August 22, 2024 • 43 mins
Jennifer Paxton was looking for a place to stay with friendly faces for a few days. Rebecca Dishman and Sean Finnegan seem to be the friendly faces she is looking for...until she walks into their apartment. On this episode of Body Bags, Joseph Scott Morgan will talk about how Jennifer Paxton was beaten with a baseball bat, shackled to a bed, raped, tortured, and eventually murdered.
Transcription Highlights
00:08.43 Introduction of Jennifer Paxton death
04:55.92 Discussion of victim, lured, tortured, raped, murdered
09:00.14 Discussion of someone treated as less than human
14:41.08 Talk about co-conspirator
19:10.79 Discussion of Paxton being placed in freezer
24:16.48 Describing police finding frozen body under bed
30:45.98 Discussion of over 50 injuries to victim
35:45.22 Talking about abuse of a corpse
40:34.78 Discussion of baseball bat used as weapon
43:10.84 Conclusion
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Body dots with Joseph scotten More. Imagine, if you will,
a new benchmark for evil and kind of let me
lay it out to you real quick. Your person who
is involved with another individual who is at minimum equally
(00:22):
as evil as you are, but maybe a tad bitten
Moore and the police strike a deal with you to
testify against the other person. And here's the kicker. This
is the best deal you're going to get if you
testify for the state. This is what you're going to receive,
(00:51):
a life sentence plus fifty years that must be served
in full. Does that spark your interest? Does that give
you an indication of how grotesque and horrible the case
(01:16):
is that we're about to break down for you. I
think it might be a place to start. I'm Joseph
Scott Morgan and this is Body Bags. Brother Dave. You
sat down a few minutes ago, and I could see
that look in your eye that you get every now
(01:40):
and then, not with every case, but every now and then.
And do you remember what I asked you just a
second ago?
Speaker 2 (01:48):
Yeah, scrubbing the brain. Yeah. Hey, Today, we're going to
tell you the story about Sean Finnigan and how he
is accused of conspiring with his girlfriend, Rebecca Dishman, to
lure Jennifer Paxton to his home in Oakridge, Tennessee, with
the promise of giving her a warm place to stay. However,
once miss Paxton was in the house, investigators say the
(02:11):
couple attacked her with a baseball bat, then raped her
and tortured her, and then during the investigation of all this,
they uncovered another crime. This time Finnegan is separately accused
of sexually abusing a child three years old or younger,
and that occurred in May of twenty twenty. It goes
(02:34):
beyond the pale of what we can imagine, but read
becka Dishman. She had to She's actually going to have
to serve an additional fifty years to if she no
matter what else happens, she has to serve an additional
fifty years at one hundred percent.
Speaker 1 (02:51):
You know, and I don't hear that. I've never heard
that term. I know that it just because I haven't
heard it doesn't mean that people don't say it or
it's not part of the mechanism that exists out there.
But it was uniquely worded. It was almost like, I
don't know an exclamation point on how horrific this is.
(03:13):
And you know, this person that has helped facilitate I
think that you and I could could both say was
one of the most horrific cases that we've heard of.
It certainly ranks up there with anything that we have covered.
(03:33):
She's only twenty five day. Put that in perspective. This
young lady, her name is actually Rebecca Dishman, who had
to testify in this case. She's only twenty five, so
she's she's looking at literally a lifetime, right, you know,
I mean, if you're I think the top end for
(03:55):
women in the United States is seventy eight on average,
just do the Riysthk metic there and you get an
idea of how long she's going to be behind bars
for that period of time. And then on top of
that this fifty years. And Dave, I'll go ahead and
and you know say that I don't know that you
(04:17):
can compare the two crimes here that we're talking about.
They're both sexually motivated, but the one for fifty years
actually involves involves the rape of a child that's three
years of age or younger, Dave, and this woman helped
(04:39):
facilitate that, and it would appear that the primary suspect
that she's testifying against actually facilitated this, and she's an
adjunct to this at twenty five years of age. Go
ahead and kind of break this down to us, man,
because OK, I to tell you.
Speaker 2 (04:56):
When the secondary story to what we're talking about today
takes up this much time at the beginning, it shows
you the shocking nature of this particular crime. Our victim
is a thirty six year old woman named Jennifer Paxton.
Jennifer Paxton is lured by Rebecca Dishman, who's twenty five,
(05:19):
and Sean Finnigin, who's fifty six years old and works
in a bar in Knoxville called The Pint. He and
Jennifer Paxton are known one another for a while. She
comes into the Pint uses the restroom. She's kind of
a nomad, lives her life is it's tough. She does
see her family though once a month she goes by
and sees the family, gets some money and goes back
(05:40):
out and does her thing. But Jennifer Paxton is friendly
enough with Sean Finnegan and is a girlfriend Rebecca Dishman
that when they invite her to stay with them at
their apartment. She takes them up on it. It's December.
It's called as twenty nineteen, December of twenty nineteen. Now
what happens is the minute Jennifer Paxton and walked into
that apartment, she enters the gates of hell. They beat
(06:03):
her with a baseball bat, They shackle her to a bed,
and then they rape her. Now we don't know at
what point in time they killed her. We know they
killed her with a ligature, but Joe, we really don't
know when that happened, how long she was torture. We
know that she went in there sometime in December, between
(06:24):
December first and December thirty first.
Speaker 1 (06:26):
Right, Yeah, of twenty nineteen. This goes back. This is
pre COVID, you know, going back, going back to that
period of time. And here's another little interesting aside about this.
Finnegan had been known and was known prior to the
(06:49):
COVID pandemic that he had had two girlfriends in the
past living with him. And I think that that and
people would would you know, laugh about that with him,
you know, that sort of thing. And they were aware
that he had two women that would reside with him
(07:12):
and one eventually left, and so he's he's in this
apartment with dishman that they have shared this home together
during this period of time, and it's almost dave as
if they were looking for a third perhaps and whatever
(07:34):
the situation is. And it actually reminds me of a
case that I covered when I first did body backs,
first started bodybacks of this alluring thing. I had a
case in New Orleans that I had that I had
actually worked, where I had a lady that lured a
(07:56):
gentleman back to her apartment from a bar, and when
they got back to her apartment, her boyfriend was waiting
there with a claw hammer and beat this other man
to death, and then that couple had sex on top
of this guy's corpse, and then they stuffed him into
a sofa and turned the heat or turned the air
(08:21):
all the way down to try to keep keep the environment.
And this this plays into this case as well, try
to keep the environment down at at a manageable cooler
level so that the body would not decay at a
particular at a normal rate. Of course, it turned out
(08:41):
that it didn't work that way, and a psychic actually
got involved in that case and actually pointed us to
where the body was found out in a landfill inside
of a sofa.
Speaker 2 (08:53):
So it was a fascin New Orleans case.
Speaker 1 (08:55):
That was the New Orleans case. Yeah, so I've seen
I've actually seen this happen before, this idea of luring
to bring somebody in and you know, you have to
enter into you have this, you have Dishman and Finnigan
entering into a conspiracy together or a confederacy certainly, you know,
(09:18):
to try to lure an individual in so that they
can use essentially as a plaything. And Dave, that's what
actually occurred here. They reduced You know, people go on
and on about the term objectification all the time, you know,
with the way you know women dress and this sort
of thing. This is the ultimate and objectification. You take
(09:42):
this poor woman and she literally becomes something less than
human in the eyes of her attackers, and they can
do anything they want to. And buddy, did they ever
in this case.
Speaker 2 (09:54):
Now we know that between December first and December thirty
first to twenty nineteen, Jennifer Paxton was yes, but we
don't know the exact date, which means we don't know
how long Jennifer Paxton was kept in that apartment alive
to be abused, as you mentioned, as a plaything. We
(10:16):
know that. And you brought up something very interesting a
minute ago that at the bar where Finnigan works, they
use a baseball bat behind the bar. When a fight
breaks out, they would bash this bar, this bat on
the bar to draw attention so that the employees could
come and gather and get the fight over with, right right,
(10:36):
And in this case, a baseball bat was used as
the means of beating her about the head. I hate
to assume, but I can't imagine any other place on
the body where one would be immediately.
Speaker 1 (10:52):
You know, Well, that's that's quite interesting because when they
you know, they do obviously examine this poor woman's remains
very carefully. And it goes back to something else you
and I have talked about that we do in forensics,
and that is resolution of injuries. And that's key here, Dave,
(11:12):
because listen, this poor woman she had the family remembers
having seen her and talked to her just prior to
Thanksgiving or right at Thanksgiving, because she would come around
to she had no means. Okay, she would come around
to her grandmother's house and her grandmother received an SSI
(11:37):
check and grandmother would always give her money.
Speaker 2 (11:42):
Yeah, you know, her grandmother was more of a motherly
fe she was.
Speaker 1 (11:45):
And she actually viewed her, according to her other relatives,
she viewed her grandmother as her mom and very sad
state of affairs, unfortunately, but that's the life that she had.
Many people have have issues in their lives, you know,
and you can't escape that, and that's that was her reality.
(12:08):
So with her, she would come around and that's how
the family kind of kept track of it. They knew
they could set their clock by it. She would she
would come back around at least once a month to
collect the check and she she would be seen. Interestingly enough,
her cousin had had actually testified in this case that
(12:30):
she saw her. She thought she saw her at maybe
the end of November or the very beginning of December,
walking in the area adjacent to the pint where Finigan worked,
and she stated at that time that she appeared to
(12:50):
be very thin, more thinner than she normally was, and
so that that's she kind of drops off of the
map at that point in time. And you know, it's
at this point in tom you know, when it's I'm
not going to use the word fascinating it's sickening to
(13:11):
think that there are predators that are out there and
this is generally their mo where they see somebody that
is in need of something. And as you'd mentioned, those
East Tennessee winters, they get pretty chilly, and she's staring
down the barrel of approaching winter tom late fall, and
(13:32):
she needs somewhere to rest her head, somewhere to say
that she has safety, somewhere where she can be warm. Unfortunately,
it was a monster who was offering these comforts to her. Dave,
(13:58):
I got to tell you, I don't know. I've often
thought of people that commit these horrific crimes that maybe
just maybe there's something that numbs them to the humanity
of the others that they're inflicting pain upon. And it
(14:24):
would seem to me, at least that Dishman, this woman
that was essentially a confederate of Finnegan, I think that
maybe her conscience got the best of her. Maybe she
sensed that And here's the thing that her time maybe
(14:48):
up because she had witnessed some things that if you
and I sat down and we were trying to create
some kind of story, first off, I wouldn't hope these
things would enter into our lexicon, are into our mind.
But she had borne witness to all of this, and
I have to think that that it didn't matter where
the safety was coming from. She wanted to feel like
(15:09):
she was going to be safe because this guy Finnegan
apparently turns out to be pure evil.
Speaker 2 (15:16):
Between December one and December thirty, first, she is attacked
with a baseball bat. She has shackled to a bed
and then strangled, But in that process she was raped
and abused. No telling how many times, how many days.
We have no way of knowing that right now, and
that boggles my mind. With everything we have forensically, Joe,
(15:39):
that we don't know, we cannot determine exactly what happened
during that thirty one day period of time in the
life of Jennifer Paxton.
Speaker 1 (15:48):
Yeah, and it's hard, and I'll give you the reason why,
and I find it. The thing is, it's rather ironic
that she was Miss Paxton was attempting to escape those
cold nights that she was faced with in Knoxviall. And
(16:10):
maybe the danger for those of you all that have
never been to Knoxwell and Knoxvill's a medium sized town.
I mean, it's a university town, big downtown. You do
have a significant homeless population there. There are encampments, that
sort of thing, the stuff that you encounter with larger
cities anyway. And you know, the opportunity. Can you imagine
(16:30):
being somebody living on the streets and then all of
a sudden somebody offers you the opportunity to go to Oakridge,
which is known literally, I tell people this all the
time Huntsville, I think it's Huntsville, Alabama, and Oakridge, Tennessee
have the highest per capita concentration of PhDs of anywhere
(16:51):
in the United States. It's because Oakridge Lapse is there,
you know where actually I think the first atomic device
was actually developed, or the beginnings of it in secret. Yeah,
And so you're going from this kind of squalid environment
that you're having to exist in and somebody says, hey,
you want to go to oak Ridge. It's right down
(17:13):
the road. We can take you there. We've got a nice,
warm place for you to stay. But you know when
when Finnegan opened the door to this place and Dishman
is there, they begin to attack her. Now this is
coming from Dishman herself, begin to attack her. And it's
(17:35):
at this point in time that they literally chain her
to a bed. She is raped upon her arrival there
after having been beaten with a bat so early on
in this captivity, she's already been sustaining severe physical abuse.
(17:57):
The problem is, and this is where the irony comes in,
is that after she is killed Dave in this apartment,
her body is placed into a stand up cooler. And
that's kind of interesting because Finnegan had a relationship with
(18:19):
a local rent to buy establishment. I think it's a
renaissent or if I'm not mistaken, And the actual delivery
guy testified in the case he was given specific instructions
and here's a big clue to leave he rented this thing.
Finnegan did a stand up freezer. Leave it on the
(18:40):
front porch, will bring it in, Okay. You know most
of the time, if I've got a piece of furniture
or something like that that I'm going to have delivered,
I want I want it all. I want you to
bring it in the house. As a matter of fact,
I want you to set it up for me and everything. No, no, no, no,
you leave it there. I'll get it when I get home.
And the sale olsman, the worker actually said he was
(19:02):
known with Finnegan was known to them, and that he
always paid his bills on tom and even that where
Finnegan worked at the Pint, they said he was a
reliable employee, that he was always there, And that just
goes to show you, you know, that you don't really
know what's going on behind closed doors. Finnegan knew, and
he knew that he had a deceased woman on his hands.
(19:25):
We think that might be the case. This is the
trick though, had he premeditated her death, maybe she was
still alive in there and he said, you know what,
I'm going to order a cooler, a freezer, if you
will have it brought to the house, and when I
do finally kill her, I'm going to store in there.
Because her death that these two brought about, that wasn't
(19:50):
the end of what they were going to do with
this poor woman's remains. Dave and so our timelines get
very much skewed when we're trying to understand the type
of trauma she sustained, when she sustained it, and how
long it had gone on for. So that piece to this,
(20:12):
which is one of the biggest pieces of investigated data
that we can collect the timeline is all skewed. And
that's because her body, when it was finally recovered, was
frozen through and through, Dave.
Speaker 2 (20:25):
And here's what makes me wonder about everything, Joe. You
say she's frozen through and through. We know Fennigen orders
the freezer from Renaissenter on December twenty seventh, and yet
we also know they beat her with a bat, they
shackled her to a bed, they raped her. But we
don't know when she was murdered. We don't know that
exact date. I don't know if there's a way we
can even know that. We just know that it didn't
(20:45):
happen the first day she was there.
Speaker 1 (20:47):
No. No, this was a lengthy process. And there have
been a number of perpetrators over the year, over the
years that have done this. They've held people captive and
have used them as essentially sex slaves or you know,
I'll go back to this idea of objective objectification, where
you can dehumanize an individual to the point where they
(21:11):
become entertainment. Uh. For for these these monsters like this,
it's really difficult. Now the answer is going to lie, Dave,
in the examination of of herb tissues, Uh not just
(21:31):
in the sense of at autopsy, but also with the
histological results that are going to come back. And when
I say histology, if you if if our if our
listeners have have watched programs where autopsies are being performed
and you see the doctor not necessarily over the body,
(21:56):
but over a cutting board. This is where we actually
dissect the organs that come out of the body. We
take sections of those organs day and so when we
take sections of those organs, they are actually prepared by
a histologist who will take a section of an organ,
place it in paraffin a wax block, and they'll begin
(22:18):
to slice it. And it's stained a particular way so
that there's different types of stains that are used, so
that brings out certain features in the tissue, and you
can look at it microscopically, and so a physician will
look at these things and begin to get an idea
as to the rate of decomposition. Perhaps if there's evidence
(22:38):
of decomposition at a cellular level. In some cases, they
can determine if a body had in fact been frozen.
But the trick is to try to do the calculation
so that you can ballpark it. And again that's why
we've got this very broad time window here, and I
don't know that there's any way that you can narrow
(23:00):
it down any further. I don't necessarily think that Dishman
aided them in this as to when she was actually killed.
When she was actually murdered, we know how this occurred.
But Dave, I got to tell you, the torture, the pain,
(23:23):
and the trauma that this woman endured for that time
that she was with this couple is the stuff of nightmares.
(23:46):
So let's just say you're a police officer and you
have information about a missing woman. You have information that
indicates that there's a high likelihood that this woman that
is missing is in fact deceased, and you go to
(24:08):
the suspect's home. You begin to search the home and
look through it, and in a closet there stands a
stand up freezer looks like a refrigerator, but it is
literally a deep freeze that a small person and that
(24:31):
comes into play here could actually stand in and the
door be closed, but it's empty, it's completely empty, and
it appears to be recently cleaned. You're looking around, you
get down on your knees, and you see something in
this bedroom that is beneath a bed. You stick your
(24:56):
hand beneath the bed, and you recoil in horror. The
reason you recoil is because what you're touching beneath the
bed is an icy, cold, frozen body. Dave, this blew
my mind when I heard this, because apparently Finnegan had
(25:17):
become aware that the police knew that he had some
kind of involvement in Miss Packson's death, and a lieutenant
in this particular case that gave testimony in this trial
actually states that he recoiled when he touched the item
(25:39):
beneath the bed, and it was apparently covered in plastic.
And the reason he recoiled is you don't expect to
feel something beneath the bed that is that cold. Just
imagine going into your freezer at home and you put
your hand on an item inside the freezer and it's warm.
(25:59):
That's an indication that either it's been freshly placed in there,
or your freezer's no longer working. Try to reverse that
now and think, well, this isn't a frozen environment, but
yet what I'm touching right here is distinctly frozen. I
don't know how would how I would react, but it
was the lieutenant's testimony gave an indication that it was
(26:22):
quite shocking to him.
Speaker 2 (26:25):
I can't think of anything comparable, Joe that to find
something freezing cold that you expect to be at least
room temperature, you know, and knowing they're looking for a body,
they are looking for Jennifer Paxton, and seeing something that
really does look like I have found her, and touching
(26:48):
it knowing it's freezing cold, that would be a freak show.
You're beyond anything I can imagine. But once you get
past that, I want to go back for a minute,
because you mentioned the freezer was cleaned out, there was
some type of warning. We know that Jennifer Paxton last
seen and murdered sometime during the month of December twenty nineteen.
(27:09):
This is August of twenty twenty. This is a full
eight months plus later, and Finigan had been tipped off
and is able to move her body from the freezer
to under the bed. But can you tell when the
body is in the freezer? Does it decompose at the
(27:33):
same rate as it would at a cellular level if
it was in a different place. Is there a way
that you can track this? The only thing we really
have is We know when the freezer was delivered to
his house, but we don't know if she was dead
at that time or if he was planning to kill
her at that time.
Speaker 1 (27:51):
Under normal circumstances, which there are very few normal circumstances
in any death. But let's just say normal day to
day life. And we've got ambient temperatures seventy two degrees,
because that's when most testing has occurred over the years.
Relative to in a broad sense, relative to determination a
post more amenable, that's ideal conditions. Okay, now you skew
(28:13):
this data where you're not increasing temperature or environmental temperature,
you're decreasing it. And you ask a very salient question
here regarding the slowing of decomposition. You can never, and
I mean never, completely stop decomposition. I would imagine you
(28:38):
probably could at if you went sub zero perhaps, but
at a cellular level, I'm so proud of you for
using that term. By the way, at a cellular level,
you're going to actually still see the process of decomposition
going on. It's very difficult to dial and into to
(29:00):
the point where you can say, okay, it stopped, it
started here, stopped here, then restarted because that might be
what you're looking at, and let me tell you why.
And this is absolutely horrible. There were terrible things that
were done to this woman in life, dave trauma that
(29:21):
she sustained and I'm talking about superficial cuts and bruises
that are all over her body. But there were things
that were done. Because we have to keep in mind
these two Finegan and Dishman are both charged with it,
with the abuse of a corpse, and I'm going to
(29:44):
give you a little insight into why they were charged
with this. We do know that she had in excess
of fifty injuries on her body. Some of these are
going to be postmortem insults, some of these are going
to be anti mortem insults. And of course the choking
is in addition, because it is our strangulation with a literature,
(30:10):
this is going to be a peri mortem, which means
in the throes of.
Speaker 2 (30:13):
Death, the strangulation hold on. The strangulation happened as she
was in the throes of death.
Speaker 1 (30:22):
Yeah, because that brings about her death at that moment
in time. And so let's just say for instance, okay,
let's say let's say this. For instance, if you have
an instance where in the anti mortem state, which means
in life, you sustain a bruise, Okay, in life, you
will get a reaction by the tissue. Uh. First off,
(30:46):
you're going to see hemorrhage appear in the immediate but
then you'll see this kind of restoration begin to take
place as those injuries resolve. With a pery mortem injury,
you can have evidence that there was hemorrhage into a
specific area but no repair started. That's really you know
(31:11):
how you that's kind of an oversimplification, but that gives
you an idea that that's a pery mortem event, that
it's happening while blood is flowing. And the emmy actually
talks about this in this case, she gave a workshop
in this I'm going to go into this in just
a second, but she talks about there was still blood
(31:32):
flow into an area, but there's no evidence that anything
was being healed or repaired. So that gives you this
is a peri mortem event. And of course everything that
you have that's a post mortem injury, you're not going
to have any hemorrhage at all. And that goes to
like looking at the slides of the sections you take, Dave,
(31:54):
I'll go ahead and tell tell everyone Packson's nose was missing.
They cut her nose off, just so that folks understand that.
And when the police began to look at what they
(32:15):
had discovered at the scene, I can only imagine the
horror that kind of Even as seasoned as I was
as a death investigator, this is the type of thing
that would give me pause. I would probably have to
stand up, walk away, catch my breath, and then go
back at it again with my examination and assessment because
(32:37):
the trauma that was inflicted upon her. She had multiple
cuts all over her face, she had cuts over the
surface of her torso and Dave the doctor, described that
she had a circumferential dissection of one of her breast
where the areola and the nipple was completely removed on
(33:01):
one breast. That means that this individual took this knife,
and she stated the me did that he very carefully
removed removed that portion of the breast, and he had
gone to work on the other one but never finished.
And then there were other injuries that she had on
(33:22):
her body that she said, we're I'm kind of paraphrasing here,
but essentially we're not as well thought out and were
more randomized. If you will, so you have to think
she's being tortured while she's alive. The assessment has to
(33:44):
come in how many of these injuries and insults did
her body sustain in life that are part of a
torturing process with her, Dave, and how much of this
and this is where it goes to if it can
possibly go to another horrific level where he is actually
we talked about objectification earlier, where he's dehumanizing this poor woman.
(34:05):
He's actually going back and playing with the body in
a post wartem sense where he is abusing a corpse.
There's probably a lot more to this from a sexual standpoint.
I think the motivation behind this for him to do
this and the idea of retaining anything that is there,
(34:28):
what you're rational for that? Why do you want to
do this? Why do you want to hang on to
these elements? Why do you want to essentially do this
half assed dissection on this poor unfortunate soul before you?
What is it within your brain that's causing you to
do this? I know this when the chief medical examiner
(34:50):
for Knox in Anderson County, she stood up in Dave,
I got to tell you, this was a brilliant move
in the courtroom with her. They brought in a posable
mannequin that is essentially this white kind of foamy structure
that has human human form, and Dave, she used these
(35:11):
little red felt stick ons that she had. Those represented
all of the cuts. Okay, and when you see this thing,
and I urge anybody that can go to YouTube and
watch this recreation, it's textbook. She placed the red little
felt cutouts all over this woman's body. Then she took
(35:33):
black ones and put them all over her body. Those
represented contusions where she had been beaten. And they're all
kind of interlaced like this, all over the remains. And
the reporters that were in court when they were putting
(35:53):
these images, the autopsy images up, they said that many
of the jury members have to turn away because they
could not they could not believe what they were going
to say. Even the judge from the bench actually said, now,
ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I've got to warn you,
because the judge has already seen all of this, I've
(36:16):
got to warn you what you're about to see is
going to be quite disturbing. And you know, many times
you'll have an attorney, a defense attorney that will object
to this because they'll say that it's a prejudicial I've
had to sit in court in pre trial motions and
go through hundreds of photographs to try to decide between
(36:37):
and having the prosecution and the defense argue over what's
the value in the photograph? What's the value in the photograph?
You know it's going to be prejudicial, Dave, You can't
escape this in this case because this is the sum
total of the case, the trauma that was inflected upon her.
Speaker 2 (36:55):
When it says that her body had slices on her face, back, arms, wrist, hands, abdomen, pelvis,
and buttocks, her nose have been removed with a sharp knife,
and the slices were precise. The slices into her abdomen
were very deep, but they were considered haphazard without the
(37:23):
opposite of what was seen with the nose. Could this
indicate two different people doing this to the body?
Speaker 1 (37:31):
Yeah, I suppose it could, or it could be more.
You know, when you have this kind of exactitude all right,
in inflicting these kinds of injuries, that gives me an
indication that maybe she's in a post mortem state. When
(37:55):
that occurs. The horror is when you see this kind
of haphazard way of cutting and this is this is
quite chilling, and you know, the doctor talked about that
there were so many injuries that could potentially be evidence
of torture. Can you imagine having a knife plunged into
(38:17):
your stomach and you're having to lay there with the
pain of that knowing what's going on. And he's not
according to Dishman, Finnegan is not averse to this type
of thing. And Dishman actually testified that for her experience
with him, he had kept her in a dog cage
sodom Monster regularly defecated and urinated on her regularly, and
(38:41):
this was kind of the standard practice for him with Dishman,
and that I don't know that she was complicit in
these you know, in these acts. She's twenty three years old,
so she's not a child old, you know, she's she's
(39:02):
an adult, and she's working alongside him. Remember, she's part
of the allureing here, you know, to get miss Paxon
into this apartment so they can do whatever they want
to with her. And it's also important to remember that
that Dishman entered in as part of this crime with
(39:24):
this three or under year old child that that they've
sexually abused together. Apparently, it's just it. It goes so
into the depths of the darkest part of human experience.
It's it's almost unmeasurable. Dave.
Speaker 2 (39:42):
One of the things that came out at trial was
the strangulation because they're trying to they still haven't found
the baseball bat and you mentioned to me that the
bat from the bar is also missing. Yes, so you've
got that bat missing. They can't find bat that was
used to beat Jennifer with, but they were talking about
(40:04):
the strangulation of what was used for that. At trial,
the state asked the doctor that did the autopsy if
a shoelace would be consistent with Paxton's injuries around her neck,
and she said yes, so indicating they believe a shoelace
may have been used to strangle her.
Speaker 1 (40:24):
Yeah, they actually found a shoe, a pair of shoes
that one of the shoelaces was missing from, and Dishman
actually confirmed this. Dishman gave very chilling testimony in this
case in that she watched Finnegan as he choked her
with the shoelace. Dishman also stated that she got down
(40:49):
on her hands and knees adjacent to this woman to
tell her goodbye. She watched her taking her final breaths
there before her very eyes. I have to think, Dave,
and this is just speculative on my part, that Dishman
probably felt like that she was going to wind up
(41:10):
in the same way that Miss Paxton had, and I
think that that's the reason that she bolted and left
this place, because you know, she bore witness to every
bit of this, the injuries that were sustained with a
baseball bat. Baseball as a baseball bat, as a bludgeoning tool,
the bat. Okay, it's kind of interesting because it makes
(41:32):
a very people don't think about the pattern that comes
about when anyone struck with anything. If you think about
a flat surface like a piece of angle iron that
someone is struck with, that's going to have very distinct margins.
But when we think about the barrel of a baseball bat,
(41:53):
we're talking it's cylindrical obviously, and its taper too. When
someone is struck with a baseball bat, the skin actually
kind of rises up over the sides of the bat,
and the margins of that contusion are going to look
a bit distorted because of the elasticity of the skin,
(42:17):
so it will actually appear to be a bit broader
than it actually is, but it will have a definitive
top margin and bottom margin as the thing begins to
taper down there. It's the only thing I can really
compare it to. I've seen a couple of baseball bat
attacks before. In some instances, I've actually seen this bruising
(42:43):
pattern or contusion pattern look kind of like a fan
dave And if you can imagine that, how fan kind
of opens up like that, and the bat kind of
does that because the skin wraps around it when the
individual is struck. But suffice it to say, the end
of this woman's life was she was not surrounded by
(43:04):
people that cared for her. Her grandmother, who had been
providing her with money periodically, was not there. Her cousins
were not there that might see her on the street
every now and then. She died in circumstances that most
of us can never imagine and hopefully will never experience.
(43:34):
I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is bodybacks
Body dots with Joseph scotten More. Imagine, if you will,
a new benchmark for evil and kind of let me
lay it out to you real quick. Your person who
is involved with another individual who is at minimum equally
(00:22):
as evil as you are, but maybe a tad bitten
Moore and the police strike a deal with you to
testify against the other person. And here's the kicker. This
is the best deal you're going to get if you
testify for the state. This is what you're going to receive,
(00:51):
a life sentence plus fifty years that must be served
in full. Does that spark your interest? Does that give
you an indication of how grotesque and horrible the case
(01:16):
is that we're about to break down for you. I
think it might be a place to start. I'm Joseph
Scott Morgan and this is Body Bags. Brother Dave. You
sat down a few minutes ago, and I could see
that look in your eye that you get every now
(01:40):
and then, not with every case, but every now and then.
And do you remember what I asked you just a
second ago?
Speaker 2 (01:48):
Yeah, scrubbing the brain. Yeah. Hey, Today, we're going to
tell you the story about Sean Finnigan and how he
is accused of conspiring with his girlfriend, Rebecca Dishman, to
lure Jennifer Paxton to his home in Oakridge, Tennessee, with
the promise of giving her a warm place to stay. However,
once miss Paxton was in the house, investigators say the
(02:11):
couple attacked her with a baseball bat, then raped her
and tortured her, and then during the investigation of all this,
they uncovered another crime. This time Finnegan is separately accused
of sexually abusing a child three years old or younger,
and that occurred in May of twenty twenty. It goes
(02:34):
beyond the pale of what we can imagine, but read
becka Dishman. She had to She's actually going to have
to serve an additional fifty years to if she no
matter what else happens, she has to serve an additional
fifty years at one hundred percent.
Speaker 1 (02:51):
You know, and I don't hear that. I've never heard
that term. I know that it just because I haven't
heard it doesn't mean that people don't say it or
it's not part of the mechanism that exists out there.
But it was uniquely worded. It was almost like, I
don't know an exclamation point on how horrific this is.
(03:13):
And you know, this person that has helped facilitate I
think that you and I could could both say was
one of the most horrific cases that we've heard of.
It certainly ranks up there with anything that we have covered.
(03:33):
She's only twenty five day. Put that in perspective. This
young lady, her name is actually Rebecca Dishman, who had
to testify in this case. She's only twenty five, so
she's she's looking at literally a lifetime, right, you know,
I mean, if you're I think the top end for
(03:55):
women in the United States is seventy eight on average,
just do the Riysthk metic there and you get an
idea of how long she's going to be behind bars
for that period of time. And then on top of
that this fifty years. And Dave, I'll go ahead and
and you know say that I don't know that you
(04:17):
can compare the two crimes here that we're talking about.
They're both sexually motivated, but the one for fifty years
actually involves involves the rape of a child that's three
years of age or younger, Dave, and this woman helped
(04:39):
facilitate that, and it would appear that the primary suspect
that she's testifying against actually facilitated this, and she's an
adjunct to this at twenty five years of age. Go
ahead and kind of break this down to us, man,
because OK, I to tell you.
Speaker 2 (04:56):
When the secondary story to what we're talking about today
takes up this much time at the beginning, it shows
you the shocking nature of this particular crime. Our victim
is a thirty six year old woman named Jennifer Paxton.
Jennifer Paxton is lured by Rebecca Dishman, who's twenty five,
(05:19):
and Sean Finnigin, who's fifty six years old and works
in a bar in Knoxville called The Pint. He and
Jennifer Paxton are known one another for a while. She
comes into the Pint uses the restroom. She's kind of
a nomad, lives her life is it's tough. She does
see her family though once a month she goes by
and sees the family, gets some money and goes back
(05:40):
out and does her thing. But Jennifer Paxton is friendly
enough with Sean Finnegan and is a girlfriend Rebecca Dishman
that when they invite her to stay with them at
their apartment. She takes them up on it. It's December.
It's called as twenty nineteen, December of twenty nineteen. Now
what happens is the minute Jennifer Paxton and walked into
that apartment, she enters the gates of hell. They beat
(06:03):
her with a baseball bat, They shackle her to a bed,
and then they rape her. Now we don't know at
what point in time they killed her. We know they
killed her with a ligature, but Joe, we really don't
know when that happened, how long she was torture. We
know that she went in there sometime in December, between
(06:24):
December first and December thirty first.
Speaker 1 (06:26):
Right, Yeah, of twenty nineteen. This goes back. This is
pre COVID, you know, going back, going back to that
period of time. And here's another little interesting aside about this.
Finnegan had been known and was known prior to the
(06:49):
COVID pandemic that he had had two girlfriends in the
past living with him. And I think that that and
people would would you know, laugh about that with him,
you know, that sort of thing. And they were aware
that he had two women that would reside with him
(07:12):
and one eventually left, and so he's he's in this
apartment with dishman that they have shared this home together
during this period of time, and it's almost dave as
if they were looking for a third perhaps and whatever
(07:34):
the situation is. And it actually reminds me of a
case that I covered when I first did body backs,
first started bodybacks of this alluring thing. I had a
case in New Orleans that I had that I had
actually worked, where I had a lady that lured a
(07:56):
gentleman back to her apartment from a bar, and when
they got back to her apartment, her boyfriend was waiting
there with a claw hammer and beat this other man
to death, and then that couple had sex on top
of this guy's corpse, and then they stuffed him into
a sofa and turned the heat or turned the air
(08:21):
all the way down to try to keep keep the environment.
And this this plays into this case as well, try
to keep the environment down at at a manageable cooler
level so that the body would not decay at a
particular at a normal rate. Of course, it turned out
(08:41):
that it didn't work that way, and a psychic actually
got involved in that case and actually pointed us to
where the body was found out in a landfill inside
of a sofa.
Speaker 2 (08:53):
So it was a fascin New Orleans case.
Speaker 1 (08:55):
That was the New Orleans case. Yeah, so I've seen
I've actually seen this happen before, this idea of luring
to bring somebody in and you know, you have to
enter into you have this, you have Dishman and Finnigan
entering into a conspiracy together or a confederacy certainly, you know,
(09:18):
to try to lure an individual in so that they
can use essentially as a plaything. And Dave, that's what
actually occurred here. They reduced You know, people go on
and on about the term objectification all the time, you know,
with the way you know women dress and this sort
of thing. This is the ultimate and objectification. You take
(09:42):
this poor woman and she literally becomes something less than
human in the eyes of her attackers, and they can
do anything they want to. And buddy, did they ever
in this case.
Speaker 2 (09:54):
Now we know that between December first and December thirty
first to twenty nineteen, Jennifer Paxton was yes, but we
don't know the exact date, which means we don't know
how long Jennifer Paxton was kept in that apartment alive
to be abused, as you mentioned, as a plaything. We
(10:16):
know that. And you brought up something very interesting a
minute ago that at the bar where Finnigan works, they
use a baseball bat behind the bar. When a fight
breaks out, they would bash this bar, this bat on
the bar to draw attention so that the employees could
come and gather and get the fight over with, right right,
(10:36):
And in this case, a baseball bat was used as
the means of beating her about the head. I hate
to assume, but I can't imagine any other place on
the body where one would be immediately.
Speaker 1 (10:52):
You know, Well, that's that's quite interesting because when they
you know, they do obviously examine this poor woman's remains
very carefully. And it goes back to something else you
and I have talked about that we do in forensics,
and that is resolution of injuries. And that's key here, Dave,
(11:12):
because listen, this poor woman she had the family remembers
having seen her and talked to her just prior to
Thanksgiving or right at Thanksgiving, because she would come around
to she had no means. Okay, she would come around
to her grandmother's house and her grandmother received an SSI
(11:37):
check and grandmother would always give her money.
Speaker 2 (11:42):
Yeah, you know, her grandmother was more of a motherly
fe she was.
Speaker 1 (11:45):
And she actually viewed her, according to her other relatives,
she viewed her grandmother as her mom and very sad
state of affairs, unfortunately, but that's the life that she had.
Many people have have issues in their lives, you know,
and you can't escape that, and that's that was her reality.
(12:08):
So with her, she would come around and that's how
the family kind of kept track of it. They knew
they could set their clock by it. She would she
would come back around at least once a month to
collect the check and she she would be seen. Interestingly enough,
her cousin had had actually testified in this case that
(12:30):
she saw her. She thought she saw her at maybe
the end of November or the very beginning of December,
walking in the area adjacent to the pint where Finigan worked,
and she stated at that time that she appeared to
(12:50):
be very thin, more thinner than she normally was, and
so that that's she kind of drops off of the
map at that point in time. And you know, it's
at this point in tom you know, when it's I'm
not going to use the word fascinating it's sickening to
(13:11):
think that there are predators that are out there and
this is generally their mo where they see somebody that
is in need of something. And as you'd mentioned, those
East Tennessee winters, they get pretty chilly, and she's staring
down the barrel of approaching winter tom late fall, and
(13:32):
she needs somewhere to rest her head, somewhere to say
that she has safety, somewhere where she can be warm. Unfortunately,
it was a monster who was offering these comforts to her. Dave,
(13:58):
I got to tell you, I don't know. I've often
thought of people that commit these horrific crimes that maybe
just maybe there's something that numbs them to the humanity
of the others that they're inflicting pain upon. And it
(14:24):
would seem to me, at least that Dishman, this woman
that was essentially a confederate of Finnegan, I think that
maybe her conscience got the best of her. Maybe she
sensed that And here's the thing that her time maybe
(14:48):
up because she had witnessed some things that if you
and I sat down and we were trying to create
some kind of story, first off, I wouldn't hope these
things would enter into our lexicon, are into our mind.
But she had borne witness to all of this, and
I have to think that that it didn't matter where
the safety was coming from. She wanted to feel like
(15:09):
she was going to be safe because this guy Finnegan
apparently turns out to be pure evil.
Speaker 2 (15:16):
Between December one and December thirty, first, she is attacked
with a baseball bat. She has shackled to a bed
and then strangled, But in that process she was raped
and abused. No telling how many times, how many days.
We have no way of knowing that right now, and
that boggles my mind. With everything we have forensically, Joe,
(15:39):
that we don't know, we cannot determine exactly what happened
during that thirty one day period of time in the
life of Jennifer Paxton.
Speaker 1 (15:48):
Yeah, and it's hard, and I'll give you the reason why,
and I find it. The thing is, it's rather ironic
that she was Miss Paxton was attempting to escape those
cold nights that she was faced with in Knoxviall. And
(16:10):
maybe the danger for those of you all that have
never been to Knoxwell and Knoxvill's a medium sized town.
I mean, it's a university town, big downtown. You do
have a significant homeless population there. There are encampments, that
sort of thing, the stuff that you encounter with larger
cities anyway. And you know, the opportunity. Can you imagine
(16:30):
being somebody living on the streets and then all of
a sudden somebody offers you the opportunity to go to Oakridge,
which is known literally, I tell people this all the
time Huntsville, I think it's Huntsville, Alabama, and Oakridge, Tennessee
have the highest per capita concentration of PhDs of anywhere
(16:51):
in the United States. It's because Oakridge Lapse is there,
you know where actually I think the first atomic device
was actually developed, or the beginnings of it in secret. Yeah,
And so you're going from this kind of squalid environment
that you're having to exist in and somebody says, hey,
you want to go to oak Ridge. It's right down
(17:13):
the road. We can take you there. We've got a nice,
warm place for you to stay. But you know when
when Finnegan opened the door to this place and Dishman
is there, they begin to attack her. Now this is
coming from Dishman herself, begin to attack her. And it's
(17:35):
at this point in time that they literally chain her
to a bed. She is raped upon her arrival there
after having been beaten with a bat so early on
in this captivity, she's already been sustaining severe physical abuse.
(17:57):
The problem is, and this is where the irony comes in,
is that after she is killed Dave in this apartment,
her body is placed into a stand up cooler. And
that's kind of interesting because Finnegan had a relationship with
(18:19):
a local rent to buy establishment. I think it's a
renaissent or if I'm not mistaken, And the actual delivery
guy testified in the case he was given specific instructions
and here's a big clue to leave he rented this thing.
Finnegan did a stand up freezer. Leave it on the
(18:40):
front porch, will bring it in, Okay. You know most
of the time, if I've got a piece of furniture
or something like that that I'm going to have delivered,
I want I want it all. I want you to
bring it in the house. As a matter of fact,
I want you to set it up for me and everything. No, no, no, no,
you leave it there. I'll get it when I get home.
And the sale olsman, the worker actually said he was
(19:02):
known with Finnegan was known to them, and that he
always paid his bills on tom and even that where
Finnegan worked at the Pint, they said he was a
reliable employee, that he was always there, And that just
goes to show you, you know, that you don't really
know what's going on behind closed doors. Finnegan knew, and
he knew that he had a deceased woman on his hands.
(19:25):
We think that might be the case. This is the
trick though, had he premeditated her death, maybe she was
still alive in there and he said, you know what,
I'm going to order a cooler, a freezer, if you
will have it brought to the house, and when I
do finally kill her, I'm going to store in there.
Because her death that these two brought about, that wasn't
(19:50):
the end of what they were going to do with
this poor woman's remains. Dave and so our timelines get
very much skewed when we're trying to understand the type
of trauma she sustained, when she sustained it, and how
long it had gone on for. So that piece to this,
(20:12):
which is one of the biggest pieces of investigated data
that we can collect the timeline is all skewed. And
that's because her body, when it was finally recovered, was
frozen through and through, Dave.
Speaker 2 (20:25):
And here's what makes me wonder about everything, Joe. You
say she's frozen through and through. We know Fennigen orders
the freezer from Renaissenter on December twenty seventh, and yet
we also know they beat her with a bat, they
shackled her to a bed, they raped her. But we
don't know when she was murdered. We don't know that
exact date. I don't know if there's a way we
can even know that. We just know that it didn't
(20:45):
happen the first day she was there.
Speaker 1 (20:47):
No. No, this was a lengthy process. And there have
been a number of perpetrators over the year, over the
years that have done this. They've held people captive and
have used them as essentially sex slaves or you know,
I'll go back to this idea of objective objectification, where
you can dehumanize an individual to the point where they
(21:11):
become entertainment. Uh. For for these these monsters like this,
it's really difficult. Now the answer is going to lie, Dave,
in the examination of of herb tissues, Uh not just
(21:31):
in the sense of at autopsy, but also with the
histological results that are going to come back. And when
I say histology, if you if if our if our
listeners have have watched programs where autopsies are being performed
and you see the doctor not necessarily over the body,
(21:56):
but over a cutting board. This is where we actually
dissect the organs that come out of the body. We
take sections of those organs day and so when we
take sections of those organs, they are actually prepared by
a histologist who will take a section of an organ,
place it in paraffin a wax block, and they'll begin
(22:18):
to slice it. And it's stained a particular way so
that there's different types of stains that are used, so
that brings out certain features in the tissue, and you
can look at it microscopically, and so a physician will
look at these things and begin to get an idea
as to the rate of decomposition. Perhaps if there's evidence
(22:38):
of decomposition at a cellular level. In some cases, they
can determine if a body had in fact been frozen.
But the trick is to try to do the calculation
so that you can ballpark it. And again that's why
we've got this very broad time window here, and I
don't know that there's any way that you can narrow
(23:00):
it down any further. I don't necessarily think that Dishman
aided them in this as to when she was actually killed.
When she was actually murdered, we know how this occurred.
But Dave, I got to tell you, the torture, the pain,
(23:23):
and the trauma that this woman endured for that time
that she was with this couple is the stuff of nightmares.
(23:46):
So let's just say you're a police officer and you
have information about a missing woman. You have information that
indicates that there's a high likelihood that this woman that
is missing is in fact deceased, and you go to
(24:08):
the suspect's home. You begin to search the home and
look through it, and in a closet there stands a
stand up freezer looks like a refrigerator, but it is
literally a deep freeze that a small person and that
(24:31):
comes into play here could actually stand in and the
door be closed, but it's empty, it's completely empty, and
it appears to be recently cleaned. You're looking around, you
get down on your knees, and you see something in
this bedroom that is beneath a bed. You stick your
(24:56):
hand beneath the bed, and you recoil in horror. The
reason you recoil is because what you're touching beneath the
bed is an icy, cold, frozen body. Dave, this blew
my mind when I heard this, because apparently Finnegan had
(25:17):
become aware that the police knew that he had some
kind of involvement in Miss Packson's death, and a lieutenant
in this particular case that gave testimony in this trial
actually states that he recoiled when he touched the item
(25:39):
beneath the bed, and it was apparently covered in plastic.
And the reason he recoiled is you don't expect to
feel something beneath the bed that is that cold. Just
imagine going into your freezer at home and you put
your hand on an item inside the freezer and it's warm.
(25:59):
That's an indication that either it's been freshly placed in there,
or your freezer's no longer working. Try to reverse that
now and think, well, this isn't a frozen environment, but
yet what I'm touching right here is distinctly frozen. I
don't know how would how I would react, but it
was the lieutenant's testimony gave an indication that it was
(26:22):
quite shocking to him.
Speaker 2 (26:25):
I can't think of anything comparable, Joe that to find
something freezing cold that you expect to be at least
room temperature, you know, and knowing they're looking for a body,
they are looking for Jennifer Paxton, and seeing something that
really does look like I have found her, and touching
(26:48):
it knowing it's freezing cold, that would be a freak show.
You're beyond anything I can imagine. But once you get
past that, I want to go back for a minute,
because you mentioned the freezer was cleaned out, there was
some type of warning. We know that Jennifer Paxton last
seen and murdered sometime during the month of December twenty nineteen.
(27:09):
This is August of twenty twenty. This is a full
eight months plus later, and Finigan had been tipped off
and is able to move her body from the freezer
to under the bed. But can you tell when the
body is in the freezer? Does it decompose at the
(27:33):
same rate as it would at a cellular level if
it was in a different place. Is there a way
that you can track this? The only thing we really
have is We know when the freezer was delivered to
his house, but we don't know if she was dead
at that time or if he was planning to kill
her at that time.
Speaker 1 (27:51):
Under normal circumstances, which there are very few normal circumstances
in any death. But let's just say normal day to
day life. And we've got ambient temperatures seventy two degrees,
because that's when most testing has occurred over the years.
Relative to in a broad sense, relative to determination a
post more amenable, that's ideal conditions. Okay, now you skew
(28:13):
this data where you're not increasing temperature or environmental temperature,
you're decreasing it. And you ask a very salient question
here regarding the slowing of decomposition. You can never, and
I mean never, completely stop decomposition. I would imagine you
(28:38):
probably could at if you went sub zero perhaps, but
at a cellular level, I'm so proud of you for
using that term. By the way, at a cellular level,
you're going to actually still see the process of decomposition
going on. It's very difficult to dial and into to
(29:00):
the point where you can say, okay, it stopped, it
started here, stopped here, then restarted because that might be
what you're looking at, and let me tell you why.
And this is absolutely horrible. There were terrible things that
were done to this woman in life, dave trauma that
(29:21):
she sustained and I'm talking about superficial cuts and bruises
that are all over her body. But there were things
that were done. Because we have to keep in mind
these two Finegan and Dishman are both charged with it,
with the abuse of a corpse, and I'm going to
(29:44):
give you a little insight into why they were charged
with this. We do know that she had in excess
of fifty injuries on her body. Some of these are
going to be postmortem insults, some of these are going
to be anti mortem insults. And of course the choking
is in addition, because it is our strangulation with a literature,
(30:10):
this is going to be a peri mortem, which means
in the throes of.
Speaker 2 (30:13):
Death, the strangulation hold on. The strangulation happened as she
was in the throes of death.
Speaker 1 (30:22):
Yeah, because that brings about her death at that moment
in time. And so let's just say for instance, okay,
let's say let's say this. For instance, if you have
an instance where in the anti mortem state, which means
in life, you sustain a bruise, Okay, in life, you
will get a reaction by the tissue. Uh. First off,
(30:46):
you're going to see hemorrhage appear in the immediate but
then you'll see this kind of restoration begin to take
place as those injuries resolve. With a pery mortem injury,
you can have evidence that there was hemorrhage into a
specific area but no repair started. That's really you know
(31:11):
how you that's kind of an oversimplification, but that gives
you an idea that that's a pery mortem event, that
it's happening while blood is flowing. And the emmy actually
talks about this in this case, she gave a workshop
in this I'm going to go into this in just
a second, but she talks about there was still blood
(31:32):
flow into an area, but there's no evidence that anything
was being healed or repaired. So that gives you this
is a peri mortem event. And of course everything that
you have that's a post mortem injury, you're not going
to have any hemorrhage at all. And that goes to
like looking at the slides of the sections you take, Dave,
(31:54):
I'll go ahead and tell tell everyone Packson's nose was missing.
They cut her nose off, just so that folks understand that.
And when the police began to look at what they
(32:15):
had discovered at the scene, I can only imagine the
horror that kind of Even as seasoned as I was
as a death investigator, this is the type of thing
that would give me pause. I would probably have to
stand up, walk away, catch my breath, and then go
back at it again with my examination and assessment because
(32:37):
the trauma that was inflicted upon her. She had multiple
cuts all over her face, she had cuts over the
surface of her torso and Dave the doctor, described that
she had a circumferential dissection of one of her breast
where the areola and the nipple was completely removed on
(33:01):
one breast. That means that this individual took this knife,
and she stated the me did that he very carefully
removed removed that portion of the breast, and he had
gone to work on the other one but never finished.
And then there were other injuries that she had on
(33:22):
her body that she said, we're I'm kind of paraphrasing here,
but essentially we're not as well thought out and were
more randomized. If you will, so you have to think
she's being tortured while she's alive. The assessment has to
(33:44):
come in how many of these injuries and insults did
her body sustain in life that are part of a
torturing process with her, Dave, and how much of this
and this is where it goes to if it can
possibly go to another horrific level where he is actually
we talked about objectification earlier, where he's dehumanizing this poor woman.
(34:05):
He's actually going back and playing with the body in
a post wartem sense where he is abusing a corpse.
There's probably a lot more to this from a sexual standpoint.
I think the motivation behind this for him to do
this and the idea of retaining anything that is there,
(34:28):
what you're rational for that? Why do you want to
do this? Why do you want to hang on to
these elements? Why do you want to essentially do this
half assed dissection on this poor unfortunate soul before you?
What is it within your brain that's causing you to
do this? I know this when the chief medical examiner
(34:50):
for Knox in Anderson County, she stood up in Dave,
I got to tell you, this was a brilliant move
in the courtroom with her. They brought in a posable
mannequin that is essentially this white kind of foamy structure
that has human human form, and Dave, she used these
(35:11):
little red felt stick ons that she had. Those represented
all of the cuts. Okay, and when you see this thing,
and I urge anybody that can go to YouTube and
watch this recreation, it's textbook. She placed the red little
felt cutouts all over this woman's body. Then she took
(35:33):
black ones and put them all over her body. Those
represented contusions where she had been beaten. And they're all
kind of interlaced like this, all over the remains. And
the reporters that were in court when they were putting
(35:53):
these images, the autopsy images up, they said that many
of the jury members have to turn away because they
could not they could not believe what they were going
to say. Even the judge from the bench actually said, now,
ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I've got to warn you,
because the judge has already seen all of this, I've
(36:16):
got to warn you what you're about to see is
going to be quite disturbing. And you know, many times
you'll have an attorney, a defense attorney that will object
to this because they'll say that it's a prejudicial I've
had to sit in court in pre trial motions and
go through hundreds of photographs to try to decide between
(36:37):
and having the prosecution and the defense argue over what's
the value in the photograph? What's the value in the photograph?
You know it's going to be prejudicial, Dave, You can't
escape this in this case because this is the sum
total of the case, the trauma that was inflected upon her.
Speaker 2 (36:55):
When it says that her body had slices on her face, back, arms, wrist, hands, abdomen, pelvis,
and buttocks, her nose have been removed with a sharp knife,
and the slices were precise. The slices into her abdomen
were very deep, but they were considered haphazard without the
(37:23):
opposite of what was seen with the nose. Could this
indicate two different people doing this to the body?
Speaker 1 (37:31):
Yeah, I suppose it could, or it could be more.
You know, when you have this kind of exactitude all right,
in inflicting these kinds of injuries, that gives me an
indication that maybe she's in a post mortem state. When
(37:55):
that occurs. The horror is when you see this kind
of haphazard way of cutting and this is this is
quite chilling, and you know, the doctor talked about that
there were so many injuries that could potentially be evidence
of torture. Can you imagine having a knife plunged into
(38:17):
your stomach and you're having to lay there with the
pain of that knowing what's going on. And he's not
according to Dishman, Finnegan is not averse to this type
of thing. And Dishman actually testified that for her experience
with him, he had kept her in a dog cage
sodom Monster regularly defecated and urinated on her regularly, and
(38:41):
this was kind of the standard practice for him with Dishman,
and that I don't know that she was complicit in
these you know, in these acts. She's twenty three years old,
so she's not a child old, you know, she's she's
(39:02):
an adult, and she's working alongside him. Remember, she's part
of the allureing here, you know, to get miss Paxon
into this apartment so they can do whatever they want
to with her. And it's also important to remember that
that Dishman entered in as part of this crime with
(39:24):
this three or under year old child that that they've
sexually abused together. Apparently, it's just it. It goes so
into the depths of the darkest part of human experience.
It's it's almost unmeasurable. Dave.
Speaker 2 (39:42):
One of the things that came out at trial was
the strangulation because they're trying to they still haven't found
the baseball bat and you mentioned to me that the
bat from the bar is also missing. Yes, so you've
got that bat missing. They can't find bat that was
used to beat Jennifer with, but they were talking about
(40:04):
the strangulation of what was used for that. At trial,
the state asked the doctor that did the autopsy if
a shoelace would be consistent with Paxton's injuries around her neck,
and she said yes, so indicating they believe a shoelace
may have been used to strangle her.
Speaker 1 (40:24):
Yeah, they actually found a shoe, a pair of shoes
that one of the shoelaces was missing from, and Dishman
actually confirmed this. Dishman gave very chilling testimony in this
case in that she watched Finnegan as he choked her
with the shoelace. Dishman also stated that she got down
(40:49):
on her hands and knees adjacent to this woman to
tell her goodbye. She watched her taking her final breaths
there before her very eyes. I have to think, Dave,
and this is just speculative on my part, that Dishman
probably felt like that she was going to wind up
(41:10):
in the same way that Miss Paxton had, and I
think that that's the reason that she bolted and left
this place, because you know, she bore witness to every
bit of this, the injuries that were sustained with a
baseball bat. Baseball as a baseball bat, as a bludgeoning tool,
the bat. Okay, it's kind of interesting because it makes
(41:32):
a very people don't think about the pattern that comes
about when anyone struck with anything. If you think about
a flat surface like a piece of angle iron that
someone is struck with, that's going to have very distinct margins.
But when we think about the barrel of a baseball bat,
(41:53):
we're talking it's cylindrical obviously, and its taper too. When
someone is struck with a baseball bat, the skin actually
kind of rises up over the sides of the bat,
and the margins of that contusion are going to look
a bit distorted because of the elasticity of the skin,
(42:17):
so it will actually appear to be a bit broader
than it actually is, but it will have a definitive
top margin and bottom margin as the thing begins to
taper down there. It's the only thing I can really
compare it to. I've seen a couple of baseball bat
attacks before. In some instances, I've actually seen this bruising
(42:43):
pattern or contusion pattern look kind of like a fan
dave And if you can imagine that, how fan kind
of opens up like that, and the bat kind of
does that because the skin wraps around it when the
individual is struck. But suffice it to say, the end
of this woman's life was she was not surrounded by
(43:04):
people that cared for her. Her grandmother, who had been
providing her with money periodically, was not there. Her cousins
were not there that might see her on the street
every now and then. She died in circumstances that most
of us can never imagine and hopefully will never experience.
(43:34):
I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is bodybacks
Host
Joseph Scott Morgan
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