May 28, 2025 • 43 mins
In November 1987 cops in Humbolt County, California, received a package in the mail. The package was mailed from San Francisco and contained partial skeletal remains. A typed letter was included in the package with directions to more skeletal remains. More skeletal remains were recovered but what was found was still an incomplete set of remains. Joseph Scott Morgan and Dave Mack discuss a case that includes a missing teacher, a husband on a business trip, and bones found in multiple locations in Northern California - and how the incredible work of Othram helped identify the partial set of human remains nearly 40 years after they first arrived at the Sheriff's office
Transcribe Highlights
00:03.47 Introduction
01:12.55 Influence of teachers at an early age
04:56.32 1987-husband comes home from business trip, wife is gone
09:39.08 Some mailed skeletal remains to police
14:39.11 Partial skeletal remains
19:51.97 Map to more remains included with remains
24:00.63 Typed letter still has "evidence"
29:27.66 Note and remains mailed from San Francisco
34:48.40 Othram brought in to identify the skeletal remains
39:14.34 Victim lived in an isolated area
43:29.15 Othram has to crowd fund to be able to work on a case
Conclusion
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Body times. But Joseph's gotten more. I didn't enjoy high school,
not by a long shot. I was involved in a
lot of stuff, but I was kind of nerdy, you know,
kind of on the outside. Played football, was in RTC,
but beyond that, I couldn't get out of that place
quick enough. But the people that really kind of, you know,
(00:24):
stayed with me were my middle school teachers, or as
we used to call it, junior high school teachers, and
to a certain degree, my elementary school teachers. There's you know,
because those are really the first people you have contact
with as you're kind of developing your learning, and so
(00:47):
I actually think that they have more of an influence
on you than maybe even the high school teachers. And
there are a couple that kind of stand out in
my mind as I look back through time. It's amazing
how teachers can change lives to a certain degree. Of course,
(01:07):
you know, families do it more than actual teachers, but
they do have an influence. But can you imagine that
you're a student in school and the person that has
taught you for maybe several years, that you've seen around campus,
seen in the hallways, suddenly they up and vanish without
(01:33):
a trace. Today, we're going to have a discussion about
one such teacher that vanished, and to make matters even
more interesting, we're going to talk about what turned out
to be her skull that washed up almost one hundred
(01:55):
miles away from where the rest of her remains were.
I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is Bodybacks Dave. Who
was your favorite teacher? Like, do you have a favorite
teacher like in elementary school or junior Pica?
Speaker 2 (02:15):
Second grade?
Speaker 1 (02:16):
Second grade?
Speaker 2 (02:17):
Really missus Sampica, Yeah, she was awesome.
Speaker 1 (02:20):
Yeah, mine was actually in the third grade Missus Peoples.
Speaker 2 (02:23):
Oh wow, Miss Peoples.
Speaker 1 (02:25):
Yeah yeah, and.
Speaker 2 (02:26):
Crazy Yeah it is that way, yeah.
Speaker 1 (02:29):
Going back all that way. I mean I can name
a couple from high school, but primarily in that elementary phase.
For me, it was it was the best I learned
how to read, you know, really learned how to read, learned,
you know, started my time's tables. But reading was a
big deal, was a big escape in my life, you know,
coming from a family that was topsy turvy and abuse
(02:50):
that was going on. She had given me a gift
of being able to read and also the ability to
retreat from what was going on in my mind and
being able to escape into a book. And so I read.
I read everything I used to read. I had two
sets of of uh encyclopedias in my bedroom, and my
(03:13):
grandmother gifted both of them to me. One was a
World Book and the other was funking Wagonal by the way.
By the way, she had gotten volume by volume from
Safeway Grocery.
Speaker 2 (03:23):
Scots Way too.
Speaker 3 (03:27):
Yeah, you couldn't afford you couldn't afford World Book.
Speaker 2 (03:30):
You got fun go wagonals.
Speaker 1 (03:32):
Yeah, because you'd have to buy the World Book all
at once. And it would be like a college kid
that would show up at the door and they're trying
to make they've got the summer job. I always saw, God,
that's a tough job. And they would come by and
they would sell them that way. Uh but yeah, yeah,
my encyclopedias, and then you know, started out reading The
Hardy Boys and which I had every one of those
(03:54):
volumes and and a lot of other stuff. You know,
it's like a.
Speaker 2 (03:56):
Older reading in second grade.
Speaker 1 (03:58):
Yeah, thing, it truly is. And you know that imprint
is left. But Dave, I got to tell you this
this case which I'll go at full disclosure right now,
this is as a result of our great friends at
Authorm Laps in the Woodlands. They finally close out a
case that I believe and correct me if I'm wrong.
(04:20):
I believe initiated in nineteen eighty seven.
Speaker 3 (04:25):
That's when. That's when Kay Adams. That's I can't pronounce
her other name. I think it's a Medan Meden Meden think, okay, yeah,
I can go with that. But whenever they give me
an aka and it has a Smith, Jones or Adams,
I'm going that way. So either way, maybe that was
a teaching thing, because you know, sometimes you get a
teacher and you know them as one name, and then
(04:46):
they get married and the name changes and it messes
with everybody. I don't know, but anyway you look at it.
In nineteen eighty seven, forty eight year old elementary school
teacher Kay Josephine Medden, her husband goes on a business
trip and when he returns, she's gone. He goes to police, Hey,
(05:07):
my wife's missing. They live in a fairly rural area
in northern California, Humboldt County, and he have a husband.
Of course, goes to the police, goes to the local
sheriff and says that my wife's missing. I don't know
where she is, and so they start looking. I mean,
he's been gone. She was here when I left, she's
not here now. I don't know what that would be like, Joe.
(05:29):
I mean, I'm putting myself in that man's position and going,
what Because this is a different time nineteen eighty seven,
you didn't have cell phones, you didn't have the things
a week right now, If if you and Kim were
separated by distance, you could pick up the phone and
get her on the phone right now, there would be
no missing for a day. If you couldn't get her
on the phone, and you should, you know, be able
(05:50):
to get her on the phone, you would have somebody
looking for her. But in this case, he's gone for
however long on business and gets home and his wife's
not there. He didn't have any clue. We don't know
when she went missing because there was nobody home.
Speaker 1 (06:03):
But yeah, precisely, but we.
Speaker 2 (06:05):
Know they searched as soon as they got home.
Speaker 1 (06:08):
Yeah they did. And keep in mind the specifics of
the story is kind of interesting, and it goes along, Dave,
with what you're saying about the husband going on a
business trip. They merely talk about how she was gone
(06:28):
or she went and missing. Get this in the summer
of nineteen eighty seven.
Speaker 2 (06:32):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (06:33):
Now, I don't know about you, but by my account,
summer last from essentially like June twentieth or something like
that most of the time and then into September. So
that's the kind of broad spectrum that you're working on here.
So obviously they could probably narrow it down. But you know,
the saying he was on his business trip, Yeah, yeah, precisely,
(06:54):
and that's how you would go back and pinpoint it.
The other thing that's kind of missing, you know, in
the story is the idea of precisely where he went
on his business trip, you know, where was he? You know,
and I'm not saying it. Look as you well know,
you and I are history on the show. You know,
we talk about you know, looking you know, looking for
(07:16):
individuals that are associated with the individual, you know, like
the intimate's familial stuff. And it feels like I ought
to just have that on a loop. Yeah, you know,
because but it's it's one of the things that plays
in to a lot of these cases. But you know,
he's out, he's away, he's away from her, so that
(07:36):
he you know, you don't have day to day accountability.
You know, gee hunt, I'm running to the store or
you know, I'm going to go and see my mom,
or I'm going to go visit friends for a couple
of nights or something like that. Back then, that was
a that was a big ask. You know, you couldn't
do it.
Speaker 3 (07:53):
I made a couple of notes on that of what
I would want to know. Yeah, I wonder where her
husband went on his business trip. I want to know
how long the husband was gone. I want to know
did the husband come back from the trip after his
wife was reported missing or did he come home and
she had been gone? We know her stuff was left behind, things.
Speaker 1 (08:15):
Like that book. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (08:16):
Still, and back then a woman in her mid forties
would not leave her house without her pocket. But no,
you know, first it's on their hip. And then, of
course did the husband help look for the wife. I
think he did because they looked over the property. But then, Joe,
a couple of months go by, and then what happens
(08:37):
what Joe?
Speaker 2 (08:38):
I feel like the big reveal.
Speaker 3 (08:39):
And now TV's Big Winner. What happened next?
Speaker 1 (08:43):
Joe? Oh my lord. Yeah, so we've gone from quote
unquote the summer of nineteen eighty seven, to a bit
more specificity, if you will. So November of nineteen eighty
seven rolls around and lo and behold, what do the
members of the Humboldt County Sheriff's Office receiving the mail?
(09:08):
It's a package of skeletal remains. Now, I don't know
about you. First off, I can't imagine someone taking skeletal
remains and placing them in the United States Postal Service
and having them delivered to a law enforcement agency. And
(09:33):
can I say one more thing about skeletal remains were
when we're talking about time here, brother Dave, the fact
that she went missing in nineteen eighty seven, the summer
of and the skeletal remains were mailed in November. I
(09:54):
don't know what the status of those skeletal remains upon
receipt were, but I can tell you this. I've worked
a lot of cases involving skeletonized remains and partially skeletonized remains, Okay,
in that same timeframe, and a lot of it depends
upon obviously depends upon the environmental conditions. But Dave, I
(10:17):
got to tell you, after a period, let's say that
she went missing in June. Okay, so we got July, August, September, October, November.
That's five months, Dave. Most of the time, if you
were to find skeleton remains out in the woods after
a five month period, you're still going to have some
soft tissue, provided that animals hadn't gotten to it. So
(10:38):
that opens up an entirely different world here. If these remains,
let's just say the status of them was completely cleaned
upon arrival at the Sheriff's office, you're talking about something
that is so beyond the pale here, because if you
(11:00):
got an individual that brought about her death, all right,
and they had these skeleton remains, they spent time with them, Dave,
They've actually spent tom cleaning them. And I don't know,
that's just one of the first things that kind of
popped in my mind with this.
Speaker 3 (11:15):
It makes sense because Joe, in order for them to
become skeleton, just a skeleton bone, they weren't left out
in the woods to their own device. I'm going to
assume that it's not like this is a boy scout
that was out of a cad jamboree. He got lost
in the woods, found some bones and said, hey, I'm
going to put these in a bag and I'll take
them back. And oh, I don't want to be accused
(11:36):
of any wrongdoing, so I'm going to anonymously mail them
from San Francisco. Now that's not what happened. That does
not make any sense.
Speaker 1 (11:42):
This thing will. And just so our friends understand, this
was in fact postmarked out of Cruisco, right, so included
something else. Yeah, please please tell a lot because this
thing you just get, you know, what was it? Ali said?
It gets curious or and curious or yeah, police go ahead, man.
Speaker 2 (12:01):
All right.
Speaker 3 (12:01):
So we have bones sent in the mail and they
find a note, and the note is a treasure map
you meant from the Hardy Boys a little while ago.
I like to think of as GOLDA balloons and pieces
of eight all belong to applegate the gold is here.
But wait, so they get a map that they remains
(12:22):
are incomplete. It's not a complete skeleton. They're just getting
parts here, just pieces of bone or bones. I don't
know to what level because they've never really broken it down.
But a letter that was included with the bones included
directions to more bones, but what was found was still
an incomplete set. So whoever did this sent some of
(12:42):
the bones to the police to get their attention. Then
he sent them on a scavenger hunt to find more bones.
Speaker 2 (12:53):
Was he in the woods watching? Wow?
Speaker 1 (12:57):
And again that's quite chilling. And since we're talking about
a coastal area, we're talking about an area that is rural,
wide open. I wonder did X actually mark the spot?
(13:28):
I got a question for you, Dave. Would you like
to know would you like to know if we get
how we clean bones that we get from a scene
that are brought back to our facility at a medical
examiner's office. Would you like to know how we do that?
Speaker 3 (13:49):
I am kind of curious at this point, to be
honest with you, mainly because I'm thinking about how did
these bones come in, you know.
Speaker 2 (13:54):
Where there's scene or what was going on with them.
Speaker 1 (13:56):
There's a couple of couple of methodologies here, all right.
It's to hold onto your hat because most people don't
realize that this is even a thing, all right. So
if we have remains that and when I say partial
skeletal remains, generally what happens when you find when you
find a body. I have found, at least in my experience,
(14:19):
that the things that actually the areas that degrade the
most where you're going to have the least soft tissue
are going to be the appendicular skeleton, which is like
the arms and the legs. Okay, so the feet you'll
have little bones, the little complex bones that kind of
fall away. You have to be real careful, particularly the
(14:40):
feet and the fingers and that sort of thing. But
then as you get closer to the core, there's still
a chance you're going to have soft tissue. Most of
the time, it's going to be like leather. And even
on the arms you might have leather like skin that's there,
and it's because it's kind of being cure naturally, all right,
(15:02):
So in human skin does appear like leather specifically. All right,
I'm not going to get I'm not going to go
down the road of ed Geen here. That's another episode
where he was, you know, turning human hides. He was
treating them to tan them, you know, and that sort
of thing. But that's that's a discussion for another day.
(15:25):
But at the back at the Medical Examiner's facility, if
you have an anthropology lab, we actually have cauldrons there.
They're not black cast iron cauldrons, however, cauldrons nonetheless, and
there are these big stainless steel pods. We will detach
(15:46):
as best we can without traumatizing the remains too much.
We will try to kind of almost pull apart those
scales remains and place them into this cauldron. It's got
water in it. Okay, And if anybody out there knows
what a crockpot is, I think of coming home from
(16:08):
church and Mom's got a pot roast in there she's
been cooking. You ever notice how the meat, you know,
literally falls off as a result of slow cooking. Well,
it's the same principle with rendering down human remains. You
would it has been explained to me by forensic anthropologists.
You don't want to do it at too high He
(16:29):
is kind of a slow kind of thing. And the
only thing I've been able to compare it to is
a crockpot. And I've actually seen a very large crockpot
in a morgue before, where they would take smaller elements
of human bodies and render them down that way over
a period of time. What happens is is that the
(16:51):
tissue essentially separates gently from the bones, and the bones,
of course are heavier, so they'll settle to the bottom.
What was one of the things that was really really
disturbing to me, and even by my standards. You know.
It's like when you you go to retrieve these these
(17:12):
remains and the way they have it with the so
called cauldron. They're big stainless steel things. They have a
they have like a basket that sits down in it, okay,
almost like you're doing a crawfish bowl, all right, or
crab ball, and you drop it into, you know, into
the pot. You know, well, this thing's very fine, it's
(17:36):
got little tiny holes in it. And so after the
soft tissue kind of drifts away, you pull this thing
up and the skeletal remains have settled to the bottom
of this basket. And when you when you take that
lid off. Initially though, there is like this really disgusting
(17:57):
beige froth that's on top of the on top of
the fluid in this thing, okay, and then you just
kind of drain it like that. And once you get
to that point, you carefully go through these remains because
the key here is to try to determine what's missing,
(18:19):
because are you dealing with a incomplete skeleton? Did you
gather for everything at the scene? Did a dog come
up and wander away with some critical bit of an
anatomical element, and you're it's gone forever and a forever
(18:41):
and ever. Amen, and every bit to this, particularly in
the case of this teacher, everything has evidentiary value, Dave.
So it's key that you you try to assemble as
much of the skeleton as you can. I'm just fascinated
that they had these bones that are sent in to
(19:08):
the police department, a collection of bones which they've retained,
all right, and then they send the police, like you said,
on a treasure hunt with How bizarre is this. I've
never even heard of anything like this to go find
more skeleton remains, which they did recover. I'm if I'm
(19:31):
understanding this correctly, but it was still incomplete David.
Speaker 2 (19:35):
That was actually before we started.
Speaker 3 (19:37):
I asked Joe a couple of questions because that's exactly
what happened. I thought, Okay, obviously you have somebody here
who has.
Speaker 2 (19:48):
Has We can't jump to that conclusion. I know we can't.
Speaker 3 (19:53):
But they had to have killed this poor woman and
then hacked or body of rendered it down to bones.
I mean, this isn't like it happened in nature and
somebody found it and mailed it in.
Speaker 2 (20:05):
Just none of that makes sense.
Speaker 3 (20:06):
What does make sense is that there's a really sadistic
witch out here, male or female, that did this. They
killed a forty eight year old elementary school teacher, is
what they did, while her husband was away, and then
did her endous things to her body, and then didn't
even send it all into police. They let them on
a wild goose chase and didn't even give them all
the bones, just gave them enough to keep them looking.
(20:27):
And this case went on for decades. They could not
solve it. And I'm wondering Joe from nineteen eighty seven
when you mentioned this a minute ago, we know she
went missing sometime in the summer of eighty seven. Was
the first group of bones came in November of eighty seven,
and they were postmarked from San Francisco. The bones had
(20:48):
to have been mechanically rendered down because in nature they
would not have been bones, only they would have had
other things on them, and they probably would have been
scattered hither and yonn from animals. But they're mailed in
from San frids Cisco or San Francsco. And folksmark with
a note. So you've got all kinds of evidence here.
Speaker 1 (21:05):
Yeah, yeah, what do you do it.
Speaker 2 (21:07):
To somebody who had something to do with these bones?
And yeah? Age back then, buddy, No.
Speaker 1 (21:15):
No, no, it wasn't. It wasn't. We're talking about eighty seven.
I'd already been I'd already been practicing as a death
investigator for two years by the time down in New Orleans.
So and no, you know, we we weren't in the
Stone Age. I mean we had we were certainly limited
in certain areas compared to where we are today, specifically
in DNA. But you know there are other things. But
(21:36):
here's another bit that they would have had access to.
First off, if you've got a note, was it written
in long hand or was it typed? Okay? And so
even with that, if you're doing it on what's saying old?
Do you remember the selectric computers? I don't know. Did
(21:56):
you take typing in high school?
Speaker 3 (21:58):
Talking about yeah, annual? We only had three electric ones, Joe. Yeah,
we had to learn how a manual type.
Speaker 1 (22:03):
So you had the arm that would push it back, Yeah,
like a royal type.
Speaker 3 (22:08):
To mash them hard. Used my fingers how deformed one?
Speaker 2 (22:14):
Okay, that's true.
Speaker 3 (22:15):
I played basketball. I jammed this fingermail. Yeah. Yeah, on
my right hand, I jammed and it popped that knuckle.
I had to hide it from my parents. We have
money for a doctor, and so the Lord and I
had typing. I had typing class that nine weeks in
seventh grade, and I had to tape it. I put
a piece of metal on the ends like a post.
I had so much trouble with that. I had to know, my.
Speaker 1 (22:34):
Lord man who rated? I got to ask who rated
the electric typewriter? So were they teacher's pets? Yeah, it
had to be, because it wasn't me.
Speaker 2 (22:42):
I know. I was just trying to get to thirty
words for minutes I could pass.
Speaker 1 (22:46):
No kid, Yeah, that was my goal too. And I
will tell you so if you think in eighty seven your.
Speaker 3 (22:51):
Computers, Joe, the best class I ever had was typing
because it taught me how to use a keyboard.
Speaker 1 (22:58):
Yeah, it did, it did. And I guess they still
teach typing. I don't know if they do or not.
I know they teach a lot of information science classes
now and maybe yeah, no kid, so thumbs, yeah, and
I've got dumb thumb. So it's I'll miss misspell things
many times.
Speaker 2 (23:15):
At any rate.
Speaker 1 (23:16):
So Yeah, so if you're Leopolden Love.
Speaker 3 (23:18):
They had a typewriter, the type the note. Remember that
mantle didn't throw it away in parts, and they still
were able to find that and put it back together.
That was sixty years before.
Speaker 1 (23:26):
This, right, And so with those those those strikes on
a piece of paper, you might think that every single
typewriter in the world is the same. Let's just say
that I was. I was kind of uh, you know,
laughing a second deal about royal typewriters, but you know,
you think about the old manual typewriters. That strike that
(23:47):
takes place when you depress that button requires a lot
of force. You can actually strike it and it's going
to hit that tape that has the ink on it,
and you can have a light strike or a heart strike.
I know all of this because when I was at
the State Medical Examiner's Office, assigned there for like eight
months with the State Medical Examiner's Office in Georgia. My
(24:09):
office was immediately adjacent to the question document person, and
she and I became great friends. And I would sit
there and I was amazed at what she what she
the vast, her vast spectrum of learning everything from counterfeit
money to hand handwriting to two old typewriters, even computer stuff,
(24:31):
you know, at that at that point in time. So yeah,
you've got that bit of evidence, which would still be significant.
But look, you can have all the typed letters in
the world, but if you don't have a machine to
go back to. Now, there are certain machines out there
that generate a particular type of strike that would separate one,
(24:52):
like one particular brand from another. You know that that
might be something that you could go on, but you
would have to you know, and you can narrow it
down to say selectric, all right, and there's but how
many additions of selectric were made over the years, you
know that somebody could got you know, we can't even
begin to calculate.
Speaker 2 (25:13):
That you could find a fingerprint on the paper.
Speaker 1 (25:16):
Yeah you could again, I think I mentioned the other
day about the use of what you've got, Like one
of the ways you recover prints off of paper is
you can either use like ninhydrant spray or you can
use iodine as well, and that binds with it and
you can actually pick up on grassen I dine idne
(25:36):
raising raising latent prints on paper and it's beautiful. I
mean it's there forever and ever amen once you do
it though, So yeah, and the features are very unique.
Here's another piece to this, no pun intended. But with
the skeletal remains, let's say that he didn't have knowledge
(26:00):
of Professor Morgan's crock pots, all right, and what we
know to use in forensics and how anthropologists render things down, Well,
that leads me to think that if he's taking soft
tissue off, did he use a knife or some other
(26:21):
sharp object. Well, if he did that, then these bones
there's a high probability you'd have tool marks in various
locations on these bones, which is a gold mine. But again,
just like with the typewriter. Hell, just like with DNA,
if you don't have an original source of a knife,
(26:45):
of a typewriter, or somebody's DNA which you've collected, doesn't
initially have much value. So you know, we have this
(27:08):
presentation of the skeletal remains which arrive at the Humboldt
County Sheriff's office, along with a note, this kind of
cryptic note to again send the police out to a
specific location or recover remains. But Dave, something happened in
(27:30):
nineteen ninety three relative to this case, and I'm actually
kind of fascinated by this because what are the odds,
what are the odds that this particular partial element would
ever be discovered. It's almost like there's a hand of
providence on this.
Speaker 2 (27:48):
Why is it an anonymous person that founded?
Speaker 3 (27:51):
Joe?
Speaker 2 (27:51):
I'm curious about.
Speaker 3 (27:52):
That because the finder of this piece of skull, the
person who founded, is anonymous to us, and where they
found it is kind of.
Speaker 1 (28:04):
I would say it.
Speaker 2 (28:05):
Oh, they're impossible. Yeah, I mean I.
Speaker 3 (28:11):
Got some real questions about this that I'm not suitable
to ask, you know, I just really wonder, Joe, I mean,
does this not make you question everything?
Speaker 2 (28:19):
But you know about it?
Speaker 3 (28:20):
Because we know we got the first set mailed in
with the note to the second set? And now we
have part of a skull, and I'm assuming a couple
other bones, not just one little piece of bone here,
because how would you pick up one piece of bone
and it wouldn't think I got a human skull.
Speaker 2 (28:34):
I don't know how big it was to you? Was
it big?
Speaker 1 (28:36):
No? I don't know. It sounds like it was fragmented
and yeah, either well, there's any number of things that
could have happened. All right, Maybe the skull maybe the
skull or that portion of skull, because it was a
partial skull that was recovered. And if I'm not mistaken,
this skull, this part of the skull was actually found
(29:01):
uh on a beach area and what's referred to as
Trinidad Head one hundred miles away. Yeah, one hundred miles
away from her home. One hundred miles.
Speaker 2 (29:12):
So Trinidad Head. Is that a tip?
Speaker 1 (29:18):
Oh my gosh, I hadn't even considered that, Dave. Really,
you're in the wrong line of work, dude. That's yeah,
that's actually kind of fascinating, isn't it. And so you
we don't know who the finder is and they're never named,
but they found this, this partial of a skull, and
(29:40):
how that skull would make it back to the rest
of the remains again is kind of fascinating as well.
You know how, and I'm asking this in a, you know,
a kind of a generalized kind of way. How did
they connect these remains from Humboldt County to this partial
(30:02):
skull that's one hundred miles away. And the other thing
too here I can't get past the idea of that
note and those remains being mailed from San Francisco. You know,
I know, as a native California you can explain this
to us, because you know, those of us that are
(30:23):
uneducated geographically about California, we always hear the terms northern California.
It's northern California, Southern California. You're a Southern California, dude.
And so you've got northern California and this is northern California.
And I've driven up the coastal road there one on one.
There's a whole lot of northern California. Not to say
(30:44):
there's not a lot of southern California, but it's worth
to go the more isolated it is.
Speaker 3 (30:50):
I grew up in suburbia, you know. I grew up
where our second grade field trip, yeah, a dairy farm.
So we could see cows in person, Okay, actually see them,
because none of us had ever seen a cow. I mean,
where are we going to see a cow? We saw
kmart and we saw you know, and so that was
a big deal for us. And but you go to
(31:11):
northern California and they're slaughter and hogs where they go
to school. I mean, it's a big difference, you know,
And it's beautiful up there. It is breathtakingly beautiful as
those county.
Speaker 1 (31:20):
Yes it is. And you know, when I saw the
images of this Trinidad head as you as it's being
referred to as this location where this remnant is found,
it's and I urge anybody that's listening to this episode
go check out the images of this place. It's striking,
I mean absolutely striking. And that's still some great distance
(31:46):
from San Francisco. So and then to get even further,
if you get up to the area that's the town
of Eureka, which a lot of this is kind of
centered around relative to Humboldt County, that's still a great,
great drive up there as well. I mean you're talking
about a massive distance here when you couple all three
(32:07):
of these geographic points along the way. So how do
these remains get dispersed and how do they bring them
all back together collectively so that you can try to
try to come up with some kind of narrative about
what happened, because you know, you can look at us,
(32:28):
you can look at a skeleton, all right, and even
absent a head, all right, the skull forensic anthropologists who
are excellent at this. If you have a pelvis or
even part of a pelvis. They can actually look at
that pelvis and give you an idea if this is
a male or female. Generally, female pelvis is are wider
(32:51):
to accommodate a birth canal, and the males tend to
be more narrow. The bones with females are referred to
and I love this word. It's the term grassile. Grass
Isle actually refers it's kind of translates loosely into the
word for fine, like fine, delicate, that sort of thing.
(33:11):
Whereas with male skeletons, they're referred to as robust, you know,
and a lot of that hinges on, you know, facial
characteristics if you have a skull. But even with a
partial skull, trust me, anthropologists are going to take a
stab at it and they're going to try to put
all of this together. But however, they were able to
reconstitute these remains. When it comes down to brass tacks,
(33:34):
humbold County still had an unidentified and what they knew
as a female Jane Doe that was within their jurisdiction.
And I can only imagine, you know, and this is
the thing. You can have people that will call in
and report cases all right, they'll say, you know, my
mom's missing or my daughter is missing. But just because
(33:57):
you say they're missing doesn't mean that. Okay, nineteen eighty seven,
that's ninety seven, that's ten, two thousand and seven, that's twenty, twenty, seventeen,
thirty years after thirty years, is anybody going to remember
that there was one hundred person search team scouring the
area up there when she went missing? Is anybody going
(34:17):
to have a recollection of that? No, because so many
other things have happened since that time. The fact that
they were able to do this kind of reconstitution of
this skeleton and then come up with an actual name
is absolutely amazing, and that brings us to who.
Speaker 3 (34:38):
Dave Authorm Always back to Authorm when when I was
looking at this, Joe, and I was going back because
I was looking at the notes from ninety three, and
because you're talking to a lot of DNA. We're talking
about this the other day of the great strides that
had been made. But by ninety three they were pretty
set up to get a lot of information, a lot.
Speaker 2 (35:00):
A lot of it was new.
Speaker 3 (35:01):
Hill didn't always know what to do with it, but
it was there, and Authorn was able to Basically it
gets down to genetic genealogy again of we've got a link,
now let's find it back. And this is the part
that I always tell folks. Author is so amazing at this.
The work they do is so intense that they can't
even do it Like you and I work and we
(35:22):
considered our desk and work and do whatever for five
six seven hours. They do it at fifteen minutes at
a crack because it's such intense work that they have
to take be forced to.
Speaker 1 (35:32):
Take a break, yep.
Speaker 3 (35:33):
And I imagine they don't want to because each little
thing they pull back, it's like can you imagine being
on that hunt and each one you know, it's this is.
Speaker 1 (35:43):
We're that close, We're close.
Speaker 3 (35:45):
And it is that a level of thinking that I
cannot comprehend that that I'm thinking, you're so smart, How
are we still the same species?
Speaker 2 (35:53):
You know it?
Speaker 1 (35:54):
I know it seems like they've risen above a certain
of my pay grade. I can see some day someday
you and I are going to visit the woodlands in Texas.
It's the area just north of Houston. I'm going to
take you to that lab. And when you go to
Authorm's lab. It's like you're walking onto the deck of
the starship Enterprise. It is so amazing, and everything is
(36:17):
really locked down because they're work they're actively working cases
in there that have open investigations. You know, before you
can actually walk through the area, they literally have to
stop what they're doing and collect everything they're working on
and secure it and then you can walk through the area.
That's how that's how locked down this place is. And
(36:38):
but just to see the technology that they're using and
and the strides that they have made. And again, this
goes back to to k and it always comes back
to and I believe she is a victim here, even
though I cannot definitively say that she is a homicide victim.
(37:00):
There are so many things that are pointing to somebody
else's hand involved in this. And it seems like I've
used this term a lot lately. I don't know, it's
on my mind. Perhaps i'd say a sadist that would
do this because you're not you've had her remains, assuming
(37:22):
that what we believe is true, and you have particulated
her remains, you're rendering down her remains and you're literally
waving it in the face of law enforcement not to
mention and I hate to report this, but her husband too,
and you know he if I'm not mistaken, he died
just a few years ago and he never got to
(37:44):
see a resolution to this. Can you imagine going through
the rest of your life. And maybe he remarried, I
don't know, but still, even if he did remarry, that
question would always linger in the back of this poor
man's mind. And I can guarantee you there were people
around there and around this case that said, you know, quiet, quietly,
(38:05):
hush tones, Yeah, we think he had something to do
with it. There's always those people.
Speaker 3 (38:09):
You know, because Joe, we have such vagueness to the beginning. Yeah,
where you know, he went on a business trip and
he came back and his wife was gone. We don't
know when she was gone because we weren't looking for
her before he left. We don't know when he actually
left or when he came back. I mean, there's a
lot of unknowns there. But let's assume that they tied
(38:32):
all that down and we're able to say, hey, this,
you know, let's hope that she was there with him
at the airport and they took a picture as he
got on the plane. You know, that's what I would
hope that, because that's the only way you're going to
have that guy in the clear.
Speaker 2 (38:45):
Otherwise, what a miserable life of doubt.
Speaker 1 (38:49):
Yeah. Yeah, and it would always haunt you. You know.
I think about this case, and I think again, going
back to this idea, if we believe that that she
died at the hand end of another, which is of
course how we define a homicide. I reflect on this
and I think if this was La or even San Francisco,
(39:12):
you might say, well, yeah, you know, there's people here
that would break into somebody's house and do this sort
of thing. Sacramento that sort of thing. But Dave, where
they lived, by all accounts, it's so isolated. It seems
to me that whoever had an awareness that this couple
lived there would be very familiar, not only familiar with that,
(39:37):
but also familiar with the comings and goings of her
and her husband. Additionally, you brought up a great point,
and it really hit me like a ton of bricks
when you made the mention about the map and sending
those police out there to look for those remains. Was
(39:58):
he watching? Was he watching? I don't know, Maybe he was,
because if he has a sadistic meant he would probably
take great pleasure in doing that sort of thing. But
we do know this, We do know that part of
this puzzle, at least relative to who this victim was,
(40:23):
has been solved. The journey of any death investigation generally starts,
in my opinion, at least with the identification of a victim,
because if you learn who they are, that is the
first step on a long journey towards success, because once
you know who they are, you begin to explore who
(40:47):
their associates were. Who was it that she came in
contact with. Well, back in eighty seven, she was teaching
in a public school. She had contact with a lot
of people, students, parents, staff members, maybe the guy that
was coming to the school to deliver sodas, or the
(41:09):
people that will pull up in the truck and deliver
the food, or maybe the guy that hauled away the
trash at the school. See, in a small community, if
you work at a school, you probably have more contact
with individuals in that tiny community than anyone else that
might occupy that same space. So I think that that
is probably the starting place in this case, because at
(41:32):
this point in time, the husband who has unfortunately passed
on is not somebody you can go back and chat with.
But there are people to chat with. But again, a
big shout out to our friends at Authorm. They are doing,
in my estimation, God's work. I think that this is
(41:52):
the noblest thing that you can do as far as
death investigation goes. The reason and I always say this,
the reason that I belie leaving what they're doing is
I've stood over the graves of so many people that
were placed into potters Field with no name, simply an
aluminum band that's wrapped around their ankle, wrapped around the
(42:14):
wrist that's snapped in place. They're placed in a body
bag and thrown in an unmarked grave, and it just
says Jane Do or John Doe. So many of those
cases I stood over and watched them push the dirt in.
They're clearing these, my friends, They're clearing them, and you
can help clear them too. If you're interested in participating
(42:35):
in bringing a family out there peace to yourself favor,
log on to DNA solts dot com. You can go there.
You can pick out a case. Maybe it's in your region,
maybe it's a case. When you hear the background, it
kind of catches you. It grabs you by your heart
(42:59):
and you say, what I want to help with this,
and they'll take anything that you can give them. They're
not picky, all right, because they have to reach a
certain amount and it's like seven thousand to seventy five
hundred bucks just to get the ball rolling on this
Star Trek technology, as I'd mentioned, to move the case forward.
But you might be the person that pushes it over
(43:22):
the edge, and by virtue of a donation that you make,
you might bring peace to a family somewhere out there
that is always looking in an empty chair, that never
knows what happened to their loved one. I'm Joseph Scott
Morgan and this is Body Backs
Body times. But Joseph's gotten more. I didn't enjoy high school,
not by a long shot. I was involved in a
lot of stuff, but I was kind of nerdy, you know,
kind of on the outside. Played football, was in RTC,
but beyond that, I couldn't get out of that place
quick enough. But the people that really kind of, you know,
(00:24):
stayed with me were my middle school teachers, or as
we used to call it, junior high school teachers, and
to a certain degree, my elementary school teachers. There's you know,
because those are really the first people you have contact
with as you're kind of developing your learning, and so
(00:47):
I actually think that they have more of an influence
on you than maybe even the high school teachers. And
there are a couple that kind of stand out in
my mind as I look back through time. It's amazing
how teachers can change lives to a certain degree. Of course,
(01:07):
you know, families do it more than actual teachers, but
they do have an influence. But can you imagine that
you're a student in school and the person that has
taught you for maybe several years, that you've seen around campus,
seen in the hallways, suddenly they up and vanish without
(01:33):
a trace. Today, we're going to have a discussion about
one such teacher that vanished, and to make matters even
more interesting, we're going to talk about what turned out
to be her skull that washed up almost one hundred
(01:55):
miles away from where the rest of her remains were.
I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is Bodybacks Dave. Who
was your favorite teacher? Like, do you have a favorite
teacher like in elementary school or junior Pica?
Speaker 2 (02:15):
Second grade?
Speaker 1 (02:16):
Second grade?
Speaker 2 (02:17):
Really missus Sampica, Yeah, she was awesome.
Speaker 1 (02:20):
Yeah, mine was actually in the third grade Missus Peoples.
Speaker 2 (02:23):
Oh wow, Miss Peoples.
Speaker 1 (02:25):
Yeah yeah, and.
Speaker 2 (02:26):
Crazy Yeah it is that way, yeah.
Speaker 1 (02:29):
Going back all that way. I mean I can name
a couple from high school, but primarily in that elementary phase.
For me, it was it was the best I learned
how to read, you know, really learned how to read, learned,
you know, started my time's tables. But reading was a
big deal, was a big escape in my life, you know,
coming from a family that was topsy turvy and abuse
(02:50):
that was going on. She had given me a gift
of being able to read and also the ability to
retreat from what was going on in my mind and
being able to escape into a book. And so I read.
I read everything I used to read. I had two
sets of of uh encyclopedias in my bedroom, and my
(03:13):
grandmother gifted both of them to me. One was a
World Book and the other was funking Wagonal by the way.
By the way, she had gotten volume by volume from
Safeway Grocery.
Speaker 2 (03:23):
Scots Way too.
Speaker 3 (03:27):
Yeah, you couldn't afford you couldn't afford World Book.
Speaker 2 (03:30):
You got fun go wagonals.
Speaker 1 (03:32):
Yeah, because you'd have to buy the World Book all
at once. And it would be like a college kid
that would show up at the door and they're trying
to make they've got the summer job. I always saw, God,
that's a tough job. And they would come by and
they would sell them that way. Uh but yeah, yeah,
my encyclopedias, and then you know, started out reading The
Hardy Boys and which I had every one of those
(03:54):
volumes and and a lot of other stuff. You know,
it's like a.
Speaker 2 (03:56):
Older reading in second grade.
Speaker 1 (03:58):
Yeah, thing, it truly is. And you know that imprint
is left. But Dave, I got to tell you this
this case which I'll go at full disclosure right now,
this is as a result of our great friends at
Authorm Laps in the Woodlands. They finally close out a
case that I believe and correct me if I'm wrong.
(04:20):
I believe initiated in nineteen eighty seven.
Speaker 3 (04:25):
That's when. That's when Kay Adams. That's I can't pronounce
her other name. I think it's a Medan Meden Meden think, okay, yeah,
I can go with that. But whenever they give me
an aka and it has a Smith, Jones or Adams,
I'm going that way. So either way, maybe that was
a teaching thing, because you know, sometimes you get a
teacher and you know them as one name, and then
(04:46):
they get married and the name changes and it messes
with everybody. I don't know, but anyway you look at it.
In nineteen eighty seven, forty eight year old elementary school
teacher Kay Josephine Medden, her husband goes on a business
trip and when he returns, she's gone. He goes to police, Hey,
(05:07):
my wife's missing. They live in a fairly rural area
in northern California, Humboldt County, and he have a husband.
Of course, goes to the police, goes to the local
sheriff and says that my wife's missing. I don't know
where she is, and so they start looking. I mean,
he's been gone. She was here when I left, she's
not here now. I don't know what that would be like, Joe.
(05:29):
I mean, I'm putting myself in that man's position and going,
what Because this is a different time nineteen eighty seven,
you didn't have cell phones, you didn't have the things
a week right now, If if you and Kim were
separated by distance, you could pick up the phone and
get her on the phone right now, there would be
no missing for a day. If you couldn't get her
on the phone, and you should, you know, be able
(05:50):
to get her on the phone, you would have somebody
looking for her. But in this case, he's gone for
however long on business and gets home and his wife's
not there. He didn't have any clue. We don't know
when she went missing because there was nobody home.
Speaker 1 (06:03):
But yeah, precisely, but we.
Speaker 2 (06:05):
Know they searched as soon as they got home.
Speaker 1 (06:08):
Yeah they did. And keep in mind the specifics of
the story is kind of interesting, and it goes along, Dave,
with what you're saying about the husband going on a
business trip. They merely talk about how she was gone
(06:28):
or she went and missing. Get this in the summer
of nineteen eighty seven.
Speaker 2 (06:32):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (06:33):
Now, I don't know about you, but by my account,
summer last from essentially like June twentieth or something like
that most of the time and then into September. So
that's the kind of broad spectrum that you're working on here.
So obviously they could probably narrow it down. But you know,
the saying he was on his business trip, Yeah, yeah, precisely,
(06:54):
and that's how you would go back and pinpoint it.
The other thing that's kind of missing, you know, in
the story is the idea of precisely where he went
on his business trip, you know, where was he? You know,
and I'm not saying it. Look as you well know,
you and I are history on the show. You know,
we talk about you know, looking you know, looking for
(07:16):
individuals that are associated with the individual, you know, like
the intimate's familial stuff. And it feels like I ought
to just have that on a loop. Yeah, you know,
because but it's it's one of the things that plays
in to a lot of these cases. But you know,
he's out, he's away, he's away from her, so that
(07:36):
he you know, you don't have day to day accountability.
You know, gee hunt, I'm running to the store or
you know, I'm going to go and see my mom,
or I'm going to go visit friends for a couple
of nights or something like that. Back then, that was
a that was a big ask. You know, you couldn't
do it.
Speaker 3 (07:53):
I made a couple of notes on that of what
I would want to know. Yeah, I wonder where her
husband went on his business trip. I want to know
how long the husband was gone. I want to know
did the husband come back from the trip after his
wife was reported missing or did he come home and
she had been gone? We know her stuff was left behind, things.
Speaker 1 (08:15):
Like that book. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (08:16):
Still, and back then a woman in her mid forties
would not leave her house without her pocket. But no,
you know, first it's on their hip. And then, of
course did the husband help look for the wife. I
think he did because they looked over the property. But then, Joe,
a couple of months go by, and then what happens
(08:37):
what Joe?
Speaker 2 (08:38):
I feel like the big reveal.
Speaker 3 (08:39):
And now TV's Big Winner. What happened next?
Speaker 1 (08:43):
Joe? Oh my lord. Yeah, so we've gone from quote
unquote the summer of nineteen eighty seven, to a bit
more specificity, if you will. So November of nineteen eighty
seven rolls around and lo and behold, what do the
members of the Humboldt County Sheriff's Office receiving the mail?
(09:08):
It's a package of skeletal remains. Now, I don't know
about you. First off, I can't imagine someone taking skeletal
remains and placing them in the United States Postal Service
and having them delivered to a law enforcement agency. And
(09:33):
can I say one more thing about skeletal remains were
when we're talking about time here, brother Dave, the fact
that she went missing in nineteen eighty seven, the summer
of and the skeletal remains were mailed in November. I
(09:54):
don't know what the status of those skeletal remains upon
receipt were, but I can tell you this. I've worked
a lot of cases involving skeletonized remains and partially skeletonized remains, Okay,
in that same timeframe, and a lot of it depends
upon obviously depends upon the environmental conditions. But Dave, I
(10:17):
got to tell you, after a period, let's say that
she went missing in June. Okay, so we got July, August, September, October, November.
That's five months, Dave. Most of the time, if you
were to find skeleton remains out in the woods after
a five month period, you're still going to have some
soft tissue, provided that animals hadn't gotten to it. So
(10:38):
that opens up an entirely different world here. If these remains,
let's just say the status of them was completely cleaned
upon arrival at the Sheriff's office, you're talking about something
that is so beyond the pale here, because if you
(11:00):
got an individual that brought about her death, all right,
and they had these skeleton remains, they spent time with them, Dave,
They've actually spent tom cleaning them. And I don't know,
that's just one of the first things that kind of
popped in my mind with this.
Speaker 3 (11:15):
It makes sense because Joe, in order for them to
become skeleton, just a skeleton bone, they weren't left out
in the woods to their own device. I'm going to
assume that it's not like this is a boy scout
that was out of a cad jamboree. He got lost
in the woods, found some bones and said, hey, I'm
going to put these in a bag and I'll take
them back. And oh, I don't want to be accused
(11:36):
of any wrongdoing, so I'm going to anonymously mail them
from San Francisco. Now that's not what happened. That does
not make any sense.
Speaker 1 (11:42):
This thing will. And just so our friends understand, this
was in fact postmarked out of Cruisco, right, so included
something else. Yeah, please please tell a lot because this
thing you just get, you know, what was it? Ali said?
It gets curious or and curious or yeah, police go ahead, man.
Speaker 2 (12:01):
All right.
Speaker 3 (12:01):
So we have bones sent in the mail and they
find a note, and the note is a treasure map
you meant from the Hardy Boys a little while ago.
I like to think of as GOLDA balloons and pieces
of eight all belong to applegate the gold is here.
But wait, so they get a map that they remains
(12:22):
are incomplete. It's not a complete skeleton. They're just getting
parts here, just pieces of bone or bones. I don't
know to what level because they've never really broken it down.
But a letter that was included with the bones included
directions to more bones, but what was found was still
an incomplete set. So whoever did this sent some of
(12:42):
the bones to the police to get their attention. Then
he sent them on a scavenger hunt to find more bones.
Speaker 2 (12:53):
Was he in the woods watching? Wow?
Speaker 1 (12:57):
And again that's quite chilling. And since we're talking about
a coastal area, we're talking about an area that is rural,
wide open. I wonder did X actually mark the spot?
(13:28):
I got a question for you, Dave. Would you like
to know would you like to know if we get
how we clean bones that we get from a scene
that are brought back to our facility at a medical
examiner's office. Would you like to know how we do that?
Speaker 3 (13:49):
I am kind of curious at this point, to be
honest with you, mainly because I'm thinking about how did
these bones come in, you know.
Speaker 2 (13:54):
Where there's scene or what was going on with them.
Speaker 1 (13:56):
There's a couple of couple of methodologies here, all right.
It's to hold onto your hat because most people don't
realize that this is even a thing, all right. So
if we have remains that and when I say partial
skeletal remains, generally what happens when you find when you
find a body. I have found, at least in my experience,
(14:19):
that the things that actually the areas that degrade the
most where you're going to have the least soft tissue
are going to be the appendicular skeleton, which is like
the arms and the legs. Okay, so the feet you'll
have little bones, the little complex bones that kind of
fall away. You have to be real careful, particularly the
(14:40):
feet and the fingers and that sort of thing. But
then as you get closer to the core, there's still
a chance you're going to have soft tissue. Most of
the time, it's going to be like leather. And even
on the arms you might have leather like skin that's there,
and it's because it's kind of being cure naturally, all right,
(15:02):
So in human skin does appear like leather specifically. All right,
I'm not going to get I'm not going to go
down the road of ed Geen here. That's another episode
where he was, you know, turning human hides. He was
treating them to tan them, you know, and that sort
of thing. But that's that's a discussion for another day.
(15:25):
But at the back at the Medical Examiner's facility, if
you have an anthropology lab, we actually have cauldrons there.
They're not black cast iron cauldrons, however, cauldrons nonetheless, and
there are these big stainless steel pods. We will detach
(15:46):
as best we can without traumatizing the remains too much.
We will try to kind of almost pull apart those
scales remains and place them into this cauldron. It's got
water in it. Okay, And if anybody out there knows
what a crockpot is, I think of coming home from
(16:08):
church and Mom's got a pot roast in there she's
been cooking. You ever notice how the meat, you know,
literally falls off as a result of slow cooking. Well,
it's the same principle with rendering down human remains. You
would it has been explained to me by forensic anthropologists.
You don't want to do it at too high He
(16:29):
is kind of a slow kind of thing. And the
only thing I've been able to compare it to is
a crockpot. And I've actually seen a very large crockpot
in a morgue before, where they would take smaller elements
of human bodies and render them down that way over
a period of time. What happens is is that the
(16:51):
tissue essentially separates gently from the bones, and the bones,
of course are heavier, so they'll settle to the bottom.
What was one of the things that was really really
disturbing to me, and even by my standards. You know.
It's like when you you go to retrieve these these
(17:12):
remains and the way they have it with the so
called cauldron. They're big stainless steel things. They have a
they have like a basket that sits down in it, okay,
almost like you're doing a crawfish bowl, all right, or
crab ball, and you drop it into, you know, into
the pot. You know, well, this thing's very fine, it's
(17:36):
got little tiny holes in it. And so after the
soft tissue kind of drifts away, you pull this thing
up and the skeletal remains have settled to the bottom
of this basket. And when you when you take that
lid off. Initially though, there is like this really disgusting
(17:57):
beige froth that's on top of the on top of
the fluid in this thing, okay, and then you just
kind of drain it like that. And once you get
to that point, you carefully go through these remains because
the key here is to try to determine what's missing,
(18:19):
because are you dealing with a incomplete skeleton? Did you
gather for everything at the scene? Did a dog come
up and wander away with some critical bit of an
anatomical element, and you're it's gone forever and a forever
(18:41):
and ever. Amen, and every bit to this, particularly in
the case of this teacher, everything has evidentiary value, Dave.
So it's key that you you try to assemble as
much of the skeleton as you can. I'm just fascinated
that they had these bones that are sent in to
(19:08):
the police department, a collection of bones which they've retained,
all right, and then they send the police, like you said,
on a treasure hunt with How bizarre is this. I've
never even heard of anything like this to go find
more skeleton remains, which they did recover. I'm if I'm
(19:31):
understanding this correctly, but it was still incomplete David.
Speaker 2 (19:35):
That was actually before we started.
Speaker 3 (19:37):
I asked Joe a couple of questions because that's exactly
what happened. I thought, Okay, obviously you have somebody here
who has.
Speaker 2 (19:48):
Has We can't jump to that conclusion. I know we can't.
Speaker 3 (19:53):
But they had to have killed this poor woman and
then hacked or body of rendered it down to bones.
I mean, this isn't like it happened in nature and
somebody found it and mailed it in.
Speaker 2 (20:05):
Just none of that makes sense.
Speaker 3 (20:06):
What does make sense is that there's a really sadistic
witch out here, male or female, that did this. They
killed a forty eight year old elementary school teacher, is
what they did, while her husband was away, and then
did her endous things to her body, and then didn't
even send it all into police. They let them on
a wild goose chase and didn't even give them all
the bones, just gave them enough to keep them looking.
(20:27):
And this case went on for decades. They could not
solve it. And I'm wondering Joe from nineteen eighty seven
when you mentioned this a minute ago, we know she
went missing sometime in the summer of eighty seven. Was
the first group of bones came in November of eighty seven,
and they were postmarked from San Francisco. The bones had
(20:48):
to have been mechanically rendered down because in nature they
would not have been bones, only they would have had
other things on them, and they probably would have been
scattered hither and yonn from animals. But they're mailed in
from San frids Cisco or San Francsco. And folksmark with
a note. So you've got all kinds of evidence here.
Speaker 1 (21:05):
Yeah, yeah, what do you do it.
Speaker 2 (21:07):
To somebody who had something to do with these bones?
And yeah? Age back then, buddy, No.
Speaker 1 (21:15):
No, no, it wasn't. It wasn't. We're talking about eighty seven.
I'd already been I'd already been practicing as a death
investigator for two years by the time down in New Orleans.
So and no, you know, we we weren't in the
Stone Age. I mean we had we were certainly limited
in certain areas compared to where we are today, specifically
in DNA. But you know there are other things. But
(21:36):
here's another bit that they would have had access to.
First off, if you've got a note, was it written
in long hand or was it typed? Okay? And so
even with that, if you're doing it on what's saying old?
Do you remember the selectric computers? I don't know. Did
(21:56):
you take typing in high school?
Speaker 3 (21:58):
Talking about yeah, annual? We only had three electric ones, Joe. Yeah,
we had to learn how a manual type.
Speaker 1 (22:03):
So you had the arm that would push it back, Yeah,
like a royal type.
Speaker 3 (22:08):
To mash them hard. Used my fingers how deformed one?
Speaker 2 (22:14):
Okay, that's true.
Speaker 3 (22:15):
I played basketball. I jammed this fingermail. Yeah. Yeah, on
my right hand, I jammed and it popped that knuckle.
I had to hide it from my parents. We have
money for a doctor, and so the Lord and I
had typing. I had typing class that nine weeks in
seventh grade, and I had to tape it. I put
a piece of metal on the ends like a post.
I had so much trouble with that. I had to know, my.
Speaker 1 (22:34):
Lord man who rated? I got to ask who rated
the electric typewriter? So were they teacher's pets? Yeah, it
had to be, because it wasn't me.
Speaker 2 (22:42):
I know. I was just trying to get to thirty
words for minutes I could pass.
Speaker 1 (22:46):
No kid, Yeah, that was my goal too. And I
will tell you so if you think in eighty seven your.
Speaker 3 (22:51):
Computers, Joe, the best class I ever had was typing
because it taught me how to use a keyboard.
Speaker 1 (22:58):
Yeah, it did, it did. And I guess they still
teach typing. I don't know if they do or not.
I know they teach a lot of information science classes
now and maybe yeah, no kid, so thumbs, yeah, and
I've got dumb thumb. So it's I'll miss misspell things
many times.
Speaker 2 (23:15):
At any rate.
Speaker 1 (23:16):
So Yeah, so if you're Leopolden Love.
Speaker 3 (23:18):
They had a typewriter, the type the note. Remember that
mantle didn't throw it away in parts, and they still
were able to find that and put it back together.
That was sixty years before.
Speaker 1 (23:26):
This, right, And so with those those those strikes on
a piece of paper, you might think that every single
typewriter in the world is the same. Let's just say
that I was. I was kind of uh, you know,
laughing a second deal about royal typewriters, but you know,
you think about the old manual typewriters. That strike that
(23:47):
takes place when you depress that button requires a lot
of force. You can actually strike it and it's going
to hit that tape that has the ink on it,
and you can have a light strike or a heart strike.
I know all of this because when I was at
the State Medical Examiner's Office, assigned there for like eight
months with the State Medical Examiner's Office in Georgia. My
(24:09):
office was immediately adjacent to the question document person, and
she and I became great friends. And I would sit
there and I was amazed at what she what she
the vast, her vast spectrum of learning everything from counterfeit
money to hand handwriting to two old typewriters, even computer stuff,
(24:31):
you know, at that at that point in time. So yeah,
you've got that bit of evidence, which would still be significant.
But look, you can have all the typed letters in
the world, but if you don't have a machine to
go back to. Now, there are certain machines out there
that generate a particular type of strike that would separate one,
(24:52):
like one particular brand from another. You know that that
might be something that you could go on, but you
would have to you know, and you can narrow it
down to say selectric, all right, and there's but how
many additions of selectric were made over the years, you
know that somebody could got you know, we can't even
begin to calculate.
Speaker 2 (25:13):
That you could find a fingerprint on the paper.
Speaker 1 (25:16):
Yeah you could again, I think I mentioned the other
day about the use of what you've got, Like one
of the ways you recover prints off of paper is
you can either use like ninhydrant spray or you can
use iodine as well, and that binds with it and
you can actually pick up on grassen I dine idne
(25:36):
raising raising latent prints on paper and it's beautiful. I
mean it's there forever and ever amen once you do
it though, So yeah, and the features are very unique.
Here's another piece to this, no pun intended. But with
the skeletal remains, let's say that he didn't have knowledge
(26:00):
of Professor Morgan's crock pots, all right, and what we
know to use in forensics and how anthropologists render things down, Well,
that leads me to think that if he's taking soft
tissue off, did he use a knife or some other
(26:21):
sharp object. Well, if he did that, then these bones
there's a high probability you'd have tool marks in various
locations on these bones, which is a gold mine. But again,
just like with the typewriter. Hell, just like with DNA,
if you don't have an original source of a knife,
(26:45):
of a typewriter, or somebody's DNA which you've collected, doesn't
initially have much value. So you know, we have this
(27:08):
presentation of the skeletal remains which arrive at the Humboldt
County Sheriff's office, along with a note, this kind of
cryptic note to again send the police out to a
specific location or recover remains. But Dave, something happened in
(27:30):
nineteen ninety three relative to this case, and I'm actually
kind of fascinated by this because what are the odds,
what are the odds that this particular partial element would
ever be discovered. It's almost like there's a hand of
providence on this.
Speaker 2 (27:48):
Why is it an anonymous person that founded?
Speaker 3 (27:51):
Joe?
Speaker 2 (27:51):
I'm curious about.
Speaker 3 (27:52):
That because the finder of this piece of skull, the
person who founded, is anonymous to us, and where they
found it is kind of.
Speaker 1 (28:04):
I would say it.
Speaker 2 (28:05):
Oh, they're impossible. Yeah, I mean I.
Speaker 3 (28:11):
Got some real questions about this that I'm not suitable
to ask, you know, I just really wonder, Joe, I mean,
does this not make you question everything?
Speaker 2 (28:19):
But you know about it?
Speaker 3 (28:20):
Because we know we got the first set mailed in
with the note to the second set? And now we
have part of a skull, and I'm assuming a couple
other bones, not just one little piece of bone here,
because how would you pick up one piece of bone
and it wouldn't think I got a human skull.
Speaker 2 (28:34):
I don't know how big it was to you? Was
it big?
Speaker 1 (28:36):
No? I don't know. It sounds like it was fragmented
and yeah, either well, there's any number of things that
could have happened. All right, Maybe the skull maybe the
skull or that portion of skull, because it was a
partial skull that was recovered. And if I'm not mistaken,
this skull, this part of the skull was actually found
(29:01):
uh on a beach area and what's referred to as
Trinidad Head one hundred miles away. Yeah, one hundred miles
away from her home. One hundred miles.
Speaker 2 (29:12):
So Trinidad Head. Is that a tip?
Speaker 1 (29:18):
Oh my gosh, I hadn't even considered that, Dave. Really,
you're in the wrong line of work, dude. That's yeah,
that's actually kind of fascinating, isn't it. And so you
we don't know who the finder is and they're never named,
but they found this, this partial of a skull, and
(29:40):
how that skull would make it back to the rest
of the remains again is kind of fascinating as well.
You know how, and I'm asking this in a, you know,
a kind of a generalized kind of way. How did
they connect these remains from Humboldt County to this partial
(30:02):
skull that's one hundred miles away. And the other thing
too here I can't get past the idea of that
note and those remains being mailed from San Francisco. You know,
I know, as a native California you can explain this
to us, because you know, those of us that are
(30:23):
uneducated geographically about California, we always hear the terms northern California.
It's northern California, Southern California. You're a Southern California, dude.
And so you've got northern California and this is northern California.
And I've driven up the coastal road there one on one.
There's a whole lot of northern California. Not to say
(30:44):
there's not a lot of southern California, but it's worth
to go the more isolated it is.
Speaker 3 (30:50):
I grew up in suburbia, you know. I grew up
where our second grade field trip, yeah, a dairy farm.
So we could see cows in person, Okay, actually see them,
because none of us had ever seen a cow. I mean,
where are we going to see a cow? We saw
kmart and we saw you know, and so that was
a big deal for us. And but you go to
(31:11):
northern California and they're slaughter and hogs where they go
to school. I mean, it's a big difference, you know,
And it's beautiful up there. It is breathtakingly beautiful as
those county.
Speaker 1 (31:20):
Yes it is. And you know, when I saw the
images of this Trinidad head as you as it's being
referred to as this location where this remnant is found,
it's and I urge anybody that's listening to this episode
go check out the images of this place. It's striking,
I mean absolutely striking. And that's still some great distance
(31:46):
from San Francisco. So and then to get even further,
if you get up to the area that's the town
of Eureka, which a lot of this is kind of
centered around relative to Humboldt County, that's still a great,
great drive up there as well. I mean you're talking
about a massive distance here when you couple all three
(32:07):
of these geographic points along the way. So how do
these remains get dispersed and how do they bring them
all back together collectively so that you can try to
try to come up with some kind of narrative about
what happened, because you know, you can look at us,
(32:28):
you can look at a skeleton, all right, and even
absent a head, all right, the skull forensic anthropologists who
are excellent at this. If you have a pelvis or
even part of a pelvis. They can actually look at
that pelvis and give you an idea if this is
a male or female. Generally, female pelvis is are wider
(32:51):
to accommodate a birth canal, and the males tend to
be more narrow. The bones with females are referred to
and I love this word. It's the term grassile. Grass
Isle actually refers it's kind of translates loosely into the
word for fine, like fine, delicate, that sort of thing.
(33:11):
Whereas with male skeletons, they're referred to as robust, you know,
and a lot of that hinges on, you know, facial
characteristics if you have a skull. But even with a
partial skull, trust me, anthropologists are going to take a
stab at it and they're going to try to put
all of this together. But however, they were able to
reconstitute these remains. When it comes down to brass tacks,
(33:34):
humbold County still had an unidentified and what they knew
as a female Jane Doe that was within their jurisdiction.
And I can only imagine, you know, and this is
the thing. You can have people that will call in
and report cases all right, they'll say, you know, my
mom's missing or my daughter is missing. But just because
(33:57):
you say they're missing doesn't mean that. Okay, nineteen eighty seven,
that's ninety seven, that's ten, two thousand and seven, that's twenty, twenty, seventeen,
thirty years after thirty years, is anybody going to remember
that there was one hundred person search team scouring the
area up there when she went missing? Is anybody going
(34:17):
to have a recollection of that? No, because so many
other things have happened since that time. The fact that
they were able to do this kind of reconstitution of
this skeleton and then come up with an actual name
is absolutely amazing, and that brings us to who.
Speaker 3 (34:38):
Dave Authorm Always back to Authorm when when I was
looking at this, Joe, and I was going back because
I was looking at the notes from ninety three, and
because you're talking to a lot of DNA. We're talking
about this the other day of the great strides that
had been made. But by ninety three they were pretty
set up to get a lot of information, a lot.
Speaker 2 (35:00):
A lot of it was new.
Speaker 3 (35:01):
Hill didn't always know what to do with it, but
it was there, and Authorn was able to Basically it
gets down to genetic genealogy again of we've got a link,
now let's find it back. And this is the part
that I always tell folks. Author is so amazing at this.
The work they do is so intense that they can't
even do it Like you and I work and we
(35:22):
considered our desk and work and do whatever for five
six seven hours. They do it at fifteen minutes at
a crack because it's such intense work that they have
to take be forced to.
Speaker 1 (35:32):
Take a break, yep.
Speaker 3 (35:33):
And I imagine they don't want to because each little
thing they pull back, it's like can you imagine being
on that hunt and each one you know, it's this is.
Speaker 1 (35:43):
We're that close, We're close.
Speaker 3 (35:45):
And it is that a level of thinking that I
cannot comprehend that that I'm thinking, you're so smart, How
are we still the same species?
Speaker 2 (35:53):
You know it?
Speaker 1 (35:54):
I know it seems like they've risen above a certain
of my pay grade. I can see some day someday
you and I are going to visit the woodlands in Texas.
It's the area just north of Houston. I'm going to
take you to that lab. And when you go to
Authorm's lab. It's like you're walking onto the deck of
the starship Enterprise. It is so amazing, and everything is
(36:17):
really locked down because they're work they're actively working cases
in there that have open investigations. You know, before you
can actually walk through the area, they literally have to
stop what they're doing and collect everything they're working on
and secure it and then you can walk through the area.
That's how that's how locked down this place is. And
(36:38):
but just to see the technology that they're using and
and the strides that they have made. And again, this
goes back to to k and it always comes back
to and I believe she is a victim here, even
though I cannot definitively say that she is a homicide victim.
(37:00):
There are so many things that are pointing to somebody
else's hand involved in this. And it seems like I've
used this term a lot lately. I don't know, it's
on my mind. Perhaps i'd say a sadist that would
do this because you're not you've had her remains, assuming
(37:22):
that what we believe is true, and you have particulated
her remains, you're rendering down her remains and you're literally
waving it in the face of law enforcement not to
mention and I hate to report this, but her husband too,
and you know he if I'm not mistaken, he died
just a few years ago and he never got to
(37:44):
see a resolution to this. Can you imagine going through
the rest of your life. And maybe he remarried, I
don't know, but still, even if he did remarry, that
question would always linger in the back of this poor
man's mind. And I can guarantee you there were people
around there and around this case that said, you know, quiet, quietly,
(38:05):
hush tones, Yeah, we think he had something to do
with it. There's always those people.
Speaker 3 (38:09):
You know, because Joe, we have such vagueness to the beginning. Yeah,
where you know, he went on a business trip and
he came back and his wife was gone. We don't
know when she was gone because we weren't looking for
her before he left. We don't know when he actually
left or when he came back. I mean, there's a
lot of unknowns there. But let's assume that they tied
(38:32):
all that down and we're able to say, hey, this,
you know, let's hope that she was there with him
at the airport and they took a picture as he
got on the plane. You know, that's what I would
hope that, because that's the only way you're going to
have that guy in the clear.
Speaker 2 (38:45):
Otherwise, what a miserable life of doubt.
Speaker 1 (38:49):
Yeah. Yeah, and it would always haunt you. You know.
I think about this case, and I think again, going
back to this idea, if we believe that that she
died at the hand end of another, which is of
course how we define a homicide. I reflect on this
and I think if this was La or even San Francisco,
(39:12):
you might say, well, yeah, you know, there's people here
that would break into somebody's house and do this sort
of thing. Sacramento that sort of thing. But Dave, where
they lived, by all accounts, it's so isolated. It seems
to me that whoever had an awareness that this couple
lived there would be very familiar, not only familiar with that,
(39:37):
but also familiar with the comings and goings of her
and her husband. Additionally, you brought up a great point,
and it really hit me like a ton of bricks
when you made the mention about the map and sending
those police out there to look for those remains. Was
(39:58):
he watching? Was he watching? I don't know, Maybe he was,
because if he has a sadistic meant he would probably
take great pleasure in doing that sort of thing. But
we do know this, We do know that part of
this puzzle, at least relative to who this victim was,
(40:23):
has been solved. The journey of any death investigation generally starts,
in my opinion, at least with the identification of a victim,
because if you learn who they are, that is the
first step on a long journey towards success, because once
you know who they are, you begin to explore who
(40:47):
their associates were. Who was it that she came in
contact with. Well, back in eighty seven, she was teaching
in a public school. She had contact with a lot
of people, students, parents, staff members, maybe the guy that
was coming to the school to deliver sodas, or the
(41:09):
people that will pull up in the truck and deliver
the food, or maybe the guy that hauled away the
trash at the school. See, in a small community, if
you work at a school, you probably have more contact
with individuals in that tiny community than anyone else that
might occupy that same space. So I think that that
is probably the starting place in this case, because at
(41:32):
this point in time, the husband who has unfortunately passed
on is not somebody you can go back and chat with.
But there are people to chat with. But again, a
big shout out to our friends at Authorm. They are doing,
in my estimation, God's work. I think that this is
(41:52):
the noblest thing that you can do as far as
death investigation goes. The reason and I always say this,
the reason that I belie leaving what they're doing is
I've stood over the graves of so many people that
were placed into potters Field with no name, simply an
aluminum band that's wrapped around their ankle, wrapped around the
(42:14):
wrist that's snapped in place. They're placed in a body
bag and thrown in an unmarked grave, and it just
says Jane Do or John Doe. So many of those
cases I stood over and watched them push the dirt in.
They're clearing these, my friends, They're clearing them, and you
can help clear them too. If you're interested in participating
(42:35):
in bringing a family out there peace to yourself favor,
log on to DNA solts dot com. You can go there.
You can pick out a case. Maybe it's in your region,
maybe it's a case. When you hear the background, it
kind of catches you. It grabs you by your heart
(42:59):
and you say, what I want to help with this,
and they'll take anything that you can give them. They're
not picky, all right, because they have to reach a
certain amount and it's like seven thousand to seventy five
hundred bucks just to get the ball rolling on this
Star Trek technology, as I'd mentioned, to move the case forward.
But you might be the person that pushes it over
(43:22):
the edge, and by virtue of a donation that you make,
you might bring peace to a family somewhere out there
that is always looking in an empty chair, that never
knows what happened to their loved one. I'm Joseph Scott
Morgan and this is Body Backs
Host
Joseph Scott Morgan
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