October 29, 2024 • 41 mins
Libby German and Abby Williams vanished from a public park area in broad daylight on February 13. Witnesses were all around, but nobody saw what happened to the girls. The girls were on the High Bridge at 2:13 pm taking pictures and posting them online. By 3:15 Libby isn't answering her phone and nobody can find the girls. Police are called early but Libby and Abby are nowhere to be found. The bodies of Libby and Abby are found on February 14. They were murdered. Joseph Scott Morgan has been involved in the case since it began and has met with Family members but waited until some of the forensic information was available so he could break it down and explain what the science tells us about the deaths of Libby German and Abby Williams.
00:00:00.89 INTRODUCTION: Delphi Murder Trial
00:02:36.29 Delphi Case - getting to know Libby's grandparents
00:07:19.95 Who knows about a "snow day" "teacher day"
00:12:15.62 By 5pm Libby and Abby are missing
00:17:10.56 Libby and Abby not dressed for running off
00:22:16.14 Elderly gentleman finds the girls, turns his back, waits for police
00:27:21.54 Trial underway: More info available
00:32:10.84 The Reason a large crime scene is created
00:37:02.39 Libby's shirt found tossed in tree
00:40:20.38 Trial is ongoing, this is the first show on Delphi
There will be more shows coming up
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Body does with Joseph's gotten more. I guess I was
probably about four years old, and I had gone with
my mother to this gigantic in my eyes, at least,
there was this gigantic shopping mall back in the sixties.
And you know, when you're little, you hold on to
(00:25):
your mama's hand when you go out public. My mother
demanded it, and I would hold her hand, and of course,
Mama's being mama's, they get distracted. We were in a
department store and she's looking around and looking at the
racks of clothes, and somehow don't ask me how we
got separated, but I came to the realization that I
(00:50):
was holding a stranger's hand, and sure enough I looked
up and there was a lady who had a child
on her other side, and she looked down at me
and considered me. I looked at her, and immediately I
started crying. I still remember that to this day. It
burns into my mind because there was this overwhelming fear
(01:10):
that crept in, and I can still remember that from
that age to the age I am today. Just think
about it, your parent, your grandparent, and those things that
tether us together, those familial bonds, Sometimes they are hands.
(01:35):
Sometimes they're just being able to see. Sometimes, particularly nowadays,
there are electronics that tether us together. But just imagine
your worst nightmare comes true. You try to call, there's
no answer, You go to look, there's nothing seen, until
(01:57):
finally someone comes to you and tells you that you're
precious angels are gone. Coming to you from Jacksonville State University.
I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is Bodybacks Dave. I
(02:24):
guess probably since I guess the second month after after
the Delphie case happened, I was in. I was all in.
As a matter of fact, I was in so much
that Kim and I we when we would go to
crime Con. From that time forward, we became acquainted very
(02:52):
well with Patty family, the grandparents of Liberty, Liberty German,
and got to know them quite well. I remember my
wife being over with Liberty's grandmother and both of them
weeping together, my wife praying for at crime Con and
(03:15):
we just stayed in touch. We stayed in touch with Kelsey,
who is the sister that dropped both girls off at
the bridge, and we heard her tell her story. We've
watched her as she has gone through life can you
imagine bearing that burden through She's gotten married, gone to college,
gotten married, and had a baby. Since then, it goes
(03:39):
to sha and all it took to do this. Yeah,
I know. And that's the thing about it, you know,
I would it's like every year, you know, we would
see them over a period of time. We're in twenty
twenty four LA right now, and obviously this happened seven
years ago, and so it's like every year you expect.
It's like I would walk in there. There were a
(04:01):
couple of people that I would always first try to
see and you're hoping against hope that they're going to
say something to you that will reveal more information than
we had had the last time that we had met,
which had been one calendar here prior to that, and
it never came to fruition, never seemed like it happened.
(04:23):
There would be little snippets that would come out, and
there would even be some of the authority figures that
weren't working on the case that would appear at crime
con but it just nothing seemed to gel. And you
could just see there's a weird thing that goes on
with the families of victims. You can kind of see
this hollowed out, hopeless look in their face that I've
(04:44):
seen many times before, but it was I don't know,
there was just something about this that has always haunted me,
Dave about this case that it just it was not
solved any sooner than it has been. Again, I submit
to you, I don't think that it's necessarily been solved.
It's just that we're in the midst of a trial
right now and they have someone that is accused of
(05:07):
doing this. But it's baggage, you know, that people carry
with them forever, and you know, here I am grousing
about what my perception was. I'm a stranger. I'm an outsider.
You know. I didn't take care of these children when
they were little. They're not mine. I'm not linked to them,
but we're all kind of linked to them now because
we've been following this for so long.
Speaker 2 (05:28):
When it first happened, talking right around Valentine's Day twenty seventeen,
and I remember Nancy covering this story as it became
a national story at the time. Her twins we're a
little younger than the victims here, and if you can
imagine that, which it's one of those things when you're
(05:52):
a parent and a grandparent, you look at ages of
children think that could be mine. And that's why so
many people really did gravitate to this story of Libby
and Abbey. Here's what happened. It was February thirteen, twenty seventeen, Delphi, Indiana,
where Abby and Libby are best friends. They have been
best friends for years. They spend time at one another's
(06:14):
houses and that's what they had done that night. Abbey's
had spent the night before with Libby and they got
up that in Ney. It was a snow day, but
not because it snowed. It was a snow day that
had been set aside for snow day, and when it
wasn't used, the kids got it anyway, you know. Met
it a teacher workday, and so they were off school
that Monday, and Abby and Libby wanted to go to
(06:37):
the Mona and High Bridge, the park, the trails. It's
called a number of different things, but it was an
area that was visited by many people in that area
to walk the trails. It was a regular spot for
many people, and that's what they were doing.
Speaker 1 (06:52):
Now, Dave, can I say something right here real quick?
This is actually a very specific point that has intrigued
me all these years later. Okay, and here's what it is.
You remember, do you remember what it was like when
we were kids and we had a teacher work day
(07:13):
and you were going to have free day at home.
You know, you could have free day to do. You know,
you thought it was just about anything you wanted to do.
I'm not talking about an actual snow day where you
were locked inside and you were hoping to go out
sledding or do all the stuff that was down here
in South get much of a chance to do. No,
I'm talking about today where you just have the ability
to free roam. One of the things that has really
(07:35):
struck me about this case from the beginning. Maybe I'm
off base, I don't know, but one of the things
I've always wondered about, Dave, is do you realize how
intimately involved with a community you have to be. What
kind of an awareness you have to have in order to
know that there is going to be a schoolid absent day.
(07:56):
I mean you have to understand things like the buses.
You're not going to put your kid on the bus.
There's going to be in One of the other things
is you got to look out for kids, because otherwise
you're going about your daily life. Now there's going to
be kids out there, just like summertime. You're saying, why
are all the kids out? You know, that sort of thing.
And many times it's sent home. The school would send
(08:17):
a notice or I guess nowadays you get an email,
you know, telling the parents there's not going to be
school meeting. But that implies that you have to be
involved in that area just to have that knowledge, and
particularly if you go down this path of where you
think that one of these two victims, or perhaps both
we're targeted.
Speaker 2 (08:37):
Dave Well, Livvy and Abbey. We're fourteen and thirteen at
the time, and as you mentioned, it's teach your workday,
whatever you want to call it. They were out of
school that day and so they were looking for something
to do. The weather was nice. I don't know what
Indiana weather is like. It's not like us doing.
Speaker 1 (08:52):
It's no, it's not. It's cold. It's very very cold,
bone chilling cold as a matter of fact. And of
course further you go up north in state, you get
close to those lakes up there, and it's it's brutal.
On this day, it wasn't that cold. It was actually
a lot of somebody. Yeah, some people had described it
as like a late spring day, which is rare's hens
teeth up up in that area. So you know how
(09:14):
it is when it's been like just insufferably cold for
so long and all of a sudden, it's like you
get a breath of fresh air, you know, and you
get to get out and you fill the warm sun
on your face, or you know, maybe a cool refreshing
breeze instead of those breezes that cut you down to
the bone, you know, low humidity. Perhaps it's just you
(09:34):
just want to be out in it and experience it.
Speaker 2 (09:36):
And so the girls wanted to go out and do that.
Abby and Libby had gone to Libby's grandmother, Becky Patty,
and asked, you know, hey, can we go down to
the bridge and the trails and it was Becky Patty
has said she had a home office that she worked
in and she's working in her and so she's kind
of like, yeah, go ahead, but make sure you wear
something cold. You know, don't go off without wearing something warm.
(09:59):
Even though it's warm out now, it's going to get cold,
and you know, being a parent, grandparent, yeah, that's the
first thing you think of your child, the one you're
responsible for being comfortable. So, Kelsey, you mentioned her a
minute ago. Libby's older sister, Kelsey, she gave the girls
a ride. She gives Abby and Libby a ride to
the trailhead at one thirty in the afternoon, drops them off. Now,
(10:22):
they had made arrangements to be picked up between three
thirty and four o'clock by Libby's dad, and they go
to the park and at three thirty he's calling Libby's phone.
Abby didn't have a phone, Libby did. He's calling Libby
and getting no answer. Round three thirty, he calls several times,
(10:43):
gets no answer. He calls Libby's grandma, Becky Patty not
getting up with Libby. What's going on? You know? Do
I miscommunicate something, do I not understand? And that's the
first sign that they have trouble. And so they're like, well,
they try everything they can, but they're just not there.
So Becky calls Mike at work. He's getting ready to
(11:06):
get off work anyway, and she says, hey, Libby didn't
come back yet. And now everybody thinks at this point
in time, because we're really dealing with they got dropped
off around one thirty. It's now three thirty. You know,
nobody's panic stricken. Yet it's just not like these two
girls to not do what they say they're going to
do and be where they say they're going to be.
So they all gathered and started looking. It didn't take long.
(11:30):
We're talking by four thirty, five o'clock that afternoon, they
were talking to police. This now has gone from they
didn't get to where they were supposed to be to
they are nowhere to be found, and it's going to
get dark soon. They're trying to get up with Abby's mother,
Anna Williams, and she's at her second job. This is
(11:51):
a single mom working two gigs. And think about that
for a minute. You're Libby, and you're Libby and Abby's
parents and grandparents, and you know, Abby's mom is at work,
Libby's grandma is trying to call her. You know, you
got to get them involved. Hey, they're missing. By five o'clock,
they are no longer just late for being where they're
supposed to be picked up. They are missing Joe and
(12:16):
everybody in the park. And I thought about this the
other day. I was listening as we've been covering the
trial on the Nancy Gray Show. I was pulling a
lot of our shows over the last several years on
this with the Mike and Becky Patty. Actually, they did
a show with Nancy Grace at Crime con in Nashville
and had the chance to listen to them sharing their
(12:39):
thoughts moment by moment. And it's like any other parent
or grandparent responsible for a child. The only difference is
we know how it ended. Becky and Mike, Patty, Anna
Williams and all their friends, neighbors, Sheriff's department, police, everybody
hit that park. They walked up and down the creek.
(13:01):
They went north, they went south, they went east and west,
and did not find the girls. Finally they had to
call off the search because it was dark. It was
late at night, and by then you know it's bad.
Speaker 1 (13:14):
Yeah it is. And you know how I was mentioned
mentioning just a few months ago this kind of intimate
knowledge that you would have of what's going on in
this area by all counts in this case, this bridge,
in this walking area out there, you don't know that
(13:34):
this thing exists. It's like if you and I hopped
in our car and we decided to drive up Delphi,
Indiana right now. First off, we'd have to get directions,
and Delphi is not like immediately adjacent to some big
I don't know, metropolitan area. I guess if you want
to go to metropolitan area, maybe Indianapolis. But it's poke.
(13:55):
It's like Delpha is one of those places that you
only wind up there because that's your destination. You don't
wind up there by accident. I'm not saying that in
a disparaging way. I'm saying it actually kind of in
a complimentary way, because it's one of those places that
if you live there and you love it, you don't
(14:15):
want anybody else to know about it. And so that
goes to this location up there with this bridge. You
think about how isolated it is, all the little nooks
and crannies. You've got Deer Creek that runs right below
that railroad trestle that's out there. You can see for
yards and yards remembers. These trees had not greened up yet.
(14:36):
We were still in wintertime, Dave, and you're looking around.
You've got a vision for some distance out there. But
in order to negotiate just the topography out there, this
is not a place that you would want to go
into and not understand the lay of the land. It's
my opinion that whoever perpetrated these murders murders had intimate
(15:03):
knowledge of this location. I'd be willing to bet with
(15:23):
anybody that and plainly state that the most critical moment
in any investigation. It's not necessarily the awareness that you've
lost someone, but it's when you find them and you
find what remains of them, because it's at that moment
(15:44):
that you have a primary crime scene. Primary is different
than secondary and certainly different than tertiary because it's contained
within that spot most of the data that you're going
to need to forensically assess an event, and certainly an
event like this Dave, that is so very complex. If
(16:06):
you begin to think about the authorities in Delphi, I
don't fault them a lot. And this is why, because
it's really easy to look back and say, well, this
is what should have happened. You're talking about two they're young, granted,
you know, but you're talking about two young girls who
(16:29):
have now disappeared, and they and girls at this age,
boys too, can disappear for any number of reasons. You know,
kids threatening all the time, they're going to run off together.
You get two of them together and they begin to
talk about their lives or talk about troubles and that
sort of thing. They're like, listen, let's just go, let's
just go. We don't have anything. And of course they
(16:51):
were certainly underclothed. They didn't have anything as far as
material possessions would go, that they could sustain themselves on.
So I think that you can pretty much discount the
idea that they may have run off together. The reason
I'm saying this is that knowing what we know now,
you know you would want to call in, say like
(17:14):
you would want to call in somebody like an emergency
management personnel that could come in and organize a search.
You'd have it divided up into teams. You're going to
have a central point of communication where all this information
is going to be filtered. There'll be a team leader
for each one of the teams. No one move. If
you find something, it doesn't matter what it is, stop
(17:35):
plant yourself right there. We'll get to you. If it's evidence,
we'll process it right there. If it's a body, you damn,
we're better stay right there because we're going to have
to process that and we need to know precisely. It
sounds as though that it's it's the height of disorganization.
They're not thinking dead, is what I'm saying today. They're thinking,
(17:56):
we want to find these two girls. Are they out
here injured? But it's one Okay, It would be one
thing if we had one of these children that had
slipped on a rock and fallen off of a cliff,
and you had the other one trying to trying to
rescue this child. The other child. Okay, maybe they're injured
and they're just trying to rescue them. What are the
(18:17):
odds that you're going to have two one two girls
that are slaughtered? You know, it completely puts it in
a different light at that point in time, and I
think that, you know, I would imagine that when the
bodies are finally discovered, that they had this kind of
(18:37):
epiphanal moment where they knew that they were dealing with
something that is far beyond their scope of what they
would normally what they would normally deal with.
Speaker 2 (18:46):
Dave, Well, you're dealing with a very small area, as
you just mentioned, very small. You know, we're talking one
hundred and twenty five miles south of Chicago about seventy
five miles north west of Indianapolis. Indianapolis, they had to
go to Fort Wayne, Indiana, one hundred miles away to
get jurors for this case. Just so you know. But
(19:09):
anyway back to let's get back to the day of
the day of, meaning the day they found the bodies.
We find two girls and they're slaughtered. We I mentioned,
you know now that we actually have our end trial.
We mentioned at the very top of the show. I
(19:30):
learned so much yesterday listening to the autopsy of what
was said when the girls were found, Joe. They were
not found like huddled together attacked by an animal or
a four legged animal. The girls were actually found with
their clothes.
Speaker 1 (19:51):
One.
Speaker 2 (19:52):
Abby was closed. Libby was nude. Libby had blood all
over her body. Abby was clothed, but not with just
her clothes. Her pants were wet and she was wearing
some of Libby's clothing. Clothing was found in the river
in the creek in Deer Creek, and it was inside
(20:14):
out and all wet, and there was a sign of
blood and injury at the neck on Abbey, but she
didn't have blood all over her like Libby did. Yeah,
and that's just the outward glance from the sheriff's deputy
(20:37):
who actually was there first on the scene, who stopped
every You know, he didn't touch, he didn't do anything.
He did what you said, stop what you're doing and
guard this with your life, which is what he did.
Speaker 1 (20:49):
Which is what he's supposed to do. He's the gatekeeper
at that point in time. Nothing else in, nothing else out.
And if you have witnesses, yeah, I mean we would
call searchers witnesses if they are finders, okay, because they
are a witness to the fact at hand. And the
fact at hand is at that primary scene where you
have two deceased individuals. What did you see when you
(21:12):
first rolled up, because that is a snapshot in time
for that moment.
Speaker 2 (21:18):
Tom, let me ask you something very quickly, Joe. You
could you just mention that it was an older gentleman
who actually found them first. Yep, and being older, he
knew they were dead, yes, and out of respect he
(21:38):
turned his back.
Speaker 1 (21:39):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (21:40):
Yeah, I heard this and stood five feet away and
waited for police, waited for somebody official to show up
so he could leave. But I thought, in that moment
he did the one thing you know that you should
do don't touch, don't mess with anything, because everything is evidence.
And so you and I did a show the other
(22:01):
day where you talked about jury duty and yeah, how
shocking it is. You don't know what you're getting into.
And I thought about that when I was going over
this man's testimony of his shock all these years later,
you know.
Speaker 1 (22:13):
Yeah, and at heartbreaking because you know, he didn't how
do I phrase this, He didn't ask for this. He
was going out and looking for two missing.
Speaker 2 (22:21):
Girls trying to help find him.
Speaker 1 (22:22):
Yeah, do the calculus on that. And what you know,
you said, he's an older gentleman, and you have to think,
you know, well, what in the world is he ever
going to be divested of that memory? And he's not.
It's something he'll carry with him for the rest of
his life. And he bore witness to it. And I
got to tell you the fact that he did better
(22:43):
actually on one level than some uniformed police officers I've
come across in the past where they feel this, they're
compelled to want to go in and touch the body,
you know, search the body for you know, ID and
all this sort of thing, which is completely forebod And
if you've got a death and you're waiting for the
medical examiner to get there. You never touch the body.
(23:04):
The fact that he had the restraint and the forethought
to in his own way he was securing the scene.
I mean, I'm sure he would have torn into anybody
that would have walked up and said, hey, which guy there?
He would have said, wait, you stand back one second,
we found him, you just stand over there. And then
he turned his back because he couldn't bear to look
at it, and why should he have to. But he
(23:27):
did the job that you would want a police officer,
uniform police officer to actually do, to secure it, to
lock it down, and to not move from that location.
And you know it's going to be you know that testimony.
And one of the things that that makes that testimony
so powerful other than the fact that that you know it,
(23:47):
you know, because the other part to this that that
I wanted to reveal is that he you know, he
began to tear up. You know. Still it's still stings
like that. So we know that he had eyes on front. First,
He's going to be the best representation of what was
out there at that moment time. We know that this
has burned into his memory, so any amount of recall
(24:09):
that he might have. He's truly a person of fact
at this and you want a factual witness here, and boy,
this is bottom line right here. He's the one that
found him, He's the one that took care of him
for that period of time.
Speaker 2 (24:24):
When law enforcement arrives at the scene of a situation
like this, are they expected to touch, feel, and determine
that no life saving measures should be taken?
Speaker 1 (24:35):
Yeah, they are, I think to a certain degree. There
are certain cases, particularly if you've got obvious sons of decomposition,
there's no point in it. You know, why risk it?
I mean, you can obviously see and even young officers
understand understand some of the basics of postmortem changes in
human remains. They understand that to a certain degree. And
(24:55):
so the fact that you would want just one person
if they're going to do an assessment to assess the bodies,
the preference would be if you have an EMT there,
because you can it's easier to justify an EMT checking
for signs of life if you have one available, because
(25:16):
that is specifically their job. And I know that police
do this regularly. But you know, once they've made their
initial assessment, when it might be as simple as just
trying to palpate for a pulse. But how are you
going to do that because the first place EMTs normally
don't go go for the risk, to go for the neck.
And what did you say, just a moment ago, You've
(25:37):
got an area you know that has been so insulted
that it's crusted with blood. You couldn't do that assessment
or you know, any right thinking MT would look look
at the situation and know that this person is beyond
hope at this point in time. So yeah, you would
want to assess a body to that point. You're looking
for what are referred to as the cardinal signs of death.
(25:58):
There's like seven of them, and one of them is, uh,
there's no pulse, there's no respirations, that's just you know,
one slash two of the of the cardinal signs of death.
(26:23):
There's been so many questions all these years. You know
later you know, and uh, I've often had thoughts about
this case, and it would it kind of rises to
the top for me every single time. I've never I've
never I've appeared on news shows about it, but I've
never done a bodybacks episode. And there's a specific reason
(26:45):
I haven't. It's because I've been so tied into this
case for so long. I wanted to wait. I wanted
to wait because some of the biggest questions I always
had circled or evolved around the forensics, and for so
long we really didn't know anything. They played it so
close to the vast day, but just with the trial
(27:05):
opening up, you know, just a few days ago. Now
we're as we're chatting now, I finally feel like I'm
in a place where I would like to talk about
it and kind of explore it a little bit.
Speaker 2 (27:18):
To back up very quickly, that bridge, the Monin high
Bridge that they were walking on earlier that we have
the snapchat video from. I didn't realize how high up
it was. I didn't realize how decrepit that thing was.
It's a danger It's a dangerous place to be walking.
Speaker 1 (27:36):
Yeah, it's it seems to me like that would be
the best place to have a crosswalk that went beneath
the bridge and you could look up at the bridge
and view it. This thing is still open for people
to walk across. I've often and this is nothing I've
wondered Dave over the years since this thing has been opened.
How many people have fallen off of it? You know,
because that is that that is a lethal fall. You know,
(27:59):
you're seeing I feed up. Yeah. Yeah, that's enough to
kill the most hearty of us. And the fact that
people could still walk across this thing is amazing to me.
You know, every time I see that frozen image of
Abby walking, She's got her hands, her little hands in
the pockets that gray sweatshirt, and she's looking you know,
(28:19):
she's looking down, you know, in that freeze frame that
they have for her. And the reason I think she's
looking down is she wants to make sure she's putting
her feet in the right place, because it's terrifying to me.
I would not want to do it, you know. I
wouldn't do it. If I had a safety harness.
Speaker 2 (28:33):
Couldn't do it. I would be like that little kid
and stand by me on all fo Yeah, crawling.
Speaker 1 (28:39):
On a cross ties, Yeah I would too, you know,
shouting trains, Yeah, you know, and uh, yeah I would too.
I don't. I don't think I could do it. But
it goes to the nature of the isolation in this place.
Speaker 2 (28:50):
It also goes back to you said you mentioned it
earlier about knowing knowing what day it was, the kids
were out of school. It was a Monday out of school,
and you would actually have to have a specific reason
to be on that bridge. In this case, Libya and
Abbey did. They were going out there being little girls,
being you know, teens, and out there walking around taking
(29:12):
pictures and doing that. Yeah, where their bodies were found
relative to being on top. I think about being on
top of the bridge at that age of just you
know how when you're thirteen and fourteen and now you're
looking at everything and you're off school for the day
or with your best friend. I mean, my gosh, that
just had to have been the greatest day.
Speaker 1 (29:33):
Oh yeah, yes, it's incredibly great day. And you know
you're done with all the fetters of home and school
and all those things. It's where your mind can, you know,
kind of be freed up. And who would know, you know,
who would ever have suspected that you would have an
animal that would show up? You know? And I mean
that in most sincereous terms, whoever did this was an
(29:55):
animal perpetrating of this crime. But back to this earlier
comment that you made Dave about the crime scene. When
you begin to think about that. You know how I've
heard the crime scene described over and over again now
and it keeps turning up because it was mentioned in
trial is to keep using termed football field, And actually,
can I tell you I take some comfort in the
(30:17):
fact that they identified it that way and that's a
big area it is. I want it to be big.
I want any kind of crime scene that you're working.
This is the rule of thumb for us in forensics.
You can always start off at the most distal location
you can think of. If you have again, I'll go
(30:40):
back to my wagon wheel analogy, with the bodies being
the hub of the wagon wheel and everything else radiating
out from them. There's a reason why they give you
a badge and authority. You set the parameters of that
crime scene and you push it out as far as
you can. So the rationale is is that once you've
set up the tape, you've created a barrier there. You've
(31:01):
captured what you believe. Now, there can always be other
items found, okay, but you begin to consider the area
that you're in. This is not like being in a structure.
You're outdoors, which is a major headache. You can always
set those outer parameters, but you can always contract it.
(31:21):
You cannot start with a small space and then expand
outward because once you get people fiddling around outside the tape,
and even if you don't have people fiddling around, the
defense can say that they were there at least imply it.
So once you've established those boundaries, you know, relative to
the tape what you're saying, the authorities are saying, Okay,
(31:43):
this is my side, that your side that goes to
the general public in media, you can be on that
side of the tape because out there we're identifying this
as not having as much as of importance as within
the tape. So the reason you want to start off really,
really big is that you're going to be able to,
you know the old adage about cast wide net catch
(32:04):
a lot of fish. You capture everything you can, and
then if you need to contract it and say it's
cumbersome and you know that there's nothing else of value out,
say let's bring hey, guys, let's bring it in twenty
feet now. And so you begin this contracting that takes
place at seeing. The worst possible scenario is that you
start there and you put up a perimeter that literally
(32:27):
only extends out from the body maybe twenty feet in
a big area like this, and you haven't assessed everything
else around it. That's a nightmare because if you get
people walking up and you've established that boundary, the defense
can say, well, you know, this cigarette but has nothing
to do with with my you know, with my defendant.
There were people outside the tape that could have dropped
(32:49):
it there or spent casing, which plays into the I
mean I spent not a spent but an ejected live round,
which plays into this. And of course that was found.
You're the body, but what if you find another one
and it's outside the tape? So you want to extend
this out as far as you can and then contract.
Speaker 2 (33:06):
Okay, how do you establish that? I mean, we've got
two bodies and we're looking. I mean, do you actually
physically stand there and start looking around to see where
you can find blood in the grass?
Speaker 1 (33:17):
Really, you're gonna you're gonna do Yeah, You're going to
do a search. You're going to get as many eyes
on as you can. There needs to be a leader.
You're going to go out in teams of people looking
where you're putting your feet. I doubt that everybody out
there had shoe covers on and hair covers and all
of that sort of thing. But you know, you're chomping
through the woods and you're trying to establish how far
(33:39):
out do we put this outer marker and then you
have accountability for it. Okay, it's at this point in time,
and you will see this in a report. It was
at this point time that we established that that the
outer boundary of the crime scene was going to extend
out one hundred feet from the bodies, and we put
up tape. Then we set security at this point, this point,
(33:59):
this point, the point we have a single point of entry.
We have somebody keeping a name of an entry log,
which you're supposed to You have one point of egress.
That way you can, I mean, everything is done through
that one entry point. You never go anywhere else to enter,
you don't, you know how you see in the in
movies and whatnot, people will lift up tape and walk
underneath it and do it in random spots. It's not
(34:21):
the way you handle it. The way you handle it
is one central point of entry and you walk on
the same path every time, and that way you're not
going in there. Hair them, scare them, with no accountability
for where people are putting their feet or kicking around.
One of the worst feelings you can ever have is
a crime scene investigator, and this applies to if you're
(34:43):
working a scene in a parking lot, is to hear
that metal tink tink tink rolling across a parking lot
and you didn't realize you just kicked a spent shell
casing because you weren't paying attention and you didn't put
an evidence marker there. I've done it. I've stepped on
them before and ground them into the earth. And you
have to try to examine the area in total. You
(35:05):
want to have the best lighting situation you can. And
once you establish that tape, this is the only point
that everybody's entering. Right here, we're keeping a log of
everybody it's walking in and out of this area, So
that's very essential.
Speaker 2 (35:16):
They said it was one hundred you know, side of
a football field.
Speaker 1 (35:19):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (35:19):
Now, starting at the bodies and going out, they saw
clothing and shoes in the in the creek in Deer Creek.
So I get it that that would be part of it,
But would you consider the creek also part because you've
got clothing there with the creek and the direction of
(35:41):
what would that also be included in your crime scene.
Speaker 1 (35:44):
Yeah, you're going to be walking up and down that
creek bank law enforcement at this point in time. Now,
you're not going to have civilians out there.
Speaker 2 (35:51):
Yeah, they shut civilians down right as soon as we
got the bodies.
Speaker 1 (35:53):
Everybody stopped as well as should because it's one thing
to go out to try to find bodies, okay, and
we need people to help us find bodies. But once
the bodies have been found and it's no longer a rescue,
you hear this term all the time. This is no
longer a rescued this is now a crime scene, all right,
And you'll hear that with mass shootings a lot, you know,
they'll say that sort of thing. So, yeah, in answer
(36:14):
to your question, brother, that creek you have to have
people that can put their waiters on okay, and step
down in that water and begin to because you know,
you get a completely different view of a creek if
you're in the middle of it and you're looking back
towards the banks as opposed to standing on a bank
(36:35):
and looking down into the creek. There's all kinds of locations.
You know, you've got roots that are growing out from trees,
that are immediately adjacent to creek banks, and they're they're
kind of descending into the water. You never know what's
going to get caught up in here. And so there
were items of clothes found found in the creek. But
in addition to that, you begin to think about in
(36:55):
you know, kind of this I don't want to say,
you know, necessarily two dimensional world. But Libby's shirt was
found tossed up in a tree, this tight I shirt.
So you think about security of a crime scene, does
the parameters of a crime scene go up as well?
You know, you have to look everywhere. You're not just
(37:18):
gonna look at your eye level. You have to look up,
you have to look down, you have to get in
the creek, walk in the creek, look at anything, because,
let's face it, if you're first off, I'm very surprised
the bodies weren't placed in the creek, okay, because it
would seem that that's one of the most the quickest
(37:38):
way to get rid of any kind of physical evidence.
You know, water destroys everything eventually, and there's movement. So
you've got people searching one area, you got the bodies
that may flow downstream, and they're gonna be out there
and you're gonna have there would be a lot less
to work with. But the one saving grace is this
is horrible, but the remains were actually placed and I
(37:59):
think posed in this one location in particular. That was
a saving grace here. But you've got somebody that's pitching
evidence into a moving body of water. Who lord only
knows how far this thing extends or what else could
have been placed in there. Maybe this perpetrator had something
(38:20):
with them that they wanted to get that was a
personal line of them. They tossed it over there. You know.
One of the things I've always thought about was, for instance,
we've had you know, we've been covering the case for
a while now with Nancy, and we've had a lot
of forensic psychologists that have been on the air with us,
and you know, it doesn't you don't have to have
(38:42):
sex to make it a sexual assault, okay. And a
prime example of that is that you will have people
that will murder, they will have a twisted desire for someone,
in this case, two children, and once they kill them,
they're not going to have sex with them necessarily, because
(39:05):
you know, we have found out that there's not evidence
of sexual assault, at least that's what the forensic pathologist
is saying, But that doesn't mean it's not sexually related.
And this is what I'm saying about the creek. If
that's the case, If this guy had mastpatory fantasies where
he's posing the bodies almost like they're in a movie
or like in a girly magazine or something like this.
(39:26):
As discussing as this is, and forgive me, but he
could stand there and masturbate, catch a semen, maybe in
a tissue or maybe even in his hand, walk over
to the creek, and deposit that tissue and it's gone.
There's no evidence of any kind of DNA deposition relative
to seminal fluid, So it's gone, you know, in that moment.
(39:51):
And who you know, who's to say? You know that
an individual like this wouldn't want to go back out
there and do this over and over again, because you know,
we've got many people on record over the years that
have killed people and pose their bodies and then gone
back out and had these fantasies. I hate to always
go back to this guy, but you know, this satan
(40:11):
spawn of bt K, he did this regularly. You know,
he would fantasize over over these you know, over these
poor people that he victimized over the years. I will
say this plainly. We're in the middle of the trial
right now, but I felt compelled to go ahead and
lay this down for Bodybacks and for all our friends
out there. I wanted this to kind of orient ourselves.
And I make you this promise. I make it to you, David,
(40:33):
I make it to all of our friends out there.
As the case continues to develop, we will be back
with another episode of Body Backs, and when the case
is concluded again, we will come back with a final
assessment of the case, regardless of the outcome, because this
is the thing that has been bothering us all for years.
It's the thing that we want all of the answers for.
(40:56):
But now we've laid the foundation. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan,
and this is Bodybags.
Body does with Joseph's gotten more. I guess I was
probably about four years old, and I had gone with
my mother to this gigantic in my eyes, at least,
there was this gigantic shopping mall back in the sixties.
And you know, when you're little, you hold on to
(00:25):
your mama's hand when you go out public. My mother
demanded it, and I would hold her hand, and of course,
Mama's being mama's, they get distracted. We were in a
department store and she's looking around and looking at the
racks of clothes, and somehow don't ask me how we
got separated, but I came to the realization that I
(00:50):
was holding a stranger's hand, and sure enough I looked
up and there was a lady who had a child
on her other side, and she looked down at me
and considered me. I looked at her, and immediately I
started crying. I still remember that to this day. It
burns into my mind because there was this overwhelming fear
(01:10):
that crept in, and I can still remember that from
that age to the age I am today. Just think
about it, your parent, your grandparent, and those things that
tether us together, those familial bonds, Sometimes they are hands.
(01:35):
Sometimes they're just being able to see. Sometimes, particularly nowadays,
there are electronics that tether us together. But just imagine
your worst nightmare comes true. You try to call, there's
no answer, You go to look, there's nothing seen, until
(01:57):
finally someone comes to you and tells you that you're
precious angels are gone. Coming to you from Jacksonville State University.
I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is Bodybacks Dave. I
(02:24):
guess probably since I guess the second month after after
the Delphie case happened, I was in. I was all in.
As a matter of fact, I was in so much
that Kim and I we when we would go to
crime Con. From that time forward, we became acquainted very
(02:52):
well with Patty family, the grandparents of Liberty, Liberty German,
and got to know them quite well. I remember my
wife being over with Liberty's grandmother and both of them
weeping together, my wife praying for at crime Con and
(03:15):
we just stayed in touch. We stayed in touch with Kelsey,
who is the sister that dropped both girls off at
the bridge, and we heard her tell her story. We've
watched her as she has gone through life can you
imagine bearing that burden through She's gotten married, gone to college,
gotten married, and had a baby. Since then, it goes
(03:39):
to sha and all it took to do this. Yeah,
I know. And that's the thing about it, you know,
I would it's like every year, you know, we would
see them over a period of time. We're in twenty
twenty four LA right now, and obviously this happened seven
years ago, and so it's like every year you expect.
It's like I would walk in there. There were a
(04:01):
couple of people that I would always first try to
see and you're hoping against hope that they're going to
say something to you that will reveal more information than
we had had the last time that we had met,
which had been one calendar here prior to that, and
it never came to fruition, never seemed like it happened.
(04:23):
There would be little snippets that would come out, and
there would even be some of the authority figures that
weren't working on the case that would appear at crime
con but it just nothing seemed to gel. And you
could just see there's a weird thing that goes on
with the families of victims. You can kind of see
this hollowed out, hopeless look in their face that I've
(04:44):
seen many times before, but it was I don't know,
there was just something about this that has always haunted me,
Dave about this case that it just it was not
solved any sooner than it has been. Again, I submit
to you, I don't think that it's necessarily been solved.
It's just that we're in the midst of a trial
right now and they have someone that is accused of
(05:07):
doing this. But it's baggage, you know, that people carry
with them forever, and you know, here I am grousing
about what my perception was. I'm a stranger. I'm an outsider.
You know. I didn't take care of these children when
they were little. They're not mine. I'm not linked to them,
but we're all kind of linked to them now because
we've been following this for so long.
Speaker 2 (05:28):
When it first happened, talking right around Valentine's Day twenty seventeen,
and I remember Nancy covering this story as it became
a national story at the time. Her twins we're a
little younger than the victims here, and if you can
imagine that, which it's one of those things when you're
(05:52):
a parent and a grandparent, you look at ages of
children think that could be mine. And that's why so
many people really did gravitate to this story of Libby
and Abbey. Here's what happened. It was February thirteen, twenty seventeen, Delphi, Indiana,
where Abby and Libby are best friends. They have been
best friends for years. They spend time at one another's
(06:14):
houses and that's what they had done that night. Abbey's
had spent the night before with Libby and they got
up that in Ney. It was a snow day, but
not because it snowed. It was a snow day that
had been set aside for snow day, and when it
wasn't used, the kids got it anyway, you know. Met
it a teacher workday, and so they were off school
that Monday, and Abby and Libby wanted to go to
(06:37):
the Mona and High Bridge, the park, the trails. It's
called a number of different things, but it was an
area that was visited by many people in that area
to walk the trails. It was a regular spot for
many people, and that's what they were doing.
Speaker 1 (06:52):
Now, Dave, can I say something right here real quick?
This is actually a very specific point that has intrigued
me all these years later. Okay, and here's what it is.
You remember, do you remember what it was like when
we were kids and we had a teacher work day
(07:13):
and you were going to have free day at home.
You know, you could have free day to do. You know,
you thought it was just about anything you wanted to do.
I'm not talking about an actual snow day where you
were locked inside and you were hoping to go out
sledding or do all the stuff that was down here
in South get much of a chance to do. No,
I'm talking about today where you just have the ability
to free roam. One of the things that has really
(07:35):
struck me about this case from the beginning. Maybe I'm
off base, I don't know, but one of the things
I've always wondered about, Dave, is do you realize how
intimately involved with a community you have to be. What
kind of an awareness you have to have in order to
know that there is going to be a schoolid absent day.
(07:56):
I mean you have to understand things like the buses.
You're not going to put your kid on the bus.
There's going to be in One of the other things
is you got to look out for kids, because otherwise
you're going about your daily life. Now there's going to
be kids out there, just like summertime. You're saying, why
are all the kids out? You know, that sort of thing.
And many times it's sent home. The school would send
(08:17):
a notice or I guess nowadays you get an email,
you know, telling the parents there's not going to be
school meeting. But that implies that you have to be
involved in that area just to have that knowledge, and
particularly if you go down this path of where you
think that one of these two victims, or perhaps both
we're targeted.
Speaker 2 (08:37):
Dave Well, Livvy and Abbey. We're fourteen and thirteen at
the time, and as you mentioned, it's teach your workday,
whatever you want to call it. They were out of
school that day and so they were looking for something
to do. The weather was nice. I don't know what
Indiana weather is like. It's not like us doing.
Speaker 1 (08:52):
It's no, it's not. It's cold. It's very very cold,
bone chilling cold as a matter of fact. And of
course further you go up north in state, you get
close to those lakes up there, and it's it's brutal.
On this day, it wasn't that cold. It was actually
a lot of somebody. Yeah, some people had described it
as like a late spring day, which is rare's hens
teeth up up in that area. So you know how
(09:14):
it is when it's been like just insufferably cold for
so long and all of a sudden, it's like you
get a breath of fresh air, you know, and you
get to get out and you fill the warm sun
on your face, or you know, maybe a cool refreshing
breeze instead of those breezes that cut you down to
the bone, you know, low humidity. Perhaps it's just you
(09:34):
just want to be out in it and experience it.
Speaker 2 (09:36):
And so the girls wanted to go out and do that.
Abby and Libby had gone to Libby's grandmother, Becky Patty,
and asked, you know, hey, can we go down to
the bridge and the trails and it was Becky Patty
has said she had a home office that she worked
in and she's working in her and so she's kind
of like, yeah, go ahead, but make sure you wear
something cold. You know, don't go off without wearing something warm.
(09:59):
Even though it's warm out now, it's going to get cold,
and you know, being a parent, grandparent, yeah, that's the
first thing you think of your child, the one you're
responsible for being comfortable. So, Kelsey, you mentioned her a
minute ago. Libby's older sister, Kelsey, she gave the girls
a ride. She gives Abby and Libby a ride to
the trailhead at one thirty in the afternoon, drops them off. Now,
(10:22):
they had made arrangements to be picked up between three
thirty and four o'clock by Libby's dad, and they go
to the park and at three thirty he's calling Libby's phone.
Abby didn't have a phone, Libby did. He's calling Libby
and getting no answer. Round three thirty, he calls several times,
(10:43):
gets no answer. He calls Libby's grandma, Becky Patty not
getting up with Libby. What's going on? You know? Do
I miscommunicate something, do I not understand? And that's the
first sign that they have trouble. And so they're like, well,
they try everything they can, but they're just not there.
So Becky calls Mike at work. He's getting ready to
(11:06):
get off work anyway, and she says, hey, Libby didn't
come back yet. And now everybody thinks at this point
in time, because we're really dealing with they got dropped
off around one thirty. It's now three thirty. You know,
nobody's panic stricken. Yet it's just not like these two
girls to not do what they say they're going to
do and be where they say they're going to be.
So they all gathered and started looking. It didn't take long.
(11:30):
We're talking by four thirty, five o'clock that afternoon, they
were talking to police. This now has gone from they
didn't get to where they were supposed to be to
they are nowhere to be found, and it's going to
get dark soon. They're trying to get up with Abby's mother,
Anna Williams, and she's at her second job. This is
(11:51):
a single mom working two gigs. And think about that
for a minute. You're Libby, and you're Libby and Abby's
parents and grandparents, and you know, Abby's mom is at work,
Libby's grandma is trying to call her. You know, you
got to get them involved. Hey, they're missing. By five o'clock,
they are no longer just late for being where they're
supposed to be picked up. They are missing Joe and
(12:16):
everybody in the park. And I thought about this the
other day. I was listening as we've been covering the
trial on the Nancy Gray Show. I was pulling a
lot of our shows over the last several years on
this with the Mike and Becky Patty. Actually, they did
a show with Nancy Grace at Crime con in Nashville
and had the chance to listen to them sharing their
(12:39):
thoughts moment by moment. And it's like any other parent
or grandparent responsible for a child. The only difference is
we know how it ended. Becky and Mike, Patty, Anna
Williams and all their friends, neighbors, Sheriff's department, police, everybody
hit that park. They walked up and down the creek.
(13:01):
They went north, they went south, they went east and west,
and did not find the girls. Finally they had to
call off the search because it was dark. It was
late at night, and by then you know it's bad.
Speaker 1 (13:14):
Yeah it is. And you know how I was mentioned
mentioning just a few months ago this kind of intimate
knowledge that you would have of what's going on in
this area by all counts in this case, this bridge,
in this walking area out there, you don't know that
(13:34):
this thing exists. It's like if you and I hopped
in our car and we decided to drive up Delphi,
Indiana right now. First off, we'd have to get directions,
and Delphi is not like immediately adjacent to some big
I don't know, metropolitan area. I guess if you want
to go to metropolitan area, maybe Indianapolis. But it's poke.
(13:55):
It's like Delpha is one of those places that you
only wind up there because that's your destination. You don't
wind up there by accident. I'm not saying that in
a disparaging way. I'm saying it actually kind of in
a complimentary way, because it's one of those places that
if you live there and you love it, you don't
(14:15):
want anybody else to know about it. And so that
goes to this location up there with this bridge. You
think about how isolated it is, all the little nooks
and crannies. You've got Deer Creek that runs right below
that railroad trestle that's out there. You can see for
yards and yards remembers. These trees had not greened up yet.
(14:36):
We were still in wintertime, Dave, and you're looking around.
You've got a vision for some distance out there. But
in order to negotiate just the topography out there, this
is not a place that you would want to go
into and not understand the lay of the land. It's
my opinion that whoever perpetrated these murders murders had intimate
(15:03):
knowledge of this location. I'd be willing to bet with
(15:23):
anybody that and plainly state that the most critical moment
in any investigation. It's not necessarily the awareness that you've
lost someone, but it's when you find them and you
find what remains of them, because it's at that moment
(15:44):
that you have a primary crime scene. Primary is different
than secondary and certainly different than tertiary because it's contained
within that spot most of the data that you're going
to need to forensically assess an event, and certainly an
event like this Dave, that is so very complex. If
(16:06):
you begin to think about the authorities in Delphi, I
don't fault them a lot. And this is why, because
it's really easy to look back and say, well, this
is what should have happened. You're talking about two they're young, granted,
you know, but you're talking about two young girls who
(16:29):
have now disappeared, and they and girls at this age,
boys too, can disappear for any number of reasons. You know,
kids threatening all the time, they're going to run off together.
You get two of them together and they begin to
talk about their lives or talk about troubles and that
sort of thing. They're like, listen, let's just go, let's
just go. We don't have anything. And of course they
(16:51):
were certainly underclothed. They didn't have anything as far as
material possessions would go, that they could sustain themselves on.
So I think that you can pretty much discount the
idea that they may have run off together. The reason
I'm saying this is that knowing what we know now,
you know you would want to call in, say like
(17:14):
you would want to call in somebody like an emergency
management personnel that could come in and organize a search.
You'd have it divided up into teams. You're going to
have a central point of communication where all this information
is going to be filtered. There'll be a team leader
for each one of the teams. No one move. If
you find something, it doesn't matter what it is, stop
(17:35):
plant yourself right there. We'll get to you. If it's evidence,
we'll process it right there. If it's a body, you damn,
we're better stay right there because we're going to have
to process that and we need to know precisely. It
sounds as though that it's it's the height of disorganization.
They're not thinking dead, is what I'm saying today. They're thinking,
(17:56):
we want to find these two girls. Are they out
here injured? But it's one Okay, It would be one
thing if we had one of these children that had
slipped on a rock and fallen off of a cliff,
and you had the other one trying to trying to
rescue this child. The other child. Okay, maybe they're injured
and they're just trying to rescue them. What are the
(18:17):
odds that you're going to have two one two girls
that are slaughtered? You know, it completely puts it in
a different light at that point in time, and I
think that, you know, I would imagine that when the
bodies are finally discovered, that they had this kind of
(18:37):
epiphanal moment where they knew that they were dealing with
something that is far beyond their scope of what they
would normally what they would normally deal with.
Speaker 2 (18:46):
Dave, Well, you're dealing with a very small area, as
you just mentioned, very small. You know, we're talking one
hundred and twenty five miles south of Chicago about seventy
five miles north west of Indianapolis. Indianapolis, they had to
go to Fort Wayne, Indiana, one hundred miles away to
get jurors for this case. Just so you know. But
(19:09):
anyway back to let's get back to the day of
the day of, meaning the day they found the bodies.
We find two girls and they're slaughtered. We I mentioned,
you know now that we actually have our end trial.
We mentioned at the very top of the show. I
(19:30):
learned so much yesterday listening to the autopsy of what
was said when the girls were found, Joe. They were
not found like huddled together attacked by an animal or
a four legged animal. The girls were actually found with
their clothes.
Speaker 1 (19:51):
One.
Speaker 2 (19:52):
Abby was closed. Libby was nude. Libby had blood all
over her body. Abby was clothed, but not with just
her clothes. Her pants were wet and she was wearing
some of Libby's clothing. Clothing was found in the river
in the creek in Deer Creek, and it was inside
(20:14):
out and all wet, and there was a sign of
blood and injury at the neck on Abbey, but she
didn't have blood all over her like Libby did. Yeah,
and that's just the outward glance from the sheriff's deputy
(20:37):
who actually was there first on the scene, who stopped
every You know, he didn't touch, he didn't do anything.
He did what you said, stop what you're doing and
guard this with your life, which is what he did.
Speaker 1 (20:49):
Which is what he's supposed to do. He's the gatekeeper
at that point in time. Nothing else in, nothing else out.
And if you have witnesses, yeah, I mean we would
call searchers witnesses if they are finders, okay, because they
are a witness to the fact at hand. And the
fact at hand is at that primary scene where you
have two deceased individuals. What did you see when you
(21:12):
first rolled up, because that is a snapshot in time
for that moment.
Speaker 2 (21:18):
Tom, let me ask you something very quickly, Joe. You
could you just mention that it was an older gentleman
who actually found them first. Yep, and being older, he
knew they were dead, yes, and out of respect he
(21:38):
turned his back.
Speaker 1 (21:39):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (21:40):
Yeah, I heard this and stood five feet away and
waited for police, waited for somebody official to show up
so he could leave. But I thought, in that moment
he did the one thing you know that you should
do don't touch, don't mess with anything, because everything is evidence.
And so you and I did a show the other
(22:01):
day where you talked about jury duty and yeah, how
shocking it is. You don't know what you're getting into.
And I thought about that when I was going over
this man's testimony of his shock all these years later,
you know.
Speaker 1 (22:13):
Yeah, and at heartbreaking because you know, he didn't how
do I phrase this, He didn't ask for this. He
was going out and looking for two missing.
Speaker 2 (22:21):
Girls trying to help find him.
Speaker 1 (22:22):
Yeah, do the calculus on that. And what you know,
you said, he's an older gentleman, and you have to think,
you know, well, what in the world is he ever
going to be divested of that memory? And he's not.
It's something he'll carry with him for the rest of
his life. And he bore witness to it. And I
got to tell you the fact that he did better
(22:43):
actually on one level than some uniformed police officers I've
come across in the past where they feel this, they're
compelled to want to go in and touch the body,
you know, search the body for you know, ID and
all this sort of thing, which is completely forebod And
if you've got a death and you're waiting for the
medical examiner to get there. You never touch the body.
(23:04):
The fact that he had the restraint and the forethought
to in his own way he was securing the scene.
I mean, I'm sure he would have torn into anybody
that would have walked up and said, hey, which guy there?
He would have said, wait, you stand back one second,
we found him, you just stand over there. And then
he turned his back because he couldn't bear to look
at it, and why should he have to. But he
(23:27):
did the job that you would want a police officer,
uniform police officer to actually do, to secure it, to
lock it down, and to not move from that location.
And you know it's going to be you know that testimony.
And one of the things that that makes that testimony
so powerful other than the fact that that you know it,
(23:47):
you know, because the other part to this that that
I wanted to reveal is that he you know, he
began to tear up. You know. Still it's still stings
like that. So we know that he had eyes on front. First,
He's going to be the best representation of what was
out there at that moment time. We know that this
has burned into his memory, so any amount of recall
(24:09):
that he might have. He's truly a person of fact
at this and you want a factual witness here, and boy,
this is bottom line right here. He's the one that
found him, He's the one that took care of him
for that period of time.
Speaker 2 (24:24):
When law enforcement arrives at the scene of a situation
like this, are they expected to touch, feel, and determine
that no life saving measures should be taken?
Speaker 1 (24:35):
Yeah, they are, I think to a certain degree. There
are certain cases, particularly if you've got obvious sons of decomposition,
there's no point in it. You know, why risk it?
I mean, you can obviously see and even young officers
understand understand some of the basics of postmortem changes in
human remains. They understand that to a certain degree. And
(24:55):
so the fact that you would want just one person
if they're going to do an assessment to assess the bodies,
the preference would be if you have an EMT there,
because you can it's easier to justify an EMT checking
for signs of life if you have one available, because
(25:16):
that is specifically their job. And I know that police
do this regularly. But you know, once they've made their
initial assessment, when it might be as simple as just
trying to palpate for a pulse. But how are you
going to do that because the first place EMTs normally
don't go go for the risk, to go for the neck.
And what did you say, just a moment ago, You've
(25:37):
got an area you know that has been so insulted
that it's crusted with blood. You couldn't do that assessment
or you know, any right thinking MT would look look
at the situation and know that this person is beyond
hope at this point in time. So yeah, you would
want to assess a body to that point. You're looking
for what are referred to as the cardinal signs of death.
(25:58):
There's like seven of them, and one of them is, uh,
there's no pulse, there's no respirations, that's just you know,
one slash two of the of the cardinal signs of death.
(26:23):
There's been so many questions all these years. You know
later you know, and uh, I've often had thoughts about
this case, and it would it kind of rises to
the top for me every single time. I've never I've
never I've appeared on news shows about it, but I've
never done a bodybacks episode. And there's a specific reason
(26:45):
I haven't. It's because I've been so tied into this
case for so long. I wanted to wait. I wanted
to wait because some of the biggest questions I always
had circled or evolved around the forensics, and for so
long we really didn't know anything. They played it so
close to the vast day, but just with the trial
(27:05):
opening up, you know, just a few days ago. Now
we're as we're chatting now, I finally feel like I'm
in a place where I would like to talk about
it and kind of explore it a little bit.
Speaker 2 (27:18):
To back up very quickly, that bridge, the Monin high
Bridge that they were walking on earlier that we have
the snapchat video from. I didn't realize how high up
it was. I didn't realize how decrepit that thing was.
It's a danger It's a dangerous place to be walking.
Speaker 1 (27:36):
Yeah, it's it seems to me like that would be
the best place to have a crosswalk that went beneath
the bridge and you could look up at the bridge
and view it. This thing is still open for people
to walk across. I've often and this is nothing I've
wondered Dave over the years since this thing has been opened.
How many people have fallen off of it? You know,
because that is that that is a lethal fall. You know,
(27:59):
you're seeing I feed up. Yeah. Yeah, that's enough to
kill the most hearty of us. And the fact that
people could still walk across this thing is amazing to me.
You know, every time I see that frozen image of
Abby walking, She's got her hands, her little hands in
the pockets that gray sweatshirt, and she's looking you know,
(28:19):
she's looking down, you know, in that freeze frame that
they have for her. And the reason I think she's
looking down is she wants to make sure she's putting
her feet in the right place, because it's terrifying to me.
I would not want to do it, you know. I
wouldn't do it. If I had a safety harness.
Speaker 2 (28:33):
Couldn't do it. I would be like that little kid
and stand by me on all fo Yeah, crawling.
Speaker 1 (28:39):
On a cross ties, Yeah I would too, you know,
shouting trains, Yeah, you know, and uh, yeah I would too.
I don't. I don't think I could do it. But
it goes to the nature of the isolation in this place.
Speaker 2 (28:50):
It also goes back to you said you mentioned it
earlier about knowing knowing what day it was, the kids
were out of school. It was a Monday out of school,
and you would actually have to have a specific reason
to be on that bridge. In this case, Libya and
Abbey did. They were going out there being little girls,
being you know, teens, and out there walking around taking
(29:12):
pictures and doing that. Yeah, where their bodies were found
relative to being on top. I think about being on
top of the bridge at that age of just you
know how when you're thirteen and fourteen and now you're
looking at everything and you're off school for the day
or with your best friend. I mean, my gosh, that
just had to have been the greatest day.
Speaker 1 (29:33):
Oh yeah, yes, it's incredibly great day. And you know
you're done with all the fetters of home and school
and all those things. It's where your mind can, you know,
kind of be freed up. And who would know, you know,
who would ever have suspected that you would have an
animal that would show up? You know? And I mean
that in most sincereous terms, whoever did this was an
(29:55):
animal perpetrating of this crime. But back to this earlier
comment that you made Dave about the crime scene. When
you begin to think about that. You know how I've
heard the crime scene described over and over again now
and it keeps turning up because it was mentioned in
trial is to keep using termed football field, And actually,
can I tell you I take some comfort in the
(30:17):
fact that they identified it that way and that's a
big area it is. I want it to be big.
I want any kind of crime scene that you're working.
This is the rule of thumb for us in forensics.
You can always start off at the most distal location
you can think of. If you have again, I'll go
(30:40):
back to my wagon wheel analogy, with the bodies being
the hub of the wagon wheel and everything else radiating
out from them. There's a reason why they give you
a badge and authority. You set the parameters of that
crime scene and you push it out as far as
you can. So the rationale is is that once you've
set up the tape, you've created a barrier there. You've
(31:01):
captured what you believe. Now, there can always be other
items found, okay, but you begin to consider the area
that you're in. This is not like being in a structure.
You're outdoors, which is a major headache. You can always
set those outer parameters, but you can always contract it.
(31:21):
You cannot start with a small space and then expand
outward because once you get people fiddling around outside the tape,
and even if you don't have people fiddling around, the
defense can say that they were there at least imply it.
So once you've established those boundaries, you know, relative to
the tape what you're saying, the authorities are saying, Okay,
(31:43):
this is my side, that your side that goes to
the general public in media, you can be on that
side of the tape because out there we're identifying this
as not having as much as of importance as within
the tape. So the reason you want to start off really,
really big is that you're going to be able to,
you know the old adage about cast wide net catch
(32:04):
a lot of fish. You capture everything you can, and
then if you need to contract it and say it's
cumbersome and you know that there's nothing else of value out,
say let's bring hey, guys, let's bring it in twenty
feet now. And so you begin this contracting that takes
place at seeing. The worst possible scenario is that you
start there and you put up a perimeter that literally
(32:27):
only extends out from the body maybe twenty feet in
a big area like this, and you haven't assessed everything
else around it. That's a nightmare because if you get
people walking up and you've established that boundary, the defense
can say, well, you know, this cigarette but has nothing
to do with with my you know, with my defendant.
There were people outside the tape that could have dropped
(32:49):
it there or spent casing, which plays into the I
mean I spent not a spent but an ejected live round,
which plays into this. And of course that was found.
You're the body, but what if you find another one
and it's outside the tape? So you want to extend
this out as far as you can and then contract.
Speaker 2 (33:06):
Okay, how do you establish that? I mean, we've got
two bodies and we're looking. I mean, do you actually
physically stand there and start looking around to see where
you can find blood in the grass?
Speaker 1 (33:17):
Really, you're gonna you're gonna do Yeah, You're going to
do a search. You're going to get as many eyes
on as you can. There needs to be a leader.
You're going to go out in teams of people looking
where you're putting your feet. I doubt that everybody out
there had shoe covers on and hair covers and all
of that sort of thing. But you know, you're chomping
through the woods and you're trying to establish how far
(33:39):
out do we put this outer marker and then you
have accountability for it. Okay, it's at this point in time,
and you will see this in a report. It was
at this point time that we established that that the
outer boundary of the crime scene was going to extend
out one hundred feet from the bodies, and we put
up tape. Then we set security at this point, this point,
(33:59):
this point, the point we have a single point of entry.
We have somebody keeping a name of an entry log,
which you're supposed to You have one point of egress.
That way you can, I mean, everything is done through
that one entry point. You never go anywhere else to enter,
you don't, you know how you see in the in
movies and whatnot, people will lift up tape and walk
underneath it and do it in random spots. It's not
(34:21):
the way you handle it. The way you handle it
is one central point of entry and you walk on
the same path every time, and that way you're not
going in there. Hair them, scare them, with no accountability
for where people are putting their feet or kicking around.
One of the worst feelings you can ever have is
a crime scene investigator, and this applies to if you're
(34:43):
working a scene in a parking lot, is to hear
that metal tink tink tink rolling across a parking lot
and you didn't realize you just kicked a spent shell
casing because you weren't paying attention and you didn't put
an evidence marker there. I've done it. I've stepped on
them before and ground them into the earth. And you
have to try to examine the area in total. You
(35:05):
want to have the best lighting situation you can. And
once you establish that tape, this is the only point
that everybody's entering. Right here, we're keeping a log of
everybody it's walking in and out of this area, So
that's very essential.
Speaker 2 (35:16):
They said it was one hundred you know, side of
a football field.
Speaker 1 (35:19):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (35:19):
Now, starting at the bodies and going out, they saw
clothing and shoes in the in the creek in Deer Creek.
So I get it that that would be part of it,
But would you consider the creek also part because you've
got clothing there with the creek and the direction of
(35:41):
what would that also be included in your crime scene.
Speaker 1 (35:44):
Yeah, you're going to be walking up and down that
creek bank law enforcement at this point in time. Now,
you're not going to have civilians out there.
Speaker 2 (35:51):
Yeah, they shut civilians down right as soon as we
got the bodies.
Speaker 1 (35:53):
Everybody stopped as well as should because it's one thing
to go out to try to find bodies, okay, and
we need people to help us find bodies. But once
the bodies have been found and it's no longer a rescue,
you hear this term all the time. This is no
longer a rescued this is now a crime scene, all right,
And you'll hear that with mass shootings a lot, you know,
they'll say that sort of thing. So, yeah, in answer
(36:14):
to your question, brother, that creek you have to have
people that can put their waiters on okay, and step
down in that water and begin to because you know,
you get a completely different view of a creek if
you're in the middle of it and you're looking back
towards the banks as opposed to standing on a bank
(36:35):
and looking down into the creek. There's all kinds of locations.
You know, you've got roots that are growing out from trees,
that are immediately adjacent to creek banks, and they're they're
kind of descending into the water. You never know what's
going to get caught up in here. And so there
were items of clothes found found in the creek. But
in addition to that, you begin to think about in
(36:55):
you know, kind of this I don't want to say,
you know, necessarily two dimensional world. But Libby's shirt was
found tossed up in a tree, this tight I shirt.
So you think about security of a crime scene, does
the parameters of a crime scene go up as well?
You know, you have to look everywhere. You're not just
(37:18):
gonna look at your eye level. You have to look up,
you have to look down, you have to get in
the creek, walk in the creek, look at anything, because,
let's face it, if you're first off, I'm very surprised
the bodies weren't placed in the creek, okay, because it
would seem that that's one of the most the quickest
(37:38):
way to get rid of any kind of physical evidence.
You know, water destroys everything eventually, and there's movement. So
you've got people searching one area, you got the bodies
that may flow downstream, and they're gonna be out there
and you're gonna have there would be a lot less
to work with. But the one saving grace is this
is horrible, but the remains were actually placed and I
(37:59):
think posed in this one location in particular. That was
a saving grace here. But you've got somebody that's pitching
evidence into a moving body of water. Who lord only
knows how far this thing extends or what else could
have been placed in there. Maybe this perpetrator had something
(38:20):
with them that they wanted to get that was a
personal line of them. They tossed it over there. You know.
One of the things I've always thought about was, for instance,
we've had you know, we've been covering the case for
a while now with Nancy, and we've had a lot
of forensic psychologists that have been on the air with us,
and you know, it doesn't you don't have to have
(38:42):
sex to make it a sexual assault, okay. And a
prime example of that is that you will have people
that will murder, they will have a twisted desire for someone,
in this case, two children, and once they kill them,
they're not going to have sex with them necessarily, because
(39:05):
you know, we have found out that there's not evidence
of sexual assault, at least that's what the forensic pathologist
is saying, But that doesn't mean it's not sexually related.
And this is what I'm saying about the creek. If
that's the case, If this guy had mastpatory fantasies where
he's posing the bodies almost like they're in a movie
or like in a girly magazine or something like this.
(39:26):
As discussing as this is, and forgive me, but he
could stand there and masturbate, catch a semen, maybe in
a tissue or maybe even in his hand, walk over
to the creek, and deposit that tissue and it's gone.
There's no evidence of any kind of DNA deposition relative
to seminal fluid, So it's gone, you know, in that moment.
(39:51):
And who you know, who's to say? You know that
an individual like this wouldn't want to go back out
there and do this over and over again, because you know,
we've got many people on record over the years that
have killed people and pose their bodies and then gone
back out and had these fantasies. I hate to always
go back to this guy, but you know, this satan
(40:11):
spawn of bt K, he did this regularly. You know,
he would fantasize over over these you know, over these
poor people that he victimized over the years. I will
say this plainly. We're in the middle of the trial
right now, but I felt compelled to go ahead and
lay this down for Bodybacks and for all our friends
out there. I wanted this to kind of orient ourselves.
And I make you this promise. I make it to you, David,
(40:33):
I make it to all of our friends out there.
As the case continues to develop, we will be back
with another episode of Body Backs, and when the case
is concluded again, we will come back with a final
assessment of the case, regardless of the outcome, because this
is the thing that has been bothering us all for years.
It's the thing that we want all of the answers for.
(40:56):
But now we've laid the foundation. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan,
and this is Bodybags.
Host
Joseph Scott Morgan
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