In this episode of "Body Bags," we unravel the harrowing story of Shaye Groves, a woman consumed by her obsession with serial killers and ultimately implicated in the brutal murder of her boyfriend, Frankie Fitzgerald Delving into the chilling fascination that permeated her life and relationships, the hosts uncover the disturbing evidence that led to the gruesome crime. Hosts Joseph Scott Morgan and Dave Mack explore the challenges investigators face when encountering an unfamiliar crime scene and the unsettling environment they discover including a macabre collection of serial killer images and the couple's history of violent, videotaped sex acts. They discuss Shaye Groves' possible premeditation of the murder, her manipulation and blackmail of previous partners through recorded sex acts, and her meticulous execution of the crime, such as using bleach to clean up the scene.
Shownotes:
00:20 - Intro to case.
02:10 - Dave Mack gives background and overview of case.
04:10 - What impact did having serial killer images in her home have on Shay Groves and her mindset?
05:25 - The disturbing nature of Shay Groves' obsession and how it relates to the crime and her life.
07:10 - Shay Groves and Frankie Fitzgerald's romantic relationship and Shaye's controlling nature.
09:25 - Challenges investigators face when entering an unfamiliar crime scene and disturbing evidence and how their first impressions can impact their investigation.
11:50 - The couple's history of violent sex acts captured on video and how this escalated.
14:00 - The use of bleach in morgue cleanups and how the smell of bleach can linger, connecting it to the crime scene.
15:10 - Possibility of Shea Groves planning the murder and the use of bleach to clean the crime scene.
19:50 - Shea's obsession with serial killers, dark imagery, and the types of knives used in the murder.
21:55 - JoScott talks about the differences between single-edged and double-edged knife wounds.
24:40 - The catastrophic loss of blood that led to Frankie's death and Shaye’s possible motives and methods during the attack.
26:40 - Determining if any wounds were inflicted post-mortem and whether the crime was a torture event or a dark fantasy acted out by Shaye.
28:54 - Outro.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:08):
Bodybags with Joseph Scott Morgan. My wife likes to say
that she loves love. Now. I think that all of
us have this kind of romanticized view of what it
means to love somebody. But for some, I guess their
(00:31):
perception of love or the way love is expressed, is
in a different atmosphere from many of us. I've never
thought of integrating the term knife play into an expression
that even remotely resembles romantic love. But the case I'm
(00:52):
going to lay on you today is beyond anything I've covered. Really,
it doesn't occur here in the US. It's actually in
Great Britain, England specifically, which I've traveled too many times
and that I have an incredible affection for. But what
happened in this little town, in this space is absolutely
(01:15):
beyond the pale. Today I'm going to talk about the
murder of Frankie Fitzgerald and his girlfriend that perpetrated this crime,
Shak Robes. I am Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is
Body Bags. Dave mac my good buddy, is a senior
(01:35):
crime reporter for Crime on Want. I want to apologize
to you in advance for springing this case on you.
There's no saying. In the South, some people say you
get something in your mind that's so horrible, they'll actually say, well, thanks,
I'm going to have to slaughter a hog get that
image out of my mind. And in this particular case,
I got to tell you it ranks right up there
(01:56):
all the stuff that we cover on body bags. I
need some more reorientation here. Perhaps maybe you can offer
that up, Dave. I don't know.
Speaker 2 (02:04):
I don't think I have a degree in psychology or
sociology that could help break this down, Joe. But I
will tell you this. There's an old saying pretty is
as pretty does, and this twenty seven year old Shay
Groves is physically attractive on the outside. When you get
down to the nitty gritty of who that individual is
not very pretty. Matter of fact, it's pretty disgusting, and
(02:27):
Shay Groves is kind of the definition of that. When
we were looking at this story, big big story in
Great Britain, not so much here. He did get some
play in the US, but huge in Great Britain. And
it goes back to the all the photos. Young people
now live their lives online and that means a lot
of pictures, a lot of stories and things like that.
Oftentimes we can see somebody over the years either devolve
(02:50):
or evolve in their thinking and how they look at
themselves in the world. But in her case, just just
throw it out there. Shay Grows even buy our best
day estimation from her friends, was always a bit of
a weirdo even as a child. Shay groves when she
was younger, how little girls dress up in colorful outfits
and things. She didn't go full on goth look at
(03:11):
five years old, but she was bending that way. But
the thing that really catches the attention for this case
in particular is the fact that she is quote unquote
obsessed with serial killers. I don't know how you go
past it when somebody is obsessed with serial killers and
has pictures of them framed in their home. I'm going
(03:33):
to tell you what, Joe, If you're that person and
somebody in your world dies a violent death, who do
you think the cops you're looking at?
Speaker 1 (03:40):
First, there's this finn line that is easy to cross,
perhaps where there's this fascination with the morbid, and certainly
we explore many of these horrible events that have occurred
and try to put some sense to it. If you will.
From a scientific standpoint, I don't know that there's a
necessarily a way you can take the measure of it
(04:02):
day in and day out. And what is it in
your life to get you to the point where you're
going to frame a picture of Ted Bundy and hang
it on your wall, and so that every day when
you get up to start your day, maybe to have
a cup of coffee or as the Brits say, have
a cup of tea to get the day rolling. There
(04:25):
you are eye to eye with a person that's arguably
a monster. I've seen the pictures of her apartment. If
you're looking at Ted, you look to the left. Oh
my gosh, there's Richard Ramiz, the nightstalker who does this.
There's even a charcoal of Jeffrey Dahmer hanging on the
wall of this home. Say what you will about the
(04:48):
Impressionists went about reproductions, But if I had a choice,
I think I'd much rather look at lily pads by Monet,
you know, to be created with, to sip, to sit
my morning, my morning off you with and meditate on things.
So this is what you're filling your mind with day
in and day out. And people make light of this.
There's any number of memes out there, little clips that
(05:10):
are floating about on social media, you know, where they'll
say what my husband thinks I'm listening to as opposed
to what I'm actually listening to. And then you hear
this narrator's voice that says, this person murdered her husband
or whatever it is. And it's quite comical. But now
you kind of have a touch of reality with this
when you enter the space. This is her private space,
(05:31):
this is her home, and yet it is festooned with
all manner of these images that are quite chilling. And
if you take the totality of what each one of
these monsters has done, and you were to kind of
calculate that and pilot up and you think about all
of the sorrow and the misery and the horror that's
(05:54):
associated with each one of these people that hangs on
her wall. It's quite staggering to think that an individual
could in fact become this obsessed with these individuals who
are arguably some of the most evil people that have
ever entered Armand's eye.
Speaker 2 (06:13):
You know, I'm glad you pointed out what these pictures
represented inside the home. You actually alluded to Monette and
Lily's Other Fields, which is a beautiful painting. It has
sold many times over from multiple millions of dollars. So
you've got your choice. Do I get a reproduction of that?
Or do I frame photos of the nice stocker, Ted
Bundy and others. On top of all that, remember this
(06:34):
just Scott Morgan. Shae Groves has a daughter. So as
you're trying to raise a child, do you think it's
in the child's best interest for you to surround that
child with happy, wonderful, colorful pictures of beautiful things and
love or of the most evil, darkest things you can find.
Because what we're seeing in the life of Shad Groves
(06:56):
is that after having her daughter, her life did not
around and start becoming more focused on happy thoughts and
a happy place, but actually continued to go deeper and
deeper and darker and darker. To set this table very quickly,
Shay Groves and Frankie Fitzgerald were in a romantic relationship
(07:17):
for about six months on and off, is what it says.
But in six months time to have a relationship, there
are going to be a few ups and downs, but
that's really the limit here. I thought they'd been together
much longer. According to her friend, Shay Groves was a
very controlling person. She had very few friends, but the
friends she did have, she was able to control them,
manipulate them. She had power over them. And one of
(07:40):
the things that did come up about Shay Groves is
even as a little girl, she loved the Chucky doll,
that crazy redheaded killer Chucky that spawned a number of movies.
She loved Chucky. Look, it's one thing for a doll
to be kind of funny. You know, a horror movie
with a doll named Chucky. It's funny. Fine, But she
started referring to some of her friends as Chucky. That
(08:02):
was like her thing. She was always limited to a
small group of friends, although she was close to them,
and she would manipulate them and their situations. And she
and Frankie Fitzgerald for about six months, on and off,
they had a very sexual relationship. I say that because
everything about what we found out in this case it
seemed to be centered on their sex life. She was
(08:25):
obsessed with her sex life with Frankie Fitzgerald and even
used his prowess in the bedroom against him. Later on,
as the police were zeroing in because one has to remember,
if somebody you're close to dies and the police come
to talk to you and they find pretty much a
museum for the worst criminal killers of all time in
(08:47):
your house, you're going to be a suspect. Here we
go back to back. The Shae Grove story starts with
her and Frankie Fitzgerald in a very active sexual relationship.
She has videos that she is sending to friends to
try to set it up that she's a victim Joe
actually saying that he was raping her, he was abusing her.
(09:10):
But even her best friend at the time saw these
videos she was using to try to manipulate her friends
and said, this is a really bad editing job. She
tried to edit it to make it look like he
was raping her, when in fact it was all a stage.
The whole thing was a big setup.
Speaker 1 (09:26):
If you're an investigator and you walk into this environment
and you're trying to take the measure of it relative
to what's going on, Because as investigators, we walk in
to a location where a death has occurred, and we
come in cold. There's a high probability that you've never
met the person that you're about to look into their life.
(09:47):
Unless you're in a very small location, you're not going
to know the victim. Most of the time, you're not
going to know the perpetrator. Every now and then you'll
have police that have particularly uniform police officers that will
have gone out to a scene where there is domestic
instability and they'll have to calm things down. I've had
this happen a number of times where I'll arrive at
(10:08):
a homicide scene and There'll be a young patrol officer
there and I'll go up and talk to them. Do
you come to this address very frequent? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
I've been here several times. They love to break glass
and bust furniture and yell at one another. There's been
a couple of punches thrown over the years, but we
could get them settled down. Or there's a domestic violence
(10:29):
issue that has come up. They've both gone to chord
on it. Once had restraining orders, but yet the other
one chose to move back with the individual, and you'll
get this kind of long serial history that goes along
with it. But for investigators, when you show up the scene,
there's a high probability you're not going to know either one.
So first impressions, right, you walk in to a location,
(10:49):
and trust me, if you're an investigator, you've been to
enough seminars over the years, even if you don't follow
a true crime. The stuff that we learn about, the
things that we read, the old cases that we review
to try to understand how an earlier generation of investigators
worked the case. You're gonna be familiar with some of
these images hanging on the wall, and I hate to
(11:10):
use the word iconic, but you begin to think about
you can't go anywhere without seeing a picture of Dahmer
or John way Gacy or hillside stranglers or even the nightstalker.
They're gonna be there. In your mind, you're gonna see that.
But then when you walk into this kind of domestic
situation and you've got these images hanging all about, and
(11:32):
you're thinking, what what does this say about the individual
that lives in this environment, that exist within this environment?
It kind of denotes that their mind is focused in
one particular area. And then when it comes to these
two you had mentioned the manipulation of the video, how
do you do that? Well? She had a camera that
(11:54):
was set up in her bedroom where she would tape
all of her sex acts with Fitzgerald, and for whatever reason,
she'd go back and review them. The sex life that
they had had a level of violence to it. They
were into bondage, they were into sado masochism, and maybe retrospectively,
they would go back take a look at the videos
(12:17):
and it would sexually excite them or arouse them, or
whatever the case might be. So she apparently had whole catalog.
You'd mentioned a relationship that had taken place over six
month period. Just think about this for a second. You're
with someone for let's face it, a very short period
of time, six months, and your situation has evolved or
(12:42):
devolved to the point where you're engaged in dangerous behavior
in the bedroom. I'd mentioned earlier she was famously into
knife play. Now what does that mean. Well, knife play
generally is where individuals will high an individual up, and
(13:03):
after they've tied them up, they'll take out an edged weapon, perhaps,
and while they're in the midst of having sex, the
blade is placed against the throat, or maybe it's placed
just adjacent to the eye in a threatening manner, and
this causes arousal. So this is being taped over and
(13:25):
over and over again. And you really wonder, Dave, You
really wonder what was it that, of all the times,
out of all the times that they've engaged in this
behavior over a six month period, what actually led her
to cut his throat?
Speaker 2 (14:01):
Dave?
Speaker 1 (14:01):
When I smell bleach, I guess I could think of
our laundry room here at home. But one of the
things I always think of is the time that I
spent working in the morgue. For all of those years,
Bleach was central to what I would use in order
to clean with. And that's after I'd applied a detergent
to the surrounding area to scrub things down, and then
(14:25):
as a final kind of exclamation point on the morgue
and kind of the finishing touches, I would wipe everything
down with bleach. And that smell lingers, doesn't it. Can
you imagine when the police show up at a scene
and you have someone that is deceased, that smell of
bleach hits you full force in the face. I would
(14:47):
think that you would begin to wonder what has occurred
in here.
Speaker 2 (14:51):
I'm telling you this is a freaky story that I've
had trouble just getting past. But you said something a
minute ago and it kind of caught my attention and
throwing this out here for you because it is body
Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan. I wonder if Shay Groves
actually determined she was going to commit this murder before
(15:14):
she ever met Frankie Fitzgerald. And the reason I say
that is in six months time she went from meeting
in a pub to putting him in the ground. And
we have her best friend saying that Shay Groves used
these videotapes of sex in previous relationships. She used these
(15:34):
videos of her having sex with boyfriends as a way
to manipulate them. She used it for blackmail of previous boyfriends.
So she was actively filming her sex acts for many months,
maybe years, before she ever met Frankie Fitzgerald. Then brings
him in and immediately they're down the sadomasochism path that
included in writing that he Frankie was allowed to wake
(16:01):
Shay up with violent sex. This is in writing in
their contract. Okay, the pre planning that went in it
was to actually be able to videotape this act taking
place and then use it against him later on saying
it was rape again. I'm going back to this pre planning.
Here did she actually find her victim after she decided
(16:23):
I need these things, because again we've got a woman
obsessed with serial killers, obsessed with murder, obsessed with the
idea of killing somebody than she did. So you mentioned
bleach that cover up as much a part of the
murder as any part of the crime, because she knew
she would be the suspect.
Speaker 1 (16:43):
Maybe you're right, Dave, Maybe she had thought about these
things for so long where she had contemplated doing this,
had kind of toyed around with it. As it turns out,
she was thinking about how to get away with crimes
based upon things that she had seen in true crime
that she could certainly have videography, and as you had mentioned,
(17:07):
the fact that she presented as a piece of evidence
if you will. There's no shame here, by the way, either.
See look at this video that I've created, and you
can see him clearly here being aggressive towards me sexually.
He's attempting to rape me. I was in fear of
my life and all of this sort of thing. So
that takes some bit of planning to do, and not
(17:28):
just the planning, but the execution of just that bit there.
She had also considered the idea that maybe after she
perpetrates this horrible crime against mister Fitzgerald, that she's going
to need bleach to clean up afterwards. You think about
that just for a second. What did she absorb from
(17:48):
watching true crime documentaries perhaps or reading about the exploits
of serial killers that, by the way, many of these
individuals had gotten away with crimes for protracted period of
time before they were ever caught. And here's one more
I'll throw at you if you like that one. What
if this was just going to be an attempt at
(18:12):
killing for the first time, with maybe thoughts extending out
into the future. If I can do it one time,
maybe I can do it again. And she's got a
child living in the house with her. Think about that.
When you consider what this place is populated with, it's
absolutely in totally pure evil. Day investigators walk into an
(18:53):
environments that I've often made comments about, we're always have
to understand the abnormal in the context of the normal.
And when I say this, this is not a battlefield,
this is not a slaughterhouse. This is a home. Think
(19:14):
about what home means, and then you look at what
has occurred in this home and what occurs in so
many other places that you're having to take the measure
of as an investigator and trying to make sense of
it all. When you see a young man whose life
has just been drained out of him, literally, and you
(19:37):
think about what has to occur, What was it that
brought them to this point that such violence would be
exacted upon someone like Frankie Fitzgerald.
Speaker 2 (19:48):
You mentioned a couple of things during the course of
the program today, and one of those was knife play.
We know that Jay Grose was obsessed with serial killers murder.
She had gone down a path of darkness on the outside.
The image she projected to the outside world was of
a tatted up young woman with a lot of piercings,
(20:10):
and they were not happy hollygo lightly type of piercings
and tattoos. These were really dark. I'm really curious here
because you mentioned knife play and the fact that Shay
Groves actually killed Frankie Fitzgerald, her boyfriend air quotes in
bed and everything I'm seeing is that she sliced his
(20:33):
throat and stabbed him multiple times, like what twenty five
to forty times? But there are multiple different knives here
at play four specific types of knives, but one was
referred to as a dagger. Others were referred to as
bladed cutlery. I'm looking at this going okay, help me understand,
Joseph Scott Morgan, what we're actually dealing with here in
(20:57):
terms of the knives and the actual act of slicing
or punging.
Speaker 1 (21:02):
When you throw up the word dagger, it has a
very Shakespearean ring to it because daggers were carried by
people for their utility. It wasn't just merely an implement
that was used to protect yourself with. The Romans used
them famously to open oysters. They loved oysters, and they
(21:23):
were used through time for any number of things. You
could carve a meal with them. But what sets a
dagger apart from say, other edged weapons, is that it's
a double edged weapon. So it's not like you have
this blunt spine. Think of any kind of knife that
you take out of your drawer at home. Most knives
that you have in a home are going to have
(21:45):
this kind of blunt spine that runs away from the
hilt and goes out to the tip and then tip
curves back down onto the bladed surface. So you've got
a sharp surface and you've got kind of a blunted surface.
When you look at a single edged knife wound compared
to a double edged wound, it is completely different. Some
(22:10):
people refer to it as the winking eye. A single
edged weapon, when you take a look at it, at first,
it has a sharp edge or point. It comes to
a very acute point on one side, and then the
other side is kind of blunted looking. When you look
at it close enough, you begin to see an eye. Conversely,
(22:31):
when you take a look at a double edged weapon,
such as a dagger, it's going to have two distinct
acute points on either side of it. How these things
are going to appear is going to be dependent upon
where you are stabbed. We have contour lines that run
all over the course of our skin throughout our body.
(22:52):
As a matter of fact, when physicians learn how to
conduct even minor surgery, they're taught about something called the
lines of languor. And lines of Langer are these contour
lines that run throughout our body, and they have to
do with the tension of the skin and how we're
kind of constructed. And if you go opposing to the
lines of Langer, you get these really nasty looking cuts
(23:16):
that are open and gaping. It doesn't mean the weapon
was any larger than say, where they're not as gaping.
It's just that you've gone across the grain, if you will,
and so it opens up. So with surgeons, when they
make an incision into someone, they follow the line of Langer,
and if they do this, then you're not going to
(23:36):
have as nasty a scar. If they go against the grain,
that opens up in this very horrific kind of way.
When you're reading these wounds, you have to be very
very careful. Actually in the more one of the things
that we'll do sometimes is you've heard of us doing
tape lifts, where we're lifting fragile evidence, trace evidence, this
sort of thing. What we will do many times is
(23:58):
we've got one of these big gaping wounds, we'll actually
take scotch tape after we've cleaned the wound, and will
place the scotch tape over both sides of the wound
and draw it together so that we can get an
idea of the orientation of the wound, because if it's
gone across the grain, you might not be able to
appreciate it as it had insulted the body initially, so
(24:21):
you have to be mindful of that. When you're in
the morgue. You take a look at all of these
things and it gives you ideas to the orientation. Now,
what we have here in this case with Frankie Fitzgerald
is that his throat was in fact cut. And I
find it interesting their language is a bit different than ours.
In the court documents when you begin to read about
(24:41):
this case, they state that he had a catastrophic loss
of blood. That's such a very British thing to say.
Here in the US we would say, well, he bled
to death. They're saying it was a catastrophic loss of blood,
and in medical terminology we would say that he ex sanguinated,
which means the volume of blood that he loss was
incompatible with life. That's what it came down to.
Speaker 2 (25:02):
Is that because of the throat slash, meaning the other
stab wounds.
Speaker 1 (25:07):
Perhaps that's a good point. It is a cataclysmic event
from a physiological standpoint, when you've got this knife being
plunged into him. Now he's obviously in a very submissive
position when this has occurred. You have to imagine that
she's on top of him. The question you would want
to ask is how do you perpetrate this many insults
(25:30):
to his body? Was he restrained in some way or
was he drugged? Or how did he get into this
position where he could not fend her off? That's an
important question here, I think, and it goes to the
lifestyle that they were engaging in. You have submissives and
you have dominance. They lived by this ethos of bondage
(25:51):
and sado masochism and these sorts of things. So was
he in a submissive position? Did he see this on
his horizon? Was he submitting to her when this happened.
When you go back and you look at the injuries,
in order to assess these injuries, you would have to
take each one one by one and consider the location anatomically.
(26:13):
Are they in the middle line of the chest or
in the side of the chest? Also, are any of
these post mortem? And that's a big factor here, Dave,
because if she's into knife play and she's into serial killers.
Some of the hallmarks of serial killers, not every one
of them obviously, but many of them is what will
(26:35):
they do with bodies after they're deceased? Well, sometimes there's
a further attempt to disfigure the body or to abuse
a body. So you would want to take the measure
of that to try to understand is there hemorrhage in
all of these wounds? Are all of these in the
throes of death what we refer to the Perry mortem state.
(26:58):
You have this initial area where he was attacked. How
much blood was associated with this? We'd mentioned the throat
being cut, So if you're bleeding out through this insult
to the throat, which most of these that you see
are wide and gaping, and again that goes to these
contour lines that i'd mentioned in the body. If you're
cutting across the grain, the throat will open up significantly,
(27:19):
because people can have their throat cut without it being fatal.
But if you get into the area where you're down
into these vessels where you're thinking about, particularly the carotids,
you're down that deep, which is a couple of centimeters
below the surface of the skin, and then you go
across the trachea, which, for lack of a better term,
is the wind pipe. There's things that we can look for, say,
(27:41):
for instance, in the lungs, well, if the throat is cut,
you're still breathing, perhaps or attempting to breathe, you're gasping.
Guess what you're going to find down in the airway.
You're gonna find blood, and sometimes you will find blood
within the lungs, depending upon how long the individual. And
I'm not talking about where we have what's referred to
as plural effusion, where the chest cavity is filled with
(28:05):
blood and the lungs are floating in it. That's not
what I'm saying. I'm talking about when there's an insult
to the airway and people actually aspirate blood where they
draw it in when they're taking in their breath and
it just kind of goes back into the lungs and
you can find it when the lungs are dissected. That's
kind of fascinating too. And all of this goes to time,
doesn't it. You begin to think about how much time
(28:27):
did this take? How much time did she spend with him?
Was it a torture event? Because knives have been used
over the ages to torment and to terrorize people. Think
back to what our initial premise was with her, where
she has stated openly that they engaged in quote unquote
knife play. Was she ultimately living out a fantasy here
(28:50):
that of course wound up in the death of Frankie Fitzgerald.
I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is body Backs.
Bodybags with Joseph Scott Morgan. My wife likes to say
that she loves love. Now. I think that all of
us have this kind of romanticized view of what it
means to love somebody. But for some, I guess their
(00:31):
perception of love or the way love is expressed, is
in a different atmosphere from many of us. I've never
thought of integrating the term knife play into an expression
that even remotely resembles romantic love. But the case I'm
(00:52):
going to lay on you today is beyond anything I've covered. Really,
it doesn't occur here in the US. It's actually in
Great Britain, England specifically, which I've traveled too many times
and that I have an incredible affection for. But what
happened in this little town, in this space is absolutely
(01:15):
beyond the pale. Today I'm going to talk about the
murder of Frankie Fitzgerald and his girlfriend that perpetrated this crime,
Shak Robes. I am Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is
Body Bags. Dave mac my good buddy, is a senior
(01:35):
crime reporter for Crime on Want. I want to apologize
to you in advance for springing this case on you.
There's no saying. In the South, some people say you
get something in your mind that's so horrible, they'll actually say, well, thanks,
I'm going to have to slaughter a hog get that
image out of my mind. And in this particular case,
I got to tell you it ranks right up there
(01:56):
all the stuff that we cover on body bags. I
need some more reorientation here. Perhaps maybe you can offer
that up, Dave. I don't know.
Speaker 2 (02:04):
I don't think I have a degree in psychology or
sociology that could help break this down, Joe. But I
will tell you this. There's an old saying pretty is
as pretty does, and this twenty seven year old Shay
Groves is physically attractive on the outside. When you get
down to the nitty gritty of who that individual is
not very pretty. Matter of fact, it's pretty disgusting, and
(02:27):
Shay Groves is kind of the definition of that. When
we were looking at this story, big big story in
Great Britain, not so much here. He did get some
play in the US, but huge in Great Britain. And
it goes back to the all the photos. Young people
now live their lives online and that means a lot
of pictures, a lot of stories and things like that.
Oftentimes we can see somebody over the years either devolve
(02:50):
or evolve in their thinking and how they look at
themselves in the world. But in her case, just just
throw it out there. Shay Grows even buy our best
day estimation from her friends, was always a bit of
a weirdo even as a child. Shay groves when she
was younger, how little girls dress up in colorful outfits
and things. She didn't go full on goth look at
(03:11):
five years old, but she was bending that way. But
the thing that really catches the attention for this case
in particular is the fact that she is quote unquote
obsessed with serial killers. I don't know how you go
past it when somebody is obsessed with serial killers and
has pictures of them framed in their home. I'm going
(03:33):
to tell you what, Joe, If you're that person and
somebody in your world dies a violent death, who do
you think the cops you're looking at?
Speaker 1 (03:40):
First, there's this finn line that is easy to cross,
perhaps where there's this fascination with the morbid, and certainly
we explore many of these horrible events that have occurred
and try to put some sense to it. If you will.
From a scientific standpoint, I don't know that there's a
necessarily a way you can take the measure of it
(04:02):
day in and day out. And what is it in
your life to get you to the point where you're
going to frame a picture of Ted Bundy and hang
it on your wall, and so that every day when
you get up to start your day, maybe to have
a cup of coffee or as the Brits say, have
a cup of tea to get the day rolling. There
(04:25):
you are eye to eye with a person that's arguably
a monster. I've seen the pictures of her apartment. If
you're looking at Ted, you look to the left. Oh
my gosh, there's Richard Ramiz, the nightstalker who does this.
There's even a charcoal of Jeffrey Dahmer hanging on the
wall of this home. Say what you will about the
(04:48):
Impressionists went about reproductions, But if I had a choice,
I think I'd much rather look at lily pads by Monet,
you know, to be created with, to sip, to sit
my morning, my morning off you with and meditate on things.
So this is what you're filling your mind with day
in and day out. And people make light of this.
There's any number of memes out there, little clips that
(05:10):
are floating about on social media, you know, where they'll
say what my husband thinks I'm listening to as opposed
to what I'm actually listening to. And then you hear
this narrator's voice that says, this person murdered her husband
or whatever it is. And it's quite comical. But now
you kind of have a touch of reality with this
when you enter the space. This is her private space,
(05:31):
this is her home, and yet it is festooned with
all manner of these images that are quite chilling. And
if you take the totality of what each one of
these monsters has done, and you were to kind of
calculate that and pilot up and you think about all
of the sorrow and the misery and the horror that's
(05:54):
associated with each one of these people that hangs on
her wall. It's quite staggering to think that an individual
could in fact become this obsessed with these individuals who
are arguably some of the most evil people that have
ever entered Armand's eye.
Speaker 2 (06:13):
You know, I'm glad you pointed out what these pictures
represented inside the home. You actually alluded to Monette and
Lily's Other Fields, which is a beautiful painting. It has
sold many times over from multiple millions of dollars. So
you've got your choice. Do I get a reproduction of that?
Or do I frame photos of the nice stocker, Ted
Bundy and others. On top of all that, remember this
(06:34):
just Scott Morgan. Shae Groves has a daughter. So as
you're trying to raise a child, do you think it's
in the child's best interest for you to surround that
child with happy, wonderful, colorful pictures of beautiful things and
love or of the most evil, darkest things you can find.
Because what we're seeing in the life of Shad Groves
(06:56):
is that after having her daughter, her life did not
around and start becoming more focused on happy thoughts and
a happy place, but actually continued to go deeper and
deeper and darker and darker. To set this table very quickly,
Shay Groves and Frankie Fitzgerald were in a romantic relationship
(07:17):
for about six months on and off, is what it says.
But in six months time to have a relationship, there
are going to be a few ups and downs, but
that's really the limit here. I thought they'd been together
much longer. According to her friend, Shay Groves was a
very controlling person. She had very few friends, but the
friends she did have, she was able to control them,
manipulate them. She had power over them. And one of
(07:40):
the things that did come up about Shay Groves is
even as a little girl, she loved the Chucky doll,
that crazy redheaded killer Chucky that spawned a number of movies.
She loved Chucky. Look, it's one thing for a doll
to be kind of funny. You know, a horror movie
with a doll named Chucky. It's funny. Fine, But she
started referring to some of her friends as Chucky. That
(08:02):
was like her thing. She was always limited to a
small group of friends, although she was close to them,
and she would manipulate them and their situations. And she
and Frankie Fitzgerald for about six months, on and off,
they had a very sexual relationship. I say that because
everything about what we found out in this case it
seemed to be centered on their sex life. She was
(08:25):
obsessed with her sex life with Frankie Fitzgerald and even
used his prowess in the bedroom against him. Later on,
as the police were zeroing in because one has to remember,
if somebody you're close to dies and the police come
to talk to you and they find pretty much a
museum for the worst criminal killers of all time in
(08:47):
your house, you're going to be a suspect. Here we
go back to back. The Shae Grove story starts with
her and Frankie Fitzgerald in a very active sexual relationship.
She has videos that she is sending to friends to
try to set it up that she's a victim Joe
actually saying that he was raping her, he was abusing her.
(09:10):
But even her best friend at the time saw these
videos she was using to try to manipulate her friends
and said, this is a really bad editing job. She
tried to edit it to make it look like he
was raping her, when in fact it was all a stage.
The whole thing was a big setup.
Speaker 1 (09:26):
If you're an investigator and you walk into this environment
and you're trying to take the measure of it relative
to what's going on, Because as investigators, we walk in
to a location where a death has occurred, and we
come in cold. There's a high probability that you've never
met the person that you're about to look into their life.
(09:47):
Unless you're in a very small location, you're not going
to know the victim. Most of the time, you're not
going to know the perpetrator. Every now and then you'll
have police that have particularly uniform police officers that will
have gone out to a scene where there is domestic
instability and they'll have to calm things down. I've had
this happen a number of times where I'll arrive at
(10:08):
a homicide scene and There'll be a young patrol officer
there and I'll go up and talk to them. Do
you come to this address very frequent? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
I've been here several times. They love to break glass
and bust furniture and yell at one another. There's been
a couple of punches thrown over the years, but we
could get them settled down. Or there's a domestic violence
(10:29):
issue that has come up. They've both gone to chord
on it. Once had restraining orders, but yet the other
one chose to move back with the individual, and you'll
get this kind of long serial history that goes along
with it. But for investigators, when you show up the scene,
there's a high probability you're not going to know either one.
So first impressions, right, you walk in to a location,
(10:49):
and trust me, if you're an investigator, you've been to
enough seminars over the years, even if you don't follow
a true crime. The stuff that we learn about, the
things that we read, the old cases that we review
to try to understand how an earlier generation of investigators
worked the case. You're gonna be familiar with some of
these images hanging on the wall, and I hate to
(11:10):
use the word iconic, but you begin to think about
you can't go anywhere without seeing a picture of Dahmer
or John way Gacy or hillside stranglers or even the nightstalker.
They're gonna be there. In your mind, you're gonna see that.
But then when you walk into this kind of domestic
situation and you've got these images hanging all about, and
(11:32):
you're thinking, what what does this say about the individual
that lives in this environment, that exist within this environment?
It kind of denotes that their mind is focused in
one particular area. And then when it comes to these
two you had mentioned the manipulation of the video, how
do you do that? Well? She had a camera that
(11:54):
was set up in her bedroom where she would tape
all of her sex acts with Fitzgerald, and for whatever reason,
she'd go back and review them. The sex life that
they had had a level of violence to it. They
were into bondage, they were into sado masochism, and maybe retrospectively,
they would go back take a look at the videos
(12:17):
and it would sexually excite them or arouse them, or
whatever the case might be. So she apparently had whole catalog.
You'd mentioned a relationship that had taken place over six
month period. Just think about this for a second. You're
with someone for let's face it, a very short period
of time, six months, and your situation has evolved or
(12:42):
devolved to the point where you're engaged in dangerous behavior
in the bedroom. I'd mentioned earlier she was famously into
knife play. Now what does that mean. Well, knife play
generally is where individuals will high an individual up, and
(13:03):
after they've tied them up, they'll take out an edged weapon, perhaps,
and while they're in the midst of having sex, the
blade is placed against the throat, or maybe it's placed
just adjacent to the eye in a threatening manner, and
this causes arousal. So this is being taped over and
(13:25):
over and over again. And you really wonder, Dave, You
really wonder what was it that, of all the times,
out of all the times that they've engaged in this
behavior over a six month period, what actually led her
to cut his throat?
Speaker 2 (14:01):
Dave?
Speaker 1 (14:01):
When I smell bleach, I guess I could think of
our laundry room here at home. But one of the
things I always think of is the time that I
spent working in the morgue. For all of those years,
Bleach was central to what I would use in order
to clean with. And that's after I'd applied a detergent
to the surrounding area to scrub things down, and then
(14:25):
as a final kind of exclamation point on the morgue
and kind of the finishing touches, I would wipe everything
down with bleach. And that smell lingers, doesn't it. Can
you imagine when the police show up at a scene
and you have someone that is deceased, that smell of
bleach hits you full force in the face. I would
(14:47):
think that you would begin to wonder what has occurred
in here.
Speaker 2 (14:51):
I'm telling you this is a freaky story that I've
had trouble just getting past. But you said something a
minute ago and it kind of caught my attention and
throwing this out here for you because it is body
Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan. I wonder if Shay Groves
actually determined she was going to commit this murder before
(15:14):
she ever met Frankie Fitzgerald. And the reason I say
that is in six months time she went from meeting
in a pub to putting him in the ground. And
we have her best friend saying that Shay Groves used
these videotapes of sex in previous relationships. She used these
(15:34):
videos of her having sex with boyfriends as a way
to manipulate them. She used it for blackmail of previous boyfriends.
So she was actively filming her sex acts for many months,
maybe years, before she ever met Frankie Fitzgerald. Then brings
him in and immediately they're down the sadomasochism path that
included in writing that he Frankie was allowed to wake
(16:01):
Shay up with violent sex. This is in writing in
their contract. Okay, the pre planning that went in it
was to actually be able to videotape this act taking
place and then use it against him later on saying
it was rape again. I'm going back to this pre planning.
Here did she actually find her victim after she decided
(16:23):
I need these things, because again we've got a woman
obsessed with serial killers, obsessed with murder, obsessed with the
idea of killing somebody than she did. So you mentioned
bleach that cover up as much a part of the
murder as any part of the crime, because she knew
she would be the suspect.
Speaker 1 (16:43):
Maybe you're right, Dave, Maybe she had thought about these
things for so long where she had contemplated doing this,
had kind of toyed around with it. As it turns out,
she was thinking about how to get away with crimes
based upon things that she had seen in true crime
that she could certainly have videography, and as you had mentioned,
(17:07):
the fact that she presented as a piece of evidence
if you will. There's no shame here, by the way, either.
See look at this video that I've created, and you
can see him clearly here being aggressive towards me sexually.
He's attempting to rape me. I was in fear of
my life and all of this sort of thing. So
that takes some bit of planning to do, and not
(17:28):
just the planning, but the execution of just that bit there.
She had also considered the idea that maybe after she
perpetrates this horrible crime against mister Fitzgerald, that she's going
to need bleach to clean up afterwards. You think about
that just for a second. What did she absorb from
(17:48):
watching true crime documentaries perhaps or reading about the exploits
of serial killers that, by the way, many of these
individuals had gotten away with crimes for protracted period of
time before they were ever caught. And here's one more
I'll throw at you if you like that one. What
if this was just going to be an attempt at
(18:12):
killing for the first time, with maybe thoughts extending out
into the future. If I can do it one time,
maybe I can do it again. And she's got a
child living in the house with her. Think about that.
When you consider what this place is populated with, it's
absolutely in totally pure evil. Day investigators walk into an
(18:53):
environments that I've often made comments about, we're always have
to understand the abnormal in the context of the normal.
And when I say this, this is not a battlefield,
this is not a slaughterhouse. This is a home. Think
(19:14):
about what home means, and then you look at what
has occurred in this home and what occurs in so
many other places that you're having to take the measure
of as an investigator and trying to make sense of
it all. When you see a young man whose life
has just been drained out of him, literally, and you
(19:37):
think about what has to occur, What was it that
brought them to this point that such violence would be
exacted upon someone like Frankie Fitzgerald.
Speaker 2 (19:48):
You mentioned a couple of things during the course of
the program today, and one of those was knife play.
We know that Jay Grose was obsessed with serial killers murder.
She had gone down a path of darkness on the outside.
The image she projected to the outside world was of
a tatted up young woman with a lot of piercings,
(20:10):
and they were not happy hollygo lightly type of piercings
and tattoos. These were really dark. I'm really curious here
because you mentioned knife play and the fact that Shay
Groves actually killed Frankie Fitzgerald, her boyfriend air quotes in
bed and everything I'm seeing is that she sliced his
(20:33):
throat and stabbed him multiple times, like what twenty five
to forty times? But there are multiple different knives here
at play four specific types of knives, but one was
referred to as a dagger. Others were referred to as
bladed cutlery. I'm looking at this going okay, help me understand,
Joseph Scott Morgan, what we're actually dealing with here in
(20:57):
terms of the knives and the actual act of slicing
or punging.
Speaker 1 (21:02):
When you throw up the word dagger, it has a
very Shakespearean ring to it because daggers were carried by
people for their utility. It wasn't just merely an implement
that was used to protect yourself with. The Romans used
them famously to open oysters. They loved oysters, and they
(21:23):
were used through time for any number of things. You
could carve a meal with them. But what sets a
dagger apart from say, other edged weapons, is that it's
a double edged weapon. So it's not like you have
this blunt spine. Think of any kind of knife that
you take out of your drawer at home. Most knives
that you have in a home are going to have
(21:45):
this kind of blunt spine that runs away from the
hilt and goes out to the tip and then tip
curves back down onto the bladed surface. So you've got
a sharp surface and you've got kind of a blunted surface.
When you look at a single edged knife wound compared
to a double edged wound, it is completely different. Some
(22:10):
people refer to it as the winking eye. A single
edged weapon, when you take a look at it, at first,
it has a sharp edge or point. It comes to
a very acute point on one side, and then the
other side is kind of blunted looking. When you look
at it close enough, you begin to see an eye. Conversely,
(22:31):
when you take a look at a double edged weapon,
such as a dagger, it's going to have two distinct
acute points on either side of it. How these things
are going to appear is going to be dependent upon
where you are stabbed. We have contour lines that run
all over the course of our skin throughout our body.
(22:52):
As a matter of fact, when physicians learn how to
conduct even minor surgery, they're taught about something called the
lines of languor. And lines of Langer are these contour
lines that run throughout our body, and they have to
do with the tension of the skin and how we're
kind of constructed. And if you go opposing to the
lines of Langer, you get these really nasty looking cuts
(23:16):
that are open and gaping. It doesn't mean the weapon
was any larger than say, where they're not as gaping.
It's just that you've gone across the grain, if you will,
and so it opens up. So with surgeons, when they
make an incision into someone, they follow the line of Langer,
and if they do this, then you're not going to
(23:36):
have as nasty a scar. If they go against the grain,
that opens up in this very horrific kind of way.
When you're reading these wounds, you have to be very
very careful. Actually in the more one of the things
that we'll do sometimes is you've heard of us doing
tape lifts, where we're lifting fragile evidence, trace evidence, this
sort of thing. What we will do many times is
(23:58):
we've got one of these big gaping wounds, we'll actually
take scotch tape after we've cleaned the wound, and will
place the scotch tape over both sides of the wound
and draw it together so that we can get an
idea of the orientation of the wound, because if it's
gone across the grain, you might not be able to
appreciate it as it had insulted the body initially, so
(24:21):
you have to be mindful of that. When you're in
the morgue. You take a look at all of these
things and it gives you ideas to the orientation. Now,
what we have here in this case with Frankie Fitzgerald
is that his throat was in fact cut. And I
find it interesting their language is a bit different than ours.
In the court documents when you begin to read about
(24:41):
this case, they state that he had a catastrophic loss
of blood. That's such a very British thing to say.
Here in the US we would say, well, he bled
to death. They're saying it was a catastrophic loss of blood,
and in medical terminology we would say that he ex sanguinated,
which means the volume of blood that he loss was
incompatible with life. That's what it came down to.
Speaker 2 (25:02):
Is that because of the throat slash, meaning the other
stab wounds.
Speaker 1 (25:07):
Perhaps that's a good point. It is a cataclysmic event
from a physiological standpoint, when you've got this knife being
plunged into him. Now he's obviously in a very submissive
position when this has occurred. You have to imagine that
she's on top of him. The question you would want
to ask is how do you perpetrate this many insults
(25:30):
to his body? Was he restrained in some way or
was he drugged? Or how did he get into this
position where he could not fend her off? That's an
important question here, I think, and it goes to the
lifestyle that they were engaging in. You have submissives and
you have dominance. They lived by this ethos of bondage
(25:51):
and sado masochism and these sorts of things. So was
he in a submissive position? Did he see this on
his horizon? Was he submitting to her when this happened.
When you go back and you look at the injuries,
in order to assess these injuries, you would have to
take each one one by one and consider the location anatomically.
(26:13):
Are they in the middle line of the chest or
in the side of the chest? Also, are any of
these post mortem? And that's a big factor here, Dave,
because if she's into knife play and she's into serial killers.
Some of the hallmarks of serial killers, not every one
of them obviously, but many of them is what will
(26:35):
they do with bodies after they're deceased? Well, sometimes there's
a further attempt to disfigure the body or to abuse
a body. So you would want to take the measure
of that to try to understand is there hemorrhage in
all of these wounds? Are all of these in the
throes of death what we refer to the Perry mortem state.
(26:58):
You have this initial area where he was attacked. How
much blood was associated with this? We'd mentioned the throat
being cut, So if you're bleeding out through this insult
to the throat, which most of these that you see
are wide and gaping, and again that goes to these
contour lines that i'd mentioned in the body. If you're
cutting across the grain, the throat will open up significantly,
(27:19):
because people can have their throat cut without it being fatal.
But if you get into the area where you're down
into these vessels where you're thinking about, particularly the carotids,
you're down that deep, which is a couple of centimeters
below the surface of the skin, and then you go
across the trachea, which, for lack of a better term,
is the wind pipe. There's things that we can look for, say,
(27:41):
for instance, in the lungs, well, if the throat is cut,
you're still breathing, perhaps or attempting to breathe, you're gasping.
Guess what you're going to find down in the airway.
You're gonna find blood, and sometimes you will find blood
within the lungs, depending upon how long the individual. And
I'm not talking about where we have what's referred to
as plural effusion, where the chest cavity is filled with
(28:05):
blood and the lungs are floating in it. That's not
what I'm saying. I'm talking about when there's an insult
to the airway and people actually aspirate blood where they
draw it in when they're taking in their breath and
it just kind of goes back into the lungs and
you can find it when the lungs are dissected. That's
kind of fascinating too. And all of this goes to time,
doesn't it. You begin to think about how much time
(28:27):
did this take? How much time did she spend with him?
Was it a torture event? Because knives have been used
over the ages to torment and to terrorize people. Think
back to what our initial premise was with her, where
she has stated openly that they engaged in quote unquote
knife play. Was she ultimately living out a fantasy here
(28:50):
that of course wound up in the death of Frankie Fitzgerald.
I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is body Backs.
Host
Joseph Scott Morgan
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