October 23, 2025 • 44 mins
A gruesome story out of Staten Island: a 45-year-old man is beaten to death with a meat tenderizer by his girlfriend's 19-year-old son.
Damien Hurstel allegedly told police he wanted to know what it was like to kill somebody. His plan was to kill Anthony Casalaspro, 45, cut off his head, and liquefy his body in a blender.
Joseph Scott Morgan and Dave Mack discuss what happened when Hurstel attempts to carry out his fiendish plan and how a meat tenderizer, a handsaw, a spoon, a blender, and a bathtub are all part of the crime scene.
Transcribe Highlights
00:00.03 Introduction: No Country For Old Men
03:01.10 Learning from failure
08:10.78 Mental Health issues
12:18.65 Desecrating remains, displayed body parts
17:54.27 Arrival on scene
22:05.02 Cutting Body into pieces is hard
28:04.13 Suspects wants to know what it is like to kill somebody
33:36.79 Matching up the pattern from weapon
38:10.84 Blood in the blender would be everywhere
43:00.20 Mom says "why did you kill him, I still love him"
44:53.74 Conclusion
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Body Dogs, but Joseph's gotten more.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
In the movie No Country for Old Men, which is
derived from a book of the same name, there's a
line in that movie where Tommy Lee Jones's character is
sitting He plays a sheriff and he's sitting in a
diner with another sheriff I think from El Paso, Texas,
(00:28):
and there is a conversation going on between two of
these gentlemen, and one of the gentlemen makes a comment
where he says, it's the dismal tide. It's the dismal tide,
and then he says it's not the one thing, and
Tommy Lee responds, it's not the one thing. Today, on Bodybags,
(00:53):
we're going to talk about a case where I can
say that, just like in No Country for Old Men,
it's not the one thing. But I can tell you
the totality of those things added up to arguably one
of the most horrific cases in recent memory that brother
(01:16):
Dave and I have covered, and today we're gonna chat
about it. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan coming to you from
the beautiful campus of Jacksonville State University. This is Bodybacks. Dave.
I gotta tell you I came to the knowledge of
(01:39):
this case as a result of my friends, and I
urge you each to go and listen to my friends
on the podcast Mother Knows Death, where we see each
other all the time at crime con and they are
(02:01):
a mother and daughter team and they are absolutely lovely. Nicole,
along with her daughter Maria, have this podcast, and Nicole
has a similar background to mine. She's a pathology assistant
and has done pathology for a long long time, and.
Speaker 1 (02:17):
She talks about death, talk about how she worked with
a meat cleaver or something.
Speaker 2 (02:23):
No, no, we'll get to that in a moment. But yeah,
And this came to me because I actually appeared on
their show, I think it was yesterday, and I said, hey, look,
i'd really like to cover this case on body bags,
just simply from the forensic standpoint, and they said they
gave me their blessing. And I'd had another show that
I wanted to do, but this kind of popped onto
my radar and I was like, I got to talk
(02:45):
about this because there was there's so much here that
has forensic value and learning value. I think, as horrific
as it is, I think that many times, Dave, I
don't know if you agree with this, but I'll ask you,
because we cover so many horrible things, it seems to
me that much like in life, we learn so much
(03:07):
from our failures as opposed to our successes. I think
the more horrible a case is many times from a
forensic standpoint and from an education standpoint, we can glean
more from that than we can other things. It might
be more. I don't know how you put it. Ps S.
Perhaps there's so much to dig into, and particularly in
this case as from a trauma standpoint, in interpreting that trauma,
(03:29):
I think.
Speaker 1 (03:29):
You're right in every level there. Yeah, Okay, this case
today is about a forty five year old victim. His
name is Anthony cast A Lostpro. Is that how you
say his name? Okay? Yes, because I knew you were
on that show that they would say it properly, and
I attended.
Speaker 2 (03:45):
Well, they're from Philly, so yeah, they could say it properly.
Speaker 1 (03:48):
I remember when I met that at Grime Gone. They're
just wonderful. But anyway, Anthony Castle Lostpro is forty five
years by the way, he is already retired. He's a
mechanic who is retired on disability and just doing his thing.
They're living up in the northeast and he's been dating
a woman. They've been together for six years and living together.
(04:10):
They have heard two children in the home, nineteen year
old Damien Herstal and his sixteen year old sister. And
Damien has had his share of issues over time, some
psychological things, some problems at school. He's been he has
a history of mental illness issues and he has been
(04:32):
medicated from time to time, been hospitalized for it as
a matter of fact. But in this particular case, something
happened and it wasn't my stepdad made me, made me mad,
and I attacked him. This is a case of what
was described as it wasn't any one thing. It was
(04:54):
a combination of things that boiled over and it ended
with forty five year old Anthony costelospro in the bathtub.
He's dead and Damien is covered in blood from head
to toe. Actually that's not right. His face and arms
(05:15):
were covered in blood. Somehow, his shirt wasn't. We got
to figure this out. This is the description from the neighbors.
Because what happens is what we're going to tell you
in this story is pretty gruesome. And I'm trying, I'm
trying not to make a light of it, because there's
so many jokes in this, but it actually happened. This
hands like a movie like if we were to do
(05:36):
scary movie twenty six whatever we want now, you know,
making fun of skin, that's what you would do. You
would do something like, I don't leave a spoon in
an eye socket.
Speaker 2 (05:47):
You know, yeah, you know it fuddles. I can I
say something about this victim as well? You touched on
the fact that he's he's actually this happened in Staten Island, which,
of course, for those that don't know, that's a burrow
of New York City. People forget about Staten Island many times.
I've actually been there and on the SAT Now if
(06:09):
Alan Staten Island Ferry and you know, kind of traditional neighborhoods,
that sort of thing. When this guy is retired, medically retired,
if I if I'm remembering correctly from the sanitation department,
(06:30):
and Dave, one more thing, because you made me think
about it with the spoon. We'll get to that in
a second. This guy was going blind. He was slowly
going blind. That's why he was, why he's got it,
why he's on disability. I you know, I've worn glasses,
I guess since I was ten. I think still were them.
(06:52):
Can't see can't see anything without them. I mean, I'm horrible.
And you know, as I've gotten older, I've seen my sight,
you know, fading even further, which is expected. But I
can't imagine being at the age of this man and
you're suddenly given a diagnosis of you know, you're going blind,
(07:17):
you know, but yet here you are. You're retired, medically retired,
you're disabled, and you're cohabitating with a woman now for
many years, and David, you're essentially taking care of her kids. Now.
I don't know what she did for a living. I
don't know what she did outside of the home. But
(07:41):
these two, this nineteen year old and a sixteen year old,
are living under his roof. Okay, you're providing shelter to them.
I'm assuming he's putting groceries in the cabinet for you,
in the cupboard and refrigerator, you know, those sorts of things.
He's making a way for these kids, and it has
it has not been an easy road for them throughout
(08:02):
you know, you talked about this kid struggles with with
you know, mental health will get on the damn struggle bus.
You know what I'm saying, there's a lot of people
that deal with with mental mental issues and they don't.
They don't and to use a use a mental health
(08:24):
care term, they don't act out like this because this
is the ultimate in acting out now. Granted, from what
I'm understanding, they have meddled with his meds periodically, which
is a dangerous thing to do in the first place.
(08:45):
It particularly when you introduce new substances into somebody's system
because it's this crazy whack of chemistry. But you know
what else, he was not so inclined to take his
meds either. So you know, my sympathy meters dropping really
quickly here, you know, for somebody like this, because you
(09:06):
can't even self maintenance yourself at that point in time.
Speaker 1 (09:10):
It's sad. Mental health people tend to self medicate through
many problems in life, and then we tend to use
a diagnosis of health mental health issues as an excuse. Yeah,
and I'm about tired of hearing the excuse that a
nineteen year old decapitates the man who takes care of
(09:31):
him and by the way, who can't even really defend himself.
He is on disability he can't really see. I mean,
he's not in the best of shape at forty five
years old, and this guy nineteen years old beats him
over the head with the meat meat tender riser. That's
one of those metal hammers.
Speaker 2 (09:48):
With like yeah, yeah, I've got one in the drawer
at home. You know, I use it. I use it
particularly with chicken breast, boneless chicken breast. Yeah, I don't know,
you know, Julia, Yeah, I boy, the really tough chickens. Uh,
so you know you're going to yeah, exactly. But it's
(10:11):
the surface. The surface of this thing is very very specific.
If you've never seen a meat tenderizer, uh for those
that don't, Now, they do have machines that do this
in restaurants, you can run it through this thing. But
a meat tenderizer itself is uh is dimpled, and it's
got these little protrusions, and there's rows upon rows upon
(10:32):
rows of them, and you know, the the I think
from a forensic standpoint here, uh, when you look at this,
this is going to be a classic case of what
are referred to as pattern injuries. But the injuries themselves,
they don't just stop with with being struck over the head.
(10:55):
A couple of times, uh, in order to end this
person's life. This guy's head is actually you know, split open,
if you will, for lack of a better term, where
you have probably extrusion, extrusion extrusion, not excrusion, extrusion of
(11:19):
gray matter that's issuing force from probably gaping injuries in
this guy's skull. Lots of pattern injuries here. There's multiple
tools that are at work here. And you know, here's
the really interesting thing here is that it was all
contained inside of this man's house. His head has been
(11:44):
separated from his body. There's a blender that is involved.
I'll go ahead and tease that right now. But the
worst thing of all is that the perpetrator, upon upon
acting out in this evil manner, not only did he
(12:06):
act out and desecrate this man's remains, he took very
essential parts of this man's body and displayed them to
his sixteen year old sister upon her arrival at home
that day. One of the tough things Dave about cases
(12:42):
involving multiple trauma is the idea of trying to understand
what instrument was used and or instruments were used in
the perpetration of a crime. Also trying to understand and
(13:02):
we've talked about this a lot over the course of
of you know, all of our episodes, trying to understand
how much of this stuff happened prior to death, uh,
and how much of it occurred afterwards. Dave, we got
We're going to use our word that we use far
more frequently. I think we probably use this word more
than any other podcast out there, and that's the word dismemberment. Uh.
(13:25):
This this involves a case of dismemberment, not not just
dismember but also desecration.
Speaker 1 (13:32):
I'm sorry, I'm not laughing at the dismemberment. It's just
that we have covered a lot. We've covered so many
that actually, a couple of years ago a crime con
in or Land, we actually did the whole show in
front of an audience because this has become a deal lately.
Speaker 2 (13:46):
Of Now go let me let me just ask you this.
Do you I had this discussion yesterday on Mother Knows Death.
That title just cracks me up.
Speaker 1 (14:03):
I use.
Speaker 2 (14:06):
People are gonna take this maybe the wrong way. I
have no idea, but homicide is one thing. Okay. It
seems to me that you commit a homicide and then
it's literally kicked up to another level of uh of evil?
(14:28):
Is that is that accurate? You know, when you get
into disrespecting the dead like this, uh where you know
people always talk about in society, They'll say, well, I'm
being devalued. There's devalued, and then there's devalued. Okay, where
you can take take a human being, a fellow human being,
(14:51):
by the way, and and degrade them to the point
where you know, they become almost like your own little
experien And I think about that. Do you think that
do you think that this is a sign I do
of some kind of a greater evil here.
Speaker 1 (15:08):
When you get to a scene like this where you
have police are called. Okay, just to set the stage here, Okay,
the police were called because the sixteen year old comes
home from school. Yeah, and the nineteen year old says,
you need to go to your room. I've done something
really bad. And she goes to the bathroom, sees blood
(15:29):
everywhere and calls mom, calls the police. Mom gets home
before the police get there. And when they do, when
the police show up with the rescue teams and everything else,
the mom goes, don't even bother, don't even bother. His
head's not attached anymore, don't even bother. He can't be safe. Now,
those are pretty obscene words to put together with somebody
(15:52):
you've been sharing your life with, that you could be
that bold. But what I was thinking, and what I
wanted to ask you, yeah, is when police are getting
the first bite of the apple. They got the suspect
here and they have a chance to say what happened,
you know, because there are other options than okay, we've
(16:14):
got a real bloody mess. But you know what, maybe
this guy was abusing him and they got into a fight.
This kid couldn't take it anymore. He just lost it
and it ended like this. I mean, that's why they
ask what's going on. But when the suspect says, I
don't know, man, I just wanted to see somebody. I
just want to know what was life for somebody to die.
(16:35):
I just wanted to know what it's like to kill someone.
I want to know what it was like to watch
somebody's life leave their body. I mean anything, which is
kind of what he said to police. And I'm wondering
what that means to you when you come on the
scene now, because we already know we have a victim.
He's dead. He ain't going anywhere. We've got our suspect.
(16:58):
He's gone his way to jail in the hospital because
he's going to have seizures later on. And I'm wondering,
as you go into that kind of living scene. This
is a scene that twenty four hours earlier, the family
was eating dinner or watching TV or whatever people do
in their own homes, and now it has become this
macabre floor show of a crime scene. And I wonder
(17:23):
what you walk into, what do you do when you
come into that?
Speaker 2 (17:27):
Well, yeah, I mean, if I'm armed, it's great. If
you this slices two ways, it's great if you're armed
with that information, you know about comments that are made
on one end of it, because you can, I guess
you can kind of contextualize it sometimes. And I was
just talking about this the other day of my class,
(17:48):
lecturing about actually arrival and scene. It's my sophomore class.
I don't want anybody to talk to me when I
get there. I have an idea. You know, if you're
dispatched the scene, say we've got a whatever the local
signal is for death. In Atlanta, it's a signal forty eight.
In New Orleans, it was a signal twenty nine. You know,
(18:11):
they summon you out to the scene. I don't. I
don't want to know much more behind that, beyond that,
because as I as a matured as an investigator, I
didn't want my view to be colored anyway, so I
could be as objective as possible. You know, if somebody
simply says to me, we've got a victim in the
(18:32):
house and they're in the bathroom, okay, if if I
can go in with that kind of you're never completely pristine.
So maybe that's not a good word. But if if
my mind is kind of clear of all the other
you know, chatter that's going around, and it never happens
like this, cops are worse than a knitting circle, all right,
(18:53):
because they want to, they want to yammer. They really didn't.
They want to. They'll grab you by the elbow and
drag you in, you know, and wanted, Yeah, you got
to see this, or this is the worst thing I've
ever seen. I don't. I don't want to hear that.
I would rather I know that it's going to be bad.
I'm I'm a death investigator, all right. You just you
know my degree of bad and their degree of bad
(19:15):
is completely different. So I prefer just to go in
kind of you know, pure uh you know, uh, in
in my mind and in what I'm viewing. But yeah,
when and here's here's another thing that you can't avoid.
And I'd read this when the police arrived at the scene,
(19:37):
and I don't know if this is the mother of
these kids, you know, the girlfriend, fiance or you know
whatever her you know, title is the report seeing a
grown woman out in the street weeping and vomiting, and
that kind of paints you know that that that's only
(20:00):
paints one picture here, it's it was rare. And in
my case, I think I only remember remember a couple
of times where I had people that were vomiting it scenes.
There were things that would be vomited inducing, I think
for many people, but you don't normally get that reaction
(20:21):
most of the time. You know, certain things are just
over the top and people can't handle them. But in
this case, you know she's out there vomiting. If you
walk into a scene I'm talking about through a civilian's eyes,
it's really hard to kind of first off the area
here because of what has gone on inside of this
house and in his bathroom. Specifically, it's going to be
(20:42):
bathed in blood. There will be I can't imagine that
there would be a surface that's not touched.
Speaker 1 (20:49):
And let's get into that. Then what happened to blood?
We know that he's in the bathtub, but we beat it, like,
cuags him in there? Did he I mean, didn't he
start beating him somewhere else and get him in there
to take him apart?
Speaker 2 (20:58):
Yeah? Yeah. The of the bathroom I think acts as
a slaughter point or slaughterhouse essentially. It's it's kind of
our death the facto. Yeah, you're you're gonna take because
what do you want to do, well, if you're going
to try to if you're going to try to render
someone down, if you will to the smallest elements, Oh,
let me.
Speaker 1 (21:18):
Ask you something because that's just stop. Because we were
told this was just a boiling over of things. But
this guy, this nineteen year old Damien, he had a plan.
You mentioned render it down. He already had a plan
for what he was going to do after he kills
(21:39):
the man. You know, that's where a lot of times
people they something happens, they kill somebody, they don't know
what to do. He had a plan after death, and
you said render down. Okay, you mentioned the blender. So
step by step he's used that meat beater you talked about,
and he has killed a forty five year old man
(22:03):
who's been taking care of him for six years. And
now he has a plan how he's going to get
rid of the body. And you have said this so
many times day. People don't know what it's like to
really cut a body apart, or they will try.
Speaker 2 (22:19):
No, they don't. They have no idea because you know,
you get you get involved in this. If I've got
somebody that's reaching for a blender, you got to tell
me more. Okay, because the way the way this is
going down. You know, he actually allegedly and we have
to say allegedly, right because this has just happened. This
(22:41):
has just happened, y'all. And so his idea was liquefying
this man. So let's just take it, take, you know,
take this and just kind of run with it. Just
for a second. In what world do you think you're
Hamilton beat blender is going to be able to render
(23:03):
down a grown man because he started apparently, you know,
after he attacked him with this meat tenderizer. You know,
he he's got what's called an intrusion into the cranial vault,
and so he's beat him enough that the that the
(23:27):
skull has, the the structural integrity of the skull has
given way. And I've seen this happen where you'll have
severe head trauma and the skull will actually fracture off.
Sometimes it'll actually fracture along the future lines that we have.
If you've ever seen a skull, and look, Halloween's coming up,
you're gonna see skeletons that are everywhere. And sometimes they'll
(23:49):
do these mock up skeletons. If you'll look at an
actual skeleton, you know, mock up at whatever store that
you're buying Halloween stuff at, you'll see these little wiggly
lines all right on the surface of the skull. Well,
those are suture lines there there where are skull fusia
fuses during development, all right, And many times you'll see,
(24:10):
depend upon the strike, the type of instrument, how many
times the areas. Sometimes the plates of the skull will
actually fracture along those fusion lines that you know, our
skull was fusing like that came together and Mommy's tummy, right,
So when when we're going through birth, you know, and
eventually the fontinell's, you know, they all fuse together and
the soft spots disappear and all that, and our skull
(24:33):
begins to ossify, gets harder and harder. But when you
strike with a blunt instrument like this, you can get
these plates that will come about and they'll kind of float.
You'll have these I've heard physicians called floating skull fractures.
The only thing that's really keeping the skull, the plates
of the skull in places, the underlying dura matter, that's
(24:56):
that sack, that's you know, that the brain is actually
contained in. Well, he goes into i think into one
of these plates that has been fractually probably pulled the
cap of the thing off, maybe in a couple of places,
and he begins, I'm just a speculative on my part.
(25:17):
Because there's a spoon involved. We already know that there
was a spoon, you know, embedded in this man's eye.
He probably attempted to try to spoon out the brain.
Just let that sink in just for a second. So
he's there spooning out the brain, he's putting it into
a blender. An initial report says he showed the blended
(25:41):
brain to the sixteen year old sister of his. If
you can even begin to fathom that, look what I did.
And he's trying to liquefy this. I guess he was
going for the eye as well, to you know, kind
of you know, to spoon it out, if you will,
to try to liquefy it. This problem, says I. You know,
(26:01):
you begin to see people that are doing this, and
it's really easy to say, oh, well, he's just crazy.
He's just crazy. He's just doing this. Crazy would be
I don't know, maybe walking down the street with a
machete in one hand and holding a bloody head in
the other and screaming at the moon. All right, it's
not what happened. This guy becomes very procedural at this point.
(26:21):
Now listen, it's highly inefficient and ineffective. But he, like
you said, he's got a plan, you know, to do
this brother day, and he has obviously failed miserably at
this point. I've often thought, you know, in cases of well,
(26:53):
if you think about a homicide, you don't have a
firearm handy and maybe you know you Grandpappy didn't bring
back a samurai sword or katana sword from World War Two?
What are you going to choose? It's kind of like
that that scene in Pulp Fiction where Bruce Willis is
looking up, you know, looking around the pawn shop to
decide what weapon he's going to use, and he looks
(27:15):
up and sees it. You know, he looks at a
chainsaw first, and he there is a samurai katana there.
Speaker 1 (27:22):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (27:22):
You know, what are you going to choose? You know,
just when you had lying about the house of.
Speaker 1 (27:26):
All the things, and that's not where I would have picked.
I thought that was unique for the movie, and it
just not what I would in my world. Joe. I
know what those are like when you play with them
when you're a kid, and they're plastic and they bend,
but a real one, Yeah, I don't know.
Speaker 2 (27:42):
Not too many people have have have access to them
and have certainly the training Bruce Willis seemingly came across
as being very effective in that movie. But you know,
when you begin to think about this kid and he's
wandering around the house and suddenly he gets and this
is another thing I'd like to mention, he suddenly gets
(28:03):
the urge. You know, we're talking about the totality of
everything you know, kind of culminating in this. But yet
he says to the police that he wants to he
wanted to know what it felt like to kill somebody.
I'm always fascinated by the statement with these people that
We've had a number of these cases where people will
(28:24):
say I wanted to know what it felt like to
kill somebody. They never say that about themselves, like I've
always wondered, you know, what it would be like to
throw myself in front of a train or throw myself
off of a building. No, they always say I always
wondered what it would be like to kill somebody. You know,
he couldn't put his mind to better use, maybe say, gee,
(28:47):
I've always wanted to learn how to cross stitch, or
I've always wanted to know what it would be like
to macro may a lampshade, or yeah, I don't know,
I don't you know, it's amazing to me that they
land on this. You know, I've always wanted to know
what it would feel like to kill somebody.
Speaker 1 (29:04):
Yeah, and many of the time I've woken up in
the morning and said, Hey, today's the day.
Speaker 2 (29:09):
Yeah, today's the day. And so, you know, his first
stop along this continuum is Okay, here's my target. I'm
going after a guy that's been taking care of me.
And oh, by the bye, he is disabled, he's losing
his sight, probably can't get around real well any longer.
Let's see, I'm going into the kitchen. I'm going to
(29:30):
open the drawer. Well, what does mom have in here
that I can use? Oh, I know a meat tenderizer.
And dependent upon the type of meat tenderizer it is,
you can get some that are very lightweight, and there
are some that are very heavy, almost like a mallet.
And apparently he chose something that was weighted enough so
that it's going to it's going to crack the external
(29:54):
table of skull. But going back here, before we get
into the the capitation, when they would examine this poor
victim's body back at the morgue, one of the things
that will that has been done, I can I can
almost guarantee it. His scalp would have been shaved. Okay,
(30:21):
the victim's scalp would have been shaved and would have
been shaved extensively. The flaps of the skin that you
know were probably lacerated. They would be folded back over
into their normal configuration and one of the things that
we would do in the morgue, Dave is and hopefully
(30:42):
the police brought this, this meat tenderizer mallet contraption to
the morgue. This does happen, by the way. They will
bring instruments to the morgue that are alleged to be
used and you can and it's really kind of cool
because if you have access to it and the police
have it in their control, they can bring it in
and you can appreciate the patterns, particularly like this. These
(31:06):
patterns are going to be absolutely striking when you see them.
I can only imagine this guy's defense attorney when he
sees these images from the morgue. He's going to go,
oh my god. Because what will happen is as the
scalp is struck, as that underline, even with hair, even
with thick hair, when it is struck, it will literally
(31:29):
leave what's referred to as a pattern abrasion, where that
the leading edge the face of this thing struck and
it will be multi dimpled. So if you think about
I don't know if I can do the math correctly here,
but if you think about maybe seven rows across and
(31:50):
maybe I don't know, ten rows ten rows up and down.
You're going to have each one of those rows will
we populated with these little pimpled, pimpled metallic surfaces, so
it's like a collection of teeth that are going into
each and every strike, the head would be shaved, and
(32:13):
they will take copious photographs just of the scalp and
for every photograph that they take, and they'll do scale
measurements in this you can actually take that same scale
and put it across put it adjacent to the face
the business end of this mallet meat tenderizer, and you
can show the measurement of it and guess what, dude,
(32:33):
You can take the images of the shaved head and
put put a scale on it as well and show
the dimensions of it, and guess what it's going to
marry up. It'll marry up. And the reason that's important
to describe is that can you imagine, if you're a prosecutor,
how powerful this would be to stand up in front
of a jury and say he was struck once twice,
(32:58):
three times, four times, five times, six times, seven times,
eight times, nine times, ten times. Maybe I don't know
how many times we heard the forensic pathologist sit on
the stand and actually say this is the number because
you can match it up. It's not. It's not the
reason this case is so intriguing just from a pattern injury.
(33:20):
It's not like he took a baseball bat that's you know,
cylindrical essentially. And I'm not saying that those strikes are
not uniform. It's not the same thing. It's getting struck
with a meat tenderizer, because you can see it every
single time the thing is machined. Is it's meant to
tend to ize meat. It's meant to deliver that kinetic energy,
(33:44):
you know, transferring from the arm as it's swung down
on top of this man's head. And that's going to
be demonstrative in court.
Speaker 1 (33:50):
Dave, all right, so now he's taken off the top,
said pretty much. He has immobilized him. And he gets
into the bathroom and he is now going to remove
the head. He's going to remove the skull from the
top of the body. Yeah, and he's going to set
it off to the side. What's he going to use,
Joe to remove the head?
Speaker 2 (34:10):
Well, whatever's whatever's handy. In this particular case, this perpetrator,
Dave started out with what they're terming as a kitchen knife,
and look, there's there's a whole variety of kitchen knives.
They tell you something interesting about my household with with
my beautiful wife, Kimmy her family. They refer to butter
(34:33):
knives as case knives. I'd never heard that term before. Yeah,
case knives, and now there are Case brand pocket knives,
but you know, case knife to her was like a
butter knife. Okay, so you know, do you have another
case knife? And she would say that to me. It's like,
you know, her family's from Missouri. They use the term
(34:55):
via duct all the time, and I'm like, what the
Hell's a via duct? And it's an overpass or whatever.
So yeah, and you see them around the country. It's
just it's you know, it's a regional. But anyway, yeah,
so you got this variety of knives, you know that
are in the drawers. I've got stuff in in in
my utensil drawers at home. I have no idea, you know,
(35:16):
I can pick this thing up and say what is this?
Where did I get this from? I've got like an orange,
an orange slicer, an apple slicer, and all these sorts
of things. I don't know. When's the last time I
reused one of these things. But it's sitting in a drawer,
you know, I'm thinking about it, Oh, when it's sitting
right next to my meat tender riser, that's in the drawers.
Speaker 1 (35:32):
We did the episode on the Burning Man Killer. Yeah,
I went because you made that knife so appealing. I'm like,
I got to get me one of those. So now
I've got one. I'm so I'm not. I got it
after the guy was killed. Okay, okay, good. I wanted
to make sure I don't want to miss out. That
sounded like a pretty cool life.
Speaker 2 (35:50):
It is. It is. It is interesting.
Speaker 1 (35:52):
And I got a meat beater thing too.
Speaker 2 (35:55):
There you go, well, there you go. Uh and and
with with this, he appeared he started out with some
non specific kitchen knife to try to decapitate this guy
with it wasn't working. So guess what Homie does. He
goes out to the shed and retrieves a saw. And
it's that and again they're non specific, is it. And
(36:17):
there's a variety of saws We've got, you know, carpenter saw,
there's a hacksaw. We've got limb sauce, which I've had.
I don't know if you remember I think her name
who I hope I don't get this wrong, ingrid Lend.
I think the case out of Seattle, Washington. It was
a tender date. Her date happened to be a homeless guy.
(36:41):
She went out on a date with this guy, went
to a Mariner's ball game, and he got her home
and he he dismembered her with a limb saw, which
is one of the bow kind of saws. It's got
the single blade. I don't know if you recall that.
And they took apart her plumbing in the house because
he had done it in the bathtub. Well, this guy
goes out and he retrieves a saw from the shed,
(37:04):
having now experienced what it's like to kill somebody. Finally
you got to feel what that was like. So I
guess now he's decided I want to know what it's
like to render a body down. So he's got it.
There's a lot of things going on. He's gone and
gotten mom's Hamilton beach blender, and I'm just throwing that
out there. It's the first, you know, brand that comes
to mind. He could be one of those ninja things
for all I know. But he comes and brings this
(37:26):
back and I'm wondering if he's taking it and plugged
it into the bathroom. I'm assuming he has unless he's
walking up and down the hallway with body parts brain specifically,
and then going to the kitchen counter and putting putting
the contents in his hands and transforming in there. My
suspicion is it's in the bathroom, and if he didn't
put the lid on the thing. I mean, how many
(37:48):
times have you ever have you ever used used a blender?
My daughter was trying to make margaritas one time we
were at the beach and the lid was not on.
We spent the rest of the evening cleaning up the
floor because it stuff one everywhere, you know, so you're
going to have blood trace evidence that's certainly going to
be rather profuse. That's inside of the blender. I don't
(38:10):
know the I don't even know what you call a
blender container. You know that's got the little blades in it.
You're going to have that that's going to have this
guy's DNA in it, along with any kind of tissue
that's caught up in this thing, any other bits of hair, skin,
anything that went in there. And you're going tons of
(38:31):
trace evidence, and then the the trace evidence that's created
just by sawing. This guy's are decapitating him with a saw.
You're actually gonna dave. You're actually gonna have bone dust
here as well. You know, bone dust, You're going to
have any any connective tissue that's in there. Obviously, you're
gonna have blood. You'll have all the soft tissues, whether
(38:53):
it's skin, the fashion, the muscle. You'll have vessels that
are that become detached. You know, when when this exercise
is said and done and he's got blood on him,
you know, he's got blood on him, and I'm wondering where,
you know, like are hopefully I'm hoping that they collected
(39:16):
all of his clothing. One of the things that happens
is is that when you get a suspect like this
and you get them back to you know, to the Hooscal,
you're going to go get first off, you're going to
have them strip uh. There's an evidence technician that is
in fact standing by. If you're you know, if you're
in blood soak clothes, they're going to collect those from
(39:36):
you individually. They're going to take pictures of you, possibly
in the nude, with your arms extended, you're going to
take They're going to take pictures of your hands, both
uh the ventral and the dorsom, up and down the arms.
They're going to take pictures of your face, the whole
nine yards. They're going to document every inch of this
guy's body, any blood that's there, any marks that are there,
(39:58):
and they're going to collect his clothing and it'll be
taken back to the crime lab where it will be assessed,
and they'll collect all the DNA. There's no way I
can't imagine in any circumstances that a judge is going
to grant this guy, grant this guy the possibility of
getting out of jail because of this evidence. The evidence
(40:20):
when this thing is presented to the grand jury is
going to be so incredibly overwhelming day and the whole
thing is so very tragic along the way when you
think about what this poor victim was doing for this
young man.
Speaker 1 (40:36):
All he was doing was helping raise a couple of
kids with their mom. That's all he was doing for
the last six years. Yeah, and by the way, dealing
with a nineteen year old with mental health issues. The
guy had to have been a saint, you know, because
he was there every day on disability, losing his eyesight
every day, and this is how he gets repaid. I'm
(40:57):
thinking about the trauma that's going to extend out too,
because the sixteen year old daughter who comes home and
the nineteen year old brother says, you need to go
to your room. I've done something bad, and she says, no, man.
She follows the blood trail to the bathroom and finds her. Well,
he's been there six years. That's a step dad. And
his head is now sitting there severed from his body.
(41:18):
There's a spin sticking out of his mouth, out of
his ear, I mean, out of his eye. And they
said he tried to use a hammer to get the
brain out, and I think, what do you do? He
couldn't get it all the way out, and so he
used the hook end of it to try to cry
it out. I mean, this goes beyond anything, Joe, that
I've ever thought we would talk about on this show.
And by the way, it's happening now. As you mentioned earlier,
(41:41):
this is not an old show, This is not an
old story. This is now.
Speaker 2 (41:46):
Yeah. Yeah, we rarely do really old old I mean
unless something tickles my fancy relative to histrionics. But in
this case, you had this guy and he did involve
a hammer in this as well. You know, it's almost like,
you know, I'm thinking almost a primal level, like somebody,
you know, some animal trying to crack up in a
coconut to get to the interior of this thing using
(42:08):
utilizing whatever they have with it's a rock or whatever.
And you know, he probably would have used a rock,
if that's what he had at his disposal, uh, to
try to break break this man's body down into elements
that could in fact be dissolved. Uh. You know, and
he used the term liquefied allegedly when making this admission
(42:31):
to the police. Of course, you know he's going to
have a team of lawyers or a lawyer that is
going to defend him and say that you know, he
he he didn't do this, he has no knowledge of it.
I'm just waiting to hear to see if if they
used the old I blacked out and I didn't remember anything,
(42:52):
and the next thing I knew, I woke up and
I was covered with blood. We'll see what happens relative
to this, But you know, I gotta tell you, man,
this gentleman, this gentleman that you know, that gave of himself,
gave of his home and opened his door to you know,
(43:14):
not just this woman who claims that she still loved him.
That's a statement that she actually made to the boy,
to the nineteen year olds, she said, why did you
do this? I still loved him, which is an odd
statement in and of itself. He not only gave of
himself to this woman, but also to her children, his time,
(43:37):
his money, his resources, maybe even his wise counsel at
some point in time, trying to help him become a
better person, a better man, hopefully in the future. And
it's not that this is a failure on victim Anthony's part.
This is a failure on the part and let's say
(43:57):
it plainly, on the part of the perpetry in this case.
He's creature free will. He's one that retrieved a meat tenderizer.
He's the one that you know, retrieved a hammer. He's
one that retrieved a kitchen knife. He's the one that
retrieved retrieved a saw. He's one that retrieved a blender.
(44:20):
No one else did this. It's a sad case, it's
very tragic and hopefully, hopefully if there is justice in
this world. It will come about. But we do know this.
We do know that this family and this man's extended
family is scarred forever and ever because this case is
(44:43):
the stuff of nightmares. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this
is bodybags.
Body Dogs, but Joseph's gotten more.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
In the movie No Country for Old Men, which is
derived from a book of the same name, there's a
line in that movie where Tommy Lee Jones's character is
sitting He plays a sheriff and he's sitting in a
diner with another sheriff I think from El Paso, Texas,
(00:28):
and there is a conversation going on between two of
these gentlemen, and one of the gentlemen makes a comment
where he says, it's the dismal tide. It's the dismal tide,
and then he says it's not the one thing, and
Tommy Lee responds, it's not the one thing. Today, on Bodybags,
(00:53):
we're going to talk about a case where I can
say that, just like in No Country for Old Men,
it's not the one thing. But I can tell you
the totality of those things added up to arguably one
of the most horrific cases in recent memory that brother
(01:16):
Dave and I have covered, and today we're gonna chat
about it. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan coming to you from
the beautiful campus of Jacksonville State University. This is Bodybacks. Dave.
I gotta tell you I came to the knowledge of
(01:39):
this case as a result of my friends, and I
urge you each to go and listen to my friends
on the podcast Mother Knows Death, where we see each
other all the time at crime con and they are
(02:01):
a mother and daughter team and they are absolutely lovely. Nicole,
along with her daughter Maria, have this podcast, and Nicole
has a similar background to mine. She's a pathology assistant
and has done pathology for a long long time, and.
Speaker 1 (02:17):
She talks about death, talk about how she worked with
a meat cleaver or something.
Speaker 2 (02:23):
No, no, we'll get to that in a moment. But yeah,
And this came to me because I actually appeared on
their show, I think it was yesterday, and I said, hey, look,
i'd really like to cover this case on body bags,
just simply from the forensic standpoint, and they said they
gave me their blessing. And I'd had another show that
I wanted to do, but this kind of popped onto
my radar and I was like, I got to talk
(02:45):
about this because there was there's so much here that
has forensic value and learning value. I think, as horrific
as it is, I think that many times, Dave, I
don't know if you agree with this, but I'll ask you,
because we cover so many horrible things, it seems to
me that much like in life, we learn so much
(03:07):
from our failures as opposed to our successes. I think
the more horrible a case is many times from a
forensic standpoint and from an education standpoint, we can glean
more from that than we can other things. It might
be more. I don't know how you put it. Ps S.
Perhaps there's so much to dig into, and particularly in
this case as from a trauma standpoint, in interpreting that trauma,
(03:29):
I think.
Speaker 1 (03:29):
You're right in every level there. Yeah, Okay, this case
today is about a forty five year old victim. His
name is Anthony cast A Lostpro. Is that how you
say his name? Okay? Yes, because I knew you were
on that show that they would say it properly, and
I attended.
Speaker 2 (03:45):
Well, they're from Philly, so yeah, they could say it properly.
Speaker 1 (03:48):
I remember when I met that at Grime Gone. They're
just wonderful. But anyway, Anthony Castle Lostpro is forty five
years by the way, he is already retired. He's a
mechanic who is retired on disability and just doing his thing.
They're living up in the northeast and he's been dating
a woman. They've been together for six years and living together.
(04:10):
They have heard two children in the home, nineteen year
old Damien Herstal and his sixteen year old sister. And
Damien has had his share of issues over time, some
psychological things, some problems at school. He's been he has
a history of mental illness issues and he has been
(04:32):
medicated from time to time, been hospitalized for it as
a matter of fact. But in this particular case, something
happened and it wasn't my stepdad made me, made me mad,
and I attacked him. This is a case of what
was described as it wasn't any one thing. It was
(04:54):
a combination of things that boiled over and it ended
with forty five year old Anthony costelospro in the bathtub.
He's dead and Damien is covered in blood from head
to toe. Actually that's not right. His face and arms
(05:15):
were covered in blood. Somehow, his shirt wasn't. We got
to figure this out. This is the description from the neighbors.
Because what happens is what we're going to tell you
in this story is pretty gruesome. And I'm trying, I'm
trying not to make a light of it, because there's
so many jokes in this, but it actually happened. This
hands like a movie like if we were to do
(05:36):
scary movie twenty six whatever we want now, you know,
making fun of skin, that's what you would do. You
would do something like, I don't leave a spoon in
an eye socket.
Speaker 2 (05:47):
You know, yeah, you know it fuddles. I can I
say something about this victim as well? You touched on
the fact that he's he's actually this happened in Staten Island, which,
of course, for those that don't know, that's a burrow
of New York City. People forget about Staten Island many times.
I've actually been there and on the SAT Now if
(06:09):
Alan Staten Island Ferry and you know, kind of traditional neighborhoods,
that sort of thing. When this guy is retired, medically retired,
if I if I'm remembering correctly from the sanitation department,
(06:30):
and Dave, one more thing, because you made me think
about it with the spoon. We'll get to that in
a second. This guy was going blind. He was slowly
going blind. That's why he was, why he's got it,
why he's on disability. I you know, I've worn glasses,
I guess since I was ten. I think still were them.
(06:52):
Can't see can't see anything without them. I mean, I'm horrible.
And you know, as I've gotten older, I've seen my sight,
you know, fading even further, which is expected. But I
can't imagine being at the age of this man and
you're suddenly given a diagnosis of you know, you're going blind,
(07:17):
you know, but yet here you are. You're retired, medically retired,
you're disabled, and you're cohabitating with a woman now for
many years, and David, you're essentially taking care of her kids. Now.
I don't know what she did for a living. I
don't know what she did outside of the home. But
(07:41):
these two, this nineteen year old and a sixteen year old,
are living under his roof. Okay, you're providing shelter to them.
I'm assuming he's putting groceries in the cabinet for you,
in the cupboard and refrigerator, you know, those sorts of things.
He's making a way for these kids, and it has
it has not been an easy road for them throughout
(08:02):
you know, you talked about this kid struggles with with
you know, mental health will get on the damn struggle bus.
You know what I'm saying, there's a lot of people
that deal with with mental mental issues and they don't.
They don't and to use a use a mental health
(08:24):
care term, they don't act out like this because this
is the ultimate in acting out now. Granted, from what
I'm understanding, they have meddled with his meds periodically, which
is a dangerous thing to do in the first place.
(08:45):
It particularly when you introduce new substances into somebody's system
because it's this crazy whack of chemistry. But you know
what else, he was not so inclined to take his
meds either. So you know, my sympathy meters dropping really
quickly here, you know, for somebody like this, because you
(09:06):
can't even self maintenance yourself at that point in time.
Speaker 1 (09:10):
It's sad. Mental health people tend to self medicate through
many problems in life, and then we tend to use
a diagnosis of health mental health issues as an excuse. Yeah,
and I'm about tired of hearing the excuse that a
nineteen year old decapitates the man who takes care of
(09:31):
him and by the way, who can't even really defend himself.
He is on disability he can't really see. I mean,
he's not in the best of shape at forty five
years old, and this guy nineteen years old beats him
over the head with the meat meat tender riser. That's
one of those metal hammers.
Speaker 2 (09:48):
With like yeah, yeah, I've got one in the drawer
at home. You know, I use it. I use it
particularly with chicken breast, boneless chicken breast. Yeah, I don't know,
you know, Julia, Yeah, I boy, the really tough chickens. Uh,
so you know you're going to yeah, exactly. But it's
(10:11):
the surface. The surface of this thing is very very specific.
If you've never seen a meat tenderizer, uh for those
that don't, Now, they do have machines that do this
in restaurants, you can run it through this thing. But
a meat tenderizer itself is uh is dimpled, and it's
got these little protrusions, and there's rows upon rows upon
(10:32):
rows of them, and you know, the the I think
from a forensic standpoint here, uh, when you look at this,
this is going to be a classic case of what
are referred to as pattern injuries. But the injuries themselves,
they don't just stop with with being struck over the head.
(10:55):
A couple of times, uh, in order to end this
person's life. This guy's head is actually you know, split open,
if you will, for lack of a better term, where
you have probably extrusion, extrusion extrusion, not excrusion, extrusion of
(11:19):
gray matter that's issuing force from probably gaping injuries in
this guy's skull. Lots of pattern injuries here. There's multiple
tools that are at work here. And you know, here's
the really interesting thing here is that it was all
contained inside of this man's house. His head has been
(11:44):
separated from his body. There's a blender that is involved.
I'll go ahead and tease that right now. But the
worst thing of all is that the perpetrator, upon upon
acting out in this evil manner, not only did he
(12:06):
act out and desecrate this man's remains, he took very
essential parts of this man's body and displayed them to
his sixteen year old sister upon her arrival at home
that day. One of the tough things Dave about cases
(12:42):
involving multiple trauma is the idea of trying to understand
what instrument was used and or instruments were used in
the perpetration of a crime. Also trying to understand and
(13:02):
we've talked about this a lot over the course of
of you know, all of our episodes, trying to understand
how much of this stuff happened prior to death, uh,
and how much of it occurred afterwards. Dave, we got
We're going to use our word that we use far
more frequently. I think we probably use this word more
than any other podcast out there, and that's the word dismemberment. Uh.
(13:25):
This this involves a case of dismemberment, not not just
dismember but also desecration.
Speaker 1 (13:32):
I'm sorry, I'm not laughing at the dismemberment. It's just
that we have covered a lot. We've covered so many
that actually, a couple of years ago a crime con
in or Land, we actually did the whole show in
front of an audience because this has become a deal lately.
Speaker 2 (13:46):
Of Now go let me let me just ask you this.
Do you I had this discussion yesterday on Mother Knows Death.
That title just cracks me up.
Speaker 1 (14:03):
I use.
Speaker 2 (14:06):
People are gonna take this maybe the wrong way. I
have no idea, but homicide is one thing. Okay. It
seems to me that you commit a homicide and then
it's literally kicked up to another level of uh of evil?
(14:28):
Is that is that accurate? You know, when you get
into disrespecting the dead like this, uh where you know
people always talk about in society, They'll say, well, I'm
being devalued. There's devalued, and then there's devalued. Okay, where
you can take take a human being, a fellow human being,
(14:51):
by the way, and and degrade them to the point
where you know, they become almost like your own little
experien And I think about that. Do you think that
do you think that this is a sign I do
of some kind of a greater evil here.
Speaker 1 (15:08):
When you get to a scene like this where you
have police are called. Okay, just to set the stage here, Okay,
the police were called because the sixteen year old comes
home from school. Yeah, and the nineteen year old says,
you need to go to your room. I've done something
really bad. And she goes to the bathroom, sees blood
(15:29):
everywhere and calls mom, calls the police. Mom gets home
before the police get there. And when they do, when
the police show up with the rescue teams and everything else,
the mom goes, don't even bother, don't even bother. His
head's not attached anymore, don't even bother. He can't be safe. Now,
those are pretty obscene words to put together with somebody
(15:52):
you've been sharing your life with, that you could be
that bold. But what I was thinking, and what I
wanted to ask you, yeah, is when police are getting
the first bite of the apple. They got the suspect
here and they have a chance to say what happened,
you know, because there are other options than okay, we've
(16:14):
got a real bloody mess. But you know what, maybe
this guy was abusing him and they got into a fight.
This kid couldn't take it anymore. He just lost it
and it ended like this. I mean, that's why they
ask what's going on. But when the suspect says, I
don't know, man, I just wanted to see somebody. I
just want to know what was life for somebody to die.
(16:35):
I just wanted to know what it's like to kill someone.
I want to know what it was like to watch
somebody's life leave their body. I mean anything, which is
kind of what he said to police. And I'm wondering
what that means to you when you come on the
scene now, because we already know we have a victim.
He's dead. He ain't going anywhere. We've got our suspect.
(16:58):
He's gone his way to jail in the hospital because
he's going to have seizures later on. And I'm wondering,
as you go into that kind of living scene. This
is a scene that twenty four hours earlier, the family
was eating dinner or watching TV or whatever people do
in their own homes, and now it has become this
macabre floor show of a crime scene. And I wonder
(17:23):
what you walk into, what do you do when you
come into that?
Speaker 2 (17:27):
Well, yeah, I mean, if I'm armed, it's great. If
you this slices two ways, it's great if you're armed
with that information, you know about comments that are made
on one end of it, because you can, I guess
you can kind of contextualize it sometimes. And I was
just talking about this the other day of my class,
(17:48):
lecturing about actually arrival and scene. It's my sophomore class.
I don't want anybody to talk to me when I
get there. I have an idea. You know, if you're
dispatched the scene, say we've got a whatever the local
signal is for death. In Atlanta, it's a signal forty eight.
In New Orleans, it was a signal twenty nine. You know,
(18:11):
they summon you out to the scene. I don't. I
don't want to know much more behind that, beyond that,
because as I as a matured as an investigator, I
didn't want my view to be colored anyway, so I
could be as objective as possible. You know, if somebody
simply says to me, we've got a victim in the
(18:32):
house and they're in the bathroom, okay, if if I
can go in with that kind of you're never completely pristine.
So maybe that's not a good word. But if if
my mind is kind of clear of all the other
you know, chatter that's going around, and it never happens
like this, cops are worse than a knitting circle, all right,
(18:53):
because they want to, they want to yammer. They really didn't.
They want to. They'll grab you by the elbow and
drag you in, you know, and wanted, Yeah, you got
to see this, or this is the worst thing I've
ever seen. I don't. I don't want to hear that.
I would rather I know that it's going to be bad.
I'm I'm a death investigator, all right. You just you
know my degree of bad and their degree of bad
(19:15):
is completely different. So I prefer just to go in
kind of you know, pure uh you know, uh, in
in my mind and in what I'm viewing. But yeah,
when and here's here's another thing that you can't avoid.
And I'd read this when the police arrived at the scene,
(19:37):
and I don't know if this is the mother of
these kids, you know, the girlfriend, fiance or you know
whatever her you know, title is the report seeing a
grown woman out in the street weeping and vomiting, and
that kind of paints you know that that that's only
(20:00):
paints one picture here, it's it was rare. And in
my case, I think I only remember remember a couple
of times where I had people that were vomiting it scenes.
There were things that would be vomited inducing, I think
for many people, but you don't normally get that reaction
(20:21):
most of the time. You know, certain things are just
over the top and people can't handle them. But in
this case, you know she's out there vomiting. If you
walk into a scene I'm talking about through a civilian's eyes,
it's really hard to kind of first off the area
here because of what has gone on inside of this
house and in his bathroom. Specifically, it's going to be
(20:42):
bathed in blood. There will be I can't imagine that
there would be a surface that's not touched.
Speaker 1 (20:49):
And let's get into that. Then what happened to blood?
We know that he's in the bathtub, but we beat it, like,
cuags him in there? Did he I mean, didn't he
start beating him somewhere else and get him in there
to take him apart?
Speaker 2 (20:58):
Yeah? Yeah. The of the bathroom I think acts as
a slaughter point or slaughterhouse essentially. It's it's kind of
our death the facto. Yeah, you're you're gonna take because
what do you want to do, well, if you're going
to try to if you're going to try to render
someone down, if you will to the smallest elements, Oh,
let me.
Speaker 1 (21:18):
Ask you something because that's just stop. Because we were
told this was just a boiling over of things. But
this guy, this nineteen year old Damien, he had a plan.
You mentioned render it down. He already had a plan
for what he was going to do after he kills
(21:39):
the man. You know, that's where a lot of times
people they something happens, they kill somebody, they don't know
what to do. He had a plan after death, and
you said render down. Okay, you mentioned the blender. So
step by step he's used that meat beater you talked about,
and he has killed a forty five year old man
(22:03):
who's been taking care of him for six years. And
now he has a plan how he's going to get
rid of the body. And you have said this so
many times day. People don't know what it's like to
really cut a body apart, or they will try.
Speaker 2 (22:19):
No, they don't. They have no idea because you know,
you get you get involved in this. If I've got
somebody that's reaching for a blender, you got to tell
me more. Okay, because the way the way this is
going down. You know, he actually allegedly and we have
to say allegedly, right because this has just happened. This
(22:41):
has just happened, y'all. And so his idea was liquefying
this man. So let's just take it, take, you know,
take this and just kind of run with it. Just
for a second. In what world do you think you're
Hamilton beat blender is going to be able to render
(23:03):
down a grown man because he started apparently, you know,
after he attacked him with this meat tenderizer. You know,
he he's got what's called an intrusion into the cranial vault,
and so he's beat him enough that the that the
(23:27):
skull has, the the structural integrity of the skull has
given way. And I've seen this happen where you'll have
severe head trauma and the skull will actually fracture off.
Sometimes it'll actually fracture along the future lines that we have.
If you've ever seen a skull, and look, Halloween's coming up,
you're gonna see skeletons that are everywhere. And sometimes they'll
(23:49):
do these mock up skeletons. If you'll look at an
actual skeleton, you know, mock up at whatever store that
you're buying Halloween stuff at, you'll see these little wiggly
lines all right on the surface of the skull. Well,
those are suture lines there there where are skull fusia
fuses during development, all right, And many times you'll see,
(24:10):
depend upon the strike, the type of instrument, how many
times the areas. Sometimes the plates of the skull will
actually fracture along those fusion lines that you know, our
skull was fusing like that came together and Mommy's tummy, right,
So when when we're going through birth, you know, and
eventually the fontinell's, you know, they all fuse together and
the soft spots disappear and all that, and our skull
(24:33):
begins to ossify, gets harder and harder. But when you
strike with a blunt instrument like this, you can get
these plates that will come about and they'll kind of float.
You'll have these I've heard physicians called floating skull fractures.
The only thing that's really keeping the skull, the plates
of the skull in places, the underlying dura matter, that's
(24:56):
that sack, that's you know, that the brain is actually
contained in. Well, he goes into i think into one
of these plates that has been fractually probably pulled the
cap of the thing off, maybe in a couple of places,
and he begins, I'm just a speculative on my part.
(25:17):
Because there's a spoon involved. We already know that there
was a spoon, you know, embedded in this man's eye.
He probably attempted to try to spoon out the brain.
Just let that sink in just for a second. So
he's there spooning out the brain, he's putting it into
a blender. An initial report says he showed the blended
(25:41):
brain to the sixteen year old sister of his. If
you can even begin to fathom that, look what I did.
And he's trying to liquefy this. I guess he was
going for the eye as well, to you know, kind
of you know, to spoon it out, if you will,
to try to liquefy it. This problem, says I. You know,
(26:01):
you begin to see people that are doing this, and
it's really easy to say, oh, well, he's just crazy.
He's just crazy. He's just doing this. Crazy would be
I don't know, maybe walking down the street with a
machete in one hand and holding a bloody head in
the other and screaming at the moon. All right, it's
not what happened. This guy becomes very procedural at this point.
(26:21):
Now listen, it's highly inefficient and ineffective. But he, like
you said, he's got a plan, you know, to do
this brother day, and he has obviously failed miserably at
this point. I've often thought, you know, in cases of well,
(26:53):
if you think about a homicide, you don't have a
firearm handy and maybe you know you Grandpappy didn't bring
back a samurai sword or katana sword from World War Two?
What are you going to choose? It's kind of like
that that scene in Pulp Fiction where Bruce Willis is
looking up, you know, looking around the pawn shop to
decide what weapon he's going to use, and he looks
(27:15):
up and sees it. You know, he looks at a
chainsaw first, and he there is a samurai katana there.
Speaker 1 (27:22):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (27:22):
You know, what are you going to choose? You know,
just when you had lying about the house of.
Speaker 1 (27:26):
All the things, and that's not where I would have picked.
I thought that was unique for the movie, and it
just not what I would in my world. Joe. I
know what those are like when you play with them
when you're a kid, and they're plastic and they bend,
but a real one, Yeah, I don't know.
Speaker 2 (27:42):
Not too many people have have have access to them
and have certainly the training Bruce Willis seemingly came across
as being very effective in that movie. But you know,
when you begin to think about this kid and he's
wandering around the house and suddenly he gets and this
is another thing I'd like to mention, he suddenly gets
(28:03):
the urge. You know, we're talking about the totality of
everything you know, kind of culminating in this. But yet
he says to the police that he wants to he
wanted to know what it felt like to kill somebody.
I'm always fascinated by the statement with these people that
We've had a number of these cases where people will
(28:24):
say I wanted to know what it felt like to
kill somebody. They never say that about themselves, like I've
always wondered, you know, what it would be like to
throw myself in front of a train or throw myself
off of a building. No, they always say I always
wondered what it would be like to kill somebody. You know,
he couldn't put his mind to better use, maybe say, gee,
(28:47):
I've always wanted to learn how to cross stitch, or
I've always wanted to know what it would be like
to macro may a lampshade, or yeah, I don't know,
I don't you know, it's amazing to me that they
land on this. You know, I've always wanted to know
what it would feel like to kill somebody.
Speaker 1 (29:04):
Yeah, and many of the time I've woken up in
the morning and said, Hey, today's the day.
Speaker 2 (29:09):
Yeah, today's the day. And so, you know, his first
stop along this continuum is Okay, here's my target. I'm
going after a guy that's been taking care of me.
And oh, by the bye, he is disabled, he's losing
his sight, probably can't get around real well any longer.
Let's see, I'm going into the kitchen. I'm going to
(29:30):
open the drawer. Well, what does mom have in here
that I can use? Oh, I know a meat tenderizer.
And dependent upon the type of meat tenderizer it is,
you can get some that are very lightweight, and there
are some that are very heavy, almost like a mallet.
And apparently he chose something that was weighted enough so
that it's going to it's going to crack the external
(29:54):
table of skull. But going back here, before we get
into the the capitation, when they would examine this poor
victim's body back at the morgue, one of the things
that will that has been done, I can I can
almost guarantee it. His scalp would have been shaved. Okay,
(30:21):
the victim's scalp would have been shaved and would have
been shaved extensively. The flaps of the skin that you
know were probably lacerated. They would be folded back over
into their normal configuration and one of the things that
we would do in the morgue, Dave is and hopefully
(30:42):
the police brought this, this meat tenderizer mallet contraption to
the morgue. This does happen, by the way. They will
bring instruments to the morgue that are alleged to be
used and you can and it's really kind of cool
because if you have access to it and the police
have it in their control, they can bring it in
and you can appreciate the patterns, particularly like this. These
(31:06):
patterns are going to be absolutely striking when you see them.
I can only imagine this guy's defense attorney when he
sees these images from the morgue. He's going to go,
oh my god. Because what will happen is as the
scalp is struck, as that underline, even with hair, even
with thick hair, when it is struck, it will literally
(31:29):
leave what's referred to as a pattern abrasion, where that
the leading edge the face of this thing struck and
it will be multi dimpled. So if you think about
I don't know if I can do the math correctly here,
but if you think about maybe seven rows across and
(31:50):
maybe I don't know, ten rows ten rows up and down.
You're going to have each one of those rows will
we populated with these little pimpled, pimpled metallic surfaces, so
it's like a collection of teeth that are going into
each and every strike, the head would be shaved, and
(32:13):
they will take copious photographs just of the scalp and
for every photograph that they take, and they'll do scale
measurements in this you can actually take that same scale
and put it across put it adjacent to the face
the business end of this mallet meat tenderizer, and you
can show the measurement of it and guess what, dude,
(32:33):
You can take the images of the shaved head and
put put a scale on it as well and show
the dimensions of it, and guess what it's going to
marry up. It'll marry up. And the reason that's important
to describe is that can you imagine, if you're a prosecutor,
how powerful this would be to stand up in front
of a jury and say he was struck once twice,
(32:58):
three times, four times, five times, six times, seven times,
eight times, nine times, ten times. Maybe I don't know
how many times we heard the forensic pathologist sit on
the stand and actually say this is the number because
you can match it up. It's not. It's not the
reason this case is so intriguing just from a pattern injury.
(33:20):
It's not like he took a baseball bat that's you know,
cylindrical essentially. And I'm not saying that those strikes are
not uniform. It's not the same thing. It's getting struck
with a meat tenderizer, because you can see it every
single time the thing is machined. Is it's meant to
tend to ize meat. It's meant to deliver that kinetic energy,
(33:44):
you know, transferring from the arm as it's swung down
on top of this man's head. And that's going to
be demonstrative in court.
Speaker 1 (33:50):
Dave, all right, so now he's taken off the top,
said pretty much. He has immobilized him. And he gets
into the bathroom and he is now going to remove
the head. He's going to remove the skull from the
top of the body. Yeah, and he's going to set
it off to the side. What's he going to use,
Joe to remove the head?
Speaker 2 (34:10):
Well, whatever's whatever's handy. In this particular case, this perpetrator,
Dave started out with what they're terming as a kitchen knife,
and look, there's there's a whole variety of kitchen knives.
They tell you something interesting about my household with with
my beautiful wife, Kimmy her family. They refer to butter
(34:33):
knives as case knives. I'd never heard that term before. Yeah,
case knives, and now there are Case brand pocket knives,
but you know, case knife to her was like a
butter knife. Okay, so you know, do you have another
case knife? And she would say that to me. It's like,
you know, her family's from Missouri. They use the term
(34:55):
via duct all the time, and I'm like, what the
Hell's a via duct? And it's an overpass or whatever.
So yeah, and you see them around the country. It's
just it's you know, it's a regional. But anyway, yeah,
so you got this variety of knives, you know that
are in the drawers. I've got stuff in in in
my utensil drawers at home. I have no idea, you know,
(35:16):
I can pick this thing up and say what is this?
Where did I get this from? I've got like an orange,
an orange slicer, an apple slicer, and all these sorts
of things. I don't know. When's the last time I
reused one of these things. But it's sitting in a drawer,
you know, I'm thinking about it, Oh, when it's sitting
right next to my meat tender riser, that's in the drawers.
Speaker 1 (35:32):
We did the episode on the Burning Man Killer. Yeah,
I went because you made that knife so appealing. I'm like,
I got to get me one of those. So now
I've got one. I'm so I'm not. I got it
after the guy was killed. Okay, okay, good. I wanted
to make sure I don't want to miss out. That
sounded like a pretty cool life.
Speaker 2 (35:50):
It is. It is. It is interesting.
Speaker 1 (35:52):
And I got a meat beater thing too.
Speaker 2 (35:55):
There you go, well, there you go. Uh and and
with with this, he appeared he started out with some
non specific kitchen knife to try to decapitate this guy
with it wasn't working. So guess what Homie does. He
goes out to the shed and retrieves a saw. And
it's that and again they're non specific, is it. And
(36:17):
there's a variety of saws We've got, you know, carpenter saw,
there's a hacksaw. We've got limb sauce, which I've had.
I don't know if you remember I think her name
who I hope I don't get this wrong, ingrid Lend.
I think the case out of Seattle, Washington. It was
a tender date. Her date happened to be a homeless guy.
(36:41):
She went out on a date with this guy, went
to a Mariner's ball game, and he got her home
and he he dismembered her with a limb saw, which
is one of the bow kind of saws. It's got
the single blade. I don't know if you recall that.
And they took apart her plumbing in the house because
he had done it in the bathtub. Well, this guy
goes out and he retrieves a saw from the shed,
(37:04):
having now experienced what it's like to kill somebody. Finally
you got to feel what that was like. So I
guess now he's decided I want to know what it's
like to render a body down. So he's got it.
There's a lot of things going on. He's gone and
gotten mom's Hamilton beach blender, and I'm just throwing that
out there. It's the first, you know, brand that comes
to mind. He could be one of those ninja things
for all I know. But he comes and brings this
(37:26):
back and I'm wondering if he's taking it and plugged
it into the bathroom. I'm assuming he has unless he's
walking up and down the hallway with body parts brain specifically,
and then going to the kitchen counter and putting putting
the contents in his hands and transforming in there. My
suspicion is it's in the bathroom, and if he didn't
put the lid on the thing. I mean, how many
(37:48):
times have you ever have you ever used used a blender?
My daughter was trying to make margaritas one time we
were at the beach and the lid was not on.
We spent the rest of the evening cleaning up the
floor because it stuff one everywhere, you know, so you're
going to have blood trace evidence that's certainly going to
be rather profuse. That's inside of the blender. I don't
(38:10):
know the I don't even know what you call a
blender container. You know that's got the little blades in it.
You're going to have that that's going to have this
guy's DNA in it, along with any kind of tissue
that's caught up in this thing, any other bits of hair, skin,
anything that went in there. And you're going tons of
(38:31):
trace evidence, and then the the trace evidence that's created
just by sawing. This guy's are decapitating him with a saw.
You're actually gonna dave. You're actually gonna have bone dust
here as well. You know, bone dust, You're going to
have any any connective tissue that's in there. Obviously, you're
gonna have blood. You'll have all the soft tissues, whether
(38:53):
it's skin, the fashion, the muscle. You'll have vessels that
are that become detached. You know, when when this exercise
is said and done and he's got blood on him,
you know, he's got blood on him, and I'm wondering where,
you know, like are hopefully I'm hoping that they collected
(39:16):
all of his clothing. One of the things that happens
is is that when you get a suspect like this
and you get them back to you know, to the Hooscal,
you're going to go get first off, you're going to
have them strip uh. There's an evidence technician that is
in fact standing by. If you're you know, if you're
in blood soak clothes, they're going to collect those from
(39:36):
you individually. They're going to take pictures of you, possibly
in the nude, with your arms extended, you're going to
take They're going to take pictures of your hands, both
uh the ventral and the dorsom, up and down the arms.
They're going to take pictures of your face, the whole
nine yards. They're going to document every inch of this
guy's body, any blood that's there, any marks that are there,
(39:58):
and they're going to collect his clothing and it'll be
taken back to the crime lab where it will be assessed,
and they'll collect all the DNA. There's no way I
can't imagine in any circumstances that a judge is going
to grant this guy, grant this guy the possibility of
getting out of jail because of this evidence. The evidence
(40:20):
when this thing is presented to the grand jury is
going to be so incredibly overwhelming day and the whole
thing is so very tragic along the way when you
think about what this poor victim was doing for this
young man.
Speaker 1 (40:36):
All he was doing was helping raise a couple of
kids with their mom. That's all he was doing for
the last six years. Yeah, and by the way, dealing
with a nineteen year old with mental health issues. The
guy had to have been a saint, you know, because
he was there every day on disability, losing his eyesight
every day, and this is how he gets repaid. I'm
(40:57):
thinking about the trauma that's going to extend out too,
because the sixteen year old daughter who comes home and
the nineteen year old brother says, you need to go
to your room. I've done something bad, and she says, no, man.
She follows the blood trail to the bathroom and finds her. Well,
he's been there six years. That's a step dad. And
his head is now sitting there severed from his body.
(41:18):
There's a spin sticking out of his mouth, out of
his ear, I mean, out of his eye. And they
said he tried to use a hammer to get the
brain out, and I think, what do you do? He
couldn't get it all the way out, and so he
used the hook end of it to try to cry
it out. I mean, this goes beyond anything, Joe, that
I've ever thought we would talk about on this show.
And by the way, it's happening now. As you mentioned earlier,
(41:41):
this is not an old show, This is not an
old story. This is now.
Speaker 2 (41:46):
Yeah. Yeah, we rarely do really old old I mean
unless something tickles my fancy relative to histrionics. But in
this case, you had this guy and he did involve
a hammer in this as well. You know, it's almost like,
you know, I'm thinking almost a primal level, like somebody,
you know, some animal trying to crack up in a
coconut to get to the interior of this thing using
(42:08):
utilizing whatever they have with it's a rock or whatever.
And you know, he probably would have used a rock,
if that's what he had at his disposal, uh, to
try to break break this man's body down into elements
that could in fact be dissolved. Uh. You know, and
he used the term liquefied allegedly when making this admission
(42:31):
to the police. Of course, you know he's going to
have a team of lawyers or a lawyer that is
going to defend him and say that you know, he
he he didn't do this, he has no knowledge of it.
I'm just waiting to hear to see if if they
used the old I blacked out and I didn't remember anything,
(42:52):
and the next thing I knew, I woke up and
I was covered with blood. We'll see what happens relative
to this, But you know, I gotta tell you, man,
this gentleman, this gentleman that you know, that gave of himself,
gave of his home and opened his door to you know,
(43:14):
not just this woman who claims that she still loved him.
That's a statement that she actually made to the boy,
to the nineteen year olds, she said, why did you
do this? I still loved him, which is an odd
statement in and of itself. He not only gave of
himself to this woman, but also to her children, his time,
(43:37):
his money, his resources, maybe even his wise counsel at
some point in time, trying to help him become a
better person, a better man, hopefully in the future. And
it's not that this is a failure on victim Anthony's part.
This is a failure on the part and let's say
(43:57):
it plainly, on the part of the perpetry in this case.
He's creature free will. He's one that retrieved a meat tenderizer.
He's the one that you know, retrieved a hammer. He's
one that retrieved a kitchen knife. He's the one that
retrieved retrieved a saw. He's one that retrieved a blender.
(44:20):
No one else did this. It's a sad case, it's
very tragic and hopefully, hopefully if there is justice in
this world. It will come about. But we do know this.
We do know that this family and this man's extended
family is scarred forever and ever because this case is
(44:43):
the stuff of nightmares. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this
is bodybags.
Host
Joseph Scott Morgan
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