February 29, 2024 • 44 mins
A Minnesota man claims his mistress fatally shot herself with his gun. The question of Murder or Suicide plays out in this episode of Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan. Joe will walk you through all of the forensic problems with the story being told. And when everything is said and done, you decide, was it murder, or suicide?
Transcript Highlights
00:01:20 Would a right-handed person use left hand to shoot
00:02:19 Discuss murder or suicide
00:04:15 Talk about “accidental”
00:05:51Discuss science and determination
00:11:16 How quick does a body become stiff
00:13:50 Different jurisdictions
00:18:25 Talk about the scene
00:21:40 Difference in suicide among genders
00:26:27Discuss drying blood
00:29:31Discuss ER Nurse can’t do CPR
00:33:14 Talk about short timeline
00:38:50 Discuss can you wash away evidence?
00:41:36 Talk about skin, brain, muzzle flash
00:44:14 Discuss desire to help people and achieve and throw it all away
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:08):
Bodybacks with Joseph Scott Morgan. I've heard it said before
that the more brilliant people you get into a room,
the more confusing things become. And that's the case sometimes
(00:35):
in forensic pathology as well, because everybody, you know, forensic
pathologists are no different than any of the rest of
us in that they all have their own opinions, which
is good, but sometimes things can be kind of murky
(00:56):
or confusing. And in our case here that we're going
to talk about, there is a bit of confusion about
a ruling relative to a death. But one thing is
(01:16):
for certain. Alexandra alex Pennig, who's thirty two years old,
sustained a gunshot wound to her head, and we do
know that she didn't survive it. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan,
and this is body bags. They you know sometimes you
(01:42):
and I I know this. You're the guru. You're the
guru when it comes to all things audio and production
and all these sorts of things. And I got to
tell you, I'm glad that there's not two of us
that are brilliant because you can help me walk through
these with problems with little or no concern. I know
(02:03):
that the content that we put out is going to
sound good most of the time, I think, and it's
because you're you're the you're the bright one when it
comes to all of that. You can help walk through
technical problems. But sometimes, such as in this case today,
it's it's hard to make heads or tails of things.
(02:25):
And I think that sometimes we just throw our hands
up and say, well, I can't call it anything other
than what it is, and that is undetermined. And that's
what we're left with here.
Speaker 2 (02:36):
I don't understand how that's possible. What does it really
mean when manner of death is undetermined? Now, just so
you know, today we're dealing with murder or suicide the
death of Alexandra Pinnick. She preferred to go by alex
thirty two years old. She has a gunshot to the head.
(02:58):
Boyfriend claims he grabbed his gun, ran in the bathroom
and shot herself. Police listened to his side of the
story and it didn't match the facts as they could
see them in the earliest moments of the investigation, and
so it was left to the medical examiner to tell
them what happened. And the medical examiner and by the way,
(03:22):
when you have a prosecution. You know, the defense has
their own person to come in and say whatever the
defense needs to say.
Speaker 1 (03:28):
And in this case, oh well, if the defense has
enough money for it, right, Yeah, yeah, you got to
be clear about that. Should have been very clear. And
in this particular case, both of them, the prosecution, the
actual medical examiner and the one hired by the defense,
had the same thing. The manner of death is undetermined.
(03:49):
What does manner of death mean? Joseph Scott Morgan. Yeah, well,
there's only five to select from. And when it comes
too violent deaths regarding firearms, which is what we're going
to discuss, most of the time, it's going to fit
(04:10):
into one of one of those two categories. It's either
going to be homicide or suicide. Accidental is an outlier you.
As a matter of fact, most of the time it
has been my and in practice it was. If someone
told me that it was an accidental shooting, I'll say you,
(04:34):
you have to clearly explain this to me how this
was an accident before I'm going to bite on that.
Because those are a rarity when you compare it to
the number of suicides we have in this country, because
they outpaced homicides fire Oh yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2 (04:53):
Firearm death suicide outpaces homicide.
Speaker 1 (04:57):
Oh yeah, wow, by boss quite quite a significant margin. Yeah. Well,
a lot of people, you know, possess firearms and they
see it as a quick and and powerful solution to
whatever is facing them in their lives. Uh. And so yeah,
(05:17):
you have that. If you throw up accident, then it
leaves me in a position where you're going to have
to explain that to me, or the data is going
to have to play itself out where the dynamic of
that event can be easily explained and we can prove
it scientifically. But you know, there's another choice here, and
that is undetermined. And I've always I've always had this
(05:44):
kind of vision in my mind where when it's written undetermined,
I always have this like little cartoon character that pops
up in my brain where you got you got them,
and they're looking at you and there's just kind of
shrugging their shoulders with their hands upturned, looking at you
like I don't have an answer to this. I don't know.
And in this particular case, that's what we're dealing with.
(06:07):
We're dealing with the case involving a gunshot wound to
the head. We can definitively say that, but the classification
of it has been left undetermined. I do know this.
I do know that the two people that are involved
in this case, the victim and the perpetrator, are both
(06:28):
healthcare providers. They're both nurses, and I think that probably
from the prosecution standpoint, the circumstantial evidence just didn't It
didn't hold water in this particular case because there's certain
things that you as an observer, based upon what you
(06:49):
know about people that practice medicine or work in allied health,
you expect them to behave under stressful search situations in
a very specific manner, and Dave, that didn't happen in
this case.
Speaker 2 (07:01):
You know, when we get into this actual story, I
want you to know the background, because the background follows through.
Speaker 1 (07:07):
We have.
Speaker 2 (07:09):
A number of people involved in this relationship. Alexandra, remember
Alexandra Penning. Alex Penning is thirty two and she is
the victim. She was dating Matthew Ecker. Matthew Ecker is
forty five, married with four children. Alex was also dating
(07:31):
another man and his name was Shane Anderson. On the
night in question, Alexandra had had an argument was Shane
earlier in the day about their relationship. Matthew Ecker comes
to the apartment and this is all up in Saint Paul, Minnesota.
(07:55):
Matthew Ecker lives hours away, but he got those two
be at the side of Alex while she's frustrated in
the relationship with Shane. And Matthew and Alex go out
for drinks that evening. When they come into this one place,
there is Shane Anderson with another woman. That causes Alex
(08:17):
to be very upset Matthew defending his girlfriend. See this
is where it gets confusing, Okay, but bottom line, Matthew
is with Alex, Shane Anderson is with another woman, and
Matthew actually confronts Shane and Shane hits him, probably says,
(08:39):
you're married, why are you talking to me? Get out,
you know, and hits him. Well, Shane Anderson and the
other woman leave. Matthew Ecker and Alex Penny stay at
the bar for another forty five minutes, having a couple
of drinks. Alex and Matthew go back to Alex's apartment
and this is the story that Matthew Ecker tells everybody.
(09:04):
They arrive at her apartment, she grabs a gun out
of his backpack and runs to the bathroom and shoots
herself in the head. He bashes through the door and
calls nine one one, tries to stop the bleeding by
holding his thumb to the bullet hole. I guess police
(09:25):
arrive a few minutes later, and she's already cold, stiff.
And I want to ask you about this, Joe, because
here's my question. Based on Matthew Ecker's story, how soon
does a body get cold and stiff? Based on his timeline,
(09:51):
he calls nine minutes after she shoots herself four minutes
police arrive five minutes later. So based on his timetable,
she gets shot at forty five to forty six in
the morning. At three oh five four police are there
and medics arrive and they declare her dead in the
(10:13):
space of nineteen minutes. I think, from shooting to declaring
her dead, and she's cold and stiff.
Speaker 1 (10:21):
Yeah, as it said, the old saying that dog don't hunt, okay,
And you know.
Speaker 2 (10:28):
So you know, Joe, I didn't know that. That's why
I'm asking because I think most of us don't know
how quickly does a body that is dead.
Speaker 1 (10:35):
Yeah, it takes it takes a well, a lot of
it is environmentally dependent. But in a course of let's
let's let's be generous here, let's say that it was
twenty minutes, if you still wouldn't have these presentations that
you're talking about physically with the deceased individual where they're
(10:56):
cool to the touch. And that's the best way I
can describe it, because you know, we do things like
body temperatures at scenes and depend upon the jurisdiction. There's
multiple ways that we can get in sometime about how
we take body temperatures on the dead. But you don't
expect in a twenty minute, a twenty minute time frame
(11:18):
for a body to be cold to the touch. And
look if he's talking about stiffening or rigidity, and generally
that's how we refer to it, and again rigidity of
the body. That means how that goes to Roger Mortis.
It takes even longer for Roger Mortis to set in.
(11:40):
So any investigator that knows what they're doing, they're out
on the scene, they're making that initial assessment and they're
trying to marry this up with what he is saying scientifically.
That's why I said this dog don't hunt, because you're
not going to have these manifestations that are occurring now.
Things are happening at a cellar level. As soon as
(12:01):
we die, we begin to change, all right, and it's
because cellular respiration has ceased, you'll begin production of lactic acid,
which is actually what creates riger mortis. If I tell
my students at Jacksonville State, I teach medical legal death investigation,
(12:21):
it's this class that I've taught for years. If you
ever not that anybody would, but if you ever want
to understand what Ryger mortis would feel like, don't work
out for a while. Go to the gym and get
a vigorous workout. In the next morning, when you wake
(12:42):
up and you're stiff, that's lactic acid that has built
up in your body. That's about as close as you'll
ever feel to what riger is. And that takes some time, though,
and you know that's happening at a cellular level, but
it's not happening this quick. There's no way. And that's
(13:04):
that's how we that's in investigations, that's how we test,
at least on my side of the house, that's how
we test an alibi. Okay, if somebody is trying to
alibi themselves, and say, well, this is what happened, this
is a time frame that it happened in, and this
is what I experienced at this moment, Tom And then
(13:24):
you're looking at what's left behind, all that remains, if
you will, we're the dead, and you know good and
well that what they're saying is not valid. And that's
the case here, Dave.
Speaker 2 (13:36):
And that's what I was really curious about, Joe when
in going over this story, knowing we had it on
our table, murder versus suicide. How quickly do the police
call you to come in when they have a scene
like this pretty quickly?
Speaker 1 (13:52):
And again it's jurisdictionally dependent. Okay, So but up in
if you think about the Twin Cities, if you think
about Minneapolis, Saint Paul, I was friends with the chief
investigator for Hennepon County for some time, dear lady, who
was at the top of her game. She was a
former nurse and she was the chief investigator. And that's
(14:16):
a top flight office that they have in Hennepon County.
Their response would have been as soon as the police
have visualized the scene and they know that this person
is in fact deceased, they're going to say start the Emmy,
and they're going to say start CID and c IDEA
is a criminal investigation division, and start the crime scene unit.
(14:37):
So all three of us would essentially head out simultaneously
from our different offices. We'd show up pretty quickly, and
the sooner that we can get there to do the assessment,
the better, because the further you move down that timeline
away from when the actual event occurred, you're losing data.
And then it's the environment is producing other data that
(15:00):
might skew your conclusions. All right, So timeliness is a
huge factor in everything that we do. As a matter
of fact, I think our our entire existence is kind
of based upon we examined for trauma. But one of
the underpinnings of what we do is we're trying to
(15:22):
analyze time. We're trying to analyze a timeline and trying
to understand what is happening within a specific period there
and does it merry up with with the narrative that
we're being given. Dave, you got my head's women, man.
(15:57):
I often say, you need a what's that thing called
the playbill like they use for Broadway. You need to
play build to keep up with characters and a given.
And I'm thinking about Ecker, who is a married man
with four young'un's man four four, and he's involved in
(16:19):
an ongoing relationship with this young lady who's thirty two.
She's I don't know what, roughly twelve years younger than him,
which is fine. I mean, that's their thing. They can do,
you know. But yet he stated in an interview that
he had been involved for some time with her and
that they I think for two years, and that they
were involved, they had an open relationship. Well, it seems
(16:43):
like he's open is the key word here. I mean
he's open to a lot of things, and it has
not It's not turned out well on either end of
the spectrum here for him and certainly for Alex, who's now.
Speaker 2 (17:00):
I don't know what was going on in the relationship
because Alex is dead. What we only have what we
have left. Just like his story, we have Matthew Ecker's
story of what he says happened, and by the way,
according to police, his story changed. We can kind of
understand the relationship dynamics and that Alex at thirty two
(17:25):
and a nurse involved with an older, married guy. We
don't know if Matthew Ecker's wife knew of the relationship before,
but we know that she did divorce him when this
came out. I don't know Shane Anderson. I didn't want
to mention his name, but I had to mention his
name because as part of the story, you know, there
(17:48):
was something going on here that caused or seems to
have caused Alex to be upset. And the part that
I have the most questions about is what happened when
they got back to the apartment. Because Matthew Ecker's story,
(18:09):
and this is why I'm asking you, Joe, about how
soon a person does get cold and stiff, because these
are professional Matthew Ecker is a professional nurse. He's a
nurse practitioner. He works in the emergency room. This is
not his first, you know, bullet wound he's ever seen.
I'm gonna assume no, no, it's not. And the story
(18:31):
he tells you just say that dog won't hunt. So
let's go over this really quickly. Because when police found Alex,
she's laying on the floor of the bathroom. Her legs
are straddling the door her the gun is placed on
(18:52):
her chest. I say placed for a reason, and her
hands are near it. By the way, Alex is right handed,
but the shut the bullet wound was on the left
side of her head.
Speaker 1 (19:05):
Yeah, gs w to the left side, all right.
Speaker 2 (19:07):
Now, while nothing is impossible, you know it does. Have
you known of a case where somebody who was right
hand dominant to shoot themselves on the left side of
the head?
Speaker 1 (19:20):
No?
Speaker 2 (19:21):
Do women usually shoot themselves in the head of the heart?
Speaker 1 (19:24):
Goo?
Speaker 2 (19:24):
Uh?
Speaker 1 (19:25):
Yeah that well, let's let's go with the first one first. Uh,
the first one first. I like that. So if they
do change hands, it is a it's an outlier. It's
not something you would come because it's like picking up
a pencil. It's like picking up a golf club or
(19:46):
picking up a baseball bat, or picking up your knife
and fork. You're going to use your dominant hand. Now.
I don't know how much experience Alex had had with
a weapon, but one of the questions we always ask
Dave when doing a suicide investigation, which suicide investigations are.
First off, I've always felt as though, from me, the
(20:07):
suicide investigations are much more difficult than homicide investigations because
most of the time you don't have a witness to it,
and so you're having to draw these conclusions based upon
what science is telling you. But when we begin to
interview their their intimates, their peripherals, you know, in their life,
will say, well, this is a apparent suicide. Maybe they
(20:29):
left a note, who knows. But was there an indication
that they were they ambidextrius? Did they could they use
both hands or were they left or right hand dominant?
And you would expect that if your right hand dominant,
that the gunshot wound would be would be on that
(20:54):
dependent side, and in this case it wasn't on the
left hand side. Now to this question about about do
women shoot themselves in the head, if we were having
this discussion, let's see, if we were having this discussion
in the early eighties, I would say that, you know,
(21:17):
you you rarely have ever seen that. But you know, Dave,
as my career.
Speaker 2 (21:21):
Progressed, rarely have ever seen a headshunt.
Speaker 1 (21:24):
Yeah, with with females. And people say that there's data
that backs us up. Maybe there is. But as my
career progressed, I began to see more and more cases
of females that would in their lives much like men
(21:47):
did that you know, i'd have mentor oil, gunshot woes,
gunshot womans to the side of the head, you know,
those sorts of things. I think that there was this uh,
this uh thesis is kind of put forward in our
field where it says that, you know, because of appearance,
that women were not inclined to shoot themselves in the head.
(22:10):
I gotta be honest with you, I don't ever remember
a self inflicted gunshot wound by a female where they
shot themselves in the abdomen. I think I had a
couple in the chest, but I'd say that I probably
had more headshots self inflicted with women than I did
(22:32):
any other location. So I don't I just don't. I
don't buy into it that that that that idea. Do
men and women take their lives in a variety of
different ways, Yeah, they do. And I don't know if
that's gender dependent or not, but it's it's one of
those things that floats around and get asked that question
(22:53):
a lot, you know, over the years, I've been asked
that question. But that she had a gunshot one to
the head and they were thinking it might be suicide,
at least it wouldn't be surprising. I don't think to
anybody that was out there that would be working the scene.
But here's the thing that's really shocking about this. Let's
go back to what you said about Eckert. Not only
(23:16):
is he a nurse practitioner, Dave, he's working. He's working
as a nurse practitioner in an emergency room setting, and
let's face it, a major metropolitan area. He's gonna see trauma, Dave.
And I got to tell you, I worked as an
ear tech for a number of years in college, and
(23:37):
in that environment, if you have gunshot wounds that come in,
knife wounds, that sort of thing, you're gonna get blood
on you. You're gonna have it on you. I mean,
that's the nature of what you do. You can put
on gloves, but you'll even get blood up up above
your wrist, onto your elbows, those sorts of things. You'll
get blood if you're wearing scrubs, which everybody does. That's
(24:00):
why you wear scrubs because they used to be almost disposable.
You know, you would get bloodstains on you. You could go
to closet, get a fresh pair and change out. So
you would expect him if he is he allegedly attempted
to stem the bleeding by placing his hand or his
(24:23):
finger over the defect in her head to stem the bleeding, Dave,
if that were the case. If that were the case,
he would have blood all over his hands. There's a
high probability that she probably clipped cerebral artery in there,
so it's going to be pumping blood out. It could
spray onto him. There's really no trace evidence of blood
(24:44):
on him, so I think that that's really making the
cops question what's going on.
Speaker 2 (24:49):
He actually claims that he washed up now just to
Ecker claims that when he opens the bathroom door and
sees Alex, she shut herself in the head. He claims
he tried to stop the bleeding short of that before
(25:09):
he calls nine one one to report what has just
taken place. He took the time to wash himself up,
and he tells police he did it in the bathroom
sink and he washed with soap. He then calls nine
one one, and he says he called nine one one
within four minutes of the shot. So you've got him
coming to the bathroom finding his girlfriend on the bathroom
(25:32):
floor with a gunshot wounded the head. He then removes
the gun. He takes the gun and puts it in
a suitcase. Then he comes back in after trying to
save her life, washes up using soap and water, and
apparently cleans the gun as well, because he then places
the gun on her chest and calls nine one one.
Police arrived minutes later, and the first thing they notice
(25:55):
he has no blood on him and the gun is
remarkably clean. Yeah, despite the nature of this scene, the
gun is scrubbed clean. The fact that he uses soap
and water on his hands to ostensibly clean up blood
like that would be the worry at that point, particular moment.
Speaker 1 (26:13):
Yeah, its nose and the.
Speaker 2 (26:15):
Bathroom sink is dry. The bathroom sink is dry, but
he tells them he just used it to wash his hands.
By the way, blood on the floor of the bathroom
is drying already.
Speaker 1 (26:25):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (26:27):
I wonder how long it takes at it seen.
Speaker 1 (26:29):
Yeah, it takes, it takes it takes uh, it takes
a while. I'll put it to you that way again.
I hate to kind of weasel out of the question,
but it's going to be environmentally dependent, and it's going
to be dependent upon the surface in the bathroom. Are
the carpets in there. Is it a tile? Uh? You
know what, what's the temperature inside of the room, what's
(26:53):
temperature of the floor. That's going to promote this because
you know, when you get drying blood, uh, you're you're
at that point time. And when I say drying blood,
I'm talking about dry blood that's that's beginning to to
flake or it has the appearance that it doesn't have.
(27:13):
Let's see that the tension of the blood surface itself
has diminished to the point where it's almost at the
same level as the floor that it's on or the
surface that it's on. It it's it's lost all of
that and it's beginning to almost look like paint. That
takes that takes some amount of time. I'm thinking, I'm
(27:37):
thinking beyond an hour, I would I would think, And
it's really hard to judge that. But you know, here
here's another thing with the weapon. And by the way,
this is kind of interesting. He was a licensed firearms carrier.
He had to carry permit, and he had kept this weapon.
(27:59):
According to him in his book back which you'll see
a lot of nurses that are coming in on the
hospital that carry book bags. They almost look like students
and they you know, they've got extra changes of clothes
in there, their whatnot, you know, is carried around and there.
He carried his weapon in there and she Alex, according
(28:19):
to him, went she had an awareness of the weapon
that he had one before she went into the bathroom.
She went into his bag and retrieved this weapon. She
knew it was there and went into the bathroom.
Speaker 2 (28:29):
And showed it to him. Okay, she grabs it and
according to Ecker, she point has the gun in her
hand and she is walking backwards, telling him don't come
any closer. I'll shoot myself, and backs herself into the bathroom,
then shuts the door, and he says, within two seconds
of the door shutting, here's the gun. Go off, opens
the door and finds her. That's why this timetable is
very important to the whole story, because from the moment
(28:51):
he calls nine to one one to the minute cops arrive,
it's a very short window, very very short. There's something
else that goes into this too. According to the story
Ecker told police, you know, he moves the gun and
put he again. He moves the gun, puts it in
a bag, then brings it back in places on our chest.
(29:13):
He says he tried to save her life, that she
was breathing when he first got there. He tries to
stop the flow of blood, but they asked him, did
you perform CPR? Again, going back to the blood that
would be everywhere, and he says, no, I did not
do CPR because I didn't know what to do. How
does a nurse practitioner working in an emergency room not
(29:35):
know how to do CPR?
Speaker 1 (29:38):
You can't. But and that's that's that's what's so odd
about this. In order to work in an emergency room
or if you're going to be let's say, if you're
going to work in ic ICU or one of these
places critical care units like this, you you have to
be certified in advanced life So and first off, CPR
(30:03):
is is that's the bottom line. I mean, these people
go through such training. I mean nurses are you know,
are the life blood of a hospital. You think about doctors,
forget it. It's the nurses that run the show and
they control everything that's there, and they are trained and
you're not trained. If you can't keep up in that environment,
(30:24):
you can find another job somewhere because they got other
people that'll take your job. Really quick that are proficient
at what they do. This guy would have had to
have been certified in advanced life support and he would
have understood the principles behind CPR. And here's another thing.
If he had done compressions on her at the scene,
did you know that with a gunshot wound to the head,
(30:47):
one of the things that also happens is you'll get
this fracturing of the skull. Obviously, because you're creating, you know,
you're cavitating the cranial vault, and you've got these fractures
that go on the victim as you're doing compressions, you'll
actually get blood from the nose, the mouth, not to
mention the defect in the head. So yeah, it would
be a bloody mess. I wonder if he had an
(31:10):
awareness of that as well. I'm not so much concerned
about the absence of blood on his hands, Dave. What
I'm really interested in, since he's saying that this is
in fact a self inflicted gunshot woman, was there no
blood on her hands? Well, it looks like they've got
(31:49):
quite the conundrum here, don't they. You've got a guy
that I would imagine, in the face of questioning the
local PD he ain't doing so well. And but yet
you've got a a young lady and will go ahead
(32:09):
and say it plainly because it's it's already out there.
She's got she's got some real emotional issues. I mean,
she's you know, fought anxiety, depression, all these sorts of things.
As a matter of fact, Ecker has been providing her
with with Benzo's for anxiety, and he's also been providing
(32:32):
her with adderall kind of mood stabilizing. And so you, uh,
you think about that, she's got all this dynamic going
on with her, and you listen, you have to consider
that that maybe taking her own life is on the table.
As far as an investigator, you have to be able
to take all of that in consideration. Uh, that would
(32:55):
do that? Would it would behoove you as an investigator
to go back and dig into her past. If she's
under therapy, if she's receiving therapy, you'd want to question
the individual that's providing her therapy. And then you got
to talk to her friends. You got to talk to
her family members that might you know, she may have
confided in that sort of thing. It's not just talking
(33:16):
to Ecker or to this other fellow that she's involved
in a relationship with. This is on its surface, this
seems like a very simple case. But it's like I said,
cases like this are very very complex.
Speaker 2 (33:32):
Well, the physical evidence, taking away the psychology and everything else,
just the physical evidence alone, the scene of the crime,
the scene of the incident. Yeah, was it murder or suicide?
One of the handgun didn't have blood on it. Now,
if she takes her own life, she's right handed, but
she shoots the gun with her left hand and the
left side of her head. But police get there minutes later.
(33:54):
By the way back to the timetable, the phone call
to nine one one was made at two point fifty am,
and Matthew Ecker claims that he called nine to one
one four minutes after she shot herself. Police arrive and
she is declared dead by medical professionals. MS workers are
there and she's declared dead at three h four am.
(34:16):
So from the time he called, the time he calls,
to the time they're there and declared dead is fourteen minutes.
Add another four minutes from the time he says she
shot herself, and you have eighteen minutes from gunshot to
declared dead at the scene of the crime you mentioned,
Why are her hands not bloody? What is the test
that is done by medical experts to determine whether or
(34:37):
not somebody has fired a gun?
Speaker 1 (34:39):
Yeah, yeah, it's a gunshot residue test. It's there are
three major components in in in firearms, in the actual
process of kind of lighting the fuse on a projectile.
All right, So when if you just imagine, if you'll
(35:03):
just imagine in your mind that when you initiate the
firing sequence with any kind of firearm, when you pull
that trigger, okay, and that firing pin or the hammer
slams forward onto the base of that live round, you
(35:23):
have got a primer cap. And the primer itself is
a bit more unstable chemically, that is is it doesn't
take much to set it off, which is what you want,
because there's like a little cap. If you look at
the end of a live round, there's a little cap
(35:44):
in the end of it, and it's called a primer
cap that's tapped off. And when that's tapped off, it
creates an explosion, all right, And that explosion sparks up
through what are referred to as flash holes, and within
the flat holes, the it ignites what's referred to as
the propellant that's contained within the cartridge itself, that's the gunpowder.
(36:10):
So when you do when you do a GSR test,
you're looking for antimony, barium, and also lead those three components,
and primer residue is a bit different than that. So
you can get an idea that if it's if it's
(36:31):
primer residue that you're looking for, perhaps it it you
would expect to find it on a hand, all right,
that's where it's. It's kind of got a c clamp
on the on the grip of the pistol in this case,
and then you'll find the rest the remaining elements there
that kind of shower down out of this cloud you know,
(36:53):
you see the gun smoke, you know, cloud that comes
out and it's kind of showering down. We try to
do That's one of the reasons. Like at the scene,
and I would imagine in this particular scene, at this
particular scene, rather they would have bagged her hands at
the scene, that's what we would do, okay. And the
reason is is that when you place her body into
(37:16):
a body bag, sometimes the bags can sweat and you
have to protect those hands because you're going to do
a GSR test on the victim at the morgue, and
we have series of swabs that we go through and
that's sent off to the state crime lab and you
can test to see if she's recently fired a weapon.
(37:36):
The trick is I wonder. I wonder if the police
at that moment in time, based upon how unsteady his
story was. I wonder if they said, Okay, we need
to do a GSR test on you, and I wonder
if he submitted to that, if they actually did one,
(37:57):
because right now at this point, we don't know if
they did that. There's no indication that that that that
has necessarily come up. Not saying it didn't happen, but
it's one of the things that you would do in
a case like this, particularly where you're questioning the tomeline
about how everything went down and it keeps getting marked
(38:18):
because you you stated Dave that he changed his story
a couple of times, and for me, that's that's a
huge red flag. Well because if you're so, yeah, go ahead.
Speaker 2 (38:28):
The soap and water, he claims because they noticed a man.
You said you tried to save her life, but there's
no blood on you and the gun is incredibly clean. Uh,
he is the can you wash away like the GRS
test the gun residue? Did I say that?
Speaker 1 (38:42):
Right?
Speaker 2 (38:42):
GRS?
Speaker 1 (38:43):
It's GSR, but YESR anyway, but they're going to test
it if you wash your hands with soap and water. Huh,
can you wash away that residue so that you do
a test on me? And it's like, I'm sorry, man,
it's just soap and water. I had to clean up
the blood. It's my gun. I touched the gun. I mean,
is there a way that he now can explain any
kind of residue on his hands, but I use something
(39:04):
water to clean them. I mean yeah, And just because
you have, just because you have these results, First off,
GSR tests are not fool for if people think that
they are, they're not. They're not.
Speaker 2 (39:19):
And so that's why they're not putting a whole lot
of heat on that. All right, Yeah, Yeah, that explains
that I wondered, Joe. I didn't know.
Speaker 1 (39:25):
I'm not going to say that GSR is in the
same realm as like a polygraph. Okay, it's not like that,
but you're not necessarily you know, they did one study
years ago with people that worked in what was it.
They worked in munitions factories and they would randomly test
people with GSR in those environments and they would come
(39:46):
back with negative results. And these people have been handling munitions,
you know, for days and days, and I always found
that that kind of interesting. They put a lot of
weight on these tests. But you know, I don't I
don't necessarily think that GSR is required in this case
because he's he's kind of betraying, you know, the original narrative.
(40:13):
Here's he keeps deviating from the story. And that's a
circumstantial in circumstantial evidence. But still he's the only witness
to all of this. He was an ear witness to
you know, any kind of statements. He certainly saw what
happened that evening, and I guess you know, you begin
to think about, well, what would be his motivation to
(40:35):
do this to her? Why? Why would he take her life?
And you think about maybe it all came to a
head that night in the bar where he gets into
this tete a tet with this other man in her life.
He's he's married, he's got four kids. Maybe he had
this moment in time where he's like, what am I doing?
(40:55):
And the only way that he can see to solve
this is perhaps taking her life. I don't know the
weapon itself, though, when you look at it, there's also
you know, they were talking about how clean it was.
Many times, not every case, but many times with self
inflicted gunshot wounds day you'll see evidence of what's referred
(41:17):
to as blowback on weapons, where you'll have blood that
will come back onto the surface of the weapon, and
if it's a close contact gunshot wound, which I really
want to get into here, you would have I've worked
cases where I've had skin, hair, brain matter in the
(41:39):
muzzle of the weapon where it blows back down the barrel.
You'll actually have that occur because you know that barrel
space is empty after that projectile. It happens in a flash,
but after that projectile exits the barrel, it cavitates into
the skull, and you've got this energy that's forcing backwards
(42:02):
towards the point of origin of this thing, and you'll
get this kind of distribution on the surface weapon. They're
not seeing that here, So I think that that's the
position that this puts the forensic pathologists, and I say
pathologist because we're plural. We've got two of them Dave,
we're talking about two uh too highly learned or learned.
(42:24):
I guess they say uh learned learned people here. They
are board certified forensic pathologists, and they both arrived at
the same conclusion. They can't say that this is either
a homicide a suicide. They can't say it's accidental. So
their default position here is it turns out to be
(42:45):
undetermined in this particular case. I find that quite fascinating.
Speaker 2 (42:52):
But it does end up going to court. Matthew Ecker
is charged, and it goes back to the reason I
was hitting the timeline so hard is because you really
are dealing with eighteen minutes from starting to finish on
her death. And his story did change. It didn't make sense.
He's a nurse practitioner working in an emergency room, didn't
(43:14):
perform CPR or do anything he knows to do. And
he was clean. The scene was clean, blood was drying.
There's nothing in the sink indicating anybody had washed anything
in the sink in the bathroom like he claimed. The
evidence didn't bear out his story, so he took it
to court. He was charged with her murder. It has
been adjudicated.
Speaker 1 (43:35):
Joe, what's our conclusion here, Dave is he now cool
in his heels in state penitentiary.
Speaker 2 (43:42):
Matthew Philip Becker, forty five years old. His wife did
divorce him, by the way. The father of four convicted
of the sole count of second degree intentional murder not
premeditated for shooting thirty two year old alex Xandra Lee
Pennig in the head December sixteenth, twenty twenty two.
Speaker 1 (44:05):
I've got to tell you, at the end of the day,
you think about you think about all of the effort
that went into living the lives that these people lived.
The desire to help people in healthcare, the desire to
get all of the education that's required, those hoops that
you have to jump through, and to throw it all away.
(44:28):
I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is Bodybacks
Bodybacks with Joseph Scott Morgan. I've heard it said before
that the more brilliant people you get into a room,
the more confusing things become. And that's the case sometimes
(00:35):
in forensic pathology as well, because everybody, you know, forensic
pathologists are no different than any of the rest of
us in that they all have their own opinions, which
is good, but sometimes things can be kind of murky
(00:56):
or confusing. And in our case here that we're going
to talk about, there is a bit of confusion about
a ruling relative to a death. But one thing is
(01:16):
for certain. Alexandra alex Pennig, who's thirty two years old,
sustained a gunshot wound to her head, and we do
know that she didn't survive it. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan,
and this is body bags. They you know sometimes you
(01:42):
and I I know this. You're the guru. You're the
guru when it comes to all things audio and production
and all these sorts of things. And I got to
tell you, I'm glad that there's not two of us
that are brilliant because you can help me walk through
these with problems with little or no concern. I know
(02:03):
that the content that we put out is going to
sound good most of the time, I think, and it's
because you're you're the you're the bright one when it
comes to all of that. You can help walk through
technical problems. But sometimes, such as in this case today,
it's it's hard to make heads or tails of things.
(02:25):
And I think that sometimes we just throw our hands
up and say, well, I can't call it anything other
than what it is, and that is undetermined. And that's
what we're left with here.
Speaker 2 (02:36):
I don't understand how that's possible. What does it really
mean when manner of death is undetermined? Now, just so
you know, today we're dealing with murder or suicide the
death of Alexandra Pinnick. She preferred to go by alex
thirty two years old. She has a gunshot to the head.
(02:58):
Boyfriend claims he grabbed his gun, ran in the bathroom
and shot herself. Police listened to his side of the
story and it didn't match the facts as they could
see them in the earliest moments of the investigation, and
so it was left to the medical examiner to tell
them what happened. And the medical examiner and by the way,
(03:22):
when you have a prosecution. You know, the defense has
their own person to come in and say whatever the
defense needs to say.
Speaker 1 (03:28):
And in this case, oh well, if the defense has
enough money for it, right, Yeah, yeah, you got to
be clear about that. Should have been very clear. And
in this particular case, both of them, the prosecution, the
actual medical examiner and the one hired by the defense,
had the same thing. The manner of death is undetermined.
(03:49):
What does manner of death mean? Joseph Scott Morgan. Yeah, well,
there's only five to select from. And when it comes
too violent deaths regarding firearms, which is what we're going
to discuss, most of the time, it's going to fit
(04:10):
into one of one of those two categories. It's either
going to be homicide or suicide. Accidental is an outlier you.
As a matter of fact, most of the time it
has been my and in practice it was. If someone
told me that it was an accidental shooting, I'll say you,
(04:34):
you have to clearly explain this to me how this
was an accident before I'm going to bite on that.
Because those are a rarity when you compare it to
the number of suicides we have in this country, because
they outpaced homicides fire Oh yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2 (04:53):
Firearm death suicide outpaces homicide.
Speaker 1 (04:57):
Oh yeah, wow, by boss quite quite a significant margin. Yeah. Well,
a lot of people, you know, possess firearms and they
see it as a quick and and powerful solution to
whatever is facing them in their lives. Uh. And so yeah,
(05:17):
you have that. If you throw up accident, then it
leaves me in a position where you're going to have
to explain that to me, or the data is going
to have to play itself out where the dynamic of
that event can be easily explained and we can prove
it scientifically. But you know, there's another choice here, and
that is undetermined. And I've always I've always had this
(05:44):
kind of vision in my mind where when it's written undetermined,
I always have this like little cartoon character that pops
up in my brain where you got you got them,
and they're looking at you and there's just kind of
shrugging their shoulders with their hands upturned, looking at you
like I don't have an answer to this. I don't know.
And in this particular case, that's what we're dealing with.
(06:07):
We're dealing with the case involving a gunshot wound to
the head. We can definitively say that, but the classification
of it has been left undetermined. I do know this.
I do know that the two people that are involved
in this case, the victim and the perpetrator, are both
(06:28):
healthcare providers. They're both nurses, and I think that probably
from the prosecution standpoint, the circumstantial evidence just didn't It
didn't hold water in this particular case because there's certain
things that you as an observer, based upon what you
(06:49):
know about people that practice medicine or work in allied health,
you expect them to behave under stressful search situations in
a very specific manner, and Dave, that didn't happen in
this case.
Speaker 2 (07:01):
You know, when we get into this actual story, I
want you to know the background, because the background follows through.
Speaker 1 (07:07):
We have.
Speaker 2 (07:09):
A number of people involved in this relationship. Alexandra, remember
Alexandra Penning. Alex Penning is thirty two and she is
the victim. She was dating Matthew Ecker. Matthew Ecker is
forty five, married with four children. Alex was also dating
(07:31):
another man and his name was Shane Anderson. On the
night in question, Alexandra had had an argument was Shane
earlier in the day about their relationship. Matthew Ecker comes
to the apartment and this is all up in Saint Paul, Minnesota.
(07:55):
Matthew Ecker lives hours away, but he got those two
be at the side of Alex while she's frustrated in
the relationship with Shane. And Matthew and Alex go out
for drinks that evening. When they come into this one place,
there is Shane Anderson with another woman. That causes Alex
(08:17):
to be very upset Matthew defending his girlfriend. See this
is where it gets confusing, Okay, but bottom line, Matthew
is with Alex, Shane Anderson is with another woman, and
Matthew actually confronts Shane and Shane hits him, probably says,
(08:39):
you're married, why are you talking to me? Get out,
you know, and hits him. Well, Shane Anderson and the
other woman leave. Matthew Ecker and Alex Penny stay at
the bar for another forty five minutes, having a couple
of drinks. Alex and Matthew go back to Alex's apartment
and this is the story that Matthew Ecker tells everybody.
(09:04):
They arrive at her apartment, she grabs a gun out
of his backpack and runs to the bathroom and shoots
herself in the head. He bashes through the door and
calls nine one one, tries to stop the bleeding by
holding his thumb to the bullet hole. I guess police
(09:25):
arrive a few minutes later, and she's already cold, stiff.
And I want to ask you about this, Joe, because
here's my question. Based on Matthew Ecker's story, how soon
does a body get cold and stiff? Based on his timeline,
(09:51):
he calls nine minutes after she shoots herself four minutes
police arrive five minutes later. So based on his timetable,
she gets shot at forty five to forty six in
the morning. At three oh five four police are there
and medics arrive and they declare her dead in the
(10:13):
space of nineteen minutes. I think, from shooting to declaring
her dead, and she's cold and stiff.
Speaker 1 (10:21):
Yeah, as it said, the old saying that dog don't hunt, okay,
And you know.
Speaker 2 (10:28):
So you know, Joe, I didn't know that. That's why
I'm asking because I think most of us don't know
how quickly does a body that is dead.
Speaker 1 (10:35):
Yeah, it takes it takes a well, a lot of
it is environmentally dependent. But in a course of let's
let's let's be generous here, let's say that it was
twenty minutes, if you still wouldn't have these presentations that
you're talking about physically with the deceased individual where they're
(10:56):
cool to the touch. And that's the best way I
can describe it, because you know, we do things like
body temperatures at scenes and depend upon the jurisdiction. There's
multiple ways that we can get in sometime about how
we take body temperatures on the dead. But you don't
expect in a twenty minute, a twenty minute time frame
(11:18):
for a body to be cold to the touch. And
look if he's talking about stiffening or rigidity, and generally
that's how we refer to it, and again rigidity of
the body. That means how that goes to Roger Mortis.
It takes even longer for Roger Mortis to set in.
(11:40):
So any investigator that knows what they're doing, they're out
on the scene, they're making that initial assessment and they're
trying to marry this up with what he is saying scientifically.
That's why I said this dog don't hunt, because you're
not going to have these manifestations that are occurring now.
Things are happening at a cellar level. As soon as
(12:01):
we die, we begin to change, all right, and it's
because cellular respiration has ceased, you'll begin production of lactic acid,
which is actually what creates riger mortis. If I tell
my students at Jacksonville State, I teach medical legal death investigation,
(12:21):
it's this class that I've taught for years. If you
ever not that anybody would, but if you ever want
to understand what Ryger mortis would feel like, don't work
out for a while. Go to the gym and get
a vigorous workout. In the next morning, when you wake
(12:42):
up and you're stiff, that's lactic acid that has built
up in your body. That's about as close as you'll
ever feel to what riger is. And that takes some time, though,
and you know that's happening at a cellular level, but
it's not happening this quick. There's no way. And that's
(13:04):
that's how we that's in investigations, that's how we test,
at least on my side of the house, that's how
we test an alibi. Okay, if somebody is trying to
alibi themselves, and say, well, this is what happened, this
is a time frame that it happened in, and this
is what I experienced at this moment, Tom And then
(13:24):
you're looking at what's left behind, all that remains, if
you will, we're the dead, and you know good and
well that what they're saying is not valid. And that's
the case here, Dave.
Speaker 2 (13:36):
And that's what I was really curious about, Joe when
in going over this story, knowing we had it on
our table, murder versus suicide. How quickly do the police
call you to come in when they have a scene
like this pretty quickly?
Speaker 1 (13:52):
And again it's jurisdictionally dependent. Okay, So but up in
if you think about the Twin Cities, if you think
about Minneapolis, Saint Paul, I was friends with the chief
investigator for Hennepon County for some time, dear lady, who
was at the top of her game. She was a
former nurse and she was the chief investigator. And that's
(14:16):
a top flight office that they have in Hennepon County.
Their response would have been as soon as the police
have visualized the scene and they know that this person
is in fact deceased, they're going to say start the Emmy,
and they're going to say start CID and c IDEA
is a criminal investigation division, and start the crime scene unit.
(14:37):
So all three of us would essentially head out simultaneously
from our different offices. We'd show up pretty quickly, and
the sooner that we can get there to do the assessment,
the better, because the further you move down that timeline
away from when the actual event occurred, you're losing data.
And then it's the environment is producing other data that
(15:00):
might skew your conclusions. All right, So timeliness is a
huge factor in everything that we do. As a matter
of fact, I think our our entire existence is kind
of based upon we examined for trauma. But one of
the underpinnings of what we do is we're trying to
(15:22):
analyze time. We're trying to analyze a timeline and trying
to understand what is happening within a specific period there
and does it merry up with with the narrative that
we're being given. Dave, you got my head's women, man.
(15:57):
I often say, you need a what's that thing called
the playbill like they use for Broadway. You need to
play build to keep up with characters and a given.
And I'm thinking about Ecker, who is a married man
with four young'un's man four four, and he's involved in
(16:19):
an ongoing relationship with this young lady who's thirty two.
She's I don't know what, roughly twelve years younger than him,
which is fine. I mean, that's their thing. They can do,
you know. But yet he stated in an interview that
he had been involved for some time with her and
that they I think for two years, and that they
were involved, they had an open relationship. Well, it seems
(16:43):
like he's open is the key word here. I mean
he's open to a lot of things, and it has
not It's not turned out well on either end of
the spectrum here for him and certainly for Alex, who's now.
Speaker 2 (17:00):
I don't know what was going on in the relationship
because Alex is dead. What we only have what we
have left. Just like his story, we have Matthew Ecker's
story of what he says happened, and by the way,
according to police, his story changed. We can kind of
understand the relationship dynamics and that Alex at thirty two
(17:25):
and a nurse involved with an older, married guy. We
don't know if Matthew Ecker's wife knew of the relationship before,
but we know that she did divorce him when this
came out. I don't know Shane Anderson. I didn't want
to mention his name, but I had to mention his
name because as part of the story, you know, there
(17:48):
was something going on here that caused or seems to
have caused Alex to be upset. And the part that
I have the most questions about is what happened when
they got back to the apartment. Because Matthew Ecker's story,
(18:09):
and this is why I'm asking you, Joe, about how
soon a person does get cold and stiff, because these
are professional Matthew Ecker is a professional nurse. He's a
nurse practitioner. He works in the emergency room. This is
not his first, you know, bullet wound he's ever seen.
I'm gonna assume no, no, it's not. And the story
(18:31):
he tells you just say that dog won't hunt. So
let's go over this really quickly. Because when police found Alex,
she's laying on the floor of the bathroom. Her legs
are straddling the door her the gun is placed on
(18:52):
her chest. I say placed for a reason, and her
hands are near it. By the way, Alex is right handed,
but the shut the bullet wound was on the left
side of her head.
Speaker 1 (19:05):
Yeah, gs w to the left side, all right.
Speaker 2 (19:07):
Now, while nothing is impossible, you know it does. Have
you known of a case where somebody who was right
hand dominant to shoot themselves on the left side of
the head?
Speaker 1 (19:20):
No?
Speaker 2 (19:21):
Do women usually shoot themselves in the head of the heart?
Speaker 1 (19:24):
Goo?
Speaker 2 (19:24):
Uh?
Speaker 1 (19:25):
Yeah that well, let's let's go with the first one first. Uh,
the first one first. I like that. So if they
do change hands, it is a it's an outlier. It's
not something you would come because it's like picking up
a pencil. It's like picking up a golf club or
(19:46):
picking up a baseball bat, or picking up your knife
and fork. You're going to use your dominant hand. Now.
I don't know how much experience Alex had had with
a weapon, but one of the questions we always ask
Dave when doing a suicide investigation, which suicide investigations are.
First off, I've always felt as though, from me, the
(20:07):
suicide investigations are much more difficult than homicide investigations because
most of the time you don't have a witness to it,
and so you're having to draw these conclusions based upon
what science is telling you. But when we begin to
interview their their intimates, their peripherals, you know, in their life,
will say, well, this is a apparent suicide. Maybe they
(20:29):
left a note, who knows. But was there an indication
that they were they ambidextrius? Did they could they use
both hands or were they left or right hand dominant?
And you would expect that if your right hand dominant,
that the gunshot wound would be would be on that
(20:54):
dependent side, and in this case it wasn't on the
left hand side. Now to this question about about do
women shoot themselves in the head, if we were having
this discussion, let's see, if we were having this discussion
in the early eighties, I would say that, you know,
(21:17):
you you rarely have ever seen that. But you know, Dave,
as my career.
Speaker 2 (21:21):
Progressed, rarely have ever seen a headshunt.
Speaker 1 (21:24):
Yeah, with with females. And people say that there's data
that backs us up. Maybe there is. But as my
career progressed, I began to see more and more cases
of females that would in their lives much like men
(21:47):
did that you know, i'd have mentor oil, gunshot woes,
gunshot womans to the side of the head, you know,
those sorts of things. I think that there was this uh,
this uh thesis is kind of put forward in our
field where it says that, you know, because of appearance,
that women were not inclined to shoot themselves in the head.
(22:10):
I gotta be honest with you, I don't ever remember
a self inflicted gunshot wound by a female where they
shot themselves in the abdomen. I think I had a
couple in the chest, but I'd say that I probably
had more headshots self inflicted with women than I did
(22:32):
any other location. So I don't I just don't. I
don't buy into it that that that that idea. Do
men and women take their lives in a variety of
different ways, Yeah, they do. And I don't know if
that's gender dependent or not, but it's it's one of
those things that floats around and get asked that question
(22:53):
a lot, you know, over the years, I've been asked
that question. But that she had a gunshot one to
the head and they were thinking it might be suicide,
at least it wouldn't be surprising. I don't think to
anybody that was out there that would be working the scene.
But here's the thing that's really shocking about this. Let's
go back to what you said about Eckert. Not only
(23:16):
is he a nurse practitioner, Dave, he's working. He's working
as a nurse practitioner in an emergency room setting, and
let's face it, a major metropolitan area. He's gonna see trauma, Dave.
And I got to tell you, I worked as an
ear tech for a number of years in college, and
(23:37):
in that environment, if you have gunshot wounds that come in,
knife wounds, that sort of thing, you're gonna get blood
on you. You're gonna have it on you. I mean,
that's the nature of what you do. You can put
on gloves, but you'll even get blood up up above
your wrist, onto your elbows, those sorts of things. You'll
get blood if you're wearing scrubs, which everybody does. That's
(24:00):
why you wear scrubs because they used to be almost disposable.
You know, you would get bloodstains on you. You could go
to closet, get a fresh pair and change out. So
you would expect him if he is he allegedly attempted
to stem the bleeding by placing his hand or his
(24:23):
finger over the defect in her head to stem the bleeding, Dave,
if that were the case. If that were the case,
he would have blood all over his hands. There's a
high probability that she probably clipped cerebral artery in there,
so it's going to be pumping blood out. It could
spray onto him. There's really no trace evidence of blood
(24:44):
on him, so I think that that's really making the
cops question what's going on.
Speaker 2 (24:49):
He actually claims that he washed up now just to
Ecker claims that when he opens the bathroom door and
sees Alex, she shut herself in the head. He claims
he tried to stop the bleeding short of that before
(25:09):
he calls nine one one to report what has just
taken place. He took the time to wash himself up,
and he tells police he did it in the bathroom
sink and he washed with soap. He then calls nine
one one, and he says he called nine one one
within four minutes of the shot. So you've got him
coming to the bathroom finding his girlfriend on the bathroom
(25:32):
floor with a gunshot wounded the head. He then removes
the gun. He takes the gun and puts it in
a suitcase. Then he comes back in after trying to
save her life, washes up using soap and water, and
apparently cleans the gun as well, because he then places
the gun on her chest and calls nine one one.
Police arrived minutes later, and the first thing they notice
(25:55):
he has no blood on him and the gun is
remarkably clean. Yeah, despite the nature of this scene, the
gun is scrubbed clean. The fact that he uses soap
and water on his hands to ostensibly clean up blood
like that would be the worry at that point, particular moment.
Speaker 1 (26:13):
Yeah, its nose and the.
Speaker 2 (26:15):
Bathroom sink is dry. The bathroom sink is dry, but
he tells them he just used it to wash his hands.
By the way, blood on the floor of the bathroom
is drying already.
Speaker 1 (26:25):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (26:27):
I wonder how long it takes at it seen.
Speaker 1 (26:29):
Yeah, it takes, it takes it takes uh, it takes
a while. I'll put it to you that way again.
I hate to kind of weasel out of the question,
but it's going to be environmentally dependent, and it's going
to be dependent upon the surface in the bathroom. Are
the carpets in there. Is it a tile? Uh? You
know what, what's the temperature inside of the room, what's
(26:53):
temperature of the floor. That's going to promote this because
you know, when you get drying blood, uh, you're you're
at that point time. And when I say drying blood,
I'm talking about dry blood that's that's beginning to to
flake or it has the appearance that it doesn't have.
(27:13):
Let's see that the tension of the blood surface itself
has diminished to the point where it's almost at the
same level as the floor that it's on or the
surface that it's on. It it's it's lost all of
that and it's beginning to almost look like paint. That
takes that takes some amount of time. I'm thinking, I'm
(27:37):
thinking beyond an hour, I would I would think, And
it's really hard to judge that. But you know, here
here's another thing with the weapon. And by the way,
this is kind of interesting. He was a licensed firearms carrier.
He had to carry permit, and he had kept this weapon.
(27:59):
According to him in his book back which you'll see
a lot of nurses that are coming in on the
hospital that carry book bags. They almost look like students
and they you know, they've got extra changes of clothes
in there, their whatnot, you know, is carried around and there.
He carried his weapon in there and she Alex, according
(28:19):
to him, went she had an awareness of the weapon
that he had one before she went into the bathroom.
She went into his bag and retrieved this weapon. She
knew it was there and went into the bathroom.
Speaker 2 (28:29):
And showed it to him. Okay, she grabs it and
according to Ecker, she point has the gun in her
hand and she is walking backwards, telling him don't come
any closer. I'll shoot myself, and backs herself into the bathroom,
then shuts the door, and he says, within two seconds
of the door shutting, here's the gun. Go off, opens
the door and finds her. That's why this timetable is
very important to the whole story, because from the moment
(28:51):
he calls nine to one one to the minute cops arrive,
it's a very short window, very very short. There's something
else that goes into this too. According to the story
Ecker told police, you know, he moves the gun and
put he again. He moves the gun, puts it in
a bag, then brings it back in places on our chest.
(29:13):
He says he tried to save her life, that she
was breathing when he first got there. He tries to
stop the flow of blood, but they asked him, did
you perform CPR? Again, going back to the blood that
would be everywhere, and he says, no, I did not
do CPR because I didn't know what to do. How
does a nurse practitioner working in an emergency room not
(29:35):
know how to do CPR?
Speaker 1 (29:38):
You can't. But and that's that's that's what's so odd
about this. In order to work in an emergency room
or if you're going to be let's say, if you're
going to work in ic ICU or one of these
places critical care units like this, you you have to
be certified in advanced life So and first off, CPR
(30:03):
is is that's the bottom line. I mean, these people
go through such training. I mean nurses are you know,
are the life blood of a hospital. You think about doctors,
forget it. It's the nurses that run the show and
they control everything that's there, and they are trained and
you're not trained. If you can't keep up in that environment,
(30:24):
you can find another job somewhere because they got other
people that'll take your job. Really quick that are proficient
at what they do. This guy would have had to
have been certified in advanced life support and he would
have understood the principles behind CPR. And here's another thing.
If he had done compressions on her at the scene,
did you know that with a gunshot wound to the head,
(30:47):
one of the things that also happens is you'll get
this fracturing of the skull. Obviously, because you're creating, you know,
you're cavitating the cranial vault, and you've got these fractures
that go on the victim as you're doing compressions, you'll
actually get blood from the nose, the mouth, not to
mention the defect in the head. So yeah, it would
be a bloody mess. I wonder if he had an
(31:10):
awareness of that as well. I'm not so much concerned
about the absence of blood on his hands, Dave. What
I'm really interested in, since he's saying that this is
in fact a self inflicted gunshot woman, was there no
blood on her hands? Well, it looks like they've got
(31:49):
quite the conundrum here, don't they. You've got a guy
that I would imagine, in the face of questioning the
local PD he ain't doing so well. And but yet
you've got a a young lady and will go ahead
(32:09):
and say it plainly because it's it's already out there.
She's got she's got some real emotional issues. I mean,
she's you know, fought anxiety, depression, all these sorts of things.
As a matter of fact, Ecker has been providing her
with with Benzo's for anxiety, and he's also been providing
(32:32):
her with adderall kind of mood stabilizing. And so you, uh,
you think about that, she's got all this dynamic going
on with her, and you listen, you have to consider
that that maybe taking her own life is on the table.
As far as an investigator, you have to be able
to take all of that in consideration. Uh, that would
(32:55):
do that? Would it would behoove you as an investigator
to go back and dig into her past. If she's
under therapy, if she's receiving therapy, you'd want to question
the individual that's providing her therapy. And then you got
to talk to her friends. You got to talk to
her family members that might you know, she may have
confided in that sort of thing. It's not just talking
(33:16):
to Ecker or to this other fellow that she's involved
in a relationship with. This is on its surface, this
seems like a very simple case. But it's like I said,
cases like this are very very complex.
Speaker 2 (33:32):
Well, the physical evidence, taking away the psychology and everything else,
just the physical evidence alone, the scene of the crime,
the scene of the incident. Yeah, was it murder or suicide?
One of the handgun didn't have blood on it. Now,
if she takes her own life, she's right handed, but
she shoots the gun with her left hand and the
left side of her head. But police get there minutes later.
(33:54):
By the way back to the timetable, the phone call
to nine one one was made at two point fifty am,
and Matthew Ecker claims that he called nine to one
one four minutes after she shot herself. Police arrive and
she is declared dead by medical professionals. MS workers are
there and she's declared dead at three h four am.
(34:16):
So from the time he called, the time he calls,
to the time they're there and declared dead is fourteen minutes.
Add another four minutes from the time he says she
shot herself, and you have eighteen minutes from gunshot to
declared dead at the scene of the crime you mentioned,
Why are her hands not bloody? What is the test
that is done by medical experts to determine whether or
(34:37):
not somebody has fired a gun?
Speaker 1 (34:39):
Yeah, yeah, it's a gunshot residue test. It's there are
three major components in in in firearms, in the actual
process of kind of lighting the fuse on a projectile.
All right, So when if you just imagine, if you'll
(35:03):
just imagine in your mind that when you initiate the
firing sequence with any kind of firearm, when you pull
that trigger, okay, and that firing pin or the hammer
slams forward onto the base of that live round, you
(35:23):
have got a primer cap. And the primer itself is
a bit more unstable chemically, that is is it doesn't
take much to set it off, which is what you want,
because there's like a little cap. If you look at
the end of a live round, there's a little cap
(35:44):
in the end of it, and it's called a primer
cap that's tapped off. And when that's tapped off, it
creates an explosion, all right, And that explosion sparks up
through what are referred to as flash holes, and within
the flat holes, the it ignites what's referred to as
the propellant that's contained within the cartridge itself, that's the gunpowder.
(36:10):
So when you do when you do a GSR test,
you're looking for antimony, barium, and also lead those three components,
and primer residue is a bit different than that. So
you can get an idea that if it's if it's
(36:31):
primer residue that you're looking for, perhaps it it you
would expect to find it on a hand, all right,
that's where it's. It's kind of got a c clamp
on the on the grip of the pistol in this case,
and then you'll find the rest the remaining elements there
that kind of shower down out of this cloud you know,
(36:53):
you see the gun smoke, you know, cloud that comes
out and it's kind of showering down. We try to
do That's one of the reasons. Like at the scene,
and I would imagine in this particular scene, at this
particular scene, rather they would have bagged her hands at
the scene, that's what we would do, okay. And the
reason is is that when you place her body into
(37:16):
a body bag, sometimes the bags can sweat and you
have to protect those hands because you're going to do
a GSR test on the victim at the morgue, and
we have series of swabs that we go through and
that's sent off to the state crime lab and you
can test to see if she's recently fired a weapon.
(37:36):
The trick is I wonder. I wonder if the police
at that moment in time, based upon how unsteady his
story was. I wonder if they said, Okay, we need
to do a GSR test on you, and I wonder
if he submitted to that, if they actually did one,
(37:57):
because right now at this point, we don't know if
they did that. There's no indication that that that that
has necessarily come up. Not saying it didn't happen, but
it's one of the things that you would do in
a case like this, particularly where you're questioning the tomeline
about how everything went down and it keeps getting marked
(38:18):
because you you stated Dave that he changed his story
a couple of times, and for me, that's that's a
huge red flag. Well because if you're so, yeah, go ahead.
Speaker 2 (38:28):
The soap and water, he claims because they noticed a man.
You said you tried to save her life, but there's
no blood on you and the gun is incredibly clean. Uh,
he is the can you wash away like the GRS
test the gun residue? Did I say that?
Speaker 1 (38:42):
Right?
Speaker 2 (38:42):
GRS?
Speaker 1 (38:43):
It's GSR, but YESR anyway, but they're going to test
it if you wash your hands with soap and water. Huh,
can you wash away that residue so that you do
a test on me? And it's like, I'm sorry, man,
it's just soap and water. I had to clean up
the blood. It's my gun. I touched the gun. I mean,
is there a way that he now can explain any
kind of residue on his hands, but I use something
(39:04):
water to clean them. I mean yeah, And just because
you have, just because you have these results, First off,
GSR tests are not fool for if people think that
they are, they're not. They're not.
Speaker 2 (39:19):
And so that's why they're not putting a whole lot
of heat on that. All right, Yeah, Yeah, that explains
that I wondered, Joe. I didn't know.
Speaker 1 (39:25):
I'm not going to say that GSR is in the
same realm as like a polygraph. Okay, it's not like that,
but you're not necessarily you know, they did one study
years ago with people that worked in what was it.
They worked in munitions factories and they would randomly test
people with GSR in those environments and they would come
(39:46):
back with negative results. And these people have been handling munitions,
you know, for days and days, and I always found
that that kind of interesting. They put a lot of
weight on these tests. But you know, I don't I
don't necessarily think that GSR is required in this case
because he's he's kind of betraying, you know, the original narrative.
(40:13):
Here's he keeps deviating from the story. And that's a
circumstantial in circumstantial evidence. But still he's the only witness
to all of this. He was an ear witness to
you know, any kind of statements. He certainly saw what
happened that evening, and I guess you know, you begin
to think about, well, what would be his motivation to
(40:35):
do this to her? Why? Why would he take her life?
And you think about maybe it all came to a
head that night in the bar where he gets into
this tete a tet with this other man in her life.
He's he's married, he's got four kids. Maybe he had
this moment in time where he's like, what am I doing?
(40:55):
And the only way that he can see to solve
this is perhaps taking her life. I don't know the
weapon itself, though, when you look at it, there's also
you know, they were talking about how clean it was.
Many times, not every case, but many times with self
inflicted gunshot wounds day you'll see evidence of what's referred
(41:17):
to as blowback on weapons, where you'll have blood that
will come back onto the surface of the weapon, and
if it's a close contact gunshot wound, which I really
want to get into here, you would have I've worked
cases where I've had skin, hair, brain matter in the
(41:39):
muzzle of the weapon where it blows back down the barrel.
You'll actually have that occur because you know that barrel
space is empty after that projectile. It happens in a flash,
but after that projectile exits the barrel, it cavitates into
the skull, and you've got this energy that's forcing backwards
(42:02):
towards the point of origin of this thing, and you'll
get this kind of distribution on the surface weapon. They're
not seeing that here, So I think that that's the
position that this puts the forensic pathologists, and I say
pathologist because we're plural. We've got two of them Dave,
we're talking about two uh too highly learned or learned.
(42:24):
I guess they say uh learned learned people here. They
are board certified forensic pathologists, and they both arrived at
the same conclusion. They can't say that this is either
a homicide a suicide. They can't say it's accidental. So
their default position here is it turns out to be
(42:45):
undetermined in this particular case. I find that quite fascinating.
Speaker 2 (42:52):
But it does end up going to court. Matthew Ecker
is charged, and it goes back to the reason I
was hitting the timeline so hard is because you really
are dealing with eighteen minutes from starting to finish on
her death. And his story did change. It didn't make sense.
He's a nurse practitioner working in an emergency room, didn't
(43:14):
perform CPR or do anything he knows to do. And
he was clean. The scene was clean, blood was drying.
There's nothing in the sink indicating anybody had washed anything
in the sink in the bathroom like he claimed. The
evidence didn't bear out his story, so he took it
to court. He was charged with her murder. It has
been adjudicated.
Speaker 1 (43:35):
Joe, what's our conclusion here, Dave is he now cool
in his heels in state penitentiary.
Speaker 2 (43:42):
Matthew Philip Becker, forty five years old. His wife did
divorce him, by the way. The father of four convicted
of the sole count of second degree intentional murder not
premeditated for shooting thirty two year old alex Xandra Lee
Pennig in the head December sixteenth, twenty twenty two.
Speaker 1 (44:05):
I've got to tell you, at the end of the day,
you think about you think about all of the effort
that went into living the lives that these people lived.
The desire to help people in healthcare, the desire to
get all of the education that's required, those hoops that
you have to jump through, and to throw it all away.
(44:28):
I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is Bodybacks
Host
Joseph Scott Morgan
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