June 2, 2026 • 41 mins
Out of prison for exactly one month, Christopher Ebanks is accused of killing a friend, Billy Joe Carrethers, with some type of odd stabbing weapon, then forcing Carrethers girlfriend, Selena Blanco, to clean up the mess. The victim was then placed in a bathtub, wrapped up in carpet and air mattress, bound with an extension cord and put into a closet. But not before Ebanks allegedly cut off the victims' head and hands and placed them in a suitcase and carried out of the apartment. Joseph Scott Morgan and Dave Mack discuss the case and additional details that help explain some of the charges Ebanks now faces with his bond set at $1 million! As this is an ongoing case, updates will follow.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Quality Bus with Joseph Scott More. I don't think anybody
out there wants to live in squalor. There are many
people that believe that cleaning every single day is therapeutic.
(00:22):
I can see how it would be. I'm not one
of those people. But there are some people that like
to push a vacuum cleaner every single day. Some people
go through countless numbers of cans of furniture polish. They
like that fresh, lemony smell.
Speaker 2 (00:37):
Right.
Speaker 1 (00:39):
There are others that like to clean their windows. Nothing
wrong with that, particularly if it helps you make it
through life. But I want you to think about something.
Can you imagine being made to clean a particular area.
And we're not talking as a child, your parents admonishing
you because of a dirty bedroom or dishes they haven't
(01:01):
been able to put their hands on in months and months. No,
we're talking about something totally different. What if What if
there were an instance where one's lover had killed someone
in their home, maybe even taken a knife to the body,
(01:21):
and they look at that other person, their significant other,
and says, clean this up today on body bags, We're
going to talk about one such case and a big
mess that was left behind regarding a homicide that came
(01:41):
along with dismemberment. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is
body bags. I'm not saying that that Kimmy and I
are the neatest people in the world. Day however, you know,
I want to leave a coffee cup here or there, shoes,
(02:04):
you know, thrown about. I'm always in a hurry. I
mean you see me, I kind of spin in like
a tornado and then spin back out, and I don't know.
I think I'm at a point in time where I'm
just you know, you just get to a point where
you're just so dog tired at the end of the day.
It's like I'll just I'll get to it tomorrow. But
you know, Dave, when you've got cases that involve really
(02:27):
intense violence, I think that most people that are involved
in such things have an awareness that I don't need
to leave any other kind of evidence around that's visible
certainly to the unaided eye. They even know that you've
got to clean up blood, you've got to clean up
any kind of mess that may have been created in
(02:49):
say a scuffle.
Speaker 2 (02:50):
And that's a case that we have today.
Speaker 3 (02:53):
If you think it's therapeutic to clean, come to my house.
Speaker 4 (02:56):
Okay, you talk about living. Here's what's really bad.
Speaker 3 (03:00):
Imagine this, Joe, just a brief snippet into my life.
I used to four kids and all their friends. My
wife and I are dogs that we adopt dogs. So
we always had a house full of activity, and there.
Speaker 4 (03:13):
Was always something laying around.
Speaker 3 (03:15):
Well, somebody else is gonna pick that up before I
get home, right, Yeah, Well now it's just me. So
when I look at the mess, dude, I created it
and I'm the only one that's.
Speaker 4 (03:27):
Going to pick it up. I can't even blame the dogs.
So you go ahead and keep leaving your coffee.
Speaker 2 (03:32):
Your soul proprietor. Is that what you said?
Speaker 3 (03:34):
That I am just me and this house and electronics.
That's it, all right. But here's the deal. In this case,
you have a dad. Every dad knows at some point
in time you're going to get a call from one
of your children and you're going to have to relay
messages to somebody. Oftentimes it's to another parent because somebody
has messed up. And in this case, so Leah Blanco's
(03:57):
dad has to call the cops, and he calls them.
Jeffrey Malacca calls the police to say, Okay, guys, I'm
not really sure what has happened, but my daughter says
a criminal friend killed her boyfriend. And that's where the
(04:18):
story starts, Joe, with a dad getting a call from
his daughter and him having to relay this information to police.
And you mentioned a fight, right, there was an altercation. Well,
this is a case that I'm really curious because we've
dealt with so many different things. My goodness, Joe, we
(04:43):
did an entire episode of Crime con about dismemberment for
crying out loud, we could do this one. Because in
this case, we've got everything you could possibly imagine. We
don't even know the truth yet, because this is a
brand new case. It is still being adjudicated. There has
not been the guy's just arrested. Okay, we have not
even had a trial. Everything is alleged. I want to
(05:05):
be very careful about that. But the allegation is that
a couple was having an argument about the rent and
the victim calls his buddy for some reason to come
over and help him get the girlfriend to agree to
(05:28):
pay the rent.
Speaker 4 (05:29):
I'm not sure you know.
Speaker 3 (05:30):
This is one of those crazy stories that when it
finally gets to court, will know more. But bottom line,
that's where it started. A couple having a couple of
drinks probably invite a friend over into their argument, and
an argument becomes physical. Now, Joe, if you were in
(05:52):
the presence of a friend of yours and he and
his spouse got into an argument that turned physical, what
would you do?
Speaker 1 (06:01):
I guess it depends on how it's defined as physical.
Speaker 4 (06:04):
They're hitting each other.
Speaker 1 (06:06):
Yeah, well, I'm going to have to interdict that situation.
And I think that I think that any man, certainly
that's there and that is seeing another man perhaps put
hands on a woman, it should be interdicted at that
point in time. But the problem is is that crazy
has always been around, as we know. But you know,
(06:29):
I submit to you. You and I have had this
discussion many times off camera where evil seems to escalate
and has been escalating, it would seem, and not that
there hasn't always been evil, It's just that it seems
as though the level of violence many times has increased.
And I think that this is is evidence from my perspective,
(06:51):
at least upon by viewing the violence that is exacted
upon the bodies of the dead, not just bodies of
the living. You know, when someone is attacked, but how
how the dead or treated. And in this case, I
think that that that's that that's evidence. Let me give
you one more little slice of reality here. I don't
(07:13):
know if this is evidence of anything, however, the accused
in this particular case, Dave. You know, we we hear
about a lot of cases that are non adjudicated that
we might speak about either on bodybags or other platforms
that we're with. But I'm always curious about a number
(07:34):
that is put up. If somebody has been hooked up
on charges and the judge says, you have to have
this much money to get out of jail, Dave, they
must feel pretty strongly.
Speaker 2 (07:46):
About this case because this guy, what's.
Speaker 1 (07:50):
His number again? Can you give it to me again
so all of our friends can hear.
Speaker 4 (07:52):
Christopher E.
Speaker 3 (07:53):
Banks is the guy's name, not just of Abank, Christopher Ebank,
And I guess the judge thinks e Bank means a
million dollars a million dollars bond. But Joe, this is
not his first rodeo. He Christopher Ebanks is a convicted felon,
(08:14):
A convicted fellaon who was on probation had just been
let out of prison one month earlier, in his first
month of a new life, he finds himself going back
to court.
Speaker 4 (08:25):
But you know what he did.
Speaker 3 (08:26):
Joe gets that million dollars bond and he appears before
the judge and he says, Ebanks says to the judge,
can't we lower that to.
Speaker 4 (08:36):
I don't know, a half million.
Speaker 3 (08:37):
I don't think I can come up with a million,
but half million, I think I might be able to
do it. The judge said, I think I'm good with
a million. I think I'm good.
Speaker 2 (08:45):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (08:46):
Yeah, Well, let me let's just play a little a
little ping pong here just for a second in your opinion,
do you think that, if I mean just the evidence
alone in this case is for other egregious if he
had not just recently been let out of prison, do
you think that if he had allegedly perpetrated the same crime,
(09:09):
that the that that bond would have been set at
the same amount.
Speaker 3 (09:13):
I think, Joe, I think you're dead on right, because
when we get into the nuts and bolts of what transpired,
the judge has to take all things into consideration. You
know that what is alleged here, it's not that there
was an accident in the skateboard park with friends out
there singing kumbah yah and and tripped over a thing
(09:34):
and you know, fell and oh my gosh, I accidentally
hit him in the head with a brick. It's not
like that. I mean, this is one month out of prison. Yeah,
and you are accused of beating a friend and stabbing
(09:56):
him with an axe type of weapon. And they say
because the way the wounds were mentioned, they were kind
of like a cross of some type like an X
or something.
Speaker 1 (10:08):
Jettally they had mentioned, Yeah, they had mentioned triangular. I'm
gonna be fascinated to see the evidence in this case.
Let me give you a little bit of history here.
Speaker 4 (10:15):
I knew you would. You know what.
Speaker 3 (10:17):
When I saw this, I was like, okay, I remember
you telling me about like the in the medieval times
where they would have like a piece of lead at
the end of a stick that goes back and forth,
has claws on it. Yeah, and they bop you in
the head with it and take your brain out.
Speaker 4 (10:30):
You know.
Speaker 1 (10:30):
Well, that's yeah, that's that's actually I think Richard, Richard
the Third I think, uh, that's how he was killed.
They believe there was this this triangular shaped blade. I say,
it's not really a well, I guess it has edges,
but it's triangular shaped if you look down the long
(10:51):
axis of it, and it was meant to penetrate armor,
and you would hold it and they believe that he
had this kind of injury. You know, his skeleton kind
of revealed this where you could hold it over over
a victim that's down before you, and you take it
and you jam it through you know, their helmet or
their arm or anything. But here's a more modern context.
Speaker 2 (11:13):
Did you know that years and years.
Speaker 1 (11:19):
Ago they outlawed triangular shaped bayonets. There were bayonets that
had three It was like if you pressed it into something,
it kind of had a three pointed star appearance to it.
Speaker 2 (11:30):
And the reason.
Speaker 1 (11:33):
That they did that is that those particular types of
insults were so catastrophic that surgeons could not close them
up because of the nature of the three the three edges.
So if you think about a fixed bayonet, and we're
not talking about like a civil war, we're talking about
going into into like World War One that era, and
(11:55):
so this could be driven through armor and you know
things that might impede. They used to wear these kind
of leather, heavy flat kind of like flat vests, it
could penetrate through there, and if if that were the case,
then then you know it was an unrecoverable injury. And
(12:16):
so those were outlaws. Man, I'm finding it very interesting
they're saying acts like yet triangularly.
Speaker 3 (12:22):
That's why I couldn't get to I'm sitting here going
I can't wait for Joe to explain this one, because
right now I'm in my head, Joe, I'm thinking, Okay,
how does the meeting begin where you're saying, okay, we
got your regular bayonet that when you're in hand to
hand combat in war where this other person is going
to kill you if you don't kill them first.
Speaker 4 (12:41):
But this one jabbing item is just yeah, it's too gross.
Speaker 3 (12:47):
It just we want you to kill each other, but
this is just too much mayhem.
Speaker 4 (12:52):
Really, So if I.
Speaker 3 (12:53):
Stick this into your heart, that's okay, but this one
is not.
Speaker 4 (12:59):
How does that mean?
Speaker 1 (13:01):
There's a big philosophical now in the military, there's a
big philosophical debate that's gone on for years and years,
and people may have heard this before. You know that
you think about people shooting to kill many, many, many people.
I don't necessarily hold to it but many people believe
that it's better to wound the enemy. For every one wounded,
(13:22):
it takes two people or at least one other person
to get them off the battlefield. And that's always kind
of this underlying principle. Now I don't know that that
was necessarily the case with that, but I'm very curious
in our case here out of Arizona. I'm really wondering
if in fact this subject had access to something like this,
because I can tell you you had mentioned just a
(13:44):
moment ago that, you know, when walking down the sidewalk.
He can't just merely say, you know, well my friend,
my friend tripped and conked his head and died. Not
only can you not say that, in this case, you
can't say, well, my friend walked down the sidewalk and
his head accidentally fell off either because this gentleman was
(14:09):
in fact missing his nogging. We talk a lot about
interpreting trauma on bodyback stave, and I think that in
this particular case, there's going to be a lot of
(14:31):
trauma to go through, and not to mention, we know
that we have a witness to the trauma as well,
and that's going to be quite compelling. I think coupled
with the story that the forensicthologists are going to tell
when they do eventually get onto the stand in this case,
because they can talk about, you know, every single impact.
(14:54):
We're talking about a beating case here, and so every
impact interpretively, I think for our PA, you know how
I said that in the past. I think we did
a recent episode as well where I said it's almost
impossible for us to sequence in Yes, yeah, that's important
here because this is one of those cases. I'm not
(15:17):
saying that it is going to be a fact. However,
if you have an eyewitness to an attack and you've
got injuries or insults to a person's face and their
head and their neck and all these other areas, maybe
their chest, if you have an eyewitness to that event,
(15:38):
you might not can say absent you know, firsthand witness accounts,
I can tell you the sequence in this particular case,
we very well might can, Dave.
Speaker 3 (15:47):
You know, it's interesting that we kind of come to
this from a really weird standpoint in that we have
the story of what took place, you know, according to
the eyewitness, before we even had the body, you know,
and you mentioned cleaning up.
Speaker 4 (16:05):
So let's just start with I told.
Speaker 3 (16:07):
You it was a fight and it ended up between
guys that are supposedly friends. Now I don't know about
the friends. I don't know that. I just know that
that's how it is presented. We'll find out later. But
you know I mentioned the Christopher Ebanks. He's thirty two
years old, Joe, and he just got out of prison
a month earlier, a month before this happened. The victim's
name is Billy Joe Correthers. Billy Joe's forty four. Now
(16:30):
according to our eyewitness, or actually it's whoever tells the
story to last, but no matter what happened, the three
of them were drinking together, the witness, Billy Joe and
mister Ebanks, and that's when the couple, the victim and
his girlfriend got into an argument. And according to I
(16:52):
guess right now the witness, the violence began when this
argument about rent money became physical, when the victim, Billy
Joe Carrothers, physically attacked his girlfriend hit his girlfriend.
Speaker 4 (17:05):
I don't know.
Speaker 3 (17:06):
I don't want to say that. It's just that's what's
being alleged in some reporting of this. What happened after
that is that, according to this eye witness. That's when
Billy Joe and Christopher Ebanks got into a battle.
Speaker 4 (17:21):
Christopher Ebanks faced.
Speaker 3 (17:22):
Off with him and said, hey, you want to fight
a man, fight a man, come on, fight me, and
that's what began the fight. But during this fight, Billy
Joe Carrethers was fighting hands. Maybe he's throwing hands. But
Christopher Ebank has some type of weapon. I'm guessing you
(17:48):
know it's it's been called an act of some type
with like you mentioned that patch trash with how don't
you get to triangle in? I'm thinking, okay, well, here's
the sumpthing.
Speaker 4 (17:56):
Joe. The guy's been in prison.
Speaker 3 (17:59):
Maybe once he got home, he has some time on
his hands, and he's making his own instead of prison shank.
He's got his apartment shank. He's making his own weapon
in his apartment and he wants to do the most
damage he can and he knows this is what we'll
do it. So he made his own type of a weapon.
That's all I can think of because they don't sell them.
Speaker 2 (18:17):
I know.
Speaker 1 (18:17):
That's an interesting point that you bring up, because if
he is a felon, and we know that he is,
that's confirmed. He's just got out of prison. Remember the
bond that we talked about a million bucks, right, and
he could come up with five hundred thousand. Wow, that's interesting.
What if he had created because you know, if you're
a felon and you're in possession of a fire on right,
(18:38):
you know, and coming out of a prison environment, and
that is a world that most people cannot identify with
where and depended upon the level of security that you're in,
the people that you're housed with, all the sorts of things.
You have to think about your personal safety all the time.
And I think that this is a genius idea that
(18:58):
you've come up with. Did he fashion a weapon perhaps
of his own making, that he could have at his
fingertips and if somebody came by the house to check
on him or whether the case, I'm not possession of
fire man, I don't have one. I'm not going back.
I'm not going back to the joint over this. Yeah,
I've got a hatchet. There's nothing wrong with having a hatchet.
(19:19):
What if he developed a weapon that not only had
an end of it that was like an axe or
saying hatchet, and it also had another end that could
perhaps be a penetrative tool, which by the way, shank, shives,
whatever you want to call it. I think there are
shanks and you get shived with a shank, or is
(19:40):
it you have a shive and you get shanked with
a shive. I don't know, but those two terms are
many times used interchangeably. And if this is something that
was fashioned and attached, it's going to give this interesting injury,
which is fascinating to me because I've seen injuries, Dave.
You know what is a very fascinating injury to see
(20:01):
is actually to see someone that has been stabbed with
a Phillips screw screwdriver, Phillips head screwdriver, and there are
other you know, when you have these multiple tiny little blades, Okay,
you don't. You don't appreciate it as much like if
it goes into the soft tissue of the chest and
to the abnum where it collapses. But let's just say
(20:21):
you have it over the sternum. You can see where
people have used and I've seen foreheads, the tops of heads,
jaws where they've been stabbed with the Phillips head and
it leaves these little starred patterns behind, okay, and you'll
see it impressed on the bone beneath it too. It
doesn't look like a bladed tip, like a standard what's
(20:42):
called a regular head screwdriver. Okay, we're talking about pattern injuries. Now,
I'm fascinated by the fact that they're talking about this
because I've got to know more friends I don't know
about you, guys, I got to know more about this weapon.
And you're stabbed over and over again. You'll see these
little patterns begin to develop. And according to what we're hearing,
this hatchet may have had multiple utilities. It's not just
(21:05):
a stabbing no weapon, but it's used for something else.
Speaker 3 (21:09):
Well, all right, enough of the beating is going on
that Ebanks kills, allegedly kills Correthers. Now there's blood, and
you know we've talked about what happens after somebody's dead.
What happens, Well, they took the body, they being Ebanks,
And now we believe that based on what we're being told,
(21:32):
the girlfriend.
Speaker 4 (21:34):
Selena got helped.
Speaker 3 (21:38):
Helped take her boyfriend car others into the bathroom and
put his body in the bathtub. Now, when the body
is in the bathtub, he's dead. Remember this, this is
just an hour or so earlier. We're having a couple
of drinks and having fun, got to an arguing about rent.
Now you're putting your boyfriend who you live with in
(21:58):
the bathtub, dead, blood everywhere, and Ebanks, Christopher Ebanks, the
convicted felon out of jail, just celebrating his one month
out of prison by killing a man, allegedly, got to
clean it up.
Speaker 4 (22:11):
Joe got to clean up, and he.
Speaker 3 (22:15):
Makes he makes Selina, he makes her clean up, demands
that she clean up this mess.
Speaker 4 (22:23):
How big of a mess is it going to be? Joe?
Speaker 3 (22:25):
A man that dies of these unique weapon injuries, being
stabbed in the chest and I'm guessing the chest. I'm
kind of focused just on that area.
Speaker 1 (22:35):
I think, brother, I think that these injuries are going
to be widering. Wow, that's what I think because the
sense and I've got indication of that, and I'm going
to give a reveal here in just a second. But
I think, first off, I think that you can see
that this is a disordered case in the way that
the cleanup was handled. But let's go back to the
(22:56):
injuries just for a second, because we know, we know
hatchet is involved, and we also know that these this
three bladed weapon for whatever the utility of the thing
was initially was used in this particular case. So in life,
(23:19):
in life, as we're attacked, let's just say that he
was initially struck in the face. Well, where are we
going to have blood issue from in the beginning? Well,
the first two places you're struck in the head and
I'm just talking about with a closed fist, nose, and mouth.
All right, So you know my comments about the Guthrie
case where I'm talking about blood deposition outside the door,
(23:43):
so you're going to see passive fall will be these
big droplets that are deposited all over the place if
it's in the naso farnex area, which with what was
left behind there is expert. And let's clear this up
because all our friends and body bags know this.
Speaker 2 (23:59):
We'll say it again.
Speaker 1 (24:00):
There's a difference between aspir it. We're aspirating something, right, okay, aspiration, pneumonia,
these sorts of things. And then we have expert Okay, okay,
coming out of the nose in the mouth. You said
Guthries blood deposition there and they say that it is
her blood. You get these tiny little satellites that are
all over the place, and some of the big droplets
(24:22):
also look like they're air rated, which means I've got
these tiny little bubbles in the bigger droplets. I think
it was it had oxygen in it, or air at
least anyway.
Speaker 3 (24:30):
Ask to something about that, Joe, because I'm wondering. You know,
when I'm watching reports on different crimes and I see
somebody trying to share an expert opinion and they're wrong,
and I know they're wrong because I know that's not
what you know. I know that you know what the
blood looks like from all the different ways that it
comes out of a person's body. When you're watching some
(24:52):
of the reporters, they're just so off that the experts
are so off. Do you want to pick up the
phone and call somebody? What do you do? Does it
cause I want to throw some of the TV Half
the time? You know, I get really frustrated to be
able to say something is just wrong.
Speaker 1 (25:06):
Yeah, it's very frustrating, because you know, if you don't,
if you don't get it right, and you're and look,
I've I've been wrong. I'm not you know, I'm chief
among sinners. I will get things wrong. However, you try
to go back and self correct, and you know, just
going back even a step further you start talking about
Charlie Kirk Cakes, there were several individual individuals I'll say
(25:29):
that without saying their name, that we're referring to the
corner and Utah. Utah hasn't had a corner in over
one hundred years, and they were saying the corner was this,
and corner was that.
Speaker 2 (25:40):
Get your facts straight, because there's a huge gulf of.
Speaker 1 (25:42):
Difference between a corner and medical examiner. And by the way,
in case you didn't know, Utah has a state medical examiner.
They don't have elected county corners.
Speaker 2 (25:50):
So get your facts straight before you start talking about.
Speaker 3 (25:52):
What I was after, Joe, because I know that I wondered,
you know, I actually heard somebody describing the blood of
the Guthrie place, and I knew what they were saying
was wrong. And they are actually somebody of merit that
I see on other they're just making something up about
what they saw, and in this case, what we're dealing
with here in Arizona where Ebanks has allegedly, you know,
stabbed this man to death and then use the hatchet
(26:15):
for another way, which we'll get to in just a second.
Speaker 4 (26:17):
But you're going to find that blood all over.
Speaker 3 (26:19):
Is that blood going to be indicative of when that like,
is blood going to come out of a wound differently
the first or two stabs versus the last stab or
is it all gonna be the same.
Speaker 1 (26:30):
It all depends on the target area anatomical location of
the injury itself. Let's just say that you hit somewhere
that is less vascular, say, for instance, than another location.
Maybe if someone is stabbed in the shoulder, all right,
there's a gulf of difference between this insult and an
insult to the throat. Okay, So that deposition unless you
(26:53):
clip of an artery and we've all heard about arterial spray,
you know, and that's a real thing, and you know
it kind of when you see that deposition of the blood,
you see it kind of pumping out and you'll see
it kind of and with the movement in the individual
is if it wasn't so ghastly it's scientifics it would
(27:13):
be truly scientifically fascinating from the perspective of how how
the human body is made, how it works. Right, So
you can actually track movement not just to the blood,
but also the victim spatially as they're moving, say across
a big white wall and you've got blood it's being cast.
Whereas if you stab a less than vascular area, you're
(27:35):
always going to hit some kind of vessel because we've
got capillary beds, all right, arterials and venuals. We learned
that when we were back in the eighth, seventh, eighth grade. Uh,
you're always going to have some blood that is coming
out of the body. It's just going to have a
different velocity to it, all right. Some might not have
any velocity at all. That's why, you know, going back
to Guthrie, if you have bloody nose, that you can
(27:58):
have a bloody nose that is producing profusely, but it's
not going to be the same as like a sneeze
or like a cough to clear, or certainly like a
gunshot wound where you have literally high velocity blood deposition
and so dependent upon the injury that you have, it's
(28:20):
going to look completely different. I mean, how many times
friends out there have you ever seen or maybe you
yourself have experienced this where you've gotten a cut on
your face, certainly in your scalp. You know, down here
in the South, we say, boy, you better settle down.
You're gonna bust your head wide open. Well, there's a
reason they say that, because you're gonna get like this
big open laceration and the volume of blood that comes
(28:42):
out because the head is so vascular, you'll get this
profuse amount of blood. But it's not necessarily spurting, it's
just kind of pouring. So that deposition is going to
look different, right, And so you have to have a
real keen eye for this, for this sort of thing.
And I think that blood blood will be a part
of this. But as they begin to tell this tale,
(29:06):
the injuries are also going to be a big part
of it, both those that occurred in life and those
that occurred in death. I hate flies. The reason I
(29:28):
hate flies is that they're filthy. They light on things,
they light on you, and I take great pleasure. I
don't know, maybe I do have a touch of the
sadist in me. I love fly paper and I like
those little sticky tapes that you can hang outside and
you'll see them all adhere to the thing and they
can't they can't move and get away. You know, their
(29:50):
little legs are stuck. They just die there. I've often
thought of individuals that find themselves in situations like this
where they have committed a homicide allegedly and now they're
trying to figure out what to do, kind of like
the fly stuck in the you know, on the fly paper.
(30:13):
What do you what are you going to do? Man?
You've got all six I don't know of your lenx,
you know, stuck to the fly paper. Maybe even your
wing gets stuck. You might even tear your wing away,
you know. And you're panicked, right, You're panicked. And that
goes to the mindset many times of people that are
trying to free themselves up for the horror that they
(30:36):
themselves have created. And many times, many times, brother Dave,
they create more of a mess, if you know, then
need be well. And I think that might be the
case here Joe.
Speaker 3 (30:51):
When when the police say the first thing they smell
when they walk in the door is bleach, you know
and cleaning.
Speaker 4 (30:57):
Yeah, yeah, you know what was going on?
Speaker 3 (30:58):
And in this case, according to the victim's girlfriend, all right, remember,
Christopher Ebanks has allegedly killed this man. The body is
now in the bathtub, and Christopher Ebanks tells the man's
girlfriend clean it up. Now they get all the cleaning stuff.
He's making her clean it up. It's not even saying
(31:19):
that he's cleaning up Joe. It's Ebanks is not apparently
helping clean up. He's directing cleaning it up, telling her
to clean up the mess, getting blood up off the
floor wherever it is, walls, cabins.
Speaker 4 (31:34):
I don't know.
Speaker 3 (31:34):
I mean, getting all that up is one thing. But
they still have a body in the bathtub, Joe, and
got to do something with it. So Christopher Ebanks has
a plan, apparently, and that plan includes an inflatable mattress cord.
And I want to get this right, Okay, the victim
(31:58):
was wrapped in carpeting, an air mattress and was bound
with a white extension cord and additional items. Now I'm wondering,
was there a lamp blow dryer plugged into the extension cord, Joe?
And they just kept wrapping around this thing.
Speaker 4 (32:16):
I don't know. We'll find out.
Speaker 2 (32:17):
I don't know.
Speaker 1 (32:18):
Well, you remember I mentioned the frenzy disordered attack, right,
this is not like a precision surgical thing, you know,
Like I'm gonna wait in the dark and the guy
you know comes walking up the stairway and I'm going
to pop him with a suppressed weapon, right and then
just disappear into the darkness.
Speaker 2 (32:38):
That's not what we're talking about.
Speaker 1 (32:39):
We're talking about a spur of the moment, frenzied attack
that could involve hands, a hatchet, a three bladed object.
I don't know, little green men from Mars.
Speaker 2 (32:56):
I have no idea.
Speaker 1 (32:57):
You've got all of these elements that are and so
you know that that kind of odd gumbo of components
that you just talked about, how many things do you need?
Because if you're talking about an air mattress, a piece
of carpet, you're using an extension cord. This is not
something that you know. And how many times was the
(33:17):
guy I can't remember the guy's name that got rid
of his wife. I don't know if they've ever been
able to find her body. Was it in Connecticut? And
they've got him come into home depot and they've got
him on camera and he's purchasing I know our friends.
Speaker 4 (33:29):
Oh yeah, I know you're talking about Yeah he's uh,
oh god, and.
Speaker 1 (33:33):
Yeah, didn't he take his own life?
Speaker 4 (33:35):
I think it's talking about different ones. You might.
Speaker 3 (33:38):
We'll have to you know what, Let's come back to
that in a minute, because we still got this guy.
We've got a body in the tub, wrapped in all
that stuff. But Joe, he's missing a couple of things too,
because Christopher Ebanks went in there and all I'm thinking, Joe,
if he doesn't have a head and he doesn't have hands,
the body can't be identified. Is that Does that sound
(33:59):
like prison law? A prison lawyer came up with that,
somebody who's been in the clink for thirty five forty years.
Speaker 1 (34:06):
Yeah, well, yeah, it probably does. There's been this new
thing in the last few decades called DNA, and so yeah,
the adage of.
Speaker 2 (34:17):
The old adage of.
Speaker 1 (34:17):
If I get rid of the hands and I get
rid of the head, I'm doing away with you know,
with dental I'm doing away with fingerprints, all this sort
of thing. Now you're leaving the biggest component here, because
we can harvest DNA from just about end, particularly with
a fresh dead and this guy's fresh dead. Okay, this
is not something that you know, what is it, Old
John John Brown lays lay a moldering in his grave.
(34:41):
That's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about
guys fresh dead. That is, these samples could be easily harvested.
But you know, one of the problems. Back to the bathtub,
and I'm thinking about the hatchet.
Speaker 2 (34:54):
What a big reveal here.
Speaker 1 (34:57):
He's missing a head, right, he's missing his hands. And
if you've got let's say you've got a bathtub, Okay,
now what kind of bathtub is it? Is it ceramic tile?
Is it one of those porcel old porcelain tubs, or
is it one of these cheap old plastic insert things. Well,
I'm just thinking if you're if you're in the tub
and you're doing this any of those three choices, if
(35:19):
you're wielding a hatchet, and that you're gonna ding up
the surface. Okay, this is not something you're gonna leave.
Not only are you gonna leave marks on the bone,
you're gonna leave marks on the underlying surface. So whatever
the instrument that you're using can be married up, not
just from a tool mark perspective, on the edges, the
leading edges of the bone where the appendage is missing.
Speaker 2 (35:42):
You'll literally you can take a.
Speaker 1 (35:43):
Section of that tub or the wall or whatever it is,
if it's left to mark there, and you've got to
what's called a questioned a question bit of evidence, which
would be that hatchet or it could be a saw.
You can marry that up. You can marry that up
through two mark examination. The other thing that you're going
to leave behind, and I've actually participated in this after
(36:05):
someone has bled in a bathtub through dismemberment is drain traps.
And so the idea is you pull the whole tub out,
that s trap that's underneath underneath there. You pull that
sucker out, and you generate a lot of cast off material,
not just the blood. You'll find it in there, and
that can be typed as well, Dave.
Speaker 4 (36:26):
So you've got you got so many ways to get caught.
Speaker 3 (36:31):
Yeah, but apparently allegedly, chop off the head, chop off
the hands, and let's get this body wrapped in the
carpet and the air mattress, and let's put him someplace else.
So they take him out of the bathtub and shove
the body in a closet without his head and hands.
(36:53):
The head in the hands have been placed inside the
bathroom in a suitcase, a suitcase. Joe, and you know
what he did. Christopher Ebanks allegedly left with the suitcase
and threatened the girl to get in the car and
(37:13):
go to his place because she's going to get herself
cleaned up now to get rid of that evidence. So
in his car they drive from the apartment where the
killing has taken allegedly happened. Now they're traveling to Christopher
Ebanks apartment to get to make this victim's girlfriend wash herself.
(37:35):
And it's that knife point or gunpoint, not sure, but
he's holding a weapon on her and threatening her with
death if she doesn't do it. So he's already made
her clean up all the blood, clean up all the
mass where I killed your boyfriend. Now you're going to
clean yourself.
Speaker 1 (37:46):
And you know, we see that happen many times with
sexual assault perpetrators with female victims. Oh yeah, they'll hang around,
they'll make the victims take a shower and demonstrate, you know,
that they are cleaning themselves, and then collect all of
that as said evidence and go and try to depose.
There's just an innumerable amount of those cases that are
(38:10):
out there that has that kind of because the one
tie back, the one anchor point in all of this
is that it's all associated with violence, that you're compelling
somebody to do this. And look, I'm not sitting in
judgment of this woman. You know, if I had born
witness to what she saw and that I've got somebody
holding a weapon on me. I'm not saying I wouldn't
(38:32):
you know, I would not be compliant. I mean all
of us can say that we would, that we wouldn't comply,
that we wouldn't do Really, how do you know? At
least how do you know what you know? Because you
see certain levels of horror and you're traumatized where you're
you're almost catatonic.
Speaker 3 (38:47):
Man, and the police have been very clear on the
show she is not a suspect and that she's a victim.
Speaker 4 (38:53):
She was kidnapped.
Speaker 3 (38:54):
And by the way, Christopher Ebanks is charged with kidnapping
because what he did to her after the fact. Now,
remember how I told you we started with it was
this girl's dad that called the police, right because she
got away from Christopher Ebanks and calls dad, tells him
what has just happened.
Speaker 4 (39:12):
He doesn't know this is she tripping? You know, what's
really going on?
Speaker 3 (39:15):
I mean I have trouble believe in that, Joe, I would,
but he calls police and explain and then police go
to the apartment and sure enough, they find mister Carruthers
in the closet Okay wrapped up in the carpet in
the air mattress. It takes him a day to locate
Christopher Ebanks. He's only been out of prison for a month.
(39:38):
He's not really dug in yet into the community. They
do find his apartment, They make entry and they find
the suitcase. Joe described by the victim's girlfriend. When they
opened the suitcase, there you have the victim's head and hands.
Speaker 1 (39:57):
Well, what you know, what possible explain nation? Can you
offer up from that?
Speaker 2 (40:03):
Do you say?
Speaker 1 (40:03):
I was just walking down the street and I found this.
I found the suitcase. Oh, I had a suitcase that
was empty, and I happened to find these I collected.
I'm just going to bring them to you.
Speaker 4 (40:12):
I was bringing a for you guys. Hey that you're
saving me the trip, saving me the gas money. Thank you.
Speaker 1 (40:18):
Well, you know, I was thinking, what in the world
are you going to do? What was the plan? What
was the plan with these all that remained of this gentleman.
You know that area in Phoenix, it doesn't have much water,
but it's surrounded by a sea of sand and wilderness
and desert. It doesn't take too far to drive out
(40:40):
of town. And you're in the middle of nowhere was
his plan to try to go out and deposit these
Why what would be the motivation for destroying a man's
body like this? Whereas if you had kept it intact,
if you had handled it yourself, maybe you might have
had a better chance of getting away with it. But
for every punch he threw, every puncture wound he created,
(41:05):
every swing of the hatchet, and every bit of his
body that he chopped up, he left behind more and
more evidence. Now he's only alleged to have committed this crime.
He has not been tried, and he's certainly not been convicted.
But let's see where the science leads in this particular case.
(41:28):
I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is body bags.
Quality Bus with Joseph Scott More. I don't think anybody
out there wants to live in squalor. There are many
people that believe that cleaning every single day is therapeutic.
(00:22):
I can see how it would be. I'm not one
of those people. But there are some people that like
to push a vacuum cleaner every single day. Some people
go through countless numbers of cans of furniture polish. They
like that fresh, lemony smell.
Speaker 2 (00:37):
Right.
Speaker 1 (00:39):
There are others that like to clean their windows. Nothing
wrong with that, particularly if it helps you make it
through life. But I want you to think about something.
Can you imagine being made to clean a particular area.
And we're not talking as a child, your parents admonishing
you because of a dirty bedroom or dishes they haven't
(01:01):
been able to put their hands on in months and months. No,
we're talking about something totally different. What if What if
there were an instance where one's lover had killed someone
in their home, maybe even taken a knife to the body,
(01:21):
and they look at that other person, their significant other,
and says, clean this up today on body bags, We're
going to talk about one such case and a big
mess that was left behind regarding a homicide that came
(01:41):
along with dismemberment. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is
body bags. I'm not saying that that Kimmy and I
are the neatest people in the world. Day however, you know,
I want to leave a coffee cup here or there, shoes,
(02:04):
you know, thrown about. I'm always in a hurry. I
mean you see me, I kind of spin in like
a tornado and then spin back out, and I don't know.
I think I'm at a point in time where I'm
just you know, you just get to a point where
you're just so dog tired at the end of the day.
It's like I'll just I'll get to it tomorrow. But
you know, Dave, when you've got cases that involve really
(02:27):
intense violence, I think that most people that are involved
in such things have an awareness that I don't need
to leave any other kind of evidence around that's visible
certainly to the unaided eye. They even know that you've
got to clean up blood, you've got to clean up
any kind of mess that may have been created in
(02:49):
say a scuffle.
Speaker 2 (02:50):
And that's a case that we have today.
Speaker 3 (02:53):
If you think it's therapeutic to clean, come to my house.
Speaker 4 (02:56):
Okay, you talk about living. Here's what's really bad.
Speaker 3 (03:00):
Imagine this, Joe, just a brief snippet into my life.
I used to four kids and all their friends. My
wife and I are dogs that we adopt dogs. So
we always had a house full of activity, and there.
Speaker 4 (03:13):
Was always something laying around.
Speaker 3 (03:15):
Well, somebody else is gonna pick that up before I
get home, right, Yeah, Well now it's just me. So
when I look at the mess, dude, I created it
and I'm the only one that's.
Speaker 4 (03:27):
Going to pick it up. I can't even blame the dogs.
So you go ahead and keep leaving your coffee.
Speaker 2 (03:32):
Your soul proprietor. Is that what you said?
Speaker 3 (03:34):
That I am just me and this house and electronics.
That's it, all right. But here's the deal. In this case,
you have a dad. Every dad knows at some point
in time you're going to get a call from one
of your children and you're going to have to relay
messages to somebody. Oftentimes it's to another parent because somebody
has messed up. And in this case, so Leah Blanco's
(03:57):
dad has to call the cops, and he calls them.
Jeffrey Malacca calls the police to say, Okay, guys, I'm
not really sure what has happened, but my daughter says
a criminal friend killed her boyfriend. And that's where the
(04:18):
story starts, Joe, with a dad getting a call from
his daughter and him having to relay this information to police.
And you mentioned a fight, right, there was an altercation. Well,
this is a case that I'm really curious because we've
dealt with so many different things. My goodness, Joe, we
(04:43):
did an entire episode of Crime con about dismemberment for
crying out loud, we could do this one. Because in
this case, we've got everything you could possibly imagine. We
don't even know the truth yet, because this is a
brand new case. It is still being adjudicated. There has
not been the guy's just arrested. Okay, we have not
even had a trial. Everything is alleged. I want to
(05:05):
be very careful about that. But the allegation is that
a couple was having an argument about the rent and
the victim calls his buddy for some reason to come
over and help him get the girlfriend to agree to
(05:28):
pay the rent.
Speaker 4 (05:29):
I'm not sure you know.
Speaker 3 (05:30):
This is one of those crazy stories that when it
finally gets to court, will know more. But bottom line,
that's where it started. A couple having a couple of
drinks probably invite a friend over into their argument, and
an argument becomes physical. Now, Joe, if you were in
(05:52):
the presence of a friend of yours and he and
his spouse got into an argument that turned physical, what
would you do?
Speaker 1 (06:01):
I guess it depends on how it's defined as physical.
Speaker 4 (06:04):
They're hitting each other.
Speaker 1 (06:06):
Yeah, well, I'm going to have to interdict that situation.
And I think that I think that any man, certainly
that's there and that is seeing another man perhaps put
hands on a woman, it should be interdicted at that
point in time. But the problem is is that crazy
has always been around, as we know. But you know,
(06:29):
I submit to you. You and I have had this
discussion many times off camera where evil seems to escalate
and has been escalating, it would seem, and not that
there hasn't always been evil, It's just that it seems
as though the level of violence many times has increased.
And I think that this is is evidence from my perspective,
(06:51):
at least upon by viewing the violence that is exacted
upon the bodies of the dead, not just bodies of
the living. You know, when someone is attacked, but how
how the dead or treated. And in this case, I
think that that that's that that's evidence. Let me give
you one more little slice of reality here. I don't
(07:13):
know if this is evidence of anything, however, the accused
in this particular case, Dave. You know, we we hear
about a lot of cases that are non adjudicated that
we might speak about either on bodybags or other platforms
that we're with. But I'm always curious about a number
(07:34):
that is put up. If somebody has been hooked up
on charges and the judge says, you have to have
this much money to get out of jail, Dave, they
must feel pretty strongly.
Speaker 2 (07:46):
About this case because this guy, what's.
Speaker 1 (07:50):
His number again? Can you give it to me again
so all of our friends can hear.
Speaker 4 (07:52):
Christopher E.
Speaker 3 (07:53):
Banks is the guy's name, not just of Abank, Christopher Ebank,
And I guess the judge thinks e Bank means a
million dollars a million dollars bond. But Joe, this is
not his first rodeo. He Christopher Ebanks is a convicted felon,
(08:14):
A convicted fellaon who was on probation had just been
let out of prison one month earlier, in his first
month of a new life, he finds himself going back
to court.
Speaker 4 (08:25):
But you know what he did.
Speaker 3 (08:26):
Joe gets that million dollars bond and he appears before
the judge and he says, Ebanks says to the judge,
can't we lower that to.
Speaker 4 (08:36):
I don't know, a half million.
Speaker 3 (08:37):
I don't think I can come up with a million,
but half million, I think I might be able to
do it. The judge said, I think I'm good with
a million. I think I'm good.
Speaker 2 (08:45):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (08:46):
Yeah, Well, let me let's just play a little a
little ping pong here just for a second in your opinion,
do you think that, if I mean just the evidence
alone in this case is for other egregious if he
had not just recently been let out of prison, do
you think that if he had allegedly perpetrated the same crime,
(09:09):
that the that that bond would have been set at
the same amount.
Speaker 3 (09:13):
I think, Joe, I think you're dead on right, because
when we get into the nuts and bolts of what transpired,
the judge has to take all things into consideration. You
know that what is alleged here, it's not that there
was an accident in the skateboard park with friends out
there singing kumbah yah and and tripped over a thing
(09:34):
and you know, fell and oh my gosh, I accidentally
hit him in the head with a brick. It's not
like that. I mean, this is one month out of prison. Yeah,
and you are accused of beating a friend and stabbing
(09:56):
him with an axe type of weapon. And they say
because the way the wounds were mentioned, they were kind
of like a cross of some type like an X
or something.
Speaker 1 (10:08):
Jettally they had mentioned, Yeah, they had mentioned triangular. I'm
gonna be fascinated to see the evidence in this case.
Let me give you a little bit of history here.
Speaker 4 (10:15):
I knew you would. You know what.
Speaker 3 (10:17):
When I saw this, I was like, okay, I remember
you telling me about like the in the medieval times
where they would have like a piece of lead at
the end of a stick that goes back and forth,
has claws on it. Yeah, and they bop you in
the head with it and take your brain out.
Speaker 4 (10:30):
You know.
Speaker 1 (10:30):
Well, that's yeah, that's that's actually I think Richard, Richard
the Third I think, uh, that's how he was killed.
They believe there was this this triangular shaped blade. I say,
it's not really a well, I guess it has edges,
but it's triangular shaped if you look down the long
(10:51):
axis of it, and it was meant to penetrate armor,
and you would hold it and they believe that he
had this kind of injury. You know, his skeleton kind
of revealed this where you could hold it over over
a victim that's down before you, and you take it
and you jam it through you know, their helmet or
their arm or anything. But here's a more modern context.
Speaker 2 (11:13):
Did you know that years and years.
Speaker 1 (11:19):
Ago they outlawed triangular shaped bayonets. There were bayonets that
had three It was like if you pressed it into something,
it kind of had a three pointed star appearance to it.
Speaker 2 (11:30):
And the reason.
Speaker 1 (11:33):
That they did that is that those particular types of
insults were so catastrophic that surgeons could not close them
up because of the nature of the three the three edges.
So if you think about a fixed bayonet, and we're
not talking about like a civil war, we're talking about
going into into like World War One that era, and
(11:55):
so this could be driven through armor and you know
things that might impede. They used to wear these kind
of leather, heavy flat kind of like flat vests, it
could penetrate through there, and if if that were the case,
then then you know it was an unrecoverable injury. And
(12:16):
so those were outlaws. Man, I'm finding it very interesting
they're saying acts like yet triangularly.
Speaker 3 (12:22):
That's why I couldn't get to I'm sitting here going
I can't wait for Joe to explain this one, because
right now I'm in my head, Joe, I'm thinking, Okay,
how does the meeting begin where you're saying, okay, we
got your regular bayonet that when you're in hand to
hand combat in war where this other person is going
to kill you if you don't kill them first.
Speaker 4 (12:41):
But this one jabbing item is just yeah, it's too gross.
Speaker 3 (12:47):
It just we want you to kill each other, but
this is just too much mayhem.
Speaker 4 (12:52):
Really, So if I.
Speaker 3 (12:53):
Stick this into your heart, that's okay, but this one
is not.
Speaker 4 (12:59):
How does that mean?
Speaker 1 (13:01):
There's a big philosophical now in the military, there's a
big philosophical debate that's gone on for years and years,
and people may have heard this before. You know that
you think about people shooting to kill many, many, many people.
I don't necessarily hold to it but many people believe
that it's better to wound the enemy. For every one wounded,
(13:22):
it takes two people or at least one other person
to get them off the battlefield. And that's always kind
of this underlying principle. Now I don't know that that
was necessarily the case with that, but I'm very curious
in our case here out of Arizona. I'm really wondering
if in fact this subject had access to something like this,
because I can tell you you had mentioned just a
(13:44):
moment ago that, you know, when walking down the sidewalk.
He can't just merely say, you know, well my friend,
my friend tripped and conked his head and died. Not
only can you not say that, in this case, you
can't say, well, my friend walked down the sidewalk and
his head accidentally fell off either because this gentleman was
(14:09):
in fact missing his nogging. We talk a lot about
interpreting trauma on bodyback stave, and I think that in
this particular case, there's going to be a lot of
(14:31):
trauma to go through, and not to mention, we know
that we have a witness to the trauma as well,
and that's going to be quite compelling. I think coupled
with the story that the forensicthologists are going to tell
when they do eventually get onto the stand in this case,
because they can talk about, you know, every single impact.
(14:54):
We're talking about a beating case here, and so every
impact interpretively, I think for our PA, you know how
I said that in the past. I think we did
a recent episode as well where I said it's almost
impossible for us to sequence in Yes, yeah, that's important
here because this is one of those cases. I'm not
(15:17):
saying that it is going to be a fact. However,
if you have an eyewitness to an attack and you've
got injuries or insults to a person's face and their
head and their neck and all these other areas, maybe
their chest, if you have an eyewitness to that event,
(15:38):
you might not can say absent you know, firsthand witness accounts,
I can tell you the sequence in this particular case,
we very well might can, Dave.
Speaker 3 (15:47):
You know, it's interesting that we kind of come to
this from a really weird standpoint in that we have
the story of what took place, you know, according to
the eyewitness, before we even had the body, you know,
and you mentioned cleaning up.
Speaker 4 (16:05):
So let's just start with I told.
Speaker 3 (16:07):
You it was a fight and it ended up between
guys that are supposedly friends. Now I don't know about
the friends. I don't know that. I just know that
that's how it is presented. We'll find out later. But
you know I mentioned the Christopher Ebanks. He's thirty two
years old, Joe, and he just got out of prison
a month earlier, a month before this happened. The victim's
name is Billy Joe Correthers. Billy Joe's forty four. Now
(16:30):
according to our eyewitness, or actually it's whoever tells the
story to last, but no matter what happened, the three
of them were drinking together, the witness, Billy Joe and
mister Ebanks, and that's when the couple, the victim and
his girlfriend got into an argument. And according to I
(16:52):
guess right now the witness, the violence began when this
argument about rent money became physical, when the victim, Billy
Joe Carrothers, physically attacked his girlfriend hit his girlfriend.
Speaker 4 (17:05):
I don't know.
Speaker 3 (17:06):
I don't want to say that. It's just that's what's
being alleged in some reporting of this. What happened after
that is that, according to this eye witness. That's when
Billy Joe and Christopher Ebanks got into a battle.
Speaker 4 (17:21):
Christopher Ebanks faced.
Speaker 3 (17:22):
Off with him and said, hey, you want to fight
a man, fight a man, come on, fight me, and
that's what began the fight. But during this fight, Billy
Joe Carrethers was fighting hands. Maybe he's throwing hands. But
Christopher Ebank has some type of weapon. I'm guessing you
(17:48):
know it's it's been called an act of some type
with like you mentioned that patch trash with how don't
you get to triangle in? I'm thinking, okay, well, here's
the sumpthing.
Speaker 4 (17:56):
Joe. The guy's been in prison.
Speaker 3 (17:59):
Maybe once he got home, he has some time on
his hands, and he's making his own instead of prison shank.
He's got his apartment shank. He's making his own weapon
in his apartment and he wants to do the most
damage he can and he knows this is what we'll
do it. So he made his own type of a weapon.
That's all I can think of because they don't sell them.
Speaker 2 (18:17):
I know.
Speaker 1 (18:17):
That's an interesting point that you bring up, because if
he is a felon, and we know that he is,
that's confirmed. He's just got out of prison. Remember the
bond that we talked about a million bucks, right, and
he could come up with five hundred thousand. Wow, that's interesting.
What if he had created because you know, if you're
a felon and you're in possession of a fire on right,
(18:38):
you know, and coming out of a prison environment, and
that is a world that most people cannot identify with
where and depended upon the level of security that you're in,
the people that you're housed with, all the sorts of things.
You have to think about your personal safety all the time.
And I think that this is a genius idea that
(18:58):
you've come up with. Did he fashion a weapon perhaps
of his own making, that he could have at his
fingertips and if somebody came by the house to check
on him or whether the case, I'm not possession of
fire man, I don't have one. I'm not going back.
I'm not going back to the joint over this. Yeah,
I've got a hatchet. There's nothing wrong with having a hatchet.
(19:19):
What if he developed a weapon that not only had
an end of it that was like an axe or
saying hatchet, and it also had another end that could
perhaps be a penetrative tool, which by the way, shank, shives,
whatever you want to call it. I think there are
shanks and you get shived with a shank, or is
(19:40):
it you have a shive and you get shanked with
a shive. I don't know, but those two terms are
many times used interchangeably. And if this is something that
was fashioned and attached, it's going to give this interesting injury,
which is fascinating to me because I've seen injuries, Dave.
You know what is a very fascinating injury to see
(20:01):
is actually to see someone that has been stabbed with
a Phillips screw screwdriver, Phillips head screwdriver, and there are
other you know, when you have these multiple tiny little blades, Okay,
you don't. You don't appreciate it as much like if
it goes into the soft tissue of the chest and
to the abnum where it collapses. But let's just say
(20:21):
you have it over the sternum. You can see where
people have used and I've seen foreheads, the tops of heads,
jaws where they've been stabbed with the Phillips head and
it leaves these little starred patterns behind, okay, and you'll
see it impressed on the bone beneath it too. It
doesn't look like a bladed tip, like a standard what's
(20:42):
called a regular head screwdriver. Okay, we're talking about pattern injuries. Now,
I'm fascinated by the fact that they're talking about this
because I've got to know more friends I don't know
about you, guys, I got to know more about this weapon.
And you're stabbed over and over again. You'll see these
little patterns begin to develop. And according to what we're hearing,
this hatchet may have had multiple utilities. It's not just
(21:05):
a stabbing no weapon, but it's used for something else.
Speaker 3 (21:09):
Well, all right, enough of the beating is going on
that Ebanks kills, allegedly kills Correthers. Now there's blood, and
you know we've talked about what happens after somebody's dead.
What happens, Well, they took the body, they being Ebanks,
And now we believe that based on what we're being told,
(21:32):
the girlfriend.
Speaker 4 (21:34):
Selena got helped.
Speaker 3 (21:38):
Helped take her boyfriend car others into the bathroom and
put his body in the bathtub. Now, when the body
is in the bathtub, he's dead. Remember this, this is
just an hour or so earlier. We're having a couple
of drinks and having fun, got to an arguing about rent.
Now you're putting your boyfriend who you live with in
(21:58):
the bathtub, dead, blood everywhere, and Ebanks, Christopher Ebanks, the
convicted felon out of jail, just celebrating his one month
out of prison by killing a man, allegedly, got to
clean it up.
Speaker 4 (22:11):
Joe got to clean up, and he.
Speaker 3 (22:15):
Makes he makes Selina, he makes her clean up, demands
that she clean up this mess.
Speaker 4 (22:23):
How big of a mess is it going to be? Joe?
Speaker 3 (22:25):
A man that dies of these unique weapon injuries, being
stabbed in the chest and I'm guessing the chest. I'm
kind of focused just on that area.
Speaker 1 (22:35):
I think, brother, I think that these injuries are going
to be widering. Wow, that's what I think because the
sense and I've got indication of that, and I'm going
to give a reveal here in just a second. But
I think, first off, I think that you can see
that this is a disordered case in the way that
the cleanup was handled. But let's go back to the
(22:56):
injuries just for a second, because we know, we know
hatchet is involved, and we also know that these this
three bladed weapon for whatever the utility of the thing
was initially was used in this particular case. So in life,
(23:19):
in life, as we're attacked, let's just say that he
was initially struck in the face. Well, where are we
going to have blood issue from in the beginning? Well,
the first two places you're struck in the head and
I'm just talking about with a closed fist, nose, and mouth.
All right, So you know my comments about the Guthrie
case where I'm talking about blood deposition outside the door,
(23:43):
so you're going to see passive fall will be these
big droplets that are deposited all over the place if
it's in the naso farnex area, which with what was
left behind there is expert. And let's clear this up
because all our friends and body bags know this.
Speaker 2 (23:59):
We'll say it again.
Speaker 1 (24:00):
There's a difference between aspir it. We're aspirating something, right, okay, aspiration, pneumonia,
these sorts of things. And then we have expert Okay, okay,
coming out of the nose in the mouth. You said
Guthries blood deposition there and they say that it is
her blood. You get these tiny little satellites that are
all over the place, and some of the big droplets
(24:22):
also look like they're air rated, which means I've got
these tiny little bubbles in the bigger droplets. I think
it was it had oxygen in it, or air at
least anyway.
Speaker 3 (24:30):
Ask to something about that, Joe, because I'm wondering. You know,
when I'm watching reports on different crimes and I see
somebody trying to share an expert opinion and they're wrong,
and I know they're wrong because I know that's not
what you know. I know that you know what the
blood looks like from all the different ways that it
comes out of a person's body. When you're watching some
(24:52):
of the reporters, they're just so off that the experts
are so off. Do you want to pick up the
phone and call somebody? What do you do? Does it
cause I want to throw some of the TV Half
the time? You know, I get really frustrated to be
able to say something is just wrong.
Speaker 1 (25:06):
Yeah, it's very frustrating, because you know, if you don't,
if you don't get it right, and you're and look,
I've I've been wrong. I'm not you know, I'm chief
among sinners. I will get things wrong. However, you try
to go back and self correct, and you know, just
going back even a step further you start talking about
Charlie Kirk Cakes, there were several individual individuals I'll say
(25:29):
that without saying their name, that we're referring to the
corner and Utah. Utah hasn't had a corner in over
one hundred years, and they were saying the corner was this,
and corner was that.
Speaker 2 (25:40):
Get your facts straight, because there's a huge gulf of.
Speaker 1 (25:42):
Difference between a corner and medical examiner. And by the way,
in case you didn't know, Utah has a state medical examiner.
They don't have elected county corners.
Speaker 2 (25:50):
So get your facts straight before you start talking about.
Speaker 3 (25:52):
What I was after, Joe, because I know that I wondered,
you know, I actually heard somebody describing the blood of
the Guthrie place, and I knew what they were saying
was wrong. And they are actually somebody of merit that
I see on other they're just making something up about
what they saw, and in this case, what we're dealing
with here in Arizona where Ebanks has allegedly, you know,
stabbed this man to death and then use the hatchet
(26:15):
for another way, which we'll get to in just a second.
Speaker 4 (26:17):
But you're going to find that blood all over.
Speaker 3 (26:19):
Is that blood going to be indicative of when that like,
is blood going to come out of a wound differently
the first or two stabs versus the last stab or
is it all gonna be the same.
Speaker 1 (26:30):
It all depends on the target area anatomical location of
the injury itself. Let's just say that you hit somewhere
that is less vascular, say, for instance, than another location.
Maybe if someone is stabbed in the shoulder, all right,
there's a gulf of difference between this insult and an
insult to the throat. Okay, So that deposition unless you
(26:53):
clip of an artery and we've all heard about arterial spray,
you know, and that's a real thing, and you know
it kind of when you see that deposition of the blood,
you see it kind of pumping out and you'll see
it kind of and with the movement in the individual
is if it wasn't so ghastly it's scientifics it would
(27:13):
be truly scientifically fascinating from the perspective of how how
the human body is made, how it works. Right, So
you can actually track movement not just to the blood,
but also the victim spatially as they're moving, say across
a big white wall and you've got blood it's being cast.
Whereas if you stab a less than vascular area, you're
(27:35):
always going to hit some kind of vessel because we've
got capillary beds, all right, arterials and venuals. We learned
that when we were back in the eighth, seventh, eighth grade. Uh,
you're always going to have some blood that is coming
out of the body. It's just going to have a
different velocity to it, all right. Some might not have
any velocity at all. That's why, you know, going back
to Guthrie, if you have bloody nose, that you can
(27:58):
have a bloody nose that is producing profusely, but it's
not going to be the same as like a sneeze
or like a cough to clear, or certainly like a
gunshot wound where you have literally high velocity blood deposition
and so dependent upon the injury that you have, it's
(28:20):
going to look completely different. I mean, how many times
friends out there have you ever seen or maybe you
yourself have experienced this where you've gotten a cut on
your face, certainly in your scalp. You know, down here
in the South, we say, boy, you better settle down.
You're gonna bust your head wide open. Well, there's a
reason they say that, because you're gonna get like this
big open laceration and the volume of blood that comes
(28:42):
out because the head is so vascular, you'll get this
profuse amount of blood. But it's not necessarily spurting, it's
just kind of pouring. So that deposition is going to
look different, right, And so you have to have a
real keen eye for this, for this sort of thing.
And I think that blood blood will be a part
of this. But as they begin to tell this tale,
(29:06):
the injuries are also going to be a big part
of it, both those that occurred in life and those
that occurred in death. I hate flies. The reason I
(29:28):
hate flies is that they're filthy. They light on things,
they light on you, and I take great pleasure. I
don't know, maybe I do have a touch of the
sadist in me. I love fly paper and I like
those little sticky tapes that you can hang outside and
you'll see them all adhere to the thing and they
can't they can't move and get away. You know, their
(29:50):
little legs are stuck. They just die there. I've often
thought of individuals that find themselves in situations like this
where they have committed a homicide allegedly and now they're
trying to figure out what to do, kind of like
the fly stuck in the you know, on the fly paper.
(30:13):
What do you what are you going to do? Man?
You've got all six I don't know of your lenx,
you know, stuck to the fly paper. Maybe even your
wing gets stuck. You might even tear your wing away,
you know. And you're panicked, right, You're panicked. And that
goes to the mindset many times of people that are
trying to free themselves up for the horror that they
(30:36):
themselves have created. And many times, many times, brother Dave,
they create more of a mess, if you know, then
need be well. And I think that might be the
case here Joe.
Speaker 3 (30:51):
When when the police say the first thing they smell
when they walk in the door is bleach, you know
and cleaning.
Speaker 4 (30:57):
Yeah, yeah, you know what was going on?
Speaker 3 (30:58):
And in this case, according to the victim's girlfriend, all right, remember,
Christopher Ebanks has allegedly killed this man. The body is
now in the bathtub, and Christopher Ebanks tells the man's
girlfriend clean it up. Now they get all the cleaning stuff.
He's making her clean it up. It's not even saying
(31:19):
that he's cleaning up Joe. It's Ebanks is not apparently
helping clean up. He's directing cleaning it up, telling her
to clean up the mess, getting blood up off the
floor wherever it is, walls, cabins.
Speaker 4 (31:34):
I don't know.
Speaker 3 (31:34):
I mean, getting all that up is one thing. But
they still have a body in the bathtub, Joe, and
got to do something with it. So Christopher Ebanks has
a plan, apparently, and that plan includes an inflatable mattress cord.
And I want to get this right, Okay, the victim
(31:58):
was wrapped in carpeting, an air mattress and was bound
with a white extension cord and additional items. Now I'm wondering,
was there a lamp blow dryer plugged into the extension cord, Joe?
And they just kept wrapping around this thing.
Speaker 4 (32:16):
I don't know. We'll find out.
Speaker 2 (32:17):
I don't know.
Speaker 1 (32:18):
Well, you remember I mentioned the frenzy disordered attack, right,
this is not like a precision surgical thing, you know,
Like I'm gonna wait in the dark and the guy
you know comes walking up the stairway and I'm going
to pop him with a suppressed weapon, right and then
just disappear into the darkness.
Speaker 2 (32:38):
That's not what we're talking about.
Speaker 1 (32:39):
We're talking about a spur of the moment, frenzied attack
that could involve hands, a hatchet, a three bladed object.
I don't know, little green men from Mars.
Speaker 2 (32:56):
I have no idea.
Speaker 1 (32:57):
You've got all of these elements that are and so
you know that that kind of odd gumbo of components
that you just talked about, how many things do you need?
Because if you're talking about an air mattress, a piece
of carpet, you're using an extension cord. This is not
something that you know. And how many times was the
(33:17):
guy I can't remember the guy's name that got rid
of his wife. I don't know if they've ever been
able to find her body. Was it in Connecticut? And
they've got him come into home depot and they've got
him on camera and he's purchasing I know our friends.
Speaker 4 (33:29):
Oh yeah, I know you're talking about Yeah he's uh,
oh god, and.
Speaker 1 (33:33):
Yeah, didn't he take his own life?
Speaker 4 (33:35):
I think it's talking about different ones. You might.
Speaker 3 (33:38):
We'll have to you know what, Let's come back to
that in a minute, because we still got this guy.
We've got a body in the tub, wrapped in all
that stuff. But Joe, he's missing a couple of things too,
because Christopher Ebanks went in there and all I'm thinking, Joe,
if he doesn't have a head and he doesn't have hands,
the body can't be identified. Is that Does that sound
(33:59):
like prison law? A prison lawyer came up with that,
somebody who's been in the clink for thirty five forty years.
Speaker 1 (34:06):
Yeah, well, yeah, it probably does. There's been this new
thing in the last few decades called DNA, and so yeah,
the adage of.
Speaker 2 (34:17):
The old adage of.
Speaker 1 (34:17):
If I get rid of the hands and I get
rid of the head, I'm doing away with you know,
with dental I'm doing away with fingerprints, all this sort
of thing. Now you're leaving the biggest component here, because
we can harvest DNA from just about end, particularly with
a fresh dead and this guy's fresh dead. Okay, this
is not something that you know, what is it, Old
John John Brown lays lay a moldering in his grave.
(34:41):
That's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about
guys fresh dead. That is, these samples could be easily harvested.
But you know, one of the problems. Back to the bathtub,
and I'm thinking about the hatchet.
Speaker 2 (34:54):
What a big reveal here.
Speaker 1 (34:57):
He's missing a head, right, he's missing his hands. And
if you've got let's say you've got a bathtub, Okay,
now what kind of bathtub is it? Is it ceramic tile?
Is it one of those porcel old porcelain tubs, or
is it one of these cheap old plastic insert things. Well,
I'm just thinking if you're if you're in the tub
and you're doing this any of those three choices, if
(35:19):
you're wielding a hatchet, and that you're gonna ding up
the surface. Okay, this is not something you're gonna leave.
Not only are you gonna leave marks on the bone,
you're gonna leave marks on the underlying surface. So whatever
the instrument that you're using can be married up, not
just from a tool mark perspective, on the edges, the
leading edges of the bone where the appendage is missing.
Speaker 2 (35:42):
You'll literally you can take a.
Speaker 1 (35:43):
Section of that tub or the wall or whatever it is,
if it's left to mark there, and you've got to
what's called a questioned a question bit of evidence, which
would be that hatchet or it could be a saw.
You can marry that up. You can marry that up
through two mark examination. The other thing that you're going
to leave behind, and I've actually participated in this after
(36:05):
someone has bled in a bathtub through dismemberment is drain traps.
And so the idea is you pull the whole tub out,
that s trap that's underneath underneath there. You pull that
sucker out, and you generate a lot of cast off material,
not just the blood. You'll find it in there, and
that can be typed as well, Dave.
Speaker 4 (36:26):
So you've got you got so many ways to get caught.
Speaker 3 (36:31):
Yeah, but apparently allegedly, chop off the head, chop off
the hands, and let's get this body wrapped in the
carpet and the air mattress, and let's put him someplace else.
So they take him out of the bathtub and shove
the body in a closet without his head and hands.
(36:53):
The head in the hands have been placed inside the
bathroom in a suitcase, a suitcase. Joe, and you know
what he did. Christopher Ebanks allegedly left with the suitcase
and threatened the girl to get in the car and
(37:13):
go to his place because she's going to get herself
cleaned up now to get rid of that evidence. So
in his car they drive from the apartment where the
killing has taken allegedly happened. Now they're traveling to Christopher
Ebanks apartment to get to make this victim's girlfriend wash herself.
(37:35):
And it's that knife point or gunpoint, not sure, but
he's holding a weapon on her and threatening her with
death if she doesn't do it. So he's already made
her clean up all the blood, clean up all the
mass where I killed your boyfriend. Now you're going to
clean yourself.
Speaker 1 (37:46):
And you know, we see that happen many times with
sexual assault perpetrators with female victims. Oh yeah, they'll hang around,
they'll make the victims take a shower and demonstrate, you know,
that they are cleaning themselves, and then collect all of
that as said evidence and go and try to depose.
There's just an innumerable amount of those cases that are
(38:10):
out there that has that kind of because the one
tie back, the one anchor point in all of this
is that it's all associated with violence, that you're compelling
somebody to do this. And look, I'm not sitting in
judgment of this woman. You know, if I had born
witness to what she saw and that I've got somebody
holding a weapon on me. I'm not saying I wouldn't
(38:32):
you know, I would not be compliant. I mean all
of us can say that we would, that we wouldn't comply,
that we wouldn't do Really, how do you know? At
least how do you know what you know? Because you
see certain levels of horror and you're traumatized where you're
you're almost catatonic.
Speaker 3 (38:47):
Man, and the police have been very clear on the
show she is not a suspect and that she's a victim.
Speaker 4 (38:53):
She was kidnapped.
Speaker 3 (38:54):
And by the way, Christopher Ebanks is charged with kidnapping
because what he did to her after the fact. Now,
remember how I told you we started with it was
this girl's dad that called the police, right because she
got away from Christopher Ebanks and calls dad, tells him
what has just happened.
Speaker 4 (39:12):
He doesn't know this is she tripping? You know, what's
really going on?
Speaker 3 (39:15):
I mean I have trouble believe in that, Joe, I would,
but he calls police and explain and then police go
to the apartment and sure enough, they find mister Carruthers
in the closet Okay wrapped up in the carpet in
the air mattress. It takes him a day to locate
Christopher Ebanks. He's only been out of prison for a month.
(39:38):
He's not really dug in yet into the community. They
do find his apartment, They make entry and they find
the suitcase. Joe described by the victim's girlfriend. When they
opened the suitcase, there you have the victim's head and hands.
Speaker 1 (39:57):
Well, what you know, what possible explain nation? Can you
offer up from that?
Speaker 2 (40:03):
Do you say?
Speaker 1 (40:03):
I was just walking down the street and I found this.
I found the suitcase. Oh, I had a suitcase that
was empty, and I happened to find these I collected.
I'm just going to bring them to you.
Speaker 4 (40:12):
I was bringing a for you guys. Hey that you're
saving me the trip, saving me the gas money. Thank you.
Speaker 1 (40:18):
Well, you know, I was thinking, what in the world
are you going to do? What was the plan? What
was the plan with these all that remained of this gentleman.
You know that area in Phoenix, it doesn't have much water,
but it's surrounded by a sea of sand and wilderness
and desert. It doesn't take too far to drive out
(40:40):
of town. And you're in the middle of nowhere was
his plan to try to go out and deposit these
Why what would be the motivation for destroying a man's
body like this? Whereas if you had kept it intact,
if you had handled it yourself, maybe you might have
had a better chance of getting away with it. But
for every punch he threw, every puncture wound he created,
(41:05):
every swing of the hatchet, and every bit of his
body that he chopped up, he left behind more and
more evidence. Now he's only alleged to have committed this crime.
He has not been tried, and he's certainly not been convicted.
But let's see where the science leads in this particular case.
(41:28):
I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is body bags.
Host
Joseph Scott Morgan
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