July 8, 2025 • 46 mins
Joseph Scott Morgan and Dave Mack discuss the Manson family murders and the real injuries suffered by the victims, as well as beheadings carried out hundreds of years ago in an effort to explain the difference in the type of injuries created by all manner of weapons that can be used to stab, slice, carve, and disembowel. Professor Morgan explains the difference between the facts of a case and how injuries and weapons are shown in film and how difficult it is to determine the source of a sharp force injury.
Transcript Highlights
00:13.87 Introduction - Sharp Force Injuries
01:11.86 Description of a beheading
04:56.77 Sharp force injury
10:02.83 Executioner refusing to execute
14:59.68 Stabbing injuries
20:27.08 Studying the margin - edges of injury
24:48.30 Always look for the "winking eye"
29:58.47 Thorough autopsy - tongue comes out
35:03.25 First documented autopsy, Caesar
38:58.59 Manson family knife attacks, Sharon Tate
45:03.35 Manson Murders shown in movie shows fork bouncing up and down, ridiculous
46:2 9.07 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):
Quody diamonds, but Joseph's gotten more. It was a really
cold morning. Matter of fact, folks around town said that
there would be ice that day. It was the morning
of January the thirtieth, sixteen forty nine, and the Head
of State, the King of England, walked across the banqueting
(00:26):
floor in the main chamber at the Banqueting House, part
of Whitehall Palace in London, literally right down the road
from present day Parlament. It wasn't a normal strawl. He
was walking to a window, and outside of that window
(00:51):
there had been built a scaffold, and as he stepped
through the window, the cold wind cut through. He had
asked for extra clothing that morning so that the crowd
could not see him shivering, because he didn't want to
give the impression that he was afraid. For a moment,
(01:15):
he looked out over the crowd. He knew that the
crowd was so vast they'd never hear what he would
have to say. He looked at the two attendants and
the executioner told them that he was not guilty of
the charges of which he had been found guilty of.
And then he turned to the executioner and says when
(01:38):
I kneel down and lay my head on the block,
I'm going to pray, and when I extend my arms,
that will be your signal to swing the axe. In
that one moment, Europe changed. Europe changed because it was
(01:58):
viewed that all power derived from God through their sovereign.
And as Charles's head rolled over the surface of that scaffold,
the executioner, wearing a homemade mask and a wig, picked
(02:20):
it up, displayed it to the crowd, and then tossed
it to them. In that one moment, a simple tool
was used of aheading axe weighted on one side blunt,
but on the other side a crescent shaped blade razor
(02:43):
sharp had cut through the neck of the Sovereign of England.
Today we're going to learn a bit more about sharp
force injuries and people die as a result of them
every day. Not just my mind arcs. I'm Joseph Scott
Morgan and this is Bodybags. I tried to find the
(03:10):
Banqueting House many times. I finally found it when I
was walking down the streets of London day because I'd
heard the story for years and years. A Man for
All Seasons. If you've ever seen that movie, Richard Harris
and Let's see what's his name. Alec Guinnis played the
King powerful movie. There was another generation of it that
(03:34):
came out with Tim Roth playing the part of Oliver Cromwell.
Can't remember who the king was, but I'd heard about
it for years and years. I'd seen the movies and
it was a seminal time. But you know, Dave, over
a long period of time in Europe, heads were rolling
(03:59):
off everywhere, you know, all the way up you know,
through the French Revolution, they became i think, dis settled
over the guillotine for a very short period of time
and then reinstituted it as a humane way of bringing
about death.
Speaker 2 (04:15):
Okay, it seems like it's a pretty humane way, you know,
the guillotine. Okay, look, you know it's coming, Lay your
head down, pop, it's over.
Speaker 1 (04:23):
Yeah. Yeah, And to me it does. I think it's
the spectacle of it all. And as a matter of fact,
if you go and search last guillotine execution in France,
there is an image and it's real grainy that pops up.
A photograph was taken in a courtyard of the last
(04:46):
guy to be executed by guillotine in the nineteen twenties. Wow,
And yeah, you can see the length of his body
and he's like laying on a board because they you
have to kind of, you know, shimmy up this and
lay there. And I don't know if they you know,
some images I've seen show them strapping you down to
(05:08):
this thing and whatnot. But yeah, the head would pop
right off and you've got this delivery of energy that
transfers from that back weighted blade to that fine thin
edge that has been honed down so that it's razor
sharp and it passes right through the tissue and the
(05:29):
bone and the musculature. But you know, that's that's an
example of what we would call an incized injury. It's
not a stab wound, obviously, and it's not a punctural
woman that's for sure. And sharp force injuries coming up
in a variety of of of styles, I guess you
(05:54):
would say, uh, and you can you can arrive at
them with any number of instruments that are out there.
Speaker 2 (06:01):
But going back to the guillotine, because you know, we
did an entire episode on and putting people to death,
you know, and I don't understand that I'm missing something here.
You know, we have the putting them to sleep thing
with chemicals, right, and we've got people fighting over that.
(06:21):
One's inhumane. And then we've got the gunshot where we
had the guys miss you know, I'm firing squad. It
seems like, I mean, really, was there ever a failure
where the guillotine didn't actually chop the dude's head off.
Speaker 1 (06:37):
I don't know about the guillotine, however, there were several
failures relative to what we'll refer to as long swords.
If you go back in time, like during the time
of Elizabeth and I urge anybody if you've Buckingham Palace
is all cool and everything, but if you're going to
go to one royal spot in Great Britain in London,
(06:59):
rather make sure that you go to the Tower of London.
Because you say the Tower of London, you think it's
a standalone tower. It's not. It's a palace. And in
the courtyard there you know where the famous ravens are
that have had their wings clipped, and the beef eaters,
the soldiers retired soldiers that walk around in those really cool,
(07:19):
odd looking uniforms. It's still an active part of the
royal family. And that's where executions were taking place. As
a matter of fact, where they took place, I think,
if memory serves me correctly, almost all of Henry the
Eights wives were killed there, and including Anne Boleyn. Their bodies,
(07:42):
as it turned out, were actually buried in the chapel
that's adjacent. We've been in the chapel and have seen
that area. And back then during that period of time,
they used long swords and there was like a severe
punishment for an executioner that did not that did not
(08:03):
do their task, uh, to the point where it was
a death that was met quickly.
Speaker 2 (08:10):
Uh.
Speaker 1 (08:11):
And one one of the things that's interesting about blade
executions is that with axes, axes and blades in Great
Britain in particular, those types of executions were considered to
be swift and painless, and they were held they were
they were set aside for those individuals that were of rank,
(08:34):
that were nobility. The rest of everybody would be you know, uh,
hung or drawn quartered and hung, which if you've ever
seen Brave Heart, there's a description of that. You can
see the ending scene with mel Gibson, you know, uh,
(08:56):
being essentially cut into small pieces. Uh. Not much of
that movie was historically based, but that part was actually true. Uh,
So you know, it's been an evolution. It's been an
evolution of these events over a long period of time.
And going back to the executions with long swords in
(09:20):
Great Britain, Dave the they didn't use during the time
of Elizabeth and Henry Dais. They didn't use English swordsmen.
They actually employed French swordsmen that would come over and
do the execution because they were considered to be better
at it.
Speaker 2 (09:38):
Kind of crazy when you start thinking about being better
at being a swordsman for cutting up ahead. You know,
it seems like something my son, my grandson, Braylan would
probably be pretty good at it.
Speaker 1 (09:48):
You know, yeah, wielding wielding that sword. I can't imagine
that it that it would be very fulfilling work. As
a matter of fact, with Charles first, Uh, they had
to find somebody else to do it because you know,
this idea that all power derived from God for the
(10:09):
head of state, no pun intended, and the executioners refused
to do it because they felt as though that the
individual that they would be killing was appointed by God,
and so they There's been a lot of stories. No
one actually knows who the executioners were, but there was
(10:29):
an executioner and an assistant and they actually were paid
one hundred pounds in order to do this, and one
hundred pounds during that period of time was a monumental
fee to do this. But you have to understand whoever
decided to wield that sword did it, you know, under
(10:52):
penalty of pain that could come about at any moment
in time. They themselves could be killed by loyalists to
the royal family. They would be known, their families would
be known for years and years to come. So kind
of an interesting, interesting turn. But for me, when I
began as a death investigator, I think that some of
(11:16):
the most fascinating cases that I ever worked, Dave came
about as a result of sharp force injuries. And not
all sharp force injuries are ruled as as homicides. You know,
we think about sharp force, we think about individuals that
are being stabbed and cut and all these sort of things.
(11:38):
And yeah, there's tons of those. Knives in particular, are
easy to get your hands on, people can carry them,
they're easily concealed. But for the most part, you know,
I had a lot of self inflicted injuries using knives
(12:00):
slashing of wrist, that sort of thing. I had one
guy that cut his throat with a straight razor to
take his own life. And then I've had tons of
accidental deaths that involved sharp force or penetrating injuries. I've
had people that have been run over by lawnmowers, had
their feet cut off, and bled to death. One case
(12:26):
in particular involved a guy that got caught up in
the prop of a boat. Until you have seen those
kinds of injuries, you can't really appreciate how horrific a
sharp force injury is, the way it literally, the mechanical
nature of it, the way it chews up a body.
(12:47):
And even if you had had with that guy with
a prop injury, even if you had had a team
of surgeons standing by, I don't think that his life
would have been salvagable. It's important to understand that with
(13:13):
sharp force injuries, you you come away with an appreciation
that probably in cases of homicides next to next to
firearms related deaths, Dave, I'd have to say that sharp
force injuries are the number two. They're number two when
(13:35):
it comes to committing murder. And again it goes it
goes to this idea you know that we've talked about
over you know, years now that many deaths are are
rooted in some kind of relational thing. And when you
have domestic events that occur in particular and you've got
(13:58):
a kitchen, they're looking for access an opportunity, and one
of the you know, kind of fallback positions is I'm
going to go get the kitchen knife and I'm going
to go to work, and that's what happens many times. Wow,
you know, Joe.
Speaker 2 (14:15):
One of the things about using a knife that petrifies me,
it's not would not be my go to weapon, is
because of the idea of slipping, you know, like and
we have this all the time in stories we cover
where the person using the knife, unless they're experienced with them,
they cut themselves. And knowing how bloody scenes get when
(14:36):
you've got cuts going on, that'd be my one big
pay if you are not wearing gloves your hands slipping
on that knife.
Speaker 1 (14:42):
Yeah, you know, there's a the nature of blood for me,
at least because I've had this happen in The Mork,
you know, utilizing scalpels and even needles. I've cut myself
multiple times in The Mork over the yearly. Yeah, I've
stabbed myself with needles. I've you know, and terrifying, you
know when this happens, because I came of age during
(15:04):
the height of the AIDS epidemic and you know, we
were always getting tested and those sorts of things, and
you know, it's quite terrifying. There's something about the nature
of blood though that people think blood is like really tacky,
and it is, you know, it gets real sticky, but
there's something it's almost a fat like quality, so that
(15:27):
whatever you're holding onto becomes almost lubricated with blood. It's
not like water. There's a different sense to it. And so, yeah,
you're right on point. We have a lot of cases
where people will cut themselves as they're wielding some type
of sharp instrument, and of course they wind up commingling
their blood and you know, from a bigger picture of
(15:49):
their DNA with that of the victim. And that's one
of the reasons that if you have a suspect in
beatings and stabbings and that sort of thing, you're always
going to look at their hands to see if they
have injuries, if they're wearing, you know, some type of
bandage on your hand. G Man how'd you get that?
You know? Are you okay? Do you need a skitch
(16:10):
your medical help? No? No, no, no, it's it's just
a one. Hey, do you mind taking the bandage off
so we can see it? And you look at it.
It ain't healing, it's fresh. Wow. And they've never gotten
help for it, or they haven't been given help for
it because they haven't asked for it because they're trying
to disguise it.
Speaker 2 (16:27):
That would be O. J. Simpson and his first discussion
with police after arriving back from Chicago less than twenty
four hours after the death of Ron Goldman and Nicole Brown.
Simpson and hey, OJ, well, what you got going on there?
On your finger?
Speaker 1 (16:42):
Yeah? Left cut?
Speaker 2 (16:45):
Yeah, on his finger. I don't know if that's you know,
just saying it just seemed obvious. But it was in
an odd place on the outside of the left hand.
Speaker 1 (16:54):
You know.
Speaker 2 (16:54):
That's what I always seem to think that it would
have to be if you if you're trying to stab
some buddy or slice I guess you know what. It's
not a weapon I would choose to use, so I
can't really get a good handle on how it would
be used.
Speaker 1 (17:07):
No pun intended so no, and the left hand is
not an odd odd place because if you're if you're
trying to restrain somebody and holding them down with your
left hand and your right hand and you're wilding a knife,
you know, there's that, you know, there's a high probability
you could nick yourself. And look, I mean even guys
(17:29):
that are special operations, people that are trained in sharp
force are uh sharp force instrument use you know, in
a combat situation there most of them, that's not their
first choice. As a matter of fact, it's generally a
last resort. They'd much rather be shooting people than trying
to go head to head with somebody with a knife.
(17:51):
It's it's you know, it's the the last resort that
you're going to reach down. You're going to have a
knife at your you know, at your hand to try
to keep keep people away. So I'm thinking about what's
what's the uh uh, what's the uh Clinny the case
out of Miami with the only fans mid Yeah, Courtney Clinne.
(18:12):
I heard a UH special operations guy talk one time
many years ago. Somebody had asked him a question about, uh,
is there any truth to people that are expert with
knives and throwing knives, and he said, why in the
world would you if that is your last weapon, why
are you going to take it and throw it at somebody?
(18:33):
He's like, we're going to hold onto it and we're
going to carve you up. And and I think about her,
you know, scoring that shot in the subclave, on that
poor young man, and he bleeds out the odds of
that happening are slim and none, both in the sentence,
and you know, it's just it's it's it's highly implausible.
(18:56):
But you know, when we think about when we think
about think about sharp force injuries, here's kind of how
we examine them and the annotations that we make. First off,
with sharp force injuries, how do we define them, Well,
they're going to have clean edges. What does that mean, Morgan?
(19:18):
Why are you saying clean edges? Well, if you're hit
with a baseball bat and it tears the skin, that's
a laceration, and we're going to do a whole nother
lecture on blunt force trauma. Clean edges implies that you've
got a milled weapon, something that has got a mechanically
(19:39):
created blade with an edge on it, and when a
slice is made. If you think about slicing something, if
you look at whether it's a package you're going to
open at home with a knife, or if you're cutting
into a steak, if you look at the edges, or
as we refer to the margins, the web of the injury,
(20:02):
they're going to be clean. You're not going to have
interconnecting tissue there, so you've got this clean edge. That's
one of the first things we look for. Generally, there's
no what we refer to as ekamosis, which is a
fancy term for bruising around that area. So it's not
like somebody has been pounded on where if you pound somebody,
(20:22):
you've got that the blood that's leeching out into the
interstitial tissue. You're gonna have cut and it will be bleeding,
but you're not going to have this big mass of
hemorrhage around there. The one exception, though, is if you
if you have somebody that's wielding a knife and generates
a stab one and it's got like a big hilt
on it with a handguard and they drive that into
(20:44):
the body. I've seen the handguard generate a contusion or
create echymosis, but that's really the only time. If you're
going to use a steak knife on somebody, you're not
going to see it all right. And then again going
back to the clean edges, there's not going to be
any tissue bridging. And that's what I was referring to,
is as kind of thin little lines of tissue that
(21:05):
still connect one side to the other. That's something you
see in lacerations and cuts or incized injuries are not lacerations.
The medical community for years has you know, they'd love
to throw around the term, particularly an emergency or in
the term lack, which is an abbreviation for laceration. They'll
(21:25):
call everything a lack, and that's not the truth. That's
an incised injury. Laceration is generated by blunt force trauma.
So that's the way we basically look at them and
try to describe them. Now, So for us, there's three
groupings with with sharp force injuries. The first is going
(21:49):
to be a cut or an incised injury. I remember
how I mentioned about the guy that cut his throat,
you know, with a straight razor, Well, that's an incised injury.
If you've ever if you've ever been cutting something like
using a cutting board to cut up vegetables. Most of
the time you're not going to stab yourself with a
(22:09):
knife that you're cutting with. You're actually going to in
size a finger, and so that's this kind of linear
cut that you get that can be really nasty. And
then I think third, we've got what are referred to
as penetrating injuries, and most of the time they're going
(22:33):
to be a puncture. Woe. Okay, so you can have
somebody it's not a bladed instrument, but if you think
about a piece of rebar, like a piece of iron,
I've had people are an impalement, for instance, that's a
(22:54):
puncture one I've had. I think probably one of the
most bizarre cases I've ever had was a young man.
There were five people riding in a car in New
Orleans and a guy was driving. They were in bucket
seats in the front seat. Guy was driving, his girlfriend
was in the front passenger. There were two girls sitting
in the back seat and a dude sitting in the
(23:16):
center between the two women. And this guy was drunk
that was driving. The car ran off of the service
road running next to I ten and hit the chain
link fencing and the support post for the chain link
fencing began feeding through the car and it hit this
guy right in the center of his forehead. I remember
(23:37):
we had to go almost ten yards back with a
seedtling torch and cut out that core sample of his
skin skull, brain and skull and skin and had a
little patch of hair. I'll never forget it had a
little patch of hair on it. It actually taken a
core sample out of his head. That's a puncture wound,
(24:00):
and that's that's how it would be, you know, be classified.
So those are the three.
Speaker 2 (24:07):
Yeah, and you understand I'm going to have to see
that for myself. Do you bring that into court? I
want to see it.
Speaker 1 (24:12):
Well, I think it was brought into court, and it's
certainly in a civil action because I think I think
that that insurance company was in fact suit. And we
spend a lot of time in medical examiner's offices. We
probably spent as probably more time in civil court giving
depositions and that sort of thing than we ever do
in criminal court because there's so much that arises in
(24:34):
insurance claims. Uh so, yeah, those are like, you know,
kind of the three big categories. You know that that
we come up with stab wounds in particular are are
quite fascinating. And I've used this term before. I want
(24:54):
to throw it out to those that haven't heard me
say it when we're trying to identify by stab wounds.
I was taught by a friends that collage years ago
that was this kind of salty old fella, and he said,
always look for the winking eye. And I've used that
term forever. And when you see a stab wound, you
know where the instrument is not in place, it's been withdrawn.
(25:19):
When you look at a single edged weapon or the
injury that's left behind by a single edged weapon, it'll
come to a sharp point where the actual edge of
the blade is and then it's more blunted on the
other side, because that's like the backstrap of the of
the knife, and if you look at it long enough,
it looks like an eye that's squinting. And he always
(25:40):
told me, you know, look for the winking eye. And
when you roll up on a scene and you're trying
to examine a body and they've got I've had cases where,
you know, people have had fifty and sixty stab wounds
all over the bodies. I think the most I've ever
had was well above two hundred on one person because
because once somebody get well, I certainly didn't count a lap, right, Yeah, yeah,
(26:05):
there's a lot of overlap I didn't count them obviously
at the scene. But once the body is undressed and
the body is washed at back at the morgue, right
before you're going to do the autops you have to
track all these wounds. So, you know, we would actually
use probes to insert into the injuries and photograph it
(26:25):
to give an idea of the literally the path of
the wound. And they're they're fascinating to see, but you
you kind of get tired, you know, when you're having
to enumerate all these things. You you know, you see
in movies and whatnot, many times people being shot multiple
times shooting. Tracking wounds with firearms related desks is IS
(26:51):
can be tedious. However, stab wounds in particular, because it's
almost like when people get started stabbing, they don't want
to stop. They it's all. It almost reminds me of
my grandma's old Singer sewing machine. You know, the needle
that's going up and down, you know, and it's only
(27:12):
the needle moves with this, it's all over the place
and they're randomized, and then you'll have stab wounds that
are blended within sized wounds, particularly if you've got an
event where someone is attempting to disfigure somebody, where they're
trying to mark up their face in some way. You
know the old adage, if I can't have you, no
(27:32):
one will have you. You know, you have people and
we've covered Oh, my lord, Dave, I don't know how
many cases of dismemberment just in the last two years.
You know, where you've got bodies that are you know,
you'll have you know, events where people will have ears removed,
(27:53):
noses removed. Actually had a case, a drug case one
time where God had his testicles removed and placed on
the bed next to him, and you couldn't see it
when you arrived at the scene. All you saw were
these two ovoid shapes that were lying and had been
padded down so they didn't have a lot of blood.
But when you pull the comforter back, the bed is
(28:15):
just like super saturated with blood underneath him, whereas testicles
had been removed. And that was in the middle of
a game war that that had happened. Never seen anything
like that. It's quite amazing. The one troubling part of
that was this. There was an EMT that was still
at the scene, and he looked at us as we're
standing there, and he sees those two ovoid objects laying
(28:38):
on the bed and quietly says, are those his eyes?
And I remember saying to him, where does your ambulance operate?
Because I don't want to be anywhere near you if
you're going to.
Speaker 2 (28:52):
Out thinking of his man, Joe, think about the meeting. Okay,
all right, guys, got at it end with this other gang.
We're going to take it to them after you've destroyed everything,
after you've taken their money, after you have taken and
they're all dead before you leave. Here's your initiation. This
is the new guy. Here's what you're gonna do. You
(29:13):
know who comes up with this? And I have what
bobbles my mind? Joe, is there a people who want
to be part of that? I think I'd like to
be in a gang. I think I'd really like to
be in a drug gang. That's that's what I want
to do. I think, you know what, it sounds like
a fun thing to do. Well, here, take a look
at this picture, because this is you in about six months.
Speaker 1 (29:32):
Well, I got to tell you, you know, infamously, there's
there's the old and I've never seen one myself. I've
had people claim they've seen them from and again, this
is reaching back into history here with the drug wars
that went on back in the eighties with the Colombian
the infamous Colombian necktie where they would slice the underneath
(29:54):
of the chin and pull the tongue out through the
base of the floor of of of the you know,
the soft palette they would pull it down. That's actually
size in that area. Yeah, I think it's possible, No,
because I mean, we remove tongues at autopsy all the time.
As a matter of fact, if you're going to do
a thorough autopsy, tongue comes out. We used to refer
(30:16):
to it as tongues, tongue tongue to testicles. It's the
way we would refer to it. And that's particularly if
you're doing an on block dissection.
Speaker 2 (30:25):
Two things that I think I would really like to
do with you, Yeah, one would be to get you
drunk and have you telling stories and report it all.
And the other is to get you with a couple
of your favorite fellas and start sharing war stories. You know,
that I can just record because I'm telling you there's
(30:46):
a TV show waiting to happen.
Speaker 1 (30:48):
Well there is, and you know it's sometimes you have
to try to block all this stuff out of your mind,
and you do want to particularly block out sharp force injuries,
because I got to tell you, friends, out of all
of the injuries that you encounter in the field, sharp
force injuries stay with you forever and ever. We're all
(31:24):
about defining things in forensics, and the reason is is
that if you're involved in sciences, you have to have
an understanding of the data that you're trying to assess.
And I know people think of data from the perspective
of maybe information systems computers, but no, I mean we
(31:48):
collect data too. We collect data in the field and
we collect data at autopsy. And so let me just
give you a brief rundown of injury characteristics, just so
you can frame this out in your brain, particularly if
you're watching some true crime story or you're hearing about
something on a podcast somewhere. Even though we'd appreciate if
(32:11):
you listen to Body Bags, but we know that you
listen to other ones. So let's just kind of go
through these real quick cuts or in sized injuries tend
to be longer than deep. There's the old adage, I
think it might be from the Bard, death by a
thousand cuts. And what he meant by that, or what
they meant by that, is that you can slice somebody
(32:35):
multiple times and it takes a longer period of time
for them to die. Okay, so death by a thousand cuts,
and of course that's an alliteration to something else. But
then you have stab wounds, and stab wounds tend to
be deeper than long. So just because somebody is stabbed
(32:55):
doesn't mean that they're going to die if it's a
single stab wound, because there's no guarantee that you're going
to hit a vital organ, or that even if you
do hit a vital organ, that it's going to be
a terminal event. Okay, because there are people out there
that have had their lungs punctured and got on quite
well afterwards. And then we think about puncture wounds and
(33:18):
puncture wounds as a classification. The one thing you have
to keep in mind is that many times they very
well might imitate gunshot wounds, because most of the time
they're round, circular defects in the body. And I know
I've referred to rebar a lot, and rebar is something
(33:39):
you saw on the streets a lot with the homeless,
because they could take it, file down one end of it,
make a shive or a shank out of it, like
it's used in prison, and wrap one side with duct
tape and carry it in there in their pocket. And
I've had cases where people have been stabbed multiple times
with a piece of rebar and it looks just like
they sustained center mass gunshot onnes multiple times in the chest.
(34:02):
And if you didn't know that it was something other
than as advertised, you might say, yeah, this is a
multiple gunshot one case. So that's kind of the brief rundown.
But Dave, you know, we've had, actually, you know, I wish,
I wish I had them at my fingertips right now,
the number of of dismemberment cases we've actually covered. But
(34:26):
we actually did, I think a couple of years ago,
we did a special, a special show on at Crime.
Speaker 2 (34:32):
Con because we'd had so many stories.
Speaker 1 (34:34):
So many stories, and look, just because these people are
dismembered doesn't mean that that was their cause of death.
And I think in most cases it was not. You know,
you had people that were shooting individuals, you had people
that were suffocating or choking people out. And then yeah,
and then they're just trying to get rid of a body.
But what we have covered in the past, I know,
(34:57):
and one of my I you know, I don't know.
I'm not one of these people that say, well, they're
all like my children. They're not. These episodes are not
what a ghastly family. Uh. But one of my favorite
episodes is our Julius Caesar episode.
Speaker 2 (35:11):
I love more in that episode than I mean in
a purely educational sense. I encourage everyone listen to that
because it wasn't that like one of the.
Speaker 1 (35:19):
First you know, it was the very first documented autopsy
and it was his private, private physician that had done it.
And you know, Caesar was stabbed multiple times, I think
upwards of twenty if I'm not mistaken, when they all
kind of they loved, they used to love, to use
that term, when they all fell upon them with their
(35:40):
daggers and began to stabing. And you know, we learned
in that that there was probably an attempt to emasculating
emasculate him. They had many of those stab wounds that
he had sustained were in the groin area, which you know,
if you're an emperor, that's one of the things that
(36:00):
you would try to do to try to demonstrate your robbering,
robbing him of his manpower and of his pa and
and of his ability to rule effectively and being able
to track those wounds and understand what he went through,
and he had an awareness. He actually cried out. And
of course you know there's the old and I think,
(36:21):
uh Shakespeare made this popular, you know when he did
play Julius Caesar at two brute uh, you know YouTube
brutus and Bruce was like his his best friend. What
was really probably said was my child, why are you
doing this? And because he you know, for whatever reason,
(36:43):
he didn't understand maybe you should have why you know
this was occurring. But you know, these go back forever
and ever. There have been, you know, cases of people
being stabbed and brutalized. I go back. We did an
episode on the King and the car Park with Richard
(37:03):
the Third, you know, where they discovered his body and
he had been brutalized after death, but he had sustained
a sharp force injury to the back of the skull.
It was. As a matter of fact, it was probably
a Halbert that did it, which is kind of one
of these long pike looking things that's got a blade
on it and it's meant to you do it in
(37:23):
cavalry charges and you can slice whether it's kind of
a crescent shaped blade.
Speaker 2 (37:28):
It's a crazy looking weapon, is what it is.
Speaker 1 (37:32):
It's a nightmare, man.
Speaker 2 (37:33):
It's an absolute yet it's it's like death at the
end of a stick.
Speaker 1 (37:37):
Yeah, it really is. And you know, they they shaved
off you know, essentially like the parietal and into the
occipital area of his of his skull, and it exposed
his brain, so you know, and that's that's something that
that was quite remarkable. But interestingly enough, you know, Dave
(37:59):
he had a puncture woe too, because when they had
him trust over a horse after death and they saw
evidence of this on his pelvis, on his pubis. I
think someone had taken There's a dagger that is used
in battle with helmeted soldiers back during the time, and
(38:19):
it's foresighted and they would take this thing and hold
it over ahead and drive it through because it would
actually penetrate armor. And some of the scientists believed that
this thing was done to desecrate his body. This puncture
wound was inserted, you know, between his legs as he
was trussed over this horse where they were going back
(38:42):
into town with his body. Who else had well Sharon
Tate for instance, Tate LaBianca murders, vicious killing, she stabbed
multiple times. She's pregnant and no, yeah, and no they
did not, you know, remove the baby the scene. That
did not happen. But she's pleading for a life. Please,
(39:04):
you know, don't don't kill me. I have a baby.
And again, very brutal blood deposition all over that scene,
which is something that you see consistently in sharp force
injury cases where you will have super saturated areas in
the floor all about the place where people have had
(39:25):
great harm done to them. And it can be even
you know, like I mentioned earlier, it can be even
slices in sized areas. Yeah, they're not deep, but you're
bleeding out because all of these vessels have been you know,
have been compromised.
Speaker 2 (39:38):
Let me ask you a question about the tape murder. Yeah,
Sharon Tate, Okay, because you had a group of individuals.
There wasn't just one on one. There were several. There
was a bunch of people there that night. Yeah, but
you had a gun used on the kids sitting out
front when they when they first came out of text
watching and shoots one of the guys in the car,
Stephen Parent I think it was his name anyway, Yeah,
(40:00):
he gets shot. But then inside the house, you know,
it's knives and chasing down Voytech Praikowski to stab ing
Abigail Folger. They chased her fifty yards and stabbed her
multiple times. I mean, just this constant hacking of people.
Sharon Tate again, almost a tortured time, you know, of
killing of her, begging for the life of her unborn child.
(40:23):
Jay Sebring was there because he was still in love
with Sharon Tate even though she had married Roman Polanski.
But then they tied a rope to the neck of
Sharon and dropped it over a beam and tied it
to Jay Sebring. A lot of it was for show.
But are many times when a crime is taking place,
don't they just stay with one method of destruction, meaning
(40:47):
a knife. There's not usually a blurring.
Speaker 1 (40:51):
Yeah, it's a good question. Well, if you have multiple
if you have multiple actors, bad actors at a scene,
they might show up with whatever makes them feel comfortable.
Tex Watson preferred to have this revolver with him, you know,
and he and if I remember correctly, he handed out
in ives. Remember what they said, and they even use
(41:12):
this quote. I think Tarantino lifted this for once upon
a time in Hollywood. Manson had told them to make
it look witchy is the term that they had used.
And of course they famously wrote and I can't remember
was it pigs I think on the wall pigs and rise,
(41:32):
you know which obviously we just have covered Jeffrey McDonald.
I think I probably failed to mention this, but in
their home at Fort Bragg, the word pigs was written
in there too, again echoing the Manson murders that had taken.
Speaker 2 (41:47):
Which, by the way, there was an article in Esquire
magazine in Jeffrey McDonald's living room right next to the
counch he was sitting on that had been opened to
an article about the Manson family murders, and it mentioned
the word pig being written in blood. That was one
of the things that tied Jeffrey McDonald to that crime,
where they were like, well, dude, wait a minute, you
(42:08):
know you've got it right from here.
Speaker 1 (42:10):
Yeah. Yeah, that there's wild hits off running all over
the place. Yeah, and that was still fear. And I
think that, you know, the McDonald's case had occurred prior
to them affecting an arrest in the Tate Lobiyanca cases.
It was for a lot of the info.
Speaker 2 (42:28):
Actually McDonald was February seventeenth of nineteen seventy. You had
the Tate Lobyanca murders in August August sixty nine, but
the arrest came in October November. It was kind of
scattered before it all came together. The prosecution of that
case was much later. You know, it took time, so
I'm not sure the exact dates. I was a little kid,
(42:49):
but yeah, it was. It was enough that there was
information coming out, but copycat stuff was going on, and
that's where the whole McDonald thing got in.
Speaker 1 (43:00):
And you know, you think about, well, if you're going
to go in and commit a mass killing. By the way,
they didn't know that they the Manson family. They didn't
know that the Polanski's were occupying that space. They thought
that it was still the beach boy guy, I think,
the manager.
Speaker 2 (43:17):
And actually they thought it was Doris Day's.
Speaker 1 (43:19):
Son, doors STA's son, that's right, Terry.
Speaker 2 (43:22):
Melcher's home at Colo Drive, and Terry it was the
one who had actually had Charlie Manson come in and
play a song and went out and heard him because
Manson had this idea that he was going to be
this big rock star, and Terry Melcher went out and
hurt him and went, I don't think so, but Dennis
Wilson had befriended him. And as a matter of fact,
you know, the Beach Boys recorded a Manson song.
Speaker 1 (43:44):
Do you know that they did? I forgot they did.
So you know, you've got this place out of all
the places, you know, they show up and these four
people are just there totally, you know, just hanging out
in This poor kid out in the car. He was
just a random kid with a trends of radio that
he was.
Speaker 2 (44:02):
Yeah, trying to sell a radio to the kid to
live there. Just two guys doing guy stuff.
Speaker 1 (44:07):
Yeah, I know. But when you think about the Manson
I think probably the Manson killings were famously, for years,
the most prominent when it came to sharp force injuries.
People thinking about it, because you know, they did that
ridiculous movie that was based on Bugelosi's Helter Skelter, which
(44:32):
I think, you know, he's full of it in the
first place, and then.
Speaker 2 (44:37):
The way he also wrote a book about Kennedy assassination
that says Oswald did it just so yeah.
Speaker 1 (44:43):
I know, and again he's full of crap. But you know,
in that movie, I think that they actually portrayed a
serving fork being inserted into the stomach and it infamously
bounces up and down, and it's some of the stuff
is absolutely ridiculous. Trust me, the scenes are horrific enough
(45:05):
when it comes to sharp force's injuries and you know
kind of what is revealed to you in these environments,
and it is literally, you know, as old as time
when it comes to sharpforce's injuries because you don't know
what form they're going to come in, you don't know
(45:26):
what instrument might be used. In many ways, I think
that it's probably easier for us to ascertain firearms related
deaths and the origins of the projectiles than it is
relative to knives. So sharp force injuries, again some of
the most difficult cases to interpret. But it's something that
(45:50):
we do in the medical legal community every single day.
It's something that we view and here's what we can
take away. We can get an idea of the relationship.
And I don't mean like in a societal sense. I'm
talking about a physical relationship between the perpetrator and the victim.
We understand that they were very close. We understand that
(46:12):
there can be transfer of evidence. We understand that it's
going to be very brutal, and generally the more stabs
or cuts that a victim has, the more passion comes
along with it. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is
body Bags
Quody diamonds, but Joseph's gotten more. It was a really
cold morning. Matter of fact, folks around town said that
there would be ice that day. It was the morning
of January the thirtieth, sixteen forty nine, and the Head
of State, the King of England, walked across the banqueting
(00:26):
floor in the main chamber at the Banqueting House, part
of Whitehall Palace in London, literally right down the road
from present day Parlament. It wasn't a normal strawl. He
was walking to a window, and outside of that window
(00:51):
there had been built a scaffold, and as he stepped
through the window, the cold wind cut through. He had
asked for extra clothing that morning so that the crowd
could not see him shivering, because he didn't want to
give the impression that he was afraid. For a moment,
(01:15):
he looked out over the crowd. He knew that the
crowd was so vast they'd never hear what he would
have to say. He looked at the two attendants and
the executioner told them that he was not guilty of
the charges of which he had been found guilty of.
And then he turned to the executioner and says when
(01:38):
I kneel down and lay my head on the block,
I'm going to pray, and when I extend my arms,
that will be your signal to swing the axe. In
that one moment, Europe changed. Europe changed because it was
(01:58):
viewed that all power derived from God through their sovereign.
And as Charles's head rolled over the surface of that scaffold,
the executioner, wearing a homemade mask and a wig, picked
(02:20):
it up, displayed it to the crowd, and then tossed
it to them. In that one moment, a simple tool
was used of aheading axe weighted on one side blunt,
but on the other side a crescent shaped blade razor
(02:43):
sharp had cut through the neck of the Sovereign of England.
Today we're going to learn a bit more about sharp
force injuries and people die as a result of them
every day. Not just my mind arcs. I'm Joseph Scott
Morgan and this is Bodybags. I tried to find the
(03:10):
Banqueting House many times. I finally found it when I
was walking down the streets of London day because I'd
heard the story for years and years. A Man for
All Seasons. If you've ever seen that movie, Richard Harris
and Let's see what's his name. Alec Guinnis played the
King powerful movie. There was another generation of it that
(03:34):
came out with Tim Roth playing the part of Oliver Cromwell.
Can't remember who the king was, but I'd heard about
it for years and years. I'd seen the movies and
it was a seminal time. But you know, Dave, over
a long period of time in Europe, heads were rolling
(03:59):
off everywhere, you know, all the way up you know,
through the French Revolution, they became i think, dis settled
over the guillotine for a very short period of time
and then reinstituted it as a humane way of bringing
about death.
Speaker 2 (04:15):
Okay, it seems like it's a pretty humane way, you know,
the guillotine. Okay, look, you know it's coming, Lay your
head down, pop, it's over.
Speaker 1 (04:23):
Yeah. Yeah, And to me it does. I think it's
the spectacle of it all. And as a matter of fact,
if you go and search last guillotine execution in France,
there is an image and it's real grainy that pops up.
A photograph was taken in a courtyard of the last
(04:46):
guy to be executed by guillotine in the nineteen twenties. Wow,
And yeah, you can see the length of his body
and he's like laying on a board because they you
have to kind of, you know, shimmy up this and
lay there. And I don't know if they you know,
some images I've seen show them strapping you down to
(05:08):
this thing and whatnot. But yeah, the head would pop
right off and you've got this delivery of energy that
transfers from that back weighted blade to that fine thin
edge that has been honed down so that it's razor
sharp and it passes right through the tissue and the
(05:29):
bone and the musculature. But you know, that's that's an
example of what we would call an incized injury. It's
not a stab wound, obviously, and it's not a punctural
woman that's for sure. And sharp force injuries coming up
in a variety of of of styles, I guess you
(05:54):
would say, uh, and you can you can arrive at
them with any number of instruments that are out there.
Speaker 2 (06:01):
But going back to the guillotine, because you know, we
did an entire episode on and putting people to death,
you know, and I don't understand that I'm missing something here.
You know, we have the putting them to sleep thing
with chemicals, right, and we've got people fighting over that.
(06:21):
One's inhumane. And then we've got the gunshot where we
had the guys miss you know, I'm firing squad. It
seems like, I mean, really, was there ever a failure
where the guillotine didn't actually chop the dude's head off.
Speaker 1 (06:37):
I don't know about the guillotine, however, there were several
failures relative to what we'll refer to as long swords.
If you go back in time, like during the time
of Elizabeth and I urge anybody if you've Buckingham Palace
is all cool and everything, but if you're going to
go to one royal spot in Great Britain in London,
(06:59):
rather make sure that you go to the Tower of London.
Because you say the Tower of London, you think it's
a standalone tower. It's not. It's a palace. And in
the courtyard there you know where the famous ravens are
that have had their wings clipped, and the beef eaters,
the soldiers retired soldiers that walk around in those really cool,
(07:19):
odd looking uniforms. It's still an active part of the
royal family. And that's where executions were taking place. As
a matter of fact, where they took place, I think,
if memory serves me correctly, almost all of Henry the
Eights wives were killed there, and including Anne Boleyn. Their bodies,
(07:42):
as it turned out, were actually buried in the chapel
that's adjacent. We've been in the chapel and have seen
that area. And back then during that period of time,
they used long swords and there was like a severe
punishment for an executioner that did not that did not
(08:03):
do their task, uh, to the point where it was
a death that was met quickly.
Speaker 2 (08:10):
Uh.
Speaker 1 (08:11):
And one one of the things that's interesting about blade
executions is that with axes, axes and blades in Great
Britain in particular, those types of executions were considered to
be swift and painless, and they were held they were
they were set aside for those individuals that were of rank,
(08:34):
that were nobility. The rest of everybody would be you know, uh,
hung or drawn quartered and hung, which if you've ever
seen Brave Heart, there's a description of that. You can
see the ending scene with mel Gibson, you know, uh,
(08:56):
being essentially cut into small pieces. Uh. Not much of
that movie was historically based, but that part was actually true. Uh,
So you know, it's been an evolution. It's been an
evolution of these events over a long period of time.
And going back to the executions with long swords in
(09:20):
Great Britain, Dave the they didn't use during the time
of Elizabeth and Henry Dais. They didn't use English swordsmen.
They actually employed French swordsmen that would come over and
do the execution because they were considered to be better
at it.
Speaker 2 (09:38):
Kind of crazy when you start thinking about being better
at being a swordsman for cutting up ahead. You know,
it seems like something my son, my grandson, Braylan would
probably be pretty good at it.
Speaker 1 (09:48):
You know, yeah, wielding wielding that sword. I can't imagine
that it that it would be very fulfilling work. As
a matter of fact, with Charles first, Uh, they had
to find somebody else to do it because you know,
this idea that all power derived from God for the
(10:09):
head of state, no pun intended, and the executioners refused
to do it because they felt as though that the
individual that they would be killing was appointed by God,
and so they There's been a lot of stories. No
one actually knows who the executioners were, but there was
(10:29):
an executioner and an assistant and they actually were paid
one hundred pounds in order to do this, and one
hundred pounds during that period of time was a monumental
fee to do this. But you have to understand whoever
decided to wield that sword did it, you know, under
(10:52):
penalty of pain that could come about at any moment
in time. They themselves could be killed by loyalists to
the royal family. They would be known, their families would
be known for years and years to come. So kind
of an interesting, interesting turn. But for me, when I
began as a death investigator, I think that some of
(11:16):
the most fascinating cases that I ever worked, Dave came
about as a result of sharp force injuries. And not
all sharp force injuries are ruled as as homicides. You know,
we think about sharp force, we think about individuals that
are being stabbed and cut and all these sort of things.
(11:38):
And yeah, there's tons of those. Knives in particular, are
easy to get your hands on, people can carry them,
they're easily concealed. But for the most part, you know,
I had a lot of self inflicted injuries using knives
(12:00):
slashing of wrist, that sort of thing. I had one
guy that cut his throat with a straight razor to
take his own life. And then I've had tons of
accidental deaths that involved sharp force or penetrating injuries. I've
had people that have been run over by lawnmowers, had
their feet cut off, and bled to death. One case
(12:26):
in particular involved a guy that got caught up in
the prop of a boat. Until you have seen those
kinds of injuries, you can't really appreciate how horrific a
sharp force injury is, the way it literally, the mechanical
nature of it, the way it chews up a body.
(12:47):
And even if you had had with that guy with
a prop injury, even if you had had a team
of surgeons standing by, I don't think that his life
would have been salvagable. It's important to understand that with
(13:13):
sharp force injuries, you you come away with an appreciation
that probably in cases of homicides next to next to
firearms related deaths, Dave, I'd have to say that sharp
force injuries are the number two. They're number two when
(13:35):
it comes to committing murder. And again it goes it
goes to this idea you know that we've talked about
over you know, years now that many deaths are are
rooted in some kind of relational thing. And when you
have domestic events that occur in particular and you've got
(13:58):
a kitchen, they're looking for access an opportunity, and one
of the you know, kind of fallback positions is I'm
going to go get the kitchen knife and I'm going
to go to work, and that's what happens many times. Wow,
you know, Joe.
Speaker 2 (14:15):
One of the things about using a knife that petrifies me,
it's not would not be my go to weapon, is
because of the idea of slipping, you know, like and
we have this all the time in stories we cover
where the person using the knife, unless they're experienced with them,
they cut themselves. And knowing how bloody scenes get when
(14:36):
you've got cuts going on, that'd be my one big
pay if you are not wearing gloves your hands slipping
on that knife.
Speaker 1 (14:42):
Yeah, you know, there's a the nature of blood for me,
at least because I've had this happen in The Mork,
you know, utilizing scalpels and even needles. I've cut myself
multiple times in The Mork over the yearly. Yeah, I've
stabbed myself with needles. I've you know, and terrifying, you
know when this happens, because I came of age during
(15:04):
the height of the AIDS epidemic and you know, we
were always getting tested and those sorts of things, and
you know, it's quite terrifying. There's something about the nature
of blood though that people think blood is like really tacky,
and it is, you know, it gets real sticky, but
there's something it's almost a fat like quality, so that
(15:27):
whatever you're holding onto becomes almost lubricated with blood. It's
not like water. There's a different sense to it. And so, yeah,
you're right on point. We have a lot of cases
where people will cut themselves as they're wielding some type
of sharp instrument, and of course they wind up commingling
their blood and you know, from a bigger picture of
(15:49):
their DNA with that of the victim. And that's one
of the reasons that if you have a suspect in
beatings and stabbings and that sort of thing, you're always
going to look at their hands to see if they
have injuries, if they're wearing, you know, some type of
bandage on your hand. G Man how'd you get that?
You know? Are you okay? Do you need a skitch
(16:10):
your medical help? No? No, no, no, it's it's just
a one. Hey, do you mind taking the bandage off
so we can see it? And you look at it.
It ain't healing, it's fresh. Wow. And they've never gotten
help for it, or they haven't been given help for
it because they haven't asked for it because they're trying
to disguise it.
Speaker 2 (16:27):
That would be O. J. Simpson and his first discussion
with police after arriving back from Chicago less than twenty
four hours after the death of Ron Goldman and Nicole Brown.
Simpson and hey, OJ, well, what you got going on there?
On your finger?
Speaker 1 (16:42):
Yeah? Left cut?
Speaker 2 (16:45):
Yeah, on his finger. I don't know if that's you know,
just saying it just seemed obvious. But it was in
an odd place on the outside of the left hand.
Speaker 1 (16:54):
You know.
Speaker 2 (16:54):
That's what I always seem to think that it would
have to be if you if you're trying to stab
some buddy or slice I guess you know what. It's
not a weapon I would choose to use, so I
can't really get a good handle on how it would
be used.
Speaker 1 (17:07):
No pun intended so no, and the left hand is
not an odd odd place because if you're if you're
trying to restrain somebody and holding them down with your
left hand and your right hand and you're wilding a knife,
you know, there's that, you know, there's a high probability
you could nick yourself. And look, I mean even guys
(17:29):
that are special operations, people that are trained in sharp
force are uh sharp force instrument use you know, in
a combat situation there most of them, that's not their
first choice. As a matter of fact, it's generally a
last resort. They'd much rather be shooting people than trying
to go head to head with somebody with a knife.
(17:51):
It's it's you know, it's the the last resort that
you're going to reach down. You're going to have a
knife at your you know, at your hand to try
to keep keep people away. So I'm thinking about what's
what's the uh uh, what's the uh Clinny the case
out of Miami with the only fans mid Yeah, Courtney Clinne.
(18:12):
I heard a UH special operations guy talk one time
many years ago. Somebody had asked him a question about, uh,
is there any truth to people that are expert with
knives and throwing knives, and he said, why in the
world would you if that is your last weapon, why
are you going to take it and throw it at somebody?
(18:33):
He's like, we're going to hold onto it and we're
going to carve you up. And and I think about her,
you know, scoring that shot in the subclave, on that
poor young man, and he bleeds out the odds of
that happening are slim and none, both in the sentence,
and you know, it's just it's it's it's highly implausible.
(18:56):
But you know, when we think about when we think
about think about sharp force injuries, here's kind of how
we examine them and the annotations that we make. First off,
with sharp force injuries, how do we define them, Well,
they're going to have clean edges. What does that mean, Morgan?
(19:18):
Why are you saying clean edges? Well, if you're hit
with a baseball bat and it tears the skin, that's
a laceration, and we're going to do a whole nother
lecture on blunt force trauma. Clean edges implies that you've
got a milled weapon, something that has got a mechanically
(19:39):
created blade with an edge on it, and when a
slice is made. If you think about slicing something, if
you look at whether it's a package you're going to
open at home with a knife, or if you're cutting
into a steak, if you look at the edges, or
as we refer to the margins, the web of the injury,
(20:02):
they're going to be clean. You're not going to have
interconnecting tissue there, so you've got this clean edge. That's
one of the first things we look for. Generally, there's
no what we refer to as ekamosis, which is a
fancy term for bruising around that area. So it's not
like somebody has been pounded on where if you pound somebody,
(20:22):
you've got that the blood that's leeching out into the
interstitial tissue. You're gonna have cut and it will be bleeding,
but you're not going to have this big mass of
hemorrhage around there. The one exception, though, is if you
if you have somebody that's wielding a knife and generates
a stab one and it's got like a big hilt
on it with a handguard and they drive that into
(20:44):
the body. I've seen the handguard generate a contusion or
create echymosis, but that's really the only time. If you're
going to use a steak knife on somebody, you're not
going to see it all right. And then again going
back to the clean edges, there's not going to be
any tissue bridging. And that's what I was referring to,
is as kind of thin little lines of tissue that
(21:05):
still connect one side to the other. That's something you
see in lacerations and cuts or incized injuries are not lacerations.
The medical community for years has you know, they'd love
to throw around the term, particularly an emergency or in
the term lack, which is an abbreviation for laceration. They'll
(21:25):
call everything a lack, and that's not the truth. That's
an incised injury. Laceration is generated by blunt force trauma.
So that's the way we basically look at them and
try to describe them. Now, So for us, there's three
groupings with with sharp force injuries. The first is going
(21:49):
to be a cut or an incised injury. I remember
how I mentioned about the guy that cut his throat,
you know, with a straight razor, Well, that's an incised injury.
If you've ever if you've ever been cutting something like
using a cutting board to cut up vegetables. Most of
the time you're not going to stab yourself with a
(22:09):
knife that you're cutting with. You're actually going to in
size a finger, and so that's this kind of linear
cut that you get that can be really nasty. And
then I think third, we've got what are referred to
as penetrating injuries, and most of the time they're going
(22:33):
to be a puncture. Woe. Okay, so you can have
somebody it's not a bladed instrument, but if you think
about a piece of rebar, like a piece of iron,
I've had people are an impalement, for instance, that's a
(22:54):
puncture one I've had. I think probably one of the
most bizarre cases I've ever had was a young man.
There were five people riding in a car in New
Orleans and a guy was driving. They were in bucket
seats in the front seat. Guy was driving, his girlfriend
was in the front passenger. There were two girls sitting
in the back seat and a dude sitting in the
(23:16):
center between the two women. And this guy was drunk
that was driving. The car ran off of the service
road running next to I ten and hit the chain
link fencing and the support post for the chain link
fencing began feeding through the car and it hit this
guy right in the center of his forehead. I remember
(23:37):
we had to go almost ten yards back with a
seedtling torch and cut out that core sample of his
skin skull, brain and skull and skin and had a
little patch of hair. I'll never forget it had a
little patch of hair on it. It actually taken a
core sample out of his head. That's a puncture wound,
(24:00):
and that's that's how it would be, you know, be classified.
So those are the three.
Speaker 2 (24:07):
Yeah, and you understand I'm going to have to see
that for myself. Do you bring that into court? I
want to see it.
Speaker 1 (24:12):
Well, I think it was brought into court, and it's
certainly in a civil action because I think I think
that that insurance company was in fact suit. And we
spend a lot of time in medical examiner's offices. We
probably spent as probably more time in civil court giving
depositions and that sort of thing than we ever do
in criminal court because there's so much that arises in
(24:34):
insurance claims. Uh so, yeah, those are like, you know,
kind of the three big categories. You know that that
we come up with stab wounds in particular are are
quite fascinating. And I've used this term before. I want
(24:54):
to throw it out to those that haven't heard me
say it when we're trying to identify by stab wounds.
I was taught by a friends that collage years ago
that was this kind of salty old fella, and he said,
always look for the winking eye. And I've used that
term forever. And when you see a stab wound, you
know where the instrument is not in place, it's been withdrawn.
(25:19):
When you look at a single edged weapon or the
injury that's left behind by a single edged weapon, it'll
come to a sharp point where the actual edge of
the blade is and then it's more blunted on the
other side, because that's like the backstrap of the of
the knife, and if you look at it long enough,
it looks like an eye that's squinting. And he always
(25:40):
told me, you know, look for the winking eye. And
when you roll up on a scene and you're trying
to examine a body and they've got I've had cases where,
you know, people have had fifty and sixty stab wounds
all over the bodies. I think the most I've ever
had was well above two hundred on one person because
because once somebody get well, I certainly didn't count a lap, right, Yeah, yeah,
(26:05):
there's a lot of overlap I didn't count them obviously
at the scene. But once the body is undressed and
the body is washed at back at the morgue, right
before you're going to do the autops you have to
track all these wounds. So, you know, we would actually
use probes to insert into the injuries and photograph it
(26:25):
to give an idea of the literally the path of
the wound. And they're they're fascinating to see, but you
you kind of get tired, you know, when you're having
to enumerate all these things. You you know, you see
in movies and whatnot, many times people being shot multiple
times shooting. Tracking wounds with firearms related desks is IS
(26:51):
can be tedious. However, stab wounds in particular, because it's
almost like when people get started stabbing, they don't want
to stop. They it's all. It almost reminds me of
my grandma's old Singer sewing machine. You know, the needle
that's going up and down, you know, and it's only
(27:12):
the needle moves with this, it's all over the place
and they're randomized, and then you'll have stab wounds that
are blended within sized wounds, particularly if you've got an
event where someone is attempting to disfigure somebody, where they're
trying to mark up their face in some way. You
know the old adage, if I can't have you, no
(27:32):
one will have you. You know, you have people and
we've covered Oh, my lord, Dave, I don't know how
many cases of dismemberment just in the last two years.
You know, where you've got bodies that are you know,
you'll have you know, events where people will have ears removed,
(27:53):
noses removed. Actually had a case, a drug case one
time where God had his testicles removed and placed on
the bed next to him, and you couldn't see it
when you arrived at the scene. All you saw were
these two ovoid shapes that were lying and had been
padded down so they didn't have a lot of blood.
But when you pull the comforter back, the bed is
(28:15):
just like super saturated with blood underneath him, whereas testicles
had been removed. And that was in the middle of
a game war that that had happened. Never seen anything
like that. It's quite amazing. The one troubling part of
that was this. There was an EMT that was still
at the scene, and he looked at us as we're
standing there, and he sees those two ovoid objects laying
(28:38):
on the bed and quietly says, are those his eyes?
And I remember saying to him, where does your ambulance operate?
Because I don't want to be anywhere near you if
you're going to.
Speaker 2 (28:52):
Out thinking of his man, Joe, think about the meeting. Okay,
all right, guys, got at it end with this other gang.
We're going to take it to them after you've destroyed everything,
after you've taken their money, after you have taken and
they're all dead before you leave. Here's your initiation. This
is the new guy. Here's what you're gonna do. You
(29:13):
know who comes up with this? And I have what
bobbles my mind? Joe, is there a people who want
to be part of that? I think I'd like to
be in a gang. I think I'd really like to
be in a drug gang. That's that's what I want
to do. I think, you know what, it sounds like
a fun thing to do. Well, here, take a look
at this picture, because this is you in about six months.
Speaker 1 (29:32):
Well, I got to tell you, you know, infamously, there's
there's the old and I've never seen one myself. I've
had people claim they've seen them from and again, this
is reaching back into history here with the drug wars
that went on back in the eighties with the Colombian
the infamous Colombian necktie where they would slice the underneath
(29:54):
of the chin and pull the tongue out through the
base of the floor of of of the you know,
the soft palette they would pull it down. That's actually
size in that area. Yeah, I think it's possible, No,
because I mean, we remove tongues at autopsy all the time.
As a matter of fact, if you're going to do
a thorough autopsy, tongue comes out. We used to refer
(30:16):
to it as tongues, tongue tongue to testicles. It's the
way we would refer to it. And that's particularly if
you're doing an on block dissection.
Speaker 2 (30:25):
Two things that I think I would really like to
do with you, Yeah, one would be to get you
drunk and have you telling stories and report it all.
And the other is to get you with a couple
of your favorite fellas and start sharing war stories. You know,
that I can just record because I'm telling you there's
(30:46):
a TV show waiting to happen.
Speaker 1 (30:48):
Well there is, and you know it's sometimes you have
to try to block all this stuff out of your mind,
and you do want to particularly block out sharp force injuries,
because I got to tell you, friends, out of all
of the injuries that you encounter in the field, sharp
force injuries stay with you forever and ever. We're all
(31:24):
about defining things in forensics, and the reason is is
that if you're involved in sciences, you have to have
an understanding of the data that you're trying to assess.
And I know people think of data from the perspective
of maybe information systems computers, but no, I mean we
(31:48):
collect data too. We collect data in the field and
we collect data at autopsy. And so let me just
give you a brief rundown of injury characteristics, just so
you can frame this out in your brain, particularly if
you're watching some true crime story or you're hearing about
something on a podcast somewhere. Even though we'd appreciate if
(32:11):
you listen to Body Bags, but we know that you
listen to other ones. So let's just kind of go
through these real quick cuts or in sized injuries tend
to be longer than deep. There's the old adage, I
think it might be from the Bard, death by a
thousand cuts. And what he meant by that, or what
they meant by that, is that you can slice somebody
(32:35):
multiple times and it takes a longer period of time
for them to die. Okay, so death by a thousand cuts,
and of course that's an alliteration to something else. But
then you have stab wounds, and stab wounds tend to
be deeper than long. So just because somebody is stabbed
(32:55):
doesn't mean that they're going to die if it's a
single stab wound, because there's no guarantee that you're going
to hit a vital organ, or that even if you
do hit a vital organ, that it's going to be
a terminal event. Okay, because there are people out there
that have had their lungs punctured and got on quite
well afterwards. And then we think about puncture wounds and
(33:18):
puncture wounds as a classification. The one thing you have
to keep in mind is that many times they very
well might imitate gunshot wounds, because most of the time
they're round, circular defects in the body. And I know
I've referred to rebar a lot, and rebar is something
(33:39):
you saw on the streets a lot with the homeless,
because they could take it, file down one end of it,
make a shive or a shank out of it, like
it's used in prison, and wrap one side with duct
tape and carry it in there in their pocket. And
I've had cases where people have been stabbed multiple times
with a piece of rebar and it looks just like
they sustained center mass gunshot onnes multiple times in the chest.
(34:02):
And if you didn't know that it was something other
than as advertised, you might say, yeah, this is a
multiple gunshot one case. So that's kind of the brief rundown.
But Dave, you know, we've had, actually, you know, I wish,
I wish I had them at my fingertips right now,
the number of of dismemberment cases we've actually covered. But
(34:26):
we actually did, I think a couple of years ago,
we did a special, a special show on at Crime.
Speaker 2 (34:32):
Con because we'd had so many stories.
Speaker 1 (34:34):
So many stories, and look, just because these people are
dismembered doesn't mean that that was their cause of death.
And I think in most cases it was not. You know,
you had people that were shooting individuals, you had people
that were suffocating or choking people out. And then yeah,
and then they're just trying to get rid of a body.
But what we have covered in the past, I know,
(34:57):
and one of my I you know, I don't know.
I'm not one of these people that say, well, they're
all like my children. They're not. These episodes are not
what a ghastly family. Uh. But one of my favorite
episodes is our Julius Caesar episode.
Speaker 2 (35:11):
I love more in that episode than I mean in
a purely educational sense. I encourage everyone listen to that
because it wasn't that like one of the.
Speaker 1 (35:19):
First you know, it was the very first documented autopsy
and it was his private, private physician that had done it.
And you know, Caesar was stabbed multiple times, I think
upwards of twenty if I'm not mistaken, when they all
kind of they loved, they used to love, to use
that term, when they all fell upon them with their
(35:40):
daggers and began to stabing. And you know, we learned
in that that there was probably an attempt to emasculating
emasculate him. They had many of those stab wounds that
he had sustained were in the groin area, which you know,
if you're an emperor, that's one of the things that
(36:00):
you would try to do to try to demonstrate your robbering,
robbing him of his manpower and of his pa and
and of his ability to rule effectively and being able
to track those wounds and understand what he went through,
and he had an awareness. He actually cried out. And
of course you know there's the old and I think,
(36:21):
uh Shakespeare made this popular, you know when he did
play Julius Caesar at two brute uh, you know YouTube
brutus and Bruce was like his his best friend. What
was really probably said was my child, why are you
doing this? And because he you know, for whatever reason,
(36:43):
he didn't understand maybe you should have why you know
this was occurring. But you know, these go back forever
and ever. There have been, you know, cases of people
being stabbed and brutalized. I go back. We did an
episode on the King and the car Park with Richard
(37:03):
the Third, you know, where they discovered his body and
he had been brutalized after death, but he had sustained
a sharp force injury to the back of the skull.
It was. As a matter of fact, it was probably
a Halbert that did it, which is kind of one
of these long pike looking things that's got a blade
on it and it's meant to you do it in
(37:23):
cavalry charges and you can slice whether it's kind of
a crescent shaped blade.
Speaker 2 (37:28):
It's a crazy looking weapon, is what it is.
Speaker 1 (37:32):
It's a nightmare, man.
Speaker 2 (37:33):
It's an absolute yet it's it's like death at the
end of a stick.
Speaker 1 (37:37):
Yeah, it really is. And you know, they they shaved
off you know, essentially like the parietal and into the
occipital area of his of his skull, and it exposed
his brain, so you know, and that's that's something that
that was quite remarkable. But interestingly enough, you know, Dave
(37:59):
he had a puncture woe too, because when they had
him trust over a horse after death and they saw
evidence of this on his pelvis, on his pubis. I
think someone had taken There's a dagger that is used
in battle with helmeted soldiers back during the time, and
(38:19):
it's foresighted and they would take this thing and hold
it over ahead and drive it through because it would
actually penetrate armor. And some of the scientists believed that
this thing was done to desecrate his body. This puncture
wound was inserted, you know, between his legs as he
was trussed over this horse where they were going back
(38:42):
into town with his body. Who else had well Sharon
Tate for instance, Tate LaBianca murders, vicious killing, she stabbed
multiple times. She's pregnant and no, yeah, and no they
did not, you know, remove the baby the scene. That
did not happen. But she's pleading for a life. Please,
(39:04):
you know, don't don't kill me. I have a baby.
And again, very brutal blood deposition all over that scene,
which is something that you see consistently in sharp force
injury cases where you will have super saturated areas in
the floor all about the place where people have had
(39:25):
great harm done to them. And it can be even
you know, like I mentioned earlier, it can be even
slices in sized areas. Yeah, they're not deep, but you're
bleeding out because all of these vessels have been you know,
have been compromised.
Speaker 2 (39:38):
Let me ask you a question about the tape murder. Yeah,
Sharon Tate, Okay, because you had a group of individuals.
There wasn't just one on one. There were several. There
was a bunch of people there that night. Yeah, but
you had a gun used on the kids sitting out
front when they when they first came out of text
watching and shoots one of the guys in the car,
Stephen Parent I think it was his name anyway, Yeah,
(40:00):
he gets shot. But then inside the house, you know,
it's knives and chasing down Voytech Praikowski to stab ing
Abigail Folger. They chased her fifty yards and stabbed her
multiple times. I mean, just this constant hacking of people.
Sharon Tate again, almost a tortured time, you know, of
killing of her, begging for the life of her unborn child.
(40:23):
Jay Sebring was there because he was still in love
with Sharon Tate even though she had married Roman Polanski.
But then they tied a rope to the neck of
Sharon and dropped it over a beam and tied it
to Jay Sebring. A lot of it was for show.
But are many times when a crime is taking place,
don't they just stay with one method of destruction, meaning
(40:47):
a knife. There's not usually a blurring.
Speaker 1 (40:51):
Yeah, it's a good question. Well, if you have multiple
if you have multiple actors, bad actors at a scene,
they might show up with whatever makes them feel comfortable.
Tex Watson preferred to have this revolver with him, you know,
and he and if I remember correctly, he handed out
in ives. Remember what they said, and they even use
(41:12):
this quote. I think Tarantino lifted this for once upon
a time in Hollywood. Manson had told them to make
it look witchy is the term that they had used.
And of course they famously wrote and I can't remember
was it pigs I think on the wall pigs and rise,
(41:32):
you know which obviously we just have covered Jeffrey McDonald.
I think I probably failed to mention this, but in
their home at Fort Bragg, the word pigs was written
in there too, again echoing the Manson murders that had taken.
Speaker 2 (41:47):
Which, by the way, there was an article in Esquire
magazine in Jeffrey McDonald's living room right next to the
counch he was sitting on that had been opened to
an article about the Manson family murders, and it mentioned
the word pig being written in blood. That was one
of the things that tied Jeffrey McDonald to that crime,
where they were like, well, dude, wait a minute, you
(42:08):
know you've got it right from here.
Speaker 1 (42:10):
Yeah. Yeah, that there's wild hits off running all over
the place. Yeah, and that was still fear. And I
think that, you know, the McDonald's case had occurred prior
to them affecting an arrest in the Tate Lobiyanca cases.
It was for a lot of the info.
Speaker 2 (42:28):
Actually McDonald was February seventeenth of nineteen seventy. You had
the Tate Lobyanca murders in August August sixty nine, but
the arrest came in October November. It was kind of
scattered before it all came together. The prosecution of that
case was much later. You know, it took time, so
I'm not sure the exact dates. I was a little kid,
(42:49):
but yeah, it was. It was enough that there was
information coming out, but copycat stuff was going on, and
that's where the whole McDonald thing got in.
Speaker 1 (43:00):
And you know, you think about, well, if you're going
to go in and commit a mass killing. By the way,
they didn't know that they the Manson family. They didn't
know that the Polanski's were occupying that space. They thought
that it was still the beach boy guy, I think,
the manager.
Speaker 2 (43:17):
And actually they thought it was Doris Day's.
Speaker 1 (43:19):
Son, doors STA's son, that's right, Terry.
Speaker 2 (43:22):
Melcher's home at Colo Drive, and Terry it was the
one who had actually had Charlie Manson come in and
play a song and went out and heard him because
Manson had this idea that he was going to be
this big rock star, and Terry Melcher went out and
hurt him and went, I don't think so, but Dennis
Wilson had befriended him. And as a matter of fact,
you know, the Beach Boys recorded a Manson song.
Speaker 1 (43:44):
Do you know that they did? I forgot they did.
So you know, you've got this place out of all
the places, you know, they show up and these four
people are just there totally, you know, just hanging out
in This poor kid out in the car. He was
just a random kid with a trends of radio that
he was.
Speaker 2 (44:02):
Yeah, trying to sell a radio to the kid to
live there. Just two guys doing guy stuff.
Speaker 1 (44:07):
Yeah, I know. But when you think about the Manson
I think probably the Manson killings were famously, for years,
the most prominent when it came to sharp force injuries.
People thinking about it, because you know, they did that
ridiculous movie that was based on Bugelosi's Helter Skelter, which
(44:32):
I think, you know, he's full of it in the
first place, and then.
Speaker 2 (44:37):
The way he also wrote a book about Kennedy assassination
that says Oswald did it just so yeah.
Speaker 1 (44:43):
I know, and again he's full of crap. But you know,
in that movie, I think that they actually portrayed a
serving fork being inserted into the stomach and it infamously
bounces up and down, and it's some of the stuff
is absolutely ridiculous. Trust me, the scenes are horrific enough
(45:05):
when it comes to sharp force's injuries and you know
kind of what is revealed to you in these environments,
and it is literally, you know, as old as time
when it comes to sharpforce's injuries because you don't know
what form they're going to come in, you don't know
(45:26):
what instrument might be used. In many ways, I think
that it's probably easier for us to ascertain firearms related
deaths and the origins of the projectiles than it is
relative to knives. So sharp force injuries, again some of
the most difficult cases to interpret. But it's something that
(45:50):
we do in the medical legal community every single day.
It's something that we view and here's what we can
take away. We can get an idea of the relationship.
And I don't mean like in a societal sense. I'm
talking about a physical relationship between the perpetrator and the victim.
We understand that they were very close. We understand that
(46:12):
there can be transfer of evidence. We understand that it's
going to be very brutal, and generally the more stabs
or cuts that a victim has, the more passion comes
along with it. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is
body Bags
Host
Joseph Scott Morgan
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
The Breakfast Club
The World's Most Dangerous Morning Show, The Breakfast Club, With DJ Envy, Jess Hilarious, And Charlamagne Tha God!