November 19, 2025 • 41 mins
Margaret Anselmo, 45, a floral designer, mother of two, left her apartment on the morning of January 3rd, 1997, to cash a check. A delivery driver found her body, face down in a snowy alley later that day. She had been raped and beaten to death. Police believed she was the victim of an apparent random act of violence. Her cause of death was due to blunt force trauma to the head. Her killer, not identified. Until now. Joseph Scott Morgan and Dave Mack look at the life and brutal death of Margaret Anselmo as her very cold case from 1997 heats up, thaws out, and a suspect is identified. To find out how you can help Othram Labs continue the quest to solve the unsolvable, thaw out the coldest of cold cases, go to www.dnasolves.com
Transcribe Highlights
00:00.00 Introduction telling stories of the dead
03:01.22 January 3, 1997 Margaret Anselmo going to cash a check
08:26.31 Drag marks in the alley
14:08.92 Did Margaret have a regular route she took?
19:53.22 STR looking into the "known suspects"
24:20.14 Othram labs looks like a "starship"
29:14.34 Suicide is rarely mentioned in press
33:44.91 One piece of puzzle helps connect
34:11.62 Police say "if suspect was alive, he would be charged"
39:08.10 Donating to Othram
41:00.92 Conclusion
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Body das. But Joseph's gotten more. I'm here to categorically
tell you that, no, I have never talked to the dead.
All those years I've spent with the dead, all these
years i've spent with the dead trying to tell their stories,
(00:23):
I've never actually spoken with the dead. As a matter
of fact, If I ever do say that, make sure
you send the people with the butterfly nets to take
me away, because it ain't real. But I will submit
to you that the dead can speak to us. They
can speak to us in a way that is actually
(00:46):
a bit more scientifically based. They tell their stories through
all that's left behind, all that remains. If you will today,
I'm going to to tell you the tale of a
lady who lost her life at the hands of a monster,
(01:09):
and that monster left behind a message, a message in code,
as a matter of fact, a message in his DNA,
because unfortunately he's no longer around to be held accountable
for his brutality. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is
(01:33):
body bags. They say, Dave, that our sins will find
us out. I've heard that ever since I was a
little bitty boy. My grandmother used to actually.
Speaker 2 (01:51):
Say that to me, nothing is hidden. Well, that's right,
all shall be revealed. And I can't sit here and
definitively say that AUTHORAM Labs in Woodlands, Texas is an
instrument in the hand of the Almighty. However, I have
(02:13):
been around a lot of other people in my life
that claimed that they were an instrument in the hands
of the Almighty, and I've never seen their fruits. I
have seen the fruits of authorm and I know what
they're doing. They are providing information to families. And I
got to tell you, wherever there is peace, I have
to think that the Almighty is at work and that's
(02:36):
what they're delivering the families. And boy, today do we
have a tale to tell.
Speaker 3 (02:40):
Margaret Enselmo was forty five years old, Joe. She had
two children and she Margaret had a number of issues,
but she loved her kids. They were young adults at
that point. As we're talking about January third, nineteen ninety seven.
By the way, need to be clear on this January third,
(03:00):
nineteen ninety seven, Margaret living in an apartment and she
goes to cash a check and that's the last anyone
knew of her until next her body was found and
I was looking over this, Joe, because Margaret was a
(03:23):
floral designer. She just was going to cash a check.
A delivery driver found her body faced down in a
snowy alley. She had been raped and beaten to death.
Police believed she was the victim of an apparent random
(03:43):
act of violence or cause of death won force drama
to the head. Now, Joe, just laying out that scenario.
Nobody saw what took place, merely finding the victim after
the fact, based down in an alley. It's nineteen ninety seven,
(04:05):
nobody's around. Now we're starting the investigation.
Speaker 4 (04:13):
What do you do.
Speaker 1 (04:16):
Well, you try to take as much care as you can.
I got to tell you if you know when the
police would have worked this case. First off, you've got
a place that's let's just face it, you're talking about alleyways.
With alleyways, you've got locations that are obscured. You're not
(04:37):
going to have a direct line of sight many times
from the road. There's various places you can hide out
down alleyways. And let me give you a little insight
to this because these are sexually related cases. As you know.
You know, I've been to London quite a bit and
I got to go over into the hunting grounds of
(04:59):
a Jack Ripper and walk through that area. Yeah, And
I got to tell you, brother, we were there, Kim
and I were there at night and we were going
down to a pub that's that's in the same area
where he operated. And even though there are modern buildings there,
(05:20):
there are these alleyways that are adjacent that run off
of this main street. And I got to tell you
it gave me the creeps because you can still to
this day and this is here. This is in twenty
twenty five. We were just there, all right. I'd never
been into that area because I've never been like really
into the whole Jack the Ripper thing, but there were
(05:42):
you know, we were staying down in that area. I thought, Wow,
this would be a good opportunity to just go check
it out. And it's everything you can imagine, plus more.
Relative to the alleyways that are there. We actually came
upon one site that we knew was one where one
of the prostitutes commonly took her John's and she's found
(06:03):
dead in that area and it's an alleyway that's very obscured,
and she had been brutalized in that particular location. You
could literally feel it there because it's still dark. It's
very narrow. That building in that area still had the
same facade on it, the worn aged brick. It's not lighted.
(06:28):
So when the police in the case of Margaret's case,
all the way back in the mid nineties, when they
would have gone down there, they would first off, you
have to ask yourself this question, why is this non
infirmed lady in an alley found there brutalized? You know
(06:51):
that this is probably going to be a sexually motivated event,
and as it turned out, it was, and the brutality
that went long with her death kind of goes hand
in hand with the sexual nature of it. You have
to be very careful. What's really fascinating about this, Dave,
is that this case is in Spokane, Washington, which is
(07:13):
completely different than like the Seattle area and everything. There's
actually snow on the ground here. You don't go to
Seattle and see snow. And I wonder if there was
evidence in the snow, because they talk about this prominently
in this particular case. Were their footprints, was there any
(07:34):
blood deposition? There was there any evidence that anyone had
struggled back and forth? Kind of rolling over the surface.
The thing about working a case in the snow, which
I've not had that many opportunities over the course of
my career, because I've spent my career in South I
have worked a few, is that if you don't document
(07:58):
that case almost immediately, man, particularly here down in the South,
you're going to lose bits of evidence along the way
because as temperature warms up, all that stuff's going to
melt away. So was there anything there that was deposited
adjacent to her body that would have provided evidence to
(08:19):
give an idea as to the dynamics did was she
drug down down that alleyway? You know, because you can
actually see and you know you hear about this in
movies and see it on crime shows. How they people
will talk about looking for drag marks, Dave, drag marks
are real thing. Really, Yes, I can sit here and
I can tell you affirmatively that they are.
Speaker 4 (08:41):
I've seen the more creative license.
Speaker 3 (08:43):
I thought it was to figure out a way that
the detectives can figure something out. And now we've got
this marking, okay, and now so it's real. That is
a thing.
Speaker 1 (08:53):
It is real. And I got to tell you one
of the most prominent cases over the course of my
career that I worked involving drag marks was you know,
down here in the South we have pine forest and
many times these so called pond forests are more like
I refer to them as pulpwood ponds, these things that
(09:14):
are planted in a row. And I had a lady
that had been murdered and raped and murdered out in
this area, and you could see where she had been
drug over the bed of pone needles, where she had
been fighting. There were scuff marks, you know, where she
had been kicking. She was being drugged through this area,
(09:34):
and also that had transitioned onto her feet as well,
covered in dirt, you could see that there had in
fact been a struggle. Now, I'm not saying that a
pone needle covered surface is the same as a snow
covered surface, but it is the same principle you're looking
(09:55):
for any kind of evidence here. Here's another thing. If
you think about a sexual assault and the intimacy of
this and the violence of it, the perpetrator, not just
the victim that may have been drug back there or
were strained back there. The perpetrator is going to leave
(10:16):
their own impressions behind too. You begin to think about
nobody in Spokane, Washington in the winter time, it's going
to be walking around barefoot, right, So you're thinking, well,
were there any footprints at that particular time? Is there
something that may have been missed along the way that
would have been very specific? And if there were footprints,
(10:36):
is it possible that they were just eradicated they were
not good enough to lift something out of In forensics,
you do there's a wax casting that you can do.
And I've never had to do this, but there's a
wax casting that you do on prints in the snow.
Isn't that fascinating?
Speaker 4 (10:55):
Wow?
Speaker 1 (10:56):
And it's kind of sprayed on into this and you
can lift this out of the snow, and you have
to work really quickly. It's not like you can kind
of cut out a block of snow and preserve all
of the detail from the sole of a shoe and
you know, kind of freeze it and hang on to it.
Doesn't work that way. You have to cast it with
(11:16):
this wax appliance so that you can lift this so
it's there forever and ever. The problem is is that,
unlike dirt, snow does not hold onto the same detail
as dirt does or mud. Okay, so it has to
be very very carefully handled. Now I'm not saying that
(11:36):
that's the case. However, the fact that her body approximated snow,
they talk about it being in the snow. I really
wonder if there was evidence of that, Dave.
Speaker 3 (11:47):
When you're approaching this where she is found in an
alley and you knew that she was walking to cash
a check. Yeah, walking down an alley would not be
a shortcut, you know, for a professional somebody who is
used to being in an area and going you I'm
guessing or I'm thinking, what if this individual suspect picks
(12:11):
her up somewhere, offers her a drive. It's cold, it's
January third, Hey you need a lift, let me help,
you know, and she accepts it. He damages her elsewhere
and brings her and drops her in the alley. Yeah,
how do you figure that one out? Do you look
for tire tracks? Are you looking for getaway marks? What
if the snow came after you did that?
Speaker 1 (12:30):
Yeah? No kidding, So that that is significant. And I
can't tell you, over the course of my career how
many times I've literally, I've literally called there was in Atlanta.
When I was working there, I had a relationship with
a meteorologist at one of the local stations who had
(12:52):
an interest in crime. Believe it or not, we just
met and anytime I needed anything relative to the weather,
I would contact this person and they would help me out.
A lot of it had to do with the rising
and falling of river levels and lake levels, but I
could also get a sense because they can tune into
(13:13):
things like environmental temperature very specific to our region, like
what was the air temperature like at this particular time.
And I had availed myself with their services. So if
you're talking about snowfall and snow deposition, you'd really begin
to wonder if when was the last snow that fell,
(13:38):
when exactly and how much snow was deposited during that
period of time. And you have to kind of bounce
that off of when she was last seen in life
making her way to go cash check, and what was
her normal route? How far away from her point of
origin was this alleyway was it a location that she
(13:58):
would normally pass? Because here's the thing. If she had
created kind of a known path where you're walking this
predictable route every single time We've heard about this before.
And you're being observed and you draw the eye of somebody,
some cretan is there watching you, particularly some defenseless woman
(14:21):
that's just about her business. She might be afraid to
be in the area in the first place. She's clutching
her purse. She's trying to get to the location to
cash this check. There's no telling whose eyes are upon you.
But this is the case with Margaret. We don't know
if anybody saw her walking through there. We don't know
(14:43):
if this monster made visual contact with her, came up
behind her and attacked her. But he did in fact
leave a calling card, a calling card that would tell
Margaret's story afar. From an investigative perspective, Dave, when I
(15:17):
would go into a case that involved, say, for instance,
a rape homicide, there was something about those cases that
was so horrible in the sense that not only had
somebody been robbed of their life, but there is physical
(15:40):
evidence there. You can visualize it, okay, of the terror
that this person probably went through. You see the disheveled clothing.
You see a shirt and a bra that is many
(16:01):
times not removed. And this happened more than once in
these cases. But it's pushed up to expose the breast.
You'd be surprised how many of those there are out there.
You know, you think about you see something in media
where people are ripping clothes. Many times clothes will be
pushed up, okay, and pulled down. It's not so much
(16:22):
a ripping a way of clothing. Many times the victim
is so terrified that they facilitate this. They just they
want it to be over with. But if you have
someone that has and I got to tell you in
this particular case, Dave, given the nature of this, that
somebody that is infected with a bloodlust like this, they're
(16:47):
going to do anything, in everything they can to to
completely dominate and control. And I think that that's what
happened in Margaret's case. The key here, though, is they're
talking about a bludgeoning, a beating, if you will. I
really wonder if it was hands and feet or if
(17:11):
there was actually an object involved in this, Dave.
Speaker 3 (17:13):
Wow, You know, one of the things they did is
pretty standard. There is an SOP for everything, standard operating procedure,
and in this particular case, I looked up what was
traditional in nineteen ninety seven in Spokane Washington, And what
they did was right off the cheat mainly because you
are dealing with a scenario where you have no witnesses,
(17:35):
you have only a finder who is a delivery guy, yeah,
and you have a victim. So you're starting with nothing
except for the body or routine. And well there was
some DNA, yeah, And in nineteen ninety seven traditional STR
(17:56):
DNA profile was developed. Now, what is STR DNA profile.
Speaker 1 (18:00):
Short tandem repeats And so what you're looking at is
that the uh, there's little markers along the strand that
you're trying to marry up those markers so that they
tell the story at a molecular level of who this
person is now depended upon the sourcing of this DNA
(18:27):
and when they applied str methodology to it. The next
step and we even had this back then, Dave, is
they plug it into CODIS, which is the national database.
And as you well know, because you've covered so many
of these cases, Dave, the chances that you're going to
get a hit seem to be most of the time
(18:50):
more less than great. You know, they're because you know,
what you're looking at with CODIS is that there's two categories.
And forgive me if I'm being in a dead horse,
but I have to remind everybody here that you have
these known individuals that are sex offenders, and then you
have the unknowns, which is traditionally what's referred to as
(19:12):
the forensic database. So if with this str analysis that
they've run, they're looking into the known. So these are
people that have been found guilty of some kind of
sex offense. They're required to give up their dna IS
(19:32):
to posit it into the system. And back then the
search was a bit more difficult. Going back all those
years with cotis, it's not quite as it's more seamless
now than it was back then, and a lot of
that has to do with advances in technology. But you
look first in the known database, and the unknown database
(19:56):
arises from the samples that they've gotten from all these
other cases like Margaret's case, for instance, where you have
viable sample, but this person's not in the database. Who
are you going to match it up with? And so
all of these years have gone by, Dave, all these
years have gone by and there was still no match
(20:19):
or the case had fallen so far down the list,
because remember we're talking mid nineties, Dave, you think there's
been other unsolved cold cases that have occurred and Spokene,
Washington since then, of course there have been. And it's
really tragic because these cases get stacked one upon another
(20:39):
and those cases begin to disappear in the rearview mirror.
And I know that's very sad, you know, but that's
the reality. You can only work so many of these cases.
Speaker 3 (20:48):
Everybody has a job, you know, and we all know
you have a certain amount that is expected every day,
and then you have other stuff that piles on top
of that. Yeah, and that's what happens with cases if
you in a case like her, And again Margaret was
not just kicked to the curb. And you know, they
did everything they could. They interviewed everyone in the area
(21:11):
they could find. They they tried every known way of
accomplishing this, and they didn't give up by just kicking it,
filing it and being done with it. They actually did
keep returning to it to see if they could find anything.
But you know, it doesn't do any good to have
DNA if the person has never had the suspect has
(21:35):
never had their DNA taken in place in the system.
You can have the DNA all day long, but if
they're not in the system, you got nothing to compare
it to and until you do. And that's where the
development of some of the cases we've had recently that
Authorham is doing, it's because they're able to now use
this credible technology. Okay, we don't have that gap, you
(21:55):
know what, we do have something over here we can file,
you know, and they start pulling that DNA strand apart.
In this case, it took until twenty twenty two.
Speaker 4 (22:06):
Joe.
Speaker 3 (22:07):
Now, one thing I try to do on these cases,
I look at family members, you know, because I always
wonder what would they be going through not knowing you know,
your mom is dead, you know. I found out a
little bit about her daughter, and her daughter was sad
because she was such a loving, beautiful woman, but she
(22:29):
did have some mental health issues. Yeah, and that is
kind of why she was living in an apartment and
was not living with Now her daughter was nineteen at
the time. Her son was saying, I think eighteen. But
anyway you look at it, she didn't she did not
live a life on the edge. She wasn't a drug user,
(22:51):
she wasn't a party or she wasn't that you know,
she wasn't any of the things that could put somebody
at risk.
Speaker 4 (22:56):
This is a florist.
Speaker 3 (22:58):
She's lined floral arrangements for crying out loud, for weddings
and funerals. Think about that for just a minute. And
when they couldn't solve it, they kept coming back to it.
They kept trying to and finally it took years, but
finally they were able to.
Speaker 4 (23:12):
Submit to author them.
Speaker 3 (23:16):
And you know, that's that's an undertaking in and of itself,
because you submit what you have and they start working
on it, and they come up with a few ideas,
and you know, and they send it back to you
and now the police are working it again and they
find they tie some more things together, they send that
back and each time it's a couple of months in between.
It's not like they called Joe and say, hey, Joe,
(23:39):
don't you got any DNA there we can run and
you send it to him and then a week later
they go, yeah, we found this murder from thirty years ago.
Here you go, we're talking to It's a year's long process, yeah,
and it's a lot of continually working the just working
to unfold this entire or a gami, you know, of evidence.
Speaker 1 (23:58):
A great way to put it. It is very complex,
you know, and it's not just with Authorm. It's not
just the DNA scientist. And I know I've told you
this before because we talk about these cases with some frequency.
But when you walk into this the only way I
can really describe it for those that have not seen
images of Authorm, it's like walking into some futuristic lab.
(24:23):
You feel like you're on some kind of starship somewhere.
But it's not just the people behind those those glass
walls where you can see through and you can see
what they're doing. It's the other side of the house too,
where these people are literally trying to fashion family trees,
which is intellectually it's also a huge puzzle to put
(24:47):
these things together, to try to understand the genealogy. And
that's you know, what eventually leads leads back to whoever
this might be, or at least a close relative.
Speaker 4 (25:00):
It was a relative, that's the thing.
Speaker 3 (25:02):
They were able to identify somebody who is a relative
of that suspect you have over that unknown subject over here. Yeah,
well we found somebody that person is related to. And Joe,
I think that's just I think about that, and I
think that that goes beyond the scope of what my
(25:24):
head is capable of handling. That you haven't identified the suspect,
but you identified this person over here that is so
far away from him or her, you know, they don't
even know each other.
Speaker 1 (25:36):
Maybe I heard something. I read it the other day,
and I wanted to share this with you, Dave, because
it kind of it kind of dovetails with the conversation
we're having right now about because you said unknown, and
it brought it to mind again for me, and let
this kind of seep in here, this discussion, having this
(26:03):
item that I had read said that the days, the
days of the tomb of the unknown soldier are going
to be passing us by. Just imagine that, just for
a second, that that's the power of this technology. Uh.
(26:25):
You know, people that have fallen in battle and you
can you know, you can go to graveyards. You know,
we have them all over the South where you have, say,
Civil War graveyards. You can walk through them and they'll
be these headstones and it'll say things like, you know,
(26:46):
like it says on I think at the tomb in
Arlington it says known only to God, or it'll say unknown.
This technology is now at a point nowadave, where those
days are going to be passing us by very quickly.
I mean just think about you know, because you know,
(27:06):
sometime back, you know, we talked about the King and
the car park with Richard the third and dude, he
was killed in battle before Columbus discovered America, all right
before fourteen ninety two. He was back in the thirteen hundreds.
They got him identified through one of his descendants. Okay,
(27:30):
that's the world that we're living in now, and that's
what makes this tool that we have at our disposal,
and that that that authorm has facilitated, you know, and
you go back to what David Milman has said about,
you know, the Nameless List, those thousands and thousands of
(27:51):
people that are on this thing, and they are all
individual people. His goal is to clear that list out
one by one. I don't care how long it takes.
That's what his goal is. And for Margaret's case, her
case all the way back all these years ago there
(28:13):
in Spokane, down in that dirty little alley, it seemed
to come to an end then, but you know what,
her story continued with the end of the life of
her perpetrator. I don't know if you and I have
(28:43):
had this discussion before, however, I will repeat it. Okay,
did you know I've investigated more suicides in my career
than I have homicides?
Speaker 4 (28:56):
Wow? No, you haven't told me that.
Speaker 1 (29:00):
Yeah, they outpaced homicides, wow, three to one, two to one.
Depend upon the jurisiiction. You just don't hear about them
unless it's like Robin Williams, all right, unless the media
actually says this person is important. I hate that. Yeah,
and we're going to name who it is. You know,
because if you go to the newspaper, I say, newspaper.
Speaker 4 (29:22):
Yeah, you know, news resources, Thank.
Speaker 1 (29:25):
You very much. I don't remember the last time I
went to a paper box and drop coins in it.
And I don't even know if they have those anymore.
Speaker 4 (29:32):
They have them right next to the payphones.
Speaker 1 (29:36):
You know, there was a certain amount of joy that
I would derive from that, though, from actually getting the
newspaper and physically holding it.
Speaker 3 (29:42):
Getting your cigarettes from the machine avenue, yeah.
Speaker 1 (29:45):
Yeah, exactly, they're out of Marlborough's.
Speaker 3 (29:49):
Uh.
Speaker 1 (29:51):
But you know, you know, you know, you go to
the o bits in the you know, in the newspaper,
and it'll get somebody's age there. It'll say, you know
John Jones twenty nine dot suddenly right, And so that's
really all you ever, you know, know about a suicide
(30:12):
unless you're associated with a family.
Speaker 3 (30:14):
Yeah, and if the family wants you to know, unless
if the family wants you to know. Oftentimes now they
are sharing things thankfully about mental health and there are
warnings about it because you know it. You know, Joe,
I didn't put two and two together. I did not realize.
I didn't realize a lot about homicides versus suicides until
I started noticing how when you mentioned suicide, you know,
(30:37):
it's this is a big deal to talk about because
so many people feel like you got it. Look, man,
you're taking a permanent that you're making a permanent decision
for a very temporary problem.
Speaker 4 (30:49):
Yeah, so don't please.
Speaker 1 (30:52):
Yeah, And that that's something that you know, we deal
with all the time in my field where we go
out and we don't but we you know, again, you know,
drifting back putting my forensic hat on. We work all
of those suicides because it is a violent death. We
work them all as if they're homicides until we can
prove otherwise. And so we're very careful about that because
(31:15):
you have to be get one shot out, buddy. But
how it's weird. It almost seems like and I'd really
like to know the attitude of the police, because it's
like they've got in one hand, they've got this case,
Margaret's case that has just been lingering on the books
(31:36):
for all of these years, and they're hoping against hope,
they're going back checking it periodically. There's other cases coming
in and finally they do have a ray of hope
relative to identifying identifying who this person was that perpetrated
this rape homicide. And can you imagine I wonder if
(31:58):
they felt. I wonder if when they made the idea,
if they were deflated, Dave over the fact that this
person could not, at least in this world, could not
be held accountable for what he had perpetrated against Margaret
and her family.
Speaker 3 (32:17):
They were able to using the DNA that was taken
from from Margaret when her body was discovered in that alley,
and even though it took many, many years, they were
able to finally determine that that DNA came from Brian
(32:39):
James Anderson. Brian Anderson, he was twenty years old when
he committed this crime, this murder, this rape, this horrible,
vicious assault. He's a twenty year old man. He's beating
up a forty five year old woman and raping her
and leaving her like trash in an alleyway. And after
(33:03):
they figured out who he was and out he was
born April twenty ninth, nineteen seventy six and died by
suicide July eighth, two thousand and nine. I cannot imagine
what the investigators felt, because they solved it, and they
(33:25):
said in their announcement, Joe, they said, if he were alive,
we have the evidence to charge him with this and
get a conviction. That's the one thing. It wasn't just
this DNA. They had other evidence to go along with
it that all matched up once they identified.
Speaker 1 (33:40):
Him, right, and so the you know, investigatively, many times
the clouds began to part right, you know, you see,
because then you you know that big blank that you
have in your brain when you're trying to figure out
a puzzle and you get one piece of the puzzle
and then all of a sudden, everything else there's clarity
at it. Right, It's like, oh my god, can I
believe I missed this? And now you know, almost like
(34:03):
a spiderweb, you see all of the connectivity that runs
through it.
Speaker 3 (34:08):
They did say, I wanted to be clear on that Joe.
The Spokane Police farm is that if he were still alive,
they would seek to charge him with first degree murder
and first degree.
Speaker 1 (34:17):
Rate Yeah, which for those of you that don't know,
anytime you hear that term first degree, it means a
couple of things, and many jurisdictions, that means that they
are aggravating circumstances. Like I'll give you, for instance, if
you if you commit an armed robbery, for instance, and
you happen to kill somebody in the commission of an
(34:40):
armed robbery, that's an aggravating circumstance, and that can be
first degree homicide. You go to some states and they
don't they don't have the degrees like this, Like you
go to Georgia and they'll call it malice murder. And
I still have a hard time kind of wrapping my
brain around that statute. But in Louisiana, where I learned
(35:00):
criminal law as an undergraduate, you know, first degree murder
and it's murder there. You know that's a death penalty case,
and there's certain aggravating circumstances you know that make it
that way, like if you kill somebody under twelve, or
you kill actually kill a school teacher or a firefighter
or a police officer while they're working, that's first degree homicide,
(35:24):
commission of an arm, robbery, commission of a rape, all
those sorts of things. So I'm thinking that that's those
two things go hand in hand with this case where
you know, the circumstances were so over the top that
if they had had a chance to drag him into
a courtroom, there's a there's a good possibility they would
(35:47):
have gotten a conviction on this guy. Because Dave Brother,
when it comes to DNA, you cannot fight these numbers.
The only thing you can fight, and here's the way
I look at it, The only the only anything that
the defense can put up relative to a defense against
the utility of DNA and court is procedurally, how was
(36:12):
it collected, how was it protected, how was it analyzed?
Because if you followed the recipe that you're supposed to
follow every single time you get one of these samples,
and you treat it as if it's the most fragile
thing in the world, which, by the way, kind of is,
and you follow through with all of the steps prescribed
by law. Then you've got a winner on your hands.
(36:34):
You know, when you start to get up into these
astronomical numbers that go back to a specific identity, it's
something that people won't soon forget. I think that's that's
why DNA, in particular, it has two utilities. First off,
a lot of these cases, it's not just about convicting people, Dave,
(36:56):
it's about people that have been wrongly convicted. Okay, where
you can take it, and the cops were looking in
a completely different direction, or there was some kind of
mouthfeasance where they convince somebody to admit to something they
haven't done, and they go back and examine the DNA,
which is you know, it's pretty amazing when you think
about it. But here's one more bit to this case
(37:18):
that I found absolutely fascinating. Did you know, Dave, that
that this case, this case is the forty first case
that the state of Washington has utilized the services of
authorm and they've gotten off the books.
Speaker 4 (37:37):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (37:37):
So I don't know, I don't know who's been listening
to the gospel of Authorm up in Washington, but I
think you've got a bunch of true believers up there.
They see the utility of what can happen. What can
happen when you take this evidence and you apply it
and use it for the good that it serves. It's
(38:00):
quite amazing that all of these cold cases that they
have up there, whether they were unidentified bodies or unidentified
perpetrators that had committed some kind of painous act, they've
they're off the books now.
Speaker 4 (38:12):
Man love it. It's one of the most amazing things.
Speaker 3 (38:14):
And as we try to point on every time, AUTHORM
is not funded by the government, they don't have a
money tree out in the backyard. They actually have to
crowdfund to begin a lot of the projects that they're
working on. A lot of it comes like even from
a police department when they submit DNA, there has to
(38:35):
be money. They have to have seventy five hundred dollars
to begin, and I'm an honest Joe, that's not very
much money when you look at what they're doing. And
it's one of those things where if you want to
get involved, you can. You actually can take part in
this and it might not be your family. You might
not have anything in your family that well, what if
(38:57):
you knew somebody that had a death of a loved
one and there was never anyone held responsible. You know,
you could actually be a part of finding that solution
for somebody else.
Speaker 1 (39:08):
Yes, you absolutely could. And here's what I suggest. If
you go to dnasolves dot com, you can look through
the cases that are right now pending that they need
that one little push to get them over the hump
in order to begin the wheels rolling, if you will,
to flip the switch is This is the perspective I
(39:31):
ask you to at least consider. You know, we always
talk about the people nowadays like to throw around the
term family and community. And if you live in a
specific geographic location in the US, or maybe that's your
point of origin, someplace that was your old hometown, go
(39:53):
through there and find something that catches your interest. Maybe
you never know, you might have had some kind of
connection to somebody that is missing. There's unidentified remains in
your old hometown or somewhere in the state that you love.
If you want to send money that way, send it
that way. And all you have to do is go
(40:15):
to dnasolves dot com, look through the cases and you
can give as much or as little as you wish,
but listen, there is in fact a need. People are
banging on all the time about how much they wish
they could be a detective. While I'm not saying you're
going to get a gold badge, however, I can tell
(40:36):
you this by contribution that you might make to Authorm,
you're doing more than a lot of people have ever
done that were in fact so called investigators. I'm Joseph
Scott Morgan, and this is bodybags
Body das. But Joseph's gotten more. I'm here to categorically
tell you that, no, I have never talked to the dead.
All those years I've spent with the dead, all these
years i've spent with the dead trying to tell their stories,
(00:23):
I've never actually spoken with the dead. As a matter
of fact, If I ever do say that, make sure
you send the people with the butterfly nets to take
me away, because it ain't real. But I will submit
to you that the dead can speak to us. They
can speak to us in a way that is actually
(00:46):
a bit more scientifically based. They tell their stories through
all that's left behind, all that remains. If you will today,
I'm going to to tell you the tale of a
lady who lost her life at the hands of a monster,
(01:09):
and that monster left behind a message, a message in code,
as a matter of fact, a message in his DNA,
because unfortunately he's no longer around to be held accountable
for his brutality. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is
(01:33):
body bags. They say, Dave, that our sins will find
us out. I've heard that ever since I was a
little bitty boy. My grandmother used to actually.
Speaker 2 (01:51):
Say that to me, nothing is hidden. Well, that's right,
all shall be revealed. And I can't sit here and
definitively say that AUTHORAM Labs in Woodlands, Texas is an
instrument in the hand of the Almighty. However, I have
(02:13):
been around a lot of other people in my life
that claimed that they were an instrument in the hands
of the Almighty, and I've never seen their fruits. I
have seen the fruits of authorm and I know what
they're doing. They are providing information to families. And I
got to tell you, wherever there is peace, I have
to think that the Almighty is at work and that's
(02:36):
what they're delivering the families. And boy, today do we
have a tale to tell.
Speaker 3 (02:40):
Margaret Enselmo was forty five years old, Joe. She had
two children and she Margaret had a number of issues,
but she loved her kids. They were young adults at
that point. As we're talking about January third, nineteen ninety seven.
By the way, need to be clear on this January third,
(03:00):
nineteen ninety seven, Margaret living in an apartment and she
goes to cash a check and that's the last anyone
knew of her until next her body was found and
I was looking over this, Joe, because Margaret was a
(03:23):
floral designer. She just was going to cash a check.
A delivery driver found her body faced down in a
snowy alley. She had been raped and beaten to death.
Police believed she was the victim of an apparent random
(03:43):
act of violence or cause of death won force drama
to the head. Now, Joe, just laying out that scenario.
Nobody saw what took place, merely finding the victim after
the fact, based down in an alley. It's nineteen ninety seven,
(04:05):
nobody's around. Now we're starting the investigation.
Speaker 4 (04:13):
What do you do.
Speaker 1 (04:16):
Well, you try to take as much care as you can.
I got to tell you if you know when the
police would have worked this case. First off, you've got
a place that's let's just face it, you're talking about alleyways.
With alleyways, you've got locations that are obscured. You're not
(04:37):
going to have a direct line of sight many times
from the road. There's various places you can hide out
down alleyways. And let me give you a little insight
to this because these are sexually related cases. As you know.
You know, I've been to London quite a bit and
I got to go over into the hunting grounds of
(04:59):
a Jack Ripper and walk through that area. Yeah, And
I got to tell you, brother, we were there, Kim
and I were there at night and we were going
down to a pub that's that's in the same area
where he operated. And even though there are modern buildings there,
(05:20):
there are these alleyways that are adjacent that run off
of this main street. And I got to tell you
it gave me the creeps because you can still to
this day and this is here. This is in twenty
twenty five. We were just there, all right. I'd never
been into that area because I've never been like really
into the whole Jack the Ripper thing, but there were
(05:42):
you know, we were staying down in that area. I thought, Wow,
this would be a good opportunity to just go check
it out. And it's everything you can imagine, plus more.
Relative to the alleyways that are there. We actually came
upon one site that we knew was one where one
of the prostitutes commonly took her John's and she's found
(06:03):
dead in that area and it's an alleyway that's very obscured,
and she had been brutalized in that particular location. You
could literally feel it there because it's still dark. It's
very narrow. That building in that area still had the
same facade on it, the worn aged brick. It's not lighted.
(06:28):
So when the police in the case of Margaret's case,
all the way back in the mid nineties, when they
would have gone down there, they would first off, you
have to ask yourself this question, why is this non
infirmed lady in an alley found there brutalized? You know
(06:51):
that this is probably going to be a sexually motivated event,
and as it turned out, it was, and the brutality
that went long with her death kind of goes hand
in hand with the sexual nature of it. You have
to be very careful. What's really fascinating about this, Dave,
is that this case is in Spokane, Washington, which is
(07:13):
completely different than like the Seattle area and everything. There's
actually snow on the ground here. You don't go to
Seattle and see snow. And I wonder if there was
evidence in the snow, because they talk about this prominently
in this particular case. Were their footprints, was there any
(07:34):
blood deposition? There was there any evidence that anyone had
struggled back and forth? Kind of rolling over the surface.
The thing about working a case in the snow, which
I've not had that many opportunities over the course of
my career, because I've spent my career in South I
have worked a few, is that if you don't document
(07:58):
that case almost immediately, man, particularly here down in the South,
you're going to lose bits of evidence along the way
because as temperature warms up, all that stuff's going to
melt away. So was there anything there that was deposited
adjacent to her body that would have provided evidence to
(08:19):
give an idea as to the dynamics did was she
drug down down that alleyway? You know, because you can
actually see and you know you hear about this in
movies and see it on crime shows. How they people
will talk about looking for drag marks, Dave, drag marks
are real thing. Really, Yes, I can sit here and
I can tell you affirmatively that they are.
Speaker 4 (08:41):
I've seen the more creative license.
Speaker 3 (08:43):
I thought it was to figure out a way that
the detectives can figure something out. And now we've got
this marking, okay, and now so it's real. That is
a thing.
Speaker 1 (08:53):
It is real. And I got to tell you one
of the most prominent cases over the course of my
career that I worked involving drag marks was you know,
down here in the South we have pine forest and
many times these so called pond forests are more like
I refer to them as pulpwood ponds, these things that
(09:14):
are planted in a row. And I had a lady
that had been murdered and raped and murdered out in
this area, and you could see where she had been
drug over the bed of pone needles, where she had
been fighting. There were scuff marks, you know, where she
had been kicking. She was being drugged through this area,
(09:34):
and also that had transitioned onto her feet as well,
covered in dirt, you could see that there had in
fact been a struggle. Now, I'm not saying that a
pone needle covered surface is the same as a snow
covered surface, but it is the same principle you're looking
(09:55):
for any kind of evidence here. Here's another thing. If
you think about a sexual assault and the intimacy of
this and the violence of it, the perpetrator, not just
the victim that may have been drug back there or
were strained back there. The perpetrator is going to leave
(10:16):
their own impressions behind too. You begin to think about
nobody in Spokane, Washington in the winter time, it's going
to be walking around barefoot, right, So you're thinking, well,
were there any footprints at that particular time? Is there
something that may have been missed along the way that
would have been very specific? And if there were footprints,
(10:36):
is it possible that they were just eradicated they were
not good enough to lift something out of In forensics,
you do there's a wax casting that you can do.
And I've never had to do this, but there's a
wax casting that you do on prints in the snow.
Isn't that fascinating?
Speaker 4 (10:55):
Wow?
Speaker 1 (10:56):
And it's kind of sprayed on into this and you
can lift this out of the snow, and you have
to work really quickly. It's not like you can kind
of cut out a block of snow and preserve all
of the detail from the sole of a shoe and
you know, kind of freeze it and hang on to it.
Doesn't work that way. You have to cast it with
(11:16):
this wax appliance so that you can lift this so
it's there forever and ever. The problem is is that,
unlike dirt, snow does not hold onto the same detail
as dirt does or mud. Okay, so it has to
be very very carefully handled. Now I'm not saying that
(11:36):
that's the case. However, the fact that her body approximated snow,
they talk about it being in the snow. I really
wonder if there was evidence of that, Dave.
Speaker 3 (11:47):
When you're approaching this where she is found in an
alley and you knew that she was walking to cash
a check. Yeah, walking down an alley would not be
a shortcut, you know, for a professional somebody who is
used to being in an area and going you I'm
guessing or I'm thinking, what if this individual suspect picks
(12:11):
her up somewhere, offers her a drive. It's cold, it's
January third, Hey you need a lift, let me help,
you know, and she accepts it. He damages her elsewhere
and brings her and drops her in the alley. Yeah,
how do you figure that one out? Do you look
for tire tracks? Are you looking for getaway marks? What
if the snow came after you did that?
Speaker 1 (12:30):
Yeah? No kidding, So that that is significant. And I
can't tell you, over the course of my career how
many times I've literally, I've literally called there was in Atlanta.
When I was working there, I had a relationship with
a meteorologist at one of the local stations who had
(12:52):
an interest in crime. Believe it or not, we just
met and anytime I needed anything relative to the weather,
I would contact this person and they would help me out.
A lot of it had to do with the rising
and falling of river levels and lake levels, but I
could also get a sense because they can tune into
(13:13):
things like environmental temperature very specific to our region, like
what was the air temperature like at this particular time.
And I had availed myself with their services. So if
you're talking about snowfall and snow deposition, you'd really begin
to wonder if when was the last snow that fell,
(13:38):
when exactly and how much snow was deposited during that
period of time. And you have to kind of bounce
that off of when she was last seen in life
making her way to go cash check, and what was
her normal route? How far away from her point of
origin was this alleyway was it a location that she
(13:58):
would normally pass? Because here's the thing. If she had
created kind of a known path where you're walking this
predictable route every single time We've heard about this before.
And you're being observed and you draw the eye of somebody,
some cretan is there watching you, particularly some defenseless woman
(14:21):
that's just about her business. She might be afraid to
be in the area in the first place. She's clutching
her purse. She's trying to get to the location to
cash this check. There's no telling whose eyes are upon you.
But this is the case with Margaret. We don't know
if anybody saw her walking through there. We don't know
(14:43):
if this monster made visual contact with her, came up
behind her and attacked her. But he did in fact
leave a calling card, a calling card that would tell
Margaret's story afar. From an investigative perspective, Dave, when I
(15:17):
would go into a case that involved, say, for instance,
a rape homicide, there was something about those cases that
was so horrible in the sense that not only had
somebody been robbed of their life, but there is physical
(15:40):
evidence there. You can visualize it, okay, of the terror
that this person probably went through. You see the disheveled clothing.
You see a shirt and a bra that is many
(16:01):
times not removed. And this happened more than once in
these cases. But it's pushed up to expose the breast.
You'd be surprised how many of those there are out there.
You know, you think about you see something in media
where people are ripping clothes. Many times clothes will be
pushed up, okay, and pulled down. It's not so much
(16:22):
a ripping a way of clothing. Many times the victim
is so terrified that they facilitate this. They just they
want it to be over with. But if you have
someone that has and I got to tell you in
this particular case, Dave, given the nature of this, that
somebody that is infected with a bloodlust like this, they're
(16:47):
going to do anything, in everything they can to to
completely dominate and control. And I think that that's what
happened in Margaret's case. The key here, though, is they're
talking about a bludgeoning, a beating, if you will. I
really wonder if it was hands and feet or if
(17:11):
there was actually an object involved in this, Dave.
Speaker 3 (17:13):
Wow, You know, one of the things they did is
pretty standard. There is an SOP for everything, standard operating procedure,
and in this particular case, I looked up what was
traditional in nineteen ninety seven in Spokane Washington, And what
they did was right off the cheat mainly because you
are dealing with a scenario where you have no witnesses,
(17:35):
you have only a finder who is a delivery guy, yeah,
and you have a victim. So you're starting with nothing
except for the body or routine. And well there was
some DNA, yeah, And in nineteen ninety seven traditional STR
(17:56):
DNA profile was developed. Now, what is STR DNA profile.
Speaker 1 (18:00):
Short tandem repeats And so what you're looking at is
that the uh, there's little markers along the strand that
you're trying to marry up those markers so that they
tell the story at a molecular level of who this
person is now depended upon the sourcing of this DNA
(18:27):
and when they applied str methodology to it. The next
step and we even had this back then, Dave, is
they plug it into CODIS, which is the national database.
And as you well know, because you've covered so many
of these cases, Dave, the chances that you're going to
get a hit seem to be most of the time
(18:50):
more less than great. You know, they're because you know,
what you're looking at with CODIS is that there's two categories.
And forgive me if I'm being in a dead horse,
but I have to remind everybody here that you have
these known individuals that are sex offenders, and then you
have the unknowns, which is traditionally what's referred to as
(19:12):
the forensic database. So if with this str analysis that
they've run, they're looking into the known. So these are
people that have been found guilty of some kind of
sex offense. They're required to give up their dna IS
(19:32):
to posit it into the system. And back then the
search was a bit more difficult. Going back all those
years with cotis, it's not quite as it's more seamless
now than it was back then, and a lot of
that has to do with advances in technology. But you
look first in the known database, and the unknown database
(19:56):
arises from the samples that they've gotten from all these
other cases like Margaret's case, for instance, where you have
viable sample, but this person's not in the database. Who
are you going to match it up with? And so
all of these years have gone by, Dave, all these
years have gone by and there was still no match
(20:19):
or the case had fallen so far down the list,
because remember we're talking mid nineties, Dave, you think there's
been other unsolved cold cases that have occurred and Spokene,
Washington since then, of course there have been. And it's
really tragic because these cases get stacked one upon another
(20:39):
and those cases begin to disappear in the rearview mirror.
And I know that's very sad, you know, but that's
the reality. You can only work so many of these cases.
Speaker 3 (20:48):
Everybody has a job, you know, and we all know
you have a certain amount that is expected every day,
and then you have other stuff that piles on top
of that. Yeah, and that's what happens with cases if
you in a case like her, And again Margaret was
not just kicked to the curb. And you know, they
did everything they could. They interviewed everyone in the area
(21:11):
they could find. They they tried every known way of
accomplishing this, and they didn't give up by just kicking it,
filing it and being done with it. They actually did
keep returning to it to see if they could find anything.
But you know, it doesn't do any good to have
DNA if the person has never had the suspect has
(21:35):
never had their DNA taken in place in the system.
You can have the DNA all day long, but if
they're not in the system, you got nothing to compare
it to and until you do. And that's where the
development of some of the cases we've had recently that
Authorham is doing, it's because they're able to now use
this credible technology. Okay, we don't have that gap, you
(21:55):
know what, we do have something over here we can file,
you know, and they start pulling that DNA strand apart.
In this case, it took until twenty twenty two.
Speaker 4 (22:06):
Joe.
Speaker 3 (22:07):
Now, one thing I try to do on these cases,
I look at family members, you know, because I always
wonder what would they be going through not knowing you know,
your mom is dead, you know. I found out a
little bit about her daughter, and her daughter was sad
because she was such a loving, beautiful woman, but she
(22:29):
did have some mental health issues. Yeah, and that is
kind of why she was living in an apartment and
was not living with Now her daughter was nineteen at
the time. Her son was saying, I think eighteen. But
anyway you look at it, she didn't she did not
live a life on the edge. She wasn't a drug user,
(22:51):
she wasn't a party or she wasn't that you know,
she wasn't any of the things that could put somebody
at risk.
Speaker 4 (22:56):
This is a florist.
Speaker 3 (22:58):
She's lined floral arrangements for crying out loud, for weddings
and funerals. Think about that for just a minute. And
when they couldn't solve it, they kept coming back to it.
They kept trying to and finally it took years, but
finally they were able to.
Speaker 4 (23:12):
Submit to author them.
Speaker 3 (23:16):
And you know, that's that's an undertaking in and of itself,
because you submit what you have and they start working
on it, and they come up with a few ideas,
and you know, and they send it back to you
and now the police are working it again and they
find they tie some more things together, they send that
back and each time it's a couple of months in between.
It's not like they called Joe and say, hey, Joe,
(23:39):
don't you got any DNA there we can run and
you send it to him and then a week later
they go, yeah, we found this murder from thirty years ago.
Here you go, we're talking to It's a year's long process, yeah,
and it's a lot of continually working the just working
to unfold this entire or a gami, you know, of evidence.
Speaker 1 (23:58):
A great way to put it. It is very complex,
you know, and it's not just with Authorm. It's not
just the DNA scientist. And I know I've told you
this before because we talk about these cases with some frequency.
But when you walk into this the only way I
can really describe it for those that have not seen
images of Authorm, it's like walking into some futuristic lab.
(24:23):
You feel like you're on some kind of starship somewhere.
But it's not just the people behind those those glass
walls where you can see through and you can see
what they're doing. It's the other side of the house too,
where these people are literally trying to fashion family trees,
which is intellectually it's also a huge puzzle to put
(24:47):
these things together, to try to understand the genealogy. And
that's you know, what eventually leads leads back to whoever
this might be, or at least a close relative.
Speaker 4 (25:00):
It was a relative, that's the thing.
Speaker 3 (25:02):
They were able to identify somebody who is a relative
of that suspect you have over that unknown subject over here. Yeah,
well we found somebody that person is related to. And Joe,
I think that's just I think about that, and I
think that that goes beyond the scope of what my
(25:24):
head is capable of handling. That you haven't identified the suspect,
but you identified this person over here that is so
far away from him or her, you know, they don't
even know each other.
Speaker 1 (25:36):
Maybe I heard something. I read it the other day,
and I wanted to share this with you, Dave, because
it kind of it kind of dovetails with the conversation
we're having right now about because you said unknown, and
it brought it to mind again for me, and let
this kind of seep in here, this discussion, having this
(26:03):
item that I had read said that the days, the
days of the tomb of the unknown soldier are going
to be passing us by. Just imagine that, just for
a second, that that's the power of this technology. Uh.
(26:25):
You know, people that have fallen in battle and you
can you know, you can go to graveyards. You know,
we have them all over the South where you have, say,
Civil War graveyards. You can walk through them and they'll
be these headstones and it'll say things like, you know,
(26:46):
like it says on I think at the tomb in
Arlington it says known only to God, or it'll say unknown.
This technology is now at a point nowadave, where those
days are going to be passing us by very quickly.
I mean just think about you know, because you know,
(27:06):
sometime back, you know, we talked about the King and
the car park with Richard the third and dude, he
was killed in battle before Columbus discovered America, all right
before fourteen ninety two. He was back in the thirteen hundreds.
They got him identified through one of his descendants. Okay,
(27:30):
that's the world that we're living in now, and that's
what makes this tool that we have at our disposal,
and that that that authorm has facilitated, you know, and
you go back to what David Milman has said about,
you know, the Nameless List, those thousands and thousands of
(27:51):
people that are on this thing, and they are all
individual people. His goal is to clear that list out
one by one. I don't care how long it takes.
That's what his goal is. And for Margaret's case, her
case all the way back all these years ago there
(28:13):
in Spokane, down in that dirty little alley, it seemed
to come to an end then, but you know what,
her story continued with the end of the life of
her perpetrator. I don't know if you and I have
(28:43):
had this discussion before, however, I will repeat it. Okay,
did you know I've investigated more suicides in my career
than I have homicides?
Speaker 4 (28:56):
Wow? No, you haven't told me that.
Speaker 1 (29:00):
Yeah, they outpaced homicides, wow, three to one, two to one.
Depend upon the jurisiiction. You just don't hear about them
unless it's like Robin Williams, all right, unless the media
actually says this person is important. I hate that. Yeah,
and we're going to name who it is. You know,
because if you go to the newspaper, I say, newspaper.
Speaker 4 (29:22):
Yeah, you know, news resources, Thank.
Speaker 1 (29:25):
You very much. I don't remember the last time I
went to a paper box and drop coins in it.
And I don't even know if they have those anymore.
Speaker 4 (29:32):
They have them right next to the payphones.
Speaker 1 (29:36):
You know, there was a certain amount of joy that
I would derive from that, though, from actually getting the
newspaper and physically holding it.
Speaker 3 (29:42):
Getting your cigarettes from the machine avenue, yeah.
Speaker 1 (29:45):
Yeah, exactly, they're out of Marlborough's.
Speaker 3 (29:49):
Uh.
Speaker 1 (29:51):
But you know, you know, you know, you go to
the o bits in the you know, in the newspaper,
and it'll get somebody's age there. It'll say, you know
John Jones twenty nine dot suddenly right, And so that's
really all you ever, you know, know about a suicide
(30:12):
unless you're associated with a family.
Speaker 3 (30:14):
Yeah, and if the family wants you to know, unless
if the family wants you to know. Oftentimes now they
are sharing things thankfully about mental health and there are
warnings about it because you know it. You know, Joe,
I didn't put two and two together. I did not realize.
I didn't realize a lot about homicides versus suicides until
I started noticing how when you mentioned suicide, you know,
(30:37):
it's this is a big deal to talk about because
so many people feel like you got it. Look, man,
you're taking a permanent that you're making a permanent decision
for a very temporary problem.
Speaker 4 (30:49):
Yeah, so don't please.
Speaker 1 (30:52):
Yeah, And that that's something that you know, we deal
with all the time in my field where we go
out and we don't but we you know, again, you know,
drifting back putting my forensic hat on. We work all
of those suicides because it is a violent death. We
work them all as if they're homicides until we can
prove otherwise. And so we're very careful about that because
(31:15):
you have to be get one shot out, buddy. But
how it's weird. It almost seems like and I'd really
like to know the attitude of the police, because it's
like they've got in one hand, they've got this case,
Margaret's case that has just been lingering on the books
(31:36):
for all of these years, and they're hoping against hope,
they're going back checking it periodically. There's other cases coming
in and finally they do have a ray of hope
relative to identifying identifying who this person was that perpetrated
this rape homicide. And can you imagine I wonder if
(31:58):
they felt. I wonder if when they made the idea,
if they were deflated, Dave over the fact that this
person could not, at least in this world, could not
be held accountable for what he had perpetrated against Margaret
and her family.
Speaker 3 (32:17):
They were able to using the DNA that was taken
from from Margaret when her body was discovered in that alley,
and even though it took many, many years, they were
able to finally determine that that DNA came from Brian
(32:39):
James Anderson. Brian Anderson, he was twenty years old when
he committed this crime, this murder, this rape, this horrible,
vicious assault. He's a twenty year old man. He's beating
up a forty five year old woman and raping her
and leaving her like trash in an alleyway. And after
(33:03):
they figured out who he was and out he was
born April twenty ninth, nineteen seventy six and died by
suicide July eighth, two thousand and nine. I cannot imagine
what the investigators felt, because they solved it, and they
(33:25):
said in their announcement, Joe, they said, if he were alive,
we have the evidence to charge him with this and
get a conviction. That's the one thing. It wasn't just
this DNA. They had other evidence to go along with
it that all matched up once they identified.
Speaker 1 (33:40):
Him, right, and so the you know, investigatively, many times
the clouds began to part right, you know, you see,
because then you you know that big blank that you
have in your brain when you're trying to figure out
a puzzle and you get one piece of the puzzle
and then all of a sudden, everything else there's clarity
at it. Right, It's like, oh my god, can I
believe I missed this? And now you know, almost like
(34:03):
a spiderweb, you see all of the connectivity that runs
through it.
Speaker 3 (34:08):
They did say, I wanted to be clear on that Joe.
The Spokane Police farm is that if he were still alive,
they would seek to charge him with first degree murder
and first degree.
Speaker 1 (34:17):
Rate Yeah, which for those of you that don't know,
anytime you hear that term first degree, it means a
couple of things, and many jurisdictions, that means that they
are aggravating circumstances. Like I'll give you, for instance, if
you if you commit an armed robbery, for instance, and
you happen to kill somebody in the commission of an
(34:40):
armed robbery, that's an aggravating circumstance, and that can be
first degree homicide. You go to some states and they
don't they don't have the degrees like this, Like you
go to Georgia and they'll call it malice murder. And
I still have a hard time kind of wrapping my
brain around that statute. But in Louisiana, where I learned
(35:00):
criminal law as an undergraduate, you know, first degree murder
and it's murder there. You know that's a death penalty case,
and there's certain aggravating circumstances you know that make it
that way, like if you kill somebody under twelve, or
you kill actually kill a school teacher or a firefighter
or a police officer while they're working, that's first degree homicide,
(35:24):
commission of an arm, robbery, commission of a rape, all
those sorts of things. So I'm thinking that that's those
two things go hand in hand with this case where
you know, the circumstances were so over the top that
if they had had a chance to drag him into
a courtroom, there's a there's a good possibility they would
(35:47):
have gotten a conviction on this guy. Because Dave Brother,
when it comes to DNA, you cannot fight these numbers.
The only thing you can fight, and here's the way
I look at it, The only the only anything that
the defense can put up relative to a defense against
the utility of DNA and court is procedurally, how was
(36:12):
it collected, how was it protected, how was it analyzed?
Because if you followed the recipe that you're supposed to
follow every single time you get one of these samples,
and you treat it as if it's the most fragile
thing in the world, which, by the way, kind of is,
and you follow through with all of the steps prescribed
by law. Then you've got a winner on your hands.
(36:34):
You know, when you start to get up into these
astronomical numbers that go back to a specific identity, it's
something that people won't soon forget. I think that's that's
why DNA, in particular, it has two utilities. First off,
a lot of these cases, it's not just about convicting people, Dave,
(36:56):
it's about people that have been wrongly convicted. Okay, where
you can take it, and the cops were looking in
a completely different direction, or there was some kind of
mouthfeasance where they convince somebody to admit to something they
haven't done, and they go back and examine the DNA,
which is you know, it's pretty amazing when you think
about it. But here's one more bit to this case
(37:18):
that I found absolutely fascinating. Did you know, Dave, that
that this case, this case is the forty first case
that the state of Washington has utilized the services of
authorm and they've gotten off the books.
Speaker 4 (37:37):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (37:37):
So I don't know, I don't know who's been listening
to the gospel of Authorm up in Washington, but I
think you've got a bunch of true believers up there.
They see the utility of what can happen. What can
happen when you take this evidence and you apply it
and use it for the good that it serves. It's
(38:00):
quite amazing that all of these cold cases that they
have up there, whether they were unidentified bodies or unidentified
perpetrators that had committed some kind of painous act, they've
they're off the books now.
Speaker 4 (38:12):
Man love it. It's one of the most amazing things.
Speaker 3 (38:14):
And as we try to point on every time, AUTHORM
is not funded by the government, they don't have a
money tree out in the backyard. They actually have to
crowdfund to begin a lot of the projects that they're
working on. A lot of it comes like even from
a police department when they submit DNA, there has to
(38:35):
be money. They have to have seventy five hundred dollars
to begin, and I'm an honest Joe, that's not very
much money when you look at what they're doing. And
it's one of those things where if you want to
get involved, you can. You actually can take part in
this and it might not be your family. You might
not have anything in your family that well, what if
(38:57):
you knew somebody that had a death of a loved
one and there was never anyone held responsible. You know,
you could actually be a part of finding that solution
for somebody else.
Speaker 1 (39:08):
Yes, you absolutely could. And here's what I suggest. If
you go to dnasolves dot com, you can look through
the cases that are right now pending that they need
that one little push to get them over the hump
in order to begin the wheels rolling, if you will,
to flip the switch is This is the perspective I
(39:31):
ask you to at least consider. You know, we always
talk about the people nowadays like to throw around the
term family and community. And if you live in a
specific geographic location in the US, or maybe that's your
point of origin, someplace that was your old hometown, go
(39:53):
through there and find something that catches your interest. Maybe
you never know, you might have had some kind of
connection to somebody that is missing. There's unidentified remains in
your old hometown or somewhere in the state that you love.
If you want to send money that way, send it
that way. And all you have to do is go
(40:15):
to dnasolves dot com, look through the cases and you
can give as much or as little as you wish,
but listen, there is in fact a need. People are
banging on all the time about how much they wish
they could be a detective. While I'm not saying you're
going to get a gold badge, however, I can tell
(40:36):
you this by contribution that you might make to Authorm,
you're doing more than a lot of people have ever
done that were in fact so called investigators. I'm Joseph
Scott Morgan, and this is bodybags
Host
Joseph Scott Morgan
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