November 5, 2025 • 48 mins
The headline might be a little misleading but....if 314 bodies were dumped from their caskets and left in the hot desert sun to become one with the desert, you would probably take notice. In truth, the cremains of 314 people were found about an hour south of Las Vegas, neatly placed in the middle of nowhere. Joseph Scott Morgan and Dave Mack begin with questions that might not have answers as they discuss the cremains found in Nevada and what will happen next.
Transcript Highlights
00:00.33 Introduction
01:39.69 What to do with Cremains of a loved one
04:13.91 300 piles of human cremated remains
09:09.23 Remains of Michael Jordan's father
14:34.82 Neat piles of cremains means something
19:26.91 A lot or regulations with cremation
24:49.41 Cremains are left in piles
29:42.45 Investigation will involve multiple agency's
34:18.39 Positive identification of the dead
39:45.31 Nevada is a coroner state
45:00.68 Nightmare scenario for death investigation
48:34.32 Conclusion
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Quody Dines with Joseph Scott More. One of my all
time favorite scenes in any movie is from The Big Lebowski.
I have to admit I'm a massive fan of the movie.
I didn't get it the first two times I watched it.
I had people that had because I love the Cohen Brothers,
(00:22):
and I have people that encouraged me. You got to
go back and watch it, and every single time I
watched it, it was like I was peeling back a
layer of I don't know, a big reveal if you will,
but contained within that film is the scene toward the
end of the movie where the dude and Walter have
(00:45):
gone out to this beautiful stretch of beach. Obviously in California,
it's a rugged coastline. They're on rocks and they have
their friends' ashes, which by the way, are contained in
a plastic Folgers coffee box, and Walter played by John Goodman,
(01:06):
stands there and does this long resertation about their friend
Donnie and his life, and he decides to scatter Donnie's ashes.
At this moment in time, they've gone out there to
memorialize Donnie, and as Walter does this, the breeze kicks up.
And all of a sudden, these cremaines are deposited on
(01:30):
the dude and his face is white with this ash.
His clothing is white, his favorite bowling shirt, which is
a shirt that he wears throughout much of the film.
And it's something that many people don't think about. You know,
if I have cremains or ashes, what am I going
(01:52):
to do with them? What shall I do with the
remains of a loved one or a friend in their
final repose? Well, Walter made a bad decision, But today
I'm going to talk about something that is far more
(02:15):
horrendous that has occurred recently in Nevada. As a matter
of fact, there is no memorialization. There's essentially a dumping
of hundreds of human cremains. And right now we ain't
got no answers. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is
(02:42):
body bags. How could they not have How could those
characters have not or at least both of them. It's
not just Walter's fault. How could they not have anticipated
an inshore breeze? Wow, because I've been to the beach.
I know you've been there a lot over the course
of your life, and it is beautiful. It is beautiful,
(03:02):
and the fact that those those ashes blow back on
them is no surprise. I think that's one of the
reasons most of the time. I don't know if it's
the only reason. When you deposit cremaines in the ocean,
they ask. And I've been looking at state laws. There's
one place that says you need to go off shore
three nautical miles in order to scatter ashes. Right. It's
(03:26):
a curious thing, isn't it.
Speaker 2 (03:27):
Well, otherwise you got people on the beach laying out
and all of a sudden they're reaching over and kid
comes up with a really neat shell and you're going, no,
that's a tooth, baby, you know, just to share something
with you guys. Look, you know when I found out
what that, we relied to about cremaines because I thought
cremains were like in a movie where they're like a powder,
you know, very powdery looking and kind of a dust
(03:48):
and just kind of waffed into the air.
Speaker 1 (03:50):
That's what it looks like. Huh.
Speaker 2 (03:52):
It was when my mother passed and we had her,
we had her, she was cremated and we had her
service on okra Coke Island, North Carolina. Where she was
raised and it's my favorite place. That's my secret spot, right,
but not anymore. Well, buddy, the thing is is that
you know, we go out there to do this, and
(04:12):
you know, it's like they don't tell you there should
be a warning. And I'm going to give you, guys
that warning. Cremains are not dust. Okay, they can have
teeth and a lot of big parts in it, But
bottom line is always the bottom line, Joe. And in
this particular story, we have a headline that at first
you and I both thought it was like thirty which
is bad enough, but I double checked. Three hundred piles
(04:35):
of cremated cremated human remains discovered near Las Vegas now
near Vegas, about an hour outside of town. But Joe,
they went to all the effort to cremate a person
and then rather than give it to a family member
or do something, they just took them out in the
desert and then they it's almost like you mentioned the beach,
(04:59):
because they're like building sand castles like kids do on
the beach. It's like they got a bucket and that
these are piles of remains, and they're like.
Speaker 1 (05:06):
They look like I got to tell you David, I
urge anybody, any of our friends out there that are
not familiar with the story, I urge you because there
are some images. And David, I got to tell you, brother,
when I saw them, When I saw these, not to
make light, but when I saw it, it looked like.
Speaker 2 (05:24):
It.
Speaker 1 (05:25):
And they're they're almost in rows, and it looked like
fire ant beds. It did it? Did you know? They're
kind of built up, they're mounded up and nothing. I
don't know. My son, Noah is fascinated by the desert.
He loves the desert. He loves going to the desert
in Nevada, he loves He was with in the Air Force.
(05:47):
He actually went, he was in Arizona. He and I actually,
as a result of military service, were in the same
location in Arizona and Yuma, and he was just he's
fascinated by it because it's so us growing up in
South it's a completely foreign world. But I go back
to another movie, Dave Real Quick Casino. Oh yeah, Robert
(06:10):
de Niro and Joe Pesci and that infamous scene where
Joe Pesci has summoned Robert de Niro to meet him
in the desert, and you can hear the voice over
that de Niro says. He says, I hate meetings in
the desert, and it's something like nothing good ever happens
in the desert. And dude, I got to tell you
(06:34):
the person. You know. Here we go again with our
the person we always talk about, the finder. Can you
imagine this individual, because it was a finder that is
like out in the desert and he's seeing these mounds
out there and you're thinking, what in the world is this?
Speaker 2 (06:54):
Yeah, And the thing is, Joe, is that because you
even said they look like they don't look like anything
one would expect from cremaines. But here's the part that
gets me, and I really, I mean, there's so much
about this that's wrong. Okay, But Joe, you explained to
(07:14):
me how difficult it is to render a body down
because we've had a number of cases where somebody decided,
you know, they would dispose of the person they murdered
by chopping them up and putting them on a fire
or what have you. And I didn't know, I really
didn't until we started talking about how difficult it is
and what is required to render a body to that
(07:36):
status of cremaines. So Joe first let's start there. The
fact that they're out there and there's three hundred of
them means a lot of things. These could be unclaimed
bodies that somebody had to get rid of. I don't
know what they do with paupers anymore. You know, we
used to have a place where Potter's Field potters Field. Yeah,
I call it Popper's. I met Potter's Field, but.
Speaker 1 (07:58):
Yeah, no, no, you're right. Some people do say a paupers. Yeah.
I think traditionally it's Potter's and there's been a I
don't know, it sounds like a great a great title
for a podcast.
Speaker 2 (08:11):
Actually sounds like something out of a movie that Jimmy
Stewart would have been in where he.
Speaker 1 (08:16):
Was, or Charles Dickens novel or some of the potters
Field you know, maybe even Stephen King. I don't know,
but yeah, potters Field traditionally. And it's really sad because
working at Corners offices, in m E's offices, I have
been to Pottersfield. I've literally seen bodies laid out in
(08:38):
rows where you collect the bodies over a period of
time and you wait until you can have a big burial.
And a lot of people don't realize that that was done.
I doubt it's done as much anymore. But here's one
here's one thing that they have stopped doing in the
medical legal world. And somebody might prove me wrong on this,
(09:01):
but if I'm not mistaken, I don't think corners and
medical examiners cremate bodies anymore because because the fact that
there's always a chance that a family will show up,
all we got to do, We've talked about it before.
(09:21):
All we got to do is talk about Michael Jordan's daddy.
You know what a train wreck that was for that
poor corner up to Marlboro County, South Carolina, and you
look at that and you think, yikes. You know so
many times I think the fallback position when you're talking
about and it's generally called indigent burial, is the way
(09:44):
it's referred to as, and there will be I've tried
to describe what this is like to many people, but
if you've ever the worst job ever had my life
was working at Pigley Wiggily. I hated that job. I
was a kid and I was the stock guy. I
had to get in early in the morning unload trucks.
(10:06):
But on the back of eighteen wheelers. They've got that
numbered aluminum tag that actually has to be cut open,
and it's there for the protection of the goods inside
of the vehicle, and they're very resilient well with Traditionally,
with indigent remains, you take this band and it's an
(10:30):
identifying band, and you put one around the ankle, and
you put one around the wrist of the body that's
going to go into a body bag. It might go
into like a really cheap casket, but sometimes they'll just
put them. They used to put them directly into the
ground in a bag like that. But you knew that
the bodies would be organized so that if any question
(10:52):
came up with the band, you'd be able to say, okay,
this is case number zero zero zero eighty five nine,
all right, and we can go back. You can pull
back the earth, find that find that I don't know
that vessel that the body is contained, and pull it
out and go back and do further you know, further examination.
(11:16):
You do that with with cremains. What are you going
to tag with cremains? It's like trying to tag talcum
chunky talcum powder. There's nothing you know that you can
really do with it. And this has got to pose
a huge problem, you know, for for whoever is actually
looking into this case, which again is a very very
(11:36):
curious thing.
Speaker 2 (11:37):
The one thing they did determine is that they're they're human. Okay,
that was the first thing they had to decide, because
they haven't mentioned much about the finder, and you've got
me so focused on the finder now, because it's like, okay, well, okay,
why were you fifty nine minutes outside of Las Vegas
in the desert where you stumbled upon three hundred piles
(12:01):
of dirt you thought, and yet you knew it was
something other than that, So you've called it in. What
were you doing out there that we can legitimately buy
into because I'm thinking you were looking for a spot,
you know, you don't just fall into this area. But Joe,
to go to all the effort to create cremains to
(12:22):
render a body down, it takes time, it takes effort,
it takes intentionality. It's not something that accidentally happens by
ignoring a dead body. It doesn't just you know, if
you don't have them stacked up and you just kind
of lock the door and walk away and then you
come back a couple of weeks later and there's a
nice little pile of dust. This is something based on
(12:44):
the way they were found. Yep, this was actually rendered down,
put in the bag, and nobody picked it up or
they had no place to send it. And so the
best plan again. And now I'm thinking, you spent the
time and effort to render the body down into this form,
and you couldn't come up with anything better than this.
You couldn't put it in a You could not put
(13:07):
it in a big ziplock freezer bag and dig a
hole and put it in there and mark it somehow.
I mean, you couldn't even think to do that. You
just left Cremaine sitting out to be caught in the
breeze in the desert to blend in. If that was
your goal, White, you just spread him and kick it over.
If nobody knows and nobody cares. I really have to wonder, Joe,
(13:28):
there are so many other things you could have done
that would have Look man, if I came looking for
Uncle Herman three years after he died and you're the
one that got rid of him, you just I don't
know what happened to him. Nobody claimed him. I don't
know what happens you know that's the only answer. You
didn't come and pick your uncle up, Dave. It's not
my fault, you know. But here we have piles out there.
Speaker 1 (13:47):
Let me throw it. Let me throw one more thing. Yeah,
we're talking about the desert. You know what else is
near Vegas. Let's I guess an hour away. It's Lake Mead. Yeah,
you've got Hoover Dam, you got the Colorado River. Dude.
You know, if I looked at this and I was thinking,
why why would you go to this particular spot and
(14:10):
do this and leave? And this is literally evidence. And
when you talk about these piles, Dave, this is something
and I know, I know what you what you had
mentioned about, you know, the passing of your mama and
when you got to examine those remains and when you
(14:31):
see that. But let's let's face it. What's intriguing about
this to me from a physical evidence standpoint is the
fact is the fact that you've got something going on
here that I'm going to refer to as containment because
you do not get neat piles like this unless you
(14:52):
have this thing in a transportable vessel where you're going
to go with these and set them out. There's another
fact actor here too. Now I mentioned wind. Design ain't
got a lot of water, as we well know, what
it does have is wind. How is it how is
(15:17):
it that these piles have seemingly remained rather uniformed. I
don't know. I think one of the elements here that
I'm really concerned about and really interested in is time.
Time as it applies to were these things all deposited
(15:39):
at the same time? I was trying to think back.
I know that our friends out in the Vegas area,
which by the way, makes me think we're going to
(16:04):
be traveling to Vegas in a few months. Crime Con
is meeting there twenty twenty six, is it already, Tommy Man? Yeah,
so yeah, we'll be heading back out that way. Maybe
you and I can run us a car and go
out to the desert. Yeah I got out of the desert.
But you know, the NERO say is not too or at
least his character so but anyway, yeah, so you ditched me.
Speaker 2 (16:27):
A few minutes ago, I set up the whole thing
because we were doing an episode. I don't remember which
one it was, but it was one of the episodes
where somebody tried to burn a Bavodi and they were
not successful at and so actually you know what it was,
It was our least favorite JJ and Tiley. Oh yeah, yeah,
that was the first time when you actually explained the
(16:49):
process because they tried to burn Yeah, Tyly and Joe
knowing what it goes into it and knowing that to
get cremains like this they did and do this in
a backyard burn pie. So talk to me about what
goes into it, because this is a whole thing. It's
not something it's not something you could do with your
granny three hundred and fifteen times over just saying it
(17:11):
didn't happen like that.
Speaker 1 (17:13):
No, No, here's the thing with cremation. First off, there
is a huge chunk of time that is involved in this.
It's not something see how can I It's not like
(17:33):
you've got a though there is kind of a conveyor
belt process. It's not like you're just kind of pushing
something into an oven and it quickly comes out the
other end. That's not the way this works, all right.
First off, you have to have a crematory that is
(17:56):
up to the task. If we reflect back in tom
and you know, we did an episode on the tri
Tri State crematory debacle I urge anybody here within sound
of my voice to go look that up, not just
my episode, but just look it up, because it's one
of the most ghastly things that's ever happened in the South.
(18:17):
I think as far as the dead are concerned that
crematory that guy had tried to actually hooked up hook
up propane tanks to his crematory to make it operate.
That was despicable. It's disgusting. It's absolutely one of the
most disgusting things. And of course he propane does not
(18:40):
burn as hot, you know, as like natural gas, and
you have to have an ongoing gas supply for crematory.
We're not talking about building fires here. We're not talking
about a funeral pyre. So I bet you just thought
of a door song when I said that, didn't you.
So oh you man. Yeah. So we're not talking about
(19:03):
building a wooden structure to consume a body. We're talking
about a containment system. And it is truly a containment system.
And the fact that you have to meet certain EPA
regulations and you have to be literally trained and certified
in order to do this. There's all kinds of checks
(19:25):
and balances like you can get a visit from the
EPA or the state version of that, and you have
to be up to date. So it's not something that
just like somebody can just go out and do so.
In order to make this happen, A lot of it
has to do with the mass of the body, all right,
(19:45):
And it makes sense, right, So the smaller the body,
the smaller remains, the shorter amount of time it's going
to take to consume it.
Speaker 2 (19:53):
What if you're really fat, I mean, this is the
nicest well possible. I mean, really a fat person, you know,
with a lot of just water weight and flood. I
mean it burns off, it does.
Speaker 1 (20:03):
But you know, there are actually stories out there. I
don't know how many of them are true and how
many are kind of anecdotal, but they have had the
equivalent of grease fires and incrematories where it flames over,
which is it just seems to me that would be
an absolute nightmare. You know, where you have you have bodies.
Speaker 2 (20:25):
The crematorium guy in there doing it is his mother
in law that he's having to take care of, and
he says, see, I told you where it's going.
Speaker 1 (20:32):
You see it's bad, it really is. It's there's so
much and you know, and I've and to give you
an idea, I participated in autopsies of people that were,
let's you say, way way up in the triple digits
and weight. That's about as far as I'll go with it.
And it is those are the toughest cases in the
(20:55):
autopsy room to open because the size of the body,
the size of the body. When you actually make that incision,
you see the full thickness of the fat layer. And
I'm not talking about like SubQ fat. I'm talking about
the full thickness of particularly belly fat. I've seen it.
(21:17):
I've seen probably the thickness up to eight to nine
inches in depth of fat. And it is problematic. But
all of that has to be contained within within this structure,
within the crematory itself, and it has to burn. We're
(21:39):
talking I mentioned three digits with weight, we're talking about
four digits now with temperature. We're talking sustained fourteen hundred degrees.
If you can begin to kind of wrap your brain
around that, and inside inside of the structure sure itself.
(22:00):
Inside of the crematory, there are these little gas jets
that line this thing, and so they're blasting out a
flame and it's a directed flame at the subject that's
contained within it. And this has to keep going. It
has to be monitored, and over a period of time
(22:23):
they will inspect it to see if the rendering has
taken place, because just because the body might be rendered,
it might be rendered down. The task is not over
with because as the body comes out, what is initially
(22:44):
taken off of the belt itself goes into an auger,
and the auger spins looks like a gigantic screw. They
used to use opposing I've seen opposing stones, these round
stones that roll in opposite directions, and it's kind of
like a if you think about like a stone crusher,
(23:05):
but it's primarily augurs and they go around and round
and around it does it kind of looks like a
screw or a drill bit, only it's tapered and the
cremains are essentially crushed in here down to finer you know,
finer elements. You're still not You're still not going to
get rid of any kind of all of the skeletal sample.
(23:29):
It's just it's not going to happen. And teeth are
the worst. So and the other thing that they will do,
they'll go through and if they're like any kind of
medical devices, something that has not been completely rendered down,
those things will actually be removed and taken out, you know,
(23:51):
things like you know, titanium screws and all that kind
of stuff. You know, if people have had surgeries, wires
I've seen I think I've seen pacemakers before. If I'm
not mistaken, I might be. But the leads for the
pacemaker will be burned off, So yeah, it's and then
after that happens, the cremains as they are are then taken,
(24:18):
they're bagged, and then whatever kind of I keep using
this term conveyance, I guess that the family chooses whether
it's some kind of really ornate box or it's a
very simple little thing. They'll be placed in there, and
you know they'll be made available to the family after
a period of time. You know, they can come and
(24:39):
retrieve these and you get plaques put on them, all
these sorts of things. What's really fascinating about this, Dave,
just and I, if you don't mind, just indulge me
for a second and I will I will kind of
tell you this. In America. In America, the US, there
(25:00):
are approximately ten five hundred crematories nationwide in the US. Okay,
in Nevada, there are as you can imagine, fewer than that.
(25:25):
There's fifty six. What have I What have I told
you in the past, Dave, Maybe I've told this to
my students. Haven't mentioned this to you. When we do
an investigation in forensics, I like to use the idea
of a big funnel where we've got all of this
data that we kind of dump into the opening of
(25:45):
the funnel. And if you think about how funnel works,
it narrows as it gets down further and further. So
if these bodies, and this is a big gift, but
if these bodies are originating in Nevada, well, there are
only fifty six license crematories, so our field automatically is
(26:12):
narrowed down because I don't know of any other organization
that is permitted under law to cremate bodies unless we've
got something really really weird and bizarre going on here,
you know, where I don't know somebody has their own
(26:35):
crematory that's operating illegally and they're taking bodies. That's been
one of my biggest big It's not really a fear
that I have, but I've thought about it from an
investigative standpoint, what would be what would be the perfect
thing if you wanted to get rid of bodies? Right,
you know, if you had, first off, you had a
funeral home, you had access to do And we've heard
(26:58):
and maybe this is kind of a fictional device, but
where you can put a false bottom in a in
a casket and then bury a person on top of
put them in a casket, you know, Grandma goes on
top of somebody that they're trying to get rid of
and they bury it sounds like that's not real. I
don't know if it is. Again, anecdotally, it's claimed that
that has occurred before, particularly when you think about you know, uh,
(27:23):
I guess the term used to be mobbed up if
there was some funeral you know, home that was had
some kind of loose attachment to some under underworld figures
or something. You know.
Speaker 2 (27:34):
You never watched the Netflix series Ozark, did you?
Speaker 1 (27:37):
No? I did? I watched part of it, Yeah.
Speaker 2 (27:40):
To the part where they owned the funeral home.
Speaker 1 (27:43):
Uh. Yeah, it's coming back to me. Maybe that's where
I'm remembering this from. It seems like that it seems
like the perfect thing, you know, and yeah, but you'd
have to again, you'd have to have access. Okay, let
me throw this one out to you again, reflecting back
to one of our previous episodes, one of my favorite episodes.
(28:04):
It's the case out of I don't know if you
recall this, It was the case out of Philly where
they had the abandoned graveyard or cemetery that was shut
down because it was too full and the biker gang
was using going into the crypt in there and putting
(28:25):
remains down the ground. Again, great episode, fascinating case. So yeah,
again having access to that location. I'm not saying that
the the you know, that the malevolent people involved in
that case had, you know, had anything to do with
the funeral, but I think that investigatively we're going to
get more answers here, just thinking about kind of how
(28:49):
this is, how this is kind of no pun intended
parsed out investigatively, how do you do it? Because here's
the thing. You know, technically, technically, these cremains don't necessarily
fall and I found this very fascinating, Dave. They don't
(29:10):
fall under the jurisdiction of the medical examiner. At a corner,
this is a state health department issue. At this point
in time. They found something out there, Dave, that gave
them an indication first off that they were cremains, and
secondly that they were human cremains. So that means that
(29:31):
they had to take sample. Because trust me, if you
think it's tough to get an ID on an intact body,
even one that is severely decomposed and he tried nothing
until you've tried to get an ID on cremated human remains.
(30:05):
What to do? What to do in Nevada? A lot
of people spend their time in Nevada, uh, you know,
going down Strip and used to get a really good
meal in Las Vegas. Sheep, You know them days are gone, Bubba.
I used to think, Man, I can't wait to get
(30:25):
out to Nevada and grab grab, grab some lostster.
Speaker 2 (30:28):
While It's so funny how the older you get, Yeah,
things really change when you're younger. The idea of going
to Vegas is one thing. Then you hit a certain
age that's like, yeah, the buffet, come on, hey, I
want to ask it a kind of quick things here,
all right. At the end of World War Two, Patton
actually forced townspeople from Buymar to actually tour Bukenvalalve concentration camp.
(30:53):
And the reason is these because they were exterminating an
entire race and then some by putting them through the fire.
They were burning these bodies down and creating cremains, and
the stacks would blow and on certain days the gardens
would be covered with this white powdery ash. And he
(31:15):
was disgusted by how the townspeople acted like they didn't
know anything. And he's like, there's no way you can
see thousands of people coming in here and not leaving,
and the camp not overgrowing with people, and you know,
you got to put two and two together. So he
marched them through. He made them come through there and
walk through the ovens, and there were partially bodies that
(31:36):
were not totally broken down. Anyway, That's what's going through
my head is we have three hundred plus piles of people.
Each one of these piles of cremains is a person. Now,
if you were just going to dispose of somebody, Joe,
this is not how you would do it. I mean this,
(31:59):
even though there are three hundred bodies placed in you know,
their cremaine form out there in the desert an hour
away from Vegas, south of Vegas, by the way, and
they seem to be from what you and I saw,
they were actually put there in some kind of an order.
Whoever did it took care with what they were doing.
(32:20):
But I can't get past you know, I'm having a
little trouble with the why would you go to all
that trouble if all you're going to do is put
these people's cremaines out there in the desert to be
blown away, to just go to the you know that
makes you know, a dust to dust, ashes to ashes,
dust to dust. I get it, But it doesn't seem
like you're being the most respectful in this regard by
(32:43):
allowing the wind to just blow. But we know they've
identified the remains as human, which I didn't know you could.
I really didn't. I mean, can you And this is
kind of the deal breaker here? Could you if you
can identify them as human, could you you get a
DNA sample, partial tooth or something? Yeah?
Speaker 1 (33:04):
Good, good, good question, my friend. Well, obviously I think
that the now, look, this goes back to something quite interesting.
I don't know if I've ever talked about this on
body bags. Do you know that there are three three
types of identification or let me see three levels of
identication identification and we can kind of write this down.
(33:26):
Maybe we can do an entire episode on how does
the medical examiner of your bodies identified? But just as
kind of like a little tease right here, we have
positive identification, okay, where we have verified scientifically and unfortunately
(33:46):
visually many times, which I'm not a big fan of
visual identification. First off, I don't trust government IDs as
far as I can throw them. I preach this to
my kids at Jack State all the time. You know,
it's a great place to start art. But if you
pull a license out of somebody's pocket and you try
to compare it, there's some horrific stories out there about misidentification.
(34:08):
That's really what we all do an episode on. It's
quite chilling, but positive identification. And then we have unidentified
bodies okay, some that to this point have failed to
have been identified. They're not going to be identified well
unless our friends at author them do it. And then
(34:30):
here's the one that really gets people. There is an
ide that is called presumptive identification, and it's something that
people are not necessarily familiar with. Years ago, I had
a lady that was locked up in a house. I
actually wrote about this in Blood Beneath My Feet in
(34:53):
case really affected me. And she had no living relatives.
She was she worked as a bus driver in Atlanta,
and we presumptively identified her body and she had been
now holding your hat. This this is really disgusting. Uh.
(35:14):
She lived in the house with her dogs, m m yeah,
and they consumed her down to her waist. There was
nothing left. And the case really affected me as an investigator.
It's one of those things that you don't ever get past.
We even had difficulty, uh uh, just trying to find
(35:40):
a dentist that she may have gone to. It turns
out she didn't have a dentist. Uh. And so because
she was in a locked house, her keys were there,
her money was there, no signs of fourth century, and
her car was still there and she hadn't shown up
for work in weeks. I'll give you a hint, there's
no future instigators in the postal service because she had
(36:03):
piles and piles of mail stacked up outside of her house.
As a matter of fact, so many piles of mail
that several of them had actually fallen off of the
porch into the gutter adjacent. But they just kept stacking
up the mail and she'd been in there for months
and months and it was problematic for us, and I
(36:24):
hated doing that. But we presumptively identified her, and what
that means is that we don't really have anything substantive
to go with. We looked at her body, what remained
of her body, and I could say, yes, this was
an African American female because we had soft tissue. We
knew that African American female resided at this address, she
(36:46):
was domiciled there. We knew that she was human. But
what are you going to go with with these cremains? Well,
my thought is I wonder if they have taken the
time to go to eat. And because each one of
these piles presumptively represents an individual person and you know
(37:07):
here on body bags we are advocates for the debt. Okay,
so each person is entitled to their ID and to
be honored. Okay, how did they have they gotten each pile?
First off, presumptively ID? Do we know that that is
in fact human? What was contained in each pile? Do
(37:29):
we have major bits of bone that were contained in
there that from a morphology standpoint, you can have a
forensic anthropologist look at each little fragment say yes, definitively
this is a bone. Okay, this is human bone. And
then was there any dentician left in any of these
(37:52):
piles you had mentioned a you had mentioned maybe a
partial tooth. What were their intact teeth at all? And
if they were intact, could those teeth have withstood the
fourteen hundred degree its variable, it's not always going to
(38:13):
be four Could those teeth have survived or the DNA
contained in there survived because that's the only place you're
going to get DYNA. I would think I might be
off base there, but I think that that's going to
be your number one shot. Do you think that it's
possible that they went in and did DNA extraction on teeth,
(38:36):
any kind of dentition that was left behind it, and
they were able to actually profile that case and create
create a profile on the person. I don't know. I
don't know if that's if that's possible because it's a
real head scratcher. Another piece to this dave that on
(38:57):
its surface is I guess kind of heartwarming but not really,
is that the state and medical examiner or they don't
have medical examiners in Nevada, forgive me. They have corners
and by the way, Clark County Corner is one of
the finest in the country. I mean, they're really good.
As a matter of fact, a lot of the stuff
(39:18):
that on that program CSI. You know, the corners spoken
about a lot, the one that takes place I've never
watched those programs, but the one that takes place in Vegas.
They're highly regarded. And not because the television show is
because they're damn professional. They're really good. This was not
(39:40):
the Corner's office going to collect these remains. This is actually,
and they're stated, they're mentioned in the article. They're actually
this mortuary service goes out and retrieves these remains. So
how does all of this work? I think is the
big question, because look, God bless people in the funeral industry,
(40:01):
But I got to tell you, I'm not looking to
the funeral industry to do the job of forensic scientists
because to this point, they have not validated. They've not
validated as to whether or not there's something nefarious going
on with each one of these little piles out there.
How do you run all of this down. I've got
(40:23):
to imagine that Davada somewhere because they haven't released a
lot of info yet, and maybe they will. They haven't
released a lot of info yet, but there's got to
be people, Dave, I would think that are scratching their
heads out there saying, oh my lord, this was What
do people say nowadays? This was not on my Bengo card?
You know? How do we move forward with this?
Speaker 2 (40:45):
The thing about this that gets me is that if
this was a crematorium trying to get away with saving
money and giving families dirt instead, we wouldn't have cremains
in a pile in the desert if it was somebody.
Because what they've done here, they've done all the expensive,
hard part of the job, right. That part is what
(41:06):
has already been done. So we're not looking at a
criminal act in that regard that they were trying to
dodge going through like you know, you mentioned the guy
using the propane tanks to try to accomplish, you know,
doing a cremation that you know, ridiculous, but this was done.
Three hundred plus bodies have been cremated completely and here's
their pile. So the hard, expensive part of that job
(41:29):
is done. The next part is, here's your cremains, send
me the check, you know, or whatever takes place. And
so immediately I'm thinking this is something even worse. I mean,
all I can think of is I again, And we
talked about it a little bit ago. I thought, if
you have people who are indigen and can't afford a burial,
and we cremate them, you still have to have a
(41:50):
family that comes and collects the the cremains, and if
they don't, there should be a process for showing them
some respect in their final form. And that's not what's
being done here. So I'm thinking, if there is one
person in all of these, in the three hundred and
fourteen remains found so far, if they can find and
identify one, yep, yepes right one.
Speaker 1 (42:13):
I got to tell you, I'm right now as you
and I speak, I'm sitting here and I am reading
Nevada Code section out of their law and just as
a point of reference, and I'll say it very slowly,
so anybody can go back and look at this under
NRS four or five to one dot seven hundred and
this is key day funeral homes and crematories. This is
(42:36):
for Nevada funeral homes and crematories. Must establish a clear
chain of custody. Upon arrival at the facility. The deceased
must be assigned a unique identification number, recorded on all
corresponding paperwork and attached to the body throughout throughout the
(42:57):
cremation process. The number is tip here we go. I
mentioned a few minutes ago on a metal tag or
bracelet that with stands you're ready for this high Temperatures's
that's actually required by law and in a continuance. And
(43:17):
I'm not going to hate people. I hate being read to,
but I just think that it's important a separate section.
This is in a C six four to two point
four three five facility. Now get this again. We're going
back for evidentiary issues here and responsibility. Facilities must maintain
(43:39):
detailed records including the deceased full legal name, date of birth,
date of death, and identifying physical characteristics. If discrepancies arise,
cremation must you ready must be postponed until identity is
conclusively verified. That's kind of plainly set out, and that's
(44:02):
why I go back to that kind of narrow number.
You know, fifty six, got fifty six. Now, let's see
the adjacent states there. I shouldn't have opened my mouth.
But the adjacent states, who has access to or who
has what other states had the quickest access to Nevada.
(44:27):
Could it be another state?
Speaker 2 (44:29):
California, Arizona and New Mexico, Utah and Colorado. They're all around.
Speaker 1 (44:33):
That confluence in that area. But I can't imagine driving
I mean, you know, Salt Lake City. I mean Salt
Lake City, forgive me, Las Vegas is down in the
southern part of the state. That's a long way to
drive if you're coming.
Speaker 2 (44:50):
To me, sixty miles outside south of the south.
Speaker 1 (44:54):
Oh, okay, there you go. So I don't know. I
mean this, I got to tell you. Out of all
the cases we've covered, this is special in the sense
that I think unless there is a very simple explanation
for this, and I can't imagine that the simple explanation
(45:14):
is going to be legal. Okay, are condoned under law.
This is an ultimate nightmare scenario when it comes to
death investigation because you have these unidentified remains that are
just kind of piled up neatly. For whatever that's worth,
(45:38):
I don't know what is this person of a fastidious ghoul.
I have no idea there's specific arrangement order to this thing.
I look at this day from a death investigator, forensics
you know standpoint, and I'm thinking the order of the
thing where they're trying to send a message. I'd love
(45:59):
to see one of these people that do profiling, you know,
dig into this. Can you imagine a profiler takes this
thing and looks at it and says, what can you
tell us about the order, about how these are arranged,
and that they would, you know, deposit these remains out
in the desert, you know like this. I don't know
this is You've got to promise me. You've got to
(46:19):
promise me that we're going to revisit this. I mean,
we've got to because this is a big mystery.
Speaker 2 (46:29):
Find out anything.
Speaker 1 (46:30):
I'll tell you, Yeah, please do, because I got to
tell you, man, out of all the cremation stories we've covered,
the burial stories, and my lord, we have had we
have had some stories recently about funeral homes and how
they are healing handling bodies. This I'm not going to
(46:50):
say it takes the cake, but dude, it's up there,
it's up there, and it is absolutely horrific. My heart
goes out to these families. Here's one more thing and
I'll kind of end on this note. Their families out
there and either you know, in the Nevada area or
(47:14):
any of the surrounding states that have family members where
they have walked into some fancy office somewhere, appointed with
nice furniture, soft music playing in the background. You see
it festooned with flowers. They've got the casket room, they've
(47:38):
got the little vases that you can put your loved
ones in. Somebody out there has walked into one of
these facilities and they have arranged to have their loved
one identified and cremated. And right now there are people
(47:58):
in Nevada, I can guarante to you that are reading
the story. They're watching on the news. They're gonna hear
body bags, and they're gonna be worried. They're gonna be
wringing their hands over this. Is that my mother? Is
that my father? Is that my child that was left abandoned?
(48:21):
And then Nevada desert? More to come on this case.
I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is bodybags.
Quody Dines with Joseph Scott More. One of my all
time favorite scenes in any movie is from The Big Lebowski.
I have to admit I'm a massive fan of the movie.
I didn't get it the first two times I watched it.
I had people that had because I love the Cohen Brothers,
(00:22):
and I have people that encouraged me. You got to
go back and watch it, and every single time I
watched it, it was like I was peeling back a
layer of I don't know, a big reveal if you will,
but contained within that film is the scene toward the
end of the movie where the dude and Walter have
(00:45):
gone out to this beautiful stretch of beach. Obviously in California,
it's a rugged coastline. They're on rocks and they have
their friends' ashes, which by the way, are contained in
a plastic Folgers coffee box, and Walter played by John Goodman,
(01:06):
stands there and does this long resertation about their friend
Donnie and his life, and he decides to scatter Donnie's ashes.
At this moment in time, they've gone out there to
memorialize Donnie, and as Walter does this, the breeze kicks up.
And all of a sudden, these cremaines are deposited on
(01:30):
the dude and his face is white with this ash.
His clothing is white, his favorite bowling shirt, which is
a shirt that he wears throughout much of the film.
And it's something that many people don't think about. You know,
if I have cremains or ashes, what am I going
(01:52):
to do with them? What shall I do with the
remains of a loved one or a friend in their
final repose? Well, Walter made a bad decision, But today
I'm going to talk about something that is far more
(02:15):
horrendous that has occurred recently in Nevada. As a matter
of fact, there is no memorialization. There's essentially a dumping
of hundreds of human cremains. And right now we ain't
got no answers. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is
(02:42):
body bags. How could they not have How could those
characters have not or at least both of them. It's
not just Walter's fault. How could they not have anticipated
an inshore breeze? Wow, because I've been to the beach.
I know you've been there a lot over the course
of your life, and it is beautiful. It is beautiful,
(03:02):
and the fact that those those ashes blow back on
them is no surprise. I think that's one of the
reasons most of the time. I don't know if it's
the only reason. When you deposit cremaines in the ocean,
they ask. And I've been looking at state laws. There's
one place that says you need to go off shore
three nautical miles in order to scatter ashes. Right. It's
(03:26):
a curious thing, isn't it.
Speaker 2 (03:27):
Well, otherwise you got people on the beach laying out
and all of a sudden they're reaching over and kid
comes up with a really neat shell and you're going, no,
that's a tooth, baby, you know, just to share something
with you guys. Look, you know when I found out
what that, we relied to about cremaines because I thought
cremains were like in a movie where they're like a powder,
you know, very powdery looking and kind of a dust
(03:48):
and just kind of waffed into the air.
Speaker 1 (03:50):
That's what it looks like. Huh.
Speaker 2 (03:52):
It was when my mother passed and we had her,
we had her, she was cremated and we had her
service on okra Coke Island, North Carolina. Where she was
raised and it's my favorite place. That's my secret spot, right,
but not anymore. Well, buddy, the thing is is that
you know, we go out there to do this, and
(04:12):
you know, it's like they don't tell you there should
be a warning. And I'm going to give you, guys
that warning. Cremains are not dust. Okay, they can have
teeth and a lot of big parts in it, But
bottom line is always the bottom line, Joe. And in
this particular story, we have a headline that at first
you and I both thought it was like thirty which
is bad enough, but I double checked. Three hundred piles
(04:35):
of cremated cremated human remains discovered near Las Vegas now
near Vegas, about an hour outside of town. But Joe,
they went to all the effort to cremate a person
and then rather than give it to a family member
or do something, they just took them out in the
desert and then they it's almost like you mentioned the beach,
(04:59):
because they're like building sand castles like kids do on
the beach. It's like they got a bucket and that
these are piles of remains, and they're like.
Speaker 1 (05:06):
They look like I got to tell you David, I
urge anybody, any of our friends out there that are
not familiar with the story, I urge you because there
are some images. And David, I got to tell you, brother,
when I saw them, When I saw these, not to
make light, but when I saw it, it looked like.
Speaker 2 (05:24):
It.
Speaker 1 (05:25):
And they're they're almost in rows, and it looked like
fire ant beds. It did it? Did you know? They're
kind of built up, they're mounded up and nothing. I
don't know. My son, Noah is fascinated by the desert.
He loves the desert. He loves going to the desert
in Nevada, he loves He was with in the Air Force.
(05:47):
He actually went, he was in Arizona. He and I actually,
as a result of military service, were in the same
location in Arizona and Yuma, and he was just he's
fascinated by it because it's so us growing up in
South it's a completely foreign world. But I go back
to another movie, Dave Real Quick Casino. Oh yeah, Robert
(06:10):
de Niro and Joe Pesci and that infamous scene where
Joe Pesci has summoned Robert de Niro to meet him
in the desert, and you can hear the voice over
that de Niro says. He says, I hate meetings in
the desert, and it's something like nothing good ever happens
in the desert. And dude, I got to tell you
(06:34):
the person. You know. Here we go again with our
the person we always talk about, the finder. Can you
imagine this individual, because it was a finder that is
like out in the desert and he's seeing these mounds
out there and you're thinking, what in the world is this?
Speaker 2 (06:54):
Yeah, And the thing is, Joe, is that because you
even said they look like they don't look like anything
one would expect from cremaines. But here's the part that
gets me, and I really, I mean, there's so much
about this that's wrong. Okay, But Joe, you explained to
(07:14):
me how difficult it is to render a body down
because we've had a number of cases where somebody decided,
you know, they would dispose of the person they murdered
by chopping them up and putting them on a fire
or what have you. And I didn't know, I really
didn't until we started talking about how difficult it is
and what is required to render a body to that
(07:36):
status of cremaines. So Joe first let's start there. The
fact that they're out there and there's three hundred of
them means a lot of things. These could be unclaimed
bodies that somebody had to get rid of. I don't
know what they do with paupers anymore. You know, we
used to have a place where Potter's Field potters Field. Yeah,
I call it Popper's. I met Potter's Field, but.
Speaker 1 (07:58):
Yeah, no, no, you're right. Some people do say a paupers. Yeah.
I think traditionally it's Potter's and there's been a I
don't know, it sounds like a great a great title
for a podcast.
Speaker 2 (08:11):
Actually sounds like something out of a movie that Jimmy
Stewart would have been in where he.
Speaker 1 (08:16):
Was, or Charles Dickens novel or some of the potters
Field you know, maybe even Stephen King. I don't know,
but yeah, potters Field traditionally. And it's really sad because
working at Corners offices, in m E's offices, I have
been to Pottersfield. I've literally seen bodies laid out in
(08:38):
rows where you collect the bodies over a period of
time and you wait until you can have a big burial.
And a lot of people don't realize that that was done.
I doubt it's done as much anymore. But here's one
here's one thing that they have stopped doing in the
medical legal world. And somebody might prove me wrong on this,
(09:01):
but if I'm not mistaken, I don't think corners and
medical examiners cremate bodies anymore because because the fact that
there's always a chance that a family will show up,
all we got to do, We've talked about it before.
(09:21):
All we got to do is talk about Michael Jordan's daddy.
You know what a train wreck that was for that
poor corner up to Marlboro County, South Carolina, and you
look at that and you think, yikes. You know so
many times I think the fallback position when you're talking
about and it's generally called indigent burial, is the way
(09:44):
it's referred to as, and there will be I've tried
to describe what this is like to many people, but
if you've ever the worst job ever had my life
was working at Pigley Wiggily. I hated that job. I
was a kid and I was the stock guy. I
had to get in early in the morning unload trucks.
(10:06):
But on the back of eighteen wheelers. They've got that
numbered aluminum tag that actually has to be cut open,
and it's there for the protection of the goods inside
of the vehicle, and they're very resilient well with Traditionally,
with indigent remains, you take this band and it's an
(10:30):
identifying band, and you put one around the ankle, and
you put one around the wrist of the body that's
going to go into a body bag. It might go
into like a really cheap casket, but sometimes they'll just
put them. They used to put them directly into the
ground in a bag like that. But you knew that
the bodies would be organized so that if any question
(10:52):
came up with the band, you'd be able to say, okay,
this is case number zero zero zero eighty five nine,
all right, and we can go back. You can pull
back the earth, find that find that I don't know
that vessel that the body is contained, and pull it
out and go back and do further you know, further examination.
(11:16):
You do that with with cremains. What are you going
to tag with cremains? It's like trying to tag talcum
chunky talcum powder. There's nothing you know that you can
really do with it. And this has got to pose
a huge problem, you know, for for whoever is actually
looking into this case, which again is a very very
(11:36):
curious thing.
Speaker 2 (11:37):
The one thing they did determine is that they're they're human. Okay,
that was the first thing they had to decide, because
they haven't mentioned much about the finder, and you've got
me so focused on the finder now, because it's like, okay, well, okay,
why were you fifty nine minutes outside of Las Vegas
in the desert where you stumbled upon three hundred piles
(12:01):
of dirt you thought, and yet you knew it was
something other than that, So you've called it in. What
were you doing out there that we can legitimately buy
into because I'm thinking you were looking for a spot,
you know, you don't just fall into this area. But Joe,
to go to all the effort to create cremains to
(12:22):
render a body down, it takes time, it takes effort,
it takes intentionality. It's not something that accidentally happens by
ignoring a dead body. It doesn't just you know, if
you don't have them stacked up and you just kind
of lock the door and walk away and then you
come back a couple of weeks later and there's a
nice little pile of dust. This is something based on
(12:44):
the way they were found. Yep, this was actually rendered down,
put in the bag, and nobody picked it up or
they had no place to send it. And so the
best plan again. And now I'm thinking, you spent the
time and effort to render the body down into this form,
and you couldn't come up with anything better than this.
You couldn't put it in a You could not put
(13:07):
it in a big ziplock freezer bag and dig a
hole and put it in there and mark it somehow.
I mean, you couldn't even think to do that. You
just left Cremaine sitting out to be caught in the
breeze in the desert to blend in. If that was
your goal, White, you just spread him and kick it over.
If nobody knows and nobody cares. I really have to wonder, Joe,
(13:28):
there are so many other things you could have done
that would have Look man, if I came looking for
Uncle Herman three years after he died and you're the
one that got rid of him, you just I don't
know what happened to him. Nobody claimed him. I don't
know what happens you know that's the only answer. You
didn't come and pick your uncle up, Dave. It's not
my fault, you know. But here we have piles out there.
Speaker 1 (13:47):
Let me throw it. Let me throw one more thing. Yeah,
we're talking about the desert. You know what else is
near Vegas. Let's I guess an hour away. It's Lake Mead. Yeah,
you've got Hoover Dam, you got the Colorado River. Dude.
You know, if I looked at this and I was thinking,
why why would you go to this particular spot and
(14:10):
do this and leave? And this is literally evidence. And
when you talk about these piles, Dave, this is something
and I know, I know what you what you had
mentioned about, you know, the passing of your mama and
when you got to examine those remains and when you
(14:31):
see that. But let's let's face it. What's intriguing about
this to me from a physical evidence standpoint is the
fact is the fact that you've got something going on
here that I'm going to refer to as containment because
you do not get neat piles like this unless you
(14:52):
have this thing in a transportable vessel where you're going
to go with these and set them out. There's another
fact actor here too. Now I mentioned wind. Design ain't
got a lot of water, as we well know, what
it does have is wind. How is it how is
(15:17):
it that these piles have seemingly remained rather uniformed. I
don't know. I think one of the elements here that
I'm really concerned about and really interested in is time.
Time as it applies to were these things all deposited
(15:39):
at the same time? I was trying to think back.
I know that our friends out in the Vegas area,
which by the way, makes me think we're going to
(16:04):
be traveling to Vegas in a few months. Crime Con
is meeting there twenty twenty six, is it already, Tommy Man? Yeah,
so yeah, we'll be heading back out that way. Maybe
you and I can run us a car and go
out to the desert. Yeah I got out of the desert.
But you know, the NERO say is not too or at
least his character so but anyway, yeah, so you ditched me.
Speaker 2 (16:27):
A few minutes ago, I set up the whole thing
because we were doing an episode. I don't remember which
one it was, but it was one of the episodes
where somebody tried to burn a Bavodi and they were
not successful at and so actually you know what it was,
It was our least favorite JJ and Tiley. Oh yeah, yeah,
that was the first time when you actually explained the
(16:49):
process because they tried to burn Yeah, Tyly and Joe
knowing what it goes into it and knowing that to
get cremains like this they did and do this in
a backyard burn pie. So talk to me about what
goes into it, because this is a whole thing. It's
not something it's not something you could do with your
granny three hundred and fifteen times over just saying it
(17:11):
didn't happen like that.
Speaker 1 (17:13):
No, No, here's the thing with cremation. First off, there
is a huge chunk of time that is involved in this.
It's not something see how can I It's not like
(17:33):
you've got a though there is kind of a conveyor
belt process. It's not like you're just kind of pushing
something into an oven and it quickly comes out the
other end. That's not the way this works, all right.
First off, you have to have a crematory that is
(17:56):
up to the task. If we reflect back in tom
and you know, we did an episode on the tri
Tri State crematory debacle I urge anybody here within sound
of my voice to go look that up, not just
my episode, but just look it up, because it's one
of the most ghastly things that's ever happened in the South.
(18:17):
I think as far as the dead are concerned that
crematory that guy had tried to actually hooked up hook
up propane tanks to his crematory to make it operate.
That was despicable. It's disgusting. It's absolutely one of the
most disgusting things. And of course he propane does not
(18:40):
burn as hot, you know, as like natural gas, and
you have to have an ongoing gas supply for crematory.
We're not talking about building fires here. We're not talking
about a funeral pyre. So I bet you just thought
of a door song when I said that, didn't you.
So oh you man. Yeah. So we're not talking about
(19:03):
building a wooden structure to consume a body. We're talking
about a containment system. And it is truly a containment system.
And the fact that you have to meet certain EPA
regulations and you have to be literally trained and certified
in order to do this. There's all kinds of checks
(19:25):
and balances like you can get a visit from the
EPA or the state version of that, and you have
to be up to date. So it's not something that
just like somebody can just go out and do so.
In order to make this happen, A lot of it
has to do with the mass of the body, all right,
(19:45):
And it makes sense, right, So the smaller the body,
the smaller remains, the shorter amount of time it's going
to take to consume it.
Speaker 2 (19:53):
What if you're really fat, I mean, this is the
nicest well possible. I mean, really a fat person, you know,
with a lot of just water weight and flood. I
mean it burns off, it does.
Speaker 1 (20:03):
But you know, there are actually stories out there. I
don't know how many of them are true and how
many are kind of anecdotal, but they have had the
equivalent of grease fires and incrematories where it flames over,
which is it just seems to me that would be
an absolute nightmare. You know, where you have you have bodies.
Speaker 2 (20:25):
The crematorium guy in there doing it is his mother
in law that he's having to take care of, and
he says, see, I told you where it's going.
Speaker 1 (20:32):
You see it's bad, it really is. It's there's so
much and you know, and I've and to give you
an idea, I participated in autopsies of people that were,
let's you say, way way up in the triple digits
and weight. That's about as far as I'll go with it.
And it is those are the toughest cases in the
(20:55):
autopsy room to open because the size of the body,
the size of the body. When you actually make that incision,
you see the full thickness of the fat layer. And
I'm not talking about like SubQ fat. I'm talking about
the full thickness of particularly belly fat. I've seen it.
(21:17):
I've seen probably the thickness up to eight to nine
inches in depth of fat. And it is problematic. But
all of that has to be contained within within this structure,
within the crematory itself, and it has to burn. We're
(21:39):
talking I mentioned three digits with weight, we're talking about
four digits now with temperature. We're talking sustained fourteen hundred degrees.
If you can begin to kind of wrap your brain
around that, and inside inside of the structure sure itself.
(22:00):
Inside of the crematory, there are these little gas jets
that line this thing, and so they're blasting out a
flame and it's a directed flame at the subject that's
contained within it. And this has to keep going. It
has to be monitored, and over a period of time
(22:23):
they will inspect it to see if the rendering has
taken place, because just because the body might be rendered,
it might be rendered down. The task is not over
with because as the body comes out, what is initially
(22:44):
taken off of the belt itself goes into an auger,
and the auger spins looks like a gigantic screw. They
used to use opposing I've seen opposing stones, these round
stones that roll in opposite directions, and it's kind of
like a if you think about like a stone crusher,
(23:05):
but it's primarily augurs and they go around and round
and around it does it kind of looks like a
screw or a drill bit, only it's tapered and the
cremains are essentially crushed in here down to finer you know,
finer elements. You're still not You're still not going to
get rid of any kind of all of the skeletal sample.
(23:29):
It's just it's not going to happen. And teeth are
the worst. So and the other thing that they will do,
they'll go through and if they're like any kind of
medical devices, something that has not been completely rendered down,
those things will actually be removed and taken out, you know,
(23:51):
things like you know, titanium screws and all that kind
of stuff. You know, if people have had surgeries, wires
I've seen I think I've seen pacemakers before. If I'm
not mistaken, I might be. But the leads for the
pacemaker will be burned off, So yeah, it's and then
after that happens, the cremains as they are are then taken,
(24:18):
they're bagged, and then whatever kind of I keep using
this term conveyance, I guess that the family chooses whether
it's some kind of really ornate box or it's a
very simple little thing. They'll be placed in there, and
you know they'll be made available to the family after
a period of time. You know, they can come and
(24:39):
retrieve these and you get plaques put on them, all
these sorts of things. What's really fascinating about this, Dave,
just and I, if you don't mind, just indulge me
for a second and I will I will kind of
tell you this. In America. In America, the US, there
(25:00):
are approximately ten five hundred crematories nationwide in the US. Okay,
in Nevada, there are as you can imagine, fewer than that.
(25:25):
There's fifty six. What have I What have I told
you in the past, Dave, Maybe I've told this to
my students. Haven't mentioned this to you. When we do
an investigation in forensics, I like to use the idea
of a big funnel where we've got all of this
data that we kind of dump into the opening of
(25:45):
the funnel. And if you think about how funnel works,
it narrows as it gets down further and further. So
if these bodies, and this is a big gift, but
if these bodies are originating in Nevada, well, there are
only fifty six license crematories, so our field automatically is
(26:12):
narrowed down because I don't know of any other organization
that is permitted under law to cremate bodies unless we've
got something really really weird and bizarre going on here,
you know, where I don't know somebody has their own
(26:35):
crematory that's operating illegally and they're taking bodies. That's been
one of my biggest big It's not really a fear
that I have, but I've thought about it from an
investigative standpoint, what would be what would be the perfect
thing if you wanted to get rid of bodies? Right,
you know, if you had, first off, you had a
funeral home, you had access to do And we've heard
(26:58):
and maybe this is kind of a fictional device, but
where you can put a false bottom in a in
a casket and then bury a person on top of
put them in a casket, you know, Grandma goes on
top of somebody that they're trying to get rid of
and they bury it sounds like that's not real. I
don't know if it is. Again, anecdotally, it's claimed that
that has occurred before, particularly when you think about you know, uh,
(27:23):
I guess the term used to be mobbed up if
there was some funeral you know, home that was had
some kind of loose attachment to some under underworld figures
or something. You know.
Speaker 2 (27:34):
You never watched the Netflix series Ozark, did you?
Speaker 1 (27:37):
No? I did? I watched part of it, Yeah.
Speaker 2 (27:40):
To the part where they owned the funeral home.
Speaker 1 (27:43):
Uh. Yeah, it's coming back to me. Maybe that's where
I'm remembering this from. It seems like that it seems
like the perfect thing, you know, and yeah, but you'd
have to again, you'd have to have access. Okay, let
me throw this one out to you again, reflecting back
to one of our previous episodes, one of my favorite episodes.
(28:04):
It's the case out of I don't know if you
recall this, It was the case out of Philly where
they had the abandoned graveyard or cemetery that was shut
down because it was too full and the biker gang
was using going into the crypt in there and putting
(28:25):
remains down the ground. Again, great episode, fascinating case. So yeah,
again having access to that location. I'm not saying that
the the you know, that the malevolent people involved in
that case had, you know, had anything to do with
the funeral, but I think that investigatively we're going to
get more answers here, just thinking about kind of how
(28:49):
this is, how this is kind of no pun intended
parsed out investigatively, how do you do it? Because here's
the thing. You know, technically, technically, these cremains don't necessarily
fall and I found this very fascinating, Dave. They don't
(29:10):
fall under the jurisdiction of the medical examiner. At a corner,
this is a state health department issue. At this point
in time. They found something out there, Dave, that gave
them an indication first off that they were cremains, and
secondly that they were human cremains. So that means that
(29:31):
they had to take sample. Because trust me, if you
think it's tough to get an ID on an intact body,
even one that is severely decomposed and he tried nothing
until you've tried to get an ID on cremated human remains.
(30:05):
What to do? What to do in Nevada? A lot
of people spend their time in Nevada, uh, you know,
going down Strip and used to get a really good
meal in Las Vegas. Sheep, You know them days are gone, Bubba.
I used to think, Man, I can't wait to get
(30:25):
out to Nevada and grab grab, grab some lostster.
Speaker 2 (30:28):
While It's so funny how the older you get, Yeah,
things really change when you're younger. The idea of going
to Vegas is one thing. Then you hit a certain
age that's like, yeah, the buffet, come on, hey, I
want to ask it a kind of quick things here,
all right. At the end of World War Two, Patton
actually forced townspeople from Buymar to actually tour Bukenvalalve concentration camp.
(30:53):
And the reason is these because they were exterminating an
entire race and then some by putting them through the fire.
They were burning these bodies down and creating cremains, and
the stacks would blow and on certain days the gardens
would be covered with this white powdery ash. And he
(31:15):
was disgusted by how the townspeople acted like they didn't
know anything. And he's like, there's no way you can
see thousands of people coming in here and not leaving,
and the camp not overgrowing with people, and you know,
you got to put two and two together. So he
marched them through. He made them come through there and
walk through the ovens, and there were partially bodies that
(31:36):
were not totally broken down. Anyway, That's what's going through
my head is we have three hundred plus piles of people.
Each one of these piles of cremains is a person. Now,
if you were just going to dispose of somebody, Joe,
this is not how you would do it. I mean this,
(31:59):
even though there are three hundred bodies placed in you know,
their cremaine form out there in the desert an hour
away from Vegas, south of Vegas, by the way, and
they seem to be from what you and I saw,
they were actually put there in some kind of an order.
Whoever did it took care with what they were doing.
(32:20):
But I can't get past you know, I'm having a
little trouble with the why would you go to all
that trouble if all you're going to do is put
these people's cremaines out there in the desert to be
blown away, to just go to the you know that
makes you know, a dust to dust, ashes to ashes,
dust to dust. I get it, But it doesn't seem
like you're being the most respectful in this regard by
(32:43):
allowing the wind to just blow. But we know they've
identified the remains as human, which I didn't know you could.
I really didn't. I mean, can you And this is
kind of the deal breaker here? Could you if you
can identify them as human, could you you get a
DNA sample, partial tooth or something? Yeah?
Speaker 1 (33:04):
Good, good, good question, my friend. Well, obviously I think
that the now, look, this goes back to something quite interesting.
I don't know if I've ever talked about this on
body bags. Do you know that there are three three
types of identification or let me see three levels of
identication identification and we can kind of write this down.
(33:26):
Maybe we can do an entire episode on how does
the medical examiner of your bodies identified? But just as
kind of like a little tease right here, we have
positive identification, okay, where we have verified scientifically and unfortunately
(33:46):
visually many times, which I'm not a big fan of
visual identification. First off, I don't trust government IDs as
far as I can throw them. I preach this to
my kids at Jack State all the time. You know,
it's a great place to start art. But if you
pull a license out of somebody's pocket and you try
to compare it, there's some horrific stories out there about misidentification.
(34:08):
That's really what we all do an episode on. It's
quite chilling, but positive identification. And then we have unidentified
bodies okay, some that to this point have failed to
have been identified. They're not going to be identified well
unless our friends at author them do it. And then
(34:30):
here's the one that really gets people. There is an
ide that is called presumptive identification, and it's something that
people are not necessarily familiar with. Years ago, I had
a lady that was locked up in a house. I
actually wrote about this in Blood Beneath My Feet in
(34:53):
case really affected me. And she had no living relatives.
She was she worked as a bus driver in Atlanta,
and we presumptively identified her body and she had been
now holding your hat. This this is really disgusting. Uh.
(35:14):
She lived in the house with her dogs, m m yeah,
and they consumed her down to her waist. There was
nothing left. And the case really affected me as an investigator.
It's one of those things that you don't ever get past.
We even had difficulty, uh uh, just trying to find
(35:40):
a dentist that she may have gone to. It turns
out she didn't have a dentist. Uh. And so because
she was in a locked house, her keys were there,
her money was there, no signs of fourth century, and
her car was still there and she hadn't shown up
for work in weeks. I'll give you a hint, there's
no future instigators in the postal service because she had
(36:03):
piles and piles of mail stacked up outside of her house.
As a matter of fact, so many piles of mail
that several of them had actually fallen off of the
porch into the gutter adjacent. But they just kept stacking
up the mail and she'd been in there for months
and months and it was problematic for us, and I
(36:24):
hated doing that. But we presumptively identified her, and what
that means is that we don't really have anything substantive
to go with. We looked at her body, what remained
of her body, and I could say, yes, this was
an African American female because we had soft tissue. We
knew that African American female resided at this address, she
(36:46):
was domiciled there. We knew that she was human. But
what are you going to go with with these cremains? Well,
my thought is I wonder if they have taken the
time to go to eat. And because each one of
these piles presumptively represents an individual person and you know
(37:07):
here on body bags we are advocates for the debt. Okay,
so each person is entitled to their ID and to
be honored. Okay, how did they have they gotten each pile?
First off, presumptively ID? Do we know that that is
in fact human? What was contained in each pile? Do
(37:29):
we have major bits of bone that were contained in
there that from a morphology standpoint, you can have a
forensic anthropologist look at each little fragment say yes, definitively
this is a bone. Okay, this is human bone. And
then was there any dentician left in any of these
(37:52):
piles you had mentioned a you had mentioned maybe a
partial tooth. What were their intact teeth at all? And
if they were intact, could those teeth have withstood the
fourteen hundred degree its variable, it's not always going to
(38:13):
be four Could those teeth have survived or the DNA
contained in there survived because that's the only place you're
going to get DYNA. I would think I might be
off base there, but I think that that's going to
be your number one shot. Do you think that it's
possible that they went in and did DNA extraction on teeth,
(38:36):
any kind of dentition that was left behind it, and
they were able to actually profile that case and create
create a profile on the person. I don't know. I
don't know if that's if that's possible because it's a
real head scratcher. Another piece to this dave that on
(38:57):
its surface is I guess kind of heartwarming but not really,
is that the state and medical examiner or they don't
have medical examiners in Nevada, forgive me. They have corners
and by the way, Clark County Corner is one of
the finest in the country. I mean, they're really good.
As a matter of fact, a lot of the stuff
(39:18):
that on that program CSI. You know, the corners spoken
about a lot, the one that takes place I've never
watched those programs, but the one that takes place in Vegas.
They're highly regarded. And not because the television show is
because they're damn professional. They're really good. This was not
(39:40):
the Corner's office going to collect these remains. This is actually,
and they're stated, they're mentioned in the article. They're actually
this mortuary service goes out and retrieves these remains. So
how does all of this work? I think is the
big question, because look, God bless people in the funeral industry,
(40:01):
But I got to tell you, I'm not looking to
the funeral industry to do the job of forensic scientists
because to this point, they have not validated. They've not
validated as to whether or not there's something nefarious going
on with each one of these little piles out there.
How do you run all of this down. I've got
(40:23):
to imagine that Davada somewhere because they haven't released a
lot of info yet, and maybe they will. They haven't
released a lot of info yet, but there's got to
be people, Dave, I would think that are scratching their
heads out there saying, oh my lord, this was What
do people say nowadays? This was not on my Bengo card?
You know? How do we move forward with this?
Speaker 2 (40:45):
The thing about this that gets me is that if
this was a crematorium trying to get away with saving
money and giving families dirt instead, we wouldn't have cremains
in a pile in the desert if it was somebody.
Because what they've done here, they've done all the expensive,
hard part of the job, right. That part is what
(41:06):
has already been done. So we're not looking at a
criminal act in that regard that they were trying to
dodge going through like you know, you mentioned the guy
using the propane tanks to try to accomplish, you know,
doing a cremation that you know, ridiculous, but this was done.
Three hundred plus bodies have been cremated completely and here's
their pile. So the hard, expensive part of that job
(41:29):
is done. The next part is, here's your cremains, send
me the check, you know, or whatever takes place. And
so immediately I'm thinking this is something even worse. I mean,
all I can think of is I again, And we
talked about it a little bit ago. I thought, if
you have people who are indigen and can't afford a burial,
and we cremate them, you still have to have a
(41:50):
family that comes and collects the the cremains, and if
they don't, there should be a process for showing them
some respect in their final form. And that's not what's
being done here. So I'm thinking, if there is one
person in all of these, in the three hundred and
fourteen remains found so far, if they can find and
identify one, yep, yepes right one.
Speaker 1 (42:13):
I got to tell you, I'm right now as you
and I speak, I'm sitting here and I am reading
Nevada Code section out of their law and just as
a point of reference, and I'll say it very slowly,
so anybody can go back and look at this under
NRS four or five to one dot seven hundred and
this is key day funeral homes and crematories. This is
(42:36):
for Nevada funeral homes and crematories. Must establish a clear
chain of custody. Upon arrival at the facility. The deceased
must be assigned a unique identification number, recorded on all
corresponding paperwork and attached to the body throughout throughout the
(42:57):
cremation process. The number is tip here we go. I
mentioned a few minutes ago on a metal tag or
bracelet that with stands you're ready for this high Temperatures's
that's actually required by law and in a continuance. And
(43:17):
I'm not going to hate people. I hate being read to,
but I just think that it's important a separate section.
This is in a C six four to two point
four three five facility. Now get this again. We're going
back for evidentiary issues here and responsibility. Facilities must maintain
(43:39):
detailed records including the deceased full legal name, date of birth,
date of death, and identifying physical characteristics. If discrepancies arise,
cremation must you ready must be postponed until identity is
conclusively verified. That's kind of plainly set out, and that's
(44:02):
why I go back to that kind of narrow number.
You know, fifty six, got fifty six. Now, let's see
the adjacent states there. I shouldn't have opened my mouth.
But the adjacent states, who has access to or who
has what other states had the quickest access to Nevada.
(44:27):
Could it be another state?
Speaker 2 (44:29):
California, Arizona and New Mexico, Utah and Colorado. They're all around.
Speaker 1 (44:33):
That confluence in that area. But I can't imagine driving
I mean, you know, Salt Lake City. I mean Salt
Lake City, forgive me, Las Vegas is down in the
southern part of the state. That's a long way to
drive if you're coming.
Speaker 2 (44:50):
To me, sixty miles outside south of the south.
Speaker 1 (44:54):
Oh, okay, there you go. So I don't know. I
mean this, I got to tell you. Out of all
the cases we've covered, this is special in the sense
that I think unless there is a very simple explanation
for this, and I can't imagine that the simple explanation
(45:14):
is going to be legal. Okay, are condoned under law.
This is an ultimate nightmare scenario when it comes to
death investigation because you have these unidentified remains that are
just kind of piled up neatly. For whatever that's worth,
(45:38):
I don't know what is this person of a fastidious ghoul.
I have no idea there's specific arrangement order to this thing.
I look at this day from a death investigator, forensics
you know standpoint, and I'm thinking the order of the
thing where they're trying to send a message. I'd love
(45:59):
to see one of these people that do profiling, you know,
dig into this. Can you imagine a profiler takes this
thing and looks at it and says, what can you
tell us about the order, about how these are arranged,
and that they would, you know, deposit these remains out
in the desert, you know like this. I don't know
this is You've got to promise me. You've got to
(46:19):
promise me that we're going to revisit this. I mean,
we've got to because this is a big mystery.
Speaker 2 (46:29):
Find out anything.
Speaker 1 (46:30):
I'll tell you, Yeah, please do, because I got to
tell you, man, out of all the cremation stories we've covered,
the burial stories, and my lord, we have had we
have had some stories recently about funeral homes and how
they are healing handling bodies. This I'm not going to
(46:50):
say it takes the cake, but dude, it's up there,
it's up there, and it is absolutely horrific. My heart
goes out to these families. Here's one more thing and
I'll kind of end on this note. Their families out
there and either you know, in the Nevada area or
(47:14):
any of the surrounding states that have family members where
they have walked into some fancy office somewhere, appointed with
nice furniture, soft music playing in the background. You see
it festooned with flowers. They've got the casket room, they've
(47:38):
got the little vases that you can put your loved
ones in. Somebody out there has walked into one of
these facilities and they have arranged to have their loved
one identified and cremated. And right now there are people
(47:58):
in Nevada, I can guarante to you that are reading
the story. They're watching on the news. They're gonna hear
body bags, and they're gonna be worried. They're gonna be
wringing their hands over this. Is that my mother? Is
that my father? Is that my child that was left abandoned?
(48:21):
And then Nevada desert? More to come on this case.
I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is bodybags.
Host
Joseph Scott Morgan
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