November 4, 2025 • 57 mins
Caitlin Tracey is reported missing by her husband Adam Beckerink. He claims he hasn't seen his wife in a month. The next day, a foot is found on the second floor stairwell. A search of the rest of the stairwell inside the condo building and the body of Caitlin Tracey is discovered on the 5th floor. Joseph Scott Morgan and Dave Mack breakdown the relationship of Caitlin and Adam Beckerink, accusations of domestic violence, 911 calls, and the medical examiner report and what was found in the examination of Caitlin Tracey. Did she Jump? Did she fall? Was she thrown?
Transcript Highlights
00:00:00.07 Introduction
00:02:43.52 The death of Caitlin Tracey
00:05:21.13 Husband reports her missing, day before her body is found
00:11:11.78 Man found, public place, advanced decomposition
00:15:27.36 Every dead body is a murder until proven different
00:20:21.53 Not celebrating getting married
00:25:12.68 Domestic violence
00:30:26.91 Belt buckle struck victim on face and neck
00:35:06.87 People fall from height
00:40:09.43 Other insults on her body
00:45:50.38 Could a person thrown themselves over the side without hitting sides
00:50:30.29 Looking for bruising that doesn't match up
00:55:07.34 Old blood versus newer blood
00:57:13.23 Conclusion
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Body doubts, but Joseph's gotten more. When you work in
the world of medical legal death investigation, you come across
some interesting terminology as it applies to causal factors surrounding deaths.
You know, the way they're described, some of them sound
(00:25):
quite bizarre. And then you begin to look at it
from the perspective of a forensic pathologist and the practical
scientific application those sorts of things, and you begin to
understand why they're saying it this way. But it's not
necessarily the way regular people talk, and it's amazing. Sometimes
(00:49):
you'll get confusion, a confused response from an individual when
you tell them what a cause of death is, and
it's because the wording is so.
Speaker 2 (01:01):
Bizarre.
Speaker 1 (01:03):
I think the one that always baffled me, and I
guess I gave a little chuckle to was this one.
And I'll never forget the first time I heard it.
It was blunt force trauma secondary to rapid deceleration injuries.
(01:25):
Most of the time that applies to a vehicle, a
motor vehicle accident. But you know, as we've talked before
on body bags about certain types of injuries, we know
that blunt force trauma is the leading cause of death
when it comes to motor vehicle accidents. But you know
there's another category falls. Some of them are super bizarre,
(01:51):
some of them are very straightforward. But today we're going
to talk about a lady who did take quite a
fall from twenty stories and she has sustained more injuries
then some might be able to count very complex. We're
(02:16):
going to talk about the death of Caitlin Tracy. Coming
to you from the beautiful campus of Jacksonville State University.
I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Bodybags Well brother Dave.
(02:39):
As they say in Ireland, top of the morn Antolia,
it's good to see you, my friend. Without Dave is
like a day without sunshine. I love seeing my friend
and being able to chat with you. And for those
of you that think that we're in the same room,
well that's kind of a mystery. But now we're really not,
but in view one of one another, you know, uh, electronically,
(03:04):
and we make funny faces at one another that none
of you can see. But I haven't been able to
throw anything at a camera yet. I haven't felt compelled
to do that with Dave. Now there are other people
that I have been on air withoo. Before that, I
feel compelled to throw things at the camera. But you
haven't lived until you've been in a morgue with a
furious forensic pathologist and they throw a dirty surgical instrument out.
(03:29):
And that happened to me on a couple of occasions,
and you know, only a couple occasions. It was the
second occasion after it occurred, I threatened to beat them
to a bloody pulp.
Speaker 2 (03:44):
Caitlin Tracy is the victim and she is married, secretly
married to Adam Beckering. There to year relationship was fraught
with violence. Joe. It is, I hate to say, a
typical domestic violence relationship, but is very common. And the
reason we're doing this story is Caitlin Tracy was found.
(04:06):
Her body was found the day after she was reported
missing by her husband, and she was found in parts. Okay,
the way her body was described, she was pulverized. Her
torso was found on the fifth floor, her severed foot
found on the second floor. The assumption from the very
(04:29):
beginning is that she fell twenty floors and in this
condo in southside of Chicago. Now many people would say, okay,
if somebody were to fall in a stairwell in a
building that's occupied by hundreds of people. Why did it
take two days? Why was she missing for any length
(04:51):
of time inside the building? And the reason israel simple, Joe.
People use elevators. You only use the stairs and once
you get above. Now, I'm a stair guy, all right.
I used to be, and I would not wait on
an elevator three or four floors, I'm good. But once
you get over the fifth floor, you know, I'm gonna
catch in the elevator. And that's why, that's why her
(05:14):
body wasn't discovered. So remember now we are talking about
October of twenty twenty four. Her husband reported her missing
the day before her body was found, and police believe
that Adam Becker NK threw his wife over the railing
(05:36):
from the twentieth floor on October twenty fifth, twenty twenty four.
He reported her missing the next day, the twenty sixth,
and her body was found on the twenty seventh. Now,
when he reported her missing, Joe, he said he hadn't
seen her in a month, but just to give you
a heads up, he was lying. A video from inside
(05:56):
the building actually showed that they were together. You know,
the day leading up to her, but.
Speaker 1 (06:01):
There was no There was no CCTV in the stairwell
itself though.
Speaker 2 (06:05):
Correct again, and now it goes back to the elevator
versus the stairwell. It just aren't that many stairwell people
on the fifth floor, which is where her body was found.
Speaker 1 (06:13):
I got to tell you something right here. I hate
stairwells from this is why I hate them. I hate
them from the perspective of personal safety, particularly when it
comes to my family. I've warned my daughter and my
wife to a lesser degree my son, but because there
(06:37):
are so many hidden spots, many of them. And here's
another thing. If you're in a public building has a
stairwell and you've got somebody that's looking to victimize somebody,
first off, you can disable cameras, but also you can
knock lights out in those areas and it becomes a
real kind of dark area where you can't see anything,
(06:59):
and it has nothing to do well at this stage,
I don't like to do stairs if I can. And
plus I've got this horrible phobia about handrails. There's just
I hate handrails. I hate them, and Kim is always
getting onto me hold a handrail, you know, we can't
afford for you to, you know, to fall down and
(07:19):
break a hip or break a knee or you know,
break my shoulder, fracture my skull. And as a matter
of fact, she really goes over the top. She says,
you realize you don't hold that handrail, You're gonna die.
It's like, yeah, if I hold onto it, I'm going
to catch something. And I'm not really a germophobe, but
it's just I've been in men's bathrooms so many times
(07:40):
where I watch people walk by sinks and I hate
and people are holding these sinks and just dragging their
hands down and I'm thinking, oh my gosh. But I
got to tell you something real quick about observable bodies.
And you're okay. I know that you're going to remember this.
(08:02):
Do you remember the Omni in Atlanta?
Speaker 2 (08:05):
Yes?
Speaker 1 (08:05):
Do you remember?
Speaker 2 (08:06):
Then?
Speaker 1 (08:07):
One of the for people that don't know what I'm
talking about, Omni was where the Atlanta Hawks used to play.
I think they built it originally in the seventies.
Speaker 2 (08:17):
Is North Carolina State won the ACC championship in nineteen
eighty three, right that pushed them into the NCAA tournament,
where they won March Madis and became national champions and
started at the Omni in Atlanta. Would be ACC Basketball tournament.
Speaker 1 (08:31):
Go Wolfpack man, Yeah yeah, I hear you by, and
I got to tell you great concert venue. And it
was a great concert venue because you didn't feel like
you were so pushed back, you know, like they tried
to jam a lot of people in these There was
something intimate about it. I saw multiple concerts there and
(08:54):
out of everywhere we were seeing a concert in a coliseum.
It was one of the better places. But talk about
observable spaces with dead bodies. Dave, I actually had a
case in the OMNI, and this is not too long
after I had arrived in Atlanta and was one of
the more bizarre cases I had worked. It had occurred. Okay,
(09:20):
basketball season for the nh for the NBA typically ended
I think in May, kind of May area. You know.
Now they try to extend these things so long. You know,
it's like year round ball. There was. I got called
to the Omni in late July and this was not
(09:46):
in a stairwell. This was on one of the concourses
adjacent to an exit, and Dave, there was a full
grown man that was laid outside of a door, fully closed,
face down in a prone position. He was in an
advanced state of decomposition. As a matter of fact, this
(10:07):
was one of those cases involving insect activity where when
you walked a couple of theaks where you walk up
to the body and it looks like the body's moving
because of the maggot infestation. And he was covered from
head to toe and Dave, no one spotted him in
the building. No one did. And this was out The
(10:30):
Omni used to have this funky looking carpet, you know that,
you know, it's right like real brash and you know,
just horrible looking. It had, you know, the colors of
the Hawks in it, and I think that sort of thing.
And at that point in time they were not doing
concerts in there, which was kind of odd because you know,
you've got to got to feed the beast man, you know.
Speaker 2 (10:51):
And so the guy was there long enough to get
decomposed and nobody's see was.
Speaker 1 (10:55):
Yeah, and no one And it certainly gives you and
going back to that talking about kind of security and
that sort of thing, it gives you an idea. On
a concourse in a major venue like that, you would
think that you would have patrols that were going around regularly.
So for people that think that it's odd that this
(11:15):
poor woman was not discovered until several until a couple
of days later, it's not. This is not something that
has never happened before. It does. It does, in fact happen,
And I became reflective of that in that case, you know,
kind of popped in mind, you know, for me when
I heard about this, you know, because she's on a
stair well, well, how many people are going to end
(11:37):
particularly at this height. You know, we're talking twenty stories, dude,
unless you're a fitness nut, you know, or unless there's
a fire in the building or the elevators is busted.
I can't imagine anybody saying, you know, well, gee whiz,
you know, I'm going to run take the stairs. But
that's not what's key here. It's the bottom floors. People
(11:59):
are on the lower floor. I will if I'm staying
at a hotel and I'm staying on like you know,
like you said, fourth fifth floor, there's a high probability
if I'm not dragging luggage with me, if I'm going
out to dinner, I'm gonna take a stairwell. How did
they not find her body, which is which is fascinating
because once they did find her body, Dave, I can
(12:22):
only imagine, you know what, because it was the condition
of her body was so horrific. And you're thinking, well,
first off, because when you I'll put it to you
this way, without giving too much way, the condition of
her body, all right, when you see her body, it's
(12:44):
not like you would walk up and say, yeah, I
know who she is, Dave. They're using terms like pulverized.
We use those terms. We use pulpified, pulverized. When we
talk about conditions either externally or internally in the body,
(13:04):
we talk about pulpified. Pulpified injuries are organs in the body,
like the spleen and the liver and notorious for being pulpified,
and that is as a result of blunt force trauma,
where the organ itself has been so traumatized by blunt
force that all of the kind of structural integrity of
(13:26):
the thing just breaks down and it particulates almost in place.
And it's not like you would be able to walk
up to her and say, oh, yeah, I know her.
So can you imagine being that person that finds these
remains and I would imagine that upon discovery of the remainder,
(13:49):
you're looking and you're thinking, Okay, has she been beaten
to death? You know, what's the story? You know, what's
the story with her in this particular condition. Was she
assaulted when she was coming down the stairwell? But it
turns out they according to what you're saying, that's not
what the police believe here.
Speaker 2 (14:09):
You know, the I mentioned earlier about going up the stairs. Okay,
I'm a stairperson, and yet after the third or fourth floor,
I'm not going. Okay, that's kind of like my window.
And so that's why I when I was looking at
why wasn't she found? Well, okay, her body was found,
but only after her severed foot was found on the
(14:30):
second floor. So that kind of goes back to what
I was saying earlier. People do go up the first
two or three flights of stairs semi regular, and so
it makes sense that her foot was found first, not
her body. It was after they you know, they find
a shoe and you see something looking there. It is October.
(14:51):
You know, this happened in October of twenty twenty four,
and so you're thinking, you know, it's a year ago.
This time that this was going on, and so it's
a little early for Halloween. Hey, it could be you know,
decorations for that. So that foot didn't immediately scream body.
It was after a closer look that it was like oh.
And so then they started the investigation, and that's where
(15:14):
they then found her body three floors above where her
foot was found. So I thought that made somewhat sense
to me. But as you go through this, they have
to figure out, well, who she is, who is she with,
you know, and immediately Joe the police, as they begin
(15:36):
the investigation. You know, you're the one that told me
every dead body is a murder until proven otherwise. And
that didn't occur to me, It really didn't. But now
after years of doing this, even car wrecks that have
a dead body, I've seen those turn out to be
(15:56):
a homicide, you know, and that's where coming to this,
that's how they're going to that somebody committed suicide or
that maybe accident, but they're thinking homicide. They'll proven differently. Well,
it took a while, but they were able to as
they started looking at it, you're going, wait a minute.
Her husband reported her missing on the day before her
(16:19):
body was found and think about that for just a minute.
You know, they're able to prove because I have his
sen her in thirty days, got report her missing, and
that that's kind of where in going with this. You know,
got a little problem with that man when the.
Speaker 1 (16:38):
Husband, yeah, charge, It would seem to me that well,
first off, and I think that you know, since this
guy's been charged, he's not been put on trial. This
is this case has not been adjudicated at this point.
It would seem to me that probably the defense in
(17:02):
a case like this, if you were having to defend
someone in similar circumstances, they're going to be looking at
this from the perspective of, well, it cuts both ways.
They're going to look look at it from this perspective.
You know, well he was he's being a dutiful husband.
(17:23):
You know, he's worried about her, he hasn't seen her
in thirty days, and suddenly he reports her missing, but
she's not found until later. Why is he waited all
this time? And maybe they are in an estranged state.
But then the prosecution is going to look at this
and they're going to say this is point of attack,
(17:45):
This is where we can kind of boreholes into this narrative.
You know that we're talking about relative to relative to
what he has actually said. You know, it's is it
coincidental here that he hasn't seen her in thirty days
and then all of a sudden and now we've got
CCTV where we know that he's lying that he hasn't
seen her, and he calls in the day before she's found,
(18:09):
and suddenly she's found. It makes you think. It makes
you think that if you have perpetrated some kind of evil,
that if you still have some moral compass within you,
is it eating away at you? Are you thinking this
(18:30):
person who I have said that I cared about, that
I wanted to marry and that I wanted to love,
is there. I know they're there, and in some lucid moment,
say maybe just maybe not a call sent small private
(19:02):
ceremony where people are not aware that you're married. I think,
on its on its surface, Italy Dave, there's you know,
kind of a romantic thing that goes along with that.
You know we're going to Elope. I know that dads
(19:23):
all over the country are hoping for elopements when it
comes to painting for weddings. But in all seriousness, she's,
you know, in her thirties, he's in his forties, and
they it kind of sounds like they're secretly wed. Why
would why would you not want this to be a celebration,
(19:48):
you know what I'm saying. You know, weddings. To me,
weddings I always think about, you know, I go back to,
you know, the story in the New Testament, you know,
the first miracle with Christ where it's a celebration. You know,
Mary's asking for wine because they've run out of wine. Right,
it's a celebration, man, And always think about that, you know,
(20:09):
when I hear about people that don't have an opportunity
to literally celebrate their nuptials if you will. And there's
a variety of reasons why people don't, but I'm wondering.
Speaker 2 (20:19):
This is a good one.
Speaker 1 (20:20):
Yeah, this is amazing. There's more.
Speaker 2 (20:22):
Yeah, they knew each other for two years, Joe. Okay, Which,
by the way, I am not one of these people
who thinks that you need to be with somebody for
a long time before you may get married and all that.
I'm not that because I've seen people who dated for
seven years got married into all fall apart in the
first six months. I'm not that guy. I honestly will
(20:44):
tell you I met Lodonna the week of Thanksgiving. I
propose to her the week of Christmas, and we got
married in the following March.
Speaker 1 (20:55):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (20:56):
And we were married nearly twenty eight years until she
passed away. So I yeah, it just it's one of
those things. When I saw this, I look at it
because I wonder, you know, relationship wise, and having been
a pastor and counseled couples, I've seen this. Here's what
(21:18):
we have is they met in October of twenty twenty two,
and both successful, okay, business wise in their personal lives
or private lives or public life, rather their business life.
Both successful. Now, they meet in October twenty twenty two,
they begin dating. The first year, we don't hear a
whole lot in terms of the law. Okay, we don't
(21:41):
have police reports the first year twenty twenty two. But
I want you to speed dial with me to eleven
months after they begin dating. We're at September twentieth of
twenty twenty three, and they have an official breakup. Caitlin
Tracy breaks up with Adam BECKERINGK and immediately he goes
(22:08):
hey wire and she ends up having to file for
a protection order in November. Remember he is a tax layer.
And when she files for that protection order, she lists
a number of issues violence, emotional, psychological, verbal abuse. I mean,
(22:29):
there is abuse on every level that she puts into
this protection order because the times she broke up with
him in September and the time she files for the
protection order, she says, he's calling me twenty times a day,
he won't leave me alone, you know, And in that
she listed a number of issues that had happened physically
violent between them. He threatens in November twenty twenty three
(22:51):
to sue her if she doesn't pull this back, you know,
threatening a lawsuit, because you're damaging my career, credibility, my character,
you know. And so I want to be very clear here,
Caitlin Tracy is not a woman who lacks money. Her
(23:11):
family is a family of means. Her mom's a doctor,
her dad is a real estate mogul. They've got cash,
they got money, So that's not an issue at play here.
January thirteenth, twenty twenty four, Caitlyn Tracy calls nine to
one one Beck Rink assaulted her and stole from her
by the way he stole fifty thousand dollars worth of jewelry.
(23:35):
It's not a small thievery here, and beck Ran fled
before police arrived. April twenty twenty four, they get married.
Think about this for just a minute. We have one
year or eleven months between we meet, we begin to date,
she breaks up, and boom, he goes off the rails.
(23:57):
This domestic violence stuff is going back and forth, and
you can tell this the pattern. I'm so sorry, baby,
I'll never happen again. I just get so emotional because
I'm so in love with you. It's just You're in
my everything, and the thought of you not being with
me just sends me. I'm so sorry. I will make
good on that. You know. That's what happens in domestic
violence relationships, why women don't leave and Caitlin Tracy did
(24:20):
have a home in Michigan as well. She had her
own place on a lake, very nice place, so she
had place to go to Joe, she wasn't homeless if
she wasn't with him. He owns the condo in the
South side of Chicago where her body was found in
the stairwell. But they're using both of these homes during
their dating courtship. But then after all of this goes on,
after she gives him of beating her up and stealing
from her, they then get married, but none of her
(24:43):
family is invited. Now that tells you everything you need
to know about how controlling this man is. Allegedly Adam
Beckering was able to control either. She was embarrassed, you know,
to after everything she's told her family about what's going
on in the relationship and doesn't want you know, she
married him.
Speaker 1 (24:59):
She thought, she well, you see this, you see this
many times, repeated these cases that I've worked over the
years involving domestic violence. And you know, I think that
many people might give pauses and say, well, Morgan, what
do you know about domestic violence? Well, I can tell
you what I know about domestic violence. I know it
(25:19):
from the perspective of a death investigator. And when we
go back and we work these cases, you will see,
as you have well stated day, that there is a
you can actually plot a pattern along with this where
it kind of rises and falls. And there have been
(25:40):
many times where I've stood over the bodies of dead
women at scenes and the level of violence that you
see lethal violence, okay, is is like a culmination in
already ongoing violence because some of these some of these
victims will have old, receding, healing injuries that have been
(26:05):
acquired over the months preceding, and it will in fact
rise and fall. You know, the same thing happens with
children too, with child abuse cases, where you will have
a parent that will beat a child and they will
have some level of guilt and shame and there it'll
go radio silent for a while, and then all of
(26:27):
a sudden that pent up rage because they can't manage,
manage their their own mind, they fly into these furies
and do this. And that's that is an explanation for
what you see. You know many times where individuals are
literally ripped to shreds, and I mean that with some
(26:48):
of the injuries that I've seen over the years, and
they will here here's another interesting thing. With domestic violence
and child abuse cases, you will see perpetrate and I
think probably one of the most significant areas to me,
that kind of translates into if you're going to develop
(27:10):
an abuse profile on somebody, you will see damage to
the mouth. You realize that you will see like over
and over and over again. You'll see like blunt force
trauma to the mouth where people are getting punched in
the mouth. I've had cases where women have lost multiple
teeth prior to their death, and these, you know, the
sockets are actually healing where they've had teeth knocked out.
(27:33):
And you'll see kids that sustain trauma to the mouth.
You'll have events where caustic agents will actually be poured
into the mouth of children in order to shut them up.
And it's almost like if an individual is not responding
(27:53):
in the correct manner to which the abuser, you know,
wants them to respond, they literally go after the mouth.
Is that fascinating? And so you'll see all these kinds
of injuries that interpretively, you can go back and you
kind of see this line that runs through it all
and then when it comes to that last fatal moment.
It reminds me of a case that I worked many
(28:16):
years ago, and I used this case actually in teaching
here at JSU and it's a sharp force injury case.
And I had a lady that had been beaten by
her husband almost every single day and he was just
this vicious alcoholic and he worked on construction sites and
(28:41):
he had a habit of coming home getting drunk and
taking off his belt and chasing her all over the house.
And this one final night he did this to her,
I'll never forget. It was up in northeast Atlanta, and
he made the mistake that night of taking a belt,
hitting her with a buckle and struck her in the
(29:03):
neck with it and slapped her in the face, which
he had, according to her, had never done. He would
just whip her with a belt. And he was again
raging drunk. He passes out on the sofa. So it's
in that moment that she decides she's had enough. She
goes into the kitchen. She takes a really cheap serrated
(29:27):
steak knife. He's passed out on the sofa, face down,
and she drove that knife into his back over and
over and over again. To when I got out to
the scene to examine his body, she had snapped a
blade off in his back. The handle was laying over
to the side and the rest of the blade was
hanging out. I don't people, I don't know if people
(29:51):
really realize the level of anger and violence that you
see in domestic violence. Now that case ended that I'm
just mentioning where the DA to their credit, did not
charge this woman, they did not charge it. The grand
jury wouldn't bite on it because of everything she had
been through. But in the case of Caitlyn Tracy, there.
Speaker 2 (30:16):
Still it was the belt buckle on the neck that actually.
Speaker 1 (30:19):
Was Yeah, it was the belt bible that it had
struck her on the face and on the neck, and
this was evidenced in this particular case. I don't know,
because of what we're going to talk about with Kaitlyn
Tracy and the trauma that she sustained, I don't know
how easy this is going to be to interpret, to
(30:43):
be able to scientifically separate any kind of pre existing
abuse injuries she may have had prior to a fall.
But I know this, I do know that therein is
going to rest a narrative and you're not going to believe, Yeah,
the trauma that she sustained. Brother, I got to tell you,
(31:18):
you know, I was relating that case about the domestic
abuse where the lady survived, and I guess you could
call her fortunate on one level she escaped with her life.
But in Caitlin's case, we unfortunately, we're looking at a
(31:39):
pretty brutal death here. Now, it's my understanding that just
over the past week and one of the reasons you
have suggested we do this case, and I'm thankful that
you that you've made me aware of it. This person
has made some court appearances this past week and that's
(32:00):
why it's on our radar right now.
Speaker 2 (32:01):
Well, Adam beckeringk you know I mentioned the fighting before
and the charges in the nine will one call and
the filing for protection order. Well after they got married,
secretly keiving her family away in April of twenty twenty four.
Go fast forward to August of twenty twenty four there
in Michigan at her house there and she ends up
(32:24):
having to call the police and he is arrested for
domestic violence. If you watch this video of him being arrested,
it's like he is constantly going back and forth Joe
between trying to convince the police, hey, just stop, let's talk.
Come on, let's just talk, guys, don't don't take me away.
He loses it. They've got him in cups. They're taking
(32:44):
him to the car, and as they're getting ready to
put him in the car, he starts screaming. You see
him turn from come on, guys, let's just talk to you.
See the other side of him and it's violent, ambitious,
and that's why he was in courts over the course
of the last year. Her death in October of twenty
(33:06):
twenty four has been investigated, but they haven't had an arrest.
And so from the time of her death until now,
he Adam Beckering has had to deal with the domestic
violence charge from August of twenty twenty four, two months
before she died, and that's what he was in court
for this week because he skipped out on going to court.
(33:29):
They actually got him on that in Chicago and took
him back to Michigan. He showed up one time in
court drunk. That was a contempt of court charge that
landed him some extra days. So he was sentenced to
ninety four days in jail on the domestic violence charge
from August of twenty twenty four. That's why he was
in court this week. And by the way, during his
(33:50):
appearance in court this week on the domestic violence charge
a year after her death, her mother gave a victim
impact statement and it was powerful, Joe, just very very powerful.
And so as we address the issue today, remember we've
got domestic violence documented in this relationship. We have a
(34:13):
beautiful young woman who is now dead and police are
trying to figure out what happened. Now. I'm hoping that
you can make some sense out of the injuries. I
read the report from the medical examiner. Hearing or reading pulverized,
(34:34):
her body was pulverized tells me there was more to
it than just a fall. But based on the injuries,
Joseph Scott Morgan, are they going to be able to
determine what happened? Really?
Speaker 1 (34:47):
Yeah? I'm glad you asked that we were talking off
air about this, and I know I don't think we've
covered them specifically on our program, but I know that
you have, and I have, separate from you, been on
cases that we've covered on air involving individuals that have
(35:12):
fallen from height, and there's always these questions, you know,
some of the things that come to mind. There's been
a couple of cases where people have gone over the
side of cruise ships. We've had cases where people have
fallen off of trails, you know, like in you know,
some grand height. Not too many, interestingly enough, there, at
(35:34):
least for me. I'm not talking about for everybody else,
but just for me. I don't recall a case where
we've had somebody in an internal stairwell, you know where
this has occurred. What this is going to come down to,
I think is trying to interpret those injuries. And granted,
(35:58):
I have to go back to this term because fascinated
that this has been released to the public in this
in using this terminology where they're using the term pulverized.
You know, pulverized is at its base element, it's associated
with blunt force trauma. You know, it doesn't take somebody
(36:20):
with a graduate degree in forensic science figure that out.
All right, Okay, but when you hear that when somebody
is pulverized, you're talking about multiple strike points, you know,
on a body where you know this trauma has been
inflicted upon them. I'm fascinated by this because these injuries
(36:42):
that she has, Dave, are on multiple planes of the body,
multiple anatomical locations. Dave, She's got, just so folks understand,
she's got multiple skull forraized, Okay, multiple skull fractures. As
(37:05):
a matter of fact, they make it sound as though
that she's got brain extrude what we refer to as
brain extrusion, which means that one of these skull fractures
is so bad, maybe a couple of them where you
have both gray and white matter that are extruding from
(37:27):
these massive it's going to be lacerated and underlying skull
fractures where you can go to the scene and visibly
see the brain, okay, you know, presenting right there, they
make note of a particular, pretty nasty laceration that's on
(37:49):
the back of her head. And just so we know, lacerations,
God bless my friends in the medical field. But when
they use the term laceration, it doesn't mean the same
as it does when we're talking about, you know, lacerations
and death investigation laceration for us, because they'll use the
(38:13):
term laceration when actually they it's a sharp force injury,
but they'll just you know, and they'll refer to them
as lax lac. I was just talking about this in class.
As a matter of fact, they'll say lack and lax
are not always blunt force trauma. But for in our
vernacular in medical legal world, anytime you have a laceration
(38:37):
that's related to the energy of striking the skin and
the skin literally tearing, and there's certain things that we
look for, you know, and just kind of a little
primer again for folks that haven't heard this before, but
with sharp force injuries, the margins are the edges of
wounds will be very neat and clean. You know, because
(39:01):
you're talking about an instrument. You know it's drug over
an area or sliced. Okay, lacerations in the terms that
we use in forensic pathology, you're going to have what's
referred to as tissue bridging, which means that with the
tissue itself, if you if you if you ever sit
down you eat a steak or eat a piece of chicken,
(39:22):
instead of taking a knife and cutting it into if
you pull, if you pull on both sides of a
piece of steak or chicken, you'll see these kind of
strings that will appear, okay, And that's the fibrous tissue
of that of that meat that it's being pulled apart.
And that's called tissue bridging. You don't get that with
(39:43):
sharp force injuries. You get that with blunt force trauma
and so, and the injuries will be generally very very jagged, Okay,
they'll be gaping, irregular in appearance. You'll have the tissue
bridging that'll come about. So they've identified this and there's
also a other insults that she has. And look, dude,
(40:03):
we haven't even talked about the severed foot, you know,
which is a manifestation in and of itself. That's that's
super bizarre. You do see it. It's a traumatic In
my opinion, it would be what we refer to as
a traumatic amputation. But it requires so much force in
order to facilitate that.
Speaker 2 (40:22):
All right, Joe, There's a comment that was made and
in the medical examiner's report that says, beyond multiple skull fractures,
there is a deep, gaping laceration on the back of
her head, exposing cranial content. Yeah, cuts and bruises to
her face and neck, and a badly broken nose. These
(40:45):
are things one would expect, you know, on a long
on a big fall. Now, yes, are they going to
this seems stupid. They're going to go up to the
floor they believe she was thrown over the side, and
they're going to examine all the way down those stairs,
every foot to see where because her head to have
(41:07):
these injuries, it seems like it would have had to
hit other things too on the way down.
Speaker 1 (41:13):
Yep. Yeah, this is you can consider. And this is
kind of I'm so glad you brought this up. This
is fascinating from a scene processing perspective, this entire If
you think of a stairwell as like a let's just
I don't know, I don't want to use term cylinder,
but that's the best way I can kind of describe it.
(41:33):
I kind of a contained cylinder, and it's got these
and you imagine the stairwells stair rails rather that are
you know, moving about. You've got these metal objects, metal surfaces.
This scene is so complex, Dave, that you're talking. We're talking.
Let me get this straight. We're talking twenty actually twenty
(41:54):
four story, that's right.
Speaker 2 (41:56):
Okay, he was on his condos on the twenty fourth floor,
but her body was found on the fifth floor, on.
Speaker 1 (42:03):
The fifth floor, yeah, and the foot was found on
the second floor. So we're talking, we're talking. So if
you okay, let's just think about it this way. If
he's domiciled on the twenty fourth floor, and it's generally
more than this, but just for rough figures here, okay,
from the top, if we say that each floor, just
(42:28):
for round figures here, we'll say each floor is ten feet.
We're talking two hundred and forty feet. Yep, that's a
long way, man, that's a long long way. You know,
you begin thinking about terms. If I've got any friends
out there in our audience that think about the physics
and thinking about free falling, think about terminal velocity and
(42:49):
all those sorts of things. You know, can you hit
terminal velocity? But I don't think that she could have.
And this is why, because I think she's pinballing off
of these And that's why, like when you work, if
you think her point of origin and you don't know
this again, falls are really hard to interpret. If he's
domiciled up there and that's your starting point, now you'd
(43:13):
have to go superior. If it goes up any higher,
you still have to go and account for that. Because remember,
in forensics, as we've stated before, you and I both
Dave and I think you're in agreement with me, negative
findings are just as important as positive finding. So we
have to do things like rule things out, rule things in.
And you hear that a lot. That's part of our vernacular.
So we would have to go if their floor is
(43:34):
superior to this area, you'd have to start up there.
You can't just say, well, yeah, she had her husband
was domiciled on this floor. We're gonna start here and
go down. You got to go to the top. You
got and again wherever the terminus is up top, you
have to go up there and inspect every inch along
the way, and to do the slightest little droplet of
(43:57):
blood deposition as she's falling through the space is going
to be significant. And because her head is so involved, Dave,
and this is kind of this is very horrific. Okay,
With every strike, if she were to strike a handrail,
(44:18):
you can actually find bits of hair that will be
almost tacked in place by perhaps blood deposition, or if
a scalp has been torn I've seen this happen. If
the scalp is torn away, you can actually see skin
that is deposited on these strike points, on these surfaces
(44:41):
as she's free falling. Okay, so you have to inspect
every one of those because each one of those where
there is biological deposition has evidentiary value. And it makes
you know if you're going to try to describe this
in court, all right, which they will, it would not
(45:02):
surprise me. And this might be more of a defense thing,
It would not surprise me if they were to get
maybe a forensic engineer to come in and talk about
this dynamic. I don't know if that'll happen, but there's
going to be higher level math involved in this. Also,
(45:23):
the idea of and we covered this, I can't remember
which case it was. Is it you begin to think about, well,
is it possible for someone to throw themselves off, like
under your own power, you throw yourself off over a
rail and you propel, propel yourself out into space to
(45:44):
the point where you're going to free fall, okay, as
opposed to being kind of pushed over the side where
you're kind of banging all the way down. That's going
to be very interesting to examine, you know, examine just
evidentary placement deposition all the way down until until you
(46:08):
come to rest. And we have to understand the body
is separate from this traumatic amputation or the amputated foot.
There has to be a contact point, Dave, here's something interesting.
A contact point where that foot was ripped away, and
(46:31):
there will be deposition there, I can almost promise you.
Because she would have had to have attained, attained or
obtained I can't remember enough velocity for that ripping event
to occur. Did a foot. Did her foot get caught
in like between two rails, for instance? And she has
so much speed, so much velocity, that it could literally
(46:54):
be ripped away. And that's traumatic amputation. You see traumatic amputations,
see them a lot in plane crashes. Do you know
that every plane crash I've ever worked, this is a
real side. Forgive me, I'm chasing rabbits. Every plane crash
I've ever worked, I've had bilateral broken ankles on every
(47:15):
one of the victims. It's just it's that transfer of
the energy. You know that that's occurring, and you will
have you know, this kind of violent violence that's going
on now for her. The big question, Dave is were
any of these injuries pre existent, you know, to the
(47:37):
fatal event? And can you can you delineate? And so
it cooked County. When they're doing her autopsy, one of
the things that they're going to take a look at
is the totality of her remains. If she the injuries,
I think that remind me that what was it? There's
something significant on her back, isn't there.
Speaker 2 (47:57):
That you not of? Yeah, because in the report, the
corner said she suffered an eleven inch laceration on her torso,
and the coroner made note of a twelve by ten
inch area of intense black and brown abrasions on her back,
(48:19):
again pointing out these two separate things, an eleven inch
laceration on her torso and a twelve y ten inch
area of intense black and brown abrasions.
Speaker 1 (48:31):
Yeah, so this additional laceration she're referring to again, I
go back to the description that I did. The delineation
between laceration and sharp force injury is this. If you
have a pathologist calling this a laceration, that means that
that's blunt force trauma, because if it was in fact
a sharp force injury, they.
Speaker 2 (48:49):
Would say that, okay, all right, good, thank you.
Speaker 1 (48:52):
So that's going to be like blunt force trauma where
you're impacting and Dave, if you're talking about on the torso,
that's a tremendous amount of energy transfer that has to
rip the skin, particularly on the chest or the back.
I'd say more so probably if it was on chest
(49:12):
and abdomen, but certainly on the back to a certain
extent where the skin is being there's so much friction
that's involved in this skin rips. Now, this abraided area
where they're saying black, they're saying blue, blue and brown, right,
black and brown, black and brown. Well, brown implies to
(49:33):
me that this is an abrasion, okay, where because we
get these brown areas many times where the skin is literally,
I hate to use term peeled, but it's more like
scraped along the way where you're going down into the
dermis below the epidermis, into the dermis and you're kind
of peeling away. And also one more thing, if a
(49:55):
body is placed into placed into a cooler overnight, that
brown area may have actually appeared differently at the scene
because one of the things that happens folks don't realize.
That's about the more one of the things that happens
many times is if a body is refrigerated, that environment
(50:15):
tends to be very dry many times, and it will
dry out these kind of damp areas like that, and
you'll you'll begin to see a drying of these of
these upbraided areas. It'll it'll be very pronounced where there
any other bruising or contusions on the body that don't
match up with the immediate bruising that you have in
(50:37):
the perry mortem state. I think you know one of
the big questions that people need to ask with falls
many times, is that considering the level of trauma, considering
the level of trauma, was the death instantaneous? Hard question
to answer. I think everybody, I think, for their own
(51:00):
peace of mind, they would like to think that no
one feels pain and that that the death was instantaneous.
I don't think you can prove that in every single case,
over and over and again. This goes back to kind
of at a cellular level, where you've got these changes
(51:20):
that occur that are responded trauma responses, and cells trying
to see, you know, if there's any evidence here that
you know that that sheat that this was survival. I'm
thinking no, because of the extrusion of brain. They're saying
that they see brain, you know. And in addition to
(51:42):
that they you have to either ruly and rule out
how did she get separated from her foot? Uh. If
you're an investigator worth your salt, you're automatically you're not
going to assume anything in this case. You want to
know if this was a non Uh, how can I
say this that something else was not going on here?
(52:04):
Where an instrument was applied to that ankle, the foot,
You have to either rule that in or rule it out.
So in the autopsy report they're going to make note
of that as well. My suspicion is is that this
is going to be a traumatic amputation that results because
she's clipped something, she's bumped into something at a real
(52:25):
high rate of speed, and it tore this away.
Speaker 2 (52:33):
Joe, can you determine if injuries happened inside that apartment
and she was dead when she was thrown over the rail.
Speaker 1 (52:44):
I hope they got to the apartment quickly. I'll put
it to you that way. I hope that when they
facilitated all of this. Now, remember, here's what you're dealing with. Superficially,
we know that there was a delay. She was not
(53:05):
found for I don't know what was it.
Speaker 2 (53:07):
For days hours? Well, yeah, the twenty fifth. The police
believe she was dead on the twenty fifth, Then the stairwell.
She was reported missing the next day and found on
the twenty seventh.
Speaker 1 (53:19):
So yeah, you've got so we know we have an
absolute marking time where we know verifiably she was alive. Okay,
So from that moment Tom until the moment she was dead,
you know, you have to ask yourself as an investigator,
What areas of the building does she frequent you know?
Looking for patterns here? Right? So obviously you're going to
(53:41):
land on where her husband is domiciled. How quickly did
the police get out there with a warrant after they
cleared him out of that space? Is there any evidence,
any blood evidence in there? Is there any evidence that
there was a fracas in there where items were broken
or dislodged anything whatsoever? Because they're gonna have to cover
(54:02):
to sing with a fine tooth comb and kind of
inspect it very very carefully. And if there is blood
in that apartment, because blood is primarily what you're going
to be looking for, I think whose blood is it?
You know? And is it human blood?
Speaker 2 (54:20):
Was there a jud Yeah, they had domestic violence in
their relationship, So let's just say for the sake of argument,
he says, yes, that's her blood. We did have a fight,
but you know what, I didn't kill her. That's not
from that debt. Can nate hell? Was this from the
twenty fifth or did she just get upset and jump
to her death and you commit suicide by jumping over
(54:41):
the railing? I mean, if there's blood in his apartment,
as a condom. It can be explained based on two
years of.
Speaker 1 (54:49):
Domestic abuse, Yeah, it certainly could. And DV is a
there's a gulf of distance between DV and homside. Okay,
your default position, you want it to be DV related
as opposed to homicide. Homicide is completely different. Kettle fish here,
and when you look at that, what you know if
(55:11):
there is blood deposition in there and it is old blood,
there are certain tests that we can do with older
what we suspect our older blood stains, because that becomes
very fragile. Anybody that's ever seen like if you've ever
cut yourself and you missed a blood droplet, you'll notice
that blood, that blood stain that's left behind becomes very fragile.
(55:35):
Sometimes they'll even look like rust. Uh, the blood will
be flaking, okay, And so there's certain ways that we
collect that. But it's really hard to age, very very
difficult to age blood. Essentially, you can say that this
is you can say, well, it's desiccated, it's broken down,
dried out, you know. Desiccation is another term for dried out, dehydrated.
(56:00):
You're going to be looking at that and you can
make an observation. The problem is is that you really
can't say definitively this much time elapsed, Okay, you can
kind of bracket it maybe, okay, as opposed to fresh,
as opposed to old. The best thing you can do
(56:22):
in this case, though, is we look at that scene
from the perspective that every surface has a story to tell.
And as we move forward with this case, because at
this point we only have someone that's been charged, We
have no one that has been convicted. But for this
(56:44):
poor victim, we know that she had a story that
she told of her own life in life, but there's
something else. Her body tells a story about her death.
Is the definition? Is the explanation going to be sufficient
(57:06):
to the task that awaits them when they walk through
the doors of that courtroom for a trial. I'm Joseph
Scott Morgan, and this is bodybags.
Body doubts, but Joseph's gotten more. When you work in
the world of medical legal death investigation, you come across
some interesting terminology as it applies to causal factors surrounding deaths.
You know, the way they're described, some of them sound
(00:25):
quite bizarre. And then you begin to look at it
from the perspective of a forensic pathologist and the practical
scientific application those sorts of things, and you begin to
understand why they're saying it this way. But it's not
necessarily the way regular people talk, and it's amazing. Sometimes
(00:49):
you'll get confusion, a confused response from an individual when
you tell them what a cause of death is, and
it's because the wording is so.
Speaker 2 (01:01):
Bizarre.
Speaker 1 (01:03):
I think the one that always baffled me, and I
guess I gave a little chuckle to was this one.
And I'll never forget the first time I heard it.
It was blunt force trauma secondary to rapid deceleration injuries.
(01:25):
Most of the time that applies to a vehicle, a
motor vehicle accident. But you know, as we've talked before
on body bags about certain types of injuries, we know
that blunt force trauma is the leading cause of death
when it comes to motor vehicle accidents. But you know
there's another category falls. Some of them are super bizarre,
(01:51):
some of them are very straightforward. But today we're going
to talk about a lady who did take quite a
fall from twenty stories and she has sustained more injuries
then some might be able to count very complex. We're
(02:16):
going to talk about the death of Caitlin Tracy. Coming
to you from the beautiful campus of Jacksonville State University.
I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Bodybags Well brother Dave.
(02:39):
As they say in Ireland, top of the morn Antolia,
it's good to see you, my friend. Without Dave is
like a day without sunshine. I love seeing my friend
and being able to chat with you. And for those
of you that think that we're in the same room,
well that's kind of a mystery. But now we're really not,
but in view one of one another, you know, uh, electronically,
(03:04):
and we make funny faces at one another that none
of you can see. But I haven't been able to
throw anything at a camera yet. I haven't felt compelled
to do that with Dave. Now there are other people
that I have been on air withoo. Before that, I
feel compelled to throw things at the camera. But you
haven't lived until you've been in a morgue with a
furious forensic pathologist and they throw a dirty surgical instrument out.
(03:29):
And that happened to me on a couple of occasions,
and you know, only a couple occasions. It was the
second occasion after it occurred, I threatened to beat them
to a bloody pulp.
Speaker 2 (03:44):
Caitlin Tracy is the victim and she is married, secretly
married to Adam Beckering. There to year relationship was fraught
with violence. Joe. It is, I hate to say, a
typical domestic violence relationship, but is very common. And the
reason we're doing this story is Caitlin Tracy was found.
(04:06):
Her body was found the day after she was reported
missing by her husband, and she was found in parts. Okay,
the way her body was described, she was pulverized. Her
torso was found on the fifth floor, her severed foot
found on the second floor. The assumption from the very
(04:29):
beginning is that she fell twenty floors and in this
condo in southside of Chicago. Now many people would say, okay,
if somebody were to fall in a stairwell in a
building that's occupied by hundreds of people. Why did it
take two days? Why was she missing for any length
(04:51):
of time inside the building? And the reason israel simple, Joe.
People use elevators. You only use the stairs and once
you get above. Now, I'm a stair guy, all right.
I used to be, and I would not wait on
an elevator three or four floors, I'm good. But once
you get over the fifth floor, you know, I'm gonna
catch in the elevator. And that's why, that's why her
(05:14):
body wasn't discovered. So remember now we are talking about
October of twenty twenty four. Her husband reported her missing
the day before her body was found, and police believe
that Adam Becker NK threw his wife over the railing
(05:36):
from the twentieth floor on October twenty fifth, twenty twenty four.
He reported her missing the next day, the twenty sixth,
and her body was found on the twenty seventh. Now,
when he reported her missing, Joe, he said he hadn't
seen her in a month, but just to give you
a heads up, he was lying. A video from inside
(05:56):
the building actually showed that they were together. You know,
the day leading up to her, but.
Speaker 1 (06:01):
There was no There was no CCTV in the stairwell
itself though.
Speaker 2 (06:05):
Correct again, and now it goes back to the elevator
versus the stairwell. It just aren't that many stairwell people
on the fifth floor, which is where her body was found.
Speaker 1 (06:13):
I got to tell you something right here. I hate
stairwells from this is why I hate them. I hate
them from the perspective of personal safety, particularly when it
comes to my family. I've warned my daughter and my
wife to a lesser degree my son, but because there
(06:37):
are so many hidden spots, many of them. And here's
another thing. If you're in a public building has a
stairwell and you've got somebody that's looking to victimize somebody,
first off, you can disable cameras, but also you can
knock lights out in those areas and it becomes a
real kind of dark area where you can't see anything,
(06:59):
and it has nothing to do well at this stage,
I don't like to do stairs if I can. And
plus I've got this horrible phobia about handrails. There's just
I hate handrails. I hate them, and Kim is always
getting onto me hold a handrail, you know, we can't
afford for you to, you know, to fall down and
(07:19):
break a hip or break a knee or you know,
break my shoulder, fracture my skull. And as a matter
of fact, she really goes over the top. She says,
you realize you don't hold that handrail, You're gonna die.
It's like, yeah, if I hold onto it, I'm going
to catch something. And I'm not really a germophobe, but
it's just I've been in men's bathrooms so many times
(07:40):
where I watch people walk by sinks and I hate
and people are holding these sinks and just dragging their
hands down and I'm thinking, oh my gosh. But I
got to tell you something real quick about observable bodies.
And you're okay. I know that you're going to remember this.
(08:02):
Do you remember the Omni in Atlanta?
Speaker 2 (08:05):
Yes?
Speaker 1 (08:05):
Do you remember?
Speaker 2 (08:06):
Then?
Speaker 1 (08:07):
One of the for people that don't know what I'm
talking about, Omni was where the Atlanta Hawks used to play.
I think they built it originally in the seventies.
Speaker 2 (08:17):
Is North Carolina State won the ACC championship in nineteen
eighty three, right that pushed them into the NCAA tournament,
where they won March Madis and became national champions and
started at the Omni in Atlanta. Would be ACC Basketball tournament.
Speaker 1 (08:31):
Go Wolfpack man, Yeah yeah, I hear you by, and
I got to tell you great concert venue. And it
was a great concert venue because you didn't feel like
you were so pushed back, you know, like they tried
to jam a lot of people in these There was
something intimate about it. I saw multiple concerts there and
(08:54):
out of everywhere we were seeing a concert in a coliseum.
It was one of the better places. But talk about
observable spaces with dead bodies. Dave, I actually had a
case in the OMNI, and this is not too long
after I had arrived in Atlanta and was one of
the more bizarre cases I had worked. It had occurred. Okay,
(09:20):
basketball season for the nh for the NBA typically ended
I think in May, kind of May area. You know.
Now they try to extend these things so long. You know,
it's like year round ball. There was. I got called
to the Omni in late July and this was not
(09:46):
in a stairwell. This was on one of the concourses
adjacent to an exit, and Dave, there was a full
grown man that was laid outside of a door, fully closed,
face down in a prone position. He was in an
advanced state of decomposition. As a matter of fact, this
(10:07):
was one of those cases involving insect activity where when
you walked a couple of theaks where you walk up
to the body and it looks like the body's moving
because of the maggot infestation. And he was covered from
head to toe and Dave, no one spotted him in
the building. No one did. And this was out The
(10:30):
Omni used to have this funky looking carpet, you know that,
you know, it's right like real brash and you know,
just horrible looking. It had, you know, the colors of
the Hawks in it, and I think that sort of thing.
And at that point in time they were not doing
concerts in there, which was kind of odd because you know,
you've got to got to feed the beast man, you know.
Speaker 2 (10:51):
And so the guy was there long enough to get
decomposed and nobody's see was.
Speaker 1 (10:55):
Yeah, and no one And it certainly gives you and
going back to that talking about kind of security and
that sort of thing, it gives you an idea. On
a concourse in a major venue like that, you would
think that you would have patrols that were going around regularly.
So for people that think that it's odd that this
(11:15):
poor woman was not discovered until several until a couple
of days later, it's not. This is not something that
has never happened before. It does. It does, in fact happen,
And I became reflective of that in that case, you know,
kind of popped in mind, you know, for me when
I heard about this, you know, because she's on a
stair well, well, how many people are going to end
(11:37):
particularly at this height. You know, we're talking twenty stories, dude,
unless you're a fitness nut, you know, or unless there's
a fire in the building or the elevators is busted.
I can't imagine anybody saying, you know, well, gee whiz,
you know, I'm going to run take the stairs. But
that's not what's key here. It's the bottom floors. People
(11:59):
are on the lower floor. I will if I'm staying
at a hotel and I'm staying on like you know,
like you said, fourth fifth floor, there's a high probability
if I'm not dragging luggage with me, if I'm going
out to dinner, I'm gonna take a stairwell. How did
they not find her body, which is which is fascinating
because once they did find her body, Dave, I can
(12:22):
only imagine, you know what, because it was the condition
of her body was so horrific. And you're thinking, well,
first off, because when you I'll put it to you
this way, without giving too much way, the condition of
her body, all right, when you see her body, it's
(12:44):
not like you would walk up and say, yeah, I
know who she is, Dave. They're using terms like pulverized.
We use those terms. We use pulpified, pulverized. When we
talk about conditions either externally or internally in the body,
(13:04):
we talk about pulpified. Pulpified injuries are organs in the body,
like the spleen and the liver and notorious for being pulpified,
and that is as a result of blunt force trauma,
where the organ itself has been so traumatized by blunt
force that all of the kind of structural integrity of
(13:26):
the thing just breaks down and it particulates almost in place.
And it's not like you would be able to walk
up to her and say, oh, yeah, I know her.
So can you imagine being that person that finds these
remains and I would imagine that upon discovery of the remainder,
(13:49):
you're looking and you're thinking, Okay, has she been beaten
to death? You know, what's the story? You know, what's
the story with her in this particular condition. Was she
assaulted when she was coming down the stairwell? But it
turns out they according to what you're saying, that's not
what the police believe here.
Speaker 2 (14:09):
You know, the I mentioned earlier about going up the stairs. Okay,
I'm a stairperson, and yet after the third or fourth floor,
I'm not going. Okay, that's kind of like my window.
And so that's why I when I was looking at
why wasn't she found? Well, okay, her body was found,
but only after her severed foot was found on the
(14:30):
second floor. So that kind of goes back to what
I was saying earlier. People do go up the first
two or three flights of stairs semi regular, and so
it makes sense that her foot was found first, not
her body. It was after they you know, they find
a shoe and you see something looking there. It is October.
(14:51):
You know, this happened in October of twenty twenty four,
and so you're thinking, you know, it's a year ago.
This time that this was going on, and so it's
a little early for Halloween. Hey, it could be you know,
decorations for that. So that foot didn't immediately scream body.
It was after a closer look that it was like oh.
And so then they started the investigation, and that's where
(15:14):
they then found her body three floors above where her
foot was found. So I thought that made somewhat sense
to me. But as you go through this, they have
to figure out, well, who she is, who is she with,
you know, and immediately Joe the police, as they begin
(15:36):
the investigation. You know, you're the one that told me
every dead body is a murder until proven otherwise. And
that didn't occur to me, It really didn't. But now
after years of doing this, even car wrecks that have
a dead body, I've seen those turn out to be
(15:56):
a homicide, you know, and that's where coming to this,
that's how they're going to that somebody committed suicide or
that maybe accident, but they're thinking homicide. They'll proven differently. Well,
it took a while, but they were able to as
they started looking at it, you're going, wait a minute.
Her husband reported her missing on the day before her
(16:19):
body was found and think about that for just a minute.
You know, they're able to prove because I have his
sen her in thirty days, got report her missing, and
that that's kind of where in going with this. You know,
got a little problem with that man when the.
Speaker 1 (16:38):
Husband, yeah, charge, It would seem to me that well,
first off, and I think that you know, since this
guy's been charged, he's not been put on trial. This
is this case has not been adjudicated at this point.
It would seem to me that probably the defense in
(17:02):
a case like this, if you were having to defend
someone in similar circumstances, they're going to be looking at
this from the perspective of, well, it cuts both ways.
They're going to look look at it from this perspective.
You know, well he was he's being a dutiful husband.
(17:23):
You know, he's worried about her, he hasn't seen her
in thirty days, and suddenly he reports her missing, but
she's not found until later. Why is he waited all
this time? And maybe they are in an estranged state.
But then the prosecution is going to look at this
and they're going to say this is point of attack,
(17:45):
This is where we can kind of boreholes into this narrative.
You know that we're talking about relative to relative to
what he has actually said. You know, it's is it
coincidental here that he hasn't seen her in thirty days
and then all of a sudden and now we've got
CCTV where we know that he's lying that he hasn't
seen her, and he calls in the day before she's found,
(18:09):
and suddenly she's found. It makes you think. It makes
you think that if you have perpetrated some kind of evil,
that if you still have some moral compass within you,
is it eating away at you? Are you thinking this
(18:30):
person who I have said that I cared about, that
I wanted to marry and that I wanted to love,
is there. I know they're there, and in some lucid moment,
say maybe just maybe not a call sent small private
(19:02):
ceremony where people are not aware that you're married. I think,
on its on its surface, Italy Dave, there's you know,
kind of a romantic thing that goes along with that.
You know we're going to Elope. I know that dads
(19:23):
all over the country are hoping for elopements when it
comes to painting for weddings. But in all seriousness, she's,
you know, in her thirties, he's in his forties, and
they it kind of sounds like they're secretly wed. Why
would why would you not want this to be a celebration,
(19:48):
you know what I'm saying. You know, weddings. To me,
weddings I always think about, you know, I go back to,
you know, the story in the New Testament, you know,
the first miracle with Christ where it's a celebration. You know,
Mary's asking for wine because they've run out of wine. Right,
it's a celebration, man, And always think about that, you know,
(20:09):
when I hear about people that don't have an opportunity
to literally celebrate their nuptials if you will. And there's
a variety of reasons why people don't, but I'm wondering.
Speaker 2 (20:19):
This is a good one.
Speaker 1 (20:20):
Yeah, this is amazing. There's more.
Speaker 2 (20:22):
Yeah, they knew each other for two years, Joe. Okay, Which,
by the way, I am not one of these people
who thinks that you need to be with somebody for
a long time before you may get married and all that.
I'm not that because I've seen people who dated for
seven years got married into all fall apart in the
first six months. I'm not that guy. I honestly will
(20:44):
tell you I met Lodonna the week of Thanksgiving. I
propose to her the week of Christmas, and we got
married in the following March.
Speaker 1 (20:55):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (20:56):
And we were married nearly twenty eight years until she
passed away. So I yeah, it just it's one of
those things. When I saw this, I look at it
because I wonder, you know, relationship wise, and having been
a pastor and counseled couples, I've seen this. Here's what
(21:18):
we have is they met in October of twenty twenty two,
and both successful, okay, business wise in their personal lives
or private lives or public life, rather their business life.
Both successful. Now, they meet in October twenty twenty two,
they begin dating. The first year, we don't hear a
whole lot in terms of the law. Okay, we don't
(21:41):
have police reports the first year twenty twenty two. But
I want you to speed dial with me to eleven
months after they begin dating. We're at September twentieth of
twenty twenty three, and they have an official breakup. Caitlin
Tracy breaks up with Adam BECKERINGK and immediately he goes
(22:08):
hey wire and she ends up having to file for
a protection order in November. Remember he is a tax layer.
And when she files for that protection order, she lists
a number of issues violence, emotional, psychological, verbal abuse. I mean,
(22:29):
there is abuse on every level that she puts into
this protection order because the times she broke up with
him in September and the time she files for the
protection order, she says, he's calling me twenty times a day,
he won't leave me alone, you know, And in that
she listed a number of issues that had happened physically
violent between them. He threatens in November twenty twenty three
(22:51):
to sue her if she doesn't pull this back, you know,
threatening a lawsuit, because you're damaging my career, credibility, my character,
you know. And so I want to be very clear here,
Caitlin Tracy is not a woman who lacks money. Her
(23:11):
family is a family of means. Her mom's a doctor,
her dad is a real estate mogul. They've got cash,
they got money, So that's not an issue at play here.
January thirteenth, twenty twenty four, Caitlyn Tracy calls nine to
one one Beck Rink assaulted her and stole from her
by the way he stole fifty thousand dollars worth of jewelry.
(23:35):
It's not a small thievery here, and beck Ran fled
before police arrived. April twenty twenty four, they get married.
Think about this for just a minute. We have one
year or eleven months between we meet, we begin to date,
she breaks up, and boom, he goes off the rails.
(23:57):
This domestic violence stuff is going back and forth, and
you can tell this the pattern. I'm so sorry, baby,
I'll never happen again. I just get so emotional because
I'm so in love with you. It's just You're in
my everything, and the thought of you not being with
me just sends me. I'm so sorry. I will make
good on that. You know. That's what happens in domestic
violence relationships, why women don't leave and Caitlin Tracy did
(24:20):
have a home in Michigan as well. She had her
own place on a lake, very nice place, so she
had place to go to Joe, she wasn't homeless if
she wasn't with him. He owns the condo in the
South side of Chicago where her body was found in
the stairwell. But they're using both of these homes during
their dating courtship. But then after all of this goes on,
after she gives him of beating her up and stealing
from her, they then get married, but none of her
(24:43):
family is invited. Now that tells you everything you need
to know about how controlling this man is. Allegedly Adam
Beckering was able to control either. She was embarrassed, you know,
to after everything she's told her family about what's going
on in the relationship and doesn't want you know, she
married him.
Speaker 1 (24:59):
She thought, she well, you see this, you see this
many times, repeated these cases that I've worked over the
years involving domestic violence. And you know, I think that
many people might give pauses and say, well, Morgan, what
do you know about domestic violence? Well, I can tell
you what I know about domestic violence. I know it
(25:19):
from the perspective of a death investigator. And when we
go back and we work these cases, you will see,
as you have well stated day, that there is a
you can actually plot a pattern along with this where
it kind of rises and falls. And there have been
(25:40):
many times where I've stood over the bodies of dead
women at scenes and the level of violence that you
see lethal violence, okay, is is like a culmination in
already ongoing violence because some of these some of these
victims will have old, receding, healing injuries that have been
(26:05):
acquired over the months preceding, and it will in fact
rise and fall. You know, the same thing happens with
children too, with child abuse cases, where you will have
a parent that will beat a child and they will
have some level of guilt and shame and there it'll
go radio silent for a while, and then all of
(26:27):
a sudden that pent up rage because they can't manage,
manage their their own mind, they fly into these furies
and do this. And that's that is an explanation for
what you see. You know many times where individuals are
literally ripped to shreds, and I mean that with some
(26:48):
of the injuries that I've seen over the years, and
they will here here's another interesting thing. With domestic violence
and child abuse cases, you will see perpetrate and I
think probably one of the most significant areas to me,
that kind of translates into if you're going to develop
(27:10):
an abuse profile on somebody, you will see damage to
the mouth. You realize that you will see like over
and over and over again. You'll see like blunt force
trauma to the mouth where people are getting punched in
the mouth. I've had cases where women have lost multiple
teeth prior to their death, and these, you know, the
sockets are actually healing where they've had teeth knocked out.
(27:33):
And you'll see kids that sustain trauma to the mouth.
You'll have events where caustic agents will actually be poured
into the mouth of children in order to shut them up.
And it's almost like if an individual is not responding
(27:53):
in the correct manner to which the abuser, you know,
wants them to respond, they literally go after the mouth.
Is that fascinating? And so you'll see all these kinds
of injuries that interpretively, you can go back and you
kind of see this line that runs through it all
and then when it comes to that last fatal moment.
It reminds me of a case that I worked many
(28:16):
years ago, and I used this case actually in teaching
here at JSU and it's a sharp force injury case.
And I had a lady that had been beaten by
her husband almost every single day and he was just
this vicious alcoholic and he worked on construction sites and
(28:41):
he had a habit of coming home getting drunk and
taking off his belt and chasing her all over the house.
And this one final night he did this to her,
I'll never forget. It was up in northeast Atlanta, and
he made the mistake that night of taking a belt,
hitting her with a buckle and struck her in the
(29:03):
neck with it and slapped her in the face, which
he had, according to her, had never done. He would
just whip her with a belt. And he was again
raging drunk. He passes out on the sofa. So it's
in that moment that she decides she's had enough. She
goes into the kitchen. She takes a really cheap serrated
(29:27):
steak knife. He's passed out on the sofa, face down,
and she drove that knife into his back over and
over and over again. To when I got out to
the scene to examine his body, she had snapped a
blade off in his back. The handle was laying over
to the side and the rest of the blade was
hanging out. I don't people, I don't know if people
(29:51):
really realize the level of anger and violence that you
see in domestic violence. Now that case ended that I'm
just mentioning where the DA to their credit, did not
charge this woman, they did not charge it. The grand
jury wouldn't bite on it because of everything she had
been through. But in the case of Caitlyn Tracy, there.
Speaker 2 (30:16):
Still it was the belt buckle on the neck that actually.
Speaker 1 (30:19):
Was Yeah, it was the belt bible that it had
struck her on the face and on the neck, and
this was evidenced in this particular case. I don't know,
because of what we're going to talk about with Kaitlyn
Tracy and the trauma that she sustained, I don't know
how easy this is going to be to interpret, to
(30:43):
be able to scientifically separate any kind of pre existing
abuse injuries she may have had prior to a fall.
But I know this, I do know that therein is
going to rest a narrative and you're not going to believe, Yeah,
the trauma that she sustained. Brother, I got to tell you,
(31:18):
you know, I was relating that case about the domestic
abuse where the lady survived, and I guess you could
call her fortunate on one level she escaped with her life.
But in Caitlin's case, we unfortunately, we're looking at a
(31:39):
pretty brutal death here. Now, it's my understanding that just
over the past week and one of the reasons you
have suggested we do this case, and I'm thankful that
you that you've made me aware of it. This person
has made some court appearances this past week and that's
(32:00):
why it's on our radar right now.
Speaker 2 (32:01):
Well, Adam beckeringk you know I mentioned the fighting before
and the charges in the nine will one call and
the filing for protection order. Well after they got married,
secretly keiving her family away in April of twenty twenty four.
Go fast forward to August of twenty twenty four there
in Michigan at her house there and she ends up
(32:24):
having to call the police and he is arrested for
domestic violence. If you watch this video of him being arrested,
it's like he is constantly going back and forth Joe
between trying to convince the police, hey, just stop, let's talk.
Come on, let's just talk, guys, don't don't take me away.
He loses it. They've got him in cups. They're taking
(32:44):
him to the car, and as they're getting ready to
put him in the car, he starts screaming. You see
him turn from come on, guys, let's just talk to you.
See the other side of him and it's violent, ambitious,
and that's why he was in courts over the course
of the last year. Her death in October of twenty
(33:06):
twenty four has been investigated, but they haven't had an arrest.
And so from the time of her death until now,
he Adam Beckering has had to deal with the domestic
violence charge from August of twenty twenty four, two months
before she died, and that's what he was in court
for this week because he skipped out on going to court.
(33:29):
They actually got him on that in Chicago and took
him back to Michigan. He showed up one time in
court drunk. That was a contempt of court charge that
landed him some extra days. So he was sentenced to
ninety four days in jail on the domestic violence charge
from August of twenty twenty four. That's why he was
in court this week. And by the way, during his
(33:50):
appearance in court this week on the domestic violence charge
a year after her death, her mother gave a victim
impact statement and it was powerful, Joe, just very very powerful.
And so as we address the issue today, remember we've
got domestic violence documented in this relationship. We have a
(34:13):
beautiful young woman who is now dead and police are
trying to figure out what happened. Now. I'm hoping that
you can make some sense out of the injuries. I
read the report from the medical examiner. Hearing or reading pulverized,
(34:34):
her body was pulverized tells me there was more to
it than just a fall. But based on the injuries,
Joseph Scott Morgan, are they going to be able to
determine what happened? Really?
Speaker 1 (34:47):
Yeah? I'm glad you asked that we were talking off
air about this, and I know I don't think we've
covered them specifically on our program, but I know that
you have, and I have, separate from you, been on
cases that we've covered on air involving individuals that have
(35:12):
fallen from height, and there's always these questions, you know,
some of the things that come to mind. There's been
a couple of cases where people have gone over the
side of cruise ships. We've had cases where people have
fallen off of trails, you know, like in you know,
some grand height. Not too many, interestingly enough, there, at
(35:34):
least for me. I'm not talking about for everybody else,
but just for me. I don't recall a case where
we've had somebody in an internal stairwell, you know where
this has occurred. What this is going to come down to,
I think is trying to interpret those injuries. And granted,
(35:58):
I have to go back to this term because fascinated
that this has been released to the public in this
in using this terminology where they're using the term pulverized.
You know, pulverized is at its base element, it's associated
with blunt force trauma. You know, it doesn't take somebody
(36:20):
with a graduate degree in forensic science figure that out.
All right, Okay, but when you hear that when somebody
is pulverized, you're talking about multiple strike points, you know,
on a body where you know this trauma has been
inflicted upon them. I'm fascinated by this because these injuries
(36:42):
that she has, Dave, are on multiple planes of the body,
multiple anatomical locations. Dave, She's got, just so folks understand,
she's got multiple skull forraized, Okay, multiple skull fractures. As
(37:05):
a matter of fact, they make it sound as though
that she's got brain extrude what we refer to as
brain extrusion, which means that one of these skull fractures
is so bad, maybe a couple of them where you
have both gray and white matter that are extruding from
(37:27):
these massive it's going to be lacerated and underlying skull
fractures where you can go to the scene and visibly
see the brain, okay, you know, presenting right there, they
make note of a particular, pretty nasty laceration that's on
(37:49):
the back of her head. And just so we know, lacerations,
God bless my friends in the medical field. But when
they use the term laceration, it doesn't mean the same
as it does when we're talking about, you know, lacerations
and death investigation laceration for us, because they'll use the
(38:13):
term laceration when actually they it's a sharp force injury,
but they'll just you know, and they'll refer to them
as lax lac. I was just talking about this in class.
As a matter of fact, they'll say lack and lax
are not always blunt force trauma. But for in our
vernacular in medical legal world, anytime you have a laceration
(38:37):
that's related to the energy of striking the skin and
the skin literally tearing, and there's certain things that we
look for, you know, and just kind of a little
primer again for folks that haven't heard this before, but
with sharp force injuries, the margins are the edges of
wounds will be very neat and clean. You know, because
(39:01):
you're talking about an instrument. You know it's drug over
an area or sliced. Okay, lacerations in the terms that
we use in forensic pathology, you're going to have what's
referred to as tissue bridging, which means that with the
tissue itself, if you if you if you ever sit
down you eat a steak or eat a piece of chicken,
(39:22):
instead of taking a knife and cutting it into if
you pull, if you pull on both sides of a
piece of steak or chicken, you'll see these kind of
strings that will appear, okay, And that's the fibrous tissue
of that of that meat that it's being pulled apart.
And that's called tissue bridging. You don't get that with
(39:43):
sharp force injuries. You get that with blunt force trauma
and so, and the injuries will be generally very very jagged, Okay,
they'll be gaping, irregular in appearance. You'll have the tissue
bridging that'll come about. So they've identified this and there's
also a other insults that she has. And look, dude,
(40:03):
we haven't even talked about the severed foot, you know,
which is a manifestation in and of itself. That's that's
super bizarre. You do see it. It's a traumatic In
my opinion, it would be what we refer to as
a traumatic amputation. But it requires so much force in
order to facilitate that.
Speaker 2 (40:22):
All right, Joe, There's a comment that was made and
in the medical examiner's report that says, beyond multiple skull fractures,
there is a deep, gaping laceration on the back of
her head, exposing cranial content. Yeah, cuts and bruises to
her face and neck, and a badly broken nose. These
(40:45):
are things one would expect, you know, on a long
on a big fall. Now, yes, are they going to
this seems stupid. They're going to go up to the
floor they believe she was thrown over the side, and
they're going to examine all the way down those stairs,
every foot to see where because her head to have
(41:07):
these injuries, it seems like it would have had to
hit other things too on the way down.
Speaker 1 (41:13):
Yep. Yeah, this is you can consider. And this is
kind of I'm so glad you brought this up. This
is fascinating from a scene processing perspective, this entire If
you think of a stairwell as like a let's just
I don't know, I don't want to use term cylinder,
but that's the best way I can kind of describe it.
(41:33):
I kind of a contained cylinder, and it's got these
and you imagine the stairwells stair rails rather that are
you know, moving about. You've got these metal objects, metal surfaces.
This scene is so complex, Dave, that you're talking. We're talking.
Let me get this straight. We're talking twenty actually twenty
(41:54):
four story, that's right.
Speaker 2 (41:56):
Okay, he was on his condos on the twenty fourth floor,
but her body was found on the fifth floor, on.
Speaker 1 (42:03):
The fifth floor, yeah, and the foot was found on
the second floor. So we're talking, we're talking. So if
you okay, let's just think about it this way. If
he's domiciled on the twenty fourth floor, and it's generally
more than this, but just for rough figures here, okay,
from the top, if we say that each floor, just
(42:28):
for round figures here, we'll say each floor is ten feet.
We're talking two hundred and forty feet. Yep, that's a
long way, man, that's a long long way. You know,
you begin thinking about terms. If I've got any friends
out there in our audience that think about the physics
and thinking about free falling, think about terminal velocity and
(42:49):
all those sorts of things. You know, can you hit
terminal velocity? But I don't think that she could have.
And this is why, because I think she's pinballing off
of these And that's why, like when you work, if
you think her point of origin and you don't know
this again, falls are really hard to interpret. If he's
domiciled up there and that's your starting point, now you'd
(43:13):
have to go superior. If it goes up any higher,
you still have to go and account for that. Because remember,
in forensics, as we've stated before, you and I both
Dave and I think you're in agreement with me, negative
findings are just as important as positive finding. So we
have to do things like rule things out, rule things in.
And you hear that a lot. That's part of our vernacular.
So we would have to go if their floor is
(43:34):
superior to this area, you'd have to start up there.
You can't just say, well, yeah, she had her husband
was domiciled on this floor. We're gonna start here and
go down. You got to go to the top. You
got and again wherever the terminus is up top, you
have to go up there and inspect every inch along
the way, and to do the slightest little droplet of
(43:57):
blood deposition as she's falling through the space is going
to be significant. And because her head is so involved, Dave,
and this is kind of this is very horrific. Okay,
With every strike, if she were to strike a handrail,
(44:18):
you can actually find bits of hair that will be
almost tacked in place by perhaps blood deposition, or if
a scalp has been torn I've seen this happen. If
the scalp is torn away, you can actually see skin
that is deposited on these strike points, on these surfaces
(44:41):
as she's free falling. Okay, so you have to inspect
every one of those because each one of those where
there is biological deposition has evidentiary value. And it makes
you know if you're going to try to describe this
in court, all right, which they will, it would not
(45:02):
surprise me. And this might be more of a defense thing,
It would not surprise me if they were to get
maybe a forensic engineer to come in and talk about
this dynamic. I don't know if that'll happen, but there's
going to be higher level math involved in this. Also,
(45:23):
the idea of and we covered this, I can't remember
which case it was. Is it you begin to think about, well,
is it possible for someone to throw themselves off, like
under your own power, you throw yourself off over a
rail and you propel, propel yourself out into space to
(45:44):
the point where you're going to free fall, okay, as
opposed to being kind of pushed over the side where
you're kind of banging all the way down. That's going
to be very interesting to examine, you know, examine just
evidentary placement deposition all the way down until until you
(46:08):
come to rest. And we have to understand the body
is separate from this traumatic amputation or the amputated foot.
There has to be a contact point, Dave, here's something interesting.
A contact point where that foot was ripped away, and
(46:31):
there will be deposition there, I can almost promise you.
Because she would have had to have attained, attained or
obtained I can't remember enough velocity for that ripping event
to occur. Did a foot. Did her foot get caught
in like between two rails, for instance? And she has
so much speed, so much velocity, that it could literally
(46:54):
be ripped away. And that's traumatic amputation. You see traumatic amputations,
see them a lot in plane crashes. Do you know
that every plane crash I've ever worked, this is a
real side. Forgive me, I'm chasing rabbits. Every plane crash
I've ever worked, I've had bilateral broken ankles on every
(47:15):
one of the victims. It's just it's that transfer of
the energy. You know that that's occurring, and you will
have you know, this kind of violent violence that's going
on now for her. The big question, Dave is were
any of these injuries pre existent, you know, to the
(47:37):
fatal event? And can you can you delineate? And so
it cooked County. When they're doing her autopsy, one of
the things that they're going to take a look at
is the totality of her remains. If she the injuries,
I think that remind me that what was it? There's
something significant on her back, isn't there.
Speaker 2 (47:57):
That you not of? Yeah, because in the report, the
corner said she suffered an eleven inch laceration on her torso,
and the coroner made note of a twelve by ten
inch area of intense black and brown abrasions on her back,
(48:19):
again pointing out these two separate things, an eleven inch
laceration on her torso and a twelve y ten inch
area of intense black and brown abrasions.
Speaker 1 (48:31):
Yeah, so this additional laceration she're referring to again, I
go back to the description that I did. The delineation
between laceration and sharp force injury is this. If you
have a pathologist calling this a laceration, that means that
that's blunt force trauma, because if it was in fact
a sharp force injury, they.
Speaker 2 (48:49):
Would say that, okay, all right, good, thank you.
Speaker 1 (48:52):
So that's going to be like blunt force trauma where
you're impacting and Dave, if you're talking about on the torso,
that's a tremendous amount of energy transfer that has to
rip the skin, particularly on the chest or the back.
I'd say more so probably if it was on chest
(49:12):
and abdomen, but certainly on the back to a certain
extent where the skin is being there's so much friction
that's involved in this skin rips. Now, this abraided area
where they're saying black, they're saying blue, blue and brown, right,
black and brown, black and brown. Well, brown implies to
(49:33):
me that this is an abrasion, okay, where because we
get these brown areas many times where the skin is literally,
I hate to use term peeled, but it's more like
scraped along the way where you're going down into the
dermis below the epidermis, into the dermis and you're kind
of peeling away. And also one more thing, if a
(49:55):
body is placed into placed into a cooler overnight, that
brown area may have actually appeared differently at the scene
because one of the things that happens folks don't realize.
That's about the more one of the things that happens
many times is if a body is refrigerated, that environment
(50:15):
tends to be very dry many times, and it will
dry out these kind of damp areas like that, and
you'll you'll begin to see a drying of these of
these upbraided areas. It'll it'll be very pronounced where there
any other bruising or contusions on the body that don't
match up with the immediate bruising that you have in
(50:37):
the perry mortem state. I think you know one of
the big questions that people need to ask with falls
many times, is that considering the level of trauma, considering
the level of trauma, was the death instantaneous? Hard question
to answer. I think everybody, I think, for their own
(51:00):
peace of mind, they would like to think that no
one feels pain and that that the death was instantaneous.
I don't think you can prove that in every single case,
over and over and again. This goes back to kind
of at a cellular level, where you've got these changes
(51:20):
that occur that are responded trauma responses, and cells trying
to see, you know, if there's any evidence here that
you know that that sheat that this was survival. I'm
thinking no, because of the extrusion of brain. They're saying
that they see brain, you know. And in addition to
(51:42):
that they you have to either ruly and rule out
how did she get separated from her foot? Uh. If
you're an investigator worth your salt, you're automatically you're not
going to assume anything in this case. You want to
know if this was a non Uh, how can I
say this that something else was not going on here?
(52:04):
Where an instrument was applied to that ankle, the foot,
You have to either rule that in or rule it out.
So in the autopsy report they're going to make note
of that as well. My suspicion is is that this
is going to be a traumatic amputation that results because
she's clipped something, she's bumped into something at a real
(52:25):
high rate of speed, and it tore this away.
Speaker 2 (52:33):
Joe, can you determine if injuries happened inside that apartment
and she was dead when she was thrown over the rail.
Speaker 1 (52:44):
I hope they got to the apartment quickly. I'll put
it to you that way. I hope that when they
facilitated all of this. Now, remember, here's what you're dealing with. Superficially,
we know that there was a delay. She was not
(53:05):
found for I don't know what was it.
Speaker 2 (53:07):
For days hours? Well, yeah, the twenty fifth. The police
believe she was dead on the twenty fifth, Then the stairwell.
She was reported missing the next day and found on
the twenty seventh.
Speaker 1 (53:19):
So yeah, you've got so we know we have an
absolute marking time where we know verifiably she was alive. Okay,
So from that moment Tom until the moment she was dead,
you know, you have to ask yourself as an investigator,
What areas of the building does she frequent you know?
Looking for patterns here? Right? So obviously you're going to
(53:41):
land on where her husband is domiciled. How quickly did
the police get out there with a warrant after they
cleared him out of that space? Is there any evidence,
any blood evidence in there? Is there any evidence that
there was a fracas in there where items were broken
or dislodged anything whatsoever? Because they're gonna have to cover
(54:02):
to sing with a fine tooth comb and kind of
inspect it very very carefully. And if there is blood
in that apartment, because blood is primarily what you're going
to be looking for, I think whose blood is it?
You know? And is it human blood?
Speaker 2 (54:20):
Was there a jud Yeah, they had domestic violence in
their relationship, So let's just say for the sake of argument,
he says, yes, that's her blood. We did have a fight,
but you know what, I didn't kill her. That's not
from that debt. Can nate hell? Was this from the
twenty fifth or did she just get upset and jump
to her death and you commit suicide by jumping over
(54:41):
the railing? I mean, if there's blood in his apartment,
as a condom. It can be explained based on two
years of.
Speaker 1 (54:49):
Domestic abuse, Yeah, it certainly could. And DV is a
there's a gulf of distance between DV and homside. Okay,
your default position, you want it to be DV related
as opposed to homicide. Homicide is completely different. Kettle fish here,
and when you look at that, what you know if
(55:11):
there is blood deposition in there and it is old blood,
there are certain tests that we can do with older
what we suspect our older blood stains, because that becomes
very fragile. Anybody that's ever seen like if you've ever
cut yourself and you missed a blood droplet, you'll notice
that blood, that blood stain that's left behind becomes very fragile.
(55:35):
Sometimes they'll even look like rust. Uh, the blood will
be flaking, okay, And so there's certain ways that we
collect that. But it's really hard to age, very very
difficult to age blood. Essentially, you can say that this
is you can say, well, it's desiccated, it's broken down,
dried out, you know. Desiccation is another term for dried out, dehydrated.
(56:00):
You're going to be looking at that and you can
make an observation. The problem is is that you really
can't say definitively this much time elapsed, Okay, you can
kind of bracket it maybe, okay, as opposed to fresh,
as opposed to old. The best thing you can do
(56:22):
in this case, though, is we look at that scene
from the perspective that every surface has a story to tell.
And as we move forward with this case, because at
this point we only have someone that's been charged, We
have no one that has been convicted. But for this
(56:44):
poor victim, we know that she had a story that
she told of her own life in life, but there's
something else. Her body tells a story about her death.
Is the definition? Is the explanation going to be sufficient
(57:06):
to the task that awaits them when they walk through
the doors of that courtroom for a trial. I'm Joseph
Scott Morgan, and this is bodybags.
Host
Joseph Scott Morgan
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