December 9, 2025 • 37 mins
Nancy Howery meets Daniel Stearns on a dating app.
She is a 44-year-old divorced mother of two. Stearns is a 32-year-old control freak who says Nancy wasn't "following his dating rules" because she refused to date him exclusively.
Joseph Scott Morgan and Dave Mack look at the world of dating apps and how Nancy Howery became the victim of Daniel Stearns.
At his sentencing hearing, Nancy's ex-husband said of Stearns, "What he has done to Nancy was demented and defective. It wasn't just murder, okay? It was a savage slaughter."
Transcribe Highlights
00:00.05 Introduction - Geographical locations
02:03.82 Nancy Howery-met guy on dating app
05:01.99 Ex-husband reports Nancy missing
09:00.88 Digital info show Sterns mad Nancy wasn't exclusive
14:33.21 Investigators determined last person to see Nancy
19:02.10 Vehicle found abandoned in Palm Bay
23:48.31 Fingertips - rebuilding tissue
28:45.43 Body burned and dismembered
34:33.21 Bullet tracking through skull
37:50.10 Conclusion
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Quody balance, but Joseph's gotten more. You know, throughout I
guess crime history, there are geographical locations that are associated
with horrific events. All you have to do is look
at you know, Jonestown for instance, or some such place
(00:22):
as that. And you know, I think that part of
that goes to the idea that you know, we as humans,
we have to have some kind of marker to keep up,
you know, to understand and automatically when you hear certain names,
they create a chill up and down your spine. Today,
(00:43):
I want to talk about a case that originates back
in twenty twenty three. And the name that is associated
with this event, which is so horrific, is actually called
the Compound. It's located in Florida, and what took place
(01:07):
at that location I believe will chill you to your core.
I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is Body by Brother
Dave Good to join you. I you know, I feel like,
you know, sometimes I feel like I just absolutely assault
(01:30):
you based upon these cases that I send your way,
because you know, there's no you know, I don't know
rainbows and lollipops, you know, where we kind of in
dwell many times, and they're horrible things, but I feel
like this is a case that we need to talk
to we're talking about we're talking about a single mother
of two and what seems to be an origin of
(01:54):
the story in the dating app world. It's a brave
new world that we live.
Speaker 2 (02:00):
Nancy Howry, divorced, mother of two, good relationship with the
ex husband. They share custody of their two children, and
Nancy fails to pick the kids up from school as
she normally would. And when that happens, her ex husband
knows this is out of this is not normal, something's wrong,
and so immediately he's on the phone reporting her missing,
(02:23):
and boom they find out. Okay, you've mentioned this so
many times. I'm glad you have, Joe, because you've mentioned forensics,
in data forensics, in our phone, our computer. The forensic
the digital forensics that we experience now are relatively new,
and every day it's getting closer and closer to knowing
where you are every minute of the day, being able
(02:46):
to hear your every word, being able to see what
you're seeing. The camera on your computer, the camera on
your phone, it's watching you, yes, and it's marking where
you are and that's what they did to track this case.
Speaker 1 (03:00):
Yeah, and as I have Offseid and I will continue
to say, you know these you know, boat anchors that
we carry around in our pockets everywhere we go. Now,
and I teach this at Jack State. You know, my
students are entering into a world where literally these are
portable crime scenes that exist. And in twel with us
twenty four to seven. You know, I mean, you cannot escape,
(03:23):
You can't escape. You know, they're tracking, and you know,
and look to the credit of everybody involved in this case,
they really really track this guy down. I guess, Dave
in a pretty expeditious manner, if you will. You know,
there's some of these things that kind of hang in
the ether out there. But they tracked this guy down
(03:44):
pretty quickly, didn't they.
Speaker 2 (03:45):
I went back and pulled the news reports from the day, okay,
and you're talking about February eighteenth. She doesn't pick up
the kids. Within a week, they are on track with
the mister Stearns because he Daniel Stearns was dating Nancy Howry. Now,
(04:09):
Daniel Stearns is only thirty two at the time and
Nancy is forty four. That's a big difference. In age.
When you look at it from the standpoint of you
have a thirty two year old guy, and now you
have a woman who she's already gotten one marriage behind her,
with two kids, she's got an established career, she's taken
(04:29):
care of things, and he's thirty two and is dating.
You know, I mean, that's just to me, that's a
big difference at that time in life. You know, if
sixty two and fifty maybe not so much, seventy two
and sixty not at all, but forty four and thirty two,
that's a big difference to me.
Speaker 1 (04:43):
Yeah, And there's one other person involved in this. She's
you'd mentioned previous marriage. She's It would seem at least
that she's got a pretty good relationship with the ex,
doesn't she.
Speaker 2 (04:53):
Yeah, yeah, because he's the one that called and said
she didn't pick up the kids. This is not normal.
She's you know, and we looked at her house, called
the phone, can't find her, she's missing. And he was
the one that lit the fire, and every and thankfully
everybody responded because, as you've said, the forensics that you
can find. Think about it. If you're using a dating
(05:14):
app to date somebody, you're tracked right there, already done.
You're being tracked if you do something, and they need
to find out, and they did. They were able to
find Daniel Stearns had been in contact with her, they
had met, they had dated, and they'd also found out
a number of other things from mister Stearns from well,
text messages and things like that, that Daniel Stearns had
(05:37):
rules for dating that he expected Nancy to follow. And
Nancy Howry, who had already gone through a divorce, custody
battles and all that. You're not going to push a
woman like that around. You got to respect that respect
a woman who has done this. But he didn't. And
Daniel Stearns didn't like the fact that she was dating
(05:57):
other men. She wasn't just seeing him. She don't want
to to see him, She wanted to see what was
out there.
Speaker 1 (06:02):
Well, she's a single mom, and so you know, look,
I got to tell you from my perspective, all right,
every time you go on a date with somebody, and
it's it's like an extended interview, particularly if you've got
two kids, you know. And look, I mean, people get lonely,
they need related they long for a relationship, but for
(06:24):
a single mom that has two kids. You have to
think you're dating him, Yes, but I'm interviewing you to
see if you're somebody I wanted my kids' lives and
that's a that's a huge responsibility. So that kind of
adds something to it. And you know, I don't know.
I mean, people throw around the term play in the
(06:45):
field and all that, and I guess that's kind of
a well worn term now, you know, by my standards again,
I come from the days of barn dancing and ice
cream socials. You know, oh wait, yeah, there were a
few singles bars. You know, I don't want you to
think I've got straw hanging out of my teeth or anything. Ready,
you know, it's just a it's just a different world
(07:06):
that we live at. It's terrifying. I've got to you know,
I've got a twenty four year old son that's just
essentially he's just kind of giving up. You know, he's
not going to do that. You know, he's career driven,
and so it's it's kind of a tear. You don't
know what's out there, what's lurking, you know, in the
internet ether if you will, you know, what's floating about
and what you're gonna and and look, a lot of
(07:27):
this is based upon what it's based upon a questionnaire
you know that you kind of fill out, you know,
what are you looking for? And I wonder, I wonder
if there's a question on one of these, one of these,
you know sites, where it says you shall not date
anybody else, you must be exclusive to me. I don't know.
(07:47):
I think that would narrow the field down pretty quickly.
What do you think? You know?
Speaker 2 (07:50):
I think you're exactly right. And it's interesting that it's
interesting how some men think. I guess I'm not an
enlightened cat like you know. I just can't imagine enforcing
something light on somebody, you know, I can't think of
treating somebody so disrespectfully. It's like if Frida, What if
(08:11):
you're looking for one thing and they're looking for something else,
that immediately tells you we're not matched up, move on.
But that's not the case for some people. And I've
known a number of men like this that are discussing people.
The compound area that we were talking mentioned earlier, it's
an area of Florida where it's twelve square miles of
(08:33):
roads of sewer lines that have been poured, there's power
lines have been run because they were going to build
Infrastructurey were building the infrastructure for housing and shops and things.
Twelve square miles is a big area mass and that
was this area called the compound. And so as police
(08:54):
were able to they got Daniel Stearns as this guy
who has dated our victim Nancy. We don't know where
she is, and we know she was dating him based
on their communication that we have text in forro On.
They were arguing because she would not just date him only,
and they were able to determine that he mister Stearns
(09:16):
was making a number of trips from his house into
the compound in his truck and they started following him
and Joe. It's almost like they didn't solve the they
didn't find out what happened until after they found out
what he was doing in the compound. You know, it's
(09:37):
not like they found Okay, they had an argument in
this side of the house and here's blood over here
where he did whatever, and this is where he rolled
her up. And no, they didn't find her like that.
They found here in multiple areas in the compound, multiple
areas where she had been buried well, Hilarius telling you
(10:01):
that she was dismembered, right, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1 (10:03):
When you say multiple areas right now, Dave that picture
you just created for me, I'm thinking mounds, individual little mounds.
And if this makes a case like this particularly, I
think from a scene processing standpoint, it's it is a
gold mine. From a forensic standpoint, however, it makes it
(10:28):
kind of daunting when you think about you know, one
of the things we talk about many times is primary, secondary,
and tertiary scenes. Right well, if you were to stick
with the letter of this, with that, you know you're thinking, okay,
where's the primary scene? I would go back to say
that the primary scene, if you can figure it out,
(10:49):
is going to be the location where she is actually killed.
And also, again you had mentioned that she was dismembered.
Dismemberment is in my estimation, is not going to take
place in multiple locations. It's going to take place in
(11:10):
a central location, and the body will essentially be kind
of parsed up, I guess, and then delivered. I wonder
if that's what's going on in this particular case. But
I got to tell you there's one more element to
this case from a forensic standpoint that makes it all
the more difficult to work. I'll give you a hint.
(11:34):
It involves heat. I don't know if I've ever told
you this before, Dave, Yeah, back at you, big guy.
(11:59):
I work a series of killings in New Orleans many
years ago, and it was a guy that he had committed.
It was a serial killer and he had killed. It
wasn't some huge enormous number, and right now my memory
fails me. I think it was maybe five or six.
(12:19):
This guy would kill prostitutes and then every single time
he would kill them, he would go back to that
location and dump the body. Well, the sheriff's office got
the idea that we need to get two guys and
just assign them to that area and have them set
(12:40):
up a hide. And Dave, you know what this is
back in the olden times, I guess, as my grandson
would say, they actually caught this guy pulling a body
of a trunk. Wow, And he would he was dumping
this dead prostitute that he had strangled with wire. There
(13:01):
in that spot are approximated the same spot. And you
know that was way way before the days I think
our cell phones. Back then, you had to have a
bag with a strap around your neck. So there wasn't
a lot of tracking, you know that went on with
cellular cellar tracking back then, but now you know, it's
opened up an entirely different world, particularly and I think
(13:25):
it's very well demonstrated here in Nancy's Nancy's homicide.
Speaker 2 (13:30):
Well, you know, it's interesting that her the case where
she doesn't pick up the children on the eighteenth, on
February eighteenth, you know, that's where the investigation begins. And
so they were like, well, when was she last seen
And it wasn't on the eighteenth, That's when she didn't
show up pick up the kids. And as they tracked
it back, they went back to February fifteenth, that was
(13:53):
the last time she was seen. She actually met a
friend and they were at a gun club in Palm Bay,
and she with her friend at the gun club and
they're able to use digital information to determine that's where
her cell phone was, just like the friend said, and
her friend said, well, she was meeting her the guy
she's been dating Stearns later on, and so now they
(14:17):
have that's the last person. The last time she was
seen alive was at the gun club with her friend,
telling your friend. I'm going to see this guy I've
been dating Stearns, Daniel Stearns, and so that's when police
got his name. So you're talking day one, they already
have the name, how they met online, they're pulling text messages,
(14:37):
they're pulling stuff online of the dating from the dating app,
and very quickly they start looking for Nancy Howry. Where's
her car? She drove a Honda Odyssey minivan. And so
day one of the search, the first twenty four hours
they're looking for that car and her and they find
(14:57):
the Honda mining van and it's abandoned. And Joe, you've
done so many investigations over time. We often hear this
term abandoned. If a car is parked somewhere and left,
is that abandoned or is that just a term that
is used that the individual who normally drives this car
is not driving it. It was parked over here and
(15:18):
it's not in their driveway.
Speaker 1 (15:20):
Yeah, i'd have to, you know, one of the things
that my mind would flee to relative to that comment
about the abandonment of a vehicle. First off, you know,
obviously there's a huge delineation and I think you and
I both throughout our lives, We've been in positions where
our car broke down right right, Well, we didn't abandon
our vehicle. It's mechanically unsound. And did you know that
(15:44):
in cases like this there's a whole team of did
you know that many larger jurisdictions employee mechanics that check out, Yeah,
we'll check out how functional a vehicle is. Wow, And
they can pull other data off of this. These people
are very bright. You know, there's there's a lot of
(16:04):
forensic data you know that comes off of vehicles, and
particularly nowadays, you know, with the onboard computers and they
can be tracked and all these sorts of things. Uh,
you know, I'm looking now, you know, you know where
my mind is going there. I'm the last case, Yes, Celeste,
you know out in California with this you know this test.
And I'm not saying that an Honda Odyssey rises to
(16:26):
that level of technology, but what I am saying there's
information that you can pull off of a car, so
is it in fact functional? And also if it is
functional and you take that car in, one of the
things you're going to want to look for and here
is there any evidence? Well, first off of life there,
and further, is there any evidence of the end of
(16:48):
life there? You know, we begin to think again about
this idea of primary scenes. Well, if you've got a vehicle,
was she actually killed in that vehicle's point in tom
you have to entertain that thought as an investigator, because
the devil is in fact in the details. You want
to be able to kind of suss us out and
(17:08):
try to understand what kind of violence was committed in
a vehicle. So they would go over this abandoned vehicle
very very carefully, particularly when they can come back and
they tag it to a person that is, let's face it,
a single mom of two who you can set your
(17:30):
clock by her relative to the handoff with her ex husband,
who they seem to have a pretty healthy relationship, and
he's the first person that calls it in. One more
thing I wanted to mention to you about this is
that how many of these cases do we cover now
over these years where when you have some type of
violent event involved in a spouse, automatically our eyes go
(17:54):
to that spouse or the ex spouse. You know, in
your pink that's prime suspect, right, But this guy wasn't
like this. He immediately alerted the police. He's on board
with this. You know, it's not like one of these
people that kind of SLINKs off into the darkness and
doesn't participate in the search. He clams up, he calls
an attorney, all those sorts of things. You're talking about,
(18:14):
the missing mother of his children, and he has a
full appreciation of that. We actually found out about that
in court. Relative to him in comments that he made
case Dave.
Speaker 2 (18:26):
He was We'll get to that in a minute, because
he really just I just respect him for what he
did with the investigation. The ex husband in this case,
her car was I was thinking about a case we
did out of Atlanta, Joe in the recent past, where
a woman went missing. She was an eye doctor, I believe,
and her husband had been out of town and over
(18:49):
the course of a weekend in Marietta, she had gone missing.
And you know, anyway, and she turned up. She wasn't hurt,
she was alive. But they mentioned her car was abandoned,
And in that case, her car was abandoned, but it
was in a parking lot about a half mile from
where her office was. But it was in a parking lot,
and I thought, how weird to call that as abandoned.
So whenever I hear that term, that's my first thought,
(19:10):
what is abandoned? Well, in this case, her car was
found abandoned on the side of a road, and it
was found on the side of the road in Paulm Bay.
Now I don't know how big Palm Bay is, I
don't know how many roads there are, but that's where
it was found. Okay, So her car is found in
Paul Bay. The compound is in Palm Bay. So police
(19:34):
immediately are looking at Daniel Stearns as a person of interest.
They bring him to talk to him and whoa, he's
all over the map. And by the way, when you
try to lie to a cop, especially a detective, even
a regular street cop, but mainly because they hear lies,
they are more lies than truth. But a detective, yeah,
(19:56):
you're not gonna They already have a lot of information
before you sit down in front of them, and they're
going to bust you. And so they said from his
first interview. He was interviewed twice during the course of
the investigation and showed significant areas of deception and identified
himself as the prime suspect in the case. Through their
(20:16):
discussion with him during the investigation. That's how quickly they
had him and they started surveilling him. Then, So Joe,
they're watching Daniel Stearns and they see Daniel Stearns leaving
his home in his pickup truck and driving into the
(20:38):
compound different areas and it looks like he's burying things.
What does that tell.
Speaker 1 (20:46):
You if they have that kind of information, that's going
to be significant in the idea. Can you imagine being
a police officer and you begin to track somebody and
they're carrying around items in this truck and probably the
tools to facilitate this, and maybe you see him going
out discarding things, digging holes, packing the earth, all manner
(21:08):
of things like this. Your suspicion has been raised almost immediately.
You know that there are in fact problems ahead for
this man, and the police probably know that they have
a killer brands. You know, it's quite one thing to
(21:39):
have remains, you know, just found. And I got to
tell you one of the interesting things, Dave, is the
fact that you've got multiple holes, if you will, that
are dug in these locations are at let me just
say it again, the compound, and they're recovering out of
(22:01):
these you know, areas that have been dug out in
the earth are burned human remains. You got a lot
going on here because you've got dismemberment, you've got burning,
and then you've gotten bearing. There's a lot of action
involved with all of this. But you know, the big
question is, and you and I have talked about this extensively,
(22:24):
if we can find out who a person is, everything
else comes into focus, right because you begin to figure
out who who was in their orbit, who's who is
the reality of their life that they're living at that
moment in time. But you know, there was a big
there was a big piece to this that occurred. And
(22:46):
I'm not being flippant when I use that term piece,
because they've they they found a finger. Now what.
Speaker 2 (22:55):
Are the chasms and everything else? They find a finger.
Speaker 1 (22:58):
They found a finger in it's intact, and the beauty
of this is that you can take a finger and
you can actually roll a print off of it. I've
talked about in the past with I know we've had
this discussion about the de gloving of hands and decomposition
(23:20):
and how I've actually used a glove over my hand
and then put the de gloved hand of a of
a decendant over my hand and rolled a print off
of that. This this finger, though, appears to have been intact. Now,
one of the things that we will do with individual
digits of you know, like if your fingers are cut
or let's just say all that is left is the pad, uh,
(23:44):
the pad in other words, the tip of the finger
if it's kind of shriveled. Because one of the things
that happens with human remains like this, particularly fingertips, it
always happens more distantly, like so, the shoulder is proximal
to the torso, the fingers are distal to the torso,
so the furthest way apart. Did you know that those
areas begin to desiccate first, so they dry out, so
(24:06):
lots of times what we do in an attempt to
kind of rebuild the tissue is that we can use
a substance that funeral home directors use called tissue builder,
and you literally inject it into the site and the
area begins to swell. It swells, and then you can
roll a print off of it. Here's an interesting little exercise.
(24:28):
If anybody's interested in teaching your kids forensic science, just
at a basic level, go out and purchase white party balloons.
They have to be white. Okay. Get an ink pad. Okay,
if you've got a child and you want to teach
them about fingerprints, ink their finger, roll their finger across
(24:52):
the surface of an uninflated white balloon, and blow the
balloon up and see what happens. All of a sudden,
their fingerprint comes to life and it just like swells
and you can see all the little details in there. Oh,
I know, it's pretty amazing. But it's the same principle
relative to taking a a dismembered portion of the body,
(25:13):
because we've got a lot of dismemberment that has gone
on here. I'm just curious as to how that finger
got separated from the hand and this this actually winds
up put in a name with all of these pieces
that are out there. Isn't that? Isn't that kind of amazing.
Speaker 2 (25:29):
The whole this entire story.
Speaker 1 (25:33):
It is.
Speaker 2 (25:34):
It is really amazing how far science has come, you know,
forensic science, to be able to digitally you know, using
digital forensic science. Here they were able to track this
guy back using the cell phone in online activity and
they're following him around. I think we've got this fifty
hours you know, of surveillance time on him. They've got
(25:54):
him going into the compound, which is a huge area,
but they've got him going and they know where he is,
and they found him doing things that you have no
reason to do. I mean, you don't have a reason
to go out and bury a bucket of stuff in
the middle of nowhere. It's just not something that normal
people do.
Speaker 1 (26:10):
Well, correct me if I'm wrong. When when they discovered
this guy, he's actually dumping a bucket into an adjacent canal,
correct the canal? Yeah, yeah, so they've got eyes on him.
Can I throw something else at you real quickly? You're
going to go for it? Well, I think that this
is quite salient here, just because you have this finger
(26:33):
that has been you know, dismembered or cut away from
the rest of the body. That's only a finger that
you're identifying. And I'm going to introduce the lawyers on
the stage here, because you know, if you're if you're
going down a road where you're going to charge some
with a homicide. Okay, I think that it's it's dictated
(26:57):
to us that we have to make sure that every
one of these individual holes contains the validated remains scientifically
validated remains of the missing subject, because you know, people
could say, well, you know, we've got random holes out here,
how do we know they're all tied back? But that
(27:19):
fingertip is the thing that begins to kind of point
the way, isn't it, Because if you can, in fact
get that finger identified to a specific person, and then
you go through and any kind of viable remain, even
though it's burned, you might confine something in there. Can
(27:40):
you tie all of that together in one neat package
where we can actually demonstrate in court? And you have
to be prepared to do this so and they can
make it very dramatic. Certainly the prosecutor can well and
hold one, we've got this part of our body and
whole two this and do you see how the drama
bills with that? If you're taking that to core and
the science is kind of paving the way for all
(28:02):
of this, because now it's even more powerful, I think,
in my opinion, than just saying, well, we found a
suitcase full of dismembered remains. No no, no, no, no, that's
not what you're talking about here. We not only do
we have dismembered remains, each individual part has been subjected
to severe heat in an attempt to render the body. Now,
(28:25):
oh and by the by, this guy went to the
links of digging a hole for each element over and
over again and again. It goes to kind of the
darkness you know that surrounds all of this. I see
it would Yeah.
Speaker 2 (28:40):
Go finger, Joe. Okay, you've got a finger, but we
do have the other body parts. And as you mentioned
in court, is not enough to say, well it has
to be x X. You know, it doesn't work like that.
You actually have to prove it because you've always got
some guy. Yeah, probably was the class clown who comes
up and says, okay, you have the finger, but you
know what, she could have owed the and they chopped
(29:01):
it off to get her to come up with the money,
you know, and that doesn't mean he killed her. We
don't know. You got to prove it. So how are
you going to do that with the rest of the bones?
You got the finger? Okay, we know this is her finger.
I'm not being light on this at all. It's just
that's how I'm gonna be honest show. Having done crime
related reporting for a long time now, some defense attorneys
(29:23):
have no shame and say things with a straight face,
and actually you think, well, he's an educated guy or
a woman. Surely they wouldn't just make this up out
of nowhere. But they do all the time. So, all right,
you got the finger identified. You know you're on the
right track. But what about the bones. You've got a
body that he tried to render down. As you said,
(29:46):
that's I got a feeling that's going to be really
extra heinous for a jury to hear.
Speaker 1 (29:52):
Yeah, there's two ways that we go we go about this, Dave.
I think that again, back to a comment that I'd
made earlier, I think that you have to find viable.
It can't just be the tissue as be viable tissue
that you can actually do DNA testing on to say, okay,
this bit belongs to this person. And just imagine, if
(30:16):
you will, like the person you know is the central
pivot point in all of this, and you've got kind
of these almost like a ven diagram, these bubbles extending
out from that person, each one of those little bubbles.
What you want to do is scientifically validate the existence
of that person at the center point with these individual
(30:37):
bubbles of data and where it goes back to them
and you can actually say, and so you have to
scientifically verify that. The other part to this that is
really key here and goes to another level is anthropology,
because if all else fails and you're trying to get
(30:58):
an ID, you know what an anthropologist can bring to
the table here, And there are some very fine ones
in Florida. By the way, they've got several forensic anthropology
programs in the state of Florida. I don't know if
people are aware of that, but I digress. You can
still do facial reconstructions and the morphology of the bones.
You can look at the morphology and say, okay, this
(31:20):
is a white female, this individual is within this age range,
and you might even be able to determine if this
individual is suffering from any kind of disease in life.
You know, with women you get things like osteoporosis that's
evidenced on the bone, if they have arthritis, all those
sorts of things that you look for that are the
(31:41):
nature of a life having been led. But here's the key.
In this particular case, they did involve a forensic anthropologist
and guess what they found. You've got a particulated skull.
And when I let me just put that in more
layman's terms. You've got a skull that is grossly fragmented. Well,
(32:01):
why is it grossly fragmented? Was fragmented because it's been
slammed by a lead core projectile. In other words, you've
got someone that has been executed. Dave, This from what
we're understanding at this point, she the victim was actually
executed with a GSW to the back of the head,
(32:25):
and Dave, the forensic anthropologist, was actually able to go
back and say that there's an exit wound through the forehead. Now,
a lot of folks will ask, well, Morgan, how in
the world do they determine a whole as a whole? Right, No,
it ain't, it's not. And the way they determine if
(32:48):
something is in fact an entrance versus an exit. If
you will think about a BB being shot through a
glass pane. Okay, if you walk up to that defect
in the glass, you'll notice that one side is smooth. Okay,
you've got a hole in it. You look at the
other side, and that side will be beveled. It'll have
(33:11):
it'll have kind of a if you think about like beveling,
like rounded edges, like you see on footboards and things
like that. Crown not crown molding. What am I trying
to say? You know that runs along the floor floor molding.
That's a beveled edge. So it's yeah, it's shue mooed
there you go, shoe mold. It's rounded. Well, Dave, did
you know that whatever side of the defect you've got
(33:34):
that mold, that that rounding, that rounding on the beveling,
that's where it went. That's where it exited because it
blows out, It literally blows out, and it leaves that
kind of interesting ridge there behind. So when this individual
the anthropologist is trying to put this skull back together,
suddenly this thing just like pops to life. Can you
(33:56):
imagine being there and you actually see this in your
lab and you're trying to figure this out. You know,
how in the world did the skull get this fragmented?
You begin, you hope you have all the pieces, because
sometimes they don't. You begin to put this thing together,
and all of a sudden, you breathe life into this skull.
If you will, you begin to understand the dynamics. The
(34:17):
other thing that an anthropologist can actually do, Dave, Sometimes
they can determine range of fire because did you know
that even on the surface of bone, we always talk
about gunfire as it applies to like clothing and skin.
Did you know that if you have a press or
close to press contact gunshot wound, like on the back
(34:39):
of the head, that that injection, it's not just the projectile,
it's actually that hot air that's being injected into that space.
Did you know the scalp kind of pulls away from
the bone for a second like this, and if there
is unburned gunpowder and smoke and soot, it'll actually deposit
on the external table of the skull. So you can
(35:01):
go in there and you can actually see kinds of
this darkened area there. If you do a scraping on
that and you look at it with a scanning electron microscope,
you'll be able to chemically identify that that is probably
propellant or a product of propellant, you know, otherwise gunpowder,
And then you're going to see this blown out, you know,
so it and you can determine trajectory too, you know,
(35:24):
like what was the relationship physical relationship between the victim
and the perpetrator where they standing above when they did
this and this goes from backwards because we know that
we know that it's going from back to front. Okay,
so back to front, from below to above. You think
about a classic GSW gunshot one to the head, and
(35:50):
classic I mean in the sense of a classic execution
where somebody is kneeling before an individual where their back
turned to them and they're popped in the back of
the head. Well, that trajectory is from above to below.
The trick is to try to understand can you get it?
Can you get it where you can determine directionality from
(36:12):
the perspective of does it go from the left to
the right, from the right to the left. That's a
bit more difficult to determine when you have a fragment.
Speaker 2 (36:21):
It scoll though unbelievable. So that's how they were able
to present this case where we have a woman, an
accomplished woman, divorced custody arrangement with the X good relationship
there and at forty four she goes out and starts dating.
Does not want to become exclusive to this one guy
(36:43):
and he can't handle that, so he takes and kills
her by a shot to the back of the head,
and they're able to show how he did it to
get the fingerprint from her middle finger and five piles
buckets of her that he has disgustingly tried to do
(37:05):
away with in an area called the Compound in South Florida.
Speaker 1 (37:09):
Yeah, that's the tale that is told here, and it's terrifying,
particularly in the world that we live in today, where
it's not like you walk into a bar, or you
go to a church social or you're at school or
a friend introduces you. You're talking about a phantom that
(37:31):
seemingly only exists in the digital world, and then suddenly
life is breathed into them when you meet them and
you realize you've come face to face with a sadistic demon.
I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is Body Bugs.
Quody balance, but Joseph's gotten more. You know, throughout I
guess crime history, there are geographical locations that are associated
with horrific events. All you have to do is look
at you know, Jonestown for instance, or some such place
(00:22):
as that. And you know, I think that part of
that goes to the idea that you know, we as humans,
we have to have some kind of marker to keep up,
you know, to understand and automatically when you hear certain names,
they create a chill up and down your spine. Today,
(00:43):
I want to talk about a case that originates back
in twenty twenty three. And the name that is associated
with this event, which is so horrific, is actually called
the Compound. It's located in Florida, and what took place
(01:07):
at that location I believe will chill you to your core.
I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is Body by Brother
Dave Good to join you. I you know, I feel like,
you know, sometimes I feel like I just absolutely assault
(01:30):
you based upon these cases that I send your way,
because you know, there's no you know, I don't know
rainbows and lollipops, you know, where we kind of in
dwell many times, and they're horrible things, but I feel
like this is a case that we need to talk
to we're talking about we're talking about a single mother
of two and what seems to be an origin of
(01:54):
the story in the dating app world. It's a brave
new world that we live.
Speaker 2 (02:00):
Nancy Howry, divorced, mother of two, good relationship with the
ex husband. They share custody of their two children, and
Nancy fails to pick the kids up from school as
she normally would. And when that happens, her ex husband
knows this is out of this is not normal, something's wrong,
and so immediately he's on the phone reporting her missing,
(02:23):
and boom they find out. Okay, you've mentioned this so
many times. I'm glad you have, Joe, because you've mentioned forensics,
in data forensics, in our phone, our computer. The forensic
the digital forensics that we experience now are relatively new,
and every day it's getting closer and closer to knowing
where you are every minute of the day, being able
(02:46):
to hear your every word, being able to see what
you're seeing. The camera on your computer, the camera on
your phone, it's watching you, yes, and it's marking where
you are and that's what they did to track this case.
Speaker 1 (03:00):
Yeah, and as I have Offseid and I will continue
to say, you know these you know, boat anchors that
we carry around in our pockets everywhere we go. Now,
and I teach this at Jack State. You know, my
students are entering into a world where literally these are
portable crime scenes that exist. And in twel with us
twenty four to seven. You know, I mean, you cannot escape,
(03:23):
You can't escape. You know, they're tracking, and you know,
and look to the credit of everybody involved in this case,
they really really track this guy down. I guess, Dave
in a pretty expeditious manner, if you will. You know,
there's some of these things that kind of hang in
the ether out there. But they tracked this guy down
(03:44):
pretty quickly, didn't they.
Speaker 2 (03:45):
I went back and pulled the news reports from the day, okay,
and you're talking about February eighteenth. She doesn't pick up
the kids. Within a week, they are on track with
the mister Stearns because he Daniel Stearns was dating Nancy Howry. Now,
(04:09):
Daniel Stearns is only thirty two at the time and
Nancy is forty four. That's a big difference. In age.
When you look at it from the standpoint of you
have a thirty two year old guy, and now you
have a woman who she's already gotten one marriage behind her,
with two kids, she's got an established career, she's taken
(04:29):
care of things, and he's thirty two and is dating.
You know, I mean, that's just to me, that's a
big difference at that time in life. You know, if
sixty two and fifty maybe not so much, seventy two
and sixty not at all, but forty four and thirty two,
that's a big difference to me.
Speaker 1 (04:43):
Yeah, And there's one other person involved in this. She's
you'd mentioned previous marriage. She's It would seem at least
that she's got a pretty good relationship with the ex,
doesn't she.
Speaker 2 (04:53):
Yeah, yeah, because he's the one that called and said
she didn't pick up the kids. This is not normal.
She's you know, and we looked at her house, called
the phone, can't find her, she's missing. And he was
the one that lit the fire, and every and thankfully
everybody responded because, as you've said, the forensics that you
can find. Think about it. If you're using a dating
(05:14):
app to date somebody, you're tracked right there, already done.
You're being tracked if you do something, and they need
to find out, and they did. They were able to
find Daniel Stearns had been in contact with her, they
had met, they had dated, and they'd also found out
a number of other things from mister Stearns from well,
text messages and things like that, that Daniel Stearns had
(05:37):
rules for dating that he expected Nancy to follow. And
Nancy Howry, who had already gone through a divorce, custody
battles and all that. You're not going to push a
woman like that around. You got to respect that respect
a woman who has done this. But he didn't. And
Daniel Stearns didn't like the fact that she was dating
(05:57):
other men. She wasn't just seeing him. She don't want
to to see him, She wanted to see what was
out there.
Speaker 1 (06:02):
Well, she's a single mom, and so you know, look,
I got to tell you from my perspective, all right,
every time you go on a date with somebody, and
it's it's like an extended interview, particularly if you've got
two kids, you know. And look, I mean, people get lonely,
they need related they long for a relationship, but for
(06:24):
a single mom that has two kids. You have to
think you're dating him, Yes, but I'm interviewing you to
see if you're somebody I wanted my kids' lives and
that's a that's a huge responsibility. So that kind of
adds something to it. And you know, I don't know.
I mean, people throw around the term play in the
(06:45):
field and all that, and I guess that's kind of
a well worn term now, you know, by my standards again,
I come from the days of barn dancing and ice
cream socials. You know, oh wait, yeah, there were a
few singles bars. You know, I don't want you to
think I've got straw hanging out of my teeth or anything. Ready,
you know, it's just a it's just a different world
(07:06):
that we live at. It's terrifying. I've got to you know,
I've got a twenty four year old son that's just
essentially he's just kind of giving up. You know, he's
not going to do that. You know, he's career driven,
and so it's it's kind of a tear. You don't
know what's out there, what's lurking, you know, in the
internet ether if you will, you know, what's floating about
and what you're gonna and and look, a lot of
(07:27):
this is based upon what it's based upon a questionnaire
you know that you kind of fill out, you know,
what are you looking for? And I wonder, I wonder
if there's a question on one of these, one of these,
you know sites, where it says you shall not date
anybody else, you must be exclusive to me. I don't know.
(07:47):
I think that would narrow the field down pretty quickly.
What do you think? You know?
Speaker 2 (07:50):
I think you're exactly right. And it's interesting that it's
interesting how some men think. I guess I'm not an
enlightened cat like you know. I just can't imagine enforcing
something light on somebody, you know, I can't think of
treating somebody so disrespectfully. It's like if Frida, What if
(08:11):
you're looking for one thing and they're looking for something else,
that immediately tells you we're not matched up, move on.
But that's not the case for some people. And I've
known a number of men like this that are discussing people.
The compound area that we were talking mentioned earlier, it's
an area of Florida where it's twelve square miles of
(08:33):
roads of sewer lines that have been poured, there's power
lines have been run because they were going to build
Infrastructurey were building the infrastructure for housing and shops and things.
Twelve square miles is a big area mass and that
was this area called the compound. And so as police
(08:54):
were able to they got Daniel Stearns as this guy
who has dated our victim Nancy. We don't know where
she is, and we know she was dating him based
on their communication that we have text in forro On.
They were arguing because she would not just date him only,
and they were able to determine that he mister Stearns
(09:16):
was making a number of trips from his house into
the compound in his truck and they started following him
and Joe. It's almost like they didn't solve the they
didn't find out what happened until after they found out
what he was doing in the compound. You know, it's
(09:37):
not like they found Okay, they had an argument in
this side of the house and here's blood over here
where he did whatever, and this is where he rolled
her up. And no, they didn't find her like that.
They found here in multiple areas in the compound, multiple
areas where she had been buried well, Hilarius telling you
(10:01):
that she was dismembered, right, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1 (10:03):
When you say multiple areas right now, Dave that picture
you just created for me, I'm thinking mounds, individual little mounds.
And if this makes a case like this particularly, I
think from a scene processing standpoint, it's it is a
gold mine. From a forensic standpoint, however, it makes it
(10:28):
kind of daunting when you think about you know, one
of the things we talk about many times is primary, secondary,
and tertiary scenes. Right well, if you were to stick
with the letter of this, with that, you know you're thinking, okay,
where's the primary scene? I would go back to say
that the primary scene, if you can figure it out,
(10:49):
is going to be the location where she is actually killed.
And also, again you had mentioned that she was dismembered.
Dismemberment is in my estimation, is not going to take
place in multiple locations. It's going to take place in
(11:10):
a central location, and the body will essentially be kind
of parsed up, I guess, and then delivered. I wonder
if that's what's going on in this particular case. But
I got to tell you there's one more element to
this case from a forensic standpoint that makes it all
the more difficult to work. I'll give you a hint.
(11:34):
It involves heat. I don't know if I've ever told
you this before, Dave, Yeah, back at you, big guy.
(11:59):
I work a series of killings in New Orleans many
years ago, and it was a guy that he had committed.
It was a serial killer and he had killed. It
wasn't some huge enormous number, and right now my memory
fails me. I think it was maybe five or six.
(12:19):
This guy would kill prostitutes and then every single time
he would kill them, he would go back to that
location and dump the body. Well, the sheriff's office got
the idea that we need to get two guys and
just assign them to that area and have them set
(12:40):
up a hide. And Dave, you know what this is
back in the olden times, I guess, as my grandson
would say, they actually caught this guy pulling a body
of a trunk. Wow, And he would he was dumping
this dead prostitute that he had strangled with wire. There
(13:01):
in that spot are approximated the same spot. And you
know that was way way before the days I think
our cell phones. Back then, you had to have a
bag with a strap around your neck. So there wasn't
a lot of tracking, you know that went on with
cellular cellar tracking back then, but now you know, it's
opened up an entirely different world, particularly and I think
(13:25):
it's very well demonstrated here in Nancy's Nancy's homicide.
Speaker 2 (13:30):
Well, you know, it's interesting that her the case where
she doesn't pick up the children on the eighteenth, on
February eighteenth, you know, that's where the investigation begins. And
so they were like, well, when was she last seen
And it wasn't on the eighteenth, That's when she didn't
show up pick up the kids. And as they tracked
it back, they went back to February fifteenth, that was
(13:53):
the last time she was seen. She actually met a
friend and they were at a gun club in Palm Bay,
and she with her friend at the gun club and
they're able to use digital information to determine that's where
her cell phone was, just like the friend said, and
her friend said, well, she was meeting her the guy
she's been dating Stearns later on, and so now they
(14:17):
have that's the last person. The last time she was
seen alive was at the gun club with her friend,
telling your friend. I'm going to see this guy I've
been dating Stearns, Daniel Stearns, and so that's when police
got his name. So you're talking day one, they already
have the name, how they met online, they're pulling text messages,
(14:37):
they're pulling stuff online of the dating from the dating app,
and very quickly they start looking for Nancy Howry. Where's
her car? She drove a Honda Odyssey minivan. And so
day one of the search, the first twenty four hours
they're looking for that car and her and they find
(14:57):
the Honda mining van and it's abandoned. And Joe, you've
done so many investigations over time. We often hear this
term abandoned. If a car is parked somewhere and left,
is that abandoned or is that just a term that
is used that the individual who normally drives this car
is not driving it. It was parked over here and
(15:18):
it's not in their driveway.
Speaker 1 (15:20):
Yeah, i'd have to, you know, one of the things
that my mind would flee to relative to that comment
about the abandonment of a vehicle. First off, you know,
obviously there's a huge delineation and I think you and
I both throughout our lives, We've been in positions where
our car broke down right right, Well, we didn't abandon
our vehicle. It's mechanically unsound. And did you know that
(15:44):
in cases like this there's a whole team of did
you know that many larger jurisdictions employee mechanics that check out, Yeah,
we'll check out how functional a vehicle is. Wow, And
they can pull other data off of this. These people
are very bright. You know, there's there's a lot of
(16:04):
forensic data you know that comes off of vehicles, and
particularly nowadays, you know, with the onboard computers and they
can be tracked and all these sorts of things. Uh,
you know, I'm looking now, you know, you know where
my mind is going there. I'm the last case, Yes, Celeste,
you know out in California with this you know this test.
And I'm not saying that an Honda Odyssey rises to
(16:26):
that level of technology, but what I am saying there's
information that you can pull off of a car, so
is it in fact functional? And also if it is
functional and you take that car in, one of the
things you're going to want to look for and here
is there any evidence? Well, first off of life there,
and further, is there any evidence of the end of
(16:48):
life there? You know, we begin to think again about
this idea of primary scenes. Well, if you've got a vehicle,
was she actually killed in that vehicle's point in tom
you have to entertain that thought as an investigator, because
the devil is in fact in the details. You want
to be able to kind of suss us out and
(17:08):
try to understand what kind of violence was committed in
a vehicle. So they would go over this abandoned vehicle
very very carefully, particularly when they can come back and
they tag it to a person that is, let's face it,
a single mom of two who you can set your
(17:30):
clock by her relative to the handoff with her ex husband,
who they seem to have a pretty healthy relationship, and
he's the first person that calls it in. One more
thing I wanted to mention to you about this is
that how many of these cases do we cover now
over these years where when you have some type of
violent event involved in a spouse, automatically our eyes go
(17:54):
to that spouse or the ex spouse. You know, in
your pink that's prime suspect, right, But this guy wasn't
like this. He immediately alerted the police. He's on board
with this. You know, it's not like one of these
people that kind of SLINKs off into the darkness and
doesn't participate in the search. He clams up, he calls
an attorney, all those sorts of things. You're talking about,
(18:14):
the missing mother of his children, and he has a
full appreciation of that. We actually found out about that
in court. Relative to him in comments that he made
case Dave.
Speaker 2 (18:26):
He was We'll get to that in a minute, because
he really just I just respect him for what he
did with the investigation. The ex husband in this case,
her car was I was thinking about a case we
did out of Atlanta, Joe in the recent past, where
a woman went missing. She was an eye doctor, I believe,
and her husband had been out of town and over
(18:49):
the course of a weekend in Marietta, she had gone missing.
And you know, anyway, and she turned up. She wasn't hurt,
she was alive. But they mentioned her car was abandoned,
And in that case, her car was abandoned, but it
was in a parking lot about a half mile from
where her office was. But it was in a parking lot,
and I thought, how weird to call that as abandoned.
So whenever I hear that term, that's my first thought,
(19:10):
what is abandoned? Well, in this case, her car was
found abandoned on the side of a road, and it
was found on the side of the road in Paulm Bay.
Now I don't know how big Palm Bay is, I
don't know how many roads there are, but that's where
it was found. Okay, So her car is found in
Paul Bay. The compound is in Palm Bay. So police
(19:34):
immediately are looking at Daniel Stearns as a person of interest.
They bring him to talk to him and whoa, he's
all over the map. And by the way, when you
try to lie to a cop, especially a detective, even
a regular street cop, but mainly because they hear lies,
they are more lies than truth. But a detective, yeah,
(19:56):
you're not gonna They already have a lot of information
before you sit down in front of them, and they're
going to bust you. And so they said from his
first interview. He was interviewed twice during the course of
the investigation and showed significant areas of deception and identified
himself as the prime suspect in the case. Through their
(20:16):
discussion with him during the investigation. That's how quickly they
had him and they started surveilling him. Then, So Joe,
they're watching Daniel Stearns and they see Daniel Stearns leaving
his home in his pickup truck and driving into the
(20:38):
compound different areas and it looks like he's burying things.
What does that tell.
Speaker 1 (20:46):
You if they have that kind of information, that's going
to be significant in the idea. Can you imagine being
a police officer and you begin to track somebody and
they're carrying around items in this truck and probably the
tools to facilitate this, and maybe you see him going
out discarding things, digging holes, packing the earth, all manner
(21:08):
of things like this. Your suspicion has been raised almost immediately.
You know that there are in fact problems ahead for
this man, and the police probably know that they have
a killer brands. You know, it's quite one thing to
(21:39):
have remains, you know, just found. And I got to
tell you one of the interesting things, Dave, is the
fact that you've got multiple holes, if you will, that
are dug in these locations are at let me just
say it again, the compound, and they're recovering out of
(22:01):
these you know, areas that have been dug out in
the earth are burned human remains. You got a lot
going on here because you've got dismemberment, you've got burning,
and then you've gotten bearing. There's a lot of action
involved with all of this. But you know, the big
question is, and you and I have talked about this extensively,
(22:24):
if we can find out who a person is, everything
else comes into focus, right because you begin to figure
out who who was in their orbit, who's who is
the reality of their life that they're living at that
moment in time. But you know, there was a big
there was a big piece to this that occurred. And
(22:46):
I'm not being flippant when I use that term piece,
because they've they they found a finger. Now what.
Speaker 2 (22:55):
Are the chasms and everything else? They find a finger.
Speaker 1 (22:58):
They found a finger in it's intact, and the beauty
of this is that you can take a finger and
you can actually roll a print off of it. I've
talked about in the past with I know we've had
this discussion about the de gloving of hands and decomposition
(23:20):
and how I've actually used a glove over my hand
and then put the de gloved hand of a of
a decendant over my hand and rolled a print off
of that. This this finger, though, appears to have been intact. Now,
one of the things that we will do with individual
digits of you know, like if your fingers are cut
or let's just say all that is left is the pad, uh,
(23:44):
the pad in other words, the tip of the finger
if it's kind of shriveled. Because one of the things
that happens with human remains like this, particularly fingertips, it
always happens more distantly, like so, the shoulder is proximal
to the torso, the fingers are distal to the torso,
so the furthest way apart. Did you know that those
areas begin to desiccate first, so they dry out, so
(24:06):
lots of times what we do in an attempt to
kind of rebuild the tissue is that we can use
a substance that funeral home directors use called tissue builder,
and you literally inject it into the site and the
area begins to swell. It swells, and then you can
roll a print off of it. Here's an interesting little exercise.
(24:28):
If anybody's interested in teaching your kids forensic science, just
at a basic level, go out and purchase white party balloons.
They have to be white. Okay. Get an ink pad. Okay,
if you've got a child and you want to teach
them about fingerprints, ink their finger, roll their finger across
(24:52):
the surface of an uninflated white balloon, and blow the
balloon up and see what happens. All of a sudden,
their fingerprint comes to life and it just like swells
and you can see all the little details in there. Oh,
I know, it's pretty amazing. But it's the same principle
relative to taking a a dismembered portion of the body,
(25:13):
because we've got a lot of dismemberment that has gone
on here. I'm just curious as to how that finger
got separated from the hand and this this actually winds
up put in a name with all of these pieces
that are out there. Isn't that? Isn't that kind of amazing.
Speaker 2 (25:29):
The whole this entire story.
Speaker 1 (25:33):
It is.
Speaker 2 (25:34):
It is really amazing how far science has come, you know,
forensic science, to be able to digitally you know, using
digital forensic science. Here they were able to track this
guy back using the cell phone in online activity and
they're following him around. I think we've got this fifty
hours you know, of surveillance time on him. They've got
(25:54):
him going into the compound, which is a huge area,
but they've got him going and they know where he is,
and they found him doing things that you have no
reason to do. I mean, you don't have a reason
to go out and bury a bucket of stuff in
the middle of nowhere. It's just not something that normal
people do.
Speaker 1 (26:10):
Well, correct me if I'm wrong. When when they discovered
this guy, he's actually dumping a bucket into an adjacent canal,
correct the canal? Yeah, yeah, so they've got eyes on him.
Can I throw something else at you real quickly? You're
going to go for it? Well, I think that this
is quite salient here, just because you have this finger
(26:33):
that has been you know, dismembered or cut away from
the rest of the body. That's only a finger that
you're identifying. And I'm going to introduce the lawyers on
the stage here, because you know, if you're if you're
going down a road where you're going to charge some
with a homicide. Okay, I think that it's it's dictated
(26:57):
to us that we have to make sure that every
one of these individual holes contains the validated remains scientifically
validated remains of the missing subject, because you know, people
could say, well, you know, we've got random holes out here,
how do we know they're all tied back? But that
(27:19):
fingertip is the thing that begins to kind of point
the way, isn't it, Because if you can, in fact
get that finger identified to a specific person, and then
you go through and any kind of viable remain, even
though it's burned, you might confine something in there. Can
(27:40):
you tie all of that together in one neat package
where we can actually demonstrate in court? And you have
to be prepared to do this so and they can
make it very dramatic. Certainly the prosecutor can well and
hold one, we've got this part of our body and
whole two this and do you see how the drama
bills with that? If you're taking that to core and
the science is kind of paving the way for all
(28:02):
of this, because now it's even more powerful, I think,
in my opinion, than just saying, well, we found a
suitcase full of dismembered remains. No no, no, no, no, that's
not what you're talking about here. We not only do
we have dismembered remains, each individual part has been subjected
to severe heat in an attempt to render the body. Now,
(28:25):
oh and by the by, this guy went to the
links of digging a hole for each element over and
over again and again. It goes to kind of the
darkness you know that surrounds all of this. I see
it would Yeah.
Speaker 2 (28:40):
Go finger, Joe. Okay, you've got a finger, but we
do have the other body parts. And as you mentioned
in court, is not enough to say, well it has
to be x X. You know, it doesn't work like that.
You actually have to prove it because you've always got
some guy. Yeah, probably was the class clown who comes
up and says, okay, you have the finger, but you
know what, she could have owed the and they chopped
(29:01):
it off to get her to come up with the money,
you know, and that doesn't mean he killed her. We
don't know. You got to prove it. So how are
you going to do that with the rest of the bones?
You got the finger? Okay, we know this is her finger.
I'm not being light on this at all. It's just
that's how I'm gonna be honest show. Having done crime
related reporting for a long time now, some defense attorneys
(29:23):
have no shame and say things with a straight face,
and actually you think, well, he's an educated guy or
a woman. Surely they wouldn't just make this up out
of nowhere. But they do all the time. So, all right,
you got the finger identified. You know you're on the
right track. But what about the bones. You've got a
body that he tried to render down. As you said,
(29:46):
that's I got a feeling that's going to be really
extra heinous for a jury to hear.
Speaker 1 (29:52):
Yeah, there's two ways that we go we go about this, Dave.
I think that again, back to a comment that I'd
made earlier, I think that you have to find viable.
It can't just be the tissue as be viable tissue
that you can actually do DNA testing on to say, okay,
this bit belongs to this person. And just imagine, if
(30:16):
you will, like the person you know is the central
pivot point in all of this, and you've got kind
of these almost like a ven diagram, these bubbles extending
out from that person, each one of those little bubbles.
What you want to do is scientifically validate the existence
of that person at the center point with these individual
(30:37):
bubbles of data and where it goes back to them
and you can actually say, and so you have to
scientifically verify that. The other part to this that is
really key here and goes to another level is anthropology,
because if all else fails and you're trying to get
(30:58):
an ID, you know what an anthropologist can bring to
the table here, And there are some very fine ones
in Florida. By the way, they've got several forensic anthropology
programs in the state of Florida. I don't know if
people are aware of that, but I digress. You can
still do facial reconstructions and the morphology of the bones.
You can look at the morphology and say, okay, this
(31:20):
is a white female, this individual is within this age range,
and you might even be able to determine if this
individual is suffering from any kind of disease in life.
You know, with women you get things like osteoporosis that's
evidenced on the bone, if they have arthritis, all those
sorts of things that you look for that are the
(31:41):
nature of a life having been led. But here's the key.
In this particular case, they did involve a forensic anthropologist
and guess what they found. You've got a particulated skull.
And when I let me just put that in more
layman's terms. You've got a skull that is grossly fragmented. Well,
(32:01):
why is it grossly fragmented? Was fragmented because it's been
slammed by a lead core projectile. In other words, you've
got someone that has been executed. Dave, This from what
we're understanding at this point, she the victim was actually
executed with a GSW to the back of the head,
(32:25):
and Dave, the forensic anthropologist, was actually able to go
back and say that there's an exit wound through the forehead. Now,
a lot of folks will ask, well, Morgan, how in
the world do they determine a whole as a whole? Right, No,
it ain't, it's not. And the way they determine if
(32:48):
something is in fact an entrance versus an exit. If
you will think about a BB being shot through a
glass pane. Okay, if you walk up to that defect
in the glass, you'll notice that one side is smooth. Okay,
you've got a hole in it. You look at the
other side, and that side will be beveled. It'll have
(33:11):
it'll have kind of a if you think about like beveling,
like rounded edges, like you see on footboards and things
like that. Crown not crown molding. What am I trying
to say? You know that runs along the floor floor molding.
That's a beveled edge. So it's yeah, it's shue mooed
there you go, shoe mold. It's rounded. Well, Dave, did
you know that whatever side of the defect you've got
(33:34):
that mold, that that rounding, that rounding on the beveling,
that's where it went. That's where it exited because it
blows out, It literally blows out, and it leaves that
kind of interesting ridge there behind. So when this individual
the anthropologist is trying to put this skull back together,
suddenly this thing just like pops to life. Can you
(33:56):
imagine being there and you actually see this in your
lab and you're trying to figure this out. You know,
how in the world did the skull get this fragmented?
You begin, you hope you have all the pieces, because
sometimes they don't. You begin to put this thing together,
and all of a sudden, you breathe life into this skull.
If you will, you begin to understand the dynamics. The
(34:17):
other thing that an anthropologist can actually do, Dave, Sometimes
they can determine range of fire because did you know
that even on the surface of bone, we always talk
about gunfire as it applies to like clothing and skin.
Did you know that if you have a press or
close to press contact gunshot wound, like on the back
(34:39):
of the head, that that injection, it's not just the projectile,
it's actually that hot air that's being injected into that space.
Did you know the scalp kind of pulls away from
the bone for a second like this, and if there
is unburned gunpowder and smoke and soot, it'll actually deposit
on the external table of the skull. So you can
(35:01):
go in there and you can actually see kinds of
this darkened area there. If you do a scraping on
that and you look at it with a scanning electron microscope,
you'll be able to chemically identify that that is probably
propellant or a product of propellant, you know, otherwise gunpowder,
And then you're going to see this blown out, you know,
so it and you can determine trajectory too, you know,
(35:24):
like what was the relationship physical relationship between the victim
and the perpetrator where they standing above when they did
this and this goes from backwards because we know that
we know that it's going from back to front. Okay,
so back to front, from below to above. You think
about a classic GSW gunshot one to the head, and
(35:50):
classic I mean in the sense of a classic execution
where somebody is kneeling before an individual where their back
turned to them and they're popped in the back of
the head. Well, that trajectory is from above to below.
The trick is to try to understand can you get it?
Can you get it where you can determine directionality from
(36:12):
the perspective of does it go from the left to
the right, from the right to the left. That's a
bit more difficult to determine when you have a fragment.
Speaker 2 (36:21):
It scoll though unbelievable. So that's how they were able
to present this case where we have a woman, an
accomplished woman, divorced custody arrangement with the X good relationship
there and at forty four she goes out and starts dating.
Does not want to become exclusive to this one guy
(36:43):
and he can't handle that, so he takes and kills
her by a shot to the back of the head,
and they're able to show how he did it to
get the fingerprint from her middle finger and five piles
buckets of her that he has disgustingly tried to do
(37:05):
away with in an area called the Compound in South Florida.
Speaker 1 (37:09):
Yeah, that's the tale that is told here, and it's terrifying,
particularly in the world that we live in today, where
it's not like you walk into a bar, or you
go to a church social or you're at school or
a friend introduces you. You're talking about a phantom that
(37:31):
seemingly only exists in the digital world, and then suddenly
life is breathed into them when you meet them and
you realize you've come face to face with a sadistic demon.
I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is Body Bugs.
Host
Joseph Scott Morgan
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