That's I was going to ask you, how does alcohol
play a factor in what is in your stomach? Like
is wine different than beer? And is whiskey different than
what yeah, well.
Speaker 1 (47:19):
Yeah, well. The thing about it is, this is kind
of an interesting little side. If you've ever been around
somebody that had been as my granddaddy, you say, pulling
a cork the night before, the next the next morning,
I don't care if they brush your teeth, showered, shaved,
(47:39):
put on aqua velva, high karate, English leather, pick your
poison or Georgio. You can still smell the alcohol coming
off their body. If you think that's intense around a
living person. If you've got somebody that has been drinking
the night before and they died, like in a car crash,
(48:01):
or maybe they got no fight and they were hammered,
you know when they when you open the body, and
I'm talking about not even opening some I'm just talking
about the initial opening of the body, it like rushes
out like a big gasse at fist and punches you
right in the nose. You have that smell that like
permeates everything. It's everywhere, and so you can It's the
(48:27):
only way I can really describe it is that it's
sickly sweet. It's got this sickly sweet odor to it,
much like you know the smell that comes off of
somebody's body that's been drunk. They have that kind of
sickly sweet smell. It's even more pronounced in the dead
when you open the body. I used to work with
forensic pathologists. Guy's dead now. He was really, really old
and very listen. To say that forensic pathologists are eccentric
(48:54):
is an insult to eccentric people, because they are so
so eccentric. This guy used to claim, and he was
he he fancied himself a wine connoisseur. He was in
New Orleans, so you'd go to all of these beautiful
creole restaurants and he would always sample wise. He used
to claim that just by the odor, he could claim
(49:14):
he could state what type of wine they had been drinking.
I'm thinking, you're so full of it's you're so full
of it. You can't do that. But for us, you know,
in the morgue, the gastric content tells a lot about
the activity of an individual. You know, we don't think
about like passively. If we're if we're eating, if we're
(49:37):
eating either for nutrition or we're eating because of stress
or whatever. We might pick up a handful of something
We're gonna pop it in our mouth or we just
grab a quick something to eat. Well, you don't know
if that ingestion of that thing is going to be
the last thing you ever consume and that's going to
travel with you. So that's one of the reasons. And
(49:59):
I from a scientific standpoint, I value the information that
I gleaned from gast content. But probably out of all
of the postmarm interval elements, it has to be postmarmal
avidity or live mortis for me. And here's why all
(50:20):
of these other things are so and particularly riger mortis
and an alger mortise, which is body temperature, they're so
heavily environmentally dependent, Dave liver mortis is not so. Just
imagine if you've got someone that dies sitting like the
(50:42):
guy you know, I showed you the image the other
day when we did the first segment of this teaching
series about decomposition. The guy that was seated in the chair, well,
the guy that was seated in the chair that died
of an m I just a natural death, had a
heart attack based upon how he seated. The blood because
(51:02):
it's no longer pumping through the body, it's going to
settle to the gravitationally dependent areas of his body. Gravity
is like the one constant universe that kind of never changes. Now,
if I had I've got an old friend that's an astrophysicist,
probably one of the brightest people I've ever met in
my life. As you can imagine Country's butter too. You
wouldn't you wouldn't suspect this guy's got PhD In astrophysics
(51:25):
from Clemson. I used to eat lunch with him. I
just sit there amazed by this guy. He would dispute
this with me because you know, I'd say gravity is
the one constant, it doesn't vary. He say, oh, well,
if you go to the poles, it's different. You know,
if you're on the equator, it's different. We understand what
we're saying here. It's not as it's not as variable
as temperature.
Speaker 2 (51:45):
All right.
Speaker 1 (51:46):
So if you're seated in a chairing and you have
somebody that passes away, the blood is going to settle
well to the ankles, the feet. We'll actually see the
feet swell, they'll turn purple. That's why it's called How
many times have you ever heard somebody say they didn't
have another adjue to describe how angry they were, and
(52:08):
they said, I was livid like that. Well, that's where
we get this term live or mortis. It's or post
mortem lividity. It's that kind of purple coloration that comes
on the body. And it's not a decompositional change, you know,
where you'll see bodies that will go kind of purple
and black and that sort of thing. It's not like that.
This is the blood pooling. It goes first to the vessels,
(52:32):
the capillary beds. They're not meant for storing blood, they're
meant for moving blood. And those little beds burst and
when they burst, it leaches out into what's called the
interstitial tissue, the kind of the fatty tissue that surrounds
all the vessels and it stains it. And dude, once
it's gotten in there, you can't change it. So if
(52:54):
you like, for instance, we have cases where people will
be killed in one location, the person might think about
whether they're going to do with the body. They'll crumple
up the body after it's been laying on the floor
for about an hour or two hours, and they'll put
them in a trunk. Well, the first time they lay
them on their left side, they've been laying on the
left side where they were killed, they place them on
(53:14):
the trunk, laying on the right side. So you might
have two presentations of post mortal avidity. And before it
gets fixed, it can actually migrate around, and that's a
real problem, you know, if you're trying to do an assessment.
So it takes a measured point in time for post
mortal avidity to fix, and once it's fixed and it
(53:36):
stains the skin, it's not going to move. And so
if you've got a body, if we come to a
scene and we've got an individual that is lying in
a prone position, which means their chest is in contact
with the ground, and I show up at the scene
and they're laying like that, but yet they've got post
mortal avidity between their shoulder blades, I'm going to know
(54:00):
that before I arrived, somebody moved that body. At one
point in time, they were face up and then all
of a sudden, someone got the grand idea to either
flip them or move them, you know. And this goes
to scene staging as well. Well. Going back to our
four unfortunate students in Idaho, based upon the timeframe of
(54:24):
postmartal lividity, I can tell you this post wal avidity
is close to being completely fixed by the time the
corner shows up at the scene. That's how much of
a lag time you've had. And the way we test
it in the way I would hope that she had
tested it at the scene is if you get one
(54:45):
of these big purple, vivacious areas, if you take your
thumb on a gloved hand and you depress that area
that's purple and it doesn't blanch, it still stays. That
means it's fixed. That means that those little appt their
beds have erupted and it's still you know, it's no
longer blanchable, whereas you can get that staining.
Speaker 2 (55:08):
But if you.
Speaker 1 (55:09):
Press it and it blanches, that's called blanchable avidity. That
means that it hasn't fixed yet. And so for both
of those, both those instances, there's a measured amount of
time that you know, it takes for this to occur.
So when we're looking it'll be a parent. You can
(55:31):
see it kind of pop up on the radar within
twenty to thirty minutes after death. It's kind of like
the kid that you saw when you I wasn't one
of these kids that could do that that you go
to playground with and they can hang upside down the
monkey bars and their head turns the red and it
kind of swells. Less blood set now it still moving,
(55:52):
but you know what I'm saying. So if within twenty
to thirty minutes, you'll see the blood kind of pooling
in these areas and it's going to take and intensity
is going to increase up until about the seventh or
eight hour, and then it's there. It's not moving. So
wouldn't that be an interesting set of data to have
(56:15):
about the cases in Idaho? Was a lividity fixed where
there are multiple presentations of lividity. And I hope, I
certainly hope that coming up in August that all of
these questions there are many, but all of these questions
(56:37):
that can be answered, and that can be answered through
science and that assessment that hopefully took place on that
day back in twenty twenty two in November, I hope
it will thorough and I hope that we learned more
about what happened that night. I'm Joseph got Morgan and
(57:00):
this is bodybags.
Speaker 2 (57:10):
H
Host
Joseph Scott Morgan
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