October 18, 2022 • 40 mins
On Jan. 18, 2021, 46-year-old Francis Kelly’s body was discovered. Police find Kelly on his couch, in his home, and a bag of cocaine underneath him. The unexpected autopsy says he died of strangulation. All while during a heated custody battle between Kelly and Littlefield.
In this episode of Body Bags, forensics expert Joseph Scott Morgan and Jackie Howard discuss how Francis Kelly’s death was ultimately a staged overdose, the significant differences between fentanyl and cocaine, how the body reacts to the different drugs, why strangulation was not obvious to investigators, and much more!
Show Notes:
0:00 - Introduction to Body Bags with forensics expert Joseph Scott Morgan and producer Jackie Howard
0:36 - Brief overview of the homicide case involving victim Francis Kelly
1:14 - Introduction of CrimeOnline’s Jackie Howard
2:09 - When Francis Kelly's body was discovered, police found him on his couch in his home and a bag of cocaine underneath him
2:57 - The difference between fentanyl and cocaine
4:32 - Left ventricular hypertrophy
8:11 - Fentanyl was originally developed as a partner for surgical use
10:00 - How fentanyl works within the body vs. cocaine
11:08 - Narcan and its uses
16:03 - Questions: How did he get the fentanyl in his body? Is that a normal way of taking fentanyl? Is that way going to have a different reaction in the body? Would he have tasted it? Does ingesting it offer a different kind of effect?
19:26 - What is skin popping?
24:52 - “There is nothing as an investigator that will make you stop cold in your tracks than an unexpected result at autopsy. It's something that makes you question your abilities. It's something that makes you question the care that you took with the case because this is key: Once the scene has been left, the body has been removed from the scene, and can never reset.”
25:34 - Autopsy reports that Kelly was in fact strangled and did not OD as suspected
26:32 - Question: Kelly was strangled with a tie. Why was that not originally obvious? Specifically, because ligature marks typically leave a mark
31:51 - We later find out that Kelly's death was a result of a custody dispute between Littlefield and Kelly. Littlefield claimed Kelly was abusive
32:22 - Question: The other thing that we find out, which I find very interesting and kind of explains some things about the cocaine, knowing that he died from fentanyl and that it was cocaine that was found. We're looking at a good case of staging here, aren't we, Joe?
38:57 - The verdict is in
39:28 - Heidi Littlefield was sentenced to 115 years in a state prison, which included 60 years for murder. 20 years for attempted poisonings, and 35 years for conspiracy to commit murder resulting in a death
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:08):
Body Backs with Joseph Scott Morgan. You know, I guess
since about two thousand, two thousand twelve, I've appeared on
various television networks over that period of time, and one
of the things I've taken great pleasure in is the
(00:31):
fact that I wear ties on air. I love it.
And the reason I love it is that Obama ties
at thrift stores. Because so many people spend so much
money to look really good on air. I go out
and I find the coolest ties I can find, and
I wear them on the air. I think part of
it just has to go with the fact that I
(00:51):
grew up with not a lot of money, and I
like to kind of display that on air, that you
can look good without spending a bunch of money. But
the case I'm going to cover today actually talks about
a favorite tie. It talks about a favorite tie that
a gentleman like to wear on a regular basis. It
talks about an overdose involving Fentnel, and it talks about
(01:16):
a relationship gone bad. Today we're gonna talk about the
home side of Francis Kelly. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and
this is body Backs. Joining me today is my friend
Jackie Howard, executive producer of Crime Stories with Nancy Grace. Jackie,
(01:41):
I don't know about you. When I was a kid,
you had to get all gussied up to go to church,
and part of that was wearing a tie, of warning,
to tie my entire life. And you know, it's hard
for me not to wear a tie, I think when
I go out in public and that sort of thing
to do appearances and whatnot. People are more casual about it.
But some of us guys just like our ties. And
in this particular case, this poor fellow had a tie
(02:04):
that he loved, he loved, and he apparently wore it
on a regular basis, and interestingly enough, this tie actually
led to his death. Well, I'm gonna tell you, Joe,
while I did get gussied up to go to church,
I can categorically tell you I did not wear a tie.
We're talking today about forty six year old Francis Kelly.
(02:26):
When Francis Kelly's body was discovered, police found him on
his couch in his home and a bag of cocaine
underneath him. But at the time they did observe some
bruising around his eyes, elbows, knees and hand. However, there
was no evidence to suggest that foul play was involved
(02:47):
in Kelly's death, so initially before the autopsy they made
some assumptions that he had in fact odd because he
had this bag of cocaine. The autopsy discovered that Kelly
was strangle and sustained blunt force trauma to his head
and it wasn't cocaine that was found in his system.
(03:08):
But as you mentioned, fentnyl. So let's talk first about
the difference between fentnyl and cocaine and what each would
do to you having that in your system. Yeah, you know,
you're not going to see a lot of differences I
don't think externally as a result of you know, cocaine
abuse versus finnyl abuse. There's certain things that you can
(03:30):
look for. People that use cocaine many times will have
a real wasted appearance. I guess as a result of
you know, kind of hyperactivity. Uh, they don't keep weight
on them very well. Back in the eighties, when people
snorted a lot of cocaine, you'd have spontaneous nose bleeds.
I've actually worked work cases of snorting cocaine where individuals
(03:52):
have eroded the septum in their nose. You know, that
cartilaginous separation that you have between both of your nostrils
and it kind of alter rates, that sort of thing,
and those are things that you look for, and you
you look for needle tracks as well, but you know
you can have needle tracks associated with the use of
a fentanyl and cocaine as well. You know, they're both
rendered down. You can put it in a liquid form
(04:14):
and essentially injected, So you're not going to see a
lot of differences necessarily just upon initial observation of subjects
at the scene. So you know, what do you turn to, Well,
you turn to any kind of changes that might have
happened internally, and that's one of the things that we do.
You know, at autopsy with cocaine in particularly, you might
(04:35):
see signs of particularly those individuals that have long term
abuse of cocaine, you'll see hypertensive changes in the heart
that you get a condition called left ventricular hypertrophe, and
it's just kind of a fancy term for saying that
the the wall of the heart thickens again left left
(04:55):
ventricular hypertrophy, and so you begin to see it with
the the actual wall of the heart began to thicken,
and it's as a result of individuals drug use. Sometimes
it can be a natural event as well, and there'll
be the thickening that occurs, and we do measurements on
the walls of the heart at autopsy to give an
(05:15):
idea if it's and it's what they refer to as
it's normal anatomical configuration. And you know, if you see
some kind of anomaly like that, you might say, well,
you know what, maybe this person has just got severe hypertension,
maybe they've got something else genetic that you know, will
genetically predispose them to to some of these things, or
it could be a drug related event like them utilizing cocaine,
(05:39):
particularly on a regular basis. Cocaine is actually a stimulant.
It's it's going to increase the metabolic activity in our body.
It pushes your blood pressure up, these sorts of things.
But fitting alongto the hand, it's a synthetic opiate. That
means it's created in a laboratory and it depresses the system. So,
(06:01):
you know, how we talked about the heart relative to
the cocaine. If you begin to think about the lungs
relative to fentyl that's what really is hammered in the body.
And many times when you have an individual that has died,
particularly of what's referred to as acute o D and acute.
You know, just so we understand, acute is like a
(06:22):
sudden event as opposed to chronic, which means long term.
But if you have an acute event involving an opiate
like this, you'll have people that have very very heavy
lungs at autopsy. That means that they'll be heavily congested.
They'll weigh more than they normally should. Because we weigh
each organ in a scale. And I don't know if
(06:44):
people know this, but it's kind of a horrible thought.
The next time you go to the grocery store and
you see a scale that um that's in the produce aisle,
that is exactly the kind of scale that's used in
the more to weigh individual organs. And there are certain
parameters that we look for for organ weights, and any
(07:06):
time we have an organ that is over the expected
weight for that particular age, that will make a scratch
our head a little bit and say, well, what's causing
this heaviness? Or if it's lighter, for instance, which most
of the time, you find things that are heavier, and
in the cases of opiates like this opiate O D,
you would expect to find the lungs being heavier, congested
(07:29):
with fluid and blood and that sort of thing, and
sometimes that's indicative of an opiate O D. One fascinating
thing that you see at crime scenes relative to individuals
that have overdosed on some type of depressant like an
opiate is you'll have a presentation of what's referred to
(07:50):
as a frothy edemitous cone is what it's called. And
you'll see this kind of white foam looks like the
head of a beard. And we've actually talked about this
before on body bag that's issues from the nose and
from the mouth, and it'll be tainted in a pink,
kind of a pink color, and again that's as a
result of this kind of hyper congestion that's going on
(08:12):
where the people are really struggling to breeze. And because
with this drug in particular, you begin to think about,
you know, what does it do systemically, How does it
affect the brain, how does it affect your motor functions?
These sorts of things, and you'll see these individuals that
cannot move around because folks might not realize. Fentyl was
(08:35):
actually originally developed as a partner for surgical anesthesia with
other drugs, So it is meant to put an individual
down into this kind of deep repose, if you will,
to get them manageable for surgery. It's also used for
pain relief for years and years. Kind of interesting. They
(08:56):
developed fentyl and placed it in a patch. People have
seen nicotine patches for instance, that people wear, you know,
to quit smoking. Well, people have had fentyl patches as well,
and the patch itself is essentially populated with the dosage
of fentyl, and then it's what's called transdermal. You put
(09:17):
the patch over prescribed area and that medication kind of
seeps in through the skin and goes into the system
and gives pain relief. People that have things like crowding,
back pain and hip pain and all those sorts of
things that people develop over tom as a result of
age or injury can get relief with it. So it's
(09:39):
a very very powerful drug. And then when it's out
on the street and it's being manufactured, say for instance,
in a clandestine lab. Because fentyl is one of those
things that is just the absolute scourge of our society
right now. One of the many drugs it's made and
not very well controlled environments. It's made in other countries,
for instance, and then people smuggle it in and you
(10:00):
don't really know what's in it. It can make for
a very very lethal cocktail. What you're telling me, Joe,
I don't have a lot of experience in what you're
talking about. So if I understand you, what you're telling
me is one is an upper and one's a downer. Yeah,
And i'd also like to say, as your friend, I'm
glad you don't have a lot of experience into Jackie.
(10:22):
So but yeah, yeah, you're right. One is an upper, uh,
and one is a downer. And when you begin to
think about the finel in particular, it essentially sends the
victim into respiratory failure. We here a lot about cardiac failure,
but it the lung has become so heavy as a
result of this congestion that's going on. Oh so it's
(10:45):
it's not that they absorb anything, it's that they can't function,
so they're congested with fluids. Right. Yet, I had an
old doctor one time actually referred to it. It's like
the patients, it's it's the equivalent of somebody trying to
run in mud, and it's it becomes so labored and
they're struggling so hard, and they don't have an awareness,
(11:07):
you know, to kind of you can't you can't fight
fight your way out of it at a chemical level,
because it's hammering the body so hard it would be
very difficult to kind of pull back from it. That's
why nowadays, you know, they they carry narcan. You know,
we have many number of agencies out there that apply
an oar CAN. They have the ability and it kind
(11:28):
of counteracts this kind of depressant event that occurs with
a subject that has been found down. There's so many
people that just kind of fall over as a result
of being an exposed phenyl. They're they're even cases out there,
and this dangerous and how insidious this drug is. Our
law enforcement officers can go inside of the cabin of
a car many times, okay, and then think about how
(11:51):
horrific this is, and they'll open up a bag that
might contain this finnyl that has been made in some
clandestine lab and so only this kind of puff cloud
comes out and this is almost in a histamine like form.
It kind of spreads into the air and the cops
don't note it's there, you know, they're just kind of
searching the area. It's not like they have a gas
(12:12):
mask on or a ventilator on or something, you know,
like you see with firefighters. So they inhalate this stuff
and oh my gosh, you inhalate this stuff in a
powdered form and it gets right into the mucous membranes
and it's absorbed and this is going into the lung.
So how much more so, for instance, if an individual
has it mixed, and you'll find people that are mixing
(12:33):
it in cocaine, which is kind of interesting. You know,
you think about cocaine, which is in fact a stimulant,
being mixed mixed with fentel, which is at present kind
of takes us back to the days of you know,
you think about how Belushi died. He died of what
was called a speedball, which was a combination of of
cocaine and heroin and that was directly injected and it
(12:55):
just really wrecks the system. But just fentel by itself
can even send somebody to send a passive status that
a scene like a police officer that's just kind of
looking around that that kind of histamine that they can inhalate,
it can kill you. You've mentioned a couple of times now, Joe,
that fentnyl is man made. So is this what we're
(13:16):
hearing all the time about in the same vein that
methemphetamine is main where people are pulling things out of
cold midst. Yeah, well, you know, fentnyl itself is you know,
it's based on the molecule that's you know that's originally
an opiate, you know, which is a naturally occurring to pressant.
We've had, for instance, we've had like morphine, you know,
(13:37):
for a long long time, and morphine is a natural
derivative that you know, you go all the way back
to the Civil War and you begin to think about
people were trying to use painkillers, if you will, where
you know, they were able to essentially draw out that
element of of the poppy plant for instance, which is
(14:00):
you know where heroin derives from, and applied this agent
in order to reduce pain. And it has been effective.
I mean, it's it's given a lot of relief. Famously,
you know, you can think about our troops out in
the field. You know, in any number of movies we've
seen from World War Two, where the troops used to
carry serettes, they call them serettes, the little ampules with
(14:22):
the built in needle of morphine. These guys would be
in terrible pain after sustaining some horrific wound. Their fellow
soldiers would take the serette and jam it into their
leg and apply the morphine, and it gives instant relief
to a certain degree. It stems the pain because it
acts on the pain centers and it mutes that pain.
(14:43):
I just said, the person is not suffering. But you know,
here's here's the key. When you're talking about a trug
like this and in its synthetic form, which now you
take that original naturally occurring molecule and you synthesize it
and you make it a man made substance where the
molecule is very similar to that that is occurring in nature,
and you adjusted, you know, it's said, for instance, like
(15:05):
finnel Is, just hold onto your hat for this is
it's like a hundred times more powerful than Heroin. Just
let that sink in just for a second. A hundred
times more powerful that means it requires less of this
substance to get the same high than an individual might
get from heroin. But if you adjust that dosage just
slightly and you apply just a bit more, the person
(15:28):
will essentially flattening and done. You know the thing about
(15:49):
medical with that investigation that I've always tried to draw
them into any investigator that I train or those just
to give props to them those that train, is it
is always essential as an investigator you go to the scene,
You take a look at the body in its context
in which it is found. And in this case with
(16:11):
Francis Kelly, it led to some serious, serious questions that
the police had. So here's my question. The autopsy found
Kelly had fentinyl in his system, and yet there was
cocaine underneath him. So how did he get the fentyl?
We know that he ingested it. Now is that a
(16:35):
normal way of getting fentyl? Is that going to have
a different reaction in the body. We know that he
was ultimately given fentnel three times. It was in his
oatmeal and put in his me so soup, and I'm
honestly I'm not sure about what food I him the
(16:56):
third one was in, But would he have tasted it?
Would he have known that he was eating this? And
does ingesting it offer you a different kind of effect?
Those are valid questions and sense that. Um, And I'll
go ahead and tell you what what Mr Kelly had
(17:17):
remarked At one point time, he had made a remark
that he had taken a bite of food and it
tasted funny. I mean, how many of us in the
audience have ever eaten something somewhere and it had an
unnatural taste to it? If it's prepared at a restaurant
or something like that, it almost has a chemical taste
to it. A great example for me, I don't like
(17:39):
to use a dishwasher and him, so I'll just use like,
you know, dish liquid and scrub things out. And do
you ever have the experience where you didn't quite get
all of the dish liquid out of some type of
vessel that you're cleaning, and then later you go back
and you say, wow, this tastes like distettergent. Well, think
about that. It's it's got something that is unnatural to taste.
(17:59):
So yeah, he was aware of it. I think he
was aware of one of these times that someone had
attempted to actually give him some type of agent, which
you know, of course turns out to be fentyl in
his system. And yeah, there's an awareness and a lot
of it has to do with how much is applied.
One of the great questions you hear about if fentyl
(18:22):
is applied, or any kind of drug is applied, how's
it going to get systemically into the system the quickest?
And boy, I mean, I've got some incredible stories from
over the years where people you know, placed any number
of different types of agents in their body in different
locations certainly, and all have a variety of different effects,
(18:43):
and and how how long it takes for them to
kind of be absorbed into the system and will they
totally be absorbed. You think about an individual, for instance,
that that has something like cocaine or fentyl, or you know,
people have smarted heroine. That's something that has been done. Well,
it goes into the mute as membrane. Well, when you
absorb this, where's it going well into the mucous membrane,
(19:05):
it's also going directly into the lungs, and so the
uptake of this, it's going to be really quick. Another
quick way is through I V injection, which I'm not
talking about like an ivy bag hanging in a in
a hospital. I'm talking about intravenously where an individual. You've
seen movies where people will will tie off essentially and
they'll you know, render down whatever it is that they're
(19:26):
injecting into their body with a spoon, heating it, rendering
it down, and then they draw it up and injected.
They tie off with a tourniquet, the vessel pops up
and they go directly into the vein. Well, that's very
quick as well. There's something else that's kind of interesting.
People also do something called skin popping, which is very
(19:47):
it's it's really quite disgusting actually, but they will take
an injectable that they've rendered down and they'll go directly
in two their skin, not searching for a vessel. They'll
just they'll go into what's we're for two as into
the sub q fat, which means that layer fat directly
below the skin. And it's called skin popping. And you
(20:08):
have people that skin pop and those drugs are injected
and there they absorb a little bit slower. But what
occurs is these drugs that are clandestinely made, they're cut
with things like heroin, traditionally has been cut with things
like quinine um, talcum powder. Uh, it's been cut with
(20:29):
baby formula, all kinds of things over the years so
that the dealers can extend their supply of the drugs.
So they'll cut it so it's like a sixty forty cut.
It won't be in a pure state. And what happens
is with the skin popping is that these areas will
actually ulterate because when they skin pop. For instance, if
(20:50):
an individual is in injecting something like quinine or talcum powder,
it's not metabolized, it just kind of sits there, but
the skin it becomes irritated, and then you get an
ulcerated area. And you'll find many people that skin pop
will have these huge ulcerated lesions all over their bodies.
And that's types of things that you've seen. And then
(21:10):
you have people that have particularly in poisonings because that's
that's the easiest way to get it into a non
suspecting person system. You know, you approach somebody with a
needle and you inject them or attempt to inject them,
they're going to fight you off most of the time
if they haven't awareness that this is happening. So many
people will clandestinely put items into uh into food and
(21:34):
stir around or mix it up and then try to
get the person to ingest it. And then of course,
you know, you have stories of people that mule drugs
in from you know, from various countries, and they of
course insert a variety of different types of drugs in
into their backside for instance. And you know, I had
I know one kid that came up from South America
at one point time, from Bolivia specifically, and he had
(21:57):
twenty condoms that were clipped with surgical staples, and he
had pure cocaine. And each one of these condoms is
about twenty I'm sorry, it was about ten grams each,
and one of the condoms erupted and he got a
ten gram dosage of cocaine into his large intestine and
(22:18):
it like immediately he just fell over dead. It was
absorbed that quickly into the intestinal lining. I'm giving a
long answer here, but it's you never know how it's
going to be absorbed. And also, you know, if you're
talking about you know, having it passed through the digestive
track in the form of food, if it's mixed in
(22:39):
the absorption is going to take a bit longer. It
might even require higher dosage than it would, say, for instance,
if it was being injected directly into a vein. So
what we're seeing in this case, when Kelly was found,
he was still alive. So what you're telling me is
due to the method that he was given the drug,
it was not enough to kill him. Yeah, or it
(23:02):
could be you know, the progression of the metabolism itself,
the progression of the metabolism. You're gonna have to school me,
but yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean, okay, let me, let
me back off a little bit, because that's not that's
not entirely accurate, but just okay, let's just put in
common terms relative to people ingesting food, certain types of
(23:23):
food make you feel different, you know, in um, you know,
depending upon whatever it is. Say, for instance, people that
don't have necessarily a real tolerance for sugar. For instance,
you might eat a candy bar and then it might
taste really good initially, okay, and then maybe ten fifteen
minutes later, your body starts to uptake everything that's in
(23:47):
the candy bar and your body is not processing it okay,
and you start to feel really bad. Okay, Maybe people
are pre diabetic or diabetic and they eat this and
it makes them feel really really bad. Well, that's part
of the metabolic uptake of that nicular substances. Somebody has
applied some type of agent like funnel into a food source,
and the individual ing the food source, well, it's passes
(24:11):
through the mouth and the esophagus and drops into the stomach. Well,
the stomach sits there and kind of turns this food
and it's absorbed through the stomach wall. Just because it
is being absorbed in nutrients are being taken out of it,
doesn't mean you're getting everything out of it. Say, for instance,
if you took the pure substance and injected it directly
into a vein, all right, So you would either require
(24:34):
more in order to facilitate this, or it would be
a matter of the type of agent that you're mixing
it with, whether it's soup for instance, versus a oatmeal
or grits or something like that that might be a
bit more dense. It might kind of shield the individual
from ingestion of it totally and and uptaking it. And
(24:55):
so the longer your body goes along it has a
higher probability of ingesting it. And maybe you can make
it through safely. But if this is being done to
you over and over and over again, sooner or later,
you're going to die. There's nothing as an investigator that
(25:30):
will make you stop cold in your tracks than an
unexpected result at autopsy. It's something that makes you question
your abilities. It's something that makes you question the care
that you took with the case. Because this is this
is key. Once the scene has been left, once the
(25:53):
body has been removed from the scene, you can never reset,
you can never do it over. You get one shot
at doing it right. And in this case, Jackie, when
they got into this autopsy, they found something completely unexpected
that is true, and that was the fact that Kelly
(26:13):
was strangled and did not o d as they initially suspected.
Kelly's body was found by his former girlfriend Heidie Marie
little Field and her adult daughter Logan Marie Runyon and
Runyan's boyfriend Robert Walker. Now, the two women had secretly
(26:36):
got into Kelly's house and poisoned his oatmeal and some
soup as I told you, with fentyl. But when they
went back to the home, Kelly wasn't dead. He was
still grasping for breath. He was unresponsive but trying to breathe,
and at that point they decided to finish him off,
(26:58):
and they used a tie, specifically his favorite tie, to
strangle him. Why was that not originally obvious? Because, as
you've talked before, usually ligature stranglings leave a mark. So
why didn't they look at him the investigators when his
(27:20):
body was reported, why didn't they look at him and go,
oh wait, there's marks there. That's key. I want everyone
in the sound of my voice to envision a male
necktie right now. Just envisioned kind of a standard necktime.
Not talking about like a you know what, tiny little
string tie or something. I'm talking about a regular necktie there. Why.
(27:43):
They're two to three inches, maybe four inches, dependent upon
the particular cycle that you're point through a men's fashion
and generally they're smooth. Many of them are made out
of either silk, the really expensive ones, or maybe some
kind of synthetic version of a silk or to get
the appearance of a silky fabric. And you know, with
(28:05):
with that type of construction of this tie, it's not
like a rope, and it's not like an electrical chord.
Do you think about a rope or an electrical cord.
How kind of narrow they are they create when they're
used as a ligature, they create a very narrow furrow.
It's called a furrow, just like a furrow in a
field that's being plowed, and they're deep. They're very deep
(28:30):
with rope in particular, because folks will think about rope,
it's kind of woven many times. Most of the time
it's woven, and it's made out of a lot of
different materials, but it's woven. It has a very specific pattern,
you know, you think about like a harry bone pattern,
or if you have a twist like a baling rope.
It it's very rough to the touch, and when you
apply it, the more tension that you put on this thing,
(28:51):
the deeper the furrow, and it's going to leave behind
an area of abrasion, or we call it an abraided
area where this skin is kind of burned beneath it.
Depend upon how long it'spen it will have almost a dry,
kind of a dried out appearance if you will, and
sometimes if you're very very careful and you examine it
very closely, particularly with like a magnifying glass or a
(29:16):
loop like you used to examine photos with you'll see
the pattern actually manifesting itself of the surface in the entry.
And that's really good for us because in forensics, because
if we find a rope, for instance, or an electrical cord,
sometimes we can match those things up at least get
in the ballpark with it, but with a tie. Because
(29:38):
it's so broad you're in, it's so soft, you're not
going to leave that kind of a braided area on
the outside. And you know, as was mentioned Francis Kelly,
he's got ventnyl in a system. Remember what we had
discussed earlier. Ennyl is a system depressant. It reduces our
(30:01):
ability to fight back in any way. You think about
the genesis of fennyl. Fentyl is a precursor for anesthesia
or what happens when you go under. You know, anybody
in the audience that's ever ever had surgery, you know,
they tell you to count backwards and you never get
past about it's meant to relax you. It's a date you.
(30:25):
It puts you in a position where you know, you
can imagine, I don't care how big you are, if
you've got fentyl on board, you're not gonna be able
to fight back very well. You might initially, but as
it begins to take hold in your system, you're gonna
become very sleepy and passive. And so you take you
and you combine that with a smooth surface of a literature,
like a tie that doesn't it's not going to leave
(30:46):
this big, bold pattern with a deep furrow. You're not
necessarily going to see it at the scene unless that
tie has been left in place and tied in the
rear very tightly, which I've had a number of cases
like that the past. But if the tie is removed
and you might see a little bit of discoloration, it
might be kind of red, but it's not gonna like
(31:08):
just really jump out at you. And another thing you
have to think about is and I don't I don't
know that that folks really consider this, but when you're
out on the scene, when you conduct the examination of
a body, you're not in the best circumstances. You're certainly
not in the best circumstances when it comes to lighting,
(31:28):
even if you're you are in somebody's apartment. Okay, I mean,
how many of us have ever walked into a room
and it's very dimly lit depended upon what that person
likes in their home. But you take a body and
you go to the morgue with it, well, the lighting
in most marks now is surgical grade, and trust me,
(31:49):
there are very few shadows in this environment. You have
lights coming at you from all over the place, and
it's it's to blow out any kind of shadow, so
you can appreciate and see everything that's very brightly lead
in there. When you get a body back to the morgue,
you're gonna be able to pick up on little nuances
in the morgue. In that environment, you're not going to
be able to pick up on at the scene. You're
(32:09):
also kneeling over bodies. It might be hot, and you're
not paying as close attention at the scene as you will.
But when you're in the morgue and you have that
body laid on that table in front of you, you
are fully vested at that moment. We later find out
that Kelly's death was a result of a custody dispute
between little Field and Kelly. Little Field claimed Kelly was abusive.
(32:35):
Kelly claimed that little Field would not allow him to
see the daughter alone and would try to stay in
his home during their visit time. He called it parenting time.
Who would want to stay in his house during the
parenting time. So the other thing that we find out,
which I find very interesting and kind of explains some
(33:00):
things about the cocaine. Knowing that he died from fentnel
and that it was cocaine that was found, We're looking
at a good case of staging here, aren't we. Joe,
Oh my gosh, you hit it right on the head.
You're absolutely right, Jackie. You have a group of people,
a confederacy, if you will, of three that are purposed,
(33:23):
aren't they. They're going out, they've entered into an agreement
together in order to bring about this guy's death, and
they've gone so far as to not just, you know,
at the end, perpetrate homicide here, but to set it
up so that it appears though that this this man's
father odeed himself. And not only are there drugs involved,
(33:45):
but we've got this this mysterious bag of cocaine that's
found at the scene. So that means that somebody was
purposed to go out and acquire cocaine. The investigators revealed,
you know, in this particular case, that these three went
out and look at the daughter running. When she's on
the stand, she never, and I mean never denies the
fact that she's got a meth problem. And she's you know,
(34:10):
little Field's attorney, you know, ask her directly, do you
have a problem with drug addiction? And she never denied
it at all, never ever, And so she's connected in
this world. So you know, what are you gonna do. Well,
you go out and you you purchase a bag of
cocaine at one time, purchased perhaps, and you set this
(34:30):
man up because you've been going into his house clandestinely
by the way, and poisoning his food. So you figure
you're gonna finish him off. And oh, just just to
really drive home the point, we're gonna have a bag
of cocaine we're gonna go out and purchase and sticking
under his body so that when the authorities show up,
(34:51):
you know, maybe the corner. You walk into the room
and you start to do the examination of the body,
and oh, wow, what do we find here? Will you
find this bag of white power? Or you don't know
what it is because contrary to what you know, folks think,
you know, we can't just look at a bag of
white powder and say that is in fact, cocaine or
whatever type of agent that we have to test it
to confirm it. So you're telling me you stick your
(35:13):
little finger in it and taste it like everybody else
does on TV. No, that does not happen. My god,
If anybody ever, please nobody do that. That is the
most ridiculous thing. I hate that Hollywood actually demonstrates that
because some people think that they can do that, and
it is not something that anyone should ever try to
do at all. That has to be tested and you
(35:35):
need to handle it with gloves. Fentnel in particular is
nasty in the sense you know they remember they put
it in patches, and we're not talking about fentyl relative
to this bag, but there's fentyl involved in this case.
It's transdermal, which means you can absorb it through your skin.
Meth is the same way as well. It is transdermal,
very dangerous stuff, and so you can actually get a
(35:57):
dosage of this stuff just by handling it with your
bare hands. And the fact that they went out and
purchased these drugs to plant them at the scene relative
to this man and to try to paint him in
this light that he odeed what's fascinating, I think to
me is that, you know, I talked at length about
(36:17):
the tie, that a tie was used, and it's it
kind of, you know, drills down into this relationship that
Littlefield had with Francis Kelly. I think the fact that
it wasn't just a tie, it was his favorite tie.
(36:38):
And you think about that just for a second. Is
this a statement that's being made by the perpetrator? You know,
I don't I don't know how many ties Francis Kelly owned.
I don't know. Maybe he only had one. Maybe it
was a tie that at some point in time someone
who dearly loved him went out and purchased and gave
to him, but it was identified as his favorite tie,
(37:03):
and that it was actually utilized as a means to
bring about his death. And I think that when you
look at this in the final analysis and you think
about that, was it used as a statement that, you know,
I'm going to go to whatever means necessary to keep
you separated from this child that you have fathered with me.
(37:23):
And just to kind of put an exclamation point on it,
I'm gonna grab your favorite tie. I'm gonna wrap it
around your neck, and I'm going to choke you until
you're deceased, because not only to have the the tie
around your neck, I've also got fitting on in your
system now, so you're going to be manageable. And there's
some indication he may have attempted to fight back because
(37:44):
he's got some bruises that were found. It looks as
though he's sustained some type of blunt force trauma and
maybe initially he did attempt to fight back. But when
you're fighting, just think about this, not only you fighting
against this chemical that's in your system that is, by
the way, a compromising your ability to breathe. Now you've
got something wrapped around your neck that's an external factor
(38:06):
that is preventing you from uptaking oxygen. He's in a
desperate fight for his life at that moment time. Running,
in her statement from the stand, actually stated that when
they arrived, they made entry into Francis Kelly's home, they
found him on the floor and he was experiencing labored breathing.
(38:27):
And you know it. It it makes you think, did
they use that tie on him on the floor in
order to asphyxiate him in that position, or did they
do it on the sofa, which they eventually moved his
body to That goes to this idea of staging. When
you take a body and you place it into a
(38:49):
position that is other than as it was initially found,
and you plant cocaine beneath the body, that's that a
horses is a son that there was thought that went
into this, that they wanted to make this appears something
other than it was. He had enough drugs on board
so that when they did enter the apartment that it
(39:12):
had literally knocked him down to his knees and he
was laboring to breathe at that time, and I guess
it's at that time that they decided to just finish
him off. Well, the verdict is in on this case.
Joe and the daughter, Logan Runyan was charged with murder
and conspiracy to commit murder, and her boyfriend Walker was
charged with two counts of conspiracy to commit murder. Now
(39:36):
Walker pleaded guilty and was sentenced to ten years in prison.
Logan Runyan was sentenced to twenty six years in prison
and another six suspended, and forty two year old Heidi
Littlefield was sentenced to one fifteen years in the state prison,
(39:57):
which included sixty years for murder, twenty years for attempted poisonings,
and thirty five years for conspiracy to commit murder resulting
in a death. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is
body bags.
Body Backs with Joseph Scott Morgan. You know, I guess
since about two thousand, two thousand twelve, I've appeared on
various television networks over that period of time, and one
of the things I've taken great pleasure in is the
(00:31):
fact that I wear ties on air. I love it.
And the reason I love it is that Obama ties
at thrift stores. Because so many people spend so much
money to look really good on air. I go out
and I find the coolest ties I can find, and
I wear them on the air. I think part of
it just has to go with the fact that I
(00:51):
grew up with not a lot of money, and I
like to kind of display that on air, that you
can look good without spending a bunch of money. But
the case I'm going to cover today actually talks about
a favorite tie. It talks about a favorite tie that
a gentleman like to wear on a regular basis. It
talks about an overdose involving Fentnel, and it talks about
(01:16):
a relationship gone bad. Today we're gonna talk about the
home side of Francis Kelly. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and
this is body Backs. Joining me today is my friend
Jackie Howard, executive producer of Crime Stories with Nancy Grace. Jackie,
(01:41):
I don't know about you. When I was a kid,
you had to get all gussied up to go to church,
and part of that was wearing a tie, of warning,
to tie my entire life. And you know, it's hard
for me not to wear a tie, I think when
I go out in public and that sort of thing
to do appearances and whatnot. People are more casual about it.
But some of us guys just like our ties. And
in this particular case, this poor fellow had a tie
(02:04):
that he loved, he loved, and he apparently wore it
on a regular basis, and interestingly enough, this tie actually
led to his death. Well, I'm gonna tell you, Joe,
while I did get gussied up to go to church,
I can categorically tell you I did not wear a tie.
We're talking today about forty six year old Francis Kelly.
(02:26):
When Francis Kelly's body was discovered, police found him on
his couch in his home and a bag of cocaine
underneath him. But at the time they did observe some
bruising around his eyes, elbows, knees and hand. However, there
was no evidence to suggest that foul play was involved
(02:47):
in Kelly's death, so initially before the autopsy they made
some assumptions that he had in fact odd because he
had this bag of cocaine. The autopsy discovered that Kelly
was strangle and sustained blunt force trauma to his head
and it wasn't cocaine that was found in his system.
(03:08):
But as you mentioned, fentnyl. So let's talk first about
the difference between fentnyl and cocaine and what each would
do to you having that in your system. Yeah, you know,
you're not going to see a lot of differences I
don't think externally as a result of you know, cocaine
abuse versus finnyl abuse. There's certain things that you can
(03:30):
look for. People that use cocaine many times will have
a real wasted appearance. I guess as a result of
you know, kind of hyperactivity. Uh, they don't keep weight
on them very well. Back in the eighties, when people
snorted a lot of cocaine, you'd have spontaneous nose bleeds.
I've actually worked work cases of snorting cocaine where individuals
(03:52):
have eroded the septum in their nose. You know, that
cartilaginous separation that you have between both of your nostrils
and it kind of alter rates, that sort of thing,
and those are things that you look for, and you
you look for needle tracks as well, but you know
you can have needle tracks associated with the use of
a fentanyl and cocaine as well. You know, they're both
rendered down. You can put it in a liquid form
(04:14):
and essentially injected, So you're not going to see a
lot of differences necessarily just upon initial observation of subjects
at the scene. So you know, what do you turn to, Well,
you turn to any kind of changes that might have
happened internally, and that's one of the things that we do.
You know, at autopsy with cocaine in particularly, you might
(04:35):
see signs of particularly those individuals that have long term
abuse of cocaine, you'll see hypertensive changes in the heart
that you get a condition called left ventricular hypertrophe, and
it's just kind of a fancy term for saying that
the the wall of the heart thickens again left left
(04:55):
ventricular hypertrophy, and so you begin to see it with
the the actual wall of the heart began to thicken,
and it's as a result of individuals drug use. Sometimes
it can be a natural event as well, and there'll
be the thickening that occurs, and we do measurements on
the walls of the heart at autopsy to give an
(05:15):
idea if it's and it's what they refer to as
it's normal anatomical configuration. And you know, if you see
some kind of anomaly like that, you might say, well,
you know what, maybe this person has just got severe hypertension,
maybe they've got something else genetic that you know, will
genetically predispose them to to some of these things, or
it could be a drug related event like them utilizing cocaine,
(05:39):
particularly on a regular basis. Cocaine is actually a stimulant.
It's it's going to increase the metabolic activity in our body.
It pushes your blood pressure up, these sorts of things.
But fitting alongto the hand, it's a synthetic opiate. That
means it's created in a laboratory and it depresses the system. So,
(06:01):
you know, how we talked about the heart relative to
the cocaine. If you begin to think about the lungs
relative to fentyl that's what really is hammered in the body.
And many times when you have an individual that has died,
particularly of what's referred to as acute o D and acute.
You know, just so we understand, acute is like a
(06:22):
sudden event as opposed to chronic, which means long term.
But if you have an acute event involving an opiate
like this, you'll have people that have very very heavy
lungs at autopsy. That means that they'll be heavily congested.
They'll weigh more than they normally should. Because we weigh
each organ in a scale. And I don't know if
(06:44):
people know this, but it's kind of a horrible thought.
The next time you go to the grocery store and
you see a scale that um that's in the produce aisle,
that is exactly the kind of scale that's used in
the more to weigh individual organs. And there are certain
parameters that we look for for organ weights, and any
(07:06):
time we have an organ that is over the expected
weight for that particular age, that will make a scratch
our head a little bit and say, well, what's causing
this heaviness? Or if it's lighter, for instance, which most
of the time, you find things that are heavier, and
in the cases of opiates like this opiate O D,
you would expect to find the lungs being heavier, congested
(07:29):
with fluid and blood and that sort of thing, and
sometimes that's indicative of an opiate O D. One fascinating
thing that you see at crime scenes relative to individuals
that have overdosed on some type of depressant like an
opiate is you'll have a presentation of what's referred to
(07:50):
as a frothy edemitous cone is what it's called. And
you'll see this kind of white foam looks like the
head of a beard. And we've actually talked about this
before on body bag that's issues from the nose and
from the mouth, and it'll be tainted in a pink,
kind of a pink color, and again that's as a
result of this kind of hyper congestion that's going on
(08:12):
where the people are really struggling to breeze. And because
with this drug in particular, you begin to think about,
you know, what does it do systemically, How does it
affect the brain, how does it affect your motor functions?
These sorts of things, and you'll see these individuals that
cannot move around because folks might not realize. Fentyl was
(08:35):
actually originally developed as a partner for surgical anesthesia with
other drugs, So it is meant to put an individual
down into this kind of deep repose, if you will,
to get them manageable for surgery. It's also used for
pain relief for years and years. Kind of interesting. They
(08:56):
developed fentyl and placed it in a patch. People have
seen nicotine patches for instance, that people wear, you know,
to quit smoking. Well, people have had fentyl patches as well,
and the patch itself is essentially populated with the dosage
of fentyl, and then it's what's called transdermal. You put
(09:17):
the patch over prescribed area and that medication kind of
seeps in through the skin and goes into the system
and gives pain relief. People that have things like crowding,
back pain and hip pain and all those sorts of
things that people develop over tom as a result of
age or injury can get relief with it. So it's
(09:39):
a very very powerful drug. And then when it's out
on the street and it's being manufactured, say for instance,
in a clandestine lab. Because fentyl is one of those
things that is just the absolute scourge of our society
right now. One of the many drugs it's made and
not very well controlled environments. It's made in other countries,
for instance, and then people smuggle it in and you
(10:00):
don't really know what's in it. It can make for
a very very lethal cocktail. What you're telling me, Joe,
I don't have a lot of experience in what you're
talking about. So if I understand you, what you're telling
me is one is an upper and one's a downer. Yeah,
And i'd also like to say, as your friend, I'm
glad you don't have a lot of experience into Jackie.
(10:22):
So but yeah, yeah, you're right. One is an upper, uh,
and one is a downer. And when you begin to
think about the finel in particular, it essentially sends the
victim into respiratory failure. We here a lot about cardiac failure,
but it the lung has become so heavy as a
result of this congestion that's going on. Oh so it's
(10:45):
it's not that they absorb anything, it's that they can't function,
so they're congested with fluids. Right. Yet, I had an
old doctor one time actually referred to it. It's like
the patients, it's it's the equivalent of somebody trying to
run in mud, and it's it becomes so labored and
they're struggling so hard, and they don't have an awareness,
(11:07):
you know, to kind of you can't you can't fight
fight your way out of it at a chemical level,
because it's hammering the body so hard it would be
very difficult to kind of pull back from it. That's
why nowadays, you know, they they carry narcan. You know,
we have many number of agencies out there that apply
an oar CAN. They have the ability and it kind
(11:28):
of counteracts this kind of depressant event that occurs with
a subject that has been found down. There's so many
people that just kind of fall over as a result
of being an exposed phenyl. They're they're even cases out there,
and this dangerous and how insidious this drug is. Our
law enforcement officers can go inside of the cabin of
a car many times, okay, and then think about how
(11:51):
horrific this is, and they'll open up a bag that
might contain this finnyl that has been made in some
clandestine lab and so only this kind of puff cloud
comes out and this is almost in a histamine like form.
It kind of spreads into the air and the cops
don't note it's there, you know, they're just kind of
searching the area. It's not like they have a gas
(12:12):
mask on or a ventilator on or something, you know,
like you see with firefighters. So they inhalate this stuff
and oh my gosh, you inhalate this stuff in a
powdered form and it gets right into the mucous membranes
and it's absorbed and this is going into the lung.
So how much more so, for instance, if an individual
has it mixed, and you'll find people that are mixing
(12:33):
it in cocaine, which is kind of interesting. You know,
you think about cocaine, which is in fact a stimulant,
being mixed mixed with fentel, which is at present kind
of takes us back to the days of you know,
you think about how Belushi died. He died of what
was called a speedball, which was a combination of of
cocaine and heroin and that was directly injected and it
(12:55):
just really wrecks the system. But just fentel by itself
can even send somebody to send a passive status that
a scene like a police officer that's just kind of
looking around that that kind of histamine that they can inhalate,
it can kill you. You've mentioned a couple of times now, Joe,
that fentnyl is man made. So is this what we're
(13:16):
hearing all the time about in the same vein that
methemphetamine is main where people are pulling things out of
cold midst. Yeah, well, you know, fentnyl itself is you know,
it's based on the molecule that's you know that's originally
an opiate, you know, which is a naturally occurring to pressant.
We've had, for instance, we've had like morphine, you know,
(13:37):
for a long long time, and morphine is a natural
derivative that you know, you go all the way back
to the Civil War and you begin to think about
people were trying to use painkillers, if you will, where
you know, they were able to essentially draw out that
element of of the poppy plant for instance, which is
(14:00):
you know where heroin derives from, and applied this agent
in order to reduce pain. And it has been effective.
I mean, it's it's given a lot of relief. Famously,
you know, you can think about our troops out in
the field. You know, in any number of movies we've
seen from World War Two, where the troops used to
carry serettes, they call them serettes, the little ampules with
(14:22):
the built in needle of morphine. These guys would be
in terrible pain after sustaining some horrific wound. Their fellow
soldiers would take the serette and jam it into their
leg and apply the morphine, and it gives instant relief
to a certain degree. It stems the pain because it
acts on the pain centers and it mutes that pain.
(14:43):
I just said, the person is not suffering. But you know,
here's here's the key. When you're talking about a trug
like this and in its synthetic form, which now you
take that original naturally occurring molecule and you synthesize it
and you make it a man made substance where the
molecule is very similar to that that is occurring in nature,
and you adjusted, you know, it's said, for instance, like
(15:05):
finnel Is, just hold onto your hat for this is
it's like a hundred times more powerful than Heroin. Just
let that sink in just for a second. A hundred
times more powerful that means it requires less of this
substance to get the same high than an individual might
get from heroin. But if you adjust that dosage just
slightly and you apply just a bit more, the person
(15:28):
will essentially flattening and done. You know the thing about
(15:49):
medical with that investigation that I've always tried to draw
them into any investigator that I train or those just
to give props to them those that train, is it
is always essential as an investigator you go to the scene,
You take a look at the body in its context
in which it is found. And in this case with
(16:11):
Francis Kelly, it led to some serious, serious questions that
the police had. So here's my question. The autopsy found
Kelly had fentinyl in his system, and yet there was
cocaine underneath him. So how did he get the fentyl?
We know that he ingested it. Now is that a
(16:35):
normal way of getting fentyl? Is that going to have
a different reaction in the body. We know that he
was ultimately given fentnel three times. It was in his
oatmeal and put in his me so soup, and I'm
honestly I'm not sure about what food I him the
(16:56):
third one was in, But would he have tasted it?
Would he have known that he was eating this? And
does ingesting it offer you a different kind of effect?
Those are valid questions and sense that. Um, And I'll
go ahead and tell you what what Mr Kelly had
(17:17):
remarked At one point time, he had made a remark
that he had taken a bite of food and it
tasted funny. I mean, how many of us in the
audience have ever eaten something somewhere and it had an
unnatural taste to it? If it's prepared at a restaurant
or something like that, it almost has a chemical taste
to it. A great example for me, I don't like
(17:39):
to use a dishwasher and him, so I'll just use like,
you know, dish liquid and scrub things out. And do
you ever have the experience where you didn't quite get
all of the dish liquid out of some type of
vessel that you're cleaning, and then later you go back
and you say, wow, this tastes like distettergent. Well, think
about that. It's it's got something that is unnatural to taste.
(17:59):
So yeah, he was aware of it. I think he
was aware of one of these times that someone had
attempted to actually give him some type of agent, which
you know, of course turns out to be fentyl in
his system. And yeah, there's an awareness and a lot
of it has to do with how much is applied.
One of the great questions you hear about if fentyl
(18:22):
is applied, or any kind of drug is applied, how's
it going to get systemically into the system the quickest?
And boy, I mean, I've got some incredible stories from
over the years where people you know, placed any number
of different types of agents in their body in different
locations certainly, and all have a variety of different effects,
(18:43):
and and how how long it takes for them to
kind of be absorbed into the system and will they
totally be absorbed. You think about an individual, for instance,
that that has something like cocaine or fentyl, or you know,
people have smarted heroine. That's something that has been done. Well,
it goes into the mute as membrane. Well, when you
absorb this, where's it going well into the mucous membrane,
(19:05):
it's also going directly into the lungs, and so the
uptake of this, it's going to be really quick. Another
quick way is through I V injection, which I'm not
talking about like an ivy bag hanging in a in
a hospital. I'm talking about intravenously where an individual. You've
seen movies where people will will tie off essentially and
they'll you know, render down whatever it is that they're
(19:26):
injecting into their body with a spoon, heating it, rendering
it down, and then they draw it up and injected.
They tie off with a tourniquet, the vessel pops up
and they go directly into the vein. Well, that's very
quick as well. There's something else that's kind of interesting.
People also do something called skin popping, which is very
(19:47):
it's it's really quite disgusting actually, but they will take
an injectable that they've rendered down and they'll go directly
in two their skin, not searching for a vessel. They'll
just they'll go into what's we're for two as into
the sub q fat, which means that layer fat directly
below the skin. And it's called skin popping. And you
(20:08):
have people that skin pop and those drugs are injected
and there they absorb a little bit slower. But what
occurs is these drugs that are clandestinely made, they're cut
with things like heroin, traditionally has been cut with things
like quinine um, talcum powder. Uh, it's been cut with
(20:29):
baby formula, all kinds of things over the years so
that the dealers can extend their supply of the drugs.
So they'll cut it so it's like a sixty forty cut.
It won't be in a pure state. And what happens
is with the skin popping is that these areas will
actually ulterate because when they skin pop. For instance, if
(20:50):
an individual is in injecting something like quinine or talcum powder,
it's not metabolized, it just kind of sits there, but
the skin it becomes irritated, and then you get an
ulcerated area. And you'll find many people that skin pop
will have these huge ulcerated lesions all over their bodies.
And that's types of things that you've seen. And then
(21:10):
you have people that have particularly in poisonings because that's
that's the easiest way to get it into a non
suspecting person system. You know, you approach somebody with a
needle and you inject them or attempt to inject them,
they're going to fight you off most of the time
if they haven't awareness that this is happening. So many
people will clandestinely put items into uh into food and
(21:34):
stir around or mix it up and then try to
get the person to ingest it. And then of course,
you know, you have stories of people that mule drugs
in from you know, from various countries, and they of
course insert a variety of different types of drugs in
into their backside for instance. And you know, I had
I know one kid that came up from South America
at one point time, from Bolivia specifically, and he had
(21:57):
twenty condoms that were clipped with surgical staples, and he
had pure cocaine. And each one of these condoms is
about twenty I'm sorry, it was about ten grams each,
and one of the condoms erupted and he got a
ten gram dosage of cocaine into his large intestine and
(22:18):
it like immediately he just fell over dead. It was
absorbed that quickly into the intestinal lining. I'm giving a
long answer here, but it's you never know how it's
going to be absorbed. And also, you know, if you're
talking about you know, having it passed through the digestive
track in the form of food, if it's mixed in
(22:39):
the absorption is going to take a bit longer. It
might even require higher dosage than it would, say, for instance,
if it was being injected directly into a vein. So
what we're seeing in this case, when Kelly was found,
he was still alive. So what you're telling me is
due to the method that he was given the drug,
it was not enough to kill him. Yeah, or it
(23:02):
could be you know, the progression of the metabolism itself,
the progression of the metabolism. You're gonna have to school me,
but yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean, okay, let me, let
me back off a little bit, because that's not that's
not entirely accurate, but just okay, let's just put in
common terms relative to people ingesting food, certain types of
(23:23):
food make you feel different, you know, in um, you know,
depending upon whatever it is. Say, for instance, people that
don't have necessarily a real tolerance for sugar. For instance,
you might eat a candy bar and then it might
taste really good initially, okay, and then maybe ten fifteen
minutes later, your body starts to uptake everything that's in
(23:47):
the candy bar and your body is not processing it okay,
and you start to feel really bad. Okay, Maybe people
are pre diabetic or diabetic and they eat this and
it makes them feel really really bad. Well, that's part
of the metabolic uptake of that nicular substances. Somebody has
applied some type of agent like funnel into a food source,
and the individual ing the food source, well, it's passes
(24:11):
through the mouth and the esophagus and drops into the stomach. Well,
the stomach sits there and kind of turns this food
and it's absorbed through the stomach wall. Just because it
is being absorbed in nutrients are being taken out of it,
doesn't mean you're getting everything out of it. Say, for instance,
if you took the pure substance and injected it directly
into a vein, all right, So you would either require
(24:34):
more in order to facilitate this, or it would be
a matter of the type of agent that you're mixing
it with, whether it's soup for instance, versus a oatmeal
or grits or something like that that might be a
bit more dense. It might kind of shield the individual
from ingestion of it totally and and uptaking it. And
(24:55):
so the longer your body goes along it has a
higher probability of ingesting it. And maybe you can make
it through safely. But if this is being done to
you over and over and over again, sooner or later,
you're going to die. There's nothing as an investigator that
(25:30):
will make you stop cold in your tracks than an
unexpected result at autopsy. It's something that makes you question
your abilities. It's something that makes you question the care
that you took with the case. Because this is this
is key. Once the scene has been left, once the
(25:53):
body has been removed from the scene, you can never reset,
you can never do it over. You get one shot
at doing it right. And in this case, Jackie, when
they got into this autopsy, they found something completely unexpected
that is true, and that was the fact that Kelly
(26:13):
was strangled and did not o d as they initially suspected.
Kelly's body was found by his former girlfriend Heidie Marie
little Field and her adult daughter Logan Marie Runyon and
Runyan's boyfriend Robert Walker. Now, the two women had secretly
(26:36):
got into Kelly's house and poisoned his oatmeal and some
soup as I told you, with fentyl. But when they
went back to the home, Kelly wasn't dead. He was
still grasping for breath. He was unresponsive but trying to breathe,
and at that point they decided to finish him off,
(26:58):
and they used a tie, specifically his favorite tie, to
strangle him. Why was that not originally obvious? Because, as
you've talked before, usually ligature stranglings leave a mark. So
why didn't they look at him the investigators when his
(27:20):
body was reported, why didn't they look at him and go,
oh wait, there's marks there. That's key. I want everyone
in the sound of my voice to envision a male
necktie right now. Just envisioned kind of a standard necktime.
Not talking about like a you know what, tiny little
string tie or something. I'm talking about a regular necktie there. Why.
(27:43):
They're two to three inches, maybe four inches, dependent upon
the particular cycle that you're point through a men's fashion
and generally they're smooth. Many of them are made out
of either silk, the really expensive ones, or maybe some
kind of synthetic version of a silk or to get
the appearance of a silky fabric. And you know, with
(28:05):
with that type of construction of this tie, it's not
like a rope, and it's not like an electrical chord.
Do you think about a rope or an electrical cord.
How kind of narrow they are they create when they're
used as a ligature, they create a very narrow furrow.
It's called a furrow, just like a furrow in a
field that's being plowed, and they're deep. They're very deep
(28:30):
with rope in particular, because folks will think about rope,
it's kind of woven many times. Most of the time
it's woven, and it's made out of a lot of
different materials, but it's woven. It has a very specific pattern,
you know, you think about like a harry bone pattern,
or if you have a twist like a baling rope.
It it's very rough to the touch, and when you
apply it, the more tension that you put on this thing,
(28:51):
the deeper the furrow, and it's going to leave behind
an area of abrasion, or we call it an abraided
area where this skin is kind of burned beneath it.
Depend upon how long it'spen it will have almost a dry,
kind of a dried out appearance if you will, and
sometimes if you're very very careful and you examine it
very closely, particularly with like a magnifying glass or a
(29:16):
loop like you used to examine photos with you'll see
the pattern actually manifesting itself of the surface in the entry.
And that's really good for us because in forensics, because
if we find a rope, for instance, or an electrical cord,
sometimes we can match those things up at least get
in the ballpark with it, but with a tie. Because
(29:38):
it's so broad you're in, it's so soft, you're not
going to leave that kind of a braided area on
the outside. And you know, as was mentioned Francis Kelly,
he's got ventnyl in a system. Remember what we had
discussed earlier. Ennyl is a system depressant. It reduces our
(30:01):
ability to fight back in any way. You think about
the genesis of fennyl. Fentyl is a precursor for anesthesia
or what happens when you go under. You know, anybody
in the audience that's ever ever had surgery, you know,
they tell you to count backwards and you never get
past about it's meant to relax you. It's a date you.
(30:25):
It puts you in a position where you know, you
can imagine, I don't care how big you are, if
you've got fentyl on board, you're not gonna be able
to fight back very well. You might initially, but as
it begins to take hold in your system, you're gonna
become very sleepy and passive. And so you take you
and you combine that with a smooth surface of a literature,
like a tie that doesn't it's not going to leave
(30:46):
this big, bold pattern with a deep furrow. You're not
necessarily going to see it at the scene unless that
tie has been left in place and tied in the
rear very tightly, which I've had a number of cases
like that the past. But if the tie is removed
and you might see a little bit of discoloration, it
might be kind of red, but it's not gonna like
(31:08):
just really jump out at you. And another thing you
have to think about is and I don't I don't
know that that folks really consider this, but when you're
out on the scene, when you conduct the examination of
a body, you're not in the best circumstances. You're certainly
not in the best circumstances when it comes to lighting,
(31:28):
even if you're you are in somebody's apartment. Okay, I mean,
how many of us have ever walked into a room
and it's very dimly lit depended upon what that person
likes in their home. But you take a body and
you go to the morgue with it, well, the lighting
in most marks now is surgical grade, and trust me,
(31:49):
there are very few shadows in this environment. You have
lights coming at you from all over the place, and
it's it's to blow out any kind of shadow, so
you can appreciate and see everything that's very brightly lead
in there. When you get a body back to the morgue,
you're gonna be able to pick up on little nuances
in the morgue. In that environment, you're not going to
be able to pick up on at the scene. You're
(32:09):
also kneeling over bodies. It might be hot, and you're
not paying as close attention at the scene as you will.
But when you're in the morgue and you have that
body laid on that table in front of you, you
are fully vested at that moment. We later find out
that Kelly's death was a result of a custody dispute
between little Field and Kelly. Little Field claimed Kelly was abusive.
(32:35):
Kelly claimed that little Field would not allow him to
see the daughter alone and would try to stay in
his home during their visit time. He called it parenting time.
Who would want to stay in his house during the
parenting time. So the other thing that we find out,
which I find very interesting and kind of explains some
(33:00):
things about the cocaine. Knowing that he died from fentnel
and that it was cocaine that was found, We're looking
at a good case of staging here, aren't we. Joe,
Oh my gosh, you hit it right on the head.
You're absolutely right, Jackie. You have a group of people,
a confederacy, if you will, of three that are purposed,
(33:23):
aren't they. They're going out, they've entered into an agreement
together in order to bring about this guy's death, and
they've gone so far as to not just, you know,
at the end, perpetrate homicide here, but to set it
up so that it appears though that this this man's
father odeed himself. And not only are there drugs involved,
(33:45):
but we've got this this mysterious bag of cocaine that's
found at the scene. So that means that somebody was
purposed to go out and acquire cocaine. The investigators revealed,
you know, in this particular case, that these three went
out and look at the daughter running. When she's on
the stand, she never, and I mean never denies the
fact that she's got a meth problem. And she's you know,
(34:10):
little Field's attorney, you know, ask her directly, do you
have a problem with drug addiction? And she never denied
it at all, never ever, And so she's connected in
this world. So you know, what are you gonna do. Well,
you go out and you you purchase a bag of
cocaine at one time, purchased perhaps, and you set this
(34:30):
man up because you've been going into his house clandestinely
by the way, and poisoning his food. So you figure
you're gonna finish him off. And oh, just just to
really drive home the point, we're gonna have a bag
of cocaine we're gonna go out and purchase and sticking
under his body so that when the authorities show up,
(34:51):
you know, maybe the corner. You walk into the room
and you start to do the examination of the body,
and oh, wow, what do we find here? Will you
find this bag of white power? Or you don't know
what it is because contrary to what you know, folks think,
you know, we can't just look at a bag of
white powder and say that is in fact, cocaine or
whatever type of agent that we have to test it
to confirm it. So you're telling me you stick your
(35:13):
little finger in it and taste it like everybody else
does on TV. No, that does not happen. My god,
If anybody ever, please nobody do that. That is the
most ridiculous thing. I hate that Hollywood actually demonstrates that
because some people think that they can do that, and
it is not something that anyone should ever try to
do at all. That has to be tested and you
(35:35):
need to handle it with gloves. Fentnel in particular is
nasty in the sense you know they remember they put
it in patches, and we're not talking about fentyl relative
to this bag, but there's fentyl involved in this case.
It's transdermal, which means you can absorb it through your skin.
Meth is the same way as well. It is transdermal,
very dangerous stuff, and so you can actually get a
(35:57):
dosage of this stuff just by handling it with your
bare hands. And the fact that they went out and
purchased these drugs to plant them at the scene relative
to this man and to try to paint him in
this light that he odeed what's fascinating, I think to
me is that, you know, I talked at length about
(36:17):
the tie, that a tie was used, and it's it
kind of, you know, drills down into this relationship that
Littlefield had with Francis Kelly. I think the fact that
it wasn't just a tie, it was his favorite tie.
(36:38):
And you think about that just for a second. Is
this a statement that's being made by the perpetrator? You know,
I don't I don't know how many ties Francis Kelly owned.
I don't know. Maybe he only had one. Maybe it
was a tie that at some point in time someone
who dearly loved him went out and purchased and gave
to him, but it was identified as his favorite tie,
(37:03):
and that it was actually utilized as a means to
bring about his death. And I think that when you
look at this in the final analysis and you think
about that, was it used as a statement that, you know,
I'm going to go to whatever means necessary to keep
you separated from this child that you have fathered with me.
(37:23):
And just to kind of put an exclamation point on it,
I'm gonna grab your favorite tie. I'm gonna wrap it
around your neck, and I'm going to choke you until
you're deceased, because not only to have the the tie
around your neck, I've also got fitting on in your
system now, so you're going to be manageable. And there's
some indication he may have attempted to fight back because
(37:44):
he's got some bruises that were found. It looks as
though he's sustained some type of blunt force trauma and
maybe initially he did attempt to fight back. But when
you're fighting, just think about this, not only you fighting
against this chemical that's in your system that is, by
the way, a compromising your ability to breathe. Now you've
got something wrapped around your neck that's an external factor
(38:06):
that is preventing you from uptaking oxygen. He's in a
desperate fight for his life at that moment time. Running,
in her statement from the stand, actually stated that when
they arrived, they made entry into Francis Kelly's home, they
found him on the floor and he was experiencing labored breathing.
(38:27):
And you know it. It it makes you think, did
they use that tie on him on the floor in
order to asphyxiate him in that position, or did they
do it on the sofa, which they eventually moved his
body to That goes to this idea of staging. When
you take a body and you place it into a
(38:49):
position that is other than as it was initially found,
and you plant cocaine beneath the body, that's that a
horses is a son that there was thought that went
into this, that they wanted to make this appears something
other than it was. He had enough drugs on board
so that when they did enter the apartment that it
(39:12):
had literally knocked him down to his knees and he
was laboring to breathe at that time, and I guess
it's at that time that they decided to just finish
him off. Well, the verdict is in on this case.
Joe and the daughter, Logan Runyan was charged with murder
and conspiracy to commit murder, and her boyfriend Walker was
charged with two counts of conspiracy to commit murder. Now
(39:36):
Walker pleaded guilty and was sentenced to ten years in prison.
Logan Runyan was sentenced to twenty six years in prison
and another six suspended, and forty two year old Heidi
Littlefield was sentenced to one fifteen years in the state prison,
(39:57):
which included sixty years for murder, twenty years for attempted poisonings,
and thirty five years for conspiracy to commit murder resulting
in a death. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is
body bags.
Host
Joseph Scott Morgan
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