May 7, 2026 • 46 mins
In February 1998 the dismembered remains of an elderly man were found in Tuscarawas County, Ohio. The remains were in two suitcases found days apart and investigators determined all of the remains belonged to the same individual. The hands and head were not in either suitcase, preventing identification of the remains. The case went cold. Joseph Scott Morgan and Dave Mack take a look at what happened over 30 years and how Othram was able to identify the remains and in the process, identify the person who put the remains in the suitcases.
Host: Joseph Scott Morgan
Co-Host: Dave Mack
Transcribe Highlights
00:00.29 Introduction - Retirement
05:11.00 Dismembered remains found
10:35.78 Remains were "fresh"
15:16.46 Coroner would have been alerted
20:11.67 Body Bag becomes evidence
25:22.09 Forensic anthropology
30:07.00 Victim was in his 90s
36:22.81 DNA - Othram, identified remains
39:58.10 Son Collected Dad social security and pension
45:55.32 Conclusion
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Quality balance with Joseph's gotten more. I was having a
discussion with my wife not too long ago regarding our
retirement and thinking about, you know what moneies there are,
you know, how how do you access it? How do
you know how much you have? It's one thing relative
(00:23):
to like personal investments and all that. That's not what
I'm talking about. I'm talking about self security, right because
it's something I've I've never really thought about, you know,
at all. And I know I've got a lot of
great friends that are drawing their sell security right now
that listen to us faithfully. And first off, if you've
made to retirement, God bless you. I'm happy for you.
(00:44):
I think it's a great thing. I long for that someday.
But you know, they put you on that graph right
you go into the guts of the program and will
show you how much you have earned to this point.
It's a bit disheartening, I think, because when you look
(01:04):
at it, you can go back and see when you
started working, right, And I thought, oh my lord, man,
I've been at this for a long long time. And
it's a grind, isn't it. Every single day you've got
to get up. You're going to go in and I'm
like you, guys, I've had jobs that I've hated, I've
(01:26):
had jobs that I have met, and then there are
other jobs I'm just like super excited to go into.
But can you imagine can you imagine working your entire
life and finally you get to the point where you've
still got viable health and you get an opportunity maybe
(01:49):
to enjoy a few of those fruits, just maybe. As
a matter of fact, you get into your nineties, which
is a great accomplishment, but you die not unexpected. But
then what happens to you afterwards, Well, I'll give you
(02:12):
a hint. That's of security that you work for for
all those years continued to be collected in your absence,
And no it wasn't by your spouse. I'm Joseph Scott
Morgan and this is Bodybags, brother Dave. I've gotten now
(02:43):
where when I meet people, you know, I go to
these social functions at the university, and because I you know,
I represent Jack State on all these platforms, they're mentioned
very frequently, certainly on all the television stuff that I do.
So I go out and I meet a lot of alumni.
I love hanging out with our alumni. I met alumni
(03:04):
that graduated from jack State. The oldest one I met
with somebody that graduated in nineteen forty eight. And we're
not a huge school. We're just a tiny regional university.
But you know, I talk to them about how they've
been retired. They're living on a lake somewhere, you know,
they've got their boat, or they're just taking it easier
(03:25):
around the house. And yeah, you know, it comes with,
you know, physical problems and ailments as everybody gets them
you get older. But many times I find myself saying, Wow,
I wonder, I wonder what that's like. I wonder what
that's like not to have to go and work for
the man, you know, or do one of these things.
And this case came across our desk and I thought
(03:47):
about this, this gentleman and our principle here in this case,
and wow, what a what a way to end. Huh.
Speaker 2 (03:54):
Well, here's your bottom line, Joe, I sent the note
to you on this story. It's about father and son
Lawrence drop left. Lawrence is ninety three years old. His son,
who is fifty three, is living with him at the
time and working. Now. At ninety three years old, the senior,
(04:18):
mister Drow. He's not working, you know, he's he is
full on retired at ninety three. And by the way, Joe,
you mentioned social security. He's drawing social Security and he's
drawing a pension from where he had worked. So in
his retirement years, you know, he's got two different checks
coming in every month. He has his adult son living
with him, hopefully sharing the bills.
Speaker 1 (04:40):
You know.
Speaker 2 (04:40):
So the problem is this is that drop left? Is
that how we're going to pronounce his name?
Speaker 1 (04:50):
H yeah? Okay, yeah, sure.
Speaker 2 (04:52):
I was hoping because that's what it looked like to me.
Speaker 1 (04:54):
I disrespect. I mean, that's you know, to the draw
of family. But this is what we got.
Speaker 2 (05:00):
Okay, so we'll go with that.
Speaker 1 (05:01):
Well, you go.
Speaker 2 (05:03):
The problem here is that I want to get this right,
but there are three different things. So let me just
give you the opening line here, Joe, you're ready. Version
number one. February nineteen ninety eight. The remains of a
man were found in Ohio. Hikers located a suitcase and
(05:26):
bag near Interstate seventy seven in Dover Township, inside the
where the dismembered remains of an elderly man. Man's height
and weight estimated to be five eight to five ten
and one hundred and sixty pounds, give or take. The
investigators believed that only a few days had elapsed since
the man's death. That's version one, Okay, just found by hikers.
(05:50):
Version two. February nineteen ninety eight, children playing in the
woods in Dover Township discovered a suitcase containing the membered
remains of a man. Days later, days later, an additional Okay,
remains were found in a second suitcase. Authorities determined the
(06:12):
remains belong to one person, but they're unable to identify
the elderly victim due to the absence of the head
and hands. That's version two. Now version three is this
and I know this seems weird that you could have.
These are big differences in how the remains were found, Joe,
big differences. The case began in February ninety eight when
(06:33):
authorities receive a complaint. Now receive a complaint regarding a
suitcase found by a group of children on Winkler Hill
Road in Dover Township containing unidentified male body parts, including
a pelvis and part of one leg. One week later,
a second suitcase containing a torso was found along a
(06:57):
Bolt's Orchard Road in Jefferson Township. Despite the recovery of
a body, authorities unable to determine the identity of the
victim or a potential suspect, Joe. We start with hikers
finding two bags, then we have children playing find a suitcase,
and then days later another bag, and then we have
(07:20):
again found in a week later found more but this
time no head, no hands. So three different versions of
the same thing.
Speaker 1 (07:35):
Hang on one second, Brother Dave. I've got to make
a comment here because we do realize that there are
a finite number of human remains, and so I began
to think about this, you know, the distribution of these remains,
and is there any chance that the stories got all
(07:56):
jumbled up, you know, like a nest of fishing line,
and you can't see where one ends and one begins,
or these are these separate distinct events. You know, We've
got hikers and little kids. Little kids seem to be
the common thread here. And can little kids be hikers? Yes,
I suppose they can. But when I think about hikers,
(08:17):
I lived, I lived really over in Georgia. I live
within five miles of the Appalachian Trail, have a I
have a kind of a vision in my mind of
what hikers look like. And they don't look like little kids.
So in this area. This area is kind of in
eastern Ohio and at least by my view of it
(08:43):
is kind of a rural area. You know, it's not
teeming with folks. So yeah, I mean, I guess people
could be hiking in that area. But wow, to recover
three and you've got those are those are as you
and I have discussed on body bags. Those are three
individual scenes. Yeah, you know, if you think about the
(09:04):
dispersement of the remainders.
Speaker 2 (09:05):
Yeah, multiple Going back to the finder, this is something
that I have learned in working with Joe over the
last several years, looking at the finder because it means something,
all right in this case, when I started looking for
the finder and found the different versions of what took place,
and by the way, each one of the stories that
I told you, each version was printed in a legitimate
(09:30):
news report from television, print, what have you, and it's
all from nineteen ninety eight. Granted that is twenty eight
years ago. But the case went cold, Joe because they
had the body parts in two different containers. But the
only thing they really knew elderly man five eight to
five ten, one hundred and sixty pounds. That's it. And
(09:54):
because that was all they really had at the time,
the case went cold and it remained could Now the
reason we're talking about it today is because of our
friends at Authraam and the work that Authoram is doing
just remarkable. Yeah, and something that they could not identify
(10:18):
who this guy, who this person was, And we're talking
days you know, the it was mentioned that when the
body parts are found, Joe the based on what was observed,
they were fairly fresh remains. Death had only occurred recently.
Speaker 1 (10:35):
Yeah, and and most of the time day in these
dismemberment cases, you know, we we talked about the the
I don't know not the we talked about how it's
a common occurrence. It seems as though kidding more, Yeah,
(10:55):
my lord, I don't want uh, you know, podcast has
to expert on dismemberments on my gravestone, all right, but
it seems like it's headed that way. But there's so
many of them now. But yeah, when you look at
this and you look at these cases, you know, most
of the time with what really caught my eye about
(11:16):
this case is that from a forensic standpoint. When you're
discussing dismemberment, most of the time the remains are really degraded.
But you know, in every statement that has come up
about this case, they're saying that these are in fact
fresh remains. So again I go back to whoever did this,
(11:43):
their ability to kind of assess the world around them
and having some kind of awareness. This sounds like somebody
got really lucky because the thing went cold. But why
do you go to all of the trouble, Why do
you go to all of the trouble to take a saw,
(12:03):
cut up a body and place it in individual elements
and then distribute them. But yet they're found. That seems
to run contrary to all of that work, unless unless
(12:25):
possibly there's some other kind of attachment. I go out
to my garage, I go into my closet. I'm looking
(12:46):
at everything I have. I've got black plastic bags, I've
got a couple of old suitcases. What shall I use?
It's gruesome enough when you're talking about dismemberment to think about,
you know, having to do that, all right, But then
(13:07):
how do you make a decision on the conveyance? You know, like,
are the what's it called receptacle. How do you make
a decision about the receptacle. You know there's a there's
a big difference between a plastic garbage bag and a suitcase, right,
I mean to me, there is. I know that sounds
rather obvious, and you know I'm not being tongue in
(13:29):
cheek here. I'm just saying, if you're looking at this
from an assessment standpoint of from an investigative standpoint, what
compels you to go with those Why do you run
out of suitcases? Are we shining on plastic bags? Or
did you say, yeah, I still got a couple of
good suitcases. I want to travel. I'm going to use
(13:51):
these old ones and then I'm going to fill in
the blanks with the black plastic garbage bags. It's an
interesting it's an interesting conundrument. It's something I've never really
thought of in all of these cases that we've covered.
A dismemberment kind of odd.
Speaker 2 (14:08):
Let me ask you about the actual finding, Okay, Joe,
what happens when a call comes in to headquarters to
police that we have a suitcase that has body parts
in it. And I'm going to guess that the person
gets the nine to one one operator or the police
whoever got the call said stop touching it, leave it
(14:31):
where it is, do not move, I mean just stop.
And so with that call, I would imagine the first
thing is send a patrol car out verify that's what
we have. Yeah, and once it's verified, what goes next?
When do you come out there as the death investigator?
When do you actually come out Yeah?
Speaker 1 (14:48):
Okay, yeah immediately. And in Ohio, which, by the way,
if I've got any Ohio natives out there, you guys
have a fine corner system there. As corner system goes,
the corner systems. Corner systems Go Ohio has one of
the best in the country. I've trained many of them
(15:10):
over the years. I don't do it currently, but years
ago I did, and just a great group of folks.
They would have The Sheriff's office would have alerted the
corner almost immediately because here's the thing. They're going to
get their CID out there, because this is obviously something
that is that implies a homicide. You got this memberment.
(15:34):
My first stopping off point in my mind as a
cop is going to be homicide. But also there's no
rescue here, there's no attempt to save a lie for
anything like that, You've got to call the corner. I
think somebody that just graduated from the police academy last
week and they throw them on the road. They're like, yeah,
we got to call the corner, so they would be
(15:57):
out there pretty quickly. Here's logistically, here's the weird thing
for me, because you know, we've got these these scenarios,
which you did a fantastic job of breaking this down,
because you see how kind of complex this sort of
thing is. Do you come across one set of remains
(16:17):
and then you go out and you search that area.
I cannot imagine that the local police and share they've
got a lot of resources because of kind of the
isolated nature of it. But you go out there and
you look in eccentrically, so you start where the suitcase is,
(16:39):
and if you imagine like a big uh, like a
big swirl, you know, kind of extending out eccentrically from
the center. You go out and you look and there's
just at some point in tom you're you know, you're
you're thinking, Okay, there's nothing else out here. I've got
this one bag or I've got this one suitcase. There's
(17:01):
kind of a funny little aside that I see in
social media every night, and then particularly in the true
crime community, where they'll say there'll be a picture of
a black plastic bag on the side of the road,
you know, like some work team has come by and
cleaned up trash, and the meme reads like, my true
(17:24):
crime superpowers have been activated. I wonder what's in that bag,
you know, because you're looking at it and you're thinking,
is there anything else? So if you leave from that
initial scene and you've got that one set of whatever
it might be, well, if you're on patrol, I would
have to imagine that, you know, your head is always
(17:45):
on the swivel. You're trying to decide, you know what,
where's the rest of him? Because I can tell you, Dave,
once they got into the morgue, they would realize that
now they're shy a few parts, if you know what
I mean.
Speaker 2 (18:00):
Well, and that was actually something they had to do
with problems in identification. Apparently, even though it was ninety eight,
and even though we were a couple of years removed
from the O. J. Simpson trial that was all about DNA,
you know, there still were problems identifying the body and
the head and the hands were missing. I've tried to
(18:25):
determine did they ever find them and they didn't. But Joe,
when you're looking at the remains, you've got them in
the suitcase and possibly a back. After you have done
the search around the body, around the remains, and you've
(18:47):
determined we got nothing else out here, do you then
how are the remains transported? I mean in a suitcase,
they're going to be slashing around or whatever else you've
has already been opened. I mean, there's gonna be inzact dictivity.
There's going to be a lot going on with this.
How are they going to transport the suitcase and the
back from where it's found to the lab?
Speaker 1 (19:10):
Simply put, you're going to put it in a body bag? Okay,
you're going to put it in a body bag. And
it's an excellent question because I can see why, you know,
how people will you know, it looks the facility of it.
You think I can facilitate this by merely grabbing the
hand handle on the on the suitcase and continue to
(19:32):
use it as conveyance. Here's the problem. That suitcase is
now part of criminal investigation, so it's no longer a
receptacle for human remains. I'd like to go back just
for a second and think about something we talked about
last week with Celes Revus, and that is I think
(19:55):
I mentioned this. It's the only time in my experience
as a death investigator or as commentator where a body
bag has now become a piece of evidence and they're
actually swabbing, you know they talked about in Reeves's autopsy report.
They're swabbing each one of the six NHLON handles woven
(20:16):
nil one handles on that. Now, yeah, you might think,
and you'd be dead on accurate that the the handle
that in ninety eight we could not necessarily get touched DNA.
But even just touching that bag by the handle, well,
that's a specific point of contact with a perpetrator who
(20:40):
is going to grab it, so you can't. You might
you might look at it and think that it has
the utility. It's kind of like saying, yeah, I found
a I found a body in the trunk of a car.
The keys are in ignition. We found it as investigators.
I think I'll just hopping the car. It's got gas
(21:01):
in motor operates, and I'm going to drive it to
the police. You know, to the police garage and well
they no, no, no, Now you keep that in a
static position the best you can, and you load it
up and you convey it there. Because that car, that
car that I'm using in that example, it's just like
(21:24):
the suitcase or those bags. Those bags are smooth, non
porous plastic surfaces. We con fume those bags. Look for
fingerprints on the outside the bags. But here's the problem.
If you ain't got fingerprints in aphis, then you know,
my will say it ain't worth gunpowder to blow a
(21:45):
hell because yeah, you might hope that sooner or later
somebody will be printed that comes back in the system,
the automatic automated fingerprint system that we have and we've
had it for years and years. But if you're not
in system, any unknown fingerprints that you collect at that moment, Tom,
it's not going to help you, but you have to
treat it as though it can help you in the future.
(22:08):
It's kind of like the remains. Those people back in
ninety eight had no idea you know what science, what
science would would hold for us and try to understand,
you know, kind of the journey that the person and
the body has been on. And that's a major thing
(22:31):
to try and unlock. But I can tell you who
actually has the keys. It's our friend David Middleman in
the Woodlands, Texas. It's well known my version to jigsaw puzzles.
(23:02):
I was never good at it. I never had the
patience for it. But you know, in life, sometimes you're
forced to do things like that that you might not
want to do, but you got to do them, you know,
just like you're going to put a jigsaw puzzle together
with your family on Saturday afternoon it's ran outside. You know,
Dad's going to bite the bullet and you're going to
(23:22):
sit down and do it, even though it felt like
throwing the pieces across the room because it's just too overwhelming.
In my work life though kind of pride. I took
a lot of pride in trying to piece things together,
not just intellectually but also from an evid entry standpoint. Dave,
you know what one of the problems is when you
(23:44):
get a dismembered body, and they were very specific. I'm
going to ask you to call up the numbers that
you stated earlier. Did they or did they not give
us a specific height? Or it was the range was
very tight. It looked like to me, what was.
Speaker 2 (23:59):
That from five eight to five ten and one hundred
and sixty pounds? Do you ever take?
Speaker 1 (24:05):
Yeah, so you figure we know from the movie Jerry Maguire,
the Little Boy says, you know, the average human head
weighs about ten pounds. Did you know that that's actually accurate?
That little statement? You know that that Little Boy. I
love that movie by the way, that that statement that
that kid made in that movie is pretty accurate. Of course,
(24:25):
it's going to vary from person to person. But I'm
thinking about stature from an anthropology standpoint. You said, well, Morgan,
these are fresh remains. Would you why would you even
bring up anthropology? Well, here's the reason. Anthropologists set the
gold standard when it comes to measurement of the human form,
(24:47):
and they have very specific calculus that they use in
order to come up with the link. You have to
have the big thing that you use in anthropology, at
least to my way. And granted I am not a
graduate level anthropology. I'm a forensic scientist, but you know
I play one on TV. Love I love forensic anthropology.
I always have one of the key elements to anthropology
(25:11):
assessment day are actually the femur, the long bones in
the body and so. But in this case we're missing
the head, all right, So how big was his head?
I like to think I've got a head that is
a lot larger than most if you look at it.
I can't get a good hat size from my head.
(25:32):
Everything I have to expand it completely out. My wife says,
was full of brains. I think it's because my brain.
My head's full of bs most of the time. But
my head is dimensionally is essentially if you want to
think about it from you know, the chin to the
crown is probably longer than most. So if you're trying
to nail down a height, because you know, stature is
(25:55):
essential to trying to go about and talk about it.
We've got an elderly guy. We think that he's five
eight to five ten, and he might weigh one hundred
and sixty pounds. One hundred and sixty pounds is very specific.
That also gives me a lot of information about status
of the body because you know, just going back to
again Celesereevus and she's contained right, just like this case,
(26:22):
they came up the number for her weight, if I'm
not mistaken, was like in the sixties, I think is
where it was, but her body was so degraded and
it had become you know, let's face it, it had liquefied.
You don't have that here. So you're able to get
an idea of overall weight, but you're going to have
(26:43):
to calculate, well, how much would a body weigh without hands?
How much would it weigh without head? Do you know
how we weigh bodies in the morgue?
Speaker 2 (26:51):
Dave no idea.
Speaker 1 (26:53):
I told you this. There used to be I'm thinking back.
It used to be this contraption that you could wheel
in beside the body, and you would have to factor
in the weight of a stainless steel trade with a body.
It's a winch system and you hook straps underneath and
(27:16):
you wind it up click click click click like that,
and you press the button and it gives you the
weight of that thing that's being held. You subtract for
the weight of a stainless steel trade and that gives
you the body weight. And they still have the same
thing now where you push the body with a gurny
(27:38):
now and a tray perhaps onto a weighted systems like
weigh in a truck. You know, you push it up
on this platform. There's an indwelling indwelling scale in there,
and that's how we weigh the body and you can
get accurate you can get accurate weights of the physical
remains that you have. Just follow me here. However, you
(28:03):
can take that number all you want, but you have
to factor in all of sames, Dave that you're absent.
You know, we're talking about hands, we're talking about a head,
and Lord only knows what else might be missing.
Speaker 2 (28:16):
All right, now, we got to get this buddy identified,
and you've got to find out how did he die? Right,
I mean, there has to be he didn't just get
cut up and thrown in a suitcase. He died first.
And how are you going to go about trying to
identify that? Because you mentioned Silas Rebas, we have had
(28:40):
that identification you know of how she possibly died. So
did they do the same thing with the ninety three
year old man?
Speaker 1 (28:49):
You know what this is? I'm so glad you you
asked this about this case. With this this is physicians
love to use the term a diagnosis of exclusion, and
I always use the example of and God bless people
that have this condition, but people that have loopus loupus
(29:12):
presents in so many different ways, right, You know, you
have all these factors that surround it. It's a miserable
disease to have. And you know doctors have to check
off everything else in the world before they arrive on loopus. Okay, Well,
here's the problem with an elderly gentleman that is missing
(29:32):
his head and he's chopped bits. One of the big
things that we look at here is, you know what
happened to his head? Okay? Does he have a gunshot
one into the back of the head? Do you sustain
a blow to the back of the head. Now, you
can't make that assessment. What you can do is you
(29:55):
come back if you have the heart. And that's probably
my first stop on this little journey of the autopsy.
You're going to see what his heart look like. Well,
let me tell you what his heart's going to look like.
He's in his nineties, okay. And many people there's a
term that I absolutely hate that doctors use both in
(30:22):
practice out in general practice when they have a patient die.
And also the medical examiner corner community has been guilty
of this too. They will list the primary cause of
death as Sequelli is the term, and it's very it's
a bizarre term. So they'll say sequellly and what they
mean by that is they're kind of throwing their arms
(30:42):
up in the air, their hands up in there and saying,
you know, God called is essentially what they're saying, and
that applies most of the time. With people that are aged.
You'll also get and I think that this is probably
a bit more intellectually honest, some physicians will say circumstances
(31:07):
associated with advanced age or I've actually seen them. In
the top line on death certificate, just put advanced age
because you don't you don't necessarily have a lot to
hang your hat on if you're looking for somebody, for instance,
that and what we'll see in the morgue with somebody
who's had a classic heart attack like an mi I
mile cardial infarction, you'll when you do that dissection on
(31:29):
the heart, first off, you'll see, well, how blocked are
their associated cardiac vessels or coronary vessels, And then is
there any evidence of previous m I or heart attacks?
And then do you have any evidence of something that's fresh?
And sometimes those little evidences of fresh heart event, you know,
(31:53):
are striking. You know, you can back it up because
what this means is that when the corner artists get
blocked that heart muscle, the myocardium, which the heart is
one gigantic muscle. If oxygenated blood is shut off from
that area, then the muscle dies in that area that
(32:16):
are affective. Wherever that blockage is, it dies. And so,
you know, they'll talk about lots of times that you know,
the heart, you're you know, you've only got eighty five percent,
you're functioning eighty five percent. Well, what that means is
that you've got eighty five percent of your heart that's
still doing the work that it would have done when
(32:36):
you were diseased free one hundred percent, and so it's
having to make up and that can lead eventually to
you know, cardiac failure. So when you're making a diagnosis
like this, and this is kind of a complex thing
to do, this is not this is not like you
don't want to give this case to somebody that's fresh
out of training. Right this it's it's a bit new.
(33:00):
It requires a bit of ainess, you know, when you're
looking at everything, because you really have to do the
mental gymnastics. If just simply by missing the heads. Some
people will say, well, that makes it a lot easier.
Well maybe so, but are you are you satisfied as
the person's going to sign the death certificate of signing
this just hope. Just pay attention to what I'm saying.
(33:23):
Are you comfortable enough with a dismembered body to say, yeah,
this is natural and not homicide? Just think about that
just for a second, because you know that's the roads
you're going to go down. And in this particular case,
they're they're faced with this decision.
Speaker 2 (33:39):
Day and that's it's an important one because if this
person died naturally, they wouldn't have hacked themselves up and
put themselves into a suitcase in a separate bag. So
one has to look at it as this person at
the very least was abused as a corpse. Okay, yes, yeah,
(33:59):
Now when I get down to this nitty gritty here,
I want to point something out, friends, and we've talked
about this on the show on multiple occasions at Bears
repeating now nineteen ninety eight, February ninety eight, they did
run DNA, they did get DNA from the corpse. You
know they were able to create the profile. Problem is
if that DNA profile is not in a system anywhere
(34:23):
you have nothing to compare it to. And so because
of that, the case went cold and is sat there
for years and years and years. But this is where
and we started off at the very beginning part of
this as an authorom event because there are now ways
of taking this DNA and finding relatives, building a family tree,
(34:50):
and this genetic genealogy has been very effective in solving
a number of very high profile crimes used here. They
were the investigation was able to identify the remains, and
once identifying the remains, they know what Paul Harvey used
(35:12):
to call the rest of the story. The problem is
you're left with believing a story I don't necessarily believe
Justin Scott Morgan, but I'm not the investigator or no, right, Look.
Speaker 1 (35:26):
I share I share your concern over this because it's
like I would not want to be in this position,
because you know, I'm if I'm living up in this
Dover Township area in Ohio. I got questions, Okay, I
mean I got a lot of questions. So you're telling
me that back in ninety eight that you guys recovered
(35:47):
a dismembered body in multiple in bags and suitcase and
we're still you know, missing elements of the body, and
you're going to this is not a homicide, you know,
Convince me, well, David turns out, as a result of
DNA testing, all roads lead back to family, right and
(36:10):
through that testing, through that testing that was conducted by
our good friends down in the Woodlands, Texas. Of course,
we're talking about AUTHROM. They have a patented program that
they use. It's called a forensic grade genome sequencing and
it's something that is unique to David Middleman and Kristen
(36:33):
down there in those parts. And of course, as you know,
anybody that wants answers are going to go there, you know,
kind of the unveiling of these things that have been
a mystery for years and years and years. When you
look at this, they were able to determine that this gentleman,
(36:54):
this gentleman, he's got a living son. And you had
mentioned him off at the top of the show, Dave,
we're talking about a fellow who is now well up
into his seventies. I eighty one, he's eight he's eighty one. Yeah, okay, yeah,
let me do the arithmetic. Yeah, he'd be eighty one
years of eighty. He's just shy well I'll say shy,
(37:16):
shy by a decade. This family lives a long time.
Parents think about, uh, he's shy by decade of his
dad's age when his dad was essentially cut up. I
find that very interesting And gee whiz, I wonder if
the cops had questions for him Dave.
Speaker 2 (37:36):
You know Joe there, Because again you go back to
at the time this occurred, they could not identify the remains.
And so with a without a family member coming forward
and saying, hey, my ninety three year old dad is missing,
help me find him, with nobody saying that out loud,
(37:59):
the case went cold and remained cold, and the closest
that investigators came to finding out what happened was in
twenty ten, Joe in twenty ten, the Uh. In twenty ten,
it was discovered that Larry draw Left was collecting his
(38:23):
father's Social Security Larry's father would have been if he
were alive in twenty ten, well, golly, g whizbef he
would have been one hundred and five years old, one
hundred and six Okay, he was born in nineteen oh four.
Social Security's going there's no man who's getting this check
(38:45):
because it's not one hundred and six year old man. Okay,
so in twenty ten.
Speaker 1 (38:50):
This guy would have had This guy would have had
a full awareness of the end of World War One.
Oh yeah, he would have seen that dough boys come home.
Speaker 2 (38:59):
From He might Joe in nineteen oh four he was born,
which means wow. Not only he would have been at
the parades when Johnny came marching home, he would have
been waving the flag. You're right, he would have.
Speaker 1 (39:16):
Been right like just shy. The cusp of eligibility, right,
gives you an idea how old this guy is.
Speaker 2 (39:21):
He would have been too old to serve in World
War two?
Speaker 1 (39:25):
Yes, yeah, he would have been far too And Dave,
haven't we heard about these cases in recent years? You
know where they've gone back and they've audited these things.
There are people on the on the rolls out there
that are getting Social Security and the age that stated,
you know, these people are like one hundred and forty
years old or something like this. But they caught this one,
(39:46):
and please, you know, tell me what I'm like more
about this.
Speaker 2 (39:50):
Yeah, bottom line being the bottom line. In twenty ten,
they isolated the social security stuff and they stopped payments
on it. Now I I don't know the intricacies to
this because I haven't dug into that part of the investigation.
It just we were focusing on the identity of the
human remains that were found and the fact that his
son collected his social Security and by the way, Larry
(40:14):
Droughtlift collected his father's pension too. The total amount of
benefits this guy collected over about two hundred and fifty
thousand dollars, nearly a quarter million dollars in benefits he collected.
But going back to nineteen ninety eight, February nineteen ninety eight,
remains found in a suitcase in a bag, and once
(40:36):
the body was truly identified as being the victim here
that we've been talking about, when it was Larry Droughtlift,
his father was called Lawrence, not Larry. I apologize. When
Laurence Strautluff was positively identified. They reopened this case in
twenty twenty three, Joe and started looking at things. In
(40:56):
twenty twenty four, the investigation came down where they had
enough to send it to AUTHORM And you know, we've
talked about how it takes time. It's not like you
just send what you have to author them and they
come out in Ding Ding Ding. Here's your name. It
takes so much time because you send stuff to authorm,
they break it down, they send back the information to
(41:17):
the law enforcement. Law enforcement has to go back out
in the field in a lot of cases doing more interviews,
trying to find more people, and it takes time to
build out this tree in this case took about two
and a half years. But they finally did come down
to wait a minute, we know who the sun is.
And once they identified the sun, they identified the biological
(41:38):
remains of Lawrence A. Droft Loff. His son, Larry Draftloff
is called in Larry's now eighty one, by the way,
and they sit him down and they say, Larry, these
remains of your dad. Tell it. You know, we already
nailed you for collecting his stuff. So talk to us man,
how did your dad end up in that suitcase can?
(41:59):
And that's when Larry Draftliff actually admitted. But Joe, here,
here's his story. Larry Draftliff claims that he's fifty three
years old when he comes home from work and he's
living with his elderly father who is ninety three, and
he walks in the door and dad is Dad Now
(42:19):
you have to believe Larry draftlift in this found my
dad dead, and yeah, I wanted to collect his benefits,
so I hacked up his body. I put his body
in the suitcase. I put his remains in the back
and by the way, I also took some other parts
of his remains that you can't find, and I threw
(42:41):
those in a dumb I put them in bags like
trash and threw them in a dumpster near where I
work in nineteen ninety eight. So here we are, it's
twenty twenty six, and he's admitting twenty eight years ago,
I disposed of my father's head and hands in a
dumpster near where I work. You ain't find it those no, no,
(43:01):
no way. You're left with believing him that he came
home and found his ninety three year old dad dead.
And Joe, I've met some ninety three year old people,
Yeah that were You wonder how they're still alive, barely breathing.
And I've met I learned how to shoot pool from
a man who was ninety three years old. John Jennings
taught me how to shoot He was he was ninety
(43:23):
three when I met him.
Speaker 1 (43:25):
Anyway, and it's amazing you never know, you know the
level of smodies of vitality, and you know the beauty
of it also is the history that they bring along
with them. Yes, I'm sure that in this dad's mind,
you know, he he had no way of seeing, you know,
what the future held. Obviously, I don't know how malevolent
(43:50):
the sun was. You know, during this period of time,
there's no excuse for the abuse of a corpse. And
then you go to a moral level of it, the
abuse of your father's course. I was talking with Kimmy
about this case yesterday and me and my wife had
the most lovely conversations. We were sitting there and you
(44:10):
were thinking, and this has happened before. How in the
world does someone take a saw to your parents' remains?
I don't know. And there look, guys, there's many things
that I don't understand. I can't do the arithmetic on it.
Speaker 2 (44:27):
If he's used a handsaw, Joe, he used a handsaw on.
Speaker 1 (44:30):
This guy's body, and he had him in a place
that he could do this and never be detected. If
you've got two guys that are living together, an elderly
father who's going to miss him, if by that age,
and there's a high probability. A lot of his friends
have already passed on. You know, are there other family
(44:53):
members out there that want to know, you know, what
happened to our uncle? You know where is he? You know,
I don't know. You just kind of wandered off. It
would require agoing, an ongoing effort I think on the
part of the Sun to keep up the secrecy. And
of course, after a while, guess what, people stop asking questions.
(45:18):
The beauty of it is this now, with the technology
we have, questions that seemed unanswerable in the past are
now just to key struck away. That's why I urge
all of you all, just like in this case, to
go to dnasolves dot com. That's our friends at authorm.
(45:40):
Check out their website. Look through all of those cases.
There might be something you want to throw a few
bucks to. They don't want thousands of dollars from you, guys.
Just a few bucks sent their way could flip the
switch on getting these gigantic mysteries brought to a resolution.
That's dolls dot com. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this
(46:07):
is body bags. Mm hmm.
Quality balance with Joseph's gotten more. I was having a
discussion with my wife not too long ago regarding our
retirement and thinking about, you know what moneies there are,
you know, how how do you access it? How do
you know how much you have? It's one thing relative
(00:23):
to like personal investments and all that. That's not what
I'm talking about. I'm talking about self security, right because
it's something I've I've never really thought about, you know,
at all. And I know I've got a lot of
great friends that are drawing their sell security right now
that listen to us faithfully. And first off, if you've
made to retirement, God bless you. I'm happy for you.
(00:44):
I think it's a great thing. I long for that someday.
But you know, they put you on that graph right
you go into the guts of the program and will
show you how much you have earned to this point.
It's a bit disheartening, I think, because when you look
(01:04):
at it, you can go back and see when you
started working, right, And I thought, oh my lord, man,
I've been at this for a long long time. And
it's a grind, isn't it. Every single day you've got
to get up. You're going to go in and I'm
like you, guys, I've had jobs that I've hated, I've
(01:26):
had jobs that I have met, and then there are
other jobs I'm just like super excited to go into.
But can you imagine can you imagine working your entire
life and finally you get to the point where you've
still got viable health and you get an opportunity maybe
(01:49):
to enjoy a few of those fruits, just maybe. As
a matter of fact, you get into your nineties, which
is a great accomplishment, but you die not unexpected. But
then what happens to you afterwards, Well, I'll give you
(02:12):
a hint. That's of security that you work for for
all those years continued to be collected in your absence,
And no it wasn't by your spouse. I'm Joseph Scott
Morgan and this is Bodybags, brother Dave. I've gotten now
(02:43):
where when I meet people, you know, I go to
these social functions at the university, and because I you know,
I represent Jack State on all these platforms, they're mentioned
very frequently, certainly on all the television stuff that I do.
So I go out and I meet a lot of alumni.
I love hanging out with our alumni. I met alumni
(03:04):
that graduated from jack State. The oldest one I met
with somebody that graduated in nineteen forty eight. And we're
not a huge school. We're just a tiny regional university.
But you know, I talk to them about how they've
been retired. They're living on a lake somewhere, you know,
they've got their boat, or they're just taking it easier
(03:25):
around the house. And yeah, you know, it comes with,
you know, physical problems and ailments as everybody gets them
you get older. But many times I find myself saying, Wow,
I wonder, I wonder what that's like. I wonder what
that's like not to have to go and work for
the man, you know, or do one of these things.
And this case came across our desk and I thought
(03:47):
about this, this gentleman and our principle here in this case,
and wow, what a what a way to end. Huh.
Speaker 2 (03:54):
Well, here's your bottom line, Joe, I sent the note
to you on this story. It's about father and son
Lawrence drop left. Lawrence is ninety three years old. His son,
who is fifty three, is living with him at the
time and working. Now. At ninety three years old, the senior,
(04:18):
mister Drow. He's not working, you know, he's he is
full on retired at ninety three. And by the way, Joe,
you mentioned social security. He's drawing social Security and he's
drawing a pension from where he had worked. So in
his retirement years, you know, he's got two different checks
coming in every month. He has his adult son living
with him, hopefully sharing the bills.
Speaker 1 (04:40):
You know.
Speaker 2 (04:40):
So the problem is this is that drop left? Is
that how we're going to pronounce his name?
Speaker 1 (04:50):
H yeah? Okay, yeah, sure.
Speaker 2 (04:52):
I was hoping because that's what it looked like to me.
Speaker 1 (04:54):
I disrespect. I mean, that's you know, to the draw
of family. But this is what we got.
Speaker 2 (05:00):
Okay, so we'll go with that.
Speaker 1 (05:01):
Well, you go.
Speaker 2 (05:03):
The problem here is that I want to get this right,
but there are three different things. So let me just
give you the opening line here, Joe, you're ready. Version
number one. February nineteen ninety eight. The remains of a
man were found in Ohio. Hikers located a suitcase and
(05:26):
bag near Interstate seventy seven in Dover Township, inside the
where the dismembered remains of an elderly man. Man's height
and weight estimated to be five eight to five ten
and one hundred and sixty pounds, give or take. The
investigators believed that only a few days had elapsed since
the man's death. That's version one, Okay, just found by hikers.
(05:50):
Version two. February nineteen ninety eight, children playing in the
woods in Dover Township discovered a suitcase containing the membered
remains of a man. Days later, days later, an additional Okay,
remains were found in a second suitcase. Authorities determined the
(06:12):
remains belong to one person, but they're unable to identify
the elderly victim due to the absence of the head
and hands. That's version two. Now version three is this
and I know this seems weird that you could have.
These are big differences in how the remains were found, Joe,
big differences. The case began in February ninety eight when
(06:33):
authorities receive a complaint. Now receive a complaint regarding a
suitcase found by a group of children on Winkler Hill
Road in Dover Township containing unidentified male body parts, including
a pelvis and part of one leg. One week later,
a second suitcase containing a torso was found along a
(06:57):
Bolt's Orchard Road in Jefferson Township. Despite the recovery of
a body, authorities unable to determine the identity of the
victim or a potential suspect, Joe. We start with hikers
finding two bags, then we have children playing find a suitcase,
and then days later another bag, and then we have
(07:20):
again found in a week later found more but this
time no head, no hands. So three different versions of
the same thing.
Speaker 1 (07:35):
Hang on one second, Brother Dave. I've got to make
a comment here because we do realize that there are
a finite number of human remains, and so I began
to think about this, you know, the distribution of these remains,
and is there any chance that the stories got all
(07:56):
jumbled up, you know, like a nest of fishing line,
and you can't see where one ends and one begins,
or these are these separate distinct events. You know, We've
got hikers and little kids. Little kids seem to be
the common thread here. And can little kids be hikers? Yes,
I suppose they can. But when I think about hikers,
(08:17):
I lived, I lived really over in Georgia. I live
within five miles of the Appalachian Trail, have a I
have a kind of a vision in my mind of
what hikers look like. And they don't look like little kids.
So in this area. This area is kind of in
eastern Ohio and at least by my view of it
(08:43):
is kind of a rural area. You know, it's not
teeming with folks. So yeah, I mean, I guess people
could be hiking in that area. But wow, to recover
three and you've got those are those are as you
and I have discussed on body bags. Those are three
individual scenes. Yeah, you know, if you think about the
(09:04):
dispersement of the remainders.
Speaker 2 (09:05):
Yeah, multiple Going back to the finder, this is something
that I have learned in working with Joe over the
last several years, looking at the finder because it means something,
all right in this case, when I started looking for
the finder and found the different versions of what took place,
and by the way, each one of the stories that
I told you, each version was printed in a legitimate
(09:30):
news report from television, print, what have you, and it's
all from nineteen ninety eight. Granted that is twenty eight
years ago. But the case went cold, Joe because they
had the body parts in two different containers. But the
only thing they really knew elderly man five eight to
five ten, one hundred and sixty pounds. That's it. And
(09:54):
because that was all they really had at the time,
the case went cold and it remained could Now the
reason we're talking about it today is because of our
friends at Authraam and the work that Authoram is doing
just remarkable. Yeah, and something that they could not identify
(10:18):
who this guy, who this person was, And we're talking
days you know, the it was mentioned that when the
body parts are found, Joe the based on what was observed,
they were fairly fresh remains. Death had only occurred recently.
Speaker 1 (10:35):
Yeah, and and most of the time day in these
dismemberment cases, you know, we we talked about the the
I don't know not the we talked about how it's
a common occurrence. It seems as though kidding more, Yeah,
(10:55):
my lord, I don't want uh, you know, podcast has
to expert on dismemberments on my gravestone, all right, but
it seems like it's headed that way. But there's so
many of them now. But yeah, when you look at
this and you look at these cases, you know, most
of the time with what really caught my eye about
(11:16):
this case is that from a forensic standpoint. When you're
discussing dismemberment, most of the time the remains are really degraded.
But you know, in every statement that has come up
about this case, they're saying that these are in fact
fresh remains. So again I go back to whoever did this,
(11:43):
their ability to kind of assess the world around them
and having some kind of awareness. This sounds like somebody
got really lucky because the thing went cold. But why
do you go to all of the trouble, Why do
you go to all of the trouble to take a saw,
(12:03):
cut up a body and place it in individual elements
and then distribute them. But yet they're found. That seems
to run contrary to all of that work, unless unless
(12:25):
possibly there's some other kind of attachment. I go out
to my garage, I go into my closet. I'm looking
(12:46):
at everything I have. I've got black plastic bags, I've
got a couple of old suitcases. What shall I use?
It's gruesome enough when you're talking about dismemberment to think about,
you know, having to do that, all right, But then
(13:07):
how do you make a decision on the conveyance? You know, like,
are the what's it called receptacle. How do you make
a decision about the receptacle. You know there's a there's
a big difference between a plastic garbage bag and a suitcase, right,
I mean to me, there is. I know that sounds
rather obvious, and you know I'm not being tongue in
(13:29):
cheek here. I'm just saying, if you're looking at this
from an assessment standpoint of from an investigative standpoint, what
compels you to go with those Why do you run
out of suitcases? Are we shining on plastic bags? Or
did you say, yeah, I still got a couple of
good suitcases. I want to travel. I'm going to use
(13:51):
these old ones and then I'm going to fill in
the blanks with the black plastic garbage bags. It's an
interesting it's an interesting conundrument. It's something I've never really
thought of in all of these cases that we've covered.
A dismemberment kind of odd.
Speaker 2 (14:08):
Let me ask you about the actual finding, Okay, Joe,
what happens when a call comes in to headquarters to
police that we have a suitcase that has body parts
in it. And I'm going to guess that the person
gets the nine to one one operator or the police
whoever got the call said stop touching it, leave it
(14:31):
where it is, do not move, I mean just stop.
And so with that call, I would imagine the first
thing is send a patrol car out verify that's what
we have. Yeah, and once it's verified, what goes next?
When do you come out there as the death investigator?
When do you actually come out Yeah?
Speaker 1 (14:48):
Okay, yeah immediately. And in Ohio, which, by the way,
if I've got any Ohio natives out there, you guys
have a fine corner system there. As corner system goes,
the corner systems. Corner systems Go Ohio has one of
the best in the country. I've trained many of them
(15:10):
over the years. I don't do it currently, but years
ago I did, and just a great group of folks.
They would have The Sheriff's office would have alerted the
corner almost immediately because here's the thing. They're going to
get their CID out there, because this is obviously something
that is that implies a homicide. You got this memberment.
(15:34):
My first stopping off point in my mind as a
cop is going to be homicide. But also there's no
rescue here, there's no attempt to save a lie for
anything like that, You've got to call the corner. I
think somebody that just graduated from the police academy last
week and they throw them on the road. They're like, yeah,
we got to call the corner, so they would be
(15:57):
out there pretty quickly. Here's logistically, here's the weird thing
for me, because you know, we've got these these scenarios,
which you did a fantastic job of breaking this down,
because you see how kind of complex this sort of
thing is. Do you come across one set of remains
(16:17):
and then you go out and you search that area.
I cannot imagine that the local police and share they've
got a lot of resources because of kind of the
isolated nature of it. But you go out there and
you look in eccentrically, so you start where the suitcase is,
(16:39):
and if you imagine like a big uh, like a
big swirl, you know, kind of extending out eccentrically from
the center. You go out and you look and there's
just at some point in tom you're you know, you're
you're thinking, Okay, there's nothing else out here. I've got
this one bag or I've got this one suitcase. There's
(17:01):
kind of a funny little aside that I see in
social media every night, and then particularly in the true
crime community, where they'll say there'll be a picture of
a black plastic bag on the side of the road,
you know, like some work team has come by and
cleaned up trash, and the meme reads like, my true
(17:24):
crime superpowers have been activated. I wonder what's in that bag,
you know, because you're looking at it and you're thinking,
is there anything else? So if you leave from that
initial scene and you've got that one set of whatever
it might be, well, if you're on patrol, I would
have to imagine that, you know, your head is always
(17:45):
on the swivel. You're trying to decide, you know what,
where's the rest of him? Because I can tell you, Dave,
once they got into the morgue, they would realize that
now they're shy a few parts, if you know what
I mean.
Speaker 2 (18:00):
Well, and that was actually something they had to do
with problems in identification. Apparently, even though it was ninety eight,
and even though we were a couple of years removed
from the O. J. Simpson trial that was all about DNA,
you know, there still were problems identifying the body and
the head and the hands were missing. I've tried to
(18:25):
determine did they ever find them and they didn't. But Joe,
when you're looking at the remains, you've got them in
the suitcase and possibly a back. After you have done
the search around the body, around the remains, and you've
(18:47):
determined we got nothing else out here, do you then
how are the remains transported? I mean in a suitcase,
they're going to be slashing around or whatever else you've
has already been opened. I mean, there's gonna be inzact dictivity.
There's going to be a lot going on with this.
How are they going to transport the suitcase and the
back from where it's found to the lab?
Speaker 1 (19:10):
Simply put, you're going to put it in a body bag? Okay,
you're going to put it in a body bag. And
it's an excellent question because I can see why, you know,
how people will you know, it looks the facility of it.
You think I can facilitate this by merely grabbing the
hand handle on the on the suitcase and continue to
(19:32):
use it as conveyance. Here's the problem. That suitcase is
now part of criminal investigation, so it's no longer a
receptacle for human remains. I'd like to go back just
for a second and think about something we talked about
last week with Celes Revus, and that is I think
(19:55):
I mentioned this. It's the only time in my experience
as a death investigator or as commentator where a body
bag has now become a piece of evidence and they're
actually swabbing, you know they talked about in Reeves's autopsy report.
They're swabbing each one of the six NHLON handles woven
(20:16):
nil one handles on that. Now, yeah, you might think,
and you'd be dead on accurate that the the handle
that in ninety eight we could not necessarily get touched DNA.
But even just touching that bag by the handle, well,
that's a specific point of contact with a perpetrator who
(20:40):
is going to grab it, so you can't. You might
you might look at it and think that it has
the utility. It's kind of like saying, yeah, I found
a I found a body in the trunk of a car.
The keys are in ignition. We found it as investigators.
I think I'll just hopping the car. It's got gas
(21:01):
in motor operates, and I'm going to drive it to
the police. You know, to the police garage and well
they no, no, no, Now you keep that in a
static position the best you can, and you load it
up and you convey it there. Because that car, that
car that I'm using in that example, it's just like
(21:24):
the suitcase or those bags. Those bags are smooth, non
porous plastic surfaces. We con fume those bags. Look for
fingerprints on the outside the bags. But here's the problem.
If you ain't got fingerprints in aphis, then you know,
my will say it ain't worth gunpowder to blow a
(21:45):
hell because yeah, you might hope that sooner or later
somebody will be printed that comes back in the system,
the automatic automated fingerprint system that we have and we've
had it for years and years. But if you're not
in system, any unknown fingerprints that you collect at that moment, Tom,
it's not going to help you, but you have to
treat it as though it can help you in the future.
(22:08):
It's kind of like the remains. Those people back in
ninety eight had no idea you know what science, what
science would would hold for us and try to understand,
you know, kind of the journey that the person and
the body has been on. And that's a major thing
(22:31):
to try and unlock. But I can tell you who
actually has the keys. It's our friend David Middleman in
the Woodlands, Texas. It's well known my version to jigsaw puzzles.
(23:02):
I was never good at it. I never had the
patience for it. But you know, in life, sometimes you're
forced to do things like that that you might not
want to do, but you got to do them, you know,
just like you're going to put a jigsaw puzzle together
with your family on Saturday afternoon it's ran outside. You know,
Dad's going to bite the bullet and you're going to
(23:22):
sit down and do it, even though it felt like
throwing the pieces across the room because it's just too overwhelming.
In my work life though kind of pride. I took
a lot of pride in trying to piece things together,
not just intellectually but also from an evid entry standpoint. Dave,
you know what one of the problems is when you
(23:44):
get a dismembered body, and they were very specific. I'm
going to ask you to call up the numbers that
you stated earlier. Did they or did they not give
us a specific height? Or it was the range was
very tight. It looked like to me, what was.
Speaker 2 (23:59):
That from five eight to five ten and one hundred
and sixty pounds? Do you ever take?
Speaker 1 (24:05):
Yeah, so you figure we know from the movie Jerry Maguire,
the Little Boy says, you know, the average human head
weighs about ten pounds. Did you know that that's actually accurate?
That little statement? You know that that Little Boy. I
love that movie by the way, that that statement that
that kid made in that movie is pretty accurate. Of course,
(24:25):
it's going to vary from person to person. But I'm
thinking about stature from an anthropology standpoint. You said, well, Morgan,
these are fresh remains. Would you why would you even
bring up anthropology? Well, here's the reason. Anthropologists set the
gold standard when it comes to measurement of the human form,
(24:47):
and they have very specific calculus that they use in
order to come up with the link. You have to
have the big thing that you use in anthropology, at
least to my way. And granted I am not a
graduate level anthropology. I'm a forensic scientist, but you know
I play one on TV. Love I love forensic anthropology.
I always have one of the key elements to anthropology
(25:11):
assessment day are actually the femur, the long bones in
the body and so. But in this case we're missing
the head, all right, So how big was his head?
I like to think I've got a head that is
a lot larger than most if you look at it.
I can't get a good hat size from my head.
(25:32):
Everything I have to expand it completely out. My wife says,
was full of brains. I think it's because my brain.
My head's full of bs most of the time. But
my head is dimensionally is essentially if you want to
think about it from you know, the chin to the
crown is probably longer than most. So if you're trying
to nail down a height, because you know, stature is
(25:55):
essential to trying to go about and talk about it.
We've got an elderly guy. We think that he's five
eight to five ten, and he might weigh one hundred
and sixty pounds. One hundred and sixty pounds is very specific.
That also gives me a lot of information about status
of the body because you know, just going back to
again Celesereevus and she's contained right, just like this case,
(26:22):
they came up the number for her weight, if I'm
not mistaken, was like in the sixties, I think is
where it was, but her body was so degraded and
it had become you know, let's face it, it had liquefied.
You don't have that here. So you're able to get
an idea of overall weight, but you're going to have
(26:43):
to calculate, well, how much would a body weigh without hands?
How much would it weigh without head? Do you know
how we weigh bodies in the morgue?
Speaker 2 (26:51):
Dave no idea.
Speaker 1 (26:53):
I told you this. There used to be I'm thinking back.
It used to be this contraption that you could wheel
in beside the body, and you would have to factor
in the weight of a stainless steel trade with a body.
It's a winch system and you hook straps underneath and
(27:16):
you wind it up click click click click like that,
and you press the button and it gives you the
weight of that thing that's being held. You subtract for
the weight of a stainless steel trade and that gives
you the body weight. And they still have the same
thing now where you push the body with a gurny
(27:38):
now and a tray perhaps onto a weighted systems like
weigh in a truck. You know, you push it up
on this platform. There's an indwelling indwelling scale in there,
and that's how we weigh the body and you can
get accurate you can get accurate weights of the physical
remains that you have. Just follow me here. However, you
(28:03):
can take that number all you want, but you have
to factor in all of sames, Dave that you're absent.
You know, we're talking about hands, we're talking about a head,
and Lord only knows what else might be missing.
Speaker 2 (28:16):
All right, now, we got to get this buddy identified,
and you've got to find out how did he die? Right,
I mean, there has to be he didn't just get
cut up and thrown in a suitcase. He died first.
And how are you going to go about trying to
identify that? Because you mentioned Silas Rebas, we have had
(28:40):
that identification you know of how she possibly died. So
did they do the same thing with the ninety three
year old man?
Speaker 1 (28:49):
You know what this is? I'm so glad you you
asked this about this case. With this this is physicians
love to use the term a diagnosis of exclusion, and
I always use the example of and God bless people
that have this condition, but people that have loopus loupus
(29:12):
presents in so many different ways, right, You know, you
have all these factors that surround it. It's a miserable
disease to have. And you know doctors have to check
off everything else in the world before they arrive on loopus. Okay, Well,
here's the problem with an elderly gentleman that is missing
(29:32):
his head and he's chopped bits. One of the big
things that we look at here is, you know what
happened to his head? Okay? Does he have a gunshot
one into the back of the head? Do you sustain
a blow to the back of the head. Now, you
can't make that assessment. What you can do is you
(29:55):
come back if you have the heart. And that's probably
my first stop on this little journey of the autopsy.
You're going to see what his heart look like. Well,
let me tell you what his heart's going to look like.
He's in his nineties, okay. And many people there's a
term that I absolutely hate that doctors use both in
(30:22):
practice out in general practice when they have a patient die.
And also the medical examiner corner community has been guilty
of this too. They will list the primary cause of
death as Sequelli is the term, and it's very it's
a bizarre term. So they'll say sequellly and what they
mean by that is they're kind of throwing their arms
(30:42):
up in the air, their hands up in there and saying,
you know, God called is essentially what they're saying, and
that applies most of the time. With people that are aged.
You'll also get and I think that this is probably
a bit more intellectually honest, some physicians will say circumstances
(31:07):
associated with advanced age or I've actually seen them. In
the top line on death certificate, just put advanced age
because you don't you don't necessarily have a lot to
hang your hat on if you're looking for somebody, for instance,
that and what we'll see in the morgue with somebody
who's had a classic heart attack like an mi I
mile cardial infarction, you'll when you do that dissection on
(31:29):
the heart, first off, you'll see, well, how blocked are
their associated cardiac vessels or coronary vessels, And then is
there any evidence of previous m I or heart attacks?
And then do you have any evidence of something that's fresh?
And sometimes those little evidences of fresh heart event, you know,
(31:53):
are striking. You know, you can back it up because
what this means is that when the corner artists get
blocked that heart muscle, the myocardium, which the heart is
one gigantic muscle. If oxygenated blood is shut off from
that area, then the muscle dies in that area that
(32:16):
are affective. Wherever that blockage is, it dies. And so,
you know, they'll talk about lots of times that you know,
the heart, you're you know, you've only got eighty five percent,
you're functioning eighty five percent. Well, what that means is
that you've got eighty five percent of your heart that's
still doing the work that it would have done when
(32:36):
you were diseased free one hundred percent, and so it's
having to make up and that can lead eventually to
you know, cardiac failure. So when you're making a diagnosis
like this, and this is kind of a complex thing
to do, this is not this is not like you
don't want to give this case to somebody that's fresh
out of training. Right this it's it's a bit new.
(33:00):
It requires a bit of ainess, you know, when you're
looking at everything, because you really have to do the
mental gymnastics. If just simply by missing the heads. Some
people will say, well, that makes it a lot easier.
Well maybe so, but are you are you satisfied as
the person's going to sign the death certificate of signing
this just hope. Just pay attention to what I'm saying.
(33:23):
Are you comfortable enough with a dismembered body to say, yeah,
this is natural and not homicide? Just think about that
just for a second, because you know that's the roads
you're going to go down. And in this particular case,
they're they're faced with this decision.
Speaker 2 (33:39):
Day and that's it's an important one because if this
person died naturally, they wouldn't have hacked themselves up and
put themselves into a suitcase in a separate bag. So
one has to look at it as this person at
the very least was abused as a corpse. Okay, yes, yeah,
(33:59):
Now when I get down to this nitty gritty here,
I want to point something out, friends, and we've talked
about this on the show on multiple occasions at Bears
repeating now nineteen ninety eight, February ninety eight, they did
run DNA, they did get DNA from the corpse. You
know they were able to create the profile. Problem is
if that DNA profile is not in a system anywhere
(34:23):
you have nothing to compare it to. And so because
of that, the case went cold and is sat there
for years and years and years. But this is where
and we started off at the very beginning part of
this as an authorom event because there are now ways
of taking this DNA and finding relatives, building a family tree,
(34:50):
and this genetic genealogy has been very effective in solving
a number of very high profile crimes used here. They
were the investigation was able to identify the remains, and
once identifying the remains, they know what Paul Harvey used
(35:12):
to call the rest of the story. The problem is
you're left with believing a story I don't necessarily believe
Justin Scott Morgan, but I'm not the investigator or no, right, Look.
Speaker 1 (35:26):
I share I share your concern over this because it's
like I would not want to be in this position,
because you know, I'm if I'm living up in this
Dover Township area in Ohio. I got questions, Okay, I
mean I got a lot of questions. So you're telling
me that back in ninety eight that you guys recovered
(35:47):
a dismembered body in multiple in bags and suitcase and
we're still you know, missing elements of the body, and
you're going to this is not a homicide, you know,
Convince me, well, David turns out, as a result of
DNA testing, all roads lead back to family, right and
(36:10):
through that testing, through that testing that was conducted by
our good friends down in the Woodlands, Texas. Of course,
we're talking about AUTHROM. They have a patented program that
they use. It's called a forensic grade genome sequencing and
it's something that is unique to David Middleman and Kristen
(36:33):
down there in those parts. And of course, as you know,
anybody that wants answers are going to go there, you know,
kind of the unveiling of these things that have been
a mystery for years and years and years. When you
look at this, they were able to determine that this gentleman,
(36:54):
this gentleman, he's got a living son. And you had
mentioned him off at the top of the show, Dave,
we're talking about a fellow who is now well up
into his seventies. I eighty one, he's eight he's eighty one. Yeah, okay, yeah,
let me do the arithmetic. Yeah, he'd be eighty one
years of eighty. He's just shy well I'll say shy,
(37:16):
shy by a decade. This family lives a long time.
Parents think about, uh, he's shy by decade of his
dad's age when his dad was essentially cut up. I
find that very interesting And gee whiz, I wonder if
the cops had questions for him Dave.
Speaker 2 (37:36):
You know Joe there, Because again you go back to
at the time this occurred, they could not identify the remains.
And so with a without a family member coming forward
and saying, hey, my ninety three year old dad is missing,
help me find him, with nobody saying that out loud,
(37:59):
the case went cold and remained cold, and the closest
that investigators came to finding out what happened was in
twenty ten, Joe in twenty ten, the Uh. In twenty ten,
it was discovered that Larry draw Left was collecting his
(38:23):
father's Social Security Larry's father would have been if he
were alive in twenty ten, well, golly, g whizbef he
would have been one hundred and five years old, one
hundred and six Okay, he was born in nineteen oh four.
Social Security's going there's no man who's getting this check
(38:45):
because it's not one hundred and six year old man. Okay,
so in twenty ten.
Speaker 1 (38:50):
This guy would have had This guy would have had
a full awareness of the end of World War One.
Oh yeah, he would have seen that dough boys come home.
Speaker 2 (38:59):
From He might Joe in nineteen oh four he was born,
which means wow. Not only he would have been at
the parades when Johnny came marching home, he would have
been waving the flag. You're right, he would have.
Speaker 1 (39:16):
Been right like just shy. The cusp of eligibility, right,
gives you an idea how old this guy is.
Speaker 2 (39:21):
He would have been too old to serve in World
War two?
Speaker 1 (39:25):
Yes, yeah, he would have been far too And Dave,
haven't we heard about these cases in recent years? You
know where they've gone back and they've audited these things.
There are people on the on the rolls out there
that are getting Social Security and the age that stated,
you know, these people are like one hundred and forty
years old or something like this. But they caught this one,
(39:46):
and please, you know, tell me what I'm like more
about this.
Speaker 2 (39:50):
Yeah, bottom line being the bottom line. In twenty ten,
they isolated the social security stuff and they stopped payments
on it. Now I I don't know the intricacies to
this because I haven't dug into that part of the investigation.
It just we were focusing on the identity of the
human remains that were found and the fact that his
son collected his social Security and by the way, Larry
(40:14):
Droughtlift collected his father's pension too. The total amount of
benefits this guy collected over about two hundred and fifty
thousand dollars, nearly a quarter million dollars in benefits he collected.
But going back to nineteen ninety eight, February nineteen ninety eight,
remains found in a suitcase in a bag, and once
(40:36):
the body was truly identified as being the victim here
that we've been talking about, when it was Larry Droughtlift,
his father was called Lawrence, not Larry. I apologize. When
Laurence Strautluff was positively identified. They reopened this case in
twenty twenty three, Joe and started looking at things. In
(40:56):
twenty twenty four, the investigation came down where they had
enough to send it to AUTHORM And you know, we've
talked about how it takes time. It's not like you
just send what you have to author them and they
come out in Ding Ding Ding. Here's your name. It
takes so much time because you send stuff to authorm,
they break it down, they send back the information to
(41:17):
the law enforcement. Law enforcement has to go back out
in the field in a lot of cases doing more interviews,
trying to find more people, and it takes time to
build out this tree in this case took about two
and a half years. But they finally did come down
to wait a minute, we know who the sun is.
And once they identified the sun, they identified the biological
(41:38):
remains of Lawrence A. Droft Loff. His son, Larry Draftloff
is called in Larry's now eighty one, by the way,
and they sit him down and they say, Larry, these
remains of your dad. Tell it. You know, we already
nailed you for collecting his stuff. So talk to us man,
how did your dad end up in that suitcase can?
(41:59):
And that's when Larry Draftliff actually admitted. But Joe, here,
here's his story. Larry Draftliff claims that he's fifty three
years old when he comes home from work and he's
living with his elderly father who is ninety three, and
he walks in the door and dad is Dad Now
(42:19):
you have to believe Larry draftlift in this found my
dad dead, and yeah, I wanted to collect his benefits,
so I hacked up his body. I put his body
in the suitcase. I put his remains in the back
and by the way, I also took some other parts
of his remains that you can't find, and I threw
(42:41):
those in a dumb I put them in bags like
trash and threw them in a dumpster near where I
work in nineteen ninety eight. So here we are, it's
twenty twenty six, and he's admitting twenty eight years ago,
I disposed of my father's head and hands in a
dumpster near where I work. You ain't find it those no, no,
(43:01):
no way. You're left with believing him that he came
home and found his ninety three year old dad dead.
And Joe, I've met some ninety three year old people,
Yeah that were You wonder how they're still alive, barely breathing.
And I've met I learned how to shoot pool from
a man who was ninety three years old. John Jennings
taught me how to shoot He was he was ninety
(43:23):
three when I met him.
Speaker 1 (43:25):
Anyway, and it's amazing you never know, you know the
level of smodies of vitality, and you know the beauty
of it also is the history that they bring along
with them. Yes, I'm sure that in this dad's mind,
you know, he he had no way of seeing, you know,
what the future held. Obviously, I don't know how malevolent
(43:50):
the sun was. You know, during this period of time,
there's no excuse for the abuse of a corpse. And
then you go to a moral level of it, the
abuse of your father's course. I was talking with Kimmy
about this case yesterday and me and my wife had
the most lovely conversations. We were sitting there and you
(44:10):
were thinking, and this has happened before. How in the
world does someone take a saw to your parents' remains?
I don't know. And there look, guys, there's many things
that I don't understand. I can't do the arithmetic on it.
Speaker 2 (44:27):
If he's used a handsaw, Joe, he used a handsaw on.
Speaker 1 (44:30):
This guy's body, and he had him in a place
that he could do this and never be detected. If
you've got two guys that are living together, an elderly
father who's going to miss him, if by that age,
and there's a high probability. A lot of his friends
have already passed on. You know, are there other family
(44:53):
members out there that want to know, you know, what
happened to our uncle? You know where is he? You know,
I don't know. You just kind of wandered off. It
would require agoing, an ongoing effort I think on the
part of the Sun to keep up the secrecy. And
of course, after a while, guess what, people stop asking questions.
(45:18):
The beauty of it is this now, with the technology
we have, questions that seemed unanswerable in the past are
now just to key struck away. That's why I urge
all of you all, just like in this case, to
go to dnasolves dot com. That's our friends at authorm.
(45:40):
Check out their website. Look through all of those cases.
There might be something you want to throw a few
bucks to. They don't want thousands of dollars from you, guys.
Just a few bucks sent their way could flip the
switch on getting these gigantic mysteries brought to a resolution.
That's dolls dot com. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this
(46:07):
is body bags. Mm hmm.
Host
Joseph Scott Morgan
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