April 2, 2024 • 41 mins
Burned remains of a man found inside a foot locker and left in a blueberry field in Michigan were not identified for 13 years. In 2015 the case was called "The Jack-in-the-Box Murder because it was a catchy title. The remains were not identified until the Ottawa County Sheriff's Office received a tip in 2015 that gave them the information they needed to use dental records to identify the deceased as Robert Caraballo. Investigating Caraballo's life at the time of his death took investigators to the home he shared with his wife and stepdaughter. Joseph Scott Morgan will break down the forensics that brought this case to a conclusion and Dave Mack will help tell the story of how the Jack-in-the-Box Murder became The Fugitive Wife Murder Trial.
Transcript Highlights
00:00:44 Introduction of story a burned body in a trunk found in blueberry field
00:02:40 Talk about conspiracy and escaping to other side of the planet
00:05:28 Discussion of victim being alive with hammer stuck in skull
00:08:02 Discussion of injury caused by falling downstairs
00:12:34 Talk about how remains could not be identified
00:15:11 Discussion of evidence in hammer attack
00:19:49 Discussion of hitting head with a hammer
00:23:51Talk about how the skull breaks
00:28:19 Discussion of destroying a body
00:32:37 Discussion of “old school” identifying remains
00:35:15 Talk about the plan to push victim down the stairs, hit him with a bat
00:35:53 Talk about the conspiracy
00:38:01 Discussion of law in Italy for hotel guests
00:39:15 Discussion of cover-up
00:40:06 Beverly McCallum guilty on all charges
00:40:42 Talk about keeping a secret
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:08):
Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan. I am, by no
means a vegetarian. It's not my thing. But I've gotten
now where I eat a lot more fruit than I
used to. And one of the things that I have
(00:30):
come to enjoy more than anything. I guess it's because
they're convenient and kind of carry them around my hand,
or blueberries, and I will anytime I go to the
store buy a brain new pack of blueberries, like to
eat them with pecan halves. Actually, blueberries have gotten where
they bring me a lot of joy. You don't really
think about, you know, where blueberries come from or how
(00:51):
they're farmed. All I know is that I like the
way they taste. But can you imagine owning a blueberry farm,
and day after day you got to the blueberry bushes
and you check and see how they're doing. When it's
harvest time, you take them all in. But in one
particular day, out there in the middle of a blueberry farm,
(01:19):
there is found a metal foot locker, and contained within
that metal foot locker our charred human remains. And for
years they the identity remained a mystery. But just looking
(01:39):
upon that in that rather, I'm sure a bucolic environment.
You understand that all hell broke loose and there are
no explanations, at least initially. Today on body Backs, we're
going to talk about a case that involves a metal
(02:01):
foot locker, a burned body, a hammer, and a wife
that didn't want to be in a marriage any longer.
I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is body Bags. I
got to tell you this case. It kind of crossed
my desk and some of the things I've been covering
(02:24):
on the air. And I was struck by this because
there was so much forensic science involved actually in the
death of this gentleman, Robert Caraballo up in Michigan, that
I was actually astounded. And it wasn't a single perpetrator.
It was like a triad of individuals that were involved
(02:47):
in this poor man's death. And I was shocked, I
really was. And it is truly a mystery, and it
involves an individual that was on the run for a
long time. When I say on the run, I'm not
talking about you know, this happened to Michigan. I'm not
talking about somebody that ran off to Ohio or you know,
to Wisconsin. I'm talking about somebody that went literally on
(03:09):
the other side of the earth to get away from
from what she had wrought, right, and so I was fascinated.
It had me hooked.
Speaker 2 (03:17):
The entire conspiracy that went into this actually is one
step further and deeper than I thought when we started,
because one thing that has come out they did a
test run. The suspects here did a test run of
what they were going to do. Now, you said the
woman who didn't want to be a part of a marriage,
(03:38):
all right, we have a conspiracy that involves Christopher Wayne McMillan.
We have Deneen ducharmeat who is the daughter of the
main suspect here, Beverly McCallum. Robert Caraballo, the victim, was
the stepfather of Deneen dou Charmay. Christopher Wayne McMillan was
(04:06):
friends with douch Charmais. They're both college friends at the time.
He's forty five now, and this was back in two
thousand and two, So do the math. He's twenty one,
she's twenty one. Their buddies and when Beverly McCallum comes
to them, it says, I'm tired of being married to
this guy. I got to get rid of him. I
(04:26):
guess divorce is not something that crosses people's minds. I
don't know why that is. But in this particular case,
rather than divorce, she opted to allegedly kill her husband.
And what took place sounds like something out of a
movie that we made up, because according to by the
(04:48):
way Christopher McMillan turns state's evidence, and he described exactly
what happened, and that is that Beverly McKellen pushes her
husband down the stairs. At the bottom of the stairs,
her daughter, Deneen du CHARMEI has a hammer. The song
if I had a hammer, we'll never have the same
(05:09):
meaning anymore, because she had a hammer, and she starts
pummeling the man's head with the hammer. Beverly mccalm comes
downstairs because give me the hammer. You're not doing good enough.
But at some point in time, while the victim here
is still alive, Robert Carabella is still alive, and the
(05:31):
hammer gets stuck in his skull, Joe the man is
killed and suffog well, he was killed by suffocating, put
a bag over his head, tied it off with a rope,
so all the bludgeting of his dome. Having the hammer
stuck was not enough to kill him. He was suffocated
with a rope and a bag and then thrown into
(05:55):
a locker of some foot locker and burned.
Speaker 1 (05:58):
Yeah, isn't that song thing. You're leaving behind so much
evidence that can specifically lead back to cause and effect
when it comes to this individual's death. Let's go back
to this idea of the staircase. I've had a couple
of cases over the years where I've had people fall
down staircases. It's and it always seems like the staircases
(06:20):
that people fall down, I've never had one of these.
If you think about gone with the wind with a
big grand staircase, you know, never have those kind of cases.
It's always somebody that falls down into the basement. And
I think it's because places are so dark most of
the time, the rails are insufficient to the task, the
treads are worn, or whatever the case might be. Or
(06:43):
people just trip because you know when you go into
the basement. Many times people are going to the basement
to store things and they'll be carrying they don't they
don't have anything to hold on to, so it'll carry
a box or an item or something like that, and
they go tumbling what's fascinating is that when you have
a fall down a set of stairs, is that you're
going to get all of these interesting presentations on the body.
(07:06):
Obviously there can be fracturing that goes on, but some
of the more fascinating aspects are these contusions and points
of what we refer to as points of impact, and
you have multiple of them. That's why it makes it
sort of odd when you see this thing, because I mean,
everybody can identify with falling down a set of stairs
if you fall down a great number of these stairs.
(07:29):
For every time that you tumble and you make contact
with the surface again, first the first time that you fall,
if you're falling forward, you might impact I don't know,
on a shoulder or on the back of your head.
The next time you impact, you might impact on your backside.
Then you might impact on the outer thigh, and then
you might strike your shoulder again. And so you're making
(07:52):
these different different points of contact along the way. And
you know, people that survive these falls many times they'll say, well,
you know, it's like I was in a tumble dryer
with a bunch of rocks, and it's like being in
a car accident and you're getting, you know, except for
a car accident it's one, you know, kind of one impact.
This is multiple impacts. And you think about somebody that's
(08:15):
that says, well, gee whiz, you know, they're trying to
rationalize this out, and think, how am I going to
bring about somebody's death? I know, Hey, let me open
the door here, Hey, hon come here, take a look
and see what's going on, because this is obviously a
planned event, Dave. And so your first stop along the
continuum here is to your main your main weapon. You've
(08:39):
weaponized the staircase at this point in time, you're going
with pushing down the staircase because it's it's almost as
if you alluded to the idea that this It's almost
like somebody had written this out, you know, like I mean,
I don't know, maybe in a fiction form. Yeah, let's
go with the staircase. That that's gonna work. It's not
(09:00):
necessarily going to work. It's a crapshoot at best. But
then you've got somebody that's down there waiting, Dave with
a hammer.
Speaker 2 (09:08):
Yes, and then the hammer gets stuck. I don't know
why that really has me, Joe, but it does the
fact that they're using a hammer on this man's head.
By the way, this wasn't somebody that was unknown. They
didn't come home and have a robbery taking place and
they were killing this person, you know, or defending themselves.
This was McCallum's husband and stepfather to Denen do Charmeat.
(09:33):
So this was somebody They lived part of their life with.
Speaker 1 (09:36):
The most violent homicides that I ever worked. It was
not dry by shootings and things like that. Those are horrible,
but it was domestic related events. Because there's so much
anger tied up in it, and you've got people that
are striking out at individuals. It's like, I'm not merely
going to kill you. I'm going to exact an ounce
(09:59):
a pound of floa. Rather, I'm going to exact metaphorically
of course here, but a pound of flesh from you.
You will in fact suffer. And look, we don't know,
We don't necessarily know what you know, kind of the
prelude to all of this was, but we do know
this the fact that, like you said, this was a
(10:19):
husband somebody that was acting at least as a father
figure in the environment that I guess at some point
in time was a provider. But yet the perpetrator in
this case just simply got tired of it and want
to end Dave. Just this past week, I was actually
(10:52):
teaching my medical Legal Death Investigation class at Jacksonville State
and I generally teach it every semester, but the it's
it's apropos here because I was just lecturing the other
day about blunt force trauma. And let me ask you.
I've got a I've got a quizzling here for you.
(11:13):
All right, here we go, all right, what do you
think is the number one cause of fatal blunt force
trauma in America? This even surpasses firearms or anything.
Speaker 2 (11:31):
Else making your wife mad.
Speaker 1 (11:36):
Motor vehicle accents, motor vehicle accents, And that's the number
that that's literally the number one cause of blunt force trauma.
And you know, like we had said just a second ago,
it's like this guy had been Oh my god, he
was he was like in a car accident, just like
a couple of times over, just from falling down the staircase.
But you know, you got several different types of blunt
(11:59):
for here.
Speaker 2 (12:00):
I guess I had to ask you this because when
I'm looking at this case, they called it the jack
in the box case, yeah, and which I know. We
try to find names for things because if the media
does it to draw attention so that people either click
or lank.
Speaker 1 (12:15):
Some mean it's really gruesome to me, It truly is,
but go ahead.
Speaker 2 (12:19):
You know anyway, So in this case, we know, based
on the conspiracy that we actually do know what one
person involved in this set happened.
Speaker 1 (12:31):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (12:31):
Otherwise you know, you're stuck with a cold case, which
is exactly what happened. They couldn't even identify this man,
and I don't know why, but we'll get to that
in a minute. But let me ask you, Joe, because
I was trying to picture the wounds and specifically knowing
that he was hitting the head with a hammer. But
I'm thinking, if I'm falling down the stairs, I'm going
to hit my head at some point, and I'm probably
(12:52):
going to catch it on a sharp object, you know,
the stair footing, the side railing, the crown molding, the stuff,
or the shoe molding. There's so many things to hit,
so many edges to come in contact with. When you
get the bottom, you've got this bloody mass in your head.
How can you tell what came from the hammer and
what came, you know, from the stairs. How can you
(13:14):
delineate where they are from.
Speaker 1 (13:16):
That's an excellent question, Dave, And one of the ways
that we would do this in the Morgue is, first off,
I would you can. I'm not going to say that
it wouldn't happen, but you're not necessarily going to have
a tearing of the skin with a fall down a
staircase that you know is interpreted as a laceration. Remember
(13:39):
I talked about this before. Lacerations are not the same
as sharp force, but yet many people mis identify them
and there's a whole science behind that that I could
go into sometime. But with blunt force trauma, you're going
to generate injuries to the skin. Sometimes there're pattern injuries,
and one of the things that we look for are
(13:59):
first off, abrasions on the skin, which means that you're
there's like a friction event that's going on when you're
let's say, if those stairs are carpeted, Okay, when your
your bare skin hits that carpeted surface, it's going to
a braid the skin, which is superficial. All of us
have fallen down the skin in our knees or our elbows,
then underlying that you're going to have these big focal
(14:23):
areas of hemorrhage or you know, you'll have a As
one of the doctors I used to work with this
older gentleman I love dearly, he used to refer to
it as a hema tomata and he'd say, yeah, we've
got a hema tomato here, and it's a hematoma, you know,
so you'll have a large bruise. The trick is is
that how do you delineate between the impact that you
(14:47):
have on all of these multiple surfaces as you're tumbling
down the staircase as opposed to the thing that we
had mentioned a second ago is rather gruesome, which is
a hammer attack. And the save grace I think it
from an investigative standpoint, is that with a hammer attack,
the features are very very specific. As a matter of fact,
(15:08):
if we can recover the hammer, and I'm talking about
in this case, you've got a body that was burned,
but if you can recover the hammer at the scene,
many times the hammer will be brought to the mork.
Isn't that fascinating? And then we will take Yeah, you
can match it. Yeah, so just imagine, if you imagine
the business end of a hammer, as far as the
(15:29):
impact the head of the hammer, that flat surface is
almost the shape, and it's dependent upon the type of
hammer it is. But I'm just throwing this out here.
Think about the shape of a quarter, all right. And
if you take that hammer and you drive it into
some money's skull multiple times, you will get these kind
(15:50):
of elliptical they're kind of half moon shaped lacerations. And
then on the skin and then when you reflect the
scalp and you pull it back, you'll see that there
is what we refer to as a bone plug. So
the skull itself will actually fracture. You can almost marry
it up to one of the edges of the hammer.
(16:11):
You can compare it in other times if they come
directly down. You know that the head is oddly it's
not oddly shaped, that's kind of the wrong thing to say.
But it's got all these kind of curved features to it,
all right. The topography of it, it's really really interesting.
If you hit it flush, you will I've seen these
(16:32):
quarter sized bone fractures and they're shaped like a quarter,
and it's really really fascinating to compare that with the
head of the hammer and the bone plug manytime is
driven in. But I think you you had told me
that one of these individuals actually stated that they literally
buried this hammer in this man's skull.
Speaker 2 (16:54):
Is that and he was alive. That's what got me
is that he wasn't dead. They actually got the hammer
stuck and couldn't get it out, and I'm sure they
did eventually, But yeah, the McMillan here actually said in
his test in telling police because he actually copped a
plea deal. That's how we have all this information about
what actually took place and when it took place, is
(17:17):
because he told police that they actually got the hammer
stuck and the man was still alive. So when Dianne Ducharmet,
when she was the first she was at the bottom
of the stairs hitting him first, and Mom McCallum, the wife,
didn't like how she was going about this, and so
(17:37):
she starts taking the hammer and hitting and he McMillan
was specific on the side of the head over here
by the temple, and I'm thinking that had to have
been much more vicious in terms of because as in
the skull thinner in the temple areas.
Speaker 1 (17:52):
Yeah, much much thinner in that particular area. The thickest
part of the skull, there's two areas, really is going
to be the frontal bone, which makes up your forehead. Now,
if you move to the left or the right of
that and kind of down and forward of your ear,
that's where the temporal bone is. Then up above the
temporal bone, you have what's referred to as the parietals
(18:13):
some people will say parie to heal, and that's thick.
Temple bone is not thick, it's rather thin. But really
the most the thickest area, uh and I know because
I've opened a lot of skulls over the course of
my career in the morgue is actually the occiput or
(18:33):
the occipital. If you feel if you put your hand
behind your head, you can kind of feel that bump
on the back of your head. That's called the occipital protuberance.
And that's one of the thickest areas. But isn't it
interesting that area right there kind of guards that kind
of primal brain area, you know, where our base, our
(18:53):
base functions, the autonomic nervous system, you know, kind of
en dwells in that area. That's you know, we don't
have to think about breathing. We don't have to think about,
you know, our heart beating or anything like that. That
that's really protected. I would imagine that they probably did.
Even if they buried the hammer in his skull, that's
(19:16):
no guarantee necessarily that that's going to be an immediate
fatal blow, right, And I think that a lot of
people think that that would happen. I would think I.
Speaker 2 (19:25):
Did until I saw it, and I thought, you've got
to be kidding me. So he could actually be sitting
there breathing with a hammer. This is the actual testimony
by this this is ongoing case right now. Yeah, this
is what McMillan testified. As I mentioned, he has pleaded
guilty now as being a part of this whole thing.
This is what he said. He testified in court. Beverly
(19:50):
was yelling at Deneen, give me the hammer, give me
the hammer, and he says McCallum took the hammer and
hit her husband in the left side of the head
several times. The hammer became stuck in Caraballo's head. That
was the testimony.
Speaker 1 (20:10):
Joe. Yeah, and I don't know, I don't know what
kind of force the daughter had delivered this discharmat I
believe his host pronounced charmaine. I don't know what kind
of force she had delivered. Uh, you see the here's
the thing about a perpetrator that's trying to kill somebody
with a blunt object. And if you shoot somebody, you
(20:33):
know relative it's there's a high probably it's gonna be
a terminal event. You don't have to do a lot
of work other than aim it and pull the trigger.
With this, you really get Can you imagine you're put
into this position where you're armed with a hammer and
you have to Uh, if they're entering into this conspiracy together,
you're being told, okay, I'm going to push him downstairs
and we're going to kill him. Well, okay, if you're
(20:54):
coming to this, if you're coming to the situation, how
much much force is required? As grifomeess as is, what's
your skill level with a hammer? You know, I don't
know anything about the daughter, but I can't imagine she
was a finishing contractor, you know, working on homes and
framing out houses, which you know, there's a lot of
(21:17):
skill with driving a nail. If you're using a hammer
to do it, I'm not real good at it myself.
I'm always mishitting the nail or hitting my hand or
something like that. But how much more so when you're
looking down at the body of your stepfather and up
at the top of the staircase, maybe for an instant
(21:38):
you glance up and there's your mother standing there after
she's pushed this guy down the staircase, and you know
what you have to do. The problem is you don't
know how much force is required, how long you're going
to have to do it, which end of the hammer
to use in order to kill this individual. If you're
(22:19):
an investigator on a case such as this and you're
standing over, if you can just put yourself into this
position just for a second, all my friends out here,
just listen to me. You're the investigator here, and you're
standing in a blueberry field and you're standing over what
they have termed as a metal box, a metal foot
(22:40):
locker specifically, and you're staring down into this box, and
you've got this mass that's in there that is charred.
You don't know who this person is, and would not
know who this person is day for years and years
and years to come. I would think this is not
(23:00):
like finding a skeleton and you know, maybe it's been
partially buried and you've got scattered and no, this is
a concentrated collection of human remains that is in that
has been placed in a box and that has been burned.
There's a lot of there's a lot of activity going
on here. There's a lot of thought going into this,
(23:22):
and you think about that, and for an investigator, this
has got to be one of the most frustrating things.
If you don't know who was behind this to begin with,
or who your victim is.
Speaker 2 (23:31):
I'm trying to figure out how they didn't know who
this was based on. If they don't know who it is,
then they don't know who the possible suspects are. And
they didn't know who he was for ten years or
actually thirteen years. But I want to go back to
something very quickly, Joe, and I'm yeah, sure, but all right,
when somebody is getting beat about the head, Yeah, does
the skull? I know when a baby is born, how
(23:54):
they have the soft spot on the top of the
head and we're all careful of that and the dome
seals over time. Does when you're being hit about the head,
does it break in a similar fashion that it comes
together as you're growing is a brain.
Speaker 1 (24:10):
Yeah, you're you're thinking about the suture lines that are
in place. If you look, you can go along and
see see what I'm talking about. But you have like
a sagital sutures, you have a mid line suture. They
are the suture lines that you know where when we
are developing in uterow. But also and that's where the
(24:31):
fontinel comes in. You know what people commonly refer to
as a soft spot. And actually you have two. There's
one that's more antiror's up to the front. You have
another one that's not quite as pronounced, it's more posterior.
As a baby grows, that begins to close off. And
then the skull will essentially lack of a better term here,
(24:55):
really quickly off the top of my head, it will
begin to ossify, essentially, And you know, kids can strike
their head and it'll be it's not necessarily for you
or I a kid striking his head, the same thing
might be I might wind up in a hospital bed.
But the child skull is so much more pliable. When
(25:17):
you get to you know, like middle age, you know,
these fracture lines are going to show up, and sometimes
they will fracture along the future lines. But if you're
being impacted specifically with a hammer in a specific area,
the best thing I can suggest if you want to
see what this looks like, take a hard boiled egg.
(25:37):
Take a hard boiled egg and take it in after
it's bowl. Just simply hold it. You can hold it,
I don't know, six seven inches above a counter surface
and drop it straight down and don't squeeze it or
anything like that. If you do it, pick it up
and look at that fracture on that kind of curved
surface that you'll see on an egg many times with
(26:00):
direct impact, you'll see the center. It looks like a
spider web that kind of goes out from that concentric area.
Many times you'll see that with skulls as well. So
if you've got a center point of a fracturing, like
with a hammer, it's going to kind of you'll get
these kind of in glass examination. In forensics they refer
to him as radio lines. They just kind of expand
(26:22):
out like that, right, you'll see it almost like a
spider web that's there. But you know, Dave, you add
you add of heat, well you got yeah, you got
heat all right?
Speaker 2 (26:34):
Because we have all this damage to the head that
we know is caused by a hammer, and we know
that based on what we've been told that the victim
here is suffocated after you know, he took the beating
to the head and survived, and so they put a
bag over his head, tied it off with a rope,
and he suffocated to death. Right then they burned him
inside of a foot locker. And I guess my my
(26:56):
thing is, how do you go back now and figure
out how many other than a complete hit of the
hammer on the head that left a mark? You know,
you can't tell if there was if he was had
cuts all over him, you know, the death by a
thousand cuts. You can't tell that because it's all burned off.
Yeah it is, But then what is the fire due
to what's left? Is I know that you know I
(27:17):
know this from Breaking Bad that they did it in
one of the final episodes, that the teeth explode at
a certain level of heat. Is that like popcorn? Is
that a true thing?
Speaker 1 (27:28):
I wouldn't go as far as to say an explosion,
but yeah, they begin to fracture, and we have what
referred to as heat fractures. And once you attain that
kind of really high end temperature that the remains are
exposed to, you'll get fracture lines in the long bones.
And the trick is are you going to be able
(27:48):
to delineate between anti mortem fractures and post mortem fractures?
And that requires quite a bit of study. And also
with the skull, with the external table of skull where
someone's been pounded on with a hammer, you can have
that that presenting, You can have that issue presenting where
those impacts the specific impacts with a hammer. But then
(28:11):
you start exposing the body to heat, and it has
to be constant heat, David. It's not something that you
just throw a match on it and walk away. You'd
have to feed the fire. I don't know how sufficient
they were at that task. Most people don't have the
stomach for it. They can't stand there and watch a
human body be rendered down. You know, beating somebody is
one thing, But when you go to apply a safe,
(28:33):
for instance, an accelerant to a body, and you initiate
the fire with the accelerant and of course a match
or whatever you use, are you actually willing to stand
there for a protracted period of time until the body
is totally rendered down in most cases, know, people don't
do that. So what happens is, after exposure to heat,
bone begins to fracture. All right, Now, bone is different
(28:56):
than teeth. Teeth are much more resilient than bone. Bone
will begin to fracture, and once it fractures, it passes
into a phase where you have this kind of the
calcium begins to break down the bones and you'll have
bones that will eventually turn to ash. That's kind of
what you have happened in a crematory. But if the
body is intact, and this body was to a degree intact,
(29:20):
how do you delineate between those hammer fractures and maybe
even fall fractures that may have been there and heat fracturing.
And that's the big question here. What I can tell
you is that if you're struck with an object that's
a very specific blunt object like a hammer, you're going
to have these very definitive edges in the bone and
(29:42):
the bone will plug and you can actually pick up
on that even beyond the heat fracturing. So you know,
they I would suspect that upon initial observation that the
medical legal system up in Michigan, as they're examining the body.
They could pick up on some of this. The key
to all of this, I think is doing X rays.
You know, anytime you have a body that has been
(30:03):
severely burned like this, the question you have to ask is, well,
what's the purpose of fire and a relative to a
dead body. Well, unless you're trying to do a cremation,
like in a crematory, you're trying to get rid of something, Dave,
So why would you set a body on fire? You
don't think that somebody climbed into a steel foot locker
(30:24):
of their own accord and set themselves on fire. Suppose
that could happen. That's not what's going on here, though.
You have to be able to delineate between those anti
mortem events and the perry or post morteum events. In
a particular case like this.
Speaker 2 (30:39):
His body is placed in the foot locker, is set
on fire, and we're left with they can't determine who
this person is. When the foot locker is found in
the blueberry field by the farmer and it takes years
to identify the remains, I guess when I'm thinking about this,
I'm wondering why it took so long. Because they have
DNA that they can take from the bone matter and
(31:00):
things like that. I'm sure, but we are limited in
our ability to identify who that individual is unless they
already have their DNA in the system. Right.
Speaker 1 (31:11):
Yeah. On hand, I think that people think that DNA
is like this, it's almost like a magic one. You're
going to seem like, yes, yeah, it's like boom, you know,
the case is solved. That's not what happens. And you
could even look at it like fingerprints. Okay, let's just
make it even more simple. If you if you have
a latent print, which is an unseen print, you know
that has to be enhanced with dust and all that stuff.
(31:33):
If you find a print, good on you, man, I'm
happy that you found a print. Now, where are you
going to compare it to, Well, you run it through
the system. If nobody's in the system, it's cool that
you got a fingerprint, but if you don't have anything
compare it to, then it's not going to help you
a lot. The same principle with DNA.
Speaker 2 (31:49):
And that's what happened here.
Speaker 1 (31:51):
Yeah, yeah it is now. I think that this is
kind of Dave. This is kind of one of those
cases where we probably had to wait for the science
just a we bid to catch up, you know, with
the circumstances and in this particular case, that we're eventually
able to identify this poor man. And you know, it's
(32:12):
it's it's like the proverbial string on the sweater that
mama tells you not to pull. The whole thing's gonna
come unraveled. Well for us, that's good. We want to
pull on a string in forensics because it'll make the
case unravel or the mystery unravel. That way, you can
begin to figure it out. Because if you figure out
who this guy is, right, who's he in relationship with? Well,
(32:33):
you know if once you figure that out, then you
begin to develop leads from that.
Speaker 2 (32:38):
They actually used old school method of dental records to
get firm who he was. Now, once they had an
idea of who the individual was, they went back and
that led them back to the you know, where was
he living last? You know, what record do we have
with this individual? And they tracked it back to a
duplex on Horatio Street in Charlotte, Michigan, where police didn't
(33:02):
and this got I got to ask you this, Joe,
and uh, they found remnants of his DNA in the basement.
Underneath some painted services and a concrete patch on the floor.
They found his DNA under paint. That to me is remarkable.
Speaker 1 (33:23):
Yeah, it is. You you think about that, you begin
to think about you know, people talk about I think
one of the things you'll you'll hear, you know, in
all these cases that we cover and people talking talking
about this, they'll talk about the fragility of of of DNA,
and it is fragile. However, when something is protected, and
(33:47):
you know, you can define that however you want to.
When an area is particularly protected and it's even layered
in areas, you know, like under carpet or under paint
and that sort of thing, it's very resilient and you
can still go back and get a match. It all
depends on how deep you want to dig from a
crime seene perspective, how soon you get out there. And
(34:10):
again we've got a real delay here, don't we. I mean,
this case occurred the attack, his body was found in
two thousand and two, and so thirteen years, thirteen years.
You jump forward from that, and it's a grand mystery.
And here's the thing. You know, with the body, they
have the dental obviously, but they would have you have
(34:32):
a source for DNA with the actual body. Okay, if
you have that stored and that goes into that particular
jurisdiction's care, they're going to hang on to that so
that they have a sample that they can go back
and compare. So if you if you have an idea
who this individual might be, you go through there and
(34:54):
you look for the sourcing of his DNA. Well, why
in that particular area of the home is this DNA there
and concentrated there? Wow? Then the mystery begins to unfold
at that point in Tom because there's a narrative to
be told here. And we go back to this idea
of him coming down the staircase right been beaten with
a hammer, which would have been a very bloody affair.
Speaker 2 (35:15):
By the way, the original plan as he came down
the stairs, after he's pushed down the stairs, the original
plan was for McMillan, the other guy, the guy who
actually took a plean to hit him with a baseball bat,
to mash his melon with a baseball bat. That was
the plan. However, as he's coming down the stairs, McMillan
swings the bat and misses and hits a pole, and
(35:36):
that caused the bat to shatter. That's why they went
with that hammer.
Speaker 1 (35:43):
Yeah, yeah, this is you know, they always talk poorly
about the Keystone Keystone cops in reference to our friends
in law enforcement. Equally on the other side of the coin,
you begin to think about people that plan these sorts
things out, and it has a very Keystone esque quality
to it. How could you be this disorganized and backwards
(36:07):
when you're thinking about you know, and look, let's think
of it like this. The first place they're going to
start is by they're heavily depended upon pushing somebody down
a stair set of stairs in order to kill them.
Or maybe they just thought, well it'll at least incapacitating
and stunning for a moment till we can get to him. Again,
(36:28):
this goes to planning. You know, why exactly would you
be at the base of a staircase holding a baseball bat?
To begin with? Are you going out in the backyard
you know you're going to knock a few balls around.
Are you just collecting it to go out to the
car you're going to bat and cage? I don't think
that that's the case. And why do they have easy
access to a hammer? Well, you know it's the basement.
(36:48):
Maybe you keep your tools down there, all right, everybody's
got a couple of hammers, but you know, to have
it at within reach of a man that is falling
down a staircase, not falling, but has been push that
led to his fall down the staircase. You know, this
goes to who would be served by doing this? Why
would they do this? And I think the story is
(37:09):
certainly told with McCollum here.
Speaker 2 (37:10):
When they finally identified who the victim was, it didn't
take long to move from there because obviously, when investigators
start investigating a crime and you have a dead person,
the people closest to him have to have an alibi
right off the bat, and you know, where's your wife
and where's your daughter and all that, and that's what
led them to them. So they get the indictment. It
takes a couple of years, they get it done. And
at the time I think the suspect, the main suspect
(37:33):
here at the Beverly McCollum, actually is in Pakistan. And
you know you mentioned the Keystone Cops and how it
applies to criminals as well. At some point in time,
Beverly McCallum decides to go to Italy. Italy has a
law that and I didn't know this untill we prep
this show that when you check into a hotel, your
(37:54):
identification is then sent to the police for them to
make sure there are no wants and warrants on you.
It's an automatic thing, it's the law, and that's what
the police did in Italy. They sent it to the
police and it is like ding, Hey, she's been indicted
for a murder in the US.
Speaker 1 (38:09):
Yeah, she popped up on interpolse or probably yeah, right?
Did she not see this coming? You know? I've often
I've been fascinated, Dave, by these individuals that go on
the run like this and try to stay on the
run for a protracted period of time, just trying to
elude the long arm of the law. And in this case,
(38:30):
it's certainly caught up with her, didn't it.
Speaker 2 (38:32):
And they were able to get her back home. And
that's when by that time, investigators have their hands full
on basic crimes. I'm amazed at everything that has to
be done to get a conviction when you don't have
somebody admitting gilt. And in this particular case, the way
they got all their answers was from one of the conspirators, McMillan,
(38:53):
because as we mentioned, they actually did a trial run through.
We know that because of one of the conspirators, the
guy that was supposed hit him with the baseball bat.
We know about the paint in the basement because well,
he told him they had blood spatter, so they painted
over it. And the cement chips, well, same reason. There
were blood spatter and there were certain parts of the
(39:13):
cement they couldn't get it up, so they chipped it
up and replaced that with some cement over the top.
So there was a cover up going on that police
really couldn't explain and didn't have all the details until
they got the first person to crack and that was McMillan.
And now here we are where Beverly McCallum is actually
on trial for the murder of her husband at the time.
Speaker 1 (39:37):
One interesting point along this is that Dianne McCallum's daughter,
who keep in mind, was the person that was initially
wielding this hammer day. She was convicted in twenty twenty
two in the death of mister Carbollo. And you know,
(39:57):
the last one who walk through the doors of courthouse,
that's going to be tried is Beverly McCallum.
Speaker 2 (40:06):
You know, Joe, before you finished, I've got to throw
this in there. We just found out a jury has
found Beverly McCollum guilty on all charges in what started
off as the Jack in the Box murder case and
became the Fugitive wife murder trial. It was a conspiracy
that fell apart just the way you said it would, Joe.
Speaker 1 (40:28):
I think that it just goes to show Dave, particularly
when it comes to a case that is so super
bizarre and you've got individuals that are essentially entering into
a conspiracy together. The old adage applies here. It's very
very easy for one person to keep a secret, but
if you involve anybody else, you've reached the end. I'm
(40:52):
Joseph Scott Morgan and this is Bodybags
Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan. I am, by no
means a vegetarian. It's not my thing. But I've gotten
now where I eat a lot more fruit than I
used to. And one of the things that I have
(00:30):
come to enjoy more than anything. I guess it's because
they're convenient and kind of carry them around my hand,
or blueberries, and I will anytime I go to the
store buy a brain new pack of blueberries, like to
eat them with pecan halves. Actually, blueberries have gotten where
they bring me a lot of joy. You don't really
think about, you know, where blueberries come from or how
(00:51):
they're farmed. All I know is that I like the
way they taste. But can you imagine owning a blueberry farm,
and day after day you got to the blueberry bushes
and you check and see how they're doing. When it's
harvest time, you take them all in. But in one
particular day, out there in the middle of a blueberry farm,
(01:19):
there is found a metal foot locker, and contained within
that metal foot locker our charred human remains. And for
years they the identity remained a mystery. But just looking
(01:39):
upon that in that rather, I'm sure a bucolic environment.
You understand that all hell broke loose and there are
no explanations, at least initially. Today on body Backs, we're
going to talk about a case that involves a metal
(02:01):
foot locker, a burned body, a hammer, and a wife
that didn't want to be in a marriage any longer.
I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is body Bags. I
got to tell you this case. It kind of crossed
my desk and some of the things I've been covering
(02:24):
on the air. And I was struck by this because
there was so much forensic science involved actually in the
death of this gentleman, Robert Caraballo up in Michigan, that
I was actually astounded. And it wasn't a single perpetrator.
It was like a triad of individuals that were involved
(02:47):
in this poor man's death. And I was shocked, I
really was. And it is truly a mystery, and it
involves an individual that was on the run for a
long time. When I say on the run, I'm not
talking about you know, this happened to Michigan. I'm not
talking about somebody that ran off to Ohio or you know,
to Wisconsin. I'm talking about somebody that went literally on
(03:09):
the other side of the earth to get away from
from what she had wrought, right, and so I was fascinated.
It had me hooked.
Speaker 2 (03:17):
The entire conspiracy that went into this actually is one
step further and deeper than I thought when we started,
because one thing that has come out they did a
test run. The suspects here did a test run of
what they were going to do. Now, you said the
woman who didn't want to be a part of a marriage,
(03:38):
all right, we have a conspiracy that involves Christopher Wayne McMillan.
We have Deneen ducharmeat who is the daughter of the
main suspect here, Beverly McCallum. Robert Caraballo, the victim, was
the stepfather of Deneen dou Charmay. Christopher Wayne McMillan was
(04:06):
friends with douch Charmais. They're both college friends at the time.
He's forty five now, and this was back in two
thousand and two, So do the math. He's twenty one,
she's twenty one. Their buddies and when Beverly McCallum comes
to them, it says, I'm tired of being married to
this guy. I got to get rid of him. I
(04:26):
guess divorce is not something that crosses people's minds. I
don't know why that is. But in this particular case,
rather than divorce, she opted to allegedly kill her husband.
And what took place sounds like something out of a
movie that we made up, because according to by the
(04:48):
way Christopher McMillan turns state's evidence, and he described exactly
what happened, and that is that Beverly McKellen pushes her
husband down the stairs. At the bottom of the stairs,
her daughter, Deneen du CHARMEI has a hammer. The song
if I had a hammer, we'll never have the same
(05:09):
meaning anymore, because she had a hammer, and she starts
pummeling the man's head with the hammer. Beverly mccalm comes
downstairs because give me the hammer. You're not doing good enough.
But at some point in time, while the victim here
is still alive, Robert Carabella is still alive, and the
(05:31):
hammer gets stuck in his skull, Joe the man is
killed and suffog well, he was killed by suffocating, put
a bag over his head, tied it off with a rope,
so all the bludgeting of his dome. Having the hammer
stuck was not enough to kill him. He was suffocated
with a rope and a bag and then thrown into
(05:55):
a locker of some foot locker and burned.
Speaker 1 (05:58):
Yeah, isn't that song thing. You're leaving behind so much
evidence that can specifically lead back to cause and effect
when it comes to this individual's death. Let's go back
to this idea of the staircase. I've had a couple
of cases over the years where I've had people fall
down staircases. It's and it always seems like the staircases
(06:20):
that people fall down, I've never had one of these.
If you think about gone with the wind with a
big grand staircase, you know, never have those kind of cases.
It's always somebody that falls down into the basement. And
I think it's because places are so dark most of
the time, the rails are insufficient to the task, the
treads are worn, or whatever the case might be. Or
(06:43):
people just trip because you know when you go into
the basement. Many times people are going to the basement
to store things and they'll be carrying they don't they
don't have anything to hold on to, so it'll carry
a box or an item or something like that, and
they go tumbling what's fascinating is that when you have
a fall down a set of stairs, is that you're
going to get all of these interesting presentations on the body.
(07:06):
Obviously there can be fracturing that goes on, but some
of the more fascinating aspects are these contusions and points
of what we refer to as points of impact, and
you have multiple of them. That's why it makes it
sort of odd when you see this thing, because I mean,
everybody can identify with falling down a set of stairs
if you fall down a great number of these stairs.
(07:29):
For every time that you tumble and you make contact
with the surface again, first the first time that you fall,
if you're falling forward, you might impact I don't know,
on a shoulder or on the back of your head.
The next time you impact, you might impact on your backside.
Then you might impact on the outer thigh, and then
you might strike your shoulder again. And so you're making
(07:52):
these different different points of contact along the way. And
you know, people that survive these falls many times they'll say, well,
you know, it's like I was in a tumble dryer
with a bunch of rocks, and it's like being in
a car accident and you're getting, you know, except for
a car accident it's one, you know, kind of one impact.
This is multiple impacts. And you think about somebody that's
(08:15):
that says, well, gee whiz, you know, they're trying to
rationalize this out, and think, how am I going to
bring about somebody's death? I know, Hey, let me open
the door here, Hey, hon come here, take a look
and see what's going on, because this is obviously a
planned event, Dave. And so your first stop along the
continuum here is to your main your main weapon. You've
(08:39):
weaponized the staircase at this point in time, you're going
with pushing down the staircase because it's it's almost as
if you alluded to the idea that this It's almost
like somebody had written this out, you know, like I mean,
I don't know, maybe in a fiction form. Yeah, let's
go with the staircase. That that's gonna work. It's not
(09:00):
necessarily going to work. It's a crapshoot at best. But
then you've got somebody that's down there waiting, Dave with
a hammer.
Speaker 2 (09:08):
Yes, and then the hammer gets stuck. I don't know
why that really has me, Joe, but it does the
fact that they're using a hammer on this man's head.
By the way, this wasn't somebody that was unknown. They
didn't come home and have a robbery taking place and
they were killing this person, you know, or defending themselves.
This was McCallum's husband and stepfather to Denen do Charmeat.
(09:33):
So this was somebody They lived part of their life with.
Speaker 1 (09:36):
The most violent homicides that I ever worked. It was
not dry by shootings and things like that. Those are horrible,
but it was domestic related events. Because there's so much
anger tied up in it, and you've got people that
are striking out at individuals. It's like, I'm not merely
going to kill you. I'm going to exact an ounce
(09:59):
a pound of floa. Rather, I'm going to exact metaphorically
of course here, but a pound of flesh from you.
You will in fact suffer. And look, we don't know,
We don't necessarily know what you know, kind of the
prelude to all of this was, but we do know
this the fact that, like you said, this was a
(10:19):
husband somebody that was acting at least as a father
figure in the environment that I guess at some point
in time was a provider. But yet the perpetrator in
this case just simply got tired of it and want
to end Dave. Just this past week, I was actually
(10:52):
teaching my medical Legal Death Investigation class at Jacksonville State
and I generally teach it every semester, but the it's
it's apropos here because I was just lecturing the other
day about blunt force trauma. And let me ask you.
I've got a I've got a quizzling here for you.
(11:13):
All right, here we go, all right, what do you
think is the number one cause of fatal blunt force
trauma in America? This even surpasses firearms or anything.
Speaker 2 (11:31):
Else making your wife mad.
Speaker 1 (11:36):
Motor vehicle accents, motor vehicle accents, And that's the number
that that's literally the number one cause of blunt force trauma.
And you know, like we had said just a second ago,
it's like this guy had been Oh my god, he
was he was like in a car accident, just like
a couple of times over, just from falling down the staircase.
But you know, you got several different types of blunt
(11:59):
for here.
Speaker 2 (12:00):
I guess I had to ask you this because when
I'm looking at this case, they called it the jack
in the box case, yeah, and which I know. We
try to find names for things because if the media
does it to draw attention so that people either click
or lank.
Speaker 1 (12:15):
Some mean it's really gruesome to me, It truly is,
but go ahead.
Speaker 2 (12:19):
You know anyway, So in this case, we know, based
on the conspiracy that we actually do know what one
person involved in this set happened.
Speaker 1 (12:31):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (12:31):
Otherwise you know, you're stuck with a cold case, which
is exactly what happened. They couldn't even identify this man,
and I don't know why, but we'll get to that
in a minute. But let me ask you, Joe, because
I was trying to picture the wounds and specifically knowing
that he was hitting the head with a hammer. But
I'm thinking, if I'm falling down the stairs, I'm going
to hit my head at some point, and I'm probably
(12:52):
going to catch it on a sharp object, you know,
the stair footing, the side railing, the crown molding, the stuff,
or the shoe molding. There's so many things to hit,
so many edges to come in contact with. When you
get the bottom, you've got this bloody mass in your head.
How can you tell what came from the hammer and
what came, you know, from the stairs. How can you
(13:14):
delineate where they are from.
Speaker 1 (13:16):
That's an excellent question, Dave, And one of the ways
that we would do this in the Morgue is, first off,
I would you can. I'm not going to say that
it wouldn't happen, but you're not necessarily going to have
a tearing of the skin with a fall down a
staircase that you know is interpreted as a laceration. Remember
(13:39):
I talked about this before. Lacerations are not the same
as sharp force, but yet many people mis identify them
and there's a whole science behind that that I could
go into sometime. But with blunt force trauma, you're going
to generate injuries to the skin. Sometimes there're pattern injuries,
and one of the things that we look for are
(13:59):
first off, abrasions on the skin, which means that you're
there's like a friction event that's going on when you're
let's say, if those stairs are carpeted, Okay, when your
your bare skin hits that carpeted surface, it's going to
a braid the skin, which is superficial. All of us
have fallen down the skin in our knees or our elbows,
then underlying that you're going to have these big focal
(14:23):
areas of hemorrhage or you know, you'll have a As
one of the doctors I used to work with this
older gentleman I love dearly, he used to refer to
it as a hema tomata and he'd say, yeah, we've
got a hema tomato here, and it's a hematoma, you know,
so you'll have a large bruise. The trick is is
that how do you delineate between the impact that you
(14:47):
have on all of these multiple surfaces as you're tumbling
down the staircase as opposed to the thing that we
had mentioned a second ago is rather gruesome, which is
a hammer attack. And the save grace I think it
from an investigative standpoint, is that with a hammer attack,
the features are very very specific. As a matter of fact,
(15:08):
if we can recover the hammer, and I'm talking about
in this case, you've got a body that was burned,
but if you can recover the hammer at the scene,
many times the hammer will be brought to the mork.
Isn't that fascinating? And then we will take Yeah, you
can match it. Yeah, so just imagine, if you imagine
the business end of a hammer, as far as the
(15:29):
impact the head of the hammer, that flat surface is
almost the shape, and it's dependent upon the type of
hammer it is. But I'm just throwing this out here.
Think about the shape of a quarter, all right. And
if you take that hammer and you drive it into
some money's skull multiple times, you will get these kind
(15:50):
of elliptical they're kind of half moon shaped lacerations. And
then on the skin and then when you reflect the
scalp and you pull it back, you'll see that there
is what we refer to as a bone plug. So
the skull itself will actually fracture. You can almost marry
it up to one of the edges of the hammer.
(16:11):
You can compare it in other times if they come
directly down. You know that the head is oddly it's
not oddly shaped, that's kind of the wrong thing to say.
But it's got all these kind of curved features to it,
all right. The topography of it, it's really really interesting.
If you hit it flush, you will I've seen these
(16:32):
quarter sized bone fractures and they're shaped like a quarter,
and it's really really fascinating to compare that with the
head of the hammer and the bone plug manytime is
driven in. But I think you you had told me
that one of these individuals actually stated that they literally
buried this hammer in this man's skull.
Speaker 2 (16:54):
Is that and he was alive. That's what got me
is that he wasn't dead. They actually got the hammer
stuck and couldn't get it out, and I'm sure they
did eventually, But yeah, the McMillan here actually said in
his test in telling police because he actually copped a
plea deal. That's how we have all this information about
what actually took place and when it took place, is
(17:17):
because he told police that they actually got the hammer
stuck and the man was still alive. So when Dianne Ducharmet,
when she was the first she was at the bottom
of the stairs hitting him first, and Mom McCallum, the wife,
didn't like how she was going about this, and so
(17:37):
she starts taking the hammer and hitting and he McMillan
was specific on the side of the head over here
by the temple, and I'm thinking that had to have
been much more vicious in terms of because as in
the skull thinner in the temple areas.
Speaker 1 (17:52):
Yeah, much much thinner in that particular area. The thickest
part of the skull, there's two areas, really is going
to be the frontal bone, which makes up your forehead. Now,
if you move to the left or the right of
that and kind of down and forward of your ear,
that's where the temporal bone is. Then up above the
temporal bone, you have what's referred to as the parietals
(18:13):
some people will say parie to heal, and that's thick.
Temple bone is not thick, it's rather thin. But really
the most the thickest area, uh and I know because
I've opened a lot of skulls over the course of
my career in the morgue is actually the occiput or
(18:33):
the occipital. If you feel if you put your hand
behind your head, you can kind of feel that bump
on the back of your head. That's called the occipital protuberance.
And that's one of the thickest areas. But isn't it
interesting that area right there kind of guards that kind
of primal brain area, you know, where our base, our
(18:53):
base functions, the autonomic nervous system, you know, kind of
en dwells in that area. That's you know, we don't
have to think about breathing. We don't have to think about,
you know, our heart beating or anything like that. That
that's really protected. I would imagine that they probably did.
Even if they buried the hammer in his skull, that's
(19:16):
no guarantee necessarily that that's going to be an immediate
fatal blow, right, And I think that a lot of
people think that that would happen. I would think I.
Speaker 2 (19:25):
Did until I saw it, and I thought, you've got
to be kidding me. So he could actually be sitting
there breathing with a hammer. This is the actual testimony
by this this is ongoing case right now. Yeah, this
is what McMillan testified. As I mentioned, he has pleaded
guilty now as being a part of this whole thing.
This is what he said. He testified in court. Beverly
(19:50):
was yelling at Deneen, give me the hammer, give me
the hammer, and he says McCallum took the hammer and
hit her husband in the left side of the head
several times. The hammer became stuck in Caraballo's head. That
was the testimony.
Speaker 1 (20:10):
Joe. Yeah, and I don't know, I don't know what
kind of force the daughter had delivered this discharmat I
believe his host pronounced charmaine. I don't know what kind
of force she had delivered. Uh, you see the here's
the thing about a perpetrator that's trying to kill somebody
with a blunt object. And if you shoot somebody, you
(20:33):
know relative it's there's a high probably it's gonna be
a terminal event. You don't have to do a lot
of work other than aim it and pull the trigger.
With this, you really get Can you imagine you're put
into this position where you're armed with a hammer and
you have to Uh, if they're entering into this conspiracy together,
you're being told, okay, I'm going to push him downstairs
and we're going to kill him. Well, okay, if you're
(20:54):
coming to this, if you're coming to the situation, how
much much force is required? As grifomeess as is, what's
your skill level with a hammer? You know, I don't
know anything about the daughter, but I can't imagine she
was a finishing contractor, you know, working on homes and
framing out houses, which you know, there's a lot of
(21:17):
skill with driving a nail. If you're using a hammer
to do it, I'm not real good at it myself.
I'm always mishitting the nail or hitting my hand or
something like that. But how much more so when you're
looking down at the body of your stepfather and up
at the top of the staircase, maybe for an instant
(21:38):
you glance up and there's your mother standing there after
she's pushed this guy down the staircase, and you know
what you have to do. The problem is you don't
know how much force is required, how long you're going
to have to do it, which end of the hammer
to use in order to kill this individual. If you're
(22:19):
an investigator on a case such as this and you're
standing over, if you can just put yourself into this
position just for a second, all my friends out here,
just listen to me. You're the investigator here, and you're
standing in a blueberry field and you're standing over what
they have termed as a metal box, a metal foot
(22:40):
locker specifically, and you're staring down into this box, and
you've got this mass that's in there that is charred.
You don't know who this person is, and would not
know who this person is day for years and years
and years to come. I would think this is not
(23:00):
like finding a skeleton and you know, maybe it's been
partially buried and you've got scattered and no, this is
a concentrated collection of human remains that is in that
has been placed in a box and that has been burned.
There's a lot of there's a lot of activity going
on here. There's a lot of thought going into this,
(23:22):
and you think about that, and for an investigator, this
has got to be one of the most frustrating things.
If you don't know who was behind this to begin with,
or who your victim is.
Speaker 2 (23:31):
I'm trying to figure out how they didn't know who
this was based on. If they don't know who it is,
then they don't know who the possible suspects are. And
they didn't know who he was for ten years or
actually thirteen years. But I want to go back to
something very quickly, Joe, and I'm yeah, sure, but all right,
when somebody is getting beat about the head, Yeah, does
the skull? I know when a baby is born, how
(23:54):
they have the soft spot on the top of the
head and we're all careful of that and the dome
seals over time. Does when you're being hit about the head,
does it break in a similar fashion that it comes
together as you're growing is a brain.
Speaker 1 (24:10):
Yeah, you're you're thinking about the suture lines that are
in place. If you look, you can go along and
see see what I'm talking about. But you have like
a sagital sutures, you have a mid line suture. They
are the suture lines that you know where when we
are developing in uterow. But also and that's where the
(24:31):
fontinel comes in. You know what people commonly refer to
as a soft spot. And actually you have two. There's
one that's more antiror's up to the front. You have
another one that's not quite as pronounced, it's more posterior.
As a baby grows, that begins to close off. And
then the skull will essentially lack of a better term here,
(24:55):
really quickly off the top of my head, it will
begin to ossify, essentially, And you know, kids can strike
their head and it'll be it's not necessarily for you
or I a kid striking his head, the same thing
might be I might wind up in a hospital bed.
But the child skull is so much more pliable. When
(25:17):
you get to you know, like middle age, you know,
these fracture lines are going to show up, and sometimes
they will fracture along the future lines. But if you're
being impacted specifically with a hammer in a specific area,
the best thing I can suggest if you want to
see what this looks like, take a hard boiled egg.
(25:37):
Take a hard boiled egg and take it in after
it's bowl. Just simply hold it. You can hold it,
I don't know, six seven inches above a counter surface
and drop it straight down and don't squeeze it or
anything like that. If you do it, pick it up
and look at that fracture on that kind of curved
surface that you'll see on an egg many times with
(26:00):
direct impact, you'll see the center. It looks like a
spider web that kind of goes out from that concentric area.
Many times you'll see that with skulls as well. So
if you've got a center point of a fracturing, like
with a hammer, it's going to kind of you'll get
these kind of in glass examination. In forensics they refer
to him as radio lines. They just kind of expand
(26:22):
out like that, right, you'll see it almost like a
spider web that's there. But you know, Dave, you add
you add of heat, well you got yeah, you got
heat all right?
Speaker 2 (26:34):
Because we have all this damage to the head that
we know is caused by a hammer, and we know
that based on what we've been told that the victim
here is suffocated after you know, he took the beating
to the head and survived, and so they put a
bag over his head, tied it off with a rope,
and he suffocated to death. Right then they burned him
inside of a foot locker. And I guess my my
(26:56):
thing is, how do you go back now and figure
out how many other than a complete hit of the
hammer on the head that left a mark? You know,
you can't tell if there was if he was had
cuts all over him, you know, the death by a
thousand cuts. You can't tell that because it's all burned off.
Yeah it is, But then what is the fire due
to what's left? Is I know that you know I
(27:17):
know this from Breaking Bad that they did it in
one of the final episodes, that the teeth explode at
a certain level of heat. Is that like popcorn? Is
that a true thing?
Speaker 1 (27:28):
I wouldn't go as far as to say an explosion,
but yeah, they begin to fracture, and we have what
referred to as heat fractures. And once you attain that
kind of really high end temperature that the remains are
exposed to, you'll get fracture lines in the long bones.
And the trick is are you going to be able
(27:48):
to delineate between anti mortem fractures and post mortem fractures?
And that requires quite a bit of study. And also
with the skull, with the external table of skull where
someone's been pounded on with a hammer, you can have
that that presenting, You can have that issue presenting where
those impacts the specific impacts with a hammer. But then
(28:11):
you start exposing the body to heat, and it has
to be constant heat, David. It's not something that you
just throw a match on it and walk away. You'd
have to feed the fire. I don't know how sufficient
they were at that task. Most people don't have the
stomach for it. They can't stand there and watch a
human body be rendered down. You know, beating somebody is
one thing, But when you go to apply a safe,
(28:33):
for instance, an accelerant to a body, and you initiate
the fire with the accelerant and of course a match
or whatever you use, are you actually willing to stand
there for a protracted period of time until the body
is totally rendered down in most cases, know, people don't
do that. So what happens is, after exposure to heat,
bone begins to fracture. All right, Now, bone is different
(28:56):
than teeth. Teeth are much more resilient than bone. Bone
will begin to fracture, and once it fractures, it passes
into a phase where you have this kind of the
calcium begins to break down the bones and you'll have
bones that will eventually turn to ash. That's kind of
what you have happened in a crematory. But if the
body is intact, and this body was to a degree intact,
(29:20):
how do you delineate between those hammer fractures and maybe
even fall fractures that may have been there and heat fracturing.
And that's the big question here. What I can tell
you is that if you're struck with an object that's
a very specific blunt object like a hammer, you're going
to have these very definitive edges in the bone and
(29:42):
the bone will plug and you can actually pick up
on that even beyond the heat fracturing. So you know,
they I would suspect that upon initial observation that the
medical legal system up in Michigan, as they're examining the body.
They could pick up on some of this. The key
to all of this, I think is doing X rays.
You know, anytime you have a body that has been
(30:03):
severely burned like this, the question you have to ask is, well,
what's the purpose of fire and a relative to a
dead body. Well, unless you're trying to do a cremation,
like in a crematory, you're trying to get rid of something, Dave,
So why would you set a body on fire? You
don't think that somebody climbed into a steel foot locker
(30:24):
of their own accord and set themselves on fire. Suppose
that could happen. That's not what's going on here, though.
You have to be able to delineate between those anti
mortem events and the perry or post morteum events. In
a particular case like this.
Speaker 2 (30:39):
His body is placed in the foot locker, is set
on fire, and we're left with they can't determine who
this person is. When the foot locker is found in
the blueberry field by the farmer and it takes years
to identify the remains, I guess when I'm thinking about this,
I'm wondering why it took so long. Because they have
DNA that they can take from the bone matter and
(31:00):
things like that. I'm sure, but we are limited in
our ability to identify who that individual is unless they
already have their DNA in the system. Right.
Speaker 1 (31:11):
Yeah. On hand, I think that people think that DNA
is like this, it's almost like a magic one. You're
going to seem like, yes, yeah, it's like boom, you know,
the case is solved. That's not what happens. And you
could even look at it like fingerprints. Okay, let's just
make it even more simple. If you if you have
a latent print, which is an unseen print, you know
that has to be enhanced with dust and all that stuff.
(31:33):
If you find a print, good on you, man, I'm
happy that you found a print. Now, where are you
going to compare it to, Well, you run it through
the system. If nobody's in the system, it's cool that
you got a fingerprint, but if you don't have anything
compare it to, then it's not going to help you
a lot. The same principle with DNA.
Speaker 2 (31:49):
And that's what happened here.
Speaker 1 (31:51):
Yeah, yeah it is now. I think that this is
kind of Dave. This is kind of one of those
cases where we probably had to wait for the science
just a we bid to catch up, you know, with
the circumstances and in this particular case, that we're eventually
able to identify this poor man. And you know, it's
(32:12):
it's it's like the proverbial string on the sweater that
mama tells you not to pull. The whole thing's gonna
come unraveled. Well for us, that's good. We want to
pull on a string in forensics because it'll make the
case unravel or the mystery unravel. That way, you can
begin to figure it out. Because if you figure out
who this guy is, right, who's he in relationship with? Well,
(32:33):
you know if once you figure that out, then you
begin to develop leads from that.
Speaker 2 (32:38):
They actually used old school method of dental records to
get firm who he was. Now, once they had an
idea of who the individual was, they went back and
that led them back to the you know, where was
he living last? You know, what record do we have
with this individual? And they tracked it back to a
duplex on Horatio Street in Charlotte, Michigan, where police didn't
(33:02):
and this got I got to ask you this, Joe,
and uh, they found remnants of his DNA in the basement.
Underneath some painted services and a concrete patch on the floor.
They found his DNA under paint. That to me is remarkable.
Speaker 1 (33:23):
Yeah, it is. You you think about that, you begin
to think about you know, people talk about I think
one of the things you'll you'll hear, you know, in
all these cases that we cover and people talking talking
about this, they'll talk about the fragility of of of DNA,
and it is fragile. However, when something is protected, and
(33:47):
you know, you can define that however you want to.
When an area is particularly protected and it's even layered
in areas, you know, like under carpet or under paint
and that sort of thing, it's very resilient and you
can still go back and get a match. It all
depends on how deep you want to dig from a
crime seene perspective, how soon you get out there. And
(34:10):
again we've got a real delay here, don't we. I mean,
this case occurred the attack, his body was found in
two thousand and two, and so thirteen years, thirteen years.
You jump forward from that, and it's a grand mystery.
And here's the thing. You know, with the body, they
have the dental obviously, but they would have you have
(34:32):
a source for DNA with the actual body. Okay, if
you have that stored and that goes into that particular
jurisdiction's care, they're going to hang on to that so
that they have a sample that they can go back
and compare. So if you if you have an idea
who this individual might be, you go through there and
(34:54):
you look for the sourcing of his DNA. Well, why
in that particular area of the home is this DNA there
and concentrated there? Wow? Then the mystery begins to unfold
at that point in Tom because there's a narrative to
be told here. And we go back to this idea
of him coming down the staircase right been beaten with
a hammer, which would have been a very bloody affair.
Speaker 2 (35:15):
By the way, the original plan as he came down
the stairs, after he's pushed down the stairs, the original
plan was for McMillan, the other guy, the guy who
actually took a plean to hit him with a baseball bat,
to mash his melon with a baseball bat. That was
the plan. However, as he's coming down the stairs, McMillan
swings the bat and misses and hits a pole, and
(35:36):
that caused the bat to shatter. That's why they went
with that hammer.
Speaker 1 (35:43):
Yeah, yeah, this is you know, they always talk poorly
about the Keystone Keystone cops in reference to our friends
in law enforcement. Equally on the other side of the coin,
you begin to think about people that plan these sorts
things out, and it has a very Keystone esque quality
to it. How could you be this disorganized and backwards
(36:07):
when you're thinking about you know, and look, let's think
of it like this. The first place they're going to
start is by they're heavily depended upon pushing somebody down
a stair set of stairs in order to kill them.
Or maybe they just thought, well it'll at least incapacitating
and stunning for a moment till we can get to him. Again,
(36:28):
this goes to planning. You know, why exactly would you
be at the base of a staircase holding a baseball bat?
To begin with? Are you going out in the backyard
you know you're going to knock a few balls around.
Are you just collecting it to go out to the
car you're going to bat and cage? I don't think
that that's the case. And why do they have easy
access to a hammer? Well, you know it's the basement.
(36:48):
Maybe you keep your tools down there, all right, everybody's
got a couple of hammers, but you know, to have
it at within reach of a man that is falling
down a staircase, not falling, but has been push that
led to his fall down the staircase. You know, this
goes to who would be served by doing this? Why
would they do this? And I think the story is
(37:09):
certainly told with McCollum here.
Speaker 2 (37:10):
When they finally identified who the victim was, it didn't
take long to move from there because obviously, when investigators
start investigating a crime and you have a dead person,
the people closest to him have to have an alibi
right off the bat, and you know, where's your wife
and where's your daughter and all that, and that's what
led them to them. So they get the indictment. It
takes a couple of years, they get it done. And
at the time I think the suspect, the main suspect
(37:33):
here at the Beverly McCollum, actually is in Pakistan. And
you know you mentioned the Keystone Cops and how it
applies to criminals as well. At some point in time,
Beverly McCallum decides to go to Italy. Italy has a
law that and I didn't know this untill we prep
this show that when you check into a hotel, your
(37:54):
identification is then sent to the police for them to
make sure there are no wants and warrants on you.
It's an automatic thing, it's the law, and that's what
the police did in Italy. They sent it to the
police and it is like ding, Hey, she's been indicted
for a murder in the US.
Speaker 1 (38:09):
Yeah, she popped up on interpolse or probably yeah, right?
Did she not see this coming? You know? I've often
I've been fascinated, Dave, by these individuals that go on
the run like this and try to stay on the
run for a protracted period of time, just trying to
elude the long arm of the law. And in this case,
(38:30):
it's certainly caught up with her, didn't it.
Speaker 2 (38:32):
And they were able to get her back home. And
that's when by that time, investigators have their hands full
on basic crimes. I'm amazed at everything that has to
be done to get a conviction when you don't have
somebody admitting gilt. And in this particular case, the way
they got all their answers was from one of the conspirators, McMillan,
(38:53):
because as we mentioned, they actually did a trial run through.
We know that because of one of the conspirators, the
guy that was supposed hit him with the baseball bat.
We know about the paint in the basement because well,
he told him they had blood spatter, so they painted
over it. And the cement chips, well, same reason. There
were blood spatter and there were certain parts of the
(39:13):
cement they couldn't get it up, so they chipped it
up and replaced that with some cement over the top.
So there was a cover up going on that police
really couldn't explain and didn't have all the details until
they got the first person to crack and that was McMillan.
And now here we are where Beverly McCallum is actually
on trial for the murder of her husband at the time.
Speaker 1 (39:37):
One interesting point along this is that Dianne McCallum's daughter,
who keep in mind, was the person that was initially
wielding this hammer day. She was convicted in twenty twenty
two in the death of mister Carbollo. And you know,
(39:57):
the last one who walk through the doors of courthouse,
that's going to be tried is Beverly McCallum.
Speaker 2 (40:06):
You know, Joe, before you finished, I've got to throw
this in there. We just found out a jury has
found Beverly McCollum guilty on all charges in what started
off as the Jack in the Box murder case and
became the Fugitive wife murder trial. It was a conspiracy
that fell apart just the way you said it would, Joe.
Speaker 1 (40:28):
I think that it just goes to show Dave, particularly
when it comes to a case that is so super
bizarre and you've got individuals that are essentially entering into
a conspiracy together. The old adage applies here. It's very
very easy for one person to keep a secret, but
if you involve anybody else, you've reached the end. I'm
(40:52):
Joseph Scott Morgan and this is Bodybags
Host
Joseph Scott Morgan
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