February 28, 2023 • 28 mins
Debbie Collier, a Georgia resident, is reported missing on September 10th, 2022 after sending her daughter, Amanda, a Venmo payment for $2,385 with a message saying, “They are not going to let me go, love you.” She was found dead the next day in a ravine more than an hour north from her home. The newly released autopsy report reveals that when her body was found 80% of it was covered in second and third degree burns. Which is one of many reasons why the public was surprised to hear that the death has been ruled a suicide.
In this episode of Body Bags, forensics expert Joseph Scott Morgan and special guest co-host Dave Mack discuss Collier’s burns, the state of her clothing, the lack of debris found in her trachea, why police have ruled this a suicide, and much more.
Show Notes:
0:00 - Intro
0:52 - Background and overview of case
4:45 - Debbie Collier’s clothing and what it tells us
8:45 - The autopsy report and Collier’s burns
11:30 - Burning to kill vs. burning to cover something up
13:05 - No evidence of debris in her trachea
15:05 - Police ruling this a suicide
18:25 - Carboxyhemoglobin level and hydrocodone
19:50 - Is there an indication that the burning took place after death?
22:10 - Manner of death
24:00 - Was this really a suicide?
25:40 - Do police sometimes downplay what they’ve seen to the public?
29:00 - Outro
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:08):
Body Backs with Joseph Scott Morgan Debbie Collier. I can't
say that name without scratching my head a little bit,
because arguably her death is one of the most bizarre
(00:28):
that certainly I've covered in the past I don't know,
two years probably, and now we have some answers, and
today we're going to talk about this update involving the
death of this fifty nine year old office manager from Georgia.
I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is body Backs. Wow.
(00:52):
Am I glad to have my buddy Dave Mac with
me today. Dave is a crime reporter for Crime Online.
This case is something that we've covered I don't know
for several months now, I think, and certainly it left
us all a bit fuddled. I think because just in
and of itself, the fact that her death was so
(01:13):
closely associated with a fire, it was in isolation, kind
of a very remote area, and there was nothing apparently
stolen or missing from her. It was just this kind
of standalone event that's had a lot of people really
really asking a lot of questions. I don't know, do
we actually have answers now? I think we have some.
(01:33):
She's a fifty nine year old who worked as an
office manager for a real estate company in Athens, Georgia. Athens,
Georgia is outside of Atlanta. It's where the Georgia Bulldogs play,
and that does come into play here. Okay, So from
a timeline of events, on September tenth, Debbie Collier sent
a Venmo payment to her daughter at three seventeen PM.
(01:57):
That Venmo payment was for two three hundred and eighty
five dollars and it had a cryptic message, they are
not going to let me go love you. There is
a key to the house in the blue flower pot
by the door. It's set off alarm bells because her daughter,
Amanda was not expecting this payment. From all we can
(02:20):
find out, Debbie Collier had never sent a payment that
large through Venmo. That's what started all of this. Amanda
calls her dad, Debbie's husband. He's been parking cars for
the Georgia Bulldocks football game since nine o'clock that morning.
He gets home around four and they start talking try
to figure out what happened. Around six o'clock, they call
(02:42):
nine one one. We don't know where she is, we
haven't seen her, and we have this crazy message. It
was the next day, September eleventh, investigators find her car.
She had a rental van because her car hit was
in the shop. She'd been in a car wreck, so
she's driving a rental van and they used the series
XM radio in that rental van the Habersham County Sheriff's office.
(03:04):
They alerted deputies to the location of this Chrysler Pacifica
that she had rented, and boom, they were able to
find the vehicle. It's about an hour, about sixty miles
away from her home, in an area that she didn't
normally go. They find her car, and then they find
her body. It's down a ravine. She's holding on to
(03:26):
a small tree branch. She's dead. There is obviously been
a fire, and she's partially clothed the burn. If you remember, Joe,
we were told the burning was on her stomach. Well,
the timeline of events, we know that she did stop
at a family dollar shore a couple of miles away
from where her body was found prior to her death, obviously,
and she bought some items. Those items were all found
(03:47):
at the location where her body was. So from a
timeline standpoint, we know where she was, we know what
she was doing prior to her death. We don't know why,
but we know what and where. So here we go.
They've told us from the beginning, partially burned, partially clad.
The burning is on her stomach. They released this autopsy
report and Joe's got Morgan. I'm begging you to tell
(04:09):
us what it means, because I'm reading this and I'm
going somebody's lying super bizarre stuff. First off, let's go
back you had mentioned. You know, we've gotten several different
reports in regards to Miss Collier's death relative to the
status of the clothing. You know, clothing is something that
we'd look at. We begin to think about what was
the status of the clothing. First off, were they clothed?
(04:29):
And the first thing that comes up when you think
about these things, and I'm not saying that this happened
in this case, but when you associate someone being absent clothing,
particularly a lady, you're automatically thinking, well, there was some
kind of assault that had taken place, some kind of
potential sexual assault. When I hear this initially and they're saying, well,
(04:50):
she was clothed, we've heard clothes, and we've heard partially clothed,
and we've heard naked, and so you know, it's hard
to kind of make sense of that. What I have
heard now was that there was some remnant of clothing
at least beneath her legs, possibly charred. That clothing remnant
that is there You begin to ask these questions first off,
(05:11):
or these trousers that she had on, pants, jeans, whatever
the case might be, and can they be tied back
to her. Many times, when you find a body that is, say,
for instance, in a prone position where they're laying on
their belly, or you have an individual that's in a
soupon position where they're laying on their back and they
haven't been moved at all, and they're wearing clothing. The
(05:33):
clothing on the top side involving a fire will at
least completely or partially be burned away. But sometimes if
you look beneath them, those areas are protected from the
flame the heat, and you can have sometimes tags that
you can examine, you can match up sizes, all those
sorts of things. But there's something else that you look
(05:54):
for with clothing and fire, and this is significant in
this case. That is, when you collect this clothing and
it is associated with fire, we actually take clothing in
cases of our sun, that sort of thing, and it
doesn't just have to be clothed, it can be other items,
and we put them in these the only way I
(06:15):
can really describe them are these metallic paint cans. And
you say, wow, that's interesting. Yeah, So we use these
for evidence collection. And what happens is is that if
there is any accelerant and when I say accelerant, I'm
talking about lighter, fluid certainly gasoline, kerosene, any of these
types of elements, as the clothing begins to settle into
(06:39):
the bottom of the can because of gravity, the fumes,
if there's anything left, begins to rise to the top
of that can internally, and a big I don't know's
it's hard to kind of describe for folks, but just
understand that it looks like a gigantic needle is inserted
into the top of that can and the air within
(07:02):
the can is drawn off in the lab and then
once that air is drawn off, guess what they can do?
They begin to test it. And we know that the
vapors from an accelerat I mean, we've all smelled cass right,
or maybe charcoal, light or fluid, maybe kerosene has a
particular odor, right, so it's in a gaseous state. You
can smell it. That's something that can't be quantified. Smell
(07:26):
is we can qualify it, say gee, that smells like gas.
But what we want our measurements. We want to get
a specific chemical identity. They're talking about that there was
a melted gas can in the immediate vicinity of her body.
So I want to know if the gas that may
have been associated with that melted gas can, if there
was anything left from that is associated with any kind
(07:49):
of accelerant that may have been on her clothing, and
try to marry that up. That's one part of this
along the way, the evident try issue that's separate from
the body itself, because you know, when you begin to
look at what they're saying, at least was revealed in
this autopsy report that was released by the State of Georgia,
(08:11):
and this is very curious. They're saying that the burns
that she has on the body. Remember you'd mentioned this day,
you talked about how they had initially talked about how
she had burning on her abdomen, and that was kind
of it was kind of very limited at that moment time.
But now they're talking they're using terms like leathery skin.
(08:32):
That what they're driving at here. When they're talking about
leathery skin, they're talking about desiccated skin. Skin that's that
is absent any kind of moisture. It's dried out, and
it's dried out as a result of being exposed to
intense heat. Also, we grade burns in degrees. We've all
heard about this first, second, third. You know that there's
even a fourth degree burning. You generally see it with
(08:54):
individuals that are deceased. They don't talk about fourth degree
burning in here, but they do talk about second third.
Guess where the concentration is, Well, it's her head and
her face and quite possibly the upper chest. So what
does that tell us, Well, it tells us that there
was a heavy concentration of some type of accelerant or
(09:15):
fuel source that was adjacent to that. Because listen, people
know what it's like to actually touch a stove or
get burned as a result of running your hand or
a flame. You get burned, but it's not burning like
when we think about something that is a continual, constant
fuel source for fire. Human tissue cannot sustain that. It
(09:37):
just can't. You would have to have something else there
that would lead to a third degree burned. This is
very intense, and you're starting to get down into not
just the epidermis, in the dermis. Now you're starting to
get into potentially the subcue fat, which is that layer
just below the top layer of skin. Her hair is
(09:57):
probably missing her face as hensely burned in her upper chest,
so that means that more than likely the accelerant was
on top of her body, the top of her head,
maybe had run down her face at some point in time.
I think the big question is is this something that
she did to herself sitting there on the ground where
(10:21):
she takes a container of gasoline and pours it on
top of her head and then initiates the flame by
striking a match or lighting a lighter, which is something
they haven't talked about the presence of. Or is this
something that somebody else did to her. In cases that
(10:55):
I've worked where I have people that have been burned,
and certainly relative to homicize, many times burning is used
in order to cover up anything that is left behind.
But is it actually used as a means to bring
about one's on death? Well, there are cases out there
like that. You know, this is generally referred to as
(11:17):
self immolation. But here's the key. Most of the time,
when people self immolate, their doused in gasoline or some
type of other accelerant and they set themselves on fire,
you're going to have a product that is produced relative
to this burning. That's going to be your own body,
(11:39):
where you have hair and skin that's initially burned, any
clothing that's there, and any other item that immediately surround
the person. Say that they've put a fuel source on
top of them, like wood or something like this to
maintain the burning, and then they douse themselves with an
accelerant set themselves on fire, you would find remnant of that.
And Dave, she was found in a wooded area, so
(12:01):
we would expect when we open up her body at
autopsy that we would find particularly in the trachea and
that's our windpipe essentially, and into our nose, in our mouth,
into the windpipe, into the lungs, you would expect to
find evidence of debris. Dave, it ain't there, brother, So
(12:23):
does that mean that she was burned after she died.
That's a question that has not been answered. They're ruling
it as a suicide. Yea, they are ruling it as
a suicide. We have this kind of lining. If you
just think about the interior of your mouth, you just
kind of run your tongue around the interior of your mouth.
It's not too dissimilar from the same surface that you
(12:45):
have down into your airway. It's mucoid, very soft and fleshy,
and you look for debris in this area. But you
also look for what they referred to as an inflammatory response.
And they're saying that there is this area in her
trachea that would be indicative of inhalation of superheated gas. Okay,
(13:08):
superheated gas. So when people inhale and there's intense flame
around them, remember we're trying to uptake oxygen every single
second of the day. That's what we do in order
to survive. Even in the midst of a very intense fire,
you're inhaling to try to grab that oxen it's there.
(13:30):
And what does fire sek out, Well, it seeks out
oxygen as fuel source. It thrives on oxygen. It's consuming
all of the oxygen in the environment. So was she
literally inhaling the superheated gas. That's being generated by the fire.
The problem is this, it could not have been sustainable,
all right, It would not have been in a sustainable event.
(13:52):
And so they're talking about her inhaling superheated gas and
that that brought about her death. It brought about her
death that quickly after a certain amount of tom that
event is going to pass, and she would still continue
to breed, you would think unless she went into some
kind of associated sudden cardiac event. I'm not talking about
(14:13):
having a heart attack, a mile cardial infarction, That's not
what I'm talking about. But you can get yourself into
this position where essentially your heart will stop as a
result of being exposed to this kind of trauma. Is
that what they're actually saying, because right now that's really
the only thing they have to hang their hand on.
And let me ask you this. Joe I mentioned in
(14:35):
setting up the timeline that Debbie Collier had gone to
a family dollar store and made very specific purchases. Again,
we're talking sixty miles away from her house, and she's
at a family dollar store she doesn't normally go to.
She buys a blue tarp, red toebag, paper towels, a
torch lighter, and a poncho. Those were the things she
(14:59):
purchased at the family dollar store, and all these items
were found in the area of her body and the fire.
My question is this. They've ruled it a suicide, and
as you mentioned, saying it was the inhalation of the
superheated gases thermal injuries. They've also mentioned other things. But
(15:21):
I poured gas in my ditch to burn leaves one time,
and I had a whole bunch of leaves and I
poured too much gas. Okay, I let it soak in
a minute. I didn't realize how stupid I was being.
When I lit the leaves. It was an immediate explosion
and it knocked me down and shocked me. And had
(15:42):
I been closer to the leaves, I would have been burned.
If their theory of what happened is true, could it
have been that she was in some state of mind
where she bought these items. She has a gas can
that is also on the scene. As you mentioned, she
pours gas over something and leaning over, she doesn't realize
(16:05):
the power that this gas is going to have on her,
and she lights it and does what happened to me
in my front yard. I guess that that's certainly a possibility. However,
I have to go back and state that you were
talking about third degree burned, so this would not have
been I think that probably you might expect to see
a second degree event visualized on the surface of her skin.
(16:29):
You're starting to talk about third degree burning. That almost
implies that there was extended exposure to the flame in
order to achieve that level of trauma. And maybe that's
a residual effect of if she had been doused in
the flame and that there was an initial flash over
where she inhalated the superheated gas, the remnant of the
accelerant would still have to burn off of her skin
(16:51):
at that point in time. Maybe that's an answer. I
don't know that there's really enough to hang your hat on,
and we haven't seen the actual autopsy report because it
hasn't been made public at this point in time. However,
there are individuals that are commenting on it in the press.
Obviously they've seen it. You think about this and you think, well,
(17:13):
is there something else here? But according to one line
in the autopsy report, allegedly they're talking about what the
police saw, and the police are essentially opining that she
was there by herself, and that's really and that that's
an indication to them at least that this was a suicide.
So you're telling me that's you're going with that, and
(17:33):
that's what you're going to hang your hat on. And
apparently that's the decision that was made by virtue of
that the medical examiner made that decision based upon what
the police did or didn't see at the scene. One
other thing that's important here to remember. At autopsy, there
is a test that is run. It's called a carboxy
hemoglobin level, and you do it with a blood draw.
(17:57):
What you're looking for is the uptake of carbon in
the system and how it kind of gets into the bloodstream.
This gives an indication of protracted exposure because now you're
beginning to metabolize some of the stuff that's in the
air and floating around. And again when they inhale eco
systemic at that point in time, guess what carboxy hemoglobin
(18:20):
level was not going to say it was nil, but
it was, according to them, apparently within normal ranges of
what people would have in them on a regular day.
When we have cases where people have been exposed to
fire and they're in homes, say, for instance, where the
home is kind of collapsing around them they're struggling to
get out. Their carboxy hemoglobin level will in fact be
(18:42):
elevated because they're inhaling these noxious gases that are in
the environment in which they normally dwell, so that gives
you an idea of long term exposure. The absence of
a significant carboxy hemoglobin level in her blood would suggest
that this was a very quick event. One things that
they did find in her system, and this is not
(19:04):
completely unexpected, is that she had hydrocdone in her system
and she had been taking this I think, if I
remember correctly, as a result of some kind of back
pain that she had had for a protracted period of time.
She was under medical care because chronic pain from a
back injury that she had lived with for a long time.
(19:26):
And it's interesting because in November, when all of this
first came out about inhalation of superheated gases and thermal
injuries and hydro codone intoxication, that was what we were told,
and now that the autopsy has come out. This is
according to a source from Fox five in Atlanta, saying
although she had a prescription for the opioid pain killer.
(19:47):
The hydrocodone levels in her system surpassed the expected amount
roughly four times over. We've also heard her report You
and I both heard the same report that they were
at therapeutic levels. That's a confusion there, But I don't
know how much that would come into play. If you've
got eighty percent of her body burned, second and third
(20:08):
degree burns, as you've just indicated, that would have killed her. Yeah,
So which is it, I think is a big question
relative to these the levels of the hydrocodone. Wouldn't you
expect somebody to be burned after they were dead that
and doesn't this is there an indication that the burning
took place after death? That's hard to surmas based upon
(20:29):
the information that is coming in. If you're going to
have post mortem burning, that is, after death, you're not
going to have any evidence in the airway that they
have been inhaling anything. However, the one kind of bumping
the road with that is they have this change in
the tissue surfaces of her trachea that gives an indication
(20:53):
that she was exposed to these superheated gases, and that's
how they're coming back to this point that it's an
exposure two superheated gases and that she inhaled it for
a moment and it's brought about her death. And oh,
by the way, she's also got hydro code on on
board and that's actually listed. It's like one of the
contributing factors here. So you kind of picked your poison
(21:16):
here along the way as to what you're going to
call this their default position on the manner of death.
(21:42):
And as we've talked about on bodybags, there's five of
them that you can choose from. Well, can we look
at this and say that it's an accident? I don't know.
I mean, is it possible that she accidentally set this fire?
And what would be the purpose of her setting and
fire in this location? Is there evidence that this is
(22:06):
some type of natural event. Well, no, they're not saying
anything about that. We're not talking about, you know, heart
disease or something else that you associated in the natural
world that in some kind of natural disease pathology. They're
not discussing that. What they are saying is that she
had hydrocat on on board and she was exposed to
superheated gases. That's what they're going with. As their cause
(22:29):
of death, and their default position in this case is
going to be suicide. They're not arriving at any other
conclusion other than she doused herself apparently in gas and
set herself on fire. She happened to have the substance
in her system, and all of those things playing together
wound up in her death, and they're going to rule
this as a suicide and they're going to close this case. Dave,
(22:51):
we're not flippant in talking about suicide. If you or
somebody you know is suffering through anything that leads you
to think that maybe it's time to just call an
end to life as it is, please call the National
Suicide Prevention Lifeline at one eight hundred two seven three talk.
That's one eight hundred two seventy three eight two five five.
(23:16):
Sometimes people will take a permanent fix for a temporary problem.
In this particular case, Joe, where they've really a suicide
saying she took her own life, I have to question.
She's holding on to a small thing coming out of
the ground. Her body is found down aways from where
(23:36):
the fire was. She's holding that tree with her hand
and she now we're being told burned over eighty percent
of her body. There are certain things that stick out
to me. And I'm just a journalist, Joe, you're a
professional at this. Does this sound or look like anything
you've ever heard would be a suicide. I have worked
cases of self emolation, but they ve gotta tell you,
(24:00):
as my granny would say, they're rare as hens teeth.
It's it's not something that you encounter, not like when
you're talking about suicides. You're talking about self inflicted gunshot wounds.
You're talking about hangings. Every now and then you'll have
drug gods. You find more, believe it or not, self
inflicted gunshot wounds and hangings than you do drug odes.
(24:21):
In my experience, in my little slice of the bid
self immolation, just thinking back right now over my career
work in the corner of the medical examor over the
course of my career too, I think, and then peripherally
with colleagues maybe maybe in total, maybe four. So that's
(24:42):
what makes this so bizarre for those of us that
work in forensics. When you hear that you have a
case like this of self immolation, I'll put it to
you this way. This case is the type of case
that you would go to a forens at conference and
you would actually see papers presented on that's how significant
(25:07):
this is. I think one final thing when police are
covering something like this, Joe, I mean when you're saying
that you haven't seen that it's such a rare occurrence
when police officers are investigating something along these lines and
release information to the public. As we were told, at first,
the burning seemed to be minor and it was limited
to her stomach, and now we find out that it's
eighty percent of her body. Her face couldn't be identified.
(25:30):
Do police sometimes downplay what they've seen to the public
to spare the family or just because it's not fitting
to a certain degree, yeah, they will. I think most
of the time when police are making decisions about what
will and will not be released Haramont, among all things
for them is to not compromise the case. If they
(25:52):
have information that they would not like released to the
general public because they suspect that this is something there
than as advertised. That's generally what their goal is, to
keep it from the general public and our working premise.
And I know many people in our audience have heard
this term, and I use it when I teach our
(26:12):
working premise is that all deaths, not some, not a few,
but all deaths are homicides until proven otherwise, and we
have to we have to be skeptical. We have to
assume that it is other than what we're seeing, because
if you if you don't cover all of your bases
and treat it with the same degree of care as
(26:32):
you would a homicide from the beginning, you're going to
miss something. You know, and early on I think that
in miss Collier's case, you know, they did, in fact
treat it as though it was a homicide. Certainly, I
think because it's so bizarre, it's such an outlier you
find bodies that are burned. Again, I go back to
my earlier supposition that you have this isolated event where
(26:54):
you have a body kind of lying out there in
the woods and let's face it, in in a very isolated
area out of you. Automatically you're going to think, well, wow,
somebody has brought her out here, they've doused her and gas,
they've done something to her, and they're trying to cover
their tracks. But apparently based upon what the police concluded
(27:15):
from the scene, and now that we've got this autopsy report,
based upon what the medical examiner as ruling says, they
don't think that it's a homicide, but we still don't know. No,
we still don't. We don't know why she sent two thousand,
three hundred and eighty five dollars by Venmo. We don't
know what the cryptic message meant. They're not going to
let me go. Some people have alluded to the fact
(27:37):
that she's got meds on board and that maybe that
had something to do with it. Really well, I mean,
she's been taking this medication regularly. Was there any other
substance in her system. Was it combined with alcohol? I
don't know, because all they're talking about right now at
this point that we can see at the time that
this is being recorded is that she had your code
(28:00):
on board. And again the level is questionable. We have
some people saying that it's it's above normal therapeutic levels,
and we have other people saying that, well, it's well
within the parameters of survivability, if you will. So hard
to say, but I do know this, out of all
the cases that we've covered on body backs, this is
certainly one more curious. If you or somebody you know
(28:26):
is suffering through anything that leads you to think that
maybe it's time to just calling into life as it is.
Please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at one eight
hundred two seven three talk. That's one eight hundred two
seven three eight two five five. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan
(28:49):
and this is body Backs
Body Backs with Joseph Scott Morgan Debbie Collier. I can't
say that name without scratching my head a little bit,
because arguably her death is one of the most bizarre
(00:28):
that certainly I've covered in the past I don't know,
two years probably, and now we have some answers, and
today we're going to talk about this update involving the
death of this fifty nine year old office manager from Georgia.
I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is body Backs. Wow.
(00:52):
Am I glad to have my buddy Dave Mac with
me today. Dave is a crime reporter for Crime Online.
This case is something that we've covered I don't know
for several months now, I think, and certainly it left
us all a bit fuddled. I think because just in
and of itself, the fact that her death was so
(01:13):
closely associated with a fire, it was in isolation, kind
of a very remote area, and there was nothing apparently
stolen or missing from her. It was just this kind
of standalone event that's had a lot of people really
really asking a lot of questions. I don't know, do
we actually have answers now? I think we have some.
(01:33):
She's a fifty nine year old who worked as an
office manager for a real estate company in Athens, Georgia. Athens,
Georgia is outside of Atlanta. It's where the Georgia Bulldogs play,
and that does come into play here. Okay, So from
a timeline of events, on September tenth, Debbie Collier sent
a Venmo payment to her daughter at three seventeen PM.
(01:57):
That Venmo payment was for two three hundred and eighty
five dollars and it had a cryptic message, they are
not going to let me go love you. There is
a key to the house in the blue flower pot
by the door. It's set off alarm bells because her daughter,
Amanda was not expecting this payment. From all we can
(02:20):
find out, Debbie Collier had never sent a payment that
large through Venmo. That's what started all of this. Amanda
calls her dad, Debbie's husband. He's been parking cars for
the Georgia Bulldocks football game since nine o'clock that morning.
He gets home around four and they start talking try
to figure out what happened. Around six o'clock, they call
(02:42):
nine one one. We don't know where she is, we
haven't seen her, and we have this crazy message. It
was the next day, September eleventh, investigators find her car.
She had a rental van because her car hit was
in the shop. She'd been in a car wreck, so
she's driving a rental van and they used the series
XM radio in that rental van the Habersham County Sheriff's office.
(03:04):
They alerted deputies to the location of this Chrysler Pacifica
that she had rented, and boom, they were able to
find the vehicle. It's about an hour, about sixty miles
away from her home, in an area that she didn't
normally go. They find her car, and then they find
her body. It's down a ravine. She's holding on to
(03:26):
a small tree branch. She's dead. There is obviously been
a fire, and she's partially clothed the burn. If you remember, Joe,
we were told the burning was on her stomach. Well,
the timeline of events, we know that she did stop
at a family dollar shore a couple of miles away
from where her body was found prior to her death, obviously,
and she bought some items. Those items were all found
(03:47):
at the location where her body was. So from a
timeline standpoint, we know where she was, we know what
she was doing prior to her death. We don't know why,
but we know what and where. So here we go.
They've told us from the beginning, partially burned, partially clad.
The burning is on her stomach. They released this autopsy
report and Joe's got Morgan. I'm begging you to tell
(04:09):
us what it means, because I'm reading this and I'm
going somebody's lying super bizarre stuff. First off, let's go
back you had mentioned. You know, we've gotten several different
reports in regards to Miss Collier's death relative to the
status of the clothing. You know, clothing is something that
we'd look at. We begin to think about what was
the status of the clothing. First off, were they clothed?
(04:29):
And the first thing that comes up when you think
about these things, and I'm not saying that this happened
in this case, but when you associate someone being absent clothing,
particularly a lady, you're automatically thinking, well, there was some
kind of assault that had taken place, some kind of
potential sexual assault. When I hear this initially and they're saying, well,
(04:50):
she was clothed, we've heard clothes, and we've heard partially clothed,
and we've heard naked, and so you know, it's hard
to kind of make sense of that. What I have
heard now was that there was some remnant of clothing
at least beneath her legs, possibly charred. That clothing remnant
that is there You begin to ask these questions first off,
(05:11):
or these trousers that she had on, pants, jeans, whatever
the case might be, and can they be tied back
to her. Many times, when you find a body that is, say,
for instance, in a prone position where they're laying on
their belly, or you have an individual that's in a
soupon position where they're laying on their back and they
haven't been moved at all, and they're wearing clothing. The
(05:33):
clothing on the top side involving a fire will at
least completely or partially be burned away. But sometimes if
you look beneath them, those areas are protected from the
flame the heat, and you can have sometimes tags that
you can examine, you can match up sizes, all those
sorts of things. But there's something else that you look
(05:54):
for with clothing and fire, and this is significant in
this case. That is, when you collect this clothing and
it is associated with fire, we actually take clothing in
cases of our sun, that sort of thing, and it
doesn't just have to be clothed, it can be other items,
and we put them in these the only way I
(06:15):
can really describe them are these metallic paint cans. And
you say, wow, that's interesting. Yeah, So we use these
for evidence collection. And what happens is is that if
there is any accelerant and when I say accelerant, I'm
talking about lighter, fluid certainly gasoline, kerosene, any of these
types of elements, as the clothing begins to settle into
(06:39):
the bottom of the can because of gravity, the fumes,
if there's anything left, begins to rise to the top
of that can internally, and a big I don't know's
it's hard to kind of describe for folks, but just
understand that it looks like a gigantic needle is inserted
into the top of that can and the air within
(07:02):
the can is drawn off in the lab and then
once that air is drawn off, guess what they can do?
They begin to test it. And we know that the
vapors from an accelerat I mean, we've all smelled cass right,
or maybe charcoal, light or fluid, maybe kerosene has a
particular odor, right, so it's in a gaseous state. You
can smell it. That's something that can't be quantified. Smell
(07:26):
is we can qualify it, say gee, that smells like gas.
But what we want our measurements. We want to get
a specific chemical identity. They're talking about that there was
a melted gas can in the immediate vicinity of her body.
So I want to know if the gas that may
have been associated with that melted gas can, if there
was anything left from that is associated with any kind
(07:49):
of accelerant that may have been on her clothing, and
try to marry that up. That's one part of this
along the way, the evident try issue that's separate from
the body itself, because you know, when you begin to
look at what they're saying, at least was revealed in
this autopsy report that was released by the State of Georgia,
(08:11):
and this is very curious. They're saying that the burns
that she has on the body. Remember you'd mentioned this day,
you talked about how they had initially talked about how
she had burning on her abdomen, and that was kind
of it was kind of very limited at that moment time.
But now they're talking they're using terms like leathery skin.
(08:32):
That what they're driving at here. When they're talking about
leathery skin, they're talking about desiccated skin. Skin that's that
is absent any kind of moisture. It's dried out, and
it's dried out as a result of being exposed to
intense heat. Also, we grade burns in degrees. We've all
heard about this first, second, third. You know that there's
even a fourth degree burning. You generally see it with
(08:54):
individuals that are deceased. They don't talk about fourth degree
burning in here, but they do talk about second third.
Guess where the concentration is, Well, it's her head and
her face and quite possibly the upper chest. So what
does that tell us, Well, it tells us that there
was a heavy concentration of some type of accelerant or
(09:15):
fuel source that was adjacent to that. Because listen, people
know what it's like to actually touch a stove or
get burned as a result of running your hand or
a flame. You get burned, but it's not burning like
when we think about something that is a continual, constant
fuel source for fire. Human tissue cannot sustain that. It
(09:37):
just can't. You would have to have something else there
that would lead to a third degree burned. This is
very intense, and you're starting to get down into not
just the epidermis, in the dermis. Now you're starting to
get into potentially the subcue fat, which is that layer
just below the top layer of skin. Her hair is
(09:57):
probably missing her face as hensely burned in her upper chest,
so that means that more than likely the accelerant was
on top of her body, the top of her head,
maybe had run down her face at some point in time.
I think the big question is is this something that
she did to herself sitting there on the ground where
(10:21):
she takes a container of gasoline and pours it on
top of her head and then initiates the flame by
striking a match or lighting a lighter, which is something
they haven't talked about the presence of. Or is this
something that somebody else did to her. In cases that
(10:55):
I've worked where I have people that have been burned,
and certainly relative to homicize, many times burning is used
in order to cover up anything that is left behind.
But is it actually used as a means to bring
about one's on death? Well, there are cases out there
like that. You know, this is generally referred to as
(11:17):
self immolation. But here's the key. Most of the time,
when people self immolate, their doused in gasoline or some
type of other accelerant and they set themselves on fire,
you're going to have a product that is produced relative
to this burning. That's going to be your own body,
(11:39):
where you have hair and skin that's initially burned, any
clothing that's there, and any other item that immediately surround
the person. Say that they've put a fuel source on
top of them, like wood or something like this to
maintain the burning, and then they douse themselves with an
accelerant set themselves on fire, you would find remnant of that.
And Dave, she was found in a wooded area, so
(12:01):
we would expect when we open up her body at
autopsy that we would find particularly in the trachea and
that's our windpipe essentially, and into our nose, in our mouth,
into the windpipe, into the lungs, you would expect to
find evidence of debris. Dave, it ain't there, brother, So
(12:23):
does that mean that she was burned after she died.
That's a question that has not been answered. They're ruling
it as a suicide. Yea, they are ruling it as
a suicide. We have this kind of lining. If you
just think about the interior of your mouth, you just
kind of run your tongue around the interior of your mouth.
It's not too dissimilar from the same surface that you
(12:45):
have down into your airway. It's mucoid, very soft and fleshy,
and you look for debris in this area. But you
also look for what they referred to as an inflammatory response.
And they're saying that there is this area in her
trachea that would be indicative of inhalation of superheated gas. Okay,
(13:08):
superheated gas. So when people inhale and there's intense flame
around them, remember we're trying to uptake oxygen every single
second of the day. That's what we do in order
to survive. Even in the midst of a very intense fire,
you're inhaling to try to grab that oxen it's there.
(13:30):
And what does fire sek out, Well, it seeks out
oxygen as fuel source. It thrives on oxygen. It's consuming
all of the oxygen in the environment. So was she
literally inhaling the superheated gas. That's being generated by the fire.
The problem is this, it could not have been sustainable,
all right, It would not have been in a sustainable event.
(13:52):
And so they're talking about her inhaling superheated gas and
that that brought about her death. It brought about her
death that quickly after a certain amount of tom that
event is going to pass, and she would still continue
to breed, you would think unless she went into some
kind of associated sudden cardiac event. I'm not talking about
(14:13):
having a heart attack, a mile cardial infarction, That's not
what I'm talking about. But you can get yourself into
this position where essentially your heart will stop as a
result of being exposed to this kind of trauma. Is
that what they're actually saying, because right now that's really
the only thing they have to hang their hand on.
And let me ask you this. Joe I mentioned in
(14:35):
setting up the timeline that Debbie Collier had gone to
a family dollar store and made very specific purchases. Again,
we're talking sixty miles away from her house, and she's
at a family dollar store she doesn't normally go to.
She buys a blue tarp, red toebag, paper towels, a
torch lighter, and a poncho. Those were the things she
(14:59):
purchased at the family dollar store, and all these items
were found in the area of her body and the fire.
My question is this. They've ruled it a suicide, and
as you mentioned, saying it was the inhalation of the
superheated gases thermal injuries. They've also mentioned other things. But
(15:21):
I poured gas in my ditch to burn leaves one time,
and I had a whole bunch of leaves and I
poured too much gas. Okay, I let it soak in
a minute. I didn't realize how stupid I was being.
When I lit the leaves. It was an immediate explosion
and it knocked me down and shocked me. And had
(15:42):
I been closer to the leaves, I would have been burned.
If their theory of what happened is true, could it
have been that she was in some state of mind
where she bought these items. She has a gas can
that is also on the scene. As you mentioned, she
pours gas over something and leaning over, she doesn't realize
(16:05):
the power that this gas is going to have on her,
and she lights it and does what happened to me
in my front yard. I guess that that's certainly a possibility. However,
I have to go back and state that you were
talking about third degree burned, so this would not have
been I think that probably you might expect to see
a second degree event visualized on the surface of her skin.
(16:29):
You're starting to talk about third degree burning. That almost
implies that there was extended exposure to the flame in
order to achieve that level of trauma. And maybe that's
a residual effect of if she had been doused in
the flame and that there was an initial flash over
where she inhalated the superheated gas, the remnant of the
accelerant would still have to burn off of her skin
(16:51):
at that point in time. Maybe that's an answer. I
don't know that there's really enough to hang your hat on,
and we haven't seen the actual autopsy report because it
hasn't been made public at this point in time. However,
there are individuals that are commenting on it in the press.
Obviously they've seen it. You think about this and you think, well,
(17:13):
is there something else here? But according to one line
in the autopsy report, allegedly they're talking about what the
police saw, and the police are essentially opining that she
was there by herself, and that's really and that that's
an indication to them at least that this was a suicide.
So you're telling me that's you're going with that, and
(17:33):
that's what you're going to hang your hat on. And
apparently that's the decision that was made by virtue of
that the medical examiner made that decision based upon what
the police did or didn't see at the scene. One
other thing that's important here to remember. At autopsy, there
is a test that is run. It's called a carboxy
hemoglobin level, and you do it with a blood draw.
(17:57):
What you're looking for is the uptake of carbon in
the system and how it kind of gets into the bloodstream.
This gives an indication of protracted exposure because now you're
beginning to metabolize some of the stuff that's in the
air and floating around. And again when they inhale eco
systemic at that point in time, guess what carboxy hemoglobin
(18:20):
level was not going to say it was nil, but
it was, according to them, apparently within normal ranges of
what people would have in them on a regular day.
When we have cases where people have been exposed to
fire and they're in homes, say, for instance, where the
home is kind of collapsing around them they're struggling to
get out. Their carboxy hemoglobin level will in fact be
(18:42):
elevated because they're inhaling these noxious gases that are in
the environment in which they normally dwell, so that gives
you an idea of long term exposure. The absence of
a significant carboxy hemoglobin level in her blood would suggest
that this was a very quick event. One things that
they did find in her system, and this is not
(19:04):
completely unexpected, is that she had hydrocdone in her system
and she had been taking this I think, if I
remember correctly, as a result of some kind of back
pain that she had had for a protracted period of time.
She was under medical care because chronic pain from a
back injury that she had lived with for a long time.
(19:26):
And it's interesting because in November, when all of this
first came out about inhalation of superheated gases and thermal
injuries and hydro codone intoxication, that was what we were told,
and now that the autopsy has come out. This is
according to a source from Fox five in Atlanta, saying
although she had a prescription for the opioid pain killer.
(19:47):
The hydrocodone levels in her system surpassed the expected amount
roughly four times over. We've also heard her report You
and I both heard the same report that they were
at therapeutic levels. That's a confusion there, But I don't
know how much that would come into play. If you've
got eighty percent of her body burned, second and third
(20:08):
degree burns, as you've just indicated, that would have killed her. Yeah,
So which is it, I think is a big question
relative to these the levels of the hydrocodone. Wouldn't you
expect somebody to be burned after they were dead that
and doesn't this is there an indication that the burning
took place after death? That's hard to surmas based upon
(20:29):
the information that is coming in. If you're going to
have post mortem burning, that is, after death, you're not
going to have any evidence in the airway that they
have been inhaling anything. However, the one kind of bumping
the road with that is they have this change in
the tissue surfaces of her trachea that gives an indication
(20:53):
that she was exposed to these superheated gases, and that's
how they're coming back to this point that it's an
exposure two superheated gases and that she inhaled it for
a moment and it's brought about her death. And oh,
by the way, she's also got hydro code on on
board and that's actually listed. It's like one of the
contributing factors here. So you kind of picked your poison
(21:16):
here along the way as to what you're going to
call this their default position on the manner of death.
(21:42):
And as we've talked about on bodybags, there's five of
them that you can choose from. Well, can we look
at this and say that it's an accident? I don't know.
I mean, is it possible that she accidentally set this fire?
And what would be the purpose of her setting and
fire in this location? Is there evidence that this is
(22:06):
some type of natural event. Well, no, they're not saying
anything about that. We're not talking about, you know, heart
disease or something else that you associated in the natural
world that in some kind of natural disease pathology. They're
not discussing that. What they are saying is that she
had hydrocat on on board and she was exposed to
superheated gases. That's what they're going with. As their cause
(22:29):
of death, and their default position in this case is
going to be suicide. They're not arriving at any other
conclusion other than she doused herself apparently in gas and
set herself on fire. She happened to have the substance
in her system, and all of those things playing together
wound up in her death, and they're going to rule
this as a suicide and they're going to close this case. Dave,
(22:51):
we're not flippant in talking about suicide. If you or
somebody you know is suffering through anything that leads you
to think that maybe it's time to just call an
end to life as it is, please call the National
Suicide Prevention Lifeline at one eight hundred two seven three talk.
That's one eight hundred two seventy three eight two five five.
(23:16):
Sometimes people will take a permanent fix for a temporary problem.
In this particular case, Joe, where they've really a suicide
saying she took her own life, I have to question.
She's holding on to a small thing coming out of
the ground. Her body is found down aways from where
(23:36):
the fire was. She's holding that tree with her hand
and she now we're being told burned over eighty percent
of her body. There are certain things that stick out
to me. And I'm just a journalist, Joe, you're a
professional at this. Does this sound or look like anything
you've ever heard would be a suicide. I have worked
cases of self emolation, but they ve gotta tell you,
(24:00):
as my granny would say, they're rare as hens teeth.
It's it's not something that you encounter, not like when
you're talking about suicides. You're talking about self inflicted gunshot wounds.
You're talking about hangings. Every now and then you'll have
drug gods. You find more, believe it or not, self
inflicted gunshot wounds and hangings than you do drug odes.
(24:21):
In my experience, in my little slice of the bid
self immolation, just thinking back right now over my career
work in the corner of the medical examor over the
course of my career too, I think, and then peripherally
with colleagues maybe maybe in total, maybe four. So that's
(24:42):
what makes this so bizarre for those of us that
work in forensics. When you hear that you have a
case like this of self immolation, I'll put it to
you this way. This case is the type of case
that you would go to a forens at conference and
you would actually see papers presented on that's how significant
(25:07):
this is. I think one final thing when police are
covering something like this, Joe, I mean when you're saying
that you haven't seen that it's such a rare occurrence
when police officers are investigating something along these lines and
release information to the public. As we were told, at first,
the burning seemed to be minor and it was limited
to her stomach, and now we find out that it's
eighty percent of her body. Her face couldn't be identified.
(25:30):
Do police sometimes downplay what they've seen to the public
to spare the family or just because it's not fitting
to a certain degree, yeah, they will. I think most
of the time when police are making decisions about what
will and will not be released Haramont, among all things
for them is to not compromise the case. If they
(25:52):
have information that they would not like released to the
general public because they suspect that this is something there
than as advertised. That's generally what their goal is, to
keep it from the general public and our working premise.
And I know many people in our audience have heard
this term, and I use it when I teach our
(26:12):
working premise is that all deaths, not some, not a few,
but all deaths are homicides until proven otherwise, and we
have to we have to be skeptical. We have to
assume that it is other than what we're seeing, because
if you if you don't cover all of your bases
and treat it with the same degree of care as
(26:32):
you would a homicide from the beginning, you're going to
miss something. You know, and early on I think that
in miss Collier's case, you know, they did, in fact
treat it as though it was a homicide. Certainly, I
think because it's so bizarre, it's such an outlier you
find bodies that are burned. Again, I go back to
my earlier supposition that you have this isolated event where
(26:54):
you have a body kind of lying out there in
the woods and let's face it, in in a very isolated
area out of you. Automatically you're going to think, well, wow,
somebody has brought her out here, they've doused her and gas,
they've done something to her, and they're trying to cover
their tracks. But apparently based upon what the police concluded
(27:15):
from the scene, and now that we've got this autopsy report,
based upon what the medical examiner as ruling says, they
don't think that it's a homicide, but we still don't know. No,
we still don't. We don't know why she sent two thousand,
three hundred and eighty five dollars by Venmo. We don't
know what the cryptic message meant. They're not going to
let me go. Some people have alluded to the fact
(27:37):
that she's got meds on board and that maybe that
had something to do with it. Really well, I mean,
she's been taking this medication regularly. Was there any other
substance in her system. Was it combined with alcohol? I
don't know, because all they're talking about right now at
this point that we can see at the time that
this is being recorded is that she had your code
(28:00):
on board. And again the level is questionable. We have
some people saying that it's it's above normal therapeutic levels,
and we have other people saying that, well, it's well
within the parameters of survivability, if you will. So hard
to say, but I do know this, out of all
the cases that we've covered on body backs, this is
certainly one more curious. If you or somebody you know
(28:26):
is suffering through anything that leads you to think that
maybe it's time to just calling into life as it is.
Please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at one eight
hundred two seven three talk. That's one eight hundred two
seven three eight two five five. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan
(28:49):
and this is body Backs
Host
Joseph Scott Morgan
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