June 13, 2024 • 47 mins
In 1985 a skull and partial remains are found in a plastic bag near Channel Islands Harbor in Oxnard, California. Thinking the remains are from a recent victim, investigators work to solve what they think is a murder. Failing to identify the victim, the case goes cold. On this episode of Body Bags, Joseph Scott Morgan will explain how the scientists at Othram Labs developed a DNA extract from the evidence and were able to identify “Ventura County Jane Doe "as the victim of a grave robbing that happened after her death in 1915. Joseph Scott Morgan and Dave Mack will share the story of Gertrude Elliot-Littlehale, a woman born in 1864 and the amazing life she lived well before she became the unidentified “cold case” of “Ventura County Jane Doe”. Othram Labs is helping solve cases that seem unsolvable with the help of everyday people willing to make a small donation at DNASOLVES.COM Please take a moment of your time and visit DNASOLVES.COM and see how you can help solve a case.
Transcript Highlights
00:00:08 Introduction of Ventura County Jane Doe
00:03:44 Discussion of Skull found in a bag in 1985
00:07:19 Talk about history and DNA
00:11:58 Discussion identifying bodies
00:15:13 Talk about going from 1985 back to 1864
00:20:49 Discussion of dogs and old bones
00:24:14 Discussion of forensic anthropologist
00:29:04 Discussion of “suture lines”
00:33:03 Talk about solving crimes with DNA
00:38:20 Discussion of building a family tree
00:42:12 Discussion of “Gertie” and her life
00:46:50 Talk about Othram Labs
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:08):
Body bags with Joseph Scott Morgan alas poor York. I
knew him, Horatio, a fellow of infinite jest, of most
excellent fancy. He has borne me on his back a
(00:32):
thousand times, And now how abandoned in my imagination it is.
My gorge rises at it. Here hung those lips that
I have kissed. I know not how oft where be
(00:52):
your jibes, now your gambles, your songs, their flashes of
merriment that were wont to set the table on a roar.
That's the fifth act of Hamlet. That's a seminal moment
(01:19):
in that play where Prince Hamlet is actually considering the
skull that has been taken up by one of the
grave diggers in Hamlet's world, and he's considering it as
he stares into those empty sockets. It's a moment where
(01:39):
I think that Hamlet comes to a realization about his
mortality and the mortality of his family and everybody that's
around him. And he's also longing for something in the
past because York was the court jester, he was the
person that entertained everybody. He's saying old jokes. Today, we're
(02:04):
going to explore an absolutely fascinating case that involves a
skull not too dissimilar from York, but a skull also
that at one point in time in life produced fine sounds.
(02:28):
It produced musical education for many people that had never
been trained in music. Today, we're going to have a
discussion about the discovered skull of Gertrude Elliot little Hell.
(02:50):
I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is Body Bags, Dave.
I am so excited about this episode. I was of
recent with my buddy David Middleman of Authorm Labs in
the Woodlands, Texas, just north of Houston. We visited for
(03:14):
some time at Crime Con in Nashville and he laid
this case on me and I had to share it
with you because you love history as much as I do,
and you talk about dragging history, kicking and screaming into
the modern.
Speaker 2 (03:35):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (03:36):
I don't know of a case like this, certainly that
we've covered on Body Bags ever, ever, ever, at all.
Speaker 2 (03:44):
Everyone needs to hear this, Joe, Okay, everyone needs to
know that there was a skull partial remains found in
a bag in nineteen eighty five on the beach. Actually
it was on a small little channel island, but we're
talking Oxnard, calif Oxnard, not in the onion fields, Oxnard
by the beach in the water, right, a bag of
(04:06):
bones and the skull is in there. Nineteen eighty five.
So as police try to identify, Hey, we got a skull,
it's human. Got to figure out whose it is. So
nineteen eighty five, you're thinking probably in the last several years,
you know, it's because how does something end up in
(04:27):
a bag on the beach, right, And they do their
normal work that they would do in the mid eighties,
and they come up.
Speaker 1 (04:33):
With nothing with with the limitations of the eighties.
Speaker 2 (04:36):
Very limited compared to what we have now.
Speaker 1 (04:38):
Yeah, oh boy.
Speaker 2 (04:39):
But at the time they pretty they were feeling pretty
confident back in the mid eighties that they might be
able to figure out what's going on here. They didn't,
and it kind of sat there for a while when
they didn't have an immediate identification. Well, as the years
went on, it finally ends up with the National Missing
(04:59):
and Identified Person System name US. And this is like
in twenty sixteen. So you've got a skull found in
nineteen eighty five, cannot identify it, there is no ID.
But as things have advanced, NamUs has, hey, let's do
a remodeling, a reimagining of the skull and try to
(05:20):
put a face on this as somebody can recognize. It
could be a loved one, somebody they haven't seen in
a long time. Let's see what we can do. So
they did, and they did a clay rendering of the
skull and what it would look like as a face,
and they took pictures and they circulated it all around.
I mean, here's this unidentified person, the body found a
(05:40):
knight or the skull found in nineteen eighty five. Still nothing.
So Joseph Scott Morgan while we're at crime con says, dude,
you've got to see this. It's a skull found in
nineteen caleder ox in the color of Ventura County. Jane
Doe to Ventura County and he said, you're not going
(06:02):
to believe this, you know, you just this this goes
beyond what we know about body bags as a show.
So and in this particular case, we actually do have
what's left of a body in a bag. So body
bags the skull, called Jane Do. And after again nineteen
eighty five, Joe, and by the way, just so you know,
(06:23):
when you think, Hey, that was just a mid eighty's
not that long ago. Well, actually thirty nine years ago. Now, friends,
if you graduated from high school in nineteen eighty four, yes,
your fortieth anniversary is this year. Okay, you're red.
Speaker 1 (06:38):
It's around the corner here.
Speaker 2 (06:40):
Your party of three union is happening this summer right
before fall homecoming football game. Yes, you're old, Margaret, you know.
Speaker 1 (06:46):
Let's let's grind it in there. Hey, I got to
tell you something when you know I've I've known David
for a few months now. I actually got to visit
ofthrom Labs, and I think we've talked about this before,
but I've got to tell you first off, for those
that have not met David, he is and I am not.
(07:13):
I don't think that I am overstepping my assessment here.
David is arguably, Yeah, I can say this one of
the brightest people I have ever encountered. And when it
comes to DNA, Dave, I want you to hear me. Man,
This man, as far as I'm concerned, is at the
(07:37):
same the same He's in the same strata as Elon Musk.
He is that brilliant specific to DNA, and you know
what and he has got this is a cool thing
about it. He has got a heart of gold in
the sense that he understands the power of the tool
(08:01):
that he wields. And people, there are a lot of
people out there that say or think of themselves as
doing good. He is one of these true individuals that
is an altruist. He is truly an altruist because his
goal is to get the unidentified identified. It's not simply
(08:25):
about solving crimes. It is helping people, Dave. And I
say all that to tell you, as you know, as
brilliant as David is, when he told me about this case,
you could see in his eyes they were literally sparkling,
because so, what are the odds going back all the
(08:50):
way to nineteen eighty five and then moving forward through
sixteen and all of the attempts to try to figure
this thing out.
Speaker 2 (08:58):
Well, and it's kind of interesting to point out, you know,
just so you guys know, Joe had talked to me
about David Middleman and authorm and we both have I'm
familiar with it, probably more than most, but not nearly
as much as those in the industry, nearly as much
as you. But I was glad you kind of gave
me a little background on David Middleman and what kind
of a person he is, how he thinks, and things
(09:19):
like that, because if you remember, you guys were talking
in the VIP room at Crime Con and I'm just
I'm Dave Mac the radio idiot, you know, I just, hey,
how you doing good to see give me a hug.
And that's not David Middleman. If he doesn't know you,
he's going to look right through you because he doesn't
have time to mess with idiots, and he could sense
right away that guy's an idiot, and he just I mean,
(09:42):
it was like, okay, I'm going to be really polite
for what I have to endure. Now here's the beauty
of this. I knew this ahead of time. I knew
it going in, but I didn't know who it was.
I never met him before, and you were talking to
his wife.
Speaker 1 (09:53):
Yeah, Kristen is equally as brilliant. What a oh my gosh,
what a team man.
Speaker 2 (10:00):
I was so glad you had told me about them,
because when I realized, like you said, after I bum
rushed you and realized I just stepped into a really
intense intellectual conversation that I'm not allowed to partake because
I'm an idiot, and I realized I'm out numbered here.
So I realized quickly to get out before I was
found out, And which was the goal. You know, if
(10:21):
you're if you don't play on the same field as
other people, you got two choices. Prove you're an idiot
and stay there or leave. I grabbed my bagel and
went on down the road. But having noted that David
Middleman is that level of brilliance and his wife as well,
and what they're doing with Authram, believe me when I
tell you, friends, I thought that it was funded by
(10:44):
I don't know where.
Speaker 1 (10:45):
I thought.
Speaker 2 (10:45):
I actually thought maybe these types of places like Authorm
have like funding from I don't know, the unicorn. You
know that they have like this pot of gold at
the end of the rainbow, and they just delve into
it to do these incredible things. The science that they're
doing and that you know is there's so much science
that that takes place in the world today that has
no real world application for you and me. It does
(11:07):
for science, but not in our daily life. What Authorm
is doing is they're actually providing answers to people who
have questions about a loved one, they're actually doing good work,
they're actually changing lives, they're actually doing things that not
even that long ago couldn't even have been imagined by
(11:30):
the best think tank in the world.
Speaker 1 (11:32):
And you're you're up in you're up in that strata.
I think when you begin to consider this as maybe
when we were kids and we were watching Star Trek
and they went into the transporter room and they flipped
a switch and everybody just kind of kind of disintegrates
(11:55):
and then reintegrates on the other end, and you think
that that's that's not possible. And obviously that's not possible
right now.
Speaker 2 (12:04):
In our minds, he probably already hasn't figured out.
Speaker 1 (12:07):
He probably does. He he is just that brilliant. And look,
they they have to this point really provided answers. They're
they're up, they're up the altitude right now, these cases
that they've provided are in excess of three hundred. But
(12:27):
when you consider how many of these unidentified bodies out there,
this is just this is just the start. And the
reason it kind of really pricks my heart, I think
is as a former death investigator, a medical legal death investigator,
Dave I stood over so many remains during the course
(12:50):
of my career that I had no idea. I had
no idea who this was. And unfortunately, you know, many
of the remains went into what we referred to as
a potter's field where and I've seen it, you know,
where the ground was trenched out. We would hold onto
remains as long as we could from a storage standpoint,
(13:13):
and they'd be mass buried. It was almost it had
this kind of it was. It was ominous to see it.
You know, you see images from like war zones where
people are being buried on masks and that might be
placed into a bag to have the dead, we'll have
these aluminum If you have an intact remain, we'll have
(13:37):
an aluminum idbate bracelet that's put around the wrist, one
that's put around the ankle, and they're placed into disaster
poles or body back and they're buried, you know, along
along the link of this trench. I've seen that actually happen.
I've borne witness to it, and it's the saddest thing.
And so many of these people, I thought, if I
(13:59):
could have just had answers. I actually had a discussion
with somebody a number of years ago that was working
at AFIP which back then was it. It doesn't exist
in the current format, but it's the Armed Forces Institute
of Pathology, you know, what they told me to I
was amazed by this. Did you know that we had
(14:22):
so many unidentified dead in the Civil War that a
lot of those skeletal remains were collected And to this day,
many of those remains remain in cardboard boxes and their
own shelves in DC and they can't they can't. The
(14:43):
story was, they will hold on to them for as
long as they can because they can't give these individuals
proper military burials. And I was fascinated by that, you know,
because there's a lot of unknown soldier graves out there
and all that sort of thing. And I was thinking,
in my wild the dreams, I was thinking, why wouldn't
that be something if if you could take technology like
(15:07):
this and apply it genetically to these unidentified remains that
we're holding right now and find maybe there's there's a
lineage there that you could trace down and try to determine.
You know, my family, my family as a result of
Civil War. I have two ancestors that never returned and
(15:29):
they never knew what happened to them, and so for me.
You know, I began to think about this, and then
I think about Gertrude. Don't you love that name?
Speaker 2 (15:38):
It's a great name.
Speaker 1 (15:39):
It is a great name. I began to think about Gertrude.
Speaker 2 (15:43):
By the way, Gertrude is the name of the venture
county Jane. Do yeah mentioned your name yet?
Speaker 1 (15:48):
And the fascinating thing about it is that Gertrude was
born in eighteen sixty four. The Civil War back East
was still raging. There were people dying and being killed
by the bushel. But today today we finally have some
(16:11):
answers about an incredible mystery. Dave, I have to make
(16:33):
a confession. I love old names. Well, I've got a
lot of them in my family. My grandmother, who I
referenced on this program multiple times, one of the sweetest
souls that ever walked the face of the planet, as
far as I'm concerned. She had I guess, I don't
(16:55):
know what it be called an antique name. It was
it was her Her name was Pearl. I had an
aunt named Roxy Unice. I'm not too particularly fond of
that Unice myrtle Wanita, which still is used today. And
then I've had Rubies and all kinds of these interesting
(17:17):
names that they.
Speaker 2 (17:17):
Use, all the characters used in a Jim Croche song.
Speaker 1 (17:21):
Yeah, exactly, and they go back years and years. But
you know, the subject of today's episode led this remarkable
life for a woman that was born right in the
heart of the Victorian era here in the US, born
(17:43):
actually in Stockton, California.
Speaker 2 (17:47):
Day And you know, when we look at Ventura County
Jane Do, her skull found in nineteen eighty five in
a bag. When it was first discovered and turned into police,
they thought that maybe we're investigating a murder. You know,
(18:07):
maybe this is somebody who has been recently killed and
somebody stashed the body. There's all kinds of things police
are looking at. But as they started investigating, they couldn't
find anything that fit. And again, this is nineteen eighty five,
and as we mentioned earlier, it took years to get
to the point where they could identify who this person was. So, Joe,
how is it possible that I find a skull in
(18:29):
nineteen eighty five and you're telling me that this Ventura
County Jane Do is a woman named Gertrude and that
she was born during the Civil War. How do we
go from nineteen eighty five to eighteen sixty four, And
I have you said nineteen sixty four, I was like, okay,
twenty one year old female, Okay, I got that. But
(18:50):
now we're talking one hundred and twenty one years old.
Speaker 1 (18:54):
Yeah, isn't that quite something? And you know there was
an effort made back then to run through the normal
course of an investigation. Whenever you find a skull?
Speaker 2 (19:05):
What is that normal thing, Joe? What happens if today?
If today, while I'm in the woods next door, walking
around with my grandson, and I find let's say a
partial skelet Let's say I find a skull in a
bag out in my forest right here, right, And I mean,
I'm alvious. I'm going to call somebody. I guess I'm
not calling Ghostbusters. I'm going to call the county.
Speaker 1 (19:24):
And hey, you're going to punch in non Actually i'd.
Speaker 2 (19:27):
Be calling you and James Shellna. Those are my first
two calls.
Speaker 1 (19:31):
Don't call me, please, Joe? What do? What do I do?
Speaker 2 (19:35):
Have a dead body here?
Speaker 1 (19:36):
Call me and get a recommendation. My right, My My
recommendation will be three digits, not one one. And that's it.
Speaker 2 (19:43):
I call Nancy Gracio day. You need an attorney, get
one now.
Speaker 1 (19:47):
Uh yeah. So if you if you do find a
h even any element of what you believe is a human,
a human sculptor, remain the most important thing you can do,
even if it turns out because the lines share people
that find a skeletal remain I've had this happen are
(20:07):
not finding human remains most of the time. It's amazing.
It seems like the most of the remains that I
would have people show up to the medical examiner's office
with or I would be summoned out on turned out
to be hog bones most of the time. And hog yeah,
some type of pig that had been barbecued and they
(20:30):
had been they'd been tossed away. You know. It's yeah,
I know, it's it's one of those things where you're
generally not going to come across it. You know, who
finds more human remains than humans are dogs, and this
happens a lot. Dogs love dogs love skulls, and they
(20:52):
will pick up a skull. I cannot tell you how
many of these cases I've got, some actually as morbid
as it is, some kind of humor stories behind these
these events. But I would have families that would say,
oh my god, I looked out in the yard and
you know, uh, you know, Fido is playing with a skull.
(21:15):
Can you imagine this? Well, what does a skull look like? Well,
to a dog, first off, it looks like a ball.
Have you ever seen a dog take a ball and
put it between their paws and play with it and
that sort of thing. And also secondarily, they're at a
you know, at a very base level, they're seeking protein.
That's what that's what carnivores do. Uh. They want to
(21:37):
bite into that bone, and they'll gnaw on these bones.
And they've got these you know, skulls have real weird
kind of angles, uh, and they will wrap their paws
around them and begin to gnaw on bones. So this
is not unusual. But this is not the case with
Gertrude remains. You actually find them in a back and
(21:57):
that that goes to proof that first off, some other
human has handled this item, because skulls just don't wind
up in a bag, all right, particularly in a modern
context like this, and it's tossed away. So when we
would go to a scene, if we had a single
(22:17):
skeletal element, we have to work on the assumption that
there are other remains around there, and you go to
where that skull is located, that is essentially ground zero,
and everything else radiates out from that where you're searching
this entire area for any other skeletal remains, because look,
(22:40):
you've got a human skull. Why do you have a
human skull? Why is it not buried somewhere or in
case somewhere, Why is it not in a mausoleum, or
why is it not in a coffin six feet under?
So you have major questions and it's a horrific thing
to come across, obviously, but for a forensic scientist, it's
(23:05):
very intriguing.
Speaker 2 (23:06):
Joe, how do you get to that point with where
you have a skull and you actually do start the
identification process as they did in nineteen eighty five finding
a skull in a bag, the normal process? What would
it be because not everybody a lot. It costs money
to go and do a lot of the DNA testing,
(23:28):
and this is beyond that because you are dealing with
a skull, you're not dealing with the whole body. Yeah,
where does you begin?
Speaker 1 (23:35):
Well, okay, let's go back to nineteen eighty five. We're
just in the wake of Sir Alec Jeffrey, who was
the first person to actually apply in a real sense
DNA technology DNA science to crom science. Okay, so that's
where that kind of so we're literally, you know, kind
(23:57):
of in the immediate wake of that nineteen eighty five.
This is still brand new technology and it had not
it had not kind of filtered down. And Sir Alex
is actually a bread So that's where it was first used.
And so it's you. It hasn't made it. I'll put
it to this way. It hasn't made it at stock
(24:18):
in California at this point in time and nineteen eighty five,
So what we would have done back then is first
thing you do, you're going to reach out to a
forensic anthropologist and they're to this is what they're going
to do. They're going to race, they're going to sex,
they're going to age and assess for any kind of
(24:40):
trauma that skull. That's what they're going to do. So
they're going to try to just visually because races are
different and the morphology of their skulls, there are certain
markers that anthropologists look for. They're not as distinct as
they used to be because you have a lot of
(25:02):
genetic overlap nowadays as opposed in the past where there
was this kind of separation. So it's kind of a
finer science. Now you have this idea of sex, and
sex again is one of these things that's I guess
some people could say that it is kind of subjective,
(25:24):
but there's a lot of considerations that anthropologists run through
this list of things where these markers that they're looking
for that would give you an indication of a skull
and in determination of gender with a skull, what we're
looking for in that sense. And I love these terms
that anthropologists used. That we use the term robust when
(25:48):
referring to a male skull. And here's a term that
not everybody hears on a regular basis when it comes
to female skulls, that we use the term grassisle and
grass isle actually means fine. You know, like you and
I we you and I have these kind of protuberant
brow lines, you know, as males kind of robust up here,
(26:11):
the bony prominence on the back of our skull, the excipitable, uh,
protuberance that's back there. They're kind of they're there, you know,
you can see it. You know, you know where you know, uh,
we're that way. Whereas a female skull that would come
from similar races, that similar ages, is going to have
(26:36):
a finer appearance to it. So you'll have this kind
of grass ale nature that's not robust, you know, like
a male skull, it's going to be a bit finer.
And so that's that's one of the things that they
would have done back then. And then they're going to
look at age, age at the time of death. So
let's see, how can we describe this. One of the
(26:57):
first things that you look for if their teeth. You
look for wear patterns in the teeth. You know, you
can determine what side of the mouth somebody chews on,
for instance, And I ask my kids at Jacksonville State
all the time when I'm teaching, I do it. I
teach a class called Clandestine Graves and it's a blend
of obviously clandestine burials, but also forensic anthropology and also osteology.
(27:21):
And I'll ask them, okay, everybody, take the tip of
your tongue and run it along the surface of your
teeth right now, can you determine which side of the
mouth your mouth you dependently chew chew with and most
people are right, they chew on the right side, and
so the wear pattern on the teeth will be worn
down more on that side as opposed to the left. Now,
as we get older, teeth begin to wear down. That's
(27:43):
one of the ways we age age skulls. Also, where
our sutures fuse together at the top of our head.
You know, you think about the font andels that babies
the soft spots. You've got one that's antiar and posterior
front in the back well that fuse together. And you know, Dave,
after a period of time, those little lines that you
(28:05):
see any kind of skull that you see, like there'll
be a model of it, like at Halloween. You know,
you can see the skull and they have these little
lines on those are those are suture lines. That's what
they're referred to as, and it's where the skull kind
of locks together. All over a period of time through life,
those areas begin to wear down and you actually have
(28:25):
something that's referred to as suture line of bliteration. So
the more that those are worn down, the more that
those are worn down, you know, the older the person is.
You've even got them on the roof of your mouth.
I did a study at one point Tom on what
was it called palatine suture line obliteration, and I presented
(28:48):
a paper or talk. When Tom and your palaton suture
that's that's in the roof of your mouth, what would
commonly be you You actually have suture lines in the
roof of your mouth, just chewing your mouth moving all
these years. And it seems very subtle in life. But
there's where I mean, if you just take if you
grab a handful of your hair, or pressure your fingers
(29:11):
down onto your scalp and move it back and forth,
that seems very passive. But just imagine how many times
you smile, you frown, you raise your eyebrows over the
course of your life, the suture lines begin to wear. Okay,
So back then in nineteen eighty five, that's one of
(29:32):
the things that that's really the singular tool that they
would have had to have worked with. And I can
almost predict what had happened at Ventura County at the
Medical Examiner's office. Dave that skull had been sitting on
a shelf, and they probably convened a committee at the
(29:53):
Medical Examiner's office, and you know, a few years later, Look,
we've had how many how many you know, hey, hey folks,
how many unidentified remains do we have? And they've got
a log of them, trust me, and they'll go through
it and say, oh wow, this is the oldest. Let's
see if we can dig into this a little bit.
Now it's twenty sixteen, all these years later, let's see
if technology will reveal anything. The problem is is that
(30:18):
when they first started, I might catch him flag for this,
but I don't really care. The clay modeling. Now, I
don't have much of an artistic eye, but it's rare
that I will see a clay model rendering that looks
spot on to anybody. But here's the rope with this
(30:39):
as well. That clay model that they were trying to
breathe life back into that person had been dead for
over a century. I think that what many people might
(31:12):
not know about Dave and I we both love old movies.
Particularly We're always throwing lines from from mel Brooks movies
back and forth at one another. And I think I
can speak for you, Dave. One of your favorites is,
as is mine, is young Frankenstein or frankf. Einstein. There
(31:34):
you are an igor and you know, one of the
one of the essential pieces to that hilarious movie is
that they're trying to create the Frankenstein monster and grave
robbery is involved in that. And isn't there some indication
that that's what's involved case.
Speaker 2 (31:56):
In this case? Look, you have a skull fan in
a back in nineteen eighty five. It takes twenty one
years before they can even do the clay, had, you know,
the reimagining of what this person may have looked like.
And twenty one years from the time the skull is found,
and that's all they really have. And it took a tip.
Speaker 1 (32:17):
When it comes to Gertrude. They did have a lead
on grave robbers, didn't they.
Speaker 2 (32:22):
And that was the tip. I think that was a
tip that was called in And ultimately once they realized
they were dealing with somebody not of you know, not
recent and I think it opened them up because, like
I said, the clay, the whole idea of doing the
clay in twenty sixteen was hoping somebody would recognize this person.
And it's at the age that they think that the
(32:43):
person died and does anybody is this your daughter, your mom,
your aunt, whatever, Assuming it was a contemporary skull. But
then they did get a tip and that opened them
up to okay, now we got to really look. But
they had to go the DNA route, and it was
this is what really fascinates me. It's the DNA that
(33:04):
we hear about all the time solving crimes, but in
this case, it's not just the DNA, because the investigators
had to take the information they were getting back about
the DNA and then tracing it back, they had to
find something in compare it to yes, we have DNA
out of this skull, but it doesn't mean anything unless
(33:24):
somebody else has either put something up that could be found,
you know, twenty three ande meters or whatever. I mean,
there are so many things that are not happening for
every person on planet Earth. Where do you go? So
they end up having to go to Authorm. And the
part that bothers me, Joe, and I really mean this
(33:46):
that Authorm has to crowdfund if it's like or I do,
if it's my relative, if it's something I'm working on
that they don't have. And I did think that there
was for some reason. You know, we hear so many,
so many people of great wealth that donate money to
worthy causes, and I'm thinking this is something that should
be so funded. These people should these are the first
(34:09):
people on planet Earth that should have flying cars. That's
the kind of work they're doing. You know, they have
everything and they don't.
Speaker 1 (34:16):
Yeah, I know, and you want to you want to
try to aid with this as much as you can.
And but you know, that's that's the beauty of what
AUTHRM has developed. David. David has a very specific methodology
that he has developed over and I urge everybody to
visit authorm's website authroom dot com. And what what was
(34:41):
applied here was UH a methodology that that David has
developed called forensic grade genome sequencing. And so with this,
this this tool that this man has created is almost
my un blowing. He can take he can actually take
(35:05):
samples from a skull that is this old day UH
and be able to render it down so that he
can extricate a DNA sample from this. And from this,
they build this out, They build it out because at Authoram,
not only do they have these scientists that work at
a level that I really cannot intellectually appreciate. I'm not
(35:28):
at I'm not at that level.
Speaker 2 (35:30):
You were telling me they can only work for forty
five minutes on it.
Speaker 1 (35:33):
They do so in Yeah, it's very intense, it's labor intensive.
We're you're talking about doing these fine skills. You know
that they're and they have to be very very careful.
And it's like being in a surgery suite. You have
the potential to contaminate everything. Wow. So when you go there,
you see them, they're they're liking spacesuits. Man, I mean,
(35:53):
it's I know that sounds it sounds fantastical, it's but
they're they're no, really, and and they David and Kristen
have created this environment to facilitate all of this. And man,
let me tell you, they've built this thing up from
the ground up. Now, they obviously have investors that are
(36:17):
helping them, but you know, on day to day cases
they need assistance. And so when it comes to Gertrude,
when David's team utilized this forensic grade genome sequencing methodology,
they actually have genetic sciences that are there working these cases.
They've got another section within that laboratory, Dave, that are genealogists.
(36:41):
I mean, can you he employs full time genealogists. How
amazing is that, so they take.
Speaker 2 (36:47):
That's what you would have to have with this though, and.
Speaker 1 (36:49):
You would have to you're going to be walking around
in the dark without a genealogist as a part of
this because they their worldview. You take the complexity of
this kind of genomic mapping that's going on and development
of you know, through the sequencing that they do, and
that's all grand, and it's all fine, but how are
(37:11):
you going to plug it in? Well, they've got a
couple of open source databases. Twenty three and meters, by
the way, is not part of it, okay, but there
are these open source databases which are limiting that people
have donated genetic samplitude and Dave, they were actually able
(37:32):
to find Gertrude's relatives.
Speaker 2 (37:35):
That's what got me about the actual investigation that goes
into this, beyond just the DNA. A lot of us
tend to think, well, they have DNA, what else do
they need? And it's like, because we're not all in
and data, you know, we're there are those of us
in the political paranoids that think everything we have is
being monitored by government it's own level. But when it
(37:55):
comes to actually doing it in real world stuff, it
doesn't exist, and these people have figured out, these people
meaning scientists, the genomists and all that, that they get
together and build the genealogy of a family tree based
on a skull that was found in Ventura County, California,
that was in a bag with rocks in it to
soak it to the bottom of the of the channel
where it was found. It boggles my mind. But Joe,
(38:20):
how once they're able to start finding the building the
family tree, and they were given a tip that there
had been a grave robbing and that this skull may
have been part of that. I have yet to find
out why. I don't know the why. I know the
grave robbing tip came in and I know police were
able to utilize that in finding out what really transpired.
(38:41):
But do we don't know why they why this grave
was disturbed or even when do we know?
Speaker 1 (38:46):
And I've worked cases of grave robbery before. Yeah, they're horrible.
I mean, they're absolutely horrible, and people do it for
any number of reasons. You have these people that are
out there that think that they're going to go conduct
some kind of serah, so they revictimize families by virtue
of and what they're involved in I'll say it very plainly.
(39:08):
This is desecration. Yeah, this is desecration of a tomb.
And in Gertrude's case, they had a family mausoleum. So
you've got remains dave that are presumably above ground. So
remember how I mentioned like groundwater impacting mains and all that,
that's not what you have necessarily in this case, you
(39:30):
have somebody that is actually going into into a mausoleum.
And you know, I know I run on about New Orleans,
my hometown, but for those of you within the sound
of my voice, if you've ever driven through New Orleans,
one of the things we're famous for our graves. We
have above ground graves because the water is it's it,
(39:51):
you know, like I said, it destroys everything that we
can't bury because we're beneath sea level there, so you
have to bury above ground. And what happened and what
has happened in previous cases, you know they will. They
will intrude into like a family mausoleum, make it through
the door, the access door, which is no small feat.
(40:12):
Some of these things are built like bank faults. You
have the purpose to do this. And then if you've
ever looked inside of mausoleum, their works of art. I've
seen some of the most beautiful, beautiful press with stained
glass windows and all this stuff in marble. And they'll
go in and they'll take a sledgehammer. I don't we
don't know that that's necessarily the case here, but they'll
(40:33):
take a sledgehammer and they'll knock the side or the
front out of one, depend upon how the the crypt
is set up, and they'll knock a hole in it
and then begin to pull things out of it. All right,
And isn't that horrible when you begin to think about it.
And that apparently is what happened in Gertrude's case, And
(40:54):
they were able to build out, build out this genetic
structure through Authraam's Authoram's methodology, and they came up. Now,
we didn't Gertrude did have a daughter, didn't she?
Speaker 2 (41:10):
Well, actually, okay, once we were able to get all
of this found out. She was born in eighteen sixty
four in California to Glenn Elliott and Lyman Weston Elliott.
She had a sister, Louise and a brother, Theodore. Gertie,
as she was called, married James Merritt Littlehall. Together they
had a daughter, Louise, in nineteen oh eight. Sadly, Gertie
(41:32):
died in nineteen fifteen at the age of fifty. She's
got a seven year old daughter. Okay, so she was
a little on the old side for having a child.
Speaker 1 (41:41):
Uh tickle on during note that day and age.
Speaker 2 (41:43):
Yeah, yeah, I mean in her forties when she has
her child.
Speaker 1 (41:46):
Do you know what it took her so long to
have a child? I don't know if you know that,
I got it. This is a this is a huge
reveal here.
Speaker 2 (41:52):
Okay.
Speaker 1 (41:54):
In my earlier comments about Yorick, York was an entertainer, right,
he was the court jester that touched Hamlet's life. Gertie
actually was a highly regarded and accomplished musician and vocalist.
(42:17):
Her parents, now imagine this trip. They were from Stockton, California.
They put this child after she graduated high school in sixteen.
They put this child, I guess, on a train and
sent her to Boston and she studied at the Boston
Conservatory there, did that for two years, and did this,
(42:37):
got on a boat and went to Europe and studied
at multiple other locations there before she finally came back
home and became this fantastic sought after musician and vocalist
where she would teach voice training and musicianship. And so
she had lived this incredible life, particularly for a woman
(43:01):
during the let's face friend of Victorian era, and which
just makes all the more fascinating that out of all
the graves in the world that they they did, that's
the one they did. And so she she you know,
you've got this this person who made a mark during
their their short, very period of time, this very short
(43:23):
period of time of their life fifty years, and she
was remarkable in that sense. Now you take what Othrom
has done and she is now in the news again
because this just has dropped and she's made another mark
after well in excess of one hundred years.
Speaker 2 (43:47):
There's some peace in that knowing, but it's such a
deep sadness to know that your relative sat unidentified as
Ventia County Janeko, thinking she was somebody that had been
killed recently in the eighties, even that's what they thought,
and finding out she was historically significant.
Speaker 1 (44:04):
Yes, and you know, Dave, it is very sad. But
you know what, here's the cool thing about this. There's
actually a bit of hope here. There's actually something that
we can come away from this story that gives us
all hope, and certainly people that have like myself, that
(44:28):
have stood over the unidentified for all of these years.
The hope is is that now there can be answers
for you know, I think maybe what we thought was
going to be an unsolvable puzzle for so many years,
and it comes in the form of the Middlemans. It
(44:52):
comes in the form of this organization that has been
created with AUTHORM. I have people that approach me all
the time saying that I wish there was something I
could do. I wish there was something I could do
because I've always been fascinated by forensics. I've always been
(45:12):
fascinated by detective work. Well, saddle up, here's your opportunity.
Here's your opportunity to do this. I would urge everyone
to visit dnasolves dot com. That's d n A s
(45:34):
l v e S dot com, DNA Solves. Visit that website.
This is where you can see the cases that are
currently waiting to be worked, those cases that there are
no answers to. This is your opportunity to fully engage.
(45:58):
And it doesn't matter. You can donate money, you can
and it doesn't have to be tons and tons of money,
all right, just a few bucks. There's a way to contribute.
It's going to be tax deductible. Get in contact with them.
Get in contact with them, look over the cases, find
one that you're interested in, and lend a hand. Listen,
(46:21):
you have the ability and you have the power to
do something that somebody like me never had the chance
to do. I tried to provide answers for those that remained,
and I failed many times because of my limitations. My friends,
(46:43):
those limitations are beginning to fall away. Here's your chance.
Dig in, help these folks out as best you can,
and again visit DNA solves dot com. I'm Joseph Scott
Morgan and this is body Bags MHM
Body bags with Joseph Scott Morgan alas poor York. I
knew him, Horatio, a fellow of infinite jest, of most
excellent fancy. He has borne me on his back a
(00:32):
thousand times, And now how abandoned in my imagination it is.
My gorge rises at it. Here hung those lips that
I have kissed. I know not how oft where be
(00:52):
your jibes, now your gambles, your songs, their flashes of
merriment that were wont to set the table on a roar.
That's the fifth act of Hamlet. That's a seminal moment
(01:19):
in that play where Prince Hamlet is actually considering the
skull that has been taken up by one of the
grave diggers in Hamlet's world, and he's considering it as
he stares into those empty sockets. It's a moment where
(01:39):
I think that Hamlet comes to a realization about his
mortality and the mortality of his family and everybody that's
around him. And he's also longing for something in the
past because York was the court jester, he was the
person that entertained everybody. He's saying old jokes. Today, we're
(02:04):
going to explore an absolutely fascinating case that involves a
skull not too dissimilar from York, but a skull also
that at one point in time in life produced fine sounds.
(02:28):
It produced musical education for many people that had never
been trained in music. Today, we're going to have a
discussion about the discovered skull of Gertrude Elliot little Hell.
(02:50):
I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is Body Bags, Dave.
I am so excited about this episode. I was of
recent with my buddy David Middleman of Authorm Labs in
the Woodlands, Texas, just north of Houston. We visited for
(03:14):
some time at Crime Con in Nashville and he laid
this case on me and I had to share it
with you because you love history as much as I do,
and you talk about dragging history, kicking and screaming into
the modern.
Speaker 2 (03:35):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (03:36):
I don't know of a case like this, certainly that
we've covered on Body Bags ever, ever, ever, at all.
Speaker 2 (03:44):
Everyone needs to hear this, Joe, Okay, everyone needs to
know that there was a skull partial remains found in
a bag in nineteen eighty five on the beach. Actually
it was on a small little channel island, but we're
talking Oxnard, calif Oxnard, not in the onion fields, Oxnard
by the beach in the water, right, a bag of
(04:06):
bones and the skull is in there. Nineteen eighty five.
So as police try to identify, Hey, we got a skull,
it's human. Got to figure out whose it is. So
nineteen eighty five, you're thinking probably in the last several years,
you know, it's because how does something end up in
(04:27):
a bag on the beach, right, And they do their
normal work that they would do in the mid eighties,
and they come up.
Speaker 1 (04:33):
With nothing with with the limitations of the eighties.
Speaker 2 (04:36):
Very limited compared to what we have now.
Speaker 1 (04:38):
Yeah, oh boy.
Speaker 2 (04:39):
But at the time they pretty they were feeling pretty
confident back in the mid eighties that they might be
able to figure out what's going on here. They didn't,
and it kind of sat there for a while when
they didn't have an immediate identification. Well, as the years
went on, it finally ends up with the National Missing
(04:59):
and Identified Person System name US. And this is like
in twenty sixteen. So you've got a skull found in
nineteen eighty five, cannot identify it, there is no ID.
But as things have advanced, NamUs has, hey, let's do
a remodeling, a reimagining of the skull and try to
(05:20):
put a face on this as somebody can recognize. It
could be a loved one, somebody they haven't seen in
a long time. Let's see what we can do. So
they did, and they did a clay rendering of the
skull and what it would look like as a face,
and they took pictures and they circulated it all around.
I mean, here's this unidentified person, the body found a
(05:40):
knight or the skull found in nineteen eighty five. Still nothing.
So Joseph Scott Morgan while we're at crime con says, dude,
you've got to see this. It's a skull found in
nineteen caleder ox in the color of Ventura County. Jane
Doe to Ventura County and he said, you're not going
(06:02):
to believe this, you know, you just this this goes
beyond what we know about body bags as a show.
So and in this particular case, we actually do have
what's left of a body in a bag. So body
bags the skull, called Jane Do. And after again nineteen
eighty five, Joe, and by the way, just so you know,
(06:23):
when you think, Hey, that was just a mid eighty's
not that long ago. Well, actually thirty nine years ago. Now, friends,
if you graduated from high school in nineteen eighty four, yes,
your fortieth anniversary is this year. Okay, you're red.
Speaker 1 (06:38):
It's around the corner here.
Speaker 2 (06:40):
Your party of three union is happening this summer right
before fall homecoming football game. Yes, you're old, Margaret, you know.
Speaker 1 (06:46):
Let's let's grind it in there. Hey, I got to
tell you something when you know I've I've known David
for a few months now. I actually got to visit
ofthrom Labs, and I think we've talked about this before,
but I've got to tell you first off, for those
that have not met David, he is and I am not.
(07:13):
I don't think that I am overstepping my assessment here.
David is arguably, Yeah, I can say this one of
the brightest people I have ever encountered. And when it
comes to DNA, Dave, I want you to hear me. Man,
This man, as far as I'm concerned, is at the
(07:37):
same the same He's in the same strata as Elon Musk.
He is that brilliant specific to DNA, and you know
what and he has got this is a cool thing
about it. He has got a heart of gold in
the sense that he understands the power of the tool
(08:01):
that he wields. And people, there are a lot of
people out there that say or think of themselves as
doing good. He is one of these true individuals that
is an altruist. He is truly an altruist because his
goal is to get the unidentified identified. It's not simply
(08:25):
about solving crimes. It is helping people, Dave. And I
say all that to tell you, as you know, as
brilliant as David is, when he told me about this case,
you could see in his eyes they were literally sparkling,
because so, what are the odds going back all the
(08:50):
way to nineteen eighty five and then moving forward through
sixteen and all of the attempts to try to figure
this thing out.
Speaker 2 (08:58):
Well, and it's kind of interesting to point out, you know,
just so you guys know, Joe had talked to me
about David Middleman and authorm and we both have I'm
familiar with it, probably more than most, but not nearly
as much as those in the industry, nearly as much
as you. But I was glad you kind of gave
me a little background on David Middleman and what kind
of a person he is, how he thinks, and things
(09:19):
like that, because if you remember, you guys were talking
in the VIP room at Crime Con and I'm just
I'm Dave Mac the radio idiot, you know, I just, hey,
how you doing good to see give me a hug.
And that's not David Middleman. If he doesn't know you,
he's going to look right through you because he doesn't
have time to mess with idiots, and he could sense
right away that guy's an idiot, and he just I mean,
(09:42):
it was like, okay, I'm going to be really polite
for what I have to endure. Now here's the beauty
of this. I knew this ahead of time. I knew
it going in, but I didn't know who it was.
I never met him before, and you were talking to
his wife.
Speaker 1 (09:53):
Yeah, Kristen is equally as brilliant. What a oh my gosh,
what a team man.
Speaker 2 (10:00):
I was so glad you had told me about them,
because when I realized, like you said, after I bum
rushed you and realized I just stepped into a really
intense intellectual conversation that I'm not allowed to partake because
I'm an idiot, and I realized I'm out numbered here.
So I realized quickly to get out before I was
found out, And which was the goal. You know, if
(10:21):
you're if you don't play on the same field as
other people, you got two choices. Prove you're an idiot
and stay there or leave. I grabbed my bagel and
went on down the road. But having noted that David
Middleman is that level of brilliance and his wife as well,
and what they're doing with Authram, believe me when I
tell you, friends, I thought that it was funded by
(10:44):
I don't know where.
Speaker 1 (10:45):
I thought.
Speaker 2 (10:45):
I actually thought maybe these types of places like Authorm
have like funding from I don't know, the unicorn. You
know that they have like this pot of gold at
the end of the rainbow, and they just delve into
it to do these incredible things. The science that they're
doing and that you know is there's so much science
that that takes place in the world today that has
no real world application for you and me. It does
(11:07):
for science, but not in our daily life. What Authorm
is doing is they're actually providing answers to people who
have questions about a loved one, they're actually doing good work,
they're actually changing lives, they're actually doing things that not
even that long ago couldn't even have been imagined by
(11:30):
the best think tank in the world.
Speaker 1 (11:32):
And you're you're up in you're up in that strata.
I think when you begin to consider this as maybe
when we were kids and we were watching Star Trek
and they went into the transporter room and they flipped
a switch and everybody just kind of kind of disintegrates
(11:55):
and then reintegrates on the other end, and you think
that that's that's not possible. And obviously that's not possible
right now.
Speaker 2 (12:04):
In our minds, he probably already hasn't figured out.
Speaker 1 (12:07):
He probably does. He he is just that brilliant. And look,
they they have to this point really provided answers. They're
they're up, they're up the altitude right now, these cases
that they've provided are in excess of three hundred. But
(12:27):
when you consider how many of these unidentified bodies out there,
this is just this is just the start. And the
reason it kind of really pricks my heart, I think
is as a former death investigator, a medical legal death investigator,
Dave I stood over so many remains during the course
(12:50):
of my career that I had no idea. I had
no idea who this was. And unfortunately, you know, many
of the remains went into what we referred to as
a potter's field where and I've seen it, you know,
where the ground was trenched out. We would hold onto
remains as long as we could from a storage standpoint,
(13:13):
and they'd be mass buried. It was almost it had
this kind of it was. It was ominous to see it.
You know, you see images from like war zones where
people are being buried on masks and that might be
placed into a bag to have the dead, we'll have
these aluminum If you have an intact remain, we'll have
(13:37):
an aluminum idbate bracelet that's put around the wrist, one
that's put around the ankle, and they're placed into disaster
poles or body back and they're buried, you know, along
along the link of this trench. I've seen that actually happen.
I've borne witness to it, and it's the saddest thing.
And so many of these people, I thought, if I
(13:59):
could have just had answers. I actually had a discussion
with somebody a number of years ago that was working
at AFIP which back then was it. It doesn't exist
in the current format, but it's the Armed Forces Institute
of Pathology, you know, what they told me to I
was amazed by this. Did you know that we had
(14:22):
so many unidentified dead in the Civil War that a
lot of those skeletal remains were collected And to this day,
many of those remains remain in cardboard boxes and their
own shelves in DC and they can't they can't. The
(14:43):
story was, they will hold on to them for as
long as they can because they can't give these individuals
proper military burials. And I was fascinated by that, you know,
because there's a lot of unknown soldier graves out there
and all that sort of thing. And I was thinking,
in my wild the dreams, I was thinking, why wouldn't
that be something if if you could take technology like
(15:07):
this and apply it genetically to these unidentified remains that
we're holding right now and find maybe there's there's a
lineage there that you could trace down and try to determine.
You know, my family, my family as a result of
Civil War. I have two ancestors that never returned and
(15:29):
they never knew what happened to them, and so for me.
You know, I began to think about this, and then
I think about Gertrude. Don't you love that name?
Speaker 2 (15:38):
It's a great name.
Speaker 1 (15:39):
It is a great name. I began to think about Gertrude.
Speaker 2 (15:43):
By the way, Gertrude is the name of the venture
county Jane. Do yeah mentioned your name yet?
Speaker 1 (15:48):
And the fascinating thing about it is that Gertrude was
born in eighteen sixty four. The Civil War back East
was still raging. There were people dying and being killed
by the bushel. But today today we finally have some
(16:11):
answers about an incredible mystery. Dave, I have to make
(16:33):
a confession. I love old names. Well, I've got a
lot of them in my family. My grandmother, who I
referenced on this program multiple times, one of the sweetest
souls that ever walked the face of the planet, as
far as I'm concerned. She had I guess, I don't
(16:55):
know what it be called an antique name. It was
it was her Her name was Pearl. I had an
aunt named Roxy Unice. I'm not too particularly fond of
that Unice myrtle Wanita, which still is used today. And
then I've had Rubies and all kinds of these interesting
(17:17):
names that they.
Speaker 2 (17:17):
Use, all the characters used in a Jim Croche song.
Speaker 1 (17:21):
Yeah, exactly, and they go back years and years. But
you know, the subject of today's episode led this remarkable
life for a woman that was born right in the
heart of the Victorian era here in the US, born
(17:43):
actually in Stockton, California.
Speaker 2 (17:47):
Day And you know, when we look at Ventura County
Jane Do, her skull found in nineteen eighty five in
a bag. When it was first discovered and turned into police,
they thought that maybe we're investigating a murder. You know,
(18:07):
maybe this is somebody who has been recently killed and
somebody stashed the body. There's all kinds of things police
are looking at. But as they started investigating, they couldn't
find anything that fit. And again, this is nineteen eighty five,
and as we mentioned earlier, it took years to get
to the point where they could identify who this person was. So, Joe,
how is it possible that I find a skull in
(18:29):
nineteen eighty five and you're telling me that this Ventura
County Jane Do is a woman named Gertrude and that
she was born during the Civil War. How do we
go from nineteen eighty five to eighteen sixty four, And
I have you said nineteen sixty four, I was like, okay,
twenty one year old female, Okay, I got that. But
(18:50):
now we're talking one hundred and twenty one years old.
Speaker 1 (18:54):
Yeah, isn't that quite something? And you know there was
an effort made back then to run through the normal
course of an investigation. Whenever you find a skull?
Speaker 2 (19:05):
What is that normal thing, Joe? What happens if today?
If today, while I'm in the woods next door, walking
around with my grandson, and I find let's say a
partial skelet Let's say I find a skull in a
bag out in my forest right here, right, And I mean,
I'm alvious. I'm going to call somebody. I guess I'm
not calling Ghostbusters. I'm going to call the county.
Speaker 1 (19:24):
And hey, you're going to punch in non Actually i'd.
Speaker 2 (19:27):
Be calling you and James Shellna. Those are my first
two calls.
Speaker 1 (19:31):
Don't call me, please, Joe? What do? What do I do?
Speaker 2 (19:35):
Have a dead body here?
Speaker 1 (19:36):
Call me and get a recommendation. My right, My My
recommendation will be three digits, not one one. And that's it.
Speaker 2 (19:43):
I call Nancy Gracio day. You need an attorney, get
one now.
Speaker 1 (19:47):
Uh yeah. So if you if you do find a
h even any element of what you believe is a human,
a human sculptor, remain the most important thing you can do,
even if it turns out because the lines share people
that find a skeletal remain I've had this happen are
(20:07):
not finding human remains most of the time. It's amazing.
It seems like the most of the remains that I
would have people show up to the medical examiner's office
with or I would be summoned out on turned out
to be hog bones most of the time. And hog yeah,
some type of pig that had been barbecued and they
(20:30):
had been they'd been tossed away. You know. It's yeah,
I know, it's it's one of those things where you're
generally not going to come across it. You know, who
finds more human remains than humans are dogs, and this
happens a lot. Dogs love dogs love skulls, and they
(20:52):
will pick up a skull. I cannot tell you how
many of these cases I've got, some actually as morbid
as it is, some kind of humor stories behind these
these events. But I would have families that would say,
oh my god, I looked out in the yard and
you know, uh, you know, Fido is playing with a skull.
(21:15):
Can you imagine this? Well, what does a skull look like? Well,
to a dog, first off, it looks like a ball.
Have you ever seen a dog take a ball and
put it between their paws and play with it and
that sort of thing. And also secondarily, they're at a
you know, at a very base level, they're seeking protein.
That's what that's what carnivores do. Uh. They want to
(21:37):
bite into that bone, and they'll gnaw on these bones.
And they've got these you know, skulls have real weird
kind of angles, uh, and they will wrap their paws
around them and begin to gnaw on bones. So this
is not unusual. But this is not the case with
Gertrude remains. You actually find them in a back and
(21:57):
that that goes to proof that first off, some other
human has handled this item, because skulls just don't wind
up in a bag, all right, particularly in a modern
context like this, and it's tossed away. So when we
would go to a scene, if we had a single
(22:17):
skeletal element, we have to work on the assumption that
there are other remains around there, and you go to
where that skull is located, that is essentially ground zero,
and everything else radiates out from that where you're searching
this entire area for any other skeletal remains, because look,
(22:40):
you've got a human skull. Why do you have a
human skull? Why is it not buried somewhere or in
case somewhere, Why is it not in a mausoleum, or
why is it not in a coffin six feet under?
So you have major questions and it's a horrific thing
to come across, obviously, but for a forensic scientist, it's
(23:05):
very intriguing.
Speaker 2 (23:06):
Joe, how do you get to that point with where
you have a skull and you actually do start the
identification process as they did in nineteen eighty five finding
a skull in a bag, the normal process? What would
it be because not everybody a lot. It costs money
to go and do a lot of the DNA testing,
(23:28):
and this is beyond that because you are dealing with
a skull, you're not dealing with the whole body. Yeah,
where does you begin?
Speaker 1 (23:35):
Well, okay, let's go back to nineteen eighty five. We're
just in the wake of Sir Alec Jeffrey, who was
the first person to actually apply in a real sense
DNA technology DNA science to crom science. Okay, so that's
where that kind of so we're literally, you know, kind
(23:57):
of in the immediate wake of that nineteen eighty five.
This is still brand new technology and it had not
it had not kind of filtered down. And Sir Alex
is actually a bread So that's where it was first used.
And so it's you. It hasn't made it. I'll put
it to this way. It hasn't made it at stock
(24:18):
in California at this point in time and nineteen eighty five,
So what we would have done back then is first
thing you do, you're going to reach out to a
forensic anthropologist and they're to this is what they're going
to do. They're going to race, they're going to sex,
they're going to age and assess for any kind of
(24:40):
trauma that skull. That's what they're going to do. So
they're going to try to just visually because races are
different and the morphology of their skulls, there are certain
markers that anthropologists look for. They're not as distinct as
they used to be because you have a lot of
(25:02):
genetic overlap nowadays as opposed in the past where there
was this kind of separation. So it's kind of a
finer science. Now you have this idea of sex, and
sex again is one of these things that's I guess
some people could say that it is kind of subjective,
(25:24):
but there's a lot of considerations that anthropologists run through
this list of things where these markers that they're looking
for that would give you an indication of a skull
and in determination of gender with a skull, what we're
looking for in that sense. And I love these terms
that anthropologists used. That we use the term robust when
(25:48):
referring to a male skull. And here's a term that
not everybody hears on a regular basis when it comes
to female skulls, that we use the term grassisle and
grass isle actually means fine. You know, like you and
I we you and I have these kind of protuberant
brow lines, you know, as males kind of robust up here,
(26:11):
the bony prominence on the back of our skull, the excipitable, uh,
protuberance that's back there. They're kind of they're there, you know,
you can see it. You know, you know where you know, uh,
we're that way. Whereas a female skull that would come
from similar races, that similar ages, is going to have
(26:36):
a finer appearance to it. So you'll have this kind
of grass ale nature that's not robust, you know, like
a male skull, it's going to be a bit finer.
And so that's that's one of the things that they
would have done back then. And then they're going to
look at age, age at the time of death. So
let's see, how can we describe this. One of the
(26:57):
first things that you look for if their teeth. You
look for wear patterns in the teeth. You know, you
can determine what side of the mouth somebody chews on,
for instance, And I ask my kids at Jacksonville State
all the time when I'm teaching, I do it. I
teach a class called Clandestine Graves and it's a blend
of obviously clandestine burials, but also forensic anthropology and also osteology.
(27:21):
And I'll ask them, okay, everybody, take the tip of
your tongue and run it along the surface of your
teeth right now, can you determine which side of the
mouth your mouth you dependently chew chew with and most
people are right, they chew on the right side, and
so the wear pattern on the teeth will be worn
down more on that side as opposed to the left. Now,
as we get older, teeth begin to wear down. That's
(27:43):
one of the ways we age age skulls. Also, where
our sutures fuse together at the top of our head.
You know, you think about the font andels that babies
the soft spots. You've got one that's antiar and posterior
front in the back well that fuse together. And you know, Dave,
after a period of time, those little lines that you
(28:05):
see any kind of skull that you see, like there'll
be a model of it, like at Halloween. You know,
you can see the skull and they have these little
lines on those are those are suture lines. That's what
they're referred to as, and it's where the skull kind
of locks together. All over a period of time through life,
those areas begin to wear down and you actually have
(28:25):
something that's referred to as suture line of bliteration. So
the more that those are worn down, the more that
those are worn down, you know, the older the person is.
You've even got them on the roof of your mouth.
I did a study at one point Tom on what
was it called palatine suture line obliteration, and I presented
(28:48):
a paper or talk. When Tom and your palaton suture
that's that's in the roof of your mouth, what would
commonly be you You actually have suture lines in the
roof of your mouth, just chewing your mouth moving all
these years. And it seems very subtle in life. But
there's where I mean, if you just take if you
grab a handful of your hair, or pressure your fingers
(29:11):
down onto your scalp and move it back and forth,
that seems very passive. But just imagine how many times
you smile, you frown, you raise your eyebrows over the
course of your life, the suture lines begin to wear. Okay,
So back then in nineteen eighty five, that's one of
(29:32):
the things that that's really the singular tool that they
would have had to have worked with. And I can
almost predict what had happened at Ventura County at the
Medical Examiner's office. Dave that skull had been sitting on
a shelf, and they probably convened a committee at the
(29:53):
Medical Examiner's office, and you know, a few years later, Look,
we've had how many how many you know, hey, hey folks,
how many unidentified remains do we have? And they've got
a log of them, trust me, and they'll go through
it and say, oh wow, this is the oldest. Let's
see if we can dig into this a little bit.
Now it's twenty sixteen, all these years later, let's see
if technology will reveal anything. The problem is is that
(30:18):
when they first started, I might catch him flag for this,
but I don't really care. The clay modeling. Now, I
don't have much of an artistic eye, but it's rare
that I will see a clay model rendering that looks
spot on to anybody. But here's the rope with this
(30:39):
as well. That clay model that they were trying to
breathe life back into that person had been dead for
over a century. I think that what many people might
(31:12):
not know about Dave and I we both love old movies.
Particularly We're always throwing lines from from mel Brooks movies
back and forth at one another. And I think I
can speak for you, Dave. One of your favorites is,
as is mine, is young Frankenstein or frankf. Einstein. There
(31:34):
you are an igor and you know, one of the
one of the essential pieces to that hilarious movie is
that they're trying to create the Frankenstein monster and grave
robbery is involved in that. And isn't there some indication
that that's what's involved case.
Speaker 2 (31:56):
In this case? Look, you have a skull fan in
a back in nineteen eighty five. It takes twenty one
years before they can even do the clay, had, you know,
the reimagining of what this person may have looked like.
And twenty one years from the time the skull is found,
and that's all they really have. And it took a tip.
Speaker 1 (32:17):
When it comes to Gertrude. They did have a lead
on grave robbers, didn't they.
Speaker 2 (32:22):
And that was the tip. I think that was a
tip that was called in And ultimately once they realized
they were dealing with somebody not of you know, not
recent and I think it opened them up because, like
I said, the clay, the whole idea of doing the
clay in twenty sixteen was hoping somebody would recognize this person.
And it's at the age that they think that the
(32:43):
person died and does anybody is this your daughter, your mom,
your aunt, whatever, Assuming it was a contemporary skull. But
then they did get a tip and that opened them
up to okay, now we got to really look. But
they had to go the DNA route, and it was
this is what really fascinates me. It's the DNA that
(33:04):
we hear about all the time solving crimes, but in
this case, it's not just the DNA, because the investigators
had to take the information they were getting back about
the DNA and then tracing it back, they had to
find something in compare it to yes, we have DNA
out of this skull, but it doesn't mean anything unless
(33:24):
somebody else has either put something up that could be found,
you know, twenty three ande meters or whatever. I mean,
there are so many things that are not happening for
every person on planet Earth. Where do you go? So
they end up having to go to Authorm. And the
part that bothers me, Joe, and I really mean this
(33:46):
that Authorm has to crowdfund if it's like or I do,
if it's my relative, if it's something I'm working on
that they don't have. And I did think that there
was for some reason. You know, we hear so many,
so many people of great wealth that donate money to
worthy causes, and I'm thinking this is something that should
be so funded. These people should these are the first
(34:09):
people on planet Earth that should have flying cars. That's
the kind of work they're doing. You know, they have
everything and they don't.
Speaker 1 (34:16):
Yeah, I know, and you want to you want to
try to aid with this as much as you can.
And but you know, that's that's the beauty of what
AUTHRM has developed. David. David has a very specific methodology
that he has developed over and I urge everybody to
visit authorm's website authroom dot com. And what what was
(34:41):
applied here was UH a methodology that that David has
developed called forensic grade genome sequencing. And so with this,
this this tool that this man has created is almost
my un blowing. He can take he can actually take
(35:05):
samples from a skull that is this old day UH
and be able to render it down so that he
can extricate a DNA sample from this. And from this,
they build this out, They build it out because at Authoram,
not only do they have these scientists that work at
a level that I really cannot intellectually appreciate. I'm not
(35:28):
at I'm not at that level.
Speaker 2 (35:30):
You were telling me they can only work for forty
five minutes on it.
Speaker 1 (35:33):
They do so in Yeah, it's very intense, it's labor intensive.
We're you're talking about doing these fine skills. You know
that they're and they have to be very very careful.
And it's like being in a surgery suite. You have
the potential to contaminate everything. Wow. So when you go there,
you see them, they're they're liking spacesuits. Man, I mean,
(35:53):
it's I know that sounds it sounds fantastical, it's but
they're they're no, really, and and they David and Kristen
have created this environment to facilitate all of this. And man,
let me tell you, they've built this thing up from
the ground up. Now, they obviously have investors that are
(36:17):
helping them, but you know, on day to day cases
they need assistance. And so when it comes to Gertrude,
when David's team utilized this forensic grade genome sequencing methodology,
they actually have genetic sciences that are there working these cases.
They've got another section within that laboratory, Dave, that are genealogists.
(36:41):
I mean, can you he employs full time genealogists. How
amazing is that, so they take.
Speaker 2 (36:47):
That's what you would have to have with this though, and.
Speaker 1 (36:49):
You would have to you're going to be walking around
in the dark without a genealogist as a part of
this because they their worldview. You take the complexity of
this kind of genomic mapping that's going on and development
of you know, through the sequencing that they do, and
that's all grand, and it's all fine, but how are
(37:11):
you going to plug it in? Well, they've got a
couple of open source databases. Twenty three and meters, by
the way, is not part of it, okay, but there
are these open source databases which are limiting that people
have donated genetic samplitude and Dave, they were actually able
(37:32):
to find Gertrude's relatives.
Speaker 2 (37:35):
That's what got me about the actual investigation that goes
into this, beyond just the DNA. A lot of us
tend to think, well, they have DNA, what else do
they need? And it's like, because we're not all in
and data, you know, we're there are those of us
in the political paranoids that think everything we have is
being monitored by government it's own level. But when it
(37:55):
comes to actually doing it in real world stuff, it
doesn't exist, and these people have figured out, these people
meaning scientists, the genomists and all that, that they get
together and build the genealogy of a family tree based
on a skull that was found in Ventura County, California,
that was in a bag with rocks in it to
soak it to the bottom of the of the channel
where it was found. It boggles my mind. But Joe,
(38:20):
how once they're able to start finding the building the
family tree, and they were given a tip that there
had been a grave robbing and that this skull may
have been part of that. I have yet to find
out why. I don't know the why. I know the
grave robbing tip came in and I know police were
able to utilize that in finding out what really transpired.
(38:41):
But do we don't know why they why this grave
was disturbed or even when do we know?
Speaker 1 (38:46):
And I've worked cases of grave robbery before. Yeah, they're horrible.
I mean, they're absolutely horrible, and people do it for
any number of reasons. You have these people that are
out there that think that they're going to go conduct
some kind of serah, so they revictimize families by virtue
of and what they're involved in I'll say it very plainly.
(39:08):
This is desecration. Yeah, this is desecration of a tomb.
And in Gertrude's case, they had a family mausoleum. So
you've got remains dave that are presumably above ground. So
remember how I mentioned like groundwater impacting mains and all that,
that's not what you have necessarily in this case, you
(39:30):
have somebody that is actually going into into a mausoleum.
And you know, I know I run on about New Orleans,
my hometown, but for those of you within the sound
of my voice, if you've ever driven through New Orleans,
one of the things we're famous for our graves. We
have above ground graves because the water is it's it,
(39:51):
you know, like I said, it destroys everything that we
can't bury because we're beneath sea level there, so you
have to bury above ground. And what happened and what
has happened in previous cases, you know they will. They
will intrude into like a family mausoleum, make it through
the door, the access door, which is no small feat.
(40:12):
Some of these things are built like bank faults. You
have the purpose to do this. And then if you've
ever looked inside of mausoleum, their works of art. I've
seen some of the most beautiful, beautiful press with stained
glass windows and all this stuff in marble. And they'll
go in and they'll take a sledgehammer. I don't we
don't know that that's necessarily the case here, but they'll
(40:33):
take a sledgehammer and they'll knock the side or the
front out of one, depend upon how the the crypt
is set up, and they'll knock a hole in it
and then begin to pull things out of it. All right,
And isn't that horrible when you begin to think about it.
And that apparently is what happened in Gertrude's case, And
(40:54):
they were able to build out, build out this genetic
structure through Authraam's Authoram's methodology, and they came up. Now,
we didn't Gertrude did have a daughter, didn't she?
Speaker 2 (41:10):
Well, actually, okay, once we were able to get all
of this found out. She was born in eighteen sixty
four in California to Glenn Elliott and Lyman Weston Elliott.
She had a sister, Louise and a brother, Theodore. Gertie,
as she was called, married James Merritt Littlehall. Together they
had a daughter, Louise, in nineteen oh eight. Sadly, Gertie
(41:32):
died in nineteen fifteen at the age of fifty. She's
got a seven year old daughter. Okay, so she was
a little on the old side for having a child.
Speaker 1 (41:41):
Uh tickle on during note that day and age.
Speaker 2 (41:43):
Yeah, yeah, I mean in her forties when she has
her child.
Speaker 1 (41:46):
Do you know what it took her so long to
have a child? I don't know if you know that,
I got it. This is a this is a huge
reveal here.
Speaker 2 (41:52):
Okay.
Speaker 1 (41:54):
In my earlier comments about Yorick, York was an entertainer, right,
he was the court jester that touched Hamlet's life. Gertie
actually was a highly regarded and accomplished musician and vocalist.
(42:17):
Her parents, now imagine this trip. They were from Stockton, California.
They put this child after she graduated high school in sixteen.
They put this child, I guess, on a train and
sent her to Boston and she studied at the Boston
Conservatory there, did that for two years, and did this,
(42:37):
got on a boat and went to Europe and studied
at multiple other locations there before she finally came back
home and became this fantastic sought after musician and vocalist
where she would teach voice training and musicianship. And so
she had lived this incredible life, particularly for a woman
(43:01):
during the let's face friend of Victorian era, and which
just makes all the more fascinating that out of all
the graves in the world that they they did, that's
the one they did. And so she she you know,
you've got this this person who made a mark during
their their short, very period of time, this very short
(43:23):
period of time of their life fifty years, and she
was remarkable in that sense. Now you take what Othrom
has done and she is now in the news again
because this just has dropped and she's made another mark
after well in excess of one hundred years.
Speaker 2 (43:47):
There's some peace in that knowing, but it's such a
deep sadness to know that your relative sat unidentified as
Ventia County Janeko, thinking she was somebody that had been
killed recently in the eighties, even that's what they thought,
and finding out she was historically significant.
Speaker 1 (44:04):
Yes, and you know, Dave, it is very sad. But
you know what, here's the cool thing about this. There's
actually a bit of hope here. There's actually something that
we can come away from this story that gives us
all hope, and certainly people that have like myself, that
(44:28):
have stood over the unidentified for all of these years.
The hope is is that now there can be answers
for you know, I think maybe what we thought was
going to be an unsolvable puzzle for so many years,
and it comes in the form of the Middlemans. It
(44:52):
comes in the form of this organization that has been
created with AUTHORM. I have people that approach me all
the time saying that I wish there was something I
could do. I wish there was something I could do
because I've always been fascinated by forensics. I've always been
(45:12):
fascinated by detective work. Well, saddle up, here's your opportunity.
Here's your opportunity to do this. I would urge everyone
to visit dnasolves dot com. That's d n A s
(45:34):
l v e S dot com, DNA Solves. Visit that website.
This is where you can see the cases that are
currently waiting to be worked, those cases that there are
no answers to. This is your opportunity to fully engage.
(45:58):
And it doesn't matter. You can donate money, you can
and it doesn't have to be tons and tons of money,
all right, just a few bucks. There's a way to contribute.
It's going to be tax deductible. Get in contact with them.
Get in contact with them, look over the cases, find
one that you're interested in, and lend a hand. Listen,
(46:21):
you have the ability and you have the power to
do something that somebody like me never had the chance
to do. I tried to provide answers for those that remained,
and I failed many times because of my limitations. My friends,
(46:43):
those limitations are beginning to fall away. Here's your chance.
Dig in, help these folks out as best you can,
and again visit DNA solves dot com. I'm Joseph Scott
Morgan and this is body Bags MHM
Host
Joseph Scott Morgan
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