April 24, 2025 • 52 mins
Victor Contreras Sr. talked to his son, Victor Contreras Jr., and told him his younger brother, Jaime, was "acting crazy again". After not be able to reach his father for a few days, Victor Contreras Jr., went to the house to check on his 74-year-old father and says he smelled a foul odor coming from an open window. What happened next is the stuff of nightmares. Joseph Scott Morgan and Dave Mack discuss what happened inside the house, what the evidence says, and the story being told by Jaime Contreras, the only suspect in the murder of his father.
Transcribe Highlights
00:00.62 Introduction
01:20.85 Alien life form took over Dad
03:01.55 Discussion of the bowel
07:07.69 Special scissors in the morgue
10:18.70 Defining unattended death
14:59.66 Body is severely traumatized, flies show up
19:27.46 Any gash, slit, stab wound, etc...increase rate of decomp
24:56.30 Prior attack 30:25.80 Blood spatter, breaking down the terms
35:06.04 Explaining arterial spray
40:07.16 Does he really believe what he claims?
45:24.68 Mental illness
50:17.96 Chain of command on site
52:14.69 Conclusion
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Quodydas, but Joseph's gotten more. Back in the nineties, I
used to be a fan of the program X Files.
There's never been anything like it on television. That was
kind of fascinated by it. It was interesting. It truly
(00:24):
was never understood how a port certified forensic pathologist I
became a FBI agent. That never made sense to me.
And she would conduct her on the autopsies. But that aside, Hollywood,
you know now, you know those things that we thought
were quite fantastic back then would show like the X Files.
(00:50):
It seemed to be getting into our I don't know
our common conversations now regarding things like extraterrestrial life. And
you know, these people seeing things on radar, former Navy
fighter pilot seeing the infamous tic TACs, if you've seen
any of that stuff. And I've gotten kind of numb
(01:12):
to it now.
Speaker 2 (01:15):
But what.
Speaker 1 (01:17):
Happens if an individual believes that some extraterrestrial life form
has inhabited the body of a member of his family,
and not just any member of his family, his father,
(01:39):
and in order to protect himself from said extraterrestrial life
inhabiting his father's body, he thinks it's a good idea
to probably kill him. Coming to you from the beautiful
campus of Jacksonville State University in Jacksonville, Alabama. I'm Joseph
(02:04):
Scott Morgan and this is Body Backs. When when I
saw the headlines of this, first off, I'm thinking, okay,
so you're saying that, you, h, the authorities have this
(02:24):
young man has harvested his his father's organs. I want
to know what organs? Uh, you know, what precisely was harveded? Harvested?
And then they're also using the term disembowelment, which.
Speaker 2 (02:41):
Joe, I mean, I can't imagine what I think it means.
But what does disembowment really mean?
Speaker 1 (02:47):
Yeah, most of the time with disembowelment, it's it's not
removal of the large and small intestine. Because when they
say bowel, that's that's the that's what they're referring to.
And as a matter of fact, you know, when you
talk to physicians, surgeons in particular, and pathologists when you're
(03:08):
doing autopsies, they'll say, you know, we need to take
a look at at small bowel. They're not going to
say small intestine, small bowel, large bowel, And it's a
you know, out of all all of the organ systems
that I dealt with in the autopsy suite, that was
(03:29):
probably the most unpleasant. And there's a couple of reasons why.
First off, when you open human remains and you get
into the abdominal cavity, if you disrupt the bowel in
any way, and certainly if you nick it, you're going
(03:51):
to have and even this is even with the fresh debt,
you're going to have kind of an eruption or presentation
of smell in the autopsy room that is very offensive.
And I'm saying, and this is a different kind of
(04:12):
smell that you have with you know, with with decomposition.
It makes the entire room smell like a bowel movement
and it doesn't dissipate because the body is laying there,
laid bare before you. So with this disembowelment, we can
(04:36):
look back in history there there have actually been, you know,
cases where uh, disembowlment was used as a means of death,
either self inflicted or or you know, when you have
the authorities that are have sanctioned some type of capital punishment.
(04:56):
You know, one of the things that comes to mind
is that scene from Brave Heart that with mel Gibson
where they have him strapped to the table at the
end of the movie. I don't want to if no
one's seen Brave Heart by this point, I don't think
I'm gonna give a spoiler here. But you know, one
of the things that they say is they use a hook.
And the hook looks a lot like a gutting knife
(05:18):
that that you see today that people use with deer.
It's kind of a It actually does have a hooked shape.
The inner portion of the blade is very very sharp,
and you run it up the midline and the bowels
fall out. Okay, there's that famous scene from Let's See
What was it? Was it the Red Dragon or was
(05:39):
it Hannibal? I can't remember one of the Silence of
Lambs movies, and Anthony Hopkins character actually says to the
Italian detective in there, bowels in or bowels out. And
this is before he throws him over a balcony, you know,
by hanging and yeah, he dissembut him and his bowels
(06:00):
are hanging out. And there's a lot of references to
this type of punishment that you can see in art
going back years and years. I think there's even a
character I can't remember which character one person in the
Bible that they refer was it Judas? I can't remember. Yeah, yeah,
(06:21):
his bowels, you know, erupted and that sort of thing.
And now I'm talking about two different things here relative
to the disembowelment of somebody, and then trying to have
our friends understand that that the bowel is something that
even in the morgue, it's not the most pleasant thing.
It's not like taking a heart out or taking lungs out.
(06:44):
And here's a little inside baseball for you as well.
One of the things. I worked with a pathologist for years,
and when small bowel was removed, he would have me
run what they call run the bowel. And so you
start and small intestine is long. It's long. You hear
(07:08):
all kinds of figures that are thrown out. Don't believe
what you hear, but it is. It is rather robust
in length. And so you have to start at at
one end essentially where the stomach dumps into the small intestine,
and you clip it off where it dumps into the
(07:30):
large intestine, and you take a pair of scissors. And
there's actually scissors that we have in the more called
battle scissors, and they've got kind of a it looks
like the bottom half of a duck bill on one side,
on the bottom portion, and then it's that duck bill
turns into a very sharp edge. It's a pair of
(07:51):
scissors and you have a regular the top aspect is
a regular presentation of scissors. And then you just kind
of pull the bowel over the surface of the scissors
and the bowel actually opens. And the reason we do
that and the morgue is to check for any kind
of pathology that might be existing in the bowel. Now,
(08:12):
it's painstaking, takes a while. You have to wash and
clean the bowel, and of course it's a foul undertaking,
you know, as you can imagine. And then you get
into the large intestine, which is much shorter, easy to manage.
It gets really really nasty to get into that. And again,
you know, we have to explore these areas if you're
(08:32):
going to actually do an autopsy and say that you've
done a full autopsy. That's part and parcel of what
you have to do. However, in our case today, I
don't think that that was the purpose of what the
Sun was setting out to do here. I don't think
he was looking for any kind of in dwelling disease
that his dad might have had. He's, according to what
(08:55):
we're understanding from the police, he was there to search
for alien life that in dwelled his father for the day.
(09:21):
You know, when the police initially rolled up on this case,
and by the way, this is in El Paso, Texas.
When they rolled up on this case, they were summoned
to the home. And I find this wording fascinating. They
rolled up at the house regarding that quote unquote unattended death.
(09:42):
And what that generally means when you hear unattended is
somebody may have peacefully passed away in their sleep. We
use the term unattended in medical legal circles by saying
that no one was physically there when they died. Okay,
(10:03):
And any unattended death in the departments that I worked for,
you had to you had to make an appearance at
the scene because there are some deaths that occur. You
have people that are gravely ill and and they pass on. Well,
was that death attended or unattended? And our you know,
(10:23):
the last shop that I was at, you know, our
rule of thumb was was that I don't care if
there was somebody living upstairs, and this person died on
the first floor and another person lives on the second floor.
If they pass away without somebody witnessing, that's an unattended death.
So we would go out and at least do an examination.
But can you imagine, can you imagine when these officers
(10:45):
from El Paso rolled up at the scene. I can
guarantee you, I can dollars to donuts. I guarantee you
that when these folks clocked in that morning, this is
the last thing they expected to see that day.
Speaker 2 (11:03):
Well, you know, when you started off talking about aliens
and things like that, it almost almost unbuttoning the shirt,
you know, a little early because as we look at
this case, you have a father seventy four years old
and he's dead. In the days preceding his death, he's
(11:27):
calling one of his sons and saying, Hey, your brother,
Jamie is acting crazy again. I'm putting that in air quotes,
acting crazy again again. Got to add that to this,
he's acting crazy again. That means that within their nuclear family,
that tight little family circle, father and two sons, at least,
they're more than aware that Jamie is not balanced and
(11:51):
he has done this before and based on what happened,
I'm going to say he's been violent before. Now, if
Jamie has been violent before and has been acting crazy before,
did he blame those pastimes on aliens or did he
have some other thing to blame it on. In this case,
(12:12):
we've got Victor Contraras goes to the house to check
on his seventy four year old father, and before he
can make entry into the home, he smells rotting flesh.
He smells death. You've explained this before, Joe and have
talked about the smells that people incur when they come
(12:36):
upon a dead thing, a dead animal, a dead human.
Is there a big difference when you have a death
like we're talking about today, where the term disembowel has
been used. Is that a different smell than that of
rotting flesh or a combination of things going on.
Speaker 1 (12:58):
After a period of time's going to end together. However,
there is that moment in time. I would think that
with the bowels outside of the body, And not to
mention Dave, I can't just kind of gloss over this.
But if if this man was in fact disemboweled, and
we've got other injuries we're going to talk about as well,
(13:20):
there's going to be a copious amount of blood that
will have issued for from his body. Now, even in
the case, I know what people are saying, well, what
if he was dead after it happened. Listen, if with
this level of trauma that they are at least intimating,
you know, occurred, you're going to have puddles. Puddles are
(13:47):
different than pools. To me, that's kind of my own
view of it. You're going to have puddles of blood
that will, you know, kind of surround the body. You
can have pooled blood and maybe you know other people's
(14:07):
you know, understanding a volume of blood that's been let
might be different. But I've always envisioned, you know, puddles
of blood and you're stomping through rain puddles and you'll
have a copious amount of blood there on the surfaces,
and that's going to have a smell. You combine that
with the bowels that have now been released from the
abdomen that will have a particular smell. And additionally, he's
(14:34):
been down for a while. Now. What you're going to
be looking at here is that anytime you have a
body that is severely traumatized like this, you are sending
out a signal for every insect that is round about,
(14:56):
and flies will almost immediately show up. Okay, So that
process of you know that putrification is going to accelerate. Putrification,
as I teach, is different than autoliis. Autolsis is kind
of an internal breaking down. But something that's putrefied has
(15:19):
got internal and external forces working on it. And so
you're going to have a lot of flies that will
light And you say, well, my house is perfectly sealed.
I never see a fly in my house. Let me
tell you something. Where there's a will, there's a way
I've found for flies, they will get in there. I've
actually handled cases day of people that have died in
(15:44):
the summertime where I found flags have been laid on
the body within three hours of death. And I'm talking
about in the eyes and the nostrils. They stick out moist, moist,
dark areas to lay these eggs. And so again with
the fly activity, that's only going to further this. So
(16:06):
when they walk through the door, and this is not
something new to them, to the police officers, I can
assure you you know, l Pass is relatively nice sized place.
They will have been out on what he comes before,
and it's it's going to hit their senses like nobody's business,
and they're going to smell it. The son, who in
(16:27):
this case is the finder, I believe, correct, Dave correct?
He you know when he shows up at dad's domicile. Here,
how assaulting this is for a child to discover their
parents like this, And it's going to be a smell
more than likely unless he works in or around our field,
(16:50):
is going to be all the more assaulting to him.
And it's it's a horrible proposition because I can only
imagine this, this young man whose father has passed away.
He knows that he had been having conversations with his dad,
and then all of a sudden, you wonder if those
conversations began to flood back into his memory. And then
(17:14):
he's got this associated smell that's emanating from the home
and he is he hasn't yet found his dad's body,
because the smell is gonna will assault you way before
what you see assault you. It will be as soon
as he opens the door. Sometimes you can smell it
outside of the house. I've had that happen on many
(17:34):
occasions where I could smell riting flesh from within the
within the home before I ever opened the door, and
Katie barred the door when you do open it because
it slams you in the face. So he this poor child,
to this man has has really born witness, both in
the smell sense, in the in the visual sense, to
(17:56):
something that he probably wouldn't count on, Dave.
Speaker 2 (17:59):
And that's where I was looking back to that initial
call from Dad saying, Hey, your brother's not acting right.
He's acting, you know, strange, he's acting weird. Again, when
when the sun gets there to check on his dad,
he realizes that things are not just not good because
the smell tells him. I'm going to go out on
(18:19):
a limb here and say he knew death was right
around the corner before he ever set foot in the
house because it's emanating from inside the house. And by
the way, Joe, it had to have been going on
for a couple of days, right, I mean, this is
not something that is going to just happen and poof.
You can you know tell there's a dead body inside.
This is something that's been going on for a couple
(18:39):
of days, all right. Now, when he gets in, we
know that his father is dead. We know that Victor Sr.
Is dead from well we've talked about disambal, but he's
got other injuries going on too. How are these other
injuries going to impact his body? Does your body deteriorate
(19:01):
faster when you have more injuries?
Speaker 1 (19:04):
Yeah, yeah, I think that it does, and there's evidence
that it does because anytime you it's almost it's almost
like a ship. You know, if you if you insult
the structural integrity of a ship, it compromises, uh, everything
(19:26):
that's contained within the ship. Okay, so if you think
of our bodies as a vessel, and they're referred to
as vessels, uh in many texts throughout the throughout the world.
Every time there is an insult to any area of
the body, particularly where it's left a you know, a
(19:49):
gash or a slit or a stab wound or a
bullet hole or you know, a large opening body like
would be a soci with disembowment. For every every insult
to the body, I believe that you are increasing the
(20:10):
rate at which that body is going to decompose because
you violate the structural integrity of the body. So it's
going to break down quicker. That those spaces that are
normally protected in life are now open to an increased
rate of decomposition. It is also open to the external elements,
(20:34):
particularly heat in that environment, and it's also going to
be exposed to any kind of insect activity. And if
it's outdoors and you have animals about that would be
so inclined to go after the dead, you've increased that
factor as well. So Yeah, in answer to your question, yeah,
(20:57):
I believe that it does impact the rate at which
bodies de pose. But these injuries that this you know,
poor man sustained, just so we understand mister Contrera's victor,
there's evidence that not only was he disemboweled, you've got
(21:19):
blood deposition all over the house, which you would expect.
That means that probably something happened in life, unless it's
transferred blood that comes off of perpetrator and they're touching
the wall or touching some other surface. You've also got
what they have identified as stab wounds. So we know
from jump Street that we've got uh if as if
(21:41):
we need any further confirmation, we've got sharp for his
injuries to the body, and he's also got something else
that's kind of interesting here, Dave. They're kind of being
non specific, but I can I can probably guess what
this is. They're talking about a severe head injury or
head injuries. They're not saying cuts, and that takes us
(22:06):
down a completely different road. And oh yeah, by the way,
he's had his throat cut. So you've got this myriad
of injuries that have occurred. One of the problems that
the pathologist is going to be faced with because the
police are going to ask this question. And here it's
the classic question that we always get asked, You know
(22:28):
what sequence did these occur in? So, how did this
come about? At what stage did this come about? And
we've talked about before on body backs. Was it anti mortem,
perry mortem or post mortem? Only an autopsy can actually tell. So,
(23:04):
just so that we can revisit, you've got a father
who in life had contacted her to the other son
and stated that he made mention to his son, who
turns out to be the finder of Victor's body, says,
your brother's acting crazy again. That is that pretty? Is
that an accurate call? Dave?
Speaker 2 (23:24):
As something that goes along with the Hey, your son,
your brother Jamie is acting crazy again. That's what Victor
Senior told Victor Jor And that made me look back
at a few things, Joe, because my first thought was,
if dad is calling the son and saying, hey, he's
acting crazy again, that's a fearful thing to say that
(23:45):
to his son. It's asking for help without asking for help,
it's saying I got a problem I can't deal with here. Well,
I looked it up. Sure enough, police have been called before,
because before this happened, police showed up because Jamie Contreras,
the son, actually took a hammer to his father and
hit his father in the head with a hammer a
(24:05):
couple of times prior to this, and police showed up
for that one. And that's where the call your brother's
acting crazy again came from, because there was the prior attack.
Speaker 1 (24:18):
I believe.
Speaker 2 (24:18):
So when you start looking at this, one of the
things I noticed, Joe is first of all, when Victor
Junior gets there and he smells death, you know, through
a window he's outside when he comes in the house
and he sees what is obviously a body on the
floor and it's covered in a very very bloody sheet,
(24:41):
and he says that when he took the sheet off,
the body was very bloated. Yeah, and which that indicates
a number of things to you. As an investigator that
probably passed by people like me. We just kind of
assume we see a dog on the side of the road,
they bloat. But it's got to mean a whole lot
more when it's a human being inside of a home
(25:02):
as you try to determine, you know, how long he's
been there. But there was there were wounds to his head.
I'm thinking that those were caused probably by a hammer.
I got nothing to go on except that he had
beat him with a hammer of before. And I'm thinking
whenever we've done a story about somebody getting hit with
a hammer, it's in their.
Speaker 1 (25:22):
Head, Yeah it is, and that's you know, that's where
you're going to attack. That's where I think most assailants
would attack someone with a hammer. I mean, you know,
you can take and I've seen I've seen strikes on
the torso before. But you know, you got to keep
in mind that with hammer attacks, just about any kind
of blunt force attack, they're going to be very frenzied.
(25:46):
They're not real well ordered. But the goal is because
if you're wielding a hammer against someone, your ultimate goal
is to kill them, okay, and so with these hammer strikes,
what you're going to see are going to be these
(26:06):
that is, okay, there's a couple of things that we
have to throw in here. If each one of these
hammer strikes, the hammer is oriented in the manner in
which we commonly think of a hammer, where you've got
the business end of the hammer that's driving a nail. Okay,
if it's perfectly oriented like that, then you're going to
(26:28):
get an interesting little laceration sometimes that might have a
curve to it that may or may not marry up
with the blunt edge of a hammer. If the hammer
is textured in any way that surface, like if it's
got kind of a herring bone texture to it, I
don't know if I'm saying that right. Kind of crisscross.
(26:49):
Some of them will be that will actually imprint itself
on the skin as an overlying abrasion. Contusions and contusion
or two different things. So you'll have that top layer
of skin that's erupted as a result of an abrasion,
think about skin, the skin, elbow, and then that hemorrhage
(27:11):
that kind of eccentrically goes out from that central strike
point where the little vessels have been erupted and it's
bleeding out those areas are bleeding out in an interstitial tissue.
The question is how many times was he struck and
how what was the level of lethality, Because just because
(27:32):
somebody gets hit in the head with a hammer doesn't
necessarily mean that they're dead or that they're going to die. Now,
I can tell you there's high probability you're gonna do
some serious injury, and so you're not that's not going
to be revealed until you can actually take back the
scalp and you look at the under underlying external table
(27:52):
of skull. And there's some images that I've used in
classes over the years where you know you'll have a
depending upon the size of the hammer, the business end
as I like to refer to it, because I don't
know what the actual name of the end of the
hammer is that's struck with the head of the hammer.
(28:14):
It's they vary in size, and I've seen like quarter size,
like the currency quarter twenty five cents size strikes strike
points and you'll actually say a ring I hate to
say ring fracture because that's a specific fracture that happens
at the base of skull, but it has a circular appearance.
(28:37):
Let's just say that and it drives that bit of
skull if it detaches completely into the dura matter which
covers the brain, and if you hit hard enough, it'll
actually go into the brain. So if you get multiple
of these strikes where you've got that kind of intrusion
into the cranial vault, yeah, there's high probability somebody's going
to die. But Dave, I'm I'm fascinated by the fact
(29:01):
that he's struck multiple times with a hammer. But you
still feel the need not you universal you or I
guess the son suspect you. You still feel the need
to take an edge weapon and cut your father's throat.
That's kind of Is it overkill? Yeah? I mean to me,
(29:22):
it is, But why do you need to go that far?
Speaker 2 (29:26):
Well, Joe, there's something else in this that I wanted
to ask you about, regarding the fact that blood spatter
was throughout the house. Yeah, And in my head, I'm thinking,
you got the front door lock, back door locked. The
only window that's open is the bedroom window, and that's
where the father's body is found in his bedroom. But
blood spatter around the house. All I'm thinking is that
(29:52):
the father is trying to get away from the son
who is allegedly attacking him. I'm thinking there's a hammer involved,
and you're right, he's automny is chasing him. But you've
got blood spatter, which means something's being swung, right. I
mean it's got to be cast off. Is that's what
I think?
Speaker 1 (30:06):
Well, yeah, it can be. It can be cast off.
But again you have to kind of couch your terms
here a little bit. Uh. I lean more to being
conservative with these sorts.
Speaker 2 (30:17):
This is called knowing just enough to be really wrong.
Speaker 1 (30:21):
No, you will, Okay, just imagine I always like to
use the paintbrush description.
Speaker 2 (30:28):
And that's where I'm picturing from the hammer.
Speaker 1 (30:30):
Yeah, and so every time you now, the first strike
that you have with hammer is not going to generate
blood more than likely. So when the head is struck,
you've got a couple of layers you have to go through.
First off, you've got to go through a scalp. Well,
hair and scalp. Okay, do you know hair thickness can
(30:51):
affect this as well. So if you strike a guy
with really thick hair or woman really thick hair as
opposed to a bald person, the hair can actually cushion, Okay,
to a certain degree, and people don't think about that,
but it can. You got that dynamic working. But let's
just say it's sufficient enough to strike down. You hit
(31:12):
that first surface, you've compromised the structural integrity. My contention
has always been that you have to strike again in
order to kind of put blood onto that surface. That
when we talk about cast off, you're drawing the hammer
back over the top of your head like you're flinging
something over your shoulder, and you kind of are and
(31:34):
you'll get this kind of arcing deposition on the walls
and that sort of thing. Also, if he's swinging, if
he's swinging not in the vertical plane but in the
horizontal horizontal plane, say he strikes it down side of
the head and then draws it back sideways so that
you're in the horizontal plane. Then you're throwing blood on
(31:54):
the wall to the side. It's not always going to
be over the head. I think some people think that
all off is over the top of the head, over
the shoulder. It can be, and most of the time
that's what happens. But if somebody these things are very dynamic,
it's not These things don't occur in a vacuum. Okay,
they have to be real careful about the interpretation of
blood deposition and thinking about that. And then if he
(32:19):
has had I don't know, maybe a moment of ubsidity
at some point in time where he looks down his
hands and you know, he's touched the surface father's body
and it's got blood all over it, and then he
proceeds to touch the wall, then that's that's transfer blood
(32:41):
that you have. So if the instrument that you're utilizing
has got blood on it, that blood is going to
drip down off of the head of the hammer, down
onto the handle of the hammer, you know, transfer onto
your hands. And so you know, if he touched the
wall with that, if he's got blood on his clothing
(33:02):
and he bumps into the wall, that's going to transfer over.
So it's really important to try to categorize this blood
deposition that you're talking about.
Speaker 2 (33:12):
Okay, let me ask you this, Joe, because we talked
about the neck being sliced his neck. Yeah, ye, all right,
And I hate to reference everything to a television show or.
Speaker 1 (33:22):
A movie, but oh no, that's okay.
Speaker 2 (33:24):
In the TV show Breaking Bad, the Chicken Guy, he
actually there's a scene in it where he actually cuts
the neck uses the box cutter to slice the neck
open of one of Victor. Actually the guy's name is Victor,
and I think and when he does that, he holds
him and blood squirts out of his neck. Okay, it's
(33:45):
the blood is squirting. Is that going to happen when
you slice someone's neck or does it have to be
sliced in a perfect way or is that just a
movie TV thing?
Speaker 1 (33:55):
No, it's not just simply a movie TV thing, because
what they're demonstrating there is it's kind of arterial spray.
They refer to it as and the pressure that's built up.
The question is are I think that because arterial arterial
(34:15):
deposition of blood has got a very distinct appearance to it.
It's not high velocity blood deposition like you see with
someone is shot, because the blood becomes almost a histamine.
Like I tell my students, if you want to know
what high velocity blood deposition looks like, go go home,
(34:38):
get an airsolt can of hair spray, and just pump
at one time onto your mirror and you'll see kind
of what that looks like. It's very particulate and tiny
with arterial deposition, particularly if the throat is cut and
you've gotten down into a carrotid. You know, most of
the time veins ooze and artery spray, So if you're
(35:03):
into arterial spray in turn, in this case, if you're
thinking about akroti that has been sliced, then the heart
is still beating. And what's fascinating I've always been fascinated
by these people that do the blood interpretation is that
as the heart beats and blood is pouring out of
(35:28):
or being ejected out of an artery, they can see
and this is pretty fascinating. They can see with every
contraction of the heart. Then that's fascinating because the blood
itself actually presents in a manner in which you can
(35:51):
see where every single time the heart beats and it
sprays the blood in that direction, boom, boom boom. That's
how they come up with these interpretations, which is absolutely
fascinating to me that they can do this, and you know,
and of course there's all these other things that they do,
you know, where they can track somebody's movement. And I'm
(36:14):
not talking about a perpetrator, though that does exist. I'm
talking about somebody that is initially injured in one part
of the house and they egress through the house where
maybe they're touching a wall. And I've actually seen blood
deposition on a wall day where it starts off at
the highest point and it travels downward diagonally as a
(36:38):
person is losing their will or their ability to thrive,
goes down the wall all the way down the hallway.
I'll never forget a case that I had like that
until they're dead at the end of the hallway, and
you can actually kind of map that by these blood
depositions on the wall. And it can come in any
number of forms. You've got this pass of dripping that
(37:00):
happens that you know, you know famously, We've talked about
this with Ellen Greenberg with a blood flowing out of
her mouth where gravity is pulling it down. So you
get one large droplet of blood and you'll see gravity
begin to pull pull that blood downward, Okay, and then
(37:21):
or you can have smear which might be a transfer. Okay.
So there's any number of depositions that are out there
relative to the blood that are going to tell you
a lot about what happened. I'm interested in the end
of life for Victor because he's found somebody took the
time to put a sheet over him. But there's a
(37:47):
lot of activity that took place before that sheet ever
got on the body.
Speaker 2 (37:50):
Dave there is and Joe. You know, as I'm doing
a little research on this and found out about the
hammer attack and how the father was concerned enough about
previous activities by the suspect here his son, Jamie. One
thing that had come out is that apparently Jamie had
(38:13):
killed Victor's pets, his father's pets. Now they made it
plural in reporting, but didn't exactly tell us whether it
was cats, dogs, rabbits, birds, I don't know what it was,
but he was killing them. And as we look at
a man who would say that the reason, you know,
when police did catch up with Jamie Contreras, he told
(38:33):
them they said, hey, where's your dad, And he said,
he's in heaven and he explained how the aliens had
taken over him and they took his.
Speaker 1 (38:44):
Bowels or what have you.
Speaker 2 (38:45):
I mean, whatever crazy explanation the guy came up with,
but he had this. The same guy, Jamie Contreras, had
walked through his neighborhood a couple of years ago carrying
a decapitated rabbit. So I guess my thing here, Joe,
(39:05):
is when you've got a guy who's thirty nine years
old and two years ago you see him walking through
the neighborhood carrying a decapitated rabbit, how is he still
walking around outside.
Speaker 1 (39:20):
Of a hospital or jail. I have no idea. I
really don't.
Speaker 2 (39:24):
If I saw that right now, Joe, I'd be on
the phone with you saying, please call somebody. I mean,
I would freak out if somebody was walking I live
in a neighborhood. You've see my neighborhood. If I saw
somebody walking down the hill in front of my house
carrying a bunny rabbit and the head was chopped off
and they were walking like, no big deal, I'm freaking out.
Speaker 1 (39:42):
Yeah, we've got a problem at that point, Tom, And
answer to your question. You know, we could talk for
days about, you know, mental health in our country and
the way the mentally ill or dealt with And you know,
we don't know a lot about his background relative to
what kind of psychopathology you know he may have have had.
(40:03):
But if he just on the surface and played junior
psychiatrists here for a second, just on the surface, if
you believe that you've had communications with extra terrestrials. You know,
this sounds like he's in a delusional state. You know,
I don't know, maybe he's got schizophrenia or something like that.
I've actually worked a case and I mentioned this before,
(40:26):
with a young man that took his own life and
he didn't intend to, but he he did. And that's
because he thought Cia had put a microphone in his
forearm and he cut his arm open. I think we
over thirty times. He cut his arm. Yeah, no, and
he lived with his parents and he was looking for
(40:47):
the microphone that was in his forearm. Okay, so I
don't you know, I'm not saying that I'm not saying
that he should not be held responsible for what he
has done to his father. He bloody well should. But
the problem is, you don't know what his perception of
reality is, you know, if he's and again we go
(41:10):
back to this idea of he's killing animals, you know
kind of you know, you kind of got a sign
there that there's real underlying, you know, kind of a
threat of violence that's resting here. And here's another thing
that's kind of interesting. If he has got a history,
he might not just perhaps be killing his dad's animals.
(41:33):
I'd be interested to know if if he has killed
anybody else's animals and if he has whatever the sharp
instrument that he has chosen to use in this case,
was this instrument actually used to kill any animals with?
And this is from a forensic standpoint. This is kind
(41:55):
of fascinating because you know, I think any of us
can walk around and we can say, hey, you know
you look down at a red substance that's you know,
on a knife blade or laid on or that's deposited
on the floor, and you say, hey, that's blood. That's
all find good for you and I to have that
conversation and say yeah, that's blood doesn't work in court
(42:19):
because you have to when you're processing these scenes. There's
a whole series of testing that has to go on.
First off, you have to do a test that says
if this is or is not blood? Okay? You go
from that level too, is this animal or human blood?
And then you get into typing, you know where you
know the old zerology model where you're trying to type
(42:42):
the blood and then that spins off into DNA. But
you have to establish first an instrument might have blood
on it, but wouldn't it be fascinating to learn in
this case, if they tested this knife blade and they
found remnants of not just mister Contrare his blood on there,
but maybe an older sample that's on there that turns
(43:04):
out to be a cat or rabbit, a dog, you
never know if that's the instrumentality that he that he prefers,
because he's obviously got an affinity for sharp weapons, and
you know, we haven't he you know, talked about talked
about the this disembowlment to take place, which, by the way,
(43:26):
we've talked about this with dismemberment. But if you don't
have the tools to facilitate disembowlment, it's not an easy process.
I think people think that it.
Speaker 2 (43:36):
Is not just slicing the belly open and everything comes
gushing out, right.
Speaker 1 (43:39):
Yeah, it's not like I don't know, I can't remember
the Japanese term. It's not Harry Carey, but it's sepuku
or I can't remember the kind of ritualized form. It
doesn't and that's highly ritualized with very sharp instruments, where
there's a specific process that takes place with that with disembowlment,
(44:04):
and you know, if you're going to use a household instrument.
First off, it have to be very sharp, and you'd
have to have certain tolerances built into your own psyche
that would allow you to do that, to hover over
your dad's body and literally split him wide open. And
(44:25):
you know, they didn't just talk about Dave in this case,
that this was a disembowlment case. They mentioned organs as well.
So I wonder what was found in and out of
the body, if anything had been removed, was or all
of the organs accounted for? Had they been taken off somewhere?
I don't know. I don't know. And that's that's what
(44:46):
is kind of fascinating about this case.
Speaker 2 (44:48):
Ma Man, you were actually right about the term spekaepuku
sepp uku. And it also goes with Harry Carey self disembolment. Okay, okay,
I remember that from Tarawa but world War two stuff.
Speaker 1 (45:05):
Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (45:06):
The thing is here, Joe, is when we're dealing with
a case where there's a thought that maybe mental illness
has come come into play, where there is a I
don't want to say every violent act that goes far
to you know, cutting people up and things like that,
isn't crazy, but to a normal to what we consider normal.
(45:29):
I mean, it just seems like way out there. But
can you when you're walking a scene, can you actually
see a difference in the mental state of the person
committing the act. Is there a frenzied, out of control
thing that you can find in the evidence or can
you not separate anger from crazy, pain from fear?
Speaker 1 (45:53):
Now, I know what you're saying. I think that if
somebody is we'll say, how can I term this? If
somebody has psycho pathology going on, okay like that, where
they have voices that are telling them perhaps that your
dad has been, you know, inhabited by extraterrestrial life. If
(46:13):
that's their perception, then it might become more methodical, as
opposed to some person that comes home and finds their
spouse in bed with another person and they pick up
a hammer or a knife and they proceed to kill
both people, and that's going to be a very frenzy
disordered event. And again, you know, you when profilers look
(46:36):
at these sorts of things, I find it fascinating as
well that he's been killing animals and we know what
that's associated with many times as a lead up. You know,
I think that that's something that they would certainly consider
and you know, there can be and don't misconstrue what
I'm saying here, there can be. I think with a
(46:58):
mentally ill there can almost be a ritualized form of this.
And I'm not talking about like a ritualized killing per se.
But if you're listening to an outside voice or what
you perceive to be an outside voice, and they're giving
you instructions, you put this here, you know you I
(47:19):
don't know. You remove this organ and you put it
up on the shelf. You remove this organ, you put
it there. You need to take this organ and put
it in the refrigerator, because that's the key organ. You
have to keep it isolated from everything else. Whatever the
voice is telling them to do, that's what's directing them
at that point in time. Now, if you've got somebody
that does have mental illness and they feel as though
(47:40):
they're being attacked, then yeah, I would imagine it could
leach over into this idea that it's frenzied. But Dave,
he he actually admitted, correct me if I'm wrong that
he was being told something that kind of initiated this
whole thing, or he was making a stay, wasn't He
(48:01):
didn't he say something.
Speaker 2 (48:02):
Yeah, it was his belief that aliens had taken over,
that his father was gone, that his father was no
longer there. The person he was looking at was not
his father, It was an alien some And actually, you
know what I think At this point there have been
a number of different things said and or written about
this case. It's still fairly new. This is an ongoing
(48:23):
issue right now as they try to separate. This began
with haven't heard from my dad in a while? You know,
that typical call where the son comes to check on,
you know, his father, And it turns into this big
bag of what in the heck are we dealing with?
Are we dealing with somebody who really has checked out
(48:43):
from life mentally and is seeing things and hearing things.
Does he truly believe that aliens have disemboweled his father
and taken over his body. I mean, I don't know
what's going on in the guy's psyche or anything else,
but I do know this, Joe, if you were going
to walk in on that crime scene, which it is
a crime scene, regardless of whether the guy in control
(49:06):
of himself, but you're going to have to just you're
not going to hear the stories. You're not going to
the story of aliens and that it doesn't impact you
until after the fact. And we'll be writing a book
because you're going to look at this and tell me
what happened based on the evidence.
Speaker 1 (49:22):
Yeah, and it will be and and those in the
morgue as well, you know when and look, I'd be
lying if I said that. You know, pathologists are not
filled in on what they've what the police have heard
out on the scene. They're going to know that, okay, uh,
you know at this point, you know, when he rolls
in to the more decomposed by the way, they're only
(49:48):
going to have the snatches and hints at things like,
for instance, if this guy has been walking around the
neighborhood with decapitated animal bodies, he first off, he's going
to be known to the local beat unit if they've
been called out on domestics there. That information would actually
come to the cops at the scene, because what the
(50:10):
cops are going to do and are the detectives who
are cops, but you have detectives at the scene, they
will ask the shift supervisor okay, which might be a
lieutenant or a sergeant, and say, hey, have you guys
had contact at this house before, and the sergeant, particularly
(50:31):
in a case like I can only imagine a case
like this, the sergeant is gonna say, what we felt
like we need to sit up outside the house out
here because we were always getting called here. Have you
ever had contact with any people in the house. Yeah,
we've talked to the old man because he told us
that he was afraid of his son, or we have
taken the son aside and said, look, you gotta cool
(50:51):
it out, man, you know you can't behave this way,
or maybe they've taken the kid in for observation. Again
dollars to know, nuts, bet you this kid has gone
in probably in the back of a police car an
ambulance and taken in for observation at some point in time.
That most of the time this kind of thing just
doesn't just materialize out of nothing. You know, you're going
(51:14):
to have history, and in this case where you've got
a young man who has reportedly been saying, as he
is related to the police, that he wanted the aliens
to give me my power as he struck his dad down.
(51:39):
We're going to keep our eye on this case and
know that more will probably develop. We'll find out what
happens here to the sun. Has he been taken in
for an evaluation? Is he going to be placed into
an area where he can perhaps get help, get medicated,
get him in a position where maybe he can stand
(52:02):
trial at some point in time, Because this is a
horrific homicide and somebody has to be held responsible. But
we do know this, This man, who obviously loves his
children has died at the hand of his own son
and was left to decompose in the home where he
(52:25):
welcomed them on a regular basis. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan,
and this is Bodybacks
Quodydas, but Joseph's gotten more. Back in the nineties, I
used to be a fan of the program X Files.
There's never been anything like it on television. That was
kind of fascinated by it. It was interesting. It truly
(00:24):
was never understood how a port certified forensic pathologist I
became a FBI agent. That never made sense to me.
And she would conduct her on the autopsies. But that aside, Hollywood,
you know now, you know those things that we thought
were quite fantastic back then would show like the X Files.
(00:50):
It seemed to be getting into our I don't know
our common conversations now regarding things like extraterrestrial life. And
you know, these people seeing things on radar, former Navy
fighter pilot seeing the infamous tic TACs, if you've seen
any of that stuff. And I've gotten kind of numb
(01:12):
to it now.
Speaker 2 (01:15):
But what.
Speaker 1 (01:17):
Happens if an individual believes that some extraterrestrial life form
has inhabited the body of a member of his family,
and not just any member of his family, his father,
(01:39):
and in order to protect himself from said extraterrestrial life
inhabiting his father's body, he thinks it's a good idea
to probably kill him. Coming to you from the beautiful
campus of Jacksonville State University in Jacksonville, Alabama. I'm Joseph
(02:04):
Scott Morgan and this is Body Backs. When when I
saw the headlines of this, first off, I'm thinking, okay,
so you're saying that, you, h, the authorities have this
(02:24):
young man has harvested his his father's organs. I want
to know what organs? Uh, you know, what precisely was harveded? Harvested?
And then they're also using the term disembowelment, which.
Speaker 2 (02:41):
Joe, I mean, I can't imagine what I think it means.
But what does disembowment really mean?
Speaker 1 (02:47):
Yeah, most of the time with disembowelment, it's it's not
removal of the large and small intestine. Because when they
say bowel, that's that's the that's what they're referring to.
And as a matter of fact, you know, when you
talk to physicians, surgeons in particular, and pathologists when you're
(03:08):
doing autopsies, they'll say, you know, we need to take
a look at at small bowel. They're not going to
say small intestine, small bowel, large bowel, And it's a
you know, out of all all of the organ systems
that I dealt with in the autopsy suite, that was
(03:29):
probably the most unpleasant. And there's a couple of reasons why.
First off, when you open human remains and you get
into the abdominal cavity, if you disrupt the bowel in
any way, and certainly if you nick it, you're going
(03:51):
to have and even this is even with the fresh debt,
you're going to have kind of an eruption or presentation
of smell in the autopsy room that is very offensive.
And I'm saying, and this is a different kind of
(04:12):
smell that you have with you know, with with decomposition.
It makes the entire room smell like a bowel movement
and it doesn't dissipate because the body is laying there,
laid bare before you. So with this disembowelment, we can
(04:36):
look back in history there there have actually been, you know,
cases where uh, disembowlment was used as a means of death,
either self inflicted or or you know, when you have
the authorities that are have sanctioned some type of capital punishment.
(04:56):
You know, one of the things that comes to mind
is that scene from Brave Heart that with mel Gibson
where they have him strapped to the table at the
end of the movie. I don't want to if no
one's seen Brave Heart by this point, I don't think
I'm gonna give a spoiler here. But you know, one
of the things that they say is they use a hook.
And the hook looks a lot like a gutting knife
(05:18):
that that you see today that people use with deer.
It's kind of a It actually does have a hooked shape.
The inner portion of the blade is very very sharp,
and you run it up the midline and the bowels
fall out. Okay, there's that famous scene from Let's See
What was it? Was it the Red Dragon or was
(05:39):
it Hannibal? I can't remember one of the Silence of
Lambs movies, and Anthony Hopkins character actually says to the
Italian detective in there, bowels in or bowels out. And
this is before he throws him over a balcony, you know,
by hanging and yeah, he dissembut him and his bowels
(06:00):
are hanging out. And there's a lot of references to
this type of punishment that you can see in art
going back years and years. I think there's even a
character I can't remember which character one person in the
Bible that they refer was it Judas? I can't remember. Yeah, yeah,
(06:21):
his bowels, you know, erupted and that sort of thing.
And now I'm talking about two different things here relative
to the disembowelment of somebody, and then trying to have
our friends understand that that the bowel is something that
even in the morgue, it's not the most pleasant thing.
It's not like taking a heart out or taking lungs out.
(06:44):
And here's a little inside baseball for you as well.
One of the things. I worked with a pathologist for years,
and when small bowel was removed, he would have me
run what they call run the bowel. And so you
start and small intestine is long. It's long. You hear
(07:08):
all kinds of figures that are thrown out. Don't believe
what you hear, but it is. It is rather robust
in length. And so you have to start at at
one end essentially where the stomach dumps into the small intestine,
and you clip it off where it dumps into the
(07:30):
large intestine, and you take a pair of scissors. And
there's actually scissors that we have in the more called
battle scissors, and they've got kind of a it looks
like the bottom half of a duck bill on one side,
on the bottom portion, and then it's that duck bill
turns into a very sharp edge. It's a pair of
(07:51):
scissors and you have a regular the top aspect is
a regular presentation of scissors. And then you just kind
of pull the bowel over the surface of the scissors
and the bowel actually opens. And the reason we do
that and the morgue is to check for any kind
of pathology that might be existing in the bowel. Now,
(08:12):
it's painstaking, takes a while. You have to wash and
clean the bowel, and of course it's a foul undertaking,
you know, as you can imagine. And then you get
into the large intestine, which is much shorter, easy to manage.
It gets really really nasty to get into that. And again,
you know, we have to explore these areas if you're
(08:32):
going to actually do an autopsy and say that you've
done a full autopsy. That's part and parcel of what
you have to do. However, in our case today, I
don't think that that was the purpose of what the
Sun was setting out to do here. I don't think
he was looking for any kind of in dwelling disease
that his dad might have had. He's, according to what
(08:55):
we're understanding from the police, he was there to search
for alien life that in dwelled his father for the day.
(09:21):
You know, when the police initially rolled up on this case,
and by the way, this is in El Paso, Texas.
When they rolled up on this case, they were summoned
to the home. And I find this wording fascinating. They
rolled up at the house regarding that quote unquote unattended death.
(09:42):
And what that generally means when you hear unattended is
somebody may have peacefully passed away in their sleep. We
use the term unattended in medical legal circles by saying
that no one was physically there when they died. Okay,
(10:03):
And any unattended death in the departments that I worked for,
you had to you had to make an appearance at
the scene because there are some deaths that occur. You
have people that are gravely ill and and they pass on. Well,
was that death attended or unattended? And our you know,
(10:23):
the last shop that I was at, you know, our
rule of thumb was was that I don't care if
there was somebody living upstairs, and this person died on
the first floor and another person lives on the second floor.
If they pass away without somebody witnessing, that's an unattended death.
So we would go out and at least do an examination.
But can you imagine, can you imagine when these officers
(10:45):
from El Paso rolled up at the scene. I can
guarantee you, I can dollars to donuts. I guarantee you
that when these folks clocked in that morning, this is
the last thing they expected to see that day.
Speaker 2 (11:03):
Well, you know, when you started off talking about aliens
and things like that, it almost almost unbuttoning the shirt,
you know, a little early because as we look at
this case, you have a father seventy four years old
and he's dead. In the days preceding his death, he's
(11:27):
calling one of his sons and saying, Hey, your brother,
Jamie is acting crazy again. I'm putting that in air quotes,
acting crazy again again. Got to add that to this,
he's acting crazy again. That means that within their nuclear family,
that tight little family circle, father and two sons, at least,
they're more than aware that Jamie is not balanced and
(11:51):
he has done this before and based on what happened,
I'm going to say he's been violent before. Now, if
Jamie has been violent before and has been acting crazy before,
did he blame those pastimes on aliens or did he
have some other thing to blame it on. In this case,
(12:12):
we've got Victor Contraras goes to the house to check
on his seventy four year old father, and before he
can make entry into the home, he smells rotting flesh.
He smells death. You've explained this before, Joe and have
talked about the smells that people incur when they come
(12:36):
upon a dead thing, a dead animal, a dead human.
Is there a big difference when you have a death
like we're talking about today, where the term disembowel has
been used. Is that a different smell than that of
rotting flesh or a combination of things going on.
Speaker 1 (12:58):
After a period of time's going to end together. However,
there is that moment in time. I would think that
with the bowels outside of the body, And not to
mention Dave, I can't just kind of gloss over this.
But if if this man was in fact disemboweled, and
we've got other injuries we're going to talk about as well,
(13:20):
there's going to be a copious amount of blood that
will have issued for from his body. Now, even in
the case, I know what people are saying, well, what
if he was dead after it happened. Listen, if with
this level of trauma that they are at least intimating,
you know, occurred, you're going to have puddles. Puddles are
(13:47):
different than pools. To me, that's kind of my own
view of it. You're going to have puddles of blood
that will, you know, kind of surround the body. You
can have pooled blood and maybe you know other people's
(14:07):
you know, understanding a volume of blood that's been let
might be different. But I've always envisioned, you know, puddles
of blood and you're stomping through rain puddles and you'll
have a copious amount of blood there on the surfaces,
and that's going to have a smell. You combine that
with the bowels that have now been released from the
abdomen that will have a particular smell. And additionally, he's
(14:34):
been down for a while. Now. What you're going to
be looking at here is that anytime you have a
body that is severely traumatized like this, you are sending
out a signal for every insect that is round about,
(14:56):
and flies will almost immediately show up. Okay, So that
process of you know that putrification is going to accelerate. Putrification,
as I teach, is different than autoliis. Autolsis is kind
of an internal breaking down. But something that's putrefied has
(15:19):
got internal and external forces working on it. And so
you're going to have a lot of flies that will
light And you say, well, my house is perfectly sealed.
I never see a fly in my house. Let me
tell you something. Where there's a will, there's a way
I've found for flies, they will get in there. I've
actually handled cases day of people that have died in
(15:44):
the summertime where I found flags have been laid on
the body within three hours of death. And I'm talking
about in the eyes and the nostrils. They stick out moist, moist,
dark areas to lay these eggs. And so again with
the fly activity, that's only going to further this. So
(16:06):
when they walk through the door, and this is not
something new to them, to the police officers, I can
assure you you know, l Pass is relatively nice sized place.
They will have been out on what he comes before,
and it's it's going to hit their senses like nobody's business,
and they're going to smell it. The son, who in
(16:27):
this case is the finder, I believe, correct, Dave correct?
He you know when he shows up at dad's domicile. Here,
how assaulting this is for a child to discover their
parents like this, And it's going to be a smell
more than likely unless he works in or around our field,
(16:50):
is going to be all the more assaulting to him.
And it's it's a horrible proposition because I can only
imagine this, this young man whose father has passed away.
He knows that he had been having conversations with his dad,
and then all of a sudden, you wonder if those
conversations began to flood back into his memory. And then
(17:14):
he's got this associated smell that's emanating from the home
and he is he hasn't yet found his dad's body,
because the smell is gonna will assault you way before
what you see assault you. It will be as soon
as he opens the door. Sometimes you can smell it
outside of the house. I've had that happen on many
(17:34):
occasions where I could smell riting flesh from within the
within the home before I ever opened the door, and
Katie barred the door when you do open it because
it slams you in the face. So he this poor child,
to this man has has really born witness, both in
the smell sense, in the in the visual sense, to
(17:56):
something that he probably wouldn't count on, Dave.
Speaker 2 (17:59):
And that's where I was looking back to that initial
call from Dad saying, Hey, your brother's not acting right.
He's acting, you know, strange, he's acting weird. Again, when
when the sun gets there to check on his dad,
he realizes that things are not just not good because
the smell tells him. I'm going to go out on
(18:19):
a limb here and say he knew death was right
around the corner before he ever set foot in the
house because it's emanating from inside the house. And by
the way, Joe, it had to have been going on
for a couple of days, right, I mean, this is
not something that is going to just happen and poof.
You can you know tell there's a dead body inside.
This is something that's been going on for a couple
(18:39):
of days, all right. Now, when he gets in, we
know that his father is dead. We know that Victor Sr.
Is dead from well we've talked about disambal, but he's
got other injuries going on too. How are these other
injuries going to impact his body? Does your body deteriorate
(19:01):
faster when you have more injuries?
Speaker 1 (19:04):
Yeah, yeah, I think that it does, and there's evidence
that it does because anytime you it's almost it's almost
like a ship. You know, if you if you insult
the structural integrity of a ship, it compromises, uh, everything
(19:26):
that's contained within the ship. Okay, so if you think
of our bodies as a vessel, and they're referred to
as vessels, uh in many texts throughout the throughout the world.
Every time there is an insult to any area of
the body, particularly where it's left a you know, a
(19:49):
gash or a slit or a stab wound or a
bullet hole or you know, a large opening body like
would be a soci with disembowment. For every every insult
to the body, I believe that you are increasing the
(20:10):
rate at which that body is going to decompose because
you violate the structural integrity of the body. So it's
going to break down quicker. That those spaces that are
normally protected in life are now open to an increased
rate of decomposition. It is also open to the external elements,
(20:34):
particularly heat in that environment, and it's also going to
be exposed to any kind of insect activity. And if
it's outdoors and you have animals about that would be
so inclined to go after the dead, you've increased that
factor as well. So Yeah, in answer to your question, yeah,
(20:57):
I believe that it does impact the rate at which
bodies de pose. But these injuries that this you know,
poor man sustained, just so we understand mister Contrera's victor,
there's evidence that not only was he disemboweled, you've got
(21:19):
blood deposition all over the house, which you would expect.
That means that probably something happened in life, unless it's
transferred blood that comes off of perpetrator and they're touching
the wall or touching some other surface. You've also got
what they have identified as stab wounds. So we know
from jump Street that we've got uh if as if
(21:41):
we need any further confirmation, we've got sharp for his
injuries to the body, and he's also got something else
that's kind of interesting here, Dave. They're kind of being
non specific, but I can I can probably guess what
this is. They're talking about a severe head injury or
head injuries. They're not saying cuts, and that takes us
(22:06):
down a completely different road. And oh yeah, by the way,
he's had his throat cut. So you've got this myriad
of injuries that have occurred. One of the problems that
the pathologist is going to be faced with because the
police are going to ask this question. And here it's
the classic question that we always get asked, You know
(22:28):
what sequence did these occur in? So, how did this
come about? At what stage did this come about? And
we've talked about before on body backs. Was it anti mortem,
perry mortem or post mortem? Only an autopsy can actually tell. So,
(23:04):
just so that we can revisit, you've got a father
who in life had contacted her to the other son
and stated that he made mention to his son, who
turns out to be the finder of Victor's body, says,
your brother's acting crazy again. That is that pretty? Is
that an accurate call? Dave?
Speaker 2 (23:24):
As something that goes along with the Hey, your son,
your brother Jamie is acting crazy again. That's what Victor
Senior told Victor Jor And that made me look back
at a few things, Joe, because my first thought was,
if dad is calling the son and saying, hey, he's
acting crazy again, that's a fearful thing to say that
(23:45):
to his son. It's asking for help without asking for help,
it's saying I got a problem I can't deal with here. Well,
I looked it up. Sure enough, police have been called before,
because before this happened, police showed up because Jamie Contreras,
the son, actually took a hammer to his father and
hit his father in the head with a hammer a
(24:05):
couple of times prior to this, and police showed up
for that one. And that's where the call your brother's
acting crazy again came from, because there was the prior attack.
Speaker 1 (24:18):
I believe.
Speaker 2 (24:18):
So when you start looking at this, one of the
things I noticed, Joe is first of all, when Victor
Junior gets there and he smells death, you know, through
a window he's outside when he comes in the house
and he sees what is obviously a body on the
floor and it's covered in a very very bloody sheet,
(24:41):
and he says that when he took the sheet off,
the body was very bloated. Yeah, and which that indicates
a number of things to you. As an investigator that
probably passed by people like me. We just kind of
assume we see a dog on the side of the road,
they bloat. But it's got to mean a whole lot
more when it's a human being inside of a home
(25:02):
as you try to determine, you know, how long he's
been there. But there was there were wounds to his head.
I'm thinking that those were caused probably by a hammer.
I got nothing to go on except that he had
beat him with a hammer of before. And I'm thinking
whenever we've done a story about somebody getting hit with
a hammer, it's in their.
Speaker 1 (25:22):
Head, Yeah it is, and that's you know, that's where
you're going to attack. That's where I think most assailants
would attack someone with a hammer. I mean, you know,
you can take and I've seen I've seen strikes on
the torso before. But you know, you got to keep
in mind that with hammer attacks, just about any kind
of blunt force attack, they're going to be very frenzied.
(25:46):
They're not real well ordered. But the goal is because
if you're wielding a hammer against someone, your ultimate goal
is to kill them, okay, and so with these hammer strikes,
what you're going to see are going to be these
(26:06):
that is, okay, there's a couple of things that we
have to throw in here. If each one of these
hammer strikes, the hammer is oriented in the manner in
which we commonly think of a hammer, where you've got
the business end of the hammer that's driving a nail. Okay,
if it's perfectly oriented like that, then you're going to
(26:28):
get an interesting little laceration sometimes that might have a
curve to it that may or may not marry up
with the blunt edge of a hammer. If the hammer
is textured in any way that surface, like if it's
got kind of a herring bone texture to it, I
don't know if I'm saying that right. Kind of crisscross.
(26:49):
Some of them will be that will actually imprint itself
on the skin as an overlying abrasion. Contusions and contusion
or two different things. So you'll have that top layer
of skin that's erupted as a result of an abrasion,
think about skin, the skin, elbow, and then that hemorrhage
(27:11):
that kind of eccentrically goes out from that central strike
point where the little vessels have been erupted and it's
bleeding out those areas are bleeding out in an interstitial tissue.
The question is how many times was he struck and
how what was the level of lethality, Because just because
(27:32):
somebody gets hit in the head with a hammer doesn't
necessarily mean that they're dead or that they're going to die. Now,
I can tell you there's high probability you're gonna do
some serious injury, and so you're not that's not going
to be revealed until you can actually take back the
scalp and you look at the under underlying external table
(27:52):
of skull. And there's some images that I've used in
classes over the years where you know you'll have a
depending upon the size of the hammer, the business end
as I like to refer to it, because I don't
know what the actual name of the end of the
hammer is that's struck with the head of the hammer.
(28:14):
It's they vary in size, and I've seen like quarter size,
like the currency quarter twenty five cents size strikes strike
points and you'll actually say a ring I hate to
say ring fracture because that's a specific fracture that happens
at the base of skull, but it has a circular appearance.
(28:37):
Let's just say that and it drives that bit of
skull if it detaches completely into the dura matter which
covers the brain, and if you hit hard enough, it'll
actually go into the brain. So if you get multiple
of these strikes where you've got that kind of intrusion
into the cranial vault, yeah, there's high probability somebody's going
to die. But Dave, I'm I'm fascinated by the fact
(29:01):
that he's struck multiple times with a hammer. But you
still feel the need not you universal you or I
guess the son suspect you. You still feel the need
to take an edge weapon and cut your father's throat.
That's kind of Is it overkill? Yeah? I mean to me,
(29:22):
it is, But why do you need to go that far?
Speaker 2 (29:26):
Well, Joe, there's something else in this that I wanted
to ask you about, regarding the fact that blood spatter
was throughout the house. Yeah, And in my head, I'm thinking,
you got the front door lock, back door locked. The
only window that's open is the bedroom window, and that's
where the father's body is found in his bedroom. But
blood spatter around the house. All I'm thinking is that
(29:52):
the father is trying to get away from the son
who is allegedly attacking him. I'm thinking there's a hammer involved,
and you're right, he's automny is chasing him. But you've
got blood spatter, which means something's being swung, right. I
mean it's got to be cast off. Is that's what
I think?
Speaker 1 (30:06):
Well, yeah, it can be. It can be cast off.
But again you have to kind of couch your terms
here a little bit. Uh. I lean more to being
conservative with these sorts.
Speaker 2 (30:17):
This is called knowing just enough to be really wrong.
Speaker 1 (30:21):
No, you will, Okay, just imagine I always like to
use the paintbrush description.
Speaker 2 (30:28):
And that's where I'm picturing from the hammer.
Speaker 1 (30:30):
Yeah, and so every time you now, the first strike
that you have with hammer is not going to generate
blood more than likely. So when the head is struck,
you've got a couple of layers you have to go through.
First off, you've got to go through a scalp. Well,
hair and scalp. Okay, do you know hair thickness can
(30:51):
affect this as well. So if you strike a guy
with really thick hair or woman really thick hair as
opposed to a bald person, the hair can actually cushion, Okay,
to a certain degree, and people don't think about that,
but it can. You got that dynamic working. But let's
just say it's sufficient enough to strike down. You hit
(31:12):
that first surface, you've compromised the structural integrity. My contention
has always been that you have to strike again in
order to kind of put blood onto that surface. That
when we talk about cast off, you're drawing the hammer
back over the top of your head like you're flinging
something over your shoulder, and you kind of are and
(31:34):
you'll get this kind of arcing deposition on the walls
and that sort of thing. Also, if he's swinging, if
he's swinging not in the vertical plane but in the
horizontal horizontal plane, say he strikes it down side of
the head and then draws it back sideways so that
you're in the horizontal plane. Then you're throwing blood on
(31:54):
the wall to the side. It's not always going to
be over the head. I think some people think that
all off is over the top of the head, over
the shoulder. It can be, and most of the time
that's what happens. But if somebody these things are very dynamic,
it's not These things don't occur in a vacuum. Okay,
they have to be real careful about the interpretation of
blood deposition and thinking about that. And then if he
(32:19):
has had I don't know, maybe a moment of ubsidity
at some point in time where he looks down his
hands and you know, he's touched the surface father's body
and it's got blood all over it, and then he
proceeds to touch the wall, then that's that's transfer blood
(32:41):
that you have. So if the instrument that you're utilizing
has got blood on it, that blood is going to
drip down off of the head of the hammer, down
onto the handle of the hammer, you know, transfer onto
your hands. And so you know, if he touched the
wall with that, if he's got blood on his clothing
(33:02):
and he bumps into the wall, that's going to transfer over.
So it's really important to try to categorize this blood
deposition that you're talking about.
Speaker 2 (33:12):
Okay, let me ask you this, Joe, because we talked
about the neck being sliced his neck. Yeah, ye, all right,
And I hate to reference everything to a television show or.
Speaker 1 (33:22):
A movie, but oh no, that's okay.
Speaker 2 (33:24):
In the TV show Breaking Bad, the Chicken Guy, he
actually there's a scene in it where he actually cuts
the neck uses the box cutter to slice the neck
open of one of Victor. Actually the guy's name is Victor,
and I think and when he does that, he holds
him and blood squirts out of his neck. Okay, it's
(33:45):
the blood is squirting. Is that going to happen when
you slice someone's neck or does it have to be
sliced in a perfect way or is that just a
movie TV thing?
Speaker 1 (33:55):
No, it's not just simply a movie TV thing, because
what they're demonstrating there is it's kind of arterial spray.
They refer to it as and the pressure that's built up.
The question is are I think that because arterial arterial
(34:15):
deposition of blood has got a very distinct appearance to it.
It's not high velocity blood deposition like you see with
someone is shot, because the blood becomes almost a histamine.
Like I tell my students, if you want to know
what high velocity blood deposition looks like, go go home,
(34:38):
get an airsolt can of hair spray, and just pump
at one time onto your mirror and you'll see kind
of what that looks like. It's very particulate and tiny
with arterial deposition, particularly if the throat is cut and
you've gotten down into a carrotid. You know, most of
the time veins ooze and artery spray, So if you're
(35:03):
into arterial spray in turn, in this case, if you're
thinking about akroti that has been sliced, then the heart
is still beating. And what's fascinating I've always been fascinated
by these people that do the blood interpretation is that
as the heart beats and blood is pouring out of
(35:28):
or being ejected out of an artery, they can see
and this is pretty fascinating. They can see with every
contraction of the heart. Then that's fascinating because the blood
itself actually presents in a manner in which you can
(35:51):
see where every single time the heart beats and it
sprays the blood in that direction, boom, boom boom. That's
how they come up with these interpretations, which is absolutely
fascinating to me that they can do this, and you know,
and of course there's all these other things that they do,
you know, where they can track somebody's movement. And I'm
(36:14):
not talking about a perpetrator, though that does exist. I'm
talking about somebody that is initially injured in one part
of the house and they egress through the house where
maybe they're touching a wall. And I've actually seen blood
deposition on a wall day where it starts off at
the highest point and it travels downward diagonally as a
(36:38):
person is losing their will or their ability to thrive,
goes down the wall all the way down the hallway.
I'll never forget a case that I had like that
until they're dead at the end of the hallway, and
you can actually kind of map that by these blood
depositions on the wall. And it can come in any
number of forms. You've got this pass of dripping that
(37:00):
happens that you know, you know famously, We've talked about
this with Ellen Greenberg with a blood flowing out of
her mouth where gravity is pulling it down. So you
get one large droplet of blood and you'll see gravity
begin to pull pull that blood downward, Okay, and then
(37:21):
or you can have smear which might be a transfer. Okay.
So there's any number of depositions that are out there
relative to the blood that are going to tell you
a lot about what happened. I'm interested in the end
of life for Victor because he's found somebody took the
time to put a sheet over him. But there's a
(37:47):
lot of activity that took place before that sheet ever
got on the body.
Speaker 2 (37:50):
Dave there is and Joe. You know, as I'm doing
a little research on this and found out about the
hammer attack and how the father was concerned enough about
previous activities by the suspect here his son, Jamie. One
thing that had come out is that apparently Jamie had
(38:13):
killed Victor's pets, his father's pets. Now they made it
plural in reporting, but didn't exactly tell us whether it
was cats, dogs, rabbits, birds, I don't know what it was,
but he was killing them. And as we look at
a man who would say that the reason, you know,
when police did catch up with Jamie Contreras, he told
(38:33):
them they said, hey, where's your dad, And he said,
he's in heaven and he explained how the aliens had
taken over him and they took his.
Speaker 1 (38:44):
Bowels or what have you.
Speaker 2 (38:45):
I mean, whatever crazy explanation the guy came up with,
but he had this. The same guy, Jamie Contreras, had
walked through his neighborhood a couple of years ago carrying
a decapitated rabbit. So I guess my thing here, Joe,
(39:05):
is when you've got a guy who's thirty nine years
old and two years ago you see him walking through
the neighborhood carrying a decapitated rabbit, how is he still
walking around outside.
Speaker 1 (39:20):
Of a hospital or jail. I have no idea. I
really don't.
Speaker 2 (39:24):
If I saw that right now, Joe, I'd be on
the phone with you saying, please call somebody. I mean,
I would freak out if somebody was walking I live
in a neighborhood. You've see my neighborhood. If I saw
somebody walking down the hill in front of my house
carrying a bunny rabbit and the head was chopped off
and they were walking like, no big deal, I'm freaking out.
Speaker 1 (39:42):
Yeah, we've got a problem at that point, Tom, And
answer to your question. You know, we could talk for
days about, you know, mental health in our country and
the way the mentally ill or dealt with And you know,
we don't know a lot about his background relative to
what kind of psychopathology you know he may have have had.
(40:03):
But if he just on the surface and played junior
psychiatrists here for a second, just on the surface, if
you believe that you've had communications with extra terrestrials. You know,
this sounds like he's in a delusional state. You know,
I don't know, maybe he's got schizophrenia or something like that.
I've actually worked a case and I mentioned this before,
(40:26):
with a young man that took his own life and
he didn't intend to, but he he did. And that's
because he thought Cia had put a microphone in his
forearm and he cut his arm open. I think we
over thirty times. He cut his arm. Yeah, no, and
he lived with his parents and he was looking for
(40:47):
the microphone that was in his forearm. Okay, so I
don't you know, I'm not saying that I'm not saying
that he should not be held responsible for what he
has done to his father. He bloody well should. But
the problem is, you don't know what his perception of
reality is, you know, if he's and again we go
(41:10):
back to this idea of he's killing animals, you know
kind of you know, you kind of got a sign
there that there's real underlying, you know, kind of a
threat of violence that's resting here. And here's another thing
that's kind of interesting. If he has got a history,
he might not just perhaps be killing his dad's animals.
(41:33):
I'd be interested to know if if he has killed
anybody else's animals and if he has whatever the sharp
instrument that he has chosen to use in this case,
was this instrument actually used to kill any animals with?
And this is from a forensic standpoint. This is kind
(41:55):
of fascinating because you know, I think any of us
can walk around and we can say, hey, you know
you look down at a red substance that's you know,
on a knife blade or laid on or that's deposited
on the floor, and you say, hey, that's blood. That's
all find good for you and I to have that
conversation and say yeah, that's blood doesn't work in court
(42:19):
because you have to when you're processing these scenes. There's
a whole series of testing that has to go on.
First off, you have to do a test that says
if this is or is not blood? Okay? You go
from that level too, is this animal or human blood?
And then you get into typing, you know where you
know the old zerology model where you're trying to type
(42:42):
the blood and then that spins off into DNA. But
you have to establish first an instrument might have blood
on it, but wouldn't it be fascinating to learn in
this case, if they tested this knife blade and they
found remnants of not just mister Contrare his blood on there,
but maybe an older sample that's on there that turns
(43:04):
out to be a cat or rabbit, a dog, you
never know if that's the instrumentality that he that he prefers,
because he's obviously got an affinity for sharp weapons, and
you know, we haven't he you know, talked about talked
about the this disembowlment to take place, which, by the way,
(43:26):
we've talked about this with dismemberment. But if you don't
have the tools to facilitate disembowlment, it's not an easy process.
I think people think that it.
Speaker 2 (43:36):
Is not just slicing the belly open and everything comes
gushing out, right.
Speaker 1 (43:39):
Yeah, it's not like I don't know, I can't remember
the Japanese term. It's not Harry Carey, but it's sepuku
or I can't remember the kind of ritualized form. It
doesn't and that's highly ritualized with very sharp instruments, where
there's a specific process that takes place with that with disembowlment,
(44:04):
and you know, if you're going to use a household instrument.
First off, it have to be very sharp, and you'd
have to have certain tolerances built into your own psyche
that would allow you to do that, to hover over
your dad's body and literally split him wide open. And
(44:25):
you know, they didn't just talk about Dave in this case,
that this was a disembowlment case. They mentioned organs as well.
So I wonder what was found in and out of
the body, if anything had been removed, was or all
of the organs accounted for? Had they been taken off somewhere?
I don't know. I don't know. And that's that's what
(44:46):
is kind of fascinating about this case.
Speaker 2 (44:48):
Ma Man, you were actually right about the term spekaepuku
sepp uku. And it also goes with Harry Carey self disembolment. Okay, okay,
I remember that from Tarawa but world War two stuff.
Speaker 1 (45:05):
Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (45:06):
The thing is here, Joe, is when we're dealing with
a case where there's a thought that maybe mental illness
has come come into play, where there is a I
don't want to say every violent act that goes far
to you know, cutting people up and things like that,
isn't crazy, but to a normal to what we consider normal.
(45:29):
I mean, it just seems like way out there. But
can you when you're walking a scene, can you actually
see a difference in the mental state of the person
committing the act. Is there a frenzied, out of control
thing that you can find in the evidence or can
you not separate anger from crazy, pain from fear?
Speaker 1 (45:53):
Now, I know what you're saying. I think that if
somebody is we'll say, how can I term this? If
somebody has psycho pathology going on, okay like that, where
they have voices that are telling them perhaps that your
dad has been, you know, inhabited by extraterrestrial life. If
(46:13):
that's their perception, then it might become more methodical, as
opposed to some person that comes home and finds their
spouse in bed with another person and they pick up
a hammer or a knife and they proceed to kill
both people, and that's going to be a very frenzy
disordered event. And again, you know, you when profilers look
(46:36):
at these sorts of things, I find it fascinating as
well that he's been killing animals and we know what
that's associated with many times as a lead up. You know,
I think that that's something that they would certainly consider
and you know, there can be and don't misconstrue what
I'm saying here, there can be. I think with a
(46:58):
mentally ill there can almost be a ritualized form of this.
And I'm not talking about like a ritualized killing per se.
But if you're listening to an outside voice or what
you perceive to be an outside voice, and they're giving
you instructions, you put this here, you know you I
(47:19):
don't know. You remove this organ and you put it
up on the shelf. You remove this organ, you put
it there. You need to take this organ and put
it in the refrigerator, because that's the key organ. You
have to keep it isolated from everything else. Whatever the
voice is telling them to do, that's what's directing them
at that point in time. Now, if you've got somebody
that does have mental illness and they feel as though
(47:40):
they're being attacked, then yeah, I would imagine it could
leach over into this idea that it's frenzied. But Dave,
he he actually admitted, correct me if I'm wrong that
he was being told something that kind of initiated this
whole thing, or he was making a stay, wasn't He
(48:01):
didn't he say something.
Speaker 2 (48:02):
Yeah, it was his belief that aliens had taken over,
that his father was gone, that his father was no
longer there. The person he was looking at was not
his father, It was an alien some And actually, you
know what I think At this point there have been
a number of different things said and or written about
this case. It's still fairly new. This is an ongoing
(48:23):
issue right now as they try to separate. This began
with haven't heard from my dad in a while? You know,
that typical call where the son comes to check on,
you know, his father, And it turns into this big
bag of what in the heck are we dealing with?
Are we dealing with somebody who really has checked out
(48:43):
from life mentally and is seeing things and hearing things.
Does he truly believe that aliens have disemboweled his father
and taken over his body. I mean, I don't know
what's going on in the guy's psyche or anything else,
but I do know this, Joe, if you were going
to walk in on that crime scene, which it is
a crime scene, regardless of whether the guy in control
(49:06):
of himself, but you're going to have to just you're
not going to hear the stories. You're not going to
the story of aliens and that it doesn't impact you
until after the fact. And we'll be writing a book
because you're going to look at this and tell me
what happened based on the evidence.
Speaker 1 (49:22):
Yeah, and it will be and and those in the
morgue as well, you know when and look, I'd be
lying if I said that. You know, pathologists are not
filled in on what they've what the police have heard
out on the scene. They're going to know that, okay, uh,
you know at this point, you know, when he rolls
in to the more decomposed by the way, they're only
(49:48):
going to have the snatches and hints at things like,
for instance, if this guy has been walking around the
neighborhood with decapitated animal bodies, he first off, he's going
to be known to the local beat unit if they've
been called out on domestics there. That information would actually
come to the cops at the scene, because what the
(50:10):
cops are going to do and are the detectives who
are cops, but you have detectives at the scene, they
will ask the shift supervisor okay, which might be a
lieutenant or a sergeant, and say, hey, have you guys
had contact at this house before, and the sergeant, particularly
(50:31):
in a case like I can only imagine a case
like this, the sergeant is gonna say, what we felt
like we need to sit up outside the house out
here because we were always getting called here. Have you
ever had contact with any people in the house. Yeah,
we've talked to the old man because he told us
that he was afraid of his son, or we have
taken the son aside and said, look, you gotta cool
(50:51):
it out, man, you know you can't behave this way,
or maybe they've taken the kid in for observation. Again
dollars to know, nuts, bet you this kid has gone
in probably in the back of a police car an
ambulance and taken in for observation at some point in time.
That most of the time this kind of thing just
doesn't just materialize out of nothing. You know, you're going
(51:14):
to have history, and in this case where you've got
a young man who has reportedly been saying, as he
is related to the police, that he wanted the aliens
to give me my power as he struck his dad down.
(51:39):
We're going to keep our eye on this case and
know that more will probably develop. We'll find out what
happens here to the sun. Has he been taken in
for an evaluation? Is he going to be placed into
an area where he can perhaps get help, get medicated,
get him in a position where maybe he can stand
(52:02):
trial at some point in time, Because this is a
horrific homicide and somebody has to be held responsible. But
we do know this, This man, who obviously loves his
children has died at the hand of his own son
and was left to decompose in the home where he
(52:25):
welcomed them on a regular basis. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan,
and this is Bodybacks
Host
Joseph Scott Morgan
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