January 16, 2025 • 53 mins
Recorded LIVE at CrimeCon Nashville, 2024:In this episode of Body Bags, Joseph Scott Morgan explains how he 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.Within a matter of hours, Blake will find himself chased out of his girlfriend’s house in the middle of the night, walking down the road at 5 a.m. texting his girlfriend, and telling her police just stopped and talked to him. One last text to his girlfriend that he is getting cold, and his phone goes quiet.Blake Chappell is 17 and he never makes it back to his friend’s house. He just vanishes into thin air. It is October 16, 2011. Two months later on December 17, 2011, his nearly naked body is found floating in a creek, he has been shot in the back of the head.The case is still unsolved. But new search warrants were served in March 2024, will there be justice for Blake Chappell?
Transcript Highlights
00:00:13 Introduction Blake Chappel Case
00:04:40 Discuss of family financial issues
00:08:28 Blake finds ex-girlfriend who ran away
00:10:32 Blake beaten up by ex’s stepfather
00:12:26 Blake put in jail for finding his ex
00:17:35 Mother takes Blake and date to homecoming dance
00:20:48 Discussion of Blake activities walking in the night
00:24:24 Talk about Blake walking miles to see girlfriend
00:28:08 Talk about Blake texting girlfriend
00:31:49 Talk about Blake doesn’t make it back to Austin’s house
00:37:36 Discussion Blake shot in back of head
00:43:22 Discussion rumors about Blake’s death
00:48:12 Discussion Blake found wearing underwear, no shoes
00:52:34 Conclusion Joseph Scott Morgan lets his JSU class pick unsolved crime to solve Two years in a row the case of Blake Chappel is chosen for the project
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Body Facts to Joseph Scott.
Speaker 2 (00:06):
Three years ago, I was asked at my university to
start a cold case class, and knowing what I know
about cold cases, and knowing where we are in this
world that we inhabit now in forensic science and in investigations,
(00:28):
I felt that it was incumbent upon me, someone that
had been on cold case squads in the past, that
I should initiate this class and introduce my students, at
least at an undergraduate level, through the process of cold
case because it is highly complex and for me, I
wanted to introduce my children. My kids at Jacksonville State
(00:53):
University fill up my children sometimes to the methodologies they're employed.
And I got to tell you something. Two years in
a row, independent of one another, my students selected the
same case without knowing about the other group, to present
(01:14):
in class, to run down the leads, to try to
understand it, to try to make sense of it. And
I knew at that moment time when I had a
second class that chose this same case, I knew that
it was something I needed to talk about on bodybacks
and it's an absolutely heartbreaking case. So today we're going
(01:34):
to talk about the death the murder of Blake Chappelle.
I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this welcome to Crime Con
twenty twenty four Nashville. And thank you to our host
(01:57):
here at Gaylord. I really appreciate it, and thank you
for all of our fans that have turned out, Dave,
all of our friends, we'd like to call you guys
friends as opposed to fans. We get such great comments
from you, all encouragement which we need on a regular basis.
And today, Dave, I want to discuss a case that
is actually not too far away from where we live
(02:20):
in Alabama, just literally across the state lines over in
a place called Coweda County. And it might be a
case that I think that if we have if we
have parents in this classroom, I mean in this boy I.
Speaker 1 (02:39):
Guess play one on radio.
Speaker 2 (02:43):
If if we have parents, which I know that we
do here, we can identify with the struggles of life.
We can understand what it's like not to have much
money at the end of the month, and are we
going to be able to provide a living for our children?
And today I want to talk about Blake Chappelle and
(03:04):
his life with his mama that he you know he'd
been with for all of these years, and hey, they
were on hard times.
Speaker 3 (03:13):
Just so you know, this case has multi levels to it.
It's the murder of Blake Chappelle. It starts in twenty
eleven with his murder and it just had an it's unsolved,
but a new break in the case in March of
this year. So we're talking a couple of months ago.
Police were serving search warrants on this case. When we
(03:36):
were prepping for crime con we saw this and went,
holy moly, good timing. Maybe we'll have something to add, which,
by the way, we'll get into in a minute. But
he somewout Blake Chappelle and his mom, Melissa, and they
didn't have much money. To give you an idea, Blake
found it very important as a teen to help his
mom in any way could. So this is a kid
(03:57):
who didn't complain about it. He went to a Fenius
store on his way to school and bought Monster drinks
because parents say your kids can't have them, but when
they get to school, hey, who's got one? And what
he did he marked him up. So he's picking him
up at the old convenience store and up sell him
by a bucket piece, and he's making money that way.
Speaker 1 (04:15):
I don't know about you.
Speaker 3 (04:16):
There aren't too many kids that think that way Blake did.
He's also one of those kids that everybody liked. Nobody
ever said anything bad about Blake, and they said he
liked everybody.
Speaker 1 (04:26):
So we've got a kid.
Speaker 3 (04:28):
And by the way, his mother, she couldn't have been
forty ish, right, yeah, has an She had a stroke.
So we're already impoverished. My mom has a stroke. I'm
selling monster drinks at school to have some spending money
and buy some shoes. That's the kind of kid Blake
Chappelle was. When he's in tenth grade, he writes an
(04:48):
essay called poverty, and he said, most of you don't
know this, but I used to not have a place
to live.
Speaker 1 (04:56):
I'm paraphrasing.
Speaker 3 (04:57):
He says it be three months homeless, and yet they
had overcome that, and that was a perspective he was
writing from. And his perspective as a sixteen seventeen year
old kid was that sometimes people end up impoverished through
no fault of their own. And now he has sympathy
and empathy for that because he's lived it. But he'd
already grown the maturity in that essay was phenomenal, and
(05:21):
all I could think of, This is the kid I
would want my kids to hang out with, and to
see what happened to him breaks your heart. The fact
that all these years later we're talking about this and
his mom doesn't know who did it.
Speaker 1 (05:38):
The police don't know who did it.
Speaker 3 (05:41):
The only people they've ever even thought about, they haven't
even told us their names. And they've cleared two of
the three people. The third person they know wasn't there.
So they've got three persons of interest. They've cleared two
of them and the third one they know wasn't there.
That's how unsolved this case is.
Speaker 2 (06:00):
So we're coming into it cold in this sense, and
it is a cold case. And to go ahead and
kind of give you a little preview, Blake's body was
actually found tossed away like garbage in a stream in
a creek adjacent to and this is kind of the
irony of it. I find it's a relatively affluent area
(06:20):
where he was found. As a matter of fact, the
little road there was a little bridge where his body
was found adjacent to it was adjacent to a golf course.
And you know, Blake is probably the kid that would
never have an opportunity to join a golf club, but
here he is. His mortal remains are found there and
(06:43):
they're in a state of decomposition. And here we have
this young man whose life has been snuffed out. But
I think that it's important to understand as well, you know,
kind of how it all started relative to when he disappeared,
when Blake. Actually this whole thing starts, you know, like
(07:03):
we'd mentioned, it.
Speaker 3 (07:04):
Actually begins way before that and begains the story that
we have to break out. And the reason it's so
confusing is Blake had a girlfriend that ran away from
home in May.
Speaker 1 (07:14):
This happened in October.
Speaker 3 (07:16):
And if you back up to May, that's where one
of your suspects comes from.
Speaker 1 (07:22):
Yeah, it does.
Speaker 2 (07:23):
And here's here's the rub, if you will. This young lady,
scot A Skyler that he was involved with, had a
stepfather who was a convicted felon.
Speaker 3 (07:36):
This is the guy you see on TV shows where
you go you know, that's the guy that did it.
Speaker 1 (07:40):
Yeah, you know, you're ten.
Speaker 3 (07:41):
Minutes into the Lifetime movie going. Okay, he's the only
going to jail.
Speaker 1 (07:45):
That's him.
Speaker 2 (07:46):
He has the news coming on now so yeah.
Speaker 1 (07:48):
Oh my gosh, what trailer park are they hiding in? Now? Yeah?
Is this guy packing a gun? And what he? Oh
my gosh, that's why the girl ran away.
Speaker 2 (07:56):
Yeah, And if you can imagine, Blake was not the
biggest kid.
Speaker 1 (08:01):
But she had. He was tried to nine.
Speaker 2 (08:04):
She was trying to track He was trying to track
her down, and he was essentially trying to inject or
interject himself into the situation to get her safe. And
he finds her.
Speaker 1 (08:17):
He did well.
Speaker 3 (08:18):
They actually had been dating, but they had broken up
and she had run away from home. This shows you
the heart of Blake. They're not even an item. Blake
goes to find her. He knows pretty much the places
she would probably go.
Speaker 1 (08:32):
He finds her.
Speaker 3 (08:33):
He's trying to convince her to go back home, because
this doesn't end well when you runaway and your parents
are looking for you, even if it is a bad stepfather.
Problem is stepdad and two of his buddies are also
looking for Skyler, and they find her and Blake. Because
Blake found her first, stepdad and two of his redneck
(08:54):
buddies show up at the same time, and this stepfather
pro seeds to beat this sixteen year old kid, and
I said five nine one five, that's a very slight
young man. That's not a heavy eye. And this man
beat him. And then this stepfather filed charges against Blake.
(09:20):
It was custodial interference. This stepfather convinced the police that
Blake convinced Schalar to run away with him and he
was hiding her from her parents, and they arrested him.
And because Blake was in such a financial situation, not
very well off, the kid spent sixteen days in jail
because he couldn't make bail. When it finally got in
(09:43):
front of a judge, they dropped the charges. But this
sixteen year old spent sixteen days in jail because the stay.
The stepfather was never charged.
Speaker 1 (09:52):
No, he wasn't.
Speaker 2 (09:52):
And if memory serves me correctly, he had actually presented
with a weapon. Oh yeah, at one point, Tom he
And if you can imagine this year, just imagine you
think back to that period of time.
Speaker 1 (10:04):
In your life.
Speaker 2 (10:06):
You know, when you were sixteen, you were you thought
you knew everything that you really didn't. And sometimes life
will throw you curveballs, want it And suddenly the big
curveball in Blake's life is the fact that he's got
this ogre of a guy that's there convicted that felon.
I'm sure he knows this guy's history because it's coming
from his girlfriend. And this big, robust guy pulls up
(10:31):
his shirt like this and he's demonstrating a weapon to Blake.
Now Blake later relates all of this, but he's he's
beat He's beaten significantly by this man. And it was
at that point in time that this guy actually has
a nerve to go and file charges against Blake. And
(10:51):
as Dave had mentioned, and we have to go back
to the situation with Blake and his mother. I don't
know if any of you guys have ever experienced poverty
in your life. I come from a family that's like that,
that's broken. We had nothing, me and my mom, and
I understand what it's like to live off of baloney
(11:11):
sandwiches if you have that, or a sandwish he ever
had a sandwich where we have two pieces of bread
nothing between it. Can you imagine Mom has a stroke
five six years earlier. She's got a son who desperately
loves her, wants to provide for her. He hears how.
I don't know if we're going to be able to
(11:32):
make the note on the rent this month. I don't
know if we're going to be able to keep lights
on this month. You can forget about internet, own your phone.
You can't have a phone. He didn't get a phone
until some time later. And then it was a pay
as you go text phone.
Speaker 3 (11:46):
Yeah, text only. The phone we're going to talk about
in a few minutes. Yeah, it was text only.
Speaker 2 (11:50):
It was text only. So they're scraping by. Can you
imagine what it would be like for to be a
mama that is greatly debility as a result of a stroke,
and she has no way to really truly take care
of her son. There's not a dad necessarily in the picture.
But yet her son becomes almost like a surrogate husband
(12:12):
at that point in time where he's trying to provide,
and you know, the best way he can do this
is to try to scrape together any kind of pennies
that he can. And I think that you know, when
you have a child like Blake Dave, that they want love,
they want adoration, so desperately they go around and they
try to find families that they can integrate into where
(12:34):
they can just feel that and Unfortunately, it seems like
Blake is certainly the first run at least with Scholar's
family chose the wrong one in the bunch.
Speaker 3 (12:43):
And to give you an idea, his bill was twenty
five hundred dollars. It's two hundred and fifty to a bellman.
They didn't even have that, So he spent sixteen days
in jail rather than come up with two hundred and
fifty bucks. Now we tell you all that because that
happened in May. After Blake gets out of jail, and again,
like I told you, as soon as it got in
(13:03):
front of a judge, they did, charges were all dropped
and everything went away. But his mom realizes what First
of all, her son was beaten by a man and
nobody charged him with a crime. Her son spent two
and a half weeks in jail, so she moves. She's like,
we're out of here now. Things had gotten a little
bit better for them financially, but you know, paycheck to paycheck,
(13:25):
moving not not a cheap thing to do on a
good day. And she did it anyway because she was
worried about Blake's physical safety from a man who beat
him up and then got him put in jail, do
you matters?
Speaker 2 (13:36):
I understand that, Yeah, I do too, And she's trying
to protect it the best way she can. And they
move from If you're not familiar with the kind of
the metro Atlanta area, if you think about Atlanta on
a clock face down at about the seven o'clock position,
I guess they lived where this initial incident took place.
(13:57):
Took place in therey called Clayton County that's immediately due
south of Atlanta, she decides, and probably the best that
she could do, because any kind of little network of
support that she would have would still be kind of
accessible to her. They moved to Kalwita County at that
point in time. And this is where and so, not
only is Blake having to condemnd with being in jail,
(14:21):
being beat up by a felon who you know, demonstrates
a gun to him, he's broken up with his girlfriend,
his mother's had a stroke, they don't have any money. Oh,
he's got to integrate into a new school now, right,
and so, and if any of you guys have ever
been to new kid in a school, can you imagine
to show up in this set of circumstances. But yet
(14:44):
from everything that we can surmise from his history. He's
making friends everywhere he goes. He has this kind of
bright affect. He gets along with people, he integrates into
this environment. But unfortunately I got to tell you folks
when they moved to Klwita, it seems as though the
Flakes death weren't the serve for everybody in the audience.
(15:20):
Close your eyes and just think back to what it
was like in high school and maybe you can still
remember the excitement of prom or the excitement of homecoming,
and those moments in time that you know you're excited
about the possibilities that were going to occur that night,
(15:41):
hanging out with friends, going to dances. Uh, you know,
back in my day, we used to give cressages. I
don't know if they do. I think it might be
a southern is homecoming a.
Speaker 1 (15:51):
Big deal like outside of the Southeast. Okay, it's a
deal where.
Speaker 2 (15:56):
You are no matter where you are. But I don't
think they do cressages anymore.
Speaker 1 (15:59):
So they okay, okay, wait a minute. Now it's become
bigger than when we were in school. Yeah, I guess
it is.
Speaker 2 (16:04):
Yeah, they have limos now they take him to homepome
So yeah, yeah, well.
Speaker 1 (16:12):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (16:13):
Oh yeah, just don't have to unaccompanied. Yeah, but you
know I mentioned I mentioned there, you go, I mentioned,
uh limos?
Speaker 1 (16:22):
Right, yes, what do you.
Speaker 2 (16:23):
Think the chances are that Blake Chapel had a limo
that was going to pick him up and it was
going to take his date. You know who his limo was? Mama,
Mama was his limo? Yeah, that night and it was October.
Speaker 3 (16:36):
Well, okay, to make sure we're on the same page here.
You know, we told you about Skyler, the ex girlfriend
who ran away and led to the beating that led.
Speaker 1 (16:43):
To the move. Now we're in October.
Speaker 3 (16:45):
He's in a new school, he's got a new group
of friends that they love him, they talk great about him,
and he's got a new girlfriend.
Speaker 1 (16:51):
Na Ryan, it's spelled r I O N. Why do
parents do to their kids?
Speaker 3 (16:59):
I don't know, but I'm just thinking I wish I'd
done that to mine, you know, so they'd have a
real reason to be mad at me instead of just
making stuff up. But Ryan Rio N and and they
just they just clicked. They just in a good way.
They really clicked. And now I don't know if Melissa
was giving them a ride or if it was Ryan's
mother there. It depends on There's a lot of mixture here,
(17:21):
but the bottom line is that Blake didn't have a car.
His mom was his car, and mom took them to eat.
They went to this really nice Japanese steakhouse. Mom picked
them up after dinner and then took them to the dance,
which was at Kalwita High School. Eas Kalwita, right, yeah,
at he's quite Kalweita High School. And they went in
(17:43):
and the best part of all is I became a
DJ because I have no rhythm, can't dance, and the
only way you're gonna meet girls if you can't dance
is be the guy playing the music. And back when
we played records and stuff, that's pretty cool. It's different
now when you're a DJ back Venmint playing records. Now
it means making up music as you go. But he
(18:03):
could dance, and he did, and I'm watching this. There's
videos of him online, you know, from the dance, and
he's he had such a great time that night. This
is a kid that is not pretentious by any stretch
of the imagination.
Speaker 1 (18:17):
His mom, he's so close with her, he shares with her.
Speaker 3 (18:21):
These videos of him dancing and tell it this is
the greatest night of my life.
Speaker 1 (18:26):
That's probably one of the things.
Speaker 3 (18:27):
I wish my children would have said to me if
they had gone to a high school. And I've had
so much fun, this is the best night. On top
of everything else. They have to get her, you know.
Mom comes and picks them up after the dance and
they go back to Ryan's house to watch a movie. Now,
while they're at Ryan's house, it's still early, okay, they
let the dance. Remember it is a high school homecoming dwance,
(18:49):
So they're done by about ten o'clock or so.
Speaker 1 (18:51):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (18:53):
She actually picks them up at ten thirty pm exactly.
Speaker 1 (18:56):
And they go back to Ryan's house to watch a movie.
Speaker 3 (19:00):
Out already ahead of time, he was planning on going
to his buddy's Austin. After going and hanging out with
Ryan for a while, he was going to go back
to his buddy's Austin's house, and so Ryan's mom took
him from Ryan's house to his friend Austin's house. Once there,
(19:20):
that's when he actually it was then when he actually
told his mom, this is the greatest night of my life.
Thank you very much, Thank you mom, you know, and
he actually talked her into letting him spend the night
at Austin's. It was something they had discussed earlier, and
according to Melissa, after talking to him about how great
of a night had been, she said, sure, you can
spend the night with Austin.
Speaker 2 (19:39):
But Austin did not go to the home con dance
that night. He was not there. So he's introduced into
the picture now deducing this.
Speaker 3 (19:49):
It's important when you know everything else that comes next,
it's important to No, he did not go to the dance.
Speaker 2 (19:53):
Yeah, he did not. And here here's something interesting. What
do teenagers have a proclivity for doing when they say
that they're going to spend the night at somebody else's house. Yeah, well, well.
Speaker 1 (20:06):
He said they went to a Bible conference. Yeah they
didn't do that.
Speaker 2 (20:08):
It wasn't Bible study, that's for sure.
Speaker 1 (20:11):
But Blake, Blake.
Speaker 2 (20:13):
Went to Austin's house. Mom dropped him off. So guess
what Blake does. He doesn't have a car. He starts walking.
Speaker 3 (20:21):
Well, first they walked to a convenience start to get
a pack of smokes.
Speaker 2 (20:25):
Pack of smokes, and the place was closed. They go
back to Austin's at this point in time, and it's
from there that they depart, that he departs on foot,
and guess where he's going. He's going back to Ryan's house,
his date from that night. And that's where things really
take a kind of a sinister turn, because it's at
this moment in time that when you graft this out
(20:46):
and you begin to understand that this child is on foot.
Speaker 1 (20:51):
It's several miles too.
Speaker 3 (20:53):
It is okay, after they went to the convenience store
first where they were going to buy smokes, but it
was closed. It was what a mile and a half,
So you know, that's nothing for a couple of kids
this age to walk back and forth. But walking from
Austin's house to Ryan's house, yeah, three miles.
Speaker 2 (21:12):
Yeah, it's at least three. There's one estimate, dependent upon
the way he went, it could have been four. So
he's got it bad. He wants to go back to
Ryan's house, and he is there. He sneaks into.
Speaker 1 (21:26):
Her home, in her bedroom, in her.
Speaker 2 (21:28):
Bedroom, mid of the night.
Speaker 1 (21:29):
Yeah, and.
Speaker 2 (21:32):
Well, there you go.
Speaker 3 (21:32):
As the father of two daughters, I can tell you
the three o'clock in the morning outfit of every dad
with the daughter underwear and a Louisville slugger.
Speaker 1 (21:41):
That's what you're seeing.
Speaker 3 (21:42):
You're going to see an overweight, middle aged guy that
doesn't fear prison anymore. You know, grab a shovel, I
got property.
Speaker 1 (21:48):
You're done and he knows me.
Speaker 2 (21:49):
So there you go.
Speaker 1 (21:52):
And that's what happened.
Speaker 2 (21:53):
But it wasn't the dad that made the discovery. It
was Grandma who lived and so we were told in Grandma,
of course, is shocked as dumb.
Speaker 3 (22:03):
This shows you how smart sixteen year old kids are.
He's snuck in, but they make so much noise they
wake up granny.
Speaker 1 (22:10):
Granny. Yeah, he's snuck in through her window. Yeah, I know,
Granny catches him. He dives.
Speaker 3 (22:15):
This is like a Beverly Hibbey's episode, or said the man.
He dives out the window. We don't even know if
he has his clothes on because he's out, but he is.
Speaker 2 (22:24):
And he then he starts on this journey where he's leaving.
But he's got this this phone that we had mentioned
that is a text only phone. And guess who he's texting.
It's not his mother, it's not Austin. It's actually Ryan's mother.
And what he is attempting to do is to apologize.
He's apologizing for disrespecting their home, for behaving like this.
Speaker 3 (22:48):
He actually said, I'm sorry, I broke your rules. That's
the character of Blake Chappelle. I'm sorry, I broke your rules.
He's acknowledging he the rules that they had acknowledged it
with him, and he broke them. I I don't know
too many adults that take that kind of accountability anything.
Speaker 2 (23:08):
No, I don't either, But you know, I think that
in a world like this that he occupies, where every
relationship that Blake has along this continuum that he lives
in is valuable to him. He doesn't have much in
the way of material items, so every relationship that he
has to me at least, is an indication that there's
(23:29):
value there. You know. Even if you go back to
the relationship that he had with Skyler, now they were
no longer an item, but yet they were staying in touch,
and he wanted to find her because she had run
away and there's there's an undercurrent with that relationship relative
to her family situation.
Speaker 1 (23:48):
He thinking about how important that was to him.
Speaker 3 (23:49):
I didn't think about it though, right now, that that's
why he was reaching out, because he wanted himend that
fence before it got totally torn down.
Speaker 2 (23:55):
Yeah, I know, you're talking about a kid that just
has been introduced into this environment. It's new. He's trying
to make friends. He's been at the home, and can
you imagine going to the heights of joy of being
able to express this out on the dance floor, to
enjoy your friends. You're laughing, you're carrying on, and you
(24:16):
make that one final decision where you're going to say,
you know what I think I'm gonna. I'm gonna I'm
gonna push all in here and see what happens. See
what happens. Can I make it back to her house
and engage in whatever kind of activity they were engaging
at that moment, Tom.
Speaker 3 (24:37):
This is what happens when you do in Nancy Graci's show.
So often you have to act like you don't know
what they were really doing.
Speaker 1 (24:43):
No, they were. They were telling stories, they were trading jokes,
That's what they were doing. Dave, talk to me in normal,
normal people speak. I'm just a.
Speaker 2 (24:57):
So we're he's in this position where he's literally pleading
to be in her life. He's made a friend, he's
made probably an intimate friend at this moment in time,
and that's the one thing in value, these friendships that
he has. But here's the problem. When he exits that house,
(25:20):
when he starts back on this journey, this trek to
his home, he's never seen again.
Speaker 1 (25:28):
A lot.
Speaker 2 (25:43):
If you are in a situation where you don't know
where your child is, and I think that all of
us have experienced this over the courses of our lives collectively.
I know where my son is. He's here on the
front road right now, but I don't have to worry
about him anymore because he's in a old But those
moments in times reflect back, just for a second, when
(26:05):
you have children and you have this overwhelming fear that
kind of seeps into your soul, It kind of cork
screws into your spine. We were thinking, oh my gosh,
where's my child? Where's my child? And no matter how
much you scream, how much you plead, there's no bringing
them back at this point. And I think that most
(26:25):
of the time, and I think that this is the
way the police began to view this day, is that
when you have a sixteen year old that admittedly has
this kind of unbalanced life, I won't necessarily stay troubled.
Now he's spent time in jail, but that doesn't mean
he's a bad kid. And so, but for a mom
trying to find her child, I think that the authorities,
(26:47):
and we know this for a fact, they viewed this,
They viewed his absence as a runaway. And so you've
got a sixteen year old that and there are many
of them you hear about them here at crime con
that are missing out there that no one knows where
they are, and everybody's searching for them. But in this
particular case, people, for the longest period of time thought
(27:11):
thought that Blake was actually a runaway.
Speaker 3 (27:13):
And I remember he left the house sometime around four thirty.
You know, we've gone through this timeline of when they
got back home, when he left to go back to
Ryan's house, when dad or grandma caught them, and when
he left. But what we do have is the text messages.
You know, he had the phone. We mentioned it was
a pre pay text only plan at the time, this
(27:35):
twenty eleven, and he was texting Ryan while he was
after he had left, he texted the mom, I'm really
sorry I broke the rules texting Ryan. He actually texts
her between five and five thirty that morning while he's
walking and he tells her I've been stopped by the
popo around five o'clock, he says, the police. Now, there
are two different things serving that area. One is the
(27:56):
County Sheriff's Department Kwiedi Counting, and then there's the police
department that could have also been stopped. But nobody has
a record of that.
Speaker 2 (28:02):
Nobody. And that's one of the striking things about this
case is that why why would a sixteen year old
state that he had been stopped by the police at
that time of day. Why would they have a record
of that? But yet the police, I mean, who would
even begin to think that up unless it's just this
fanciful thing that he's talking to Ryan about to try to,
(28:25):
I don't know, get sympathy or whatever the case might be.
But he did complain in that text about being cold
he's walking.
Speaker 1 (28:33):
Think about it.
Speaker 3 (28:34):
Now, we're talking in the middle of October in the South.
I mean it does get cold here and October fifteenth.
Speaker 2 (28:39):
Yeah, October fifteenth, Yeah, that's davy chilly.
Speaker 3 (28:42):
You know, it's not be freezing, but yeah, he's not
wearing well, we know that he left his overcoat and jacket.
We know the only thing he wore when he went
to Ryan's house was this long sleeve shirt. He left
his other stuff at Austin's house. So when we're kind
of assuming here because we don't know, we have to
put peace together because we know that the police and
(29:02):
Sheriff's purnt don't have any record of an officer coming
into contact with any teenager that time, no record of
that anywhere. We just have the text messages between Blake
and Ryan.
Speaker 2 (29:13):
And procedurally, what in case you're not aware of it anytime?
And you see these on these these procedural show, well procedural,
let's just say that it's cops or something like that,
where if a police officer pulls somebody over, and in
this case they're stopping a pedestrian, most of the time
they'll say, uh, you know, the police officer or the
(29:34):
traffic would go something like, yeah, headquarters, be vised. I've
got a young white male. Uh, he's a pedestrian. I'm
going to step out and talk to him.
Speaker 1 (29:45):
Because what if the guy pulls a gun and shoots him? Yeah,
and if he doesn't call it in, nobody knows, and
there's a record of that.
Speaker 2 (29:50):
Most of the time. But you know, you can have
these events where a police officer might see somebody walking
down the street, and just keep in mind every time
that you record that many times deepending upon the department,
you're going to have to write a report.
Speaker 1 (30:06):
All right.
Speaker 2 (30:07):
So did a police officer pull up adjacent to him
and say, hey, son, why are you out at this time?
What are you doing out here? Because it doesn't make sense.
There's no one around here, why are you here this
sort of thing? And of course there's no record of it.
And that's that's where you know, raw, I mean, that's
where Blake at this point in tom except for this
(30:28):
interaction that he had with Ryni, he kind of falls
off of the face of the planet. We don't know
what's happened to him.
Speaker 3 (30:33):
Done at that moment, all contact with Blake ceases. And
by the way, from that moment on, nobody talked to him,
nobody saw him. There was no tax message, nothing after
five point thirty in the morning on that time, right
after you say he saw the police.
Speaker 2 (30:51):
Yeah, and so this is October. We've gone into the
morning from October fifteenth, which the dance was on that night.
Now we're into the morning of October sixteenth, he's not seen,
so they put out a bolo for him.
Speaker 3 (31:05):
Well, and it actually shows for the family, remember, yeah,
because first it's like, yeah, they're checking because well, Brian,
we know he pushed him out of our house at
the you know, in before the sun was up. Did
he make it back d Austin's house. He didn't make
it back Dawston's house. So now Ryan and her parents
know that where's Blake. Now they don't call his mom
right away, and this is a little frustrating for me
(31:27):
as a parent. You don't know where my kid is
and he was in your house and you're telling me
at eleven thirty in the day. It took hours before
they notified Melissa that they didn't know where he was.
Matter of fact, Ryan's dad went out hunting at eight
o'clock that morning. I don't know about you being in
the southeast. I'm talking to Joe about men don't go
out hunting at eight in the morning. You go out
(31:48):
hunting at four in the morning. You don't leave the
house at eight in the morning. But that's what Ryan's
dad did. He went hunting at eight in the morning.
He's already out there when they call him and say, hey,
we can't find Blake. You need to come home. They
still haven't called Melissa. All the talking has been between Ryan,
her mom, Grandma, her dad, and Austin, and that's all
(32:09):
we've got. Then they finally when they can't find him,
you know, they drive the route between the houses, can't
see him anywhere. Then they notify Melissa. She finds out
and immediately calls police. Hey, my son is missing. Go
find him.
Speaker 1 (32:24):
And to be honest with you. For the next six weeks,
seven weeks, eight weeks, they're not really even looking for him.
Speaker 3 (32:33):
Oh, they did the basics right. They checked the route
that he went on. They might have walked it, they
drove it. They didn't see anything. He ran away because
he had been involved with Skyler six months earlier and
she had run away and he was with her, and
oh my goodness, he's probably just running away from a
bad situation.
Speaker 1 (32:51):
That's how they played it. He was not a bad kid.
Speaker 2 (32:56):
December rolls around, Yeah, December nineteenth rolls around, and you
have you have pedestrian traffic that's adjacent to this golf
course and to the driving range, and someone happens to
look down over this tiny little bridge that's in this
kind of bucolic looking setting. The leaves are you know,
(33:17):
are changing. You know, in December, you still have leaves
on the trees in this area of the country. It's
cool out. They look over look down in the creek
and there they spy something that doesn't quite fit with
the rest of the scenery, if you will. And that's
where they found this young man's body, adjacent to the
(33:39):
shoreline of this little creek. It's hung in brush. He's
only wearing an undershirt and a pair of underwear his pants,
I'm sorry, shorts, his shorts, and he's absent everything else.
There's no phone, there's no money, there's no idea, there
(34:00):
is absolutely nothing now at this point in time, no
shoes whatsoever. And this is a big question, I think
from a forensic standpoint when I begin to contemplate this
and kind of the actions that go hand in hand
with this, would you dump somebody right there? Or could
(34:22):
they narrow down the location where he was last seen?
Is this part of the route. There's all kinds of
things that play into this, because you know, I've worked
cases over the years where people have just taken bodies
and thrown them into bodies of water. What do you
think the number one I'm asking this question truly, this
is not rhetorical. What do you think the number one
(34:44):
reason is that people like to take bodies and toss
them into water. You're back to get rid of evidence,
to get rid of evidence, and to make that trace
evidence or anything that's there disappear, essentially. And I've contemplated
(35:05):
this about Blake's case, and I've really wondered had someone
taken him and driven him about, had someone you know,
attempted to terrify him or terrorize him, because you know,
when they finally got his body back to the State
Medical Examiner's office, Blake had an intermediate gunshot woman to
(35:31):
the back.
Speaker 1 (35:32):
Of his Heady. You say, intermediate, how far are we
talking to you?
Speaker 2 (35:35):
Yeah, well, with an intermedia it's really we measure it
in inches. So when you begin to think about firearms
and a lot of it, you can't. This is not
a static number, all right, So people will have very there.
There's variability here when someone is fired upon like this
(35:55):
and they're shot the you know, the project is not
the only thing coming out of the weapon. You guys
have been at crime com long enough to understand that
you also have what remains behind as far as unburnt powder,
any kind of other debris that might be in the
barrel of the weapon, And so you're going to have
this deposition on the area that is being struck by
(36:19):
the projectile, and it will kind of rain in. It
loses velocity really quickly. So if you're thinking about perhaps
unburned powder which leads to stipling, you've heard that term
that it surrounds the injury, it's not. It doesn't have
the same aerodynamic qualities as say, for instance, a projectile
(36:44):
lead core projectile. And you can do this at home
if you'll just take a bit of baby powder and
put it in your hand like this and blow it,
and particularly in front of a mirror, you'll see it
begin to kind of rain down. You think, God, Morgan,
that's kind of simplistic. Well, it's science, and it's very simplistic.
It's we understand this. The aerodynamic qualities of this powder
(37:06):
kind of drift down. So you have to be close enough, now,
get a hold of this concept. You have to be
close enough so that when that weapon is initiated, it's
going to imprint, imprint that unburned powder onto the surface
of the skin. Okay, so it'll be just underneath you'll
see these little flecks of powder that are there microscopically,
(37:26):
we can take them out. We can also take tissue
sections and take a look at this, and depended upon
how close it is, you'll have like within underneath the scalp,
you can actually see smoke that's there that's deposited. It'll
sometimes you'll have a greasy ring. Sometimes you'll have this
kind of staining that goes on. So dependent upon how
(37:47):
far away you are is going to dictate the amount
of this debris that winds upon the skin. So with
an intermediate round, you've got a projectile that's entering the
head and the rest of the breeze following away. But
there is essentially enough there to get an idea of
range of fire. That's why they're calling it an intermediate round. Now,
(38:07):
to this date, the police have not released the actual
caliber of the weapon that was used. I think one
of my big questions because they haven't released the autopsy
report on Blake's remains, is well, what type of caliber
was this? They're saying pistol caliber, so that can mean
anything from you know, a twenty two caliber pistol all
(38:31):
the way up to you know, there's fifty caliber pistol.
So you've got that broad of a spectrum here. Now,
if I were betting man, I'd say, you know, you're
probably one of the most the most common caliber relative
to a semi automatic, it's going to be a nine millimeter.
That's what most most people are going to carry. You'll
have fortys. If people still carry revolvers, you might have
a thirty eight. But that's a very common round to have.
(38:56):
So did they recover around out Blake's skull? They haven't stated.
Is it a throw and through wound? It was just
one shot though, right, it's a single shot.
Speaker 1 (39:07):
Isn't that odd?
Speaker 3 (39:07):
Though? That somebody that is shot and not right up
against the head. But you're talking a little distance away.
Normally we have multiple shots, even if it is to
the head. Just to make sure, you know, could you
always talk about the kill shot but not in this case.
Speaker 2 (39:20):
Yeah, and this is a proximity So shot in the head, yeah,
shot in the back of the head from what we understand.
And so you've got this And I always talk about
in relation to firearms, I always talk about a symmetry
so if you've got someone that is actually being killed,
you will have the perpetrator, and this is kind of obvious.
You have them in a dominant position over the victims,
(39:43):
so they're firing down many times. So you'll have these
trajectories that enter on the posterior aspect of the skull,
for instance, and they proceed, you know, forward, So you'll
have this kind of above to below, a front to back,
and then you can say whether or not it's from
left to right or from right to left directionality. But
why is that important? Well, it's important because it gives
(40:04):
you an insight into the intimacy of the relationship between
the victim in this case, Blake, and the perpetrator. So
who would have the ability to take this young man,
the sixteen year old, and put him into a position
where they are dominant over him with a weapon. We
already know he's had one weapon presented to him at
(40:26):
some point in time within the last few months in
his life. Okay, so there's probably an endowell in fear.
I don't know about you, guys, but I can speak
to myself. If somebody presents with a weapon in my
face or adjacent to me, there's a chance. You know,
a lot of us can be real bold and we
can say things, but when you're staring down the barrel
of a weapon, you're going to, at least to a
(40:47):
certain degree, you're going to submit. Okay, And you're talking
about sixteen year old kid. So what do you do?
Do you take him and put him on the ground
and stand over him and fire into him. Do you
have him in the back seat of a car. Do
you go into the backseat of the car with him
and fire into him. Do you take him to some
other location, perhaps shoot him there, maybe leave a casing.
(41:11):
Maybe you're smart enough to recover the casing. Then you
put him into a vehicle and you transport him to
that location. Either way, I think that there is probably
we can surmise that there's probably a vehicle involved in this.
And what would be really interesting, and we're so far
down the road now, I don't know if it would
be possible to recover this, but any kind of biological
(41:31):
evidence or firearms evidence that you could find in a
suspected vehicle. But you know, we're I don't know, Dave,
We're many years down, right.
Speaker 1 (41:38):
Thirteen years, Yeah, the thirteen is October.
Speaker 3 (41:41):
I'm thinking is if he's in the car and well,
first of all, time of day. Okay, you're talking about
controlling somebody that for no reason. I mean again, talk
five o'clock in the morning. Let's just use that as
a as a time. Okay, between five and five thirty am.
Who knows he's walking on the road at that time?
Speaker 1 (41:59):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (41:59):
Who would know that this child, yeah is going to
be alone. Yeah, is going to be alone that there's
not going to be anybody else around him. He's already
been in a very distressing Can you just vision this
for a moment. You've got a kid, and I know
I mentioned this earlier, but just imagine he's at the height,
he's at the ultimate ecstasy in his life relative to
(42:20):
this dance. Right, we already know that he's he's reached
out to Mama and told her this best night of
my life. And then all of a sudden, you know,
he makes this decision with this young lady, goes into
a room. He's horribly embarrassed. Of anybody in here ever
been embarrassed like this?
Speaker 1 (42:36):
I have.
Speaker 2 (42:38):
You're in these circumstances, you're humiliated. Now you're you're hoping
that you can just hold on to some semblance of
this new life.
Speaker 3 (42:46):
It kind of depends on interrupted as to how he
really felt about it.
Speaker 2 (42:50):
And yeah, I know exactly, and you don't know.
Speaker 1 (42:52):
I can tell you a little bit earlier than it's
a little different than if it's later.
Speaker 2 (42:55):
Right, But either way, saying you've got you've got somebody
from an older general that comes in into this room.
How embarrassing he is?
Speaker 1 (43:03):
I forgot about granny. Yeah, there you got. And so
you imagine that scream.
Speaker 2 (43:08):
I know, and he's totally he's totally humiliated at this
point in time or relative to relative to what has
occurred in his life in this very short period of time.
And now he's cast out of the house. He's on
his own. He's reaching out to this young lady and
to her mother, and then he vanishes off the face
(43:29):
of the planet.
Speaker 1 (43:30):
Here.
Speaker 2 (43:30):
You know, there's all kinds of rumors that have kind
of floated around about about Blake's death. And Dave laid
this one on me real quick. You had mentioned this,
Uh there, there's actually this this blurb that came out.
Speaker 1 (43:46):
What was it?
Speaker 3 (43:46):
I said that there's a podcast And this is why
you kind of have to be careful of what you
listen to there's a podcaster who's claiming that the autopsy
report that the police said the body had only been
in the creek for a week. Now, if Blake's body
had only been in that creek for a week, where
was he for the seven weeks between the time he
(44:07):
was last heard from until the time they found him.
Speaker 1 (44:09):
Now.
Speaker 3 (44:10):
I'm telling you this because I hit him up with
it this morning when we were just you know, you
want to get updated. I want to come in here
and not have the most current stuff for you guys.
And I saw that he said, hey, have you seen
this anywhere? So I spent an hour today trying to
verify this. I'm talking about calling the police, calling the sheriff,
calling anybody I could of the GBI, and I can't
find anybody that'll verify.
Speaker 1 (44:27):
They said, the autopsy.
Speaker 3 (44:29):
Report hasn't been released, period, So whoever is claiming this
and a podcast is making it up so we can
throw that out the window. It doesn't make sense that
because you realize that if that's the case, then somebody
had his body stashed for seven weeks and then.
Speaker 1 (44:46):
Decided to kill him.
Speaker 3 (44:48):
I think most of us would believe that he was
probably killed the last night he made that last text.
Speaker 2 (44:52):
Yeah, And what we have learned is that his body
was actually beginning to change colors. And that's a marker
for us from a medical legal perspective. There's desicate even
though he's just follow me here just for a second,
give me some rope. Even though he's in a water,
an aquatic environment, and he's not fully submerged.
Speaker 1 (45:15):
He was floating anyway on the brush. There in the
brush he is.
Speaker 2 (45:22):
Oh and by the way, the location where he is
found is not a location that you would walk down
to the bank. And the reason I know this is
that the first group, the first group of my students
that presented this case two years ago, now, they physically
drove out there. They went to this site, my students did.
(45:44):
And you can't access the water this way. You would
have to go through so much brush in order to
do so. That leaves us with one conclusion right relative
to the bridge, that more than likely, there's a high
probability that he.
Speaker 1 (45:59):
Was pushed Williams.
Speaker 2 (46:02):
Yeah, pushed pushed off the bridge, and he's there in
the water, and he is hung in the brush. His
body is in a state. If if we are to
believe what has been reported that the body is decomposed
so badly. He had a lip ring that was right
here that he got into a lot of trouble over
with his mother, and additionally into that he had gotten
(46:23):
a Playboy Bunny tattoo.
Speaker 3 (46:26):
It was one of the ways they identified him, and
he was really not happy about that.
Speaker 2 (46:30):
And I think that it was an older brother that
was not in his life that had signed for it.
And so he's undressing at one moment in time and
she's like, what what is that? What is that on you?
You know, and he's like, oh, you know, I went
and got a tattoo. So that's how they had to
identify him. Okay, a chrome ring in his lip and
(46:50):
also the fact that he had this tattoo on his person,
and that's what they went with. I think they bolstered
that with with dental records later, but it puts them
on the right path at that point in time relative
to relative to who they thought this might be. And
there were you know, there were posters about at this
(47:10):
sort of thing and this sort of thing, you know,
relative to they were looking for him. But here here's
the thing when he's found and going back to the
condition of the body. Uh, he's only found in his
underwear and he has no personal belongings with him, including shoes,
which I think is is really something to look at
(47:32):
and cases that I've covered in the news and also
things that I have worked. We talk about embarrassment just
a little while ago. There is there any other kind
of situation. I know that there are many, but where
immediately you could really humiliate somebody and threaten them by
making them strip all of their clothes off because you feel,
(47:54):
you know, very vulnerable before the world, and that that's
an active event that has to take place. Take your
clothes off, take your shoes off. That's an action event
where you're having and you're essentially putting him into submission
at that point time. Now, I guess it, and I
could say, I could say they stripped the clothes off
(48:14):
the body, but why leave the underwear. So when you
see this young man humiliated like this and his body
is dumped off like refuse off of this bridge and
he's found floating out there in the water, it really
it really gives you insight into I think the person
that may have done this, And go ahead.
Speaker 3 (48:36):
What if dad caught him after Grandma caught him in
the bedroom with his sixteen year old daughter and your
old dad. He's got his underwear on, he's able to
pull that up. He barely got his shirt on. He
doesn't have a shit nothing, and dad loses it and
takes him off. He loads him up in the truck,
dumps him over the side of the river. He gets
rid of the clothes because he didn't have him on
(48:56):
to start with. He just finished up with my sixteen
year old daughter, you're dead. And then I'm going to
stage all this in case they decided to test me
for jess. All right, I'm going to go hunting at
eight in the morning.
Speaker 2 (49:06):
And that's certainly something that has to be and I
hope that that is something that's being factored into the investigation.
Speaker 3 (49:11):
They passed a polygraph test, so did his wife, Sutded Ryan,
and they searched their house.
Speaker 1 (49:16):
No evidence of anything.
Speaker 2 (49:17):
However, I have to say this to you, when my
kids chose to do this case, Dave was in this
past January. That's when this semester started, this previous semester.
Thank god it's over with now. When in January, when
(49:40):
I had my kids go through the process of selecting
the cold case they were going to cover they chose
Blake's case. As we were walking and you kind of
gave a hint at this earlier as we were working
our way through this case. My kids were at the time.
They came to me and they said, Professor Morian, you're
not going to believe this. But they served search warrants
(50:03):
in a place called Sharpsburg, Georgia. And this was back
in March.
Speaker 1 (50:08):
When we were talking about the newest evidence.
Speaker 2 (50:10):
Yeah, and this came out and if you can expand
on that.
Speaker 3 (50:13):
Just twenty fourth they had There have been two things
that have happened since this case, Okay, two big things,
one in twenty eleven, so it has to be between
December nineteenth and the end of the year. Police have
said in twenty eleven they received an anonymous tip that
had an information about the murder, actually real information. Years later,
(50:37):
they received a second anonymous tip letter. They believe it
is from the same person, and I believe it is
the combination of these tips that have led them to
what they have done. In the most recent search. In March,
they searched three separate locations in Sharpsburg, Georgia, and it
wasn't in any of the places that you would think.
(50:59):
And Joe and I were looking at this, going, well,
wait a minute, do the same people live in those
homes in the places that were searched, that were there
in twenty eleven. If they're not, they're searching the backyard.
Speaker 2 (51:13):
So what would be buried in the backyard. What could
they recover back there? You know, how much effort does
it take to get rid of a young man's clothing
and also a phone? Not much. I mean, that could
have been burned up, It could have been disposed of
in any other number of ways. But why go to
that location and say that this does in fact have
something to do with the death of Blake.
Speaker 3 (51:34):
But for the students did such an incredible job on this.
I have to tell you that for those of you
who have come to me and asked me about forensics,
to Jaysu the work. I had a chance to look
over this work that Joe sent me that they did.
I do it for a living, and I went to
school on the report they did. That's how good this was.
It was very thorough, it was professional, it was wonderful.
(51:57):
I thought, Okay, I'm hiring one of these guys now.
Speaker 1 (52:00):
It was good.
Speaker 2 (52:01):
Well, I'm very pleased. I'm very proud of my students
for bringing this case to us. And I felt that again,
you know the fact that two years in a row,
I had still a group of students that chose this
particular case. And trust me, we've got a lot of
cold cases in Alabama. There's a lot of cold cases
in Georgia. But you know, this is not too far
(52:23):
away from our campus in Jacksonville, Alabama. And to have
this happen two years in a row, and actually I
have students that have The students from the first group
came to a few different conclusions than second group, so
they weren't, you know, kind of feeding off of one another.
It really kind of gave me, I don't know, it
(52:46):
kind of gave me a chill, thinking this is probably
something that I need to explore with all of our friends.
There are fans of body bags, and certainly everybody here
at Crime com I'm Joseph Scott Moore, and this is
body bags.
Speaker 1 (53:04):
Mhm.
Body Facts to Joseph Scott.
Speaker 2 (00:06):
Three years ago, I was asked at my university to
start a cold case class, and knowing what I know
about cold cases, and knowing where we are in this
world that we inhabit now in forensic science and in investigations,
(00:28):
I felt that it was incumbent upon me, someone that
had been on cold case squads in the past, that
I should initiate this class and introduce my students, at
least at an undergraduate level, through the process of cold
case because it is highly complex and for me, I
wanted to introduce my children. My kids at Jacksonville State
(00:53):
University fill up my children sometimes to the methodologies they're employed.
And I got to tell you something. Two years in
a row, independent of one another, my students selected the
same case without knowing about the other group, to present
(01:14):
in class, to run down the leads, to try to
understand it, to try to make sense of it. And
I knew at that moment time when I had a
second class that chose this same case, I knew that
it was something I needed to talk about on bodybacks
and it's an absolutely heartbreaking case. So today we're going
(01:34):
to talk about the death the murder of Blake Chappelle.
I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this welcome to Crime Con
twenty twenty four Nashville. And thank you to our host
(01:57):
here at Gaylord. I really appreciate it, and thank you
for all of our fans that have turned out, Dave,
all of our friends, we'd like to call you guys
friends as opposed to fans. We get such great comments
from you, all encouragement which we need on a regular basis.
And today, Dave, I want to discuss a case that
is actually not too far away from where we live
(02:20):
in Alabama, just literally across the state lines over in
a place called Coweda County. And it might be a
case that I think that if we have if we
have parents in this classroom, I mean in this boy I.
Speaker 1 (02:39):
Guess play one on radio.
Speaker 2 (02:43):
If if we have parents, which I know that we
do here, we can identify with the struggles of life.
We can understand what it's like not to have much
money at the end of the month, and are we
going to be able to provide a living for our children?
And today I want to talk about Blake Chappelle and
(03:04):
his life with his mama that he you know he'd
been with for all of these years, and hey, they
were on hard times.
Speaker 3 (03:13):
Just so you know, this case has multi levels to it.
It's the murder of Blake Chappelle. It starts in twenty
eleven with his murder and it just had an it's unsolved,
but a new break in the case in March of
this year. So we're talking a couple of months ago.
Police were serving search warrants on this case. When we
(03:36):
were prepping for crime con we saw this and went,
holy moly, good timing. Maybe we'll have something to add, which,
by the way, we'll get into in a minute. But
he somewout Blake Chappelle and his mom, Melissa, and they
didn't have much money. To give you an idea, Blake
found it very important as a teen to help his
mom in any way could. So this is a kid
(03:57):
who didn't complain about it. He went to a Fenius
store on his way to school and bought Monster drinks
because parents say your kids can't have them, but when
they get to school, hey, who's got one? And what
he did he marked him up. So he's picking him
up at the old convenience store and up sell him
by a bucket piece, and he's making money that way.
Speaker 1 (04:15):
I don't know about you.
Speaker 3 (04:16):
There aren't too many kids that think that way Blake did.
He's also one of those kids that everybody liked. Nobody
ever said anything bad about Blake, and they said he
liked everybody.
Speaker 1 (04:26):
So we've got a kid.
Speaker 3 (04:28):
And by the way, his mother, she couldn't have been
forty ish, right, yeah, has an She had a stroke.
So we're already impoverished. My mom has a stroke. I'm
selling monster drinks at school to have some spending money
and buy some shoes. That's the kind of kid Blake
Chappelle was. When he's in tenth grade, he writes an
(04:48):
essay called poverty, and he said, most of you don't
know this, but I used to not have a place
to live.
Speaker 1 (04:56):
I'm paraphrasing.
Speaker 3 (04:57):
He says it be three months homeless, and yet they
had overcome that, and that was a perspective he was
writing from. And his perspective as a sixteen seventeen year
old kid was that sometimes people end up impoverished through
no fault of their own. And now he has sympathy
and empathy for that because he's lived it. But he'd
already grown the maturity in that essay was phenomenal, and
(05:21):
all I could think of, This is the kid I
would want my kids to hang out with, and to
see what happened to him breaks your heart. The fact
that all these years later we're talking about this and
his mom doesn't know who did it.
Speaker 1 (05:38):
The police don't know who did it.
Speaker 3 (05:41):
The only people they've ever even thought about, they haven't
even told us their names. And they've cleared two of
the three people. The third person they know wasn't there.
So they've got three persons of interest. They've cleared two
of them and the third one they know wasn't there.
That's how unsolved this case is.
Speaker 2 (06:00):
So we're coming into it cold in this sense, and
it is a cold case. And to go ahead and
kind of give you a little preview, Blake's body was
actually found tossed away like garbage in a stream in
a creek adjacent to and this is kind of the
irony of it. I find it's a relatively affluent area
(06:20):
where he was found. As a matter of fact, the
little road there was a little bridge where his body
was found adjacent to it was adjacent to a golf course.
And you know, Blake is probably the kid that would
never have an opportunity to join a golf club, but
here he is. His mortal remains are found there and
(06:43):
they're in a state of decomposition. And here we have
this young man whose life has been snuffed out. But
I think that it's important to understand as well, you know,
kind of how it all started relative to when he disappeared,
when Blake. Actually this whole thing starts, you know, like
(07:03):
we'd mentioned, it.
Speaker 3 (07:04):
Actually begins way before that and begains the story that
we have to break out. And the reason it's so
confusing is Blake had a girlfriend that ran away from
home in May.
Speaker 1 (07:14):
This happened in October.
Speaker 3 (07:16):
And if you back up to May, that's where one
of your suspects comes from.
Speaker 1 (07:22):
Yeah, it does.
Speaker 2 (07:23):
And here's here's the rub, if you will. This young lady,
scot A Skyler that he was involved with, had a
stepfather who was a convicted felon.
Speaker 3 (07:36):
This is the guy you see on TV shows where
you go you know, that's the guy that did it.
Speaker 1 (07:40):
Yeah, you know, you're ten.
Speaker 3 (07:41):
Minutes into the Lifetime movie going. Okay, he's the only
going to jail.
Speaker 1 (07:45):
That's him.
Speaker 2 (07:46):
He has the news coming on now so yeah.
Speaker 1 (07:48):
Oh my gosh, what trailer park are they hiding in? Now? Yeah?
Is this guy packing a gun? And what he? Oh
my gosh, that's why the girl ran away.
Speaker 2 (07:56):
Yeah, And if you can imagine, Blake was not the
biggest kid.
Speaker 1 (08:01):
But she had. He was tried to nine.
Speaker 2 (08:04):
She was trying to track He was trying to track
her down, and he was essentially trying to inject or
interject himself into the situation to get her safe. And
he finds her.
Speaker 1 (08:17):
He did well.
Speaker 3 (08:18):
They actually had been dating, but they had broken up
and she had run away from home. This shows you
the heart of Blake. They're not even an item. Blake
goes to find her. He knows pretty much the places
she would probably go.
Speaker 1 (08:32):
He finds her.
Speaker 3 (08:33):
He's trying to convince her to go back home, because
this doesn't end well when you runaway and your parents
are looking for you, even if it is a bad stepfather.
Problem is stepdad and two of his buddies are also
looking for Skyler, and they find her and Blake. Because
Blake found her first, stepdad and two of his redneck
(08:54):
buddies show up at the same time, and this stepfather
pro seeds to beat this sixteen year old kid, and
I said five nine one five, that's a very slight
young man. That's not a heavy eye. And this man
beat him. And then this stepfather filed charges against Blake.
(09:20):
It was custodial interference. This stepfather convinced the police that
Blake convinced Schalar to run away with him and he
was hiding her from her parents, and they arrested him.
And because Blake was in such a financial situation, not
very well off, the kid spent sixteen days in jail
because he couldn't make bail. When it finally got in
(09:43):
front of a judge, they dropped the charges. But this
sixteen year old spent sixteen days in jail because the stay.
The stepfather was never charged.
Speaker 1 (09:52):
No, he wasn't.
Speaker 2 (09:52):
And if memory serves me correctly, he had actually presented
with a weapon. Oh yeah, at one point, Tom he
And if you can imagine this year, just imagine you
think back to that period of time.
Speaker 1 (10:04):
In your life.
Speaker 2 (10:06):
You know, when you were sixteen, you were you thought
you knew everything that you really didn't. And sometimes life
will throw you curveballs, want it And suddenly the big
curveball in Blake's life is the fact that he's got
this ogre of a guy that's there convicted that felon.
I'm sure he knows this guy's history because it's coming
from his girlfriend. And this big, robust guy pulls up
(10:31):
his shirt like this and he's demonstrating a weapon to Blake.
Now Blake later relates all of this, but he's he's
beat He's beaten significantly by this man. And it was
at that point in time that this guy actually has
a nerve to go and file charges against Blake. And
(10:51):
as Dave had mentioned, and we have to go back
to the situation with Blake and his mother. I don't
know if any of you guys have ever experienced poverty
in your life. I come from a family that's like that,
that's broken. We had nothing, me and my mom, and
I understand what it's like to live off of baloney
(11:11):
sandwiches if you have that, or a sandwish he ever
had a sandwich where we have two pieces of bread
nothing between it. Can you imagine Mom has a stroke
five six years earlier. She's got a son who desperately
loves her, wants to provide for her. He hears how.
I don't know if we're going to be able to
(11:32):
make the note on the rent this month. I don't
know if we're going to be able to keep lights
on this month. You can forget about internet, own your phone.
You can't have a phone. He didn't get a phone
until some time later. And then it was a pay
as you go text phone.
Speaker 3 (11:46):
Yeah, text only. The phone we're going to talk about
in a few minutes. Yeah, it was text only.
Speaker 2 (11:50):
It was text only. So they're scraping by. Can you
imagine what it would be like for to be a
mama that is greatly debility as a result of a stroke,
and she has no way to really truly take care
of her son. There's not a dad necessarily in the picture.
But yet her son becomes almost like a surrogate husband
(12:12):
at that point in time where he's trying to provide,
and you know, the best way he can do this
is to try to scrape together any kind of pennies
that he can. And I think that you know, when
you have a child like Blake Dave, that they want love,
they want adoration, so desperately they go around and they
try to find families that they can integrate into where
(12:34):
they can just feel that and Unfortunately, it seems like
Blake is certainly the first run at least with Scholar's
family chose the wrong one in the bunch.
Speaker 3 (12:43):
And to give you an idea, his bill was twenty
five hundred dollars. It's two hundred and fifty to a bellman.
They didn't even have that, So he spent sixteen days
in jail rather than come up with two hundred and
fifty bucks. Now we tell you all that because that
happened in May. After Blake gets out of jail, and again,
like I told you, as soon as it got in
(13:03):
front of a judge, they did, charges were all dropped
and everything went away. But his mom realizes what First
of all, her son was beaten by a man and
nobody charged him with a crime. Her son spent two
and a half weeks in jail, so she moves. She's like,
we're out of here now. Things had gotten a little
bit better for them financially, but you know, paycheck to paycheck,
(13:25):
moving not not a cheap thing to do on a
good day. And she did it anyway because she was
worried about Blake's physical safety from a man who beat
him up and then got him put in jail, do
you matters?
Speaker 2 (13:36):
I understand that, Yeah, I do too, And she's trying
to protect it the best way she can. And they
move from If you're not familiar with the kind of
the metro Atlanta area, if you think about Atlanta on
a clock face down at about the seven o'clock position,
I guess they lived where this initial incident took place.
(13:57):
Took place in therey called Clayton County that's immediately due
south of Atlanta, she decides, and probably the best that
she could do, because any kind of little network of
support that she would have would still be kind of
accessible to her. They moved to Kalwita County at that
point in time. And this is where and so, not
only is Blake having to condemnd with being in jail,
(14:21):
being beat up by a felon who you know, demonstrates
a gun to him, he's broken up with his girlfriend,
his mother's had a stroke, they don't have any money. Oh,
he's got to integrate into a new school now, right,
and so, and if any of you guys have ever
been to new kid in a school, can you imagine
to show up in this set of circumstances. But yet
(14:44):
from everything that we can surmise from his history. He's
making friends everywhere he goes. He has this kind of
bright affect. He gets along with people, he integrates into
this environment. But unfortunately I got to tell you folks
when they moved to Klwita, it seems as though the
Flakes death weren't the serve for everybody in the audience.
(15:20):
Close your eyes and just think back to what it
was like in high school and maybe you can still
remember the excitement of prom or the excitement of homecoming,
and those moments in time that you know you're excited
about the possibilities that were going to occur that night,
(15:41):
hanging out with friends, going to dances. Uh, you know,
back in my day, we used to give cressages. I
don't know if they do. I think it might be
a southern is homecoming a.
Speaker 1 (15:51):
Big deal like outside of the Southeast. Okay, it's a
deal where.
Speaker 2 (15:56):
You are no matter where you are. But I don't
think they do cressages anymore.
Speaker 1 (15:59):
So they okay, okay, wait a minute. Now it's become
bigger than when we were in school. Yeah, I guess
it is.
Speaker 2 (16:04):
Yeah, they have limos now they take him to homepome
So yeah, yeah, well.
Speaker 1 (16:12):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (16:13):
Oh yeah, just don't have to unaccompanied. Yeah, but you
know I mentioned I mentioned there, you go, I mentioned,
uh limos?
Speaker 1 (16:22):
Right, yes, what do you.
Speaker 2 (16:23):
Think the chances are that Blake Chapel had a limo
that was going to pick him up and it was
going to take his date. You know who his limo was? Mama,
Mama was his limo? Yeah, that night and it was October.
Speaker 3 (16:36):
Well, okay, to make sure we're on the same page here.
You know, we told you about Skyler, the ex girlfriend
who ran away and led to the beating that led.
Speaker 1 (16:43):
To the move. Now we're in October.
Speaker 3 (16:45):
He's in a new school, he's got a new group
of friends that they love him, they talk great about him,
and he's got a new girlfriend.
Speaker 1 (16:51):
Na Ryan, it's spelled r I O N. Why do
parents do to their kids?
Speaker 3 (16:59):
I don't know, but I'm just thinking I wish I'd
done that to mine, you know, so they'd have a
real reason to be mad at me instead of just
making stuff up. But Ryan Rio N and and they
just they just clicked. They just in a good way.
They really clicked. And now I don't know if Melissa
was giving them a ride or if it was Ryan's
mother there. It depends on There's a lot of mixture here,
(17:21):
but the bottom line is that Blake didn't have a car.
His mom was his car, and mom took them to eat.
They went to this really nice Japanese steakhouse. Mom picked
them up after dinner and then took them to the dance,
which was at Kalwita High School. Eas Kalwita, right, yeah,
at he's quite Kalweita High School. And they went in
(17:43):
and the best part of all is I became a
DJ because I have no rhythm, can't dance, and the
only way you're gonna meet girls if you can't dance
is be the guy playing the music. And back when
we played records and stuff, that's pretty cool. It's different
now when you're a DJ back Venmint playing records. Now
it means making up music as you go. But he
(18:03):
could dance, and he did, and I'm watching this. There's
videos of him online, you know, from the dance, and
he's he had such a great time that night. This
is a kid that is not pretentious by any stretch
of the imagination.
Speaker 1 (18:17):
His mom, he's so close with her, he shares with her.
Speaker 3 (18:21):
These videos of him dancing and tell it this is
the greatest night of my life.
Speaker 1 (18:26):
That's probably one of the things.
Speaker 3 (18:27):
I wish my children would have said to me if
they had gone to a high school. And I've had
so much fun, this is the best night. On top
of everything else. They have to get her, you know.
Mom comes and picks them up after the dance and
they go back to Ryan's house to watch a movie. Now,
while they're at Ryan's house, it's still early, okay, they
let the dance. Remember it is a high school homecoming dwance,
(18:49):
So they're done by about ten o'clock or so.
Speaker 1 (18:51):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (18:53):
She actually picks them up at ten thirty pm exactly.
Speaker 1 (18:56):
And they go back to Ryan's house to watch a movie.
Speaker 3 (19:00):
Out already ahead of time, he was planning on going
to his buddy's Austin. After going and hanging out with
Ryan for a while, he was going to go back
to his buddy's Austin's house, and so Ryan's mom took
him from Ryan's house to his friend Austin's house. Once there,
(19:20):
that's when he actually it was then when he actually
told his mom, this is the greatest night of my life.
Thank you very much, Thank you mom, you know, and
he actually talked her into letting him spend the night
at Austin's. It was something they had discussed earlier, and
according to Melissa, after talking to him about how great
of a night had been, she said, sure, you can
spend the night with Austin.
Speaker 2 (19:39):
But Austin did not go to the home con dance
that night. He was not there. So he's introduced into
the picture now deducing this.
Speaker 3 (19:49):
It's important when you know everything else that comes next,
it's important to No, he did not go to the dance.
Speaker 2 (19:53):
Yeah, he did not. And here here's something interesting. What
do teenagers have a proclivity for doing when they say
that they're going to spend the night at somebody else's house. Yeah, well, well.
Speaker 1 (20:06):
He said they went to a Bible conference. Yeah they
didn't do that.
Speaker 2 (20:08):
It wasn't Bible study, that's for sure.
Speaker 1 (20:11):
But Blake, Blake.
Speaker 2 (20:13):
Went to Austin's house. Mom dropped him off. So guess
what Blake does. He doesn't have a car. He starts walking.
Speaker 3 (20:21):
Well, first they walked to a convenience start to get
a pack of smokes.
Speaker 2 (20:25):
Pack of smokes, and the place was closed. They go
back to Austin's at this point in time, and it's
from there that they depart, that he departs on foot,
and guess where he's going. He's going back to Ryan's house,
his date from that night. And that's where things really
take a kind of a sinister turn, because it's at
this moment in time that when you graft this out
(20:46):
and you begin to understand that this child is on foot.
Speaker 1 (20:51):
It's several miles too.
Speaker 3 (20:53):
It is okay, after they went to the convenience store
first where they were going to buy smokes, but it
was closed. It was what a mile and a half,
So you know, that's nothing for a couple of kids
this age to walk back and forth. But walking from
Austin's house to Ryan's house, yeah, three miles.
Speaker 2 (21:12):
Yeah, it's at least three. There's one estimate, dependent upon
the way he went, it could have been four. So
he's got it bad. He wants to go back to
Ryan's house, and he is there. He sneaks into.
Speaker 1 (21:26):
Her home, in her bedroom, in her.
Speaker 2 (21:28):
Bedroom, mid of the night.
Speaker 1 (21:29):
Yeah, and.
Speaker 2 (21:32):
Well, there you go.
Speaker 3 (21:32):
As the father of two daughters, I can tell you
the three o'clock in the morning outfit of every dad
with the daughter underwear and a Louisville slugger.
Speaker 1 (21:41):
That's what you're seeing.
Speaker 3 (21:42):
You're going to see an overweight, middle aged guy that
doesn't fear prison anymore. You know, grab a shovel, I
got property.
Speaker 1 (21:48):
You're done and he knows me.
Speaker 2 (21:49):
So there you go.
Speaker 1 (21:52):
And that's what happened.
Speaker 2 (21:53):
But it wasn't the dad that made the discovery. It
was Grandma who lived and so we were told in Grandma,
of course, is shocked as dumb.
Speaker 3 (22:03):
This shows you how smart sixteen year old kids are.
He's snuck in, but they make so much noise they
wake up granny.
Speaker 1 (22:10):
Granny. Yeah, he's snuck in through her window. Yeah, I know,
Granny catches him. He dives.
Speaker 3 (22:15):
This is like a Beverly Hibbey's episode, or said the man.
He dives out the window. We don't even know if
he has his clothes on because he's out, but he is.
Speaker 2 (22:24):
And he then he starts on this journey where he's leaving.
But he's got this this phone that we had mentioned
that is a text only phone. And guess who he's texting.
It's not his mother, it's not Austin. It's actually Ryan's mother.
And what he is attempting to do is to apologize.
He's apologizing for disrespecting their home, for behaving like this.
Speaker 3 (22:48):
He actually said, I'm sorry, I broke your rules. That's
the character of Blake Chappelle. I'm sorry, I broke your rules.
He's acknowledging he the rules that they had acknowledged it
with him, and he broke them. I I don't know
too many adults that take that kind of accountability anything.
Speaker 2 (23:08):
No, I don't either, But you know, I think that
in a world like this that he occupies, where every
relationship that Blake has along this continuum that he lives
in is valuable to him. He doesn't have much in
the way of material items, so every relationship that he
has to me at least, is an indication that there's
(23:29):
value there. You know. Even if you go back to
the relationship that he had with Skyler, now they were
no longer an item, but yet they were staying in touch,
and he wanted to find her because she had run
away and there's there's an undercurrent with that relationship relative
to her family situation.
Speaker 1 (23:48):
He thinking about how important that was to him.
Speaker 3 (23:49):
I didn't think about it though, right now, that that's
why he was reaching out, because he wanted himend that
fence before it got totally torn down.
Speaker 2 (23:55):
Yeah, I know, you're talking about a kid that just
has been introduced into this environment. It's new. He's trying
to make friends. He's been at the home, and can
you imagine going to the heights of joy of being
able to express this out on the dance floor, to
enjoy your friends. You're laughing, you're carrying on, and you
(24:16):
make that one final decision where you're going to say,
you know what I think I'm gonna. I'm gonna I'm
gonna push all in here and see what happens. See
what happens. Can I make it back to her house
and engage in whatever kind of activity they were engaging
at that moment, Tom.
Speaker 3 (24:37):
This is what happens when you do in Nancy Graci's show.
So often you have to act like you don't know
what they were really doing.
Speaker 1 (24:43):
No, they were. They were telling stories, they were trading jokes,
That's what they were doing. Dave, talk to me in normal,
normal people speak. I'm just a.
Speaker 2 (24:57):
So we're he's in this position where he's literally pleading
to be in her life. He's made a friend, he's
made probably an intimate friend at this moment in time,
and that's the one thing in value, these friendships that
he has. But here's the problem. When he exits that house,
(25:20):
when he starts back on this journey, this trek to
his home, he's never seen again.
Speaker 1 (25:28):
A lot.
Speaker 2 (25:43):
If you are in a situation where you don't know
where your child is, and I think that all of
us have experienced this over the courses of our lives collectively.
I know where my son is. He's here on the
front road right now, but I don't have to worry
about him anymore because he's in a old But those
moments in times reflect back, just for a second, when
(26:05):
you have children and you have this overwhelming fear that
kind of seeps into your soul, It kind of cork
screws into your spine. We were thinking, oh my gosh,
where's my child? Where's my child? And no matter how
much you scream, how much you plead, there's no bringing
them back at this point. And I think that most
(26:25):
of the time, and I think that this is the
way the police began to view this day, is that
when you have a sixteen year old that admittedly has
this kind of unbalanced life, I won't necessarily stay troubled.
Now he's spent time in jail, but that doesn't mean
he's a bad kid. And so, but for a mom
trying to find her child, I think that the authorities,
(26:47):
and we know this for a fact, they viewed this,
They viewed his absence as a runaway. And so you've
got a sixteen year old that and there are many
of them you hear about them here at crime con
that are missing out there that no one knows where
they are, and everybody's searching for them. But in this
particular case, people, for the longest period of time thought
(27:11):
thought that Blake was actually a runaway.
Speaker 3 (27:13):
And I remember he left the house sometime around four thirty.
You know, we've gone through this timeline of when they
got back home, when he left to go back to
Ryan's house, when dad or grandma caught them, and when
he left. But what we do have is the text messages.
You know, he had the phone. We mentioned it was
a pre pay text only plan at the time, this
(27:35):
twenty eleven, and he was texting Ryan while he was
after he had left, he texted the mom, I'm really
sorry I broke the rules texting Ryan. He actually texts
her between five and five thirty that morning while he's
walking and he tells her I've been stopped by the
popo around five o'clock, he says, the police. Now, there
are two different things serving that area. One is the
(27:56):
County Sheriff's Department Kwiedi Counting, and then there's the police
department that could have also been stopped. But nobody has
a record of that.
Speaker 2 (28:02):
Nobody. And that's one of the striking things about this
case is that why why would a sixteen year old
state that he had been stopped by the police at
that time of day. Why would they have a record
of that? But yet the police, I mean, who would
even begin to think that up unless it's just this
fanciful thing that he's talking to Ryan about to try to,
(28:25):
I don't know, get sympathy or whatever the case might be.
But he did complain in that text about being cold
he's walking.
Speaker 1 (28:33):
Think about it.
Speaker 3 (28:34):
Now, we're talking in the middle of October in the South.
I mean it does get cold here and October fifteenth.
Speaker 2 (28:39):
Yeah, October fifteenth, Yeah, that's davy chilly.
Speaker 3 (28:42):
You know, it's not be freezing, but yeah, he's not
wearing well, we know that he left his overcoat and jacket.
We know the only thing he wore when he went
to Ryan's house was this long sleeve shirt. He left
his other stuff at Austin's house. So when we're kind
of assuming here because we don't know, we have to
put peace together because we know that the police and
(29:02):
Sheriff's purnt don't have any record of an officer coming
into contact with any teenager that time, no record of
that anywhere. We just have the text messages between Blake
and Ryan.
Speaker 2 (29:13):
And procedurally, what in case you're not aware of it anytime?
And you see these on these these procedural show, well procedural,
let's just say that it's cops or something like that,
where if a police officer pulls somebody over, and in
this case they're stopping a pedestrian, most of the time
they'll say, uh, you know, the police officer or the
(29:34):
traffic would go something like, yeah, headquarters, be vised. I've
got a young white male. Uh, he's a pedestrian. I'm
going to step out and talk to him.
Speaker 1 (29:45):
Because what if the guy pulls a gun and shoots him? Yeah,
and if he doesn't call it in, nobody knows, and
there's a record of that.
Speaker 2 (29:50):
Most of the time. But you know, you can have
these events where a police officer might see somebody walking
down the street, and just keep in mind every time
that you record that many times deepending upon the department,
you're going to have to write a report.
Speaker 1 (30:06):
All right.
Speaker 2 (30:07):
So did a police officer pull up adjacent to him
and say, hey, son, why are you out at this time?
What are you doing out here? Because it doesn't make sense.
There's no one around here, why are you here this
sort of thing? And of course there's no record of it.
And that's that's where you know, raw, I mean, that's
where Blake at this point in tom except for this
(30:28):
interaction that he had with Ryni, he kind of falls
off of the face of the planet. We don't know
what's happened to him.
Speaker 3 (30:33):
Done at that moment, all contact with Blake ceases. And
by the way, from that moment on, nobody talked to him,
nobody saw him. There was no tax message, nothing after
five point thirty in the morning on that time, right
after you say he saw the police.
Speaker 2 (30:51):
Yeah, and so this is October. We've gone into the
morning from October fifteenth, which the dance was on that night.
Now we're into the morning of October sixteenth, he's not seen,
so they put out a bolo for him.
Speaker 3 (31:05):
Well, and it actually shows for the family, remember, yeah,
because first it's like, yeah, they're checking because well, Brian,
we know he pushed him out of our house at
the you know, in before the sun was up. Did
he make it back d Austin's house. He didn't make
it back Dawston's house. So now Ryan and her parents
know that where's Blake. Now they don't call his mom
right away, and this is a little frustrating for me
(31:27):
as a parent. You don't know where my kid is
and he was in your house and you're telling me
at eleven thirty in the day. It took hours before
they notified Melissa that they didn't know where he was.
Matter of fact, Ryan's dad went out hunting at eight
o'clock that morning. I don't know about you being in
the southeast. I'm talking to Joe about men don't go
out hunting at eight in the morning. You go out
(31:48):
hunting at four in the morning. You don't leave the
house at eight in the morning. But that's what Ryan's
dad did. He went hunting at eight in the morning.
He's already out there when they call him and say, hey,
we can't find Blake. You need to come home. They
still haven't called Melissa. All the talking has been between Ryan,
her mom, Grandma, her dad, and Austin, and that's all
(32:09):
we've got. Then they finally when they can't find him,
you know, they drive the route between the houses, can't
see him anywhere. Then they notify Melissa. She finds out
and immediately calls police. Hey, my son is missing. Go
find him.
Speaker 1 (32:24):
And to be honest with you. For the next six weeks,
seven weeks, eight weeks, they're not really even looking for him.
Speaker 3 (32:33):
Oh, they did the basics right. They checked the route
that he went on. They might have walked it, they
drove it. They didn't see anything. He ran away because
he had been involved with Skyler six months earlier and
she had run away and he was with her, and
oh my goodness, he's probably just running away from a
bad situation.
Speaker 1 (32:51):
That's how they played it. He was not a bad kid.
Speaker 2 (32:56):
December rolls around, Yeah, December nineteenth rolls around, and you
have you have pedestrian traffic that's adjacent to this golf
course and to the driving range, and someone happens to
look down over this tiny little bridge that's in this
kind of bucolic looking setting. The leaves are you know,
(33:17):
are changing. You know, in December, you still have leaves
on the trees in this area of the country. It's
cool out. They look over look down in the creek
and there they spy something that doesn't quite fit with
the rest of the scenery, if you will. And that's
where they found this young man's body, adjacent to the
(33:39):
shoreline of this little creek. It's hung in brush. He's
only wearing an undershirt and a pair of underwear his pants,
I'm sorry, shorts, his shorts, and he's absent everything else.
There's no phone, there's no money, there's no idea, there
(34:00):
is absolutely nothing now at this point in time, no
shoes whatsoever. And this is a big question, I think
from a forensic standpoint when I begin to contemplate this
and kind of the actions that go hand in hand
with this, would you dump somebody right there? Or could
(34:22):
they narrow down the location where he was last seen?
Is this part of the route. There's all kinds of
things that play into this, because you know, I've worked
cases over the years where people have just taken bodies
and thrown them into bodies of water. What do you
think the number one I'm asking this question truly, this
is not rhetorical. What do you think the number one
(34:44):
reason is that people like to take bodies and toss
them into water. You're back to get rid of evidence,
to get rid of evidence, and to make that trace
evidence or anything that's there disappear, essentially. And I've contemplated
(35:05):
this about Blake's case, and I've really wondered had someone
taken him and driven him about, had someone you know,
attempted to terrify him or terrorize him, because you know,
when they finally got his body back to the State
Medical Examiner's office, Blake had an intermediate gunshot woman to
(35:31):
the back.
Speaker 1 (35:32):
Of his Heady. You say, intermediate, how far are we
talking to you?
Speaker 2 (35:35):
Yeah, well, with an intermedia it's really we measure it
in inches. So when you begin to think about firearms
and a lot of it, you can't. This is not
a static number, all right, So people will have very there.
There's variability here when someone is fired upon like this
(35:55):
and they're shot the you know, the project is not
the only thing coming out of the weapon. You guys
have been at crime com long enough to understand that
you also have what remains behind as far as unburnt powder,
any kind of other debris that might be in the
barrel of the weapon, And so you're going to have
this deposition on the area that is being struck by
(36:19):
the projectile, and it will kind of rain in. It
loses velocity really quickly. So if you're thinking about perhaps
unburned powder which leads to stipling, you've heard that term
that it surrounds the injury, it's not. It doesn't have
the same aerodynamic qualities as say, for instance, a projectile
(36:44):
lead core projectile. And you can do this at home
if you'll just take a bit of baby powder and
put it in your hand like this and blow it,
and particularly in front of a mirror, you'll see it
begin to kind of rain down. You think, God, Morgan,
that's kind of simplistic. Well, it's science, and it's very simplistic.
It's we understand this. The aerodynamic qualities of this powder
(37:06):
kind of drift down. So you have to be close enough, now,
get a hold of this concept. You have to be
close enough so that when that weapon is initiated, it's
going to imprint, imprint that unburned powder onto the surface
of the skin. Okay, so it'll be just underneath you'll
see these little flecks of powder that are there microscopically,
(37:26):
we can take them out. We can also take tissue
sections and take a look at this, and depended upon
how close it is, you'll have like within underneath the scalp,
you can actually see smoke that's there that's deposited. It'll
sometimes you'll have a greasy ring. Sometimes you'll have this
kind of staining that goes on. So dependent upon how
(37:47):
far away you are is going to dictate the amount
of this debris that winds upon the skin. So with
an intermediate round, you've got a projectile that's entering the
head and the rest of the breeze following away. But
there is essentially enough there to get an idea of
range of fire. That's why they're calling it an intermediate round. Now,
(38:07):
to this date, the police have not released the actual
caliber of the weapon that was used. I think one
of my big questions because they haven't released the autopsy
report on Blake's remains, is well, what type of caliber
was this? They're saying pistol caliber, so that can mean
anything from you know, a twenty two caliber pistol all
(38:31):
the way up to you know, there's fifty caliber pistol.
So you've got that broad of a spectrum here. Now,
if I were betting man, I'd say, you know, you're
probably one of the most the most common caliber relative
to a semi automatic, it's going to be a nine millimeter.
That's what most most people are going to carry. You'll
have fortys. If people still carry revolvers, you might have
a thirty eight. But that's a very common round to have.
(38:56):
So did they recover around out Blake's skull? They haven't stated.
Is it a throw and through wound? It was just
one shot though, right, it's a single shot.
Speaker 1 (39:07):
Isn't that odd?
Speaker 3 (39:07):
Though? That somebody that is shot and not right up
against the head. But you're talking a little distance away.
Normally we have multiple shots, even if it is to
the head. Just to make sure, you know, could you
always talk about the kill shot but not in this case.
Speaker 2 (39:20):
Yeah, and this is a proximity So shot in the head, yeah,
shot in the back of the head from what we understand.
And so you've got this And I always talk about
in relation to firearms, I always talk about a symmetry
so if you've got someone that is actually being killed,
you will have the perpetrator, and this is kind of obvious.
You have them in a dominant position over the victims,
(39:43):
so they're firing down many times. So you'll have these
trajectories that enter on the posterior aspect of the skull,
for instance, and they proceed, you know, forward, So you'll
have this kind of above to below, a front to back,
and then you can say whether or not it's from
left to right or from right to left directionality. But
why is that important? Well, it's important because it gives
(40:04):
you an insight into the intimacy of the relationship between
the victim in this case, Blake, and the perpetrator. So
who would have the ability to take this young man,
the sixteen year old, and put him into a position
where they are dominant over him with a weapon. We
already know he's had one weapon presented to him at
(40:26):
some point in time within the last few months in
his life. Okay, so there's probably an endowell in fear.
I don't know about you, guys, but I can speak
to myself. If somebody presents with a weapon in my
face or adjacent to me, there's a chance. You know,
a lot of us can be real bold and we
can say things, but when you're staring down the barrel
of a weapon, you're going to, at least to a
(40:47):
certain degree, you're going to submit. Okay, And you're talking
about sixteen year old kid. So what do you do?
Do you take him and put him on the ground
and stand over him and fire into him. Do you
have him in the back seat of a car. Do
you go into the backseat of the car with him
and fire into him. Do you take him to some
other location, perhaps shoot him there, maybe leave a casing.
(41:11):
Maybe you're smart enough to recover the casing. Then you
put him into a vehicle and you transport him to
that location. Either way, I think that there is probably
we can surmise that there's probably a vehicle involved in this.
And what would be really interesting, and we're so far
down the road now, I don't know if it would
be possible to recover this, but any kind of biological
(41:31):
evidence or firearms evidence that you could find in a
suspected vehicle. But you know, we're I don't know, Dave,
We're many years down, right.
Speaker 1 (41:38):
Thirteen years, Yeah, the thirteen is October.
Speaker 3 (41:41):
I'm thinking is if he's in the car and well,
first of all, time of day. Okay, you're talking about
controlling somebody that for no reason. I mean again, talk
five o'clock in the morning. Let's just use that as
a as a time. Okay, between five and five thirty am.
Who knows he's walking on the road at that time?
Speaker 1 (41:59):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (41:59):
Who would know that this child, yeah is going to
be alone. Yeah, is going to be alone that there's
not going to be anybody else around him. He's already
been in a very distressing Can you just vision this
for a moment. You've got a kid, and I know
I mentioned this earlier, but just imagine he's at the height,
he's at the ultimate ecstasy in his life relative to
(42:20):
this dance. Right, we already know that he's he's reached
out to Mama and told her this best night of
my life. And then all of a sudden, you know,
he makes this decision with this young lady, goes into
a room. He's horribly embarrassed. Of anybody in here ever
been embarrassed like this?
Speaker 1 (42:36):
I have.
Speaker 2 (42:38):
You're in these circumstances, you're humiliated. Now you're you're hoping
that you can just hold on to some semblance of
this new life.
Speaker 3 (42:46):
It kind of depends on interrupted as to how he
really felt about it.
Speaker 2 (42:50):
And yeah, I know exactly, and you don't know.
Speaker 1 (42:52):
I can tell you a little bit earlier than it's
a little different than if it's later.
Speaker 2 (42:55):
Right, But either way, saying you've got you've got somebody
from an older general that comes in into this room.
How embarrassing he is?
Speaker 1 (43:03):
I forgot about granny. Yeah, there you got. And so
you imagine that scream.
Speaker 2 (43:08):
I know, and he's totally he's totally humiliated at this
point in time or relative to relative to what has
occurred in his life in this very short period of time.
And now he's cast out of the house. He's on
his own. He's reaching out to this young lady and
to her mother, and then he vanishes off the face
(43:29):
of the planet.
Speaker 1 (43:30):
Here.
Speaker 2 (43:30):
You know, there's all kinds of rumors that have kind
of floated around about about Blake's death. And Dave laid
this one on me real quick. You had mentioned this,
Uh there, there's actually this this blurb that came out.
Speaker 1 (43:46):
What was it?
Speaker 3 (43:46):
I said that there's a podcast And this is why
you kind of have to be careful of what you
listen to there's a podcaster who's claiming that the autopsy
report that the police said the body had only been
in the creek for a week. Now, if Blake's body
had only been in that creek for a week, where
was he for the seven weeks between the time he
(44:07):
was last heard from until the time they found him.
Speaker 1 (44:09):
Now.
Speaker 3 (44:10):
I'm telling you this because I hit him up with
it this morning when we were just you know, you
want to get updated. I want to come in here
and not have the most current stuff for you guys.
And I saw that he said, hey, have you seen
this anywhere? So I spent an hour today trying to
verify this. I'm talking about calling the police, calling the sheriff,
calling anybody I could of the GBI, and I can't
find anybody that'll verify.
Speaker 1 (44:27):
They said, the autopsy.
Speaker 3 (44:29):
Report hasn't been released, period, So whoever is claiming this
and a podcast is making it up so we can
throw that out the window. It doesn't make sense that
because you realize that if that's the case, then somebody
had his body stashed for seven weeks and then.
Speaker 1 (44:46):
Decided to kill him.
Speaker 3 (44:48):
I think most of us would believe that he was
probably killed the last night he made that last text.
Speaker 2 (44:52):
Yeah, And what we have learned is that his body
was actually beginning to change colors. And that's a marker
for us from a medical legal perspective. There's desicate even
though he's just follow me here just for a second,
give me some rope. Even though he's in a water,
an aquatic environment, and he's not fully submerged.
Speaker 1 (45:15):
He was floating anyway on the brush. There in the
brush he is.
Speaker 2 (45:22):
Oh and by the way, the location where he is
found is not a location that you would walk down
to the bank. And the reason I know this is
that the first group, the first group of my students
that presented this case two years ago, now, they physically
drove out there. They went to this site, my students did.
(45:44):
And you can't access the water this way. You would
have to go through so much brush in order to
do so. That leaves us with one conclusion right relative
to the bridge, that more than likely, there's a high
probability that he.
Speaker 1 (45:59):
Was pushed Williams.
Speaker 2 (46:02):
Yeah, pushed pushed off the bridge, and he's there in
the water, and he is hung in the brush. His
body is in a state. If if we are to
believe what has been reported that the body is decomposed
so badly. He had a lip ring that was right
here that he got into a lot of trouble over
with his mother, and additionally into that he had gotten
(46:23):
a Playboy Bunny tattoo.
Speaker 3 (46:26):
It was one of the ways they identified him, and
he was really not happy about that.
Speaker 2 (46:30):
And I think that it was an older brother that
was not in his life that had signed for it.
And so he's undressing at one moment in time and
she's like, what what is that? What is that on you?
You know, and he's like, oh, you know, I went
and got a tattoo. So that's how they had to
identify him. Okay, a chrome ring in his lip and
(46:50):
also the fact that he had this tattoo on his person,
and that's what they went with. I think they bolstered
that with with dental records later, but it puts them
on the right path at that point in time relative
to relative to who they thought this might be. And
there were you know, there were posters about at this
(47:10):
sort of thing and this sort of thing, you know,
relative to they were looking for him. But here here's
the thing when he's found and going back to the
condition of the body. Uh, he's only found in his
underwear and he has no personal belongings with him, including shoes,
which I think is is really something to look at
(47:32):
and cases that I've covered in the news and also
things that I have worked. We talk about embarrassment just
a little while ago. There is there any other kind
of situation. I know that there are many, but where
immediately you could really humiliate somebody and threaten them by
making them strip all of their clothes off because you feel,
(47:54):
you know, very vulnerable before the world, and that that's
an active event that has to take place. Take your
clothes off, take your shoes off. That's an action event
where you're having and you're essentially putting him into submission
at that point time. Now, I guess it, and I
could say, I could say they stripped the clothes off
(48:14):
the body, but why leave the underwear. So when you
see this young man humiliated like this and his body
is dumped off like refuse off of this bridge and
he's found floating out there in the water, it really
it really gives you insight into I think the person
that may have done this, And go ahead.
Speaker 3 (48:36):
What if dad caught him after Grandma caught him in
the bedroom with his sixteen year old daughter and your
old dad. He's got his underwear on, he's able to
pull that up. He barely got his shirt on. He
doesn't have a shit nothing, and dad loses it and
takes him off. He loads him up in the truck,
dumps him over the side of the river. He gets
rid of the clothes because he didn't have him on
(48:56):
to start with. He just finished up with my sixteen
year old daughter, you're dead. And then I'm going to
stage all this in case they decided to test me
for jess. All right, I'm going to go hunting at
eight in the morning.
Speaker 2 (49:06):
And that's certainly something that has to be and I
hope that that is something that's being factored into the investigation.
Speaker 3 (49:11):
They passed a polygraph test, so did his wife, Sutded Ryan,
and they searched their house.
Speaker 1 (49:16):
No evidence of anything.
Speaker 2 (49:17):
However, I have to say this to you, when my
kids chose to do this case, Dave was in this
past January. That's when this semester started, this previous semester.
Thank god it's over with now. When in January, when
(49:40):
I had my kids go through the process of selecting
the cold case they were going to cover they chose
Blake's case. As we were walking and you kind of
gave a hint at this earlier as we were working
our way through this case. My kids were at the time.
They came to me and they said, Professor Morian, you're
not going to believe this. But they served search warrants
(50:03):
in a place called Sharpsburg, Georgia. And this was back
in March.
Speaker 1 (50:08):
When we were talking about the newest evidence.
Speaker 2 (50:10):
Yeah, and this came out and if you can expand
on that.
Speaker 3 (50:13):
Just twenty fourth they had There have been two things
that have happened since this case, Okay, two big things,
one in twenty eleven, so it has to be between
December nineteenth and the end of the year. Police have
said in twenty eleven they received an anonymous tip that
had an information about the murder, actually real information. Years later,
(50:37):
they received a second anonymous tip letter. They believe it
is from the same person, and I believe it is
the combination of these tips that have led them to
what they have done. In the most recent search. In March,
they searched three separate locations in Sharpsburg, Georgia, and it
wasn't in any of the places that you would think.
(50:59):
And Joe and I were looking at this, going, well,
wait a minute, do the same people live in those
homes in the places that were searched, that were there
in twenty eleven. If they're not, they're searching the backyard.
Speaker 2 (51:13):
So what would be buried in the backyard. What could
they recover back there? You know, how much effort does
it take to get rid of a young man's clothing
and also a phone? Not much. I mean, that could
have been burned up, It could have been disposed of
in any other number of ways. But why go to
that location and say that this does in fact have
something to do with the death of Blake.
Speaker 3 (51:34):
But for the students did such an incredible job on this.
I have to tell you that for those of you
who have come to me and asked me about forensics,
to Jaysu the work. I had a chance to look
over this work that Joe sent me that they did.
I do it for a living, and I went to
school on the report they did. That's how good this was.
It was very thorough, it was professional, it was wonderful.
(51:57):
I thought, Okay, I'm hiring one of these guys now.
Speaker 1 (52:00):
It was good.
Speaker 2 (52:01):
Well, I'm very pleased. I'm very proud of my students
for bringing this case to us. And I felt that again,
you know the fact that two years in a row,
I had still a group of students that chose this
particular case. And trust me, we've got a lot of
cold cases in Alabama. There's a lot of cold cases
in Georgia. But you know, this is not too far
(52:23):
away from our campus in Jacksonville, Alabama. And to have
this happen two years in a row, and actually I
have students that have The students from the first group
came to a few different conclusions than second group, so
they weren't, you know, kind of feeding off of one another.
It really kind of gave me, I don't know, it
(52:46):
kind of gave me a chill, thinking this is probably
something that I need to explore with all of our friends.
There are fans of body bags, and certainly everybody here
at Crime com I'm Joseph Scott Moore, and this is
body bags.
Speaker 1 (53:04):
Mhm.
Host
Joseph Scott Morgan
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