October 16, 2025 • 45 mins
Does Houston have a Serial Killer dumping bodies in the bayous of Harris County Texas? The reason the headline is being tossed about is because of the number of bodies being pulled from the bayous over the last three years is now at 53 - and there will be more by the end of the year. Joseph Scott Morgan and Dave Mack break down the facts of the dead bodies and answer the question...Is a Serial Killer dumping bodies in the Bayous of Houston?
Transcribe Highlights
00:00.11 Introduction: Fondest childhood memory, cane pole and a worm
02:43.94 Bodies in the water around Houston
05:30.16 Bayou water is moving
10:06.47 Real numbers
15:02.50 Undetermined manner of death
20:03.37 Looking for patterns
25:10.00 Homeless woman dies, body decomposes between two guys over 6 months
30:35.77 Lady Bird Lake deaths in Austin
35:04.01 Truth needs to have a day
40:02.15 Theory of "Smiley Face Killers"
45:22.95 Conclusion
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Body bags with Joseph's gotten more. Probably the fondest memory
I have from my childhood has to do with my
mother's father and my father's mother, and both of those
centered on fishing on both sides of the family. I remember,
(00:26):
even as at a very young age, of having a
cane pole in my hand and fishing with kataba worms
that my grandmother had, like I don't know, six or
seven of these bohemoths in her yard. And kataba worms
are very resilient. You can go and you take a
long pole and you knock them off the leaves, and
(00:47):
you gather them up and you put them in peat
moss and you can freeze them. And they are the
best bait in the world, particularly in Louisiana, where the
water is black and dark deep. You catch all manner
of fish. You catch what are called bull brim these
big big brim panfish, if you will, and catfish as well.
(01:14):
And I spent many years fishing both the black value
and by you de seared in Monroe, Louisiana with my grandparents,
and pleasant memories. And the thing about being on a
by you is this, It is a kind of beauty
that if you've never experienced it. It's striking when you
(01:38):
sit there and you contemplate, because one of my favorite
things in the world is to see cypress knees coming
up out of the water, allowing these trees to breathe
and to grow the shade they provide, and to watch
the Spanish moss kind of drift back and forth in
the breeze. Something very peaceful about it. But what if
(02:02):
what if you're walking along a byou somewhere in the
Southern United States, particularly in the Houston area, and you
happen to look over into the water and you see
what you think is a body, and you say, certainly,
that's not a human body, But as you approach, you
(02:23):
see that it is. And it's one of many bodies
that have been recovered over a very short period of
time that have drawn the attention of the media, not
just in the United States, but from around the world. Today,
we're going to talk about the bodies that seem to
be popping up in the byus of Houston, Texas. I'm
(02:49):
Joseph Scott Morgan and this is body Bags, Dave. I
got to tell you, man, most people I've found don't
know what a by you is. I think that some
people languish under this idea that it's a lake by.
Speaker 2 (03:11):
You Labatry, Alabama. I thought it was from wrest Gumbe.
Speaker 1 (03:17):
Oh boy. Yeah, and I've actually been to buy you labattery.
It's not too far away from one of my favorite
vacation spots. Tell me what it is.
Speaker 2 (03:27):
Tell me what we're talking about here when we talk
about the Bayous around Houston. What is a by you?
And yea, is Houston really built on a swamp? I
mean that's what it sounds like.
Speaker 1 (03:36):
Yeah, yeah, it is, it is, and it's I'm not
knocking Houston by the way. Love Houston, Yeah, yeah, I
love Houston too. And but I got to tell you
if you if you think Atlanta traffic is bad, which
is bad, go to Houston. There's always somebody that will
that will want up. Yet, Yeah, Houston is no pleasure
(03:56):
cruise when it comes to sitting in traffic. So many
highways everywhere, and it's a massive I mean it's a
massive city. You know. People forget how big Houston is.
It's always in the top five, you know, in the country,
and it is expansive to say the very least. But
you know what they say, everything's bigger in Texas. And yeah,
so Houston, which essentially sits back a few miles from
(04:22):
the Gulf of Mexico, sits in what would be reclaimed land.
I guess if you want to frame it that way,
it's marshy, swampy, you know, and it's not at all
dissimilar from the area that I grew up in Louisiana,
and you know those points south. We've got bayous literally
(04:45):
in Louisiana, and of course in our state here in Alabama,
we have bayous here you got to go down to
the coast essentially to get close to them. And throughout
Mississippi you have bayous. So yeah, they're all over the
southern the United States, and they're they're very unique. I
think the beauty of them is all of the wildlife
(05:06):
that live in them. It's just this it's a world
in and of itself, very peaceful, by the way, because
you don't really detect that the water is moving, but
it actually is. There's actually a current that flows through
a byu.
Speaker 2 (05:21):
And sitting there it's not though it's not it's not
sitting there.
Speaker 1 (05:28):
I'm not saying it's like being you know, on the
Colorado River or something where you're going to get swept
away by a huge current, but there is a current there.
And most of the time when you see, like most
of the bayous in America are kind of concentrated around
the Mississippi Delta, Okay, so they are these kind of
little offshoots, you know, of these waterways that come off,
(05:50):
and of course everything eventually flows, you know, towards or
down to the Gulf of Mexico, and it's not too
much different. You know, over in Houston, everything's flowing. So
one of the problems that you have as a medical
legal death investigator, Dave, is when you find when you
find a body that is actually a float in water,
(06:14):
one of the biggest questions that you ask is is
there a boat ramp nearby? Where could and here's a
term that we use, this is an industry term. If
you want to where did they make entry? You know,
how did the body get into the water. Is there
a bridge that they could have fallen off of? Is
(06:34):
there a boat ramp where they could have been deposited from?
And also if there, if you suspect that it's a homicide,
is there a boat launch where they somebody could have
launched a boat gotten into the water and taken the
body and deposited it there. Another consideration is is that
if you have malevolent intent, if you will to do
(06:58):
something with a victim, say someone that's already dead, one
of the things you begin to think about, David is disposal.
And you got to admit, I'd say, I'd argue that
probably the apex predator in the United States swims in
these waters, and that's the alligator. And so they're like
(07:21):
garbage cans. They eat anything they can, particularly bodies that
are advanced in a state of decomposition, because they don't
chew real well. They bite, tear, and swallow.
Speaker 2 (07:34):
And so that's why about all you can tell you
can keep a show with duct tape, right because.
Speaker 1 (07:39):
Yeah, yeah, you've seen people do that and people holding
the jaws together and that sort of thing. They don't
have a great chewing now, they don't have a great
they've got a great tearing motion. Uh. But most of
the time, with alligators in particular, you'll see, and I
think I've talked about this before, they create, for lack
(07:59):
of better term, their own kind of meat locker under
the banks of bayous streams rivers that sort of thing.
They swish it out with their tail and they can
go beneath and depose it prey under there and let
how can I phrase this, Let the meat tender ese okay,
and then they'll go back and they'll eat it. I
(08:21):
had a buddy of mine, I know I've said this before,
that fell through as he was bank fishing, fell through
one of these meat lockers that an alligator had had
established there, and there were deer carcasses in there, like
little baby deer like fun. Wow, yeah, yeah, It's quite terrifying.
(08:43):
And he's he's like a manly man, not like me.
I mean, he's like a real, you know, manly man.
And you could see the terror in his eyes. You
know that. Do it all right?
Speaker 2 (08:52):
Now, let's get down to the nitty gritty here of
what actually is happening. We've got a story that is
coming out of Houston that is making headlines. And for
those in the industry, the headline it means so much.
And if you can put a number, double digit number
and the term serial killer in the same headline, you're
(09:13):
going to get views. And I was looking through this
because a couple of days ago, Joe, there was a
story it said sixteen bodies found in and US state
as police address sellerial killer theories. Retired detective gives warning
(09:34):
after serial killer fears grow in US. Fifty three bodies
have been found in Houston. These are the types of things.
And I've got sixteen nineteen, twenty twenty four. Those are
the numbers of bodies that have been pulled out of
the byous around Houston. Why is there such a difference
(09:56):
in numbers because people don't do their accurate reas search.
So here's the reality. If you actually go to the
Harris County Institute of Forensic Sciences. Doesn't that sound official?
Speaker 1 (10:07):
It does sound efficial.
Speaker 2 (10:08):
It is official. It's the Harris County Institute of Forensic Sciences.
For crying out loud in twenty.
Speaker 1 (10:14):
Twenty place where all of the forensic pathologists would hang out.
Speaker 2 (10:18):
I'm thinking they have a cigar club. You know they
have trivia nights on Tuesday. Yeah. Twenty twenty three, there
were nine bodies pulled out of the bayous around Houston,
Texas in twenty twenty four. Twenty bodies were pulled so
far in twenty twenty five, twenty four. Now that is
an incremental increase from last year. This year, but it's
(10:40):
a sizable increase from the nine in twenty twenty three.
Those numbers are worth looking at. That's where the fifty
three bodies comes from. But to actually break it down.
Of the fifty three since twenty twenty three, according to
the Harris County Institute of Forensic Sciences, the manner of
(11:01):
death Joe YEP fifteen accident and thirteen of those were
accidental drowning. Nine are pending, three suicide, three homicide. And
of those three I did find out they have two
(11:21):
arrests that have been made and the third one is
still under investigation. And then there's this number twenty three
undetermined manner of death undetermined in twenty three bodies pulled
out of the bayous around Houston, Texas. That's the number
(11:43):
I want to focus on. Joseph Scott Morgan. Yeah, that's
the scary one.
Speaker 1 (11:49):
Yeah, it is, And particularly when you use the U word,
uh huh undetermined, because it's got a I don't know, tonally,
it's got this kind of ominous sense about it, doesn't it.
You know, it's undetermined. We don't know what it is.
Let me tell you why. You know, how I was
talking about how beautiful. I think values are I truly do.
(12:09):
I mean, it's just one of these things. I've got
a couple of watercolors that that I have of by
you settings. The reason that I think that they are undetermined, Dave,
is that not only are vyu's beautiful, but they are
(12:30):
savage as well, Dave. They you know, uh, these environments,
I don't know that people fully appreciate how dynamic they
(12:52):
are and how difficult it is to survive in a
by you That's why, you know, the Cajuns are so
renowned because they were dumped out there after the British
random ran them out of Canada and they settled in
southwestern Louisiana and they've turned it into, you know, a
(13:13):
grand place to live. But that comes through hardship and
you have to make your way in that environment or
the environment will consume you. And it'll consume you if
you allow it to. And of course, uh Cajun culture,
Uh they haven't. They They've leaned into it. And boy,
you know what a grand place of is if you
ever get a chance to go to southwestern Louisiana and
(13:35):
listen to that beautiful music and of course the food,
Oh my lord, the food. I love.
Speaker 2 (13:38):
How good you are on that place, Joe. If you
don't have a place in your life that you talk
about the way Joe talks about Louisiana, go find it.
You haven't lived life until you have that attachment.
Speaker 1 (13:52):
I'm serious. Well, I mean you talk about I don't know,
you know, I'm really hoping that Louisiana Bureau of Tourism
will will hook us up with a sponsorship up here.
And uh, we're gonna be doing live broadcast on BYUE TESH.
How's that sound. So we'll go down there and do that.
Speaker 2 (14:06):
But yeah, uh, I'll be back in the studio, you'll
be on remote.
Speaker 1 (14:11):
I'll do it, brother. Yeah. And but you know the
thing about it is in these environments, they are very harsh.
You know, I talked about the animal life relative to allegators.
It's not just that, you know, it's it's the fact
that the BYU, much like swamps, it consumes everything around it.
You know, you're you're going to become fodder at some
(14:32):
point in time. Uh, and how much more so the dead? Right?
So if you when we have these undetermined deaths like
they're talking about in Houston. What was that number again?
Brother that you twenty three was twenty three.
Speaker 2 (14:47):
Three undetermined of the fifty three bodies in the last
three years.
Speaker 1 (14:51):
You look at that and the the environment that a
decendent is found in where the body is actually deposited
in that area. When I say deposited, don't that's not sinister.
It just means that it's the location the body wound
(15:11):
up in and it can be deposited by another person.
If it's a homicide, I suppose, and I've got a
story I want to talk about that in just a second.
But it can also mean that the person may have
just fallen over dead, they drowned, fell off a bridge,
they may have had a heart attack while sitting on
the side of the bank, you know, cane pole fishing,
(15:32):
who knows, you know. But the thing about it is
the body changes so rapidly in that environment. It is
not surprising on any level whatsoever that they wouldn't have
a causal effect here. Let me rephrase that they don't
necessarily have a cause. That's a parent and one of
the things that you're going to be looking for, as
(15:53):
we've talked about on body backs, you know, through our lessons,
you know, we're looking for hemorrhage. Right, Well, if you
don't have any soft tissue left, or the soft tissue
you have is so compromised, you're not going to be
able to appreciate things like marks on the neck and
maybe some types of other trauma. You're going to be looking, say,
for instance, for a defect in the skull, like a
(16:15):
gunshot wound. Okay, well, if you're absent that, you can
exclude that. But then you're scratching your head and you're thinking, well,
what else could it be. Well, if the body is
also so decomposed or degraded at that point in time,
guess what other problem you run into. You can't do
an effective talks panel and that and it would not
(16:35):
surprise me in the least bit if you know a
certain percentage of these deaths, the twenty three that you
mentioned that they say that are undetermined might very well
remain undetermined or you just can't come up with an
answer for the immediate cause of death. And of course
the manner of death undetermined is just an overall classification.
(16:59):
But you're still not going to the heart of the
matter relative to what brought about the death, What was
the mechanism that brought this person to their end. And
in that spirit, you don't want to commit to something
I think scientifically and not be able to back it
up with data. And right now I submit to you,
(17:19):
brother Dave, that there is no data at this point
in time. There are certain things where maybe just maybe
they are absent something that's viable that they can actually
use to make an assessment with. Because many times bodies
(17:39):
in water like this, Dave, and particularly around marine life
will disarticulate. You might be missing pieces, you know, if
you're thinking about if you're thinking of a death investigation
as a big puzzle, and I think that's a great analogy.
You have to have all the pieces to make it
come together, and sometimes body particulates and you're not going
to have everything there to examine.
Speaker 2 (17:59):
Right We've got again twenty three bodies pulled from the
bodies in the last three years that we do not
have a manner of death that they've settled on. But
there are some things that as we all, I think
and understand those of you listening to podcasts like Body
Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan and some of the other
(18:21):
crime podcasts and other shows that you and I are
both on, there are a lot of people paying attention
to a lot of different crimes, and they kind of
focus in on certain aspects of crime and run with it.
And when we've got twenty three bodies over three years undetermined,
how the matter of death, that's got people thinking, and
(18:42):
that thought process goes immediately to serial killer. I found
it fascinating when we were doing fascinating That sounds disrespectful.
Speaker 1 (18:49):
No, no, no, it is. It's fascinating for our purposes. No,
you go right ahead, you use that word. That's fine,
that's okay.
Speaker 2 (18:56):
When we were talking about ed Gean, you and I
both were like, he is lumped together or labeled as
a serial killer, but in reality, I don't think he was.
I think you're dead on right that he was a
grave robber and he was a sick file. Yeah, I
mean to the worst order. But that's different than a
serial killer. He's not like Ted Bundy. And when I
(19:18):
look at what's happening here in the Bayous, I'm curious
because I'm noticing that we've got male and female YEP
ages from twenty to the sixties. We don't have any
kind of pattern, like if we had ten college age
males found with certain things, clothing, whatever, just something common,
(19:43):
one thing common other than age. I would say, maybe
there's something to really look at here. And I'm not
saying that it shouldn't be studied. But Joe, what are
we really seeing when we look at this whole picture?
Is there any kind of common thread?
Speaker 1 (19:58):
Well, I don't know. I mean, can't look at this
name that comes to mind, John Wayne Gacy. You know
you mentioned males. You know, you can't crawl space. You know,
you go down there and you've got these males of
a certain age that are all found in there. We're
looking for patterns, right, And that's what you always have
to you know, you always have to look for. Do
(20:19):
you have a perpetrator that's out there?
Speaker 2 (20:21):
That is.
Speaker 1 (20:24):
You know you even look at like the green really
green river killer? Yeah, you know, and there's a pattern, yeah, Gar, Yeah, absolutely.
And you begin to think of Ted Mundy. You know,
you hate saying his name. He gets said all the time.
We've got to come up with a new example. But yeah,
I mean we have so many you know, how sick
(20:44):
is that? Yeah? Oh, I know it really is. Uh.
And you begin to look for these patterns, uh, and
certain patterns that you know that many of our listeners,
I know friends are fully aware of, you know, what
was the cause of death, because if you're thinking about strangulation,
if you're thinking about gunshot, wound, bludgeoning, stabbing, you know,
(21:07):
all those sorts of things. Most of the time these
individuals are going to stick with a specific methodology for killing.
And I'm not seeing this here. You know, you're talking
about a city, well, let's just say Harris County, Texas,
which is where Houston is. You've got a population of
(21:30):
roughly five million people. Okay, You're gonna have people die,
all right, and then you've got hundreds and hundreds of
miles of shoreline in this area. Remember you're talking about
a city that is built in on the surface. You know,
it's built on this kind of marshy environment. You know,
(21:51):
you've got values that run everywhere by you. By the way,
is a slow moving body of water. They can have
tributaries that come off of stream Thames creeks, rivers, and
they can be feeders to other locations and there is
a current you know, that flows through them. A lot
of these values that they have there, and this is
(22:13):
fascinating to me, actually flow beneath the bridges that are
underneath major interstate highways. How much stuff happens on interstate highways. Oh,
my lord, particularly in big cities. You're talking about tons
of homeless encampments all over the place. And I wanted,
I got to tell you the story. I was actually
(22:33):
just talking about graduate assistant about this. She was saying,
Professor Maurty, what are you all going to talk about today?
And I said, well, David and I are going to
speak about the the Houston, all these Houston discries. I
really said. I saw this in the news. I was like, yeah, yeah,
I said, there's a lot to be made of the
idea that there's a huge homeless population in Houston. Well, why, well,
(22:59):
it's very climate. You know, I got to tell you,
if I'm going to be homeless, I don't want to
be homeless like in Detroit or Chicago or any place
like that in the wintertime. You know, Now it's miserable
down in Houston during summertime, but you know, you're not
fighting off frostbite down there. So it attracts a lot
(23:20):
of homeless or as they say now the unhoused population.
So you've got these people that will inhabit these areas,
particularly under overpasses, and Dave, I got to tell you
the story real quick. I was just telling my grave
assistant about this. Did you know I worked a case
one time at a homeless encampment that is, and you've
(23:43):
actually driven over this homeless encampment. It's under I eighty
five in Atlanta. As soon as seventy five and eighty
five split, it goes off to the northeast like you're
heading in Greenville, South Carolina. Dave, I got called out
on a death there one time where there were and
(24:03):
I talked to the cops that worked this area because
I was amazed. It was like when I walked into
When I walked into I felt like Dorothy in a
Wizard of Oz when they opened the doors to Oz
and she walks in and it's all marvelous and everything.
It's just the opposite. I got called out to this
(24:25):
overpass or beneath the overpass, Dave, there was a population
of close to four hundred people living under this bridge
out there in this specific area where we as far
as I could see, there was nothing but homeless palettes,
(24:45):
laid out tents, sleeping bags, all these sorts of things.
And in this particular case that I got called out on,
just to give me an idea of the flavor of
life in this dwelling. There was a lady that was
decomposing beneath the bridge. There there were two palettes that
(25:06):
were laid immediately adjacent to her. She's been dead for
six months, and the guys that were living next to
her had not left. They laid there were her body decomposed.
Oh come on, yeah, yeah, I got to talk to
one of them. One of them was off doing something
else while we were doing the investigation. But you know,
(25:26):
we're in that cramp space and I'll never forget. I
had to stoop over to go in there, and I
had to stay stooped over for a protracted period of time.
And you just you look and you take the measure
of it. And it's really hard to take the measure
of it because you're seeing You're sitting here saying, I
can't believe what I'm seeing. This is it's so vast,
it just goes on forever. Well, Atlanta is tempered. It's
(25:49):
not as comfortable in the wintertime as Houston is, though,
and so that population down there is even larger. Well,
you've got homeless encampments that are around bodies of water,
you know, the vyues, maybe underneath overpasses, which will get
a lot of those. It's not surprising that you might
find people that have died and have either gone into
(26:13):
the water on their own or have been cast off.
You say, well, why would somebody cast off the body. Well,
I'm here to answer that question for you. If you're
involved in illegal behavior, and you, along with your compatriots
that you're in dwelling with, are also in the same lifestyle,
(26:34):
the last thing you want to draw attention to is
a dead body among you. And so I've had bodies
that have been taken out of like drug houses and
wrapped in carpets, wrapped in blankets, dumped like a mile
away from where their point of origin was. Just and
it's not that the people did anything nefarious, they just
(26:56):
don't want a dead body around them because if they
find a dead body around them, you run the risk
of having the cops investigating what you're doing. And so
it's like guilt by association in their minds, you know,
so they'll cast a body off.
Speaker 2 (27:11):
Wow, that actually makes sense, though, Joe, because going back
to the story about Atlanta, where You've got a decomposing
woman for six months, and people are still right there
because what are their options? You know, if we call
attention to this, we could all be in trouble here,
even though we might not have done anything to cause
their death. So talking about the homeless in the cabinet,
(27:32):
and that leads me to the next part of this,
which is again of the people's bodies that are the
manner of death is undetermined. Being at twenty three over
the last three years, I wonder how many people have
been matched up against those who might be missing, you know,
in that area, in an area that is like Houston,
(27:52):
you've got twenty three people a day going missing. I
would imagine, you know, you've got a lot of people
that go missing on a fairly regular basis. They would
be checking against these two, correct.
Speaker 1 (28:02):
I would think so, And a lot of that is
going to be heavily depended upon. I hate to break
it down like this, but and it's cold. I mean,
it's cold, and it's cruel, but it's the reality. What
kind of manpower do you have in order to go
through each and every one of these cases to try
to marry it up. And there will be people you know.
(28:24):
I know for a fact there will be people that
will say, well, you know, they need to commit all
resources to this to try to figure this out. Well,
it's been going on for a long long time, you know,
just like indigent burials. You know, you people get buried
in enginent graves, indigent graves all the time, and you know,
(28:48):
no one ever really thinks about it at all. Well,
there are people that are dying day in and day out,
and you never have the cause of death. Sometimes you
don't know who they are, knows that they've come to
the end of their life in this one specific location.
And I got to tell you, just because somebody does
(29:10):
in fact come to their end and is found in
a bayou, it doesn't necessarily mean that they wound up
there at the hand of a serial killer. You know, Dave.
(29:35):
A few years ago, I went to Texas with Kim
kimy Sue in tow and went to crime Con and
crime Con was being held in Austin. Never been to
Austin and had a grand time, absolutely grand tom favorite restaurant,
(30:01):
Terry Black's Barbecue. Oh my god, Yeah, I got I
got beef ribs there. They look like you remember the
opening scene from Flintstones where the car turns over. That's
what the ribs look like. Yeah, oh my lord, just
Terry Black's just incredible, I mean, absolutely incredible. But something
(30:23):
I don't like about Austin is the Lady Bird Lake deaths.
And we how many times have we heard about this
over there? And they tried, you know, they tried to
stir the pot over this for so long where they're
saying that there is an active serial killer in Austin,
Texas and two and it isn't it funny? You know?
(30:47):
It kind of ebbs and flows, doesn't it. You know,
we were hearing about that in the news all the time,
and all of a sudden it kind of fell off
the map, now, didn't it. Because and this goes back
to your earlier, earlier comment, I love that you said this. Yeah,
going from them clicks, baby, trying to get those clicks,
you know, any any way that you possibly can. And
(31:08):
just because you have people that turn up dead and
a body of water does not mean that you've got
some kind of serial killer at work here. And you know,
those those cases as well, you know, cut across all
kinds of demographic lines, you know, and causal effects as well.
Speaker 2 (31:26):
You know something you were talking about a minute ago.
It made me remember Michael Jordan's father, when Michael Jordan's dad,
when his body was found, arguably Michael Jordan, when his
father was murdered. Michael Jordan had just won his first
(31:47):
three p you know, won the world championship three times
in a row. It was ninety three, and he is,
you know, probably the most famous person on the planet.
And yet when his father died, you know, they're actually
looking for him for weeks, you know, he was out
of contact with him. And when they did find him,
it wasn't his whole body because he had actually his
(32:08):
body had been recovered in water in South Carolina or
right there on the North Carolina South Carolina.
Speaker 1 (32:13):
Border Marlboro County, South Carolina.
Speaker 2 (32:16):
And they didn't have a place to store him, couldn't
afford to really store him. And so after a certain
period of time, they saved his hands, right yeah.
Speaker 1 (32:27):
And I think they saved they and I might be misremembering,
but I could have sworn they saved his jaws was
teeth If I'm not myself or they might not, I
know that they documented, they did a very thoroughdental examination
on him.
Speaker 2 (32:40):
Yeah, and then they cremated the remains. And the reason
I'm pointing this out is because sometimes it sounds like
we're being cold or cruel about people who are homeless
or less fortunate financially. You're talking about a man who
was unidentified, but his son was the most famous guy
on the planet and very wealthy, and it didn't matter.
(33:00):
I mean, they didn't have a place to store mister
Jordan's body, so they did what they had to do.
They documented that they could prove who he was when
they actually were able to get the And so as
we look at this, I approach it from that angle
that talk about a real color blind society here, you know,
not seeing any green, black, red, doesn't matter. It's a
(33:21):
human being whose body has just turned up in the
vayu and we've got to figure out how. And I'm
going to guess they've been in the water, even for
a short period of time in the water is not good.
And I can't imagine these are fresh. I imagine them
being in there for a while before they are recovered.
The conditions can't be good.
Speaker 1 (33:42):
Yeah, Yeah, and death investigation is Here's the thing about
it is that many people always took exception, and I've
had to check myself, okay, so I can be chief
among sinners here where you got to see or you're
in the autopsy room and you say, well, I've seen
(34:02):
this before. You have to be very careful of using
that phraseology. And here's why, because no two deaths are
the same the dynamics. You might have something that closer resembles,
and you've learned lessons from from that event and how
to work the case and that sort of thing. No
two deaths are the same. There's going to be some
(34:23):
little nuance in there that's going to separate it from
the other. Now is it your job to find that
nuance every single time? Well, no, not necessarily, because we're
not doing are comparison and contrast seminar here. We're doing
a death investigation. But there are certain things that you're
going to look for to either include or exclude the
scientific information. And I think that that's going to be
(34:43):
very important here in these cases. You know you've got
and I can only imagine what the Mayor's office is
like in Houston about this particular topic. I can assure
you they have one person that's on this where they've
been assigned it's going to be some press person where
they're going to be talking about being consistent with our
(35:07):
statements every single time, because this thing has created such
a I'm not going to say firestorm, but let's face
it, it's been cycling through the news now for a couple
of weeks, and they're going to have to have, you know,
people on task here. So it's going to be involved
not just the press office with the mayor's office, but
also more importantly law enforcement, you know, whether it's Harris
(35:28):
County law enforcement or City of Houston law enforcement. Dave,
you've got and kind of just throw this at you
real quick, because this was fascinating to me. You know,
there is one Byue in particular that has come up
in statements about these bodies that have been recovered, and
(35:55):
I think this goes back to let's see yet. So
we've got twenty two bodies that this total has risen
to in twenty twenty five, but over period of eleven
days in this past September. Davi's not just one by you.
We've got white Oak by you, We've got Buffalo by you,
(36:20):
we've got braize by you, we've got greens by you,
and we've got hunting by you, and we're talking about literally,
if we want to measure it by shoreline, we're talking
hundreds and hundreds of miles of shoreline. You said, well, Morgan,
how can that be because we're talking about a city,
and yes, it's a big city. You're talking hundreds and
hundreds of miles of shoreline. Yeah, you bet, you, you
(36:42):
bet you I am And this is why, because when
you have byus, they have these little interesting twists and
turns and eddy's that people don't think about, and they
curve through neighborhoods. You'll have homes built on byus. You'll
have these things that you never ever see. You know.
It's talking about the homeless in camp that you've driven
over before heading up to South Carolina, North Carolina. You
(37:04):
didn't know it was there, but you know you've got
these you know, you've got these interstate highways that are
passing over these values and people don't give it a
second thought. But the people that live around there, like
the homeless population, or maybe somebody steps out in their
backyard to have a smoked cigarette, drink c up coffee
out there and just look at the beauty of the bayue.
They look down and they see, you know, an individual
(37:25):
doing literally the dead man's float out there, and they're
going to summon the authorities and come in. Or they
find just an element of a body, maybe they see
a whitewashed skull that's just floating out there, and there's
some attachments that are still left and other things are missing,
and it is an absolute nightmare to try to narrow
this thing down to work it, to work a case
(37:50):
that is waterborne as opposed to an event where say
we walk into somebody's backyard and they've been shot or
into their house and you've got hanging or you know,
where everything is contained dave, when this vast geographic area
is so daunting that most people that have never been
in this kind of environment they can't fully they can't
(38:12):
fully appreciate or grasp it, right. And so that's one
of the things that investigators and cops in particular, you know,
are are struggling with right now.
Speaker 2 (38:20):
All right, let me let me ask you this because
we talked about it with Long Island serial killer with Lisk,
about the possibility of there being more than one killer
using that dumping ground. Well here where we've got twenty
three different bodies that are the manner of death has
not been determined. There are theories. I want to throw
(38:40):
one out to you, because if you get twenty three
bodies that you don't know how they doe, you don't
know the manner of death, you could have two or
three killers using these bayous as a dumping ground for
five or six of their victims, you.
Speaker 1 (38:57):
Know, yeah, and you could, yes, absolutely.
Speaker 2 (39:00):
Based on that one theory. And this is the only
one I really want to talk about because I'm this
keeps popping up now. The Smiley Faced Killers plural. This
is a theory and it's controversial, but it's still a
theory and people are throwing it out there that it's
(39:20):
a group of serial killers responsible for the deaths of
dozens of college aged men across the country and primarily
in the Midwest, but still even like in Alabama a
couple of years ago, college age guy after a football
game out drinking, goes missing and is found in the
river a couple of days later, and they still haven't
(39:45):
solved that one, I don't think, And so that's one
of those could have been the Smiley Faced Killers, Like
these are organized, disorganized groups of men, you know that
are gathering together to kill people and like fight club
or something. Instead of a fight club, it's the smiley
face club where they're finding people of a certain you
(40:07):
know type and killing them and putting their bodies in water.
That's a theory, Joe, and it's getting some traction because
of all the crime related programs that are out there.
Because anybody with a computer and a connection to the
Internet can create something and put it out there. You
don't know what's real and what isn't.
Speaker 1 (40:25):
Okay, here's my response to that. Is it incumbent upon
the police and the investigators the forensic scientists to disprove
that theory or should it be taken into consideration at all?
(40:45):
But should they be spending time looking for that pattern? Okay?
Well yeah, but I'd have to look at the intellectual
underpinning of this, the scientific underpinning. More specifically, how are
you arriving at this conclusion. I'm not saying you, I'm
saying the universal you this kind of nebulous environment that's
(41:06):
that's out there that creates, you know, these these questions.
What conclusions are you arriving at that draw you to
this idea that you've got a group a network, if
you will, of killers that are coalescing around this one
area and then not just this one area, but they've
(41:29):
apparently networked because they're involved in other geographic locations around
the country. Now, is that possible? Uh? Yeah, I guess
it is. Is it probable? I'd say probably not, you know,
I mean, I don't know. Do they have meetings, you know,
(41:50):
back to my my flintstones referenced to, you know, the
the Royal Order of the Buffalo, you know, where they
wear the hats and the horns coming out of it.
I don't know. I means that is that plausible that
they're all getting together and that they're I guess they're
exchanging messages with one another on the dark web and
they're saying, hey, guys, okay, we're getting together in Houston
(42:12):
and we're going to deposit these bodies and g Fred,
what kind of methodology are you going to use to
take this person's life? And are we all going to
stay with the same group? I mean, are you know
Fred likes to kill males and Sam likes to kill females?
You know, I don't. I don't know, And so I
(42:34):
think that it's it's certainly interesting to sit around and entertaining,
as you know, as a verse as I am to
saying that, to have a lively discussion over a cup
of coffee about it, or maybe it's your computer screen.
But is it actually plausible? Is that possible? I don't know,
but I do know this compared to the other cases
(42:59):
right now now that we have been speaking about for
some time. Now, you know, we've got lisk Okay, Long
Island serial killer. We've got Ladybird Lake in Austin. Now
we have and I'm wondering what name they're going to
give to give to this one down in Houston. I'm
(43:21):
still holding out for that. Oh and by the way,
hey Dave, I forgot about another one. We've gotten this
as well. That's up in the northeast, right and you've
got an individual that is apparently or individuals that are
floating around this area, you know, that's up in the northeast.
Remember we we actually I was actually with our friends
(43:42):
from cross Space podcast and did taped an episode of
their podcast at Crime con in Denver back in September
about that specific topic. Is there connectivity between any of this? Well,
right now, from what I can see is that there
are several points of connection. Primarily people are dead. We
(44:08):
don't have causal factors. We don't have any kind of
connection relative that we're aware of between some specter that's
out there killing people. But yet we do know that
they're being grouped together, they're being called specific things. And
(44:28):
remember those are buzzwords or buzz terms that you know,
we'll wind up with a lot of clicks. But at
the end of the day, this is what we have
to keep in mind. Each individual that is found dead,
whether it be in a bayou in southeast Texas, or
(44:52):
maybe along a Long Island Expressway, or maybe just outside
of Boston or maybe in Austin, Texas, every individual was
loved by somebody at one point in time. They're dead,
(45:13):
they're gone. Let's try to keep sanity as our watchword here,
and let's follow these cases and see where the science
leads us. I'm Jesseph Scott Morgan and this is Bodybags
Body bags with Joseph's gotten more. Probably the fondest memory
I have from my childhood has to do with my
mother's father and my father's mother, and both of those
centered on fishing on both sides of the family. I remember,
(00:26):
even as at a very young age, of having a
cane pole in my hand and fishing with kataba worms
that my grandmother had, like I don't know, six or
seven of these bohemoths in her yard. And kataba worms
are very resilient. You can go and you take a
long pole and you knock them off the leaves, and
(00:47):
you gather them up and you put them in peat
moss and you can freeze them. And they are the
best bait in the world, particularly in Louisiana, where the
water is black and dark deep. You catch all manner
of fish. You catch what are called bull brim these
big big brim panfish, if you will, and catfish as well.
(01:14):
And I spent many years fishing both the black value
and by you de seared in Monroe, Louisiana with my grandparents,
and pleasant memories. And the thing about being on a
by you is this, It is a kind of beauty
that if you've never experienced it. It's striking when you
(01:38):
sit there and you contemplate, because one of my favorite
things in the world is to see cypress knees coming
up out of the water, allowing these trees to breathe
and to grow the shade they provide, and to watch
the Spanish moss kind of drift back and forth in
the breeze. Something very peaceful about it. But what if
(02:02):
what if you're walking along a byou somewhere in the
Southern United States, particularly in the Houston area, and you
happen to look over into the water and you see
what you think is a body, and you say, certainly,
that's not a human body, But as you approach, you
(02:23):
see that it is. And it's one of many bodies
that have been recovered over a very short period of
time that have drawn the attention of the media, not
just in the United States, but from around the world. Today,
we're going to talk about the bodies that seem to
be popping up in the byus of Houston, Texas. I'm
(02:49):
Joseph Scott Morgan and this is body Bags, Dave. I
got to tell you, man, most people I've found don't
know what a by you is. I think that some
people languish under this idea that it's a lake by.
Speaker 2 (03:11):
You Labatry, Alabama. I thought it was from wrest Gumbe.
Speaker 1 (03:17):
Oh boy. Yeah, and I've actually been to buy you labattery.
It's not too far away from one of my favorite
vacation spots. Tell me what it is.
Speaker 2 (03:27):
Tell me what we're talking about here when we talk
about the Bayous around Houston. What is a by you?
And yea, is Houston really built on a swamp? I
mean that's what it sounds like.
Speaker 1 (03:36):
Yeah, yeah, it is, it is, and it's I'm not
knocking Houston by the way. Love Houston, Yeah, yeah, I
love Houston too. And but I got to tell you
if you if you think Atlanta traffic is bad, which
is bad, go to Houston. There's always somebody that will
that will want up. Yet, Yeah, Houston is no pleasure
(03:56):
cruise when it comes to sitting in traffic. So many
highways everywhere, and it's a massive I mean it's a
massive city. You know. People forget how big Houston is.
It's always in the top five, you know, in the country,
and it is expansive to say the very least. But
you know what they say, everything's bigger in Texas. And yeah,
so Houston, which essentially sits back a few miles from
(04:22):
the Gulf of Mexico, sits in what would be reclaimed land.
I guess if you want to frame it that way,
it's marshy, swampy, you know, and it's not at all
dissimilar from the area that I grew up in Louisiana,
and you know those points south. We've got bayous literally
(04:45):
in Louisiana, and of course in our state here in Alabama,
we have bayous here you got to go down to
the coast essentially to get close to them. And throughout
Mississippi you have bayous. So yeah, they're all over the
southern the United States, and they're they're very unique. I
think the beauty of them is all of the wildlife
(05:06):
that live in them. It's just this it's a world
in and of itself, very peaceful, by the way, because
you don't really detect that the water is moving, but
it actually is. There's actually a current that flows through
a byu.
Speaker 2 (05:21):
And sitting there it's not though it's not it's not
sitting there.
Speaker 1 (05:28):
I'm not saying it's like being you know, on the
Colorado River or something where you're going to get swept
away by a huge current, but there is a current there.
And most of the time when you see, like most
of the bayous in America are kind of concentrated around
the Mississippi Delta, Okay, so they are these kind of
little offshoots, you know, of these waterways that come off,
(05:50):
and of course everything eventually flows, you know, towards or
down to the Gulf of Mexico, and it's not too
much different. You know, over in Houston, everything's flowing. So
one of the problems that you have as a medical
legal death investigator, Dave, is when you find when you
find a body that is actually a float in water,
(06:14):
one of the biggest questions that you ask is is
there a boat ramp nearby? Where could and here's a
term that we use, this is an industry term. If
you want to where did they make entry? You know,
how did the body get into the water. Is there
a bridge that they could have fallen off of? Is
(06:34):
there a boat ramp where they could have been deposited from?
And also if there, if you suspect that it's a homicide,
is there a boat launch where they somebody could have
launched a boat gotten into the water and taken the
body and deposited it there. Another consideration is is that
if you have malevolent intent, if you will to do
(06:58):
something with a victim, say someone that's already dead, one
of the things you begin to think about, David is disposal.
And you got to admit, I'd say, I'd argue that
probably the apex predator in the United States swims in
these waters, and that's the alligator. And so they're like
(07:21):
garbage cans. They eat anything they can, particularly bodies that
are advanced in a state of decomposition, because they don't
chew real well. They bite, tear, and swallow.
Speaker 2 (07:34):
And so that's why about all you can tell you
can keep a show with duct tape, right because.
Speaker 1 (07:39):
Yeah, yeah, you've seen people do that and people holding
the jaws together and that sort of thing. They don't
have a great chewing now, they don't have a great
they've got a great tearing motion. Uh. But most of
the time, with alligators in particular, you'll see, and I
think I've talked about this before, they create, for lack
(07:59):
of better term, their own kind of meat locker under
the banks of bayous streams rivers that sort of thing.
They swish it out with their tail and they can
go beneath and depose it prey under there and let
how can I phrase this, Let the meat tender ese okay,
and then they'll go back and they'll eat it. I
(08:21):
had a buddy of mine, I know I've said this before,
that fell through as he was bank fishing, fell through
one of these meat lockers that an alligator had had
established there, and there were deer carcasses in there, like
little baby deer like fun. Wow, yeah, yeah, It's quite terrifying.
(08:43):
And he's he's like a manly man, not like me.
I mean, he's like a real, you know, manly man.
And you could see the terror in his eyes. You
know that. Do it all right?
Speaker 2 (08:52):
Now, let's get down to the nitty gritty here of
what actually is happening. We've got a story that is
coming out of Houston that is making headlines. And for
those in the industry, the headline it means so much.
And if you can put a number, double digit number
and the term serial killer in the same headline, you're
(09:13):
going to get views. And I was looking through this
because a couple of days ago, Joe, there was a
story it said sixteen bodies found in and US state
as police address sellerial killer theories. Retired detective gives warning
(09:34):
after serial killer fears grow in US. Fifty three bodies
have been found in Houston. These are the types of things.
And I've got sixteen nineteen, twenty twenty four. Those are
the numbers of bodies that have been pulled out of
the byous around Houston. Why is there such a difference
(09:56):
in numbers because people don't do their accurate reas search.
So here's the reality. If you actually go to the
Harris County Institute of Forensic Sciences. Doesn't that sound official?
Speaker 1 (10:07):
It does sound efficial.
Speaker 2 (10:08):
It is official. It's the Harris County Institute of Forensic Sciences.
For crying out loud in twenty.
Speaker 1 (10:14):
Twenty place where all of the forensic pathologists would hang out.
Speaker 2 (10:18):
I'm thinking they have a cigar club. You know they
have trivia nights on Tuesday. Yeah. Twenty twenty three, there
were nine bodies pulled out of the bayous around Houston,
Texas in twenty twenty four. Twenty bodies were pulled so
far in twenty twenty five, twenty four. Now that is
an incremental increase from last year. This year, but it's
(10:40):
a sizable increase from the nine in twenty twenty three.
Those numbers are worth looking at. That's where the fifty
three bodies comes from. But to actually break it down.
Of the fifty three since twenty twenty three, according to
the Harris County Institute of Forensic Sciences, the manner of
(11:01):
death Joe YEP fifteen accident and thirteen of those were
accidental drowning. Nine are pending, three suicide, three homicide. And
of those three I did find out they have two
(11:21):
arrests that have been made and the third one is
still under investigation. And then there's this number twenty three
undetermined manner of death undetermined in twenty three bodies pulled
out of the bayous around Houston, Texas. That's the number
(11:43):
I want to focus on. Joseph Scott Morgan. Yeah, that's
the scary one.
Speaker 1 (11:49):
Yeah, it is, And particularly when you use the U word,
uh huh undetermined, because it's got a I don't know, tonally,
it's got this kind of ominous sense about it, doesn't it.
You know, it's undetermined. We don't know what it is.
Let me tell you why. You know, how I was
talking about how beautiful. I think values are I truly do.
(12:09):
I mean, it's just one of these things. I've got
a couple of watercolors that that I have of by
you settings. The reason that I think that they are undetermined, Dave,
is that not only are vyu's beautiful, but they are
(12:30):
savage as well, Dave. They you know, uh, these environments,
I don't know that people fully appreciate how dynamic they
(12:52):
are and how difficult it is to survive in a
by you That's why, you know, the Cajuns are so
renowned because they were dumped out there after the British
random ran them out of Canada and they settled in
southwestern Louisiana and they've turned it into, you know, a
(13:13):
grand place to live. But that comes through hardship and
you have to make your way in that environment or
the environment will consume you. And it'll consume you if
you allow it to. And of course, uh Cajun culture,
Uh they haven't. They They've leaned into it. And boy,
you know what a grand place of is if you
ever get a chance to go to southwestern Louisiana and
(13:35):
listen to that beautiful music and of course the food,
Oh my lord, the food. I love.
Speaker 2 (13:38):
How good you are on that place, Joe. If you
don't have a place in your life that you talk
about the way Joe talks about Louisiana, go find it.
You haven't lived life until you have that attachment.
Speaker 1 (13:52):
I'm serious. Well, I mean you talk about I don't know,
you know, I'm really hoping that Louisiana Bureau of Tourism
will will hook us up with a sponsorship up here.
And uh, we're gonna be doing live broadcast on BYUE TESH.
How's that sound. So we'll go down there and do that.
Speaker 2 (14:06):
But yeah, uh, I'll be back in the studio, you'll
be on remote.
Speaker 1 (14:11):
I'll do it, brother. Yeah. And but you know the
thing about it is in these environments, they are very harsh.
You know, I talked about the animal life relative to allegators.
It's not just that, you know, it's it's the fact
that the BYU, much like swamps, it consumes everything around it.
You know, you're you're going to become fodder at some
(14:32):
point in time. Uh, and how much more so the dead? Right?
So if you when we have these undetermined deaths like
they're talking about in Houston. What was that number again?
Brother that you twenty three was twenty three.
Speaker 2 (14:47):
Three undetermined of the fifty three bodies in the last
three years.
Speaker 1 (14:51):
You look at that and the the environment that a
decendent is found in where the body is actually deposited
in that area. When I say deposited, don't that's not sinister.
It just means that it's the location the body wound
(15:11):
up in and it can be deposited by another person.
If it's a homicide, I suppose, and I've got a
story I want to talk about that in just a second.
But it can also mean that the person may have
just fallen over dead, they drowned, fell off a bridge,
they may have had a heart attack while sitting on
the side of the bank, you know, cane pole fishing,
(15:32):
who knows, you know. But the thing about it is
the body changes so rapidly in that environment. It is
not surprising on any level whatsoever that they wouldn't have
a causal effect here. Let me rephrase that they don't
necessarily have a cause. That's a parent and one of
the things that you're going to be looking for, as
(15:53):
we've talked about on body backs, you know, through our lessons,
you know, we're looking for hemorrhage. Right, Well, if you
don't have any soft tissue left, or the soft tissue
you have is so compromised, you're not going to be
able to appreciate things like marks on the neck and
maybe some types of other trauma. You're going to be looking, say,
for instance, for a defect in the skull, like a
(16:15):
gunshot wound. Okay, well, if you're absent that, you can
exclude that. But then you're scratching your head and you're thinking, well,
what else could it be. Well, if the body is
also so decomposed or degraded at that point in time,
guess what other problem you run into. You can't do
an effective talks panel and that and it would not
(16:35):
surprise me in the least bit if you know a
certain percentage of these deaths, the twenty three that you
mentioned that they say that are undetermined might very well
remain undetermined or you just can't come up with an
answer for the immediate cause of death. And of course
the manner of death undetermined is just an overall classification.
(16:59):
But you're still not going to the heart of the
matter relative to what brought about the death, What was
the mechanism that brought this person to their end. And
in that spirit, you don't want to commit to something
I think scientifically and not be able to back it
up with data. And right now I submit to you,
(17:19):
brother Dave, that there is no data at this point
in time. There are certain things where maybe just maybe
they are absent something that's viable that they can actually
use to make an assessment with. Because many times bodies
(17:39):
in water like this, Dave, and particularly around marine life
will disarticulate. You might be missing pieces, you know, if
you're thinking about if you're thinking of a death investigation
as a big puzzle, and I think that's a great analogy.
You have to have all the pieces to make it
come together, and sometimes body particulates and you're not going
to have everything there to examine.
Speaker 2 (17:59):
Right We've got again twenty three bodies pulled from the
bodies in the last three years that we do not
have a manner of death that they've settled on. But
there are some things that as we all, I think
and understand those of you listening to podcasts like Body
Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan and some of the other
(18:21):
crime podcasts and other shows that you and I are
both on, there are a lot of people paying attention
to a lot of different crimes, and they kind of
focus in on certain aspects of crime and run with it.
And when we've got twenty three bodies over three years undetermined,
how the matter of death, that's got people thinking, and
(18:42):
that thought process goes immediately to serial killer. I found
it fascinating when we were doing fascinating That sounds disrespectful.
Speaker 1 (18:49):
No, no, no, it is. It's fascinating for our purposes. No,
you go right ahead, you use that word. That's fine,
that's okay.
Speaker 2 (18:56):
When we were talking about ed Gean, you and I
both were like, he is lumped together or labeled as
a serial killer, but in reality, I don't think he was.
I think you're dead on right that he was a
grave robber and he was a sick file. Yeah, I
mean to the worst order. But that's different than a
serial killer. He's not like Ted Bundy. And when I
(19:18):
look at what's happening here in the Bayous, I'm curious
because I'm noticing that we've got male and female YEP
ages from twenty to the sixties. We don't have any
kind of pattern, like if we had ten college age
males found with certain things, clothing, whatever, just something common,
(19:43):
one thing common other than age. I would say, maybe
there's something to really look at here. And I'm not
saying that it shouldn't be studied. But Joe, what are
we really seeing when we look at this whole picture?
Is there any kind of common thread?
Speaker 1 (19:58):
Well, I don't know. I mean, can't look at this
name that comes to mind, John Wayne Gacy. You know
you mentioned males. You know, you can't crawl space. You know,
you go down there and you've got these males of
a certain age that are all found in there. We're
looking for patterns, right, And that's what you always have
to you know, you always have to look for. Do
(20:19):
you have a perpetrator that's out there?
Speaker 2 (20:21):
That is.
Speaker 1 (20:24):
You know you even look at like the green really
green river killer? Yeah, you know, and there's a pattern, yeah, Gar, Yeah, absolutely.
And you begin to think of Ted Mundy. You know,
you hate saying his name. He gets said all the time.
We've got to come up with a new example. But yeah,
I mean we have so many you know, how sick
(20:44):
is that? Yeah? Oh, I know it really is. Uh.
And you begin to look for these patterns, uh, and
certain patterns that you know that many of our listeners,
I know friends are fully aware of, you know, what
was the cause of death, because if you're thinking about strangulation,
if you're thinking about gunshot, wound, bludgeoning, stabbing, you know,
(21:07):
all those sorts of things. Most of the time these
individuals are going to stick with a specific methodology for killing.
And I'm not seeing this here. You know, you're talking
about a city, well, let's just say Harris County, Texas,
which is where Houston is. You've got a population of
(21:30):
roughly five million people. Okay, You're gonna have people die,
all right, and then you've got hundreds and hundreds of
miles of shoreline in this area. Remember you're talking about
a city that is built in on the surface. You know,
it's built on this kind of marshy environment. You know,
(21:51):
you've got values that run everywhere by you. By the way,
is a slow moving body of water. They can have
tributaries that come off of stream Thames creeks, rivers, and
they can be feeders to other locations and there is
a current you know, that flows through them. A lot
of these values that they have there, and this is
(22:13):
fascinating to me, actually flow beneath the bridges that are
underneath major interstate highways. How much stuff happens on interstate highways. Oh,
my lord, particularly in big cities. You're talking about tons
of homeless encampments all over the place. And I wanted,
I got to tell you the story. I was actually
(22:33):
just talking about graduate assistant about this. She was saying,
Professor Maurty, what are you all going to talk about today?
And I said, well, David and I are going to
speak about the the Houston, all these Houston discries. I
really said. I saw this in the news. I was like, yeah, yeah,
I said, there's a lot to be made of the
idea that there's a huge homeless population in Houston. Well, why, well,
(22:59):
it's very climate. You know, I got to tell you,
if I'm going to be homeless, I don't want to
be homeless like in Detroit or Chicago or any place
like that in the wintertime. You know, Now it's miserable
down in Houston during summertime, but you know, you're not
fighting off frostbite down there. So it attracts a lot
(23:20):
of homeless or as they say now the unhoused population.
So you've got these people that will inhabit these areas,
particularly under overpasses, and Dave, I got to tell you
the story real quick. I was just telling my grave
assistant about this. Did you know I worked a case
one time at a homeless encampment that is, and you've
(23:43):
actually driven over this homeless encampment. It's under I eighty
five in Atlanta. As soon as seventy five and eighty
five split, it goes off to the northeast like you're
heading in Greenville, South Carolina. Dave, I got called out
on a death there one time where there were and
(24:03):
I talked to the cops that worked this area because
I was amazed. It was like when I walked into
When I walked into I felt like Dorothy in a
Wizard of Oz when they opened the doors to Oz
and she walks in and it's all marvelous and everything.
It's just the opposite. I got called out to this
(24:25):
overpass or beneath the overpass, Dave, there was a population
of close to four hundred people living under this bridge
out there in this specific area where we as far
as I could see, there was nothing but homeless palettes,
(24:45):
laid out tents, sleeping bags, all these sorts of things.
And in this particular case that I got called out on,
just to give me an idea of the flavor of
life in this dwelling. There was a lady that was
decomposing beneath the bridge. There there were two palettes that
(25:06):
were laid immediately adjacent to her. She's been dead for
six months, and the guys that were living next to
her had not left. They laid there were her body decomposed.
Oh come on, yeah, yeah, I got to talk to
one of them. One of them was off doing something
else while we were doing the investigation. But you know,
(25:26):
we're in that cramp space and I'll never forget. I
had to stoop over to go in there, and I
had to stay stooped over for a protracted period of time.
And you just you look and you take the measure
of it. And it's really hard to take the measure
of it because you're seeing You're sitting here saying, I
can't believe what I'm seeing. This is it's so vast,
it just goes on forever. Well, Atlanta is tempered. It's
(25:49):
not as comfortable in the wintertime as Houston is, though,
and so that population down there is even larger. Well,
you've got homeless encampments that are around bodies of water,
you know, the vyues, maybe underneath overpasses, which will get
a lot of those. It's not surprising that you might
find people that have died and have either gone into
(26:13):
the water on their own or have been cast off.
You say, well, why would somebody cast off the body. Well,
I'm here to answer that question for you. If you're
involved in illegal behavior, and you, along with your compatriots
that you're in dwelling with, are also in the same lifestyle,
(26:34):
the last thing you want to draw attention to is
a dead body among you. And so I've had bodies
that have been taken out of like drug houses and
wrapped in carpets, wrapped in blankets, dumped like a mile
away from where their point of origin was. Just and
it's not that the people did anything nefarious, they just
(26:56):
don't want a dead body around them because if they
find a dead body around them, you run the risk
of having the cops investigating what you're doing. And so
it's like guilt by association in their minds, you know,
so they'll cast a body off.
Speaker 2 (27:11):
Wow, that actually makes sense, though, Joe, because going back
to the story about Atlanta, where You've got a decomposing
woman for six months, and people are still right there
because what are their options? You know, if we call
attention to this, we could all be in trouble here,
even though we might not have done anything to cause
their death. So talking about the homeless in the cabinet,
(27:32):
and that leads me to the next part of this,
which is again of the people's bodies that are the
manner of death is undetermined. Being at twenty three over
the last three years, I wonder how many people have
been matched up against those who might be missing, you know,
in that area, in an area that is like Houston,
(27:52):
you've got twenty three people a day going missing. I
would imagine, you know, you've got a lot of people
that go missing on a fairly regular basis. They would
be checking against these two, correct.
Speaker 1 (28:02):
I would think so, And a lot of that is
going to be heavily depended upon. I hate to break
it down like this, but and it's cold. I mean,
it's cold, and it's cruel, but it's the reality. What
kind of manpower do you have in order to go
through each and every one of these cases to try
to marry it up. And there will be people you know.
(28:24):
I know for a fact there will be people that
will say, well, you know, they need to commit all
resources to this to try to figure this out. Well,
it's been going on for a long long time, you know,
just like indigent burials. You know, you people get buried
in enginent graves, indigent graves all the time, and you know,
(28:48):
no one ever really thinks about it at all. Well,
there are people that are dying day in and day out,
and you never have the cause of death. Sometimes you
don't know who they are, knows that they've come to
the end of their life in this one specific location.
And I got to tell you, just because somebody does
(29:10):
in fact come to their end and is found in
a bayou, it doesn't necessarily mean that they wound up
there at the hand of a serial killer. You know, Dave.
(29:35):
A few years ago, I went to Texas with Kim
kimy Sue in tow and went to crime Con and
crime Con was being held in Austin. Never been to
Austin and had a grand time, absolutely grand tom favorite restaurant,
(30:01):
Terry Black's Barbecue. Oh my god, Yeah, I got I
got beef ribs there. They look like you remember the
opening scene from Flintstones where the car turns over. That's
what the ribs look like. Yeah, oh my lord, just
Terry Black's just incredible, I mean, absolutely incredible. But something
(30:23):
I don't like about Austin is the Lady Bird Lake deaths.
And we how many times have we heard about this
over there? And they tried, you know, they tried to
stir the pot over this for so long where they're
saying that there is an active serial killer in Austin,
Texas and two and it isn't it funny? You know?
(30:47):
It kind of ebbs and flows, doesn't it. You know,
we were hearing about that in the news all the time,
and all of a sudden it kind of fell off
the map, now, didn't it. Because and this goes back
to your earlier, earlier comment, I love that you said this. Yeah,
going from them clicks, baby, trying to get those clicks,
you know, any any way that you possibly can. And
(31:08):
just because you have people that turn up dead and
a body of water does not mean that you've got
some kind of serial killer at work here. And you know,
those those cases as well, you know, cut across all
kinds of demographic lines, you know, and causal effects as well.
Speaker 2 (31:26):
You know something you were talking about a minute ago.
It made me remember Michael Jordan's father, when Michael Jordan's dad,
when his body was found, arguably Michael Jordan, when his
father was murdered. Michael Jordan had just won his first
(31:47):
three p you know, won the world championship three times
in a row. It was ninety three, and he is,
you know, probably the most famous person on the planet.
And yet when his father died, you know, they're actually
looking for him for weeks, you know, he was out
of contact with him. And when they did find him,
it wasn't his whole body because he had actually his
(32:08):
body had been recovered in water in South Carolina or
right there on the North Carolina South Carolina.
Speaker 1 (32:13):
Border Marlboro County, South Carolina.
Speaker 2 (32:16):
And they didn't have a place to store him, couldn't
afford to really store him. And so after a certain
period of time, they saved his hands, right yeah.
Speaker 1 (32:27):
And I think they saved they and I might be misremembering,
but I could have sworn they saved his jaws was
teeth If I'm not myself or they might not, I
know that they documented, they did a very thoroughdental examination
on him.
Speaker 2 (32:40):
Yeah, and then they cremated the remains. And the reason
I'm pointing this out is because sometimes it sounds like
we're being cold or cruel about people who are homeless
or less fortunate financially. You're talking about a man who
was unidentified, but his son was the most famous guy
on the planet and very wealthy, and it didn't matter.
(33:00):
I mean, they didn't have a place to store mister
Jordan's body, so they did what they had to do.
They documented that they could prove who he was when
they actually were able to get the And so as
we look at this, I approach it from that angle
that talk about a real color blind society here, you know,
not seeing any green, black, red, doesn't matter. It's a
(33:21):
human being whose body has just turned up in the
vayu and we've got to figure out how. And I'm
going to guess they've been in the water, even for
a short period of time in the water is not good.
And I can't imagine these are fresh. I imagine them
being in there for a while before they are recovered.
The conditions can't be good.
Speaker 1 (33:42):
Yeah, Yeah, and death investigation is Here's the thing about
it is that many people always took exception, and I've
had to check myself, okay, so I can be chief
among sinners here where you got to see or you're
in the autopsy room and you say, well, I've seen
(34:02):
this before. You have to be very careful of using
that phraseology. And here's why, because no two deaths are
the same the dynamics. You might have something that closer resembles,
and you've learned lessons from from that event and how
to work the case and that sort of thing. No
two deaths are the same. There's going to be some
(34:23):
little nuance in there that's going to separate it from
the other. Now is it your job to find that
nuance every single time? Well, no, not necessarily, because we're
not doing are comparison and contrast seminar here. We're doing
a death investigation. But there are certain things that you're
going to look for to either include or exclude the
scientific information. And I think that that's going to be
(34:43):
very important here in these cases. You know you've got
and I can only imagine what the Mayor's office is
like in Houston about this particular topic. I can assure
you they have one person that's on this where they've
been assigned it's going to be some press person where
they're going to be talking about being consistent with our
(35:07):
statements every single time, because this thing has created such
a I'm not going to say firestorm, but let's face
it, it's been cycling through the news now for a couple
of weeks, and they're going to have to have, you know,
people on task here. So it's going to be involved
not just the press office with the mayor's office, but
also more importantly law enforcement, you know, whether it's Harris
(35:28):
County law enforcement or City of Houston law enforcement. Dave,
you've got and kind of just throw this at you
real quick, because this was fascinating to me. You know,
there is one Byue in particular that has come up
in statements about these bodies that have been recovered, and
(35:55):
I think this goes back to let's see yet. So
we've got twenty two bodies that this total has risen
to in twenty twenty five, but over period of eleven
days in this past September. Davi's not just one by you.
We've got white Oak by you, We've got Buffalo by you,
(36:20):
we've got braize by you, we've got greens by you,
and we've got hunting by you, and we're talking about literally,
if we want to measure it by shoreline, we're talking
hundreds and hundreds of miles of shoreline. You said, well, Morgan,
how can that be because we're talking about a city,
and yes, it's a big city. You're talking hundreds and
hundreds of miles of shoreline. Yeah, you bet, you, you
(36:42):
bet you I am And this is why, because when
you have byus, they have these little interesting twists and
turns and eddy's that people don't think about, and they
curve through neighborhoods. You'll have homes built on byus. You'll
have these things that you never ever see. You know.
It's talking about the homeless in camp that you've driven
over before heading up to South Carolina, North Carolina. You
(37:04):
didn't know it was there, but you know you've got
these you know, you've got these interstate highways that are
passing over these values and people don't give it a
second thought. But the people that live around there, like
the homeless population, or maybe somebody steps out in their
backyard to have a smoked cigarette, drink c up coffee
out there and just look at the beauty of the bayue.
They look down and they see, you know, an individual
(37:25):
doing literally the dead man's float out there, and they're
going to summon the authorities and come in. Or they
find just an element of a body, maybe they see
a whitewashed skull that's just floating out there, and there's
some attachments that are still left and other things are missing,
and it is an absolute nightmare to try to narrow
this thing down to work it, to work a case
(37:50):
that is waterborne as opposed to an event where say
we walk into somebody's backyard and they've been shot or
into their house and you've got hanging or you know,
where everything is contained dave, when this vast geographic area
is so daunting that most people that have never been
in this kind of environment they can't fully they can't
(38:12):
fully appreciate or grasp it, right. And so that's one
of the things that investigators and cops in particular, you know,
are are struggling with right now.
Speaker 2 (38:20):
All right, let me let me ask you this because
we talked about it with Long Island serial killer with Lisk,
about the possibility of there being more than one killer
using that dumping ground. Well here where we've got twenty
three different bodies that are the manner of death has
not been determined. There are theories. I want to throw
(38:40):
one out to you, because if you get twenty three
bodies that you don't know how they doe, you don't
know the manner of death, you could have two or
three killers using these bayous as a dumping ground for
five or six of their victims, you.
Speaker 1 (38:57):
Know, yeah, and you could, yes, absolutely.
Speaker 2 (39:00):
Based on that one theory. And this is the only
one I really want to talk about because I'm this
keeps popping up now. The Smiley Faced Killers plural. This
is a theory and it's controversial, but it's still a
theory and people are throwing it out there that it's
(39:20):
a group of serial killers responsible for the deaths of
dozens of college aged men across the country and primarily
in the Midwest, but still even like in Alabama a
couple of years ago, college age guy after a football
game out drinking, goes missing and is found in the
river a couple of days later, and they still haven't
(39:45):
solved that one, I don't think, And so that's one
of those could have been the Smiley Faced Killers, Like
these are organized, disorganized groups of men, you know that
are gathering together to kill people and like fight club
or something. Instead of a fight club, it's the smiley
face club where they're finding people of a certain you
(40:07):
know type and killing them and putting their bodies in water.
That's a theory, Joe, and it's getting some traction because
of all the crime related programs that are out there.
Because anybody with a computer and a connection to the
Internet can create something and put it out there. You
don't know what's real and what isn't.
Speaker 1 (40:25):
Okay, here's my response to that. Is it incumbent upon
the police and the investigators the forensic scientists to disprove
that theory or should it be taken into consideration at all?
(40:45):
But should they be spending time looking for that pattern? Okay?
Well yeah, but I'd have to look at the intellectual
underpinning of this, the scientific underpinning. More specifically, how are
you arriving at this conclusion. I'm not saying you, I'm
saying the universal you this kind of nebulous environment that's
(41:06):
that's out there that creates, you know, these these questions.
What conclusions are you arriving at that draw you to
this idea that you've got a group a network, if
you will, of killers that are coalescing around this one
area and then not just this one area, but they've
(41:29):
apparently networked because they're involved in other geographic locations around
the country. Now, is that possible? Uh? Yeah, I guess
it is. Is it probable? I'd say probably not, you know,
I mean, I don't know. Do they have meetings, you know,
(41:50):
back to my my flintstones referenced to, you know, the
the Royal Order of the Buffalo, you know, where they
wear the hats and the horns coming out of it.
I don't know. I means that is that plausible that
they're all getting together and that they're I guess they're
exchanging messages with one another on the dark web and
they're saying, hey, guys, okay, we're getting together in Houston
(42:12):
and we're going to deposit these bodies and g Fred,
what kind of methodology are you going to use to
take this person's life? And are we all going to
stay with the same group? I mean, are you know
Fred likes to kill males and Sam likes to kill females?
You know, I don't. I don't know, And so I
(42:34):
think that it's it's certainly interesting to sit around and entertaining,
as you know, as a verse as I am to
saying that, to have a lively discussion over a cup
of coffee about it, or maybe it's your computer screen.
But is it actually plausible? Is that possible? I don't know,
but I do know this compared to the other cases
(42:59):
right now now that we have been speaking about for
some time. Now, you know, we've got lisk Okay, Long
Island serial killer. We've got Ladybird Lake in Austin. Now
we have and I'm wondering what name they're going to
give to give to this one down in Houston. I'm
(43:21):
still holding out for that. Oh and by the way,
hey Dave, I forgot about another one. We've gotten this
as well. That's up in the northeast, right and you've
got an individual that is apparently or individuals that are
floating around this area, you know, that's up in the northeast.
Remember we we actually I was actually with our friends
(43:42):
from cross Space podcast and did taped an episode of
their podcast at Crime con in Denver back in September
about that specific topic. Is there connectivity between any of this? Well,
right now, from what I can see is that there
are several points of connection. Primarily people are dead. We
(44:08):
don't have causal factors. We don't have any kind of
connection relative that we're aware of between some specter that's
out there killing people. But yet we do know that
they're being grouped together, they're being called specific things. And
(44:28):
remember those are buzzwords or buzz terms that you know,
we'll wind up with a lot of clicks. But at
the end of the day, this is what we have
to keep in mind. Each individual that is found dead,
whether it be in a bayou in southeast Texas, or
(44:52):
maybe along a Long Island Expressway, or maybe just outside
of Boston or maybe in Austin, Texas, every individual was
loved by somebody at one point in time. They're dead,
(45:13):
they're gone. Let's try to keep sanity as our watchword here,
and let's follow these cases and see where the science
leads us. I'm Jesseph Scott Morgan and this is Bodybags
Host
Joseph Scott Morgan
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