October 17, 2023 • 38 mins
Ashli Ehrhardt, a woman embroiled in a tumultuous marriage, meets a devastating end in her laundry room. With signs of struggle all around and her body bearing multiple types of wounds—a belt around the neck, stab wounds, and puncture injuries—Ashli's father is the one who horrifyingly discovers her. Her husband, John Wonder, becomes the prime suspect in what appears to be a crime of passion layered with complex clues. Joseph Scott Morgan and Dave Mack unravel the chilling details surrounding Ashli’s death. From the puzzling written messages left at the crime scene to the suspect's unsettling social media behavior, this episode dives deep into the importance of forensic documentation. As the narrative unfolds, listen in for insights into unusual wounds, psychological profiles, and the critical role of time-stamped messages.
Time-coded Highlights:
00:00:20 — Joseph Scott Morgan opens the episode by discussing the power of written communication and its ability to express deep emotions.
00:02:20 — Dave Mack introduces the case involving John Wonder and Ashli Ehrhardt, a married couple going through a divorce. Mack speculates on their use of social media and text messaging.
00:07:00 — The importance of co-workers in death investigations is highlighted, especially in cases of suicide.
00:08:06 — Dave Mack discusses John Wonder's peculiar behavior.
00:10:20 — The heartbreaking moment Ashli's father discovers her body.
00:11:00 — Joseph Scott Morgan brings the horror of the scene to life by discussing the amount of blood present.
00:12:00 — Questions are raised about the cause of death when a belt is found around Ashley's neck.
00:16:42 — The unusual circumstances at the crime scene, including the belt and potential staging, are questioned by Dave Mack.
00:19:00 — Morgan stresses the necessity of a thorough examination at the autopsy table for determining the cause of death.
00:21:42 — Distinctions between stab and puncture wounds are explored.
00:29:50 — A disturbing text message from John to his sister is revealed.
00:30:20 — Mack shares an alleged text message from John indicating his plans to flee.
00:31:40 — The role of forensic document examiners in cases like this is introduced.
00:34:00 — Focusing on the writing in blood, the possibility of the defense claiming a setup is discussed.
00:40:47—The episode closes on a serious note as Joseph Scott Morgan shares the National Domestic Violence Hotline, urging those in abusive relationships to seek help.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:08):
Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan. When we think about
a written language of English, there's a couple of phrases
that come to mind. One in particular, it goes something
like this. When people are communicating verbally, they might say
(00:32):
something to someone such as words fail me. But yet
that same person, if they were to take the time,
they could perhaps take a pin or even on their computer,
and they can communicate those things through the written word
as opposed to the spoken word. It's just like there's
a connection with it, between that action of writing and
(00:53):
those things that are contained within us that are written down. Today,
I'm going to talk about a case that is in
the very early stages of investigation, but it was so
striking to me because this involves two people that were
married and were in the throes of a divorce, and those,
(01:14):
as many of you know, are very painful and contain
a lot of emotion. But the alleged perpetrator in this
case did leave a written note. His writing was allegedly
scrawled in blood. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is Bodybacks.
(01:36):
I'm a bit more ross today, I think having to
deal with this case and to talk about it with
you because it is evidence of a relationship that has
come to a brutal end. And it seems as though
that in these writings that we're going to discuss, something
fell apart as far as communication. And I don't know
(01:58):
in what sense that occurred, But many times these cases
that we cover on bodybags, there we have no rhyme
or reason to try to understand what motivation there is
behind something. But when you see people that are writing
text messages and leaving notes behind written in blood, that
takes us to a completely different level.
Speaker 2 (02:18):
John Wonder is thirty one years old. His wife, Ashley
is twenty nine, and they've been married for a couple
of years. They have two children, two boys, a four
year old and a two year old. Actually and John
worked for the same company. They also had gone through
many ups and downs in their relationship, financial and other
and they actually were still living together in their home.
(02:41):
But we're in the process of getting a divorce.
Speaker 1 (02:43):
Isn't that an interesting situation to find yourself in, particularly
if you're involved. And there's been a number of cases
like this over the years, but I've always found that
dynamic actually worked a couple like this as a death
investigator where you had people that were in the midst
of going through a divorce, and you had like one
(03:04):
party was living in the basement of the house and
occupying that has a separate area to exit the house.
And I've always felt like that familial kind of dynamic
that was once where you were kind of together as
a family and you're occupying this dwelling and all of
a sudden, this contentious thing rises up between you as
a couple and you're having to see one another still
(03:27):
you're talking about that you're going to split, make it permanent,
you're not going to be around one another, but yet
you're still under the same roof that that's a and
then to work in the same environment as well. That dynamic,
I would think is I can't even begin to imagine it,
because divorce in and of itself is so very, very painful.
Speaker 2 (03:46):
It is a very stripped down version of yourself at
oftentimes your worth. I don't know all the ins and
outs of the relationship. I don't, I nobody does. But
I do know that there was actually a plan. Ashley
was planning on moving out at the end of September,
first of October. Everyone knew it mentioned they worked together
at the same company. Everybody there knew that this couple
(04:07):
was going through a divorce, and when they didn't show
up for work, the employer called the police for a
welfare check. Now I don't know about you, Joe, but
I've had people working with me and for me that
if they didn't show up and I couldn't get them
on the phone, I would go over and check on them. Maybe,
But my first thought wouldn't be called the police and
have them go over and see what's going on. So
(04:28):
obviously there was a known possibility of violence and what
have you in this relationship that made the employer call
the police.
Speaker 1 (04:39):
Yeah, And one of the things that we do relative
to investigations when you have these familial events that occur
like this within a family. I don't know about you,
I wouldn't consider everybody I'm related to be my friend. Now.
I love I love my family, don't get me wrong.
Speaker 2 (04:56):
But you're not the person that they're going to call it.
Two am needing help.
Speaker 1 (04:59):
Right choose who your friends are going to be. And
it's really interesting that for many of us that work
in close proximity other people, you wind up being closer
with those individuals that are in your workspace than you
do with people that are extended family and this sort
of thing. And here's the interesting note about this. When
we're conducting a death investigation, and I think that a
(05:22):
lot of people that are listening to this can understand
and comprehend this. Somebody's going to walk through the door
at work and bring their home life with them many
times and they'll start just I don't know any o
the wather they describe it. They just start vomiting on
their coworkers how horrible it is at home or how
even conversely, how great it is at home. And if
(05:43):
people have a comfort level I think with relationships that
they develop at work. So when we go out to
conduct a death investigation, and it can be any kind
of death, this is particularly keen and suicide. We're keen
to extract information from coworkers. You can go and talk
to them and they will reveal details, intimate details about
(06:04):
victims that you never would get from say a cousin,
perhaps somebody that doesn't have an awareness was And it
seems rather simplistic, but it's one of the major sources
of data places to collect data about an ongoing case
where we can begin to understand things about the dynamic
that went on.
Speaker 2 (06:22):
Let me set this up a little bit. Okay, it's
about ten thirty in the morning. Ashley and John Wonder
have not shown up for work, but around eight thirty
that morning, John had taken the boys over to Ashley's parents' house.
At Ashley's mom watched the boys when they were at work,
and so John had taken the boys again, ages four
(06:43):
and two. He was driving his red car. So John
drops the kids off, but he doesn't do what he
normally does. Normally, he goes, knocks on the door, takes
them inside, gets them all situated, and goes on about
his merry way. That didn't happen on this particular morning
John dropped the boys off. He's driving his red car.
He drops the boys off on the front porch and leaves.
(07:03):
He doesn't go inside. He doesn't wait for Ashley's mom
to come out and give the kids nothing. Ashley's mother
made a note, Hey, this is different, what's up with this?
Two hours later, they get the call from police. They're
going to do the welfare check. So mom and dad,
Ashley's mother and father go to Ashley and John Wonder's
home at the same time the police are there. The
(07:24):
reason I pointed out that John had driven his red
car earlier to drop the kids off, because his red
car was there at the house when the police arrived
for the welfare check. But Ashley had a rented yellow
Toyota Wrap four and it was gone. So that's what
police are trying to figure out. They don't know what
(07:45):
they're walking into. They just know the couples in the
middle of a divorce. They didn't show up for work.
John dropped the kids off at Ashley's mom's house. But
now they can't get John or Ashley on the phone.
So the police decided let's make entry into the home.
And Ashley's dad actually walked around to the back of
the house and found a sliding glass door that was unlocked,
(08:06):
and he went in. It was Ashley Wonder's father that
discovered this bloody mess. He found his own daughter in
the laundry room with a door tied off with a
bungee cord. His twenty nine year old daughter, mother of
his two grandchildren, is laying on the floor naked from
the waist down. She's been stabbed, punctured, sliced. There's a
(08:30):
butcher knife, a cleaver next to her body and on
her leg. The word in blood wonder justin Scott Morgan,
how much blood would have been on the scene.
Speaker 1 (08:44):
A volume is sufficient to make a father recoil in horror.
I can't even begin to imagine discovering my baby girl
in the state. And unfortunately this happens many, many times.
Those that are within your circle are the ones that
bear witness or the first eyes on a horrific scene
(09:06):
like this. And depended upon how long she lived after
the initial tack with these edged weapons is going to
dictate how much blood there would be there. And also
to a lesser degree, probably the manipulation of the body,
because you can turn bodies and try to move them
in certain ways, and if they have open defects in
(09:29):
the body, you'll have leakage from the blood. So it's
not just the dynamic of say, spurting blood. You'll have
this kind of blood that will issue forth from wounds.
And this can even occur. The seepage can actually occur
even after death, particularly if someone has moved the body.
And here's one other element that I wanted to point
out the fact that this young woman when the father
(09:52):
first cast his gaze on his daughter beyond the blood,
and maybe he saw the weapons at that point in time.
It's hard to really describe or understand that because you
kind of take a snapshot in your brain, and I've
talked to a lot of first on slight witnesses relative
to these horrific kind of events, your brain, it's almost
(10:13):
like that moment in time where you see something that
you have to do a double take because you can't
your brain can't process it. And that happens to us
in life a lot, but how much more so in
an event like this where you're looking down. The other
thing that he may have observed at that point in
time that kind of rows up in this is that
Ashley has got a belt around her neck as well.
(10:37):
And this is a form of literature. So the big
question now, particularly as it applies to the police and
the medical examiner, how did she actually die? Was it
from sharp force injury or was she choked to death
with a belt. It's one thing when you're investigating in
(11:13):
death to have a single modality of death, and I
think gunshot wound, stab wound, blunt force trauma, or ligature strangulation.
But when you have two potential modalities of death. It
complicates it from an investigative standpoint. First off, it complicates
it in a sense that what is the actual weapon
(11:34):
that brought about the death and if both were utilized,
how could we do that relative to sequencing? And they're
both utilized, So what was the overwhelming factor and a death?
And in this particular case, Dy, we're looking at both
sharp force injury death as well as potential ligature strangulation.
That's something we have to make sense of.
Speaker 2 (11:55):
Back up for just a minute. The welfare check when
the employer calls police A when you do a welfare check,
I'm sure they give them some background information couples going
through divorce kind of concerned either one showed up. But
when they arrived to do this check, what would motivate
the police to allow the dad? I mean, they can't
get in the front door, they don't have a key
(12:16):
or whatever. But why would police let the dad go
around and see if he could find a way in.
It seems to me that that would be their job.
Not I'm not blaming the police, boy, I want to
make sure I'm not. I just am curious why they
would allow that to happen. Why wouldn't they go and
see if there was a door open?
Speaker 1 (12:32):
Well, this is why. Yeah, And who's to say that
the dad didn't have somebody behind him? We don't know,
But I can give you kind of the short answer
relative to this, if I'm actually capable of giving a
short answer about anything in this case. When you're doing
a welfare check, you don't know if, in fact there
is somebody within this environment that is deceased. You don't
(12:54):
know that a crime has been committed at this point
in time. So for a police officer to make in
into a home, you're on very thin ice. When it's
an issue of constitutional considerations, search and seizure and just privacy.
People have an expectation, you know, just because they're not
answering the phone doesn't mean that a cop can kick
in the door. So the default position in this particular
(13:17):
case is you say, to the family member who may
have initiated the call, we think that it actually initiated
from the office. But you have a family member there, Well,
they're interested, they understand the lay of the land. They're
the ones that are going to go make entry. Now
if the family member see something in there, believe me.
These police officers go out on welfare checks all the time. Dave.
(13:41):
It's almost like cops get false alarms all the time,
on burglar alarms, and you'll hear them on the radio.
It's kind of kind of an odd thing where they'll say, yeah,
we got another open door burglar alarm that's going on.
It's such and such main street, and they go out
there all the time. It's almost the same way with
welfare checks. They go do welfare checks all the time.
(14:01):
It doesn't mean that you're going to find somebody that
is brutally murdered in their own home. So the default
position would be the dad. Have the dad open the
door looking there, and when he sees this, you can
imagine he certainly requested the presence of the police at
that time.
Speaker 2 (14:19):
I know she's got puncture wounds, But is it possible
that the suspect here was trying to stage something maybe
to make it look like she was trying to kill
herself in the throes of depression from getting a divorce
or what have you, and that maybe that just didn't work,
and so he went ahead and killed her by strangulation,
ann knife or do we even know where? Can we
(14:39):
find out rather which came first, the knife or the strangulation.
Speaker 1 (14:43):
Yeah, let's go back to the idea of the utilization
of a belt as a ligature to facilitate death. In
answer to your question, yes, and we have to understand
that in my line of work, and there's people out
there that are doing it right now, that are out
there as we're speaking right now, that are medical legal
death investigators. We handle far more suicides than we ever
(15:05):
will homicides. I think that everybody thinks that homicides top everything.
They're not. There's the lowest percentage of manners of death,
and so we're very good in my field. We're very
good at investigating suicides because they outpace in many jurisdictions.
They will. I've seen numbers as high as three to
one outpacing homicides. And you don't ever hear about a
(15:27):
suicide unless it's somebody famous, but still it's a death investigation,
and many times it's a violent death. So my experience,
I've probably seen at least equal numbers of death where
something other than a rope has been used as a ligature.
And in this particular case, we're talking about a belt.
And here's the thing. When people think about modes of
(15:50):
death and attacks and all those sorts of things, and
even suicides, what's common in the environment that can be
used in order to facilitate either a homicide or suicide. Well,
I think everybody I know I would have to say,
I guess owns a belt. So that's at your fingertips literally,
is something that can be used and has been used
(16:10):
for years and years and years. What else can be used, Well,
a knife, a meat cleaver, all of those elements are
there within that environment, and so everything has to be
taken into consideration when you're doing your examination on a body.
Because that's why it's so important to understand we've got
too lethal modalities with this environment that are literally on
(16:33):
display right there at your feet. As an investigator, and
it's a chicken or an egg situation, you're trying to
determine what was it that we can kind of assess
at this point in time that brought about the death. Now,
you're not necessarily going to be able to appreciate that
at the scene. That's why bodies are removed from the
(16:54):
scene and taken to the medical examiner or the corner's office,
and an autopsy has performed, because this is a determination
that can only be made on the autopsy table. Is
we don't have some kind of magic vision where we
can stand over a body and say this is definitely
the cause of death. There are a lot of people
that say, well, why in the world do you have
to do an autopsy in this case? Well, because if
(17:15):
we don't do an autopsy in these particular cases, in
any kind of case, once that body is either taken
to the funeral home or taken to the crematory, that
opportunity's lost.
Speaker 2 (17:25):
Dave, So you've got to take care of everything.
Speaker 1 (17:27):
You have to, and everything has to be be taken
into consideration. The old adage about you cast a wide net,
you catch a lot of fish. Intellectually, that's kind of
where our mind is. Everything is on the table, everything
is to be considered at this unknown spot at this
particular time. Because you weren't there to bear witness to this.
(17:48):
You're an investigator coming out to investigate the scene, to
try and try to determine what had actually taken place,
because you're going to need answers, and in this case,
there's a lot of unanswered questions.
Speaker 2 (18:00):
We've got the belt around your neck they may mention
of a bungee cord being used on the laundry room door.
They may mention of the knives, but also puncture wounds
and stab wounds. I thought that those were just different
words for the exact same thing.
Speaker 1 (18:18):
No, not at all, because in our world, puncture wound
implies a specific element that would create how can I
describe it? In court? You'll read medical examiner reports, autopsy
reports where we will use the term defect, defect, defect
a defect in our world, essentially, if you want to
(18:39):
break it down to the elemental level, means whole, and
when you see multiple defects in a body, well that
can mean anything. What we're saying in a roundabout way
is to say that there are multiple holes in a body.
But when you break it down and you say we
have stab wounds, well, stab wounds have a particular nature
to them. Off they're defined as narrow and deep. And
(19:04):
what does that mean, Well, the actual hole or the
defect in the body when that knife, that sharp edged
weapon is inserted, it creates this kind of linear defect
which means lyne and I've often described it to my
students as a winking eye. If it's a single edged weapon, okay,
and most knives are. You don't come across a lot
(19:26):
of double edged knives like daggers, so most and in
this particular case, there's a butcher knife found, which is
a single edged weapon. So it looks like that defect
actually looks like a winking eye. Just imagine that in
your mind. With a puncture wound. That implies a circular
hole of a circular defect. Well, what can do that? Well,
(19:49):
there are a number of things that can create a
circular defect. If you have, say, for instance, a piece
of rebar, which is the structure that you use to rebar,
is used to shore up concrete, you pour over it.
It's steel, very hard substance. If someone is punctured with
a piece of rebar and that's withdrawn, you'll see a
(20:11):
circular defect as a matter of fact. In street population
in Atlanta, for instance, when I was working there, we
had a group of guys that would carry around homemade
shinks or shives as they are called in prison. They're
made out of rebar one ends wrapped with duct tape
as a grip, and they would puncture people multiple times
with these to defend themselves with Well, Dave, when you
(20:34):
withdraw this thing, you leave behind a circular defect. And
guess what else it looks like. It looks like a
bullet hole. So you have to be very careful when
you're using terms. And that's what's very confusing about this case,
because we've heard the term puncture wound and we've heard
the term stabbing, and those are completely two different types
of injuries. So there's a bit of confusion in the
(20:55):
language here.
Speaker 2 (20:57):
That's just amazing that we've got a belt around the net,
we've got puncture wounds, stab wounds, we've got a butcher
knife and a cleaver next to the body. We've got
the name Wonder spelled out in blood on the leg
and I noted I made a noted this because I
don't know if it means anything to you. And the
police report has said that she was bleeding on the
(21:20):
left side. That was actually written in the police report.
So I'm wondering, based on everything that we know about
the crime scene, with bleeding in her left side, with
several puncture wounds, what does that indicate that she was
alive and the heart was still pumping blood at the
time of the puncture wounds, the stab wounds.
Speaker 1 (21:41):
Oh yeah, that's going to be an indication of that.
But we have to be very specific. Investigations have to
be very specific in their language, and this case senter's
a lot on language, doesn't it.
Speaker 2 (21:50):
Yeah, it does. And we haven't even gotten to the
text messages coming up.
Speaker 1 (21:54):
You think about when the police report is saying that
on her left side is are they saying to the
underlying floor on the left aspect of the body, on
the left side of the body, or are they talking
about is there's on the actual surface of the body
that there's a lot of blood on the left side.
There's a lot that can be I guess opined about
(22:14):
relative to that. And also if you have injuries, say
to the left side we're talking you know, maybe the
left rib cage, left of the sternum, left of the midline,
all of that. It can be the left arm. Is
there an underlying pool of blood on the floor and
you can have seepage that comes out of the body
even after death. Well to what degree we know that
(22:36):
she was found lying on the laundry room floor, but
we don't know what her actual position was. If she's
left recumbent, which recumbent is a term that is used
in medicine. So if you think about left recumbent, the
individual is on their left side, and the medical professionals
out there where the understand somebody is rotated into the
(22:58):
left recumbent position. That means that the left side is depended,
it's bearing the weight of the rest of the body,
and the right side is up in the air where
they in what's referred to as a supine position. Supine
is a fancy way of saying face up, and you
can appreciate the body looking as the body is looking
up towards the ceiling. For instance, you can observe trauma
on the left side. You can see the seepage of
(23:20):
the blood, you can see the pooling of the blood,
and it might all be on the left side. But
here's the thing. You're not going to understand any of this,
and I mean any of this until the body is
thoroughly examined back at the morgue and you begin to
understand things about one tracks. You understand things about asphyxiation
that may have led to this woman's death. My wife
(24:01):
likes to say a phrase on a regular basis, and
I've learned a lot from this phrase. She says that
words are containers of power. You say something, and many
times it'll manifest itself in your life. If you're communicating
negative thoughts or angry thoughts and that sort of thing,
it'll manifest itself. And conversely, if you're saying things that
(24:23):
are kind and supportive, that's going to manifest itself. Many times,
your words say a lot, not just in the communication
between people, but they actually say a lot about you
as a person. And I think that we've kind of
got an insight into this relationship with just the words
there here, Dave.
Speaker 2 (24:44):
I see a story where somebody has allegedly scrawled a
name in blood on a victim, or on a wall,
or what have you. I immediately think of the Manson murders.
Speaker 1 (24:55):
Yeah, and Lobiancas too. Yeah, yeah, Mansons, And yeah, absolutely
I thought that same thing I did.
Speaker 2 (25:01):
It's just something that for our generation that comes up
because that was a big part of what was reported.
And then I think about this young couple. You know,
they're not old. John Wonder is thirty one years old,
his wife is twenty nine. They've got two children, two
little boys, a four year old and a two year old.
This is their mom and dad, and even though they
were going through a divorce, they were cohabitating. And yet
(25:25):
here we are where a welfare check leads her dad,
Ashley Wonder's dad, to find her body naked from the
waist down. She's stabbed, she's punctured, she's got a belt
around her neck, and the word Wonder scrawled in blood
on her leg. Then we find out that her husband,
John Wonder, Ashley Wonder's husband. Her maiden name is Earhart,
(25:49):
and oftentimes she's referred to as Ashley Earhart. But I
just want to make a point. They were still married,
they were going through a divorce, and by the way,
Ashley had already made notes she was leaving Actober first,
she was moving out. She had another place that she
was going to. This was known to their friends, their employer,
their family. It was no secret. So John Wonder drops
the kids off, doesn't take them inside, drops them off
(26:12):
the patio on the front porch, and he goes back
home where this takes place. We know that after he
left his wife with a belt around her neck, laying
in a pool of bloody scrawls his name Wonder on
her left leg, and then he leaves, but he starts
texting people. He starts texting family and friends. And this
(26:33):
goes back to I don't know of his generational joe.
I tried to find if there was anybody else who
had done something similar, but I couldn't find any His
sister tried to reach out to him when they were
did the welfare check. Immediately, family is calling family, Hey
have you heard Have you talked to John? Have you
talked to Ashley? And so John's sister said that after
(26:54):
she attempted to reach out to him, asking where he was,
he allegedly responded to her, John, where are you? What's
going on? He wrote back this quote, sorry about the
mess For the record, it's way easier and much more
satisfying than you can imagine. See year round hotly smokes.
(27:15):
He texted that to his sister.
Speaker 1 (27:17):
That in and of itself is a real insight into
the workings of someone's mind. And let's keep in mind,
John Wonder has merely been charged. He's not convicted, he
hasn't been put on trial.
Speaker 2 (27:29):
However, he texted a friend on Facebook. Now I don't
know if he used Facebook messengers so it was private,
or if he did it on the guy's wall. I
don't know, but John Wonder allegedly messaged a friend again
same time. Now, hey, Bud, sorry to make you the
receiver of this, but I have to share with someone.
(27:49):
I'm about to throw my phone out the windows and
we'll continue north to Fargo. I'm not trying to get away,
just feel like driving far away.
Speaker 1 (28:01):
Wow, I mean, there's so much information contained in there.
First off, you've got time stamps on all of these messages,
whether it be in a Facebook format or platform, or
if this is originating as a text message from a phone.
All that stuff is time stamps relative to when you
generated that message and perhaps your movement as well. That
(28:24):
one comment that was made relative to heading north to
far and it's a specific location heading to Fargo, North Dakota.
Now I've never made the drive, but just looking at
a map, if you're talking about going from KC to Fargo,
that's a poke, man. I mean, that's a long long way.
But let me back up just for a second, before
(28:44):
any text messages were generated, and we've kind of touched
on this idea of writing in blood. There's a little
known group. You hear about them in movies and whatnot.
I've got several friends that are actually forensic document examiners
or handwriting analysts, and they live in a different world
than they used to because text messages and that sort
(29:07):
of thing, and people don't write as many notes as
they used to. But the fact that you've got this
word that has allegedly been scrawled on Ashley's remains there
on the launder floor is significant, and what will perhaps
happen is that detailed images will be taken of that wording.
(29:27):
I hope that they were very very careful Dave when
they were transporting her body, so that that scrawl was
not diminished in any way. Because when you get a
body back to a more, you have, first off, the
correct equipment that you need to utilize lighting this sort
of thing, and you can use a variety of different
types of cameras in order to capture that image. And
(29:49):
so when that image is captured, it'll be perhaps taken
to the handwriting section at the State Crime Lab. Most
handwriting examiners live in More within the construct of the
State Crime Labe. It's not necessarily something all happening on
a local level. They will look at the scrawl that
is written in blood and did you know that after
(30:12):
you have hit about age six, your motor skill, as
it is kind of connected to your brain, the way
you visualize thing, the relationship but your eyes, the way
your eyes and relationship to your hand the movement. Do
you know that that's all set in place by the
time you're about six years old and utilizing pens, crayons,
(30:33):
all that sort of stuff. And even though it might
evolve over a period of time, you've set down a
framework in the way you write. So there will be
examples of his writing, the accused. There will be examples
of his writing that will be brought to the handwriting
expert and they will compare his handwriting that he has generated,
(30:54):
whether it's signing papers or writing notes or anything that
he has generated over the years, and it will be
brought in and it will be actually compared to the
scrawl that is written on her leg to see if
they can confirm that it is actually him, because at
this point in time, you don't know. I mean, it's
just like you were saying, with staging the defense in
(31:15):
a case like this can say, well, somebody was trying
to target my defendant and they just they knew that
if they scrawled his name in blood that it would
lead back to him, and that's something the defense attorney
would probably say. So that question will be asked and
it will have to be answered, and a handwriting expert
will come on the stand and make comment about that.
(31:36):
And there's two forms when you think about script writing
that everything is based on. There's what's referred to as
the Palmer school and the Zaner Blowser school. And you
can actually regionalize, you used to could You could regionalize
where people learned how to write regionally based upon those
(31:59):
two forms of And I'll give you an example of
what this looks like when you see do you remember
when we were in school and they were teaching you
how to write cursive, they would put the letters written
in cursive up on the board, or it would be
in like little placards up on the board so that
you could see what a capital F looked like as
opposed to a lowercase F, and it would be written
(32:19):
in its own lines. And that's how we learned to write,
and depended upon many times. It used to be with
whatever region you were in in the US, that's how
you learn to write. Zan Er Blowser was more common
in southern and midwestern areas of the country. But yet
you had the palmer, which you would find perhaps up
in the northeast. And isn't that kind of interesting that
(32:41):
you can profile the person based upon their handwriting, so
his motor skills that he would have learned, or whoever
the perpetrator is, as it applies to how he writes
something is going to be unique to him. Because you
use that framework at those two possibilities and you narrow
it down how you kind of craft your own writing.
Speaker 2 (33:00):
That's just crazy. But one thing I want to go
back to, Joe, you mentioned why would you go to
all the trouble of an autopsy when you know what
already has taken place? And why do you go to
all this trouble? I mean, you're talking about a lot
of effort and a lot of work, when in reality
it looks like we have a man who has pretty
much admitted by his own text messages to friends and
(33:21):
family that he has done this. He actually says this
to review a couple of the text messages Joe. He
added to that same friend on Facebook, he said that
he hadn't cried yet, haven't cried, but quote still feel nothing.
No more anxiety though, that's a plus. And then he
wrote this about the stones that he left by her body.
Apparently she had some types of stones and things that
(33:43):
people have a certain affinity for that you know, protect
them from different things, this new age stuff. And he said, well,
quote a lot of good they did you, Hun. I mean,
how cold is that, Joe? How cold is it to
point out, yeah, a lot of good they did you?
Speaker 1 (33:58):
Yeah, it is. And again, when you begin to think
about our friends like Karen Stark, you think about how
they would examine this. But let's look at this from
a purely scientific perspective or an investigative perspective. If you're
mentioning these stones in particular, you're stating in a text
message that idolaid them out next to the body. How
(34:20):
can we validate that statement? Well, logically, you can validate
it by documenting at the scene, if they are in
fact there, that they are present. Who would have knowledge
of that? Who would know that particular stones were laid
out adjacent to the body. And so when you couple
that with and let's just get in, you know, let's
just go for it. Let's talk about if you've handled
(34:42):
a knife and there's blood. You've got blood on your
hands that knife. Unless you clean it off, there's a
high probability you're going to leave a bloody fingerprint, a
latent print that's behind on the handle of that knife.
You could have blood perhaps on this meat cleaf, which
has not really been a it's there ownership of the belt.
(35:03):
Whose belt is this? Why was it used? Was it
her belt or was it the accused belt? Is there
any blood on the surface of the belt, And that
gives you an indication that if there is blood transfer
on that belt, particularly as if you've left behind the
Layton print on the belt, well what does that mean.
It means that she had blood on her person or
in the immediate area. That is her blood. You could
(35:25):
type her blood and that his Perhaps the accused fingerprint
was found in Layton blood on the surface of the belt,
So that gives you an idea perhaps that ligature came
after the stabbing, or conversely, if it's absent of that,
prosecution might just say, well, he attempted to strangle her,
he found out that wasn't going to work, so he
went and retrieved any or maybe he had the knife
with him, and that's again a way that we can
(35:47):
try to understand the sequencing of these things.
Speaker 2 (35:49):
Back to the text messages and social media messages that
John Wonder allegedly posted and sent quote, I'm guessing they
will be finding her body right about now. I started
getting calls at nine thirty am. Now, he wrote this
message to his friend in one of his last messages
before he was arrested, and I wanted to point something out.
(36:10):
Eight forty am, John Wonder drops the boys hit four
and two off at his mother in law's house at
Ashley wonders mom's house, and he doesn't take them many
drops him off, runs to his house. Now he's saying,
they say he started getting calls at nine thirty, so
I'm assuming this is work calling. See why they weren't
at work yet. And we know that police were called
(36:31):
and went out there at ten thirty to do the
welfare check. So we now have a timetable. He says
to this person allegedly that I'm guessing they will be
finding her body right about now. I've got a feeling
that's a pretty strong thing the prosecution would want to
have in evidence, right, Yeah, it is.
Speaker 1 (36:47):
Because you're aware the individual generating that note is going
to have an awareness of the timeline. They're going to
have an awareness. And the reason they're going to have
an awareness of this is that this individual has already
stating in these text messages that he is being contacted
and he's offering up you know, this explanation of well,
they should be finding her body right about now, because
(37:09):
I have been receiving messages since this specific time. And
that gives you an idea of awareness, doesn't it.
Speaker 2 (37:15):
Quote. I keep thinking about how she never screamed, just
took it like a champ, what a gal. To honor her,
I will not go out by a gunshot suicide by cop,
but by hopefully a similar fate as Ashley unquote he
wrote that about the mother of his children.
Speaker 1 (37:35):
Yeah, I think that probably out of everything contained here,
from certainly a communication standpoint, that might be the darkest.
It gives you an insight, a first hand account, if
you will, of this woman a mother and is still
a wife, that she just kind of slipped off into
the darkness as she was being brutalized. If you are
(37:57):
anyone in the midst of a relationship ship where there
is in fact domestic violence going on, I urge you,
I plead with you reach out to somebody, and one
of the quickest ways to do that is the National
Domestic Violence Hotline, and that number is one eight hundred
seven ninety nine safe. That's one eight hundred seven ninety
(38:18):
nine seven two three three. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and
this is Bodybacks.
Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan. When we think about
a written language of English, there's a couple of phrases
that come to mind. One in particular, it goes something
like this. When people are communicating verbally, they might say
(00:32):
something to someone such as words fail me. But yet
that same person, if they were to take the time,
they could perhaps take a pin or even on their computer,
and they can communicate those things through the written word
as opposed to the spoken word. It's just like there's
a connection with it, between that action of writing and
(00:53):
those things that are contained within us that are written down. Today,
I'm going to talk about a case that is in
the very early stages of investigation, but it was so
striking to me because this involves two people that were
married and were in the throes of a divorce, and those,
(01:14):
as many of you know, are very painful and contain
a lot of emotion. But the alleged perpetrator in this
case did leave a written note. His writing was allegedly
scrawled in blood. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is Bodybacks.
(01:36):
I'm a bit more ross today, I think having to
deal with this case and to talk about it with
you because it is evidence of a relationship that has
come to a brutal end. And it seems as though
that in these writings that we're going to discuss, something
fell apart as far as communication. And I don't know
(01:58):
in what sense that occurred, But many times these cases
that we cover on bodybags, there we have no rhyme
or reason to try to understand what motivation there is
behind something. But when you see people that are writing
text messages and leaving notes behind written in blood, that
takes us to a completely different level.
Speaker 2 (02:18):
John Wonder is thirty one years old. His wife, Ashley
is twenty nine, and they've been married for a couple
of years. They have two children, two boys, a four
year old and a two year old. Actually and John
worked for the same company. They also had gone through
many ups and downs in their relationship, financial and other
and they actually were still living together in their home.
(02:41):
But we're in the process of getting a divorce.
Speaker 1 (02:43):
Isn't that an interesting situation to find yourself in, particularly
if you're involved. And there's been a number of cases
like this over the years, but I've always found that
dynamic actually worked a couple like this as a death
investigator where you had people that were in the midst
of going through a divorce, and you had like one
(03:04):
party was living in the basement of the house and
occupying that has a separate area to exit the house.
And I've always felt like that familial kind of dynamic
that was once where you were kind of together as
a family and you're occupying this dwelling and all of
a sudden, this contentious thing rises up between you as
a couple and you're having to see one another still
(03:27):
you're talking about that you're going to split, make it permanent,
you're not going to be around one another, but yet
you're still under the same roof that that's a and
then to work in the same environment as well. That dynamic,
I would think is I can't even begin to imagine it,
because divorce in and of itself is so very, very painful.
Speaker 2 (03:46):
It is a very stripped down version of yourself at
oftentimes your worth. I don't know all the ins and
outs of the relationship. I don't, I nobody does. But
I do know that there was actually a plan. Ashley
was planning on moving out at the end of September,
first of October. Everyone knew it mentioned they worked together
at the same company. Everybody there knew that this couple
(04:07):
was going through a divorce, and when they didn't show
up for work, the employer called the police for a
welfare check. Now I don't know about you, Joe, but
I've had people working with me and for me that
if they didn't show up and I couldn't get them
on the phone, I would go over and check on them. Maybe,
But my first thought wouldn't be called the police and
have them go over and see what's going on. So
(04:28):
obviously there was a known possibility of violence and what
have you in this relationship that made the employer call
the police.
Speaker 1 (04:39):
Yeah, And one of the things that we do relative
to investigations when you have these familial events that occur
like this within a family. I don't know about you,
I wouldn't consider everybody I'm related to be my friend. Now.
I love I love my family, don't get me wrong.
Speaker 2 (04:56):
But you're not the person that they're going to call it.
Two am needing help.
Speaker 1 (04:59):
Right choose who your friends are going to be. And
it's really interesting that for many of us that work
in close proximity other people, you wind up being closer
with those individuals that are in your workspace than you
do with people that are extended family and this sort
of thing. And here's the interesting note about this. When
we're conducting a death investigation, and I think that a
(05:22):
lot of people that are listening to this can understand
and comprehend this. Somebody's going to walk through the door
at work and bring their home life with them many
times and they'll start just I don't know any o
the wather they describe it. They just start vomiting on
their coworkers how horrible it is at home or how
even conversely, how great it is at home. And if
(05:43):
people have a comfort level I think with relationships that
they develop at work. So when we go out to
conduct a death investigation, and it can be any kind
of death, this is particularly keen and suicide. We're keen
to extract information from coworkers. You can go and talk
to them and they will reveal details, intimate details about
(06:04):
victims that you never would get from say a cousin,
perhaps somebody that doesn't have an awareness was And it
seems rather simplistic, but it's one of the major sources
of data places to collect data about an ongoing case
where we can begin to understand things about the dynamic
that went on.
Speaker 2 (06:22):
Let me set this up a little bit. Okay, it's
about ten thirty in the morning. Ashley and John Wonder
have not shown up for work, but around eight thirty
that morning, John had taken the boys over to Ashley's parents' house.
At Ashley's mom watched the boys when they were at work,
and so John had taken the boys again, ages four
(06:43):
and two. He was driving his red car. So John
drops the kids off, but he doesn't do what he
normally does. Normally, he goes, knocks on the door, takes
them inside, gets them all situated, and goes on about
his merry way. That didn't happen on this particular morning
John dropped the boys off. He's driving his red car.
He drops the boys off on the front porch and leaves.
(07:03):
He doesn't go inside. He doesn't wait for Ashley's mom
to come out and give the kids nothing. Ashley's mother
made a note, Hey, this is different, what's up with this?
Two hours later, they get the call from police. They're
going to do the welfare check. So mom and dad,
Ashley's mother and father go to Ashley and John Wonder's
home at the same time the police are there. The
(07:24):
reason I pointed out that John had driven his red
car earlier to drop the kids off, because his red
car was there at the house when the police arrived
for the welfare check. But Ashley had a rented yellow
Toyota Wrap four and it was gone. So that's what
police are trying to figure out. They don't know what
(07:45):
they're walking into. They just know the couples in the
middle of a divorce. They didn't show up for work.
John dropped the kids off at Ashley's mom's house. But
now they can't get John or Ashley on the phone.
So the police decided let's make entry into the home.
And Ashley's dad actually walked around to the back of
the house and found a sliding glass door that was unlocked,
(08:06):
and he went in. It was Ashley Wonder's father that
discovered this bloody mess. He found his own daughter in
the laundry room with a door tied off with a
bungee cord. His twenty nine year old daughter, mother of
his two grandchildren, is laying on the floor naked from
the waist down. She's been stabbed, punctured, sliced. There's a
(08:30):
butcher knife, a cleaver next to her body and on
her leg. The word in blood wonder justin Scott Morgan,
how much blood would have been on the scene.
Speaker 1 (08:44):
A volume is sufficient to make a father recoil in horror.
I can't even begin to imagine discovering my baby girl
in the state. And unfortunately this happens many, many times.
Those that are within your circle are the ones that
bear witness or the first eyes on a horrific scene
(09:06):
like this. And depended upon how long she lived after
the initial tack with these edged weapons is going to
dictate how much blood there would be there. And also
to a lesser degree, probably the manipulation of the body,
because you can turn bodies and try to move them
in certain ways, and if they have open defects in
(09:29):
the body, you'll have leakage from the blood. So it's
not just the dynamic of say, spurting blood. You'll have
this kind of blood that will issue forth from wounds.
And this can even occur. The seepage can actually occur
even after death, particularly if someone has moved the body.
And here's one other element that I wanted to point
out the fact that this young woman when the father
(09:52):
first cast his gaze on his daughter beyond the blood,
and maybe he saw the weapons at that point in time.
It's hard to really describe or understand that because you
kind of take a snapshot in your brain, and I've
talked to a lot of first on slight witnesses relative
to these horrific kind of events, your brain, it's almost
(10:13):
like that moment in time where you see something that
you have to do a double take because you can't
your brain can't process it. And that happens to us
in life a lot, but how much more so in
an event like this where you're looking down. The other
thing that he may have observed at that point in
time that kind of rows up in this is that
Ashley has got a belt around her neck as well.
(10:37):
And this is a form of literature. So the big
question now, particularly as it applies to the police and
the medical examiner, how did she actually die? Was it
from sharp force injury or was she choked to death
with a belt. It's one thing when you're investigating in
(11:13):
death to have a single modality of death, and I
think gunshot wound, stab wound, blunt force trauma, or ligature strangulation.
But when you have two potential modalities of death. It
complicates it from an investigative standpoint. First off, it complicates
it in a sense that what is the actual weapon
(11:34):
that brought about the death and if both were utilized,
how could we do that relative to sequencing? And they're
both utilized, So what was the overwhelming factor and a death?
And in this particular case, Dy, we're looking at both
sharp force injury death as well as potential ligature strangulation.
That's something we have to make sense of.
Speaker 2 (11:55):
Back up for just a minute. The welfare check when
the employer calls police A when you do a welfare check,
I'm sure they give them some background information couples going
through divorce kind of concerned either one showed up. But
when they arrived to do this check, what would motivate
the police to allow the dad? I mean, they can't
get in the front door, they don't have a key
(12:16):
or whatever. But why would police let the dad go
around and see if he could find a way in.
It seems to me that that would be their job.
Not I'm not blaming the police, boy, I want to
make sure I'm not. I just am curious why they
would allow that to happen. Why wouldn't they go and
see if there was a door open?
Speaker 1 (12:32):
Well, this is why. Yeah, And who's to say that
the dad didn't have somebody behind him? We don't know,
But I can give you kind of the short answer
relative to this, if I'm actually capable of giving a
short answer about anything in this case. When you're doing
a welfare check, you don't know if, in fact there
is somebody within this environment that is deceased. You don't
(12:54):
know that a crime has been committed at this point
in time. So for a police officer to make in
into a home, you're on very thin ice. When it's
an issue of constitutional considerations, search and seizure and just privacy.
People have an expectation, you know, just because they're not
answering the phone doesn't mean that a cop can kick
in the door. So the default position in this particular
(13:17):
case is you say, to the family member who may
have initiated the call, we think that it actually initiated
from the office. But you have a family member there, Well,
they're interested, they understand the lay of the land. They're
the ones that are going to go make entry. Now
if the family member see something in there, believe me.
These police officers go out on welfare checks all the time. Dave.
(13:41):
It's almost like cops get false alarms all the time,
on burglar alarms, and you'll hear them on the radio.
It's kind of kind of an odd thing where they'll say, yeah,
we got another open door burglar alarm that's going on.
It's such and such main street, and they go out
there all the time. It's almost the same way with
welfare checks. They go do welfare checks all the time.
(14:01):
It doesn't mean that you're going to find somebody that
is brutally murdered in their own home. So the default
position would be the dad. Have the dad open the
door looking there, and when he sees this, you can
imagine he certainly requested the presence of the police at
that time.
Speaker 2 (14:19):
I know she's got puncture wounds, But is it possible
that the suspect here was trying to stage something maybe
to make it look like she was trying to kill
herself in the throes of depression from getting a divorce
or what have you, and that maybe that just didn't work,
and so he went ahead and killed her by strangulation,
ann knife or do we even know where? Can we
(14:39):
find out rather which came first, the knife or the strangulation.
Speaker 1 (14:43):
Yeah, let's go back to the idea of the utilization
of a belt as a ligature to facilitate death. In
answer to your question, yes, and we have to understand
that in my line of work, and there's people out
there that are doing it right now, that are out
there as we're speaking right now, that are medical legal
death investigators. We handle far more suicides than we ever
(15:05):
will homicides. I think that everybody thinks that homicides top everything.
They're not. There's the lowest percentage of manners of death,
and so we're very good in my field. We're very
good at investigating suicides because they outpace in many jurisdictions.
They will. I've seen numbers as high as three to
one outpacing homicides. And you don't ever hear about a
(15:27):
suicide unless it's somebody famous, but still it's a death investigation,
and many times it's a violent death. So my experience,
I've probably seen at least equal numbers of death where
something other than a rope has been used as a ligature.
And in this particular case, we're talking about a belt.
And here's the thing. When people think about modes of
(15:50):
death and attacks and all those sorts of things, and
even suicides, what's common in the environment that can be
used in order to facilitate either a homicide or suicide. Well,
I think everybody I know I would have to say,
I guess owns a belt. So that's at your fingertips literally,
is something that can be used and has been used
(16:10):
for years and years and years. What else can be used, Well,
a knife, a meat cleaver, all of those elements are
there within that environment, and so everything has to be
taken into consideration when you're doing your examination on a body.
Because that's why it's so important to understand we've got
too lethal modalities with this environment that are literally on
(16:33):
display right there at your feet. As an investigator, and
it's a chicken or an egg situation, you're trying to
determine what was it that we can kind of assess
at this point in time that brought about the death. Now,
you're not necessarily going to be able to appreciate that
at the scene. That's why bodies are removed from the
(16:54):
scene and taken to the medical examiner or the corner's office,
and an autopsy has performed, because this is a determination
that can only be made on the autopsy table. Is
we don't have some kind of magic vision where we
can stand over a body and say this is definitely
the cause of death. There are a lot of people
that say, well, why in the world do you have
to do an autopsy in this case? Well, because if
(17:15):
we don't do an autopsy in these particular cases, in
any kind of case, once that body is either taken
to the funeral home or taken to the crematory, that
opportunity's lost.
Speaker 2 (17:25):
Dave, So you've got to take care of everything.
Speaker 1 (17:27):
You have to, and everything has to be be taken
into consideration. The old adage about you cast a wide net,
you catch a lot of fish. Intellectually, that's kind of
where our mind is. Everything is on the table, everything
is to be considered at this unknown spot at this
particular time. Because you weren't there to bear witness to this.
(17:48):
You're an investigator coming out to investigate the scene, to
try and try to determine what had actually taken place,
because you're going to need answers, and in this case,
there's a lot of unanswered questions.
Speaker 2 (18:00):
We've got the belt around your neck they may mention
of a bungee cord being used on the laundry room door.
They may mention of the knives, but also puncture wounds
and stab wounds. I thought that those were just different
words for the exact same thing.
Speaker 1 (18:18):
No, not at all, because in our world, puncture wound
implies a specific element that would create how can I
describe it? In court? You'll read medical examiner reports, autopsy
reports where we will use the term defect, defect, defect
a defect in our world, essentially, if you want to
(18:39):
break it down to the elemental level, means whole, and
when you see multiple defects in a body, well that
can mean anything. What we're saying in a roundabout way
is to say that there are multiple holes in a body.
But when you break it down and you say we
have stab wounds, well, stab wounds have a particular nature
to them. Off they're defined as narrow and deep. And
(19:04):
what does that mean, Well, the actual hole or the
defect in the body when that knife, that sharp edged
weapon is inserted, it creates this kind of linear defect
which means lyne and I've often described it to my
students as a winking eye. If it's a single edged weapon, okay,
and most knives are. You don't come across a lot
(19:26):
of double edged knives like daggers, so most and in
this particular case, there's a butcher knife found, which is
a single edged weapon. So it looks like that defect
actually looks like a winking eye. Just imagine that in
your mind. With a puncture wound. That implies a circular
hole of a circular defect. Well, what can do that? Well,
(19:49):
there are a number of things that can create a
circular defect. If you have, say, for instance, a piece
of rebar, which is the structure that you use to rebar,
is used to shore up concrete, you pour over it.
It's steel, very hard substance. If someone is punctured with
a piece of rebar and that's withdrawn, you'll see a
(20:11):
circular defect as a matter of fact. In street population
in Atlanta, for instance, when I was working there, we
had a group of guys that would carry around homemade
shinks or shives as they are called in prison. They're
made out of rebar one ends wrapped with duct tape
as a grip, and they would puncture people multiple times
with these to defend themselves with Well, Dave, when you
(20:34):
withdraw this thing, you leave behind a circular defect. And
guess what else it looks like. It looks like a
bullet hole. So you have to be very careful when
you're using terms. And that's what's very confusing about this case,
because we've heard the term puncture wound and we've heard
the term stabbing, and those are completely two different types
of injuries. So there's a bit of confusion in the
(20:55):
language here.
Speaker 2 (20:57):
That's just amazing that we've got a belt around the net,
we've got puncture wounds, stab wounds, we've got a butcher
knife and a cleaver next to the body. We've got
the name Wonder spelled out in blood on the leg
and I noted I made a noted this because I
don't know if it means anything to you. And the
police report has said that she was bleeding on the
(21:20):
left side. That was actually written in the police report.
So I'm wondering, based on everything that we know about
the crime scene, with bleeding in her left side, with
several puncture wounds, what does that indicate that she was
alive and the heart was still pumping blood at the
time of the puncture wounds, the stab wounds.
Speaker 1 (21:41):
Oh yeah, that's going to be an indication of that.
But we have to be very specific. Investigations have to
be very specific in their language, and this case senter's
a lot on language, doesn't it.
Speaker 2 (21:50):
Yeah, it does. And we haven't even gotten to the
text messages coming up.
Speaker 1 (21:54):
You think about when the police report is saying that
on her left side is are they saying to the
underlying floor on the left aspect of the body, on
the left side of the body, or are they talking
about is there's on the actual surface of the body
that there's a lot of blood on the left side.
There's a lot that can be I guess opined about
(22:14):
relative to that. And also if you have injuries, say
to the left side we're talking you know, maybe the
left rib cage, left of the sternum, left of the midline,
all of that. It can be the left arm. Is
there an underlying pool of blood on the floor and
you can have seepage that comes out of the body
even after death. Well to what degree we know that
(22:36):
she was found lying on the laundry room floor, but
we don't know what her actual position was. If she's
left recumbent, which recumbent is a term that is used
in medicine. So if you think about left recumbent, the
individual is on their left side, and the medical professionals
out there where the understand somebody is rotated into the
(22:58):
left recumbent position. That means that the left side is depended,
it's bearing the weight of the rest of the body,
and the right side is up in the air where
they in what's referred to as a supine position. Supine
is a fancy way of saying face up, and you
can appreciate the body looking as the body is looking
up towards the ceiling. For instance, you can observe trauma
on the left side. You can see the seepage of
(23:20):
the blood, you can see the pooling of the blood,
and it might all be on the left side. But
here's the thing. You're not going to understand any of this,
and I mean any of this until the body is
thoroughly examined back at the morgue and you begin to
understand things about one tracks. You understand things about asphyxiation
that may have led to this woman's death. My wife
(24:01):
likes to say a phrase on a regular basis, and
I've learned a lot from this phrase. She says that
words are containers of power. You say something, and many
times it'll manifest itself in your life. If you're communicating
negative thoughts or angry thoughts and that sort of thing,
it'll manifest itself. And conversely, if you're saying things that
(24:23):
are kind and supportive, that's going to manifest itself. Many times,
your words say a lot, not just in the communication
between people, but they actually say a lot about you
as a person. And I think that we've kind of
got an insight into this relationship with just the words
there here, Dave.
Speaker 2 (24:44):
I see a story where somebody has allegedly scrawled a
name in blood on a victim, or on a wall,
or what have you. I immediately think of the Manson murders.
Speaker 1 (24:55):
Yeah, and Lobiancas too. Yeah, yeah, Mansons, And yeah, absolutely
I thought that same thing I did.
Speaker 2 (25:01):
It's just something that for our generation that comes up
because that was a big part of what was reported.
And then I think about this young couple. You know,
they're not old. John Wonder is thirty one years old,
his wife is twenty nine. They've got two children, two
little boys, a four year old and a two year old.
This is their mom and dad, and even though they
were going through a divorce, they were cohabitating. And yet
(25:25):
here we are where a welfare check leads her dad,
Ashley Wonder's dad, to find her body naked from the
waist down. She's stabbed, she's punctured, she's got a belt
around her neck, and the word Wonder scrawled in blood
on her leg. Then we find out that her husband,
John Wonder, Ashley Wonder's husband. Her maiden name is Earhart,
(25:49):
and oftentimes she's referred to as Ashley Earhart. But I
just want to make a point. They were still married,
they were going through a divorce, and by the way,
Ashley had already made notes she was leaving Actober first,
she was moving out. She had another place that she
was going to. This was known to their friends, their employer,
their family. It was no secret. So John Wonder drops
the kids off, doesn't take them inside, drops them off
(26:12):
the patio on the front porch, and he goes back
home where this takes place. We know that after he
left his wife with a belt around her neck, laying
in a pool of bloody scrawls his name Wonder on
her left leg, and then he leaves, but he starts
texting people. He starts texting family and friends. And this
(26:33):
goes back to I don't know of his generational joe.
I tried to find if there was anybody else who
had done something similar, but I couldn't find any His
sister tried to reach out to him when they were
did the welfare check. Immediately, family is calling family, Hey
have you heard Have you talked to John? Have you
talked to Ashley? And so John's sister said that after
(26:54):
she attempted to reach out to him, asking where he was,
he allegedly responded to her, John, where are you? What's
going on? He wrote back this quote, sorry about the
mess For the record, it's way easier and much more
satisfying than you can imagine. See year round hotly smokes.
(27:15):
He texted that to his sister.
Speaker 1 (27:17):
That in and of itself is a real insight into
the workings of someone's mind. And let's keep in mind,
John Wonder has merely been charged. He's not convicted, he
hasn't been put on trial.
Speaker 2 (27:29):
However, he texted a friend on Facebook. Now I don't
know if he used Facebook messengers so it was private,
or if he did it on the guy's wall. I
don't know, but John Wonder allegedly messaged a friend again
same time. Now, hey, Bud, sorry to make you the
receiver of this, but I have to share with someone.
(27:49):
I'm about to throw my phone out the windows and
we'll continue north to Fargo. I'm not trying to get away,
just feel like driving far away.
Speaker 1 (28:01):
Wow, I mean, there's so much information contained in there.
First off, you've got time stamps on all of these messages,
whether it be in a Facebook format or platform, or
if this is originating as a text message from a phone.
All that stuff is time stamps relative to when you
generated that message and perhaps your movement as well. That
(28:24):
one comment that was made relative to heading north to
far and it's a specific location heading to Fargo, North Dakota.
Now I've never made the drive, but just looking at
a map, if you're talking about going from KC to Fargo,
that's a poke, man. I mean, that's a long long way.
But let me back up just for a second, before
(28:44):
any text messages were generated, and we've kind of touched
on this idea of writing in blood. There's a little
known group. You hear about them in movies and whatnot.
I've got several friends that are actually forensic document examiners
or handwriting analysts, and they live in a different world
than they used to because text messages and that sort
(29:07):
of thing, and people don't write as many notes as
they used to. But the fact that you've got this
word that has allegedly been scrawled on Ashley's remains there
on the launder floor is significant, and what will perhaps
happen is that detailed images will be taken of that wording.
(29:27):
I hope that they were very very careful Dave when
they were transporting her body, so that that scrawl was
not diminished in any way. Because when you get a
body back to a more, you have, first off, the
correct equipment that you need to utilize lighting this sort
of thing, and you can use a variety of different
types of cameras in order to capture that image. And
(29:49):
so when that image is captured, it'll be perhaps taken
to the handwriting section at the State Crime Lab. Most
handwriting examiners live in More within the construct of the
State Crime Labe. It's not necessarily something all happening on
a local level. They will look at the scrawl that
is written in blood and did you know that after
(30:12):
you have hit about age six, your motor skill, as
it is kind of connected to your brain, the way
you visualize thing, the relationship but your eyes, the way
your eyes and relationship to your hand the movement. Do
you know that that's all set in place by the
time you're about six years old and utilizing pens, crayons,
(30:33):
all that sort of stuff. And even though it might
evolve over a period of time, you've set down a
framework in the way you write. So there will be
examples of his writing, the accused. There will be examples
of his writing that will be brought to the handwriting
expert and they will compare his handwriting that he has generated,
(30:54):
whether it's signing papers or writing notes or anything that
he has generated over the years, and it will be
brought in and it will be actually compared to the
scrawl that is written on her leg to see if
they can confirm that it is actually him, because at
this point in time, you don't know. I mean, it's
just like you were saying, with staging the defense in
(31:15):
a case like this can say, well, somebody was trying
to target my defendant and they just they knew that
if they scrawled his name in blood that it would
lead back to him, and that's something the defense attorney
would probably say. So that question will be asked and
it will have to be answered, and a handwriting expert
will come on the stand and make comment about that.
(31:36):
And there's two forms when you think about script writing
that everything is based on. There's what's referred to as
the Palmer school and the Zaner Blowser school. And you
can actually regionalize, you used to could You could regionalize
where people learned how to write regionally based upon those
(31:59):
two forms of And I'll give you an example of
what this looks like when you see do you remember
when we were in school and they were teaching you
how to write cursive, they would put the letters written
in cursive up on the board, or it would be
in like little placards up on the board so that
you could see what a capital F looked like as
opposed to a lowercase F, and it would be written
(32:19):
in its own lines. And that's how we learned to write,
and depended upon many times. It used to be with
whatever region you were in in the US, that's how
you learn to write. Zan Er Blowser was more common
in southern and midwestern areas of the country. But yet
you had the palmer, which you would find perhaps up
in the northeast. And isn't that kind of interesting that
(32:41):
you can profile the person based upon their handwriting, so
his motor skills that he would have learned, or whoever
the perpetrator is, as it applies to how he writes
something is going to be unique to him. Because you
use that framework at those two possibilities and you narrow
it down how you kind of craft your own writing.
Speaker 2 (33:00):
That's just crazy. But one thing I want to go
back to, Joe, you mentioned why would you go to
all the trouble of an autopsy when you know what
already has taken place? And why do you go to
all this trouble? I mean, you're talking about a lot
of effort and a lot of work, when in reality
it looks like we have a man who has pretty
much admitted by his own text messages to friends and
(33:21):
family that he has done this. He actually says this
to review a couple of the text messages Joe. He
added to that same friend on Facebook, he said that
he hadn't cried yet, haven't cried, but quote still feel nothing.
No more anxiety though, that's a plus. And then he
wrote this about the stones that he left by her body.
Apparently she had some types of stones and things that
(33:43):
people have a certain affinity for that you know, protect
them from different things, this new age stuff. And he said, well,
quote a lot of good they did you, Hun. I mean,
how cold is that, Joe? How cold is it to
point out, yeah, a lot of good they did you?
Speaker 1 (33:58):
Yeah, it is. And again, when you begin to think
about our friends like Karen Stark, you think about how
they would examine this. But let's look at this from
a purely scientific perspective or an investigative perspective. If you're
mentioning these stones in particular, you're stating in a text
message that idolaid them out next to the body. How
(34:20):
can we validate that statement? Well, logically, you can validate
it by documenting at the scene, if they are in
fact there, that they are present. Who would have knowledge
of that? Who would know that particular stones were laid
out adjacent to the body. And so when you couple
that with and let's just get in, you know, let's
just go for it. Let's talk about if you've handled
(34:42):
a knife and there's blood. You've got blood on your
hands that knife. Unless you clean it off, there's a
high probability you're going to leave a bloody fingerprint, a
latent print that's behind on the handle of that knife.
You could have blood perhaps on this meat cleaf, which
has not really been a it's there ownership of the belt.
(35:03):
Whose belt is this? Why was it used? Was it
her belt or was it the accused belt? Is there
any blood on the surface of the belt, And that
gives you an indication that if there is blood transfer
on that belt, particularly as if you've left behind the
Layton print on the belt, well what does that mean.
It means that she had blood on her person or
in the immediate area. That is her blood. You could
(35:25):
type her blood and that his Perhaps the accused fingerprint
was found in Layton blood on the surface of the belt,
So that gives you an idea perhaps that ligature came
after the stabbing, or conversely, if it's absent of that,
prosecution might just say, well, he attempted to strangle her,
he found out that wasn't going to work, so he
went and retrieved any or maybe he had the knife
with him, and that's again a way that we can
(35:47):
try to understand the sequencing of these things.
Speaker 2 (35:49):
Back to the text messages and social media messages that
John Wonder allegedly posted and sent quote, I'm guessing they
will be finding her body right about now. I started
getting calls at nine thirty am. Now, he wrote this
message to his friend in one of his last messages
before he was arrested, and I wanted to point something out.
(36:10):
Eight forty am, John Wonder drops the boys hit four
and two off at his mother in law's house at
Ashley wonders mom's house, and he doesn't take them many
drops him off, runs to his house. Now he's saying,
they say he started getting calls at nine thirty, so
I'm assuming this is work calling. See why they weren't
at work yet. And we know that police were called
(36:31):
and went out there at ten thirty to do the
welfare check. So we now have a timetable. He says
to this person allegedly that I'm guessing they will be
finding her body right about now. I've got a feeling
that's a pretty strong thing the prosecution would want to
have in evidence, right, Yeah, it is.
Speaker 1 (36:47):
Because you're aware the individual generating that note is going
to have an awareness of the timeline. They're going to
have an awareness. And the reason they're going to have
an awareness of this is that this individual has already
stating in these text messages that he is being contacted
and he's offering up you know, this explanation of well,
they should be finding her body right about now, because
(37:09):
I have been receiving messages since this specific time. And
that gives you an idea of awareness, doesn't it.
Speaker 2 (37:15):
Quote. I keep thinking about how she never screamed, just
took it like a champ, what a gal. To honor her,
I will not go out by a gunshot suicide by cop,
but by hopefully a similar fate as Ashley unquote he
wrote that about the mother of his children.
Speaker 1 (37:35):
Yeah, I think that probably out of everything contained here,
from certainly a communication standpoint, that might be the darkest.
It gives you an insight, a first hand account, if
you will, of this woman a mother and is still
a wife, that she just kind of slipped off into
the darkness as she was being brutalized. If you are
(37:57):
anyone in the midst of a relationship ship where there
is in fact domestic violence going on, I urge you,
I plead with you reach out to somebody, and one
of the quickest ways to do that is the National
Domestic Violence Hotline, and that number is one eight hundred
seven ninety nine safe. That's one eight hundred seven ninety
(38:18):
nine seven two three three. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and
this is Bodybacks.
Host
Joseph Scott Morgan
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!