September 24, 2025 • 50 mins
Joseph Scott Morgan challenges his class at Jacksonville State University to try and solve a cold case. Two years in a row, two different classes and students chose the unsolved murder of Blake Chappell. Blake Chappell tells his mother he is having the best night of his life with his girlfriend at the East Coweta High School Homecoming Dance. By 6am the next morning, he is missing. Two months later, Blake's body is found in a creek, shot in the head. Joseph Scott Morgan and Dave Mack look at the story and how after 14 years, police have arrested Scotty Elliott Smith and have charged him with the 2011 murder of Blake Chappell!
Transcribe Highlights
00:02.06 Introduction, benchmarks in a child's life
02:04.24 Background on Blake Chappell
05:07.36 Looking at a "Cold Case"
09:15.68 JSU Students choose to work Chappell case
14:16.64 Blake walks back to girlfriend's house
19:25.73 5:00am Blake walking, texting
24:14.77 Blake ended up in jail previously
28:42.00 Police playing things close to the vest
33:27.98 Blake was found in his underwear, shot in head
39:07.60 Police arrest Scotty Elliott Smith for murder
45:32.74 Smith had a long criminal record
50:31.54 Conclusion
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Quody Bags with the Joseph's Gotten More. Being a parent,
in my estimation at least, is all about benchmarks. It's
about benchmarks in your child's life. And you know, you
think back to you know you first saw him crawl,
(00:24):
or even before that, when they first rolled over. You know,
when you walk into the bedroom and into their little
bedroom and you see that they've kind of rolled over
in the crib for the first time. Those dates when
they begin to what they call crews where they're holding
onto furniture and they're kind of walking around, and those
first awkward steps where they're stumbling, first utterances, the first
(00:48):
time they ever look at you and say, Daddy, I
love you. Sweet. Parenthood to a certain degree is all about,
particularly when you're young, and you you have that in
your mind at all times. Since twenty eleven, there has
been an unsolved murder of a very young kid. I
(01:13):
say very young. He was seventeen. But to have a
child that turns up dead and there are no answers
loath these many years, that benchmark somebody. But today I'm
proud to say that there's another benchmark because after all
of this time, Blake Chappelle's murderer has been arrested. I'm
(01:44):
Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Bodybacks, Dave. We have
done a previous episode on Blake's case some time ago,
and this case kind of inhabited my brain for a
(02:07):
protracted period of time. First off, I looked at this
boy who grew up in a single parent household with
a mother who had some physical issues. And I saw
a kid who was very loving. He loved his mother.
(02:32):
And as a matter of fact, let me tell you
what kind of kid he was. Blake knew that his
mama had trouble making ends meet, Dave. This child would
go out before he would come to school every day.
He would buy energy drinks, which I don't think at
(02:54):
that time you could buy in a high school, and
other sweets and whatnot and take them to school, marked
him up and sell them to his classmates. You say, well, wow,
that sounds that sounds kind of out of bounds. Morgan, No,
it doesn't. You know why, because he would take the
(03:16):
profits from that and give to his mama so she
could make rent. He wasn't selling wheat, No, No, he
was not selling drugs. That wasn't that wasn't his thing.
He was trying to take care of his mother in
his own way. He didn't have a car.
Speaker 2 (03:36):
You know, actually plays into the show.
Speaker 1 (03:39):
It does play into it.
Speaker 3 (03:40):
Look, Blake Chappelle went missing after a homecoming dance, after
what he said was one of the greatest nights of
his life. Oh and his mother was involved in helping
him along the way with this greatest night of his life,
this homecoming dance. This happened October sixteenth, twenty eleven. That's
(04:02):
the night of the homecoming dance. That's the night Blake
goes missing. This has been an unsolved case ever since.
We're two years in a row in Joseph Scott Morgan's
class at JSU, tell us how you gave your classes
the opportunity to work in an unsolved case? Because didn't two
(04:24):
of them two years ago do the same case? And
it was Blake Chappelle.
Speaker 1 (04:27):
Yeah, yeah, it was. Actually there was a third and
we just let me back up. Several years ago, I
constructed an undergraduate class in cold case investigations because look,
I mean the world that we're in now, you know
how many authorm cases have we done, Dave, I don't
(04:47):
even know. And that's the pinnacle of cold case from
a scientific standpoint. I'm talking about forensics here, and I
know that the students at Jack State is uh preparing
right now, are going to go into law enforcement workforce
and forensics workforce. And let's face it, cold cases are
(05:10):
kind of they they're becoming steadily becoming the meat and
potatoes of any agency they know that they go to
get these. Yah. I know, it's amazing because so many
years they just sat on the you know, sat on
the sat on the shelf, gathering dust. I was a
member of the Yeah, I think so. And also the
advancement in DNA, I think so. And and also there
(05:33):
are people out there that have had enough time on
streets as investigators that they're developing methodologies and now text
textbooks for undergraduates. And you can take that recipe. My
wife claims, by the way, give me claims that. Give
her a textbook and she'd teaches anything. It was like
(05:55):
about differential equations, how's that is?
Speaker 2 (05:58):
No, no, no, no, But my children with the helmet
all the time.
Speaker 1 (06:02):
Yeah, I was in yeah, so yeah, so you know,
but now we have we have the groundwork laid, and
I've gone through several texts I settled on one. Uh.
That's written by my good friend Joe Chacklon up in
(06:24):
New York. He's a Bronx homicide detective retired, and he's
a cold case guy.
Speaker 2 (06:32):
Jacqueline wrote a book Man.
Speaker 1 (06:33):
Yeah, Jacqueline did Man, and it's it's fantastic. Yeah, I
use it. I used it, Jack say, yeah.
Speaker 2 (06:39):
I didn't know he could read.
Speaker 1 (06:42):
Oh my god, don't let Joe here. You say that
you're going to crush his soul. Don't say that.
Speaker 2 (06:47):
I love that guy.
Speaker 3 (06:48):
I'll tell you he's scared. He invited me to the
church and I was scared. I'm not kidding. I started
confusing right there in the car. I'm your guy in
my city church.
Speaker 1 (06:58):
I feel Joe is. Joe's masterful and the work that
he's done, the text that he's created, and so hopefully
he'll send us that twenty bucks that he owses for this.
But yeah, he's written a fantastic cold case book and
I use it in my class. So, you know, for
(07:18):
a number of years, this case was not even on
my radar. You know, it's something that even we're on
kind of the periphery of the Atlanta metro area. We're
over in Alabama, but some of the stuff kind of
leeches over out of Georgia. And even this this had
not made it onto my radar. I don't even think
that Nancy had covered it, you know, over the years.
(07:40):
And this is you know, down in noon and Georgia.
It's kind of southwest of Atlanta. And it came to
my attention because of my students in this class, some
of them. We've got a lot of students at jack
State that though we're in Alabama, that come from Georgia.
Because of the forensics program, there's you know, we are
(08:01):
the standard you know in Southeast as far as I'm
concerned from a perspective of forensic investigations. And so one
of the kids came up to me and said, Professor Morgan,
our team and they were four person teams. I would
break them out into four person teams. And what they
do is they will take an unsolved case and I
(08:24):
have them work it just like their law enforcement. But
there are certain certain things they can't do. You know,
they don't have obviously any kind of investigatory powers. They
can't go out and interview people. You can call people
and ask if you can speak with them, but they
(08:45):
don't show up at a door and say we need
you to come down to headquarters with And it was
amazing to me starting with that first group, how they
kind of built a life for Blake and his mother
in class. I mean they literally kind of conjured this
(09:05):
up with the data that they were able to collect
the Noonan Police department that is in charge of Blake's
homicide investigation. And to their credit, they constantly for both
sets of classes that the teams that were handling this case,
both sets they said no comment, and they would both
(09:28):
get both classes got referred to the Cawda County disc
Attorney's office and again they were met with In one
case they were met with no comment. Later they got
an ADA that gave them a bit of information, but
not really a lot to sink into. Just to tell
you how committed they are. From jack State Campus to
(09:50):
where Blake's body was found Dave is a roughly a
two hour and twenty minute drive, okay through back roads.
They went there. The students actually drove to Georgia, took
photography equipment with them, documented the route that he was walking,
(10:13):
actually went to the location of where his body was found,
got down into this area i'll get I'll give you
more information about that in just a moment, and again
breathed life back into Blake's case. From my perspective, you
know something that had not been on my radar. You know,
I began to hear it and it tugged at my
(10:33):
heart strings because of the familial circumstances that Blake was
living in. Uh, being this kid that, as you pointed out,
he wouldn't take no, this idea that he's gonna he's
going to burn through shoe leather if he's got to
walk somewhere, it just doesn't matter. He was tenacious. I
often think that right now that if Blake had lived,
(10:57):
he would be a incredible success at whatever he was
going to do because he had that little fire that
was burning within him that said, I'm not going to
give into the circumstances in my life. I'm going to
go out and I'm going to make something despite of
my background where I come from. So that you know,
I began to see this as my students, would you know,
(11:18):
present these cases two years in a row, the same case.
I finally the third year, I was like, look, you
guys have got to choose another case. Yeah, we're not
going to do Blake again, but it just stuck with
me and so and I have followed it, and amazingly,
those students have all graduated now from both from both
of those classes, and I will still get emails from
(11:39):
them asking me if I've heard anything. I'll actually have
some of them email me and say, hey, people are
posted stuff on the message board. Again, there might be
something that's going to break. And of course it never
did until last week. And I got to tell you.
Was it to you that notified me? I think it was?
(12:00):
Wasn't it?
Speaker 2 (12:01):
I think so?
Speaker 3 (12:01):
But you're you're so on top of everything that I
think a lot of times I tell you about something,
you're going yeah, I know, but I'll give date.
Speaker 2 (12:11):
You know what.
Speaker 3 (12:12):
Yeh, there were things that you and I talked about
when we did this, because we did it at crime Con.
Yeah we did, and in front of an audience. And
I was amazed at the work the students did. I
was amazed at the just the quality of work, but
the love they put into it because they documented they
really a great job.
Speaker 2 (12:30):
First of all.
Speaker 3 (12:32):
Second of all, I noticed, after you know, we talked
about it, there was movement in the case. There would
be movement every once in a while, and police always
they held back info. They didn't they still have not
let all the info go because they're sitting on it
for one reason or another. But the bottom line is
(12:52):
that Lake Chappelle who went to his homecoming dance. I
think I said sixteen. He actually went to the dance
was on October fifteenth, That was the night of the dance. Yeah,
and he's with We went with his girlfriend Rion, Is
it Ryan? I always say yeah, r io.
Speaker 1 (13:09):
In yeah Ryan. His hou is pronounced so yeah.
Speaker 2 (13:13):
They go to the east Kawetta. That's how you pronounced that, right.
Speaker 1 (13:16):
Kawita ka Yeah, Calwita Yeah wow.
Speaker 2 (13:20):
I always say that wrong every time.
Speaker 1 (13:22):
No's that's all everybody does. It's a hard work to pronounce,
but yeah Calita, Yeah, Okay.
Speaker 3 (13:27):
They go to the homecoming dance, and Blake tells his
mother during a phone call that night it was the
best night of his life, had so much fun just
dancing and spending time with his friends. It's that time
of life where you can still do that, you know,
where yeah, you're right and there's a purity to it
that goes beyond so many things.
Speaker 2 (13:46):
And I just love it anyway.
Speaker 3 (13:49):
Sometime around ten thirty, Ryan's mom, Shannon, picks them up
from the dance and brought them back to her home,
where they watched a movie and hung out. Around eleven thirty,
Shannon drove Blake to his friend Austin's house, where he
was going to spend the night. Now you know he
(14:10):
didn't stay there at his buddy's house, right, So where
did he go?
Speaker 2 (14:14):
Joe?
Speaker 1 (14:15):
Yeah, well he decided to hoof it over to his girlfriend's.
Speaker 2 (14:19):
House the whole time.
Speaker 1 (14:22):
Yeah, they are, and yeah, he wanted to continue this
greatest night of his life. Apparently.
Speaker 3 (14:28):
Well I don't know too many boys that age that
time that don't you know.
Speaker 2 (14:34):
Yeah, Colin bulletproof man.
Speaker 1 (14:36):
You truly are. And that's you know, that's the beauty
of it. And let me just kind of expand on
this a little bit more. When you think about this
young man and the life that he had led, he's Dave,
He's burying pressures in his life that most thirty year
olds might have to deal with. Can you imagine, just
(14:57):
for a moment, just for a fleeting moment, that burden
because of the songs you hear, because of the perfume
that the girl is wearing that chose you to be
her date that night, the laughter of your friends for
just that moment, that burden, for a few precious minutes,
(15:21):
is lifted off of your shoulders, and you can be
a child again. You can be a young kid again.
You can celebrate, you can dance, you can laugh. The
one thing that he didn't realize is that the greatest
night of his life was going to turn in to
the worst night of his life. Dave, you had mentioned
(15:55):
that he had gone back to the girlfriend's house, and
there was something A bit I don't know. There's not
much about this case. It's lighthearted, but I think that
many of us in the midst of the all that
is that is youth. You can identify he's in her
(16:19):
bedroom in this house, and it's actually her grandmother that
walks in and catches him.
Speaker 2 (16:26):
Remember, remember, because it was it was Ryan's mom.
Speaker 3 (16:30):
Yeah, that drove Blake to his friend's house to go
spend the night, and it's already after midnight. I can
picture him texting right, yeah, while he watched his mom's
car pull away. Okay, she's gone, and he hops out
and starts walking right back there he does, and he's
gonna sneak in. And that's what because it's like two
o'clock in the morning, between two and three, when he
(16:51):
actually walks back over to Ryan's house. Now pick up
with granny because that cracks me up everything.
Speaker 1 (16:57):
Yeah, I know.
Speaker 2 (16:58):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (16:58):
Can you imagine your You're in your girlfriend's house and
maybe Granny's a light sleeper. No one really knows, but
she hears something and lo and behold it's Ryan's homecoming date.
And there he is, Blake in the house. Well, as
you can imagine, he was cast a drift at that point,
(17:21):
at that point in time by the family. You get
out of here right now and already, yeah, exactly, And
so off he goes, you know, he wanders off into
the night at this point in time. And this is
where you know, things turn very dark and sinister, because
(17:42):
there is a text message that is sent from Blake's phone,
and the text message is, and I'm paraphrasing, it's something like,
the cops have stopped me. The cops have stopped me.
And he's a pedestrian. And look, I got to tell you,
(18:04):
if there's a patrol officer out there he sees a
kid Blake's you know, he's not a big kid. He's
you know, I'm not going to say he's diminutive. But
if there's a patrol officer that's out there and he's
walking down the street, it's going to draw the attention
of a police officer. They're going to pull over and
(18:26):
they're going to say, hey, why are you out at
this time of night. I don't know if there was
a curfew, but I'm sure the cop would say, you're
out way late. Where you headed? What are you doing? Well?
He sends this text off and says that he has
been stopped by the police at this point in time,
(18:46):
and he falls off the planet. He just disappears. He
vaporizes into nothing. And this is a kid that had
contact with all of his buddies, with his mother and
with his girlfriend there. You know, he's he's in kind
of a tight knit group.
Speaker 3 (19:05):
He leaves there at like five in the morning, and
he's texting his girlfriend. He's texting Ryan and he's apologizing
to Brian and for mother.
Speaker 2 (19:13):
That's what he's doing while he's texting.
Speaker 3 (19:15):
Now, five five thirty in the morning, Okay, that's not
a really weird time to be out on the road.
Speaker 2 (19:24):
It's a weird time to be walking on the road,
it is okay.
Speaker 3 (19:27):
And so for him to be stopped at five five
thirty in the morning, I get that. But there's a
couple of problems here with this because he's texting and
he's head at Austin's house, which is where Bryan's mam
had taken him to start with. He left, came back,
now he's headed back over there. As he's walking, he's
sending these text messages, so we know he's in communication
(19:49):
while he's walking, apologizing to Ryan, apologizing to her mother,
probably begging, apologizing for you know, everything. But about five
thirty is when he sends the mess to Ryan saying
that he had been stopped by a police officer who
had asked him where he was going and asked for
his ID. And that's it. You say he fell off planet,
(20:12):
right then? Well, you would think at five point thirty
in the morning, if a police officer comes in contact
with anybody there, before they do anything, they radio back
to base. I'm stopping to check on something. The reason is,
you don't know if this person walking down the street
is a maniac with a machine gun. You don't know
if it's somebody who's in desperate need of help. You
(20:34):
have no idea, and you say, hey, I am can
SEP whatever they're number, whatever the code is saying, I'm
checking on a guy. So there's got the word record
of this transaction.
Speaker 1 (20:45):
But as a matter of fact, there's a situation. You
can look at it from the perspective of the police.
First off, you're gonna have radio traffic and the way
the way the radio traffic would normally go would be
And you're right because police officer their spoty senses are up.
You know, if you've got somebody walking down the road
you don't know anything about them, you're not going to
(21:07):
get out of the car. It's not sop. You're not
going to get out of the car without calling it
in to headquarters and say and headquarters, show me out
at whatever road that the individual might be on, if
they have a mile marker, or they'll say on this
road at cross streets such and such, or if they're
in front of a house, show me out at thirty
(21:28):
two Maple Lane. And then they will say, I've got
a white male pedestrian out here. I'm going to go
talk to him, and radio will acknowledge that, and that's
actually on the recording. You can go back. I've had
to listen to these recordings for years and years and years,
and you go back and you can listen to all
of these and you can get a sense of what's
(21:50):
going on. As a matter of fact, if the police
officer engaged with an underage kid under these circumstances, I
would probably write something down about it. I don't know
necessarily that this would warrant a warning, but there would
be some record of this somewhere. And Dave, there ain't nothing, brother,
(22:12):
there ain't nothing. And that's the terrifying part to this,
because I think there it has been floated for a while.
First off, there was a huge group of people that thought, well,
these were rogue cops that came after, you know, a
seventeen year old kid. And I'm thinking, rogue cops, What
is this, Hollywood? You know, why why is a police
(22:34):
officer going to come after a seventeen year old child?
It just it just didn't make sense to me. And
that was like floated out there, and you saw that
on message boards over the years. My students actually had,
you know, printouts of this stuff. Oh and you know,
it just speculation runs wild, and of course you and
I never hear about speculation, did we Dave? You know?
(22:58):
And people, you know, they draw these wild conclusions about things.
But I think one of the things that was so
terrifying to me was that if someone had stopped him
and strong harmed him in some way and said give
me your damn phone, And what if that last text
(23:22):
was the police have stopped me and it wasn't from Blake,
was it from Was it from a perpetrator? And what
could some perpetrator out there want with a seventeen year
old kid. I mean, you can look at him and
tell that he's underage. What you know, how much how
(23:43):
much jewelry, how much money? What material possessions could this
child have that a perpetrator would actually want to shake
him down for it? Just there was nowhere in this
scenario did any of this make sense? And so this
case started out as a runaway That's what this came
(24:06):
out as, you know, this kid has taken to the streets.
He's come from a broken home. Where's he going to go?
He's got another girlfriend that he had previously been broken
up with. That was as a whole another kettle of fish,
because you know, he is there were issues with that
person's father. As a matter of fact, Blake was in
(24:29):
fact taken to jail over that there was actually a
physical assault in that circumstance. That girl had moved away
and was living in an adjacent county, and a lot
of people were thinking at that point, Tom that he
had been threatened. All right, I won't go much further
than that, but I will say that he had been threatened,
(24:50):
maybe even with a weapon, at some point in time,
and that harm was going to come to him if
he ever, you know, showed his face again. And if
I remember correctly, it seems as so that individual may
have been an ex con. I'm not really sure it's
enough to make the most mighty men tremble in their boots,
(25:11):
how much more so a seventeen year old.
Speaker 3 (25:14):
And so he had and yeah, seven, okay, let's deal
with the cop thing very quickly, because I'm not buying it.
And I think a seventeen year old he's cold. He
does send a text after it, after the one about
a cop just stop me. He sends the thing saying
I'm cold. It's getting cold. And that time of day
(25:37):
in late on you're talking about October in Georgia, Alabama.
You got that chili right before, so it can be
eighty five degrees the next day, but it's gonna be
chilly thirty in the morning.
Speaker 2 (25:48):
It just does. And anyway, so you've got the I'm
not buying.
Speaker 3 (25:54):
That a cop ever stopped him, because there are just
too many things that aren't there. Too many things are
not there. But I'm not out of the possibility that
somebody stopped him, got his phone and saw that he
was communicating with somebody and wanted to ally some fears
a criminal, somebody who's a criminal.
Speaker 2 (26:13):
Yeah, they do something.
Speaker 3 (26:14):
They'd pick it up and say I just got checked
by the cops, and then the next thing is, oh,
it's cold, okay, and then nothing.
Speaker 2 (26:19):
That's it.
Speaker 3 (26:21):
I remember all the communication stops right after cop one
in my ID, oh it's getting cold.
Speaker 2 (26:28):
Then there's no more.
Speaker 3 (26:30):
So I'm thinking that maybe whoever that was, I don't
think it was Blake that sent that text about there's
a cop. I think that was somebody who got the
phone from him. I'm just based on the fact that
we don't know anything after this moment. I just don't
think it's a cop. And if it's not a cop,
it's somebody bad.
Speaker 1 (26:50):
Yeah, and someone that was there yet or to do
him harm on some level and as right, you know,
as it turns out, which you know, will chat chat
more back out. Ultimate harm was done to this child.
But in the meantime, you've got the authorities, You've got
his mother, who is you can imagine, just shocked to
(27:11):
her core at this point, because this is.
Speaker 2 (27:13):
Because he vanishes.
Speaker 3 (27:15):
He vanishes after that, after what we just shared with
you about a cop and I'm cold.
Speaker 2 (27:20):
After that, he vanishes. He's gone.
Speaker 3 (27:21):
There are no more text, no more calls, no more nothing,
no more sightings. He's gone. He's walking from his girlfriend's
house to his best friend's house, and he vanishes. Joseph
Scott Morgan gone, five thirty in the morning.
Speaker 1 (27:33):
This kid is, yeah, and you're thinking, you know, how,
first off, how how bad is his life that he
would just suddenly, by the way, in the wake of
what he said the greatest night of my life? What
kid pulls up stakes at that point in time and
decides to disappear in the darkness, never to be seen again. Uh.
(27:57):
That's that's the part that's so chilling. I think another
part of the this is that many of us can identify.
You know, I have to look back in time when
dinosaurs were on the earth, but I still remember how
exciting homecoming was, and I remember how exciting prom was
back in the day. You know, it's a different kind
of feeling. So what is it that would occur that night?
(28:17):
And there was no indication that Ryan's family on any
level was involved in this, you know, because I think
the first thing you think about is, yeah, you know,
he's he's in the house with my daughter at a
late hour. You know, we're going to show him. They
ran down all of that, and nothing came back. Dave,
(28:38):
he he went missing. I guess it was October the sixteenth,
essentially is when he vanishes and he is not seen
again until a gruesome discovery is made. We heard everything.
(29:09):
As a matter of fact. I don't know if you
recall this, but do you recall when we presented Blake's
case at Crime con and there was a story that
came out about police showing up at a property where
they went out to search the property, and we thought that, oh,
(29:31):
my lord, you know, what are they looking for at
this home? And there was an indication that this had
something to do with Blake's Blake's case. And I still
don't to this point, because, as you said, the police
are keeping a really tight lid on all of their
information that they have at their fingertips. What may have occurred,
(29:54):
you know, relative to his circumstances, what brought about his end,
and to the best of our knowledge, what we know
right now, we're still ensure if that search of that
property that was not too far away may have borne
some type of fruit. I think, go ahead.
Speaker 3 (30:14):
No, I was just gonna say, I think you're right.
We don't know because they didn't tell us. They told
us that there was a search going on that it
had to do with Blake, and police had dealt with
anonymous tips for years, and I think that's one of
the reasons they did keep playing it close to the
best for the same reason you and I and everyone
else is totally shocked that a young kid like that
(30:35):
would go missing while he's walking at five point thirty
in the morning and just gone that there's nothing of
him until two months later. And that's what we got
to get to is when did they find him, Joe?
What condition was he in when he was found? Because
at five point thirty in the morning, other than being
a little cold. According to his last text, he's walking
from his girlfriend's house to his best friend's house. Yeah,
(30:58):
he's created a little bit of a problem for himself,
but it's nothing. He's not going to get passed. And
he just had a great night. He had a great
homecoming night with his girlfriend. Now he's yeah, the greatest
night of his life.
Speaker 2 (31:09):
He's not.
Speaker 3 (31:10):
And so what happened? Because he's gone and they looked
for him, right, they're looking.
Speaker 1 (31:15):
They looked for him. They looked for him everywhere, and
they could not find him. Dave. Just imagine his mother
or just for a second, two months, two months, over
two months passed by because he went missing on October
the sixteenth of twenty eleven. He was found, Dave. He
(31:37):
was found on December nineteenth, twenty eleven, face down in
a creek adjacent to a bridge. And here's here's the
real kicker. He's wearing nothing but his underwear. I got
to tell you when I hear that you've got a
(32:02):
deceased individual. They're wearing nothing but their underwear. They're a
couple miles from where their home is and they're just
kind of cast off into a creek, into a body
of water. First off, I can't believe that they were
able to actually find his remains and that they were
still intact, but they were. As a matter of fact,
(32:25):
they were intact enough so that the state medical examiner,
this is a big piece of evidence that we got
when they examined his body. Blake had been executed, he
had been shot a single time in the head, and
his body essentially dumped off in the creek. And there's
no clothing except for his underwear. Now, who what would
(32:49):
be the motivation behind that? I got to tell you, man,
when I see people that are either partially nude or
nude and they're deceased, I think that I always think
that they're some kind of sexual component. The only other
thing I can think of is you have somebody stripped
down to their underwear so you can manage them and
you can humiliate them. But still with humiliation, I think
(33:11):
that there's a sexual component to that as well. And
even with all of that and finding his body, they
they were still at their wits end relative to this
case because there was no further data that was coming up. Yeah,
we've got this kid that has been missing for two months.
But just because you find the body, and you determine
(33:33):
that he has been shot in the head. That doesn't
that doesn't equal, that doesn't equal the solving of the case.
You're still here with a massive puzzle. And Dave, this
has gone on now for until last week, for fourteen years, fourteen.
Speaker 3 (33:48):
They never found the clothing either. They didn't find any
clothing he had. They didn't find his cell phone, they
didn't find his wallets, ID the didn't find anything of
him except body with underwear and shot at the back
of the head.
Speaker 2 (33:59):
So was he all right, let's just start with.
Speaker 3 (34:06):
Could you tell examining his body how long he had
been in the water, Like, could he have been shot
and thrown in the water that morning?
Speaker 1 (34:14):
Could we tell that a few months later? It's you know,
the further you move out in time, the more difficult
it is. I think that any reasonable person would understand
that and appreciate that, and I believe that you could. Yeah, okay,
this is what we do know. It's kind of it's
kind of like a math problem we have. We're solving
(34:38):
for X here. Well, what are our knowns here? We
know when he was last seen alive, we know the
data off of his phone, and we can tom stamp
that and then when he's found. So what we would
do is go back in comparison, compare what we're seeing
with the physical findings of his remains based upon this
(35:00):
timeline that has been established digitally, and we could do
an approximation. We would look for certain points along the
way with changes. The one thing that's really going to
be tough with this case, I think, is how far
gone his remains may have been at that time. You know,
after two months, even though we're in we're heading toward fall,
we're going to be getting and he's already passed a
(35:21):
late fall. As a matter of fact, seems like doesn't
the winter equinox happen? Like is it the equinox? I
don't know what it's called, but anyway, when we go
to winter, it's generally around December twentieth or it's right
before Christmas when that happens. So we're heading in that direction.
There are going to be significant temperature changes. So how
well is he preserved. He's in an aquatic environment, we think,
(35:44):
unless he had been killed somewhere else and moved, or
had he been held against his will for a protracted
period of time, then they bring him back with his
underwear on and discard him in the creek. And I
think that a lot of that information is being held
by the police right now. It just seems really odd.
(36:05):
Why would you make him strip down? Why would you
not find his clothing somewhere along this roadway that he's
walking down. Had he been in the custody of somebody
else for two months? And that's one of the things
are weeks, That's one of the things that you really
want to try to understand. With the post mortem changes
in this case, do they marry up with the time
(36:26):
the known timeline as opposed to maybe he's not as
far gone as they might have thought, and that would
beg the question, well, when exactly did he die? Can
we zero in on that and try to marry that
up with the timeline that we have. Again, they haven't
released this information yet. One other big piece to this
(36:48):
day is we don't know if this gunshot went into
the head is a through and through. They have not
released information if they recovered a projectile out of Blake's head,
and of course if they did, and this is a
weapon that was utilized that may have been utilized in
(37:09):
other crimes, well, the ATF has got a fantastic database
ballistic database. As a matter of fact, they probably got
the best one in the world that you would go
to for sourcing information on expended rounds. If you can
recover that round, you can get it to them and
try to match it up through their database to see
(37:30):
if it marries up with any weapons that's out there.
But the case turned actually based upon what you had
mentioned just a few months ago. You had said that
there were anonymous tips that came in, that there were
tips all along, and Dave jumped forward to twenty twenty three.
(37:52):
This scene is still being worked and man, the nowt
And Police Department actually got an anonymous tip, didn't.
Speaker 3 (37:59):
They, And you know when we were recording and talking
about this show, We've got the anonymous tip in twenty
twenty three, and police actually followed that up. Okay, they
pleaded publicly that tip told them there's more and there
are people that know more. And they also ended up
(38:22):
serving search warrants on two different properties in twenty twenty four.
Speaker 2 (38:25):
Remember those.
Speaker 3 (38:26):
Yes, they were serving these search warrants and weren't telling
anybody a whole lot, but they were looking for something.
We don't know if they found anything or not, but
we know that they were looking and it had something
to do with Blake Chappelle's case. So when you've got
a case that, for all intents and purposes, began October sixteen,
twenty eleven, and ends December nineteenth, twenty eleven, and we
(38:51):
don't know anything until now, and they're still working at
like this twelve and thirteen years later, heck, yeah, man,
these guys are doing their job and they are still
you have no idea of how much they are still
holding on to and.
Speaker 1 (39:02):
The reason, oh god, yeah.
Speaker 3 (39:04):
They're not letting it out. They're not going to let
somebody come into this and mess up their case. And
you know what, Joe, they did have an arrest finally,
and it wasn't anybody who had ever been taught to.
Speaker 1 (39:13):
Anybody that had ever had ever been investigated ever. Isn't
that something that you could have You could have this
young kid seventeen years old and for some reason, his
path intersects with this guy who actually turns out had
(39:38):
been in the joint for several years. Yeah, which is,
you know, quite amazing when you begin to think about
what is at stake here. And I believe that this
came about as a result of of the anonymous tip.
I think so and sourcing this, you know, back to
(39:58):
this individual. What precisely can you tell us about this
arrest that has been affected Dave?
Speaker 2 (40:04):
All right? He was. The guy's name is Scotty Elliott Smith.
Speaker 3 (40:09):
He was never investigated in this case, but he has
been arrested and charged and police say he has confessed
to the murder of Blake Chappelle. Police served two search
warrants in Sharpsburg in March of twenty twenty four.
Speaker 1 (40:27):
Which is just a Jason too. It's in Colwaita County
and it's outside of Noonan.
Speaker 2 (40:32):
So yeah, makes it so that's the area we're talking about.
Speaker 1 (40:35):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely, that was.
Speaker 3 (40:37):
And so again, now remember we had the tip in
twenty twenty three. We had police saying we need more
so they knew that that this top of the soda
have been popped. They served the search warrants in twenty
twenty four, and then here we are, out of the blue.
September twelfth, twenty twenty five, they send out this message,
we got an arrest and I'm looking through all my notes.
Speaker 2 (40:57):
This guy's got to be on the radiaro. No, he's nowhere.
Speaker 3 (40:59):
This guy was in jail so much Joe I actually
double checked to make sure he wasn't in jail. This
h Yeah, he is now charged by the way police
still asking for more info. Which the saddest part is
there are so many people that know what happened, and
they have maintained at least some form of silence for
this long.
Speaker 2 (41:20):
Does that.
Speaker 1 (41:21):
Yeah. Something I want to point out about Smith, who
their framing this is he has allegedly confessed. I'm understanding
that that they have conducted multiple interviews with him, and
just because he confesses prior to you know, being appearing
(41:42):
in a court and all these sorts of things that
you have to go through, that doesn't mean that he's
guilty yet. Okay, we have to understand that we need
to temper what we're saying to a certain degree. But
Dave I was doing the math on this. So the
ledged perpetrator is thirty eight right now. So he crossed
(42:04):
pass with Blake. When Blake, as I've mentioned several times,
was seventeen, he would have been twenty four years old
at that time. Young man twenty four years old out
in this area at that time of night, and what
was the plan here. Did he just merely see Blake
and saw him as an opportunity for mischief? Well, I
(42:28):
hate that word because it's not mischief but malevolent behavior.
Speaker 2 (42:33):
I mean, is that your words tell you, Joe? What
did these? I mean murder? He agated assault.
Speaker 3 (42:40):
But they've charged him with possession of a firearm or
knife during commission of or and that that's a standard charge,
I mean, because we already know that Blake was shot
in the head.
Speaker 1 (42:52):
But yeah, then we go to yeah, then we go
to conceiting feeling death another Joe, and then also tampering.
Speaker 3 (43:01):
Yeah is that so? Yeah, that tampering goes with that
concealing the death. I mean, concealing the death is not
killing him and throwing him over the side of a bridge,
you know, and him getting caught up in weeds.
Speaker 2 (43:13):
What did he do to conceal this death? Yeah? How long?
Speaker 1 (43:15):
Yeah, precisely. I think that's one of the big questions
that's going to be asked and needs to be answered,
is the concealment merely placing Blake in a creek bed
that may or may not have water flowing through it
at any given time, dependent upon rain, and also tampering
with evidence. That's that's an interesting that that's something particular
(43:41):
to this case. Because Blake was absent, he was absent
his phone, He's absent clothing. We know, was this guy
retaining clothing off of this kid? I want to know
if this guy's involved in any other kind of homicides,
because this seems like a bizarre This case is so
(44:01):
incredibly bizarre that these two people. And you have to
understand the location where this happened. This is not like
in a heavily congested urban area, and it's not necessarily
in the sticks. As a matter of fact, this area
is really growing. It has grown, you know, Atlanta exploded,
(44:22):
you know, certainly in the late eighties into the nineties.
This is a bedroom community for Atlanta. This is not
a place where you have homicides that are committed, certainly
not like this. I really I want to know if
this individual that perpetrated this as some kind of predator.
I really do. I think that that where we would
(44:45):
be fascinated to learn that bit of information. And again,
you know why why is not something we'll ever get
an answer to, But I think what was the motivation here?
What was the motivation for snuffing out the life of
a seventeen year old and I think more broadly, had
(45:07):
Blake in his short life had he ever encountered Smith before? Well,
had that ever happened?
Speaker 2 (45:15):
You mentioned that Smith is twenty four when this happens.
Speaker 1 (45:18):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (45:18):
I looked at his criminal record and it begins in
two thousand and seven when he was just twenty years old,
and Scotty Elliott Smith was charged with and indicted on fleeing,
attempted to evade hindering law enforcement in possession of weed
less than now it's back in two thousand and seven.
(45:39):
Then he had a number of other run ins with
the law. Okay, where he's negotiating, where charges are draped charges.
You know, he's negotiating his way out because if they
don't see you as a big time spender, you're going
to get a pass. When you're a little bit younger,
you're gonna go away with a few things. But then
twenty eighteen, all right, Now, this is again between two
thousand and seven twenty eighteen, an eleven year span here
(46:01):
between his first involvement with the law to when he
was charged with and indicted on aggravated assault on a
peace officer, interference with government property, criminal damage to property
first degree, second degree aggressive driving, hit and run. Then
he goes to jail, and while in jail in those
charges and awaiting trial, he's charged with then indicted on
violence in a penal institution twice, simple battery twice. In
(46:26):
eight August to twenty eighteen, he entered an offered flee
in all those cases, meaning they have enough to you're
not admitting guilt, but you're admitting that they have enough
evidence that if it went before anybody with a brain,
that you would be guilty. So he pleads it out
on all these things. But he's got a laundry list
of other things going on here, and he ended up
(46:47):
getting a lot of charges dropped through these negotiations. Now,
a lot of times police will add on things. You know,
they can. You know, when you do something, you can
end up with five charges for one thing.
Speaker 2 (47:00):
I get that.
Speaker 3 (47:03):
But this is the person who now admits that he
killed somebody in twenty and eleven. What was he doing
between the time that he first came into trouble with
the law in two thousand and seven twenty eleven that
he got away with legally, and then what did he
do after that? Murder because it looks like things escalated
for him from the age of twenty one.
Speaker 1 (47:24):
Yeah, would it be fascinating? First off, where did he
catch all these charges out of? Were they all out
of the metro area of Atlanta where he specific to
Calwita County or any of the adjoining counties like Clayton County,
Spaulding County, any of those areas in kind of the
south to southwest region of Atlanta metropolitan area, and you know,
(47:47):
kind of trying to understand the area that the waters
which he would have swam in.
Speaker 3 (47:51):
Dave, Yeah, I know that the records I pulled on
him were all in Georgia, the Department Corrections, you know,
where he served his time and things like that, But
they don't tell us I didn't. They don't tell me
where what counties I have to pull that up now.
Speaker 1 (48:05):
Well, another piece to this as well, and this is
kind of a sad commentary in the world that we
live in right now and we're seeing the fruits of
it all over the place, is what judges did he
go before? Was he was he constantly in front of
(48:26):
the same one or two judges that had allowed this
to go on? And look, I know the judges cannot
predict the future, but there are certain behaviors that come
into play when you see you see a person over
and over again, and they become an habitual offender at
that point in time, and they have no respect for
the law, they have no respect for the norms of society.
(48:50):
My question is somebody that is in fact a habitual offender,
if you keep giving them passes over and over again,
that kind of emboldens them. And I'm wondering if during
that period of time, if he felt so bold that
he encounters this kid just walking down the road. I mean,
did Blake, you know, did he say something as a
(49:13):
car was passing, because this guy's already got an issue.
I think in one of the charges, Dave, you had
mentioned that he's got an issue with I think it
was like a reckless driving thing or something like this,
where he's utilizing a weapon or he's usualizing a vehicle
that could be implied it could.
Speaker 2 (49:31):
Be weaponized driving and hit and run.
Speaker 1 (49:34):
Yeah, And so he's out on the road, he sees
this kid, and he doesn't think anybody else is around,
and the kid, you know, I don't know, maybe Blake
made some kind of provocative or what he interpreted as
provocative move toward him, and he's like, no, I'm ending
this kid's life. Well, we don't know, but I can
tell you this. I don't know necessarily that anybody that
(49:57):
is involved in this case is going to leap better
because this guy's behind bars right now in the Cawda
County jail. And there will never be perfect peace in
the lives of those who loved Blake and who miss Blake.
(50:17):
But I do know this. We're on the road right
now to more answers in this case, and as things develop,
I can promise you this, myself and brother Dave Mack
are going to be following Blake's case and we'll update
you as soon as we hear something. I'm Joseph Scott
Morgan and this is Bodybacks
Quody Bags with the Joseph's Gotten More. Being a parent,
in my estimation at least, is all about benchmarks. It's
about benchmarks in your child's life. And you know, you
think back to you know you first saw him crawl,
(00:24):
or even before that, when they first rolled over. You know,
when you walk into the bedroom and into their little
bedroom and you see that they've kind of rolled over
in the crib for the first time. Those dates when
they begin to what they call crews where they're holding
onto furniture and they're kind of walking around, and those
first awkward steps where they're stumbling, first utterances, the first
(00:48):
time they ever look at you and say, Daddy, I
love you. Sweet. Parenthood to a certain degree is all about,
particularly when you're young, and you you have that in
your mind at all times. Since twenty eleven, there has
been an unsolved murder of a very young kid. I
(01:13):
say very young. He was seventeen. But to have a
child that turns up dead and there are no answers
loath these many years, that benchmark somebody. But today I'm
proud to say that there's another benchmark because after all
of this time, Blake Chappelle's murderer has been arrested. I'm
(01:44):
Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Bodybacks, Dave. We have
done a previous episode on Blake's case some time ago,
and this case kind of inhabited my brain for a
(02:07):
protracted period of time. First off, I looked at this
boy who grew up in a single parent household with
a mother who had some physical issues. And I saw
a kid who was very loving. He loved his mother.
(02:32):
And as a matter of fact, let me tell you
what kind of kid he was. Blake knew that his
mama had trouble making ends meet, Dave. This child would
go out before he would come to school every day.
He would buy energy drinks, which I don't think at
(02:54):
that time you could buy in a high school, and
other sweets and whatnot and take them to school, marked
him up and sell them to his classmates. You say, well, wow,
that sounds that sounds kind of out of bounds. Morgan, No,
it doesn't. You know why, because he would take the
(03:16):
profits from that and give to his mama so she
could make rent. He wasn't selling wheat, No, No, he
was not selling drugs. That wasn't that wasn't his thing.
He was trying to take care of his mother in
his own way. He didn't have a car.
Speaker 2 (03:36):
You know, actually plays into the show.
Speaker 1 (03:39):
It does play into it.
Speaker 3 (03:40):
Look, Blake Chappelle went missing after a homecoming dance, after
what he said was one of the greatest nights of
his life. Oh and his mother was involved in helping
him along the way with this greatest night of his life,
this homecoming dance. This happened October sixteenth, twenty eleven. That's
(04:02):
the night of the homecoming dance. That's the night Blake
goes missing. This has been an unsolved case ever since.
We're two years in a row in Joseph Scott Morgan's
class at JSU, tell us how you gave your classes
the opportunity to work in an unsolved case? Because didn't two
(04:24):
of them two years ago do the same case? And
it was Blake Chappelle.
Speaker 1 (04:27):
Yeah, yeah, it was. Actually there was a third and
we just let me back up. Several years ago, I
constructed an undergraduate class in cold case investigations because look,
I mean the world that we're in now, you know
how many authorm cases have we done, Dave, I don't
(04:47):
even know. And that's the pinnacle of cold case from
a scientific standpoint. I'm talking about forensics here, and I
know that the students at Jack State is uh preparing
right now, are going to go into law enforcement workforce
and forensics workforce. And let's face it, cold cases are
(05:10):
kind of they they're becoming steadily becoming the meat and
potatoes of any agency they know that they go to
get these. Yah. I know, it's amazing because so many
years they just sat on the you know, sat on
the sat on the shelf, gathering dust. I was a
member of the Yeah, I think so. And also the
advancement in DNA, I think so. And and also there
(05:33):
are people out there that have had enough time on
streets as investigators that they're developing methodologies and now text
textbooks for undergraduates. And you can take that recipe. My
wife claims, by the way, give me claims that. Give
her a textbook and she'd teaches anything. It was like
(05:55):
about differential equations, how's that is?
Speaker 2 (05:58):
No, no, no, no, But my children with the helmet
all the time.
Speaker 1 (06:02):
Yeah, I was in yeah, so yeah, so you know,
but now we have we have the groundwork laid, and
I've gone through several texts I settled on one. Uh.
That's written by my good friend Joe Chacklon up in
(06:24):
New York. He's a Bronx homicide detective retired, and he's
a cold case guy.
Speaker 2 (06:32):
Jacqueline wrote a book Man.
Speaker 1 (06:33):
Yeah, Jacqueline did Man, and it's it's fantastic. Yeah, I
use it. I used it, Jack say, yeah.
Speaker 2 (06:39):
I didn't know he could read.
Speaker 1 (06:42):
Oh my god, don't let Joe here. You say that
you're going to crush his soul. Don't say that.
Speaker 2 (06:47):
I love that guy.
Speaker 3 (06:48):
I'll tell you he's scared. He invited me to the
church and I was scared. I'm not kidding. I started
confusing right there in the car. I'm your guy in
my city church.
Speaker 1 (06:58):
I feel Joe is. Joe's masterful and the work that
he's done, the text that he's created, and so hopefully
he'll send us that twenty bucks that he owses for this.
But yeah, he's written a fantastic cold case book and
I use it in my class. So, you know, for
(07:18):
a number of years, this case was not even on
my radar. You know, it's something that even we're on
kind of the periphery of the Atlanta metro area. We're
over in Alabama, but some of the stuff kind of
leeches over out of Georgia. And even this this had
not made it onto my radar. I don't even think
that Nancy had covered it, you know, over the years.
(07:40):
And this is you know, down in noon and Georgia.
It's kind of southwest of Atlanta. And it came to
my attention because of my students in this class, some
of them. We've got a lot of students at jack
State that though we're in Alabama, that come from Georgia.
Because of the forensics program, there's you know, we are
(08:01):
the standard you know in Southeast as far as I'm
concerned from a perspective of forensic investigations. And so one
of the kids came up to me and said, Professor Morgan,
our team and they were four person teams. I would
break them out into four person teams. And what they
do is they will take an unsolved case and I
(08:24):
have them work it just like their law enforcement. But
there are certain certain things they can't do. You know,
they don't have obviously any kind of investigatory powers. They
can't go out and interview people. You can call people
and ask if you can speak with them, but they
(08:45):
don't show up at a door and say we need
you to come down to headquarters with And it was
amazing to me starting with that first group, how they
kind of built a life for Blake and his mother
in class. I mean they literally kind of conjured this
(09:05):
up with the data that they were able to collect
the Noonan Police department that is in charge of Blake's
homicide investigation. And to their credit, they constantly for both
sets of classes that the teams that were handling this case,
both sets they said no comment, and they would both
(09:28):
get both classes got referred to the Cawda County disc
Attorney's office and again they were met with In one
case they were met with no comment. Later they got
an ADA that gave them a bit of information, but
not really a lot to sink into. Just to tell
you how committed they are. From jack State Campus to
(09:50):
where Blake's body was found Dave is a roughly a
two hour and twenty minute drive, okay through back roads.
They went there. The students actually drove to Georgia, took
photography equipment with them, documented the route that he was walking,
(10:13):
actually went to the location of where his body was found,
got down into this area i'll get I'll give you
more information about that in just a moment, and again
breathed life back into Blake's case. From my perspective, you
know something that had not been on my radar. You know,
I began to hear it and it tugged at my
(10:33):
heart strings because of the familial circumstances that Blake was
living in. Uh, being this kid that, as you pointed out,
he wouldn't take no, this idea that he's gonna he's
going to burn through shoe leather if he's got to
walk somewhere, it just doesn't matter. He was tenacious. I
often think that right now that if Blake had lived,
(10:57):
he would be a incredible success at whatever he was
going to do because he had that little fire that
was burning within him that said, I'm not going to
give into the circumstances in my life. I'm going to
go out and I'm going to make something despite of
my background where I come from. So that you know,
I began to see this as my students, would you know,
(11:18):
present these cases two years in a row, the same case.
I finally the third year, I was like, look, you
guys have got to choose another case. Yeah, we're not
going to do Blake again, but it just stuck with
me and so and I have followed it, and amazingly,
those students have all graduated now from both from both
of those classes, and I will still get emails from
(11:39):
them asking me if I've heard anything. I'll actually have
some of them email me and say, hey, people are
posted stuff on the message board. Again, there might be
something that's going to break. And of course it never
did until last week. And I got to tell you.
Was it to you that notified me? I think it was?
(12:00):
Wasn't it?
Speaker 2 (12:01):
I think so?
Speaker 3 (12:01):
But you're you're so on top of everything that I
think a lot of times I tell you about something,
you're going yeah, I know, but I'll give date.
Speaker 2 (12:11):
You know what.
Speaker 3 (12:12):
Yeh, there were things that you and I talked about
when we did this, because we did it at crime Con.
Yeah we did, and in front of an audience. And
I was amazed at the work the students did. I
was amazed at the just the quality of work, but
the love they put into it because they documented they
really a great job.
Speaker 2 (12:30):
First of all.
Speaker 3 (12:32):
Second of all, I noticed, after you know, we talked
about it, there was movement in the case. There would
be movement every once in a while, and police always
they held back info. They didn't they still have not
let all the info go because they're sitting on it
for one reason or another. But the bottom line is
(12:52):
that Lake Chappelle who went to his homecoming dance. I
think I said sixteen. He actually went to the dance
was on October fifteenth, That was the night of the dance. Yeah,
and he's with We went with his girlfriend Rion, Is
it Ryan? I always say yeah, r io.
Speaker 1 (13:09):
In yeah Ryan. His hou is pronounced so yeah.
Speaker 2 (13:13):
They go to the east Kawetta. That's how you pronounced that, right.
Speaker 1 (13:16):
Kawita ka Yeah, Calwita Yeah wow.
Speaker 2 (13:20):
I always say that wrong every time.
Speaker 1 (13:22):
No's that's all everybody does. It's a hard work to pronounce,
but yeah Calita, Yeah, Okay.
Speaker 3 (13:27):
They go to the homecoming dance, and Blake tells his
mother during a phone call that night it was the
best night of his life, had so much fun just
dancing and spending time with his friends. It's that time
of life where you can still do that, you know,
where yeah, you're right and there's a purity to it
that goes beyond so many things.
Speaker 2 (13:46):
And I just love it anyway.
Speaker 3 (13:49):
Sometime around ten thirty, Ryan's mom, Shannon, picks them up
from the dance and brought them back to her home,
where they watched a movie and hung out. Around eleven thirty,
Shannon drove Blake to his friend Austin's house, where he
was going to spend the night. Now you know he
(14:10):
didn't stay there at his buddy's house, right, So where
did he go?
Speaker 2 (14:14):
Joe?
Speaker 1 (14:15):
Yeah, well he decided to hoof it over to his girlfriend's.
Speaker 2 (14:19):
House the whole time.
Speaker 1 (14:22):
Yeah, they are, and yeah, he wanted to continue this
greatest night of his life. Apparently.
Speaker 3 (14:28):
Well I don't know too many boys that age that
time that don't you know.
Speaker 2 (14:34):
Yeah, Colin bulletproof man.
Speaker 1 (14:36):
You truly are. And that's you know, that's the beauty
of it. And let me just kind of expand on
this a little bit more. When you think about this
young man and the life that he had led, he's Dave,
He's burying pressures in his life that most thirty year
olds might have to deal with. Can you imagine, just
(14:57):
for a moment, just for a fleeting moment, that burden
because of the songs you hear, because of the perfume
that the girl is wearing that chose you to be
her date that night, the laughter of your friends for
just that moment, that burden, for a few precious minutes,
(15:21):
is lifted off of your shoulders, and you can be
a child again. You can be a young kid again.
You can celebrate, you can dance, you can laugh. The
one thing that he didn't realize is that the greatest
night of his life was going to turn in to
the worst night of his life. Dave, you had mentioned
(15:55):
that he had gone back to the girlfriend's house, and
there was something A bit I don't know. There's not
much about this case. It's lighthearted, but I think that
many of us in the midst of the all that
is that is youth. You can identify he's in her
(16:19):
bedroom in this house, and it's actually her grandmother that
walks in and catches him.
Speaker 2 (16:26):
Remember, remember, because it was it was Ryan's mom.
Speaker 3 (16:30):
Yeah, that drove Blake to his friend's house to go
spend the night, and it's already after midnight. I can
picture him texting right, yeah, while he watched his mom's
car pull away. Okay, she's gone, and he hops out
and starts walking right back there he does, and he's
gonna sneak in. And that's what because it's like two
o'clock in the morning, between two and three, when he
(16:51):
actually walks back over to Ryan's house. Now pick up
with granny because that cracks me up everything.
Speaker 1 (16:57):
Yeah, I know.
Speaker 2 (16:58):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (16:58):
Can you imagine your You're in your girlfriend's house and
maybe Granny's a light sleeper. No one really knows, but
she hears something and lo and behold it's Ryan's homecoming date.
And there he is, Blake in the house. Well, as
you can imagine, he was cast a drift at that point,
(17:21):
at that point in time by the family. You get
out of here right now and already, yeah, exactly, And
so off he goes, you know, he wanders off into
the night at this point in time. And this is
where you know, things turn very dark and sinister, because
(17:42):
there is a text message that is sent from Blake's phone,
and the text message is, and I'm paraphrasing, it's something like,
the cops have stopped me. The cops have stopped me.
And he's a pedestrian. And look, I got to tell you,
(18:04):
if there's a patrol officer out there he sees a
kid Blake's you know, he's not a big kid. He's
you know, I'm not going to say he's diminutive. But
if there's a patrol officer that's out there and he's
walking down the street, it's going to draw the attention
of a police officer. They're going to pull over and
(18:26):
they're going to say, hey, why are you out at
this time of night. I don't know if there was
a curfew, but I'm sure the cop would say, you're
out way late. Where you headed? What are you doing? Well?
He sends this text off and says that he has
been stopped by the police at this point in time,
(18:46):
and he falls off the planet. He just disappears. He
vaporizes into nothing. And this is a kid that had
contact with all of his buddies, with his mother and
with his girlfriend there. You know, he's he's in kind
of a tight knit group.
Speaker 3 (19:05):
He leaves there at like five in the morning, and
he's texting his girlfriend. He's texting Ryan and he's apologizing
to Brian and for mother.
Speaker 2 (19:13):
That's what he's doing while he's texting.
Speaker 3 (19:15):
Now, five five thirty in the morning, Okay, that's not
a really weird time to be out on the road.
Speaker 2 (19:24):
It's a weird time to be walking on the road,
it is okay.
Speaker 3 (19:27):
And so for him to be stopped at five five
thirty in the morning, I get that. But there's a
couple of problems here with this because he's texting and
he's head at Austin's house, which is where Bryan's mam
had taken him to start with. He left, came back,
now he's headed back over there. As he's walking, he's
sending these text messages, so we know he's in communication
(19:49):
while he's walking, apologizing to Ryan, apologizing to her mother,
probably begging, apologizing for you know, everything. But about five
thirty is when he sends the mess to Ryan saying
that he had been stopped by a police officer who
had asked him where he was going and asked for
his ID. And that's it. You say he fell off planet,
(20:12):
right then? Well, you would think at five point thirty
in the morning, if a police officer comes in contact
with anybody there, before they do anything, they radio back
to base. I'm stopping to check on something. The reason is,
you don't know if this person walking down the street
is a maniac with a machine gun. You don't know
if it's somebody who's in desperate need of help. You
(20:34):
have no idea, and you say, hey, I am can
SEP whatever they're number, whatever the code is saying, I'm
checking on a guy. So there's got the word record
of this transaction.
Speaker 1 (20:45):
But as a matter of fact, there's a situation. You
can look at it from the perspective of the police.
First off, you're gonna have radio traffic and the way
the way the radio traffic would normally go would be
And you're right because police officer their spoty senses are up.
You know, if you've got somebody walking down the road
you don't know anything about them, you're not going to
(21:07):
get out of the car. It's not sop. You're not
going to get out of the car without calling it
in to headquarters and say and headquarters, show me out
at whatever road that the individual might be on, if
they have a mile marker, or they'll say on this
road at cross streets such and such, or if they're
in front of a house, show me out at thirty
(21:28):
two Maple Lane. And then they will say, I've got
a white male pedestrian out here. I'm going to go
talk to him, and radio will acknowledge that, and that's
actually on the recording. You can go back. I've had
to listen to these recordings for years and years and years,
and you go back and you can listen to all
of these and you can get a sense of what's
(21:50):
going on. As a matter of fact, if the police
officer engaged with an underage kid under these circumstances, I
would probably write something down about it. I don't know
necessarily that this would warrant a warning, but there would
be some record of this somewhere. And Dave, there ain't nothing, brother,
(22:12):
there ain't nothing. And that's the terrifying part to this,
because I think there it has been floated for a while.
First off, there was a huge group of people that thought, well,
these were rogue cops that came after, you know, a
seventeen year old kid. And I'm thinking, rogue cops, What
is this, Hollywood? You know, why why is a police
(22:34):
officer going to come after a seventeen year old child?
It just it just didn't make sense to me. And
that was like floated out there, and you saw that
on message boards over the years. My students actually had,
you know, printouts of this stuff. Oh and you know,
it just speculation runs wild, and of course you and
I never hear about speculation, did we Dave? You know?
(22:58):
And people, you know, they draw these wild conclusions about things.
But I think one of the things that was so
terrifying to me was that if someone had stopped him
and strong harmed him in some way and said give
me your damn phone, And what if that last text
(23:22):
was the police have stopped me and it wasn't from Blake,
was it from Was it from a perpetrator? And what
could some perpetrator out there want with a seventeen year
old kid. I mean, you can look at him and
tell that he's underage. What you know, how much how
(23:43):
much jewelry, how much money? What material possessions could this
child have that a perpetrator would actually want to shake
him down for it? Just there was nowhere in this
scenario did any of this make sense? And so this
case started out as a runaway That's what this came
(24:06):
out as, you know, this kid has taken to the streets.
He's come from a broken home. Where's he going to go?
He's got another girlfriend that he had previously been broken
up with. That was as a whole another kettle of fish,
because you know, he is there were issues with that
person's father. As a matter of fact, Blake was in
(24:29):
fact taken to jail over that there was actually a
physical assault in that circumstance. That girl had moved away
and was living in an adjacent county, and a lot
of people were thinking at that point, Tom that he
had been threatened. All right, I won't go much further
than that, but I will say that he had been threatened,
(24:50):
maybe even with a weapon, at some point in time,
and that harm was going to come to him if
he ever, you know, showed his face again. And if
I remember correctly, it seems as so that individual may
have been an ex con. I'm not really sure it's
enough to make the most mighty men tremble in their boots,
(25:11):
how much more so a seventeen year old.
Speaker 3 (25:14):
And so he had and yeah, seven, okay, let's deal
with the cop thing very quickly, because I'm not buying it.
And I think a seventeen year old he's cold. He
does send a text after it, after the one about
a cop just stop me. He sends the thing saying
I'm cold. It's getting cold. And that time of day
(25:37):
in late on you're talking about October in Georgia, Alabama.
You got that chili right before, so it can be
eighty five degrees the next day, but it's gonna be
chilly thirty in the morning.
Speaker 2 (25:48):
It just does. And anyway, so you've got the I'm
not buying.
Speaker 3 (25:54):
That a cop ever stopped him, because there are just
too many things that aren't there. Too many things are
not there. But I'm not out of the possibility that
somebody stopped him, got his phone and saw that he
was communicating with somebody and wanted to ally some fears
a criminal, somebody who's a criminal.
Speaker 2 (26:13):
Yeah, they do something.
Speaker 3 (26:14):
They'd pick it up and say I just got checked
by the cops, and then the next thing is, oh,
it's cold, okay, and then nothing.
Speaker 2 (26:19):
That's it.
Speaker 3 (26:21):
I remember all the communication stops right after cop one
in my ID, oh it's getting cold.
Speaker 2 (26:28):
Then there's no more.
Speaker 3 (26:30):
So I'm thinking that maybe whoever that was, I don't
think it was Blake that sent that text about there's
a cop. I think that was somebody who got the
phone from him. I'm just based on the fact that
we don't know anything after this moment. I just don't
think it's a cop. And if it's not a cop,
it's somebody bad.
Speaker 1 (26:50):
Yeah, and someone that was there yet or to do
him harm on some level and as right, you know,
as it turns out, which you know, will chat chat
more back out. Ultimate harm was done to this child.
But in the meantime, you've got the authorities, You've got
his mother, who is you can imagine, just shocked to
(27:11):
her core at this point, because this is.
Speaker 2 (27:13):
Because he vanishes.
Speaker 3 (27:15):
He vanishes after that, after what we just shared with
you about a cop and I'm cold.
Speaker 2 (27:20):
After that, he vanishes. He's gone.
Speaker 3 (27:21):
There are no more text, no more calls, no more nothing,
no more sightings. He's gone. He's walking from his girlfriend's
house to his best friend's house, and he vanishes. Joseph
Scott Morgan gone, five thirty in the morning.
Speaker 1 (27:33):
This kid is, yeah, and you're thinking, you know, how,
first off, how how bad is his life that he
would just suddenly, by the way, in the wake of
what he said the greatest night of my life? What
kid pulls up stakes at that point in time and
decides to disappear in the darkness, never to be seen again. Uh.
(27:57):
That's that's the part that's so chilling. I think another
part of the this is that many of us can identify.
You know, I have to look back in time when
dinosaurs were on the earth, but I still remember how
exciting homecoming was, and I remember how exciting prom was
back in the day. You know, it's a different kind
of feeling. So what is it that would occur that night?
(28:17):
And there was no indication that Ryan's family on any
level was involved in this, you know, because I think
the first thing you think about is, yeah, you know,
he's he's in the house with my daughter at a
late hour. You know, we're going to show him. They
ran down all of that, and nothing came back. Dave,
(28:38):
he he went missing. I guess it was October the sixteenth,
essentially is when he vanishes and he is not seen
again until a gruesome discovery is made. We heard everything.
(29:09):
As a matter of fact. I don't know if you
recall this, but do you recall when we presented Blake's
case at Crime con and there was a story that
came out about police showing up at a property where
they went out to search the property, and we thought that, oh,
(29:31):
my lord, you know, what are they looking for at
this home? And there was an indication that this had
something to do with Blake's Blake's case. And I still
don't to this point, because, as you said, the police
are keeping a really tight lid on all of their
information that they have at their fingertips. What may have occurred,
(29:54):
you know, relative to his circumstances, what brought about his end,
and to the best of our knowledge, what we know
right now, we're still ensure if that search of that
property that was not too far away may have borne
some type of fruit. I think, go ahead.
Speaker 3 (30:14):
No, I was just gonna say, I think you're right.
We don't know because they didn't tell us. They told
us that there was a search going on that it
had to do with Blake, and police had dealt with
anonymous tips for years, and I think that's one of
the reasons they did keep playing it close to the
best for the same reason you and I and everyone
else is totally shocked that a young kid like that
(30:35):
would go missing while he's walking at five point thirty
in the morning and just gone that there's nothing of
him until two months later. And that's what we got
to get to is when did they find him, Joe?
What condition was he in when he was found? Because
at five point thirty in the morning, other than being
a little cold. According to his last text, he's walking
from his girlfriend's house to his best friend's house. Yeah,
(30:58):
he's created a little bit of a problem for himself,
but it's nothing. He's not going to get passed. And
he just had a great night. He had a great
homecoming night with his girlfriend. Now he's yeah, the greatest
night of his life.
Speaker 2 (31:09):
He's not.
Speaker 3 (31:10):
And so what happened? Because he's gone and they looked
for him, right, they're looking.
Speaker 1 (31:15):
They looked for him. They looked for him everywhere, and
they could not find him. Dave. Just imagine his mother
or just for a second, two months, two months, over
two months passed by because he went missing on October
the sixteenth of twenty eleven. He was found, Dave. He
(31:37):
was found on December nineteenth, twenty eleven, face down in
a creek adjacent to a bridge. And here's here's the
real kicker. He's wearing nothing but his underwear. I got
to tell you when I hear that you've got a
(32:02):
deceased individual. They're wearing nothing but their underwear. They're a
couple miles from where their home is and they're just
kind of cast off into a creek, into a body
of water. First off, I can't believe that they were
able to actually find his remains and that they were
still intact, but they were. As a matter of fact,
(32:25):
they were intact enough so that the state medical examiner,
this is a big piece of evidence that we got
when they examined his body. Blake had been executed, he
had been shot a single time in the head, and
his body essentially dumped off in the creek. And there's
no clothing except for his underwear. Now, who what would
(32:49):
be the motivation behind that? I got to tell you, man,
when I see people that are either partially nude or
nude and they're deceased, I think that I always think
that they're some kind of sexual component. The only other
thing I can think of is you have somebody stripped
down to their underwear so you can manage them and
you can humiliate them. But still with humiliation, I think
(33:11):
that there's a sexual component to that as well. And
even with all of that and finding his body, they
they were still at their wits end relative to this
case because there was no further data that was coming up. Yeah,
we've got this kid that has been missing for two months.
But just because you find the body, and you determine
(33:33):
that he has been shot in the head. That doesn't
that doesn't equal, that doesn't equal the solving of the case.
You're still here with a massive puzzle. And Dave, this
has gone on now for until last week, for fourteen years, fourteen.
Speaker 3 (33:48):
They never found the clothing either. They didn't find any
clothing he had. They didn't find his cell phone, they
didn't find his wallets, ID the didn't find anything of
him except body with underwear and shot at the back
of the head.
Speaker 2 (33:59):
So was he all right, let's just start with.
Speaker 3 (34:06):
Could you tell examining his body how long he had
been in the water, Like, could he have been shot
and thrown in the water that morning?
Speaker 1 (34:14):
Could we tell that a few months later? It's you know,
the further you move out in time, the more difficult
it is. I think that any reasonable person would understand
that and appreciate that, and I believe that you could. Yeah, okay,
this is what we do know. It's kind of it's
kind of like a math problem we have. We're solving
(34:38):
for X here. Well, what are our knowns here? We
know when he was last seen alive, we know the
data off of his phone, and we can tom stamp
that and then when he's found. So what we would
do is go back in comparison, compare what we're seeing
with the physical findings of his remains based upon this
(35:00):
timeline that has been established digitally, and we could do
an approximation. We would look for certain points along the
way with changes. The one thing that's really going to
be tough with this case, I think, is how far
gone his remains may have been at that time. You know,
after two months, even though we're in we're heading toward fall,
we're going to be getting and he's already passed a
(35:21):
late fall. As a matter of fact, seems like doesn't
the winter equinox happen? Like is it the equinox? I
don't know what it's called, but anyway, when we go
to winter, it's generally around December twentieth or it's right
before Christmas when that happens. So we're heading in that direction.
There are going to be significant temperature changes. So how
well is he preserved. He's in an aquatic environment, we think,
(35:44):
unless he had been killed somewhere else and moved, or
had he been held against his will for a protracted
period of time, then they bring him back with his
underwear on and discard him in the creek. And I
think that a lot of that information is being held
by the police right now. It just seems really odd.
(36:05):
Why would you make him strip down? Why would you
not find his clothing somewhere along this roadway that he's
walking down. Had he been in the custody of somebody
else for two months? And that's one of the things
are weeks, That's one of the things that you really
want to try to understand. With the post mortem changes
in this case, do they marry up with the time
(36:26):
the known timeline as opposed to maybe he's not as
far gone as they might have thought, and that would
beg the question, well, when exactly did he die? Can
we zero in on that and try to marry that
up with the timeline that we have. Again, they haven't
released this information yet. One other big piece to this
(36:48):
day is we don't know if this gunshot went into
the head is a through and through. They have not
released information if they recovered a projectile out of Blake's head,
and of course if they did, and this is a
weapon that was utilized that may have been utilized in
(37:09):
other crimes, well, the ATF has got a fantastic database
ballistic database. As a matter of fact, they probably got
the best one in the world that you would go
to for sourcing information on expended rounds. If you can
recover that round, you can get it to them and
try to match it up through their database to see
(37:30):
if it marries up with any weapons that's out there.
But the case turned actually based upon what you had
mentioned just a few months ago. You had said that
there were anonymous tips that came in, that there were
tips all along, and Dave jumped forward to twenty twenty three.
(37:52):
This scene is still being worked and man, the nowt
And Police Department actually got an anonymous tip, didn't.
Speaker 3 (37:59):
They, And you know when we were recording and talking
about this show, We've got the anonymous tip in twenty
twenty three, and police actually followed that up. Okay, they
pleaded publicly that tip told them there's more and there
are people that know more. And they also ended up
(38:22):
serving search warrants on two different properties in twenty twenty four.
Speaker 2 (38:25):
Remember those.
Speaker 3 (38:26):
Yes, they were serving these search warrants and weren't telling
anybody a whole lot, but they were looking for something.
We don't know if they found anything or not, but
we know that they were looking and it had something
to do with Blake Chappelle's case. So when you've got
a case that, for all intents and purposes, began October sixteen,
twenty eleven, and ends December nineteenth, twenty eleven, and we
(38:51):
don't know anything until now, and they're still working at
like this twelve and thirteen years later, heck, yeah, man,
these guys are doing their job and they are still
you have no idea of how much they are still
holding on to and.
Speaker 1 (39:02):
The reason, oh god, yeah.
Speaker 3 (39:04):
They're not letting it out. They're not going to let
somebody come into this and mess up their case. And
you know what, Joe, they did have an arrest finally,
and it wasn't anybody who had ever been taught to.
Speaker 1 (39:13):
Anybody that had ever had ever been investigated ever. Isn't
that something that you could have You could have this
young kid seventeen years old and for some reason, his
path intersects with this guy who actually turns out had
(39:38):
been in the joint for several years. Yeah, which is,
you know, quite amazing when you begin to think about
what is at stake here. And I believe that this
came about as a result of of the anonymous tip.
I think so and sourcing this, you know, back to
(39:58):
this individual. What precisely can you tell us about this
arrest that has been affected Dave?
Speaker 2 (40:04):
All right? He was. The guy's name is Scotty Elliott Smith.
Speaker 3 (40:09):
He was never investigated in this case, but he has
been arrested and charged and police say he has confessed
to the murder of Blake Chappelle. Police served two search
warrants in Sharpsburg in March of twenty twenty four.
Speaker 1 (40:27):
Which is just a Jason too. It's in Colwaita County
and it's outside of Noonan.
Speaker 2 (40:32):
So yeah, makes it so that's the area we're talking about.
Speaker 1 (40:35):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely, that was.
Speaker 3 (40:37):
And so again, now remember we had the tip in
twenty twenty three. We had police saying we need more
so they knew that that this top of the soda
have been popped. They served the search warrants in twenty
twenty four, and then here we are, out of the blue.
September twelfth, twenty twenty five, they send out this message,
we got an arrest and I'm looking through all my notes.
Speaker 2 (40:57):
This guy's got to be on the radiaro. No, he's nowhere.
Speaker 3 (40:59):
This guy was in jail so much Joe I actually
double checked to make sure he wasn't in jail. This
h Yeah, he is now charged by the way police
still asking for more info. Which the saddest part is
there are so many people that know what happened, and
they have maintained at least some form of silence for
this long.
Speaker 2 (41:20):
Does that.
Speaker 1 (41:21):
Yeah. Something I want to point out about Smith, who
their framing this is he has allegedly confessed. I'm understanding
that that they have conducted multiple interviews with him, and
just because he confesses prior to you know, being appearing
(41:42):
in a court and all these sorts of things that
you have to go through, that doesn't mean that he's
guilty yet. Okay, we have to understand that we need
to temper what we're saying to a certain degree. But
Dave I was doing the math on this. So the
ledged perpetrator is thirty eight right now. So he crossed
(42:04):
pass with Blake. When Blake, as I've mentioned several times,
was seventeen, he would have been twenty four years old
at that time. Young man twenty four years old out
in this area at that time of night, and what
was the plan here. Did he just merely see Blake
and saw him as an opportunity for mischief? Well, I
(42:28):
hate that word because it's not mischief but malevolent behavior.
Speaker 2 (42:33):
I mean, is that your words tell you, Joe? What
did these? I mean murder? He agated assault.
Speaker 3 (42:40):
But they've charged him with possession of a firearm or
knife during commission of or and that that's a standard charge,
I mean, because we already know that Blake was shot
in the head.
Speaker 1 (42:52):
But yeah, then we go to yeah, then we go
to conceiting feeling death another Joe, and then also tampering.
Speaker 3 (43:01):
Yeah is that so? Yeah, that tampering goes with that
concealing the death. I mean, concealing the death is not
killing him and throwing him over the side of a bridge,
you know, and him getting caught up in weeds.
Speaker 2 (43:13):
What did he do to conceal this death? Yeah? How long?
Speaker 1 (43:15):
Yeah, precisely. I think that's one of the big questions
that's going to be asked and needs to be answered,
is the concealment merely placing Blake in a creek bed
that may or may not have water flowing through it
at any given time, dependent upon rain, and also tampering
with evidence. That's that's an interesting that that's something particular
(43:41):
to this case. Because Blake was absent, he was absent
his phone, He's absent clothing. We know, was this guy
retaining clothing off of this kid? I want to know
if this guy's involved in any other kind of homicides,
because this seems like a bizarre This case is so
(44:01):
incredibly bizarre that these two people. And you have to
understand the location where this happened. This is not like
in a heavily congested urban area, and it's not necessarily
in the sticks. As a matter of fact, this area
is really growing. It has grown, you know, Atlanta exploded,
(44:22):
you know, certainly in the late eighties into the nineties.
This is a bedroom community for Atlanta. This is not
a place where you have homicides that are committed, certainly
not like this. I really I want to know if
this individual that perpetrated this as some kind of predator.
I really do. I think that that where we would
(44:45):
be fascinated to learn that bit of information. And again,
you know why why is not something we'll ever get
an answer to, But I think what was the motivation here?
What was the motivation for snuffing out the life of
a seventeen year old and I think more broadly, had
(45:07):
Blake in his short life had he ever encountered Smith before? Well,
had that ever happened?
Speaker 2 (45:15):
You mentioned that Smith is twenty four when this happens.
Speaker 1 (45:18):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (45:18):
I looked at his criminal record and it begins in
two thousand and seven when he was just twenty years old,
and Scotty Elliott Smith was charged with and indicted on fleeing,
attempted to evade hindering law enforcement in possession of weed
less than now it's back in two thousand and seven.
(45:39):
Then he had a number of other run ins with
the law. Okay, where he's negotiating, where charges are draped charges.
You know, he's negotiating his way out because if they
don't see you as a big time spender, you're going
to get a pass. When you're a little bit younger,
you're gonna go away with a few things. But then
twenty eighteen, all right, Now, this is again between two
thousand and seven twenty eighteen, an eleven year span here
(46:01):
between his first involvement with the law to when he
was charged with and indicted on aggravated assault on a
peace officer, interference with government property, criminal damage to property
first degree, second degree aggressive driving, hit and run. Then
he goes to jail, and while in jail in those
charges and awaiting trial, he's charged with then indicted on
violence in a penal institution twice, simple battery twice. In
(46:26):
eight August to twenty eighteen, he entered an offered flee
in all those cases, meaning they have enough to you're
not admitting guilt, but you're admitting that they have enough
evidence that if it went before anybody with a brain,
that you would be guilty. So he pleads it out
on all these things. But he's got a laundry list
of other things going on here, and he ended up
(46:47):
getting a lot of charges dropped through these negotiations. Now,
a lot of times police will add on things. You know,
they can. You know, when you do something, you can
end up with five charges for one thing.
Speaker 2 (47:00):
I get that.
Speaker 3 (47:03):
But this is the person who now admits that he
killed somebody in twenty and eleven. What was he doing
between the time that he first came into trouble with
the law in two thousand and seven twenty eleven that
he got away with legally, and then what did he
do after that? Murder because it looks like things escalated
for him from the age of twenty one.
Speaker 1 (47:24):
Yeah, would it be fascinating? First off, where did he
catch all these charges out of? Were they all out
of the metro area of Atlanta where he specific to
Calwita County or any of the adjoining counties like Clayton County,
Spaulding County, any of those areas in kind of the
south to southwest region of Atlanta metropolitan area, and you know,
(47:47):
kind of trying to understand the area that the waters
which he would have swam in.
Speaker 3 (47:51):
Dave, Yeah, I know that the records I pulled on
him were all in Georgia, the Department Corrections, you know,
where he served his time and things like that, But
they don't tell us I didn't. They don't tell me
where what counties I have to pull that up now.
Speaker 1 (48:05):
Well, another piece to this as well, and this is
kind of a sad commentary in the world that we
live in right now and we're seeing the fruits of
it all over the place, is what judges did he
go before? Was he was he constantly in front of
(48:26):
the same one or two judges that had allowed this
to go on? And look, I know the judges cannot
predict the future, but there are certain behaviors that come
into play when you see you see a person over
and over again, and they become an habitual offender at
that point in time, and they have no respect for
the law, they have no respect for the norms of society.
(48:50):
My question is somebody that is in fact a habitual offender,
if you keep giving them passes over and over again,
that kind of emboldens them. And I'm wondering if during
that period of time, if he felt so bold that
he encounters this kid just walking down the road. I mean,
did Blake, you know, did he say something as a
(49:13):
car was passing, because this guy's already got an issue.
I think in one of the charges, Dave, you had
mentioned that he's got an issue with I think it
was like a reckless driving thing or something like this,
where he's utilizing a weapon or he's usualizing a vehicle
that could be implied it could.
Speaker 2 (49:31):
Be weaponized driving and hit and run.
Speaker 1 (49:34):
Yeah, And so he's out on the road, he sees
this kid, and he doesn't think anybody else is around,
and the kid, you know, I don't know, maybe Blake
made some kind of provocative or what he interpreted as
provocative move toward him, and he's like, no, I'm ending
this kid's life. Well, we don't know, but I can
tell you this. I don't know necessarily that anybody that
(49:57):
is involved in this case is going to leap better
because this guy's behind bars right now in the Cawda
County jail. And there will never be perfect peace in
the lives of those who loved Blake and who miss Blake.
(50:17):
But I do know this. We're on the road right
now to more answers in this case, and as things develop,
I can promise you this, myself and brother Dave Mack
are going to be following Blake's case and we'll update
you as soon as we hear something. I'm Joseph Scott
Morgan and this is Bodybacks
Host
Joseph Scott Morgan
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