August 21, 2025 • 42 mins
Martha Nolan O'Slattarra is a business woman on the rise in the fashion world who turns up dead on a yacht in one of the richest places in the USA, Montauk in the Hamptons, New York. Joseph Scott Morgan and Dave Mack discuss the case and what is known as of this taping but with an update coming when final toxicology results are available.
Transcribe Highlights
00:00.00 Introduction
01:17.03 The song is Ripple by the Dead
04:03.73 Woman found dead on yacht
09:08.94 Finder on dock nude
14:49.84 Without obvious injury, what do you look at first?
20:43.73 Finder invested in Martha Nolan
25:34.83 The only source for info is naked guy
30:00.31 People don't snort drugs from a seat
35:11.76 Chris Durnan bit firefighter
40:24.01 Multiple agencies working the case
42:01.53 Conclusion
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Body Bus with Joseph Scott more. If my words did
glow with the gold of sunshine, and my tunes were
played on the harp unstrung, would you hear my voice
come through the music? Would you hold it near as
(00:23):
it were your own, Reach out your hand. If your
cup be empty, if your cup is full, it be again.
Let it be known there is a fountain that was
not made by the hands of men. That lyric was
(00:46):
written by Jerry Garcia in nineteen seventy and it dropped
on the nineteen seventy album by the Grateful Dead. The
name of that song is Ripple, and it is alluding
to the idea of tossing a pebble into a steady
(01:09):
body of water and creating a ripple that extends out.
It's literally my favorite Dead song. Well, today we're going
to discuss a case that has something to do with Ripple.
It's actually the name of a vessel, the name of
(01:30):
a vessel where a beautiful young woman has been found
deceased and seemingly there are no answers. Coming to you
from the beautiful campus of Jacksonville State University. I'm Joseph
Scott Morgan and this is Body bags, brother, Dave, I'm
(01:59):
going to make a inflammatory statement here. Oh thank you.
I was hoping you'd say they don't make them like
they used to. And I'm referring to music.
Speaker 2 (02:12):
You know.
Speaker 1 (02:12):
One of the reasons I like the Dead, one of
the reasons I like the Dead is this. They are not.
They never have been a corporate band. I've always liked
that about them. Say what you will, say what you
will about them, you know, you know, you can have
(02:32):
your own opinion about them. But the idea that they
wrote a lot of their own stuff. They grinded it
out only on the road for years and years and years.
And I'm putting aside all of the hippie politics stuff
and all that. I'm just talking about as craftsmen, as artists.
It's really amazing. The band is huge, if you know,
(02:53):
in the dimensions of the band and what they encompass,
and they're as musicians and technicians and oh my lord, writers,
it's amazing when you begin to kind of open up
their songbook and you get into some of the songs
and understand them, and it's it's amazing, particularly at the
stage of my life. You know, forgive my digression, and
(03:15):
I don't really think it's a digression. It's well, it's
my show, so I'll talk about what I want to
talk about. But I do love Ripple. And I got
to tell you, Dave, I came to this case out
of montac last week, and the reason I came to it,
I knew nothing about it, and I think I called you. Yeah,
(03:38):
I think I let you know. I was called by
Fox and Friends, right, they reached out to me, and
I was like, yeah, let me study this. I got
to look at it. I was like, Wow, this is
really bizarre. You see. I really thought, I really thought
from the beginning with this case that this was going
to be something kind of passive. You're going to have
this young woman might be drugs involved or say that
(04:00):
there's no visible signs of trauma, and she's found deceased
on the boat, and you know, for me, I was thinking, yeah,
you know, I kind of know, you know, it's kind
of sallacious because it's on a yacht, and it's in
the it's summertime, you know, it's up there in the Hamptons,
(04:21):
and all of a sudden, you've got the local police
department from Montalk, you got the county sheriff. You've got
the state police, and there's like a couple of other
agencies that are involved in this sing And all of
a sudden, the scene is more than merely a young
(04:43):
irishwoman who has been in America a few years designing clothes.
It's more than merely her passing away on a yacht.
There's more here, Dave. They're not going to throw this
kind of resources at a case like this and not
have some suspicions about some other things.
Speaker 3 (05:02):
Well, you've got the hint of not the hint. You've
got money, You've got people in positions of power and authority,
and a guy with two yachts who is an insurance executive.
You know, you've got a lot going on up there.
When we first saw it, we're talking about Martha Nolan Oslaterer. Now,
Martha Nolan is the by the way, before we get
(05:25):
into the idea that she's a designer, Martha Nolan is
a businesswoman and an entrepreneur. Martha Nolan Oslater is from
Ireland and from a very small town in Ireland, about
fifty miles outside of Dublin. I am geographically when it
challenged when it comes to any place other than the
United States. But pull out of Maffie you'll see what
I'm talking about. But anyway, she is an entrepreneur and
(05:49):
a marketing genius. When I say marketing genius. At the
age of thirty three, she has learned how to sell
herself first and a lifestyle first, and then she came
out with beachware. She actually has these pop up stores,
which you know what a pop up store is, Joe.
(06:11):
It's almost like a food trucks. You grab a couple
of umbrellas, you grab a couple of bamboo partitions. You
find a sidewalk area that will allow you to set
up and you hang us some of your beachware out there.
You have a cash register that takes credit which you
can do on your phone, and that is it.
Speaker 2 (06:30):
That's a pop up store. And that's what she did.
Speaker 3 (06:33):
She set up a pop up store for a weekend
in the Hampton's out on Montalk and that's where she
sold her beachware and she's developed her product line. I'm
not knocking it. I'm actually loving it. The beauty is
that she went to college for business and marketing. She
came to New York seven years ago because she was
(06:56):
going to be business and marketing. The fact that we
know mar Martha Nolan for the bikinis and things that
she's designed is secondary to she's a consultant for online marketing,
for using TikTok, Facebook, social media to market your wares
what she basically did. She's a consultant for these companies.
(07:17):
It's working for them. She goes, well, I can design this.
I'll put out a bikini.
Speaker 2 (07:20):
Here you go.
Speaker 3 (07:21):
Really and truly, Joe, the shape of the bikini hasn't
changed since it came out in the forties because it's
a part that covers this and a part that covers those,
and that's it. So where you put the bangals, I mean,
it doesn't take a design genius, ah, but a marketing
genius who knows how to use TikTok, which is exactly
(07:42):
what Martha Nolan Oslattera did. That's how at the age
of thirty three, there's pictures all over that show her
on a jets of in Champagne with her partners. I
am not about to begrudge anybody for how they market
themselves in this day and age, because she's been incredibly
successful at it. But now she's dead at thirty three,
(08:06):
and she's found on a yacht. But it's not just
a yacht, Joe, he already named it, the.
Speaker 2 (08:13):
Yachts called the Ripple.
Speaker 3 (08:15):
Yeah, and it's in montac at a yacht dock where
this really rich guy is seen at midnight running naked
on the docks, screaming helped my girlfriend.
Speaker 2 (08:31):
At Joe, A sixty.
Speaker 3 (08:33):
Year old man running naked is never a flattering sight,
I dare say, at sixty years old, most of us
find extra clothes to wear, even when whether they were
our wife of thirty years in a darkened room, you know.
Speaker 1 (08:45):
So, yeah, you're right.
Speaker 2 (08:46):
And this guy, yeah, pictures.
Speaker 1 (08:48):
Of him, Yeah, I know he's you know in look.
Speaker 2 (08:51):
I think they shaved his.
Speaker 1 (08:53):
Farbia from me that I cast a spursions on a fellow,
a fellow that's walk around nicked, because I got to
tell you, it wouldn't be wouldn't be pleasant. I might,
I might burn the retinas of those around me. But
I got to tell you. The idea is that he's known,
this fellow is known to walk around the dock area.
(09:15):
And let me tell how exclusive this dock area is.
The dock area houses other yachts, okay, in a very
exclusive area arguably one of the most exclusive areas on
all of Long Island. There's only two hundred slips here,
and we're talking about an island adjacent to the Atlantic Ocean,
(09:36):
where from that location you can you know, weigh anchor
and head out. You can go north and go south,
you can go east. And with these these vessels that
they have housed here, these are ocean going vessels, you know. Now,
I'm I don't know if you'd want to try to,
you know, go all the way to Spain in some
(09:59):
kind of vessel this, But if you're trying to meander
down the coast, try to make the keys that sort
of thing, I think that that's pretty much easy for
a lot of people that are highly skilled, or go
up to Maine, go up to the Saint Laura's seaway
from this location, you can launch out. The question is
why why is this young woman from what we understand
(10:23):
at this point, with no medical conditions, seems healthy, is
all over social media. Why is she dead in this
exclusive area and a nude, sixty year old man is
running about throwing items at people to try to get
their attention to help him because he's the one that
(10:47):
discover so they you know, standard standard operating procedure SOP.
(11:07):
We have been told by the authorities, and this is
so boilerplate that you could probably read my mind right now.
We've been told by the authorities there's no signs of
trauma and that her death is pending toxicology. So, you know,
we don't have a lot to go on, but I
think there's more than we might think. First off, one
(11:32):
of the interesting things, and I'll hammered this home until
they decide that I don't need to show anymore. Negative
findings are always great in investigations because it pushes you
down another road that you might not be considering. So
I'm sure that and I don't misunderstand me. I'm not
(11:54):
trying to be more bid or disrespectful here. I'm sure
that investigators were the scene. They're hoping that the medical
examiner is going to find some trauma, that they're going
to find something that will answer the big question is
what is it that brought about this healthy young woman's death,
and they come up with with nothing bupkus. At this
(12:17):
point in time, they don't have anything to hang their
the proverbial hat on, and of course they're left wanting
here you know, we're pending toxicology. Now, just because you're
pending toxicology, that does not mean does not mean that
the individual has drugs on board. Okay, because toxicology is
(12:41):
part of every autopsy, all right, it's even part of
autopsies where you've got decomposed bodies. We still find a
way to do to do toxicology. But in this case,
it's standard operating procedure day for this to happen, So
you can't. Really There have been people in the news
(13:01):
and I got a great story to tell you about
this as something that happened relative to Fox with Me.
In this particular case, you got certain people in the
news out there that have thrown out this side the
idea that this is potentially drug related. Well, where's proof?
Speaker 2 (13:19):
What is it?
Speaker 1 (13:19):
You know? Where do we go from here? You know,
because people are thinking that it's strug related. I don't know.
Maybe it is, but right now you don't have anything.
And what I do know is that they're saying no trauma.
If a medical examiner makes that statement, makes that statement,
follow what I'm saying here. If they make that statement,
(13:41):
and that's very definitive, and they have to come back
and say, oh wait, hang on, after further consideration, we
did in fact find trauma. Well, it makes you look
like an idiot and it erodes trust in your abilities,
because what they're talking about when you examine, when you
examine a body from head to toe and you're doing
(14:02):
X rays along with it, you're looking for any kind
of sign that might be there. You know, if you
don't have bullet defects in a body, if you don't
have stab ons, if you don't have obvious work of
some kind of blunt force instrument, where else are you
going to look? What else are you going to be presenting? Well,
(14:24):
you open the body, and I can tell you the
first place they went with the body, Dave is going
to be the neck dollars to donuts. I know that
that's what they did. And they're looking those strap muscles,
and they're going to take out the hyoid bone. How
many times we talked about the hyoid and they're going
to see if everything in there is intact. They're going
to look at the eyes there's no petiki, you know,
(14:46):
and there's other things that they might not be saying.
At this point in time. I want to know the
status of her lungs. I want to know if she
is in some kind of congestive failure. I want to
know if her lungs were like really heavy, because if
that's kind of one of the kind of peripheral findings
(15:07):
that you get many times with ODS. You'll have individuals
whose lungs have become congested and heavy, they're struggling to breathe,
and it'll be outside the normal ranges of weight. But
you can't say just because you've got heavy lungs that
the individual has died of a drug ody. You have
(15:28):
to measure everything else relative to that and wait for
the talks to come in. And then you're going to
do histological examinations, which is the microscopic examinations on the
bits of tissue that you're taken as well, and that's
going to be and it takes a while for even
those to be prepped so they can do well. It
can certainly give you an indication of any any kind
(15:53):
of of changes that might be responses to drugs like
that might be present in the lungs and the heart
is the heart dilated, you know, there's all these little
nuances that they look for microscopically that you can't see
with the unaided eye. Also, if you've got, for instance,
if you've got somebody that's you know, dealing with chronic
(16:17):
drug abuse, for instance, there's certain features that we look
for in the heart where you can actually say, yeah,
this is ongoing. It's kind of like, you know, somebody
that is abusing alcohol for years and years, you can
look and see that there are changes. First off, with alcoholism,
for instance, you can see the liver livers generally going
to be larger than normal. If cirrhosis is set in,
(16:39):
it's going to be real nodular and kind of lumpy.
It's really bizarre. It looks sometimes I've seen them look
like pieces of concrete and people's abdomen and you still
have to slice those and put them on a slide
to take a look at them. And so this is
what they're in the process of doing right now, and
you know, trying to understand this now externally. One of
(17:00):
the things that I was really curious about with her
day was there any any sign on her body of
evidence of drug abuse? Okay, And generally, you know, in
those cases, we're going to look for things like n
(17:23):
p w's needle puncture wounds, and try to examine those
and see if there's evidence that you know, maybe she's
been shooting up, if if she's smoking, for instance, smoking drugs.
If someone is smoking drugs, not her, you know, many
times depend upon the type of element that they're using
(17:43):
to to inhale. You'll have burned lips. This happens all
the time with crack abusers. They'll have these kind of charred,
burned lips you know where they're they're smoking smoking. Yeah,
very white, chalky white.
Speaker 2 (17:59):
Hey, Joe, let me ask you this.
Speaker 3 (18:00):
As you head to a scene like this, you've already
been told we have we have a body, yep, Because
are you going to go to the boater or is
she going to be transported?
Speaker 2 (18:13):
In this case, do you.
Speaker 1 (18:13):
Know, well, she was transported and they ran a code
on her, they found her and we done. This is
another piece right now that we don't know. Now. I
think we have this proclamation from the nude guy running
down the game plank. They're not the gangplank, but you
(18:34):
know the area that's surrounded the boat slip the dock
up and down it and you know he's screaming for
help and this sort of thing. When and this is
a horrible thing to think about, you know, because what
we understand, she's fully clothed right now. Factor that into
your investigation. She's fully clothed and he's nude, and and.
Speaker 2 (18:54):
His name is Christopher Dernan, and he is a multi millionaire.
Speaker 1 (18:57):
Yeah, and you know you it begs the question. And
it's not accusatory, no, it's just it's begging. It's begging
the question, why are you nicked? You know? And why
are you with this beautiful young woman who, by the way,
even though he's saying it's his girlfriend, she ain't his girlfriend.
She's actively involved in a relationship. And this individual was
(19:22):
away for the evening or something like this.
Speaker 2 (19:24):
This is account her actual boyfriend.
Speaker 3 (19:26):
Yeah, his name is Nicholas Darubio, and they were in
a very serious monogamous relationship. And she actually had sent
him a message that she was going to catch an
uber and would be back at the house round one
before one. And so that's really important to note here
because at the time all of this takes place, it's
(19:51):
after she sends this message to her boyfriend, Christopher Dernan,
the sixty year old man who operates the Durning Group,
which is a workman's comp insurance company. He had spent
two hundred thousand dollars investing in Martha Nolan O Sladerer's business. Now,
two hundred thousand dollars for a guy who's worth one
(20:13):
hundred million or whatever, that's not a lot of money.
It's an investment, and it means a lot to somebody
in a startup, but not nearly that much to somebody
who's got a lot. But they did have a business
connection there. But again, now you're back to I am
a grown man, I'm his age, and if I saw
(20:35):
I would not be around my girl, my daughter's age naked,
when she's fully clothed running around a dog at midnight,
it makes no sense. And that's why I asked if okay,
so you get her body. She's already been taken to
the hospital, she's been undressed. You're going to see a
nude body. You're not going to see her in the
setting where she was found. You're not going to see
(20:55):
that in his pristine state. You're going to see it
after the fact. If you even go, would you go to.
Speaker 1 (20:59):
The yes, Yeah, I'd go to the Yeah, because I
want to talk. Well, first off, I want to talk
to the clinicians that are there and I'm going to interview,
and this is standard fare in the medical examiner world.
You you track down the guys that were riding the truck,
the EMTs that brought her in, that rolled her in,
(21:21):
whether they're you know, because some depend upon the jurisdiction.
Some some jurisdictions will keep paramedics which are part of
the fire service at the station as well, and they'll
roll from there. And then you can have private ambulance
services or you can have county ambulance services not necessarily
part of the fire So it gets very, very complicated.
(21:41):
But they will have a what's called a run number
that will be specifically assigned to this event. Now that's
different than a police case number, all right, So you've
got all these numbers. As an investigator, you have to
keep track of and you have to document these interviews.
So EMTs are great, and let me tell you why
they are as far as source information for people like me,
(22:03):
because they're the first medical professionals that are putting eyes
on a subject that has been found down. They can
tell me everything from was there some kind of pulse,
was there an agonal or faint respiration that she was experiencing.
Was she cool or warm to the touch? That's going
(22:25):
to be significant here. Did you have to wipe vomit
off of her mouth? Did you try to look in
her did you try to start an airway? Was it
occluded by vomit? Which you get lots of times in
events You can have it well. First all, you know,
people throw up that are that have ode issues. That happens,
but you can also have these events where people are
(22:47):
having heart heart problems. Vomiting happens many times. A matter
of fact, many people present that are having an mi I.
They'll present with severe nausea and gastro intestinal discomfort and
that sort of thing. A matter of fact, many people
feel the need to go to the bathroom, So you'll
have all these kinds of physical presentations. What was their
status when you got there? And kind of peripherally, I
(23:12):
would probably ask them, Hey, this guy that was out
here that was flagging people down, did you talk to
him directly?
Speaker 2 (23:22):
Oh?
Speaker 1 (23:22):
Yeah, yeah, he was in and out or no, he
was gone. I want to know what their first blush was.
And that's why EMTs are so key to any kind
of investigation. The medical examiner is working then on top
of that, you want to ask them what life saving
measures did you take? And what that means is, remember
(23:42):
I went back and back a few seconds ago, and
I talked about getting a tube in. It's called intubation. Intubation,
you're trying to get a tube into the airway in
order to assist with breathing. If you've ever seen those
big plastic bags that people and squeeze, it is called
amboo bags, and you're forcing the air, you know, into
(24:04):
the mouth and into the lungs. Rather, you want to
know was the airway clear? Did you see any signs
when you looked at her? Did you see any signs
of trump? Was there anything you removed from her body
at the scene, Like did she have anything even loosely
around her neck? Did she have anything? Was she holding anything?
(24:28):
Because you have to understand, EMTs are not forensic scientists.
Their worldview is completely different than ours. Their sole goal,
and thank god for EMTs and firefighters, is to save lives,
all right. So their interest is not evidentiary, all right.
And so if she had something in her hand, perhaps
(24:50):
maybe they brushed it aside, put it aside, maybe they
forgot about it, or if it's there, maybe they collected it.
They'll do that sometimes and bring it in because let's
just say you have a hypodermic needle and they're still
residue inside of it. They might say, hey, this is
sitting here. Might want to pick this up and take
it in, let the doc see it. Or some of
(25:10):
them will say no, no, no, we're going to leave
it here because this looks like something that might be
drug related. They're also going to look and they're going
to be asking questions does she have any medical conditions?
Now the only source of information that they have is
a guy running around naked up and down the boat slips,
which I don't know, maybe is a great source of information,
(25:32):
but I got to tell you, you're starting off kind
of behind the curve at this point. If you're going
to come and speak to me and you're standing there
stark naked, you know, and you know, and that's the
way this whole thing kind of kicks off. That's how
the attention was brought to this day.
Speaker 3 (25:49):
All right, So you get you get the scene after
the fact. She's dead. There's no sign that she was
in a fight, no sign that she was choked, no
sign that she was not no sign that she was shot.
Nothing's glaring, and all you're left with and is everything toxicology.
(26:10):
And that's where the world has gone crazy on this story, Joe.
We have been a part of a couple of different
programs now talking about this case and the one thing
that has been mentioned, And I wonder how many times
people insert themselves into a story. I'm not knocking District
Attorney Ray Tierney, Suffolk County, DA. He has been on
(26:33):
TV a lot in the last several years because of
what's gone up there with.
Speaker 2 (26:40):
Humorman.
Speaker 3 (26:41):
Yeah, with who you know, because we had Humorman, then
we and and now we've got other things going on
up there, and now he's inserted himself into this story.
And that bothers me because I'm like, why, And when
you split you when you pull back the headlines, Joe,
a thirty three year old woman is dead who shouldn't
(27:03):
be in our eyes. She looks healthy to us, but
we don't know if she has some kind of a
heart condition. She could have no congestive heart failure and
looks healthy. We don't know if she had COVID. We
don't know. We just know that a sixty year old
rich guy was running around the Ducks naked saying my
(27:23):
girlfriend has passed out. Somebody help, which is suspicious in
every way when we find out who he is and
then we find out who the victim is. I guess
I'm just kind of at a I'm waffling between the
(27:44):
person who looks at the individual who's dead and all
the people who are trying to glom onto it to
gain some kind of insight into celebrity.
Speaker 1 (27:52):
Well, I got to tell you, you know, from Jump Street,
this is a big thing. I'm glad you brought this
up because you know, people going and on and bang
on about the Brits with tabloids, all right, and without
mentioning any names. Okay, New York has got their share
of tabloids, and if there is some type of salacious
(28:14):
news that's out there, they're going to pick up on
it and they're going to run with that headline. Sometimes
it's very misleading. But I got to tell you, aside
from all the slinging of ink that goes on in
stories like this, we're still searching for truth here. Where
do we go? Well, I can tell you where I
(28:35):
choose to go. I'm going to go with the science.
Over the course of my career as an investigator, I
worked a lot of drug related cases, and they weren't
(28:59):
necessarily all of ds. I had a lot of homicides
that were related to drugs. I count those as drugg
related as well. And I've seen all manner of things, uh,
you know, relative to evidence that is left behind as
a result of being involved in this world. And I
think one of the things that's that's pretty consistent throughout
(29:23):
these these cases that I work, particularly as it comes
to things like coke. When you go out to a
scene and now I'm thinking back to like the mid
eighties where you know, crack first appeared and cocaine had
been around for years. People thought that it was not harmful.
You know, it was a party drug, and you go
(29:45):
out to these these homes and you'd find fund find
lines of cocaine out there. The one key to h
to coke is that if it is going to be snorted,
you have to place it out on what's referred to
as a smooth, non poor surface, all right, because this
stuff is granular. That's why people would Dave. You mentioned
(30:10):
this and I'd forgotten about this element you'd mentioned. There
are people that would take family pictures, lay them on
a table and cut their coke up on their family pictures,
and they would snort it up off of an image
of Grandma or whatever, because.
Speaker 2 (30:29):
You could see where it was on the picture.
Speaker 3 (30:31):
You could see it on the glass, and you could
use your blade or your credit card or whatever.
Speaker 2 (30:35):
Not that I ever know.
Speaker 3 (30:36):
I learned about this by hearing lectures about people using drugs.
Though it's a third or fourth hand knowledge of me,
but that's what they told me they did. Of course,
if you really want to know the history of drug abuse,
go back to the nineteen sixteen movie The Mystery of
the Leaping Fish. It's a silent movie with Douglas Fairbanks
where he played a character named Coke.
Speaker 2 (30:57):
Any day cocaine has not It's nothing new.
Speaker 3 (31:01):
It's been used as a powdery substance people snort to
get high for as long as people have learned what
cocaine would do. And the one thing that I have
learned in my lifetime is you don't put it on
a cushion, you know, And when on the picture saying
this powdery substances, you don't put any any drug use
snort does not go on a cushion.
Speaker 2 (31:21):
That's ridiculous, Joe.
Speaker 1 (31:22):
Yeah, And before I went on the Fox program last week,
I kind of got waved down before that because sources
had come to multiple media outlets that dig this and
they were moving forward this as gospel truth shows how
you need to vet everything, trust no one, and they
(31:47):
were actually and there had been media outlets that had
reported this, that there was drug residue found on the
seat cushions in the salon, which is the salon on
a yacht is like as kind of like a living room,
and you've got these, you know, these fabulous seats that
are built into the to the walls and that sort
of thing, and they were calling this drug residue. Now
(32:11):
I don't know what Einstein came up with that, but
the police came back and stated that that wasn't drug residude.
That's actually fingerprint powder. And you know, so I can
you know, I you think about that, and you think
(32:31):
about the information that comes out about a case like this,
and this goes to I use this word earlier, I
guess because I like it, the salacious nature of the case.
Beautiful woman, she's found deceased on a boat. It's in
you know, let's let's face it. I think you and
I can both affirmatively testify to this. Now, I put
(32:52):
this zip code as far as wealth goes up against
any other zip code in the US. It's amazing the
amount of wealth that's up there that we bore witness to.
And so you know, it's it's it's real, it's a
real environment. But yet this this bit of gritty, real
(33:13):
world has kind of come into this And anytime you
get that that mixture with the press, you can get
some bad info because they want to create a story,
they want to make it bigger than it actually is.
And I'm not diminishing Martha in her in her demise,
but what I am saying you have to be very
very careful. If this, this case had occurred any like
(33:35):
in the inner City, dude, I don't even know that
that it would have made the headlines at all. If
this had happened someplace like in the Bronx, you know,
down in the city. I don't even know if it
had made the news. Maybe, you know.
Speaker 3 (33:50):
Perhaps you do have a famous person that's dead though,
somebody who is famous, you know in what she does
with her products, you know, with her branding, somebody who
is really developed heping her own identity in fashion and
what have you. So there's that and that's why those stories.
It's kind of like, you know, you and I have
talked about this about the power of b roll. B
(34:11):
Roll is footage that you can use of a victim
that can run silently in the background while they're telling
the story. That's why. That is why the case of
some why some cases gained more attention than others. And
it's because, well, we had the little girl dressed up
in a pageant at six years old, looking like a
twenty year old. That's why, you know, her case was
(34:31):
covered so much. Well, the same thing is true here.
You have somebody who had a lot of social media
presence with a lot of really flashy photos on jets
and helicopters and champagne glasses and caviar. You expect that
guy with the British accent to show up, you know,
and Robin Robbs.
Speaker 2 (34:47):
You know. Yeah, it's like.
Speaker 3 (34:48):
Lifestyles are rich and famous that we all want to have,
and that's what the image she was projecting. And that's
where you know, people come in and cover it. And
the thing is, this is a much loved daughter. You know,
she was a person who was coming into her own
in business and marketing and everything else, and now she's dead,
and we want to know why the fact that there's
(35:09):
a sixty year old naked guy running around screaming that's
my girlfriend when it's not. He's a very rich guy
again who actually bit a fire department. He actually but
Chris dernan bit a fireman at the twentieth I don't
want to call it anniversary, but it was marking the
twentieth year after nine to eleven in twenty twenty one,
(35:33):
they had the FDNY and number of firefighters that were
on site at nine to eleven in New York and
he was there. Dernham was there, got into a kerfuffle
with a fire department guy and bit him and he
was arrested for it.
Speaker 1 (35:45):
Yeah, they hooked him up on charges for that. And wait, yeah,
I don't know that there's any other evidence that the
spell has been involved in any kind of other Donnybrook
along the way, but it is. It is kind of
interesting this and it would seem at least I mean,
I don't know about you. I don't seek out firefighters
(36:07):
to bite me, it seems. And then you couple that,
you know, I don't know. I guess we're four years
later and he's running around neked, you know, on the
boat dock. We've also heard reports that he's uh, he
loves to play his guitar. Uh. He walks around that area,
you know, strumming a guitar and singing and all these
(36:27):
sorts of things. And that's fine. I mean, I love
I love good guitar as much as the next guy.
Speaker 3 (36:31):
You just usually asiated those with sixteen year old boys
walking in the woods bare face, Yeah, to the campfire.
Speaker 1 (36:37):
Yeah. The idea here that we're looking at this and
it's uh, this is kind of entered on to the stage. Uh,
there's certainly is certainly populated by an interesting I'll put
it to you this way, by an interesting cast. I
want to know what the rest of the story, like
Paul Harvey says is, or or did say what the
rest of the story is. I got to tell you
(36:58):
one interesting little aside. You know, we had talked about drugs.
I think it was last year they had like a
major drug running bust up there in that area where
dope was being brought into that area. And that's not
normally a location that you think about where you've got
(37:22):
an entry level for dope that's coming in. You know,
people always cite like, you know, they used to call
I ninety five and I seventy five cocaine highways, you know,
because stuff was coming up from Florida and moving back
and forth. But nowadays you never know where it's coming from.
And what had been put forward at that point in
time about the drugs that this this drug bus, this
(37:45):
major drug bus that had taken place. I think it
was last year. They that had come in on boats.
So I'm just saying here, all right, and hear me right,
we've got two boats. All right, We've got two boats.
We've got Hell in a basket by the way, is
the name of another dead song, and then of course
(38:07):
we've got Ripple, and they're both in moored in this location.
I want to know what was found on the boats.
I mean, that's that's what this is going to come
down to, you know. I mean, it's not just what
was in her system, but I want to know was
(38:27):
there anything else inside of that boat, because I got
to tell you, at this point, I haven't heard. I
want to know how thoroughly this this vessel or these
vessels there were two vessels there were searched. Did they
run the did they run the dogs through it? Was
anything found in there? If it was found, what was it?
(38:47):
And this is going to be a because you've got
a multi agency event going on, This is going to
be kind of a I would imagine will come out
kind of slowly because you've got too many You've got
too many people involved here. Now let me tell you
what's going to really sound an alarm in this case, Dave.
(39:09):
If we hear, if we hear on any level that
the FEDS have gotten involved in this, this is going
to throw a completely different light on this case. Because
I still I want to know, is that standard operating
procedure for a young woman in her thirties that dies
(39:29):
with other questions? You know, you don't know, we know
she's trauma free. How many other times have they formed?
And they're calling this, they're putting this title on this day,
a multi agency task force. They're using that term. That's
the type of term we've heard about, the task force
would list all right, we've heard about task force with
(39:53):
all kinds of other things. You're putting together a task
force because of the death of this young woman that's
you're putting those resources toward this. That question has been asked.
It needs an answer because I can't imagine that all
(40:13):
these other police agencies have the manpower of the time
to put towards something like this. If there's not smoke,
there's something going on here. It just seems that way
to me. I can't imagine that they would flip up
the flip the switch on this and send the bat
light out, and you know, you're summoning all these other
(40:35):
people to be involved in this. This This is the
type of case if it is just you know, a
natural death or maybe you might suspect that it's a
drug od the Sheriff's apartment is perfectly capable of handling this.
I don't know about the little Montak police department, but
sheriff's offices they've got you know, they've probably got their
(40:56):
own drug task force, and they've got their own crime
say and investigators. Are you bringing in state police? I
don't know it's and plus here's the other thing, Dave
you had mentioned the DA. Not only are the sheriff's
investigators involved in this and state police, they have assigned
multiple District attorney investigators to this as well. Why, why?
(41:21):
What is it? What is it about this event that's
going to require this much manpower? I don't know, but
I can tell you this, Dave. I don't know about you,
but I am as intrigued by this case right now
as anything that we have covered in the last few weeks.
I can't wait to see what toxicology reveals. I can't
(41:43):
wait to see what the task force uncovers in this
because I got to tell you, sometimes, in fact, where
there's smoke, there is in fact fire. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan,
and this is body bags
Body Bus with Joseph Scott more. If my words did
glow with the gold of sunshine, and my tunes were
played on the harp unstrung, would you hear my voice
come through the music? Would you hold it near as
(00:23):
it were your own, Reach out your hand. If your
cup be empty, if your cup is full, it be again.
Let it be known there is a fountain that was
not made by the hands of men. That lyric was
(00:46):
written by Jerry Garcia in nineteen seventy and it dropped
on the nineteen seventy album by the Grateful Dead. The
name of that song is Ripple, and it is alluding
to the idea of tossing a pebble into a steady
(01:09):
body of water and creating a ripple that extends out.
It's literally my favorite Dead song. Well, today we're going
to discuss a case that has something to do with Ripple.
It's actually the name of a vessel, the name of
(01:30):
a vessel where a beautiful young woman has been found
deceased and seemingly there are no answers. Coming to you
from the beautiful campus of Jacksonville State University. I'm Joseph
Scott Morgan and this is Body bags, brother, Dave, I'm
(01:59):
going to make a inflammatory statement here. Oh thank you.
I was hoping you'd say they don't make them like
they used to. And I'm referring to music.
Speaker 2 (02:12):
You know.
Speaker 1 (02:12):
One of the reasons I like the Dead, one of
the reasons I like the Dead is this. They are not.
They never have been a corporate band. I've always liked
that about them. Say what you will, say what you
will about them, you know, you know, you can have
(02:32):
your own opinion about them. But the idea that they
wrote a lot of their own stuff. They grinded it
out only on the road for years and years and years.
And I'm putting aside all of the hippie politics stuff
and all that. I'm just talking about as craftsmen, as artists.
It's really amazing. The band is huge, if you know,
(02:53):
in the dimensions of the band and what they encompass,
and they're as musicians and technicians and oh my lord, writers,
it's amazing when you begin to kind of open up
their songbook and you get into some of the songs
and understand them, and it's it's amazing, particularly at the
stage of my life. You know, forgive my digression, and
(03:15):
I don't really think it's a digression. It's well, it's
my show, so I'll talk about what I want to
talk about. But I do love Ripple. And I got
to tell you, Dave, I came to this case out
of montac last week, and the reason I came to it,
I knew nothing about it, and I think I called you. Yeah,
(03:38):
I think I let you know. I was called by
Fox and Friends, right, they reached out to me, and
I was like, yeah, let me study this. I got
to look at it. I was like, Wow, this is
really bizarre. You see. I really thought, I really thought
from the beginning with this case that this was going
to be something kind of passive. You're going to have
this young woman might be drugs involved or say that
(04:00):
there's no visible signs of trauma, and she's found deceased
on the boat, and you know, for me, I was thinking, yeah,
you know, I kind of know, you know, it's kind
of sallacious because it's on a yacht, and it's in
the it's summertime, you know, it's up there in the Hamptons,
(04:21):
and all of a sudden, you've got the local police
department from Montalk, you got the county sheriff. You've got
the state police, and there's like a couple of other
agencies that are involved in this sing And all of
a sudden, the scene is more than merely a young
(04:43):
irishwoman who has been in America a few years designing clothes.
It's more than merely her passing away on a yacht.
There's more here, Dave. They're not going to throw this
kind of resources at a case like this and not
have some suspicions about some other things.
Speaker 3 (05:02):
Well, you've got the hint of not the hint. You've
got money, You've got people in positions of power and authority,
and a guy with two yachts who is an insurance executive.
You know, you've got a lot going on up there.
When we first saw it, we're talking about Martha Nolan Oslaterer. Now,
Martha Nolan is the by the way, before we get
(05:25):
into the idea that she's a designer, Martha Nolan is
a businesswoman and an entrepreneur. Martha Nolan Oslater is from
Ireland and from a very small town in Ireland, about
fifty miles outside of Dublin. I am geographically when it
challenged when it comes to any place other than the
United States. But pull out of Maffie you'll see what
I'm talking about. But anyway, she is an entrepreneur and
(05:49):
a marketing genius. When I say marketing genius. At the
age of thirty three, she has learned how to sell
herself first and a lifestyle first, and then she came
out with beachware. She actually has these pop up stores,
which you know what a pop up store is, Joe.
(06:11):
It's almost like a food trucks. You grab a couple
of umbrellas, you grab a couple of bamboo partitions. You
find a sidewalk area that will allow you to set
up and you hang us some of your beachware out there.
You have a cash register that takes credit which you
can do on your phone, and that is it.
Speaker 2 (06:30):
That's a pop up store. And that's what she did.
Speaker 3 (06:33):
She set up a pop up store for a weekend
in the Hampton's out on Montalk and that's where she
sold her beachware and she's developed her product line. I'm
not knocking it. I'm actually loving it. The beauty is
that she went to college for business and marketing. She
came to New York seven years ago because she was
(06:56):
going to be business and marketing. The fact that we
know mar Martha Nolan for the bikinis and things that
she's designed is secondary to she's a consultant for online marketing,
for using TikTok, Facebook, social media to market your wares
what she basically did. She's a consultant for these companies.
(07:17):
It's working for them. She goes, well, I can design this.
I'll put out a bikini.
Speaker 2 (07:20):
Here you go.
Speaker 3 (07:21):
Really and truly, Joe, the shape of the bikini hasn't
changed since it came out in the forties because it's
a part that covers this and a part that covers those,
and that's it. So where you put the bangals, I mean,
it doesn't take a design genius, ah, but a marketing
genius who knows how to use TikTok, which is exactly
(07:42):
what Martha Nolan Oslattera did. That's how at the age
of thirty three, there's pictures all over that show her
on a jets of in Champagne with her partners. I
am not about to begrudge anybody for how they market
themselves in this day and age, because she's been incredibly
successful at it. But now she's dead at thirty three,
(08:06):
and she's found on a yacht. But it's not just
a yacht, Joe, he already named it, the.
Speaker 2 (08:13):
Yachts called the Ripple.
Speaker 3 (08:15):
Yeah, and it's in montac at a yacht dock where
this really rich guy is seen at midnight running naked
on the docks, screaming helped my girlfriend.
Speaker 2 (08:31):
At Joe, A sixty.
Speaker 3 (08:33):
Year old man running naked is never a flattering sight,
I dare say, at sixty years old, most of us
find extra clothes to wear, even when whether they were
our wife of thirty years in a darkened room, you know.
Speaker 1 (08:45):
So, yeah, you're right.
Speaker 2 (08:46):
And this guy, yeah, pictures.
Speaker 1 (08:48):
Of him, Yeah, I know he's you know in look.
Speaker 2 (08:51):
I think they shaved his.
Speaker 1 (08:53):
Farbia from me that I cast a spursions on a fellow,
a fellow that's walk around nicked, because I got to
tell you, it wouldn't be wouldn't be pleasant. I might,
I might burn the retinas of those around me. But
I got to tell you. The idea is that he's known,
this fellow is known to walk around the dock area.
(09:15):
And let me tell how exclusive this dock area is.
The dock area houses other yachts, okay, in a very
exclusive area arguably one of the most exclusive areas on
all of Long Island. There's only two hundred slips here,
and we're talking about an island adjacent to the Atlantic Ocean,
(09:36):
where from that location you can you know, weigh anchor
and head out. You can go north and go south,
you can go east. And with these these vessels that
they have housed here, these are ocean going vessels, you know. Now,
I'm I don't know if you'd want to try to,
you know, go all the way to Spain in some
(09:59):
kind of vessel this, But if you're trying to meander
down the coast, try to make the keys that sort
of thing, I think that that's pretty much easy for
a lot of people that are highly skilled, or go
up to Maine, go up to the Saint Laura's seaway
from this location, you can launch out. The question is
why why is this young woman from what we understand
(10:23):
at this point, with no medical conditions, seems healthy, is
all over social media. Why is she dead in this
exclusive area and a nude, sixty year old man is
running about throwing items at people to try to get
their attention to help him because he's the one that
(10:47):
discover so they you know, standard standard operating procedure SOP.
(11:07):
We have been told by the authorities, and this is
so boilerplate that you could probably read my mind right now.
We've been told by the authorities there's no signs of
trauma and that her death is pending toxicology. So, you know,
we don't have a lot to go on, but I
think there's more than we might think. First off, one
(11:32):
of the interesting things, and I'll hammered this home until
they decide that I don't need to show anymore. Negative
findings are always great in investigations because it pushes you
down another road that you might not be considering. So
I'm sure that and I don't misunderstand me. I'm not
(11:54):
trying to be more bid or disrespectful here. I'm sure
that investigators were the scene. They're hoping that the medical
examiner is going to find some trauma, that they're going
to find something that will answer the big question is
what is it that brought about this healthy young woman's death,
and they come up with with nothing bupkus. At this
(12:17):
point in time, they don't have anything to hang their
the proverbial hat on, and of course they're left wanting
here you know, we're pending toxicology. Now, just because you're
pending toxicology, that does not mean does not mean that
the individual has drugs on board. Okay, because toxicology is
(12:41):
part of every autopsy, all right, it's even part of
autopsies where you've got decomposed bodies. We still find a
way to do to do toxicology. But in this case,
it's standard operating procedure day for this to happen, So
you can't. Really There have been people in the news
(13:01):
and I got a great story to tell you about
this as something that happened relative to Fox with Me.
In this particular case, you got certain people in the
news out there that have thrown out this side the
idea that this is potentially drug related. Well, where's proof?
Speaker 2 (13:19):
What is it?
Speaker 1 (13:19):
You know? Where do we go from here? You know,
because people are thinking that it's strug related. I don't know.
Maybe it is, but right now you don't have anything.
And what I do know is that they're saying no trauma.
If a medical examiner makes that statement, makes that statement,
follow what I'm saying here. If they make that statement,
(13:41):
and that's very definitive, and they have to come back
and say, oh wait, hang on, after further consideration, we
did in fact find trauma. Well, it makes you look
like an idiot and it erodes trust in your abilities,
because what they're talking about when you examine, when you
examine a body from head to toe and you're doing
(14:02):
X rays along with it, you're looking for any kind
of sign that might be there. You know, if you
don't have bullet defects in a body, if you don't
have stab ons, if you don't have obvious work of
some kind of blunt force instrument, where else are you
going to look? What else are you going to be presenting? Well,
(14:24):
you open the body, and I can tell you the
first place they went with the body, Dave is going
to be the neck dollars to donuts. I know that
that's what they did. And they're looking those strap muscles,
and they're going to take out the hyoid bone. How
many times we talked about the hyoid and they're going
to see if everything in there is intact. They're going
to look at the eyes there's no petiki, you know,
(14:46):
and there's other things that they might not be saying.
At this point in time. I want to know the
status of her lungs. I want to know if she
is in some kind of congestive failure. I want to
know if her lungs were like really heavy, because if
that's kind of one of the kind of peripheral findings
(15:07):
that you get many times with ODS. You'll have individuals
whose lungs have become congested and heavy, they're struggling to breathe,
and it'll be outside the normal ranges of weight. But
you can't say just because you've got heavy lungs that
the individual has died of a drug ody. You have
(15:28):
to measure everything else relative to that and wait for
the talks to come in. And then you're going to
do histological examinations, which is the microscopic examinations on the
bits of tissue that you're taken as well, and that's
going to be and it takes a while for even
those to be prepped so they can do well. It
can certainly give you an indication of any any kind
(15:53):
of of changes that might be responses to drugs like
that might be present in the lungs and the heart
is the heart dilated, you know, there's all these little
nuances that they look for microscopically that you can't see
with the unaided eye. Also, if you've got, for instance,
if you've got somebody that's you know, dealing with chronic
(16:17):
drug abuse, for instance, there's certain features that we look
for in the heart where you can actually say, yeah,
this is ongoing. It's kind of like, you know, somebody
that is abusing alcohol for years and years, you can
look and see that there are changes. First off, with alcoholism,
for instance, you can see the liver livers generally going
to be larger than normal. If cirrhosis is set in,
(16:39):
it's going to be real nodular and kind of lumpy.
It's really bizarre. It looks sometimes I've seen them look
like pieces of concrete and people's abdomen and you still
have to slice those and put them on a slide
to take a look at them. And so this is
what they're in the process of doing right now, and
you know, trying to understand this now externally. One of
(17:00):
the things that I was really curious about with her
day was there any any sign on her body of
evidence of drug abuse? Okay, And generally, you know, in
those cases, we're going to look for things like n
(17:23):
p w's needle puncture wounds, and try to examine those
and see if there's evidence that you know, maybe she's
been shooting up, if if she's smoking, for instance, smoking drugs.
If someone is smoking drugs, not her, you know, many
times depend upon the type of element that they're using
(17:43):
to to inhale. You'll have burned lips. This happens all
the time with crack abusers. They'll have these kind of charred,
burned lips you know where they're they're smoking smoking. Yeah,
very white, chalky white.
Speaker 2 (17:59):
Hey, Joe, let me ask you this.
Speaker 3 (18:00):
As you head to a scene like this, you've already
been told we have we have a body, yep, Because
are you going to go to the boater or is
she going to be transported?
Speaker 2 (18:13):
In this case, do you.
Speaker 1 (18:13):
Know, well, she was transported and they ran a code
on her, they found her and we done. This is
another piece right now that we don't know. Now. I
think we have this proclamation from the nude guy running
down the game plank. They're not the gangplank, but you
(18:34):
know the area that's surrounded the boat slip the dock
up and down it and you know he's screaming for
help and this sort of thing. When and this is
a horrible thing to think about, you know, because what
we understand, she's fully clothed right now. Factor that into
your investigation. She's fully clothed and he's nude, and and.
Speaker 2 (18:54):
His name is Christopher Dernan, and he is a multi millionaire.
Speaker 1 (18:57):
Yeah, and you know you it begs the question. And
it's not accusatory, no, it's just it's begging. It's begging
the question, why are you nicked? You know? And why
are you with this beautiful young woman who, by the way,
even though he's saying it's his girlfriend, she ain't his girlfriend.
She's actively involved in a relationship. And this individual was
(19:22):
away for the evening or something like this.
Speaker 2 (19:24):
This is account her actual boyfriend.
Speaker 3 (19:26):
Yeah, his name is Nicholas Darubio, and they were in
a very serious monogamous relationship. And she actually had sent
him a message that she was going to catch an
uber and would be back at the house round one
before one. And so that's really important to note here
because at the time all of this takes place, it's
(19:51):
after she sends this message to her boyfriend, Christopher Dernan,
the sixty year old man who operates the Durning Group,
which is a workman's comp insurance company. He had spent
two hundred thousand dollars investing in Martha Nolan O Sladerer's business. Now,
two hundred thousand dollars for a guy who's worth one
(20:13):
hundred million or whatever, that's not a lot of money.
It's an investment, and it means a lot to somebody
in a startup, but not nearly that much to somebody
who's got a lot. But they did have a business
connection there. But again, now you're back to I am
a grown man, I'm his age, and if I saw
(20:35):
I would not be around my girl, my daughter's age naked,
when she's fully clothed running around a dog at midnight,
it makes no sense. And that's why I asked if okay,
so you get her body. She's already been taken to
the hospital, she's been undressed. You're going to see a
nude body. You're not going to see her in the
setting where she was found. You're not going to see
(20:55):
that in his pristine state. You're going to see it
after the fact. If you even go, would you go to.
Speaker 1 (20:59):
The yes, Yeah, I'd go to the Yeah, because I
want to talk. Well, first off, I want to talk
to the clinicians that are there and I'm going to interview,
and this is standard fare in the medical examiner world.
You you track down the guys that were riding the truck,
the EMTs that brought her in, that rolled her in,
(21:21):
whether they're you know, because some depend upon the jurisdiction.
Some some jurisdictions will keep paramedics which are part of
the fire service at the station as well, and they'll
roll from there. And then you can have private ambulance
services or you can have county ambulance services not necessarily
part of the fire So it gets very, very complicated.
(21:41):
But they will have a what's called a run number
that will be specifically assigned to this event. Now that's
different than a police case number, all right, So you've
got all these numbers. As an investigator, you have to
keep track of and you have to document these interviews.
So EMTs are great, and let me tell you why
they are as far as source information for people like me,
(22:03):
because they're the first medical professionals that are putting eyes
on a subject that has been found down. They can
tell me everything from was there some kind of pulse,
was there an agonal or faint respiration that she was experiencing.
Was she cool or warm to the touch? That's going
(22:25):
to be significant here. Did you have to wipe vomit
off of her mouth? Did you try to look in
her did you try to start an airway? Was it
occluded by vomit? Which you get lots of times in
events You can have it well. First all, you know,
people throw up that are that have ode issues. That happens,
but you can also have these events where people are
(22:47):
having heart heart problems. Vomiting happens many times. A matter
of fact, many people present that are having an mi I.
They'll present with severe nausea and gastro intestinal discomfort and
that sort of thing. A matter of fact, many people
feel the need to go to the bathroom, So you'll
have all these kinds of physical presentations. What was their
status when you got there? And kind of peripherally, I
(23:12):
would probably ask them, Hey, this guy that was out
here that was flagging people down, did you talk to
him directly?
Speaker 2 (23:22):
Oh?
Speaker 1 (23:22):
Yeah, yeah, he was in and out or no, he
was gone. I want to know what their first blush was.
And that's why EMTs are so key to any kind
of investigation. The medical examiner is working then on top
of that, you want to ask them what life saving
measures did you take? And what that means is, remember
(23:42):
I went back and back a few seconds ago, and
I talked about getting a tube in. It's called intubation. Intubation,
you're trying to get a tube into the airway in
order to assist with breathing. If you've ever seen those
big plastic bags that people and squeeze, it is called
amboo bags, and you're forcing the air, you know, into
(24:04):
the mouth and into the lungs. Rather, you want to
know was the airway clear? Did you see any signs
when you looked at her? Did you see any signs
of trump? Was there anything you removed from her body
at the scene, Like did she have anything even loosely
around her neck? Did she have anything? Was she holding anything?
(24:28):
Because you have to understand, EMTs are not forensic scientists.
Their worldview is completely different than ours. Their sole goal,
and thank god for EMTs and firefighters, is to save lives,
all right. So their interest is not evidentiary, all right.
And so if she had something in her hand, perhaps
(24:50):
maybe they brushed it aside, put it aside, maybe they
forgot about it, or if it's there, maybe they collected it.
They'll do that sometimes and bring it in because let's
just say you have a hypodermic needle and they're still
residue inside of it. They might say, hey, this is
sitting here. Might want to pick this up and take
it in, let the doc see it. Or some of
(25:10):
them will say no, no, no, we're going to leave
it here because this looks like something that might be
drug related. They're also going to look and they're going
to be asking questions does she have any medical conditions?
Now the only source of information that they have is
a guy running around naked up and down the boat slips,
which I don't know, maybe is a great source of information,
(25:32):
but I got to tell you, you're starting off kind
of behind the curve at this point. If you're going
to come and speak to me and you're standing there
stark naked, you know, and you know, and that's the
way this whole thing kind of kicks off. That's how
the attention was brought to this day.
Speaker 3 (25:49):
All right, So you get you get the scene after
the fact. She's dead. There's no sign that she was
in a fight, no sign that she was choked, no
sign that she was not no sign that she was shot.
Nothing's glaring, and all you're left with and is everything toxicology.
(26:10):
And that's where the world has gone crazy on this story, Joe.
We have been a part of a couple of different
programs now talking about this case and the one thing
that has been mentioned, And I wonder how many times
people insert themselves into a story. I'm not knocking District
Attorney Ray Tierney, Suffolk County, DA. He has been on
(26:33):
TV a lot in the last several years because of
what's gone up there with.
Speaker 2 (26:40):
Humorman.
Speaker 3 (26:41):
Yeah, with who you know, because we had Humorman, then
we and and now we've got other things going on
up there, and now he's inserted himself into this story.
And that bothers me because I'm like, why, And when
you split you when you pull back the headlines, Joe,
a thirty three year old woman is dead who shouldn't
(27:03):
be in our eyes. She looks healthy to us, but
we don't know if she has some kind of a
heart condition. She could have no congestive heart failure and
looks healthy. We don't know if she had COVID. We
don't know. We just know that a sixty year old
rich guy was running around the Ducks naked saying my
(27:23):
girlfriend has passed out. Somebody help, which is suspicious in
every way when we find out who he is and
then we find out who the victim is. I guess
I'm just kind of at a I'm waffling between the
(27:44):
person who looks at the individual who's dead and all
the people who are trying to glom onto it to
gain some kind of insight into celebrity.
Speaker 1 (27:52):
Well, I got to tell you, you know, from Jump Street,
this is a big thing. I'm glad you brought this
up because you know, people going and on and bang
on about the Brits with tabloids, all right, and without
mentioning any names. Okay, New York has got their share
of tabloids, and if there is some type of salacious
(28:14):
news that's out there, they're going to pick up on
it and they're going to run with that headline. Sometimes
it's very misleading. But I got to tell you, aside
from all the slinging of ink that goes on in
stories like this, we're still searching for truth here. Where
do we go? Well, I can tell you where I
(28:35):
choose to go. I'm going to go with the science.
Over the course of my career as an investigator, I
worked a lot of drug related cases, and they weren't
(28:59):
necessarily all of ds. I had a lot of homicides
that were related to drugs. I count those as drugg
related as well. And I've seen all manner of things, uh,
you know, relative to evidence that is left behind as
a result of being involved in this world. And I
think one of the things that's that's pretty consistent throughout
(29:23):
these these cases that I work, particularly as it comes
to things like coke. When you go out to a
scene and now I'm thinking back to like the mid
eighties where you know, crack first appeared and cocaine had
been around for years. People thought that it was not harmful.
You know, it was a party drug, and you go
(29:45):
out to these these homes and you'd find fund find
lines of cocaine out there. The one key to h
to coke is that if it is going to be snorted,
you have to place it out on what's referred to
as a smooth, non poor surface, all right, because this
stuff is granular. That's why people would Dave. You mentioned
(30:10):
this and I'd forgotten about this element you'd mentioned. There
are people that would take family pictures, lay them on
a table and cut their coke up on their family pictures,
and they would snort it up off of an image
of Grandma or whatever, because.
Speaker 2 (30:29):
You could see where it was on the picture.
Speaker 3 (30:31):
You could see it on the glass, and you could
use your blade or your credit card or whatever.
Speaker 2 (30:35):
Not that I ever know.
Speaker 3 (30:36):
I learned about this by hearing lectures about people using drugs.
Though it's a third or fourth hand knowledge of me,
but that's what they told me they did. Of course,
if you really want to know the history of drug abuse,
go back to the nineteen sixteen movie The Mystery of
the Leaping Fish. It's a silent movie with Douglas Fairbanks
where he played a character named Coke.
Speaker 2 (30:57):
Any day cocaine has not It's nothing new.
Speaker 3 (31:01):
It's been used as a powdery substance people snort to
get high for as long as people have learned what
cocaine would do. And the one thing that I have
learned in my lifetime is you don't put it on
a cushion, you know, And when on the picture saying
this powdery substances, you don't put any any drug use
snort does not go on a cushion.
Speaker 2 (31:21):
That's ridiculous, Joe.
Speaker 1 (31:22):
Yeah, And before I went on the Fox program last week,
I kind of got waved down before that because sources
had come to multiple media outlets that dig this and
they were moving forward this as gospel truth shows how
you need to vet everything, trust no one, and they
(31:47):
were actually and there had been media outlets that had
reported this, that there was drug residue found on the
seat cushions in the salon, which is the salon on
a yacht is like as kind of like a living room,
and you've got these, you know, these fabulous seats that
are built into the to the walls and that sort
of thing, and they were calling this drug residue. Now
(32:11):
I don't know what Einstein came up with that, but
the police came back and stated that that wasn't drug residude.
That's actually fingerprint powder. And you know, so I can
you know, I you think about that, and you think
(32:31):
about the information that comes out about a case like this,
and this goes to I use this word earlier, I
guess because I like it, the salacious nature of the case.
Beautiful woman, she's found deceased on a boat. It's in
you know, let's let's face it. I think you and
I can both affirmatively testify to this. Now, I put
(32:52):
this zip code as far as wealth goes up against
any other zip code in the US. It's amazing the
amount of wealth that's up there that we bore witness to.
And so you know, it's it's it's real, it's a
real environment. But yet this this bit of gritty, real
(33:13):
world has kind of come into this And anytime you
get that that mixture with the press, you can get
some bad info because they want to create a story,
they want to make it bigger than it actually is.
And I'm not diminishing Martha in her in her demise,
but what I am saying you have to be very
very careful. If this, this case had occurred any like
(33:35):
in the inner City, dude, I don't even know that
that it would have made the headlines at all. If
this had happened someplace like in the Bronx, you know,
down in the city. I don't even know if it
had made the news. Maybe, you know.
Speaker 3 (33:50):
Perhaps you do have a famous person that's dead though,
somebody who is famous, you know in what she does
with her products, you know, with her branding, somebody who
is really developed heping her own identity in fashion and
what have you. So there's that and that's why those stories.
It's kind of like, you know, you and I have
talked about this about the power of b roll. B
(34:11):
Roll is footage that you can use of a victim
that can run silently in the background while they're telling
the story. That's why. That is why the case of
some why some cases gained more attention than others. And
it's because, well, we had the little girl dressed up
in a pageant at six years old, looking like a
twenty year old. That's why, you know, her case was
(34:31):
covered so much. Well, the same thing is true here.
You have somebody who had a lot of social media
presence with a lot of really flashy photos on jets
and helicopters and champagne glasses and caviar. You expect that
guy with the British accent to show up, you know,
and Robin Robbs.
Speaker 2 (34:47):
You know. Yeah, it's like.
Speaker 3 (34:48):
Lifestyles are rich and famous that we all want to have,
and that's what the image she was projecting. And that's
where you know, people come in and cover it. And
the thing is, this is a much loved daughter. You know,
she was a person who was coming into her own
in business and marketing and everything else, and now she's dead,
and we want to know why the fact that there's
(35:09):
a sixty year old naked guy running around screaming that's
my girlfriend when it's not. He's a very rich guy
again who actually bit a fire department. He actually but
Chris dernan bit a fireman at the twentieth I don't
want to call it anniversary, but it was marking the
twentieth year after nine to eleven in twenty twenty one,
(35:33):
they had the FDNY and number of firefighters that were
on site at nine to eleven in New York and
he was there. Dernham was there, got into a kerfuffle
with a fire department guy and bit him and he
was arrested for it.
Speaker 1 (35:45):
Yeah, they hooked him up on charges for that. And wait, yeah,
I don't know that there's any other evidence that the
spell has been involved in any kind of other Donnybrook
along the way, but it is. It is kind of
interesting this and it would seem at least I mean,
I don't know about you. I don't seek out firefighters
(36:07):
to bite me, it seems. And then you couple that,
you know, I don't know. I guess we're four years
later and he's running around neked, you know, on the
boat dock. We've also heard reports that he's uh, he
loves to play his guitar. Uh. He walks around that area,
you know, strumming a guitar and singing and all these
(36:27):
sorts of things. And that's fine. I mean, I love
I love good guitar as much as the next guy.
Speaker 3 (36:31):
You just usually asiated those with sixteen year old boys
walking in the woods bare face, Yeah, to the campfire.
Speaker 1 (36:37):
Yeah. The idea here that we're looking at this and
it's uh, this is kind of entered on to the stage. Uh,
there's certainly is certainly populated by an interesting I'll put
it to you this way, by an interesting cast. I
want to know what the rest of the story, like
Paul Harvey says is, or or did say what the
rest of the story is. I got to tell you
(36:58):
one interesting little aside. You know, we had talked about drugs.
I think it was last year they had like a
major drug running bust up there in that area where
dope was being brought into that area. And that's not
normally a location that you think about where you've got
(37:22):
an entry level for dope that's coming in. You know,
people always cite like, you know, they used to call
I ninety five and I seventy five cocaine highways, you know,
because stuff was coming up from Florida and moving back
and forth. But nowadays you never know where it's coming from.
And what had been put forward at that point in
time about the drugs that this this drug bus, this
(37:45):
major drug bus that had taken place. I think it
was last year. They that had come in on boats.
So I'm just saying here, all right, and hear me right,
we've got two boats. All right, We've got two boats.
We've got Hell in a basket by the way, is
the name of another dead song, and then of course
(38:07):
we've got Ripple, and they're both in moored in this location.
I want to know what was found on the boats.
I mean, that's that's what this is going to come
down to, you know. I mean, it's not just what
was in her system, but I want to know was
(38:27):
there anything else inside of that boat, because I got
to tell you, at this point, I haven't heard. I
want to know how thoroughly this this vessel or these
vessels there were two vessels there were searched. Did they
run the did they run the dogs through it? Was
anything found in there? If it was found, what was it?
(38:47):
And this is going to be a because you've got
a multi agency event going on, This is going to
be kind of a I would imagine will come out
kind of slowly because you've got too many You've got
too many people involved here. Now let me tell you
what's going to really sound an alarm in this case, Dave.
(39:09):
If we hear, if we hear on any level that
the FEDS have gotten involved in this, this is going
to throw a completely different light on this case. Because
I still I want to know, is that standard operating
procedure for a young woman in her thirties that dies
(39:29):
with other questions? You know, you don't know, we know
she's trauma free. How many other times have they formed?
And they're calling this, they're putting this title on this day,
a multi agency task force. They're using that term. That's
the type of term we've heard about, the task force
would list all right, we've heard about task force with
(39:53):
all kinds of other things. You're putting together a task
force because of the death of this young woman that's
you're putting those resources toward this. That question has been asked.
It needs an answer because I can't imagine that all
(40:13):
these other police agencies have the manpower of the time
to put towards something like this. If there's not smoke,
there's something going on here. It just seems that way
to me. I can't imagine that they would flip up
the flip the switch on this and send the bat
light out, and you know, you're summoning all these other
(40:35):
people to be involved in this. This This is the
type of case if it is just you know, a
natural death or maybe you might suspect that it's a
drug od the Sheriff's apartment is perfectly capable of handling this.
I don't know about the little Montak police department, but
sheriff's offices they've got you know, they've probably got their
(40:56):
own drug task force, and they've got their own crime
say and investigators. Are you bringing in state police? I
don't know it's and plus here's the other thing, Dave
you had mentioned the DA. Not only are the sheriff's
investigators involved in this and state police, they have assigned
multiple District attorney investigators to this as well. Why, why?
(41:21):
What is it? What is it about this event that's
going to require this much manpower? I don't know, but
I can tell you this, Dave. I don't know about you,
but I am as intrigued by this case right now
as anything that we have covered in the last few weeks.
I can't wait to see what toxicology reveals. I can't
(41:43):
wait to see what the task force uncovers in this
because I got to tell you, sometimes, in fact, where
there's smoke, there is in fact fire. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan,
and this is body bags
Host
Joseph Scott Morgan
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
The Herd with Colin Cowherd
The Herd with Colin Cowherd is a thought-provoking, opinionated, and topic-driven journey through the top sports stories of the day.