May 2, 2024 • 40 mins
Lisa and David Hernandez had been separated for a year before he starts stalking her, showing up at her job uninvited and unwelcome. He sends his estranged wife a bouquet of flowers with Lillies, "the Death Flower", knowing she is extremely allergic to them. On this episode of Body Bags, Joseph Scott Morgan will explain how someone can be killed by a blunt force instrument and a sharp-edged instrument at the same time and Dave Mack will fill in the story with the creepy stalking that David Hernandez allegedly did to his wife.
Transcribed Highlights
00:02:00 Introduction of Lisa Hernandez
05:12.52 Discussion of "Death Flower"
08:50.91 Talk about a tool as a weapon
14:17.46 Discussion of skull injury
19:46.20 Discussion of suspect knowing victim allergies
24:28.29 Talk about a "staged" scene
29:19.40 Discussion of allergic reaction
32:32.27 Discussion of blunt force and sharp force
36:26.87 Talk about tossing weapon / tool into lake
41:22.33 Discussion of Searching the bottom of a lake
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:08):
Buddy Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan. I'd have to say
that probably my favorite group would have to be strawberries.
I love strawberries. I love fresh strawberries, and I haven't
(00:29):
always loved them. But there's a place that's very near
and dear to my heart where I came to love strawberries,
and it's a little town called Potchitula, Louisiana. Ponchitula has
just finished up their annual Strawberry Festival. And you know,
Louisiana is renowned for festivals. I mean, you've got everything
(00:51):
from gumbo Festival, crawfish Festival, a catfish festival, and they've
been doing it for years and years, and I like
going to all those things, but for me, there's nothing
that beats the strawberry Festival. I have seen strawberries there
the size of apples, and it is a joyous occasion.
They've got strawberry jam, jelly, They've even got strawberry wine,
(01:16):
and it is just a fantastic time. You know, you
got Cajun music, people are dancing around. And today I
want to talk about a case that unfortunately originated in
one of my favorite places in Louisiana. Paunch Toola Louisiana.
(01:36):
But the subject here is not going to be about strawberries.
It's actually going to be about another plant, a flowering
plant that many times people associate with death. Today we're
going to talk about a nurse who was seemingly attacked
(01:57):
with a blunt object in her punch tool home left
or dead, and we're going to try to understand how
somebody could have gotten rid of the evidence involved in
the case. I'm Josep Scott Morgan, and this is body
Bags Dave my wife, and I know this because I've
(02:20):
tested it over the years. My wife loves to get flowers. Now,
some people will say that it's money. You're throwing away
money when you do it. I don't believe. I see
it as an investment, Okay. I see it as an
investment in or relationship. If I get into a fight
with my wife, which we rarely do, are disagreement, let
me put it that way, I don't go out and
(02:41):
rush out and buy her flowers to try to make everything.
I just will randomly send her flowers, and I love
the expression I see on her face. It brings me joy,
and flowers commonly do bring me joy. I like growing flowers.
I like growing wildflowers. Actually some people might know that
about me. I hope you think nonetheless of me as
a result of that. But as a matter of fact,
(03:04):
our first date that we ever had.
Speaker 2 (03:07):
By the way, not talking about his first date with me,
talking about his wife.
Speaker 1 (03:11):
I cut fresh wildflowers out of my garden at home
and took those to her on our first date. And
you know, after that, a new hatter. So uh, yeah,
flowers have always played a big role in my life.
Speaker 2 (03:27):
But so you're admitting you were stuck in your futures.
Speaker 1 (03:32):
It was a blond date. It was I wasn't you know,
we were before the days where you could really cyber
stock anybody. So yeah, it was I've always loved flowers.
But I got to tell you, Dave, the this case
is very troubling today because it does involve it does
involve lilies, and you know, we've I think commonly people
(03:53):
have associated lilies with with death. There's imagery out there
of you know, bodies, even I think going back to
the Middle Ages, where you have bodies that are casketed
and they're laying there where their hands crossed and their
lilies across their chest. It's always symbolic of that. I
find this case very disturbing.
Speaker 2 (04:12):
And I'm glad you brought up the funeral with the
hands crossed with the lilies, because that actually was part
of the break in this case. Today we're talking about
the death of Lisa Hernandez, talking about a forty five
year old woman who accomplished. She's a nurse, accomplished woman.
(04:33):
She's the person everybody liked to work with. You know,
you you always think about what are people going to
say when you're gone, and you know, we don't get
to hear those things because we're gone. In this respect,
that was the first thing I thought of, is everybody
has these wonderful nice things to say about her, and
she's not here to enjoy them. She was found by
(04:54):
her daughter. Daughter comes in, calls nine one one because
she finds her mom. She's not risk responsive, she's got
blood everywhere and doesn't know what happened. It looked like
maybe there was a robbery of some sort going on
in here, but calls nine one one. They come out
and sadly Lisa Hernandez is dad. When everything was said
(05:17):
and done, Joe about her body and the damage that
had been done. I wrote this down because I had
to ask you. This says cause of death, blunt force
instrument and a sharp edged instrument. How do you, as
(05:40):
somebody investigating a death and you've got these, how do
you put this together? And what is something that could
be a blunt for instrument as well as a sharp edge?
Is there is there something that could be both?
Speaker 1 (05:53):
Oh? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. There's a couple of things that
come to mind, And I've had desks involving both of
these instruments. I'm gonna mention and these are just off
the top of my head. The first one, obviously, is
going to be a hammer, a claw hammer, you know,
where you've got the blunt leading edge that is used
to hammer nails into a surface, and then you flip
(06:17):
it around and you've got these two and they look
like big buck teeth that are coming down that have
leading edges that are very sharp, and that of course
traditionally has been used pride nails up with. But it
is one heck of a fatal instrument. The other thing
that I've had, and I don't think that's what we're
dealing with here, is a mall. A mall looks like
(06:40):
a sledge hammer with a blade on the other side,
and you can split wood with it because it's got
so much weight to it, and so that weight is transferred,
you know, down onto a block of wood. It has
a bit more utility than a standard axe, for instance,
and you can flip it around and use it as
a sledgeham.
Speaker 2 (07:00):
I've got one of those. I did not know what
it was called. It's just something that somehow ended up
in my garage. You know, a u l Yeah, it's
real heavy, it's got yeah, so it's a weird word.
Speaker 1 (07:10):
But yet hey, you know, mall itself is used to
describe the individual was maulled, So that gives you an
indication that there in the past there's been violence associated
with it. I mean, whi elst would you name this
instrument that I'm probably you know, I'm sure that some
some linguistic person that's out there will probably you know,
catch me in the lurch here some way. But that's
(07:31):
that's my assessment.
Speaker 2 (07:32):
I've got one, and I didn't Again, I don't know
how I ended up with it. I'm sure somebody passed
away and I ended up with it.
Speaker 1 (07:40):
It's one of the best instruments she can have in
your toolshit. The only thing about it is it'll wear
you out, I mean real quick. I used to get
in shape for football during the off season by felling
trees with a family member and we would split wood,
you know, we'd cut it into sections, and I had
a mall to do that with. Also had a sledge
hammer and a couple of steel wedges and all that
(08:00):
sort of thing. But the mall will get the job done.
But just understand it would wear you out. But in
this set of circumstances, Dave, I cannot necessarily see someone
coming into this house. And by the way, she was
found actually on the floor between the bed and the dresser,
I think, And there's blood everywhere. When you're at a
(08:23):
death scene and you've gotten matted, coagulated blood about, you
have to be very very careful in handling the body
and making any kind of injury assessment at that time
because you will be super encrustive with blood. That's been
my experience, and you're not going to be able to
(08:45):
appreciate everything at the scene relative to trauma. So you
can say that, yeah, there is what appears to be
copious red substance at the scene. Of course, that translates
into blood once you've confirmed it scientifically, and you can
do that at the scene, you can do an on
the spot test to say that this is in fact
blood and that it's human blood and all this sort
(09:05):
of stuff. But until you can get a body back
to the morgue under the white hot surgical lights, it's
best that you don't jump to any conclusions. Because I've
seen gunshot wounds to the head that have generated tremendous
amounts of blood. But I've also seen blunt force trauma
(09:26):
as well, and when you get a combination, Dave of both,
what they're saying is blunt force and sharp force, it
gives you a sense of probably, unfortunately, God bless her,
what this poor daughter saw once you got there. I mean,
I can't imagine walking in and someone seeing their mama
laying on the floor and she's encrusted with blood. It
would confuse the investigators out there unless they're very very
(09:48):
careful and be very painstaking to get the body to
the forensic pathologist so they can document it with the
crusted blood. Then at the more you bathe the body,
not with soap, but you just kind of rinse it down.
We have a sprayer that's hooked to the autopsy table,
and it kind of looks like a sprayer you would
have on your sink. It's a bit more robust than that,
(10:09):
and it forces water into these crusted areas and you
kind of have to wipe it away to reveal any
kind of injuries. And as a matter of fact, from
one of the things we do that I may have
mentioned before is that, particularly with injuries to the head,
we actually shave the head, we shave the area you
know around there. So you got to be real careful, Dave,
when you're you know, when you're funding assessments. It seems
(10:31):
because when you.
Speaker 2 (10:31):
Go to a funeral, I mean that, I'm sure when
you're trying to figure out how a person died, what
took place, you're not really concerned with what are they
going to look like in the casket for their family.
You've got to solve this crime. But I wondered about
the shaving. If it was full on, got to shave
everything to make sure we don't miss anything or.
Speaker 1 (10:52):
No, you'll inspect the area, you'll rense out the hair net.
Keep in mind, I know some of you guys are saying, well,
you're watching way evidence. You do this after you have
gone to great links to collect trace evidence. Okay, that's
why you don't want to wash the body down in
any way until you can do things like tape lifts
and certainly do swabs you're looking for DNA and all
(11:14):
this sort of thing. You have to be very patient.
That's why if you get these complex cases out there
where you've got multiple strikes, you will literally have a
layering of injuries. And it's a nightmare. I mean, it
really is. It's a nightmare because sometimes if you've got
multiple strikes to the head, for instance, you're going to
have overlying lacerations. And the trick is, first off, when
(11:36):
you assess us lacerations, are they anti mortem? That means
that if they struck, you should have surrounding hemorrhage. But
if they're post mortem, all you've got is a laceration
and there's no hemorrhage, there's no echmosis, which is a
fancy word for swelling. You're not going to have that.
So you have to be very careful when you're doing
this assessment because as we know, I mean, you and
(11:56):
I have covered tons of them on body bags where
we have people that do things to bodies after death
when you're doing those assessments, and then you throw in
the sharp edged element too, how do you delineate between
all of this and with a head strike, the one
thing that you can count on that you're going to
see resting just beneath the surface is going to be
(12:19):
a skull underlying that traumatized scalp, and you will have
multiple fractures of the external table of the skull, and
many times it looks precisely like a cracked, hardbolled eck.
(12:51):
When you're death investigator, you don't always frame things as
an investigator. When you're the scene, sometimes your humanity will
take over. And what I mean by that if you're
working a case in a neighborhood, for instance, just like
the one that mister Nandez lived in, I've caught myself
(13:15):
many times with my thoughts drifting to the sight of
people peeping out of their windows or coming out onto
their driveway, or even people taking photos and video of
us working a scene, and they would gather together in clusters,
and it's always stuck with me. I think it has
(13:36):
something to do with human behavior and group human behavior.
It's like you if you have a perception of evil
or harm that might be coming your way because of
one of your own in your neighborhood has been attacked.
People that might not otherwise talk to one another, gather together.
And I've often thought about, you know, what would it
(13:57):
be like to live in a neighborhood where you've got
a woman who is gainfully employed, who was known, who
had a family. What would it be like to find
out the news that she'd been literally beaten to death.
Speaker 2 (14:14):
Dave, it would be a shocking, worrisome time in your neighborhood,
that's for sure. With Lisa and David Hernandez, they actually
they're both nurses, both in the same medical field, and
they had hit the end of their relationship rope and
they were separated. They were not divorced yet from what
(14:34):
I can gather, but they had been at least separated
for a year. That's why they refer to them as exes.
In some states, you actually have to be separated legally
for a year before a divorce would be granted, and anyway,
they had been during that year.
Speaker 1 (14:49):
Though.
Speaker 2 (14:50):
It's interesting how investigators have pointed out that it was
after about a year of separation that David Hernandez started
stalking his almost ex wife. They didn't say he did
it right away. It was after, right at the edge,
when it was time where it looked like the divorce
(15:11):
was really going to happen. That's when he turns into
overdrive and he starts following her. He puts a tracking
device on her car. He sends her flowers, but not
just any flowers, Okay, David Hernandez knew that his wife
(15:31):
was highly allergic to Lili's So when he sends her
a beautiful bouquet of flowers to her place of work
for everybody to see, and here you've got lilies that
are referred to as death flowers, and she is highly allergic.
So you talk about using something you know about somebody
as it's today. And on top of all that, he
(15:54):
would randomly pop in at work. He would just he
knows what a nurse is going through at work, yet
he would still well just randomly pop up at her
work basically saying, hey, I'm here, I'm watching I got you.
And by the way, it wasn't until after her death
that they found the tracking device on her car.
Speaker 1 (16:12):
That's the wait, hang on that, that to me is
one of these absolutely terrifying things. I hate this crap.
I hate the idea of somebody being able to track
another individual. I think that one of these companies out there,
I guess it's Apple, you know, has that Apple Tracker
thing that people can use. And I understand the utility
(16:34):
of it. I mean, you know, if you've got a dog,
that's you know, like I've got a yeah, I've got
my laboratory retriever whom I love. You know, if I
could put one of those in her collar, perhaps, you know,
I could see where she is. But it's the idea
of someone having the ability to do that to another person.
You know, when we were kids, dave that kind of technology.
(16:57):
That's something that that's something we would have aught about
with James Bond movies.
Speaker 2 (17:01):
It was like a video phone, you know, yeah, yeah exactly.
Speaker 1 (17:05):
And now now everybody has access to these things. You know,
they can track you. And you know, I know Nancy,
our friend, is very you know, she uses her her
you know, locate my yeah you know, yeah, my iPhone
and she uses that with her kids. You know, she
talks about the twins all the time. I understand that,
and it does create maybe a level of security but
(17:27):
there's also a real terrifying element to this that somebody
that you no longer want to be domiciled with, obviously
you know, has the ability, that has access to the
technology and that can use it. Technology is great, man,
but I'll tell you what, buddy, it's really got a downside.
Speaker 2 (17:46):
So those track of things you mentioned actually have done
a couple of stories on this with Nancy about you know,
people using those in a bar situation, driving in at first,
things like that to a track of woman's movements, and
there are ways for you to protect yourself about it.
If you don't know what we're talking about, please look
it up. There are ways to protect yourself from somebody
unknowingly tagging you like that, and you can prevent it
(18:08):
from happening to you. So now, with regard to her
having this tracking device on her vehicle, they were able
to trace it back to her husband, her ex husband,
David Hernandez, probably by purchasing it online. They're not cheap.
We'll get into that over the next couple of days.
I can tell you that I'll be looking it up.
Some of the rest of you will as well, because
(18:28):
it is not just spooky, it's dangerous. So as they're
investigating it, Joe, they're putting these things together. I mean,
we've talked about how the person you're closest to is
the first suspect and it goes out from there. And
in this case, you have a soon to be ex
husband in estranged situation and he has been showing a
(18:51):
number of behaviors that are very worrisome to probably her friends,
other members that she worked with, things like that. So
police have their hands full right away with who they're
looking at as possible suspects. But again, it was a
scene that had been staged. You know what a scene
looks like when you go to it, Joe as a
(19:11):
death investigator. Police know what a robbery scene looks like,
and they know when something doesn't ring true. Correct, Yeah, yeah,
you do.
Speaker 1 (19:20):
And sometimes you'll see with the staging staging scenes, first off,
it's very difficult when somebody has got an open head
injury and they have obviously bled out, it's very difficult
to kind of mask that if you're the perpetrator. However,
when you have a true staged scene, you'll see many
(19:44):
times these kind of half hearted efforts to open drawers up,
maybe pull a few things out. That sort of thing.
It won't be the individual will not necessarily be all
in on it. Because when you think of like a
robbery or burglary that turned into you know, a murder,
robbery murder, when you see that at a scene when
(20:06):
it's true, you'll see all kinds of crap that's broken,
turned over, busted into a million pieces, where they're digging
for something and it looks like they're in a frenzy.
I've had several cases where you have people that are
in an addictive phase in their life and all they
want is to score. They just want to score whatever
dope that they're addicted to, and it will it looks
(20:28):
like a madman has gone through the house, and it's terrifying.
And there have been times I've worked these cases obviously
where there's somebody that's not i mean, who suspects this,
who expects it, you know, and you walk into your
home and there's this raving maniac in there, and they
kill you with a weapon of convenience. Most of the time,
(20:50):
but police can kind of understand, I think relative to staging,
one of the first things we're going to look for
is and you hear talk about it all the time
is is there evidence of forced entry at the scene,
Because forced entry implies that you had to gain access
where you were not allowed to be accessing an area
(21:12):
you had a key or maybe familiarity where you can
knock on the door and somebody's gonna let you in,
and so yeah, the police have a have a way
of doing that. But I gotta I gotta tell you,
David kind of kind of jumped ahead a little bit.
I wanted to. I had an idea that kind of
came to mind. You had mentioned a few moments ago
about the lilies that she is highly allergic to, and
(21:36):
both these individuals are also in the medical field. Now
just give me a little rope here, because I know
that this might this might run run a field, and
you know you but I'm really wondering here, if you
have knowledge that someone is specifically allergic to something and
you send it to them, are you holding out hope
(21:57):
that if they hold these things, if they have them
adjacent to them, they're going to have an anaphylactic event
where they begin to swell, their airway is going to
begin to close. You'll see their face turned red. And
interestingly enough, day people might laugh at that I actually
had a lady years and years ago that committed suicide
(22:19):
visa vis anaphylaxis, and you know how she accomplished it.
She was allergic to any kind of shellfish and she
went to a buffet with her husband and sat across
the table and just jammed her face with bail trimp
and he knew. He was like, what what are you doing?
You know, like this and before you knew it, she
(22:39):
you know, she didn't have an EpiPen. I don't even
think there was Bena drill handy, and you get to
that point. I don't know that Benadryla is going to
touch the situation. But she went into cardial respiratory arrest
right there and they ran a code and she died
at the hospital. And she had been suffering with depression
all that sort of thing. So this is interesting. It's
an interesting thought for me as an investor, Stiga, I
(23:01):
really want to know was he trying to weaponize lilies.
I think that that's a fascinating point along this because
if you have knowledge that she has a reaction to these,
is that what you're trying to do?
Speaker 2 (23:14):
That boggles my mind.
Speaker 1 (23:17):
I know, it's bizarre, isn't.
Speaker 2 (23:18):
It when I saw the death flower headline on this story. Yeah, okay,
that's kind of merterious. But I was thinking it was
one of those stinky flowers that when they open up,
they smell bad and when you feel like you're going
to die.
Speaker 1 (23:28):
Yeah, but I think those things. I think they weigh
like two tons open like every five years or something.
Speaker 2 (23:33):
That's that's what I was thinking. So is it like
feed me seymore in the basement.
Speaker 1 (23:37):
No, And I'm not saying that lilies are fatal, but
any kind of allergic reaction that you can have to anything,
I don't. You know, I wonder if.
Speaker 2 (23:46):
Neither of us are lawyers or anything else. But it
makes you wonder if you know somebody is allergic to
something and you tried to get it in their face
to cause them pain and you know whatever. I wonder
if there is not an assault charge waiting it's happened.
Speaker 1 (24:01):
Hey, That's exactly what I was thinking about, because if
you have four knowledge and listen, it's hard. You know,
when you get into the realm of medicine, when you're
certified a registered nurse, you understand allergic reactions, and then
on top of that, you're domiciled with this person. You're
married to them, You're going to know that intimate detail
so much to the point that this individual may have
(24:25):
chosen to send it. I don't know. Maybe he thought
that she liked lily's. But I got to tell you,
if I was a betting man and I'm working this
case and she's got a history of allergic reactions to
these flowers, I think that it would be something worth
kind of digging into and anything else. I'm very curious
about this case, which, by the way, at this point
(24:46):
time has not been adjudicated. This is a recent case,
so this man is innocent until proven guilty. But I'd
have to think if I were in the middle of
this thing working it, I don't want to know if
he had ever made any other kind of efforts harming
her anyway. It's almost like kind of a passive intimidation tactic.
You know, you can imagine what she thought when she
(25:08):
received these, Wow, I've got flowers. Oh no, they're lilies.
It's so bizarre. But you know that at the end
of the day, that's that's not what it came down to.
But I really wonder, Dave, I really wonder if those
lilies we're not a portent of something far more sinister
(25:29):
and evil. Investigations are. They're not instantaneous. It's not like
(25:52):
you've got a bowl of ramen and you pour hot
water in it and suddenly you've got a meal. It's
not like that. It's not instantaneous. Really good investigations take
a period of time because they're so intricate. I like
to compare them in my mind always envision them as spiderwebs,
and you've got all this directionality, you know, that kind
(26:13):
of go and it intersects with these things. And when
you get that vision in your mind, it's actually helped me,
believe it or not, when I can kind of sexualize
or compartmentalize investigations because I know what my role is
in the investigation. I don't have anything else most of
the time to do with anybody else's roles. So I
think that that's a valuable thing to keep in mind.
But Dave, you were telling me that in mister Nandez's
(26:37):
death that it took a little bit of time before
they finally settled on a suspect.
Speaker 2 (26:43):
Well, they had to figure out, they had to figure
out what happened. They know they have a dead forty
five year old woman who was beaten to death. They
know the weapon was that there was a blunt forest
instrument and a sharp edged instrument. So they're trying to
put all this together, and you know, they probably had
their eyes on this soon to be x just because
(27:05):
they were able to uncover fairly quickly what he had
been doing in terms of stalking and the police actually
terms of that he had been stalking. And again, this
isn'tn allegation. Now this is a current case, and everyone
is innocent until they're proven guilty in the court of law.
But in this particular case, they were able to build
(27:26):
enough evidence over a couple of weeks to realize that, yes,
this David Hernandez is our suspect. But that was through
just regular police work. And there was one thing that
they know, Where's where is the instrument of death? Where
is this object that we're looking for. They kind of
thought it was a hammer, They kind of were leaning
(27:46):
that way, but they couldn't figure out, couldn't find it.
It was about a month into the investigation when investigators
were able to get surveillance footage of La Paza train
and I always thought, like I'm mispronouncing that no, okay.
And I'm sure they were trying to figure out path
(28:08):
of movement and things like that of where an individual
would go. But in this particular case, a month into
the investigation, they get video surveillance video that is around
Lake ponsa train and they saw David Hernandez pull over
on the causeway and they actually said they saw him.
(28:31):
This is what the Jimmy Travis is the chief operating
officer and the Sheriff's office there, and he said, you
can see objects being thrown from the car. You see
it hit the water splashing, So they know he's thrown
something big enough and heavy enough to create that type
(28:54):
of reaction in the water. So what do you think
they did? They called out the dive team up and
they put divers in the water, and all I could
think of, Joe, I bet anybody driving along the causeway
there wanting to throw something would not consider they were
on surreulance camera. I wouldn't think it.
Speaker 1 (29:16):
They wouldn't. And first off, we're talking about literally the
world's longest bridge, and that's the Causeway bridge over Lake
Pontchraff spent unfortunately, more time on that bridge over the
course of my career when I was with the Jefferson
Parish Corners Office. And is it wide, Joe, Oh, really,
(29:36):
it's four lanes. It's four lanes. You have two lanes
southbound and two lanes northbound, and it has guardrails. My
family has a long history with Lake post Train. Matter
of fact, my ancestors and my ancestors actually opened the
very first ferry that ever went across Lake Pontch Train
(29:57):
in the late seventeen hundreds. They were bringing wood. There
was no other way to get to New Orleans other
than coming up the Mississippi River or down the Mississippi
River from Baton Rouge, or coming up through the Gulf
and through the marshes. And so my ancestors built one
of the first ferries, Killian's Ferry. And there's a little
village on Lake Pontrain called Killian is Wow. And so.
Speaker 2 (30:22):
I'm gonna have to go there and say, y'all know, Joe.
Speaker 1 (30:25):
No, they will not. And so and I love Pontcetrain.
I fished on Potch Train and here's something unique about it.
And I know a lot of our our friends out
there have have certainly visited it over the years, and
people love to drive on the causeway to say that
they've been on the world's long spriadge, like just over
twenty three miles in length. It takes a lot.
Speaker 2 (30:44):
Goodness, I didn't know it was that long.
Speaker 1 (30:46):
Yeah, there's certain points where you can't see either shore.
Speaker 2 (30:50):
But you just see water.
Speaker 1 (30:52):
You see water, yeah, and then eventually you'll see land,
you know, on the north shore, you know, kind of
poking up and and everything's flat. Obviously, it's not like
there's any hills surrounding Lake pots Train everything. But here's
something interesting about Lake Pontcha Train. Lake Potchtrain is is
actually an estuary, and it's one of the largest estuaries
(31:14):
in the world, and that it is a lake. They
call it a lake, but it's it comes off of
the Gulf of Mexico and the Mississippi River has an
influence on it too, and all the various tributaries. Lots
of life in this thing, and so you can actually
find out towards the gulf. You'll find more saltwater species
(31:36):
out there, redfish and speckled trout and all that sort
of thing. But you go go back to the west
and you can start catching things like crappie or as
the Cajun say, saku lea and largemouth bass and all
these sorts of things. And so you've got this environment.
And as big as that lake is, Dave, I'm gonna
(31:58):
throw some knowledge on you here real quick that you
might not have ever heard. Jennut Lake averages only thirteen
to fourteen feet in depth. Oh wow, as big as
this thing is because it's vast. I mean, it's not
like the size of Great Lakes, but it's vast, and
it's got a real muddy bottom. There is a central
area that's like sixty to sixty five feet and you
(32:20):
know what that is. That's a shipping channel that was
actually cut in there. And so naturally it's just it's
an estuary. It's not like a real deep You go
to the Great Lakes, you know, and you've got these
hundreds of feet of depth up there. It's not like that.
And so you have a hurricane that comes through there.
It's like the meteorologists and the hydrologists talk about, it's
(32:42):
like having water in a saucer and the wind blows
and it'll just blow water. That's one of the problems
you had with Katrina ponchtrain played a big role in
the flooding. But when here's the other thing about this
dive team, which I could never do diving claustrophobic, it
terrifies me. I've got a good buddy of mine, Bobby Chacone,
(33:03):
who is ran, who ran the FBI dive team, and
he he is a he's a beast. I mean he is.
He'll you know, he's he's done it all, he's seen
it all. It terrifies me. But you know, when you
get into poncha train, brother, you can't even see your
(33:24):
hand in front of your face, you know. So the
fact that they've got this Hernandez guy on video gives
him an idea of where to start. And also they
did this recovery in Jefferson Parish, so he traveled through
a couple of parishes and on the bridge in order
(33:46):
to facilitate this. And the fact that he did it
out there is amazing because you have what are called
the Causeway Bridge Police, and literally all these people do
is police the bridge. They run radar there always out there.
So that gives you an idea of how emboldened he was,
how confident he was. And there is no room to
(34:07):
pass on this thing, man, no room to pass. You
would have to put your flashes on and say a
Hail Mary and go out there and hope that you're
not going to get crushed, and go out there quick
enough to drop it and then scoot back to your
vehicle and start heading in the opposite direction. And that's
(34:29):
the other thing. You start heading in the opposite direction.
You got to find a place to turn around. Dude.
Speaker 2 (34:34):
Let me tell you this though, Joe. Yeah, he stayed
in his car. He stayed in his car and tossed
the items from the car.
Speaker 1 (34:44):
Well, that's that's an interesting, interesting point that he didn't
get out, And I wonder if he actually came to
a full stop to do it.
Speaker 2 (34:51):
Well, you know, I'm wondering the same thing. That's why
I was curious, because I don't know. I'm trying to
visualize this, and I can't figure out how wide the
bridge is. So we're not talking about a wide area.
Speaker 1 (35:01):
No, no, no, no, So we are.
Speaker 2 (35:03):
Time he stayed in the car, I'm guessing he just
thought I'm gonna do it right here and just out
the door, you go out the window.
Speaker 1 (35:12):
Yeah, and he obviously didn't do it in the shipping channel,
which the causeway has got this big hump. It looks
like a camel just rising up. It's this gigantic hump
that's right in the center of it. And that's so
that larger ships can get through that thing and stay
in the channel, can stay in the shipping channel. Now,
he may have had a better shot of them not
(35:34):
being able to recover this thing if he had stopped
on top of that. But the problem was stopping and
he knows this. The problem was stopping on the top.
There are two towers up there and they look like
I remember when I was a little kid, and I
see them. They look like air control towers, you know,
with the glass that goes all the way around it,
(35:55):
so that these guys that are in there can see
it for miles. You can see the landscape or the
water skate for miles and miles around. They've got ships
that are incoming and all that sort of thing. And
so you know, you're damned if you do. You're damn
if you don't. If he goes to that portion right there,
he might hit the shipping channel where this thing's going
(36:15):
to go down to a depth of you know, sixty
maybe seventy feet I don't know, and settle down in
that mud. But they caught it soon enough so that
these poor souls on this dive team had to go
down there. And when I tell you this is like,
this is hero stuff to me because it's something I
couldn't do. When they're down underwater, they're literally feeling around
(36:40):
with their hands, and trust me, there's more than an
item that this guy throughout over the edge of that bridge.
Lord only knows what you can find down there. I
see all these kids on YouTube nowadays and they do
the magnet fishing. Have you seen this where there's TSSA
And it's pretty fascinating see what they come up with.
(37:00):
And sometimes they come up with with weapons involved in
all the sides. But you know, there's it's a heavily
traveled road. It's and you think that anything that you
that you toss over is gone forever and ever. Amen,
And that ain't necessarily the case. And what did they
wind up finding to David.
Speaker 2 (37:19):
They found exactly what you were talking about earlier, on
a large hammer. Now the they pointed out that because
it was on video, that's what the sheriff actually says
he thought he was throwing away these items someplace that
they would be gone forever, never realizing that the area
he was in, he was in video surveillance while he
(37:43):
was doing it, so they knew exactly where he was
on the bridge when he threw the objects in, and
they were because they saw the splash. They knew where
it entered the water. Now, finding a hammer, a large hammer,
gonna have some weight on it. It's not going to
drift a whole lot. I don't know how the current moves,
but I'm guessing it's probably not moving a whole lot.
Speaker 1 (38:06):
No, and then and then once it like I said,
once it goes, once it starts to drift down, it's
going it's going to land in this silt, right and
once it gets embedded in that silt, it ain't going
to where as a matter of fact, on another interesting point,
down on the far end of the lake, the western end,
(38:31):
there is an entire I might be wrong. I think
it's an entire seven O seven that is beneath the
water there. And it is. When I say beneath the water,
it took off from what used it's Huey P. Long.
It's actually the Louis Armstrong Airport now it's what it's called.
It used to be called Moison plane took off in
(38:53):
nineteen sixty five, went off the end of that northern
runway and just nosedived right into the lake. And I
don't know that they ever recovered all of the bodies
out of there, and that plane is still there and
it's buried in that silt, and so that's how sticky
this thing is. So the fact that they did recover
it is quite amazing to me. I'm fascinated, but I
(39:17):
think that look, you know, David Hernandez has only been charged.
He remains innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.
But just so we understand, Lisa Hernandez God rest her
soul has her final fatal diagnosis was blunt force instrument
(39:43):
and sharp force instrument related death. And David Hernandez was
actually charged with the second Grey murder and obstruction of justice.
I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is Body Backs
Buddy Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan. I'd have to say
that probably my favorite group would have to be strawberries.
I love strawberries. I love fresh strawberries, and I haven't
(00:29):
always loved them. But there's a place that's very near
and dear to my heart where I came to love strawberries,
and it's a little town called Potchitula, Louisiana. Ponchitula has
just finished up their annual Strawberry Festival. And you know,
Louisiana is renowned for festivals. I mean, you've got everything
(00:51):
from gumbo Festival, crawfish Festival, a catfish festival, and they've
been doing it for years and years, and I like
going to all those things, but for me, there's nothing
that beats the strawberry Festival. I have seen strawberries there
the size of apples, and it is a joyous occasion.
They've got strawberry jam, jelly, They've even got strawberry wine,
(01:16):
and it is just a fantastic time. You know, you
got Cajun music, people are dancing around. And today I
want to talk about a case that unfortunately originated in
one of my favorite places in Louisiana. Paunch Toola Louisiana.
(01:36):
But the subject here is not going to be about strawberries.
It's actually going to be about another plant, a flowering
plant that many times people associate with death. Today we're
going to talk about a nurse who was seemingly attacked
(01:57):
with a blunt object in her punch tool home left
or dead, and we're going to try to understand how
somebody could have gotten rid of the evidence involved in
the case. I'm Josep Scott Morgan, and this is body
Bags Dave my wife, and I know this because I've
(02:20):
tested it over the years. My wife loves to get flowers. Now,
some people will say that it's money. You're throwing away
money when you do it. I don't believe. I see
it as an investment, Okay. I see it as an
investment in or relationship. If I get into a fight
with my wife, which we rarely do, are disagreement, let
me put it that way, I don't go out and
(02:41):
rush out and buy her flowers to try to make everything.
I just will randomly send her flowers, and I love
the expression I see on her face. It brings me joy,
and flowers commonly do bring me joy. I like growing flowers.
I like growing wildflowers. Actually some people might know that
about me. I hope you think nonetheless of me as
a result of that. But as a matter of fact,
(03:04):
our first date that we ever had.
Speaker 2 (03:07):
By the way, not talking about his first date with me,
talking about his wife.
Speaker 1 (03:11):
I cut fresh wildflowers out of my garden at home
and took those to her on our first date. And
you know, after that, a new hatter. So uh, yeah,
flowers have always played a big role in my life.
Speaker 2 (03:27):
But so you're admitting you were stuck in your futures.
Speaker 1 (03:32):
It was a blond date. It was I wasn't you know,
we were before the days where you could really cyber
stock anybody. So yeah, it was I've always loved flowers.
But I got to tell you, Dave, the this case
is very troubling today because it does involve it does
involve lilies, and you know, we've I think commonly people
(03:53):
have associated lilies with with death. There's imagery out there
of you know, bodies, even I think going back to
the Middle Ages, where you have bodies that are casketed
and they're laying there where their hands crossed and their
lilies across their chest. It's always symbolic of that. I
find this case very disturbing.
Speaker 2 (04:12):
And I'm glad you brought up the funeral with the
hands crossed with the lilies, because that actually was part
of the break in this case. Today we're talking about
the death of Lisa Hernandez, talking about a forty five
year old woman who accomplished. She's a nurse, accomplished woman.
(04:33):
She's the person everybody liked to work with. You know,
you you always think about what are people going to
say when you're gone, and you know, we don't get
to hear those things because we're gone. In this respect,
that was the first thing I thought of, is everybody
has these wonderful nice things to say about her, and
she's not here to enjoy them. She was found by
(04:54):
her daughter. Daughter comes in, calls nine one one because
she finds her mom. She's not risk responsive, she's got
blood everywhere and doesn't know what happened. It looked like
maybe there was a robbery of some sort going on
in here, but calls nine one one. They come out
and sadly Lisa Hernandez is dad. When everything was said
(05:17):
and done, Joe about her body and the damage that
had been done. I wrote this down because I had
to ask you. This says cause of death, blunt force
instrument and a sharp edged instrument. How do you, as
(05:40):
somebody investigating a death and you've got these, how do
you put this together? And what is something that could
be a blunt for instrument as well as a sharp edge?
Is there is there something that could be both?
Speaker 1 (05:53):
Oh? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. There's a couple of things that
come to mind, And I've had desks involving both of
these instruments. I'm gonna mention and these are just off
the top of my head. The first one, obviously, is
going to be a hammer, a claw hammer, you know,
where you've got the blunt leading edge that is used
to hammer nails into a surface, and then you flip
(06:17):
it around and you've got these two and they look
like big buck teeth that are coming down that have
leading edges that are very sharp, and that of course
traditionally has been used pride nails up with. But it
is one heck of a fatal instrument. The other thing
that I've had, and I don't think that's what we're
dealing with here, is a mall. A mall looks like
(06:40):
a sledge hammer with a blade on the other side,
and you can split wood with it because it's got
so much weight to it, and so that weight is transferred,
you know, down onto a block of wood. It has
a bit more utility than a standard axe, for instance,
and you can flip it around and use it as
a sledgeham.
Speaker 2 (07:00):
I've got one of those. I did not know what
it was called. It's just something that somehow ended up
in my garage. You know, a u l Yeah, it's
real heavy, it's got yeah, so it's a weird word.
Speaker 1 (07:10):
But yet hey, you know, mall itself is used to
describe the individual was maulled, So that gives you an
indication that there in the past there's been violence associated
with it. I mean, whi elst would you name this
instrument that I'm probably you know, I'm sure that some
some linguistic person that's out there will probably you know,
catch me in the lurch here some way. But that's
(07:31):
that's my assessment.
Speaker 2 (07:32):
I've got one, and I didn't Again, I don't know
how I ended up with it. I'm sure somebody passed
away and I ended up with it.
Speaker 1 (07:40):
It's one of the best instruments she can have in
your toolshit. The only thing about it is it'll wear
you out, I mean real quick. I used to get
in shape for football during the off season by felling
trees with a family member and we would split wood,
you know, we'd cut it into sections, and I had
a mall to do that with. Also had a sledge
hammer and a couple of steel wedges and all that
(08:00):
sort of thing. But the mall will get the job done.
But just understand it would wear you out. But in
this set of circumstances, Dave, I cannot necessarily see someone
coming into this house. And by the way, she was
found actually on the floor between the bed and the dresser,
I think, And there's blood everywhere. When you're at a
(08:23):
death scene and you've gotten matted, coagulated blood about, you
have to be very very careful in handling the body
and making any kind of injury assessment at that time
because you will be super encrustive with blood. That's been
my experience, and you're not going to be able to
(08:45):
appreciate everything at the scene relative to trauma. So you
can say that, yeah, there is what appears to be
copious red substance at the scene. Of course, that translates
into blood once you've confirmed it scientifically, and you can
do that at the scene, you can do an on
the spot test to say that this is in fact
blood and that it's human blood and all this sort
(09:05):
of stuff. But until you can get a body back
to the morgue under the white hot surgical lights, it's
best that you don't jump to any conclusions. Because I've
seen gunshot wounds to the head that have generated tremendous
amounts of blood. But I've also seen blunt force trauma
(09:26):
as well, and when you get a combination, Dave of both,
what they're saying is blunt force and sharp force, it
gives you a sense of probably, unfortunately, God bless her,
what this poor daughter saw once you got there. I mean,
I can't imagine walking in and someone seeing their mama
laying on the floor and she's encrusted with blood. It
would confuse the investigators out there unless they're very very
(09:48):
careful and be very painstaking to get the body to
the forensic pathologist so they can document it with the
crusted blood. Then at the more you bathe the body,
not with soap, but you just kind of rinse it down.
We have a sprayer that's hooked to the autopsy table,
and it kind of looks like a sprayer you would
have on your sink. It's a bit more robust than that,
(10:09):
and it forces water into these crusted areas and you
kind of have to wipe it away to reveal any
kind of injuries. And as a matter of fact, from
one of the things we do that I may have
mentioned before is that, particularly with injuries to the head,
we actually shave the head, we shave the area you
know around there. So you got to be real careful, Dave,
when you're you know, when you're funding assessments. It seems
(10:31):
because when you.
Speaker 2 (10:31):
Go to a funeral, I mean that, I'm sure when
you're trying to figure out how a person died, what
took place, you're not really concerned with what are they
going to look like in the casket for their family.
You've got to solve this crime. But I wondered about
the shaving. If it was full on, got to shave
everything to make sure we don't miss anything or.
Speaker 1 (10:52):
No, you'll inspect the area, you'll rense out the hair net.
Keep in mind, I know some of you guys are saying, well,
you're watching way evidence. You do this after you have
gone to great links to collect trace evidence. Okay, that's
why you don't want to wash the body down in
any way until you can do things like tape lifts
and certainly do swabs you're looking for DNA and all
(11:14):
this sort of thing. You have to be very patient.
That's why if you get these complex cases out there
where you've got multiple strikes, you will literally have a
layering of injuries. And it's a nightmare. I mean, it
really is. It's a nightmare because sometimes if you've got
multiple strikes to the head, for instance, you're going to
have overlying lacerations. And the trick is, first off, when
(11:36):
you assess us lacerations, are they anti mortem? That means
that if they struck, you should have surrounding hemorrhage. But
if they're post mortem, all you've got is a laceration
and there's no hemorrhage, there's no echmosis, which is a
fancy word for swelling. You're not going to have that.
So you have to be very careful when you're doing
this assessment because as we know, I mean, you and
(11:56):
I have covered tons of them on body bags where
we have people that do things to bodies after death
when you're doing those assessments, and then you throw in
the sharp edged element too, how do you delineate between
all of this and with a head strike, the one
thing that you can count on that you're going to
see resting just beneath the surface is going to be
(12:19):
a skull underlying that traumatized scalp, and you will have
multiple fractures of the external table of the skull, and
many times it looks precisely like a cracked, hardbolled eck.
(12:51):
When you're death investigator, you don't always frame things as
an investigator. When you're the scene, sometimes your humanity will
take over. And what I mean by that if you're
working a case in a neighborhood, for instance, just like
the one that mister Nandez lived in, I've caught myself
(13:15):
many times with my thoughts drifting to the sight of
people peeping out of their windows or coming out onto
their driveway, or even people taking photos and video of
us working a scene, and they would gather together in clusters,
and it's always stuck with me. I think it has
(13:36):
something to do with human behavior and group human behavior.
It's like you if you have a perception of evil
or harm that might be coming your way because of
one of your own in your neighborhood has been attacked.
People that might not otherwise talk to one another, gather together.
And I've often thought about, you know, what would it
(13:57):
be like to live in a neighborhood where you've got
a woman who is gainfully employed, who was known, who
had a family. What would it be like to find
out the news that she'd been literally beaten to death.
Speaker 2 (14:14):
Dave, it would be a shocking, worrisome time in your neighborhood,
that's for sure. With Lisa and David Hernandez, they actually
they're both nurses, both in the same medical field, and
they had hit the end of their relationship rope and
they were separated. They were not divorced yet from what
(14:34):
I can gather, but they had been at least separated
for a year. That's why they refer to them as exes.
In some states, you actually have to be separated legally
for a year before a divorce would be granted, and anyway,
they had been during that year.
Speaker 1 (14:49):
Though.
Speaker 2 (14:50):
It's interesting how investigators have pointed out that it was
after about a year of separation that David Hernandez started
stalking his almost ex wife. They didn't say he did
it right away. It was after, right at the edge,
when it was time where it looked like the divorce
(15:11):
was really going to happen. That's when he turns into
overdrive and he starts following her. He puts a tracking
device on her car. He sends her flowers, but not
just any flowers, Okay, David Hernandez knew that his wife
(15:31):
was highly allergic to Lili's So when he sends her
a beautiful bouquet of flowers to her place of work
for everybody to see, and here you've got lilies that
are referred to as death flowers, and she is highly allergic.
So you talk about using something you know about somebody
as it's today. And on top of all that, he
(15:54):
would randomly pop in at work. He would just he
knows what a nurse is going through at work, yet
he would still well just randomly pop up at her
work basically saying, hey, I'm here, I'm watching I got you.
And by the way, it wasn't until after her death
that they found the tracking device on her car.
Speaker 1 (16:12):
That's the wait, hang on that, that to me is
one of these absolutely terrifying things. I hate this crap.
I hate the idea of somebody being able to track
another individual. I think that one of these companies out there,
I guess it's Apple, you know, has that Apple Tracker
thing that people can use. And I understand the utility
(16:34):
of it. I mean, you know, if you've got a dog,
that's you know, like I've got a yeah, I've got
my laboratory retriever whom I love. You know, if I
could put one of those in her collar, perhaps, you know,
I could see where she is. But it's the idea
of someone having the ability to do that to another person.
You know, when we were kids, dave that kind of technology.
(16:57):
That's something that that's something we would have aught about
with James Bond movies.
Speaker 2 (17:01):
It was like a video phone, you know, yeah, yeah exactly.
Speaker 1 (17:05):
And now now everybody has access to these things. You know,
they can track you. And you know, I know Nancy,
our friend, is very you know, she uses her her
you know, locate my yeah you know, yeah, my iPhone
and she uses that with her kids. You know, she
talks about the twins all the time. I understand that,
and it does create maybe a level of security but
(17:27):
there's also a real terrifying element to this that somebody
that you no longer want to be domiciled with, obviously
you know, has the ability, that has access to the
technology and that can use it. Technology is great, man,
but I'll tell you what, buddy, it's really got a downside.
Speaker 2 (17:46):
So those track of things you mentioned actually have done
a couple of stories on this with Nancy about you know,
people using those in a bar situation, driving in at first,
things like that to a track of woman's movements, and
there are ways for you to protect yourself about it.
If you don't know what we're talking about, please look
it up. There are ways to protect yourself from somebody
unknowingly tagging you like that, and you can prevent it
(18:08):
from happening to you. So now, with regard to her
having this tracking device on her vehicle, they were able
to trace it back to her husband, her ex husband,
David Hernandez, probably by purchasing it online. They're not cheap.
We'll get into that over the next couple of days.
I can tell you that I'll be looking it up.
Some of the rest of you will as well, because
(18:28):
it is not just spooky, it's dangerous. So as they're
investigating it, Joe, they're putting these things together. I mean,
we've talked about how the person you're closest to is
the first suspect and it goes out from there. And
in this case, you have a soon to be ex
husband in estranged situation and he has been showing a
(18:51):
number of behaviors that are very worrisome to probably her friends,
other members that she worked with, things like that. So
police have their hands full right away with who they're
looking at as possible suspects. But again, it was a
scene that had been staged. You know what a scene
looks like when you go to it, Joe as a
(19:11):
death investigator. Police know what a robbery scene looks like,
and they know when something doesn't ring true. Correct, Yeah, yeah,
you do.
Speaker 1 (19:20):
And sometimes you'll see with the staging staging scenes, first off,
it's very difficult when somebody has got an open head
injury and they have obviously bled out, it's very difficult
to kind of mask that if you're the perpetrator. However,
when you have a true staged scene, you'll see many
(19:44):
times these kind of half hearted efforts to open drawers up,
maybe pull a few things out. That sort of thing.
It won't be the individual will not necessarily be all
in on it. Because when you think of like a
robbery or burglary that turned into you know, a murder,
robbery murder, when you see that at a scene when
(20:06):
it's true, you'll see all kinds of crap that's broken,
turned over, busted into a million pieces, where they're digging
for something and it looks like they're in a frenzy.
I've had several cases where you have people that are
in an addictive phase in their life and all they
want is to score. They just want to score whatever
dope that they're addicted to, and it will it looks
(20:28):
like a madman has gone through the house, and it's terrifying.
And there have been times I've worked these cases obviously
where there's somebody that's not i mean, who suspects this,
who expects it, you know, and you walk into your
home and there's this raving maniac in there, and they
kill you with a weapon of convenience. Most of the time,
(20:50):
but police can kind of understand, I think relative to staging,
one of the first things we're going to look for
is and you hear talk about it all the time
is is there evidence of forced entry at the scene,
Because forced entry implies that you had to gain access
where you were not allowed to be accessing an area
(21:12):
you had a key or maybe familiarity where you can
knock on the door and somebody's gonna let you in,
and so yeah, the police have a have a way
of doing that. But I gotta I gotta tell you,
David kind of kind of jumped ahead a little bit.
I wanted to. I had an idea that kind of
came to mind. You had mentioned a few moments ago
about the lilies that she is highly allergic to, and
(21:36):
both these individuals are also in the medical field. Now
just give me a little rope here, because I know
that this might this might run run a field, and
you know you but I'm really wondering here, if you
have knowledge that someone is specifically allergic to something and
you send it to them, are you holding out hope
(21:57):
that if they hold these things, if they have them
adjacent to them, they're going to have an anaphylactic event
where they begin to swell, their airway is going to
begin to close. You'll see their face turned red. And
interestingly enough, day people might laugh at that I actually
had a lady years and years ago that committed suicide
(22:19):
visa vis anaphylaxis, and you know how she accomplished it.
She was allergic to any kind of shellfish and she
went to a buffet with her husband and sat across
the table and just jammed her face with bail trimp
and he knew. He was like, what what are you doing?
You know, like this and before you knew it, she
(22:39):
you know, she didn't have an EpiPen. I don't even
think there was Bena drill handy, and you get to
that point. I don't know that Benadryla is going to
touch the situation. But she went into cardial respiratory arrest
right there and they ran a code and she died
at the hospital. And she had been suffering with depression
all that sort of thing. So this is interesting. It's
an interesting thought for me as an investor, Stiga, I
(23:01):
really want to know was he trying to weaponize lilies.
I think that that's a fascinating point along this because
if you have knowledge that she has a reaction to these,
is that what you're trying to do?
Speaker 2 (23:14):
That boggles my mind.
Speaker 1 (23:17):
I know, it's bizarre, isn't.
Speaker 2 (23:18):
It when I saw the death flower headline on this story. Yeah, okay,
that's kind of merterious. But I was thinking it was
one of those stinky flowers that when they open up,
they smell bad and when you feel like you're going
to die.
Speaker 1 (23:28):
Yeah, but I think those things. I think they weigh
like two tons open like every five years or something.
Speaker 2 (23:33):
That's that's what I was thinking. So is it like
feed me seymore in the basement.
Speaker 1 (23:37):
No, And I'm not saying that lilies are fatal, but
any kind of allergic reaction that you can have to anything,
I don't. You know, I wonder if.
Speaker 2 (23:46):
Neither of us are lawyers or anything else. But it
makes you wonder if you know somebody is allergic to
something and you tried to get it in their face
to cause them pain and you know whatever. I wonder
if there is not an assault charge waiting it's happened.
Speaker 1 (24:01):
Hey, That's exactly what I was thinking about, because if
you have four knowledge and listen, it's hard. You know,
when you get into the realm of medicine, when you're
certified a registered nurse, you understand allergic reactions, and then
on top of that, you're domiciled with this person. You're
married to them, You're going to know that intimate detail
so much to the point that this individual may have
(24:25):
chosen to send it. I don't know. Maybe he thought
that she liked lily's. But I got to tell you,
if I was a betting man and I'm working this
case and she's got a history of allergic reactions to
these flowers, I think that it would be something worth
kind of digging into and anything else. I'm very curious
about this case, which, by the way, at this point
(24:46):
time has not been adjudicated. This is a recent case,
so this man is innocent until proven guilty. But I'd
have to think if I were in the middle of
this thing working it, I don't want to know if
he had ever made any other kind of efforts harming
her anyway. It's almost like kind of a passive intimidation tactic.
You know, you can imagine what she thought when she
(25:08):
received these, Wow, I've got flowers. Oh no, they're lilies.
It's so bizarre. But you know that at the end
of the day, that's that's not what it came down to.
But I really wonder, Dave, I really wonder if those
lilies we're not a portent of something far more sinister
(25:29):
and evil. Investigations are. They're not instantaneous. It's not like
(25:52):
you've got a bowl of ramen and you pour hot
water in it and suddenly you've got a meal. It's
not like that. It's not instantaneous. Really good investigations take
a period of time because they're so intricate. I like
to compare them in my mind always envision them as spiderwebs,
and you've got all this directionality, you know, that kind
(26:13):
of go and it intersects with these things. And when
you get that vision in your mind, it's actually helped me,
believe it or not, when I can kind of sexualize
or compartmentalize investigations because I know what my role is
in the investigation. I don't have anything else most of
the time to do with anybody else's roles. So I
think that that's a valuable thing to keep in mind.
But Dave, you were telling me that in mister Nandez's
(26:37):
death that it took a little bit of time before
they finally settled on a suspect.
Speaker 2 (26:43):
Well, they had to figure out, they had to figure
out what happened. They know they have a dead forty
five year old woman who was beaten to death. They
know the weapon was that there was a blunt forest
instrument and a sharp edged instrument. So they're trying to
put all this together, and you know, they probably had
their eyes on this soon to be x just because
(27:05):
they were able to uncover fairly quickly what he had
been doing in terms of stalking and the police actually
terms of that he had been stalking. And again, this
isn'tn allegation. Now this is a current case, and everyone
is innocent until they're proven guilty in the court of law.
But in this particular case, they were able to build
(27:26):
enough evidence over a couple of weeks to realize that, yes,
this David Hernandez is our suspect. But that was through
just regular police work. And there was one thing that
they know, Where's where is the instrument of death? Where
is this object that we're looking for. They kind of
thought it was a hammer, They kind of were leaning
(27:46):
that way, but they couldn't figure out, couldn't find it.
It was about a month into the investigation when investigators
were able to get surveillance footage of La Paza train
and I always thought, like I'm mispronouncing that no, okay.
And I'm sure they were trying to figure out path
(28:08):
of movement and things like that of where an individual
would go. But in this particular case, a month into
the investigation, they get video surveillance video that is around
Lake ponsa train and they saw David Hernandez pull over
on the causeway and they actually said they saw him.
(28:31):
This is what the Jimmy Travis is the chief operating
officer and the Sheriff's office there, and he said, you
can see objects being thrown from the car. You see
it hit the water splashing, So they know he's thrown
something big enough and heavy enough to create that type
(28:54):
of reaction in the water. So what do you think
they did? They called out the dive team up and
they put divers in the water, and all I could
think of, Joe, I bet anybody driving along the causeway
there wanting to throw something would not consider they were
on surreulance camera. I wouldn't think it.
Speaker 1 (29:16):
They wouldn't. And first off, we're talking about literally the
world's longest bridge, and that's the Causeway bridge over Lake
Pontchraff spent unfortunately, more time on that bridge over the
course of my career when I was with the Jefferson
Parish Corners Office. And is it wide, Joe, Oh, really,
(29:36):
it's four lanes. It's four lanes. You have two lanes
southbound and two lanes northbound, and it has guardrails. My
family has a long history with Lake post Train. Matter
of fact, my ancestors and my ancestors actually opened the
very first ferry that ever went across Lake Pontch Train
(29:57):
in the late seventeen hundreds. They were bringing wood. There
was no other way to get to New Orleans other
than coming up the Mississippi River or down the Mississippi
River from Baton Rouge, or coming up through the Gulf
and through the marshes. And so my ancestors built one
of the first ferries, Killian's Ferry. And there's a little
village on Lake Pontrain called Killian is Wow. And so.
Speaker 2 (30:22):
I'm gonna have to go there and say, y'all know, Joe.
Speaker 1 (30:25):
No, they will not. And so and I love Pontcetrain.
I fished on Potch Train and here's something unique about it.
And I know a lot of our our friends out
there have have certainly visited it over the years, and
people love to drive on the causeway to say that
they've been on the world's long spriadge, like just over
twenty three miles in length. It takes a lot.
Speaker 2 (30:44):
Goodness, I didn't know it was that long.
Speaker 1 (30:46):
Yeah, there's certain points where you can't see either shore.
Speaker 2 (30:50):
But you just see water.
Speaker 1 (30:52):
You see water, yeah, and then eventually you'll see land,
you know, on the north shore, you know, kind of
poking up and and everything's flat. Obviously, it's not like
there's any hills surrounding Lake pots Train everything. But here's
something interesting about Lake Pontcha Train. Lake Potchtrain is is
actually an estuary, and it's one of the largest estuaries
(31:14):
in the world, and that it is a lake. They
call it a lake, but it's it comes off of
the Gulf of Mexico and the Mississippi River has an
influence on it too, and all the various tributaries. Lots
of life in this thing, and so you can actually
find out towards the gulf. You'll find more saltwater species
(31:36):
out there, redfish and speckled trout and all that sort
of thing. But you go go back to the west
and you can start catching things like crappie or as
the Cajun say, saku lea and largemouth bass and all
these sorts of things. And so you've got this environment.
And as big as that lake is, Dave, I'm gonna
(31:58):
throw some knowledge on you here real quick that you
might not have ever heard. Jennut Lake averages only thirteen
to fourteen feet in depth. Oh wow, as big as
this thing is because it's vast. I mean, it's not
like the size of Great Lakes, but it's vast, and
it's got a real muddy bottom. There is a central
area that's like sixty to sixty five feet and you
(32:20):
know what that is. That's a shipping channel that was
actually cut in there. And so naturally it's just it's
an estuary. It's not like a real deep You go
to the Great Lakes, you know, and you've got these
hundreds of feet of depth up there. It's not like that.
And so you have a hurricane that comes through there.
It's like the meteorologists and the hydrologists talk about, it's
(32:42):
like having water in a saucer and the wind blows
and it'll just blow water. That's one of the problems
you had with Katrina ponchtrain played a big role in
the flooding. But when here's the other thing about this
dive team, which I could never do diving claustrophobic, it
terrifies me. I've got a good buddy of mine, Bobby Chacone,
(33:03):
who is ran, who ran the FBI dive team, and
he he is a he's a beast. I mean he is.
He'll you know, he's he's done it all, he's seen
it all. It terrifies me. But you know, when you
get into poncha train, brother, you can't even see your
(33:24):
hand in front of your face, you know. So the
fact that they've got this Hernandez guy on video gives
him an idea of where to start. And also they
did this recovery in Jefferson Parish, so he traveled through
a couple of parishes and on the bridge in order
(33:46):
to facilitate this. And the fact that he did it
out there is amazing because you have what are called
the Causeway Bridge Police, and literally all these people do
is police the bridge. They run radar there always out there.
So that gives you an idea of how emboldened he was,
how confident he was. And there is no room to
(34:07):
pass on this thing, man, no room to pass. You
would have to put your flashes on and say a
Hail Mary and go out there and hope that you're
not going to get crushed, and go out there quick
enough to drop it and then scoot back to your
vehicle and start heading in the opposite direction. And that's
(34:29):
the other thing. You start heading in the opposite direction.
You got to find a place to turn around. Dude.
Speaker 2 (34:34):
Let me tell you this though, Joe. Yeah, he stayed
in his car. He stayed in his car and tossed
the items from the car.
Speaker 1 (34:44):
Well, that's that's an interesting, interesting point that he didn't
get out, And I wonder if he actually came to
a full stop to do it.
Speaker 2 (34:51):
Well, you know, I'm wondering the same thing. That's why
I was curious, because I don't know. I'm trying to
visualize this, and I can't figure out how wide the
bridge is. So we're not talking about a wide area.
Speaker 1 (35:01):
No, no, no, no, So we are.
Speaker 2 (35:03):
Time he stayed in the car, I'm guessing he just
thought I'm gonna do it right here and just out
the door, you go out the window.
Speaker 1 (35:12):
Yeah, and he obviously didn't do it in the shipping channel,
which the causeway has got this big hump. It looks
like a camel just rising up. It's this gigantic hump
that's right in the center of it. And that's so
that larger ships can get through that thing and stay
in the channel, can stay in the shipping channel. Now,
he may have had a better shot of them not
(35:34):
being able to recover this thing if he had stopped
on top of that. But the problem was stopping and
he knows this. The problem was stopping on the top.
There are two towers up there and they look like
I remember when I was a little kid, and I
see them. They look like air control towers, you know,
with the glass that goes all the way around it,
(35:55):
so that these guys that are in there can see
it for miles. You can see the landscape or the
water skate for miles and miles around. They've got ships
that are incoming and all that sort of thing. And
so you know, you're damned if you do. You're damn
if you don't. If he goes to that portion right there,
he might hit the shipping channel where this thing's going
(36:15):
to go down to a depth of you know, sixty
maybe seventy feet I don't know, and settle down in
that mud. But they caught it soon enough so that
these poor souls on this dive team had to go
down there. And when I tell you this is like,
this is hero stuff to me because it's something I
couldn't do. When they're down underwater, they're literally feeling around
(36:40):
with their hands, and trust me, there's more than an
item that this guy throughout over the edge of that bridge.
Lord only knows what you can find down there. I
see all these kids on YouTube nowadays and they do
the magnet fishing. Have you seen this where there's TSSA
And it's pretty fascinating see what they come up with.
(37:00):
And sometimes they come up with with weapons involved in
all the sides. But you know, there's it's a heavily
traveled road. It's and you think that anything that you
that you toss over is gone forever and ever. Amen,
And that ain't necessarily the case. And what did they
wind up finding to David.
Speaker 2 (37:19):
They found exactly what you were talking about earlier, on
a large hammer. Now the they pointed out that because
it was on video, that's what the sheriff actually says
he thought he was throwing away these items someplace that
they would be gone forever, never realizing that the area
he was in, he was in video surveillance while he
(37:43):
was doing it, so they knew exactly where he was
on the bridge when he threw the objects in, and
they were because they saw the splash. They knew where
it entered the water. Now, finding a hammer, a large hammer,
gonna have some weight on it. It's not going to
drift a whole lot. I don't know how the current moves,
but I'm guessing it's probably not moving a whole lot.
Speaker 1 (38:06):
No, and then and then once it like I said,
once it goes, once it starts to drift down, it's
going it's going to land in this silt, right and
once it gets embedded in that silt, it ain't going
to where as a matter of fact, on another interesting point,
down on the far end of the lake, the western end,
(38:31):
there is an entire I might be wrong. I think
it's an entire seven O seven that is beneath the
water there. And it is. When I say beneath the water,
it took off from what used it's Huey P. Long.
It's actually the Louis Armstrong Airport now it's what it's called.
It used to be called Moison plane took off in
(38:53):
nineteen sixty five, went off the end of that northern
runway and just nosedived right into the lake. And I
don't know that they ever recovered all of the bodies
out of there, and that plane is still there and
it's buried in that silt, and so that's how sticky
this thing is. So the fact that they did recover
it is quite amazing to me. I'm fascinated, but I
(39:17):
think that look, you know, David Hernandez has only been charged.
He remains innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.
But just so we understand, Lisa Hernandez God rest her
soul has her final fatal diagnosis was blunt force instrument
(39:43):
and sharp force instrument related death. And David Hernandez was
actually charged with the second Grey murder and obstruction of justice.
I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is Body Backs
Host
Joseph Scott Morgan
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