August 20, 2025 • 46 mins
Forensic Odontology is much more than just "bite mark" evidence. It is an incredible science that helps identify people and provide answers to families. That said, most people hear Forensic Odontology think "Bite Mark". "Bite Mark" evidence has been used in many criminal cases over several decades, until science started showing it might not be as conclusive as once thought. Joseph Scott Morgan and Dave Mack talk about Ted Bundy leaving a bite mark on Lisa Levy's buttocks that later served to help convict and sentence him to death as well as other crimes solved and people sentenced to death using "bite mark" evidence that turned out to be something other than a bite mark.
Transcribe Highlights
00:03.55 Introduction
00:50.52 Forensic Odontologist
04:31.54 Wear pattern of teeth
09:01.90 Did Kohberger study forensic odontology
14:02.90 Teeth biting sadists
20:09.39 Identifying people in a plane crash 1982
24:52.28 using saw to pop the roof of the mouth and remove teeth
30:11.52 Biting an apple
34:23.79 Girl stolen from home while mom folds clothes
39:13.61 Bite marks as a science
44:24.65 Bite mark out of a hickey
46:17.22 Conclusion
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Quality dymists. But Joseph's gotten more other than forensic pathologists.
The very first people that I came in contact with
and got to know really well in the world of
forensic scientists or actually forensic odentologist. I actually met forensic
(00:22):
odentologist before I ever met my first forensic anthropologist. And
I've always viewed myself as one of these people that
is a frustrated forensic anthropologist, because it's something I would
have loved to have done but never had the time,
you know, to go down that career path. I just
(00:44):
like digging in the dirt and those sorts of things,
and you know, working puzzles from that perspective. But forensic
identologists were interesting people, and I had a couple of
them that were a big influence in my career because
it gave me a perspective on forensic science in general
(01:07):
and specifically death investigation from a different side of the house.
You know, you always hear it from the physician side
in death investigation, but forensic codeontologists have a different view.
And today on bodybacks, I was really hoping that we
could explore this world and talk a little bit about
(01:30):
form function and maybe some famous and also infamous forensic
codeontologists that are out there. It's gonna be a good conversation.
I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is bodybacks. Have you
ever heard a more odd word than odentology, Dave. I mean,
(01:54):
when you first hear that, you think, first off, what
is it? And and you know, where does it come from?
Where does it originate? Because some people out there will
use interchangeably. They will say forensic odentology and forensic dentistry,
and I think dentistry actually predates the word odentology. Odentology
(02:19):
is an English word that first popped up in like
the early eighteen hundreds. Do you know what the big
difference is, no idea. Dentistry is kind of the treatment
of teeth examination that you know, measuring health and doing
extractions and fillings and all of the stuff that dental
(02:42):
folks do. Odentology, interestingly enough, deals more towards the function
of the teeth, how they work. You know how they work,
and most people don't don't think about most people don't
even think about chewing because it's one of these things
that you've done it your entire life. You don't think
(03:05):
about what's involved in it as a matter of fact,
let me try an experiment real quick. Everybody that's listening
to me, you, including Dave. I want you to take
the tip of your tongue and run it across the
surface of your teeth, both upper and lower and just
by using the tip of your tongue, can you tell
(03:26):
me what is your dependent side of your mouth that
you chew on? Yeah?
Speaker 2 (03:38):
Can you?
Speaker 1 (03:39):
Uh huh oh yeah, okay.
Speaker 2 (03:42):
Freak show. But yeah, I mean I paid a lot
of money for these teeth. Yeah, I know exactly where
I chew.
Speaker 1 (03:47):
Where do you chew? What's the right side?
Speaker 2 (03:49):
Right?
Speaker 1 (03:50):
Yeah? Me too? And so and if you notice if
you notice teeth when you look at them, I mean
probably most famously people when they see teeth and they
think things like bite marks. We think about our canines.
My kids used to call them their vampire teeth. You know,
there's two pointy they have a single cusp that kind
of sticks down well for humans with these teeth, they
(04:17):
do serve a each tooth. Each tooth grouping serves a
specific form and function. So you're learning, like if you
can tell what side of your where pattern is, that's
going to be specific to maybe a life lived there's
evidence if you eat to unrefined grains, your teeth will
(04:41):
be worn down in a particular manner. There's a manifestation
that comes about in Native Americans and Asian populations. It's
called dental shoveling, which the backside of the teeth literally
kind of shovel out because they're eating things like unrefined rice, corn,
those sorts of things, and so it grinds it teeth
down over a period of time. You can also get
(05:02):
a you know, you can look at teeth until you know,
see people that maybe have not had fluorinated water. You know,
all these things that are out there that so much
you can learn about the teeth. You can check trauma
with teeth. You know, how many teeth have you had
chipped over the course of your life and have not
been repaired? How many teeth? And my wife hates me, Well,
(05:24):
she doesn't hate me, she cannot stand the fact that
my first off, my teeth are very crooked. People always say,
why don't you smile on your photographs? Well, my left
upper lateral incisor is recessed back in my mouth and
it actually looks like I got a hole in my teeth,
and I don't. I never got braces. And so my wife, however,
(05:51):
is always tending to her teeth and she's got very
soft teeth and that's unique to her, and they wear
that sort of thing. They've literally people hate me for this.
I've literally never had a cavity in my life.
Speaker 2 (06:03):
Wow, good for you.
Speaker 1 (06:05):
Never And I don't know what that's like. I've had
tooth pain. However, Kim my wife, she's had crowned, she's
had feelings, you know, and she flasses religiously, brushes several times,
and she'll look at me and say, so, what did
the dentists say, I don't have any cavities?
Speaker 2 (06:24):
Chew more ice.
Speaker 1 (06:26):
Yeah, a lot of stuff could be extrapolated from that,
by the way, but we're not gonna get road.
Speaker 2 (06:32):
As soon as I saw, you know, forensic odentology, that's
what we're going to talk about. I thought Ted Bundy
and the Kyomega attack where they used his the impression
of his bite mark Uh at trial, and I wondered,
(06:52):
out loud, how exacting is that science? Because I've heard toothing.
I've heard, oh, yeah, everybody has a unique bite. Actually
that's not true, right.
Speaker 1 (07:02):
No, it's not. And well, let me tell you why
it is kind of unique. First off, the Bundy trial
is probably the most famous out of all of bike
mark cases. There's that image that's out there of this
poor young woman that was bitten on her buttock, and
you can see that, and I think that that was
put forward in that trial specifically, and they did a
good job of explaining it. And remember they had to
(07:25):
force him to give a dental impression where.
Speaker 2 (07:29):
He gets something to try to mess with his teeth too.
I'm trying to be I was.
Speaker 1 (07:32):
I don't remember what it was, because he's one of
those people that people talk about so much that I'm
bad in my life to do the opposit. I go
the opposite of the crowd most of the time, and
so I have I've not studied Bundy as much as
a lot of people, or should I say, I know
people that all they want to talk about is Bundy,
(07:53):
and you know, there's been so many cases since him,
but yeah, I mean, he's kind of a touchstone for
a lot of reasons and forensics, but bite mark in particular.
Speaker 2 (08:03):
And here's you know what's really odd, though, Joe, with Bundy,
you had so many Okay, the Kyomega where we had
the bite mark thing. But in his other killings, whether
it was in Utah or Washington, Oregon, there were different
things at each one of them. He did different things
(08:24):
along the way to people. I mean, he did different killings,
and it's like that to me. I don't want to
say it's fascinating because the guy is the most evil person.
I think that every walks at the pace of the earth,
or at least up in the top five. But you know,
it's like each one of his different groupings of cases
brings about a whole new set or a different set
of ideas to talk about of a killer. But you know,
(08:48):
like you're talking about, you don't follow along with that.
You know. The one thing that with the you and
I both have done so much on Coburger, I was
kind of hit with Coburger and Bundy, you know, the
early late night, early morning attack in a house in
a confined area where there are living you know, people
that actually saw you know, and and so those comparisons,
(09:10):
and I wondered, based on Coberger's background, did he study this?
Did did he study forensic odontology?
Speaker 1 (09:18):
He would have he I can't say what he studied.
Lord only knows, you know. Yeah, Oh my god, don't
bring that up again, please, I swear I got to
tell you the further down the road that we go
with the scene looking at him, I'm more inclined to
Danny Rowling, you know, the the Gainsville Ripper because and
(09:42):
I think a lot of that had to do with
the kpar knife and how it was utilized, and that
it was a college campus and it was off campus
housing and that was It's just that you didn't have
a one night event where you had people kluster and
he had multiple people Danny Danny Rowling in very spots
and I had kind of a weird kind of involvement.
(10:04):
Was rolling in one sense that he's from Louisiana. We
had a series of serial killings that were going on
in South Louisiana and I was on a task force
and he had, if I remember correctly, he had perpetrated
something up in North Louisiana. It seems like it was Freeport.
(10:25):
I can't remember. And the task force was asked to
look at, if any when the ripper thing happened in Gainesville.
Back then, we were asked, are there any of these
cases that you're currently working that kind of pair up
with what happened in Gainsvielle, because I think Gainsville was
eighty nine if I'm not mistaken, and we couldn't find
(10:45):
I mean just the fact that, well, let's let's face it,
you know, he used a knife to dismember at least
one person that I remember off the top of my head.
We didn't have that in that series. But now with Bundy,
Bundy is he's a straight up sadist and he actually
(11:08):
he actually had a what's called a sexual uh paraphilia,
which is a dex alexia. I think it's let me
check the pronounce the pronunciation again. I think that's uh.
Speaker 2 (11:25):
And while you get those who are listening and you
mentioned Danny Rolling in the Gainesville Ripper, I encourage you, friends,
if you've been following Coburger, go look into Danny Rolling.
That's where the k bar knife came into play, and
a few other things that are very reminiscent of the
two cases. Plus we found out recently in the last
week that Coburger actually had downloaded a PDF about Danny
(11:49):
Rolling to his phone.
Speaker 1 (11:52):
And there are similarities I think between and everybody will say, well,
Bundy was really small Danny Roland was no idiot. I mean,
I guess it all depends on how you define idiot.
But but he he had a there was a certain
template with him. And I'm still not convinced that that
(12:15):
Danny Rowland hadn't been at what he was doing for longer.
You know, some people think, but seems odd that.
Speaker 2 (12:22):
We have a killer that all of a sudden strikes
yeah and and does such horror.
Speaker 1 (12:29):
And that's a similarity. That's more similar to Rolling than Bundy.
Bundy when he showed up at uh FSU in Tallahassee
with Coyo House, he was at the end at that point,
he was on the run. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Rolling. It
was seemed just like Coburger burst on the scene in
(12:51):
a dramatic way, which is, you know, quite fascinating to consider.
I've thought about several people along the way, and wow,
I'm really chasing rabbits here. But you know, I've considered everybody,
including including Ted Kazinski, the unibomber uh And a lot
(13:12):
of that is based on those images that he took
of himself with the hoodie, because he looked except for
the sunglasses, he actually looked like that composite and of course, uh,
of course, you know Ted Kazinsky was brilliant PhD in mathematics,
and this guy esteemed to be brilliant, right, and also
have a PhD. So I don't know. But when it
(13:35):
comes down to biting people like Bundy did, there is
a satos actually a sadistic practice of a sexual paraphilia
that's associated with this type of behavior that's actually called
a dexelegnia. And I know they've got a name for
(13:59):
everything at the bottom. I know, there's no basement in
the house of the private so in this practice, and
it's very as you can imagine, it's very intimate. Now,
there are some people that are you know, good luck
with all that. There are a lot of people that
are into biting one another. Okay, like and you know,
(14:21):
kind of teasing that sort of thing. We're not going
to go down that road right now. This is not
that kind of show. But there is a group of
these people that are sadists that actually bite, and I
mean bite hard because they are directly involved in inflicting
(14:41):
pain on another individual, tortures pain. If anybody's ever been
bitten by like a dog, and you can imagine that
dog not letting go of you. And I'm sure that
many of you that are hearing this right now have
been have been attacked, at least in a limited sense
by dog. There's nothing quite as painful, particularly if you
(15:01):
can't get a dog off of you. Well, imagine a
human doing this and he's got you pinned down, he's
twice your size and he's biting down on you. Well,
it's through this that we see kind of the early
genesis of forensic idontology in the practice. And the I
think the reason it got so much, it was so
(15:24):
validated back during its day is it exploded with Ted
Bundy because it was this new fascinating thing that they
had and it's like, guys, we caught him, you know,
that kind of thing. You know, We've got him, you know,
and they tied it back through the teeth, you know.
(15:45):
And now it's quite quite interesting now bide Mark's not
recognized in the vast majority of courts anymore. It's considered,
it's kind of been invalidated. It's some people. It's not
me using the term. Actually Obama's best practices in forensic
(16:07):
science studies. I think that was back from twelve I
think actually referred to it as a pseudoscience, and which
is And listen, I've you know, some of the people
that I've come in contact with that are forensic codeontologists.
I hold in very high esteem Ronnie Carr in particular,
as a guy that took me under his wing when
(16:29):
I was a young investigator, actually allowed me to come
to the dental school and audit a dental class that
he was teaching as an elective in forensic codeontology. But
odentology is just not about bitemarks. The other utility that
they have, and probably that's more practical, are doing postmortem
dental examinations, which are fascinating in and of themselves, because
(16:54):
as we know skin, skin can be damaged, it can
be burned, it can rot, it can fade away. Bones
can be snapped in half and hauled away. But teeth,
we've still got teeth that were found in the heads
of mummies three thousand years ago. They last a long
(17:18):
long time. Consider your teeth, just for a moment again,
I've already asked you to try to determine what side
of your mouth you chew on the most, and everything
(17:42):
that happens with your teeth is unique to you. All right,
Mommy and Daddy could have paid for braces, but still
those teeth will be unique to you. The fascinating thing
about teeth and what makes them have a utility for
human identification, particularly not so much bite mark, because we'll
(18:03):
get into that in a second, but just the basic
utility of teeth as a means to identify people. Think
about think about it like this. Every tooth has at
least five visible surfaces, well partially visible. If you think
about the top. Okay, you think about the outer side
(18:23):
that you can see, the inner side that you can
see if you look in the mirror, and then you've
got two other sides that are up against adjoining teeth,
all right, community not really communicating, but they're sitting there,
all right. So all of those planes for every tooth
that you have that has these sides, for every way
that it rotates, like it can rotate two degrees, three degrees,
(18:46):
four degrees, and dentist considering this while they're examining your teeth,
that makes that individual tooth unique to you. You take
that and multiply that by thirty two teeth, and that
makes you very unique. It still makes you unique if
you're missing your wisdom teeth, because that means you're in
the population that doesn't have wisdom teeth. So if I'm
(19:09):
trying to get a body identified, if you're missing your
wisdom teeth and we know that they were probably extracted
as opposed to falling out as a result of decomposition,
you're into a separate pile and getting bodies identified, which
teeth was were the main way that we did that
on really complex cases for years and years. Now you
(19:31):
have DNA and teeth still play a part in DNA,
but you would do these examinations on teeth and they
would always kind of point the way. Of course, you
would have to have a suspected list of people that
a suspected list of people that you could get their
(19:52):
anti mortem dental records and compared to. Let me tell
you about a nightmare case that in my old office
that occurred in nineteen eighty two. Anybody feel free to
look this up in Kenner, Louisiana. I think it was
in nineteen eighty two. There was a pan Am crash
and when the crash took place, the plane took off
going from with Lake ponta train at the rear of
(20:16):
the plane, so you're traveling from it's going from north
to south, so north south runway. Thing takes off and Dave,
it doesn't get probably any higher than maybe six seven
hundred feet off the ground, and it knows dives. It
knows dives were a full I mean they were heading
(20:38):
to Vegas nose dives. It goes across the highway and
into a neighborhood and just obliterates the neighborhood and anybody
that was there. It's like at four o'clock in the afternoon.
I've got colleagues that showed up, Dave, and they saw
things like one of the most shocking things they saw
while they were there was actually a woman's torso cut
(21:02):
in half and was hanging from a live oak tree
by her pantyhose, and the top half of her was
completely gone. There was cash laying everywhere all over the place,
and just to show you how scummy some human beings
can be. Before the police arrived on scene, there were
(21:24):
allegedly allegedly civilians that had walked in there and they
were picking up cash. The reason there was cash is
this is before the days of going to a slot
machine in Vegas and taking a digital card and sticking
it in. You had to show up with cash and
handbag and you could. I still remember the sound of
the coins falling, you know, when they would follow somebody
(21:47):
who had a jackpot. So people would literally travel with
huge amounts of cash. I'm getting to the point. I'm
going to tell you why this is so complex. When
they crashed into the ground, you had bodies that were burning,
you had homes that were burning. There were people that
were just living their life on the ground that had died.
There was one child I remember the old investigators talking
(22:11):
about that was in her sandbox and the sand she
like incinerated right there. There were plastic toys that had
melted and they were like in a multicolored blob and Dave,
part of the sand had turned to glass. That's how
hot it got. Now I can't validate that personally. That's
word of mouth that came to me and that you
(22:33):
can still drive through there even to this day in
that part of Kenner loose in it and you can
still see where the plane. There's new homes there, but
you can see what's newer and what's older, and it's
this horrific event. So back to why it was so difficult.
A goodly number of these people that were on the plane,
they had a lot of Indian nationals that were from
(22:56):
India and they were trying to Yet back then, they
were trying to get dental records. You realize how hard
it is to get dental records from India. I mean,
it's a bloody nightmare. So you have people that are
there that have very specific dental presentations and you don't
(23:20):
have anything to compare it to. Now solid as the
science is with the alignment of teeth and restorations and
malaclusions and all these things that Dennis talk about, it
would have been great, but it's very difficult to get
those and they actually had a number of leftover remains
that they never could actually get positively identified. I think
(23:43):
there's a level that you and I have never really
discussed about identification. It's called presumptive identification, and it's like
you have all the information, but you don't have enough
to say scientifically that absolutely this is it. It's a
presumptive idea and you go ahead and go without it.
I've never been a big fan of that, but some
of these were presumptive ideas. The forensic identologists, though, can
(24:07):
come into an environment, and they come into all kinds
of austere environments. There were a ton of forensic odontologists
on the ground at nine to eleven. They travel all
over the world to work plane crashes. And we're not
talking about bike marks here, Dave. We're talking about actual
dental examinations. I've assisted many of these over the years,
(24:28):
and to give you an idea how this works in
the morgue, Generally, the dentally identification of an individual is
done our examination. Rather, identification comes later after the examination.
It comes after the autopsy. Okay, So you do the
autopsy first and then the forensic odentologist comes in. And
(24:50):
what we will do for that odentologist is we literally
cut the jaws out of the body. So you go
up here to the primary joint with the jaw like
TMJ you cut through it. You cut out all the
soft tissue and remove the jaw. Then you have to
go into the maxilla, which is where your upper teeth,
(25:12):
your maxillary teeth are located. And you know, as you
go up from inside of the maxilla, you start to
get into sinuses, you know, so you cut you reflect
the lips all the way up do dissection. You take
the striker saw, the same one that you open the
skull with, and all the way back to the very
back tooth to that area. You're going to cut this
(25:37):
kind of arcing linear incision with the striker saw and
literally pop the roof of the mouth out with the
teeth intact. You say, wow, it's incredibly gruesome, Morgan, thank
you for giving me that image. Well, let me explain
to you why we do it that way. If you've
ever seen like a the best way I can explain it,
if you've ever seen like a mechanical engineering dr where
(26:00):
they have like what they call an exploded view of
all the little nuts and bolts and everything that you
couldn't see, like if it was all self contained, Like
if you're putting together a boiler. It's got all kinds
of you know, internal guts, mechanisms and everything. You can't
really see that you don't understand it, so they do
what's called an exploded view. Well, same kind of principle
(26:21):
exists with friends of codentology and examination post warning examination.
If you can take those jaws, the jaw itself and
lay it down on the table, and take the maxilla
and lay it out so that the teeth are upward,
the bases of the teeth are up or the business
surface of the teeth are up then as they're sitting there,
(26:46):
you can go over them. I mean, think about every
time you've sat in a dental chair and you got
this guy. He's got a light on top of his head.
He's got these fine tools that really really hurt many times.
And what what's the one directive they're always telling you
when you're sitting in a chair, open wider, open wider,
(27:07):
open wider. The hygienis will say that are hey, could
you turn your head this way and open a little
bit wider, and they're trying to get access. Well, these
individuals are deceased, and so you don't have to ask
for access. As a matter of fact, you're not encumbered
by the lack of light. That's one of the tough
things about I think about people that practice dentistry is
(27:30):
the lack of light that they have to illuminate this
very tight space they're having to work in. So we
can actually take those jaws and do X rays. I've
here's two interesting things that people might not know. I've
actually gotten bodies identified through sinus patterns on skulls where
(27:52):
we're examining the teeth. We do an X ray of
the face, and you can see all of the sinuses, okay,
and they kind of even dip down into the maxillary area.
And we'll compare a post mortem X ray with an
anti mortem X ray and it's a teeth or like
missing or whatever. We'll actually use sinuses to get those.
(28:15):
To get those identified, you can rotate the head and
any number of ways, or you know, you can rotate
the jaws in any number of ways to capture capture
a post mortem X ray so that you can manipulate it,
you can better observe, Like if there's fillings, you know,
look just because okay, Dave, Let's say that you and
(28:36):
I both had a filling, okay, and it's the same tooth,
all right. Let's say it's our second molar all right
bottom right side. We've both got a cavitated area in there.
You and I are going to go get a filling
for this thing. Well, after they put the filling in,
they take our X rays, okay, post filling, and you
(28:58):
look at it, did you you know did you know
that if they put those side by side, even though
we've had the same tooth filled. And this might seem
rather obvious, but just don't want people understand. Put them
side by. Our feelings are not going to look the same, Okay,
because the cavity doesn't look the same. Just because your
tooth cavitates in a particular way doesn't mean that mine will.
(29:19):
So even the outline of that can be used as
a point of identification. So I think, from the perspective
of using teeth as an identifier with the dead, it
has a lot of utility. I don't think that we
will ever leave that behind. The other side to this
is going to be this area that forensic dentistry got
(29:42):
off into, which is bite mark assessment. And keep in mind,
not every forensic dentist practiced forensic bite mark assessment because
they knew scientifically that you can't and I use this
term a lot, you can't quantify it. Understand this, and
(30:02):
just think about this the next time you bite into
an apple. All right, if you eat your apples with
the skin on, This only applies to the skin on people.
So you bite an apple and you bite into it
depended upon how you're holding the apple in your hand,
depended upon if you're laying on your back, you're sitting up,
maybe you're leaned over a table. It's going to adjust
(30:26):
how your teeth are going to strike that surface if
you rotate it just the slightest a bit. Now, take
that same image in your mind and apply it to
a human being that's wiggling beneath you as you're choking
life out of them, as you're beating them to death.
They're resistant to this sadistic pain that's being inflicted upon them.
(30:49):
So as they adjust, and we know that skin is
very malleable. It moves in all kinds of directions. Some
people's skin is loaded with collagen and it snaps back
really quick. The older you are, the more wrinkly you get,
the less collagen you get, skin is not going to
be as reactive. You bite into this person and they
(31:10):
twist in a particular way, Well, guess what the static
teeth that an individual has in their mouths Suddenly that
impression is blown all to helen back because the movement
of the victim, and also you don't know what position
the perpetrator was in when they bit down on an individual,
and all the teeth are not always going to be
(31:30):
included in this so it's a That's one of the
reasons that like when you go to court with any
kind of evidence, it doesn't matter what it is. When
you go to court with any kind of evidence, you
have to be able to scientifically verify that and validate
it and try to understand what form and function and
(31:53):
can you sit on a stand and explain to a
jury why this is this way? Because we know this,
we know this. There have been forensic idontologists out there
that's simply based upon their testimony. They have literally put
people on death row. Dave the gray or my hair
(32:30):
gets more forgetful, I would come. You look back over
your shoulder and tom or as some people say, in
the rear view mirror, and those fine details that you
once held on to. It's really hard many times to
kind of recapture those. But there are certain events that
stand out over the course of your career. The average
mundane day to day is it's whatever. But there are
(32:53):
certain things that you know to kind of draw you
back to the past. And there's one case in particular
that I kind of wanted to put out there that
I don't know. I thought that our friends might might
find it interesting. I certainly do still to this day.
I got called out to a case on what's referred
(33:14):
to as the West Bank in New Orleans, in Jefferson Parish,
and it was involving a young girl and it seems
like she was either seven seven or nine, seven eight
or nine, and it was her living in an apartment.
And it was a second story apartment that had you
(33:35):
know that I know you've probably lived in one. I've
lived in one where the walkway for the entire apartment
goes right outside your window. You know, It's like it's
got like a cast iron rail right there, and you know,
you enter in off the walkway and you can stand
outside and look over the you know, look over the
parking lot is essentially it's not the most private thing,
you know. But this little girl was living with her mama,
(33:59):
and it was about it's probably about nine o'clock at night.
It was in summertime, and she had already put on
her nightgown and she was wearing a nightgown and my
little pony underwear. I'll never forget that as long as
I live. And the air was out and this is
(34:19):
in New Orleans, all right, So you've got the window
open adjacent to the walkway. The kitchen windows open so
you can get cross ventilation, and Mama's in the back
room fold and clothes because mama has to go downstairs
to the laundry room. You know, you have these in
all the you know apartment complexes where you got to
(34:40):
drop quarters in, sit there with your laundry, little girls
watching some television program Mama enters the room and programs on.
Little girl's gone doors locked from the inside, and didn't
know where she she went. There was a big manh
(35:01):
hunt that it ensued, and when she was found by
a group of men that were had kind of all
gathered in on this hunt, she was right on the
edge of a little forested area just out back of
this apartment that her mama rented. And to say that
(35:28):
she was unrecognizable is inaccurate. I never beheld anything like this.
And are you familiar, Dave, with Asex tennis shoes. You
ever heard that name before? Ax, Well, that's the first
time I'd ever heard of Asex. The reason it's significant
(35:49):
is because the person that killed her stomped her to
death with a pair of Asex and the patterns that
appeared on her on her face her neck, her shoulders,
and even on her chest were consistent with a particular
(36:09):
style of this make of shoe. Well, as it turns out,
he was finally caught and it was actually the caretaker
for h for this apartment complex. It's one of the
few times, Dave, where I have seen a group of
cops so furious that they they had murder in their eyes.
(36:29):
And it was actually kind of a scary place to
be in because people have been searching for this girl,
holding out hope that they were going to find her,
and this all happened, and like just the twinkling of
an eye. I mean, the whole process happened really quick.
You know, it wasn't like you know these cases we
hear today, We've got a missing child alert out and
they go for days, and it wasn't like that. This
(36:51):
whole thing turned around in like I don't know, it's
like five hours, and you had people really pumped up
about this, you know, they were they wanted to find
the scirrel. Wanted to find squirrel. You got that.
Speaker 2 (37:01):
It's in the first hours. You've got a chance to
get her alive, you know, you do. You could have
just run off and she's missed I mean that's you're right.
Everybody's totally pumped the first few.
Speaker 1 (37:10):
Hours they are, and I had I saw senior police
officers talking down junior police officers because they everybody wanted peace.
The guy survived, but I got to tell you it
was the whole thing was just surreal. We say, more
than does this have to do with forensic codeontology? Well,
(37:31):
I'm glad you asked that question, because I'm about to
get to it. It was that same night that I
happened to meet an individual named Michael West. I'd never
seen him in person, never shaking hands with him. However,
one of my colleagues back then, actually guy that was
my mentor, said you got to meet this guy. He's
(37:53):
amazing because he's a forensic odentologist and he works with
alternative lighting. And when I say alternative lighting, I'm talking
about using things like UV infra red, this sort of
thing in order to take photographs where certain details under
(38:14):
those conditions will be enhanced that you could not otherwise
see with regular photography or the naked eye. Well, he
drove down from Hattiesburg, Mississippi, and man, he had all
these whiz bangs with him. I mean he had everything lights,
you know, the whole nine yards talks real fast. He's
big fella, comes into our morgue and it's my case.
(38:38):
So I volunteered, and I had to call the forendsic
pathologists like is this okay if I do this? And
his renown had spread by that time. It was way
outside of the area, you know, the New Orleans area
in Mississippi. He was appearing and talking places. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
let's go ahead and use it. Well, Dave, I didn't.
I didn't know anything about, you know, alternative lighting when
(38:59):
it comes to documenting injuries on bodies. And I remember
sitting there and watching him go through this exercise of
snapping the various photographs, having me move the body so
that he could get these, and it was almost like
being at a magic show where the guy that's got
(39:21):
the cards and he's saying, look here, you know, like this,
look here, watch this, and all the while something else
is going on, and he kept telling me, almost as
if I'm there to validate what he's seeing. Don't you
see this BikeE mark right here? I guess I don't.
This is outside my realm of expertise. I don't know
(39:44):
if that's a bite mark, because what I had seen
was this specific waffle pattern that had abraided this precious
young girl's face and shoulders and her abdomen all over
the place. And he's out of all of that, he's
finding BikeE marks as well. And granted, the alternative light
(40:07):
pictures that he took were incredible. You know when you
see them, there wasn't no more a bike mark on
that young girl's body than a man in the moon.
And you know, and that's one of the things that
happened with bike mark. It wasn't just West, it was
others like him. But you know, they had so many
(40:28):
of these cases, Dave in and there's two in particular
that really really caught my attention. There were these two
African American gentlemen that had both been accused in the
same area of raping little girls and biting them and
tossing their bodies in a creek. And they this is
(40:51):
before DNA, they didn't have it. One guy was sent
to serve a life term in prison, the other guy
was sent to death row. And as it turned out,
it was a close both yeah, both, No, No, it wasn't.
It was the bite marks may have been there, but
(41:13):
it was one person doing all of it, and they
didn't catch that individual.
Speaker 2 (41:17):
Oh my gosh, So these poor men around these two guys.
Speaker 1 (41:21):
Yeah, and and that's there have been Just so that
I get my facts right here, you know, I'm I'm
looking right now at an article from twenty twenty, I
guess from Criminal Legal News. There have been thirty thirty
(41:42):
four convictions based on bite marks alone that had been overturned.
Thirty four. Just let that sink in just for a second.
And the idea that that you can take. You remember
what I was talking about the dynamics of the teeth
and the dynamic of actually biting somebody. You can't there's
(42:03):
no way that I can take and assign a number
to that. And in the examination of some kind of
contused area where you can't you can't make out fine
detail the mouth. The mouth is fascinating the way it works.
Most people never consider it. You know, I was talking
about earlier, how you go through the process of processing
(42:27):
food in your body. Just so you understand, you have incisors, right,
So you've got the incisors. What do they call it? Incisors? Well,
in size means to cut, Okay, So that's why we say,
even in forensic pathology, in sized wound, that's like a slice,
So you're incisors actually slice food. So then you get
to your canines, which are cuspids, and then you have bicuspods.
(42:52):
Imagine those cuspards being almost like the times on a
hayfork like this, So you go up into the hay
and you rip, you rip like this. The bicuspods then
take the teeth, take the food. They'll move it down
the line to the premolars and the molars. And what
(43:13):
are they made for, Well, they're made for grinding. So
you've got cut tear grind, cut tear grind. And the
entire time the tongue is involved in this as well.
That's why if we do have what we suspect as
a bite mark, we can go to that area and
swab the area around the bite mark to collect potential
(43:33):
foreign DNA, just off saliva, because saliva is very rich
in DNA that that certainly has utility. You know, when
you begin to think about these bite marks and what
happens in that process. And here's another thing that occurs
with biting. Biting has an element of sucking too. Well,
you don't think about it it's not something that's like
(43:56):
really profound. You know, when people are taking in food
depend upon how they eat. But if you have a
sexual attack, if you have a sexual attack, it's almost
like this gigantic hickey that appears on the body. And
the thing about the hickey is the hickey creates a
hematoma and it can disrupt the appearance of the bite
(44:16):
mark as well, because you've got a contusion that's coming
about as a result of the teeth breaking the skin
and it's kind of leaching in there. You've got the
sucking action that's going on behind it. So many times
you'll get this kind of gigantic, amorphous, kind of oval
shaped blob with very little detail. Well, you're going to
tell me that scientifically, you can look at the outer
(44:38):
fringes of that and apply number to that because it
has to be numerical. That goes back to a suspected
person that has done the body. It beats all I've
ever seen, and sometimes it's very disheartening, you know, when
you think about the various practices there are in forensic
science that are out there, you think about the good
(45:01):
that forensic science has done, but when you consider the
sheer numbers of people that have gone to jail. They've
missed Christmas, they've missed their kids graduating from high school,
they've missed dance recyitles, they've been threatened with their life
(45:22):
being taken away, and all because a faulty forensic science.
I think we've made a course correction at this point
in time. I think that forensicodontology certainly has grand utility
when it comes to still identifying bodies. There's nobody better
out there than a dentist at fine motorwork that I
(45:44):
put them up against just about anybody that's a physician
because they have to deal with the tiniest of tools.
They're great at extracting DNA from the pulp of teeth,
which is something we certainly need a lot of right now.
They're delicate and their practice, I would hazard say I
probably learned more from forensic identologists about what to do
(46:09):
right in forensic science, but along learning what is definitely wrong.
I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is body backs
Quality dymists. But Joseph's gotten more other than forensic pathologists.
The very first people that I came in contact with
and got to know really well in the world of
forensic scientists or actually forensic odentologist. I actually met forensic
(00:22):
odentologist before I ever met my first forensic anthropologist. And
I've always viewed myself as one of these people that
is a frustrated forensic anthropologist, because it's something I would
have loved to have done but never had the time,
you know, to go down that career path. I just
(00:44):
like digging in the dirt and those sorts of things,
and you know, working puzzles from that perspective. But forensic
identologists were interesting people, and I had a couple of
them that were a big influence in my career because
it gave me a perspective on forensic science in general
(01:07):
and specifically death investigation from a different side of the house.
You know, you always hear it from the physician side
in death investigation, but forensic codeontologists have a different view.
And today on bodybacks, I was really hoping that we
could explore this world and talk a little bit about
(01:30):
form function and maybe some famous and also infamous forensic
codeontologists that are out there. It's gonna be a good conversation.
I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is bodybacks. Have you
ever heard a more odd word than odentology, Dave. I mean,
(01:54):
when you first hear that, you think, first off, what
is it? And and you know, where does it come from?
Where does it originate? Because some people out there will
use interchangeably. They will say forensic odentology and forensic dentistry,
and I think dentistry actually predates the word odentology. Odentology
(02:19):
is an English word that first popped up in like
the early eighteen hundreds. Do you know what the big
difference is, no idea. Dentistry is kind of the treatment
of teeth examination that you know, measuring health and doing
extractions and fillings and all of the stuff that dental
(02:42):
folks do. Odentology, interestingly enough, deals more towards the function
of the teeth, how they work. You know how they work,
and most people don't don't think about most people don't
even think about chewing because it's one of these things
that you've done it your entire life. You don't think
(03:05):
about what's involved in it as a matter of fact,
let me try an experiment real quick. Everybody that's listening
to me, you, including Dave. I want you to take
the tip of your tongue and run it across the
surface of your teeth, both upper and lower and just
by using the tip of your tongue, can you tell
(03:26):
me what is your dependent side of your mouth that
you chew on? Yeah?
Speaker 2 (03:38):
Can you?
Speaker 1 (03:39):
Uh huh oh yeah, okay.
Speaker 2 (03:42):
Freak show. But yeah, I mean I paid a lot
of money for these teeth. Yeah, I know exactly where
I chew.
Speaker 1 (03:47):
Where do you chew? What's the right side?
Speaker 2 (03:49):
Right?
Speaker 1 (03:50):
Yeah? Me too? And so and if you notice if
you notice teeth when you look at them, I mean
probably most famously people when they see teeth and they
think things like bite marks. We think about our canines.
My kids used to call them their vampire teeth. You know,
there's two pointy they have a single cusp that kind
of sticks down well for humans with these teeth, they
(04:17):
do serve a each tooth. Each tooth grouping serves a
specific form and function. So you're learning, like if you
can tell what side of your where pattern is, that's
going to be specific to maybe a life lived there's
evidence if you eat to unrefined grains, your teeth will
(04:41):
be worn down in a particular manner. There's a manifestation
that comes about in Native Americans and Asian populations. It's
called dental shoveling, which the backside of the teeth literally
kind of shovel out because they're eating things like unrefined rice, corn,
those sorts of things, and so it grinds it teeth
down over a period of time. You can also get
(05:02):
a you know, you can look at teeth until you know,
see people that maybe have not had fluorinated water. You know,
all these things that are out there that so much
you can learn about the teeth. You can check trauma
with teeth. You know, how many teeth have you had
chipped over the course of your life and have not
been repaired? How many teeth? And my wife hates me, Well,
(05:24):
she doesn't hate me, she cannot stand the fact that
my first off, my teeth are very crooked. People always say,
why don't you smile on your photographs? Well, my left
upper lateral incisor is recessed back in my mouth and
it actually looks like I got a hole in my teeth,
and I don't. I never got braces. And so my wife, however,
(05:51):
is always tending to her teeth and she's got very
soft teeth and that's unique to her, and they wear
that sort of thing. They've literally people hate me for this.
I've literally never had a cavity in my life.
Speaker 2 (06:03):
Wow, good for you.
Speaker 1 (06:05):
Never And I don't know what that's like. I've had
tooth pain. However, Kim my wife, she's had crowned, she's
had feelings, you know, and she flasses religiously, brushes several times,
and she'll look at me and say, so, what did
the dentists say, I don't have any cavities?
Speaker 2 (06:24):
Chew more ice.
Speaker 1 (06:26):
Yeah, a lot of stuff could be extrapolated from that,
by the way, but we're not gonna get road.
Speaker 2 (06:32):
As soon as I saw, you know, forensic odentology, that's
what we're going to talk about. I thought Ted Bundy
and the Kyomega attack where they used his the impression
of his bite mark Uh at trial, and I wondered,
(06:52):
out loud, how exacting is that science? Because I've heard toothing.
I've heard, oh, yeah, everybody has a unique bite. Actually
that's not true, right.
Speaker 1 (07:02):
No, it's not. And well, let me tell you why
it is kind of unique. First off, the Bundy trial
is probably the most famous out of all of bike
mark cases. There's that image that's out there of this
poor young woman that was bitten on her buttock, and
you can see that, and I think that that was
put forward in that trial specifically, and they did a
good job of explaining it. And remember they had to
(07:25):
force him to give a dental impression where.
Speaker 2 (07:29):
He gets something to try to mess with his teeth too.
I'm trying to be I was.
Speaker 1 (07:32):
I don't remember what it was, because he's one of
those people that people talk about so much that I'm
bad in my life to do the opposit. I go
the opposite of the crowd most of the time, and
so I have I've not studied Bundy as much as
a lot of people, or should I say, I know
people that all they want to talk about is Bundy,
(07:53):
and you know, there's been so many cases since him,
but yeah, I mean, he's kind of a touchstone for
a lot of reasons and forensics, but bite mark in particular.
Speaker 2 (08:03):
And here's you know what's really odd, though, Joe, with Bundy,
you had so many Okay, the Kyomega where we had
the bite mark thing. But in his other killings, whether
it was in Utah or Washington, Oregon, there were different
things at each one of them. He did different things
(08:24):
along the way to people. I mean, he did different killings,
and it's like that to me. I don't want to
say it's fascinating because the guy is the most evil person.
I think that every walks at the pace of the earth,
or at least up in the top five. But you know,
it's like each one of his different groupings of cases
brings about a whole new set or a different set
of ideas to talk about of a killer. But you know,
(08:48):
like you're talking about, you don't follow along with that.
You know. The one thing that with the you and
I both have done so much on Coburger, I was
kind of hit with Coburger and Bundy, you know, the
early late night, early morning attack in a house in
a confined area where there are living you know, people
that actually saw you know, and and so those comparisons,
(09:10):
and I wondered, based on Coberger's background, did he study this?
Did did he study forensic odontology?
Speaker 1 (09:18):
He would have he I can't say what he studied.
Lord only knows, you know. Yeah, Oh my god, don't
bring that up again, please, I swear I got to
tell you the further down the road that we go
with the scene looking at him, I'm more inclined to
Danny Rowling, you know, the the Gainsville Ripper because and
(09:42):
I think a lot of that had to do with
the kpar knife and how it was utilized, and that
it was a college campus and it was off campus
housing and that was It's just that you didn't have
a one night event where you had people kluster and
he had multiple people Danny Danny Rowling in very spots
and I had kind of a weird kind of involvement.
(10:04):
Was rolling in one sense that he's from Louisiana. We
had a series of serial killings that were going on
in South Louisiana and I was on a task force
and he had, if I remember correctly, he had perpetrated
something up in North Louisiana. It seems like it was Freeport.
(10:25):
I can't remember. And the task force was asked to
look at, if any when the ripper thing happened in Gainesville.
Back then, we were asked, are there any of these
cases that you're currently working that kind of pair up
with what happened in Gainsvielle, because I think Gainsville was
eighty nine if I'm not mistaken, and we couldn't find
(10:45):
I mean just the fact that, well, let's let's face it,
you know, he used a knife to dismember at least
one person that I remember off the top of my head.
We didn't have that in that series. But now with Bundy,
Bundy is he's a straight up sadist and he actually
(11:08):
he actually had a what's called a sexual uh paraphilia,
which is a dex alexia. I think it's let me
check the pronounce the pronunciation again. I think that's uh.
Speaker 2 (11:25):
And while you get those who are listening and you
mentioned Danny Rolling in the Gainesville Ripper, I encourage you, friends,
if you've been following Coburger, go look into Danny Rolling.
That's where the k bar knife came into play, and
a few other things that are very reminiscent of the
two cases. Plus we found out recently in the last
week that Coburger actually had downloaded a PDF about Danny
(11:49):
Rolling to his phone.
Speaker 1 (11:52):
And there are similarities I think between and everybody will say, well,
Bundy was really small Danny Roland was no idiot. I mean,
I guess it all depends on how you define idiot.
But but he he had a there was a certain
template with him. And I'm still not convinced that that
(12:15):
Danny Rowland hadn't been at what he was doing for longer.
You know, some people think, but seems odd that.
Speaker 2 (12:22):
We have a killer that all of a sudden strikes
yeah and and does such horror.
Speaker 1 (12:29):
And that's a similarity. That's more similar to Rolling than Bundy.
Bundy when he showed up at uh FSU in Tallahassee
with Coyo House, he was at the end at that point,
he was on the run. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Rolling. It
was seemed just like Coburger burst on the scene in
(12:51):
a dramatic way, which is, you know, quite fascinating to consider.
I've thought about several people along the way, and wow,
I'm really chasing rabbits here. But you know, I've considered everybody,
including including Ted Kazinski, the unibomber uh And a lot
(13:12):
of that is based on those images that he took
of himself with the hoodie, because he looked except for
the sunglasses, he actually looked like that composite and of course, uh,
of course, you know Ted Kazinsky was brilliant PhD in mathematics,
and this guy esteemed to be brilliant, right, and also
have a PhD. So I don't know. But when it
(13:35):
comes down to biting people like Bundy did, there is
a satos actually a sadistic practice of a sexual paraphilia
that's associated with this type of behavior that's actually called
a dexelegnia. And I know they've got a name for
(13:59):
everything at the bottom. I know, there's no basement in
the house of the private so in this practice, and
it's very as you can imagine, it's very intimate. Now,
there are some people that are you know, good luck
with all that. There are a lot of people that
are into biting one another. Okay, like and you know,
(14:21):
kind of teasing that sort of thing. We're not going
to go down that road right now. This is not
that kind of show. But there is a group of
these people that are sadists that actually bite, and I
mean bite hard because they are directly involved in inflicting
(14:41):
pain on another individual, tortures pain. If anybody's ever been
bitten by like a dog, and you can imagine that
dog not letting go of you. And I'm sure that
many of you that are hearing this right now have
been have been attacked, at least in a limited sense
by dog. There's nothing quite as painful, particularly if you
(15:01):
can't get a dog off of you. Well, imagine a
human doing this and he's got you pinned down, he's
twice your size and he's biting down on you. Well,
it's through this that we see kind of the early
genesis of forensic idontology in the practice. And the I
think the reason it got so much, it was so
(15:24):
validated back during its day is it exploded with Ted
Bundy because it was this new fascinating thing that they
had and it's like, guys, we caught him, you know,
that kind of thing. You know, We've got him, you know,
and they tied it back through the teeth, you know.
(15:45):
And now it's quite quite interesting now bide Mark's not
recognized in the vast majority of courts anymore. It's considered,
it's kind of been invalidated. It's some people. It's not
me using the term. Actually Obama's best practices in forensic
(16:07):
science studies. I think that was back from twelve I
think actually referred to it as a pseudoscience, and which
is And listen, I've you know, some of the people
that I've come in contact with that are forensic codeontologists.
I hold in very high esteem Ronnie Carr in particular,
as a guy that took me under his wing when
(16:29):
I was a young investigator, actually allowed me to come
to the dental school and audit a dental class that
he was teaching as an elective in forensic codeontology. But
odentology is just not about bitemarks. The other utility that
they have, and probably that's more practical, are doing postmortem
dental examinations, which are fascinating in and of themselves, because
(16:54):
as we know skin, skin can be damaged, it can
be burned, it can rot, it can fade away. Bones
can be snapped in half and hauled away. But teeth,
we've still got teeth that were found in the heads
of mummies three thousand years ago. They last a long
(17:18):
long time. Consider your teeth, just for a moment again,
I've already asked you to try to determine what side
of your mouth you chew on the most, and everything
(17:42):
that happens with your teeth is unique to you. All right,
Mommy and Daddy could have paid for braces, but still
those teeth will be unique to you. The fascinating thing
about teeth and what makes them have a utility for
human identification, particularly not so much bite mark, because we'll
(18:03):
get into that in a second, but just the basic
utility of teeth as a means to identify people. Think
about think about it like this. Every tooth has at
least five visible surfaces, well partially visible. If you think
about the top. Okay, you think about the outer side
(18:23):
that you can see, the inner side that you can
see if you look in the mirror, and then you've
got two other sides that are up against adjoining teeth,
all right, community not really communicating, but they're sitting there,
all right. So all of those planes for every tooth
that you have that has these sides, for every way
that it rotates, like it can rotate two degrees, three degrees,
(18:46):
four degrees, and dentist considering this while they're examining your teeth,
that makes that individual tooth unique to you. You take
that and multiply that by thirty two teeth, and that
makes you very unique. It still makes you unique if
you're missing your wisdom teeth, because that means you're in
the population that doesn't have wisdom teeth. So if I'm
(19:09):
trying to get a body identified, if you're missing your
wisdom teeth and we know that they were probably extracted
as opposed to falling out as a result of decomposition,
you're into a separate pile and getting bodies identified, which
teeth was were the main way that we did that
on really complex cases for years and years. Now you
(19:31):
have DNA and teeth still play a part in DNA,
but you would do these examinations on teeth and they
would always kind of point the way. Of course, you
would have to have a suspected list of people that
a suspected list of people that you could get their
(19:52):
anti mortem dental records and compared to. Let me tell
you about a nightmare case that in my old office
that occurred in nineteen eighty two. Anybody feel free to
look this up in Kenner, Louisiana. I think it was
in nineteen eighty two. There was a pan Am crash
and when the crash took place, the plane took off
going from with Lake ponta train at the rear of
(20:16):
the plane, so you're traveling from it's going from north
to south, so north south runway. Thing takes off and Dave,
it doesn't get probably any higher than maybe six seven
hundred feet off the ground, and it knows dives. It
knows dives were a full I mean they were heading
(20:38):
to Vegas nose dives. It goes across the highway and
into a neighborhood and just obliterates the neighborhood and anybody
that was there. It's like at four o'clock in the afternoon.
I've got colleagues that showed up, Dave, and they saw
things like one of the most shocking things they saw
while they were there was actually a woman's torso cut
(21:02):
in half and was hanging from a live oak tree
by her pantyhose, and the top half of her was
completely gone. There was cash laying everywhere all over the place,
and just to show you how scummy some human beings
can be. Before the police arrived on scene, there were
(21:24):
allegedly allegedly civilians that had walked in there and they
were picking up cash. The reason there was cash is
this is before the days of going to a slot
machine in Vegas and taking a digital card and sticking
it in. You had to show up with cash and
handbag and you could. I still remember the sound of
the coins falling, you know, when they would follow somebody
(21:47):
who had a jackpot. So people would literally travel with
huge amounts of cash. I'm getting to the point. I'm
going to tell you why this is so complex. When
they crashed into the ground, you had bodies that were burning,
you had homes that were burning. There were people that
were just living their life on the ground that had died.
There was one child I remember the old investigators talking
(22:11):
about that was in her sandbox and the sand she
like incinerated right there. There were plastic toys that had
melted and they were like in a multicolored blob and Dave,
part of the sand had turned to glass. That's how
hot it got. Now I can't validate that personally. That's
word of mouth that came to me and that you
(22:33):
can still drive through there even to this day in
that part of Kenner loose in it and you can
still see where the plane. There's new homes there, but
you can see what's newer and what's older, and it's
this horrific event. So back to why it was so difficult.
A goodly number of these people that were on the plane,
they had a lot of Indian nationals that were from
(22:56):
India and they were trying to Yet back then, they
were trying to get dental records. You realize how hard
it is to get dental records from India. I mean,
it's a bloody nightmare. So you have people that are
there that have very specific dental presentations and you don't
(23:20):
have anything to compare it to. Now solid as the
science is with the alignment of teeth and restorations and
malaclusions and all these things that Dennis talk about, it
would have been great, but it's very difficult to get
those and they actually had a number of leftover remains
that they never could actually get positively identified. I think
(23:43):
there's a level that you and I have never really
discussed about identification. It's called presumptive identification, and it's like
you have all the information, but you don't have enough
to say scientifically that absolutely this is it. It's a
presumptive idea and you go ahead and go without it.
I've never been a big fan of that, but some
of these were presumptive ideas. The forensic identologists, though, can
(24:07):
come into an environment, and they come into all kinds
of austere environments. There were a ton of forensic odontologists
on the ground at nine to eleven. They travel all
over the world to work plane crashes. And we're not
talking about bike marks here, Dave. We're talking about actual
dental examinations. I've assisted many of these over the years,
(24:28):
and to give you an idea how this works in
the morgue, Generally, the dentally identification of an individual is
done our examination. Rather, identification comes later after the examination.
It comes after the autopsy. Okay, So you do the
autopsy first and then the forensic odentologist comes in. And
(24:50):
what we will do for that odentologist is we literally
cut the jaws out of the body. So you go
up here to the primary joint with the jaw like
TMJ you cut through it. You cut out all the
soft tissue and remove the jaw. Then you have to
go into the maxilla, which is where your upper teeth,
(25:12):
your maxillary teeth are located. And you know, as you
go up from inside of the maxilla, you start to
get into sinuses, you know, so you cut you reflect
the lips all the way up do dissection. You take
the striker saw, the same one that you open the
skull with, and all the way back to the very
back tooth to that area. You're going to cut this
(25:37):
kind of arcing linear incision with the striker saw and
literally pop the roof of the mouth out with the
teeth intact. You say, wow, it's incredibly gruesome, Morgan, thank
you for giving me that image. Well, let me explain
to you why we do it that way. If you've
ever seen like a the best way I can explain it,
if you've ever seen like a mechanical engineering dr where
(26:00):
they have like what they call an exploded view of
all the little nuts and bolts and everything that you
couldn't see, like if it was all self contained, Like
if you're putting together a boiler. It's got all kinds
of you know, internal guts, mechanisms and everything. You can't
really see that you don't understand it, so they do
what's called an exploded view. Well, same kind of principle
(26:21):
exists with friends of codentology and examination post warning examination.
If you can take those jaws, the jaw itself and
lay it down on the table, and take the maxilla
and lay it out so that the teeth are upward,
the bases of the teeth are up or the business
surface of the teeth are up then as they're sitting there,
(26:46):
you can go over them. I mean, think about every
time you've sat in a dental chair and you got
this guy. He's got a light on top of his head.
He's got these fine tools that really really hurt many times.
And what what's the one directive they're always telling you
when you're sitting in a chair, open wider, open wider,
(27:07):
open wider. The hygienis will say that are hey, could
you turn your head this way and open a little
bit wider, and they're trying to get access. Well, these
individuals are deceased, and so you don't have to ask
for access. As a matter of fact, you're not encumbered
by the lack of light. That's one of the tough
things about I think about people that practice dentistry is
(27:30):
the lack of light that they have to illuminate this
very tight space they're having to work in. So we
can actually take those jaws and do X rays. I've
here's two interesting things that people might not know. I've
actually gotten bodies identified through sinus patterns on skulls where
(27:52):
we're examining the teeth. We do an X ray of
the face, and you can see all of the sinuses, okay,
and they kind of even dip down into the maxillary area.
And we'll compare a post mortem X ray with an
anti mortem X ray and it's a teeth or like
missing or whatever. We'll actually use sinuses to get those.
(28:15):
To get those identified, you can rotate the head and
any number of ways, or you know, you can rotate
the jaws in any number of ways to capture capture
a post mortem X ray so that you can manipulate it,
you can better observe, Like if there's fillings, you know,
look just because okay, Dave, Let's say that you and
(28:36):
I both had a filling, okay, and it's the same tooth,
all right. Let's say it's our second molar all right
bottom right side. We've both got a cavitated area in there.
You and I are going to go get a filling
for this thing. Well, after they put the filling in,
they take our X rays, okay, post filling, and you
(28:58):
look at it, did you you know did you know
that if they put those side by side, even though
we've had the same tooth filled. And this might seem
rather obvious, but just don't want people understand. Put them
side by. Our feelings are not going to look the same, Okay,
because the cavity doesn't look the same. Just because your
tooth cavitates in a particular way doesn't mean that mine will.
(29:19):
So even the outline of that can be used as
a point of identification. So I think, from the perspective
of using teeth as an identifier with the dead, it
has a lot of utility. I don't think that we
will ever leave that behind. The other side to this
is going to be this area that forensic dentistry got
(29:42):
off into, which is bite mark assessment. And keep in mind,
not every forensic dentist practiced forensic bite mark assessment because
they knew scientifically that you can't and I use this
term a lot, you can't quantify it. Understand this, and
(30:02):
just think about this the next time you bite into
an apple. All right, if you eat your apples with
the skin on, This only applies to the skin on people.
So you bite an apple and you bite into it
depended upon how you're holding the apple in your hand,
depended upon if you're laying on your back, you're sitting up,
maybe you're leaned over a table. It's going to adjust
(30:26):
how your teeth are going to strike that surface if
you rotate it just the slightest a bit. Now, take
that same image in your mind and apply it to
a human being that's wiggling beneath you as you're choking
life out of them, as you're beating them to death.
They're resistant to this sadistic pain that's being inflicted upon them.
(30:49):
So as they adjust, and we know that skin is
very malleable. It moves in all kinds of directions. Some
people's skin is loaded with collagen and it snaps back
really quick. The older you are, the more wrinkly you get,
the less collagen you get, skin is not going to
be as reactive. You bite into this person and they
(31:10):
twist in a particular way, Well, guess what the static
teeth that an individual has in their mouths Suddenly that
impression is blown all to helen back because the movement
of the victim, and also you don't know what position
the perpetrator was in when they bit down on an individual,
and all the teeth are not always going to be
(31:30):
included in this so it's a That's one of the
reasons that like when you go to court with any
kind of evidence, it doesn't matter what it is. When
you go to court with any kind of evidence, you
have to be able to scientifically verify that and validate
it and try to understand what form and function and
(31:53):
can you sit on a stand and explain to a
jury why this is this way? Because we know this,
we know this. There have been forensic idontologists out there
that's simply based upon their testimony. They have literally put
people on death row. Dave the gray or my hair
(32:30):
gets more forgetful, I would come. You look back over
your shoulder and tom or as some people say, in
the rear view mirror, and those fine details that you
once held on to. It's really hard many times to
kind of recapture those. But there are certain events that
stand out over the course of your career. The average
mundane day to day is it's whatever. But there are
(32:53):
certain things that you know to kind of draw you
back to the past. And there's one case in particular
that I kind of wanted to put out there that
I don't know. I thought that our friends might might
find it interesting. I certainly do still to this day.
I got called out to a case on what's referred
(33:14):
to as the West Bank in New Orleans, in Jefferson Parish,
and it was involving a young girl and it seems
like she was either seven seven or nine, seven eight
or nine, and it was her living in an apartment.
And it was a second story apartment that had you
(33:35):
know that I know you've probably lived in one. I've
lived in one where the walkway for the entire apartment
goes right outside your window. You know, It's like it's
got like a cast iron rail right there, and you know,
you enter in off the walkway and you can stand
outside and look over the you know, look over the
parking lot is essentially it's not the most private thing,
you know. But this little girl was living with her mama,
(33:59):
and it was about it's probably about nine o'clock at night.
It was in summertime, and she had already put on
her nightgown and she was wearing a nightgown and my
little pony underwear. I'll never forget that as long as
I live. And the air was out and this is
(34:19):
in New Orleans, all right, So you've got the window
open adjacent to the walkway. The kitchen windows open so
you can get cross ventilation, and Mama's in the back
room fold and clothes because mama has to go downstairs
to the laundry room. You know, you have these in
all the you know apartment complexes where you got to
(34:40):
drop quarters in, sit there with your laundry, little girls
watching some television program Mama enters the room and programs on.
Little girl's gone doors locked from the inside, and didn't
know where she she went. There was a big manh
(35:01):
hunt that it ensued, and when she was found by
a group of men that were had kind of all
gathered in on this hunt, she was right on the
edge of a little forested area just out back of
this apartment that her mama rented. And to say that
(35:28):
she was unrecognizable is inaccurate. I never beheld anything like this.
And are you familiar, Dave, with Asex tennis shoes. You
ever heard that name before? Ax, Well, that's the first
time I'd ever heard of Asex. The reason it's significant
(35:49):
is because the person that killed her stomped her to
death with a pair of Asex and the patterns that
appeared on her on her face her neck, her shoulders,
and even on her chest were consistent with a particular
(36:09):
style of this make of shoe. Well, as it turns out,
he was finally caught and it was actually the caretaker
for h for this apartment complex. It's one of the
few times, Dave, where I have seen a group of
cops so furious that they they had murder in their eyes.
(36:29):
And it was actually kind of a scary place to
be in because people have been searching for this girl,
holding out hope that they were going to find her,
and this all happened, and like just the twinkling of
an eye. I mean, the whole process happened really quick.
You know, it wasn't like you know these cases we
hear today, We've got a missing child alert out and
they go for days, and it wasn't like that. This
(36:51):
whole thing turned around in like I don't know, it's
like five hours, and you had people really pumped up
about this, you know, they were they wanted to find
the scirrel. Wanted to find squirrel. You got that.
Speaker 2 (37:01):
It's in the first hours. You've got a chance to
get her alive, you know, you do. You could have
just run off and she's missed I mean that's you're right.
Everybody's totally pumped the first few.
Speaker 1 (37:10):
Hours they are, and I had I saw senior police
officers talking down junior police officers because they everybody wanted peace.
The guy survived, but I got to tell you it
was the whole thing was just surreal. We say, more
than does this have to do with forensic codeontology? Well,
(37:31):
I'm glad you asked that question, because I'm about to
get to it. It was that same night that I
happened to meet an individual named Michael West. I'd never
seen him in person, never shaking hands with him. However,
one of my colleagues back then, actually guy that was
my mentor, said you got to meet this guy. He's
(37:53):
amazing because he's a forensic odentologist and he works with
alternative lighting. And when I say alternative lighting, I'm talking
about using things like UV infra red, this sort of
thing in order to take photographs where certain details under
(38:14):
those conditions will be enhanced that you could not otherwise
see with regular photography or the naked eye. Well, he
drove down from Hattiesburg, Mississippi, and man, he had all
these whiz bangs with him. I mean he had everything lights,
you know, the whole nine yards talks real fast. He's
big fella, comes into our morgue and it's my case.
(38:38):
So I volunteered, and I had to call the forendsic
pathologists like is this okay if I do this? And
his renown had spread by that time. It was way
outside of the area, you know, the New Orleans area
in Mississippi. He was appearing and talking places. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
let's go ahead and use it. Well, Dave, I didn't.
I didn't know anything about, you know, alternative lighting when
(38:59):
it comes to documenting injuries on bodies. And I remember
sitting there and watching him go through this exercise of
snapping the various photographs, having me move the body so
that he could get these, and it was almost like
being at a magic show where the guy that's got
(39:21):
the cards and he's saying, look here, you know, like this,
look here, watch this, and all the while something else
is going on, and he kept telling me, almost as
if I'm there to validate what he's seeing. Don't you
see this BikeE mark right here? I guess I don't.
This is outside my realm of expertise. I don't know
(39:44):
if that's a bite mark, because what I had seen
was this specific waffle pattern that had abraided this precious
young girl's face and shoulders and her abdomen all over
the place. And he's out of all of that, he's
finding BikeE marks as well. And granted, the alternative light
(40:07):
pictures that he took were incredible. You know when you
see them, there wasn't no more a bike mark on
that young girl's body than a man in the moon.
And you know, and that's one of the things that
happened with bike mark. It wasn't just West, it was
others like him. But you know, they had so many
(40:28):
of these cases, Dave in and there's two in particular
that really really caught my attention. There were these two
African American gentlemen that had both been accused in the
same area of raping little girls and biting them and
tossing their bodies in a creek. And they this is
(40:51):
before DNA, they didn't have it. One guy was sent
to serve a life term in prison, the other guy
was sent to death row. And as it turned out,
it was a close both yeah, both, No, No, it wasn't.
It was the bite marks may have been there, but
(41:13):
it was one person doing all of it, and they
didn't catch that individual.
Speaker 2 (41:17):
Oh my gosh, So these poor men around these two guys.
Speaker 1 (41:21):
Yeah, and and that's there have been Just so that
I get my facts right here, you know, I'm I'm
looking right now at an article from twenty twenty, I
guess from Criminal Legal News. There have been thirty thirty
(41:42):
four convictions based on bite marks alone that had been overturned.
Thirty four. Just let that sink in just for a second.
And the idea that that you can take. You remember
what I was talking about the dynamics of the teeth
and the dynamic of actually biting somebody. You can't there's
(42:03):
no way that I can take and assign a number
to that. And in the examination of some kind of
contused area where you can't you can't make out fine
detail the mouth. The mouth is fascinating the way it works.
Most people never consider it. You know, I was talking
about earlier, how you go through the process of processing
(42:27):
food in your body. Just so you understand, you have incisors, right,
So you've got the incisors. What do they call it? Incisors? Well,
in size means to cut, Okay, So that's why we say,
even in forensic pathology, in sized wound, that's like a slice,
So you're incisors actually slice food. So then you get
to your canines, which are cuspids, and then you have bicuspods.
(42:52):
Imagine those cuspards being almost like the times on a
hayfork like this, So you go up into the hay
and you rip, you rip like this. The bicuspods then
take the teeth, take the food. They'll move it down
the line to the premolars and the molars. And what
(43:13):
are they made for, Well, they're made for grinding. So
you've got cut tear grind, cut tear grind. And the
entire time the tongue is involved in this as well.
That's why if we do have what we suspect as
a bite mark, we can go to that area and
swab the area around the bite mark to collect potential
(43:33):
foreign DNA, just off saliva, because saliva is very rich
in DNA that that certainly has utility. You know, when
you begin to think about these bite marks and what
happens in that process. And here's another thing that occurs
with biting. Biting has an element of sucking too. Well,
you don't think about it it's not something that's like
(43:56):
really profound. You know, when people are taking in food
depend upon how they eat. But if you have a
sexual attack, if you have a sexual attack, it's almost
like this gigantic hickey that appears on the body. And
the thing about the hickey is the hickey creates a
hematoma and it can disrupt the appearance of the bite
(44:16):
mark as well, because you've got a contusion that's coming
about as a result of the teeth breaking the skin
and it's kind of leaching in there. You've got the
sucking action that's going on behind it. So many times
you'll get this kind of gigantic, amorphous, kind of oval
shaped blob with very little detail. Well, you're going to
tell me that scientifically, you can look at the outer
(44:38):
fringes of that and apply number to that because it
has to be numerical. That goes back to a suspected
person that has done the body. It beats all I've
ever seen, and sometimes it's very disheartening, you know, when
you think about the various practices there are in forensic
science that are out there, you think about the good
(45:01):
that forensic science has done, but when you consider the
sheer numbers of people that have gone to jail. They've
missed Christmas, they've missed their kids graduating from high school,
they've missed dance recyitles, they've been threatened with their life
(45:22):
being taken away, and all because a faulty forensic science.
I think we've made a course correction at this point
in time. I think that forensicodontology certainly has grand utility
when it comes to still identifying bodies. There's nobody better
out there than a dentist at fine motorwork that I
(45:44):
put them up against just about anybody that's a physician
because they have to deal with the tiniest of tools.
They're great at extracting DNA from the pulp of teeth,
which is something we certainly need a lot of right now.
They're delicate and their practice, I would hazard say I
probably learned more from forensic identologists about what to do
(46:09):
right in forensic science, but along learning what is definitely wrong.
I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is body backs
Host
Joseph Scott Morgan
Popular Podcasts
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
NFL Daily with Gregg Rosenthal
Gregg Rosenthal and a rotating crew of elite NFL Media co-hosts, including Patrick Claybon, Colleen Wolfe, Steve Wyche, Nick Shook and Jourdan Rodrigue of The Athletic get you caught up daily on all the NFL news and analysis you need to be smarter and funnier than your friends.
The Joe Rogan Experience
The official podcast of comedian Joe Rogan.