September 28, 2023 • 35 mins
In a chilling twist of events, Annamarie Cochrane Rintala is found dead, her stiff body soaked in both paint and blood.
The spouse, Cara Rintala, finds herself in a situation that marks a legal first in Massachusetts—a woman charged with the murder of her wife. Joseph Scott Morgan and Dave Mack delve into the perplexing nature of the evidence, from the viscosity of paint and blood to the subtleties of rigor mortis. Morgan discusses the troubling aspects of multiple trials and the contentious role of so-called experts in courtroom drama.
The hosts also scrutinize the telltale signs of asphyxial death and the importance of scientific validation in legal cases.
Time-coded Highlights:
- 00:00:00 — Joseph Scott Morgan starts by revealing his love for art and its connection to forensic science. He even touches on its relevance in motor vehicle accidents.
- 00:02:41 — Morgan mentions that the accused is facing trial for an unprecedented fourth time.
- 00:03:22 — Dave Mack announces the historical context; it’s the first case in Massachusetts where a wife is charged with murdering her wife.
- 00:04:31 — Mack offers a rundown on the turbulent relationship between Annamarie Cochrane Rintala and Cara Rintala, including debt, jealousy, and exhausting work hours. He describes the crime scene, which is filled with a mixture of paint and blood.
- 00:06:43 — Morgan delves into the injuries typically seen in cases involving falls, contrasting them with the injuries sustained by the victim, Annamarie.
- 00:08:59 — Highlighting the unexpected detail of the victim's body being soaked in paint, Joe Scott navigates through the signs of death, focusing on the rigidity of Annamarie's body.
- 00:13:05 — Likening the process of rigor mortis to post-workout stiffness, Morgan provides a relatable touch to a grim subject. He elaborates on how heat affects rigor mortis, introducing elements like metabolic activity into the equation.
- 00:15:44 — Morgan provides insight into the informative value of a deceased person's hand position.
- 00:18:50 — Morgan reiterates the necessity of considering various elements for a comprehensive death investigation.
- 00:19:53 — Mack stresses the role of first responders in observing and documenting vital details like blood and bruises. Morgan describes how bruises can remain on a body, offering clues into the timeline of a death.
- 00:28:40 — The conversation pivots to discuss the speculative act of deliberately pouring paint on Annamarie, emphasizing the need to examine her clothing for more clues.
- 00:29:40 — Joseph Scott Morgan draws parallels between this case and the Caylee Anthony homicide, highlighting the use of questionable scientific methods in court.
- 00:32:38 — Dave Mack and Joe Scott Morgan discuss the implications of the cause of death being strangulation, and what signs to look for.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:08):
Bodybacks with Joseph Scott Morgan. I make it a practice,
my wife and I do, at least when we can
save our pennies enough and we go. Trust me, before
I say this, I want you to think I'm some
(00:29):
kind of rich guy because I ain't. Save our pennies
and pack a backpack both of us, and we hop
on the cheapest flight we can find and we go
to Great Britain. And we've done this a couple of times,
and stay very very cheap and stay in fancy hotels. Hey,
if you're in America, you can always stay in some
big chain, right, So we try to stay in, you know,
(00:49):
in hostels for families or maybe in an inn that's
outside of town and take public transit in. And one
of the things that we were prone to do while
we're overseas is go is at art museums. Probably one
of the most fantastic experiences I've ever had was the
National Museum in London. Some of the most beautiful artistry
I've ever seen, and also particularly in Cardiff. Welles went
(01:13):
down there and went to the National Art Museum and
they had beautiful Monet paintings and they're all originals there
and you walk through these things and just the I
don't know, you can just stare at them for hours.
And the old portraits too, the ones that go back
hundreds and hundreds of years, and it's amazing what an
artist can do with paint. It certainly is now. In forensics,
(01:35):
we study paint. We study paint as it applies to
motor vehicle accidents because you know, you might not know this,
but when a person gets hit by car and it's
a hit and run, sometimes the car will deposit paint
on the deceased body. Today, I'm going to chat with
you guys about a case that involves paint, but it
(01:56):
involves paint in a manner in which I have never
experience in all of my years as a medical legal
death investigator. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is Bodybacks
Dave Mack. Good to be back with you, my friend.
I have to tell you I came across this case
because actually I've had two television channels that networks that
(02:19):
have wanted me to cover it, and I was not
aware of it. There's so many things that come across
my desk in media and they are these things get
put up on the shelf in my brain somewhere, I
don't know where. I just I forget about them. I
didn't remember hearing about this case. But what caught my
attention about this case is that this is actually involving
(02:40):
a person and dig this man that's going up on
trial for not one not the second time, but not
the third time, but the fourth time. You talk about
an outlier. This is just not something you commonly see.
Speaker 2 (02:55):
Doesn't happen like this. The bottom line always the bottom line.
Why are there four trials? You always can have one
you appeal it. There was a problem with this or
that piece of evidence. But in this particular case, there
was actually a conviction at trial that was overthrown by
the state Supreme Judicial Court over erroneous evidence, which plays
(03:16):
into your paint discussion earlier. This case, also, Joe, it's
the first time in Massachusetts where a wife has been
charged with the death of their wife, first time for everything.
This is the first time this has happened. And to
be honest with you, when you read all the reports
of this couple that we're dealing with today, Golly g
Whisby sounds like just about every other married couple that
(03:37):
ends up fighting over money and jealousy and childcare, the
normal aggravations of everyone else. So the one thing that
makes it different actually makes them the same as everybody else.
It's funny how that works.
Speaker 1 (03:49):
Yeah, it is. And I think that that applies to
relationships across the board. When you have two people that
are in an intimate relationship, they're sharing Look, they're sharing
life there in an household together, You've got all of
the stressors on you that happened to everybody, so nothing
should set them apart. I would assume that from a
news media standpoint, this is something that the news media
(04:12):
would latch onto. But at the end of the day,
you got two human beings and we're flawed and we're
prone to violence. I mean, we truly are. That's it.
As a bottom line, we all have our measures of it.
You can push us to limits, you can get cross
ways with people, as they say, and in this case,
this is apparently happened.
Speaker 2 (04:32):
And that's what happened in the couplehood of Anna Marie
Cochrane Rentala and her wife Kara Rentala. They had been
together for several years before they actually got married. They
got married in two thousand and seven. They adopted a
girl toddler or baby at the time, Brianna. But this
was a very volatile couple, Joe Scott. There was a
lot of jealousy, there were a lot of interpersonal relationship issues,
(04:55):
a lot of debt. They worked long hours, very stressful,
and both of them. When you get down to the
nitty gritty of what actually transpired and why we are
now heading into a fourth trial. Two hung juries, one
conviction on erroneous evidence or the judge determined to be
bad evidence, and now a fourth time. Let me give
you the description. Let's just start there. Here's the description
(05:18):
from the one on trial versus Anna Maria's the victim.
Kara is the accused. Kara claims that she and Brianna
went out to run some errands during the course of
the day. They've been gone for several hours. They get
home around seven o'clock at night. When they arrive in
the house, Brianna at this times of toddler, she's got
her in her arms. They've got some bags. She sets
(05:39):
the bags down, but she sees our door is open
towards the basement. Down the stairs, she sees Anna Marie's feet.
She doesn't see her whole body. She sees her feet.
That's enough for Kara to grab Brianna and the dog
and go next door and say, hey, would you mind
watching Brianna and our dog for lo while? And by
the way, call nine and send them to my house.
(06:02):
Right now. She's doing all this based on nothing but
seeing her wife's feet from the top of the stairs.
She's at the top stairs, her wife is at the
bottom of the basement. All she sees their feet, they're
laying down when police arrived. Joe Scott Morgan the description
given by first responders. When they arrived at the house,
they walked downstairs to the basement and they were confronted
(06:22):
with a bizarre scene. Anna Marie is laying base up
across the lap of Kara in the basement, and there's
paint and blood everywhere. They said that it was the
weirdest scene because there's paint, blood and the wailing woman
on the concrete floor cradling her wife's corpse.
Speaker 1 (06:43):
Yeah, that's kind of amazing. I've had cases over the
course of my career, Dave, where you have individuals that
fall down sets of staircases, and you do have multiple trauma.
But here's the rub your body is interacting with the
forces of gravity as you are being pulled down the
staircase by gravity, you're free falling, and you don't impact
(07:07):
many times deep. Now listen, taller or the longer the staircase,
the bigger the opportunity is that you're going to hammer
into multiple points contact. But with most homes it essentially
ascends to the floor above and you're not going to
do much more. I don't think that these people lived
in some grand palace where there's a main staircase that
(07:29):
leads down to the basement where you're falling upon foot
and rolling over like some kind of movie set. So
what you would expect to see are like perhaps some bruising,
and it will be specifically concentrated on the body in
particular areas. Remember I use the term concentrated. You're not
going to have wildly dispersed injuries all over the body.
(07:53):
You're going to have perhaps if you hit the back
of your head, you'll have a large contusion on the
back of your head. You can bust your chin, for instance.
You can bruise your shoulder, your hip, a knee. Perhaps
you can go into the wall and fracture a rib.
Maybe you hit the handrail, that's going to be the
extent Dave. From my understanding, this victim had in excess
(08:17):
of twenty different bruises on her body. And you know what,
that doesn't even account for the trauma that she sustained
to both her scalp and her neck. And let me
tell you something, when you take a fall and you're
looking at blunt force trauma in areas of impact, the
neck is not the first place you look. You know,
(08:59):
David is mentioned earlier in our conversation here. I don't
recall ever working a case where a body is just
super saturated and paint like being put forward here. But
there was something else that kind of caught my eye
with this case. One of the reports stated that as
this victim is being cradled in the lap of her wife,
(09:22):
the first responders noted that the body was rigid and stiff.
What's really intriguing is that you're talking about an EMT, Dave.
EMTs roll out on cases all the time. They roll
out on cases where people have been found dead, and
then they call the medical examiner after the EMT has
been there. And one of the things that you assess
in death there are what are referred to as the
(09:44):
cardinal signs of death. And one of the cardinal signs
of death, I mean, you have non responsiveness to painful stimuli,
signs obviously of decomposition, but one of the things that
you look for, and as one of the cardinal signs
is rigidity, rigidity, development of postmortem lividity, to settling a blood,
cool to the touch, that sort of thing. And here,
(10:05):
oh my gosh, this is glaring. I mean, I can
only imagine what was going through maybe the EMT's minds
if they know this person that is an EMT and
they're thinking, how long have you been here?
Speaker 2 (10:15):
That was the first thing they all were going, Wait
a minute, they know who they're dealing with. These women
were involved as paramedics locally. That's a pretty close knit group.
From one group to the next. They do talk and
they know one another.
Speaker 1 (10:28):
They're like, cops, actually there, you don't you do, but
you don't. You cannot really get into their world because
of the things they see and God blessed paramedic. I
love them. I've had them save my life, but they
are no one can really identify with the world that
they in. Dwell, it's a different kind of life.
Speaker 2 (10:46):
And that's where this comes from, because they were shocked.
I had a question for you, and I want to
let me just share so everybody understands what they saw
when you mentioned the rigidk When they get down, they
see the victim, Anna Marie, her lifeless body face up
across Kara's lap. Kara's hysterical, she's going overboard here, and
(11:08):
Anna Marie's eyes were open, her arms were locked in
a quote unquote hands up position, and her body was
so stiff that it took two first responders to pry
her off her hysterical wife. Here's what they actually said,
though direct quote. Now, her entire body moved as one unit,
(11:32):
like a board. We're talking about. You call this riger mortis.
I've always heard it called rigor mortis. What is the
difference is there?
Speaker 1 (11:40):
There's not. It's just it's a matter of how you
pronounce it, rigor riger tomato, tomato, And it all depends
on where you were trained.
Speaker 2 (11:47):
How long does it take for riga mortis to set
in like this.
Speaker 1 (11:50):
It's a gradual event. And let me dispel a few
rumors here. When you begin to think about rigidity in
a body, people will say, well, it starts in the
small muscles of the face and then kind of proceeds outward.
That's not the case. It starts in all the muscle
groups at one time. You just first appreciated in the
(12:11):
tiny muscle. So folks may not have heard about this before,
but you know you can get rigidity in the muscles
of the eyelids. It happens in the jaw facial muscles,
and then it kind of extends out. You'll get it
in the shoulders, elbows, fingers. One of the bigger groups
of muscles that it is last appreciated in are going
(12:32):
to be kind of these real robust muscles that you
have in the upper leg, like your quads and your
buttocks and that sort of thing. So it's taking time
to happen, and the process that it's going through is
I won't get too far off into the weeds and
get too sciencey with you, but in life, we have
the cycle that we study in school that's referred to
(12:54):
as the crib cycle, and it's a cellular respiration is
essentially what it is. And just keep in mind that
as the creb cycle spins, it creates these little balls
of energy called atp Well when it ceases, you begin
to create a DP, and ADP produces something that everybody's
familiar with. As a matter of fact, let me ask
(13:16):
you this question if you have it, Dave, If you
haven't worked out in a while, and you decide you're
gonna go get on the bench press or whatever, and
maybe you're gonna do kettlebells and you begin lifting, and man,
you really put yourself through a workout other than close
to death. How are you going to feel the next morning?
Speaker 2 (13:33):
You're going to be stiff and sorry, I know that
you did it well.
Speaker 1 (13:36):
Talany'll help you, it probably will, but you know what
will happen even without the talanol. It will begin to recede.
And the reason it recedes is that you have what's
referred to as a lactic acid build up. This is
as close as you will ever feel in life as
to what it feels like when Roger Mortis sets into
a body. Now, you can tear a muscle, and that's
(13:57):
something different. But I'm just talking about the stiffness and
the joints. That's lactic acid. But the difference between us
and the dead is that we still have metabolic activity
going on, so we can process that lactic acid. They
can't it, their bodies can't. It has to dissipate over
period of time, and that's how we measure rigidity. So
(14:17):
within about an hour to four hours deep in there's
some factors here, you will begin to see some stiffening,
but it will not be fully developed. You're still looking
at a window that and none of the science is
perfectly exact, and I can see how this might be
trouble for them in court, but you're looking at a
window of maybe, and this is very broad. Sometimes six
(14:40):
to twelve hours before you have full development. Some people
will push it even further out. A lot of it
is dependent upon environmental temperature and then what's going on
internally with the person. Heat speeds up the reaction, So
the hotter it is, the higher the chance that rigidity
will set in. As a matter of fact, if you
(15:00):
have a guy, say, for instance, that is running from
the police and he's got meth on board, and the
police shoot him and kill him on the spot, rigidity
will set in quicker with that guy, as opposed to
a grandma who's essentially in stasis, that's been laying in
the bed dies overnight in her sleep. It's cool to
the touch when you touch her, but her her limbs
(15:21):
are still flaccid because she doesn't have the same level
of metabolic activity. And so that's one of the little
cues along the way that we look for to kind
of gauge. And I can only imagine when these folks
looked at this body being cradled by this person, and
what was kind of fascinating. The way they describe it
is they say she was in a hands up position.
(15:44):
Now hands up means that maybe I'm surrendering, maybe worshiping God,
whatever the case might be. But your hands are up,
it's not extended, they're up above the head. You know
what that tells me, Dave, that when you see that
position body and the hands are up above the head,
one of two things happened. Either that person died flat
(16:06):
on their back with her hands above their head already,
or they were face down hands extended out in front
of them and they were being choked from the rear.
So you could perhaps be choked from the front or
took from the rear, but your arms are up and extended, okay.
Speaker 2 (16:21):
And her body, according to Kara, that her body was
laying flat, face down, and that Kara claims that when
she saw Anna Marie that she went down to cradle
her body and she turned her over and that's how
she was face up. But I've seen people love on
somebody who had passed away in the moments right after.
That's a given. You care about them deeply. You know
(16:42):
they're gone, but you just can't let go yet. I
have never seen anybody cradle a stiff corpse. It's like
a mannequin. I've never seen anybody that loved somebody that
would want that attachment, because we all want the attachment
to their life. And that just shocks me right there.
The hands up, that's another one. But she's so stiff
that they're moving her like a cartoon, And I'm thinking,
(17:04):
how did she get her turned over? Because according to
the according of reports from police, Anna Marie was well
over two hundred pounds. She was not a small lady.
And it took two men, two grown men, to get
Anna Marie's body off of Kara.
Speaker 1 (17:20):
Yeah, it did. And here's another piece. When the EMT's
the first responders actually are doing their assessment, they mentioned
that they had to go through several steps in order
to what referred to in the Morgue as breaking rigger,
which means that you have to fight against the rigidity
in order to loosen up the joints so that you
(17:41):
can assess them. You know, maybe they think that she's
had a seizure. I don't know. I can't imagine as
a practitioner, an EMS practitioner, what you're thinking, because you
know your job is to save life. So you're looking
for a place you can put in an IV line.
You're trying to assess if there's any kind of trauma
that you can kind of stem bleeding from. You're looking
to try to stabilize them. Look, you've got a person
(18:03):
that is apparently found deceased at the bottom of a staircase.
And one of the things that really stands out is
when you think about this, you're thinking about a cerebral
spinal injury. So they're taught from Jump Street, hey, look,
you've got to stabilize that neck. You've got to do
whatever you can, and so they're going through all of
these calculations in their mind. But then at some point
(18:25):
in time they have this reality check where they look
and they say, she's literally stiff as a board. In
(18:50):
a death investigation, it is not that one thing. It
is the sum total of all things considered that you
discover at a scene, back at the morgue, through interview
of subjects and for the police interrogation, it's that sum total.
But in the world of science that myself and my
(19:11):
colleagues in habit, we're trying to determine, Dave, what is
it that the body can tell us about what has happened?
And one of the biggest questions that you always get
when you go out to the scene as a medical
legal death investigator from police officers. They'll look at us
and they'll say how long, Because if they can establish
how long relative to when life ceased, that is the
(19:35):
beginning of the trail for them to establish a timeline. Hey,
there's even a show out there that's named forty eight hours.
It's one of the most popular television shows anywhere. And
there's a reason forty eight hours is very important, and
in my world it's certainly important. Time is the currency
in which we work.
Speaker 2 (19:52):
In all right, Joe. When they got there, when first
responders got there, once they realized that the person is dead,
they're making mental notes about everything there, all the paint
and blood. I was looking over that because they're trying
to determine where the blood was coming from, right, and
they noticed that bruises. I got a question about the
bruises too, But they noticed a number of lacerations on
(20:13):
her scalp and blood coming from those. I guess, But
does a lot of blood come that way? And what
it mixed with the paint? But other than that, the bruises.
How long does it take for bruises to show up
on a body if the person's dead.
Speaker 1 (20:27):
Oh wow, Yeah, that's a fascinating question. And bruises. First off,
let me kind of dispel this. Dead bodies don't bruise.
So any kind of contusion, which is a fancy word
for a bruise, a contusion, it has to arise in
an anti mortem state. That means before death. And so
if you've got a fight that's going on when an
(20:49):
individual is sustaining blunt force trauma, because that's where bruises
come from. Bruises result from the impact of being struck
by something. It can be a baseball bat, it can
be in a car accident, or it can be a
fist or a foot or a Headbut when that impact occurs,
those little capillary beds just beneath the skin are being ruptured,
(21:09):
plain and simple, that's what's happening. But you're not breaking
skin with a bruise. As they're being ruptured, the blood
seeps out into what's referred to as the interstitial tissue,
and so that's those areas that surround the vessels and
that's what creates the bruise well as you know, as
any person in the sound of my voice knows. And
once you have a bruise, it changes color over period time.
(21:32):
That's another way that we try to tell the history
or tell the story of what happens. So if you've
got a bruise that is red, that means that that's
an immediate event. Once it goes from black to blue
or blue to black, then you're talking about maybe a
day up to four days. And then it goes I think,
I know I'm going to get this wrong. Then it
(21:53):
goes to green, then it gets to that nasty yellow
color that we all see, and then it's gone and
actually in and this is one of the things we
use when we're trying to assess child abuse cases because
you can have these different colors all over the bodies
and so contusions are very important as to what we do.
But once that contusion is there, and it can be
(22:14):
just immediately prior to death, it's going to be there.
There's no eradicating it. Even when a body is prepared
at the mortuary, the bruise doesn't go away. They have
to put makeup over it because they're infusing the vessels,
they're not infusing the interstitial tissue, so you have to
cover it with makeup or whatever it is that the
morticians do. So that's very important. And for every contusion
(22:38):
that you have, there is a physical explanation as to
why it arose, and that means that that's a direct
result of impact. Now you mentioned that there were lacerations
that were on the head. Now, lacerations also come about
as a result of blood forced trauma. It's just that
there's more force required my path parts. From my friends
(23:01):
in therapeutic medicine in this area, they will refer commonly,
particularly in the emergency room. Don't be mad at me
for saying this. They refer to everything as a laceration,
and everything is not a laceration for us. We have
lacerations those arise from blunt force trauma, and then you
have sharp force injuries which are in sized areas. Blunt
force trauma generates lacerations, so one of the things you
(23:23):
look for is something called tissue bridging, and they're irregular,
they're very jagged, thank Frankenstein. And so if you're struck
in the head and it creates this jagged injury, when
you see that gaping wound, you know that it's not
an incized area because a mild blade hasn't been taken
to it. You've got these little bits of tissue. If
you've ever handled something like a piece of meat or
(23:45):
something that you're eating and you pull it apart, the
tissue gets real string. It's the same principle with elaceration.
I'll have these real they're called tissue bridges, and you
can differentiate between an incized area and e laceration because
it's still connected. It's not a clean slice, and you've
got multiple of these. But for every laceration, every contusion,
(24:06):
you have to have a point of impact. They don't
just magically appear. The wind doesn't create them. So it
has to be a strike, it has to be a fall,
and you're kind of limited. If you're talking about all
of these injuries, which there were a plethora of them
all over her. If you're trying to say that this
(24:27):
was merely caused by a fall from even the top
end of the staircase, maybe if she fell down two
hundred steps, you might have a chance at seeing a
contusion on multiple areas of the body. But just leading
down to the basement, it's a horrible thing to happen.
I've fallen downstairs. You've probably fallen downstairs, Dave, But you're
(24:49):
not going to generate this number of injuries without a
direct strike.
Speaker 2 (24:52):
I have fallen down basement stairs, but you tend to
slip on those. As an adult, we don't go into
over end. Children do that, but as adults we tend
to slip and our feet go out and we go
on our butt all the way down, and that hurts.
But I know that I've been accused of sitting on
my brain sometimes, but very rarely have I landed on
my button, torn a hold in my head. Got other
things we got to get do on this, because we've
(25:13):
got paint everywhere, and by the way, all the bruising,
all the contusions, all the blood, none of that had
anything to do with the cause of death. Joe, You've
got blood everywhere and paint. Why are we having paint
and blood together? I'm really confused here. Can paramedics do
they know how to set up a crime scene so
(25:35):
that it looks like somebody fell down the stairs? Oh?
Speaker 1 (25:38):
I suit you're saying, yeah, I mean, could.
Speaker 2 (25:40):
A paramedic come up with this as a reasonable idea?
Because well, by the way, need to throw this out there. Kara,
while the first responders are there, suggests that Anna Marie
has fallen down the stairs. But while they're still cleaning
the body, I know, I'm the first suspect. Well, falling
down the stairs is not crime, so you would not
(26:00):
be a suspect in that. So throwing out the idea
that it's a criminal act when you just said she
fell down the stairs and again remember her story. She
had been gone all day, comes home with their toddler, Brianna.
At the bottom of the stairs, she sees Anna Marie
feet laying in the basement in paint and leaves on
that note. That's what we know. That's what she said.
(26:21):
But then the crime scene itself, the body itself. Joe,
you've already told us all the things that have happened
with that body. The fact that riger Mortiz has not
just set in, but she's fixed like a board. And
we've got twenty three bruises. We've got lacerations of the head.
We pointed out by the way, I didn't know that
about it. I really did think that all. When they
said laceration, I kind of thought it was like a
(26:43):
cut with a knife.
Speaker 1 (26:44):
Not in the medical legal sense. So I always take
exception with that. I try not to be a know
at all. But if somebody says laceration and it's a cut, no,
that's not a laceration.
Speaker 2 (26:54):
See you're looking at this crime scene, Joe, what is
sticking out to you on the body? What is sticking
out to you there with the Do you see these
all as factors working towards the death of Ana Marie?
Speaker 1 (27:05):
I think a lot of it would have to be
kind of like blood stained pattern analysis. To a certain degree,
blood is viscous. It's thicker than water. We've heard that
term before, haven't we, But in the little sense that's
why they say that it is thicker than water, it's
more viscous. Paint is even more viscous than blood. So
my understanding is that there was an open paint container down.
Speaker 2 (27:27):
There five gallon It was a five gallon container.
Speaker 1 (27:30):
Yeah, a five gallon one. And so if what you're
putting forth to me is that she falls while toating
this five gallon container, you're going to have a very
dynamic event depended upon if you can figure out where
the paint can or paint container actually strikes first, and
(27:52):
if it is kind of spinning in the air and
it's kind of literally you know, we use this term
in bloodstain analysis called cast off, where you have blood
issuing off the tip of a blade or a bludgeon
or something like that, We actually refer to it as
painting the walls of blood. Is it that kind of
dynamic thing or is the dynamicism of the blood limited
(28:13):
to kind of a slow pore, And that can be
assessed because if you have blood that is thrown off
of a bludgeon, it's going to have kind of an
arcing appearance to it. Some of it will be the
droplets will be very fine, and the higher the velocity,
the finer the drops. But with this, if you're talking
about paint, let's just say, for instance, someone did take
(28:36):
paint and dump it on her body, literally pouring it
on her body. The dynamics of the flow the poor,
if you will, would need to be examined. I'm really
wondering if they've done that. And given the fact that
she is literally covered in paint, I'd like to know
how closely the clothing was examined by the criminalists back
at the crime lab. Now, her body would have been
(28:58):
transported from the scene to the emmy's office, and once
she had gotten to the emmy's office, she would have
been undressed. They would not It's not like, hey, take
these clothes and throw them in the washing machine. We're
going to get the paint out. No no, no, no, no, no, that's
not what's happening. Those clothes individually. We're talking about shirt, painties, bra, socks, pants, shoes, individually,
(29:22):
packaged and taken to the crime lab for them to analyze.
And if a bloodstained person could come in and analyze
that paint and give us an idea about the dynamics
of the spreading of the paint over the body, that
would be a fascinating issue with this. But one of
the things I think the third trial, which was mind
blowing to me, the prosecution actually brought in somebody that
(29:46):
they claimed was an expert in determining at what rate
paint dries, and this smacked of I just have to
say this the Kaylee Anthony homicide case. And this is
why because they brought in this fellow who testified to
the smell of human decomposition, and that so called science
(30:08):
was thrown out the door. And in this case this
has been overturned because the appellate court ruled that there's
not enough science to back this up, Like you have
to be able to test this thing outside the court.
You know how much how many papers have been written
about this. It does it is scientifically valid. In this
particular case, they couldn't validate it. And that's that's the reason.
(30:30):
The third time they didn't get a conviction. Well they
got a conviction, but it was overturned based upon this
one expert that came in to testify about the drying
rates of paint.
Speaker 2 (30:39):
And what was fascinating to me, Joe about the paint
just throwing this out there because I actually went through
this one is getting white paint. Sometimes when you put
white paint on a wall or a ceiling in particular,
it has a pink tint to it. And the reason
for that is because if you're painting a room white
and you're painting on top of white, you don't know
where you've been, and so it comes out out of
(30:59):
the camp and it's kind of pink when you're putting
it on the wall, but it dries white. And that
was one of the things here, because you're going, well,
there is either so much blood that it tinted the
paint red or it had been spilled recently to cover
up a scene, and it was still pink. An amazing thing,
but you go, you're right about how jacked up it
was when you don't have the science backing you up
and you come up with the night you and I
(31:20):
could have formulated a better opinion, Joe.
Speaker 1 (31:22):
I think so, Dave. And the real interesting thing about
this the blood evidence that they had. They had a
couple of spots that they could not necessarily tie back
to the victim, and so you've got this commingling of
this paint, and it puts forth quite the conundrum. If
you've got blood, human blood that is in fact commingled
with paint, how can you go about and separate that
(31:44):
and does it compromise the integrity those things that we
would use to identify the blood and then type the
blood and even do a DNA analysis of the blood.
We know that she has got fatal injuries, and this
is the way the me had ruled. And this is
what really kind of brings us home to me. She's
got what appear to be circumferential contusions around her neck,
(32:07):
which they consider to be consistent with an apixial death,
almost like a manual strangulation. So as the neck is
being squeezed, you get these focal areas of hemorrhage. And
she's got PATIKII, which means that the little vessels in
her eyes, maybe around her lips and in her nose
even have burst. And that's because of this kind of
(32:28):
facial pressure in the blood vessels and they have exploded.
And so that's when we see this, and that again
is another fast You don't get this from falling down
a staircase.
Speaker 2 (32:38):
That's what I was going to ask you to If
you've got what does the blood mean, if the cause
of death is strangulation, what do the bruises mean if
the cause of death is strangulation. If the cause of
death is strangulation, then she could have been playing in
a football game that afternoon without a helmet and gotten
bruised in bloody and then came home. If none of
that matters, strangulation is the cause, what are you going
(33:00):
to find on her neck? If it is manual's strangulation,
what are you going to see?
Speaker 1 (33:04):
Yeah, well you're externally You're going to see marks and
they will come up as contoosed areas because it's not
like a direct like if you think about someone taking
their hand and punching soft tissue, like punching somebody in
the chest or on the arm. It's kind of a
slow burn. With direct pressure applied to the neck, you'll
see these red areas around the neck. It's a lot
(33:25):
more pronounced when you have a ligature like a rope
that's around the neck, but you can still see it
with hands. And where it's most mind blowing is when
you get into the neck dissection. It's when we in
the morgue we call it reflection of the neck. So
the neck, the tissue of the neck, the external tissue
of the skin, if you will, is literally flipped back
and we can see all of the muscles in the
(33:48):
neck and you look for what to refer to, these
kind of interlaced muscles on the front part of the
neck called strap muscles. That's what perpetrators go after. And
they run on either side of our trachea, and as
they squeeze down on the trachia, they're also applying pressure
to these strap muscles and they get hemorrhage in them.
And you don't get that from somebody falling on a staircase. Now,
(34:11):
if they fell on a staircase, let's see, how could
they sustain that? If they fell, you could maybe fall
from a height and your point of impact would be
your neck onto an iron bar. And in the old
days when they had gigantic steering wheels and cars before restraints,
I've seen them where I've actually seen high one hyoid
(34:32):
bone fractured from striking a steering wheel on a gigantic
Pontiac sedan. That's the only way you're going to get
this other than manual strangulation. You've got this entire cacophony
of injuries on this woman's body. And it seems as
though they had enough data to convince a jury with
(34:53):
they decided to go down this rabbit hole with the
trying of paint, and I just I don't intellectually, I
don't understand the value, and that is what it comes
down to.
Speaker 2 (35:01):
It sounds to me like the defense did a good
job of confusing the prosecution. And I'm not being a
lawyer here. If the cause of death is strangulation, why
are we worrying about anything else?
Speaker 1 (35:15):
I really I have no idea, but suffice it to
say that Kara Rentala is currently on trial for a
fourth time, and like in all cases, she is innocent
until proven guilty. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is Bodybacks.
Bodybacks with Joseph Scott Morgan. I make it a practice,
my wife and I do, at least when we can
save our pennies enough and we go. Trust me, before
I say this, I want you to think I'm some
(00:29):
kind of rich guy because I ain't. Save our pennies
and pack a backpack both of us, and we hop
on the cheapest flight we can find and we go
to Great Britain. And we've done this a couple of times,
and stay very very cheap and stay in fancy hotels. Hey,
if you're in America, you can always stay in some
big chain, right, So we try to stay in, you know,
(00:49):
in hostels for families or maybe in an inn that's
outside of town and take public transit in. And one
of the things that we were prone to do while
we're overseas is go is at art museums. Probably one
of the most fantastic experiences I've ever had was the
National Museum in London. Some of the most beautiful artistry
I've ever seen, and also particularly in Cardiff. Welles went
(01:13):
down there and went to the National Art Museum and
they had beautiful Monet paintings and they're all originals there
and you walk through these things and just the I
don't know, you can just stare at them for hours.
And the old portraits too, the ones that go back
hundreds and hundreds of years, and it's amazing what an
artist can do with paint. It certainly is now. In forensics,
(01:35):
we study paint. We study paint as it applies to
motor vehicle accidents because you know, you might not know this,
but when a person gets hit by car and it's
a hit and run, sometimes the car will deposit paint
on the deceased body. Today, I'm going to chat with
you guys about a case that involves paint, but it
(01:56):
involves paint in a manner in which I have never
experience in all of my years as a medical legal
death investigator. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is Bodybacks
Dave Mack. Good to be back with you, my friend.
I have to tell you I came across this case
because actually I've had two television channels that networks that
(02:19):
have wanted me to cover it, and I was not
aware of it. There's so many things that come across
my desk in media and they are these things get
put up on the shelf in my brain somewhere, I
don't know where. I just I forget about them. I
didn't remember hearing about this case. But what caught my
attention about this case is that this is actually involving
(02:40):
a person and dig this man that's going up on
trial for not one not the second time, but not
the third time, but the fourth time. You talk about
an outlier. This is just not something you commonly see.
Speaker 2 (02:55):
Doesn't happen like this. The bottom line always the bottom line.
Why are there four trials? You always can have one
you appeal it. There was a problem with this or
that piece of evidence. But in this particular case, there
was actually a conviction at trial that was overthrown by
the state Supreme Judicial Court over erroneous evidence, which plays
(03:16):
into your paint discussion earlier. This case, also, Joe, it's
the first time in Massachusetts where a wife has been
charged with the death of their wife, first time for everything.
This is the first time this has happened. And to
be honest with you, when you read all the reports
of this couple that we're dealing with today, Golly g
Whisby sounds like just about every other married couple that
(03:37):
ends up fighting over money and jealousy and childcare, the
normal aggravations of everyone else. So the one thing that
makes it different actually makes them the same as everybody else.
It's funny how that works.
Speaker 1 (03:49):
Yeah, it is. And I think that that applies to
relationships across the board. When you have two people that
are in an intimate relationship, they're sharing Look, they're sharing
life there in an household together, You've got all of
the stressors on you that happened to everybody, so nothing
should set them apart. I would assume that from a
news media standpoint, this is something that the news media
(04:12):
would latch onto. But at the end of the day,
you got two human beings and we're flawed and we're
prone to violence. I mean, we truly are. That's it.
As a bottom line, we all have our measures of it.
You can push us to limits, you can get cross
ways with people, as they say, and in this case,
this is apparently happened.
Speaker 2 (04:32):
And that's what happened in the couplehood of Anna Marie
Cochrane Rentala and her wife Kara Rentala. They had been
together for several years before they actually got married. They
got married in two thousand and seven. They adopted a
girl toddler or baby at the time, Brianna. But this
was a very volatile couple, Joe Scott. There was a
lot of jealousy, there were a lot of interpersonal relationship issues,
(04:55):
a lot of debt. They worked long hours, very stressful,
and both of them. When you get down to the
nitty gritty of what actually transpired and why we are
now heading into a fourth trial. Two hung juries, one
conviction on erroneous evidence or the judge determined to be
bad evidence, and now a fourth time. Let me give
you the description. Let's just start there. Here's the description
(05:18):
from the one on trial versus Anna Maria's the victim.
Kara is the accused. Kara claims that she and Brianna
went out to run some errands during the course of
the day. They've been gone for several hours. They get
home around seven o'clock at night. When they arrive in
the house, Brianna at this times of toddler, she's got
her in her arms. They've got some bags. She sets
(05:39):
the bags down, but she sees our door is open
towards the basement. Down the stairs, she sees Anna Marie's feet.
She doesn't see her whole body. She sees her feet.
That's enough for Kara to grab Brianna and the dog
and go next door and say, hey, would you mind
watching Brianna and our dog for lo while? And by
the way, call nine and send them to my house.
(06:02):
Right now. She's doing all this based on nothing but
seeing her wife's feet from the top of the stairs.
She's at the top stairs, her wife is at the
bottom of the basement. All she sees their feet, they're
laying down when police arrived. Joe Scott Morgan the description
given by first responders. When they arrived at the house,
they walked downstairs to the basement and they were confronted
(06:22):
with a bizarre scene. Anna Marie is laying base up
across the lap of Kara in the basement, and there's
paint and blood everywhere. They said that it was the
weirdest scene because there's paint, blood and the wailing woman
on the concrete floor cradling her wife's corpse.
Speaker 1 (06:43):
Yeah, that's kind of amazing. I've had cases over the
course of my career, Dave, where you have individuals that
fall down sets of staircases, and you do have multiple trauma.
But here's the rub your body is interacting with the
forces of gravity as you are being pulled down the
staircase by gravity, you're free falling, and you don't impact
(07:07):
many times deep. Now listen, taller or the longer the staircase,
the bigger the opportunity is that you're going to hammer
into multiple points contact. But with most homes it essentially
ascends to the floor above and you're not going to
do much more. I don't think that these people lived
in some grand palace where there's a main staircase that
(07:29):
leads down to the basement where you're falling upon foot
and rolling over like some kind of movie set. So
what you would expect to see are like perhaps some bruising,
and it will be specifically concentrated on the body in
particular areas. Remember I use the term concentrated. You're not
going to have wildly dispersed injuries all over the body.
(07:53):
You're going to have perhaps if you hit the back
of your head, you'll have a large contusion on the
back of your head. You can bust your chin, for instance.
You can bruise your shoulder, your hip, a knee. Perhaps
you can go into the wall and fracture a rib.
Maybe you hit the handrail, that's going to be the
extent Dave. From my understanding, this victim had in excess
(08:17):
of twenty different bruises on her body. And you know what,
that doesn't even account for the trauma that she sustained
to both her scalp and her neck. And let me
tell you something, when you take a fall and you're
looking at blunt force trauma in areas of impact, the
neck is not the first place you look. You know,
(08:59):
David is mentioned earlier in our conversation here. I don't
recall ever working a case where a body is just
super saturated and paint like being put forward here. But
there was something else that kind of caught my eye
with this case. One of the reports stated that as
this victim is being cradled in the lap of her wife,
(09:22):
the first responders noted that the body was rigid and stiff.
What's really intriguing is that you're talking about an EMT, Dave.
EMTs roll out on cases all the time. They roll
out on cases where people have been found dead, and
then they call the medical examiner after the EMT has
been there. And one of the things that you assess
in death there are what are referred to as the
(09:44):
cardinal signs of death. And one of the cardinal signs
of death, I mean, you have non responsiveness to painful stimuli,
signs obviously of decomposition, but one of the things that
you look for, and as one of the cardinal signs
is rigidity, rigidity, development of postmortem lividity, to settling a blood,
cool to the touch, that sort of thing. And here,
(10:05):
oh my gosh, this is glaring. I mean, I can
only imagine what was going through maybe the EMT's minds
if they know this person that is an EMT and
they're thinking, how long have you been here?
Speaker 2 (10:15):
That was the first thing they all were going, Wait
a minute, they know who they're dealing with. These women
were involved as paramedics locally. That's a pretty close knit group.
From one group to the next. They do talk and
they know one another.
Speaker 1 (10:28):
They're like, cops, actually there, you don't you do, but
you don't. You cannot really get into their world because
of the things they see and God blessed paramedic. I
love them. I've had them save my life, but they
are no one can really identify with the world that
they in. Dwell, it's a different kind of life.
Speaker 2 (10:46):
And that's where this comes from, because they were shocked.
I had a question for you, and I want to
let me just share so everybody understands what they saw
when you mentioned the rigidk When they get down, they
see the victim, Anna Marie, her lifeless body face up
across Kara's lap. Kara's hysterical, she's going overboard here, and
(11:08):
Anna Marie's eyes were open, her arms were locked in
a quote unquote hands up position, and her body was
so stiff that it took two first responders to pry
her off her hysterical wife. Here's what they actually said,
though direct quote. Now, her entire body moved as one unit,
(11:32):
like a board. We're talking about. You call this riger mortis.
I've always heard it called rigor mortis. What is the
difference is there?
Speaker 1 (11:40):
There's not. It's just it's a matter of how you
pronounce it, rigor riger tomato, tomato, And it all depends
on where you were trained.
Speaker 2 (11:47):
How long does it take for riga mortis to set
in like this.
Speaker 1 (11:50):
It's a gradual event. And let me dispel a few
rumors here. When you begin to think about rigidity in
a body, people will say, well, it starts in the
small muscles of the face and then kind of proceeds outward.
That's not the case. It starts in all the muscle
groups at one time. You just first appreciated in the
(12:11):
tiny muscle. So folks may not have heard about this before,
but you know you can get rigidity in the muscles
of the eyelids. It happens in the jaw facial muscles,
and then it kind of extends out. You'll get it
in the shoulders, elbows, fingers. One of the bigger groups
of muscles that it is last appreciated in are going
(12:32):
to be kind of these real robust muscles that you
have in the upper leg, like your quads and your
buttocks and that sort of thing. So it's taking time
to happen, and the process that it's going through is
I won't get too far off into the weeds and
get too sciencey with you, but in life, we have
the cycle that we study in school that's referred to
(12:54):
as the crib cycle, and it's a cellular respiration is
essentially what it is. And just keep in mind that
as the creb cycle spins, it creates these little balls
of energy called atp Well when it ceases, you begin
to create a DP, and ADP produces something that everybody's
familiar with. As a matter of fact, let me ask
(13:16):
you this question if you have it, Dave, If you
haven't worked out in a while, and you decide you're
gonna go get on the bench press or whatever, and
maybe you're gonna do kettlebells and you begin lifting, and man,
you really put yourself through a workout other than close
to death. How are you going to feel the next morning?
Speaker 2 (13:33):
You're going to be stiff and sorry, I know that
you did it well.
Speaker 1 (13:36):
Talany'll help you, it probably will, but you know what
will happen even without the talanol. It will begin to recede.
And the reason it recedes is that you have what's
referred to as a lactic acid build up. This is
as close as you will ever feel in life as
to what it feels like when Roger Mortis sets into
a body. Now, you can tear a muscle, and that's
(13:57):
something different. But I'm just talking about the stiffness and
the joints. That's lactic acid. But the difference between us
and the dead is that we still have metabolic activity
going on, so we can process that lactic acid. They
can't it, their bodies can't. It has to dissipate over
period of time, and that's how we measure rigidity. So
(14:17):
within about an hour to four hours deep in there's
some factors here, you will begin to see some stiffening,
but it will not be fully developed. You're still looking
at a window that and none of the science is
perfectly exact, and I can see how this might be
trouble for them in court, but you're looking at a
window of maybe, and this is very broad. Sometimes six
(14:40):
to twelve hours before you have full development. Some people
will push it even further out. A lot of it
is dependent upon environmental temperature and then what's going on
internally with the person. Heat speeds up the reaction, So
the hotter it is, the higher the chance that rigidity
will set in. As a matter of fact, if you
(15:00):
have a guy, say, for instance, that is running from
the police and he's got meth on board, and the
police shoot him and kill him on the spot, rigidity
will set in quicker with that guy, as opposed to
a grandma who's essentially in stasis, that's been laying in
the bed dies overnight in her sleep. It's cool to
the touch when you touch her, but her her limbs
(15:21):
are still flaccid because she doesn't have the same level
of metabolic activity. And so that's one of the little
cues along the way that we look for to kind
of gauge. And I can only imagine when these folks
looked at this body being cradled by this person, and
what was kind of fascinating. The way they describe it
is they say she was in a hands up position.
(15:44):
Now hands up means that maybe I'm surrendering, maybe worshiping God,
whatever the case might be. But your hands are up,
it's not extended, they're up above the head. You know
what that tells me, Dave, that when you see that
position body and the hands are up above the head,
one of two things happened. Either that person died flat
(16:06):
on their back with her hands above their head already,
or they were face down hands extended out in front
of them and they were being choked from the rear.
So you could perhaps be choked from the front or
took from the rear, but your arms are up and extended, okay.
Speaker 2 (16:21):
And her body, according to Kara, that her body was
laying flat, face down, and that Kara claims that when
she saw Anna Marie that she went down to cradle
her body and she turned her over and that's how
she was face up. But I've seen people love on
somebody who had passed away in the moments right after.
That's a given. You care about them deeply. You know
(16:42):
they're gone, but you just can't let go yet. I
have never seen anybody cradle a stiff corpse. It's like
a mannequin. I've never seen anybody that loved somebody that
would want that attachment, because we all want the attachment
to their life. And that just shocks me right there.
The hands up, that's another one. But she's so stiff
that they're moving her like a cartoon, And I'm thinking,
(17:04):
how did she get her turned over? Because according to
the according of reports from police, Anna Marie was well
over two hundred pounds. She was not a small lady.
And it took two men, two grown men, to get
Anna Marie's body off of Kara.
Speaker 1 (17:20):
Yeah, it did. And here's another piece. When the EMT's
the first responders actually are doing their assessment, they mentioned
that they had to go through several steps in order
to what referred to in the Morgue as breaking rigger,
which means that you have to fight against the rigidity
in order to loosen up the joints so that you
(17:41):
can assess them. You know, maybe they think that she's
had a seizure. I don't know. I can't imagine as
a practitioner, an EMS practitioner, what you're thinking, because you
know your job is to save life. So you're looking
for a place you can put in an IV line.
You're trying to assess if there's any kind of trauma
that you can kind of stem bleeding from. You're looking
to try to stabilize them. Look, you've got a person
(18:03):
that is apparently found deceased at the bottom of a staircase.
And one of the things that really stands out is
when you think about this, you're thinking about a cerebral
spinal injury. So they're taught from Jump Street, hey, look,
you've got to stabilize that neck. You've got to do
whatever you can, and so they're going through all of
these calculations in their mind. But then at some point
(18:25):
in time they have this reality check where they look
and they say, she's literally stiff as a board. In
(18:50):
a death investigation, it is not that one thing. It
is the sum total of all things considered that you
discover at a scene, back at the morgue, through interview
of subjects and for the police interrogation, it's that sum total.
But in the world of science that myself and my
(19:11):
colleagues in habit, we're trying to determine, Dave, what is
it that the body can tell us about what has happened?
And one of the biggest questions that you always get
when you go out to the scene as a medical
legal death investigator from police officers. They'll look at us
and they'll say how long, Because if they can establish
how long relative to when life ceased, that is the
(19:35):
beginning of the trail for them to establish a timeline. Hey,
there's even a show out there that's named forty eight hours.
It's one of the most popular television shows anywhere. And
there's a reason forty eight hours is very important, and
in my world it's certainly important. Time is the currency
in which we work.
Speaker 2 (19:52):
In all right, Joe. When they got there, when first
responders got there, once they realized that the person is dead,
they're making mental notes about everything there, all the paint
and blood. I was looking over that because they're trying
to determine where the blood was coming from, right, and
they noticed that bruises. I got a question about the
bruises too, But they noticed a number of lacerations on
(20:13):
her scalp and blood coming from those. I guess, But
does a lot of blood come that way? And what
it mixed with the paint? But other than that, the bruises.
How long does it take for bruises to show up
on a body if the person's dead.
Speaker 1 (20:27):
Oh wow, Yeah, that's a fascinating question. And bruises. First off,
let me kind of dispel this. Dead bodies don't bruise.
So any kind of contusion, which is a fancy word
for a bruise, a contusion, it has to arise in
an anti mortem state. That means before death. And so
if you've got a fight that's going on when an
(20:49):
individual is sustaining blunt force trauma, because that's where bruises
come from. Bruises result from the impact of being struck
by something. It can be a baseball bat, it can
be in a car accident, or it can be a
fist or a foot or a Headbut when that impact occurs,
those little capillary beds just beneath the skin are being ruptured,
(21:09):
plain and simple, that's what's happening. But you're not breaking
skin with a bruise. As they're being ruptured, the blood
seeps out into what's referred to as the interstitial tissue,
and so that's those areas that surround the vessels and
that's what creates the bruise well as you know, as
any person in the sound of my voice knows. And
once you have a bruise, it changes color over period time.
(21:32):
That's another way that we try to tell the history
or tell the story of what happens. So if you've
got a bruise that is red, that means that that's
an immediate event. Once it goes from black to blue
or blue to black, then you're talking about maybe a
day up to four days. And then it goes I think,
I know I'm going to get this wrong. Then it
(21:53):
goes to green, then it gets to that nasty yellow
color that we all see, and then it's gone and
actually in and this is one of the things we
use when we're trying to assess child abuse cases because
you can have these different colors all over the bodies
and so contusions are very important as to what we do.
But once that contusion is there, and it can be
(22:14):
just immediately prior to death, it's going to be there.
There's no eradicating it. Even when a body is prepared
at the mortuary, the bruise doesn't go away. They have
to put makeup over it because they're infusing the vessels,
they're not infusing the interstitial tissue, so you have to
cover it with makeup or whatever it is that the
morticians do. So that's very important. And for every contusion
(22:38):
that you have, there is a physical explanation as to
why it arose, and that means that that's a direct
result of impact. Now you mentioned that there were lacerations
that were on the head. Now, lacerations also come about
as a result of blood forced trauma. It's just that
there's more force required my path parts. From my friends
(23:01):
in therapeutic medicine in this area, they will refer commonly,
particularly in the emergency room. Don't be mad at me
for saying this. They refer to everything as a laceration,
and everything is not a laceration for us. We have
lacerations those arise from blunt force trauma, and then you
have sharp force injuries which are in sized areas. Blunt
force trauma generates lacerations, so one of the things you
(23:23):
look for is something called tissue bridging, and they're irregular,
they're very jagged, thank Frankenstein. And so if you're struck
in the head and it creates this jagged injury, when
you see that gaping wound, you know that it's not
an incized area because a mild blade hasn't been taken
to it. You've got these little bits of tissue. If
you've ever handled something like a piece of meat or
(23:45):
something that you're eating and you pull it apart, the
tissue gets real string. It's the same principle with elaceration.
I'll have these real they're called tissue bridges, and you
can differentiate between an incized area and e laceration because
it's still connected. It's not a clean slice, and you've
got multiple of these. But for every laceration, every contusion,
(24:06):
you have to have a point of impact. They don't
just magically appear. The wind doesn't create them. So it
has to be a strike, it has to be a fall,
and you're kind of limited. If you're talking about all
of these injuries, which there were a plethora of them
all over her. If you're trying to say that this
(24:27):
was merely caused by a fall from even the top
end of the staircase, maybe if she fell down two
hundred steps, you might have a chance at seeing a
contusion on multiple areas of the body. But just leading
down to the basement, it's a horrible thing to happen.
I've fallen downstairs. You've probably fallen downstairs, Dave, But you're
(24:49):
not going to generate this number of injuries without a
direct strike.
Speaker 2 (24:52):
I have fallen down basement stairs, but you tend to
slip on those. As an adult, we don't go into
over end. Children do that, but as adults we tend
to slip and our feet go out and we go
on our butt all the way down, and that hurts.
But I know that I've been accused of sitting on
my brain sometimes, but very rarely have I landed on
my button, torn a hold in my head. Got other
things we got to get do on this, because we've
(25:13):
got paint everywhere, and by the way, all the bruising,
all the contusions, all the blood, none of that had
anything to do with the cause of death. Joe, You've
got blood everywhere and paint. Why are we having paint
and blood together? I'm really confused here. Can paramedics do
they know how to set up a crime scene so
(25:35):
that it looks like somebody fell down the stairs? Oh?
Speaker 1 (25:38):
I suit you're saying, yeah, I mean, could.
Speaker 2 (25:40):
A paramedic come up with this as a reasonable idea?
Because well, by the way, need to throw this out there. Kara,
while the first responders are there, suggests that Anna Marie
has fallen down the stairs. But while they're still cleaning
the body, I know, I'm the first suspect. Well, falling
down the stairs is not crime, so you would not
(26:00):
be a suspect in that. So throwing out the idea
that it's a criminal act when you just said she
fell down the stairs and again remember her story. She
had been gone all day, comes home with their toddler, Brianna.
At the bottom of the stairs, she sees Anna Marie
feet laying in the basement in paint and leaves on
that note. That's what we know. That's what she said.
(26:21):
But then the crime scene itself, the body itself. Joe,
you've already told us all the things that have happened
with that body. The fact that riger Mortiz has not
just set in, but she's fixed like a board. And
we've got twenty three bruises. We've got lacerations of the head.
We pointed out by the way, I didn't know that
about it. I really did think that all. When they
said laceration, I kind of thought it was like a
(26:43):
cut with a knife.
Speaker 1 (26:44):
Not in the medical legal sense. So I always take
exception with that. I try not to be a know
at all. But if somebody says laceration and it's a cut, no,
that's not a laceration.
Speaker 2 (26:54):
See you're looking at this crime scene, Joe, what is
sticking out to you on the body? What is sticking
out to you there with the Do you see these
all as factors working towards the death of Ana Marie?
Speaker 1 (27:05):
I think a lot of it would have to be
kind of like blood stained pattern analysis. To a certain degree,
blood is viscous. It's thicker than water. We've heard that
term before, haven't we, But in the little sense that's
why they say that it is thicker than water, it's
more viscous. Paint is even more viscous than blood. So
my understanding is that there was an open paint container down.
Speaker 2 (27:27):
There five gallon It was a five gallon container.
Speaker 1 (27:30):
Yeah, a five gallon one. And so if what you're
putting forth to me is that she falls while toating
this five gallon container, you're going to have a very
dynamic event depended upon if you can figure out where
the paint can or paint container actually strikes first, and
(27:52):
if it is kind of spinning in the air and
it's kind of literally you know, we use this term
in bloodstain analysis called cast off, where you have blood
issuing off the tip of a blade or a bludgeon
or something like that, We actually refer to it as
painting the walls of blood. Is it that kind of
dynamic thing or is the dynamicism of the blood limited
(28:13):
to kind of a slow pore, And that can be
assessed because if you have blood that is thrown off
of a bludgeon, it's going to have kind of an
arcing appearance to it. Some of it will be the
droplets will be very fine, and the higher the velocity,
the finer the drops. But with this, if you're talking
about paint, let's just say, for instance, someone did take
(28:36):
paint and dump it on her body, literally pouring it
on her body. The dynamics of the flow the poor,
if you will, would need to be examined. I'm really
wondering if they've done that. And given the fact that
she is literally covered in paint, I'd like to know
how closely the clothing was examined by the criminalists back
at the crime lab. Now, her body would have been
(28:58):
transported from the scene to the emmy's office, and once
she had gotten to the emmy's office, she would have
been undressed. They would not It's not like, hey, take
these clothes and throw them in the washing machine. We're
going to get the paint out. No no, no, no, no, no, that's
not what's happening. Those clothes individually. We're talking about shirt, painties, bra, socks, pants, shoes, individually,
(29:22):
packaged and taken to the crime lab for them to analyze.
And if a bloodstained person could come in and analyze
that paint and give us an idea about the dynamics
of the spreading of the paint over the body, that
would be a fascinating issue with this. But one of
the things I think the third trial, which was mind
blowing to me, the prosecution actually brought in somebody that
(29:46):
they claimed was an expert in determining at what rate
paint dries, and this smacked of I just have to
say this the Kaylee Anthony homicide case. And this is
why because they brought in this fellow who testified to
the smell of human decomposition, and that so called science
(30:08):
was thrown out the door. And in this case this
has been overturned because the appellate court ruled that there's
not enough science to back this up, Like you have
to be able to test this thing outside the court.
You know how much how many papers have been written
about this. It does it is scientifically valid. In this
particular case, they couldn't validate it. And that's that's the reason.
(30:30):
The third time they didn't get a conviction. Well they
got a conviction, but it was overturned based upon this
one expert that came in to testify about the drying
rates of paint.
Speaker 2 (30:39):
And what was fascinating to me, Joe about the paint
just throwing this out there because I actually went through
this one is getting white paint. Sometimes when you put
white paint on a wall or a ceiling in particular,
it has a pink tint to it. And the reason
for that is because if you're painting a room white
and you're painting on top of white, you don't know
where you've been, and so it comes out out of
(30:59):
the camp and it's kind of pink when you're putting
it on the wall, but it dries white. And that
was one of the things here, because you're going, well,
there is either so much blood that it tinted the
paint red or it had been spilled recently to cover
up a scene, and it was still pink. An amazing thing,
but you go, you're right about how jacked up it
was when you don't have the science backing you up
and you come up with the night you and I
(31:20):
could have formulated a better opinion, Joe.
Speaker 1 (31:22):
I think so, Dave. And the real interesting thing about
this the blood evidence that they had. They had a
couple of spots that they could not necessarily tie back
to the victim, and so you've got this commingling of
this paint, and it puts forth quite the conundrum. If
you've got blood, human blood that is in fact commingled
with paint, how can you go about and separate that
(31:44):
and does it compromise the integrity those things that we
would use to identify the blood and then type the
blood and even do a DNA analysis of the blood.
We know that she has got fatal injuries, and this
is the way the me had ruled. And this is
what really kind of brings us home to me. She's
got what appear to be circumferential contusions around her neck,
(32:07):
which they consider to be consistent with an apixial death,
almost like a manual strangulation. So as the neck is
being squeezed, you get these focal areas of hemorrhage. And
she's got PATIKII, which means that the little vessels in
her eyes, maybe around her lips and in her nose
even have burst. And that's because of this kind of
(32:28):
facial pressure in the blood vessels and they have exploded.
And so that's when we see this, and that again
is another fast You don't get this from falling down
a staircase.
Speaker 2 (32:38):
That's what I was going to ask you to If
you've got what does the blood mean, if the cause
of death is strangulation, what do the bruises mean if
the cause of death is strangulation. If the cause of
death is strangulation, then she could have been playing in
a football game that afternoon without a helmet and gotten
bruised in bloody and then came home. If none of
that matters, strangulation is the cause, what are you going
(33:00):
to find on her neck? If it is manual's strangulation,
what are you going to see?
Speaker 1 (33:04):
Yeah, well you're externally You're going to see marks and
they will come up as contoosed areas because it's not
like a direct like if you think about someone taking
their hand and punching soft tissue, like punching somebody in
the chest or on the arm. It's kind of a
slow burn. With direct pressure applied to the neck, you'll
see these red areas around the neck. It's a lot
(33:25):
more pronounced when you have a ligature like a rope
that's around the neck, but you can still see it
with hands. And where it's most mind blowing is when
you get into the neck dissection. It's when we in
the morgue we call it reflection of the neck. So
the neck, the tissue of the neck, the external tissue
of the skin, if you will, is literally flipped back
and we can see all of the muscles in the
(33:48):
neck and you look for what to refer to, these
kind of interlaced muscles on the front part of the
neck called strap muscles. That's what perpetrators go after. And
they run on either side of our trachea, and as
they squeeze down on the trachia, they're also applying pressure
to these strap muscles and they get hemorrhage in them.
And you don't get that from somebody falling on a staircase. Now,
(34:11):
if they fell on a staircase, let's see, how could
they sustain that? If they fell, you could maybe fall
from a height and your point of impact would be
your neck onto an iron bar. And in the old
days when they had gigantic steering wheels and cars before restraints,
I've seen them where I've actually seen high one hyoid
(34:32):
bone fractured from striking a steering wheel on a gigantic
Pontiac sedan. That's the only way you're going to get
this other than manual strangulation. You've got this entire cacophony
of injuries on this woman's body. And it seems as
though they had enough data to convince a jury with
(34:53):
they decided to go down this rabbit hole with the
trying of paint, and I just I don't intellectually, I
don't understand the value, and that is what it comes
down to.
Speaker 2 (35:01):
It sounds to me like the defense did a good
job of confusing the prosecution. And I'm not being a
lawyer here. If the cause of death is strangulation, why
are we worrying about anything else?
Speaker 1 (35:15):
I really I have no idea, but suffice it to
say that Kara Rentala is currently on trial for a
fourth time, and like in all cases, she is innocent
until proven guilty. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is Bodybacks.
Host
Joseph Scott Morgan
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